Excerpts

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“The Monkeys Were Implanted With A Tiny Probe With Two Sensors”

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

Eventually you’ll have the implant, but right now monkeys get it first. From Benedict Carey in the New York Times:

“In the study, researchers at Wake Forest trained five rhesus monkeys to play a picture-matching game. The monkeys saw an image on a large screen — of a toy, a person, a mountain range — and tried to select the same image from a larger group of images that appeared on the same screen a little while later. The monkeys got a treat for every correct answer.

After two years of practice, the animals developed some mastery, getting about 75 percent of the easier matches correct and 40 percent of the harder ones, markedly better than chance guessing.

The monkeys were implanted with a tiny probe with two sensors; it was threaded through the forehead and into two neighboring layers of the cerebral cortex, the thin outer covering of the brain.”

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The Master And His Pupils In Los Angeles (1950)

September 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

These three classic 1950 photos of pensive, unsmiling people were taken at a Dianetics seminar in Los Angeles, with the shadowy L. Ron Hubbard himself leading the meeting. Hubbard and his $4 self-empowerment book were largely ignored by the mainstream press until the title became a mammoth bestseller. From a 1950 Look magazine article about the rise of a new belief system, which initially took root most strongly in Los Angeles:

“Of all the dianetic centers, Los Angeles is the most exuberantly expansive and enthusiastic. There the Hubbard Foundation moved into a suite of modest offices last July. In August, it took over a two-story building housing a lecture theater and 20 ‘processing’ rooms. A few weeks later, it had to expand again – this time into a 110-room building where swarms of student auditors raptly attend Hubbard’s lectures and practice processing one another.

Still more recently, there have been instituted a series of weekend sessions at the swank Country Club Hotel in Hollywood. Here, taking over 20 or 30 rooms, a band of student auditors and pre-clears meet under the guidance of professional auditors for ‘intensive auditing with chemical assist.’

Hubbard and his associates insist that this use of drugs has nothing to do with narcosynthesis. They claim that ‘chemical assistants,’ purchasable in California at any drugstore, aid in helping resistant pre-clears to achieve dianetic reverie and to dredge up their basic-basic engrams.”

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“Doctors May Repair The Damage Caused By Heart Attack By Replacing It With Tissue That Rolled Off Of A Printer”

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

From the UCSD site, a release about researchers discovering a way to print blood vessels:

“Nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego have developed a novel technology that can fabricate, in mere seconds, microscale three dimensional (3D) structures out of soft, biocompatible hydrogels. Near term, the technology could lead to better systems for growing and studying cells, including stem cells, in the laboratory. Long-term, the goal is to be able to print biological tissues for regenerative medicine. For example, in the future, doctors may repair the damage caused by heart attack by replacing it with tissue that rolled off of a printer.” (Thanks Next Big Future.)

“Imagine Managing Pension Liabilities In A World Where Everyone Lives Forever”

September 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Economists have their hands full merely trying to figure out what just happened–and what the hell just happened?!? Izabella Kaminska of the Financial Times, whom I referred to earlier today, wonders whether they’re also unprepared for the brave new world of the next few decades. But who isn’t? An excerpt from her post:

“To get a bit more Kurzwelian on the matter — let’s consider for a moment that the world really is on the verge of a technological revolution equal to, if not greater than, the industrial revolution of the 19th century. The singularity, if you will.

We’re talking epic sci-fi mega trends.

Looking at just a few of the technologies futurists tell us might be common place by the time today’s 50-year US Treasury bonds gilts mature…

…let’s start with the one that would undoubtedly have the most striking impact on conventional economics — life extension.

We’re talking about a world where every child born will have the potential to live for at least 200 years, if not more. A world where medical advances crossed with developments in biological nano technology, bionic limbs and robotics mean life expectancy becomes limitless.

Now imagine a world where the human brain has been reverse engineered in such detail that all memory content can be routinely downloaded and backed up, and eventually re-uploaded to new synthetic bodies, time and time again. Eternal life, ortranshumanism, for want of a better word.

Plausibility of the latter aside, life extension of no more than 10 years alone would have dramatic enough consequences on pension funds. Anything more, especially in the current low yield environment, and the pension model starts to be threatened.

So, imagine managing pension liabilities in a world where everyone lives forever?”

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“A Majority Of Americans Did Not Believe Apollo Was Worth The Cost”

September 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

From historian Roger Launius (via Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic), a reminder of the unpopularity of the U.S. space program of the 1960s:

“For example, many people believe that Project Apollo was popular, probably because it garnered significant media attention, but the polls do not support a contention that Americans embraced the lunar landing mission. Consistently throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969. And consistently throughout the decade 45-60 percent of Americans believed that the government was spending too much onspace, indicative of a lack of commitment to the spaceflight agenda. These data do not support a contention that most people approved of Apollo and thought it important to explore space.”

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“They May Be The Cutting Edge Of The Coming Global Manufacturing Revolution”

September 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

I would guess somewhere in this world there will always be a sweatshop with people toiling in dangerous conditions for little gain because sadly it’s actually better than the life they know. But sweat equity will decline markedly in the next few decades, as robotics replace human capital at the most basic level. The assembly line will assemble itself and then assemble the products. Those countries that excel at 3D printers and bot builders will win the race. That probably bodes well for the U.S. and not so much for China. Some thoughts from economist Antoine van Agtmael provided by Izabella Kaminska at the Financial Times:

“The US technological lead in advanced, top-end manufacturing, smartphones and smartpads, and its capacity to create smart companies, is already starting to pay off. Whether these particular products – lifestyle changing as they are – will accelerate US growth is a moot point.

But they may be the cutting edge of the coming global manufacturing revolution provided by additive manufacturing technology, or so-called 3D printing. This revolution is expected to tilt economic advantage back towards the US, and to other Western companies.

Localised and customised manufacturing won’t employ much labour, though in ageing societies, labour supply will fall, or stagnate anyway. It will, however, increase the importance of being close to one’s market, resources, and centres of technological excellence, and diminish the significance of long global manufacturing supply chains, and large-scale process manufacturing, both of which characterise Asia’s and China’s functions in the global economy.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“It Will Cost $2 Trillion A Year, And Possibly Destroy The Amazon Jungle While Unleashing Giant Swarms Of Locusts Across Africa”

September 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

“Some scientists have published a plan to transform a part of the Sahara desert into a lush forest.” (Image by Luca Galuzzi.)

If we want to keep Earth livable for as long a span of time as possible, our best bet would be to switch as soon as possible to alternative fuels and halt meat production. Or we could go the riskier route and try to terraform parts of the planet, maybe turning our deserts into rain forests. But that could cause complications since networks are interconnected. From Stuart Fox at PopSci:

“Now that scientists agree that humans have profoundly changed the Earth’s climate, many have begun asking if we can use our globe-altering power to simply change it back. Geoengineering, essentially terraforming on Earth, has been floated as a cure for global warming a number of times over the past year, but now some scientists have published a plan to transform a part of the Sahara desert into a lush forest, and in the process, absorb enough carbon to offset the world’s current fossil fuel use. The catch: it will cost $2 trillion a year, and possibly destroy the Amazon jungle while unleashing giant swarms of locusts across Africa.”

“Every Couple Of Hours, Though, In As Little As 30 Seconds, The Barriers Break Down”

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

The opening of “When Networks Network,” Elizabeth Quill’s excellent Science News article about the interaction of networks, the ones inside the human body and the numerous external ones we navigate each day:

“Half a dozen times each night, your slumbering body performs a remarkable feat of coordination.

During the deepest throes of sleep, the body’s support systems run on their own timetables. Nerve cells hum along in your brain, their chitchat generating slow waves that signal sleep’s nether stages. Yet, like buses and trains with overlapping routes but unsynchronized schedules, this neural conversation has little to say to your heart, which pumps blood to its own rhythm through the body’s arteries and veins. Air likewise skips into the nostrils and down the windpipe in seemingly random spits and spats. And muscle fluctuations that make the legs twitch come and go as if in a vacuum. Networks of muscles, of brain cells, of airways and lungs, of heart and vessels operate largely independently.

Every couple of hours, though, in as little as 30 seconds, the barriers break down. Suddenly, there’s synchrony. All the disjointed activity of deep sleep starts to connect with its surroundings. Each network — run via the group effort of its own muscular, cellular and molecular players — joins the larger team.

This change, marking the transition from deep to light sleep, has only recently been understood in detail — thanks to a new look at when and how the body’s myriad networks link up to form an übernetwork.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“There Will Come A Time When Robots Will Understand Us Better Than We Understand Ourselves”

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

You might think roboticist Hans Moravec has been playing with wires and dials too long when he talks about Artificial Intelligence being able to manipulate humans by the middle of this century, but he was absolutely right about Roombas and bomb-defusing bots–actually, his timeline was conservative. From a 1997 interview he did with NOVA about the first four generations of robots:

“NOVA: 

Can you envision a robot understanding the psychology of a terrorist better than a human being?

Hans Moravec:

Well, ultimately. Now we’re talking 40 or 50 years from now, when we have these fourth generation machines and their successors, which I think ultimately will be better than human beings, in every possible way. But, the two abilities that are probably the hardest for robots to match, because they’re the things that we do the best, that have been life or death matters for us for most of our evolution, are, one, interacting with the physical world. You know, we’ve had to find our food and avoid our predators and deal with things on a moment to moment basis. So manipulation, perception, mobility – that’s one area. And the other area is social interaction. Because we’ve lived in tribes forever and we’ve had to be able to judge the intent and probable behavior of the other members of our tribe to get along. So the kind of social intuition we have is very powerful and probably uses close to the full processing power of our brain—the equivalent of a hundred trillion calculations per second—plus a lot of very special knowledge, some of which is hard-wired, some of which we learned growing up. This is probably where robots catch up last. But, once they do catch up, then they keep on going. I think there will come a time when robots will understand us better than we understand ourselves, or understand each other. And, you can even imagine the time in the more distant future when robots will be able to host a very detailed simulation of what’s going on in our brains and be able to manipulate us. 

NOVA: 

Wow.”

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See also:

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“The Land They Were Looking At Has No Infrastructure At All—It’s Just Desert”

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

I put up a post in May about CITE, the insta-ghost town to be built in Hobbs, New Mexico. The billion-dollar project, planned by Pegasus Holdings was to simulate a city that could hold (but wouldn’t hold) 35,000 people and be a testing ground for all sorts of technological innovations. But land acquisition and other factors has proven difficult, and the project seems more and more merely a pipe dream and a press release. It’s just hard to build a ghost town these days. From Wren Abbott in the Santa Fe Reporter:

“Part of Pegasus’ vision for CITE includes testing of driverless cars, but the company has yet to announce a partnership with the country’s forerunner in that industry, Google, Inc.. Google is already testing its cars in California, with drivers sitting behind the wheel to intervene in case of emergency. Legislation passed in Nevada allows Google to do the same thing there.

Pegasus’ plan also seems to now include power generation, despite the significant obstacles it would have faced with an alternate location it considered for CITE. If Pegasus had chosen a site near Las Cruces, the city would have had to build $40 million of infrastructure in order to begin alternative energy production, [Las Cruces Mayor Ken} Miyagishima says.

‘The land they were looking at has no infrastructure at all—it’s just desert,’ Miyagishima says. ‘It would have taken awhile to get infrastructure out there.'”

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“Chess Programs Regularly Play At Good Amateur Level”

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

An excerpt from “Today’s Computers, Intelligent Machines and Our Future,” an essay by roboticist Hans Moravec from 1978, before Deep Blue was beating Kasparov in chess and Watson was wowing Trebek on Jeopardy!: 

“In the thirty years since then computers have become vastly more capable, but the goal of human performance in most areas seems as elusive as ever, in spite of a great deal of effort. The last ten years, in particular, has seen thousands of people years devoted directly to the problem, referred to as Artificial Intelligence or AI. Attempts have been made to develop computer programs which do mathematics, computer programming and common sense reasoning, are able to understand natural languages and interpret scenes seen through cameras and spoken language heard through microphones and to play games humans find challenging.

 There has been some progress. Samuel’s checker program can occasionally beat checker champions. Chess programs regularly play at good amateur level, and in March 1977 a chess program from Northwestern University, running on a CDC Cyber-176 (which is about 20 times as fast as previous computers used to play chess) won the Minnesota Open Championship, against a slate of class A and expert players. A ten year effort at MIT has produced a system, Mathlab, capable of doing symbolic algebra, trigonometry and calculus operations better in many ways than most humans experienced in those fields. Programs exist which can understand English sentences with restricted grammar and vocabulary, given the letter sequence, or interpret spoken commands from hundred word vocabularies. Some can do very simple visual inspection tasks, such as deciding whether or not a screw is at the end of a shaft. The most difficult tasks to automate, for which computer performance to date has been most disappointing, are those that humans do most naturally, such as seeing, hearing and common sense reasoning. 

A major reason for the difficulty has become very clear to me in the course of my work on computer vision. It is simply that the machines with which we are working are still a hundred thousand to a million times too slow to match the performance of human nervous systems in those functions for which humans are specially wired. This enormous discrepancy is distorting our work, creating problems where there are none, making others impossibly difficult, and generally causing effort to be misdirected.”

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“He Developed Theatrical Calls, Aiming Hand-Pistols At Runners And Screaming OUTOUTOUTOUTOUT”

September 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Sports, Videos | Permalink

Ron Luciano, a showboating baseball umpire and tireless self-promoter, might have been amusing if his constant need for attention wasn’t a sign of desperation. His emphatic out calls and (relatively) outrageous book, The Umpire Strikes Back, made him a well-known figure in the ’70s and 80s. In a game of rules, he made his own, openly mocking a sport that was often taken too seriously. But he had no second act. When his routine grew tired and the beer commercials ran out, Luciano returned to his hometown and sadly committed suicide in 1995. From Matthew Callan at the Classical:

“As Luciano began his slow, undignified climb to the major leagues, he compensated for his lack of knowledge about the game by constantly chatting up players, managers, and even fans, as if hoping to acquire their expertise by osmosis. He developed theatrical calls, aiming hand-pistols at runners and screaming OUTOUTOUTOUTOUT as he emptied an imaginary clip; the hope was that, even if he was wrong, he’d at least be remembered. Luciano made sure to volunteer for every dumb stunt local owners put on both so he would be seen as a good sport and team player, and so he would be seen, period.

Once in the bigs, he constantly got in trouble with league American League president Lee MacPhail, usually for engaging in behavior that dared suggest baseball might be fun. Even if MacPhail wasn’t a fan, Luciano’s antics brought himself attention immediately, at a time when the average fan would have struggled to name even one umpire. A 1974 Sports Illustrated profile painted Luciano as ‘a rebel, an individualist,’ which says more about the staid atmosphere of baseball at the time than it does about the umpire. (His birdwatching hobby was counted among his acts of wanton individualism.)

By the end of the decade, he became president of the umpires’ association through what amounted to determined nudging, positioning himself nearest to the door during union meetings so he could be the first man to talk to reporters waiting outside, and therefore appear to be important; he understood this, correctly, as the most important factor in being important. Luciano’s tales from behind the plate made him a favorite on the winter banquet circuit, a hot stove tradition that’s nearly gone the way of the dodo, and eventually landed him a gig doing color commentary and profiles for NBC’s Game of the Week. The Umpire Strikes Back was the culmination of all this, a huge bestseller that blazed the ‘wacky sports’ trail of the 1980s later trod by The Hall of Shame series, Miller Lite commercials, and an infinite loop of blooper reels.”

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Luciano, at the end of his fame in 1991, selling diet cream soda:

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“Amanullah Launched An Ambitious Program Of Modernization From Above”

September 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

“Both his reforms and his failures have set the pattern for successive generations of Afghan modernizers.” (Image by Magnustraveller.)

The opening of a concise essay by Mariam and Ashraf Ghani in the New York Review of Books about the last 100 years or so of Afghanistan’s tortured history and thwarted attempts at political and social reform:

“Amanullah ruled Afghanistan from 1919 to 1929, first as amir and then, after he changed his own title, as king. During his brief reign, Amanullah launched an ambitious program of modernization from above, which was cut off prematurely by a revolt from below. His many reforms included promulgating rule of law through Afghanistan’s first constitution; investing in education through literacy programs and the building of schools; promoting unveiling and the end of purdah; transforming the traditional institution of the Loya Jirga, or Grand Council, into a mechanism for public consultation; winning Afghanistan’s independence from Britain; and large-scale urban planning, with the partial completion of the ‘new city’ of Dar ul-Aman, just to the west of Kabul. Both his reforms and his failures have set the pattern for successive generations of Afghan modernizers, who have returned again and again to his unfinished project, only to succumb to their own blind spots and collapse in their own ways.”

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“Every Time He Plays, He’s Confronted With Inarguable Evidence Of Success Or Failure”

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

By virtue of the money they make, most pundits are detached from reality and fairly useless. They misread the tea leaves and their talk disappears into the void. No one really keeps score, they live to talk another day and little is learned. From Aaron Swartz at Raw Thought, an excerpt from his essay about our reluctance to face reality and our failings:

“If you want to understand experts, you need to start by finding them. So the psychologists who wanted to understand ‘expert performance’ began by testing alleged experts, to see how good they really were.

In some fields it was easy: in chess, for example, great players can reliably beat amateurs. But in other fields, it was much, much harder.

Take punditry. In his giant 20-year study of expert forecasting, Philip Tetlock found that someone who merely predicted ‘everything will stay the same’ would be right more often than most professional pundits. Or take therapy. Numerous studies have found an hour with a random stranger is just as good as an hour with a professional therapist. In one study, for example, sessions with untrained university professors helped neurotic college students just as much as sessions with professional therapists. (This isn’t to say that therapy isn’t helpful — the same studies suggest it is — it’s just that what’s helpful is talking over your problems for an hour, not anything about the therapist.)

As you might expect, pundits and therapists aren’t fans of these studies. The pundits try to weasel out of them. As Tetlock writes; ‘The trick is to attach so many qualifiers to your vague predictions that you will be well positioned to explain pretty much whatever happens. China will fissure into regional fiefdoms, but only if the Chinese leadership fails to manage certain trade-offs deftly, and only if global economic growth stalls for a protracted period, and only if…’The therapists like to point to all the troubled people they’ve helped with their sophisticated techniques (avoiding the question of whether someone unsophisticated could have helped even more). What neither group can do is point to clear evidence that what they do works.

Compare them to the chess grandmaster. If you try to tell the chess grandmaster that he’s no better than a random college professor, he can easily play a professor and prove you wrong. Every time he plays, he’s confronted with inarguable evidence of success or failure. But therapists can often feel like they’re helping — they just led their client to a breakthrough about their childhood — when they’re actually not making any difference.”

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“These Machines Will Kill The Bad Kind Of Weeds”

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

Perhaps weedbots will soon be busy in your garden, doing the work now done by herbicides. From Klint Finley at TechCrunch:

“Blue River is designing weed elimination robots for agriculture. No, the company’s not making marijuana crop destructobots — these machines will kill the bad kind of weeds that farmers would otherwise use chemicals, or a legion of weed pullers, to destroy. Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla claims that Blue River’s technology can reduce herbicide use in the U.S. by 250 million pounds a year.

Blue River was founded by Stanford alumni Jorge Heraud and Lee Redden. To make it work, the team has done extensive development of machine vision algorithms for recognizing different types of plants. It’s one of the most ambitious applications of machine vision I’ve seen.”

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“What’s Left Is … Investing In Ourselves. Even If We’re Not Such A Good Bet.”

September 10, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s not that I don’t believe in charter schools–I just don’t believe in them in the hands of today’s conservatives. It seems a scheme to not teach evolution or to decrease educational opportunities for minorities. Of course, there are some thinkers who believe public education in America should be dissolved because it’s a remnant of the Industrial Age. But it’d be helpful if such people–all college graduates–actually knew what we would be put in its place. 

In her Newsweek piece, Megan McArdle (graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and University of Chicago) isn’t questioning the existence of K-12 but rather wondering if college for the masses has failed. An excerpt:

“That debate matters a lot, because while the value of an education can be very high, the value of a credential is strictly limited. If students are gaining real, valuable skills in school, then putting more students into college will increase the productive capacity of firms and the economy—a net gain for everyone. Credentials, meanwhile, are a zero-sum game. They don’t create value; they just reallocate it, in the same way that rising home values serve to ration slots in good public schools. If employers have mostly been using college degrees to weed out the inept and the unmotivated, then getting more people into college simply means more competition for a limited number of well-paying jobs. And in the current environment, that means a lot of people borrowing money for jobs they won’t get.

But we keep buying because after two decades prudent Americans who want a little financial security don’t have much left. Lifetime employment, and the pensions that went with it, have now joined outhouses, hitching posts, and rotary-dial telephones as something that wide-eyed children may hear about from their grandparents but will never see for themselves. The fabulous stock-market returns that promised an alternative form of protection proved even less durable. At least we have the house, weary Americans told each other, and the luckier ones still do, as they are reminded every time their shaking hand writes out another check for a mortgage that’s worth more than the home that secures it. What’s left is … investing in ourselves. Even if we’re not such a good bet.”

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“My Experiences With Disaster Have All Been Situational”

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

A segment from a Reddit Ask Me Anything with a female doomsday prepper:

“Question:

Do you have something specific you’re prepping for?

And with that question in mind, you talked mostly about food preparation and a bit about land. How are you prepping for what, if anything, you’re specifically expecting? Meaning, if you expect a nuclear attack, you would plan a bunker I assume. So how are you fitting out your house?

 Female Doomsday Prepper:

Nothing in particular, my experiences with disaster have all been situational — I walked to another cubicle just before a bomb went off so I wasn’t at my desk when the window shattered over where I was sitting, I was in the Holland Tunnel when the first plane hit on 9/11 then in Port Authority when the second hit, all because I had missed my departing flight earlier that weekend — both events were out of my control but I will admit that the bomb blast helped get my ass in gear so when 9/11 happened I was much better prepared.

With that in mind I think disaster/doom preparedness is really about what you can prepare for. I can prepare for hurricanes, disease and unrest so that’s what I work on. Disease epidemiology has always been a fascination of mine so a lot of my prep focus is related to pandemics. Thus I stockpile medical supplies and medicine, I also grow a lot of herbs — I think botanic pharmacology is essential.

I would love a decontamination area so I am working on adding a stylish outdoor shower next to my barn. I am building a fire pit that can double as a spot to burn clothing. When I have the chance I collect linens and sort them into packs for ease of use. I do have an electric fence that encircles part of my property, the goal is to completely enclose the property next summer with a nice fence. Small boundaries are the key at this point, I don’t need a bunker.

I do have a generator, rain barrels, and a concrete basement cistern. We have a well for water, propane for stove/dryer and oil for our heating — including a water heater. Our oil tank is inside the basement so in the event of a fuel shortage we can protect what we have.

For the future, I ‘made’ one of my guys go through Photovoltaic training so we can start planning our off-grid power supply — high on our list but it is only as the budget allows. There’s security in the works but I don’t want to spend too much time on things I have yet to acquire.”

“I Wouldn’t Actually Care All That Much About Making The Best Gasoline Car In The World”

September 9, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Tesla Motors Model X, with falcon doors.

The big picture for Elon Musk and Tesla Motors is to produce cars that change hearts and minds, that make people look in awe at electric vehicles and with pity on the current predominant autos that run their internal combustion engines on dinosaur juice. From an interview Sebastian Blanco did with Musk at Auto Blog:

“Auto Blog: 

Is that part of the excitement for you, to again be pushing what EVs can do?

Elon Musk: 

That’s our goal, absolutely. The fundamental good that Tesla will serve is as a catalyst for the advent of electric vehicles. We’ve got to address all of the concerns that people have about electric vehicles and the reason that the Model S be the world’s best car – not for some ego reason – is it’s got to show that an electric can can be a better car than any gasoline car. I wouldn’t actually care all that much about making the best gasoline car in the world. That’s, eh. But if we can make an electric car that people think is better than any gasoline car, then they’ll buy it just because it’s the best car and then we’re way beyond people who just care about the environment. That’s great, but for a lot of people, it’s just not their top thing, so that’s why it’s very important for us to achieve that, which means our quality has got to be fantastic, our safety has got to be top of the line and we have to address the long-distance travel issue, and that’s what the Supercharger is about. I certainly hope people copy us, that’d be great.”

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“These Houses Are The Shells Of Prematurely Stunted Hopes, Laced With Traces Of Bitterness And Regret”

September 9, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

I was reading Chloe Schama’s New Republic piece about the return of the haunted house as a “character” in modern literature, though the spooky homes are in a different form. During the age of foreclosure, the houses aren’t even often completed–the ghosts are the homes themselves, nothing within them. And what’s scarier really: things abandoned when half-built or fully built? I’d say the former.

With completion comes possibility–for good as well as bad. Every new Frankenstein is frightening, whether it be electricity, the telephone or the Internet, because it will upend certain parts of our lives. But with these upsetting inventions come progress. Without their completion, no “monsters” are unloosed, but we are stunted and stifled. The half-built is stillborn. From Schama’s article:

“What makes the new literary haunted house different is that dreams dry up more quickly, sometimes before they even take root. Modernity means speed, even when it comes to malevolent spirits. These houses are the shells of prematurely stunted hopes, laced with traces of bitterness and regret. Perhaps at no other moment in America’s history have so many of our towns and cities been filled with these kinds of structures, and pulp has put them convincingly on the page.”

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“Some Lawyers Built Their Careers By Defending Animals”

September 9, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

In recent years, wild animals have attacked humans in increasing numbers in America, owing to the keeping of exotic pets by people inspired by Animal Planet. In the Middle Ages, offending beasts were often put on trial and given a public hearing. Seriously. From Drew Nelles at Maisonneuve:

“As outlined in E.P. Evans’ comprehensive 1906 work The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, there were two kinds of animal trials during the Middle Ages: criminal proceedings against domestic creatures accused of individual crimes, and ecclesiastical tribunals to prosecute whole groups of vermin. The latter targeted animals like mice, locusts, weevils and caterpillars for such transgressions as ruining harvests or eating food stores. (Crimes against propriety could also incur the church’s wrath; a German pastor once anathematized local sparrows after their ‘scandalous unchastity’ interrupted a sermon.) The animals were typically tried, en masse and in absentia, and issued a date by which they had to leave town or face the unspecified disapproval of the righteous. Needless to say, the results of such ultimatums were mixed.

Ever the opportunists, some lawyers built their careers by defending animals. A sixteenth-century French jurist named Bartholomew Chassenée made his name as the counsel to some rats who were accused, in an ecclesiastical trial in Autun, of decimating the area’s barley crops. Rats being rats, Chassenée could hardly rely on his clients’ sympathetic qualities to get them off the hook. So, like numerous lawyers before and since, he built his argument on technicalities: the defendants couldn’t be expected to appear in court, as Evans says, ‘owing to the unwearied vigilance of their mortal enemies, the cats, who watched all their movements, and, with fell intent, lay in wait for them at every corner and passage.'” (Thanks Browser.)

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“A Question Remains: How Will Driverless Cars Defend Themselves?”

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

The opening of David Hambling’s new Popular Mechanics piece about safeguarding driverless cars from theft and diversionary tactics in a future world in which unmanned delivery trucks and drones become ubiquitous:

“In a few years’ time, once we get used to the idea of Google’s self-driving cars, it’s conceivable that autonomous trucks will take over the delivery industry. But while a driverless vehicle might bring with it big advantages, such as being less prone to accidents than a big rig with a road-weary driver behind the wheel, a question remains: How will driverless cars defend themselves? 

David Mascarenas, a researcher who studies cyber-physical systems at Los Alamos National Lab, says that as more robots venture out on their own, their creators are already struggling with how to protect them. During an exercise in Narragansett Bay, R.I., this summer, the U.S. Navy had to warn off at least one individual attempting to grab a miniature robot sub. In June, Cockrell School of Engineering assistant professor Todd Humphreys showed how drones could be decoyed into landing in the wrong place by deceiving their GPS. Mascarenas’s own involvement started with protecting expensive structural sensors now being placed on bridges to monitor their condition.”

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Houdini And Lincoln, Reading A Book (1920s)

September 7, 2012 in Excerpts, Photography, Science/Tech | Permalink

I came across this classic photograph of Harry Houdini and President Lincoln, and assumed it was the former debunking seances, which he loved to do. But it was actually a different kind of demystification–that of spirit photography. That phenomenon, which was first documented in the 1850s, supposedly showed ghosts of the dead making their presence known in photographs. It was a funereal kind of photobombing. In the 1920s, when Houdini created this image to show how phony the whole thing was, even bright people like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle were still arguing that spirit photography was genuine. From Kristi Finefield at the Library of Congress:

“In fact, Sir David Brewster, in his 1856 book on the stereoscope, gave step-by-step instructions for creating a spirit photo, beginning with:

‘For the purpose of amusement, the photographer might carry us even into the regions of the supernatural. His art, as I have elsewhere shewn, enables him to give a spiritual appearance to one or more of his figures, and to exhibit them as ‘thin air’ amid the solid realities of the stereoscopic picture.’

He went on to explain how this was easily done. Simply pose your main subjects. Then, when the exposure time is nearly up, have the ‘spirit’ figure enter the scene, holding still for only seconds before moving out of the picture. The ‘spirit’ then appeared as a semi-transparent figure, as seen in The Haunted Lane.

One of the more famous–and infamous–spirit photographers was William H. Mumler of Boston. He turned his ability to make photographs with visible spirits into a lucrative business venture, starting in the 1860s. Doubts grew about his work, but even when a spiritualist named Doctor Gardner recognized some of the so-called spirits as living Bostonians, people continued to pay as much as $10 a sitting. Mumler was charged with fraud in 1869, though not convicted, due to lack of evidence.  However, his career as a photographer of the spirit world was essentially over.

Celebrities took sides in the debate in the 1920s. Famed author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was an outspoken Spiritualist who believed that the supernatural could appear in photographs, while illusionist Harry Houdini denounced mediums as fakes and spirit photography as a hoax. Doyle and Houdini publicly feuded in the newspapers.

To demonstrate how easy it was to fake a photograph, Houdini had this image made in the 1920s, showing himself talking with Abraham Lincoln. He even based entire shows around debunking the claims of mediums and the entire idea of Spiritualism.”

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“The Public School System Is Designed To Produce A Workforce For An Economy That Will Not Be There”

September 7, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Alvin Toffler of Future Shock fame, called for the dismantling of the U.S. public-education system in a 2007 interview at Edutopia. A couple of excerpts follow.

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Edutopia:

You’ve been writing about our educational system for decades. What’s the most pressing need in public education right now?

Alvin Toffler:

Shut down the public education system.

Edutopia:

That’s pretty radical.

Alvin Toffler:

I’m roughly quoting Microsoft chairman Bill Gates, who said, “We don’t need to reform the system; we need to replace the system.”

Edutopia:

Why not just readjust what we have in place now? Do we really need to start from the ground up?

Alvin Toffler:

We should be thinking from the ground up. That’s different from changing everything. However, we first have to understand how we got the education system that we now have. Teachers are wonderful, and there are hundreds of thousands of them who are creative and terrific, but they are operating in a system that is completely out of time. It is a system designed to produce industrial workers.

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Alvin Toffler:

The public school system is designed to produce a workforce for an economy that will not be there. And therefore, with all the best intentions in the world, we’re stealing the kids’ future.

Do I have all the answers for how to replace it? No. But it seems to me that before we can get serious about creating an appropriate education system for the world that’s coming and that these kids will have to operate within, we have to ask some really fundamental questions.

And some of these questions are scary. For example: Should education be compulsory? And, if so, for who? Why does everybody have to start at age five? Maybe some kids should start at age eight and work fast. Or vice versa. Why is everything massified in the system, rather than individualized in the system? New technologies make possible customization in a way that the old system — everybody reading the same textbook at the same time — did not offer.

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“It Lays A Foundation For Helping People With Paralysis Walk Again”

September 6, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Following up on yesterday’s post about brain-machine interfaces, an excerpt from Wired about gray matter controlling exoskeleton legs: “A new brain-computer interface allows a person to walk using a pair of mechanical leg braces controlled by brain signals. The device has only been tested on able-bodied people, and while it has limitations, it lays a foundation for helping people with paralysis walk again.”

“The Fast Trains And Self-Driving Cars Will Help The Airports”

September 6, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The recent book Aerotropolis argues that high-speed rail will increase, not decrease, air traffic. More people will simply use the trains to reach airports. A similar argument from Brad Templeton’s new Singularity Hub article about high-speed rail and driverless cars:

“The air travel industry is not going to sit still. The airlines aren’t going to just let their huge business on the California air corridor disappear to the trains the way the HSR authority hopes. These are private companies, and they will cut prices, and innovate to compete. They will find better solutions to the security nightmare that has taken away their edge, and they’ll produce innovative products we have yet to see. The reality is that good security is possible without requiring people arrive at airports an hour before departure, if we are driven to make it happen. And the trains may not remain immune from the same security needs forever.

On the green front, we already see Boeing’s new generation of carbon fiber planes operating with less fuel. New turboprops are quiet and much more efficient, and there is more to come.

The fast trains and self-driving cars will help the airports. Instead of HSR from downtown SF to downtown LA, why not take that same HSR just to the airport, and clear security while on the train to be dropped off close to the gate. Or imagine a self-driving car that picks you up on the tarmac as you walk off the plane and whisks you directly to your destination. Driven by competition, the airlines will find a way to take advantage of their huge speed advantage in the core part of the journey.”

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