From an insane 1955 Look magazine article which suggested that the future of aviation might be subterranean and saucer-shaped:
Future airports built for vertically rising flying saucers would have no need of the long, vulnerable runways today’s fighters require. The complete operation could go underground. Tunnels with take-off shafts set into the ground, complete with maintenance bays, fuel and crew quarters, would be bombproof shelters for a saucer squadron. The shafts would be sealed after take-off for camouflage and protection.•
“Not content with building a computer that can win Jeopardy without breaking an electronic sweat, IBM has announced plans to create a ‘cognitive computer’ that will simulate the same number of neurons as the human brain, yet run on less energy than the supercomputer that made Ken Jennings look like an average human being.
The company’s SVP and Director of Research John Kelly explained during a Capitol Hill briefing yesterday that ‘Computer systems are becoming more bioinspired,’ which may also account for the desire to create a supercomputer that runs on less than the 85 KW of electricity that WATSON needed; the human brain ‘runs on 20 watts of electricity,’ Kelly said.
The project, expected to be completed within the next ten years, is being worked on in cooperation with the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA). The two have already created a computer that simulated the same number of neurons found in a cat.”
"He has learned not to let premonitions of apocalypse spoil his good mood." (Image by David Shankbone.)
If you haven’t read it already, the new issue of the New Yorker has a brief article by Mattathias Schwartz about Kalle Lasn, the odd duck publisher of Adbusters magazine who gave Occupy Wall Street its name and vision, though I doubt many protesters see things the same why he does. An excerpt:
“Lasn is sixty-nine years old and lives with his wife on a five-acre farm outside Vancouver. He has thinning white hair and the small eyes of a bulldog. In a lilting voice, he speaks of ‘a dark age coming for humanity’ and of ‘killing capitalism,’ alternating gusts of passion with gentle laughter. He has learned not to let premonitions of apocalypse spoil his good mood.
The magazine, which he founded twenty-two years ago, depicts the developed world as a nightmare of environmental collapse and spiritual hollowness, driven to the brink of destruction by its consumer appetites. Adbusters’ images—a breastfeeding baby tattooed with corporate logos; a smiling Barack Obama with a clown’s ball on his nose—are combined with equally provocative texts and turned into a paginated montage. Adbusters is not the only radical magazine calling for the end of life as we know it, but it is by far the best-looking.”
E.O. Wilson wondered if we’re programmed to do away with ourselves in his 2005 Cosmos article, “Is Humanity Suicidal?” An excerpt:
“Unlike any creature that lived before, humans have become a geophysical force, swiftly changing the atmosphere and climate as well as the composition of the world’s fauna and flora.
Now in the midst of a population explosion, this species has doubled in number to more than 6 billion during the past 50 years. It is scheduled to double again in the next 50 years. No other single species in evolutionary history has even remotely approached the sheer mass in protoplasm generated by humanity.
Darwin’s dice have rolled badly for Earth. It was a misfortune for the living world in particular, many of our scientists believe, that a carnivorous primate and not some more benign form of animal made the breakthrough.
Our species retains hereditary traits that add greatly to our destructive impact. We are tribal and aggressively territorial, intent on private space beyond minimal requirements and oriented by selfish sexual and reproductive drives. Cooperation beyond the family and tribal levels comes hard. Worse, our liking for meat causes us to use the Sun’s energy at low efficiency.” (Thanks TETW.)
Huntington Hartford was heir to the A&P grocery fortune and at one point one of the richest people in the world. Every bit the eccentric, he lost most of the money during his 97 years to failed marriages, quixotic arts and real estate projects and a handwriting institute.
Hartford tells David Frost about the Bahamian island he purchased:
FromHartford’s 2008 New York Times obit: “Huntington Hartford II, who inherited a fortune from the A. & P. grocery business and lost most of it chasing his dreams as an entrepreneur and arts patron, died Monday at his home in Lyford Cay, Nassau, in the Bahamas, where he had lived since 2004. He was 97.
His death was announced by his daughter, Juliet Hartford.
As a boy Huntington Hartford was treated like a prince, indulged by his mother and a staff of servants and provided with a living of $1.5 million a year. Not content merely to be rich, he longed to be a writer and, more than that, an arbiter of culture and a master builder. But his ambitions were far greater than his reach.
A famous example was the Huntington Hartford Museum, also known as the Gallery of Modern Art, at 2 Columbus Circle in Manhattan. Mr. Hartford opened it in 1964 as a showcase for 19th- and 20th-century work that went against the prevailing current of abstract expressionism, which he detested. The building, designed by Edward Durell Stone, was considered a folly or worse: ‘a die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops,’ wrote Ada Louise Huxtable, then the architecture critic of The New York Times.
The art within was generally unremarkable. And far from becoming the self-sustaining museum that Mr. Hartford had envisioned, it cost him $7.4 million before he abandoned the building to a rocky fate. It was occupied for many years by the city’s Department of Cultural Affairs and the Convention and Visitors Bureau and is now undergoing an extensive redesign as the future home of the Museum of Arts and Design (formerly known as the American Craft Museum).
Costlier still was Mr. Hartford’s makeover of Hog Island, in the Bahamas. After buying four-fifths of the place in 1959 and having it renamed Paradise Island, he set about developing a resort with the construction of the Ocean Club and other expensive amenities. Advisers persuaded him to stop short of exotic attractions like chariot races, but, over-extended and unable to get a gambling license, he ultimately lost an estimated $25 million to $30 million on the project.
Then there was the automated parking garage in Manhattan, the handwriting institute, the modeling agency, and his own disastrous stage adaptation of Jane Eyre, among the many lesser ventures that either bombed or fizzled.”
Akio Morita envisioned Sony as a way to lift Japan from the rubble of two atom bombs to world business dominance, and he pulled off the unlikely feat. Morita was as important to his company as Steve Jobs was to Apple, but Sony has not been a player in the Internet Age. An excerpt from Bryan Gruley’s smartBusinessweek articleon the topic:
“There’s more to Sony’s problems than acts of God and currency traders. The maker of the Walkman and the Trinitron hasn’t driven pop culture for years. Sony thrived in an era of stand-alone electronics. When the Internet arose and digital began to mean connected, iPods became the center of people’s entertainment lives, then smartphones and tablets—which Sony was late to produce. Even the quintessential Sony product—the TV set—has become a millstone. Sony has lost nearly $8.5 billion on TVs over eight years and expects to keep losing at least into 2013. Samsung, Vizio, and other upstarts have driven prices so low that one Sony executive says the company charges less for some TVs than it cost to ship them a few years ago.
Sony has been trying to adapt to the Internet Age for at least a decade, yet remains a gargantuan and unwieldy manufacturer, with 168,200 employees, 41 factories, and more than 2,000 products from headphones to medical printers to Hollywood-grade 3D movie production equipment. Jeff Loff, a senior analyst with Macquarie Capital Securities in Tokyo, points out that Sony sells nine different 46-inch TV models in the U.S. and its mobile-phone joint venture with Ericsson offers more than 40 handsets. ‘Can you imagine how dilutive that is to your R&D?’ he says. A Sony spokesman says the number of phones is being reduced, and notes that Samsung has 15 different 46-inch TVs.
•••••••••••
Ted Koppel interviews Akio Morita about Japan’s tech dominance, in 1990, just a few years before Sony was to be eclipsed by U.S. companies:
On what is Louis Daguerre’s 224th birthday, here’s a classic 1844 daguerreotype, an image of the man himself that was taken by Jean-Baptiste Sabatier-Blot. Daguerre was an artist and physicist who perfected his method of picture making in 1839, which popularized the art of the photograph. He died in 1851, seven years after this image was made, and by then modern photography had already begun to eclipse the Frenchman’s process. An outline of the rise and fall of the daguerreotype from “Sun Pictures,” published in the January 3, 1886 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Daguerreotype was the name under which printing by light first became generally known, some forty-five years ago; true it is, that pictures had previously been taken by means of the sun by Niepce as far back as 1816, but the method by which these were produced was a very imprefect one, and it was not until 1839, when Daguerre published his improved process, that photography was shown to be an art capable of practical employment. We may consider, therefore, daguerreotype as the first steps in the art of photography. The process consists, as is well known, in rendering a polished silver surface sensitive to the action of light, by treating it with iodine, and thus forming iodide of silver. This compound possesses the power of absorbing, so to speak any image that is reflected upon its surface, an invisible picture being produced, which may afterward be developed or rendered visible by treatment with mercury. By means of this mode of proceeding, therefore, we are enabled to produce upon a metal plate a fixed reflection or image of any object, and pictures thus obtained are termed daguerreotypes. They are very faithful productions and possessed of much detail and delicacy of light and shade, but they possess, unfortunately, many serious disadvantages. They are not permanent, they are costly in production, and the image, being depicted upon a highly polished surface, it is difficult to examine it, excepting when the light falls upon it from a particular direction; lastly, only one picture can be obtained at each operation, and the process must be repeated for the production of every subsequent copy required. In 1851 a new era dawned upon photography.”
The opening of Albert Q. Maisel’s highly skeptical 1950 Look magazine article about a new pseudoscience, something called “Dianetics,” conceived by pulp writer L. Ron Hubbard:
“A year ago, L. Ron Hubbard was an obscure writer of pseudoscientific pulp fiction. Today he has:
.. Half a million devout followers.
.. A foundation with a chain of bustling branches stretching from Elizabeth, N.J. to far-off Honolulu.
.. The best-selling nonfiction book since Dale Carnegie discovered the secret of success.
.. A swarm of pop-eyed students, who stand in line for the privilege of plunking down 500 bucks for a one-month course which converts them into “professional auditors,” complete with a couch and capable of outpsyching any ordinary psychiatrist.
.. Even larger and faster-growing tribes who pay $200 each for the 15-lecture short course – or $25 an hour to have their ‘cases opened’ by $500 professional auditors.
.. And a small army of associate members, at a mere 15 smackers each, who gratefully keep up with the whirlwind developments of Hubbard’s new ‘science’ of dianetics through the Dianetics Auditors Bulletin.
Dianetics and the Discovery of Fire
Hubbard, you may gather from the foregoing, has discovered the key to success and demonstrated once again that Barnum underestimated the sucker birth rate.
But that, by Hubbard’s own admission, is probably the least of his discoveries.
Unencumbered by the modesty that hog-ties ordinary mortals, Hubbard starts his book – THE BOOK, his followers call it – with the calm assertion that ‘the creation of dianetics is a milestone for Man comparable to his discovery of fire and superior to his invention of the wheel and the arch.’
A few lines beyond, one learns that, with dianetics, ‘the intelligent layman can successfully and invariably treat all psychosomatic ills and inorganic aberrations.’
Farther on, one discovers that these psychosomatic ills, ‘uniformly cured by dianetic therapy.’ include such varied maladies as eye trouble, bursitis, ulcers, some heart difficulties, migraine headaches and the common cold.
Erich von Däniken is a shifty, good-natured salesman of horseshit who became something of a sensation in the 1960s when he published the best-selling Chariots of the Gods? and kicked off an “ancient astronauts” fad that posited that it was plausible that extraterrestrials had visited Earth at the time of the dawn of humans and had mingled with–and even procreated with–our ancestors. Each time science pointed out the holes in his “theories,” the author was canny enough to revise and reposition his arguments, changing the shoe size of his Bigfoot, packing a little more powder onto his Abominable Snowman. In 1974, an incredulous Playboy magazine interviewed von Däniken–a “stocky Swiss ex-convict” is how they described him. The interview’s opening:
Playboy:
Since your theories appear to change somewhat with the times, can you tell us what you currently believe?
Erich von Däniken:
I say in my books not only that we have been visited from outer space in ancient times but that those visitors had sexual intercourse with our ancestors. Many scientists reply, “That is damned nonsense, because even if we accept that there are extraterrestrial beings and that they can travel in space, why should they come to Earth, out of all the billions of planets? And why should visitors from outer space look like us and have a similar way of thinking?” This point of view–and it is certainly a serious one–is, in my eyes, wrong. If we admit that the visitors had intercourse with us and altered, by artificial mutation, our intelligence, then it means we are the products of them. A child can never ask, ‘Why should my parents look like me?” There is no other possibility; he came from his parents. This does not deny Darwin and his theory; I fully admit that we came from apes. My question is why and how we became intelligent. To this question each mythology, each old religion gives the same answer: The gods created men after their own image.•
From James Kirchick’s righteously bruisingForeign Affairs pieceabout that modern totalitarian hellhole, Belarus, which is lorded over by vicious thugocrat, Aleksandr Lukashenko, who has not only brutalized his opponents but even gone so far as to crack down on (no joke) applause:
“That Belarus has been ruled for seventeen years by a regime that would proscribe clapping is hardly the least of its problems. But as the former Soviet republic faces the worst economic crisis since the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Lukashenko’s ossified leadership is, for the first time, actually beginning to threaten his near-two decade rule. Belarus’s economic predicament is the result of several factors, but was made inevitable once Lukashenko suddenly increased the salaries of public employees by thirty percent just weeks before last year’s presidential election, the results of which were declared on December 19th. In a country where little has changed since Soviet times and where some eighty percent of the public is still employed by the state, the move was Lukashenko’s attempt to literally buy support. Given his near total control over the country’s media, domination of the electoral commission, and harassment of opposition activists, however, he didn’t need to resort to such a Peronist tactic. His regime rigged the ballot in a process widely condemned by international observers, dispatched violent riot police to set upon thousands of peaceful protestors, and imprisoned seven of the nine opposition presidential candidates, two of whom remain in jail to this day.
A former collective farm manager who won a democratic election in 1994 and has withstood both Western sanctions and Russian pipeline politics to stay in power, Lukashenko can definitely boast of possessing certain leadership skills, but basic economic literacy is clearly not among them. Artificially raising the salaries of the vast majority of the country’s citizens was obviously going to boost inflation, which it almost immediately did. By April, the country’s foreign currency reserves had fallen by more than $2 billion to $3.7 billion. The following month, the government devalued the ruble against the dollar by thirty-seven percent. From the time I visited Minsk in December to my return in June, the value of the ruble had been cut in half.
In the aftermath of last year’s brutal post-election crackdown—which saw more than seven hundred people detained—a pall of desperation descended upon the country’s already beleaguered democrats. Many of the Belarusians I spoke to that frigid December night, both those formally affiliated with opposition politics and those who had never taken part but felt inspired to gather outside the main government building and demand an end to Lukashenko’s rule, genuinely felt that they had a chance to bring down the man often described as ‘The Last Dictator in Europe.’The large presence of international media and election observers (welcomed by Lukashenko in a halfhearted bid to prove his democratic bona fides), added to the perception that he would negotiate with the people on the street. That naive hope came crashing down when Lukashenko unleashed truncheon-wielding riot police, expelled representatives from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, and held a series of Stalinist show trials against his opponents. Many activists fled the country, adding to the already sizable Belarusian diaspora.” (ThanksBrowser.)
In HiLoBrow, Peggy Nelson conducts an excellent interview with media ecologist Douglas Rushkoff, which covers currency, corporations and how the word “home” was gradually redefined to have an isolating effect. An excerpt:
“Rushkoff: From the 1920s to the 1970s an iconography was developed that turned corporations into our heroes. Instead of me buying stuff from people I know, I actually trust the Quaker Oat Man more than you. This is the result of public relations campaigns, and the development of public relations as a profession.
Nelson: Did the rise of PR just happen, or did they have to do that in order to prevent things from getting out of control?
Rushkoff: They had to do that in order to prevent things from getting out of control. The significant points in the development of public relations were all at crisis moments. For example, labor movements; it’s not just that labor was revolting but that people were seeing that labor was revolting. There was a need to re-fashion the stories so that people would think that labor activists were bad scary people, so that people would think they should move to the suburbs and insulate themselves from these throngs of laborers, from ‘the masses.’ Or to return to the Quaker Oats example, people used to look at long-distance-shipped factory products with distrust. Here’s a plain brown box, it’s being shipped from far away, why am I supposed to buy this instead of something from a person I’ve known all my life? A mass media is necessary to make you distrust your neighbor and transfer your trust to an abstract entity, the corporation, and believe it will usher in a better tomorrow and all that.
It got the most crafty after WWII when all the soldiers were coming home. FDR was in cahoots with the PR people. Traumatized vets were coming back from WWII, and everyone knew these guys were freaked out and fucked up. We had enough psychology and psychiatry by then to know that these guys were badly off, they knew how to use weapons, and — this was bad! If the vets came back into the same labor movement that they left before WWII, it would have been all over. So the idea was that we should provide houses for these guys, make them feel good, and we get the creation of Levittown and other carefully planned developments designed with psychologists and social scientists. Let’s put these vets in a house, let’s celebrate the nuclear family.
Nelson: So home becomes a thing, rather than a series of relationships?
Rushkoff: The definition of home as people use the word now means ‘my house,’ rather than what it had been previously, which was ‘where I’m from.’My home’s New York, what’s your home?’
Nelson: Right, my town.
Rushkoff: Where are you from? Not that ‘structure.’ But they had to redefine home, and they used a lot of government money to do it. They created houses in neighborhoods specifically designed to isolate people from one another, and prevent men in particular from congregating and organizing — there are no social halls, no beer halls in these developments. They wanted men to be busy with their front lawns, with three fruit trees in every garden, with home fix-it-up projects; for the women, the kitchen will be in the back where they can see the kids playing in the back yard.
Nelson: So you don’t see the neighbors going by. No front porch.
Rushkoff: Everything’s got to be individual, this was all planned! Any man that has a mortgage to pay is not going to be a revolutionary. With that amount to pay back, he’s got a stake in the system. True, he’s on the short end of the stick of the interest economy, but in 30 years he could own his own home.” (Thanks Longform.)
••••••••••
“And now my bags are packed for travelin’ / Glass, concrete, and stone / It’s just a house, not a home”:
“Here’s your ticket, pack your bag / Time for jumpin’ overboard / Transportation is here / Burning down the house”:
In what is ostensibly a New York Times op-ed piece about Mitt Romney bringing Mormonism to the U.S. political mainstream, but is actually a condemnation of the widespread worship of greed, Harold Bloom crystallizes some truly perplexing things about American voting patterns. An excerpt:
“A dark truth of American politics in what is still the era of Reagan and the Bushes is that so many do not vote their own economic interests. Rather than living in reality they yield to what oddly are termed ‘cultural’ considerations: moral and spiritual, or so their leaders urge them to believe. Under the banners of flag, cross, fetus, exclusive marriage between men and women, they march onward to their own deepening impoverishment. Much of the Tea Party fervor merely repeats this gladsome frolic.”
The opening of “2050 Or Bust,” Frederick Deknatel’s L.A. Review of Books piece about the bold future of urban planning that Mubarak had envisioned for Egypt, which he never, ever would have delivered:
“This past August in Heliopolis, the Cairo suburb built over desert by a Belgian industrialist in 1905, I sat in an architect’s office, a place called Cube Architectural Consultants, and heard a glowing, impromptu presentation on ‘Cairo 2050.’ Cairo 2050 is a series of outlandish master plans and megaprojects for Egypt’s capital that the regime of Hosni Mubarak began promoting in 2008, with the help of the United Nations and the Japanese government. Its future, an earnest architect informed me gently, was ‘uncertain in the new Egypt.’
Imagine Dubai in the Nile Valley, if instead of building it on empty sand, futurist skyscrapers and business parks rose over what are now the packed, informal neighborhoods that today house the majority of Cairo’s estimated 17 million people. This authoritarian, outsized development ‘vision’ would involve relocating millions to the furthest edges of the desert — areas banally termed ‘new housing extensions’— to make way for ’10 star’ hotels, huge parks, ‘residential touristic compounds,’ and landing-strip-sized boulevards lined with a monotony of towers. It’s unlikely to happen in an Egypt after Mubarak — if it was ever possible at all, given budgets and popular resistance. Still, Cairo 2050 offers a glimpse at the Egyptian government’s approach to urban planning and policy. As David Sims, an economist and consultant who has worked in Cairo since 1974, writes in Understanding Cairo: The Logic of a City Out of Control, the Cairo 2050 project represents ‘a continued penchant for the manufacture of unrealistic dreams’ on the part of ‘government planners and their consultants.'”
“The idea of the exhibition is to look forward 50 or 100 years, not back, said Michael Shara, the curator of the show. ‘We’re at a crossroads,’ he said. ‘We have to decide what to do when we grow up. Where is the vision?’
In this case, the vision is solely Dr. Shara’s, he admitted, arrived at by picking the brains of space experts. Lest you get too excited, it does not yet represent the official agenda of NASA or any other agency.
The world sorely needs some kind of cosmic blueprint going forward, if indeed we are to go forward and outward, and though one can quibble with many details, this one is as good as any. One can fantasize that this show could have the same long-range impact on shaping public expectations in space as magazine articles and television shows did in the 1950s. In that case, I hope it travels to the other countries that are now flexing their space muscles, like China.
Those who think that human spaceflight is ridiculously expensive, wasteful, dangerous and unscientific — a group that includes a lot of scientists I know — might want to stop reading right here. The exhibition plays shamelessly to those of us who were captivated long ago by science fiction dreams and the notion that humanity’s destiny is somehow tied to the stars. For the most part these plans don’t come with price tags attached nor, for that matter, any indication of what currency the price should be denominated in.
‘Somebody will do these things,’ Dr. Shara said. ‘Maybe not the U.S.””
A lot of terrible things are done in the service of ideals, the abstract and the big picture giving people license to rationalize what should not happen. Sometimes people believe that a place is special and being a part of that place makes them special, so they reflexively lash out at those who see dark corners and not just green lawns. It’s my country right or wrong. For too long, Penn State has been its own country. From Bruce Arthur’s excellent National Post essay about life in the place named Happy Valley:
“People who grew up here, and people who live here, both point to the local ties of the people already implicated, how they are steeped in this place. As State College native Michael Weinreb wrote for ESPN’s Grantland.com, ‘We grew older, and we came to understand one of the central truths of human nature, which is that when you brush up against a truly powerful force, it is never quite as benevolent as you imagined it to be.’
‘You’ve got to remember that a lot of guys who were involved in the cover-up grew up here, or close enough,’ says the State College native who knew McQueary, the Curleys, and the Paternos.
‘There are a lot of people here who never left,’ says another longtime resident who works for the university. ‘Look at this. Joe’s been here 60 years. Mike McQueary, local guy, played here, never left. Tim Curley grew up here, high school here, never left. Schultz came here to go to school, never left. Even Spanier had been here for 16 years. That’s a long time for a university president.
‘And again, that in itself isn’t evil. But it makes it a lot easier for secrets to be kept when you’ve been here forever, and you’re part of this thing, and there is this mafia-like sense of the family. It’s identity. And it wasn’t just Joe.’
It wasn’t just Joe. It wasn’t just Spanier. It wasn’t just Curley. It wasn’t just Schultz. And tragically, it was not just Sandusky, either.
Happy Valley is a place wrestling for its soul, wrestling to keep itself alive in its own mind. The high priests let the children suffer for the grander idea, for the place that was good. A professor who teaches journalism ethics here, Russell Frank, wrote a piece that began, ‘It’s time to stop calling this place Happy Valley. The name doesn’t fit. It never did.'”
So, this is an interesting find, to say the least. I was looking for something completely different and stumbled across “The Dead Body and the Living Brain,” a 1967 Look magazine article by Oriana Fallaci about pioneering head-transplant experimentation. In the piece, Fallaci reports on the sci-fi-ish experiments that Dr. Robert White was doing with rhesus monkeys at a time when consciousness about animal rights was on the rise. White’s unusual work continued until his death in 2010. The opening:
Libby had eaten her last meal the night before: orange, banana, monkey chow. While eating she had observed us with curiosity. Her hands resembled the hands of a newly born child, her face seemed almost human. Perhaps because of her eyes. They were so sad, so defenseless. We had called her Libby because Dr. Maurice Albin, the anesthetist, had told us she had no name, we could give her the name we liked best, and because she accepted it immediately. You said “Libby!” and she jumped, then she leaned her head on her shoulder. Dr. Albin had also told us that Libby had been born in India and was almost three years, an age comparable to that of a seven-year-old girl. The rhesuses live 30 years and she was a rhesus. Prof. Robert White uses the rhesus because they are not expensive; they cost between $80 and $100. Chimpanzees, larger and easier to experiment with, cost up to $2,000 each. After the meal, a veterinarian had come, and with as much ceremony as they use for the condemned, he had checked to be sure Libby was in good health. It would be a difficult operation and her body should function as perfectly as a rocket going to the moon. A hundred times before, the experiment had ended in failure, and though Professor White became the first man in the entire history of medicine to succeed, the undertaking still bordered on science fiction. Libby was about to die in order to demonstrate that her brain could live isolated from her body and that, so isolated, it could still think.•
They’ve put the cash register in your pocket, Amazon has, and it is shiny and compact and beautiful. No, the Kindle Fire is apparently not a great tablet, but that isn’t the point. Jeff Bezos’ willingness to sell each Kindle Fire at a loss let’s you know that his goal is to ensure you are able to make impulse buys no matter where you are, that you will always be at a check-out line, that you will load up on media. You can do these things with your laptop or your phone, but no previous tech item has been as aggressive as the Fire in regard to ancillary sales. The razor will be cheap, but the blades will be expensive. From Rebecca J.Rosen’s new Atlantic piece:
“There is one thing, however, that the Fire seems to excel at: Being a store. As Jon Philips writes at Wired, ‘Indeed, the Fire is a fiendishly effective shopping portal in the guise of a 7-inch slate.’ And that’s no surprise, since it’s been known for quite a while that the Fire is a loss leader, meant as a gateway to other Amazon purchases.
But with Amazon as one of only four companies competing in the Great Battle to Rule Our Digital Future (Facebook, Apple, and Google being the three others), the Kindle Fire is our best and latest clue as to what Amazon’s vision for that future is: The Internet as a store — and that store is Amazon. As Amazon continues to increase its offerings beyond Amazon.com, expect those offerings (tablets, e-readers, apps) to always in some way have the growth of Amazon.com’s sales as a fundamental purpose. “
To the avid baseball fan, it would seem Billy Beane has ceased being an elite GM, the architect of Moneyball who could outsmart his peers, mostly because his interests are too broad. Among other things, he’s involved professionally with major-league soccer, computer software and finance. Beane’s restless mind stems in part from being a working-class kid who grudgingly passed on a Stanford scholarship he dearly wanted to accept in order to pocket a signing bonus from the Mets. Simon Kuper of the Financial Times was on hand recently when Beane caught up with author Michael Lewis, the two forever linked by baseball statistics, market inefficiencies and Brad Pitt. An excerpt:
“And so Moneyball became in large part the drama of Billy Beane: the autodidact who gave himself an education. When Beane was 18 years old, Stanford University had offered him a football and baseball scholarship. He and his parents – bright people without much money who had married young and joined the military middle class – were ecstatic. A good college was everything they wanted. But then the New York Mets offered Beane $125,000 to play baseball instead, and he felt he ought to do it. The movie shows the teenager, around the kitchen table with his parents in the simple family home, making the fateful decision. The filmmakers catch the scene well, but, as Beane says, ‘I’m not sure they could capture the complete horror.’
‘Listen,’ he adds, ‘I’m trying not to talk about myself here. I don’t look at life as a bunch of hindsight reviews of your decisions. But that’s exactly what I wanted to do, to attend Stanford University.’
Billy Beane was 18 when Stanford University offered him a football and baseball scholarship, but he went to play or the New York Mets instead
Beane’s life since – his compulsive reading, his discovery of the Moneyball system, his later discovery of soccer – is a long attempt to give himself the university education he never had. Just as Sergey Brin and Larry Page created Google partly because they went to Stanford, Beane created Moneyball partly because he didn’t.”
“FACIAL recognition technology is a staple of sci-fi thrillers like Minority Report.
But of bars in Chicago?
SceneTap, a new app for smart phones, uses cameras with facial detection software to scout bar scenes. Without identifying specific bar patrons, it posts information like the average age of a crowd and the ratio of men to women, helping bar-hoppers decide where to go. More than 50 bars in Chicago participate.
As SceneTap suggests, techniques like facial detection, which perceives human faces but does not identify specific individuals, and facial recognition, which does identify individuals, are poised to become the next big thing for personalized marketing and smart phones. That is great news for companies that want to tailor services to customers, and not so great news for people who cherish their privacy. The spread of such technology — essentially, the democratization of surveillance — may herald the end of anonymity.”
In his smart Awl article which explains why the utterly gross McRib sandwich likely only makes occasional appearances on the McDonald’s menu, Willy Staley also recalls why the sandwich originally came to be. An excerpt:
“The McRib was, at least in part, born out of the brute force that McDonald’s is capable of exerting on commodities markets. According to this history of the sandwich, Chef Arend created the McRib because McDonald’s simply could not find enough chickens to turn into the McNuggets for which their franchises were clamoring. Chef Arend invented something so popular that his employer could not even find the raw materials to produce it, because it was so popular. ‘There wasn’t a system to supply enough chicken,’ he told Maxim. Well, Chef Arend had recently been to the Carolinas, and was so inspired by the pulled pork barbecue in the Low Country that he decided to create a pork sandwich for McDonald’s to placate the frustrated franchisees.” (Thanks Longform.)
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McNugget rage surveillance video, 2010:
Ray Kroc explains why the chain is called “McDonald’s”:
It’s easy to get robots to walk, but difficult to get them to walk like humans. An excerpt from Physorg.com:
“AIST researchers, like other scientific groups dedicated to robotics, have been working hard to create the ‘perfect’ walking robot and to design walking technologies that can make their robots most closely resemble the way humans walk.
This has not been easy. Developing a robot to walk like a human has been a challenge for engineers, but that has only motivated more work toward this end in robotics.
The AIST researchers focused on a few key areas of the robot to improve results. The robot’s toes now support the legs better during each stride, and the legs straighten out more.
Details about how they got ‘Miim’ to walk in a more human fashion than in previous iterations are in the paper, ‘Human-Like Walking with Toe Supporting for Humanoids,’ by Kanako Miura, Mitsuharu Morisawa, Fumio Kanehiro, Shuuji Kajita, Kenji Kaneko, and Kazuhito Yokoi.”
From a 1978 Playboy Interview with Ted Turner, who was always batshit crazy, probably a necessary personality type if you aspire to turn a billboard advertising business into a billion-dollar cable TV company:
“PLAYBOY: It wasn’t long before you took over the company, right?
TURNER: That’s right. My father committed suicide when I was 24 years old. Blew his brains out. I think he made the mistake of limiting his horizons. When he was a boy in Mississippi, he had told his mother that someday he would make $1,000,000. And when he did that, he had nowhere to go from there. When he killed himself, he was extended for about $5,000,000 or $6,000,000 and had assets of only about $2,000,000. But the situation was not hopeless.
PLAYBOY: How did you handle it?
TURNER: Well, just before he shot himself, he had actually sold the company. But I wanted to keep it. So I had to return the down payment, plus a penalty to the guys who had bought it, to annul the deal. Everybody said I was crazy. I could have taken that money and started something else. Those were very bad times in outdoor advertising. Television was killing billboards.
PLAYBOY: How did you survive?
TURNER: By hustling. We doubled our profits at a time when the industry went down 16 percent. But it’s fun, too, getting up at five in the morning to get out and install a new sign before the traffic gets started. And painting billboards, you’re Michelangelo in the Sistine Chapel, except that you don’t have to work lying on your back. One night, the guys were doing this 50-foot billboard with the Coppertone girl stretched out across it, you know. So they just left off the bikini. Painted on tits and a nice bush at the right spot, see. But we made them dress her before it went out of the warehouse. After about four years in the business, I could have retired.
PLAYBOY: Why didn’t you?
TURNER: I heard about a television station for sale. It was Channel 17, a U.H.F. independent in Atlanta. When I bought that, everybody just hooted at me. The station was really at death’s door–we lost about $2,000,000 in the first two years. I didn’t bullshit anybody: I told them I didn’t know anything about TV. But now we’re socko. We’ve got all the reruns, all the sports in Atlanta and people love us. Our movie inventory includes about half of the 6000 or 7000 movies ever made. We even have news: It comes on at four in the morning. Our news director gets pies thrown in his face a lot.”
The most important thing to realize about the future is that it’s a choice. People choose which visions to pursue, people choose which research gets funded, people choose how they will spend their careers.
Despite how it appears to the culture at large, technology doesn’t just happen. It doesn’t emerge spontaneously, like mold on cheese. Revolutionary technology comes out of long research, and research is performed and funded by inspired people
And this is my plea — be inspired by the untapped potential of human capabilities. Don’t just extrapolate yesterday’s technology and then cram people into it.,,Our hands feel things, and our hands manipulate things. Why aim for anything less than a dynamic medium that we can see, feel, and manipulate?” (ThanksBrowser.)
This classic photo shows Harry Houdini, in the year before he died, revealing tricks used by opportunistic spiritualists to an assemblage of New York clergyman. (Notice beneath the table that the illusionist rings a bell with his toes.) The meeting took place at the Hippodrome, which seven years earlier was the site of Houdini’s famous vanishing elephant trick. What the photo doesn’t show is the magician’s young assistant, Dorothy Young, 17, who he hired that year to help with his stage act. Young lived to 103, passing away earlier this year. From herNew York Times obituary:
“Born on May 3, 1907, in Otisville, N.Y., Dorothy Young was the daughter of a Methodist minister, Robert Young, and Lena Caldwell Young, a church organist. It took some convincing for her parents to allow Dorothy to sign a contract with Houdini after she won an audition in Manhattan in early 1925. She was 17.
Though she was with the Houdini tour for only a little more than a year, Miss Young gained notice. Soon after, her dancing skills were paired with those of Gilbert Kiamie, the son of a silk lingerie magnate. As Dorothy and Gilbert, they toured the country and became known for their own Latin dance, the ‘rumbalero.’ She also danced in several movies, among them the Fred Astaire musical comedy Flying Down to Rio (1933).
Miss Young’s first marriage, to Robert Perkins, ended in divorce. She married Mr. Kiamie in 1945; he died in 1992. Besides her granddaughter, she is survived by a son, Robert Jr., two other grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. Though she took her husbands’ names in marriage, she preferred to be known professionally as Dorothy Young.
In 2003, with a considerable inheritance from Mr. Kiamie, Miss Young was able to donate more than $10 million to the creation of the Dorothy Young Center for the Arts at Drew University in Madison, N.J.
In her later years, Miss Young sometimes attended ‘séances’ organized by magicians and Houdini aficionados to celebrate and, perhaps, hear from the master. In November 2006, at a gathering in Manhattan, she sat in one of the 12 occupied chairs on the stage. The 13th chair remained empty.
Miss Young had talked with Houdini about returning from the dead, she said, while he was alive. He told me, ‘It’s humanly impossible, but I’ll be there in spirit.'”
British researchers will spend the next decade figuring out if Charles Babbage is truly the father of the programmable computer. From a John Markoff article in the New York Times:
“Researchers in Britain are about to embark on a 10-year, multimillion-dollar project to build a computer — but their goal is neither dazzling analytical power nor lightning speed.
Indeed, if they succeed, their machine will have only a tiny fraction of the computing power of today’s microprocessors. It will rely not on software and silicon but on metal gears and a primitive version of the quaint old I.B.M. punch card.
What it may do, though, is answer a question that has tantalized historians for decades: Did an eccentric mathematician named Charles Babbage conceive of the first programmable computer in the 1830s, a hundred years before the idea was put forth in its modern form by Alan Turing?”
