Excerpts

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“The Curious Aliens Would Have Noticed That As The Planet Brightened, Its Surface Cooled”

April 9, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A volcano the intensity of the one in 1815 that disrupted the world will occur again at some point, but even though there is more to destroy now, the impact by some measures–on agriculture, say–will probably not be as great today. From the Economist (by way of the Browser):

IF ALIENS had been watching the Earth during 1815 the chances are they would not have noticed the cannon fire of Waterloo, let alone the final decisions of the Congress of Vienna or the birth of Otto von Bismark. Such things loom larger in history books than they do in astronomical observations. What they might have noticed instead was that, as the year went on, the planet in their telescopes began to reflect a little more sunlight. And if their eyes or instruments had been sensitive to the infrared, as well as to visible light, the curious aliens would have noticed that as the planet brightened, its surface cooled. …

In his book Eruptions that Shook the World, Clive Oppenheimer, a volcanologist at Cambridge University, puts the number killed by the ash flows, the tsunamis and the starvation that followed them in Indonesia at 60,000-120,000. That alone would make Tambora’s eruption the deadliest on record. But the eruption did not restrict its impact to the areas pummelled by waves and smothered by ash.

When the sulphur hits the stratosphere

The year after the eruption clothes froze to washing lines in the New England summer and glaciers surged down Alpine valleys at an alarming rate. Countless thousands starved in China’s Yunnan province and typhus spread across Europe. Grain was in such short supply in Britain that the Corn Laws were suspended and a poetic coterie succumbing to cabin fever on the shores of Lake Geneva dreamed up nightmares that would haunt the imagination for centuries to come. And no one knew that the common cause of all these things was a ruined mountain in a far-off sea.

While lesser eruptions since then have had measurable effects on the climate across the planet, none has been large enough to disrupt lives to anything like the same worldwide extent. It may be that no eruption ever does so again. But if that turns out to be the case, it will be because the human world has changed, not because volcanoes have. The future will undoubtedly see eruptions as large as Tambora, and a good bit larger still.•

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“We Take Cells From The Very Best Animals You Could Possibly Imagine”

April 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If we progress intelligently, we should be able to feed a much-larger world population while being kinder to animals and the environment. That can’t be done at hatching factories and the like, but perhaps biotechnology can fill the cupboard. An exchange from Techononmy between Paul Gurney of McKinsey and Andras Forgacs, co-founder of Modern Meadow, developer of cultured animal products:

Paul Gurney:

What is the advantage of removing the live animal from the equation?

Andras Forgacs:

Sure, so just by way of context, at Modern Meadow we have a food program and we have a materials program. We’re developing a way to grow leather and leather-like materials without having to slaughter animals, and we’re also developing a way of growing meat and umami savory products without having to slaughter animals. Now, that said, the animal is not completely absent from the equation, because you need to source the cells from somewhere. So, in the case of our food program, we take cells from the very best animals you could possibly imagine, the healthiest animals, and by the way the process does not need to kill the animal. So this a great way of going to the prize winning heifer, the most delicious Angus cow, taking cells from it, the cow can continue to live a very happy life.

Paul Gurney:

So you take a biopsy, basically?

Andras Forgacs:

Exactly. You take a biopsy, and then we expand those cells in very large quantities. So we’re effectively becoming the world’s most efficient mammalian cell factory. Now the advantage—and in the materials program, we actually may not ever need to go back to the animal, because we can do things at the cellular level that means we never have to go back to the animal again. But the advantage of doing that is that animals take a lot of space.

If you put all the livestock industry all together, it’s using about a third of all available land, ice-free land in the world, directly or indirectly, for grazing or for feed crops. They consume a lot of water, and they contribute to a lot of greenhouse gas emissions. So by taking animals out of the equation and just relying on a much smaller donor pool of animals, the process is a lot less resource intensive. And you also have a lot more control over the process. Animals have a fairly inefficient feed conversion ratio. It takes about ten pounds of grain for a cow to produce a pound of bodyweight, and you only consume, effectively use one third of that mass for food.

Paul Gurney:

And ridiculous amounts of water, right?

Andras Forgacs:

Exactly.•

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“We Need To Get Something Like 10,000 Times Better…To Even Start Talking About A Real Full-Auto Robocar”

April 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Driverless cars remake the roads–and the economy–once they are fully autonomous. Until then, the gradual integration of elements is useful though not truly revolutionary. Those final few percentage points are tricky, but it appears technologists are headed in the right direction. In a blog post, Brad Templeton, Google driverless consultant, puts the just-completed Delphi cross-country drive into context. An excerpt:

Most of the robocar press this week has been about the Delphi drive from San Francisco to New York, which completed yesterday. Congratulations to the team. Few teams have tried to do such a long course and so many different roads. (While Google has over a million miles logged in their testing by now, it’s not been reported that they have done 3,500 distinct roads; most testing is done around Google HQ.)

The team reported the vehicle drove 99% of the time. This is both an impressive and unimpressive number, and understanding that is key to understanding the difficulty of the robocar problem.

One of the earliest pioneers, Ernst Dickmanns did a long highway drive 20 years ago, in 1995. He reported the system drove 95% of the time, kicking out every 10km or so. This was a system simply finding the edge of the road, and keeping in the lane by tracking that. Delphi’s car is much more sophisticated, with a very impressive array of sensors — 10 radars, 6 lidars and more, and it has much more sophisticated software.

99% is not 4% better than 95%, it’s 5 times better, because the real number is the fraction of road it could not drive. And from 99%, we need to get something like 10,000 times better — to 99.9999% of the time, to even start talking about a real full-auto robocar.•

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“Such Findings Challenge Many Of The Pervasive Ideas About What Drives Radical Beliefs”

April 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Radicals, be that terrorists or any manner of zealots, may be driven as much by mental illness as ideology. Are the kids signing up for the life of ISIS much different than the confused, damaged minions who roomed on a ranch with Manson? Young, troubled minds are open to such dangers. At New Scientist, epidemiologist Kamaldeep Bhui writes about radicalization as a mental health issue. An excerpt:

Research in the US following the 9/11 attacks suggested that having sympathies for terrorist acts and violent protest is a sign that people are susceptible to future radicalising influences. We took that as our starting point and assessed these kinds of sympathies in men and women of Pakistani and Bangladeshi origin living in the UK.

We found that these views were uncommon – they were held by just 2.5 per cent of our sample – and were unrelated to poverty, political engagement, or experience of discrimination and adversity. However, we did find a correlation between extremist sympathies and being young, in full-time education, relative social isolation, and having a tendency towards depressive symptoms.

In contrast, we found that being born outside the UK, general ill health or having large social networks were all associated with moderate views. We also found that women were as likely as men to hold extreme sympathies, although the association with depression was stronger in men. Frequency of religious worship and attending a place of worship were not correlated with extremist leanings.

Such findings challenge many of the pervasive ideas about what drives radical beliefs, including the notion that religious orthodoxy fuels extremism.•

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“You Are A Space Explorer, Preparing To Land On The Surface Of A Newly Discovered World That Might Support Life”

April 9, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

As Galileo noted, much to his detriment, it all revolves around the sun.

I’ve mentioned how much I love Yuval Harari’s new book, Sapiens, and I recall something he wrote about our dear star: Every 90 minutes enough energy is delivered to Earth to power the planet for a year. We won’t really be doomed in the immediate future by energy scarcity but perhaps by want of ideas in harnessing it. 

But if the sun dies eventually, could we live on another planet, a star-less rogue one, and survive, even thrive in the gloom and on the margins? Perhaps, but it won’t be easy, as Sean Raymond writes in “Life in the Dark,” the latest great Aeon essay. The opening:

I’s 10,000 years in the future. You are a space explorer, preparing to land on the surface of a newly discovered world that might support life. This planet is dark, so dark that you can’t identify any of its surface features. All you can see is an ominous black circle blocking the stars. You enter its atmosphere and descend through a thick layer of clouds detectable only by the spaceship’s sensors. There is no light outside your ship. No sunlight. No stars. You turn to your commander, perplexed, and shout: ‘Wait a minute! This planet has no Sun! What the hell are we doing here?’

The Sun gets a lot of good press. Nearly everyone likes sunny days and rainbows. Solar panels are virtuous. Sunlight drives photosynthesis, which produces the oxygen we breathe. Our bodies make such mood-improving substances as vitamin D from sun exposure. Sun worship and solar deities appear throughout recorded history. We love our Sun.

But, does the Sun live up to the hype? Do we really need it? Yes, we do. If the Sun were to suddenly turn off, Earth would freeze over into an ice ball. Our planet’s geological thermostat – the carbonate-silicate cycle – is useless without the Sun. Lakes, rivers and ponds would freeze first. It would take decades but the ocean would eventually freeze solid. Some heat would continue to leak out of Earth’s interior at volcanoes and mid-ocean ridges. Eventually, Earth would look like Hoth, the ice-covered planet from the film The Empire Strikes Back. Most of Earth’s life would vanish.

Earth was born and grew up with the Sun. It’s not playing fair to just make the Sun disappear. Let’s consider a different type of planet, an Earth that never had a Sun, a ‘rogue’ or ‘free-floating’ planet. These planets don’t orbit stars. They wander the stars. They are free citizens of the galaxy. It might seem like the stuff of science fiction but several free-floating gas giants have been found in recent years.

Our own gas giants, Jupiter and Saturn, are leashed to the Sun on well-behaved orbits, but this might not be the norm in our galaxy. One study, published in Nature in 2011, suggests that the Milky Way contains two rogue gas giants for every star. That particular study remains controversial, but most astronomers agree that rogue planets are common in our galactic neighbourhood. And for every rogue gas giant there are likely to be several rogue Earth-sized rocky worlds. There are likely tens to hundreds of billions of these planets in our galaxy.

A free-floating Earth would miss out on many of the things we enjoy on our actual Earth. There would be no seasons or sunsets. And with no Sun to revolve around, no birthdays. But could a rogue planet support life, let alone a vibrant biosphere like Earth’s?•

 

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“Something Dark Is Forming On The Horizon”

April 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Capitalism is good except when it’s bad–and vice versa. It’s the best machinery we’ve come up with to grow wealthier in the aggregate, and it’s still quite a shitstorm. 2008 was only the most recent reminder. Will political tumult caused by technological employment force it to be seriously moderated? In a Spiegel interview conducted by Romain Leick, Marxist jokester Slavoj Žižek sees gathering clouds in the Western political structure-democracy, namely–but he probably always does. The opening:

Spiegel:

Mr. Žižek, the financial and economic crisis showed just how vulnerable the free market system can be. You have made it your task to examine the contradictions of contemporary capitalism. Are you anticipating a new revolution?

Slavoj Žižek: 

Unfortunately not.

Spiegel:

But you would like to experience one? Are you still a communist?

Slavoj Žižek: 

Many consider me to be a crazy Marxist who’s waiting for the end of time. I may be a very eccentric, but I’m not a madman. I am a communist for lack of something better, out of despair over the situation in Europe. Six months ago, I was in South Korea to gave talks on the crisis in global capitalism, the usual you know, bla bla bla. Then the audience started to laugh and said: What are you talking about? Just look at us — China, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam — we’re doing very well economically. So who is that has slipped into crisis? It’s you in Western Europe — or, more precisely, in parts of Western Europe.

Spiegel:

Well, it’s not quite as simple as that.

Slavoj Žižek: 

Still, there’s some truth to it. Why do we Europeans feel that our unfortunate situation is a full-fledged crisis? I think what we are feeling is not a question of yes or no to capitalism, but that of the future of our Western democracy. Something dark is forming on the horizon and the first wind storms have already reached us.•

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“Digital Technology Could Have A Greater Impact Than Anything That Has Come Before”

April 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In their Matter essay, “Our Transparent Future,” Daniel C. Dennett and Deb Roy examine transparency from an evolutionary perspective and guess where this new normal (abnormal?) is taking us. When the Internet of Things is the thing, when drones and such shrink to the head of a pin, transparency will be the rule, almost everything knowable and leakable, which is a blessing and curse. And you’ll hardly hear the monitoring. It will flow like electricity through a wire, so quiet. The opening:

More than half a billion years ago a spectacularly creative burst of biological innovation called the Cambrian explosion occurred. In a geologic “instant” of several million years, organisms developed strikingly new body shapes, new organs, and new predation strategies and defenses against them. Evolutionary biologists disagree about what triggered this prodigious wave of novelty, but a particularly compelling hypothesis, advanced by University of Oxford zoologist Andrew Parker, is that light was the trigger. Parker proposes that around 543 million years ago, the chemistry of the shallow oceans and the atmosphere suddenly changed to become much more transparent. At the time, all animal life was confined to the oceans, and as soon as the daylight flooded in, eyesight became the best trick in the sea. As eyes rapidly evolved, so did the behaviors and equipment that responded to them.

Whereas before all perception was proximal — by contact or by sensed differences in chemical concentration or pressure waves — now animals could identify and track things at a distance. Predators could home in on their prey; prey could see the predators coming and take evasive action. Locomotion is a slow and stupid business until you have eyes to guide you, and eyes are useless if you cannot engage in locomotion, so perception and action evolved together in an arms race. This arms race drove much of the basic diversification of the tree of life we have today.

Parker’s hypothesis about the Cambrian explosion provides an excellent parallel for understanding a new, seemingly unrelated phenomenon: the spread of digital technology. Although advances in communications technology have transformed our world many times in the past — the invention of writing signaled the end of prehistory; the printing press sent waves of change through all the major institutions of society — digital technology could have a greater impact than anything that has come before. It will enhance the powers of some individuals and organizations while subverting the powers of others, creating both opportunities and risks that could scarcely have been imagined a generation ago.•

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“Why Should Anybody Doubt China’s Ability To Grow Quickly For Years?”

April 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

China’s economic boom has been like nothing the world has ever seen, and that financial might will continue translating into political capital. But is the country headed for a painful correction similar to the one experienced by Japan in the 1990s? Perhaps, and that doesn’t even take into consideration a gigantic older population that will need to be supported as modernization increases lifespan. From Martin Wolf at Financial Times:

…why should anybody doubt China’s ability to grow quickly for years?

The first reason is that growing very quickly is rather like riding a bicycle: it goes well so long as speed is maintained. Once it slows, however, a bicycle starts to wobble. This is why managing deceleration is so hard. The second reason is crucial: the Chinese economy is highly unbalanced. Slowing an unbalanced economy is particularly hard.

A salient aspect of the unbalanced economy is the high savings rate and thus its reliance on investment as a source of demand. Yet, as the economy slows, the demand for investment is likely to fall more than proportionately. The reason is that past investment was done on the assumption of annual growth at 10 per cent. With growth substantially slower, excess capacity will be chronic. What do people do when they have excess capacity? They stop investing. That is also why China’s government needs to keep growth up: if it fails to do so, investment might collapse, with devastating effects.

That is not all. The combination of a debt overhang with a slowing economy is particularly damaging. Yet that is what the credit-fuelled, property-related investment boom has created. As growth slows so would the ability to service debt, even if underlying investments might ultimately be profitable. This decline in debt-servicing capacity would generate a “balance-sheet recession” in demand. That would add to the adjustment to investment outlined above. This combination is what laid the Japanese economy low in the 1990s.

If the Chinese economy is to shift into its new normal on a stable and sustainable basis, it has to avoid any such collapse.•

“Mr. Freberg Was A Hard Man To Pin Down”

April 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

Stan Freberg, a household name for several decades in America, just passed away. He defied easy categorization, doing many things–satire, records, voice acting, radio, etc.–but was probably best at being an adman, lending the form a wryness and angst it hadn’t previously enjoyed. He was sort of the Philip Roth of the 30-second spot. Or maybe Joseph Heller? From his NYT obituary by Douglas Martin:

Mr. Freberg was a hard man to pin down. He made hit comedy records, voiced hundreds of cartoon characters and succeeded Jack Benny in one of radio’s most prestigious time slots. He called himself a “guerrilla satirist,” using humor as a barbed weapon to take on issues ranging from the commercialization of Christmas to the hypocrisy of liberals.

“Let’s give in and do the brotherhood bit,/Just make sure we don’t make a habit of it,” he sang in “Take an Indian to Lunch,” a song on the 1961 album “Stan Freberg Presents the United States of America,” a history lesson in songs and sketches. Time magazine said it may have been the “finest comedy album ever recorded.”

His radio sketches for CBS in 1957 included some of the earliest put-downs of political correctness (before that idea had a name). One sketch entailed a confrontation with a fictional network censor, Mr. Tweedlie, who insisted that Mr. Freberg change the lyrics of “Ol’ Man River,” starting with the title. He wanted it renamed “Elderly Man River.”

Mr. Freberg made his most lasting impact in advertising, a field he entered because he considered most commercials moronic. Usually working as a creative consultant to large agencies, he shattered Madison Avenue conventions. He once produced a musical commercial nearly six minutes long to explain why his client, Butternut Coffee, lagged behind its competitors by five years in developing instant brew.

His subversive but oddly effective approach caused Advertising Age to call him the father of the funny commercial and one of the 20th century’s most influential admen.•

_____________________________

With Dick Cavett, giving the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi a deserved roasting.

A vintage Freberg Cheerios commercial, which was very offbeat for the time.

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“Jaffar Doesn’t Come Off As Some Sort Of Evil Dictator’s Demon Spawn”

April 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Idi Amin, peckish Ugandan dictator, was a barbaric monster and also a dad. One son, Jaffar Amin, a colorful character and something of a revisionist, is profiled by Justin Rohrlich in Foreign Policy. An excerpt:

Jaffar, now 48, lives in Kampala with his wife and six kids. A prolific Facebooker, he regularly posts pictures of his family, including his father, along with anecdotes, reminiscences, and the odd complaint about the current state of Uganda.

I’ve always been interested in the private lives of dictators, and a couple of years ago, after a quick search, I landed on Jaffar’s profile. I sent him a friend request, along with a note asking if he’d be willing to share his story with me for an article. I expected a polite “No thanks.” But Jaffar responded right away, agreeing to forward along “generic” answers to questions he has either been asked over the years, or ones he assumed he would be asked.

What he sent was anything but generic. One afternoon in August 2013, I looked at my inbox to find dozens and dozens of pages littered with almost stream-of-consciousness reminiscences about life with his father. It took a while to make sense of it all — some of it seemed to be notes for a future book, some of it taken from a talk Jaffar had given, and some of it consisted of large, disjointed blocks of text pasted directly into the email.

Jaffar doesn’t come off as some sort of evil dictator’s demon spawn, but rather as an everyday guy living in the suburbs. He spent 11 years working as a manager for DHL. These days, he picks up commercial voiceover gigs when he can — his dulcet tones have urged people to visit the Kampala showroom of a South Korean furniture company called Hwansung, to tune in to 88.2 FM, and to fly Qatar Airways.

Though I wouldn’t describe the two of us as “friends,” Jaffar and I have spoken on the phone a handful of times to discuss our possible collaboration. After about a year, Jaffar’s emails started coming with signoffs like, “God bless you and your family.” He recently wrote to me, “I owe you a wealth of thanks for bringing out the human side of my parent.”

At the same time, Jaffar has also obviously grown somewhat weary of discussing the past. Early on, when I asked one too many follow-up questions, Jaffar replied, “You could be a run-of-the-mill blogger for all I [know], for I have always only given Interviews to the Established Media Houses so consider this my last correspondence with you[,] take the gift or simply trash it or bin it as we Anglophones are fond of expressing.”

It was far from our last exchange.•

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“It Will Fundamentally Change The Human Race”

April 8, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

People will eventually be able to engineer people, and then what?

It may be necessary for the survival of the species, but the games will be messy and so much could go wrong. But if, say, China started doing it, how would other nations not?

I’m pretty sure it was David Epstein who discussed how this type of human alteration is not realistic in the short term because genes have such complicated, multifaceted functions. But there’s nothing theoretically impossible about it given more time. If we don’t do ourselves in, eventually we’ll be making ourselves over.

From Michael Tennesen at Salon:

We’ve proven we can change the genetic makeup of plants and ani­mals, so how about us? We don’t need to wait for natural selection: we can start selecting right now. The cost of genomic sequencing, the key to moving modern medicine from reactive standards to per­sonalized prevention, has fallen astronomically. When the Human Genome Project was announced in 1990, deciphering the genome of one man was budgeted at $3 billion. By 2001 the cost was down to $3 million. In 2010 it was below $5,000. By 2012 it was below $1,000. At this rate, in ten years a fully sequenced human genome should cost about $10.

As genetic screenings become more common, designing the body to alter genetic weaknesses will be more common as well. Angelina Jolie getting a double mastectomy because of a gene in her body that makes her more susceptible to breast cancer is just the start. It may one day be possible to change the gene rather than the result. The negative aspect is that many genes perform more than one function. Changing a gene to match a given result may have unintended conse­quences. Trial and error will be necessary here.

What will be the big forces behind genetic manipulation? The University of Washington’s Peter Ward sees parents as strong se­lective forces, since many will want their offspring to live long, look good, and be brainy. “If the kids are as smart as they are long-lived— an IQ of 150 and a life span of 150 years—they could have more chil­dren and accumulate more wealth than the rest of us,” wrote Ward in a January 2009 article for Scientific American. Socially they would be drawn to others of their kind, which could lead to speciation.

Parental desires could provide the big necessary push for the cre­ation of designer genes if only to ensure that their children will be talented, the right height, or the right weight. Such considerations could be a major force for not just designer genes but designer chil­dren. Stanford University’s Rob Jackson speculates, “What would happen if women could order Brad Pitt’s sperm from the back of a magazine? Even better, what if they could mix Will Smith’s smile and George Clooney’s eyes from a catalog? It will fundamentally change the human race.”

What if we could alter male genes to make the perfect soldier? Ac­cording to Henry Harpending, “The Chinese talk about that often— without batting an eye.” The perfect soldier . . . what about the perfect nuclear physicist?•

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“The Scariest Thing Is That We Don’t Know What The Scariest Thing Is”

April 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

With the Internet, for the first time we truly stepped inside the machine–and vice versa.

The Internet of Things will heighten the process, as we’ll be tracked and quantified like never before, a process which holds great promise and threat. The catch: You won’t be able to opt out. From Danny Bradbury at the Guardian:

Whenever someone introduces a pervasive new technology, someone else gets worried about it. With many already worried about surveillance issues, it’s no wonder that nightmare privacy scenarios surrounding the IoT have been popping up.

“The scariest thing is that we don’t know what the scariest thing is,” said Geoff Webb, senior director of solution strategy at identity and access management firm NetIQ.

The problem with the IoT is that no one quite knows what it’s going to look like. It’s a continuum that things like Amazon’s Dash, connected cars and smart meters usher us along, rather than a state that we suddenly enter. No one really understood how the internet was going to affect things, and the impact of the IoT will probably be more pervasive, rolling out over time, but affecting us more immediately and in more profound ways.

One thing we can predict is that an internet of sensors and other devices could generate a vast ocean of information about our activities.

“People can pull that information together in ways that are very difficult to predict,” said NetIQ’s Webb.

Some rental car firms now include sensors in the vehicles that warn drivers if they are driving too recklessly, based on how quickly and volatile its movements are. Some services are using phone services to do the same. He worries that people might be denied car insurance, for example, based on sensors like these delivering data to interested parties.

“The capacity to correlate information is going to change all of those interactions,” worries Webb. “I lose power over a great deal of my life when there’s a massive amount of information over me that I don’t have control over.”

What about other breaches, though, that may be more difficult to avoid, or are simply invisible? Could your utility’s smart meter – or your Google Nest device – know when you arrive and leave at your home based on energy usage patterns? When your smart bathroom scale beams data to a cloud-based health service, could that data be used by a health insurance provider?•

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“The Entire Population Of America Could Fit Into Texas With More Than An Acre For Each Household To Enjoy”

April 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I read once that if the population density of Brooklyn was applied to the whole of America, we’d be able to fit everyone into New Hampshire. Now, New Hampshire would most likely become a real sty, but it shows how inefficiently we’re using our land.

I don’t think any of us want rampant and unrelenting building in every nook of each neighborhood, but it’s clear that U.S. home prices are jacked up artificially by overaggressive zoning laws. There has to be a middle ground. From an :

BUY land, advised Mark Twain; they’re not making it any more. In fact, land is not really scarce: the entire population of America could fit into Texas with more than an acre for each household to enjoy. What drives prices skyward is a collision between rampant demand and limited supply in the great metropolises like London, Mumbai and New York. In the past ten years real prices in Hong Kong have risen by 150%. Residential property in Mayfair, in central London, can go for as much as £55,000 ($82,000) per square metre. A square mile of Manhattan residential property costs $16.5 billion.

Even in these great cities the scarcity is artificial. Regulatory limits on the height and density of buildings constrain supply and inflate prices. A recent analysis by academics at the London School of Economics estimates that land-use regulations in the West End of London inflate the price of office space by about 800%; in Milan and Paris the rules push up prices by around 300%. Most of the enormous value captured by landowners exists because it is well-nigh impossible to build new offices to compete those profits away.

The costs of this misfiring property market are huge, mainly because of their effects on individuals. High housing prices force workers towards cheaper but less productive places. According to one study, employment in the Bay Area around San Francisco would be about five times larger than it is but for tight limits on construction.•

“When You Have A Safety Net In Place, People Will Take More Risks”

April 7, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Martin Ford, author of Rise of the Robots, is interviewed by Marguerite McNeal at Wired about the specter of technological unemployment. The story is labeled as “Sponsored Content” and seems to have been paid for by Nokia. Advertorial, I suppose. The ugh side of the media landscape. 

At any rate, Ford answers a question about the role social safety nets will play if we’re all out of work and out of luck. What will the highly ambitious do in such a new world order? It’s similar to the McAfee solution. The exchange:

Question:

So in the all-automated economy, what will ambitious 20-somethings choose to do with their lives and careers?

Martin Ford:

My proposed solution is to have some kind of a guaranteed income that incentivizes education. We don’t want people to get halfway through high school and say, ‘Well if I drop out I’m still going to get the same income as everyone else.’

Then I believe that a guaranteed income would actually result in more entrepreneurship. A lot of people would start businesses just as they do today. The problem with these types of businesses you can start online today is it’s hard to put enough together to generate a middle-class income.

If people had an income floor, and if the incentives were such that on top of that they could do other things and still keep that extra money, without having it all taxed away, then I think a lot of people would pursue those opportunities.

There’s a phenomenon called the Peltzman Effect, based on research from an economist at the University of Chicago who studied auto accidents. He found that when you introduce more safety features like seat belts into cars, the number of fatalities and injuries doesn’t drop. The reason is that people compensate for it. When you have a safety net in place, people will take more risks. That probably is true of the economic arena as well.

People say that having a guaranteed income will turn everyone into a slacker and destroy the economy. I think the opposite might be true, that it might push us toward more entrepreneurship and more risk-taking.•

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“A Simple Way To Forecast The Future Is To Look At What Rich People Have Today”

April 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

To be an early adopter in technology, you sometimes need to have as much money as vision. As Andrew McAfee notes in his latest Financial Times blog post, if you want to see how the 99% will soon live, just take a look at the 1%. No, the majority won’t soon have more money (less, probably), but the coveted goods and services of the privileged will soon probably become accessible to almost all.

Of course, the cheapening of these lifestyle choices, a further Walmartization of our economy, isn’t good for Labor. McAfee offers a remedy, if not a new one. An excerpt:

Of the many things I’ve learnt from Google’s chief economist Hal Varian, perhaps my favourite is his elegant and thrifty approach to prediction. “A simple way to forecast the future,” he says, “is to look at what rich people have today.” This works. Applying this method a few years ago would have led one to foresee the rise of Uber and the spread of smartphones around the world, to take just two examples.

Hal’s point is that tech progress quite quickly makes initially expensive things — both goods and services — cheaper, and so hastens their spread. Which is why this progress is the best economic news on the planet (I wish there were stiffer competition for that title these days).

So what do the rich have today that will soon spread widely? A recent article in the online magazine Matter probably holds a clue. Lauren Smiley’s “The Shut-In Economy” details the parade of delivery people and service providers that show up each evening at the apartment complexes that house San Francisco’s tech elite. Smiley writes that “Outside my building there’s always a phalanx of befuddled delivery guys… Inside, the place is stuffed with the goodies they bring.”•

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“We Must Consider Interactions Between Intelligent Robots Themselves”

April 7, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m pretty sure the NFL will be an all-robot league one day. Blocks getting knocked off minus the concussion-related litigation. But what if the machines grow intelligent and hire lawyers? Who am I kidding? They’ll be the clients and the lawyers.

In a Scientific American piece, Hutan Ashrafian isn’t only concerned about conscious machines extincting us but also how we will treat them and how they’ll treat each other. An excerpt:

Academic and fictional analyses of AIs tend to focus on human–robot interactions, asking questions such as: would robots make our lives easier? Would they be dangerous? And could they ever pose a threat to humankind?

These questions ignore one crucial point. We must consider interactions between intelligent robots themselves and the effect that these exchanges may have on their human creators. For example, if we were to allow sentient machines to commit injustices on one another—even if these ‘crimes’ did not have a direct impact on human welfare—this might reflect poorly on our own humanity. Such philosophical deliberations have paved the way for the concept of ‘machine rights.’ …

Animals that exhibit thinking behaviour are already afforded rights and protection, and civilized society shows contempt for animal fights that are set up for human entertainment. It follows that sentient machines that are potentially much more intelligent than animals should not be made to fight for entertainment.

Of course, military robots are already being deployed in conflicts. But outside legitimate warfare, forcing AIs and robots into conflict, or mistreating them, would be detrimental to humankind’s moral, ethical and psychological well-being.•

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“Memories Can Be Both A Pleasure And A Hardship”

April 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

If you want to argue the best articles from another era of the New Yorker are better than the best of the current iteration, I suppose you could, but I don’t think the journalism has ever been so consistently on top as in the modern version.

Even by those usual high standards, 2015 has already been an exceptionally rich year. Consider just last month. I don’t think there’s been a day since reading Patrick Radden Keefe’s IRA revisitation, “Where the Bodies Are Buried,” that his complex piece hasn’t popped into my mind.

Another example: Daniel Zalewski’s “Life Lines,” which profiles artist Lonni Sue Johnson, whose hippocampus was left in ruins by encephalitis. The article is filled with spare, knowing phrases like this one: “Johnson’s reliance on the tote bag is a radical extension of what humans naturally do.” Dedicated study of the remaining functions of Johnson’s damaged brain may tell us a lot about our own intact ones. An excerpt:

Memories can be both a pleasure and a hardship. The most dissatisfied people, Kierkegaard observed, can “be found among the unhappy rememberers.” As [Nicholas] Turk-Browne put it, “Memory is such a great thing, but it’s also where your anxiety comes from.” Johnson’s emotional load certainly seems lighter: she is never going to regret making an impatient remark to Aline or worry for days that the Princeton researchers find her tedious. But even the sketchiest memories can weigh someone down. Johnson knows how deeply she loved her past, even if she can perceive only some of its outlines. Aline said, “I took a walk with her the other day, and an airplane flew over and she said, ‘Do you know what that makes me think of? Do you know how much I miss flying?’ And she just went on and on, and got so caught up in that. We were walking on one of the most beautiful days outside that there could be, and she could hardly see the beauty, because she was so caught in the past.”

Aline asked her sister what she’d seen in the scanner.

Silence. “All sorts of things.”

Aline pressed. Had she been sitting up or lying down?

“Lying down—wasn’t that true?”

Aline looked at Turk-Browne searchingly. Correct answers made it seem as if Johnson’s temporal window were expanding. Diplomatically, Turk-Browne observed that Johnson’s answers could reflect semantic knowledge—a general sense of what happened inside the scanner. “It’s amazing how much you can get by on semantic memory,” he told me later.

Johnson and I had said hello earlier that morning. Though I repeatedly mentioned that I was a journalist, she seemed to consider me one of the ambient scientists in her life. “You look so familiar,” she said, and complimented the plaid shirt that I was wearing: “It’d make a great puzzle.”

The data from a dozen scanning sessions took months to assess, and in November Jiye Kim presented the results at a gathering of the Society for Neuroscience, in Washington, D.C. Johnson’s brain had retained objects and scenes for three minutes—as long as intact brains did. To Turk-Browne, the results proved, surprisingly, that “repetition suppression is a form of short-term memory that does not require the hippocampus.” He theorized that another—as yet undiscovered—“visual buffer of recent experience” must be “propping up the visual system and feeding into it.” Perhaps the visual cortex had its own scratch pad. Johnson’s unique brain had exposed a mystery inside everyone’s brain.

As Johnson was leaving the laboratory that day, Turk-Browne asked, “So, where are we?” Her eyes darted. “We’re in . . . a wonderful place,” she said, smiling uneasily.•

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“We Meet In An Hour Of Change And Challenge”

April 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

I feel like I’ve been living inside the second album from Public Service Broadcasting, The Race for Space, for years, so I’m glad the band finally recorded it.

Instrumental music applied to archival radio news reports from the era make for something glorious and epic (despite a relatively brief 48-minute running time). It’s the age of Sputnik and Apollo convincingly and beautifully re-awakened by two musicians who weren’t even alive at the time of the moon landing. An oddity, perhaps, but one with a wide embrace. From Richard Hollingham at the BBC:

We are all familiar with the visual icons of the space race – such as Gagarin being lauded in Red Square the Earthrise picture from Apollo 8 or the American flag on the lunar surface – but, for Willgoose, audio has proved just as emotive.

“Radio has the best pictures, there’s a certain amount of imagination that this music calls upon,” he says. “Our live shows are so video-heavy and we get a lot of presumptions that the music is totally reliant on the images but I think it’s the other way round.”•

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“Mr. Dahl’s Brainstorm Began, As Many Do, In A Bar”

April 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Most of us do not get what we deserve in life, and struggling adman Gary Dahl did not merit wealth because he boozily dreamed up a novelty that ever so briefly became a national sensation. His Pet Rock was a gag that went large for a few months in the mid-’70s and minted him a millionaire. You could have thought of the Pet Rock, but you didn’t. Dahl did. Read what you will about Me Decade zeitgeist into the popularity of the packaged “domesticated” Mexican beach stones, but the joke about “pets” that need no affection nor could offer any was funny. Well, for about five minutes. And that was long enough for Dahl to cash in.

The huckster-ish marketer recently passed away. The New York Times obituary desk writer Margalit Fox, who has been for years–along with the dearly departed David Carr–my favorite stylist at the publication, penned Dahl’s post-mortem. An excerpt from Fox follows another from a 1975 People magazine piece which bemoaned the rocky story.

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From People:

It is, apparently, an idea whose moment is regrettably here. Like the Hula Hoops, mink-lined shoehorns and giant paper clips of yore, Pet Rocks are the new national mania, selling like crazy in stores ranging from I. Magnin in San Francisco to Neiman-Marcus in Dallas. Says Dennis Hamel, gift buyer at New York’s Bloomingdale’s: “It’s unbelievable. We’re selling 400 a day.”

They are not, of course, prosaic pebbles, but egg-shaped Mexican beach stones, nestled on a bed of excelsior and packaged in a little doggy carrying case, equipped with breathing holes. The kit, selling for $4, is the concoction of Gary Dahl, a 38-year-old advertising copywriter from Los Gatos, Calif., who claims he hit on the idea while boozing with pals. He attributes its success to the fact that “people are so damn bored, tired of all their problems. This takes them on a fantasy trip—you might say we’ve packaged a sense of humor.”•

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From Fox:

Gary Dahl, the man behind that scheme — described variously as a marketing genius and a genial mountebank — died on March 23 at 78. A down-at-the-heels advertising copywriter when he hit on the idea, he originally meant it as a joke. But the concept of a “pet” that required no actual work and no real commitment resonated with the self-indulgent ’70s, and before long a cultural phenomenon was born. 

A modern incarnation of “Stone Soup” as stirred by P. T. Barnum, Pet Rocks made Mr. Dahl a millionaire practically overnight. Though the fad ran its course long ago, the phrase “pet rock” endures in the American lexicon, denoting (depending on whether it is uttered with contempt or admiration) a useless entity or a meteoric success.

But despite the boon Pet Rocks brought him, Mr. Dahl came to regret the brainstorm that gave rise to them in the first place.

Mr. Dahl’s brainstorm began, as many do, in a bar.

One night in the mid-’70s, he was having a drink in Los Gatos, the Northern California town where he lived for many years. At the time, he was a freelance copywriter (“that’s another word for being broke,” he later said), living in a small cabin as a self-described “quasi dropout.”

The bar talk turned to pets, and to the onus of feeding, walking and cleaning up after them.

His pet, Mr. Dahl announced in a flash of bibulous inspiration, caused him no such trouble. The reason?

“I have a pet rock,” he explained.•

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“When He Died, People All Over The World Who Didn’t Know Him From Adam Were Weeping”

April 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

There’s another passage from Andrew O’Hehir’s recent Salon interview with Alex Gibney I wanted to put up when I published the Going Clear one, a section about his forthcoming Steve Jobs documentary, but it seemed odd to combine them. Although, you know, cults!

An excerpt in which the director tries to explain why he believes there was a deluge of grief over the passing of Jobs, a businessman:

Question:

How does your approach to Jobs differ from the conventional wisdom?

Alex Gibney:

It’s an impressionistic rumination on his life and what it means to us. I didn’t want to do a dutiful, stone-skipping, “Here are all the events in Steve Jobs’ life” movie. But I was interested in the idea that, when he died, people all over the world who didn’t know him from Adam were weeping. I mean, this guy was not like Martin Luther King Jr. or John Lennon. He was a businessman. But nobody is going to weep for Lloyd Blankfein when he goes. [Laughter.]

Question:

No. Or Bill Gates either, I think.

Alex Gibney:

Or Bill Gates, despite the fact that Bill Gates has contributed more to make the world a better place than Steve Jobs ever did. That’s one of the things we get at, because what I got interested in was values. Not just the story of technology, but the story of values. Why do we care so much about him? And I think the answer — I hate to say “the answer,” because then why bother making the movie — but one of the answers is that he was our guide through this world of the computer. He introduced us to it. He made the computer warm and fuzzy. He made us feel like we were one with the computer. He came very much out of counterculture. He took acid, he went to Reed College and dropped out, he traveled around the world. It was all about “Think Different,” and putting up billboards with Martin Luther King Jr. and Cesar Chavez and Rosa Parks.

Where did those values take us? By the end, they didn’t take us to such a nice place, although there are aspects of his life that I find very important and moving. For those who see the film as a slam, they’re looking at the wrong end of the telescope. Because a lot of the film is about us, it’s about how we deal with our machines. There’s a small group of people in the film, and they’re not always the ones you would think of. So I hope it ends up being an interesting and in some ways unexpected portrait. We spent a lot of time on his affection for Zen, for instance. We found some great footage of his spiritual adviser, Kobun Chino, talking about his first exchanges with Jobs. So it’s a meditation on many aspects of this person’s life.

Question:

Well, there’s such a contrast with Jobs. We have this person who was really a revolutionary and a visionary when it came to understanding the way people use technology, and then we have the effect he had on the culture of the American workplace.

Alex Gibney:

We definitely talk about that. And as I say, there’s the question of values, expressed in terms of how Apple used and uses its corporate power. It’s one thing for Jobs to give the finger to IBM as a young man. But when you’re atop the most valuable corporation in history and you’re still giving the finger, to whom are you giving the finger?

Question:

Yet Apple still somehow has this cultural cachet of being an underdog company who we’re all supposed to root for.

Alex Gibney:

Yes! And how that happens, I just don’t get. Last year I did a film about James Brown, and there’s a lot that’s similar about James Brown and Steve Jobs. He’s an awesome performer, on stage at those Apple events and presentations. Most people think of him as Edison. Steve Jobs was not Edison — he was a lot closer to P.T. Barnum.•

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“We Face Eternal Annihilation If We Do Nothing”

April 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Left to its own devices, the universe will cease to be. We may be wary of tinkerers, that they may gum up the system, but the system, ultimately, will be completely gummed up without them. 

Thinking we could somehow reengineer the universe to make it (or at least part of it) infinitely inhabitable is preposterous right now. Even crazier is the thought that we could actually activate a Big Bang and create a stripling universe. But will it be so unbelievable a million years from today, should we get that amount of time? What about in a hundred million years? Can we defuse the biggest bomb of all?

From Michael Hanlon’s latest Aeon essay:

So, what can be done? Should life surrender to its sad, entropic fate, or should we (for ‘we’ are the only entities we know of who might be able to make a difference) at least begin to think about postponing – perhaps indefinitely – the death of the only home we have? It sounds ridiculous, and out of keeping with the current philosophy to ‘leave nature be’. But the truth is, we face eternal annihilation if we do nothing.

We can certainly delay our demise in our Solar System. As the Sun warms, we could move outwards – to the conveniently placed Mars, or to the moons of Jupiter or Saturn. A billion years’ hence, a balmy Mars will be as warm as Earth is today. Three billion years on, and Titan, Saturn’s icy companion, might be a mild, watery paradise with a thick atmosphere and none of the deadly radiation that afflicts Jupiter’s inner moons.

If we find that we are terribly attached to dear old Earth we could simply move it into a new orbit. Propelling asteroids or comets at near-miss distance would allow us to use their gravitational pull to act as a celestial tugboat, dragging the Earth out of the fiery clutches of our Sun.

But that just buys us time – 3 or 4 billion years. Note that no one is assuming that anything resembling humans will be alive then. I am talking about our successors – either a replacement species, or possibly sentient machine intelligences that have taken over from thinking meat. Either way, we, or they, will need to find a new home.

By then our descendants might have found common cause with extrasolar alien intelligences, assuming they exist. Far-seeing minds will know, as we do, that not even the red and brown dwarfs will last forever. From now on, the battle will not be against the heat of dying suns, but against cold. With no stars, any lifeforms or machines will have to find new ways of powering themselves and their civilisations.

Lack of resources will be a huge issue – on the cosmic scale just as it is here on Earth today.•

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“Is This Going To Be Some Creepy Doll That Records What Is Going On In Your Home Without You Knowing It?”

April 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In a few months, Mattel is releasing an interactive, Wi-Fi-enabled version of its most iconic doll, and it’s only surprising that Siri and Barbie haven’t met sooner. It could be a great moment for teaching–or marketing and surveillance. From Natasha Singer at the New York Times:

This fall, Mattel plans to introduce Hello Barbie, a Wi-Fi enabled version of the iconic doll, which uses ToyTalk’s system to analyze a child’s speech and produce relevant responses.

“She’s a huge character with an enormous back story,” Mr. Jacob says of Barbie. “We hope that when she’s ready, she will have thousands and thousands of things to say and you can speak to her for hours and hours.”

It was probably inevitable that the so-called Internet of Things — those Web-connected thermostats and bathroom scales and coffee makers and whatnot — would beget the Internet of Toys. And just like Web-connected consumer gizmos that can amass details about their owners and transmit that data for remote analysis, Internet-connected toys hold out the tantalizing promise of personalized services and the risk of privacy perils.

“Is this going to be some creepy doll that records what is going on in your home without you knowing it?” asks Nicole A. Ozer, the director of technology and civil liberties at the American Civil Liberties Union of Northern California. “What is being recorded? How long is it being stored? Who is it being shared with?”

The advent of connected toys that can record and talk back to children is likely to deepen this debate over the Internet of Things because of the potential for these intelligent toys to powerfully affect children’s imagination, learning and social development.•

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Sally Ride became the first American female to travel into space in 1983, and those enlightened designers at Mattel’s Barbie division were ready to pay tribute to the progress of women–well, to a point. Astronaut Barbie was a trailblazer in outer space, but she also enjoyed dancing in high heels under a disco ball. Seemingly intended for young girls with serious cocaine problems.

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“What, Indeed, Would The Word ‘We’ Actually Mean?”

April 6, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

When Norman Mailer was assigned to write of the Apollo 11 mission, he covered it as a prizefight that had been decided in the staredown, knowing that despite the outcome of this particular flight, the Eagle had already landed, technology had eclipsed humans in many ways, and our place in the world was to be recalibrated. Since then, we’ve constantly redefined why we exist. 

In the 2003 essay “Just Who Will Be We, in 2493?” Douglas Hofstadter argued we needn’t necessarily fear silicon-based creatures crowding us at the top. Perhaps, he thought, we should be welcoming, like natives embracing immigrants. An excerpt:

If we shift our attention from the flashy but inflexible kinds of game-playing programs like Deep Blue to the less glamorous but more humanlike programs that model analogy-making, learning, memory, and so forth, being developed by cognitive scientists around the world, we might ask, “Will this kind of program ever approach a human level of intelligence?” I frankly do not know. Certainly it’s not just around the corner. But I see no reason why, in principle, humanlike thought, consciousness, and emotionality could not be the outcome of very complex processes taking place in a chemical substrate different from the one that happens, for historical reasons, to underlie our species.

The question then arises – a very hypothetical one, to be sure, but an interesting one to ponder: When these “creatures” (why not use that term?) come into existence, will they be threats to our own species? My answer is, it all depends. What it depends on, for me, comes down to one word: benevolence. If robot/ computers someday roam along with us across the surface of our planet, and if they compose music and write poetry and come up with droll jokes- and if they leave us pretty much alone, or even help us achieve our goals- then why should we feel threatened? Obviously, if they start trying to push us out of our houses or to enslave us, that’s another matter and we should feel threatened and should fight back.

But just suppose that we somehow managed to produce a friendly breed of silicon-based robots that shared much of our language and culture, although with differences, of course. There would naturally be a kind of rivalry between our different types, perhaps like that between different nations or races or sexes. But when the chips were down, when push came to shove, with whom would we feel allegiance? What, indeed, would the word “we” actually mean?

There is an old joke about the Lone Ranger and his sidekick Tonto one day finding themselves surrounded by a shrieking and whooping band of Indians circling in on them with tomahawks held high. The Lone Ranger turns to his faithful pal and says, “Looks like we’re done for, Tonto … ” To which Tonto replies, “What do you mean, we, white man?”

Let me suggest a curious scenario. Suppose we and our artificial progeny had coexisted for a while on our common globe, when one day some weird strain of microbes arose out of the blue, attacking carbon-based life with a viciousness that made today’s Ebola virus and the old days’ Black Plague seem like long-lost friends. After but a few months, the entire human race is utterly wiped out, yet our silicon cousins are untouched. After shedding metaphorical tears over our disappearance, they then go on doing their thing- composing haunting songs (influenced by Mozart, the Beatles, and
Rachmaninoff ), writing searching novels (in English and other human languages), making hilarious jokes (maybe even ethnic and sexual ones), and so on. If we today could look into some crystal ball and see that bizarre future, would we not thank our lucky stars that we had somehow managed, by hook or by crook, to propagate ourselves into the indefinite future by means of a switchover in chemical substrate? Would we not feel, looking into that crystal ball, that “we” were still somehow alive, still somehow there? Or – would those silicon-chip creatures bred of our own fancy still be unworthy of being labeled “we” by us?•

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“They Would Have To Fundamentally Uproot Their Belief System”

April 6, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

Lawrence Wright, Going Clear writer, holds out hope that Scientology can reform itself, normalize, transition from cult to religion, but filmmaker Alex Gibney, who adapted the book into an HBO sensation, harbors no such faith. An exchange from one of Andrew O’Hehir’s customarily smart Salon interviews:

Question:

Larry speculates that it might be possible for the church to reform itself by doing what they did before on the issue of homophobia, and pretending that Hubbard’s bigoted and hateful remarks basically never existed. I think he’s being overly generous. I can’t imagine an organization that is this paranoid and this hateful finding a way to reinvent itself. Can you?

Alex Gibney:

No. Look at what’s happening now with Pope Francis and the Catholic Church. The weight of history is so strong, much stronger for the Catholic Church of course. But in the case of the Church of Scientology they would have to fundamentally uproot their belief system. Whether he was a bigot or just a creature of his age, Hubbard was virulently anti-gay and thought it was a disease that could be cured. How do you fix that unless you come out and say, “You know what? Hubbard was wrong about a lot of things.” And that’s hard to do. That’s what was so interesting about these individuals in our film: It was hard for them to wake up one day and say they had been wrong for 30 years.

I don’t know if you read this piece in the New Yorker recently, about the Jean McConville murder in Northern Ireland? It was a fascinating piece and one of the aspects that caught my eye was this one woman [Dolours Price] who was basically a hit woman for the IRA. She was very attractive, ended up marrying Stephen Rea. But when the Good Friday Accords happened, suddenly all the certainty she’d had that allowed her to believe that the end justified the means had been removed. And it sent her into a tailspin. Once that certainty is gone – I mean, it’s a wonderful kind of narcotic. I think that for Danny Masterson and Bodhi Elfman, it probably feels good to say, “Those are hateful bastards saying this stuff.” Because it’s pure; it may be hate but it’s pure hate, and it feels good because you’re certain. But when your certainty is removed, what’s left?•

_____________________________

“Yes, and Jane came by with a lock of your hair
She said that you gave it to her
That night that you planned to go clear
Did you ever go clear?”

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“We’ve Been Working Around The Least Reliable Part Of The Car: The Driver”

March 27, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Excerpts follow from two posts (one from Andrew McAfee at the Financial Times and one from the TED blog) that look at the progress of driverless cars, which have improved at a stunning pace since the “Debacle in the Desert“ in 2004. Elements of driverless will be helpful, but they change the game in many ways–some wonderful, some concerning–only when they become completely autonomous. McAfee has been further convinced about the sector by recent developments.

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From McAfee:

Transportation. Most of us have heard of driverless cars by now. I had the chance to ride in one of Google’s in 2012. It was an experience that went from mind-bending to boring remarkably quickly; the car is such a good and stable driver that I quickly lost all sense of adventure while I was in it. Still, though, I was unprepared for how much progress has been made since then with autonomous road vehicles. Google project director Chris Urmson brought us up to speed with that company’s work, and made a compelling case that we should be striving not for more and better tech to assist human drivers, but instead to replace them. Doing so will save lives, open up opportunity to the blind and disabled and free us from a largely tedious task. And in response to the criticism that self-driving cars aren’t good at dealing with unanticipated events, he showed a video of what happened when one of his fleet encountered a woman in a wheelchair chasing a duck around in the street. The car responded beautifully; we in the audience lost our minds.•

From the TED blog:

Why we need self-driving cars. “In 1885, Carl Benz invented the automobile,” says Chris Urmson, Director of Self-Driving Cars at Google[x]. “A year later, he took it out for a test drive and, true story, promptly crashed it into a wall.” Throughout the history of the car, “We’ve been working around the least reliable part of the car: the driver.” Every year, 1.2 million people are killed on roads around the world. And there are two approaches to using machines to help solve that problem: driver assistance systems, which help make the driver better, and self-driving cars, which take over the art of driving. Urmson firmly believes that self-driving cars are the right approach. With simulations that break a road down to a series of lines, boxes and dots, he shows us how Google’s driverless cars handles all types of situations, from a turning truck to a woman chasing ducks through the street. Every day, these systems go through 3 million miles of simulation testing. “The urgency is so large,” says Urmson. “We’re looking forward to having this technology on the road.”•

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