Excerpts

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“They Knew That To Put God In The Constitution Was To Put Man Out”

December 6, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

From Susan Jacoby’s beautifully written American Scholar essay about Bob Ingersoll, the “Great Agnostic” of the 19th century, who is largely forgotten today:

Known as Robert Injuresoul to his clerical enemies, he raised the issue of what role religion ought to play in the public life of the American nation for the first time since the writing of the Constitution, when the Founders deliberately left out any acknowledgment of a deity as the source of governmental power. In one of his most popular lectures, titled ‘Individuality,’ Ingersoll said of Paine, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin:

They knew that to put God in the Constitution was to put man out. They knew that the recognition of a Deity would be seized upon by fanatics and zealots as a pretext for destroying the liberty of thought. They knew the terrible history of the church too well to place in her keeping, or in the keeping of her God, the sacred rights of man. They intended that all should have the right to worship, or not to worship; that our laws should make no distinction on account of creed. They intended to found and frame a government for man, and for man alone. They wished to preserve the individuality and liberty of all; to prevent the few from governing the many, and the many from persecuting and destroying the few.

To the question that retains its politically divisive power to this day—whether the United States was founded as a Christian nation—Ingersoll answered an emphatic no. The marvel of the Framers, he argued in an oration delivered on July 4, 1876, in his hometown of Peoria, Illinois, was that they established ‘the first secular government that was ever founded in this world’ at a time when every government in Europe was still based on union between church and state. “Recollect that,” Ingersoll admonished his audience. “The first secular government; the first government that said every church has exactly the same rights and no more; every religion has the same rights, and no more. In other words, our fathers were the first men who had the sense, had the genius, to know that no church should be allowed to have a sword.” A government that had “retired the gods from politics,” Ingersoll declared with decidedly premature optimism on America’s 100th birthday, was a necessary condition of progress.

To 19th-century freethinkers, as to their 18th-century predecessors, intellectual and material progress went hand in hand with abandonment of superstition, and strong ties between government and religion amounted to state-endorsed superstition. Born decades before cities were illuminated by electricity, before the role of bacteria in the transmission of disease was understood, before Darwin’s revolutionary insight that humans were descended from lower animals was fully accepted even within the scientific community, Ingersoll was the most outspoken and influential voice in a movement that was to forge a secular intellectual bridge into the 20th century for many of his countrymen.•

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“We Try To Make The Corporation Like The Garage”

December 5, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Vacuums needn’t look as good nor function as well as James Dyson makes them, but for decades he’s been creating dust-busting appliances that rival Apple’s greatest designs. He probably won’t stop, even if you ask him nicely. From Shoshana Berger’s new Wired Q&A with the inventor:

“Wired: 

Now that Dyson is a sprawling, multinational corporation, how do you keep the spirit of innovation alive?

James Dyson: 

We try to make the corporation like the garage. We don’t have technicians; our engineers and scientists actually go and build their own prototypes and test the rigs themselves. And the reason we do that—and I don’t force people to do that, by the way, they want to do it—is that when you’re building the prototype, you start to really understand how it’s made and what it might do and where its weaknesses might be. If you merely hand a drawing to somebody and say, ‘Would you make this, please?’ and in two weeks he comes back with it and you hand it to someone else who does the test, you’re not experiencing it. You’re not understanding it. You’re not feeling it. Our engineers and scientists love doing that.

Wired: 

Do they ever fail?

James Dyson: 

Absolutely. It’s when something fails that you learn. If it doesn’t fail, you don’t learn anything. You haven’t made any progress. Everything I do is a mistake. It fails. For the past 42 years—I’ve had a life of it.”

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“Did The Bikini Underwear Effectively Hide Their Thunder?”

December 5, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

“9-9-9.”

An essential figure in the lives of stoners and pornographers alike, the pizza delivery guy is a revered member of our fat, dumb culture. One such worker just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit to talk about his hard-knock life, though he should be happy he isn’t a flight attendant. A few excerpts follow.

_____________________________

Question:

Best experience that sticks out in your mind? 

Answer:

Laughing so hard that I cried after delivering to a porn shoot.

Question:

What did they order??

Answer:

3 MEAT LOVERS HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Not even kidding.

 _____________________________

Question:

Worst thing someone was wearing when they answered the door? 

Answer:

I’ve had drunk dudes wearing bikini underwear answer the door before. That was awkward.

Question:

Did the bikini underwear effectively hide their thunder?

Answer:

Thankfully, yes.

  _____________________________

Question:

Is it true that people with lower incomes/smaller houses generally tip better?

Answer:

Yes. Never really had a bad tip from that demographic.

 _____________________________

Question:

Hey man, I just moved to the area and stuff, don’t know many people yet. …you know where I can get some weed?

Answer:

LOL.

“Keep the change.”

“Urbanites Become Consumers Of Choices Laid Out For Them By Prior Calculations”

December 5, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Cities, wonderful though they are, can be scary and confusing, but they’re better imperfect than being completely smart and quantified, argues Richard Sennett in the Guardian. He would rather live in Rio’s welter than in Songdo’s planned perfection. An excerpt:

“The debate about good engineering has changed now because digital technology has shifted the technological focus to information processing; this can occur in handheld computers linked to ‘clouds,’ or in command-and-control centres. The danger now is that this information-rich city may do nothing to help people think for themselves or communicate well with one another.

Imagine that you are a master planner facing a blank computer screen and that you can design a city from scratch, free to incorporate every bit of high technology into your design. You might come up with Masdar, in the United Arab Emirates, or Songdo, in South Korea. These are two versions of the stupefying smart city: Masdar the more famous, or infamous; Songdo the more fascinating in a perverse way.

Masdar is a half-built city rising out of the desert, whose planning – overseen by the master architect Norman Foster – comprehensively lays out the activities of the city, the technology monitoring and regulating the function from a central command centre. The city is conceived in ‘Fordist‘ terms – that is, each activity has an appropriate place and time. Urbanites become consumers of choices laid out for them by prior calculations of where to shop, or to get a doctor, most efficiently. There’s no stimulation through trial and error; people learn their city passively. ‘User-friendly’ in Masdar means choosing menu options rather than creating the menu.”

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“I Know That Reality Is, In Some Ghastly Way, Porous Or Sensitive At Great Heights”

December 4, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I trust almost no one for basic competence in day-to-day life, but I don’t worry much about dying a fiery death when I’m on an airplane. I readily put myself in the hands of the crew, even though they’re probably a bunch of horny wiseasses judging us harshly. Let someone else be responsible of my continued breathing for awhile; I’m exhausted from the task. But writer A.L. Kennedy is, like many people, terrified of flying. From her new Aeon essay on the topic:

“I am not superstitious. Magical thinking is an open well of nonsense into which we fall at our peril, it leaves us prey to charlatans and all that is self-defeating about human psychology. I use tapping and listening to music to induce positive states as a kind of self-hypnosis, I don’t believe I’m performing magic… I don’t believe in magic… Yet as soon I get within sight of an airport I know that reality is, in some ghastly way, porous or sensitive at great heights. Some deep, irrational urging, some remnant of young hominids’ anxieties around over-tall trees, tells me that nature itself is able to feel my thoughts at any altitude from which a fall would prove fatal. The higher I get, the more clearly my conscious mind’s emanations will invite attention. It will lean close, like a startled mother bending in over a baby she suddenly realizes is not a baby, but merely a baby-shaped monster swapped for her beloved by evil elves and likely to bite her at night if she doesn’t throw the appalling thing clear out of a window right now. To be precise, the more I fill with fears, the more the universe will attend to and believe my fears, thus making them real. And down will come baby, cradle and all.”

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“The Second Drone, An Insect-Like Quadrotor Is Designed For Higher Flying Missions”

December 4, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“I believe there are lasers in the jungle somewhere,” a poet of despair once cautioned, but just as surprising are the tethered flying bots that can spy on you indefinitely in the suburbs. From Endgadget: “A new venture from an iRobot co-founder called CyPhy Works has borne fruit in the form of two flying drones dedicated to surveillance duty. The first, called Ease, is a mere foot in diameter by 16-inches tall and can fly safely in tight spaces or through open windows or doors, thanks to its petite size and ducted rotors. It packs a pair of HD cameras along with a thermal imager and can stay aloft permanently, in theory, thanks to a microfilament tether attached to a ground station — which also makes it impervious to weather, tracking and interception at the same time, according to CyPhy. The second drone, an insect-like quadrotor called Parc, is designed for higher flying missions thanks to its larger size and maximum 1,000-foot altitude.”

“There Were Surfers, Cruisers, Teenyboppers, Beboppers, Strippers, Bikers, Beats, Heads, And, Of Course, Hippies”

December 4, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Quintessential New York writer Tom Wolfe actually has quite a history on the West Coast as well. From Michael Anton’s excellent City Journal consideration of Wolfe’s California experiences, the moment Wolfe recognized the richness of Left Coast subcultures:

“It started by accident. Wolfe was working for the New York Herald Tribune, which, along with eight other local papers, shut down for 114 days during the 1962–63 newspaper strike. He had recently written about a custom car show—phoned it in, by his own admission—but he knew there was more to the story. Temporarily without an income, he pitched a story about the custom car scene to Esquire. ‘Really, I needed to make some money,’ Wolfe tells me. ‘You could draw a per diem from the newspaper writers’ guild, but it was a pittance. I was in bad shape,’ he chuckles. Esquire bit and sent the 32-year-old on his first visit to the West—to Southern California, epicenter of the subculture.

Wolfe saw plenty on that trip, from Santa Monica to North Hollywood to Maywood, from the gardens and suburbs of mid-’60s Southern California to its dung heaps. He saw so much that he didn’t know what to make of it all. Returning to New York in despair, he told Esquire that he couldn’t write the piece. Well, they said, we already have the art laid in, so we have to do something; type up your notes and send them over. ‘Can you imagine anything more humiliating than being told, ‘Type up your notes, we’ll have a real writer do the piece’?’ Wolfe asks. He stayed up all night writing a 49-page memo—which Esquire printed nearly verbatim.

It’s a great tale, but, one fears, too cute to be strictly true. I ask him about it point-blank. ‘Oh, yes, that’s exactly what happened,’ he says. ‘I wrote it like a letter, to an audience of literally one person’—Esquire managing editor Byron Dobell—’with all these block phrases and asides. But at some point in the middle of the night, I started to think it might actually be pretty good.’

That piece—’The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby’—represents the first time that Wolfe truly understood and was able to formulate the big idea that would transform him from an above-average feature writer into the premier cultural chronicler of our age. Those inhabiting the custom car scene were not rich, certainly not upper-class, and not prominent— indeed, they were almost invisible to society at large. Wolfe described his initial attempt to write the story as a cheap dismissal: ‘Don’t worry, these people are nothing.’ He realized in California that he had been wrong. These people were something, and very influential within their own circles, which were far larger than anyone on the outside had hitherto noticed.

‘Max Weber,’ Wolfe tells me, ‘was the first to argue that social classes were dying everywhere—except, in his time, in England—and being replaced by what he called ‘status groups.’ ‘ The term improves in Wolfean English: ‘Southern California, I found, was a veritable paradise of statuspheres,’ he wrote in 1968. Beyond the customizers and drag racers, there were surfers, cruisers, teenyboppers, beboppers, strippers, bikers, beats, heads, and, of course, hippies. Each sphere started off self-contained but increasingly encroached on, and influenced, the wider world.

‘Practically every style recorded in art history is the result of the same thing—a lot of attention to form plus the money to make monuments to it,’ Wolfe wrote in the introduction to his first book. ‘But throughout history, everywhere this kind of thing took place, China, Egypt, France under the Bourbons, every place, it has been something the aristocracy was responsible for. What has happened in the United States since World War II, however, has broken that pattern. The war created money. It made massive infusions of money into every level of society. Suddenly classes of people whose styles of life had been practically invisible had the money to build monuments to their own styles.’ If Wolfe’s oeuvre has an overarching theme, this is it.'”

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“There’s An Entire Time That No Longer Exists, That Has Been Suppressed”

December 4, 2012 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

What has been gained in access to information and communication during the Digital Age more than makes up for anything lost. But there have been losses. Process helps determine outcome, and the speed of digital removes significant time from effort. And precision means there are fewer errors and accidents, those things that birth genius. If method is faster, is the result naturally speeded up as well? From Richard Brody’s 2000 New Yorker profile of Jean-Luc Godard:

“I began by asking him about his most recently released feature film, For Ever Mozart, from 1996, a bitter fantasy about art and mourning. In it, three young French people with lofty ideas but idle hands take off for Sarajevo to put on a play and are killed in Bosnia by paramilitary thugs. One of the victims is the daughter of an old French director who has been stalled in his work; in his grief, he finds the will to create.

Typically, Godard was not satisfied with the film. ‘It wasn’t very good,’ he said. ‘The actors aren’t good enough, and things remained too theoretical.’ Godard’s complaint about his movie led to a complaint about young actors today: that even unknowns, inundated with media hype, comport themselves like stars and are ‘less available’ to direction: ‘They think they know what to do, by the fact that they’ve been chosen. They have no doubt. Doubt no longer exists today. With digital, doubt no longer exists.’

This abrupt switch from the sociological to the technological is typical of Godard’s conversation: his sentences, like his films, are always soaring into abstractions, or breaking off, pivoting on an instant of silence to change direction. ‘With digital, there is no past,’ he continued. ‘I’m reluctant to edit on these new so-called ‘virtual’ machines, these digital things, because, as far as I’m concerned, there’s no past. In other words, if you want to see the previous shot, O.K., you do this’—he tapped the table like a button—’and you see it at once. It doesn’t take any time to get there, the time to unspool in reverse, the time to go backward. You’re there right away. So there’s an entire time that no longer exists, that has been suppressed. And that’s why films are much more mediocre, because time no longer exists.'”

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“Just Scan The Item’s Bar Code And The App Shows You Whether You Can Get It Cheaper Somewhere Else”

December 3, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Big-box stores, with their savage price-cutting, created a monster they can no longer control: consumers who refuse to pay anything above deep discount. Armed with smartphones, they go to stores to sample items, reach for their iPhones and order the goods from Amazon for a smaller price. From a Megan McArdle Newsweek piece about the category-killers attempting to reinvent themselves on the fly, unlikely as that seems:

“To survive, stores like Best Buy will need to kill their own category, remaking themselves into what might be called ‘small-box stores’: more intimate, accessible, with a unique mix of products and expert personal service that the Internet simply can’t provide. Other retailers have shown that it’s still possible, even in this day and age, to get people to buy things in stores. But can the giants of yesteryear cut themselves down to scrappy, nimble competitors? Can Goliath transform himself into David before the money runs out?

To find out, I went to see the place where Best Buy is reinventing itself. Earlier this year, the firm announced that it would be closing 50 stores, while opening 100 smaller ‘mobile’ locations. It’s also undertaking extensive renovations on remaining stores to refocus them around personal service—the one thing that Amazon can’t deliver via UPS. ‘With things like home appliances, people are going to want the things we offer, for example, the delivery to service and install. Or Geek Squad: thousands of people sitting in homes, doing installations, across all the platforms,’ says Stephen Gillett, the digital wizard who helped lead a turnaround at Starbucks before joining Best Buy eight months ago. ‘If you’ve got a Kindle, a Samsung television, an Android phone, good luck getting service for that at Amazon.’

The idea is that nicer-looking stores and better service will help combat ‘showrooming’—the act of visiting a store to look at a videogame console or fancy television before you buy it, cheaper, on the Internet. The trend has been gathering steam for years, but over the past 18 months, smartphone apps like RedLaser and Amazon’s Price Check have made it as easy as, er, stealing display space from a big box: just scan the item’s bar code and the app shows you whether you can get it cheaper somewhere else.

Usually, you can.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“She Has Been Crying In Private And Trying To Get Back To Riding Her Horses”

December 3, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

You can file Ann Romney being too distraught to ride her horses after her husband’s election loss  as the type of problem that well-fed, privileged people have, and you’d be right. But there’s something more at play neurologically, something that pertains to us all. We sometimes convince ourselves that life is going to be a certain way. It becomes our reality, even if it isn’t a reality yet. Perhaps it’s the repetition of chemical reactions, but we manage to hardwire our brain in a certain direction. Sometimes trauma can knock us out of this mindset in an instant. But usually it’s a slow mourning, a deliberate process.

From a really good Washington Post piece by Philip Rucker about the new normal facing the Romneys post-campaign:

“The defeated Republican nominee has practically disappeared from public view since his loss, exhibiting the same detachment that made it so difficult for him to connect with the body politic through six years of running for president. He has made no public comments since his concession speech in the early hours of Nov. 7 and avoided the press last week during a private lunch with President Obama at the White House. Through an aide, Romney declined an interview request for this story.

After Romney told his wealthy donors that he blamed his loss on ‘gifts’ Obama gave to minority groups, his functionaries were unrepentant and Republican luminaries effectively cast him out. Few of the policy ideas he promoted are even being discussed in Washington.

‘Nothing so unbecame his campaign as his manner of leaving it,’ said Robert Shrum, a senior strategist on Democratic presidential campaigns. ‘I don’t think he’ll ever be a significant figure in public life again.’

Yet friends insist Romney is not bitter. Bitterness, said one member of the family, ‘is not in the Romney genetic code.’

One longtime counselor contrasted Romney with former vice president Al Gore, whose weight gain and beard became a symbol of grievance over his 2000 loss. ‘You won’t see heavyset, haggard Mitt,’ he said. Friends say a snapshot-gone-viral showing a disheveled Romney pumping gas is just how he looks without a suit on his frame or gel in his hair.

‘He’s not a poor loser,’ said John Miller, a meatpacking magnate who co-chaired Romney’s finance committee and owns the beach house next door. ‘He’s not crying on anybody’s shoulders. He’s not blaming anybody. . . . He’s doing a lot of personal introspection about the whole process — and I’m not even sure that’s healthy. There’s nothing you can do about it now.’

By all accounts, the past month has been most difficult on Romney’s wife, Ann, who friends said believed up until the end that ascending to the White House was their destiny. They said she has been crying in private and trying to get back to riding her horses.”

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“I Directed Him To The On-Board Toilet”

December 3, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

People feel unloosed from norms and mores when driving or flying because the odds of violent death increase so they have an excuse to regress. Otherwise nice people flip you off on the turnpike and seemingly average folks want to bang in a can 30,000 feet in the air. A flight attendant just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit, and who better to testify on reductive on-flight decorum? A few passages follow.

_______________________________

Question:

What is the most crazy request you have been asked by a passenger, and what is the best thing about being a flight attendant?

Answer:

Crazy? Goodness.

  • A bag to spit in. I had to confirm several times the word spit
  • A lady with a neck brace “I need soft food I will have rice” (The menu items did not include rice even after explaining she kept ordering things that just didn’t exist)
  • Hot fried chips
  • Nappies
  • Ice cream
  • My number

If it exists a passenger has asked me for it. They ask for EVERYTHING.

Best thing? I feel obvious but new destinations, I get a small taste of EVERYTHING I love it so much, I get to see smell and taste so much. I meet friends all over the world and party like a rockstar everywhere I go because I know I wont be there for long.

Edit: On a Lagos flight a passenger told me he wanted to masturbate. I directed him to the on board toilet.

_______________________________

Question:

Are there as many people joining the mile high club in the bathroom as television portrays it? 

Answer:

Yes people try to join the mile high club. Let me tell you something, those toilets are FILTHY. Absolute FILTH. People shit in the sinks.

Moving on, I caught a lesbian couple in the toilets we had to get three crew to bang open the door and make them come out. She responded with “We were trying to piss”

A crew was fired for getting drunk while she was a passenger flying somewhere and joining a gentleman in the lavatory

A woman had TWO men going at it on a flight from Manchester. Crew opened the door on them and the female tried to assault the crew. When the men went to their connecting flight they were arrested. Not sure what happened to them!

_______________________________

Question:

Since you fly so much, do you happen to have any sexual urges while in a different country? Do you get off to hooking up with passengers or do you go somewhere to get some?

Where do you get your fix for sex while flying from country to country? 

Answer:

Yep! I um see friends in outstations. I have had some encounters in Hong Kong and I have a few ‘friends’ in Dubai. It’s really hard and you get really lonely so you look for any guy to meet you after flights. All the crew sleep with each other in outstation. It’s a big problem, the cabin crew are desperate to sleep with pilots and senior crew. You have crew call you in the middle of the night in your room, especially pilots!

“The First Person To Live To 150 Years Has Probably Already Been Born”

December 2, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The Financial Times published its “Best Books of 2012“ list today. The contrarian libertarian Peter Thiel chose Sonia Arrison’s 100 Plus, a volume about the longevity boom that’s likely in our near future. The book asserts that “the first person to live to 150 years has probably already been born.” Thiel’s blurb:

“As our parents and grandparents live longer lives, they also contend with diseases and indignities. Many question whether we should want to live longer, to say nothing of for ever. In 100 Plus (Basic Books), Sonia Arrison answers definitively: longer lives and healthier lives are the same goal. The greatest threat to our quality of life in old age comes from complacent acceptance of the inevitability of decay; if you think something will break down anyway, why bother fixing it? Arrison demolishes every argument for fatalism.”

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“A Shifter Would Tempt A Victim Into Joining”

December 2, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ben Schott has a really fun piece in the New York Times about the “Shifters,” a mysterious pyramid scheme that spread virally among Flappers in that decidedly pre-Internet year of 1922. It promised “something for nothing,” but worked inversely to that credo as all pyramid schemes do. An excerpt:

“By mid-March, the press was reporting who it thought the Shifters were and what it guessed they were up to — though the picture is fragmented and contradictory.

For example, The Providence Evening Tribune asserted that “the fad started at Hanover in the room of an ingenious minded Dartmouth student of psychology,” whereas The News Sentinel blamed ‘Boston high school debutantes,’ and The Pittsburgh Press blamed high school students in New York.

What is clear is that the Shifters had no structure, no leader and no politics — other than an apparent sympathy with another nebulous group of convention-defying jazz-age women: the Flappers. (The Shifters were often classified as a subspecies of Flapper.)

Central to the Shifters’ rapid growth was a pyramid scheme of enrollment and enrichment that was encapsulated by the Shifter motto,’Get something for nothing.’

A Shifter would tempt a victim into joining, swear her to secrecy, make her pledge to ‘be a good fellow’ and demand an initiation fee of anything from 5 cents to $6. The newly minted Shifter was then dismissed to find fresh victims and make good her investment.

According to The Border Cities Star, ‘down in New York one stenog. cleaned out 1,200 persons in the Woolworth building offices during her membership campaign, and naturally collected 1,200 dollars.'”

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Aimee Semple McPherson, Spreading Cheer (1935)

November 30, 2012 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

A lot of twentieth-century America was written into the life of Aimee Semple McPherson, the evangelist who went from backwater tent revivals to Los Angeles megachurch media maven in short shrift. She was a feminine icon, progressive on matters of race before her country was, deeply charitable and in possession of a genius for broadcasting. She also had the type of sizable public missteps you would expect from a larger-than-life figure.

In the above classic photograph from the Los Angeles Daily News, the evangelist, left, prepares holiday baskets in a pantry. From H.L. Mencken’s 1930 writing about her in the American Mercury:

“For years she toured the Bible Belt in a Ford, haranguing the morons nightly, under canvas. It was a depressing life, and its usufructs were scarcely more than three meals a day. Often, indeed, there was too little money to buy them, and she had to depend upon the charity of the pious. She was attracted to Los Angeles, it appears, by the climate. The Bible Belt was sending a steady stream of its rheumatic mortgage sharks in that direction, and she simply followed. The result, as everyone knows, was a swift and roaring success. The town has more morons in it than the whole State of Mississippi, and thousands of them had nothing to do save gape at the movie dignitaries and go to revivals.

Aimée piped a tune that struck their fancy and in a short while she was as massive a local figure as Sid Grauman or the Rev. Bob Shuler. In five years she had a plant almost as big as that of Henry Ford, with an auditorium seating 5300 customers, a huge Bible School, a radio broadcasting station, a flourishing publishing house, three brass bands, three choirs, two orchestras and six quartettes. She is today the most prosperous ecclesiastic in America and her annual net takings exceed those of Bishop Manning.

But, as I have said, I doubt that she is happy in the homely secular sense, though the grace of God is undoubtedly in her. I detect a far-away look in her eye, an I detect a heavy heart in her book, despite its smooth, glad air of a Y. M. C. A. secretary. Certainly the attempt to jail her on perjury, a year ago, left some scars on her.

Connoisseurs will recall the outlines of the case: she alleged that she had been kidnapped, and the Los Angeles police alleged that she had been on a protracted week-end party with one of her male employees. She won in the end, but only after a long and nerve-wracking trial, in the course of which she had plenty of chance to observe that Moronia could punish as well as applaud. The trial, indeed, was an orgy typical of the half-fabulous California courts. The very officers of justice denounced her riotously in the Hearst papers while it was in progress, and she says herself that she was almost asphyxiated by the smoke of photographers’ flash-lights in the courtroom.”

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“The Literacy Of College-Educated Citizens Declined Between 1992 And 2003”

November 30, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

America is still rich beyond compare thanks to our preeminence in science, but there are cracks in the foundation. Our infrastructure is weakening, our infant-mortality rate is exasperating and our higher-education system, though still one of our great strengths, has reached the point of diminishing returns.

It used to be that the unprepared didn’t make the grade, but the democratization of higher education now means using the bloated tuition costs of lesser students to pay for the work of those with higher aptitudes. I believe we’re getting smarter in many ways, but not in the things colleges traditionally teach. From a report about American universities in the Economist:

“In 1962 one cent of every dollar spent in America went on higher education; today this figure has tripled. Yet despite spending a greater proportion of its GDP on universities than any other country, America has only the 15th-largest proportion of young people with a university education. Wherever the money is coming from, and however it is being spent, the root of the crisis in higher education (and the evidence that investment in universities may amount to a bubble) comes down to the fact that additional value has not been created to match this extra spending. Indeed, evidence from declines in the quality of students and graduates suggests that a degree may now mean less than it once did.

For example, a federal survey showed that the literacy of college-educated citizens declined between 1992 and 2003. Only a quarter were deemed proficient, defined as ‘using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.’ Almost a third of students these days do not take any courses that involve more than 40 pages of reading over an entire term. Moreover, students are spending measurably less time studying and more on recreation. ‘Workload management,’ however, is studied with enthusiasm—students share online tips about ‘blow off’ classes (those which can be avoided with no damage to grades) and which teachers are the easiest-going.”

“The Device Is A Remarkable Engineering Feat”

November 29, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Predictive text, the prompts you get on Google or a smartphone when you begin typing a word, is  thought of as an Information Age innovation, but it actually has its roots in the Chinese typewriter. From at Max McClure at Stanford’s site:

“For most Americans, predictive text is something cell phones do. From the T9 system on clamshell phones to autocomplete on smartphones, tough-to-type-on cell phones have been natural candidates for this kind of labor-saving input technology.

But in China, predictive text has been around far longer – since Mao Zedong was in power more than 50 years ago, in fact.

Stanford history Associate Professor Thomas Mullaney is an expert – virtually the only expert – on the Chinese typewriter. Though viewed as little more than a joke in the West, the device is a remarkable engineering feat.

Chinese typewriters have no keys. Instead, the typist moves a character-selection lever over a tray bed filled with metal character slugs. The typist then presses a type bar, and the lever picks up the character, inks it, types it and returns it to its place.

But with upward of 2,500 characters crammed into the tray bed, simply locating the correct one could be a daunting task for early Chinese typists. And when they rearranged the tray bed to improve their typing speeds, these workers happened to anticipate many of the advances of modern text prediction software.

‘Input issues that we’re dealing with now are questions that China was thinking about in the mid-20th century,’ said Mullaney.”

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“People Did Suggest The Idea That String Theory Might Be Different”

November 29, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

String Theory, the idea that all the forces in nature can be explained in one unified theory, is something I have trouble accepting. I believe in loose ends, dead ends and split ends. But I could be very, very wrong. From a Browser Five Books Q&A with Steven Gubser on the topic, a passage in which he addresses what’s probably the main criticism of the field: 

“Question:

One problem with string theory that I’ve heard is that there is not just one string theory, there are a number that coexist, rendering the predictive power of string theory, its ability to explain physical phenomena, void. Is that a valid criticism?

Steven Gubser:

Yes and no. It’s certainly oft-repeated. One quick comeback would be to say quantum field theory is like that too, but nobody complains about it. This is the theory that Richard Feynman won his Nobel Prize for, where you are describing the quantum mechanics of relativistic particles. And if you just start with that as your goal you get a wonderfully broad and inclusive structure, which can deal with all sorts of things – it can deal with electrons, protons, neutrons and so on and so forth. But by itself, it only has so much information and you have to supplement quantum field theory with a lot of specific knowledge of physics before you’re going to get anything out of it. The quick comeback would be to say, it’s always like that – whenever you have a theoretical framework it has always been the case that you have to include facts about the world. It’s true that historically, in the 1980s, people did suggest the idea that string theory might be different. That maybe in string theory, you wouldn’t have to add in facts about the world before you could get something out of the theory; you could just sit down and calculate everything. I never said that. I wasn’t working in string theory at the time. I wouldn’t have expected it, and it didn’t happen, but what else is new? It’s true of all theories that we know – so string theory is no better and no worse in that regard.

Where I really do worry is the extent to which string theory can be connected to modern experiment. It’s one thing to say that you have to put in facts about the world before you can get anything out, but a far greater worry is, once you put in facts about the world, what do you get? So what I’m working on right now is that very question. What can you get out about modern physics, once you are willing to use string theory as a calculational tool rather than saying it’s going to be just a theory which predicts everything from scratch? Instead you say, I’m going to use this set of ideas to understand experiments. In fact there have been a number of calculations in the past five to seven years, where some strikingly successful numerical predictions have come out of string theory.”

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“At Least 23 Other People Built Prototype Light Bulbs Before Edison”

November 28, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

So-called job creators are full of crap and actual creators may even be overrated. If you get a great idea, there’s a good chance that someone else may be onto the same thing. The opening of “Are Inventions Inevitable?” at the Long Nose:

“Thomas Edison invented the light bulb in 1879. What if he had never been born, Would we still have light bulbs? And would they still have been invented in 1879? It turns out that this is not just a philosophical question and the answer is yes, the light bulb would have been invented at roughly the same time. We know this because at least 23 other people built prototype light bulbs before Edison, including two groups who filed patents and fought legal battles with him over the rights (Sawyer and Mann in the U.S. and Swan in England).

This is not a strange coincidence that happened with electric lighting, it is the norm in both technological invention and scientific and mathematical discovery. Newton and Leibniz independently invented calculus, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both filed a patent for the telephone on the same day — within three hours of each other — and sunspots were simultaneously discovered by four scientists living in four different countries.”

“I Was Born Ten Years Before Michael Jackson. I Remember That Distinctly.”

November 28, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A seemingly homeless man woke up outside of a Georgia Burger King in 2004, beaten badly and without a memory. Since then, no amount of research or attempts to recollect have been able to uncover his identity. Now 64, Benjamin Kyle, as he is called these days, is still officially listed as “missing,” as only his whereabouts are known. He is a stranger to all–including himself. Kyle just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

_______________________________

Question:

Were there other things you forgot besides your identity that you had to relearn?

Answer: 

I’m not sure I had to re learn anything. It seems like whenever i need to do something, if i’ve done it before, I remember. When I got in a car I knew how to drive a car.

I had a dream where I repaired a restaurant stove. And remembered how to do it.

_______________________________

Question:

How do you know how old you are?

Answer:

I was born ten years before Michael Jackson. I remember that distinctly.

_______________________________

Question: 

What are your life goals – career, family, etc?

Answer:

Oh long term, I’m planning on dying. Hell, I’m 64. I plan on working until im dying. There will be no retirement or credit.

_______________________________

Question: 

Are you a time traveller?

Answer:

Everyone is a time traveler. They’re born, they live, and they die.

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“It Will No Longer Be Optional For Machines To Have Ethical Systems”

November 28, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Excellent post by psychologist Gary Marcus at the New Yorker site about the soul, so to speak, of machines, as driverless cars are poised to become the first contraptions to force the issue of AI ethical systems. The opening:

“Google’s driver-less cars are already street-legal in three states, California, Florida, and Nevada, and some day similar devices may not just be possible but mandatory. Eventually (though not yet) automated vehicles will be able to drive better, and more safely than you can; no drinking, no distraction, better reflexes, and better awareness (via networking) of other vehicles. Within two or three decades the difference between automated driving and human driving will be so great you may not be legally allowed to drive your own car, and even if you are allowed, it would be immoral of you to drive, because the risk of you hurting yourself or another person will be far greater than if you allowed a machine to do the work.

That moment will be significant not just because it will signal the end of one more human niche, but because it will signal the beginning of another: the era in which it will no longer be optional for machines to have ethical systems. Your car is speeding along a bridge at fifty miles per hour when errant school bus carrying forty innocent children crosses its path. Should your car swerve, possibly risking the life of its owner (you), in order to save the children, or keep going, putting all forty kids at risk? If the decision must be made in milliseconds, the computer will have to make the call.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“In Whatever Form, Either Intelligence Or Stupidity, This Collective Behavior Has Existed For A Long Time”

November 28, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

There’s something about the hive mind that’s fascinating, the way large swaths of people can come to an often tacit consensus of things, the way we swarm to what we believe is the light. In the Information Age, we think of how Google and Wikipedia depend on the wisdom of the crowds to assemble unparalleled knowledge, but stupidity, too, can be the product of many. At Edge, MIT’s Professor Thomas Malone considers the power of collective thinking. An excerpt:

“Pretty much everything I’m doing now falls under the broad umbrella that I’d call collective intelligence. What does collective intelligence mean? It’s important to realize that intelligence is not just something that happens inside individual brains. It also arises with groups of individuals. In fact, I’d define collective intelligence as groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent. By that definition, of course, collective intelligence has been around for a very long time. Families, companies, countries, and armies: those are all examples of groups of people working together in ways that at least sometimes seem intelligent.

It’s also possible for groups of people to work together in ways that seem pretty stupid, and I think collective stupidity is just as possible as collective intelligence. Part of what I want to understand and part of what the people I’m working with want to understand is what are the conditions that lead to collective intelligence rather than collective stupidity. But in whatever form, either intelligence or stupidity, this collective behavior has existed for a long time.

What’s new, though, is a new kind of collective intelligence enabled by the Internet. Think of Google, for instance, where millions of people all over the world create web pages, and link those web pages to each other. Then all that knowledge is harvested by the Google technology so that when you type a question in the Google search bar the answers you get often seem amazingly intelligent, at least by some definition of the word ‘intelligence.’

Or think of Wikipedia, where thousands of people all over the world have collectively created a very large and amazingly high quality intellectual product with almost no centralized control. And by the way, without even being paid. I think these examples of things like Google and Wikipedia are not the end of the story. I think they’re just barely the beginning of the story. We’re likely to see lots more examples of Internet-enabled collective intelligence—and other kinds of collective intelligence as well—over the coming decades.”

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“The Country Will Literally Rise Above Any Other”

November 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The questions regarding contemporary China are fairly simple: Will it be merely an imitator or develop into an originator? Will it just appropriate or actually innovate? I’ve put up posts before about China’s Broad Sustainable Building Corporation, which is leading the way in erecting quick and clean high-rises. From Kathryn Blaze Carlson’s rather breathless National Post article about Broad’s latest and greatest project and China’s so-called tech prowess, which is far from a proven commodity:

“When Pierre Beaudet was told about a Chinese corporation’s plans to build the world’s tallest building in record speed — 2,749 soaring feet in just 90 days — the global studies professor marvelled Thursday: ‘Ah. There’s nothing they can’t do.’

Having already revolutionized construction by literally stacking factory-made modules like Lego blocks, Broad Sustainable Building Corporation is sending the world a message — not just about itself, but also about its home country: Make no mistake, China is an epicentre of technological progress and a nation worthy of awe.

‘It’s a symbol of their new superiority,’ said Takashi Fujitani, the director of Asia Pacific studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs’ Asian Institute in Toronto. ‘Modernity today is really about speed in a lot of ways, so being at the top of the world is about being able to do things fast.’

Decades ago, the United States and Russia flexed their muscles in a politically charged race to the moon; today, China is racing for the clouds. The phrase ‘the rise of China’ is uttered so often it is almost cliched, but if Broad is successful, the country will literally rise above any other.”

“There Was Nothing Noble About What We Did”

November 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

We’re all prone to arguing our “side” rather than the facts and changing our opinions if our so-called enemies accept them. You see it in the minutiae of day-to-day life and you see it writ large in national policy. When President Obama relented and decided to use a health-care reform idea from the conservative Heritage Foundation (individual mandates), his counterparts branded the idea as a tool of socialism. When they got something they wanted they didn’t want it anymore. Emotion and narrative were more important than fact.

Marvin Miller, the first Major League Baseball Players Association union leader, who just passed away at 95, was no stranger to this phenomenon. When he went to court to fight for the players’ right to enjoy the same basic employment freedoms as any other American worker, team owners went ballistic. They had been in control of the game since the start, and they weren’t worried about what was right morally or for business; they just wanted to maintain that upper hand. Even if that was bad for the bottom line. Free agency and player movement, which Miller eventually won, grew fan interest, lifted attendance and TV ratings, and transformed the owners from millionaires into billionaires (or close to it). If the owners had been paying attention to facts instead of fighting for “their side,” they might have noticed this sooner.

There will be stories, no doubt, about how every modern player should attend Miller’s funeral, how they all owe him a debt. And that’s true. But every owner should be there as well. He did even more for them, though they fought him every step of the way. From Jeff Passan’s Yahoo! Sports piece about Miller’s passing:

“Over his 17 years as leader of the Major League Baseball Players Association, Miller instilled confidence in what was a fractured group of players and fear in ownership, preaching the strength of unity. During his tenure through 1982, Miller oversaw MLB’s first collective-bargaining agreement, gained free agency for players, weathered three strikes and two lockouts, and positioned the players to reap the benefits they do today, when the average major league salary is more than $3.4 million.

‘There was nothing noble about what we did,’ Miller said in a May interview with Yahoo! Sports. ‘We did what was right. That was always at the heart of it.’

Baseball’s era of labor discord has evolved into one of peace that’s now deep into its second decade.”

 

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“How Can We Be Expected To Imagine The Death Of A City?”

November 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

New York City residents have always joked, with gleeful cruelty, that California would one day sink into the ocean. But who’s all wet now? In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, James Atlas wonders in the New York Times if our city is ultimately to be submerged. An excerpt:

“There had been warnings. In 2009, the New York City Panel on Climate Change issued a prophetic report. ‘In the coming decades, our coastal city will most likely face more rapidly rising sea levels and warmer temperatures, as well as potentially more droughts and floods, which will all have impacts on New York City’s critical infrastructure,’ said William Solecki, a geographer at Hunter College and a member of the panel. But what good are warnings? Intelligence agents received advance word that terrorists were hoping to hijack commercial jets. Who listened? (Not George W. Bush.) If we can’t imagine our own deaths, as Freud insisted, how can we be expected to imagine the death of a city?

History is a series of random events organized in a seemingly sensible order. We experience it as chronology, with ourselves as the end point — not the end point, but as the culmination of events that leads to the very moment in which we happen to live. ‘Historical events might be unique, and given pattern by an end,’ the critic Frank Kermode proposed in The Sense of an Ending, his classic work on literary narrative, ‘yet there are perpetuities which defy both the uniqueness and the end.’ What he’s saying (I think) is that there is no pattern. Flux is all.

Last month’s ‘weather event’ should have taught us that. Whether in 50 or 100 or 200 years, there’s a good chance that New York City will sink beneath the sea. But if there are no patterns, it means that nothing is inevitable either. History offers less dire scenarios: the city could move to another island, the way Torcello was moved to Venice, stone by stone, after the lagoon turned into a swamp and its citizens succumbed to a plague of malaria. The city managed to survive, if not where it had begun. Perhaps the day will come when skyscrapers rise out of downtown Scarsdale.”

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“This Machine Would Be The ‘Last Invention’ That Mankind Will Ever Make”

November 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

While I’m fully aware that humanity can off itself in any number of ways–climate change seems most prominent right now–I don’t think the Singularity will be the end of us. Carbon and silicon can synthesize quite nicely. But some people argue persuasively that the rise of the latter means doom for the former. Machines, meanwhile, seem suspiciously unconcerned. From “Humanity’s Last Invention and Our Uncertain Future” at the University of Cambridge site:

“In 1965, Irving John ‘Jack’ Good sat down and wrote a paper for New Scientist called Speculations concerning the first ultra-intelligent machine. Good, a Cambridge-trained mathematician, Bletchley Park cryptographer, pioneering computer scientist and friend of Alan Turing, wrote that in the near future an ultra-intelligent machine would be built.

This machine, he continued, would be the ‘last invention’ that mankind will ever make, leading to an ‘intelligence explosion’ – an exponential increase in self-generating machine intelligence. For Good, who went on to advise Stanley Kubrick on 2001: a Space Odyssey, the ‘survival of man’ depended on the construction of this ultra-intelligent machine.

Fast forward almost 50 years and the world looks very different. Computers dominate modern life across vast swathes of the planet, underpinning key functions of global governance and economics, increasing precision in healthcare, monitoring identity and facilitating most forms of communication – from the paradigm shifting to the most personally intimate. Technology advances for the most part unchecked and unabated.

While few would deny the benefits humanity has received as a result of its engineering genius – from longer life to global networks – some are starting to question whether the acceleration of human technologies will result in the survival of man, as Good contended, or if in fact this is the very thing that will end us.”

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