Excerpts

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“What If A Human Mind Somehow Got Trapped Inside A Sheep’s Head?”

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

From a pretty overheated Associated Press article about stem-cell research and the commingling of species:

“But the biological co-mingling of animal and human is now evolving into even more exotic and unsettling mixes of species, evoking the Greek myth of the monstrous chimera, which was part lion, part goat and part serpent.

In the past two years, scientists have created pigs with human blood, fused rabbit eggs with human DNA and injected human stem cells to make paralyzed mice walk.

Particularly worrisome to some scientists are the nightmare scenarios that could arise from the mixing of brain cells: What if a human mind somehow got trapped inside a sheep’s head?

The ‘idea that human neuronal cells might participate in ‘higher order’ brain functions in a nonhuman animal, however unlikely that may be, raises concerns that need to be considered,’ the academies report warned.”

“The Building Was The Advertisement”

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

I don’t understand why children can’t go into bars or buy cigarettes, but they can eat at fast-food restaurants. It ingrains in them at an impressionable age as unhealthy a lifestyle as can be. I have no problem with adults who choose to do these things, but I don’t get how we draw the line with kids to allow them to stuff huge amounts of salt and sugar into their hearts.

That said, I’ll acknowledge that I’ve always been entranced by the branding and design of fast-food places: the consistency, the brightness, the modernism, the formerly industrial materials being wound into a homey decor in a way that Ray and Charles Eames could appreciate. It’s the perfect meeting of form and function. Don’t get me wrong: Even if I wasn’t a vegetarian, I would not eat this garbage, and the implications of its globalization also bother me. But I do love the architecture and design of such places, especially the earliest iterations.

From Jimmy Stamp’s Smithsonian blog post, “Design Decoded: The Golden Arches of Modernism,” an excerpt about the initial McDonald’s structures, which were planned and executed during the apex of roadside culture:

“In the early 1950s brothers Richard and Maurice McDonald hired architect Stanley Clark Meston to design a drive-in hamburger stand that carried on the traditions of roadside architecture established in the 1920s and 1930s. They had some experience with previous restaurants and a very clear idea of how they wanted their new venture to work – at least on the inside. Meston described the design as ‘logically dictated by clear program and commercial necessities’ and compared it to designing a factory. Though he didn’t necessarily consider himself a modernist, Meston’s pragmatic, functionalist approach reveals, at the very least, a sympathy with some of the tenets of Modernism. Function before form. But not, it would appear, at the expense of form.

And anyway, the exterior had its own function to fulfill. In an age before ubiquitous mass media advertisements, the building was the advertisement. To ensure the restaurant stood out from the crowd, Meston decided to make the entire building a sign specifically designed to attract customers from the road. Now, many architects have speculated that McDonald’s iconic Golden arches have their origin in Eero Saarinen’s 1948 design for the St. Louis Gateway Arch or Swiss architect Le Corbusier’s unbuilt 1931 design for the Palace of the Soviets. But they tend to read little too much into things. The answer is much simpler.

The building was a sign but it wasn’t really signifying anything – other than ‘hey! Look over here!’ According to Hess, the initial idea for the golden arches –and they were called ‘golden arches’ from the very beginning– came from ‘a sketch of two half circle arches drawn by Richard McDonald.’ It just seemed to him like a memorable form that could be easily identified form a passing car. The longer a driver could see it from behind a windshield, the more likely he or she would be to stop. Oddly enough, the idea to link the arches, thereby forming the letter ‘M’, didn’t come about until five years later. McDonald had no background in design or architecture, no knowledge of Eero Saarinen, Le Corbusier, or the triumphal arches of ancient Rome. He just thought it looked good. Weston turned that sketch into an icon.

Technology has long conditioned urban form and continues to do so today. But this was perhaps never quite so clear as it was with roadside attractions and restaurants like McDonalds.”

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“The Distinction Between Verbal And Visual Literacy Needs To Be Done Away With”

July 25, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a New York Review of Books essay, Martin Scorsese sums up the new literacy:

“Now we take reading and writing for granted but the same kinds of questions are coming up around moving images: Are they harming us? Are they causing us to abandon written language?

We’re face to face with images all the time in a way that we never have been before. And that’s why I believe we need to stress visual literacy in our schools. Young people need to understand that not all images are there to be consumed like fast food and then forgotten—we need to educate them to understand the difference between moving images that engage their humanity and their intelligence, and moving images that are just selling them something.

As Steve Apkon, the film producer and founder of the Jacob Burns Film Center in Pleasantville, New York, points out in his new book The Age of the Image, the distinction between verbal and visual literacy needs to be done away with, along with the tired old arguments about the word and the image and which is more important. They’re both important. They’re both fundamental. Both take us back to the core of who we are.

When you look at ancient writing, words and images are almost indistinguishable. In fact, words are images, they’re symbols. Written Chinese and Japanese still seem like pictographic languages. And at a certain point—exactly when is ‘unfathomable’—words and images diverged, like two rivers, or two different paths to understanding.

In the end, there really is only literacy.”

 

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“Americans Are Segregating By Income More Than Ever Before”

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

The opening of a Guernica piece about the fall of Detroit and the rise of American income disparity, by that tiny communist Robert Reich:

“One way to view Detroit’s bankruptcy—the largest bankruptcy of any American city—is as a failure of political negotiations over how financial sacrifices should be divided among the city’s creditors, city workers, and municipal retirees—requiring a court to decide instead. It could also be seen as the inevitable culmination of decades of union agreements offering unaffordable pension and health benefits to city workers.

But there’s a more basic story here, and it’s being replicated across America: Americans are segregating by income more than ever before. Forty years ago, most cities (including Detroit) had a mixture of wealthy, middle-class, and poor residents. Now, each income group tends to lives separately, in its own city—with its own tax bases and philanthropies that support, at one extreme, excellent schools, resplendent parks, rapid-response security, efficient transportation, and other first-rate services; or, at the opposite extreme, terrible schools, dilapidated parks, high crime, and third-rate services.

The geo-political divide has become so palpable that being wealthy in America today means not having to come across anyone who isn’t.

Detroit is a devastatingly poor, mostly black, increasingly abandoned island in the midst of a sea of comparative affluence that’s mostly white. Its suburbs are among the richest in the nation.”

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“They Will Want It To Look Unusual”

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

Do we want the future to be seamless or jarring, at least initially? From Brad Templeton’s Robocars post about Vislab’s driverless car, which relies mostly on cameras:

“The Vislab car uses a LIDAR for forward obstacle detection, but their main thrust is the use of cameras. An FPGA-based stereo system is able to build point clouds from the two cameras. Driving appears to have been done in noonday sunlight. (This is easy in terms of seeing things but hard in terms of the harsh shadows.)

The article puts a focus on how the cameras are cheaper and less obtrusive. I continue to believe that is not particularly interesting — lasers will get cheaper and smaller, and what people want here is the best technology in the early adopter stages, not the cheapest. In addition, they will want it to look unusual. Cheaper and hidden are good goals once the cars have been deployed for 5-10 years.”

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“Lawyers And Big Law Firms Were Paid More Than They Could Justify”

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

Noam Scheiber of the New Republic just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit about his recent article which predicts the collapse of Big Law. A couple of exchanges follow.

_______________________

Question: 

Why do you think the business model is collapsing? 

How can you show that the current biglaw downturn is not just the product of a big recession that will subside? 

Why do you think that corporations will pay less for legal services in the future in a systematic way? 

Noam Scheiber:

I think the business model is collapsing because of increased transparency in billing/pricing. Corporations are able to see what they’re paying for in more detail than ever before when it comes to legal services, and they don’t love what they’re seeing. Increasingly over the past decade or so, but especially since the recession, they’re simply refusing to go along with it. The best example is paying $300 an hour for the continued legal education of a first or second year associate who just doesn’t know anything. That is a dying institution. It’s of course possible that the current downturn is a product of the recession, but certain numbers suggest otherwise. According to NALP, the percentage of law grads who find a job where bar admission is required within 9 months is at its lowest ever – significantly lower than it was midway through the recession.

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Question:

Is the collapse of the biglaw model generally good, bad, or neutral for society as a whole?

Noam Scheiber:

From a purely economic perspective, it’s probably a good thing. it was economically inefficient – because of the irrationalities in the system, lawyers and big law firms were paid more than they could justify, output wise. which attracted to many smart, productive people into the legal profession and siphoned them away from other professions, where it would have been more efficient to deploy them. on the other hand, as i note in the piece, the beauty of the big law model was that it served as a psychological safety night for generations of college grads. you could go off and try your true passion, knowing that a respectable upper-middle class existence awaited you via law school if things didn’t work out. the loss of that safety net is a bit of a bummer. but it’s hard to say it justified the bigger economic distortion.

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“Most Victorian Freaks, However, Actually Earned A Comfortable Living”

July 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Nadja Durbach’s Public Domain Review reconsideration of the life of Joseph Merrick, the Elephant Man:

“The scenes are among the most heartless in cinema history: a drunken, abusive showman exhibiting the severely deformed Joseph Merrick to horrified punters. David Lynch’s The Elephant Man begins with its lead character being treated little better than an animal in a cage. But it soon finds a clean-cut hero in the ambitious young surgeon Frederick Treves, who rescues the hapless Merrick from his keeper and gives him permanent shelter at the London Hospital. Supported by charitable donations, the victim recovers his humanity: he learns to speak again (in a decidedly middle-class accent), to entertain society guests and to dress and behave like a well-heeled young dandy. Merrick, no more the degraded show freak, reveals his inner goodness and spirituality and dies happy.

Lynch’s movie is based largely on Treves’ sentimental chronicle. But that narrative is merely one version of events – and one that in the end tells us more about middle-class morality than it does about Merrick. There is another story that casts a different light on what happened. The memoirs of Tom Norman, Merrick’s London manager, are surely as biased as Treves’. But as one of the most respected showmen of his day, Norman’s account challenges head on Treves’ claim that Merrick was ultimately better off in the hospital than at the freakshow.

In August 1884, after checking himself out of the Leicester workhouse, Merrick began his career as “the Elephant Man”. The exhibition of human oddities had been part of English entertainment since at least the Elizabethan period. In the 1880s, alongside the Elephant Man, the British public could see Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy, American Jack the Frog Man, Krao the Missing Link, Herr Unthan the Armless Wonder and any number of giants, dwarfs, bearded women and other “freaks of nature”. Despite the freakshow’s popularity, by the end of the 19th century, middle-class morality was condemning it as immoral, indecent and exploitive.

Most Victorian freaks, however, actually earned a comfortable living. Many were free agents who negotiated the terms of their exhibition and could ask for a salary or a share of the profits. They sold souvenirs to the crowds to make extra money. The freakshow was thus an important economic resource for working people whose deformities prevented them undertaking other forms of labour. Indeed, freak performers did not consider their exhibitions to be obscene or degrading. Rather, they saw themselves as little different from other entertainers.”

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“I Will Be Sort Of The Way I Really Am, Somewhat Skeptical, And That Will Be Funny”

July 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Wallace Shawn talking to the Paris Review last year about My Dinner with Andre, one of my obsessions:

“Paris Review:

How did My Dinner with André get set up, as they say?

Wallace Shawn:

After André directed Our Late Night, he decided to get out of theater. Then, three years later, he came back and said, Let’s do something else. And I thought, Let’s not do a play, let’s do a television film of some kind—talking heads, you and me. You’ll be you—you’ll tell about all these amazing things that you did while you were not working in the theater—and I will be sort of the way I really am, somewhat skeptical, and that will be funny. So we talked on tape, audio tape, for many months, and I wrote a script that was based on the transcriptions of those tapes. And after much discussion of all the world’s great directors, André and I decided to send the script to Louis Malle. Amazingly, we reached him quite quickly, through Diana Michener, a mutual friend, and our script must have come at exactly the right moment in his schedule, and apparently it came at the right moment in his life as well, because it rang some bell with him. He read the script almost immediately and then called André and said, Let’s do it. 

Paris Review:

Why Malle?

Wallace Shawn:

Louis Malle was a superb storyteller, and we felt he’d bring out the story, the plot of the script, because it has a plot, even though it seems we’re just idly talking. Malle also had a great sense of humor. And he had a fearless what-the-hell attitude. Many directors would have been terrified that the audience would become bored, and they would have been tempted to illustrate the various stories with flashbacks or at least to cut away to other events in the restaurant. Louis wasn’t frightened of the audience and didn’t do those things.

Paris Review:

How long was the shoot?

Wallace Shawn:

Three weeks. In the first week, though, Louis Malle simply tested out various complicated camera moves. By the end of the week, he’d decided he didn’t want to do any of them. So basically we had ten days, and we went methodically from one angle to the next, with one camera, and we shot ten feet of film for every foot we used, as in any normal film.”

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“Her Excursions Outside Twice Had Ended In Gunfire”

July 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

One of the most shocking episodes in the upside-down decade of the ’70s was the kidnapping of heiress Patty Hearst by the Symbionese Liberation Army, a violent and radical outgrowth of the tortured anti-war movement of the ’60s. The nation shuddered for the shanghaied scion, but soon Hearst was a full-fledged member of the SLA, knocking over banks, cursing the “pigs” and being pursued, along with her new “friends,” by the FBI. Was she brainwashed? Was she a traitor? Was she a rich girl acting out? 

I doubt Rolling Stone received too much grief for putting a terrorist on its cover back in 1975 (with an image that played off of Andrew Wyeth’s “Christina’s World”), since the magazine was then decidedly counterculture and un-glossy. From Howard Kohn and David Weir’s article: 

“The next day Patty ate her meals in the car. Even standing in line at a McDonalds was a risk. Millions had seen her picture on the evening news and the cover of Newsweek or heard her soft, distinctive voice on radio broadcasts of the S.L.A. communiqués.

For most of the previous four months she had been cooped up inside. Her excursions outside twice had ended in gunfire. Now she was driving across country through an FBI dragnet that already had employed more agents than any other civilian case.

The strain of the past months was showing. To Patty the passing world was populated by an army of undercover agents. Once, as Jack showed up to ease past a construction site, she ducked and whispered in a half shriek: ‘did you see that guy? I know he’s a pig.’

‘C’mon, he’s a highway flagman. Don’t be so uptight.’

When Jack pulled in for gas she frequently demanded he speed away as an attendant approached. ‘I don’t like the way he looks,’ she’d explain. ‘He looks like a pig.’

Patty’s repeated reviling of ‘pigs’ soon lead to a discussion about the political criterion for such a classification. Patty took the position that a pig was anyone who did not give wholehearted support to the S.L.A. Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden, for instance, were pigs because they’d criticized the S.L.A. tactics. Patty sounded like what she was — a new convert to radical thinking.”

“Making Them Work Can Be Tedious, If Not Outright Painful”

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

From “Slow Ideas,” another excellent Atul Gawande New Yorker article, this one about why some innovations are almost instantly sticky and why others get stuck:

“This has been the pattern of many important but stalled ideas. They attack problems that are big but, to most people, invisible; and making them work can be tedious, if not outright painful. The global destruction wrought by a warming climate, the health damage from our over-sugared modern diet, the economic and social disaster of our trillion dollars in unpaid student debt—these things worsen imperceptibly every day. Meanwhile, the carbolic-acid remedies to them, all requiring individual sacrifice of one kind or another, struggle to get anywhere.

The global problem of death in childbirth is a pressing example. Every year, three hundred thousand mothers and more than six million children die around the time of birth, largely in poorer countries. Most of these deaths are due to events that occur during or shortly after delivery. A mother may hemorrhage. She or her baby may suffer an infection. Many babies can’t take their first breath without assistance, and newborns, especially those born small, have trouble regulating their body temperature after birth. Simple, lifesaving solutions have been known for decades. They just haven’t spread.

Many solutions aren’t ones you can try at home, and that’s part of the problem. Increasingly, however, women around the world are giving birth in hospitals. In India, a government program offers mothers up to fourteen hundred rupees—more than what most Indians live on for a month—when they deliver in a hospital, and now, in many areas, the majority of births are in facilities. Death rates in India have fallen, but they’re still ten times greater than in high-income countries like our own.

Not long ago, I visited a few community hospitals in north India, where just one-third of mothers received the medication recommended to prevent hemorrhage; less than ten per cent of the newborns were given adequate warming; and only four per cent of birth attendants washed their hands for vaginal examination and delivery. In an average childbirth, clinicians followed only about ten of twenty-nine basic recommended practices.

Here we are in the first part of the twenty-first century, and we’re still trying to figure out how to get ideas from the first part of the twentieth century to take root.”

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“The Vacuum Cleaners, The Drones, Those Are The Initial Steps”

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

From Brian Handwerk’s new National Geographic piece about the next wave of robot learning:

“Would a robot serving you coffee in bed make waking up easier on weekday mornings? Could a household robot help an elderly relative who is living alone? How would you like to climb into a robotic car and eat breakfast with the kids while you’re all driven to school and work?

These scenarios may sound like science fiction, but experts say they’re a lot closer to becoming reality than you probably think.

Brown University roboticist expects a near-term robot revolution that will echo the computing revolution of recent decades. And he says it will be driven by enabling robots to learn more like humans do—by watching others demonstrate behaviors and by asking questions.

‘The robots you’re seeing now mostly are analogous to the mainframe computers of the 1970s,’ Jenkins said. ‘But you’re starting to see things develop. The vacuum cleaners, the drones, those are the initial steps,’ he said, referring to iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaner, which has autonomously cleaned millions of homes since its 2002 debut.”

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“Oh, West, You’ve Got The Biggest Ego In The World”

July 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

I don’t agree with all of President Obama’s policies–I’m not happy about Gitmo still being open and a lack (thus far) of meaningful Wall Street reform–but I think in the big picture he’s done an excellent job, reversing the disastrous course the nation was on, and setting us up in many ways in the future to be healthier, fairer, more environmentally friendly, more scientifically savvy and more welcoming to minorities of all kinds. It’s even more impressive when you consider that he’s done so while dragging along the corpse of this dying iteration of the GOP.

And when I hear the remarks the President made at the White House on Friday in regard to the George Zimmerman trial, I tend to wonder whether there’s another person in the country quite like him, who has that ability to articulate such complex thoughts in such a measured and nuanced way. I’m sure they’re out there somewhere, but they don’t make it to the Oval Office very often. In moments like those on Friday, I’m pretty much awed.

Of course, not everyone agrees. In addition to right-wingers accusing him of trying to start a race war, two people who’ve long dogged the President with criticism on almost every front (including this one) are the clownish tandem of Tavis Smiley and Cornel West. This pair has been on a for-profit, anti-Obama tour for years, and I don’t believe for a moment it has anything to do with policy. I think it’s all about ego and jealousy.

Smiley is self-styled champion of the worker and the impoverished whose well-appointed lifestyle is funded in part by generous support from Walmart, a corporation not exactly know for its worker-friendly ways. He responded to the President’s Trayvon Martin comments on Twitter and on Meet the Press.

 ________________________

Tavis Smiley@tavissmiley

Took POTUS almost a week to show up and express mild outrage. And still, it was as weak as pre-sweetened Kool-Aid.

 ________________________

Smiley may think President Obama’s words on the topic were “mild” or “weak,” but his own words about Walmart’s worker abuses are nonexistent. Unlike President Obama fighting for health-care reform while dealing with the political realities trying to stop that from happening, Smiley is impeded only by his own ambition and wants. No one who is poor will ever get health insurance because of Smiley. No one poor will ever have anything because of him. He is all talk and no action. He is a hypocrite.

West, that educated fool, who is in business (and cahoots) with Smiley, went even further. He continually grows his desperately needy and delusional cult of personality because he’s a narcissistic poseur who regards himself as the martyr of a cause–which turns out to be Cornel West’s outsized sense of himself. He and his pal want attention–and lots of it–or else. 

From “I Want to Be Like Jesus,” Lisa Miller’s sharp 2012 New York magazine profile of West:

“Barack Obama and Cornel West first crossed paths in 2004, after Obama, then a senator from Illinois, spoke at the Democratic National Convention. In that speech, Obama called the United States of America ‘a magical place, a beacon of freedom and opportunity,’ and West went on television to debate the point. Americans have fought hard to earn and protect their freedoms, he said; magic has nothing to do with it. The senator phoned West, and the two men talked for four hours, especially about their mutual commitment to the dreams of Dr. King—’It was a wonderful conversation,’ West says. During the 2008 primaries, West stumped for Obama, making 65 appearances in half a dozen states, and he was in the room as Obama prepped to debate his Democratic rivals at Howard University. West had the candidate’s personal cell-phone number, and he left messages on it frequently. ‘I was calling him, not every day, but I did call him often, just prayed for him, prayed for his safety and that he’d do well in the debates and so on.’

But after Election Day, the man whose character and judgment West had so enthusiastically lauded at the Apollo never called to express his gratitude, and West found himself unable to procure tickets to the inauguration—something he desperately wanted to do for his mother. West was infuriated. Even now, when he talks about the break in their relations, West uses the language of a jilted lover. ‘One of the reasons I was personally upset is that I did not get a phone call, ever, after 65 events. It just struck me that it was not decent,’ West says to me. ‘I don’t roll like that. People would say, ‘Oh, West, you’ve got the biggest ego in the world. He ain’t got time to say nothing to you.’ I say, ‘Weeell, I’m not like that. I’m not like that. If somebody does something for you, you take time to say thank you.’’

West speculates that something scared the president-elect off. Perhaps, he says, it was his long friendship with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s problematical former pastor. “Jeremiah Wright is my brother,” says West, who was in the audience at the National Press Club, when Wright combusted in May 2008, refusing to repudiate the sermon in which he said “God damn America.” Or it might have been that Obama needed to distance himself from the “socialist” label that was dogging him. West himself suspects he was “too leftist.” He believes someone in Obama’s circle said, “We don’t want to get too close to this brother.’ (A senior official from the 2008 campaign insists that no one had any intention of shutting West out of the proceedings. ‘If something dropped there, that’s unfortunate. But whatever happened, that isn’t President Obama’s fault.’)

Despite his lack of access, West arrived in Washington with his mother and brother on Inauguration Day, wanting to participate in the historic event. As they were checking into their hotel, the Wests were astonished to find that their bellhop was luckier than they. “We drive into the hotel, and the guy who picks up my bags from the hotel has a ticket to the inauguration,” he told Truthdig. “We had to watch the thing in the hotel.” Later that day, West’s ruffled feathers were smoothed when he ran into Arianna Huffington and she invited the West brothers to join her at the Huffington Post party. Of all the celebrations that night, “that turned out to be the best one,” says West. Arianna let him pick a few people from the rope line, he says: friend of Obama’s John Rogers, and Michelle Obama’s brother Craig ­Robinson. Inside, West ran into his nemesis, Larry Summers. “I shook his hand. He looked like a skeleton. I said, ‘Congratulations, my brother.’ ”

West continues to insist that it’s the president’s policies, and not what he perceives as ingratitude, that motivates his critique. “

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“About 96 Percent Of All New Vehicles Sold In The United States Have The Boxes”

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

Not all devices that track us are cameras. Some are black boxes. Not only do airplanes have them, but most cars do as well. Soon all will. Even police cars. Technology is the police of us all. And that’s so seamless and efficient, so why does it give pause? Because it’s something different? Or for another reason? From Jaclyn Trop in the New York Times:

“When Timothy P. Murray crashed his government-issued Ford Crown Victoria in 2011, he was fortunate, as car accidents go. Mr. Murray, then the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, was not seriously hurt, and he told the police he was wearing a seat belt and was not speeding.

But a different story soon emerged. Mr. Murray was driving over 100 miles an hour and was not wearing a seat belt, according to the computer in his car that tracks certain actions. He was given a $555 ticket; he later said he had fallen asleep.

The case put Mr. Murray at the center of a growing debate over a little-known but increasingly important piece of equipment buried deep inside a car: the event data recorder, more commonly known as the black box.

About 96 percent of all new vehicles sold in the United States have the boxes, and in September 2014, if the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has its way, all will have them.”

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“I Think It Told Us Why He Was Able To Do What He Did”

July 21, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Early adopters have an advantage for awhile, sure, but will technology ultimately make for narrower margins of victory? What if we’re all optimized and enhanced, if we all become the exception to nature, if nature itself is transformed? Will a victory by many lengths even be possible? Will it even be imaginable to be one in a million?

The preamble to William Nack’s classic 1990 Sports Illustrated piece about the amazing career of Secretariat, a racehorse that not only had a great heart but had a great heart:

Just before noon the horse was led haltingly into a van next to the stallion bam, and there a concentrated barbiturate was injected into his jugular. Forty-five seconds later there was a crash as the stallion collapsed. His body was trucked immediately to Lexington, Ky., where Dr. Thomas Swerczek, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Kentucky, performed the necropsy. All of the horse’s vital organs were normal in size except for the heart.

“We were all shocked,” Swerczek said. “I’ve seen and done thousands of autopsies on horses, and nothing I’d ever seen compared to it. The heart of the average horse weighs about nine pounds. This was almost twice the average size, and a third larger than any equine heart I’d ever seen. And it wasn’t pathologically enlarged. All the chambers and the valves were normal. It was just larger. I think it told us why he was able to do what he did.”•

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“What Is Behind This Spectacular And Widespread Improvement?”

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

There have been a myriad of reasons suggested for the steady fall of petty and violent crime across America since the early 1990s. The Freakonomics guys controversially suggested it may have occurred because legalized abortion had diminished the population of unwanted children. But the trend America has experienced has spread across the globe in the decades that followed, and not all of those countries have similar abortion laws. Is is because of criminology, technology or shifting demography? All of these things combined? From “Where Have All the Burglars Gone?” in the Economist:

“Both police records (which underestimate some types of crime) and surveys of victims (which should not, but are not as regularly available a source of data) show crime against the person and against property falling over the past ten years in most rich countries. In America the fall began around 1991; in Britain it began around 1995, though the murder rate followed only in the mid-2000s. In France, property crime rose until 2001—but it has fallen by a third since. Some crimes are all but disappearing. In 1997, some 400,000 cars were reported stolen in England and Wales: in 2012, just 86,000.

Cities have seen the greatest progress. The number of violent crimes has fallen by 32% since 1990 across America as a whole; in the biggest cities, it has fallen by 64%. In New York, the area around Times Square on 42nd Street, where pornographers once mingled with muggers, is now a family oriented tourist trap. On London’s housing estates, children play in concrete corridors once used by heroin addicts to shoot up. In Tallinn you can walk home from the theatre unmolested as late as you like.

What is behind this spectacular and widespread improvement? Demographic trends are an obvious factor. The baby-boom in the decades after the second world war created a bubble in the 16- to 24-year-old population a couple of decades later, and most crimes are committed by men of that age. That bubble is now long deflated. In most Western countries, the population is ageing, often quite fast.

But demographics are not everything.”

“If A Face Is A Match, The Program Sends An Alert To Staff Via Computer”

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

We still believe on some level that we can control the cameras, that there can be a correction, but that isn’t so. From an NPR story by Brenda Salinas about facial-recognition software that allows retailers to identify preferred customera:

“When a young Indian-American woman walked into the funky L.A. jewelry boutique Tarina Tarantino, store manager Lauren Twisselman thought she was just like any other customer. She didn’t realize the woman was actress and writer Mindy Kaling.

‘I hadn’t watched The Office,’ Twisselman says. Kaling both wrote and appeared in the NBC hit.

This lack of recognition is precisely what the VIP-identification technology designed by NEC IT Solutions is supposed to prevent.

The U.K.-based company already supplies similar software to security services to help identify terrorists and criminals. The ID technology works by analyzing footage of people’s faces as they walk through a door, taking measurements to create a numerical code known as a ‘face template,’ and checking it against a database.

In the retail setting, the database of customers’ faces is comprised of celebrities and valued customers, according to London’s Sunday Times. If a face is a match, the program sends an alert to staff via computer, iPad or smartphone, providing details like dress size, favorite buys or shopping history.”

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“How In The World Is This Thing Going To Work?”

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

Ahead of Elon Musk’s August announcement about the particulars of the Hyperloop, Russell Brandon at the Verge guesses at what the technologist will reveal. An excerpt:

“The details Musk has already hinted at tell us a great deal about the project, and outline a number of the challenges he’s likely to face. Based on simple math, we know it will have to travel an average of more than 600 mph. And it will have to do so almost frictionlessly, allowing for the low-power travel Musk envisions. It’s a big promise, and one that would have major consequences for the transportation industry and for society at large. For the technically minded, it raises the obvious question: how in the world is this thing going to work?

So far, the closest we’ve got is Japan’s superconducting maglev train — best known as the ‘bullet train.’ Its official top speed is 361mph, although it usually travels closer to 300 mph. Jim Powell, co-inventor of the bullet train and current director of Maglev 2000, thinks that’s as fast as open-air rail lines will ever go. ‘Air drag becomes too much of a problem after 300 mph, just from a power point of view,’ Powell says. ‘And then that air drag starts to generate noise. You wouldn’t want an airplane flying past your house at 600 mph.'”

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“We Have Now Created The First RoboBees—Flying Bee-Size Robots”

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

Bees have been experiencing Colony Collapse Disorder–and you’re not looking so hot yourself–but can pollination be outsourced to their silicone doppelgangers? From Inhabitat:

“Honey bee populations around the world are in decline due to causes ranging from ‘super mites‘ to Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) and even cell phones – and if the insects disappear completely the planet’s ecosystems would be in peril. The issue has become so dire that now a team of Harvard and Northeastern University scientists are working on a swarm of miniature Robobee robots that could pollinate flowers and do the job of real bees if required.

Speaking to Scientific American, the team leaders said: “In 2009 the three of us began to seriously consider what it would take to create a robotic bee colony. We wondered if mechanical bees could replicate not just an individual’s behavior but the unique behavior that emerges out of interactions among thousands of bees. We have now created the first RoboBees—flying bee-size robots—and are working on methods to make thousands of them cooperate like a real hive.””

•••••••••••

“If you’re after getting the honey  / Then you don’t go killing all the bees”:

“It Was The First Time In My Life That I’d Gone Anywhere With A Sense Of Purpose”

July 18, 2013 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

From a 1967 Paris Review interview conducted by Maggie Paley, Terry Southern discussing his first screenwriting job, on a little film called Dr. Strangelove:

“Terry Southern

It was the first time in my life that I’d gone anywhere with a sense of purpose. I mean, I’d always traveled, I’d made about ten trips back and forth, but just aimless, with no justification except having the G.I. Bill and using it as a means to be there. It was the first time I’d gone anywhere and been paid for it. It was very satisfying, very interesting, and almost unbelievable to be moving about like that.

Stanley himself is a strange kind of genius. I’d always had a notion that people in power positions in movies must be hacks and fools, and it was very impressive to meet someone who wasn’t. He thinks of himself as a ‘filmmaker’—his idol is Chaplin—and so he’s down on the idea of ‘director.’ He would like, and it’s understandable, to have his films just say, ‘A Film by Stanley Kubrick.’ He tries to cover the whole thing from beginning to end. Including the designing of the ads. He’s probably the only American director who works on big-budget pictures who has complete control of his movies.

Interviewer:

Strangelove was originally conceived as a melodrama, not a comedy. Did you work with Kubrick to restructure the whole thing, or were you able to just insert the jokes?

Terry Southern:

I knew what he wanted. It was a question of working together, rewriting each line, and changing the tone.

Interviewer:

When you started the project, you’d never written movie dialogue. You presumably didn’t know anything about how to write a screenplay.

Terry Southern:

Yes, I knew, because I like movies. And writing dialogue has always been easy for me.”

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“Turns Out He’s Weird”

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

The folks at Pitch Perfect PR sent me a reminder that Andy Kaufman and His Grandmother, the otherworldy comic’s posthumous (and first!) LP, which I told you about back in May, is now available. It’s sort of Andy’s ode to the Internet, which he made in a time before the Internet existed. Typical for him. You can purchase it at the Drag City site–although it looks to be already sold out there–or you can buy it at Amazon. From an excellent Grantland piece about the album by Alex Pappademas:

“[Lynne Margulies] Osgood was Kaufman’s last girlfriend. They met in 1983 when Osgood, as Lynne Margulies, played a small role in the low-budget feature My Breakfast With Blassie, a mostly improvised My Dinner With Andre parody in which Kaufman eats and talks with the pro wrestler ‘Classy’ Freddie Blassie at a Sambo’s coffee shop in Los Angeles.

They lived together, and after Kaufman died, Osgood — now an artist and teacher who lives on the Oregon coast — held on to his stuff, including the tapes he’d made in the ’70s. In 2009, she published a book of letters written to Kaufman by women who wanted to wrestle him, titled Dear Andy Kaufman: I Hate Your Guts!; through that book’s publisher, Process Media’s Jodi Wille, she met Dan Koretzy, cofounder of the Chicago indie-rock label Drag City. Osgood sat with Koretzky at a Starbucks in Los Angeles and played him some of the tapes. This week, Drag City and Process Media jointly released the first-ever Andy Kaufman comedy album, Andy and His Grandmother, a collection of bits culled from Kaufman’s cassette archives by writer/producer Vernon Chatman and Rodney Ascher, the director of the Stanley Kubrick conspiracy-theory documentary Room 237. The plummy, solemn Bill Kurtis–esque narration is by Saturday Night Live alum Bill Hader; Kaufman’s friend and creative coconspirator Bob Zmuda contributes liner notes.

Posthumously assembled albums of any kind tend to be a crapshoot, even with confidants and superfans in the mix, and comedy albums don’t always capture that which is remarkable about the comics who make them. Plus, pure audio doesn’t seem like the optimal delivery system for a performer like Kaufman, whose act was so visual and televisual and depended so much on gestures and the look on Kaufman’s placid David Berkowitz face. And yet Andy and His Grandmother is a landmark. It passes the basic comedy-album test in that it’s often quite funny. At one point, Andy chats up some hookers from his car; when they offer him a date, he suggests bowling or roller skating, and when they realize he’s just goofing around and start to walk away, he calls after them, ‘What kind of work do you do?’ But as always with Kaufman’s work, the jokes aren’t the most important thing about it. The most important thing about it is Kaufman. You don’t come away from the record feeling like you know him, necessarily, but you feel like you’ve actually met him for the first time. Turns out he’s weird.”

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“Google’s investment in These Technologies Can Be Seen As Part Of A Shaping Strategy”

July 18, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’m sure Google would love if Glass and the company’s still-developing driverless-car software became ubiquitous, but Jeremy Fisher makes a good point at Medium: Even if another company invents a more popular version of those things, the search leader stands to profit. From Fisher’s essay:

“No matter who brings the rest of the world online, develops the first breakout wearable computer, or perfects the self-driving car, chances are good it’s Google we’ll be using while we sand-surf across the Sahara towed by a driverless automobile. You can–and companies will–try changing the default option and giving preference to another service, as Apple did when it replaced Google Maps, but that’s worked out poorly in the past.

Google’s investment in these technologies can be seen as part of a shaping strategy aimed at increasing aggregate global online time. Glass spurs Apple to develop the iWatch/iBand, which spurs Samsung…Loon spurs Safaricom…and so on. From this perspective, it’s possible that Google agrees with its critics: It’s all good, as long as someone invents the next iPhone. If these projects can make that happen faster, they will have proved a wise investment.”

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“The Past Century Of Rising Affluence Started The Decline Of The Rooming House”

July 18, 2013 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Alan Durning’s Slate piece in praise of the so-called flophouse, the cheap and tiny living quarters which used to be a staple of every major American metropolis, and are, perhaps, making a comeback:

“Most Americans live in houses or apartments that they own or rent. But a century ago, other less expensive choices were just as common: renting space in families’ homes, for example, or living in residential hotels, which once ranged from live-in palace hotels for the business elite to bunkhouses for day laborers. Working-class rooming houses, with small private bedrooms and shared bathrooms down the hall, were particularly numerous, forming the foundation of affordable housing in North American cities. Misguided laws and regulations almost wiped out these other kinds of housing, with disastrous consequences, but now there’s a chance for them to come back, helping those who are young, single, or on the lower rungs of our increasingly unequal society.

In the early decades of the 20th century, rooming houses offered affordable housing for America’s urban working class. Some offered boarding, with a kitchen and dining hall in the basement. In San Francisco a century ago, a passable room might cost 35 cents a night ($8 in today’s currency). Concentrated near downtowns, rooming houses and other forms of residential hotels provided quintessentially urban living. The dense mixture of accommodations with affordable eateries, laundries, billiard halls, saloons, and other retail establishments made life convenient on foot and on slim budgets.

The past century of rising affluence started the decline of the rooming house. With higher incomes, we bought more space and privacy. Young, upwardly mobile, enterprising residents moved out of hotels, depriving hotel districts of their best customers. Those left behind were harder to employ, poorer, on the wrong side of the law, or simply eccentric. This trend accelerated in the 1960s and 1970s, when authorities deinstitutionalized many people with mental illnesses and began sheltering them in rooming houses and other cheap hotels. In most cases, mental health authorities intended such arrangements to be temporary. Some planned to build and support constellations of small, neighborhood-based care facilities, for example, but not-in-my-backyard politics intervened. The care facilities never got built, and some of society’s most vulnerable were stranded in rooming houses, which by then had come to be known as single-room occupancy hotels (SROs).

Meanwhile, new state and local laws made residential hotels more expensive to operate. Other rules simply made them illegal outside of historic downtowns. As cities expanded outward, rooming houses could not spread to the new neighborhoods.

The rules were not accidents.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“Huawei Unveiled Plans For A New Smartphone With ‘Instant Facial Beauty Support’ Software”

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

Oh sure, we’ll all be famous for 15 minutes in the future–and the future is now–but it will never be enough, never be more than a fleeting illusion. Changes in technology gave us the selfie, but why did we accept it? It might seem like it makes the world more egalitarian, like every one is a star, but it mostly just distracts from true inequities. From Elizabeth Day’s Guardian piece about the rise of the selfie:

“Although photographic self-portraits have been around since 1839, when daguerreotype pioneer Robert Cornelius took a picture of himself outside his family’s store in Philadelphia (whether he had the help of an assistant is not known), it was not until the invention of the compact digital camera that the selfie boomed in popularity. There was some experimentation with the selfie in the 1970s – most notably by Andy Warhol – when the Polaroid camera came of age and freed amateur photographers from the tyranny of the darkroom. But film was expensive and it wasn’t until the advent of digital that photographs became truly instantaneous.

The fact that we no longer had to traipse to our local chemist to develop a roll of holiday snaps encouraged us to experiment – after all, on a digital camera, the image could be easily deleted if we didn’t like the results. A selfie could be done with the timer button or simply by holding the camera at arm’s length, if you didn’t mind the looming tunnel of flesh dog-earing one corner of the image.

As a result, images tagged as #selfie began appearing on the photo-sharing website Flickr as early as 2004. But it was the introduction of smartphones – most crucially the iPhone 4, which came along in 2010 with a front-facing camera – that made the selfie go viral. According to the latest annual Ofcom communications report, 60% of UK mobile phone users now own a smartphone and a recent survey of more than 800 teenagers by the Pew Research Centre in America found that 91% posted photos of themselves online – up from 79% in 2006.

Recently, the Chinese manufacturer Huawei unveiled plans for a new smartphone with ‘instant facial beauty support’ software which reduces wrinkles and blends skin tone.”

Selfie.

Selfie.

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“In The Real World, It’s Called Common Sense”

July 17, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Many middle-aged white women in America have become increasingly addicted to OxyContin and other pain medications in the last decade. It hasn’t only spiked the number of overdoses in white women of a certain age, but it could possibly lead them to being accident-prone drivers or perhaps stealing to support their habit. And if they have trouble doctor-shopping, maybe they are buying street drugs which leads to a black market and violence.

Washington Post columnist Kathleen Parker is a white woman in that age group. She should be profiled not only by police who hope to reduce illicit drug purchases but also by armed civilians in cars who pursue her while she’s on foot. She is naturally a suspect because of how she looks. Perhaps those are just Skittles in her bag, but who knows? Maybe she’s wandering around your neighborhood looking for her dealer. According to Kathleen Parker’s reasoning, it’s just common sense that she be stopped and frisked, that other citizens must stand their ground. 

From her latest column:

“The point is that this is one of those rare instances in which everyone is right within his or her own experience. African Americans are right to perceive that Martin was followed because he was black, but it is wrong to presume that recognizing a racial characteristic is necessarily racist. It has been established that several burglaries in Zimmerman’s neighborhood primarily involved young black males.

Picture Zimmerman’s neighbor Olivia Bertalan, a defense witness, hiding in her locked bedroom with her infant and a pair of rusty scissors while two young males, later identified as African American, burglarized her home. They ran when police arrived.

This is not to justify what subsequently transpired between Zimmerman and Martin but to cast a dispassionate eye on reality. And no, just because a few black youths caused trouble doesn’t mean all black youths should be viewed suspiciously. This is so obvious a truth that it shouldn’t need saying and yet, if we are honest, we know that human nature includes the accumulation of evolved biases based on experience and survival. In the courtroom, it’s called profiling. In the real world, it’s called common sense.”

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“In English, The Top 10 Most Controversial Articles Are As Follows”

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

From MIT’s Technology Review, a list of the ten most controversial subjects on the English-language Wikipedia:

“That gives a simple list of the most controversial articles in each language. In English, the top 10 most controversial articles are as follows:

  1. George W Bush
  2. Anarchism
  3. Muhammad
  4. List of World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. employees
  5. Global Warming
  6. Circumcision
  7. United States
  8. Jesus
  9. Race and intelligence
  10. Christianity”

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