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“A Fleeting Glimpse Of Someone, Or A Brief Exchange With Him Or Her, Yields Just A Tiny Sample Of That Person’s Traits”

July 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In an attempt to wring absolutely all the magic from romantic crushes, John Allen Paulos of the New York Times looks at the science and statistics behind human desire. We’ve been doing it all wrong! An excerpt:

“Let’s begin by imagining a person to be an assemblage of traits. Many are personal — our looks, habits, backgrounds, attitudes and so on. Many more are situational: how we behave in the myriad contexts in which we find ourselves.

The first relevant statistical notion is sampling bias. If we want to gauge public feelings about more stringent gun control, for instance, we won’t get a random sample by asking only people at a shooting range. Likewise, a fleeting glimpse of someone, or a brief exchange with him or her, yields just a tiny sample of that person’s traits.

But if we find that sample appealing, it can lead to a crush, even if it is based on nothing more than an idealized caricature: We see what we want to see. In the throes of incipient romantic fog, we use what the psychologist Daniel Kahneman, in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow, calls System 1 thinking — ‘fast, automatic, frequent, emotional, stereotypic and subconscious.'”

 

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“Leri Had Done Some Primatology Research In Hollywood After The Tate-LaBianca Murders”

July 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Because it was inevitable, Timothy Leary once met Charles Manson. In prison, of course—Folsom to be exact. The LSD guru had been apprehended by the FBI in Afghanistan and extradited. One of his cellmates was the Helter Skelter dipshit. Leary documented the meeting in a 1976 article in OUI, a middling vagina periodical of the Magazine Age. The article’s opening:

Commodore Leri, Agent from Central Intelligence assigned to earth, third planet of the G-type Star, sits on the bench of the holding cell of Soledad Prison, dressed in the white jump suit worn by transferees. On his left, John O’Neill, a slick good-looking big-city Irishman down for ten to life for murder two. To his right, a tall, slim, pretty cowboy named Ted with Indian cheekbones and a deep tan. Ted babbles evasively. He has been in and out of the joint for years and has the reputation of being a professional fuck-up. (‘He ain’t playing with a full deck,’ whispers O’Neill. ‘He’s one of the girls and a snitch, too.’) The three hold one-way tickets to the Dark Tower, and that has formed a bond among them. The Dark Tower is Folsom, a trans-Einsteinian Black Hole in the Earth Galaxy from which nothing ever escapes but feeble red radiation.

· · ·

Leri had done some primatology research in Hollywood after the Tate-LaBianca murders and was fascinated by the wave of fright that swept through the film colony. The chic reaction was to install gate locks, which were opened by remote control after visitors identified themselves over an intercom. Whatever solace this arrangement provided, it certainly would not have thwarted the creepy-crawly Mansonites, who avoided the gate at the Tate house because they suspected that it was electrified. So Leri wrote a memoir for OUI magazine to show that none of the human fears that Manson systematically exploited can be neutralized by external defenses. These terrors, he wrote, are internal neurological reactions and, in order to understand Manson, one must understand the neurology of human fear.

Manson, it was said, stimulated fear in others in order to gain power.

‘One aspect of Manson’s philosophy especially puzzled me: his strange attitude toward fear,’ Vincent Bugliosi says in Helter Skelter. ‘He not only preached that fear as beautiful, he often told the family that they should live in a constant state of fear. What did he mean by that? I asked Paul [Watkins, Manson’s second-in-command].

‘To Charlie, fear was the same thing as awareness, Watkins said. The more fear you have, the more awareness, hence the more love. When you’re really afraid, you come to ‘Now.’ And when you are at Now, you are totally conscious.’

Let us give credit where credit is due: Manson’s manipulation of fear has its roots in the paranoia behind the Cold War military posture, the antidrug scare campaigns, the addictive success of the most-popular movies and crime shows, the actions of all bureaucracy and law-enforcement agencies, and the operation of our penal institutions.

Before we can understand Manson, we must realize that a prison system is a microcosm of a culture and that the American prison system is run on raw fear and violence.”•

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Leary (sans Manson) interviewed at Folsom.

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“The Evidence Of Teams Already Using Technology Can Been Seen Throughout The Tournament”

July 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

You know a really good way to get brain damage? Have another human being kick a soccer ball sixty yards really high into the air and then strike it with your head before it falls to the ground. How many times did we see that scenario during the just-completed World Cup, the goalie booming the ball past mid-field and some striker taking one for the team? 

The research of soccer players getting CTE is far behind such investigations in American football, and most of the science and tech that has entered the game is more about optimizing immediate performance than impact on long-term health. The 2014 tournament is certainly the one in which technology came of age on a global stage. From “The Science Behind World Cup Success” by Brielle Buis at Sports Illustrated:

“Science has a growing a role in the game, and if used correctly heart rate monitors, GPS trackers, and monitored recovery devices can make player regeneration more efficient. ‘Where many teams struggle is that you can’t half use science and kind of follow it but [also] kind of just go with your gut. It won’t work,’ says [Rutgers exercise science professor Shawn] Arent.

The evidence of teams already using technology can been seen throughout the tournament as players remove their jerseys revealing heart rate monitors strapped around their chests. Whether their teams are using the devices correctly is up for question, but according to Arent, ‘The teams’ knowing that the technology exists is a step in the right direction.’

In order to maximize the benefits of science, according to Arent, coaches need to fully buy into it and bring in a science staff, a performance staff, and a medical staff, because the best coaches in the world are really good at soccer but they aren’t trained in exercise science.

[FC Dallas head coach Oscar] Pareja realized the benefit of heart rate monitors to guide the team’s recovery in Texas, where the heat and humidity play a large role, but the affect of the temperature cannot always be seen by the naked eye. ‘We use heart rate monitors every time we step on the field, tracking the players training loads,’ he says. ‘You can see the difference in the training load data based on the weather and heat.’

In a tournament in which teams play anywhere from three to seven matches, the heart rate monitors could reveal when teams should train on their off days and when they should recover. ‘I’ve realized just as important as training is, recovery is equally as important,’ says Pareja.”

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“Chance Makes Its Selection Without Any Recourse To Reasons”

July 15, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

An excerpt from “How to Choose?” Michael Schulson’s Aeon essay about the reasons why dumb luck sometimes outdoes deduction:

“Over the millennia, cultures have expended a great deal of time, energy and ingenuity in order to introduce some element of chance into decision-making. Naskapi hunters in the Canadian province of Labrador would roast the scapula of a caribou in order to determine the direction of their next hunt, reading the cracks that formed on the surface of the bone like a map. In China, people have long sought guidance in the passages of the I Ching, using the intricate manipulation of 49 yarrow stalks to determine which section of the book they ought to consult. The Azande of central Africa, when faced with a difficult choice, would force a powdery poison down a chicken’s throat, finding the answer to their question in whether or not the chicken survived – a hard-to-predict, if not quite random, outcome. (‘I found this as satisfactory a way of running my home and affairs as any other I know of,’ wrote the British anthropologist E E Evans-Pritchard, who adopted some local customs during his time with the Azande in the 1920s).

The list goes on. It could – it does – fill books. As any blackjack dealer or tarot reader might tell you, we have a love for the flip of the card. Why shouldn’t we? Chance has some special properties. It is a swift, consistent, and (unless your chickens all die) relatively cheap decider. Devoid of any guiding mind, it is subject to neither blame nor regret. Inhuman, it can act as a blank surface on which to descry the churning of fate or the work of divine hands. Chance distributes resources and judges disputes with perfect equanimity.

Above all, chance makes its selection without any recourse to reasons. This quality is perhaps its greatest advantage, though of course it comes at a price. Peter Stone, a political theorist at Trinity College, Dublin, and the author of The Luck of the Draw: The Role of Lotteries in Decision Making (2011), has made a career of studying the conditions under which such reasonless-ness can be, well, reasonable.

‘What lotteries are very good for is for keeping bad reasons out of decisions,’ Stone told me. ‘Lotteries guarantee that when you are choosing at random, there will be no reasons at all for one option rather than another being selected.’ He calls this the sanitising effect of lotteries – they eliminate all reasons from a decision, scrubbing away any kind of unwanted influence. As Stone acknowledges, randomness eliminates good reasons from the running as well as bad ones. He doesn’t advocate using chance indiscriminately. ‘But, sometimes,’ he argues, ‘the danger of bad reasons is bigger than the loss of the possibility of good reasons.’”

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Old Print Article: “Here To Show Us How To Use Mail Rockets,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1935)

July 14, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

We

Wernher von Braun, center, with Willy Ley, right, in 1954.

Ley with daughter Xenia at the Hayden Planetarium, 1957.

Speaking of Nazis, the top photograph offers an odd juxtaposition: That’s Wernher von Braun, a rocketeer who was a hands-on part of Hitler’s mad plan, whose horrid past was whitewashed by the U.S. government (here and here) because he could help America get a man on the moon; with Willy Ley, a German science writer and space-travel visionary who fled the Third Reich in 1935. A cosmopolitan in an age before globalization, Ley only wanted to share science across the word and encourage humans into space and onto the moon. He knew early on Nazism was madness leading to mass graves, not space stations. When Ley arrived in America after using falsified documents to escape Germany, he worked a bit on an odd rocket-related program: Ley led an effort to use missiles to deliver mail. It was a long way to go to get postcards from point A to point B, and an early attempt failed much to the chagrin of Ley, who donned a spiffy asbestos suit for the blast-off. Here’s the story of the plan’s genesis in the February 21, 1935 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“It may be a long time before you can take a trip to the moon or to Mars in a rocket, but the time is not far off when rockets will be used to carry mail and to catapult airplanes from ships or from the ground.

This, according to Willy Ley of Berlin, who arrived today on Cunard-White Star liner Olympic for a seven-month stay in the United States, during which time he will work on the development of the rocket with G. Edward Pendray of Crestwood, N.J. Mr. Pendray is president of the American Rocket Society. 

Mr. Ley said that a friend in Austria had used rockets successfully in the delivery of mail between two towns, only two and a half miles apart, but separated by high mountains. In a very short time, he said, the rocket may supplant all other means of mail delivery.

Its use as a catapult for airplanes, he said would make it possible to equip planes with smaller engines, because airplane engines now require most of their horsepower to take off and can do without it in the air. By using rocket as a catapult, this extra horsepower would not be necessary, he pointed out.

Also on the Olympic were Dr. Walter Braun, young German physician, who has come to live with his brother, Fred Braun of 468 8th St., Brooklyn; William M.L. Fiske, recently chosen captain of the American bobsled team which is to compete in the coming Olympics, who has been in Europe on business; the Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, who will visit friends in South Carolina. The ship was a day late due to terrific headwinds it met in the crossing.”

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In 1952, Ley being interviewed, preposterously, about flying saucers, and also about space travel:

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“This Would Mean An Ultrafuturistic Design Coupled With Loads Of Automation”

July 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Elon Musk, whose ambitions are part Edison and part Tesla, just announced he’s building a spaceport in Texas, aiming to send up rockets at an exceptionally fast clip. From Ashlee Vance in Businessweek:

“The new site in Texas, though, would give SpaceX a clean slate to put its unique spin on a spaceport. Knowing Musk, I believe this would mean an ultrafuturistic design coupled with loads of automation. The space industry could certainly benefit from this type of modernization, since it’s still relying, in most cases, on decades-old sites that were mainly built to send up missiles.

The SpaceX spaceport will be in Cameron County, where the company has been gobbling up land not far from the border with Mexico and near the cities of McAllen and Brownsville. The FAA has granted SpaceX approval (pdf) for 12 commercial launches per year on a 56.5 acre parcel of land. SpaceX would mostly be launching its current Falcon 9 rockets and its upcoming Falcon Heavy rockets.

Musk’s ultimate goal is to get to Mars, and he wants to be able to perform several launches a day, so that enough equipment and people could be sent to the planet to sustain life. The Texas site represents the first steps toward perfecting some of the launch technology needed to pull this off.”

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“[It Had] Two Built-In Shopping Carts In The Trunk For Trips To The Mall Or Grocery store”

July 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A three-wheeled concept car, the General Motors Roundabout was introduced at the 1964 World’s Fair as part of the “Futurama II” exhibit. Like the Electric Shopper, it was meant mostly as a chore vehicle. It looked like the future. It was not. From Concept Car Central: “The Runabout was a three-wheeled commuter car with two built-in shopping carts in the trunk for trips to the mall or grocery store. The front wheel could turn 180 degrees for easy parking. Aerodynamically similar to the Firebird IV concept, the Runabout featured a sliding canopy which provided access to the four seats. Driver equipment was sparse, though the Runabout had no driveline, and had to be rolled into the showroom.”

 

“We Don’t Know About The Very Beginning”

July 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In an interview conducted by Michael Proctor at King’s Review, astronomer Martin Rees is asked the two questions he probably receives most: 1) How did life begin here and 2) Is there life out there? (Thanks Browser.)

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“Martin Proctor:

Obviously, you think that the Big Bang is the correct explanation for the origins of the universe, as opposed to, say, the steady state theory. Do you feel there is a place for any sort of external force or creator?

Martin Rees:

We don’t know about the very beginning. The Big Bang may be embedded in some grander structure where there are many, many Big Bangs. I think all bets are off with regards to how it started and whether there even was a beginning. I think the aim of studying the cosmos is to push back the causal chain. Newton explained why the planets move in ellipses, but he wrote in a couple of places that he found it mysterious that the planets were moving on more or less the same plane, what we call the ecliptic, whereas the comets come from more random directions. He thought that must be providence. We understand now why planetary orbits are more or less coplanar – it’s a consequence of their origin in a dusty protostellar disc. And we’ve pushed back the causal chain to understand the formation of atoms, stars and galaxies, but there’s always a further step as well.

Martin Proctor:

Is there ‘life out there’?

Martin Rees:

That’s one of the most fascinating questions of all. But it’s a biological question. And biology is a more difficult subject than astronomy in that it deals with more complicated phenomena. We don’t even understand how life began on Earth. We understand how Darwinian evolution led from simple life to our complex biosphere. But people don’t understand the transition from complex chemistry to the first metabolising and reproducing systems. It’s gratifying that some really serious biochemists are now addressing this question When we understand that, it will tell us two things: whether it’s likely or unlikely that extraterrestrial life is widespread; and whether there is something particularly special about the chemistry on which terrestrial life is based. In other words, would we expect any other life to have the same DNA? So we don’t know that. Even the most firmly Earth-bound biologists would be fascinated by this issue. Another exciting prospect is that observations will tell us whether some of these planets have a biosphere. That will be do-able within ten or twenty years by the next generation of giant telescopes, powerful enough to provide sharp images, and collect enough light to identify the spectrum of a planet even if it’s millions of times fainter than its parent star.”

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“[It] Will Be The First Temperature-Controlled Mini-City”

July 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Dubai, which is taking the lead in the air, hopes to forge ahead with air-conditioning as well, announcing plans for the first temperature-controlled, indoor city, the Mall of the World. I want to know more about the “specialized surgical procedures and cosmetic treatments” available in the “Wellness District,” which will cater to “medical tourists.” If the emirate’s real-estate market is as much a bubble as some think it is, we may have the first ghost town with a quiet-cool setting. From Belinda Lanks at Businessweek:

“Dubai is the land of superlatives. It already lays claim to the tallest building and the biggest fish tank in the world. Now the city has unveiled plans to build the largest mall and biggest indoor theme park in what will be the first temperature-controlled mini-city.

The 8-million-square-foot shopping center, dubbed Mall of the World, will include 100 hotels, a medical resort, event facilities, and a theater district—all of which can be shielded from the elements by a large retractable roof. The project, according to the developer, Dubai Holding, will be built ‘in phases in alignment with the gradual growth of family tourism in Dubai.’

Attracting shoppers from abroad is the goal.”

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“Catering to medical tourists in a 3-million sq. ft. area”:

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“We Had Russians, Israelis, Computer Experts, Physicists. They Were All Working On This Fusion Project.”

July 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

What the late Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione loved almost as much as a hot piece of ass was cold fusion. At one point during his outsize life, Guccione, along with wife Kathy Keeton, funded a lab staffed with dozens of scientists studying the hypothetical nuclear reaction. From a 2004 New York article by Anthony Haden-Guest: 

“Omni also attests to the couple’s shared enthusiasm for the scientific fringe. Cold fusion, for instance. In 1989, two scientists claimed that they had proved experimentally that limitless free energy could be harmlessly produced from water. Mainstream scientists failed to duplicate the results and condemned the claims as piffle —which did not deter Bob and Kathy. ‘At one point, Penthouse magazine was supporting 82 scientists in San Diego,’ Guccione told me. ‘Eighty-two scientists from around the world. We had Russians, Israelis, computer experts, physicists. They were all working on this fusion project.

‘And we were doing very well. But we had reached a point where we needed to create a device which would ignite the plasma. That device would have a life of about one ten-thousandth of a second and cost about $35 million to build.

‘And since I was the sole supporter, I couldn’t go any further.'”

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“Computers Still Aren’t Smart Enough To Parse The Complexities Of Human Communications”

July 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Marcus Wohlsen’s Wired piece about the potential for an automated version of the Cynk penny-stock fiasco, the bloodless machines not yet able to decipher the language of human irrationality:

“That said, Cynk’s rise probably has less to do with a software glitch and more with a bug in human programming that blinds some people to the myth of a free lunch. Given the low volume of trading in Cynk shares—fewer than 400,000 shares yesterday, with a closing price of $13.90 per share—no one made or lost a whole lot of money, at least not by Wall Street standards. The winners and losers likely were typical penny stock hustlers, day traders chasing small jumps and drops. A few might have thought Cynk was the white whale they’d been chasing all along, and some of them may have landed it.

But the potential for an automated version of that kind of quick-buck thinking is there. After all, high-frequency trading, as revealed by Michael Lewis and others, is a similar kind of arbitrage, just at much faster speeds and informed by microseconds of insider knowledge that come from hardwired connections to the stock exchanges. While most high-frequency trading remains grounded in statistical analyses of patterns in the markets themselves, the AP Twitter hack example shows trading firms are letting their machines comb social media and the news in search of competitive advantage.

The problem is that computers still aren’t smart enough to parse the complexities of human communications in a way that makes them reliable arbiters of what news is actually worth trading on.”

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“Data Is This Generation’s Plastics”

July 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

If ousted Citigroup chairman Vikram Pandit had made the following comments, recorded by Tom Braithwaite in a “Lunch with the Financial Times“ piece, twenty years ago, they would have been bold, forward-thinking statements. Now? Meh. Feels like he’s playing catch-up. An excerpt:

“‘Data is like . . . You’re too young, but there was a movie with the [line about] plastics.’ When I assure him I’m familiar with The Graduate, he says: ‘Data is this generation’s plastics. I don’t see business models being truly successful until you get it.’

Pandit has a fondness for big concepts and management-speak and it can be difficult to bring him down to earth. I press him for examples. ‘You have large auto companies saying, ‘Where is the growth?’ and, on the other hand, you have a SMAC stack that’s created Uber. What’s interesting is that all those intangible abilities are inside the auto companies to make it happen.’

He has been investing in a steady stream of companies that he thinks embody innovative ideas that might make them the next Uber, the suddenly ubiquitous taxi-ordering app. At the same time, he is chairman of TGG Group, a consulting company set up by Steven Levitt, co-author of pop economics book Freakonomics – which aims to help corporations unlock their inner Ubers.

Starters cleared away, Pandit isolates a small breadcrumb in the expanse of white tablecloth and tweezers it between his finger nails. Behavioural economics, he says, provides an ‘uncanny ability to predict how you’re going to behave.’ Levitt, best-known for a book which explores the business model of drug-dealers and cheating sumo wrestlers, is applying his analysis of human behaviour to companies in ways that ‘will be in textbooks in 10 years.'”

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“I Asked Him To Recommend His Favorite Book About Business”

July 13, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Bill Gates’ WSJ piece revealing his favorite business book, which was penned decades ago by a New Yorker writer whose name probably doesn’t resonate so much today:

“Not long after I first met Warren Buffett back in 1991, I asked him to recommend his favorite book about business. He didn’t miss a beat: It’s Business Adventures, by John Brooks,” he said. “I’ll send you my copy.” I was intrigued: I had never heard of Business Adventures or John Brooks.

Today, more than two decades after Warren lent it to me—and more than four decades after it was first published—Business Adventures remains the best business book I’ve ever read. John Brooks is still my favorite business writer. (And Warren, if you’re reading this, I still have your copy.)

A skeptic might wonder how this out-of-print collection of New Yorker articles from the 1960s could have anything to say about business today. After all, in 1966, when Brooks profiled Xerox, the company’s top-of-the-line copier weighed 650 pounds, cost $27,500, required a full-time operator and came with a fire extinguisher because of its tendency to overheat. A lot has changed since then.•

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Old Print Article: “Machine May Replace Typewriter Girls,” Los Angeles Herald (1907)

July 12, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Two brief newspaper articles which announced the invention, in 1907, of an automatic typewriter by Thomas A. McCall, which was at the time being demonstrated at business conventions, including one at Madison Square Garden. It eventually came to the market under the name the Hooven Automatic, a carbon paper-less way to reproduce scores of form letters and memos.

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From “Truly Wonderful Machine,” in the August 5, 1907 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

In Columbus, O., a man has produced a mechanical typewriter that promises to eliminate the present day pretty stenographer that has become such a familiar figure in the modern office. This machine will actually write letters at the rate of one thousand words a minute, continuously, and do the work correctly and automatically. This wonderful machine will be on exhibition at the national business shows to be held in New York and Chicago this fall. The machine may be operated in two ways. If it is desired to make a number of copies of the letter, with different names and addresses, it will perform this work producing in each case an original letter in one, two or three colors, fill in the name and address and add the signature.

A business man desiring to dictate may use this automatic typewriter by talking his letters into a device like a phonograph, transfer the record to the machine, turn on the electric current and go home. The next morning the letters will all be done, and the machine will automatically stop when all the letters are written. It will also address envelopes or wrappers and count them as well.

It will write forward or backward, and if desired the lines may be justified like type, which at the present time is impossible on ordinary typewriters. With the general introduction of this machine wives of business men will breathe easier, for the machine is warranted not to flirt. The national business shows, where the machine will be shown to the public for the first time, will be held in Madison Square Garden in New York October 12 to 19 and in the Coliseum, Chicago, November 9 to 16.•

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From “Machine May Replace Typewriter Girls,” in the October 15, 1907 Los Angeles Herald:

Typewriter girls may find their occupations gone if what is said of a new invention turns out to be true. It is exhibited at the business show now in progress in Madison Square Garden and is an automatic typewriter run by compressed air and capable, it is said, of writing from 5,000 to 10,000 words an hour for twenty-four hours at a stretch.

The invention is the work of A. McCall of Columbus, Ohio.•

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“American Homes Dwarf Those In Nearly Every Other Country On Earth”

July 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Cars are smaller and fewer and less gassy in America, but home-size growth halted only briefly during the depths of the Great Recession, subsequently regaining the lost square footage and then some. Even our most famous environmentalist, Al Gore, lives in a climate-killing monster with more-than-ample mantle space for his Nobel and Oscar. From Henry Grabar’s Salon piece, “We Must Kill the McMansion!“:

“This surfeit of space is a potent symbol of the American way of life; it speaks to our priorities, our prosperity and our tendency to take more than we need. But the superlative size of our houses isn’t just a foam finger America can hold up to the world. It’s correlated with land use patterns and population density, which in turn determine the environmental impact and personal health of communities, and whether they can support a diverse range of businesses, facilities and transportation choices. It’s no coincidence that a modern American suburb like Weston, Florida, has just one-third the population density of Levittown.

Given the environmental, infrastructural and financial costs of Americans’ insatiable spatial appetites – the share of our budgets devoted to housing is 41 percent, up from 26 percent in the Levittown era – you can understand why some saw good news in the recession-era report that our houses had begun to shrink. Between 2007 and 2010, for the first time in a half century, the average size of new U.S. homes fell by more than a hundred square feet, dropping back toward 2004 levels.

It was no peak; last year, the average size of new American houses reached an all-time high of 2,679 square feet. The increase in space per person has been even more dramatic. Between 1973 and 2013, the average American household shrank from 3.01 to 2.54 persons; new homes give Americans more than 1,000 square feet per family member, on average. That’s roughly twice as much space as we had in 1973.

You may consider this an indicator of success, excess, or both. Planners consider it a challenge. Economic growth, as the prolific planner Pedro Ortiz has written, drives urban expansion far more than population growth. In Madrid, for example, the average person’s living space expanded from 129 square feet in 1974 to 301 square feet in 2007 — a nearly threefold increase. While the population hardly changed between 1975 and 1995, the city’s footprint expanded by 50 percent.

The phenomenon is universal. But American homes dwarf those in nearly every other country on Earth.”

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“UberX Drivers Are Also Undercutting Professional Cab Drivers…Helping Encourage An Overall Race To The Bottom”

July 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Cheap is often expensive, and low prices come off of someone else’s bottom line, almost always workers. In a The Daily Dot piece, Tim Jones-Yelvington argues against the sharing economy for the injuries it causes labor, though I don’t think regulation will cause it to screech to a halt. Nor should it, really. Beyong ride-sharing, driverless cars are going to displace workers, and we shouldn’t try to stop that innovation from occurring. We do, however, need some nimble political solutions to deal with the transitional pain of change and automation. An excerpt:

“What Uber and their ilk are fighting for is their right to evade regulatory protections that ensure not just safety for passengers, but also basic labor protections for the professional taxi drivers for whom cabs are a primary source of income. According to Uber, policies like the one pending in my home state of Illinois will destroy thousands of jobs for people in need of cash to pay their bills, including ‘military veterans, teachers, retirees, students, students, the unemployed and underemployed.’ (See also: babies and dogs.)

They’re referring to the part-time drivers who participate in the low-cost non-taxi ridesharing service UberX, who are currently not required to hold commercial licenses, and who are facing some pretty sketchy working conditions, including unpredictable percentages owed to Uber and unreliable protection from the company in case of accidents.

But UberX drivers are also undercutting professional cab drivers and could arguably be described as scabs, helping encourage an overall race to the bottom. With their help, the taxi cab business is now going the way of many other industries in the 21st century, as what was once a potentially viable career is displaced by contingent, part-time, and more easily exploited workers.”

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“About 1.8m Years Ago Man’s Brain Became Larger, His Gut Became Smaller And He Started Walking Upright. No Ape Had Done That Before.”

July 11, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Economist has a review of The Improbable Primate: How Water Shaped Human Evolution, Clive Finlayson’s new book which argues that H2O was what made us modern, though I’ve always thought it likely that it was a confluence of numerous factors. The opening:

“ACCORDING to the standard treatment in evolutionary biology, about 1.8m years ago man’s brain became larger, his gut became smaller and he started walking upright. No ape had done that before. It was an important milestone in the story of human evolution.

The ancestor in question, Homo erectus, could use simple tools and hunt. His diet was more meat-based than plant-based. Meat has more calories than food derived from plants. Humans had transformed themselves from tree-climbing apes that needed to spend a lot of time searching for food to upright, meat-consuming hunters that could roam large distances. So successful was this transformation, evolutionarily speaking, that in due course the descendants of Homo erectus, modern-day Homo sapiens, had no problems colonising the far reaches of the globe.

A few years ago Richard Wrangham, a British primatologist at Harvard University, challenged this accepted wisdom by arguing that learning to cook had made apes human. People cannot easily digest raw meat, he said. Cooking food increases its nutritional value. Mr Wrangham showed that Homo erectus learned to cook with fire about 1.8m years ago. This development conferred evolutionary benefits that ultimately led to the dominance of Homo sapiens today.

In a new book, Clive Finlayson, a zoologist and palaeontologist, who is the director of the Gibraltar Museum, offers another view of 7m years of human evolution. Instead of food, he focuses on water, advancing the theory that the spread of Homo sapiens across the globe was driven largely by changes in climate and access to fresh water.”

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“A New Idiosyncratic Kind Of Luxury Began To Flourish”

July 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Web 1.0 firms prided themselves not just on the informality of their office space but the austerity. Giant tech firms aren’t just lavish now, but their campuses possess identities as pronounced as those of nation-states. Some day (and relatively soon) they will all be gone, but presently they are gleaming cities on a hill. What do the offices of Google and Twitter and Apple tell us about our more collective future? From Kate Losse’s essay “Tech Aesthetics” at Aeon:

“The trend towards office design as an expression of employee taste began after the dotcom crash, when tech companies auctioned off all of their Aeron chairs and ping pong tables, which had come to symbolise tech-office playfulness. As a result, tech offices of the early 2000s tended towards a more sober utility, meant to reassure investors of their restraint.

It took a new generation of companies to renew the playful tech aesthetic. In 2004, Mark Zuckerberg moved Facebook from his dorm room at Harvard University cross-country to its headquarters in Silicon Valley. The company’s first office on Emerson Avenue in Palo Alto recreated Zuckerberg’s dorm room in its design aesthetic, with a video game room replete with ratty couch and rattier blankets. Meanwhile Google’s headquarters in nearby Mountain View adopted a playful, more elementary-school feel with primary colours, exercise balls, and oversized robot sculptures. By 2007, the Day-Glo look – what one could call the ‘orange period’ – had taken over tech, transforming conferences, T‑shirts, and offices into seas of bright orange, yellow and lime green.

The economic crash of 2008 ushered in a new, almost military sobriety, best represented by Facebook’s renovation of an old Hewlett-Packard building in the Stanford Research Park in Palo Alto complete with cavernous, sterile rooms and cement floors. As the economy recovered over the next several years, a new idiosyncratic kind of luxury began to flourish, evident in the appearance of custom pieces, hand-hewn wooden trimmings, and the increasingly eclectic fixtures that mark today’s tech offices. This latest trend can be read as an attempt to disguise work – with trimmings that suggest personality in place of the smooth, ordered humming of a corporate workforce.

This is why the walls in Facebook’s latest headquarters in Menlo Park are covered in graffiti: it makes an office sited on suburban marshland seem like a buzzy urban street. Reassuringly for its well-off workers, however, it’s still a high-end kind of street where the graffiti is done by artists on commission rather than by some masked figure spray‑painting without permission.

What connects Facebook’s incongruous graffiti and Twitter’s incongruous log cabins is their expense. Both represent a complete renovation of the space, making graffiti and log cabins (not in themselves luxurious) seem like high-end amenities.”

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“We Were Asked To Imagine A Yardstick Within Our Minds”

July 11, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The novelist Leo Litwak spent some quality time in the ’60s and ’70s writing magazine articles about American dreamers, from Ronald Reagan to Walt Disney to Werner Erhard, and getting to the essence of Esalen before Paul Mazursky did. For his fascinating 1972 New York Times Magazine piece, “Rolfing, Aikido, Hypnodramas, Psychokinesis, and Other Things Beyond the Here and Now” (subscription required), Litwak attended the Association for Humanistic Psychology meeting at Squaw Valley, becoming familiar with all manner of back-cracking, mind-bending, life-altering methods. An excerpt:

The insistence upon active audience participation keeps the meetings from becoming dull. I attended a hypnodrama session at the Hofbrau, an A-frame, chalet-type building, with scripted placards advertising the menu hanging from the walls (“Hier gibts fondue”). The Hofbrau was jammed. We were to be hypnotized, and were then to participate in a hypnodrama. We encircled the fieldstone fireplace in the center of the large dining hall as Ira Greenberg of the Carmelito, Calif., State Hospital led the session. He described hypnosis as a “control of our controls.” It was a technique, he said, that enabled us to concentrate deeply and regress to forgotten states; once these states were recalled, hypnodrama could be used to act them out, enabling us finally to gratify the unsatisfied nurture needs of infancy.

We removed our shoes and lay on the floor flat on our backs. We were instructed to relax. We began with the toes and very gradually worked up to the head. We were assured that the process was pleasant. We were asked to imagine a yardstick within our minds. We slowly counted down the yardstick until we came to the number which we felt represented the depth of our hypnosis. We tried to sink beneath this number. There were a few snores. We were urged to stay awake. We then began a fantasy trip. We flew up the mountain that was behind the Hofbrau; we were told to soar above the crest and enjoy the flight. We then settled down near the crest by a cave; entered inside and walked down a corridor passing several doors, stopping at that one which enclosed a place we had always wished to enter. We passed through this door, looked around, left the cave, descended to the Hofbrau and then awoke. We assembled in groups of five to discuss the experience. An elderly couple, a trifle disgruntled, denied that they were hypnotized and were skeptical that anyone else was. I myself felt quite relaxed and refreshed. A good many of those in the audience said they had been in deep trances.

A hypnodrama was then staged, based on a young woman’s fantasy. When she had been asked to pass through the door to her special place, her fantasy was that she had entered her high-school lavatory; a woman attendant sat at the threshold and refused to acknowledge her; she felt deeply disturbed. Roles were assigned to volunteers. The young lady was returned to hypnosis. She again passed through the door and confronted the impassive woman attendant. She burst into tears, and begged for a demonstration of affection. The attendant rose to comfort her. At the moment of revelation I had to leave for an appointment with the A.H.P. officers who were to brief me on the current state of humanistic psychology.•

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“Brazil Was The World Cup Favorite Before The Tournament Began, And Its Championship Chances Still Rank First”

July 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Football is beautiful, but the World Cup is pretty much statistically meaningless–tremendous fun, but meaningless. Any tournament with a three-game first round and single elimination thereafter won’t tell us much, especially when we’re talking about a low-scoring sport contested on an expansive playing surface. Yes, the better teams tend to make it into the later rounds, but there’s no way this type of system is deciding which of them is truly best. And trying to handicap the semifinals and finals is a fool’s errand, as the FiveThirtyEight site just learned. The opening of its Brazil-Germany prediction piece: 

“On Tuesday, Brazil and Germany kick off the World Cup semifinals, where there are no real party-crashers to be found. Including A Seleção and Die Mannschaft, four of the top five teams in the pre-Cup Elo ratings are still active in the tournament. Sorry, Spain.

With such evenly matched squads — and the ever-present specter of randomness — barring a huge blowout, the final four games of the World Cup are unlikely to provide much of a referendum on which side is truly the world’s best. But at the same time, the absence of a longshot entry boosts the chances that one of the remaining four teams is in fact the “true” best team in the field. More important, it also increases the odds that we’ll see a pair of exciting, close matches at the doorstep of the World Cup final.

IN DEPTH

Brazil was the World Cup favorite before the tournament began, and its championship chances still rank first according to the FiveThirtyEight model. Our official projections even say there’s a 73 percent probability that Brazil will beat Germany Tuesday and advance to the final. But those numbers don’t know that the gifted Brazilian striker Neymar will miss the rest of the tournament with a broken vertebra, an injury he sustained against Colombia in the quarterfinals. If we account for his absence (and that of his teammate Thiago Silva, who racked up two yellow cards and must sit out Tuesday’s match), Brazil’s chances of beating Germany drop to somewhere near 65 percent, numbers fueled in large part simply by the match’s location on Brazilian soil.”

“Had He Lost Deliberately? Or Was He Rattled? Unset­tled? Even, As Some Thought, Insane?”

July 10, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Before we realized that the machines were our common enemy, we fought amongst ourselves. Deep Blue would eventually make us all pale in comparison, but in 1972, it was Red vs. Red, White and Blue, in one of the most thrilling contests ever witnessed. In dethroning Russian chess champion Boris Spassky, Bobby Fischer was his unorthodox self, playing like a supercomputer with its wires crossed. An excerpt from Robert Greene’s The 48 Laws of Power, via Delancey Place:

“The first game of a chess tournament is critical, since it sets the tone for the months to come. It is often a slow and quiet struggle, with the two play­ers preparing themselves for the war and trying to read each other’s strate­gies. This game was different. Fischer made a terrible move early on, perhaps the worst of his career, and when Spassky had him on the ropes, he seemed to give up. Yet Spassky knew that Fischer never gave up. Even when facing checkmate, he fought to the bitter end, wearing the opponent down. This time, though, he seemed resigned. Then suddenly he broke out a bold move that put the room in a buzz. The move shocked Spassky, but he recovered and managed to win the game. But no one could figure out what Fischer was up to. Had he lost deliberately? Or was he rattled? Unset­tled? Even, as some thought, insane?

After his defeat in the first game, Fischer complained all the more loudly about the room, the cameras, and everything else. He also failed to show up on time for the second game. This time the organizers had had enough: He was given a forfeit. Now he was down two games to none, a position from which no one had ever come back to win a chess champi­onship. Fischer was clearly unhinged. Yet in the third game, as all those who witnessed it remember, he had a ferocious look in his eye, a look that clearly bothered Spassky. And despite the hole he had dug for himself, he seemed supremely confident. He did make what appeared to be another blunder, as he had in the first game — but his cocky air made Spassky smell a trap. Yet despite the Russian’s suspicions, he could not figure out the trap, and before he knew it Fischer had checkmated him. In fact Fischer’s un­orthodox tactics had completely unnerved his opponent. At the end of the game, Fischer leaped up and rushed out, yelling to his confederates as he smashed a fist into his palm, ‘I’m crushing him with brute force!’

In the next games Fischer pulled moves that no one had seen from him before, moves that were not his style.”

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“Many Of Baseball’s Best Hitters Have Never Seen A Screwball”

July 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

I’m sticking with my non-scientific analysis that so many baseball pitchers are getting injured and requiring Tommy John surgery because they’re simply overthrowing. When I was a kid, you would have a Nolan Ryan here or there who could very easily bring a hellacious fastball, but most of the pitchers were able to succeed with more finesse than force. With the injuries piling up and today’s focus on defensive shifting and a pitch-to-defense philosophy, you would think teams would start to lay off the throwers who are clearly going full-tilt on every pitch and have likely been doing so since they were in grade school. Let’s just hope Masahiro Tanaka won’t be added to the growing list of TJ-surgery alumni. 

One devastating pitch was shelved almost league-wide over the last several decades because it was thought unfriendly to the arm. From “The Mystery of the Vanishing Screwball,” Bruce Shoenfeld’s New York Times Magazine article about the pitch that dare not be thrown:

“A pitcher’s typical menu includes a fastball, a curveball and a changeup as the meat and potatoes, with perhaps a slider, cut fastball or sinker as a side. The screwball is another dish entirely. Those who serve one have typically been looked upon as oddities, custodians of a quirky art beyond the realm of conventional pitching. Over time, the word itself has taken on the characteristics of both the pitch and those who throw it: erratic, irrational or illogical, unexpected. Unlike the knuckleball, which is easy to throw but hard to master, the screwball requires special expertise just to get it to the plate. The successful screwball pitcher must overcome an awkward sensation that feels like tightening a pickle jar while simultaneously thrusting the wrist forward with extreme velocity. Yet the list of master practitioners includes some of baseball’s greats: Christy Mathewson, Carl Hubbell, Warren Spahn, Juan Marichal.

In 1974, Mike Marshall of the Los Angeles Dodgers won the National League’s Cy Young Award by relying on the screwball. Tug McGraw used it to get to three World Series as a reliever with the Mets and Phillies. In 1984, Detroit’s screwballer, Willie Hernandez, was both the American League’s top pitcher and Most Valuable Player. The last great practitioner was Fernando Valenzuela, most famously a Dodger, who threw a wide assortment of pitches, none more prominent — or effective — than his screwball.

Today few, if any, minor leaguers are known to employ the pitch. College coaches claim they haven’t seen it in years. Youths are warned away from it because of a vague notion that it ruins arms. ‘Pitchers have given it up,’ says Don Baylor, the former player and manager, who now works with Angels hitters. ‘Coaches don’t even talk about it. It’s not in the equation.’

Many of baseball’s best hitters have never seen a screwball. This spring, I spent time in nearly a dozen clubhouses asking about the pitch. ‘Maybe in Wiffle ball,’ David Freese, the Angels’ third baseman, said. ‘But I’ve never sat in a hitters’ meeting and heard, ‘This guy’s got a screwball.’ It doesn’t come up. I’m not sure I even know exactly what it is.’

As a result, the pitch has taken on somewhat mythical properties.”

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Two Brief, Beautiful Films By Jean Painlevé

July 10, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink


“Calder’s Circus” (1955):


“L’Hippocampe” (1934):

“The Project Represents A Breakthrough In The Field Of Micro-Aerial Vehicles”

July 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Cell phones proliferated in the early aughts in America just as Colony Collapse Disorder began to claim large swaths of our bee population, and some thought perhaps there was a connection. But it was just correlation, not causation. Bees seem instead to be stressed by nicotine-derived pesticides and other still-to-be-determined factors. From Dina Spector at Business Insider, an article about RoboBees, one proposed solution to the problem but probably not the best one:

“Honeybees, which pollinate nearly one-third of the food we eat, have been dying at unprecedented rates because of a mysterious phenomenon known as colony collapse disorder (CCD). The situation is so dire that in late June the White House gave a new task force just 180 days to devise a coping strategy to protect bees and other pollinators. The crisis is generally attributed to a mixture of disease, parasites, and pesticides. 

Other scientists are pursuing a different tack: replacing bees. While there’s no perfect solution, modern technology offers hope.

Last year, Harvard University researchers led by engineering professor Robert Wood introduced the first RoboBees, bee-size robots with the ability to lift off the ground and hover midair when tethered to a power supply. The details were published in the journal Science. A coauthor of that report, Harvard graduate student and mechanical engineer Kevin Ma, tells Business Insider that the team is ‘on the eve of the next big development.’ Says Ma: ‘The robot can now carry more weight.’

The project represents a breakthrough in the field of micro-aerial vehicles. It had previously been impossible to pack all the things needed to make a robot fly onto such a small structure and keep it lightweight.”

_________________________

“Hello Doug. Would you personally miss bees if they disappeared?”

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“I Tried Yoga, Dale Carnegie, Zen, Scientology, Encounter Groups, T-Groups, Psychoanalysis, Reality Therapy, Gestalt, Love, Nudity”

July 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The openings of two People articles from several decades ago about a couple of radically different seminar teachers, Moshe Feldenkrais and Werner Erhard, who wanted to help you be the best you that you could be.

From Jon Keller and Bonnie Freer’s 1981 piece, “His Methods May Seem Bizarre“:

Israeli scientist Moshe Feldenkrais is not easily impressed. Over the years he has treated thousands of people, from statesmen (Israel’s first Prime Minister, David Ben-Gurion) to violin virtuosos (Yehudi Menuhin), with his unique method of movement that—he claims and his disciples devoutly believe—results in a kind of heightened self-awareness and improved physical coordination. 

So when Julius Erving, the Philadelphia 76ers’ $550,000-a-year star hoopster, recently became interested in the work of the 77-year-old mind-body guru, even Dr. J got a dose of Feldenkrais’ characteristic crankiness. “There shouldn’t be any professional athletes,” huffs Feldenkrais. “Everyone should be athletic. But if someone wants to sell his skills, it’s his business—not mine.”

Erving and more than 200,000 people from Tel-Aviv to Argentina regard Feldenkrais’ curmudgeonly ways as small price to pay for learning what he calls “Awareness Through Movement.” Essentially, the Feldenkrais Method is a program of exercises that suggest mind over matter, with the body programming the brain so that the whole system works in a new way. 

Feldenkrais concedes there are no simple explanations for his approach (he even scoffs at such attempts), but it is akin to the “patterning” technique widely used to treat retarded children. Patterning involves repeated manipulation of the limbs, and the feedback from these motions stimulates the brain to accept the movements as normal. 

“I am not interested in the movements themselves,” explains Feldenkrais, “but rather in how you do them. Any movement which is difficult and done over and over again can actually reorganize molecules in the brain and the way they send impulses.” Taking his mind-body philosophy on the road, Feldenkrais has just completed a four-day-a-week, nine-week training course for 235 of his pupils at Hampshire College in Amherst, Mass. Fee: $2,000 per person. This week Feldenkrais is leading a four-day workshop in Washington, D.C. before heading home.•

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From 1975’s “Werner Erhard“:

“I wanted to get as far away from Jack Rosenberg as I could get,” explains Werner Erhard. His reason is clear: Jack Rosenberg was a loser. Born in Lower Merion, Pa., Rosenberg married at 18, fathered four children and worked as a construction company supervisor—until he dropped out in 1960. Leaving his family, he took off for St. Louis with a girlfriend (now his second wife and mother of three). To start fresh, Rosenberg adopted space scientist Wernher von Braun‘s first name (misspelling it) and former West German Chancellor Ludwig Erhard’s last name. “Freudians,” Werner Erhard concedes, “would say this was a rejection of Jewishness and a seizure of strength.”

The rest of Erhard’s spiritual hegira has become legend among his cult. For eight years he worked as a crackerjack instructor of encyclopedia salesmen. Then one morning while driving down the freeway south of San Francisco, to which he moved in 1964, he was suddenly struck by the realization that “I was never going to make it. No matter how much money or recognition I achieved, it would never be enough.”

To overcome this hopelessness, Erhard experimented with just about every method guaranteed to bring peace of mind. “I tried yoga, Dale Carnegie, Zen, Scientology, encounter groups, t-groups, psychoanalysis, reality therapy, Gestalt, love, nudity, you name it,” he recalls. “But when it was over, that was not it.”

Once again, Erhard was behind the wheel when he finally “got it”—a religious happening that the faithful call “The Experience.” And what is ‘it’? Replies the Master: “What is it, is it. When you drop the effort to make your life work, you begin to discover that it’s perfect the way it is. You can relax. It’s all going to unfold.”

Not much of a message, perhaps, but as packaged, promoted and proselytized by Erhard in a two-weekend, 60-hour course (price $250), his movement, known as est (Latin for ‘it is,’ as well as Erhard Seminars Training), has turned out more than 63,000 converts in 12 U.S. cities. Another 12,000 hopefuls are on the waiting list. Among the alumni of est’s psychic boot camps are Emmy winner Valerie Harper (who thanked Erhard on TV for changing her life), Cloris Leachman, John Denver, astronaut Buzz Aldrin and activist Jerry Rubin.•

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