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“I Never Had The Chance To Pry Off The Top Of His Head To See What Motivated Decisions Like This”

June 9, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Regardless of what actually killed him, Howard Hughes died of being Howard Hughes, eaten alive from the inside by neuroses. But that doesn’t mean he was alone at the feast. An autopsy suggested codeine and painkillers were among the culprits, and his personal physician, Dr. Wilbur Thain, whose brother-in-law Bill Gay was one of the executives angling for control of Hughes’ holdings, was treated like a precursor to Conrad Murray, though he was ultimately cleared of any wrongdoing.

From Dennis Breo’s 1979 People interview with Thain, who made the extremely dubious assertion that aspirin abuse claimed the man who was both disproportionately rich and poor:

Question:

Are you satisfied that Hughes received adequate medical attention?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

Everything possible was done to help Hughes in his final hours. At no time did the authors of Empire try to get in touch with me. Yet they say in the book that an aviator friend of Hughes called me in Logan, Utah two days before Hughes’ death and told me, “I don’t want to play doctor, but your patient is dying.” I am quoted as telling the guy to mind his own business, since I had to go to a party in the Bahamas. Well, the first word I actually got that Hughes was in trouble was about 9 p.m. April 4, 1976—the night before he died. I was in Miami at the time—not Utah. At about midnight I was called and told that Hughes had suddenly become very critical. I was stunned. I left Miami at 3:30 a.m., arriving in Acapulco at 8 a.m. April 5.

Question:

What was the first thing you did?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

Empire says the first thing I did was spend two hours shredding documents in Hughes’ rooftop suite at the Acapulco Princess. This is absolutely false. I walked straight into Hughes’ bedroom with my medical bag. He was unconscious and having multiple seizures. He looked like he was about to die. Other than one trip to the bathroom, I spent the next four hours with him.

Question:

Why did you then fly to Houston?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

The Mexican physician who had seen Hughes advised against trying to take him to a local medical center, so we spent two hours trying to find an oxygen tank that didn’t leak and preparing the aircraft to fly us to Houston. We left at noon. He died en route.

Question:

Was Howard Hughes psychotic?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

No, not at any time in his life. He was severely neurotic, yes. To be psychotic means to be out of touch with reality. Howard Hughes may have had some fanciful ideas, but he was not out of touch with reality. He was rational until the day he died.

Question:

Was Hughes an impossible patient?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

That’s a masterpiece of understatement. He wanted doctors around, but he didn’t want to see them unless he had to. He would allow no X-rays—I never saw an X-ray of Hughes until after he died—no blood tests, no physical exams. He understood his situation and chose to live the way he lived. Rather than listen to a doctor, he would fall asleep or say he couldn’t hear.

Question:

Is that why you didn’t accept his job offer after you got out of medical school?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

No, I just wanted to practice medicine on my own. I understand that Hughes was quite upset. I didn’t see him again for 21 years. He was 67 then. He had grown a beard, his hair was longer. He had some hearing loss partially due to his work around aircraft. That’s why he liked to use the telephone: It had an amplifier. He was very alert and well-informed. His toenails and fingernails were pretty long, but he had a case of onchyomycosis—a fungus disease of the nails which makes them thick and very sensitive. It hurt like hell to trim them. For whatever reason, he only sponge-bathed his body and hair.

Question:

What was the turning point?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

After his successful hip surgery in August of 1973 he chose never to walk again. Once—only once—he walked from the bedroom to the bathroom with help. That was the beginning of the end for him. I told him we’d even get him a cute little physical therapist. He said, “No, Wilbur, I’m too old for that.”

Question:

Why did he decide not to walk?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

I never had the chance to pry off the top of his head to see what motivated decisions like this. He would never get his teeth fixed, either. Worst damn mouth I ever saw. When they operated on his hip, the surgeons were afraid his teeth were so loose that one would fall into his lung and kill him!

Question:

What kinds of things did he talk about toward the end of his life?

Dr. Wilbur Thain:

The last year we would talk about the Hughes Institute medical projects and his earlier life. All the reporting on Hughes portrayed him as a robot. This man had real feelings. He talked one day about his parents, whom he loved very much, and his movies and his girls. He said he finally gave up stashing women around Hollywood because he got tired of having to talk to them. In our last conversation, he told me how much he still loved his ex-wife Jean Peters. But he was also always talking about things 10 years down the road. He was an optimist in that sense. If it hadn’t been for the kidney failure, Hughes might have lasted a lot longer.•

A 1976 Houston local news report on the death of Howard Hughes, whose demise was as shrouded in mystery as was much of his life.

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“Coppola Said He Sees A Future In Which Movies Will Be Presented ‘Live'”

June 8, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

I don’t see why movies wouldn’t get universal releases on all platforms once smartphones and other distribution channels have saturated the globe, and I can see films being more fluid creations with numerous remixes, but Francis Ford Coppola goes even further when thinking about the future of the medium. From David Robb at Deadline Hollywood:

Francis Ford Coppola can see the future of cinema, and it’s going to be “live,” like a digital play or a virtual opera. Speaking before an overflow crowd at the closing of the Producer Guild‘s Produced By conference, Coppola said he sees a future in which movies will be presented “live” to audiences all around the world at the same time.

With the digital revolution, he said, “movies no longer have to be set in stone and can be composed and interpreted for different audiences that come to see it. Film has always been a recorded medium, but live cinema remixes might be ’30 percent pre-recorded as the actors do it live. You can do anything and you can do it live.”•

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“This Future Vehicle Is Not A Car, Not As We Know It Today”

June 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a blog post by Brad Templeton, consultant to Google’s driverless-car division, about the company’s recent wheel-less and brake-less autonomous prototype, which has been surprisingly mocked by some:

“I was not involved in the specifics of design of this vehicle, though I pushed hard as I could for something in this direction. Here’s why I think it’s the right decision.

First of all, this is a prototype. Only 100 of this design will be made, and there will be more iterations. Google is all about studying, learning and doing it again, and they can afford to. They want to know what people think of this, but are not scared if they underestimate it at first.

Secondly, this is what is known as a ‘Disruptive Technology.’ Disruptive technologies, as described in the Silicon Valley bible The Innovators Dilemma are technologies that seem crazy and inferior at first. They meet a new need, not well understood by the incumbent big companies. Those big companies don’t see it as a threat — until years later, they are closing their doors. Every time a disruptive technology takes over, very few of the established players make it through to the other side. This does not guarantee that Google will dominate or crush those companies, or that everything that looks silly eventually wins. But it is a well established pattern.

This vehicle does not look threatening — not to people on the street, and not to existing car companies and pundits who don’t get it. Oh, there are many people inside those car companies who do get it, but the companies are incapable of getting it in their bones. Even when their CEOs get it, they can’t steer the company 90 degrees — there are too many entrenched forces in any large company. The rare exception are founder-led companies (like Google and Facebook and formerly Apple and Microsoft) where if the founder gets it, he or she can force the company to get it.

Even large companies who read this blog post and understand it still won’t get it, not most of the time. I’ve talked to executives from big car companies. They have a century of being car companies, and knowing what the means. Google, Tesla and the coming upstarts don’t.

One reason I will eventually move away from my chosen name for the technology — robocar — along with the other popular names like ‘self-driving car’ is that this future vehicle is not a car, not as we know it today. It is no more a ‘driverless car’ than a modern automobile is a horseless carriage. 100 years ago, the only way they could think of the car was to notice that there was no horse. Today, all many people notice about robocars is that no human is driving. This is the thing that comes after the car.”

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“If It Can Be Improved, Then These Robots, And Others Like Them, Might Stride Out Of Research Laboratories And Populate The World”

June 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

An excerpt from “The Robots Running This Way,” Will Knight’s long-form Technology Review article about Boston Dynamics, one of Google’s recently purchased robotics companies:

Many of the robots struggle to complete the tasks without malfunctioning, freezing up, or toppling over. Of all the challenges facing them, one of the most difficult, and potentially the most important to master, is simply walking over uneven, unsteady, or just cluttered ground. But the Atlas robots (several academic groups have entered versions of the Boston Dynamics machine) walk across such terrain with impressive confidence.

A couple of times each day, the crowd gets to see two other legged robots made by Boston Dynamics. In one demo, a four-legged machine about the size of a horse trots along the track carrying several large packs; it cleverly shuffles its feet to stay upright when momentarily unbalanced by a hefty kick from its operator. In another, a smaller, more agile four-legged machine revs up a loud diesel engine, then bounds maniacally along the racetrack like a big cat, quickly reaching almost 20 miles per hour.

The crowd, filled with robotics researchers from around the world and curious members of the public, gasps and applauds. But the walking and running technology found in the machines developed by Boston Dynamics is more than just dazzling. If it can be improved, then these robots, and others like them, might stride out of research laboratories and populate the world with smart mobile machines. That helps explain why a few days before the DARPA Challenge, Boston Dynamics was acquired by Google.•

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“SpaceX Already Has The Lowest Launch Costs In The Industry”

June 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Critics of President Obama as a big-government champion certainly aren’t talking about about space exploration, which he seems content to leave to Elon Musk and other private market entities. There’s little doubt that Space X is more cost effective than NASA’s Space Launch System will be, but corporations can change course on projects based on economics, personnel and stock prices, whereas the government has to stay the course. Probably best to have a competition between public and private. That should be the new Space Race. From the Economist:

“SpaceX, the most successful of the private firms, is planning to build a super-heavy Falcon rocket of its own that would be even beefier than the SLS. If all goes to plan, the so-called Falcon XX could reach lunar orbit in the early 2020s and go on to Mars later in the decade, ten years ahead of the SLS. SpaceX already has the lowest launch costs in the industry. It is working on making its rockets reusable, which would cut prices even further. Some (admittedly speculative) estimates say that NASA could cut its costs by a factor of 25 or 50 by going with the Falcon XX rocket instead of the (non-reusable) SLS.

But this is not just an argument about money and jobs. The charitable interpretation of Congress’s plan is that it takes its inspiration from the greatness of the government-run Apollo programme. But Mr Musk is equally forceful when he says that ‘NASA’s most valuable role is to fund advanced science projects such as the Hubble space telescope or the Curiosity Mars rover—things that are valuable for humanity as a whole [and] where there’s not an obvious commercial transaction.’ The rest, in other words, including colonising Mars, Mr Musk’s ultimate aspiration, should be left to entrepreneurs.”

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“London Wrote That He Wanted The Piggery To Be ‘The Delight Of All Pig-Men In The United States'”

June 8, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a Modern Farmer article by Tyler LeBlanc about the last decade of Jack London’s life, when he repaired to Sonoma to create a “futuristic farm”:

Of his innovations, arguably the most impressive was the pig palace, an ultra-sanitary piggery that could house 200 hogs yet be operated by a single person. The palace gave each sow her own “apartment” complete with a sun porch and an outdoor area to exercise. The suites were built around a main feeding structure, while a central valve allowed the sole operator to fill every trough in the building with drinking water.

London wrote that he wanted the piggery to be “the delight of all pig-men in the United States.” While it may not have brought about significant change in the industry – it is said to have cost an astounding $3,000 (equal to $70,000 now) to build — it was one of London’s greatest innovations, and, unfortunately, his last. He died the following year.•

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“An Electric Heating Element Is Woven Into The Fabric”

June 8, 2014 in Science/Tech | Permalink

Putting up the post about Isadora Duncan’s death reminded me of an unusual 1934 ad I’d seen. It was for a scarf that could be heated electronically by your car battery as you drove, in the days before autos were temperature controlled.

“Let’s See What He’s Got Up His Sleeve For Us This Time”

June 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

People in show business are often labeled “genius” if they’re able to complete a sudoku slightly faster than Heidi Klum. But Ricky Jay is the real deal, a deeply brilliant person who can accomplish amazing things with his brain despite the deterioration of some basic neurological functions. A clip of the magician, actor and scholar appearing with Merv Griffin in 1983 and then an excerpt from Mark Singer’s great 1993 New Yorker profile, “Secrets of Magus.”

“Jay has an anomalous memory, extraordinarily retentive but riddled with hard-to-account-for gaps. ‘I’m becoming quite worried about my memory,’ he said not long ago. ‘New information doesn’t stay. I wonder if it’s the NutraSweet.’ As a child, he read avidly and could summon the title and the author of every book that had passed through his hands. Now he gets lost driving in his own neighborhood, where he has lived for several years—he has no idea how many. He once had a summer job tending bar and doing magic at a place called the Royal Palm, in Ithaca, New York. On a bet, he accepted a mnemonic challenge from a group of friendly patrons. A numbered list of a hundred arbitrary objects was drawn up: No. 3 was ‘paintbrush,’ No. 18 was ‘plush ottoman,’ No. 25 was ‘roaring lion,’ and so on. ‘Ricky! Sixty-five!’ someone would demand, and he had ten seconds to respond correctly or lose a buck. He always won, and, to this day, still would. He is capable of leaving the house wearing his suit jacket but forgetting his pants. He can recite verbatim the rapid-fire spiel he delivered a quarter of a century ago, when he was briefly employed as a carnival barker: ‘See the magician; the fire ‘manipulator’; the girl with the yellow e-e-elastic tissue. See Adam and Eve, boy and girl, brother and sister, all in one, one of the world’s three living ‘morphrodites.’ And the e-e-electrode lady . . .’ He can quote verse after verse of nineteenth-century Cockney rhyming slang. He says he cannot remember what age he was when his family moved from Brooklyn to the New Jersey suburbs. He cannot recall the year he entered college or the year he left. ‘If you ask me for specific dates, we’re in trouble,’ he says.”

“He’s An Extreme Life Hacker”

June 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If Apple is going Fitbit and the iWatch is coming to the market in October, it will allow wearers another way to measure sleep activity, calorie consumption, blood oxygen levels and other vital statistics, another opportunity to quantify themselves at high levels, to understand behavior patterns that might not otherwise be apparent. It will also tacitly permit corporations and (likely) government to obtain such personal information. But Chris Dancy is already living in that space. The opening of Ira Boudway’s Bloomberg Businessweek piece about him:

“Ask Chris Dancy what he ate on Aug. 11 of last year, and he can tell you (Chick-fil-A). He can also tell you about the weather that day (83F), what music he listened to (Kelly Clarkson’s Walk Away), how many e-mails he sent (21), how long he slept (8 hours and 35 minutes), how many steps he took (8,088), and when he took his dogs to the park (1:04 p.m.). Dancy, 45, doesn’t have an amazing memory. He’s an extreme life hacker: He collects information about himself and his surroundings from 10 devices he wears or carries and 13 more in his home and car. He also catalogs virtually all of his online activity. The exhaustive record-keeping is an effort to discover the systems that shape his behavior so he can tinker with them and live better.

Dancy’s project began five years ago when he started archiving his tweets. Twitter (TWTR) didn’t make them searchable at the time, and Dancy wanted to collect them as a kind of diary. He also started dumping his Facebook (FB) posts and status updates into spreadsheets. ‘Then it just became a domino effect,’ he says. He began using any device he thought would help him find his quantified self.”

 

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“The Market Isn’t Logical, Any More Than Is Any Other Human Behavior”

June 6, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Zoe Williams’ brief review of Ha-Joon Chang’s Economics: The User’s Guide, the first title from the revived Pelican paperback line, a description of the underlying forces that drive financial considerations:

“I think his favourite section is ‘Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom’ – to judge, anyway, from his endearing pick’n’mix approach, in which he describes the nine key schools of thought, then makes up fresh labels, which you can use, if you wish, to describe yourself. The author’s references from culture proliferate: perhaps the best example is when he tries to explain, later, that the market isn’t logical, any more than is any other human behaviour, and that the things we can trade on the open market (carbon usage) and can’t (people, organs) come from beliefs, impulses and feelings that are deeper than money. ‘So politics is creating, shaping and reshaping markets before any transaction can begin. It is like the ‘Deeper Magic’ that had existed before the dawn of time, which is known to Aslan (the lion) but not to the White Witch in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.’“

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“Two Robots Called Rosie and Sandy Blast Away Paint And Corrosion All Day Long Without A Break”

June 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A Financial Times article by Chris Bryant looks at robots that have graduated from the factory to relieve you of your open-air jobs. We’re sorry, but your services will no longer be required. The opening:

“Cleaning the Sydney Harbour Bridge used to be a dangerous, dirty and laborious job. As soon as a team of workers, operating a sandblaster, reached one end of the iconic structure they had to start again to keep 485,000 square metres of steel pristine.

Now two robots called Rosie and Sandy, built by SABRE Autonomous Solutions, blast away paint and corrosion all day long without a break. They determine which area needs most attention via a laser scan and move about on rails.

‘A sand blaster can slice through flesh. Automating jobs like that is a good thing, it helps improve the quality of human work,’ says Roko Tschakarow, head of the Mobile Gripper Systems Division at Schunk, which supplies the lightweight robot arm for the Sydney robots.
Cows and robots

Rosie and Sandy are at the forefront of a wave of new autonomous robots that have broken out of the factory and could be coming to your workplace soon.”

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“He Used An Electronic Computer To Evaluate Each Player’s Performance”

June 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

Numbers being crunched is nothing new to sports, as this 1959 video of the Case Institute of Technology basketball team reminds. The assistant coach was an undergraduate computer whiz named Don Knuth who fed data into an IBM 650 to help improve his school’s chances (when he wasn’t busy freelancing for Mad). An excerpt from an interview at computer history.org in which Knuth recalls the first time he saw a computer:

“Later on in my freshman year there arrived a machine that, at first,  I could see only through the glass window. They called it a computer. I think it was actually called the IBM 650 ‘Univac.’ That was a funny name, because Univac was a competing brand. One night a guy showed me how it worked, and gave me a chance to look at the manual. It was love at first sight. I could sit all night with that machine and play with it.”

“Her Real Standout Characteristic Is The Ability To Strike Up Casual Conversations”

June 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of Brad Molen’s Endgadget piece about Microsoft’s human-ish digital assistant, which is based on a scantily clad video-game character:

“She was modeled after real-life personal assistants. She is the product of two years of work, and a large team of scientists and product managers. She has video game origins. She is Microsoft’s response to Siri and Google Now. She is Artificial Intelligence and proud of it. She is Cortana.

It seems odd to refer to smartphone software as a ‘she,’ but that human element is exactly what Microsoft is after with its new Windows Phone digital assistant. Cortana, named after her fictional counterpart in the video game series Halo, takes notes, dictates messages and offers up calendar alerts and reminders. But her real standout characteristic, and the one Microsoft’s betting heavily on, is the ability to strike up casual conversations with users; what Microsoft calls ‘chitchat.’ Next to Apple’s Siri, Cortana is the only other smartphone assistant to come with a baked-in personality. And it’s hard not to see the parallels between Cortana and the affable, Scarlett Johansson-voiced AI in Spike Jonze’s film Her.”

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“The Company Intends To Enter Markets It Says Are Currently Underserved By Games”

June 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

The first post I ever put up on this blog about driverless cars was in 2010. In it, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell was very enthusiastic about “auto-cars,” and I thought it was dubious that American drivers would be willing to give up the wheel in the immediate future.

Anyhow, Bushnell’s legendary gaming company, essentially a ghost brand that’s still alive in the now-adult minds of the children it entertained decades ago, is about to go through its umpteenth attempt at revival. From Nick Wingfield at the New York Times:

“In a phone interview, Mr. [Frédéric] Chesnais said the company was now focusing on mobile and Facebook games, rather than on the far riskier console market, where development budgets are much higher. Atari has announced plans for a social casino game that will exploit vintage Atari games like Asteroids, Centipede and Breakout within slot, poker and blackjack games.

The company intends to enter markets it says are currently underserved by games. In one game under development, Pridefest, players will be able to create their own L.G.B.T. pride parade, designing floats and parade routes. It’s a variation on an existing Atari franchise, RollerCoaster Tycoon, that lets players design amusement parks.

Mr. Chesnais is exploring other, more inchoate concepts. He calls one Atari TV, a plan to produce exclusive video content. The first example is a daily video blog Atari is co-producing called TheRealPelé, which is following the activities of the Brazilian soccer legend in the days leading up to the World Cup in that country.”

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So strange and wonderful: In 1972, Rod Serling introduces I’ve Got a Secret host Steve Allen to the home version of the video game Pong. Begins at the 15:40 mark.

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“It’s Rare To Totally Lose Command Of A First Language”

June 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

One of the interesting footnotes of the political football that is the case of Sgt Bowe Bergdahl is that in five years the soldier lost much of his ability to speak in his native tongue. Some insight into such cases from the BBC Magazine:

“Some people have gone decades without speaking or hearing their first language but they retain the ability to speak it easily, says Dr. Monika Schmid, a linguistics professor at the University of Essex in the UK. But others begin losing fluency within a few years of not speaking it.

It’s rare to totally lose command of a first language, she says. Instead people have ‘language attrition’ – trouble recalling certain words or they use odd grammar structures. Age is a factor. Once past puberty, Dr Schmid says, your first language is stable and the effects of attrition can reverse themselves if you are re-immersed. But children as old as 10 don’t necessarily retain the language they were born into. In a study of French adoptees who left South Korea in childhood, when asked in their early 30s to identify Korean, they did no better than native French speakers with no exposure to the language.”

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“Owning A Dishwasher Doesn’t Mean Your Position Relative To The Rest Of Society Is Anything Resembling Good Or Fair”

June 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Marc Andreessen, whose Google Glasses are rose-colored, sees technological progress in one light when, of course, there are a couple of shades. It’s a net win, sure, but there’s collateral damage and an uneven distribution of the spoils. In a Valleywag post, Sam Biddle takes down Andreessen over a series of breathless technotopia tweets. Part of the summation:

In conclusion, the fact that we aren’t all living in mud huts or clinging to the side of crevasses, babies bundled in animal pelts, is a feat of Silicon Valley. The affordability of a smartphone or a television has everything to do with uncritical, unwavering faith in “tech innovation” and some childish, abstract notion of industrial progress. It has absolutely nothing to do with, say, the legion of Chinese laborers working under deplorable conditions. Ignore the fact that that owning a dishwasher doesn’t mean your position relative to the rest of society is anything resembling good or fair—just be glad your standard of living has increased since the 17th century.

This argument was better made by people like Adam Smith, over two hundred years ago, rather than Marc Andreessen, a guy inside a bubble with a bachelor’s degree in computer science:

Compared, indeed, with the more extravagant luxury of the great, his accommodation must no doubt appear extremely simple and easy; and yet it may be true, perhaps, that the accommodation of an European prince does not always so much exceed that of an industrious and frugal peasant, as the accommodation of the latter exceeds that of many an African king, the absolute master of the lives and liberties of ten thousand naked savages.

Rich have always been able to pay servants to read aloud to them; now most US households can Google ‘wealth of nations summary’ at their leisure. It doesn’t matter, though: Andreessen’s industry peers are so desperate to get some insight via Twitter osmosis, they’ll ignore that his whitewashed analysis and vague trickle-down gesturing would probably land you a C in high school. Marc Andreessen, so far as Valleywag is aware, is not a high school student, but the head of one of the most powerful venture capital firms in history.

The scariest thing here isn’t that Andreessen has such a poor grasp on the history and economics, or his flatly counterfactual statements…•

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Old Print Article: “Engineer Won’t Bare System In $1,000 Joust With Robot,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1951)

June 5, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

“CRC-102 promptly accepted the challenge.”

AI wouldn’t be able to beat the world’s best human chess player for 46 more years, but it was game on in 1951 when an engineer challenged a computer to a $1,000 series of matches. The machine was rudimentary, so the acceptance of the wager came with some suspect conditions. From the November 12, 1951 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Washington–Engineer Donald H. Jacobs, who challenged an electronic ‘brain’ to a $1,000 chess tournament, agreed today to follow the machine’s ring rules, ‘but  won’t teach the thing how to play chess.’

Jacobs, president of the Jacobs Instrument Company of nearby Bethesda, Md., said he was looking forward to matching wits with CRC-102, the ‘brain’s’ technical name.

The only hitch was that the ‘brain’s’ second–the Computer Research Corporation, Torrence, Cal.–said that Jacobs would have to reveal his ‘chess system’ in advance.

‘I’m not going to give away my system to the machine,’ Jacobs said. ‘With that knowledge, any mortal chess player, much less the ‘brain,’ could win with no trouble.’

Jacobs made his ‘gentlemen’s bet’ for the man-versus-machine struggle over 20 games of chess to prove that man still can outthink a machine–at least over a chess board.

‘Although I am a poor chess player,’ he said, ‘pure egotism makes me unwilling to concede that a computing machine can play better than I can.’

CRC-102 promptly accepted the challenge. Engineer Richard E. Sprague, a director of Computer Research, said his ‘champion’ will take on Jacobs ‘any time, any place…and will take him apart.’

Computer Research, which has just developed the first portable electronic digital computer, claims that the ‘brain’–among its other talents–is an unbeatable chess player.

Sprague laid down three ‘ring rules,’ however, before CRC-102 will meet Jacobs in combat.

1. A time limit on the match so that the human contestant doesn’t take ‘a year or so to make up his mind on a move.’

2. Permission to tell the ‘eyeless’ machine what move its human adversary has made ‘so he can make the proper countermove.’

3. Jacobs must provide CRC-102 with his chess system.”

 

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“When We Write, A Unique Neural Circuit Is Automatically Activated”

June 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There certainly seems to be a link between handwriting and memory, and as the former fades and the latter is increasingly stored remotely, what does it mean for primary education? From Maria Konnikova of the New York Times:

“Does handwriting matter?

Not very much, according to many educators. The Common Core standards, which have been adopted in most states, call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency on the keyboard.

But psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep.

Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how.

‘When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,’ said Stanislas Dehaene, a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris. ‘There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in your brain.

‘And it seems that this circuit is contributing in unique ways we didn’t realize,’ he continued.”

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“Let The Machines Do All The Work!”

June 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Before an automated workforce was a threat to employees, it was a real concern for management (of all kinds). The opening exchanges of a fascinating Salon conversation about technology, democracy, capitalism, and other subjects, between Thomas Frank and David Graeber:

“Thomas Frank:

Let’s start at the beginning: Keynes’ prediction, back in the 1930s, that before too long workers would have all sorts of leisure time because of improving productivity. Is there a history of this idea? I mean, others have argued this as well, correct?

David Graeber:

Well, radical elements in the labor movement began embracing such visions from quite early on. After the successful campaigns for the eight-hour day in the 1880s, people immediately started thinking, can we move this to seven, six, or less. Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law, and author of The Right to Be Lazy, was already calling for something along those lines in 1883. I have a Wobbly T-shirt with a turn-of-the-century style design that says ‘join the IWW for a new dawn,’ it has a sun rising over the rooftops, and on the sun is written, ‘four-day week, four-hour day.’ I don’t know how old the image really is but I’m guessing it’s from the Teens or the ’20s. In the 1930s, a lot of labor unions did move their industries to a 35-hour week. My mom was a garment worker at the time and that’s how she ended up getting involved in the ILGWU musical review Pins and Needles, because everyone had moved to a shorter week and the union started providing leisure activities.

Thomas Frank:

And when did this expectation finally start dying out?

David Graeber:

By the ‘60s, most people thought that robot factories, and ultimately, the elimination of all manual labor, was probably just a generation or two away. Everyone from the Situationists to the Yippies were saying ‘let the machines do all the work!’ and objecting to the very principle of 9-to-5 labor. In the ‘70s, there were actually a series of now-forgotten wildcat strikes by auto workers and others, in Detroit, I think Turin, and other places, basically saying, ‘we’re just tired of working so much.’

This sort of thing threw a lot of people in positions of power into a kind of moral panic. There were think-tanks set up to examine what to do—basically, how to maintain social control—in a society where more and more traditional forms of labor would soon be obsolete. A lot of the complaints you see in Alvin Toffler and similar figures in the early ‘70s—that rapid technological advance was throwing the social order into chaos—had to do with those anxieties: too much leisure had created the counter-culture and youth movements, what was going to happen when things got even more relaxed? It’s probably no coincidence that it was around that time that things began to turn around, both in the direction of technological research, away from automation and into information, medical, and military technologies (basically, technologies of social control), and also in the direction of market reforms that would send us back towards less secure employment, longer hours, greater work discipline.

Thomas Frank:

Today productivity continues to increase, but Americans work more hours per week than they used to, not fewer. Also, more than workers in other countries. Correct?

David Graeber:

The U.S., even under the New Deal, was always a lot stingier than most wealthy countries when it comes to time off: whether it’s maternity or paternity leave, or vacations and the like. But since the ‘70s, things have definitely been getting worse.”

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“Forty Years Ago, Co-Writing A Song With Ringo Starr Would Have Provided Me A House And A Pool”

June 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

A world driven by the written word, by novels and newspapers, may have just been a fleeting dream, even if it lasted for more than a century. Was the professional songwriter just a mirage as well? Sure, we knew the brick-and-mortar record store would be sacrificed to technology, but it wasn’t always clear that those who write the songs would also be forced to the altar. The opening of Van Dyke Parks’ Daily Beast piece about watching profits float away in the stream:

“Last month I was invited up to Ringo Starr’s home in Beverly Hills. He asked me to write a song with him for his next ‘virtual’ album. In two days’ devotion, we conjured and recorded a piece called ‘Bamboula.’

We then sat back and guessed what our possible ‘day rate’ for that time and effort would be. What an irony!

Forty years ago, co-writing a song with Ringo Starr would have provided me a house and a pool. Now, estimating 100,000 plays on Spotify, we guessed we’d split about $80. When I got home, on closer study, I found out we were way too optimistic. Spotify (on par with other streamers) pays only .00065 cents per play.

There’s less support for all the arts today, and the blade gets duller with every cut in arts funding. It degrades dance, opera, even academia and, significantly, the art of journalism. As a result, in the U.S., public opinion suffers from what we call ‘infotainment.’ That’s a genre of media news that is not informing, entertaining, or remedial. And it’s a direct result of a vacuum of patronage (and by patronage, I don’t mean just Medici-style sponsorship but the willingness of all arts consumers to pay for what they listen to, read, and watch, and for the industry to fairly recompense creators).

But let’s limit ourselves to a narrow-band study of royalty rates in my occupational field, music composition, and to industry practices in the U.S. from 1914 to 2014, a century in which declining royalty figures reveal a real dilemma: an imploding commodification if not outright destruction of intellectual property rights.”

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“I Wanted To Find A ­Disruptive Bank”

June 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s no shock that disruptive banks haven’t been the thing in Silicon Valley the way market-shifting laundry services have. Literally losing your shirt is unfortunate, but losing it figuratively is completely unacceptable. The opening of Kevin Roose’s New York Magazine article about the possibility of nouveau banking that bucks the system:

“Recently, after a long, drawn-out fight over an overdraft fee, I decided to break up with my bank. I withdrew my balance, closed my accounts, and began looking around. I wanted to find a ­disruptive bank, in the Silicon Valley parlance—one better than the opaque, fee-filled behemoths I’d dealt with in the past.

The problem, I quickly learned, is such a thing doesn’t yet exist. The big banks all offer basically the same bevy of services, and small banks and credit unions tend to skimp on the add-ons I need, like mobile-banking apps and spending trackers. All of them, big and small, run on the same outdated infrastructure—paper checks, debit cards that require punched-in pins, wire transfers that take days to clear. Despite Wall Street’s reputation for ruthless efficiency and staying ahead of the curve, the last truly important innovation in consumer banking might have been the ATM.

To listen to Silicon Valley tell it, that will change soon. ‘I am dying to fund a disruptive bank,’ venture capitalist Marc Andreessen tweeted earlier this year. Financial start-ups—known collectively as ‘fintech’—are spreading like kudzu, each with a different idea about how to usurp the giants of Wall Street by offering better services, lower fees, or both. Bitcoin and other digital currencies are the tech scene’s infatuation du jour. But a number of other companies are finding success by innovating within the monetary system we already have. ‘When I go to Silicon Valley … they all want to eat our lunch,’ lamented ­JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon this year.”

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“He Said This Had Been Caused By Heading Footballs”

June 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

American football, with its brutal smashmouth style, is something like dogfighting for humans, leaving many players with devastating brain damage. But what about that other sport that the rest of the world calls football, with relatively tamer contact that’s often theatrical, even comical, could it be dangerous to gray matter? Soccer may actually also be quite bad in this regard, with brain injuries caused by jarring headers during the game and thousands of bounces off the skull in practice. From the BBC:

“Ex-England striker Jeff Astle died from a brain condition normally linked to boxers rather than Alzheimer’s disease as previously thought, a neurosurgeon has claimed.

Dr Willie Stewart carried out a new examination of the former West Bromwich Albion forward’s brain.

He said Astle, who died, aged 59, in 2002, was killed by chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

He said this had been caused by heading footballs.

Dr Stewart said CTE was formerly known as dementia pugilistica – a progressive degeneration of the the brain caused by repeated head trauma.

He said the condition was frequently mistaken for dementia, as happened to Astle when he was incorrectly diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.

Astle scored the winning goal in West Brom’s 1-0 victory over Everton in the 1968 FA Cup final

Dr Stewart said he believed a number of footballers could be affected by CTE.”

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“It’s Difficult To Conceptualize American Streets Before Automobiles Were Everywhere”

June 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A passage from “Murder Machines,” Hunter Oatman-Stanford’s Collectors Weekly article which recalls American streets before Henry Ford’s blasted contraptions became popular:

“Though various automobiles powered by steam, gas, and electricity were produced in the late 19th century, only a handful of these cars actually made it onto the roads due to high costs and unreliable technologies. That changed in 1908, when Ford’s famous Model T standardized manufacturing methods and allowed for true mass production, making the car affordable to those without extreme wealth. By 1915, the number of registered motor vehicles was in the millions.

Within a decade, the number of car collisions and fatalities skyrocketed. In the first four years after World War I, more Americans died in auto accidents than had been killed during battle in Europe, but our legal system wasn’t catching on. The negative effects of this unprecedented shift in transportation were especially felt in urban areas, where road space was limited and pedestrian habits were powerfully ingrained.

For those of us who grew up with cars, it’s difficult to conceptualize American streets before automobiles were everywhere. ‘Imagine a busy corridor in an airport, or a crowded city park, where everybody’s moving around, and everybody’s got business to do,’ says Norton. ‘Pedestrians favored the sidewalk because that was cleaner and you were less likely to have a vehicle bump against you, but pedestrians also went anywhere they wanted in the street, and there were no crosswalks and very few signs. It was a real free-for-all.’

Roads were seen as a public space, which all citizens had an equal right to, even children at play. ‘Common law tended to pin responsibility on the person operating the heavier or more dangerous vehicle,’ says Norton, ‘so there was a bias in favor of the pedestrian.’ Since people on foot ruled the road, collisions weren’t a major issue: Streetcars and horse-drawn carriages yielded right of way to pedestrians and slowed to a human pace. The fastest traffic went around 10 to 12 miles per hour, and few vehicles even had the capacity to reach higher speeds.

In rural areas, the car was generally welcomed as an antidote to extreme isolation, but in cities with dense neighborhoods and many alternate methods of transit, most viewed private vehicles as an unnecessary luxury. ‘The most popular term of derision for a motorist was a ‘joyrider,’ and that was originally directed at chauffeurs,’ says Norton. ‘Most of the earliest cars had professional drivers who would drop their passengers somewhere, and were expected to pick them up again later. But in the meantime, they could drive around, and they got this reputation for speeding around wildly, so they were called joyriders.'”

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“The Autonomous Car Brings A Significant Direct Benefits To Consumers”

June 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Maciamo Hay at h+ magazine, an argument for why autonomous vehicles may grow much more rapidly than the slow uptick experienced of hybrids:

“Some might doubt that autonomous cars will take over the market within 10-15 years of their introduction. After all, hybrid cars were launched over 15 years ago (even if only the Toyota Prius at first) and still represent only 10% of new sales in the US, and 25% in Japan, which has the world’s highest percentage. The reason why hybrid cars haven’t been selling very well yet is that they are too expensive. Even though they consume less fuel, for many years it was very hard to amortize due to the difference of initial investment. The initial enthusiasts were often environmentalists.

In contrast, the autonomous car brings a significant direct benefits to consumers in the form of increased safety and convenience, so that people will want them even if they are a bit more expensive, just as happened with smartphones. As always price will be the determinant factor for the speed of adoption, and sales will follow an exponential curve as manufacturing costs drop progressively.”

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“An Obsession With Speed Is Also The Fear Of Being Left Behind Oneself”

June 2, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’m not on any social media even though I acknowledge there are a great many wonderful things about it. I just don’t know how healthy it is to live inside that machine. And that’s what it seems like to me–a machine. In fact, it probably most resembles a retro one, a pinball machine. The glass is transparent, there’s a lot of jarring noise and the likely outcomes are TILT and GAME OVER. At the end, you’re a little poorer and unnerved by the cheap titillation and the spent adrenaline. I think it’s particularly questionable whether we should be so linked to our past, that every day could be a high-school reunion. Sure, there’s comfort in it, but maybe comfort is what we want but not what we need. And, of course, being virtual isn’t being actual. Like an actor who goes too deeply into a role, it’s hard to disconnect ourselves from the unreality.

In stepping away for a spell from social media and his neverending Twitter wars, Patton Oswalt shared a quote he loves: “For fear of becoming dinosaurs we are turned into sheep.” It comes from Garret Keizer’s 2010 Harper’s essay, “Why Dogs Go After Mail Carriers.” Here’s the fuller passage from the piece:

“More than the unionization of its carriers or the federal oversight of its operations, the most bemoaned evil of the US mail is its slowness {1}. No surprise there, given our culture’s worship of speed. I would guess that when the average American hears the word socialism the first image to appear in his or her mind is that of a slow-moving queue, like they have down in Cuba, where people have been known to take a whole morning just to buy a chicken and a whole night just to make love. Unfortunately, the costs of our haste do not admit to hasty calculation. As Eva Hoffman notes in her 2009 book Time, ‘New levels of speed … are altering both our inner and outer worlds in ways we have yet to grasp, or fully understand.’

The influence of speed upon what Hoffman aptly calls ‘the very character and materiality of lived time’ [my emphasis] has been a topic of discussion for decades now, though its bourgeois construction typically leans toward issues of personal health and lifestyle aesthetics. Speed alters our brain chemistry; it leaves us too little time to smell the roses – a favorite trope among those who would do better to smell their own exhaust. In essence, the speed of a capitalistic society is about leaving others behind, the losers in the race, the ‘pedestrians’ at the side of the road, the people with obsolete computers and junker cars and slow-yield investments. An obsession with speed is also the fear of being left behind oneself – which drives the compulsion to buy the new car, the faster laptop, the inflated stock. For fear of becoming dinosaurs we are turned into sheep.'”

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