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Muhammad Ali just made an appearance in London for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. Here’s footage from another Ali jaunt to that great city, when he recorded a special 1974 interview program. The boxer and activist was diminished physically at this point, mostly due to two titanic bouts with Joe Frazier. Neither fighter was ever the same again.
Tags: Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali
From the September 21, 1897 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Jamaica, L.I.–Five children of Frank Fleischauer, the oldest 8 years of age and the youngest a 7 months old infant, were found deserted in their house on South Street, a day or two ago. There was no fire in the house and the infant had its feet frozen and it was suffering from a lung fever. The mother was adjudged insane a week ago and is still wandering the streets as the husband has not signed the commitment papers upon which she is to be conveyed to a state hospital for the insane.”
Tags: Frank Fleischauer
“Extremely mean.”
The students are “push overs” who are struggling through life because they are unable to be assertive and need your help.
Olympic ceremonies, now routinely treated like blockbusters and “directed” by leading filmmakers, began to grow in size and proportion when the Games were staged in 1984 (with the help of a UFO) at the home of Hollywood.
The opening of an argument by Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson at Philosophy Now in favor of using bioenhancement to develop human morality:
“For the vast majority of our 150,000 years or so on the planet, we lived in small, close-knit groups, working hard with primitive tools to scratch sufficient food and shelter from the land. Sometimes we competed with other small groups for limited resources. Thanks to evolution, we are supremely well adapted to that world, not only physically, but psychologically, socially and through our moral dispositions.
But this is no longer the world in which we live. The rapid advances of science and technology have radically altered our circumstances over just a few centuries. The population has increased a thousand times since the agricultural revolution eight thousand years ago. Human societies consist of millions of people. Where our ancestors’ tools shaped the few acres on which they lived, the technologies we use today have effects across the world, and across time, with the hangovers of climate change and nuclear disaster stretching far into the future. The pace of scientific change is exponential. But has our moral psychology kept up?
With great power comes great responsibility. However, evolutionary pressures have not developed for us a psychology that enables us to cope with the moral problems our new power creates. Our political and economic systems only exacerbate this. Industrialisation and mechanisation have enabled us to exploit natural resources so efficiently that we have over-stressed two-thirds of the most important eco-systems.
A basic fact about the human condition is that it is easier for us to harm each other than to benefit each other.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Ingmar Persson, Julian Savulescu
“At the point of his steadily leveled revolver he has, he declares, on several occasions compelled automobilists to obey his commands.”
Horses didn’t take kindly to automobiles when the new-fangled vehicles began to join them on the road in the late 1800s, and neither did some horse owners. Just such a story of tradition at loggerheads with the future appeared in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle on June 26, 1902, when most cars were still powered by electricity and steam. An excerpt:
“Dr. William B. Gibson, one of the coroners of Suffolk County, who resides in Huntington, carries a big loaded revolver for the declared purpose of shooting down any automobilist who refuses to slow up and get to one side of the road while he passes with his spirited team, which is described as being very nettlesome and easily terrified at every noisy approach of the automatic vehicles. The doctor, who is a political power in this county, declares vehemently that in the case of the large racing road machines he insists that they be driven into the fields when he approaches, and at the point of his steadily leveled revolver he has, he declares, on several occasions compelled automobilists to obey his commands. The doctor takes the position that the roads are made for the convenience and the use of residents of the country, who in passing over them in the pursuit of their daily vocation or pleasure should not have their lives endangered by any person who may choose to operate the noisy machines propelled by steam.
The average automobilist of the racing sort not alone, declares the doctor, is utterly regardless of the fright into which he throws the horses he meets, but adds to the terrifying din of his machine by infernal noises meant to act as warnings.
‘I am compelled to use the roads on business in going to and from my patients and in attending to my duties as coroner,’ says the doctor, ‘and I do not propose to have my life endangered by any person, and there is no law of the land or the state that can compel me to desist from taking due measures toward protecting myself from being maimed or killed.’
“Now, get into the field,” yelled the doctor, “or I’ll shoot you down.”
At the recent dinner of the examining doctors of the Royal Arcanum, held in Manhattan, Dr. Gibson declared in the presence of half a dozen brother physicians that he would certainly shoot and kill any person who while controlling an automobile refuses to stop and get to one side to permit his horse or team to pass into safety and without endangering his safety.
Coroner Gibson, although an officer of the law, has secured a permit from a justice of the peace to carry a revolver, and in applying for the weapon he made a statement embodying the specific reason he had in wishing to be armed. Soon after securing the permit, the coroner, while driving along one of the country roads surrounding Huntington, was met with one of the heavy automobiles known to the country side as red devils. According to the story of the occurrence, as told by the official himself, the automobilist must have received a decidedly strong impression of the ability of the hayseeds to protect themselves.
Standing up in his carriage the doctor leveled his revolver at the approaching automobilist and loudly shouted at him to halt. The sight of the leveled pistol had its effect and when the astonished owner of the terrifying machine had obeyed the command, he further ordered him, in no uncertain language, to give more room for the passing of the frightened horses.
‘Now, get into the field,’ yelled the doctor, ‘or I’ll shoot you down.’ The manner accompanying the order was convincing and into the field went the automobile.”
Tags: Dr. William B. Gibson
Our phones are smarter than us now, and soon our cars will be as well. From an explanation of intelligent mobility by Jamie Carter at Tech Radar:
“Intelligent mobility describes any technology that increases transport network capacity while also reducing accidents and pollution. It’s largely about collaboration, about creating both cars and cities that can communicate with each other, and react accordingly.
It starts with a car dashboard that knows about upcoming traffic jams in advance and automatically re-plots a route to avoid it, perhaps taking into account congestion zone charges.
And it reaches its zenith when cars automatically change speed to avoid each other, with the idea of ‘platooning’ when the lead car at traffic lights literally sets the exact pace of all cars behind – all networked and communicating in real-time – in an effort to get more cars through junctions as quickly as possible.
Humans losing control of their own vehicles is a distant memory in the dreams of transport planners, and while no world city is anywhere near that point, some are distinctly ‘smarter’ than others.”
Tags: Jamie Carter
A few exchanges from an Ask Me Anything on Reddit with 21-year-old female sexton, or gravedigger, from Norway.
“Question (aresef):
Do you tend to get buried in your work?
Answer (Asexton):
To be dead serious, no, not really.”
“Question (contraband82):
So, I’m not sure if I’m missing something, but is embalming not practiced in Norway?
Answer (Asexton):
No, I don’t think it’s legal. At least I have never heard about it being practiced here.”
“Question (gr9yfox):
Was it obvious to you that Bruce Willis was dead the whole time?
Answer (Asexton):
As a professional, yes. I always know a dead man when I see one.”
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Dempsey-Carpentier, Jersey City, 1921.
Hugh Pearman’s Wall Street Journal piece, “These Knock-Down, Shrinkable Games,” looks at the transient structures that are making the London Games fiscally sensible. It reminded me that wooden insta-stadia capable of seating 50,000 to 100,000 were routinely built in a couple of months nearly a century ago for major prizefights. They were razed soon after the bout. Tex Rickard built just such a momentary edifice for Jack Dempsey’s defense of the heavyweight title against Georges Carpentier on July 2, 1921. Two excerpts follow, one from Pearman and one about the ’21 Dempsey fight stadium:
From Pearman’s WSJ piece: “Some hankered after a flashier stadium to rival Beijing’s, but a firm policy was established once the bid was won in 2005: Mindful of the legacy of neglect common among many earlier Olympic-host cities, no white-elephant buildings were allowed for London. This was to be the knock-down Games: Venues with no obvious long-term future—such as the Olympic Stadium—were designed to be dismantled entirely, while others were to be shrinkable once the huge audiences for the Games dispersed.”
From the April 26, 1921 New York Times: “Although the plot embraces thirty-four acres the particular land Rickard has contracted for includes only about six-and-one-half acres. Upon this stretch of ground the promoter will erect his giant arena with its proposed seating capacity of over 50,000. The start will be made on the arena just as soon as the ground is levelled. Rickard expects that the arena will be completed within fifty days, without rushing the workmen or necessitating overtime. It is estimated that 100 carloads of lumber will be used in its construction.”
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Great footage of the stadium at the outset of this video:
Tags: Georges Carpentier, Hugh Pearman, Jack Dempsey, Tex Rickard
Baby in hoodie. Nice hoodie, baby.
Architect Moshe Safdie became a sensation while in his twenties when his Habitats tiny-box buildings wowed the world at Expo ’67 in Montreal. He landed on the cover of Newsweek just a few years later. John Heilpern recently interviewed Safdie for a Vanity Fair piece, revealing him to be something of a Method architect. An excerpt:
“While his own work can be spectacular, Mr. Safdie’s school of architecture amounts to an artless art when compared with the showy geometry of the fashionable starchitect. He’s constantly asking what the purpose of a building actually is—as his early mentor, Louis I. Kahn, once asked, ‘What does a building want to be?’
‘We live in a complicated, oppressive world with enormous cities and vast populations, and I try to contribute by making it more light and open and calm,’ Mr. Safdie said. ‘I try firstly to make buildings humane. Countries and places have a history, a story, and a culture. I want my buildings to take root and look as if they’ve always been there.’
It’s why, when he designed the Khalsa Heritage Centre, in the Indian holy city of Anandpur Sahib, he studied the Sikh religion for two years and wanted the contemporary museum to look as if it had been built 300 years ago.
‘It isn’t about pastiche or adapting what’s already there,’ he added. ‘It’s about trying to blend the future and the past.’
He has seen the future and it doesn’t always work. Soulless malls masquerading as new village squares, glass-box skylines, Trump taste, postmodern froufrou, and the Bilbao effect are all anathema to him.”
Tags: John Heilpern, Moshe Safdie
Something like this (which I definitely don’t agree with): “Even though we don’t live under anything resembling a tyranny right now, it is possible in the future, for unforeseen reasons, that our government could become one. If we, unlike, say, the people of Syria, are heavily armed with very powerful weapons, we can prevent this oppression. Further, if assault weapons are criminalized and unavailable through the current avenues of attainment, a black market will develop and the money from such purchases can be funneled into other illegal activities. Yes, we fully understand our beliefs mean that sometimes these incredibly destructive weapons will fall into the hands of people who are mentally ill or criminal or domestic terrorists, and they will be used to harm and kill innocent people, causing great pain for their families and communities. As regrettable as this is, in the big picture we believe that a greater loss of life and liberty can occur if these weapons are kept from citizens.”
Hello my name is Karla im 23 years old very physically and mentally. Willing to take any medical test.. I have kid 3 years old very gorgeous!!!.. Looking forward to help couples or ppl with desires of being a mom / dad by renting my belly.
Tags: Karla
Charlton Heston interviewed about his career, including parts he would have rather forgotten, by the gleefully obnoxious Russell Harty in 1979.
Tags: Charlton Heston, Russell Harty
I would guess bio-printers will eventually make organ scarcity a problem of the past, but until that occurs should people be allowed to sell their organs? Moral philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards has long argued that the trade, while unsettling, should be permitted. An excerpt from her reasoning:
I find trade in organs as intuitively repugnant as does everyone else but strong feelings of a moral kind, by themselves, cannot form reliable guides for action. Remember the traditional reactions to inter-racial marriage, unfeminine women and homosexuality – themselves now widely regarded as repugnant? If we find the trade repugnant because of the harm it does to vendors, we must find the idea of making their situation worse by stopping the trade more repugnant. The worse we think it is to sell a kidney, the more repugnant should we find any objectively worse alternative. We should find it much more repugnant that the Turkish father should be forced to keep his kidney and watch his daughter die than that he should sell it and save her. We should also find our repugnance proportionately lessened if we could assure high standards of care that would make the harm minimal.
This does not prove conclusively that organ sales should be allowed; good arguments for prohibition may still be found. The fact that so many bad arguments are used, however, shows that good ones must be hard to come by, and it also suggests that our strong feelings of repugnance are systematically distorting our arguments. We are in effect treating the removal of our own feelings of disgust as more important than the real interests of the people on whose behalf we claim to be concerned. It is therefore morally essential to understand the power of these feelings so that we can think impartially about the problem.
In the meantime, until someone produces a far better argument than has yet appeared, there seems to be no escaping the provisional conclusion that the prohibition of the sale of organs does substantial harm of various sorts, that these have not been shown to be justified and therefore that we should not be trying to prevent the selling of organs but rather to lessen whatever harms are now involved and to increase the benefits to both vendors and purchasers by getting the trade properly regulated.•
Tags: Janet Radcliffe Richards
Sad to hear of the passing of pioneering female astronaut Sally Ride. I haven’t been able to find any footage of her you haven’t seen a million times already, but here’s a 1977 clip of some of the other women who were vying for the distinction that Ride eventually earned.
Tags: Ann Whittaker, Caroline Griner, Mary Johnston, Sally Ride
From the Economist, an explanation of the Uncanny Valley Effect, which tries to explain human unease with examples of AI that seem real and unreal at once:
“ARTIFICIALLY created beings, whether they be drawn or sculpted, are warmly accepted by viewers when they are distinctively inhuman. As their appearances are made more real, however, acceptance turns to discomfort until the point where the similarity is almost perfect, when comfort returns. This effect, called ‘the uncanny valley’ because of the dip in acceptance between clearly inhuman and clearly human forms, is well known, particularly to animators, but why it happens is a mystery. Some suggest it is all about outward appearance, but a study just published in Cognition by Kurt Gray at the University of North Carolina and Daniel Wegner at Harvard argues that there can be something else involved as well: the apparent presence of a mind where it ought not to be.
According to some philosophers the mind is made up of two parts, agency (the capacity to plan and do things) and experience (the capacity to feel and sense things). Both set people apart from robots, but Dr Gray and Dr Wegner speculated that experience in particular was playing a crucial role in generating the uncanny-valley effect. They theorised that adding human-like eyes and facial expressions to robots conveys emotion where viewers do not expect emotion to be present. The resulting clash of expectations, they thought, might be where the unease was coming from.”
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Facial motion test of AI baby:
Tags: Daniel Wegner, Kurt Gray
Augmented catalog by the Swedish manufacturer of furniture and meatballs. (Thanks Wired.)
Anderson Cooper seems like a great guy and has the chops to be an excellent journalist, but he also has a hero complex that sometimes gets in the way of his work. In his telecast following the horrific Aurora tragedy, Cooper made a point to say that he didn’t want to say the name of the shooter and would spend as little time as possible on him so as not to glorify him. It was grandstanding nonsense.
Does that suggest that other journalists who’ve examined the killer’s past and motives are somehow misbehaving? Can’t facts be gathered and disseminated without the glorification of a murderer? Of course they can.
The only way to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable is by seeking truth. I do want to hear the name of the killer, as unpleasant as it will sound. I want to know his story. I want to know about his family. Did he develop schizophrenia as he entered his twenties? Was this a crime beyond motive by someone who was too disturbed for reason? Were there indications of his deteriorating state at his university, perhaps some record his behavior? Are there adequate resources for families and educators to get help for such a person? If so, what went wrong? Where did the system fail?
If some people are annoyed by attention being focused on someone who perpetrated such a horrible crime, so be it. That kind of enlightenment may help us avoid similar tragedies in the future. The role of the journalist isn’t to soothe people in a time of crisis or tragedy; that’s something to be accomplished by family, friends, clergy, civic leaders and mental-health professionals. Journalists should always be decent but not necessarily popular.•
Tags: Anderson Cooper
“The tail was cut off and stuffed and brought to this city and is now on exhibition in a water front saloon.”
A ridiculous seafaring story, which originally appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle, was republished in the December 28, 1884 Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The article:
“The whaling bark Alaska, which arrived in this port a few days ago from the Arctic Ocean, brings a strange story of the narrow escape from death of six of her crew. The first officer, George Johnson, stated the circumstances to a Chronicle reporter yesterday, as follows: On the 16th of last October, when the vessel was forty-six miles south of Alaska, an object was perceived in the distance whose proportions and shape indicated it to be a monster sea lion. A boat was immediately lowered and placed in charge of First Officer Johnson and five of the crew. As the distance was being decreased between the boat and the huge animal they became convinced that it was the famed sea serpent. When they came within a few hundred yards the monster made a mad dash for the boat, striking out its immense tail against the craft. Several of the occupants were precipitated into the water, and were rescued with difficulty. A harpoon and lance were fired into the body of the beast and it disappeared beneath the surface. Half an hour later it reappeared, floating on the water, dead. It was secured with ropes and towed to the vessel and hoisted on the deck. There the capture was seen to be a villainous looking thing. Its head closely resembled that of an alligator, while the body resembled that of a lizard. It measure thirty-three feet in length, the tail alone being nine feet long. The tail was cut off and stuffed and brought to this city and is now on exhibition in a water front saloon.”
Tags: George Johnson
The opening of Esther Dyson’s new Project Syndicate essay, which suggests we should apply the self-quant movement to communities:
“I have written previously about the Quantified Self movement – individuals equipped with the tools (monitoring devices and software) needed to measure their own health and behavior (and, by doing so, to improve them). This movement is not quite sweeping the world, but it is making a difference. So-called Quantified Selfers are monitoring their blood pressure, sleep cycles, and body mass. At least some of them are using that information to improve their health and live more productively.
In the same way, I predict (and am trying to foster) the emergence of a Quantified Community movement, with communities measuring the state, health, and activities of their people and institutions, thereby improving them. Just consider: each town has its own schools, library, police, roads and bridges, businesses, and, of course, people. All of them potentially generate a lot of data, most of it uncollected and unanalyzed. That is about to change.” (Thanks Browser.)
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Early quantified community, 1977:
Tags: Esther Dyson
From the “3000 A.D.” section of FutureTimeline.net, which predicts the far-flung:
“Purely biological humans are typically 7ft tall now, with lifespans of 120+
For centuries now, the technological singularity has produced enormous wealth and prosperity throughout the solar system. Across-the-board improvements in healthcare, education and living standards have led to humans evolving into a race of giants – 7ft tall, muscular and highly athletic, with lifespans of 120+. Note that this lifespan refers to purely biological (non-cyborg) humans, who comprise a small minority by now. The vast majority of citizens have opted for genetic engineering and biotechnology upgrades which offer practical immortality”
“Kinda weird, I know.”
HEY IF ANY GUYS HAVE POCKET PUSSYS OR MASTURBATORS THEY DONT USE ILL BUY EM FROM YOU. KINDA WEIRD I KNOW, BUT ITS A GOOD WAY TO TRY NEW ONES OUT.
From Swiss sociologist Dirk Helbing’s Edge essay,”A New Kind Of Socio-Inspired Technology,” a passage about our stunning level of connectivity:
“Our future information society will be characterized by computers that behave like humans in many respects. In ten years from now, we will have computers as powerful as our brain, and that will really fundamentally change society. Many professional jobs will be done much better by computers. How will that change society? How will that change business? What impacts does that have for science, actually?
There are two big global trends. One is big data. That means in the next ten years we’ll produce as many data, or even more data than in the past 1,000 years. The other trend is hyperconnectivity. That means we have networking our world going on at a rapid pace; we’re creating an Internet of things. So everyone is talking to everyone else, and everything becomes interdependent. What are the implications of that? Well, first of all, of course, we have wonderful new gadgets like Facebook, for example, so we can network with each other. We have new services, new opportunities, and that is just fantastic.
But on the other hand, it turns out that we are, at the same time, creating highways for disaster spreading. We see many extreme events, we see problems such as the flash crash, or also the financial crisis. That is related to the fact that we have interconnected everything. In some sense, we have created unstable systems. We can show that many of the global trends that we are seeing at the moment, like increasing connectivity, increase in the speed, increase in complexity, are very good in the beginning, but (and this is kind of surprising) there is a turning point and that turning point can turn into a tipping point that makes the systems shift in an unknown way.”
Tags: Dirk Helbing
From the BBC: “Five million ‘test tube babies’ have now been born around the world, according to research presented at a conference of fertility experts. Delegates hailed it as a ‘remarkable milestone’ for fertility treatments. The first test tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in the UK in July 1978. Her mother Leslie Brown died last month.”
The birth of the first test-tube baby:
Tags: Leslie Brown, Louise Brown