Excerpts

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“This Is No Graffito, This Is No Train, This Is A Jean-Michel Basquiat. This Is A Keith Haring.”

March 9, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

"I'm always amazed at how people come up with things. Like Jean-Michel." (Image by Michael Halsband.)

From Rene Ricard’s 1981 Artforum article, “The Radiant Child,” which was the first major piece to look at the work of emerging NYC artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring:

“Graffiti refutes the idea of anonymous art where we know everything about a work except who made it: who made it is the whole Tag. Blade, Lady Pink, Pray, Sex, Taki, Cliff 159, Futura 2000, Dondi, Zephyr, Izzy, Haze, Daze, Fred, Kool, Stan 153, SAMO, Crash. (Crash is still bombing.) But trains get buffed (the damnatio memoriae of the Transit Authority), and with the need for identity comes the artist’s need for identification with the work, and to support oneself by the work is the absolute distinction between the amateur and the pro. Therefore, the obvious was to raise oneself by the supreme effort of will from the block, from the subway, to the Mudd, to the relative safety and hygiene of the gallery. Because an artist is somebody. Say what you will about group shows and collaborative enterprise: Das Kapital was written by one man. This is no graffito, this is no train, this is a Jean-Michel Basquiat. This is a Keith Haring.

Both these artists are a success in the street where the most critical evaluation of a graffito takes place. Jean-Michel is proud of his large SAMO Tag in a schoolyard, surrounded by other Tags on top of Tags, yet not marked over. This demonstrates respect for the artist as not just a graffitist but as an individual, the worth of whose Tag is recognized. There’s prestige in not being bombed over. There are also fake SAMOS and Harings as well as a counter-Haring graffitist who goes around erasing him. The ubiquity of Jean-Michel’s SAMO and Haring’s baby Tags has the same effect as advertising; so famous now is that baby button that Haring was mugged by four 13-year-olds for the buttons he was carrying (as well as for his Sony Walkman.) The Radiant Child on the button is Haring’s Tag. It is a slick Madison Avenue colophon. It looks as if it’s always been there. The greatest thing is to come up with something so good it seems as if it’s always been there, like a proverb. Opposite the factory-fresh Keith Haring is Jean-Michel’s abandoned cityscape. His prototype, the spontaneous collage of peeling posters, has been there for everyone’s ripping off. His earlier paintings were the logical extension of what you could do with a city wall. (For the moment he’s stopped the collage.) His is a literal case of bringing something in off the street but with the element of chance removed. I’m always amazed at how people come up with things. Like Jean-Michel. How did he come up with the words he puts all over everything, his way of making a point without overstating the case, using one or two words he reveals a political acuity, gets the viewer going in the direction he wants, the illusion of the bombed-over wall. One or two words containing a full body. One or two words on a Jean-Michel contain the entire history of graffiti. What he incorporates into his pictures, whether found or made, is specific and selective. He has a perfect idea of what he’s getting across, using everything that collates to his vision.”

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Just under a year before Keith Haring died:

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The Next Generation Of The Google Search

March 9, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"Google is staking its claim in a near-future world where nearly every computing device will have its own eyes and ears." (Image by Coolcaesar.)

By focusing research and development on speech recognition, machine translation and computer vision, Google is looking to be the brand leader in the next epoch of search engines, in which there will be a supercomputer in your pocket capable of conducting searches that are light years smarter than the current ones. An excerpt from “Inside Google’s Age of Augmented Reality,” Wade Roush’s article in Xconomy:

“Here’s how [Eric] Schmidt put it in his speech: ‘When I walk down the streets of Berlin, I love history, [and] what I want is, I want the computer, my smartphone, to be doing searches constantly. ‘Did you know this occurred here, this occurred there?’ Because it knows who I am, it knows what I care about, and it knows roughly where I am.’ And, as Schmidt might have added, the smartphone will know what he’s seeing. ‘So this notion of autonomous search, the ability to tell me things that I didn’t know but I probably am very interested in, is the next great stage, in my view, of search.’

This type of always-on, always-there search is, by definition, mobile. Indeed, Schmidt says Google search traffic from mobile devices grew by 50 percent in the first half of 2010, faster than every other kind of search. And by sometime between 2013 and 2015, analysts agree, the number of people accessing the Web from their phones and tablet devices will surpass the number using desktop and laptop PCs.

By pursuing a data-driven, cloud-based, ‘mobile first’ strategy, therefore, Google is staking its claim in a near-future world where nearly every computing device will have its own eyes and ears, and where the boundaries of the searchable will be much broader. ‘Google works on the visual information in the world, the spoken and textual and document information in the world,’ says Michael Cohen, Google’s speech technology leader. So in the long run, he says, technologies like speech recognition, machine translation, and computer vision ‘help flesh out the whole long-term vision of organizing literally all the world’s information and making it accessible. We never want you to be in a situation where you wish you could get at some of this information, but you can’t.'” (Thanks Longform.)

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Listeria: Definition Of Five “B” Words (1912)

March 9, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

(Image by Gonzalo Rivero.)

Baseball: A glorified and systematized development of the old English game of “rounders,” now recognized in the United States as a distinctively national pastime. It is played spectacularly by highly-paid professional experts as well as by skilled amateurs, with a hard leather-covered ball of lightly twisted yarn, over a rubber core, and a rounded wooden bat or club not exceeding 42 inches long or 2 1/2 inches in diameter. Nine men constitute each side: one team takes the field and the others go to bat in rotation. The pitcher of the outside delivers the ball to the selected striker of the inside, who endeavors to hit it so as to elude the fielders and run around the bases without being caught or put out. Occasionally the hit may result in a “home run,” i.e., a round of the bases without being put out; usually the strikes are one, two, but sometimes three “base hits.” As each safe hit is made those on the bases run to the next and so on until one run is scored by the third baseman reaching the “plate.” Should the batsman miss three balls from the pitcher and the third ball be caught by the catcher, the striker is out. Upon three men being put out by catching or touching with the ball when off the bases, the fielding side go in; and after nine innings have been completed the side having registered most runs is declared to have won. The catcher stands behind the striker, to catch and throw to the basemen in the field the balls pitched to the striker. All the fielding side need to be good throwers, swift runners, and sure at a catch. The game is governed by very elaborate rules, and the umpire’s position is very responsible. Baseball is played upon level expanses of turf not less than 500 feet by 350 feet.

Beard: The hair on a man’s face. Little is found among Africans, Chinese and Eskimos. It is heavy with the Europeans and the Semitic races. The Egyptians shaved the whole body, the Greeks and later Romans the whole face, and this was the European custom of the eighteenth century.

Bicycle: A two-wheeled machine (successor to the velocipede of large wheel) which about 1870 came into vogue. It then consisted of one high wheel, driven by the pedals, and a small connecting wheel, behind. In its present form, with two wheels of even circumference, pneumatic tires, and effective gearing, it is a much more manageable affair, and obtained for a while a very wide adoption by all classes, young and old, male and female. The motor-bicycle is the latest form of this two-wheeled road machine.

Birth-mark: A discoloration, like the so-called “port wine stain,” on the skin of a human being. It sometimes disfigures the whole countenance. It is usually a case of enlarged blood vessels and is attributed popularly to some ungratified longing on the part of the mother of the sufferer during her pregnancy.

Black Hand: A secret organization of Italians, Sicilians and Neapolitans mainly, so-called from the emblem used by it in making its demands. Has been active in New York City and wherever there is a large Italian element, giving much trouble to the detective force. The assassination of Giuseppe Petrosino, a New York City detective in Italy, was laid at its door. The better class of Italians in this country have organized to pull it down.

•Taken from the 1912 Standard Illustrated Book of Facts.

See also:

 

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Why Chris Rock Likes The Tea Party

March 9, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Chris Rock: "It actually feels like racism's almost over." (Image by dbking.)


From Scott Raab’s Esquire interview:

“Scott Raab: Like many nice Caucasians, I cried the night Barack Obama was elected. It was one of the high points in American history. And all that’s happened since the election is just a shitstorm of hatred. You want to weigh in on that?

Chris Rock: I actually like it, in the sense that — you got kids? Kids always act up the most before they go to sleep. And when I see the Tea Party and all this stuff, it actually feels like racism’s almost over. Because this is the last— this is the act up before the sleep. They’re going crazy. They’re insane. You want to get rid of them — and the next thing you know, they’re fucking knocked out. And that’s what’s going on in the country right now.”

 

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Immigrants Arrive At Ellis Island (1902)

March 8, 2011 in Excerpts, Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

Hopeful of entering America, immigrants are processed at Ellis Island. (Image by Underwood & Underwood.)

The classic photograph above shows the huddled masses being processed after reaching Ellis Island in 1902, hoping to be admitted into America. But sometimes entrée was complicated, even if you were remarkably beautiful. An article in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Her Beauty Is Bewildering: A Captivating French Girl Who Is To Be Sent Home” (May 25, 1894): “Sitting in the detention pen at Ellis Island this morning was a French girl of such rare beauty as is seldom seen witnessed by authorities of the immigrant isle. A wealth of golden hair crowned a face, the profile of which is perfect. Her complexion is fresh and rosy, and the large, dreamy blue eyes have a sad expression. The employees have tried in vain to cheer her up and she is continually surrounded by a number of them. She is waiting to be sent back to her home on the next outgoing American line steamship, and this is her story.

Her name is Amelia Caron, 17 years old, and before she sailed for this country on the Paris, which arrived here May 12, she had lived with her parents and elder sister in the village of Chambre, France. which is about an hour’s ride from Paris. There she met and loved a young man named Caesar Hall, 26 years old. They took passage on the Paris together, and upon reaching Ellis Island told authorities they were married. The man was well dressed, good looking and said he was a clerk, They were to live at the Leo house, 6 State street, a semi religious boarding place. Early this week Hall was arrested, charged with stealing 700 francs from a passenger on the voyage across, and was held for trial. The proprietor of the boarding house informed Dr. Senner of the girl’s predicament as her lover had all their funds, which were considerable, and which secured their release from the island.

The authorities took the girl back on Tuesday last. She was examined by the board of special inquiry, when she admitted that she was not married to Hall, but had eloped with him. She was ordered sent back to her home.”

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Immigrants arrive at Ellis Island, 1906:

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“The Life Of The Party At A Beefsteak Used To Be The Man Who Let Out The Most Enthusiastic Grunts”

March 8, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

"At a contemporary beefsteak it is unusual for a man to do away with more than six pounds of meat and thirty glasses of beer."

Joseph Mitchell’s great 1939 New Yorker story, “All You Can Hold For Five Bucks.” profiles the NYC tradition of the working-class beefsteak dinner, which was begun in the 1880s by political machines and has long-survived only in obsolescence. An excerpt from the article about how women, who began attending the banquets in the 1920s, “corrupted” the tradition of the beer-soaked beef-fest:

“It didn’t take women long to corrupt the beefsteak. They forced the addition of such things as Manhattan cocktails, fruit cups, and fancy salads to the traditional menu of slices of ripened steaks, double lamb chops, kidneys, and beer by the pitcher. They insisted on dance orchestras instead of brassy German bands. The life of the party at a beefsteak used to be the man who let out the most enthusiastic grunts, drank the most beer, ate the most steak, and got the most grease on his ears, but women do not esteem a glutton, and at a contemporary beefsteak it is unusual for a man to do away with more than six pounds of meat and thirty glasses of beer. Until around 1920, beefsteak etiquette was rigid. Knives, forks, napkins, and tablecloths never had been permitted; a man was supposed to eat with his hands. When beefsteaks became bisexual, the etiquette changed. For generations men had worn their second-best suits because of the inevitability of grease spots; tuxedos and women appeared simultaneously. Most beefsteaks degenerated into polite banquets at which open-face sandwiches of grilled steak happened to be the principal dish.”

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“I Took Back A Barrel Of Bones To New York. They Were My Symbols Of The Desert.”

March 8, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Open Culture posted this cool video of a 92-year-old Georgia O’Keeffe.

An excerpt from “Horizons of a Pioneer,” a 1968 Life cover story about O’Keeffe, who found other artists in New York but truly found her own art in New Mexico:

“When I came to New Mexico in the summer of 1929, I was so crazy about the country that I thought, how can I take part of it with me to work on? There was nothing to see in the land in the way of a flower. There were just dry white bones. So I picked them up. People were pretty annoyed having their cars filled with those bones. But I took back a barrel of bones to New York. They were my symbols of the desert, but nothing more. I haven’t sense enough to think of any other symbolism. The skulls were there and I could say something with them. To me they are as beautiful as anything I know. To me they are strangely more living than the animals walking around–hair, eyes and all, with their tails switching. The bones seem to cut sharply to the center of something that is keely alive on the desert even though it is vast and empty and untouchable–and knows no kindness with all its beauty.”


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“Stock Markets Are Now Dangerously Short-Sighted”

March 8, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

"Mass media, especially TV today, is so short-term that few in its audience grasp the lasting damage." (Image by Kowloonese.)

Going public on the stock exchange was traditionally a way for small businesses to raise capital to grow their companies. But what if the shortsightedness of the markets–and the media that attends them–is more injurious to a company than helpful? Facebook recently passed on going public in favor of private investors and the number of public American companies has shrunk from 7,500 to 4,100 since 1997. That means that the average person has less access to potential wealth-building opportunities while the monied few have more to gain. An excerpt from Jason Kirby’s “The Stock Market Is for Suckers” in McClean’s:

“In 2004, at the age of 92, the late Sir John Templeton, a pioneer in the world of mutual funds, issued a stark warning to investors. ‘The stock market is broken,’ he said in an interview. He went on to predict the housing bubble would spark the sort of terrible market crash we witnessed four years later. But Templeton saw a bigger problem than just the bubble then emerging. Stock markets are now dangerously short-sighted. ‘Mass media, especially TV today, is so short-term that few in its audience grasp the lasting damage and corrective impact which will continue to linger from the greatest financial crash in world history,’ he said. In the wake of that very crash, short-term thinking is as much a problem as ever before.

The stats behind investors’ amputated attention spans are astonishing, and reveal the damage caused to the wider economy. According to the New York Stock Exchange, in the 1960s the holding period for stocks was eight years. By 1990 it had fallen to two years and today the average stock is held for just nine months. As investors have shortened their time horizons, companies have been focused on each next quarter’s financial results at the expense of the next decade, say experts. Last spring, the U.S. Senate banking committee held hearings to examine the plague of short-term thinking in capital markets. Some astonishing revelations emerged. In a survey of 400 chief financial officers, 80 per cent said they’d cut research and development spending to goose short-term performance. To make matters worse, when companies do beat expectations, executives are lavished with huge paycheques and millions of stock options that dilute existing shareholders even further.”

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Listeria: Definition Of Five “A” Words (1912)

March 8, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Abduction: A term for the forcible carrying off of a woman, either against her own will or the right of her legal protector. It is an offense severely punished as a felony. The abduction of an unmarried girl under sixteen is punishable as a misdemeanor even when there has been no intent of detention against the will of her parents or guardian.

Abortion: The expulsion of a fœtus from the womb before it is capable of life. Prior to the sixth month of pregnancy it is called miscarriage. It is hereditary and may be prevented, by repose, good regimen and the avoidance of constipation. If intentional it is a statutory offense and if the woman dies it is felony. In domestic animals it may be avoided by isolation, proper food and level stalls.

Alcoholism: The symptoms of alcohol poisoning. In acute alcohol-poisoning the victim’s face becomes flushed, his hands shaky, his speech rapid and incoherent, his control of his limbs uncertain and finally his entire nervous system becomes paralyzed so that he falls into a coma from which he cannot be moved. Others instead of becoming conscious grow frantic and try to injure those about them, and thus, especially after a long debauch, the most frightful crimes are committed.

Astrology: The science of discovering the past and determining the future by the movement of the stars. It was the science of sciences in olden times, but today has only a small number of adepts, besides the always numerous number of persons easily victimized by charlatans claiming to be able to read the “past, present and future.”

Automobile: The name generally applied to a self-propelled vehicle which carries its own fuel. The pleasure of moving at great speed and for great distances has made automobiles a permanent feature in modern life, thought and action, though law has not been able to control the abuse of this new force. They are coming more and more into employment for commercial purposes, and their great cleanliness in the streets is a sanitary advantage. In time they will diminish the loneliness and hardship of life upon the farm.

•Taken from the 1912 Standard Illustrated Book of Facts.

“McLuhan Did Not Want To Live In The Global Village. The Prospect Frightened Him.”

March 7, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Gary Wolf’s 1993 Wired article about Marshall McLuhan, “The Wisdom of Saint Marshall, the Holy Fool”:

McLuhan did not want to live in the global village. The prospect frightened him. Print culture had produced rational man, in whom vision was the dominant sense. Print man lived in a world that was secular rather than sacred, specialized rather than holistic.

But when information travels at electronic speeds, the linear clarity of the print age is replaced by a feeling of “all-at-onceness.” Everything everywhere happens simultaneously. There is no clear order or sequence. This sudden collapse of space into a single unified field ‘dethrones the visual sense.’ This is what the global village means: we are all within reach of a single voice or the sound of tribal drums. For McLuhan, this future held a profound risk of mass terror and sudden panic.

The current idea of a global village as a place of universal harmony and industrious basket-weaving is a tourist’s fantasy. McLuhan gave in to the intoxication of this hope for a few years in the early ’60s, and it is evident throughout Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, his most optimistic work. In that book, McLuhan sings of the furthest reaches of electronic culture, when computer technology has replaced language with instant nonverbal communication. He compares this mystical unification of humanity to the Christian Pentecost. But McLuhan soon realized that before the Pentecost comes suffering and crucifixion, and while we are all waiting for the Holy Ghost to descend, Jerusalem is likely to be scary as hell.•

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Bukowski On The Dark Side Of Democracy

March 7, 2011 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

“Law,” by Charles Bukowski:

“Look,“ he told me,
“all those little children dying in the trees.”
And I said, “What?”
He said, “look.”
And I went to the window and sure enough, there they were hanging in the trees,
dead and dying.
And I said, “What does it mean?”
He said, “I don’t know it’s authorized.”

The next day I got up and they had dogs in the trees,
hanging, dead, and dying.
I turned to my friend and I said, “What does it mean?”
And he said,
“Don’t worry about it, it’s the way of things. They took a vote. It was decided.”
The next day it was cats.
I don’t see how they caught all those cats so fast and hung them in the trees, but they did.
The next day it was horses,
and that wasn’t so good because many bad branches broke.

And after bacon and eggs the next day,
my friend pulled his pistol on me across the coffee
and said,
“Let’s go,”
and we went outside.
And here were all these men and women in the trees,
most of them dead or dying.
And he got the rope ready and I said,
“What does it mean?”
And he said, “It’s authorized, constitutional, it past the majority,”
And he tied my hands behind my back then opened the noose.
“I don’t know who’s going to hang me,” he said,
“When I get done with you.
I suppose when it finally works down
there will be just one left and he’ll have to hang himself.”
“Suppose he doesn’t,” I ask.
“He has to,” he said,
“It’s authorized.”
“Oh,” I said, “Well,
let’s get on with it.”

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“Did Nabokov Consciously Borrow And Quote?”

March 6, 2011 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

"Just like the old man in that book by Heinz von Lichberg" would have been the worst Police lyric ever.

The opening of Jonathan Lethem’s excellent long-form 2007 Harper’s essay, “The Ecstasy of Influence: A Plagiarism,” which looks at the way artists borrow, whether through cryptomnesia, repurposing or stealing:

“Consider this tale: a cultivated man of middle age looks back on the story of an amour fou, one beginning when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a preteen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narrator—marked by her forever—remains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.

The author of the story I’ve described, Heinz von Lichberg, published his tale of Lolita in 1916, forty years before Vladimir Nabokov’s novel. Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful works faded from view. Did Nabokov, who remained in Berlin until 1937, adopt Lichberg’s tale consciously? Or did the earlier tale exist for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory? The history of literature is not without examples of this phenomenon, called cryptomnesia. Another hypothesis is that Nabokov, knowing Lichberg’s tale perfectly well, had set himself to that art of quotation that Thomas Mann, himself a master of it, called ‘higher cribbing.’ Literature has always been a crucible in which familiar themes are continually recast. Little of what we admire in Nabokov’s Lolita is to be found in its predecessor; the former is in no way deducible from the latter. Still: did Nabokov consciously borrow and quote?” (Thanks Essayist.)

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Vladimir Nabokov discusses Lolita in the 1950s:

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Did Lincoln Encourage Freed Slaves To Leave America?

March 6, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

"Lincoln urged a White House audience of 'free blacks' to leave the US and settle in Central America."

Documents uncovered by historians at George Mason suggest that Abraham Lincoln was much more committed to seeing that freed American slaves relocated to Central America and started their own new nation. The more you study history, the thornier it gets. An excerpt from Matthew Barakat’s story on the topic from the Independent:

“It claims, among other things, that in 1862 Lincoln urged a White House audience of ‘free blacks’ to leave the US and settle in Central America. He told them: ‘For the sake of your race, you should sacrifice something of your present comfort for the purpose of being as grand in that respect as the white people.’ He went on to say that those who envisioned a permanent life in the US were being ‘selfish’ and he promoted Central America as an ideal location ‘especially because of the similarity of climate with your native land – thus being suited to your physical condition.'”

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Apple And The Post-PC Universe

March 5, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"Without that key component of sheer delight, the road for them is long and hard." (Image by Glenn Fleishman.)

Joshua Topolsky has an interesting post on Endgadget that looks at Apple’s attempt, with its category-defining iPad, to steer the conversation of computing into a Post-PC world. My biggest complaint about the iPad being the future of computing is that its minuscule size and touch keypad–amazing though they are–reduce the act of writing to an afterthought. It’s like we’re headed for a society in which sounds and flashes and glyphs supplant sentences–and we may very well be. An excerpt from Topolsky’s piece about the perils facing Apple’s competitors:

“But right now — in the tablet space at least — the problem for Motorola, Samsung, HP, RIM, and anyone else who is challenging Apple becomes infinitely more difficult. Almost any company could put together a more powerful or spec-heavy tablet, but all the horsepower in the world can’t help you if you don’t find a way to delight the average consumer. Those other tablet makers may have superior hardware (and in the case of the Xoom, some superior software as well), but without that key component of sheer delight, the road for them is long and hard. HP is getting close by touting features like Touch-to-Share, but against experiences like the new GarageBand for iOS and the 65,000 apps (and counting) that currently exist, it’s hard to see a clear path to sizable competition. That goes for Google and RIM as well.”

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Lobster Was Long Considered Low-Class Eating

March 4, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

"Some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats." (Image by Steve Rhodes.)

The late David Foster Wallace has previously unpublished fiction in the New Yorker this week, but here’s an interesting fact from his landmark 2004 food writing, “Consider the Lobster“:

“Up until sometime in the 1800s, though, lobster was literally low-class food, eaten only by the poor and institutionalized. Even in the harsh penal environment of early America, some colonies had laws against feeding lobsters to inmates more than once a week because it was thought to be cruel and unusual, like making people eat rats. One reason for their low status was how plentiful lobsters were in old New England. ‘Unbelievable abundance’ is how one source describes the situation, including accounts of Plymouth pilgrims wading out and capturing all they wanted by hand, and of early Boston’s seashore being littered with lobsters after hard storms—these latter were treated as a smelly nuisance and ground up for fertilizer. There is also the fact that premodern lobster was often cooked dead and then preserved, usually packed in salt or crude hermetic containers. Maine’s earliest lobster industry was based around a dozen such seaside canneries in the 1840s, from which lobster was shipped as far away as California, in demand only because it was cheap and high in protein, basically chewable fuel.”

 

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How Whitfield Diffie Created PowerPoint

March 4, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

"A mathematician, a former peacenik, and an enemy of exclusive government control of encryption systems."

Whitfield Diffie created a tool to help him explain a product, but it was the tool itself that was the great product. To understand how Diffie never made a cent from his creation of the game-changing invention of PowerPoint, read this 2001 article by the excellent New Yorker writer Ian Parker. An excerpt:

“In 1980, though, it was clear that a future of widespread personal computers—and laser printers and screens that showed the very thing you were about to print—was tantalizingly close. In the Mountain View, California, laboratory of Bell-Northern Research, computer-research scientists had set up a great mainframe computer, a graphics workstation, a phototypesetter, and the earliest Canon laser printer, which was the size of a bathtub and took six men to carry into the building—together, a cumbersome approximation of what would later fit on a coffee table and cost a thousand dollars. With much trial and error, and jogging from one room to another, you could use this collection of machines as a kind of word processor.

Whitfield Diffie had access to this equipment. A mathematician, a former peacenik, and an enemy of exclusive government control of encryption systems, Diffie had secured a place for himself in computing legend in 1976, when he and a colleague, Martin Hellman, announced the discovery of a new method of protecting secrets electronically—public-key cryptography. At Bell-Northern, Diffie was researching the security of telephone systems. In 1981, preparing to give a presentation with 35-mm. slides, he wrote a little program, tinkering with some graphics software designed by a B.N.R. colleague, that allowed you to draw a black frame on a piece of paper. Diffie expanded it so that the page could show a number of frames, and text inside each frame, with space for commentary around them. In other words, he produced a storyboard—a slide show on paper—that could be sent to the designers who made up the slides, and that would also serve as a script for his lecture. (At this stage, he wasn’t photocopying what he had produced to make overhead transparencies, although scientists in other facilities were doing that.) With a few days’ effort, Diffie had pointed the way to PowerPoint.” (Thanks Longform.)

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More about Whitfield Diffie from Steven Levy: “Mary Fischer loathed Whitfield Diffie on sight. He was a type she knew all too well, an MIT brainiac whose arrogance was a smoke screen for a massive personality disorder. The year of the meeting was 1969; the location a hardware store near Central Square in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Over his shoulder he carried a length of wire apparently destined for service as caging material for some sort of pet. This was a typical purchase for Diffie, whose exotic animal collection included a nine-foot python, a skunk, and a rare genetta genetta, a furry mongooselike creature whose gland secretions commonly evoked severe allergic reactions in people. It lived on a diet of live rats and at unpredictable moments would nip startled human admirers with needlelike fangs.”


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Working Human Kidney Produced By “Printer”

March 4, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

UPDATE: Popular Science made a couple of crucial errors in its original story about Dr. Atala’s bio-printer presentation at TED. Thanks to Karen Richardson, who does publicity for Wake Forest, for sending me the corrections:

“Reports in the media that Dr. Anthony Atala printed a real kidney at the TED conference in Long Beach, Calif., are completely inaccurate. At the conference, Dr. Atala used a new type of technology to print a kidney-shaped mold and explained how one day – many years from now – the technology might be used to print actual organs.

At the conference, Atala was reunited with a former patient who received a laboratory-engineered bladder 10 years ago. News reports are incorrectly saying that he received a printed kidney.”

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Bio-printing replacement organs and tissue is coming sooner than later, and that’s a great thing, since kidneys in particular are in great demand and short supply. Yesterday surgeon Anthony Atala of Wake Forest took the TED stage at Long Beach and “printed” a working human kidney. It’s a stunner, but the process has been in the testing phase for a decade. An excerpt from an Independent story:

“College student Luke Massella was among the first people to receive a printed kidney during experimental research a decade ago when he was just 10 years old.

He said he was born with Spina Bifida and his kidneys were not working.

‘Now, I’m in college and basically trying to live life like a normal kid,’ said Massella, who was reunited with Atala at TED.

‘This surgery saved my life and made me who I am today.'”

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No footage yet of Dr. Atala’s demonstration from yesterday, but here he is discussing the topic at TED in 2010.

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“The Bulk Of Technology In Our Lives Was Invented Long Before We Were Born”

March 4, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink


Kevin Kelly defines “technology” on his blog:

“I want to suggest a theory for technology, a framework that might provide a logic and context for this parade of new things in our lives. But I have to start with the fact that we have a warped idea of what technology is. A lot of us tend to think that technology is ‘anything that was invented after you were born.’ Or technology is: ‘anything that doesn’t work yet.’ As if only the new is what we are talking about.

But of course technology includes old inventions, like clocks and levers, and ancient materials that work very well, like concrete and bricks. The bulk of technology in our lives was invented long before we were born. Ordinary technology also contains intangible ‘stuff’ that we usually don’t see such as calendars, bookkeeping principles, law, and software. It includes large complex things like social organizations and cities. Technology is all this, the old, the invisible, the large and the new — the accumulated usefulness that our minds invent.”

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“He Went From Reporting For The New York Times To Leading Homeless People In Berkeley As A Pseudo Prophet”

March 3, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

""Despite his name and appearance, Hate isn't what you might expect from a homeless person." (Image by TwoWings.)

Even by Berkeley’s very relaxed standards of behavior, homeless philosopher Mark Hawthorne stands out. Known locally as “Hate Man,” he believes in sharing negative feelings towards others, even while otherwise treating them kindly. He always has a “fuck you” at the ready for anyone who crosses his path, but he had a much larger vocabulary when he was a reporter for the New York Times from 1961 to 1970. How he get from his old life to his current one is the subject of a story by Kathleen Richards and Sandeep Abraham in the East Bay Express. An excerpt:

“Despite his name and appearance, Hate isn’t what you might expect from a homeless person — especially one that greets others with ‘fuck you’ and eats out of garbage cans. He is kind, and his gentle eyes belie the hardened life of decades spent on the streets. He is also thoughtful and clearly educated — not to mention quite a talker.

Some of his followers say they help keep the peace in People’s Park. Hate says he doesn’t like to take handouts from anyone, doesn’t drink, and no longer does drugs. His only vices appear to be Virginia Slims cigarettes, the smoke of which engulfs him in a perpetual halo, and coffee, which he carries in a glass jar and loads up with sugar.

How he went from reporting for The New York Times to leading homeless people in Berkeley as a pseudo prophet involves a long, strange trip and a string of failed relationships. It may sound like a fall from grace, but Hate says he’s exactly where he’s always wanted to be.” (Thanks Longreads.)

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How Jack Dorsey Created Twitter

March 3, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Kirkpatrick's article details Jack Dorsey's new company, Square, which has created a way for individuals to accept credit card payments with the aid of a cell phone attachment. (Image by Joi Ito.)

An explanation for how Twitter was created, from David Kirkpatrick’s smart Vanity Fair article about Jack Dorsey, the company’s founder and deposed CEO:

“Little Jack Dorsey was obsessed with maps of cities. He papered his walls with maps from magazines, transit maps, maps from gas stations. His parents had resisted joining the emigration to the suburbs, and their shy, skinny son supported them by becoming a passionate proponent of city life. He was mesmerized by locomotives, police cars, and taxis. He would drag his younger brother Danny to nearby rail yards, where they waited just to videotape a passing train.

When their father brought home the family’s first computer that year—an IBM PC Jr.—Jack immediately took to it. He had a talent for both math and art, and began to design his own maps using a graphics program. Soon, he taught himself programming to learn how to make little dots—representing trains and buses—scoot around the maps. He spent hours listening to police and ambulance radio frequencies, then plotted the emergency vehicles as they moved toward an accident or a hospital. As he evolved into a talented teenage programmer, he came to an oddly poetic view of this precise, orderly urban grid. ‘I wanted to play with how the city worked, so I could see it,’ Dorsey recalls.

His obsession with cities—and with programming—never abated. By early 2006, having dropped out of N.Y.U. and bouncing between jobs, he found himself working for a San Francisco software start-up called Odeo, which was going nowhere. One day he proposed an idea to his boss based on a notion that Dorsey had been noodling over for years. He was fascinated by the haiku of taxicab communication—the way drivers and dispatchers succinctly convey locations by radio. Dorsey suggested that his company create a service that would allow anyone to write a line or two about himself, using a cell phone’s keypad, and then send that message to anyone who wanted to receive it. The short text alert, for him, was a way to add a missing human element to the digital picture of a pulsing, populated city.”

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Jack Dorsey’s first computer, the IBM PC Jr.

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“I Prefer To Think Of The Long-Term Future Of AI As A Kind Of Purgatory”

March 3, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"That it could spin half-discernible essays on postmodern theory before it could be shown a chair and say, as most toddlers can, 'chair'?"

From “Mind vs. Machine,” an article in the Atlantic by Brian Christian.

“As for the prospects of AI, some people imagine the future of computing as a kind of heaven. Rallying behind an idea called ‘The Singularity,’ people like Ray Kurzweil (in The Singularity Is Near) and his cohort of believers envision a moment when we make smarter- than-us machines, which make machines smarter than themselves, and so on, and the whole thing accelerates exponentially toward a massive ultra-intelligence that we can barely fathom. Such a time will become, in their view, a kind of a techno-Rapture, in which humans can upload their consciousness onto the Internet and get assumed—if not bodily, than at least mentally—into an eternal, imperishable afterlife in the world of electricity.

Others imagine the future of computing as a kind of hell. Machines black out the sun, level our cities, seal us in hyperbaric chambers, and siphon our body heat forever.

I’m no futurist, but I suppose if anything, I prefer to think of the long-term future of AI as a kind of purgatory: a place where the flawed but good-hearted go to be purified—and tested—and come out better on the other side.

Who would have imagined that the computer’s earliest achievements would be in the domain of logical analysis, a capacity once held to be what made us most different from everything else on the planet? That it could fly a plane and guide a missile before it could ride a bike? That it could create plausible preludes in the style of Bach before it could make plausible small talk? That it could translate before it could paraphrase? That it could spin half-discernible essays on postmodern theory before it could be shown a chair and say, as most toddlers can, ‘chair’?

As computers have mastered rarefied domains once thought to be uniquely human, they simultaneously have failed to master the ground-floor basics of the human experience—spatial orientation, object recognition, natural language, adaptive goal-setting—and in so doing, have shown us how impressive, computationally and otherwise, such minute-to-minute fundamentals truly are.

We forget how impressive we are. Computers are reminding us.”

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Bologna On Floor Even Worse Than Regular Bologna

March 3, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Even on a plate, bologna is horrifying.

From the Science section of the New York Times:

“Q. You know the five-second rule for dropped food? Is it really safe if you pick it up in time?

A. “The five-second rule probably should become the zero-second rule,” said Dr. Roy M. Gulick, chief of the division of infectious diseases at Weill Cornell Medical College. “Eating dropped food poses a risk for ingestion of bacteria and subsequent gastrointestinal disease, and the time the food sits on the floor does not change the risk.”

In general, if there are bacteria on the floor, they will cling to the food nearly immediately on contact, Dr. Gulick said. Factors that influence the risk and the rate of bacterial transfer include the type of floor; the type of food; the type of bacteria; and how long the bacteria have been on the floor.”


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How Sputnik’s Success Inadvertently Aided U.S. Computer and Internet Development

March 2, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, gave Russia the early lead in the space race.

From  Stewart Brand’s “Spacewar: Fanatic Life and Symbolic Death Among the Computer Bums,” published in Rolling Stone in 1972:

“After Russia’s Sputnik humiliated the US in the middle of the Fifties, America came back hard with the Mercury Program, John Glenn and all that, crash-funded through a new agency directly under the Secretary of Defense – ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency).

When the US space program was moved out of the military to become NASA, ARPA was left with a lot of funding momentum and not much program. Into this vacuum stepped J.C.R. Licklider among others, with the suggestion that since the Defense Department was the world’s largest user of computers, it would do well to support information-medium like computers.

So in 1963 a fraction of ARPA’s budget, some $5-8 million, went into a program called IPT, Information Processing Techniques, under the initial direction of Licklider and then of a 26-year-old named Ivan Sutherland. Sutherland, the developer of ‘Sketchpad’ at MIT, gave the agency its bias toward interactive graphics and its commitment to ‘blue sky mode’ re- search. The next director, Bob Taylor, then 32, doubled I PT’s . budget (while ARPA’s overall budget was shrinking) and administered a five-year golden age in computer research.

The beauty was, that being at the very top of the Defense Establishment, the agency had little Congressional scrutiny had little bureaucratic responsibility, able to take creative chances and protect long-term deep-goal projects. Alan Kay: ’90 percent of all good things that I can think of that have been done in computer science have been done funded by that agency. Chances that they would have been funded elsewhere are very low. The basic ARPA idea is that you find good people and you give them a lot of money and then you step back. If they don’t do good things in three years they get dropped – where ‘good’ is very much related to new or interesting.’

One of the accomplishments of ARPA-funded research during this time was time-sharing, Time-sharing is a routing technique that allows a large number of users to sit down ‘on-line’ with a. computer as if each were all alone with it. Naturally, timesharing was of no interest to computer manufacturers like IBM since it meant drastically morc efficient use of their hardware.”

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Spotnik’s launch, October 4, 1957:

Isaac Asimov Explains American Democracy

March 2, 2011 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Still no explanation for the mutton chops.

From Goodreads.com: “Anti-intellectualism has been a constant thread winding its way through our political and cultural life, nurtured by the false notion that democracy means that ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge.’“

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First Female Computer Science Ph.D. Was A Nun

March 2, 2011 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"We’re having an information explosion…and it’s certainly obvious that information is of no use unless it’s available."

From “The 15 Most Important Women in Tech History” on Maximum PC:

“Although Barbara Liskov is often named as the first woman to be awarded a Ph.D. in computer science, that honor actually goes to Sister Keller who beat Liskov to the punch by three years. After earning her Ph.D from the University of Wisconsin in 1965, Sister Keller went on to assist in the development of BASIC computer language at Dartmouth – which had previously held a ‘men only’ rule. Sister Keller, who also held a BS in Mathematics and an MS in Mathematics and Physics from DePaul University, felt that women should be involved in computer science (especially in the field of information specialist) and has been quoted as saying ‘We’re having an information explosion…and it’s certainly obvious that information is of no use unless it’s available.’ Also interested in advancements toward AI, Sister Keller founded – and directed – the computer science department at Clarke College for twenty years.”

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