Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
You are currently browsing the archive for the Urban Studies category.
“I smell terrible all the time.”
Have someone staying in your home and you want out? Well today’s the day. See I smell terrible all the time. Have me around for a bit and they are sure to want to leave. Really this will work. I want in return iPads, laptops, cash, gold, cash. Email for more info.
If the lithe Wendy’s Girl actually ate at Wendy’s with any frequency, she would be overweight and unhealthy. There are very large corporations determined to sell us as much cheap, lousy food as possible, strategizing how to best trigger our impulsive behaviors and undermine sound diets. On this topic, Deborah Cohen, RAND Corporation scientist and author of A Big Fat Crisis, conducted an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few excerpts.
_______________________
Question:
Do you think that “big is beautiful” and “plus size models” encourage obesity rather than discourage?
Deborah Cohen:
No, I don’t think this encourages obesity. It is a way to cope with the current situation of high rates of obesity, but it fails to point out the true causes of the epidemic. What we need to do is the shatter the myth that body size has anything to do with moral character. The fact is that the obesity epidemic is more about irresponsible business practices than irresponsible people.
Question:
You state that the “obesity epidemic is more about irresponsible business practices than irresponsible people”, and I agree that many businesses promote unhealthy attitudes. However, at the end of the day, what about personal responsibility? Shouldn’t we focus on strengthening the will power versus removing the temptation?
Deborah Cohen:
Over the past few decades many people have tried to strengthen their willpower and have invested billion is the diet industry. Yet few are successful. That’s because willpower is limited and fatigues like a muscle. Willpower is also a genetic trait and most people cannot improve their capacity for self-control. Some studies have followed people over 40 years and they found that the children who lacked self-control at age 4 still had low levels of self control compared to their peers at age 44. That’s why most New Year’s resolutions fail. We want to improve, yet the biggest barrier to controlling food intake is the environment. We can’t change people’s genes, but we can change business practices.
_______________________
Question:
Your book recommends that the government limit “the amount and choice of food items supermarkets would be allowed to sell to individual customers,” according to the Boston Globe. Americans would march in the streets if that law was implemented (at least until we got winded). How do you see ideas like yours not ending the careers of any politician who proposes them?
Deborah Cohen:
The Boston Globe reviewer misunderstood. What I recommend are limits on impulse marketing strategies, by which I mean not placing candy at the cash register or chips and sodas on the end-of-aisle displays. I recommend putting items that increase the risk of chronic diseases in places like the middle of an aisle on the bottom shelf, so those who want to buy them can still do so, and people who want to avoid them will be able to. Lots of people want candy-free check out aisles, but most supermarkets prefer to tempt people and manufacturers pay them for this shelf space.
_______________________
Question:
Do you think anything needs to be done about the relentless airings of fast food commercials on television? The only ones that don’t make me hungry are the Hardee’s commercials where scantily clad super models pretend to eat burgers larger than their heads.
Deborah Cohen:
Yes, I think that instead of banning these commercials we should have counter-advertising that points out how these commercials are duping us. It worked for tobacco control and I believe it would be successful to control obesity. Under the Fairness Doctrine, TV stations were mandated to provide free air time for anti-tobacco ads if the stations were airing pro-tobacco ads. The tobacco companies wised up and stopped showing tobacco ads so there was no more free air time for counter ads.
_______________________
Question:
I have personally never been sold on the “fat gene” idea. We almost never saw fat people until the second half of the 20th century when it became common; previously it was only the very wealthy that could even get fat. Nowadays with cheap fatty food available for all it just makes sense that people can get big fast. Now obviously some people have better metabolism than others, but the idea that someone can claim they’re fat because of their genes always seems like a cop out for someone that loves fast food and no working out.
Not having read your book, can you reinforce our counter my claim that genetics does not play a large role in weight gain/health?
Deborah Cohen:
You are right! Obesity rates doubled between 1980 and 2000, a time period too short for genetics to play a role. The increase in obesity, I believe, is solely due to the change in the food environment. As I argue in my book, our country has been turned into a food swamp, inundating us with too much food, too much food advertising, and easy, convenient access to calories 24/7.
_______________________
Question:
What do you think of a South Beach-type diet for long-term weight control?
Deborah Cohen:
Most diets work if you can follow them. The problem is that most people cannot stay on a diet because they are continually undermined by all the cues that tempt people to eat more than they need. People are wired to feel hungry when they see or smell tempting food. If humans were like cars, and could only fill up a limited tank when it was empty, we would not have survived over the millenia. Dieting in and of itself can backfire for some people and lead them to gain more weight than if they hadn’t been on a diet in the first place. That’s because once we try to forget about food, that’s all we can think of. We become even more sensitive to food cues and if we are stressed, we can find ourselves binging. Willpower fatigues like a muscle, and most of us face limits in our capacity for self-control.•
Tags: Deborah Cohen
In 1979, J.G. Ballard believed the future was shifting from mobile to home-based, especially the way we entertain ourselves. That’s happened, largely. Going to the game is not so important now because there are so many ways for the game to come to us. From Kevin Clark and Jonathan Clegg in the WSJ:
“The NFL enters the first round of playoff games this weekend with soaring television ratings, billions of dollars in network TV contracts in their pocket and a nation of football fans who can’t wait to hop on their couch and watch a weekend of games.
The league has never been a more popular viewing option. There’s just one problem: Fewer people want to actually attend the games.
In the latest evidence that the sports in-home viewing experience has possibly trumped the in-stadium one, ticket sales were slow for the first week of the National Football League’s marquee stretch of games.
Three teams hosting games this weekend asked the league for extensions to sell more tickets for the games to avoid a television blackout in local markets, which is imposed by NFL policy if a game isn’t sold out. The teams, the Green Bay Packers, Indianapolis Colts and Cincinnati Bengals, needed large corporate assistance to ensure the sellouts.”
_________________________________________
Walter Cronkite in 1967: “We could watch a football game.”
Tags: Kevin Clark
“The use of animal manures to fertilize the land was considered by Alcott to be ‘disgusting in the extreme.'”
In 1843, Amos Bronson Alcott, Louisa May’s dad and a Transcendentalist and suffragist and abolitionist and animal rights activist, founded the commune known as “Fruitlands” in Massachusetts. He and a bevy of fellow non-farmers planned a small society that was to be safe alike for humans and animals–oh, and for John Palmer, a bearded man who refused to shave much to the consternation of the locals. It was to be a paradise of enlightenment and veganism a century before that latter word was even coined; but much like Brook Farm, it was a crashing financial failure and a dream soon abandoned. From an article in the July 25, 1915 New York Times:
“Alcott got his idea of the new Eden while visiting a group of English mystics headed by James Pierrepoint Greaves, a pupil of Pestalozzi, who had established a school according to the Concord philosopher’s teachings in Surrey, calling the place Alcott House. It was at this school that he met Charles Lane and H.C. Wright, and seems to have been fascinated by both men. Indeed, he writes home of the latter: ‘I am already knit to him with more than human ties, and must take him with me to America …or else abide here with him.’ Both returned with Alcott, and both joined him in establishing the New Eden. …
The scheme of life that underlay Fruitlands was simple. No ‘flesh,’ as the members called meat, was to be eaten. This prohibition included every animal product, such as milk, eggs, honey, butter, cheese. Moreover, they were to raise or to exchange for what could be raised in the neighborhood, all they used in a material way. No sugar, tea or coffee, neither silk nor wool for garments, were allowed. Linen was to be their raiment, for cotton, too, was tabooed. Tunics and trousers or brown liner clothed them fitly.
Not one of their number except Palmer seems to have had any notion of how to farm. Also, as Lane explains in a letter, ‘we are impressed with the conviction that by a faithful reliance on the Spirit which actuates us, we are sure of attaining to clear revelations of daily practical duties as they are to be daily done for us,’ wherefore no plan of work was laid out, and the various philosophers would wander vaguely about the fields, when the spirit hinted, sowing and digging, in some cases going over the same plot which one had scattered with clover seed to sow it again with rye, oats or barley. Two mulberry trees planted by them were put so close to the house that they almost heaved it free of its foundation in later years, though this misfortune was one that the community itself did not have to suffer.
The use of animal manures to fertilize the land was considered by Alcott to be ‘disgusting in the extreme,’ and was therefore prohibited. The idea was to plow under the growing green crops to achieve the required richness. The drawback to this being the difficulty of harvesting anything for themselves. But this did not as yet trouble them. What did trouble them was the unaccustomed toil with the spade, for they did not believe in using enslaved beasts to work for them, broke their backs and tore their hands. A compromise was achieved, and Old Palmer went off for a yoke of oxen to do the plowing. One of these proved to be a cow, and Palmer, to the horror of the rest, was seen to indulge in that creature’s yield of milk. He had, as he expressed it, ‘to be let down easy.’
There seem to have been other more spiritual concessions to this demand for an easier rule. The bread of the community was unbolted flour. In order to make it more palatable, Mr. Alcott, with something approximating humor, was accustomed to form the loaves ‘into the shapes of animals and other pleasing figures.’ Water was the sole drink, but it was invariably spoken of as their ‘beverage,’ probably with the same hope of making it appear more desirable. As for the meals, they are always spoken of as ‘chaste,’ the intercourse between the members at Fruitlands was ‘social communion,’ and sleep was a ‘report to sweet repose.’ If there is a power in words, and true sustenance, Fruitlands made the most of it.
Old Palmer’s life was one long fight to keep his beard, an appendage which Fruitlands alone, at the epoch, regarded with equanimity. In spite of the rage with which people generally regarded beards in those days, Palmer believed in them, and his life was a splendid assertion of this belief. Through all sorts of vicissitudes he hung on to that beard. Going to Boston he would be followed by hooting crowds. Men would spring out on him in his native Fitchburg from doorways, and endeavor to tear the offending thing from his face, but he could defend it, and did. Then he would be hauled to court for assault and battery, a fine imposed, on refusal to pay which Palmer would be sentenced to jail. There he remained at one time for over a year, part of it in solitary confinement. The jailers actually tried to shave him there, but the old man put up so fierce a fight that they desisted. Once the minister refused him Holy Communion, whereupon he strode to the altar and took the cup himself, asserting with flashing eyes that he ‘loved his Jesus as well as or better than any one else present.’ When at last he died he had his bearded face carved on his tombstone. where it may still be seen. When Fruitlands failed it was Palmer who bought the place, and there he carried on a queer sort of community of his own for more than twenty years.”
Tags: Amos Bronson Alcott', Charles Lane, H.C. Wright, John Palmer
“I’m fine with broken legs, smashed skull.”
I am interested in any and all dead wild animals in decent condition.
If you hunt, or live in a place where you often see roadkill, it’s easy to throw it in a freezer and later bring it to the city. I would like whole animals, but also have interest in unwanted parts- heads, organs, pelts, trimmed fat, scrap meat, carcasses, etc…
In exchange I can provide you with money or some kind of service or trade. I can also butcher/process animals and give you the parts you want and keep whatever is left.
Animals I want: Deer, rabbit, squirrel, mouse, muskrat, chipmunk, turtle, raccoon, beaver, hare, bear, coyote, fox, fish, grouse, wild turkey, other birds, turtle, frog… probably any animal. As long as it came from the wilderness. No subway rats, apartment mice, house cats, etc.
What I consider decent condition:
Relatively fresh-some smell or a small rotting area is okay, my standards are lower than many.
Relatively in-tact–I’m fine with broken legs, smashed skull… anything really as long as the animal is not completely exploded.
Additionally, I am interested in any surplus food or plant like edible weeds, wild/sour apples, and black walnuts.
If you are able to do this, or know someone who might be up for it, please contact me. Thanks.
There’s a price to pay for living longer: Diseases that never had time to grow within us in the past now reach “maturity.” In our favor, though, fewer people perish now due to the birth of twins. From “How We Used to Die,” a post at Priceonomics:
“They say that nothing is certain but death and taxes, but how we die is far from certain. What kills us these days? By a wide margin, cancer and heart disease. This is very different from how we used to die in the United States.
In a study by the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers compared causes of death from the past hundred years. They found that, in 1900, while heart disease and cancer were still major killers, they were less lethal than a host of other ailments. Pneumonia/influenza, tuberculosis, and gastrointestinal infections each claimed more lives per 100,000 people than did heart disease. On average, more people died by accident than by cancer.”
From the March 8, 1897 New York Times:
“GUADALAJARA, Mexico–Jesus Campeche, thought to be the oldest man on earth, died on Friday, and, according to his affirmation and other testimony, he was 154 years old. He said he was born in Spain in 1742 and came to this country when he was twenty-four years old. He was living with his great-great-grandson and had copies of the church register at Valladolid, Spain, showing the date of his birth and baptism. According to these papers, he was born Dec. 12, 1742. He related incidents which occurred in the last century, showing that he had told the truth or had stored his mind well with the happenings of that time.
A priest in the church which he attended, who is now eighty-four years old, says he remembers Campeche as being an old man when he was a little boy.”
Tags: Jesus Campeche
Ambitious or just myopic Attorney Generals or District Attorneys sometimes shine too bright a light on a scary but small faction of criminals, forcing the public attention in the wrong direction. Such was the case in California in 1966 when a shocking report of a crime made the Hell’s Angels public enemy no. 1. Hunter S. Thompson elucidated the disproportionate attention the motorcycle gang was receiving in an article that year in the Nation, before feeding the myth himself with a book about the unholy rollers. An excerpt:
“After two weeks of intensive dealings with the Hell’s Angels phenomenon, both in print and in person, I’m convinced the net result of the general howl and publicity has been to obscure and avoid the real issues by invoking a savage conspiracy of bogeymen and conning the public into thinking all will be ‘business as usual’ once this fearsome snake is scotched, as it surely will be by hard and ready minions of the Establishment.
Meanwhile, according to Attorney General Thomas C. Lynch’s own figures, California’s true crime picture makes the Hell’s Angels look like a gang of petty jack rollers. The police count 463 Hell’s Angels: 205 around L.A. and 233 in the San Francisco-Oakland area. I don’t know about L.A. but the real figures for the Bay Area are thirty or so in Oakland and exactly eleven–with one facing expulsion–in San Francisco. This disparity makes it hard to accept other police statistics. The dubious package also shows convictions on 1,023 misdemeanor counts and 151 felonies–primarily vehicle theft, burglary and assault. This is for all years and all alleged members.
California’s overall figures for 1963 list 1,116 homicides, 12,448 aggravated assaults, 6,257 sex offenses, and 24,532 burglaries. In 1962, the state listed 4,121 traffic deaths, up from 3,839 in 1961. Drug arrest figures for 1964 showed a 101 percent increase in juvenile marijuana arrests over 1963, and a recent back-page story in the San Francisco Examiner said, ‘The venereal disease rate among [the city’s] teen-agers from 15-19 has more than doubled in the past four years.’ Even allowing for the annual population jump, juvenile arrests in all categories are rising by 10 per cent or more each year.
Against this background, would it make any difference to the safety and peace of mind of the average Californian if every motorcycle outlaw in the state (all 901, according to the state) were garroted within twenty-four hours? This is not to say that a group like the Hell’s Angels has no meaning. The generally bizarre flavor of their offenses and their insistence on identifying themselves make good copy, but usually overwhelm–in print, at least–the unnerving truth that they represent, in colorful microcosm, what is quietly and anonymously growing all around us every day of the week.
‘We’re bastards to the world and they’re bastards to us,’ one of the Oakland Angels told a Newsweek reporter. ‘When you walk into a place where people can see you, you want to look as repulsive and repugnant as possible. We are complete social outcasts–outsiders against society.’
A lot of this is a pose, but anyone who believes that’s all it is has been on thin ice since the death of Jay Gatsby. The vast majority of motorcycle outlaws are uneducated, unskilled men between 20 and 30, and most have no credentials except a police record. So at the root of their sad stance is a lot more than a wistful yearning for acceptance in a world they never made; their real motivation is an instinctive certainty as to what the score really is. They are out of the ball game and they know it–and that is their meaning; for unlike most losers in today’s society, the Hell’s Angels not only know but spitefully proclaim exactly where they stand.”
_________________________________
A year later, Sonny Barger terrorizes Thompson:
It’s not surprise, I suppose, that top tech companies have economics departments of their own, hoping to carve behavioral patterns into data mountains. From a Bloomberg article by Aki Ito about Silicon Valley competing with academia, government and Wall Street for newly minted PhDs:
“It’s this real-world impact that drew economist Michael Bailey to Menlo Park, California-based Facebook in 2012. Managers across the social-networking company come to his team of data scientists with various problems, and Bailey’s group runs experiments to find solutions.
Their goal is to have the findings be used to make the social-networking site a better platform for both advertisers and the now more than 1 billion users worldwide, he said.
Bailey said he didn’t even consider a career outside academia until Facebook asked him to join full-time after a stint there as a research intern. Even then, he was unsure: the point of enduring five grueling years of graduate school was to become a professor. Only after he returned to Stanford to complete his dissertation did he realize life in Silicon Valley was the better choice for him.
‘The pace is just so much faster here and I’m much happier solving a lot of different problems than focusing on one problem for seven years,’ said Bailey, 30.
Besides, he says, ‘the data’s just so awesome. It’s an economist’s dream.’
The rise of the Internet company economist can be traced to Hal Varian, who started consulting with Google in 2002 as a UC Berkeley professor. He became the company’s chief economist in 2007 and has helped hone the design of the company’s search advertising auctions, central to the $50 billion business.
Other experts in microeconomics have since made similar moves. Preston McAfee joined Yahoo! Inc.’s research arm in 2007 and left for Google in 2012. Susan Athey, then a professor at Harvard and now at Stanford, started consulting for Microsoft in 2007. Patrick Bajari has led Amazon’s team of economists since 2010.”
Tags: Aki Ito, Michael Bailey
Are there any butcher shops in major American cities that still have dead animals hanging in the window? That used to be de rigueur, but suffering and death are bad for business; it’s better to focus on the finished product and disappear all the unpleasantness. The opening of “The Case for Ethical Warning Labels on Meat,” from Thomas Rodham Wells at the Philosopher’s Beard:
“Like cigarettes, meat and dairy packaging should include no nonsense factual warnings about the negative consequences of one’s consumption choices. Just as with cigarettes, there is a strong case that exercising one’s sovereign right to free choice on personal matters requires that people be adequately informed about the significant negative implications of their choices by someone other than the manufacturer that wants them to buy the product. In this case the significant consequences relate to living up to one’s ethical values rather than safe-guarding one’s prudential interests in long-term health. But the principle is the same.
Ethical warning labels would inform consumers of the physical and mental suffering involved in producing the animal products they are considering buying. I envisage labels like this:
This chicken’s beak was cut off, causing it intense pain until its death
and
This cow’s babies were taken away and killed to keep it producing milk.
Servers of cooked animal products, from lowly hot-dog stands to the fanciest restaurants, would also have to include these ethical warnings prominently on their menus.”
Tags: Thomas Rodham Wells
Drugs have always been for polite people, too, though the packaging is often nicer. Prescriptions written on clean, white sheets of paper dispense pain killers with alarming regularity now, but it’s always been one high or another. From “White-Collar Pill Party,” Bruce Jackson’s 1966 Atlantic article:
Think for a moment: how many people do you know who cannot stop stuffing themselves without an amphetamine and who cannot go to sleep without a barbiturate (over nine billion of those produced last year) or make it through a workday without a sequence of tranquilizers? And what about those six million alcoholics, who daily ingest quantities of what is, by sheer force of numbers, the most addicting drug in America?
The publicity goes to the junkies, lately to the college kids, but these account for only a small portion of the American drug problem. Far more worrisome are the millions of people who have become dependent on commercial drugs. The junkie knows he is hooked; the housewife on amphetamine and the businessman on meprobamate hardly ever realize what has gone wrong.
Sometimes the pill-takers meet other pill-takers, and an odd thing happens: instead of using the drug to cope with the world, they begin to use their time to take drugs. Taking drugs becomes something to do. When this stage is reached, the drug-taking pattern broadens: the user takes a wider variety of drugs with increasing frequency. For want of a better term, one might call it the white collar drug scene.
I first learned about it during a party in Chicago last winter, and the best way to introduce you will be to tell you something about that evening, the people I met, what I think was happening.
There were about a dozen people in the room, and over the noise from the record player scraps of conversation came through:
“Now the Desbutal, if you take it with this stuff, has a peculiar effect, contraindication, at least it did for me. You let me know if you … “
“I don’t have one legitimate prescription, Harry, not one! Can you imagine that?” “I’ll get you some tomorrow, dear.”
“… and this pharmacist on Fifth will sell you all the leapers [amphetamines] you can carry—just like that. Right off the street. I don’t think he’d know a prescription if it bit him.” “As long as he can read the labels, what the hell.”
“You know, a funny thing happened to me. I got this green and yellow capsule, and I looked it up in the Book, and it wasn’t anything I’d been using, and I thought, great! It’s not something I’ve built a tolerance to. And I took it. A couple of them. And you know what happened? Nothing! That’s what happened, not a goddamned thing.”
The Book—the Physicians’ Desk Reference, which lists the composition and effects of almost all commercial pharmaceuticals produced in this country—passes back and forth, and two or three people at a time look up the contents and possible values of a drug one of them has just discovered or heard about or acquired or taken. The Book is the pillhead’s Yellow Pages: you look up the effect you want (“Sympathomimetics” or “Cerebral Stimulants,” for example), and it tells you the magic columns. The pillheads swap stories of kicks and sound like professional chemists discussing recent developments; others listen, then examine the PDR to see if the drug discussed really could do that.
Eddie, the host, a painter who has received some recognition, had been awake three or four days, he was not exactly sure. He consumes between 150 and 200 milligrams of amphetamine a day, needs a large part of that to stay awake, even when he has slipped a night’s sleep in somewhere. The dose would cause most people some difficulty; the familiar diet pill, a capsule of Dexamyl or Eskatrol, which makes the new user edgy and overenergetic and slightly insomniac the first few days, contains only 10 or 15 milligrams of amphetamine. But amphetamine is one of the few central nervous system stimulants to which one can develop a tolerance, and over the months and years Ed and his friends have built up massive tolerances and dependencies. “Leapers aren’t so hard to give up,” he told me. “I mean, I sleep almost constantly when I’m off, but you get over that. But everything is so damned boring without the pills.”
I asked him if he knew many amphetamine users who have given up the pills.
“For good?”
I nodded.
“I haven’t known anybody that’s given it up for good.” He reached out and took a few pills from the candy dish in the middle of the coffee table, then washed them down with some Coke.•
Tags: Bruce Jackson'
“After a number of escapades in her early career here she ended up in Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum for a short term.”
The Swami Laura Horos was a Kentucky-born religious swindler of regal countenance, innumerable aliases and great talent, known as a medium who created short-lived sects aimed at separating the devout from their dollars, often selling “spiritual paintings” of little value for exorbitant fees. A serial bride, her husbands were likewise scammers or the unfortunately scammed, and she was frequently arrested in New York City and other points in America. She faced her most serious criminal trial, however, in England in 1901, when she and one of her spouses were charged with (and found guilty of) fraud and rape. Her vagabond life continued when she was released from custody in 1906. A New York Times article in the August 26, 1909 edition covers her return to the city, as she practiced her dark art under the name Ann O’Delia Dis Debar. An excerpt about her career, as it were:
“…Ann O’Delia Dis Debar has been in the papers for years. When she came to New York some thirty-eight years ago she was a handsome young woman, who claimed to be Princess Edith, Countess of Landsfelt, daughter of Ludwig I, King of Bavaria, and Lola Montez. Others say she was the daughter of a Kentucky school teacher named Salomon.
After a number of escapades in her early career here she ended up in Blackwell’s Island Insane Asylum for a short term. She married Paul Noel Massant, who died soon after; then she turned up in Baltimore. She married Gen. Joseph Dis Debar, and soon afterward was giving spiritualistic séances.
It was about 1885 that she met Luther R. Marsh in this city. He was a wealthy and distinguished lawyer, who had studied law in Daniel Webster’s office. He came entirely under her influence. She gave séances in his Madison Avenue house, which he gave to her, and then bought many paintings which she claimed had been made by spirits. His friends took up his case, had Ann O’Delia Dis Debar indicted, and made her disgorge some some of Mr. Marsh’s property. She spent some time on Blackwell’s Island in 1888.
After her release she went to Europe, returned to Chicago, where she was known as Vera P. Ava and Ida Veed-Ya, and was sent to Joliet Penitentiary for two years. When she got out she married her third husband, William J. McGowan, who had considerable money. He died soon afterward.
In 1899, she was in New Orleans with Theodore Jackson, whose wife she professed to be. They were driven out of New Orleans and turned up in Florida next. Later they were heard of in Africa doing a religious turn under the name of Helena and Horos. In London, in 1901, her husband was charged with luring young girls into a new cult. He was sent to prison for fifteen years and Dis Debar for seven years. She was turned out on parole in August, 1906, and immediately decamped. For this Scotland Yard is looking for her.
Next she descended upon Michigan at the head of a new cult called the ‘House of Israel,’ or the ‘Flying Rollers.’ Then David Mckay became her secretary. She called herself Elinor L. Mason.
She and Mackay disappeared in 1907 after her identity became suspected and neither had been heard from since up to yesterday. It was learned that they have been working quietly in New Jersey and New York.
The Detective Bureau would like to know where Dis Debar is right now.”
Tags: Ann O'Delia Dis Debar, Countess of Landsfelt, Daniel Webster, David Mckay, Elinor L. Mason, Gen. Joseph Dis Debar, Helena and Horos, Ida Veed-Ya, Luther R. Marsh, Paul Noel Massant, Princess Edith, Swami Laura Horos, Theodore Jackson, Vera P. Ava, William J. McGowan
Im in need of money and willing to sell my kidney-$6500 (non smoker and non drinker) or i.d.-$2500 (social security card and birth certificate).
Obamacare is far from perfect, but for tens of millions of Americans it’s the difference between life and death. I can’t believe how often that point gets lost in the discussion. As if we aren’t all unique people who mean something special to those close to us. People with health insurance don’t face death panels, but people without it potentially face them every day.
I think there are a few economists who read the blog, and it would be appreciated if you could refer me to any studies of what tens of millions of newly insured people will mean to the economy. I would think it would be a boon, but I’d like to read what non-demagogue professionals have to say.
From a new Michael Moore op-ed in the New York Times that looks at both sides of the Affordable Care Act:
“TODAY marks the beginning of health care coverage under the Affordable Care Act’s new insurance exchanges, for which two million Americans have signed up. Now that the individual mandate is officially here, let me begin with an admission: Obamacare is awful.
That is the dirty little secret many liberals have avoided saying out loud for fear of aiding the president’s enemies, at a time when the ideal of universal health care needed all the support it could get. Unfortunately, this meant that instead of blaming companies like Novartis, which charges leukemia patients $90,000 annually for the drug Gleevec, or health insurance chief executives like Stephen Hemsley of UnitedHealth Group, who made nearly $102 million in 2009, for the sky-high price of American health care, the president’s Democratic supporters bought into the myth that it was all those people going to get free colonoscopies and chemotherapy for the fun of it. …
And yet — I would be remiss if I didn’t say this — Obamacare is a godsend. My friend Donna Smith, who was forced to move into her daughter’s spare room at age 52 because health problems bankrupted her and her husband, Larry, now has cancer again. As she undergoes treatment, at least she won’t be in terror of losing coverage and becoming uninsurable. Under Obamacare, her premium has been cut in half, to $456 per month.
Let’s not take a victory lap yet, but build on what there is to get what we deserve: universal quality health care.”
Tags: Barack Obama, Michael Moore
In 1844, Samuel Morse tapped out his first coded sentence: “What hath God wrought!” And in the 170 years since then, the tools that have been wrought have been increasingly wonderful and terrifying. You really can’t legislate the more ill effects away, but the bright side is that they are double-edged swords, and those who misuse them are also prone to them.
On the topic of tools run amok: A passage from a Cleveland Plain Dealer article by Paul Hoynes explaining how the Indians signing of outfielder David Murphy, meant to be kept a secret for a while, spread accidentally at first and then virally:
“The Indians signing of free agent outfielder David Murphy to a two-year $12 million deal didn’t belong in the same airspace, let along the flight path, of Seattle’s deal with Cano. Still, it will go down as the most intriguing of the winter because the story was first reported by Murphy’s five-year-old daughter, Faith, at her Dallas-area preschool.
The deal wasn’t officially announced until Nov. 25 even though it hit Twitter on Nov. 19. The trigger to the story – a lesson on the meaning of Thanksgiving at Faith’s preschool.
‘She was in preschool and they were learning about Pilgrims and Indians,’ Murphy told reporters on the day his deal became official. ‘She spoke up that her dad was going to the Indians. Obviously, the word spreads quickly because of social media. It’s not the best situation, but it’s a good story to tell her when she gets older.’
There are no more scoops in the news business — at least not in the traditional sense. Breaking news hits the Internet in a matter of seconds. No one knows that better than a general manager of a big league baseball team, but even Chris Antonetti was taken back by a text he received from a reporter concerning Murphy.
‘Initially, I didn’t know how it broke,’ said Antonetti, entering his fourth year as Indians general manager. ‘Then I got a text from a writer and it said, ‘There is a kindergarten teacher in Texas Tweeting that David Murphy is going to be an Indian. I said, OK.’
Some back tracking was needed to see how the story leaked.”
Tags: Chris Antonetti, David Murphy, Faith Murphy, Paul Hoynes
Ray Kurzweil’s prognostications always seem too optimistic and aggressive to me. It’s not that I don’t think we’ll accomplish most of what he says we will–if we don’t destroy ourselves first, that is–but I think it will take longer, in some cases much longer. The opening of his CNN piece which predicts the short term future of science and technological development:
“By the early 2020s, we will have the means to program our biology away from disease and aging.
Up until recently, health and medicine was basically a hit or miss affair. We would discover interventions such as drugs that had benefits, but also many side effects. Until recently, we did not have the means to actually design interventions on computers.
All of that has now changed, and will dramatically change clinical practice by the early 2020s.
We now have the information code of the genome and are making exponential gains in modeling and simulating the information processes they give rise to.
We also have new tools that allow us to actually reprogram our biology in the same way that we reprogram our computers.
RNA interference, for example, can turn genes off that promote disease and aging. New forms of gene therapy, especially in vitro models that do not trigger the immune system, have the ability to add new genes.
Stem cell therapies, including the recently developed method to create ‘induced pluripotent cells’ (IPCs) by adding four genes to your own skin cells to create the equivalent of an embryonic stem cell but without use of an embryo, are being developed to rejuvenate organs and even grow then from scratch.
There are now hundreds of drugs and processes in the pipeline using these methods to modify the course of obesity, heart disease, cancer, and other diseases and aging processes.
As one of many examples, we can now fix a broken heart — not (yet) from romance — but from a heart attack, by rejuvenating the heart with reprogrammed stem cells.
Health and medicine is now an information technology and is therefore subject to what I call the ‘law of accelerating returns,’ which is a doubling of capability (for the same cost) about each year that applies to any information technology.
As a result, technologies to reprogram the ‘software’ that underlie human biology are already a thousand times more powerful than they were when the genome project was completed in 2003, and will again be a thousand times more powerful than they are today in a decade, and a million times more powerful in two decades.”
Tags: Ray Kurzweil
Whenever someone frets about us using computers to augment memory, I think back to Socrates agonizing over the effect of the written word on the same. I think the gain is far greater than the loss. Chris Ware, that brilliant fellow, isn’t so sure, at least when it comes to capturing special moments on smartphones. An excerpt from an essay he wrote to explain his newest New Yorker cover:
“Steve Jobs, along with whatever else we’re crediting to him, should be granted the patent on converting the universal human gesture for trying to remember something from looking above one’s head to fumbling in one’s pants pocket. I’m pretty sure I read somewhere that most pre-industrial composers could creditably reproduce an entire symphony after hearing it only once, not because they were autistic but simply because they had to. We’ve all heard Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos hundreds of times more than Bach ever did, and where our ancestors might have had only one or two images by which to remember their consumptive forebears, we have hours of footage of ours circling the luxury-cruise midnight buffet tables.
Sometimes, I’ve noticed with horror that the memories I have of things like my daughter’s birthday parties or the trips we’ve taken together are actually memories of the photographs I took, not of the events themselves, and together, the two somehow become ever more worn and overwrought, like lines gone over too many times in a drawing. The more we give over of ourselves to these devices, the less of our own minds it appears we exercise, and worse, perhaps even concomitantly, the more we coddle and covet the devices themselves. The gestures necessary to operate our new touch-sensitive generation of technology are disturbingly similar to caresses.”
Tags: Chris Ware
I wish I had more of a feel for pop culture than I do, but most of it leaves me cold, from comic-book film adaptations to reality TV to pop music. I just don’t care. I don’t think I’m better than it–just separate from it.
For instance: I’ve never had any interest in Star Trek, the TV series or films. I actually feel physical pain if I have to sit through it. But creator Gene Roddenberry was obviously a special guy and not only for his progressive outlook on race and gender. In a 1976 Penthouse interview conducted by Linda Merinoff, Roddenberry laid out the next 40 years of our society, from the Internet to email to swarms and crowdsourcing to the decline of the traditional postal service to online learning to the telecommunications revolution. Three excerpts follow.
_________________________
Penthouse:
What is happening to television as a piece of mechanical equipment?
Gene Roddenberry:
I think there is little doubt that we’re probably on the threshold of a whole new revolution in telecommunications. We are now experimenting with mating television sets with print-out devices, think of TV mated with a Xerox-type machine in which probably our newspapers will ultimately be delivered. It’s a much more efficient system. The minute you put the newspaper to bed electronically, you can then push a button and any house that subscribes to the service can have the thing rolled right out of the TV set. We’re also experimenting, in some cities already, with mating television with simple computers and the home will be run by a home-computing feature. You’ll do your billing on it, your banking, probably a great part of your shopping. I think it is inescapable that we mate TV with reproducing devices, that it will become our postal system of the future, almost certainly our telephone or videophone. So I see television going in either of two directions. One is that it can become that opiate we fear. Or, used properly, it can be a way for all people, everywhere, to have access to all the recorded knowledge of all humanity.
_________________________
Penthouse:
Where do you think mankind is heading?
Gene Roddenberry:
There’s a theory I have that i’ve been making notes on for a couple of years now and intend to write a book on it sometime in the future. You often hear the question, “I wonder what the next dominant species will be?” I think that completely unnoticed by practically all people is the fact that the next dominant species on earth has already arrived and has been with us for some time. And this is a species that I call socio-organism. It first began to make its appearance when men started to gather together in tribal groups, and then city-states, and more lately in nations, giant corporations, and so on. The socio-organism is a living organism that is made up of individual cells–which are human beings. In other words the United States of America is a socio-organism. It is made up of 200 million cells, many of them become increasingly specialized just as the cells in our body do. Furnish food, take away waste products, or the nerves–the sight, the thinking, the planning. Your local PTA is also a small socio-organism. General Motors and ITT are socio-organisms. The interesting thing about this new creature is that unlike all the past life forms, one cell in a socio-organism can be a member of several of these socio-organisms. Also, they do not have to live in physical proximity with each other as in our bodies. It sounds a rather foolish sci-fi thing to say that General Motors is a living organism. But if you take a few steps back and view it from this point of view, you begin to discover that the evolution of this socio-organism almost exactly parallels everything we know about Darwinian evolution.
Briefly, Darwinian evolution is fairly generally accepted, that the first life forms on earth were individual cells floating on the warm soup seas of the time. Finally, through chance and other factors, groups of these cells discovered that by being gathered together they could get their food more efficiently, protect themselves, and become dominant over the single-cell amoebas. With humans, exactly the same thing happened. More and more individual units began to get more and more specialized. As it became more complex, with more and more highly specialized units, the creature became more and more powerful, was capable of protecting itself, taking care of its individual cells. This is a process of accumulating interdependence. The frightening thing about viewing humankind now, this way, is that the socio-organisms are really becoming more dominant than the individual. In Red China they are teaching the very lessons that our bodies have, over the centuries, taught to its cells–that we can no longer exist for ourselves. We must exist for the whole. But you can see the same thing in the United States. People now live the corporate morality. If I join a corperation, my duty is to the corperation. If the corperation says lie, cheat, steal, move here, do that, I must do it because my duty is to the whole. So if indeed civilization is following the laws of Darwinian evolution, you can predict ahead a few centuries or a few dozen or hundred centuries, until a time in which the independent individual will have totally vanished and this planet will be inhabited by totally specialized cells who function as part of these giant, living things. The great battle and great decision we humans face is whether to let this continue until we become faceless, totally interdependent organisms. Whether this is goood or bad I don’t know. You might, if it were possible, talk to a cell of my heart and say, “Look cell, are you happy?” It seems to have adapted well. Maybe this is the way it suppose to be. Maybe there is some form of mass mind, mass consciousness, when a socio-organism reaches its final form, and we will be part of it and perfectly happy to be part of it. There may be contentments and happiness in this that we presently can’t visualize. I fear it because I can’t visualize it being better than remaining a free individual. I also fear the fact that is I remain, and insist on remaining totally independent and free, that the way things are going I am to be treated as a cancer cell by the socio-organisms around me, which will find it necessary to eradicate me because I endanger the organism.
Penthouse:
What is one’s purpose in this socio-organism? Just to survive?
Gene Roddenberry:
No. My purpose… that’s a hard question. I’ll try to answer it. My purpose is to live out whatever my function may be as a part of the whole that is God. I am a piece of Him. I believe that all intelligence is a part of the whole and it may be a great cyclical thing in which we have to go on, evolving, perfecting, until we reach the point where we are God, so that we can create ourselves so that we know we existed in the first place.
_________________________
Penthouse:
You’ve said that you felt that Star Trek was a very optimistic show. Are you still that optimistic in the 70’s about the future of mankind?
Gene Roddenberry:
Yes, but I think that if we have an earth of the Star Trek century, it will not be ab unbroken, steady rise to that kind of civilization. We’re in some very tough times. Our twentieth-century technological civilization has no guarantees that it is going to stay around for a long time. But I think man is really an incredible creature. We’ve had civilizations fall before and we build a somewhat better one on the ashes every time. And I’d never consider the society we depicted in Star Trek necessarily a direct, uninterrupted out-growth of our present civilization, with its heavy emphasis on materialism. I think But my optimism is not for our society. It’s for our essential ingredient in humankind. And I think we humans will rebuild and, if necessary, we’ll lose another civilization and rebuild again on top of that until slowly, bit by bit, we’ll get there.•
Tags: Gene Roddenberry, Linda Merinoff
From the August 13, 1891 New York Times:
“SAN FRANCISCO–The steamship Oceanic, which arrived last night from Hong-kong and Yokohama, brings copies of a native Japanese paper called the Kokkai, which publishes a remarkable story of a monster serpent.
It says that on the 17th inst. a man called Neemura Tahichi, twenty-five years of age, went out with his wife Otora, who was forty-eight, to pursue his usual avocation of tree cutting in Koshitamura, Province of Lamba. The husband and wife separated at a place called Matsu Yama. Shortly afterward, while engaged felling a tree, Tahichi thought he heard his wife cry out. Running to the place he was horrified to find that a huge snake, described as being three feet in circumference, had Otora’s head in its mouth, and was engaged in swallowing her, despite her struggles. Tahichi ran off to the hamlet and summoned seven or eight of his neighbors, who when they reached the scene of the catastrophe found the snake had swallowed the woman as far as her feet, and was slowly making its way to its home. They were too much terrified to touch it, and it finally effected its escape unmolested.
The Province of Lamba is one of the most desolate in Japan, and monster reptiles and wild animals are frequently killed there.”
It’s always been a difficult balance for newspapers–and never more than it is now–to give readers what they want and what they seemingly need. From Eugene L. Meyer’s Bethesda Magazine interview with Katherine Weymouth, the Graham family member who has stayed aboard the Washington Post as publisher at the behest of new owner, Jeff Bezos:
“Question:
What can Jeff Bezos do that the Grahams couldn’t?
Katherine Weymouth:
I personally believe there’s no magic bullet. If there were, someone would’ve found it, how to transform for the digital era. But we are in a great position. We have a credible brand, deeply engaged readers, [and we] cover Washington. And now we are owned by someone with deep pockets who cares what we do and is willing to invest for the long term.
Question:
What has changed now that the Post newspaper is owned by Jeff Bezos?
Katherine Weymouth:
People have stopped wearing ties, that’s the biggest change around here. …He hasn’t yet told us what to do, not that he would. He’s buying it for all the right reasons: It’s an important institution. He said, ‘I’m an optimist by nature and, yes, I’m optimistic about the future of the Post. If not, I wouldn’t join you.’ Can he bring something to the table? He clearly does have deep pockets. By itself, that’s not enough. He is obsessively focused on the reader’s experience.
Question:
Have you and he discussed changes you might make under his ownership that you were unable to or didn’t make before?
Katherine Weymouth:
I do not anticipate any dramatic changes. He has made it clear that he wants to build on what we do best, with a deep focus on serving our readers…[while] experimenting with new ways of presenting our journalism digitally that will create even more compelling experiences for our readers and users.”
At Practical Ethics, Joao Fabiano has a smart consideration of some of the perils of neuro-modification of morality, which we will probably delay dealing with for as long as we can. But what if a violent serial criminal could be “adjusted” to no longer behave aberrantly? Sounds great and frightening. The opening:
“It is 2025. Society has increasingly realised the importance of breaking evolution’s chains and enhancing the human condition. Large grants are awarded for building sci-fi-like laboratories to search for and create the ultimate moral enhancer. After just a few years, humanity believes it has made one of its most major breakthroughs: a pill which will rid our morality of all its faults. Without any side-effects, it vastly increases our ability to cooperate and to think rationally on moral issues, while also enhancing our empathy and our compassion for the whole of humanity. By shifting individuals’ socio-value orientation towards cooperation, this pill will allow us to build safe, efficient and peaceful societies. It will cast a pro-social paradise on earth, the moral enhancer kingdom come.
I believe we better think twice before endeavouring ourselves into this pro-social paradise on the cheap. Not because we will lose ‘the X factor,’ not because it will violate autonomy, and not because such a drug would cause us to exit our own species. Even if all those objections are refuted, even if the drug has no side-effects, even if each and every human being, by miracle, willingly takes the drug without any coercion whatsoever, even then, I contend we could still have trouble.
Surprisingly, the scenario imagined in the first paragraph is not that far-fetched. The field of cognitive moral neuroscience and the study of moral cognition have been flourishing; we have already found many neurochemical manipulations which seem to alter our social and moral preferences.”
Tags: Joao Fabiano
A passage from a new Wired interview by Alex Pasternack with security expert Bruce Schneier about safety vulnerabilities, the physical kinds and virtual ones:
“Wired:
What about attacks that affect infrastructure? Obviously the past few years have shown that industry, cities, utilities, even vehicles are vulnerable to hacking. Are those serious threats?
Bruce Schneier:
There are threats to all embedded systems. We’ve seen groups mostly at universities hacking into medical devices, hacking into automobiles, into various security cameras, and demonstrating the vulnerabilities. There’s not a lot of fixing at this time. The industries are still largely ignoring the problem, maybe very much like the computer industry did maybe twenty years ago, when they belittled the problem, pretended it wasn’t there. But we’ll get there.
When I look at the bigger embedded systems, the power grids, various infrastructure systems in cities, there are vulnerabilities. I worry about them a little less because they’re so obscure. But I still think we need to start figuring out how to fix them, because I think there are a lot of hidden vulnerabilities in embedded systems.
Wired:
Are there particular security concerns right now that you think the public, given its misunderstanding about security, doesn’t appreciate enough?
Bruce Schneier:
I’m most worried about potential security vulnerabilities in the powerful institutions we’re trusting with our data, with our security. I’m worried about companies like Google and Microsoft and Facebook. I’m worried about governments, the US and other governments. I’m worried about how they are using our data, how they’re storing our data, and what happens to it. I’m less worried about the criminals. I think we’ve kinda got cyber-crime under control, it’s not zero but it never will be. I’m much more worried about the powerful abusing us than the un-powerful abusing us.”
Tags: Alex Pasternack, Bruce Schneier
“And before you ask – NO!! – you can’t sleep with her.”
Hello, I need a room to use. About once/twice a week max. Weekdays from 9am-2pm. About 2-3 hours each time. My GF doesn’t like motels/hotels and are own places are out of the question. House or apartment is fine. Can you help us out??
And before you ask – NO!! – you can’t sleep with her.
Let me know what you can offer and what you need from us to use it.
The 1970s sensation of the King Tut exhibit obviously had it roots in ancient times, but its modern story began in 1922 when Howard Carter unearthed the unimaginable trove, wonderfully preserved. Soon after the discovery, the New York Times sent a reporter to Egypt to document the find that stunned the world. The article’s opening:
Through the courtesy of Howard Carter, the American Egyptologist, who, as director of Lord Carnarvon’s expedition, has, after thirty-three years’ search dug up the tomb of King Tutankhamen of the eighteenth dynasty, the correspondent of The New York Times was allowed today an exclusive view of the interior of the two ante-chambers of the tomb in the Valley of the Kings in Upper Egypt. The rest of the chambers of the tomb are still sealed.
Down a steep incline we entered straight to the first chamber. In the middle of the wall to the right is a doorway evidently leading to the chamber or chambers wherein doubtless are the sarcophagus and mummy of the King, and perhaps other treasures, since the antechambers are merely a hallway with a drawing room concealed behind a tantalizing sealed door, which will not be opened before the return of Lord Carnarvon from London, which will be about the middle of February.
Against this doorway are two life-size statues of the King made of bitumenized wood–not ebony, as at first reported. They are still standing on reed mats, just as they stood in the King’s palace and exactly as laid down on the Pharaonic funerary ritual. This again is evidence that this is the tomb and not the cache of Tutankhamen, as, if it were the cache the statues would be standing anywhere and anyhow, certainly not in exact accordance with the ritual.
The feet of each statue are shod with solid gold sandals of inestimable value. Each statue is crowned with a golden crown, bearing in front the royal serpent, or uraeus. As Thebes was the shrine of the cult of the serpent this is not unusual.
Incidentally, the day the tomb was opened and the party found these golden serpents in the crowns of the two statues there was an interesting incident at Carter’s house. He brought a canary with him this year to relieve his loneliness. When the party was dining, that night there was a commotion outside on the veranda. The party rushed out and found that a serpent of similar type to that in the crowns had grabbed the canary. They killed the serpent, but the canary died, probably from fright.
The incident made an impression on the native staff, who regard it as a warning from the spirit of the departed King against further intrusion on the privacy of his tomb.
But the most notable thing about the statues is the rare beauty of the faces. They have evidently been made from plaster casts such as were made by the ancient Egyptians a thousand years before the Greeks or Romans ever thought of them. They show the King as a man of royal mien. Gazing on the beautiful, calm, kindly and strong countenance on the left-hand statue, which is undamaged, one finds it difficult to realize that such a monarch could have succumbed to the overwhelming influence among the priests as he did, to become again an adherent of the orthodox religion. The explanation is probably that he realized the futility of opposition to pressure so strong that it even forced the Queen to change her name from Ankhosenaten to Ankhosenamen.
It is certain that the King would not have agreed to his humiliation unless there was no alternative. This fact is historically most interesting as indicating that the power of the Hierarchy of Amon in the days of Tutankhamen was greater than that of Pharaoh, though these sacredotal Princes did not seize the throne from the Pharaohs until more than 300 years later.
As works of art those statues reach a plane of excellence probably higher than has been reached in any subsequent period of the world.
On the other side of the chamber is a throne incomparably magnificent and wondrously beautiful. One must note its infallible evidence of the wholly unsuspected height reached by ancient Egyptian art. The innate refinement, pure lofty estheticism and amazing skill of the craftsman constitute a startling revelation. It shows not only the imperial splendor of ancient Egypt was far more delicate and magnificent than was imagined or equaled in the world’s history, but also that the late greatest craftsmen of ancient Greece were mere hacks compared to the master who designed and adorned the throne.•
Tags: George Herbert 5th Earl of Carnarvon, Howard Carter, King Tutankhamen
You could tell me anything really far-fetched about technology right now, and I couldn’t readily dismiss it, even if I thought you were probably lying. So reports about gigantic vending machines in China dispensing electric cars didn’t really make me blink. Unlike Mark Rogowsky of Forbes, however, I’m not high on the potential of this disruptive business model. The opening of his recent breathless article about Kandi Technologies:
“China is growing so fast it’s sometimes difficult to get different sources to even agree which the biggest cities are and how many people live in them. But that said, among them is a name unfamiliar to most Americans, the city of Hangzhou, located in eastern China, and home to 8.7 million as of 2010. That would make it the biggest city in the U.S. even though it’s barely a third the size of Shanghai, the world’s largest. But Hangzhou isn’t just big, it’s also home to an ambitious experiment that combines electric vehicles, giant vending machines and a Zipcar-like business model. Oh, and if it works, private car ownership as we know it is probably going to disappear in the world’s biggest cities.”