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“Our Willingness To Be More Aggressive In Optimizing Our Positioning Has Definitely Been One Of Many Factors”

August 14, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

You look at the Pittsburgh Pirates with the team’s lack of Kershaws and King Felix’s in the rotation and wonder how they’ve allowed the fewest runs in baseball, claiming the MLB’s best record after suffering through 20 straight losing seasons. It’s not because of a special diet for the players but because of Moneyball-ish opportunism: defensive shifting that’s the best in the game. The masterminds behind the schemes are Dan Fox, the team’s director of baseball systems development, and quantitative analyst Mike Fitzgerald. From “The Hidden Secret Behind Baseball’s Best Team,” by James Santelli at Pirates Prospects:

“Fox, the Pirates’ director of baseball systems development, and quantitative analyst Mike Fitzgerald are the minds behind a defensive scheme that has pulled MLB’s most alignment shifts in baseball on balls in play (according to Baseball Info Solutions) and turned the most batted balls into outs. The Pirates have adopted Fox’s plan gradually over the last three years, and now the results are evident for the defense that is MLB’s second-best team at preventing runs this year.

‘Our willingness to be more aggressive in optimizing our positioning has definitely been one of many factors,’ Fox says. ‘I definitely think it’s helped.’

Let’s take this back to basics: A baseball team gets to put 9 players out on defense. The spots for the pitcher and catcher are largely fixed, but the seven other players have been placed in the spots teams believe can best cover the two acres of grass and dirt and three bases on the field. Over the years, those players have converted about 70 percent of their plays into outs.

How do you improve that? You look at where the batters hit the baseballs your defense is trying to grab and throw. Today, we have data that tells us where and how hard the batters are hitting the ball, where the pitchers give up their ground balls fly balls and the best way to defend those balls to throw out the batter before he can reach base.”

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“Musk Deliberately Hopes His Hyperloop Will Disrupt Current Plans For The $68 Billion Railroad”

August 14, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Karen Weise’s Businessweek article about the inevitable gamesmanship between Elon Musk (with his Hyperloop) and the California High-Speed Rail Authority (and its bullet train):

“The contrast between Musk’s futuristic option for bridging Los Angeles and the Bay Area, and the much-delayed, over-budget, fast train that the state already has in the works, couldn’t have seemed starker or more striking. And that’s the point. Musk deliberately hopes his Hyperloop will disrupt current plans for the $68 billion railroad. ‘I don’t think we should do the high-speed rail thing,’ Musk told reporters. ‘It’s basically going to be California’s Amtrak,’ he said. He didn’t mean that as a compliment.

The California High-Speed Rail Authority was not amused. Chairman Dan Richard told the San Francisco Chronicle that while the Hyperloop sounds ‘great,’ it won’t be competition anytime soon: ‘It’s sort of like me saying, ‘Don’t buy a Tesla, because the Jetsons’ flying car is right around the corner.”

Richard said Musk greatly underestimates the costs of the Hyperloop, not to mention how hard it is to secure funding for mass transit and convince neighbors and environmentalists that such a system won’t be harmful. ‘While we have a lot of respect for his inventiveness, I think we could tell him a few things about the realities of building in California,’ Richard said.

Hyperloop might just be a drawing, and a far-fetched one at that, but as Southern California Public Radio points out, it’s already working in one regard—by reminding residents that California’s existing bullet train plan has plenty of shortfalls.“

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“DNA Tests Are Not Now And Have Never Been Infallible”

August 14, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Criminology has come a long way, but it’s still a very imperfect science. I would guess that some of the people who’ve been exonerated for long-ago crimes based only on DNA evidence probably were actually guilty. Genetic fingerprints can get “smudged.” From Justin Peters at Slate:

“In films and on television, crime labs are sterile and well-equipped, technicians are brilliant, DNA samples are in perfect condition, and results are conclusive.

Real life is different. As William C. Thompson puts it in an article for GeneWatch, although they are generally reliable, ‘DNA tests are not now and have never been infallible. Errors in DNA testing occur regularly. DNA evidence has caused false incriminations and false convictions, and will continue to do so.’ Labs are underfunded, technicians are overworked. Samples are imperfect. Answers can be elusive—even in cases of more recent vintage than the Walker murders.

Knowing all that, there was no reason to expect that the In Cold Blood exhumations were likely to solve this very cold case. The Walkers were killed in 1959, in an era when DNA testing did not exist, and authorities at the time would’ve had no reason to maintain Christine Walker’s semen-stained underwear in perfect condition just in case DNA testing was ever invented. Even if they had, it can be hard to extract viable samples from a 50-year-old corpse, because corpses decay. The authorities were only able to construct a partial DNA profile from Hickock’s and Smith’s bodies, which basically means that, even if all else went well, technicians would only have been able to place Hickock and Smith within a larger group of people who also matched the sample.”

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“I’d Probably Try My Own Meat. I Don’t See Why Not.”

August 14, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Because meat doesn’t just rain down from the heavens, the first lab-made meat was taste-tested in London recently, the burger made possible thanks to a generous donation from Google’s Sergey Brin. Isha Datar, the director of a cultured-meat research group called New Harvest, was present at the meal. She just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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 Question: 

Could you make different flavors of meat?

Isha Datar:

In theory, yes, any muscle cell type could be cultured.

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Question: 

Hello, I read an article in The Week yesterday about your impressive achievement. However it cited a few critics who participated in your taste test, and said that your product did not cook well because of its lack of fat. They (harshly) described it as grey and a little gross, if my memory serves. They also cited its lack of iron, do you have any comments on these criticisms, or plans to address them before your product hits the markets? 

Isha Datar: 

I’d like to point out first the this product is proof of concept. It’s to show that it is physically possible to culture a hamburger. It’s not practical at all right now. We need more funds to get there. There is nothing close to reaching the market just yet.Fat is something that can also be cultured and added, as is blood (where the iron could come from). This will certainly be looked at in the time to come.

The meat wasn’t really grey, because colour was enhanced with beet and saffron. But isn’t regular hamburger meat grey after cooked?

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Question:

How much time will it take for the meat to be available at the local supermarket? and will it be cheap?

Isha Datar: 

It will not start out cheap, just because of how expensive it will be. Think about how the computer trickled down into society. Highly exclusive and expensive and impractical… down to a huge proportion of the population having one in your pocket.

Not sure when everyone will have a burger in their pocket. Haha.

This first burger was $300K.. the next probably in the $10K range.. slowly moving down. The first tastings will be exclusive and expensive, slowly becoming more mainstream. Just cause technology moves that way.

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Question:

What do you say to those who, after research and understanding, still don’t want it? Do you foresee a future where this is the only type of meat available?

Isha Datar:

That’s fine if they don’t want it. But the standard price of meat can only increase with time. So they should keep that in mind.

And if they’re veg*n then no problem!

I think meat just needs to be diversified. For instance, beef is supposed to be raised on pasture that is totally unfit for farming. Hilly, rocky, steep, whatever. The problem is most beef is not produced this way. Beef is usually raised on food humans could eat (soy, corn) rather than food humans can’t eat (grass).

I personally have to problem with traditional farming. It’s just that that’s not the norm. 

There should be many types of meats, and various price levels.

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Question:

As I understand, you use bovine serum (or another similar animal product) in the media for the cultured meat. Have y’all been making steps towards using media that is 100% non-animal sources? Or is that further down the road? This would be crucial for vegetarians. 

Isha Datar: 

It is a goal to make the serum animal-free. Research is being done on culturing mammalian cells in algae-based and mushroom-based media. But SO MUCH MORE research needs to be done in this area.It’s something that hasn’t been pushed for in the medical community, which is why the research is lagging big time.

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Question:

Since you stated that the process could be used on any animal, I suppose it’s technically possible to grow human meat. Would you ever consider it or do you think society wouldn’t be ready for the ethical debate? Would you eat your own meat? 

Isha Datar:

Yes, it is technically possible. In fact it might be easier since we have so much more familiarity with human cells than the cell lines of agricultural animals.

I’d probably try my own meat. I don’t see why not.

As for society… I never know what it wants but it’s not a bad thought-experiment to engage in.•

••••••••••

Mmmm…

 

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“Tell Traffic Control To Get My Monobile Ready”

August 13, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A Musk-esque Hyperloop via the 1962 British TV series Space Patrol.

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“Here, In One Glorious Place, Was Information — Statistics, Team Rosters, Records, Schedules, Predictions”

August 13, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

The opening of Peter Croatto’s New York Times article about a sports stats guru from the pre-Internet era:

“Zander Hollander sat silently on his couch. Rows of books — a large portion of them ones he created, edited and nurtured — hovered above him, dominating a wall in his Manhattan apartment.

From 1971 to 1997, Hollander edited sports yearbooks, brick-like tomes known as Complete Handbooks, which in the pre-Internet era were almost holy objects to a certain type of sports-crazed youngster. Here, in one glorious place, was information — statistics, team rosters, records, schedules, predictions for the coming season and more — freed from the restrictions of newspaper column inches and far beyond what a still embryonic cable system was providing.

In black and white were photos and detailed profiles of players from every team, players that even the most devoted fans might only glimpse in a rare nationally televised network game of the week or an All-Star contest, if at all. The work was Hollander’s driving force. Then he had a stroke, with Alzheimer’s following shortly after. Now 90, he no longer remembers the books that he struggled to produce, that brought him professional fulfillment, friendships and minor fame. So Phyllis, his wife of 60 years, now does the talking.

‘You interrupt if you have anything to say,’ Phyllis Hollander, 85, sweetly instructed her husband as she showed a visitor their apartment. It was a sweltering May afternoon, and the dining area’s air-conditioning unit whirred.

‘I’ll interrupt,’ Hollander, bright-faced and white-haired, said from the couch.”

He never did.”

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“How Would You Slow Down?”

August 12, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Speaking of the Hyperloop reveal, Elon Musk did an interview today about the transport mode with Businessweek. In the Q&A, he answers an essential question:

“Question:

How would you slow down?

Elon Musk:

When you arrive at the destination, there would be another linear electric motor that absorbs your kinetic energy. As it slows you down, you put that energy back into a battery pack, which then provides the source energy for accelerating the next pod and for storing energy for overnight transport.

The solar panels would be laid on top of the tubes. You would store excess energy in battery packs at each station, so you could run 24-7.”

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“Los Angeles Was Like Nothing In The East”

August 12, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Sunshine Technopolis,” Gregory Brenford’s new essay in the Los Angeles Review of Books which ruminates on the wired side of  L.A.:

“If San Francisco was somewhat like Boston, though, Los Angeles was like nothing in the East. For a while it seemed more like brawling Chicago, its cultural currents making for tricky navigation, as the novel and film LA Confidential showed so well. Los Angeles’s Old Money scarcely dated back more than a few generations, and usually kept its cash in real estate, where it grew fast. Hammett and Chandler wove their noir visions of the seamy underside in the 1930s and 1940s. Robert A. Heinlein briefly attended UCLA and lived in the L.A. area alongside such SF authors as Jack Williamson and L. Ron Hubbard. Their tech-centered SF was crucial to the Golden Age of the genre.

Such newcomers brought a sense of open horizons. Though the Other Coast had invented and first developed the airplane, their advantages yielded to our sheer energy. By the 1950s the aerospace-electronics complex bestrode the largest high-tech industrial region in the world, a rank it holds today. The Jet Propulsion Labratory and Ramo-Wooldridge provided the first U.S. space satellite, Explorer, in 1958. A year later, Rocketdyne’s Redstone engine drove the first Project Mercury flights. The Shuttle lifts off from Cape Canaveral, but it lands at Edwards Air Force Base. Meanwhile the U.S.’s most active spaceport is at Vandenberg, at SoCal’s northern edge.

In aerospace and electronics especially, SoCal pioneered the new high-tech hierarchy: well-paid managers, scientists, and engineers, underpinned by a vast stratum of laborers who assembled and built the molded plastics, aluminum cowlings, printed circuit boards, and, lately, personal computers. Growth was cutthroat and unregulated among this understory. Price gouging and lurching job growth brought their Darwinnowings of the small capital firms that came and went like vagrant, failed species in evolution’s grand opera.

Californians did not stay put when firms went bust. They could cruise the mile-equals-a-minute freeways to new frontiers, where towns became mere off-ramps. A mobile cadre of people used to living by their wits made innovation paradoxically routine.”

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“So What Is Hyperloop Anyway?”

August 12, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Key passages from Elon Musk’s promised reveal about the Hyperloop, his idea for a clean, high-speed fifth mode of transport:

“So What is Hyperloop Anyway?

Short of figuring out real teleportation, which would of course be awesome (someone please do this), the only option for super fast travel is to build a tube over or under the ground that contains a special environment. This is where things get tricky.

At one extreme of the potential solutions is some enlarged version of the old pneumatic tubes used to send mail and packages within and between buildings.

You could, in principle, use very powerful fans to push air at high speed through a tube and propel people-sized pods all the way from LA to San Francisco. However, the friction of a 350 mile long column of air moving at anywhere near sonic velocity against the inside of the tube is so stupendously high that this is impossible for all practical purposes.

Another extreme is the approach, advocated by Rand and ET3, of drawing a hard or near hard vacuum in the tube and then using an electromagnetic suspension. The problem with this approach is that it is incredibly hard to maintain a near vacuum in a room, let alone 700 miles (round trip) of large tube with dozens of station gateways and thousands of pods entering and exiting every day. All it takes is one leaky seal or a small crack somewhere in the hundreds of miles of tube and the whole system stops working.

However, a low pressure (vs. almost no pressure) system set to a level where standard commercial pumps could easily overcome an air leak and the transport pods could handle variable air density would be inherently robust.

Overcoming the Kantrowitz Limit

Whenever you have a capsule or pod (I am using the words interchangeably) moving at high speed through a tube containing air, there is a minimum tube to pod area ratio below which you will choke the flow. What this means is that if  the walls of the tube and the capsule are too close together, the capsule will behave like a syringe and eventually be forced to push the entire column of air in the system. Not good.

Nature’s top speed law for a given tube to pod area ratio is known as the Kantrowitz limit. This is highly problematic, as it forces you to either go slowly r have a super huge diameter tube. Interestingly, there are usually two solutions to the Kantrowitz limit – one where you go slowly and one where you go really, really fast.

The latter solution sounds mighty appealing at first, until you realize that going several thousand miles per hour means that you can’t tolerate even wide turns without painful g loads. For a journey from San Francisco to LA, you will also experience a rather intense speed up and slow down. And, when you get right down to it, going through transonic buffet in a tube is just fundamentally a dodgy prospect.

Both for trip comfort and safety, it would be best to travel at high subsonic speeds for a 350 mile journey. For much longer journeys, such as LA to NY, it would be worth exploring super high speeds and this is probably technically
feasible, but, as mentioned above, I believe the economics would probably favor a supersonic plane.

The approach that I believe would overcome the Kantrowitz limit is to mount an electric compressor fan on the nose of the pod that actively transfers high pressure air from the front to the rear of the vessel. This is like having a pump
in the head of the syringe actively relieving pressure.

It would also simultaneously solve another problem, which is how to create a low friction suspension system when traveling at over 700 mph. Wheels don’t work very well at that sort of speed, but a cushion of air does. Air bearings,
which use the same basic principle as an air hockey table, have been demonstrated to work at speeds of Mach 1.1 with very low friction. In this case, however, it is the pod that is producing the air cushion, rather than the tube, as it is important to make the tube as low cost and simple as possible. That then begs the next question of whether a battery can store enough energy to power a fan for the length of the journey with room to spare. Based on our calculations, this is no problem, so long as the energy used to accelerate the pod is not drawn from the battery pack.

This is where the external linear electric motor comes in, which is simply a round induction motor (like the one in the Tesla Model S) rolled flat. This would accelerate the pod to high subsonic velocity and provide a periodic reboost roughly every 70 miles. The linear electric motor is needed for as little as ~1% of the tube length, so is not particularly costly.”

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“Given This Choice, Where Would $100,000 Do The Most Good?”

August 12, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Giving is good, but all giving is not equal. From the moral philosopher Peter Singer in the New York Times:

“Suppose your local art museum is seeking funds to build a new wing to better display its collection. The museum asks you for a donation for that purpose. Let’s say that you could afford to give $100,000. At the same time, you are asked to donate to an organization seeking to reduce the incidence of trachoma, an eye disease caused by an infectious micro-organism that affects children in developing countries. Trachoma causes people to slowly lose their sight, typically culminating in their becoming blind between 30 and 40 years of age. It is preventable. You do some research and learn that each $100 you donate could prevent a person’s experiencing 15 years of impaired vision followed by another 15 years of blindness. So for $100,000 you could prevent 1,000 people from losing their sight.

Given this choice, where would $100,000 do the most good? Which expenditure is likely to lead to the bigger improvement in the lives of those affected by it?

On one side we have 1,000 people spared 15 years of impaired vision followed by 15 years of blindness, with all the ensuing problems that that would cause for poor people with no social security. What do we have on the other side?

Suppose the new museum wing will cost $50 million, and over the 50 years of its expected usefulness, one million people will enjoy seeing it each year, for a total of 50 million enhanced museum visits. Since you would contribute 1/500th of the cost, you could claim credit for the enhanced aesthetic experiences of 100,000 visitors. How does that compare with saving 1,000 people from 15 years of blindness?

To answer, try a thought experiment. Suppose you have a choice between visiting the art museum, including its new wing, or going to see the museum without visiting the new wing. Naturally, you would prefer to see it with the new wing. But now imagine that an evil demon declares that out of every 100 people who see the new wing, he will choose one, at random, and inflict 15 years of blindness on that person. Would you still visit the new wing? You’d have to be nuts. Even if the evil demon blinded only one person in every 1,000, in my judgment, and I bet in yours, seeing the new wing still would not be worth the risk.”

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“It Is Becoming A Simple Matter To Wire And Pick Out Of Your Homes Your Private, Once Solely Personal Life And Record It”

August 12, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Michael J. Arlen wrote a very funny, and, I think, very unfair piece about Marshall McLuhan in the April 1, 1967 edition of the New Yorker (paywalled here). It was a response to an NBC Experiment in Television program which featured the thoughts of the media and cultural critic. Arlen depicts McLuhan as master of the obvious, which at least wasn’t the usual critique. But I think history scores it a solid win for McLuhan. From the piece:

“The NBC program provided a fairly broad embrace, as these things go. ‘The electric age is having a profound effect on us,’ intoned the narrator, paraphrasing McLuhan. ‘We are in a period of fantastic change…that is coming about at fantastic speed. Your life is changing dramatically! You are numb to it!’ And ‘The walls of your rooms are coming down. It is becoming a simple matter to wire and pick out of your homes your private, once solely personal life and record it. Bugging is the new means for gathering information.’ And ‘The family circle has widened, Mom and Dad! The world-pool of information constantly pouring in on your closely knit family is influencing them a lot more than you think.’ Well, O.K. But it all sounds too much like the revival preacher, who really doesn’t tell you anything about hellfire you didn’t know before but who tells it to you more forcefully, with all the right, meliorative vogue words (‘fantastic change…fantastic speed…dramatically…numb’), and so makes you feel appropriately important and guilty in the process.  In this instance, McLuhan tells us, the fire next time will be technological and lit by an electric circuit, but, having told us that, the preacher seems content to take up the collection and walk out of the church, leaving us with happy, flagellated expressions and a vague sense of having been in touch with an important truth–if we could only remember what it was.”

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“His Uncle Takes One Of His Daughter’s Dresses And Orders The Boy To Wear It To School”

August 11, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening David L. Ulin’s Los Angeles Times review of the first comprehensive biography of Charles Manson, who remains as inexplicable as he is despicable four decades after this scar of a man taught American parents that their children were, to an extent, unknowable–strangers, even:

“Early in Jeff Guinn’s Manson: The Life and Times of Charles Manson, the first full biography of the infamous mass killer, there’s a moment of unexpected and discomforting empathy. It’s 1939, and Manson — 5 years old, living with relatives in West Virginia while his mother is in state prison for armed robbery — has embarrassed himself by crying in a first-grade class. To toughen him up, his uncle takes one of his daughter’s dresses and orders the boy to wear it to school.

‘Maybe his mother and Uncle Luther were bad influences,’ Guinn writes, ‘but Charlie could benefit from Uncle Bill’s intercession. It didn’t matter what some teacher had done to make him cry; what was important was to do something drastic that would convince Charlie never to act like a sissy again.’

That’s a key moment in Manson — both for what it does and for what it cannot do. On the one hand, it opens up our sense of Guinn’s subject, establishing him in a single brush stroke as more than just a monster, as a broken human being. On the other, it ends so quickly, without revealing what happened once he got to class, that it never achieves the necessary resonance.”

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“I Have Found A New Kind Of Pencil — The Best I Have Ever Had!”

August 11, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Seth Abramovitch’s Hollywood Reporter article about that town’s strange obsession with the Blackwing 602, a pencil that went out of production in 1998 and whose supply continues to dwindle:

“In the spring of 1960, Vladimir Nabokov was living in a rented villa in Los Angeles’ Mandeville Canyon, hard at work adapting his novel Lolita into a screenplay for Stanley Kubrick. He wrote in four-hour stretches, planted in a lawn chair ‘among the roses and mockingbirds,’ he later wrote, ‘using lined index cards and a Blackwing pencil for rubbing out and writing anew the scenes I had imagined in the morning.’ With more than 1,000 cards to work with, the scribe found that his pencil arguably became his most trusted collaborator.

Nabokov isn’t alone in his devotion to the Blackwing 602, without question among the most fetishized writing instruments of all time. It counts among its cultish fan base some of the greatest creative geniuses of the 20th century, from John Steinbeck (‘I have found a new kind of pencil — the best I have ever had!’ he wrote) to Quincy Jones (the Thriller producer says he carries one under his sweater when making ‘continual fixes’ to his music) and Truman Capote (who stocked his nightstands with fresh boxes) to Stephen Sondheim, who has composed exclusively with Blackwings since the early 1960s.

The pencil even made its way onto television’s most object-obsessive series, AMC’s Mad Men, put there by TV director Tim Hunter, who says, ‘I just had always felt that these folks would be using Blackwings.’ Animators, including artists who drew such iconic characters as Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse, remain its most die-hard devotees — and earliest hoarders: The Blackwing 602 is becoming increasingly rare as it fast approaches its 80th birthday, with ostensibly only a few thousand in existence among the 13,000 that comprised its last lot in 1998, when the line was phased out.”

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“Price: $185,000.00 + $4.49 Shipping”

August 9, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Although I don’t think Amazon’s entry into the art market can make that scene any more ridiculous than it already is, economist Tyler Cowen writes disapprovingly of the early returns in a Marginal Revolution post. An excerpt:

“I expect the real business here to come in posters, lower quality lithographs, and screen prints, not fine art per se.  And sold on a commodity basis.  There is nothing wrong with that, but I don’t think it will amount to much more aesthetic importance than say Amazon selling tennis balls or lawnmowers.

Should you buy this mediocre Mary Cassatt lithograph for ‘Price: $185,000.00 + $4.49 shipping’?  (Jeff, is WaPo charging you $250 million plus $4.49 shipping?  I don’t think so. )

One enduring feature of the art world is that a given piece will sell for much more in one context rather than another.  The same painting that might sell for 5k from a lower tier dealer won’t command more than 2k on eBay, if that.  Yet it could sell for 10k, as a bargain item, relatively speaking, if it ended up in the right NYC gallery (which it probably wouldn’t).  Where does Amazon stand in this hierarchy?  It doesn’t look promising.

Their Warhols are weak and overpriced, even if you like Warhol.  Are they so sure that this rather grisly Monet is actually the real thing?  I say the reviews of that item gets it right.  At least the shipping is free and you can leave feedback.

I’ve browsed the ‘above 10k’ category and virtually all of it seems a) aesthetically abysmal and b) drastically overpriced.  It looks like dealers trying to unload unwanted, hard to sell inventory at sucker prices.  I’m guessing that many of these are being sold at multiples of three or four over auction price histories.”

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“The Operator Of A Robocar Can Set The Car To Operate At Any Speed Within Its General Limits, Regardless Of The Road Speed Limit”

August 9, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Robocars and the Speed Limit,” Brad Templeton’s essay about why he thinks we should allow autonomous vehicles to speed:

“The limit is a number, but it is not especially magic. It’s not like one is safe at 65mph and reckless at 66mph, even though that’s how the law is written. Rather the risk from accidents increases gradually with speed. The risk of having an accident is harder to measure, but the severity of an accident is related to the square of the speed of impact.

There is a speed at which we may judge the accident risk is above acceptable limits. This speed is not a single number. It varies from driver to driver, and from car to car. It varies from hour to hour, from weather condition to weather condition and from road to road. As the Autobahn’s lower accident rate shows, some drivers are safer at very high speeds on well designed roads than other drivers are at 50mph on lesser roads.

And while the Germans are content to do it, the USA is not prepared to officially let drivers decide what the right speed for acceptable safety is. Rather it is done unofficially and irregularly.

How does a robocar enter this world? There are two common schools of thought:

  1. As with its ancestor, the cruise control, the operator of a robocar can set the car to operate at any speed within its general limits, regardless of the road speed limit. The moral and safety decisions rest with this person.
  2. The vehicle must be programmed to not break the speed limit, nor allow its operator to do so. It must be aware of all limits and obey them.

I believe the first choice is both better and more likely.”

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“The Inability Of Newspapers To Adapt To The Fluidity Of Modern Thinking–I Think That’s Their Problem”

August 9, 2013 in Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Really good new B.S. Report with Bill Simmons welcoming Nate Silver and Malcolm Gladwell to discuss newspapers in the age of the Internet and the Graham family selling the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos, among other topics. Some interesting moments:

  • Gladwell on the New Yorker in the Digital Age: “We’re one of the winners of this revolution.” He points out something that doesn’t get said very often: Because the print version of the magazine goes online at the same time all over the world, it’s opened more of a global market. Of course, the same is true of the Times, which hasn’t benefited as much. But the New Yorker has a smaller cast of talent to support and we live more in a niche, boutique age with bigger but fewer global blockbusters. Also: The New Yorker was never given away for free on any platform for any period of its existence.
  • I don’t know if I agree with Gladwell’s take (expressed in the headline) that newspapers need to have polymaths, free of specific beats, who are writing on any number of topics. In such a deadline-driven environment, that may lead to superficial knowledge and armchair journalism. (Gladwell, a proud polymath himself, has been accused of such things.) And does such a wide-ranging talent pool really exist? Could it supply hundreds of such reporters to the Times and the same amount to, say, a quartet of other national newspapers? He may be right in theory–news dissemination should resemble more closely the mash-up machinery that disseminates it–but I wonder if his idea could be applied in a practical sense.
  • My take on Silver’s feeling about the New York Times after listening to this podcast: He speaks of the place respectfully, but feels it isn’t nearly bold enough in reinventing itself, which was one of the main reasons he departed for ESPN, a company with oodles of money to invest in a dynamic online presence. He also questions the business acumen of the Times: “With all the traffic the New York Times is getting right now, I feel like it should be making a much higher profit.”

Listen here.

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“E-Books Are Well Suited To Some Types Of Books (Like Genre Fiction) But Not Well Suited To Other Types”

August 8, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The sales of e-books have flattened this year in the U.S., and even declined worldwide, surprisingly. An excerpt from Nicholas Carr’s list of six reasons why this might be so:

“1. We may be discovering that e-books are well suited to some types of books (like genre fiction)  but not well suited to other types (like nonfiction and literary fiction) and are well suited to certain reading situations (plane trips) but less well suited to others (lying on the couch at home). The e-book may turn out to be more a complement to the printed book, as audiobooks have long been, rather than an outright substitute.

2. The early adopters, who tend also to be the enthusiastic adopters, have already made their move to e-books. Further converts will be harder to come by, particularly given the fact that 59 percent of American book readers say they have ‘no interest’ in e-books, according to the Bowker report.

3. The advantages of printed books have been underrated, while the advantages of e-books have been overrated.”

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“I’m Certainly Taking Less Of A Risk Now Than I Was With A Diet Known To Be Unhealthy”

August 8, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Monica Heisey of Vice has an update on an earlier story about Rob Rhinehart, who began living on a meal-replacement drink of his own making about seven months ago. Despite receiving massive criticism from nutritionists and foodies, he says his health has been good and now he’s incorporated. From the piece:

“Vice:

A lot of people got mad when you claimed Soylent was as nutritious as fruit or vegetables.

Rob Rhinehart:

Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s safe or healthy, and just because something is artificial doesn’t mean it’s unhealthy or dangerous. Look around you. Nothing we buy is natural. Everything useful is designed and manufactured, and food should be no different. People are afraid of sweeteners when it’s real sugar that’s killing us. They’re afraid of preservatives when food waste is rampant. McDonald’s is trying to engineer lower-calorie food that is more filling to fight obesity, but people are demanding natural-sounding ingredients. It’s frustrating to watch. The idea of ‘real food’ is just snobbery. Everyone has the right to be healthy, even people who don’t like vegetables.

Vice:

If it’s all completely approved why do you think people are still afraid of it?

Rob Rhinehart:

Fear makes a better story—fear-mongering in food is too easy for many media outlets and entertainers to resist. Part of the reason I created Soylent was to avoid the cacophony of opinions and misinformation around food and diet. I’m certainly taking less of a risk now than I was with a diet known to be unhealthy. People fear what they don’t understand. By being transparent and clear we will continue to bring more people around to this important idea.

Vice:

Nutritionists, foodies, and other critics seemed particularly attached to the idea of chewing, and are mad at you for taking it away. Are you dedicated to the smoothie medium or could Soylent move into bars and cereals and other solid foods?

Rob Rhinehart:

We can make anything, but a liquid is the best for nutrient absorption. Humans started chewing in the first place because it makes food closer to a liquid.”

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“I Guess It’s Fun, Because You Shoot Rockets Up In The Air”

August 8, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Two exchanges from the new Bill Gates interview in Businessweek in which he criticizes, unfairly I think, the high-tech endeavors of Brin & Page, Bezos and Musk.

____________________

Question: 

There are other successful businessmen who are orienting their extracurricular interests around space exploration. Is that interesting to you? Is that worthwhile for humanity?

Bill Gates:

Everybody’s got their own priorities. In terms of improving the state of humanity, I don’t see the direct connection. I guess it’s fun, because you shoot rockets up in the air. But it’s not an area that I’ll be putting money into.

____________________

Question: 

One of Google’s convictions is that bringing Internet connectivity to less-developed countries can lead to all sorts of secondary benefits. It has a project to float broadband transmitters on balloons. Can bringing Internet access to parts of the world that don’t have it help solve problems?

Bill Gates:

When you’re dying of malaria, I suppose you’ll look up and see that balloon, and I’m not sure how it’ll help you. When a kid gets diarrhea, no, there’s no website that relieves that. Certainly I’m a huge believer in the digital revolution. And connecting up primary-health-care centers, connecting up schools, those are good things. But no, those are not, for the really low-income countries, unless you directly say we’re going to do something about malaria.

Google started out saying they were going to do a broad set of things. They hired Larry Brilliant, and they got fantastic publicity. And then they shut it all down. Now they’re just doing their core thing. Fine. But the actors who just do their core thing are not going to uplift the poor.

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“If I’m Viewing On My iPad At Midnight, Do I See Different Recommendations”

August 7, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us. A passage from Tom Vanderbilt’s smart Wired interview with Netflix’s recommendations honchos Carlos Gomez-Uribe and Xavier Amatriain:

“Question:

So if I’m viewing on my iPad at midnight, do I see different recommendations than I would on my TV at 8 pm?

Xavier Amatriain: 

We have been working for some time on introducing context into recommendations. We have data that suggests there is different viewing behavior depending on the day of the week, the time of day, the device, and sometimes even the location. But implementing contextual recommendations has practical challenges that we are currently working on. We hope to be using it in the near future.”

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“The Humanities Are The Domain In Which The Intrusion Of Science Has Produced The Strongest Recoil”

August 7, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Steven Pinker, who is not a douchebag despite what some people say, has published “Science Is Not Your Enemy,” an article for the New Republic. From a passage about the most recent collision of the Two Cultures:

“The humanities are the domain in which the intrusion of science has produced the strongest recoil. Yet it is just that domain that would seem to be most in need of an infusion of new ideas. By most accounts, the humanities are in trouble. University programs are downsizing, the next generation of scholars is un- or underemployed, morale is sinking, students are staying away in droves. No thinking person should be indifferent to our society’s disinvestment from the humanities, which are indispensable to a civilized democracy.

Diagnoses of the malaise of the humanities rightly point to anti-intellectual trends in our culture and to the commercialization of our universities. But an honest appraisal would have to acknowledge that some of the damage is self-inflicted. The humanities have yet to recover from the disaster of postmodernism, with its defiant obscurantism, dogmatic relativism, and suffocating political correctness. And they have failed to define a progressive agenda. Several university presidents and provosts have lamented to me that when a scientist comes into their office, it’s to announce some exciting new research opportunity and demand the resources to pursue it. When a humanities scholar drops by, it’s to plead for respect for the way things have always been done.

Those ways do deserve respect, and there can be no replacement for the varieties of close reading, thick description, and deep immersion that erudite scholars can apply to individual works. But must these be the only paths to understanding? A consilience with science offers the humanities countless possibilities for innovation in understanding. Art, culture, and society are products of human brains. They originate in our faculties of perception, thought, and emotion, and they cumulate and spread through the epidemiological dynamics by which one person affects others. Shouldn’t we be curious to understand these connections? Both sides would win. The humanities would enjoy more of the explanatory depth of the sciences, to say nothing of the kind of a progressive agenda that appeals to deans and donors. The sciences could challenge their theories with the natural experiments and ecologically valid phenomena that have been so richly characterized by humanists.

In some disciplines, this consilience is a fait accompli. Archeology has grown from a branch of art history to a high-tech science. Linguistics and the philosophy of mind shade into cognitive science and neuroscience.

Similar opportunities are there for the exploring.”

“I Believe That Hyperloop Is Merely A Modern Day Version Of The Pneumatic Tubes”

August 7, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At Motherboard, John Gardi guesses at the nature of Elon Musk’s Hyperloop, a guess which the Tesla Motors chief says is the best one he’s seen. An excerpt:

“I believe that Hyperloop is merely a modern day version of the pneumatic tubes used in banks, stores, and industry to move money and small items over long distances or to other floors of a building. They’ve been around for over a century, though not so much these days. There is only one in my town that I know of, and it has fallen into disuse. One reason I think Hyperloop is simpler than folks think is that Elon Musk has resurrected another technology from the depths of time, one that was a contender once, too: the electric car!

The main focus of this document will be to show how we might accomplish Elon Musk’s claim that his Hyperloop concept could be built for a 10th of the cost of California’s proposed high speed rail. Using technology no more complicated than warehouse building, I’ll discuss how the Hyperloop’s main line between Los Angeles and San Francisco might be constructed well within Musk’s estimates. 

I’ll describe an overall design as well as construction techniques—since the main line will comprise the bulk of Hyperloop’s hardware, this will be where cost reduction matters the most.

With what clues we all know now, I do believe I can make a pretty good (self) educated guess about how Hyperloop’s main line could be built and why it could be done cost effectively. There’s a lot we can extrapolate without having to augur down into the nuts and bolts of Hyperloop’s specific technologies.

I’ll leave that part to Elon Musk himself on August 12th.”

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“He’s Supposed To Have Gone To Lloyd’s, Taken An Insurance Against Martians Being Discovered Before The Film Was Released”

August 6, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

In 1995, just as the Internet began entering the public consciousness with a fury, Tod Mesirow interviewed Arthur C. Clarke. Part of that discussion has now been posted at the Los Angeles Review of Books. An excerpt about 2001: A Space Odyssey:

“Tod Mesirow:

The idea of an intelligent computer, an artificial intelligence like HAL, do you think we’ll achieve that?

Arthur C. Clarke: 

Oh, I don’t think there’s any question of that. I think that the people that say we will never develop computer intelligence — they merely prove that some biological systems don’t have much intelligence.

Tod Mesirow:

What was it like to create the scene when HAL is dying in 2001?

Arthur C. Clarke:

Well, Danny Curry deserves most of the credit for that, and by the way, when I switch off my computer you hear HAL say, “My mind is going.” It happens every time I switch it off. [laughs]

Tod Mesirow:

Was 2001 an interesting experience? You’re planning what would happen if —

Arthur C. Clarke:

Well, it was, you know, a fascinating experience, for many reasons. I was moonlighting at Time Life where I was doing a book called Man and Space. This was in 1964 when the Apollo Program, you know, had been announced. But, no one really believed we would go to the moon and, still sort of had a skepticism. And also, Stanley and I had to outguess what would happen, I believe — this may not be true, maybe Stanley’s publicity department — he’s supposed to have gone to Lloyd’s, taken an insurance against Martians being discovered before the film was released. [laughs] Well, I don’t think — I don’t know how Lloyd’s would have carried the odds on that one. [laughs] So, anyway, we were writing the film, before we had any close-ups of the moon’s surface. We had to guess what it might be like, and there are all sorts of problems. I — we — I think we did pretty well. One or two mistakes. For instance, we show the moon as more rugged then in fact it turned out to be. It turned out to be sort of smooth and sort of sandblasted.”

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“People Have Been Admitting To Things They Haven’t Done For As Long As They’ve Been Committing Crimes”

August 6, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There’s nothing more human than denying guilt when we’ve done something wrong, but most of us can’t even imagine the reverse scenario. From “The Confessions of Innocent Men,” Marc Bookman’s Atlantic article about a puzzling phenomenon, people who admit to crimes they never committed, oftentimes not because of duress:

“People have been admitting to things they haven’t done for as long as they’ve been committing crimes. On the North American continent, prominent examples reach back to 1692 and the Salem witch trials. DNA exonerations over the past 24 years have established not only how error-prone our system of justice is, but how more than a quarter of those wrongly convicted have been inculpated by their own words. Now an entire body of scientific research is devoted to the phenomenon of the false confession. In his article ‘The Psychology of Confessions,’ Saul Kassin, a professor of psychology at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, details three different categories of false confession: voluntary, compliant, and internalized.

Voluntary false confessions are the best known, the most easily disproved, and perhaps the simplest to understand. They are prompted not by police behavior but rather by a need for attention or self-punishment. For obvious reasons, these confessions contain only facts known to the public; they surface in high-profile cases. The kidnapping of the Lindbergh baby garnered hundreds of such confessions.

Compliant false confessions are the opposite of voluntary confessions. They are coerced by police conduct, and are generally made in the hope of ending the coercion. What stressors would make someone confess to a horrible crime, knowing that the confession’s long-term implications would far outweigh any short-term relief? Torture, of course: physical violence, or the threat of future violence such as execution or prison rape. But the coercion need not be nearly as severe as that. Promises of food, a phone call, drugs to feed a habit — all of these have led to compliant false confessions. The guarantee of sleep or simply being left alone has been enough to get an innocent person to admit to a horrendous crime. Even the illogic of a promise to go home was sufficient to get five New York City teenagers to confess, completely independently, to a Central Park jogger’s rape.

Internalized false confessions differ from voluntary and compliant ones in a significant way: the confessor comes to believe that he may be guilty of the crime. Richard Leo, a law professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, prefers to call them persuaded rather than internalized, and explains that such confessions result from interrogations that ‘shatter the confidence you have in the reliability of your own memory.’ In essence, some people begin to doubt their own memories, and start to instead believe that they might have done something awful, sometimes confabulating false memories in the process.”

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“Local Papers Described Him As Crazy, Arrogant, A ‘Homeless Computer Geek,’ An Eccentric Stats Hobbyist”

August 6, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve posted about some pre-Beane baseball theorists who never had Brad Pitt play them in a film. There was Walter Lappe, who sensed that something was wrong with the way “experts” analyzed the sport, and Eric Walker, who was one of the earliest to figure out exactly what was amiss. But I’ve never mentioned Mike Gimbel, a numbers-cruncher who was mocked from the game before Moneyball took hold, in a time when advanced analytics, much like taking a walk, was still viewed in the mainstream as a form of weakness. Grantland’s Hua Hsu sought out Gimbel at the recent Left Forum. The opening of his resultant article:

“There are a lot of useful ideas about justice and democracy exchanged across the hundreds of panel discussions that constitute the Left Forum, a three-day meeting of scholars, activists, and concerned citizens that takes place every year in Manhattan. My main interest was baseball. Another was crocodiles.

I had come to listen to a paper being presented by Mike Gimbel. In the 1990s, Gimbel put together a nice side career advising major league teams on player transactions. He had a day job working for the New York City water department, and in his free time he sat in front of his computer, inputted stats, and came up with what he believed was a unified theory of player value. He talked his way into a part-time gig evaluating talent for Dan Duquette, soon to become the general manager of the Montreal Expos. When Duquette moved to the Red Sox, Gimbel was the only Expos staffer he was allowed to take with him — he was a secret weapon of sorts. But during spring training in 1997, Gimbel sat for an interview with the Boston Globe‘s Gordon Edes. Once word spread of Boston’s ‘stat man’ — itself an epithet back in the pre-Moneyball days — the Sox front office immediately distanced itself from him. Local papers described him as crazy, arrogant, a ‘homeless computer geek,’ an eccentric stats hobbyist. He was ridiculed for his unkempt beard, his yellow teeth, and the heavy coat he wore despite the Florida heat. ‘I guess Duquette calls him like he would call the Psychic Network,’ Jose Canseco joked to the local beat writers. Gimbel’s contract expired at the end of the 1997 season. It was his last formal contact with a major league team.”

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