Urban Studies

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“It Won’t Be Much Longer Before We Start Creating Synthetic Animals For The Real World”

April 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

George Dvorsky’s io9 post “This Could Be the First Animal to Live Entirely Inside A Computer” examines neuroscientist Stephen Larson’s attempts to create a virtual worm, which has massive implications for the future of medicine and so much else. An excerpt:

“To be fair, scientists , namely the exceptionally small free-living bacteria known as Mycoplasma genitalia. It’s an amazing accomplishment, but the pathogen — with its 525 genes — is one of the world’s simplest organisms. Contrast that with E. coli, which has 4,288 genes, and humans, who have anywhere from 35,000 to 57,000 genes.

Scientists have also created synthetic DNA that can self-replicate and an artificial chromosome from scratch. Breakthroughs like these suggest it won’t be much longer before we start creating synthetic animals for the real world. Such endeavors could result in designer organisms to help in the manufacturing of vaccines, medicines, sustainable fuels, and with toxic clean-ups.

There’s a very good chance that many of these organisms, including drugs, will be designed and tested in computers first. Eventually, our machines will be powerful enough and our understanding of biology deep enough to allow us to start simulating some of the most complex biological functions — from entire microbes right through to the human mind itself (what will be known as whole brain emulations).

Needless to say we’re not going to get there in one day. We’ll have to start small and work our way up. Which is why Larson and his team have started to work on their simulated nematode worm.”

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Old Print Article: “Jack To Have New Nose For Next Fight,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1924)

April 25, 2014 in Film, Old Print Articles, Photography, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Heavyweight champ Jack Dempsey was one of the biggest things going in America in the Roaring Twenties, in an age when boxing was the king of sports. He was as big a star as Babe Ruth or Charlie Chaplin or Harry Houdini. Like all public figures of those days, Dempsey had a brand new audience to please: filmgoers, who could see his every imperfection in newsreels projected on larger-than-life screens. The boxer had added reason to be concerned about his punched-up mug: He wanted to make Hollywood movies. So during a three-year sabbatical from the ring, during which time he made more than ten silent shorts and starred in Manhattan Madness, Dempsey decided to get his nose fixed. From the August 10, 1924 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Los Angeles–Whoever opposes Jack Dempsey in the next battle for the heavyweight ring championship will have an opportunity to test his marksmanship on a nice new nose.

The world’s champion has gone into retirement with a bandaged face after bowing to the filmdom fad of having one’s nose rebuilt to suit the cameraman.

Since Dempsey had been publicly connected with the motion picture industry all summer, there was no way out of it, and accordingly the plastic surgeon was given permission to cut away a piece of the boxer’s left ear and put it where it would make his nose look like Valentino’s.

It will be a week, the doctor said, before the new nose can be unveiled.”

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“Animals Are Hardly Strangers To Our Courts”

April 24, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Considering the appalling way we treat animals apart from a couple of cute ones we are very protective of, it’s worth pondering if non-human creatures should have legal recourse. Historically, animals have taken part in court systems, though as defendants, not plaintiffs. From Charles Siebert’s New York Times Magazine article, “Should a Chimp Be Able to Sue Its Owner?“:

“Animals are hardly strangers to our courts, only to the brand of justice meted out there. In the opening chapters of [Steven] Wise’s first book, Rattling the Cage: Toward Legal Rights for Animals, published in 2000, he cites the curious and now largely forgotten history, dating at least back to the Middle Ages, of humans putting animals on trial for their perceived offenses, everything from murderous pigs, to grain-filching rats and insects, to flocks of sparrows disrupting church services with their chirping. Such proceedings — often elaborate, drawn-out courtroom dramas in which the defendants were ostensibly accorded the same legal rights as humans, right down to being appointed the best available lawyers — were essentially allegorical rituals, a means of expunging evil and restoring some sense of order to a random and disorderly world.

Among the most common nonhuman defendants cited by the British historian E. P. Evans in his 1906 book, The Criminal Prosecution and Capital Punishment of Animals, were pigs. Allowed to freely roam the narrow, winding streets of medieval villages, pigs and sows sometimes maimed and killed infants and young children. The ‘guilty’ party would regularly be brought before a magistrate to be tried and sentenced and then publicly tortured and executed in the town square, often while being hung upside down, because, as Wise explains it in Rattling the Cage, ‘a beast . . . who killed a human reversed the ordained hierarchy. . . . Inversion set the world right again.’

The practice of enlisting animals as unwitting courtroom actors in order to reinforce our own sense of justice is not as outmoded as you might think. As recently as 1906, the year Evans’s book appeared, a father-son criminal team and the attack dog they trained to be their accomplice were prosecuted in Switzerland for robbery and murder. In a trial reported in L’Écho de Paris and The New York Herald, the two men were found guilty and received life in prison. The dog — without whom, the court determined, the crime couldn’t have been committed — was condemned to death.

It has been only in the last 30 years or so that a distinct field of animal law — that is laws and legal theory expressly for and about nonhuman animals — has emerged.”

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“Some People Object That Nudges Are A Form Of Unacceptable Paternalism”

April 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Corporations don’t just nudge–they push hard. Trying to get us to consume products that are often injurious to us, they attack with constant messages to trigger our behavior. That’s considered freedom. But it’s stickier when governments try to influence us with sin taxes, default agreements and helpful reminders. That’s called a nanny state. Sometimes I like such initiatives (cigarette taxes) and sometimes I don’t, but they influence us less and to healthier ends than corporations do. From Cass Sunstein’s new Guardian article about nudging:

“The beauty of nudges is that when they are well chosen, they make people’s lives better while maintaining freedom of choice. Moreover, they usually don’t cost a lot, and they tend to have big effects. In an economically challenging time, it is no wonder that governments all over the world, including in the US and UK, have been showing a keen interest in nudging.

Inevitably, we have been seeing a backlash. Some people object that nudges are a form of unacceptable paternalism. This is an objection that has intuitive appeal, but there is a real problem with it: nudging is essentially inevitable, and so it is pointless to object to nudging as such.

The private sector nudges all the time. Whenever a government has websites, communicates with its citizens, operates cafeterias, or maintains offices that people will visit, it nudges, whether or not it intends to. Nudges might not be readily visible, but they are inevitably there. If we are sceptical about official nudging, we might limit how often it occurs, but we cannot possibly eliminate it.

Other sceptics come from the opposite direction, contending that in light of what we know about human errors, we should be focusing on mandates and bans. They ask: when we know people make bad decisions, why should we insist on preserving freedom of choice?“

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“Technology Is An Existential Disposition”

April 24, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Americans have always viewed technology (and anti-technology) in romantic terms. In a New Atlantis piece, Benjamin Storey argues that Alexis de Tocqueville didn’t give tech in the U.S. the short shrift but instead viewed it as a poetic impulse as much as an economic one. An excerpt: 

“For Tocqueville, technology is not a set of morally neutral means employed by human beings to control our natural environment. Technology is an existential disposition intrinsically connected to the social conditions of modern democratic peoples in general and Americans in particular. On this view, to be an American democrat is to be a technological romantic. Nothing is so radical or difficult to moderate as a romantic passion, and the Americans Tocqueville observed accepted only frail and minimal restraints on their technophilia. We have long since broken many of those restraints in our quest to live up to our poetic self-image. Understanding the sources of our fascination with the technological dream, and the distance between that dream and technological reality, can help revitalize the sources of self-restraint that remain to us.

That Tocqueville presents much of his commentary on technology in the chapter of Democracy in America entitled ‘Of Some Sources of Poetry among Democratic Nations‘ already indicates why his analysis of technology has been less well received than his analysis of town government or the tyranny of the majority. What, after all, does technology have to do with poetry? Wouldn’t Tocqueville have done better to offer a systematic analysis of ‘the material bases of American life,’ in the manner of an economic or industrial historian, as Garry Wills suggests?

To see what exactly poetry has to do with technological progress, we must first seek to understand Tocqueville’s account of the nature of poetry and the human need for it. We must then turn to his account of the appeal of the poetry of technology to the psychic passions of democratic man. Finally, we must consider his analysis of why democratic peoples would take an argument about the hard facts of economics or industry more seriously as a mode of understanding the question of technology than his own reflections on poetry. By doing so, we can understand something about our typical mode of self-understanding and the distinctive kind of blindness to ourselves to which we are most prone.”

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“He Placed A 120-Foot-Long Banana Split In The Outfield”

April 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Robert Andrew Powell’s Grantland article about El Paso betting heavily on minor league baseball and a new (seemingly needless) downtown stadium, a beautifully written passage about how Vietnam vet Jim Paul purchased a struggling Double A franchise for $1000 in 1974 and drew up the Veeck-ian blueprint for the wry, family-friendly entertainment success that the bush leagues have become:

“On the blackboard, Paul mapped out Kazoo Night. Ten-Cent Beer Night. Country Days, of course, and also an appearance by a then-obscure touring mascot called the San Diego Chicken. At one game, Paul tried to set a record for the most soap bubbles blown at one time. He placed a 120-foot-long banana split in the outfield, handed plastic spoons to every kid in attendance, and invited them to race out and eat as much ice cream as they could. When creditors repossessed the stadium’s organ — money was always tight — Paul bought a tape recorder at Radio Shack and began playing the Rolling Stones and Janis Joplin over the loudspeakers. After Diablos home runs, fans placed dollar bills in the batter’s helmet, in gratitude. The ballpark was renamed the Dudley Dome even though it remained roofless. The PA announcer relayed statistics — “No team scores more runs with two outs than the Diablos!” — that he simply made up.

The Diablos, a Double-A team, began drawing overflow crowds even while the team trudged along in last place. The Texas League named Paul its executive of the year. Twelve months later, he won executive of the year for all of the minor leagues. A winter marketing seminar he launched in El Paso grew exponentially as his methods proved successful. The athletic directors of schools such as Notre Dame and LSU began showing up, joining executives from baseball clubs as big as the Houston Astros.”

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A Brief Note From 1925 About Ugliness

April 24, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the July 3, 1925 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“After his clever work as a plastic surgeon was completed, Dr. W.A. Pratt married his model, his patient and the ideal of his own recreating. Dr. and Mrs. Pratt have just returned to New York on the S.S. Columbus and are ‘married and very happy,’ as the culmination of a romance that began with the surgeon’s knife.

Dr. Pratt, who recently predicted ‘a perfect-featured nation’ when the skill of the plastic surgeon becomes more widely known and in demand, had been remoulding foreheads, chins, cheeks and noses for some time before he met the woman whose beauty was to make him forget his profession long enough to take a honeymoon.

‘A woman is only as charming as she is beautiful,’ he says. ‘It is only a question of time when ugly features will have disappeared from the human race.’

His story of falling in love with his model shows that his interest increased as the face under his skillful fingers became more and more lovely. ‘When the work was completed, I was wholly in love,’ he explained.”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

April 23, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Bass Player for the Rolling Stones – 55 (Norwalk)

I have just been told that I am to be someday the bass player for the Rolling Stones, life does not get better than that! Happy (fucking) Easter!

Billy

“Why Does China’s Ruling Single Party Still Call Themselves Communist When They Are So Clearly Anything But?”

April 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

Shanghai during WWII.

Shanghai during WWII.

NPR Shanghai correspondent Frank Langfitt just did an excellent Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

How “free and open” does the regular Chinese citizen feel? I remember talking to some older Chinese people who had immigrated to Canada who were still a little worried about being openly critical about the Chinese government. In other words, do regular citizens feel safe in being able to speak openly about government policy and issues or is there still a feeling of paranoia?

Frank Langfitt:

With friends and even strangers Chinese are much more open with their political views than they were a generation ago. On a 20 minute taxi ride in Shanghai, you can get a very thoughtful deconstruction of Chinese politics and the party. But if you take out your tape recorder, everything changes.

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Question:

What kinds of things do regular Chinese citizens think about the USA that isn’t correct?

Frank Langfitt:

Chinese know America much better than we know China and their knowledge is improving. One question i get a lot of in recent years is will the U.S. and China go to war. There is a fear that a conflict between China and Japan over the islands in the East China Sea will draw in the U.S. I’ve found this sort of talk really unsettling and revealing about how some ordinary Chinese sea the geopolitics of their country’s rise.

Question:

Do you think, China and Japan will go to a war of some type?

Frank Langfitt:

i really hope not. it would be a disaster. #2 and #3 economies at war in north asia. And #1 economy has defense treaty with #3. Yikes.

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Question:

What is the most disgusting thing you have seen in China (I heard kids take shit directly on the street)?

Frank Langfitt:

Not sure what is most disgusting thing i’ve seen, but kids do relieve themselves on the streets sometimes and this has become a really interesting phenomenon. As more Chinese travel, occasionally this will happen on a subway outside the country, say Hong Kong or Taiwan and it goes viral and creates a big controversy inside and outside the country.

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Question:

How bad is the smog really? Have you had to do a lot to adjust to it?

Frank Langfitt:

It depends on where you are. Beijing is at times not habitable for creatures with lungs. there is no way to exaggerate conditions there. Shanghai is much better, largely because we are on the East China Sea and the winds clear out the smog. We have lots of blue sky days and all the glass and steel shimmers and the city looks great. Back in December, though, we had terrible air and we stayed inside the apartment for four days and just blasted the air filters.

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Question:

Why does China’s ruling single party still call themselves Communist when they are so clearly anything but? They still have Mao on bank notes, yet their modern society is an ongoing contradiction of the values he espoused. How do everyday Chinese people and the elites reconcile their hypercapitalist current system with their “communist” party government?

Frank Langfitt:

Great, great question. The Communist Party knows it is not Communist, but can’t dump the name because it is key to its legitimacy. There is a story — perhaps apocryphal — in which the former premier Zhu Rongji asked an American politician what was the one thing the Communist Party could do to change its image in the eyes of Americans. The politician said: “change the name.” Zhu shook his head and said they just couldn’t do that. Chinese people are supremely pragmatic, much to their credit, and they are happy to take advantage of a capitalist-style economy that helps them improve their lives and are less hung up on what things are called.•

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Old Print Article: “Widen Search For Brother Of Dead Recluse,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1947)

April 23, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Homer

Homer Collyer, 1939.

Langley

Langley Collyer, 1946.

One person can lose his mind, but nothing is madder than a couple. 

Two people can encourage each other to health and prosperity, but they can also nurture mutual insanity, creating a madhouse behind close doors, replacing bedroom mirrors with the funhouse kind. No living quarters in New York City history were likely crazier than the Fifth Avenue hoarder heaven that the reclusive brothers Homer and Langley Collyer called home sweet home. It contained, among many–many–other things, 240,000 pounds of garbage, 18,000 books, 17 grand pianos, eight live cats, three dressmaking dummies and two very damaged brothers. 

The following is a March 22, 1947 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article about the demise of the Collyers, published after the police had found Homer’s lifeless body seated in a chair but 18 days before they realized that Langley was just ten feet away, dead and buried under some of his favorite things:

“The junk-filled mansion of the mysterious Collyer brothers in Harlem today was boarded up following the discovery of the body of Homer Collyer but his brother Langley was nowhere to be found.

Homer’s body was found yesterday by police on the second-story brownstone house at 2078 5th Ave. The blind and paralyzed septuagenarian was found in a sitting-up position after a neighbor phoned police.

How anyone ever got in or out of the mansion, reported to be the repository of a fortune in cash, was a mystery to police. They found their way barred at every opening by piles of newspapers, tin cans and other assorted junk.

Walls of Junk

Patrolman William Parker of the 122nd St. station finally got in through a second-story window after a ladder was thrown up. He had to clear away a solid wall of newspapers, however, before worming his way into the house.

The body of the dead recluse was taken out in a khaki bag to the morgue where an autopsy will probably be made today. John R. McMullen, the Collyers’ attorney, said burial will take place in Evergreens Cemetery in Brooklyn. He was confident Langley would get in touch with him.

William Rodriquo of 1 W. 127th St., Manhattan, a Democratic co-captain in the 9th A.D. and friend of the Collyers, insisted that Langley was in a little room on the third floor of the house. But Inspector Joseph Goldstein, who ordered the place boarded up, said if Langley were around he would have come out.”

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“They Have Further Developed A New Technique To Aim A High-Energy Laser Beam Into Clouds To Make It Rain”

April 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Charles Hatfield, 1915.

Charles Hatfield, rainmaker, 1915.

Of the things humans still can’t do, making it rain is one of the more perplexing. We should be able to manage that by now, right? You would think making nuclear power and traveling to the moon would be tougher. We finally may be making progress in this area. From Kurzweil AI:

“Researchers at the University of Central Florida’s College of Optics & Photonics and the University of Arizona have further developed a new technique to aim a high-energy laser beam into clouds to make it rain or trigger lightning.

The solution: surround the beam with a second beam to act as an energy reservoir, sustaining the central beam to greater distances than previously possible. The secondary ‘dress’ beam refuels and helps prevent the dissipation of the high-intensity primary beam, which on its own would break down quickly.

A report on the project, ‘Externally refueled optical filaments,’ was recently published in Nature Photonics.

Water condensation and lightning activity in clouds are linked to large amounts of static charged particles. Stimulating those particles with the right kind of laser holds the key to possibly one day summoning a shower when and where it is needed.”

“Who Should Declare When An Individual Is Dead?”

April 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Thanks to the wonderful Browser, I came across one of the three best pieces I’ve read so far this year (along with this one and this one), Roger Highfield’s eye-opening Mosaic article “The Mind Readers,” which focuses on the life that lingers beneath the surface when humans are rendered into a vegetative state. A passage:

“Half a century ago, if your heart stopped beating you could be pronounced dead even though you may have been entirely conscious as the doctor sent you to the morgue. This, in all likelihood, accounts for notorious accounts through history of those who ‘came back from the dead’. As a corollary, those who were fearful of being buried alive were spurred on to develop ‘safety coffins’ equipped with feeding tubes and bells. As recently as 2011, a council in the Malatya province of central Turkey announced it had built a morgue with a warning system and refrigerator doors that could be opened from the inside.

What do we mean by ‘dead’? And who should declare when an individual is dead? A priest? A lawyer? A doctor? A machine? [Adrian] Owen discussed these issues at a symposium in Brazil with the Dalai Lama and says he was surprised to find that they both agreed strongly on one point: we need to create an ethical framework for science that is based on secular, rather than religious, views; science alone should define what we mean by death.Near death experience

The problem is that the scientific definition of ‘death’ remains as unresolved as the definition of ‘consciousness’. Much confusion is sowed by the term ‘clinical death’, the cessation of blood circulation and breathing. Even though this is reversible, the term is often used by mind–body dualists who cling to the belief that a soul (or self) can persist separately from the body. Today, however, being alive is no longer linked to having a beating heart, explains Owen. If I have an artificial heart, am I dead? If you are on a life-support machine, are you dead? Is a failure to sustain independent life a reasonable definition of death? No, otherwise we would all be ‘dead’ in the nine months before birth.

The issue becomes murkier when we consider those trapped in the twilight worlds between normal life and death – from those who slip in and out of awareness, who are trapped in a ‘minimally conscious state’, to those who are severely impaired in a vegetative state or a coma. These patients first appeared in the wake of the development of the artificial respirator during the 1950s in Denmark, an invention that redefined the end of life in terms of the idea of brain death and created the specialty of intensive care, in which unresponsive and comatose patients who seemed unable to wake up again were written off as ‘vegetables’ or ‘jellyfish’. As is always the case when treating patients, definitions are critical: understanding the chances of recovery, the benefits of treatments and so on all depend on a precise diagnosis.”

“The Delivery Robot Is A Much Easier Problem Than The Self-Delivering Taxi”

April 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Brad Templeton, a consultant to Google’s driverless-car division, explaining why he thinks delivery robots, which will transport goods and not people, shouldn’t be governed by the same restrictions as autonomous cars:

“Delivery robots are world-changing. While they won’t and can’t carry people, they will change retailing, logistics, the supply chain, and even going to the airport in huge ways. By offering very quick delivery of every type of physical goods — less than 30 minutes — at a very low price (a few pennies a mile) and on the schedule of the recipient, they will disrupt the supply chain of everything. Others, including Amazon, are working on doing this by flying drone, but for delivery of heavier items and efficient delivery, the ground is the way to go.

While making fully unmanned vehicles is more challenging than ones supervised by their passenger, the delivery robot is a much easier problem than the self-delivering taxi for many reasons:

  • It can’t kill its cargo, and thus needs no crumple zones, airbags or other passive internal safety.
  • It still must not hurt people on the street, but its cargo is not impatient, and it can go more slowly to stay safer. It can also pull to the side frequently to let people pass if needed.
  • It doesn’t have to travel the quickest route, and so it can limit itself to low-speed streets it knows are safer.
  • It needs no windshield or wheel, and can be small, light and very inexpensive.

A typical deliverbot might look like little more than a suitcase sized box on 3 or 4 wheels. It would have sensors, of course, but little more inside than batteries and a small electric motor. It probably will be covered in padding or pre-inflated airbags, to assure it does the least damage possible if it does hit somebody or something. At a weight of under 100lbs, with a speed of only 25 km/h and balloon padding all around, it probably couldn’t kill you even if it hit you head on (though that would still hurt quite a bit.)

The point is that this is an easier problem, and so we might see development of it before we see full-on taxis for people.”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

April 22, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Employment (all NJ)

forget working, working is for poor people. be a vagabond, jump on a freight train, and get out of dodge, leave jersey, be a hobo type of individual, think like a child, dream of far away places, get a job on a tramp steamer heading for the south seas, stop at tropical islands, explore. hunt for treasure, you just need enough money for food and shelter. live in the south seas, food is free, weather beautiful, guys and gals gorgeous, you can catch fish, hunt wild pig and goat, fruit is free, plenty of island to roam and settle down. anyone can do this.

A Note From 1885 About A Zoologist’s Appetite

April 21, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the August 30, 1885 New York Times:

FRANK BUCKLAND‘S LARDER–This queer fancy which exercised the genius of the cooks of his latter days, began very early. Already at Winchester squirrel pie and mice cooked in butter were looked upon as real dainties, while Frank Buckland has left it on record that ‘a roast field mouse–not a house mouse–is a splendid bonne bouche for a hungry boy: it eats like a lark.’ Very likely this is so; that house mice are not to be recommended I can myself testify as the result of certain experiments which were made at Eton some five-and-thirty years ago. But roast field mouse and squirrel pie were very commonplace viands compared with what was to follow. Christchurch, for instance, was to see a very grisly meal in the shape of a dish of panther chops. The panther at the Surrey Zoological Gardens had died, and the curator, who was a friend of Buckland’s sent him notice of the melancholy fact. Says Frank, ‘I wrote up at once to tell him to send me down some chops. It had, however, been buried a couple of days, but I got them to dig it up and send me some. It was not very good.”

 

“Some People Would Rather Tell Themselves Fables Of Inevitable Doom Rather Than Tackling The Harder Problem”

April 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Do we fetishize an endgame because it’s easier than making the future work? Is it less a burden to await the final nail in the coffin than to treat the patient? From “The Comforts of Dystopia,” a Jacobin article by Peter Frase, author of “Four Futures” and other speculations:

“While we live in a world that abounds in utopian potential, the realization of that potential depends on the outcome of political struggle. A rich elite that wants to preserve its privileges will do everything possible to ensure that we don’t reach a world of leisure and abundance, even if such a world is materially possible.

But one of the things I’ve struggled with as a writer is the tendency of my more speculative writing to mine a streak of apocalyptic quiescence on the radical left. To me, the story I’m telling is all about hope and agency: the future is here, it’s unevenly distributed, and only through struggle will we get it distributed properly. I suppose it’s no surprise, though, after decades in retreat, that some people would rather tell themselves fables of inevitable doom rather than tackling the harder problem of figuring out how we can collectively walk down the path to paradise.

So of the four futures I described, the one that I think is both the most hopeful and most interesting — the one I call ‘communism’ — is the least discussed. Instead, it’s exterminism, the mixture of ecological constraints, automation, and murderous elites, that seems to stick in peoples’ brains, with the anti-Star Trek dystopia of intellectual property rentiers running a close second.

But strip away the utopian and Marxist framework, and all you have is a grim dismissal of the possibility of egalitarian politics. You get something like this, from Noah Smith, which echoes my account of exterminism but updates it to our present drone-obsessed times. For a lot of isolated intellectual writer types, it can be perversely reassuring to think that achieving a better world is not just difficult, but actually impossible.”

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“The Software Estimates The Probability That An Inmate Will Relapse”

April 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

One really easy way to reduce the American penitentiary population would be to decriminalize drugs except for instancess in which someone has sold them to minors. Legalize the less-dangerous ones (marijuana) and sentence pushers to workfare and users to out-patient rehab and education for harder ones (heroin).

Even if that unlikely scenario were to play out, the prisons would still be too crowded and parole would remain a problem. If incarceration is meant to keep offenders from recommiting crimes and not merely as a punitive measure, how do we know which convicts to release and when? Parole has long been an inexact science, but perhaps Big Data can help. Perhaps. An excerpt from the Economist:

“Help may be at hand, in the form of ‘risk-assessment’ software, which crunches data to estimate the likelihood a prisoner will re-offend. Such software tends to increase the proportion of applicants who are granted parole while also reducing the proportion who re-offend. Two such programmes, LSI-R and LS/CMI, appear to reduce parolee recidivism by about 15%. Developed by Multi-Health Systems, a Canadian firm, they were used to assess 775,000 parole applications in America in 2012. Four-fifths of parole boards now use similar technology, says Joan Petersilia of Stanford University.

The data that matter include the prisoner’s age at first arrest, his education, the nature of his crime, his behaviour in prison, his friends’ criminal records, the results of psychometric tests and even the sobriety of his mother while he was in the womb. The software estimates the probability that an inmate will relapse by comparing his profile with many others. The American version of LS/CMI, for example, holds data on 135,000 (and counting) parolees.

It is better to be guided by software than one’s gut, says Olivia Craven, head of the Idaho Commission of Pardons and Parole. Donna Sytek of the New Hampshire Parole Board agrees. Unaided, parole board members rely too much on their personal experiences and make inconsistent decisions, she says.“

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“Will Las Vegas Remain A Boom Town In The 21st Century?”

April 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Speaking of disreputable acts in Las Vegas, there’s the continued attempt to suburbanize that desert city. Fancy casino fountains don’t threaten its future–the lawns do. It’s enough to drive a person underground. From John M. Glionna in the Los Angeles Times:

“Officials say Las Vegas uses only 80% of its Colorado River allotment and is banking the rest for the future. But critics say that even if the city taps all of its entitled water, that amount would still not be enough to meet its needs in a prolonged drought. And after years of recession, building is starting to come back here, leaving many to ask: Where are all these new residents going to get their water?

‘How foolish can you be? It’s the same fatal error being repeated all over the Southwest — there is no new water,’ said Tim Barnett, a marine physicist at UC San Diego’s Scripps Institution of Oceanography and coauthor of two reports about dwindling Western water resources. His research concluded that without massive cutbacks in water use, Lake Mead had a 50% chance of deteriorating to ‘dead pool’ by 2036. That’s the level at which the reservoir’s surface drops beneath Las Vegas’ lowest water intake.

Yet casinos and developers continue to push growth, and critics say lawmakers often seem to lack the willpower to draw the line. ‘Will Las Vegas remain a boom town in the 21st century? The city wants to appear confident but it’s a place built on illusion and luck,’ said Emily Green, an environmental journalist who writes about water issues on her blog, Chance of Rain.

‘When it comes to water,’ she added, ‘those aren’t very good guiding principles.’

The real water hog is not people, many say, but grass: About 70% of Las Vegas water goes to lawns, public parks and golf courses. A rebate program has already ripped out 168 million square feet of grass, enough to lay an 18-inch-wide roll of sod about 85% of the way around the Earth.

But is Las Vegas ready to ban grass entirely? ‘Well, at that point you’re seriously impacting quality of life. We’re not being complacent. We’re just not ready for draconian cuts,’ said [J.C.] Davis, the spokesman for the water authority.”

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“They Were Told They Had Managed To Offend The Audience At The Annual Adult-Film Awards”

April 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

David Foster Wallace wrote a great description of the nicotine-and-sandpaper comedian Bobby Slayton, who once descended on Las Vegas to host the Adult Film Awards, the Oscars of oral: “A gravelly-voiced Dice Clay knockoff who kept introducing every female performer as ‘the woman I’m going to cut my dick off for,’ and who astounded all the marginal print journalists in attendance with both his unfunniness and his resemblance to every apartment-complex coke dealer we’d ever met.”

As disreputable as Slayton may have seemed, he was one-upped by the toilet-mouthed ventriloquist act, Otto and George, when it headlined the grindhouse gala, actually managing to upset a roomful of people best known for performing deep throats and double penetrations. Otto Petersen, the fleshy half of the act, just passed away. His New York Times obituary was written by Margalit Fox, whose copy is steadfastly one of the great joys of reading the publication. An excerpt:

Popular with audiences and widely admired by other comics, Mr. Petersen was often described as soft-spoken in private life. But he was no match, he often said, for the strong-willed, forked-tongue George, whose caustic, profanity-laced outbursts rained down on a spate of targets, not least of all Mr. Petersen himself.

No subject was sacred, and George’s myriad observations could range over matters sexual, scatological, urological, gastroenterological, racial, bestial, theological and homicidal. None will be quoted here.

Mr. Petersen’s act was so scurrilous that it once proved too much for a historically thick-skinned crowd.

“They were told they had managed to offend the audience at the annual adult-film awards — the porno-world equivalent to the Academy Awards — in Las Vegas,” The Montreal Gazette reported in 2010. “Otto and George had twice served as hosts, but weren’t asked back by the insulted and suddenly squeamish organizers.•

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Old Print Article: “New York Applauds The Talking Picture,” New York Times (1913)

April 21, 2014 in Film, Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A non-projection version of the Kinetophone that presaged the theater type. It was referred to as a “peep show.”

A 1912 Edison publicity still of a home version of the Kinetophone.

A 1912 Edison publicity still of a home version of the Kinetophone.

One persistent problem for Thomas Edison was the development of the talking picture. He thought he had the answer in 1913, when he exhibited a projection version of his Kinetophone in New York City to much acclaim. But it was still just another phonograph record-based model that had to be synced to the images by an operator, Unfortunately, these employees generally had butterfingers, and the new sensation soon lost its lustre. Before the close of the following year, all the Kinetophone images and sound masters were destroyed in a warehouse fire. True talkies would have to wait. A New York Times article about the initial exhibition, which touched on the technical issues to come:

After Thomas A. Edison had invented the motion picture and the talking machine he dreamed of talking pictures, and the next morning he went to work again. For several years hints came from the Edison laboratory that the Kinetophone was in the process of development. Finally Edison spoke of his invention as a thing accomplished and yesterday, for the first time on any stage, the “Kinetophone” was on the bill at four of the Keith Theatres, the Colonial, the Alhambra, the Union Square, and the Fifth Avenue. To judge from the little gasps of astonishment and the chorus of “Ain’t that something wonderful?” that could be heard on all sides the Kinetophone is a success.

The problem involved was fairly simple. Mr. Edison was looking for perfect synchronization of record and film. The difficulty was to have a record sufficiently sensitive to receive the sounds from the lips of actors who would still be free to move about in front of the camera instead of being obliged to roar into the horn of a phonograph. But the difficulties have been overcome and the kinetoscope is actually in vaudeville and highly regarded there.

The first number of the exhibit was a descriptive lecture. The screen showed a man in one of those terribly stuffy, early eighties rooms that motion-picture folk seem to affect. He talked enthusiastically about the invention, and as his lips moved the words sounded from the big machine behind the screen. Gesture and speech made the thing startlingly real. He broke a plate, blew a whistle, dropped a weight. The sounds were perfect. Then he brought on a pianist, violinist, and soprano, and “The Last Rose of Summer” was never listened to with more fascinated attention. Finally the scope of kinetophone powers was further illustrated by a bugler’s apoplectic efforts, and the barking of some perfect collies.

The second number was a minstrel show with orchestra, soloists, end men, and interlocutor, large as life and quite as noisy. It brought down the respective houses but the real sensation of the day was scored quite unintentionally by the operator of the machine at the Union Square Theatre last evening. He inadvertently set the picture some ten or twelve seconds ahead of his sounds, and the result was amazing. The interlocutor, who, by a coincidence, wore a peculiarly defiant and offended expression, would rise pompously, his lips would move, he would bow and sit down. Then his speech would float out over the audience. It would be an announcement of the next song, and before it was all spoken the singer would be on his feet with his mouth expanded in fervent but soundless song.

This diverted the audience vastly, but the outbursts of laughter would come when the singer would close his lips, smile in a contented manner, bow, notes were still ringing clear. The audience, however, knew what happened, and the mishap did not serve to lessen their tribute of real wonder at Edison’s intent.•

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“When It Is Shown On TV, Will It Be A Movie Or TV?”

April 20, 2014 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Marshall McLuhan and artist and ace typographer Harley Parker enjoyed a bull session in 1967′s “Picnic in Space,” a 28-minute experiment informed by Warhol, Lichtenstein and Godard.

Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

April 20, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"Then, murder again."

“Then, murder again.”

Hermit Crab Habitat and accessories – $15 (Park Slope)

We are clearly not good people. I mean, we have excellent intentions. And we all know what that paves. We were gifted 2 hermit crabs by a departing do-gooder friend. We decided to do right by them and upgrade their home to a hermie castle. And they lived well for a time, basking in the glory of our love and their crabiness.

But things would take a dark turn in the castle. Shell-envy was in the air, and there was a murder. It was a sad reckoning, shattering our idyllic existence and bringing home the harsh truth of life in the wild. We pardoned the murderer, thinking we could rehabilitate him. Or outsmart him. We bought him a new companion, one several times his size. After a brief “getting to know you” period, things settled down and we seemed to be back in our happy place.

Then, murder again. That little crab is a goddamn ninja. I don’t know how he did it, taking out that huge crab. It would be like me taking out that dude from Troy, where Brad Pitt jumps and stabs him in the neck. Only I’m not Achilles.

At that point, we weren’t going to invest in any more sacrificial crabs, er, roommates. So the ninja was in solitary, a fitting punishment. But then he passed recently, of boredom or guilt, we’ll never know.

Come take our guilt and items off our hands.

 

“Both Companies Have A Vital Interest In Speeding Up The Process Of Getting Those 5 Billion Souls Online”

April 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a Guardian article by John Naughton, a passage speculating on the recent gamesmanship of Google and Facebook, both of which aren’t merely interested in drones that deliver goods but ones that can deliver the Internet itself:

“The Google boys have decided that advanced robotics, machine-learning, distributed sensors and digital mapping are going to be the essential ingredients of a combinatorial future, and they are determined to be the dominant force in that.

As far as the high-altitude drones are concerned, Google and Facebook are on exactly the same wavelength. Since internet access in the industrialised world is now effectively a done deal, all of the future growth is going to come from the remaining 5 billion people on the planet who do not yet have a proper internet connection. Both companies have a vital interest in speeding up the process of getting those 5 billion souls online, for the simple reason that the more people who use the internet the greater their revenues will be. And they see high-altitude drones as the means to that profitable end.”

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“Compact Consumer Computers Have Quietly Entered The Household”

April 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

An article I found in a 1970 Life magazine is probably the earliest profile I’ve ever read of an average American family (well, a relatively affluent one) having a networked home computer. An added bonus is that it was written by Michael Shamberg, a guerilla filmmaker and journalist who has gone on to produce some crazy documentaries and Pulp Fiction and Django Unchained. The opening:

“Computers for the home have been envisioned by science-fiction writers and engineers ever since a huge, unwieldy prototype was developed 25 years ago. The whole futuristic age the prophesied, with an omnipotent electronic monster named Horace in every living room, is still a long way from realization, but compact consumer computers have quietly entered the household. While the market hardly rivals TV sets or refrigerators, the computer-as-home-appliance is now more than just a toy for the wealthy or a mysterious instrument for technical specialists.

Those pioneer families who have one, like the Theodore Rodmans of Ardmore, Pa., have discovered their obedient machine can perform a large variety of useful functions. Dr. Rodman originally brought it home for medical research, but then his family found it could plan mortgage payments, help out with homework, even play with the children. Although the cost is still high, computers like theirs have come within possible reach of a two-car family budget. A small, self-contained model is available for $8,000, complete. The Rodmans’ computer system, called time-sharing, uses a Teletype terminal connected to a big central unit via telephone. It costs $110 a month rent, plus $7.50 per hour of use.

The Rodmans’ computer is no anthropomorphic robot that can accomplish physical feats. It cannot flip the light switch, monitor the thermostat or do the cooking. Rather, it is a sophisticated mental appendage with a capacity for problem-solving that is limited only by the family’s imagination. Neither Dr. Rodman nor his family had ever operated, much less programmed, a computer before a terminal was installed in their home last August. Since then they have assigned it so many chores that Mrs. Rodman says, half seriously, ‘It’s really become a member of the family.’

‘For me, the main physical effect of having a computer at home is that I’m able to spend a lot more time with my family,’ says Dr. Rodman, who is a lung specialist on the faculty of Temple University medical school in Philadelphia. ‘For all of us the real impact is mental. Programming a computer is like thinking in a foreign language. It forces you to approach problems with a high degree of logic. Because we always have a computer handy, we turn to it with problems we never would have thought of doing on one before.'”

 

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A Brief Note From 1913 About A Reunion

April 20, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the February 5, 1913 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Santa Cruz, Cal.–Survivors of the pioneer band of ‘Death Valley Argonauts,’ who crossed the desert into California sixty-three years ago, held a reunion here yesterday at the home of Mrs. James W. Brier, one of the party now 99 years of age. Thirty-six of the band of 200, who drank ox blood to quench their thirst in the arid salt sink were present–every living member but one.

Old records of the trip, passed around at the banquet table, showed that the ‘Jayhawkers,’ as they called themselves. left Galesburg, Ill., April 5, 1849. The party was the first to explore Death Valley.”

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