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We are informed, in part, to stimuli we receive from others, and no matter how strong-minded we are, it plays a role in wiring our brains. Reactions can help form actions, so to speak. A researcher who has done work in the science of facial attractiveness just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.
____________________________
Question:
Answer:
It’s difficult sometimes to think about futuristic living, all sleek and clean and perfect. Yesterday morning I sat down on a subway car next to a guy who smelled like a toilet had backed up onto a corpse in the bathroom of a diarrhea factory. Then he started snoring.
But some among us can see a future, or something resembling it, that is more orderly. From a Foreign Policy piece about the predictions in Eric Schmidt and Jared Cohen’s just-published book, The New Digital Age:
“Futuristic living:
Your apartment is an electronic orchestra, and you are the conductor. With simple flicks of the wrist and spoken instructions, you can control temperature, humidity, ambient music and lighting. You are able to skim through the day’s news on translucent screens while a freshly cleaned suit is retrieved from your automated closet because your calendar indicates an important meeting today. You head to the kitchen for breakfast and the translucent news display follows, as a projected hologram hovering just in front of you, using motion detection, as you walk down the hallway…. Your central computer system suggests a list of chores your housekeeping robots should tackle today, all of which you approve. It further suggests that, since your coffee supply is projected to run out next Wednesday, you consider purchasing a certain larger-size container that it noticed currently on sale online. Alternatively, it offers a few recent reviews of other coffee blends your friends enjoy.”
Tags: Eric Schmidt, Jared Cohen
From Robert Kuttner’s New York Review of Books piece about David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years, a passage about the inequality of debt relief:
“The double standard in debt relief that favored large merchants, present at the creation of bankruptcy law in 1706, persists today in many different forms. It gets surprisingly little attention in the debt debates. Despite the tacit assumption that ‘surely one has to pay one’s debts,’ the evasion of repayment is both widespread and selective. Corporate executives routinely walk away from their debts via Chapter 11 of the national bankruptcy law when that seems expedient. Morality scarcely enters the conversation—this is strictly business.
Even more galling is the fact that the executives who drove the company into the ground often keep control by means of a doctrine known as debtor-in- possession. A judge simply permits the company to write off old debts, while creditors collect so many cents on the dollar out of available assets. Every major airline has now been through bankruptcy, and US Airways has gone in and out of Chapter 11 twice. In this process, all creditors are not created equal. Since banks typically have liens on the aircraft, bankers get paid ahead of others. Major losers are employees and retirees, since Chapter 11 allows a corporation to break a labor contact or reduce pension debts. Shareholders also lose, but by the time bankruptcy is declared, the company’s share value has usually dwindled to almost nothing. Much of the private equity industry uses the strategy of acquiring a company, taking it into bankruptcy, thus shedding its debts, and then cashing in on its subsequent profitability. Despite the misleading term private ‘equity,’ tax-deductible private debt is the essence of this industry, which relies heavily on borrowed money to finance its takeovers.
Homeowners, however, are explicitly prohibited from using the bankruptcy code to reduce their outstanding mortgage debt. White House legislation proposed in 2009 would have allowed a judge to reduce the principal on a home mortgage, as part of the effort to contain the economic crisis. Congress rejected the measure after extensive lobbying by the financial industry. Consumers may use bankruptcy to shed other debts, but a revision of the law signed by President Bush in 2005 subjects most bankrupt consumers to partial repayment requirements, while bankrupt corporations get a general discharge from their debts. Thanks to the influence of the same financial lobby, the rules of student debt provide that the obligations of a college loan follow a borrower to the grave.”
Tags: David Graeber, Robert Kuttner
From Greg Klerkx’s Aeon essay, “Spaced Out,” a tidy explanation of how the “final frontier” differs from frontiers of old:
“Space tourism, driven by ‘astropreneurs’ such as Virgin Galactic’s Richard Branson, will soon add hundreds of wealthy people to the astronaut ranks, but only for brief sojourns: they’ll reach suborbital space for a few quick minutes before returning to the atmosphere. Eventually, those high-paying tourists might want to stay awhile; Bigelow Aerospace has made no secret that its inflatables would be ideal for such a purpose, and the ISS has already hosted several tourists. Study upon study has indicated that many happy billions of dollars are there to be made in the human spaceflight business, which includes not just space labs, stations and hotels but also outposts on the moon and beyond.
Space futurists — many of whom I count as friends — can finally, and with some measure of reality, lay claim to the idea that we are on the verge of fulfilling the philosophical promise of the Space Age and becoming what the SpaceX founder Elon Musk describes as ‘a multi-planet species’. Certainly, it has taken longer than they’d hoped: the pace of the Apollo years was unsustainable, being largely fuelled by the geopolitics of the Cold War, and space bureaucracies have been slow to take advantage of entrepreneurial efficiencies. Space futurists argue that things are changing. They insist that a new Space Age is dawning. But what if the signs they see are only the last wispy auroras of the first one?
Whether launched for profit or pride, the ISS, Bigelow Aerospace and Chinese space stations are artifacts of a particular cultural moment, when living in space was thought to be the next step in humankind’s evolution. Space had become more than an ocean to traverse, paceKennedy. It had become, in that iconic Star Trek phrase, ‘the final frontier’.
I am as big a Star Trek fan as anyone, but I fear the frontier analogy misses the mark. On the frontier of old, one expected to find a better version of the world left behind: more land, more resources, more possibility. But the more we learn about ‘space’, the more we understand that living there would mean being forever enswathed in a portable bubble of Earth, with the goal being merely to survive.”
Tags: Greg Klerkx
The aviation industry is a miracle to me. There hasn’t been a fatal air crash in America in four years, fares are relatively inexpensive and carbon emissions are surprisingly low. The automotive industry, which initially had a huge advantage thanks to Henry Ford and his assembly line, only now seems to be catching up, with emphasis on lighter, smarter and more fuel-efficient vehicles, even driverless ones. From an Economist report about the future of cars in the global market:
“As an investment, then, the motor industry has to be treated with caution. But its engineering and environmental credentials are improving all the time. A century after becoming a mass-market product, the car is still a long way from being a mature technology. Manufacturers and their suppliers are investing huge sums in a variety of improved propulsion systems and in new lightweight materials to meet regulators’ emissions targets. The current generation of models is already vastly cleaner than earlier ones, and emissions of carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxides, soot and other pollutants are set to fall much further. The smog that began to afflict traffic-choked California in the 1950s and is now obscuring the sky in Chinese cities will gradually clear. The day may come when environmentalists stop worrying so much about cars and turn their attention to other polluters.
Consumers will be in heaven. Improved manufacturing systems will allow the bigger carmakers to offer an ever wider range of models, supplemented by a steady stream of niche products from new entrants. Fierce competition will keep prices down even as cars are packed with ever more technology that will make them more expensive to produce. More of them will drive themselves, park themselves and avoid collisions automatically. That should cut down on accidents and traffic jams, reduce the stress associated with driving and provide personal mobility for the growing ranks of the elderly and disabled.
All the technology that will go into making cars cleaner will also make them far more fuel-efficient and more economical. For motorists with short, predictable daily drives, all-electric cars may prove adequate and, as batteries improve, increasingly cost-effective. Others will be able to pick from a range of propulsion systems, including hybrid, natural gas and hydrogen as well as improved petrol or diesel engines, to suit their needs.”
Video killed the radio star, but algorithms got the American film critic.
The Digital Age has made it easy for Netflix and others to tell you what you would like to see without reading film criticism or even watching thumbs point north or south. And the global market for movies has birthed the creation of one comic-book blockbuster after another, heavy on action and effects and light on dialogue, moving many of the better creators of personal storytelling to cable television. These shifts have sent film critics the way of travel agents.
However, Jonathan Rosenbaum, legendary arbiter of the Chicago Reader, pushes back at the idea that the Digital Age is a death knell for cinema writers. His best argument: Many of the most high-profile, pre-Netflix movie-reviewing slots were filled by hacks who knew little. That’s true. It’s hard to deny, though, that the vocation–not avocation–has cratered. From John Lingan’s Los Angeles Review of Books piece about Rosenbaum during the so-called twilight of the critics:
“For the Love of Movies is a grim tale of extinction, in which [Gerald] Peary guides the audience through the marquee names in American movie writing from Frank E. Woods to Harry Knowles before asking us to mourn the dozens of critics who have lost their jobs since the recession began. Throughout the film, headshots of former critics flash like a succession of milk carton children. And in a final gesture that no other audience member seemed to find as comically melodramatic as I did, the final credits rolled over a contemporary rendition of Stephen Foster’s Civil War–era ballad for the downtrodden, ‘Hard Times Come Again No More.’
Ten minutes into the Q&A, Rosenbaum pushed back against Peary’s negativity, as I expected he might.
When the moderator suggested that nonprofessional film bloggers lack a proper appreciation for the history of cinema, Rosenbaum declared, ‘To be quite frank, the whole time I’ve been involved in film criticism, I’ve never understood what the difference is between professionalism and amateurs. There are people in positions of great authority who know very little about film, and people who are considered amateurs who know a great deal.’
Rosenbaum’s career has been marked by this disregard for accepted hierarchies. In London in the early 1970s, he reviewed everything from the British Film Institute’s revivals to soft-core porn movies. At the Reader, he paid equal attention to the multiplex, art houses, and museum programming. And, in response to the American Film Institute’s 1998 list of the ‘100 Greatest American Movies,’ Rosenbaum published his own top 100, which included experimental works and documentaries alongside lush Hollywood moneymakers like An Affair to Remember. ‘If these lists have any purpose at all from our standpoint (as opposed to the interests of the merchandisers),’ he argued:
this is surely to rouse us out of our boredom and stupor, not to ratify our already foreshortened definitions and perspectives. Above all, the impulse to provide another list is to defend the breadth, richness, and intelligence of the American cinema against its self-appointed custodians, who seem to want to lock us into an eternity of Oscar nights.
Addressing Peary on the National Gallery stage, Rosenbaum said, ‘My biggest problem with [For the Love of Movies] is you focused too much on American film criticism,’ eliciting a mild gasp from the crowd for spoiling the heretofore united front. Peary made the reasonable defense that his limited budget and running time didn’t allow him the luxury of a global view, but Rosenbaum had mounted one of his favorite hobbyhorses and wasn’t about to dismount.
‘The great possibility of the Internet is its internationalism,’ he continued. Few critics Rosenbaum’s age have embraced this ‘great possibility’ so forcefully. He spoke admiringly of the young, unpaid writers and unprofitable web magazines that, in the liveliness of their thought and content, often eclipse even hallowed print journals like Film Comment or Sight & Sound.”
Tags: Gerald Peary, John Linga, Jonathan Rosenbaum
ESPN’s Colin Cowherd is a hideous man, full of bluster, arrogance and wrongheadedness–and it’s obvious that he’s a sign of the times in American broadcasting. He creates elaborate, asinine theories and stuffs them full of “facts” that are usually not true. His predictions are almost always wrong. If Cowherd tells you to bet the rent money on something, you best sock it under a mattress. But being wrong and obnoxious has yet to cost him because like most pundits, he’s not in the business of being right. He’s in the business of being loud and of being a brand.
Just one small example: Before the 2012 baseball season, the Texas Rangers let pitcher C.J. Wilson become a free agent, instead opting to invest money in Japanese pitcher Yu Darvish, whom the organization had scouted heavily. Cowherd went on the radio with one of his typical idiotic rants, stating authoritatively that this was an example of how people are attracted to the unknown instead of appreciating what has worked for them, that the team had fallen in love with an ideal instead of understanding what they already had was better, that Wilson would prove to be the superior pitcher. Mark my words, Cowherd said.
He didn’t take into account that Darvish was a young pitcher about to age into his prime and Wilson was older and exiting his. He didn’t pay attention to Darvish having a deeper arsenal of pitches. He didn’t pay attention to reality at all. The Rangers hadn’t fallen in love with an ideal; it was Cowherd who had fallen in love with his moronic theory. I guess I don’t have to add that in the 14 months since Texas made its decision–one based on scouting, data and analysis–Darvish has proven to be one of the best pitchers in MLB while Wilson has faltered badly for his new team. And this isn’t just the exception with Cowherd–it’s the rule.
Cowherd doesn’t limit his foolishness to sports–he also makes gross and insulting generalizations about women and anyone he feels isn’t as successful as he is, though your definition of “successful” may differ. The suits at the sports network are obviously bright enough to realize what a huge douche they have working for them. But they only care about one thing: Can we turn him into a star and make money from his noise?
Of course, this is just a sports guy and sports aren’t important. But the same holds true for media across all areas in this country, especially in our age of dwindling financial returns for traditional platforms. When Jeff Zucker became the new head of CNN, he promised that he would “broaden the definition of what news is.” That remark won him applause from Rupert Murdoch, who has been poisoning the air with non-news and dubious research methods for decades. Murdoch has always believed that news is just another form of entertainment. Perhaps its just a coincidence that CNN and News Corp. properties were fast and first and embarrassingly wrong in the aftermath of the horrendous Boston Marathon carnage.
Proud jughead Joe Scarborough was able to cherry-pick polls that helped him sell dishonest stories in the run-up to the Presidential election, while questioning the integrity of pollster Nate Silver, who stuck to the numbers. The facts didn’t matter.
These aren’t crazy conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones–the single biggest sack of shit in American media–but in some ways their dishonesty is more dangerous. It isn’t cloaked in extremism but in respectability. And there’s nothing respectable about it.
The opening of Colin McGowan’s new article about the cartoonish Cowherd at the Classical:
“This past Friday, Colin Cowherd sat down with Bill Simmons to talk mostly about Colin Cowherd. They also kicked around a few theories about the mutation of LeBron’s competitiveness gene and the link between fascism and food. In tone, the podcast is more or less what one would expect: two hip-shooters a-hip-shootin’, and some excessive mutual admiration—Cowherd talks about Simmons’s perspective and craft as if Simmonsian should join Kafkaesque as an OED-approved literary adjective; Simmons gushes over Cowherd’s ability to… talk to himself for nine minutes at a time. For my part, I cleaned my apartment and occasionally yelled ‘wrong!’ from across the room.
I listened to the interview because I’m not looking to set my brain on fire with intellectual stimulation while drinking gin and scrubbing cat piss out of my bathroom floor on a Friday evening, but also because I wanted to listen to two powerful media figures I dislike talk shop. I think both Cowherd and Simmons, in their own ways, are what’s wrong with sports media, which in turn makes for an increasingly facile and (in Cowherd’s case) needlessly hostile mainstream sports discourse. I’ve called Simmons ‘either a hack or a complete asshole,’ and Cowherd, along with his louder, more malignant cousin Skip Bayless, isn’t in the sports business so much as he’s in the infuriation business. He peddles haughty reductiveness and calls it honesty, then bats around an overmatched simpleton from Steak’s Landing, Wisconsin for a few minutes before returning to his now-basically-show-long rant about Carmelo Anthony’s facial expressions and how, he doesn’t care what you think, he’s gonna go on pronouncing it ‘jih-roh.’
The podcast isn’t uninteresting, which Cowherd might claim is the entire battle. He exclaims at one point ‘What’s wrong with being interesting?’ which is exactly the sort of unassailable bully logic he employs on his radio show. Of course there is obviously nothing wrong with being interesting—what with it being definitionally positive—but here, Cowherd isn’t talking about the Lakers’ playoff chances for the third time in four days or staging overrated/underrated debates about literally anything. He’s talking about himself, and why he is the way he is, what he believes in. This is engaging enough: Colin Cowherd the human being is unlike anyone I’ve ever met. If he wants to talk about what makes him strange, I’ll listen.
What makes him strange—wrong, but also strange—is that he sees a direct correlation between popularity and, if not quite quality, some inherent goodness.”
Tags: Colin Cowherd, Colin McGowan
The opening of Peter Lewis’ barnesandnoble.com review of Joel F. Harrington’s The Faithful Executioner, a new volume about the 16th-century man who did “god’s work” in the gallows:
“Frantz Schmidt was a master executioner. He had a notarized certificate to prove it. He apprenticed under a master; he paid his journeyman’s dues. He mostly worked in the imperial city of Nuremberg during his forty-five years of service, 1573-1618. He executed 394 people: men, women, and some boys and girls. Schmidt, always poised, delivered a good death, whether he beat you to kingdom come with a wagon wheel or applied the pitch and touched the flame, slipped the noose or cut off your head.
A ‘good death’ was meant to shock and awe the locals, to keep them ruly in the absence of any effective central authority during some seriously unruly times. Executions were carefully orchestrated, ritualized brutality that sated the drive for retribution, with clear rules and conduct. The fathers of Nuremberg, a city then at the zenith of its power and wealth, hired Frantz Schmidt: reliable, honest, pious, reflective, loyal, sober Frantz, a rare bird in the world of executioners.”
Why would established authors continue to work for publishing companies instead of putting out their own books? I suppose if there is a bucket of money involved, it might make sense to be owned rather than to own, but as publishers continue to be undone by technological tumult, they have fewer dollars to pay except for blockbusters, and they do less and less in terms of fact-checking, publicity, etc. In fact, the only reason there will soon be to publish a printed book is for vanity, the ego-stroking joy of having a printed-and-bound product to show off.
David Mamet has made the only intelligent decision, going the lone-wolf route with his forthcoming book. From Leslie Kaufman in the New York Times:
“As digital disruption continues to reshape the publishing market, self-publishing — including distribution digitally or as print on demand — has become more and more popular, and more feasible, with an increasing array of options for anyone with an idea and a keyboard. Most of the attention so far has focused on unknown and unsigned authors who storm onto the best-seller lists through their own ingenuity.
The announcement by ICM and Mr. Mamet suggests that self-publishing will begin to widen its net and become attractive also to more established authors. For one thing, as traditional publishers have cut back on marketing, this route allows well-known figures like Mr. Mamet to look after their own publicity.
Then there is the money. While self-published authors get no advance, they typically receive 70 percent of sales. A standard contract with a traditional house gives an author an advance, and only pays royalties — the standard is 25 percent of digital sales and 7 to 12 percent of the list price for bound books — after the advance is earned back in sales.”
Tags: David Mamet, Leslie Kaufman
From a Wired report by Tim Maly at Wired a microchip by Freescale that is so small that, yes, it can be swallowed:
“Chipmaker Freescale Semiconductor has created the world’s smallest ARM-powered chip, designed to push the world of connected devices into surprising places.
Announced today, the Kinetis KL02 measures just 1.9 by 2 millimeters. It’s a full microcontroller unit (MCU), meaning the chip sports a processor, RAM, ROM, clock and I/O control unit — everything a body needs to be a basic tiny computer.
The KL02 has 32k of flash memory, 4k of RAM, a 32 bit processor, and peripherals like a 12-bit analog to digital converter and a low-power UART built into the chip. By including these extra parts, device makers can shrink down their designs, resulting in tiny boards in tiny devices.
How tiny? One application that Freescale says the chips could be used for is swallowable computers. Yes, you read that right. ‘We are working with our customers and partners on providing technology for their products that can be swallowed but we can’t really comment on unannounced products,’ says Steve Tateosian, global product marketing manager.”
Tags: Tim Maly
Douglas Rushkoff, author of Present Shock, discussing the anarchic nature of the flow of time in the Digital Age in a New York Times interview conducted by Quentin Hardy:
Question:
You say we have ‘a new relationship with time.’ What is it, and why is that a bad thing?
Douglas Rushkoff:
What we’ve done has made time even more dense. On Facebook, your past comes into your present when someone from your second grade class suddenly pops up to send you a message, and your future is being manipulated by what Facebook knows to put in front of you next. Present shock interrupts our normal social flow.
It didn’t have to be this way. When digital culture first came along, it was supposed to create more time, by allowing us to shift time around. Somehow instead we’ve strapped devices to ourselves that ping us all the time.
Question:
Hasn’t time been collapsing for centuries? We moved from the rhythm of seasons to living by the clock in the Industrial Age. We’ve paced in front of the microwave for decades.
Douglas Rushkoff:
Yes, but it has hit a point where we have lost any sense of analog time, the way a second hand sweeps around a clock. We’ve chosen the false ‘now’ of our devices. It has led to a collapse of linear narratives and a culture where you have political movements demanding that everything change, now. The horrible truth is we are linear beings; we can’t multitask, and we shouldn’t keep interrupting important connections to each other with the latest message coming in.
Question:
It’s a funny thing: the counterculture used to talk about ‘Be here now,’ and the need to chase after self-awareness by seeking the eternal present. What is the difference between that world of the “now” and this one?
Douglas Rushkoff:
People are seduced by signals from the world, but that is manipulation, not reality. Computers have learned more about us than we’ve learned about them.•
Tags: Douglas Rushkoff, Quentin Hardy
Mark Jacobson has crafted a plan that contends that New York State can fulfill all its energy needs by 2030 sans fossil fuels or carbon emissions, simply using WWS (Wind, Water, Sun). He discusses the major obstacles and criticisms of the plan in a Scientific American interview conducted by Mark Fischetti. An excerpt:
“Question:
What are the main obstacles to such a sweeping overhaul at a state or national level?
Mark Jacobson:
The main obstacles are political and social—getting politicians onboard. There are always local zoning issues. I’m sure there will be a big push by the gas lobby and the oil lobby against this.
Question:
So then how do you sell the plan?
Mark Jacobson:
There is a huge savings in lives. The New York plan would prevent 4,000 mortalities a year in the state due to less air pollution, and a related savings of $33 billion—about 3 percent of the GDP of the state. That resonates more with people than climate change issues. We also looked at job creation; more jobs would be created than lost.
Question:
The main criticism about heavy reliance on wind and solar power is that the sources are intermittent: the wind doesn’t always blow, the sun doesn’t shine at night. Do your plans rely a lot on energy storage, which remains a tough challenge?
Mark Jacobson:
If you get the [power] transmission grid right you don’t need a whole lot of storage. By combining wind and solar and geothermal and hydroelectric, you can match the power demand. And if you oversize the grid, when you’re producing extra electricity you use it to produce hydrogen [for fuel-cell vehicles and ships as well as some district heating and industrial processes]. You can also spread the peak demand by giving financial incentives [for consumers to use power at off-peak times]. Some storage certainly would help; we have storage in the form of hydrogen and in concentrated solar power plants. There are many ways to tackle the intermittency issues.
Question:
The other concern that is usually raised about renewable energy is that it is more expensive than fossil fuels. What would electricity prices be like in New York?
Mark Jacobson:
The residential electricity cost in the U.S. on average is 13.1 cents per kilowatt-hour. In New York it’s 18.1 cents. If you look at the states that have the highest percentage of electricity generation from wind, the average electricity price increase from 2003 to 2011 was 2 cents a kilowatt-hour, whereas all the other states averaged 3.6 cents. So prices in the states that didn’t put in a lot of wind went up more.”
Tags: Mark Fischetti, Mark Jacobson
From Joseph Stiglitz, on tax day, in the New York Times:
“Leona Helmsley, the hotel chain executive who was convicted of federal tax evasion in 1989, was notorious for, among other things, reportedly having said that ‘only the little people pay taxes.’
As a statement of principle, the quotation may well have earned Mrs. Helmsley, who died in 2007, the title Queen of Mean. But as a prediction about the fairness of American tax policy, Mrs. Helmsley’s remark might actually have been prescient.
Today, the deadline for filing individual income-tax returns, is a day when Americans would do well to pause and reflect on our tax system and the society it creates. No one enjoys paying taxes, and yet all but the extreme libertarians agree, as Oliver Wendell Holmes said, that taxes are the price we pay for civilized society. But in recent decades, the burden for paying that price has been distributed in increasingly unfair ways.
About 6 in 10 of us believe that the tax system is unfair — and they’re right: put simply, the very rich don’t pay their fair share.”
Tags: Joseph Stiglitz, Leona Helmsley
From “Civilization Vs. Human Desire,” a post at the Overcoming Bias blog, Robin Hanson explains why our wants drive the future better than planning ever could:
“So, if we could, we’d pick futures that transfer to us, honor us, preserve our ways, and act warm and moral by our standards. But we don’t get what we’d want. That is, we mostly don’t consciously and deliberately choose to change civilization according to our preferences. Instead, changes are mostly side effects of our each trying to get what we want now. Civilizations change as cultures and technologies are selected for being more militarily, rhetorically, economically, etc. powerful, and for giving people what they now want. This is mostly out of anyone’s control, and yes it could end very badly.
And yet, it is our unique willingness and ability to let our civilization change and be selected by forces out of our control, and then to tell us that we like it, that has let our species dominate the Earth, and gives us a good chance to dominate the galaxy and more. While our descendants may be somewhat less happy than us, or than our distant ancestors, there may be trillions of trillions or more of them. I more fear a serious attempt by overall humanity to coordinate to dictate its future, than I fear this out of control process.”
Tags: Robin Hanson
From Holman W. Jenkins, Jr.’s new Wall Street Journal interview with the ever-fascinating Ray Kurzweil:
“Mr. Kurzweil’s frank efforts to outwit death have earned him an exaggerated reputation for solemnity, even caused some to portray him as a humorless obsessive. This is wrong. Like the best comedians, especially the best Jewish comedians, he doesn’t tell you when to laugh. Of the pushback he receives from certain theologians who insist death is necessary and ennobling, he snarks, ‘Oh, death, that tragic thing? That’s really a good thing.’
‘People say, ‘Oh, only the rich are going to have these technologies you speak of.’ And I say, ‘Yeah, like cellphones.’
To listen to Mr. Kurzweil or read his several books (the latest: How to Create a Mind) is to be flummoxed by a series of forecasts that hardly seem realizable in the next 40 years. But this is merely a flaw in my brain, he assures me. Humans are wired to expect ‘linear’ change from their world. They have a hard time grasping the ‘accelerating, exponential’ change that is the nature of information technology.
‘A kid in Africa with a smartphone is walking around with a trillion dollars of computation circa 1970,’ he says. Project that rate forward, and everything will change dramatically in the next few decades.
‘I’m right on the cusp,’ he adds. ‘I think some of us will make it through’—he means baby boomers, who can hope to experience practical immortality if they hang on for another 15 years.”
From Rachel Hardwick’s new Vice interview with Dennis M. Hope, a man who claims to “own the moon”:
“Vice:
How did you end up owning and selling off chunks of the moon?
Dennis M. Hope:
I started in 1980 when I was going through a divorce. I was out of money and thought maybe I could make some if I owned some property, then I looked out the window, saw the moon, and thought, Hey, there’s a load of property! So I went to the library, looked up the 1968 Outer Space Treaty and, sure enough, Article 2 states: ‘No nation by appropriation shall have sovereignty or control over any of the satellite bodies.’ Meaning it was unowned land.
Vice:
But how did you acquire it?
Dennis M. Hope:
I just filed a claim of ownership for the moon, the other eight planets and their moons, and sent it to the United Nations with a note stating that my intent was to subdivide and sell the property to anybody who wanted it. I told them that if they had a legal problem with it they should please let me know.
Vice:
Did they ever get back to you?
Dennis M. Hope:
They never responded. Shame on them! I’ve never had a challenge to my claim of ownership by any government on this planet, period. I’ve had a lot of people telling me I don’t have the right to do this, but that’s just their opinion.
Vice:
So how much land have you sold so far?
Dennis M. Hope:
Well, this is the only job I’ve had since 1995, which is when I started doing this full time. We’ve sold 611 million acres of land on the moon, 325 million acres on Mars, and a combined 125 million acres on Venus, Io, and Mercury.”
Tags: Dennis M. Hope, Rachel Hardwick
A Nicholas Thompson post at the New Yorker blog looks at the peculiar state of Stanford University, which has administrators tacitly encouraging students to drop out of school to create riches for themselves and their elders. It’s not so much a sign of the decentralization of modern education as it is a contemporary tale of a gold rush and things that get lost in the haste. The post’s opening:
“Is Stanford still a university? The Wall Street Journal recently reported that more than a dozen students—both undergraduate and graduate—have left school to work on a new technology start-up called Clinkle. Faculty members have invested, the former dean of Stanford’s business school is on the board, and one computer-science professor who taught several of the employees now owns shares. The founder of Clinkle was an undergraduate advisee of the president of the university, John Hennessy, who has also been advising the company. Clinkle deals with mobile payments, and, if all goes well, there will be many payments to many people on campus. Maybe, as it did with Google, Stanford will get stock grants. There are conflicts of interest here; and questions of power dynamics. The leadership of a university has encouraged an endeavor in which students drop out in order to do something that will enrich the faculty.
Stanford has been heading in this direction for a while.”
Tags: Nicholas Thompson
From a post at the great Paleofuture blog which recalls a 1969 prediction about the polarizing potential of narrowcasting, a term that had yet to be coined:
“Imagine a world where the only media you consume serves to reinforce your particular set of steadfast political beliefs. Sounds like a pretty far-out dystopia, right? Well, in 1969, Internet pioneer Paul Baran predicted just that.
In a paper titled “On the Impact of the New Communications Media Upon Social Values,” Baran (who passed away in 2011) looked at how Americans might be affected by the media landscape of tomorrow. The paper examined everything from the role of media technology in the classroom to the social effects of the portable telephone — a device not yet in existence that he predicted as having the potential to disrupt our lives immensely with unwanted calls at inopportune times.
Perhaps most interestingly, Baran also anticipated the political polarization of American media; the kind of polarization that media scholars here in the 21st century are desperately trying to better understand.
Baran understood that with an increasing number of channels on which to deliver information, there would be more and more preaching to the choir, as it were. Which is to say, that when people of the future find a newspaper or TV network or blog (which obviously wasn’t a thing yet) that perfectly fits their ideology and continuously tells them that their beliefs are correct, Americans will see little reason to communicate meaningfully with others who don’t share those beliefs.”
Tags: Paul Baran
At the excellent Marginal Revolution blog, economist Tyler Cowen takes on a thought experiment: What if we all died at forty? An excerpt from his answer:
“One question is how child-bearing norms will evolve. There will be considerable pressure to have kids at age eighteen or so. (It might be considered unethical to have a child at age thirty-five, although if the fertility rate falls enough the economy might shift heavily into orphanages and this could be considered virtuous nonetheless.) I predict many people would become much stricter in their morals and more religious, and they will have children quite early.
Other people would attempt to maintain a collegiate lifestyle through their death at age forty. There would be a polarization of outcomes and approaches to life. Old age as an equalizer, and as an enforcer of responsible savings behavior, would be gone.
The likelihood of warfare would rise, if only because the sage elderly won’t be around and male hormones will run rampant.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Tyler Cowen
You have to have a lot of faith in humanity to be an anarchist. Have you met people? They’re awful.
The collapse of Wall Street, the sway of corporations that see us as consumers rather than citizens, grave concerns about our environment and the decentralization of communication have opened a door for anarchic movements in the form of Occupy Wall Street and beyond. If only I had more faith in people, the awful, awful people.
An excerpt from an excellent interview that Gawker’s Adrian Chen conducted with anarchist, author and scholar David Graeber:
“Question:
One of the major themes of your book is that the current political structure is not at all democratic. I think among the people who would read your book, that’s kind of a given. But you go further in pointing out the anti-democratic nature of the Founding Fathers.
David Graeber:
Most people think these guys had something to do with democracy, but nobody ever reads what they actually said. What they said is very explicit: They would say things like ‘We need to do something about all this democracy.’
Question:
So as an alternative, you promote the model of consensus that Occupy used to organize, through its General Assembly.
David Graeber:
Yeah. What we wanted to do was A) change the discourse and then B) create a culture of democracy in America, which really hasn’t had one. I mean direct democracy, hands on, let’s figure out how you make this system together. It’s ironic because if you go to someplace like Madagascar, everybody knows how to do that. They sit in a circle and they do a consensus process. There is a way that you can do these things, that millions and millions of people over human history have developed and it comes out pretty much the same wherever they are because there are certain logical constraints and people being what they are.
Consensus isn’t just about agreement. It’s about changing things around: You get a proposal, you work something out, people foresee problems, you do creative synthesis. At the end of it you come up with with something that everyone thinks is okay. Most people like it, and nobody hates it.
Question:
This is pretty much the opposite of what goes on in mainstream politics.
David Graeber:
Yeah, exactly. It’s like, ‘People can be reasonable, I didn’t think it was possible!’ And that’s something I’ve noticed, that authoritarian regimes, what they do is that they always come up with some way to teach people about political decision making that says people aren’t basically reasonable, so don’t try this at home. I always point out the difference between the Athenian Agora and the Roman Circus. When most Athenians gathered together in a big mass it was to do direct democracy. But here’s Rome, this authoritarian regime. When did most Romans get together in the same place? If they’re voting on anything it’s like thumbs-up or thumbs-down to kill some gladiator. And these things are all organized by the elite, right? So all the people who are really running things throw these games where they basically organize people into a giant lynch mobs. And then they say, ‘Look, see how people behave! You don’t want to have Democracy!'”
Tags: Adrian Chen, David Graeber
A Hindustan Times report profiles the attempts of a Russian oligarch to create cyborgs by 2045, essentially defeating death. Even if he is successful (very unlikely), what he preserves won’t be exactly you or I. The opening:
“A Russian billionaire has unveiled plans to make humans immortal by converting them into ‘Terminator-style’ cyborgs – a creature that’s part human and part machine – within the next three decades.
Thirty two-year-old mogul, Dmitry Itskov has been pushing the project forward since
The so called ‘Cyborg’ will have no physical form, and exist in a network similar to the Internet and be able to travel at the speed of light all over the Earth, or even into the space.”
Tags: Dmitry Itskov
Louis C.K. has some new stuff he wants you to buy (his Oh My God HBO special), so he’s doing an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. Otherwise he would never talk to you. He doesn’t like you.
I love Louis C.K., but he should probably stop being so strict and self-righteous with people who do minor idiotic things in his presence (complimenting him during his routine, asking him for a photo on the street). You’ve done worse things than those in your life, Louis. You don’t get to be the moralistic one now. You get to be reluctantly patient with others because others were reluctantly patient with you. Don’t be a suckbag. A few exchanges follow.
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Question:
Louis C.K.:
Question:
For funsies: What’s your favorite short joke/one-liner?
Louis C.K.:
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Question:
Who are some of your favorite stand up comedians? What’s your favorite Christmas movie and why is it Die Hard? How many dicks were in the largest bag of dicks you’ve ever encountered?
Louis C.K.:
“What’s your favorite Christmas movie and why is it Die Hard?” made me laugh.
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Question:
Who is your favorite female comedian?
Louis C.K.:
Don’t know. Maria Bamford is great. Tig Notaro. Laura Kightlinger. Kathy Griffin. Sarah Silverman. Jessica Kirson KILLS. Marina franklin can be inspired in moments. she’s not a comedian but Mellissa mccarthy is hilarious. I know i’m leaving some out. Going back Joan Rivers. Carol Brunette Phillis Diller Lilly tomlin. Margaret Smith had great jokes. Rosanne had some great stuff. Moms Mabley. I used to open for Paula Poundstone who is a phenomenal performer. Joy Behar, used to work with her in clubs in new york. She was GREAT in the clubs. Um… There’s a woman named Laura House who i don’t think does standup anymore. Susie Essman. Lots of great women comedians. Lots of shitty ones. More shitty men comedians.
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Question:
You’ll have to ask Ewan Mcgregor that. I can tell you that his cock is fine. Because it’s in my mouth right now. I am not joking. I am blowing Ewan Mcgregor right this second.
Tags: Louis C.K.
There’s no better source for thought-provoking essays on the web than the remarkable Aeon site. There are several pieces each week that make me glad the Internet exists. The latest pair of examples are Leo Hollis’ exploration of future-proofing cities in an age of extreme weather and Jesse Gamble’s study of technological “remedies” for sleep.
“We do not, however, need to rely on speculation to imagine the impact of extreme weather events on the city. We have seen this scenario unfold before.
On Thursday, 13 July, 1995, the temperature in downtown Chicago rose to a record 104ºF (40ºC), the high point in an unrelenting week of heat. Combined with high humidity, it was so hot that it was almost impossible to move around without discomfort. At the beginning of the week, people made jokes, broke open beers and celebrated the arrival of the good weather. But after seven days and nights of ceaseless heat, according to the Chicago Tribune:
Overheated Chicagoans opened an estimated 3,000 fire hydrants, leading to record water use. The Chicago Park District curtailed programs to keep children from exerting themselves in the heat. Swimming pools were packed, while some sought relief in cool basements. People attended baseball games with wet towels on their heads. Roads buckled and some drawbridges had to be hosed down to close properly.
Only once the worst of the heatwave had passed were authorities able to audit the damage. More than 739 people died from heat exhaustion, dehydration, or kidney failure, despite warnings from meteorologists that dangerous weather was on its way. Hospitals found it impossible to cope. In a vain attempt to help, one owner of a meatpacking firm offered one of his refrigeration trucks to store the dead; it was so quickly filled with the bodies of the poor, infirm and elderly that he had to send eight more vehicles. Afterwards, the autopsies told a grim, predictable tale: the majority of the dead were old people who had run out of water, or had been stuck in overheated apartments, abandoned by their neighbours.
It is easy to forget that cities are made out of people who live and thrive in the spaces between buildings
In response to the crisis, a team from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) scoured the city for the causes of such a high number of deaths, hoping to prevent a similar disaster elsewhere. The results were predictable: the people who died had failed to find assistance or refuge. They had died on their own, without help. In effect, the report blamed the dead for their failure to leave their apartments, ensure that they had enough water, or check that the air conditioning was working.
These two scenarios offer a bleak condemnation of our urban future. Natural disasters appear to be inevitable, and yet we seem largely incapable of readying ourselves for the unexpected. What can we do to prepare, and perhaps prevent, coming catastrophe?”
“Work, friendships, exercise, parenting, eating, reading — there just aren’t enough hours in the day. To live fully, many of us carve those extra hours out of our sleep time. Then we pay for it the next day. A thirst for life leads many to pine for a drastic reduction, if not elimination, of the human need for sleep. Little wonder: if there were a widespread disease that similarly deprived people of a third of their conscious lives, the search for a cure would be lavishly funded. It’s the Holy Grail of sleep researchers, and they might be closing in.
As with most human behaviours, it’s hard to tease out our biological need for sleep from the cultural practices that interpret it. The practice of sleeping for eight hours on a soft, raised platform, alone or in pairs, is actually atypical for humans. Many traditional societies sleep more sporadically, and social activity carries on throughout the night. Group members get up when something interesting is going on, and sometimes they fall asleep in the middle of a conversation as a polite way of exiting an argument. Sleeping is universal, but there is glorious diversity in the ways we accomplish it.
Different species also seem to vary widely in their sleeping behaviours. Herbivores sleep far less than carnivores — four hours for an elephant, compared with almost 20 hours for a lion — presumably because it takes them longer to feed themselves, and vigilance is selected for. As omnivores, humans fall between the two sleep orientations. Circadian rhythms, the body’s master clock, allow us to anticipate daily environmental cycles and arrange our organ’s functions along a timeline so that they do not interfere with one another.
Our internal clock is based on a chemical oscillation, a feedback loop on the cellular level that takes 24 hours to complete and is overseen by a clump of brain cells behind our eyes (near the meeting point of our optic nerves). Even deep in a cave with no access to light or clocks, our bodies keep an internal schedule of almost exactly 24 hours. This isolated state is called ‘free-running’, and we know it’s driven from within because our body clock runs just a bit slow. When there is no light to reset it, we wake up a few minutes later each day. It’s a deeply engrained cycle found in every known multi-cellular organism, as inevitable as the rotation of the Earth — and the corresponding day-night cycles — that shaped it.
Human sleep comprises several 90-minute cycles of brain activity. In a person who is awake, electroencephalogram (EEG) readings are very complex, but as sleep sets in, the brain waves get slower, descending through Stage 1 (relaxation) and Stage 2 (light sleep) down to Stage 3 and slow-wave deep sleep. After this restorative phase, the brain has a spurt of rapid eye movement (REM) sleep, which in many ways resembles the waking brain. Woken from this phase, sleepers are likely to report dreaming.
One of the most valuable outcomes of work on sleep deprivation is the emergence of clear individual differences — groups of people who reliably perform better after sleepless nights, as well as those who suffer disproportionately. The division is quite stark and seems based on a few gene variants that code for neurotransmitter receptors, opening the possibility that it will soon be possible to tailor stimulant variety and dosage to genetic type.
Around the turn of this millennium, the biological imperative to sleep for a third of every 24-hour period began to seem quaint and unnecessary. Just as the birth control pill had uncoupled sex from reproduction, designer stimulants seemed poised to remove us yet further from the archaic requirements of the animal kingdom.”
Tags: Jesse Gamble, Leo Hollis
Truck-platooning, in which a single driver leads a convoy of automated delivery vehicles, is being tested in Japan. From Steven Ashley at the BBC:
“Imagine cruising down a three-lane highway and rounding a bend to find four trucks rolling along in single-file. They are all traveling close together – perhaps too close – but otherwise everything seems normal.
Yet as you pass the trailing truck, you look up through the sun roof to see the driver on a mobile phone. He should know better, you think as you slide by. Passing the next one, the driver appears to be sipping a cup of coffee and you could swear that he’s watching TV. That can’t be right, but you power on regardless. Then, coming alongside the third, there seems to be no driver at all. You must be mistaken, you tell yourself, as the truck stays in lane and otherwise rides as per usual.
By the time you glance up at the lead truck, you glimpse a driver concentrating on the road. Perhaps your mind was playing tricks on you after all.
Or maybe not. In February this year, a similar line-up of four large trucks circled an oval test track in Tsukuba City, Japan to help get so-called ‘truck platooning’ technology ready for real-world use.”
Tags: Steven Ashley
A current teacher and retired male stripper answered questions about his former profession in an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.
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Is there any real difference between performing for a male vs. female party?
Answer:
Yes there is a HUGE difference when performing for males vs females, although the venue does play a part in how crazy it can get. Performing for women is absolutely crazier. Girls let everything out that they normally can’t when in public. They go absolutely nuts. It’s impossible to describe it unless you’ve seen it in person. They scream, throw money, try and rush the stage, and typically get away with stuff that a guy would get thrown out for.
Question:
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Was the flow of drugs around you constant?
Answer:
There’s definitely a lot of drugs in the industry. A lot guys pop pills, do coke and smoke. Surprisingly roids aren’t as prevalent as you might think. I only ran into a few guys who were taking them.
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