I miss living in NYC! 
(Somewhere in the USA)
Some great times I had there….got so much ass it was unreal! Women, men, couples….GREAT SEX! Where I live now, everyone is married at 23 and kids by 25.
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I miss living in NYC!
From Jon Evans at Techcrunch, some thoughts about our new normal, a post-scarcity world without enough jobs nor a stated policy to deal with such a landscape:
“I want to stress again that this is only the beginning — that as software eats the world, as Marc Andreessen put it, this two-track economy will grow ever more divergent around the planet. The relatively few people fortunate enough to work in technology (or have the capital to invest in it) will grow steadily wealthier, even as more and more jobs around the world are replaced by software and drones and robots.
At least I hope so.
Not because I want a tiny fraction of the world to become rich beyond Croesus while everyone else is desperately broke. On the contrary: because in the long run, this is good for everyone. People who think everyone should have a job aren’t thinking big enough.
As Gregory Ferenstein points out, technology may be destroying jobs, but it’s also creating wealth; and as I’ve argued before, the endgame of all this wealth creation, some generations hence, isn’t a world of full employment. Instead it’s a post-scarcity world of no employment, as we understand the word. Fewer and fewer jobs coexisting with more and more wealth is exactly what you would expect on the road to that outcome.
Trouble is, our societies and economies are built around the assumption of mass employment, and we’ll need some pretty wrenching adjustments to that paradigm to deal with the changes to come. Some are already stealthily underway. As NPR reported earlier this year:
In the past three decades, the number of Americans who are on disability has skyrocketed. The rise has come even as medical advances have allowed many more people to remain on the job, and new laws have banned workplace discrimination against the disabled. Every month, 14 million people now get a disability check from the government … The vast majority of people on federal disability do not work. Yet because they are not technically part of the labor force, they are not counted among the unemployed.
In other words, the US government is already quietly paying a significant fraction of the American population not to work. If jobs keep disappearing, while the overall wealth of America and the world keeps increasing, then we can expect initiatives like that to keep expanding. George Monbiot is the latest to propose a basic income, which ‘gives everyone, rich and poor, without means-testing or conditions, a guaranteed sum every week.’
It’s been suggested that, along with ‘peak jobs,’ America has also hit ‘peak capitalism.'”
Tags: Jon Evans
“To poison’s one neighbor then was all the fashion.”
On the slowest news day in the history of the printed word, the New York Times published an article about poisoning in 16th-century France. The December 29, 1907 piece:
“Paris–Apropos of Sardou’s new play at the Theatre St. Martin, ‘L’Affair des Poisons,’ a cabled synopsis of which has already appeared in the New York Times, boulevard historians are writing much nowadays about the vogue which poisoning enjoyed during the sixteenth century. To poison’s one neighbor then was all the fashion.
L’Estoile, writing of this in his journal, estimated that in 1572 no fewer than 30,000 persons were mixing noxious compunds in Paris alone. As the population of the city at that time only numbered about 300,000, one out of every ten Parisians was a poisoner. Contemporaneous writers tell weird tales of the methods employed.
It appears that a perfumed glove or the prick of a jeweled ring could be as deadly as a blunderbuss. Only the common horde put poison in food. Some dilettantes of the craft put their ‘cruel venoms on a horse’s saddle,’ so one writer says, and the cavalier was doomed. Another amateur acquired such singular address in his art that all he had to do was to rub his concoction into the stirrup of the man he wished to kill. Riding boots were about an inch thick in those days, but the victim only a few minutes after mounting ‘felt his limbs convulse, his blood burn,’ and so he died.
Kings, Princes, prelates and other high personages whose taking off would cause somebody’s advancement were regarded as legitimate prey. But panic was spread by them to the lowest classes. Thus, according to the author of the ‘Memoires de l’Estat de France sous Francois II,’ peasants for twenty leagues round hid their children when they heard that the royal family was about to come their way.
“The tip of a stag’s tail and the brain of a cat are specimen ingredients of some of the concoctions.”
They feared that the King’s relatives would steal their little ones for the sake of their blood, children’s blood being necessary to a ‘venom’ of sufficient strength to affect the royal health. The habit of stealing children for this purpose was attributed especially to the Italians living in France, and the chronicles of the time are full of accounts of lynchings which such accusations inspired.
Catherine de Medicis, whose Italian nativity was doubtless to blame for many of the stories told about her, was commonly believed to be something of a witch. It was represented that her favorite companions were her perfumer, René, and her astrologer, Cosme Rugieri. She was believed to mix with her own hands, eternally gloved, the deadliest powders and pastes.
But while many of the poisons used in this murderous epoch were doubtless effective enough, some of them were of a nature to give the intended victim the reputation of bearing a charmed life. The tip of a stag’s tail and the brain of a cat are specimen ingredients of some of the concoctions. And according to Ambroise Paré, the bite of a red-headed man, ‘especially if he be freckled,’ was almost as bad as the bite of an adder.
Against all these evils they possessed, fortunately, admirable antidotes. Precious stones, especially the sapphire, were far more useful in warding off evil in those days than they are now. Nuts and dried figs also nullified any ordinary poison. And if those proved impotent, there was always that heroic remedy or splitting open a horse or an ox and getting inside.”
Some ideas about the zombies stumbling through our connected-yet-distant world, from David Varela at the Literary Platform:
“By the time Shaun of the Dead comes round in 2004, the satirical target has changed but the zombie still proves a potent metaphor. Here, the topic isn’t political homogeny or mindless consumerism – it’s social apathy. Shaun has been in a dead-end job for years, he still lives with his best mate from school, and he’s too emotionally stunted to maintain a decent relationship. His life is moribund.
When the zombie apocalypse comes, it creeps up on him because it looks so like his everyday life. Commuters drop to the ground and nobody goes to help. Neighbours grunt rather than hold conversations. There’s another global crisis on the news – change the channel. Shaun, like so many modern Londoners, is self-concerned to the point of paralysis, and it’s only when the threat literally reaches his own backyard that he decides to take action.
But Shaun isn’t like Duane Jones or the lone hero of I Am Legend. Shaun’s act of resistance is not to stubbornly protect his insular lifestyle but instead to stop being a loner. He actively reaches out to his ex-girlfriend, his mother and his despised stepfather, dragging them all to safety in that ailing stronghold of social life, the pub.
In the twenty-first century, the ultimate act of revolution is to talk to your neighbours. Today’s zombie horde is a multitude of individuals disengaged from society, never speaking to or caring for each other, too concerned about checking their Klout score to look up from their mobiles, take off their headphones and really connect with people.
So this is the apocalypse. All this time, we’ve been guarding against a sudden violent outbreak, but the real zombie threat to civilisation is much more insidious. We’re all in danger of turning, not because of a virus but through complacency, through prejudice, and through a lack of empathy for our fellow human beings.
Our only defence against this evil? Our brains.”
Tags: David Varela
The opening of David Segal’s New York Times article about the Russian billionaire who wants to replace death with downloading:
“GET right up close to Dmitry Itskov and sniff all you like — you will not pick up even the faintest hint of crazy. He is soft-spoken and a bit shy, but expansive once he gets talking, and endearingly mild-mannered. He never seems ruffled, no matter what question you ask. Even if you ask the obvious one, which he has encountered more than a few times since 2011, when he started ‘this project,’ as he sometimes calls it.
‘I hear that often,’ he said with a smile, over lunch one recent afternoon in Manhattan. ‘There are quotes from people like Arthur C. Clarke and Gandhi saying that when people come up with new ideas they’re called ‘nuts.’ Then everybody starts believing in the idea and nobody can remember a time when it seemed strange.’
It is hard to imagine a day when the ideas championed by Mr. Itskov, 32, a Russian multimillionaire and former online media magnate, will not seem strange, or at least far-fetched and unfeasible. His project, called the 2045 Initiative, for the year he hopes it is completed, envisions the mass production of lifelike, low-cost avatars that can be uploaded with the contents of a human brain, complete with all the particulars of consciousness and personality.”
Tags: David Segal, Dmitry Itskov
A prediction about the near-term future of voice-to-text input, from venture capitalist Tom Tonguz:
“In five years, I believe voice will be as common a mode of data input as keyboards. It’s more natural to speak to a computer rather than type because the computer can respond at the pace of your thoughts. I spend less time responding to emails because of dictation. It’s also much faster pen these posts because instead of focusing on spelling or typing or corrections, I’m focused on the content and the computer takes care of the rest.
Startups are taking notice and beginning to differentiate through voice. Roobiq is a CRM that solves the data entry problem through voice. Siri and Google Now are the more obvious examples. These will only become more common and particularly on the phone.
At first blush, it might seem that the smart phone ushered out the era of voice in favor of SMS and short form messaging and mobile application use. After all what fraction of time spent on a mobile making telephone calls? But a more accurate refinement of that statement that the mobile phone ushered out the era of synchronous voice.
The mobile phone will be the harbinger of the asynchronous voice-to-text era. And our wrists will be the better for it.”
Tags: Tom Tonguz
Archival 1960s footage from the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation of an early ATM known as IDA (Identifying-Dispensing-Accounting).
If you forget nothing, then it’s difficult to live in the moment, as today is forever cluttered by an increasing number of yesterdays. People with such neurological quirks, rare though though are, actually exist. From “Superhumans,” Michael Banissy’s new Aeon article, a passage about “super-recognizers”:
“These are a rare group of individuals who excel in the ability to remember faces. First reported in 2009 by researchers at Harvard University and Dartmouth College, these are people who really never forget a face. They can recognise people whom they might have seen only a few times in their lives or, as Brad Duchaine, one of the Dartmouth College research team, puts it, ‘an extra they saw in a movie years before’.
Such people can identify casual staff that served them years earlier, a waitress at a motorway inn they passed through, a car-park attendant they once glimpsed, or a fellow department store shopper with whom they never interacted. The difficulties that this super-ability might cause in social settings are easy enough to imagine, and many super-recognisers will hide their memory of long-ago encounters to avoid discomfiting people who never even registered them.
Work is ongoing to determine just how common super-recognisers are, but there is some evidence to suggest that they can put their skills to good use. For example, the Metropolitan Police Service in London used super-recognisers in their ranks to help identify individual rioters during the 2011 riots across the capital.”
Tags: Michael Banissy
If I could communicate with monkeys, I might point out to them that throwing feces is rude. Understandable, but rude. Or I would at least encourage them to throw feces over there, because here is not such a great spot right now. Here is currently inconvenient for me. From Megan Garber’s Yahoo! interview with animal behaviorist Con Slobodchikoff, who believes we can build gadgets which allow us to talk to the animals:
“Con Slobodchikoff
I think we have the technology now to be able to develop the devices that are, say, the size of a cellphone, that would allow us to talk to our dogs and cats. So the dog says ‘bark!’ and the device analyzes it and says, ‘I want to eat chicken tonight.’ Or the cat can say ‘meow,’ and it can say, ‘You haven’t cleaned my litterbox recently.’
But if we’re going to get to that technology, it’s going to take some research. And it’s probably five to 10 years out. But I think we can get to the point where we can actually communicate back and forth in basic animal languages to dogs, cats, maybe farm animals — and, who knows, maybe lions and tigers.
Megan Garber:
It’s fascinating, thought-experiment-wise, to consider what that might mean for the whole relationship between humans and animals. Paradigms would be shifted, for sure.
Con Slobodchikoff:
Yeah. It would be world-changing. Consider that, for example, 40 percent of all households in America have dogs, 33 percent have cats — at least one cat, at least one dog. And consider that something like 4 million dogs are euthanized every year because of behavioral problems. Well, most problems are because of the lack of communication between animal and human. The human can’t get across to the animal what the human expects, and the animal can’t get across to the human what it’s experiencing. And if we had a chance to talk back and forth, the dog could say, ‘You’re scaring me.’ And you could say, ‘Well, I’m sorry, I didn’t realize that I was scaring you. I’ll give you more space.’
What I’m hoping, actually, is that down the road, we will be forming partnerships with animals, rather than exploiting animals. A lot of people either exploit animals, or they’re afraid of animals, or they have nothing to do with animals because they don’t think that animals have anything to contribute to their lives. And once people get to the point where they can start talking to animals, I think they’ll realize that animals are living, breathing, thinking beings, and that they have a lot to contribute to people’s lives.”
Tags: Con Slobodchikoff, Megan Garber
From the November 9, 1897 New York Times:
“St. Petersburg--A terrible famine is ravaging the Province of Archangel, a Government of European Russia in the extreme north, extending from the Ural Mountains on the east to Finland on the West. The people wander about reduced almost to skeletons, their heads swollen to the size of buckets. Tea is the only means of subsistence.”
“Cashinskee.”
WTF? Can i move in with you for 125$ A week? Comedian/overall nice dude (Manhattan)
I will pay 125$ a week and a little taste upfront!!! ( Maybe 300$ sumthin like that) AND ill even bring some weed!!!
Shared, anything. I do stand up and i have some shows this summer and i gotta save some cashinskee.
I am the definition of nice and of clean.
Btw: You live with me for the summer, your life will never be the same forever again.
Ok good luck.
“The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor,” observed Leonard Cohen once upon a time, but there was no video streaming back then nor such a complex understanding of the workings of compulsive behavior. Today’s serialized TV, regardless of what size screen you’re watching it on, isn’t interested in diverting you but on hooking you, on making you, not just the video, go viral. You are the receiver of the content, but you’re also the messenger. And while that’s always been true, it’s never been more true. It’s a science–it’s a narcotic. We’re not talking about CBS trying to get viewers to tune into the Mary Tyler Moore Show once a week at an appointed time. We’re talking about narratives that have to defeat time shifting, the long tail of zillions of other options and the game-changing effect of a decentralized media.
Of course, these creations are an inexact science and the idea of a “scheme” being used to push our buttons and make us consume in bulk can be overstated, but the seemingly endless access we have to content is something new and worth analyzing. I guess this is the most interesting question for me: If the programs are really good, does it mitigate somewhat attempts to program us? From an Andrew Romano article in Newsweek about the age of binge viewing:
“So far, no scientist has studied binge watching per se, or the Hyperserial generation of television programming that has inspired so much of it. But the groundbreaking work of a Princeton University psychologist named Uri Hasson may hint at why the current trend toward narrative precision may also be triggering an increase in viewer engagement.
Hasson, a bald, bespectacled professor with a thick Israeli accent, doesn’t binge watch any television shows himself. ‘That is for people without work the next morning—or children,’ he quips. But Hasson may understand better than anyone else why the rest of us can’t help ourselves. In 2008 he coined the term ‘neurocinematics’—the neurobiological study of how films interact with the brain—to describe his work. A study published that year in Projections (subtitle:The Journal for Movies and Mind) was particularly revelatory. Employing fMRI technology, Hasson and his neuroscience colleagues screened four film clips—from Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Alfred Hitchcock’s ‘Bang! You’re Dead,’ Larry David’s Curb Your Enthusiasm, and an unedited, single-camera shot of New York’s Washington Square Park—and then watched as viewers’ brains reacted. Their goal? To measure the degree to which different people would respond the same way to what they were seeing.
The results varied widely, depending on which film was shown. The unstructured, ‘realistic’ video from Washington Square Park, for instance, elicited the same neurological reaction in only about 5 percent of viewers. Responses to Curb Your Enthusiasm were slightly more correlated, at roughly 18 percent; and The Good, the Bad and the Ugly ranked even higher, 45 percent. But ultimately, Hitchcock was the runaway ‘favorite’: a full 65 percent of the study’s cerebral cortices lit up the same way in response to the clip from ‘Bang! You’re Dead.’
Hasson’s conclusion was fascinating: the more ‘controlling’ the director—the more structured the film—the more attentive the audience. ‘In real life, you’re watching in the park, a concert on Sunday morning,’ Hasson tells me. ‘But in a movie, a director is controlling where you are looking. Hitchcock is the master of this. He will control everything: what you think, what you expect, where you are looking, what you are feeling. And you can see this in the brain. For the director who is controlling nothing, the level of variability is very clear because each person is looking at something different. For Hitchcock, the opposite is true: viewers tend to be all tuned in together.’
Is it possible, then, that the recent trend toward more structured, page-turning narratives on television might be generating ever-higher levels of cerebral correlation—and viewer engagement—in living rooms across the country?
‘Absolutely,’ Hasson says.”
_______________________
“It’s like daylight already. How did that happen?”
Tags: Andrew Romano, Uri Hasson
Dictaphones and typewriters were becoming office heirlooms in 1976, as demonstrated in this Canadian Broadcasting Corporation video about the office of tomorrow.
I was recently gifted with a copy of the latest issue of the excellent Fashion Projects, which is edited by the beautiful (and pregnant) Francesca Granata. The presumed father of the child, Jay Ruttenberg, editor of the Lowbrow Reader Reader and a favorite of hoboes everywhere, is a contributor.
This issue focuses exclusively on fashion criticism and has interviews with Guy Trebay, Suzy Menkes, Judith Thurman and others. You can sample and purchase it here. An excerpt from Granata’s conversation with New Yorker writer Thurman:
“Fashion Projects:
I was wondering how you came to your current post writing about fashion at the New Yorker?
Judith Thurman:
It was sort of happenstance. I followed fashion, but not professionally. I had worked at The New Yorker before I left to write the biography of Colette. David Remnick, who had just taken up the editorship of the magazine in 1999 said, ‘Why don’t you come back and work for us? I know you can write about books and art, but what else can you do? Is there something else you really want to do?’ To which I replied ‘Actually I would love to write about fashion. I think I would always be an outsider; I am not going to write about it as an insider, like my great friend Holly Brubach a wonderful fashion critic who covered the collections. I said I don’t want to do that and you don’t want me to do it.’ He said, ‘You are right.’ So that’s how I started.
Fashion Projects:
So you started writing about fashion, somewhat recently, in the last decade or so. What drew you to the subject?
Judith Thurman:
I see it as an important element of culture and itself a culture. That really interests me. It is a form of expression, a kind of language dealing with identities. And the aesthetic of it also drew me to it. I love clothes and couture and its history is very interesting to me. For instance, I have always gone to museums and studied the clothing in the paintings. However, I don’t particularly like the fashion world and I try not to write about the business side of it.
Fashion Projects:
So you see yourself more as a cultural critic writing about fashion as opposed to a more traditional fashion critic covering the collections?
Judith Thurman:
Yes, although I have written about the collections. I used to go once a year to do one collection, whether it was menswear or couture or Paris or New York. I kind of stopped doing that. They were very hard pieces to write, since I wasn’t actually critiquing the clothes, I was trying to find some sort of zeitgeist that was coming out of the collections.”•
Jay Ruttenberg: Dresses like scarecrow.
Edgar Allan Crow: “I resent that comparison.”
Many of the Americans who are most staunchly anti-abortion seem to lose focus on infants once the cord is cut. Gov. Rick Perry of Texas, Dubya without the likability, is currently waging war on the Affordable Health Care Act, legislation that could help a state that’s abysmal in providing medical insurance for children. He’s not alone, of course, which helps explain why such a wealthy nation has such an agonizingly high infant mortality rate. Finland, which has one of the lowest death rates for newborns, has a simple measure to keep hope alive: a box of baby supplies the state gives each expectant mother. The opening of “Why Finnish Babies Sleep in Cardboard Boxes,” by Helena Lee at BBC News:
“It’s a tradition that dates back to the 1930s and it’s designed to give all children in Finland, no matter what background they’re from, an equal start in life.
The maternity package – a gift from the government – is available to all expectant mothers.
It contains bodysuits, a sleeping bag, outdoor gear, bathing products for the baby, as well as nappies, bedding and a small mattress.
With the mattress in the bottom, the box becomes a baby’s first bed. Many children, from all social backgrounds, have their first naps within the safety of the box’s four cardboard walls.
Mothers have a choice between taking the box, or a cash grant, currently set at 140 euros, but 95% opt for the box as it’s worth much more.
The tradition dates back to 1938.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Helena Lee, Rick Perry
In “Change the World,” George Packer’s excellent New Yorker article about the intermingling of Silicon Valley and the Washington Beltway, one insider neatly summed up why technologists might be a positive force for political change: “Our voice carries a lot of weight because we are broadly popular with Americans.” That was certainly true until recently, with the nerds having had their revenge, the clever children bringing the future to us now, the turtlenecked gurus encouraged to treat their marked-up gadgets as holy grails. But do you get the sense that those good feelings are beginning to change, that, perhaps the Digital Revolution, like most revolutions do, has gotten messy, and that those who stormed the gates now seem a little barbaric?
From the excellent Matt Novak at Paleofuture, a document that recalls how one 1960s Internet visionary predicted superwealth for a breed of people who were then high school freshmen and younger:
“In 1969, internet pioneer Paul Baran predicted that by the year 2000, computer programmers may very well be the richest people in the world. Remember, this is when Bill Gates was just a 14-year-old nerd in Seattle.
The ARPANET had not yet drawn its first breath when Baran wrote his 1969 paper, ‘On The Impact of the New Communications Media Upon Social Values.’ But his vision for what new communications technology would enable (and sometimes harm) in the last three decades of the 20th century, was disturbingly prescient.
His prediction about the computer programmer of the year 2000 makes one wonder if Baran was a time traveler perhaps warning us about the dot-com bubble:
As communication development evolves, more decision functions will be placed upon computers tied together as a common communications network. Financial success may in the future come to depend more upon the brilliance and imagination of the human who programs the computer than upon any other single factor. The key man in the new power elite will be the one who can best program a computer, that is, the person who makes the best use of the available information and the computer’s skills in formulating a problem.”
Tags: George Packer, Matt Novak, Paul Baran
One would hope that premarital sex was rare in Greeley, Colorado, in early 1900s, as one resident learned during that era that her intended was also her immediate relative. From the February 24, 1914 New York Times:
“Greeley, Col.–Just as they were leaving to procure a marriage license and have the nuptial knot tied by a Justice of the Peace. Miss Mary Hardy, a homesteader near Buckingham, Weld County, discovered that Frank Cameron, a neighboring homesteader, to whom she was engaged, was her brother. Miss Hardy fainted, and it was some time before she could be revived.
The discovery of the relationship between Miss Hardy and Cameron, the real name of both being Howard, was brought about through Cameron wearing for the first time in her presence a small gold ring with a peculiar button setting as a fob for his watch chain.
‘Where did you get that ring?’ faltered Miss Hardy, as she noticed and then inspected it.
‘My sister gave me that to remember her by the last time I saw her twenty-three years ago,’ answered Cameron, astonished at her agitation.
‘Then you are my brother!’ exclaimed Miss Hardy and fainted.
When Miss Hardy was revived she proved their relationship beyond all doubt by going to her jewel box and taking from it a silver coin bearing the date of her brother’s birth and his initials, which he had engraved when a boy.
It appears that the brother and sister were deserted in childhood by their parents and later were adopted in different families.”
Tags: Frank Cameron, Miss Mary Hardy
If you think Fruitarians are ridiculous, you should meet Breatharians, who believe that food and water are superfluous. Tom Snyder met a prominent one, Wiley Brooks, in 1981.
Tags: Tom Snyder, Wiley Brooks
Julian Assange makes a raft of good points in his New York Times Op-Ed piece about the globalizing effect of the Googleplex and its arrogant brand of technocracy. But because he’s the kind of exasperating person who sees the world only in extremes, Assange goes too far in painting the company as unmitigated autocratic evil. If you think we’re going to become the United States of Google, let’s recall that Microsoft was not too long similarly feared, and even without government intervention, it would have collapsed beneath its own weight because that’s usually what corporate behemoths do. And Google is nowhere near the tool of American governmental policy that Bell Labs was. You remember Bell Labs, right? It used to be a thing. An excerpt from Assange’s article, which is inspired by the book, The New Digital Age:
“The writing is on the wall, but the authors cannot see it. They borrow from William Dobson the idea that the media, in an autocracy, ‘allows for an opposition press as long as regime opponents understand where the unspoken limits are.’ But these trends are beginning to emerge in the United States. No one doubts the chilling effects of the investigations into The Associated Press and Fox’s James Rosen. But there has been little analysis of Google’s role in complying with the Rosen subpoena. I have personal experience of these trends.
The Department of Justice admitted in March that it was in its third year of a continuing criminal investigation of WikiLeaks. Court testimony states that its targets include ‘the founders, owners, or managers of WikiLeaks.’ One alleged source, Bradley Manning, faces a 12-week trial beginning tomorrow, with 24 prosecution witnesses expected to testify in secret.
This book is a balefully seminal work in which neither author has the language to see, much less to express, the titanic centralizing evil they are constructing. ‘What Lockheed Martin was to the 20th century,’ they tell us, ‘technology and cybersecurity companies will be to the 21st.’ Without even understanding how, they have updated and seamlessly implemented George Orwell’s prophecy. If you want a vision of the future, imagine Washington-backed Google Glasses strapped onto vacant human faces — forever. Zealots of the cult of consumer technology will find little to inspire them here, not that they ever seem to need it. But this is essential reading for anyone caught up in the struggle for the future, in view of one simple imperative: Know your enemy.“
Tags: Julian Assange
Snake Dream (New York)
I had a dream that I was taking a shit on the floor of my apartment and a snake or something like it was in the feces. I am a male in my mid-30s and I think my girlfriend was there. I can’t entirely remember if it was her, but definitely a woman. Any ideas as to what this dream might mean? I’ve looked on some dream websites but they say different things.
From the May 17, 1875 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“A rather curious freak of a somnambulist is reported as having occurred on Saturday night at No. 669 Bedford Avenue, in this city. At the place mentioned a young man named Chandler Cobb, whose abode is in the town of Wilmington, Vermont, has been on a brief visit to his relative, Mr. Snyder, and during the time has slept in the same bed with another young man named William Martin. Cobb, it seems, is subject to attacks of somnambulism, and while in that state has been known to leave the couch and wander about the dwelling and even out onto the streets. Well, on this occasion, he took one of those walking spells, and after getting up was seized with an idea that Martin was going to shoot him, and so he took a chair and proceeded to beat that unfortunate youth, who was fast asleep, over the head, and did it so energetically for several moments that the other occupants were aroused from their slumbers by the unearthly screams of the victim. While in the act of beating his friend, Cobb became wide awake, and then seemed to be seized with a temporary attack of insanity, for he ran wild down to the store floor, and in his efforts to escape from his imaginary foe, through a large pane of plate glass door, and in so doing was very seriously cut about the head, hands and legs.”
Tags: Chandler Cobb, Mr. Snyder, William Martin
Remember at last year’s Republican Convention when Texas Congressman Ted Cruz was all but christened as a future President by lazy pundits simply because he was in the GOP and had an Hispanic name? None of these well-paid shoutbots actually stopped to notice that Cruz was a paranoid wackjob un-electable in a national contest even in the sovereign country of Upper Nixonia.
Mark Warner, former Virginia Governor, was once that guy for the other party. A Southern liberal technocrat made left-leaning politicos salivate before they became aware that shifting demographics were jumbling the electoral map. In 2006, the very talented political reporter Matt Bai wrote a cover story for the New York Times Magazine about Warner as the apparent anti-Hillary. You heard rumors by 2008 about why Warner ultimately passed on a campaign, but who knows why he didn’t run? We should all pause the next time someone is “nominated” because they fit into certain categories. Barack Obama, who most certainly did not fit into any of them, is mentioned almost as an afterthought in Bai’s piece. The opening of the article, which is now largely remembered for the altered colors of the eccentric cover art:
“If you harbor serious thoughts of running for the presidency, the first thing you do — long before you commission any polls or make any ads, years before you charter planes to take you back and forth between Iowa and New Hampshire — is to sit down with guys like Chris Korge. A real-estate developer in Coral Gables, outside Miami, Korge is one of the Democratic Party’s most proficient “bundlers.” That is, in the last two presidential elections, he bundled together more than $7 million in campaign checks for Al Gore and John Kerry from his friends and contacts.
For Korge, the 2008 presidential campaign began a few days after Kerry lost, when, he says, one prospective candidate — he won’t say who — called to enlist his help. Having raised money for both of Bill Clinton’s presidential campaigns, which earned him an overnight stay in the Lincoln Bedroom, Korge already knew he would support Hillary Clinton if she ran; he considers her the most impressive politician he has ever met, including her husband. But that didn’t stop her potential rivals — John Edwards, Joe Biden, Evan Bayh, Wesley Clark — from dropping by, nor did it stop Korge, a guy who rightly prides himself on knowing just about everybody in Democratic politics, from taking the meetings. ‘In the last six months, I’ve pretty much seen or talked with all of them, or they’ve tried to meet with me,’ Korge told me during a conversation in late January.
A few weeks before we spoke, Korge had lunch at the Capital Grille in Miami with Mark Warner, who was then in his final weeks as Virginia’s governor. Though little known nationally, Warner has emerged in recent months as the bright new star in the constellation of would-be candidates, a source of curiosity among Democrats searching for a charismatic outsider to lead the party. Pundits credit Warner’s popularity in Republican-dominated Virginia — his 80 percent approval rating when he left office made him one of the most adored governors in the state’s history — with enabling his Democratic lieutenant governor, Tim Kaine, to win the election to succeed him last November. Suddenly, Warner is being mentioned near the top of every list of candidates vying for the nomination in 2008.”
Tags: Mark Warner, Matt Bai, Ted Cruz
Graphic User Interface and sleek product design turned cold computers into must-have accessories, and MIT roboticist and artist Alexander Reben realizes that aesthetics can do the same for ‘bots. And that’s true for better or worse: That thing that is taking my job and trying to murder me is as cute as a kitten–and it talks!
The creator of Boxie the Cute Robot describes his work thusly: “These robots use their cuteness to get people to answer questions that are then made into a documentary filmed by the robot’s internal camera.” Reben just started doing an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges and a video follow.
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Question:
Alexander Reben:
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Question:
What is the most interesting thing that came out of this project for you and the other people you worked on this with? Did you find any challenges with the Boxie/BlabDroid project that you didn’t expect when you started? What was the biggest challenge in making it a success?
Alexander Reben:
The most interesting thing is that everyone had a great experience with the robots. If you watch the videos you see some people get really deep with them, some even crying. However, nobody asked for the video to not be used (everyone knows the robots are filming them). It was almost the inverse, the more people told the robots, the better the interaction. Many described it as a “cathartic” experience.
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Question:
Alexander Reben:
Right now, we plan to bring the robots around the world to meet new people and “learn more about the humans that inhabit earth.” They will be at the Doc/Fest festival in Sheffield England next week. We would love to get them other places like for a talk show segment or TV show.
Indeed, we are planning to bring the cost of the robots down to the price range of a premium Bluetooth accessory. Our plan is to allow the user to use their cellphone camera as the robot’s camera, thereby making them cheaper yet still getting high quality video. We also want to open source the protocols used to control the robot so people can hack them. We are still very optimistic because everyone who sees a BlabDroid in person wants one!
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“If there was no money and no law, what would be the first thing you would do?”
Tags: Alexander Reben
Molly Knight, one of the excellent parts of that mixed blessing known as ESPN, has a new article in the New York Times Magazine about “Stalker Sarah,” a Los Angeles teen who’s found value of a kind in the detritus of modern celebrity. The girl chases down celebs at airports and restaurants not to snap pap photos to make a buck but to share cell-phone shots with those who are of the moment or on the cusp. Posting these images to the Internet affords her a different sort of wealth–notoriety by (fleeting) proximity. Although it’s ultimately sad as stories about fame almost always are, this piece is no Day of the Locust. It’s about a well-intentioned person with questionable priorities in an age of media anarchy, a time when focus is less important than click. An excerpt:
“In L.A., stalking celebrities may not be the most dignified job in the world, but it can pay the bills. A nonexclusive photograph of a celebrity can earn a few hundred dollars. The most prolific paparazzi can sell five or six sets of pictures a day and earn about $10,000 a month, but many operate under the premise that they are one groping photo away from a major payoff. A photo’s main value, after all, depends largely on what the star is doing. ‘You could get a photo of Brad Pitt just standing there, and you wouldn’t sell it,’ says Henry Flores, who co-owns the agency Buzz Foto. ‘I have taken photos of Angelina and Brad holding hands, and I couldn’t even sell it.’ But Flores earned $30,000 for a photograph he took five years ago of Britney Spears being loaded into an ambulance. The photographs last summer that showed Kristen Stewart kissing Rupert Sanders, her married Snow White and the Huntsman director, may have sold for up to $250,000, Melanie Bromley, the former West Coast bureau chief of US Weekly, told The Los Angeles Times.
In pursuit of these career-defining moments, the most successful paparazzi spend years cultivating relationships with not only managers and publicists, but also restaurant workers and trainers. ‘You can’t be covered in tattoos and dressed like a gangster if you want to be successful at what we do,’ Flores says. Many star handlers reward these less-threatening photographers with choreographed exclusives, but the business is still littered with less-polished free agents who chase stars in their cars or photograph their children on school grounds. Ninety-five percent of paparazzi, it seems, are men, many of whom go by the sort of nicknames — like the Fingerbreaker and Cheesecake — that you would expect to hear on a minor-league hockey team. Mostly, though, they stand around waiting for something to happen.
Sarah is very much a part of their circle, trading texts and tips with them. The paparazzi have accepted her for strategic reasons. In the era of YouTube and reality TV, there are simply more people than ever before who qualify as famous, and their every move is seemingly reported in a never-ending proliferation of gossip sites and blogs. Perhaps only a teenager could possess the energy and technical aptitude to serve as the global tracking device for it all. Sarah is incredibly adept at recognizing even the most minor celebrities and has a much better sense than her older colleagues about which seem ready to break huge. Scooter Braun, the 31-year-old talent manager of Justin Bieber, Carly Rae Jepsen, Psy and the Wanted, considers it part of his job to follow Sarah’s whereabouts on social-networking sites. It also helps that she’s nice to his clients. ‘The thing is, she’s not overbearing,’ he told me. ‘She respects people’s space. She’ll say, ‘Do you mind if I get a picture?’ And if you’re like, ‘Not right now, Sarah,’ she’s like, ‘No problem.’ And she’s just a very sweet, sweet person.’
Most celebrity photographers yearn to catch a star at their most defenseless, but Sarah tends to think of them as friends.”
Tags: Molly Knight, Stalker Sarah
China is speeding into the future–or at least catching up to the present–by using methods of industrialization which created great wealth in the West but have compromised our ecology. Evan Osnos of the New Yorker has an excellent interview on the topic with Craig Simons, a journalist who spent most of the aughts reporting from China on that nation’s unbridled growth. An excerpt:
“Evan Osnos:
The Times reported this month that Chinese protesters succeeded in delaying the I.P.O. of a company that specializes in extracting bile from captive bears for the production of folk remedies. What kinds of campaigns have impact, and what kinds don’t?
Craig Simons:
N.G.O.s have had a limited ability to influence the decisions of average Chinese consumers. A group of advertisements by WildAid (including one where Yao Ming swears off shark-fin soup) have been successful and are important. But their benefits are offset by millions of Chinese just now becoming rich enough to buy exotic ingredients and medicines. The campaigns may ultimately prove more important by putting pressure on Beijing. The international community, for example, has successfully lobbied against Beijing legalizing the sale of bones from farmed tigers, a move many scientists argue would doom the world’s remaining wild tigers. In short, a government ban is more efficient than trying to get 1.3 billion people to change deep-rooted beliefs and traditions, but both are key in the long term.
Evan Osnos:
You went to the four corners of the world for this. What was the moment that lingers most?
Craig Simons:
Strangely enough, the most vivid moment came when I was researching in Washington, D.C. I came across a request by environmental groups that Arkansas ban the collection of wild turtles, many of which were being shipped to China, as food. Their driving argument was that if officials didn’t stop the hunt, several species would be wiped out. The petition contained a few surprising figures: licensed collectors removed more than half a million turtles from Arkansas between 2004 and 2006; more than two hundred and fifty thousand ‘wild caught adult turtles’ were exported to Asia from a single airport over a span of four years. But it was the proximity that struck me. I’d expected to link Chinese demand to tiger poaching in India, logging in Papua New Guinea, and (renewed) mining in Colorado. But I’d never thought that decisions by Chinese diners could threaten Arkansas’s terrapins.”
Tags: Craig Simons, Evan Osnos