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“Just Scan The Item’s Bar Code And The App Shows You Whether You Can Get It Cheaper Somewhere Else”

December 3, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Big-box stores, with their savage price-cutting, created a monster they can no longer control: consumers who refuse to pay anything above deep discount. Armed with smartphones, they go to stores to sample items, reach for their iPhones and order the goods from Amazon for a smaller price. From a Megan McArdle Newsweek piece about the category-killers attempting to reinvent themselves on the fly, unlikely as that seems:

“To survive, stores like Best Buy will need to kill their own category, remaking themselves into what might be called ‘small-box stores’: more intimate, accessible, with a unique mix of products and expert personal service that the Internet simply can’t provide. Other retailers have shown that it’s still possible, even in this day and age, to get people to buy things in stores. But can the giants of yesteryear cut themselves down to scrappy, nimble competitors? Can Goliath transform himself into David before the money runs out?

To find out, I went to see the place where Best Buy is reinventing itself. Earlier this year, the firm announced that it would be closing 50 stores, while opening 100 smaller ‘mobile’ locations. It’s also undertaking extensive renovations on remaining stores to refocus them around personal service—the one thing that Amazon can’t deliver via UPS. ‘With things like home appliances, people are going to want the things we offer, for example, the delivery to service and install. Or Geek Squad: thousands of people sitting in homes, doing installations, across all the platforms,’ says Stephen Gillett, the digital wizard who helped lead a turnaround at Starbucks before joining Best Buy eight months ago. ‘If you’ve got a Kindle, a Samsung television, an Android phone, good luck getting service for that at Amazon.’

The idea is that nicer-looking stores and better service will help combat ‘showrooming’—the act of visiting a store to look at a videogame console or fancy television before you buy it, cheaper, on the Internet. The trend has been gathering steam for years, but over the past 18 months, smartphone apps like RedLaser and Amazon’s Price Check have made it as easy as, er, stealing display space from a big box: just scan the item’s bar code and the app shows you whether you can get it cheaper somewhere else.

Usually, you can.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“She Has Been Crying In Private And Trying To Get Back To Riding Her Horses”

December 3, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

You can file Ann Romney being too distraught to ride her horses after her husband’s election loss  as the type of problem that well-fed, privileged people have, and you’d be right. But there’s something more at play neurologically, something that pertains to us all. We sometimes convince ourselves that life is going to be a certain way. It becomes our reality, even if it isn’t a reality yet. Perhaps it’s the repetition of chemical reactions, but we manage to hardwire our brain in a certain direction. Sometimes trauma can knock us out of this mindset in an instant. But usually it’s a slow mourning, a deliberate process.

From a really good Washington Post piece by Philip Rucker about the new normal facing the Romneys post-campaign:

“The defeated Republican nominee has practically disappeared from public view since his loss, exhibiting the same detachment that made it so difficult for him to connect with the body politic through six years of running for president. He has made no public comments since his concession speech in the early hours of Nov. 7 and avoided the press last week during a private lunch with President Obama at the White House. Through an aide, Romney declined an interview request for this story.

After Romney told his wealthy donors that he blamed his loss on ‘gifts’ Obama gave to minority groups, his functionaries were unrepentant and Republican luminaries effectively cast him out. Few of the policy ideas he promoted are even being discussed in Washington.

‘Nothing so unbecame his campaign as his manner of leaving it,’ said Robert Shrum, a senior strategist on Democratic presidential campaigns. ‘I don’t think he’ll ever be a significant figure in public life again.’

Yet friends insist Romney is not bitter. Bitterness, said one member of the family, ‘is not in the Romney genetic code.’

One longtime counselor contrasted Romney with former vice president Al Gore, whose weight gain and beard became a symbol of grievance over his 2000 loss. ‘You won’t see heavyset, haggard Mitt,’ he said. Friends say a snapshot-gone-viral showing a disheveled Romney pumping gas is just how he looks without a suit on his frame or gel in his hair.

‘He’s not a poor loser,’ said John Miller, a meatpacking magnate who co-chaired Romney’s finance committee and owns the beach house next door. ‘He’s not crying on anybody’s shoulders. He’s not blaming anybody. . . . He’s doing a lot of personal introspection about the whole process — and I’m not even sure that’s healthy. There’s nothing you can do about it now.’

By all accounts, the past month has been most difficult on Romney’s wife, Ann, who friends said believed up until the end that ascending to the White House was their destiny. They said she has been crying in private and trying to get back to riding her horses.”

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“The First Person To Live To 150 Years Has Probably Already Been Born”

December 2, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The Financial Times published its “Best Books of 2012“ list today. The contrarian libertarian Peter Thiel chose Sonia Arrison’s 100 Plus, a volume about the longevity boom that’s likely in our near future. The book asserts that “the first person to live to 150 years has probably already been born.” Thiel’s blurb:

“As our parents and grandparents live longer lives, they also contend with diseases and indignities. Many question whether we should want to live longer, to say nothing of for ever. In 100 Plus (Basic Books), Sonia Arrison answers definitively: longer lives and healthier lives are the same goal. The greatest threat to our quality of life in old age comes from complacent acceptance of the inevitability of decay; if you think something will break down anyway, why bother fixing it? Arrison demolishes every argument for fatalism.”

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“They Shouldn’t Be Worried About Making Mistakes”

December 2, 2012 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Before William Shockley co-invented the transistor, won the Nobel Prize and wrecked his reputation with asinine ramblings about race, class and IQ, he was an incredibly brilliant but deeply troubled physicist at Bell Labs who was capable of revolutionizing modern life–if he didn’t first commit suicide via Russian roulette. Here’s a 1969 interview in Palo Alto with Shockley, when only those closest to him knew of his demons.

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“The Literacy Of College-Educated Citizens Declined Between 1992 And 2003”

November 30, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

America is still rich beyond compare thanks to our preeminence in science, but there are cracks in the foundation. Our infrastructure is weakening, our infant-mortality rate is exasperating and our higher-education system, though still one of our great strengths, has reached the point of diminishing returns.

It used to be that the unprepared didn’t make the grade, but the democratization of higher education now means using the bloated tuition costs of lesser students to pay for the work of those with higher aptitudes. I believe we’re getting smarter in many ways, but not in the things colleges traditionally teach. From a report about American universities in the Economist:

“In 1962 one cent of every dollar spent in America went on higher education; today this figure has tripled. Yet despite spending a greater proportion of its GDP on universities than any other country, America has only the 15th-largest proportion of young people with a university education. Wherever the money is coming from, and however it is being spent, the root of the crisis in higher education (and the evidence that investment in universities may amount to a bubble) comes down to the fact that additional value has not been created to match this extra spending. Indeed, evidence from declines in the quality of students and graduates suggests that a degree may now mean less than it once did.

For example, a federal survey showed that the literacy of college-educated citizens declined between 1992 and 2003. Only a quarter were deemed proficient, defined as ‘using printed and written information to function in society, to achieve one’s goals and to develop one’s knowledge and potential.’ Almost a third of students these days do not take any courses that involve more than 40 pages of reading over an entire term. Moreover, students are spending measurably less time studying and more on recreation. ‘Workload management,’ however, is studied with enthusiasm—students share online tips about ‘blow off’ classes (those which can be avoided with no damage to grades) and which teachers are the easiest-going.”

“Learn To Love Solitude”

November 30, 2012 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

It doesn’t seem there’s any solitude now. We’re all interconnected, we’re tracked and commodified by gadgets in our pockets 24/7. We’re consumers more than citizens, more icon than flesh. And how can we develop, ask ourselves the important questions without the quiet?

Yet people are still surprising when you get to know them. They’ve kept something in reserve. Maybe solitude has transformed. Maybe we’ve split ourselves, created our own doppelgangers. Not just because of ego, but also for self-preservation. Perhaps there’s still an inner self that we keep in a separate, uncluttered place. Via Biblioklept, a message to young people from Andrei Tarkovsky.

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“The Device Is A Remarkable Engineering Feat”

November 29, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Predictive text, the prompts you get on Google or a smartphone when you begin typing a word, is  thought of as an Information Age innovation, but it actually has its roots in the Chinese typewriter. From at Max McClure at Stanford’s site:

“For most Americans, predictive text is something cell phones do. From the T9 system on clamshell phones to autocomplete on smartphones, tough-to-type-on cell phones have been natural candidates for this kind of labor-saving input technology.

But in China, predictive text has been around far longer – since Mao Zedong was in power more than 50 years ago, in fact.

Stanford history Associate Professor Thomas Mullaney is an expert – virtually the only expert – on the Chinese typewriter. Though viewed as little more than a joke in the West, the device is a remarkable engineering feat.

Chinese typewriters have no keys. Instead, the typist moves a character-selection lever over a tray bed filled with metal character slugs. The typist then presses a type bar, and the lever picks up the character, inks it, types it and returns it to its place.

But with upward of 2,500 characters crammed into the tray bed, simply locating the correct one could be a daunting task for early Chinese typists. And when they rearranged the tray bed to improve their typing speeds, these workers happened to anticipate many of the advances of modern text prediction software.

‘Input issues that we’re dealing with now are questions that China was thinking about in the mid-20th century,’ said Mullaney.”

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“People Did Suggest The Idea That String Theory Might Be Different”

November 29, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

String Theory, the idea that all the forces in nature can be explained in one unified theory, is something I have trouble accepting. I believe in loose ends, dead ends and split ends. But I could be very, very wrong. From a Browser Five Books Q&A with Steven Gubser on the topic, a passage in which he addresses what’s probably the main criticism of the field: 

“Question:

One problem with string theory that I’ve heard is that there is not just one string theory, there are a number that coexist, rendering the predictive power of string theory, its ability to explain physical phenomena, void. Is that a valid criticism?

Steven Gubser:

Yes and no. It’s certainly oft-repeated. One quick comeback would be to say quantum field theory is like that too, but nobody complains about it. This is the theory that Richard Feynman won his Nobel Prize for, where you are describing the quantum mechanics of relativistic particles. And if you just start with that as your goal you get a wonderfully broad and inclusive structure, which can deal with all sorts of things – it can deal with electrons, protons, neutrons and so on and so forth. But by itself, it only has so much information and you have to supplement quantum field theory with a lot of specific knowledge of physics before you’re going to get anything out of it. The quick comeback would be to say, it’s always like that – whenever you have a theoretical framework it has always been the case that you have to include facts about the world. It’s true that historically, in the 1980s, people did suggest the idea that string theory might be different. That maybe in string theory, you wouldn’t have to add in facts about the world before you could get something out of the theory; you could just sit down and calculate everything. I never said that. I wasn’t working in string theory at the time. I wouldn’t have expected it, and it didn’t happen, but what else is new? It’s true of all theories that we know – so string theory is no better and no worse in that regard.

Where I really do worry is the extent to which string theory can be connected to modern experiment. It’s one thing to say that you have to put in facts about the world before you can get anything out, but a far greater worry is, once you put in facts about the world, what do you get? So what I’m working on right now is that very question. What can you get out about modern physics, once you are willing to use string theory as a calculational tool rather than saying it’s going to be just a theory which predicts everything from scratch? Instead you say, I’m going to use this set of ideas to understand experiments. In fact there have been a number of calculations in the past five to seven years, where some strikingly successful numerical predictions have come out of string theory.”

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“At Least 23 Other People Built Prototype Light Bulbs Before Edison”

November 28, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

So-called job creators are full of crap and actual creators may even be overrated. If you get a great idea, there’s a good chance that someone else may be onto the same thing. The opening of “Are Inventions Inevitable?” at the Long Nose:

“Thomas Edison invented the light bulb in 1879. What if he had never been born, Would we still have light bulbs? And would they still have been invented in 1879? It turns out that this is not just a philosophical question and the answer is yes, the light bulb would have been invented at roughly the same time. We know this because at least 23 other people built prototype light bulbs before Edison, including two groups who filed patents and fought legal battles with him over the rights (Sawyer and Mann in the U.S. and Swan in England).

This is not a strange coincidence that happened with electric lighting, it is the norm in both technological invention and scientific and mathematical discovery. Newton and Leibniz independently invented calculus, Alexander Graham Bell and Elisha Gray both filed a patent for the telephone on the same day — within three hours of each other — and sunspots were simultaneously discovered by four scientists living in four different countries.”

“I Was Born Ten Years Before Michael Jackson. I Remember That Distinctly.”

November 28, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A seemingly homeless man woke up outside of a Georgia Burger King in 2004, beaten badly and without a memory. Since then, no amount of research or attempts to recollect have been able to uncover his identity. Now 64, Benjamin Kyle, as he is called these days, is still officially listed as “missing,” as only his whereabouts are known. He is a stranger to all–including himself. Kyle just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

_______________________________

Question:

Were there other things you forgot besides your identity that you had to relearn?

Answer: 

I’m not sure I had to re learn anything. It seems like whenever i need to do something, if i’ve done it before, I remember. When I got in a car I knew how to drive a car.

I had a dream where I repaired a restaurant stove. And remembered how to do it.

_______________________________

Question:

How do you know how old you are?

Answer:

I was born ten years before Michael Jackson. I remember that distinctly.

_______________________________

Question: 

What are your life goals – career, family, etc?

Answer:

Oh long term, I’m planning on dying. Hell, I’m 64. I plan on working until im dying. There will be no retirement or credit.

_______________________________

Question: 

Are you a time traveller?

Answer:

Everyone is a time traveler. They’re born, they live, and they die.

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“It Will No Longer Be Optional For Machines To Have Ethical Systems”

November 28, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Excellent post by psychologist Gary Marcus at the New Yorker site about the soul, so to speak, of machines, as driverless cars are poised to become the first contraptions to force the issue of AI ethical systems. The opening:

“Google’s driver-less cars are already street-legal in three states, California, Florida, and Nevada, and some day similar devices may not just be possible but mandatory. Eventually (though not yet) automated vehicles will be able to drive better, and more safely than you can; no drinking, no distraction, better reflexes, and better awareness (via networking) of other vehicles. Within two or three decades the difference between automated driving and human driving will be so great you may not be legally allowed to drive your own car, and even if you are allowed, it would be immoral of you to drive, because the risk of you hurting yourself or another person will be far greater than if you allowed a machine to do the work.

That moment will be significant not just because it will signal the end of one more human niche, but because it will signal the beginning of another: the era in which it will no longer be optional for machines to have ethical systems. Your car is speeding along a bridge at fifty miles per hour when errant school bus carrying forty innocent children crosses its path. Should your car swerve, possibly risking the life of its owner (you), in order to save the children, or keep going, putting all forty kids at risk? If the decision must be made in milliseconds, the computer will have to make the call.” (Thanks Browser.)

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1 Thing About Us Future People Won’t Believe

November 28, 2012 in Science/Tech | Permalink

  • College Admissions: Long ago, all universities didn’t have open admissions. Everyone attended college in person and there was limited space. Students had to apply and only some were chosen. Despite best efforts at meritocracy, this system was inefficient and prone toward nepotism. Many who could have thrived were excluded, and those who were lucky enough to attend often had to assume huge debt because there wasn’t the necessary scale to control costs. Education hasn’t improved in every way since it’s moved online and become open to everyone, but it’s decentralized nature allows for unparalleled reach and opportunity. Anyone with the ability to achieve has the chance to.

More Things About Us Future People Won’t Believe:

“In Whatever Form, Either Intelligence Or Stupidity, This Collective Behavior Has Existed For A Long Time”

November 28, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

There’s something about the hive mind that’s fascinating, the way large swaths of people can come to an often tacit consensus of things, the way we swarm to what we believe is the light. In the Information Age, we think of how Google and Wikipedia depend on the wisdom of the crowds to assemble unparalleled knowledge, but stupidity, too, can be the product of many. At Edge, MIT’s Professor Thomas Malone considers the power of collective thinking. An excerpt:

“Pretty much everything I’m doing now falls under the broad umbrella that I’d call collective intelligence. What does collective intelligence mean? It’s important to realize that intelligence is not just something that happens inside individual brains. It also arises with groups of individuals. In fact, I’d define collective intelligence as groups of individuals acting collectively in ways that seem intelligent. By that definition, of course, collective intelligence has been around for a very long time. Families, companies, countries, and armies: those are all examples of groups of people working together in ways that at least sometimes seem intelligent.

It’s also possible for groups of people to work together in ways that seem pretty stupid, and I think collective stupidity is just as possible as collective intelligence. Part of what I want to understand and part of what the people I’m working with want to understand is what are the conditions that lead to collective intelligence rather than collective stupidity. But in whatever form, either intelligence or stupidity, this collective behavior has existed for a long time.

What’s new, though, is a new kind of collective intelligence enabled by the Internet. Think of Google, for instance, where millions of people all over the world create web pages, and link those web pages to each other. Then all that knowledge is harvested by the Google technology so that when you type a question in the Google search bar the answers you get often seem amazingly intelligent, at least by some definition of the word ‘intelligence.’

Or think of Wikipedia, where thousands of people all over the world have collectively created a very large and amazingly high quality intellectual product with almost no centralized control. And by the way, without even being paid. I think these examples of things like Google and Wikipedia are not the end of the story. I think they’re just barely the beginning of the story. We’re likely to see lots more examples of Internet-enabled collective intelligence—and other kinds of collective intelligence as well—over the coming decades.”

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“The Country Will Literally Rise Above Any Other”

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

The questions regarding contemporary China are fairly simple: Will it be merely an imitator or develop into an originator? Will it just appropriate or actually innovate? I’ve put up posts before about China’s Broad Sustainable Building Corporation, which is leading the way in erecting quick and clean high-rises. From Kathryn Blaze Carlson’s rather breathless National Post article about Broad’s latest and greatest project and China’s so-called tech prowess, which is far from a proven commodity:

“When Pierre Beaudet was told about a Chinese corporation’s plans to build the world’s tallest building in record speed — 2,749 soaring feet in just 90 days — the global studies professor marvelled Thursday: ‘Ah. There’s nothing they can’t do.’

Having already revolutionized construction by literally stacking factory-made modules like Lego blocks, Broad Sustainable Building Corporation is sending the world a message — not just about itself, but also about its home country: Make no mistake, China is an epicentre of technological progress and a nation worthy of awe.

‘It’s a symbol of their new superiority,’ said Takashi Fujitani, the director of Asia Pacific studies at the Munk School of Global Affairs’ Asian Institute in Toronto. ‘Modernity today is really about speed in a lot of ways, so being at the top of the world is about being able to do things fast.’

Decades ago, the United States and Russia flexed their muscles in a politically charged race to the moon; today, China is racing for the clouds. The phrase ‘the rise of China’ is uttered so often it is almost cliched, but if Broad is successful, the country will literally rise above any other.”

“There Was Nothing Noble About What We Did”

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

We’re all prone to arguing our “side” rather than the facts and changing our opinions if our so-called enemies accept them. You see it in the minutiae of day-to-day life and you see it writ large in national policy. When President Obama relented and decided to use a health-care reform idea from the conservative Heritage Foundation (individual mandates), his counterparts branded the idea as a tool of socialism. When they got something they wanted they didn’t want it anymore. Emotion and narrative were more important than fact.

Marvin Miller, the first Major League Baseball Players Association union leader, who just passed away at 95, was no stranger to this phenomenon. When he went to court to fight for the players’ right to enjoy the same basic employment freedoms as any other American worker, team owners went ballistic. They had been in control of the game since the start, and they weren’t worried about what was right morally or for business; they just wanted to maintain that upper hand. Even if that was bad for the bottom line. Free agency and player movement, which Miller eventually won, grew fan interest, lifted attendance and TV ratings, and transformed the owners from millionaires into billionaires (or close to it). If the owners had been paying attention to facts instead of fighting for “their side,” they might have noticed this sooner.

There will be stories, no doubt, about how every modern player should attend Miller’s funeral, how they all owe him a debt. And that’s true. But every owner should be there as well. He did even more for them, though they fought him every step of the way. From Jeff Passan’s Yahoo! Sports piece about Miller’s passing:

“Over his 17 years as leader of the Major League Baseball Players Association, Miller instilled confidence in what was a fractured group of players and fear in ownership, preaching the strength of unity. During his tenure through 1982, Miller oversaw MLB’s first collective-bargaining agreement, gained free agency for players, weathered three strikes and two lockouts, and positioned the players to reap the benefits they do today, when the average major league salary is more than $3.4 million.

‘There was nothing noble about what we did,’ Miller said in a May interview with Yahoo! Sports. ‘We did what was right. That was always at the heart of it.’

Baseball’s era of labor discord has evolved into one of peace that’s now deep into its second decade.”

 

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“How Can We Be Expected To Imagine The Death Of A City?”

November 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

New York City residents have always joked, with gleeful cruelty, that California would one day sink into the ocean. But who’s all wet now? In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, James Atlas wonders in the New York Times if our city is ultimately to be submerged. An excerpt:

“There had been warnings. In 2009, the New York City Panel on Climate Change issued a prophetic report. ‘In the coming decades, our coastal city will most likely face more rapidly rising sea levels and warmer temperatures, as well as potentially more droughts and floods, which will all have impacts on New York City’s critical infrastructure,’ said William Solecki, a geographer at Hunter College and a member of the panel. But what good are warnings? Intelligence agents received advance word that terrorists were hoping to hijack commercial jets. Who listened? (Not George W. Bush.) If we can’t imagine our own deaths, as Freud insisted, how can we be expected to imagine the death of a city?

History is a series of random events organized in a seemingly sensible order. We experience it as chronology, with ourselves as the end point — not the end point, but as the culmination of events that leads to the very moment in which we happen to live. ‘Historical events might be unique, and given pattern by an end,’ the critic Frank Kermode proposed in The Sense of an Ending, his classic work on literary narrative, ‘yet there are perpetuities which defy both the uniqueness and the end.’ What he’s saying (I think) is that there is no pattern. Flux is all.

Last month’s ‘weather event’ should have taught us that. Whether in 50 or 100 or 200 years, there’s a good chance that New York City will sink beneath the sea. But if there are no patterns, it means that nothing is inevitable either. History offers less dire scenarios: the city could move to another island, the way Torcello was moved to Venice, stone by stone, after the lagoon turned into a swamp and its citizens succumbed to a plague of malaria. The city managed to survive, if not where it had begun. Perhaps the day will come when skyscrapers rise out of downtown Scarsdale.”

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“This Machine Would Be The ‘Last Invention’ That Mankind Will Ever Make”

November 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

While I’m fully aware that humanity can off itself in any number of ways–climate change seems most prominent right now–I don’t think the Singularity will be the end of us. Carbon and silicon can synthesize quite nicely. But some people argue persuasively that the rise of the latter means doom for the former. Machines, meanwhile, seem suspiciously unconcerned. From “Humanity’s Last Invention and Our Uncertain Future” at the University of Cambridge site:

“In 1965, Irving John ‘Jack’ Good sat down and wrote a paper for New Scientist called Speculations concerning the first ultra-intelligent machine. Good, a Cambridge-trained mathematician, Bletchley Park cryptographer, pioneering computer scientist and friend of Alan Turing, wrote that in the near future an ultra-intelligent machine would be built.

This machine, he continued, would be the ‘last invention’ that mankind will ever make, leading to an ‘intelligence explosion’ – an exponential increase in self-generating machine intelligence. For Good, who went on to advise Stanley Kubrick on 2001: a Space Odyssey, the ‘survival of man’ depended on the construction of this ultra-intelligent machine.

Fast forward almost 50 years and the world looks very different. Computers dominate modern life across vast swathes of the planet, underpinning key functions of global governance and economics, increasing precision in healthcare, monitoring identity and facilitating most forms of communication – from the paradigm shifting to the most personally intimate. Technology advances for the most part unchecked and unabated.

While few would deny the benefits humanity has received as a result of its engineering genius – from longer life to global networks – some are starting to question whether the acceleration of human technologies will result in the survival of man, as Good contended, or if in fact this is the very thing that will end us.”

“You Can Get The Cost Down To Half A Million Dollars For Someone To Move To Mars”

November 26, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Elon Musk, who dreams big, believes he can create a Mars community of 80,000 during his lifetime. An excerpt from Discovery piece by Rob Coppinger about the proposed space colony:

“He also estimated that of the eight billion humans that will be living on Earth by the time the colony is possible, perhaps one in 100,000 would be prepared to go. That equates to potentially 80,000 migrants.

Musk figures the colony program — which he wants to be a collaboration between government and private enterprise — would end up costing about $36 billion. He arrived at that number by estimating that a colony that costs 0.25 percent or 0.5 percent of a nation’s gross domestic product (GDP) would be considered acceptable.

The United States’ GDP in 2010 was $14.5 trillion; 0.25 percent of $14.5 trillion is $36 billion. If all 80,000 colonists paid $500,000 per seat for their Mars trip, $40 billion would be raised.

‘Some money has to be spent on establishing a base on Mars. It’s about getting the basic fundamentals in place,’ Musk said. ‘That was true of the English colonies [in the Americas]; it took a significant expense to get things started. But once there are regular Mars flights, you can get the cost down to half a million dollars for someone to move to Mars. Then I think there are enough people who would buy that to have it be a reasonable business case.'”

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“It’s As Bad Or Worse Than The Dial-Up Connections I Used During The ’90s”

November 25, 2012 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I always remember, especially on seemingly difficult days, that some people in the world starve to death. They don’t have enough food and they suffer from malnutrition before their organs shut down and they die. It’s horrible. You and I on either side of this blog post are very fortunate. That isn’t our condition.

But realizing we’re lucky to have what we have doesn’t mean we shouldn’t point out the things that don’t work well in society, even if they’re not life-and-death things. When I sit with my laptop in a café in 2012 in Manhattan, thought of as the key real estate in America, I’m struck by how incredibly slow my Internet connection is. It’s as bad or worse than the dial-up connections I used during the ’90s. How is that possible?

The short answer is that there are way more wired gadgets than there were then. Not only have laptops exploded in popularity, but now we have millions of tablets and smartphones. The stress on the infrastructure is incredible. But it’s hard to believe this is the best we can do, that the system’s failings aren’t our failings as well.

I’m happy President Obama invested stimulus money in desperately needed alternative energies–and that the investments have thus far turned out so well–but we need some sort of large-scale federal planning to correct our faulty Information Superhighway as well as our physical highways. Not only does business depend on it, but so does the exchange of information. The free market just isn’t handling these issues.•

“They Don’t Always Fully Take Into Account All Current And Future Patterns”

November 25, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

One of the many interesting tidbits I learned from reading Jon Gertner’s The Idea Factory earlier this year is that the genius physicist John Van Vleck was always allowed to ride the nation’s passenger trains for free after helping the railroad industry perfect its schedule for maximum efficiency. (For whatever reason, he became obsessed with rail schedules when he was just seven.) Of course, transportation of all types is a target of improvement in the era of Big Data. From Doug Newcomb in Wired:

“IBM is testing the new traffic-management technology in a pilot program in Lyon, France, that’s designed to provide the city’s transportation engineers with ‘real-time decision support’ so they can proactively reduce congestion. Called Decision Support System Optimizer (DSSO), the technology uses IBM’s Data Expansion Algorithm to combine old and new data to predict future traffic flow. Over time the system ‘learns’ from successful outcomes to fine-tune future recommendations.

The company’s technology allows traffic engineers to quickly take action based on constantly updated information, such as putting detours in place or providing alternative routes to get traffic moving after a snag. They’re unable to do this now, according to IBM, since most metro traffic management centers rely only on video feeds and color maps showing real-time traffic conditions. Jurij R. Paraszczak, director of Smarter Cities IBM Research, says this means traffic engineers don’t have a ‘360-degree view’ of traffic, and depending on predefined responses or making reactive decisions, they don’t always fully take into account all current and future patterns.

‘Rather than pulling all the data together and displaying it in one place where people make decisions on to what to do with it, the idea is to pull the data, display it and then provide tools to drive what-ifs,’ Paraszczak told Wired. ‘The idea is to help them make decisions.'”

“For Politicians, Casino Money Is A Powerful Allure”

November 25, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Building ballparks for wealthy businesspeople is a scam that never helps a local economy. The same goes for legalizing gambling. It’s a bad bet that politicians keep making despite a preponderance of economic studies that prove the folly of such schemes. Urban theorist Richard Florida writes about New York’s drift into becoming a gambling haven in, of all places, the New York Daily News, which isn’t exactly known for its think pieces. An excerpt:

“For politicians, casino money is a powerful allure. Casinos offer a potent triple whammy of big ground-breakings; new jobs in construction, hospitality and gaming tables; and substantial new sources of public revenue. ‘[I]t’s important to look at other sources other than taxing people to death,’ Florida City’s Mayor Otis Wallace (whose city just proposed a 25-acre horse racing, jai alai and casino complex), told the Miami Herald.

While politicians and casino magnates seek to sell gambling complexes to the public as magic economic bullets, virtually every independent economic development expert disagrees — and they have the studies to back it up.

More than a decade ago, the bipartisan National Gambling Impact Study Commission’s Final Report concluded that while the introduction of gambling to highly depressed areas may create an economic boost, it ‘has the negative consequence of placing the lure of gambling proximate to individuals with few financial resources.’

When gambling is added in more prosperous places, ‘the benefits to other, more deserving places are diminished due to the new competition. And as competition for the gambling dollar intensifies, gambling spreads, bringing with it more and more of the social ills that led us to restrict gambling in the first place.'”

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“He’s Not In La-La Land”

November 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

A one-paragraph portrait of technologist Elon Musk as a child in South Africa, from a new Smithsonian profile by Carl Hoffman:

“As a child growing up in Pretoria, South Africa, his mother thought he might have hearing problems. ‘We called Elon ‘genius boy,’ says his mother, Maye. ‘His brain was just ahead of everyone else’s and we thought he was deaf, so we took him to the doctor. But he was just in his own world.’ Musk shrugs when I tell him that story. ‘They took my adenoids out, but it didn’t change anything. It’s just when I’m concentrating on something I tune everything else out.’ He was bullied by other kids. He hated going to school. He was obsessed with facts and reading. ‘If someone said the Moon is, like, a million miles away,’ says Maye, ‘he’d say, ‘No, it’s 238,855 miles from the Earth, depending on when you view it.’ Kids would just go ‘Huh?’ He’s just curious about everything and never stops reading and remembers everything he reads. He’s not in la-la land; he just sees everything as a problem that can be fixed.'”

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“It’s An Augmented Reality Glasses / Heads-Up Display”

November 23, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Microsoft, once ferocious and now an afterthought, has filed patents for augmented-reality glasses to compete with Google. It’s hard to believe the company will become the dominant player in any category again, including this one. From Unwired View:

“Microsoft has it’s own Project Glass cooking in the R&D labs.

It’s an augmented reality glasses/heads-up display, that should supply you with various bits of trivia while you are watching a live event, e.g. baseball game. The device was made public via Microsoft’spatent application published today.”

“This Eventually Led To The Design Of A Self-Filling Water Bottle”

November 21, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Opening of a story from the Next Big Web about an inventor of a bottle that can fill itself with much-needed H2O, even in the most arid of climates:

“The Namib Desert beetle lives in an area that only gets half an inch of rainfall per year, and so it draws 12 percent of its weight in water from the air to quench its thirst. NBD Nano co-founder Deckard Sorensen was inspired by the beetle to the point that he created a self-filling water bottle, which he hopes to bring to the market by 2014.

Every morning, the beetle climbs to the top of a sand dune, faces away from the wind, and ensures that water condenses in hydrophilic areas of its back. Eventually, the water flows to a storage area in the beetle.

To mimic nature, Sorenson layered a surface with hydrophilic and hydrophobic coatings, used a fan to pass air over the surface, and eventually managed to get water to condense. This eventually led to the design of a self-filling water bottle.”

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“He Was A Nailed Down Psychopath. He Wasn’t Violent.”

November 21, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In a Q&A with Time, Oxford psychologist Kevin Dutton points out, among other things, that not all psychopaths are violent. Dutton has authored the new book, The Wisdom of Psychopaths. An excerpt in which he shares his belief that his father was a non-violent psychopath:

“Question:

You write that you think your father was a psychopath…

Kevin Dutton:

It sounds like a crazy thing to say, but there’s no doubt at all about it. He was a nailed down psychopath.  He wasn’t violent. He was a market trader [in the U.K., a person who sells things at an open-air street market].  One of the central messages of the book is that you don’t need to be violent to be a psychopath.  My dad was ruthless, fearless and also extremely charming. He could have sold shaving cream to the Taliban.

Question:

So what would be an example of his psychopathic behavior?

Kevin Dutton:

When I was a kid, probably about 9 or 10 [years old], we went to an Indian restaurant for dinner. Just as my dad was about to pay, he suddenly tinked his spoon against his glass and stood up. The whole restaurant went silent. My dad said, ‘I’d just like to thank you all for coming; some from just round the corner, some from much further afield. You’re all most welcome to join us for a little drinks reception across the road.’

And so an entire restaurant of strangers who had never seen us before were  all applauding wildly because they didn’t want to be seen as gatecrashers. We just took off. He [told me] we’re not going to the pub really and [explained that his] old friend Malcolm had [just opened a new pub across the street].

If you think about the front you need to do that: it’s a whole different kind of personality. On a personal level, I guess I wrote the book to figure out my old man.” (Thanks Browser.)

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