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“Physics Was Invented By People Who Happened To Be Very Religious”

January 31, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Contrarian theoretical physicist Lee Smolin is interviewed by Michael Segal of Nautilus about the nature of time. A passage about the intersection of religion and science at the dawn of physics:

“Michael Segal:

Newton was revolutionary in part because he applied a timeless set of laws to the whole universe. Was he wrong to do so?

Lee Smolin:

Physics was invented by people who happened to be very religious. Newton is one example. For him the laws of nature and their mathematical representations were synonymous with knowing the thoughts of God: Space was the sensorium of God and true time was the time in which God experienced the world and made things in the world. And Newton’s style of doing physics works perfectly when you apply it to a small part of the universe, say something going on in a laboratory. But when you take Newton’s style of doing physics and apply it to the universe as a whole, you implicitly assume that there is something outside the universe making things happen inside the universe, the same way there’s something outside the laboratory system making things happen in the laboratory. What I think has happened is that even physicists who have no religious faith or commitment have gotten sucked into a form of explanation which has a religious underpinning, by which I mean it requires pointing to something outside the universe in order to give a complete explanation. Many people who think of themselves as atheists do this habitually. In my view, it makes them think sloppy thoughts about cosmology. When it comes to extending science to the universe as a whole, you have to think differently than applying science to a laboratory system.

Michael Segal:

Is it not possible for our universe to be affected by other universes?

Lee Smolin:

It is possible. But you know, science is not about what might be the case, science is about what we can demonstrate is the case through publicly available evidence. There’s an infinite number of things that might be the case: There might be other universes, there might be a platonic realm in which mathematical objects move eternally, there might be God and heaven and angels. But science is not about that. If you want to explain the whole universe within science, you have to explain the laws in terms of things inside the universe itself. I think this is the only aspiration for cosmology that’s true to the real spirit of science.”

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“Instead Of Editors And Reporters, Facebook’s Publication Is Staffed By A Computer Algorithm And Human ‘Curators'”

January 31, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’m in favor of getting news to the people in any and all manners, so the following sentences about a new Facebook app don’t strike me as being as vampiric and frightening as you might expect. Print news has been on a collision course with computerization and, to some extent, automation, for four decades. I don’t think these adjustments, painful though they are, will replace the primary goal of news but ensure its existence. The channels need to be fed. The programming of the channels is, of course, worrisome. But that was the case in pre-digital times as well. From Reed Albergotti at the WSJ:

“On Thursday, Facebook introduced a long-awaited mobile app, called Paper, that offers users a personalized stream of news. Facebook said it will be available Feb. 3 for the iPhone; there is no date yet for Android.

Instead of editors and reporters, Facebook’s publication is staffed by a computer algorithm and human ‘curators.’ The content comes from outside sources, based on links shared by the social network’s 1.2 billion users. During a recent demonstration, the curated content featured articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post and Time magazine, among others.

The move is part of Facebook’s long-term strategy to be more than just a popular app, or a destination on the Internet. Facebook wants to be the global hub of human communication, essential in the lives of its users.”

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“I’m Sort Of A Techno-Geek, Propeller-Head, Science-Fiction Type”

January 31, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Three quick exchanges from Erik Lundegaard’s 1996 interview with then-fledgling Internet entrepreneur Jeff Bezos, when Amazon was merely books, and delivery drones and Washington Post ownership were most certainly not in the offing.

__________________

Question:

So how did you come up with the idea for this company?

Jeff Bezos:

… I looked at several different areas and finally decided that one of the most promising ones is interactive retailing. Then I made a list of 20 products, and force-ranked them, looking for the first-best product to sell on-line.

Original logo for amazon.comIn the top five were things like magazine subscriptions, computer hardware, computer software, and music. The reason books really stood out is because there are so many books. Books are totally unusual in that respect—to have so many items in a particular category. There are one and a half million English-language books, different titles, active and in-print at any given time. There are three million titles active and in-print worldwide in all languages. If you look at the number two category in that respect, it’s music, and there are only about 200 thousand active music CDs. Now when you have a huge number of items that’s where computers start to shine because of their sorting and searching and organizing capabilities. Also, it’s back to this idea that you have to have an incredibly strong value proposition. With that many items, you can build a store on-line that literally could not exist in any other way. It would be impossible to have a physical bookstore with 1.5 million titles. The largest physical bookstores in the world only have about 175,000 titles. It would also be impossible to print the amazon.com catalogue and make it into a paper catalogue. If you were to print the amazon.com catalogue it would be the size of seven New York City phone books.

So here we’re offering a service that literally can’t be done in any other way, and, because of that, people are willing to put up with this infant technology.

__________________

Question:

 Do you have a favorite book?

Jeff Bezos:

It used to be Dune. I’m sort of a techno-geek, propeller-head, science-fiction type, but my wife got me to read Remains of the Day and I liked that a lot. I also like the Penguin edition of Sir Richard Francis Burton’s biography

___________________

Question:

How will all of this affect physical bookstores?

Jeff Bezos:

I think you’ll see a continuation of the trend that’s already in place, which is that physical bookstores are going to compete by becoming better places to be. They’ll have better lattes, better sofas, all this stuff. More comfortable environments. I still buy about half of my books from physical bookstores and one of the big reasons is I like being in bookstores. It’s just like TV didn’t put the movies out of business—people still like to go to the movie theater, they like to mingle with their fellow humans—and that’s going to continue to be the case. Good physical bookstores are like the community centers of the late 20th century. Good physical bookstores have great authors come in and you can meet them and shake their hands, and that’s a different thing. You can’t duplicate that on-line.

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“[Perhaps] Intelligent Machines Will Come To The Conclusion That Sex Is The Best Way For Them To Evolve”

January 30, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Extrapolating a degree beyond the idea of self-replicating machines, George Zarkadakis of the Telegraph wonders whether robots will eventually pair off and hook up, whether the future of “life” will be determined by sexed machines. From his article:

“Perhaps by exploring and learning about human evolution, intelligent machines will come to the conclusion that sex is the best way for them to evolve. Rather than self-replicating, like amoebas, they may opt to simulate sexual reproduction with two, or indeed innumerable, sexes.

Sex would defend them from computer viruses (just as biological sex may have evolved to defend organisms from parasitical attack), make them more robust and accelerate their evolution. Software engineers already use so-called ‘genetic algorithms’ that mimic evolution.

Nanotechnologists, like Eric Drexler, see the future of intelligent machines at the level of molecules: tiny robots that evolve and – like in Lem’s novel – come together to form intelligent superorganisms. Perhaps the future of artificial intelligence will be both silicon- and carbon-based: digital brains directing complex molecular structures to copulate at the nanometre level and reproduce. Perhaps the cyborgs of the future may involve human participation in robot sexual reproduction, and the creation of new, hybrid species.

If that is the future, then we may have to reread Paley’s Natural Theology and take notice. Not in the way that creationists do, but as members of an open society that must face up to the possible ramifications of our technology. Unlike natural evolution, where high-level consciousness and intelligence evolved late as by-products of cerebral development in mammals, in robotic evolution intelligence will be the guiding force. Butler will be vindicated. Brains will come before bodies. Robotic evolution will be Intelligent Design par excellence. The question is not whether it may happen or not, but whether we would want it to happen.”

 

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“I Vehemently Oppose The Use Of These Discoveries For Tailor-Making Children”

January 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

It seems like the “engineering” of babies, “designer babies” as they’re often called, will happen at some point, but I would think it will be a slow, gradual process, this shock of the new coming to newborns. From Ferris Jabr’s Scientific American blog post, “Are We Too Close to Making Gattaca a Reality?“:

“In 2009 [Jeffrey] Steinberg announced that he would soon give parents the option to choose their child’s skin color, hair color and eye color in addition to sex. He based this claim on studies in which scientists at deCode Genetics in Iceland suggested they could identify the skin, hair and eye color of a Scandinavian by looking at his or her DNA. ‘It’s time for everyone to pull their heads out of the sand,’ Steinberg proclaimed to the BBC at the time. Many fertility specialists were outraged. Mark Hughes, a pioneer of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, told the San Diego Union-Tribune that the whole idea was absurd and the Wall Street Journal quoted him as saying that ‘no legitimate lab would get into it and, if they did, they’d be ostracized.’ Likewise, Kari Stefansson, chief executive of deCode, did not mince words with the WSJ: ‘I vehemently oppose the use of these discoveries for tailor-making children,’ he said. Fertility Institutes even received a call from the Vatican urging its staff to think more carefully. Steinberg withdrew his proposal.

But that does not mean he and other likeminded clinicians and entrepreneurs have forgotten about the possibility of parents molding their children before birth. ‘I’m still very much in favor of using genetics for all it can offer us,’ Steinberg says, ‘but I learned a lesson: you really have to take things very, very slowly, because science is scary to a lot of people.'”

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“Out Here Among The Stars Lies The Destiny Of Mankind”

January 29, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Well, this is fun. Introduced by Vernon Myers, the publisher of Look, the 1966 short film, “A Look Behind the Future,” focuses on the magazine’s former photographer Stanley Kubrick, who was in the process of making 2001: A Space Odyssey at London’s MGM studios. It’s a nice companion piece to Jeremy Bernstein’s two great New Yorker articles about the movie during its long gestation (here and here).

Mentioned or seen in this video: Mobile phones, laptop computers, Wernher Von Braun, memory helmets, a 38-ton centrifuge, Arthur C. Clarke at the Long Island warehouse where the NASA L.E.M. (Lunar Excursion Module) was being constructed, Keir Dullea meeting the press, etc. 

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“He Planned Two Modern Utopias Modeled On This Idea Of The City As Machine”

January 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Buckminster Fuller wanted to dome a chunk of Manhattan, but even that plan wasn’t as outré as his designs for a floating city. From “10 Failed Utopian Cities That Influenced the Future,” a fun i09 post by Annalee Newitz and Emily Stamm:

“Cloud Nine, the Floating City

Science — and science fiction — often influenced city designers. But nobody took futuristic ideas more seriously than mid-twentieth century inventor Buckminster Fuller, who responded to news about overcrowding in Tokyo by imagining cities in the sky. The Spherical Tensegrity Atmospheric Research Station, called STARS or Cloud 9s, would be composed of giant geodesic spheres. When filled with air, the sphere would weigh one-thousandth of the weight of the air inside it. Fuller planned on heating that air with solar power or human activity, causing the sphere to float. He would anchor his floating cities to mountains, or let them drift around the world. They were never built, but Fuller’s idea for a pre-fab, geodesic dome dwelling called Dymaxion House eventually influenced the pre-fab house movement which is still going strong.”

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“I Chose To Go With The Eavesdropper”

January 29, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Here’s a wonderful featurette about Francis Ford Coppola making The Conversation, the 1974 psychological thriller, which moved the disquiet of Antonioni’s Blow-Up into the Watergate era, asked questions about a world where everyone is a spy and spied upon. The surprise 40 years later: Few seem upset about the new order of the techno-society. We haven’t been trapped after all; we’ve logged on and signed up for it. My short essay about the film follows the video.

A product of the Watergate decade, an era when spying and snooping at least gave us pause, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation was made before ubiquitous public security cameras were watching us, phones were tracking us and seemingly everyone was living in public. A lack of privacy has never been as well-regarded as it is today nor have the perils of such actions, which are investigated in this film, been so invisible.

Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a jazz loving San Franciscan who earns his living as a surveillance expert, stealthily recording private conversations with an elaborate array of mikes of his own making. Caul is top dog in the trade, and he’s paid handsomely to find answers for his bosses and not ask them any questions. A devout Catholic, the wire tapper has moral issues with his work, especially since information he culled in a past case led to murder. But it’s hard for Caul to stop doing what he’s doing because he’s so damn good at it, something of an artist.

While he may be an artist, Caul is definitely a hypocrite. He keeps everything about himself strictly private, even from his girlfriend (Teri Garr) and point man (John Cazale). He rationalizes he’s doing it for safety reasons, but it’s also in his nature. This delicate balance is thrown off-kilter when Caul believes his latest assignment, in which a wealthy man is paying for info about his young wife, may also lead to murder. Caul can’t head down that road again and a crisis of conscience makes him go rogue. Soon he himself is the target of surveillance, a probing that he can’t withstand.

In the era that saw the downfall of an American President who listened to the tapes of others and erased his own, The Conversation was amazingly relevant, but in some ways it may be even more meaningful in this exhibitionist age, in which we gleefully hand over our privacy to satisfy our egos. As Caul and Nixon learned, and as we may yet, those who press PLAY don’t always get to choose when to press STOP.•

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“A Startling Number Of American Web Users Are No Longer Paying Attention To The News As It Is Traditionally Defined”

January 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

News at it used to be produced is a niche item now. It may have always been to some degree, but more so today. But is that necessarily a bad thing? I think in our decentralized age, American citizens seem far less likely to be bullshitted than they were not too long ago. It may be best that news is delivered in all forms from all directions.

The opening “Doesn’t Anyone Read The News?” by Timothy Wu at the New Yorker blog:

“The State of the Union address is one of the few times each year when a large percentage of Americans reliably pay attention to politics. Once upon a time, as legend has it, things were different: most Americans tuned into Walter Cronkite in the evening or picked up the morning newspaper, which covered matters of national and international importance, like politics, foreign affairs, and business developments.

If analysts at Microsoft Research are correct, a startling number of American Web users are no longer paying attention to the news as it is traditionally defined. In a recent study of ‘filter bubbles,’ Sharad Goel, Seth Flaxman, and Justin Rao asked how many Web users actually read the news online. Out of a sample of 1.2 million American users, just over fifty thousand, or four per cent, were ‘active news customers’ of ‘front section’ news. The other ninety-six per cent found other things to read.”

 

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“Technology And Drugs Have Always Existed In An Easy Symbiosis”

January 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Some think the government is gaining too much control over us at the very instant that I think the opposite is happening. Pretty soon, as the anarchy of the Internet is loosed back into the real world, it will be tougher to control much of anything. Big Brother can watch, but can he act?

That wonderful Browser blog pointed me to “The Drug Revolution No One Can Stop,” Mike Power’s Medium article about designer drugs that are made to order and delivered to you like a chair, a lamp, a knife. An excerpt:

“MXE is part of a cultural shift that started a generation ago, but has taken on a new edge in the last few years. In 2008, the first in a wave of new, legal, synthetic drugs emerged into the mainstream. They had little to no history of human use. Instead, they were concocted in labs by tweaking a few atoms here and there—creating novel, and therefore legal, substances. Sold mainly online, these designer drugs cover every category of intoxication imaginable, and their effects resemble the full range of banned drugs, from the mellowness of marijuana to the extremes of cocaine and LSD. They are known as ‘legal highs,’ and they have exploded in popularity: the 2012 Global Drugs Survey found that one in twelve people it surveyed worldwide takes them.

Legislators around the world have been put off-balance by the emergence of this massively distributed, technically complex and chemically sophisticated trade. And the trade is growing rapidly.

In 2009 The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction’s early warning system identified 24 new drugs. In 2010, it identified 41. In 2011, another 49, and in 2012, there were 73 more. By October 2013, a further 56 new compounds had already been identified—a total of 243 new compounds in just four years.

In its latest World Drug Report, the United Nations acknowledged this extraordinary expansion: ‘While new harmful substances have been emerging with unfailing regularity on the drug scene,’ it said, ‘the international drug control system is floundering, for the first time, under the speed and creativity of the phenomenon.’

Technology and drugs have always existed in an easy symbiosis: the first thing ever bought and sold across the Internet was a bag of marijuana. In 1971 or 1972, students at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory used ARPANET—the earliest iteration of the Internet—to arrange a marijuana deal with their counterparts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

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“The Mood Organ Is A Device That Allows The User To Dial A Code To Instantly Be In A Certain Mood”

January 29, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Oh, I have trouble reading science fiction. The ideas are interesting, but the actual writing usually leaves me cold. There are some exceptions, of course, as there always are in life, but I doubt I’ll even have a period in which I dive deeply into the genre. Rebecca J. Rosen of the Atlantic has an interview with Dan Novy and Sophia Bruckner of MIT who are going to be teaching a course “Science Fiction to Science Fabrication.” A passage from the Q&A about one of the exceptions, Philip K. Dick:

“Rebecca J. Rosen:

What are some specific examples you’ll be looking at?

Sophia Bruckner:

For example, we will be reading the classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, who is one of my favorite authors and is a master of crazy gadget ideas. The devices he describes in his writings can be very humorous and satirical but are truly profound. People have probably seen Blade Runner, an excellent movie based on this book, but the book is very different! Many of the most compelling devices from the book did not make it into the movie.

For example, the Mood Organ is a device that allows the user to dial a code to instantly be in a certain mood. The book contains multiple funny instances of people using this device, such as when one character plugs in the code 888 to feel ‘the desire to watch TV no matter what is on,’ but Dick also points out some disturbing implications resulting from the existence of such a technology. ‘How much time do you set aside each month for specific moods?’ asks one character. Should you be happy and energized to work all the time? This character eventually concludes that two days a month is a reasonable amount for feeling despair. Today, we are hoping science and technology will find the secret to forever happiness, but what will happen if we actually succeed?

Another one of my favorite gadgets from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the Empathy Box. A person holds the handles on the Empathy Box and is connected with all other people using it at the same time by sharing the feelings of a spiritual figure named William Mercer. Amazingly, even in 1968, Dick saw the potential for technology to not only connect people across long distances but to do so with emotional depth. Dick writes that the Empathy Box is ‘the most personal possession you have! It’s an extension of your body; it’s the way you touch other humans, it’s the way you stop being alone.’

Actually, I just realized while answering this question that I’ve been attempting to build a version of the Empathy Box as part of my thesis! I believe people crave for their computers and phones to fulfill this need for connection, but they manage to do so only superficially. As a result, people feel increasingly estranged and alone despite being connected all the time. Like Dick, I also am intrigued by how to use technology to promote empathy and a greater sense of genuine interconnectedness with one another, and I am currently working on designing wearable devices to do this. Some of my best ideas stem from reading science fiction, and I often don’t realize it until later!'”

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“Now Comes A New Kind Of Challenge To The Evidence Of A Cognitive Decline”

January 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Since copies of cells are less perfect than healthy original ones, I would assume some cognitive decline occurs over time, that our brains deteriorate as do our other organs. But the age-decline of brain matter has probably always been somewhat overstated; we forget more over time simply because we have inelastic memories that are taxed by a surfeit of information collected over a lifetime. Perhaps we know too much. That’s why it’s a good thing, not a scary thing, for some of our data to be stored in computers, for our heads to be in the cloud. We just don’t have the necessary space for so much information. We can’t fit it all in our heads. We need more room.

From “The Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind,” by Benedict Carey in the New York Times:

“Now comes a new kind of challenge to the evidence of a cognitive decline, from a decidedly digital quarter: data mining, based on theories of information processing. In a paper published in Topics in Cognitive Science, a team of linguistic researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany used advanced learning models to search enormous databases of words and phrases.

Since educated older people generally know more words than younger people, simply by virtue of having been around longer, the experiment simulates what an older brain has to do to retrieve a word. And when the researchers incorporated that difference into the models, the aging ‘deficits’ largely disappeared.

‘What shocked me, to be honest, is that for the first half of the time we were doing this project, I totally bought into the idea of age-related cognitive decline in healthy adults,’ the lead author, Michael Ramscar, said by email. But the simulations, he added, ‘fit so well to human data that it slowly forced me to entertain this idea that I didn’t need to invoke decline at all.”

Can it be?”

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“Will Virtual Intelligence Ever Be Anything More Than A Figment Of A Real Person?”

January 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Anything we can conjure in our minds, not matter how far-fetched, could happen eventually in reality. Maybe not exactly in the form we hoped or as soon as we wanted, but in some sense. From a Code(Love) piece by Roger Huang about digitally raising the dead, a favorite pursuit of Ray Kurzweil:

“Will virtual intelligence ever be anything more than a figment of a real person? The question examines everything humans have always assumed about human nature: that we are unique, and that we are defined by our uniqueness against non-humans. We possess a strange combination of social interaction, physical manipulation, and processing power that is hard to define, so we often use comparisons to living things that are distinctly not human to define ourselves.

We are not cows. We are not dolphins. We are not chimpanzees, even though that is getting uncomfortably close.

The closer robots get to piercing that space, the more uncomfortable humans get with them. This is the ‘uncanny valley.’ The more robots look, and act like humans, even if we distinctly know they are not, the more we revile them. Like the broken souls of the Ring, poorly designed robots can lead us to hate, and to pain, because they lead us to question who we truly are.

Virtual life that humans can accept must pass the Turing Test. It must fool a human into thinking that it too is a human, that it is really he or she. When Ray sits down to talk with his reincarnated father, he cannot be talking with a robot, but with a real, living human being that he has been yearning to speak to for forty long years.

Ray Kurzweil believes that will happen within a couple of decades.”•

________________________________

The 17-year-old Kurzweil in 1965 on I’ve Got a Secret:

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“There’s Increasing Evidence That The Will To Work Out Is Partly Genetically Determined”

January 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Some athletes respond overwhelmingly to exercise and training which results in only modest gains for others. It’s also likely that some of us have a genetic predisposition to actually doing the work necessary to excel, and while just showing up probably isn’t quite 80% of success as Woody Allen once opined, it is really important. We truly are programmed, though thankfully in complicated and mysterious ways. From Bruce Grierson at Pacific Standard:

“To a certain kind of sports fan—the sort with a Ph.D. in physiology—Olga Kotelko is just about the most interesting athlete in the world. A track and field amateur from Vancouver, Canada, Kotelko has no peer when it comes to the javelin, the long jump, and the 100-meter dash (to name just a few of the 11 events she has competed in avidly for 18 years). And that’s only partly because peers in her age bracket tend overwhelmingly to avoid athletic throwing and jumping events. Kotelko, you see, is 94 years old.

Scientists want to know what’s different about Olga Kotelko. Many people assume she simply won the genetic lottery—end of story. But in some ways that appears not to be true. Some athletes carry genetic variants that make them highly ‘trainable,’ acutely responsive to aerobic exercise. Kotelko doesn’t have many of them. Some people have genes that let them lose weight easily on a workout regime. Kotelko doesn’t.

Olga’s DNA instead may help her out in a subtler way. There’s increasing evidence that the will to work out is partly genetically determined.”

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“We Could See People And Things Moving Around Our Living Rooms”

January 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

One of the neat fictional things that Gene Roddenberry dreamed up, the holodeck, might actually be coming to our living rooms soon, so that we can be completely drenched by even more entertainment, until it’s oozing from every last pore. Because we’re all children now who have to be amused every last fucking second. Everybody is excited about a holodeck potentially bringing us even more diversions. Well, not everybody. Starving children and colorectal cancer patients probably don’t care. But they have perspective, so they don’t count. From Nick Bilton in the New York Times:

“This is all part of a quest by computer companies, Hollywood and video game makers to move entertainment closer to reality — or at least a computer-generated version of reality. Rather than simply watch movies, the thinking goes, we could become part of the story. We could see people and things moving around our living rooms. The actors could talk to us. Gamers who today slouch on the couch could step inside their games. They could pick up a computer-simulated bat in computer-simulated Yankee Stadium while a computer-simulated crowd roared around them.

‘The holodeck is something we’ve been fixated on here for a number of years as a future target experience that would be truly immersive,’ said Phil Rogers, a corporate fellow at Advanced Micro Devices, the computer chip maker. ‘Ten years ago, it seemed like a dream. Now, it feels within reach.'”

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“Experiment In Progress”

January 27, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Having posted earlier today about speleologist and chronobiologist Michel Siffre, here’s a gorgeous, hypnotic film about his 1972 “Midnight Cave” time-isolation experiment in Del Rio, Texas. It’s TV dinners and Plato and guns and mice and being and nothingness.

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“An Ethics Board Will Have The Authority To Determine How Google Is Allowed To Implement Artificial Intelligence Research”

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

It isn’t often that a corporate acquisition results in the acquirer setting up an ethics board to govern the work which will result from the collaboration. But that’s what’s apparently happened with Google’s purchase of DeepMind Technologies. From Jason Inofuentes at ArsTechnica:

“London-based DeepMind was founded in 2010, and it has brought together some of the preeminent researchers in deep learning. The company has a staff of 50-75, with 30 PhDs in a particular subset of machine learning called ‘deep learning,’ the development of algorithms that allow machines to learn as humans do. Deep learning models eschew pre-scripted forms of artificial intelligence and instead rely on experiential learning based on rudimentary capabilities. The models require vast server networks and can be broadly applied to any problem that requires advanced pattern recognition.

DeepMind’s well-funded work hasn’t yielded any commercial products, but a recent paper (PDF) demonstrates how far the company has come. In the paper, DeepMind’s researchers describe a neuronal network that was able to learn how to play Breakout, the Atari 2600 game. …

The DeepMind purchase price seems to be up for debate, but The Information is reporting an interesting non-financial wrinkle to the deal: an ethics board will have the authority to determine how Google is allowed to implement artificial intelligence research. DeepMind reportedly insisted on the board’s establishment before reaching a deal.”

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“There Were Electronic Computers And The Demands Involved Such Complications That He Could No Longer Cope”

January 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Commenting on experience and loss made me think of Wim Klein (known alternately as Willem), the human calculator. A rare breed, lightning calculators had always been employed by sideshows and dime museums, and Klein worked French circuses (under the names “Pascal” and “Willy Wortel”), a curiosity with amazing mathematical abilities. He ultimately left the big top to become a human calculator at CERN in the late 1950s. In addition to his miraculous mental abilities, Klein was fascinating because his amazing tent-show talents ran up against the Computer Age, a time he could not navigate, and one that overwhelmed his gifts. Klein retired in 1976, just as personal computers began pushing their way into homes. He was subsequently killed, violently and mysteriously. From a memory of Klein by his friend Frans Cerulus:

So one day arrived Wim Klein, introduced by a note from Director-General Bakker. Professor Bakker wrote that Mr Klein had been recommended by the director of the Zeeman laboratory in Amsterdam as a remarkable calculator.

I was charged with examining Mr Klein’s abilities; such jobs befall usually to the younger member of a team and in addition I spoke Dutch. He needed no desk calculator and performed exceedingly well, exceeding in speed even my own desk calculator in multiplication and division. I wanted to test something more complicated, took the table prepared by the British ladies and asked Klein to calculate a line, with my eye on my watch.

He came up with the result in a minute: his number did not agree with the table. This made him nervous, he did it all over and obtained the same result, getting red in the face. I then sat down and did the calculations twice on my desk calculator, which took me about ten minutes: Klein was right, the ladies had made an error! Klein was appointed.

The next job he did for me was ideally suited for him. I needed tables of combinations of so-called Clebsch-Gordan coefficients. Such coefficients are really fractions which can become quite complicated: there existed tables where the values of the coefficients had been tabled as decimal numbers, e.g. 0.92308. But I needed the explicit form, with the numerator and denominator as whole numbers. Normally this would have required doing the computation all over. But for Wim – by then I could call him Wim – it was just play to find that was just 11/13. He told me part of his secrets: he was gifted with an extraordinary memory for numbers, he could remember a row of 50 digits given him an hour earlier. He kept in his head the multiplication tables up to one hundred and all the logarithms from 2 to 100; in addition he knew the standard interpolation rules.

Wim was very reliable, except perhaps on Monday morning. But then we had that most remarkable secretary, Tatiana Fabergé, who had to type out the tables and spotted any unusual number in the row.

In later years Wim became rather unhappy: there were electronic computers and the demands involved such complications that he could no longer cope and had to learn the basics of computer programming. The moments he could again become the entertainer and show off his extraordinary feats of mental calculation were then moments for happiness for him.•

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“Instead Of Studying Caves, You Ended Up Studying Time”

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

Just read psychologist Adam Alter’s 2013 book, Drunk Tank Pink, which I really enjoyed even if some of the historical material he presents is well-worn. (Oh, and even though I think the connection the author draws between Usain Bolt’s surname and his career success is overstated. Jamaican steering committees responded to those fast-twitch leg muscles and stop-watch times, not his thunderous “title.”) A brief passage in the section about social isolation discusses the experience of French speleologist Michel Siffre who insinuated himself into the Space Race in the 1960s by conducting extreme self-deprivation experiments, in an attempt to anticipate how such conditions would effect astronauts. In 1962, Siffre lived within the solitude of an underground glacier to test the effect on his mental faculties. The following decade, he spent 205 days alone in a Texas cave. A Cousteau who does not get wet, Siffre has dived so deep inside of himself that time has seemed to cease.

Alter’s writing reminded me of a 2008 Cabinet interview that Joshua Foer, that memory enthusiast, conducted with the time-isolation explorer. The opening:

“Joshua Foer:

In 1962, you were just twenty-three years old. What made you decide to live underground in complete isolation for sixty-three days?

Michel Siffre:

You have to understand, I was a geologist by training. In 1961, we discovered an underground glacier in the Alps, about seventy kilometers from Nice. At first, my idea was to prepare a geological expedition, and to spend about fifteen days underground studying the glacier, but a couple of months later, I said to myself, “Well, fifteen days is not enough. I shall see nothing.” So, I decided to stay two months. And then this idea came to me—this idea that became the idea of my life. I decided to live like an animal, without a watch, in the dark, without knowing the time.

Joshua Foer:

Instead of studying caves, you ended up studying time.

Michel Siffre:

Yes, I invented a simple scientific protocol. I put a team at the entrance of the cave. I decided I would call them when I woke up, when I ate, and just before I went to sleep. My team didn’t have the right to call me, so that I wouldn’t have any idea what time it was on the outside. Without knowing it, I had created the field of human chronobiology. Long before, in 1922, it had been discovered that rats have an internal biological clock. My experiment showed that humans, like lower mammals, have a body clock as well.”

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“Now We’re Telling People You Have To Learn This Programming Too, Or Else The Robots Are Going To Get You”

January 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Everybody needs to learn comouter coding because why? As someone who learned a fair amount of HTML in the late ’90s only to not need to know any of it, I can’t make sense of the analogy being drawn between book literacy and coding literacy. If we are all “coders” in the future, it will be a very different thing and a simpler process that produces more complex answers. From NPR’s “Computers Are the Future, but Does Everyone Need to Code?“:

“Some people aren’t so enthusiastic about all the pro-coding rhetoric. ‘Reading and writing are hard; the basics are hard,’ says software developer Jeff Atwood. ‘And now we’re telling people you have to learn this programming too, or else the robots are going to get you.’

Atwood started making his own video games as a 12-year-old back in the ’80s. Now he runs a coding blog and a set of websites to help people with programming. But he remembers a time not so long ago when computers weren’t at all intuitive.

‘When I got my first computer in the mid-80s, when you turned it on, what you got was a giant, blinking cursor on the screen — that was the boot up,’ he recalls. ‘It wasn’t like turning on an iPad where you have a screen full of apps and you start doing things. … When I hear: ‘Everyone must learn to program,’ what I hear is: We’re going back in time to a place where you have to be a programmer to do things on the computer.’

Atwood thinks that’s going backward. He’s glad that people don’t have to be computer whizzes anymore just to be able to use a computer. He thinks that if computers aren’t your thing, then it’s OK to let the programmers make life easier for you.

‘It’s sort of like an obsession with being an auto mechanic,’ he says. ‘There are tons of cars, there’s tons of driving … but I think it’s a little crazy to go around saying everyone should really learn to be an auto mechanic because cars are so essential to the functioning of our society. Should you know how to change oil? Absolutely. There are [also] basic things you should know when you use a computer. But this whole ‘become an auto mechanic’ thing? It’s just really not for everyone.'”

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“A Funny View Of The Future Is That Everybody Is Going Around Looking At The Sequence Of Auto-Suggests”

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

Two excerpts from Robin Kawakami’s Wall Street Journal article in which Google’s Peter Norvig and physicist and software designer Stephen Wolfram discuss the technology on display in Spike Jonze’s Her:

  • Norvig comparing today’s computers to HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey:

“Going back to a more rudimentary science fiction computer—HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—Norvig noted that in some ways, today’s computers have already surpassed those capabilities. ‘HAL was really limited in that he had a number of eyes throughout the spaceship, and he could see the astronauts,’ he said. But HAL, being a mainframe computer, was also crippled by his design. ‘He wasn’t as mobile as what we have today with our robots that can move around, or even our phones and our laptops have this greater physical capability.'”

  • Wolfram on technology’s predictive powers:

Exploring personality amplification through technology is a key concept from the film for Wolfram. In the same way that various gadgets enhance our abilities—whether it’s finding our way around with a GPS or moving objects with machines—an AI might enable us to accomplish certain goals, just as Samantha nudged Theodore toward a book contract. ‘What could you achieve by having an emotional connection to a sophisticated, AI-like thing?’ he said. ‘Can you be the best instance of what you intended to be?’

On the same token, can an AI-driven agenda aimed at personal improvement actually limit us? Since machines are generally better at predicting a little bit into the future than humans are, Wolfram sees a possibility of people following computer recommendations. ‘A funny view of the future is that everybody is going around looking at the sequence of auto-suggests,’ he said. ‘And pretty soon the machines are in charge.'”

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“It Is The Most Affordable Sony Radio On The Prison Market”

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

Apart from a shiv, the thing I’d most like to have if I were incarcerated would be a Sony SRF-39FP, the most popular radio in the big house. It’s manufactured specifically for inmates, with a transparent case to prevent its use as a container for contraband. From “The iPod of Prison,” by Joshua Hunt at the New Yorker blog:

“The pocket analog radio, known by the bland model number SRF-39FP, is a Sony ‘ultralight’ model manufactured for prisons. Its clear housing is meant to prevent inmates from using it to smuggle contraband, and, at under thirty dollars, it is the most affordable Sony radio on the prison market.

That market consists of commissaries, which were established by the Department of Justice in 1930 to provide prisoners with items not supplied by their institutions; by offering a selection of shampoos and soaps, they shifted personal hygiene costs to inmates, while distractions like playing cards eased tensions among the nation’s growing prison population. More than half a million inmates each week shop at commissaries stocked by the Keefe Group, a privately held company that sells items to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and twelve out of fourteen privately managed state departments of corrections. A sample commissary order form lists items like an I.B.M. typewriter ribbon, hair dye, RC Cola, Sensodyne toothpaste, chili-garlic sauce, Koss CL-20 headphones, and a ‘Sony Radio.’

Commissaries often carry other, bargain-brand radios, but according to former inmates and employees of the Bureau of Prisons and the Keefe Group, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, America’s federal prisoners are most likely to own a Sony. Melissa Dolan, a Sony spokesperson, confirmed in an e-mail that selling portable radios in American prisons has long been a ‘stable business’ that represents ‘sizable’ sales for the company. Of the models available, the SRF-39FP remains an undisputed classic, still found on commissary lists an impressive fifteen years after its initial release, making it nearly as common behind prison walls as Apple’s iPod once was outside of them, despite competition from newer devices like digital radios and MP3 players.”

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“The New Technology Demanded New Skills”

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

In a Washington Post article about power looms coming to factories in 19th-century Massachusetts, James Bessen suggests that the Information Age will ultimately confer wealth to workers as the Industrial Age previously did, something that is certainly possible but not definite. An excerpt:

“When Charles Dickens visited Lowell in 1842, he reported back to his English readers three facts that he thought many of them would find ‘preposterous’: young girls who worked in the mills played the piano, they subscribed to circulating libraries and they published their own literary magazines. To the class-bound English, such activities were ‘above the station’ of factory workers.

British readers expected mill workers to come from the lower classes because the first British mills sought the cheapest labor. This lowest-common-denominator approach wouldn’t have worked in Lowell. While much of the machinery was copied from Britain, the mills were organized differently. In Britain, specialized workshops produced a variety of cloth goods, many of fine quality. In contrast, in Lowell all of the operations involved in turning raw cotton into finished cloth were conducted in one integrated facility. That allowed the production of a highly standardized product in large quantities.

Coordinating all aspects of production under one roof required specialized technical and business skills. The Waltham mill was one of the first business organizations to use professional managers, called mill agents, who were separate from stockholders (though many mill agents also owned stock).

Waltham mills also required a different kind of worker. Mass production demanded training on a large scale and the new technology demanded new skills. In the British craft workshops, sons often learned as informal apprentices to their fathers. But apprenticeships couldn’t quickly train the large numbers of workers the mills required. And technology was changing too quickly for formal classroom training to be practical. Instead, Lowell and his partners sought to recruit intelligent workers who could learn quickly from experience on the job.

This is why American mill owners encouraged the cultural enrichment activities Dickens found so ‘preposterous.'”

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“Users Simply Need To Hold The Watch About A Foot Away From Their Computer Screens To Download Data”

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

When Timex introduced cheap, seemingly unbreakable watches in the 1950s, the product was given short shrift by both media and jewelers, but they soon were category leaders. The Timex Data Link of the 1990s, however, made in conjunction with Microsoft, was probably awarded too much credit. Before computers were tiny and powerful, the Data Link was the first watch that could receive downloaded information. It wasn’t good enough, but it was (sort of) the future. From a 1994 article in the New York Times:

“Talk about information at your fingertips. The Timex Corporation and the Microsoft Corporation said today that they had teamed up to develop a wristwatch that can store information received directly from a personal computer screen.

The Timex Data Link watch, which will cost about $130 when it goes on sale in September, uses a wireless optical scanning system to receive data from Microsoft software.

The Data Link watch was demonstrated today at a presentation by Microsoft’s chairman, Bill Gates, who held it up to a computer as a series of bar-code lines flashed on the screen. After several seconds, Mr. Gates was able to scroll through personal information like appointment locations and telephone numbers at the touch of a button on the watch.

Fast Sales Predicted

C. Michael Jacobi, the president of Timex, predicted that the company would sell 200,000 of the watches in the final three months of this year, making it the fastest-selling watch ever in its price category.

The new watch looks like a regular round sports watch and includes such standard digital watch functions as a calendar, light, dual time-zone settings and alarms.

Using a microchip developed by Timex with Motorola Inc., the watch can store about 70 messages in its memory, downloading them in about 20 seconds, officials said.

Each watch will include software compatible with Microsoft Windows 3.1 and the company’s scheduling applications, such as Schedule Plus. The software also will be compatible with future versions of Windows, including a ‘Chicago’ upgrade expected out by the end of the year.

Users simply need to hold the watch about a foot away from their computer screens to download data, which can be done as often as needed.

Laptops Won’t Work

However, road warriors will be disappointed to learn that the watch will not work with laptop computers, which do not have a strong enough lighting source in their screens, Timex officials said.”

____________________________

Unrelated to the Data Link but very beautiful, a 1965 commercial touting Timex’s waterproof properties:

“For Some Crazy Reason We’re Just In The Right Place At The Right Time”

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

As absolutely everyone has mentioned, it’s the 30th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh and the great “1984” ad that introduced it to the masses. The Mac, even if it wasn’t a tremendous success in and of itself, changed everything by popularizing GUI, making text interfaces obsolete, and coming up with a design that aspired to update the modernist beauty of Olivetti.

Steven Levy, the best tech journalist of the personal-computing age, is releasing an unexpurgated version of an interview he did with Steve Jobs just as the Mac was about to drop. In that conversation, the Apple co-founder asserts that the invention of the light bulb influenced the course of history more than Marxism. I probably disagree with that, though a lot fewer people died by misuse of the light bulb. From Nick Bilton at the New York Times:

“There are some aspects of the 30-year-old interview that might answer some unanswerable questions about what Mr. Jobs would have done with his life if he were still alive today.

When Mr. Levy told Mr. Jobs that there was ‘speculation’ that he might go into politics, Mr. Jobs replied that he had no desire to enter the public sector and noted that the private sector could have a greater influence on society. ‘I’m one of those people that think Thomas Edison and the light bulb changed the world more than Karl Marx ever did,’ Mr. Jobs said.

One thing Mr. Levy was continually searching for in the interview, was what was driving Mr. Jobs — a question that was echoed in 2011 in Steve Jobs, the biography written by Walter Isaacson.

In the 1983 interview, it’s clear that money isn’t the answer. Mr. Jobs talked about his net worth falling by $250 million in six months. ‘I’ve lost a quarter billion dollars! You know, that’s very character building,’ he said, and notes that at some point, counting your millions of dollars is ‘just stupid.’

Mr. Levy pressed again. ‘The question I was getting at is, what’s driving you here?

‘Well, it’s like computers and society are out on a first date in this decade, and for some crazy reason we’re just in the right place at the right time to make that romance blossom,’ Mr. Jobs replied, noting that the 1980s were the beginning of the computing revolution. ‘We can make them great, we can make a great product that people can easily use.’

Such passion is something that would follow Mr. Jobs through his career, and what he said next seemed to be the driving force behind that passion.”

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