Urban Studies

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A Brief Note From 1900 About Eccentric Brothers

October 3, 2013 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the December 11, 1900 New York Times:

“Plainfield, N.J.–Frederick Hatfield, who for years has been noted as one of the eccentric and parsimonious characters in this section, died Saturday night in the tumble-down house that he and his brother have lived in for years on the old Frazee Lee property in Fanwood Township. He had been ill but a few days with pneumonia.

The two brothers lived alone, and were noted for their hate of women. No woman, it is said, had darkened the door of their home for over a quarter of a century. They never had their hair cut, and never wore hats. Whenever they came to town to trade they drove a donkey attached to a two-wheeled gig of their own make. The brothers are reputed to be worth $100,000. The house they lived in is said to have been built over a century ago, but had gone to ruin through neglect.”

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“Robots, Unlike Humans, Are Not Consumers”

October 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

From “Avoiding Our Dystopian Robot Future” at the Philosopher’s Beard, a passage that speculates on how an autonomous society that’s also a capitalist one might reconcile itself:

“The first dystopian threat has been well analysed by lots of people (eg, eg, eg). At present our political economy provides individuals with purchasing power claims on goods and services mainly through the labour market. That is, most people provide for themselves (and their dependents) by finding a job that pays enough to afford to buy what they need for a basic standard of living, and at least some of what they want as well. Government welfare policy is mainly oriented to supporting this central labour market mechanism, for example by providing public education for people to improve their employability, and social insurance nets for the disabled and temporarily unemployed.  

The problem that robots pose is that they may make this labour market obsolete by causing ‘technological unemployment’ for humans. If robots can not only perform mechanical tasks more quickly, accurately, and tirelessly than humans (the problem the Luddites confronted), but also cognitive tasks (like exam grading, driving, legal discovery, etc) then what will humans have left to sell on the labour market? Our birthright – the ability to use our bodies and minds to create things that others find valuable – will be worthless. Yet people will still need food, shelter, and the rest. How will they get it? 

Robots will revolutionise the supply side of the economy, resulting in much cheaper goods and services. Yet the economic gains of this efficiency will not be split between labour (wages) and capital (profits), since robots don’t need to be paid. Thus the owners of capital – the owners of the machines – will end up with an increasingly large share of whatever income the economy generates. (The ratio under capitalism 1.0 has historically been about 2/3 labour, 1/3 capital.) The pessimistic conclusion is that the society of the future would be characterised by an unimaginable abundance that only a very few can afford to buy.

Yet perhaps that scenario is not so likely. Not only can one expect the political mobilisation of the 99% objecting to their economic disenfranchisement. There is also a contradiction in the capitalists’ own position. For robots, unlike humans, are not consumers. That is part of what makes them so cheap to use in producing goods and services. Yet at the aggregate level that is a big problem. If no one (except the handful of capitalists, software designers, and hangers on) can afford to buy what you’re selling, then it hardly matters how cheaply you can produce it. Such an economy will be relatively small (‘depressed’) despite its enormous potential, and thus the capitalists as a class will be poorer than they might be. 

Given the convergence of the interests of both capitalists and ordinary citizens, it seems reasonable to expect that some kind of accommodation can be reached to transform the political economy to cope with the end of human labour. Specifically, governments will have to reorient themselves from supporting citizens’ opportunity for waged labour to providing them with a direct rights claim on economic purchasing power (like pensions). Income is now redistributed from capitalists to ordinary citizens through the labour market. In future it will have to be redistributed through another mechanism, whether that be direct corporate taxation or perhaps some system of universal share ownership. That would be a radically different political economy than we have had for the last couple of hundred years. Call it Capitalism 2.0.”•

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Rod Serling, 1964:

“The Real Problem With Ebooks Is That They’re More ‘E’ Than Book”

October 3, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Have you smelled any good books lately?

The worst argument against ebooks is the sensory one, that dead trees are more pleasing. That you miss how the paper and binding smell. You shouldn’t have been smelling your books anyhow. That’s disgusting. But there are some good points to be made against the digitization of books, in terms of privacy, memory and economics. For some thoughts in the latter category, here’s the opening of Art Brodsky’s new Wired article:

“This is not one of those rants about missing the texture, touch, colors, whatever of paper contrasted with the sterility of reading on a tablet. No, the real abomination of ebooks is often overlooked: Some are so ingrained in the product itself that they are hiding in plain sight, while others are well concealed beneath layers of commerce and government.

The real problem with ebooks is that they’re more ‘e’ than book, so an entirely different set of rules govern what someone — from an individual to a library — can and can’t do with them compared to physical books, especially when it comes to pricing.

The collusion of large ebook distributors in pricing has been a public issue for a while, but we need to talk more about how they are priced differently to consumers and to libraries. That’s how ebooks contribute to the ever-growing divide between the literary haves and have-nots.”

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Old Print Article: “Confessions Of A Body-Snatcher,” New York Times (1878)

October 3, 2013 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

"I've bought meat of this man many a time, and now I'll sell him for meat."

“I’ve bought meat of this man many a time, and now I’ll sell him for meat.”

Demand invites supply. Case in point: Medical schools need bodies for students to work on, so a trade arose in the nineteenth century that put grave robbers in cahoots with medical colleges. Shovel-ready entrepreneurs scanned local papers for death notices, headed to cemeteries, usually with doctors in tow, and welcomed back the recently departed. Sometimes the bodies of particularly wealthy citizens would be ransomed, but the corpses would usually just be sold for a couple of bucks to universities. An inside look at an Ohio operation in this strange “recycling” business appeared in the November 18, 1878 New York Times. The story:

“Cleveland–Joiner, the wretch who has been in all the recent grave robbing jobs in this section, continues to divulge the secrets of the trade. He pretends to be very contrite over what he has done, and ready to make amends by exposing his companions in guilt. His last story related to Mr. J.E. French, a son of the old gentleman who was ruthlessly torn from his grave, in Willoughby, on Sept. 16. The robbers watch the newspapers, and when death notices of persons thought to be available occur, the graves are visited and a resurrection takes place. In August last a young man fell over a ledge in Geauga County and broke his neck. The fact was published, and the night after the funeral Minor and Joiner repaired to Chardon, 30 miles distant, where the burial had taken place, with the intention of obtaining the body. As usual, the doctor was sought, who told them that the grave was watched by two men with shot-guns. This was unpleasant, but the robbers thought the doctor might be deceiving them with the intention of obtaining the body himself. They accordingly sought another doctor, who confirmed the story, and so they abandoned the scheme and returned. At Chester Cross Roads, in the same county, two robbers from this city were assisted by the Doctor and a medical student of that village. They went to get the body of an old lady who was very fleshy, and who had died of apoplexy. The coffin was reached and broken open without accident, and a hook fastened in the neck. Four men tugged and pulled in vain at the prize, but were unable to move it. They were in despair, when a happy thought struck them. Taking the reins from the harness and hitching the horse to the hook, the body was successfully brought to the surface. Another pull and the body was safely sacked and loaded. Another visit was made to Hampden, in this county, and this time the robbers were assisted by two doctors and a medical student. They did what Joiner calls a good night’s work, obtaining three bodies in a short time. One of these was that of a butcher, and as his body was sacked the home doctor remarked: ‘I’ve bought meat of this man many a time, and now I’ll sell him for meat.’ Some time after this the body of a young lady was stolen from the cemetery at Leroy, Lake County. After digging a certain distance they found water. This had to be bailed from the coffin before the body could be taken out. The corpse was found to be somewhat swollen but made a good subject. Mr. French, who is quite wealthy, expressed his determination to follow up this gang and will prosecute in every case. Dr. Carlisle, who is said to have assisted in the Willoughby job, has been indicted in the Lake County Court for disturbing the grave. The best counsel in this part of the State has been engaged on both sides, and important revelations will doubtless come out. The trial is set down for Thursday next.”

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“The Baby Had Learned To Talk”

October 3, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In Felix Salmon’s critique of Dave Eggers’ new novel, he writes glowingly of “It Knows,” Daniel Soar’s 2011 London Review of Books piece about three volumes regarding Google and the place of the Plex in our world. (Or is it our place in the Plex’s world?) A passage about the late GOOG-411 service:

“Levy tells the story of a new recruit with a long managerial background who asked Google’s senior vice-president of engineering, Alan Eustace, what systems Google had in place to improve its products. ‘He expected to hear about quality assurance teams and focus groups’ – the sort of set-up he was used to. ‘Instead Eustace explained that Google’s brain was like a baby’s, an omnivorous sponge that was always getting smarter from the information it soaked up.’ Like a baby, Google uses what it hears to learn about the workings of human language. The large number of people who search for ‘pictures of dogs’ and also ‘pictures of puppies’ tells Google that ‘puppy’ and ‘dog’ mean similar things, yet it also knows that people searching for ‘hot dogs’ get cross if they’re given instructions for ‘boiling puppies’. If Google misunderstands you, and delivers the wrong results, the fact that you’ll go back and rephrase your query, explaining what you mean, will help it get it right next time. Every search for information is itself a piece of information Google can learn from.

By 2007, Google knew enough about the structure of queries to be able to release a US-only directory inquiry service called GOOG-411. You dialled 1-800-4664-411 and spoke your question to the robot operator, which parsed it and spoke you back the top eight results, while offering to connect your call. It was free, nifty and widely used, especially because – unprecedentedly for a company that had never spent much on marketing – Google chose to promote it on billboards across California and New York State. People thought it was weird that Google was paying to advertise a product it couldn’t possibly make money from, but by then Google had become known for doing weird and pleasing things. In 2004, it launched Gmail with what was for the time an insanely large quota of free storage – 1GB, five hundred times more than its competitors. But in that case it was making money from the ads that appeared alongside your emails. What was it getting with GOOG-411? It soon became clear that what it was getting were demands for pizza spoken in every accent in the continental United States, along with questions about plumbers in Detroit and countless variations on the pronunciations of ‘Schenectady’, ‘Okefenokee’ and ‘Boca Raton’. GOOG-411, a Google researcher later wrote, was a phoneme-gathering operation, a way of improving voice recognition technology through massive data collection.

Three years later, the service was dropped, but by then Google had launched its Android operating system and had released into the wild an improved search-by-voice service that didn’t require a phone call. You tapped the little microphone icon on your phone’s screen – it was later extended to Blackberries and iPhones – and your speech was transmitted via the mobile internet to Google servers, where it was interpreted using the advanced techniques the GOOG-411 exercise had enabled. The baby had learned to talk. Now that Android phones are being activated at a rate of more than half a million a day,​4 Google suddenly has a vast and growing repository of spoken words, in every language on earth, and a much more powerful learning machine.”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

October 2, 2013 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"I am selling my bedbugs and bedbug eggs for people to use against people"

“I am selling my bedbugs and bedbug eggs for people to use against people.”

BEDBUGS FOR MALICE – $30 (Bedstuy Bushwick)

Hi! New York can be a pretty difficult place to live! As they say, if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere!

I’ve lived here almost a full calendar year, and have found that it’s super difficult to keep positive. There are so many things trying to keep you down – the subway track work, craigslist roommate scams, reappearing enemies from college, ex girlfriends finding out your account info…That said, I recently moved into a room that happens to be infested with bedbugs. Luckily for me, I’m not allergic, and barely notice them. My girlfriend, however, is blaming me for HER infestation, even though it’s totally NOT. MY. FAULT. I really didn’t know we had them, and by the time we found it, it was too late. She broke up with me. Unfortunately she was also my boss, so I need to find a new job.

So, I’m trying to make my challenges and hardships work FOR me instead of AGAINST me. I need some extra ca$h, and if I can help-a-bruthah out while I’m doin it, the more the merrier!

I’m aware that it’s impossible to live in this city without fucking someone over. So, I am selling my bedbugs and bedbug eggs for people to use against people. You can let it roam in their bag, their home, etc etc. I am simply selling bedbugs, how you use them is your business.

I will package them up so that they both a) live and b) stay in their container.

 

“Streamlined As A Plane Is This Unique Creation”

October 2, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

When I was putting up the post about the Waterland boat-car hybrid, it reminded of another odd vehicle, the Davis three-wheel sedan which was produced by a short-lived California company in 1947-48. The automobile was nicknamed “Baby.” I may have put up this video before, but here it is just in case.

“With Autonomous Cars, Infrastructure Enters The Realm Of Science Fiction”

October 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of Terry Bennett’s new Wired opinion piece about the smart infrastructure that will be needed to handle interconnected, autonomous cars:

“Much has been written about the era of connected cars, especially as excitement grows around announcements that besides Google, Audi, Nissan, Tesla, Mercedes Benz, and others are planning to make commercially available self-driving cars, too.

The discussions range from the ethics of autonomous cars to every latest announcement around the technology involved in Google’s own self-driving car project — from wearables to manufacturing. But there’s a danger to these one-dimensional discussions: We can’t rely on the technology inside the car alone.

We need to think about what’s outside, too — a smart, interconnect infrastructure for our roadways.

It’s moving from thinking only about traffic lights, signs, and crosswalk lights to adding intelligence into pavement, utilities, and the like. This will require changes in how we think about business models, job functions, and more. Because our existing roadways aren’t inert objects: They’re dynamic systems comprised of the interplay between cars and traffic signals, as well as repaving and restriping.

With autonomous cars, infrastructure enters the realm of science fiction.”

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“I Saw An Enormous Statue Of Myself, Lying In The Desert, Mouth Open As If I Were Dead. I Entered My Mouth.”

October 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The impetus for change in 1969’s Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice comes from two of the titular characters attending guerrilla psychological workshops at the Esalen Institute at Big Sur. Two years prior, Leo Litwak, the novelist, journalist and book reviewer, brought his considerable writing skills to the alternative-therapy retreat for a New York Times Magazine story. A section from “Joy Is the Prize” in which the author is awakened to a repressed memory from WWII:

I never anticipated the effect of these revelations, as one after another of these strangers expressed his grief and was eased. I woke up one night and felt as if everything were changed. I felt as if I were about to weep. The following morning the feeling was even more intense. 

Brigitte and I walked down to the cliff edge. We lay beneath a tree. She could see that I was close to weeping. I told her that I’d been thinking about my numbness, which I had traced to the war. I tried to keep the tears down. I felt vulnerable and unguarded. I felt that I was about to lose all my secrets and I was ready to let them go. Not being guarded, I had no need to put anyone down, and I felt what it was to be unarmed. I could look anyone in the eyes and my eyes were open. 

That night I said to Daniel: “Why do you keep diverting us with your intellectual arguments? I see suffering in your eyes. You give me a glimpse of it, then you turn it off. Your eyes go dead and the intellectual stuff bores me. I feel that’s part of your strategy.”

Schutz suggested that the two of us sit in the center of the room and talk to each other. I told Daniel I was close to surrender. I wanted to let go. I felt near to my grief. I wanted to release it and be purged. Daniel asked about my marriage and my work. Just when he hit a nerve, bringing me near the release I wanted, he began to speculate on the tragedy of the human condition. I told him: “You’re letting me off and I don’t want to be left off.”

Schutz asked if I would be willing to take a fantasy trip.

It was later afternoon and the room was already dark. I lay down, Schutz beside me, and the group gathered around. I closed my eyes. Schutz asked me to imagine myself very tiny and to imagine that tiny self entering my own body. He wanted me to describe the trip.

I saw an enormous statue of myself, lying in the desert, mouth open as if I were dead. I entered my mouth. I climbed down my gullet, entering it as if it were a manhole. I climbed into my chest cavity. Schutz asked me what I saw. “It’s empty,” I said. “There’s nothing here.” I was totally absorbed by the effort to visualize entering myself and lost all sense of the group. I told Schutz there was no heart in my body. Suddenly, I felt tremendous pressure in my chest, as if tears were going to explode. He told me to go to the vicinity of the heart and report what I saw. There, on a ledge of the chest wall, near where the heart should have been, I saw a baby buggy. He asked me to look into it. I didn’t want to, because I feared I might weep, but I looked, and I saw a doll. He asked me to touch it. I was relieved to discover that it was only a doll. Schutz asked me if I could bring a heart into my body. And suddenly there it was, a heart sheathed in slime, hung with blood vessels. And that heart broke me up. I felt my chest convulse. I exploded. I burst into tears.

I recognized the heart. The incident had occurred more than 20 years before and had left me cold.•

 

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Jules Reveillier, By Land Or By Sea (1907)

October 2, 2013 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

That the early 20th-century demonstrations of the Waterland were a great success didn’t really matter; there wasn’t a market for an amphibious automobile. But that doesn’t diminish the wow factor of inventor Jules Reveillier’s insane boat-on-wheels, pictured here in a classic photograph. From a November 13, 1907 New York Times report about an outlandish test run in (and around) the Hudson:

“The amphibious French automobile took its first plunge in America yesterday afternoon at Fort Washington on the Hudson, while fifty or more automobile and motorboat experts watched its performance. After a half hour spent in diving from the beach to the river and returning, cavorting about in the quiet waters of the Hudson, and similar stunts, the car ran up the bank and across the New York Central Railroad tracks, climbed the steep hill to Riverside Drive, and rolled merrily down the Drive amid the plaudits of those who watched it. The opinion of the experts who saw it was that the demonstration was a complete success, though in its present form its commercial value is not apparent.

The demonstration was arranged by a firm of automobile dealers, and on its success was supposed to depend whether or not the firm would put the invention on the market. The invention is owned by Jules Reveillier, a French automobile enthusiast, who recently brought the boat across the Atlantic to show Americans its possibilities.

The contrivance is unusual enough in appearance to arouse interest anywhere. Its body is shaped exactly like the ordinary motorboat, except that it is a little broad of bean for high speed. It has the regulation straight prow, sharp nosed and broadening quickly to its greatest beam. The engine is set well forward in the usual covered compartment, and a cockpit, equipped with typical automobile steering wheel, is directly amidships. A seat wide enough to comfortably accommodate two persons is set behind the wheel, and is supposed to be occupied by the steersman and the engineer. Behind this seat, and almost flush with the deck, is another, wide enough for two men. The body is rounded off abruptly at the stern.

The front wheels, which respond to the steering wheel, are set forward of the engine two or three feet. The wheels are directed by a steering gear like that attached to the rudder of an ordinary boat operated by chains running from the bow, while the rear wheels are turned by chain gear.

The wheels are made of hollow steel plates and have ordinary automobile tires. They are thus available for road service, and act as air chambers to help keep the machine afloat when in the water and as a keel to prevent it from turning over. A simple mechanical contrivance shifts the power from the driving wheels to the propeller as the boat enters the water, and shifts it back again when it reaches land.

The present boat is built entirely of steel. It is equipped with a low power automobile engine. On land the engine is capable of driving the car twenty miles an hour, while in the water it attains a speed of about nine knots under ordinary conditions.

The machine is 8 or 9 feet long, with a wheel base of 54 inches.

The possibility of navigating on land was acknowledged by the party that went up the Hudson to see to see the boat tried, and it was taken at once to the waterfront yesterday. It traveled over the rough ground on the bank of the river without difficulty, and entered the water easily. As the forward wheels entered the water they floated the prow, when the hub was submerged, and the rear wheels drove the boat on while they were on land.

The driver who handled the car transferred the power to the propeller skillfully, and the momentum acquired in leaving the bank carried the contrivance well out into the stream. It answered perfectly to the rudder.

Returning, the machine mounted the bank easily. Several time these dives were repeated, and the boat each time entered and left the water successfully.”

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“The Eggers Novel I’d Love To Read Is The One Dominated By The Best Of Intentions”

October 1, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I posted an excerpt from the new Dave Eggers novel earlier, and here’s part of a riposte to the book that Felix Salmon wrote for Reuters, which contends that the author gets Silicon Valley all wrong. Because the novel doesn’t come out for another week and I haven’t read it, I don’t know what to say about this critique. Eggers seems to have purposely written about the Valley without firsthand experience in the same way that Kafka imagined America or Stephen Crane the Civil War, hoping to create something of an impressionistic truth. At any rate, this is from Salmon:

“The thing about the Valley that Eggers misses is that it’s populated by people who consider themselves above the rest of the country — intellectually, culturally, financially. They consider themselves the cognitive elite; the rest of us are the puppets dancing on the end of their strings of code.

Besides, we all share the downside of being part of an always-on, networked society, whether we participate on social media or not. If you’re going to suffer the downside, you might as well enjoy the upside — that’s all the motivation that anybody needs to get involved, there’s no need for crude coercion.

In science, there’s a phenomenon called ‘herd immunity’: if you vaccinate a high enough proportion of people, the entire population becomes immune. The evolution of the web is similar: enough of us are connected, in many different ways, that no one has real privacy any longer. Eggers can see that, but he then tries to reverse-engineer how we got here, and, by dint of not doing his homework, gets it very wrong.

The Circle is a malign organization; you can almost see its CEO, Eamon Bailey, stroking a white cat in his suburban Palo Alto lair, dreaming of Global Domination. In reality, however, the open protocols of the World Wide Web led naturally and ineluctably to our current loss of privacy. Tim Berners-Lee is no evil genius; he’s a good guy. And the Eggers novel I’d love to read is the one dominated by the best of intentions. Rather than the one which thinks that if technology is causing problems, then the cause must always be technologists with maleficent ulterior motives.”•

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Eggers visits Conan in 2004:

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“There Are No Death Panels In The Law”

October 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

People with health insurance don’t face death panels–people without it do. Cutting through the nonsense surrounding the arrival of Obamacare is Carter Price, an analyst at the think-tank RAND Corporation, who’s spent much recent time studying the Affordable Care Act. He did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit on the day Obamacare goes into effect.

___________________________ 

Question:

Which talking point against the Affordable Care Act is the least truthful/meritorious? And which has the most merit?

 

Carter Price: 

There are no death panels in the law.

You won’t necessarily be able to keep your exact insurance. 

___________________________

Question:

So, can I keep my health insurance? 

Carter Price:

It depends on how you get your insurance. If you get it from your employer, the law won’t change that (though your employer might). If you get it on the individual market, you will have access to new types of plans and your existing plan might not be allowed (for example, if you have a very high deductible plan)

Question:

Is it fair to say, then, that Obama’s initial promise when selling the bill (“If you like your insurance, you can keep it”) was, although spoken with honest intentions, a bit misleading? 

Carter Price: 

Those statements certainly did not capture all of the nuances of the law, but for most people with insurance, there won’t be an impact.

______________________________

Question:

So in your professional opinion will the ACA have a net positive or net negative effect on employment?

Carter Price:

It will vary substantially state to state.

Researchers at the Urban Institute found that it would reduce “job-lock” where people are locked into jobs because of the insurance only.

_____________________________

Question:

How much savings if any would the US receive if an NHS model or even a Canadian-single payer model was implemented? Would drug price negotiation, non-employment-based insurance or something else help?

Why is the US so embattled over domestic issues while so apparently lax on military spending? A single aircraft carrier is $9B-$14B (why so expensive?) and in comparison, medicaid cuts in many populous states amount less than that.

Carter Price:

The US is on a path to spending 20% of our GDP on health care. Most other developed countries spend less than 10%. So in is certainly possible that a different model could result in much lower costs. I haven’t done the same level of analysis on applying these alternate systems to the U.S. and can’t really answer that in detail.•

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“My God, Mae Thought. It’s Heaven.”

October 1, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Dave Eggers’ latest novel, The Circle, is a satire about, among other things, social networking, that really good and really bad idea. Here’s the opening of an excerpt from it running in the New York Times Magazine this week:

“My God, Mae thought. It’s heaven.

The campus was vast and rambling, wild with Pacific color, and yet the smallest detail had been carefully considered, shaped by the most eloquent hands. On land that had once been a shipyard, then a drive-in movie theater, then a flea market, then blight, there were now soft green hills and a Calatrava fountain. And a picnic area, with tables arranged in concentric circles. And tennis courts, clay and grass. And a volleyball court, where tiny children from the company’s day care center were running, squealing, weaving like water. Amid all this was a workplace, too, 400 acres of brushed steel and glass on the headquarters of the most influential company in the world. The sky above was spotless and blue.

Mae was making her way through all of this, walking from the parking lot to the main hall, trying to look as if she belonged. The walkway wound around lemon and orange trees, and its quiet red cobblestones were replaced, occasionally, by tiles with imploring messages of inspiration. ‘Dream,’ one said, the word laser-cut into the stone. ‘Participate,’ said another. There were dozens: ‘Find Community.’ ‘Innovate.’ ‘Imagine.’ She just missed stepping on the hand of a young man in a gray jumpsuit; he was installing a new stone that said, ‘Breathe.’

On a sunny Monday in June, Mae stopped in front of the main door, standing below the logo etched into the glass above. Though the company was less than six years old, its name and logo — a circle surrounding a knitted grid, with a small ‘c’ in the center — were already among the best known in the world. There were more than 10,000 employees on this, the main campus, but the Circle had offices all over the globe and was hiring hundreds of gifted young minds every week. It had been voted the world’s most admired company four years running.

Mae wouldn’t have thought she had a chance to work at such a place but for Annie. Annie was two years older, and they roomed together for three semesters in college, in an ugly building made habitable through their extraordinary bond, something like friends, something like sisters — or cousins who wished they were siblings and would have reason never to be apart. Their first month living together, Mae broke her jaw one twilight, after fainting, flu-ridden and underfed, during finals. Annie had told her to stay in bed, but Mae went to the Kwik Trip for caffeine and woke up on the sidewalk, under a tree. Annie took her to the hospital and waited as they wired her jaw and then stayed with Mae, sleeping next to her, in a wooden chair, all night, and then at home, for days, had fed Mae through a straw. It was a fierce level of commitment and competence that Mae had never seen from someone her age or near her age, and Mae was thereafter loyal in a way she’d never known she could be.

While Mae was still at Carleton, meandering between majors, from art history to marketing to psychology — getting her degree in psych with no plans to go further in the field — Annie had graduated, gotten her M.B.A. from Stanford and was recruited everywhere, but particularly at the Circle, and had landed here days after graduation. Now she had some lofty title — Director of Ensuring the Future, Annie joked — and had urged Mae to apply for a job. Mae did so, and though Annie insisted that she pulled no strings, Mae was sure Annie had, and she felt indebted beyond all measure. A million people, a billion, wanted to be where Mae was at this moment, entering this atrium, 30 feet high and shot through with California light, on her first day working for the only company that really mattered at all.” 

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“Many Things Have Started With A Dream”

October 1, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

The more popular cars in the 1890s or so were electric and steam with the fossil-fuel models trailing. Alas, things change. Violinist Jascha Heifetz bucked the trend in the 1967 and commissioned a battery-powered car to be custom built for him.

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“All Whistleblowers Are Immediately Demonized”

October 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Edward Snowden didn’t tell me anything I didn’t know already and I doubt he surprised you, either. With our cameras and clouds, everyone is watching everyone and I don’t think legislation will change that no matter how much idealistic people wish it would. But that doesn’t mean Snowden did a horrible thing, either, that he’s a villain just because he’s not a hero. Someone who hates surveillance winding up in Russia has played a bad joke on himself, but his intentions seem to have been noble. Rather than trying to make him Public Enemy # 1, I wish we’d take a moment to have an honest discussion about how much privacy is truly possible in the world we’ve created for ourselves.

Glenn Greenwald and Janine Gibson of the Guardian US, which broke the Snowden story,  just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. Largely like-minded people showed up for it, so there’s sadly mostly congratulation and little debate. But a few exchanges follow.

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Question:

What would you say is the single most shocking revelation that Snowden has leaked and why?

Glenn Greenwald:

The general revelation that the objective of the NSA is literally the elimination of global privacy: ensuring that every form of human electronic communication – not just those of The Terrorists™ – is collected, stored, analyzed and monitored.

The NSA has so radically misled everyone for so long about its true purpose that revealing its actual institutional function was shocking to many, many people, and is the key context for understanding these other specific revelations.

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Question:

Will there be any more groundbreaking leaks? Also, how do you feel about the response from the American people?

Glenn Greenwald:

There are definitely huge new stories to come: many more. I’ve said that from the start every time I was asked and I think people see by now that it’s true. In fact, as Janine said the other day, the documents and newsworthy revelations are so massive that no one news organization can possibly process them all.

As for public opinion, I’m incredibly gratified that Americans, and people around the world, have been so engaged by these issues and that public opinion polls show radical shifts in how people perceive that threats to their privacy/civil liberties from their own government are greater than threats to their safety from The Terrorists.

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Question:

I just realized you’ve done a good job keeping your source out of the limelight, it feels like he’s slowly fading from public consciousness and the real story is gaining traction.

Glenn Greenwald:

This is an astute point, and the credit for this is due to Snowden.

One of the most darkly hilarious things to watch is how government apologists and media servants are driven by total herd behavior: they all mindlessly adopt the same script and then just keep repeating it because they see others doing so and, like parrots, just mimic what they hear.

All whistleblowers are immediately demonized – they have to be “crazy” lest people think that there is something valid to their view that they saw injustices so fundamental that it was worth risking their liberty to expose. That’s why Nixon wanted Daniel Ellsberg’s psychoanalysis files: degrading the psyche of whistleblowers is vital to defending the status quo.

The script used to do this to Snowden was that he was a “fame-seeking narcissist.” Hordes of people who had no idea what “narcissism” even means – and who did not know the first thing about Snowden – kept repeating this word over and over because that became the cliche used to demonize him.

The reason this was darkly hilarious is because there is almost no attack on him more patently invalid than this one. When he came to us, he said: “after I identify myself as the source and explain why I did this, I intend to disappear from media sight, because I know they will want to personalize the story about me, and I want the focus to remain on the substance of NSA disclosures.”

He has been 100% true to his word. Almost every day for four months, I’ve had the biggest TV shows and most influential media stars calling and emailing me, begging to interview Snowden for TV. He has refused every request because he does not want the attention to be on him, but rather on the disclosures that he risked his liberty and even his life to bring to the world.

He could easily have been the most famous person in the world, on TV every day and night. But he chose not to, selflessly, so that he would not distract from the substance of the story.

How the people who spent months screaming “fame whore” and “narcissist” at him don’t fall on the ground in shame is mystifying to me. Few smear campaigns have ever proven more baseless than this one.

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Question:

Why do you think the leak about forwarding data to Israel received relatively little attention compared to other leaks?

Glenn Greenwald:

1) Because it involved “Israel”, which sends some people into fear-based silence; 2) Because it happened in the middle of Syria, which took up most oxygen; 3) Because the New York Times published nothing about it, for ignominious and self-serving reasons highlighted by its own public editor; and 4) Because there is some NSA fatigue: a sense that nothing that is revealed can surprise any longer.

The Times’ excuse for those interested.

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Question:

Is Seymour Hersh right? Is the Osama death story “one big lie”?

Glenn Greenwald:

I don’t know, but I know that Seymour Hersh is responsible for some of the bravest and most important journalism of the last 40 years; has incredibly good sources; and gave one of the best interviews I’ve ever heard on the nature of the US media last week. That doesn’t mean he’s infallible, but I trust him far more than most US journalists deemed Serious and Important (i.e., D.C. courtiers of the royal court).•

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“I Look For Natural Ingredients In My Food”

October 1, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Gypsy Boots wasn’t the only old school natural-food enthusiast. Case in point: Euell Gibbons, who prepared three-course meals from plants foraged from Central Park. Profiled by John McPhee in the New Yorker in 1968, here he is in a Grape Nuts commercial from the following decade.

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

October 1, 2013 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

The Spin Cycle ebook/screenplay-dark comedy – $99 (Midtown)

I have published my feature screenplay, The Spin Cycle, as an ebook.

Logline: A young woman runs a laundromat and develops a fetish for guys in wheelchairs, much to her promiscuous mother’s chagrin.

“You Know This Because You Live In The Future Where Surveillance Is Universal, Ubiquitous And Unavoidable”

September 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of “Life in the Fishbowl,” Stuart Armstong’s Aeon essay which takes an optimistic view of the surveillance state, seeing the Google Glass as half full:

“Suppose you’re walking home one night, alone, and you decide to take a shortcut through a dark alley. You make it halfway through, when suddenly you hear some drunks stumbling behind you. Some of them are shouting curses. They look large and powerful, and there are several of them. Nonetheless, you feel safe, because you know someone is watching.

You know this because you live in the future where surveillance is universal, ubiquitous and unavoidable. Governments and large corporations have spread cameras, microphones and other tracking devices all across the globe, and they also have the capacity to store and process oceans of surveillance data in real time. Big Brother not only watches your sex life, he analyses it. It sounds nightmarish — but it might be inevitable. So far, attempts to control surveillance have generally failed. We could be headed straight for the panopticon, and if recent news developments are any indication, it might not take that long to get there.

Maybe we should start preparing. And not just by wringing our hands or mounting attempts to defeat surveillance. For if there’s a chance that the panopticon is inevitable, we ought to do some hard thinking about its positive aspects. Cataloguing the downsides of mass surveillance is important, essential even. But we have a whole literature devoted to that. Instead, let’s explore its potential benefits.”

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“He Invented A Machine That Can Read What You Type”

September 30, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Just amazing footage of the late inventor David H. Shepard demonstrating his Optical Character Reader on a 1959 episode of I’ve Got a Secret. From his 2007 New York Times obituary: “David H. Shepard, who in his attic invented one of the first machines that could read, and then, to facilitate its interpreting of credit-card receipts, came up with the near-rectilinear font still used for the cards’ numbers, died on Nov. 24 in San Diego. He was 84. …

Mr. Shepard followed his reading machine, more formally known as an optical-character-recognition device, with one that could listen and talk. It could answer only ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ but each answer led to a deeper level of complexity. A later version could simultaneously handle multiple telephone inquiries. …

In 1964, his ‘conversation machine’ became the first commercial device to give telephone callers access to computer data by means of their own voices.  …

Mr. Shepard apologized many times for his major role in forcing people to converse with a machine instead of with a human being.”

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A Brief Note From 1907 About A Meat Market

September 30, 2013 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the May 19, 1907 New York Times:

“Berlin–The Cologne Gazzette reports that fearful cannibalism is still practiced in the German West African protectorate of Kamerun.

A German merchant writes to the newspaper that the natives not only devour their enemies, but also criminals and persons who have been locked up for trivial offenses. The merchant escaped the fate with difficulty. 

Kaka natives, he writes, offer human flesh for sale in the public market, to provision which death sentences are imposed for the most trivial offenses.”

“If It Had Been A Plague It Would Have Been A Historic Event”

September 30, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The jobless recovery is a complicated thing, and not just a political one. So many jobs have become ghosts in the machine. Luddism doesn’t work, but the new normal can scare you to death. Are an automated society and a capitalist one compatible? From Katharine Rowland’s Guernica interview with George Packer about his recent book, The Unwinding:

Guernica:

There’s also a story that reads almost like a parable of the fall occurring between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. What’s happened in that period with regard to the middle class? 

George Packer:

That’s part of the story. I had seen this in more political terms as sort of the end of the conservative era. The Reagan era began in 1980 and ended in 2008, that was my historical hypothesis. Now I’m remembering other false starts, like I spent months reading the literature of the neoconservatives of the 1970s to get into the mindset of the early Reagan years. But all of that fell by the wayside when I figured out I could do it through characters. It was these people who took me to the big theme of the social contract. It was in all their lives. It used to be that jobs were going to be there when you left high school in Winston Salem, North Carolina. Screw-up students went to textile factories, and better students went to the RJ Reynolds Warehouse, believe it or not, and the really good students went to community college. And that doesn’t happen anymore, those jobs aren’t there. The screw-up students are doing meth and hanging out at the pool hall and the bowling alley.

I didn’t look for it, it was there everywhere—the sense that not necessarily a wonderful life, but a decent life had been available to the majority, and it was gone. You could see its absence on these main streets. It was traumatic. It’s become normal to people who live there, but you get people talking about it and there are ghosts everywhere. As one man said to me, if it had been a plague it would have been a historic event, but it was economic dislocation, so it’s considered a natural process.

Guernica:

It was your sense that it had become normal for the people going through it?

George Packer:

I didn’t sense that they thought it was normal, but that they had stopped thinking about it all the time because they had to live in it.•

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“To Add A Way For Authors To Sign E-Books…Would Be A Boon For Readers”

September 30, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I buy books just to read them, so I don’t want any author signatures inside. I paid for that book! Do not write in it! But readers who’ve made the switch to ebooks will likely soon have the option of having them autographed. From Carolyn Kellogg at the Los Angeles Times:

“Want to hand over your iPad so an author can sign your e-book? You might be able to soon.

Apple has registered for a patent that would allow an e-book owner with an iPad get his or her book signed by an author. Readers might even be able to pose for a photo with the author as authentication to go with it — a photo that would go right into the e-book on the traditional signature page.

As Publishers Lunch tweeted Friday, the patent-following website Patently Apple has posted a description of the patent application. ‘On September 26, 2013, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office published a patent application from Apple that reveals a new iBook autographing system and more specifically to techniques and systems for embedding autographs in electronic books,’ the report said.

To add a way for authors to sign e-books — and do something extra, like add a photo that would be embedded in the e-book — would be a boon for readers.”

“Technology Already Exists To Create Underwater Colonies”

September 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Prediction: I will never live in an undersea colony nor a space one. Not unless the only other option is living in Bay Ridge. Then, sure. But if you care to not reside on solid ground, underwater habitats are already feasible. From Rachel Nuwer at the BBC:

“According to [Ian] Koblick, the technology already exists to create underwater colonies supporting up to 100 people – the few bunker-like habitats in operation today providing a blueprint. ‘There are no technological hurdles,’ Koblick says. ‘If you had the money and the need, you could do it today.’ Beyond that number, technological advances would be needed to deal with emergency evacuation systems, and environmental controls of air supply and humidity.

With safety being paramount, operators assure underwater habitats are running smoothly by monitoring life support systems – air composition, temperature and humidity – from the surface. Above the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Aquarius Reef Base, the third of the three existing facilities (which accommodates up to six aquanauts at a time), a bright yellow circular disc tethered to the undersea lab 60ft (18m) below collects data from a variety of sensors and sends it to shore via a special wireless internet connection. Future habitats could use satellites to communicate this important information. For now, energy independence is still a challenge. Sustainable future options might include harnessing wave action or placing solar panels on the surface.

Making larger habitats with multiple modules made of steel, glass and special cement used underwater would be simpler than trying to create one giant bubble. These smaller structures could be added or taken away to create living space for as many people as desired. Most likely, we wouldn’t want to build any deeper than 1,000ft (300m), because the pressures at such depths would require very thick walls and excessive periods of decompression for those returning to the surface. Koblick and his colleagues did not experience any ill effects from living below the surface for around 60 days, and he thinks stints up to six months would be feasible.”

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“What’s Making It Possible? Why Now?”

September 30, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Chris Anderson, former EIC at Wired, has expanded on his contention that smartphones are responsible for the developing drone market. He further believes that they’re also enabling self-driving cars. Two quotes from him.

From Wired, June 2012:

“Why? The reason is the same as with every other digital technology: a Moore’s-law-style pace where performance regularly doubles while size and price plummet. In fact, the Moore’s law of drone technology is currently accelerating, thanks to the smartphone industry, which relies on the same components—sensors, optics, batteries, and embedded processors—all of them growing smaller and faster each year. Just as the 1970s saw the birth and rise of the personal computer, this decade will see the ascendance of the personal drone. We’re entering the Drone Age.”

From Silicon Beat, September 2013:

“Drone and robot technology is at what Anderson is calling ‘the Macintosh moment,’ the turning point at which PCs went mainstream. What’s making it possible? Why now? From their components to the innovations springing up around them, the answer is smartphones, Anderson says.”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

September 30, 2013 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

“I will ship anywhere.”

Pregnant lady’s used panties! – $30 (Philadelphia/Anywhere) 

Have a panty fetish? Find pregnant women extremely sexy? Then you will love having a pair of my sexy panties! I’m 5 and 1/2 months along and I’d love to do whatever you want while wearing them before I send them to you!

I will SHIP anywhere, cost included in the price. NO MEETING. Pictures available too, for purchase, as dirty and explicit as you want ’em! you won’t be disappointed!

Interested in breast-milk, lactating pictures, etc? Message me for that too, naughty boys!!

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