Excerpts

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“Leave It To Charlie Rose To Begin His Black Eye Story With ‘I Had Been To The Museum That Morning…'”

April 2, 2013 in Excerpts | Permalink

Charlie Rose, a handsome and agreeable robot who was constructed in a laboratory almost entirely from bourbon and cufflinks, just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Good morning, Charlie Rose. I have read that when you were a child you worked in your father’s country store. What were the dreams you had growing up? Have you fulfilled them? Where did your sophistication come from?

Charlie Rose:

I was born in 1942 in a small town: Henderson, North Carolina. About 15,000 people. My father fought in World War II and my mother and I lived with my grandparents; when my father came back, my responsibility was to get up every morning and open the store. The interesting thing about my dreams was that there was a train that ran from Boston to Miami that came close to our house. And I would look at that train — it was always going north — and think, wouldn’t I love to be on that? I didn’t know journalists and I didn’t know actors and I didn’t know architects and I didn’t know scientists. I knew lawyers and doctors and businesspeople. But my whole drive was to experience, to live, to access as much as I could. To have my driving passion be curiosity. All of the passions that have served me, made me. Curiosity, drive, the pursuit of experience. Whenever I look back, I know I learned more from when I said “yes” than when I said “no.”

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Question:

Who’s been your favorite guest over the years?

Charlie Rose:

It’s hard to say. I think mainly of fields. Among politicians, certainly Bill Clinton because he’s engaged by a whole range of subject matter. When I think about athletes, probably my favorite guest of all time among baseball players was Ted Williams. Richard Serra, the great sculptor, personifies an artist for me. When I think about science, certainly Eric Kandel because of the Brain Series we did. Actors: Clooney, because of friendship, but British actors are interesting because of simply the diversity of what they bring to the table from Shakespeare to comedy to James Bond. The person I’ve always wanted to interview but never met was Richard Burton. I also like a lot of directors; the one I’ve never interviewed is Spielberg, but I like Sam Mendes. As a general rule, I like artists and writers — people who are creative. Increasingly, I find scientists interesting because of their work.

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Question:

Sorry if this is a sore subject Mr. Rose, but what’s up with the black eye you had last year? When I was watching I saw it but had no idea what happened.

Charlie Rose:

I had been to the museum that morning. It was a Saturday morning. I had taken with me my new MacBook Air. As I was coming back, at the intersection of 59th Street and 5th Avenue, I tripped on a curb and put my hand out to save the computer, but in the process got a black eye. Rather than making up a much more interesting story, that’s the story. Apple I think offered to make a commercial but I didn’t take them up on that.

Question:

Leave it to Charlie Rose to begin his black eye story with “I had been to the museum that morning…”

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Question:

If you would not have gone into journalism and television, what career would you have chosen? What fields intrigue you enough to perhaps considered?

Charlie Rose:

I would’ve been intrigued by being a film director. I would’ve been intrigued by politics. I thought about architecture. I would not have been working for something big, I would’ve been trying to create something. You can do that in a large institution but it’s just not what’s natural for me. I’d like to big something big but I don’t want to start in something big.•

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“They Just Had A Desire Not To Deal With What They Assumed Would Be A Constant Problem”

April 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of a really interesting Discover blog post by Dave Levitan, who wonders if we are technologically adept enough to predict if and when increasingly harsh weather will turn the Jersey Shore into a ghost town:

“Diamond City, North Carolina, is not actually a city, in that no one actually lives there. People did live there, though, back in 1899. That was when a major hurricane hit the community, on a small barrier island near Cape Hatteras. Homes were destroyed, animals were killed, and graves were uncovered or washed away in the storm according to a conservation group in the area. By 1902, all 500 residents in Diamond City had picked up and left.

The people there didn’t have computer climate models, or rapidly rising seas, or any understanding of increasing storm vulnerability; they just had a desire not to deal with what they assumed would be a constant problem. That problem, of course, is one that anyone living on the East Coast is confronting, especially with the waters of Hurricane Sandy still slowly receding from our coastal consciousness. The question is, when should people in New Jersey, Long Island, Maryland, and elsewhere start thinking about leaving behind their own versions of Diamond City?”

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“The Era Of Hamstrung Government Seems To Be Coming To An End”

April 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Paul Krugman is looking at California as a microcosm for America–as it often is–wondering whether moderate liberal rule with the freedom to make decisions will be a federal-level bellwether. Though it’s unlikely President Obama will ever know governance without obstruction. An excerpt:

“California isn’t a state in which liberals have run wild; it’s a state where a liberal majority has been effectively hamstrung by a fanatical conservative minority that, thanks to supermajority rules, has been able to block effective policy-making.

And that’s where things get really interesting — because the era of hamstrung government seems to be coming to an end. Over the years, California’s Republicans moved right as the state moved left, yet retained political relevance thanks to their blocking power. But at this point the state’s G.O.P. has fallen below critical mass, losing even its power to obstruct — and this has left Mr. Brown free to push an agenda of tax hikes and infrastructure spending that sounds remarkably like the kind of thing California used to do before the rise of the radical right.

And if this agenda is successful, it will have national implications. After all, California’s political story — in which a radicalized G.O.P. fell increasingly out of touch with an increasingly diverse and socially liberal electorate, and eventually found itself marginalized — is arguably playing out with a lag on the national scene too.

So is California still the place where the future happens first? Stay tuned.”

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“The Hidden Truth About Many Attempts To ‘Bury’ Technology Is That They Embody An Amoral And Unsustainable Vision”

April 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Two seemingly unrelated things about contemporary American life that are related: 1) We’ve outsourced slavery–or some form of it. People in factories toil in ungodly conditions around the clock to make our cheap tech products. Undocumented workers are allowed to do our least appealing jobs–the things we “outsource” domestically–and are forgotten, except when they’re used as political pawns, made to seem like they’re “stealing” from us. 2) Digital sound has reduced us, demeaned our culture. We remove the rattle and hum to try to get closer to meaning, but much of the meaning was in the discord. The connection: The friction is missing, the dissonance buried. We forget the discomfort and that means the discomfort of others increases.

From Evgeny Morozov’s New York Times piece about life in a time when lo-fi has been tuned out:

“‘Civilization,’ wrote the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead in 1911, ‘advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.’ Whitehead was writing about mathematics, but technology, with its reliance on formula and algorithms, easily fits his dictum as well.

On this account, technology can save us a lot of cognitive effort, for ‘thinking’ needs to happen only once, at the design stage. We’ll surround ourselves with gadgets and artifacts that will do exactly what they are meant to do — and they’ll do it in a frictionless, invisible way. ‘The ideal system so buries the technology that the user is not even aware of its presence,’ announced the design guru Donald Norman in his landmark 1998 book, The Invisible Computer. But is that what we really want?

The hidden truth about many attempts to ‘bury’ technology is that they embody an amoral and unsustainable vision. Pick any electrical appliance in your kitchen. The odds are that you have no idea how much electricity it consumes, let alone how it compares to other appliances and households. This ignorance is neither natural nor inevitable; it stems from a conscious decision by the designer of that kitchen appliance to free up your ‘cognitive resources’ so that you can unleash your inner Oscar Wilde on ‘contemplating’ other things. Multiply such ignorance by a few billion, and global warming no longer looks like a mystery.”

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“We Are Just Experiencing A Shift That Other Civilizations Have Faced When The Traditional Means For Storytelling Transform”

April 1, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of Alex Williams’ short Techcrunch piece which asserts that data won’t kill narrative but rather alter it:

“I keep seeing this topic push up about how data is affecting creativity. Some say we are losing our sense of narration and storytelling. It’s not this at all. We are just experiencing a shift that other civilizations have faced when the traditional means for storytelling transform to give a sense of the changing times facing society.

That does not mean a rejection of the narrative form. The ancient Greeks developed a rich oral tradition for telling stories. Out of that they created a common language, which formed the foundation for fables, legends and myths.

Now we see that data, shaped by software, creates a space to tell stories in new ways. Narrative methods to express our imagination will change as techniques emerge that allow us to use programming languages to carry on what we know for the next generations.”

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“Stephen Colbert Is, For Me, Working On A Whole Different Level From Anyone Else”

April 1, 2013 in Excerpts | Permalink

When Dick Cavett was a TV talk-show host, he almost never sat behind a desk, which made it very difficult for him to hide his penis. The nation stared at the shame of his sex as it flopped about. Still, the show went on.

In Cavett’s New York Times blog and in culture critic Ken Tucker’s long, new Grantland article about the current late-night shuffling and scuffling, each man names the same host as his favorite in the ever-more-crowded yet ever-less-influential world of late-night television: Stephen Colbert. (His reign will continue until Donald Trump gets a talk show. He’s the best at everything.) An excerpt:

From Cavett: “And speaking of Dave’s presumably stepping aside some sad day, if CBS is smart, there is in full view a self-evident successor to The Big L. of Indiana.

The man I’m thinking of has pulled off a miraculous, sustained feat, against all predictions — descendants of those same wise heads who foresaw a truncated run for the Carson boy — of making a smashing success while conducting his show for years with a dual personality. And I don’t mean Rush Limbaugh (success without personality).

I can testify, as can anyone who’s met him and seen him as himself, how much more there is to Stephen Colbert than the genius job he does in his ‘role’ on The Colbert Report. Everything about him — as himself — qualifies him for that chair at the Ed Sullivan Theater that Letterman has so deftly and expertly warmed for so long. Colbert is, among other virtues, endowed with a first-rate mind, a great ad-lib wit, skilled comic movement and gesture, fine education, seemingly unlimited knowledge of affairs and events and, from delightful occasional evidence, those things called The Liberal Arts — I’ll bet you he could name the author of Peregrine Pickle. And on top of that largess of qualities (and I hope he won’t take me the wrong way here), good looks.

Should such a day come, don’t blow it, CBS.”

From Tucker: “Stephen Colbert is, for me, working on a whole different level from anyone else, and is currently the most consistent, deeply satisfying late-night host. Colbert’s ability to joke and conduct interviews on The Colbert Report while inhabiting a persona antithetical to what is probably a profoundly decent person beneath that smirk ‘n’ makeup is the most sustained piece of performance art ever. I’m not saying he’s greater than Letterman was (and still can be) at his best, but that they both inhabit roles (for Dave, the ironic rube; for Stephen, the cheerfully evil asshole) as utterly as Daniel Day-Lewis.”

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“We’ve Had Eight Decades Of Increasingly Frenetic Fiscal And Monetary Policy Activism”

March 31, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In his frothing and scattershot New York Times op-ed piece, onetime Reagan budget director David Stockman isn’t wrong about everything. That’s because when you essentially say that everything is horrible, you’re bound to be right some of the time. It’s one of the loonier things to appear in the Times in recent memory, ignorant of history–as if the U.S. economic system was just a little “bumpy” before Roosevelt’s New Deal ruined it all–and dishonest about government investment (the Internet, which was shepherded by the public sector, seems to have grown sort of popular). An excerpt:

“So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.

When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.

THIS dyspeptic prospect results from the fact that we are now state-wrecked. With only brief interruptions, we’ve had eight decades of increasingly frenetic fiscal and monetary policy activism intended to counter the cyclical bumps and grinds of the free market and its purported tendency to underproduce jobs and economic output. The toll has been heavy.

As the federal government and its central-bank sidekick, the Fed, have groped for one goal after another — smoothing out the business cycle, minimizing inflation and unemployment at the same time, rolling out a giant social insurance blanket, promoting homeownership, subsidizing medical care, propping up old industries (agriculture, automobiles) and fostering new ones (‘clean’ energy, biotechnology) and, above all, bailing out Wall Street — they have now succumbed to overload, overreach and outside capture by powerful interests. The modern Keynesian state is broke, paralyzed and mired in empty ritual incantations about stimulating ‘demand,’ even as it fosters a mutant crony capitalism that periodically lavishes the top 1 percent with speculative windfalls.

The culprits are bipartisan, though you’d never guess that from the blather that passes for political discourse these days.”

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“There Was No Internet To Crystallize Trends On A Dime”

March 31, 2013 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

In the Financial Times, Douglas Coupland, about to turn 50, thinks back on Generation X, his sensation of a novel published just 22 years ago, but perhaps the longest 22 years ever:

“1991 was more than 20 years ago, before not just the internet but also email. I remember worrying about my phone bill each month. And I remember the Kuwait war, and I remember no more USSR, and I remember the snow on the ground during that particularly mild winter in Montreal where I was living at the time of Gen X’s publication. I also remember waiting for the first copy of the book to arrive. Ask any writer: the true moment of birth is when the FedEx envelope is ripped open and a book is fully midwifed into the world.

Here are a few Generation X facts: it was originally going to be called 52 Daffodils after a story contained within the book. I wonder what life would be like now if I’d done that. My Canadian publisher also declined to publish the book, which forever gave American publishers right of first refusal on new books, which began the myth within the Canadian writing world that I was trying to be American not Canadian. But it took years for me to figure out that that was what was actually happening – there was no internet to crystallize trends on a dime – trends took place across the span of years, not days. Trends had backlashes and then counter-backlashes that also went on for years. These days a meme is good for a few days or a few weeks, max.”

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“The Google Self-Driving Cars Come With Very Real Consequences”

March 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Ashlee Vance’s Businessweek piece about sharing the road with robots in Mountain View, California, ground zero for Google’s driverless car experimentation, in a time before the bots become dominant:

“My hometown, Mountain View, Calif., has become the unofficial capital of the robotic car revolution. Each day, I seem to run into one, two, or three self-driving Google cars. They’re on my freeways; they’re in my neighborhood; they’re taking my shortcuts.

One time, five of the self-driving cars gathered at a gas station equidistant from my house and Google headquarters. It felt a bit like the robots had taken ownership of my watering hole. People, likely well-paid engineers, had to fill up the cars as if they were fleshy lackeys. The rest of us waited for the robots to get full and head off to wherever it is robots go.

Away from the general unease they stir up, the Google self-driving cars come with very real consequences. I’ll concede that the cars may be better at driving than humans. They follow the rules of the road perfectly and change lanes with appropriate caution. They always signal. Thing is, the cars make the drivers around them worse.”

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“President Obama Is The Most Radical Man Ever To Occupy The Oval Office”

March 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Liz Cheney, that miserable dipshit and daughter of a waterboarder, has outdone herself with one of the more overheated and ludicrous op-ed pieces of the year, with her insane new crap in the Wall Street Journal. Before I present a passage, I will say this: The constant state of crisis in Washington is caused by Cheney’s extremist party, President Obama has spent at a more conservative rate of anyone in the White House since Eisenhower, the debt grew because Cheney’s cracked party destroyed the economy, and the Affordable Health Care Act will create new jobs. 

As I’ve said before, this version of the GOP is in a death spiral, unwilling and unable to reform. An excerpt from Cheney’s drivel:

“These days Washington careens from crisis to crisis, most of them manufactured. The Obama White House and its allies are engaged in the kind of sky-is-falling melodrama normally reserved for the lives of teenage girls. (As the mother of teenage girls, I speak with authority on this, though the comparison does a disservice to teenagers.) With our attention diverted by each fiscal cliff or sequestration drama, we are at risk of missing the real threats to the republic.

President Obama is the most radical man ever to occupy the Oval Office. The national debt, which he is intent on increasing, has passed $16 trillion. He believes that more government borrowing and spending are the solution to every problem. He seems unaware that the free-enterprise system has lifted more people out of poverty than any other economic system devised by man.

Perhaps his ignorance of that fact explains his hostility toward the private sector. In one of his autobiographies, the president writes that he felt ‘like a spy behind enemy lines’ during his brief stint working for private industry.

The president has launched a war on Americans’ Second Amendment rights. He has launched a war on religious freedom. He has launched a war on fossil fuels. He is working to nationalize one-sixth of the economy with job-killing ObamaCare.”

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“The Rapid Movement In Technological Advancements Creates A Phantom Of Progress”

March 29, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If I had to say one thing about the time we’re living in, I would say this: Jesus H. Christ, our phones are great! Our phones are better than ever! I’m not sure if we’ve improved otherwise, but, wow, we’ve such progress in the area of phones! 

Seriously, we seem to be making progress in a variety of ways (see the current reversal in the attitude toward gay marriage in America), but there’s still a lot of suffering and unfairness in the world. Are we moving forward or laterally–or even backwards? 

John Gray, political philosopher and author of The Silence of Animals: On Progress and Other Modern Myths, believes our contention that we are moving human rights forward is self-satisfied bullshit. From an interview Gray did with Johannes Niederhauser at Vice:

“Question:

Isn’t the belief that everything will get better and that the world is now moving toward a blessed end state kind of schizophrenic, in the sense that we’ve actually been living in a deep crisis since the 1970s?

John Gray:

The rapid movement in technological advancements creates a phantom of progress. Phones are getting better, smaller, and cheaper all the time. In terms of technology, there’s a continuous transformation of our actual everyday life. That gives people the sense that there is change in civilization. But, in many ways, things are getting worse. In the UK, incomes have fallen and living standards are getting worse.

Question:

And advances in technology don’t mean that things are necessarily getting better in the grand scheme of things.

John Gray:

Oh, absolutely. Technological progress is double-edged. The internet, for example, has more or less destroyed privacy. Anything you do leaves an electronic trace.

Question:

Some people even want their mind to be transferred into the Internet to be digitally immortal.

John Gray:

That’s kind of moving in a way, but also utterly absurd. Even if it were possible to upload your whole mind on to a computer, it wouldn’t be you.

Question:

There seems to be a wide misunderstanding of what it means to be yourself.

John Gray:

Yes. You haven’t chosen to be the self that you are. You’re irreplaceable. You’re a singularity. We are who we are because of the lives that we have. And that involves having a body, being born, and dying.

Question:

Especially dying.

John Gray:

Yes, especially. A lot of contemporary phenomena, like faith in progress, is really an attempt to evade the reality of death. In actuality, each of our lives is singular and final; there is no second chance. This is not a rehearsal. It’s the real thing.”

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“We’re Going To Be Able To Put Computers Inside Any Living Cell You Want”

March 28, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From a Mercury News story about biological computing experimentation at Stanford University:

“In the foreseeable future, humans might carry microscopic natural computers inside their cells that could guard against disease and warn of toxic threats based on a Stanford research achievement.

A team of engineers there has invented genetic transistors, completing a simple computer within living cells, a major step forward in the emerging field of synthetic biology.

The startling achievement, to be unveiled in Friday’s issue of the journal Science, presages the day when ‘living computers’ inside the human body could screen for cancer, detect toxic chemicals or even turn cell reproduction on and off.

‘We’re going to be able to put computers inside any living cell you want,’ said lead researcher Drew Endy of Stanford’s School of Engineering.

‘We’re not going to replace the silicon computers. We’re not going to replace your phone or your laptop,’ he said. ‘But we’re going to get computing working in places where silicon would never work.

‘Any place you want a little bit of logic, a little bit of computation, a little bit of memory — we’re going to be able to do that,’ said Endy.”

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“You Wake Up At 7AM On A Wonderful Morning In Early 2000”

March 28, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a smart David Bauer essay at Medium that points out the folly of attaching “the future” to a specific date, like the year 2000, when the next wave actually arrives all the time:

“You wake up at 7am on a wonderful morning in early 2000. Dreamy as you are, you grab your phone to check the news and your email. Well, the news is that no one has texted you while you were sleeping and that your phone doesn’t connect to the internet. Because, well, you don’t have a smartphone. Just like everyone else doesn’t. Actually, a bestselling mobile phone launched in 2000 looked like this. You could still play a round of Snake, though.

After a refreshing shower — pretty much like you remember it from 2013 — you make yourself comfortable at the breakfast table. You’re an early adopter, so you have your laptop right there with you to check the news. While you wait for the computer to start up, you have time to brew some coffee.

Time to check Twitter for the latest…ah well, no Twitter yet. So let’s see what your friends are up to over on Face…doesn’t exist either. Not even MySpace. Heck, not even Friendster.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“I Had Always Been Attracted To S&M, Even At An Early Age, When I Didn’t Know What It Was”

March 28, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

For most of his life, Buzz Bissinger was a Brooks Brothers-clad, rage-filled asshole given to inappropriate utterances, so he decided to change his wardrobe. From “My Gucci Addiction,” the journalist’s extreme self-portrait in GQ, which focuses on shopping and fucking:

“It is safe to assume that when someone buys more than half a million dollars of clothing in three years, it isn’t simply beautiful clothing that he seeks. My wife and I realized several years ago that we had run our sexual course. It was on the surface a strange decision, since both of us were highly sexualized. And great lovers to each other. And she was absolutely beautiful. But the twin killers of menopause and boredom had set in, as they do in every marriage. And I had never been able to equate sex with intimacy.

I had always been attracted to S&M, even at an early age, when I didn’t know what it was. My mother wore leather gloves in springtime. My first teacher in kindergarten, who probably thought I was mentally challenged because I never spoke, also wore leather gloves, and every day as she left I would watch as she slowly put them on with the stretch and pull of the fingers. My eighth-grade math teacher wore stiletto black leather boots and black hair like Elvira and spoke in dismissive clips, and I adored her, even when she dropped test results into my lap with B- circled in red at the top.

I did engage in a relationship with a dominatrix after the failure of my second marriage. I left the scene after two years. But I clearly missed it, the trappings of leather increasingly irresistible. I liked extreme feelings of restraint and taking pain. But I was also interested in everything.

My sexual appetites began to spin in all sorts of different directions. My wife and I talked about it at length. She was far more experienced than I was, and she did in high school what I longed to but could not because of the need to please others—get laid, smoke dope, go to Woodstock. Before she left for Abu Dhabi, she urged me to explore, not on the basis that we wanted some open marriage but because of her feeling that I owed it to myself, to both of us, because my unfulfilled desires, or at least what I thought might be my desires, were leading to the nastiness and the contempt toward a spouse that comes from frustration.”

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“While The Théâtrophone Was An Impressive Invention In Its Day, The Subscription Model Itself Has A Prolific And Fascinating History”

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

Ad-supported content just isn’t feasible for most media companies in the Digital Age. From an article about the current rise of content subscriptions by Dan Burkhart at All Things D, a passage about the Théâtrophone, which had much in common with the Telephone Herald:

“More than a century before Netflix and Hulu and Spotify first charged subscribers to satisfy their daily media cravings, another device existed called the Théâtrophone. From 1881 to 1932, telephonic devices called Théâtrophones were made available to dignitaries and guests in luxury hotels who required their daily fix of live opera performances via subscription fee — 50 centimes for five minutes.

While the Théâtrophone was an impressive invention in its day, the subscription model itself has a prolific and fascinating history of enabling innovation throughout the world. Subscriptions have helped companies pioneer new distribution models across a diverse set of business applications; all in the name of seeking efficient annuity revenue streams that outweigh the cost of production and distribution. From an end-customer ‘subscriber’ perspective, the convenience of easy access or repeat consumption can greatly outweigh the incremental cost of subscribing.

Subscriptions have historically also found ways to take on greater social meaning through the signaling of a certain status by way of access to a secret society, social club or charitable organization.”

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“He Can Be Sleeping Soundly When The Story Writes Itself”

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

Algorithm-based journalism–what could go wrong? From Jesse M. Kelly at the Vancouver Sun:

“Journalist Ken Schwencke has occasionally awakened in the morning to find his byline atop a news story he didn’t write.

No, it’s not that his employer, The Los Angeles Times, is accidentally putting his name atop other writers’ articles. Instead, it’s a reflection that Schwencke, digital editor at the respected U.S. newspaper, wrote an algorithm — that then wrote the story for him.

Instead of personally composing the pieces, Schwencke developed a set of step-by-step instructions that can take a stream of data — this particular algorithm works with earthquake statistics, since he lives in California — compile the data into a pre-determined structure, then format it for publication.

His fingers never have to touch a keyboard; he doesn’t have to look at a computer screen. He can be sleeping soundly when the story writes itself.”

Just call him robo-reporter.”

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“The Entire Plane Weighs Less Than A Car”

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

A solar-powered plane that can fly in the dark is soon going to make a cross-country flight. From Steve Henn at NPR:

“Next month, a very odd looking plane will take off from Moffett Field in Mountain View, Calif., and head east to New York. The Solar Impulse — the world’s first solar-powered plane — is capable of flying nonstop all day and all night. Its creators plan to fly it across the U.S. this spring, and by 2015 they hope to fly a similar aircraft around the world.

Its wingspan is longer than a 747 Boeing, but the entire plane weighs less than a car.

‘That was the challenge,’ says Andre Borschberg, one of the creators and a pilot. He says the wings are so large in part to generate lift and in part to create a bigger surface ‘to integrate solar cells.'”

_______________________

Solar Impulse as featured on 60 Minutes:

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“What Makes A Good Name?”

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

A “professional namer” for a branding agency, who was on the teams that came up with Bing and Cingular, among other corporate names, just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

Care to name my johnson?

Answer:

Tiny.

Question:

Well, this backfired.

______________________

Question:

What makes a name a good name?

Answer:

A good name should either say what the thing is (or what benefits it offers) or it should at least be memorable somehow–it be easy to say and talk about. There’s a lot more than that, but that’s a big one (and even that one has some exceptions…Haagen Dazs anyone?)

Names tend to change from horrible to awesome based just on people’s perspectives of the brand though. Imagine you were on the board at what is now Google, and one of the board members says, “OK, we’ve narrowed it down to 2 potential names for our company: WebSearcher or Google.” I’d say at least 9 out of 10 people would’ve gone with “WebSearcher” and said “what a ridiculously stupid name!” about Google. Admittedly though, we have heard some names that just leave us speechless…usually those are names that people have come up with themselves for their own business/product.

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Question:

So how do you come up with new names?

Answer:

Lots of things: brainstorming sessions, interviews, focus groups, thesaurus-mining, Excel tables, magazines, scrabble–you name it. Every once in a while though, the perfect answer really does appear to you out of nowhere, which can be very nice.

______________________
 

Question:

How much does a job like this pay?

Answer:

Starting pay at most agencies is around 30-35K. If you’re the CEO at a big agency, you could be making 8-10 million a year–everyone else is somewhere in between.

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Question:

What would you name a man with no arms and no legs floating in the ocean? 

Answer:

I’d call him f**ked, but that’s my non-professional opinion.•

“We Must Grow Beyond The Simple Stories On Which We Were Raised”

March 26, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At Rob Walker’s Yahoo! blog, he interviews technology critic Douglas Rushkoff about his new book, Present Shock, an updating of sorts of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. An excerpt about adaptation strategies in our brave new world:

“Qusetion:

The book addresses what you’re calling ‘present shock,’ referencing Alvin Toffler’s idea of ‘future shock,’ and (if I can oversimplify) suggesting that we’re now living in Toffler’s future, and we’re not coping all that well. How might we respond to ‘society without narrative context’?

Douglas Rushkoff:

Present Shock is the panicky reaction to this always-on, real-time society in which we have found ourselves. But there are definitely ways to adapt and thrive in a ‘presentist’ world. So, take the collapse of narrative. We live in a world where it’s really hard to tell a story. People don’t have patience, they have interactive devices that encourage them to break up or leave a story in progress, and they don’t really think about things as having beginnings, middles and ends. We are in the now, and not looking forward to long-term goals anymore. This is as true for kids playing endless adventure games like World of Warcraft as it is for derivatives traders hoping to make money not off long-term investments but on the trades themselves. 

So on the one hand, we get the scary stuff: movements with long-term goals are increasingly unpopular. Political parties are hated. The notion of a career path or a commitment to (and from) an employer seems ludicrous. On the other hand, we begin to see some people attempting to live in a more ‘steady state.’ We don’t have to fight and win wars so much as deal with our problems in a more ongoing way. Global warming is not something we fight against and ‘win,’ but a chronic problem we can only face with sustainable solutions. We don’t need to yearn for endings—unless of course we really want to bring about the apocalypse. Instead, we must grow beyond the simple stories on which we were raised, and learn to live in a never-ending kind of story, in which we are the living players. 

This is what Occupy was groping toward, in its own way. They don’t have demands or goals so much as approaches. They are attempting to model a way of living. When asked how the movement is supposed to ‘end,’ they say, “Why should it end?'”

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“I Believe There Are Steve Jobses All Around Us”

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

Nolan Bushnell, the Atari founder who famously nurtured Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak, has published a new book, Finding the Next Steve Jobs. An excerpt from an interview Eric Johnson just did with him at All Things D:

“Question:

Just how close were you to Steve after his brief involvement with Atari?

Nolan Bushnell: 

We’d talk on the phone infrequently, but he’d come up to [my house in] Woodside about once a month, usually on a Saturday or Sunday morning, and we’d go up on the hill and talk. Occasionally, I’d go down to his place, but a lot of the time it was him coming up to my place.

Question:

Why are we even looking for the ‘next Steve Jobs?’

Nolan Bushnell:

Steve took a failing computer company — and they probably would have never brought him back if they weren’t at the end of their rope — and turned it into the highest-market-cap company in the world. People were always aware that innovative solutions are good for your company. I think this just underscored it in a really powerful way. It wasn’t just through cutting costs or innovative marketing. Though Steve was a pretty good marketer.

Question:

But that was when he returned to Apple in 1997. Most of the time when people talk about the ‘next Steve Jobs,’ they’re using that phrase to refer to entrepreneurs who are still early on in their careers. So, are those people really that hard up for work?

Nolan Bushnell:

I believe there are Steve Jobses all around us. Really, what is happening is that they’re being edited out of importance. Right now, Google is doing some great things, but Hewlett-Packard is trying to commit suicide. Every company needs to have askunkworks, to try things that have a high probability of failing. You try to minimize failure, but at the same time, if you’re not willing to try things that are inherently risky, you’re not going to make progress.”

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“It’s Absolutely Not True That We Need Natural Gas, Coal Or Oil”

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

The first step to reducing our reliance on carbon-choking fossil fuels is realizing that we’re not reliant on them. In case you missed Elisbaeth Rosenthal’s “Life After Oil and Gas” Sunday Review piece in the New York Times, an excerpt:

“A National Research Council report released last week concluded that the United States could halve by 2030 the oil used in cars and trucks compared with 2005 levels by improving the efficiency of gasoline-powered vehicles and by relying more on cars that use alternative power sources, like electric batteries and biofuels.

Just days earlier a team of Stanford engineers published a proposal showing how New York State — not windy like the Great Plains, nor sunny like Arizona — could easily produce the power it needs from wind, solar and water power by 2030. In fact there was so much potential power, the researchers found, that renewable power could also fuel our cars.

‘It’s absolutely not true that we need natural gas, coal or oil — we think it’s a myth,’ said Mark Z. Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering and the main author of the study, published in the journal Energy Policy. ‘You could power America with renewables from a technical and economic standpoint. The biggest obstacles are social and political — what you need is the will to do it.'”

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“They Became America’s First Genetically Engineered Pets”

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

We modify ourselves for aesthetic pleasure, but should we do so with our pets? The answer may be dubious, but it’s sort of beside the point because it’s happening and it will become commonplace. We’ve only just begun playing with genes. The opening of “Beauteous Beasts,” Emily Anthes’ new Aeon essay about manipulating DNA to make pets more presentable: 

“Among the reeds and roots of India’s flooded rice paddies lives a small, freshwater fish. It is covered, face to fin, in horizontal black-and-white stripes, giving the minnow its name: the zebrafish. The fish are striking — and hardy — which has made them popular pets. Over the decades, the fish have spread beyond the shallow, silty waters of the Indian subcontinent to show off their racing stripes in living rooms around the world.

But today, these fish — at least, the original, black-and-white model popular among generations of aquarium keepers — are beginning to seem like relics from a simpler, bygone era. Thanks to biotechnology, the zebrafish has gotten a modern, Technicolor upgrade. By plucking pieces of DNA from jellyfish, sea coral and sea anemones, and popping them into the tiny, tropical fish, biologists have created zebrafish that glow in electric shades of red, orange, green, blue, and purple. In late 2003, a small Texas company called Yorktown Technologies began selling these animals, which they dubbed GloFish. They became America’s first genetically engineered pets.

GloFish are now available at pet stores throughout 49 American states (all but California), selling for $5 or $6 a pop. Two years ago, I bought six of them, along with a special tank designed to bring out their vibrant colours. I was enchanted, watching the fish dart around the aquarium in a neon blaze. But I also found myself confronting some thorny ethical and philosophical questions.”

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“They Were Taken In By A Woman, Who Read Of Their Plight In A Newspaper—But Threw Them Out After Learning Of Their Fondness For Nudity”

March 25, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

The ending of Mike Nichols’ film version of The Graduate was an ambiguous, not happy, one. A young idealistic couple on the run–but where to? And would they soon run out? For Charles Webb, the author of the novel the film was based on, and his wife, Eve, life has also been quixotic and difficult, as you might imagine it would be for devoted nudists who continually give away all their money. The author and his mate (who eventually shaved her head and changed her name to “Fred”), were profiled in a 1988 People article. The opening:

“It was an image that captured the rebellious spirit of a generation: Dustin Hoffman pounding frantically on the church window, shattering the sounds of silence with his primal scream, “Elaine!” But the 1967 blockbuster The Graduate did not quite end at the exhilarating moment when Benjamin Braddock broke up the wedding of Mrs. Robinson’s daughter, carrying her off to reckless freedom and true love. In the final frames, as Ben and Elaine stole away on a bus, their tentative smiles seemed to ask, ‘What next?’

Imagine this scenario: Benjamin and Elaine get divorced but never live apart. Remaining true to their unconventional principles, they squander whatever money comes their way. Arriving at middle age, they don’t settle for sipping cynicism on the sofa. Instead, we find the idealistic pair huddled in the back of a battered VW bus—their only home—down to their last few hundred bucks. 

That just about sums up the fate of author Charles Webb, who wrote The Graduate, and his own Elaine, who now calls herself Fred. Maybe Ben—and Charles—should have gotten into plastics. ‘It’s hard to say how we got to this point,’ says Webb, 49, as he sits in a Bethel, Conn., diner. His features marked by a perpetual frown, he can barely conceal his anxiety over their situation yet seems equally incapable of discussing it. Fred, 48, although concerned about winter’s approach, remains hopeful. ‘What we need now is a place to settle,’ she says. ‘Then Charles can get back to work.’

Webb, after all, was once a literary rising star who published The Graduate, his first book, at age 24 in 1963. During the next 15 years, Webb says, he made almost $150,000 from that and five other books, including the $20,000 he received for film rights to The Graduate. ‘All of that seemed like a lot to us 10, 20 years ago,’ says Webb. ‘But money was never important to us.’ Fred agrees. ‘In fact,’ she says, ‘we have given away just about everything we owned.’ That includes two houses, a Rauschenberg drawing and a Warhol print—all donated to nonprofit organizations. For the past 10 years, Charles and Fred have subsisted on diminishing royalties from paperback sales of The Graduate, which now amount to about $2,500 a year. 

Since the couple pulled up stakes in Southern California and arrived in Massachusetts last July with their mutt, Mrs. R. (named, of course, for the story’s Mrs. Robinson), and a few thousand dollars in savings, the fates have not been kind to the Webbs. First, they had hoped to settle in Williamstown, home of Charles’s alma mater, Williams College, where he planned to begin writing a sequel to The Graduate. Unable to find a place they could afford, they were taken in by a woman in Bethel, Conn., who read of their plight in a newspaper—but threw them out after learning of their fondness for nudity.”

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“I Never Knew I Was Part Of A Cult Till I Got Out”

March 25, 2013 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

The reason why cults and other mind-control systems seek out the young isn’t only because they’re energetic and lack familial responsibilities, but because they’re “impressionable.” What does that mean? When we’re not yet formed, when we haven’t had enough repetition of thought to set ourselves, ideas can be pushed into our brains–and pushed out–more readily than later in life. And as deprogrammers can tell us, once something does become deeply ingrained at that age, it’s a chore changing a mind. That’s why you see otherwise intelligent teens become Manson Family members or an American Taliban. It’s not a lack of intelligence, but a lack of experience. And that applies whether it’s a cult based on religion or sex or anything else, because it’s all about power. 

From “The Master,” Marc Fisher’s painstaking and painful exploration of the Horace Mann sex-abuse scandal, a passage about one of the victims of a charismatic teacher who maintained control over some of his students even when they grew into adults, assembling them in a country house to be his makeshift ‘family”:

“The other original owner of the house, the bond trader, who spoke on the condition that he not be named, said that he first encountered Berman in tenth grade, when his relationship with his parents was crumbling. ‘I didn’t know it, but I was looking for someone like Berman, who had authority, who was a leader,’ he says. ‘In a school that made everyone think he was special, this was the hardest guy to have approve of you. I needed somebody to talk to and he offered himself as a counsellor.’

Like the other boys, he was invited to Berman’s apartment, in eleventh grade. ‘We didn’t think of ourselves as gay, and I never was, though I engaged in homosexual activities, obviously,’ the bond trader says. Berman would describe the sex as a natural part of the teacher-student relationship, dating back to ancient Greece. ‘We might spend a night and then go home to our parents, and other kids would come in,’ he says. ‘He took great pleasure in stealing kids from the parents he hated.’

The trader also says that, while he lived at Satis House, Berman kept him on a restricted diet, to hold his weight at about twenty-five pounds below the level at which he had played football in college. In the early years of their relationship, he says, Berman regularly beat him with a belt buckle. Berman wrote to me that this wasn’t true: ‘I do not recall ever striking anyone with a belt buckle; I guess I’d remember if I had. (Excellent idea, though.)’

After four years at Satis House, the trader left, and he has spent the subsequent decades trying to figure out why he stayed so long. ‘There was always the threat of excommunication, lack of approval, castigation,’ he told me. ‘We weren’t even allowed not to like the food he made—and it was awful. And there was always alcohol, lots of it. You drank one woolie and you were relatively pliable after that. I never knew I was part of a cult till I got out.'”

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“The Biorobotics Lab Is Something Of A Specialist In Robotic Snakes”

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

From Wired UK, a report about a Carnegie Mellon robotic snake that can perch itself on poles and branches: “The Biorobotics Lab is something of a specialist in robotic snakes. Given a snake’s lack of limbs, feet and any additional appendages, their unique take on propulsion is an ideal one to replicate in robots designed to explore hard-to-reach locations. “These highly articulated devices can coordinate their internal degrees of freedom to perform a variety of locomotion capabilities that go beyond the capabilities of conventional wheeled and the recently-developed legged robots,” reads the lab’s site. ‘The true power of these devices is that they are versatile, achieving behaviors not limited to crawling, climbing, and swimming.'”

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