Excerpts

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“Even If Someone Gets A Great Result, It Can Be Appreciated By Only A Few Dozen People In The Entire World”

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

I got the flu a number of years ago while reading Gina Kolata’s excellent book about the 1918 influenza pandemic, but I’m not pointing fingers. The opening of “Power in Numbers,” her new New York Times profile of Eric Lander, a brilliant mathematician who made the unlikely career switch to genome-mapping without the benefit of a biology background:

“His Ph.D. is in pure mathematics, in a subfield so esoteric and specialized that even if someone gets a great result, it can be appreciated by only a few dozen people in the entire world. But he left that world behind and, with no formal training, entered another: the world of molecular biology, medicine and genomics.ounding director of the Broad Institute of Harvard and M.I.T., he heads a biology empire and raises money from billionaires. He also teaches freshman biology (a course he never took) at M.I.T., advises President Obama on science and runs a lab.

Eric Lander — as a friend, Prof. David Botstein of Princeton, put it — knows how to spot and seize an opportunity when one arises. And he has another quality, says his high school friend Paul Zeitz: bravery combined with optimism.

‘He was super smart, but so what?’ said Dr. Zeitz, now a mathematics professor at the University of San Francisco. ‘Pure intellectual heft is like someone who can bench-press a thousand pounds. But so what, if you don’t know what to do with it?’

Eric Lander, he added, knew what to do. And he knew how to carry out strong ideas about where progress in medicine will come from — large interdisciplinary teams collaborating rather than single researchers burrowed in their labs.

So how did he end up at the Broad Institute, going from the most solitary of sciences to forging new sorts of collaborations in a field he never formally studied? What sort of person can make that journey?

Dr. Lander’s story can be told as a linear narrative of lucky breaks and perfect opportunities. But he doesn’t subscribe to that sort of magical thinking. To him, biography is something of a confection: ‘You live your life prospectively and tell your story retrospectively, so it looks like everything is converging.'”

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Back to the 1918 flu pandemic for a moment: “Grotesque and ugly in their influenza masks, the people of San Francisco celebrate.”

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“Charges Were Eventually Dropped When She Passed A Seven-Hour Sodium-Pentothal Test”

January 3, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Before we fully descended into the Age of Celebrity, People magazine used to do hard-hitting journalism along with its fluff and risk all sorts of legal hazards in the process. From the 1978 article, “The Bizarre Cult of Scientology“:

“Perhaps no critic of the church has suffered more than New York free-lance writer Paulette Cooper, author of a 1971 book titled The Scandal of Scientology–and the target of the church operation code-named ‘Freak Out.’ Her publisher withdrew Scandal and destroyed most copies almost as soon as it was printed–in the face of defamation suits in five countries seeking $15 million damages. But according to a suit Cooper plans to file after the federal indictments are announced, the church continued for years afterward to press a smear campaign bent on putting her ‘in a mental institution [or] in jail.’ To that end, she charges, that church members followed her, stole her diary, threatened her with a gun, lifted files for her psychiatrist and her lawyer, wrote anonymous ‘Dear Fellow Tenant’ letters saying she was a sexual deviant with venereal disease–and framed her on federal charges of making bomb threats against the church. (They wrote the threats themselves on her stationery, which they had stolen.) Charges were eventually dropped when she passed a seven-hour sodium-pentothal test, but she had to spend $28,000 to defend herself and $4,000 on psychotherapy to cope with the stress. ‘At one point I was down to 83 pounds,’ she remembers. The recently seized church documents may well support her latest suit against the church–for $40 million damages–but she still lives like a fugitive, using the service elevator in her New York apartment and wearing dark sunglasses and disguises.”

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People TV ad, 1978:

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“Where He Grew Up, He Could Only See A Few Bright Stars”

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

A portrait of the scientist as a young child, from Carl Zimmer’s new profile of star astrophysicist Neil deGrasse Tyson in Playboy:

“Tyson first saw the Milky Way when he was nine, projected across the ceiling of New York’s Hayden Planetarium. He thought it was a hoax. From the roof of the Skyview Apartments in the Bronx, where he grew up, he could only see a few bright stars. When Tyson turned eleven, a friend loaned him a pair of 7×35 binoculars. They weren’t powerful enough to reveal the Milky Way in the Bronx sky. But they did let him make out the craters on the moon. That was enough to convince him that the sky was worth looking at. 

He began to work his way up through a series of telescopes. For his twelfth birthday, he got a 2.4-inch refractor with three eyepieces and a solar projection screen. Dog walking earned him a five-foot-long Newtonian with an electric clock for tracking stars. Tyson would run an extension cord across the Skyview’s two-acre roof into a friend’s apartment window. Fairly often, someone would call the police. He charmed the cops with the rings of Saturn.

Tyson took classes at the Hayden Planetarium and then began to travel to darker places to look more closely at the heavens. In 1973, at age fourteen, he went to the Mojave Desert for an astronomy summer camp. Comet Kahoutek had appeared earlier in the year, and Tyson spent much of his time in the Mojave taking pictures of its long-tailed entry into the solar system. After a month he emerged from the desert, an astronomer to the bone.” (Thanks Longform.)

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“Comet Kahoutek is on its way” (at 6:30):

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“The First iPhone Was Actually Dreamed Up In 1983”

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

From a post on Mashable by Zachary Sniderman, about Apple’s first attempt at a game-changing phone, in 1983, even before the introduction of the Macintosh:

“The first iPhone was actually dreamed up in 1983. Forget that silly old touchscreen, this iPhone was a landline with full, all-white handset and a built-in screen controlled with a stylus.

The phone was designed for Apple by Hartmut Esslinger, an influential designer who helped make the Apple IIc computer (Apple’s first “portable” computer) and later founded Frogdesign. The 1983 iPhone certainly fits in with Esslinger’s other designs for Apple. It also foreshadows the touchscreens of both the iPhone and iPad.”

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Esslinger, 2009:

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“We Now Find Ourselves At A Historic Fork In The Road”

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

From “The Accidental Universe: Science’s Crisis of Faith,” a Harper’s piece by physicist and novelist Alan Lightman:

“Dramatic developments in cosmological findings and thought have led some of the world’s premier physicists to propose that our universe is only one of an enormous number of universes with wildly varying properties, and that some of the most basic features of our particular universe are indeed mere accidents—a random throw of the cosmic dice. In which case, there is no hope of ever explaining our universe’s features in terms of fundamental causes and principles.

It is perhaps impossible to say how far apart the different universes may be, or whether they exist simultaneously in time. Some may have stars and galaxies like ours. Some may not. Some may be finite in size. Some may be infinite. Physicists call the totality of universes the ‘multiverse.’ Alan Guth, a pioneer in cosmological thought, says that ‘the multiple-universe idea severely limits our hopes to understand the world from fundamental principles.’ And the philosophical ethos of science is torn from its roots. As put to me recently by Nobel Prize–winning physicist Steven Weinberg, a man as careful in his words as in his mathematical calculations, ‘We now find ourselves at a historic fork in the road we travel to understand the laws of nature. If the multiverse idea is correct, the style of fundamental physics will be radically changed.'”

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Brian fails to complete his novel in several universes:


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“What If The Free And Abundant Parking Drivers Crave Is About The Worst Thing For The Life Of Cities?”

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

From “Between the Lines,” a really interesting piece in L.A. Magazine by Dave Gardetta about the science of parking spaces, a segment about UCLA traffic guru Donald Shoup:

“In the United States hundreds of engineers make careers out of studying traffic. Entire freeway systems like L.A.’s have been hardwired with sensors connecting to computer banks that aggregate vehicle flow, monitor bottlenecks, explain congestion in complicated algorithms. Yet cars spend just 5 percent of their lives in motion, and until recently there was only one individual in the country devoting his academic career to studying parking lots and street meters: Donald Shoup.

Shoup is 73 years old. He drives a 1994 Infiniti but for the last three decades has steered a 1975 Raleigh bike two miles uphill daily in fair weather, from his home near the Mormon temple to the wooded highlands of UCLA’s north campus. He was born near one shore (Long Beach), grew up on a far shore (Hawaii), and resembles a 19th-century figure sketched by Melville. He has a mildly hectic complexion, a halo of silver hair that breaks over his small ears into a white froth of a beard, and brimstone eyes. This year Shoup’s 765-page book, The High Cost of Free Parking, was rereleased to zero acclaim outside of the transportation monthlies, parking blogs, and corridor beyond his office door in UCLA’s School of Public Affairs building. He wasn’t surprised—’There’s not even a name for what I do,’ he says. Shoup, however, does not lack for acolytes. His followers call themselves Shoupistas, like Sandinistas, and on a Facebook page they leave posts suggesting parking meters for prostitutes and equations that quantify the contradiction between time spent cruising for free parking versus the ‘assumed time-value’ cited to justify expanding roadways. (The hooker stuff is more interesting.)

After 36 years, Shoup’s writings—usually found in obscure journals—can be reduced to a single question: What if the free and abundant parking drivers crave is about the worst thing for the life of cities? That sounds like a prescription for having the door slammed in your face; Shoup knows this too well. Parking makes people nuts. ‘I truly believe that when men and women think about parking, their mental capacity reverts to the reptilian cortex of the brain,’ he says. ‘How to get food, ritual display, territorial dominance—all these things are part of parking, and we’ve assigned it to the most primitive part of the brain that makes snap fight-or-flight decisions. Our mental capacities just bottom out when we talk about parking.'” (Thanks Longform.)

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Godard‘s darkly comic 1967 traffic nightmare:

Goofy on a superhighway, 1965:

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“Among The Survivors Are Crazy Ants, Millions Of Them”

December 30, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Built in the 1990s in Arizona, Biosphere 2 was a sealed and self-contained ecological world that was to house a team of researchers during two closures. But even controlled environments can’t really be controlled. Disputes over financial management led to the early termination of Biosphere 2 in 1994, and ownership of its remants have changed hands several times, as if it were a failed department store. From a 1996 New York Times article by William J. Broad about Columbia University taking over Biosphere for a spell, at a time when it lay dormant, a domicile only to exotic ants:

The exotic species of ant known as Paratrechina longicornus, or the crazy ant, named for its speedy and erratic behavior when excited, somehow managed to kill off all the other ants over the years, as well as the crickets and grasshoppers.

Swarms of them crawled over everything in sight: thick foliage, damp pathways littered with dead leaves and even a bearded ecologist in the humid rain forest of Biosphere 2, an eight-story, glass-and-steel world in the wilds of the Sonora Desert that cost $200 million to build.

“These little guys pretty much run the food web,” Dr. Tony Burgess, the ecologist, said as he tapped a dark frond, sending dozens of the ants into a frenzy. ”Until we understand the ecology, we’re reluctant to eliminate them.”

Columbia University, an icon of the Ivy League, is struggling to turn a utopian failure into a scientific triumph.

The university took over management of Biosphere 2 in January and is starting to reveal just how badly things went awry when four men, four women and 4,000 species of plants and animals were sealed inside this giant terrarium for a two-year experiment that ended in 1993.

The would-be Eden became a nightmare, its atmosphere gone sour, its sea acidic, its crops failing, and many of its species dying off. Among the survivors are crazy ants, millions of them.•

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Biosphere 2, before its fall:

Jane Poynter recalls living in Biosphere 2, at TED:

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“How Many People Would Be Dumb Enough To Come Watch A Riot?”

December 30, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

As the Flash Mob concept closes in on a decade of existence, its originator, Wired editor Bill Wasik, has penned an article about the intersection of group behavior, technology and violence. Wasik on the origins of the idea:

“I even called my events ‘mobs,’ as a wink to the scary connotations of a large group gathered for no good reason. But I didn’t come up with the name flash mob—that honor belongs to Sean Savage, a UC Berkeley grad student who was blogging about my events and the copycats as they happened. He added the word ‘flash’ as an analogy to a flash flood, evoking the way that these crowds (which in the original version arrived all at once and were gone in 10 minutes or less) rushed in and out like water from a sudden storm. Savage and I never met while the original mobs were still going on, but today we work just a block away from each other in San Francisco—me at Wired, him at Frog Design, where he’s an interaction designer—so we now can get together and commiserate about what’s become of our mutual creation. It had been bad enough to see the term get appropriated by Oprah to describe a ridiculous public dance party featuring the Black Eyed Peas. Now the media was stretching the term to include just about any sort of group crime. ‘It means everything and nothing now,’ Savage says morosely.

One reason the term ‘flash mob’ stuck back in 2003 was its resonance, among some sci-fi fans who read Savage’s blog, with a 1973 short story by Larry Niven called ‘Flash Crowd.’ Niven’s tale revolved around the effects of cheap teleportation technology, depicting a future California where “displacement booths” line the street like telephone booths. The story is set in motion when its protagonist, a TV journalist, inadvertently touches off a riot with one of his news reports. Thanks to teleportation, the rioting burns out of control for days, as thrill-seekers use the booths to beam in from all around to watch and loot. Reading ‘Flash Crowd’ back in 2003, I hadn’t seen much connection to my own mobs, which I intended as a joke about the slavishness of fads. I laughed off anyone who worried about these mobs getting violent. In 2011, though, it does feel like Niven got something chillingly correct. He seems especially prescient in the way he describes the interplay of curiosity, large numbers, and low-level criminality that causes his fictional riots to grow. ‘How many people would be dumb enough to come watch a riot?’ the narrator asks. ‘But that little percentage, they all came at once, from all over the United States and some other places, too. And the more there were, the bigger the crowd got, the louder it got—the better it looked to the looters … And the looters came from everywhere, too.’

That last line passed for science fiction in 1973. The not-infrequent riots that wracked American cities in the 1960s tended to be strikingly localized, with rioters taking out their aggression on the immediate neighborhood in which they lived. By contrast, Nick de Bois says that of the 165 or so people arrested so far for the looting in Enfield Town, only around 60 percent hailed from the local borough, which includes not just greater Enfield but a few surrounding towns. The other 40 percent commuted in from elsewhere, including locales as far afield as Essex and Twickenham, each a good hour’s drive away. Instead of teleportation booths replacing telephone booths—how quaint!—it turned out that those phones merely had to shrink down enough to fit into our pockets.”

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Austin Flash Mob, 2003, the year it started:

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Tewa Woman Wears Maiden Hairstyle (1922)

December 28, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

The above picture, taken by American West photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis, depicts a young woman from the Tewa tribe, wearing her hair in the style of an unmarried maiden. It was composed two years prior to the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act, legislation that gave Indigenous Peoples rights of full U.S. citizenship at a time when the popular idea among white culture was that Native Americans were a “vanishing race” and would soon completely disappear. Thankfully, that hasn’t occurred, though Curtis’ photographs are an amazing history lesson nonetheless. From a 1911 New York Times article, “Lives 22 Years With Indians To Get Their Secrets,” in which Curtis discusses becoming an Indian priest:

“‘Do you mean that you are a Pueblo priest in good order?’ asked the reporter.

‘Yes,’ said Mr. Curtis,’ and I am a priest in other nations. If I went back there to-day I could officiate as a priest in the snake-dance, that is, in the order to which I belonged.’

‘Then you were adopted into the tribe?’

‘No,’ he said. ‘That isn’t necessary. Being adopted into a tribe is nothing–nothing. The thing is to become a member of a secret order. That is the only way to learn their secrets, and to do that it is not necessary to be adopted into the tribe.

‘Every ceremonial group you get into makes it easy to get into others. Belonging to the Snake Order in that village wouldn’t necessarily let me into an order in another village, but it would give me a good ground to make an argument.

‘My belonging to the Snake Order in Arizona helped me greatly when I tried to get into a ceremonial order in Alaska.’

‘You were a priest in Alaska, too?’

‘Oh, yes,’ he said, in a matter of fact way.

‘But what could the Alaska Indians know about what was done so far off as Arizona?’

‘Oh, when they saw my photographs of the snake dance and heard the phonograph records–‘

‘Do you mean to say that you photographed and phonographed these ceremonies while you were officiating as a priest?’

‘Yes.’

‘How did you make them agree to such a thing?’

‘It was not easy,’ said Mr. Curtis, ‘but I finally convinced them of the advantages of getting in the record.'”

Edward Sheriff Curtis, self-portrait, 1889.

 

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“Before They Teed Off, They Sometimes Had To Pull Weeds”

December 28, 2011 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A founding member of the Ladies Professional Golf Association which formed in 1950, Bettye Danoff didn’t enjoy the fame or financial rewards of contemporary players, but it sounds like she had fun while paving the way for them. An excerpt from her New York Times obituary by Maraglit Fox:

“Bettye Danoff, one of 13 founding members of the Ladies Professional Golf Association, which began as a hardy, poorly paid band of women who traveled the country for the chance to play the game, died on Thursday in McKinney, Tex. She was 88.

Her daughter Debbie Danoff Bell confirmed the death.

Officially founded in 1950, the L.P.G.A. was begun by 13 women, including Danoff, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Patty Berg and Alice Bauer.

If Danoff was somewhat less well known than they, that owed partly to the fact that she curtailed her touring in the early 1960s, after her husband’s death left her with children to care for at home.

But before that, she joined her comrades in driving from tournament to tournament, convoy style, in their own cars. In each car, the driver kept a set of color-coded paddles — red, green and yellow — that she could wave out the window to signal a stop for gas, food or the bathroom.

Arriving at a course, they might encounter a sea of mud, or greens more brown than green. Before they teed off, they sometimes had to pull weeds. At night they shared motel rooms and sang popular songs together, sweetly off-key. It was A League of Their Own with woods and irons.”

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Some of Danoff’s fellow female golf pioneers, 1950s:

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“The New Species, Or ‘Posthuman,’ Will Likely View The Old ‘Normal’ Humans As Inferior, Even Savages”

December 28, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If you want to argue that athletes shouldn’t be using PEDs because they may suffer terrible health consequences, feel free. It’s risky business. But arguing that enhancement should not occur at all is futile. We’re all going to be enhanced in the future. It’s not a matter of if it will be done but how. In “The Case for Enhancing People” in the New Atlantis, Ronald Bailey examines pretty much every angle of the topic, including the potential inequality of our brave new world. An excerpt:

“Those who favor restricting human enhancements often argue that human equality will fall victim to differential access to enhancement technologies, resulting in conflicts between the enhanced and the unenhanced. For example, at a 2006 meeting called by the American Association for the Advancement of Science, Richard Hayes, the executive director of the left-leaning Center for Genetics and Society, testified that ‘enhancement technologies would quickly be adopted by the most privileged, with the clear intent of widening the divisions that separate them and their progeny from the rest of the human species.’ Deploying such enhancement technologies would ‘deepen genetic and biological inequality among individuals,’ exacerbating ‘tendencies towards xenophobia, racism and warfare.’ Hayes concluded that allowing people to use genetic engineering for enhancement ‘could be a mistake of world-historical proportions.’

Meanwhile, some right-leaning intellectuals, such as Nigel Cameron, president of the Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, worry that ‘one of the greatest ethical concerns about the potential uses of germline interventions to enhance normal human functions is that their availability will widen the existing inequalities between the rich and the poor.’ In sum, egalitarian opponents of enhancement want the rich and the poor to remain equally diseased, disabled, and dead.

Even proponents of genetic enhancement, such as Princeton University biologist Lee M. Silver, have argued that genetic engineering will lead to a class of people that he calls the ‘GenRich,’ who will occupy the heights of the economy while unenhanced ‘Naturals’ provide whatever grunt labor the future economy needs. In Remaking Eden (1997), Silver suggests that eventually ‘the GenRich class and the Natural class will become … entirely separate species with no ability to cross-breed, and with as much romantic interest in each other as a current human would have for a chimpanzee.’

In the same vein, George J. Annas, Lori B. Andrews, and Rosario M. Isasi have laid out a rather apocalyptic scenario in the American Journal of Law and Medicine:

The new species, or ‘posthuman,’ will likely view the old ‘normal’ humans as inferior, even savages, and fit for slavery or slaughter. The normals, on the other hand, may see the posthumans as a threat and if they can, may engage in a preemptive strike by killing the posthumans before they themselves are killed or enslaved by them. It is ultimately this predictable potential for genocide that makes species-altering experiments potential weapons of mass destruction, and makes the unaccountable genetic engineer a potential bioterrorist.

Let’s take their over-the-top scenario down a notch or two. The enhancements that are likely to be available in the relatively near term to people now living will be pharmacological — pills and shots to increase strength, lighten moods, and improve memory. Consequently, such interventions could be distributed to nearly everyone who wanted them. Later in this century, when safe genetic engineering becomes possible, it will likely be deployed gradually and will enable parents to give their children beneficial genes for improved health and intelligence that other children already get naturally. Thus, safe genetic engineering in the long run is more likely to ameliorate than to exacerbate human inequality.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“Thirty-Six Scheduled Executions Would Translate Into 72 Kidneys And Corneas”

December 27, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The opening of “The Xinjiang Procedure,” Ethan Gutmann’s alarming Weekly Standard article about the organ market that surrounds executions of China’s political prisoners:

“To figure out what is taking place today in a closed society such as northwest China, sometimes you have to go back a decade, sometimes more.

One clue might be found on a hilltop near southern Guangzhou, on a partly cloudy autumn day in 1991. A small medical team and a young doctor starting a practice in internal medicine had driven up from Sun Yat-sen Medical University in a van modified for surgery. Pulling in on bulldozed earth, they found a small fleet of similar vehicles—clean, white, with smoked glass windows and prominent red crosses on the side. The police had ordered the medical team to stay inside for their safety. Indeed, the view from the side window of lines of ditches—some filled in, others freshly dug—suggested that the hilltop had served as a killing ground for years.

Thirty-six scheduled executions would translate into 72 kidneys and corneas divided among the regional hospitals. Every van contained surgeons who could work fast: 15-30 minutes to extract. Drive back to the hospital. Transplant within six hours. Nothing fancy or experimental; execution would probably ruin the heart.” (Thanks Longform.)

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“Patients are suspended by wires through long bones”:

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“A Cow—Or Its Head—Appears Trapped In The Rubble, Its Body Colonised By The Ruins”

December 27, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of “The Real Cape Kennedy Is Inside Your Head,” a Dylan Trigg meditation in 3:AM Magazine about J.G. Ballard’s “Cape Canaveral” stories:

Against a saturated blue sky, a landscape is in a state of decomposition. Semi-gelatinous material entwines with desiccated chunks of a destroyed world. Towering shafts of ruined debris shoot haphazardly into the sky, forming a monolithic domelike structure in the process. A cow—or its head—appears trapped in the rubble, its body colonised by the ruins. Into this zone of mutilation, two figures, a man and a woman, stand adrift. They enter the field of our horizon and then remain motionless in the ruins. The woman is dressed elegantly, her back turned to the viewer, her body in motion. Turning toward her, a man with the skull of a bird looks on passively. Whether or not they were caught in the destruction or have returned to survey the remains, the viewer cannot be sure. In each case, they are no longer recognisable as “human” and instead have begun assuming the physiognomic characteristics of the landscape. Like the cow, their bodies are in a state of atrophy, their tones now mirroring the colouring of the landscape. Everywhere, borders collapse. What looks like the remains of a civilization may also be the inception of a new world. Similarly, if there are humans in the ruins, then they might just as easily be a new species of life, composed from both the organic and synthetic waste left behind. In the rot and the ruin, there is also life and vitality, a bewildering fusion of different orders of space and time colliding in the same sphere.

We are in the world of Max Ernst’s celebrated painting, Europe After the Rain II. Painted between 1940-1942, the work has become canonised as a masterpiece in the surrealist tradition. For J.G. Ballard, the landscapes of Max Ernst assumed a particular importance in his own thinking and writing. Above all else, what Ballard was able to discover in Ernst’s visions was a symbiosis of the natural and the supernatural, the banal and the uncanny, all of which begin not in the objective features of the landscape, but in the pathology of inner space. In his words, Ernst’s world took the form of “self-devouring phantasmagoric jungles [which] screamed silently to itself, like the sump of some insane unconscious.” Like the German romantics who influenced him, Ernst’s eerie forests and organic cities are emblems of the inner working of the deep unconscious manifest—as though by accident—on the canvas of the work. In Ballard, the same process of alchemically distilling disjoined images from the prima materia of everyday life finds its strange expression in his repetition of motifs. Abandoned parking lots, empty swimming pools, and neon nightclubs glowing in the thick forests of night all assume a level of spectral significance made possible thanks to the conjunction of inner and outer space.

Nowhere is this strange union between inner and outer space clearer than in Ballard’s “Cape Canaveral” stories, which are scattered through his writing from the early 1960s to the 1990s. In these stories, Ballard plays with themes of spatio-temporal distortion resulting from the flight into cosmic space. At once a warning against cosmic misadventures, the stories can also be read as an affirmation of humanity’s transformation the misadventures entail, as he states:

By leaving his planet and setting off into outer space man had committed an evolutionary crime, a breach of the rules governing his tenancy of the universe, and of the laws of time and space. Perhaps the right to travel through space belonged to another order of beings, but his crime was being punished just as surely as would be any attempt to ignore the laws of gravity.•

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“Shannon Was Always One Of These People That Thought He Was 10 Feet Tall And Bulletproof”

December 27, 2011 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

By far, the worst moment of the 2011 MLB season was when Texas Rangers’ fan Shannon Stone reached for a thrown baseball from the stands in Arlington, hoping to nab a souvenir for his six-year-old son, but instead plunged to his death. In the Sunday Times Magazine, Lisa Pollak of This American Life tells Stone’s story, with the help of the late man’s parents. SuZann and Al Stone. An excerpt:

“SuZann: Well, at that time the Rangers had a third-base player named Buddy Bell. And that was Shannon’s very favorite player, just as Josh Hamilton is Cooper’s player. We were pretty close behind home plate, if I’m not mistaken. Where we were sitting, Buddy Bell hit a foul ball, and it came back over —

Al: There was an upper deck just above us. I remember seeing this foul ball. The wind carried it. The ball went out of sight as it went up above that other deck, and then the wind caught it and blew it back.

SuZann: And it just almost fell right into Al’s lap. Shannon was so excited that he got that ball.

Al: Getting a ball is kind of like the holy grail of baseball. It’s one of the reasons you go, is hoping to get a souvenir of the game, a ball. To be able to catch one from Buddy Bell just made it so much more important.

SuZann: Shannon always kept it on a shelf. He loved baseball. And then it just seemed like when Cooper came along, he just kind of passed that on to Cooper.

Al: They were inseparable.

SuZann: They always sat in the same place, because Josh Hamilton played left field. So they always sat so they could be out where Josh Hamilton was. That’s why they sat there, hoping they could catch a ball. And Shannon was always one of these people that thought he was 10 feet tall and bulletproof. There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. I’m sure he thought, I can reach out there, I can get it, I can just stretch a little bit farther.”

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“These Enormous Databases Of Captured Information Will Create What Amounts To A Surveillance Time Machine”

December 26, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"The evolving role of digital storage in facilitating truly pervasive surveillance is less widely recognized." (Image by Bob Blaylock.)

The opening of John Villasenor’s new cautionary article, “Recording Everything: Digital Storage as an Enabler of Authoritarian Governments“:

“Within the next few years an important threshold will be crossed: For the first time ever, it will become technologically and financially feasible for authoritarian governments to record nearly everything that is said or done within their borders – every phone conversation, electronic message, social media interaction, the movements of nearly every person and vehicle, and video from every street corner. Governments with a history of using all of the tools at their disposal to track and monitor their citizens will undoubtedly make full use of this capability once it becomes available.

The Arab Spring of 2011, which saw regimes toppled by protesters organized via Twitter and Facebook, was heralded in much of the world as signifying a new era in which information technology alters the balance of power in favor of the repressed. However, within the world’s many remaining authoritarian regimes it was undoubtedly viewed very differently. For those governments, the Arab Spring likely underscored the perils of failing to exercise sufficient control of digital communications and highlighted the need to redouble their efforts to increase the monitoring of their citizenry.

Technology trends are making such monitoring easier to perform. While the domestic surveillance programs of countries including Syria, Iran, China, Burma, and Libya under Gadhafi have been extensively reported, the evolving role of digital storage in facilitating truly pervasive surveillance is less widely recognized. Plummeting digital storage costs will soon make it possible for authoritarian regimes to not only monitor known dissidents, but to also store the complete set of digital data associated with everyone within their borders. These enormous databases of captured information will create what amounts to a surveillance time machine, enabling state security services to retroactively eavesdrop on people in the months and years before they were designated as surveillance targets. This will fundamentally change the dynamics of dissent, insurgency and revolution.”

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“Soon the ultimate tool will become the ultimate weapon”:

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Two More Great 2011 Nonfiction Pieces Online

December 26, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Scanning the Browser‘s list of the best 2011 articles reminded me of two more of my favorite pieces from this year: Economist Joseph Stiglitz’s Vanity Fair essay from May, which I blogged about at the time, was ahead of the curve in its crystallization of wealth inequality; and Peter Hessler’s excellent September New Yorker profile looked at the workaday life of a small-town Colorado chemist and the amazing way the past revisits him.

••••••••••

From “Of the 1%, by the 1%, for the 1%“:

“It’s no use pretending that what has obviously happened has not in fact happened. The upper 1 percent of Americans are now taking in nearly a quarter of the nation’s income every year. In terms of wealth rather than income, the top 1 percent control 40 percent. Their lot in life has improved considerably. Twenty-five years ago, the corresponding figures were 12 percent and 33 percent. One response might be to celebrate the ingenuity and drive that brought good fortune to these people, and to contend that a rising tide lifts all boats. That response would be misguided. While the top 1 percent have seen their incomes rise 18 percent over the past decade, those in the middle have actually seen their incomes fall. For men with only high-school degrees, the decline has been precipitous—12 percent in the last quarter-century alone. All the growth in recent decades—and more—has gone to those at the top. In terms of income equality, America lags behind any country in the old, ossified Europe that President George W. Bush used to deride. Among our closest counterparts are Russia with its oligarchs and Iran. While many of the old centers of inequality in Latin America, such as Brazil, have been striving in recent years, rather successfully, to improve the plight of the poor and reduce gaps in income, America has allowed inequality to grow.”

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From “Dr. Don“:

“When outsiders come to town—loners, drifters—they often find their way to Don. A number of years ago, a man in his seventies named Tim Brick moved to Naturita and rented a mobile home. He placed special orders at the Apothecary Shoppe: echinacea, goldenseal, chamomile teas. He distrusted doctors, and often had Don check his blood pressure. It was high, and eventually Don persuaded him to get on regular medication. Soon, he was visiting every four or five days, mostly to talk.

Don referred to him as Mr. Brick. He had no other local friends, and he was cagey about his past, although certain details emerged over time. His birth name had been Penrose Brick—he was a descendant of the Penrose family, which came from Philadelphia and had made a fortune from mining claims around Cripple Creek. But for some reason Mr. Brick had been estranged from all his relatives for decades. He had changed his first name, and he had spent most of his working life as an auto mechanic.

One day, his mobile home was broken into, and thieves made off with some stock certificates. Mr. Brick had never used a broker—to him, they were just as untrustworthy as doctors—so he went to the Apothecary Shoppe for help. Before long, Don was making dozens of trips across Disappointment Valley, driving two hours each way, in order to get documents certified at the bank in Cortez, Colorado. Eventually, he sorted out Mr. Brick’s finances, but then the older man’s health began to decline. Don managed his care, helping him move out of various residences; on a couple of occasions, Mr. Brick lived at Don’s house for an extended stretch. At the age of ninety-one, Mr. Brick became seriously ill and went to see a doctor in Montrose. The doctor said that prostate cancer had spread to his stomach; with surgery, he might live another six months. Mr. Brick said he had never had surgery and he wasn’t going to start now.

Don spent the next night at the old man’s bedside. At one point in the evening, Mr. Brick was lucid enough to have a conversation. ‘I think you’re dying,’ Don said.

‘I’m not dying,’ Mr. Brick said. ‘I’m just going to pray now.’

‘Well, you better pray pretty hard,’ Don said. ‘But I think you’re dying.'”

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“You Are Not Our Customer. You Are The Product That We Sell.”

December 25, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Just as the cash register is being placed in our pockets more and more, we are also increasingly products ourselves, handing over what’s in our hearts and minds in exchange for “free” products. From a Daily Beast piece by Dan Lyons, the erstwhile Fake Steve Jobs, about the true cost of doing business today:

“The truth is, we have no interest in protecting your privacy, and if you still believe that we do, then you are stupider than we thought, and believe me, we already thought you were pretty stupid. Think about it. The only way our business works is if we can track what you do and sell that information to advertisers. Did you honestly not realize that?

You are not our customer. You are the product that we sell. For us to say we’re going to protect you is like the poultry industry promising to create more humane living conditions for chickens. Sure, they say that. But you know they don’t mean it.”

••••••••••

Maggie gets scanned, quantified:

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“He Never Told Us That He Himself Shrunk Humans”

December 23, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Mary Roach has never met a dead man she didn’t like, so it’s no surprise Outside sent her to investigate a true-life tale of head shrinking. An excerpt:

“Thirteen inches from heel to crown, the specimen is mounted on a mahogany stand that could serve as a paper-towel holder. The first thing you notice is the skin color. The Shuar believed that killing a man created an avenging soul that would leave the corpse via the mouth and come after the perpetrator. Lips were sewn shut to prevent this, and true ceremonial tsantsas have blackened skin, the result of the killer having rubbed it with charcoal to prevent the victim’s spirit from ‘seeing’ out. This child’s skin is the buff color and rough texture of a dried kala­mata fig. Based on its proportions—the plump bowed legs, the nubbin of a penis, the fat cheeks—it looks more like a mummified infant than a shrunken boy. In fact, the inventory lists it as ‘stillborn.’

‘Gustav told us it had been given to him by the Shuar and that he carried it out when he escaped,’ Brown says. ‘He never told us that he himself shrunk humans.’

Brown has his laptop open and has been clicking through images from his family’s photo albums. He shows me a 1955 shot of Gus and Gert—as American friends sometimes called them—seated at a restaurant table for a family dinner in Los Angeles. Bowls and spoons are set before them. Struve looks at the camera with the mild peevishness of an old guy who wants to have his soup. He wears dress suspenders over a short-sleeved button-down shirt and sports the pencil-thin mustache he wore most of his adult life. I remark to Brown that it’s hard to picture this natty gentleman flaying bodies and boiling skins.

‘Check the pattern on the shirt,’ he says. I lean in closer. The shirt is decorated with a row of tsantsas, life-size and garish, with lips sewn shut and flowing Wonder Woman hair.

‘So he was a bit of an odd one,’ I say.

‘Well, bear in mind,’ Brown says quickly, ‘America was in the midst of a ­shrunken-head craze.’ He calls up a 1960s TV ad for a toy Witch Dr. Head Shrinkers Kit (‘Shrunken heads for all occasions!’) featuring a pith-helmeted actor hacking his way through what looks like a Kansas wheat field.”

••••••••••

Witch Dr. Head Shrinkers Kit ad:

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“Computer And Computer Graphics Bring To Mind The Kind Of Tools That May Characterize An Age Succeeding This Century’s Age Of The Machine”

December 23, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From “Computational Periodics,” a 1975 essay by the Pasadena-born computer-animation pioneer John Whitney:

“Also from the point of view that this Century is but an episode in the life of human culture, it is clear that more paraphernalia of this epoch may be castoff than will survive into the next. Yet surely the computer will not. A solid state image storage system will replace the silver chemical ribbon and cinema will eventually be interred in the archival museum. But computer and computer graphics bring to mind the kind of tools that may characterize an age succeeding this century’s age of the machine.”

••••••••••

“Catalog” (1961):

“Per•mu•ta•tion” (1966):

“Arabesque” (1975):

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“Finally Sinatra Could Not Contain Himself”

December 22, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From the Harlan Ellison segment of the most famous magazine article of the last 50 years, Gay Talese’s 1965 Esquire piece, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold“:

“The younger men in the room, accustomed to seeing Sinatra at this club, treated him without deference, although they said nothing offensive. They were a cool young group, very California-cool and casual, and one of the coolest seemed to be a little guy, very quick of movement, who had a sharp profile, pale blue eyes, blondish hair, and squared eyeglasses. He wore a pair of brown corduroy slacks, a green shaggy-dog Shetland sweater, a tan suede jacket, and Game Warden boots, for which he had recently paid $60.

Frank Sinatra, leaning against the stool, sniffling a bit from his cold, could not take his eyes off the Game Warden boots. Once, after gazing at them for a few moments, he turned away; but now he was focused on them again. The owner of the boots, who was just standing in them watching the pool game, was named Harlan Ellison, a writer who had just completed work on a screenplay, The Oscar.

Finally Sinatra could not contain himself.

‘Hey,’ he yelled in his slightly harsh voice that still had a soft, sharp edge. ‘Those Italian boots?’

“No,” Ellison said.

‘Spanish?’

‘No.’

‘Are they English boots?’

‘Look, I donno, man,’ Ellison shot back, frowning at Sinatra, then turning away again.

Now the poolroom was suddenly silent. Leo Durocher who had been poised behind his cue stick and was bent low just froze in that position for a second. Nobody moved. Then Sinatra moved away from the stool and walked with that slow, arrogant swagger of his toward Ellison, the hard tap of Sinatra’s shoes the only sound in the room. Then, looking down at Ellison with a slightly raised eyebrow and a tricky little smile, Sinatra asked: ‘You expecting a storm?’

Harlan Ellison moved a step to the side. ‘Look, is there any reason why you’re talking to me?’

‘I don’t like the way you’re dressed,’ Sinatra said.

‘Hate to shake you up,’ Ellison said, ‘but I dress to suit myself.’

Now there was some rumbling in the room, and somebody said, ‘Com’on, Harlan, let’s get out of here,’ and Leo Durocher made his pool shot and said, ‘Yeah, com’on.’

But Ellison stood his ground.

Sinatra said, ‘What do you do?’

‘I’m a plumber,’ Ellison said.

‘No, no, he’s not,” another young man quickly yelled from across the table. ‘He wrote The Oscar.’

‘Oh, yeah,’ Sinatra said, ‘well I’ve seen it, and it’s a piece of crap.’

‘That’s strange,’ Ellison said, ‘because they haven’t even released it yet.’

‘Well, I’ve seen it,’ Sinatra repeated, ‘and it’s a piece of crap.’

Now Brad Dexter, very anxious, very big opposite the small figure of Ellison, said, ‘Com’on, kid, I don’t want you in this room.’

‘Hey,” Sinatra interrupted Dexter, “can’t you see I’m talking to this guy?’

Dexter was confused. Then his whole attitude changed, and his voice went soft and he said to Ellison, almost with a plea, ‘Why do you persist in tormenting me?’

The whole scene was becoming ridiculous, and it seemed that Sinatra was only half-serious, perhaps just reacting out of sheer boredom or inner despair; at any rate, after a few more exchanges Harlan Ellison left the room. By this time the word had gotten out to those on the dance floor about the Sinatra-Ellison exchange, and somebody went to look for the manager of the club. But somebody else said that the manager had already heard about it — and had quickly gone out the door, hopped in his car and drove home. So the assistant manager went into the poolroom.

‘I don’t want anybody in here without coats and ties,’ Sinatra snapped.

The assistant manager nodded, and walked back to his office.”

_____________________________

The young, cool Ellison who irked Sinatra so much:

See also:

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“He’s The Only Man Who Ever Fired General Motors”

December 22, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Before he was crushed beneath the wheel of his dreams. John Z. DeLorean had as much ambition as anyone in the history of American commerce. From a 1980 People article by Martha Smilgis about the automaker, when all roads still seemed wide open and endless:

“Six years ago John Z. (for Zachary) DeLorean was earning $650,000 a year as a General Motors vice-president—with a passably clear track to the presidency—when he stunned Detroit by abruptly quitting. Two months ago he rocked Motor City again, this time because of a book that attacks his old company for waste, corruption, neglect of consumers and corporate amorality. Among some cringing auto company men, the book has made him a hero—’He’s the only man who ever fired General Motors,’ as one admirer puts it. Now DeLorean, who will be 55 this week, is about to go that one better. Next fall he will market a new sports car of his own design and production, and he has convinced some GM dealers to distribute it. ‘Don’t people believe you can start a business these days?’ DeLorean asks skeptics. ‘I’d like to show that a bunch of little guys can make it.’

The humility is attractive but a bit disingenuous. DeLorean Motor Company is a $200 million operation backed by a consortium of investors in the U.S. and Europe (Johnny Carson among them). DeLorean himself is hardly the average internal-combustion tinkerer. A twice-divorced bon vivant whose romantic life has been as prodigious as his business career, DeLorean fled Detroit in part, he says, because he was bored with it. 

The disenchantment is plain in his book, On a Clear Day You Can See General Motors. Written by the former Detroit bureau chief of Business Week, J. Patrick Wright, and billed as DeLorean’s ‘own story,’ the book charges GM with official nonchalance toward the Corvair (a car that inspired Ralph Nader’s Unsafe at Any Speed). It ridicules numbing, time-wasting rituals of paper-shuffling in the executive suites and waxes outraged at the perks demanded by top GM brass. (To provide a traveling sales executive with his customary midnight snack, the book charges, GM took out a window in his hotel suite and lowered in a fully stocked refrigerator by crane.) After giving Wright all his ammunition, DeLorean pulled out of their publishing agreement—thereby saving his skin with GM—but Wright published the book anyway. ‘It came out a lot tougher than was my intention,’ DeLorean says. ‘I wanted it to be constructive.’ Then he smiles and adds, ‘GM hasn’t retaliated. In fact they’ve offered me an opportunity to merge with their Iranian subsidiary.’ A Ford factory worker’s son who paid his own way through college and earned master’s degrees in automotive engineering and business at night, DeLorean insists he has goodwill toward his old company: ‘GM was very good to me. I was an unsophisticated transmission engineer who was given many opportunities.’

What GM never appreciated, he says, was his life-style. Six-foot-four with movie star good looks, DeLorean is a physical fitness zealot who works out three times a week and is as proud of his 30-inch waist as of his latest marketing coup. Between his three marriages, he squired the likes of Ursula Andress, Joey Heatherton, Candice Bergen and Nancy Sinatra. Such glamorous escorts, along with his modishly long hair and turtleneck sweaters, scandalized automotive society. In 1973 he married fashion model Cristina Ferrare—she had lived with him for three months before saying, ‘Either we marry or I am leaving.’ The clatter of tongues grew louder. He was 48, she was 23. ‘I consider myself young for my age, so that wasn’t a problem for us,” he says. ‘But Cristina wasn’t accepted into Detroit society, and I didn’t want to subject her to that kind of vindictiveness. When I told her I wanted to leave, she supported me 100 percent.'”

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A year before the People article was published, Gary Numan showed appreciation for automobiles:

More DeLorean posts:

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“It Is The Unspoken Will Of The Majority”

December 21, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Here’s a topic I never would have considered on my own because I’m too busy analyzing Abbott & Costello: How much free will do pedestrians have when walking down the street, and how much are we influenced by the crowd and history of decisions made by previous crowds. From the Economist:

“Imagine that you are French. You are walking along a busy pavement in Paris and another pedestrian is approaching from the opposite direction. A collision will occur unless you each move out of the other’s way. Which way do you step?

The answer is almost certainly to the right. Replay the same scene in many parts of Asia, however, and you would probably move to the left. It is not obvious why. There is no instruction to head in a specific direction (South Korea, where there is a campaign to get people to walk on the right, is an exception). There is no simple correlation with the side of the road on which people drive: Londoners funnel to the right on pavements, for example.

Instead, says Mehdi Moussaid of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, this is a behaviour brought about by probabilities. If two opposing people guess each other’s intentions correctly, each moving to one side and allowing the other past, then they are likely to choose to move the same way the next time they need to avoid a collision. The probability of a successful manoeuvre increases as more and more people adopt a bias in one direction, until the tendency sticks. Whether it’s right or left does not matter; what does is that it is the unspoken will of the majority.

That is at odds with most people’s idea of being a pedestrian. More than any other way of getting around—such as being crushed into a train or stuck in a traffic jam—walking appears to offer freedom of choice. Reality is more complicated. Whether stepping aside to avoid a collision, following the person in front through a crowd or navigating busy streets, pedestrians are autonomous yet constrained by others. They are both highly mobile and very predictable. ‘These are particles with a will,’ says Dirk Helbing of ETH Zurich, a technology-focused university.”

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“Hey, say! You are blocking my path, you are right in my way”:

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“How Did You Manage All These Years To Have So Much Energy?”

December 21, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Barbra Streisand chats up Golda Meir in 1978 as part of The Stars Salute Israel at 30. Fun, despite the atrocious canned laughter.

See also:

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“We Now Have The Ability To Control Nanobots Inside A Living, Breathing Body”

December 20, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Nanobots are now a near-term reality. From ExtremeTech’s “Top 10 Tech Breakthroughs of 2011“:

“Nanorobotics 

One of the most marked breakthroughs in 2011 was our control of nanorobotics, or nanobots. We now have the ability to control nanobots inside a living, breathing body, and using them to deliver highly-targeted medications — like cancer drugs — is now just a year or two away.

When you factor in autonomous ‘Constructicon’ robots and this year’s discovery of one-molecule electric motors and ‘nanocars,’ it’s also humbling to think how close we are to a reality with swarms of nanobots that fly or float around building and maintaining our towns and cities.”

“Fresh Dondi Cartoons Are Published Only On The Walls Of The Nectar Café”

December 20, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Irwin Hasen, longtime illustrator of Dondi, the once-popular comic strip about a war orphan, now draws fresh panels of the strip only on the walls of a Manhattan eatery. From Corey Kilgannon’s New York Times piece:

“From 1955 to 1986, Mr. Hasen spent nearly every day drawing the character, a lovable war orphan, for the syndicated daily strip that at its peak was carried by more than 100 newspapers.

Now, fresh Dondi cartoons are published only on the walls of the Nectar Café at Madison Avenue and 79th Street, where nearly every morning for the past 30 years Mr. Hasen has arrived at 8:30 on the dot to sit at the same stool at the counter.

Dondi’s endorsements of the diner, and cartoon versions of its employees, are posted above the grill and on the menu rack.

‘I call it Café Hasen — I’m the staff artist,’ said Mr. Hasen, who lives a block away. He has a corresponding evening constitutional: his 5:30 jaunt to the bar at Bistro Le Steak, on Third Avenue and 75th Street, for a martini.”

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