“The robotics industry is on the cusp of a major transformation. Today’s factory robots are solitary precision instruments, mimicking the repertoire of capabilities of skilled craftsmen while repeating a handful of tasks thousands of times over. But future factory robots will likely have to be capable of thousands of tasks, performing each only several times, and they will work in collaboration with humans.
Furthermore, interest in nonindustrial robots is emerging at an even quicker pace, and new and larger marketplaces are opening up as never before. But that means some pretty significant shifts in design from caged robots to adjacent workers, from stationary position to portable motion, from programming intensive to easily trainable, and from connected to autonomous robots. Even as they work to improve upon their current industrial offerings, robotics companies are closely watching demand for co-robots, which are the safe, flexible, vision-enabled and easily trainable robotic assistants that science fiction movies made culturally popular.
Thus the reinvention of robotics is fundamentally a transition from industrial robotics to service robotics, and one that is demanding flexibility and versatility beyond what is presently available.”
* We must create a new renewable-energy system to end our costly need to control the world’s oil militarily. Wind and solar-thermal have become the cheapest new-power-generating technologies, and are also labor-intensive; photovoltaic and battery storage technologies are improving rapidly; geothermal is an enormous resource—and oil companies happen to know how to drill wells. The U.S. is rich in renewable energy resources, and should aim at total energy independence, which will save us vast sums in the long run.
* We must rebuild our cities in the proven, compact forms of the world’s great cities, to reduce our dependence on petroleum-fueled cars. Our sprawling suburbs need to be transformed from cultural wastelands into communities with healthy centers and the creative cultural richness that cities have traditionally offered. A lot of tracks need to be laid and urban and suburban concrete poured. If we walk to transit stops, like New Yorkers, we will even lose weight and live longer. If Bechtel can build mega-airports, civil and military, it can certainly build eco-cities.
* We must develop a universal recycling system, so that all major materials (steel, paper, glass, aluminum, wood, plastic, even water) will be in steady and predictable supply without sabotaging our support system, the natural order. A giant job-intensive industry must be created here.
* We must restore our forests, fisheries, and agriculture to stable, net positive productivity. At present, we are cutting more timber than we grow and catching more fish than can reproduce. We are even putting far more petroleum-based calories into agriculture than we get out in food calories—in essence, we are eating oil, a non-renewable resource. And if we eat lower on the food chain and cut down on livestock, we will reduce our climate impacts even more than by getting rid of private cars.
* We must put people to work restoring our rivers, waterfronts, and wetlands—trashed by generations of engineers, dumpers, and developers. Carry on with what the New Deal started!
Here’s the full 22-minute version of Paul Ryan’s excellent 1969 documentary, “Ski Racing,” which uses bold editing and FM radio rock to help profile that era’s world-class downhill racers. One of the pros included is Vladimir “Spider” Sabich who would die horribly in 1976 in an infamous crime.
In selling the tour, the sales pitch is not pegged strictly to exciting races and the crack skiers but also to its colorful personalities. There is Sabich, who flies, races motorcycles and figures that a night in which he hasn’t danced on at least one tabletop is a night wasted. Jim Lillstrom, Beattie’s P.R. man, also enjoys checking off some of the other characters.Norway’s Terje Overland is known as the Aquavit Kid for the boisterous postvictory celebrations he has thrown. He’s also been known to pitch over a fully laden restaurant table when the spirits have so moved him. Then there is the poet, Duncan Cullman, of Twin Mountain, N.H., author of The Selected Heavies of Duncan Duck, published at his own expense, who used to travel the tour with a gargantuan, bearded manservant. And Sepp Staffler, a popular Austrian, who plays guitar and sitar and performs nightly at different lounges in Great Gorge, N.J. when he isn’t competing. The ski tour also has its very own George Blanda. That would be blond, wispy Anderl Molterer, the 40-year-old Austrian, long a world class racer and still competitive.
Pro skiing’s immediate success, however, seems to depend on an authentic rivalry building up between Sabich and [Billy] Kidd, who are close friends but whose living styles are as diverse as snow and sand. Sabich is freewheeling on his skis as well as on tabletops. Kidd is thoughtful, earnest, a perfectionist. Spider has his flying, his motorcycles and drives a Porsche 911-E. Billy paints and now drives a Volvo station wagon. Spider enjoys the man-to-man challenge of the pro circuit. Billy harbors some inner doubts regarding his ability to adapt to it.•
From “What Facebook Knows,” Tom Simonite’s interesting MIT Technology Review article about the myriad of unexpected ways that the voluminous data Zuckerberg and friends have collected allows the social network to do social science:
“One of [Cameron] Marlow’s researchers has developed a way to calculate a country’s ‘gross national happiness’ from its Facebook activity by logging the occurrence of words and phrases that signal positive or negative emotion. Gross national happiness fluctuates in a way that suggests the measure is accurate: it jumps during holidays and dips when popular public figures die. After a major earthquake in Chile in February 2010, the country’s score plummeted and took many months to return to normal. That event seemed to make the country as a whole more sympathetic when Japan suffered its own big earthquake and subsequent tsunami in March 2011; while Chile’s gross national happiness dipped, the figure didn’t waver in any other countries tracked (Japan wasn’t among them). Adam Kramer, who created the index, says he intended it to show that Facebook’s data could provide cheap and accurate ways to track social trends—methods that could be useful to economists and other researchers.”
Jonathan Rauch, that introvert, writing in 2001 for the Atlantic about old and new economies becoming acquainted:
“Although at this point no one can prove anything, a story that seems plausible to many economists and business executives goes like this: In the 1980s Old Economy businesses tended to waste much of what they spent on computers and software. Companies in traditional industries would drop a PC on every desk and declare themselves computerized; they would buy spreadsheet programs and word-processing software and networking equipment that as often as not just substituted new frustrations for old ones. This began to change, however, as software and hardware grew in power, and as companies began learning how to use them not just as conveniences or crutches but to change the nature of the job. At first the impact, like a misty drizzle, was too small to show up in the national economic statistics. However, each innovation enabled other innovations, none of them revolutionary but all of them combining in an accelerating cascade. By the second half of the 1990s the aggregate effect on productivity became large enough to register in the national accounts, and the line between the New Economy and the Old Economy began to blur. That is the story of the New Old Economy.”
“If you compare consumption today to consumption 60 years ago there are differences. What you will find, broadly speaking, is that the big things are more expensive and the little things are less expensive. Cars are more expensive – they may be safer but they’re more expensive. Houses are more expensive – they’re bigger but they’re more expensive. Healthcare is more expensive – more people’s diseases are cured but it’s more expensive. College education is more expensive – and I don’t think you can make the case that college education is improved in any way compared to 50 or 60 years ago. My guess is that, if anything, it’s probably a little bit worse over the last half century. So those big things are harder to obtain.
The little things – electronics, food and clothing – are easier to obtain. The only one of those items that you have to get on a regular basis is food. And yes, clothing is less expensive. So are TVs. But you probably buy these less frequently, so they’re less meaningful. Meanwhile you have these gigantic expenses for things that are really vital. Healthcare keeps you alive. College education makes it possible for you to achieve upward mobility. An automobile in many parts of the country is a necessity to get you to your job.”
Robert Moses wrote an Atlantic essay in 1962 in which he returned fire at his many critics just as his iron fist was losing its grip on New York City. The power broker argued, naturally, in favor of a metropolis based on automobiles and high-occupancy apartment buildings. An excerpt:
“To sum up, let me ask the Gamaliels of the city a few pointed questions.
By what practical and acceptable means would they limit the growth of population?
How would they reduce the output of cars, and if they could, what would take the place of the car as an employer of workers or as a means of transport in a motorized civilization?
If more cars are inevitable, must there not be roads for them to run on? If so, they must be built somewhere, and built in accordance with modern design. Where? This is a motor age, and the motorcar spells mobility.
Is the present distinction between parkways, landscaped limited-access expressways, boulevards, ordinary highways, and city streets unscientific? If so, what do the critics propose as a substitute?
Is mass commuter railroad transportation the sole and entire answer to urban street congestion? Is conflict between rubber and rails in fact irrepressible? Are there not practical combinations of public, quasi-public, and private financing which can solve the riddle? And what of the people who prefer cars and car pools and find them more comfortable, faster, and even cheaper than rails?
If a family likes present city life, should it be forced to live according to avant-garde architectural formulas? Do most professional planners in fact know what people think and want? The incredible affection of slum dwellers for the old neighborhood and their stubborn unwillingness to move are the despair of experts. The forensic medicine men who perform the autopsies on cities condemn these uncooperative families to hell and imply that they could be transplanted painlessly to New Delhi, Canberra, Brasilia, and Utopia. We do not smoke such opium. We have to livewith our problems.
Is it a mark of genius to exhibit lofty indifference to population growth, contempt for invested capital, budgets, and taxes; to be oblivious to the need of the average citizen to make a living and to his preferences, immediate concerns, and troubles?
What do the critics of cities offer as a substitute for the highly taxed central city core which supports the surrounding, quieter, less densely settled, and less exploited segments of the municipal pie? Have they an alternative to real-estate taxes?
Pending responsible answers to these questions, those of us who have work to do and obstacles to overcome, who cannot hide in ivory towers writing encyclopedic theses, whose usefulness is measured by results, must carry on.”
••••••••••
A rarely shown 1953 interview with Moses on the Longines Chronoscope:
From the Economist, a passage in which the recent meme (and hoax) the TacoCopter is used to illustrate why cheap tech like drones might allow innovators to overcome the increasing burden of knowledge:
“That’s another reason the burden of knowledge issue is less of a concern to me than it may be to others. Advancement of the scientific frontier is growing more difficult. Yet deployment of existing technologies to more productive ends may well be growing easier. Consider the tacocopter. The tacocopter is a not-quite-real-not-quite-a-joke business idea that became a brief internet sensation back in March. The concept is stunningly simple: order tacos on your iPhone and a quadracopter drone will deliver them to your doorstep. As you can read here, the plan would face technical and (especially) regulatory hurdles if implemented today. Yet the potential, for this or similar experiments, is obvious. Cheap, agile drone technology is available now. Building apps is trivially easy. Mapping and location technology and data are getting better all the time. If not drone copters, perhaps 3D printers or autonomous vehicles. It’s a short leap from the ridiculous to the transformative. And the ideas needed to transfer these technologies to everyday life are increasingly the domain of entrepreneurs rather than academics. One doesn’t need 20 years of study to spot profit opportunities.”
I poked fun at Lebron James a couple years back after his ridiculous Decision program, when he announced on live television that he’d be “bringing his talents to South Beach,” but even a Knicks fan like myself can be awed by him. And I don’t just mean the way he plays the game. Here was a guy born with tremendous talent, yes, but born also into a place and situation where so many things could have gone wrong. Instead, despite being the American sports fan’s best frenemy, he’s turned out tremendously on and off the court.
At Grantland, Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell discuss, among many things, an astute comment that Shane Battier made offhandedly about James. That comment:
“He sneezes and it’s a trending topic on Twitter. He is a fascinating study because he’s really the first and most seminal sports figure in the information age, where everything he does is reported and dissected and second-guessed many times over and he handles everything with an amazing grace and patience that I don’t know if other superstars from other areas would have been able to handle.”
The opening of a2003 interviewthe Harvard Review of Philosophy conducted with the moral philosopher Philippa Foot, who introduced her famed Trolley Problem in 1967:
“HRP: At the beginning ofNatural Goodness,you recall an intervention of Wittgenstein’s at a seminar at which a speaker realized that what he was about to say was, though seductive, clearly ridiculous. The speaker was trying to hit on something more sensible, and Wittgenstein said: ‘No. Say what you want to say! Be crude, and then we shall get on.’ Why do you think this is good advice for philosophers?
Philippa Foot: I begin Natural Goodness with this remark, since I have found it excellent advice. Whenever I find myself tempted to pass over a weird thought, I try to do the opposite, and give this thought its day in court. So I advise people to stick with their seductive but really ridiculous thoughts, because one may well strike gold just there.”
Bruce Sterling’s thoughtful New York Times homage to Ray Bradburyreminded me that therecently deceased sci-fi authorwrote his greatest work, Fahrenheit 451, on a coin-operated typewriter. The machine, invented in 1938 by Martin Tytell, was located in train stations and hotel lobbies and cost a couple of dimes an hour. From Tytell’s 2008Economist obituary:
“His love affair had begun as a schoolboy, with an Underwood Five. It lay uncovered on a teacher’s desk, curved and sleek, the typebars modestly contained but the chrome lever gleaming. He took it gently apart, as far as he could fillet 3,200 pieces with his pocket tool, and each time attempted to get further. A repair man gave him lessons, until he was in demand all across New York. When he met his wife Pearl later, it was over typewriters. She wanted a Royal for her office; he persuaded her into a Remington, and then marriage. Pearl made another doctorly and expert presence in the shop, hovering behind the overflowing shelves where the convalescents slept in plastic shrouds.
Mr. Tytell could customise typewriters in all kinds of ways. He re-engineered them for the war-disabled and for railway stations, taking ten cents in the slot. With a nifty solder-gun and his small engraving lathe he could make an American typewriter speak 145 different tongues, from Russian to Homeric Greek. An idle gear, picked up for 45 cents on Canal Street, allowed him to make reverse carriages for right-to-left Arabic and Hebrew. He managed hieroglyphs, musical notation and the first cursive font, for Mamie Eisenhower, who had tired of writing out White House invitations.”
America should have announced in January 1970, in the wake of our successful moon voyage, that we were visiting Mars in 1986, when that planet and ours were going to be in relatively close orbit. Just imagine how much further our science would have progressed if we had stayed on course. But failure of vision isn’t the only reason why our Space Age fantasies haven’t come to fruition. The opening of David Graeber’s Baffler essay, “Of Flying Cars and the Declining Rate of Profit“:
“A secret question hovers over us, a sense of disappointment, a broken promise we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like. I am referring not to the standard false promises that children are always given (about how the world is fair, or how those who work hard shall be rewarded), but to a particular generational promise—given to those who were children in the fifties, sixties, seventies, or eighties—one that was never quite articulated as a promise but rather as a set of assumptions about what our adult world would be like. And since it was never quite promised, now that it has failed to come true, we’re left confused: indignant, but at the same time, embarrassed at our own indignation, ashamed we were ever so silly to believe our elders to begin with.
Where, in short, are the flying cars? Where are the force fields, tractor beams, teleportation pods, antigravity sleds, tricorders, immortality drugs, colonies on Mars, and all the other technological wonders any child growing up in the mid-to-late twentieth century assumed would exist by now? Even those inventions that seemed ready to emerge—like cloning or cryogenics—ended up betraying their lofty promises. What happened to them?
We are well informed of the wonders of computers, as if this is some sort of unanticipated compensation, but, in fact, we haven’t moved even computing to the point of progress that people in the fifties expected we’d have reached by now.”
Every time I think that physics is tremendously important and philosophy is not, I remind myself that physicists didn’t come up with democracy. From a recent Jim Holt piece in the New York Times:
“Last year at a Google ‘Zeitgeist conference’ in England, Stephen Hawking declared that philosophy was ‘dead.’ Another great physicist, the Nobel laureate Steven Weinberg, has written that he finds philosophy ‘murky and inconsequential’ and of no value to him as a working scientist. And Richard Feynman, in his famous lectures on physics, complained that ‘philosophers are always with us, struggling in the periphery to try to tell us something, but they never really understand the subtleties and depths of the problem.’
Why do physicists have to be so churlish toward philosophy? Philosophers, on the whole, have been much nicer about science. ‘Philosophy consists in stopping when the torch of science fails us,’ Voltaire wrote back in the 18th century. And in the last few decades, philosophers have come to see their enterprise as continuous with that of science.”
From Ed Young at the Not Exactly Rocket Science blog, the opening of a post asking if we can clone a mammoth–and if we should:
“Tens of thousands of years ago, woolly mammoths roamed the northern hemisphere. These giant beasts may now be extinct, but some of their bodies still remain in the frozen Arctic wilderness. Several dozen such carcasses have now been found, and some are in extremely good condition. Scientists have used these remains to discover much about how the mammoth lived and died, and even to sequence most of its genome. But can they also bring the animal back from the dead? Will the woolly mammoth walk again?
Akira Iritani certainly seems to think so. The 84-year-old reproductive biologist has been trying to clone a mammoth for at least a decade, with a team of Japanese and Russian scientists. They have tried to use tissues from several frozen Siberian specimens including, most recently, a well-preserved thighbone. Last year, Iritani told reporters, ‘I think we have a reasonable chance of success and a healthy mammoth could be born in four or five years'” (Thanks Browser.)
I’m always disconcerted when I read Nielsen breakdowns of the viewing habits of white and black Americans, and see how little crossover there is, though, of course, I understand the reasons. It reminds that something can seem incredibly brilliant to a certain group of people but not to another because the social context and experience we bring to a work of art is often as important as the art itself. From “The Very White Poetry of Mad Men” at Capital from my excellent old pal Steven Boone:
“It would be interesting to see what Quentin Tarantino, a product of multi-ethnic working class neighborhoods in L.A., would do behind the camera on a Mad Men episode. His punk history lessonInglourious Basterds revels in ‘mistakes’ (starting with the title) and the perseverance of life’s D-students in a world of letter-perfect sociopaths-in-power. What mischief, what banana peels would Q.T. set in Don Draper’s path?
What approach would we see from filmmaker Robert Downey, Sr., who actually worked in the real-life New York ad agency milieu in the 1960s, funneling these experiences into the anarchic Putney Swope (1969)? In Swope, militant blacks take over a swank agency, a one-joke premise crawling with cobwebs by now, sure, but one which still packs a punch in the stubbornly segregated Bloomberg-era Manhattan.
Mad Men, which so far has given a few lines to a black maid, a black girlfriend and, in the latest season, a black secretary, actually does resonate in that way: In any of the ‘good jobs’ I held in Manhattan across 20 years, I was either the sole black person or one of two black people in the office. A smattering of Asians or Hispanics completed the rainbow.
But that may also be the reason I had such a hard time finding black professionals to talk to who watch Mad Men.
One black computer programmer who requested anonymity was candid about why he doesn’t: ‘Mad Men isn’t for me…. I don’t know any black people who watch the show. I know they’re out there, but I’ve never met any of them.’
The programmer was quick to add that it’s not because of the low melanin content, but because it’s too familiar.
‘It’s not necessary for me to need a black or minority character to enjoy a movie or show, but Mad Men is just so appropriately shiny and false,’ he said. ‘It reminded me a lot of dealing with the sales people I’ve dealt with over the years as a software developer. I’ve worked in offices for 25 years now, and I’ve been the only Negro in my different office departments more years than I’ll admit. It’s that way right now, in fact.
‘Programmers don’t come in our shade unless they’re from India. Until the 2000’s, I didn’t see many minorities of any stripe in high positions at places I worked. So for me, I’ve spent my entire career watching white office folks bicker, fight, backstab, love, hate, succeed and fail, all the while doing little to involve somebody like me. So why the fuck would I want to watch this on TV?'”
••••••••••
Faux ad from Putney Swope, 1969: “It started last weekend / At the Yale-Howard game.”
"Just 44 percent of Americans approve of the job the Supreme Court is doing." (Image by Stephen Masker.)
When I was a kid, the Supreme Court was held up to children as an example of high-mindedness at its best. I put up a post recently about the extreme drift we’ve seen in the way the country perceives the Court. And while the diminished view didn’t begin with the Roberts Court, the current iteration has experienced a dramatic cratering in standing. From the New York Times:
“Just 44 percent of Americans approve of the job the Supreme Court is doing and three-quarters say the justices’ decisions are sometimes influenced by their personal or political views, according to a poll conducted by The New York Times and CBS News.
Those findings are a fresh indication that the court’s standing with the public has slipped significantly in the past quarter-century, according to surveys conducted by several polling organizations. Approval was as high as 66 percent in the late 1980s, and by 2000 approached 50 percent.”
From Mashable, a report of a smart jug that texts you when your milk has soured on you: “Milkmaid is a unique home appliance that notifies the user via SMS text when its content is low or the milk has gone bad. The jug is embedded with high-tech features such as sensors, GSM radio module, antenna, SIM card and a rechargeable battery.”
Psychologist Philip Zimbardo, mastermind of the notorious Stanford Prison Experiment, which provided a chilling look at how quickly and thoroughly jailers can become dehumanized–a dress rehearsal, if you will, for Abu Ghraib–just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. He discusses the SPE and his new e-book about the effect Internet porn and video games have on boys. A few exchanges about Stanford.
_____________________
Question:
For those unaware, modern-day psychological studies (or anything even remotely involving testing humans) have to go through fairly rigorous scrutiny from ethics committees to ensure that no harm lasting damage is done. Up until relatively recent times these committees weren’t necessary and researchers had much more freedom – often at the expense of their subjects.
At the Browser, economist Tim Harford comments on Charles Perrow’s book Normal Accidents, which suggests that our technological systems growing more complex inevitably leads to greater chaos:
“Tim Harford: For him, at the time he published the first edition of this book, Three Mile Island [the nuclear core meltdown in Pennsylvania in 1979] was the definitive one. It prefigured Chernobyl. And then he revisits the subject at the end of the 1990s. The book goes through awful accidents in complex systems and explores why they happened – the human failings that go into them, the systemic consequences, the fact you could have a very small error that propagates and propagates. It’s quite a technical book, but it’s wonderful and completely compelling.
I originally read the book because I wanted to write about a particular accident. My sister is a qualified safety engineer, and she gave me a bunch of safety engineering books. But as I read Perrow’s book, I realised that it could have been written about the financial crisis. That was really shocking to me – this realisation that these banks and their interconnections were, in many ways, the same kind of system as a nuclear reactor, or at least had very important similarities.
And is there any way of avoiding this kind of disaster in future? Does the book shed any light on that?
Tim Harford: Perrow is, in many ways, a pessimist. He says that if the system is too complicated, you will have accidents. There’s nothing you can do about it. Looking back at the history of financial crises, that’s probably appropriate. But one thing that comes out of the book is the idea that we tend to make systems more complex by adding safety systems on top of them, and that the safety systems themselves create new ways for things to go wrong. That was a key problem in the financial crisis. A lot of banks were taking bets and then insuring themselves with credit default swaps (CDS). Credit default swaps were, basically, insurance contracts that banks wrote, often with [the big insurance company] AIG. Or banks were repackaging sub-prime mortgages into vehicles that were supposed to make risky loans safe. These two innovations – the packages of sub-prime loans and the credit default swaps – were both safety systems. But they were both absolutely crucial in explaining why the system blew up. I think that’s a central and really useful idea, that these safety systems are probably not helpful – and even when they are helpful, they will have unintended consequences.”
Tactus has invented dynamic physical buttons that rise from your touchscreen. From TG Daily:
“Well, Tactus uses microfluidic technology to create physical buttons that rise from the touchscreen to give users the experience or feeling of operating a physical keyboard. When no longer needed, the buttons recede back into the touchscreen, leaving no trace of their presence. The Tactile Layer panel is a completely flat, transparent, dynamic surface that adds no extra thickness to the standard touchscreen display since it replaces a layer of the already existing display stack.”
I read the 1996 New York Time Magazine article “James Is a Girl” some time ago but hadn’t recalled that it was written by Jennifer Egan, who has, of course, since become a hugely acclaimed novelist. The titular girl with the boy’s name was the 16-year-old Nebraska-born model James King, a scary mix of adult and child, who is known today as the actress Jaime King. Unmentioned in the piece was that the teen already had a raging heroin habit. An excerpt:
“When James has finished her breakfast — tea, a small pain au chocolat and a chain of Marlboros — I walk with her and Samersova to the Theatre des Champs-Elysees, where the Galliano show is to take place. Despite the balmy weather, Paris has been a mess — a general strike and the resulting gridlock have filled the air with a throat-scorching smog; the proliferation of terrorist bombs in subways and garbage cans has led to a heavy police presence on the streets. Yet the fashion world feels eerily removed from all this. At the backstage entrance to the Galliano show, the most pressing question is who will get in and who won’t. Fashion shows used to be sedate affairs catering mostly to magazine editors and department-store buyers. Now that models have become icons, the shows have about them an air of exquisite urgency: they’re cultural high-low events, like a Stones concert in the 1970’s.
Though the show isn’t scheduled to start until 6:30 P.M., models like James who aren’t yet stars are summoned hours ahead to have their hair and makeup done, so that the top models can arrive last and enjoy the full attention of the staff members. In a windowless backstage area, time drifts by on a languorous haze of smoke and hair spray and blow-dryer heat. A dance beat throbs unnoticed, like a pulse. James sips a can of Heineken and smokes. She picked up a horrible cough in Milan and developed shingles on her back from stress — a wide brush stroke of tiny purple blisters that she takes obvious glee in showing people. Samersova nags at her to take her medicine.
James likes to tell people that she and Samersova are Tauruses. ‘I mean she is the second me,’ James says. ‘That’s why I bring her here, because I know that when I’m too frazzled to make a rational decision I can trust her because we think exactly the same. I mean she’s like a boyfriend but not.’
James seems quite childlike at times — she’s easily distracted, prone to slouching and staring into space, then snapping to attention in a fit of enthusiasm. She’s physically affectionate in a sweet, unself-conscious way, always hugging people and leaning against them. She can be insecure, like the time she accused a Company Management driver of preferring to drive another model rather than herself, then stalked away, looking as if she might cry. Yet other moments she seems much older than 16, so jaded as to be unshockable. She has a pierced nipple, a large tattoo of a winged fairy on her lower back, refers to people in their 20’s as ‘kids’ and frequently invokes her ‘whole life,’ as if this were an endless expanse of time. These contradictions are all present, somehow, in her face, which looks freshly minted in its innocence yet, somehow, knowing.”
“I FIRST MEET JULIA ORMOND FOUR MONTHS earlier in November 1994. We’re having breakfast at the Parker Meridien in New York, where Paramount Pictures has put her up. She’s in town for wardrobe fittings on Sabrina, which Paramount is producing. She seems upbeat as she tries to unravel for me the mystery of her sudden change in status. She takes her time with every question, and seems intensely quizzical herself about the inescapable belief among those around her that she may soon be a movie star.
It strikes us both as odd because at the moment, almost no one in America outside the movie business has yet heard of her. Until now Ormond has only been known to those who watch the movie business closely by reading movie magazines or scanning E!, cable’s entertainment channel.
As recently as three years ago, she was an unknown actress in London. Today she is pampered by an industry with the resources to provide every necessary comfort, and several optional extras. Ormond suddenly finds herself in the back of stretch limos, and struggling over what to do with the single-stemmed, wrapped-in-plastic roses often passed her way by friendly drivers, pilots and other helping hands. She has a personal assistant, Jane Collins Emanuel, to handle her schedule, her luggage and the roses.
‘I think you’re tapping into the bizarreness,’ Ormond is saying in front of a glass of grapefruit juice that remains untouched. Will Edridge, her pleasant, sandy-haired British doctor-boyfriend, sits beside her quietly. He listens intently as her unusually well-formed thoughts spill forth. Her words betray her emotions more than her face, but there’s an underlying sense that Ormond wants to please. ‘There are too many people who are talented . . . who fulfill all the things that are needed but are not movie stars,’ she says. ‘I don’t know what happened either.’ Ormond agrees that it would be interesting for a writer to examine the process of becoming a movie star without a single major movie in release.”
From Spiegel, Daniel Kahneman explaining how “priming” prompts behavior:
“SPIEGEL: Professor Kahneman, you’ve spent your entire professional life studying the snares in which human thought can become entrapped. For example, in your book, you describe how easy it is to increase a person’s willingness to contribute money to the coffee fund.
Kahneman: You just have to make sure that the right picture is hanging above the cash box. If a pair of eyes is looking back at them from the wall, people will contribute twice as much as they do when the picture shows flowers. People who feel observed behave more morally.
SPIEGEL: And this also works if we don’t even pay attention to the photo on the wall?
Kahneman: All the more if you don’t notice it. The phenomenon is called “priming”: We aren’t aware that we have perceived a certain stimulus, but it can be proved that we still respond to it.
SPIEGEL: People in advertising will like that.
Kahneman: Of course, that’s where priming is in widespread use. An attractive woman in an ad automatically directs your attention to the name of the product. When you encounter it in the shop later on, it will already seem familiar to you.” (Thanks Browser.)
From “Our Biotech Future,” Freeman Dyson’s 2007 New York Review of Books essay, in which the scientist ponders the possibilities that will result from genetic engineering being conducted by the general public:
“Domesticated biotechnology, once it gets into the hands of housewives and children, will give us an explosion of diversity of new living creatures, rather than the monoculture crops that the big corporations prefer. New lineages will proliferate to replace those that monoculture farming and deforestation have destroyed. Designing genomes will be a personal thing, a new art form as creative as painting or sculpture.
Few of the new creations will be masterpieces, but a great many will bring joy to their creators and variety to our fauna and flora. The final step in the domestication of biotechnology will be biotech games, designed like computer games for children down to kindergarten age but played with real eggs and seeds rather than with images on a screen. Playing such games, kids will acquire an intimate feeling for the organisms that they are growing. The winner could be the kid whose seed grows the prickliest cactus, or the kid whose egg hatches the cutest dinosaur. These games will be messy and possibly dangerous. Rules and regulations will be needed to make sure that our kids do not endanger themselves and others. The dangers of biotechnology are real and serious.
If domestication of biotechnology is the wave of the future, five important questions need to be answered. First, can it be stopped? Second, ought it to be stopped? Third, if stopping it is either impossible or undesirable, what are the appropriate limits that our society must impose on it? Fourth, how should the limits be decided? Fifth, how should the limits be enforced, nationally and internationally? I do not attempt to answer these questions here. I leave it to our children and grandchildren to supply the answers.”
