Excerpts

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“I Thought Art Should Be Like Science, Always Discovering Things Afresh”

June 4, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

At the Financial Times, Simon Schama presents a portrait of Yoko Ono at 79. An excerpt about the bold performance art she made before she was a Beatle bride, which showed a really good understanding of neuroscience:

“In a cold-water apartment on Chambers Street, New York, she gave a series of performances and concerts in which minimalist ‘instructions’ and transient experiences replaced the static, monumental pretensions of framed pictures. The prompted eye and the receptive brain made the pictures instead. The technique was lovely, liberating and genuinely innovative. ‘I thought art should be like science, always discovering things afresh, and I wanted to be Madame Curie.’

So when she and Lennon had their momentous encounter at Indica in 1966, Ono was already established as an avant-garde conceptual artist. She insists she really had no idea who he was or what he did. ‘I just saw this rather attractive guy who seemed to be taking my work very seriously.’ Of pop music she knew nothing, ‘not even of Elvis Presley; just maybe some jazz.’ Of what was about to hit them both out there in Beatlemania land she had no clue. ‘I was naïve. We both were … we thought that it was going to be really great.’ It wasn’t. ‘My work totally disappeared and John, with all that power he had, was going to go down too.’ She falls quiet for a moment; a flicker of sadness clouding the wide, expressively sunny face. ‘I feel very badly if maybe I was the cause of it.'” (Thanks Browser.)

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“The Cut Piece,” 1965:

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“The Future Isn’t All Thrilling Robo-Sex And Free Solar Energy Though”

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

Speaking of the Singularity, a passage from Carole Cadwalladr’s new Guardian article about Peter Diamandis’ ultra-expensive Singularity University:

“There’s a neat circularity to this. Peter Diamandis grew up in Brooklyn, the son of Greek immigrant parents, and was himself inspired to become a scientist by the Apollo mission, doing degrees in medicine and molecular biology and finally a PhD in aerospace engineering at MIT. The Singularity University isn’t even the first university he’s founded. He set up the International Space University while he was still in his 20s and which has now trained an entire generation of NASA scientists. It’s why Buzz Aldrin has come along, and why another astronaut, Dan Barry, teaches the SU’s robotics course (Barry’s big prediction: cyberdildonics. Robot sex. ‘You think it’s funny, right? But I’m also a rehabilitation physician, and sex is a basic human drive robots will be able to fulfil for the disabled, the widowed, the elderly. It’s going to happen. You might as well accept it and get in on the ground floor.’)

The future isn’t all thrilling robo-sex and free solar energy though. Barry’s talk also includes video of some of the other robots in development. If you think drones are scary, it’s because you haven’t yet seen the video on YouTube of autonomous swarming quadrocoptors. Or the hummingbird-shaped drone that can hover in the air and then fly in through a window, or Big Dog, which looks like something from Blade Runner, or, just last week, a new one with legs that can go where no Dalek ever could: up stairs.

None of these are being developed to help with meals on wheels or palliative care nursing, though. They’re war machines, most of which are being developed with funding or support from DARPA.”

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“Preparing humanity for accelerating technological change”:

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“The Past 150 Years Have Been A Golden Age For Doctors”

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

Interesting article in the Economist predicting the decline of the efficacy of doctors in an increasingly wired world with a growing, graying population:

“The past 150 years have been a golden age for doctors. In some ways, their job is much as it has been for millennia: they examine patients, diagnose their ailments and try to make them better. Since the mid-19th century, however, they have enjoyed new eminence. The rise of doctors’ associations and medical schools helped separate doctors from quacks. Licensing and prescribing laws enshrined their status. And as understanding, technology and technique evolved, doctors became more effective, able to diagnose consistently, treat effectively and advise on public-health interventions—such as hygiene and vaccination—that actually worked.

This has brought rewards. In developed countries, excluding America, doctors with no speciality earn about twice the income of the average worker, according to McKinsey, a consultancy. America’s specialist doctors earn ten times America’s average wage. A medical degree is a universal badge of respectability. Others make a living. Doctors save lives, too.

With the 21st century certain to see soaring demand for health care, the doctors’ star might seem in the ascendant still. By 2030, 22% of people in the OECD club of rich countries will be 65 or older, nearly double the share in 1990. China will catch up just six years later. About half of American adults already have a chronic condition, such as diabetes or hypertension, and as the world becomes richer the diseases of the rich spread farther. In the slums of Calcutta, infectious diseases claim the young; for middle-aged adults, heart disease and cancer are the most common killers. Last year the United Nations held a summit on health (only the second in its history) that gave warning about the rising toll of chronic disease worldwide.

But this demand for health care looks unlikely to be met by doctors in the way the past century’s was.”

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“Man…woman…birth…death…infinity”:

“This Change Will Be A Throwing Away Of All The Previous Rules”

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

From Vernor Vinge’s famous 1993 essay, “The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era,” which coined the word which describes that moment when machine knowledge surpasses the human kind:

“What are the consequences of this event? When greater-than-human intelligence drives progress, that progress will be much more rapid. In fact, there seems no reason why progress itself would not involve the creation of still more intelligent entities — on a still-shorter time scale. The best analogy that I see is with the evolutionary past: Animals can adapt to problems and make inventions, but often no faster than natural selection can do its work — the world acts as its own simulator in the case of natural selection. We humans have the ability to internalize the world and conduct ‘what if’s’ in our heads; we can solve many problems thousands of times faster than natural selection. Now, by creating the means to execute those simulations at much higher speeds, we are entering a regime as radically different from our human past as we humans are from the lower animals.

From the human point of view this change will be a throwing away of all the previous rules, perhaps in the blink of an eye, an exponential runaway beyond any hope of control. Developments that before were thought might only happen in ‘a million years’ (if ever) will likely happen in the next century.

I think it’s fair to call this event a singularity (‘the Singularity’ for the purposes of this paper). It is a point where our models must be discarded and a new reality rules. As we move closer and closer to this point, it will loom vaster and vaster over human affairs till the notion becomes a commonplace. Yet when it finally happens it may still be a great surprise and a greater unknown.”

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“The Divorce Hotel Concept Is Up And Running In The Netherlands”

June 3, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

"Seventeen couples have tried it so far. All but one left divorce-ready." (Image by Jennifer Pahlka.)

The road to splitsville can be a tortuous path for many married couples, but Dutch entrepreneur Jim Halfens has come up with an answer of sorts: the Divorce Hotel, a place for quick and tidy dissolutions. He hopes to bring his idea (and a reality show) to America, which will make us no more miserable than we already are. From Janet Morrissey in the New York Times:

“THE American marriage, it seems, is on the rocks. The common line — true or not — is that half of all marriages in this country end in divorce.

So here comes a plucky entrepreneur from, of all places, the Netherlands, with a wild, you’ve-got-to-be-joking plan to profit from the sorry state of so many American unions.

It’s called Divorce Hotel, and the idea is this: Check in on Friday, married. Then, with the help of mediators and independent lawyers, check out on Sunday, divorce papers in hand, all for a flat fee.

And — why not? — toss in some reality TV for good measure.

Unusual as it sounds, the Divorce Hotel concept is up and running in the Netherlands, where its mastermind, Jim Halfens, is helping unhappy marrieds divorce en suite. Seventeen couples have tried it so far. All but one left divorce-ready.

Now Mr. Halfens, 33, wants to take the idea to the United States. He is negotiating with hotels in several cities, including New York and Los Angeles, as well as with law firms and, yes, two television production companies — for a reality show.”

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“It’s Called The Informal Economy, And In Much Of The World It Is Bigger Than The Formal One”

June 1, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Maybe it’s because I’m from a fringy, blue-collar background in NYC, but I’ve always been very familiar with the informal economy, people earning a few extra dollars selling loosies or trinkets or food, handing out betting cards for bookies and other stuff that may or may not be legal. Such low-level entrepreneurship is becoming more common in the West during these desperate times, with the help of digital tools. A succinct explanation of the informal economy by Anand Giridharadas in the New York Times:

“One of the differences between rich and poor countries is that in the latter, people seldom wait for the government to ‘create jobs.’

When times are hard, they buy packs of cigarettes and sell them as singles; they find houses to clean through cousins of a cousin; they rent out bedrooms to students; they stock up on cellphone credit and peddle sidewalk calls by the minute.

It’s called the informal economy, and in much of the world it is bigger than the formal one. But it has been pushed onto the sidelines in the West, the refuge of criminals and the poor, because of labor laws, taxes, health and safety regulations and the like, which emerged to protect workers and consumers from the market’s vicissitudes and companies’ whims.”

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“His Mind’s Eye Had Suddenly Gone Blind”

June 1, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of “Look Deep Into the Mind’s Eye,” Carl Zimmer’s 2010 Discover article about a building surveyor’s sudden inability to visualize things:

“One day in 2005, a retired building surveyor in Edinburgh visited his doctor with a strange complaint: His mind’s eye had suddenly gone blind.

The surveyor, referred to as MX by his doctors, was 65 at the time. He had always felt that he possessed an exceptional talent for picturing things in his mind. The skill had come in handy in his job, allowing MX to recall the fine details of the buildings he surveyed. Just before drifting off to sleep, he enjoyed running through recent events as if he were watching a movie. He could picture his family, his friends, and even characters in the books he read.

Then these images all vanished. The change happened shortly after MX went to a hospital to have his blocked coronary arteries treated. As a cardiologist snaked a tube into the arteries and cleared out the obstructions, MX felt a ‘reverberation’ in his head and a tingling in his left arm. He didn’t think to mention it to his doctors at the time. But four days later he realized that when he closed his eyes, all was darkness.”

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“One Wound Was Said To Be Near Her Heart”

June 1, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Norman Mailer, a towering talent prone to huge missteps, became the worst groom this side of William S. Burroughs in 1960 when he stabbed his wife. His punishment was 17 days in Bellevue for observation; a suspended sentence was subsequently arrived at. An excerpt from the initial November 22, 1960 New York Times report of the infamous incident:

“When detectives went to question his wife Sunday at the hospital, they were told she was too ill to be questioned. One wound was said to be near her heart.

Last night, the hospital permitted the police to question her. They said she admitted with reluctance that her husband had stabbed her.

She said the stabbing occurred about 5 A.M. Sunday at a party at their apartment.

Mrs. Mailer told the police she could give no reason for the stabbing.

She said her husband suddenly walked up to her, looked at her, stabbed her with what she thought was a penknife or clasp knife, and left the apartment.

Mrs. Mailer said her husband later took her to the hospital.”

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“The Average Life Expectancy Of Medical Immortals Would Be 5,775 Years”

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

From “Do You Really Want to Live Forever?” Ronald Bailey’s Reason review of Stephen Cave’s new book, Immortality, which sees the defeat of death as a Pyrrhic victory: 

“Why not simply repair the damage caused by aging, thus defeating physical death? This is the goal of transhumanists like theoretical biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey who has devised the Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence (SENS) program. SENS technologies would include genetic interventions to rejuvenate cells, stem cell transplants to replace aged organs and tissues, and nano-machines to patrol our bodies to prevent infections and kill nascent cancers. Ultimately, Cave cannot argue that these life-extension technologies will not work for individuals but suggests that they would produce problems like overpopulation and environmental collapse that would eventually subvert them. He also cites calculations done by a demographer that assuming aging and disease is defeated by biomedical technology accidents would still do in would-be immortals. The average life expectancy of medical immortals would be 5,775 years.” (Thanks Browser.)

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‘Robots Are Spreading In The Civilian World”

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

From a piece about the need for ethical robots, in the Economist:

“Robots are spreading in the civilian world, too, from the flight deck to the operating theatre. Passenger aircraft have long been able to land themselves. Driverless trains are commonplace. Volvo’s new V40 hatchback essentially drives itself in heavy traffic. It can brake when it senses an imminent collision, as can Ford’s B-Max minivan. Fully self-driving vehicles are being tested around the world. Google’s driverless cars have clocked up more than 250,000 miles in America, and Nevada has become the first state to regulate such trials on public roads. In Barcelona a few days ago, Volvo demonstrated a platoon of autonomous cars on a motorway.

As they become smarter and more widespread, autonomous machines are bound to end up making life-or-death decisions in unpredictable situations, thus assuming—or at least appearing to assume—moral agency. Weapons systems currently have human operators ‘in the loop,’ but as they grow more sophisticated, it will be possible to shift to ‘on the loop’ operation, with machines carrying out orders autonomously.

As that happens, they will be presented with ethical dilemmas. Should a drone fire on a house where a target is known to be hiding, which may also be sheltering civilians? Should a driverless car swerve to avoid pedestrians if that means hitting other vehicles or endangering its occupants? Should a robot involved in disaster recovery tell people the truth about what is happening if that risks causing a panic?”

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Volvo’s autonomous vehicles in Barcelona:

“It’s Not Guaranteed That Such A Cyber-Terror Campaign Would Be As Spectacular As Detonating A Bomb”

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

In Evgeny Morozov’s new article at Slate, he explains why cyber warfare may not be attractive to terrorist groups. Of course, if there was a critical mass of driverless cars or robotic surgeons to tamper with, things might be different. There would definitely by a scary wow factor in that scenario. An excerpt:

“Terrorists may be more keen on anonymity, but the reality is that in the decade since 9/11, no terrorist group has had much success causing serious disruption of the civilian or military infrastructure. For a group like al-Qaida, the costs of getting it right are too high, particularly because it’s not guaranteed that such a cyber-terror campaign would be as spectacular as detonating a bomb in a busy public square.”

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“My Memory Flows Like A Movie—Nonstop And Uncontrollable”

May 31, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The opening of “Remember This,” Joshua Foer’s excellent 2007 National Geographic piece about people with extreme memories and those of us with more average neural connections governing the data and images we retain:

“There is a 41-year-old woman, an administrative assistant from California known in the medical literature only as ‘AJ,’ who remembers almost every day of her life since age 11. There is an 85-year-old man, a retired lab technician called ‘EP,’ who remembers only his most recent thought. She might have the best memory in the world. He could very well have the worst.

‘My memory flows like a movie—nonstop and uncontrollable,’ says AJ. She remembers that at 12:34 p.m. on Sunday, August 3, 1986, a young man she had a crush on called her on the telephone. She remembers what happened on Murphy Brown on December 12, 1988. And she remembers that on March 28, 1992, she had lunch with her father at the Beverly Hills Hotel. She remembers world events and trips to the grocery store, the weather and her emotions. Virtually every day is there. She’s not easily stumped.

There have been a handful of people over the years with uncommonly good memories. Kim Peek, the 56-year-old savant who inspired the movie Rain Man, is said to have memorized nearly 12,000 books (he reads a page in 8 to 10 seconds). ‘S,’ a Russian journalist studied for three decades by the Russian neuropsychologist Alexander Luria, could remember impossibly long strings of words, numbers, and nonsense syllables years after he’d first heard them. But AJ is unique. Her extraordinary memory is not for facts or figures, but for her own life. Indeed, her inexhaustible memory for autobiographical details is so unprecedented and so poorly understood that James McGaugh, Elizabeth Parker, and Larry Cahill, the neuroscientists at the University of California, Irvine who have been studying her for the past seven years, had to coin a new medical term to describe her condition: hyperthymestic syndrome.

EP is six-foot-two (1.9 meters), with perfectly parted white hair and unusually long ears. He’s personable, friendly, gracious. He laughs a lot. He seems at first like your average genial grandfather. But 15 years ago, the herpes simplex virus chewed its way through his brain, coring it like an apple. By the time the virus had run its course, two walnut-size chunks of brain matter in the medial temporal lobes had disappeared, and with them most of EP’s memory.”

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Oliver Sacks discussing his pen pal Alexander Luria, the neuropsychologist who authored The Mind of a Mnemonist:

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“Baseball Franchises Discovered That A Substitute Was Actually A Complement”

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

Major League Baseball long generated most of its income through live attendance, so there was apprehension about “giving away” games on cable, even as screens shrunk and became ubiquitous. But regional–and very lucrative–contracts have proliferated as team owners realized that they weren’t harming their brands but extending them. And cable badly needs baseball, since it can provide so much live content that isn’t likely to be time-shifted. From the Sports Economist:

“Local TV rights provides the revenue stream, but doesn’t this just push back the insanity one level?  Why would anyone bid these amounts for baseball — America’s dying pastime? A funny thing happened on the way to the funeral — baseball franchises discovered that a substitute was actually a complement. Over the past several years, teams switched to televising most, if not all, of their games via local broadcast/cable/satellite. Teams long resisted such TV saturation, thinking that televised games substitute for fans in the seats.  Texas drew almost 3 million fans last season in spite of extensive regional televising of their games. Yes, a few fans, at the margin, will choose to attend fewer games and watch on TV.  However, many potential fans will attend very few games regardless. Televising the games becomes a way of extending the stadium capacity to include these households. The TV advertisers along with cable/satellite fees pay for these ‘at-home season ticket holders.'”

“It’s An Entirely New Form Of Personal Transportation”

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

From an L.A. Times piece about the C-1, a self-balancing, enclosed, electric motorcycle from Lit Motors.

“Lit Motors calls it the C-1, but the San Francisco start-up’s untippable motorcycle seems nothing short of magic. It uses gyroscopes to stay balanced in a straight line and in turns in which drivers can, in theory, roll down their windows and drag their knuckles on the ground.

Is it a motorcycle? A car? Neither. It’s an entirely new form of personal transportation, presuming it gets off the ground.

The all-electric vehicle is fully enclosed and uses a steering wheel and floor pedals like a car. But it weighs just 800 pounds and balances on two wheels even when stopped, making it more efficient than hauling around a 2-ton four-wheeler and safer than an accident-prone bike.”

“He Had Built In His Kitchen A New Kind Of Headset That Could Amplify Sound”

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

From “How Headphones Changed the World,” Derek Thompson’s Atlantic article about the unusual origins of the tech item, which was invented by Nathaniel Baldwin, a Mormon supporter of the polygamist movement:

“In 1910, the Radio Division of the U.S. Navy received a freak letter from Salt Lake City written in purple ink on blue-and-pink paper. Whoever opened the envelope probably wasn’t expecting to read the next Thomas Edison. But the invention contained within represented the apotheosis of one of Edison’s more famous, and incomplete, discoveries: the creation of sound from electrical signals.

The author of the violet-ink note, an eccentric Utah tinkerer named Nathaniel Baldwin, made an astonishing claim that he had built in his kitchen a new kind of headset that could amplify sound. The military asked for a sound test. They were blown away. Naval radio officers clamored for the ‘comfortable, efficient headset’ on the brink of World War I. And so, the modern headphone was born.”

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Headphones on display in a 1970s Continental ad:

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“Each Of The Bugs Will Have A Mission”

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

The first three graphs of Wil S. Hylton’s excellent New York Times Magazine article about Craig Venter, who wants to make tiny machines that breathe:

“In the menagerie of Craig Venter’s imagination, tiny bugs will save the world. They will be custom bugs, designer bugs — bugs that only Venter can create. He will mix them up in his private laboratory from bits and pieces of DNA, and then he will release them into the air and the water, into smokestacks and oil spills, hospitals and factories and your house.

Each of the bugs will have a mission. Some will be designed to devour things, like pollution. Others will generate food and fuel. There will be bugs to fight global warming, bugs to clean up toxic waste, bugs to manufacture medicine and diagnose disease, and they will all be driven to complete these tasks by the very fibers of their synthetic DNA.

Right now, Venter is thinking of a bug. He is thinking of a bug that could swim in a pond and soak up sunlight and urinate automotive fuel. He is thinking of a bug that could live in a factory and gobble exhaust and fart fresh air. He may not appear to be thinking about these things. He may not appear to be thinking at all. He may appear to be riding his German motorcycle through the California mountains, cutting the inside corners so close that his kneepads skim the pavement. This is how Venter thinks. He also enjoys thinking on the deck of his 95-foot sailboat, halfway across the Pacific Ocean in a gale, and while snorkeling naked in the Sargasso Sea surrounded by Portuguese men-of-war. When Venter was growing up in San Francisco, he would ride his bicycle to the airport and race passenger jets down the runway. As a Navy corpsman in Vietnam, he spent leisurely afternoons tootling up the coast in a dinghy, under a hail of enemy fire.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“The Number Of State Prisoners Nationwide Declined In 2009 And 2010 For The First Times In At Least Three Decades”

May 29, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “New York Has Some Prisons To Sell You,” Thomas Kaplan’s NYT article about the Governor Cuomo’s attempts to dismantle the state’s prison-industrial complex:

“These real-estate listings come from an unpracticed seller, the State of New York. After cutting costs through traditional means like freezing wages of state workers and consolidating government offices, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo is embarking on a less conventional effort: trying to sell New York’s old prisons.

The state has a glut of vacant correctional facilities because of lower crime rates, new programs that allow early release for nonviolent offenders and the dismantling of its strict drug laws. The situation in New York reflects changing national attitudes toward criminal justice policy: the number of state prisoners nationwide declined in 2009 and 2010 for the first times in at least three decades, according to the federal Bureau of Justice Statistics.

Mr. Cuomo’s predecessor, Gov. David A. Paterson, closed three prisons as he confronted budget problems. Mr. Cuomo declared in his first address to the State Legislature that prisons were “not an employment program,” and proceeded to shut seven of the state’s remaining 67 correctional facilities, removing 3,800 beds.

These closings reflect a sharp reversal. After New York adopted mandatory drug sentences in 1973, the state’s prison population soared from 13,437 to a peak of 71,472 in 1999, prompting a boom in prison construction, much of it during the tenure of Gov. Mario M. Cuomo, the current governor’s father. But since then, the number of inmates in state facilities has fallen nearly a quarter, to about 55,000, leaving thousands of empty beds.”

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“Imagine A Scene From A Dystopian Movie That Depicts Our Society In The Near Future”

May 29, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

"Some of them love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalize torture to defend it." (Image by Ggia.)

The opening of Slavoj Žižek’s new essay about Greece in the London Review of Books, which articulates how we often sacrifice our principles during a fight to preserve those very same principles:

“Imagine a scene from a dystopian movie that depicts our society in the near future. Uniformed guards patrol half-empty downtown streets at night, on the prowl for immigrants, criminals and vagrants. Those they find are brutalised. What seems like a fanciful Hollywood image is a reality in today’s Greece. At night, black-shirted vigilantes from the Holocaust-denying ne0-fascist Golden Dawn movement – which won 7 per cent of the vote in the last round of elections, and had the support, it’s said, of 50 per cent of the Athenian police – have been patrolling the street and beating up all the immigrants they can find: Afghans, Pakistanis, Algerians. So this is how Europe is defended in the spring of 2012.

The trouble with defending European civilisation against the immigrant threat is that the ferocity of the defence is more of a threat to ‘civilisation’ than any number of Muslims. With friendly defenders like this, Europe needs no enemies. A hundred years ago, G.K. Chesterton articulated the deadlock in which critics of religion find themselves: ‘Men who begin to fight the Church for the sake of freedom and humanity end by flinging away freedom and humanity if only they may fight the Church … The secularists have not wrecked divine things; but the secularists have wrecked secular things, if that is any comfort to them.’ Many liberal warriors are so eager to fight anti-democratic fundamentalism that they end up dispensing with freedom and democracy if only they may fight terror. If the ‘terrorists’ are ready to wreck this world for love of another, our warriors against terror are ready to wreck democracy out of hatred for the Muslim other. Some of them love human dignity so much that they are ready to legalise torture to defend it. It’s an inversion of the process by which fanatical defenders of religion start out by attacking contemporary secular culture and end up sacrificing their own religious credentials in their eagerness to eradicate the aspects of secularism they hate.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“The Buildings Were As Sleek, Silver And Modern As The Gadgets Designed In The Research Labs Within”

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

From an essay by Gabrielle Esperdy at Design Observer about the Trollope-ish trips across America taken by the late urban theorist Reyner Banham, who loved Los Angeles:

“Once Banham got a driver’s license, the pull of those miles was irresistible, and he spent plenty of time behind the wheel: up and down the California coast, into the deserts and canyons of the Southwest and Texas, across the rust belt and the Midwest, and over and through the northeast megalopolis. There were countless stops in between and along the way, all fully documented in field notebooks, maps, postcards and 35mm slides. Banham visited architectural monuments and natural landmarks, evincing equal interest in the Seagram Building and the Cima Dome. He was attracted to everyday landscapes and out-of-the-way obscurities, supermarkets and motel chains having nearly the same allure as one-off wilderness resorts. He explored thriving commercial centers and abandoned industrial wastelands (and vice versa), lavishing the same attention on a Ponderosa Steak House as on a General Mills grain elevator. 

From the Tennessee Valley to Silicon Valley, no building or landscape was unworthy — or safe — from Banham’s formal analysis, socio-cultural critique or outspoken opinionating. He thought the TVA dams with their ‘overwhelming physical grandeur’ were better in real life than in the iconographic New Deal photographs where he had first encountered them, and while he may have sneered at the ‘Redneck Macholand’ in which they were located, he reserved his true scorn for the ‘eco-radicalist’ supporters of the Endangered Species Act who, in the 1970s, prevented the closing of the Tellico Dam sluices in order to preserve the snail darter minnow. The construction of the dam may have looked more arrogant, but Banham wondered if it really was. 

The ‘Fertile Crescent of Electronics’ presented no such moral quandaries when Banham visited the sylvan corporate landscapes of IBM, Hewlett-Packard and other now obsolete tech-companies in 1981. Concerns about the environmental impact of all those microchips were still about a decade away and, given his long-standing technophilia, Banham would probably have minimized their significance with the same greater-good rationale he applied to the TVA. While 1981 was early enough in the digital revolution that Space Invaders was cutting edge, it was late enough that Silicon Valley had already produced a ‘better-than-respectable body of architecture.’ The buildings, in Banham’s view, were as sleek, silver and modern as the gadgets designed in the research labs within, an alignment of high-tech imagery and confident industrial consciousness — exemplified by MBT Associate’s IBM’s Santa Teresa campus in San Jose — that Banham considered a cause for celebration. Only the most ‘crass and unobservant’ among the ‘modern-architecture knockers’ and ‘California-mockers’ could possibly disagree.”

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“We Know That They Are On The Edge Of A Vast Change That Will Transform Their World And Lead Them Out Of Stifling Technocratic Order”

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

A brief analysis of the romantic appeal of Mad Men by the resolutely astute Adam Curtis at the BBC:

“The widespread fascination with the Mad Men series is far more than just simple nostalgia. It is about how we feel about ourselves and our society today.

In Mad Men we watch a group of people who live in a prosperous society that offers happiness and order like never before in history and yet are full of anxiety and unease. They feel there is something more, something beyond. And they feel stuck.

I think we are fascinated because we have a lurking feeling that we are living in a very similar time. A time that, despite all the great forces of history whirling around in the world outside, somehow feels stuck. And above all has no real vision of the future.

And as we watch the group of characters from 50 years ago, we get reassurance because we know that they are on the edge of a vast change that will transform their world and lead them out of their stifling technocratic order and back into the giant onrush of history.

The question is whether we might be at a similar point, waiting for something to happen. But we have no idea what it is going to be.”

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“Everybody Has The Capacity To Be Dishonest, And Almost Everybody Cheats”

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

In a new WSJ piece, behavioral economist Dan Ariely looks at how almost everyone is duplicitous and how widespread small-scale cheating aggregates to trump Madoff-sized indiscretions. An excerpt:

“We tend to think that people are either honest or dishonest. In the age of Bernie Madoff and Mark McGwire, James Frey and John Edwards, we like to believe that most people are virtuous, but a few bad apples spoil the bunch. If this were true, society might easily remedy its problems with cheating and dishonesty. Human-resources departments could screen for cheaters when hiring. Dishonest financial advisers or building contractors could be flagged quickly and shunned. Cheaters in sports and other arenas would be easy to spot before they rose to the tops of their professions.

But that is not how dishonesty works. Over the past decade or so, my colleagues and I have taken a close look at why people cheat, using a variety of experiments and looking at a panoply of unique data sets—from insurance claims to employment histories to the treatment records of doctors and dentists. What we have found, in a nutshell: Everybody has the capacity to be dishonest, and almost everybody cheats—just by a little. Except for a few outliers at the top and bottom, the behavior of almost everyone is driven by two opposing motivations. On the one hand, we want to benefit from cheating and get as much money and glory as possible; on the other hand, we want to view ourselves as honest, honorable people. Sadly, it is this kind of small-scale mass cheating, not the high-profile cases, that is most corrosive to society.”

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“We Are Much Better Storytellers Than We Are Logicians”

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

From a Guardian article about superstar psychologist Daniel Kahneman, an example of the type of questions he asks to poke holes in our seemingly natural proclivity for favoring narrative over rational thought:

“Kahneman’s approach to psychology spurns heart-sinking tables and formulae in favour of short, intriguing questions that elegantly illustrate the ways our intuitions mislead us.

Take the famous ‘Linda question’: Linda is a single 31-year-old, who is very bright and deeply concerned with issues of social justice. Which of the following statements is more probable: a) that Linda works in a bank, or b) that Linda works in a bank and is active in the feminist movement? The overwhelming majority of respondents go for b), even though that’s logically impossible. (It can’t be more likely that both things are true than that just one of them is.) This is the ‘conjunctive fallacy,’ whereby our judgment is warped by the persuasive combination of plausible details. We are much better storytellers than we are logicians.”

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“It Can Be Used On Your Eardrums Or Even Your Eyeball”

May 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A needleless injection system, just patented by MIT, delivers medicine to the bloodstream through a hypospray. From Dvice: “MIT has developed an injection system that uses a powerful magnetic piston to push a near-supersonic dose of medication straight through your skin into your body. The drugs themselves are carried along on a blast of air that’s skinnier than the proboscis of a mosquito, which means that you can’t feel it at all. In fact, it doesn’t even leave a mark, which means that it can be used on your eardrums or even your eyeballs without causing any damage.”

“Nature From Now On Has To Be Programmed”

May 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The opening of “Divine Inspiration,” Jeet Heer’s new article in The Walrus about the religious underpinnings of Marshall McLuhan’s vision:

“APPROPRIATELY ENOUGH, a century after his birth in 1911, Marshall McLuhan has found a second life on the Internet. YouTube and other sites are a rich repository of McLuhan interviews, revealing that the late media sage still has the power to provoke and infuriate. Connoisseurs of Canadian television should track down a 1968 episode of a CBC program called The Summer Way, a highbrow cultural and political show that once featured a half-hour debate about technology between McLuhan and the novelist Norman Mailer.

Both freewheeling public intellectuals with a penchant for making wild statements, Mailer and McLuhan were well matched mentally, yet they displayed an appropriate stylistic contrast. Earthy, squat, and pugnacious, Mailer possessed all the hot qualities McLuhan attributed to print culture. Meanwhile, McLuhan adopted the cerebral and cavalier cool approach he credited to successful television politicians like John F. Kennedy and Pierre Trudeau, who responded to attacks with insouciant indifference.

Early on in the program, McLuhan and Mailer tackle the largest possible issue, the fate of nature:

McLuhan: We live in a time when we have put a man-made satellite environment around the planet. The planet is no longer nature. It’s no longer the external world. It’s now the content of an artwork. Nature has ceased to exist.

Mailer: Well, I think you’re anticipating a century, perhaps.

McLuhan: But when you put a man-made environment around the planet, you have in a sense abolished nature. Nature from now on has to be programmed.

Mailer: Marshall, I think you’re begging a few tremendously serious questions. One of them is that we have not yet put a man-made environment around this planet, totally. We have not abolished nature yet. We may be in the process of abolishing nature forever.

McLuhan: The environment is not visible. It’s information. It’s electronic.

Mailer: Well, nonetheless, nature still exhibits manifestations which defy all methods of collecting information and data. For example, an earthquake may occur, or a tidal wave may come in, or a hurricane may strike. And the information will lag critically behind our ability to control it.

McLuhan: The experience of that event, that disaster, is felt everywhere at once, under a single dateline.

Mailer: But that’s not the same thing as controlling nature, dominating nature, or superseding nature. It’s far from that. Nature still does exist as a protagonist on this planet.

McLuhan: Oh, yes, but it’s like our Victorian mechanical environment. It’s a rear-view mirror image. Every age creates as a utopian image a nostalgic rear-view mirror image of itself, which puts it thoroughly out of touch with the present. The present is the enemy.”

••••••••••

The full ’68 McLuhan-Mailer debate the article references:

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“Will Chinese Companies Ever Go From Assembling iPads To Fostering Future Apples Of Their Own?”

May 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In August of last year I put up a post entitled, “Can China, With Its Present Government And Business Structure, Ever Turn Out A Company Like Apple?” I was asking whether a nation that has famously opened countless fake Apple stores could ever create an actual company like the one birthed by Jobs-Wozniak. In the New York Times, the excellent James Fallows wonders similar things in “Can China Escape The Low-Wage Trap?” An excerpt about the downside to China’s meteoric rise:

“Some of the limits and failures are well publicized: among others, the environmental despoliation that has made cancer the leading cause of death in China; the demographic shift caused by the one-child policy that threatens to make China the first society to grow old before it grows rich; and the problems of transparency and accountability in the Chinese governing system, illustrated most recently by the Bo Xilai and Chen Guangcheng cases.

Those, at least, are the problems that get the headlines. But there’s a bigger one, which the Chinese government and public are only now starting to recognize: whether the success of China’s current model is leading toward a ‘low-wage trap,’ in which its outsourcing factories get bigger but don’t necessarily move the country toward the higher tiers of the world economic structure.

PUT differently, will Chinese companies ever go from assembling iPads to fostering future Apples of their own — or, similarly, from selling knockoff copies of Western movies, music, search engines and online apps to establishing China’s own pop-culture industries with worldwide profits and soft-power appeal?

Nearly every Apple product is ‘made’ in China, but barely 10 cents on the Apple sales dollar stay with workers, suppliers or anyone else in te country. The rest goes to designers and shareholders in the United States, component makers in Japan, machine-tool makers in Germany and retailers or shippers around the world. The problem for America with this arrangement is that it disproportionately rewards the top rather than the middle of our income scale. The problem for China is figuring out how to capture more of the rewards to begin with.”

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