Excerpts

You are currently browsing the archive for the Excerpts category.

“Video Will Become The Standard Form Of Communications”

October 21, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From Bernard Moon’s “The Coming Ubiquity of Video Communications,” via ReadWriteWeb:

“Over the past decades, the promise of video as a standard form of communication has been presented to us through many mediums, from Star Trek to The Jetsons and even through my old Avengers comic books over 30 years ago. While corporations utilize video conferencing technology at a rapid rate, it hasn’t yet penetrated the daily habits of people across the globe but it will.

The core technology has been there for decades, but not the bandwidth and compression technology along with the hardware to make it an everyday utility. With the growth of Skype’s video chat, Google’s GTalk, Apple’s Facetime and other services, combined with the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, video will become the standard form of communications versus SMS, voice only and even email in some situations within a few years.”

••••••••••

“Mom, it’s a picture phone”:

Tags:

“Of The Current Fortune 500 CEOs, Some 99% Have A College Degree”

October 21, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

In Time, polymath Vartan Gregorian offers a riposte to the popular contemporary idea that college dropouts–Jobs, Gates, Dell, Zuckerberg–are more likely to become wealthy, an idea he says is espoused by books like Michael Ellsberg’s The Education of Millionaires. An excerpt:

“I am also not surprised that while Ellsberg highlights the accomplishments of dropouts, he excludes degree holders who have become wealthy and famous. For example, of the current Fortune 500 CEOs, some 99% have a college degree. Similarly, of the Forbes 400 richest people in America, 81% hold postsecondary degrees. (In my experience, when the time comes for both well-off college dropouts and graduates to send their children to school, they both opt for the most highly rated schools on anyone’s list, no matter what the cost.) So why should the exception — the dropout — become the rule to emulate?”

Tags: ,

“But Movement Isn’t A Thing. It Isn’t, Itself, An Organization…It’s A Verb Seeking To Be A Noun”

October 21, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

"An ensemble of moving parts, very much in motion, each drawing upon the others and pressing upon them." (Image by David Shankbone.)

The always eloquent and insightful Todd Gitlin analyzes the Occupy Wall Street movement at the Los Angeles Review of Books. An excerpt: 

“But movement isn’t a thing. It isn’t, itself, an organization. It doesn’t have officers or headquarters. It’s a verb seeking to be a noun, yet fearful of hardening at the same time, for noun-things solidify, and anarchic energy afoot wants to be liquid, not so much a thing as a process: an ensemble of moving parts, very much in motion, each drawing upon the others and pressing upon them, each making their moves in the light of what others do, an ensemble of movement actors. There’s the inner movement, the outer movement, the politicians, the opposition — and, never forget, the police. They can do you favors, as did the NYPD, first with pepper spray, then with the Brooklyn Bridge mass arrest. But you can’t count on that.

The inner movement has a horizontally organized internal life: an amalgam of task forces and working groups operating under the awkward but so far workable discipline of direct democracy. A common sentiment in the public spaces, as far as I can make out, includes such deep suspicion of representative government — of the very principle of delegation — and such strong faith in the decision-making capacities of ordinary people, as to have invested all legitimate authority in the daily general assemblies.

‘Let the people decide’ was an early sixties slogan, but SDS never coherently knew what it meant, or even worried enough about not knowing. In the late ‘60s, when police bullhorns blared out arrest orders, ‘In the name of the people of California…,’ crowds shouted back, ‘We are the people.’ But we weren’t. In fact, a large majority of the people of California elected Ronald Reagan governor in 1966 and reelected him in 1970. The question of which people get to decide what: This is, of course, the master problem of political theory, and let’s just say I have no triumphant solution to offer here. It’s a problem that doesn’t go away. No matter the urgency, no matter the passion, no matter the circumstance, it just plain doesn’t go away. A serious movement has to be serious about it.”

Tags:

“The Taut Harris Applauded Until Her Body Shook”

October 20, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In 1981, William F. Buckley and Diana Trilling investigated the ramifications of the murder of Dr. Henry Tarnower by his longtime companion, Jean Harris, a slaying which awakened all sorts of emotions about the dynamics between men and women.

From “Jean Harris: Murder with Intent to Love,” the 1981 Time article by Walter Isaacson and James Wilde: “Prosecutor George Bolen, 34, was cold and indignant in his summation, insisting that jealousy over Tarnower‘s affair with his lab assistant, Lynne Tryforos, 38, was the motivating factor for murder. Argued Bolen: ‘There was dual intent, to take her own life, but also an intent to do something else . . . to punish Herman Tarnower . . . to kill him and keep him from Lynne Tryforos.’ Bolen ridiculed the notion that Harris fired her .32-cal. revolver by accident. He urged the jury to examine the gun while deliberating. Said he: ‘Try pulling the trigger. It has 14 pounds of pull. Just see how difficult it would be to pull, double action, four times by accident.’ Bolen, who was thought by his superiors to be too gentle when he cross-examined Harris earlier in the trial, showed little mercy as he painted a vivid picture of what he claims happened that night. He dramatically raised his hand in the defensive stance he says Tarnower used when Harris pointed the gun at him. When the judge sustained an objection by Aurnou that Bolen‘s version went beyond the evidence presented, the taut Harris applauded until her body shook.”

Tags: , , , , , , ,

“We Have To Ask Ourselves: Do We Need Human Intelligence?”

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

In the European, science historian George Dyson, son of physicist Freeman Dyson, is interviewed about evolution and innovation. An excerpt from the Q&A:

“The European: Is the Internet increasing the innovative potential of mankind? 

Dyson: It is very easy to be a pessimist: There is no good music anymore, no good art. But maybe we have to recognize that innovation is still happening, albeit in very different ways. We might feel that all that time people spend on Facebook is a great loss for the creativity of the human species, but maybe that is not true.

The European: I expected a somewhat different answer: We used to have only human intelligence, and now that has been supplemented by computational intelligence. So we would expect the potential for innovation to become supplemented as well. 

Dyson: Yes and no. The danger is not that machines are advancing. The danger is that we are losing our intelligence if we rely on computers instead of our own minds. On a fundamental level, we have to ask ourselves: Do we need human intelligence? And what happens if we fail to exercise it?

The European: The question becomes: What progress is good progress? 

Dyson: Right. How do we maintain our diversity? It would be a great shame to lose something like human intelligence that was developed at such costs over such a long period of time. I spent a lot of my life living in the wilderness and building kayaks. I believe that we need to protect our self-reliant individual intelligence—what you would need to survive in a hostile environment. Few of us are still living self-reliant lives. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but we should be cautious not to surrender into dependency on other forms of intelligence. I am a historian of science, I believe in preserving the past.

The European: Are there any predictions for the future we can make, based on these lessons from the past? 

Dyson: The universe is a probability space in which possible things can happen. Over the last fifty years, we have developed a combined human-computational intelligence that is able to search that space at a tremendous rate. But we have no way to predict what might happen in the future to that space of possibilities. The whole idea of species might be called into question. Darwin called his book On the Origin of Species, but evolution really isn’t limited to species. The next step might be the end of distinct species and the beginning of a more symbiotic life.” (Thanks Browser.)

••••••••••

In 2002, George Dyson recalls the spectacular Project Orion:

Tags:

“Are You Ready To Shoot Yourself, Or Are You Ready To Go On A Booze Trip, Or Whatever?”

October 19, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Betrayed by a stubborn Rapture that refused to abide his calculations, California-based televangelist Harold Camping was seemingly silenced in May when the Earth remained unscorched. But like any resilient prophet, Camping has dusted himself off and is doubling down on doom. An exceprt from Dan P. Lee’s smart new New York magazine article about the prognosticating preacher:

“By Monday, in a development he could not have previously fathomed, Camping found himself sitting back in his chair in his wood-paneled studio before a scrum of television cameras. His rail-thin body was clad in an old JCPenney suit, and in his lap he held a massive leather-bound Bible. Though ancient-looking, Camping came across surprisingly confident. After calling ‘this last weekend a very interesting weekend,’ he cut to the chase: ‘And so, the first question is, ‘Camping, what about you? Are you ready to shoot yourself, or are you ready to go on a booze trip, or whatever?’ ’ he asked rhetorically. ‘Well, I can tell you very candidly that when May 21 came and went, it was a very difficult time for me.’

As God had it, an answer began forming and was furthered along via some ideas in a letter he’d received that very morning from a listener. He realized, he explained, he’d been taking some of the end-time verses in the Bible too literally. ‘Suddenly it dawned on me, Oh, I see what happened,’ he said. God had indeed returned to Earth on May 21, he explained, but His return—and the earthquakes and terror that were to accompany it—was for now spiritual, not physical. It was, Camping said, necessary for it to be this way; if God had let Camping realize there would be no fire and brimstone, then his warnings might have been less vigorous. Most important, the timeline he’d parsed from the Bible was no less accurate. The Final Judgment was already occurring. It would last for five months—153 days—and we were already two days in.

 ‘And it will continue right up until October 21, 2011, and at that time the whole world will be destroyed,’ Camping said calmly. ‘This is why we don’t have to talk about this anymore. The world is under judgment. We are not going to be passing out any more tracts; all billboards are coming down. Our work is done. The world has been warned. My! How they have been warned.'”

Tags: ,

‘The Critic Judith Crist Even Shilled For A Feminine-Hygiene Spray’

October 19, 2011 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I’d be really happy if New York Times film critics A.O. Scott and Manohla Dargis were awarded Pulitzers in the same year. The quantity and quality of their writing is pretty stunning. The pair teamed up for a discussion about the legendary Pauline Kael, an influential scribe in her day (and ours, still) who was a thorny character, to say the least. An excerpt from Dargis about the erstwhile celebrity status of film critics:

“If she still casts a shadow it’s less because of her ideas, pugilistic writing style, ethical lapses and cruelties (and not merely in her reviews), and more because she was writing at a time when movies, their critics and, by extension, the mainstream media had a greater hold on American culture than they do now. In his book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls Peter Biskind relates a story from the mid-’80s when Kael turned to Richard Schickel at a meeting of film critics and said, ‘It isn’t any fun anymore.’ Mr. Schickel asked her why and she replied: ‘Remember how it was in the ’60s and ’70s, when movies were hot, whenwe were hot? Movies seemed to matter.’ The thing is, they did matter and still do, just differently.

One thing that changed was the role of the film critic, who by the mid-’80s no longer had to persuade a skeptical, sometimes hostile general audience that it was necessary to take movies seriously. In 1967, though, Kael had to explain in The New Yorker why and how Bonnie and Clyde was important (and in 9,000 words!). She was part of a critical vanguard spreading the new film gospel in reviews, books, talk shows, everywhere. They were true pop cultural figures. The critic Judith Crist even shilled for a feminine-hygiene spray. She later said that she did the ad because Richard Avedon took the photos, she could write most of the text and the ad would reach more than 100 million readers. Also: she got $5,000.”

•••••••••

Kael and other film critics were famous enough in 1977 to be spoofed by SCTV:

Tags: , , ,

“Their Fears And Their Frustrations….Can Turn Into Political Paranoia And Demonize Them…Making Them Ripe For The Plucking By Some Guy On Horseback”

October 19, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Community organizer Saul Alinsky became an enemy of the American Right all over again three decades after his death, thanks to a posthumous link to President Obama. Amusingly enough, Alinsky pretty much predicted the American drift into Conservatism and the Presidency of anti-government traliblazer Ronald Reagan and the more extreme iterations that followed him. From a 1972 Playboy interview with Alinsky, which was conducted just months before he died in California from a heart attack. 

“Saul Alinsky: The middle class actually feels more defeated and lost today on a wide range of issues than the poor do. And this creates a situation that’s supercharged with both opportunity and danger. There’s a second revolution seething beneath the surface of middle-class America — the revolution of a bewildered, frightened and as-yet-inarticulate group of desperate people groping for alternatives — for hope. Their fears and their frustrations over their impotence can turn into political paranoia and demonize them, driving them to the right, making them ripe for the plucking by some guy on horseback promising a return to the vanished verities of yesterday. The right would give them scapegoats for their misery — blacks, hippies, Communists — and if it wins, this country will become the first totalitarian state with a national anthem celebrating ‘the land of the free and the home of the brave.'”

Tags: , ,

“The Four American Companies That Have Come To Define 21st-Century Information Technology And Entertainment Are On The Verge Of War”

October 18, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Farhad Manjoo has an excellent new article in Fast Company, “The Great Tech War of 2012,” which looks at the quartet of dominant American technology companies poised to do battle with one another. An excerpt:

“To state this as clearly as possible: The four American companies that have come to define 21st-century information technology and entertainment are on the verge of war. Over the next two years, Amazon, Apple, Facebook, and Google will increasingly collide in the markets for mobile phones and tablets, mobile apps, social networking, and more. This competition will be intense. Each of the four has shown competitive excellence, strategic genius, and superb execution that have left the rest of the world in the dust. HP, for example, tried to take a run at Apple head-on, with its TouchPad, the product of its $1.2 billion acquisition of Palm. HP bailed out after an embarrassingly short 49-day run, and it cost CEO Léo Apotheker his job. Microsoft’s every move must be viewed as a reaction to the initiatives of these smarter, nimbler, and now, in the case of Apple, richer companies. When a company like Hulu goes on the block, these four companies are immediately seen as possible acquirers, and why not? They have the best weapons–weapons that will now be turned on one another as they seek more room to grow.”

••••••••••

Majoo on living in the post-fact digital world, 2008:

“The Show Is Most Engrossing, And Most Disturbing, When Mr. Daisey Delves Into The Grim Realities Of Workers’ Lives”

October 18, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Theater talker Mike Daisey has a particularly timely monologue with The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, in which he investigates the dark side of the modern miracle of consumer electronics, which stared squarely at him in the ginormous Chinese factories where the gadgets are manufactured at a high human cost. An excerpt from Ben Brantley’s New York Times review:

“For Mr. Daisey, as for many others, affection for Apple products evolved into reverence for Mr. Jobs, the Apple co-founder whose identification with the company and its products has been much remarked upon, and worried over, since his illness made news several years ago.

Mr. Daisey has been performing this show since July of last year, and while the death of Mr. Jobs lends the evening a certain eerie timeliness, it also means that many in the audience will be familiar with the life and career of Mr. Jobs from reading obituaries and tributes.

The hippie-meets-tech-geek ethos, the founding of and then ouster from Apple, the triumphant return and the revolutionary series of consumer products that followed: Mr. Daisey covers this material fluently and with amiable humor, mixing obvious hero worship with some pointed skepticism. (Mr. Jobs, he notes, was the kind of imperious guy who divided the world’s population into ‘geniuses and bozos.’)

But the show is most engrossing, and most disturbing, when Mr. Daisey delves into the grim realities of workers’ lives in Shenzhen, a city that he memorably describes as looking as if ‘Blade Runner threw up on itself.'”

••••••••••

“A laptop so thin you can slice a sandwich”:

Tags: ,

“It Was This Search For The Hidden Workings Of Magic That Led Diaconis To Math”

October 17, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In the Chronicle Review, Jeffrey R. Young has a fascinating profile of Stanford mathematician Persi Diaconis, who began his career as an intinerant magician’s assistant. The opening:

“Persi Diaconis‘s unlikely scholarly career in mathematics began with a disappearing act.

He was 14 years old and obsessed with magic, spending much of his free time in or around Tannen’s Magic Store, on Times Square, where sleight-of-hand masters regularly gathered to show off tricks and to gossip. There, one of the most influential magicians of the past century, a card maestro named Dai Vernon, saw Diaconis’s prodigious trick dealing and invited the young man to leave New York and join him on the road.

Diaconis vanished from his regular life, dropping out of school and cutting ties with his family. ‘I packed a little bag—I took some decks of cards and some socks,’ remembers Diaconis, now 66 with unruly tufts of white hair, in his office at Stanford University, where he is a professor of mathematics and statistics. ‘I was sort of his assistant.’ And his student. Vernon, then in his 60s, promised that if his apprentice advanced far enough in his studies, he would reveal secrets of magic he had never shared with anyone else.

It was this search for the hidden workings of magic that led Diaconis to math. During a few years on the road doing his own magic act, he came to think of the hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs in a deck of cards as variables that followed predictable formulas as he shuffled them. He could code the cards as binary numbers in his head and perform mental calculations as audience members cut the deck, so that when they picked a card, any card, Diaconis could name it.” (Thanks Browser.)

••••••••••

Diaconis’ mentor, Dai Vernon, in action:

Tags: ,

“So What Can Be Done About This Latest Edition Of Know-Nothings?”

October 17, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In a Financial Times article in which he elaborately kisses the ass of President Bill Clinton, historian Simon Schama also elicits some fine political analysis from 42. An excerpt about the Tea Party:

“‘The Tea Party,’ Clinton says, ‘is the most extreme incarnation of the 30-year cycle that began when Ronald Reagan said in his first inaugural that government isn’t the answer, government is the problem. But the real issue is not that the Tea Party is in control of the country, has captured the airwaves or represents a majority of public sentiment; the problem is that something [the deal-making system] that has worked for the American people in the past isn’t working now.’

And the ideologues haven’t had their ‘Waterloo moment to break the fever,’ such as the two shut-downs of the federal government engineered by Speaker Newt Gingrich and the incoming House Republicans in 1995. That triumphant phalanx assembled beneath the banner of the Contract with America to which they vowed to remain uncompromisingly faithful. But the public hated the shut-downs and blamed Republicans to the point when it became apparent they had actually taken out a contract on themselves. It was Gingrich, not Clinton, who was ousted, the president winning re-election a year later. The manufactured spat earlier this year over raising the debt ceiling had Waterloo-moment promise, but the prospect of the US defaulting for the only time in its history and the risk of sending the already stressed bond market over the cliff meant that Obama, unlike Clinton, couldn’t call the naysayers’ bluff.

So what can be done about this latest edition of Know-Nothings? ‘You can’t convert the ideologues because they don’t care what the facts are. With the world as it is, you have to fight the fight you can win, and the fight you can win is economics.’ He gets intense at this point. ‘There isn’t a single example of a successful country on the planet today – if you define success as lower rates of unemployment, higher rates of job growth, less income inequality and a health system that produces the same or better care at lower cost – that doesn’t have both a strong economy and effective government that find some way to work in harness with each other … If you don’t do that, if you don’t have a system by which the poor can work their way into it, then you lose the social cohesion necessary to hold the country together and that is a big problem.”

••••••••••

Schama discusses slavery in America with perpetually exhausted Charlie Rose:

Tags: ,

“A Lot Of People Saw The Apple I Before Steve Jobs Even Knew About It”

October 16, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In the wake of Steve Jobs’ death, his Apple cofounder Steve Wozniak talked to journalist Dan Lyons. In this segment, Woz recalls the early years:

“How did you and Steve come up with the idea for the first Apple product, the Apple I?

Oh, a lot of people saw the Apple I before Steve Jobs even knew about it. I was in the Homebrew Computer Club. Steve was up in Oregon, working at an orchard, in a commune. We were really not in touch. But I got inspired to help this revolution. People in our club thought the personal computer would affect everyone’s life. We thought everyone would have a little computer, a little thing with switches and weird numbers on it, and people would learn to program to operate a computer. We didn’t think it would be normal stuff like it turned out to be.

I never wanted to run a business. I had a perfect job for life at HP. I went to club meetings every week and I passed out my schematics for the Apple I, no copyright, nothing, just, “Hey all you guys here is a cheap way to build a computer.” I would demo it on a TV set.

Then Steve Jobs came in from Oregon, and he saw what the club was about, and he saw the interest in my design. I had the only one that was really affordable. Our first idea was just to make printed circuit boards. We could make them for 20 dollars and sell them for 40 or something like that. I had given the schematics away. But Steve thought it could be a company.

This was actually our fifth product together. We always were 50-50 partners. We were best friends. We first did the blue boxes. The next one I did was I saw Pong at a bowling alley so I built my own Pong with 28 chips. I was at HP designing calculators. Steve saw Pong and ran down to Atari and showed it to them and they hired him. Whether they thought he had participated in the design, I don’t know and I could not care less. They offered him a job and put him on the night shift. They said he doesn’t get along with people very well, he’s very independent minded. It rubbed against people. So they put him on the night shift alone.

Our next project was when Steve said that Nolan (Bushnell, head of Atari) wanted a one-player game with bricks that you hit out. He said we could get a lot of money if we could design it with very few chips. So we built that one and got paid by Atari.

The legend is that Steve cheated you out of some money on that deal.

The legend is true. It didn’t matter to me. I had a job. Steve needed money to buy into the commune or something. So we made Breakout and it was a half-man-year job but we did it in four days and nights. It was a very clever design.” (Thanks Browser.)

•••••••••

Super Breakout, 1978;

Tags: , ,

“Gradually They Became A Political Force”

October 16, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From a 1997 Playboy Interview with Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan, in which he explains why religious fundamentalism became entrenched in contemporary American politics:

“Playboy: Fundamentalism is a big problem at home and abroad. Are you lobbied by the Christian right?

Moynihan: I will say this to you and if you can print it, do. Once a year the anti-abortion people come to Washington. They are the only people who come to see me. I shouldn’t say “only,” but they are the one group that comes to see me that doesn’t want anything other than to discuss a moral issue it’s concerned with. I might meet three or four other people a year like that, but not many. They’re the only working people I ever see. They come down by bus. They don’t go out to lunch at the mall. They just want to say they have a view of something. I’ve always voted against them.

Playboy: But the Christian right has other issues besides abortion. Some members say every word of the Bible is literally true and they want to impose their views on everyone else. The movement seems pretty important. Do you agree?

Moynihan: It is hugely important. And there’s nothing new about this. At different times in our history there have been very important political movements that were basically religious or concerned with matters of conscience. Abolition was one, out of which came the Republican Party. Prohibition was another. And abortion is a third. Roe vs. Wade just shook the conscience of a large segment of the American population, particularly the fundamentalist Protestants, who were quite content to live a life that didn’t have much politics in it. They didn’t have politics, they had their own religious concerns. Suddenly a matter of true import to them became the law of the land by a decision of the Supreme Court. And they thought, What is this? This has to change. And gradually they became a political force.

Playboy: Do you consider the Christian right dangerous?

Moynihan: No, good God. They’re the nicest people in the world if you leave their consciences alone. And if you don’t, it’s not the first time in history you get resentment. The Catholic Church is just as involved, but the Catholic Church has a wider agenda. In the way we are now using the word, the Catholic social doctrine is liberal. If you’re talking about minimum wage or something like that, they’re with you all the time.

Playboy: Do you feel you have to take the Christian right, creationism and all, into account?

Moynihan: Well, you’d better if you’re thinking to run for president.

Playboy: That makes them sound very powerful.

Moynihan: They are. We may lose our voting rights in the General Assembly because we passed a bill that would pay almost $1 billion in UN dues, but it included a provision that no money will go to any organization that performs abortions. The president has said he will veto the bill over that issue. If you go two years without paying your dues — which may happen if this impasse is not resolved — you can lose your voting rights in the General Assembly.

Playboy: This is bizarre.

Moynihan: Yeah. And it’s a big thing for us to lose our voting rights over something — over what?

Playboy: So a minority can make international policy?

Moynihan: The Southern Baptists aren’t exactly a minority. The Supreme Court is. And if nine people can say that something they find absolutely morally unacceptable is the law of the land, well, that makes people think.”

••••••••••

Moynihan discusses race, 1967:

Tags:

“Do-It-Yourselfers Were Looking For Ways To Make The New Electric Car…Even Better”

October 16, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Engineering is never truly finished today as consumers continue to tinker with smart products to make them even smarter. From Bradley Berman’s smart piece in the New York Times:

“WITHIN weeks of when Nissan first began delivering the Leaf to buyers last December, do-it-yourselfers were looking for ways to make the new electric car — an engineering marvel from one of the world’s leading automakers — even better.

Among those who applied their 21st-century engineering skills to tinkering pursuits that date to the dawn of automobiles was Gary Giddings, 69, a retired engineer and a passionate supporter of electric vehicles.

‘At this point in my life, my goal is to spend whatever time I have trying to help E.V.’s become successful,’ Mr. Giddings said. He is using his Ph.D. in electrical engineering, earned at the University of California, Berkeley in the free-speech 1960s, to correct some of the Leaf’s shortcomings and to squeeze more performance out of it.”

••••••••••

Excellent Nissan Leaf ad by TBWA:

Tags: ,

“When Republicans Express Concern About The Anti-Government Militancy In Their Midst, It Has A Ring Of Serious Denial”

October 14, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Will the 2012 Presidential election be an opportunity for the GOP to take back the White House or for centrist members to take back their own party? From Matt Bai’s New York Times Magazine piece,  “Does Anyone Have a Grip on the G.O.P.?“:

“It’s worth pointing out that when Republicans express concern about the anti-government militancy in their midst, it has a ring of serious denial. After all, generations of Republican candidates have now echoed the theme of Ronald Reagan in his 1981 inaugural address: ‘In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem. Government is the problem.’ And a progression of ideological uprisings inside the party — the Reagan revolutionaries, Pat Buchanan’s pitchfork brigades, Newt Gingrich’s band of guerrilla lawmakers and now the Tea Partiers — have only pushed the anti-Washington argument closer to its illogical extreme. Thus could a smiling Michele Bachmann stand on a debate stage last month and declare that no one should pay the federal government a penny of taxes, for anything — a statement that didn’t even draw a follow-up question from the panel of Fox News journalists arrayed before her.

Longtime Republicans have been satisfied enough to have their candidates run down activist government as a campaign tactic, even as they themselves retained a more nuanced view of the federal government’s role (which is why a Republican Congress, working with a Republican president, managed to pass a Medicare prescription-drug bill in 2003). But when you talk to them now, these same Republicans seem positively baffled that anyone could have actually internalized, so literally, all the scorching resentment for government that has come to define the modern conservative campaign.”

Tags:

“An Electorate’s Decision Is Imposed Involuntarily Upon The Innocent”

October 14, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In the “Ethics of Voting,” philosopher Jason Brennan argues that people shouldn’t vote if they’re not sufficiently educated about the issues and shouldn’t vote for self-interest. I actually would be more than happy with people voting for self-interest. When you see union members supporting candidates openly hostile to unions or senior citizens who need Social Security to survive voting for candidates who detest that safety net, there is definitely a dangerous disconnect. But, yes, democracy without an informed public is a bad thing. An excerpt from Brennan’s piece:

“Imagine a jury is about to decide a murder case. The jury’s decision will be imposed involuntarily (through violence or threats of violence) upon a potentially innocent person. The decision is high stakes. The jury has a clear obligation to try the case competently. They should not decide the case selfishly, capriciously, irrationally, or from ignorance. They should take proper care, weigh the evidence carefully, overcome their biases, and decide the case from a concern for justice.

What’s true of juries is also true of the electorate. An electorate’s decision is imposed involuntarily upon the innocent. The decision is high stakes. The electorate should also take proper care.” (Thanks Marginal Revolution.)

••••••••••

“A vote for Popeye means free ice cream for all the kiddies,” 1956:

Tags:

“If You Put A Man On A Bicycle, He Was Instantly Twice As Efficient As The Condor”

October 14, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

More about tools. From Bloomberg Businessweek‘s “Steve Jobs: The Beginning, 1955-1985“:

“In the late 1970s, computer makers were popping up much the way car companies did in Detroit at the turn of the 20th century. Osborne, Commodore, and RadioShack were all selling what were becoming known as ‘personal computers.’ Like the Apple I, they were made for hobbyists. They were hard to use and didn’t really do much. The Altair, the earliest, pretty much just lit up little lights once you laboriously connected a bunch of switches on the logic board.

Jobs wanted the next computer to be something different—an appliance, something anyone could use. That was the Apple II, which came out a year after the Apple I. He hammered at his message as the company grew: Computers should be tools. Trip Hawkins, one of Apple’s first 50 employees, remembers Jobs obsessing over an article he’d read in a science magazine about the locomotive efficiency of animal species. ‘The most efficient species was the condor, which could fly for miles on only a few calories,’ Hawkins says. ‘Humans were way down the list. But then if you put a man on a bicycle, he was instantly twice as efficient as the condor.’ The computer, Jobs said, was a ‘bicycle for the mind.'”

••••••••••

Trick riding, 1899:

Tags:

“Because Tools Open Up Options, They Remake Us”

October 13, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The tools we use are only as good as those of us using them. There’s no denying that tablet computers and smart phones are among the greatest tools ever invented. They connect us to a dramatically large number of people and an astonishing amount of information–potentially. But I don’t think I’ve ever been sitting next to someone using a tablet when they weren’t watching some cruddy sitcom, updating their Facebook page or reading a dopey magazine. And considering the screens keep getting smaller and print books scarcer, where are we headed? If these new gadgets are just about ease of function and not introducing ourselves to better content, we’re talking more about a mirror–and not even an honest one–than a looking glass. Will it just be the same crap on a different screen? But others are more sanguine. From Kevin Kelly’s “Tools Are the Revolution,” in 2000’s Whole Earth Catalog: 

“Tools make revolutions. ‘When we make a new tool, we see a new cosmos,’ says physicist Freeman Dyson. He was probably thinking of microscopes, telescopes, and atomic particle accelerators. But even the workaday tools reviewed in this issue can alter our perspective. A tool—any tool—is possibility at one end and a handle at the other. Because tools open up options, they remake us. A really fantastic atlas of the world  is literally a new world. A whisper-quiet ultra-efficient electricity generator and a wireless Internet let us see ourselves as more nomadic than perhaps we have seen ourselves lately.

There are many ways to change the world, but I think the most direct way, the way being pioneered by artists, hackers, and scientists—third-culture citizens—is to adopt new tools.”

Tags:

“Kurzweil Doesn’t Think That The Future Will Arrive In A Rush”

October 13, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From a Cory Doctorow-Ray Kurzweil discussion about the Singularity in Asimov’s in 1995;

“‘Progress is exponential–not just a measure of power of computation, number of Internet nodes, and magnetic spots on a hard disk–the rate of paradigm shift is itself accelerating, doubling every decade. Scientists look at a problem and they intuitively conclude that since we’ve solved 1 percent over the last year, it’ll therefore be one hundred years until the problem is exhausted: but the rate of progress doubles every decade, and the power of the information tools (in price-performance, resolution, bandwidth, and so on) doubles every year. People, even scientists, don’t grasp exponential growth. During the first decade of the human genome project, we only solved 2 percent of the problem, but we solved the remaining 98 percent in five years.’

But Kurzweil doesn’t think that the future will arrive in a rush. As William Gibson observed, ‘The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed.'” (Thanks Longform.)

•••••••

Kurzweil sits for an interview with that dashing cyborg Charlie Rose, 2007:

Tags: ,

“He Was Not A Kindly, Soft-Spoken Sage Who Might Otherwise Live Atop A Mountain In India”

October 13, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Did Steve Jobs being a jerk to underlings help make his products great, or was the meanness something that was withstood because of his genius but unnecessary? Is greatness and kindness a zero-sum game? Can a perfectionist be a nice person? D.B. Grady votes “no” to the latter question with “In Praise of Bad Steve“ in the Atlantic. An excerpt:

“Steve Jobs was a genius, and one of the most important businessmen and inventors of our time. But he was not a kindly, soft-spoken sage who might otherwise live atop a mountain in India, dispatching wisdom to pilgrims. He was a taskmaster who knew how to get things done. ‘Real artists ship’ was an Apple battle cry from the earliest days. Everyone, by now, knows about the Steve Jobs ‘reality distortion field’ — the charismatic Care Bear Stare that compels otherwise reasonable people to spend weeks in line for a slightly faster telephone. In his biography of Jobs, journalist Alan Deutschman described the Apple co-founder’s lesser-known hero-shithead roller coaster. ‘He could be Good Steve or he could be Bad Steve. When he was Bad Steve, he didn’t seem to care about the severe damage he caused to egos or emotions so long as he pushed for greatness.’ When confronted with the full ‘terrifying’ wrath of Bad Steve (even over the slightest of details), the brains at Apple would push themselves beyond all personal limits to find a way to meet Jobs’s exacting demands, and somehow return to his good graces. And the process would repeat itself. ‘Steve was willing to be loved or feared, whatever worked.’ As Bud Tribble, Vice President of Software Technology at Apple explained. ‘It let the engineers know that it wasn’t OK to be sloppy in anything they did, even the 99 percent that Steve would never look at.'”

Tags: ,

“Edison Dismissed Tesla’s Ideas As ‘Splendid’ But ‘Utterly Impractical'”

October 13, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A tidy encapsulation of the what caused the rift between Edison and Tesla, courtesy of Smithsonian:

‘After Edison developed the first practical incandescent light bulb in 1879, supported by his own direct current electrical system, the rush to build hydroelectric plants to generate DC power in cities across the United States practically guaranteed Edison a fortune in patent royalties. But early on, Edison recognized the limitations of DC power. It was very difficult to transmit over distances without a significant loss of energy, and the inventor turned to a 28-year-old Serbian mathematician and engineer whom he’d recently hired at Edison Machine Works to help solve the problem. Nikola Tesla claimed that Edison even offered him significant compensation if he could design a more practical form of power transmission. Tesla accepted the challenge. With a background in mathematics that his inventor boss did not have, he set out to redesign Edison’s DC generators. The future of electric distribution, Tesla told Edison, was in alternating current—where high-voltage energy could be transmitted over long distances using lower current—miles beyond generating plants, allowing a much more efficient delivery system. Edison dismissed Tesla’s ideas as ‘splendid’ but ‘utterly impractical.’ Tesla was crushed and claimed that Edison not only refused to consider AC power, but also declined to compensate him properly for his work. Tesla left Edison in 1885 and set out to raise capital on his own for Tesla Electric Light & Manufacturing, even digging ditches for the Edison Company to pay his bills in the interim, until the industrialist George Westinghouse at Westinghouse Electric & Manufacturing Company, a believer in AC power, bought some of Tesla’s patents and set about commercializing the system so as to take electric light to something more than an urban luxury service. While Tesla’s ideas and ambitions might be brushed aside, Westinghouse had both ambition and capital, and Edison immediately recognized the threat to his business.”

••••••••••

Bowie as Tesla, The Prestige:

Tags: ,

“We Are Watching The Beginnings Of A Global Economic Boom”

October 12, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If only it were so. An economic prediction from “The Long Boom,” Wired, 1997:

“But there’s a new, very different meme, a radically optimistic meme: We are watching the beginnings of a global economic boom on a scale never experienced before. We have entered a period of sustained growth that could eventually double the world’s economy every dozen years and bring increasing prosperity for – quite literally – billions of people on the planet. We are riding the early waves of a 25-year run of a greatly expanding economy that will do much to solve seemingly intractable problems like poverty and to ease tensions throughout the world. And we’ll do it without blowing the lid off the environment.

If this holds true, historians will look back on our era as an extraordinary moment. They will chronicle the 40-year period from 1980 to 2020 as the key years of a remarkable transformation. In the developed countries of the West, new technology will lead to big productivity increases that will cause high economic growth – actually, waves of technology will continue to roll out through the early part of the 21st century. And then the relentless process of globalization, the opening up of national economies and the integration of markets, will drive the growth through much of the rest of the world.”

“Late Adolescents In Suburbs Like Ours Had Suddenly Gone Berserk, Running Away To Other Cities To Have Sex And Not Attend College”

October 12, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From “The Comfort Zone,” Jonathan Franzen’s great 2004 New Yorker essay about his childhood relationship with Charles Schulz’s Peanuts strip:

“I was unaware of it, but an epidemic had broken out across the country. Late adolescents in suburbs like ours had suddenly gone berserk, running away to other cities to have sex and not attend college, ingesting every substance they could get their hands on, not just clashing with their parents but rejecting and annihilating everything about them. For a while, the parents were so frightened and so mystified and so ashamed that each family, especially mine, quarantined itself and suffered in isolation.

When I went upstairs, my bedroom felt like an overwarm sickroom. The clearest remaining vestige of Tom was the Don’t Look Back poster that he’d taped to a flank of his dresser where Bob Dylan’s psychedelic hair style wouldn’t always be catching my mother’s censorious eye. Tom’s bed, neatly made, was the bed of a kid carried off by an epidemic.

In that unsettled season, as the so-called generation gap was rending the cultural landscape, Charles Schulz’s work was almost uniquely beloved. Fifty-five million Americans had seen A Charlie Brown Christmas the previous December, for a Nielsen share of better than fifty per cent. The musical You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown was in its second sold-out year on Broadway. The astronauts of Apollo X, in their dress rehearsal for the first lunar landing, had christened their orbiter and landing vehicle Charlie Brown and Snoopy. Newspapers carrying Peanuts reached more than a hundred and fifty million readers, Peanuts collections were all over the best-seller lists, and if my own friends were any indication there was hardly a kid’s bedroom in America without a Peanuts wastebasket or Peanuts bedsheets or a Peanuts gift book. Schulz, by a luxurious margin, was the most famous living artist on the planet.”

••••••••••

The other Pigpen, 1970:

Tags: ,

“Chances Are That You Have An Introvert On Your Hands”

October 12, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The single best description of a personality type that I have ever read is still “Caring for Your Introvert,” Jonathan Rauch’s 2003 Atlantic article. The opening:

“Do you know someone who needs hours alone every day? Who loves quiet conversations about feelings or ideas, and can give a dynamite presentation to a big audience, but seems awkward in groups and maladroit at small talk? Who has to be dragged to parties and then needs the rest of the day to recuperate? Who growls or scowls or grunts or winces when accosted with pleasantries by people who are just trying to be nice?

If so, do you tell this person he is ‘too serious,’ or ask if he is okay? Regard him as aloof, arrogant, rude? Redouble your efforts to draw him out?

If you answered yes to these questions, chances are that you have an introvert on your hands—and that you aren’t caring for him properly.”

••••••••••

“I vant to be…”:

Tags:

« Older entries § Newer entries »