Excerpts

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“This Was The Future A Lot Of Dystopian Sci-Fi Authors Warned Us About”

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

Excellent article at Capital by my old pal Steven Boone, in which he does the Wi-Fi shuffle, scamming free connectivity wherever he can and summing up our somnambulant, searching age. An excerpt: 

“Back home I had run into many such late-night nerd-drifters at the Apple store on 58th Street. An angry young black British writer had tipped me to the glories of 24-hour Apple joints one night, when we both found ourselves kicked out of the Grand Central Terminal wifi hotspot at closing time. 

58th Street was a revelation. So this was where all the weirdoes who used to fill the early-2000’s Internet cafe on Times Square had migrated.

Under the supervision of highly tolerant Apple store Geniuses, folks could play with the latest MacBooks, iPods, Shuffles, Airs, iPhones, and iMacs (iPads were still a few months off) for as long as they could stand or lean at the waist-level display tables. Others who brought their own devices siphoned wifi while sitting on the stone bench encircling the store’s Logan’s Run-looking glass elevator.

My favorite stand-up regular was a wild Hispanic man who scoured YouTube for reggaeton booty-shaking videos. None of my business, except that he would watch the clips full-screen on the store’s biggest iMac display, the speaker bass thumping while he ground his hips in the approximate space the dancing women’s butts would have occupied if the videos were holograms. Here was the only argument for 3-D that I could respect. On a similar theme, I once overheard a young, broke playboy arranging a booty call on one of the iPhones. Speaking above the store’s iTunes-diverse muzak, he told the girl he was just leaving the studio.

Others conducted important business on the phones, shouting or sobbing or plaintively whispering. Been there, too: The day my MacBook and phone got stolen, I ran to the Geniuses before I thought to run to the cops.

This was the future a lot of dystopian sci-fi authors warned us about, where a private, profit-hungry corporation could make itself feel like Mom’s house.“

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“The System Kind Of Got Loose”

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

"A decentralized network that routed mes­sages from place to place using addresses that had nothing to do with physical locations." (Image by Remi Jouan.)

From “World War 3.0,” Michael Joseph Gross’ new Vanity Fair examination of the current challenges to the Internet, a passage about the origin of the boundary-busting nature of the medium:

“Vint Cerf knew from the start that there was a problem—he just couldn’t fix it. The year was 1975, and Cerf was on a team of computer scientists at Stanford University under contract to finish a new communications network for the U.S. military. The goal was full cryptographic capability—a system that allowed all messages to be authenticated from both sides—on a network that could be used anywhere in the world. Two things prevented the scientists from making this network as secure as they would have liked. One obstacle was institutional: ‘The only technology that would have allowed for such security was still classified at the time,’ Cerf recalls. The other obstacle was simple momentum. Before the developers could implement truly secure encryption, Cerf explains, ‘the system kind of got loose,’ meaning that problems would have to be fixed on the fly.

Cerf is frequently referred to as ‘the father of the Internet.’ His most celebrated achievement, for which he shares credit with the engineer and computer scientist Robert Kahn, was creating the TCP/IP protocol, the system that allows computers and networks all over the world to talk to one another. He was an early chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or icann, which maintains the Domain Name System, the virtual address book that shows your computer where to go when you type the name of a Web site into your browser. He now works as Internet Evangelist—that’s his actual title—for Google.

Most of the Internet’s problems, Cerf believes, stem from the issue of state sovereignty. The Internet was designed to ignore national boundaries. It was designed this way, Cerf says, because ‘it was intended to deal with a military problem’: how could soldiers exchange messages without letting their enemies know where they were? Cerf and others solved that problem by building a decentralized network that routed mes­sages from place to place using addresses that had nothing to do with physical locations.

This was something new.”

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“You Get To Have A Live Skype Chat Session With A Bonobo”

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

"The funds will be used to 'design, program, harden, and field-test the apps with bonobo testers and to connect them to robots.'" (Image by Ltshears.)

Giving a bonobo its own robot to control remotely isn’t, on the face if it, as dangerous as letting a kangaroo have an A-bomb, but I still have my concerns. Nonetheless, unless this is an early April fools joke, a new Kickstarter campaign wants to match primates and bots. From IEEE Spectrum:

“What Dr. Ken Schweller (a professor of computer science and psychology and chair of the Great Ape Trust) wants to do is develop a set of Internet-connected keyboards that the bonobos can carry around with them and use to communicate directly with humans. Humans, for their part, will be able to use an app that translates their speech directly to the symbols used by the bonobos, potentially opening up real-time two-way intelligent communication between you and another species.

RoboBonobo and Bonobo Chat are trying to raise $20,000 on Kickstarter; the funds will be used to ‘design, program, harden, and field-test the apps with bonobo testers and to connect them to robots and other external devices.’ That’s a little bit unspecific for such a large sum of money (although we do know that the robot in the picture above will be getting a total redesign), but at least the $500 level reward is pretty awesome: you get to have a live Skype chat session with a bonobo, completely safe from rampaging RoboBonobos with water cannons.”

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“Imagine The Titanic Sinking Not In 1912 But In 2012″

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

Two Titanic survivors, tennis pros Richard Williams and Karl Behr, met for a match in Boston several months after the disaster. In “Unsinkable,” L. Jon Wertheim’s excellent new Sports Illustrated story, the writer recalls their dramatic stories. An excerpt that imagines the shipwreck occurring in our media-drenched era:

“Imagine the Titanic sinking not in 1912 but in 2012. Passengers’ Twitter feeds and Facebook posts would describe the disaster in real time as they were rescued. Cable networks would provide round-the-clock coverage, complete with theme music, a catchphrase—Catastrophe at Sea!—and digital animation of the sinking. Morning shows would book survivors, literary and film agents would hustle story rights, class-action lawyers would troll for clients. Just see the media frenzy that followed the sinking of the Italian luxury cruise linerCosta Concordia earlier this year.

Now consider a scenario in which two of the survivors were dashing, world-class athletes in the same sport, destined to face off against each other many times. The hype surrounding those matches would be immeasurable. After their playing careers, the two men would be bracketed together—the Ralph Branca and Bobby Thomson of the sea—perhaps cowriting a book, then hitting the speaking circuit.

A century ago the culture was different. Look-at-me sensibilities were considered gauche. Many passengers lucky enough to have ended up on the Carpathia struggled with what today would be diagnosed as post–traumatic stress disorder. This was especially true for the men, whose survival was seen by some as evidence of cowardice. Ismay, the White Star director, was pilloried in the British newspapers. Ostracized by London society, he moved to Ireland and spent the remaining 25 years of his life out of the public eye.

Behr, according to family members, suffered profound survivor’s guilt. His granddaughter Helen Behr Sanford, known as Lynn, spent 10 years meticulously researching his story and recently published Starboard at Midnight, a fictionalized account of Behr’s experience on the Titanic. ‘He wished he had saved someone from the water so that at least an act of heroism could have resulted from his survival,’ she writes. ‘He was crushed by [an] inarticulate sadness beyond anyone’s understanding.'” (Thanks Browser.)

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“The Evacuated Tube Transport Would Take Passengers From New York To Beijing In Just Two Hours”

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

I love Ray Kurzweil, but let’s say that he is a glass-half-full kind of futurist. Naturally, he’s drawn to the promise of Evacuated Tube Transport Technolgy (ET3), car-sized passenger capsules that travel via tubes. Space travel here on Earth! Someday, perhaps. From Kurzweil:

“The Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) system (U.S. Patent 5950543, assigned to ET3.com, Inc.) would take passengers from New York to Beijing in just two hours. Advocates of Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) claim it is silent, cheaper than planes, trains, or cars and faster than jets.

How it would work: put a superconducting maglev train in evacuated tubes, then accelerate using linear electric motors until the design velocity is attained. Passive superconductors allow the capsules to float in the tube, while eddy currents induced in conducting materials drive the capsules. Efficiency of such a system would be high, as the electric energy required to accelerate a capsule could largely be recaptured as it slows.”

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ET3 promotional video:

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“The Attempt To Achieve The Impossible Very Often–If Not Always–Has Huge Costs”

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

At the Browser, John Gray decries the idea of Utopia, which was considered extremist in the days of George Ripley’s failed Brook Farm experiment, but has become more centrist in our age, resulting in tortured nation-building experiments in the Middle East. An excerpt:

“Q: If utopias are unreachable – you could say that in Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia, which coined the term, that’s the whole point – why does that make the striving for them pernicious?

John Gray: There are those who say that utopian projects, while they can never be achieved, are valuable because they spur human advance. That’s not my view. My view is that the attempt to achieve the impossible very often – if not always – has huge costs. Even if a project has good intent, its colossal cost always outweighs its reasonability, as we saw inIraq. What is distinctive about utopianism at the end of the 20th century and start of the 21st is that it has become centrist. In other words, for the first half of the 20th century utopianism was extremist, but now we have the utopian idea of building democracy inLibya or Afghanistan. So the utopian impulse – the impulse to achieve what rational thought tells us is impossible – has migrated to the centre of politics. That is connected with humanism and the idea of progress.”

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“Macciello Was Never A Real Contender For The Team. He Is, Instead, A Fraud.”

March 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In the technologically simpler era of a hoaxer like Clifford Irving (here and here), perhaps there was some slim chance a public fraud could get away his scheme, or at least he could live well for a good, long time before his deceit undid him. But in our age of extreme connectivity and data trails, there’s no way someone can misrepresent themselves for too long. So why do people continue to perpetrate doomed hoaxes? Pathological behavior, I would assume. But more troublingly: Why do some others continue to cling to a faker’s veracity after the truth has become apparent, as if surrendering on one issue will topple their entire belief system? 

From Gene Maddeus’ LA Weekly story about a drug dealer who feigned being a billionaire intent on purchasing the Los Angeles Dodgers:

“At this point, Dodger fans are desperate to be told two things: That the McCourt era is over, and that the team will win again. Unfortunately, nobody can say those things.

McCourt seems to have every intention of hanging on to the Dodger Stadium parking lots. That would force the new owner into an awkward partnership with the most hated man in Los Angeles.

As for winning, no one can make any promises about that, either — at least not while the bankruptcy sale is pending. The auction is a secret process, and the bidders making a play for the team have signed nondisclosure agreements. Though there have been plenty of leaks, no one is permitted to speak directly to the fans.

No one, except Josh Macciello.

Because, as it turns out, Macciello was never a real contender for the team. He is, instead, a fraud. Despite what he’s told reporter after reporter, and despite what those journalists have dutifully repeated, he does not have billions of dollars. He does not have rights to any gold mines. He is, instead, a convicted drug dealer and a huckster who has used his talents to persuade many people — not just journalists — to place their confidence in him. In his wake he has left a string of abandoned projects and broken promises.

The Dodger play is his boldest stunt so far. And, judged strictly as a bid for attention, it was a fantastic success. Reporters and fans ate up the tale of the regular guy who wanted to buy the team. Never mind the gaping holes in that narrative: At the end of the day, it was a great story.

Macciello is such a charismatic force that people continue to believe in him, even when confronted with evidence of his deceit. Provided with some of that information, his publicist, Cindy Rakowitz, continues to stand up for him. ‘I really do believe he has the money somewhere, somehow, some way,’ she says. ‘I want to believe.'”

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“All his life he was a million-to-one shot”:

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“A Red Splotch Forms Around The ‘Wound'”

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

Factories already use robots that can repair themselves, and we aren’t too far from self-healing materials. From Popsci:

“Self-healing materials will eventually fix anything from cell phone screens to car fenders, enabling surfaces to heal on their own in the presence of different types of light. But none of the earlier prototypes we’ve seen work quite like this new plastic: It bleeds red at the site of injury. Then it heals itself, inspired by the properties of tree trunks and human skin.

Marek W. Urban from the University of Southern Mississippi presented a paper on his new co-polymer at the American Chemical Society’s national meeting in San Diego Monday. When it scratches or tears, a red splotch forms around the ‘wound,’ marking the site.”

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“It Is A New Kind Of Human Settlement”

March 27, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A book that was seemingly written specifically for me (and anyone else who spends way too much time thinking about airports), Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, by John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay, predicts that airport-centric insta-cities will be the next wave. Probably not going to happen outside of a few autocratic states, but it’s still a fun thought project. From the introduction of an interview with Lindsay at BLDG:

“If Atlanta’s Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport were to become its own country, its annual workforce and user base would make it ‘the twelfth most populous nation on Earth,’ as John Kasarda and Greg Lindsay explain in Aerotropolis; even today, it is the largest employer in the state of Georgia. 

As J.G. Ballard once wrote, and as is quoted on the frontispiece of Aerotropolis:

I suspect that the airport will be the true city of the 21st century. The great airports are already the suburbs of an invisible world capital, a virtual metropolis whose fauborgs are named Heathrow, Kennedy, Charles de Gaulle, Nagoya, a centripetal city whose population forever circles its notional center, and will never need to gain access to its dark heart.

The remarkable claims of John Kasarda’s and Greg Lindsay’s new book are made evident by its subtitle: the aerotropolis, or airport-city, is nothing less than ‘the way we’ll live next.’ It is a new kind of human settlement, they suggest, one that ‘represents the logic of globalization made flesh in the form of cities.’ Through a kind of spatial transubstantiation, the aerotropolis turns abstract economic flows—disembodied currents of raw capital—into the shining city form of tomorrow.

The world of the aerotropolis is a world of instant cities—urbanization-on-demand—where nations like China and Saudi Arabia can simply ‘roll out cities’ one after the other. ‘Each will be built faster, better, and more cheaply than the ones that came before,’ Aerotropolis suggests: whole cities created by the warehousing demands of international shipping firms. In fact, they are “cities that shipping and handling built,’ Lindsay and Kasarda quip—urbanism in the age of Amazon Prime.” 

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“Architecture Is The Will Of An Epoch Translated Into Space”

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

Mies van der Rohe, who was born 125 years ago today, put God in the details of his spare, glassy, flat-roofed buildings and striking furniture. From his 1969 New York Times obituary:

“Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, a man without any academic architectural training, was one of the great artist-architect-philosophers of his age, acclaimed as a genius for his uncompromisingly spare design, his fastidiousness and his innovations.

Along with Frank Lloyd Wright and Le Corbusier, the German-born master builder who was universally know as Mies (pronounced mees) fashioned scores of imposing structures expressing the spirit of the industrial 20th century.

‘Architecture is the will of an epoch translated into space,’ he remarked in a talkative moment. Pressed to explain his own role as a model for others–a matter on which he was shy, as he was on most others–he said:

‘I have tried to make an architecture for a technological society. I have wanted to keep everything reasonable and clear–to have an architecture that anybody can do.'”

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Lego version of the Farnsworth House:

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“There Was Always Some Trigger-Hippie Rage Boiling In Gallagher’s Eyes”

March 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Much like Dick Cheney, the comedian Gallagher is an asshole with a bad heart. (Correction: Cheney was an asshole with a bad heart. He just had a heart transplant. Congratulations, you asshole!) No one should waste a moment of life writing a great article about a bigoted prop comic with a vicious streak, but that’s what Alex Pappademas did for Grantland. An excerpt from Gallagher Retires, Sort Of:

“He got bitterer as time went on. As with [George] Carlin, there was always some trigger-hippie rage boiling in Gallagher’s eyes; unlike Carlin, Gallagher never got a Mark Twain Prize, wrote bestsellers, or saved the universe using a time-traveling phone booth. Former standup comedians who went on to become huge stars despite not being good at standup comedy, according to a 2005 interview with Gallagher: David Letterman, Robin Williams, Tom Hanks, Chevy Chase, Michael Keaton (‘a terrible comedian’), Jim Carrey (’embarrassing.’)

‘It amazes me,’ he fumed, ‘that these comedians have serious acting careers.’

In his later years, when he wasn’t smashing fruit onstage, he was spraying bile—railing against gays, transsexuals, Mexicans, opponents of torture, people with tattoos, and the French, and spewing Arab jokes your most right-wing relative might have thought twice about mass-emailing even on the morning of 9/12/01. Most written accounts suggest that your average 21st-century Gallagher show played not unlike the way Wikipedia describes his 1992 laserdisc-based live-action shooting game, Gallagher’s Gallery: ‘Generally, the items that Gallagher deems broken or unnecessary, or those he simply dislikes, must be targeted.’ Reviewing a 2010 Gallagher performance in Bremerton, Washington for the Stranger, Lindy West described him spitting out the word Obama ‘like a mouthful of burning hair’ before impugning both Obama’s blackness and his loyalty to this country.”

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Gallagher’s Gallery video game:

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“It Is A Space That Humans Cannot Actually Encounter Without Dying”

March 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In the 1960s, NASA spacesuits were iconic for their fashion-forward look, but their main goal was to be a life-sustaining garment. From an excellent interview at BLDG with Nicholas de Monchaux about his book, Spacesuit: Fashioning Apollo:

“De Monchaux: One of the things I find most fascinating about the idea of the spacesuit is that space is actually a very complex and subtle idea. On the one hand, there is space as an environment outside of the earthly realm, which is inherently hostile to human occupation—and it was actually John Milton who first coined the term space in that context. 

On the other hand, you have the space of the architect—and the space of outer space is actually the opposite of the space of the architect, because it is a space that humans cannot actually encounter without dying, and so must enter exclusively through a dependence on technological mediation. 

Whether it’s the early French balloonists bringing capsules of breathable air with them or it’s the Mongolfier brothers trying to burn sheep dung to keep their vital airs alive in the early days of ballooning, up to the present day, space is actually defined as an environment to which we cannot be suited—that is to say, fit. Just like a business suit suits you to have a business meeting with a banker, a spacesuit suits you to enter this environment that is otherwise inhospitable to human occupation. 

From that—the idea of suiting—you also get to the idea of fashion. Of course, this notion of the suited astronaut is an iconic and heroic figure, but there is actually some irony in that. 

For instance, the word cyborg originated in the Apollo program, in a proposal by a psycho-pharmacologist and a cybernetic mathematician who conceived of this notion that the body itself could be, in their words, reengineered for space. They regarded the prospect of taking an earthly atmosphere with you into space, inside a capsule or a spacesuit, as very cumbersome and not befitting what they called the evolutionary progress of our triumphal entry into the inhospitable realm of outer space. The idea of the cyborg, then, is the apotheosis of certain utopian and dystopian ideas about the body and its transformation by technology, and it has its origins very much in the Apollo program. 

But then the actual spacesuit—this 21-layered messy assemblage made by a bra company, using hand-stitched couture techniques—is kind of an anti-hero. It’s much more embarrassing, of course—it’s made by people who make women’s underwear—but, then, it’s also much more urbane. It’s a complex, multilayered assemblage that actually recapitulates the messy logic of our own bodies, rather than present us with the singular ideal of a cyborg or the hard, one-piece, military-industrial suits against which the Playtex suit was always competing.

The spacesuit, in the end, is an object that crystallizes a lot of ideas about who we are and what the nature of the human body may be—but, then, crucially, it’s also an object in which many centuries of ideas about the relationship of our bodies to technology are reflected.”

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The EX-1A offered great mobility, 1960s:

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“We Just May Simply Not Be Asking The Rght Questions About What’s Going On”

March 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

George Dyson at Edge discussing our digital revolution, still very much in its infancy, going who knows where:

“We’re still here at the big bang of this thing, and we’re not studying it enough. Who’s the cosmologist really looking at this in terms of what it might become in 10,000 years? What’s it going to be in 100 years? Here we are at the very beginning and we just may simply not be asking the right questions about what’s going on. Try looking at it from the other side, not from our side as human beings. Scientists are the people who can do that kind of thing. You can look at viruses from the point of view of a virus, not from the point of view of someone getting sick.

Very few people are looking at this digital universe in an objective way. Danny Hillis is one of the few people who is. His comment, made exactly 30 years ago in 1982, was that “memory locations are just wires turned sideways in time”. That’s just so profound. That should be engraved on the wall. Because we don’t realize that there is this very different universe that does not have the same physics as our universe. It’s completely different physics. Yet, from the perspective of that universe, there is physics, and we have almost no physicists looking at it, as to what it’s like. And if we want to understand the sort of organisms that would evolve in that totally different universe, you have to understand the physics of the world in which they are in.  It’s like looking for life on another planet. Danny has that perspective. Most people say just, ‘well, a wire is a wire. It’s not a memory location turned sideways in time.’ You have to have that sort of relativistic view of things.

We are still so close to the beginning of this explosion that we are still immersed in the initial fireball. Yet, in that short period of time, for instance, it was not long ago that to transfer money electronically you had to fill out paper forms on both ends and then wait a day for your money to be transferred. And, in a very few years, it’s a dozen years or so, most of the money in the world is moving electronically all the time.”

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George’s dad, Freeman, planning interplanetary travel via A-bomb, 1958:

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“We Saw The Kind Of Fire We’d Been After”

March 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Some people are fascinated by post-apocalyptic culture, but they don’t really want the world to end. Not most of them anyhow, thankfully. The thought of people being harmed or killed of the engines of society actually falling to pieces are horrifying. So, what then is the fantasy of barren landscapes and streets that have no name? What is alluring about people-less avenues and ruined earth?

I think it stems less from survivalist urges than from creative frustration, from people imagining a blank slate and what they could do with it. Knocking down a sand castle to creat a new and better one, if you will. Now some people can’t separate fantasy and reality. The composer Karl Stockhausen infamously called 9/11 the “greatest work of art.” Let’s hope that was the result of senility. Disaster movies were criticized at the time because they were supposedly providing a blueprint for terrorists. While the images we create can certainly influence others, I think it’s good we’ve continued to create art about our fantasies, even our dark ones. Nothing is as dangerous as a repressed society.

In a New York Times Opinion piece Bill Clegg links his own urges to witness disaster–the real kind, unfortunately–to his gradual descent into one of his own making. The opening:

“MY college roommates and I chased firetrucks.

We’d hear the sirens wail, hop in the car and tear off in the direction of the sound with the windows open, no matter how cold. We lived in a small town on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and there were many rickety old wooden buildings prime for fire, so there was always something going up in flames. Most of the time we’d chase the receding sound, sniff for smoke as we passed a joint between us, scan the side streets for signs of catastrophe and after a while call it quits and go home.

Once, just once that I can remember, we saw the kind of fire we’d been after. An old many-shuttered thing with flames licking from every inch. We pulled up seconds after the firetrucks. We got out of the car and from across the street felt great waves of heat coming off the place. It popped and cracked and roared out of control and we stood, mesmerized.

A ballet of sparks in the air made magic above the chaos. People were everywhere, standing around watching the roof collapse and the tops of nearby trees catch fire. No one spoke. We stayed for hours. Each time we moved away some part of the house threatened to collapse; we knew we were stuck, that we had somehow contracted to see it through to the very end, until the last charred beam had fallen and all that was left was a smoldering, ashy ruin.”

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“The American Public Was Encouraged To See War As A Technological Process And A Media Event”

March 25, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Shaun Randol of the L.A. Review of Books writing about the numbing intersection of warfare and software:

“As Paul Virilio has noted, with the filming of the 1990-91 Gulf War, most notably by CNN, the American public was encouraged to see war as a technological process and a media event. The ubiquitous green and grainy images of anti-aircraft fire over Baghdad, or black-and-white videos of missiles slamming into boxy structures from projectile-mounted cameras were so bereft of the realities of warfare — blood, guts, screams, and mangled bodies — that they were shown in prime-time news broadcasts. Much of the public enthusiastically embraced this antiseptic projection of war. Now, many soldiers and their civilian leaders see war through the same technological lens. 

American military training and planning increasingly uses video games and virtual reality (for pre-deployment and decompressing) and autonomous robots (for actual fighting). Peter Finn surmises that ‘the successful exercise in autonomous robotics could presage the future of the American way of war: a day when drones hunt, identify and kill the enemy based on calculations made by software, not decisions made by humans.’ Peter W. Singer of the Brookings Institution has written extensively on how the increase in military research into robots, be it nanotechnology or outsized pilotless aircraft that can — theoretically — stay adrift indefinitely, indicates the direction of the U.S.’s fighting strategy.”

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“We Perceive Flavor As Occurring In Our Mouths, And That Illusion Is Nearly Unshakable”

March 25, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Didn’t realize until spying The Electric Typewriter that “The Taste Makers,” Raffi Khatchadourian’s excellent 2009 New Yorker article about the clandestine food flavor industry, is online for free. A brief excerpt:

“Flavor is a cognitive figment. The brain fuses into a single experience the results of different stimuli registered by the tongue, nose, eyes, and ears, in addition to memories of previously consumed meals. For reasons that are not fully understood, we perceive flavor as occurring in our mouths, and that illusion is nearly unshakable, as is made clear by our difficulty identifying, with any reasonable specificity, the way each of our various senses contributes to the experience. In 2006, Jelly Belly, the candy manufacturer, produced a jellybean that mimicked the flavor of an ice-cream sandwich. When the company manufactured a prototype with a brown exterior and a white interior, people identified the flavor accurately during a trial, and said that it was a good representation of an ice-cream sandwich. Jelly Belly then made an all-white prototype; many trial respondents found it confusing, misidentifying its flavor as vanilla or marshmallow. As Hagen told me, ‘Color can play tricks on your mind, for sure.'”

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Inside the Jelly Belly factory:

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“Vampires And Dragons Are, After All, Far More Dependable Draws”

March 25, 2012 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

My favorite era of film runs from Easy Rider to The Man Who Fell To Earth, nearly a decade when auteurs were preeminent in Hollywood. So, my least favorite movies (though I recognize they aren’t bad movies) are Jaws and Star Wars, the blockbusters that marginalized personal films, that made the auteur the exception as opposed to the rule, that led to the dumbing down of not only mass movies but B films as well. For every Tarantino or Coen brother now, there are many Michael Bays. Not that Bay isn’t an auteur in his own way, but his vision is global and post-literate, democratic, yes, but only insofar as he seeks to titillate large audiences long enough to pick their pockets. His crass vision is particular to him not because of some great talent but because he’s the one who currently has control over the special-effects crews. It’s spectacle without a soul.

At Grantland, Andy Greenwald makes a compelling case that TV, which exploited the yawning opening in the auteur market, giving us brilliant, visionary shows like The Sopranos, The Wire, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, Curb Your Enthusiasm and Louie, among others, during a relatively short span, has likewise made a fatal shift toward the blockbuster. An excerpt:

“In a conversation last summer, Shawn Ryan, himself the creator of one of the Golden Age’s finer scriptures, The Shield, pegged the end of the era to the fall 2010 premiere of The Walking Dead. Not as any referendum on the zombie show’s quality but more of what it signified: by tripling the potential audience for a cable show and by doing so with genre spectacle, The Walking Dead was television’s Jaws moment. Like the flowering of American film in the ’70s, TV’s Golden Age was the product of new companies (or, in this case, channels) empowering creators because they didn’t know what else to do. The blockbuster success of The Walking Dead — along with Game of Thrones and True Blood — provided a way out, or at least around, the complicated power dynamic of the omnipotent showrunner. Vampires and dragons are, after all, far more dependable draws than David Simon’s cantankerous take on the social safety net. (To my mind, the Golden Age was also sunk by the rise of prestige simulacra, hollow shows like The Killing and Hell on Wheels that ganked the ponderous pacing and adult themes of contemporary critical darlings without any of the singular wit or perspective.)”

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“There Is An Increasing Likelihood That Water Will Be ‘Potentially Used As A Weapon'”

March 25, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I’m always stunned that water technology hasn’t grown more sophisticated, that we haven’t figured out a better way–or several. What economics are working against securing our most necessary solution? The opening of Karen DeYoung’s recent Washington Post report about the fears U.S. Intelligence experts have about water access being used as a weapon:

“Fresh-water shortages and more droughts and floods will increase the likelihood that water will be used as a weapon between states or to further terrorist aims in key strategic areas, including the Middle East, South Asia and North Africa, a U.S. intelligence assessment released Thursday said.

Although ‘water-related state conflict’ is unlikely in the next 10 years, the assessment said, continued shortages after that might begin to affect U.S. national security interests.

The assessment is drawn from a classified National Intelligence Estimate distributed to policymakers in October. Although the unclassified version does not mention problems in specific countries, it describes “strategically important water basins” tied to rivers in several regions. These include the Nile, which runs through 10 countries in central and northeastern Africa before traveling through Egypt into the Mediterranean Sea; the Tigris-Euphrates in Turkey, Syria and Iraq; the Jordan, long the subject of dispute among Israel, Jordan and the Palestinians; and the Indus, whose catchment area includes Afghanistan, Pakistan, India and Tibet.

‘As water problems become more acute, the likelihood . . . is that states will use them as leverage,’ said a senior U.S. intelligence official who briefed reporters on the condition of anonymity. As the midpoint of the century nears, he said, there is an increasing likelihood that water will be ‘potentially used as a weapon, where one state denies access to another.'”

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“Either you bring the water to L.A., or you bring L.A. to the water”:

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“People Around The World Have Gone Crazy For This Opportunity”

March 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

No one fully knows how our technological revolution will change the landscape of higher education, but it’s clear that things will be different in the coming decades. Perhaps markedly different. Sebastian Thrun departed from a tenured position at Stanford to become a Google fellow and to begin the online university Udacity. If all attempts to alter higher learning are this intelligent and enlightened, we will be very blessed. The opening of Steven Leckert’s new Wired article about the technologist’s experiment, in which the author enrolls in a Thrun class:

“Stanford doesn’t want me. I can say that because it’s a documented fact: I was once denied admission in writing. I took my last math class back in high school. Which probably explains why this quiz on how to get a computer to calculate an ideal itinerary is making my brain hurt. I’m staring at a crude map of Romania on my MacBook. Twenty cities are connected in a network of straight black lines. My goal is to determine the best route from Arad to Bucharest. A handful of search algorithms with names like breadth-first, depth-first, uniform-cost, and A* can be used. Each employs a different strategy for scanning the map and considering various paths. I’ve never heard of these algorithms or considered how a computer determines a route. But I’ll learn, because despite the utter lack of qualifications I just mentioned, I’m enrolled in CS221: Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, a graduate- level course taught by Stanford professors Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig.

Last fall, the university in the heart of Silicon Valley did something it had never done before: It opened up three classes, including CS221, to anyone with a web connection. Lectures and assignments—the same ones administered in the regular on-campus class—would be posted and auto-graded online each week. Midterms and finals would have strict deadlines. Stanford wouldn’t issue course credit to the non-matriculated students. But at the end of the term, students who completed a course would be awarded an official Statement of Accomplishment.

People around the world have gone crazy for this opportunity. Fully two-thirds of my 160,000 classmates live outside the US. There are students in 190 countries—from India and South Korea to New Zealand and the Republic of Azerbaijan. More than 100 volunteers have signed up to translate the lectures into 44 languages, including Bengali. In Iran, where YouTube is blocked, one student cloned the CS221 class website and—with the professors’ permission—began reposting the video files for 1,000 students.”

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 Thrun talking self-driving cars:

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“None Of Those Products Were Adopted As Fast By The American People As The Boom Box“

March 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s tough to imagine consumer electronics that grew faster than the Walkman or iPod or iPhone, but according to one study none of them can compare to the much-derided boom box, which saturated American culture at a blinding rate. From Alexis Madrigal in the Atlantic:

“When we think about the great consumer electronics technologies of our time, the cellular phone probably springs to mind. If we go farther back, perhaps we’d pick the color television or the digital camera. But none of those products were adopted as fast by the American people as the boom box.

That factoid is a sidenote in a 2011 paper that I stumbled on from the Journal of Management and Marketing Research. Author Tarique Hossain included data from the Consumer Electronics Manufacturing Association on the ‘observed penetration rate at the end of the 7th year’ for all the technologies listed above. Hossain’s data didn’t include the starting years for these seven-year periods, but I’m assuming they mark the introduction of the boom box in the mid-1970s. That would mean that by the early 1980s, more than 60 percent of American households owned some kind of portable cassette player with speakers attached to it. “

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“His Gaze Fixed On The Dizzying Colors Around Him”

March 22, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of “Operation Midnight Climax,” Troy Hooper’s San Francisco Weekly story about CIA experiments with LSD in the 1950s-60s, in which Americans in the Bay Area and New York were unwittingly dosed with the hallucinogenic:

“It’s been over 50 years, but Wayne Ritchie says he can still remember how it felt to be dosed with acid.

He was drinking bourbon and soda with other federal officers at a holiday party in 1957 at the U.S. Post Office Building on Seventh and Mission streets. They were cracking jokes and swapping stories when, suddenly, the room began to spin. The red and green lights on the Christmas tree in the corner spiraled wildly. Ritchie’s body temperature rose. His gaze fixed on the dizzying colors around him.

The deputy U.S. marshal excused himself and went upstairs to his office, where he sat down and drank a glass of water. He needed to compose himself. But instead he came unglued. Ritchie feared the other marshals didn’t want him around anymore. Then he obsessed about the probation officers across the hall and how they didn’t like him, either.Everyone was out to get him. Ritchie felt he had to escape.

He fled to his apartment and sought comfort from his live-in girlfriend. It didn’t go as planned. His girlfriend was there, but an argument erupted. She told him she was growing tired of San Francisco and wanted to return to New York City. Ritchie couldn’t handle the situation. Frantic, he ran away again, this time to the Vagabond Bar where he threw back more bourbon and sodas. From there, he hit a few more bars, further cranking up his buzz. As he drank his way back to Seventh and Mission, Ritchie concocted a plan that would change his life.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“AT&T Labs Is Contributing With A Vibrating Steering Wheel”

March 22, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

AT&T Labs has developed a new smart steering wheel, an intermediary step on the way to driverless cars. From Technology Review:

“Distracted driving kills an estimated 3,000 people yearly in the United States, triggering calls for bans on one of the causes, mobile phone use in vehicles. In response, the wireless industry is ramping up its anti-distraction efforts. Now, AT&T Labs is contributing with a vibrating steering wheel that promises to deliver navigation information to drivers more safely than on-screen instructions or turn-by-turn GPS commands.

In the prototype, a clockwise pattern of vibrations on the steering wheel means ‘turn right’; counterclockwise means ‘turn left.’ The wheel’s 20 actuators can fire off in any pattern. And while the initial focus has been on improving delivery of GPS navigation instructions, other applications are under development, such as notifying drivers if cars are in their blind spots. The technology underlying these tactile cues is known as haptics.

A study of the gadget in driving simulators, by AT&T Labs researchers and collaborators at Carnegie Mellon University, found that it provided clear benefits: participants’ eyes stayed on the road longer.”

“How Did Prisons Become These Violent Hellholes That They Now Are?”

March 21, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

In “Prisoner’s Dilemma,” a discursive, funny and sort of nutty Grantland article, stats guru Bill James explains why crowd decorum at baseball games has improved while inmate behavior in penitentiaries has deteriorated. An excerpt:

“In his 1929 book 20,000 Years in Sing Sing, Warden Lewis E. Lawes says that his young daughter, who was born inside the prison, knew all of the prisoners and was allowed to wander freely around the prison, with a few obvious out-of-bounds penalties. Think about what a different world that is from a modern prison. If I could divert your attention for just a second with a serious question: How did we slip backward like that? How did prisons become these violent hellholes that they now are, so that it is unimaginable to have an 8-year-old girl wandering the hallways of a maximum-security lockup?”

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“There’s Been An Enormous Explosion In Scientific Discovery And Technological Advancement”

March 21, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Nuclear physicist Edward Teller was best known as the father of the hydrogen bomb and claimed to have no regrets about it. James Day interviewed the controversial scientist, 1974.

From Teller’s 2003 obit in the Stanford Report: “The model for the title character of Stanley Kubrick’s satirical film Dr. Strangelove, Teller became in the last half of his life the leading proponent of major weapons systems, the guiding inspiration for the Strategic Defense Initiative (‘Star Wars’) and an enthusiastic supporter of nuclear energy. He became arguably the most influential scientist of the Reagan Administration.”

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“Nothing Covers Twitter Better Than The Robots”

March 21, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Evgeny Morozov opines at Slate on computer-driven automatic journalism. An excerpt:

“Narrative Science is one of several companies developing automated journalism software. These startups work primarily in niche fields—sports, finance, real estate—in which news stories tend to follow the same pattern and revolve around statistics. Now they are entering the political reporting arena, too. A new service from Narrative Service generates articles about how the U.S. electoral race is reflected in social media, what issues and candidates are most and least discussed in a particular state or region, and similar topics. It can even incorporate quotes from the most popular and interesting tweets into the final article. Nothing covers Twitter better than the robots.

It’s easy to see why Narrative Science’s clients—the company says it has 30—find it useful. First of all, it’s much cheaper than paying full-time journalists who tend to get sick and demand respect. As reported in the New York Times last September, one of Narrative Science’s clients in the construction industry pays less than $10 per 500-word article—and there is no one to fret about the terrible working conditions. And that article takes only a second to compose. Not even Christopher Hitchens could beat that deadline. Second, Narrative Science promises to be more comprehensive—and objective—than any human reporter. Few journalists have the time to find, process, and analyze millions of tweets, but Narrative Science can do so easily and, more importantly, instantaneously. It doesn’t just aim to report fancy statistics—it attempts to understand what those numbers mean and communicate this significance to the reader. Would Narrative Science have unmasked the Watergate? Probably not. But then most news stories are easier to report and decipher.

Narrative Science’s founders claim that they simply want to help—not exterminate!—journalism, and they may very well be sincere. Reporters are likely to hate their guts, but some publishers, ever concerned with paying the bills, would surely embrace them with open arms. In the long run, however, the civic impact of such technologies—which are only in their infancy today—may be more problematic.” (Thanks Browser.)

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Read more Evgeny Morozov posts:

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