Science/Tech

You are currently browsing the archive for the Science/Tech category.

“It Is The Charismatic Figure That People Identify With And Hope To Emulate”

January 29, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The most important thing for Apple’s future will be the first new product it produces post-Jobs that isn’t just an iteration of another one (e.g., shrinking the iPad). Even if Steve Jobs himself had the product in the pipeline, the way it’s executed and introduced will determine what Apple is going forward. But even if the company delivers, stock price won’t necessarily follow, because that isn’t always congruous with performance. The circus is still popular, but it isn’t the same without P.T. Barnum, minus his perfections and imperfections. From Bruce Nussbaum’s new Fast Company essay, “Why Apple Is Losing Its Aura“:

“Apple, of course, also gives us traditional physicality and aesthetics in the tactility of its products and the touch-screen mode of our communicating with them. For two decades or so, corporations shifted away from ‘things’ to ‘services’ and ‘thinking’ and ‘monetizing,’ but Apple stayed with making beautiful stuff that felt good in the hand. The ‘fit and finish,’ the glass and aluminum, the size and shape of its products added to the company’s Aura. Now Amazon (with its Kindle), Google (with its glasses), and others are following.

Finally, Aura is often associated with charisma. It is the charismatic figure that personifies and makes possible all the elements of Aura. It is the charismatic figure that people identify with and hope to emulate. They have high expectations for this leader but are forgiving of sins if they are acknowledged and changed. Jobs played that role, in close association with Ive and a small team of incredibly creative people who worked with him for many years.

This Aura, this combination of elements that beckon us to Apple and compel us to stay, is the generator of its economic value. This emotional engagement, not simply the number of iPhones sold worldwide, is the real value of the company. Looking at Apple’s value through the concept of aura allows us to move beyond the technology and the units sold to place the company’s economic value within a social context from which it is derived. If you don’t understand the auratic power of engagement, you can’t understand Apple or modern capitalism.” (Thanks Browser.)

Tags: ,

“His Argument Also Runs Counter To What I Have Been Saying In Congress”

January 28, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

The last time professional chucklehead Joe Scarborough used his flat-earth theory–if many people believe the round earth is flat, then the person who believes that the round Earth is round is a fool–he ended up being embarrassed by his scurrilous criticism of pollster Nate Silver. But some people never learn. He’s now lambasting New York Times economist Paul Krugman about deficit spending not because the MSNBC pundit has some sort knowledge or proof, but because, in Scarborough’s mind, Krugman’s reasoning “runs counter to conventional wisdom across the Western world.” Sooner or later, the “other people disagree with this guy” theory will work the way some shit eventually sticks to a wall. The opening of Scarborough’s new Politico column “Paul Krugman vs. the World“:

“Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman came on Morning Joe Monday to discuss his latest book and the state of affairs in Washington. Mr. Krugman’s view is that Americans would be better off if its government ran deeper deficits and ignored its longterm debt. That, of course, runs counter to conventional wisdom across the Western world, which is exactly why the New York Times columnist believes Spain and Great Britain are suffering through endless recessions.

His argument also runs counter to what I have been saying in Congress and in the media since 1994. So it would be no surprise that the guy who wrote this, and this, and this and this over the past week would take exception to Mr. Krugman’s words. But most of our viewers did not tune in to hear me talk over the Nobel Prize winner. They tuned in to hear Paul Krugman. So I did my best to give him space.”

Tags: ,

“The Word Is Then Projected In The Chosen Language”

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

The Ivy Guide is a pen attachment that scans and translates text as you wand over it. From Mashable: “Learning a new language comes with its difficulties, but three designers are looking to put translations right at your fingertips.

The Ivy Guide, a device that fits over pens and pencils, scans words and projects its translation directly onto the document.

The scanner tip adjusts to any writing tool with a flexible sponge, and while pressing the translating button, readers can underline text. The word is then projected in the chosen language, and cleared by pressing again. The scanner connects to a USB for easy charging.”

“Would Research Subjects Simply Extinguish The Life Of A Machine Pleading For Its Life?”

January 28, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

We treat each other like crap but would we be better to bots? The opening of an NPR report by Alix Siegel about reimagining the Milgram experiments for the age of robotics:

“In 2007, Christoph Bartneck, a robotics professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, decided to stage an experiment loosely based on the famous (and infamous) Milgram obedience study.

In Milgram’s study, research subjects were asked to administer increasingly powerful electrical shocks to a person pretending to be a volunteer ‘learner’ in another room. The research subject would ask a question, and whenever the learner made a mistake, the research subject was supposed to administer a shock — each shock slightly worse than the one before.

As the experiment went on, and as the shocks increased in intensity, the ‘learners’ began to clearly suffer. They would scream and beg for the research subject to stop while a ‘scientist’ in a white lab coat instructed the research subject to continue, and in videos of the experiment you can see some of the research subjects struggle with how to behave. The research subjects wanted to finish the experiment like they were told. But how exactly to respond to these terrible cries for mercy?

Bartneck studies human-robot relations, and he wanted to know what would happen if a robot in a similar position to the ‘learner’ begged for its life. Would there be any moral pause? Or would research subjects simply extinguish the life of a machine pleading for its life without any thought or remorse?”


Stranley Milgram Obedience by djfaheezy

Tags:

“Ben Franklin Rocked One Of History’s Finest Bald-Mullets”

January 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jesse Lichtenstein has followed up his “Do We Really Want to Live Without the Post Office?” article in Esquire with an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few excerpts follow.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Question:

Who was the coolest postmaster general?

Answer:

Ben Franklin rocked one of history’s finest bald-mullets. And then there was Frank H. Hitchcock, 43rd postmaster, who paid a pilot out of his own pocket to demonstrate the usefulness of airplanes when the Army wasn’t convinced.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Question:

Why does/should the USPS have a monopoly on a person’s mailbox? As I understand it, only the USPS can place mail in someone’s mailbox. Is that correct?

Answer:

This is correct. The post office is established in the US Constitution (in fact, the post office was established in 1775, before the US itself, but a federal post office is written into the constitution) and it’s been given this monopoly by law. In theory, that lawful monopoly could be changed by new legislation. 

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Question:

What’s the biggest problem you think we will face if the USPS does get shut down?

Answer:

I think there won’t be a lot of interest in the private sector in rebuilding anything with the scope of the USPS. And that means nothing close to the same delivery standards for the whole country, and probably much more variable pricing.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Question:

Where do you see the future of the postal service industry, and what new and innovative inventions do you think will revolutionize the way we receive mail?

Answer:

I think the growth of ecommerce and our rising expectations that things can and should be delivered to us quickly could be the way that the postal service survives and even thrives. There’s a generational problem USPS has to grapple with. In broad strokes, more older people still want to do their business through the mail (bills, bank statements, etc. — they trust a hard copy) and more younger people have very little meaningful relationship with mail — except getting STUFF.

There’s also room for the postal service to grow into the area of hybrid mail. I talk about this in the piece — the idea that we should have scanned images of mail arrive in our inboxes and we can decide which pieces we want delivered, and when; and maybe for a fee, we could have the USPS open the mail and email us a scan. By the same token, we should be able to type something up, email a file to USPS, and have them deliver a physical document.

––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––––

Question:

Assuming you could ship a live animal, which would be easier: 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?

Answer:

It’s really a question of how much extra space you have to budget for containing the waste matter. Horses’ diets are so fiber-intensive, while ducks break it down to a liquid. I’m going with h-s duck.

“Then There Was The Small Matter Of The Murder”

January 27, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve posted before about Eadweard Muybridge, genius of nascent cinema who wound up on trial for murder. There’s a new book about him, The Inventor and the Tycoon, which receives a beautifully written review this week in the New York Times by Candice Millard. The opening:

“Genius, it seems, is almost always accompanied by eccentricity, if not madness. Those rare instances of genuine brilliance that we find scattered throughout history — in the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, the mathematical equations of John Nash — often appear to have come at great cost to the minds that produced them. The work of Eadweard Muybridge is no exception.

While Muybridge’s photographs are widely known, his personal life has been largely neglected, which seems incredible now that, in Edward Ball’s engrossing book, The Inventor and the Tycoon, we have the whole fascinating story, full of strange and surprising details. At the height of his genius, Muybridge, a British immigrant whose stunning advancements in photography in the mid-to-late 1800s astonished the world and gave rise to the motion picture industry, looked and generally lived like a vagabond. He dressed in clothing so tattered that his uncombed, usually unwashed, hair poked out of holes in his hat, and his pants threatened to fall off in pieces as he walked. He ate cheese flies, tiny insects that hover around the tops of old cheese and that he used to gather up into packages and snack on as he brooded over his photographs. Then there was the small matter of the murder.

In 1874, just a year after one of his most important breakthroughs, when he was well into the work that would make him famous, Muybridge killed a man.”

Tags:

“There Will Be New Celebrities, Thousands Of Them”

January 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The excellent Paleofuture blog at the Smithsonian found a 1997 article in which Garrison Keillor made predictions about the future of different aspects of American life, including the media. Here’s a couple of passages: the first accurately predicts the rise of reality TV while the second wrongly believed that people would mourn the demise of newspapers:

1.

“People will feel nostalgia for celebrities, real ones, like there used to be back when there were three TV networks and Americans watched the same shows at the same time and talked about them the next day at work. Television was common currency. Sunday afternoons you watched the NFL game with your dad on the couch and then you went to the table and ate pot roast and mashed potatoes. Everybody else did the same thing.

Every American knew Sinatra by sight and by voice, but when you scattered the audience among 200 cable-TV channels and 1,000 movies you could watch on the Internet and 10,000 CDs you could down-load, there weren’t many true celebrities anymore. People will miss them.

There will be new celebrities, thousands of them, but not many people will know who they are.”

2.

“People are not going to dress up as us or stage re-enactments of our wars or collect our cellular phones, our books on healing and empowerment, our CDs of Old Age music, our pepper grinders, our billions of T-shirts. They will resent what we did to the country, and we will go down in their history as the age of effluvia, with the simple moral: If you love trash too much, you will make yourself stupid.

By ‘trash’ I don’t mean a publication such as The New York Times. People are going to miss it a lot – they’ll think: What a wonderful thing a newspaper was! You opened it and there it was, you didn’t have to wait three minutes for the art to download, and when your wife said, ‘Give me a section,’ you did.”

Tags:

“We Can Clone All Kinds Of Mammals, So It’s Very Likely That We Could Clone A Human”

January 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From a really good recent Spiegel interview with synthetic biology pioneer George Church, a passage about cloning Neanderthals, which would allow us to finally end our shortage of stupid people:

“Spiegel:

Mr. Church, you predict that it will soon be possible to clone Neanderthals. What do you mean by ‘soon’? Will you witness the birth of a Neanderthal baby in your lifetime?

George Church:

That depends on a hell of a lot of things, but I think so. The reason I would consider it a possibility is that a bunch of technologies are developing faster than ever before. In particular, reading and writing DNA is now about a million times faster than seven or eight years ago. Another technology that the de-extinction of a Neanderthal would require is human cloning. We can clone all kinds of mammals, so it’s very likely that we could clone a human. Why shouldn’t we be able to do so?

Spiegel:

Perhaps because it is banned?

George Church:

That may be true in Germany, but it’s not banned all over the world. And laws can change, by the way.

Spiegel:

Would cloning a Neanderthal be a desirable thing to do?

George Church:

Well, that’s another thing. I tend to decide on what is desirable based on societal consensus. My role is to determine what’s technologically feasible. All I can do is reduce the risk and increase the benefits.”

Tags:

“The Library Of Congress Is Now Stockpiling The Entire Twitterverse”

January 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Kim Kardashian Kim Kardashian‏@KimsThoughts_

Do ants have dicks?

______________________

From James Gleick’s New York Review of Books article about the Library of Congress collecting the whole of Twitter, no matter how stupid the tweets, a historical antecedent for such a massive information-collecting undertaking:

“For a brief time in the 1850s the telegraph companies of England and the United States thought that they could (and should) preserve every message that passed through their wires. Millions of telegrams—in fireproof safes. Imagine the possibilities for history!

‘Fancy some future Macaulay rummaging among such a store, and painting therefrom the salient features of the social and commercial life of England in the nineteenth century,’wrote Andrew Wynter in 1854. (Wynter was what we would now call a popular-science writer; in his day job he practiced medicine, specializing in ‘lunatics.’) ‘What might not be gathered some day in the twenty-first century from a record of the correspondence of an entire people?’

Remind you of anything?

Here in the twenty-first century, the Library of Congress is now stockpiling the entire Twitterverse, or Tweetosphere, or whatever we’ll end up calling it—anyway, the corpus of all public tweets. There are a lot.”

Tags: ,

“Why Shouldn’t The Future Be Brighter Than Today”

January 23, 2013 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Deep Space Industries plans to mine asteroids and other far-flung objects.

“If Aliens Came Here And Were Determined To Treat Us The Way That Vegan Humans Treat Animals, We’d Still Be In Serious Trouble”

January 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Nature is a necessary evil, so I try to do my part: I’m a vegetarian bordering on vegan. But I use a cell phone and do you know how many birds are killed each year by cell towers? Animals are also done in by radio towers and logging and commercial development, and I enjoy products that those industries create. Essentially, for anyone who really cares about animals being treated ethically, diet isn’t enough. So asserts Rhys Southan in his new Aeon essay, “The Vegans Have Landed.” An excerpt about the speculative scenario in which a superior alien race that takes over Earth happens to be vegan–and still ruins us:

“My objection to the alien invasion scenario is more sweeping. If we want to take the interests of animals seriously, then the biggest failure of the analogy is that it underestimates just how malign we are. Sure, if we were replaced as the dominant animals on the planet, we’d probably prefer the new ruling species to be vegan. But if aliens with superior technology and minds came here and were determined to treat us the way that vegan humans treat animals on this planet, we’d still be in serious trouble. Veganism would hardly figure as a safeguard of our wellbeing.

Universal veganism wouldn’t stop the road-building, logging, urban and suburban development, pollution, resource consumption, and other forms of land transformation that kills animals by the billions. So what does veganism do exactly? Theoretically, it ends the raising, capture and exploitation of living animals, and it stops a particular kind of killing that many vegans claim is the worst and least excusable: the intentional killing of animals in order to use their bodies as material goods.

Veganism, as a whole, requires us to stop using animals for entertainment, food, pharmaceutical testing, and clothing. If it were to become universal, factory farming and animal testing would end, which would be excellent news for all the animals that we capture or raise for these purposes. But it would accomplish next to nothing for free-roaming wild animals except to stop hunting, which is the least of their problems.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature in Switzerland, the world’s first global environmental organisation, says:

Analyses of the data on threats to bird, mammal and amphibian species… show that the most pervasive threat that they face is habitat destruction and degradation driven by agricultural and forestry activities.”

Tags:

“This Robot Is Designed To Be More Realistic, Functional And Easier To Use”

January 22, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

mar

Dental training robot from Japan. I am fairly certain dentists are having sex with these dolls after hours. Thank you, Obamacare.

“We Wanted Flying Cars, Instead We Got 140 Characters”

January 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s arrogant for any particular group of humans at any moment to think that they are the beginning, that what came before them was merely prelude. But the same type of hubris may attend the thought that we’ve exhausted all intellectual possibility, that we are at the end. I accept that output and incomes have stagnated in America for most of the last four decades and that transformational technologies are hard to come by, but I don’t think we’ve reached an endgame of ingenuity. From the recent Economist cover story about the seeming diminishing returns of human effort:

“To those fortunate enough to benefit from the best that the world has to offer, the fact that it offers no more can disappoint. As Mr [Peter] Thiel and his colleagues at the Founders Fund, a venture-capital company, put it: ‘We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters.’ A world where all can use Twitter but hardly any can commute by air is less impressive than the futures dreamed of in the past.

The first thing to point out about this appeal to experience and expectation is that the science fiction of the mid-20th century, important as it may have been to people who became entrepreneurs or economists with a taste for the big picture, constituted neither serious technological forecasting nor a binding commitment. It was a celebration through extrapolation of then current progress in speed, power and distance. For cars read flying cars; for battlecruisers read space cruisers.

Technological progress does not require all technologies to move forward in lock step, merely that some important technologies are always moving forward. Passenger aeroplanes have not improved much over the past 40 years in terms of their speed. Computers have sped up immeasurably. Unless you can show that planes matter more, to stress the stasis over the progress is simply a matter of taste.”

Tags:

“A Few Individuals Could, Via Error Or Terror, Trigger A Societal Breakdown”

January 21, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

When he was creating the online salon Edge, John Brockman wanted collect the greatest minds in the world. One of the people he chose was David Brooks. Go figure.

Still, there’s a lot of amazing stuff on the site (including one of my favorite essays from 2012), and no exception is the new feature, “What *Should* We Be Worried About?” It poses that question to a slew of thinkers. Here’s the opening of scientist Martin Rees’ answer:

“Those of us fortunate enough to live in the developed world fret too much about minor hazards of everyday life: improbable air crashes, carcinogens in food, and so forth. But we are less secure than we think. We should worry far more about scenarios that have thankfully not yet happened—but which, if they occurred, could cause such world-wide devastation that even once would be too often.

Much has been written about possible ecological shocks triggered by the collective impact of a growing and more demanding world population on the biosphere, and about the social and political tensions stemming from scarcity of resources or climate change. But even more worrying are the downsides of powerful new technologies: cyber-, bio-, and nano-. We’re entering an era when a few individuals could, via error or terror, trigger a societal breakdown with such extreme suddenness that palliative government actions would be overwhelmed.

Some would dismiss these concerns as an exaggerated Jeremiad: after all, human societies have survived for millennia, despite storms, earthquakes and pestilence. But these human-induced threats are different: they are newly emergent, so we have a limited timebase for exposure to them and can’t be so sanguine that we would survive them for long – nor about the ability of governments to cope if disaster strikes. And of course we have zero grounds for confidence that we can survive the worst that even more powerful future technologies could do.”

Tags:

“What Is A Word Processor?”

January 19, 2013 in Books, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Michael Crichton pushed his book Electronic Life: How To Think About Computers while visiting Merv Griffin in 1983. The personal computing revolution was upon us, but the Macintosh had yet to reach the market, so it still seemed so far away, especially to the tech-challenged host.

Tags: ,

“Cars Could Become A Self-Organizing Entity”

January 10, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the future, small caravans of cars could wirelessly become insta-social networks on the highway, sharing information, preventing crashes. From ArsTechnica:

“But what if getting on the highway also meant joining a wireless mesh network consisting of all the cars around you? Cars could become a self-organizing entity, avoiding collisions and minimizing traffic congestion. The cars themselves would be smart enough to cooperate with each other.

‘You can imagine in the future, you could enter the highway, mesh with five or six other vehicles around you and you caravan together,’ said Dan Rabinovitsj, senior VP of chipmaker Qualcomm Atheros’s networking business unit. ‘You’re essentially making sure you’re not just keeping proper distance from the front and back, which a number of vehicles do today, but literally in 360 degrees. And of course passing along messages: there’s a policeman up ahead, there’s an accident up ahead, or there’s a stoplight. All of these things are starting to intersect.'”

Tags:

“The Purpose Of This Discussion Is Not To Impugn The Character Of Billionaires”

January 10, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Gawker writer Hamilton Nolan thinks that everything is terrible and everybody is horrible. He’s probably right. In his post “Do the ‘Good Rich’ Exist?” Nolan references a great 2006 essay by philosopher Peter Singer and a new book by historian Robert F. Dalzell to consider if the super-rich who give away great wealth while still in possession of even greater wealth are actually deserving of our praise. An excerpt:

“The purpose of this discussion is not to impugn the character of billionaires. It is to ask: What is the cost to society of the perception that we should be grateful to these wealthy men for their generosity? The assumptions implicit in that view are A) that the wealthy are fully entitled to their money because they earned it on the basis of their own talents, and B) that the need for society and its laws to protect the entitlement of the rich to their own wealth outweighs the aggregate societal needs that could be cured or ameliorated by that wealth (poverty, disease, etc.). Gratitude towards the great philanthropists is based on the assumption that they are not and should not be expected to give their wealth back to the world; it is based on the assumption that the normal, default, acceptable behavior for the very wealthy is to hoard most of their wealth and put it solely to their own use. It is a view in which society grovels at the feet of great men who have succeeded where the rest of us have failed.

Warren Buffett himself has attributed most of his success to the society he lives in—its governmental protections, its rule of law, its fair and transparent markets, its educational system, and so on. The wise rich (and anyone realistic about the role of chance in the outcomes of all of our lives) recognize that personal talent is but one minor ingredient of vast success. If society is responsible for the vast majority of the success of the rich, then returning the vast majority of that wealth back to society is the least that the rich can do. (Really, it’s the least, considering the fact that they would still be left incredibly wealthy.) This level of giving back to the society that spawned them should be expected of the rich. Yes, society owes them its gratitude—the same gratitude that it owes you for paying your taxes, and volunteering, and making your annual donation to UNICEF. The same gratitude, regardless of the number of zeroes on the check. The gratitude that comes when someone does a good thing that they are expected to do. The gratitude you get for fulfilling your role as a responsible member of society.

To the extent that we should be grateful to the great philanthropists, we should be grateful to them for fulfilling a duty. And to the extent that that duty is to be truly generous, it is a duty that none of them have fulfilled.”

Tags: , ,

“We Took Their Jaw, Cut It Up And Remade It”

January 9, 2013 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Experimentation with creepily realistic robotic facial expressions at UCSD.

“Social Standards Inherited From The Days Of Cheap Servant Labor Dictate Much More Cleanliness Than Is Required For Hygiene”

December 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Housework in Utopia,” a post about domestic drudgery by economist John Quiggin, a passage about how we struggle to keep up appearances that were established under a long-abandoned societal model:

“The household appliances that first came into widespread use in the 1950s  (washing machines, vacuum cleaners, dishwashers and so on), eliminated a huge amount of drudgery, but technological progress for the next forty years or so was pretty limited. The only truly significant innovation I can date to this period is the microwave oven.

At the same time, the great decline in inequality freed lots of working class women from doing the chores of others, as well as maintaining their own homes. Those same tasks, eased by technology but still burdensome, were shifted onto middle-class women who would previously have employed servants.

How likely is it that new appliances will resolve the remaining problems of household labor? We just acquired a vacuum cleaning robot which is a real boon, and there are versions that are supposed to clean tiled floors as well.

In other cases, there are less direct solutions. Technological progress in the clothing industry means that it no longer makes economic sense to sew your own clothes, or even to mend them. So, these are now jobs that fit into category (2) – to the extent that we do them it’s because we enjoy them. Similarly, while the bugs still need to be ironed out of online shopping, particularly for groceries, it won’t be long before no one needs to visit a physical shop unless they enjoy the experience (once every three months is about optimal for me!).

That still leaves a number of inescapably physical and essentially crappy jobs, for which technology has yet to offer a solution. The obvious examples for me are cleaning (surfaces, baths, toilets etc) and ironing (not such a problem if, unlike me, you can do it while watching a video/TV). Something these tasks share, and which is true of a lot of crappy jobs, is that we do a lot more than is actually necessary.  Social standards inherited from the days of cheap servant labour dictate much more cleanliness than is required for hygiene, and practices like ironing for which there is no need at all.

So, a final part of my idea of utopia would be the institution of social norms that frown on unnecessary crap-work. In my utopia, a freshly ironed shirt would attract the same kind of response that is now elicited by a fur coat or an ivory brooch – a mixture of anachronistic admiration with disapproval of the process by which it was produced, with the latter element predominating over time.

I haven’t done the numbers yet, but it seems to me that with a bit of technological progress and a sensible attitude, we could get the requirement for household crapwork below an hour a day, which even utopians should be willing to live with.”

Tags:

“Many Of Those Technologies May End Up Restricted”

December 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Brad Plumer at the Washington Post reports on a question I’ve wondered about: In the future, what are we going to smuggle? He collects info from Wikistrat’s crowdsourcing project to predict what will be desired contraband in 2050. I don’t agree with most of the list, but it is fun. Two entries:

“– Experimental health enhancers. The future could bring a whole host of new technologies, from ‘software to create pleasurable sensory overloads’ to ‘biotechnology allowing the creation of (truly) perfect babies,’ says Wikistrat. Many of those technologies may end up restricted. For instance, schools and communities may decide to bar cognition-enhancing drugs because they give certain students unfair advantages. In that case, they may thrive on the black market, much as steroids do.

– Rare species. Scientists are already warning that millions of species could become extinct by 2050 because of human activity and climate change. Some useful species that are already dying out — those mysteriously vanishing honeybees, perhaps? — could be a hot black market commodity by mid-century.”

Tags:

“They Had More Staff In Florida Than We Had In The Country”

December 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Michael Kranish of the Boston Globe exhaustively analyzes why President Obama beat Mitt Romney, giving credit, yes, to a more information-rich campaign, but also stressing the importance of marrying big data to retail politics. An excerpt:

“Tagg Romney could not figure it out. Why had Obama spent so heavily during the primaries when he had no primary opponent? Only later did Tagg realize this was a key to Obama’s victory.

‘We were looking at all the money they were spending in the primary and we were thinking ‘what are they spending all their money on? They’re wasting a lot of money.’ They weren’t. They were paying staffers in Florida’ and elsewhere.

If Romney’s Manhattan Project had been debate preparation, then Obama’s was the ground game.

Building on its 2008 field organ­ization, Obama’s campaign had far more people on the ground, for longer periods, and backed by better data. In Florida, for example, the ­Romney campaign said it had fewer than 200 staff members on the ground, a huge commitment of its total of 500 nationwide. But the Obama campaign had 770 staff in Florida out of 3,000 or so nationwide.

‘They had more staff in Florida than we had in the country, and for longer,’ said Romney adviser Ron Kaufman.

Indeed, in swing state after swing state, the Obama field team was much bigger than the Romney troops. Obama had 123 offices in Ohio, compared with Romney’s 40. Obama had 59 offices in Colorado, compared with Romney’s 15, accord­ing to statistics compiled by the Obama campaign.

Stevens said he expressed alarm about the Democrat’s early advantage in money and staff. He said Obama’s decision to reject public financing for the fall campaign (a move Romney followed) worked to Obama’s advantage ­because Obama used primary funds to prepare for the general election, and it meant there was no ceiling on how much could be spent.

‘It is like sitting in the ­Alamo,’ Stevens said in the postelection interview, comparing the siege by Mexican troops in 1836 to competing against the superior forces of the Obama campaign. ‘Yes, it is alarming. There are a lot of Santa Anna’s soldiers out there.'” (Thanks Browser.)

Tags: , ,

“We’re Ceding Control Of That History To The Cold Precision Of The Computer”

December 27, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Precision has always been the goal of the cartographer, but does the increasing exactness of computer-generated navigation (Apple Maps aside) reduce the quest in some essential way? I vote “no” but Simon Garfield makes intelligent points on the subject in “The End of the Map” in the Wall Street Journal. An excerpt:

“As some may recall, it was not so long ago that we got around by using maps that folded. Occasionally, if we wanted a truly global picture of our place in the world, we would pull shoulder-dislocating atlases from shelves. The world was bigger back then. Experience and cheaper travel have rendered it small, but nothing has shrunk the world more than digital mapping.

There is something valuable about getting lost occasionally, even in our pixilated, endlessly interconnected world.

In medieval Christian Europe, Jerusalem was the center of the world, the ultimate end of a religious pilgrimage. If we lived in China, that focal point was Youzhou. Later, in the days of European empire, it might be Britain or France. Today, by contrast, each of us now stands as an individual at the center of our own map worlds. On our computers and phones, we plot a route not from A to B but from ourselves (‘Allow current location’) to anywhere of our choosing. Technology has enabled us to forget all about way-finding and geography. This is some change, and some loss.

Maps have always related and realigned our history; increasingly, we’re ceding control of that history to the cold precision of the computer. With this comes great responsibility. Leading mapmakers used to be scattered around the world, all lending their distinctive talents and interpretations. These days by far the most influential are concentrated in one place—Mountain View, Calif., home of the Googleplex.

There is something disappointing about the austere potential perfection of the new maps. The satellites above us have seen all there is to see of the world; technically, they have mapped it all. But satellites know nothing of the beauty of hand-drawn maps, with their Spanish galleons and sea monsters, and they cannot comprehend wanderlust and the desire for discovery. Today we can locate the smallest hamlet in sub-Saharan Africa or the Yukon, but can we claim that we know them any better? Do the irregular and unpredictable fancies of the older maps more accurately reflect the strangeness of the world?”

Tags:

“There Will Be No C, X Or Q In Our Everyday Alphabet”

December 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Predictions for the next century from the Ladies Home Journal in 1900, some spot-on and ridiculous, courtesy of Buzzfeed and Reddit. (Click on image a couple of times to read large-scale version.)

 

“It Was Nothing Like What I Had Seen When Stoned”

December 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve never used illegal drugs, but my experience with people who have is that, members of the Grateful Dead excepted, heavy LSD users are the biggest assholes, even worse than cokeheads. Maybe because they’ve briefly glimpsed the world through cleansed doors of perception and are disappointed by the reality they face when they come down? But most likely it’s just because they’re assholes. From Jon Wiener’s  Los Angeles Review of Books interview with neurologist Oliver Sacks, who’s neither an asshole nor a heavy user of drugs, a conversation about the doctor’s long-ago experimentation with acid:

“Jon Weiner:

When and how did you first come to take LSD?

Oliver Sacks:

I think it was a few months after I smoked that joint. There was a lot of LSD around. In one of the early experiences I had with LSD, recklessly, I had mixed it with some other drugs and topped it off with some cannabis. I’d been reading about the color indigo, and was puzzled by the fact that no two people seemed to agree on what indigo was. Newton added indigo to the spectrum because he thought the spectrum ought to have seven colors, as the musical scale has seven notes.

Anyhow I got stoned on acid. And when I was really high, I said, ‘I want to see indigo, now!’ And, as if thrown by a paintbrush, a huge, trembling, pear-shaped drop of purest indigo appeared on the wall in front of me. It seemed wonderfully luminous, and sort of numinous at the same time. So much so that I thought, ‘This is the color of heaven. This must be the color which Giotto tried to get into his paintings but could never get. And maybe he couldn’t get it because it doesn’t exist.’

I lent toward this in a sort of rapture, and it suddenly disappeared, leaving me with an immense sense of loss. I had had a sense of bliss or rapture, almost orgasm, seeing the indigo.

For months after, I kept looking for indigo. I went to a mineralogical museum and looked at azurite, which is often described as indigo. But it was nothing like what I had seen when stoned.

I did see indigo again, curiously. I was at a concert, listening to some Monteverdi. And I was enraptured by the music, thrown into a sort of ecstasy. The concert was in the Egyptology gallery of a museum in New York, and in the interval I went out and saw some of the lapis lazuli things. And they were indigo. And I thought, ‘It really exists.’ But then, after the concert, I went again, and it wasn’t indigo. I’ve never seen it since.'”

Tags: ,

“Would Even The Most Penny-Pinching Cut-Price Airline Be Able To Sell Tickets To Passengers On Flights That Have An Empty Cockpit?”

December 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I would trust a pilotless aircraft just as much as a piloted one–perhaps more. Maybe at least one of the people on the ground controlling the plane isn’t falling-down drunk? Your average aviator ain’t exactly Sully Sullenberger. And you know how Jet Blue pilots tend to joke that they were just testing the plane’s new tires after they do a crappy job landing and bounce down the runway? You know how everyone laughs because they’re happy they’re not dead? I really don’t think it’s funny. From the Economist, an excerpt from an article about unmanned flight:

“It is potentially a huge new market. America’s aviation regulators have been asked by Congress to integrate unmanned aircraft into the air-traffic control system as early as 2015. Some small drones are already used in commercial applications, such as aerial photography, but in most countries they are confined to flying within sight of their ground pilot, much like radio-controlled model aircraft. Bigger aircraft would be capable of flying farther and doing a lot more things.

Pilotless aircraft could carry out many jobs at a lower cost than manned aircraft and helicopters—tasks such as traffic monitoring, border patrols, police surveillance and checking power lines. They could also operate in conditions that are dangerous for pilots, including monitoring forest fires or nuclear-power accidents. And they could fly extended missions for search and rescue, environmental monitoring or even provide temporary airborne Wi-Fi and mobile-phone services. Some analysts think the global civilian market for unmanned aircraft and services could be worth more than $50 billion by 2020.

Whatever happens, pilots will still have a role in aviation, although not necessarily in the cockpit. ‘As far as the eye can see there will always be a pilot in command of an aircraft,’ says Lambert Dopping-Hepenstal, the director of ASTRAEA. But that pilot may be on the ground and he may be looking after more than one unmanned aircraft at the same time.

Commercial flights carrying freight and express parcels might one day also lose their on-board pilots. But would even the most penny-pinching cut-price airline be able to sell tickets to passengers on flights that have an empty cockpit? More realistically, those flights might have just one pilot in the future. Technology has already relieved the flight deck of a number of jobs. Many early large aircraft had a crew of five: two pilots, a flight engineer, a navigator and a radio operator. First the radio operator went, then the navigator, and by the time the jet era was well under way in the 1970s flight engineers began to disappear too. Next it could be the co-pilot, replaced by the autonomous flight systems now being developed.”

« Older entries § Newer entries »