Excerpts

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“They Bowed Their Heads And Raised Their Gloved Hands To The Sky”

October 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports | Permalink

From a 1968 Pete Hamill report in Ramparts about the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, the Games of Tommy Smith and John Carlos’ Black Power salute but also of George Foreman’s flag-waving:

“HE FIRST BLACK SCOURGE of the Republic to appear at the games was Jim Hines, who won the 100 meters in the world record time of nine and nine-tenths seconds. Hines opposed San Jose State College Professor Harry Edwards’ proposed boycott, but let it be known that under no circumstances would he accept his medal if Avery Brundage was the man awarding it. Avery Brundage did not award the medal.

But the real confrontation was yet to come, and it came from John Carlos and Tommie Smith, who were running in the 200-meter dash. It began when they wore long black socks (later changed to ankle socks, to prevent cutting circulation in the legs) in preliminary heats. They went on to win with Smith finishing first, in a blazing 19.8, setting a new world record. Smith might have peeled another few tenths off the record had he not raised his arms in exultation as he crossed the finish line. Carlos finished third, behind Australian Peter Norman.

When they came out for the award ceremony, they walked without shoes, carrying a track shoe in one hand, with the other hand tucked into their windbreakers. They climbed the stand, and then, after receiving the medals, they turned toward the American flag as the Star Spangled Banner was played. They took their hands out. Smith’s right hand wore a black glove, Carlos’ left hand its mate. As the anthem played, they bowed their heads and raised their gloved hands to the sky in a clenched fist salute. Thirty hours later they were kicked off the team.

At this point the Olympic team almost collapsed. Carlos, who couldn’t stop talking before the protest, now wouldn’t talk to anyone. He stomped back and forth through the Olympic Village, followed by reporters and cameramen, and he even threatened to punch one of them. Smith, who had finished first, was less available than Carlos. In front of Building II, more than 100 people assembled while Roby tried to explain what had happened. The members of the committee had met (‘How many blacks on that committee?’ someone shouted) and decided that the two members of the team had violated the Olympic tradition of sportsmanship by their ‘immature’ conduct (‘What rule did they break?’ shouted Joe Flaherty of the Village Voice.) The crowd was told that if strong action was not taken, the American team would be completely disqualified.

A banner saying ‘Down with Brundage’ fluttered from the seventh floor of the American dormitory; on the fourth, a Wallace for President bumper sticker appeared. The seventh floor housed the black track athletes; the fourth floor housed the rifle team.

When Lee Evans, Larry James and Ron Freeman finished one-two-three in the 400 meters, everyone waited to see what they would do. They wore Black Panther berets because, said Evans, who had been in tears over the dismissal of his teammates, ‘It was raining.’ But they were not thrown off the team. They were still needed for the 1600-meter relay. Smith and Carlos had not been needed for anything.

The protest of the black athletes was more muted than had been expected. But the people on the IOC, and especially the members of the American Committee, seemed terrified. Something even as restrained as the gesture of Smith and Carlos had never happened before. They had always before been able, in Roby’s phrase, to ‘control’ their athletes.“

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“You Could Argue That Much Of Our Government Spaceflight Has Been Tourism”

October 22, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From “Elon Musk’s Mission to Mars,” Chris Anderson’s new Wired interview with the SpaceX founder, a discussion about the goals driving the technologist’s privately held space program:

“Anderson: 

Let’s talk about where all this is headed. You’ve brought the cost of rocket launches down by a factor of 10. Suppose you can bring it down even more. How does that change the game? It seems like when you radically reduce the price, you can discover a whole new market. It’s a form of exploration in itself.

Musk: 

Right.

Anderson: 

What glimpses of that new market have you seen?

Musk: 

A huge one is satellites. There are a lot of applications for satellites that suddenly begin to make sense if the transportation costs are low: more telecommunications, more broadcast, better weather mapping, more science experiments.

Anderson: 

So traditional satellite markets—but more of them, and cheaper.

Musk: 

There’s also likely to be a lot more private spaceflight.

Anderson: 

By that you mean tourism.

Musk: 

Yeah, but I think tourism is too pejorative a word. You could argue that much of our government spaceflight has been tourism. But the main thing—the goal I still believe in for the long term—is to make life multi-planetary.”

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“Several Times I Heard Him Muttering To Himself: ‘I Get Stupider And Stupider Every Day'”

October 22, 2012 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

I’m perplexed by Freeman Dyson’s carefree (careless?) views about environmentalism. I know Earth must ultimately be disposable, but we needn’t hurry the process. But I love reading his essays in the New York Review of Books. From his latest piece, a consideration of Jim Holt’s new volume about modern philosophers, a history of his perplexing relationship with Ludwig Wittgenstein, first as reader, then as student:

“Wittgenstein, unlike Heidegger, did not establish an ism. He wrote very little, and everything that he wrote was simple and clear. The only book that he published during his lifetime was Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, written in Vienna in 1918 and published in England with a long introduction by Bertrand Russell in 1922. It fills less than two hundred small pages, even though the original German and the English translation are printed side by side. I was lucky to be given a copy of the Tractatus as a prize when I was in high school. I read it through in one night, in an ecstasy of adolescent enthusiasm. Most of it is about mathematical logic. Only the last five pages deal with human problems. The text is divided into numbered sections, each consisting of one or two sentences. For example, section 6.521 says: ‘The solution of the problem of life is seen in the vanishing of this problem. Is not this the reason why men, to whom after long doubting the sense of life became clear, could not then say wherein this sense consisted?’ The most famous sentence in the book is the final section 7: ‘Wherof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.’

I found the book enlightening and liberating. It said that philosophy is simple and has limited scope. Philosophy is concerned with logic and the correct use of language. All speculations outside this limited area are mysticism. Section 6.522 says: ‘There is indeed the inexpressible. This shows itself. It is the mystical.’ Since the mystical is inexpressible, there is nothing more to be said. Holt summarizes the difference between Heidegger and Wittgenstein in nine words: ‘Wittgenstein was brave and ascetic, Heidegger treacherous and vain.’ These words apply equally to their characters as human beings and to their intellectual output.

Wittgenstein’s intellectual asceticism had a great influence on the philosophers of the English-speaking world. It narrowed the scope of philosophy by excluding ethics and aesthetics. At the same time, his personal asceticism enhanced his credibility. During World War II, he wanted to serve his adopted country in a practical way. Being too old for military service, he took a leave of absence from his academic position in Cambridge and served in a menial job, as a hospital orderly taking care of patients. When I arrived at Cambridge University in 1946, Wittgenstein had just returned from his six years of duty at the hospital. I held him in the highest respect and was delighted to find him living in a room above mine on the same staircase. I frequently met him walking up or down the stairs, but I was too shy to start a conversation. Several times I heard him muttering to himself: ‘I get stupider and stupider every day.’

Finally, toward the end of my time in Cambridge, I ventured to speak to him. I told him I had enjoyed reading the Tractatus, and I asked him whether he still held the same views that he had expressed twenty-eight years earlier. He remained silent for a long time and then said, ‘Which newspaper do you represent?’ I told him I was a student and not a journalist, but he never answered my question.

Wittgenstein’s response to me was humiliating, and his response to female students who tried to attend his lectures was even worse. If a woman appeared in the audience, he would remain standing silent until she left the room. I decided that he was a charlatan using outrageous behavior to attract attention. I hated him for his rudeness. Fifty years later, walking through a churchyard on the outskirts of Cambridge on a sunny morning in winter, I came by chance upon his tombstone, a massive block of stone lightly covered with fresh snow. On the stone was written the single word, ‘WITTGENSTEIN.’ To my surprise, I found that the old hatred was gone, replaced by a deeper understanding. He was at peace, and I was at peace too, in the white silence. He was no longer an ill-tempered charlatan. He was a tortured soul, the last survivor of a family with a tragic history, living a lonely life among strangers, trying until the end to express the inexpressible.”

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“It Was The Birth Of The Modern Attack Ad”

October 22, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

It’s hard to imagine that Upton Sinclair would have made a very good California governor in 1934, but he never had a fair shot thanks to the birth of the modern smear ad. From a Smithsonian post about the dirty race which saw the writer’s populist campaign undone by Hollywood filmmakers:

“Nothing matched the impact of the three ‘newsreels’ produced by Irving Thalberg, the boy wonder of the motion picture business, who partnered with Louis B. Mayer and helped create Metro Goldwyn Mayer while still in his early twenties. Mayer had vowed to do everything in his power to stop Sinclair, even threatening to support the film industry’s move to Florida if the socialist were elected governor. Like the other studios, MGM docked its employees (including stars) a day’s pay and sent the money to [Frank] Merriam’s campaign.

Using stock images from past movies and interviews by an ‘inquiring cameraman,’ Thalberg produced alleged newsreels in which actors, posing as regular citizens, delivered lines that had been written to destroy Sinclair. Some actors were portrayed as reasonable Merriam supporters, while others claiming to be for Sinclair were shown in the worst light.

‘I’m going to vote for Upton Sinclair,’ a man said, standing before a microphone.

‘Will you tell us why?’ the cameraman asked.

‘Upton Sinclair is the author of the Russian government and it worked out very well there, and I think it should do here.’

A young woman said, ‘I just graduated from school last year and Sinclair says that our school system is rotten, and I know that this isn’t true, and I’ve been able to find a good position during this Depression and I’d like to be able to keep it.’

An African-American man added, ‘I’m going to vote for Merriam because I need prosperity.’

The inquiring cameraman also claimed to have interviewed more than 30 ‘bums’ who, he claimed, were part of a wave of unemployed workers ‘flocking’ to California because of Sinclair’s plan. Stock footage showed such ‘bums’ hopping off packed freight trains. (Unemployed people did move to California, but did not pose the social and economic burdens implied by the newsreel.)

Greg Mitchell, author of The Campaign of the Century, wrote that the newsreels devastated Sinclair’s campaign. ‘People were not used to them,’ Mitchell stated. ‘It was the birth of the modern attack ad. People weren’t used to going into a movie theater and seeing newsreels that took a real political line. They believed everything that was in the newsreels.'”

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“He Is Raising Consciousness, Not Merely Dust”

October 21, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From a 1979 People article about the auto-racing exploits of Est scream machine Werner Erhard, who has always been a piece of work:

“For hours mechanics have been fine-tuning the squat red-and-silver race car, while assistants check their clipboards and keep the Watkins Glen (N.Y.) bivouac free of litter and strangers. One fan wanders through in a T-shirt with the baffling slogan: ‘Before I was different, now I’m the same.’ Presently the driver emerges from an enormous van, astronaut-like in his creamy flame-proof suit, and heads for the Formula Super Vee racer (named for its Volkswagen engine). At the wave of a flag he will roar around a 3.3-mile Grand Prix course at speeds up to 130 mph. 

There are 29 other qualifiers in this Gold Cup event, but only driver Werner Erhard claims he is here for the sake of mankind. Erhard, the founder of est (Erhard seminars training), says that when he slides into his 164-horsepower Argo JM4, he is raising consciousness, not merely dust. 

‘Real people—you and me—feel like they don’t make any difference in this lousy world,’ says the 43-year-old Erhard. He is tall and loose-limbed with icy blue eyes; he insists on eye contact during a conversation. If his listener looks away, even momentarily, Erhard stops talking. He wants everyone to understand why he is driving fast cars these days in addition to heading the $20 million business that est has become, plus a 1977 spin-off, his program ‘to end world hunger by 1997.’ ‘I wanted to organize a high-performance team,’ Erhard continues, ‘that could master a complex skill in a very short time with winning results and show that everyone involved makes a big difference, from grease monkeys to spectators.’ In order to prove this estian point, Erhard says he considered such adventures as skydiving and karate, but rejected them as not collective enough. ‘Auto racing was perfect!’ he exclaims. ‘I hadn’t driven a car in six years and didn’t know the first thing about racing. Whatever we’d achieve, we’d achieve together.'”

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“I found it a remarkable technology”:

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“Many Of The Giants Of American Finance Have Come To…’Hate’ The President”

October 21, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

I never underestimate the ability of the American middle class to be fooled or swindled, but no one should believe the reasons why so many super-rich members of our executive overclass claim to hate President Obama so much.

It isn’t that he spends too much. He’s spent at a lower rate than the either President George  W. Bush or President Reagan; our huge deficit is the result of so many Americans being out of work after the economic collapse, thus being disappeared from the tax base. It’s not that he’s been bad to Wall Street. The TARP funds saved it and the market has flourished under his leadership. It’s not that he’s making government bigger; growth of government has been nominal under Obama while it grew greatly under his predecessor. It’s not that the Affordable Care Act will cost America so many jobs; 30 million new citizens receiving health care will create a huge number of jobs.

The hatred stems from two things: 1) He wants to do away with the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and return to the Clinton rates. 2) He’s dared to point out that there are inequities in our system and that the 1% has become arrogant, entitled and destructive. And they’ve reacted to that news flash in an arrogant, entitled and destructive fashion.

From “The Billionaires Next Door,” an excerpt at Reuters from Chrystia Freeland’s new book:

“It is this not-our-fault mentality that accounts for the plutocrats’ profound sense of victimization in the Obama era. You might expect that American elites — and particularly those in the financial sector — would be feeling pretty good, and more than a little grateful, right now. Thanks to a $700 billion TARP bailout and trillions of dollars lent nearly free of charge by the Federal Reserve (a policy Soros himself told me was a ‘hidden gift’ to the banks), Wall Street has surged back to precrisis levels of compensation even as Main Street continues to struggle.

But instead, many of the giants of American finance have come to, in the words of a mystified administration economist, ‘hate’ the president and to believe he is fundamentally opposed to them and their well-being. In a much quoted newsletter to investors in the summer of 2010, hedge fund manager — and 2008 Obama fund-raiser — Dan Loeb fumed, ‘So long as our leaders tell us that we must trust them to regulate and redistribute our way back to prosperity, we will not break out of this economic quagmire.’ Two other former Obama backers on Wall Street — both claim to have been on Rahm Emanuel’s speed dial list — recently told me that the president is ‘antibusiness’; one went so far as to worry that Obama is ‘a socialist.'” (Thanks Browser.)

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“How Wonderful It Would Be To Make Some Device Which Had Even The Possibility Of Ascending To Mars”

October 21, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Charles Lindbergh photo of Goddard’s rocket, 1935, Roswell, New Mexico.

From a brief post by Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic about the source of Robert Goddard’s rocketeering:

“I don’t tend to believe most origin stories about how people came to do their life’s work, but I love this one about Robert Goddard, the father of American rocketry, anyway. As told by Goddard Space Center science writer, Daniel Pendick, it was on this day in 1899 (!) that the scientist first decided that he wanted to ‘fly without wings’ to Mars. He climbed up a cherry tree to do some pruning and had a vision of his/the future.

‘I imagined how wonderful it would be to make some device which had even the possibility of ascending to Mars, and how it would look on a small scale, if sent up from the meadow at my feet,’ one of his biographers, Milton Lehman, recorded. ‘I was a different boy when I descended the tree from when I ascended, for existence at last seemed very purposive.'”

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“Is The Trade-Off Worth It?”

October 21, 2012 in Excerpts, Fake, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Peter Aspden’s Financial Times piece about the slate of recent hand-wringing books about the future of cinema, a passage regarding the creative destruction that technology has brought to cinema:

“It is one of the most famous one-liners in the history of cinema, which also turned out to be an inadvertent prophecy. ‘I am big,’ says the slighted Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950). ‘It’s the pictures that got small.’

She had no idea. The past half-century has seen the pictures get smaller and smaller, to the point that we wonder if they can ever be big again. From television screen, to laptop, to smartphone, the ever-shrinking movies reach a greater part of the world than ever before. But what have we lost along the way? On a recent flight, I downloaded the relatively well-received Marvel spin-off The Avengers to watch on my iPhone. It was, of course, a ridiculous venture, this squeezing of monumental themes on to a miniaturist canvas, lacking in textural detail, atmosphere, communality of experience. But it was easily accessible, convenient and cheap. Is the trade-off worth it?”

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“I Assume We All Believe That Bats Have Experience”

October 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Each human being lives in a unique world, but at least there are enough similarities to attempt to understand someone else’s consciousness. Not so with different creatures. From Thomas Nagel’s 1974 paper, “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?“:

“I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all, they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience. I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.

I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case,5 and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion.

Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications.

To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a bat without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would not be anything like the experiences of those animals. On the other hand, it is doubtful that any meaning can be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neurophysiological constitution of a bat. Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would  be like. The best evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if we only knew what they were like.”

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“If You Fix Cities, You Kind Of Fix The World”

October 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Las Vegas, 1895.

There’s a smart article in this week’s New York Times Magazine by Timothy Pratt about Zappos founder Tony Hsieh hoping to remake urban living in the desolate downtown of Las Vegas. It certainly won’t be a quick fix, but will it be quixotic? An excerpt:

“The Downtown Project got its unofficial start several years ago when Hsieh realized that Zappos, the online shoe-and-apparel company that he built to $1 billion in annual sales in less than a decade, would soon outgrow its offices in nearby Henderson, Nev. Though Amazon bought Zappos in 2009 for $1.2 billion, Hsieh still runs the company, and he has endeavored to keep alive its zany corporate culture. This includes a workplace where everyone sits in the same open space and employees switch desks every few months in order to get to know one another better. ‘I first thought I would buy a piece of land and build our own Disneyland,’ he told the group. But he worried that the company would be too cut off from the outside world and ultimately decided ‘it was better to interact with the community.’

Around the same time, the Las Vegas city government was also about to move, and Hsieh saw his opportunity. He leased the former City Hall — smack in the middle of downtown Vegas — for 15 years. Then he got to thinking: If he was going to move at least 1,200 employees, why not make it possible for them to live nearby? And if they could live nearby, why not create an urban community aligned with the culture of Zappos, which encourages the kind of ‘serendipitous interactions’ that happen in offices without walls? As Zach Ware, Hsieh’s right-hand man in the move, put it, ‘We wanted the new campus to benefit from interaction with downtown, and downtown to benefit from interaction with Zappos.’ The only hitch was that it would require transforming the derelict core of a major city.

For Hsieh, though, this was part of the appeal. Transforming downtown Vegas would ‘ultimately help us attract and retain more employees for Zappos.’ For the city itself, it would ‘help revitalize the economy.’ More important, it would ‘inspire,’ a word Hsieh uses often. Hsieh closed his presentation at the faux log cabin high above the desert with the sort of fact he seems to always have on hand: up to 75 percent of the world’s population will call cities home in our lifetime. ‘So,’ he concluded, ‘if you fix cities, you kind of fix the world.'”

Las Vegas, 1941.

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“In Fact, Science Is Not A Collection Of Truths”

October 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Freeman Dyson’s 2011 New York Review of Books piece about James Gleick’s The Information, a passage about the uncertain nature of science and knowledge in the Digital Age, the “noisiest” epoch in humankind:

“The information flood has also brought enormous benefits to science. The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.

Even physics, the most exact and most firmly established branch of science, is still full of mysteries. We do not know how much of [Claude] Shannon’s theory of information will remain valid when quantum devices replace classical electric circuits as the carriers of information. Quantum devices may be made of single atoms or microscopic magnetic circuits. All that we know for sure is that they can theoretically do certain jobs that are beyond the reach of classical devices. Quantum computing is still an unexplored mystery on the frontier of information theory. Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude of voices. It resembles Wikipedia much more than it resembles the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

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“Rather Than Write, I Will Ride Buses, Study The Insides Of Jails, And See What Goes On”

October 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “The Social History of the Hippies,” Warren Hinckle’s 1967 Ramparts article about those who tuned in, turned on and dropped out, a segment on writer Ken Kesey after his fall from grace with the younger longhhairs: 

“HERE WASN’T MUCH DOING on late afternoon television, and the Merry Pranksters were a little restless. A few were turning on; one Prankster amused himself squirting his friends with a yellow plastic watergun; another staggered into the living room, exhausted from peddling a bicycle in ever-diminishing circles in the middle of the street. They were all waiting, quite patiently, for dinner, which the Chief was whipping up himself. It was a curry, the recipe of no doubt cabalistic origin. Kesey evidently took his cooking seriously, because he stood guard by the pot for an hour and a half, stirring, concentrating on the little clock on the stove that didn’t work.

There you have a slice of domestic life, February 1967, from the swish Marin County home of Attorney Brian Rohan. As might be surmised, Rohan is Kesey’s attorney, and the novelist and his aides de camp had parked their bus outside for the duration. The duration might last a long time, because Kesey has dropped out of the hippie scene. Some might say that he was pushed, because he fell, very hard, from favor among the hippies last year when he announced that he, Kesey, personally, was going to help reform the psychedelic scene. This sudden social conscience may have had something to do with beating a jail sentence on a compounded marijuana charge, but
when Kesey obtained his freedom with instructions from the judge ‘to preach an anti-LSD warning to teenagers’ it was a little too much for the Haight-Ashbury set. Kesey, after all, was the man who had turned on the Hell’s Angels.

That was when the novelist was living in La Honda, a small community in the Skyline mountain range overgrown with trees and, after Kesey invited the Hell’s Angels to several house parties, overgrown with sheriff’s deputies. It was in this Sherwood Forest setting, after he had finished his second novel with LSD as his co-pilot, that Kesey inaugurated his band of Merry Pranksters
(they have an official seal from the State of California incorporating them as ‘Intrepid Trips, Inc.’), painted the school bus in glow sock colors, announced he would write no more (‘Rather than write, I will ride buses, study the insides of jails, and see what goes on’), and set up funtime housekeeping on a full-time basis with the Pranksters, his wife and their three small children (one confounding thing about Kesey is the amorphous quality of the personal relationships in his entourage—the several attractive women don’t seem, from the outside, to belong to any particular man; children are loved enough, but seem to be held in common).

When the Hell’s Angels rumbled by, Kesey welcomed them with LSD. ‘We’re in the same business. You break people’s bones, I break people’s heads,’ he told them. The Angels seem to like the whole acid thing, because today they are a fairly constant act in the Haight-Ashbury show, while Kesey has abdicated his role as Scoutmaster to fledgling acid heads and exiled himself across the Bay.

This self-imposed Elba came about when Kesey sensed that the hippie community had soured on him. He had committed the one mortal sin in the hippie ethic: telling people what to do. ‘Get into a responsibility bag,’ he urged some 400 friends attending a private Halloween party. Kesey hasn’t been seen much in the Haight-Ashbury since that night, and though the Diggers did succeed in getting him to attend the weekend discussion, it is doubtful they will succeed in getting the novelist involved in any serious effort to shape the Haight-Ashbury future. At 31, Ken Kesey is a hippie has-been.”

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“Russia Actually Did Block Imports Of Monsanto Corn”

October 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Even if we were treating our environment well–and we’re not–eventually weather patterns will shift and the agrarian culture we’ve enjoyed will be imperiled. So it makes sense for humans to experiment with genetically modified foods. I know it seems intuitive that natural food is good and laboratory modifications are bad, but there is plenty of poison in nature. We should demand transparency from corporations involved with our food chain, but we should proceed. We need to have an honest discussion, not disinformation. Unfortunately, we’re often getting the latter. From Bjørn Lomborg at Slate:

“French researcher Gilles-Eric Séralini attempted to fuel public opposition to genetically modified foods byshowing the public how GM corn, with and without the pesticide Roundup, caused huge tumors and early death in 200 rats that had consumed it over two years.

Supplying an abundance of pictures of rats with tumors the size of ping-pong balls, Séralini certainly captured the public’s attention. France’s health, ecology, and agriculture ministers promised a prompt investigation and threatened to ban imports of Monsanto’s GM corn to the European Union. Russia actually did block imports of Monsanto corn. 

But Séralini’s research posed many problematic issues. For starters, the Sprague-Dawley strain of rats that he used is naturally prone to tumors. Studies of Sprague-Dawley rats show that 88 percent to 96 percent of those that serve as experimental controls develop tumors before they reach two years of age. But the public saw only pictures of tumorous rats that had consumed GM corn and Roundup. If the public had seen the similarly grotesque tumors that grow on untreated rats, officials most likely would not have acted so hastily.”

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“There Will Be DNA Life Forms There”

October 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Two teams hope to send DNA-sequencing machines to Mars to prove the Red Planet harbors life. One of the groups is led by Craig Venter, who believes in building better bugs. From Antonio Regalado at MIT Technology Review:

“Although neither team yet has a berth on Mars rocket, their plans reflect the belief that the simplest way to prove there is life on Mars is to send a DNA sequencing machine.

‘There will be DNA life forms there,’ Venter predicted Tuesday in New York, where he was speaking at the Wired Health Conference.

Venter said researchers working with him have already begun tests at a Mars-like site in the Mojave Desert. Their goal, he said, is to demonstrate a machine capable of autonomously isolating microbes from soil, sequencing their DNA, and then transmitting the information to a remote computer, as would be required on an unmanned Mars mission. Heather Kowalski, a spokeswoman for Venter, confirmed the existence of the project but said the prototype system was ‘not yet 100 percent robotic.'”

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“Modern Cars Have Shipped With Multiple Embedded Computers For Years”

October 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve mentioned before that automatic, driverless cars, for all the good they can bring, will become a magnet for hackers, even terrorists. But the future may have arrived before computers have become designated drivers. From Nathan Willis at LWN:

“There was no security track at the 2012 Automotive Linux Summit, but numerous sessions and the ‘hallway track’ featured anecdotes about the ease of compromising car computers. This is no surprise: as Linux makes inroads into automotive computing, the security question takes on an urgency not found on desktops and servers. Too often, though, Linux and open source software in general are perceived as insufficiently battle-hardened for the safety-critical needs of highway speed computing — reading the comments on an automotive Linux news story it is easy to find a skeptic scoffing that he or she would not trust Linux to manage the engine, brakes, or airbags. While hackers in other embedded Linux realms may understandably feel miffed at such a slight, the bigger problem is said skeptic’s presumption that a modern Linux-free car is a secure environment — which is demonstrably untrue.

First, there is a mistaken assumption that computing is not yet a pervasive part of modern automobiles. Likewise mistaken is the assumption that safety-critical systems (such as the aforementioned brakes, airbags, and engine) are properly isolated from low-security components (like the entertainment head unit) and are not vulnerable to attack. It is also incorrectly assumed that the low-security systems themselves do not harbor risks to drivers and passengers. In reality, modern cars have shipped with multiple embedded computers for years (many of which are mandatory by government order), presenting a large attack surface with numerous risks to personal safety, theft, eavesdropping, and other exploits. But rather than exacerbating this situation, Linux and open source adoption stand to improve it.”

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“He Has Adapted His Daily Life To Live Onboard An Airplane”

October 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A Pacific Northwest man has repurposed a decommissioned Boeing airplane into a home. From Inhabitat: “What looks like a jetliner that has miraculously landed in the woods is actually one man’s dream retreat! Inspired by his passion for the aircraft as well as the need for shelter, Oregonian Bruce Campbell converted a Boeing 727-200 into a home. Campbell is not looking to be in Better Homes and Gardens – instead of turning the airplane into a full-fledged house he has adapted his daily life to live onboard an airplane.”

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“Whenever It’s Hot, The Humans Actually Beat The Horses”

October 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Pushing the human body beyond what seems normal might not be healthy but it is fascinating, whether we’re talking about professional pedestrians in the nineteenth century or today’s ultramarathoners. Harvard evolutionary scientist Daniel Lieberman has an excellent post at Edge about the origins and development of endurance in humans. An excerpt: 

“We have this notion that humans are terrible natural athletes. But we’ve been looking at the wrong kind of athleticism. What we’re really good at is not power, what we’re really phenomenal at is endurance. We’re the tortoises of the animal world, not the hares of the animal world. Humans can actually outrun most animals over very, very long distances.

The marathon, of course, is a very interesting example. A lot of people think marathons are extraordinary, and they wonder how many people can run marathons. At least a million people run a marathon every year. If you watch any major marathon, you realize that most of those folks aren’t extraordinary athletes, they’re just average moms and dads. A lot of them are charity runners who decided to raise money for some cancer cause or diabetes or something. I think that proves that really your average human being can run 26.2 miles without that much training, or much ability to be a great athlete. Of course, to run a marathon at really fast speeds is remarkable, but again, it just takes some practice and training. It’s not something that’s really extraordinary.

We’re actually remarkable endurance athletes, and that endurance athleticism is deeply woven into our bodies, literally from our heads to our toes. We have adaptations in our feet and our legs and our hips and pelvises and our heads and our brains and our respiratory systems. We even have neurobiological adaptations that give us a runner’s high, all of which help make us extraordinary endurance athletes. We’ve lost sight at just how good we are at endurance athleticism, and that’s led to a perverse idea that humans really aren’t very good athletes.

A good example is that every year they have races where they actually compare humans and horses. In Wales, this started a few years ago, I guess it started out as a typical sort of drunken pub bet, where some guy bet that a human couldn’t beat a horse in a marathon. They’ve been running a marathon in Wales for the last, I think 15-20 years. To be fair, most years, the horses beat the humans, but the humans often come very close. Whenever it’s hot, the humans actually beat the horses. They also have now ultramarathons in Arizona, where humans race horses. Again, most years, the horses beat the humans, but every once in a while, the humans do beat the horses. The point is not that humans are poor athletes, because the horses occasionally beat us, but humans can actually compete with and often beat horses at endurance races. Most people are surprised at that.”

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“It’s Not About Me — The Story Is The Fuel”

October 17, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Even many of those plastic bottles we dutifully place in recycling bins end up in the ocean, as barges accidentally drop tons and tons of the discards into the water. It’s obviously a threat to the food chain. The opening of Bettina Wassener’s New York Times story about a British company using diesel made from plastic to fuel a long plane trip:

“Sometime in the next few months, a single-engine Cessna will fly from Sydney to London. Converted to be able to carry extra amounts of fuel, the small plane will take 10 days for its journey, making 10 or so stops along the way.

What will make this journey special is not the route or the identity of the pilot — a 41-year-old British insurance industry executive who lives in Australia — but the fuel that the aircraft will be using: diesel processed from discarded plastic trash.

‘I’m not some larger-than-life character, I’m just a normal bloke,’ the pilot, Jeremy Rowsell, said by phone. ‘It’s not about me — the story is the fuel.’

The fuel in question will come from Cynar, a British company that has developed a technology that makes diesel out of so-called end-of-life plastics — material that cannot be reused and would otherwise end up in landfills.

Batches of the fuel will be prepositioned along the 17,000-kilometer, or 10,500-mile, route.

‘The idea is to fly the whole route on plastic fuel alone and to prove that this technology works,’ Mr. Rowsell said. ‘I’m a kind of carrier pigeon, carrying a message.'”

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“On Earth, The Past Is Even Quicker To Vanish”

October 17, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Dendrochronology, not to be confused with Dendrophilia, is the science of tree rings. The opening of Ross Andersen’s new Aeon piece on the topic of ring-related research, which compares the past century of fervent deforestation with the burning of another set of valuable leaves, the Library of Alexandria:

“No event, however momentous, leaves an everlasting imprint on the world. Take the cosmic background radiation, the faint electromagnetic afterglow of the Big Bang. It hangs, reassuringly, in every corner of our skies, the firmest evidence we have for the giant explosion that created our universe. But it won’t be there forever. In a trillion years’ time it is going to slip beyond what astronomers call the cosmic light horizon, the outer edge of the observable universe. The universe’s expansion will have stretched its wavelength so wide that it will be undetectable to any observer, anywhere. Time will have erased its own beginning.

On Earth, the past is even quicker to vanish. To study geology is to be astonished at how hastily time reorders our planet’s surface, filling its craters, smoothing its mountains and covering its continents in seawater. Life is often the fastest to disintegrate in this constant churn of water and rock. The speed of biological decomposition ensures that only the most geologically fortunate of organisms freeze into stone and become fossils. The rest dissolve into sediment, leaving the thinnest of molecular traces behind.

Part of what separates humans from nature is our striving to preserve the past, but we too have proved adept at its erasure. It was humans, after all, who set fire to the ancient Library of Alexandria, whose hundreds of thousands of scrolls contained a sizable fraction of classical learning. The loss of knowledge at Alexandria was said to be so profound that it set Western civilisation back 1,000 years. Indeed, some have described the library’s burning as an event horizon, a boundary in time across which information cannot flow.

The burning of books and libraries has perhaps fallen out of fashion, but if you look closely, you will find its spirit survives in another distinctly human activity, one as old as civilisation itself: the destruction of forests. Trees and forests are repositories of time; to destroy them is to destroy an irreplaceable record of the Earth’s past. Over this past century of unprecendented deforestation, a tiny cadre of scientists has roamed the world’s remaining woodlands, searching for trees with long memories, trees that promise science a new window into antiquity. To find a tree’s memories, you have to look past its leaves and even its bark; you have to go deep into its trunk, where the chronicles of its long life lie, secreted away like a library’s lost scrolls. This spring, I journeyed to the high, dry mountains of California to visit an ancient forest, a place as dense with history as Alexandria. A place where the heat of a dangerous fire is starting to rise.”

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“Further Evolution Of Themselves And Their Tools Will Be In Their Hands And Not Ours”

October 17, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Robert L. Blum’s post at Kurzweil AI about extreme long-term planning for humanity–like a billion years or so–which he feels would be better accomplished by intelligent machines than people:

“Long-term, humanity (whether augmented, re-engineered, or uploaded) will be left in the dust by the machines, who will stand in relation to us as we to bacteria. OK, that has a heavy-metal Skynet ring to it, so let me replace it immediately by a term I’ve come to love (from David Grinspoon’s book Lonely Planets): the Immortals.

Who are the Immortals? Perhaps we know who we want them to be: wise, superintelligent, compassionate, and just. And powerful! More powerful than a light-speed rocket, able to leap into intergalactic space in a single bound, and imbued with truth, justice, and the Western democratic way!

Whatever we choose to call them, further evolution of themselves and their tools will be in their hands and not ours. While future advances will greatly benefit humans, humans will be replaced as the helmsmen of a space-faring civilization before the Singularity — probably by 2040 (Philip K. Dick nailed this prediction in Blade Runner).

The evolving prototypes that will eventually leap to the stars will be electronic — informed by human design and concerns, but not constrained by them. Their decisions and wisdom will encompass all that is on the Web and all that is perceived by the world’s sensors. With a solar system full of effectors they will accomplish engineering that we cannot imagine. That is how they will begin their evolution and their journey to the stars.

So let’s leave the really long term planning (post-Singularity) to the Immortals.

Sometime before the Cambrian era 500 million years ago, the first differentiated, multicellular creatures arose. As the reproductive unit changed from a single cell to a multicellular organism, the individual cells had surrendered their autonomy for a greater chance of survival.

I think about the coming superorganism as something that will (at least initially) encompass human beings and confer upon them greater survival and quality of life.”

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“At 66, John Cheever Is A Resurrected Man”

October 16, 2012 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

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From a 1979 People article about the late-life John Cheever, who was every bit as gifted at the short-story form as F. Scott Fitzgerald or Flannery O’Connor or Paul Bowles or any American writer:

Instead of whiskey, the traditional tonic of his profession, the tumbler in Cheever’s hand contains dark tea nowadays, and he distastefully yet methodically counts leftover cigarette butts in his ashtray, a requirement of Smokenders. Cheever joined because “there is something humiliating about getting off the plane in a place like Sofia and thinking, ‘Oh, my God, are they going to have my brand?'” Once tormented by phobias, Cheever required a slug of Scotch from the bottle in the glove compartment before he dared drive across a bridge. He was the despair of his publishers’ PR men, an author who disappeared for six weeks after the publication of a book and refused interviews upon returning. When his first novel was finished, he fled to Rome for a full year. Today such quirks have vanished. At 66, John Cheever is a resurrected man.

“Five years ago I was washing down Thorazine with Scotch,” he says candidly. “I felt suicidal; my life and my career were over. I wanted to end it.” Always a hard drinker, Cheever sank into alcoholism after a near-fatal heart attack in 1972. He swore off temporarily but relapsed while teaching at Boston University. Novelist John Updike, an old friend, saw him at his alcoholic nadir and sadly remarked, ‘I keep thinking the John Cheever I know is in there someplace.’ Finally, with the support of his family, Cheever faced the facts of his behavior (“such a loss of dignity”) and agreed to enter Smithers, an exclusive Manhattan clinic for alcoholism. “If you can have it cured,” he says, five years later, “I am cured.” When released after 32 days, he promptly sat down and, in less than a year, wrote his much-acclaimed fourth novel, Falconer, a gothic tale of life in a prison very much like Sing Sing. Cheever knew his subject well: He once taught a writing course to the convicts.

“I don’t know where the blackness in my life comes from,” Cheever says. “There is a great deal of sadness, of melancholy. I have no idea where it originates.” Part of it may stem from Cheever’s seafaring Yankee ancestry, and his grandfather, who, Cheever was told, committed suicide. John was born in Quincy, Mass., the son of a businessman bankrupted by the crash of ’29. His father was often away, and he and his older brother, Fred (also an alcoholic, who died in 1976), were raised by their English mother. She supported the family with a small gift shop, a source of embarrassment to Cheever. He was close to his maternal grandmother “partly because she called my mother a cretin, which is an easy way to endear yourself to a child” and remembers that she insisted French be spoken at meals. “I don’t recall her French was all that good.”•

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Cheever’s cameo in the big-screen adaptation of “The Swimmer”:

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“We Can’t Be Eating More Meat — The Planet Can’t Take It”

October 16, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Michael Pollan, who tells us to “eat food, not too much, mostly plants,” has a new Ask Me Anything on Reddit. Some excerpts follow.

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Question:

If it turns out that a diet based almost entirely on animal fat and protein is best for us and at the same time that such a diet is the worst for the planet, what should we do?

Michael Pollan

We can’t be eating more meat — the planet can’t take it. Plant-based diets are the key, meat should be treated more as a flavor principle –as it is in traditional Asian diets– and not the center of the plate. To exonerate saturated fat is not to say we should all eat 16 ounce steaks! plants are still better for you, and lots of red meat is correlated with higher rates of cancer.

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Question:

How do you feel about Mayor Bloomberg’s soda ban?

Michael Pollan:

On Mayor Bloomberg’s ban– it’s not on soda, but only big cups. And I think it’s an experiment we need to try. The proof is in the pudding. But the soda companies are trying to stop him, as they are trying to stop soda tax proposals nationwide. Can we just give one of these plans a real-world test? Reducing soda consumption will do more for the public health than just about anything else we can do in the food area– let’s test to see if that’s true!

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Question:

I am not sure how to word my question but I would like to know exactly you came to write about food? This is a very selfish question because I myself have a yearning to do the same as you. I began thinking I should major in Food Science but after taking an English class and writing many papers on GMOs I”m not sure if that was the right choice. So I was wondering if you had any advice for a hopeful food writer, or specifically what majors I should look into. I was thinking about possibly double majoring in English and Anthropology.

Michael Pollan:

I was an english major, so obviously had no plan to write about food– I might have taken biology if I did. But I followed my curiosity, and a passion for gardening –and growing food– turned into a series of essays on what gardens have to teach us and this eventually brought be around to looking at agriculture. You can predict these things. But English and Anthro is a great prep for just about anything.

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“Philosophers Began To Muse About What It Would Be Like To Be A Brain In A Vat”

October 16, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of “From Cooling System to Thinking Machine,” Carl Zimmer’s excellent Being Human essay about historical attempts to understand brain function, from anatomical experiments to thought experiments:

“Hilary Putnam is not a household name. The Harvard philosopher’s work on the nature of reality, meaning, and language may be required reading in graduate school, but Putnam’s fame hasn’t extended far beyond the academy. But one of Putnam’s thought experiments is familiar to millions of people: what it would be like to be a brain in a vat?

Here’s how Putnam presented the idea in his 1981 book, Reason, Truth, and History:

Imagine that a human being…has been subjected to an operation by an evil scientist. The person’s brain…has been removed from the body and placed in a vat of nutrients which keeps the brain alive. The nerve endings have been connected to a super-scientific computer which causes the person whose brain it is to have the illusion that everything is perfectly normal. There seem to be people, objects, the sky, etc.; but really, all the person…is experiencing is the result of electronic impulses travelling from the computer to the nerve endings.

Philosophers have wondered for thousands of years how we can be sure whether what we’re experiencing is reality or some shadowy deception. Plato imagined people looking at shadows cast by a fire in a cave. Descartes imagined a satanic genius. Starting in the 1960s, philosophers began to muse about what it would be like to be a brain in a vat, with reality supplied by a computer. The story circulated in obscure philosophy journals for over a decade before Putnam laid it out in his book.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“I Found Myself Incarcerated In An Anonymity”

October 16, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver was many things, and not all of them were good. But no one could deny he was a fascinating fashion designer. After fleeing the United States when charged with the attempted murder of police officers in Oakland in 1968, the revolutionary spent seven years hiding in a variety of foreign countries. A mostly forgotten part of his walkabout was Cleaver surfacing as a fashion designer in Paris at the very end of his exile. As shown in the print advertisement above, his so-called “penis pants” had an external sock attached so that a guy could wear his junk on the outside. I mean, just because your soul was on ice, that didn’t mean your dong had to be. Cucumber sales soared.

From an article Cleaver penned about the early part of his life at large for Ramparts in 1969, a look at the more serious side of expatriation:

“SO NOW IT IS OFFICIAL. I was starting to think that perhaps it never would be. For the past eight months, I’ve been scooting around the globe as a non-person, ducking into doorways at the sight of a camera, avoiding  English-speaking people like the plague. I used so many names that my own was out of focus. I trained myself not to react if I heard the name Eldridge Cleaver called, and learned instead to respond naturally, spontaneously, to my cover names. Anyone who thinks this is easy to do should try it. For my part, I’m glad that it is over.

This morning we held a press conference, thus putting an end to all the hocus-pocus. Two days ago, the Algerian government announced that I had arrived here to participate in the historic First Pan-African Cultural Festival. After that, there was no longer any reason not to reach for the telephone and call home, so the first thing I did was to call my mother in Los Angeles. ‘Boy, where are you at?’ she asked. It sounded as though she expected me to answer, ‘Right around the corner, mom,’ or ‘Up here in San Francisco,’ so that when I said I was in Africa, in Algeria, it was clear that her mind was blown, for her response was, “Africa? You can’t make no phone call from Africa!” That’s my mom. She doesn’t relate to all this shit about phone calls across the ocean when there are no phone poles. She has both her feet on the ground, and it is clear that she intends to keep them there.

It is clear to me now that there are forms of imprisonment other than the kind I left Babylon to avoid, for immediately upon splitting that scene I found myself incarcerated in an anonymity, the walls of which were every bit as thick as those of Folsom Prison. I discovered, to my surprise, that it is impossible to hold a decent conversation without making frequent references to one’s past. So I found myself creating personal histories spontaneously, off the top of my head, and I felt bad about that because I know that I left many people standing around scratching their heads. The shit that I had to run down to them just didn’t add up.

Now all that is over. So what? What has really changed? Alioto is still crazy and mayor, Ronald Reagan is still Mickey Mouse, Nixon is in the White House and the McClellan Committee is investigating the Black Panther Party. And Huey P. Newton is still in prison. I cannot make light of this shit because it is getting deeper. And here we are in Algeria. What is a cat from Arkansas, who calls San Francisco home, doing in Algeria? And listen to Kathleen behind me talking over the telephone in French. With a little loosening of the will, I could easily flip out right now!”

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“Making A Cardboard Box Is Easy…But To Make A Bicycle Was Extremely Difficult”

October 15, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

An Israeli inventor has successfully designed and built a cardboard bicycle which figures to retail for about $20. For poor people in desperate need of transportation it could improve lives–even save them. From Reuters:

“Izhar Gafni, 50, is an expert in designing automated mass-production lines. He is an amateur cycling enthusiast who for years toyed with an idea of making a bicycle from cardboard.

He told Reuters during a recent demonstration that after much trial and error, his latest prototype has now proven itself and mass production will begin in a few months.

‘I was always fascinated by applying unconventional technologies to materials and I did this on several occasions. But this was the culmination of a few things that came together. I worked for four years to cancel out the corrugated cardboard’s weak structural points,’ Gafni said.

‘Making a cardboard box is easy and it can be very strong and durable, but to make a bicycle was extremely difficult and I had to find the right way to fold the cardboard in several different directions. It took a year and a half, with lots of testing and failure until I got it right,’ he said.”

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