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“Is 2050 An Unrealistic Deadline For Robots To Beat The Best Humans At Football?”

July 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

The German soccer team, triumphant at the just-completed World Cup, is called, with a mixture of awe and envy, “The Machine,” which suggests that the squad is somehow circumventing the natural order of things. Of course, that’s not the case. The real machines, however, are now competing at the latest RoboCup, AI’s version of the football competition, and the question is when will machines be able to kick us from soccer dominance the way Deep Blue did Kasparov in chess. Seems an absurd notion, for now. From a new Economist article:

“In the early years of RoboCup, there were huge differences in quality between the teams. No longer. The best of the little league routinely finish their ten-minute-long games with the low scores characteristic of well-matched human teams. Indeed, Dr [Manuela] Veloso’s squad came in second last year, after a penalty shoot-out following a 2-2 game.

Nor need only the players be robots. In a step that many of FIFA’s critics may admire, Dr Veloso and her team are developing automated referees. That will not stop some teams from exploiting decidedly human traits, such as fouling by forcefully bumping into another robot. But it may result in more effective enforcement of things like the maximum kick-speed rule.

What fascinates Dr Veloso most about RoboCup is the execution, during the game, of moves that had not been deliberately inserted into the algorithms controlling the robots. She is ebullient about an unexpected three-way pass and chip, worthy of a minor Messi and his Argentine teammates. Such unanticipated plays are examples of emergent behaviour, a hallmark of artificial intelligence at its highest level, and something she reckons RoboCup teams in all leagues will produce a lot more of with each passing year.

So is 2050 an unrealistic deadline for robots to beat the best humans at football? Half a century is roughly the time that separates ENIAC, America’s first electronic computer, from Deep Blue, the IBM machine that beat chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov in 1997. Judged in that light, RoboCup’s goal does not seem absurd. Indeed, the question may be whether, come 2050, there are still any human football players around who have not been prosthetically enhanced in some way, making them cyborgs. RoboCup v RoboCop, anyone?”

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“Robotic Legal Personhood In The Near Future Makes Sense”

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

I don’t think a questionable Turing Test means we should be granting robots marriage licenses or social security cards, but there are ethical and legal questions to be addressed as society becomes increasingly automated and performance-enhancement on a grand scale becomes widespread. From Mark Goldfeder’s CNN piece “The Age of Robots Is Here“:

“Robotic legal personhood in the near future makes sense. Artificial intelligence is already part of our daily lives. Bots are selling stuff on eBay and Amazon, and semiautonomous agents are determining our eligibility for Medicare. Predator drones require less and less supervision, and robotic workers in factories have become more commonplace. Google is testing self-driving cars, and General Motors has announced that it expects semiautonomous vehicles to be on the road by 2020.

When the robot messes up, as it inevitably will, who exactly is to blame? The programmer who sold the machine? The site owner who had nothing to do with the mechanical failure? The second party, who assumed the risk of dealing with the robot? What happens when a robotic car slams into another vehicle, or even just runs a red light?

Liability is why some robots should be granted legal personhood. As a legal person, the robot could carry insurance purchased by its employer. As an autonomous actor, it could indemnify others from paying for its mistakes, giving the system a sense of fairness and ensuring commerce could proceed unchecked by the twin fears of financial ruin and of not being able to collect. We as a society have given robots power, and with that power should come the responsibility of personhood.

From the practical legal perspective, robots could and should be people.“

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“There Is No Reason To Think That Intelligence Itself Will Make Something Behave Nice And Morally”

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

electronicbrain

I think we’re pretty much done for without superintelligence, though it could also do us in. It’s just a gamble we’ll have to take. From Anders Sandberg’s Guardian article about doomsday scenarios, “The Five Biggest Threats to Human Existence“:

Intelligence is very powerful. A tiny increment in problem-solving ability and group coordination is why we left the other apes in the dust. Now their continued existence depends on human decisions, not what they do. Being smart is a real advantage for people and organisations, so there is much effort in figuring out ways of improving our individual and collective intelligence: from cognition-enhancing drugs to artificial-intelligence software.

The problem is that intelligent entities are good at achieving their goals, but if the goals are badly set they can use their power to cleverly achieve disastrous ends. There is no reason to think that intelligence itself will make something behave nice and morally. In fact, it is possible to prove that certain types of superintelligent systems would not obey moral rules even if they were true.

Even more worrying is that in trying to explain things to an artificial intelligence we run into profound practical and philosophical problems. Human values are diffuse, complex things that we are not good at expressing, and even if we could do that we might not understand all the implications of what we wish for.

Software-based intelligence may very quickly go from below human to frighteningly powerful. The reason is that it may scale in different ways from biological intelligence: it can run faster on faster computers, parts can be distributed on more computers, different versions tested and updated on the fly, new algorithms incorporated that give a jump in performance.

It has been proposed that an “intelligence explosion” is possible when software becomes good enough at making better software. Should such a jump occur there would be a large difference in potential power between the smart system (or the people telling it what to do) and the rest of the world. This has clear potential for disaster if the goals are badly set.•

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“I Was Impressed By Their Almost Human Expressions”

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

Pierre Boulle wasn’t exactly embarrassed, just perplexed, by the success of The Planet of the Apes, his 1963 French novel which became an unlikely American film franchise in a time before franchises were really a thing. It seemed to him an odd, little fantasy that shouldn’t have approached the popularity of something like the Oscar-winning The Bridge Over the River Kwai, yet it did. A good deal of the big-screen appeal was the remarkable make-up work of John Chambers, who made monkeys out of men (and women), and Boulle was aware of this contribution, but he still couldn’t account for the reception. Here’s a (rough) translation into English of an interview Boulle did about Apes, though I’m not sure of the source:

Question:

What inspired you to write Planet of the Apes?

Pierre Boulle:

I do not really remember. I think it was during a visit to the zoo, watching the gorillas. I was impressed by their almost human expressions. This led me to imagine what would a man/monkey relationship. Some believe that I had King Kong in mind when I wrote my book, but this is totally false. Frankly, I have never considered it one of my best novels, but more like a fun fantasy. I’m not very happy with the final result: I think I could have done better with parts of the book.

Question:

Do you think the film is faithful to the book?

Pierre Boulle:

You should never ask that of an author whose novel has been made into a film. There have been a lot of changes, and some very disconcerting. My planet had three suns for example. The first part of the film is excellent, and the monkeys’ makeup is particularly successful. I do not like the end with the Statue of Liberty. I prefer mine where finally we were not on Earth but of course on another planet. But critics loved it, so maybe I’m a bad judge. I knew from the outset that the producer Arthur P. Jacobs wanted this. He had it in mind from the first day and told me about it. I replied ‘Why not try it?’ Critics have approved, but I’m a little more rational writer and I prefer everything to be explained from A to Z. I am also completely unable to work in a group, which seems a necessity in the production of a film. When I write, I am alone. I give the book to my editor, and do not want to change anything, to the last comma.

Question:

But you have started working on the sequel to Planet of the Apes?

Pierre Boulle:

True. After the success of the first film, Arthur asked me to write more for him. It was called Planet of Women. They initially agreed, but then there were so many changes. I read the script of the Secret of the Planet of the Apes, and it interested me because it had nothing to do with my work. It was completely different. This does not bother me because the film did not ultimately matter to me. I rarely see movies. It is also strange that what I write inspires such visual and adaptable on-screen elements.

What would you attribute the success of the Planet of the Apes?

Pierre Boulle:

Honestly, I have no idea.•

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“It’s The Thoughts That Are Weird And Scary, Not The Person”

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

I don’t think there’s been an American stand-up comic over the last five years who’s worked at close to the same level as Maria Bamford, CK and Oswalt and Burr included, so I was happy to see her the subject of an insightful profile by Sara Corbett in the New York Times Magazine. Stand-up mostly attracts people who have some significant degree of instability, but does the very act of writing and telling jokes exacerbate those issues? It certainly doesn’t seem to be a palliative, not the talk therapy you might expect, the repetition perhaps more deeply ingraining the problems than releasing them. From the Times piece:

“Bamford has a song that she sometimes performs onstage called ‘My Anxiety Song.’ It has no melody. Instead, it sounds more like an incantation, a desperate verbal hum. ‘If I keep the ice-cube trays filled,’ she chants, ‘no one will diiiiieeee.’ She continues, in a monotone, ‘As long as I clench my fists at odd intervals, then the darkness within me won’t force me to do anything inappropriate or sexual’ — here, she drops her voice a couple of notes — ‘at dinner partieeeees. . . . ‘

This, she is saying, is the agony of O.C.D., the skewed sense of cause and effect that first began to plague her when she was about 10. According to the National Institutes of Health, about 2.2 million adult Americans contend with some form of obsessive-compulsive disorder. It’s not uncommon for the symptoms to appear during childhood. Bamford is patient when explaining the particulars, aware that when she jokes about having wanted to chop up her family into bits or imagining what it would be like to lick a urinal, it can make her sound weird and also scary. But she makes a distinction: It’s the thoughts that are weird and scary, not the person. And while most of us are prone to having fleeting notions that would qualify as inappropriate, in the mind of someone with O.C.D., they are more likely to lodge themselves and repeat. The thoughts don’t tend to inspire action, only fear. It’s like having a homegrown terrorist in the brain.”

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Old Print Article: “A Man-Bird With Golden Plumage And Spectral Eyes,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1903)

July 20, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Reuben Jasper Spalding’s flying machine never actually flew, but neither did Leonardo da Vinci’s. The Colorado-based inventor devised a breathtaking design for a manned-flight contraption in 1889 (patent here), and even if there wasn’t much chance the sun would get the opportunity to melt its wings, it was still an impressive apparatus. From an article about a rediscovered model of the contrivance, in the October 12, 1903 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

rjspalding6

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“Our New Tech Armies Rarely Take The Time To Think Through What They Are Doing”

July 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Eventually you’ll have the implant, promised Larry Page several years ago, explaining that Google would someday literally be in your head, but isn’t it there already? Don’t we already see things radically differently, our brains having been tapped from the outside? Hasn’t that already made things better and also worse?

From Robert Pogue Harrison’s New York Review of Books anti-disruption screed,”The Children of Silicon Valley,” which I don’t agree with in the macro, though I acknowledge it makes some salient points:

“Our silicon age, which sees no glory in maintenance, but only in transformation and disruption, makes it extremely difficult for us to imagine how, in past eras, those who would change the world were viewed with suspicion and dread. If you loved the world; if you considered it your mortal home; if you were aware of how much effort and foresight it had cost your forebears to secure its foundations, build its institutions, and shape its culture; if you saw the world as the place of your secular afterlife, then you had good reasons to impute sinister tendencies to those who would tamper with its configuration or render it alien to you. Referring to all that happened during the ‘dark times’ of the first half of the twentieth century, ‘with its political catastrophes, its moral disasters, and its astonishing development of the arts and sciences,’ Hannah Arendt summarized the human cost of endless disruption:

The world becomes inhuman, inhospitable to human needs—which are the needs of mortals—when it is violently wrenched into a movement in which there is no longer any sort of permanence.

The twenty-first century has only aggravated the political, moral, social, and environmental concussions of the twentieth. There would be reason to applaud the would-be world-changers and start-up companies of Silicon Valley if they made it their business to resist or reverse this process of planetary upheaval, the way environmentalists seek to do with the wounds we have afflicted on nature. Sadly they have no such militancy in their souls, nor much thoughtfulness. With a few exceptions, our new tech armies rarely take the time to think through what they are doing. Or if they do, they tend to think in ways that only add to the turmoil and agitation.

Silicon Valley, and everything it stands for metonymically in our culture, has indeed affected billions of people around the planet. The innovations have come fast and furious, turning the past four decades into a series of ‘before and after’ divides: before and after personal computers, before and after Google, before and after Facebook, iPhones, Twitter, and so forth. In the silicon age, ‘changing the world’ means at bottom finding new and more ingenious ways to turn my computer or smart phone into my primary—and eventually my only—access to ‘reality.’

In truth Silicon Valley does not change the world as much as it changes my way of being in it, or better, of not being in it.”

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“The Visitors Raised Cries Of ‘Hoax’ And ‘Fairy Tale'”

July 20, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Hoaxes that work do so because they play upon a deep-seated fear or satisfy a psychological want–a need, even. That’s why we’re able to suspend disbelief about something that seems ridiculous in retrospect. When I published the post about a passage from Daniel Lieberman’s recent book, The Story of the Human Body, it reminded me that he (briefly) touches on the story of the Tasaday people, a “stone-age” tribe discovered in 1971 in Philippine caves, which was untouched by wars hot and cold, threats of nuclear disaster, and trends in which clans–families–were unable to stay together. It was a sensation that National Geographic granted a cover and a 32-page story, and, of course, it was a hoax. But it had a good, long run, with Charles Lindbergh himself spending some of his final moments of life writing the foreword for a popular book about this make-believe people. The opening of a 1986 New York Times article by Seth Mydans, written when the work finally began to stop working:

“MANILA, May 12— After more than a decade, scientists and reporters have returned to visit a remote Stone Age tribe called the Tasaday, and found that its earlier contacts with the outside world have set it on what appears to be an irreversible road to change.

The new visits have also reopened a debate on the authenticity of the Tasaday, who have now been found to possess bits of clothing, knives, bows and arrows, a mirror and domesticated dogs.

In interviews, two anthropologists who recently revisited the tribe said these new possessions, which had aroused the scepticism of Swiss and German reporters who saw them recently, were an expectable product of the tribe’s first contacts with outsiders in the early 1970’s.

Discovered in 1971

The scientists said they now feared that, if new protective measures were not taken, an influx of researchers, journalists and tourists would destroy their fragile way of life, already imperiled by the approach of loggers, slash-and-burn farmers and the armed insurgencies that share the forests of the southern Philippine island of Mindanao.

The Tasaday, a group of fewer than 30 people, were discovered in 1971 and drew international attention as a cave-using tribe of hunter-gatherers who dressed in orchid leaves and bark, knew no enemies and had no words for war, for ocean or for other peoples.

When two groups of journalists trekked into the jungle recently, they found the tribe members wearing bits and pieces of clothing and displaying other signs of outside influence, and the visitors raised cries of ‘hoax’ and ‘fairy tale.’

The two anthropologists who visited soon afterward, however, in the company of John Nance, author of a book on the tribe, and a television crew, said the changes were not surprising, and indeed enhanced the scientific interest of the group.

‘Textbook Case of Change’

‘We’re seeing a textbook case of social change, compressed in time,’ said one of the anthropologists, Jesus Peralta, who is curator of anthropology for the National Museum of the Philippines.

The other anthropologist who visited, Carlos Fernandez, said, ‘Before we first met them, they were purely forest gatherers.’

‘Then they learned to use a blade, to set traps and now they are learning to hunt,’ he went on. ‘Before long they will try their hand at planting.

‘This is one of the most exciting subjects for an anthropological investigator.’

Mr. Nance, the author of The Gentle Tasaday, who traveled last month to Mindanao with the two anthropologists, said the Tasaday’s preference for T-shirts and other articles of clothing was only natural. ‘If leaves were better, we’d all be wearing leaves,’ he said. Brides From Another Tribe

The scientists said the question of a hoax had always been present and remained a possibility. But they said such details as the stone tools and the language used by the Tasaday would be extremely difficult to fabricate.

‘Unless another anthropologist produces conflicting data, then the literature stands,’ said Mr. Peralta.

Many of the changes were thought to be the result of two outside influences: a tribal hunter named Dafal, and the marrying of women from a nearby tribe called the Blit.

A small group of primarily male cousins, the Tasaday’s main request of the scientists who discovered them was for brides. Mr. Peralta said that, in the years since then, 15 Blit women and two men had married into the tribe.

Trapping and Weapons

Dafal and the Blit spouses brought with them clothing, beads, knives, rice and cigars, the scientists said.

They also said they taught them to trap and use bows and arrows to supplement their traditional diet of yams, the hearts of palms and rattan, and fish, frogs and tadpoles.

‘They were already in transition when we first met them,’ Mr. Nance said, referring to their earlier contacts with Dafal. ‘Scientists worked to reconstruct what their life had been like before that, and people took the reconstruction as the current reality.’

He said this had led to misconceptions and to the recent accusations of a hoax.”

 

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“For $200 To $450 They Could Instead Purchase A 1-Horsepower Electric Motorcycle”

July 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At this point, the question may not be whether cars are going to transition, at last, to electric, but whether solar farms will be able to provide enough relatively clean electricity to meet the demand. China is certainly on board with EV, having received an unlikely nudge from SARS. From Dennis Taylor at the Monterey County Herald:

“What was lost on that audience, he said, is the fact that China now has more than 200 million electric-vehicle drivers — a statistic that by next year is expected to eclipse the total number of drivers in the United States.

A big part of the electric-vehicle surge in China can be traced to the 2002 epidemic of the SARS virus, during which many mass-transit users became afraid to board a bus and discovered that for $200 to $450 they could instead purchase a 1-horsepower electric motorcycle.

The alternative caught on: In 2013, the Chinese bought 37 million two-wheeled electric vehicles, Jurvetson said.

Electric motorcycles (which look a lot like bullet bikes), electric cars, even electric boats were among the vehicles showcased just outside the Hyatt’s convention center as Jurvetson spoke to a large and enthusiastic crowd at the symposium, drawing parallels between the future of electric cars and commercial space-travel vehicles that are the focus of SpaceX.”

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“I Was Nervous Because Of The Murder”

July 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Manias are nothing new in America, and one that stretched from Huntington Beach to Thailand was that of The Children of God, a cult infamous for Flirty Fishing and Hookers for Jesus, which was rife with child abuse and perhaps worse. The group was the subject of “A Violent Act Jolts the Serenity of the Peace-Preaching Children of God,” a 1975 article by Jerome Doolittle of OUI, a middling vagina periodical. The cult “rebranded” itself a few years after this piece was published. The opening:

The Victory Monument in Bangkok sits in the middle of a huge traffic circle. All around the circle are bus stops. Vendors sit on the sidewalks in the heat, selling mangoes and durians and mangosteens and little pieces of broiled chicken liver spitted on bamboo slivers. People are everywhere, practically all of them Buddhists. Three are not, though. They are:

  • Little John, 20 a Thai student wearing a faded-blue T-shirt decorated with a giant Levi Strauss & Co. emblem
  • Gang, a four-year-old Thai boy
  • Shema, an 18-year-old American girl who is braless in accordance with the precepts of her religion, which is Christianity as interpreted and amended by David Brandt Berg, 55, aka Moses David.

The three are passing out Thai translations of a brief tract called ‘You Gotta Be a Baby.’ It reads, in part: Dear Lord, please forgive me for being bad and naughty and deserving a good spanking! Thank You so much for sending Jesus, Your son, to take my spanking for me.

They are distributing the tracts on behalf of a sect called the Children of God, and the distribution process is know as litnessing– witnessing by literature. For a time there, the Children of God in Bangkok had to cool it on the litnessing, but now the hullabaloo over the murder has pretty much died down and they are back at it again, as other Children of God are doing in 100 countries all over the earth. Praise God!

In Bangkok the Children of God work out of a former noodle shop in an alley behind a movie theater. The neighborhood is not fashionable and neither is the theater. One day not long ago, to give you an idea, it was playing a winner called The Crazy Boys at the Supermarket.

The steel folding shutters of the noodle shop were almost closed, leaving just enough of a gap for someone to squeeze through. Since the murder, no one at C.O.G. headquarters has been anxious to overexpose himself. Inside were two American males, caught in the tension zone between boyhood and manhood, complexions not quite cleared up yet. Around their necks, they wore chains from which hung small metal yokes, symbols of their servitude to God. On their faces, they wore smiles- the slightly awkward smiles offered by people told to smile for the camera.

OUI magazine? They were sorry, but they hadn’t heard of it. It sounded interesting, though; the human form was beautiful, nothing to be ashamed of. (Or parts of it, at any rate. In the letters of Moses, it is written: “I don’t see anything beautiful about these crotch shots of the women sticking their fannies right under your nose.” And it is further written: “You’d rather see some beautifully draped cloth covering that uncomely part” and making her form even more attractive, than just plain corny-porny, ugly-wugly, nitty-gritty, smarty-smelly, hara-kiri crotches!”)

Perhaps I would like to stop by a little later in the day, when Gibeah would be there. Gibeah speaks for us. What hotel was I in? The Trocadero, hadn’t I said? What room number had I said? I hadn’t said, but it was 421. (Why would they want to know the room number? Did they want to visit me? With what in mind? I was nervous because of the murder.)

When I went back, it turned out that the Children of God were nervous about my motives, too.•

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“Life Used To Be Simple”

July 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Via the excellent Browser, here’s the opening of “Choosing a Driving Plan: 2035, United States,” a post at A History of the Future which examines automobiles in a post-driver, post-ownership landscape:

“The ‘driverless’ car revolutionised every aspect of transportation — particularly the business model. This brochure demonstrates how people struggled to come to grips with the new world:

Life used to be simple. If you wanted to travel, all you had to do was buy a car and put gas in it every so often. Sure, keeping a car was expensive, and it bled value every minute you weren’t using it, and you had to pay for parking and repairs and insurance, and you wasted thousands of hours of your life in the mindless drudgery of driving, but at least you knew you had absolutely no choice in the matter.

Well, it’s 2035 now, and while we’re blessedly free from the monotony and expense of driving, we’re also faced with a bewildering range of options for getting from A to B. The plummeting cost of cars (we can surely drop the term ‘driverless’ by now), along with their tight network integration, has seen a thousand flowers bloom in the burgeoning ‘cars as a service’ sector.

With so many choices available it’s easy to get confused, but don’t worry: we’re here to help you find your perfect car plan!

(Before we begin, those Pay As You Go plans that seem so cheap with their free miles and entertainment? Unless you’re a penniless hermit who only makes ten trips a year, or you hate the idea of being able to travel wherever you want, whenever you want, forget it.)

Now we’ve gotten that out of the way, here a few general tips on finding a good plan.

First off, don’t go for flat-rate pricing for ‘car minutes’ or ‘car miles.'”

“The City’s Anonymity And Restless Flux Are In Fact Its Strength”

July 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A city that’s too orderly is a museum and dying. You can look at it, but it can’t look back at you. A metropolis shouldn’t merely be shelter and welter, but you don’t want it to be lifeless any more than you’d want it to be lawless. It should, to some degree, be a mess. From Will Wiles’ new Aeon essay, “The Concrete Tangle“:

“In 1974, when mainstream discourse held the metropolis to be a behavioural sink fit only to be turned over to the waiting Droogs, the British author Jonathan Raban’s treatise Soft City made a case for city dwelling. Writing chiefly about London and New York, Raban acknowledged that they could be unfriendly and often violent (far more so than today), but added that they offered hugely attractive social and psychological possibilities. Where Mumford finds the teeming metropolis alienating and false, Raban sees it as a splendid masquerade, a place where one is free to try on and slough off identities multiple times in a day, a stage for exploring and defining the self. The difficulty and danger become perverse sources of pride and belonging, distinguishing the seasoned urbanite from the greenhorn. The city’s anonymity and restless flux are in fact its strength: its plasticity, its softness, where it awaits ‘the imprint of an identity’.

Raban’s free and expressive city life requires fluency in certain conventions. One has to learn the city’s codes, its languages. ‘So much takes place in the head, so little is known or fixed,’ he writes. ‘Signals, styles, systems of rapid, highly conventionalised communication, are the lifeblood of the big city. It is when these systems break down – when we lose our grasp on the grammar of modern life – that the Envies [a violent gang] take over.’

These ‘systems’ constitute an invisible social infrastructure; one, indeed, in which we might see a certain resemblance to the city’s tangle of service mechanisms. Both are always multiple, improvised, threatening to break under the weight of the city’s sheer extremity:

Language codifies an order, a hierarchy, a stable view of the world, which is grossly exceeded by the reality of the modern city: and the arrival of the immigrant propels him into abstractions and the contemplation of his own internal state of mind. It is a source of transformations and distortions of scale which can only be received with dumb wonder. In American fiction and autobiography, the townscape of New York is turned into a giant perceptual conundrum, as if it has been deliberately designed as a monstrous challenge to eyes and ears accustomed to the human proportions of village and small-town architecture. … If the city is normal, then he is a dwarf; if he is normal, then the city must be some kind of concrete optical illusion, for what perspective or grammar exists in which such breathtaking heights and breadths are possible? Shifting in size, at once dwarfed and elevated by these amazing confusions of scale, the greenhorn lurches forward into his myopic destiny. … City architecture is an eloquent proclamation of the absolute strangeness of city life, a reminder that here you abandon hope of holding on to your old values, your old language.

The city is a machine for teaching people to be city-dwellers. But first it necessitates submission, which it extracts by means of its scale, but also its complexity, its confusions – its tangle.”

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“We Should Be Working Only Three Days A Week”

July 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Carlos Slim, who enjoys cable, thinks people should work 33 hours a week but compress their labor into just three days. Not so much because of automaton making jobs scarce but for quality-of-life reasons. From Jude Webber at the Financial Times:

“We’ve got it all wrong, says Carlos Slim, the Mexican telecoms tycoon and world’s second-richest man: we should be working only three days a week.

Attending a business conference in Paraguay, Mr Slim said it was time for a ‘radical overhaul’ of people’s working lives. Instead of being able to retire at 50 or 60, he says, we should work until we are older – but take more time off as we do so.

‘People are going to have to work for more years, until they are 70 or 75, and just work three days a week – perhaps 11 hours a day,’ he told the conference, according to Paraguay.com news agency.

‘With three work days a week, we would have more time to relax; for quality of life. Having four days [off] would be very important to generate new entertainment activities and other ways of being occupied.’

The 74-year-old self-made magnate believes that such a move would generate a healthier and more productive labour force, while tackling financial challenges linked to longevity.”

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“He Concurred That James Smithson Was Probably Insane”

July 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Sasha Archibald’s wonderful Los Angles Review of Books essay about the history of the Smithsonian Institution, the respected American national museum whose roots are neither particularly respectable nor American:

“THE SMITHSONIAN MAY be America’s national museum, but it was not the brainchild of an American. The institution was foisted on the country by an outsider, an obscure British mineralogist who left a mysterious bequest. James Smithson never set foot in America, and there is little evidence that he befriended any Americans. He did not write approvingly (or disapprovingly) of the new democracy, and did not profess to admire American sensibilities. At the time he wrote his will, in 1826, the Smithsonian’s benefactor can best be described as a wealthy apolitical dandy, obsessed with his bloodline.

The Americans didn’t ask for Smithson’s charity, and neither were they glad to receive it. Congress had more pride than greed, and the unexpected gift rankled: not only was it that of a reviled Brit, but a Brit who dared demand he be acknowledged in perpetuity. Moreover, it was earmarked for a purpose Americans never would have chosen themselves. Smithson’s patronage was condescending — nothing more, one Congressman surmised, than a rich man’s bid for immortality. Even John Quincy Adams, the bequest’s most passionate advocate, refused to venerate Smithson as a magnanimous patron. It was Adams who kicked up a fuss when investors were allowed to squander the funds (later replenished by the US Treasury) and Adams who protested that a national farm didn’t meet Smithson’s stipulations. In private, however, he concurred that James Smithson was probably insane.

Insane, or perhaps just consumed by a single obsession. In addition to gifting a fortune to a country he’d never visited, Smithson’s other anomalous life decision was to change his name, at the late age of 36. He was the illegitimate child of the Duke of Northumberland, Sir Hugh Smithson, and although he never suffered for material want — his widowed mother managed to amass a fortune — his exclusion from the Northumberland dynasty irked him through adulthood. After both his parents died, Smithson abandoned his mother’s familial name, Macie, and claimed his father’s, vowing, somewhat histrionically, that Smithson would become more enduring a name than Northumberland.

That seemed unlikely. The Northumberlands were one of the wealthiest and most prominent families in Britain, while Smithson’s solitary life was occupied mainly by the meetings of various science clubs. He collected rocks and published articles on dilettantish topics — the mineral content of a woman’s tear, and how to brew a better cup of coffee. Traveling with a manservant and a lavish silver tea service, he settled in Paris, added a pompous flourish to his new name (‘Monsieur de Smithson’), and commissioned portraits of himself. By 1816, in his early 50s, Smithson had named Britain’s Royal Society as the benefactor of his trust, but the Society misstepped in deleting a few sentences from an article Smithson had submitted for publication. Always quick to perceive a slight, Smithson decided to gift his money elsewhere. He traveled to England one last time, in 1825, to make end-of-life arrangements, liquidating his property and drafting a will and testament that named his nephew as the primary benefactor. Should his nephew have no heirs (legitimate or illegitimate, Smithson pointedly wrote), the money should be used for ‘an Establishment for the increase & diffusion of knowledge among men’ in America, to be known as the ‘Smithsonian Institution.’

Having tended to business, Smithson returned to Paris, and then, likely anticipating his death, decamped in high style to Genoa, bringing along his silk handkerchiefs and jewel collection, where he quietly died June 27, 1829. (There is no record of the cause of death, and exhuming Smithson’s skeleton, in 1973, yielded only that he was very petite, with many rotten teeth.)”

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Old Print Article: “Field On Roof, Hangar Underground, Seen,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1929)

July 18, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Francis Keally was an architect with a focus on airport design who viewed the whole world through the prism of his passion. For sure, airports did in many cases become mini-cities with lodging, shopping and dining, but the underground airports and the rooftop landing strips awaiting the arrival of super-auto gyroplanes? That never did come to pass. From an article about some of Keally’s outré ideas in the December 29, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle: 

“Aviation will completely change the character of American architecture within the next century, according to the prediction made by Francis Keally, distinguished architect and authority on airport design, in the current issue of the American Architect magazine.

‘One hundred years from today we shall have not batteries of skyscrapers to point out to our trans-atlantic visitors,’ says Mr. Keally.

Ancient Cities Imitated

‘On the contrary, our future cities, because of the aerial age, will be flat-topped, and two out of every three buildings will serve as some kind of landing area for a super-auto gyroplane or a transcontinental air express. What towers there are will be built at a great distance from the airports and will serve as mooring masts for giant dirigibles.

‘The architects of our future cities may have to go back to places like Constantinople and Fez for their inspiration, where they can find a low horizontal character to an entire city, broken here and there by a minaret.’

Airports to be Underground 

Mr. Keally believes that population will be spread out as a result of rapid aerial transportation, instead of being congested into limited areas, as in the case of the great cities of today. He points out that the new regional plan for New York City provides for 46 landing fields within the metropolitan area, which are far away from the present heart of the city. These fields will become sub-centers of population, he foresees, with their own shopping, entertainment and residential zones.

‘Entirely new cities will also be built as residential centers at a great distance from the present congested areas.

‘Airships carrying hundreds of passengers are certain to have a strong bearing on changes that will come in our architecture and domestic life,’ he continues. ‘People will want their roof tops beautifully designed. Today it is the front of the house that is given the most attention. But from the air you see only the roof.

‘There will be underground airports with hangars, waiting rooms, rail and motor terminals, and all approaches underground. With a scheme of this kind, a plane landing at such a port will have no landing obstacles of any kind. Planes entering or leaving the ports will pass through a trapdoor in the surface of the field. The doors will be connected by ramps to the underground facilities in a manner similar to that now in our modern railroad terminals.”

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“Most Creatures Are Almost Always Hungry”

July 18, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The majority of creatures on Earth are hungry most of the time, every single day. That’s true of almost all of them and some of us, too. A change by a degree or two in the temperature could mean a world of difference in how many creatures are able eat, us included. A brief passage from Daniel Lieberman’s excellent book, The Story Of The Human Body:

“Are you worried about rapid global climate change today? If not, you should be, because rising temperatures, altered rainfall pattern, and the ecological shifts they cause imperil our food supply. Yet, as we have already seen, global change has long been a major impetus in human evolution because of its effects on the age-old problem pf ‘what’s for dinner?’ It turns out that getting enough food in the face of global climate change also triggered the age of humans. 

Getting dinner (or, for that matter, breakfast and lunch) probably does not dominate your list of daily concerns, yet most creatures are almost always hungry and preoccupied with the quest for calories and nutrients. To be sure, animals also need to find mates and avoid being eaten, but the struggle for existence is often a struggle for food, and until recently the vast majority of humans were no exception to this rule. Consider also that acquiring food is even more taxing when when your habitat alters dramatically, causing the foods you normally eat to vanish or become less common.”

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“It’s Not Really About Tesla, Or Electric Cars. It’s About Money.”

July 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Ben Gilbert of Endgadget has a succinct explanation of why Tesla is finding it a chore to open its Apple Store-ish dealerships in many states. It seems to have nothing to do with electric vs. gas. An explanation:

“Why do so many states have provisions against direct-to-consumer car sales? Because of the way the car dealership system works. Early in the automotive industry, carmakers needed individual franchise owners to invest and set up a system for consumers to buy vehicles. Without highways, transporting vehicles was difficult. Additionally, cars required far more maintenance early on. Thus, the franchise model was born.

The companies making cars — Ford, GM, etc. — negotiated deals with car dealers. As The New Yorker explained in a 2009 piece, those early deals were weighted heavily against car dealers:

‘In 1920, for instance, the US economy went into a deep recession. But Henry Ford kept his factories running at full tilt, and forced thousands of Ford dealers around the country to buy new cars that they had little chance of selling. The dealers knew that if they said no they’d never see a Model T again, so they ate the inventory. A decade later, when the Great Depression hit, Ford and GM used the same strategy to help keep the production lines going. They turned their dealers into a cushion against hard times.’

To protect themselves, car dealers formed associations. Laws were enacted, and it’s those laws — meant to protect car dealers — that are interfering with Tesla’s ability to sell cars directly to consumers. Here’s the logic of the argument against Tesla: If Tesla can sell cars directly to consumers, what stops the rest of the car industry from doing that? That is the heart of this, so let’s be totally clear:

The entire argument against Tesla selling cars directly to consumers is that car dealers might have to face competition from the companies they currently represent.

That’s it. It’s not really about Tesla, or electric cars. It’s about money. It’s an argument against competition that may or may not even manifest in reality.”

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“I’m Feeling Like This Is Probably My Last Conventional Album”

July 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In his 1983 Police parody, “King Of Suede,” “Weird” Al Yankovic sang an ode to mom-and-pop stores, to the last time mail-order catalogs and video arcades would matter, to the moment just before the whole world could fit into your pocket, disappear there. It was a sweet, nostalgic and sad song, released on a vinyl album which was sold in record stores and counted down by Casey Kasem. More than three decades later, Yankovic is releasing his latest send-ups as an album, a format that’s largely lost its groove. He’s his own mom-and-pop store now, in danger of closing. From “The Winter of Weird Al,” Steven Hyden’s Grantland piece about the parodist’s precarious place in the new normal, where the 45s and 78s have vanished into the 0s and 1s: 

“‘Is the album dead?’ is an old canard that comes up regularly in very thinky think pieces each time another mediocre quarterly sales report is released. But as it pertains specifically to musical parody albums, the format truly does seem to be operating on dial-up speed in a breathless, web-oriented universe. At least the Lonely Island and Tenacious D are known for original material, which makes buying their albums seem sort of worth it. But Weird Al subsists solely on the rapidly staling bread of pop-culture ephemera. He might have benefited from the record-label system for much of his career, but his music was proto-viral back when the Internet was just an idea hypothesized by Weird Al–loving Poindexters.

In the past, Weird Al’s timing was perhaps his greatest asset. Right when the culture seemed to be tiring of a particular song or artist, the Weird Al parody would appear. It was the sign of an artist reaching ‘we love you, but we also can’t stand you’ stardom. But that timing now seems rather, well, sluggish, and this has caused Weird Al to drift back into a crowded field. Now that the release of Mandatory Fun completes Yankovic’s record contract, it seems wise to explore more expedient alternatives.

When I asked Yankovic if it still made sense for him to make albums in the future, he was eager to steer the conversation back to the record he had already made and was trying to promote. But in spite of the hemming and hawing, he was pretty clear about what’s next.

‘I don’t want to draw any hard lines in the sand, because I’d like to leave all my options open, but I’m feeling like this is probably my last conventional album,’ he said.”

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“It Sounds Crazy, It Sounds Like Manipulating, But Why Not?”

July 17, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Speaking of a romantic age of advertising, here are videos of David Ogilvy of Ogilvy & Mather; and George Lois, who is responsible, along with Harold Hayes, for the classic Esquire covers, and on his own for the “I Want My MTV” campaign. The Ogilvy clip is from the ’60s and the Lois from 1974.

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“In Professional Football The Use Of The Computer Has Proliferated Enormously During The Last Five Years”

July 17, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve mentioned before that Tom Landry, legendary coach of the Dallas Cowboys, was computer savvy in the 1970s (here and here), but the team’s faith in AI stretches back a decade prior, when original GM Tex Schramm invested in some hardware to help crunch numbers for the draft, hoping to remove confirmation bias and other human negatives from the equation. The opening of “Make No Mistakes About It,” Tex Maule’s 1968 Sports Illustrated article:

“The best computer in the world today is a small machine about the size and consistency of a ripe cantaloupe. It can digest, evaluate and extrapolate more data than the most sophisticated hard-metal device yet evolved and can do it quicker and better. The huge computer complex—a machine that takes up more than a thousand feet of floor space—has one advantage over the little one. It has a better memory.

Both types of machine are used in modern professional football, and next week they will be working overtime as the combined National and American football leagues meet to draft this year’s crop of eligible players. The little machines—the cantaloupes—rest in the skulls of the coaches and scouts of the game. The big one—the computer machine—accepts the data given it by the little ones, analyzes it, shuffles through its memory bank and returns black and white judgments to the brains for further evaluation.

In professional football the use of the computer has proliferated enormously during the last five years. The trend began with the escape of a general manager from a professional football team to a short term as an assistant to CBS Sports Director Bill MacPhail. It grew with the immigration of an Indian statistics expert to the U.S. and reached fulfillment when a young man who had made his living taking pictures of newborn babies in Milwaukee hospitals gave up his job to follow his hobby. The three together—led by the ex-CBS executive—easily developed the most intelligent scouting system in all sports.

Tex Schramm, formerly general manager of the Los Angeles Rams and now president of the Dallas Cowboys, decided upon computerized consideration of football players while he was associated with CBS. The Rams, during the years Schramm worked for Owner Dan Reeves and luxuriated in what was then by far the most efficient scouting system in pro football, consistently came up with the best draft in the National Football League and just as consistently lost to other teams that grabbed their discards. Deluged with fine young talent in those years, the Rams tended to drop ripening players in favor of bringing in the new ones.

‘While I was with CBS, I thought the whole thing out very carefully,’ Schramm said the other day. ‘I decided that I had undervalued experience and overvalued youth. And I decided, too, that I would have to find an objective method of deciding on the worth of a football player when I went back into pro football. The only defect in the Ram scouting system was that the people involved all had built-in prejudices of one sort or another. I thought we had to find a way to judge players without emotion. We used computers to figure scores and standings when I was in charge of CBS coverage of the Winter Olympics in 1958, and I discussed using computers to evaluate football players with IBM experts then. But I didn’t get a chance to put the idea into operation until 1962, when I was with the Cowboys.’

As examples of what Schramm means by emotional judgment, he admits that for years he has been partial to speed to the exclusion of other qualities when judging the ability of a player. ‘If a guy can run a 9.4 hundred,’ he says, ‘I’ll overlook a lot of faults. Some coaches have built-in prejudices against small colleges, and some coaches feel that a Big Ten player automatically is good. There are prejudices for and against regions and for and against individual coaches. These prejudices all lead to inaccurate judgments.’

Restored to football in 1960, when Clint Murchison bought the Dallas franchise, Schramm hired Photographer Gil Brandt of Milwaukee as his chief scout and installed a detailed and expensive scouting system. Because there were so many other details to be mastered, it was not until 1962 that he began to solve the problem of objective analysis. In that year the Cowboys were approached by a subsidiary of IBM, Service Bureau Corporation, which was trying to develop a market in handling pro football accounting systems. Schramm countered with the suggestion that SBC try to develop a method for applying computers to the multiple problems of scouting. Eventually SBC sent an Indian—Salam Qureishi—to Texas to look the situation over.”

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“He’s Probably Part Artist, Part Businessman, Part Scientist, I Guess”

July 17, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

If you’re interested in advertising, New York City in the ’60s, Mad Men or the subtle levers of the free market, “The Quiet Persuader,” a 1967 installment of the BBC’s Inside America series, is great fun. It profiles Young & Rubicam exec Steve Frankfurt at 33, during the middle of that decade when the industry was flush and fascinating, when TV, the medium in which he excelled, was becoming the center of the ad world. Frankfurt’s work was so highly regarded that he was even hired to create the title sequence for To Kill a Mockingbird and other films. His first wife, Suzie, who also appears in the documentary, was a highly regarded interior designer and a friend and collaborator of Andy Warhol.

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“God Knows What We Have In Store In 30, 40 Years’ Time”

July 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Nautilus Q&A conducted by John Steele, which focuses on the valuation of nature, Cambridge economist Sir Partha Dasgupta offers up a dismal view of our future:

“Question:

What do you think the world will look like in 50 years?

Sir Partha Dasgupta:

I’m pretty pessimistic. I don’t believe humanity is going down the tube; that is meaningless. There will be always some rich people who will overcome the problems that we will face, and enough rich people. But I think the idea that we are in a universal movement towards progress, for example the idea that we will eliminate poverty in 10 years, 15 years, yes, we can do it for a short period, but the way we are attacking nature, the way we are handling nature, she’s biting back. She bites back at the local level; we already know that. Catastrophe is not a feature of the future. Villages have been wiped out in various parts of the world, as we know, over the decades, civil unrest, civil war amongst tribes, neighbors, which we have seen in our own time, are not exactly unrelated to resource scarcities. These are battles for resources. The epiphenomenon might be cultural divides and so forth, but at the end of the day when you’re very poor you worry about who’s going to feed your child, and our baser instincts, our nobler instincts are suppressed. So in my judgment we have seen enough of that. To think that those things can be cured on a large-scale basis, I don’t have many hopes because we are doing enormous damage to the oceans, we have done enormous damage. Obviously the theme of this conference in large measure has been over climate, and God knows what we have in store in 30, 40 years’ time.

Now, it doesn’t really mean that, as I say, the idea isn’t like that we’re all like lemmings, we all fold under the roof. No, it’s not going to happen like that. The richest parts of the world will find ways, because they have enough resources to be able to overcome the difficulties, at least in some measure. They may not be able to prosper as much. But I hate to think what’s going to happen in the drier parts of the world, sub-Saharan Africa, Northern India. I don’t know what will happen there, but to think that it’s all progress ahead of us if we get our institutions right, I think probably we are a bit too late for that. Many of these processes have very long-term irreversibilities. I mean, my climate science friends tell me that even if you were to have a zero emission now, the cumulative effect of the past will come to terrorize us in some form or the other in the future. So I think we’re going to see deep poverty in various parts of the world, even as we move in whatever direction we have to move, because we’ve set in motion processes which are amazingly tenacious, some of them being our own habits. I don’t think we have in the modern era come to terms with the fact that collective action is required with the greatest urgency at every level, community level, and there is collective action at the community level; we see it everywhere in some form. At the national level far less so, and of course at the international level we see mainly disappointments. So we’ll survive, but this idea of progress which we have become accustomed to over a 250-year period since the beginning of the industrial revolution, certainly in the past 60, 70 years, I mean since the end of the Second World War, there’s been this very optimistic and rightly so, optimistic view with the knowledge that we had that reasoned behavior will take us there, but we’ve been using the wrong metric.”

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“All Cryptocoins Are Risky At The Moment”

July 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Edward Castronova, Indiana University telecommunications professor and student of video-game economies and cryptocurrencies, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. One exchange that cuts to the heart of virtual money:

“Question:

If you had $500 to invest in a virtual currency if your choice, which one would it be and why?

Edward Castronova:

I would not invest in any coin at the moment. I don’t like risky investments at all. All cryptocoins are risky at the moment and, from 60,000 feet, they do not show enough signs of better or worse right now. It’s like social network software in 2005. Would you bet on MySpace, Friendster, or Orkutt? It turned out that Facebook was the winner.”

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“The Report Also Warned That Autonomous Cars May Be Used As ‘Lethal Weapons'”

July 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Mark Harris’ Guardian report on the FBI’s investigation into robocars, which could be deployed as fleets of driverless taxis or as automated bomb-delivery systems–or both:

“Google’s driverless car may remain a prototype, but the FBI believes the ‘game changing’ vehicle could revolutionise high-speed car chases within a matter of years. The report also warned that autonomous cars may be used as ‘lethal weapons.’

In an unclassified but restricted report obtained by the Guardian under a public records request, the FBI predicts that autonomous cars ‘will have a high impact on transforming what both law enforcement and its adversaries can operationally do with a car.’

In a section called Multitasking, the report notes that ‘bad actors will be able to conduct tasks that require use of both hands or taking one’s eyes off the road which would be impossible today.’

One nightmare scenario could be suspects shooting at pursuers from getaway cars that are driving themselves.”

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“The U.S. Government Coined A Plan: They’d Nuke The Moon”

July 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Zachary Crockett’s Priceonomics post which recalls a proposed mission scrubbed from the collective memory, the time when the United States considered a Sagan-aided plan to put a kaboom on the moon:

“As far back as 1949, Chicago’s Armour Research Institute (known as the IIT Research Institute today) had studied the effects of nuclear explosions on the environment and atmosphere. In 1958, the program was approached by the United States Air Force and asked to determine the hypothetical consequences of a nuclear explosion on the Moon. Sensing that national morale was low after the Soviets launched Sputnik, the U.S. government coined a plan: they’d nuke the Moon, causing an explosion so big that it’d be visible from Earth. They hoped the explosion would not only boost the confidence and approval of Americans, but serve as a show of power to the Soviets.

Led by renowned physicist Leonard Reiffel, a ten-person research team was formed under a rather auspicious project title: ‘A Study of Lunar Research Flights’ (or, ‘Project A-119’). Immediately, the team began studying ‘the potential visibility of the explosion, benefits to science, and implications for the lunar surface.’ An essential element to ensuring that the explosion would be seen from Earth was determining the mathematical projection of the expansion of the resulting dust cloud in space; Carl Sagan, a young doctoral student at the time, was brought in to help find an answer.”

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