Excerpts

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“For The First Time The Rocket Is Alone, Whole And Free”

December 6, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From “The Heron and the Astronaut,” Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s lyrical 1969 Life account of the Apollo 8 mission:

“At midnight, we decide to go out to the Cape to see the rocket lit up with searchlights for its final servicing. Already the roads approaching the Cape are full, the sides lined with cars, tents and trailers full of people spending the night on the beach to be in place for the early morning spectacle.

Even before we reach the Cape we see Apollo 8 miles away across the water, blazing like a star on the horizon. We journey toward it until we are only a mile or two distant. As we approach, it gets larger and brighter until it dominates the dark landscape, an incandescent tube, a giant torch with searchlights, focused on it and and beaming beyond over the heavens. The whole sky is arched with rainbows of light.

We climb out of the car and stand in the night wind, facing the source of light. Even at this distance we can see the rocket clearly, poised on its pad and gleaming white. The service structure, one half of its protective sheath, has been pulled away. Only the mobile launcher (the umbilical tower), that dark, bulky cranelike structure, stands beside it, dimmed by brilliance.

For the first time the rocket is alone, whole and free. It is no longer in sections, dwarfed by the mammoth assembly building or obscured by scaffolding. The thousands of details we witnessed this morning have been unified into a single shape. We cannot see, except as a dazzling whiteness, the glaze of frost that coats it due to the extreme cold of the liquid fuels it holds. There is just a wisp of vapor curling from one side like a white plume of breath in the darkness. All is simplified by distance and night into the sheer pure shape of flight, into beauty.”

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The Apollo 8 mission:

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“Quietly, Automation Has Taken Charge Of Many Other Life-And-Death Functions”

December 6, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In our lifetimes, will we see commercial flights that are completely automated and pilotless? My guess is yes. The opening of Philip E. Ross’ investigation of that topic in IEEE Spectrum:

“Time was when a uniformed man would close a metal gate, throw a switch, and intone, ‘Second floor—men’s clothing, linens, power tools…’ and the carload of people would glide upward. Now each passenger handles the job with a punch of a button and not a hint of white-knuckled hesitation. The first automatic elevator was installed by Otis Elevator Co. in 1924; the things became common in the 1950s.

And back in the day, every train had an ‘engineer’ in the cab of the locomotive. Then robo-trains took over intra-airport service, and in the past decade they have appeared on subway lines in Copenhagen, Detroit, Tokyo, and other cities.

Quietly, automation has taken charge of many other life-and-death functions. It manages white-hot ribbons of steel that shoot through rolling mills. It guides lasers that sculpt the eye and scalpels that excise the prostate gland. It runs oceangoing freighters, the crews of which have shrunk by an order of magnitude in living memory. And, most obviously, it is mastering aerial warfare. Today, the U.S. military trains twice as many ground operators for its unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) as pilots for its military jets. Its UAVs started off by flying surveillance missions, then took on ground attack; now they are being readied to move cargo and evacuate wounded soldiers.

In the sphere of commercial flight, too, automation has thinned the cockpit crew from five to just the pilot and copilot, whose jobs it has greatly simplified. Do we even need those two? Many aviation experts think not.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“Mirror Worlds Will Rub Your Nose In The Big Picture And Society May Be Subtly But Deeply Different As A Result”

December 6, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A genius computer scientist who long ago predicted cloud computing, social networks and the current connectivity, David Gelernter was famously sent an explosive by the Unabomber, though his life accomplishments should render that bold headline a footnote. The Economist has an excellent short profile of the technologist. An excerpt:

“More than two decades ago, Dr Gelernter foresaw how computers would be woven into the fabric of everyday life. In his book Mirror Worlds, published in 1991, he accurately described websites, blogging, virtual reality, streaming video, tablet computers, e-books, search engines and internet telephony. More importantly, he anticipated the consequences all this would have on the nature of social interaction, describing distributed online communities that work just as Facebook and Twitter do today.

‘Mirror Worlds aren’t mere information services. They are places you can ‘stroll around’, meeting and electronically conversing with friends or random passers-by. If you find something you don’t like, post a note; you’ll soon discover whether anyone agrees with you,’ he wrote. ‘I can’t be personal friends with all the people who run my local world any longer, but via Mirror Worlds we can be impersonal friends. There will be freer, easier, more improvisational communications, more like neighbourhood chatting and less like typical mail and phone calls. Where someone is or when he is available won’t matter. Mirror Worlds will rub your nose in the big picture and society may be subtly but deeply different as a result.'”

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Gelernter’s Lifestreaming predated Facebook:

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“During The 1920s, Department Stores Started Issuing Charge Plates Or Coins…To Encourage Loyal Customers To Run A Tab”

December 5, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Buying on credit will likely never cease, though the plastic cards that have long been part of the transactions may disappear. From a brief history of credit cards by Hilary Greenbaum and Dana Rubinstein in the New York Times Magazine:

“In Looking Backward, Edward Bellamy’s 1888 novel about a socialist utopia more than a century hence, citizens are issued ‘credit cards’ entitling them to shares of the national wealth. In today’s dystopian reality, people use a different sort of card to buy stuff on the Internet. Yet according to Robert Manning, a historian and author of Credit Card Nation, plastic remains ‘one of the top 10 innovations in the post-World War II period.’ Even if it owes its ubiquity, in part, to a New York businessman named Frank X. McNamara, who forgot to bring cash to a lunch meeting. In 1950, McNamara introduced a cardboard charge card. He called it the Diners Club.

During the 1920s, department stores started issuing charge plates or coins — round or rectangular and mostly made from metal — to encourage loyal customers to run a tab. The most popular, made by a company called Charga-Plate, was rectangular and big enough for an account number, a name and an address.”

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“He wines and dines without ever spending cash,” 1963:

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Twin Girls, One Hopeful And One Not (1966)

December 5, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Grotesque images don’t bother us unless they remind us of ourselves–then they’re appalling. Photographer Diane Arbus was the most famous cataloger of people who broke the mold: giants, dwarves, twins, transvestites, etc. She was accused of exploitation, but she was always really exploring the frailties of those viewing, not those on view. In the above classic 1966 photo, Arbus’ subjects are twin girls who are identical save expressions set in different directions.

Arbus committed suicide in July 1971. From her Village Voice obituary by A.D. Coleman: “Diane Arbus slashed her wrist and bled to death in her Westbeth apartment–sometime late Monday or early Tuesday, since her diary contained an entry dated Monday, July 25. Hers was the third suicide at Westbeth, the second by a photographer. Her body was discovered by her close friend Marvin Israel, on Wednesday, July 28. Funeral services were held at Campbell’s on Madison Avenue. She was 48 years old.

Diane Arbus studied with Lisette Model and earned her living as a commercial photographer, but her concern as an artist–I should say her concerns, as twinned as the children in one of her most famous images–were the freakishness of normalcy and the normalcy of freakishness. She called freaks ‘the quiet minorities,’ and defined her special field of interest in photography as a ‘sort of contemporary anthropology,’ much reminiscent of August Sander, with whose work her own had considerable affinity.

In a 1967 interview for Newsweek, she said about freaks, ‘There’s a quality of legend about them. They’ve passed their test in life. Most people go through life dreading they’ll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They’ve already passed it. They’re aristocrats.’

And, about herself, in a more recent statement: ‘Once I dreamed I was on a gorgeous ocean liner, all pale, gilded, cupid-encrusted, rococo as a wedding cake. There was smoke in the air, people were drinking and gambling. I knew the ship was on fire and we were sinking, slowly. They knew it too but they were very gay, dancing  and singing and kissing, a little delirious. There was no hope. I was terribly elated. I could photograph anything I wanted to.'”

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“There Was One Of The Greatest Teachers, Poets, And Leaders That Ever Lived”

December 4, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From a 1979 Philip K. Dick interview in Science Fiction Review, in which the author inexplicably shows great love for Chairman Mao and makes an interesting point about the human capacity for blocking out the truth:

Question:

Right now, the first reports are coming back from our probes on Mars. What effect, if any, would news of life on Mars have on humanity?

Philip K. Dick:

You mean the average person?

Question:

Yes. What would it do to their thoughts of themselves, and their place in the universe?

Philip K. Dick: 

All right. Yesterday, Chairman Mao died. To me, it was as if a piece of my body had been torn out and thrown away, and I’m not a Communist. There was one of the greatest teachers, poets, and leaders that ever lived. And I don’t see anybody walking around with any particularly unhappy expression. There have been some shots of people in China crying piteously, but I woke my girlfriend up at 7:00 in the morning. I was crying. I said, ‘Chairman Mao has died.’ She said, ‘Oh my God, I thought you said ‘Sharon was dead” — some girl she knows. I think I would be like that. I think there would be little, if any, real reaction. If they can stand to hear that Chairman–that that great poet and teacher, that great man, that–one guy on TV — one Sinologist — said ‘The American public would have to imagine as if, on a single day, both Kennedys, Dr. King, and Franklin D. Rossevelt were all killed simultaneously,’ and even then they wouldn’t get the full impact of it. So I don’t really think that to find life on Mars is going to affect people. One time I was watching TV, and a guy comes on, and he says, ‘I have discovered a 3,000,000-year-old humanoid skull with one eye and two noses.’ And he showed it — he had twenty-five of them, they were obviously fake. And it had one eye, like a cyclops, and had two noses. And the network and everybody took the guy seriously. He says, ‘Man originated in San Diego, and he had one eye and two noses.’ We were laughing, and I said, ‘I wonder if he has a moustache under each nose?

People just have no criterion left to evaluate the importance of things. I think the only thing that would really affect people would be the announcement that the world was going to be blown up by the hydrogen bomb. I think that would really effect people. I think they would react to that. But outside of that, I don’t think they would react to anything. ‘Peking has been wiped out by an earthquake, and the RTD — the bus strike is still on.’ And some guy says, ‘Damnit! I’ll have to walk to work!’ So? You know, 800,000 Chinese are lying dead under the rubble. Really. It cannot be burlesqued.

I think people would have been pleased if there was life on Mars, but I think they would have soon wearied of the novelty of it, and said, ‘But what is there on Jupiter? What can the life do?’ And, ‘My pet dog can do the same thing.’ It’s sad, and it’s also very frightening in a way, to think that you could come on the air, and you could say, ‘The ozone layer has been completely destroyed, and we’re all going to die of cancer in ten years.’ And you might get a reaction. And then, on the other hand, you might not get a reaction from people. So many incredible things have happened.

I talked to a black soldier from World War II who had entered the concentration camp — he had been part of an American battalion that had seized a German death camp — it wasn’t even a concentration camp, it was one of the death camps, and had liberated it. And he said he saw those inmates with his own eyes, and he said, ‘I don’t believe it. I saw it, but I have never believed what I saw. I think that there was something we don’t know. I don’t think they were being killed.’ They were obviously starving, but he says, ‘Even though I saw the camp, and I was one of the first people to get there, I don’t really believe that those people were being killed by millions. For some reason, even though I myself was one of the first human’ — notice the words ‘human beings’ — ‘human beings to see this terrible sight, I just don’t believe what I saw.’ And I guess that’s it, you know. I think that may have been the moment when this began, was the extermination of the gypsies, and Jews, and Bible students in the death camps, people making lampshades out of people’s skins. After that, there wasn’t much to believe or disbelieve, and it didn’t really matter what you believed or disbelieved.•

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“The Sex Pistols, Strictly Speaking, Were Right: There Is No Future”

December 2, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From “The Omega Glory,” Michael Chabon’s essay about that amorphous thing known as The Future, at The Long Now:

“The Sex Pistols, strictly speaking, were right: there is no future, for you or for me. The future, by definition, does not exist. ‘The Future,’ whether you capitalize it or not, is always just an idea, a proposal, a scenario, a sketch for a mad contraption that may or may not work. ‘The Future’ is a story we tell, a narrative of hope, dread or wonder. And it’s a story that, for a while now, we’ve been pretty much living without.

Ten thousand years from now: can you imagine that day? Okay, but do you? Do you believe ‘the Future’ is going to happen? If the Clock works the way that it’s supposed to do—if it lasts—do you believe there will be a human being around to witness, let alone mourn its passing, to appreciate its accomplishment, its faithfulness, its immense antiquity? What about five thousand years from now, or even five hundred? Can you extend the horizon of your expectations for our world, for our complex of civilizations and cultures, beyond the lifetime of your own children, of the next two or three generations? Can you even imagine the survival of the world beyond the present presidential administration?” (Thanks TETW.)

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Punks and rotters, the lot of them, 1976:

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“The Prisoners Were Ordered To Turn Their Backs Whenever He Came Into View. Those Caught Stealing Glances At Him Were Hanged.”

December 1, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Compromise as much as courage was key to the U.S.A. touching down on the moon first. Operation Paperclip rounded up scores of Nazi scientists at the conclusion of WWII, and brought them to America to make us preeminent in rockets, satellites, and ultimately, spaceships, without ever holding these men accountable for their atrocities. Chief among these unlikely American heroes was brilliant Wernher von Braun, who was portrayed to the American public as a scientist who was dispassionate about politics, just another pawn in the horrible Nazi game. Of course, that was far from the truth. From “The Rocket Man’s Dark Side,” Leon Jaroff’s 2002 Time report about the genius whose awful past was lost in space:

Still, he was apolitical, wasn’t he, and during the war had really only been pursuing his lifelong interest in rocketry. And hadn’t he fully redeemed himself with his great contributions to our space race with the Soviets?

That’s the gist of the official von Braun biography posted  on the web site of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, where under the directorship of von Braun, the mighty Saturn 5 rocket was developed. And it’s this sanitized biography that has roused the indignation of Tom Gehrels, a noted University of Arizona astronomer and pioneer in the program to discover and track Earth-threatening asteroids. A member of the Dutch resistance during World War II, Gehrels readily acknowledges von Braun’s contributions to the world of science, but is all too aware of the little-known dark side of both him and his brother Magnus. “They were Jekyll and Hyde characters,” Gehrels insists, “and the full truth ought to be known.”

It is Gehrels who has pieced together that truth, largely from interviews with surviving political prisoners who had been forced to build V-1s and V-2s under the supervision of the von Brauns in an underground complex near Nordhausen, Germany. These prisoners were housed in an adjacent concentration camp called Dora, and new arrivals were given the standard welcoming speech: ‘You came in through that gate, and you’ll leave through that chimney [of the crematorium].’

Indeed, some 20,000 died at Dora, from illness, beatings, hangings and intolerable working conditions. Workers, scantily clad, were forced to stand at attention in the biting cold during roll calls that went on for hours. Average survival time in the unventilated paint shop was one month. One prisoner told of being bitten on his legs by guard dogs. Presumably to test the effectiveness of a new medication, one of his legs was treated, the other allowed to fester and deteriorate.

For reasons best known to von Braun, who held the rank of colonel in the dreaded Nazi SS, the prisoners were ordered to turn their backs whenever he came into view. Those caught stealing glances at him were hung. One survivor recalled that von Braun, after inspecting a rocket component, charged, “That is clear sabotage.” His unquestioned judgment resulted in eleven men being hanged on the spot. Says Gehrels, ‘von Braun was directly involved in hangings.”•

Dr. Strangelove’s backstory—and salutes—were inspired by von Braun.

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“After Wrapping Up His Speech, He Moved Briskly Through The Crowd”

December 1, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"The footage would capture the candidate seeming engaged in the kind of heart-to-heart dialogues with working-class Americans that the campaign had otherwise left off his schedule that day." (Image by Gage Skidmore .)

The source of the considerable reservoir of rage beneath Mitt Romney’s well-polished exterior is as mysterious as President Obama’s ever-present sense of calm–though it’s obviously more concerning. Robert Draper’s new New York Times Magazine article about the likely GOP Presidential nominee suggests that Romney is unflappable–I’m not buying it–but makes good points about the guy you’d least like to have a beer with competing for the country’s highest office. An excerpt;

“It’s very unlikely that we’ll ever hear Mitt Romney and Barack Obama openly discuss the things they have in common. Nonetheless, we may well see in the general election a contest between two dispassionate and accommodating pragmatists and skilled debaters who relish intellectual give-and-take, and whose willingness to compromise has infuriated the party faithful. Both have promised change. Each will frame the other as being not up to the task.

How ably Romney the nominee will defend himself, given the kid-gloves treatment by his current competition and the campaign’s avoidance of large segments of his own life story, is difficult to say just yet. In early November I watched Romney return to Iowa for only the fourth time. He stopped in Dubuque and Davenport and, before decent-size crowds, essentially regurgitated his address on the economy from the week before. In both cases he spoke for less than 20 minutes and did not take questions from the audience. Far more of his ground time was devoted to filming promotional material in a Dubuque sheet-metal factory, where the footage would capture the candidate seeming engaged in the kind of heart-to-heart dialogues with working-class Americans that the campaign had otherwise left off his schedule that day.

Near the end of his talk in Davenport, he said to the 275 east Iowans in attendance, ‘I want you to get to know me a little better.’ After wrapping up his speech, he moved briskly through the crowd, pausing now and then to take photos and sign autographs, before flying out of Iowa with Stuart Stevens and a couple of other staff members.”

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“Did you hear what I said?”

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“Almost No One Alive Today Has A Mature, Firsthand Memory Of A Country That Used To Be Very Different—That Was Not A Superpower”

November 30, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

America got rid of the draft but continued waging wars, which meant that a military class needed to emerge and companies had to form to manage outsourced dirty work. Most of us never get any blood on our hands, but America is more than ever in the business of war. In Vanity Fair, Todd S, Purdum investigates how the U.S. transformed during the Cold War and War on Terror from sleeping giant into a militarized security state. An excerpt:

“Just over 50 years ago, in his farewell address from the Oval Office, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned the nation of the dangers inherent in a powerful ‘military-industrial complex,’ and just three days later—as if in proof of Eisenhower’s words—John Fitzgerald Kennedy famously vowed to ‘pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe in order to assure the survival and the success of liberty.’ Yes, the United States faced extraordinary challenges in the postwar era—and was forced to shoulder extraordinary responsibilities. But some steps, once taken, prove impossible to walk back. By 1961 the problem that Eisenhower had identified was well advanced. Already, the United States was spending more on military security than the net income of all American corporations combined.

In the years since, the trend has warped virtually every aspect of national life, with consequences that are quite radical in their cumulative effect on the economy, on the vast machinery of official secrecy, on the country’s sense of itself, and on the very nature of national government in Washington. And yet the degree to which America has changed is noticed by almost no one—not in any visceral way. The transformation has taken hold too gradually and over too long a period. Almost no one alive today has a mature, firsthand memory of a country that used to be very different—that was not a superpower; that did not shroud the workings of its government in secrecy; that did not use ends-justify-the-means logic to erode rights and liberties; that did not undertake protracted wars on the president’s say-so; that had not forgotten how to invest in urgent needs at home; that did not trumpet its greatness even as its shortcomings became more obvious. An American today who is 25 or 50 or even 75—such a person has lived entirely in the America we have become.”

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“It Was A Japanese Surgeon Who Performed The First Known Surgery Under Anaesthetic, In 1804”

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

We’ve never really understood why anaesthesia works, only that it does, and that surgery was horrifying before its advent. But perhaps brain imaging will soon reveal the mystery of anesthesia’s potency. An excerpt from New Scientist about the history of surgery with gas:

“It was a Japanese surgeon who performed the first known surgery under anaesthetic, in 1804, using a mixture of potent herbs. In the west, the first operation under general anaesthetic took place at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1846. A flask of sulphuric ether was held close to the patient’s face until he fell unconscious.

Since then a slew of chemicals have been co-opted to serve as anaesthetics, some inhaled, like ether, and some injected. The people who gained expertise in administering these agents developed into their own medical specialty. Although long overshadowed by the surgeons who patch you up, the humble ‘gas man’ does just as important a job, holding you in the twilight between life and death.” (Thanks Browser.)

“Kael Knew How To Read The New Graphic Nihilism”

November 30, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Laurie Winer writing in the Los Angeles Review of Books about Brian Kellow’s new Pauline Kael bio:

“Kael assumed national prominence in 1967, exactly when movies were taking quantum leaps in depictions of sex and violence, causing, as such leaps always do, anguish among cultural gatekeepers. Her review of Bonnie and Clyde marked Kael’s real debut in the New Yorker — she had previously published one article there about movies on TV. With his review of the same film, Bosley Crowther saw his 27-year reign as movie critic at the New York Times come to an end; Kael knew how to read the new graphic nihilism, and Crowther, her avowed nemesis, was left in the dark. Crowther had long been a powerful critic, and he had had his day, opposing Eugene McCarthy and censorship, and helping Americans to accept foreign films such as Open City and The Bicycle Thief. Now he was exposed as perilously out of touch. He was such an advocate of film as a force for betterment that he could hardly tell one violent movie from another. He called Bonnie and Clyde ‘a cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy that treats the hideous depredation of that sleazy, moronic pair as though they were as full of fun and frolic as the jazz-age cut-up in Thoroughly Modern Millie.’ The resistance to this position was so strong that he wrote a second screed, precipitating his forced retirement as a film critic at the end of 1967.

Kael’s response to Arthur Penn’s film was so visceral because she sensed it marked a change in her own life as well as a change in movies. She was 48 years old, the single mother of a daughter, a person who had come from a West Coast farming family and who had struggled long and hard and with precious little recognition. With Bonnie and Clyde she finally came into her own as a critic of stature, someone who could influence the course of events, and she was eager to insert herself into the cultural moment: ‘The audience is alive to it,’ she wrote of the film, as if anyone with sense felt her excitement:

Our experience as we watch it has some connection with the way we reacted to movies in childhood: with how we came to love them and to feel they were ours — not an art that we learned over the years to appreciate but simply and immediately ours.”

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PK + WA, 1975:

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Twain, With Tesla Watching, Lights Up A Room (1894)

November 30, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

To celebrate the 176th birthday of Samuel Clemens, who was the Mark Twain of his day, here is a classic 1894 photo of the humorist messing around in the New York City laboratory of his good pal, Nikola Tesla. Twain’s wit and wisdom gained him worldwide adoration, made him  a fortune (which he lost and regained), brought him into close contact with every notable figure of his era (not just Serbian electricians) and earned him a permanent place in the American literary canon. His speaking engagements were attended by rapturous audiences full of swooning women. Reports of his death may have been exaggerated, but his fame was not.

But like funny people before and after him, Twain had a melancholy side. A brief note from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 1898: “Mark Twain, at one time was in the habit of lunching at a restaurant in New York, pretty far uptown and away from the madding crowd. A lady who lived in one of the flats above the restaurant, meeting him just as he was coming away from lunch, spoke to him for a few minutes. Later on, when she herself was having her lunch, the waiter asked her to tell him the name of the gentleman with whom she had been speaking. He said he wanted to know because he was the saddest looking gentleman he had ever seen. ‘It’s quite depressing to wait on him,’ he said, ‘for I’ve never once seen him smile.'”

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The Connecticut Yankee, in white suit, of course, 1909:

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“He Said Exactly What You Wanted To Hear, And He Became Who You Wanted Him To Be”

November 28, 2011 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Finally got around to reading that doozy of a Deadspin post by Barry Patchesky about sleazy baseball agent Dan Lozano, a USC dropout who used dubious methods to become one of the sport’s biggest power brokers, building a house of cards atop a three-legged table. An excerpt:

“With Lozano, that question is always there. Through the years, he has told clients and colleagues that his career began in 1990 as a kid fresh out of USC, where he played Division I ball and earned a law degree. Every part of that sentence is false. Lozano never passed the bar, never went to law school, didn’t even earn an undergraduate degree. He told USA Today that he was just one Spanish class shy of graduating, but he once told a co-worker he lasted only ‘a few semesters.’ (He also told USA Today he dropped out because he was ‘negotiating the biggest deal in baseball history.’ He was referring to Mike Piazza’s gargantuan Mets contract, which was signed nine years after he dropped out.) As for his boast of playing baseball for the Trojans? Longtime USC coach Mike Gillespie has no recollection of Lozano, and his name appears nowhere in a list of all-time letterwinners. It’s not for nothing that, according to colleagues, people in the BHSC office took to calling him ‘Lie-zo.’

If there’s one thing his superiors at BHSC did know, it’s that Lozano was good. He had a preternatural ability to meet a baseball player once and become fast friends. More importantly to his bosses and his bottom line, he had a knack for turning those friends into clients.

‘He was downright charming,’ says a former friend who watched the young Lozano’s stock skyrocket. ‘He said exactly what you wanted to hear, and he became who you wanted him to be. And he could move on to the next player and be a completely different person for them.’“

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“The Idea Is To Find A Way To Create The Meat Without The Animal By Growing It Directly”

November 28, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Animal-free, factory-grown meat isn’t practical to produce yet, but it is coming. An excerpt from David Szondy’s new Gizmag article on the topic:

“Dr. Mark Post, a vascular biologist at the University of Maastricht in the Netherlands, is one of a handful of scientists around the world working on the problem ofcultivating meat artificially in a laboratory. The idea is to find a way to create the meat without the animal by growing it directly. Speaking to the Reuters news agency, Dr. Post estimates that, if he succeeds, his first burger will cost a staggering $345,000, but when the technique is perfected and scaled up to industrial levels, economies of scale should kick in and make lab-grown beef (or pork or chicken or fish) as cheap, if not cheaper, than its four-legged counterpart. He also believes that the advantages of in vitro meat, as it is called, are such that it will go a long way toward alleviating world hunger and saving the environment.”

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“I Don’t Wish Him To Die–But I Don’t Give A Damn Whether He Lives”

November 28, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Oriana Fallaci reflected on some of her most famous interview subjects in a 1969 Life article in which the grand inquisitor was the one being quizzed:

“Robert F. Kennedy: A very cold and shy man. He blushed at every question. I never managed to provoke him. One of my worst interviews.

Barbra Streisand: We liked each other very much, but she and her press agent complained about the story. I sent them both to hell.

John Glenn: The second time I saw him, after his fall, he was a better man, I thought, not playing the Boy Scout so much.

Federico Fellini: We are total enemies now. He wished me to die. I don’t wish him to die–but I don’t give a damn whether he lives.

Paul Newman: He seems like a nice American boy who reads the Times and Washington Post daily. I think I’d like him as a neighbor.”

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More Oriana Fallaci posts:

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“Bill Gates Didn’t Think The Internet Would Be Big”

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

In his speech, “Libraries: Where It All Went Wrong,” Nat Torkington (not to be confused with Karl Pilkington) draws a parallel between how book-lending facilities were destabilized by the Internet in much the same way Microsoft was. I think Bill Gates had more of an idea of the Internet’s potential power than Torkington gives him credit for, but it’s still an interesting speech. An excerpt: 

“Bill Gates wrote a bestseller in 1995.  He was on a roll: Microsoft Windows had finally crushed its old foe the Macintosh computer from Apple, Microsoft was minting money hand over fist, and he was hugely respected in the industry he had helped start. He roped in other big brains from Microsoft to write a book to answer the question, ‘what next?’  The Road Ahead talked about the implications of everyone having a computer and how they would use the great Information Superhighway that was going to happen.

The World Wide Web appears in the index to The Road Ahead precisely four times.  Bill Gates didn’t think the Internet would be big.  The Information Superhighway of Gates’s fantasies would have more structure than the Internet, be better controlled than the Internet, in short it would be more the sort of thing that a company like Microsoft would make.

Bill Gates and Microsoft were caught flat-footed by the take-up of the Internet. They had built an incredibly profitable and strong company which treated computers as disconnected islands: Microsoft software ran on the computers, but didn’t help connect them.  Gates and Microsoft soon realized the Internet was here to stay and rushed to fix Windows to deal with it, but they never made up for that initial wrong-footing.

At least part of the reason for this was because they had this fantastic cash cow in Windows, the island software.  They were victims of what Clayton Christenson calls the Innovator’s Dilemma: they couldn’t think past their own successes to build the next big thing, the thing that’d eat their lunch.  They still haven’t got there: Bing, their rival to Google, has eaten $5.5B since 2009 and it isn’t profitable yet.” (Thanks Browser.)

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Bill Gates enters the world of Doom, 1995:

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“Bloggers And Television Reporters Quickly Dubbed Them The Waffle House Terrorists”

November 27, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Drunks, criminals and terrorists aren’t the only ones who dine at the ubiquitous Southern comfort-food chain, Waffle House, but they certainly make their presence felt.  An excerpt from Robbie Brown’s New York Times article :

“When four elderly men were arrested in northern Georgia this month on charges of planning terrorist attacks in Atlanta and along the East Coast, F.B.I. surveillance tapes revealed where they had met to hatch their plot — a Waffle House. Bloggers and television reporters quickly dubbed them the Waffle House Terrorists.

Last month, when a Florida state representative was ridiculed for proposing that death row inmates be killed by electrocution or firing squad, he said the idea had come from a constituent he met at — you guessed it — a Waffle House.

In Georgia, there have been other less-noted incidents: after nearly 17 years on the run, a fugitive was caught this month at a Waffle House in Augusta, and a cross-dressing bank robber in Marietta has evaded the police but was spotted on surveillance video this month eating at a Waffle House.

In Cobb County, where some of the robberies occurred, Sgt. Dana Pierce said the police were paying extra attention to all 24-hour diners, but especially Waffle Houses. It is easy to see why they can become targets for criminals, he said. ‘They are cash-driven,’ he said. ‘They are near Interstate exits. And they are open 24 hours, when people aren’t necessarily in a sober state of mind.'”

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Waffle House employee allows himself to be tazed:

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Bradbury Building Gets Its Close-Up (1960)

November 25, 2011 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

This classic 1960 picture, which was taken by longtime National Parks Service photographer Jack E. Boucher, depicts the interior of L.A.’s Bradbury Building, one of the most filmed and photographed pieces of architecture in the world. The setting for numerous films and music videos, the downtown Los Angeles structure is perhaps best known for its appearance in Blade Runner. Built in 1893 by George Wyman for the visionary mining millionaire Lewis L. Bradbury, the building was completed a year after its namesake’s death. Wyman purportedly consulted a Ouija board before accepting the assignment.

A brief history about the project from the Pacific Coast Architecture Database:

Sumner P. Hunt began a five-story design for the mining magnate, Lewis Leonard Bradbury (1823-1892), in 1891; Bradbury wanted an office building that he could walk to from his house on Bunker Hill in Los Angeles; Hunt had previously designed a warehouse for Bradbury in Mazatlan, Mexico; Hunt had completed plans for the new office building by March 1893 at the latest; Bradbury died in July 1892, and there were legal disputes over his estate; in this contentious context, it is possible that the Bradbury Estate may have wanted to finish the Bradbury Building as inexpensively as possible; in 1892 or 1893, George Herbert Wyman, a draftsman in Hunt’s office, entered the picture, as a project supervisor, taking control from Hunt. According to Cecilia Rasmussen writing in the Los Angeles Times, modern research on the history of the Bradbury Block derived from a story done by the noted architectural critic and historian, Esther McCoy (1904-1989), in Arts and Architecture magazine in 1953. Rasmussen stated: “Esther McCoy interviewed Wyman’s two daughters, Louise Hammell and Carroll Wyman. McCoy’s story…reports that Wyman’s daughters told her that Bradbury found Hunt’s design uninspiring and promptly offered the job of redesigning the building to their father. They told McCoy that their father incorporated ideas for his design from Edward Bellamy’s 1887 novel, Looking Backward, which described a utopian civilization of the year 2000. Wyman, the daughters told McCoy, originally turned down the offer, judging acceptance as unethical. But that weekend, while using a Ouija board with his wife, he received a message from his 8-year-old dead brother Mark: ‘Take the Bradbury assignment. It will make you successful.'”•

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“Eventually Kare Earned A Commission From An Arkansas Museum To Sculpt A Razorback Hog Out Of Steel”

November 25, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Steve Silberman’s NeuroTribes post about GUI pioneer Susan Kare, who gave computer code a friendly face, creating many of the iconic images for the Apple Macintosh:

“The challenge of designing a personal computer that ‘the rest of us’ would not only buy, but fall crazy in love with, however, required input from the kind of people who might some day be convinced to try using a Mac. Fittingly, one of the team’s most auspicious early hires was a young artist herself: Susan Kare.

After taking painting lessons as a young girl and graduating from New York University with a Ph.D. in fine arts, Kare moved to the Bay Area, where she took a curatorial job at the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. But she quickly felt like she was on the wrong side of the creative equation. ‘I’d go talk to artists in their studios for exhibitions,’ she recalls, ‘but I really wanted to be working in my studio.’

Eventually Kare earned a commission from an Arkansas museum to sculpt a razorback hog out of steel. That was the project she was tackling in her garage in Palo Alto when she got a call from a high-school friend named Andy Hertzfeld, who was the lead software architect for the Macintosh operating system, offering her a job.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“CBS News‘s Bob Schieffer Is The Classic American Establishment TV Journalist: Unfailingly Deferential To The Politically Powerful Personalities Who Parade Before Him”

November 25, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

"That's why we heard so little dissent during the run-up to the Iraq War and the destruction of our economy." (Image by Rotem Danzig.)

Like many people who are intensely interested in politics, I refuse to watch almost everything about politics on TV. I think my breaking point was watching Candy Crowley interview someone from the Bush Administration, being told one bald-faced lie after another and not asking follow-up questions that might annoy her guest–and provide illumination. That’s not to pick on Crowley. She seems like a very good, smart person, and she was really only doing what she was paid to do: Provide a facade of serious political analysis and nothing deeper. That’s what political interviewers do on television. No one says anything that is truly challenging, guests move from one chair to another and everyone keeps getting paid. No one forces the clown car of American journalism off the road. It’s motion without progress.

Equally abhorrent is the of air of “objectivity” provided by news anchors who are quietly complicit in maintaining a status quo power structure in America. That’s why we heard so little dissent during the run-up to the Iraq War and the destruction of our economy. Glenn Greenwald has an excellent essay on the latter topic on Salon, using an interview that Bob Schieffer of CBS conducted with Ron Paul to present his case. The opening:

“CBS News‘s Bob Schieffer is the classic American establishment TV journalist: unfailingly deferential to the politically powerful personalities who parade before him, and religiously devoted to what he considers his own ‘objectivity,’ which ostensibly requires that he never let his personal opinions affect or be revealed by his journalism. Watch how thoroughly and even proudly he dispenses with both of those traits when interviewing Ron Paul last Sunday on Face the Nation regarding Paul’s foreign policy views. In this 7-minute clip, Schieffer repeatedly mocks, scoffs at, and displays his obvious contempt for, two claims of Paul’s which virtually no prominent politician of either party would dare express: (1) American interference and aggression in the Muslim world fuels anti-American sentiment and was thus part of the motivation for the 9/11 attack; and (2) American hostility and aggression toward Iran (in the form of sanctions and covert attacks) are more likely to exacerbate problems and lead to war than lead to peaceful resolution, which only dialogue with the Iranians can bring about.

You actually believe 9/11 was America’s fault? Your plan to deal with the Iranian nuclear program is to be nicer to Iran? This interview is worth highlighting because it is a vivid case underscoring several points about the real meaning of the much-vaunted ‘journalistic objectivity.'”

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“He Liked To Troll The City Sewers And Dissolve Slugs With Salt”

November 25, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I originally read Daniel Zalewski’s excellent New Yorker profile of filmmaker Guillermo del Toro in the print version and never realized until now that it’s online for free. Even if you’re not a fan of Del Toro’s work, you’ll probably enjoy it since the article is pretty much perfect. The opening:

In 1926, Forrest Ackerman, a nine-year-old misfit in Los Angeles, visited a newsstand and bought a copy of Amazing Stories—a new magazine about aliens, monsters, and other oddities. By the time he reached the final page, he had become America’s first fanboy. He started a group called the Boys’ Scientifiction Club; in 1939, he wore an outer-space outfit to a convention for fantasy aficionados, establishing a costuming ritual still followed by the hordes at Comic-Con. Ackerman founded a cult magazine, Famous Monsters of Filmland, and, more lucratively, became an agent for horror and science-fiction writers. He crammed an eighteen-room house in Los Feliz with genre memorabilia, including a vampire cape worn by Bela Lugosi and a model of the pteranodon that tried to abscond with Fay Wray in King Kong. Ackerman eventually sold off his collection to pay medical bills, and in 2008 he died. He had no children.

But he had an heir. In 1971, Guillermo del Toro, the film director, was a seven-year-old misfit in Guadalajara, Mexico. He liked to troll the city sewers and dissolve slugs with salt. One day, in the magazine aisle of a supermarket, he came upon a copy of Famous Monsters of Filmland. He bought it, and was so determined to decode Ackerman’s pun-strewed prose—the letters section was called Fang Mail—that he quickly became bilingual.

Del Toro was a playfully morbid child. One of his first toys, which he still owns, was a plush werewolf that he sewed together with the help of a great-aunt. In a tape recording made when he was five, he can be heard requesting a Christmas present of a mandrake root, for the purpose of black magic. His mother, Guadalupe, an amateur poet who read tarot cards, was charmed; his father, Federico, a businessman whom del Toro describes, fondly, as “the most unimaginative person on earth,” was confounded. Confounding his father became a lifelong project.

Before del Toro started school, his father won the Mexican national lottery. Federico built a Chrysler-dealership empire with the money, and moved the family into a white modernist mansion. Little Guillermo haunted it. He raised a gothic menagerie: hundreds of snakes, a crow, and white rats that he sometimes snuggled with in bed.•

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“Musk Wanted To Place A Small Greenhouse Laden With Seeds And Nutrient Gel On The Martian Surface”

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

The opening of Andrew Chalkiin’s article about Elon Musk’s mission to Mars, in Air & Space magazine:

“You can be rich enough to buy a rocket and still get sticker shock. In early 2002, PayPal co-founder Elon Musk, already a multimillionaire at 30, was pursuing a grand scheme to rekindle public interest in sending humans to Mars. A lifelong space enthusiast with degrees in physics and business, Musk wanted to place a small greenhouse laden with seeds and nutrient gel on the Martian surface to establish life there, if only temporarily. The problem wasn’t the lander itself; he’d already talked to contractors who would build it for a comparatively low cost. The problem was launching it. Unwilling to pay what U.S. rocket companies were charging, Musk made three trips to Russia to try to buy a refurbished Dnepr missile, but found deal-making in the wild west of Russian capitalism too risky financially.

On the flight home, he recalls, ‘I was trying to understand why rockets were so expensive. Obviously the lowest cost you can make anything for is the spot value of the material constituents. And that’s if you had a magic wand and could rearrange the atoms. So there’s just a question of how efficient you can be about getting the atoms from raw material state to rocket shape.’ That year, enlisting a handful of veteran space engineers, Musk formed Space Exploration Technologies, or SpaceX, with two staggeringly ambitious goals: To make spaceflight routine and affordable, and to make humans a multi-planet species.” (Thanks Longreads.)

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“Bass Thinks That The Only Reliable Investments Are Guns And Gold, And Has Just Bought Twenty Million Nickels”

November 22, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the New York Review of Books, John Lanchester takes on Michael Lewis’ new volume about the global economic meltdown, Boomerang. A passage about the apocalyptic view of fund manager Kyle Bass:

“His first interlocutor, Kyle Bass, is a classic example. Bass is a fund manager who made a fortune ‘shorting’ toxic mortgage assets, and then became preoccupied by the subject of global debt levels. Bass is, to put it very mildly, a pessimist on the subject of sovereign debt:

Spain and France had accumulated debts of more than ten times their annual revenues. Historically, such levels of government indebtedness had led to government default. ‘Here’s the only way I think things can work out for these countries,’ Bass said. ‘If they start running real budget surpluses. Yeah, and that will happen right after monkeys fly out of your ass.’

The prognostications that ensue from Bass’s analysis are gloomy, and form the basis of Boomerang‘s big-picture overview. ‘The financial crisis of 2008 was suspended only because investors believed that governments could borrow whatever they needed to rescue their banks. What happened when the governments themselves ceased to be credible?’

Bass thinks that the only reliable investments are guns and gold, and has just bought twenty million nickels, because the metal in a five-cent nickel is worth 6.8 cents, and they are going to be a stable source of value when things go wrong.”

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“Six Football Players Were Charged By Police For Forcing Their Way Into A Campus Apartment That April And Beating Up Several Students, One Of Them Severely”

November 22, 2011 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The culture of cover-up at Penn State’s football program was no doubt deeply rooted, and you have to wonder what’s going on at other college athletic programs that have a legendary coach and a cash cow in the form of a fat TV contract. An excerpt from Reed Albergotti’s WSJ article:

“In an Aug. 12, 2005, email to Pennsylvania State University President Graham Spanier and others, Vicky Triponey, the university’s standards and conduct officer, complained that Mr. Paterno believed she should have ‘no interest, (or business) holding our football players accountable to our community standards. The Coach is insistent he knows best how to discipline his players…and their status as a student when they commit violations of our standards should NOT be our concern…and I think he was saying we should treat football players different from other students in this regard.’

The confrontations came to a head in 2007, according to one former school official, when six football players were charged by police for forcing their way into a campus apartment that April and beating up several students, one of them severely. That September, following a tense meeting with Mr. Paterno over the case, she resigned her post, saying at the time she left because of ‘philosophical differences.'”

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Joe Paterno tells President Nixon, another cover-up artist, to “shove it”:

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