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“My Thumb Would Almost Certainly Have Grown Back Perfectly Without Any Treatment”

June 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

If you want to know interesting things that you may not have learned yet, Delanceyplace is a good place to go. From a story by Michaeleen Doucleff about children regenerating fingertips:

“‘When I was three years old I caught my thumb in a folding chair. I cannot remember this episode, filled as it must have been with blood and pain, but my mother does. She packed the amputated tip of the thumb on ice and rushed me to the Emergency Department, where a surgeon sewed it back on again. I still have the scar on my thumb now, running parallel to the base of my nail.

‘What my mother didn’t know, and what most doctors still don’t, is that my thumb would almost certainly have grown back perfectly without any treatment. It would have regenerated in the same way as some amphibians can grow back their tails or legs. Bone, nail, nerves, blood vessels, the whole lot. All it needed was a gentle clean, a non-adherent dressing, and a lollipop to soothe my frayed, three-year-old nerves.

‘It turns out humans can regenerate, but only the very tips of their fingers and only [some] children. In the 1970s a Sheffield paediatrician even published a paper on this effect in the Journal of Paediatric Surgery. Her results were unequivocal: amputations above the last joint in children under six left to heal naturally would regrow, the entire finger, without a scar or deformity!'”

________________________

Not regeneration but transplantation, 2011:

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“It’s A Matter Of What Are You Doing To Battle Those Inequities”

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

If you were living in extreme poverty, in a place rotten with disease, who would you rather see, someone with a laissez–faire attitude who was proud of himself for not causing any unintended consequences as he stood on the sidelines, or someone like Jeffrey Sachs or Bill and Melinda Gates, who, sure, can’t make the world perfect, but who might give you some of the tools you need to survive, maybe even thrive a little? It’s awfully easy to dismiss philanthropists for their failings as they learn the best ways to succeed, but if I were in great need I would always gravitate to people who might give me something real even if it wasn’t ideal. From Samiha Shafy and Mathieu von Rohr’s Spiegel interview with Melinda Gates:

“Spiegel:

In your speech at the WHO, you said that you and your husband despise inequity. But isn’t it strange when you return from your trips to your luxurious mansion on Lake Washington outside of Seattle? A property for which you have to pay more than a million dollars a year in taxes.

Melinda Gates:

I think it is the same for you if you go to the developing world and then come home and get into your car with seat heaters. Or you come home, turn on your shower and you have hot water. I don’t care whether you live in a small apartment or in a giant house, there are inequities. Quite frankly, neither Bill nor I would build that house again if we had it to do all over again. But it’s a matter of what are you doing to battle those inequities and for Bill and me, we have now oriented our life around that. We’re spending not only our money, but also our time.

Spiegel:

Are you doing so partly out of a sense of guilt?

Melinda Gates:

No, I wouldn’t say guilt. We feel like we have a responsibility. Any of us that is lucky enough to grow up in a country like Germany or Great Britain or Japan or the US ought to do something for the rest of the world.

Spiegel:

The French economist Thomas Piketty recently triggered a debate with his book in which he argues that iniquities are also growing in the industrialized world. His recipe is that of raising taxes for the very rich. Do you agree with him?

Melinda Gates:

Bill and I are both in favor of an estate tax and we’ve actually been quite outspoken about that. But it hasn’t gotten very far in the US. If you’re in the upper quartile of income in any of these wealthy economies, you ought to give back more than other people. Bill, Warren Buffett and I are quite involved in trying to get people of substantial wealth to commit to giving half back, either in their lifetime or at their death.”

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“Crack Wasn’t The Real Problem”

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

Neuroscientist Carl Hart shares contrarian views about drugs in his new book, High Price. In addition to refusing the idea that methamphetamines destroy a person’s looks–that widely held belief is just the result of a very successful anti-drug propaganda campaign, he argues–Hart doesn’t think crack is nearly as addictive as it’s made out to be. From an interview by Amy Chozick in the New York Times Magazine:

“Question:

You begin your book High Price with a story about an experiment you did. You offered a crack addict a hit or $5.

Carl Hart:

He chose the cash. Why did you lead with this? We have rigorous science to support that crack cocaine is not as addictive as people think and that they have been hoodwinked. I was hoping people would want to read further if they had a myth busted right up front.

Question:

How do you think Hollywood plays into our perceptions about drugs and addiction? It’s not only Hollywood.

Carl Hart:

One of Public Enemy’s bigger songs, ‘Night of the Living Baseheads,’ is all about this crack addict who’s just fiending. Public Enemy did so many good things, but on that song, they were wrong. And New Jack City is on TV, like, every week. Remember New Jack City?

Question:

Yes, the movie about a drug kingpin who turns an apartment complex into a crack factory.

Carl Hart:

Again, the filmmakers were trying to help their community, but the problem was that crack wasn’t the real problem. The real problem was unemployment, lack of education, lack of skills. Politicians are happy not to have to focus on those larger issues. You can just focus on crack cocaine, put more cops on the street and make tougher laws.”

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“We Don’t Know How Quickly It Will Come, Just That It Will”

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

In a New York Review Books piece, Bill McKibben lays out the sobering ramifications of the Great Melt, which can be slowed down and perhaps managed to some extent with technological innovation and political will, but which cannot be stopped. An excerpt:

“In mid-May of this year, a pair of papers were published in Science and Geophysical Research Letters that made clear that the great glaciers facing the Amundsen Sea were no longer effectively ‘buttressed.’ It turns out that the geology of the region is bowl-shaped: beneath the glaciers the ground slopes downward, meaning that water can and is flooding underneath them. It is eating away at them from below and freeing them from the points where they were pinned to the ground. This water is warmer, because our oceans are steadily warming. This slow-motion collapse, which will occur over many decades, is ‘unstoppable’ at this point, scientists say; it has ‘passed the point of no return.’

This means that as much as ten feet of sea-level rise is being added to previous predictions. We don’t know how quickly it will come, just that it will. And that won’t be all. A few days after the Antarctic announcement, other scientists found that much of Greenland’s ice sheet shows a similar underlying geology, with warm water able to melt it from underneath. Another study that week showed that soot from huge forest fires, which are more frequent as a result of global warming, is helping to melt the Greenland ice sheet, a remarkably vicious cycle.

In certain ways none of this really comes as news. A leading glaciologist, Jason Box of the Geological Survey of Denmark and Greenland (GEUS), has calculated that given the paleoclimatic record, our current atmospheric levels of greenhouse gases are probably enough to produce an eventual sixty-nine feet of sea-level rise.2 But it’s one thing to know that the gun is cocked, and another to see the bullet actually traveling; the news from the Antarctic is a turning point. It doesn’t mean we should give up efforts to slow climate change: if anything, as scientists immediately pointed out, it means we should ramp them up enormously, because we can still affect the rate at which this change happens, and hence the level of chaos it produces. Coping over centuries will be easier than coping over decades.”

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Old Print Article: “Jonathan Reed Stricken In Tomb Where He Lived,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1905)

June 26, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“He said that if he could keep her warm she would just as much be his wife as before her death.”

Parting is such sweet sorrow, especially when we’re talking about the dearly departed, but one businessman in 1905 was too sad to let go when his wife died. He decided to keep her “alive” in her elaborate tomb and to keep her company. From an article in that year’s March 23 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Jonathan Reed, who has lived almost continuously for seven years in the tomb of his wife at Evergreen Cemetery, was found shortly after 4 o’clock today, lying on the stone floor of the tomb apparently in a dying condition. The laborer who discovered the old man did not know who he was and before he had been identified he was taken in an ambulance to the Kings County Hospital. It was reported at 8 o’clock that Mr. Reed was still alive, but in a very critical condition.

The workman who found Mr. Reed happened to pass the doorway of the tomb shortly after 1 o’clock. He noticed that the iron door stood partly open, and thinking that something was wrong entered the tomb. When he saw the old man on the floor he thought that he was dead and hastened to inform Policeman Dooley, the special patrolman assigned to the cemetery, of the fact. Dooley, without waiting to investigate, summoned Dr. Meister from the Bradford Street Hospital to attend the man. Dr. Meister reached the tomb at 1:30 o’clock. He saw at once that the man was not dead, but had suffered a severe stroke of apoplexy. The physician sent a call to the Kings County Hospital for an ambulance, which carried Mr. Reed to the hospital, before any of those who had attended him knew who he was.

When the marble workers and the other business men near the cemetery heard of the old man’s illness, they made an effort to have him sent to his home, but he had already been placed in the pauper’s ward at the hospital and it was decided to let him remain there.

Jonathan Reed, according to his own statement, is 70 years of age. He was formerly prominent in the Eastern District of Brooklyn as a business man and is believed to be wealthy. When his wife died about eight years ago, Mr. Reed had built for her in Evergreen Cemetery one of the most remarkable tombs ever constructed. It was his belief that there was no such thing as a life after death. When his wife died he told friends that the only change which had come about was that the warmth had left her body. He said that if he could keep her warm she would just as much be his wife as before her death. Acting on this theory, Mr. Reed had the tomb fitted elaborately with a dwelling room and from the time of its completion up to the present he had lived there constantly. 

For a period of several hours every day and every night Mr. Reed had been accustomed to sit by the casket of his dead wife and talk to her just as he did when she was alive. He says that she understands everything that he says and that he understands the responses which she makes. 

In spite of this remarkable eccentricity in regard to his dead wife, Mr. Reed is in other respects an unusually intelligent and interesting man. He converses on all subjects with a degree of knowledge and insight rare to a person of his age. It is only upon the subject of death that he appears to be at all deranged.”

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“We’ve Become Too Much Of A Spectator Culture”

June 26, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Great interview by Tyler Cowen at American Interest with Ralph Nader, the consumer watchdog and politician who’s mostly been right and occasionally colossally wrong, tied to the latter’s publication of Unstoppable, a book about finding political common ground in a divisive age. In one exchange, Nader decries the corporatization of sports, which he believes has made us passive spectators. I suppose this might be true of athletics, but I don’t think in a broader sense that the average person has ever participated more in society than right now. Of course, a participatory culture is only as good as its participants. An excerpt:

“Tyler Cowen:

Do you think we need a more communitarian culture to push back against the corporate state and its abuses? I’m very struck by something in your book The Seventeen Solutions, for instance, where you talk about how America needs a new tradition of sports. Sports, you say, shouldn’t be something corporate-run that people watch on television, but something they do themselves, something that creates community, something that brings people together. Is that kind of social cohesion a necessary first step?

Ralph Nader:

Yes. We’ve become too much of a spectator culture, spending the better part of each day in front of screens. One of the consequences is that the few more athletic kids play while the rest watch, and the lack of physical activity leads to obesity. It’s not just youngsters; adults conform with the purposes of corporate advertising. The processed food producers and some other corporations, like pharmaceuticals, get rich when Americans get fat.

Corporations are also extremely adept at commercializing childhood and maneuvering around or undermining parental authority. They urge children to nag their parents at a young age to buy junk food, soft drinks, and violent video games. You see fewer kids out in the street now, just playing. These old games we used to play, like hopscotch—kids today wouldn’t even know what you’re talking about. But they do know a lot about video game violence and the heroes and villains involved.

So I think we do need a broad recognition of the need to bring the neighborhoods and communities into more participatory sports. Just a hoop, and throwing the ball into a hoop—anything to connect human to human rather than let kids wallow more and more in virtual reality. The whole electronic world is affecting us in ways we have yet to discover. That amount of time spent day after day in front of these screens can’t not have an effect on the human mind, and probably not a healthy one.”

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“Right Now There Are More Space Spacecraft And Launch Systems Being Designed And Tested Than Any Other Moment In Human History”

June 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

I don’t agree with Joe Pappalardo of the Guardian who believes the U.S. should scrap government space programs and rely on investment in the private sector–I think there should be a competition between the two–but his article does spell out really well how reasoning not supported by facts can lead to policy based on gross distortions. The opening:

“‘Elon Musk,’ the satellite industry insider told me over a beer, ‘has got to be the luckiest son of a bitch alive.’

Musk – the insanely dedicated, wealthy and polarizing founder of PayPal, Tesla and Space Exploration Technologies (SpaceX) – is on a hot streak when it comes to spaceflight. He’s raiding revenue streams from Nasa and the US military to fund a private manned space program. His main weapon: low prices, with SpaceX offering satellite launches at about one-fifth the price of competitors at just over $60m a pop.

Sooner or later, the haters say, Musk’s streak will end in a fiery accident, or a satellite horribly deployed. That kind of disaster, naturally, would undercut the current soaring confidence in SpaceX, from investors, private-space believers and even taxpayers.

Another group of doubters on Capitol Hill say the industries needed to keep private space exploration viable simply don’t exist, necessitating a mini-Apollo push from Nasa, despite soaring progress from the Elon Musks of the world and soaring prices for government programs.

‘There’s a sense that America is falling behind, with our best days behind us,’ lamented Rep Lamar Smith of Texas on Wednesday, at yet another painful hearing of the House Committee on Science and Technology. ‘Today, America’s finest spaceships and largest rockets are found in museums rather than on launch pads.’

He’s wrong: Right now there are more space spacecraft and launch systems being designed and tested than any other moment in human history. Smith and others in Congress may be hooked on pork for their districts, but Washington doesn’t know how to build a space program. Inconsistent planning and politics have so stultified Nasa, after all, that America today has no way to launch people into space.”

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“The Few Who Provide Good Ideas Will Reap Huge Rewards”

June 26, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of “New World Order,” a Foreign Affairs essay by Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee, authors of The Second Machine Age, and Michael Spence, which astutely examines the new normal and what it will likely bring:

“Recent advances in technology have created an increasingly unified global marketplace for labor and capital. The ability of both to flow to their highest-value uses, regardless of their location, is equalizing their prices across the globe. In recent years, this broad factor-price equalization has benefited nations with abundant low-cost labor and those with access to cheap capital. Some have argued that the current era of rapid technological progress serves labor, and some have argued that it serves capital. What both camps have slighted is the fact that technology is not only integrating existing sources of labor and capital but also creating new ones.

Machines are substituting for more types of human labor than ever before. As they replicate themselves, they are also creating more capital. This means that the real winners of the future will not be the providers of cheap labor or the owners of ordinary capital, both of whom will be increasingly squeezed by automation. Fortune will instead favor a third group: those who can innovate and create new products, services, and business models.

The distribution of income for this creative class typically takes the form of a power law, with a small number of winners capturing most of the rewards and a long tail consisting of the rest of the participants. So in the future, ideas will be the real scarce inputs in the world — scarcer than both labor and capital — and the few who provide good ideas will reap huge rewards. Assuring an acceptable standard of living for the rest and building inclusive economies and societies will become increasingly important challenges in the years to come.”

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“We Get So Worried About These Things That We Don’t Get The Benefits”

June 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Google’s Larry Page, who believes you’ll eventually have a brain implant, tells Farhad Manjoo of the New York Times, somewhat defensively, one of the main obstacles of technologists who wish to quantify and mine our lives: 

“Farhad Manjoo:

You’re saying the usefulness of the products will change how people feel about them?

Larry Page: 

Yeah, and we know that if we talk about things before people see them, there’s a much more negative reaction. That’s one of the things we learned. It’s really important for people to be able to experience products; otherwise you fear the worst without seeing those benefits.

I’m not trying to minimize the issues. For me, I’m so excited about the possibilities to improve things for people, my worry would be the opposite. We get so worried about these things that we don’t get the benefits. I think that’s what’s happened in health care. We’ve decided, through regulation largely, that data is so locked up that it can’t be used to benefit people very well.

Right now we don’t data-mine health care data. If we did we’d probably save 100,000 lives next year. I’m very worried that the media and governments will try to stoke the people’s fears and we’ll end up in a state where we could benefit a lot of people but we’re not able to do that. That’s the likely outcome.”

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“My Coffin Doesn’t Have A Phone”

June 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

It might be hyperbolic to refer to Jack White as the final rock star, but I think it’s fair to say he’s the last great one rooted in the Industrial Age. It’s not just the garage rock parked in a time before driverless cars but also his lyrical imagery. In the 80 words of “Hello Operator,” how many means of communication now obsolete or in their obsolescence are worried over? Telephone operators, payphones, mail carriers, carrier pigeons, obituaries, coinage, paper money, paper documents and print newspapers.

“Hello Operator”

Hello operator 
Can you give me number nine? 
Can i see you later? 
Will you give me back my dime? 
Turn the oscillator 
Twist it with a dollar bill 
Mail man bring the paper 
Leave it on my window sill 
Find a canary 
A bird to bring my message home 
Carry my obituary 
My coffin doesn’t have a phone 
How you gonna get the money? 
Send papers to an empty home? 
How you gonna get the money? 
Nobody to answer the phone

___________________________

Jack and Meg discuss the Tesla coil, invented in 1891:

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“I Do Favor A ’10 To 1′ Law”

June 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Baseball-stats and true-crime expert Bill James is a brilliant and occasionally maddening person, who can cut through the bullshit of JFK assassination theories yet create some doozies of his own in defending Joe Paterno’s handling of Jerry Sandusky. James’ politics unsurprisingly seem to be complex, a bricolage of beliefs. On his site, he’s provided a simple and straightforward solution to the executive-pay portion of the wealth-disparity argument in America. Courtesy of Tim Marchman at Deadspin, here it is in a nutshell:

“I suppose it is quasi-socialist of me, but I do favor a ’10 to 1′ law stating that no company may pay any employee more than ten times as much as it pays any other employee, on a full-time basis. Enforceable by lawsuit: If your company pays anyone else ten times more than they pay you, you can bring suit against the company AND against the person who is excessively compensated.”

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“For Want Of Hyphen, Venus Rocket Is Lost”

June 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Imagine any person’s DNA code as the Encyclopedia Britannica and realize that one small error in the long string of letters, just a typo, can cause a congenitally damaged heart or an illness that will ensure a brief life. Self-destruction all because of a wrong letter. Machine code isn’t much different, something that has to be somewhat concerning to us at the advent of things like driverless cars. despite their enormous promise. From “The Typo that Destroyed a NASA Rocket,” a Priceonomics post by Zachary Crockett:

“On July 22, 1962, at 9:21 AM, Mariner I was launched to great fanfare. Less than five minutes later, the mission was ‘forcefully aborted,’ $80 million went to waste, and the potentially historical flight came crashing to the ground — all because of a tiny typo in mathematical code. On its website, NASA delineates what went wrong in the moments following the launch:

‘The booster had performed satisfactorily until an unscheduled yaw-lift maneuver was detected by the range safety officer. Faulty application of the guidance commands made steering impossible and were directing the spacecraft towards a crash, possibly in the North Atlantic shipping lanes or in an inhabited area. [A range safety officer subsequently ordered its destructive abort.]’

Multiple theories emerged surrounding the reasons behind the craft’s failure, largely stemming from a bevy of reports produced in the aftermath (some official, and others merely speculation). But the most commonly cited explanation, directly from Mariner I’s Post-Flight Review Board, is that a lone ‘dropped hyphen or overbar’ in the computer code instructions incited the flight’s demise.

Five days after the ill-fated launch, a New York Times headline harped on the minuscule typo — ‘For Want of Hyphen, Venus Rocket is Lost’ — and the paper’s story reported that the error had been the result of ‘the omission of a hyphen in some mathematical data.’ Purportedly, a programmer at NASA had left out the symbol while entering a “mass of coded information” into the computer system.”

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“There Is No Telling Whether Robots Will Ever Replace Jockeys”

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

Thinking about silicon taking jobs from carbon reminded me of an 2012 Wall Street Journal article by Pia Catton about the possibility of introducing robotic jockeys into horse racing, a sport that’s always been fascinated with gadgets. An excerpt:

“The idea that seems to have the most potential is the notion of replacing jockeys with robots. In fact, it is already happening: After years of controversy surrounding child riders, camel racing switched to lightweight remote-controlled machines. The guidance that a jockey provides to a horse comes through shifts of weight and control of the reins and whip.

John Cisneros, a former jockey and assistant to trainer Mike Harrington, said horses wouldn’t pay attention to a nonhuman. ‘Horses are much more agile than camels,’ he said.

Even if the jockey makes a mistake in judgment, Reed said, that is part of the race. ‘Sometimes they’re the hero, sometimes the goat.’

However, it isn’t unthinkable that these functions could be performed by a machine, even though there is no telling whether robots will ever replace jockeys. But if they do, there might be one group that is silently pleased by the idea: the trainers.

‘I’m a proponent of remote-control robots—where the trainers could work the joystick from the grandstand,’ joked [trainer Gary] Contessa.”

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“Owning A Smartphone Is Not The Equivalent Of Owning The Means Of Production”

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

Marc Andreessen is sure that the Information Age, like the Industrial Age before it, will lead to an explosion of wealth, and he’s probably right. But who will own that wealth? Will it be concentrated or diffuse? Can a highly automated society provide enough jobs or will we be playing with our smartphones in the margins? Will we have to settle for bread and Kardashians? At Jacobin, in an open letter to Andreessen, Alex Payne asserts that the average person isn’t as frightened by robots as those who own them. An excerpt: 

“While I didn’t jibe with your take on recent macroeconomic history, I was heartened to see that you’re interested in empowering individuals through technology:

[T]he current technology revolution has put the means of production within everyone’s grasp. It comes in the form of the smartphone (and tablet and PC) with a mobile broadband connection to the Internet.

If we’re going to throw around Marxist terminology, though, can we at least keep Karl’s ideas intact?

Owning a smartphone is not the equivalent of owning the means of production. I paid for my iPhone in full, but Apple owns the software that runs on it, the patents on the hardware inside it, and the exclusive right to the marketplace of applications for it. If I want to participate in their marketplace, Apple can arbitrarily reject my application, extract whatever cut of my sales they see fit, and change the terms whenever they like.

Same story with their scant competitors. It seemed like a lot of people were going to get rich in the ‘app economy.’ Outside of Apple and Google, it turns out, not so much. For every WhatsApp there are thousands of failures.

The real money in tech is in platforms, network effects, scale. Sell pickaxes and jeans to the miners, right? Only today it’s Amazon selling the pickaxes. The startup with its servers on EC2 is about as likely to find gold as a ’49er panhandler. Before the startup goes out of business, Amazon gets paid.”

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“I Try Not To Think About Animal Rights Because I Fear I’d Have To Become A Vegetarian If I Worked It Out Consistently”

June 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

From an excellent give-and-take at the New York Review of Books blog between philosophers Tim Crane and John Searle, the latter, who doesn’t believe that humans should have the automatic right to housing simply by virtue of being human, shares his views on animal rights:

“Tim Crane:

Coming back to the question of rights, since every right requires a corresponding obligation, does it follow from your view that animals don’t have rights, since they have no obligations?

John Searle:

Most rights have to do with specific institutions. As a professor in Berkeley I have certain rights, and certain obligations. But the idea of universal rights—that you have certain rights just in virtue of being a human being—is a fantastic idea. And I think, Why not extend the idea of universal rights to conscious animals? Just in virtue of being a conscious animal, you have certain rights. The fact that animals cannot undertake obligations does not imply that they cannot have rights against us who do have obligations. Babies have rights even before they are able to undertake obligations.

Now I have to make a confession. I try not to think about animal rights because I fear I’d have to become a vegetarian if I worked it out consistently. But I think there is a very good case to be made for saying that if you grant the validity of universal human rights, then it looks like it would be some kind of special pleading if you said there’s no such thing as universal animal rights. I think there are animal rights.

Tim Crane:

Why does that mean they have rights?

John Searle:

For every right there’s an obligation. We’re under an obligation to treat animals as we arrogantly say, ‘humanely.’ And I think that’s right. I think we are under an obligation to treat animals humanely. The sort of obligation is the sort that typically goes with rights. Animals have a right against us to be treated humanely. Now whether or not this gives us a right to slaughter animals for the sake of eating them, well, I’ve been eating them for so long that I’ve come to take it for granted. But I’m not sure that I could justify it if I was forced to.”

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Old Print Article: “Radio ‘Howls’ Made Music By Russian Edison’s Invention,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1928)

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

"The young inventor, with sweeping gestures of his hands, 'drew music from the ether.'"

“The young inventor, with sweeping gestures of his hands, ‘drew music from the ether.'”

The creator of an 1920s electronic instrument that seemingly stole music from the air, Leon Theremin was considered the Russian counterpart to Thomas Edison for his innovations in sound and video. He also created ingenious spying devices for the Soviet Union when he returned to his homeland–perhaps he was kidnapped by KGB agents but probably not–after a decade in the U.S. The text of a January 25, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article reporting on the Manhattan demonstration of Theremin’s namesake instrument in front of a star-studded audience:

“In the not-too-distant future there is likely to be found in thousands of homes a simple and inexpensive device whereby music lovers may by a mere waving of the hands conjure from the air entrancing melodies.

This conclusion seems possible as the result of a demonstration last night in the Hotel Plaza of the ‘Theremin Vox,’ by its inventor, Prof. Leon Theremin, a slender, rosy-cheeked young Russian, the ‘Russian Edison.’

Musical celebrities, including Rachmaninoff, Toscanini and Kreisler, sat spellbound with amazement as the young inventor, with sweeping gestures of his hands, ‘drew music from the ether.’

By these same gestures he caused the colors of a spotlight played on his face to change in keeping with musical tones, thus creating a synthesis of color and harmony.

It was frankly described as crude by both the inventor and J. Goldberg, who assisted in the demonstration. They made it clear that they were not musicians and that far better results could be achieved by one possessing musical technique.

The apparatus is not a reproducer or transmitter, like the photograph or radio, but an actual originator of music, creating sound by the principle of applying different frequencies of an alternative current–the so-called ‘heterodyne’ principle.

Its novelty consists in the method of controlling these frequencies of current by turning the knob of an ordinary condenser or by moving the hand within an electromagnetic field set up in the instrument, thus converting ‘radio howls’ into music.”

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“They Want A Kit That Can Be Applied To Almost Any Car The Market Tells Them To Target”

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

A parallel industry to the driverless car market will, at least initially, be kits that allow owners of pre-autonomous models to retrofit their rides to have robocar capacity. It appears odd to invest money in companies that would seem to have a short shelf life since the hands-free option will likely be standardized in the coming decades, but there are profits to be made in the interim. From a post by Google driverless-cars consultant Brad Templeton:

“So far it’s been big players like Google and car companies with plans in the self-driving space. Today, a small San Francisco start-up named Cruise, founded by Kyle Vogt (a founder of the web video site Justin.tv) announces their plans to make a retrofit kit that will adapt existing cars to do basic highway cruise, which is to say, staying in a lane and keeping pace behind other cars while under a driver’s supervision.

I’ve been following Cruise since its inception. This offering has many similarities to the plans of major car companies, but there are a few key differences:

  • This is a startup, which can be more nimble than the large companies, and having no reputation to risk, can be bolder.
  • They plan to make this as a retrofit kit for a moderate set of existing cars, rather than custom designing it to one car.

They’re so dedicated to the retrofit idea that the Audi A4 they are initially modifying does not even have drive-by-wire brakes like the commonly used hybrid cars. Their kit puts sensors on the roof, and puts a physical actuator on the brake and another physical actuator on the steering wheel — they don’t make use of the car’s own steering motor. They want a kit that can be applied to almost any car the market tells them to target.”

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“Far From Being A Scary Prospect, That’s A Good Thing”

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

Algorithms replacing workers and upending industries wouldn’t be so frightening provided we had some political solution to reconcile a free-market economy and an automated one should not enough new industries bloom to keep wealth from being even more unevenly distributed. But political solutions aren’t our forte right now. I think Steven Rattner, who did yeoman’s work during the auto bailout, is far too optimistic about the labor market, at least during this painful, transitional period, but he believes the Information Age will play out the same way as the Industrial Age. From “Fear Not the Coming Age of Robots,” his op-ed piece at the New York Times:

“Call it automation, call it robots, or call it technology; it all comes down to the concept of producing more with fewer workers. Far from being a scary prospect, that’s a good thing.

Becoming more efficient (what economists call ‘productivity’) has always been central to a growing economy. Without higher productivity, wages can’t go up and standards of living can’t improve.

That’s why, in the sweep of history, the human condition barely improved for centuries, until the early days of the industrial revolution, when transformational new technologies (the robots of their day) were introduced.

Consider the case of agriculture, after the arrival of tractors, combines and scientific farming methods. A century ago, about 30 percent of Americans labored on farms; today, the United States is the world’s biggest exporter of agricultural products, even though the sector employs just 2 percent of Americans.

The trick is not to protect old jobs, as the Luddites who endeavored to smash all machinery sought to do, but to create new ones. And since the invention of the wheel, that’s what has occurred.

When was the last time you talked to a telephone operator? And yet if rotary dial telephones hadn’t been invented, millions of Americans would currently be wastefully employed saying “Central” every time someone picked up a telephone receiver. More recently but similarly, the Internet has rendered human directory assistance nearly extinct.

Of course, I can’t prove that the impact of some new wave of technological innovation won’t ever upend thousands of years of history. But it hasn’t happened yet.”

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“Two-Person Vehicles Will Be Suspended From Elevated Magnetic Tracks”

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

Sheer coolness aside, a network of hover cars suspended by a magnetic track doesn’t sound like the future of transportation to me. But that’s what skyTran is planning to build in Israel. From Jane Wakefield at the BBC:

“A 500m loop will be built on the campus of Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI) followed by a commercial network, according to skyTran, the company that will build it.

Two-person vehicles will be suspended from elevated magnetic tracks, as an alternative transport method to congested roads, the firm promised.

The system should be up and running by the end of 2015.

The firm hopes the test track will prove that the technology works and lead to a commercial version of the network.

The plan is to allow passengers to order a vehicle on their smartphone to meet them at a specific station and then head directly to their destination.”

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“After Every Major Tsunami And Earthquake The Organ Brokers Come In Right After The Relief Agencies”

June 24, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Scott Carney is an investigative journalist whose 2011 book, The Red Market, looks at the world’s very unsettling illicit trade in human flesh, including an Indian “blood farm,” in which a former dairy farmer kidnapped people, drained their blood and sold it. Carney just finished writing his next book, which focuses on the grisly and confusing death of a man at an Arizona Tibetan retreat, but his new Ask Me Anything at Reddit still mostly centers on underground human-organ trafficking, which is usually less about a shanghaied victim than pure economic predation. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

How much of the illegal trade is actually non-consensual though? Do a lot of people sell their organs on the black market out of economic necessity or are they mostly forced into it by gangsters?

Scott Carney:

It’s impossible to get accurate statistics of anything having to do with the illegal organ trade–but from what I witnessed it seems to me that the majority of the trafficking occurs because very rich companies and hospitals take advantage of desperately poor individuals. So, technically, most of it is consensual, it’s also incredibly coercive. There’s a reason that after every major tsunami and earthquake that the organ brokers come in right after the relief agencies.

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Question:

So it’s less kidnapping people and leaving them in bathtubs full of ice and more pressuring incredibly poor people into selling their organs or face starving to death?

In a way that’s much worse, rather than individual acts of violence it’s an entrenched economic problem that is a lot harder to fix than simply arresting a few kidnapping gangs.

Scott Carney:

Yes. It’s really rare to kidnap people–especially tourists. However, it DOES happen. In this article in Foreign Policy I wrote about several cases where people are simply picked up off the streets and robbed of their organs. That said, it is generally a lot less risky for the brokers to simply convince people they’ve entered into a fair trade, rather than raise suspicion amongst law enforcement.

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Question:

How valuable are each of the harvested body parts approximately? Does it vary widely around the world or are different organs more valuable in different countries?

Scott Carney:

This is a tough question because body parts don’t have a fixed value. Their price fluctuates like a used car. However, I did write a piece for Wired a few years ago where I tried to come up with general prices. Check it out here.

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Question:

How big is this industry estimated to be? How many organ trades a year are we talking worldwide? Obviously with all things criminal we don’t have exact stats but are we talking tens of thousands or millions or what?

Scott Carney:

It is easily worth billions of dollars, but there is no solid statistic that I can point to. It turns out that the criminals are terrible at filing quarterly reports. The best I can point to is a WHO report that says that 10% of organ transplants happen on the black market.

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Question:

Are there any other known places in the world where black market organ trading occurs? And how do they transport the organs?

Scott Carney:

It’s a global problem. I think just about every country has some relation to it. Live organs aren’t usually transported across international lines. In those cases the patients fly abroad for surgery.

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Question:

Do you think an increase in voluntary organ donation would help reduce this market?

Scott Carney:

This is a fascinating question that has more than one answer. I tackle it in the last chapter of my book a little bit. In short, I have to say no. While voluntary donation will increase the overall supply of organs, it does nothing to stem the overall demand. Since 1984 when the National Organ Transplant Association started up the waiting list for a kidney was almost seven years long. Today, with vastly expanded voluntary supply (I think it is something like 50,000 transplants a year now), the list is still just as long. What is happening is that as the supply grows, doctors find more eligible recipients for organs. It’s perverse, but the demand for organs is actually a reflection of the supply. Not the other way around.•

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A Brief Note From 1910 About Sleepy People

June 23, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the April 11, 1910 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Evansville, Ind.–Scores of people in this community complained yesterday that they were unable to get enough sleep. In fact, in several instances people have slept for fifteen or twenty-four hours and still were sleepy. The attribute this inclination to sleep to Halley’s comet.”

“I Have No Idea Why Anyone Would Do It, Even If The Equipment Were Free”

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

Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal visited the smartest home in America–the Maryland abode of SmartThings CEO Alex Hawkinson–and came away perplexed by the way the “convenient” gadgets actually complicate the quotidian life. He does, however, see potential for one innovation that may be a problem for the security industry. An excerpt:

“Mr. Hawkinson believes the most compelling application for smart-home technology, at least for now, is home security. Surveys suggest about 80% of Americans might like some kind of security and home-monitoring system. For $300, SmartThings will sell you a kit that fits the bill—while also avoiding the monthly fees associated with traditional home-security systems.

Google apparently agrees with Mr. Hawkinson, as its Nest subsidiary, which started out making a smart thermostat, announced Friday that it’s acquiring Internet-connected video-camera startup Dropcam. What’s a surveillance camera for if not home monitoring and security?

It’s this task-driven approach to selling the idea of the smart home—offering a device or kit that solves a specific problem, rather than an all-in-one solution—that seems most likely to overcome the reluctance of most of us to add complexity to our personal sanctuaries. If you need to monitor a pet, elderly parent or home, why wouldn’t you add a straightforward system to do it?

But frankly, other than people who have very specific reasons to add automation to their homes, I have no idea why anyone would do it, even if the equipment were free. As countless reviewers have noted, including in this newspaper, even when smart-home technology works as advertised, the complexity it adds to everyday life outweighs any convenience it might provide.”

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“He Told His Staff That They Had An Effectively Unlimited Hiring Budget”

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

Gawker Media thinks it can reach 80-million unique visitors a month by the end of 2014, while the New York Times currently boasts 31 million. Gawker clearly doesn’t turn out better content nor does it traffic in eyeball-grabbing gossip nearly as much as it used to. If you want blind items and reveals, you go elsewhere. Those running Gawker are simply better at understanding the new normal (including viral bullshit) and exploiting this knowledge, which is easier for them in many ways because they’re not hidebound to traditional journalistic ethics. The New York Times is certainly doing better, more important and more challenging work, but it’s not doing as well. Here’s my question: Is that because those in charge of the Times don’t understand the terrain, or is it because doing the kind of work the Times does can’t find traction in 2014? I would say the former, but it’s not like any other traditional newspaper company has managed the feat, either. From Peter Sterne at Capital: 

“Gawker has never made a secret of its ambitions as it has risen from Manhattan media troublemaker to a network of niche-focused sites that apply its roguish sensibility to topics ranging from sports to women’s issues. Founder Nick Denton spent the first part of 2014 positioning his company as a sort of anti-Buzzfeed, and there’s his Kinja commenting platform that he hopes will do nothing short of reshape the very nature of online discussion. And while Denton has always seemed to take a particular glee in publicly critiquing and encouraging his own operation (and tweaking the competition) along the way, concrete growth plans at Gawker have been harder to come by.

In order to achieve its goals, [editorial director Joel] Johnson announced plans for the company to increase its editorial staff by the end of the year from 120 full-time staffers to 150 full-time staffers and 24 active members of its ‘recruits’ farm system. A slide accompanying Johnson’s presentation declared that hiring is the site’s number one priority, and he told his staff that they had an effectively unlimited hiring budget.

‘If things go right, we could double our editorial staff by the end of 2015,’ he said.”

 

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Old Print Articles: “Nikola Tesla, Father Of Radio, Who Hated It,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1943)

June 23, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Nikola Tesla outlived a good deal of his fame, and he didn’t even make it to 140. Perhaps the greatest “electrician” ever, the one who knew a century ago that there would be drones and mobile phones, a man who dreamed so differently that he seemingly fell to Earth, Tesla’s scientific goals grew more outsize as he aged. He even announced in 1933, at age 76, that he would live at least 64 more years because he slept only once a year, for five or six hours, supplementing this rest with an hour-long nap now and again. 

When he died in Manhattan an octogenarian, he wasn’t forgotten, but the lights had dimmed because his ambitions had grown so far beyond comprehension, and because he didn’t have a coterie of associates to burnish his reputation. His obituary in the January 3, 1943 Brooklyn Daily Eagle was relegated to page 11, despite his front-cover, above-the-fold mind. The story:

“Nikola Tesla, 86, the electrical genius who discovered the fundamental principle of modern radio, was found dead in his room at the Hotel New Yorker, Manhattan, last night.

Tesla never married. He had always lived alone, and the hotel management did not believe he had any near-relatives.

Despite his more than 700 inventions, he was not wealthy. He cared little for money, and so long as he could experiment he was happy.

Thought Radio a Nuisance

He was the first to conceive an effective method of utilizing alternating current, and in 1888 patented the induction motor, which converted electrical energy into mechanical energy more effectively and economically than by direct current. Among his other principal inventions were arc lighting, and the Tesla coil.

‘The radio, I know I’m its father, but I don’t like it,’ he once said. ‘I just don’t like it. It’s a nuisance. I never listen to it. The radio is a distraction and keeps you from concentrating. There are too many distractions in this life for quality of thought, and it’s quality of thought, not quantity, that counts.’

Evidently, he did a lot of thinking that never materialized. It was his custom on his birthday–July 10–to announce to reporters the shape of things to come.

On his 76th birthday, he announced: ‘The transmission of energy to another planet is only a matter of engineering. I have solved the problem so well I don’t regard it as doubtful.’

Told of ‘Death Beam’

When he was 78 he announced he had perfected a ‘death beam’ that would bring down a fleet of 10,000 enemy planes 250 miles from a nation’s borders and make millions of soldiers fall dead in their tracks. His beam, he said, would make war impossible.

Tesla was born at Smiljan, Croatia, when it was a part of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire.

He came to the United States in 1884, became a citizen and an associate of Thomas A. Edison. Later he established the Tesla Laboratory in New York and devoted himself to research.”

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“Will Antitrust Authorities Eventually Come To Scrutinize Amazon And Its Market Power?”

June 22, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

A passage from Steve Coll’s New York Review of Books piece about Brad Stone’s The Everything Store, a title bout Amazon strongarming publishers, which was recently caught in the crossfire of Jeff Bezos’ battle with Hachette:

“Jeff Bezos’s conceit is that Amazon is merely an instrument of an inevitable digital disruption in the book industry, that the company is clearing away the rust and cobwebs created by inefficient analog-era ‘gatekeepers’—i.e., editors, diverse small publishers, independent bookstores, and the writers this system has long supported. In Bezos’s implied argument, Amazon’s catalytic ‘creative destruction,’ in the economist Joseph Schumpeter’s phrase, will clarify who will prosper in an unstoppably faster, more interconnected economy.

‘Amazon is not happening to book selling,’ Bezos once told Charlie Rose. ‘The future is happening to book selling.’ Yet the more Amazon uses its vertically integrated corporate power to squeeze publishers who are also competitors, the more Bezos’s claim looks like a smokescreen. And the more Amazon uses coercion and retaliation as means of negotiation, the more it looks to be restraining competition.

Toward the end of his account, Stone asks the essential question: ‘Will antitrust authorities eventually come to scrutinize Amazon and its market power?’ His answer: ‘Yes, I believe that is likely.’ It is ‘clear that Amazon has helped damage or destroy competitors small and large,’ in Stone’s judgment.”

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