Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
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Frank Sinatra, that erstwhile Liberal Democrat, supporting his Hollywood buddy Ronald Reagan at the 1980 Republican Convention. Chris Wallace and Lynn Sherr do the honors. Lousy audio, but still worth it.
Another post about a celebrity political endorsement:
Tags: Frank Sinatra, Ronald Reagan
"...and the young kid who looks like Jesus Christ."
Usually I buy low salt cold cuts here as not every place has them and I figure they serve a lot of people so the product is fresh. So I walk over and and wait, watching 3 deli employees including the Manager, who has his face hanging up on the wall. He is asking this “Tony” thing to go over and wait on me. It squawks and takes its sweet time.I ‘m standing there and decide there are other places that must want my money and walk away. As i am walking to check out my other items the manager sends another deli person over and says that the manager will personally take care of me. I refuse. I’m done with the attitudes of the Pathmark Deli people. The little brunette who can’t be nice even if you treat her like gold, the blonde who constantly walks away from her post, the older woman who goes in 2 speeds, stop and reverse. I feel the only people who care are the asian kid the older lady with a ponytail and glasses and the young kid who looks like Jesus Christ. My $ 10 dollars a week in deli just went to someone else, Thanks Tony/Toni.
I always hear how Pathmark is on the verge of going under… Can’t understand why?
In Philip K. Dick’s too-bleak 1972 essay, “The Android and the Human,” there is, unsurprisingly, some truth:
“I would like then to ask this: what is it, in our behavior, that we can call specifically human? That is special to us as a living species? And what is it that, at least up to now, we can consign as merely machine behavior, or, by extension, insect behavior, or reflex behavior? And I would include, in this, the kind of pseudo-human behavior exhibited by what were once living men — creatures who have, in ways I wish to discuss next, become instruments, means, rather than ends, and hence to me analogs of machines in the bad sense, in the sense that although biological life continues, metabolism goes on, the soul — for lack of a better term — is no longer there or at least no longer active. And such does exist in our world — it always did, but the production of such inauthentic human activity has become a science of government and such-like agencies, now. The reduction of humans to mere use — men made into machines, serving a purpose which although ‘good’ in an abstract sense has, for its accomplishment, employed what I regard as the greatest evil imaginable: the placing on what was a free man who laughed and cried and made mistakes and wandered off into foolishness and play a restriction that limits him, despite what he may imagine or think, to the fulfilling of an aim outside of his own personal — however puny — destiny. As if, so to speak, history has made him into its instrument. History, and men skilled in — and trained in — the use of manipulative techniques, equipped with devices, ideologically oriented, themselves, in such as way that the use of these devices strikes them as a necessary or at least desirable method of bringing about some ultimately desired goal.
I think, at this point, of Tom Paine’s comment about or another party of the Europe of his time: ‘They admired the feathers and forgot the dying bird.’ And it is the ‘dying bird’ that I am concerned with. The dying — and yet, I think, beginning once again to revive in the hearts of the new generation of kids coming into maturity — the dying bird of authentic humanness.”
Tags: Philip K. Dick
It’s always curious to me that negotiators, whether politicians or the opposing sides of sports leagues, so often delay working on an agreement in earnest until they place themselves under severe time constraints, which would seem to be the worst time for those in disagreement to reach a compromise. The reliably lucid James Surowiecki explains why negotiations go bonkers under time pressure, in his article on the debt-ceiling debacle in the New Yorker.
“You might think that there are benefits to putting negotiators under the gun. But, as the Dutch psychologist Carsten de Dreu has shown, time pressure tends to close minds, not open them. Under time pressure, negotiators tend to rely more on stereotypes and cognitive shortcuts. They don’t consider as wide a range of alternatives, and are more likely to jump to conclusions based on scanty evidence. Time pressure also reduces the chances that an agreement will be what psychologists call ‘integrative’—taking everyone’s interests and values into account.
In fact, by turning dealmaking into a game of chicken, the debt ceiling favors fanaticism. As the economist Thomas Schelling showed many years ago, ‘It does not always help to be, or to be believed to be, fully rational, coolheaded, and in control of oneself’ when it comes to brinksmanship.”
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A dramatic interpretation of the American economy, with Slim Pickens in the role of John Boehner:
Tags: Carsten de Dreu, James Surowiecki
That’s a lot of lost luggage. (Thanks Reddit.)
I didn’t know there were Flappers in Moscow, Idaho, in 1922, but this classic photograph is proof positive. As is often the case with fashions that shock, there was an underlying message of social rebellion woven into the fabric of the style. In this case, the risqué clothes were about women trying to establish an identity that didn’t require being housebound in a housecaot. An excerpt from a 1922 New York Times article about the Flapper craze that looks at how one young woman didn’t really care if hemlines grew longer as long as she could work:
“One of the emancipated ones, with a Knickerbocker grandmother and much family oposition behind her ‘adventures into the open,’ in telling of her struggle for freedom, said:
‘I worked during the war, of course–every one did. And I decided then that never again would I be content to sit at home and do nothing but go to parties. It was hard work at first to get my people to understand how I felt about it. But I finally succeeded. I’ve been here two years. Now I want a better job. I want more money and I think I’m worth it. Jobs are awfully hard to get, though. I do not want my friends to help me if I can manage to get a better position without their assistance.
‘Several of my friends have gone to work because they were so bored at home. One of them is a saleswoman in a smart costume shop. She’s been having lots of fun with some of the snobbish friends of her rich family connections. These snobbish ones haven’t gotten used to the ‘working girl’ idea yet.
‘No, I don’t think I shall give up working when I marry. It seems to me that you understand the ‘tired business man’ much better when you have been a ‘tired business woman.’ It’s not very easy being at a desk all day. I certainly wouldn’t expect my husband to take me to late parties every night, which seems to be what wives who have never worked seem to expect.'”
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A trip to the inventors’ convention with that flapper, Betty Boop:
Just before assuming control of the News of the World, which recently assumed control of him.
Tags: Rupert Murdoch
"Synthetic telepathy, as the technology is called, is getting closer to battlefield reality." (Image by PaulWicks.)
Discover has an article by Adam Piore about the U.S. military’s plans to develop a thought-helmet which would allow soldiers to wordlessly communicate with one another in the battlefield through synthetic telepathy. An excerpt:
“The mind reader is Gerwin Schalk, a 39-year-old biomedical scientist and a leading expert on brain-computer interfaces at the New York State Department of Health’s Wads worth Center at Albany Medical College. The Austrian-born Schalk, along with a handful of other researchers, is part of a $6.3 million U.S. Army project to establish the basic science required to build a thought helmet—a device that can detect and transmit the unspoken speech of soldiers, allowing them to communicate with one another silently.
As improbable as it sounds, synthetic telepathy, as the technology is called, is getting closer to battlefield reality. Within a decade Special Forces could creep into the caves of Tora Bora to snatch Al Qaeda operatives, communicating and coordinating without hand signals or whispered words. Or a platoon of infantrymen could telepathically call in a helicopter to whisk away their wounded in the midst of a deafening firefight, where intelligible speech would be impossible above the din of explosions.”
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More about the brain-computer interface from the good people at IntendiX:
Tags: Adam Piore, Gerwin Schalk
"No President in history has ever gotten a shoe thrown at him."
I have the original Newspaper of George bush getting a shoe thrown at him from an angry Iraqi. I have this with both New York Daily news and post.
Great collectors item. No President in history has ever gotten a shoe thrown at him. LIMITED TIME OFFER!! MUST BUY NOW!!
Tags: George W. Buch
Solar cells. (Image by Georg Slickers.)
In “10 Technologies That Will Change The World In The Next 10 Years,” an article by Julie Bort on CIO, one number jumped out at me. Is it really possible that a city with one million inhabitants will be built somewhere in the world every month over the next two decades? Seems high, but I could be wrong. In any event, we should be expanding our use of solar power as fast as possible. An excerpt:
“No. 6: The power of power
The human population also continues to grow, and [Cisco’s Chief Futurist Dave] Evans estimates that a city with 1 million inhabitants will be built every month over the next two decades. More efficient methods to power those cities are becoming a necessity, particularly solar energy.
‘Solar alone can meet our energy needs. In fact, to address today’s global demand for energy, 25 solar super sites — each consisting of 36 square miles — could be erected. Compare this to the 170,000 square kilometers of forest area destroyed each year,’ says Evans. Such a solar farm could be completed in just three years.
Technologies to make this more economically pragmatic are on their way. In June, Oregon State University researchers showed off a novel, relatively affordable, low-impact method to ‘print’ solar cells using an inkjet printer.”
Related post:
Tags: Dave Evans, Julie Bort
Carl Zimmer writes in the New York Times of scientists using the city as laboratory, examing the evolutionary changes wrought by the necessities of urban life. An excerpt:
“To study evolution, Jason Munshi-South has tracked elephants in central Africa and proboscis monkeys in the wilds of Borneo. But for his most recent expedition, he took the A train.
Dr. Munshi-South and two graduate students, Paolo Cocco and Stephen Harris, climbed out of the 168th Street station lugging backpacks and a plastic crate full of scales, Ziploc bags, clipboards, rulers and tarps. They walked east to the entrance of Highbridge Park, where they met Ellen Pehek, a senior ecologist in the New York City Parks and Recreation Department. The four researchers entered the park, made their way past a basketball game and turned off the paved path into a ravine.
They worked their way down the steep slope, past schist boulders, bent pieces of rebar, oaks and maples, hunks of concrete and freakish poison ivy plants with leaves the size of a man’s hands. The ravine flattened out at the edge of Harlem River Drive. The scientists walked north along a guardrail contorted by years of car crashes before plunging back into the forest to reach their field site.
‘We get police called on us a lot,’ said Dr. Munshi-South, an assistant professor at Baruch College. ‘Sometimes with guns drawn.’
Dr. Munshi-South has joined the ranks of a small but growing number of field biologists who study urban evolution — not the rise and fall of skyscrapers and neighborhoods, but the biological changes that cities bring to the wildlife that inhabits them. For these scientists, the New York metropolitan region is one great laboratory.”
Tags: Carl Zimmer, Jason Munshi-South
U.S. military testing nukes in Nevada in 1951. Silence makes it more chilling.
Ivan Illich was a radical priest, who, during the ’60s and ’70s, was embraced by liberals and conservatives alike, each group able to read their ideology into his sharp critiques of institutional education. Illich didn’t always seem to know what he wanted by way of an alternative, but he knew what he didn’t like. Apart from rigidly structured education, Illich also had his doubts about technology, concerned that we would interpret the world around us first and foremost through tools. In that sense, he was certainly prescient. Largely forgotten by the time of his death in 2002, Illich was eulogized by longtime friend Jerry Brown, former and future California Governor, in the Whole Earth Catalog. An excerpt:
“In the Seventies, facing sharp criticism from the Vatican, Illich withdrew from the active priesthood and refrained from speaking ever again as a Catholic theologian. Instead, he focused on the nature of technology and modern institutions and their capacity for destroying common sense and the proper scale for human activity. Illich identified the ‘ethos of non-satiety’ as ‘at the root of physical depredation, social polarization, and psychological passivity.’ Instead of welfare economics and environmental management, Illich emphasized friendship and self-limitation.”
Tags: Ivan Illich, Jerry Brown
Horse trainers in the nineteenth century would try to win races by hook or by crook, even if it involved giving cocaine to their steeds or attaching electric currents to spurs and saddles. An inside look at the tricks of the trade was provided by an article in the December 18, 1900 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. An excerpt:
“The use of drugs, opiates or mechanical appliances to accelerate or deaden the speed of horses has been a common practice on our race tracks for many years, but in England these practices were totally unknown until the advent of the American trainer, who brought with him the modern methods. So, it is little wonder that our English cousins threw up their hands in amazement when they saw the sudden improvement worked by the mysterious methods of the Yankees. Ordinary selling platers of the commonest types became good handicap horses, while those of the latter division suddenly blossomed forth as stake horses. For a time they marveled. Then they began to suspect that the sudden improvement was due to other than ordinary training methods. While admitting that the superiority of the American style of riding had some bearing on this change of form, the Englishmen could not comprehend how horses purchased at a small price–horses which had never shown enough speed to get out of their own way–in the hands of the American trainers, developed wonderful speed, while these same horses, when sold by the shrewd Americans for a fancy price, as rapidly deteriorated to their pristine form and became utterly unable to win purses.
It is related that one inquisitive English trainer asked Lester Rieff one day at Newmarket what Wishard gave his horses to cause them to break away from the post so quickly and get into their stride at the very beginning of the race. ‘Feed them on pineapples,’ replied the jockey, confidingly. The trainer at once put his horses on a pineapple diet, with the result that he very nearly ruined his whole string.
The prevailing opinion that it is necessary for a jockey to pull his horse in order to lose a race is an entirely erroneous one. To the astute trainer there are a legion of ways by which he can increase or diminish the speed of a horse, and that without fear of detection. Ever since the shrewd American trainer began to cast about him for means by which he might gain an advantage over his rivals, the use of electricity has played an important part. The first known use of an electric battery in racing was with a mare named Marie Lovell, at the Gloucester track, over a decade ago. The battery used was the invention of a man named Tobin and was a rather primitive affair. It consisted of a leather belt, strapped around the jockey’s body, next to the skin, and containing eight cells, four on a side, and located under the armpits. Insulated wires ran down the inside of the boot and connected with the spurs. The horse above mentioned was at long price in the betting and won easily, to the great surprise of all those who were not in the game.
This battery was operated throughout the season without detection, one of its greatest successes being pulled off on the mare Gyda, at Guttenberg. This horse was at 100 to 1 in the betting and won handily. Before the race, the report was circulated that Gyda had run away, collided with an ice wagon and injured herself badly. In consequence of this report, and despite some desultory play on the mare, her price remained at the same high figure. The promoters of the scheme cleaned up at a fat winning on her race.
There were soon many improvements on the old body battery, the saddle battery attaining the most success. In this, the cells were concealed in the under part of the saddle. The wires ran down the stirrup leathers and connected with the stirrup irons. A steel plate, under the instep of the jockey, made the connection with the spurs. From this style of battery a very powerful flow of electricity could be obtained and it proved particularly magical in its effect on sulkers.
Another form of electric battery was concealed in the boot; another in the pockets, where the lead pads were kept, while still another was held in the hand and thrown away after the jockey had won the race and before he returned to the scales. Then there was the whip battery, which caused the horses to swerve badly, and was never a success.
After a time, it became extremely difficult to use an electric apparatus without fear of detection. The use of drugs, either hypodermically injected into the veins or else administered in a capsule, then came in vogue. Cocaine and other stimulating drugs were used and drenching, which consists of giving a horse exhilarating and courage-increasing drugs in a liquid form, also came into practice. On the outlaw tracks fully one-half the horses became ‘dope’ horses.”
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Horse racing in 1897 at Sheepshead Bay, Brooklyn:
"No urine, vomit, or feces stains (human, canine, or feline)." (Image by Idlir Fida.)
My wife and I need a couch to furnish our new home. We are willing to pay, just nothing more than $100.
I don’t mean to be picky, but please: No urine, vomit, or feces stains (human, canine, or feline). No funky smell. No broken piles of junk that you need hauled away. I don’t think this seems unreasonable.
I just need a decent couch that isn’t contaminated, diseased, or dilapidated.
Marlon Brando at a NYC press conference in 1965. Already hating the game but still playing to some extent.
Tags: Marlon Brando
I’m not a gamer, but Dwarf Fortress seems fascinating. The most complex and organic video game ever created, it’s the work of brothers Zach and Tarn Adams, who plan on continually and gradually improving it, like painters who expand on a single mural their whole lives. An excerpt from Jonah Weiner’s New York Times Magazine article about the game designers and their creation:
“Dwarf Fortress may not look real, but once you’re hooked, it feels vast, enveloping, alive. To control your world, you toggle between multiple menus of text commands; seemingly simple acts like planting crops and forging weapons require involved choices about soil and season and smelting and ores. A micromanager’s dream, the game gleefully blurs the distinction between painstaking labor and creative thrill.
‘Playing Dwarf Fortress is like taking the controls of a plane right as it’s taking off,’ says Chris Dahlen, editor in chief of the gaming magazine Kill Screen. And, he added, ‘flying a jet is a lot more interesting than just riding in a jet.’
Dwarf Fortress is too willfully noncommercial to have any discernible influence on gaming at large, but it is widely admired by game designers. Programmers behind The Sims 3 reportedly played Dwarf Fortress when they were making their game, and several homages to Dwarf Fortress appear in the blockbuster fantasy game World of Warcraft. Richard Garfield, who created the hit card game Magic: The Gathering, once attended a Dwarf Fortress fan meet in Seattle to introduce himself to Tarn. ‘I told him there’s nothing out there quite like it,’ Garfield recalled. He suggested ways of broadening the game’s appeal, but ‘that stuff didn’t matter to Tarn. The charm of it is that he’s making exactly the game he wants to make.’
After nine years of development, Dwarf Fortress is, from the perspective of game play, perhaps the most complex video game ever made. And yet it is still only in ‘alpha’ — the most recent release is version 0.31. By version 1.0, Tarn says, the game will include military campaigns and magic, along with scores of other additions. He showed me a four-inch stack of index cards, color-coded and arranged into umbrella categories, to keep track of his goals. ‘I like being able to hold the game in my hands,’ he says.
I asked Tarn when he thought he and Zach would reach version 1.0. ‘Twenty years from now,’ he replied. ‘That’s the number we talk about.’ He chuckled at the prospect, adding that even when that milestone arrived, Dwarf Fortress would keep growing. ‘This is going to be my life’s work.'”
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Let’s play Dwarf Fortress:
Tags: Jonah Weiner, Tarn Adams, Zach Adams
TED Talk by Markus Fischer of Festo.
Tags: Markus Fischer
Mmm…
So last night around 10PM, this dark-haired girl decides to stroll down Graham Ave. barefoot, carrying her shoes to the subway, where she puts them on. Because, you know, it’s filthy down there.
“The sun is zooming in / Engines stop running / And the wheat is growing thin.”
"Dr. W.H. Shoemaker, a talented and leading physician of this city, has been declared insane owing to have become a vicitm to the cocaine habit."
Cocaine, for a brief time, was a popular 19th-century anesthetic and treatment for minor illnesses, before people realized it was highly addictive. Physicians who had easy access to the drug often became hooked on it, as the following stories from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle demonstrate.
••••••••••
“He Operated on Himself” (May 15, 1889): “Birmingham, Ala.–Dr. W.H. Shoemaker, a talented and leading physician of this city, has been declared insane owing to have become a victim to the cocaine habit. While under the influence of the drug he in December last performed upon himself probably the most unique and most remarkable surgical operation ever recorded. He had been a sufferer for some time from a tumor on his liver. One night while he was alone he took his surgical instruments and deliberately cut into the abdominal cavity, cut the tumor from his liver, sewed the incision up, showed the tumor next morning to his brother physicians and has since entirely recovered. His use of cocaine previous to the operation became habitual.”
••••••••••
“He Gave Cocaine Recklessly” (February 25, 1893): “Jackson, Mich.–A local physician, himself a confirmed taker of cocaine, has brought many of his patients under its influence. Reputable medical men have determined that the practice must stop and that the practitioner himself be put under treatment or be debarred from practice. Some of the best class of citizens are addicted to the habit, and the local press publishes a list of hundreds. The majority of the victims became addicted to cocaine before knowing what they were taking, it having been administered for throat troubles, hay fever and many minor ills.”
••••••••••
“Started a Fire in His Room” (December 17, 1896): “Crazed by the use of morphine, cocaine and whisky, Dr, Floyd Lamott Danforth, a dentist, with offices at East One Hundred and Twenty-fifth Street, New York, piled his effects in the center of the floor of his apartments early this morning and set fire to them. He then went out and told the police. The fire was extinguished before any material damage was done and the unfortunate man was taken to the East One Hundred and Twenty-fifth street station and locked up.”
••••••••••
"Dr. Manaton is addicted to the use of cocaine." (Image by Anssi Pulkkinen.)
“Cocaine Made Him Crazy” (January 6, 1894): “Greenport, L.I.–The monotony of life in Greenport during the season was broken last night and the whole town was thrown into a fever of excitement by the antics of a crazy physician armed with an axe. The unfortunate is Dr. Manaton, who, associated with Dr. Wilson, has been practicing in Greenport since his removal from Brooklyn last summer.
Dr. Manaton is addicted to the use of cocaine. Last night he took an overdose of the drug and became violently insane. He had just retired to his room and was but partially dressed when the attack came upon him. His sister and the servant had retired and they were aroused by a tremendous racket in the doctor’s apartment. They realized that the windows were being shattered and the furniture being smashed and suspected the cause. The women locked themselves in the room and the work of destruction went on. They heard the doctor go down stairs and out into the yard. When he returned Miss Manaton peeped out of the door and saw that her brother had armed himself with an axe and with it he commenced to chop away the stair railing. The frenzied man caught sight of his sister through the partly open door and made a rush for her with the uplifted axe. She closed and locked the door and before he succeeded in breaking it in with the axe the two women escaped through a door into an adjoining room and made their way out of the house clad only in their night clothes.”
Marshall McLuhan was born on July 21, 1911, and to celebrate his century mark I present the following excerpt from Jane Howard’s 1966 Life magazine article, “Oracle of the Electric Age“:
No people in the history of humanity, McLuhan insists, ever faced demands as grueling as those that confront us. We are witnessing simultaneously the end of what he calls the Mechanical, or Gutenberg, Era, dominated by movable type and later mechanical forms, and the birth pangs of the new and entirely different Electric Age, which he sometimes calls the Age of Circuitry, or of Information. As his books The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media explain, the change is the most traumatic since the transition 9,000 years ago, from the paleolithic culture to the neolithic, from hunting to agriculture.
The change, says McLuhan, is making movable type obsolete and with it books, newspapers, magazines–in fact all kinds of printed matter, including the sentence you are now reading. We will also have to junk the by-products of the Gutenberg invention which, says, McLuhan, have created our culture’s visual, literary, detached, linear approach to life. This dooms a lot more linear by-products than you might think, including railways, clotheslines, stocking seams, the grid system in city planning and stag lines at dances. Even points of view must go–“because it’s no longer possible to take a fixed position for more than a single moment.” So must jobs, which are fragmentary in nature and do not suit the new age in which people crave roles with depth involvement.•
Tags: Jane Howard, Marshall McLuhan
No one gets murdered, shockingly. (Thanks Reddit.)
On Boing Boing, neurobiologist David J. Linden pushes back on futurist Ray Kurzweil’s vision of nanobots being introduced into our brains in the near term, making it possible for us to communicate with external hardware and extend our memory and intellect almost infinitely. An excerpt:
“Don’t get me wrong. I do believe that the fundamental and long-standing mysteries of the brain will ultimately be solved. I don’t hold with those pessimists who claim that we can never understand our minds by using our brains. I also share Kurzweil’s belief that technological advancement will be central to unlocking the enduring mysteries of brain function. But while I see an exponential trajectory in the amount of neurobiological data collected to date, the ploddingly linear increase in our understanding of neural function means that an idea like mind-uploading to machines being usefully deployed by the 2020s or even the 2030s seems overly optimistic.” (Thanks Browser.)
Kurzweil’s take:
“Still not within the nervous system, you got 20 years, 25 years, these nanobots, these blood cell size devices will be going in our bodies keeping us healthy from inside. We’ll have some go inside our brains to the capillaries not invasively, there would be interacting with our biological neurons so it’ll extends our memory, our decision making faculties, put our brains on the internet and they also enable us to enter virtual reality environment from within the nervous system.
So, for on to go in the virtual reality environment, the nanobots will shut down the signals coming from I realize in my real skin and create the signals that will be appropriate for the virtual environment and that will feel like I’m in that environment and I’ll have a virtual body and those environment could be the same body I have in real reality, it could be a different body, a couple could become each other, experience relationship from the others perspective, teacher could design a student to become Ben Franklin in the virtual constitutional congress not just dress up as him but become that character and this virtual environments would be like websites, you’ll have millions to choose from and some will be recreations are beautiful earthly environments like the Taj Mahal or the Mediterranean Beach.”
Tags: David J. Linden, Ray Kurzweil