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From the June 3, 1897 New York Times:
“Hagerstown, Ind.–The death of Thomas Purdy of this place yesterday is considered by physicians one of the most remarkable known to science. Some weeks ago Mr. Purdy had all his teeth extracted. Partial loss of the use of the throat muscles and vocal chords ensued.
This was followed by paralysis of these parts, which rendered it impossible for him to take nourishment. After striving twenty days to swallow food, he died in horrible agony of starvation.”
Tags: Thomas Purdy
Using invasiveness to battle criminality, a Google Glass app allows you to scan a stranger’s eyes and know within moments whether that person has been registered with a sex-offender database. Of course, the greater moral question will come when an app can look into eyes and determine what that person might be about to do, not only what they’ve done in the past. From “Through a Face Scanner Darkly,” Betsy Morais at the New Yorker blog:
“Anonymity forms a protective casing. When it’s punctured, on the street or at a party, the moment of recognition falls somewhere on a spectrum of delight and horror. Soon enough, though, technology will see to it that we can no longer expect to disappear into a landscape of passing faces.
NameTag, an app built for Google Glass by a company called FacialNetwork.com, offers a face scanner for encounters with strangers. You see somebody on the sidewalk and, slipping on your high-tech spectacles, select the app. Snap a photo of a passerby, then wait a minute as the image is sent up to the company’s database and a match is hunted down. The results load in front of your left eye, a selection of personal details that might include someone’s name, occupation, Facebook and/or Twitter profile, and, conveniently, whether there’s a corresponding entry in the national sex-offender registry.”
Tags: Betsy Morais
Private zoos have always been a strange beast, and some Animal Planet enthusiasts now oddly invite the elephant into the living room (scroll down to second item), but one menagerie faced a far crazier time during Japan’s Great Zoo Massacre of WWII. The opening of “Bambi and Tong Tong,” Julia Adeney Thomas’ Times Literary Supplement review of a new book about understanding the psychology and politics of the horror:
“Behind the curtain of empire, horrors lurk. At the Tokyo Imperial Zoo on September 4, 1943, two starving elephants remained silent, obedient to their trainers, while a religious service on the other side of a red-and-white awning prematurely memorialized their sacrifice for Japan’s imperial cause. Buddhist monks, government officials and schoolchildren made offerings of food to the elephants’ spirits and to the spirits of other captive animals killed by order of the government. This unprecedented ceremony known as the ‘Memorial Service for Martyred Animals’ was held on the zoo’s grounds where nearly a third of the cages stood empty. Lions from Abyssinia, tigers representative of Japan’s troops, bears from Manchuria, Malaya and Korea, an American bison, and many others had been clubbed, speared, poisoned and hacked to death in secret. Although the zoo’s director had found a way to save some of the condemned creatures by moving them to zoos outside Tokyo, Mayor Ōdaichi Shigeo insisted on their slaughter. Ōdaichi himself, along with Imperial Prince Takatsukasa Nobusuke and the chief abbot of Asakusa’s Sensōji Temple, presided over the carefully choreographed and highly publicized ‘Memorial Service,’ thanking the animals for sacrificing themselves for Japan’s war effort.
But the elephants were not dead.”
Tags: Julia Adeney Thomas
Just looking for a woman willing to kick me very hard in the balls. Nothing else. No nudity or anything needed.
You know the story about the Paris-based celebrity doctor who liked to prescribe sauerkraut, was Alexandre Dumas’ personal physician and kept a vicious pet monkey? No? Well, here it is, courtesy of the December 18, 1898 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
Paris Bureau–All capitals contain so great a number of eccentric people that if we knew them all, we would still more readily come to the conclusion that there are more mad people outside than inside insane asylums.
It is probable the Paris does not contain as many as London, for it is known that for oddity and originality the English have the precedence; but such specimens as Dr. Gruby show that if the number is not as large as in Paris as in London, they, at least, are quite as capable to do as eccentric things and lead as eccentric lives.
Dr. Gruby was a physician who possessed all of the necessary diplomas, but he was called a healer. This country, like all other countries, in fact, is flooded with healers. Legitimate doctors do all in their power to bring them into disfavor, but vox populi is vox dei, and the more eccentric the healer seems to be and the more extraordinary his cures appear to the patients, the more they knock at his door to be healed.
“Alexandre Dumas would have no other doctor.”
There is not a French celebrity of any kind, within the last forty years, who, afflicted with any serious illness, has not gone to Dr. Gruby, and who was not dumbfounded when the healer prescribed carrots, sauerkraut or some other unheard of medicament with the grave countenance of a doctor who writes down the most complicated mixtures in an incomprehensible page of Latin words.
But faith was there. Had the healer not made the most remarkable cures? Were not such men as Alexandre Dumas and Ambroise Thomas there to testify that whatever surprising things the healer gave, they, one and all, were benefited by it?
He did not reserve all his oddities for his patients; he kept a great number for his own actions and behavior. One of them was that he never wanted to appear but in the best of health to all humanity, his servants included. He died at the age of 80, behind a locked door. He did not even admit his servants during his last two days of agony. He died in a dark room, without a streak of light, for he feared some curious eye might see him in the throes of death. At last the scared servants had the door forced open by the commissaire de police and they found but a cold corpse. The healer had drawn his last breath about twelve hours before.
Not so long ago, Mme. Ambroise Thomas was asked to tell us some eccentricities of the doctor. “Alexandre Dumas would have no other doctor, and for a long while, by the orders of Dr. Gruby, Dumas would start off on a morning constitutional with four apples in his pocket. The orders were to walk from the Avenue de Villiens to the Arch of Triumph and there stop to eat an apple; then to start again and walk to the Place de la Concorde, and stop there and eat another apple. He was to return to the Arch and eat his third apple, and take the fourth before his own door and have the last bite in his mouth before he crossed the threshold.
“And Dr. Gruby’s servants were allowed to be visible only at certain hours. He was passionately fond of animals and plants. He had dogs and cats and for a long time possessed a vicious monkey whom he called his brother, and who bit several of his friends.”•
Tags: David Gruby
I think of the era in America between the one wallpapered with newsprint (pre-1960) and the one given to smartphone updates (today), that time when TV news was predominant, as an age of delusion. That was when Newt Gingrich’s word games could work, when a screenshot of Willie Horton could win. It was an age of bullshit and manipulation. Why, an actor playing a part could become President, aided by Hallmark Card-level writers.
You’re free to feel less than sanguine about the transition, about the financial metrics of newsgathering and the threat it poses to less-profitable but vital journalism (as I sometimes am), but I will choose the deluge of information we get now to centralized media when far fewer had far greater control of the flow. People seem to get bamboozled much less now. Let it rain, I say. Let it pour. Let us swim together in the flood.
Anyhow, we always romanticized the wrong part of the newspaper. It wasn’t great because of the print. I mean, what’s so important about a lousy, crummy newspaper?
From “The Golden Age of Journalism?” a wonderful TomDispatch essay by Tom Engelhardt about the downfall of one type of news and the thing that has supplanted it:
“In so many ways, it’s been, and continues to be, a sad, even horrific, tale of loss. (A similar tale of woe involves the printed book. It’s only advantage: there were no ads to flee the premises, but it suffered nonetheless — already largely crowded out of the newspaper as a non-revenue producer and out of consciousness by a blitz of new ways of reading and being entertained. And I say that as someone who has spent most of his life as an editor of print books.) The keening and mourning about the fall of print journalism has gone on for years. It’s a development that represents — depending on who’s telling the story — the end of an age, the fall of all standards, or the loss of civic spirit and the sort of investigative coverage that might keep a few more politicians and corporate heads honest, and so forth and so on.
Let’s admit that the sins of the Internet are legion and well-known: the massive programs of government surveillance it enables; the corporate surveillance it ensures; the loss of privacy it encourages; the flamers and trolls it births; the conspiracy theorists, angry men, and strange characters to whom it gives a seemingly endless moment in the sun; and the way, among other things, it tends to sort like and like together in a self-reinforcing loop of opinion. Yes, yes, it’s all true, all unnerving, all terrible.
As the editor of TomDispatch.com, I’ve spent the last decade-plus plunged into just that world, often with people half my age or younger. I don’t tweet. I don’t have a Kindle or the equivalent. I don’t even have a smart phone or a tablet of any sort. When something — anything — goes wrong with my computer I feel like a doomed figure in an alien universe, wish for the last machine I understood (a typewriter), and then throw myself on the mercy of my daughter.
I’ve been overwhelmed, especially at the height of the Bush years, by cookie-cutter hate email — sometimes scores or hundreds of them at a time — of a sort that would make your skin crawl. I’ve been threatened. I’ve repeatedly received “critical” (and abusive) emails, blasts of red hot anger that would startle anyone, because the Internet, so my experience tells me, loosens inhibitions, wipes out taboos, and encourages a sense of anonymity that in the older world of print, letters, or face-to-face meetings would have been far less likely to take center stage. I’ve seen plenty that’s disturbed me. So you’d think, given my age, my background, and my present life, that I, too, might be in mourning for everything that’s going, going, gone, everything we’ve lost.
But I have to admit it: I have another feeling that, at a purely personal level, outweighs all of the above. In terms of journalism, of expression, of voice, of fine reporting and superb writing, of a range of news, thoughts, views, perspectives, and opinions about places, worlds, and phenomena that I wouldn’t otherwise have known about, there has never been an experimental moment like this. I’m in awe. Despite everything, despite every malign purpose to which the Internet is being put, I consider it a wonder of our age. Yes, perhaps it is the age from hell for traditional reporters (and editors) working double-time, online and off, for newspapers that are crumbling, but for readers, can there be any doubt that now, not the 1840s or the 1930s or the 1960s, is the golden age of journalism?
Think of it as the upbeat twin of NSA surveillance.“•
Tags: Tom Engelhardt
From the October 25, 1874 New York Times:
“The Fall River letter in the Providence Journal of Saturday says: ‘The experiment of a direct transfusion of the blood of a live lamb was performed upon the person of Herman Dubois, residing at No. 41 Globe Street, by Drs. Julius Hoffman and Weyland, of New-York City, this afternoon at 5 o’clock. It took one minute and thirty-three seconds to make the transfusion, about six ounces being transfused within the time, and it proved an entire success. It took nearly an entire day to prepare the lamb for the experiment. Every vein which was connected with the jugular vein was severed and securely tied by the physicians, so as to allow the blood free egress to the arm of the patient. Dr. Hoffman used a small glass tube, about two inches and one-half inch long, slightly curved for the operation, thus bringing the neck of the lamb in very close proximity to the patient’s arm. Mr. Dubois has been afflicted with the consumption a little more than two years, and as a last resort for relief, it was thought best by his friends to try the experiment. At last accounts he was quite comfortable. Immediately after transfusion the patient experienced sharp pains throughout the back, chest and limbs, together with a shortness of breath for about fifteen minutes, then he became quiet until a little after 6, when he exhibited the same symptoms, accompanied with chills for about half an hour, then he became quiet, and remained in that condition at 11 o’clock.”
“Full of more shit than a diaper.”
You name it i write it!!!!!!!!
leave you flat like a tire expired and on fire/
you a liar and its my desire to make you retire/
i am a writer that require a higher level of hyper/
you a snake like a viper full of more shit than a diaper if you a rival i will sniper ya/
dont get gassed like a lighter i will knuckle up like a fighter/
ignite a flame that will light up your entire empire/
my lyrics tighter than a virgin and im nicer with inventing more shit than macgyver/
i gets deeper than deep sea divers and liver and the 3rd rail or open electrical wires
FOR MORE INFO–CONTACT.
“I’m nicer, inventing more shit than Macgyver.”
Vanity Fair journalist Nina Munk is this week’s guest on a very good EconTalk podcast with Russ Roberts. Munk wrote a 2007 article, “Jeffrey Sachs’ $200 Billion Dream,” which looked at the passion and plans of the End of Poverty author. She then decided to follow Sachs’ work in a long-term way, and things got complicated.
If Munk didn’t exactly come to praise the economist, she didn’t think she would end up burying him–but that’s pretty much what happened. Her resulting book on the topic, The Idealist, is a story of good intentions run aground as it pertains to the Sachsian method of sustainable development in impoverished African communities. Munk acknowledges the Millennium Villages Project isn’t an abject failure as a charity, but believes it isn’t a success in its stated aspiration to find a poverty-fighting formula. Munk doesn’t seem to be attempting to demonize anyone (although she does accuse Sachs of “emotional blackmail”) but is trying to make sense of the naivete and folly and mistakes.
I like Roberts, though I find self-serving his suggestion that idealists who try and fail are crueler than Libertarians who oppose activism.
Listen here and read a Vanity Fair Q&A about the book here. See some excerpts from Sachs’ recent Ask Me Anything at Reddit.
Tags: Jeffrey Sachs, Nina Munk, Russ Roberts
Extrapolating a degree beyond the idea of self-replicating machines, George Zarkadakis of the Telegraph wonders whether robots will eventually pair off and hook up, whether the future of “life” will be determined by sexed machines. From his article:
“Perhaps by exploring and learning about human evolution, intelligent machines will come to the conclusion that sex is the best way for them to evolve. Rather than self-replicating, like amoebas, they may opt to simulate sexual reproduction with two, or indeed innumerable, sexes.
Sex would defend them from computer viruses (just as biological sex may have evolved to defend organisms from parasitical attack), make them more robust and accelerate their evolution. Software engineers already use so-called ‘genetic algorithms’ that mimic evolution.
Nanotechnologists, like Eric Drexler, see the future of intelligent machines at the level of molecules: tiny robots that evolve and – like in Lem’s novel – come together to form intelligent superorganisms. Perhaps the future of artificial intelligence will be both silicon- and carbon-based: digital brains directing complex molecular structures to copulate at the nanometre level and reproduce. Perhaps the cyborgs of the future may involve human participation in robot sexual reproduction, and the creation of new, hybrid species.
If that is the future, then we may have to reread Paley’s Natural Theology and take notice. Not in the way that creationists do, but as members of an open society that must face up to the possible ramifications of our technology. Unlike natural evolution, where high-level consciousness and intelligence evolved late as by-products of cerebral development in mammals, in robotic evolution intelligence will be the guiding force. Butler will be vindicated. Brains will come before bodies. Robotic evolution will be Intelligent Design par excellence. The question is not whether it may happen or not, but whether we would want it to happen.”
Tags: George Zarkadakis
“His strength seemed to increase enough to allow him to enjoy the sunrise.”
Mark Twain, jester and debunker and literary giant, showed you could leave an impression, a mark, on American life and letters even if you weren’t as scarred as Emily Dickinson or Edgar Allan Poe, even if your first impulse was to go for the joke. He saw things as they were and tried to make us all see them a little differently, and in that he succeeded. No matter who comes after, he will always really be the country’s king of comedy. The opening of his obituary in the April 22, 1910 New York Times:
“Danbury, Conn., April 21 — Samuel Langhorne Clemens, ‘Mark Twain,’ died at 22 minutes after 6 tonight. Beside him on the bed lay a beloved book- it was Carlyle’s French Revolution-and near the book his glasses, pushed away with a weary sigh a few hours before. Too weak to speak clearly, ‘Give me my glasses,’ he had written on a piece of paper. He had received them, put them down, and sunk into unconsciousness from which he glided almost imperceptibly into death. He was in his seventy-fifth year.
For some time, his daughter Clara and her husband, Ossip Cabrilowitsch, and the humorist’s biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, had been by the bed waiting for the end, which Drs. Quintard and Halsey had seen to be a matter of minutes. The patient felt absolutely no pain at the end and the moment of his death was scarcely noticeable.
Death came, however, while his favorite niece, Mrs. E. E. Looms, and her husband, who is Vice President of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railway, and a nephew, Jervis Langdon, were on the way to the railroad station. They had left the house much encouraged by the fact that the sick man had recognized them, and took a train for New York ignorant of what happened later.
Hopes Aroused Yesterday
Although the end had been foreseen by the doctors and would not have been a shock at any time, the apparently strong rally of this morning had given basis for the hope that it would be postponed for several days. Mr. Clemens awoke at about 4 o’clock this morning after a few hours of the first natural sleep he has had for several days, and the nurses could see by the brightness of his eyes that his vitality had been considerably restored. He was able to raise his arms above his head and clasp them behind his neck with the first evidence of physical comfort he had given for a long time.
His strength seemed to increase enough to allow him to enjoy the sunrise, the first signs of which he could see out of the windows in the three sides of the room where he lay. The increasing sunlight seemed to bring ease to him, and by the time the family was about he was strong enough to sit up in bed and overjoyed them by recognizing all of them and speaking a few words to each. This was the first time that his mental powers had been fully his for nearly two days, with the exception of a few minutes early last evening, when he addressed a few sentences to his daughter.
Calls for His Book
For two hours he lay in bed enjoying the feeling of this return of strength. Then he made a movement asked in a faint voice for the copy of Carlyle’s French Revolution, which he has always had near him for the last year, and which he has read and re-read and brooded over.
The book was handed to him, and he lifted it up as if to read. Then a smile faintly illuminated his face when he realized that he was trying to read without his glasses. He tried to say, ‘Given me my glasses,’ but his voice failed, and the nurses bending over him could not understand. He motioned for a sheet of paper and a pencil, and wrote what he could not say.
With his glasses on he read a little and then slowly put the book down with a sigh. Soon he appeared to become drowsy and settled on his pillow. Gradually he sank and settled into a lethargy. Dr. Halsey appreciated that he could have been roused, but considered it better for him to rest. At 3 o’clock he went into complete unconsciousness.
Later Dr. Quintard, who had arrived from New York, held a consultation with Dr. Halsey, and it was decided that death was near. The family was called and gathered about the bedside watching in a silence which was long unbroken. It was the end. At twenty-two minutes past 6, with the sunlight just turning red as it stole into the window in perfect silence he breathed his last.
Died of a Broken Heart
The people of Redding, Bethel, and Danbury listened when they were told that the doctors said Mark Twain was dying of angina pectoris. But they say among themselves that he died of a broken heart. And this is a verdict not of popular sentiment alone. Albert Bigelow Paine, his biographer to be and literary executor, who has been constantly with him, said that for the last year at least Mr. Clemens had been weary of life. When Richard Watson Gilder died, he said: ‘How fortunate he is. No good fortune of that kind ever comes to me.’
The man who has stood to the public for the greatest humorist this country has produced has in private life suffered overwhelming sorrows. The loss of an only son in infancy, a daughter in her teens and one in middle life, and finally of a wife who was a constant and sympathetic companion, has preyed upon his mind. The recent loss of his daughter Jean, who was closest to him in later years when her sister was abroad studying, was the final blow. On the heels of this came the first symptoms of the disease which was surely to be fatal and one of whose accompaniments is mental depression. Mr. Paine says that all heart went out of him and his work when his daughter Jean died. He has practically written nothing since he summoned his energies to write a last chapter memorial of her for his autobiography.”
Tags: Mark Twain
One final Pete Seeger video, this one is “To Hear Your Banjo Play,” a 1947 short written and directed by musicologist Alan Lomax. Probably the best portrait of the man and his music.
Tags: Alan Lomax, Pete Seeger
Buckminster Fuller wanted to dome a chunk of Manhattan, but even that plan wasn’t as outré as his designs for a floating city. From “10 Failed Utopian Cities That Influenced the Future,” a fun i09 post by Annalee Newitz and Emily Stamm:
Science — and science fiction — often influenced city designers. But nobody took futuristic ideas more seriously than mid-twentieth century inventor Buckminster Fuller, who responded to news about overcrowding in Tokyo by imagining cities in the sky. The Spherical Tensegrity Atmospheric Research Station, called STARS or Cloud 9s, would be composed of giant geodesic spheres. When filled with air, the sphere would weigh one-thousandth of the weight of the air inside it. Fuller planned on heating that air with solar power or human activity, causing the sphere to float. He would anchor his floating cities to mountains, or let them drift around the world. They were never built, but Fuller’s idea for a pre-fab, geodesic dome dwelling called Dymaxion House eventually influenced the pre-fab house movement which is still going strong.”
From the October 30, 1912 New York Times:
“Golfers and visitors to the golf links at Van Cortlandt Park were not a little surprised yesterday afternoon by the sight of a man wearing a black mask, black clothes, and black plush cap playing on the course. Many inquiries were made, but nothing was learned of the identity of the strange golfer except that he styled himself ‘the Black Masker.’
Other golfers were astonished at the length of the stranger’s drives, and soon practically all of them quit their play to follow him over the course. Still no one was able to account for the presence of the black mask.”
News at it used to be produced is a niche item now. It may have always been to some degree, but more so today. But is that necessarily a bad thing? I think in our decentralized age, American citizens seem far less likely to be bullshitted than they were not too long ago. It may be best that news is delivered in all forms from all directions.
The opening “Doesn’t Anyone Read The News?” by Timothy Wu at the New Yorker blog:
“The State of the Union address is one of the few times each year when a large percentage of Americans reliably pay attention to politics. Once upon a time, as legend has it, things were different: most Americans tuned into Walter Cronkite in the evening or picked up the morning newspaper, which covered matters of national and international importance, like politics, foreign affairs, and business developments.
If analysts at Microsoft Research are correct, a startling number of American Web users are no longer paying attention to the news as it is traditionally defined. In a recent study of ‘filter bubbles,’ Sharad Goel, Seth Flaxman, and Justin Rao asked how many Web users actually read the news online. Out of a sample of 1.2 million American users, just over fifty thousand, or four per cent, were ‘active news customers’ of ‘front section’ news. The other ninety-six per cent found other things to read.”
Tags: Timothy Wu
If I was offered a good job in Los Angeles, I think I’d move in a minute. I’m one of those people who was born and raised in New York and lived here my whole life, could never have imagined living elsewhere. This city has been the biggest part of my education, has taught me as much a place can. But the last couple of decades have changed it in ways that pain me. So much that was interesting is gone. The way poor and working-class people have been pushed to the edges–to the brink–just saddens me. It was our city, and it was as beautiful as it was ugly. And in the last half-dozen years or so, so many of the brightest, most-creative people I know have left for better opportunities elsewhere.
I’m not one of those people who romanticizes Times Square of the bad old days. I don’t think of child prostitutes as useful props in the fantasies of those who love the idea of urban grit. But I don’t think we had to become a shopping mall, either.
New York was always about money, but it wasn’t only about money. You could create disco or rap or art from what others discarded. It wasn’t a city for the few but for the masses. You could have less but still be equal. You felt like you had it all, even if you had next to nothing. I don’t think that’s true anymore.
Friends chide me for feeling this way. You act like it’s Toledo or something, they say. They’re right. New York is still more interesting than Toledo. But was that the goal?
I probably wouldn’t really like anywhere else, either. But being disappointed by a place not your own is different than being disappointed by home.
Millions of other New Yorkers across decades have said the same things about the city that I’m saying now, and they’ve all been wrong. And I’m wrong, too. But I still feel that way.
I think one advantage L.A. has over New York has long been viewed as a deficit: it’s sprawl. When something has no center, it can’t really be “fixed” (or ruined). From “Los Angeles: a City That Outgrew Its Masterplan. Thank God,” by Colin Marshall in the Guardian:
“This lack of definition makes it no easy place to write about, and the challenge has reduced many an otherwise intelligent observer to the comforts of obscurantism and polemic. Nobody understands Los Angeles who thinks about it only through the framework of its entertainment industry, its freeways, its class divisions, or its race relations. I don’t even pretend to understand Los Angeles, but living here I’ve undergone the minor enlightenment whereby I recuse myself from the obligation of doing so.
My own time in LA has, in fact brought me to see many other world cities as theme-park experiences by comparison, made enjoyable yet severely limited by the claims of their images. San Francisco has long strained under the sheer fondness roundly felt for it, or at least for an idea of it, never quite living up to how people imagine or half-remember it in various supposedly prelapsarian states of 20, 40, 60 years ago. New York has similarly struggled with perceptions of it as the ultimate expression of the urban, and even lovers of Paris come back admitting that Paris-as-reality seems hobbled by Paris-as-idea.”
Tags: Colin Marshall
Some think the government is gaining too much control over us at the very instant that I think the opposite is happening. Pretty soon, as the anarchy of the Internet is loosed back into the real world, it will be tougher to control much of anything. Big Brother can watch, but can he act?
That wonderful Browser blog pointed me to “The Drug Revolution No One Can Stop,” Mike Power’s Medium article about designer drugs that are made to order and delivered to you like a chair, a lamp, a knife. An excerpt:
“MXE is part of a cultural shift that started a generation ago, but has taken on a new edge in the last few years. In 2008, the first in a wave of new, legal, synthetic drugs emerged into the mainstream. They had little to no history of human use. Instead, they were concocted in labs by tweaking a few atoms here and there—creating novel, and therefore legal, substances. Sold mainly online, these designer drugs cover every category of intoxication imaginable, and their effects resemble the full range of banned drugs, from the mellowness of marijuana to the extremes of cocaine and LSD. They are known as ‘legal highs,’ and they have exploded in popularity: the 2012 Global Drugs Survey found that one in twelve people it surveyed worldwide takes them.
Legislators around the world have been put off-balance by the emergence of this massively distributed, technically complex and chemically sophisticated trade. And the trade is growing rapidly.
In 2009 The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction’s early warning system identified 24 new drugs. In 2010, it identified 41. In 2011, another 49, and in 2012, there were 73 more. By October 2013, a further 56 new compounds had already been identified—a total of 243 new compounds in just four years.
In its latest World Drug Report, the United Nations acknowledged this extraordinary expansion: ‘While new harmful substances have been emerging with unfailing regularity on the drug scene,’ it said, ‘the international drug control system is floundering, for the first time, under the speed and creativity of the phenomenon.’
Technology and drugs have always existed in an easy symbiosis: the first thing ever bought and sold across the Internet was a bag of marijuana. In 1971 or 1972, students at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory used ARPANET—the earliest iteration of the Internet—to arrange a marijuana deal with their counterparts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”
Tags: Mike Power
Pete Seeger, in 2012, trading bon mots with that “right-wing gun nut” Stephen Colbert. The host is brilliant, as he always is, in using just a few words to trace the history of lefty politics from the folk movement forward.
Tags: Bob Dylan, Pete Seeger, Stephen Colbert
“A unique character is Seth Kinman, the grizzly bear hunter and presidential chair presenter.”
Seth Kinman was a self-made man and a self-promoter. A bushy-faced nineteenth-century California hunter who never met a bear or buck he cared for, Kinman used the skins and carcasses from his quarry to fashion unusual chairs that he presented to several American Presidents.
Kinman began bestowing these odd gifts to Presidents during the Buchanan Administration, which is the subject of the first excerpt, taken from an 1857 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The second excerpt, an article from a 1885 New York Times that originally ran in the San Francisco Call, further examines Kinman’s life and by then what had become a longstanding chair-giving tradition that had allowed him to become friend to several Presidents.
From May 18, 1857 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
President Andrew Johnson’s chair.
From “Seth Kinman, The Pacific Coast Nimrod Who Gives Chairs to Presidents,” New York Times, reprinted from the San Francisco Call (December 9, 1885):
A unique character is Seth Kinman, the grizzly bear hunter and presidential chair presenter, now stopping in this city. He is a tall man, 70 years old, straight as an arrow, dressed in buckskin from head to foot, with long silver hair, beard, and shaggy eyebrows, under which and his immense hat a pair of keen eyes peer sharply.
He is the Nimrod of this coast, the great elk shooter and grizzly bear hunter of California, who has presented elk horns and grizzly bear claws from animals that have fallen before his unerring rifle to four Presidents of the United States–Buchanan, Lincoln, Johnson, and Hayes–and has ‘the finest of all’ to present to President Cleveland next spring. He claims to have shot in all more than 800 grizzlies, as many as 50 elk in one month, and to have supplied the Government troops and sawmill hands in Humboldt with 240 elk in 11 months on contract at 25 cents per pound.
He was born in Union County, Penn., in 1815, went to Illinois in 1830, and crossed the plains to California in 1849. He tried mining on Trinity River, but followed hunting mainly for a living. In the Winter of 1856-57 he made his first elkhorn chair, and conceived the idea of presenting it to President Buchanan. Peter Donahue favored it. He went on in the Golden Age with letters to Col. Rynders in New-York, and in Washington he met Senator Gwin, Gen. Denver, and others. Dr. Wozencroft made the presentation speech, and Buchanan was highly pleased. He wrote Rynders to get Kinman the best gun he could find in New-York, which he did, together with two fine pistols. He also got an appointment to corral the Indians on the Government reservation, and when they strayed away he brought them back.
In November, 1804, he presented President Lincoln with an elkhorn chair, which greatly pleased him; Clinton Lloyd, Clerk of the House, made the presentation speech. The chair to Hayes was presented when he was Governor of Ohio, but nominee for President. The chair presented to President Johnson was made of the bones and hide of a grizzly.•
Anything we can conjure in our minds, not matter how far-fetched, could happen eventually in reality. Maybe not exactly in the form we hoped or as soon as we wanted, but in some sense. From a Code(Love) piece by Roger Huang about digitally raising the dead, a favorite pursuit of Ray Kurzweil:
“Will virtual intelligence ever be anything more than a figment of a real person? The question examines everything humans have always assumed about human nature: that we are unique, and that we are defined by our uniqueness against non-humans. We possess a strange combination of social interaction, physical manipulation, and processing power that is hard to define, so we often use comparisons to living things that are distinctly not human to define ourselves.
We are not cows. We are not dolphins. We are not chimpanzees, even though that is getting uncomfortably close.
The closer robots get to piercing that space, the more uncomfortable humans get with them. This is the ‘uncanny valley.’ The more robots look, and act like humans, even if we distinctly know they are not, the more we revile them. Like the broken souls of the Ring, poorly designed robots can lead us to hate, and to pain, because they lead us to question who we truly are.
Virtual life that humans can accept must pass the Turing Test. It must fool a human into thinking that it too is a human, that it is really he or she. When Ray sits down to talk with his reincarnated father, he cannot be talking with a robot, but with a real, living human being that he has been yearning to speak to for forty long years.
Ray Kurzweil believes that will happen within a couple of decades.”•
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The 17-year-old Kurzweil in 1965 on I’ve Got a Secret:
Tags: Ray Kurzweil, Roger Huang
We’re all irreplaceable, each of us, but few more than the singer-songwriter Pete Seeger, whose death feels like the actual end of the twentieth century, so many of that era’s struggles and triumphs burned into his flesh. He was really American and completely foreign. Not a bad thing to be.
An episode of his lo-fi 1960s TV odyssey, Rainbow Quest.
From Jennie Rothenberg Gritz in the Atlantic, writing about Rainbow Quest:
“For a brief period in the mid-1960s, Seeger hosted his own program on the ‘magic screen.’ The show was called Rainbow Quest (named after a line in one of Seeger’s songs). Despite the colorful title, it was filmed in black and white, in a New Jersey studio with no audience, and broadcast over a Spanish-language UHF station. Seeger’s wife, Toshi, was listed in the credits as ‘Chief Cook and Bottle Washer.’
Even with this bare-bones production, Seeger clearly found the new medium disorienting. ‘You know, I’m like a blind man, looking out through this little magic screen,” he said at the start of the first episode, gazing awkwardly into the camera. ‘And I—I don’t know if you see me. I know I can’t see you.’ Over the next 10 minutes, he alternated between noodling gorgeously on his banjo and explaining his distrust of the ‘little box’ that sat in every American living room, killing ambition, romance, and human interaction.
But then he started talking about Huddie Ledbetter and giving his invisible audience an impromptu 12-string guitar lesson. And then the Clancy Brothers showed up in their big woolly sweaters and performed a rousing set of Irish tunes. At that point, Seeger seemed to settle into his comfort zone—a state of natural curiosity and delight.”
“Let me know.”
One of the neat fictional things that Gene Roddenberry dreamed up, the holodeck, might actually be coming to our living rooms soon, so that we can be completely drenched by even more entertainment, until it’s oozing from every last pore. Because we’re all children now who have to be amused every last fucking second. Everybody is excited about a holodeck potentially bringing us even more diversions. Well, not everybody. Starving children and colorectal cancer patients probably don’t care. But they have perspective, so they don’t count. From Nick Bilton in the New York Times:
“This is all part of a quest by computer companies, Hollywood and video game makers to move entertainment closer to reality — or at least a computer-generated version of reality. Rather than simply watch movies, the thinking goes, we could become part of the story. We could see people and things moving around our living rooms. The actors could talk to us. Gamers who today slouch on the couch could step inside their games. They could pick up a computer-simulated bat in computer-simulated Yankee Stadium while a computer-simulated crowd roared around them.
‘The holodeck is something we’ve been fixated on here for a number of years as a future target experience that would be truly immersive,’ said Phil Rogers, a corporate fellow at Advanced Micro Devices, the computer chip maker. ‘Ten years ago, it seemed like a dream. Now, it feels within reach.'”
Tags: Gene Roddenberry, Nick Bilton
Having posted earlier today about speleologist and chronobiologist Michel Siffre, here’s a gorgeous, hypnotic film about his 1972 “Midnight Cave” time-isolation experiment in Del Rio, Texas. It’s TV dinners and Plato and guns and mice and being and nothingness.
Tags: Michel Siffre
From the October 9, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Kansas City, Mo.–Kansas City’s Fall Carnival came to an end amid scenes of roystering and riotous disorder seldom witnessed anywhere. Many fights and brawls resulted and over seventy arrests were made. As a result of the state of affairs Chief of Police Irwin has declared that in future carnivals no masqueraders will be permitted on the streets at night.”
Tags: Chief of Police Irwin
