In South Korea, Big Brother might actually be your big brother, or somebody’s big brother. The unemployed (and underemployed) have found a niche working as “paparazzi,” but not of the usual variety. Citizens are paid by the government to photograph anyone committing illegal acts. The opening of Choe Sang-Hun’s excellent New York Times article about the league of professional snitches:
“SEOUL, South Korea — With his debts mounting and his wages barely enough to cover the interest, Im Hyun-seok decided he needed a new job. The mild-mannered former English tutor joined South Korea’s growing ranks of camera-toting bounty hunters.
Known here sarcastically as paparazzi, people like Mr. Im stalk their prey and capture them on film. But it is not celebrities, politicians or even hardened criminals they pursue. Rather, they roam cities secretly videotaping fellow citizens breaking the law, deliver the evidence to government officials and collect the rewards.
‘Some people hate us,’ Mr. Im said. ‘But we’re only doing what the law encourages.’
The opportunities are everywhere: a factory releasing industrial waste into a river, a building owner keeping an emergency exit locked, doctors and lawyers not providing receipts for payment so that they can underreport their taxable income.”
Nissan and Swiss universityEPFLare attempting to build cars that can read the thoughts of the driver. From Physorg:
“‘The idea is to blend driver and vehicle intelligence together in such a way that eliminates conflicts between them, leading to a safer motoring environment,’ saidJose del R. Millan, a professor at Swiss technological university EPFL who is leading the project.
The project uses ‘brain activity measurement, eye movement patterns and by scanning the environment around the car in conjunction with the car’s ownsensors’ to forecast the driver’s next move.”
Steven Pinker, author of The Stuff of Thought among other provocative books, provides a history of violence–and its gradual decline–at Edge. An excerpt about the mitigating effect the printing press had on violence:
“By the 18th century a majority of men in England were literate.
Why should literacy matter? A number of the causes are summed up by the term ‘Enlightenment.’ For one thing, knowledge replaced superstition and ignorance: beliefs such as that Jews poisoned wells, heretics go to hell, witches cause crop failures, children are possessed, and Africans are brutish. As Voltaire said, ‘Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.’
Also, literacy gives rise to cosmopolitanism. It is plausible that the reading of history, journalism, and fiction puts people into the habit of inhabiting other peoples’ minds, which could increase empathy and therefore make cruelty less appealing. This is a point I’ll return to later in the talk.”
Rats are now becoming cyborgs, getting brain implants, as reported by Linda Geddes inNew Scientist:
“AN ARTIFICIAL cerebellum has restored lost brain function in rats, bringing the prospect of cyborg-style brain implants a step closer to reality. Such implants could eventually be used to replace areas of brain tissue damaged by stroke and other conditions, or even to enhance healthy brain function and restore learning processes that decline with age.
Cochlear implants and prosthetic limbs have already proved that it is possible to wire electrical devices into the brain and make sense of them, but such devices involve only one-way communication, either from the device to the brain or vice versa.
Now Matti Mintz of Tel Aviv University in Israel and his colleagues have created a synthetic cerebellum which can receive sensory inputs from the brainstem – a region that acts as a conduit for neuronal information from the rest of the body. Their device can interpret these inputs, and send a signal to a different region of the brainstem that prompts motor neurons to execute the appropriate movement.”
David Stern had a great run as NBA Commissioner in the ’80s and most of the ’90s, but he should have been replaced long ago. The record TV ratings that the league experienced last season came about only because players defied his wishes. Stern, somehow the last person to not see how free agency turned baseball from a sport of millions into one of billions as player movement sparked fan excitement and made the game a year-round attraction, has long tried to maneuver the rules to make it much more palatable for NBA stars to spend their whole careers with one team. The fans insisted they wanted this, though it’s not the job of the consumers to know what they want. However gracelessly Lebron brought his talents to South Beach, the superteam concept created a ratings renaissance yet unseen in the post-Jordan era. And that was no thanks to the commissioner. Now even that coup is being threatened because of a needless lockout being spearheaded by Stern and his disingenuous owner poverty campaign.
Over at Grantland, Malcolm Gladwell tears through the commissioner’s lies, explaining how the business of basketball is mostly not about he game itself but the real estate and media deals attached to the sport. In stating his case, Gladwell makes an interesting point about the recent history of American wealth disparity. An excerpt:
“One of the great forgotten facts about the United States is that not very long ago the wealthy weren’t all that wealthy. Up until the 1960s, the gap between rich and poor in the United States was relatively narrow. In fact, in that era marginal tax rates in the highest income bracket were in excess of 90 percent. For every dollar you made above $250,000, you gave the government 90 cents. Today — with good reason — we regard tax rates that high as punitive and economically self-defeating. It is worth noting, though, that in the social and political commentary of the 1950s and 1960s there is scant evidence of wealthy people complaining about their situation. They paid their taxes and went about their business. Perhaps they saw the logic of the government’s policy: There was a huge debt from World War II to be paid off, and interstates, public universities, and other public infrastructure projects to be built for the children of the baby boom. Or perhaps they were simply bashful. Wealth, after all, is as often the gift of good fortune as it is of design. For whatever reason, the wealthy of that era could have pushed for a world that more closely conformed to their self-interest and they chose not to. Today the wealthy have no such qualms. We have moved from a country of relative economic equality to a place where the gap between rich and poor is exceeded by only Singapore and Hong Kong. The rich have gone from being grateful for what they have to pushing for everything they can get. They have mastered the arts of whining and predation, without regard to logic or shame. In the end, this is the lesson of the NBA lockout. A man buys a basketball team as insurance on a real estate project, flips the franchise to a Russian billionaire when he wins the deal, and then — as both parties happily count their winnings — what lesson are we asked to draw? The players are greedy.”
This classic 1963 photo profiles Hangar One at Moffett Federal Airfield in Northern California. The towering hangar looks like something that arrived mysteriously from both the future and the past, a man-made colossus that seems to be the result of some higher creature. One of the world’s largest free-standing structures, Hangar One is 200-feet tall and spans eight acres. It was built during the Depression to house the U.S.S. Macon dirigible, an aircraft carrier that was the biggest airship in the world when it launched in 1933. But damage caused by a storm in 1935 buried the Macon deep in the Pacific Ocean. Today, a restored Hangar One is used by NASA. From a 2006 Spiegel article about the wreck of the Macon:
“The tragedy unfolded unusually slowly for an aviation catastrophe: The crew fought to control the USS Macon for more than an hour. US naval officers threw fuel canisters overboard in an attempt to reduce the weight of their vessel. The canisters imploded on their way to the ocean floor. Meanwhile, the Macon — the largest rigid airship ever constructed in the United States — sank inexorably downward, the safety of the Moffett Field hangar just within reach.
The Macon hit the water surface only five kilometers (three miles) off the Californian coast, along the latitude of the Point Sur lighthouse near Monterey, on Feb. 12, 1935. The zeppelin broke apart and sank into the deep water. Two of the 83 crew members died — the low number of deaths is likely due to the fact that the Macon sank in slow motion.
Neither enemy fire nor sabotage was to blame for the giant airship’s doom (and a giant it was: longer than three 747 jets parked nose to tail). A heavy storm above the picturesque stretch of Californian coast known as Big Sur tore off the Macon’s vertical tail fin. The airship’s structural framework was so badly damaged that the Macon broke apart when it hit the water.”
“A new type of software has been shown to predict revolutions by mining news reports around the world. Retrospectively mining the news for the past 30 years the software indicates points at which the likelihood for a revolution is high. When put to the test – bingo! – the software showed spikes just before the recent Egyptian and Libyan upheavals. It was also able to sift through world news to retrospectively pinpoint Osama Bin Ladin’s location to within 200 km. In the emerging science of ‘culturomics’ that tracks cultural trends through the written word, the software was the first to demonstrate that news coverage can be used to predict future events.”
From Conor Friedersdorf”sAtlantic pieceabout energy-saving motion sensors, now widely used in Spain:
“In the vast majority of tapas bars and restaurants I patronized, and in train stations and other public places too, I’d open bathroom doors to find it dark inside, start to fumble for a light switch, and remember that practically every last light is now triggered by motion sensors, a cheap alternative to the status quo here: leaving the lights on all the time, whether anyone is in the bathroom or not.
The motion sensor was also put to use in at least one shopping mall that I visited in Valencia. With four or five stories of stores, it had a bunch of escalators to transport shoppers from one level to another. Instead of running them at full speed all the time, however, they slowed down considerably when no one was on the steps. Tripping an invisible beam while walking onto the bottom step, it sped up immediately to normal escalator speed, costing patrons no time and saving energy.”
As the foundering Boston Red Sox attempt to collapse across the finish line and win the American League Wild Card, Steve Wulf of ESPN profiles their genius owner, John Henry, who applied objective analysis in business before bringing it to big-market baseball. An excerpt:
“Henry loves facts — ‘I don’t read fiction’ — so here are some. He was an asthmatic farm boy who grew up worshipping a miner’s son named Stan Musial; a philosophy major who fell under the thrall of Indian individualist Jiddu Krishnamurti; a rock musician who shaved his eyebrows to play a space alien in a rock opera; a mathematical whiz who was banned from Las Vegas blackjack tables; a commodities trader who watched soybeans grow into a beanstalk that eventually yielded ownership of some of the most storied franchises in Major League Baseball, NASCAR (Roush Fenway Racing) and the Premier League (Liverpool FC). You have to make this stuff up.
But it’s not just Henry’s bio that makes him interesting. He’s a whole host of contradictions. He uses dispassionate analysis in pursuit of his own passions. He’s a serious thinker given to practical jokes, a shy fellow who counts Bill Clinton, Michael Douglas and Steven Tyler among his friends, an owner of a 164-foot yacht who will dash from the owner’s box above home plate at Fenway to the first-aid room to check on a fan who’s been hit by a foul ball. He may be a 62-year-old father of two girls (a 14-year-old and a 1-year-old), but he has never lost his own childlike sense of wonder.
He’s also the kind of person who politely declines personal interview requests, then spends hours thoughtfully responding to e-mail questions — at 12:32 a.m. To a query about the major influences in his life, he writes, quoting mythologist Joseph Campbell, ‘If you follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you …’ That’s what led me into the financial world. I started John W. Henry & Company because I enjoyed applying mathematics to markets, and it was a profound challenge that resonated within me.”
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John Henry enters the womb-like studio of wealthy workaholic, Charlie Rose:
From asmart New York Times Op-Ed pieceby Matthew Avery Sutton, about the bizarre and scary intersection of the end of days and the beginning of the political season:
“For some evangelicals, President Obama is troubling. The specious theories about his place of birth, his internationalist tendencies, his measured support for Israel and his Nobel Peace Prize fit their long-held expectations about the Antichrist. So does his commitment to expanding the reach of government in areas like health care.
In 2008, the campaign of Senator John McCain, the Republican nominee, presciently tapped into evangelicals’ apocalyptic fears by producing an ad, ‘The One,’ that sarcastically heralded Mr. Obama as a messiah. Mr. McCain was onto something. Not since Roosevelt have we had a president of charisma and global popularity, who so perfectly fits the evangelicals’ Antichrist mold.”
From “Quantum Leap,” a 2006 Fortune interview with DARPA legend Stuart Wolf, about life in 2030:
“She awakes early on the morning of April 10, 2030, in the capable hands of her suburban Chicago apartment. All night, microscopic sensors in her bedside tables have monitored her breathing, heart rate, and brain activity.
The tiny blood sample she gave her bathroom sink last night has been analyzed for free radicals and precancerous cells; the appropriate preventative drugs will be delivered to her hotel in Atlanta this evening. It’s an expensive service, but as a gene therapist, Sharon Oja knows it’s worth it.
She steps into the shower. The tiles inside detect her presence and start displaying the day’s top headlines. The manned mission to Mars is going to launch ahead of schedule. U.S. military drones have destroyed another terrorist training camp using smart dust. A top Manhattan banker has been found guilty of fraud and sentenced to 10 years of low tech.
And today is the 20th anniversary of the very first quantum computer.
Sharon laughs. It is her 24th birthday, and she has little idea what the world was like before the qubits – the smallest pieces of quantum information – took over.”
Sanjhih Pod City in Nothern Tapei, with its abandoned and worn Futuro houses, is like no other place on Earth. Construction began in 1978 on what was supposed to be a vacation paradise for the wealthy. But the project was abandoned while in progress, because of financial problems and the accidental death of many workers, which convinced people the property was haunted. An excerpt froma storyabout the futuristic ghost town in the Taipei Times:
“One of the designers behind the UFO houses spoke exclusively to the Taipei Times. Lin, who only gave his family name, said that there were lots of rumors about the site, but most of them were false.
‘First of all, the site is definitely not haunted,’ Lin said, in reference to oft-heard rumors that many people have seen ghosts near the complex or the high number of unexplained traffic accidents on the nearby road.
There were also rumors that more than 20,000 skeletons were discovered at the site when construction work began and that it was the scene of several murders.”
From “Is Facebook Forever?” Rebecca J. Rosen’s Atlantic article about the overwhelming reach of the most popular social-networking site:
“Social-networking sites are fragile, as MySpace and Friendster proved. Unlike Yahoo! and AOL, whose users can get more or less the same experience if there are millions of others like them or if they are the last ones on Earth, social-networking sites can shrivel quickly if the perception rises that people are leaving. But even if Facebook does someday flag, its reach and its repository may mean a different kind of decline than those of the social networks before it. Those houses, once abandoned, fell apart. But Facebook may be more like the house you moved out of when you went to college — a house you still stop by to check in from time to time, see how the neighborhood is doing, say hi to old friends. It’s no longer where you live, or the place you call home, but it’s never quite gone either.”
‘THE event reminder on Melissa Weinblatt’s iPhone buzzed: 15 minutes till her shrink appointment.
She mixed herself a mojito, added a sprig of mint, put on her sunglasses and headed outside to her friend’s pool. Settling into a lounge chair, she tapped the Skype app on her phone. Hundreds of miles away, her face popped up on her therapist’s computer monitor; he smiled back on her phone’s screen.
She took a sip of her cocktail. The session began.
Ms. Weinblatt, a 30-year-old high school teacher in Oregon, used to be in treatment the conventional way — with face-to-face office appointments. Now, with her new doctor, she said: ‘I can have a Skype therapy session with my morning coffee or before a night on the town with the girls. I can take a break from shopping for a session. I took my doctor with me through three states this summer!'”
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“The unique service of the future, like the picture phone” (1960s):
Roger and Gene review the Mitsubishi VisiTel Visual Phone, 1988 (at 8:45):
From Kate Moisse and ABC News comes this story about a breakthrough in our ability to visually reconstruct people’s memories:
“California scientists have found a way to see through another person’s eyes.
Researchers from UC Berkeley were able to reconstruct YouTube videos from viewers’ brain activity — a feat that might one day offer a glimpse into our dreams, memories and even fantasies.
‘This is a major leap toward reconstructing internal imagery,’ said Jack Gallant, professor of psychology and coauthor of a study published today in Current Biology. ‘We are opening a window into the movies in our minds.””
••••••••
“Reconstructing visual experiences from brain activities evoked by natural movies”:
Robots in Singapore are getting fingerprints. Frompopsci:
“Researchers at the National University of Singapore are enhancing robots’ sense of touch by mimicking the ridged and contoured surfaces of human fingertips. Fingerprints, it turns out, don’t just give humans better grip but also carry out a sensitive type of signal processing. By imparting that same kind of signal processing to robots, we could reduce the processing loads to robots’ CPUs and help them better identify objects through their shapes.
Fingerprints provide a unique identifier and a better means to hold on to objects, but they also shape the ways we sense and perceive the world around us. When we touch something, the ridges alter the vibrations moving through our skin such that nerve endings can better receive them. This serves as a kind of signal processing that allows the skin in our fingertips to provide richer information to our central nervous system than skin on other parts of the body.”
From a1999 Playboy interview with writer/director Michael Crichton, who fretted, to great financial success, over science outpacing ethics:
Playboy:
In Jurassic Park, you looked at the potential hazards of DNA research. What’s your view of cloning?
Michael Crichton:
I think we’re a long way from cloning people. But I am worried about scientific advances without consideration of their consequences. The history of medicine in my lifetime is one of technological advances that outstrip our ethical systems. We’ve never caught up. When I was in medical school—30-odd years ago—people were struggling to deal with mechanical-respiration systems. They were keeping alive people who a few years earlier would have died of natural causes. Suddenly people weren’t going to die of natural causes. They were either going to get on these machines and never get off or—or what? Were we going to turn the machines off? We had the machines well before we started the debate. Doctors were speaking quietly among themselves with a kind of resentment toward these machines. On the one hand, if somebody had a temporary disability, the machines could help get them over the hump. For accident victims—some of whom were very young—who could be saved if they pulled through the initial crisis, the technology saved lives. You could get them over the hump and then they would recover, and that was terrific.
But on the other hand, there was a category of people who were on their way out but could be kept alive. Before the machine, ‘pulling the plug’ actually meant opening the window too wide one night, and the patient would get pneumonia and die. That wasn’t going to happen now. We were being forced by technology to make decisions about the right to die—whether it’s a legal or religious issue—and many related matters. Some of them contradict longstanding ideas in an ethically protected world; we weren’t being forced to make hard decisions, because those decisions were being made for us—in this case, by the pneumococcus.
This is just one example of an ethical issue raised by technology. Cloning is another. If you’re knowledgeable about biotechnology, it’s possible to think of some terrifying scenarios. I don’t even like to discuss them. I know people doing biotechnology research who have decided not to pursue avenues of research because they think they’re too dangerous. But we go forward without sorting out the issues. I don’t believe that everything new is necessarily better. We go forward with the technology while the ethical issues are still up in the air, whether it’s the genetic variability of crop streams, which is a resource in times of plant plagues, to the assumption that we all have to be connected all the time. The technology is here so you must use it. Do you? Do you have to have your cell phone and your e-mail address and your Internet hookup? I was just on holiday in Scotland without e-mail. I had to notify people that I wouldn’t be checking my e-mail, because there’s an assumption that if I send you an e-mail, you’ll get it. Well, I won’t get it. I’m not plugged in, guys. Some people are horrified: “You’ve gone offline?” People feel so enslaved by technology that they will stop having sex to answer the telephone. What could be so important? Who’s calling, and who cares?•
In theNew York Review of Books,Christian Caryl explains the ramifications of the incredible rise of the drones:
“Drones are not remarkable because of their weaponry. There is nothing especially unusual about the missiles they carry, and even the largest models are relatively lightly armed. They are not fast or nimble. What makes them powerful is their ability to see and think. Most of the bigger drones now operated by the US military can take off, land, and fly by themselves. The operators can program a destination or a desired patrol area and then concentrate on the details of the mission while the aircraft takes care of everything else. Packed with sensors and sophisticated video technology, UAVs can see through clouds or in the dark. They can loiter for hours or even days over a target—just the sort of thing that bores human pilots to tears. Of course, the most significant fact about drones is precisely that they do not have pilots. In the unlikely event that a UAV is shot down, its operator can get up from his or her console and walk away.
So far, so good. But there are also quite a few things about drones that you might not have heard yet. Most Americans are probably unaware, for example, that theUS Air Force now trains more UAV operators each year than traditional pilots. (Indeed, the Air Force insists on referring to drones as “remotely piloted aircraft” in order to dispel any suspicions that it is moving out of the business of putting humans into the air.) As I write this, the US aerospace industry has for all practical purposes ceased research and development work on manned aircraft. All the projects now on the drawing board revolve around pilotless vehicles. Meanwhile, law enforcement agencies around the country eagerly await the moment when they can start operating their own UAVs. The Federal Aviation Administration is considering rules that will allow police departments to start using them within the next few years (perhaps as early as 2014). Soon, much sooner than you realize, your speeding tickets will be issued electronically to your cell phone from a drone hovering somewhere over the interstate. The US Customs Service has already used UAVs to sneak up on drug-smuggling boats that easily evade noisier conventional aircraft.”
Mind and body have long been seen as disparate parts with the former located in the brain. But recent research suggests that the mind operates not just in our gray matter but in all our matter. The eloquent opening of Jonah Lehrer’s newWall Street Journal pieceon the topic:
“One of the deepest mysteries of the human mind is that it doesn’t feel like part of the body. Our consciousness seems to exist in an immaterial realm, distinct from the meat on our bones. We feel like the ghost, not like the machine.
This ancient paradox—it’s known as the mind-body problem—has long perplexed philosophers. It has also interested neuroscientists, who have traditionally argued that the three pounds of our brain are a sufficient explanation for the so-called soul. There is no mystery, just anatomy.
In recent years, however, a spate of research has put an interesting twist on this old conundrum. The problem is even more bewildering than we thought, for it’s not just the coiled cortex that gives rise to the mind—it’s the entire body. As the neuroscientist Antonio Damasio writes, ‘The mind is embodied, not just embrained.'”
••••••••••
Lehreraddresses concerns over the brain-changing effects of the Internet:
Unmentioned in my post on Meek’s Cutoff was that two of its cast members are the great young actors Paul Dano and Zoe Kazan (an off-screen couple as well). Dano came to notice in Little Miss Sunshine and gave a mind-blowing performance in There Will Be Blood. He was the subject of a short profile by Melena Ryzik in the New York Times Magazine in 2009. An excerpt:
“Mr. Dano grew up in Manhattan and Wilton, Conn. He made his Broadway debut at 12 in Inherit the Wind, with George C. Scott and Charles Durning, and a few years later appeared as a troubled teenager preyed upon by a pedophile (played by Brian Cox) in the film L.I.E. Despite the steady work, Mr. Dano wasn’t thinking about building a career. Acting was just fun, he said, on a par with other after-school activities, like basketball.
Little Miss Sunshine, released in 2006, was a turning point. The story of a misfit family’s road trip, it became the toast of Sundance and won two Oscars. Mr. Dano’s character, a misfit among misfits, doesn’t speak for most of the movie, yet manages to be a focal point in a cast including Alan Arkin and Steve Carell.
Mr. Dano auditioned for it two years before it was made. ‘Sometimes when people don’t have a line, they want to mime the line or communicate too much, but he was good at holding it all in,’ Ms. Faris said. ‘His silence was so much more intimidating, in a way, than other actors.'”
••••••••••
“The devil is in your hands and I will suck it out”:
From an MSNBC report about the first time the smiley emoticon was used:
“At 11:44 a.m. on September 19, 1982, a man named Scott Fahlman posted a message to an electronic computer-science department bulletin board at Carnegie Mellon University. And with that simple action he did something wonderful: He became the individual who would later be credited as the inventor of :-), an ASCII-based emoticon.”
••••••••••
Ten years after the Smiley was born, Jessica Yu captured a different expression in “Sour Death Balls”:
Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Jounral arguing that the recent London riots are only a harbinger of things to come for all of Europe:
“What comes next is the explosion of the European project. Given what European leaders have made of that project over the past 30-odd years, it’s not an altogether bad thing. But it will come at a massive cost. The riots of Athens will become those of Milan, Madrid and Marseilles. Parties of the fringe will gain greater sway. Border checkpoints will return. Currencies will be resurrected, then devalued. Countries will choose decay over reform. It’s a long, likely parade of horribles.” (Thanks Browser.)
From the opening chapter of Thomas Kuhn’s 1957 book, The Copernican Revolution, about the biggest game-changer in science history:
“Even its consequences for science do not exhaust the Revolution’s meanings. Copernicus lived and worked during a period when rapid changes in political, economic, and intellectual life were preparing the bases of modern European and American civilization. His planetary theory and his associated conception of a sun-centered universe were instrumental in the transition from medieval to modern Western society, because they seemed to affect man’s relation to the universe and to God. Initiated as a narrowly technical, highly mathematical revision of classical astronomy, the Copernican theory became one focus for the tremendous controversies in religion, in philosophy, and in social theory, which, during the two centuries following the discovery of America, set the tenor of the modern mind. Men who believed that their terrestrial home was only a planet circulating blindly about one of an infinity of stars evaluated their place in the cosmic scheme quite differently than had their predecessors who saw the earth as the unique and focal center of God’s creation. The Copernican Revolution was therefore also part of a transition in Western Man’s sense of values.”
Apple claims that Samsung has ripped off design aspects of its iPad; Samsung has countered by charging Apple with lifting the iPad design from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Odd defense, which I doubt will work. From the legal paperwork, via disinfo:
“Attached hereto as Exhibit D is a true and correct copy of a still image taken from Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. In a clip from that film lasting about one minute, two astronauts are eating and at the same time using personal tablet computers…As with the design claimed by the D’889 Patent, the tablet disclosed in the clip has an overall rectangular shape with a dominant display screen, narrow borders, a predominately flat front surface, a flat back surface (which is evident because the tablets are lying flat on the table’s surface), and a thin form factor.”
Muhammad Ali, long before anyone could imagine an African-American President, sagely suggested that a person of color will hold that office only once the job has become completely undesirable.
From “Ego,” the 1971 Norman Mailer Life article mentioned in the video:
Muhammad Ali begins with the most unsettling ego of all. Having commanded the stage, he never pretends to step back and relinquish his place to other actors–like a six-foot parrot, he keeps screaming at you that he is the center of the stage, ‘Come here, and get me, fool,’ he says. ‘You can’t, ’cause you don’t know who I am. You don’t know where I am. I’m human intelligence and you don’t even know if I’m good or evil.’ This has been his essential message to America all these years. It is intolerable to our American mentality that the figure who is probably most prominent to us after the President is simply not comprehensible, for he could be a demon or a saint. Or both!•
