Excerpts

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“Car Makers Believe Autonomous Driving Will Be Introduced Gradually”

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

From a Telegraph article by Jeevan Vasagar about Germany automaker’s plans to gradually sway drivers into giving up the wheel:

“Devised by a team at the Free University of Berlin, the self-driving VW Passat is a highly advanced autonomous car, capable of navigating a safe path through unpredictable city traffic.

It sees the world through a spinning silver cylinder mounted on the roof, a laser scanner, which generates one million data points per second to give the car’s computer a real-time map of its surroundings.

Cameras and radar sensors provide a further wealth of detail, alongside an ultra-precise GPS based on the navigation systems used in aircraft.

It will be many years before a car this sophisticated is commercially available. But Germany’s luxury car makers have begun introducing an array of autonomous features which enable some of their leading models to drive and steer themselves.

Rather than the sudden advent of robot vehicles, car makers believe autonomous driving will be introduced gradually.

Daimler, which owns Mercedes Benz, predicts that at low speeds – such as in traffic jams or parking – cars will operate with full autonomy ‘in a matter of years.’ At higher speeds, several manufacturers plan for highly automated driving within the structured environment of the motorway.”

•••••

The great Peter Stormare, representing Deutschland:

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“The Robotic Companion Was Made To Look Like A Harp Seal”

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

Hopefully technology will soon be able to prevent, even reverse, dementia, but until then researchers are experimenting with robotic companions for people with faltering faculties. From Scientific American:

“A team of international researchers recently found that a therapeutic robot companion improved the quality of life for a small group of people with mid- to late-stage dementia.

In the real-life case, the robotic companion was made to look like a harp seal. It was fitted with AI software and tactile sensors that enabled it to respond to touch and sound. The robot could express surprise, happiness or anger and even respond to certain words. Patients who spent time with the robot seemed happier and less anxious.”

“Matthews Has Seen Crazy Ants Disable Scores Of Air-Conditioning Units Near Austin, Texas”

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

Texas already has a crazy uncle and now it has crazy ants. From NBC News, a story by Douglas Main about the paratrechina genus, which swarm into electronics, disabling, even destroying them, perhaps threatening the nation’s Twitter output:

“Exterminator Mike Matthews got the call because the home’s air-conditioning unit had short-circuited. Why an exterminator for a problem with an appliance? Because of the crazy ants.

Matthews has seen crazy ants disable scores of air-conditioning units near Austin, Texas, where the invasive creatures have been a real headache. The ants swarm inside the units, causing them to short-circuit and preventing them from turning on. Often the switches inside them need to be replaced, thanks to the ants, said Matthews, who works for the Austin-area pest control business The Bug Master.

‘When you open these things up, you see thousands of the ants, just completely filling them up,’ Matthews said.

The ants first appeared in the United States in 2002 but have become more of a menace in the past few years, spreading to many areas of the Gulf Coast, particularly Texas and Florida. The ants are obnoxious because they reproduce in large numbers, sometimes outnumbering all other ants 100-to-1. That’s a problem since ecosystems depend on a wide variety of ants to perform different tasks; domination by one species is highly unusual, said Edward LeBrun, a researcher at the University of Texas. As the ants have advanced into new habitats, they’ve had the annoying habit of swarming inside electronics, such as air conditioners and farm equipment like pumps and occasionally destroying them, LeBrun told LiveScience.”

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“What Makes Wikipedia So Valuable For Users Is What Gets In Its Way Of Becoming A Valuable”

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

“Jimmy Wales Is Not an Internet Billionaire” is the title of Amy Chozick’s short, sharp New York Times Magazine portrait of the Wikipedia founder, a singular figure in the Information Age, who was right about crowdsourcing knowledge when almost everyone else thought he was wrong, when he was treated like a punchline. The collective nature of the virtual encyclopedia made it impossible for Wales to cash in, but somehow I think he’ll slide by. Let’s weep for others. An excerpt:

“Wikipedia, which is now available in 285 languages, gets more than 20 billion page views and roughly 516 million unique visitors a month. It is the fifth-most-visited Web site in the world behind Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook; and ahead of Amazon, Apple and eBay. Were Wikipedia to accept banner and video ads, it could, by most estimates, be worth as much as $5 billion. But that kind of commercial sellout would probably cause the members of the community, who are not paid for their contributions, to revolt. ‘The paradox,’ says Michael J. Wolf, managing director at Activate, a technology-consulting firm in New York and a member of the Yahoo! board, ‘is that what makes Wikipedia so valuable for users is what gets in its way of becoming a valuable, for-profit enterprise.’

Wales suffers from the same paradox. Being the most famous traveling spokesman for Internet freedom brings in a decent living, but it’s not Silicon Valley money. It’s barely London money. Wales’s total net worth, by most estimates, is just above $1 million, including stock from his for-profit company Wikia, a wiki-hosting service. His income is a topic of constant fascination. Type ‘Jimmy Wales‘ into Google and ‘net worth’ is the first pre-emptive search to pop up. ‘Everyone makes fun of Jimmy for leaving the money on the table,’ says Sue Gardner, the executive director of the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit that runs Wikipedia.

Wales is well rehearsed in brushing off questions about his income. In 2005, Florida Trend magazine reported that he made enough money in his brief stint as an options-and-futures trader in Chicago, before starting Wikipedia, that he would never have to work again. But that was before he had to pay child support and rent for homes in Florida and London. When I brought up the topic recently, Wales seemed irritated. ‘It rarely crosses my mind,’ he said. ‘Reporters ask me all the time and expect me to say: ‘I’m heartbroken. Where’s my billion dollars?’  On two occasions, he compared himself to an Ohio car salesman. ‘There are car dealers in Ohio who have far more money than I’ll ever have, and their jobs are much, much less interesting than mine,’ he said during one conversation. When his net worth came up again, he brought up Ayn Rand. ‘Can you imagine Howard Roark saying, ‘I just want to make as much money as possible?’ Wales asked rhetorically.

Wales likes to invoke the higher purpose of Wikipedia.“

•••••

Encyclopedia Britannica infomercial, 1992:

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“Mr. Snowden Has Put Himself In A Terrible Spot”

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

As I pointed out on Sunday, Edward Snowden placed himself in a whole different category when he accepted refuge in Russia. If you hate spying and surveillance, you just don’t do it. Beyond the principal of the thing, there are practical matters. From spy novelist Alex Berenson in the New York Times:

“Faced with the prospect of decades in prison, Mr. Snowden panicked. Instead of waiting for the territory or its masters in Beijing to decide his fate, he packed his laptops and headed for Moscow. Now he gets to see a soft dictatorship (such a lovely phrase) up close. On Sunday, the willful naïfs from WikiLeaks who are ‘helping’ Mr. Snowden said that Sheremetyevo airport would simply be a stopover. But why would the Russian government let him go before it has squeezed him dry? In interviews, Mr. Snowden has said he has plenty of secrets left on his hard drives, and there’s no reason to doubt him. He has already disclosed details of American and British spying on a conference in 2009 in London.

Mr. Snowden has put himself in a terrible spot. Moscow will surely protect him for as long as it feels like irritating Washington. But by the time the Russians are finished sifting through his laptops, he’ll be their spy, whether or not he meant to be. Beijing may have already pulled the same trick; some intelligence officers believe that Chinese spy agencies copied Mr. Snowden’s hard drives during his Hong Kong stay.”

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“The Bible Contemplates Marriage Between One Man And Several Women”

June 26, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Harvard Law professor and Bloomberg columnist Noah Feldman just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit to help untangle the meaning of this week’s landmark Supreme Court decisions on the Voting Rights Act and DOMA. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

In your opinion what will congress do in regard to the voting rights act & make it whole again or will we continue to see red states suppress the vote. 

Noah Feldman:

Hard to imagine the politics that would allow for a new VRA coverage definition.

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Question: 

Justice Antonin Scalia, reading from his dissent, said, “The error in both springs from the same diseased root: an exalted notion of the role of this Court in American democratic society.” 

He also said, “In my view a perfectly valid justification for this statute is contained in its title: the Defense of Marriage Act.” 

This second quote makes it plain that Scalia’s understanding of marriage adopts the Biblical premise that it should be between one man and one women. It seems conservative thought in general on this issue shares the same diseased root: that somehow the language of the constitution should be interpreted from a Christian perspective.

What happened to separation of church and state? How can a supreme court justice in 2013 get away with making so many outrageous and purposefully inflammatory statements?

Noah Feldman:

Well, strictly speaking the Bible contemplates marriage between one man and several women, but we will pass over that. Short answer is that the justices can say whatever they like! The Ct once said we are a Christian nation.

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Question:

Will gay couples be included in the immigration reform bill after the rulings today? 

Noah Feldman:

Yes if their marriage is legally recognized in a state that recognizes same-sex marriage.

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Question:

Will the court ever decide to legalize gay marriage or will it always be a state choice?

Noah Feldman: 

I would guess they will eventually have to — perhaps 3 to 5 years depending on the progress of the litigation and of course the composition of the Court.•

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“There Is An Immense—But Mostly Invisible—Cost To The Embrace Of Big Data By The Intelligence Community”

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

Big Data as applied to terrorism (and more banal matters) is useful because it provides predictive behavior patterns without spending time and resources on locating the cause of the behavior. But should we abandon cause and just be concerned with potential effect? From Evgeny Morozov at Slate:

“The end of theory, which Chris Anderson predicted in Wired a few years ago, has reached the intelligence community: Just like Google doesn’t need to know why some sites get more links from other sites—securing a better place on its search results as a result—the spies do not need to know why some people behave like terrorists. Acting like a terrorist is good enough.

As the media academic Mark Andrejevic points out in Infoglut, his new book on the political implications of information overload, there is an immense—but mostly invisible—cost to the embrace of Big Data by the intelligence community (and by just about everyone else in both the public and private sectors). That cost is the devaluation of individual and institutional comprehension, epitomized by our reluctance to investigate the causes of actions and jump straight to dealing with their consequences. But, argues Andrejevic, while Google can afford to be ignorant, public institutions cannot. 

‘If the imperative of data mining is to continue to gather more data about everything,’ he writes, ‘its promise is to put this data to work, not necessarily to make sense of it. Indeed, the goal of both data mining and predictive analytics is to generate useful patterns that are far beyond the ability of the human mind to detect or even explain.’ In other words, we don’t need to inquire why things are the way they are as long as we can affect them to be the way we want them to be. This is rather unfortunate. The abandonment of comprehension as a useful public policy goal would make serious political reforms impossible.

Forget terrorism for a moment. Take more mundane crime. Why does crime happen? Well, you might say that it’s because youths don’t have jobs. Or you might say that’s because the doors of our buildings are not fortified enough. Given some limited funds to spend, you can either create yet another national employment program or you can equip houses with even better cameras, sensors, and locks. What should you do?

If you’re a technocratic manager, the answer is easy: Embrace the cheapest option.”

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“Are You Guys Going To… Blowup Asteroids?”

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

Mason Peck, NASA’s chief technologist, did a smart Ask Me Anything at Reddit about a month ago. He’s back doing another one right now, this time focusing on asteroid exploration. A few exchanges follow.

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 Question:

What is the actual chance of an asteroid large enough to do some serious damage actually hitting us anytime soon?

Mason Peck:

Very low. None of the asteroids we have found are expected to impact the earth in the foreseeable future. And we have found most of the largest asteroids. There are still many smaller ones that remain undetected. That’s the current challenge: where are those asteroids, and do they pose a threat?

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Question:

When is it estimated that NASA will be able to send people to an asteroid?

Mason Peck:

The President’s goal is for NASA to do so by 2025. If we find the right asteroid, we’ll be able to do so as early as 2021. We’ll use mostly hardware we’ve already got and are already working on, including the SLS launch vehicle and the Orion multi-purpose crew vehicle.

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Question:

I’m an idiot on this subject, and please forgive me. So are you guys going to… blowup asteroids? Like with a missile or something? 

Mason Peck:

The asteroid initiative includes plans to send a robotic spacecraft to move a small asteroid into an orbit near the moon. It also includes a Grand Challenge in which we ask for the world to engage with NASA to identify the threats asteroids pose to human populations and then know what to do about them. The Grand Challenge addresses your question. There are many ideas about how to keep an asteroid from hitting the Earth, but the best offense is a good defense: know where they are, and the sooner we know, the easier it will be to deflect them.

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Question:

What is the point/what can be gained from moving a small asteroid into orbit near the moon?

Mason Peck:

So much! We’ll learn how to send humans beyond Earth orbit, using technologies that will take us to Mars in the following decade. The moon is relatively convenient and safe, compared to trying out these systems for the first time in Mars orbit. So, this is a very cost-effective and yet ambitious way to make a lot of progress towards exploring Mars.

We’re going to send the first, robotic spacecraft under the power of solar-electric propulsion (SEP). So, this mission will be a technology demonstration of a technique that is broadly applicable across NASA’s portfolio and will help the commercial space industry as well. Our plans are to use a 30-50 kW SEP system here, which is traceable to at least 10x that level. This is a bold move, depending on a technology demo. That audacity recalls Apollo and the other work that has made NASA great. 

The President’s goal is for NASA to do so by 2025. If we find the right asteroid, we’ll be able to do so as early as 2021. We’ll use mostly hardware we’ve already got and are already working on, including the SLS launch vehicle and the Orion multi-purpose crew vehicle.

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“It Has No Hands, Holes In Place Of Ears, And The Mona Lisa Smile Of Something Undead”

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

Another post which concerns the work of Dmitry Itskov and other immortality enthusiasts. This one presents the opening of a smart report about transhumanism from Andrew Couts at Digital Trends:

“Behind me, a Florida-orange senior citizen, in her orange blazer, wearing orange earrings, an orange bead necklace, and a white summer fedora, stands on the tip-toes of her orange leather loafers to get a better look at the weird scene unfolding in front of the crowd in the lobby of Lincoln Center’s Alice Tully Hall in midtown Manhattan.

‘Yes,’ I tell Orange Woman. ‘The one sitting down is a robot. The one standing up is the guy who made him … er … it.’

‘Oh!’ she says. ‘I couldn’t tell the difference.’

‘Gemanoid HI-2,’ as it’s called, is an exact replica of its eccentric creator, Dr. Hiroshi Ishiguro. Same hair. Same all-black shirt and pants. Same little necklace. The only discernable difference between the two is that, while Dr. Ishiguro tells jokes, Mr. Gemanoid sits silently, slightly cross-eyed, blinking and jerking its head, with the eternally confused look of someone who suffered a paralyzing stroke while contemplating the ethics of Westboro Baptist Church.

In a tripod contraption next to Gemanoid hangs another of Ishiguro’s creations – a demented Casper the Ghost with all the charm of an aborted fetus. Its legs are a fused-together chunk. It has no hands, holes in place of ears, and the Mona Lisa smile of something undead. Ishiguro calls it Telenoid, an android designed with human-like features, but without all the pesky details that save onlookers from missing out on cold-sweat nightmares.

‘Well, that’s just wonderful,’ says Orange Woman. ‘It’s so lifelike!'”

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“In Some Sense They Have The Future In Mind”

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

A philosopher once said this: “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” Something more troubling than being lost in the sweep of time, in being an infinitesimally small piece of a larger plan, however, is if there’s not plan at all. The opening of Michael Ruse’s Aeon essay, “Does Life Have a Purpose?”:

“Aristotle, Plato’s student, didn’t want God in the business of biology like this. He believed in a God, but not one that cared about the universe and its inhabitants. (Rather like some junior members of my family, this God spent Its time thinking mostly of Its own importance.) However, Aristotle was very interested in final causes, and argued that all living things contain forces that direct them towards their goal. These life forces operate in the here and now, yet in some sense they have the future in mind. They animate the acorn in order that it might turn into an oak, and likewise for other living things. Like Plato, Aristotle used the metaphor of design but unlike Plato he wanted to keep any supervisory, conscious intelligence out of the game.

All of this came crashing down during the Scientific Revolution of the 16th and 17th centuries. For both Plato and Aristotle, the question of final causes had applied to physical phenomena — the stars, for example — as much as to biological phenomena. Both thought of objects as being rather like organisms. Why does the stone fall? Because being made of the element earth it wants to find its proper place, namely as close to the centre of the Earth as possible. It falls in order to achieve its right end: it wants to fall.

Now, however, the governing metaphors of nature changed. No longer did scientists think in terms of organisms: they thought in terms of machines. The world, the universe, is like a gigantic clock. As the 17th-century French philosopher-scientist René Descartes insisted, the human body is nothing but an intricate machine. The heart is like a pump, and the arms and legs are a system of levers and pulleys and so forth. The 17th-century English chemist and philosopher Robert Boyle realised that as soon as you start to think in the mechanical fashion, then talking about ends and purposes really isn’t very helpful. A planet goes round and round the Sun; you want to know the mechanism by which it happens, not to imagine some higher purpose for it. In the same way, when you look at a clock you want to know what makes the hands go round the dial — you want the proximate causes.

But surely machines have purposes just as much as organisms do?”

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“It Is Future Failure That Is At Issue”

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

I’ve posted before about Henry Petroski’s first book, To Engineer Is Human, which I love. It’s the one that made crystal for a non-engineer like myself that building bridges and buildings is not only a matter of science but also of best guesses. All these years after that 1985 volume–and with many books in between–Petroski has published a sequel of sorts, To Forgive Design, which examines, among other things, how the lessons of the past are no match for climate change of today and tomorrow. From “Collapse and Crash,” by Bill McKibben, in the New York Review of Books:

“But what if, in fact, the old war stories are becoming obsolete? The engineer, like the insurance agent, is hampered by the fact that his skill depends on the earth behaving in the future as it has in the past. As Petroski writes,

Since it is future failure that is at issue, the only sure way to test our hypotheses about its nature and magnitude is to look backward at failures that have occurred historically. Indeed, we predict that the probability of occurrence for a certain event, such as a hundred-year storm, is such and such a percentage, because all other things being equal, that has been the actual experience contained in the historical meteorological record.

That record, however, is now shattered. In the course of Petroski’s lifetime, and all of ours, we’ve left behind the Holocene, the ten-thousand-year period of benign climatic stability that marked the rise of human civilization. We’ve raised the global temperature about a degree so far, but a better way of thinking about it is: we’ve amped up the amount of energy trapped in our narrow envelope of atmosphere, and hence every process that feeds off that energy is now accelerating. For instance, this piece of simple physics: warm air holds more water vapor than cold. Already we’ve increased moisture in the atmosphere by about 4 percent on average, thus increasing the danger both of drought, because heat is evaporating more surface water, and of flood, because evaporated water must eventually come down as rain. And those loaded dice are doing great damage. The federal government spent more money last year repairing the damage from extreme weather than it did on education.”

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“We’re Never Going To Be Totally Immersive As Long As We’re Looking At A Square”

June 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

A little more regarding Steven Spielberg’s comments about the future of cinema (which I posted about recently) from Frank Rose in the New York Times:

“Mr. Spielberg offered a more radical vision. At a time of ubiquitous screens — video, movie and computer — he predicted an end to on-screen entertainment. Instead, he said he thought we’d have a kind of enveloping, wraparound entertainment.

‘We’re never going to be totally immersive as long as we’re looking at a square, whether it’s a movie screen or whether it’s a computer screen,’ Mr. Spielberg said.’ We’ve got to get rid of that and put the player inside the experience, where no matter where you look you’re surrounded by a three-dimensional experience. That’s the future.’

Though most people treat screens as a window, Mr. Spielberg seems to understand them as a barrier, one that prevents viewers — now ‘players’ — from being fully, actively engaged in their entertainment.

The idea of immersive entertainment — in which you can lose yourself and in which the line between fiction and reality blurs — isn’t new at all. And its impact can be disorienting.”

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“Designers’ Imaginations Were Allowed To Run Riot With Little Consideration Of Practicality Or Budget”

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

From an Economist article about newly released archives which detail futuristic tech projects in Britain that never reached fruition, a brief bit from 1968 about the MUSTARD (the Multi-Unit Space Transport And Recovery Device) space shuttle:

“READERS of a certain age may remember Gerry and Sylvia Anderson’s sci-fi puppet shows—Supercar, Fireball XL5, Stingray, Thunderbirds and Captain Scarlet—filmed, as the Andersons put it, in “Supermarionation”. Those who remember Captain Scarlet in particular may find one of the pictures here eerily familiar. English Electric’s Fighter Jet Take-Off Platform, a flying airfield, is not quite the Cloudbase from which the immortal captain operated. But it was intended, like its fictional counterpart, to launch and receive planes while itself airborne. It would have taken off and landed vertically in, say, a jungle clearing otherwise inaccessible to the aircraft piggybacking on it.

English Electric was one of the firms merged into what eventually became BAE Systems, and BAE has recently been through its archives and publicised some of the projects dreamed up in the glory days of the 1960s, when designers’ imaginations were allowed to run riot with little consideration of practicality or budget. MUSTARD (the Multi-Unit Space Transport And Recovery Device), for example, was designed by the British Aircraft Corporation (BAC). It could pass for something out of Fireball XL5 or Supercar—though it also resembles Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo which will, Virgin hopes, soon be taking paying passengers to the edge of space. It would have been a three-stage space-plane, though only one stage would have made it into orbit. The other two were reusable boosters.”

•••••

“This man will be our hero, for fate will make him indestructible. His name: Captain Scarlet.”

“The Minimalist House Is An Idea That Continues To Fascinate Piano”

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

The Digoene is Renzo Piano’s new attempt at a mobile home. From Vitra:

“The development of Diogene

In an interview with Renzo Piano, the architect explains that the ideal of minimalist housing is something which he has been considering since his student days. It is a kind of obsession, but a good one. A living space of two by two by two metres – just enough space for a bed, a chair and a small table – is a dream many architecture students share. Back then, he was unable to realise the idea. At the end of the 1960s, however, when Piano was teaching at the Architectural Association in London, he joined forces with his students to build mini houses on Bedford Square. The architect has also designed boats, cars and, a few years ago, cells for the nuns of the Poor Clare nunnery of Ronchamp. There too, it was about minimising the spatial environment of these people, not for reasons of economic efficiency, but for self-moderation. The minimalist house is an idea that continues to fascinate Piano, particularly in an era in which his office is dealing with big projects, for instance what was Europe’s tallest high-rise at the time of its completion in 2012 – ‘The Shard’ in London.” (Thanks Pop-Up City.)

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“Brainteasers Are A Complete Waste Of Time”

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

You know how Google famously asked applicants brainteasers during the interview process? Like, how many basketballs can you fit into this office building? You and I always knew this was self-flattering, grandstanding nonsense that was predictive of nothing, and even Google management has finally come around. From Adam Bryant’s New York Times interview with Laszlo Bock, Google Senior Vice President of People Operations:

“Laszlo Bock

On the hiring side, we found that brainteasers are a complete waste of time. How many golf balls can you fit into an airplane? How many gas stations in Manhattan? A complete waste of time. They don’t predict anything. They serve primarily to make the interviewer feel smart.

Instead, what works well are structured behavioral interviews, where you have a consistent rubric for how you assess people, rather than having each interviewer just make stuff up.

Behavioral interviewing also works — where you’re not giving someone a hypothetical, but you’re starting with a question like, ‘Give me an example of a time when you solved an analytically difficult problem.’ The interesting thing about the behavioral interview is that when you ask somebody to speak to their own experience, and you drill into that, you get two kinds of information. One is you get to see how they actually interacted in a real-world situation, and the valuable ‘meta’ information you get about the candidate is a sense of what they consider to be difficult.

On the leadership side, we’ve found that leadership is a more ambiguous and amorphous set of characteristics than the work we did on the attributes of good management, which are more of a checklist and actionable.

We found that, for leaders, it’s important that people know you are consistent and fair in how you think about making decisions and that there’s an element of predictability. If a leader is consistent, people on their teams experience tremendous freedom, because then they know that within certain parameters, they can do whatever they want. If your manager is all over the place, you’re never going to know what you can do, and you’re going to experience it as very restrictive.”

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“Books Should Not Spy On You”

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

A lot of Americans seemed to not be aware until the Snowden leak case that the government is spying on us–and that we’re spying on the government. The realization caused the Amazon sales rank of George Orwell’s 1984 to surge. Of course, Amazon was collecting information about you with each order and if you purchased the Kindle version of the book about spying overlords, you were potentially setting up a trail of info that could incriminate you. The opening of Nick Harkaway’s article on the topic at Future Book:

“I’m quoted in the Guardian’s piece on Joyland and filesharing today, and on the basis that if you’re here at all it’s because you’re prepared to let me flesh out some ideas, that’s what I’m going to do. In the words of George Cyril Wellbeloved: ‘I expect you’re wondering what I think about all this.’

‘All this,’ incidentally, is a new system which apparently alters the text of ebooks in order to trace whose copy has been copied without consent.

In the first place, I think the notion of a book which is reconfigured to provide a chain of evidence in a civil proceeding against the reader is repellant. I think that is in the most perfectly Teutonic sense an un-book. Books should not spy on you. I’m fascinated by Kobo’s remarkable ability to track readers’ progress through an ebook, and the commercial side of me really wants that information. But the civil liberties thinker in me hates that the facility exists and loathes the fact that people aren’t entirely clear on how much they’re telling the system about themselves. It really unsettles me. This is far worse: the deliberate creation of an engine of observation inside the text of the book. It stinks“

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“Is Tweeting The Same As Publishing?”

June 20, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

hemingway@realhemingway

Isn’t it pretty to think so? #sadendings

 

•••••

An excerpt from a New Yorker blog post, in which author Thomas Beller, who is not Madison Smart Bell, considers the intersection of Twitter and literature:

“Though Twitter is not exactly a new writing technology, it is a technology that is affecting a lot of writers. It used to be a radical cri de coeur to claim, ‘We live in public.’ Like many mantras of the cyber-nineties, this turns out to be mostly true, but misses an even larger truth: more and more, we think in public. For writers, this is an especially strange development.

•••

I sometimes wonder how the great writers of the past would handle the Twitter predicament. Would they ignore it or engage and go down the rabbit hole? Who are the really unlikely tweeters from literary history? Would Henry James, whose baroque sentences could never have been slimmed down into a hundred and forty characters, have disdained Twitter?

Most great writers could, if they wanted to, be very good at Twitter, because it is a medium of words and also of form. Its built-in limitation corresponds to the sense of rhythm and proportion that writers apply to each line. But some writers achieve their effect through an accumulation, or make sense via sentences that are, by themselves, on the far edge of making sense. (Robert Musil comes to mind.) Not everyone is primed to be a modern-day Heraclitus, like Alain de Botton, who starts each day, it seems, by cranking up his inner fortune-cookie machine and producing a string of tweets that are, to varying degrees, sour, funny, fatalistic, and bitingly true. It’s a comedian’s form. The primal tweet may be, ‘Take my wife, please!’

Gertrude Stein, with her gnomish, arty, aphoristic tendencies, would seem to be ideal. ‘There is no there there’ may be one of the great proto-tweets.

Joyce Carol Oates, whom I don’t think of as famously concise but who has become a prolific and often ingenious tweeter, recently tweeted a question: ‘If an action is not recorded on a smart phone, does it, did it, exist?’

Oates’s question touches on a set of major problems for writers on Twitter: Does a piece of writing that is never seen by anyone other than its author even exist? Does a thought need to be shared to exist? What happens to the stray thought that drifts into view, is pondered, and then drifts away? Perhaps you jot it down in a note before it vanishes, so that you can mull it over in the future. It’s like a seed that, when you return to it, may have grown into something visible. Or perhaps you put it in a tweet, making the note public. But does the fact that it is public diminish the chances that it will grow into something sturdy and lasting? Does articulating a thought in public freeze it in place somehow, making it not part of a thought process but rather a tiny little finished sculpture? Is tweeting the same as publishing?”

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“He Wanted Year-Round Amusements, Year-Round Employees”

June 20, 2013 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Who among us doesn’t build a castle in the sky once or twice in his or her dreams? Some, however, don’t let such fancies pass.

For more than three decades, Horace Bullard fantasized of building a Coney Island with some of the luster the one of his youth possessed. And year after year he was frustrated, unable to transform what was in his head into reality. Bullard wasn’t a Rip Van Winkle: He lived a full life. But along with that life was a parallel one that remained unrealized, though he could almost touch it. Would reality have been a disappointment? We’ll never know.

From C.J. Hughes in the New York Times:

“Born in 1938 in East Harlem, Mr. Bullard grew up impoverished as the son of a black father, who was a plumber, and a Puerto Rican mother who raised five children. He began working at the age of 8 shining shoes, according to a television interview produced for the Manhattan Neighborhood Network TV channel in the early 2000s.

And although he said he largely shrugged off prejudice, his sister blamed racism for his failure to secure a Kentucky Fried Chicken franchise in New York in the 1960s. But he later turned that to his advantage, having a friend analyze the chain’s batter and adding Puerto Rican spices, or ‘a touch of love,’ his sister said.

In 1968, that recipe grew into Kansas Fried Chicken, a chain named for Max’s Kansas City, a popular nightclub in Lower Manhattan where Mr. Bullard liked to spend time, said Ita Lew Bullard, who said she was his common-law wife for 35 years until they separated in 2002. He made his fortune from the chain, which once had 18 locations across the country — including one on the ground floor of the Shore Theater.

The business eventually closed, but the profits enabled Mr. Bullard to buy up properties on Coney Island and to begin dreaming of restoring the resort area’s luster with new or improved rides and parks.

‘He wanted year-round amusements, year-round employees,’ said Ralph Perfetto, a Coney Island resident and political organizer who knew Mr. Bullard since the 1970s. ‘It would make the neighborhood safe at night, it would be lighted up and clean, so we were strongly in favor of Horace Bullard.’ Even Mr. Bullard’s stationery was inscribed with carnival rides on it.”

 

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“A Team Of Technicians Had Rallied Around His Cancer-Riddled Cadaver With Great Optimism”

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

The opening of “Man of the Future,” a very well-written article by Alex Mar at the Believer, about the death–perhaps temporary–of Iranian transhumanist Fereidoun Esfandiary:

“On July 8, 2000, a man was loaded into an ambulance, packed in with dozens of Ziploc bags of ice cubes, and rushed onto the long flight from New York City to Scottsdale, Arizona. Several hours earlier, he’d been pronounced clinically dead, but on the ground a team of technicians had rallied around his cancer-riddled cadaver with great optimism.

At the Alcor Life Extension Foundation, they laid out the body—now patient A-1261—on an operating table encased in a coffin-shaped Plexiglas box. To keep the temperature down, the technicians pumped the box full of hyper-cold nitrogen gas, maintaining A-1261 in what they believed to be a liminal state—on pause. They worked so feverishly to preserve the body because it belonged to one of their champions. A-1261 was (and, they hoped, would someday become again) one of the world’s most celebrated transhumanists, a prominent member of a loose collective of futurists working in philosophy, science, and technology to realize humankind’s full potential, with the ultimate goal of shrugging off the shackles of aging and death. At Alcor, the Holy See of cryonics, the attendants were of the same tribe, and this is how you die if you’re one of them: an impermanent death, your mind and all the radical ideas contained therein ‘cryopreserved’ until a distant, far more evolved Future is ready to grow you a new body and embrace you as your Phase Two, cyborg self. A transhumanist’s death is merely a pit stop on the way to his inevitable resurrection.

The surgeons inserted their bright blue rubber-gloved hands through mail-slot openings in the Plexiglas to tend to the vessel. They cut deeply with the scalpel, then identified the precise spot—between the sixth and seventh vertebrae—and with a chisel and a mallet lopped off the head of Fereidoun Esfandiary.”

•••••

Now you can tweet forever:

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“We Are Not Ahead Of The Planet In Anything But Space”

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

From a fascinating, brief portrait by Andrew E. Kramer of the New York Times of a space-age city in decline, a remnant of the collapsed Soviet Union that maintains vital importance as one of two active space-launch sites in the world:

“Baikonur, in remote western Kazakhstan, was once the pride of the Soviet Union, the home of the Baikonur Cosmodrome, the launching site of Sputnik, the dog Laika and the first man in space, Yuri Gagarin. But today, nomadic herders from the nearby steppe are moving into abandoned buildings.

That is just one of the signs of the city’s long fade into the sunset of post-Soviet social and economic problems, which are all the more remarkable given that much of the world, including the United States, still relies on Baikonur for manned space launchings. The only other site for such liftoffs is in Jiuquan, in the Gobi Desert in China.

‘It’s painful for me to think of my town,’ Anna Khodakovskaya, the editor of the local newspaper, said of its glum state. The first cellphones appeared here in 2004; the first M.R.I. machine in 2011. ‘We are not ahead of the planet in anything but space,’ she said.”

•••••

A video about Laika, the first animal to orbit Earth. She did not have a happy return like Ham the AstroChimp.

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“What’s Now Regarded As Esoteric Information Is Everything Except For Stuff That Directly Concerns Kim Kardashian”

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

Two Q&As about our leaker culture, in this time when no one–and no entity–is truly private: Edward Snowden taking questions from Guardian readers, and Russell Brand explaining at Gawker why he’s been speaking in support of Bradley Manning.

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From Snowden’s Guardian interview, moderated by Glenn Greenwald:

Question:

US officials say terrorists already altering TTPs because of your leaks, & calling you traitor. Respond?

Edward Snowden:

US officials say this every time there’s a public discussion that could limit their authority. US officials also provide misleading or directly false assertions about the value of these programs, as they did just recently with the Zazi case, which court documents clearly show was not unveiled by PRISM.

Journalists should ask a specific question: since these programs began operation shortly after September 11th, how many terrorist attacks were prevented SOLELY by information derived from this suspicion-less surveillance that could not be gained via any other source? Then ask how many individual communications were ingested to achieve that, and ask yourself if it was worth it. Bathtub falls and police officers kill more Americans than terrorism, yet we’ve been asked to sacrifice our most sacred rights for fear of falling victim to it.

Further, it’s important to bear in mind I’m being called a traitor by men like former Vice President Dick Cheney. This is a man who gave us the warrantless wiretapping scheme as a kind of atrocity warm-up on the way to deceitfully engineering a conflict that has killed over 4,400 and maimed nearly 32,000 Americans, as well as leaving over 100,000 Iraqis dead. Being called a traitor by Dick Cheney is the highest honor you can give an American, and the more panicked talk we hear from people like him, Feinstein, and King, the better off we all are. If they had taught a class on how to be the kind of citizen Dick Cheney worries about, I would have finished high school.

__________________________

From Gawker‘s Brand interview, conducted by Camille Dodero:

Gawker:

Why are you talking about Bradley Manning on your birthday?

Russell Brand:

I don’t know a great deal about international espionage, but sometimes one senses that an issue is drifting in a certain direction, and just by speaking out in a small way, you can make a subtle difference on that perception. Some people have made their mind up no matter what: “Bradley Manning is a traitor because of revealing classified information.” It’s very difficult to impact those people. W.B. Yeats said, The best lack all conviction, while the worst/Are full of passionate intensity. But it might be nice, if I, from my gentle position—bouncing around on the Left elegantly and Englishly—suggest that it doesn’t seem like this person is acting particularly out of self-interest, but rather [Manning] was motivated out of a different kind of patriotism: a genuine love of the people of this country and concern for the people.

Gawker:

So what’s your realistic expectation when you lend your name to a campaign like this?

Russell Brand:

That you’ll get a a degree of abuse from people who are intrinsically opposed. The best you can do is draw the attention of people who are otherwise unsure or curious.

The culture has been expertly constructed so that what’s now regarded as esoteric information is everything except for stuff that directly concerns Kim Kardashian. So everything other than that, you might as well be speaking Aristotle in Greek. For me, I live, to a degree, in popular culture. So if I say, “Oh, that Bradley Manning seems that he was really trying his best to expose information he thought was important to American people regarding what was being done in their name,” all I’m hoping is that people who would otherwise entirely ignore it may have a flickering awareness, and some who would have had a flickering awareness would investigate further.•

 

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“They Can Feel ‘Connected’ With Other People That Are Not With Them In The Present Moment”

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

I don’t have the hard statistics on this one, but I feel like I see more people crying in public these days than ever before. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it is odd to see what are considered private moments burst through so openly. Is the world sadder now, with all our economic struggles? Is being connected to more people an opportunity for more disappointment? High school never really turns out right. Or are we just living privately in plain sight, existing within the smartphone in our hand or pocket without regard to what’s around us? As if we were in sort of a virtual phone booth. The latter is my suggestion of what it’s all about. We’re someplace else–maybe even some other time–even when we’re here and now.

The opening of “Connected, but Alone?” by Armando Duran at Medium:

“We live in the age of distraction with our multiple technological devices which in a way ‘give’ us the sense that we are connected to the world, to our friends, to our loved ones and to to the people that we share our lives with.

For a few months now, I have been noticing this behavior almost everywhere I go. Groups of friends and families gather to be together for multiple reasons. Yet their minds are elsewhere as most of the people have a device with which they can feel ‘connected’ with other people that are not with them in the present moment.

Technology has always inspired me as to what advancements we can achieve and how technology can make our lives easier. It is almost unstoppable the consumerism that has been built around getting the newest thing that there is.

I am not sure how much we, as intelligent human beings, stop and reflect on what is the impact in our psychology and our consciousness by the technological inventions we ourselves create. Sometimes the only way to make people reflect on something is when things start to go really bad.”

 

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“Betamax And VHS Were Just The Beginning”

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

Time-shifting, largely an excellent thing, all began with the simple VHS vs. Betamax format war. From an Ars Technica article about the most disruptive recent technologies:

“Time-shifting (or why Jack Valenti is spinning in his grave)

Time-shifting content has been with us for a long time, driving the media industry nuts ever since the invention of the video cassette recorder. In 1982, Jack Valenti—then president of the Motion Picture Association of America—testified before Congress, saying, ‘The VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.’ (See the Ars series on TV for more Valenti rage.)

But Betamax and VHS were just the beginning. It was a shaky beginning at that, as I can tell you firsthand from years of prying my kids’ mangled copy of half a season’s worth of Power Rangers episodes out of the maw of a VCR tape slot. When hard drives were eventually married to video recording, it did a lot more than just change the recording mechanism. Digital recording moved time-shifting of TV and other content off tapes, virtualizing and outsourcing the recording process to the point that broadcast times are almost irrelevant.

So in some ways, Jack Valenti was right about time-shifting, or at least prescient. The virtualization of broadcast content—its separation from the tyranny of network time slots and from recording media itself—has changed the acts of viewing and listening. It’s accelerated the disintegration of network television and hastened the creation of new media outlets made purely for the Internet. If it weren’t for the move from analog VCR to bits on a disk, things like Netflix’s on-demand service and its all-at-once release of the original series House of Cards would never have happened.”

••••••••••

Time-shifting in 1977:

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“Who Else Is Watching Me, Besides The NSA? What Are They Doing With My Information?”

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

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries, who co-authored the “What They Know” series about surveillance for the Wall Street Journal, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

___________________________

Question:

I’m as frustrated as anybody with what the government is doing. But i also know we need to be vigilant in trying to track and find out what real terrorists are doing. How can we strike the right balance between privacy and fighting against terrorism?

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries:

I might end up giving this answer a lot. But I think transparency is the key first step.

We can’t, as a society, decide if we agree with something if we don’t even know what that “something” is.

A couple senators on the Intelligence committee have been saying for some time, rather loudly, that there is a “secret interpretation of the law” that should worry us all. Turns out that secret legal interpretation is what allows this massive gathering of phone record information and so forth.

Those senators had been asking to have the legal reasoning be declassified, but they weren’t able to effect that change.

To me, if you can’t even declassify the way our own laws are being interpreted, that’s a huge question for our system. That’s not about protecting troop movements or activities. It’s about whether we as citizens get to know what the law says.

___________________________

Question:

Who else is watching me, besides the NSA? What are they doing with my information?

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries:

It depends on who you are and what you mean by “watching.”But I’ll just tackle this broadly.Your data can be gathered with incredible ease. For the most part, the folks doing this are the companies who are providing you the services. Google, for example, sifts through Gmail to show you ads. As you know, the phone companies can get a lot of information about the “metadata” from your calls.Depending on the type of data and who is gathering it, some of it gets sent to companies called data brokers. These guys (Acxiom, for example, or Lexis Nexis) store a lot of data about you from private sources as well as public databases, like court and real estate records.

Right now, in terms of corporate tracking, this is done mostly to show advertising. But it’s also done to identify good customers and tell marketers about who desirable customers are.

I myself like getting targeted ads. The concern comes if companies are doing this to alter prices, especially for sensitive categories such as insurance. My fellow reporters and I had a story about this type of thing in December.

As for government tracking, law enforcement has the ability to track people pursuant to several authorities.

To get content (what you’re actually saying), they get a Title III wiretap warrant, which requires probable cause as well as minimization of extraneous content and other things.

Law enforcement also can get things like email metadata pursuant to a lesser court order, which requires going before a judge and showing “specific and articulable facts.”

The lowest type of court order, called a “pen register trap and trace” order, provides things like phone metadata. For that, investigators just have to show that it’s relevant to an ongoing investigation. They aren’t supposed to use that authority to track you.

___________________________

Question:

How concerned are the conservative and Tea Party groups about and the widespread phone and internet searches and the loss of privacy?When there was the gun control debate after Sandy Hook, these organizations were enraged about the encroachment on the 2nd Amendment, do they care that the 4th Amendment is now under attack?

Jennifer Valentino-DeVries:

The only thing I know about the Tea Party is from my family back in Texas, and they seem concerned. Sample size of two, though!However, I’ve also heard conservative commentators come out in favor of this surveillance.One of the things I think is so interesting about this issue of surveillance is that it doesn’t always break neatly on party lines. It has now been promoted by two administrations that are different politically. And it has now been assailed by people on both sides of the spectrum as well.•

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“Bloomberg Presents A Conundrum”

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

Did it amuse any of you (if bitterly) that Mahmoud Ahmadinejad respected term limits in Iran over the weekend, but Mayor Bloomberg didn’t do the same in New York four years ago? Bloomberg has done his share of good things for the city–and some really dumb, tone-deaf ones–but circumventing the free vote of the people will always stain him. As his third term draws to a close, a passage from “The Untouchable,” Ben McGrath’s pitch-perfect 2009 New Yorker profile about Bloomberg at the very moment his arrogance was in the process of transforming him from able technocrat into something far less flattering:

“To people who aspire to become mayor of New York City in the traditional way, by suffering countless fund-raisers in apartments far larger than their own and attending interminable Democratic club meetings with the same cast of hangers-on, year after year, Bloomberg presents a conundrum. Many in the city’s political class believe that he’s been a good, if overrated, executive, and acknowledge that his ability to forgo the shaming hat-in-hand routine has proved far more valuable in warding off corruption than they would have liked to admit. When dealing individually with the more promising among these wannabes, Bloomberg is affable and plainspoken, in the way that a self-made man can be. He dispenses advice, tinged with just enough humor so that the condescension is not immediately apparent. (‘You know what you should do is, go out and make a billion dollars first, and then run for office.’) Or he chides, gently, ‘Why are you wasting your time doing this? You could be doing something really meaningful.’ They are flattered—who wouldn’t be?—by the attention. Only in retrospect does it begin to rankle. It’s not as though they haven’t privately nursed fantasies of ditching the numbing routines and indignities associated with a legislative life and exploiting their connections in the service of making millions (though maybe not billions) of dollars. They are not fools. They understand that the political game is rigged in favor of hackery. They know it because the hack businessmen come calling every day on the steps of City Hall.

But the political class always viewed Bloomberg’s mayoralty as an anomaly rather than as a paradigm shift, and looked forward to 2009 and, thanks to term limits, the end of his reign. For much of the second term, they endured the chatter, from the kinds of people whom they sometimes grudgingly court as their donors, about who could possibly succeed Mayor Mike, now that the bar had been raised: Dick Parsons, the Time Warner C.E.O. (since installed at Citigroup)? Jonathan Tisch, the Loews chairman? Joel Klein, the schools chancellor? One well-regarded politician recalled a breakfast last year at the Regency Hotel at which Tisch and Parsons joked about splitting the job in a tandem arrangement: alternating days, with both off on Sunday. Perhaps it was just a good-natured attempt at deflecting all the wishful speculation, but to the politician, after six-plus years of Mike Bloomberg’s booming New York, it sounded like self-satisfied dilettantism. It drove him mad. More insulting still was the proto-candidacy of John Catsimatidis, whose résumé seemed a too literal re-creation of the Mayor’s—billionaire entrepreneur, amateur pilot, and lifelong Democrat who had recently discovered the conveniences of Republicanism—but who seemed to lack any of Bloomberg’s obvious gifts. Catsimatidis owns Gristedes, a second-rate grocery-store chain, not a revered technology company that revolutionized global finance. But at least he was beatable. Then Bloomberg decided that he didn’t want to surrender his seat.”

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