“[Chris] Ellsworth provides a quick demo. On the massive tablet is a map of a hypothetical warzone. Blue icons represent the positioning of Team America assets — ground troops and overhead aircraft. Red icons show the enemy. When a new red diamond pops up, Ellsworth taps his finger on it, and then drags a bluish character over it.
It looks a little bit like a ghost from Ms. Pac-Man. But Ellsworth has just directed a drone — in this (fictional) case, one of AAI’s tiny Aerosonde-1 spy robots — to the enemy position. Whoever’s sitting miles away in an air conditioned Ground Control Station, wielding the joystick that controls the drone, has now received her new orders on an equivalent device — perhaps the smartphone that the Army might one day put in her pocket.
Either way, an IM confirming that the order is understood pops up on an adjacent flatscreen TV repurposed as a computer monitor. The drone above our fictional warzone should be on its way to its new position imminently.”
••••••••••
A piece about the increasing digitization of warfare, featuring AAI:
“The journey started back in the early 1970s. The University of Hawaii had facilities scattered around different islands, but the computers were located at the main campus in Honolulu. Back then, computers weren’t all that portable, but it was still possible to connect to those computers from remote locations by way of a terminal and a telephone connection at the blazing speed of 300 to 1200 bits per second. But the telephone connection was both slow and unreliable.
A small group of networking pioneers led by Norman Abramson felt that they could design a better system to connect their remote terminals to the university’s central computing facilities. The basic idea, later developed into ‘AlohaNET,’ was to use radio communications to transmit the data from the terminals on the remote islands to the central computers and back again. In those days, the well-established approach to sharing radio resources among several stations was to divide the channel either into time slots or into frequency bands, then assign a slot or band to each of the stations. (These two approaches are called time division multiple access [TDMA] and frequency division multiple access [FDMA], respectively.)
Obviously, dividing the initial channel into smaller, fixed-size slots or channels results in several lower-speed channels, so the AlohaNET creators came up with a different system to share the radio bandwidth. AlohaNET was designed with only two high-speed UHF channels: one downlink (from Honolulu) and one uplink (to Honolulu). The uplink channel was to be shared by all the remote locations to transmit to Honolulu. To avoid slicing and dicing into smaller slots or channels, the full channel capacity was available to everyone. But this created the possibility that two remote stations transmit at the same time, making both transmissions impossible to decode in Honolulu. Transmissions might fail, just like any surfer might fall off her board while riding a wave. But hey, nothing prevents her from trying again. This was the fundamental, ground-breaking advance of AlohaNET, reused in all members of the family of protocols collectively known as ‘random access protocols.'”
Slavoj Žižek, that provocateur and performance artist, gave a speech at Occupy Wall Street. Thankfully, his rhetoric was short on his usual bullshit (smirking apologias for Stalin, for example) and long on common sense. The speech’s opening from thefull transcriptprovided by Sarah Shin at Verso:
“Don’t fall in love with yourselves, with the nice time we are having here. Carnivals come cheap—the true test of their worth is what remains the day after, how our normal daily life will be changed. Fall in love with hard and patient work—we are the beginning, not the end. Our basic message is: the taboo is broken, we do not live in the best possible world, we are allowed and obliged even to think about alternatives. There is a long road ahead, and soon we will have to address the truly difficult questions—questions not about what we do not want, but about what we DO want. What social organization can replace the existing capitalism? What type of new leaders we need? The XXth century alternatives obviously did not work.
So do not blame people and their attitudes: the problem is not corruption or greed, the problem is the system that pushes you to be corrupt. The solution is not ‘Main Street, not Wall Street,’ but to change the system where main street cannot function without Wall street. Beware not only of enemies, but also of false friends who pretend to support us, but are already working hard to dilute our protest. In the same way we get coffee without caffeine, beer without alcohol, ice-cream without fat, they will try to make us into a harmless moral protest. But the reason we are here is that we had enough of the world where to recycle your Coke cans, to give a couple of dollars for charity, or to buy Starbucks cappuccino where 1% goes for the Third World troubles is enough to make us feel good. After outsourcing work and torture, after the marriage agencies started to outsource even our dating, we see that for a long time we were allowing our political engagements also to be outsourced—we want them back.
They will tell us we are un-American. But when conservative fundamentalists tell you that America is a Christian nation, remember what Christianity is: the Holy Spirit, the free egalitarian community of believers united by love. We here are the Holy Spirit, while on Wall Street they are pagans worshipping false idols.
They will tell us we are violent, that our very language is violent: occupation, and so on. Yes we are violent, but only in the sense in which Mahathma Gandhi was violent. We are violent because we want to put a stop on the way things go—but what is this purely symbolic violence compared to the violence needed to sustain the smooth functioning of the global capitalist system?”
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Žižek at Occupy Wall Street:
Žižek holding forth in a garbage dump, in Astra Taylor’s Examined Life:
I’ve never fully comprehended people who reject the idea of genetically modified food. I’m not speaking of concerns about corporations producing the food safely or the FDA’s reluctance to have such food labeled–those concerns I understand. I’m talking more about people who out of hand reject the notion that we should be using biotechnology when it comes to our diet. The weather patterns we currently enjoy, which allow for our agrarian culture, have existed for only about 10,000 years. Even if we were treating our environment well, which we’re most definitely not, those weather patterns will eventually shift, and we’ll need new ways to prevent famine. There seems to be a dogged belief that anything natural is good and anything engineered by humans is somehow tainted. But there are plenty of lethal plants which exist in nature. At Singularity Hub,Aaron Saenz brings common senseto the argument over the labeling genetically modified foods:
“We should label GMOs. I don’t see why the FDA and GMO developers are fighting this. I believe in GMO technology. I think it’s one of the most likely paths to cheaply and securely feeding the world. While current incarnations of the technology are still far from perfect, a mature GMO industry may be able to design humanity with the organisms it needs to survive in the 21st Century.
But I still think GMOs should be labeled.
Why the hell not? Let consumers see the benefits of GM crops. Sure, some will definitely switch to competitors products because they are adverse to consuming new forms of food. That’s fine. If GM foods really are cheaper then many more consumers will choose them to save money. If GM foods aren’t cheap enough to compete with non-GMO foods, then their developers should go back to the drawing board and make GMOs that can compete. By keeping consumers in the dark we’re artificially stalling GMO science.”
Nanotechnology may be able to transform air expelled through the nose during respiration into a source of power which could in turn provide the energy for medical devices implanted in the human head. An excerpt from a Science Daily report:
“‘Basically, we are harvesting mechanical energy from biological systems. The airflow of normal human respiration is typically below about two meters per second,’ says Wang. ‘We calculated that if we could make this material thin enough, small vibrations could produce a microwatt of electrical energy that could be useful for sensors or other devices implanted in the face.’
Researchers are taking advantage of advances in nanotechnology and miniaturized electronics to develop a host of biomedical devices that could monitor blood glucose for diabetics or keep a pacemaker battery charged so that it would not need replacing. What’s needed to run these tiny devices is a miniscule power supply. Waste energy in the form or blood flow, motion, heat, or in this case respiration, offers a consistent source of power.”
This month marks the 40th anniversary of the first ARPANET email, which was sent by Ray Tomlinson. A remembrance of that leap forward in communications, via The Next Web:
“As Tomlinson told the Times in 2008, he doesn’t remember what that first email actually said – perhaps ‘QWERTY’ or another string of characters, but whatever it was, it traveled a distance of one meter between two separate computers. One small step for a message, one giant leap for mankind.
Besides inventing email, Tomlinson is also the man to thank for the popularity of the ‘@’ symbol. He established the convention of an email ‘address’ in order to identify the recipient and the computer or network that they were using. To separate these two pieces of information, he chose ‘@’. He told The Times, ‘It conveyed a sense of place, which seemed to suit.'”
Polaroid has faltered badly in the digital age, but that company’s genius inventor Edwin H. Land was to his time what Steve Jobs was to ours, and, yet, his name is probably unfamiliar to most people just two decades after his death. Christopher Bonanos has an excellent piece in the New York Times about the Land-Jobs link. An excerpt:
“Most of all, Land believed in the power of the scientific demonstration. Starting in the 60s, he began to turn Polaroid’s shareholders’ meetings into dramatic showcases for whatever line the company was about to introduce. In a perfectly art-directed setting, sometimes with live music between segments, he would take the stage, slides projected behind him, the new product in hand, and instead of deploying snake-oil salesmanship would draw you into Land’s World. By the end of the afternoon, you probably wanted to stay there.
Three decades later, Jobs would do exactly the same thing, except in a black turtleneck and jeans. His admiration for Land was open and unabashed. In 1985, he told an interviewer, ‘The man is a national treasure. I don’t understand why people like that can’t be held up as models: This is the most incredible thing to be — not an astronaut, not a football player — but this.'”
••••••••••
Land demonstrates the Polaroid instant camera, 1948:
Swashbuckling Raiders ownerAl Davis just passed away. A person with tremendous capacity for both good and bad, Davis was one of the people most responsible for the NFL-AFL merger which created the modern NFL, even though he didn’t want his upstart AFL to merge with the more established league–he wanted to kick its ass. From a1981 People articleabout the take-no-prisoners football executive, who made the Raiders an outfit for social misfits, on the eve of his team winning Superbowl XV:
“No one kicks the hell out of Davis for long—his competitive instinct is too finely honed. According to an instructive popular myth, former San Diego Coach Harland Svare is said to have approached a light fixture in the visitors’ locker room at Oakland once, yelling, ‘Damn you, Al Davis, I know you’re up there.’ Asked later if he had indeed bugged the Chargers, Davis would say only, ‘The thing wasn’t in the light fixture, I’ll tell you that.’
Davis’ father, Lou, was a successful children’s clothing manufacturer who moved the family to the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn when Al was 5. Strictly second-string as an athlete, Davis had the time and inclination to contemplate strategy. After graduating from Syracuse (in English) in 1950, he became assistant football coach at Adelphi University, then took a series of college jobs before becoming an assistant with the Chargers in 1960.
When Davis joined the Raiders, they had won only one game the season before. The following year he led them to a 10-4 mark. Though he owns only 25 percent of the team’s stock and there are 14 other partners, nothing happens in the franchise without Al Davis’ approval. It was his decision to choose little-known punter Ray Guy in the first round of the 1973 college draft, and to pick a widely belittled defensive back named Lester Hayes in 1977. Both rewarded him by becoming All-Pro performers. Equally decisive in matters of style, Davis also selected the team’s distinctive colors, silver and black. ‘I used to be color-blind,’ he explains.”
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Part of the dark side of those macho, lawless 1980s Raiders teams is that drug use was rampant and Lyle Alzado, John Matuszak and numerous others died young. Alzado believed that steroid abuse was behind the brain cancer that killed him at age 43 in 1992. Alzado gets his pump on in 1984 with the aid of a couple of gallons of milk:
This classic 1971 photograph of the crescent Earth was taken by astronaut Alan Shepard, while he was aboard Apollo 14, exactly a decade after he became the first American in space. From Shepard’s 1998 New York Times obituary: “On the morning of May 5, 1961, Mr. Shepard became an immediate American hero. A lean, crew-cut former Navy test pilot, then 37, he began the day lying on his back in a cramped Mercury capsule atop a seven-story Redstone rocket filled with explosive fuel. After four tense hours of weather and mechanical delays, he was shot into the sky on a 15-minute flight that grazed the fringes of space, at an altitude of 115 miles, and ended in a splashdown in the Atlantic Ocean 302 miles downrange from Cape Canaveral, Fla.
Though not much by today’s standards, the brief suborbital flight had stopped a whole country in its tracks, waiting anxiously at radios and television sets. When the message of success came through — with a phrase that would enter the idiom, ‘Everything is A-O.K.!’– everyone seemed to let out a collective sigh of relief.
Yuri Gagarin of the Soviet Union may have been first into space, 23 days before, and have flown a full orbit, but with Mr. Shepard’s flight the United States finally had reason to cheer. In fact, Mr. Shepard’s success is credited with giving President John F. Kennedy the confidence to commit the nation to the goal of landing men on the Moon within the decade.”
At Slate,James Verini examines “The Obama Effect,” a theory gaining traction which states that dwindling violent-crime rates in predominantly African-American neighborhoods in the past three years, even during this bruising recession, is the result of a more positive outlook among blacks since the election of the first African-American President. An excerpt:
“One unlikely explanation that is gaining credence among experts, including some of the biggest names in the field, is a phenomenon tentatively dubbed ‘the Obama Effect.’ Simply put, it holds that the election of the first black president has provided such collective inspiration that it has changed the thinking or behavior of would-be or one-time criminals. The effect is not yet quantifiable, but some very numbers-driven researchers believe it may exist.
Rick Rosenfeld, the president of the American Society of Criminology, studies the relationship between consumer sentiment and crime rates, which appear to track closely. Despite the recession, Rosenfeld has found, black Americans are remarkably confident about their economic futures. In 2009, despite being in the midst of the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, 39 percent of black people surveyed said they were better off than they’d been five years before, as opposed to just 20 percent who answered that question in the affirmative in 2007. In the same survey, there was a 14 percent increase among blacks who said they thought the standard of living gap between themselves and whites was diminishing, and a 9 percent increase in blacks who believed that the future for black people will be better.
‘I think there’s little question the election had the effect of improving the general outlook of blacks and especially their economic outlook,’ Rosenfeld told me. ‘Normally, blacks tend to be more pessimistic about economic prospects, even in good economic times.'”
'You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there.' (image by John Atherton.)
From “Goodbye To All That,” Joan Didion’s famous 1967 essay in which she said farewell to New York City not forever but for a long spell:
“Nothing was irrevocable; everything was within reach. Just around every corner lay something curious and interesting, something I had never before seen or done or known about. I could go to a party and meet someone who called himself Mr. Emotional Appeal and ran The Emotional Appeal Institute or Tina Onassis Blandford or a Florida cracker who was then a regular on what the called ‘the Big C,’ the Southampton-El Morocco circuit (‘I’m well connected on the Big C, honey,’ he would tell me over collard greens on his vast borrowed terrace), or the widow of the celery king of the Harlem market or a piano salesman from Bonne Terre, Missouri, or someone who had already made and list two fortunes in Midland, Texas. I could make promises to myself and to other people and there would be all the time in the world to keep them. I could stay up all night and make mistakes, and none of them would count.
You see I was in a curious position in New York: it never occurred to me that I was living a real life there. In my imagination I was always there for just another few months, just until Christmas or Easter or the first warm day in May.”
"Now the scope of the protests are even wider, more global." (Image by David Shankbone.)
From a post on Kevin Kelly’s Technium blog, in which he meditates on the ever-decreasing centralization of political power in the Digital Age:
“There seems to be a global-scale protest underway. People, mostly young people, are bypassing the institutional voting system to try to force change through decentralized adhocracy and anarchy. The world saw something similar in the 1960s when student protests erupted in Europe and the US and the Americas all at the same time. Now the scope of the protests are even wider, more global, reaching from Arab Africa, to the Mid East, to East Asia, to the the heartland of Europe and the US.
In a clear-headed front-page article in the New York Times today, one factor in this global unrest is assigned to technology. In particular common communication technology is seen as enabling this protest to blossom (although not causes the protest).
I agree with the Times that more important than the technology which is embraced are the mind-habits, the framework, the ideology of the technology, which the protesters are trying to migrate into non-electronic situations.
Here is a bit from the middle of the article:
The critical mass of wiki and mapping tools, video and social networking sites, the communal news wire of Twitter and the ease of donations afforded by sites like PayPal makes coalitions of like-minded individuals instantly viable.‘You’re looking at a generation of 20- and 30-year-olds who are used to self-organizing,’ said Yochai Benkler, a director of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University. ‘They believe life can be more participatory, more decentralized, less dependent on the traditional models of organization, either in the state or the big company. Those were the dominant ways of doing things in the industrial economy, and they aren’t anymore.'”
In “The End of the Future” at the National Review, Peter Thiel argues that technological progress is starting to run aground. The opening:
“Modern Western civilization stands on the twin plinths of science and technology. Taken together, these two interrelated domains reassure us that the 19th-century story of never-ending progress remains intact. Without them, the arguments that we are undergoing cultural decay — ranging from the collapse of art and literature after 1945 to the soft totalitarianism of political correctness in media and academia to the sordid worlds of reality television and popular entertainment — would gather far more force. Liberals often assert that science and technology remain essentially healthy; conservatives sometimes counter that these are false utopias; but the two sides of the culture wars silently agree that the accelerating development and application of the natural sciences continues apace.
Yet during the Great Recession, which began in 2008 and has no end in sight, these great expectations have been supplemented by a desperate necessity. We need high-paying jobs to avoid thinking about how to compete with China and India for low-paying jobs. We need rapid growth to meet the wishful expectations of our retirement plans and our runaway welfare states. We need science and technology to dig us out of our deep economic and financial hole, even though most of us cannot separate science from superstition or technology from magic. In our hearts and minds, we know that desperate optimism will not save us. Progress is neither automatic nor mechanistic; it is rare. Indeed, the unique history of the West proves the exception to the rule that most human beings through the millennia have existed in a naturally brutal, unchanging, and impoverished state. But there is no law that the exceptional rise of the West must continue. So we could do worse than to inquire into the widely held opinion that America is on the wrong track (and has been for some time), to wonder whether Progress is not doing as well as advertised, and perhaps to take exceptional measures to arrest and reverse any decline.” (Thanks Browser.)
The opening of “Slow Scan To Moscow,” Adam Hochschild’s 1986 Mother Jones article about the growing electronic connectivity between people of the U.S. and the Soviet Union, two countries that were still locked in the Cold War:
“Joel Schatz has wire-rimmed glasses and an Old Testament-sized beard. A big head of curly black hair flecked with gray adds a few extra inches to his sixfoot-two frame. ‘This trip we’re about to take,’ he says enthusiastically, ‘is so important that I’ve even gotten a haircut.’ Its effects are not noticeable.
Joel is sitting in the study of his San Francisco apartment, where most of the furniture consists of pillows on the floor. The largest thing in sight is an enormous reflector telescope, which can be pivoted around on its pedestal and aimed out a high window, Joel explains, ‘to remind me of my place in the cosmos. We’re all voyagers out there.
‘If I had millions of dollars I’d build neighborhood observatories all over the world. And at each one I’d have good conga drums, so people could drum together as well as observe.’
The object of Joel’s attention at this moment, however, as it is much of the time, is his four-pound, briefcase-size Radio Shack Tandy Model 100 portable computer. ‘I bought this machine for $399. For $1.82 a minute – $1.82! – I can send a telex message to Moscow. This technology is going to revolutionize human communications! Think what it will mean when you can get thousands of Americans and Soviets on the same computer network. Once scientists in both countries begin talking to each other on these machines they won’t be able to stop. And we’ll be taking a running leap over the governments on both sides.
‘I’m not a scientist,’ Joel adds. ‘I’ve only owned a computer for four months. I don’t understand how they work. I’ll leave that to other people. I’m just interested in how they can improve communication on this planet.'” (ThanksLongform.)
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Radio Shack Tandy 102 portable computer, the final refresh of the 100 series:
Going a step or two further than Amazon with its Kindle Fire, the Indian government is hoping to bridge the digital gap between haves and have-nots with the Aakash, which is the lowest priced tablet in the world. Having access to seemingly infinite information hasn’t necessarily enriched Amercians or made us significantly smarter–not yet anyhow–but those long denied the basics tend to use tools more aggressively than those of us in more comfortable situations. From Adam Clark Estes’ Atlantic Wire post:
“On Wednesday, Indian officials proudly touted the launch of the Aakash, a government-backed tablet that costs only $35 for students and $50 for everyone else. The WiFi-enable touchscreen device is the size of a paperback book, can handle video conferencing and comes with 4GB of storage. Some testers complained that it’s a little slow, but did you see the price? The government is giving away the first 100,000 to students for free. ‘This is not just for us. This is for all of you who are disempowered,’ Human Resource Development Minister Kapil Sibal said. ‘This is for all those who live on the fringes of society.’
The idealistic rhetoric behind the launch of what’s being billed as world’s cheapest tablet is not restricted to the Indian government. It seems like everyone has high hopes for the potential of ultra-cheap technology like the Aakash, which means ‘sky’ in Hindi. The Washington Post calls it the ‘tablet computer to lift villagers out of poverty,’ Suneet Singh Tuli, CEO of DataWind who’s manufacturing the tablets, boasted to the BBC, ‘We’ve created a product that will finally bring affordable computing and internet access to the masses.’ The inverse relationship between internet access and poverty is not a new idea. Sha Zukang, the United Nation’s Under Secretary-General for Economic and Social Affairs told the crowd at last year’s Internet Governance Forum, ‘Through both simple and sophisticated techniques, the internet can help eradicate poverty, educate people, sustain the environment and create healthier populations.'”
Interesting idea from William J. Stuntz’s The Collapse of American Criminal Justice (via Tyler Cowen at Marginal Revolution), which argues that NYC is far more violent than it was a century ago, but we don’t notice because emergency medical care and surgical procedures have improved so markedly that there are fewer fatalities. The only caveat is that I’d be curious as to how exhaustive statistics were 100 years ago. The passage:
“New York is America’s safest large city, the city that saw crime fall the most and the fastest during the 1990s and the early part of this decade. Yet New York’s murder rate is 80 percent higher now than it was at the beginning of the twentieth century — notwithstanding an imprisonment rate four times higher now than then. That crime gap is misleadingly small; thanks to advances in emergency medicine, a large fraction of those early twentieth-century homicide victims would survive their wounds today. Taking account of medical advances, New York is probably not twice as violent as a century ago, but several times more violent. At best, the crime drop must be counted a pyrrhic victory.”
In World Policy, sci-fi writer Neal Stephenson vents about the diminishing of the American space program, and what it says about our nation’s capacity for executing large-scale, top-down, risk-heavy endeavors. The opening:
“My lifespan encompasses the era when the United States of America was capable of launching human beings into space. Some of my earliest memories are of sitting on a braided rug before a hulking black-and-white television, watching the early Gemini missions. This summer, at the age of 51—not even old—I watched on a flatscreen as the last Space Shuttle lifted off the pad. I have followed the dwindling of the space program with sadness, even bitterness. Where’s my donut-shaped space station? Where’s my ticket to Mars? Until recently, though, I have kept my feelings to myself. Space exploration has always had its detractors. To complain about its demise is to expose oneself to attack from those who have no sympathy that an affluent, middle-aged white American has not lived to see his boyhood fantasies fulfilled.
Still, I worry that our inability to match the achievements of the 1960s space program might be symptomatic of a general failure of our society to get big things done. My parents and grandparents witnessed the creation of the airplane, the automobile, nuclear energy, and the computer to name only a few. Scientists and engineers who came of age during the first half of the 20th century could look forward to building things that would solve age-old problems, transform the landscape, build the economy, and provide jobs for the burgeoning middle class that was the basis for our stable democracy.” (Thanks Browser.)
The Solyndra boondoggle is already a politicized hand grenade, but as anyone in venture capital will tell you, investing in the future doesn’t ensure return. Malfeasance should always be remedied, but fear of failure will guarantee no success. From “A Waste of Energy?‘ by the New Yorker‘s reliably lucid James Surowiecki:
‘Of course, some think the Solyndra failure shows that the government isn’t investing smartly. But, while government subsidies have built-in problems—most obviously, some money will go to projects that would have happened anyway—there’s little sign that the Department of Energy has handed out money recklessly: the vetting process, which relied on three thousand outside experts, was unusually rigorous. Solyndra was a wager that went wrong, but failure is integral to the business of investing in new companies; many venture capitalists will tell you that, of the companies they fund, they expect a third, if not more, to fail. By those standards, the government is actually doing pretty well so far: under the stimulus program, the D.O.E. has handed out nearly twenty billion dollars in loan guarantees to renewable-energy companies, and only Solyndra has defaulted, accounting for a small fraction of the money guaranteed. Solyndra’s failure isn’t a reason for the government to give up on alternative energy, any more than the failure of Pets.com during the Internet bubble means that venture capital should steer clear of tech projects.”
At the American,Vaclav Smil argues that Steve Jobs shouldn’t be compared to Thomas Edison. An excerpt:
“I have no desire to disparage or dismiss anything Jobs has done for his company, for its stockholders, or for millions of people who are incurably addicted to incessantly checking their tiny Apple phones or washing their brains with endless streams of music—I just want to explain why Jobs is no Edison.
Any student of the history of technical progress must be struck by the difference between the epochal, first-order innovations that take place only infrequently and at unpredictable times and the myriad of subsequent second-order inventions, improvements, and perfections that could not have taken place without such a breakthrough and that both accompany and follow (sometimes with great rapidity, often rather tardily) the commercial maturation of that fundamental enabling advance. The oldest example of such a technical saltation was when our hominin ancestors began using stones to fashion other stones into sharp tools (axes, knives, and arrows). And there has been no more fundamental, epoch-making modern innovation than the large-scale commercial generation, transmission, distribution, and conversion of electricity.”
I just stumbled onto “In 2010, We Will Live On The Moon,” a 2009 Slate article by Paul Collins that recalls the dreamy, breathless futurism of the late, lamented science magazine, Omni, which was the brainchild of weathered pornographer Bob Guccione and his lucky bride, Kathy Keeton. An excerpt:
“But the only place you’ll find Omni for sale today is in a junk shop or on eBay. To look over old issues of Omni is to experience equal parts amazement (a science mag by Penthouse‘s founder interviews Richard Feynman?) and amusement (by 2010, robots will—yes!—”clean the rug, iron the clothes, and shovel the snow.’) It was in a 1981 Omni piece that William Gibson coined the word ‘cyberspace,’ while the provoking lede ‘For this I spent two thousand dollars? To kill imaginary Martians?’ exhorted Omni-readers to go online in 1983—where, they predicted, everything from entire libraries to consumer product reviews would soon migrate. A year later, the magazine ran one of the earliest accounts of telecommuting with Doug Garr’s ‘Home Is Where the Work Is,’ which might have also marked the first appearance of this deathless standby of modern reportage: ‘I went to work in my pajamas.’
Then again, that same issue predicted the first moon colony in 2010; supplied with ‘water in the shadowed craters of the moon’s north pole’ (not a bad guess), it might be attacked by ‘space-based Soviet particle-beam weapons.'”
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Omni magazine commercial, 1978 (with voiceover by Guccione):
I don’t share Nick Carr’s angst over e-book readers not adopting the look and functionality of dead-tree books, but he eloquently makes a true point about a new medium initially mimicking–if only in spirit–what preceded it:
“The future arrives wearing the clothes of the past. The first book that came off a printing press – Gutenberg’s Bible – used a typeface that had been meticulously designed to look like a scribe’s handwriting:
The first TV shows were filmed radio broadcasts. The designers of personal computers used the metaphor of a desk for organizing information. The world wide web had ‘pages.’ The home pages of online newspapers mimicked the front pages of their print editions. As Richard Goldstein succinctly put it, ‘every novel technology draws from familiar forms until it establishes its own aesthetic.’ It’s tempting to look at the early form of a new media technology and assume that it will be the ultimate form, but that’s a big mistake. The transitional state is never the final state. Eventually, the clothes of the past are shed, and the true nature, the true aesthetic, of the new technology is revealed.
So it is with what we call ‘electronic books.’ Amazon’s original Kindle was explicitly designed to replicate as closely as possible the look and feel of a printed book.”
Interesting take by Mimi Swartz in the Sunday Times Magazine on Rick Perry and his Presidential aspirations facing an Old South-New South divide. Swartz, executive editor at Texas Monthly, has a bird’s-eye view of the backstabbing and jockeying. An excerpt:
“What is surprising is the situation among Republicans. ‘There’s no doubt that there’s been a split in the Republican Party in Texas between the country-club wing and the much more conservative base segment of the party,’ says Matt Mackowiak, an Austin-based political consultant and a Perry supporter. That divide is only going to expand. When Karl Rovetakes digs at the governoron The Wall Street Journal’s op-ed page, and when George H. W. and Barbara Bush endorse Perry’s gubernatorial primary competitor Kay Bailey Hutchison, that’s the sound of early salvos in an intrastate, intraparty class war.
This isn’t just about snobbery but about something far more important here: money. Texans who have spent zillions to brag about the state’s opera and ballet companies, and who have paid the likes of Santiago Calatrava for architectural gewgaws, also know that multinational corporations aren’t willing to locate in a place that has awful schools and toxic air and that wears its provincialism proudly.”
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Santiago Calatrava’s Margaret Hunt Hill Bridge, Dallas, Texas:
From the introduction of “Will Robots Steal Your Job?” a series of articles about the increasing IQ of artificial intelligence, by the resolutely excellent Farhad Manjoo at Slate:
“Artificial intelligence machines are getting so good, so quickly, that they’re poised to replace humans across a wide range of industries. In the next decade, we’ll see machines barge into areas of the economy that we’d never suspected possible—they’ll be diagnosing your diseases, dispensing your medicine, handling your lawsuits, making fundamental scientific discoveries, and even writing stories just like this one. Economic theory holds that as these industries are revolutionized by technology, prices for their services will decline, and society as a whole will benefit. As I conducted my research, I found this argument convincing—robotic lawyers, for instance, will bring cheap legal services to the masses who can’t afford lawyers today. But there’s a dark side, too: Imagine you’ve spent three years in law school, two more years clerking, and the last decade trying to make partner—and now here comes a machine that can do much of your $400-per-hour job faster, and for a fraction of the cost. What do you do now?”
The world was stunned when NASA announced last December that arsenic-based life existed on Earth, a finding that ran counter to everything we believed, suggesting a parallel life form was possible on our planet. Then the microbes hit the fan, and Felisa Wolfe-Simon, the young astrobiologist at the center of the discovery, was caught up in a firestorm. The opening of a Tom Clynes article on the controversy at Popsci:
“It is this mud, and the peculiar microbes in it, that have stuck Wolfe-Simon in the middle of one of the most extraordinary scientific disputes in recent memory. Last December, at a highly publicized NASA press briefing, Wolfe-Simon announced that her research team had isolated bacteria from Mono Lake, on the edge of California’s Eastern Sierra mountain range, that could subsist on arsenic in place of phosphorus, one of the elements considered essential for all life.
The research, financed mostly by NASA and published initially in the online edition of Science, jolted the scientific community. If confirmed, scientists said, the discovery would mean that this high mountain lake hosts a form of life distinct from all others known on Earth. It would open up the possibility of a shadow biosphere, composed of organisms that can survive using means that long-accepted rules of biochemistry cannot explain. And it would give Mono Lake, rather than Mars or one of Jupiter’s moons, the distinction of being the first place in our solar system where ‘alien’ life was discovered.
But within days, researchers began to question Wolfe-Simon’s methodology and conclusions. Many of them cast aside traditions of measured commentary in peer reviewed periodicals and voiced their criticism directly on blogs and Twitter. Then, as the conflict spilled into the mainstream, the scientific community witnessed something few would have predicted: meaningful public engagement over a serious scientific issue. For several days, at least, a good many water cooler conversations revolved around the metabolic capabilities of a Gammaproteobacterium.
Among academics, the debate devolved into something more vitriolic and personal. One researcher questioned whether Wolfe-Simon and her team were ‘bad scientists.’ Another called her work ‘science fiction.’ One blog post bore the title ‘Is Felisa Wolfe-Simon an Alien?'”
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“A tiny microbe that can survive concentrations of arsenic that would kill all normal life dead”:
Gizmodo has agood postby Mat Honan which fleshes out what became obvious yesterday after Amazon’s dazzling Kindle Fire presentation: For the time being, Jeff Bezos will fill the void created by Steve Jobs stepping aside at Apple. Amazon has always been formidable, but a little blah. No more. An excerpt:
“And so when it was all over, the press, the great opinionator that drives purchasing decisions, was utterly flabbergasted. It was totally Jobsed, so to speak. Hypnotized and drawn in by the mind-blowing Bezos.
Much of that that is because of his passion. You can see it in his eyes, full of zeal and bordering on crazy. He isn’t just conning you, he believes in it. He feels strongly that he’s got the right product, at the right time. And so watch him and you will too.
And yet, it’s not just about his salesmanship. ‘Jeff Bezos is the newRon Popeil‘ is a whole other story. He mirrors Apple’s former CEO in a host of other ways as well.
Most obviously, he’s a founder/CEO. Amazon is his. Yes, it’s a public company, but it goes where his vision takes it. It follows his mind into markets. Amazon is Jeff Bezos. Without him it would be adrift.”
