Video about the press conference to promote the 1992 rematch between Bobby Fischer and Boris Spassky, which was played for money, not glory. Fischer was far gone at this point, a sad spectacle overflowing with demons.
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Tags: Bobby Fischer, Boris Spassky
"Monkeys could choose whether they got a tiny square of blue Jell-O or a big chunk of red Jell-O." (Image by Donar Reiskoffer.)
From Amy Dockser Marcus’ WSJ article about Yale psychologist Laurie Santos’ experiments with monkey-based economics, an excerpt about the differences between human and simian fiscal sense:
“The experiments that have been done so far show that many of our economic behaviors are deeply rooted. Still, there appears to be a place where the two species part ways.
Researchers wondered whether monkeys, like humans, desire an expensive item more. For the same number of tokens, the monkeys could choose whether they got a tiny square of blue Jell-O or a big chunk of red Jell-O. Later, the monkeys were allowed to choose which kind they wanted. If the monkeys were like humans, they would have gone for the blue Jell-O, the more ‘expensive’ choice. But the monkeys gorged happily on both.
The researchers are still gathering and analyzing the data. One possibility: Human taste preferences are based on many factors, whereas the monkeys’ are not. Some might argue that human economic behavior is more advanced since it includes ‘culture and meta-awareness’ in decision-making, said Dr. Santos. There’s another, less flattering possibility too. ‘The monkeys,’ she said, ‘are more rational.'”
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Santos lectures on monkey economics at TED:
Tags: Amy Dockser Marcus, Laurie Santos
Speaking of B.F. Skinner, his daughter, Deborah, has always vehemently denied charges that she was raised as a Behaviorist lab rat. From a 2004 Guardian article:
“My early childhood, it’s true, was certainly unusual – but I was far from unloved. I was a much cuddled baby. Call it what you will, the ‘aircrib,’ ‘baby box,’ ‘heir conditioner’ (not my father’s term) was a wonderful alternative to the cage-like cot. My father’s intentions were simple, and based on removing what he and my mother saw as the worst aspects of a baby’s typical sleeping arrangements: clothes, sheets and blankets. These not only have to be washed, but they restrict arm and leg movement and are a highly imperfect method of keeping a baby comfortable. My mother was happy. She had to give me fewer baths and of course had fewer clothes and blankets to wash, so allowing her more time to enjoy her baby.
I was very happy, too, though I must report at this stage that I remember nothing of those first two and a half years. I am told that I never once objected to being put back inside. I had a clear view through the glass front and, instead of being semi-swaddled and covered with blankets, I luxuriated semi-naked in warm, humidified air. The air was filtered but not germ-free, and when the glass front was lowered into place, the noise from me and from my parents and sister was dampened, not silenced.
I loved my father dearly. He was fantastically devoted and affectionate. But perhaps the stories about me would never have started if he had done a better job with his public image. He believed that, although our genes determine who we are, it is mostly our environment that shapes our personality. A Time magazine cover story ran the headline ‘BF Skinner says we can’t afford freedom.’ All he had said was that controls are an everyday reality – traffic lights and a police force, for instance – and that we need to organise our social structures in ways that create more positive controls and fewer aversive ones. As is clear from his utopian novel, Walden Two, the furthest thing from his mind was a totalitarian or fascist state.”
Finally got around to reading the Economist article, “What Happened to the Flying Car?” An excerpt about a couple of such vehicles close to the market:
“The Transition is being aimed at pilots who want to be able to drive to the airport and take off without changing vehicles, or land at a distant airport and not be stranded. As its name implies, it is intended to be a transitional product, a step on the way to true sky cars capable of taking off and landing almost anywhere. Such aircraft will require the development of more efficient motors and better control systems, says Rob Bulaga, president of Trek Aerospace in Folsom, California, another company developing a flying car.
Trek is adapting a ‘personal aerial vehicle’ concept originally developed for DARPA, the research-funding agency of America’s Department of Defence, to create a civilian vehicle. This two-seater, the Tyrannos, has ducted propellers powered by petrol engines, with a battery backup. Although it has been possible to make such vehicles for decades, they are notoriously difficult to fly. ‘It’s just basic physics,’ says Mr Bulaga. ‘Any vehicle that takes off and lands vertically is unstable.’ To make it practical, computers are needed to make the constant tweaks required to achieve stable flight. Without them, even just hovering is like trying to stand on a beachball, he says.”
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A personal flying vehicle from Trek Aerospace:
Tags: Rob Bulaga
William F. Buckley and B.F. Skinner, in 1973, discussing moral development.
See also:
Tags: B.F. Skinner, William F. Buckley
Before the sun dies, we are likely to be struck by about ten asteroids that can return us to the Permian Era–or worse. What to do? The opening of “Deflecting Asteroids,” Gregory L. Matloff’s IEEE Spectrum piece:
“In early 2007, I took part in a NASA Marshall Space Flight Center study of proposed deflection techniques that could be ready for use by the end of 2020. My colleagues and I assumed that by that point we’d have a heavy-lift booster capable of sending 50 000 kg or more on an Earth-escape trajectory.
We considered several strategies. The most dramatic—and the favorite of Hollywood special-effects experts—is the nuclear option. Just load up the rocket with a bunch of thermonuclear bombs, aim carefully, and light the fuse when the spacecraft approaches the target. What could be simpler? The blast would blow off enough material to alter the trajectory of the body, nudging it into an orbit that wouldn’t intersect Earth.
But what if the target is brittle? The object might then fragment, and instead of one large body targeting Earth, there could be several rocks—now highly radioactive—headed our way. Also, a lot of people might object to even the mere testing of any plan that involved lobbing 100-megaton bombs into space. The nuclear option might then be limited to a last-ditch defense of Earth, should we get little warning of an impending impact.”
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Future scientists in training, 1979:
Tags: Gregory L. Matloff
The late, great Hiram Bullock joins David Sanborn, Marcus Miller, Omar Hakim and Philippe Saisse on Night Music in 1989 to jam on electric toy instruments.
Tags: David Sanborn, Hiram Bullock, Marcus Miller, Omar Hakim, Philippe Saisse
From a typically eccentric Adam Curtis essay, “Bodybuilding and Nation-Building,” a look at how developing muscles was begun as a riposte to industrialization:
“At the end of the nineteenth century a fanatical craze for physical fitness swept through Britain. Millions of men and women took up gymnastics, body building and other physical exercises.
Such a thing had never happened before – and it was given a name – Physical Culture.
The craze had an almost religious intensity because those who promoted it said that it was the only way to prevent the British nation – and its Empire – from collapsing. Behind this was a powerful belief that the modern world of the 1890s – the teeming cities with their slums and giant factories – was leading to a ‘physical degeneracy’ in millions of people.
It was a fear that had started with the elite who ran Britain’s public schools. Matthew Arnold warned of ‘the strange disease of modern life’ with its ‘sick hurry’ and ‘divided aims.’ Out of that came a movement called ‘Muscular Christianity’ which wanted to recreate the kind of heroic human being that existed before industry and the modern world came along and corroded everything.
It was a vision of a restored physical and moral perfection in the young men who were going to run the empire. And it involved doing lots of exercises in new things called Gymnasiums. Then liberal reformers got worried about the working classes – convinced that the slums were leading to a ‘physical degeneracy.’ So they persuaded lots more people to do exercises.
Then a figure rose up who united all of this dramatically into a mass movement. He was called Eugen Sandow.
Sandow came from Prussia, he started as a circus and music-hall performer. But then in the late 1890s he invented something he called ‘body-building.’ It caused a sensation throughout Europe and America – and he became a massive celebrity because he was seen as the leader of a crusade of Physical Culture that was going to stop the degeneracy that was plaguing Britain.” (The Browser.)
Tags: Adam Curtis, Eugen Sandow
Smart Sand shares information, joins together to form objects. From CNET: “Researchers at MIT have developed a robotic system for duplicating shapes, a potential alternative approach to three-dimensional printing. The Distributed Robotics Lab at MIT today detailed research aimed at replicating objects by essentially carving them from an unformed pile of ‘smart sand’ or ‘robot pebbles.’ The vision is to have these miniature robots automatically create replicas of different sizes with only an original shape to work with.”
Only a computer demo at this point:
I watched this excellent John Zorn documentary about a decade ago, but where? There was no Youtube. Was it all a dream? No, it was real.
Tags: John Zorn
I’ve probably posted something about swarmbots being programmed to create their own language, but Marcus du Sautoy sums up the experimentation really well in a new article about the Turing Test in the Guardian. An excerpt:
“For me one of the most striking experiments in AI is the brainchild of the director of the Sony lab in Paris, Luc Steels. He has created machines that can evolve their own language. A population of 20 robots are first placed one by one in front of a mirror and they begin to explore the shapes they can make using their bodies in the mirror. Each time they make a shape they create a new word to denote the shape. For example the robot might choose to name the action of putting the left arm in a horizontal position. Each robot creates its own unique language for its own actions.
The really exciting part is when these robots begin to interact with each other. One robot chooses a word from its lexicon and asks another robot to perform the action corresponding to that word. Of course the likelihood is that the second robot hasn’t a clue. So it chooses one of its positions as a guess. If they’ve guessed correctly the first robot confirms this and if not shows the second robot the intended position.
The second robot might have given the action its own name, so it won’t yet abandon its choice, but it will update its dictionary to include the first robot’s word. As the interactions progress the robots weight their words according to how successful their communication has been, downgrading those words where the interaction failed. The extraordinary thing is that after a week of the robot group interacting with each other a common language tends to emerge. By continually updating and learning, the robots have evolved their own language. It is a language that turns out to be sophisticated enough to include words that represent the concept of ‘left’ and ‘right.’ These words evolve on top of the direct correspondence between word and body position. The fact that there is any convergence at all is exciting but the really striking fact for me is that these robots have a new language that they understand yet the researchers at the end of the week do not comprehend until they too have interacted and decoded the meaning of these new words.”
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Luc Steels talks robot culture at TED:
Tags: Luc Steels, Marcus du Sautoy
The cameras follow us now, but we don’t mind. We even invite them. Nothing seems real, but everything is a reality show. It’s attention we think we need. But when everyone is a star, no one is. What happens when this new arrangement is not enough?
We don’t even know what it means yet, but we guess it’s cool. But what if it isn’t? What if those pictures of us on screens of all sizes aren’t flattering?
Not you, Ashlee. You’re good people. But what of the rest of us?•
From Felix Gillette’s smart new Businessweek article about the Internet buzz saw that is Buzzfeed, a passage on company co-founder Jonah Peretti, who sees the site as a psycho-sociological experiment, and one of his influences, Stanley Milgram:
“Peretti, 38, has a knack for coining clever Web neologisms. Among the keys to achieving success on the Internet, he says, is deploying ‘Big Seed Marketing,’ optimizing ‘Viral Lift,’ using a ‘Mullet Strategy,’ and catering to the ‘Bored at Work Network.’ ” He sees himself not only as a businessman but as something of an applied scientist, testing the theories of 20th century academic sociologists vs. the contemporary data of the social Web.
To understand some of the principles underlying BuzzFeed’s strategy, he recommends reading The Individual in a Social World, a 1977 book by Stanley Milgram, who is known, among other things, for his experiments leading to the six degrees of separation theory. ‘When some cute kitten video goes viral,’ says Peretti, ‘you know a Stanley Milgram experiment is happening thousands of times a day.’
Peretti grew up in Oakland, Calif., graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 1996 with a degree in environmental studies, and spent a couple of years teaching computers and Web publishing to high school students in New Orleans. After co-writing a number of papers for academic conferences (‘Historical Role-Playing in Virtual Worlds: VRML in the History Curriculum and Beyond’), he matriculated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he earned a master’s degree from the Media Lab.
In 2001, inspired by reports of substandard working conditions at Nike (NKE) factories, Peretti ordered a pair of custom Nike sneakers decorated with the word ‘Sweatshop.’ The company refused to fill the order, and Peretti got into a theatrical back-and-forth with a customer rep on e-mail. Afterward, Peretti e-mailed the document to 10 acquaintances, who passed it along to their friends. The whole thing snowballed. Overnight, Peretti became an Internet sensation. NBC flew him to New York to appear on Today.
Peretti walked away from the Nike affair a presumed expert on the explosive Internet phenomena now known as viral media. Writing about his experience for the Nation in April 2001, he theorized, ‘In the long run this episode will have a larger impact on how people think about media than how they think about Nike and sweatshop labor.’ He speculated that by understanding the dynamics of ‘decentralized distribution systems and peer-to-peer networks,’ new forms of social protest would emerge and challenge the ‘constellations of power traditionally supported by the mass media.'”
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Stanley Milgram’s 1962 experiment, “Obedience”:
Excellent article at Capital by my old pal Steven Boone, in which he does the Wi-Fi shuffle, scamming free connectivity wherever he can and summing up our somnambulant, searching age. An excerpt:
“Back home I had run into many such late-night nerd-drifters at the Apple store on 58th Street. An angry young black British writer had tipped me to the glories of 24-hour Apple joints one night, when we both found ourselves kicked out of the Grand Central Terminal wifi hotspot at closing time.
58th Street was a revelation. So this was where all the weirdoes who used to fill the early-2000’s Internet cafe on Times Square had migrated.
Under the supervision of highly tolerant Apple store Geniuses, folks could play with the latest MacBooks, iPods, Shuffles, Airs, iPhones, and iMacs (iPads were still a few months off) for as long as they could stand or lean at the waist-level display tables. Others who brought their own devices siphoned wifi while sitting on the stone bench encircling the store’s Logan’s Run-looking glass elevator.
My favorite stand-up regular was a wild Hispanic man who scoured YouTube for reggaeton booty-shaking videos. None of my business, except that he would watch the clips full-screen on the store’s biggest iMac display, the speaker bass thumping while he ground his hips in the approximate space the dancing women’s butts would have occupied if the videos were holograms. Here was the only argument for 3-D that I could respect. On a similar theme, I once overheard a young, broke playboy arranging a booty call on one of the iPhones. Speaking above the store’s iTunes-diverse muzak, he told the girl he was just leaving the studio.
Others conducted important business on the phones, shouting or sobbing or plaintively whispering. Been there, too: The day my MacBook and phone got stolen, I ran to the Geniuses before I thought to run to the cops.
This was the future a lot of dystopian sci-fi authors warned us about, where a private, profit-hungry corporation could make itself feel like Mom’s house.“
Tags: Steven Boone
"A decentralized network that routed messages from place to place using addresses that had nothing to do with physical locations." (Image by Remi Jouan.)
From “World War 3.0,” Michael Joseph Gross’ new Vanity Fair examination of the current challenges to the Internet, a passage about the origin of the boundary-busting nature of the medium:
“Vint Cerf knew from the start that there was a problem—he just couldn’t fix it. The year was 1975, and Cerf was on a team of computer scientists at Stanford University under contract to finish a new communications network for the U.S. military. The goal was full cryptographic capability—a system that allowed all messages to be authenticated from both sides—on a network that could be used anywhere in the world. Two things prevented the scientists from making this network as secure as they would have liked. One obstacle was institutional: ‘The only technology that would have allowed for such security was still classified at the time,’ Cerf recalls. The other obstacle was simple momentum. Before the developers could implement truly secure encryption, Cerf explains, ‘the system kind of got loose,’ meaning that problems would have to be fixed on the fly.
Cerf is frequently referred to as ‘the father of the Internet.’ His most celebrated achievement, for which he shares credit with the engineer and computer scientist Robert Kahn, was creating the TCP/IP protocol, the system that allows computers and networks all over the world to talk to one another. He was an early chairman of the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or icann, which maintains the Domain Name System, the virtual address book that shows your computer where to go when you type the name of a Web site into your browser. He now works as Internet Evangelist—that’s his actual title—for Google.
Most of the Internet’s problems, Cerf believes, stem from the issue of state sovereignty. The Internet was designed to ignore national boundaries. It was designed this way, Cerf says, because ‘it was intended to deal with a military problem’: how could soldiers exchange messages without letting their enemies know where they were? Cerf and others solved that problem by building a decentralized network that routed messages from place to place using addresses that had nothing to do with physical locations.
This was something new.”
Tags: Michael Joseph Gross, Robert Kahn, Vint Cerf
Russell Harty visits Quentin Crisp’s filth-covered East Village dump in 1985.
At one point, Crisp comments that what makes New York City different is that it’s the only place where everyone talks to everyone. That may still be true for certain strips of Brooklyn, but it’s mostly a thing of the past otherwise. And it’s not just New Yorkers who have become so alienated from others–people who visit here from the rest of the country (and the rest of the world) seem even worse. We’ve always been tribal, but the tribe used to be more bound to geography and genuineness. No more. Now the virtual network of “friends” we accrue online is our tribe. The other self we create on social networks, which has only a glancing connection to the truth, is who we think we are. But it’s not real and we’re disconnected from ourselves and disenchanted with reality when it has the gall to encroach on our bubble. Things have gotten murky.
Tags: Quentin Crisp, Russell Harty
"The funds will be used to 'design, program, harden, and field-test the apps with bonobo testers and to connect them to robots.'" (Image by Ltshears.)
Giving a bonobo its own robot to control remotely isn’t, on the face if it, as dangerous as letting a kangaroo have an A-bomb, but I still have my concerns. Nonetheless, unless this is an early April fools joke, a new Kickstarter campaign wants to match primates and bots. From IEEE Spectrum:
“What Dr. Ken Schweller (a professor of computer science and psychology and chair of the Great Ape Trust) wants to do is develop a set of Internet-connected keyboards that the bonobos can carry around with them and use to communicate directly with humans. Humans, for their part, will be able to use an app that translates their speech directly to the symbols used by the bonobos, potentially opening up real-time two-way intelligent communication between you and another species.
RoboBonobo and Bonobo Chat are trying to raise $20,000 on Kickstarter; the funds will be used to ‘design, program, harden, and field-test the apps with bonobo testers and to connect them to robots and other external devices.’ That’s a little bit unspecific for such a large sum of money (although we do know that the robot in the picture above will be getting a total redesign), but at least the $500 level reward is pretty awesome: you get to have a live Skype chat session with a bonobo, completely safe from rampaging RoboBonobos with water cannons.”
Tags: Ken Schweller
Steve Mahan, a blind man, behind the wheel of a Google self-driving car. (Thanks Verge.)
Tags: Steve Mahan
Two Titanic survivors, tennis pros Richard Williams and Karl Behr, met for a match in Boston several months after the disaster. In “Unsinkable,” L. Jon Wertheim’s excellent new Sports Illustrated story, the writer recalls their dramatic stories. An excerpt that imagines the shipwreck occurring in our media-drenched era:
“Imagine the Titanic sinking not in 1912 but in 2012. Passengers’ Twitter feeds and Facebook posts would describe the disaster in real time as they were rescued. Cable networks would provide round-the-clock coverage, complete with theme music, a catchphrase—Catastrophe at Sea!—and digital animation of the sinking. Morning shows would book survivors, literary and film agents would hustle story rights, class-action lawyers would troll for clients. Just see the media frenzy that followed the sinking of the Italian luxury cruise linerCosta Concordia earlier this year.
Now consider a scenario in which two of the survivors were dashing, world-class athletes in the same sport, destined to face off against each other many times. The hype surrounding those matches would be immeasurable. After their playing careers, the two men would be bracketed together—the Ralph Branca and Bobby Thomson of the sea—perhaps cowriting a book, then hitting the speaking circuit.
A century ago the culture was different. Look-at-me sensibilities were considered gauche. Many passengers lucky enough to have ended up on the Carpathia struggled with what today would be diagnosed as post–traumatic stress disorder. This was especially true for the men, whose survival was seen by some as evidence of cowardice. Ismay, the White Star director, was pilloried in the British newspapers. Ostracized by London society, he moved to Ireland and spent the remaining 25 years of his life out of the public eye.
Behr, according to family members, suffered profound survivor’s guilt. His granddaughter Helen Behr Sanford, known as Lynn, spent 10 years meticulously researching his story and recently published Starboard at Midnight, a fictionalized account of Behr’s experience on the Titanic. ‘He wished he had saved someone from the water so that at least an act of heroism could have resulted from his survival,’ she writes. ‘He was crushed by [an] inarticulate sadness beyond anyone’s understanding.'” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Karl Behr, L. Jon Wertheim, Richard Williams
Nicholas de Monchaux, who’s written a history of NASA spacesuits, proposes taking underutilized city-owned parcels, maximizing them and linking them.
Tags: Nicholas de Monchaux
I love Ray Kurzweil, but let’s say that he is a glass-half-full kind of futurist. Naturally, he’s drawn to the promise of Evacuated Tube Transport Technolgy (ET3), car-sized passenger capsules that travel via tubes. Space travel here on Earth! Someday, perhaps. From Kurzweil:
“The Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) system (U.S. Patent 5950543, assigned to ET3.com, Inc.) would take passengers from New York to Beijing in just two hours. Advocates of Evacuated Tube Transport (ETT) claim it is silent, cheaper than planes, trains, or cars and faster than jets.
How it would work: put a superconducting maglev train in evacuated tubes, then accelerate using linear electric motors until the design velocity is attained. Passive superconductors allow the capsules to float in the tube, while eddy currents induced in conducting materials drive the capsules. Efficiency of such a system would be high, as the electric energy required to accelerate a capsule could largely be recaptured as it slows.”
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ET3 promotional video:
Tags: Ray Kurzweil
Leaps 30 feet without sustaining damage. From Boston Dynamics.
At the Browser, John Gray decries the idea of Utopia, which was considered extremist in the days of George Ripley’s failed Brook Farm experiment, but has become more centrist in our age, resulting in tortured nation-building experiments in the Middle East. An excerpt:
“Q: If utopias are unreachable – you could say that in Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia, which coined the term, that’s the whole point – why does that make the striving for them pernicious?
John Gray: There are those who say that utopian projects, while they can never be achieved, are valuable because they spur human advance. That’s not my view. My view is that the attempt to achieve the impossible very often – if not always – has huge costs. Even if a project has good intent, its colossal cost always outweighs its reasonability, as we saw inIraq. What is distinctive about utopianism at the end of the 20th century and start of the 21st is that it has become centrist. In other words, for the first half of the 20th century utopianism was extremist, but now we have the utopian idea of building democracy inLibya or Afghanistan. So the utopian impulse – the impulse to achieve what rational thought tells us is impossible – has migrated to the centre of politics. That is connected with humanism and the idea of progress.”
Tags: John Gray
Russell Harty, who played a huge wanker on TV, interviewing Gary Numan on a plane.
Tags: Gary Numan, Russell Harty
Considering the Los Angeles Dodgers just sold to Magic Johnson’s ownership group for approximately $2.15 billion, I reiterate my question about Forbes’ sports franchise valuations (and most likely all their company valuations). I understand Magic and co. overpaid, but the numbers aren’t even close.
Tags: Magic Johnson