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“Grab a few brews afterwards.”
Am 5’11″, 180lbs. Fit former high school wrestling team member.
Looking for someone close in weight to duel it out with me today, tomorrow. Be real. Knock out or tap out wins. No homo.
Grab a few brews afterwards.
No homo.
Thanks.
“Their first movements angered the bird, indicating their nearness to his nest.”
When Ben Franklin wasn’t busy with orgies, teetotalism or inventions, he took a moment to suggest that the turkey be made the United States’ official bird. Not a bad idea. Turkeys are resourceful as hell, can survive almost anything and are pretty good neighbors. The bald eagle, which instead won out, is admired for its fierceness, but such temperament rarely stays in check for long. That was the horrifying lesson learned by two California lads who happened too close to a bald eagle’s nest in 1895. The story from New York Times article of that year:
“Ukiah, Mendocino County, Cal.–Clinging to the side of Hill’s Peak, 1,000 feet above the canon bed, Willie and Eddie Briggs, aged thirteen and eleven years, fought a bald eagle for their lives Tuesday. The younger lad was knocked down repeatedly, and so torn by the talons and beak of the bird that he will lose his eyes and be disfigured for life. His life was saved by his brother’s heroic attack on the eagle with a short stick, beating it off. A party of men from Bachelor Valley organized when they heard of the eagle’s attack and succeeded in killing it. The bird measured eight feet eight inches from tip to tip of the wings.
For four years a large eagle has been noticed in the vicinity of Hill’s Peak, and it has been supposed it had a nest in that locality. Hill’s Peak is one of the most inaccessible and dangerous places in the neighborhood of Bachelor Valley. For some time farmers of the valley have missed lambs from their flocks and chickens from their yards, but not until lately did the eagle become so bold as to be caught in the act of making off with a lamb from the flock of Lemuel Briggs.
Seeing the swoop of the bird, Mr. Briggs went to the house for his gun, but before he could return the great American bird was far out of reach. He told his two boys to watch and see if they could find out where the eagle made its nest.
The next day, while tending a flock of sheep some distance from the house, the boys sighted the eagle near the peak and prepared to make the ascent. To do this they had to go up on the divide between Potter Valley and Bachelor Valley and get up back of the mountain on the north side. The south side is inaccessible, being a sheer precipice of about 1,000 feet at the foot of Doyle Creek.
Everything went smoothly with the boys until they were nearing the top, and knowing that the hardest part of their work was yet to come, they took a short rest, and then commenced their laborious work of climbing. The rock near the top is almost perpendicular, and they now had to use the greatest care, for a slip meant a fall to the bottom of the canon.
The boys had reached a little bench and were commencing to get their breath from their hard work, when without the least warning and before Eddie, the youngest, could put himself on his guard, the eagle came swooping down upon them and almost knocked the little fellow over the precipice. So sudden was the descent that they could not tell from which way the bird came.
The eagle now commenced to circle around them, sometimes coming within striking distance. The two boys stood as close together as possible, to combine forces in case of another attack, which they realized would come sooner or later. They also tried to get to a place of safety.
Their first movements angered the bird, indicating their nearness to his nest. Having for their weapons only the short poles they used in climbing, they were, as they soon realized, practically defenseless.
Every movement on their part was watched by the bird, and it was not long before the eagle, with a screech, made for the younger boy, this time knocking him down.
The position in which they were made it almost impossible for one to help the other and they were at the mercy of the fierce bird. The bird seemed to know this and to take advantage of it, and it now became a fight for life with the boys.
They determined, if possible, to retrace their steps. At every turn the eagle came swooping down upon them, making the fiercest attacks upon the smaller boy. Willie tried in every way to encourage his little brother, but from his exertions from climbing and from resisting the fierce attacks of the bird, the lad soon lost his strength and said he could go no further.
Realizing now that his only chance to save his brother would be to draw the bird’s attention to himself, Willie started off, telling Eddie to keep quiet and he would look for some place where they could defend themselves until their father could come to their assistance. He had not gone far when he heard piercing screams from his brother and returned immediately. He found a most horrible sight.
The eagle had pounced upon Eddie and was tearing his face, neck, and head with beak and talons. With almost superhuman effort Willie struck the bird a well-directed blow and it went screaming away. Willie found his brother insensible and covered with blood. He wiped the blood away as best he could, only to find one of Eddie’s eyes protruding from its socket and the other badly injured.
Fearing a new attack, Willie made frantic appeals to his father, whom he saw in the valley below. Loosening a large rock he rolled it down and was rewarded by his father’s attention being drawn upward. The boy made frantic gestures to his father, who saw something was wrong and started for the cliff. He reached them, and by dint of hard work the disfigured boy was carried to his home and medical attention secured. His right eye is lost, and the probability is that the sight of the other is destroyed.
The people in and around the valley organized a party and went out looking for the eagle. They came upon the bird yesterday and succeeded in shooting it.”
Tags: Eddie Briggs, Lemuel Briggs, Willie Briggs
Even before things were computerized, we wanted them to be, we pretended as if they were. We prepared ourselves for the real thing, when computers would make us more powerful, not yet realizing they might want to keep the power for themselves.
A 1969 commercial for Computer Football, which was not computerized.
The late Robert “Gypsy Boots” Bootzin was a beatnik and a hippie and a commune member and a vegetarian and a health-food salesman and a fitness expert long before those things were part of mainstream American culture. In essence, he seemed eccentric because he was right and in the minority. Here he is in the 1955 (at the 15:35 mark) amusing Groucho Marx on You Bet Your Life.
From his 2004 obituary in the San Diego Union-Tribune: “Los Angeles – Gypsy Boots, a California fitness icon, author and health guru who paved the way for generations of beatniks, hippies and health-food junkies, has died at age 89.
Boots, born Robert Bootzin, died early Sunday at a convalescent home in Camarillo after a brief illness, said his son, Daniel Bootzin.
Born Aug. 19, 1915, in San Francisco to Jewish immigrant parents, Boots defined what it meant to live close to nature decades before the nation’s current obsession with organic foods, yoga and exercise.
During his life, he tried a number of careers, from author to entertainer to hay baler to trendy restaurateur – but never shed his long hair and thick beard or his passion for natural foods and a near-Spartan existence.
‘What people have a hard time understanding is that in the early 1960s, there were no hippies and nobody had long hair, nobody had a beard,’ said Daniel Bootzin. ‘He really was that way way before anybody had that look. As a child, I was painfully aware that he was extremely different than anybody else.'”
I look askance at any article, like Bill Roberson’s new Digital Trends piece, which compares the course-altering effect of JFK’s Space Race pronouncement to Elon Musk’s push for electric cars. It’s overheated, but who knows, perhaps the latter will have a more profound influence on our environment. From the article, which also provides a historical look at the impact of automobiles:
“The Tesla is a bit like the Apollo moon landings. In truth, the lunar missions came before their time. We were supposed to orbit, build a space station platform, then head for new worlds. But President Kennedy’s space race with the Soviets lead the U.S. to leapfrog the Step 2 Space Station and throw for the end zone. Nice catch, NASA.
The Model S is making the electric car market do much the same thing. Logically, we should all be driving the offspring of the Toyota Prius and Honda Insight: cars with gas engines and electric motors mixed together for high mileage and unlimited range with no ‘anxiety.’ Hybrids, in all their forms, were supposed to be the bridge from gas to the all-electric future. But Mr. Musk changed the equation and now everyone is chasing the Model S, years ahead of schedule.
That the car is so tremendously good at this stage in its development cycle is a credit to Mr. Musk’s engineering prowess and his able employees. But years from now, history will show it shifted the proverbial paradigm just as the Model T did in the early 20th century.
Carmakers of all sizes are now scrambling to bring all-electric vehicles to market – all while the infrastructure to power them remains off the pace. Hopefully, Tesla’s Superchargers will light a fire under carmakers, politicians, city planners and transportation departments to get chargers in place to fuel the growing number of electric cars. Once the charging network hits critical mass – which is when EV owners can essentially drive anywhere and charge up quickly – electric car ownership numbers will carve heavily into those of gas-powered cars.
Eventually, it will be goodbye gasoline, at least for personal cars.”
Tags: Bill Roberson, Elon Musk
I love the Internet and the information it brings me, but I’m not on Facebook or Twitter and I don’t have a smartphone, so I’ve obviously said “no” to certain things. But will the things I’ve said “yes” be the same tomorrow? Will they be quietly remade by updating, constant updating? From “When Tech Turns Nouns Into Verbs,” Quentin Hardy’s New York Times blog post about a world in which the tools you use to measure also measure you, where things, simply put, change:
“We’re remaking the world so quickly that our language is breaking down.
Think about the phone you carry. You talk with people on it, but you can also open apps and transform it into a camera or chess board. As much as you talk on it, you use its Internet browser. In total daily usage, your phone is mostly pinging cellphone towers and Wi-Fi antennas, informing phone service providers, digital map makers and retailers of where you are.
Whatever this object is, it isn’t a phone in any conventional sense. And that may be a clue to a whole new way of thinking about the world around us.
The phone is a little connected computer — a device whose uses and meaning we continually explore and modify. It is by no means a phone in the historical sense. It is still a physical object, of course, but it is really a vehicle for one or another software-enabled experience. In an important sense, it is made to be contingent, changing with every download and update. That focus on the needs-driven experience means it behaves less like a static noun and more like an active verb.
This is becoming a commonplace across our connected world.”
Tags: Quentin Hardy
Even this early in the game, autonomous vehicles are probably as safe or safer than ones driven by humans. But the question is this: How much safer can they be? From Adam Fisher’s long-form PopSci look at Google’s fleet in beat mode:
“Right now, Chauffeur is undergoing what’s known in Silicon Valley as a closed beta test. In the language particular to Google, the researchers are ‘dogfooding’ the car—driving to work each morning in the same way that [Anthony] Levandowski does. It’s not so much a perk as it is a product test. Google needs to put the car in the hands of ordinary drivers in order to test the user experience. The company also wants to prove—in a statistical, actuarial sense—that the auto-drive function is safe: not perfect, not crash-proof, but safer than a competent human driver. ‘We have a saying here at Google,’ says Levandowski. ‘In God we trust—all others must bring data.’
Currently, the data reveal that so-called release versions of Chauffeur will, on average, travel 36,000 miles before making a mistake severe enough to require driver intervention. A mistake doesn’t mean a crash—it just means that Chauffeur misinterprets what it sees. For example, it might mistake a parked truck for a small building or a mailbox for a child standing by the side of the road. It’s scary, but it’s not the same thing as an accident.
The software also performs hundreds of diagnostic checks a second. Glitches occur about every 300 miles. This spring, Chris Urmson, the director of Google’s self-driving-car project, told a government audience in Washington, D.C., that the vast majority of those are nothing to worry about. ‘We’ve set the bar incredibly low,’ he says. For the errors worrisome enough to require human hands back on the wheel, Google’s crew of young testers have been trained in extreme driving techniques—including emergency braking, high-speed lane changes, and preventing and maneuvering through uncontrolled slides—just in case.
The best way to execute that robot- to-human hand-off remains an open question. How many seconds of warning should Chauffeur provide before giving back the controls? The driver would need a bit of time to gather situational awareness, to put down that coffee or phone, and refocus. ‘It could be 20 seconds; it could be 10 seconds,’ suggests Levandowski. The actual number, he says, will be ‘based on user studies and facts, as opposed to, ‘We couldn’t get it working and therefore decided to put a one-second [hand-off] time out there.’
So far, Chauffeur has a clean driving record. There has been only one reported accident that can conceivably be blamed on Google. A self-driving car near Google’s headquarters rear-ended another Prius with enough force to push it forward and impact another two cars, falling-dominoes style. The incident took place two years ago—the Stone Age, in the foreshortened timelines of software development—and, according to Google spokespeople, the car was not in self-driving mode at the time, so the accident wasn’t Chauffeur’s fault. It was due to ordinary human error.
Human drivers get into an accident of one sort or another an average of once every 500,000 miles in the U.S. Accidents that cause injuries are even rarer, occurring about once every 1.3 million miles. And a fatality? Every 90 million miles. Considering that the Google self-driving program has already clocked half a million miles, the argument could be made that Google Chauffeur is already as safe as the average human driver.”
Tags: Adam Fisher, Anthony Levandowski
“Hey, I’m no great looker.”
SWM 62. Are you sick and tired of playing the dating/courtship game that goes nowhere but to rejection, and then you have to start playing the game all over again from “start”?……..How about marriage instead of the same old dating games? How about marriage to a man who will REALLY!!!!!!!!!! appreciate you? To a man who will accept you as you are? To a sensitive, communicative, caring man who will be here for you?
I’m the best man you’ll read here, if you can realize that and you are an unmarried woman over 50 then don’t look for anyone else, answer this ad and if you are the first woman to claim me then you’ve got me and you will be claiming a man who will be everything good that you ever wanted in a mate.
I’d like to meet an older woman who has just one quality. That quality is that she knows how to say “I Do.” No, I don’t care about looks, figure, age or about any other stupidficial “quality” and if you are really, truly, seriously looking for a good man to marry then I suggest that you answer this ad because I may not be the looker who you are looking for but I’m the good, serious, communicative, intelligent, sincere man who happens to be what you need.
Please don’t be like the following who broke my heart…….Let’s just call her ‘brooklyn heights baby” (not her real neighborhood).
I met her a year ago today from a singles site, we went out a few times (and I thought that) we had fun. She was over 60, a few years older than me. We both were alone.
I treated her like a lady, respectful, equal, soft spoken and sensitive but I always do treat women this way.
I’m no great looker, as for her she was clumsy, gawky, a real sweet humanity in her face, voice, body language and I liked her and found her seeming humanity to look very attractive, I was interested and she claimed as well to be interested. We went out a few times, I took her to good restaurants, movies, paid for everything.
A month and change later she calls me up out of nowhere and gives me the oldest cliche in the book (as if we were 15 years old or something: she gives me the thrown out/unthought about/totally insensitive “drop dead” cliche of “Oh, I’ve been thinking, you’re a REALLY nice guy and I don’t want to hurt you BUT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!”
“We have nothing in common.”
(In other words, you aren’t good looking. Yep, I know the code words, we all recognize the code words. AS IF she didn’t enjoy the restaurants, the movies, the conversations.)
I was hurt, hurt bad by this shattering of a dream. I tried to reason with her but no, instead I should have hung up the phone the second that her cliche began because I knew what was coming and maybe it would have hurt a lot less if I hadn’t have talked to her…….she didn’t care how I felt, she just wanted to rid herself of an undesired suitor.
Now today I go back on the website and I see she’s still there and coming there actively (just like she has all year), she found nobody yet. Either she dumps everyone and or her ad has become one of the older familiar ones so its overlooked by now.
Her choice but IMHO she could have had a good year with a good man if her mind hadn’t been stuck in emotional adolecense waiting for some who knows, tall? handsome? macho? who never came her way this year or is it just that I’m too ugly?
Hey, I’m no looker but I know that I’m satisfied with any woman that likes me and I’m too realistic to play kiddie looks games and capriciously say “Oh, you’re not my type so have a nice life.”
Are you wiser than she was? Then please claim this good heart that she so foolishly discarded and I will share a happier, better life with you than the miserable loneliness which to be honest, all three of us are going through right now.
“Are you wiser than she was?”
First you fall in love and then you get married. These rules of courtship apply also to robots. If they are made to sound like us and move like us, bots are more likely to be accepted by people. Of course, we don’t treat other humans so well, either, so perhaps silicone should shudder at our embrace. From “How Robots Can Trick You Into Loving Them,” Maggie Koerth-Baker’s New York Times Magazine piece about the beginnings of a modern romance:
“In the future, more robots will occupy that strange gray zone: doing not only jobs that humans can do but also jobs that require social grace. In the last decade, an interdisciplinary field of research called Human-Robot Interaction has arisen to study the factors that make robots work well with humans, and how humans view their robotic counterparts.
H.R.I. researchers have discovered some rather surprising things: a robot’s behavior can have a bigger impact on its relationship with humans than its design; many of the rules that govern human relationships apply equally well to human-robot relations; and people will read emotions and motivations into a robot’s behavior that far exceed the robot’s capabilities. As we employ those lessons to build robots that can be better caretakers, maids and emergency responders, we risk further blurring the (once unnecessary) line between tools and beings.
Provided with the right behavioral cues, humans will form relationships with just about anything — regardless of what it looks like. Even a stick can trigger our social promiscuity. In 2011, Ehud Sharlin, a computer scientist at the University of Calgary, ran an observational experiment to test this impulse to connect. His subjects sat alone in a room with a very simple ‘robot’: a long, balsa-wood rectangle attached to some gears, controlled by a joystick-wielding human who, hidden from view, ran it through a series of predetermined movements. Sharlin wanted to find out how much agency humans would attribute to a stick.
Some subjects tried to fight the stick, or talk it out of wanting to fight them. One woman panicked, complaining that the stick wouldn’t stop pointing at her. Some tried to dance with it. The study found that a vast majority assumed the stick had its own goals and internal thought processes. They described the stick as bowing in greeting, searching for hidden items, even purring like a contented cat.”•
Milgram meets metal:
Tags: Ehud Sharlin, Maggie Koerth-Baker
Two items related to game shows:
I think I miss stuff sometimes because I don’t have a television, but did the rest of you know that Monty Hall is still alive? The Let’s Make a Deal host and inspiration for a probability puzzle, now 92, will be interviewed this Thursday on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast, which is always excellent except when his guests are chefs or Thom Yorke.
From 1973:
The two nicest comedians I’ve had chance meetings with are Catherine O’Hara and the late Phil Hartman. As you might guess, Hartman was very into his own head and quiet when not in character, but he was also very sweet. Here he is as “Philip Hartman” in a 1979 Dating Game episode, which aired, of course, during the original run of Saturday Night Live, where he was to later become an Aykroyd-ish star. Beginning at the 10:40 mark.
Tags: Marc Maron, Monty Hall, Phil Hartman
From the July 15, 1912 New York Times:
“Ludwig Wozny, a machinist, of Jackson and Beebe Avenues, Long Island City, had his nose almost cut off last evening by the automobile of Alexander C. Walker of 414 Riverside Drive. The prompt and skillful work of Dr. Brown of St. John’s Hospital, it was said last night, would save Wozny from having to go through life without a nose.”
Tags: Alexander C. Walker, Dr. Brown, Ludwig Wozny
I hate when some incorrigible wiseass makes a good point in a snide way and I’m not that incorrigible wiseass. It should have been me. Henry Porter of the Guardian suggests that gun violence in America has become a humanitarian crisis requiring international intervention, just like Syria with its chemical weapons. The opening of his article:
“Last week, Starbucks asked its American customers to please not bring their guns into the coffee shop. This is part of the company’s concern about customer safety and follows a ban in the summer on smoking within 25 feet of a coffee shop entrance and an earlier ruling about scalding hot coffee. After the celebrated Liebeck v McDonald’s case in 1994, involving a woman who suffered third-degree burns to her thighs, Starbucks complies with the Specialty Coffee Association of America‘s recommendation that drinks should be served at a maximum temperature of 82C.
Although it was brave of Howard Schultz, the company’s chief executive, to go even this far in a country where people are better armed and only slightly less nervy than rebel fighters in Syria, we should note that dealing with the risks of scalding and secondary smoke came well before addressing the problem of people who go armed to buy a latte. There can be no weirder order of priorities on this planet.
That’s America, we say, as news of the latest massacre breaks – last week it was the slaughter of 12 people by Aaron Alexis at Washington DC’s navy yard – and move on. But what if we no longer thought of this as just a problem for America and, instead, viewed it as an international humanitarian crisis – a quasi civil war, if you like, that calls for outside intervention? As citizens of the world, perhaps we should demand an end to the unimaginable suffering of victims and their families – the maiming and killing of children – just as America does in every new civil conflict around the globe.”
Tags: Henry Porter
“I am confident of success.”
Franz Reichelt was sure he was right. A tailor taken with aviation, Reichelt convinced himself in 1912 that his nouveau parachute would serve and protect. French authorities forbade his planned demonstration of the contraption with a leap from the Eiffel Tower unless a dummy was used in his stead. But Reichelt would not listen to reason: He became his own dummy. These two classic photos show him just prior to his fatal miscalculation played itself out in front of hundreds. From “Dies in Parachute From Eiffel Tower,” a New York Times article that misspells the surname of the man in decline:
“Paris–Franz Reichalt, an Austrian tailor, who had been experimenting with a new form of parachute, jumped to-day from the first platform of the Eiffel Tower, 180 feet high, and fell to the ground like a stone. He was killed instantly.
Reichalt had long been interested in aviation questions. Every spare hour he spent pursuing this hobby. He recently decided to compete for a prize offered for the best form of parachute or other device which would safeguard an aviator in the event of an accident happening to his machine.
Reichalt tried several designs for a parachute and experimented with them in the courtyard of the house he occupied. Apparently his experiments to some extent were successful. At all events for weeks past Reichalt had been petitioning the authorities to allow him to make a serious trial of as apparatus from the Eiffel Tower.
Such permissions were not easily obtained, and that which he finally got from the Prefecture stipulated that the test be made with a dummy. There was little secrecy about the fact, however, that Reichalt intended to substitute himself for the dummy in spite of 10 degrees of frost and a stiff northeaster.
Several hundred people gathered underneath the Eiffel Tower toward 8 o’clock when the experiment was to be made. Reichalt arrived with a friend carrying his parachute, which was made of khaki colored canvas, weighing about 20 pounds and had a surface of nearly 40 square yards.
Several aviation specialists were present, among them M. Hervieu, who made several experiments with the same kind of device himself, and it is significant that M. Hervieu, on examining Reichalt’s apparatus, expressed great doubt as to its practicability, advancing one or two technical arguments against it which Reichalt was quite unable to oppose.
But he was not shaken in his conviction even at the eleventh hour, for he said almost jauntily: ‘I am confident of success.’ Mr. Hervieu emphatically declared, on seeing a preliminary test from a distance that the parachute required much too long a time to open itself out. His judgement had hardly been made when it was most fully confirmed.
Reichelt clambered over the hand rail and threw himself forward, but the parachute never opened, and his descent was one of unbroken acceleration 180 feet to the ground. His body was a shapeless mass when the police picked it up and carried it with all speed in a taxicab to the nearest infirmary.
The accident caused a protest to be raised this evening against a repetition of such experiments except with the fullest approval and knowledge of specialists.“•
Tags: Franz Reichelt, M. Hervieu
I root every day for alternatives (online or otherwise) to what America’s higher-education system has become: a fast-food meal with five-star prices, preparation for a fictional world that doesn’t exist, a lottery without a prize, a trick, a hoax, a Ponzi sheme. Nobody lays out the woes better than Thomas Frank did in his recent Baffler essay, “Academy Fight Song.” The opening:
“This essay starts with utopia—the utopia known as the American university. It is the finest educational institution in the world, everyone tells us. Indeed, to judge by the praise that is heaped upon it, the American university may be our best institution, period. With its peaceful quadrangles and prosperity-bringing innovation, the university is more spiritually satisfying than the church, more nurturing than the family, more productive than any industry.
The university deals in dreams. Like other utopias—like Walt Disney World, like the ambrosial lands shown in perfume advertisements, like the competitive Valhalla of the Olympics—the university is a place of wish fulfillment and infinite possibility. It is the four-year luxury cruise that will transport us gently across the gulf of class. It is the wrought-iron gateway to the land of lifelong affluence.
It is not the university itself that tells us these things; everyone does. It is the president of the United States. It is our most respected political commentators and economists. It is our business heroes and our sports heroes. It is our favorite teacher and our guidance counselor and maybe even our own Tiger Mom. They’ve been to the university, after all. They know.
When we reach the end of high school, we approach the next life, the university life, in the manner of children writing letters to Santa. Oh, we promise to be so very good. We open our hearts to the beloved institution. We get good grades. We do our best on standardized tests. We earnestly list our first, second, third choices. We tell them what we want to be when we grow up. We confide our wishes. We stare at the stock photos of smiling students, we visit the campus, and we find, always, that it is so very beautiful.
And when that fat acceptance letter comes—oh, it is the greatest moment of personal vindication most of us have experienced. Our hard work has paid off. We have been chosen.
Then several years pass, and one day we wake up to discover there is no Santa Claus. Somehow, we have been had. We are a hundred thousand dollars in debt, and there is no clear way to escape it. We have no prospects to speak of. And if those damned dreams of ours happened to have taken a particularly fantastic turn and urged us to get a PhD, then the learning really begins.”
“Like rotting flesh.”
I am periodically smelling a foul odor that appears to be coming from my nasal like rotting flesh! Of course, I am concerned and I hoped that someone could offer some guidance in rectifying this matter. I also would like to add that I have been a frequent user of Afrin nasal spray for many many years. Any assistance that you may offer would be greatly appreciated.
Alan Weisman’s 2007 thought-experiment, The World Without Us, isn’t just one of my favorite books of the past decade but one of my favorite books, period. His soon-to-be published follow-up, Countdown, concerns world population, which still is booming. We’ve heard before of population bombs that never detonated, but Weisman has run the numbers and is not pleased. From Kenneth R. Weiss’ Los Angles Times interview with the journalist:
“‘Our numbers have reached a point where we’ve essentially redefined the concept of original sin,’ Weisman writes. ‘From the instant we’re born, even the humblest among us compounds the world’s mounting problems by needing food, firewood, and a roof, for starters. Literally and figuratively, we’re all exhaling CO2 and pushing other species over the edge.’
The theme of the book focuses mostly on the ecological question, how many people can Earth support without capsizing? It’s not a new pursuit, of course. Scholars dating to Tertullian, in 2nd century Carthage, have written about a teeming population being ‘burdensome’ to the world.
Weisman sets out to define an ‘optimum population’ for a sustainable Earth, one that balances the overall human numbers with how much each person consumes. As far as per capita consumption is concerned, he proposes a European lifestyle as something that would be widely acceptable but not something as energy-intensive as living in the United States or as difficult as living in much of Africa and Asia.
He doesn’t specify an optimum target population, although he sketches some 20-year-old calculations by Stanford biologist Paul Ehrlich and colleagues that set the number at 2 billion or so. Instead, Weisman argues that we should get on a path of reducing our numbers or suffer the fate of the profusion of deer on Arizona’s Kaibab Plateau north of the Grand Canyon that starved to death in the 1920s.
‘Like Kaibab deer, every species in the history of biology that outgrows its resource base suffers a population crash — a crash sometimes fatal to the entire species,’ Weisman writes. ‘…Inevitably –- and, we must hope, humanely and nonviolently — that means gradually bringing our numbers down. The alternative is letting nature –- the new nature we’ve inadvertently created in our own image –- do that for us.'”
A 1954 interview segment in which Art Linkletter, no fan of Timothy Leary, speaks to hotelier Conrad Hilton, a son of San Antonio, New Mexico, who rose to great heights in the hospitality industry and begat some especially horrifying descendants. Hilton was a believer in globalization for its diplomatic currency as well as the other kind.
Tags: Art Linkletter, Conrad Hilton
From the August 25, 1898 New York Times:
“Anton Wozonecski, twenty-seven years old, died at his home, 173 Eleventh Street, Jersey City, at midnight on Tuesday from poison administered by his wife through mistake. Wozonecski was suffering from an attack of bilious colic and a neighbor suggested that he should take a dose of rochelle salts.
Mrs. Wozonecski went to Freeman Stoddard’s drug store, 557 Grove Street. She says she asked for rochelle salts. She speaks English imperfectly. Mrs. Stoddard says she simply asked for ‘roach.’ He though she wanted an insect powder and gave her one. This is borne out by the package that contained it. It was originally marked ‘Persian powder,’ but this had been scratched out and the words ‘roach powder’ were written in its place.
Mrs. Wozonecski gave her husband the poison. He soon became worse and then Dr. Finnerty was called in, but when he arrived Wozonecski was dead.”
Tags: Anton Wozonecski, Dr. Finnerty, Freeman Stoddard, Mrs. Wozonecski
My initial reaction when I heard about autonomous cars a few years back was that they sounded amazingly cool and would be much safer than vehicles guided by human drivers. My second thought was that a terrorist–or just a bored teen–would ultimately be able to make a few thousand vehicles turn left simultaneously when they should be turning right. From “The Rise of Car Hacking” by Jeremy Laird at the Independent:
“Charlie Miller, a security engineer at Twitter, and Chris Valasek, director of security intelligence at security firm IOActive, aimed to increase awareness of car hackability by hooking up a Nintendo game-console controller to a US-market Ford Escape SUV.
They were able to accelerate, brake and steer as though they were playing a video game. Except this wasn’t a game. It was a very real two-tonne SUV and it had been comprehensively hacked. Miller and Valasek also wired into a Toyota Prius hybrid car using a laptop computer and took control of several safety-critical systems including the brakes.
If there is a good news angle to this, it’s that those exploits, along with the BMW thefts, all require physical access to cars. Where things get really worrying is the potential for wireless attacks. What if the bad guys could compromise your car as easily as they take over your laptop’s web browser? And do it from behind a computer screen hundreds or thousands of miles away?”
Tags: Jeremy Laird
So far 28,000 students have signed up for an online course on comic books and graphic novels to be taught by William Kuskin, English professor at University of Colorado at Boulder, which speaks to our shifting notions of education and literacy. A couple of exchanges from the teacher’s Ask Me Anything at Reddit.
________________________
Question:
Why do you think comic books and graphic novels are such a successful storytelling medium?
William Kuskin:
Great question. You know, my own feeling is that comics are like medieval manuscripts from the fifteenth century. They are best, best, best artform for the book. They are something to have and collect and sort of worship. As the internet has made books only one medium of many for communication, the comic book has seized the format and exploded. That said, a lot of the energy has to do with community. People need a community of the imagination. Comics provide the platform for that community.
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Question:
Looking forward to the course. My question is about the collapse of higher education. I was in the phd program at UPenn’s English Department (had to drop out because of severe depression unrelated to that). Anyway, I spent what free time I had trying to organize grad employees (we had already suffered the fatal(?) blow of the NLRB’s decision deeming grad employees at private unis not actually employees, so our election results had been impounded and never counted). Anyway, I did a study of the school of arts and sciences, and more than 70% of the courses were taught by adjuncts. Any thoughts on the ‘casualization of academic labor’? Also, the year most of my cohort went on the job market, there were 3 tenure-track jobs in the entire country…
William Kuskin:
This is a major question. A major one, and a difficult one. You are not alone in your experience and your # of 70% is sad, but not inaccurate. I have to put my ‘chair of the department’ hat on now to answer this. I would say three things: 1. Higher Education has been in a process of change to adjunct labor for some time. This is a painful and unplanned process. 2. Nevertheless the mission of higher education–to educate, to ennoble, and to foster new research–remains the same. I do not believe that mission will go away. Ever. In terms of graduate education, the only wise thing is to try, but also set a time limit to how long you can afford to stay in. There is much to be gained from going to graduate school, taking lessons, and moving on.•
Tags: William Kuskin
Well, Time‘s cover story, Can Google Solve Death?, overpromises just a little, doesn’t it? I mean, Google hasn’t even been able to solve social media. The article doesn’t provide much insight into its ostensible premise, that with the launch of Calico, a life-extension outfit, Google aims to, yes, defeat mortality, through information-rich analysis. But the piece by Harry McCracken and Lev Grossman works because of its shadow premise.
The real story, not necessarily a new one but well-stated here, is that Google is a deeply strange company–which is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s not like Microsoft, which rode its primary product (software) to great wealth, occasionally dabbling (unsuccessfully) in sectors it had already lost (Slate for online content, Bing for search, Zune for digital-music players). Facebook seems to be much more like Microsoft in its mission purity, whereas Google wants to cut a broader path.
No, the template for the search giant is the golden age of Bell Labs. Of course, Google hasn’t had nearly the success yet that AT&T’s R&D lab did. But it only has to hit in a couple of areas (e.g., driverless-car software leading a fleet of autonomous taxis) to begin to diversify itself into a seemingly endless future. Ultimately, it’s own life is the one Google is really trying to extend.
From the article (which is paywalled):
“Most of the firm’s wildest ideas are dreamed up at Google X, which functions something like Google’s fantastical subconscious. It’s a secretive research arm headquartered a three-minute ride from the main Googleplex on one of the company’s 1,000-plus brightly colored bikes. While Page tends to the entire business as CEO, Brin now devotes much of his attention to X, which he runs in partnership with scientist and entrepreneur Astro Teller. Teller’s title–just to underline the operation’s stratospheric aspirations–is ‘Captain of Moonshots.’ (Teller changed his name from Eric to Astro, a reference to the AstroTurf-like buzz cut he sported in high school.) Except for his long hair, beard and mustache, he’s a dead ringer for his paternal grandfather, physicist Edward Teller, the father of the hydrogen bomb.
According to Teller, Google X’s moon shots have three things in common: a significant problem for the world that needs solving, a potential solution and the possibility of breakthrough technology making all the difference. (Making money comes later.) Even a proposed project that meets all these criteria probably won’t make the cut. ‘Sergey and I being pretty excited about it is a necessary but not sufficient condition,’ Teller explains. ‘Depending on what it is, it might require consulting experts, it might require building prototypes, sometimes even forming a temporary team to see where it goes and then saying to the team, ‘It is your goal to kill this idea as fast as possible.’’
Four big Google X efforts are public knowledge. There’s Google Glass, the augmented-reality spectacles that pack a camera and a tiny Web-connected screen you can peek at out of the corner of your right eye and control with your voice and gestures. Makani Power–a startup that the company invested in and then bought outright in May–puts energy-generating wind turbines on flying wings that are tethered to the ground but circle 1,000 ft. in the air. Project Loon aims to deliver Internet access to remote areas of the planet by beaming it wirelessly from 39-ft.-tall helium balloons hovering 12 miles in the sky. Though Calico is a Google X–style long shot, it will be a separate entity from Teller’s shop.
But if you had to pick a Google X moon shot with the most plausible chance of permanently reshaping the way we live, it would be the self-driving automobiles.”
Tags: Astro Teller, Harry McCracken, Larry Page, Lev Grossman, Sergey Brin
One final interview excerpt from The Americans, the 1970 book by David Frost which also gave us the Jon Voight and Ralph Nader pieces. Here’s an exchange in which the TV host and the author and politician Clare Boothe Luce talk about the future of marriage in the U.S.:
David Frost:
Do you think marriage will change, Clare?
Clare Boothe Luce:
Oh, I think it’s changing very rapidly, yes. In some states in the Union now there are definite proposals that marriage should be contractual over a period of time, like any other human engagement. And they’re proposing in some states that marriage contracts should automatically dissolve at periods, say, of ten years, when the children presumably are grown.
I think that the reasons for this are, first and most importantly, that ours is now a very mobile world. And people move around very fast. The old traditions, all of them, religion, all the rest of them, seem to be collapsing. One out of every three marriages today ends in divorce.
And there is a drive now to legalize that thing, so that there’ll be no more divorce trials, and no more struggles over alimony. Simply that people marry, and the union dissolves every ten years.
Now as a Catholic and a Christian, I deplore this. But this seems what is likely to happen. And another thing too, we’ve got to remember that the life span has been greatly lengthened, and that people now live to be eighty. Women outlive the men. In the old days, not a hundred years ago, you go into a New England graveyard and you’ll see on the gravestone, over and over again, ‘Here lies John Jones and his first wife, Mary, and his second wife, Jean, and his third wife, Kate. A man wore out three women, of course, that was before they conquered childbirth fever.
Now women outlive men, according to statistics, by five years. So any kind of Christian marriage, normal marriage, will probably last fifty years. And it’s highly debatable how many people there are in the world who aren’t sick to death of one another after twenty, no less fifty.•
Tags: Clare Boothe Luce, David Frost
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“A party of 30 or 40 people believe that Mrs. John E. Martin is Christ manifest in the flesh.”
A religious mania with a gender twist arose in urban Ohio in the late nineteenth century, according to an article in the July 18, 1886 New York Times. The story:
“Cincinnati--One of the most remarkable religious manias of which there is any record has broken out in a little circle in this city. A party of 30 or 40 people, most of them prominent and above the average in intelligence, believe that Mrs. John E. Martin, of Walnut Hills, is Christ manifest in the flesh, and that her sister, Mrs. John F. Brock, is the Holy Ghost. The followers of these two young women meet at Mrs. Brook’s house and worship them both. Mrs. Martin has exerted some strange and wonderful influence that has put them completely in her power, and they are fanatics on the subject. One of the followers of this woman Christ is named Jerome. He was a bookkeeper here for the Cincinnati agency of D. Appleton & Co., the New-York publishers. He gave up his position of $1,800 a year to serve the female Saviour of mankind. To an Enquirer reporter who saw him to-day he said in an earnest and eloquent conversation: ‘I have seen God face to face in the last half hour.’
A young man named Cook, who works in the auditor’s office of the Adams Express Company, has also been captured. He resigned his position, and has attached himself to the new sect. They believe that all churches are frauds, and the preachers a set of fools. Accounting for the fact that Christ should manifest himself in a female, they say that in heaven there are no sexes, and the Saviour is as liable to appear in a woman as in a man. Mrs. Martin, the ‘New Christ,’ and Mrs. Brook, the ‘Holy Ghost,’ they say, are the only two perfect women on earth, and that the millennium is at hand. This movement has been going on quietly for a year without becoming generally known. The women seclude themselves, and will not be seen by any one who is not a worshiper, or vouched for by one of them. Many have sold their homes and taken houses near the woman on the hill. Those who have given up their positions say they do not need work or money. All they need is spiritual food, and this will be furnished by the Lord, just as it was furnished to the children in the wilderness.
A Miss Andrews, who lives with her mother on Walnut Hills, is almost insane from excitement, and passes her whole time in weeping, singing, and praying. Her mother has tried to show her the folly of her belief, but in vain. Among the worshipers of these new gods are Mrs. Judge Worthington, Miss Julia Carpenter, Miss Emma Black, Mrs. L.H. Foulds, Mr. John Cook, Miss Cook, Mr. E.W. Jerome, Miss Marie Andrews, Mr. and Mrs. J.L. Burke, Mr. and Mrs. Reuben Sherwood, Mrs. Flora Miller, Mr. Sheppard, Miss Homitt, and Mrs. Crocker. In this list are numbered some of the best people in Cincinnati. Exposure to public ridicule, it is thought, will bring them to their senses.”
In a short Atlantic article, Steven Levine explains why the major automakers are going to cede the race for autonomous cars to Tesla and Google. An excerpt:
“Versions of the technology itself are not new—in 1959, GM created a Cadillac Cyclone concept car (see photo above) with a radar-equipped hood. But the Cyclone was never produced, and Flores says that GM will wait for much better sensors based on radar and laser-based lidar. ‘It has to be bullet-proof because you are talking about people’s lives,’ he said. In Japan, Nissan says much the same.
What’s the problem here? Donald Hillebrand, director of transportation research at the US Argonne National Laboratory, cited America’s notorious litigiousness as the main reason why big carmakers are content to let upstarts such as Tesla and Google take the first step. An autonomous car will eventually crash, and it will not be immediately clear who should be sued.
‘They want someone to go and explore the legal landscape first. There needs to be some case law,’ Hillebrand said.”
••••••••••
“With no help from the driver”:
Tags: Donald Hillebrand, Steven Levine
