In writing about the new Steven Soderbergh film, Contagion, Alex Tabarrok of the Marginal Revolution points out an unintended benefit of the war against bio-terrorism that arose after 9/11:
“That is exactly right. Fortunately, under the umbrella of bio-terrorism, we have invested in the public health system by building more bio-safety level 3 and 4 laboratories including the latest BSL3 at George Mason University, we have expanded the CDC and built up epidemic centers at the WHO and elsewhere and we have improved some local public health centers. Most importantly, a network of experts at the department of defense, the CDC, universities and private firms has been created. All of this has increased the speed at which we can respond to a natural or unnatural pandemic.
In 2009, as H1N1 was spreading rapidly, the Pentagon’s Defense Threat Reduction Agency asked Professor Ian Lipkin, the director of the Center for Infection and Immunity at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health, to sequence the virus. Working non-stop and updating other geneticists hourly, Lipkin and his team were able to sequence the virus in 31 hours. (Professor Ian Sussman, played in the movie by Elliott Gould, is based on Lipkin.) As the movie explains, however, sequencing a virus is only the first step to developing a drug or vaccine and the latter steps are more difficult and more filled with paperwork and delay. In the case of H1N1 it took months to even get going on animal studies, in part because of the massive amount of paperwork that is required to work on animals.”
Albany, New York, is the site of experimentation that may allow us to control computing devices with minds instead of hands. From a newNew York Times articleby Pagan Kennedy:
“Now Schalk can get all the human brains he wants within walking distance of his office. In 2007, he discovered that the Albany Medical Center houses an epilepsy center, and he set up shop in his hometown, working closely with Anthony Ritaccio, a professor of neurology and neurosurgery at Albany Medical College.
When I met Ritaccio in front of the hospital, he also talked about the problems with fingers. ‘We’re always interested in doing things faster,’ he said. ‘I remember the transition to an electric typewriter. We’re addicted to speed. But obviously the way we communicate with computers is rather comical. The way we interact with this blazing fast machine is to poke at it with a finger.’
Schalk and Ritaccio’s research has been underwritten by a $2.2 million Department of Defense grant. The project is part of a $6.3 million Army initiative to invent devices for telepathic communication — for instance, a ‘telepathy helmet‘ that would allow soldiers to beam thoughts to one another. Schalk seemed untroubled by the military applications. He said the grant allows him to do research that could, one day, let us all — civilians included — merge with our machines.”
I don’t agree with the great Esquire writer Tom Junod that Jon Stewart has lost his sense of humor over the years, but here’s an excerpt from his interesting new profile of TV’s most-lauded truth-teller:
“Now, you have to understand Jon Stewart is just like everybody else: He can be a dick. His father took off when he was a kid, leaving a hole in his heart approximately the old man’s shoe size. He’s damaged and is capable of doing damage in return, especially in close quarters. There are plenty of Daily Show staffers, present and former, who love and revere their boss for his difficult brilliance. There are also plenty — mostly on the former side — who have been, well, fucked up by him and his need to dominate. When he arrived at The Daily Show in 1999, its humor was goofy and improvisational, based on the interplay between the fake-news host and the fake-news correspondents and dependent on whimsy and happenstance. But Stewart knew what he wanted right away, and it wasn’t that. He wanted the show to be more competitive, almost in a news-gathering sense, and he wanted it to have a point of view, which happened to be his own. There are writers and producers from the first five years of the show, both male and female, who are described as ‘battered wives’; hell, there are people who used to work for him who are scared to talk about him because they’re scared of not being able to work again. And before he pushed out the show’s cocreator, he notoriously threw a newspaper at her in a story meeting and then, according to a staffer, apologized to her later with the words ‘Sorry, that was the bad Jon — I try not to let him out…'”
From Aaron Saenz’s Singularity Hub post about Apple’s planned futuristic Cupertino offices, designed by Steve Jobs and scheduled to open in 2015: “Apple Campus 2, nicknamed ‘the Mothership,’ is set to break ground in 2012 and it looks simply stunning. Part flying saucer, part hadron super collider, part Dr. No’s lair, the Mothership will be a 2.8 million square foot facility located on a 175 acre lot off Highway 280 in Cupertino. Featuring a 1000 seat auditorium, 300,000 square feet of research space, and its own power plant, the new campus will house Apple and 12,000 in house employees in glorious style.”
At theAtlantic,Alexis Madrigal looks anew book by Shelley Adlerwhich comes to unusual conclusions about the mysterious cluster of deaths among Hmong men who had emigrated to America in the 1980s. The piece’s opening:
“They died in their sleep one by one, thousands of miles from home. Their median age was 33. All but one — 116 of the 117 — were healthy men. Immigrants from southeast Asia, you could count the time most had spent on American soil in just months. At the peak of the deaths in the early 1980s, the death rate from this mysterious problem among the Hmong ethnic group was equivalent to the top five natural causes of death for other American men in their age group.
Something was killing Hmong men in their sleep, and no one could figure out what it was. There was no obvious cause of death. None of them had been sick, physically. The men weren’t clustered all that tightly, geographically speaking. They were united by dislocation from Laos and a shared culture, but little else. Even House would have been stumped.
Doctors gave the problem a name, the kind that reeks of defeat, a dragon label on the edge of the known medical world: Sudden Unexpected Nocturnal Death Syndrome. SUNDS. It didn’t do much in terms of diagnosis or treatment, but it was easier to track the periodic conferences dedicated to understanding the problem.
Twenty-five years later, Shelley Adler’s new book pieces together what happened, drawing on interviews with the Hmong population and analyzing the extant scientific literature. Sleep Paralysis: Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind Body Connection is a mind-bending exploration of how what you believe interacts with how your body works. Adler, a professor at the University of California, San Francisco, comes to a stunning conclusion: In a sense, the Hmong were killed by their beliefs in the spirit world, even if the mechanism of their deaths was likely an obscure genetic cardiac arrhythmia that is prevalent in southeast Asia.”
“There’s a popular myth that NASA spent ‘millions’ of dollars developing a pen for astronauts to use in the weightless environment of a space ship — while their sensible Russian counterparts were happy to use the low-tech pencil. Alas, for all its appeal and plausibility, this is not true. Initially, astronauts and cosmonauts were both equipped with pencils, but there were problems: if a piece of lead broke off, for example, it could float into someone’s eye or nose. A pen was needed, one that would defy gravity, write in extreme heat or cold, and be leak proof: blobs of ink floating around the cabin would be more perilous than a stray pencil lead. A long-time pen maker named Paul C. Fisher patented the ‘space pen’ in 1965 (which he had developed at the cost of a million dollars, at the request of but not under the auspices of NASA.) NASA bought four hundred of them at $6 each, and, after a couple of years of testing, the pens were put into space.”
Steven Johnson, who wroteThe Ghost Map,a fascinating account of amateur epidemiology in Victorian England,shares his recollectionsof the mind-altering, game-changing effect of the Macintosh computer, in the Wall Street Journal. An excerpt:
“But that first Macintosh did much more than expand my data storage needs. It also fundamentally changed my relationship to technology—and in doing that, ultimately changed the course of my life.
It’s hard to remember now, but in the mid-1980s—before Wired Magazine, Pixar, dot-com start-ups, celebrity tweeting—being obsessed with your computer had almost no cultural cachet. You were just a nerd, full stop. The computers of the day had all the playfulness of a tax audit, and the creative people who used them did so begrudgingly.
But one look at the Mac and you could tell something was different. The white screen alone seemed revolutionary, after years of reading green text on a black background. And there were typefaces! I had been obsessed with typography since my grade-school years; here was a computer that treated fonts as an art, not just a clump of pixels. The then-revolutionary graphic interface made the screen feel like a space you wanted to inhabit, to make your own. To paraphrase Le Corbusier, the Mac was a machine you wanted to live in.” (Thanks Browser.)
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Steven Johnson revisits the cholera outbreak of 1854 during his TED Talk:
"There was no way for Ru to moderate his frenetic relentlessness. He pushed everything to the max." (Image by Tim Hipps.)
From frostbite to a broken neck to a plane crash to morbid obesity, Greco-Roman wrestler Rulon Gardner has famously cheated death so many times it’s difficult to remember that the farmboy scored one of the greatest upsets in Olympic history just a little more than a decade ago. From a 2007 GQ profile by Michael Paterniti:
“After defeating Karelin—in a match that became known as Miracle on the Mat—Ru appeared on Leno, Oprah, Letterman. He showed up at the Espy Awards and was photographed with Tiger Woods and Lara Flynn Boyle. He befriended heroes like Garth Brooks and Jason Giambi. He won the prestigious Sullivan Award, given to the country’s best amateur athlete. There were parades and city keys, more awards and gifts, including a waverunner from Rosie. He showed up in a ‘Got Milk?’ ad, hoisting buckets of milk while wearing a creamy white mustache. He went on tour, giving inspirational speeches to corporate clients willing to pay up to $15,000 a speech. He wrote his autobiography, titledNever Stop Pushing.
If he didn’t entirely believe his own legend yet, if he approached everyone as if he were still the old affectless Rulon Gardner, the farm boy from Star Valley seeking a little love and approval, he had seen through to a life beyond the Valley. And that life included proving he was no fluke by winning World Championships the following year and then preparing to defend his gold medal at the 2004 Games.
Where he once clandestinely sold the Cuban cigars he’d collected at an international meet in Havana in order to support himself, his new-won fame now turned on a spigot of income flow. His father had once lived over him, always on the verge of bankruptcy, and here he was, Rulon Gardner, a national treasure having made $250,000 the year after he won his gold—and the number was climbing. (‘He spent nine minutes on the mat with that ugly man from Russia,’ Reed Gardner jokingly told a reporter. ‘I spent fifty to sixty years on the farm, and I don’t have nothin’.’) So, he’d begun to accumulate toys, to live a grown-up version of the childhood he’d missed, with motorcycles and guns and a shiny snowmobile he took into the mountains near Star Valley. Of course there was no way for Ru to moderate his frenetic relentlessness. He pushed everything to the max.
Extreme snowmobiling can be as harrowing as any sport invented, man and machine against the mountain, finding aggressive routes up pitched faces, jumping rivers, riding into deep powder, and searching for perfect isolation. There are breakdowns and strandings, sudden submersions in icy water and the constant challenge of righting a 500-pound machine after having fallen chest-deep in snow—all in quest of some banana-cream vision out there through the trees, up on the ridge, gazing all those silver miles over Wyoming. In other words, it combines all the ingredients that make someone like Rulon Gardner tick: high-octane risk-taking, brute physicality, farm-boy ingenuity, nimble coordination, and conflict reduced to its simplest denominator, survival.
In February 2002, Ru went out snowmobiling with two friends in the Bridger-Teton National Forest, in Wyoming, thirty minutes from his home. They cruised the high peaks and winding valleys for a couple of hours until Ru peeled off, alone, into a gully of virgin snow near the head of the Salt River, ‘to play a little,’ as he put it. Shooshing down into the gully, he had no inkling that he wouldn’t be able to get out for seventeen hours. He was wearing a T-shirt, sweatshirt, and fleece pullover, having left his jacket behind. The sun had begun to dip in the sky; the temperature, which had been twenty-five degrees, began to plummet. Over the course of the next hours, Rulon tried to work his way out of the gully. His machine didn’t have the power necessary to take him back up the route he’d just dropped down. Worse, as he crisscrossed the Salt River in an increasing panic, occasionally submerging his sled, he found himself in a narrow gully where, ultimately, his machine became stuck between two boulders. During the journey, he had to repair a belt and fell four times into the river, soaking his clothes. (‘Once I got wet, I knew I had about an hour before frostbite and hypothermia,’ he said.) Finally, as night fell, he dug out a spot among the trees and waited for his own inevitable death. Sometime around 2 a.m., he heard the roar of snowmobiles, but then the sound faded. ‘I thought I was rescued,’ he said. ‘They came within 200 yards, and I was yelling, but they couldn’t hear me over their engines—and then they just turned away.’ He slipped in and out of consciousness, having visions: first of Jesus and then of his brother Ronald, who died at the age of 14 of a rare blood disease. (When his leg had to be amputated because of gangrene, Ronald said, ‘It’s okay, Dad, I can wrestle with one leg.’) Time crawled. What helped keep him alive was the thought of his family and friends finding him frozen there, a lifeless face with eyes open like Jack Nicholson in The Shining.
The next morning he was spotted by a search plane, and two hours later a helicopter landed, and he was able to crawl across the snow and climb in. His core body temperature had dropped into the 80s, and both his feet were so badly frostbit it would take four surgeries and three months before he could walk.” (Thanks TETW.)
At the New York Times, David Plotz, a really talented writer and editor, weighs in on the positive side of the utter lack of regulations overseeing America’s fertility business. An excerpt:
“The American fertility business has long been a cowboy enterprise — cavalier about rules, casual about paperwork, irritated by government interference. Its strange place on the political spectrum shielded it from the regulation that guides other kinds of medicine, or real estate, or even used car sales. Conservatives, skeptical of regulation, were glad to leave fertility alone, and let it grow into a profitable marketplace. Liberals, normally fond of regulation, were leery of doing anything to dictate women’s reproductive choices. The result was an open field.
And there’s no doubt that the American fertility business has been way too chaotic: Sperm banks run by unqualified cranks, unscrupulous egg donation schemes, and practically no way to keep track of who’s fathering whom. (In my reporting, I’ve met numerous sperm donors who travel from bank to bank to bank, spawning uncounted numbers of kids, and leaving virtually no paper trail.) It’s certain that more regulation, and an end to donor anonymity, would clean up the industry, soothe customers, and help donor offspring.
Still, we’ll miss the lawless fertility business when it’s gone. Its lack of rules spurred innovation, and transformed fertility from a prudish, conservative corner of medicine into a consumer-driven business.”
About 5% of Americans believe that they are “allergic” to the electromagnetic waves that allow our seemingly endless communications connectivity. Some have begun taking refuge in a Radio Quiet Zone in West Virginia. From a BBC report:
“Diane Schou is unable to hold back the tears as she describes how she once lived in a shielded cage to protect her from the electromagnetic radiation caused by waves from wireless communication.
‘It’s a horrible thing to have to be a prisoner,’ she says. ‘You become a technological leper because you can’t be around people.
‘It’s not that you would be contagious to them – it’s what they’re carrying that is harmful to you.’
Ms Schou is one of an estimated 5% of Americans who believe they suffer from Electromagnetic Hypersensitivity (EHS), which they say is caused by exposure to electromagnetic fields typically created by mobile phones, wi-fi and other electronic equipment.”
David Packard's garage, Palo Alto, the birthplace of Silican Valley.
America’s Dream Factory used to be Hollywood, but it’s Silicon Valley now, a place where science and tech push furiously toward the future, untouched even by severe global economic woes. From “Bubble Boys,” Christopher Beam’s smart New York magazine article about a world of big ideas and even bigger money:
“Right this minute, Silicon Valley is America’s opposite: House prices are soaring and demand for young talent far outstrips supply. The ongoing cyberspace race between Facebook, Apple, and Google, among others, means computer engineers enjoy more freedom—and power—than ever before. The barriers to entry for web programming are almost nonexistent. Angel investors are blessing start-ups left and right, and launching a software company is cheaper than ever. Do I take the offer from Google, or take the venture capital to start my own thing? Only in this one little quadrant do people have the luxury to ask such questions. For Feross [Aboukhadijeh], the son of a schoolteacher and a Syrian-born electrical engineer, the forecast is bright, though indistinct. He may become the next Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs; he may not. But while most of the country is in economic darkness, the American Dream is beaming bright in Palo Alto.”
The Cornell Creative Machines Lab is trying to popularize 3D food printers. From a Lakshmi Sandhana article in Fast Company:
“The newest 3-D food printer, now being honed at CCML, can produce: tiny space shuttle-shaped scallop nuggets (image above); and cakes or cookies that, when you slice into them, reveal a special message buried within, like a wedding date, initials (image below) or a corporate logo. They can also make a solid hamburger patty, with liquid layers of ketchup and mustard, or a hamburger substitute that’s made from vegan or raw foods.
The CCML food printers require edible inks and electronic blueprints called FabApps. This machine prints food using multiple cartridges, going line by line until the desired shape is extruded. ‘The electronic blueprint specifies exactly which materials go where–it is essentially a blueprint of the food item,’ says Hod Lipson, the head of the lab.”
Trains that look like rockets will, perhaps, take China to the moon or the future or something, even as concerns about corruption and safety linger. In “How Fast Can China Go?” in the new Vanity Fair, Simon Winchester writes about riding the recent inaugural CRH380A bullet between Shanghai and Beijing. An excerpt:
“Shanghai’s Rainbow Bridge Station is sited next to the city’s old (but newly rebuilt) domestic airport and in a fast-growing nexus of skyscrapers, restaurants, and subway lines (the city had no subway lines until 1995 and now has 11, each one built deeper than the last). The station is run by a woman, Bao Zhenghong. She is a little under 40, pretty, brisk, friendly, with a blue diamond-shaped badge of authority (over dozens of men, at least) on the sleeve of her no-nonsense uniform blouse. As she paced down the concourse marble she remarked, between shy grins and blushes, that she had started work as a menial at a suburban station 20 years ago, on graduation from technical school. She could not in her wildest dreams, she said, have imagined being so swiftly promoted to take total control of this $2.3 billion glass monument (built in only two years) to China’s newness. Hers is the largest station in Asia, with 60 platforms: it sees 250,000 passengers a day, is made of 80,000 tons of steel, is home to countless stores and restaurants and viewing galleries, and is powered by the biggest solar-panel array in creation.
Miss Bao earns only $900 a month, hardly within a whisper of her country’s growing battalions of millionaires, but she’s proud nonetheless: A young woman like me, she gestured at the echoing immensity, standing under a football-field-size electronic display flickering with train information. Who could have believed it?
But behind her was a red silk banner, which was half the station’s width, and which probably granted her all the credibility she needed. It was a banner displaying a 100-yard-long sentence in large Chinese characters, a reminder of the underpinning ethos of a country that to many seems merely—but probably wrongly—a capitalist juggernaut, spinning wildly toward an improbable future. The sign was old-school politburo propaganda, the kind of rhetoric that once blared interminably down from loudspeakers in every factory and village commune in the country. It displayed for the ideological benefit of everyone in her station a sober exhortation, one that most station workers know by heart: LET US ALL WORK HARD TO HARNESS THE GOOD OF TECHNOLOGICAL ACHIEVEMENT TO CREATE THE FINEST RAILWAY IN THE WORLD FOR THE ULTIMATE BETTERMENT OF THE CHINESE PEOPLE. Miss Bao grinned. Perhaps that is why an achievement like hers is more believable.”
From a Steve Lohr New York Times article about computer-written articles proliferating online thanks to new software, like that created by the good people at Narrative Science:
“The company’s software takes data, like that from sports statistics, company financial reports and housing starts and sales, and turns it into articles. For years, programmers have experimented with software that wrote such articles, typically for sports events, but these efforts had a formulaic, fill-in-the-blank style. They read as if a machine wrote them.
But Narrative Science is based on more than a decade of research, led by two of the company’s founders, Kris Hammond and Larry Birnbaum, co-directors of theIntelligent Information Laboratory at Northwestern University, which holds a stake in the company. And the articles produced by Narrative Science are different.
‘I thought it was magic,’ says Roger Lee, a general partner of Battery Ventures, which led a $6 million investment in the company earlier this year. ‘It’s as if a human wrote it.'”
About the engineering of self-destroying species, from New Scientist:
“IN THE urban jungle of Juazeiro in Brazil, an army is being unleashed. It is an army like no other: the soldiers’ mission is to copulate rather than fight. But they are harbingers of death, not love. Their children appear healthy at first but die just before they reach adulthood, struck down by the killer genes their fathers passed on to them.
These soldiers are the first of a new kind of creature – ‘autocidal’ maniacs genetically modified to wipe out their own kind without harming other creatures. The first animals being targeted with these ‘living pesticides’ are disease-carrying mosquitoes and crop-munching caterpillars, but the approach should work with just about any animal – from invasive fish and frogs to rats and rabbits. If it is successful, it could transform the way we think about genetically engineered animals.”
Kleenex was apparently not originally intended for nose-blowing. From “It’s Spreading,” Jill Lepore’s excellent 2009 New Yorker article about the media feeding frenzy that created the Parrot Flu scare of the 1929-30:
“By the twenties, Americans, and especially housewives, lived in fear of germs. Not only did newspapers and magazines run almost daily stories about newly discovered germs like undulant fever but their pages were filled with advertisements for hygiene products, like Listerine (first sold over the counter in 1914 and, in many ways, the granddaddy of Purell), Lysol (marketed, in 1918, as an anti-flu measure), Kotex (‘feminine hygiene,’ the first menstrual pad, introduced in 1920, a postwar conversion of a surgical dressing developed by Kimberly-Clark), Cellophane (1923), and Kleenex (1924; another Kimberly-Clark product, sold as a towel for removing makeup until a consumer survey revealed that people were using it to blow their noses).” (Thanks Longform.)
Why build a skyscraper or shopping mall in a developing country when you can put up a small private city? That’s the thinking of Russia’s Renaissance Partners, which is currently building an insta-city in Kenya and has announced plans for another in the Congo. A note about the massive projects from the Moscow Times:
“The investment unit of Renaissance Group plans to build a 2,600-hectare city in the Democratic Republic of Congo as it seeks to benefit from Africa’s urbanization.
Renaissance Partners is working on a master plan for the new urban center after securing land outside Lubumbashi, the country’s second-largest city, Arnold Meyer, Renaissance Partners’ managing director for real estate in Africa, said in London.
‘The West has peaked in terms of economic growth and the new markets are in Africa,’ Meyer said. ‘And the main drivers of this growth in Africa are going to be cities.
Renaissance’s Lubumbashi project will be more than double the size of Tatu City, the $5 billion center that the firm is building from scratch outside the Kenyan capital of Nairobi.” (Thanks Marginal Revolution.)
Bill “Spaceman” Lee, a true countculture character who starred in the very button-down sport of baseball from 1969-1982, was an outspoken eccentric who bragged about sprinkling marijuana on his pancakes. In the years before he was blackballed from the sport, Lee was profiled in all his mad glory in a1978 Sports Illustrated articleby Curry Kirkpatrick. An excerpt:
“Much of Lee’s rambling over the years has been about such terrific subjects as pyramid power, zero population growth, the goodness of soyburgers, the badness of sugar, interplanetary creative Zen Buddhism and heavy, heavy, zapped-out karma. But Lee’s philosophy is more out of comic books—to be specific, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, which his 8-year-old son Michael shares with his dad—than Nietzsche or Vonnegut or even Paramahansa Yogananda…
The Boston-area public always has been divided along geographical as well as generational lines in its feelings toward Lee. In the blue-collar Irish bars of Southie, Lee was anathema after he defended Judge Arthur Garrity Jr., who ordered the desegregation of Boston schools by busing, as ‘the only guy in this town with any guts.’ On the other hand, the Spaceman was a prince to the city’s hip-liberal college population—largely based in Cambridge—which was thrilled by his outspoken lobbying for decriminalization of marijuana and his open defiance of pot laws.
The Red Sox were left in a quandary as to just what to do with Lee. Possibly the most straitlaced organization in all of pro sports, Boston was one of the first teams to impose a no-liquor rule on team flights and one of the last to dress out in form-fitting knit uniforms. In the matter of race, the Sox signed their first black player—Pumpsie Green—long after every other team in the majors had blacks. Even today only two U.S.-born blacks are on theRed Sox’ roster, Jim Rice and George Scott.
In Lee, team officials saw a flaming radical, junkballing journeyman lefthander with no fastball, no loyalty and no moral values. Yet they also saw a media hero who visited all the sick children, kept the sports talk shows in clover and drew crowds to Fenway Park.”
“Michael Hart, who was widely credited with creating the first e-book when he typed the Declaration of Independence into a computer on July 4, 1971, and in so doing laid the foundations for Project Gutenberg, the oldest and largest digital library, was found dead on Tuesday at his home in Urbana, Ill. He was 64
His death was confirmed by Gregory B. Newby, the chief executive and director of Project Gutenberg, who said that the cause had not yet been determined.
Mr. Hart found his life’s mission when the University of Illinois, where he was a student, gave him a user’s account on a Xerox Sigma V mainframe computerat the school’s Materials Research Lab.
Estimating that the computer time in his possession was worth $100 million, Mr. Hart began thinking of a project that might justify that figure. Data processing, the principal application of computers at the time, did not capture his imagination. Information sharing did.”
From theBulletin of Atonmic Scientists, about one of the lesser costs, the financial one, of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan:
“If the newspapers periodically remind us of these slain American soldiers by showing us the ‘faces of the fallen,’ the injured are less visible, but the cost of caring for them will only increase. Nearly 100,000 American soldiers have been officially wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, but many injuries, such as post-traumatic-stress disorder, may not manifest until after deployment. More than 522,000 veterans of our Middle Eastern wars have now filed disability claims. Based on prior experience in World War II, Korea, and Vietnam, we know that the health care costs of such veterans do not peak until 30 to 40 years after the wars are over. In other words, we could pull every last soldier out of Iraq and Afghanistan tomorrow, but the costs of caring for them will keep climbing until at least 2040. These costs are expected to total between $600 billion and $1 trillion.”
This classic 1974 NASA photograph shows the Skylab Orbital Workshop in its final orbit before returning to Earth. Skylab became a sensation of sorts behind closed doors in Washington because the astronauts photographed the super-secretive Area 51 (also known as “Groom Lake”), even though they had been ordered not to. Once the mission was complete, there was a scrum among various agencies for control of the photos (which were never released). Dwayne A. Day revealed the brouhaha in 2006 for the Space Review. An excerpt:
“Far out in the Nevada desert, miles from prying eyes, is a secret Air Force facility that has been known by numerous names over the years. It has been called Paradise Ranch, Watertown Strip, Area 51, Dreamland, and Groom Lake. Groom is probably the most mythologized real location that few people have ever seen. According to people with overactive imaginations, it is where the United States government keeps dead aliens, clones them, and reverse-engineers their spacecraft. It is also where NASA filmed the faked Moon landings.
However, for humans whose feet rest on solid ground, Groom is the site of highly secret aircraft development. It is where the U-2 spyplane, the Mach 3 Blackbird, and the F-117 stealth fighter were all developed. It has also probably hosted its own fleet of captured, stolen, or clandestinely acquired Soviet and Russian aircraft. Because of this, the United States government has gone to extraordinary lengths to preserve the area’s secrecy and to prevent people from seeing it.
This secrecy was threatened in early 1974 when the astronauts on Skylab pointed their camera out the window and took pictures of a facility that did not officially exist. They returned to Earth and their photographs quickly became a headache for NASA, the CIA, and the Department of Defense.”
“GPS and the End of the Road“ is Ari N. Schulman’s New Atlantis article about how the technological boom has resulted in a revolution in navigation. Of course, while we know better where we’re headed, other people also know where we’re headed. And reliance on GPS likely diminishes our ability to naturally navigate, making it one more step in the direction of cars that drive themselves. An excerpt:
“If each successive era has closed an old realm of exploration while opening up another, then what are we to make of the innovations in navigational technologies that have just gotten underway in earnest over the last ten years? The rise of digital mapping and the Global Positioning System (GPS) has seemed to come upon us almost as a matter of course, blended in with the general dawning of the digital age, and on its own relatively unremarked — but it has in a blink ushered in the greatest revolution in navigation since the map and compass.
The conception of GPS by the U.S. military began in the 1960s. Satellites with extremely precise onboard clocks constantly send out packets of information containing the time and coordinate at which they were sent; navigation devices here below receive the signal and calculate the transit time and distance. By combining information from several satellites, an accurate and precise coordinate for the navigation device can be calculated. In 1983, a navigational error sent Korean Air Lines Flight 007 into restricted Soviet airspace, where it was shot down, killing all 269 people aboard; subsequently, President Reagan directed that GPS be opened up for civilian use once it had been fully implemented. This occurred in the early 1990s, when a network of satellites was put in place.” (ThanksLongform.)
For whatever reason, I lately find myself thinking about a 2006 Economist obituary for Pink Floyd’s Syd Barrett, who self-medicated his worsening mental illness with massive doses of LSD, extinguishing his great talent by 1968, three years after the group had formed. An excerpt from the obit:
“His weird words and odd, simplistic melodies, sent through an echo-machine, seemed sometimes to be coming from outer space.
Yet there was also something quintessentially English and middle class about Mr Barrett. His songs contained the essence of Cambridge, his home town: bicycles, golden robes, meadows and the river. Startlingly, he sang his hallucinations in the perfect, almost prissy enunciation of the Home Counties. He made it possible to do rock in English rather than American, inspiring David Bowie among others. The band’s first album, ‘The Piper at the Gates of Dawn’ (1967), made Mr Barrett central, plaintively calling up the new age from some distant and precarious place.
Yet the songs were already tipping over into chaos, and by January 1968 Mr Barrett was unable to compose or, almost, to function. Dope, LSD and pills, consumed by the fistful, overwhelmed a psyche that was already fragile and could not bear the pressures of success. At concerts he would simply play the same note over and over, or stand still in a trance. If he played, no one knew where he was going, least of all himself. The band did not want to part with him, but could not cope with him; so he was left behind, or left them, enduring drug terrors in a cupboard under the stairs in his London flat. Casualties of ‘bad trips’ usually recovered, with stark warnings for the unwary. Mr Barrett, famously, went on too many and never came back.”
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“Come on you raver, you seer of visions / Come on you painter, you piper, you prisoner”:
Umpiring baseball apparently comes with a degree of ethnic bias, as millions of pitch calls were analyzed and umpires displayed a persistent tendency to call pitches more favorably for members of their own ethnic group. Considering how few African-American baseball players there currently are and the lack of Latin American umpires, I wonder if that sample size had an effect on the study. An excerpt from an article on Ars Technica by John Timmer:
“Several studies have shown that sporting officials have a tendency to exhibit subtle biases in favor of members of their own ethnic group, So, an umpire that’s white might be expected to favor a white pitcher, giving him more favorable calls when pitches are at the edge of the strike zone. This sort of bias might be expected to be subtle, but the research has the sort of statistical power that comes from large numbers: a record of over 3.5 million pitches, and what their outcomes were. (Here, the authors turned to ESPN.com for a pitch-by-pitch record of the game to match up with their computer data.)
After eliminating things like foul balls, swinging strikes, and intentional balls, the authors still had a very impressive collection of data to work with: 1.9 million pitches in which the umpires made a decision. Then came the real drudge work. Using sources such as About.com and web searches, the authors pieced together the ethnic origins of all the major league players and umpires involved. And then they started crunching numbers. And what they found was a subtle bias that went away when the umpires thought someone was watching them.”
Has the rise of the machines made widespread enployment in America a thing of the past? That’s the question Douglas Rushkoff asks at the CNN site. An excerpt:
“New technologies are wreaking havoc on employment figures — from EZpasses ousting toll collectors to Google-controlled self-driving automobiles rendering taxicab drivers obsolete. Every new computer program is basically doing some task that a person used to do. But the computer usually does it faster, more accurately, for less money, and without any health insurance costs.
We like to believe that the appropriate response is to train humans for higher level work. Instead of collecting tolls, the trained worker will fix and program toll-collecting robots. But it never really works out that way, since not as many people are needed to make the robots as the robots replace.
And so the president goes on television telling us that the big issue of our time is jobs, jobs, jobs — as if the reason to build high-speed rails and fix bridges is to put people back to work. But it seems to me there’s something backwards in that logic. I find myself wondering if we may be accepting a premise that deserves to be questioned.
I am afraid to even ask this, but since when is unemployment really a problem? I understand we all want paychecks — or at least money. We want food, shelter, clothing, and all the things that money buys us. But do we all really want jobs?
We’re living in an economy where productivity is no longer the goal, employment is. That’s because, on a very fundamental level, we have pretty much everything we need. America is productive enough that it could probably shelter, feed, educate, and even provide health care for its entire population with just a fraction of us actually working.”
