Excerpts

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“Although They Promise Nature, They Are Necessarily Unnatural”

November 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I think of modern zoos as something far different from their sickening antecedents which displayed animals–even humans–in in awful conditions with no regard to the creatures. And they are far better–though that doesn’t mean the tension between our needs and the subject’s has disappeared. In his Aeon essay on the topic, Stephen Cave uses the death of a polar bear named Knut as a springboard. An excerpt:

“This is the paradox of the modern zoo: although they promise nature, they are necessarily unnatural. We visit them in search of the unpredictable, the vital — the sublime that cannot be found in the clockwork world we have built for ourselves. Yet they are made by humans, with all the artifice, technology and tools at our disposal. The lion and the zebra in the zoo will never meet in mortal struggle as they do daily on the Serengeti, but instead each is carefully contained, their needs met by plans, plumbing, and delivery vans.

Zoos have redefined their mission since the days of the menagerie, when people were content to show animals as spectacles and subjugates. Today, keeping wild animals behind bars demands justification beyond amazing or amusing us, and this is made on three grounds: research, education, and conservation. Each of these depends upon an idea of nature out there, beyond the city limits — a nature to be researched and understood; a nature about which we can and should be educated; and a nature that zoos want to help us conserve.”

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“Is Drug Addiction Actually Part Of Our Natural Evolution As A Species?”

November 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

I always think people behave insanely, but then I recall casual conversations I’ve had with pharmaceutical-industry employees. So many of us are on prescription medicines, especially Oxycodone and Vicodin and other painkillers. More than we might suppose. Then I’m surprised that we don’t act even more off-the-wall. Have we silently become the walking dead, or does the impulse to dose, despite the short-term ramifications, augur well for the future of human enhancement? The opening of “Is Drug Addiction Part of Human Evolution?” Sasha Wolfe’s h+ essay about the hidden meaning of the dosages we consume:

“The human mind may be a wondrous and expansive thing that is constantly learning and adapting itself to the changing universe that surrounds us. Nonetheless human beings have a habit of becoming unsatisfied with our surroundings. Dealing with mental anguish and boredom has always been one of our greatest challenges as a species. To meet these challenges many of us have resorted to the use of recreational drugs in an effort to either expand our minds, embrace new experiences or simply to nullify the pain that life has inflicted upon us. Since the time of the ancient Egyptians mankind has sought out, cultivated and harvested a wide variety of recreational drugs to satisfy our cravings, alleviate our shortcomings and nullify our insecurities. The more advanced we evolve as a species the more sophisticated and widespread our involvement in the drug culture. But if we are to believe the teachings of Darwin about evolution, the strongest of the species will always thrive and dominate over the weaker of the species. Hence, given the proliferation of drug use with the technological advancement of our society, we must ask ourselves some fundamental questions. Is the use of recreational drugs just part of the human condition, and to that end is drug addiction actually part of our natural evolution as a species?”

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“He Liked White Men Can’t Jump”

November 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Reddit has a new Ask Me Anything with Stanley Kubrick’s daughter Katharina and grandson Joe. If you read the blog regularly, you probably know I’m a little obsessed with Kubrick, whom I rate above all other filmmakers, even Wilder, Buñuel and Godard. A few exchanges with Katharina follow.

________________________

Question:

Katharina, I don’t know how old you are, so I’m not sure if this is relevant or not. But what was your father like during filming as opposed in between films? Did he seem more stressed, or did he ever complain about so and so not being able to nail a take? Or was he pretty much always the same at home?

Also, any cool stories of you being on set with him or anything like that?

Katharina:

I’m nearly 59. Between films he did a lot of reading, caught up with viewing the videos of American football games that his sister used to send him. He was always working on improving print qualities, hiring directors to shoot the voice overs for films that had to be dubbed and checking on how his films were doing in other parts of the world. He never stopped tending his babies even once they were out in the world.

________________________

Question:

What were Stanley’s favorite movies? (Aside from his own) 

Katharina:

He loved films. He admired the work of Bergman, Tarkovsky, Bunuel, Spike Lee, Speilberg, the list is long and varied.

Question:

I love the idea of Stanley Kubrick watching Do the Right Thing or She’s Gotta Have It. 

Katharina:

He liked White Men Can’t Jump. It was on TV and I asked him if I should watch it, and he said, “yeah that’s a good movie, you’ll enjoy it.”

________________________

Question: 

What are your favorite memories of Stanley? What was he like around the house?

Katharina:

He was just a Dad who liked making tuna sandwiches and watching sport on TV. He was always working, and we learned a lot being around him.

••••••••••

Two recent Kubrick posts:

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“As Bad Writers Go, He Took The Cake”

November 13, 2012 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

Gore Vidal regularly diminished other writers-often really talented ones–as a means of elevating himself. It’s an immature and cheap way of making yourself seem superior. (It’s the same thing that Chevy Chase, that miserable prick, does with fellow comedians). In a 2006 interview conducted by Jon Wiener that’s published at Los Angeles Review of Books, Vidal used this tactic on Truman Capote and Thomas Pynchon, two writers who were his betters and who turned out works that will outlast anything he did. Not even close. An excerpt:

“Jon Wiener: 

One of the things they do at community colleges is teach writing. I think there are programs everywhere now. At my school, U.C. Irvine, we have an undergraduate major called ‘Literary Journalism.’ It started only a couple of years ago, but it already has over 200 majors, and if there are 200 at Irvine, there is a similar number at a hundred other schools. This means hundreds of thousands of students are studying to be writers. What do you make of this?

Gore Vidal: 

We have Truman Capote to thank for that. As bad writers go, he took the cake. So bad was he, you know, he created a whole new art form: the nonfiction novel. He had never heard of a tautology, he had never heard of a contradiction. His social life was busy. To have classes in fiction — that really is hopeful, isn’t it. People can go to school and bring in physics. The genius of Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow: he had to take all of his first year courses at, what was it, Cornell? One of his teachers was Nabokov. And everything he had in his first year’s physics went in to Gravity’s Rainbow. Whether it fit in or not, it just went in there. That’s one way of doing it.”

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“We’ve Had Enough Of This Dumbed-Down Conservatism”

November 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Bobby Jindal: Dumber than a box of hammers. (Image by Gage Skidmore.)

Watching the GOP sift through the wreckage of election night is a case study in selective amnesia. Karl Rove, whose party aggressively tried to suppress minority votes, accuses President Obama of voter suppression for running successful political ads. Joe Scarborough, a member of the delusional conservative media, is angry at the delusional conservative media. Stunningly, Newt Gingrich is one of the very few to show utter humility. Amazements never cease.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal has gotten into the act, encouraging the Republican Party to stop being “stupid.” But this posture doesn’t cohere with some of his own positions as a creationist and supporter of intelligent design. Three excerpts follow.

From Politico: “‘It is no secret we had a number of Republicans damage our brand this year with offensive, bizarre comments — enough of that,’ Jindal said. ‘It’s not going to be the last time anyone says something stupid within our party, but it can’t be tolerated within our party. We’ve also had enough of this dumbed-down conservatism. We need to stop being simplistic, we need to trust the intelligence of the American people and we need to stop insulting the intelligence of the voters.'”

From Slate, 2012: “Jindal has an elite résumé. He was a biology major at my school, Brown University, and a Rhodes scholar. He knows the science, or at least he ought to. But in his rise to prominence in Louisiana, he made a bargain with the religious right and compromised science and science education for the children of his state. In fact, Jindal’s actions at one point persuaded leading scientific organizations, including the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology, to cross New Orleans off their list of future meeting sites.”

From the New Orleans Times-Picayune, 2012: “Vouchers are supposed to rescue students from underperforming public schools and give them access to superior instruction. That will not always happen, it being the height of naivete to assume that private schools are necessarily better. But, thanks to Zack Kopplin, we know for certain that at least 19 of the schools receiving a public subsidy will deliver precisely the opposite of the advertised effect. Their graduates will be treated by employers and college administrators as pariahs.

That vouchers have led to this is hardly surprising. They are Gov. Bobby Jindal’s educational panacea, and he has always supported creationism.”

JC: Don’t take everything so literally, people.

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“If You Can Link The Sound Of A Word To A Picture Representing Its Meaning, It’ll Be Far More Memorable”

November 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’ve always assumed there’s been a connection between my lack of musical ability and difficulty learning foreign languages–I just don’t have the ear for it. Joshua Foer, who is obsessed with memory, claims to not be very good at languages, either. Yet he was able to converse in an obscure tongue after a very short course of study thanks to a particular method of mnemonics. From his new article in the Guardian:

“I have never been particularly good with languages. Despite a dozen years of Hebrew school and a lifetime of praying in the language, I’m ashamed to admit that I still can’t read an Israeli newspaper. Besides English, the only language I speak with any degree of fluency is Spanish, and that came only after five years of intense classroom study and more than half a dozen trips to Latin America. Still, I was determined to master Lingala before leaving for the Congo. And I had just under two and a half months to do it. When I asked Ed if he thought it would be possible to learn an entire language in such a minuscule amount of time using Memrise, his response was matter-of-fact: ‘It’ll be a cinch.’

Memrise takes advantage of a couple of basic, well-established principles. The first is what’s known as elaborative encoding. The more context and meaning you can attach to a piece of information, the likelier it is that you’ll be able to fish it out of your memory at some point in the future. And the more effort you put into creating the memory, the more durable it will be. One of the best ways to elaborate a memory is to try visually to imagine it in your mind’s eye. If you can link the sound of a word to a picture representing its meaning, it’ll be far more memorable than simply learning the word by rote.” (Thanks Browser.)

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Sculptor Auguste Rodin, Mid-Career (1893)

November 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Photography | Permalink

Auguste Rodin, 1893, the year his art caused controversy and failed to sell at Chicago’s World Fair.

On Auguste Rodin’s 172nd birthday, I present to you this classic photograph of the sculptor, which was taken in 1893 by Felix Nadar. By this point, The Thinker was complete and the artist’s reputation secure. Rodin died 24 years after this picture was taken at age 77. In 1923, Rodin’s secretary published a book alleging that the great artist died from a lack of heat in his home, his friends and nation having turned their backs on him. In its first month of existence in March of 1923, Time magazine ran an article (subscription only) about the controversy. An excerpt:

“Paris has been deeply shocked by a report of the circumstances of the death of the great Impressionist sculptor, Auguste Rodin.

A book by Mile. Tirel, Rodin’s secretary, states definitely that Rodin died of cold, neglected by friends and officials of the state, while his sculptures, which he had given to the nation, were kept warmly housed in a centrally heated museum at public expense. His case was so desperate that he asked to be permitted to have a room in the museum—the Hotel Biron, formerly his own studio. The official in charge of the museum refused. Other officials and friends promised coal but never sent it, though his situation at Meudon, ill, and freezing to death, was apparently well known to all of them.

No one in a position to know the facts has denied Mile. Tirel’s charges. The book has the sanction of Rodin’s son.”

•••••••••

Rodin, through Sacha’s Guitry’s eyes:

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“We Are Greater Than The Sum Of Our Individual Ambitions”

November 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

“Obama invoked average Americans living out this ethos of mutual responsibility.” (Image by David Shankbone.)

Where are the “job creators” right now? Probably eating freedom fries. As the language of manipulation has been drowned out by machines crunching raw data, it’s good to remember that some people in addition to Nate Silver were calling bullshit on the GOP narratives leading up to Election Day. One was New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait, who called out the wishful thinking being sold in earnest daily by Joe Scarborough and others. (It’s very amusing that Scarborough is now angrily calling out the lies of the conservative media, considering he was a big part of the problem.) Chait’s well-tuned ears also caught the gist of Obama’s victory speech which  might have been lost in the wee hours of the morning. From his new article, “We Just Had a Class War: And One Side Won“:

“Obama then proceeded to define the American idea in a way that excludes the makers-versus-takers conception of individual responsibility propounded by Paul Ryan and the tea party. Since Obama took office, angry men in Colonial garb or on Fox News have harped on ‘American exceptionalism,’ which boils our national virtue down to the freedom from having to subsidize some other sap’s health insurance. Obama turned this on its head. ‘What makes America exceptional,’ he announced, ‘are the bonds that hold together the most diverse nation on Earth. The belief that our destiny is shared; that this country only works when we accept certain obligations to one another and to future generations.’ Obama invoked average Americans living out this ethos of mutual responsibility (such as a ‘family business whose owners would rather cut their own pay than lay off their neighbors,’ the example of which stands at odds with the corporate ethos of a certain ­Boston-based private-equity executive). And even the line about red states and blue states began with the following statement: ‘We are greater than the sum of our individual ambitions.’

Presumably more was at work here than mere uplift. The president was establishing the meaning of his victory.”

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“[It’s] A Breakthrough That Could Be The Beginnings Of A New Kind Of Robot Skin”

November 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Via Clay Dillow at PopSci, a report about the development of artificial human skin that repairs itself at room temperature:

“Before we can construct the realistic humanoid robots that populate our most vivid sci-fi-driven dreams, there are a lot of human systems that researchers are going to have to emulate synthetically. Not the least challenging is human skin; filled with nerve endings and able to heal itself over time, our skin serves as both a massive sensory system and a barrier between our innards and the outside world. Now, an interdisciplinary team of Stanford researchers has created the first synthetic material that is both self-healing at room temperature and sensitive to touch–a breakthrough that could be the beginnings of a new kind of robot skin (and in the meantime enjoy much more practical applications like enhanced prosthetics).”

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“In The Future We Will Need To Change Our Bodies And Brains”

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

The opening of “Will Robots Inherit the Earth?” Marvin Minsky’s 1994 Scientific American article about the end of carbon’s dominance:

“Everyone wants wisdom and wealth. Nevertheless, our health often gives out before we achieve them. To lengthen our lives, and improve our minds, in the future we will need to change our bodies and brains. To that end, we first must consider how normal Darwinian evolution brought us to where we are. Then we must imagine ways in which future replacements for worn body parts might solve most problems of failing health. We must then invent strategies to augment our brains and gain greater wisdom. Eventually we will entirely replace our brains — using nanotechnology. Once delivered from the limitations of biology, we will be able to decide the length of our lives–with the option of immortality — and choose among other, unimagined capabilities as well.

In such a future, attaining wealth will not be a problem; the trouble will be in controlling it. Obviously, such changes are difficult to envision, and many thinkers still argue that these advances are impossible–particularly in the domain of artificial intelligence. But the sciences needed to enact this transition are already in the making, and it is time to consider what this new world will be like.

Such a future cannot be realized through biology.”

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“The Notes That Do Survive Have Done So Thanks To ‘Long Periods Of Benign Neglect'”

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

Miami has the greatest concentration of Art-Deco architecture of any city (though not the most, overall) because it was so unattractive a place to builders for for so long. It was left to debilitate, though it turned out to be surprisingly benign neglect. No one wanting to build there for decades allowed for the survival of those gorgeous old buildings that had passed into disrepair. They otherwise most certainly would have been razed and replaced with lesser structures. By the time Miami was ready to roar back, the citizens realized they possessed unburied treasures. Thus we have modern Miami, an architectural hotspot. Decay–to a point–can be a favor.

Information, like architecture, often requires benign neglect to survive, especially since it’s not always immediately clear what information is most vital. From Sebastian Stockman’s Atlantic article about the history of note-taking:

“Historically, notes were not always well preserved. Pliny the Elder, for instance, took ‘prodigious’ notes, according to the conference’s other co-organizer, Harvard history professor Ann Blair. Pliny would have first made notes on clay tablets before copying them to parchment. But no third copies were made, and we only know that Pliny the Elder was a serious note-taker because Pliny the Younger said so.

The notes that do survive, Blair said, have done so thanks to ‘long periods of benign neglect, combined with crucial moments of careful stewardship’ by various libraries and other institutions. This conference was held in part to highlight such stewardship at many of Harvard’s libraries, and the fact that anyone can now view digitized versions of these annotations here. You can examine high-resolution images of John Hancock’s commonplace book, say, or pages from William James’diary. You might also follow one or more of the guided itineraries through the collections, curated by conference participants and others. (Price’s tour is here; Blair’s is here.)

While there was plenty of fascinating history (Did you know that ‘off the cuff’originally referred not to the practice of extemporaneous speaking, but to a speaker’s surreptitious glance at penciled notes on his starched shirt cuff? Or that Elizabethan-era theater-goers used to crib from plays not the main plot points, but the funniest jokes or the best pick-up lines?), the conference considered the future of note-taking.

Because it does have a future.”

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“The News Is Not That We Are Biased, It’s How Deeply Biased We Are”

November 8, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of Kwame Anthony Appiah’s New York Review of Books piece about Rorschach readings of politics in the age of Obama:

“You know the joke. A psychiatrist shows a patient a series of inkblots. Each time, the patient sees an erotic episode. ‘You seem to be preoccupied with sex,’ the psychiatrist concludes. The patient protests: ‘You’re the one with all those dirty pictures.’ Ask people to read the inkblots of American political life and that result, too, is likely to tell you more about them than it does about what is really going on.

Jamie Barden, a psychologist at Howard University, ran an experiment that demonstrated this very nicely. Take a bunch of students, Republicans and Democrats, and tell them a story like this: a political fund-raiser named Mike has a serious car accident after a drunken fund-raising event. A month later he makes an impassioned appeal against drunk driving on the radio. Now ask them this question: Hypocrite or changed man?

It turned out that people (Democrats and Republicans both) were two and a half times as likely to think Mike was a hypocrite if they were told he belonged to the other party. This experiment only confirms a wide body of work in social psychology demonstrating that we’re biased against people we take to be members of a group that isn’t our own, more biased if we think of them as the opposition. That’s not something most of us needed a psychologist to tell us, of course. The news is not that we are biased, it’s how deeply biased we are.”

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“They Developed A Four-Winged Robot Weighing Less Than One Ounce”

November 8, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

TechJet’s Dragonfly bots, customizable, can spy and photograph. You have been warned. From Discovery:

“TechJet, led by cofounders Jayant Ratti and Emanuel Jones, pictures different Dragonfly versions being used for gaming, dynamic photography, home security and military surveillance. Inspired by the way real dragonflies can fly and hover, they developed a four-winged robot weighing less than one ounce that can do the same.

Each Dragonfly has stereoscopic vision, flight control systems and a camera-ready operating system, according to the company. TechJet will be offering different options for robotics elements such as wings and actuators through its website, depending on what the user wants to do. For example, one version could be made more stable with better endurance for aerial photography.”

“The Display Collects Light To Some Extent…Making It Look Similar To Paper”

November 7, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Japan Display has developed a paper-like, low-power color video display. From Dig Info: “”This display has what’s called a Light Control Layer. When the display simply reflects light as usual, it looks metallic, like a mirror. When we add this layer, the display collects light to some extent, in the direction of the user’s eyes, making it look similar to paper. But the light returns efficiently in the direction of the eyes. By developing this layer, we’ve achieved good color, which couldn’t be done with ordinary digital paper. This display can show video, so we think it’ll lead to new solutions and applications.” (Thanks Next Big Future.)

“In 2002, On A Friday, Larry Page Began To End The Book As We Know It”

November 7, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Data is key, but perhaps not everything should be quantified. The opening of “Literature Is Not Data,” Stephen Marche’s essay at the L.A. Review of Books:

“BIG DATA IS COMING for your books. It’s already come for everything else. All human endeavor has by now generated its own monadic mass of data, and through these vast accumulations of ciphers the robots now endlessly scour for significance much the way cockroaches scour for nutrition in the enormous bat dung piles hiding in Bornean caves. The recent Automate This, a smart book with a stupid title, offers a fascinatingly general look at the new algorithmic culture: 60 percent of trades on the stock market today take place with virtually no human oversight. Artificial intelligence has already changed health care and pop music, baseball, electoral politics, and several aspects of the law. And now, as an afterthought to an afterthought, the algorithms have arrived at literature, like an army which, having conquered Italy, turns its attention to San Marino.

The story of how literature became data in the first place is a story of several, related intellectual failures.

In 2002, on a Friday, Larry Page began to end the book as we know it. Using the 20 percent of his time that Google then allotted to its engineers for personal projects, Page and Vice-President Marissa Mayer developed a machine for turning books into data. The original was a crude plywood affair with simple clamps, a metronome, a scanner, and a blade for cutting the books into sheets. The process took 40 minutes. The first refinement Page developed was a means of digitizing books without cutting off their spines — a gesture of tender-hearted sentimentality towards print. The great disbinding was to be metaphorical rather than literal. A team of Page-supervised engineers developed an infrared camera that took into account the curvature of pages around the spine. They resurrected a long dormant piece of Optical Character Recognition software from Hewlett-Packard and released it to the open-source community for improvements. They then crowd-sourced textual correction at a minimal cost through a brilliant program called reCAPTCHA, which employs an anti-bot service to get users to read and type in words the Optical Character Recognition software can’t recognize. (A miracle of cleverness: everyone who has entered a security identification has also, without knowing it, aided the perfection of the world’s texts.) Soon after, the world’s five largest libraries signed on as partners. And, more or less just like that, literature became data.”

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“The Campaign Guarded What It Believed To Be Its Biggest Institutional Advantage Over Mitt Romney’s Campaign: Its Data”

November 7, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Our society has gone from one that is verbally driven to one that is defined by algorithms, and politics is no exception. There was a time when Newt Gingrich and his ilk felt they could control the power if they could control the language. But it doesn’t work anymore. Data is king now. The opening of “Inside the Secret World Of the Data Crunchers Who Helped Obama Win,” by Michael Scherer at Time:

“In late spring, the backroom number crunchers who powered Barack Obama’s campaign to victory noticed that George Clooney had an almost gravitational tug on West Coast females ages 40 to 49. The women were far and away the single demographic group most likely to hand over cash, for a chance to dine in Hollywood with Clooney — and Obama.

So as they did with all the other data collected, stored and analyzed in the two-year drive for re-election, Obama’s top campaign aides decided to put this insight to use. They sought out an East Coast celebrity who had similar appeal among the same demographic, aiming to replicate the millions of dollars produced by the Clooney contest. ‘We were blessed with an overflowing menu of options, but we chose Sarah Jessica Parker,’ explains a senior campaign adviser. And so the next Dinner with Barack contest was born: a chance to eat at Parker’s West Village brownstone.

For the general public, there was no way to know that the idea for the Parker contest had come from a data-mining discovery about some supporters: affection for contests, small dinners and celebrity. But from the beginning, campaign manager Jim Messina had promised a totally different, metric-driven kind of campaign in which politics was the goal but political instincts might not be the means. ‘We are going to measure every single thing in this campaign,’ he said after taking the job. He hired an analytics department five times as large as that of the 2008 operation, with an official ‘chief scientist’ for the Chicago headquarters named Rayid Ghani, who in a previous life crunched huge data sets to, among other things, maximize the efficiency of supermarket sales promotions.

Exactly what that team of dozens of data crunchers was doing, however, was a closely held secret. ‘They are our nuclear codes,’ campaign spokesman Ben LaBolt would say when asked about the efforts. Around the office, data-mining experiments were given mysterious code names such as Narwhal and Dreamcatcher. The team even worked at a remove from the rest of the campaign staff, setting up shop in a windowless room at the north end of the vast headquarters office. The ‘scientists’ created regular briefings on their work for the President and top aides in the White House’s Roosevelt Room, but public details were in short supply as the campaign guarded what it believed to be its biggest institutional advantage over Mitt Romney’s campaign: its data.”

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“She Suggested Infrequent Shampooing When Staying On A Yacht”

November 6, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the insanity of Hurricane Sandy, I never ran a post about the recent passing of Letitia Baldrige, one of the grand dames of American manners. If you think people are rude today, you should have seen things before Baldrige. She was the one who convinced everybody that when they had violent diarrhea they needed to say “excuse me” before heading to the can to let it rip. Prior to that, people would just run out of the room clutching their fiery anuses while screaming at Jesus. And she strongly suggested you wash after you were done fingering yourself, even if you weren’t going to shake hands with anyone for a couple of hours.

I am a horrible man. Seriously, Baldrige was a lovely person who did her best to make us less cretinous. I personally have a complicated relationship with manners: I think we should behave well but not repress our true emotions. It’s a difficult balance. From her New York Times obituary, written by Anita Gates:

“In the 1970s she established herself as an authority on contemporary etiquette, writing a syndicated newspaper column on the subject and updating Amy Vanderbilt’s Complete Book of Etiquette in 1978, less than four years after Ms. Vanderbilt’s death. Ms. Baldrige’s face soon appeared on the cover of Time magazine, which hailed her as the nation’s social arbiter.

After that, her own name was enough to attract readers, and in 1985 she published Letitia Baldrige’s Complete Guide to Executive Manners, which dealt with behavior in the workplace and outside it. In that book, she declared it acceptable to cut salad with a knife. She recommended that whoever reaches the door first — either man or woman — open it. And she suggested infrequent shampooing when staying on a yacht, to be considerate about conserving water.”

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“There Is Another You, Sitting On An Identical Earth”

November 6, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

If we live in a multiverse and not a universe, then what we’ve long believed to be true is not true. Or at the very least, it’s a small sliver of the truth. From an excellent Aeon article on the topic by Michael Hanlon: 

“The new terrain is so strange that it might be beyond human understanding.

That hasn’t stopped some bold thinkers from trying, of course. One such is Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University in New York. He turned his gaze upon the multiverse in his latest book, The Hidden Reality (2011). According to Greene, it now comes in no fewer than nine ‘flavours’, which, he says, can ‘all work together’.

The simplest version he calls the ‘quilted multiverse’. This arises from the observation that the matter and energy we can see through our most powerful telescopes have a certain density. In fact, they are just dense enough to permit a gravitationally ‘flat’ universe that extends forever, rather than looping back on itself. We know that a repulsive field pervaded spacetime just after the Big Bang: it was what caused everything to fly apart in the way that it did. If that field was large enough, we must conclude that infinite space contains infinite repetitions of the ‘Hubble volume’, the volume of space, matter and energy that is observable from Earth.

If this is correct, there might — indeed, there must — be innumerable dollops of interesting spacetime beyond our observable horizon. There will be enough of these patchwork, or ‘pocket’, universes for every single arrangement of fundamental particles to occur, not just once but an infinite number of times. It is sometimes said that, given a typewriter and enough time, a monkey will eventually come up with Hamlet. Similarly, with a fixed basic repertoire of elementary particles and an infinity of pocket universes, you will come up with everything.

In such a case, we would expect some of these patchwork universes to be identical to this one. There is another you, sitting on an identical Earth, about 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 120 light years away. Other pocket universes will contain entities of almost limitless power and intelligence. If it is allowed by the basic physical laws (which, in this scenario, will be constant across all universes), it must happen. Thus there are unicorns, and thus there are godlike beings. Thus there is a place where your evil twin lives. In an interview I asked Greene if this means there are Narnias out there, Star Trek universes, places where Elvis got a personal trainer and lived to his 90s (as has been suggested by Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York). Places where every conscious being is in perpetual torment. Heavens and hells. Yes, it does, it seems. And does he find this troubling? ‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘Exciting. Well, that’s what I say in this universe, at least.’”

••••••••••

Brian fails to complete his novel in several universes:


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“What The President’s Embrace Gave Christie Was A Grand Identity”

November 5, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Governor Chris Christie of New Jersey, not exactly a favorite of mine because of his economic politics and lapses into rudeness, acted correctly, bravely and resolutely in the face of Hurricane Sandy, putting the interests of Americans before politics. And that’s something Mitt Romney did not do once during the election season. 

Doesn’t Christie realize what party he’s in? For four years, even before his inauguration was complete, President Obama has dealt with an obstructionist opposition that didn’t want to moderate his policies but desired to bring him down. If Obama adopted a conservative idea (e.g., individual mandates), it became a “socialist” policy. And the American people are the ones who’ve paid.

Christie, who has been labeled cynical and egomaniacal by Republicans for his righteous embrace of the President during the crisis, has actually won wide respect from most average Americans. It wasn’t his goal, but he may have earned some votes and certainly earned much respect. About Christie’s calm during the storm, by Benjamin Wallace-Wells in New York:

“Which brings us to the defining gesture of Christie’s political career so far: His embrace, after the storm, of President Obama—a man whom two weeks earlier the governor had called arrogant, wondering, ‘What the hell is he doing asking for another four years?’ Suddenly, they were together, two politicians who double as literary archetypes—the rector and the brawler—looking down over battered amusement parks and swallowed towns, each borrowing the other’s authority and reputation for empathy to enhance his own. The president’s response was ‘outstanding,’ Christie said; Obama ‘ deserves great credit.’ When he was asked on Fox News whether he’d also tour the state with Mitt Romney, the governor dismissed the question as absurd: ‘I’ve got a job to do in New Jersey, and it’s much bigger than presidential politics.’ The reaction was divided between those (mainly Democrats) who viewed his gesture as heroic and those (Republicans and cynics) who detected some tactical play for the White House in 2016 and argued that Christie was nothing but a megalomaniac.

As if heroism and megalomania are not very often the same exact thing. One of the few things that Christie and Obama share is a palpable sense that their political opponents are lesser men, though in Obama this exhibits itself as an airy idealism and in Christie as an all-encompassing disgust. What the president’s embrace gave Christie was a grand identity—a national leader, bigger than politics—that for once matched his own self-image. And so here he was, Chris Christie, guardian of the boardwalk, canceler of Halloween, bard of the sausage-and-pepper stand, raging against the storm, ministering to sorrow, a man in full.”

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“We’re At A Cultural Crossroads, Those Of Us Who Live In Countries Where iPhones And Social Media Mean Something”

November 5, 2012 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

I can’t say that I’ve been the biggest fan of Leos Carax’s films, but my smart little brother Steven Boone has an article in Capital New York about the director’s latest work, the fantasy drama Holy Motors, which has convinced me I need to catch up on it. Boone draws comparison between Carax’s take on the oft-brutal changes of our technological revolution with Chaplin’s meditation on the hardships the Industrial Revolution wrought a century ago. An excerpt:

“We’re at a cultural crossroads, those of us who live in countries where iPhones and social media mean something. We’re leaving behind a whole range of physical products forever, in favor of ones that exist only as data or abstractions. We’re crossing these precarious bridges on faith, or just resignation to the tools set before us as we scramble to survive.

What are we losing in the transfer? In Holy Motors, glimpses of ancient Etienne-Jules Marey motion photography and still-stunning Edith Scob (star of the 1960 French classic Eyes without a Face) as Lavant’s limo driver, seem to cry for continuity with the past.

Now that whole archives are trusted to ‘the Cloud,’ there’s as much risk of losing it all as there is promise in the way digital media smuggle history over to the very demographic that mega-corporations prefer to remain unawares, the youth. (Go to YouTube and witness all the awed teenagers commenting under classic silent movies.)  Carax is thinking about all that stuff in Holy Motors, pitting Lavant’s Lon Chaney makeup kit and costumes and absurdly luxurious limo against a world that suddenly moves faster than any vehicle, silently, invisibly, through data cables and air waves.”

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“Women Are Changing Into Men, And Men Are Becoming Women”

November 5, 2012 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Marcello Mastroianni was a sensitive, befuddled male icon of screen in the second half of the 20th century, often crumbling under the modern world and its changing mores. At the end of 8 1/2, in one of cinema’s greatest scenes, he walks away from all that he’s built, realizing the folly of constructing on a shifting landscape. In real life, the Italian actor was none too fond of the era’s feminist movement, never quite grasping that an unequal society is a sick one for masters and servants alike. Though, yeah, the masters have it way better. An excerpt from a 1965 Playboy interview with Mastroianni during the early days of the cultural revolution:

“PLAYBOY:

All the films you’ve made, in one way or another, are about weak men—psychologically, socially and often sexually impotent. Is that you?

MASTROIANNI:

Yes and no. It’s part of me; and I think it’s part of many other men today. Modern man is not as virile as he used to be. Instead of making things happen, he waits for things to happen to him. He goes with the current. Something in our society has led him to stop fighting, to cease swimming upstream.

PLAYBOY:

What is that something?

MASTROIANNI:

Doubt, for one thing. Doubt about his place in society, his purpose in life. In my country, for example, I was brought up with the thought of man as the padrone, the pillar of the family. I wanted to be a loving, caring, protective man. But now I feel lost; the sensitive man everywhere feels lost. He is no longer padrone—either of his own world or of his women. 

PLAYBOY:

Why not?

MASTROIANNI:

Because women are changing into men, and men are becoming women. At least, men are getting weaker all the time. But much of this is man’s own fault. We shouted, “Women are equal to men; long live the Constitution!” But look what happened. The working woman emerged—angry, aggressive, uncertain of her femininity. And she multiplied—almost by herself. Matriarchy, in the home and in the factory and in business, has made women into sexless monsters and piled them up on psychiatric couches. Instead of finding themselves, they lost what they had. But some see this now and are trying to change back. Women in England, for example, who were the first to raise the standard of equality, are today in retreat.

PLAYBOY:

How about American women

MASTROIANNI:

They should retreat, but they don’t. I’ve never seen so many unhappy, melancholy women. They have liberty—but they are desperate. Poor darlings, they’re so hungry for romance that two little words in their ears are enough to crumble them before your eyes. American women are beautiful, but a little cold and too perfect—too well brought up, with the perfume and the hair always just so and the rose-colored skin. What perfection—and what a bore! Believe me, it makes you want to have a girl with a mustache, cross-eyes and runs in her stockings. I got to know a few of them when I was there, but I swear it was like knowing only one woman. Geraldine Page was the only exception—and an exciting one.” (Thanks Cinema Archive.)

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“Skillful Manipulation Based On High-Speed Sensory Motor Fusion”

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

In the future, endings will not only be happy but also brutally efficient. Presenting the high-speed bot hand from the Ishikawa Komuro Lab.

“It Hopes To Teach A Billion Students”

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

The opening of “The Most Important Education Technology in 200 Years,” Antonio Regalado’s MIT’s Technology Review article about the advent of limitless admissions:

“If you were asked to name the most important innovation in transportation over the last 200 years, you might say the combustion engine, air travel, Henry Ford’s Model-T production line, or even the bicycle. The list goes on.

Now answer this one: what’s been the single biggest innovation in education?

Don’t worry if you come up blank. You’re supposed to. The question is a gambit used by Anant Agarwal, the computer scientist named this year to head edX, a $60 million MIT-Harvard effort to stream a college education over the Web, free, to anyone who wants one. His point: it’s rare to see major technological advances in how people learn.

Agarwal believes that education is about to change dramatically. The reason is the power of the Web and its associated data-crunching technologies. Thanks to these changes, it’s now possible to stream video classes with sophisticated interactive elements, and researchers can scoop up student data that could help them make teaching more effective. The technology is powerful, fairly cheap, and global in its reach. EdX has said it hopes to teach a billion students.”

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“I Believe That We Are On The Brink Of A Revolution Of Similar Magnitude”

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

From a particularly prescient 1993 memo by Microsoft’s Nathan Myhrvold about the tech revolution that was about to rework information distribution in a truly profound way:

“Gutenberg Reprised

If you grant that the world writes and makes decisions with PCs, what is next? The real answer is long and complex, but three of the key components are to read, communicate and beentertained. An even simpler way to describe this is to say that computing technology will become central to distributing information.

As a rule, distribution has much more pervasive effects than authoring. Improving life for the author of a document does not materially effect the size or nature of the audience that she can address, but changes in distribution have a dramatic effect. The clearest precedent is the invention of the printing press. Great works of science and literature – Euclid’s geometry, Plato and Horace, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Iliad and Icelandic Sagas, all- existed long before the printing press, so humans clearly were able to conceive them, but they had a very limited customer base. Monks and scribes spent lifetimes copying books by hand, while bards and minstrels memorized and orally repeated tales to spread and preserve them. No matter how cheaply one values their time, it was still a very expensive proposition which was the primary limiting factor in broadening the number of customers. If we could use a time machine to supply all those monks with PCs and Word for Windows, but limited the rate at which they could print to the same level of time and expense, it would make little difference – except perhaps for letting the monks channel their energies toward other fields.

When Gutenberg did change the economics of distribution, the world changed in a fundamental way. It is estimated that Europe had on the order of ten thousand books just prior to Johan’s invention – within fifty years it would have over eight million. Literacy became a key skill. The advent of mass media – through printed handbills – revolutionized politics, religion, science and literature and most other factes of intellectual life.

I believe that we are on the brink of a revolution of similar magnitude. This will be driven by two technologies – computing and digital networking. We’ve already discussed the change in computing technology, and that is certainly dramatic, but it is communications which really enables distribution.”

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“We’ve Been Burying People Alive For A Long Time”

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

Being buried alive is a primordial fear, but it may not be a baseless one. It’s not as easy to tell if someone’s dead as you might think. There have been different rules through the ages and new technologies cause a continued reassessment of those rules. Dick Teresi has written a book on the subject and now Peter Rothman has a smart piece at h+ on the ever-changing nature of life’s terminus. The opening:

“Black or white. Alive or dead. Right?

In reality death is not well defined and the definition of death has changed substantially over time.

H.P Lovecraft famously wrote, ‘That is not dead which can eternal lie. Yet with strange aeons even death may die.‘ This amounts to a pretty good summary of our current philosophical understanding of death. Death is simply the condition wherein you can not be brought back to life. If you can be brought back, then you weren’t really dead.

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy provides us a few examples of more nuanced definitions, for example one might suggest that death is ‘the irreversible cessation of organismic functioning’ or the ‘irreversible loss of personhood.’ These amount to circular definitions that really don’t tell us anything specific about how to decide when someone is dead. What is ‘organismic functioning’ and how do we know when it is happening? Personhood is of course mostly a legal definition pertaining to rights which are terminated upon death. But if you are brought back to life, you weren’t really dead.

And we’ve been burying people alive for a long time.” (Thanks Browser.)

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