Urban Studies

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“Colonial Authorities Described For Him The Enormous Search Already Under Way”

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

Michael Rockefeller may not have been devoured by crocodiles or cannibals but he was most definitely swallowed whole by the rugged expanses of New Guinea in 1961. The wealthy young scion of Governor Nelson Rockefeller was in that country studying the culture and art of the Asmat people when he and his associate found themselves stranded in a canoe. Rockefeller decided to try to swim 12 miles to shore. He was never seen again, his body never recovered, and sensational theories about his disappearance began to emerge. I have not yet read Carl Hoffman’s new book on the subject, Savage Harvest, but here’s an excerpt from Richard B. Stolley’s 1961 Life article about the fruitless rescue mission:

“The full horror of this primitive country where his son was lost struck Governor Nelson Rockefeller only after he had seen it himself. En route from New York with his daughter, Mary Strawbridge, he was cheered by news that his son’s companion, Dutch Anthropologist Rene Wassing, had been saved. When the governor’s chartered jetliner landed at Biak, on the north side of the island, colonial authorities described for him the enormous search already under way. They had moved extra patrol boats in, chartered air search planes from as far away as Australia and sent policeman sloshing through coastal swamps to look for Mike and to urge the friendly Asmat natives to do the same.

A Dutch admiral told Rockefeller that the Navy had put a seaman into Flamingo Bay, where Mike disappeared, with two metal gasoline cans like those Mike had used. By holding the cans in front of him, the sailor could swim quite rapidly, and the experiment proved that young Rockefeller might easily have reached shore. Everywhere in New Guinea, compassionate Dutch officials treated Rockefeller not so much with deference due a man who is one of the most powerful leaders in the U.S. but with the sympathy deserved by a father who has lost a son.”

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The subject of an In Search Of… episode:

“It Turns Out That A Person Needs High-Performing Cognitive Hardware”

April 18, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the wake of 9/11, the military needed to know which adults could quickly learn a language (preferably an Arabic one) and be able to translate a backlog of neglected communications. That led to the development of an advanced system of evaluation for language learning which will now likely make its way into mainstream education. The opening of Michael Erard’s Nautilus piece on the topic:

“Imagine a test that could tell you how good you can ultimately get in any foreign language, from Hindi to Welsh, from Igbo to Spanish, before you’ve even learned how to say ‘hello’ or “please pass the butter.” Tres alléchant, no? Most adults would have to put in 10 years or more of dedicated work to find out if they have what it takes to end up with the vocabulary, accent, and grammatical sensibilities of a near-native speaker. This test could direct them from the debút.

And it may be coming your way soon.

Called the Hi-LAB (or ‘High Level Language Aptitude Battery’), it was developed by University of Maryland researchers working on a government contract in order to predict a person’s ability to learn a language to a very high level. Since its release in 2012, the Hi-LAB has been rolled out to government agencies and military training schools and will eventually be available for civilians as well. (Details of the Hi-LAB were only recently released to the public.) In the same way that America’s space program and the Cold War created spin-off products and technologies that altered civilian life, the Hi-LAB could become one of the first civilian benefits to come out of America’s war on terror.

Scientists who study second language acquisition have long been fascinated by the difficulty that adults have in becoming native-like in a language they begin learning after puberty. Most adults have no problem picking up modest amounts of vocabulary and grammar, assuming they’re motivated to put in sustained effort. But to become highly skilled in a second language, simply devoting the 10,000 hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell made famous in Outliers isn’t enough. It turns out that a person needs high-performing cognitive hardware, too.

The Hi-LAB provides feedback about who has this ability from the get-go, before the armed services invest any money in them. Cathy Doughty, the director of the team that developed the Hi-LAB, says: ‘Research has shown both focused motivation and personality factors to be necessary… [but they] don’t guarantee success, because the outcomes are limited by aptitude.’ Will education eventually follow this model too?”

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“He Visited For Several Hours And ‘Locked Horns’ With The Wikileaks Founder”

April 18, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

There’s no corporation, including Google, that should be trusted with our private information. Of course, there’s no way to avoid such a faustian bargain in this world of clouds. Everything is free, but it still costs a lot. There’s the rub.

Later this year, Julian Assange is to release a book, When Google Met WikiLeaks, the description of which sounds bombastic, grandiose and borderline crazy, like Assange himself. But that’s not to say it won’t contain truth. Just because the messenger is deeply flawed doesn’t mean the message is completely wrong. Sometimes, it’s only the truly damaged person who’ll step forward. From Alison Flood in the Guardian:

‘Julian Assange is writing a ‘major’ new book, in which the Wikileaks founder details his vision for the “future of the internet’ as well as his encounter in 2011 with Google chairman Eric Schmidt – a meeting which his publisher described as ‘an historic dialogue’ between ‘the North and South poles of the internet.’

The book, When Google Met WikiLeaks, will be published in September this year, announced publisher OR Books this morning. It will recount how, in June 2011 when Assange was living under house arrest at Ellingham Hall in Norfolk, Schmidt and ‘an entourage of US State Department alumni including a top former adviser to Hillary Clinton’ visited for several hours and ‘locked horns’ with the Wikileaks founder.

‘The two men debated the political problems faced by human society, and the technological solutions engendered by the global network – from the Arab Spring to Bitcoin. They outlined radically opposing perspectives: for Assange, the liberating power of the internet is based on its freedom and statelessness. For Schmidt, emancipation is at one with US foreign policy objectives and is driven by connecting non-western countries to American companies and markets. These differences embodied a tug-of-war over the internet’s future that has only gathered force subsequently,’ said OR Books in its announcement.

The title will include an edited transcript of the conversation between Schmidt and Assange, as well as new material written by Assange, who has been confined to the Ecuadorian embassy, in London, for the last 18 months.”

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“This Is A Moral Issue”

April 18, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Barbara Ehrenreich was an early supporter of John Edwards’ debacle of a 2008 Presidential campaign, seduced by the populist message without realizing the messenger was hollow, that he had all of the slickness of Bill Clinton without any of the prodigious political gifts. But she’s been right about so much regarding the fear of falling in America, and long before the disruption of the Internet Age or the recent economic collapse. While doing an Ask Me Anything at Reddit to promote her new book, she answered a couple of questions about minimum wage. The exchanges follow.

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Question:

Do you think we’re getting any closer to minimum wage being a living wage as well?

Barbara Ehrenreich:

Well, there’s a lot of talk about raising the minimum wage and I think it will probably happen. That’s something most people agree with. The opposition is coming from, well, Republicans, employers, and especially the so-called hospitality industry like restaurants and hotels which employ a lot of low-wage people. But even if we get the national minimum to about $10.50 an hour which Obama’s talked about, that’s not going to be a living wage in most places. The living wage that you need for various cities, states, etc. is something that is constantly being calculated by a group at MIT for example, and they do it by reason. They give you the amount you need for a bare-bones existence for various family sizes, and certainly where I am sitting in Northern Virginia, $10.50 is not going to do it. It would need to be more like $20 an hour.

Question:

What do you think of raising the minimum wage and if you think it should be raised why wouldn’t it create a surplus of labor?

Barbara Ehrenreich:

This is the argument that is made all the time against raising the minimum wage, that it will lead to unemployment. There is no empirical evidence for it. Obviously if we raise the minimum wage to the living wage, there might be some difficulty, but you can look at places like the state of Washington, which has one of the highest minimum wages in the country, and compare its economy to that of Idaho, right across the border, and Washington does better.

I would say to that argument is: I don’t care. This is a moral issue. If you are paying people less than they can live on, you are in effect expecting them to make a charitable contribution TO YOU. If someone says “Well I’m a small business person, and I can’t afford to pay more than $8 an hour” then maybe you don’t have a business plan. You have a plan to exploit the desperation of certain people. With all this talk of a minimum wage, how come there is so little complaint when we see a CEO or hedge fund manager when they add $10 million to their pay? Yet we don’t. We get all bent out of shape going from $7 to $10 an hour. And that’s crazy to me.•

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Old Print Article: “Lady Doyle Tells How She Became A Spiritualist And Why She Knows She Can Talk With The Departed,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1923)

April 18, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

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“They on the other side are ever anxious to communicate with us here.”

We tell ourselves stories in order to live, Joan Didion wrote.

Like a lot of people searching for answers after the unexpected jolt of tragedy, Jean Elizabeth Leckie developed some odd beliefs that helped her get through it all. The second wife of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, she, just like her spouse, was an ardent spiritualist. She came to believe after the heartbreaking death of her brother, a soldier killed in combat during WWI, someone she desperately needed to be waiting for her “on the other side.” In the April 29, 1923 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, an article delved into her personal relationship with the dead. An excerpt:

“I will say that from my analysis of her personality and her character and the super-evident vigor and keenness of her intellectuality, she is far from being one whose credulity can be readily imposed upon–that she is far from being one whose one self-willed thought can be swayed from its original course without the strongest proofs–material, moral and spiritual.

‘My husband has been a Spiritualist for thirty-six years,’ said she. ‘During long years I was in doubt. I have been a Spiritualist since the Battle of the Marne. My brother was killed there.

We became very frank in our talk after that. She told me she had nothing to conceal; that she hoped that Spiritualism might be spread throughout the world–that it meant the spread of the true religion. When she believed in the life hereafter life in this world took on such a different aspect that it was the duty of all who had investigated the other life to endeavor to link the two lives together.

‘We can help one another in this sphere and the higher sphere,’ she said. ‘They on the other side are ever anxious to communicate with us here. But we should aid them in that communication. From the earthly viewpoint, let me illustrate. There may be some one on your telephone wire who is anxious to talk to you, but if you have your receiver down you cannot hear from him. That is what we are apparently constantly doing in this world–and on the other side they are trying, trying, ever trying to reach us.

‘Oh, if we all only knew–if we all could only realize how like the world here is the world there–waiting to prepare the way for us–waiting to make a home for us. And if we are fond of certain things in this earth; if we like our home and the furniture and the pictures and the books in it; if we like our garden–all those will be there for us–duplicated–on the other side.’

‘But with a higher appeal?’ I queried.

‘Yes, with a higher appeal,’ she said. ‘All the material things that we like here may be duplicated there, but on the other side there is ever an advance. There are higher spheres than the sphere just beyond here. One goes to a sphere higher than the first sphere beyond this world as one becomes more fitted for the higher life. One who has gone to that higher sphere can come back to the first sphere to help relatives or friends who have just passed from the earth. But one cannot pass from the first sphere on the other side to higher spheres until one is advanced spiritually. For example: If a child dies its grandmother who had advanced to a higher sphere than the first, may come back to the first sphere to help the child.’

‘In regard to childhood and old age,’ I said, ‘Sir Arthur told me that while there was no such thing as time, as we understood it, the apparent average age of the other side was about 35 years, that youth and old age adapted themselves to this apparent age.’

‘Yes,’ said she.

‘We often read,’ I said, ‘of a child or an old man appearing to persons sitting in a spiritualistic seance. How would you reconcile that with the 35-year age average?’

‘The spirits appear to their friends and relatives at the period of their lives when they passed away, so that they will be recognized,’ said she. …

Having been told by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle that Lady Doyle was an automatic writer, receiving messages from the Spirit World. I asked her as to her method.

‘I do not enter a trance,’ she said. ‘Two or three of us sit at a table. I have paper before me and a pencil in my hand. At the top of the paper I make the mark of the cross. Sir Arthur makes a sharp prayer–and he offers a very beautiful prayer–and then we wait. Generally I soon feel the desire to write. I am unconscious of what I am writing, but I know it is a direct communication from the other side. I know that.'”

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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle discusses Sherlock Holmes and psychic experiences:

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“The Notion That Technology Will Stave Off The Most Catastrophic Effects Of Global Warming Is Not Just Wrong, It’s Repellent”

April 17, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Writer and former eco-activist Paul Kingsnorth believes he’s seen the future and thinks it’s murder. He no longer dreams of averting an environmental collapse, the doom of us all, as traditional green activists and next-wave biotechnologists do, but believes it’s a foregone conclusion. His best-case scenario is that some can scrape by using the random parts of an exploded machine. From a Daniel Smith’s New York Times profile of Kingsnorth:

“Instead of trying to ‘save the earth,’ Kingsnorth says, people should start talking about what is actually possible. Kingsnorth has admitted to an ex-activist’s cynicism about politics as well as to a worrying ambivalence about whether he even wants civilization, as it now operates, to prevail. But he insists that he isn’t opposed to political action, mass or otherwise, and that his indignations about environmental decline and industrial capitalism are, if anything, stronger than ever. Still, much of his recent writing has been devoted to fulminating against how environmentalism, in its crisis phase, draws adherents. Movements like Bill McKibben’s 350.org, for instance, might engage people, Kingsnorth told me, but they have no chance of stopping climate change. ‘I just wish there was a way to be more honest about that,’ he went on, ‘because actually what McKibben’s doing, and what all these movements are doing, is selling people a false premise. They’re saying, ‘If we take these actions, we will be able to achieve this goal.’ And if you can’t, and you know that, then you’re lying to people. And those people . . . they’re going to feel despair.’

Whatever the merits of this diagnosis (‘Look, I’m no Pollyanna,’ McKibben says. ‘I wrote the original book about the climate for a general audience, and it carried the cheerful title The End of Nature’), it has proved influential. The author and activist Naomi Klein, who has known Kingsnorth for many years, says Dark Mountain has given people a forum in which to be honest about their sense of dread and loss. “Faced with ecological collapse, which is not a foregone result, but obviously a possible one, there has to be a space in which we can grieve,’ Klein told me. ‘And then we can actually change.’

Kingsnorth would agree with the need for grief but not with the idea that it must lead to change — at least not the kind of change that mainstream environmental groups pursue. ‘What do you do,’ he asked, ‘when you accept that all of these changes are coming, things that you value are going to be lost, things that make you unhappy are going to happen, things that you wanted to achieve you can’t achieve, but you still have to live with it, and there’s still beauty, and there’s still meaning, and there are still things you can do to make the world less bad? And that’s not a series of questions that have any answers other than people’s personal answers to them. Selfishly it’s just a process I’m going through.’ He laughed. ‘It’s extremely narcissistic of me. Rather than just having a personal crisis, I’ve said: ‘Hey! Come share my crisis with me!’’

In 2012, in the nature magazine Orion, Kingsnorth began to publish a series of essays articulating his new, dark ecological vision. He set his views in opposition to what he called neo-environmentalism — the idea that, as he put it, ‘civilization, nature and people can only be ‘saved’ by enthusiastically embracing biotechnology, synthetic biology, nuclear power, geoengineering and anything else with the prefix ‘new’ that annoys Greenpeace.’ Or as Stewart Brand, the 75-year-old ‘social entrepreneur’ best known as the publisher of the Whole Earth Catalog, has put it: ‘We are as gods and have to get good at it.’

For Kingsnorth, the notion that technology will stave off the most catastrophic effects of global warming is not just wrong, it’s repellent — a distortion of the proper relationship between humans and the natural world and evidence that in the throes of crisis, many environmentalists have abandoned the principle that ‘nature has some intrinsic, inherent value beyond the instrumental.’ If we lose sight of that ideal in the name of saving civilization, he argues, if we allow ourselves to erect wind farms on every mountain and solar arrays in every desert, we will be accepting a Faustian bargain.”

 

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

April 16, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

MURDER/CRIME Letters for sale (USA)

Many handwritten letters by America’s Most Notorious Killers & Serial Killers.

A Brief Note From 1930 About A New Sect

April 16, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the June 8, 1930 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Bucharest--There was recently discovered at Veresti, in the Botolani district in Rumania, a strange new sect styling itself the ‘Sect of the Tremblers.’ Its leader gives himself the title of patriarch. It has not many adherents.

At their meetings the members lie flat on the ground trembling continually; they believe that they are able to shake off their sins in this way. They have assemblies twice a week at which they weep for many hours.”

“The Micro-Robots Can Be Very Fast”

April 16, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

SRI International experimenting with robotic insects that employ swarm techniques for macro manufacturing. 

“Nothing I Had Read Or Seen Had Prepared Me For It”

April 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As an exhibition of the amazing images by the late filmmaker Chris Marker opens at the Whitechapel Gallery, Sukhdev Sandhu of the Guardian has an article about these visions, simultaneously dreams and nightmares, which have profoundly influenced the culture, even this modest blog. An excerpt of William Gibson’s comments:

“I first saw ‘La Jetée’ in a film history course at the University of British Columbia, in the early 1970s. I imagine that I would have read about it earlier, in passing, in works about science fiction cinema, but I doubt I had much sense of what it might be. And indeed, nothing I had read or seen had prepared me for it. Or perhaps everything had, which is essentially the same thing.

I can’t remember another single work of art ever having had that immediate and powerful an impact, which of course makes the experience quite impossible to describe. As I experienced it, I think, it drove me, as RD Laing had it, out of my wretched mind. I left the lecture hall where it had been screened in an altered state, profoundly alone. I do know that I knew immediately that my sense of what science fiction could be had been permanently altered.

Part of what I find remarkable about this memory today was the temporally hermetic nature of the experience. I saw it, yet was effectively unable to see it again. It would be over a decade before I would happen to see it again, on television, its screening a rare event. Seeing a short foreign film, then, could be the equivalent of seeing a UFO, the experience surviving only as memory. The world of cultural artefacts was only atemporal in theory then, not yet literally and instantly atemporal. Carrying the memory of that screening’s intensity for a decade after has become a touchstone for me. What would have happened had I been able to rewind? Had been able to rent or otherwise access a copy? It was as though I had witnessed a Mystery, and I could only remember that when something finally moved – and I realised that I had been breathlessly watching a sequence of still images – I very nearly screamed.”

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“The Idea Is To Have The Wireless Charging Pads In The Roads Around City Centers”

April 16, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Sam Volkering’s Tech Insider article about the upcoming Formula-E racing championship and how its futuristic technologies may eventually run down all streets:

“Qualcomm has signed on as the Official Founding Technology Partner of the Formula-E championship. This isn’t a simple sponsorship opportunity. There’s far more to it that that. Qualcomm see this as an opportunity to develop their technologies around the globe.

This will include revolutionary coverage of the races using Qualcomm wireless technologies. But also perhaps more importantly Qualcomm’s unique electric vehicle (EV) technologies.

In the inaugural championship the pace cars will be electric. And electric cars need recharging. But instead of a plug, the pace cars will recharge using Qualcomm’s ‘Halo’ wireless charging system.

From year two, the race cars will use this technology also. The idea is to have the wireless charging pads in the roads around city centres. These areas where the cars race will allow charging ‘on-the-go’ for the cars. Simply, as the cars pass over the charging pads their batteries are charged.

Now if you think that’s great for a bunch of racing cars take it all one step further. If wireless EV charging pads are in city centre streets, then normal EV’s can benefit from the technology as well…

And that’s where cutting edge technology from series like Formula-E and Formula 1 filter down into the cars we drive every day.”

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Old Print Article: “Where Witches Flourish In This Twentieth Century,” New York Times (1911)

April 15, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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“It was obvious to them that she was living on a witch’s diet.”

In the September 10, 1911 edition of the New York Times, an article took the starch out of latter-day witch-chasers in Allentown, Pennsylvania, who blamed a slightly eccentric woman for allegedly hatching hexes. The article’s opening:

“In the twentieth century, more than two hundred years after the last witch was tried at Salem, a prosaic New York dressmaker was hauled into court in a large, prosperous and up-to-date American city and charged with being a witch.

This thing happened in Allentown, Penn., a couple of weeks ago, and what makes the case more remarkable is that it was not an accidental and sporadic instance of superstition, but apparently a symptom of a state of mind which is almost universal in Eastern Pennsylvania. Neither the witch herself nor the people who caused her arrest seemed to see anything unusual about the proceedings brought against her. None of her neighbors did; and yet the community in which she lived was not a back-country district, but a busy and populous neighborhood in a big, wide-awake, and thoroughly modern city. 

The woman was Meta Immerman, a New York dressmaker who had gone to Allentown to start a sort of Kneipp sanitarium. She believed in various theories of the kind which the frivolous-minded term ‘crank.’ Some of them had to do with diet; one of them was the belief that you could cure most of your bodily ills by going barefoot when dew was on the grass.

That of itself would have been enough to convict her of witchcraft in the eyes of her new neighbors at Allentown. The very idea of such a thing suggested the weaving of spells. So, the first time Meta was seen walking barefooted in early morning her case was permanently diagnosed.

However, she did not leave her neighbors with merely this evidence. She carried a little pocket electric light, and sometimes on dark nights she would pull this out and use it–say for some such purpose as to read the number on the street door of some house she was looking for.

So there were now two counts on her indictment, and the evidence was almost overwhelming.

  1. She wove spells by walking barefooted through the grass at dawn.
  2. She cast spells by throwing a witch light on houses at dead of night.

And now, to cap the climax, the unconscious dressmaker one morning walked through the grass with her shoes in her hand. Her reason simply was that she had no convenient place to put them down; but this did not come out until her terrified neighbors had had her hauled to court as a witch, and the amazed Mrs. Immerman was frantically protesting her innocence.

She was lodging with the family of George Kipp of South Thirteenth Street. A young couple by the name of Sober also lived in the house. It was the male Sober, John by name, who brought things to a crisis. He was seized one night with what he called ‘a terrible pain in my stomach.’

"One of these nut-devourers is Senator La Follette"

“One of these nut-devourers is Senator La Follette”

That was enough. All the suspicious circumstances in Mrs. Immerman’s case flashed at once to the minds of the Sobers and the Kipps. Then a new and still more damning thing was remembered, which was that Mrs. Immerman lived on nuts and raw eggs. She did, as a matter of fact, and so do a large number of the curious people who worry all the time about their stomachs. One of these nut-devourers is Senator La Follette. However, the Kipps and the Sobers did not know that. It was obvious to them that she was living on a witch’s diet.

They did not proceed to extremities at once. Kipp relied on a charm he had put over his door to keep witches away. Sober’s pain, however, was too real and too severe for him to wait for results. His wife advised him to lose no time, but to go and see a witch doctor right away. 

Fortunately, one of the best witch doctors in Allentown lived right across the street, George Kistler by name, and Sober at once consulted him. ‘No,’ said Sober afterward, ‘he didn’t give me any medicine. He just closed his eyes and asked me if I felt like anyone was clutching my sides. That was how I felt, and I told him so, and he closed his eyes again and seemed to go into a trance. Then he said: ‘Young man, some woman has cast a spell over you.’ I said, ‘Do you mean a witch?’ He closed his eyes again, and said that was just how people were bewitched.

‘I came home and told my wife, and she said right away it must be Miss Immerman. Then I knew when it was that she had cast that spell. She had asked me to help carry her trunk to the third floor. Of course, I obliged her, and as I took it up the stairs she kept her eyes fastened on me steadily, instead of looking at the trunk. I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but now I know it was then she was casting the spell.

Kistler, the ‘pow-wow’ doctor, never charged Mrs. Immerman with witchcraft; it seems that ‘hex’ doctors never give names. The simply diagnose the case as any other doctor would do, and discover, the bewitching from the symptoms. So Kistler had merely diagnosed the case as one of witchcraft, and it was the Sobers who settled on Mrs. Immerman as the witch.

And they had her arrested, and she served a jail sentence of forty-eight hours. Not, of course, for witchcraft; she was charged with some prosaic modern offense such as refusing to pay her room rent. It was necessary to get her out of Allentown and back to New York, where she is now and where she can weave her spells with impunity and even ride a broom if she can find a good steady nag of that kind, and the arrest served the purpose. It was enough; Mrs. Immerman took the hint and hastened back to this infidel and materialistic town, where, if there are people who believe in witchcraft, there is at least no great danger of getting arrested for practicing it.”

 

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

April 15, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"I metal detect as a hobby"

“I metal detect as a hobby”

People who lost something in their yard

Have you lost something in your yard? Let me bring my metal detector and help find it. I metal detect as a hobby and would enjoy helping you.

“I Met An Idiosyncratic Troupe Of Former Park Rangers, Sculptors, Philosophers, And Machinists”

April 15, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jon Gertner, who wrote an excellent book about Bell Labs, has an article at Fast Company about Google X, the lab that is trying to be its creative descendant, though the search giant’s “moonshot” wing is even further afield, more an amorphous thing than something that is solid state. An excerpt:

“X does not employ your typical Silicon Valley types. Google already has a large lab division, Google Research, that is devoted mainly to computer science and Internet technologies. The distinction is sometimes framed this way: Google Research is mostly bits; Google X is mostly atoms. In other words, X is tasked with making actual objects that interact with the physical world, which to a certain extent gives logical coherence to the four main projects that have so far emerged from X: driverless cars, Google Glass, high-­altitude Wi-Fi balloons, and glucose-monitoring contact lenses. Mostly, X seeks out people who want to build stuff, and who won’t get easily daunted. Inside the lab, now more than 250 ­employees strong, I met an idiosyncratic troupe of former park rangers, sculptors, philosophers, and machinists; one X scientist has won two Academy Awards for special effects. [Astro] Teller himself has written a novel, worked in finance, and earned a PhD in artificial intelligence. One recent hire spent five years of his evenings and weekends building a helicopter in his garage. It actually works, and he flew it regularly, which seems insane to me. But his technology skills alone did not get him the job. The helicopter did. ‘The classic definition of an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing,’ says DeVaul. ‘And people like that can be extremely useful in a very focused way. But these are really not X people. What we want, in a sense, are people who know less and less about more and more.’

If there’s a master plan behind X, it’s that a frictional arrangement of ragtag intellects is the best hope for creating products that can solve the world’s most intractable issues. Yet Google X, as Teller describes it, is an experiment in itself–an effort to reconfigure the process by which a corporate lab functions, in this case by taking incredible risks across a wide variety of technological domains, and by not hesitating to stray far from its parent company’s business. We don’t yet know if this will prove to be genius or folly. There’s actually no historical model, no ­precedent, for what these people are doing.”

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“It Makes No Sense To Talk About The Internet As Separate From The Economy”

April 15, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The new freedoms of the Internet Age are great and in the aggregate we’re wealthier, but the dollars themselves are in far fewer hands than before we were wired. Astra Taylor, who’s made two excellent full-length documentaries (this one and this one), has a new book, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, which talks about the current wave of inequality fostered in part by the emergence of the web. Gawker’s Michelle Dean interviewed Taylor on the topic. The opening exchange:

“Question:

Can you boil down for me the main reason you think the internet isn’t the ‘democratizing’ force we were promised?

Astra Taylor:

Because of money. It makes no sense to talk about the internet as separate from the economy. In the mainstream pundit world, there are two camps. One would say the internet is ruining everything, or distracting, or addictive. The other camp would say the internet’s amazing, we’re all connected, and it’s going to bring about a new age of democratization of culture, and creativity.

It’s not [that I have] some revolutionary theory. But there was a disconnect between this chatter from a fundamental characteristic of our world, just sitting there, and I just felt like somebody had to address it. No one was talking about the role of finance and the way business imperatives shape the development of tech.

The web is not an even playing field. There are economic hierarchies, and there’s this rich-get-richer phenomenon. And it’s emergent of these massive digital corporations, you know, Google and Apple. They’re not the upstarts they position themselves as.”

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A Brief Note From 1876 About A Thirsty Man

April 14, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the September 16, 1876 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“San Francisco, Cal.–A dispatch from Los Angeles narrates a terrible tale of suffering on the Colorado desert. Henry Smith, from St. Louis, with one companion and a pack train, left Yuma for Los Angeles and wandered four days on the desert without water. Smith opened veins of his arm and drank the blood, which clotted in his throat. He then cut his windpipe to remove it, and died in a few hours after. His companion reached the station in the last stage of exhaustion.”

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“It Was Some Guy Named Craig Who Would Take This Particular Profit Center From Them”

April 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Rupert Murdoch said recently that he believes the New York Post will still exist in ten years, if in a digital form. It’s difficult to imagine a scenario where that’s possible. Most newspapers won’t survive the transition to the Digital Age, obviously, though dissemination of high-quality news reporting will likely continue. From Michael Kinsley’s new Vanity Fair piece, “Front Page 2.0,” in which he argues the same even if he’s as short on particulars as I am:

“It’s not true that the publishers have just stood by while the Internet has stolen their business. Way back in 1981, the American Newspaper Publishers Association, under its leader that year—Katharine Graham, the C.E.O. of the Washington Post Co.—made a big lobbying push for a law forbidding AT&T, then a government-sanctioned telephone monopoly, to sell classified ads electronically. The publishers argued that the telephone company’s monopoly guaranteed the company profits that it could then use to subsidize the development of an electronic Yellow Pages, which would threaten one of their most profitable products, classified ads.

It was a bold argument. The newspaper industry had a higher rate of return on its investment than the phone company did. Nevertheless, the publishers were correct in seeing classified ads as the first thing they would lose as their business went online, though they missed the fact that the telephone company itself was about to be split into little bits and that it was some guy named Craig who would take this particular profit center from them.

Although it is hard to believe now, when The Washington Post can be bought by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos for pocket change of $250 million, but just 15 or 20 years ago, before the commercial arrival of the Internet, there was no sweeter sinecure in American capitalism than owning the one newspaper in a one-newspaper town. And cities as large as Los Angeles and Washington had effectively become one-newspaper towns. It was heaven: you could earn huge monopoly profits from advertisers like the big department stores, which had nowhere else to go. You were automatically a civic leader. And if you got bored, or your family needed cash, you could sell out to Gannett, which always stood ready to gobble up monopoly newspapers and lower the tone. At symposia and seminars on the Future of Newspapers, professional worriers used to worry that these monopoly or near-monopoly newspapers were too powerful for society’s good.

It couldn’t go on, and therefore it didn’t.”

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“TV Shopping Is Quick And Principally Easy”

April 14, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Predictions about the year 2000 from 1957 Germany. Cooking with punch cards never happened. It was all a lie.

“This Place Is Like A Child – It’s In A Development Phase”

April 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Kubla Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome, but he couldn’t escape the voices of the dead. China is building its top-down insta-cities, believing it can forgo organic development, but large swaths of these developments don’t echo with life. If they’re a dream, it’s a dream that may never be fulfilled. The opening of Jonathan Kaiman’s Guardian article about Tianjin Eco-city, which is green in more ways than one:

“Wang Lin needed a change. The crushing air pollution and gridlock traffic in his hometown Hangu, an industrial district in China’s northern metropolis of Tianjin, made him anxious and sometimes sick.

Then he heard about the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city. According to its marketing, the £24bn development – a joint venture between the governments of China and Singapore – will one day be a “model for sustainable development” only 40km from Tianjin’s city centre and 150km from central Beijing. To Wang, it sounded like paradise.

Last year, the 36-year-old moved into an inexpensive flat in one of the city’s half-occupied apartment blocks. As a freelance translator, he doesn’t mind that most viable employers are at least half an hour away by car. He loves the relatively clean air and the personal space. But he also has his complaints.

By the time the city is complete – probably by 2020 – it should accommodate 350,000 people over 30 square kilometres. Five years into the project, however, only about three sq km have been completed, housing 6,000 permanent residents. There are no hospitals or shopping malls. Its empty highways traverse a landscape of vacant mid-rises and dusty construction yards.

‘This place is like a child – it’s in a development phase,’ Wang says. ‘But it’s chasing an ideal. It’s the kind of place where people can come to pursue their dreams.'”

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“Remotely Piloted Aircraft, Almost By Definition, Are Going To Cross Borders”

April 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Drones are made not only to deliver what you ordered but to stop by unannounced. The opening of Robert Wall’s WSJ article about this technology getting ahead of regulation in Europe:

“The U.K. has a history in unmanned aviation spanning almost 100 years. It added to that this month when a court in northern England issued the country’s first-ever fine for the dangerous and illegal use of an unmanned aircraft.

The drone’s owner flew his craft in restricted airspace, over where Britain builds its nuclear submarines. The fine came in at £800 ($1,340.) Legal fees were another $3,500. And the aircraft crashed in the water.

Europe, which has trailed the U.S. and Israel in the development of unmanned military aircraft, is now beginning an effort to avoid falling behind on commercial drones, too. The European Union plans to spell out rules to govern a market it suggests could reach around 15 billion euros ($20.7 billion)per year.

Europe’s challenge is that several countries have embarked on permitting commercial drone operations, but there has been no effort to harmonize standards across the region.

‘Remotely piloted aircraft, almost by definition, are going to cross borders,’ Siim Kallas, the European Commission for Transport said in a statement last week.

Old Print Article: “Even Mussolini Can’t Keep Cannibals From Eating Up Arabian Gulf Light Keepers,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1926)

April 14, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

“I have never run into a place where the cannibals are so thick.”

I don’t know that a whole lot of fact-checking went into the September 29, 1926 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In that issue, ship captain Edward Harper told tales of cannibalism in Somalia to reporter E.K. Titus, which were seemingly published verbatim. The opening:

“Guardaful is a bad place to be a lighthouse-keeper. The holder of this post may be flesh and bones one day and mince meat the next. 

‘Every now and then, when we pass this light, just outside the Arabian Gulf, we notice that the light is not burning. This means that the lighthouse-keeper and his two aides have just been eaten up,’ explained Edward Harper, famous old bos’n of the S.S. Sandown Castle of the Barber line, which docked at the foot of Pioneer St. yesterday.

‘Italy owns this outpost, and I’m telling you it’s a tough job to navigate past it, when the lighthouse keeper has been consumed, and there is no one to keep the glimmer going. It gets harder and harder every year for Italy to find anyone to go out there. I think they’ll soon have to assign a regular garrison to the place to keep the light going.

“Guess even Mussolini can’t keep the cannibals on the straight and narrow path.”

‘Guess even Mussolini can’t keep the cannibals on the straight and narrow path in Guardaful. In all my experiences of 40 years sailing the seas I have never run into a place where the cannibals are so thick. 

Zulus Know How to Live.

But my boy, if you want to have a good life, you ought to become a citizen of Zululand. Guess you would have to black your face up with a little charcoal before they would take you into their commonwealth and make you a chieftain. But they sure know how to live.

‘Don’t get the Zulus mixed up with the cannibals. They are altogether different. Where the Zulus excel is in knowing how to have a large number of wives.

Wives cost $75 to $150.

‘Wives in Zululand cost from $75 to $150, depending on how large they are. The larger and stronger, the more expensive they come. When a Zulu has bought four wives he is made a sort of chieftain and is given some land for his own and his worries are finished.

‘A Zulu, working as a longshoreman, can earn five shillings or $1.25 a day. This is about five times as much as they could earn ordinarily on shore. They don’t figure in dollars though, but in bullocks. For $10 they can buy a bullock. For six bullocks they can buy a wife if they’re not particular. If they want a nice, big, strong wife it costs them 12 bullocks. And with four wives they can retire.”

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“It Really Feels Like There’s Someone There, Keeping An Eye On You”

April 14, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Because phone holograms aren’t a thing yet, SociBot, the creepiest invention since Google Glass, is now an option. It can approximate the face from a photo you feed it and watches you with a pair of embedded cameras, responding to your gestures and expressions. As the product’s site says: “The eyes follow you around the room; the expression changes to reflect its mood (or yours!).” You’ll never be alone again. Never. From Oliver Wainwright at the Guardian:

“If Skype and FaceTime aren’t giving you enough of the human touch, you could soon be talking face to rubbery face with your loved ones, thanks to SociBot, a creepy ‘social robot’ that can imitate your friends.

‘It’s like having a real presence in the room,’ says Nic Carey, research co-ordinator at Engineered Arts, the Cornish company behind the device. ‘You simply upload a static photo of the face you want it to mimic and our software does the rest, animating the features down to subtle mouth twitches and eyes that follow you around the room. Even when they’re not speaking, it really feels like there’s someone there, keeping an eye on you.’

The face of a disembodied colleague staring out from a silvery helmet might not be what you’d expect at your average teleconference, but the company thinks it could transform the way we interact over long distances by simulating the subtleties of human expression, recreating the things that are lost on a flat screen.

Designed to be gender and ethnically neutral, the translucent mask is projected on from within, the chosen face 3D-mapped on to its surface and speech perfectly lip-synched, while the head turns and tilts as it talks.”

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“Your Body Is A Deathtrap”

April 13, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The three Transformations humans must make if we’re to attain a higher plane of living, à la philosopher Nick Bostrom’s “Letter from Utopia“:

“To reach Utopia, you must first discover the means to three fundamental transformations.

The First Transformation: Secure life!

Your body is a deathtrap. This vital machine and mortal vehicle, unless it jams first or crashes, is sure to rust anon. You are lucky to get seven decades of mobility; eight if you be fortune’s darling. That is not sufficient to get started in a serious way, much less to complete the journey. Maturity of the soul takes longer. Why, even a tree-life takes longer.

Death is not one but a multitude of assassins. Do you not see them? They are coming at you from every angle. Take aim at the causes of early death – infection, violence, malnutrition, heart attack, cancer. Turn your biggest gun on aging, and fire. You must seize the biochemical processes in your body in order to vanquish, by and by, illness and senescence. In time, you will discover ways to move your mind to more durable media. Then continue to improve the system, so that the risk of death and disease continues to decline. Any death prior to the heat death of the universe is premature if your life is good.

Oh, it is not well to live in a self-combusting paper hut! Keep the flames at bay and be prepared with liquid nitrogen, while you construct yourself a better habitation. One day you or your children should have a secure home. Research, build, redouble your effort!

The Second Transformation: Upgrade cognition!

Your brain’s special faculties: music, humor, spirituality, mathematics, eroticism, art, nurturing, narration, gossip! These are fine spirits to pour into the cup of life. Blessed you are if you have a vintage bottle of any of these. Better yet, a cask! Better yet, a vineyard!

Be not afraid to grow. The mind’s cellars have no ceilings!

What other capacities are possible? Imagine a world with all the music dried up: what poverty, what loss. Give your thanks, not to the lyre, but to your ears for the music. And ask yourself, what other harmonies are there in the air, that you lack the ears to hear? What vaults of value are you witlessly debarred from, lacking the key sensibility?

Had you but an inkling, your nails would be clawing at the padlock.

Your brain must grow beyond any genius of humankind, in its special faculties as well as its general intelligence, so that you may better learn, remember, and understand, and so that you may apprehend your own beatitude.

Mind is a means: for without insight you will get bogged down or lose your way, and your journey will fail.

Mind is also an end: for it is in the spacetime of awareness that Utopia will exist. May the measure of your mind be vast and expanding.

Oh, stupidity is a loathsome corral! Gnaw and tug at the posts, and you will slowly loosen them up. One day you’ll break the fence that held your forebears captive. Gnaw and tug, redouble your effort!

The Third Transformation: Elevate well-being!

What is the difference between indifference and interest, boredom and thrill, despair and bliss?

Pleasure! A few grains of this magic ingredient are worth more than a king’s treasure, and we have it aplenty here in Utopia. It pervades into everything we do and everything we experience. We sprinkle it in our tea.

The universe is cold. Fun is the fire that melts the blocks of hardship and creates a bubbling celebration of life.

It is the birth right of every creature, a right no less sacred for having been trampled on since the beginning of time.

There is a beauty and joy here that you cannot fathom. It feels so good that if the sensation were translated into tears of gratitude, rivers would overflow.

I reach in vain for words to convey to you what it all amounts to… It’s like a rain of the most wonderful feeling, where every raindrop has its own unique and indescribable meaning – or rather it has a scent or essence that evokes a whole world… And each such evoked world is subtler, richer, deeper, more multidimensional than the sum total of what you have experienced in your entire life.

I will not speak of the worst pain and misery that is to be got rid of; it is too horrible to dwell upon, and you are already cognizant of the urgency of palliation. My point is that in addition to the removal of the negative, there is also an upside imperative: to enable the full flourishing of enjoyments that are currently out of reach.

The roots of suffering are planted deep in your brain. Weeding them out and replacing them with nutritious crops of well-being will require advanced skills and instruments for the cultivation of your neuronal soil. But take heed, the problem is multiplex! All emotions have a natural function. Prune carefully lest you accidentally reduce the fertility of your plot.

Sustainable yields are possible. Yet fools will build fools’ paradises. I recommend you go easy on your paradise-engineering until you have the wisdom to do it right.

Oh, what a gruesome knot suffering is! Pull and tug on those loops, and you will gradually loosen them up. One day the coils will fall, and you will stretch out in delight. Pull and tug, and be patient in your effort!

May there come a time when rising suns are greeted with joy by all the living creatures they shine upon.”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

April 13, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

friends for nudity – 25 (SoHo)

Hello, im looking for people who like nudity for a nude meeting.

Email me and we can plan.

A Brief Note From 1886 About Jewelers

April 13, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the January 13, 1886 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Paris–For a long time the authorities have been endeavoring to capture a gang of robbers who have been violating the graves in the cemetery at St. Guen sur Seine. The robbers eluded the guards until Monday, when two of them were arrested while stripping jewels from a corpse which they had stolen from a grave.”

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