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“He Was Thin, Tearful And Tense”

February 15, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From an NPR report by Howard Berkes about the recently deceased aerospace engineer Roger Boisjoly, who fought like mad but futilely to stop the launch of the doomed 1986 Challenger space shuttle:

‘The explosion of Challenger and the deaths of its crew, including Teacher-in Space Christa McAuliffe, traumatized the nation and left Boisjoly disabled by severe headaches, steeped in depression and unable to sleep. When I visited him at his Utah home in April of 1987, he was thin, tearful and tense. He huddled in the corner of a couch, his arms tightly folded on his chest. But he was ready to speak publicly.

‘I’m very angry that nobody listened,’ Boisjoly told me. And he asked himself, he said, if he could have done anything different. But then a flash of certainty returned.

‘We were talking to the right people,’ he said. ‘We were talking to the people who had the power to stop that launch.'”

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“Obviously a major malfunction”:

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“Until Recently, Supercomputers Were Extremely Expensive”

February 14, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Supercomputer created at Nagasaki University with basic parts for $420,000, as opposed to the usual billion-dollar price tag.

“Inequality Has Only Been Ended Through Communist Revolution, War Or Deflationary Economic Collapse”

February 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From an American Interest interview with Libertarian thinker Peter Thiel (who was also profiled by George Packer in the New Yorker last year):

“Francis Fukuyama: I’d like to begin by asking you about a point you made about there being certain liberal and conservative blind spots about America. What did you mean by that?

Peter Thiel: On the surface, one of the debates we have is that people on the Left, especially the Occupy Wall Street movement, focus on income and wealth inequality issues—the 99 percent versus the 1 percent. It’s evident that both forms of inequality have escalated at a very high rate. Probably from 1973 to today, they have gone up faster than they did in the 19th century. The rapid rise in inequality has been an issue that the Right has not been willing to engage. It tends either to say it’s not true or that it doesn’t matter. That’s a very strange blind spot. Obviously if you extrapolate an exponential function it can go a lot further. We’re now at an extreme comparable to 1913 or 1928; on a worldwide basis we’ve probably surpassed the 1913 highs and are closer to 1789 levels.

In the history of the modern world, inequality has only been ended through communist revolution, war or deflationary economic collapse. It’s a disturbing question which of these three is going to happen today, or if there’s a fourth way out. On the Right, the Tea Party argument has been about government corruption—not ethical violations necessarily, but inefficiency, that government can’t do anything right and wastes money. I believe that is true, and that this problem has gotten dramatically worse. There are ways that the government is working far less well than it used to. Just outside my office is the Golden Gate Bridge. It was built under FDR’s Administration in the 1930s in about three and a half years. They’re currently building an access highway on one of the tunnels that feeds into the bridge, and it will take at least six years to complete.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“The LS3 Prototype Recently Completed Its First Outdoor Assessment”

February 13, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

DARPA’s LS3 (Legged Squat Support System) bot can carry 100 pounds of equipment. Burros are screwed.

From DARPA: “Today’s dismounted warfighter can be saddled with more than 100 pounds of gear, resulting in physical strain, fatigue, and degraded performance. To help alleviate the impact of excess weight on troops, DARPA is developing a highly mobile, semi-autonomous four-legged robot, the Legged Squad Support System (LS3). LS3 includes onboard sensors to perceive obstacles in its environment and path-planning capabilities to avoid them. The LS3 platform is designed with the squad in mind and is therefore significantly quieter, faster and has a much higher carrying capacity for longer mission durations than DARPA’s earlier mobility technology demonstrator BigDog. The LS3 prototype recently completed its first outdoor assessment, demonstrating mobility by climbing and descending a hill and exercising its perception and autonomous follow-the-leader capabilities.”

“They Propose Sending Robots To Seed The Surface Of The Moon”

February 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

While Newt Gingrich and others seem determined to turn the moon into a strip mall, a lunar Levittown of sorts may be feasible soon thanks to a quartet of USC professors and their plan for “contour construction.” From Tim Maly at Fast Company:

“First, you solve the material transport problem by making the moon base out of the moon itself. Second, you mitigate the ‘humans are expensive’ problem by keeping them on the ground until the last minute–you use robots to build the base. Recently, USC Professors Behrokh Khoshnevis (Engineering), Anders Carlson (Architecture), Neil Leach (Architecture), and Madhu Thangavelu (Astronautics) completed their first research visualization for a system to do exactly that.

Using a technique called contour crafting, they propose sending robots to seed the surface of the moon with the basic infrastructure for a moon base (landing pads, roads, hangars, etc.). Once the construction is completed, human crew could lift off and move into their new home.”

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A house printed in a day:

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“The Age Of Corporations Is Coming To An End”

February 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I don’t think corporations have necessarily entered into a certain and permanent decline as information technology expert Venkat Rao does in “A Brief History of the Corporation: 1600 to 2100,” but I really enjoyed his essay. I always like thinking about things building up or falling apart–stasis isn’t that interesting. The opening of Rao’s work:

“On 8 June, a Scottish banker named Alexander Fordyce shorted the collapsing Company’s shares in the London markets. But a momentary bounce-back in the stock ruined his plans, and he skipped town leaving £550,000 in debt. Much of this was owed to the Ayr Bank, which imploded. In less than three weeks, another 30 banks collapsed across Europe, bringing trade to a standstill. On July 15, the directors of the Company applied to the Bank of England for a £400,000 loan. Two weeks later, they wanted another £300,000. By August, the directors wanted a £1 million bailout.  The news began leaking out and seemingly contrite executives, running from angry shareholders, faced furious Parliament members. By January, the terms of a comprehensive bailout were worked out, and the British government inserted its czars into the Company’s management to ensure compliance with its terms.

If this sounds eerily familiar, it shouldn’t. The year was 1772, exactly 239 years ago today, the apogee of power for the corporation as a business construct. The company was the British East India company (EIC). The bubble that burst was the East India Bubble. Between the founding of the EIC in 1600 and the post-subprime world of 2011, the idea of the corporation was born, matured, over-extended, reined-in, refined, patched, updated, over-extended again, propped-up and finally widely declared to be obsolete. Between 2011 and 2100, it will decline — hopefully gracefully — into a well-behaved retiree on the economic scene.

In its 400+ year history, the corporation has achieved extraordinary things, cutting around-the-world travel time from years to less than a day, putting a computer on every desk, a toilet in every home (nearly) and a cellphone within reach of every human.  It even put a man on the Moon and kinda-sorta cured AIDS.

So it is a sort of grim privilege for the generations living today to watch the slow demise of such a spectacularly effective intellectual construct. The Age of Corporations is coming to an end. The traditional corporation won’t vanish, but it will cease to be the center of gravity of economic life in another generation or two. They will live on as religious institutions do today, as weakened ghosts of more vital institutions from centuries ago.

It is not yet time for the obituary (and that time may never come), but the sun is certainly setting on the Golden Age of corporations. It is time to review the memoirs of the corporation as an idea, and contemplate a post-corporate future framed by its gradual withdrawal from the center stage of the world’s economic affairs.” (Thanks TETW.)

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“It Is Our Imperfections That Make Us So Perfect”

February 12, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Ultra-realistic skin that may be making its way into films and video games, created by computer-graphics researcher Jorge Jimenez. (Thanks Gizmag.)

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“You Saw Science About To Fulfill All The Nightmares Of Mankind”

February 12, 2012 in Books, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

J.G. Ballard looking darkly (of course) at technology.

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“We Live In Very Unsettled Times”

February 10, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Walter Cronkite’s 1966 interview with Carl Sagan about UFOs, which have never, ever visited Earth.

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“The Changes Are Tectonic”

February 10, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Over the last three decades, America has become a country where the non-wealthy flatline and the rich grow richer. And that’s not just limited to money. As an article by Sabrina Tavernise in the New York Times points out, while the education gap between white blacks and whites has shrunk, the chasm between well-to-do and poor children has widened exponentially. Programs like the Harlem Children’s Zone are green shoots, but that type of intelligent investment in education is clearly the exception. Sadly, that gives sophists like Charles Murray (who’s quoted in the piece) more opportunity for their ugly politics.

It reminds that having access to endless information doesn’t mean we’re using that opportunity correctly. What should be a great equalizer–cheap technology connecting us to each other and everything we would ever need to know–creates only a wider gap if only the few are being nurtured to use these tools in an empowering way. From the Times article:

“Now, in analyses of long-term data published in recent months, researchers are finding that while the achievement gap between white and black students has narrowed significantly over the past few decades, the gap between rich and poor students has grown substantially during the same period.

‘We have moved from a society in the 1950s and 1960s, in which race was more consequential than family income, to one today in which family income appears more determinative of educational success than race,’ said Sean F. Reardon, a Stanford University sociologist. Professor Reardon is the author of a study that found that the gap in standardized test scores between affluent and low-income students had grown by about 40 percent since the 1960s, and is now double the testing gap between blacks and whites.

In another study, by researchers from the University of Michigan, the imbalance between rich and poor children in college completion — the single most important predictor of success in the work force — has grown by about 50 percent since the late 1980s.

The changes are tectonic, a result of social and economic processes unfolding over many decades. The data from most of these studies end in 2007 and 2008, before the recession’s full impact was felt. Researchers said that based on experiences during past recessions, the recent downturn was likely to have aggravated the trend.

‘With income declines more severe in the lower brackets, there’s a good chance the recession may have widened the gap,’ Professor Reardon said.”

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“He Knew From His Plastics Success That The Chemicals Industry Was Ripe For Exploiting”

February 10, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From Clare O’Connor’s new Fortune profile of Manoj Bhargava, the inscrutable force behind the 5 Hour Energy empire:

“Bhargava says he spent his 20s traveling between monasteries owned and tended by an ashram called Hanslok. He and his fellow disciples weren’t monks, exactly. ‘It’s the closest Western word,’ he says. ‘We didn’t have bowler haircuts or robes or bells.’ It was more like a commune, he says, but without the drugs. He did his share of chores, helped run a printing press and worked construction for the ashram. Bhargava claims he spent those 12 years trying to master one technique: the stilling of the mind, often through meditation. He still considers himself a member of the Hanslok order and spends an hour a day in his Farmington Hills basement in contemplative silence.

Bhargava would return to the U.S. periodically during his ashram years, working odd jobs before returning to India. For a few months he drove a yellow cab in New York. When he moved back from India for good, it was to help with the family plastics business at his parents’ urging. He spent the next decade dabbling in RV armrests and beachchair parts. He had no interest in plastics whatsoever but devoted himself to buying small, struggling regional outfits and turning them around. By 2001 Bhargava had expanded his Indiana PVC manufacturer from zero sales to $25 million (he eventually sold it to a private equity firm for $20 million in 2006). He decided to retire and moved to Michigan to be near his wife’s family. ‘Nobody moves on purpose to Detroit,’ he says. His retirement lasted two months. He knew from his plastics success that the chemicals industry was ripe for exploiting. ‘Chemicals are really simple,’ he says. ‘You mix a couple things together and sell it for more than the materials cost.’

Bhargava takes a shot of his creation every morning and another before his thrice-weekly tennis game. He shakes his head at the suggestion that taking shots infused with caffeine is at odds with his quest for inner stillness. ‘5-Hour Energy is not an energy drink, it’s a focus drink,’ he says, turning one of the pomegranate-flavor bottles around in his hands. ‘But we can’t say that. The FDA doesn’t like the word ‘focus.’ I have no idea why.'”

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“Sleepy? Groggy? Dying for a nap?”

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A Brief Note From 1856 About A Native-American Chief With Two Mouths

February 9, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a ridiculous story that never, ever happened, which actually ran in the March 24, 1856 Sentinel of Napoleon, Arkansas: 

“We were shown by Dr. Legrader, a few days since, a most singular and remarkable head–that of Fouchee, a celebrated chief of the Creeks. The singularity of the head consists in two perfect mouths–a front and rear mouth, with a double set of masticators to each. It is a remarkable fact that it made no difference in his eating or feeding operations which mouth he used, as either answered the same purpose, but whenever he imbibed from the rear mouth, drunkenness ensued much sooner than if he had taken it by the front. Such a head is worthy of the study of anatomy of the medical faculty.”

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“Hello, Commander”

February 9, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Three decades before Siri was able to respond to verbal cues and answer complex questions, just hearing a computer voice seemed impressive. George Plimpton for Intellivoice, 1982.

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“A Very Small Incision Is Made In The Astronaut’s Skin For Each Biocapsule”

February 9, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From a Gizmodo report about the NASA Biocapsule, a breakthrough that will allow for automatic diagnosis and time-release treatment of astronauts in space and, eventually, people on Earth:

“Picture this: An astronaut is going to Mars. The round-trip journey will take between two and three years. During that time, the astronaut will not have access to a doctor, and there’s a lot that can go wrong with the human body in space. So, prior to launch, the astronaut is implanted with a number of NASA Biocapsules. A very small incision is made in the astronaut’s skin for each Biocapsule (probably in the thigh), which is implanted subcutaneously. It’s outpatient surgery that requires only local anesthetic and a stitch or two to close the wound. But after it’s complete, the astronaut’s body is equipped to deal with a whole host of problems on its own.

One of the primary threats in space is exposure to high levels of radiation. When astronauts travel beyond Low Earth Orbit (i.e., to the Moon or Mars), they are at risk of acute radiation exposure from ‘solar particle events,’ sudden releases of intense radiation from the sun, which can damage bone marrow and wipe out someone’s immune system. That’s where the NASA Biocapsule kicks in: It could be filled with cells that sense the increased levels of radiation and automatically disperse medicine to help the body compensate.

This isn’t science fiction.”

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“Unleashed By Technology”

February 8, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Rob Malpage, the South African cinematographer who’s helped give Die Antwoord its spectacularly outré look, also directed this striking BMW spot.

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“It Could Let Us Download Movies From The Lamps In Our Home”

February 8, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I’ve posted before about Harald Haas, the Austrian software designer who is able to stream data using simple household light bulbs and lamps. More about Haas and his Li-Fi from Michael Watts in Wired UK:

“Using off-the-shelf electronics, he can stream videos using an ordinary light bulb fitted with signal-processing technology of his own design. The lamp shines directly on to a hole cut into the oblong box on which it sits. Inside this box is a receiver that converts the light signal into a high-speed data stream, and a transmitter that projects the data on to a screen as a short video. If Haas puts his hand in front of the lamp, excluding the light, the video stops.

Haas, 43, holds the chair of mobile communications at Edinburgh University’s Institute for Digital Communications. His demo is scientifically groundbreaking: it proves that large amounts of data, in multiple parallel streams, can be transferred using various forms of light (infrared, ultraviolet and visible). The technology, he says, has huge commercial potential. His device can be used with regular lighting and electronics — albeit reconfigured — and could transform the way we access everything from video to games, accelerating the speed of internet access by many hundreds of megabits. It could let us download movies from the lamps in our homes, read maps from streetlights and listen to music from illuminated billboards in the street.”

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“We have 14 billion of these lightbulbs”:

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“The Putty Takes The Form Of A Gel That Gets Injected Into The Broken Bones”

February 7, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The ability to repair a broken human bone within days is moving closer to reality, thanks to Fracture Putty. From Geek.com:

“Speeding up the time it takes to heal a broken bone is highly desirable, and a solution may be on the horizon. Research being carried out at the University of Georgia Regenerative Bioscience Center has helped create a new gel being referred to as Fracture Putty. It’s major benefit to those suffering broken bones is its ability to heal them in just a few days, or in the case of severe breaks, cut the healing time to weeks instead of months.

Fracture Putty has yet to be tested on humans, but it has already been proven to work in animals. The putty takes the form of a gel that gets injected into the broken bones. It then goes to work rapidly generating bone much faster than a body can achieve on its own.

The key to Fracture Putty is the use of mesenchymal stem cells that produce a protein key to bone generation. The cells survive long enough after injection into the patient to cause a rapid generation of new bone, thus healing it very quickly.

The time it takes to heal depends on the severity of the fracture, but in all cases it should speed up the process. In cases where complex or multiple bone fractures have a occurred, Fracture Putty could mean the difference between losing a limb and making a full recovery.”

Old Print Article: “Merciful With Madmen–Lunatics Are No Longer Treated Like Wild Beasts,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1893)

February 7, 2012 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"The poor wretches in the cells were chained by the neck to the bars of the grated windows."

A lot of people in the world are still treated horribly, but it was even worse in the past. An excerpt from a report about progress from the February 5, 1893 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Men who have the honor and pleasure of attending a dancing party at the Flatbush lunatic asylum, where the agreeable company assembles for music, singing, dancing and social converse, can hardly conceive of the lunatic asylum of one hundred years ago. Bad as was the prison, the asylum was far worse. It was more hopeless, as the inmates were more helpless. In the middle ages the lunatics were supposed to be possessed of devils and all sorts of tortures were applied to them to oust the fiendish tenants of their bodies. As this belief in the supernatural cause of insanity gave way the maniac came to be regarded in the light of a savage wild beast. Before the establishment of asylums the insane were kept in cages in the market town. Their delusions were the subject of much amusement to the market folks and all kinds of plans were tried to cure them. One physician of Elizabeth’s day gravely recommended rotating cages, like those in which squirrels are confined, the idea being to shake the lunatic up so thoroughly as to stir his brains up, just as a clock is sometimes shaken to set it going.

When asylums were established at first they were merely huge cages, where those who were looked upon as human wild beasts were confined. Society’s idea then was confinement, just that and nothing more. The consequence was brutality and degradation so appalling that when the result of the parliamentary investigation was known in England in 1815 people deemed it hardly credible.

"I never saw nature subdued to such lowliness."

In Dr. Madden’s ‘Travels in Europe,’ is the following upon the subjects of asylums in Cairo, Egypt, as it was in 1840: ‘I was led from one passage to another, door after door was unbarred, the keeper armed himself with a kourbash, a whip with a thong of hippopotamus hide, and we at length got into the open court, round which the dungeons of the lunatics were situated. Some who were not violent were walking unfettered, but the poor wretches in the cells were chained by the neck to the bars of the grated windows. The keeper went round as he would in a menagerie of wild beasts, rattling the chain at the window to rouse the inmates and dragging them by it when they were tardy in approaching. One madman, who spat at me as I passed his cell, I saw the keeper pull by his chain and knock his head against the bars till blood issued from his nose. I forced him to desist. Each of them, as we passed, called out for food. I inquired about their allowance and to my horror I heard that there was none except what charitable people were pleased to afford them from day to day. It was now noon and they had no food from the preceding morning.

‘Two well dressed Turkish women brought in, while I was there, a large water melon and two cakes of bread. This was broken into pieces and thrown to the famished creatures. I never saw nature subdued to such lowliness. They devoured what they got like hungry tigers, some of them thrusting their tongues through the bars, others screaming for more bread. I sent for a few piastres’ worth of bread, dates and some milk. Its arrival was hailed with a yell of ecstasy that pierced the very soul. I thought they would have torn down the iron bars to get at the provisions, and in spite of the kourbash, their eagerness to get their portions rendered it a difficult matter to get our hands out of their clutches. It was humiliation to humanity to see these poor wretches tearing their food with their filthy fingers. Some of their nails were so long as to resemble the talons of a hawk.'”

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“Is It A Vehicle Which Does Not Go About Entirely On Land?”

February 7, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Chuck Yeager never went to the moon, but he was pretty much father to all the astronauts. Perhaps the greatest pilot ever, the first one to ever break the sound barrier, the Colonel guested on What’s My Line? in 1964.

From a 1983 People account of Yeager’s greatest feat: “October 14, 1947. He is strapped inside an orange, needle-nosed firecracker with stubby, razor-thin wings, dangling nearly five miles above the rattlesnake ridges and skeletal Joshua trees of the California high desert. Around him gurgles an incipient hellfire of alcohol and liquid oxygen, just waiting to erupt. His right side hurts like a sumbitch: Two days ago, on a wild midnight horseback ride, he’d been thrown and sprung two ribs—all part of what author Tom Wolfe in his 1979 panegyric to the aces of aerospace, The Right Stuff, calls ‘the military tradition of Flying & Drinking and Drinking & Driving.’ No drinking today, but right quick now he’d be driving…

Straight toward the Barrier.

It hangs out there somewhere ahead: invisible, murderous—a zone of wild turbulence that can flip even the best-prepared aircraft into a wing-shredding spin. Already the Barrier has claimed the life of a top test pilot, Britain’s Geoffrey de Havilland, son of the famed aircraft designer. De Havilland’s DH-108 was hammered to bits, like a macerated moth, as it neared the Barrier.

Now it is Yeager’s turn to try. At 26,000 feet the B-29 mother ship goes into a shallow dive and unloads its ordnance. The firecracker with the man in its belly—known as the Bell X-1 but christened ‘Glamorous Glennis’ by its pilot—drops like a bomb. As Yeager lights off the four rocket chambers, fire leaps from the orange tail pipe, and the plane surges skyward into the sun.”

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“Then They Put The Electrodes On Me”

February 7, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Shortcuts help but can they also hurt? Do we miss something fundamental by taking an abbreviated route, or does arriving at our destination sooner allow us to use the time more profitably? Here’s the thing: We’re going to find out the answer. Electrodes will be attached to our brains, pills will become available, genes will be modified. It’s closer than you might think. Are you prepared? The opening of “Zap Your Brain Into the Zone,” Sally Adee’s New Scientist account of her experimentation with brain enhancement:

“I’m close to tears behind my thin cover of sandbags as 20 screaming, masked men run towards me at full speed, strapped into suicide bomb vests and clutching rifles. For every one I manage to shoot dead, three new assailants pop up from nowhere. I’m clearly not shooting fast enough, and panic and incompetence are making me continually jam my rifle.

My salvation lies in the fact that my attackers are only a video, projected on screens to the front and sides. It’s the very simulation that trains US troops to take their first steps with a rifle, and everything about it has been engineered to feel like an overpowering assault. But I am failing miserably. In fact, I’m so demoralised that I’m tempted to put down the rifle and leave.

Then they put the electrodes on me.

I am in a lab in Carlsbad, California, in pursuit of an elusive mental state known as ‘flow’– that feeling of effortless concentration that characterises outstanding performance in all kinds of skills.

Flow has been maddeningly difficult to pin down, let alone harness, but a wealth of new technologies could soon allow us all to conjure up this state. The plan is to provide a short cut to virtuosity, slashing the amount of time it takes to master a new skill – be it tennis, playing the piano or marksmanship.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“Amazon Launching Their Own Store Will Give Customers A Way To Physically Buy Books”

February 6, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Amazon is opening a boutique retail store in Seattle, à la the Apple Stores, to sell the Kindle line. If it proves profitable, Jeff Bezos might open a chain of shops around the country, maybe internationally. In addition to selling their e-reader, Amazon will likely sell the physical books that they have begun publishing. It would be great if they also offered a carefully curated selection of books outside of their own imprint, perhaps some seminal tech books. Either way, it may likely be the final chain of stores selling physical books that will ever open in America. An excerpt from a Goodreader.com post on the topic by Michael Kozlowski:

“Amazon sources close to the situation have told us that the company is planning on rolling out a retail store in Seattle within the next few months. This project is a test to gauge the market and see if a chain of stores would be profitable. They intend on going with the small boutique route with the main emphasis on books from their growing line of Amazon Exclusives and selling their e-readers and tablets.

Seattle is where Amazon’s main headquarters is based and is known as a fairly tech savvy market. It is a perfect launch location to get some hands on experience in the retail sphere. A source has told us that they are not looking to launch a huge store with thousands of square feet. Instead they are going the boutique route and stocking the shelves with only high margin and high-end items. Their intention is to mainly hustle their entire line of Kindle e-Readers and the Kindle Fire. They also will be stocking a ton of accessories such as cases, screen protectors, and USB adapters.

The company has already contracted the design layout of the retail location through a shell company, which is not unusual for Amazon. When Amazon releases new products to the FCC it is always done through anonymous proxy companies to avoid disclosure to their competition on what they are working on. While we don’t know the actual name of the firm they are working with we have heard rumors that they are based in Germany.

The store itself is not just selling tangible items like e-readers and tablets, but also their books. Amazon recently started their own publishing division and has locked up many indie and prominent figures to write exclusively for the company. This has prompted their rivals such as Barnes and Noble, Indigo and Books-A-Million to publicly proclaim they won’t touch Amazon’s physical books with a ten-foot pole. Amazon launching their own store will give customers a way to physically buy books and also sample ebooks via WIFI when they are in a physical location.”

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“A High-Tech Alternative Appeared In 1909”

February 6, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As recalled in a new Saturday Evening Post article by Jeff Nilsson, the first GPS for automobiles was commercially available in 1909, the year after the initial iteration of Henry Ford’s Model T. (Nick Paumgarten covered similar terrain in 2006 in the New Yorker.) An excerpt:

“As if this wasn’t enough discouragement, there was the challenge of navigating. Road signs were rare and often incorrect. Travelers were frequently reduced to driving from one roadside stranger to the next, gathering a few miles of directions at a time. The earliest road maps by Rand McNally were printed only after 1904.

Yet a high-tech alternative appeared in 1909: a real-time, on-board directional guide called the Jones Live Map. It was invented by J. W. Jones, who had also introduced the Jones Speedometer, the Jones Disc Phonograph Record, and the Jones Yobel —’the gentlemen’s automobile horn.

The idea was revolutionary. The Live Map was a small turntable device with a cable that attached to an automobile’s odometer. Before making their journeys, drivers would purchase paper discs with the route to their destination prescribed by The Touring Club of America.

At the beginning of the journey, the driver would place his journey’s disc to the Live Map’s turntable so that the journey’s starting point lined up with an arrow indicator on the glass cover. As the car began rolling, the turning odometer cable caused the map to rotate. The arrow would point to the driver’s changing position in the journey.

Each disc had up to 100 miles of travel details around its perimeter. If the journey was longer than 100 miles, the driver would replace the first disc with a second, or third part.”

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“More People Live Alone Than At Any Other Time In History”

February 5, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Hell is other people, wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, and have you seen us in the morning? Eew! The opening of “One’s a Crowd,” Eric Kleinberg’s New York Times Opinion piece about the ever-rising number of earthlings choosing to live alone:

“More people live alone than at any other time in history. In prosperous American cities — Atlanta, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco and Minneapolis — 40 percent or more of all households contain a single occupant. In Manhattan and in Washington, nearly one in two households are occupied by a single person.

By international standards, these numbers are surprising — surprisingly low. In Paris, the city of lovers, more than half of all households contain single people, and in socialist Stockholm, the rate tops 60 percent.

The decision to live alone is common in diverse cultures whenever it is economically feasible. Although Americans pride themselves on their self-reliance and culture of individualism, Germany, France and Britain have a greater proportion of one-person households than the United States, as does Japan. Three of the nations with the fastest-growing populations of single people — China, India and Brazil — are also among those with the fastest growing economies.

The mere thought of living alone once sparked anxiety, dread and visions of loneliness. But those images are dated. Now the most privileged people on earth use their resources to separate from one another, to buy privacy and personal space.

Living alone comports with modern values. It promotes freedom, personal control and self-realization — all prized aspects of contemporary life.

It is less feared, too, for the crucial reason that living alone no longer suggests an isolated or less-social life. After interviewing more than 300 singletons (my term for people who live alone) during nearly a decade of research, I’ve concluded that living alone seems to encourage more, not less, social interaction.”

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“Jesus Is Trending Right Now”

February 5, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Louis CK, with his wonderful, wonderful mind, hating on Twitter.

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Isn’t That A More Righteous Use Of Gandhi’s Image Than Some Commercial Selling Cheap Computers At A High Human Cost?

February 5, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"Be the change you wish to see in the world."--Mohandas Gandhi. Think Different.

Sometimes I think about this: Some people have so little food that they starve to death. I don’t mean that metaphorically. They literally lack enough food to keep their organs functioning properly. They develop distended bellies and are no more able to smile than a skeleton. Then they die. Other people have so much food that they read magazines about food. Food is readily available and they have to stop eating at some point, so they fetishize food so that they can keep “eating” even when they’re not. This might sound simplistic and sophomoric and maybe it is, but here’s the thing: Those people really are dying, painfully.

Mike Daisey has applied this thinking to consumer electronics. Some people are so poor that they literally die working in brutal conditions on assembly lines. Most don’t die, but you wouldn’t want their lives in a million years. Things are so bad that the Foxconn factory complex in China has had to place suicide nets outside its windows. Other people have so much accessibility to cheap electronics that the read magazines about consumer electronics on their consumer electronics. They have so much “food” that they fetishize it. And since we tend to calculate purchase price in dollars rather than human cost, no one puts a face on the misery. That’s the crux of Daisey’s monologue, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs.

I’ve already put up a couple of posts about Mike Daisey’s one-man show (here and here), but a follow-up feels necessary. The last post included a good bit from his work which was broadcast on This American Life. The radio show provided a post-performance rebuttal of sorts, which had very humane and progressive thinkers like Paul Krugman and Nick Kristof arguing that the horrid conditions of China’s Foxconn factory were better for the people there than no sweatshops at all. And they’re right: Always choose bad over worse.

But what if that isn’t the only choice? Foxconn has reached such a critical mass of production that Apple (and every other tech company) won’t move production elsewhere if a fairer treatment of workers resulted in slightly higher costs. Payroll is such a small piece of the final price of electronics anyhow. Almost all of it comes from R&D and profit taking.

Daisey isn’t going to back off, nor should we. If we absolutely demand that the workers at Foxconn are treated better, if we use our purchasing power to ensure this, it will happen. Maybe the products will be slightly more expensive and we’ll only have enough money to enjoy them and not enough to fetishize them, but isn’t that enough?

Isn’t that a more meaningful use of the “Think Different” phrase? Isn’t that a more righteous use of Gandhi’s image than some commercial selling cheap computers at a high human cost?

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