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“A Girl Born To a French Farmer In 1789 Had A Life Expectancy Of Just Twenty-Eight Years”

July 27, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

One final post referencing Daniel Lieberman’s The Story of the Human Body, this one a brief passage that explains how farming was never truly drudgery until it became hierarchal:

“The very first farmers certainly had to work hard, but we know from archaeological sites that they still hunted animals, did some gathering and initially practiced cultivation on a modest scale. Farming pioneers certainly had challenging lives, but the popular image of the incessant drudgery, filth, and misery of being a farmer probably applies more to later peasants in feudal systems than to early Neolithic farmers. A girl born to a French farmer in 1789 had a life expectancy of just twenty-eight years, she probably suffered from frequent bouts of starvation, and she was more likely than not to die from diseases such as measles, smallpox, typhoid fever, and typhus. No wonder they had a revolution. The very first farmers of the Neolithic had demanding lives, but they were not yet beset by plagues, such as smallpox or the Black Death, and they were not oppressed by a heartless feudal system in which a handful of powerful aristocrats owned their land and appropriated a large percentage of their harvest.” 

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“Oh My God! Do You Know Your Neighbor Cuts His Grass Naked?”

July 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

For some reason–perhaps political–Americans became consumed by their front lawns in the middle of last century, looking not out anymore but down, fussing over those essentially useless patches of respectability which require tremendous maintenance and resources. Even when water grows scarce, we still find a way to turn them green–or even plastic. From Syndee Barwick in the Guardian:

“I like most of my neighbors, but the lengths to which they’ll go to keep up with one another and their gusto to transform weeds into ‘flawless’ turf both fascinates and infuriates me.

There is some entertainment value in the spectacle: for instance, the neighbor who sits astride his lawn tractor sans shirt, socks or sneakers – but with a pair of short-shorts that ride up and become harder to spot as the mowing goes one. (A visiting friend once spotted him and shouted, ‘Oh my God! Do you know your neighbor cuts his grass naked?’)

But I am not amused when the stink of another neighbor’s toxic fertilizer application or pesticide treatment invades my house or wafts past as I sit in my backyard. It’s fine if he wants to expose himself to toxic chemicals as part of his ritual worship to the outdoors, but there’s no reason to poison me, too.

Our frenzied love affair with green lawns fuels an industry worth $40bn per year and counting, as estimated by Ted Steinberg in American Green: The Obsessive Quest for the Perfect Lawn – whether you do it yourself or hire help, it takes some serious cash to maintain that perfect green. A quick shopping list: seed, fertilizer, weedkiller, bug killer, more seed, a lawnmower, maintenance for the lawnmower (gas, blade sharpening, storage), a weedwacker and some sort of irrigation system. Money might not grow on trees, but it is, in fact, growing your lawn.

And then there’s the water: according to the Environmental Protection Agency, the average American household uses about 320 gallons of water per day for outdoor use – and more than half of that is for lawns and gardens. Across the US, landscape irrigation alone sucks up one-third of residential water use (most of it on grass). The grand total: 9bn gallons per day.”

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“It’s Just Chinese Patriotism On The Screen, Not American”

July 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Before globalization reached critical mass, America pretty much owned the narrative ever since the conclusion of World War II. But there are other players on the stage (and screen) today, including those communists capitalists in China. If you ever scratch your head when something like Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters gets a sequel despite a relatively soft North American box office, just check the domestic and foreign grosses, because the international business is what turns the light green now. We’re not alone anymore. THEY are out there. From “Hollywood Transformed,” by Tom Shone in the Financial Times:

“Nobody said global takeover would be easy. On course to beating Avatar (2009) as the top-grossing film of all time at the Chinese box office, Transformers: Age of Extinction picked up a flurry of complaints from Chinese companies who had paid for their products to appear in the movie.

A Chinese takeaway chain that sells duck necks said it was ‘very dissatisfied’ with a three-second shot of its meat in a refrigerator; the Wulong Karst National Park was upset the US production team had mistaken a sign that read ‘Green Dragon Bridge’ for the park’s actual logo, and given the impression the park was near Hong Kong, when they are actually more than 700 miles apart. Clearly, the park owners had never seen Michael Bay’s movies, with their cheerful war on all manner of coherence: spatial, geographical, narratological.

‘Why do all the cars that fought in Hong Kong have their [steering] wheels on the left?’ one movie-goer asked on Weibo, the Chinese Twitter, where many gathered to puzzle over the movie’s numerous product placements. ‘Why would a middle-aged man in the middle of the desert in Texas take out a China Construction Bank card to withdraw money from the ATM?’ asked another.

A fitting image, perhaps, for the new breed of eastward-bound Hollywood blockbuster, aimed at penetrating China’s ‘Great Wall’ quota system – limiting the number of foreign films shown and the profits passed on to its makers – by gaining coveted ‘co-production’ status.

Working with their Chinese counterparts, Jiaflix Enterprises and the China Movie Channel, the producers of the fourth Transformers film shot the movie partly in China. They also cast Chinese stars Li Bingbing and Han Geng in small roles, and made multiple product-placement deals with Chinese consumer brands, although by far the strangest endorsement in the film has to be for single-party, non-democratic rule. While western democracy is represented by a Cheney-esque goon heading up the CIA and running rings around an ineffectual president, the response of the Chinese government to alien invasion is one of efficient, disciplined resolve. ‘Transformers: Age of Extinction is a very patriotic film,’ noted Variety, ‘It’s just Chinese patriotism on the screen, not American.’”

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A Note From 1910 About A Million-Candle Power

July 25, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the August 26, 1910 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

comiskey

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“On Casual Inspection, Not That Much Has Changed. But One Thing Has Changed.”

July 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

One version of the future, a relatively rosy one where thorny questions have been answered, is proposed by Scott Aaronson at Big Questions Online (via 3 Quarks Daily), who looks at life enriched by quantum information in 2040. The opening:

“Picture, if you can, the following scene. It’s the year 2040. You wake up in the morning, and walk across your bedroom to your computer to check your email and some news websites. Your computer, your mail reader, and your web browser have some new bells and whistles, but all of them would be recognizable to a visitor from 2014: on casual inspection, not that much has changed. But one thing has changed: if, while browsing the web, you suddenly feel the urge to calculate the ground state energy of a complicated biomolecule, or to know the prime factors of a 5000-digit positive integer—and who among us don’t feel those urges, from time to time?—there are now online services that, for a fee, will use a quantum computer to give you the answer much faster than you could’ve obtained it classically. Scientists, you’re vaguely aware, are using the new quantum simulation capability to help them design drugs and high-efficiency solar cells, and to explore the properties of high-temperature superconductors. Does any of this affect your life? Sure, maybe it does—and if not, it might affect your children’s lives, or your grandchildren’s. At any rate, it’s certainly cool to know about.

Privacy and security are different as well in this brave new world. When you connect to a secure website—let’s say, to upload sensitive financial data—there’s still a padlock icon in your web browser; indeed, the user experience is pretty much the same as it was in 2014. But, you’ve heard, the previous mechanism that encrypted your data was broken by quantum computers, with their ability to factor large numbers. In place of the old mechanism is a suite of new ones: some of them classical, based on mathematical problems more complicated than factoring integers (like finding short vectors in lattices), and others that, ironically, use quantum mechanics itself to fix what quantum computers had broken. The technology of quantum key distribution, over half a century old, finally has a decent user base, although it only works over distances of a few hundred kilometers (quantum key distribution to and from satellites is expected to start soon). Truth be told, you never understood the old, broken security mechanisms, you don’t understand the new, quantum-proof mechanisms either, and in fact you continue to use your birthday as your email password, since you don’t really have secrets that anyone else would go to any lengths to steal. But you’re vaguely aware that things have changed in the world of encryption, and that the reason why they changed was quantum computing.”

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“You’re A Future Man…Where’s My Jetpack?”

July 25, 2014 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Stephen Colbert, preparing for a demotion to network TV, interviews Elon Musk about rockets, Tesla patents and jetpacks.

If one of SpaceX’s reusable rockets should implode over the next few years, will there be a huge overreaction to such an occurrence? Unfortunate, certainly, but it would really be an unsurprising outcome in rocketry, part of the learning curve.

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“The Phrase ‘Earning A Living’ Should Disappear From Our Vernacular”

July 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Oh, robots and automation will make us richer in the aggregate, but there’s the potential for even greater inequality. Sure, you’ll get even cheaper and shinier gadgets to distract you, but will bread and Kardashians ultimately be enough? The midterm range of the new normal looks particularly daunting. Computer scientist Federico Pistono, author of Robots Will Steal Your Job, But That’s OK just conducted an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. An exchange suggests a big-picture political solution, though one short on details. An excerpt:

Question:

I’m nearly at the end of my full-time employment life. In the early days, I assumed that shortened work weeks with livable wages and things like working from outside the office would be standard procedure by now. Instead, it’s turned out to be cheaper to pay 1.5 wages for virtually mandatory overtime than to hire additional staff and split the hours equally, even keeping the wages constant.

What evidence is there that robots will free people from the tyranny of employment without introducing the tyranny of poverty?

Federico Pistono:

Robots/automation without a restructuring of the social system lead to robber barons, the disappearance of the middle class, increased wealth inequality, and a nonsensical race to the bottom for most of the people, while plutocracies run amok.

I mentioned it in another answer, I think the greatest challenge for humanity in the next decade or so will be to decouple income and work.

Work is now essentially wage slavery, with over 80% of the people hating their job, and having most jobs either irrelevant, redundant, socially, psychologically, or environmentally destructive.

Work should not be viewed as a requisite for survival. The phrase ‘earning a living’ should disappear from our vernacular. We have enough for people to just be, without having to justifying their existence through often tedious, meaningless, or degrading work.

Even in this schizophrenic society, as much as 50% of the people find the time to volunteer for social causes (helping the elderly, the disabled, cleaning up the environment, doing community work, etc.). Imagine if nobody had to work for living, how many would do useful things for others, how many would create something amazing.•

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“The Shoes Are A Natural Extension Of The Human Body”

July 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Now they’re just fucking with us. An Indian company has designed $100 Bluetooth-enabled smart shoes which communicate directions by vibrating the left or right foot. It actually sounds like great technology for blind people. From Dhanya Ann Thoppil at the WSJ:

“While they can’t buy Google Glass in India yet, Indians will be the first in the world to get access to what could be the next big thing in wearable technology: the smart shoe.

Indian startup Ducere Technologies Pvt. is going to start selling its Bluetooth enabled Lechal shoes for more than $100 a pair in September. The shoes sync up with a smartphone app that uses Google maps and vibrate to tell users when and where to turn to reach their destination.

Just tell your phone where you want to go and then you can leave it in your pocket because the buzzing in your left or right shoe will lead the way.

Ducere was started by two Indian engineers who had studied and worked in the U.S. in 2011 and has grown to 50 employees in the city of Secunderabad in the newly-formed southern Indian state of Telengana.

‘The shoes are a natural extension of the human body,’ said Krispian Lawrence, 30, co-founder and chief executive officer of the company. ‘You will leave your house without your watch or wristband, but you will never leave your house without your shoes.'”

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Old Print Article: “Rocket Expert Outlines Plan To Land 50 Explorers On Mars,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1951)

July 24, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Muammar Gaddafi got exactly what he deserved, but most don’t. Case in point: Wernher von Braun, complete Nazi and celebrated American hero, who was rescued from cosmic justice at the end of WWII by an accident of geopolitics. Hitler’s rocketeer knew as much about blasting off without blowing up as anybody at just the moment when the U.S.A. and the Soviet Union both wanted to rule the air, the Space Race on the horizon. He was deemed necessary and his slate wiped clean. An article by John B. McDermott in the September 6, 1951 Brooklyn Daily Eagle laid out von Braun’s plans for a nuclear-powered mission to Mars.

wernherrocketmars

London–Wernher von Braun, German rocket expert, outlined a plan today to land 50 explorers on Mars for a 13-month visit.

His proposal was the latest scheme for interplanetary travel laid before the international Congress on Astronautics.

Von Braun, designer of the mighty V-2 rocker bomb that plastered London late in 1944, submitted a paper to the conference detailing his proposal. He is in the United States.

Fifty men could reach Mars, he suggested, by traveling on space ships and rockets. They would stop over for refuelling at artificial moons fixed in space between the earth and Mars.

Would Take 260 Days

The journey to Mars, Von Braun said, would take 260 days. Ten space ships with 70 men aboard would take off from earth and stop at the first artificial moon for supplies. They would then travel to another man-made orbit closer to Mars.

From there, he said, 50 men would be selected to land on Mars in three 300-ton rockets.

Von Braun said the trip would be possible as soon as the artificial moons were built.

L.R. Shepherd, British atomic scientist, told the gathering later suspended moons were no longer “a remote possibility.”

Instead of just talking or writing about them, he said, the idea ‘should now be actively pursued in laboratory tests and on the proving range.’

If given vigorous development, the gap should be bridged in 10 to 20 years, Shepherd said.

225,000 MPH Speed Seen

Professor Lyman Spitzer of Princeton University told the conference space ships could eventually travel at 225,000 miles per hour. They would be propelled, he said, by uranium or plutonium converted into electrical energy.

“While a voyage of many hundred million miles in space could readily be achieved by this ship, ascent of the first few hundred miles to a circular orbit (artificial moon) would definitely require a booster of some sort,” he said.

“In fact, the design and construction of a large launching rocket might well be more difficult than that of a long-range space ship.”•

 

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“A Laboratory Exists Where Reasearchers Are Trying To Capture This Human Energy On Film”

July 24, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A photo process that used a metal plate and electrical charge to take trippy, often spectral-looking pictures, Kirlian photography was thought at one point to perhaps be able to reveal the “auras” of its subjects. Could it read the mental states of people whose thumbs were photographed? Could it tell who was suffering from cancer before other tests could reveal the disease? No, it couldn’t. The process was discovered by accident in 1939 by Russian inventor Semyon Kirlian, who spent a decade developing the equipment with his wife, Valentina. While oddly beautiful to look at, it ultimately had no scientific application. Footage is from UCLA in 1974, when that university was heavily researching parapsychology.

“This Guerrilla Marketing Strategy Is Popular”

July 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There’ve been persuaders who tried subtlety and those who attempted invisibility. So it’s no shock that brands are hurrying their way into six-second Vines, purchasing placement in what are ostensibly just little, personal videos. But it’s not personal–it’s strictly business. The “influencers” are under the influence. From Kurt Warner at Mashable:

“With sights set on its 40 million users — many of whom are teenagers — advertisers are getting crafty in their efforts to break into ad-free Vine.

The six-second video platform, which is owned by Twitter, is one of the largest social networks that doesn’t yet run paid advertisements. Marketers can’t sponsor or promote videos the way they do on Twitter and Facebook (a sponsored post is clearly marked and shows up in front of people it wouldn’t otherwise surface for). But that doesn’t mean they’re sitting idly by.

Instead, brands are utilizing a form of stealth advertising, paying the platform’s most popular users to ‘organically’ push products to their massive followings.

(Brands already use Vine to create their own videos, but the message is much different when it comes from a ‘regular user’ instead of the brand itself.)

Comedic Vine influencer Jake Paul, for example, made a video of his undercover attempt to steal a bottle of Coke from a friend only to get caught at the last second. (Brought to you by Coca-Cola’s #ShareACoke campaign, revealed in the video’s description.)

The videos don’t feature a ‘sponsored’ or ‘promoted’ label and, in some cases, the only indication that the creator was paid by a brand is that hashtag.

This guerrilla marketing strategy is popular, and Vine’s video format and wealth of influential users have made it a testing ground for major brands like Coca-Cola, Virgin Mobile, and Kellogg’s.”

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“The Aggressive School Sees This As A Computer That Has A Set Of Wheels”

July 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Three great images by futurist/illustrator Syd Mead.

Are driverless cars wheels with a computer or a computer with wheels? The latter seems more the truth. In “The Two Cultures of Robocars,” Google consultant Brad Templeton weighs this question. The opening:

“I have many more comments pending on my observations from the recent AUVSI/TRB Automated Vehicles Symposium, but for today I would like to put forward an observation I made about two broad schools of thought on the path of the technology and the timeline for adoption. I will call these the aggressive and conservative schools. The aggressive school is represented by Google, Induct (and its successors) and many academic teams, the conservative school involves car companies, most urban planners and various others.

The conservative view sees this technology as a set of wheels that has a computer.

The aggressive school sees this as a computer that has a set of wheels.

The conservative view sees this as an automotive technology, and most of them are very used to thinking about automotive technology. For the aggressive school, where I belong, this is a computer technology, and will be developed — and change the world — at the much faster pace that computer technologies do.

Neither school is probably entirely right, of course.”

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“Can Baseball Keep Selling Such A Low-Scoring, Low-Activity Environment In The Meantime?”

July 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

The worst idea for changing baseball this season–even worse than this–is the one which anchors Tom Verducci’s latest SI column. He suggests the sport should ban defensive shifts because they’re suppressing offense. What a ridiculous thing. It’s oblivious about the history of game, something Verducci actually knows well, which has always seen fluctuations in runs and run prevention, but even more than that, it’s ignorant of how information works.

Analytics in the sport has gotten rich, implementation of such knowledge has improved, so let’s handicap those who are using the numbers well? That’s a good way to keep baseball from growing and improving, to restrain its evolution. It’s similar (though obviously far less important) to the cockamamie notion that English should be made America’s “official language.” You know, we should somehow control and constrain language, as if that were possible. As William Burroughs said: “Language is a virus from outer space.” So, to some extent, are any living, growing things which use information, including baseball. Let them evolve. From Verducci:

“Support of an ‘illegal defense’ rule – or at least the consideration of it – is gaining some traction in baseball. Such a rule might stipulate, for instance, that you cannot have three infielders on one side of second base. A shortstop would be able to shift as far as directly behind second base on a lefthanded hitter, but no farther.

Is it time for such a rule? My gut reaction is that it is time to at least think about it. All-fields hitting needs to increase. But Maddon, himself a former hitting instructor, believes that it will take years for the counter-response to make an impact. He said the emphasis on using the whole field to hit must begin with organizational teaching in the low minors. ‘You can’t make the same impact with guys already at the major league level,’ he said.

So you may be talking about three years or more before you start seeing real change. Can baseball keep selling such a low-scoring, low-activity environment in the meantime?

Teams have figured out not just where hitters are most likely to hit the ball, but also that the second baseman should not be stationed so close to the first baseman, as he was for the past 100 years or more. It’s not just that a shortstop or third baseman is shifted to the right side against lefthanded hitters; it’s that the second baseman often can play a deep rover-type position in rightfield – it’s a matter of logic that the second baseman can play as far away from the first baseman as does the third baseman. More depth means more range, which means fewer chances for a hit to a hitter’s preferred field.”

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“The Idea That We Are Defined By Our Struggles To Deal With Our Fellow Humans Is Shaking Up Archaeology”

July 24, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of “Beyond the Bones: The Archaeology of Human Networks,” Alun Anderson’s New Scientist review of two books on evolution which suggest that our historical development may have rested more on surviving each other than the elements:

“‘HELL is other people,’ goes Jean-Paul Sartre’s famous line. It is a hell that may have created us and our culture, judging by two new books. They show that the idea that we are defined by our struggles to deal with our fellow humans is shaking up archaeology and how we think about the key force driving human evolution.

The first book is Thinking Big by archaeologists Clive Gamble and John Gowlett and evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar. It is the story of a seven-year project – From Lucy to Language – that confronted archaeologists with the social brain hypothesis of human evolution.

The result is a dramatic demolition of the ‘stones and bones’ approach to archaeology, which keeps researchers firmly fixed only on the physical evidence they dig up, and a move towards a grand look at the evolving human mind. There is ‘more to humanity than the bits of chipped bone,’ write the authors as they seek a framework for all human psychological traits, from kinship and laughter to language and ceremony. Old dogma is derided as never moving beyond ‘WYSWTW’ (What You See is What There Was).

The second book is a solo effort by Dunbar, the key thinker behind the social brain hypothesis. In Human Evolution, he lays out the big ideas that the archaeologists later took up. At its heart is the observation that as brains grew bigger, so did the groups we live in: bigger brains were built for and by social life. Modern humans have a cognitive limit of about 150 friends and family (the well-known ‘Dunbar’s number’). Within that circle are an average of five ‘intimates,’ 15 best friends and 50 good friends. Chimps have an average community size of 55.

Studies of living, non-human primates show why you might need bigger brains to live in bigger groups.”

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“The Employment Of The Future Is Here, And It’s Terrific For Everyone Except The People Doing The Work”

July 23, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Through the prism of structural changes at TaskRabbit, Sam Biddle of Valleywag looks at (perhaps) the future of labor, in which the wishes of workers disappear into algorithms, and we’re all lackeys, everyone Walmarted. You know how you love cheap service? That’s your job now. The opening:

“The employment of the future is here, and it’s terrific for everyone except the people doing the work. TaskRabbit, which lets you outsource the things you don’t want to do to people who need money, is at the forefront of this chore revolution, and it’s already making some lives harder.

In 1994, professors Stanley Aronowitz and William DiFazio published a book titled The Jobless Future, surveying sea changes in the way people work. It didn’t look good: ‘Today, the regime of world economic life consists in scratching every itch of everyday life with sci-tech,’ they wrote. A big heap of trivial problems were being solved by a bigger heap of trivial jobs, marked by a trend ‘toward more low-paid, temporary, benefit-free blue and white collar jobs and fewer decent permanent factory and office jobs.’

Twenty years later, we’ve nearly perfected this ephemeral gig machine with TaskRabbit, a software engine that does for labor what Snapchat’s done for memories.”

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“This Non-Toxic Surface Treatment Is Safe For Children And Pets”

July 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

For a good part of the 1965 season, the outfield at the Houston Astrodome had no actual living grass but a surface of dirt and dead grass painted green. The team had yet to figure out how to block out the glare of the sun and also let enough light into the roofed stadium to grow grass. And there was no Astroturf yet, so the problem was painted over.

California’s drought is forcing a similar solution. At the Guardian, there’s a photo essay about Green Canary, a company which returns brown lawns to their preferred color with the aid of a coat of paint. Here’s a mission statement from the company’s site:

“Green Canary is a cost effective, advanced aqueous polymer formulation for maintaining the aesthetic appearance of grass and lawns on residential and commercial properties. Green Canary is a turn key product and service that transforms dry, diseased, or dormant grass into green eye-pleasing turf. This non-toxic surface treatment is safe for children and pets, and Green Canary contains no VOCs or other environmental hazards. What’s more, Green Canary helps to conserve water, minimize maintenance, and eliminate lawn care chemicals. Costing merely a fraction of new grass and traditional upkeep, Green Canary will have you seeing green — in your yard, as well as your pocket book.”

“Sentiment Aside, This Is The Cost Of Progress”

July 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Three entries from “17 Ways Driverless Cars Could Change America,” by Dan McLaughlin of the Federalist, which meditates on the consequences (and unintended consequences) of autonomous vehicles.

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4. Changing Who Can Drive: Driving, today, is a hallmark of responsible adulthood. Getting a driver’s license at 16 or 17, and learning to safely operate a motor vehicle, is a major rite of passage. High schools spend teaching time on Driver’s Ed. Driver’s licenses are the most widely-used form of photo identification, and whether the government should issue them to people who are in the country illegally is a continuing source of political controversy. People with serious physical or mental handicaps cannot drive. People who have had too much to drink, or are high on drugs or heavily medicated, cannot or should not drive. And at the other end, for the elderly, losing the ability to drive when their eyesight and reflexes fail can be a major blow to their independence.

None of these things need be true of a driverless car. A child old enough to ride a bicycle or take the subway unescorted could be old enough to take a driverless car trip, especially assuming (as discussed below) improvements in anti-theft technologies and the impossibility of even moving the car without being tracked. The elderly and the handicapped could gain greatly from the increased mobility and independence of being able to use a driverless car to go places and shop for groceries. On the other hand, the demise of the driver’s license creates challenges for the many ways in which it is used as a de facto identification card, and could create pressure for a new federal identification card.

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7. Destroying Car Culture: Here we move from the specific to the general, because cars, in America, are not just an appliance. They represent a deep expression of how American culture expressed and asserted itself in the 20th Century. Cars meant independence, and the bond between an American—particularly an American man—and his car was deep and profound, the subject of numerous songs and movies. People drive for fun, to see places, to get away, they tinker with their cars, love their cars, and argue about their merits. That bond will inevitably be lost in a world where the car is no longer controlled and steered by the individual, but is simply a delivery service for a requested address.

Sentiment aside, this is the cost of progress. In the 19th Century, we had a horse culture. Horses were the companion of the settler, the wagon train, the cavalryman, the cowboy. Even if you lived in a big city, where people traveled by carriage and goods were delivered by horse-drawn wagons, most every American knew some of the basics of horsemanship: how to mount a horse, win a horse’s trust, command and steer a horse, and re-shoe a horse at need. Today, horsemanship is the province of the very rich, the very rural, and those who make a living dealing with horses, and is alien to most Americans. In time, the same will be true of car culture—the wealthy will race on private tracks, the country boys and girls will drive off road, but the rest of us will be escorted around by machines without thought for how to drive them. We may not even be able to foresee all the ways that changes how we view our own lives and the culture we live in.

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15. Fewer Used Cars, More Inequality: The more cars involve electronics rather than simple machinery, the costlier they are to design and repair, and the shorter their likely shelf life. That’s bad news for poorer people who want to own one. Traditionally, the low end of the used-car market was a haven for men, especially young men, who had little money but had the know-how to keep a fading piece of machinery running for a few more years. Doing that with the kind of sophisticated computer systems and pricey components needed to run driverless navigation systems is something a lot fewer young men, especially the less educated, are prepared to do.

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“In A Long-Tail World, Even No. 1 Is A Relative Term”

July 23, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Few things gall me more than poorly contextualized reporting. Even when it pertains to something relatively unimportant like pop music. Or something even less important like parodies of pop music. 

I published a post a week ago about “Weird” Al Yankovic in the Digital Age, about how his lifeblood, an album of songs, is pretty much beside the point by now. Not exactly a revolutionary statement. A week after Mandatory Fun has been in release, multiple publications announced that the record has reached heights the parodist has never before seen, hitting No. 1 on the Billboard album charts. The stories made it seem like it’s his greatest career achievement.

Which is wonderful…except it’s more of a case of the one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind. From what I can gather, the tens of millions of Youtube views for his barrage of accompanying videos translated into somewhere between 75,000 and 110,000 albums sold during the debut week. A couple of other numbers to consider:

  • His best-known album, 1984’s “Weird Al” Yankovic in 3-D, went platinum (at least one million sold) but never ranked higher than 17 on Billboard’s U.S. album chart. No. 17! I can’t find the week-to-week breakdown, but I imagine he approached his current No. 1 sales in some seven-day periods.
  • Just three years ago, before her own album sales tanked, Lady Gaga’s Born This Way sold 1.1 million albums in its first week.

Let me point out that I’ve always loved “Weird” Al, both for his (sometimes) oddly detailed lyrics and for putting out an album entitled Straight Outta Lynwood nearly two decades after that made sense. But his reaching the top of the Billboard charts in 2014 isn’t a sign of great triumph but rather an avoidance of complete disaster.

In a long-tail world, even No. 1 is a relative term.•

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Old Print Article: “Newsreel Theater,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1929)

July 22, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The “Fox” in Fox News is taken from the surname of pioneering film producer William Fox, whether he would be happy with the contemporary association or not. One of Fox’s great innovations was the launching, in 1929, of the Embassy Newsreel Theatre in Manhattan, as a showcase of continuous non-fiction fare, presaging around-the-clock cable by many decades. Newsreels–or “film newspapers“–had been popular since the beginning of cinema, but until Fox they were secondary to the main attraction in the United States. He redefined them as the attraction. By 1930, the proprietor had lost control of his film company and theaters, having been knocked out by a near-fatal automobile crash and the stock-market collapse. This reversal was followed by legal problems, a commission of perjury and a prison stint. Fox died in 1952, largely forgotten by the media he helped define. The text of a brief, understated article from the November 4, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, unwittingly announcing the moment when news in America–or something resembling it–became an infinite loop:

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“I Performed In A Concert That Lasted 18 Hours”

July 22, 2014 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Two Johns–Cage and Cale–bring the avant garde to I’ve Got a Secret in the 1960s.

In 1960, Cage goes electric–with an electric mixer.

Cale, in 1963, the year before he met Lou Reed.

“More Chinese People Are Gaining Access To The Internet With Mobile Devices Than With Personal Computers”

July 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We’ve shrunk the world, and now it’s portable and harder to see. That’s good and bad. To paraphrase Norma Desmond, is it just the pictures that have gotten smaller, or is some part of us also diminished? In the macro, it’s a huge victory, but there are losses even in the greatest gains. From Neil Gough at the New York Times:

“For the first time, more Chinese people are gaining access to the Internet with mobile devices than with personal computers.

The shift is significant, if expected, in China, which is the world’s biggest market for both Internet and smartphone users.

China had 632 million Internet users at the end of June, an increase of 14.4 million since the end of December, according to a semiannual report published on Monday by the official China Internet Network Information Center, which is known as CNNIC. Of those, 83.4 percent reported gaining access to the Internet with mobile devices, exceeding for the first time the percentage who reported using computers to go online, at 80.9 percent.

The results of the survey showed that more Chinese were heading online to send instant messages (through popular mobile apps like Tencent’s Weixin, or WeChat), listen to music, play video games and read.”

“We Don’t Talk About Obamacare”

July 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Many Kentuckians who now have Obamacare love the care and hate Obama. When it comes to affordable health insurance, they need it, they want it, they wish they could live without it. Passages follow from a BBC piece about the health-care reform that dare not speak its name in the Blue Grass State and an Ezra Klein Vox post about the aftermath of the Halbig case ruling.

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From Claire Bolderson’s “Obamacare in Kentucky: The luxury of seeing a doctor“:

“Liberty Sizemore leans back in her chair and beams. The 26-year-old filling station cashier has just been told her enrolment in Obamacare is complete.

Now she can have her first routine doctor’s appointment for seven years.

‘I am so happy,’ says Sizemore as she waits at the Grace Community Health Centre in Clay County, Kentucky, ‘I’ve not had insurance since I turned 19.’

But Sizemore is also nervous. She is seriously overweight and was warned in her teens that she was likely to develop diabetes. Without health insurance she has not been able to afford tests or check-ups to see if she has indeed got the disease.

‘I’ll go to the hospital only in an emergency,’ says Sizemore, who is still paying off the $10,000 bill for removing her appendix two years ago.

‘That’s what’s on my credit card right now,’ she sighs, ‘hospital bills.’

Sizemore is one of 421,000 people in Kentucky who’ve signed up since the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, widely known as Obamacare, came into force last October.

Like many, she now qualifies for Medicaid, the government programme that pays for health care for the poorest Americans. Under the new law, the federal government offers states money to expand Medicaid so that many more people on very low wages, like Liberty Sizemore, are covered.

There are also federal funds for new state insurance exchanges where Americans can shop for private plans. Some plans are heavily subsidised by the government, depending on the applicant’s income level.

Kentucky is one of a minority of states – and the only one in the South – to have taken Washington’s money and embraced all the reforms.

But it has done it without embracing the man after whom they are named.

‘The president is not all that popular in the state,’ says Democratic Governor Steven Beshear, pointing to Mr Obama’s 34% approval rating in Kentucky (eight points below the latest national figure reported by Gallup). ‘So we don’t talk about Obamacare,’ he explains.”

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The opening of Klein’s “No, the Halbig case isn’t going to destroy Obamacare“:

“The Halbig case could destroy Obamacare. But it won’t. The Supreme Court simply isn’t going to rip insurance from tens of millions of people in order to teach Congress a lesson about grammar.

As Adrianna McIntyre explains, the Halbig case holds that Obamacare’s subsidies are illegal in the 36 states where the federal government runs (or partly runs) the exchange. The plaintiffs rely on an unclearly worded sentence in the law to argue that Congress never intended to provide subsidies in federally-run exchanges and so the subsidies that are currently being provided in those 36 states are illegal and need to stop immediately.

This is plainly ridiculous. The point of Obamacare is to subsidize insurance for those who can’t afford it. The point of the federal exchanges is to make sure the law works even in states that can’t or won’t set up an exchange.

For Congress to write a law that provides for federal exchanges but doesn’t permit money to flow through them would have been like Congress writing a transportation law that builds federal highways but doesn’t allow cars, bikes or buses to travel on them.

That was…not what Congress thought it was doing.”

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“It’s A Gray Area”

July 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Go here to listen to a really good Econtalk discussion between economists Russ Roberts and Mike Munger about the sharing economy. Uber and Airbnb certainly provide improved offerings (though not always a lower price), but they also skirt tax and regulatory rules. It’s pretty clear that consumers want a peer-to-peer economy, but there are consequences for those who’ve adhered to traditional regulations. What if you spent a million dollars on a NYC taxi medallion a few years ago only to find out the value of your purchase has cratered (which hasn’t happened yet but potentially could) because of Uber and Lyft and the like? These companies have improved the transportation market, they’ve innovated ways for consumers to connect to cabs, but they aren’t playing by the rules.

So here’s the question: What happens to all parties when the rules have changed in practice but not (yet) on paper? Munger thinks New York will ban Uber, but it’s hard to believe those market forces will be constrained for very long. Nor should they be, really. One passage from the discussion:

“Russ Roberts:

We should explain. A medallion is–

Mike Munger:

A license.

Russ Roberts:

It’s a license that allows you to, in the case of a cab company, to pick up a stranger on the street who is raising his hand, saying, ‘Taxi’. There has always been an out for limos. You can always call a limo service to your house. I don’t think they need the same–they don’t have the exact same regulatory structure. But certainly, it is against the law in almost every city in America to cruise around and offer to pick up somebody who is raising his or her hand looking for a taxi and act like a taxi. And what Uber has done is be a little bit different. Sort of like that, but a little bit different. And that’s what the regulatory issue is.

Mike Munger:

Yeah. It’s much harder for the police. You don’t have to raise your hand, now. You just press a button on your phone unobtrusively. And the police don’t know. For all they know, it’s your friend picking you up at the airport.

Russ Roberts:

But, I think you exaggerate slightly. So, the medallion–now medallions have sold recently for as much as a million dollars.

Mike Munger:

In New York.

Russ Roberts:

In New York. Despite the Chicago story. So, there are people who are still investing in the right to be a taxi cab driver, either because they think that Uber is not as important as we do, or they think that Uber will be stopped and shut down and will not be a competitive force.

Mike Munger:

I predict that Uber will be stopped and shut down.

Russ Roberts:

Okay, I’m going to go against you there. I’m going to disagree with you. It is under tremendous regulatory pressure. Pittsburgh just announced–

Mike Munger:

I just meant in New York. In New York City. I just think that the people who made that, are making a good bet. It’s too easy to make a sting operation.

Russ Roberts:

Okay. We’ll see. But I do think that–the question isn’t that–I don’t think that Uber is illegal right now. It’s a gray area. Pittsburgh has just ruled that it must comply with the Pittsburgh Utility Council’s, or Pennsylvania Utility Council’s regulations. In Europe there’s tremendous pressure to shut down Uber, not allow them. But remember, there is tremendous pressure from riders. Who like it. And I think–I want to make sure we make something clear here. There are two aspects to this attractiveness of Uber. One of them–I don’t think it’s so much the price. I don’t think the price is that much different. I think it’s the convenience and power of it, on a calm, normal day; and I think it’s its ability change price on the fly, using a fairly sophisticated algorithm.

Mike Munger:

But the taxi companies can mimic all of that. They’ll do it within a month. It’s easy to do. If that were the reason, that’s easy to do. It’s basically open-source software.

Russ Roberts:

I don’t know about that. Um, you are suggesting then that the cab company doesn’t offer me a web, a phone-based opportunity to hail a cab because they don’t need to? Because they have a monopoly?

Mike Munger:

Yeah.

Russ Roberts:

I don’t know. I think the software is what gives Uber its comparative advantage.

Mike Munger:

It’s interesting that the taxi companies are so awful at this. So, if nothing else, Uber may force the taxi companies to improve the way that you connect with a taxi. But I think the cost advantage is really a problem, because it actually raises a lot of questions about the nature of due process. Suppose that we don’t take any action and the value of these medallions falls to zero. Are we obliged to offer compensation, because we in effect made a regulatory decision that is a taking? This property right, this medallion, had significant value. We made a choice, without due process, that said we are going to reduce the value of this medallion to zero. Are we obliged to compensate?

Russ Roberts:

Who is ‘we’?

Mike Munger:

The state. Just like we would if we were taking your land under eminent domain to build a road.”

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“What Would The World Be Like After The Takeover?”

July 21, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Speaking of the emergence of really smart machines, philosopher Nick Bostrom’s new book, Superintelligence, has just been published in the UK (with the U.S. edition available later this year). Here’s a piece from Clive Cookson’s Financial Times review:

“Since the 1950s proponents of artificial intelligence have maintained that machines thinking like people lie just a couple of decades in the future. In Superintelligence – a thought-provoking look at the past, present and above all the future of AI – Nick Bostrom, founding director of Oxford’s university’s Future of Humanity Institute, starts off by mocking the futurists.

‘We are still far from real AI despite last month’s widely publicised ‘Turing test’ stunt, in which a computer mimicked a 13-year-old boy with some success in a brief text conversation. About half the world’s AI specialists expect human-level machine intelligence to be achieved by 2040, according to recent surveys, and 90 per cent say it will arrive by 2075. Bostrom takes a cautious view of the timing but believes that, once made, human-level AI is likely to lead to a far higher level of ‘superintelligence’ faster than most experts expect – and that its impact is likely either to be very good or very bad for humanity.

The book enters more original territory when discussing the emergence of superintelligence. The sci-fi scenario of intelligent machines taking over the world could become a reality very soon after their powers surpass the human brain, Bostrom argues. Machines could improve their own capabilities far faster than human computer scientists.

‘Machines have a number of fundamental advantages, which will give them overwhelming superiority,’ he writes. ‘Biological humans, even if enhanced, will be outclassed.’ He outlines various ways for AI to escape the physical bonds of the hardware in which it developed. For example, it might use its hacking superpower to take control of robotic manipulators and automated labs; or deploy its powers of social manipulation to persuade human collaborators to work for it. There might be a covert preparation stage in which microscopic entities capable of replicating themselves by nanotechnology or biotechnology are deployed worldwide at an extremely low concentration. Then at a pre-set time nanofactories producing nerve gas or target-seeking mosquito-like robots might spring forth (though, as Bostrom notes, superintelligence could probably devise a more effective takeover plan than him).

What would the world be like after the takeover? It would contain far more intricate and intelligent structures than anything we can imagine today – but would lack any type of being that is conscious or whose welfare has moral significance. ‘A society of economic miracles and technological awesomeness, with nobody there to benefit,’ as Bostrom puts it. ‘A Disneyland without children.'”

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“Over The Past 200 Years Or So Industrialisation Led To An Unprecedented Increase In Prosperity In The West”

July 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Kurt Vonnegut pointed out that some of us get wicker furniture and some get bubonic plague. It seems counterintuitive, but perhaps the kindest thing we can do to help the plagued is to buy more twiggy chairs. 

The idea that the best citizen is a good consumer isn’t a new one, though it’s always been complicated because of feelings of personal guilt and concerns about ecology. In his Aeon essay, “The Good Consumer,” Florian Schui, argues against the self-reproach, and while he acknowledges the environmental costs of free-market capitalism, he seems less worried about it than most. The opening:

“Westerners are constantly worrying about consuming too much and living too well. This is not a new concern. For at least the past 2,000 years we have worried about having to pay a price for prosperity. What is perhaps more surprising is that we continue to worry. During the first millennia of human existence, increases in consumption were extremely slow, but over the past 200 years or so industrialisation led to an unprecedented increase in prosperity in the West. This was topped off by a super-increase in the 1950s and ’60s. And yet, we have still not had our comeuppance. Instead, for most Westerners, the principal outcomes have been longer and more comfortable lives.

That said, the benefits of increasing prosperity are distributed highly unequally, making growing inequality perhaps the most pressing economic and social problem of our era. Consumption is one of the areas where inequality is felt most strongly, not so much due to excessive consumption at the top, interestingly enough, but because of increasing deprivation at the bottom. If we want to correct this imbalance, through redistribution, we need to recognise that this will inevitably result in a further substantial increase in overall consumption. That might be no bad thing, providing policymakers make the effort to understand the long tradition of criticising consumption that is almost as old as Western civilisation.”

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