Excerpts

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“Another Subject Was Actually Working On A Reality TV Series But Came To Believe That His Fellow Crew Members Were Secretly Filming Him”

August 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Mike Jay’s Aeon piece, “The Reality Show,” about the nature of mental illness in a world guided by technology and covered in cameras, a place in which we’re always, to some extent, onstage, is probably the best essay I’ve read so far this year. The opening:

Clinical psychiatry papers rarely make much of a splash in the wider media, but it seems appropriate that a paper entitled “The Truman Show Delusion: Psychosis in the Global Village,” published in the May 2012 issue of Cognitive Neuropsychiatry, should have caused a global sensation. Its authors, the brothers Joel and Ian Gold, presented a striking series of cases in which individuals had become convinced that they were secretly being filmed for a reality TV show.

In one case, the subject travelled to New York, demanding to see the “director” of the film of his life, and wishing to check whether the World Trade Centre had been destroyed in reality or merely in the movie that was being assembled for his benefit. In another, a journalist who had been hospitalised during a manic episode became convinced that the medical scenario was fake and that he would be awarded a prize for covering the story once the truth was revealed. Another subject was actually working on a reality TV series but came to believe that his fellow crew members were secretly filming him, and was constantly expecting the This-Is-Your-Life moment when the cameras would flip and reveal that he was the true star of the show.

Few commentators were able to resist the idea that these cases — all diagnosed with schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, and treated with antipsychotic medication — were in some sense the tip of the iceberg, exposing a pathology in our culture as a whole. They were taken as extreme examples of a wider modern malaise: an obsession with celebrity turning us all into narcissistic stars of our own lives, or a media-saturated culture warping our sense of reality and blurring the line between fact and fiction. They seemed to capture the zeitgeist perfectly: cautionary tales for an age in which our experience of reality is manicured and customised in subtle and insidious ways, and everything from our junk mail to our online searches discreetly encourages us in the assumption that we are the centre of the universe.

But part of the reason that the Truman Show delusion seems so uncannily in tune with the times is that Hollywood blockbusters now regularly present narratives that, until recently, were confined to psychiatrists’ case notes and the clinical literature on paranoid psychosis. Popular culture hums with stories about technology that secretly observes and controls our thoughts, or in which reality is simulated with virtual constructs or implanted memories, and where the truth can be glimpsed only in distorted dream sequences or chance moments when the mask slips. A couple of decades ago, such beliefs would mark out fictional characters as crazy, more often than not homicidal maniacs. Today, they are more likely to identify a protagonist who, like Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank, genuinely has stumbled onto a carefully orchestrated secret of which those around him are blandly unaware. These stories obviously resonate with our technology-saturated modernity. What’s less clear is why they so readily adopt a perspective that was, until recently, a hallmark of radical estrangement from reality. Does this suggest that media technologies are making us all paranoid? Or that paranoid delusions suddenly make more sense than they used to?•

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“He Was Recognized As The Most Important Patient In The History Of Brain Science”

August 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’m always fascinated by memory, especially in the extreme. Those who have the rare ability to stretch what is seemingly inelastic are fascinating, but so are those with huge potholes in their past. And some of us consistently reorder what’s transpired to suit us, seemingly a reflexive, subconscious defense mechanism. 

Because I don’t have amnesia, I was just thinking about an obituary I read several years ago about Henry Molaison, who was a profound amnesiac. From Benedict Carey in the December 4, 2008 New York Times:

“He knew his name. That much he could remember.

He knew that his father’s family came from Thibodaux, La., and his mother was from Ireland, and he knew about the 1929 stock market crash and World War II and life in the 1940s.

But he could remember almost nothing after that.

In 1953, he underwent an experimental brain operation in Hartford to correct a seizure disorder, only to emerge from it fundamentally and irreparably changed. He developed a syndrome neurologists call profound amnesia. He had lost the ability to form new memories.

For the next 55 years, each time he met a friend, each time he ate a meal, each time he walked in the woods, it was as if for the first time.

And for those five decades, he was recognized as the most important patient in the history of brain science. “

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“Why Did You Name Your Son Rand?”

August 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

Ron Paul, who has frequently been elected President of straw, seems like a good idea to some college kids and many baristas. Sacha Baron Cohen’s bedroom guest just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow. 

________________________

Question:

How do you feel about Texas banning the sale of Tesla cars? Doesn’t seem very American or Libertarian.

Ron Paul: 

It’s un-American and it’s unpatriotic and it’s bad economic policy, and it should not be any business of the government what car you can buy.

________________________

Question:

Is there anything that Obama has done that you DO support?

Ron Paul:

That’s a narrow question. How long since it’s been since I’ve strongly supported what ANY president have done? Unfortunately our Presidents and our Congress have been systematically moving in the wrong direction. They have been undermining our freedoms and bankrupting our country and supporting perpetual war.

________________________

Question:

What are your thoughts on free migration? Do you think restrictions against immigration violate the non-aggression principle? Do you agree with economists who say that the World’s GDP would increase by magnitudes if you allowed free migration?

Ron Paul:

That might be the ideal to seek and it should be talked about and maybe someday we can reach that. That is essentially what our 13 Colonies set up under the Constitution – we could move back and forth as freely as possible, and it’s worked out rather well. The problem that we have today deals with the economy and the Welfare State. Because if the doors are wide open and you let all individuals in, all individuals suddenly qualify for welfare benefits – and you are looking for lots of problems. In a free society that is prosperous, the doors should be open as wide as possible. Even today we could do that if we could say “Come and work, come and play, but you don’t get automatic citizenship or benefits.” Those open doors would be very beneficial to us, but it’s been messed up because of the demagoguery and welfare state. But in an ideal world, there would be an economic benefit to it.

________________________

Question:

While I highly agree with many of your policies, can you give us an official response on your stance of separation of church and state?

Ron Paul:

Yes. The church should never run the state. They should never be synonymous. And the state should never interfere with the church. The responsibility of the government should be to protect the right to free choice, whether it is religion, philosophy, or our personal habits.

________________________

Question:

Dr. Paul, we have seen the expansion of Libertarianism over the past several years. How much of it do you think is enabled by the internet, and what are your thoughts on the recent, repeated attempts to limit the freedom of the net and our right to privacy? 

Ron Paul: 

Well that’s a great threat – the attack on the internet – because the internet is our best vehicle. It has been the best thing for us to have to spread our message. So it has been VERY instrumental in being able to get the message of Libertarianism out. The other thing that has helped us with this message is the evident failure now of our Keynesian economic system which we’ve had now for close to 100 years, and also the obvious evidence that our foreign policy is a complete failure and people are looking for answers, especially the young people, because they see it deeply flawed.

________________________

Question:

Why did you name your son Rand?

Ron Paul:

My wife had the children and she had the privilege of naming the children. Afterwards there was a little bit of discussing with her husband, namely me. 

But his name is not after Ayn Rand. His name is RANDALL despite some things that have been around on the Internet. He was called “Randy” at home, and he became “Rand” after becoming a physician.

••••••••••

“So tell me, who are you wearing?”:

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“HGH Quietly Has Become The Substance Of Choice For Tinseltown Denizens”

August 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

I interviewed Nick Nolte, one of my favorite actors, nearly a decade ago, and he told me about his regimen of taking human growth hormone as a way of trying to repair the damage he did to his body with a variety of excesses. It seemed an unusual anecdote at the time, but no more.

PEDs have, of course, never been just for athletes. Among numerous others, students, classical musicians and Hollywood actors all indulge to enhance their performance. In the latter community, you can add to botox and collagen a heavy usage of HGH and steroids. The opening of an article on the topic from Tatiana Siegel in the Hollywood Reporter:

“In 2005, a 30-something actor on the precipice of superstardom began prepping for a lead feature role that required ample spotlight on his abs. The actor met with the film’s trainer and outlined the performance-enhancing drugs, including human growth hormone (HGH), he already had been taking. The trainer, a firm believer that a chiseled physique should be achieved naturally, recused himself from working with the actor.

‘He told me that HGH made him feel like nothing else ever made him feel,’ recalls the trainer, who declined to be identified out of respect for trainer/trainee confidentiality. ‘He was basically addicted. I told him to find another trainer. He did.’

That actor, now an A-lister who continues to cash in on his impressive torso, is just one of Hollywood’s growing list of stars who turn to injectable HGH and other performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs) amid the ever-competitive world of looking great at any age.

With its fountain-of-youth promise, HGH quietly has become the substance of choice for Tinseltown denizens looking to quickly burn fat, boost energy and even improve complexion.”

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“He Had Learned That Nostalgia Is Just Another Form Of Depression”

August 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Like a lot of comedians, Abbie Hoffman was sad. After gaining international fame for railing against capitalism and the American war machine during the 1960s, he lived on the lam (wanted but not desired), was covered in an avalanche of blow, suffered from clinical depression and was unable to reinvent himself when he finally resurfaced. He didn’t want to live in the past but couldn’t seem to find a place in the present. His was a great trick that couldn’t be performed twice. Sad and broken, he took his own life in 1989. From the People article “A Troubled Rebel Chooses A Silent Death“:

“In the sunny, plant-filled apartment where Abbie Hoffman ended his life with a massive overdose of phenobarbital, the artifacts on the wall bespoke decades of rebellion: a poster of the Grateful Dead, another of a raised fist with the word STRIKE!, a bumper sticker reading VOTE REPUBLICAN. IT’S EASIER THAN THINKING, a photo of a young Hoffman wearing a Chicago policeman’s shirt.

Summoned to this corner of pastoral Bucks County, Pa., six years ago by an environmental group that wanted his help battling the diversion of the Delaware River water to cool a nuclear reactor, Hoffman told an interviewer in 1987 that he was happy to ‘live and die here fighting the Philadelphia Electric Company-it’s just like the ’60s for me.’

But it was not just like the ’60s. In that theatrical era, young Abbie Hoffman held center stage. A self-styled ‘Groucho Marxist’ and co-founder of the Youth International Party (supporters were dubbed yippies), which existed mostly in his imagination, he was the antiwar movement’s mad genius of media events. He disrupted business on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange by tossing dollar bills from the balcony. He rallied 50,000 anti-Vietnam War demonstrators to levitate the Pentagon. He nominated a pig—Pigasus—for President when thousands of protesters converged on Chicago to demonstrate at the 1968 Democratic Convention. The violence in the streets there led to the most famous political trial of the decade, as Hoffman and his Chicago Eight co-defendants were charged in 1969 with conspiracy to incite riot.

They ultimately beat the charges but not before turning Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom into a countercultural circus: Abbie somersaulted into court one day and wore judicial robes another. ‘Where do you reside?’ his lawyer asked him on the witness stand. ‘I live in Woodstock Nation,’ he replied. ‘It is a nation of alienated young people. We carry it around with us as a state of mind…. It is a nation dedicated to…the idea that people should have better means of exchange than property or money.’

Just what that ‘better means’ should be was never clearly spelled out, but it didn’t matter then. ‘F—the System!’ was program enough so long as it left room for lots of sex and drugs and rock and roll. ‘He used to say, ‘All I care about is who’s bringing the ice cream to the demonstration,’ recalls fellow yippie Jerry Rubin, 50. ‘Essentially, he wanted to have fun.’

Now, those alienated young people are no longer young, and Woodstock Nation is a memory. But  ‘Abbie wasn’t interested in nostalgia,’ says Al Giordano, 29, a journalist who knew him well. ‘He was interested in battling the power structure. He had learned that nostalgia is just another form of depression.’

The last thing Hoffman needed was more forms of depression.”

__________________________

Abbie makes gefilte fish, 1973:

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“Again And Again E-Books Just Won’t Behave Like Their Print Counterparts”

August 22, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Hannes Eder’s Literary Platform essay about the Swedish model for settling the dispute between publishers and libraries in the age of e-book lending:

“Again and again e-books just won’t behave like their print counterparts. And not only when it comes to libraries for that matter; when you click the ‘buy now’ button on Amazon the fine print shows what’s really going on.  The following comes from the Kindle store’s Terms of Use:

‘Kindle Content is licensed, not sold, to you by the Content Provider. The Content Provider may include additional terms for use within its Kindle Content. Those terms will also apply, but this Agreement will govern in the event of a conflict.’

If treating ebooks like physical books is beginning to feel a bit like trying to push a square peg through a round hole, that feeling is confirmed by the the letter of the law. In a legal sense e-books aren’t goods. That’s why the right of first sale-doctrine doesn’t apply to them, which in plain English means that you can’t do what you want with an e-book just because you payed for it. Instead e-books are considered services, and services are licensed on terms that need to be negotiated between the licensor and the licensee. That’s why libraries and publishers now need to sit down to negotiate, where before there was really no need to talk.

Some say the war over e-books can’t be solved since libraries lack enough of a value proposition to make publishers even want to sit down at the table. New York-based business analyst Mike Shatzkin has made this point, and perhaps it holds true in America where the war is raging most ferociously and where none of the biggest publishers are now making their full e-book catalogs available to libraries.

But what’s true in America doesn’t have to be true in Europe, which the example of Sweden clearly shows.

Sweden has a long tradition of building community based cultural infrastructure that is controlled in full neither by the state nor by private interest. To mention just one of many examples: Ingmar Bergman probably wouldn’t have had such a tremendous reach if he hadn’t been backed by the Swedish Film Institute, in which the private film industry pools its resources together with state money.

The book industry is no different. Just over a decade ago publishers and librarians formed a joint task force that came up with a model for e-book lending which still to this day seems unique in the world: transaction fees for every loan; no cap on the number of concurrent loans; and access to full catalogs without entry fees. In short, e-books are treated as services.”

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“Technology Has Been Marshaled, If Anything, To Figure Out Ways To Make Us All Work More”

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

In an automated society, there are supposed to be fewer bullshit jobs, the drudgery passed on to machines. But that hasn’t happened in our brave new world. There’s just as much toil now, and even the few excruciating tasks that have been largely disappeared–phone operator, for instance–have just resulted in the shifting of responsibilities. Twice this week I’ve heard people publicly cursing into their cells as they tried to get through a series of prompts to attain some information or other. The salaries vanished but the work did not.

The first two paragraphs from David Graeber’s excellent Strike! magazine essay, “On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs“:

“In the year 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that, by century’s end, technology would have advanced sufficiently that countries like Great Britain or the United States would have achieved a 15-hour work week. There’s every reason to believe he was right. In technological terms, we are quite capable of this. And yet it didn’t happen. Instead, technology has been marshaled, if anything, to figure out ways to make us all work more. In order to achieve this, jobs have had to be created that are, effectively, pointless. Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.

Why did Keynes’ promised utopia – still being eagerly awaited in the ‘60s – never materialise? The standard line today is that he didn’t figure in the massive increase in consumerism. Given the choice between less hours and more toys and pleasures, we’ve collectively chosen the latter. This presents a nice morality tale, but even a moment’s reflection shows it can’t really be true. Yes, we have witnessed the creation of an endless variety of new jobs and industries since the ‘20s, but very few have anything to do with the production and distribution of sushi, iPhones, or fancy sneakers.”

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“No Human Effort Will Be Necessary”

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

The Ray Kurzweil writing that spurred Bill Joy to pen his famous 2000 Wired article, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” in which he worried about a utopia that seemed to him dystopic:

“THE NEW LUDDITE CHALLENGE

First let us postulate that the computer scientists succeed in developing intelligent machines that can do all things better than human beings can do them. In that case presumably all work will be done by vast, highly organized systems of machines and no human effort will be necessary. Either of two cases might occur. The machines might be permitted to make all of their own decisions without human oversight, or else human control over the machines might be retained.

If the machines are permitted to make all their own decisions, we can’t make any conjectures as to the results, because it is impossible to guess how such machines might behave. We only point out that the fate of the human race would be at the mercy of the machines. It might be argued that the human race would never be foolish enough to hand over all the power to the machines. But we are suggesting neither that the human race would voluntarily turn power over to the machines nor that the machines would willfully seize power. What we do suggest is that the human race might easily permit itself to drift into a position of such dependence on the machines that it would have no practical choice but to accept all of the machines’ decisions. As society and the problems that face it become more and more complex and machines become more and more intelligent, people will let machines make more of their decisions for them, simply because machine-made decisions will bring better results than man-made ones. Eventually a stage may be reached at which the decisions necessary to keep the system running will be so complex that human beings will be incapable of making them intelligently. At that stage the machines will be in effective control. People won’t be able to just turn the machines off, because they will be so dependent on them that turning them off would amount to suicide.

On the other hand it is possible that human control over the machines may be retained. In that case the average man may have control over certain private machines of his own, such as his car or his personal computer, but control over large systems of machines will be in the hands of a tiny elite – just as it is today, but with two differences. Due to improved techniques the elite will have greater control over the masses; and because human work will no longer be necessary the masses will be superfluous, a useless burden on the system. If the elite is ruthless they may simply decide to exterminate the mass of humanity. If they are humane they may use propaganda or other psychological or biological techniques to reduce the birth rate until the mass of humanity becomes extinct, leaving the world to the elite. Or, if the elite consists of soft-hearted liberals, they may decide to play the role of good shepherds to the rest of the human race. They will see to it that everyone’s physical needs are satisfied, that all children are raised under psychologically hygienic conditions, that everyone has a wholesome hobby to keep him busy, and that anyone who may become dissatisfied undergoes ‘treatment’ to cure his ‘problem.’ Of course, life will be so purposeless that people will have to be biologically or psychologically engineered either to remove their need for the power process or make them ‘sublimate’ their drive for power into some harmless hobby. These engineered human beings may be happy in such a society, but they will most certainly not be free. They will have been reduced to the status of domestic animals.”

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“That Alarms Privacy Advocates”

August 21, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Crowd-scanning is still a chore for technologists, but you know it will be perfected–and soon. No more being just another face in the crowd, no more being lonely, no more being left alone. From Charlie Savage in the New York Times:

“WASHINGTON — The federal government is making progress on developing a surveillance system that would pair computers with video cameras to scan crowds and automatically identify people by their faces, according to newly disclosed documents and interviews with researchers working on the project.

The Department of Homeland Security tested a crowd-scanning project called the Biometric Optical Surveillance System — or BOSS — last fall after two years of government-financed development. Although the system is not ready for use, researchers say they are making significant advances. That alarms privacy advocates, who say that now is the time for the government to establish oversight rules and limits on how it will someday be used.

There have been stabs for over a decade at building a system that would help match faces in a crowd with names on a watch list — whether in searching for terrorism suspects at high-profile events like a presidential inaugural parade, looking for criminal fugitives in places like Times Square or identifying card cheats in crowded casinos.

The automated matching of close-up photographs has improved greatly in recent years, and companies like Facebook have experimented with it using still pictures.”

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“He Argues That His Colleagues Have Forgotten About The ‘Intelligence’ Part Of Artificial Intelligence”

August 21, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

At the New Yorker Elements blog, NYU psychology professor Gary Marcus has a post about the AI community, which seems more interested in creating machines that are better at sleight of hand than depth of thought. An excerpt:

“In a terrific paper just presented at the premier international conference on artificial intelligence, [Henry] Levesque, a University of Toronto computer scientist who studies these questions, has taken just about everyone in the field of A.I. to task. He argues that his colleagues have forgotten about the ‘intelligence’ part of artificial intelligence.

Levesque starts with a critique of Alan Turing’s famous ‘Turing test,’ in which a human, through a question-and-answer session, tries to distinguish machines from people. You’d think that if a machine could pass the test, we could safely conclude that the machine was intelligent. But Levesque argues that the Turing test is almost meaningless, because it is far too easy to game. Every year, a number of machines compete in the challenge for real, seeking something called the Loebner Prize. But the winners aren’t genuinely intelligent; instead, they tend to be more like parlor tricks, and they’re almost inherently deceitful. If a person asks a machine ‘How tall are you?’ and the machine wants to win the Turing test, it has no choice but to confabulate. It has turned out, in fact, that the winners tend to use bluster and misdirection far more than anything approximating true intelligence. One program worked by pretending to be paranoid; others have done well by tossing off one-liners that distract interlocutors. The fakery involved in most efforts at beating the Turing test is emblematic: the real mission of A.I. ought to be building intelligence, not building software that is specifically tuned toward fixing some sort of arbitrary test.”

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“The Anti-PED Hysteria Isn’t About The Cheating”

August 20, 2013 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

As the A-Rod drama reminds us, the whole steroid hysteria surrounding Major League Baseball is a perplexing thing. It’s not that anyone should use steroids. Almost all available evidence tells us that they’re dangerous. But football players are about twice the size of their MLB counterparts, yet no one seems to care. Hockey and basketball players are also much larger, but there’s very little noise about it.

I would assume baseball received special attention (even Congressional hearings) because the Mark McGwire and Barry Bonds years saw the obliteration of the single-season and career home-run records, which were considered “sacred” for some reason. (Even when Roger Maris nosed out Babe Ruth’s record in 1961 with no suspicions of cheating, he was reviled. Hank Aaron, a great gentleman, received death threats when approaching Ruth’s career record, though those were motivated mostly by racism.)

Some sportswriters with a particularly moralistic bent have been unleashing fire and brimstone, reminding us about an earlier, cleaner era of baseball which never existed. Baseball has always been rife with drugs and cheating. Just because the drugs have gotten more effective doesn’t really change that. Some of the most famous players in history used amphetamines. Bob Costas may have arranged it in his head that amphetamines are “performance-enablers” and not “performance-enhancers,” but that isn’t so. It’s just a rationalization. (I think the best description of Newt Gingrich likewise suits Costas: He’s a dumb person’s idea of what a smart person sounds like.)

All this hand-wringing over a lost idyllic past is not dissimilar to politicians who sell nostalgia for an earlier, more-perfect America. You know, the one with much more racism and sexism and inferior medicine and science. It’s not that baseball shouldn’t try to keep the sport as drug-free as possible just because PEDs have always been used, but it shouldn’t be a dishonest, moralistic pursuit of a history that simply didn’t occur.

From Scott Lemieux at Deadspin: 

“Singling out Rodriguez is a perfect symbol of anti-PED hysteria. First, there’s the singling out of baseball players in general. Almost nobody cares about NFL players who use PEDs, although PED use in the NFL can actually result in players better able to inflict injuries on each other. This should make it clear that whatever our anti-PED hysteria is about, it’s not about a concern for the health of the athletes. People who (like me) watch the NFL—let alone people who make a good living covering it—really can’t get on their high horse about the health effects of PEDs. Injecting yourself with Human Growth Hormone is certainly a lot safer than playing a sport in which the normal course of action results in hits that might slowly turn your brain to mush. Nor is it obvious why taking PEDs is considered highly objectionable but taking cortisone to play through terrible knee or back injuries is considered part of the game.

The anti-PED hysteria isn’t about the cheating, either. High-level athletes will always seek an edge. “

“Silicon Valley Has Killed Major Innovation”

August 20, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Why Silicon Valley Funds Instagrams, Not Hyperloops,” entrepreneur Jerzy Gangi’s astute critique of America’s contemporary idea factory:

“As an entrepreneur, I began to wonder, ‘Why hasn’t anyone proposed this already?’ It’s a great idea, but… Elon Musk can’t be the first person to think of it.

In doing some research online I found out that other American inventors have had similar designs and proposals for a decade. However, none of them were able to get taken seriously or obtain funding.

Why did that happen?

I want to tell you my answer.

MY THESIS

My thesis is simple. We haven’t seen Silicon Valley develop a company like Hyperloop — even though the plans have been out there for over a decade — because there’s a systemic failure in the startup ecosystem. In short, Silicon Valley has killed major innovation.

In all of the hype around companies like Facebook and Instagram — what really are just glorified websites — we’ve lost sight of some real innovation opportunities, most of which occur in the offline world.

The entire culture of Silicon Valley, and entrepreneurship around the globe, has taken on a groupthink that prevents truly novel inventions, like the Hyperloop, from reaching the market.

The result is a major loss. It’s a loss to our society. It’s a loss to our capital markets. It’s a loss to private investors. And it’s a loss to entrepreneurs.”

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“If Somebody Wants To Call Me A Cracker Bitch, That’s Cool”

August 20, 2013 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

A couple of punks and writers, Nick Tosches and Patti Smith, got together in 1976 as the former interviewed the latter for Penthouse, that classy journal published by Bob Guccione. An excerpt:

“Penthouse: 

Has the women’s movement had anything to do with your growth as a poet?

Patti Smith: 

No. I remember getting totally pissed off the first time I got a letter that started off with ‘Dear Ms. Smith.’ A word like Ms. is really bullshit. Vowels are the most illuminated letters in the alphabet. Vowels are the colors and souls of poetry and speech. And these assholes take the only fuckin’ vowel out of the word Miss. So what do they have left? Ms. It sounds like a sick bumblebee, it sounds frigid. I mean, who the hell would ever want to stick his hand up the dress of somebody who goes around calling herself something like Ms.? It’s all so stupid.

I don’t like answering to other people’s philosophies. I don’t have any philosophy, I just believe in stuff. Either I believe in something or I don’t. Like, I believe in the Rolling Stones but not in the Dave Clark Five. There’s nothing philosophic about it. Whenever I’m linked with a movement, it pisses me off. I like who I am. I always liked who I was and I always loved men. The only time I ever feel fucked around by men is when I fight with a guy or when a guy ditches me. And that’s got nothing to do with women’s lib. That has to do with being ditched.

I don’t feel exploited by pictures of naked broads. I like that stuff. It’s a bad photograph or the girl’s ugly, then that pisses me off. Shit, I think bodies are great.

Every time I say the word pussy at a poetry reading, some idiot broad rises and has a fit. ‘What’s your definition of pussy, sister?’ I dunno, it’s a slang term. If I wanna say pussy, I’ll say pussy. If I wanna say nigger, I’ll say nigger. If somebody wants to call me a cracker bitch, that’s cool. It’s all part of being American. But all these tight-assed movements are fucking up our slang, and that eats it.

Penthouse: 

Do you have many encounters with groupies?

Patti Smith: 

Yeah, but they’re almost always girls. They’re usually pretty young, too. They try to act heavy and come on like leather. I always act as if they’re real cool. I never go anyplace with them. They bring me drugs and poetry and black leather gloves and stuff like that. It’s pretty funny. I don’t really know what they want. I mean, I think they’re actually straight girls.

The guys that I get, they’re always such great losers. Really pimply faced fuck-ups with thick glasses, but a lot of heart, y’know? My heart really goes out for those kids ’cause I can still taste what it feels like to be sixteen and totally fucked up. I remember everything. And I figure if I came out of it okay, then these kids are going to be okay, too. They just need to be told that they’re going to be okay, that’s all.”

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“During The Summer Of 1963, Earth Looked A Tiny Bit Like Saturn”

August 20, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I never knew about this: In 1963, the U.S. government apparently blasted a ring of copper around the Earth, fearful that the Soviet Union could compromise its communications abilities.The opening of an article on the topic from Joe Hanson at Wired:

“During the summer of 1963, Earth looked a tiny bit like Saturn.

The same year that Martin Luther King, Jr. marched on Washington and Beatlemania was born, the United States launched half a billion whisker-thin copper wires into orbit in an attempt to install a ring around the Earth. It was called Project West Ford, and it’s a perfect, if odd, example of the Cold War paranoia and military mentality at work in America’s early space program.

The Air Force and Department of Defense envisioned the West Ford ring as the largest radio antenna in human history. Its goal was to protect the nation’s long-range communications in the event of an attack from the increasingly belligerent Soviet Union.

During the late 1950’s, long-range communications relied on undersea cables or over-the-horizon radio. These were robust, but not invulnerable. Should the Soviets have attacked an undersea telephone or telegraph cable, America would only have been able to rely on radio broadcasts to communicate overseas. But the fidelity of the ionosphere, the layer of the atmosphere that makes most long-range radio broadcasts possible, is at the mercy of the sun: It is routinely disrupted by solar storms. The U.S. military had identified a problem.”

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“Christ Wasn’t White. Christ Was A Black Man.”

August 19, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

When bitterly trying to push buttons, Malcolm X said some ridiculous and hurtful things. But I think he said as many startlingly true things as any American in the second half of last century. He was at his best and worst in a 1963 Playboy interview, which was conducted by Alex Haley. An excerpt:

“Playboy:

You say that white men are devils by nature. Was Christ a devil?

 

Malcolm X:

Christ wasn’t white. Christ was a black man.

Playboy: 

On what Scripture do you base this assertion?

Malcolm X:

Sir, Billy Graham has made the same statement in public. Why not ask him what Scripture he found it in? When Pope Pius XII died, LIFE magazine carried a picture of him in his privatestudy kneeling before a black Christ. What was the source of their information? All white people who have studied history and geography know that Christ was a black man. Only the poor, brainwashed American Negro has been made to believe that Christ was white, to maneuver him into worshiping the white man. After becoming a Muslim in prison, I read almost everything I could put my hands on in the prison library. I began to think back on everything I had read and especially with the histories, I realized that nearly all of them read by the general public have been made into white histories. I found out that the history-whitening process either had left out great things that black men had done, or some of the great black men had gotten whitened.

 Playboy: 

Would you list a few of these men?

Malcolm X:

Well, Hannibal, the most successful general that ever lived, was a black man. So was Beethoven; Beethoven’s father was one of the black moors that hired themselves out in Europe as professional soldiers. Haydn, Beethoven’s teacher, was of African descent. And Solomon. Great Biblical characters. Columbus, the discoverer of America, was a half-black man. Whole black empires, like the Moorish, have been whitened to hide the fact that a great black empire had conquered a white empire even before America was discovered. The Moorish civilization–black Africans–conquered and ruled Spain; they kept the light burning in Southern Europe. The word ‘Moor’ means ‘black,’ by the way. Egyptian civilization is a classic example of how the white man stole great African cultures and makes them appear today as white European. The black nation of Egypt is the only country that has a science named after its culture: Egyptology. The ancient Sumerians, a black-skinned people, occupied the Middle Eastern areas and were contemporary with the Egyptian civilization. The Incas, the Aztecs, the Mayans, all dark-skinned Indian people, had a highly developed culture here in America, in what is now Mexico and northern South America. These people had mastered agriculture at the time when European white people were still living in mud huts and eating weeds. But white children, or black children, or grownups here today in America don’t get to read this in the average books they are exposed to.

Playboy:  

Can you cite any authoritative historical documents for these observations? 

Malcolm X:

I can cite a great many, sir. You could start with Herodotus, the Greek historian. He outright described the Egyptians as ‘black, with woolly hair.’ And the American archaeologist and Egyptologist James Henry Breasted did the same thing. Read Pliny. Read any of the ancient Roman, Greek and, more recently, European anthropologists and archaeologists.”

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“If He Goes Even Halfway Through With This Much-Vaunted Reinvention Of Journalism, There Is No Way He’s Not Going To Break Some Eggs”

August 19, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m fascinated by what Jeff Bezos may do with the Washington Post, and I’m not the only one. I think he certainly has a big-picture idea of where it’s going, no matter what he says. He’ll work out the details as he goes, but he has a blueprint. From an article by David Streitfeld and Christine Haughney in the New York Times, another traditional newspaper trying to traverse the digital divide:

“‘Jeff may be outwardly goofy, with that trademark laugh, but he’s a very tough guy,’ said James Marcus, who was Amazon employee No. 55. ‘If he goes even halfway through with his much-vaunted reinvention of journalism, there is no way he’s not going to break some eggs.’

Mr. Bezos is the sole founder, the public face, the largest shareholder and the visionary of Amazon. ‘For many of us, creating Earth’s biggest bookstore would have been enough,’ said Kerry Fried, employee No. 251. ‘Jeff’s goal was a touch grander: to conquer the world.’

He has more than his share of detractors — just ask your neighborhood bookseller, if you can find one. But it is increasingly hard to dispute that he is the natural heir of Steve Jobs as the entrepreneur with the most effect on the way people live now.

Amazon, which is as much a reflection of Mr. Bezos’ personality as a corporation worth $125 billion can be, is by far the fastest-growing major retailer, although that simple label long ago ceased to suffice. It is also a movie studio, an art gallery (a 1962 Picasso,’Jacqueline au Chapeau Noir,‘ can be had for $175,000) and a publisher. It is an empire that spans much of the globe and even has its own currency, Amazon Coins. What it does not have much of, and never did, are old-fashioned profits.”

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“I Want To Stress The Importance Of Being Young And Technical”

August 19, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I think one of the sadder aspects of American culture is ageism. If you haven’t accomplished a certain thing by a certain age it seems like you’red disqualified. Just when you’re actually at a point when you can pretty much handle anything. It makes no sense. It comes as no surprise that age discrimination is particularly acute in Silicon Valley. From Andrew S. Ross at the SFGate:

“In fact, tech executives claim to have tens of thousands of jobs going begging, so much so that they need to bring in educated workers from overseas to fill them.

But if demand is outstripping supply, how come so many skilled IT professionals in the Bay Area are out of work? In a nutshell, job experience in the tech industry matters far less than it once did. In fact, it can work against you.

‘It’s been quite a shock, coming out of my last job, which I had for 11 years,’ said Robert Honma, 49, of Sunnyvale, his resume filled with senior tech positions in multinational companies and small startups. He’s been out of work for 10 months. ‘The Facebooks, the Googles are driven by the young.’

Mark Zuckerberg agrees.

‘I want to stress the importance of being young and technical,” Facebook’s CEO (now 28) told a Y Combinator Startup event at Stanford University in 2007.”

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“I Want To Focus On His Claim That A Fact Can’t Be Racist”

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

Richard Dawkins got into trouble recently for sending out a tweet about the paucity of Nobel Prizes won by Muslims. Part of the defense of his statement was sort of ridiculous–that facts can’t be bigoted. But, of course, they can.

They certainly are when white supremacists (even the ones in academia) try to prove that African-Americans students are inferior because they’ve score lower overall on standardized testing, without mentioning the racial bias embedded in the exams or that preparation for such tests among different groups of students is heavily influenced by history, economics, etc. Facts can be prejudiced when they’re delivered free of such important context. From David Edmonds at Practical Ethics:

“Here is the sequence of events.  1. Richard Dawkins tweets that all the world’s Muslims have fewer Nobel Prizes than Trinity College Cambridge.  2. Cue a twitter onslaught – accusing Professor Dawkins of racism.  3. Richard Dawkins writes that a fact can’t be racist.

It seems to me pretty silly to call Dawkins a racist, for some of the reasons he spells out here.

But I want to focus on his claim that a fact can’t be racist.  That seems to me a bit silly too.”

“Fannie Glass Says She Most Misses Having Some Dirt To Eat”

August 18, 2013 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

This will sound like a provincial and insulting question, but it’s not meant to be: Do people in the American South still eat dirt? I’ve read at various times that devouring soil was a custom, especially among children, in the region. I’m sure the earth has plenty of nutrients, but is it passé at this point? From William E. Schmidt in the February 3, 1984 New York Times:

“CRUGER, Miss. Feb. 9— It’s after a rainfall, when the earth smells so rich and damp and flavorful, that Fannie Glass says she most misses having some dirt to eat.

‘It just always tasted so good to me,’ says Mrs. Glass, who now eschews a practice that she acquired as a small girl from her mother. ‘When it’s good and dug from the right place, dirt has a fine sour taste.’

For generations, the eating of clay-rich dirt has been a curious but persistent custom in some rural areas of Mississippi and other Southern states, practiced over the years by poor whites and blacks.

But while it is not uncommon these days to find people here who eat dirt, scholars and others who have studied the practice say it is clearly on the wane. Like Mrs. Glass, many are giving up dirt because of the social stigma attached to it.

‘In another generation I suspect it will disappear altogether,’ said Dr. Dennis A. Frate, a medical anthropologist from the University of Mississippi who has studied the phenomenon. ‘As the influence of television and the media has drawn these isolated communities closer to the mainstream of American society, dirt eating has increasingly become a social taboo.'”

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“It’s Now So Inexpensive To Have A Powerful Computing Device In My Car Or Lapel”

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

The opening of Christopher Mims’ Quartz post about Google’s push into screenless computing:

“The spread of computing to every corner of our physical world doesn’t just mean a proliferation of screens large and small—it also means we’ll soon come to rely on mobile computers with no screens at all. ‘It’s now so inexpensive to have a powerful computing device in my car or lapel, that if you think about form factors, they won’t all have keyboards or screens,’ says Scott Huffman, head of the Conversation Search group at Google.

Google is already moving rapidly to enable voice commands in all of its products. On mobile phones, Google Now for Android and Google’s search app on the iPhone allow users to search the web via voice, or carry out other basic functions like sending emails. Similarly, Google Glass would be almost unusable without voice interaction. At Google’s conference for developers, it unveiled voice control for its Chrome web browser. And Motorola’s new Moto X phone has a specialized microchip that allows the phone to listen at all times, even when it’s asleep, for the magic word that begins every voice conversation with a Google product: ‘OK…’

There’s nothing new about voice interaction with computers per se. What’s different about Google’s work on the technology is that the company wants to make it as fluid and easy as keyboards and touch screens are now. That’s a challenge big enough that, thus far, it has kept voice-based interfaces from going mainstream in our personal computing devices. And in cases when they are in use, such as interactive voice response systems designed to handle customer service calls, they can be frustrating.”

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“It’s A Matriarchy Parading Around As A Macho Patriarchy”

August 16, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Julia Ioffe, who covers Russia for the New Republic, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

__________________________

Question:

We who are not particularly knowledgeable about Russia still think of it as having a pretty sexist culture. Are women treated more inferior there than in other more ‘Westernized’ countries?

Julia Ioffe:

Yes! Omg, yes, yes, yes. Russia is still extremely sexist. I can write volumes on this, but, good lord. Basically, it’s a matriarchy parading around as a macho patriarchy. That said, the wage gap between men and women is smaller in Russia than in the U.S. And once a year, on International Women’s Day (March 8) Russian women get tons and tons of flowers — I guess to make up for being treated as cooks/strippers with uteruses the rest of the year.

________________________

Question:

Is there something about Russian Culture/Society that makes the country so prone to authoritarian dictatorship-esque regimes (Stalin, USSR, to Putin)?

Julia Ioffe:

I think Stalin set the stage for Putin, and the czars set the stage for Stalin. If the czars taught Russians that they were eternal subjects to the holy emperor and his Church, Stalin drove home the notion by jailing and killing millions and millions of Soviets, of making people afraid not just to speak up and resist, but to trust each other. The scars of what he did are there, but they’re fading in the generation born after the fall of the Soviet Union. I don’t know that it’s a cultural thing as much as it is hard, cruel historical training.

________________________

Question:

Do you think Putin is really this homophobic or is he just making a statement?

Julia Ioffe:

I don’t think Putin is any more homophobic than most Russians, which is pretty homophobic — Russians, like I said, are pretty ignorant about homosexuality and think it’s abnormal). I also don’t think it was his initiative. This law, unlike many, came up to the federal level after being introduced in cities around Russia, and Putin signed into law what the Duma gave him, which obviously signifies his approval: if he hadn’t approved, it would’ve never made it out of the lower chamber of the Russian parliament. That said, the law reflects a tone set by Putin by bringing the Orthodox Church, a very conservative institution, increasingly not just into public life but into the government. It’s all part of a pattern of looking for a more conservative, “Russian” national idea — whatever that means.

____________________________

Question:

What are your thoughts on 2014 Olympics? Should gay athletes not attend, attend but protest?

Julia Ioffe:

I think gay athletes should absolutely attend, kick ass, and show Russia and the rest of the largely homophobic world that they are an athletic force to be reckoned with.

__________________________

Question:

How serious of a threat is Islamic radicalization in Russia via both the Caucasus and the quickly growing Muslim population in other regions?

Will Putin’s often times heavy hand lead to instability via this particular demographic?

Julia Ioffe:

It’s a pretty serious threat, and I can’t say that the Russians are doing a good job fighting it. For one thing, they’ve installed a guy named Ramzan Kadyrov to run Chechnya (once torn up by war) and he’s running a pretty Islamist ship. (If you want proof, look at his Instagram account.) And Putin, who is in many ways hostage to him, can’t do much about it.

__________________________

Question:

What is the biggest misconception Americans have about Russian politics?

Julia Ioffe:

That Putin thinks ahead.•

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“No One Knows If The Thing Would Actually Work”

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

Tad Friend, the excellent California correspondent for the New Yorker, mercifully liberated from having to profile Ben Stiller’s narcissism, provides his two cents on Elon Musk’s Hyperloop plans. Here’s the glass-half-empty part:

“The bad news is that there’s no conceivable way that the system would cost just six billion dollars, or that one-way tickets would cost twenty dollars. Overpromise disease is endemic to Silicon Valley, but Musk has an aggravated case. When I wrote a profile of him, in 2009, he told me that a third-generation Tesla would be selling for less than thirty thousand dollars in 2014, the same year that he expected SpaceX’s Falcon 9 to begin ferrying tourists around the moon. Well, no and hell no. More worrisomely, he promised that you could start driving the Model S in western California ‘at breakfast and be halfway across the country by dinnertime.’ Musk is a lot better at math than I am, but he eventually acknowledged that by ‘dinnertime’ he really meant ‘the following morning’s breakfast’—if, again, you didn’t stop to go to the bathroom.

 Additional bad news is that California’s politicians are skeptical of the Hyperloop, as they’ve already committed to their own relatively slow high-speed rail system, now projected to be finished in 2029. And that no community in San Francisco or Los Angeles would want giant tubes running through it. And that, from the evidence of Musk’s own route map, he hasn’t figured out how to get the Hyperloop across the San Francisco Bay or any closer to downtown Los Angeles than about an hour north of it—which kind of kills the whole point. Also, earthquakes! The suggested route more or less parallels the San Andreas Fault. (Musk says that his flexible tube joints and dampered pylons would enable the system to absorb seismic shocks. But the worst place to be in an earthquake would be ripping along at barely-subsonic speeds twenty feet above the ground—in a system attached to it. Disaster-film auteurs are surely already storyboarding the money shot of Hyperloop pods disgorging onto a teeming freeway at seven hundred miles an hour.)

Finally, of course, no one knows if the thing would actually work.”

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“Human Subjects Submit To Experiments Aimed At Manipulating Their Subconscious Minds”

August 15, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

We think we can control non-fiction that reads like fiction, but that point has passed. The dial will not turn back. The opening Sharon Weinberger’s new article at Wired:

“MOSCOW — The future of U.S. anti-terrorism technology could lie near the end of a Moscow subway line in a circular dungeon-like room with a single door and no windows. Here, at the Psychotechnology Research Institute, human subjects submit to experiments aimed at manipulating their subconscious minds.

Elena Rusalkina, the silver-haired woman who runs the institute, gestured to the center of the claustrophobic room, where what looked like a dentist’s chair sits in front of a glowing computer monitor. ‘We’ve had volunteers, a lot of them,’ she said, the thick concrete walls muffling the noise from the college campus outside. ‘We worked out a program with (a psychiatric facility) to study criminals. There’s no way to falsify the results. There’s no subjectivism.’

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has gone to many strange places in its search for ways to identify terrorists before they attack, but perhaps none stranger than this lab on the outskirts of Russia’s capital. The institute has for years served as the center of an obscure field of human behavior study — dubbed psychoecology — that traces it roots back to Soviet-era mind control research.

What’s gotten DHS’ attention is the institute’s work on a system called Semantic Stimuli Response Measurements Technology, or SSRM Tek, a software-based mind reader that supposedly tests a subject’s involuntary response to subliminal messages.”

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“One Possibility Being Explored Is That They Were Frightened To Death By Nightmares”

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

Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome (SUNDS) has a name now, but that wasn’t the case in 1977 when seemingly healthy Laotian refugees in America began dying in their sleep. While it was always suspected that irregular heart rhythms played a part in the mysterious deaths, more inscrutable sources have been suggested. Malign spirits? Nightmares? From Wayne King in the May 10, 1981 New York Times:

“SAN FRANCISCO, May 9— The Federal Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta is conducting an intensive inquiry into the manner in which 18 apparently healthy Laotian refugees died mysteriously in their sleep in this country within the last four years. One possibility being explored is that they were frightened to death by nightmares.

The 17 men and a woman were members of a preliterate Laotion mountain society called the Hmong. About 35,000 Hmong are now living in the United States. Most of them fled their homeland after it was overrun in 1975 by the Pathet Lao.

The Hmong come from an isolated culture similar to that of the American Indian. Most of those who have been resettled in this country live in concentrated communities in Missoula, Mont.; Santa Ana, Calif.; Providence, R.I.; Denver and Minneapolis-St. Paul, where the largest number, 10,000 to 12,000, reside.

Very few speak English. Their own tongue became a written language only a few years ago, and their adaptation to American life has been marginal. Until some relatively recent conversions to Buddhism and Christianity, their religion is animist, governed by spirits and manifestions of the soul.

Terror Induced by Nightmare

The cause of death of the 18 refugees in their own beds in the early morning hours remains a mystery. The deaths have generally been attributed to ‘probable cardiac arrythmia,’ or irregular heartbeat. Although pathologists have been reluctant to advance it publicly, one possibility being explored is an obscure pattern described in medical literature as ‘Oriental nightmare death syndrome,’ in which death results from terror induced by a nightmare.”

“It Would Make Obama The First President Since President Jimmy Carter To Go Green”

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

I knew that Jimmy Carter had installed solar panels on the White House in the late 1970s, but I never realized that Ronald Reagan had them removed roughly a decade later. Dipshit. President Obama is putting them back as the solar-energy biz enjoys a renaissance. From Cyrus Farivar at Ars Technica:

“On Thursday, a White House official confirmed to the Washington Post that President Barack Obama would finally make good on a 2010 promise to install solar panels on the First Family’s residence. The panels are being installed this week.

Once complete, it would make Obama the first president since President Jimmy Carter to go green. Carter’s solar panels were installed in 1979, but President Ronald Reagan had them removed in 1986. It also makes the Obama family part of the rapidly expanding growth in solar energy across the United States.

According to new industry data from GTM Research, solar panels have fallen in price, and their installation and collective energy-generating capacity has consequently skyrocketed. Nearly two-thirds of the world’s existing solar panels have been installed in the last 2.5 years.”

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