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“Look Up The Cast List Online, Tweet Out A Comment, Talk To Others…While Superman Played In The Background”

August 5, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Superman has had to adjust in the age of smartphones, and some would like movie theaters to make concessions as well. From Hunter Walk, a suggestion for creating an alternative big-screen experience for moviegoers who want to talk, Tweet and multitask during a film:

“In my 20s I went to a lot of movies. Now, not so much. Over the past two years becoming a parent has been the main cause but really my lack of interest in the theater experience started way before that. Some people dislike going to the movies because of price or crowds, but for me it was more of a lifestyle decision. Increasingly I wanted my media experiences plugged in and with the ability to multitask. Look up the cast list online, tweet out a comment, talk to others while watching or just work on something else while Superman played in the background. Of course these activities are discouraged and/or impossible in a movie theater.

But why? Instead of driving people like me away from the theater, why not just segregate us into environments which meet our needs. “

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“How Easy Would It Be, He Recently Wondered, To Monitor The Movement Of Everyone On The Street”

August 5, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Somini Sengupta’s New York Times blog post about our post-privacy world, about our age of cheap and sophisticated tools:

“Brendan O’Connor is a security researcher. How easy would it be, he recently wondered, to monitor the movement of everyone on the street – not by a government intelligence agency, but by a private citizen with a few hundred dollars to spare?

Mr. O’Connor, 27, bought some plastic boxes and stuffed them with a $25, credit-card size Raspberry Pi Model A computer and a few over-the-counter sensors, including Wi-Fi adapters. He connected each of those boxes to a command and control system, and he built a data visualization system to monitor what the sensors picked up: all the wireless traffic emitted by every nearby wireless device, including smartphones.

Each box cost $57. He produced 10 of them, and then he turned them on – to spy on himself. He could pick up the Web sites he browsed when he connected to a public Wi-Fi – say at a cafe – and he scooped up the unique identifier connected to his phone and iPad. Gobs of information traveled over the Internet in the clear, meaning they were entirely unencrypted and simple to scoop up.

Even when he didn’t connect to a Wi-Fi network, his sensors could track his location through Wi-Fi ‘pings.’ His iPhone pinged the iMessage server to check for new messages. When he logged on to an unsecured Wi-Fi, it revealed what operating system he was using on what kind of device, and whether he was using Dropbox or went on a dating site or browsed for shoes on an e-commerce site. One site might leak his e-mail address, another his photo.

‘Actually it’s not hard,’ he concluded. ‘It’s terrifyingly easy.'”

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“The Brain-As-Computer Is, Indeed, Only A Metaphor, One Group Of Scientists Would Like To Stand That Metaphor On Its Head”

August 4, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of an Economist report about neuromorphic computing, or the attempt to make silicon intelligence more like the carbon kind so it can in turn help us to make better silicon intelligence:

“Analogies change. Once, it was fashionable to describe the brain as being like the hydraulic systems employed to create pleasing fountains for 17th-century aristocrats’ gardens. As technology moved on, first the telegraph network and then the telephone exchange became the metaphor of choice. Now it is the turn of the computer. But though the brain-as-computer is, indeed, only a metaphor, one group of scientists would like to stand that metaphor on its head. Instead of thinking of brains as being like computers, they wish to make computers more like brains. This way, they believe, humanity will end up not only with a better understanding of how the brain works, but also with better, smarter computers.

These visionaries describe themselves as neuromorphic engineers. Their goal, according to Karlheinz Meier, a physicist at the University of Heidelberg who is one of their leaders, is to design a computer that has some—and preferably all—of three characteristics that brains have and computers do not. These are: low power consumption (human brains use about 20 watts, whereas the supercomputers currently used to try to simulate them need megawatts); fault tolerance (losing just one transistor can wreck a microprocessor, but brains lose neurons all the time); and a lack of need to be programmed (brains learn and change spontaneously as they interact with the world, instead of following the fixed paths and branches of a predetermined algorithm).

To achieve these goals, however, neuromorphic engineers will have to make the computer-brain analogy real.”

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“Brady’s Other Great Marketing Device Was Celebrity”

August 4, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Lincoln.

Barnum.

Barnum.

Twain.

Twain.

The opening of Caleb Crain’s New York Times Book Review piece about Mathew Brady, Robert Wilson’s portrait of the Civil War-era’s chief portraitist:

“Death was early American photography’s killer app. Since the first pictures required long exposures, it was convenient to have a subject that held still. There was a psychological angle as well. A 19th-­century photographer reported that when he visited a town in upstate New York, all the residents welcomed him except the blacksmith, who at first reviled him as a swindler. But then the blacksmith’s son drowned — and the blacksmith came begging for an image of the boy.

The tale is retold by Robert Wilson, the editor of The American Scholar, in Mathew Brady, his patient and painstaking new biography of the portraitist and Civil War photographer. Brady wasn’t one to overlook a sales tool. ‘You cannot tell how soon it may be too late,’ he warned in an 1856 ad that ran in The New York Daily Tribune, advising readers to come sit for a portrait while they still could. When the Civil War began in 1861, thousands of new soldiers and their families became acutely aware that it might soon be too late. They were willing to pay a dollar apiece for tintypes, and Wilson reports that at Brady’s Washington studio, ‘the wait was sometimes hours long.’

Brady’s other great marketing device was celebrity. His business strategy consisted of photographing politicians, generals and actors for free and displaying their likenesses in a gallery to attract paying customers. His own celebrity was self-made. He was born into an Irish immigrant’s family near Lake George in upstate New York around 1823, and seems to have first entered the photography business in the 1840s as a manufacturer of the leather cases that held the early photographs known as daguerreotypes — fine-grained ­images developed on copper plates that have an almost holographic quality.”

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“The Goal Of Tesla Is To Accelerate The Advent Of Sustainable Transport”

August 4, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Elon Musk at the recent Teslive town-hall event, discussing Tesla Motors’ future.

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Old Print Article: “Tesla’s New Device Like Bolts Of Thor,” New York Times (1915)

August 4, 2013 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“Dr. Tesla said that it would be possible with his wireless mechanism to direct an ordinary aeroplane, manless, to any point.”

Unlike Thomas Edison, national hero and reliable citizen, there was always an element of danger and irresponsibility about Nikola Tesla. Part of that came from his old boss and heated rival Edison planting stories about his recklessness, but in all fairness, Tesla did dream up a lot of crazy, scary stuff. The year before he won the Nobel Prize, he proposed a new military defense system which was also a weapon of mass destruction–a drone system, basically–according to a breathless article in the December 8, 1915 New York Times. The story:

“Nikola Tesla, the inventor, winner of the 1915 Nobel Physics Prize, has filed patent applications on the essential parts of a machine the possibilities of which test a layman’s imagination and promise a parallel of Thor’s shooting thunderbolts from the sky to punish those who had angered the gods. Dr. Tesla insists there is nothing sensational about it, that it is but the fruition of many years of work and study. He is not yet ready to give the details of the engine which he says will render fruitless any military expedition against a country which possesses it. Suffice it to say that the destructive invention will go through space with the speed of 300 miles a second, a manless airship without propelling engine or wings, sent by electricity to any desired point on the globe on its errand of destruction, if destruction its manipulator wishes to effect.

Ten miles or a thousand miles, it will be all the same to the machine, the inventor says. Straight to the point, on land or on sea, it will be able to go with precision, delivering a blow that will paralyze or kill, as is desired. A man in a tower on Long Island could shield New York against ships or army by working a lever, if the inventor’s anticipations become realizations.

‘It is not the time,’ said Dr. Tesla yesterday, ‘to go into the details of this thing. It is founded upon a principle that means great things in peace; it can be used for great things in war. But I repeat, this is no time to talk of such things.

‘It is perfectly practicable to transmit electrical energy without wires and produce destructive effects at a distance. I have already constructed a wireless transmitter which makes this possible, and have been described it in my technical publications, among which I may refer to my patent 1,119,732 recently granted. With transmitters of this kind we are enabled to project electrical energy in any amount to any distance and apply it for innumerable purposes, both in peace and war. Through the universal adoption of this system, ideal conditions for the maintenance of law and order will be realized, for then the energy necessary to the enforcement of right and justice will be normally productive, yet potential, and in any moment available, for attack and defense. The power transmitted need not be necessarily destructive, for, if existence is made to depend upon it, its withdrawal or supply will bring about the same results as those now accomplished by any force of arms.

‘But when unavoidable, the same agent may be used to destroy property and life. The art is already so far developed that great destructive effects can be produced at any point on the globe, determined beforehand and with great accuracy. In view of this I have not thought it hazardous to predict a few years ago that the wars of the future will not be waged with explosives but with electrical means.’

Dr. Tesla then said that it would be possible with his wireless mechanism to direct an ordinary aeroplane, manless, to any point, over a ship or an army, and to discharge explosives of great strength from the base of operations.”

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“When It Started, We Had No Idea. Now It’s Too Late To Change Things.”

August 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “When the NSA Comes to Town,” Justine Sharrock’s smart BuzzFeed report about the massive and mysterious NSA data center located in Bluffdale, Utah:

“When I asked various people who have toured the building with the consortium what their impression was, the responses were vague and similar: ‘huge,’ ‘impressive.’

‘I was interested in the mythology of the NSA, and was asking questions, like, can they crack the hardest encryption and reading erased hard drives?’ says [Pete] Ashdown, Utah’s most vocal internet privacy activist. ‘I wish I had not been so starstruck. I would have asked the question, ‘How do you rectify what you are doing with the Constitution?’

It was a story I heard a lot in and around Bluffdale: When it started, we had no idea. Now it’s too late to change things.

‘Everything, of course, changed as more information about the NSA spying program was released,’ Ashdown says. ‘That kind of put the tour in a different light for me. I wasn’t really thinking about [NSA whistle-blower Russ Tice’s 2006 wiretapping revelations]. I remember hearing about that, but I didn’t put two and two together, realizing that they are storing all the information here.’

When Tice told me that the Utah Data Center was up and running, according to his sources — meaning that the NSA has the power for full content collection beyond metadata — I headed down to Utah to see it myself. I got close. I drove up the unmarked road toward the facility, past the unmanned gates, but got apprehended by two NSA police officers in dark sunglasses, driving white SUVs. They threatened me with federal charges for trespassing on restricted military property, but ultimately let me go.

‘I would not have suggested that, if you told me you were going to do it,’ Tice told me after he heard what I had done. ‘Bottom line, these are not people to be trifled with. They are dangerous people.’ He pointed out that things could have gone much, much worse.

An official tour was out of the question. The local NSA media spokesperson suggested I try to take photos from the periphery. She even suggested I go to the National Guard parking lot. But, more than the anonymous monoliths of the facility, the community surrounding the center was what grabbed my attention.

It was a microcosm of America’s relationship to the NSA scandal at large. There’s the data center, lurking in the background — visible but invisible, real and unreal — doing something that, for reasons that deserve far more explanation than they get, has been made literally unspeakable.”

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“You Might Prepare To Have Your Warm, Fuzzy, Happiness Bubble Burst”

August 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Members of the Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s did all sorts of cool things with new computing power, including linking up the coffee makers and lighting in their houses so that they could be activated by timers. It didn’t become universal right away, but homes now are becoming smarter and more automated, and we’re just at the beginning. But, of course, all knowledge can be compromised. From Network World:

“If you added a home automation system to create your version of a ‘smart’ house, it could give you access from anywhere in the world to remotely control your lights, door locks, house temperature, electric appliances, water valves, alarm system, garage door, the ability to open and close your shades and blinds, or even to turn on music and crank up the volume. While that might seem pretty sweet, it also can be pretty vulnerable. If you use the Z-Wave wireless protocol for home automation then you might prepare to have your warm, fuzzy, happiness bubble burst; there will be several presentations about attacking the automated house at the upcoming Las Vegas hackers’ conferences Black Hat USA 2013 and Def Con 21.

Home automation devices are easy to spot with Shodan, a search engine for hackers, as pointed out by its creator John Matherly. And the home automation market forecast is predicted ‘to exceed $5.5 billion in 2016.’ Despite the technology having been available for over a decade, and many of these automation systems being extremely vulnerable, having a ‘smart house’ has become very trendy.

Exploiting houses with home automation may not be low-hanging fruit for malicious hackers, but with its increasing popularity and expanding product lines, we will see it gaining more attention from hackers who realize how insecure many of these systems actually are.”

. . . . . . . . . .

In 1967, Walter Cronkite looks the home of the future:

“We Have Nothing In Our Evolutionary History That Prepares Us Or Primes Us, No Intellectual Architecture, To Try And Grasp The Remoteness Of Those Odds”

August 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From “Why We Keeping Playing the Lottery,” Adam Piore’s smart Nautilus piece on the psychological pull of paying the idiot tax:

“To grasp how unlikely it was for Gloria C. MacKenzie, an 84-year-old Florida widow, to have won the $590 million Powerball lottery in May, Robert Williams, a professor of health sciences at the University of Lethbridge in Alberta, offers this scenario: head down to your local convenience store, slap $2 on the counter, and fill out a six-numbered Powerball ticket. It will take you about 10 seconds. To get your chance of winning down to a coin toss, or 50 percent, you will need to spend 12 hours a day, every day, filling out tickets for the next 55 years. It’s going be expensive. You will have to plunk down your $2 at least 86 million times.

Williams, who studies lotteries, could have simply said the odds of winning the $590 million jackpot were 1 in 175 million. But that wouldn’t register. ‘People just aren’t able to grasp 1 in 175 million,’ Williams says. ‘It’s just beyond our experience—we have nothing in our evolutionary history that prepares us or primes us, no intellectual architecture, to try and grasp the remoteness of those odds.’ And so we continue to play. And play. People in 43 states bought a total of 232 million Powerball tickets for the lottery won by MacKenzie. In fact, the lottery in the United States is so exceedingly popular that it was one of the few consumer products where spending held steady and, in some states, increased, during the recent recession. That’s still the case. About 57 percent of Americans reported buying tickets in the last 12 months, according to a recent Gallup study. And for the 2012 fiscal year, U.S. lottery sales totaled about $78 billion, according to the North American Association of State and Provincial Lotteries.

It may seem easy to understand why we keep playing. As one trademarked lottery slogan goes, ‘Hey, you never know.’ Somebody has to win. But to really understand why hundreds of millions of people play a game they will never win, a game with serious social consequences, you have to suspend logic and consider it through an alternate set of rules—rules written by neuroscientists, social psychologists, and economists.” (Thanks Browser.)

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New York porter wins $20k in first U.S. lottery:

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“ELF Is A Revolutionary Vehicle Powered By You And The Sun”

August 1, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

A presentation of the hybrid bike and solar-powered car, the ELF.

“Let Someone Build Just One Far-Out Sports Car And His Car Could Well Be On The Cover Of Many Enthusiast Books”

July 31, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Mesmerizing 17-minute DeLorean DMC-12 prospectus film that was shown to dealers and investors ahead of the automobile reaching the market in 1981.

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“What We Have To Recognize That Those Old Times Aren’t Coming Back”

July 31, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At Amazon, David Blum, the editor of Kindle Singles, has a very smart (and completely free) interview with President Obama about the state of the economy. The President touches on the sweeping changes that automation has brought to the job market, though he doesn’t go nearly far enough in acknowledging the seismic shifts that are occurring. Globalization may have been just as disruptive thus far, but it’s automation that will ultimately have a deeper and more-lasting impact. And I don’t know that community college courses will remedy that. An excerpt:

“President Obama:

Where I think we have fallen is in staying focused on the benefits of an economy where growth is broad based and everybody has opportunity. We have increasingly resigned ourselves to a ‘winner-take-all’ economy–again, driven a lot by technology and globalization, where folks at the very top are doing very well and the broad middle class of people, people trying to get into the middle class, are having a tougher and tougher time. You will see that in every profession. You see that in journalism. It used to be that there were local newspapers everywhere. If you wanted to be a journalist, you could really make a good living working for your hometown paper. Now you have a few newspapers that make a profit because they’re national brands, and journalists are having to scramble to piece together a living, in some cases as freelancers and without the same benefits that they had in a regular job for a paper. What’s true in journalism is true in manufacturing and is true in retail. What we have to recognize is that those old times aren’t coming back. We’re not going to suddenly eliminate globalization. We’re not going to eliminate technology. If people are going to book their vacation over the Internet, they’re not going to go down to a local travel agent. If that’s the case, then where are the new opportunities? Where are the new industries? With just a few modest, but really important, changes to government policy, we could be doing an awful lot better than we’re doing right now. American living standards would still be higher than folks a generation ago. People might have different jobs, so instead of a guy who had just graduated from college walking over to the local plant, like his dad did, and getting a good middle class job doing blue collar manufacturing work, now he might have to go to a community college and get more specialized training because he’s working as a computer technician. The opportunities are available. We just haven’t done a good job of making sure they’re accessible to all people.”

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“Your Robotic Car Detects An Imminent Head-On Crash With A Non-Robotic Vehicle — A School Bus Full Of Kids”

July 31, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In his Wired article, Patrick Lin articulates the new driverless car thought experiment, “the school-bus problem,” though like everyone else he doesn’t mention that hitting a bus would likely kill the car’s driver as well. The example could use a more logical spin, though I get the point. An excerpt:

“Ethical dilemmas with robot cars aren’t just theoretical, and many new applied problems could arise: emergencies, abuse, theft, equipment failure, manual overrides, and many more that represent the spectrum of scenarios drivers currently face every day.

One of the most popular examples is the school-bus variant of the classic trolley problem in philosophy: On a narrow road, your robotic car detects an imminent head-on crash with a non-robotic vehicle — a school bus full of kids, or perhaps a carload of teenagers bent on playing ‘chicken” with you, knowing that your car is programmed to avoid crashes. Your car, naturally, swerves to avoid the crash, sending it into a ditch or a tree and killing you in the process.

At least with the bus, this is probably the right thing to do: to sacrifice yourself to save 30 or so schoolchildren. The automated car was stuck in a no-win situation and chose the lesser evil; it couldn’t plot a better solution than a human could.”

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“The Number Of Deaths…Was More Than Six Times Greater Than The Hospital Previously Averaged For Such A Period”

July 31, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I know from being such a fan of baseball and the game’s statistics that numerical outliers sometimes occur without reason. The worst position player in the game can have the best month of hitting in the league. Fans wonder: Has this player who had no track record of success somehow bloomed late? Is he using performance-enhancing drugs? But often it’s just an unlikely outcome, an aberration that disappears as mysteriously as it arrives. The player returns to his former poor results, maybe he’s soon back in the minors or even out of the sport.

When it comes to something more important than baseball, matters of life and death, it’s difficult to dismiss odd results. Sometimes a cancer cluster is just that: a statistical oddity. Sometimes it’s not the water or the air but merely chance. But it’s hard to ever feel relieved about such a thing, to make the nagging go away. From an odd 1981 New York Times article about Perris, California (which doesn’t even merit a mention today in the town’s Wikipedia page), an account describing a statistical outlier or the result of negligence or even something far more sinister:

“Perris, Calif., May 21— ”It’s a mystery, all right. But other than going slower past the cemetery when they were doing the exhumations, I haven’t noticed things are too much different, day to day,” said Penny Brechtel, executive secretary of the Perris Valley Chamber of Commerce.

She paused a moment, then had another thought: ‘Well, one thing’s for sure: Now Perris is on the map.’ This desert town south of Los Angeles has been on the map since 25 elderly men and women died mysteriously, most of them between 1 A.M. and 4 A.M., in the intensive care unit of the financially troubled Community Hospital of the Valleys. The number of deaths, all from March 8 to April 22, was more than six times greater than the hospital previously averaged for such a period.

‘Nobody likes this kind of notoriety,’ said Jim Adams, an insurance man who is on the City Council. ‘It makes us look like a bunch of ninnies, with nobody paying attention to what was going on at the hospital. Now, we just have to let it run its course, there’s nothing we can do.'”

 

“It Has Among The World’s Zippiest Broadband Speeds”

July 31, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening paragraph of an Economist piece which explains how Estonia became such an unlikely technology powerhouse: 

“WHEN Estonia regained its independence in 1991, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, less than half its population had a telephone line and its only independent link to the outside world was a Finnish mobile phone concealed in the foreign minister’s garden. Two decades later, it is a world leader in technology. Estonian geeks developed the code behind Skype, Hotmail and Kazaa (an early file-sharing network). In 2007 it became the first country to allow online voting in a general election. It has among the world’s zippiest broadband speeds and holds the record for start-ups per person. Its 1.3m citizens pay for parking spaces with their mobile phones and have their health records stored in the digital cloud. Filing an annual tax return online, as 95% of Estonians do, takes about five minutes. How did the smallest Baltic state develop such a strong tech culture?“

Old Print Article: “Rulloff’s Brain,” New York Times (1871)

July 30, 2013 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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“In the formation of his brain, Rulloff was a ferocious animal.”

Even if he hadn’t had a brain the size of a medicine ball, Edward H. Rulloff’s death by execution would have been notable. A brilliant philologist and author who committed a slew of violent crimes during his life, Rulloff was the last prisoner to die by public hanging in New York State. For a long while, he managed to stay a step ahead of the law, even when he was suspected for the beating deaths of his wife and daughter and lethally poisoning a couple of other relatives. But when the vicious linguist was finally convicted to die for the murder of an Upstate New York shop clerk, some voiced support for sparing his life, in order to allow him to keep sharing his genius about language. Mark Twain coolly mocked them, suggesting, in Swiftian fashion, that someone else be hung in Rulloff’s place. The doomed man just wanted the show to get on the road. “Hurry it up!’ he hollered on the day he was to wear a noose, “I want to be in hell in time for dinner.”

Colorful enough, sure, but when his severed head was examined after the death sentence was carried out, Rulloff proved to have one of the largest brains ever recorded. From the May 24, 1871 New York Times article about the measure of a wonderful, terrible man:

“The work of dissecting Rulloff’s head was so far completed this morning as to enable those having it in charge to ascertain the weight of his brain. The brain weighed fifty-nine ounces, being nine and a half or ten ounces heavier than the average weight. The heaviest brain ever weighed was that of Cuvier, the French naturalist, which is given by some authorities at sixty-five ounces. The brain of Daniel Webster (partly estimated on account of a portion being destroyed by disease) weighed sixty-four ounces. The brain of Dr. Abercrombie, of Scotland, weighed sixty-three ounces.

The average weight of men’s brain is about 50 ounces; the maximum weight 65 ounces (Cuvier’s), and the minimum weight (idiots) 20 ounces. As an average, the lower portion of the brain (cerebellum) is to the upper portion (cerebrum) as 1 is to 8 8-10. The lower, brute portion, of Rulloff’s brain and the mechanical powers were unusually large. The upper portion of the brain, which directs the higher moral and religious sentiments, was very deficient in Rulloff. In the formation of his brain, Rulloff was a ferocious animal, and so far as disposition could relieve him from responsibility, he was not strictly responsible for his acts. There is no doubt he thought himself not a very bad man, on the morning he was lead out of prison, cursing from the cell to the gallows.

“He was not strictly responsible for his acts.”

With the protection of a skull half an inch thick, and a scalp of the thickness and toughness of a rhinoceros rind, the man of seven murders was provided with a natural helmet that would have defied the force of any pistol bullet. If he had been in Mirick’s place the bullet would have made only a slight wound; and had he been provided with a cutis vera equal to his scalp, his defensive armor against bullets would have been as complete as a coat of mail.

The cords in Rulloff’s neck were as heavy and strong as those of an ox, and from his formation, one would almost suppose that he was protected against death from the gallows as well as by injury to his head.

Rulloff’s body was [said to be] larger than it was supposed to be by casual observers. The Sheriff ascertained when he took measure of the prisoner for a coffin to bury him in, that he was five feet and ten inches in height, and measured nineteen inches across the shoulders. When in good condition his weight was about 175 pounds.

It is very well-known that Rulloff’s grave was opened three times last Friday night by different parties who wanted to obtain his head. One of those parties was from Albany, and twice the body was disinterred by persons living in Binghamton. One company would no sooner cover up the body, which all found headless, and leave it, then another company would come and go through with the same operations. It is now known that the head was never buried with the body, but was legally obtained before the burial by the surgeons who have possession of it.

The hair and beard were shaved off close, and an excellent impression in plaster was taken of the whole head. The brain is now undergoing a hardening process, and when that is completed an impression will be taken of it entire, and then it will be parted, the different parts weighed, and impressions made of the several sections.”

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“It Almost Sounds Too Good To Be True”

July 30, 2013 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Even before the Internet, there were plenty of ridiculous rumors and urban legends that went viral. There is a cure for cancer, but the medical establishment won’t release it so that it can still keep profiting off of drugs and treatments. There are light bulbs that never burn out, but the light-bulb companies would be ruined if they were sold. Oh, and there is a car that can run on water, but Big Oil won’t allow its production. 

But there really is a car now that can run on water, though its tough to say how broadly its technology can be applied.

“These Cars–They Are Cars–May Be The Fastest Road-Going Machines In The World”

July 29, 2013 in Film, Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

A 1975 documentary about Formula One racing, which has been known at various times as One by One, Quick and the Dead, and Champions Forever. An interesting period piece with a funked-up score, which focuses on Jackie Stewart, Peter Revson and their peers. Stacy Keach is the cool-as-can-be narrator, but racer François Cévert sums it up simply and best: “Steering is hard,” he admits.

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“Their Answers, Along With Reams Of Data On The Ways In Which They Arrived At Those Answers, Were Beamed To Distant Servers”

July 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Seth Fletcher’s Scientific American article about Big Data entering the classroom, managing an overflow of students and replacing lecturers:

“When Arnecia Hawkins enrolled at Arizona State University last fall, she did not realize she was volunteering as a test subject in an experimental reinvention of American higher education. Yet here she was, near the end of her spring semester, learning math from a machine. In a well-appointed computer lab in Tempe, on Arizona State’s desert resort of a campus, she and a sophomore named Jessica were practicing calculating annuities. Through a software dashboard, they could click and scroll among videos, text, quizzes and practice problems at their own pace. As they worked, their answers, along with reams of data on the ways in which they arrived at those answers, were beamed to distant servers. Predictive algorithms developed by a team of data scientists compared their stats with data gathered from tens of thousands of other students, looking for clues as to what Hawkins was learning, what she was struggling with, what she should learn next and how, exactly, she should learn it.

Having a computer for an instructor was a change for Hawkins. ‘I’m not gonna lie—at first I was really annoyed with it,’ she says. The arrangement was a switch for her professor, too. David Heckman, a mathematician, was accustomed to lecturing to the class, but he had to take on the role of a roving mentor, responding to raised hands and coaching students when they got stumped. Soon, though, both began to see some benefits. Hawkins liked the self-pacing, which allowed her to work ahead on her own time, either from her laptop or from the computer lab. For Heckman, the program allowed him to more easily track his students’ performance. He could open a dashboard that told him, in granular detail, how each student was doing—not only who was on track and who was not but who was working on any given concept. Heckman says he likes lecturing better, but he seems to be adjusting. One definite perk for instuctors: the software does most of the grading for them.

At the end of the term, Hawkins will have completed the last college math class she will probably ever have to take. She will think back on this data-driven course model—so new and controversial right now—as the ‘normal’ college experience. ‘Do we even have regular math classes here?’ she asks.”

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“To Clarify, I’m Not Leaving Political Analysis”

July 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

Star stats guy Nate Silver has left the New York Times for ESPN and other properties under the Disney umbrella. He just did an Ask Me Anything at Deadspin. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

When will I die?

Nate Silver:

I’d guess that the median Deadspin commenter is a 34-year-old white male with middle-to-high income but also above-average alcohol consumption. So we’re taking about a remaining live expectancy of 47 years, give or take. My best guess is that you’ll die in 2060, perhaps just a few days before Sasha Obama wins her second term.

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Question:

What size staff do you envision the new 538 having? Are you going to be looking more for specialists or generalists?

Nate Silver: 

I think the goal is perhaps to have a site where we’re publishing 3-4 articles per weekday, plus perhaps some blogs and other quick-hit type stuff. What I’m not quite sure about is exactly how many people we’ll need to hire to make that happen, and what the mix of freelancers versus full-time staffers will be.

We are looking for people with a diverse set of interests, within reason. We’ll have people who specialize in sports, I’m sure, as opposed to politics or economics or culture. But I’m not sure that we’ll have people who specialize only in (say) baseball or golf, as opposed to sports more broadly.

And yes — we are taking resumes. (There’s no formal process for this yet, but it’s not too hard to find my email.) We’ve already gotten interest from some great quant-friendly journalists. What’s a little bit tougher to find is people who are journalism-friendly quants, if that makes sense — people who might be employed in (say) tech or finance or consulting right now but who can express themselves pretty well and who might be interested in a change of careers.

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Question:

Nate, what will you miss most about the political analysis you did for the Times and what will you miss the least?

Nate Silver:

To clarify, I’m not leaving political analysis. My guess is that it might still occupy 40-50% of my time personally, and that politics/elections might represent something like 30-40% of the content at the “new” 538. We’ll probably also hire at least one full-time politics writer/editor, along with some talented freelancers.

But to be honest — there’s not very much I’ll miss about pulling back from politics some. 2012 was an amazing year for me in any objective sense, but I still get sort of bitter and angry when I think about how hard it was to get people to accept some very basic statistical conclusions, and how personal things became.•

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“If Cars Can Drive Themselves, The Place Of The Automobile In Our Culture Will Start To Change Radically”

July 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The ability to create safe driverless cars is upon us, but I’m still not sure that everyone is going to want to give up the wheel–give up ownership, even. From a report by Navneet Alang at the Globe & Mail on some of the larger implications of autonomous vehicles:

“As easy as it is to conceive of a future much like the present, only with highways full of autonomous cars, the reality is quite different. If cars can drive themselves, the place of the automobile in our culture will start to change radically – and how it does so will have enormous ramifications for cities, for commuters and for our lives.

It’s tempting to think of the arrival of driverless cars like other switches from manual to automatic technologies: the benefits will all be about of convenience. You could have the privacy and effectiveness of a single car for your ride to work, but could read the newspaper and eat your breakfast on the way. It’s the best of your Honda and a subway rolled into one.

But if cars can move themselves around, why, for example, should they lie in a parking lot all day or night? Instead, as others have suggested, it might make far more sense to have a car simply drop you off at work, and either keep itself elsewhere or transport someone else, thereby saving the increasingly valuable real estate in cities for other things. The inefficiency of a vehicle that goes unused for most of the day may start to seem quite wasteful.

In fact, that sort of thinking leads quite logically into challenging the very idea of owning a car. Rather than storing a thirty- or forty-thousand dollar machine in your garage, it may make more sense to pull out your smartphone and hail one if and when needed. Cars could be shared, either through extending the services we have now like Zipcar or Car2Go, or through new forms of shared ownership we haven’t quite conceived of yet.”

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“Backgammon Is Now The First Board Or Card Game With, In Effect, A Machine World Champion”

July 28, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

For some reason, the editors of the New Yorker never ask me for advice. I don’t know what they’re thinking. I would tell them this if they did: Publish an e-book of the greatest technology journalism in the magazine’s history. Have one of your most tech-friendly writers compose an introduction and include Lillian Ross’ 1970 piece about the first home-video recorder, Malcolm Ross’ 1931 look inside Bell Labs, Anthony Hiss’ 1977 story about the personal computer, Hiss’ 1975 article about visiting Philip K. Dick in Los Angeles, and Jeremy Bernstein’s short 1965 piece and long 1966 one about Stanley Kubrick making 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Another inclusion could be A.I., Bernstein’s 1981 profile of the great artificial-intelligence pioneer Marvin Minsky. (It’s gated, so you need a subscription to read it.) The opening:

In July of 1979, a computer program called BKG 9.8–the creation of Hans Berliner, a professor of computer science at Carnegie-Mellon University, in Pittsburgh–played the winner of the world backgammon championship in Monte Carlo. The program was run on a large computer at Carnegie-Mellon that was connected by satellite to a robot in Monte Carlo. The robot, named Gammonoid, had a visual-display backgammon board on its chest, which exhibited its moves and those of its opponent, Luigi Villa, of Italy, who by beating all his human challengers a short while before had won the right to play against the Gammonoid. The stakes were five thousand dollars, winner take all, and the computer won, seven games to one. It had been expected to lose. In a recent Scientific American article, Berliner wrote:

Not much was expected of the programmed robot…. Although the organizers had made Gammonoid the symbol of the tournament by putting a picture of it on their literature and little robot figures on the trophies, the players knew the existing microprocessors could not give them a good game. Why should the robot be any different?

This view was reinforced at the opening ceremonies in the Summer Sports Palace in Monaco. At one point the overhead lights dimmed, the orchestra began playing the theme of the film Star Wars, and a spotlight focused on an opening in the stage curtain through which Gammonoid was supposed to propel itself onto the stage. To my dismay the robot got entangled and its appearance was delayed for five minutes.

This was one of the few mistakes the robot made. Backgammon is now the first board or card game with, in effect, a machine world champion. Checkers, chess, go, and the rest will follow–and quite possibly soon. But what does that mean for us, for our sense of uniqueness and worth–especially as machines evolve whose output we can less distinguish from our own?•

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“This Container Once Held Dr. James Bedford Who, In 1967, Became The World’s First-Ever Cryonaut”

July 28, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Inside the Immortality Business,” Josh Dean’s excellent Buzzfeed report about cryonics, a passage about the first-ever “cryonaut”:

“At one end of Alcor’s conference room is a picture window of the kind you see in police interrogation rooms. It’s typically covered with a metal screen, but Mike Perry, the company’s Patient Care Director, pushed a cartoonishly large red button and it raised to reveal the cold storage room, which if you’ve been on a brewery tour, basically looks like that. On the far wall is a row of towering silver canisters containing four patients each (claustrophobia is not a concern of the cryopreserved) — plus another eight or 10 frozen heads, which are stored in crock-pot-sized cans and stacked in the canister’s center channel. Each capsule, Perry explained, is cooled to 320 degrees below zero Fahrenheit using liquid nitrogen and requires no electricity. Canisters operate on the same basic principle as a thermos bottle; they are double-walled with a vacuum-sealed space between the two walls and are known as dewars, for the concept’s Scottish inventor, James Dewar. The chamber itself is filled with liquid nitrogen and is replenished weekly from a huge storage container, though in truth, Perry noted, that’s overkill. A test canister once went eight months before all of the nitrogen finally boiled off, so there’s little reason to worry about your frozen loved ones thawing should the nightwatchman fall asleep on the job.

Perry, who is gaunt, wispy-haired, and hunchbacked (a condition he hopes will be fixed when he’s revived down the road), drew my attention to another unit, horizontal and obviously much older, on the floor just on the far side of the glass. This container once held Dr. James Bedford who, in 1967, became the world’s first-ever cryonaut, as the fervent press at the time dubbed him. Perry said that security reasons prevented him from identifying precisely which of the new capsules now contained Bedford, or for that matter the baseball legend Ted Williams, who is the most famous ex-person publicly known to be in Alcor’s care. (Walt Disney, contrary to urban legend, was never frozen. Neither was Timothy Leary, who was once an Alcor member, but later canceled.)

Cryonics as a concept has existed in science-fiction for more than a century, but it traces its real-world origins to the 1964 publication of The Prospect of Immortality. That book, written by a physics and math professor from Atlantic City named Robert Ettinger, opened with a bold proclamation: ‘Most of us now living have a chance for personal, physical immortality.’ Ettinger went on to lay out, in a very specific and carefully constructed scientific argument, why humans should immediately begin to consider this plausible alternative. He wrote: ‘The fact: At very low temperatures it is possible, right now, to preserve dead people with essentially no deterioration, indefinitely.’ Ettinger called this ‘suspended death’ and the overall movement he hoped would grow up to support it ‘the freezer program,’ an ominous phrase that didn’t stick for obvious reasons. (In a later book, he called it being ‘preserved indefinitely in not-very-dead condition,’ which is so hilariously stiff as to sound bureaucratic.)”

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“The Local Government Has Embraced The Disruption”

July 28, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I haven’t been to San Francisco in a few years, but most reports describe it as a burgeoning tech nightmare, with a gigantic income disparity and Google employees being separated from the general population by private buses and the like. From “The Dark Side of Startup City,” by Susie Cagle at the Grist:

“A Lyft car idling at every stoplight, a smartphone in every hand — and an eviction on every block.

Few cities have seen as much disruption as San Francisco has over the last 10 years. Once a hotbed of progressive political activism and engagement, the city is being remade in the image of the booming tech industry, headquartered in Silicon Valley to the south.

Rents in some of San Francisco’s most desirable neighborhoods have doubled in a year. Apartment construction has exploded in order to absorb the new residents. The city is developing so rapidly that Google’s streetview photos from 2011 are already well outdated.

The local government has embraced the disruption. Longtime residents, meanwhile, talk about fleeing or saving their city as though a hurricane is coming. But the hurricane has landed “

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“Do You Think People Will Still Be Going To The Movies In Large Numbers In 30 Or 50 Years?”

July 26, 2013 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At the Los Angeles Review of Books, Andrew Gumbel has an excellent interview with film producer Lynda Obst, whose new book, Sleepless in Hollywood, examines the puzzling economics of the moment in Hollywood. An excerpt:

“Andrew Gumbel:

As home viewing systems become more sophisticated, what about the movies will remain irreplaceable? Do you think people will still be going to the movies in large numbers in 30 or 50 years, or will it become a minority pursuit devoted to showings of the classics, a bit like opera now?

Lynn Obst:

There’s a lot of thinking about the future of the movie-going experience. One direction is the development of destination theaters, with reclining seats and really good food and alcoholic drinks with waiter service — more of a screening experience. Another is allowing people to watch first-run movies at home, at a price that still works for the distributors. But, one way or another, people are still going to go to the movies. Sure, people who prefer to do so will stay home. But teenagers just want to get away from their parents and be with one another, and the movies provide that opportunity. And the excitement of the communal experience will not diminish. It was so much fun to watch Bridesmaids on the opening weekend in a room full of people who were loving it. That’s true for comedies, and it’s true for a lot of powerful dramas. Movies that aren’t made for that communal experience will probably stop being shown in theaters altogether. But the movies have never been more of a mass experience than right now.

Andrew Gumbel: 

How can you say that when entertainment is increasingly being consumed by individuals sitting in front of their screens?

Lynn Obst:

Movies are one of the great escapes — and that includes escaping from this social media enclosure we’re in. There’s almost nowhere you can go without people being in their own private Idaho, tied to their iPhones. But, at the movies, they turn off their phones and scream at the screen and talk to each other on the way in and out. Movies are one thing we do that brings us together.”

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