Excerpts

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“There Are Many Ways Of Communicating”

December 17, 2012 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Michelangelo Antonioni was still three years from the U.S. release of his “hippie film,” Zabriskie Point, when he sat for a Playboy Interview in 1967. But unsurprisingly, discussion got around to American hippies, a subject that always fascinated him. He suggested that young people were trying to slip out from under old masks, using new ways of communicating, hoping to become more honest. But more than four decades later, we seem to be covering up as much as ever in our information-rich, interconnected world, in what’s supposed to be a time of great transparency. We may be hiding behind an icon rather than a mask, but the artifice remains. We never really lose the blueprint to reconstruct that wall. An excerpt:

“Playboy:

Some people over 30 seem to feel that today’s youth is a lost generation, withdrawn not only from commitment but, in the case of the hippies, from reality. Do you disagree?

Michelangelo Antonioni:

I don’t think they’re lost at all. I’m not a sociologist nor a psychologist, but it seems to me they are seeking a new way to be happy. They are committed, but in a different way–and the right way, I think. The American hippies, for example, are against the war in Vietnam and against Johnson–but they combat the warmongers with love and peace. They demonstrate against police by embracing them and throwing flowers. How can you club a girl who comes to give you a kiss? That, too, is a form of protest. In California’s ‘loving parties,’ there is an atmosphere of absolute calm, tranquility. That, too, is a form of protest, a way of being committed. It shows that violence is not the only means of persuasion. It’s a complicated subject–more so than it seems–and I can’t handle it, because I don’t know the hippies well enough.

Playboy:

Sometimes that tranquility you spoke of is induced by hallucinogenic drugs. Does the use of such drugs alarm you?

Michelangelo Antonioni:

No, some people have negative reactions or can’t stand hallucinations, but others stand them extremely well. One of the problems of the future world will be the use of leisure time. How will it be filled up? Maybe drugs will distributed free of charge by the government.

Playboy:

You’ve always emphasized both the importance and the difficulty of communication between people in your films. But doesn’t the psychedelic experience tend to make people withdraw into an inner-directed mysticism, even drop out of society altogether? And doesn’t this tend to destroy communication?

Michelangelo Antonioni:

There are many ways of communicating. Some hold the theory that new forms of communication between people can be obtained through hallucinogenic drugs.

Playboy:

Would you want to try some yourself?

Michelangelo Antonioni:

You can’t go to an LSD or pot party unless you take it yourself. If I want to go. I must take drugs myself.

Playboy:

Have you?

Michelangelo Antonioni:

That’s my business. But to show you the new mentality: I visited St Mark’s in Venice with a young woman who smokes pot, as do most young people in her environment. When we were above the gilded mosaics–St. Mark’s is small and intimate–she exclaimed, ‘How I’d like to smoke here!’ You see how new that reaction is? We don’t even suspect it. There was nothing profane in her desire to smoke; she merely wanted to make her aesthetic emotions more intense. She wanted to make her pleasure giant-size before the beauty of St. Mark’s.

Playboy:

Does this mean that you believe that the old means of communicating have become masks, as you seem to suggest in your films, that obscure communication?

Michelangelo Antonioni:

I think they become masks yes.”

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“There Is Still No Machine Remotely Flexible Enough To Deal With The Real World”

December 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Another really smart post by NYU psychology professor Gary Marcus at the New Yorker News Desk blog, this one entitled, “Why Making Robots Is So Darned Hard.” An excerpt:

“Meanwhile, whether a robot looks like a human or hockey puck, it is only as clever as the software within. And artificial intelligence is still very much a work-in-progress, with no machine approaching the full flexibility of the human mind. There is no shortage of strategies—ranging from simulations of biological brains to deep learning and to older techniques drawn from classical artificial intelligence—but there is still no machine remotely flexible enough to deal with the real world. The best robot-vision systems, for example, work far better with isolated objects than with complex scenes involving many objects; a robot can easily learn to tell the difference between a person and a basketball, but it’s far harder to learn why the people are passing the ball a certain way. Visual recognition of complex flexible objects, like strands of cooked spaghetti and opening and closing humans hands, present tremendous challenges, too. Even further away is a robust way of embodying computers with common sense.

In virtually every robot that’s ever been built, the key challenge is generalization, and moving things from the laboratory to the real world. It’s one thing to get a robot to fold a colorful towel in an empty room; it’s another to get it to succeed in a busy apartment with visual distractions that the machine can’t quite parse.”

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Hi Jolly, Sans Camel, With Bride (App. 1880)

December 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jordanian camel driver Hadji Ali was, in 1856, one of the few in his profession hired by the U.S. Army to create a caravan of humped beasts in the Southwest, delivering much-needed supplies. His name was bastardized by accident, and he was rechristened “Hi Jolly.” The camels, quite literally, delivered, but the War Between the States ended the program’s funding. Hi Jolly tried to make a go of it on his own, starting a camel-centric freight-delivery business, but it didn’t last long. He subsequently released his few remaining charges into the Arizona desert, where one is alleged to have frightened a young Douglas MacArthur. In the above classic photograph, the pack leader poses with bride Gertrudis Serna. By this point he had chosen the name “Philip Tedro” for himself, seemingly unaware that “Hi Jolly” was the greatest name ever. From Examiner.com:

“The story begins in 1855 when the Secretary of War, Jefferson Davis, started tossing ideas around as to how to establish and supply a route from Camp Verde, Texas, to Fort Defiance (a.k.a. Roop’s Fort), California. After exploring his options, the future Confederate President ultimately opted for camels. Once Congress had appropriated $30,000 for the effort, the USS Supply promptly shipped 33 animals from the Middle East to Texas.

By doubling the load managed by traditional beasts of burden, eating off the land and demanding minimal water, the camels were a hit. Yes, the new kids on the block made quite a splash and their ungainly appearance put the existing pack animals on edge. In fact, due to the general avoidance shown by raider’s horses, caravans were consequently safer than wagon trails.

However, the introduction of a foreign and little-known species was not all fun and games. The craggy southwestern terrain was a far cry from the camel’s native, comparatively silken sands and they were perpetually plagued by rocks painfully wedging themselves between their toes. Moreover, the ability to deal with a biting, spitting creature characterized by its cantankerous disposition was not to be found among local talent. Experienced handlers were deemed essential and the federal government thus employed a handful of camel professionals.

The leader of the pack, so to speak, was a Mr. Hadji Ali whose name was quickly transformed to ‘Hi Jolly” by heavy-tongued residents. Mr. Jolly, therefore, led a wildly successful operation for the next several years. The venture was so successful that some 40 more camels were added to the lineup.

When the project lost funding in favor of the Civil War and the ensuing Reconstruction, it ceased to be a reality.”

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“Bedbugs Are The Herpes Of Furniture”

December 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

A fully-employed man who regularly Dumpster dives to get free food and other goods just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few excerpts follow.

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Question:

No offense, man, whatever creams your twinkie, and I’m certainly not above liberating things that are still good and the owner has lost eye contact, but damn, just reading this thread makes me all creepy-crawley and itchy.

Answer:

It’s not for everyone. I can understand that. There’s lots of things others do that I accept of them but would never do myself.Do keep in mind I have enough experience to stay clean, safe, and productive while diving. It’s not as though I stick my head in waste, I carefully pick up packaged lettuce with a grabber tool, place it in a sealed bag, take it home, wash off the exterior of the bag, inspect it for tears, and wash the contents again before using it.Really is it that much more disgusting than the thought of animals in the fields where the produce grows, covering it in pesticides, strangers picking it up and putting it in reused wooden boxes, sitting in the back of semi container used for any mystery purpose in the past, getting put on the shelf by store employees, and having who-knows-how-many customers manhandle that apple and put it back on the stack?

Being in a metal box outside which is full of other healthy produce hardly seems an issue by comparison. If you disagree, I can accept that.

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Question:

Living in New York, the bedbug thing is really what has stopped me in my tracks when recovering used furniture. The other thing is our rat population is so large, I’d be terrified of eating something that potentially has animal feces on it. I’m interested on hearing an expanded take on that.

Answer:

I can understand that. If I were in New York, especially NYC, I would be deterred as well. I am fortunate to live somewhere I only occasionally see raccoons, who keep their distance. Bedbugs aren’t common here. Even so I don’t want to be the black swan who gets a bedbug infestation, and so I never recover fabric furniture. I’m very, very cautious of wood furniture as well and try not to let it indoors. Bedbugs are the herpes of furniture.I only eat fully packaged food products to be more certain that they are sanitary. Just in case, I also recook (not just reheat) pizzas and other hot product. For bottle of juice I check them for bloating, and if clear I put them in warm bleach-water in the sink to disinfect the exterior and then let then air dry. For produce, even though its bagged I wash it really really well. I figure there’s nothing in the bin any worse than was on the farm workers hands, the box truck, the grocery store shelf, or my crisper drawer.

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Question:

Do you have a family? Wife and kids or close to parents and siblings? Do they dumpster dive as well? How do they feel about that?

Answer:

I am married, and we go diving together most of the time. It’s nice to have one person in the car, and the other run out to scout a dumpster before bothering to park.

Her parents also dumpster dive, but not as adventurously as we do. What is nice is that they live about 2 hours away, and we visit we can exchange scores. We get lots of juice and no bread, they get lots of bread and no juice, so we make sure to bring some trade whenever we go over, and vice-versa.

My parents know and don’t mind, but they also don’t really talk about it and I know they wouldn’t appreciate me serving them dived foods. I cook them conventionally obtained foods when they visit. I’ll admit it has crossed my mind to make them an all dumpster meal and surprise them with the reveal after desert…but I decided I like their Christmas gifts too much to risk it.

“Let’s See What He’s Got Up His Sleeve For Us This Time”

December 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

People in show business are labeled “genius” if they’re able to complete a sudoku slightly faster than Stephen Baldwin. But Ricky Jay is the real deal, a deeply brilliant person who can accomplish amazing things with his brain despite the deterioration of some basic neurological functions. A clip of the magus, actor and scholar appearing with Merv Griffin in 1983, and then an excerpt from Mark Singer’s great 1993 New Yorker profile, “Secrets of Magus.”

“Jay has an anomalous memory, extraordinarily retentive but riddled with hard-to-account-for gaps. ‘I’m becoming quite worried about my memory,’ he said not long ago. ‘New information doesn’t stay. I wonder if it’s the NutraSweet.’ As a child, he read avidly and could summon the title and the author of every book that had passed through his hands. Now he gets lost driving in his own neighborhood, where he has lived for several years—he has no idea how many. He once had a summer job tending bar and doing magic at a place called the Royal Palm, in Ithaca, New York. On a bet, he accepted a mnemonic challenge from a group of friendly patrons. A numbered list of a hundred arbitrary objects was drawn up: No. 3 was ‘paintbrush,’ No. 18 was ‘plush ottoman,’ No. 25 was ‘roaring lion,’ and so on. ‘Ricky! Sixty-five!’ someone would demand, and he had ten seconds to respond correctly or lose a buck. He always won, and, to this day, still would. He is capable of leaving the house wearing his suit jacket but forgetting his pants. He can recite verbatim the rapid-fire spiel he delivered a quarter of a century ago, when he was briefly employed as a carnival barker: ‘See the magician; the fire ‘manipulator’; the girl with the yellow e-e-elastic tissue. See Adam and Eve, boy and girl, brother and sister, all in one, one of the world’s three living ‘morphrodites.’ And the e-e-electrode lady . . .’ He can quote verse after verse of nineteenth-century Cockney rhyming slang. He says he cannot remember what age he was when his family moved from Brooklyn to the New Jersey suburbs. He cannot recall the year he entered college or the year he left. ‘If you ask me for specific dates, we’re in trouble,’ he says.”

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“The Emaciated Figure Strikes One With Terror”

December 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There are enough real monsters in the world, but we invent more, projecting our fears and loathing onto others, hoping to destroy these feelings, to be rid of them. And this act of projection itself often leads to monstrous results. In the 1800s, the bloody coughs of tuberculosis so frightened people that a parasitic creature was roused from his daytime slumber. From Abigail Tucker’s Smithsonian article “The Great New England Vampire Panic,” a passage about a New Hampshire family that succumbed to the dreaded illness one member after another:

“People dreaded the disease without understanding it. Though Robert Koch had identified the tuberculosis bac­terium in 1882, news of the discovery did not penetrate rural areas for some time, and even if it had, drug treatments wouldn’t become available until the 1940s. The year Lena died, one physician blamed tuberculosis on ‘drunkenness, and want among the poor.’ Nineteenth-century cures included drinking brown sugar dissolved in water and frequent horseback riding. ‘If they were being honest,’ Bell says, ‘the medical establishment would have said, ‘There’s nothing we can do, and it’s in the hands of God.’’

The Brown family, living on the eastern edge of town, probably on a modest homestead of 30 or 40 stony acres, began to succumb to the disease in December 1882. Lena’s mother, Mary Eliza, was the first. Lena’s sister, Mary Olive, a 20-year-old dressmaker, died the next year. A tender obituary from a local newspaper hints at what she endured: ‘The last few hours she lived was of great suffering, yet her faith was firm and she was ready for the change.’ The whole town turned out for her funeral, and sang ‘One Sweetly Solemn Thought,’ a hymn that Mary Olive herself had selected.

"The neighbors asked to exhume the bodies, in order to check for fresh blood in their hearts.”

“The neighbors asked to exhume the bodies, in order to check for fresh blood in their hearts.”

Within a few years, Lena’s brother Edwin—a store clerk whom one newspaper columnist described as ‘a big, husky young man’—sickened too, and left for Colorado Springs hoping that the climate would improve his health.

Lena, who was just a child when her mother and sister died, didn’t fall ill until nearly a decade after they were buried. Her tuberculosis was the ‘galloping’ kind, which meant that she might have been infected but remained asymptomatic for years, only to fade fast after showing the first signs of the disease. A doctor attended her in ‘her last illness,’ a newspaper said, and ‘informed her father that further medical aid was useless.’ Her January 1892 obituary was much terser than her sister’s: ‘Miss Lena Brown, who has been suffering from consumption, died Sunday morning.’

As Lena was on her deathbed, her brother was, after a brief remission, taking a turn for the worse. Edwin had returned to Exeter from the Colorado resorts ‘in a dying condition,’ according to one account. ‘If the good wishes and prayers of his many friends could be realized, friend Eddie would speedily be restored to perfect health,’ another newspaper wrote.

But some neighbors, likely fearful for their own health, weren’t content with prayers. Several approached George Brown, the children’s father, and offered an alternative take on the recent tragedies: Perhaps an unseen diabolical force was preying on his family. It could be that one of the three Brown women wasn’t dead after all, instead secretly feasting ‘on the living tissue and blood of Edwin,’ as the Providence Journal later summarized. If the offending corpse—the Journal uses the term ‘vampire’ in some stories but the locals seemed not to—was discovered and destroyed, then Edwin would recover. The neighbors asked to exhume the bodies, in order to check for fresh blood in their hearts.”

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“There Is No Evidence That Criminality Is Passed Down Through The Genes. It’s A Fiction.”

December 12, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The Browser has an excellent Five Books Interview with psychology professor Susan Gelman on the topic of essentialism, or the way we categorize people and things we encounter based on biases we believe to be facts. One of Gelman’s choices is William March’s novel, The Bad Seed, which allows her to address the idea of so-called inherited evil. An excerpt:

Question:

Let’s go on to The Bad Seed, a 1954 thriller about a little girl who turns out to be a serial killer.

Susan Gelman:

I love this book. I have to confess that in high school I had the lead in a play that we put on of The Bad Seed. I was the evil girl. So I’ve been thinking about this one for a long time. It’s really essentialism personified. What makes it essentialism is that this girl, who outwardly seems very sweet and innocent, in actuality is bad to the core. So there’s this appearance/reality distinction that is a big piece of essentialism. Also, the reason that she’s evil is that she was born that way – it was passed down from her grandmother. Her grandmother was a serial killer who got executed. The serial killer’s daughter was a very young child at the time. She was adopted and didn’t even remember any of this in more than the vaguest way. She was a perfectly fine person: The evil skipped a generation, and it was her own daughter who turned out to be this bad seed. The idea is that your moral character can be in-born. This little girl was raised in a wonderful environment, but that had no effect. That the evil is passed down from generation to generation is a very essentialist idea. It was actually controversial. If you read some reviews when the book came out, some of the reviewers really objected to that aspect.

Question:

What’s your view?

Susan Gelman:

As far as I understand it, there is no evidence that criminality is passed down through the genes. It’s a fiction, but it’s one that resonates with people. This is not supposed to be a work of science fiction. It works well for the plot of the book: The mother feels guilty for passing this along to her daughter. In some ways she feels her daughter is not at fault, because she doesn’t know any better. This is just the way she was born. What’s interesting to me is that that’s considered a plausible underlying theme that a reader can perfectly well accept. It’s a nice illustration of the common-sense aspect of essentialism.”

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“The Car Can Drop You At The Front Door To The Building You Work At And Then It Goes And Parks Itself”

December 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Miguel Helft’s new Fortune interview with Google CEO Larry Page, an exchange about self-driving cars:

“Fortune:

When you’re thinking about the next bet you’re going to make, how do you pick?

Larry Page:

That’s something we’ve been thinking about a lot. Unfortunately, there’s not a perfect science to that. Partly I feel that Google is in uncharted territory in the sense that I don’t think there’s an example from history I can take and say: “Why don’t we just do that?” We’re at a pretty big scale. We’re doing a lot of different things. We want to be a different kind of company. We’d like to have more of a social component in what we do. We like people to be happy with the products they’re using. We like our employees to be happy about working here.

Sorry, back to your main question: Choosing what to do. We want to do things that will motivate the most amazing people in the world to want to work on them. You look at self-driving cars. You know a lot of people die, and there’s a lot of wasted labor. The better transportation you have, the more choice in jobs. And that’s social good. That’s probably an economic good. I like it when we’re picking problems like that: big things where technology can have a really big impact. And we’re pretty sure we can do it. And whatever the technology investment we need to do that, it’s not going to be that huge compared to the payoff.

Fortune:

What else would change [in a world with self-driving cars]? Would we not have streetlights? Would the cities be different? Do you have a vision for what could happen?

Larry Page:

It’s very hard to predict entirely. I think that, you know, one of the issues we face here is parking. I’m getting quotes [for] the cost for us to build a parking lot structure [of] $40,000 per space. It’s all concrete and steel. Do you really want to use all your concrete and steel to build parking lots? It seems pretty stupid. If we have automated cars, or even if we have some fraction of automated cars, we’ll save hundreds of millions of dollars on parking, just at Google. When you think about your experience, the car can drop you at the front door to the building you work at and then it goes and parks itself. Whenever you need it, your phone notices that you’re walking out of the building, and your car’s there immediately by the time you get downstairs.”

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“It Is Strange To See Pop Musicians With Sitars”

December 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

Ravi Shankar just passed away at 92. Here he teaches George Harrison the sitar, which the Beatle used most famously on “Within You, Without You.”

“He Was Charged With Sending Four Docile Girls And A Hairy Male Acolyte Off To Slaughter Strangers”

December 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Those who feared (envied, perhaps) the new freedoms enjoyed by the young people of the 1960s found their counterargument in Charles Manson, a pathetic slip of a man who somehow fashioned himself into a poisonous pied piper capable of leading children to their demise. In the White Album, Joan Didion wrote about the crimes in the broader context of the wide-open Los Angeles of the era, where rumors of horrible occurrences had previously been spoken of only in hushed tones. “Everything was unmentionable but nothing was unimaginable,” she wrote, the words bleeding out like a threat. In the aftermath of the horrendous 1969 mass murder carried out by the former bright-eyed children of the Manson Family, Life magazine made the ringleader its cover subject and published a long article by Paul O’Neil about Manson and his minions. The opening:

“Long-haired, bearded little Charlie Manson so disturbed the American millions last week–when he was charged with sending four docile girls and a hairy male acolyte off to slaughter strangers in two Los Angeles houses last August–that the victims of his blithe and gory crimes seemed suddenly to have played secondary roles in the final brutal moments of their own lives. The Los Angeles killings struck innumerable Americans as an inexplicable controversion of everything they wanted to believe about the society and their children–and made Charles Manson seem to be the very encapsulation of truth about revolt and violence by the young.

What failure of the human condition could produce a Charlie Manson? What possible aspects of such a creature’s example could induce sweet-faced young women and a polite Texas college boy to acts of such numbing cruelty–even though they might have abandoned the social and political precepts of their elders like so many other beaded and bell-bottomed mother’s children in 1969? Some of the answers seemed simple enough if one weighed Charlie Manson on the ancient scales of human venality. He attracted and controlled his women through flattery, fear and sexual attention and by loftily granting them a sort of sisterhood of exploitation–methods used by every pimp in history. He sensed something old as tribal blood ritual which most of us deny in ourselves–that humans can feel enormous fulfillment and enormous relief in the act of killing other humans if some medicine man applauds and condones the deed. But Charlie was able to attune his time-encrusted concepts of villainy to the childish yearnings of hippie converts–to their weaknesses, their catchwords, their fragmentary sense of religion and their enchantment with drugs and idleness–and to immerse them in his own ego and idiotic visions of the apocalypse.”

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“There Are Tests That Could Be Done To Begin To Work Out Whether We Are In Fact Real”

December 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Technologists are planning to explore whether our universe is merely a simulation created by a futuristic supercomputer, which raises the question: Are supercomputers in the future out of their fucking minds? In America, Dancing with the Stars, which features bad dancing and no stars, is the number one television show. Fuck you, future, and fuck you, too, supercomputers. From Matthew Finnegan at TechEye:

“US scientists are attempting to find out whether all of humanity is currently living a Matrix-style computer simulation being run on supercomputers of the future.

According to researchers at the University of Washington, there are tests that could be done to begin to work out whether we are in fact real, or merely a simulation created by a futuristic android on its lunch break.

Currently, computer simulations are decades away from creating even a primitive working model of the universe. In fact, scientists are able to accurately model only a 100 trillionth of a metre, with work to create a model of a full human being still out of reach.

By looking for underlying patterns, physicists believe that it may be possible to work out if we are existing in a computer created universe, created many years in the future.  Looking at constraints imposed on simulations by limited resources could show signs that we are mere bit-part players in a Matrix-style film plot.”

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“Our Vision Is That No One Is Killed Or Injured In A New Volvo By 2020”

December 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There have been articles since 2008 reporting that Volvo is manufacturing a driverless, crash-proof car. Significantly, the planned date for the vehicle to reach the market has never been kicked up the road from 2020, so either the automaker is continually fooling itself or production is still on target. More about the so-called “no-death cars” from Ray Massey at the Daily Mail:

“Car giant Volvo is developing ‘no death’ cars that drive themselves and are impossible to crash – ready for launch in showrooms within eight years.

The computerised vehicles will  be fitted with high-tech sensors and will ‘refuse to be steered’ into other objects.

Volvo says they will be  on sale to customers by 2020, but that some of the life-saving technology will be incorporated into its vehicles even earlier – from 2014 – it says.

Volvo’s head of government affairs Anders Eugensson said: ‘Our vision is that no one is killed or injured in a new Volvo by 2020.’

It is part of the race by leading car manufacturers including Volvo, Ford Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Vauxhall and even Google to build fully automomous ‘Robo-cars’ that can drive themselves – like the one which actor Will Smith drove in the sci-fi movie ‘I, Robot.’

The biggest hurdle is not the technology which is largely developed – but public acceptance of it and and issues of who would be liable if a crashproof car did actually crash: the driver or the manufacturer?

Volvo’s Mr Eugensson said;’We have tested prototypes on thousands of miles of test drives on public roads in Spain and on the company’s test track in western Sweden.

‘The car of the future will be like the farmer’s horse.’

‘The farmer can steer the horse and carriage but if he falls asleep the horse will refuse to walk into a tree or off a cliff.’”

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“The Product Molds To The Anatomy”

December 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From DARPA, a release about a foam that essentially freezes severe internal injuries so that trauma victims can be moved safely to hospitals: “DARPA launched its Wound Stasis System program in 2010 in the hopes of finding a technological solution that could mitigate damage from internal hemorrhaging. The program sought to identify a biological mechanism that could discriminate between wounded and healthy tissue, and bind to the wounded tissue. As the program evolved, an even better solution emerged: Wound Stasis performer Arsenal Medical, Inc. developed a foam-based product that can control hemorrhaging in a patient’s intact abdominal cavity for at least one hour, based on swine injury model data. The foam is designed to be administered on the battlefield by a combat medic, and is easily removable by doctors during surgical intervention at an appropriate facility, as demonstrated in testing.”

“Her Book, Reworked From Her Lapsed Dissertation, Is So Saccharine And Idolatrous That It Can Only Be Tolerated With An Insulin Injection”

December 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Why, exactly, do we need heroes? I don’t mean children, but adult Americans who should know better. Sure, others can inspire us, but can that inspiration come only if we’ve whitewashed their negatives, if we’ve turned them into pretty lies? Do we scrub their sins to remove our own? Why not just admit that we’re all pretty flawed? Ronald Reagan wasn’t really a cowboy and neither are you or I. Tear down the statues, all of them.

From Frank Rich’s New York magazine excoriation of Petraeus, Broadwell and our deep need to manufacture heroes from substandard materials:

“None of Petraeus’s recent history would matter were it not completely at odds with everything we knew about him prior to Election Day. As you go back through the many profiles that proliferated once he was center stage in Iraq, you hear mainly of his exacting scholarliness, his push-up contests and five-mile runs with his bros in the press corps, and his straight-arrow personal style. Some of the praise heaped on Petraeus was written by the same journalists and pundits who promoted the Iraq misadventure in the first place and saw in the cool intellectual general and his surge a tool for rehabilitating both their own tarnished reputations and the disastrous, gratuitous war that had recklessly diverted American resources from the actual post-9/11 threat in Afghanistan. In truth, Petraeus didn’t redeem the Iraq fiasco. What the surge did accomplish, as a trustworthy soldier-scholar, Andrew Bacevich of Boston University, recently noted, was to allow the United States to ‘extricate itself from Iraq without having to acknowledge abject failure.’ Petraeus’s subsequent tour of duty in Afghanistan, a sudden assignment after the resignation of Stanley McChrystal, and his fourteen-month tenure as CIA director accomplished far less. Finally, we are starting to learn why.

The general’s distracting adventures among the Real Housewives of Tampa on the home front were in the public domain, reported in the local press for anyone who wanted to look. No one in the national media bothered until sex and a catfight between Broadwell and Kelley entered the story. Also hiding in plain sight, and also ignored, was Broadwell’s own curious rise in the same media-think-tank Establishment that was glorifying Petraeus. All In was not actually written by Broadwell but by a Washington Post editor. A faux author, Broadwell was also a faux counterinsurgency expert: Though an Army officer, she had never been posted in a combat zone, and though she had enrolled in a doctoral program at Harvard’s Kennedy School (where she first networked with Petraeus), she had been asked to leave because of substandard course work.

Her book, reworked from her lapsed dissertation, is so saccharine and idolatrous that it can only be tolerated with an insulin injection. Nonetheless, All In attracted a roster of ecstatic blurbs, still visible on the book’s Amazon page, from two Pulitzer Prize winners and boldfaced names at NBC News, CNN, the Brookings Institution, and Foreign Affairs. (The prize entry is from Tom Brokaw, describing Petraeus as ‘one of the most important Americans of our time, in or out of uniform.’) Sure enough, this degree of celebrity networking helped propel Broadwell into a career as a television talking head and public speaker. She paraded her dubious expertise before such august organizations as the Aspen Institute, the Concordia Summit, and the United States Chamber of Commerce—sometimes sharing the program with Bill Clinton, John McCain, and Obama Cabinet members. Like Petraeus’s other efforts to court and stroke the press, his targeted deployment of Broadwell, his most determined and devoted personal publicist, to nearly every corridor of media power helps explain how the myth of his public persona was scrupulously enforced even after his days living large in Tampa. Broadwell was so effective at insinuating herself and her message into rarefied echelons of the military-media-political complex that we should be grateful that her only causes were herself and Petraeus. She would have been a killer foreign mole.”

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“Replacement-Limb Technology Is Expected By The Panel To Be Prevalent”

December 10, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From an article at RT about the National Intelligence Council’s just-released predictions for life in 2030, none of which seem very far-fetched:

“No matter who is calling the shots, though, the NIC seems to think that a generation down the line will be a damn exciting time to be a human being. ‘People may choose to enhance their physical selves as they do with cosmetic surgery today’ in 2030, they predict, at which point the replacement-limb technology is expected by the panel to be prevalent.

‘Future retinal eye implants could enable night vision, and neuro-enhancements could provide superior memory recall or speed of thought,’ the report adds. ‘Brain-machine interfaces could provide ‘superhuman’ abilities, enhancing strength and speed, as well as providing functions not previously available.'”

“A Blinking Light Or Auditory Warning That Triggers As The Shock Is Prepared”

December 10, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Eric Limer at Gizmodo, a report about just-patented futuristic handcuffs that can administer shocks or sedatives (holy crap!):

“The recent patent application from Scottsdale Inventions LLC shows what seems to be a pretty well developed prototype of handcuffs that will shock the wearer into submission. The patent also allows for a blinking light or auditory warning that triggers as the shock is prepared, presumably to warn the wearer to CALM DOWN. The shocks could come for any number of reasons—too much movement, movement outside a radius, or under order of the cuff’s owner—and the cuffs would also contain EKG/ECG sensors to keep from shocking detainees a little too silly (i.e. to death).

That’s not even where it ends though, because there’s additional language describing how the cuffs could actually administer a substance ‘to achieve any desired result’ via needles or gas. It could be anything from medication to sedatives to irritants, to who knows what else.”

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“They Just Tend To Sit There Like A Stunned Mullet”

December 10, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Because not everyone is talented enough to deliver pizza, some people are forced to become mall Santas. One such “performer” just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. Some excerpts follow.

_______________________________

Question:

How many little kids have started crying as soon as they have been placed on your lap in a typically day?

Answer:

Too many to count. You can divide them pretty clearly into groups. 0-9-month-old kids are too young to really know what’s going on and just tend to sit there like a stunned mullet. But from about 10 months to two years old you can forget it. I’d say two thirds of this group cries and refuses to come up. Some of them can be encouraged to get a photo if their parents sit with them. From about two-to-four years old they’re a bit better, but a lot still cry. From about five-to-seven years old they are generally just in love with Santa, and my least favorite age are the seven-to-ten-year-olds who still believe in Santa but are developing a sense of skepticism. I see them looking at me with doubt and it is really annoying.

_______________________________

Question:

Real beard?

Answer:

Ridiculous fake beard.

Question:

Itchy?

Answer:

It is absolutely terrible. The worst part is when the pieces of stray beard/moustache hair get in my mouth, and I can’t really reach into my face with my gloved hand and pull them out. So I try to push them out of my mouth with my tongue, which ends up causing more bits of fake beard hair to stick to the inside of my mouth. I have nearly choked and retched many times because of this.

_______________________________

Question:

Funniest thing a child has asked for?

Answer:

“You.” Wasn’t a child, was a mischievous twenty-something-year-old gay man.

Question:

And what was your response?

Answer:

An awkward “ho ho ho ho.” This is my response to almost any weird situation.

“In Reality The Move Was Caused By A Bug”

December 10, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Blake Masters’ blog has ideas about and notes from Peter Thiel’s recent Stanford address, “The Future of Legal Technology.” From an exchange during the audience Q&A, which points out, among other things, that we can sometimes mistake error for genius:

“Question: 

What is your take on building machines that work just like the human brain?

Peter Thiel: 

If you could model the human brain perfectly, you can probably build a machine version of it. There are all sorts of questions about whether this is possible.

The alternative path, especially in the short term, is smart but not AI-smart computers, like chess computers. We didn’t model the human brain to create these systems. They crunch moves. They play differently and better than humans. But they use the same processes. So most AI that we’ll see, at least first, is likely to be soft AI that’s decidedly non-human.

Question: 

But chess computers aren’t even soft AI, right? They are all programmed. If we could just have enough time to crunch the moves and look at the code, we’d know what/s going on, right? So their moves are perfectly predictable. 

Peter Thiel: 

Theoretically, chess computers are predictable. In practice, they aren’t. Arguably it’s the same with humans. We’re all made of atoms. Per quantum mechanics and physics, all our behavior is theoretically predictable. That doesn’t mean you could ever really do it. 

Question: 

There’s the anecdote of Kasparov resigning when Deep Blue made a bizarre move that he fatalistically interpreted as a sign that the computer had worked dozens of moves ahead. In reality the move was caused by a bug. 

Peter Thiel: 

Well… I know Kasparov pretty well. There are a lot of things that he’d say happened there…” (Thanks Browser.)

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“It Made Table Tennis A Game Based On Fraud, Deception, Deceit”

December 10, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

Marty Reisman, the Lower East Side kid who became one of the greatest table-tennis players in the world, just passed away. He was a John Henry of sorts in his arena, battling technology that he felt threatened the game, from new-fangled paddles to robot players. From Harold Evans’ fun remembrance of Resiman at the Daily Beast:

“The turning point in table-tennis history was in Bombay in 1952. Reisman was the favorite to win from a field crowded with stars. It was not to be. They were massacred, baffled by an indifferent player on the Japanese team, Hiroji Satoh. He came equipped with a destructive technology: resilient foam rubber he’d glued to his racket. It was like the silencer on a pistol, and it was as lethal. The sponge imparted unreadable spins. Gone was the distinctive kerplock-kerplock conversation of the ball being struck and returned by rackets surfaced with thin pimpled rubber. Gone were the classic long rallies that were such fun for basement players and that thrilled thousands of spectators in the tournament finals. The sponge players who followed Satoh are fine athletes, but the games they play have been generally unwatchable. Serve and smash became the competitive norm and, save for the Olympics, mass audiences vanished.

The Reisman kid refused to adopt sponge. ‘It made table tennis a game based on fraud, deception, deceit.’ He was convinced that the universal appeal of the game—the world’s most popular—was in simplicity, in strokes and tactics, not in technology and trickery. He tested his faith by challenging the new champion Satoh to a return match in Osaka, pitting his hardbat against sponge. Before an astounded crowd, he beat Satoh fair and square.”

••••••••••

Reisman as a 19-year-old hotshot in 1949 at Wembley Stadium:

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“Up To About 1800, People Were Allowed To Have Visions Or To Hear Voices”

December 10, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Oliver Sacks recently sat for an interview with Tim Adams at the Guardian to discuss his new book, Hallucinations. One exchange concerning a shift toward rationalism in the last 200 years, although we continue to create mundane ways to distance ourselves from facts:

“Guardian:

It seems that such visual disorders at certain points in history have been more ‘believable’ and also, therefore, more commonly noted?

Oliver Sacks:

Yes, in other places and at other times, hallucinations were far more acceptable. Up to about 1800, people were allowed to have visions or to hear voices. They were seen to have some external spiritual reality; they were ghosts or angels or demons. The word hallucination only really became a pejorative at the end of the 18th or early 19th century. We still associate it with madness. But how those who hallucinate understand what they see also changes. We are more likely to see UFOs and aliens when people in earlier times would see angels.”

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“Liftoff Was A Blue Pill Taken On An Empty Stomach At 9 A.M.”

December 9, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I suppose the best argument for a war on drugs is that using narcotics is thought to lower IQ and if enough people in a society make themselves less intelligent, it puts that society at a disadvantage in the global marketplace. But here’s the problem with the prohibition of drugs: It doesn’t work. Not at all. Criminalizing something that consenting adults want to do just serves to enable a black market. And if people don’t have access to street drugs, they’ll abuse Oxycodone and the like. The war on drugs is not going to stop usage so we should stop the war on drugs. At Tom Dispatch, Lewis Lapham recalls his sole encounter with acid:

“So too in the 1960s, the prudent becoming of an American involved perilous transmigrations, psychic, spiritual, and political. By no means certain who I was at the age of 24, I was prepared to make adjustments, but my one experiment with psychedelics in 1959 was a rub that promptly gave me pause.

Employed at the time as a reporter at the San Francisco Examiner, I was assigned to go with the poet Allen Ginsberg to the Stanford Research Institute there to take a trip on LSD. Social scientists opening the doors of perception at the behest of Aldous Huxley wished to compare the flight patterns of a Bohemian artist and a bourgeois philistine, and they had asked the paper’s literary editor to furnish one of each. We were placed in adjacent soundproofed rooms, both of us under the observation of men in white coats equipped with clipboards, the idea being that we would relay messages from the higher consciousness to the air-traffic controllers on the ground.

Liftoff was a blue pill taken on an empty stomach at 9 a.m., the trajectory a bell curve plotted over a distance of seven hours. By way of traveling companions we had been encouraged to bring music, in those days on vinyl LPs, of whatever kind moved us while on earth to register emotions approaching the sublime.

Together with Johann Sebastian Bach and the Modern Jazz Quartet, I attained what I’d been informed would be cruising altitude at noon. I neglected to bring a willing suspension of disbelief, and because I stubbornly resisted the sales pitch for the drug — if you, O Wizard, can work wonders, prove to me the where and when and how and why — I encountered heavy turbulence. Images inchoate and nonsensical, my arms and legs seemingly elongated and embalmed in grease, the sense of utter isolation while being gnawed by rats.

To the men in white I had nothing to report, not one word on either the going up and out or the coming back and down. I never learned what Ginsberg had to say. Whatever it was, I wasn’t interested, and I left the building before he had returned from what by then I knew to be a dead-end sleep.”

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“When He Got A Pogo Stick, He Would Go Up And Down The Hall On That, Too”

December 9, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I mentioned Jon Gertner’s Bell Lab history, The Idea Factory, a couple of times recently. For me, the most interesting parts are the passages about Information Theory mastermind Claude Shannon. As the author points out, Shannon’s co-workers were often years ahead of the curve in their work, but Shannon himself was working decades in the future. In addition to knowing what the world would look like generations in advance, Shannon, a wisp of a man, was deeply eccentric and fond of games and parlor tricks. He designed the first computer chess program and the initial computerized mouse that “learned” more every time it went through a maze. (Like this, but 60 years ago.) His wife, Betty, was always challenged when choosing a Christmas present for him because what do you get for the man who has everything–in his head? An excerpt from Gertner’s book, which recalls how the scientist turned Bell Labs into a fucking clown car:

“One year, Betty gave him a unicycle as a gift. Shannon quickly began riding; then he began building his own unicycles, challenging himself to see how small he could make one that could still be ridden. One evening after dinner at home in Morristown, Claude began to spontaneously juggle three balls, and his efforts soon won him some encouragement from the kids in the apartment complex. There was no reason, as far as Shannon could see, why he shouldn’t pursue his two new interests, unicycling and juggling, at Bell Labs, too. Nor was there any reason not to pursue them simultaneously. When he was in the office, Shannon would take a break from work to ride his unicycle up and down the long hallways, usually at night when the building wasn’t so busy. He would nod to passerby, unless he was juggling as he rode. Then he would be lost in concentration. When he got a pogo stick, he would go up and down the hall on that, too.

Here, then, was a picture of Claude Shannon, circa 1955, a man–slender, agile, handsome, abstracted–who rarely showed up on time for work, who often played chess or fiddled with amusing machines all day; who frequently went down the halls juggling or pogoing, and who didn’t seem to care, really, what anyone thought of him or his pursuits. He did what was interesting. He was categorized, still, as a scientist. But it seemed obvious that he had the temperament and sensibility of an artist.”

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“Every Time A Passenger Taps The Window A New Element Is Added”

December 7, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

You’re not allowed to shoot buffalo from speeding trains anymore, but you can see the Eiffel Tower from the window even if you’re traveling through the American Midwest. That’s thanks to augmented reality. It doesn’t look genuine enough to me yet, but still! From Andrew Liszewski at Gizmodo: “The AR system, called ‘Touch the Train Window,’ is composed of a Kinect with GPS hardware, an iPhone, custom software, and a projector to overlay images on the window. Every time a passenger taps the window a new element is added, which is perfectly tracked into the passing scenery. It’s also a great way to get the most travel for your buck, letting you pass the Eiffel Tower, the Colosseum in Rome, even Stonehenge, as you roll through the boring wheat fields of the American mid-west.”

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Tad Lincoln, The Decade Before His Death (1860s)

December 7, 2012 in Excerpts, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Mary Todd Lincoln suffered many losses in her life, and one of the bitterest was the 1871 death of her youngest child, Thomas,  nicknamed “Tad,” when he was just 18. The cause of death was reported to be “dropsy of the heart,” but it could have been TB or some other cardiac illness. To put it mildly, Tad was a free spirit, and he is responsible for the origin of a White House tradition. Long before President Obama was pardoning turkeys at Thanksgiving, the Lincoln child saved a similar bird. From Gilbert King at the Smithsonian history blog:

“However, the earliest known sparing of a holiday bird can be traced to 1863, when Abraham Lincoln was presented with a Christmas turkey destined for the dinner table and his young, precocious son Tad intervened.

Thomas ‘Tad’ Lincoln was just 8 years old when he arrived in Washington, D.C., to live at the White House after his father was sworn into office in March 1861. The youngest of four sons born to Abraham and Mary Todd Lincoln, Tad was born after Edward ‘Eddie’ Lincoln died in the winter of 1850 at the age of 11, most likely of tuberculosis. Both Tad and his brother William ‘Willie’ Lincoln were believed to have contracted typhoid fever in Washington, and while Tad recovered, Willie succumbed in February of 1862. He was 11.

With the eldest Lincoln son, Robert, away at Harvard College, young Tad became the only child living at in the White House, and by all accounts, the boy was indomitable—charismatic and full of life at a time when his family, and the nation, were experiencing tremendous grief. Born with a cleft palate that gave him a lisp and dental impairments that made it almost impossible for him to eat solid food, Tad was easily distracted, full of energy, highly emotional and, unlike his father and brother, none too focused on academics.

‘He had a very bad opinion of books and no opinion of discipline,’ wrote John Hay, Lincoln’s secretary. Both Lincoln parents, Hay observed, seemed to be content to let Tad ‘have a good time.’ Devastated by the loss of Willie, and both proud and relieved by Robert’s fastidious efforts at Harvard, the first couple gave their rambunctious young son free rein at the executive mansion. The boy was known to have sprayed dignitaries with fire hoses, burst into cabinet meetings, tried to sell some of the first couple’s clothing at a ‘yard sale’ on the White House lawn, and marched White House servants around the grounds like infantry.”

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“Scientism Takes Science To Be Not Only Better Than Philosophy At Answering Such Questions, But The Only Means Of Answering Them”

December 7, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

As dearly as I wish that people would be far more rational when making decisions, I find it disquieting that philosophy is considered dead in some scientific circles. And I say this as a gigantic atheist–one of the biggest atheists ever. Empiricism is a wonderful, vital thing, but I think philosophy is more important than ever in our Information Age. I know weak-minded philosophy can be damaging but so can science unfettered from ethics. I believe every great scientist has been fortified by philosophy (and every great philosopher by science). From “The Folly of Scientism,” Austin L. Hughes’ New Atlantis essay on the topic:

“Modern science is often described as having emerged from philosophy; many of the early modern scientists were engaged in what they called ‘natural philosophy.’ Later, philosophy came to be seen as an activity distinct from but integral to natural science, with each addressing separate but complementary questions — supporting, correcting, and supplying knowledge to one another. But the status of philosophy has fallen quite a bit in recent times. Central to scientism is the grabbing of nearly the entire territory of what were once considered questions that properly belong to philosophy. Scientism takes science to be not only better than philosophy at answering such questions, but the only means of answering them. For most of those who dabble in scientism, this shift is unacknowledged, and may not even be recognized. But for others, it is explicit. [Peter] Atkins, for example, is scathing in his dismissal of the entire field: ‘I consider it to be a defensible proposition that no philosopher has helped to elucidate nature; philosophy is but the refinement of hindrance.’

Is scientism defensible? Is it really true that natural science provides a satisfying and reasonably complete account of everything we see, experience, and seek to understand — of every phenomenon in the universe? And is it true that science is more capable, even singularly capable, of answering the questions that once were addressed by philosophy? This subject is too large to tackle all at once. But by looking briefly at the modern understandings of science and philosophy on which scientism rests, and examining a few case studies of the attempt to supplant philosophy entirely with science, we might get a sense of how the reach of scientism exceeds its grasp.”

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