Urban Studies

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Old Print Article: “Eccentric Millionaire To Build Freak Pavilion,” New York Times (1907)

January 15, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

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“A remarkable feature of this dancing floor is that though it is situated fifty feet above ground no railing has been placed about it.”

A wealthy Pennsylvanian who maybe drank on occasion decided to spend a fortune building a garish pavilion with trees lit up by gas fires and a dance floor without railing 50 feet above the ground. An excerpt from an article about the dreamer pleasure park in the September 1, 1907 New York Times, which at the time spelled “Pittsburgh” without the “h”:

“PITTSBURG, Penn.–A small paradise is the hill back of the home of Thomas McDermott, at Glenfield, ten miles below Pittsburg, on the banks of the Ohio. It is because of McDermott, who is said to be wealthy, is spending so much money beautifying the little park, making it a Luna Park and World’s Pavilion combined, that his wife, Catherine McDermott, has entered court, asking that he be declared an habitual drunkard. Mrs. McDermott tried to have her husband a lunatic because of his reckless expenditures on landscape, but failed, and now she wants to cut off his drinks.

THE TIMES correspondent has had an interview with McDermott,and has also looked through his wonderful pleasure park, which he is building, his wife says, for himself. He says that he is a recluse. This is what makes McDermott so angry. He admits that for the time he does not want the public to know much about his queer venture, nor would anything have been known about it until he was ready had it not been that Mrs. McDermott became suspicious and entered suit to obtain control of his estate. 

McDermott says he is and has been for some time preparing a treat for his neighbors; that it was and is his intention to invite every one to a grand ball and opening as soon as his monster pavilion is completed. McDermott, who is an Irishman, is very angry at his woman neighbors, whom he charges with having led his wife into wrong ways of thinking. He denies the allegation of Mrs. McDermott that he hasn’t been sober in thirty-nine years.

It is safe to assume that if McDermott is the real designer of the great pavilion, Mrs. McDermott will have great trouble proving her assertion. No inebriate ever designed and carried out the massive work now under way. It is a massive toy being erected by a man who has the money and who says he doesn’t care a blank what the public thinks; that it is his own money; he made it honestly, and will spend it as he sees fit. …

The pavilion is shaped like a woman’s hat, which, according to a certain humorist, is ‘anything with any shape at all.’ There just isn’t any shape to the McDermott pavillion. It wanders about, dodging trees here and encircling other trees, while in some places the roof and sides have been so constructed as to avoid hurting some favorite branch of a favorite tree. The whole thing is in the centre of a woody space which McDermott calls his ‘park.’

Rider Haggard never conceived of anything half so grotesque as that park when illuminated at night. There are at least sixty large trees, and from some point in each there springs a tongue of flame. The flame may come from a point high up or burst from near the base of the tree. Weird and uncanny the thing appears until one is told how it is done. It is natural gas which has been piped to each tree and the pipe cunningly concealed. In some cases the pipes are run up the tree quite a distance and out to the end of a branch. In other cases the pipes are run into old-fashioned chandeliers in the top branches of trees. This work was done by McDermott personally in spite of his sixty-odd years, and it was one of his delights to lead a visitor into his park and have his big trees lighted one by one. 

On top of the pavilion is a dancing floor, through which immense poplar trees break here and there, for McDermott has been most careful of his trees. On account of the many trees included in the make-up of the dancing floor it will scarcely ever be popular with the waltzers. A remarkable feature of this dancing floor is that though it is situated fifty feet above ground no railing has been placed about it, nor will one be placed there. A couple might easily two-step off the dancing floor.”

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“They Went Around The Country And Created Computer Clubs Everyplace They Went”

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

At Medium, Walter Isaacson posted a new excerpt (which awaits your crowdsourcing) from his forthcoming book on Silicon Valley creators. His latest segment concerns the famed Homebrew Computer Club, the original cult of the microprocessor, which was spread across the country with a Johnny Appleseed approach several years before there was an Apple Computers. The first two paragraphs: 

“The Homebrew Mentality

In June 1975, the month that Gates first moved down to Albuquerque, Ed Rogers decided to send the Altair or the road showing off its marvels as if it were a carney show exhibit. His goal was to create computer clubs in towns across America, preferably filled with Altair loyalists. He tricked out a Dodge camper van, dubbed it the MITS Mobile, and sent it on a sixty-town tour up the coast of California then down to the Southeast, hitting such hotspots as Little Rock, Baton Rouge, Macon, Huntsville, and Knoxville. Gates, who went along for part of the ride, thought it was an amazingly neat marketing ploy. ‘They bought this big blue van and they went around the country and created computer clubs everyplace they went,’ he marveled. ‘Most of the computer clubs in America were created by MITs.’ Gates was at the shows in Texas, and Allen joined for the ride when they got to Alabama. At the Huntsville Holiday Inn, sixty people — a mix of hippyish hobbyists and crew-cut engineers — paid $10 to attend, then about four times the cost of a movie. The presentation lasted three hours. At the end of a display of a lunar landing game, doubters came and looked under the table assuming there were cables to some bigger minicomputer hidden underneat. ‘But once they saw it was real,’ Allen recalled. ‘the engineers became almost giddy with enthusiasm.’

One of the stops that summer was Rickeys Hyatt House in Palo Alto. There a fateful encounter occurred after Microsoft BASIC was demonstrated to a group of hackers and hobbyists from a newly-formed local group known as the Homebrew Computer Club. ‘The room was packed with amateurs and experimenters eager to find out about this new electronic toy,’ the club’s newsletter reported. Some of them were also eager to act on the hacker credo that software, like information, should be free. This was not surprising given the social and cultural attitudes — so different from the entrepreneurial zeal of those who had migrated up from Albuquerque — which had flowed together in the early 1970s leading up to the formation of the Homebrew Computer Club.”

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A Brief Note From 1897 About A Cow Autopsy

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

From the October 27, 1897 New York Times:

“Providence–The Coroner in that portion of South Kingston known as Gould’s Crossing decided to-day, after holding an autopsy upon the carcass of the favorite Jersey cow of Charles C. Allen, that the animal had been killed by a football. The animal became wheezy last Saturday and in the evening at milking time she had kicked and punted so desperately that weakness knocked her out and she fell in a heap.

Farmer Allen sent for a veterinary surgeon, and the two sat up all night and tried unsuccessfully to diagnose that puzzling disease. The veterinary declared that the trouble was a new one to him. He applied all sorts of remedies, and occasionally the distressed animal would arise and kick like a mule, driving her attendants before her. The appetite of the cow failed on Saturday night, and Sunday and Monday she wanted no fodder at all. Then death followed, and Farmer Allen determined to learn the nature of the strange and fatal illness.

The football was found in the stomach and was still partially blown up. It appears that the boys living about Gould’s Crossing went over to one of the fields of the Allen farm Saturday to have a line up, and that in some mysterious manner one of their footballs disappeared. The autopsy explained it all.”

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“There Is An Alarming Possibility That Our Economy Is Moving In The Direction Of What Some People Call A Two-Tier Society”

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

In addition to a 1987 edition of Omni featuring Bill Gates and Dr. Timothy Leary opining on the future of technology in America, the publication also invited the economist Robert Heilbroner to speculate on the U.S. economy in 2007. He was spot-on about income inequality, the creative disruption of technology and the threats to American exceptionalism, though he whiffed on Japan’s place in today’s global marketplace. His forecast:

“There is an alarming possibility that our economy is moving in the direction of what some people call a two-tier society — a large population of people with middle-class or higher incomes and values, with a considerable bulge at the top. and a large number of people who have been economically and culturally uncoupled from the main society.

What’s most alarming is that the ladder that has connected the bottom to the top is now missing some important rungs. There were certain industries, like the steel and auto industries, that provided more or less continuous ladders of jobs from the bottom to the top. You could enter as an unskilled person, acquire new skills, and move up the ladder to secure, unionized, better-paying jobs. But now these industries have been seriously imperiled, and their place as employers has been replaced by what I call the McDonald’s employers. More people work for McDonald’s than work for U.S. Steel, but McDonald’s has no ladders. The problem is serious.

A great many economists, myself included, feel uneasy about the fact that 70 percent ol the economy does what is called service work and only 30 percent does what is called goods-related work. New technology keeps entering the economy and disrupting employment. When you look back at how the American economy developed, you see a migration off the farm into the factory and out of the factory into the office. The main push has come from technology. There has been relatively little new machinery to push people out of the office, but that’s changing now. If the computer creates jobs in the office, the service sector will increase and there will be no squeezing of employment. But if technology bumps service people out of work, I don’t know where they are going to go.

Personally. I think American optimism is in for a very severe challenge. We have always considered ourselves virtually to have a right to be number one in the world. But of course we don’t have any such right or assurance. And we have to resign ourselves to the unsettling fact that we are number two, or three, or four in many ways. In terms of health, for instance, we have fallen seriously behind, and that’s a big blow to our self-image.

In the next 20 years the government will have to take active steps in providing work and income tor the bottom one third of the population. The government grudgingly provides some sort of income, but it doesn’t provide work. And work is essential for people’s self-esteem and also for the building of many kinds of infrastructures that are needed in the country.

It is quite possible, it seems to me, that America will emerge from its present, wholly unaccustomed struggle for world position very worse off than it is today; that we will not find the right combination of talents and the right distribution of workforce in various occupations; that we will not develop the right technologies and will end up with a seriously disadvantaged economy. Not so long ago England was still regarded as one of Ihe most remarkable economies in the world, but it is now slightly less productive than Portugal. I think it is quite possible that the day of unquestioned American preeminence may be finished.

We could suddenly find that the way Americans live, their chances for life expectancy, their amenities of life are not as. good as, let’s just say, the Germans’ or the Swedes’. We might fail to produce the necessary output to bring our living standards and quality of life up to an acceptable level.

In the old days we tended to think about political possibilities in terms of left and right. Since Iran we’ve realized there is another dimension ‘up and down.’ There is potential for a great deal of political mischief and sabotage in ‘underdeveloped’ countries, and anyone who tries to think about the future has to consider that. There is going to be lots of trouble.

It is clear which countries are emerging as economic powers. It is entirely possible that Japan is going to be the England of the future — I mean the 1850’s England. Japan may be the organizer for a ‘Pacific Rim’ economy — as England was for Europe a century ago. Japan may combine its leadership and technology with the inexpensive manpower and the intelligence of the Chinese, the Malaysians, the Taiwanese, the Indians, the Koreans. It is quite possible that there will be a new world economic ’empire’ out there, which will severely challenge the formerly undisputed hegemony of the West. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union, as far as I can see, will continue to be very bureaucratic and will be very unlikely to make any economic changes.

Sooner or later this terrific debt problem has to be resolved, and there is only one possible way to resolve it, and that is to ‘forget’ it. The debt is unrepayable, and it is going to be swallowed by a number of people taking their lumps— banks, corporations, and governments. And some of the borrowers will have to swallow bitter pills. The decks have to be cleared. I suspect that under international agreements the old debts are going to be washed away, forgiven, or rephased — such wonderful jargon words!

I think everyone recognizes now that the achievement of a better world is more complicated and difficult than some of us thought 20 years ago.”

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“NSA Officials Are Infuriated That All This Havoc Was Caused By Some Random Contractor”

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

In an addendum of sorts to his recent Wired article, “How the NSA Almost Killed the Internet,” Steven Levy, who wrote one of my favorite books ever, has published some takeaways from his recent conversations with the embattled government organization. One example about a certain freelancer:

“They really hate Snowden. The NSA is clearly, madly, deeply furious at the man whose actions triggered the biggest crisis in its history. Even while contending they welcome the debate that now engages the nation, they say that they hate the way it was triggered. The NSA has an admittedly insular culture — the officials described it as almost like a family. Morale suffers when friends and neighbors think that NSA employees are sitting around reading grandma’s email. Also, the agency believes that the Snowden leaks have seriously hurt national security (though others dispute this). NSA officials are infuriated that all this havoc was caused by some random contractor. They suggest that had Snowden been familiar with the culture and the ethos of the agency, understood the level of training undergone by its employees, seen the level of regulations and oversight, he would have been less likely to abscond with all those documents. (Snowden’s interviews indicate otherwise.) Still, they are stunned that someone ‘inside the fence’ would do what Snowden did. Even if Snowden is eventually pardoned, he’d do well to steer clear of Fort Meade.”

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“I Think The Notion We Have Contained Too Big To Fail Is Ludicrous”

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

Tom Easton, American Finance Editor at the Economist, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit about what a big honking mess the U.S. is financially. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

You’ve commented that the US economy is moving towards the state-run model used in China and you’ve seen the effect of that first hand. There are many people in the US who think that’s not a bad thing. Can you briefly summarize the top 3 benefits and top 3 disadvantages to this model?

Tom Easton:

The Chinese economy functions because of a vibrant semi-legal market built around companies that do not pay taxes or follow national laws. At a certain point of maturity, they come under the system and lose their vitality. This is becoming sort of true in America as well, in as much as even though companies follow laws, the laws themselves are Orwellian – all equal, but more equal for some entities then others. Ones falling into this category include the various branches of private equity companies, master limited partnerships, real estate investment trusts, and business development companies. They largely avoid paying taxes on a corporate level, and are growing components of the American economy. When they get extremely large (and perhaps they are nearing this point), pressure will lead to change (maybe). The good part of this facet of America is that allows economic dynamism. The bad part is that it is extremely unfair. That is just like what occurs in China.

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Question:

Treasury Secretary Lew–and the current Administration more broadly–recently began to promote the idea that Dodd-Frank and related Basel III capital and liquidity reforms have solved the problem of Too Big to Fail.

What are your thoughts on the metrics economists and analysts use to measure TBTF, specifically the existence of a “subsidy” in the form of cheaper debt financing as a result of implicit government support. Does the subsidy accurately measure TBTF? And if not, how can we know when we have addressed one of the core symptoms of the financial crisis?

And what do you think of the glaring holes in financial regulatory reform that the TBTF debate seems to ignore, i.e., securities financing transactions, money market funds, and other shadow banking entities.

Tom Easton:

I think the notion we have contained too big to fail is ludicrous. In many ways, during the crisis we merely shifted risks from private institutions to the government, and governments can still fail. Student loans, medicaid and social security are all structurally unsound, as are numerous large public pension plans. Nobody understands Dodd Frank, and I say this having read it, heard incoherent blather from its named authors, and spoken to numerous lawyers making a fortune from its nuances. Worse, perhaps the one uncontroversial ingredient of the financial crisis was its tie to improperly backed housing loans, and there is every indication the administration is pushing in this direction once again. Risk can not be eliminated and to suggest otherwise is to deceive. At best, it can be channeled and made more transparent. Consider one key plank of Dodd Frank: the stress test by the Fed. No one really understands what is in the test, and to the extent there is opacity, good credit will be curtailed and credit broadly will be provided by other sorts of entities that aren’t exposed to the same bureaucracy. There are already signs that it will come through companies which themselves are backed by bank, merely making the system more convoluted. The end of this questions suggests the author, bae8, clearly understands the limitations of the rules. We may have gotten the worst of both worlds – a “safety” net full of holes that nonetheless asphyxiates virtuous economic activity.

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Question:

Do you think there will be any economic repercussions down the road due to the late start young adults are having in terms of jobs, starting careers, settling down etc?

Tom Easton:

At the Economist we have meetings in the editors office. Ideas are debated and often research cited. Sometimes I feel that what I hear is exactly contrary to what I have experienced. This is one of those areas. In a meeting I attended, one of our economic writers cited a piece that said the damage caused by a delayed or adverse start to a career will cause profound long-term damage to a career, and the reverse is true as well – there are golden moments to begin work. I have certainly seem anecdotal evidence of the latter – business school graduates from the late 1940s controlled vast swathes of the American economy. That said, I found that many of the most talented, driven and open people I have encountered were hit hard early on by adverse economic circumstances. When I began my career, the most extraordinary people I encountered had lived through bitter times during the Depression. It is no secret that Apple and Microsoft were founded in the 1970s. I think the key is how miserable the person is about their late start. The more miserable they are, the happier they will be.

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Question:

What do you think is the biggest danger to the world economy that isn’t talked about in the media or intellectual circles today?

Tom Easton:

The single biggest danger is that there is no consensus, and perhaps no understanding, on underpins a viable economic system. In America, I think we are at a point where there is no agreement – and again maybe no understanding – of what defines the structure of a company, the role of the state, illegal activity, and even ownership. People often refer to the “american system” but whatever this may be is currently in great flux. That is a huge challenge to the rule of law – meaning clear demarcations of what is right and just, and what constitutes appropriate activity. The result is that there a movement toward cronyism – success is tied to who you know and the friends that can be purchased. The good news is that I believe many in America are aware of this, and it is not illegal to discuss it (untrue in much of the world) and consequently, I anticipate the emergence of better ideas and conditions.•

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Old Print Article: “A Hideous Sect,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1890)

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

“Gradually he widened his teachings to his little band until he openly advocated the drinking of blood for all diseases.”

“Gradually he widened his teachings to his little band until he openly advocated the drinking of blood for all diseases.”

A 19th-century American religious cult became convinced that drinking human blood was the way to cure all ills, as evidenced by an article in the January 27, 1890 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“Something’s Happening Here In San Francisco”

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

San Francisco is ground zero in the tech-driven divide of haves and have-nots, with gourmet cafeterias and private transportation for the those inside the ‘plex and diminishing returns for the unlucky on the outside looking in. It’s not that corporations are responsible for curing all of society’s ills, but they can be held to account for making them worse through dodging taxes and privatizing basic services–by disengaging from a bustling city into a gated community. It’s a utopia; it’s an earthquake.

There have been a torrent of articles on the topic recently, but Katharine Blake McFarland’s 3 Quarks Daily essay is particularly good. The opening:

“Something is happening in San Francisco. It’s nothing new, exactly; the widening gap between rich and poor is a story unfolding across the nation and the world and San Franciscans are growing weary of the spotlight. But the story here is hard to keep quiet about because it’s unfolding dramatically, at an accelerated pace and on an exaggerated scale. The numbers speak for themselves: in the city of San Francisco, the median price for a two-bedroom apartment is now $3,875, the highest in the country, and eviction notices are up 40 percent since 2010. On the one hand, the city counted 6,436 homeless people, more than half of whom suffer from mental illness, earning San Francisco fourth place in the nation for its homeless population. On the other, if all Stanford-alumni-founded companies formed a nation, its economy would be the 10th largest in the world, creating 5.4 million jobs and generating an annual revenue of $2.7 trillion.

It’s more than statistical extremity that accounts for the drama: characters here play their roles with pizzazz. In December, at one of the private bus protests, Union organizer Max Apler pretended to be a Google employee and his rant went viral: ‘This is a city for the right people who can afford it…Can’t afford it? You can leave.’ Residents’ willingness to believe the gag points to the problem. Then realer villains took the stage. AngelHack CEO Greg Gopman posted a Facebook tirade about ‘the degenerates’—San Francisco’s ‘crazy, homeless, drug dealers, dropouts, and trash … [who] gather like hyenas, spit, urinate, taunt you, sell drugs, get rowdy…’ He wrote:

The difference is in other cosmopolitan cities, the lower part of society keep to themselves. They sell small trinkets, beg coyly, stay quiet, and generally stay out of your way. They realize it’s a privilege to be in the civilized part of town and view themselves as guests. And that’s okay…

You can preach compassion, equality, and be the biggest lover in the world, but there is an area of town for degenerates and an area of town for the working class. There is nothing positive gained from having them so close to us. It’s a burden and a liability having them so close to us. Believe me, if they added the smallest iota of value I’d consider thinking different, but the crazy toothless lady who kicks everyone that gets too close to her cardboard box hasn’t made anyone’s life better in a while.“

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

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

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“I’m in search of small animals that have died.”

Wanted: animals that have “passed” naturally for taxidermy

Hi there, I am learning the art of taxidermy and right now working on skeletal articulation, wet preservation, and traditional mounting. I’m in search of small animals that have died due to natural or accidental causes. I am not looking for, nor believe in, animals being killed for artistic purposes. Also, no illegal species please! I am looking for donated/purchasable/trades for whole bodied specimens from breeders/pet stores that they may not have a need for.

“The Dream Of Having The World Database At Your Fingertips Will Have Become A Reality”

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

In 1987, two software moguls, Bill Gates and Dr. Timothy Leary, were asked by Omni to make predictions about life 20 years in the future. Gates was more accurate in his prognostications, though Leary provided some gems like this one: “What will you be? A performer. Everyone will be performing.”

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Bill Gates, Chairman of the Board, Microsoft Corporation:

The processing of digital information is improving very quickly. In ten years you’ll have 30 to 40 times as much computational power, and you’ll be able to manipulate the images and sounds that you now receive just passively from TV — you’ll insert yourself into a game or even change the outcome according to your wishes. So in 20 years your ability to get information will be expanded exponentially.

Take one example; You’re sitting at home. You’ll have a variety of image libraries that will contain, say, all the world’s best art. You’ll also have very cheap, flat panel-display devices throughout your house that will provide resolution so good that viewing a projection will be like looking at the original oil. painting. It will be that realistic.

In 20 years the Information Age will be here, absolutely. The dream of having the world database at your fingertips will have become a reality. You’ll even be able to call up a video show and place yourself in it. Today, if you want to create an image on a screen — a beach with the sun and waves— you’ve got to take a picture of it. But in 20 years you’ll literally construct your own images and scenes. You will have stored very high-level representations of what the sun looks like or how the wind blows. If you want a certain movie star to be sitting on a beach, kind of being lazy, believe me, you’ll be able to do that. People are already doing these things.

Also, we will have serious voice recognition. I expect to wake up and say, “Show me some nice Da Vinci stuff,” and my ceiling, a high-resolution display, will show me what I want to see — or call up any sort of music or video. The world will be online, and we’ll be able to simulate just about anything. Let’s say you want to go out to a racetrack. When you wake up you’ll say, “Hey, rent me one of those formula cars in Daytona,” and with some local controls, a little steering wheel you pull out of your drawer, you’ll be able to get the image and feel like you’re driving the car.

There’s a scary question to all this: How necessary will it be to go to real places or do real things? I mean, in 20 years we will synthesize reality. We’ll do it super-realistically and in real time. The machine will check its database and think of some stories you might tell, songs you might sing, jokes you might not have heard before. Today we simply synthesize flight simulation.

A lot of things are going to vanish from our lives. There will be a machine that keys off of physiological traits, whether it’s voiceprint or fingerprint; so in 2007 Mick Jagger will be onstage, and when Mick feels heat, you’ll feel heat. If a spray of water hits Tina on the back, you’ll feel that, too. I hope passive entertainment will disappear. People want to get involved. It will really start to change the quality of entertainment because it will be so individualized. If you like Bill Cosby, then there will be a digital description of Cosby, his mannerisms and appearance, and you will build your own show from that.

People will like the idea that the machine really knows them and that the machine can create experiences formed around the events in their lives to fulfill their particular needs and interests. But there’s a danger, too. It will be easy to feel worthless or overwhelmed by the amount of data. So what we’ll have to do is make sure the machine can tailor the data to the individual.

Probably all this progress will be pretty disruptive stuff. We’ll really find out what the human brain can do, but we’ll have serious problems about the purpose of it all. We’re going to find out how curious we are and how-much stimulation we can take. There have been experiments in which a monkey can choose to ingest cocaine and the monkey keeps on pushing that button until he dies. Well, we are going to create some pretty intense experiences through synthesized video-audio. Do you think you’ll reach a point of satisfaction when you no longer have to try something new or make something better? Life is really going to change; your ability to access satisfying experiences will be so large.

Take the change in movies in the last few years. Just a few years ago you had to find out where the movie was playing, then go to a certain neighborhood and stand in line to see the movie. Now you can go two blocks and find 10,000 titles. You feel inadequate. It’s going to be intimidating.

Twenty years ago I was ten years old. We already had color TV. I didn’t have theories about what the world might be like. But in the next 20 years you won’t be able to extrapolate the rate of progress from any previous pattern or curve because the new chips, these local intelligences that can process information, will cause a warp in what it’s possible to do. The leap will be unique. I can’t think of any equivalent phenomenon in history.•

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Timothy Leary, President, Futique Software Company:

By 2007 the problem of scarcity will be solved. Because most work will be done by robots and computers, you won’t have to work. Material possessions won’t mean as much to us as they do now, If there are nine Porsches in your garage. you’re going to say, “Take them away.” We’ve done that with wheat and grain, and we can do it with other things if we put our minds to it.

The way we define human beings will change. You won’t be a serf, a slave, or a worker. What will you be? A performer. Everyone will be performing. Passive listening, passive observing, passive watching will disappear. Of course, Big Brother, both of the Reagan and Ihe Gorbachev type, want us to be passive. They don’t want us to think for ourselves.

In 2007 you’ll be living in an information society in which information will be what money and machinery were in the Industrial Age. Everyone is going to be a psychologist, computer whiz, philosopher. Mind play, mind performance, psychological skill are going to be the equivalent of land, money, and power in the earlier ages.

Now to the nuts and bolts of this stuff: Every kid will learn how to communicate at a very young age; every kid will have his own computer — like a pair of sneakers, a pair of Nikes. No one will steal a computer, because you’ll throw them away. And everyone will learn how to chart his thoughts and his mental performance — like a baseball player’s stats. Even kids will plot their thoughts like they plot their batting average. The name of our species is Homo sapiens. That means we’re the organism that thinks, and our species finally will be proficient in thinking.

The biggest effect will be on blacks and members of other minority groups in this country. In the Information Age, to keep any poor kid from having a computer would be like keeping him from having food, medicine, shelter, or clothing now.

Within 20 years we’ll have scrapped the current system of partisan politics. Partisan politics belongs back in an age of feudalism, or at most the Industrial Age. It is insane to run a highly complicated, technological, pluralistic society like America when you have in the cabin of the spaceship a Democratic and a Republican candidate kneeing and gouging and beating up each other to see who’s going to be president for four years. In an electronic society an intelligent person would no more send Tip O’Neil to Washington to make his laws than you’d send Tip O’Neill to the wine shop to pick out a good wine for you.

Everyone is going to be responsible for government. It will be done by televoting, perhaps every Sunday between, say, twelve and one. But we’ll be voting on major issues — not parties, people, or a glamorous candidate who will play on our superstitions and emotions. You’ll educate yourself on the issues by using your own thought-processing appliances, the new computers. So you’ll be continually teaching yourself, continuously learning.

Right now there is a great deal of concern about the drug problem. In 20 years there will be hundreds of neurotransmitters that will allow you to boot up and activate your brain and change mental performance. There are going to be what I call brain radios — hearing aids you put in your ear— that will pick up and communicate with the electricity in your brain. You will be able to tune in any brain aspect, like sex, that you want. You will speed up or slow down your thinking. Anything you can do with chemicals you can do with brain waves, and they are so much healthier.

Drugs will be old-fashioned. No one will be addicted because you can just turn on the ultimate orgasm and keep it going for an hour. But how long are you going to do that? You’ll get bored. You’re going to want to turn it down or off. The criminality of drugs is what is causing the so-called drug crisis, but if you legalize a brain radio — and you’re going to have to — everyone will have the ability to dial into any emotional, mental, or sensual experience. We will use these radios to think more clearly and, above all, to communicate more clearly. The key to the twenty-first century will be five words: “think for yourself,” and “question authority.”

People will become more intelligent. I am really bored with the level of intelligence on this planet. There’s no one to talk to, and there is so much superstition. I am just waiting for people to smarten up. In 20 years I’ll have more fun, and I’ll have more people to talk to. People will be teaching me, and life is going to be more exciting. Twenty years ago — 1967 — the summer of love was just beginning, and I was busy performing the rituals that had to be performed then. The computers were IBM business machines that were used to de- personalize and control us. I frankly was too dumb to look ahead.•

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“The Next Global Conflicts Are More Likely To Be Fought In Tightly Packed Urban Areas”

January 12, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Hope Landsem’s WSJ review of David Kilcullen’s new book about the future of warfare, a passage about the heat of the battle potentially shifting to areas of population density:

“Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerrilla is his attempt at a study of future threats. The author says he was alerted by ‘a sense of dissonance about our reliance on ‘pure’ or binary theories that are framed around the nature of a specific threat group.’ Mr. Kilcullen worries that previous counterinsurgency theories, his own included, don’t adequately address current or potential problems, including global trends like population growth, urbanization, and the ready dissemination of military expertise and technology such as cellphones and drones.

These trends, Mr. Kilcullen says, will have a profound effect on the future of warfare. Take Libya, where anti-Gadhafi rebels in 2011 were able to use their technical expertise to modify weapons in factories near Benghazi—despite their lack of prior military experience. In Syria, urban areas became breeding grounds for dissatisfaction following years of diminishing water supplies. Social networks and social media helped fuel Syria’s 2011 uprising, which subsequently devolved into a sectarian civil war centered around cities.

As these examples show, the next global conflicts are more likely to be fought in tightly packed urban areas rather than in mountain environs. Coastal regions present extremely likely future threats, Mr. Kilcullen says—fitting, given that coastal regions contain more than 80% of the world’s cities.”

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A Brief Note From 1899 About A Lost Party

January 12, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the June 20, 1899 New York Times:

“Circle City, Alaska (via San Francisco)–A story of possible cannibalism and death on the Yukon trail has just reached here. Three men who left Dahl River on December 5 for Jimtown were not heard of again, and they were supposed to have been lost. Nothing was heard of them till the steamer Rideout, which arrived to-day, brought a terrible tale of suffering and horror.

The men were Michael Daly, Victor Eldair and M. Provost. They were from Providence, R.I.; Woonsocket, R.I.; and Brockton, Mass., respectively. There bodies were discovered seventeen from the mouth of Old Man’s Creek, they have in all probability having lost the trail and become bewildered. They left Dahl River with only three weeks’ food, which was amply sufficient for the 150 miles to Jimstown, but they soon were reduced to starvation.

Daly’s partially eaten body was found on the stove in the tent just as it was left when death overtook the others. Some scraps of moose hide and moccasin, of which they were endeavoring to make a stew, were also found. Daly’s body was identified by means of the clothes. The other two men were found dead five miles away from the tent. The fact that the tent flaps were shut down would seem to preclude the possibility of Daly’s body having been eaten by animals. The other men were doubtless driven to the awful extremity of cannibalism by hunger. Four hundred dollars were found on the body.”

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“Even Our Best And Brightest Devices Must Be Accommodated Within Existing Practices And Assumptions”

January 12, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

We often see technological development as a silver bullet that can change everything, but that bullet still has to be sized to fit a gun, even if it’s a 3D-printed gun. Structural changes are usually incremental and new technologies have to accommodate that pace. It’s evolution, not revolution. It can’t impose perfection and order upon the world. The telephone, for instance, started conversations but did not end wars. 

In his final BBC column, Tom Chatfield addresses revolution as it relates to technology. The opening:

“Lecturing in late 1968, the American sociologist Harvey Sacks addressed one of the central failures of technocratic dreams. We have always hoped, Sacks argued, that ‘if only we introduced some fantastic new communication machine the world will be transformed.’ Instead, though, even our best and brightest devices must be accommodated within existing practices and assumptions in a ‘world that has whatever organisation it already has.’

As an example, Sacks considered the telephone. Introduced into American homes during the last quarter of the 19th Century, instantaneous conversation across hundreds or even thousands of miles seemed close to a miracle. For Scientific American, editorializing in 1880, this heralded ‘nothing less than a new organization of society – a state of things in which every individual, however secluded, will have at call every other individual in the community, to the saving of no end of social and business complications…’

Yet the story that unfolded was not so much ‘a new organization of society’ as the pouring of existing human behaviour into fresh moulds: our goodness, hope and charity; our greed, pride and lust. New technology didn’t bring an overnight revolution. Instead, there was strenuous effort to fit novelty into existing norms.”

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“A State Can End War, But A Traditional Society Cannot”

January 12, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Amy Chozick’s New York Times Magazine interview with Jared Diamond in which the scientist defends his recent book, The World Until Yesterday, from criticism:

“NYT:

On the other hand, the book has been criticized for saying traditional societies are very violent.

Jared Diamond:

Some people take a view of traditional society as being peaceful and gentle. But the proportional rate of violent death is much higher in traditional societies than in state-level societies, where governments assert a monopoly on force. During World War II, until Aug. 14, 1945, American soldiers who killed Japanese got medals. On Aug. 16, American soldiers who killed Japanese were guilty of murder. A state can end war, but a traditional society cannot.

NYT:

People have called the book racist, saying it suggests third-world poverty is caused by environmental factors instead of imperialism and conquests.

Jared Diamond:

It’s clearly nonsense. It’s not as if people in certain parts of the world were rich until Europeans came along and they suddenly became poor. Before that, there were big differences in technology, military power and the development of centralized government around the world. That’s a fact.”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

January 10, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"This could be great fun for kids."

“This could be great fun for kids.”

Wanted – Live stink bugs! – $10 (Hudson Valley)

I am looking for LIVE “Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs.” These insects can be nuisances this time of year as they move to homes, barns and other structures to find a place to overwinter. I need them, and you need them gone. Will pay $10 per hundred if you collect. Otherwise, will pay a token finders fee for access to a collectible population. Am looking for as many as three thousand. This could be great fun for kids. Thanks for your reply!

Old Print Article: “Stomach A Junk Shop,” New York Times (1900)

January 10, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

The “human ostrich,” an inversion of the hunger artist, was a fixture of 19th-century dime museums who would down dimes, sure, but also all manner of metal, from pins to nails to cutlery. But there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and sooner or later the result was stomach surgery for the performer. Such was the case with John Fasel, who found himself atop a surgeon’s table in 1900. From an article about his daring diet and its consequences in the January 14, 1900 New York Times (which referred to him erroneously as “Sasel”):

“John Sasel, twenty-two years old, applied for admission to the St. John’s Hospital, Brooklyn, Thursday. At 4 o’clock yesterday afternoon an operation was performed on the man, and among the other junk the following articles were removed from his stomach:

Two nickel watch chains and one brass chain, two latch keys, six hairpins, 128 common pins, ten two and one-half inch iron nails, two horseshoe nails, and one finger ring, set with a stone. The doctors say that there still remain to be removed eight or more horseshoe nails, the pendant of a gas lamp, and several other articles. The man was said last night to be doing well and to have excellent chance of a recovery.

Sasel had been employed as ‘the man with the ostrich stomach’ at a dime museum in this borough for the last fourteen months. He told the doctors that such articles had been his daily diet during that time, and that he had thrived upon them until Dec. 16 when after swallowing 320 pins, he felt pains in his stomach. These continued until last Wednesday, when he went to a doctor. He then took an emetic, which brought forth a steel watch chain twelve inches long twelve inches long. The doctor advised him to go to a hospital.

At St. John’s Hospital an X ray phtograph was taken Friday afternoon. His stomach was seen to be a veritable junk shop, and the operation was determined upon. Dr. George G. Hopkins, chief operating surgeon at the hospital, performed the operation.”

“Extremely Short Exposures To A Relatively Simple Computer Program Could Induce Powerful Delusional Thinking In Quite Normal People”

January 10, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The real shift in our time isn’t only that we’ve stopped worrying about surveillance, exhibitionism and a lack of privacy, but that we’ve embraced these things–demanded them, even. There must have been something lacking in our lives, something gone unfulfilled. But is this intimacy with technology and the sense of connection and friendship and relationship that attends it–often merely a likeness of love–an evolutionary correction or merely a desperate swipe in the wrong direction?

The opening of Brian Christian’s New Yorker piece about Spike Jonze’s Her, a film about love in the time of simulacra, in which a near-future man is wowed by a “woman” who seems to him like more than just another pretty interface:

“In 1966, Joseph Weizenbaum, a professor of computer science at M.I.T., wrote a computer program called Eliza, which was designed to engage in casual conversation with anybody who sat down to type with it. Eliza worked by latching on to keywords in the user’s dialogue and then, in a kind of automated Mad Libs, slotted them into open-ended responses, in the manner of a so-called non-directive therapist. (Weizenbaum wrote that Eliza’s script, which he called Doctor, was a parody of the method of the psychologist Carl Rogers.) ‘I’m depressed,’ a user might type. ‘I’m sorry to hear you are depressed,’ Eliza would respond.

Eliza was a milestone in computer understanding of natural language. Yet Weizenbaum was more concerned with how users seemed to form an emotional relationship with the program, which consisted of nothing more than a few hundred lines of code. ‘I was startled to see how quickly and how very deeply people conversing with DOCTOR became emotionally involved with the computer and how unequivocally they anthropomorphized it,’ he wrote. ‘Once my secretary, who had watched me work on the program for many months and therefore surely knew it to be merely a computer program, started conversing with it. After only a few interchanges with it, she asked me to leave the room.’ He continued, ‘What I had not realized is that extremely short exposures to a relatively simple computer program could induce powerful delusional thinking in quite normal people.’

The idea that people might be unable to distinguish a conversation with a person from a conversation with a machine is rooted in the earliest days of artificial-intelligence research.”

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A Note From 1897 About Risqué Moving Pictures

January 9, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the July 30, 1897 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“The Rev. Frederick Bruce Russell made a raid on the Mutoscope machines at Coney Island this morning and closed several of them. These are a species of moving picture contrivances and show various scenes. They are operated by the dropping of a nickel in a slot. Those closed by Mr. Russell to-day were at Feltman’s Pavilion, Koster’s Concert Hall, the Sea Beach Palace and the Old Iron Pier. The particular pictures which fell under the reformer’s eye were entitled ‘What the Girls Did With Willie’s Hat’ and ‘Fun in a Boarding School.’”

“He Was A Hero In Certain Circles Well Before The Assassination Of President Kennedy”

January 8, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

I think you know my feelings about JFK conspiracists, but Mark Lane, author of 1966’s Rush to Judgement, a broadside directed at the Warren Commission, has lived a colorful existence even beyond that explosive chapter in American history. A lawyer for anti-war factions and civil-rights groups in the 1960s, Lane later became a legal representative for Jim Jones and his Jonestown settlement in Guyana, which in 1978 descended into madness and mass death. He was on the scene when the cult members prepared to follow their mad leader’s orders–to drink his Kool-Aid–and survived by escaping and hiding somewhere safer–the jungle.

Here’s Lane, in 1966, discussing the Warren Commission with William F. Buckley.

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

January 8, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Natalie Portman

She’s pretty. There’s no denying that, she’s a good looking young woman. Shes a REALLY good looking young woman. But in my life she’s the only REALLY good looking woman I’ve ever seen that isn’t sexy. It’s strange.

Old Print Article: “The Lost Donner Treasure,” New York Times (1891)

January 8, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

621px-Stumps_of_trees_cut_by_the_Donner_Party

The Donner Party, best known for its eclectic menu, was also a fascination for the buried treasure it reportedly left behind. Prospectors unearthed some of the loot almost fifty years after the pioneers found themselves stranded and starving. A report from the May 17, 1891 New York Times:

Truckee, Cal–There is great excitement in Truckee over the discovery of a portion of the treasure buried by the Donner party in 1846-7. In the early days of gold excitement in the State the Donner party attempted to cross the mountains into California by an untried pass. They were snowed up in the mountains, and suffered great hardships, many dying from cold and starvation. Relief expeditions were sent out and a few survivors were rescued in this way. During their sufferings the party buried a quantity of treasure, the amount of which is estimated by some at $10,000. A search has frequently been made for this treasure, but without success.

There is authentic history of the burial of several hundred dollars by Mrs. Graves, one of the members of the party, on March 8, 1847, near the shores of Donner Lake, and it is supposed it was this money which was found on Thursday last by a miner named Reynolds, who was prospecting the hillside near the lake. He found a spot where the earth had been torn up by a falling tree, and his attention was accidentally called to some dark looking pieces of money lying on top of the ground. He picked up ten ancient looking dollars, and upon scratching slightly in the earth uncovered a large quantity of silver. He afterward searched the ground with a companion, and yesterday the men succeeded in finding nearly $200. They are still prosecuting the search and other searching parties are being organized here. From the present indications the hills on the north side of Donner Lake will be covered with treasure hunters.

Persons familiar with the incidents connected with the Donner party feel no doubt that the money just found is that buried by the party forty years ago. The coins are antiquated and all of dates prior to 1845. They are from France, Spain, Bolivia, Argentine Republic, and a number of other foreign countries, besides a very rare collection of American pieces. As relics of the Donner party the find is a very valuable one, $100 having been offered for one of the pieces.•

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“I’m Tired, My Feet Hurt, My Shoes Got Holes In Them”

January 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Zack Crockett’s Priceonomics blog post about one homeless veteran in San Francisco, how he fell into that mean existence and the intractability of such a predicament:

“Nathaniel only trusts two people: ‘Jesus, and a MUNI driver named Curtis.’ In the heart of the city, off homeless-dense Market Street, he bumbles along the brick wall of an alleyway, watching his shadow shuffle one step ahead. He has trouble making eye contact. As if bearing some great weight, he hunches, hiding his face beneath the brim of a colorful Rolling Stones cap. He’s 57 with poor eyesight. A new pair of reading glasses — his only Christmas gift this year —dangles from the loose neck of his t-shirt, and he occasionally pauses to make sure they’re still safe.

One of 7,000-10,000 homeless residents of San Francisco, Nathaniel, or ‘Nate the Great,’ as his mother once called him, is particularly worn down tonight, and at the end of his wits.

‘I’m tired, my feet hurt, my shoes got holes in them,’ he says without an iota of self-pity. ‘Thankfully, the holidays are over. It ain’t bad you know, but another year, and the same old thing. You haven’t moved along.’

He’s been roaming Market Street for 15 years. Like most homeless who are not sheltered in the city (about 50%), Nate subsists on what he makes panhandling throughout the day — usually $10-15 over the course of 15 hours, from 9 am to 12 am. There’s the occasional rare day where he’ll pull in $50. And then there was that one time he woke up with a coffee tin full of $300 in quarters. But he hasn’t seen a day like that for a long time. Today, he ‘retires early’ at 5 pm with four dollars and nineteen cents in his pocket.”

___________________________

“He needs your help desperately…we just don’t do that here”:

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“The Power Of Intelligent Machines Is Growing As Their Cost Collapses”

January 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of “The Robots Are Coming,” Gavin Kelly’s smart and sober-minded Guardian piece about the rise of the machines and what that will mean for job markets in automated societies:

“Whether it’s our humdrum reliance on supermarket self-service tills, Siri on our iPhones, the emergence of the drone as a weapon of choice or the impending arrival of the driverless car, intelligent machines are woven into our lives as never before.  

It’s increasingly common, a cliche even, for us to read about the inexorable rise of the robot as the fundamental shift in advanced economies that will transform the nature of work and opportunity within society. The robot is supposedly the spectre threatening the economic security not just of the working poor but also the middle class across mature societies. ‘Be afraid’ is the message: the march of the machine is eating into our jobs, pay rises and children’s prospects. And, according to many experts, we haven’t seen anything yet. 

This is because the power of intelligent machines is growing as their cost collapses. They are doing things reliably now that would have sounded implausible only a few years ago. By the end of the decade, Nissan pledges the driverless car, Amazon promises that electric drones will deliver us packages, Rolls-Royce says that unmanned robo-ships will sail our seas. The expected use of machines for everyday purposes is already giving rise to angst about the nascent problem of ‘robot smog‘ as other people’s machines invade ever more aspects of our personal space.“

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“A Self-Contained City With Over 1200 Inhabitants”

January 7, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Brief doc about the then-futuristic offices of the Miami Herald in 1961, a time of typewriters, pneumatic tubes and typesetters, when the era of print seemed limitless, before technological efficiency began to destroy the economic model.

A Brief Note From 1873 About A Wolf Boy

January 6, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the August 29, 1873 New York Times:

“An interesting child, remarks the Pall Mall Gazette, has lately made his appearance at Lucknow. The Pioneer reports the arrival there of ‘a novelty in the shape of a wolf boy.’ This young gentleman, who is now undergoing a process of taming in a lunatic asylum, was, it is said, carried off by wolves when an infant, and has remained with them until a short time ago, when caught and recognized by his parents. His family, however, can hardly be congratulated on his restoration to their bosom, for his education in the wolf nursery (which, by the way, was purely secular), seems to have been very defective. His manners are not only disagreeable, but peculiar. At first he walked on all fours, though now he has been induced to walk on his two feet only, like a reasonable being; he has long hair on his head, and his body is much scarred, and he cannot speak, nor can he understand a single word. His parents suffered much inconvenience on his first arrival at home, owing to his frequently attacking and trying to devour them by night; and, indeed, it was owing to his persistence in this unfilial conduct that they were compelled in self-defense to place him under medical surveillance. He also, among other disagreeable habits, tears raw meat to pieces with his teeth, and eats it ravenously like a wild beast, and, moreover, bites and snaps at any one who attempts to touch him.”

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