Excerpts

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“In This World Man And Machine Were One”

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

From novelist Chloe Aridjis’ Granta article about cosmonauts trying to adjust to space–and readjust to Earth:

“Initially, it was unclear how man in space would react, how he would endure weightlessness and ‘unknown nervous-emotional overloads’. In a pre-emptive move, a ‘logic lock’ was installed aboard the Vostoks – early Soviet spacecrafts – to prevent any ‘irrational intervention of the cosmonaut in the direction of the ship’. Gagarin, for instance, had no control over his voyage.

After all, in this world man and machine were one, incorporated into a single control system, its two main exponents poised to operate at highest potential and coherence. Yet despite all the preparation there were human variables, and the symbiotic relationship led to both real and imaginary ailments. One healthy cosmonaut, for instance, experienced cardiac arrhythmia after being exposed to sustained stressors related to onboard equipment failure.

During the first ninety-six-day Salyut mission in 1978, cosmonaut Yury Romanenko was apparently so mesmerized by the vastness of the cosmos that he stepped out to have a better look and forgot to attach himself with safety tethers to the space station. Fortunately his cohort noticed and quickly grabbed his foot as it floated out of the hatch. Even the most trained and disciplined individual could ignore all precautions and checklists and succumb to a greater urge.

And then there was the monotony of space, the long stretches of nothingness, whether experienced alone – certainly the deepest emptiness of all – or in a small group, when tensions nearly always arose. Despite the speed of the aircraft, inside there was often no sensation of movement and everything appeared fixed and motionless. Moments of sensory bombardment alternated with extended periods of sensory deprivation. The first few cosmonauts were given books; later ones, curiously, were instead handed knives, wood blocks, coloured pencils and paper with which to pass the time. Some individuals would apparently become so exasperated with the lack of stimuli that they’d wish for the equipment to break down simply to provide some variety.”

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“I can assure you that I had no butterflies or anything else in my stomach”:

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“In Just Six Hours, The World’s Deserts Receive More Energy From The Sun Than Humans Consume In A Year”

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

“We have proved the commercial profit of sun power in the tropics and have more particularly proved that after our stores of oil and coal are exhausted the human race can receive unlimited power from the rays of the sun.”–Frank Shuman, New York Times, 1916

Desertec, a European consortium, is trying to realize Shuman’s dream of a “sun engine,” attempting to turn the Sahara into a gigantic solar farm. From Leo Hickman’s recent article in the Guardian:

“Gerhard Knies, a German particle physicist, was the first person to estimate how much solar energy was required to meet humanity’s demand for electricity. In 1986, in direct response to the Chernobyl nuclear accident, he scribbled down some figures and arrived at the following remarkable conclusion: in just six hours, the world’s deserts receive more energy from the sun than humans consume in a year. If even a tiny fraction of this energy could be harnessed – an area of Saharan desert the size of Wales could, in theory, power the whole of Europe – Knies believed we could move beyond dirty and dangerous fuels for ever. Echoing Schuman’s own frustrations, Knies later asked whether ‘we are really, as a species, so stupid’ not to make better use of this resource. Over the next two decades, he worked – often alone – to drive this idea into public consciousness.

The culmination of his efforts is ‘Desertec,’ a largely German-led initiative that aims to provide 15% of Europe’s electricity by 2050 through a vast network of solar and wind farms stretching right across the Mena region and connecting to continental Europe via special high voltage, direct current transmission cables.”

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“Voluntary Electrical Brain Waves…Will Maneuver Large And Small Robots Remotely”

September 5, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

A concise summation of the long-term applications of brain-machine interfaces from Miguel A. L. Nicolelis’ new Scientific American article about the advent of artificial limbs controlled by thought:

“In this futuristic scenario, voluntary electrical brain waves, the biological alphabet that underlies human thinking, will maneuver large and small robots remotely, control airships from afar, and perhaps even allow the sharing of thoughts and sensations of one individual with another over what will become a collective brain-based network.”

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“You Need To Get Down Into These New Patterns, These Micro-Patterns”

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

Esther Dyson has called for quantified communities, and others are working in the same direction. Computer scientist Sandy Pentland argues at Edge that Karl Marx and Adam Smith didn’t possess the proper information to be completely correct, but we now do:

“These Big Data issues are important, but there are bigger things afoot. As you move into a society driven by Big Data most of the ways we think about the world change in a rather dramatic way. For instance, Adam Smith and Karl Marx were wrong, or at least had only half the answers. Why? Because they talked about markets and classes, but those are aggregates. They’re averages.

While it may be useful to reason about the averages, social phenomena are really made up of millions of small transactions between individuals. There are patterns in those individual transactions that are not just averages, they’re the things that are responsible for the flash crash and the Arab spring. You need to get down into these new patterns, these micro-patterns, because they don’t just average out to the classical way of understanding society. We’re entering a new era of social physics, where it’s the details of all the particles—the you and me—that actually determine the outcome. 

Reasoning about markets and classes may get you half of the way there, but it’s this new capability of looking at the details, which is only possible through Big Data, that will give us the other 50 percent of the story. We can potentially design companies, organizations, and societies that are more fair, stable and efficient as we get to really understand human physics at this fine-grain scale. This new computational social science offers incredible possibilities.”

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“The Difference That Swamps All Of These Is The Difference Between The Present And The Past”

September 5, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

We don’t know precisely what the future will look like, but we know that it will look different. Often we think we’ve reached our limits, though we don’t truly know where our limits lie. If we’re lucky, the future will lap us and laugh at us. We should welcome that. From a post by Stuart Armstrong at Practical Ethics:

“In 1920, Jackson Scholz set the men’s 100m world record at 10.6 seconds. The 100m race is one where progress is very hard; we’re getting towards the limit of human possibility. It’s very tricky to squeeze out another second or fraction of a second. Still, in 2009, Usain Bolt set the men’s 100m world record at 9.58 seconds.

Apart from the Bolt, who else today can run faster than Jackson Scholz? Well, the fastest 16 year old ran the 100m in 10.27 second. The visually impaired world record is 10.46seconds. The woman’s world record is 10.49 seconds.

The point of this extended metaphor is that we are focused on the differences we see today: between teenagers and adults, between men and women, between the able-bodied and those not. But the difference that swamps all of these is the difference between the present and the past.”

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“So I Decided To Try A Sensory-Isolation Experiment”

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

John C. Lilly explaining his 1954 invention, the isolation tank, in a 1983 Omni interview:

“Omni:

Tell me the circumstances that led you to invent the first isolation tank.

John C. Lilly:

There was a problem in neurophysiology at the time: Is brain activity self-contained or not? One school of thought said the brain needed external stimulation or it would go to sleep–become unconscious–while the other school said, ‘No, there are automatic oscillators in the brain that keep it awake.’ So I decided to try a sensory-isolation experiment, building a tank to reduce external stimuli–auditory, visual, tactile, temperature–almost to nil. The tank is lightproof and soundproof. The water in the tank is kept at ninety-three to ninety-four degrees. So you can’t tell where the water ends and your body begins, and it’s neither hot nor cold. If the water were exactly body temperature, it couldn’t absorb your body’s heat loss, your body temperature would rise above one hundred six degrees, and you might die.

I discovered that the oscillator school of thought was right, that the brain does not go unconscious in the absence of sensory input. I’d sleep in the tank if I hadn’t had any sleep for a couple of nights, but more interesting things happen if you’re awake. You can have waking dreams, study your dreams, and, with the help of LSD-25 or a chemical agent I call vitamin K, you can experience alternate realities. You’re safe in the tank because you’re not walking around and falling down, or mutating your perception of external ‘reality.'”

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“The tank was unusual in that it was vertical and looked like an old boiler”:

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“I Often Have To Cut Into The Brain And It Is Something I Hate Doing”

September 4, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening paragraph of neurosurgeon Henry Marsh’s excellent Granta essay about what goes on in his brain as he is slicing open someone else’s:

“I often have to cut into the brain and it is something I hate doing. With a pair of short-wave diathermy forceps I coagulate a few millimetres of the brain’s surface, turning the living, glittering pia arachnoid – the transparent membrane that covers the brain – along with its minute and elegant blood vessels, into an ugly scab. With a pair of microscopic scissors I then cut the blood vessels and dig downwards with a fine sucker. I look down the operating microscope, feeling my way through the soft white substance of the brain, trying to find the tumour. The idea that I am cutting and pushing through thought itself, that memories, dreams and reflections should have the consistency of soft white jelly, is simply too strange to understand and all I can see in front of me is matter. Nevertheless, I know that if I stray into the wrong area, into what neurosurgeons call eloquent brain, I will be faced with a damaged and disabled patient afterwards. The brain does not come with helpful labels saying ‘Cut here’ or ‘Don’t cut there’. Eloquent brain looks no different from any other area of the brain, so when I go round to the Recovery Ward after the operation to see what I have achieved, I am always anxious.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“Human Speciation Will Happen At An Explosive Pace And Our One Species Will Become Many”

September 4, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Perhaps I’m a pessimist but based on information in “The Coming Age of Wonders,” Rudy Rucker’s 1997 Washington Post review of a Freeman Dyson book, I’m predicting a war in the year 3000 between the people of Saturn and those of Jupiter. An excerpt from Rucker’s piece:

“Going further into the future, Dyson says that sometime around the year 3000, our descendants will have dispersed over the whole solar system. Due to the vast size of this space, our population could become many millions of times as large. ‘No central authority will be able to regulate their activities or even be aware of their existence. The process of speciation, the division of our species into many varieties with genetic endowment drifting gradually further apart, will then be under way.’ Thanks to genetic engineering, human speciation will happen at an explosive pace and ‘our one species will become many.’

As well as there being many more people, the quality of human experience may change. ‘Some of our descendants will be eager to explore the delights of collective memory and collective consciousness, made possible by . . . radiotelepathy. The experience . . . will enormously enlarge art, science, religion and history. . . . Those who have experienced the merging of memory and consciousness into a larger mind may find it difficult to communicate with those who still rely on spoken or written words. Those who have been part of an immortal group-mind may find it difficult to communicate with ordinary mortals.'”

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“Still, We Can Let Them Back In To Visit Family And Friends A Few Days A Year”

September 3, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Here’s a (mostly) tongue-in-cheek thought experiment from the Philosopher’s Beard aimed at solving the problem of wealth inequality in America. It’s ridiculous but is written with that blog’s customary dark wit and works like a piece of speculative fiction:

“Hence my modest proposal. We should first identify with some precision the category of what it seems reasonable to call rich i.e. those people whose capabilities for independence from and command over the rest of us crosses the threshold between enviable affluence and aristocratic privilege. That definition should be ‘absolutely relative’ rather than merely relative (e.g. we can’t just use the richest 1%, because there will always be a richest 1%). A good way to go might be to use some multiple of the median citizen’s wealth as a proxy for the distance from and power over ordinary citizens that defines problematic wealth. What that multiple should be is a matter for social scientists to investigate and democracies to debate, but, for the purposes of this discussion, let me suggest 30.

Exact numbers are tricky here because measuring wealth is highly subject to accounting definitions and methods. Another issue is that wealth defined in terms of net financial value of one’s assets depends on market conditions. For example, the assets of the middle-class are primarily their house and pensions, which have both been hit hard by the economic crisis; while the assets of the rich are primarily financial products, and thus prone to continuous fluctuations. In light of this, it might be best to set bands based on average data, and then revise them every few years to take account of long term trends. But for reference, the median American household’s wealth is presently around $120,000 (having declined 35% over the crisis), suggesting a cut-off of $3.5 million. (For context, $5.5 million is the present entry point to America’s richest 0.1%.) On the other side of the Atlantic, the slightly less unequal UK apparently has a median wealth of £200,000, suggesting a rather more generous wealth allowance of £6 million.

Then, when anyone in our society lands in the category of the problematic rich we should say, as at the end of a cheesy TV gameshow, ‘Congratulations, you won the economy game! Well done.’ And then we should offer them a choice: give it up (hold a potlatch, give it to Oxfam, their favourite art musuem foundation, or whatever) or cash out their winnings and depart our society forever, leaving their citizenship at the door on their way out. Since the rich are, um, rich, they have all the means they need to make a new life for themselves elsewhere, and perhaps even inveigle their way into citizenship in a country that is less picky than we are. So I’m sure they’ll do just fine. Still, we can let them back in to visit family and friends a few days a year – there’s no need to be vindictive.”

“It’s The Year 2020 And Newlyweds Tom And Sara Are Expecting Their First Child”

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

At IEEE Spectrum, Dan Siewiorek of Carnegie Mellon imagines the future of smartphones. Timelines are notoriously difficult to predict, but he suggests nothing outlandish. The opening:

“It’s the year 2020 and newlyweds Tom and Sara are expecting their first child. Along with selecting the latest high-tech stroller, picking out a crib, and decorating the nursery, they download the ‘NewBorn’ application suite to their universal communicator; they’re using what we’ll call a SmartPhone 20.0. Before the due date, they take the phone on a tour of the house, letting the phone’s sensors and machine-learning algorithms create light and sound ‘fingerprints’ for each room.

When they settle Tom Jr. down for his first nap at home, they place the SmartPhone 20.0 in his crib. Understanding that the crib is where the baby sleeps, the SmartPhone activates its sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS) application and uses its built-in microphone, accelerometers, and other sensors to monitor little Tommy’s heartbeat and respiration. The “Baby Position” app analyzes the live video stream to ensure that Tommy does not flip over onto his stomach—a position that the medical journals still report contributes to SIDS. Of course, best practices in child rearing seem to change quickly, but Tom and Sara aren’t too worried about that because the NewBorn application suite updates itself with the latest medical findings. To lull Tommy to sleep, the SmartPhone 20.0 plays music, testing out a variety of selections and learning by observation which music is most soothing for this particular infant.

As a toddler, Tommy is very observant and has learned the combination on the gate to the swimming pool area. One day, while his parents have their backs turned, he starts working the lock. His SmartPhone ‘Guardian’ app recognizes what he is doing, sounds an alarm, disables the lock, and plays a video demonstrating what could happen if Tommy fell into the pool with no one else around. Not happy at being thwarted, Tommy throws a tantrum, and the Guardian app, noting his parents’ arrival, briefs them on the situation and suggests a time-out.” (Thanks Browser.)

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When function reached its limit, Bell Labs focused on modernizing form. The landline, nearing its last gasp, 1977:

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“Pretty Much Anyone Who Wishes To Compete…Takes Something To At Least Dull The Pain”

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

There’s a good chance that you’re favorite baseball legend from an earlier, “cleaner” era used some sort of performance-enhancing drug, whatever was available at the time. From an interview at the Classical that Pete Beatty did with Villanova professor and baseball historian Mitchell Nathanson:

“The Classical: 

In your book, you talk about presenting ‘counter-stories’ to the anodyne, mostly cheerful history of baseball that MLB espouses—for every Black Sox scandal that teaches a canned moral, there’s a Hal Chase; for every PED bust, there are steroid-era records that will never be asterisked or erased. What do you think some of the counter-stories of the future might be for baseball, or some of the issues that will shape how we see the future history of the game?

Mitchell Nathanson: 

I think we’re in the midst of one right now: the Melky Cabrera ‘tainted’ batting title story. As it becomes more and more likely that he’ll win the NL batting title, there’s going to be an ever-increasing push to strip it from him by whatever means necessary in order to protect the ‘integrity of the game.’ Of course, this assumes that that PED story is a black-and-white one—involving ‘good guys’ like Andrew McCutchen and ‘bad guys’ like Melky Cabrera. The truth is that everyone and everything is shrouded in gray. I don’t know what McCutchen (or Derek Jeter for that matter) takes to enable him to hit consistently well over the course of a grueling season but I’m willing to wager that it’s more than milk and spinach. Those days are over (in fact, they never existed). The only difference between the so-called good guys and the bad ones is that the supplements taken by the alleged bad guys have been banned whereas the ones taken by the alleged good guys haven’t been—yet. Don’t forget that that bottle of Andro spotted in Mark McGwire’s locker in 1998 was purchased legally as a widely available ‘over the counter’ nutritional supplement. The truth is that pretty much anyone who wishes to compete—at the professional or even the amateur level—takes something to at least dull the pain enough to enable them to make it through nine innings or eighteen holes. Supplements are a growing fact of modern life and the lines between what is acceptable and what isn’t are blurred and only becoming blurrier by the day. This holds true, by the way, for the people who write, often sanctimoniously, about the game as well. I’m pretty sure that more than a few of the scribes calling on Bud Selig to do something, anything, to purge Cabrera’s name from the record book are meeting their daily late night deadlines with the help of a Five Hour Energy drink or something like it.”

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“There Was A Panel Of Scientists On One Side Of The Studio, With Us On The Other”

September 2, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Maybe everyone except me knew about this? During the first moon walk, Pink Floyd was in studio at the BBC jamming along with the live televised event. From David Gilmour in the Guardian:

“We [Pink Floyd] were in a BBC TV studio jamming to the landing. It was a live broadcast, and there was a panel of scientists on one side of the studio, with us on the other. I was 23.

The programming was a little looser in those days, and if a producer of a late-night programme felt like it, they would do something a bit off the wall. Funnily enough I’ve never really heard it since, but it is on YouTube. They were broadcasting the moon landing and they thought that to provide a bit of a break they would show us jamming. It was only about five minutes long. The song was called Moonhead – it’s a nice, atmospheric, spacey, 12-bar blues.

I also remember at the time being in my flat in London, gazing up at the moon, and thinking, ‘There are actually people standing up there right now.’ It brought it home to me powerfully, that you could be looking up at the moon and there would be people standing on it.”

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“Cowboys And Indians Alike Were In The Wrong Side Of The Barbed Wire Fence”

September 2, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of “Realtechnik, Nausea and Technological Longing,” Venkat Rao’s recent blog post which neatly explains how new inventions, often simple ones, upend accepted orders:

“The story of barbed wire is one of the most instructive ones in the history of technology. The short version is this: barbed wire (developed between 1860 to 1873) helped close the American frontier, carved out the killing fields of World War I, and by spurring the development of the tank as a counter-weapon, created industrial-era land warfare. It also ended the age-old global conflict between pastoral nomads and settled agriculturalists (of animals, vegetables and minerals) and handed a decisive victory to the latter. Cowboys and Indians alike were on the wrong side of the barbed wire fence. Quite a record for a technology that had little deep science or engineering behind it.

Barbed wire is an example of a proximal-cause technology that eventually disturbed multiple human balances of powers, starting with the much-mythologized cowboys-versus-ranchers balance. When things finally stabilized, a new technological world order had emerged, organizing everything from butter to guns differently.  Barbed wire was not a disruptive innovation in the Clayton Christensen sense. It was something far bigger. Its introduction marked what Marshall McLuhan called a break boundary in technological evolution: a rapid, irreversible and wholesale undermining of a prevailing planet-wide technological equilibrium. So ironically, the ultimate boundary-maker of physical geography was a boundary breaker in technology history.”

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“China’s Like Heaven For Corruption. So Why Do They Have To Escape?”

August 31, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

A segment from an interview in Foreign Policy with tech-friendly Chinese artist and political dissisdent Ai Weiwei:

“Foreign Policy: In 1949, American writer E.B. White said in Here Is New York that New York was three cities: the city of the native, who gives it solidity and continuity; the city of the commuter, who comes to the city temporarily for business, and they give the city its restlessness. The third city is that of the immigrant, who came for the dream and stayed; this group gave New York its passion, its culture, and its art. You lived in New York for more than a decade, but it’s been almost 20 years since you left. Do you see any similarities between 1949 New York and Beijing today?

Ai Weiwei: Maybe it looks similar, but it’s completely different, because we are not in a democratic society and the resources and decision-making aren’t fairly distributed. So many officials are escaping China with huge amounts of money — shocking numbers, billions. Then you start to ask: Why can’t they stay? China’s like heaven for corruption. So why do they have to escape? Because the system will not protect them, because there are always political struggles here. They just take the money and leave.”

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“They’ll Be Rewriting What It Means To Be A City In The World”

August 31, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m wary of demographic predictions but the premise of Nate Berg’s new piece at the Atlantic, that the world’s least livable cities are growing the fastest, is really solid. What can these emerging but impoverished places learn from tidy, healthy metropolises like Vancouver and Melbourne? Not much, perhaps. An excerpt:

 that roughly 90 percent of the urbanization underway globally is taking place in developing cities like Dhaka and Lagos and in developing countries like Zimbabwe and Papua New Guinea. And between 2009 and 2050, the number of urban dwellers in these developing countries is expected to more than double, to 5.2 billion, according to the World Health Organization. That puts nearly 75 percent of the world’s expected 7 billion urbanites in cities in the developing world.

While Melbourne and Vienna and Vancouver will most certainly continue to grow and evolve, they won’t be undergoing the same speed and intensity of urbanization as cities in the developing world. And as these dramatically changing cities deal with these urban shifts in a very short time span, it is with an equally swift pace that they’ll be rewriting what it means to be a city in the world. The urbanity of London, gradually spreading over centuries, is being overshadowed by the instant skyscraper forests of burgeoning megacities in China and the massively dense urban cores of Dhaka and Lagos. The London model isn’t going anywhere, but the majority of the next major cities will develop more like Shenzhen or Kabul.”

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“The Team Decided That A Mic Would Not Reveal New Facts About Mars’s Habitability”

August 31, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Interesting question I hadn’t though of: Why is the Curiosity sending back visuals of Mars but no audio? An excerpt from the answer at Curiosity Watch:

“So why’s there no mic on board? That’s mainly because MSL is a scientific mission and has a clearly defined objective:

The overall scientific goal of the mission is to explore and quantitatively assess a local region on Mars’ surface as a potential habitat for life, past or present. 

Hence, every instrument has to work toward the overall scientific goal. Maybe there have been discussions about including a microphone in the early planning stages but the team decided that a mic would not reveal new facts about Mars’s habitability.

Also, spaceflight is extremely expensive and every extra gram costs money, so you only bring the things you really need.”

“It Was In Its Early Days, Dubbed A Truman Show For The Elderly And Sick”

August 30, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a really interesting piece by Jon Henley in the Guardian about a self-contained, four-acre Dutch village for those suffering from dementia:

“Hogewey was, in its early days, dubbed a Truman Show for the elderly and sick, after the Jim Carrey film in which reality turned out to be the set of an elaborate TV show. The home is, admits Van Hal, ‘not completely normal. We pretend it is, but ultimately it is a nursing home, and these are people with severe dementia. Sometimes the illusion falls down; they’ll try to pay at the hairdresser’s, and realise they have no money, and become confused.

‘We can still do more. But in general, I think we get pretty close to normal. You don’t see people lying in their beds here. They’re up and about, doing things. They’re fitter. And they take less medication. I think maybe we’ve shown that even if it is cheaper to build the kind of care home neither you or I would ever want to live in, the kind of place where we’ve looked after people with dementia for the past 30 years or more, we perhaps shouldn’t be doing that any more.'” (Thanks Browser.)

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“Animals Might Also Be Bioengineered To Better Suit Captivity”

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

From Jennifer Abassi’s short, new Discover piece about the mashup of zoos and futurism, which touches on vertical zoos in urban areas and more outré topics:

“Within decades, advances in sequencing genes from ancient tissue could allow scientists to clone extinct dodo birds, saber-toothed cats, and woolly mammoths, says Jeffrey Yule, an evolutionary ecologist at Louisiana Tech University. Researchers in Asia and Europe are working to piece together DNA from mammoth tissue preserved in Siberian permafrost. Someday they might be able to insert it into an elephant egg to produce an embryo that a surrogate elephant would carry. It could fall to zoos to look after these animals.

Animals might also be bioengineered to better suit captivity, says John Fraser, former director of the Wildlife Conservation Society. Altering big cats, for example, to produce more endorphins might make them less aggressive. ‘We’ve spent a lot of time creating what look like barrier-less exhibits, but they still have barriers.'”

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The “Messiah” Holds Court In Los Angeles (1949)

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

I know there’ve been cults all throughout human history, but I tend to think of the ones that popped up in America after 1965. The classic 1949 photo above shows an earlier cult, a postwar sect established in Los Angeles known as the WKFL (Wisdom, Knowledge, Faith, Love) Fountain of the World. Founded by inveterate jailbird Francis Herman Pencovic, who reinvented himself as the self-styled messiah Krishna Venta, the group had an apocalyptic edge and seemed to be an antecedent to the Manson Family. Penecovic was murdered in 1958 in a suicide bombing perpetrated by former members of the cult. From the International Cultic Studies Association:

“His name was Krishna Venta, and Monday, December 10, 2008, marked the 50th anniversary of his violent assassination, which all told ended ten lives.

Born Francis Pencovic in the San Francisco of 1911, Venta was an interesting candidate for messiah, having previously lived as burglar, thief, con artist, and shipyard timekeeper. This changed in 1946 when, following a stretch on a chain gang and a stint in the Army, Pencovic’s body (or so he claimed) became the host vessel for the ‘Christ Everlasting,’ an eternal spirit being who had not only died on the cross at Calvary 2,000 years earlier, but had commandeered to Earth from the planet Neophrates a convoy of rocket ships whose passengers included Adam and Eve.

But in the wake of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, insisted Venta, such ancient history was irrelevant. This time around, his Earthly mission was to gather the 144,000 Elect foretold in Revelation and deliver them from an apocalypse heretofore unseen by mankind.

To draw attention to this cause, Venta donned a monk’s robe, permanently discarded footwear, and thereafter forewent cutting both hair and beard.  In the Truman and Eisenhower eras, Venta, who frequently made headlines for both his luck at the dog track and his repeated arrests for failure to pay child support, cut a unique figure.  His message, however, could not have been more tailor-made for Cold War America.

Armageddon, prophesied Venta, would begin as an armed race war in the streets of America.”

Sister Audrey, 1958.

Krishna Venta, homesteading in Alaska, 1958.

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“Some Researchers Say A Large Crowd Makes It Less Likely That An Individual Hero Will Step Up”

August 29, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Until now, I missed this recent and interesting WSJ piece by Sue Shellenbarger about the psychology of heroism. An excerpt:

“Certain traits make it more likely that a person will make a split-second decision to take a heroic risk. People who like to take charge of situations, who respond sympathetically to others, and who have a strong sense of moral and social responsibility are more likely to intervene than people who lack those traits, research shows. Heroes tend by nature to be hopeful, believing events will turn out well. They consciously try to keep fear from hampering their pursuit of goals, and they tend to block out the possibility of injury or material loss.

People who are otherwise good and caring may still shrink back in a crisis. Their responses depend partly on whether they perceive the situation as an emergency and whether they know how to help; someone who doesn’t know anything about electrical wiring probably won’t rush to save a person tangled in a power line. How you’re feeling that day makes a difference, too; ‘people who are in a good mood are more likely to help,’ says Julie M. Hupp, an assistant professor of psychology at Ohio State University in Newark. Context also matters; some researchers say a large crowd makes it less likely that an individual hero will step up.”

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“The Chinese Urban Reckoning Will Be Even More Severe Than America’s”

August 29, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

China is building cities and skyscrapers faster than the West can, but it’s still thus far relying on the same-old intellectual templates: an auto-centric culture and Le Corbusier-style design. From Peter Calthorpe in Foreign Policy:

“The choices China makes in the years ahead will have an immense impact not only on the long-term viability, livability, and energy efficiency of its cities, but also on the health of the entire planet. Unfortunately, much of what China is building is based on outdated Western planning ideas that put its cars at the center of urban life, rather than its people. And the bill will be paid in the form of larger waistlines, reduced quality of life, and choking pollution and congestion. The Chinese may get fat and unhappy before they get rich.

Like the U.S. cities of the 1950s and ’60s, Chinese cities are working to accommodate the explosive growth of automobile travel by building highways, ring roads, and parking lots. But more than any other factor, the rise of the car and the growth of the national highway system hollowed out American cities after World War II. Urban professionals fled to their newly accessible palaces in the suburbs, leaving behind ghettos of poverty and dysfunction. As Jane Jacobs, the great American urbanist, lamented, ‘Not TV or illegal drugs but the automobile has been the chief destroyer of American communities.’

Only in the last few decades, as urban crime rates have plummeted and the suburbs have become just as congested as the downtowns of old, have Americans returned to revitalize their cities in large numbers, embracing mass transit, walkable communities, and street-level retail. But while America’s yuppies may now take ‘urban’ to mean a delightful new world of cool bars, Whole Foods stores, and bike paths, urbanization in China means something else entirely: gray skies, row after row of drab apartment blocks, and snarling traffic.

If anything, due to China’s high population density, the Chinese urban reckoning will be even more severe than America’s. “

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“Their Epic Match…Captured Our Attention In A Way That No Struggle Of Intellect Has Since”

August 29, 2012 in Excerpts, Sports, Videos | Permalink

I’m of two minds about Stephen L. Carter’s arguments in his new Bloomberg essay, “How Bobby Fischer (Briefly) Changed America.” Carter recalls the Fischer-Spassky chess matches of 1972, which became a national sensation, as the last time Americans were interested in complex ideas. There are by far more U.S. citizens right now than ever before who are interested in and capable of complicated thinking, though there are probably many more focused on the basic function of tools rather than challenging content they can deliver. The piece’s opening:

“This summer marks the anniversary of an extraordinary moment in U.S. history: the 1972 match in which the American genius Bobby Fischer defeated the Soviet wizard Boris Spassky for the chess championship of the world.

The battle probably should have been just one more headline in an eventful three months that saw the Watergate burglary, the expulsion of the Soviet military from Egypt and the humiliating dismissal of vice presidential nominee Thomas Eagleton from the Democratic ticket. Somehow the story of Fischer and Spassky and their epic match, which ended 40 years ago this month, captured our attention in a way that no struggle of intellect has since.

The two best players in the world were playing 24 games in Iceland, and everyone paid attention. Strangers who had never picked up a chess piece discussed the match on subway trains. Newspapers put out special editions announcing the results of the games, and vendors hawked them from the corners, shouting out the name of the winner. Book publishers were signing up chess writers by the dozens.

Chess is a very hard game, and what is most remarkable about that summer is that people wanted to play anyway. They wanted their minds stretched, and were willing to work for that reward. The brief period of Fischer’s ascendancy — he quit chess three years later — was perhaps the last era in our nation’s history when this could be said.”

••••••••••

Mike Wallace’s excellent profile of Fischer in 1972, just prior to the showdown with Spassky. Lewis Cohen, the 12-year-old prodigy who loses a game of speed chess to Fischer, may be this guy.

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“When The Signature Was Required On Top, Only 37 Percent Cheated”

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

The human mind is really good at justification and rationalization and delaying responsibility, so it’s not surprising that a cleverly designed recent study reveals that we’re much more likely to answer printed questions honestly when we’re asked to sign the form at the beginning rather than the end. From John Timmer at Ars Technica:

“Their hypothesis was that ‘signing one’s name before reporting information (rather than at the end) makes morality accessible right before it is most needed, which will consequently promote honest reporting.’

To test this proposal, they designed a series of forms that required self reporting of personal information, either involving performance on a math quiz where higher scores meant higher rewards, or the reimbursable travel expenses involved in getting to the study’s location. The only difference among the forms? Some did not ask for a signature, some put the signature on top, and some placed it in its traditional location, at the end.

In the case of the math quiz, the researchers actually tracked how well the participants had performed. With the signature at the end, a full 79 percent of the participants cheated. Somewhat fewer cheated when no signature was required, though the difference was not statistically significant. But when the signature was required on top, only 37 percent cheated—less than half the rate seen in the signature-at-bottom group.”

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“They See People Not Just As Individuals, But Also As Ecosystems”

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

Since we contain far more bacterial cells than cells from our parents, some medical researchers are beginning to look at the human body as an ecosystem. The opening of a piece on the topic from the Economist:

“WHAT’S a man? Or, indeed, a woman? Biologically, the answer might seem obvious. A human being is an individual who has grown from a fertilised egg which contained genes from both father and mother. A growing band of biologists, however, think this definition incomplete. They see people not just as individuals, but also as ecosystems. In their view, the descendant of the fertilised egg is merely one component of the system. The others are trillions of bacteria, each equally an individual, which are found in a person’s gut, his mouth, his scalp, his skin and all of the crevices and orifices that subtend from his body’s surface.

A healthy adult human harbours some 100 trillion bacteria in his gut alone. That is ten times as many bacterial cells as he has cells descended from the sperm and egg of his parents. These bugs, moreover, are diverse. Egg and sperm provide about 23,000 different genes. The microbiome, as the body’s commensal bacteria are collectively known, is reckoned to have around 3m. Admittedly, many of those millions are variations on common themes, but equally many are not, and even the number of those that are adds something to the body’s genetic mix.

And it really is a system, for evolution has aligned the interests of host and bugs. In exchange for raw materials and shelter the microbes that live in and on people feed and protect their hosts, and are thus integral to that host’s well-being. Neither wishes the other harm. In bad times, though, this alignment of interest can break down. Then, the microbiome may misbehave in ways which cause disease.”

“He Was Saying That He Had Won”

August 28, 2012 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

Life is a fight that’s long and bruising, the score changes regularly yet surprisingly, and no one really wins in the end. And that’s for the fortunate ones. When we’re at our best or worst, it seems like it will go on forever, that no fall or rise is possible. But the sands shift and the tides are unimpressed. We can spend our time marking down who’s leading, but we’re all falling behind.

Two fighters, Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier, brought out the best and worst in one another. Their three fights in the early 1970s made them legends and made them old. Ali used ugly, racist words to describe his fiercest opponent. It was the Greatest at his lowest. Frazier relished Ali’s eventual physical decline, diminishing himself in the process. They were both winners, but it wasn’t enough–the other had to lose. Ali seemed better about letting go of the feud in later years, but let’s remember that he won two of the fights. From “The Lonesome Death of Smokin’ Joe Frazier,” Tom Junod’s 2011 Esquire piece about the rivalry that couldn’t end on its own terms:

“The only time I ever met Joe Frazier was in downtown Atlanta, outside the arena used as a boxing venue during the 1996 Summer Olympics. The week before, Ali had once again “shocked the world” when he was handed the torch at the opening ceremonies, and then he elicited both pity and awe when he shakily climbed the stairs and ignited the Olympic flame. Despite winning the gold medal in the 1964 Games, Joe wasn’t invited to the stadium that night, and now he was selling T-shirts in a jerryrigged shack outside the boxing arena, just another of the carnie barkers who infested downtown during the games and turned Atlanta into an eyesore. His son Marvis — the former heavyweight contender who had been knocked out as if by a gunshot by a Larry Holmes right hand and then almost killed by Mike Tyson — was working the shack, making change. ‘Hey Joe!’ I said, and walked up to him as my father had 25 years earlier. He held out his hand horizontally, and held it still. ‘Hey Joe!’ I repeated, and Joe, looking at his hand and then at me, said with a familiar smile: ‘Still steady.’

He was saying that he had won. He was saying that while Ali was a rattling relic with Parkinson’s Syndrome, he, Joe Frazier, was still steady, and capable of keeping his hand still. He was saying, above all, that wherever Ali was, he, Joe Frazier, put him there, and that he was vindicated by the split decision handed down by the fullness of time.

Now Joe Frazier is dead, and Muhammad Ali has once again miraculously outlasted him. But that’s the thing about fighting your battles over the fullness of time: You fight when you’re a young man, and you fight until the final bell. You keep fighting when you’re an old man, and you keep fighting to the death.”

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