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From the September 26, 1911 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Kalamazoo, Mich.–While pulling a tooth yesterday, Dr. Burr Bannister, one of the oldest dentists in Kalamazoo, was perhaps fatally injured. The patient turned to one side during the operation and tipped the chair over, pinning the doctor beneath it. One of the arms of the chair struck the dentist in the stomach, causing an internal hemorrhage.”
Tags: Dr. Burr Bannister
An excerpt from “The Robots Running This Way,” Will Knight’s long-form Technology Review article about Boston Dynamics, one of Google’s recently purchased robotics companies:
Many of the robots struggle to complete the tasks without malfunctioning, freezing up, or toppling over. Of all the challenges facing them, one of the most difficult, and potentially the most important to master, is simply walking over uneven, unsteady, or just cluttered ground. But the Atlas robots (several academic groups have entered versions of the Boston Dynamics machine) walk across such terrain with impressive confidence.
A couple of times each day, the crowd gets to see two other legged robots made by Boston Dynamics. In one demo, a four-legged machine about the size of a horse trots along the track carrying several large packs; it cleverly shuffles its feet to stay upright when momentarily unbalanced by a hefty kick from its operator. In another, a smaller, more agile four-legged machine revs up a loud diesel engine, then bounds maniacally along the racetrack like a big cat, quickly reaching almost 20 miles per hour.
The crowd, filled with robotics researchers from around the world and curious members of the public, gasps and applauds. But the walking and running technology found in the machines developed by Boston Dynamics is more than just dazzling. If it can be improved, then these robots, and others like them, might stride out of research laboratories and populate the world with smart mobile machines. That helps explain why a few days before the DARPA Challenge, Boston Dynamics was acquired by Google.•
Tags: Will Knight
From a Modern Farmer article by Tyler LeBlanc about the last decade of Jack London’s life, when he repaired to Sonoma to create a “futuristic farm”:
Of his innovations, arguably the most impressive was the pig palace, an ultra-sanitary piggery that could house 200 hogs yet be operated by a single person. The palace gave each sow her own “apartment” complete with a sun porch and an outdoor area to exercise. The suites were built around a main feeding structure, while a central valve allowed the sole operator to fill every trough in the building with drinking water.
London wrote that he wanted the piggery to be “the delight of all pig-men in the United States.” While it may not have brought about significant change in the industry – it is said to have cost an astounding $3,000 (equal to $70,000 now) to build — it was one of London’s greatest innovations, and, unfortunately, his last. He died the following year.•
Tags: Jack London, Tyler LeBlanc
“I have a terrible toothache.”
Anyone know where I can get some antibiotics? Some bodegas sell them but I don’t know which. I am new to the area. I have a terrible toothache. Need help now til I can get to a dentist. Thanks!
“Some bodegas sell them.”
“‘For the first time I am writing for money; now I am frightened that some quick accident might happen.”
Isadora Duncan never did learn to drive. Out for a car ride in France with a friend and a chauffeur who promised to teach her to operate an automobile, the free-spirited dancer was done in by her free-flowing scarf, which entangled in one of the motor car’s front wheels and yanked her into the next world. It was the end of a short life that felt like a long one. An Associated Press article that appeared in the September 15, 1927 Brooklyn Daily Eagle on the morning after Duncan’s sudden death:
“Nice, France (AP)–The body of Isadora Duncan, dancer, whose adventurous career terminated in an automobile tragedy here last night, was locked in her studio today. Police are guarding the door and will permit no one to enter until a Soviet consular official has signed the necessary papers allowing friends to take charge of the body.
Miss Duncan left no will, according to Mrs. Mary Desto Perks, British newspaper woman who was driving with the dancer when she met death. Mrs. Perks said that all the dancer’s friends would testify that she intended all her property go to her blind brother, Augustin. Although Miss Duncan was recently financially embarrassed, Mrs. Perks declared the royalties on her book of memoirs were expected to net many thousands of dollars. The draperies and pictures in the studio here were alone valued at $10,000.
Citizenship in Doubt
At an autopsy performed today the verdict of accidental death due to strangulation was returned.
The only identifying document found in the Nice apartment was a Soviet passport, and police in accordance with French laws notified the nearest Russian Consul, who is at Marseilles. He was asked to come to Nice by motor at once.
A search at the American consulate here failed to show whether Miss Duncan had claimed American citizenship since 1921.
Miss Duncan was killed last night as she was learning to drive her new car.
A silken scarf of red–the color of which she was fond, and which seems to have symbolized her radicalism–fluttered about the neck of the dancer as she sped along the Promenade des Angels. With her was a French chauffeur, who was going to teach her to drive, and Mrs. Perks.
Killed Instantly
“The idea of ‘interpretive’ dancing came to her.”
The end of the long scarf whipped over the side of the car, became entangled in the front wheel and jerked the dancer from her seat. The chauffeur jammed on the brakes and he and Mrs. Perks disengaged the scarf from the limp body. The drove frantically to the St. Roch Hospital, but in vain. The doctors said her neck was broken and that death must have been instantaneous.
At one time a stage idol, Miss Duncan had long devoted herself to the training of young dancers. Her affairs did not appear to prosper, and her Neuilly studio had to be sold to pay her debts.
Had Premonitions of Death
Of late she had given much of her time to writing memoirs of her career, from which she hoped great things. She seems to have had premonitions of her death as, in talking with a correspondent of the Associated Press on Tuesday, she said:
‘For the first time I am writing for money; now I am frightened that some quick accident might happen.’
_______
From a hesitant debut as a 15-year-old girl in California, Isadora Duncan’s dancing feet carried her across two continents to wealth, a certain degree of fame and a life crowded with adventure and tragedy.
Bare Legs Stirred Protests
Born in San Francisco in May, 1878, the daughter of Charles Duncan, a dancing teacher, she received early training in the art on which she was to leave an indelible impress.
The idea of ‘interpretive’ dancing came to her and she began to devise dance figures of her own. In development of her idea she discarded customary costumes, appearing in filmy attire and with bare legs, a daring innovation in those days and one which brought many protests.
One of her first successes in New York was a dance version of ‘Omar Khayyam,’ in which she interpreted the spirit of the classic poem while the verses were recited by Justin Huntly McCarthy.
She was teaching a class of children in the Hotel Windsor, New York, when the fire broke out on March 7, 1899, which leveled the structure. She saved every one of the pupils at the risk of her life.
In the same year she decided to go to Europe and made the trip with her mother and brothers on a cattleboat, the venture being financed with the aid of friends. Europe was quick to recognize a form of art in her dramatic dancing, and she established a ‘Temple of Art’ in Paris.
King Edward VII, Gabriele d’Annunzio, Ernst Haeckel, Gordon Craig and Rodin the sculptor were listed among the admirers.
In 1904, her first financial success came when she started a school of classical dancing in Berlin, where she trained the girls who came to be known as the Duncan Dancers, forerunners of many later dancing groups of this character.
The girls performed, as their teacher did, in flowing draperies and bare feet.
Back in Paris again, in 1913, she encountered opposition from the authorities when she appeared as a nude bacchante, and in order to continue her fetes without interruption she purchased a villa at Neuilly, where she gave her brilliant parties for nearly four years.
Two Children Drowned
“There tragedy overtook her.”
There tragedy overtook her. Her two children, Beatrice, 5, and Patrick, 2–she was never married and never revealed the name of their father–were drowned when the motorcar in which they were sitting plunged into the Seine River when it was cranked while in gear.
Of radical sympathies, her fortunes were adversely affected with the outbreak of the World War, and when the Russian revolution came in 1917 she immediately announced her adhesion to the Bolshevik cause. She went to Moscow some time later on the invitation of the Soviet Government to found a new school of dancing. Difficulties arose, and the plan was abandoned.
It was in Moscow that she married Sergei Yesenin, young Russian poet, in 1921. The next year she brought him to the United States and gave a series of dances. Later in Paris she announced that she had sent the young poet back to Russia, and eventually she divorced him, describing him as ‘really too impossible.’ He committed suicide in Russia in December, 1925.”
Tags: Auguste Rodin, Augustin Duncan, Beatrice Duncan, Charles Duncan, Deirdre Duncan, Ernst Haeckel, Gabriele d'Annunzio, Gordon Craig, Isadora Duncan, Justin Huntly McCarthy, King Edward VII, Mary Desto Perks, Patrick Duncan, Sergei Yesenin
If Apple is going Fitbit and the iWatch is coming to the market in October, it will allow wearers another way to measure sleep activity, calorie consumption, blood oxygen levels and other vital statistics, another opportunity to quantify themselves at high levels, to understand behavior patterns that might not otherwise be apparent. It will also tacitly permit corporations and (likely) government to obtain such personal information. But Chris Dancy is already living in that space. The opening of Ira Boudway’s Bloomberg Businessweek piece about him:
“Ask Chris Dancy what he ate on Aug. 11 of last year, and he can tell you (Chick-fil-A). He can also tell you about the weather that day (83F), what music he listened to (Kelly Clarkson’s Walk Away), how many e-mails he sent (21), how long he slept (8 hours and 35 minutes), how many steps he took (8,088), and when he took his dogs to the park (1:04 p.m.). Dancy, 45, doesn’t have an amazing memory. He’s an extreme life hacker: He collects information about himself and his surroundings from 10 devices he wears or carries and 13 more in his home and car. He also catalogs virtually all of his online activity. The exhaustive record-keeping is an effort to discover the systems that shape his behavior so he can tinker with them and live better.
Dancy’s project began five years ago when he started archiving his tweets. Twitter (TWTR) didn’t make them searchable at the time, and Dancy wanted to collect them as a kind of diary. He also started dumping his Facebook (FB) posts and status updates into spreadsheets. ‘Then it just became a domino effect,’ he says. He began using any device he thought would help him find his quantified self.”
Tags: Chris Dancy, Ira Boudway
A Financial Times article by Chris Bryant looks at robots that have graduated from the factory to relieve you of your open-air jobs. We’re sorry, but your services will no longer be required. The opening:
“Cleaning the Sydney Harbour Bridge used to be a dangerous, dirty and laborious job. As soon as a team of workers, operating a sandblaster, reached one end of the iconic structure they had to start again to keep 485,000 square metres of steel pristine.
Now two robots called Rosie and Sandy, built by SABRE Autonomous Solutions, blast away paint and corrosion all day long without a break. They determine which area needs most attention via a laser scan and move about on rails.
‘A sand blaster can slice through flesh. Automating jobs like that is a good thing, it helps improve the quality of human work,’ says Roko Tschakarow, head of the Mobile Gripper Systems Division at Schunk, which supplies the lightweight robot arm for the Sydney robots.
Cows and robots
Rosie and Sandy are at the forefront of a wave of new autonomous robots that have broken out of the factory and could be coming to your workplace soon.”
Tags: Chris Bryant, Roko Tschakarow
From the July 20, 1923 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Shreveport, La.–Mrs. Arthur Mausey complained to the District Attorney here yesterday that her husband had traded their 14-month-old son to an unidentified man for a horse and buggy and then had sold the outfit for $20. She appealed to the authorities to assist her to recover the child.”
Tags: Arthur Mausey, Mrs. Arthur Mausey
Anyone have sweaty hands all the time? I do. If you do too I’d like to hear of your experience and we may have a nice convo. Thanks.
“CRC-102 promptly accepted the challenge.”
AI wouldn’t be able to beat the world’s best human chess player for 46 more years, but it was game on in 1951 when an engineer challenged a computer to a $1,000 series of matches. The machine was rudimentary, so the acceptance of the wager came with some suspect conditions. From the November 12, 1951 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Washington–Engineer Donald H. Jacobs, who challenged an electronic ‘brain’ to a $1,000 chess tournament, agreed today to follow the machine’s ring rules, ‘but won’t teach the thing how to play chess.’
Jacobs, president of the Jacobs Instrument Company of nearby Bethesda, Md., said he was looking forward to matching wits with CRC-102, the ‘brain’s’ technical name.
The only hitch was that the ‘brain’s’ second–the Computer Research Corporation, Torrence, Cal.–said that Jacobs would have to reveal his ‘chess system’ in advance.
‘I’m not going to give away my system to the machine,’ Jacobs said. ‘With that knowledge, any mortal chess player, much less the ‘brain,’ could win with no trouble.’
Jacobs made his ‘gentlemen’s bet’ for the man-versus-machine struggle over 20 games of chess to prove that man still can outthink a machine–at least over a chess board.
‘Although I am a poor chess player,’ he said, ‘pure egotism makes me unwilling to concede that a computing machine can play better than I can.’
CRC-102 promptly accepted the challenge. Engineer Richard E. Sprague, a director of Computer Research, said his ‘champion’ will take on Jacobs ‘any time, any place…and will take him apart.’
Computer Research, which has just developed the first portable electronic digital computer, claims that the ‘brain’–among its other talents–is an unbeatable chess player.
Sprague laid down three ‘ring rules,’ however, before CRC-102 will meet Jacobs in combat.
1. A time limit on the match so that the human contestant doesn’t take ‘a year or so to make up his mind on a move.’
2. Permission to tell the ‘eyeless’ machine what move its human adversary has made ‘so he can make the proper countermove.’
3. Jacobs must provide CRC-102 with his chess system.”
There certainly seems to be a link between handwriting and memory, and as the former fades and the latter is increasingly stored remotely, what does it mean for primary education? From Maria Konnikova of the New York Times:
“Does handwriting matter?
Not very much, according to many educators. The Common Core standards, which have been adopted in most states, call for teaching legible writing, but only in kindergarten and first grade. After that, the emphasis quickly shifts to proficiency on the keyboard.
But psychologists and neuroscientists say it is far too soon to declare handwriting a relic of the past. New evidence suggests that the links between handwriting and broader educational development run deep.
Children not only learn to read more quickly when they first learn to write by hand, but they also remain better able to generate ideas and retain information. In other words, it’s not just what we write that matters — but how.
‘When we write, a unique neural circuit is automatically activated,’ said Stanislas Dehaene, a psychologist at the Collège de France in Paris. ‘There is a core recognition of the gesture in the written word, a sort of recognition by mental simulation in your brain.
‘And it seems that this circuit is contributing in unique ways we didn’t realize,’ he continued.”
Tags: Maria Konnikova, Stanislas Dehaene
Before an automated workforce was a threat to employees, it was a real concern for management (of all kinds). The opening exchanges of a fascinating Salon conversation about technology, democracy, capitalism, and other subjects, between Thomas Frank and David Graeber:
“Thomas Frank:
Let’s start at the beginning: Keynes’ prediction, back in the 1930s, that before too long workers would have all sorts of leisure time because of improving productivity. Is there a history of this idea? I mean, others have argued this as well, correct?
David Graeber:
Well, radical elements in the labor movement began embracing such visions from quite early on. After the successful campaigns for the eight-hour day in the 1880s, people immediately started thinking, can we move this to seven, six, or less. Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law, and author of The Right to Be Lazy, was already calling for something along those lines in 1883. I have a Wobbly T-shirt with a turn-of-the-century style design that says ‘join the IWW for a new dawn,’ it has a sun rising over the rooftops, and on the sun is written, ‘four-day week, four-hour day.’ I don’t know how old the image really is but I’m guessing it’s from the Teens or the ’20s. In the 1930s, a lot of labor unions did move their industries to a 35-hour week. My mom was a garment worker at the time and that’s how she ended up getting involved in the ILGWU musical review Pins and Needles, because everyone had moved to a shorter week and the union started providing leisure activities.
Thomas Frank:
And when did this expectation finally start dying out?
David Graeber:
By the ‘60s, most people thought that robot factories, and ultimately, the elimination of all manual labor, was probably just a generation or two away. Everyone from the Situationists to the Yippies were saying ‘let the machines do all the work!’ and objecting to the very principle of 9-to-5 labor. In the ‘70s, there were actually a series of now-forgotten wildcat strikes by auto workers and others, in Detroit, I think Turin, and other places, basically saying, ‘we’re just tired of working so much.’
This sort of thing threw a lot of people in positions of power into a kind of moral panic. There were think-tanks set up to examine what to do—basically, how to maintain social control—in a society where more and more traditional forms of labor would soon be obsolete. A lot of the complaints you see in Alvin Toffler and similar figures in the early ‘70s—that rapid technological advance was throwing the social order into chaos—had to do with those anxieties: too much leisure had created the counter-culture and youth movements, what was going to happen when things got even more relaxed? It’s probably no coincidence that it was around that time that things began to turn around, both in the direction of technological research, away from automation and into information, medical, and military technologies (basically, technologies of social control), and also in the direction of market reforms that would send us back towards less secure employment, longer hours, greater work discipline.
Thomas Frank:
Today productivity continues to increase, but Americans work more hours per week than they used to, not fewer. Also, more than workers in other countries. Correct?
David Graeber:
The U.S., even under the New Deal, was always a lot stingier than most wealthy countries when it comes to time off: whether it’s maternity or paternity leave, or vacations and the like. But since the ‘70s, things have definitely been getting worse.”
Tags: David Graeber, Thomas Frank
It’s no shock that disruptive banks haven’t been the thing in Silicon Valley the way market-shifting laundry services have. Literally losing your shirt is unfortunate, but losing it figuratively is completely unacceptable. The opening of Kevin Roose’s New York Magazine article about the possibility of nouveau banking that bucks the system:
“Recently, after a long, drawn-out fight over an overdraft fee, I decided to break up with my bank. I withdrew my balance, closed my accounts, and began looking around. I wanted to find a disruptive bank, in the Silicon Valley parlance—one better than the opaque, fee-filled behemoths I’d dealt with in the past.
The problem, I quickly learned, is such a thing doesn’t yet exist. The big banks all offer basically the same bevy of services, and small banks and credit unions tend to skimp on the add-ons I need, like mobile-banking apps and spending trackers. All of them, big and small, run on the same outdated infrastructure—paper checks, debit cards that require punched-in pins, wire transfers that take days to clear. Despite Wall Street’s reputation for ruthless efficiency and staying ahead of the curve, the last truly important innovation in consumer banking might have been the ATM.
To listen to Silicon Valley tell it, that will change soon. ‘I am dying to fund a disruptive bank,’ venture capitalist Marc Andreessen tweeted earlier this year. Financial start-ups—known collectively as ‘fintech’—are spreading like kudzu, each with a different idea about how to usurp the giants of Wall Street by offering better services, lower fees, or both. Bitcoin and other digital currencies are the tech scene’s infatuation du jour. But a number of other companies are finding success by innovating within the monetary system we already have. ‘When I go to Silicon Valley … they all want to eat our lunch,’ lamented JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon this year.”
Tags: Kevin Roose, Marc Andreessen
From the July 6, 1910 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Vincennes, Ind.–A blind horse, frightened by the explosion of a cannon, ran away yesterday, threw its driver, Wayne Bunting, out of the buggy, fatally injuring him, plunged through a window of the home of Mrs. Anna Dugger and fell on a bed, in which Mrs. Dugger and her daughter were sleeping.
Mrs. Dugger and her daughter were bruised and both were shocked into hysteria before the men of the neighborhood, alarmed by the crash and the screams of the women, could drag the frantic horse out of the house.”
Tags: Mrs. Anna Dugger, Mrs. Dugger's Daughter, Wayne Bunting
A passage from “Murder Machines,” Hunter Oatman-Stanford’s Collectors Weekly article which recalls American streets before Henry Ford’s blasted contraptions became popular:
“Though various automobiles powered by steam, gas, and electricity were produced in the late 19th century, only a handful of these cars actually made it onto the roads due to high costs and unreliable technologies. That changed in 1908, when Ford’s famous Model T standardized manufacturing methods and allowed for true mass production, making the car affordable to those without extreme wealth. By 1915, the number of registered motor vehicles was in the millions.
Within a decade, the number of car collisions and fatalities skyrocketed. In the first four years after World War I, more Americans died in auto accidents than had been killed during battle in Europe, but our legal system wasn’t catching on. The negative effects of this unprecedented shift in transportation were especially felt in urban areas, where road space was limited and pedestrian habits were powerfully ingrained.
For those of us who grew up with cars, it’s difficult to conceptualize American streets before automobiles were everywhere. ‘Imagine a busy corridor in an airport, or a crowded city park, where everybody’s moving around, and everybody’s got business to do,’ says Norton. ‘Pedestrians favored the sidewalk because that was cleaner and you were less likely to have a vehicle bump against you, but pedestrians also went anywhere they wanted in the street, and there were no crosswalks and very few signs. It was a real free-for-all.’
Roads were seen as a public space, which all citizens had an equal right to, even children at play. ‘Common law tended to pin responsibility on the person operating the heavier or more dangerous vehicle,’ says Norton, ‘so there was a bias in favor of the pedestrian.’ Since people on foot ruled the road, collisions weren’t a major issue: Streetcars and horse-drawn carriages yielded right of way to pedestrians and slowed to a human pace. The fastest traffic went around 10 to 12 miles per hour, and few vehicles even had the capacity to reach higher speeds.
In rural areas, the car was generally welcomed as an antidote to extreme isolation, but in cities with dense neighborhoods and many alternate methods of transit, most viewed private vehicles as an unnecessary luxury. ‘The most popular term of derision for a motorist was a ‘joyrider,’ and that was originally directed at chauffeurs,’ says Norton. ‘Most of the earliest cars had professional drivers who would drop their passengers somewhere, and were expected to pick them up again later. But in the meantime, they could drive around, and they got this reputation for speeding around wildly, so they were called joyriders.'”
Tags: Hunter Oatman-Stanford'
When you possess $5 billion and several families full of highly ambitious people, you bequeath a great deal of drama along with great wealth when you die. H.L. Hunt, an ultraconservative oilman with a backstory as large as Texas itself, left just that sort of a messy arrangement 40 years ago when he succumbed to cancer. His descendants behaved in such a manner that they reputedly were the inspiration for the melodramatic TV series Dallas. From a 1974 People:
Haroldson Lafayette Hunt was 32 and broke when he sat down to a game of five-card stud in the Arkansas boom town of El Dorado and won his first oil well. By the time he died of cancer two weeks ago at age 85, H.L. Hunt had pyramided his poker winnings into a global oil empire that made him one of the world’s half-dozen wealthiest men. Long before “Popsie” Hunt’s death, however, an ugly struggle had already begun within his family over the disposition of the Texas tycoon’s personal fortune, estimated at $5 billion.
The issue is between Hunt’s children by his first wife and those of his second. His first marriage to Lyda Bunker Hunt produced four sons and two daughters—Mrs. Al Hill, 59, H.L. Jr., 57, Mrs. Hugo W. Schoellkopf Jr., 52, Nelson Bunker, 48, Herbert, 46, and Lamar, 42. Hunt’s second wife was Ruth Ray Wright, a former Hunt company secretary, who married H.L. two years after Lyda’s death in 1955. She had four children, whom H.L. immediately adopted: Ray, 30, June, 29, Helen, 26, and Swanee, 23. (Friends say members of the family have told them H.L. was their actual as well as adoptive father.)
The internecine intrigue began, H.L. confidant Paul Rothermel told a federal grand jury, when he convinced the patriarch in 1969 to leave 51% of Hunt Oil to the “second family.” The first six children, recalled Rothermel, had already amassed many millions of their own. However, the other four children had “only” about $3 million all-told in trust funds. Two years later, private detectives working for Nelson Bunker and Herbert were convicted of tapping the phones of Rothermel and four other Hunt Oil executives believed sympathetic to the younger set of Hunts. Themselves now under federal indictment for ordering the wiretaps, Nelson Bunker and Herbert have pleaded not guilty, arguing that they simply wanted to investigate unaccountable company losses of $62 million over two years. Should the two Hunts be convicted, they could be fined up to $10,000 or be sentenced to five years, or both. For his part, Rothermel has come to an undisclosed out-of-court settlement with the Hunts over the wiretap.•
From Maciamo Hay at h+ magazine, an argument for why autonomous vehicles may grow much more rapidly than the slow uptick experienced of hybrids:
“Some might doubt that autonomous cars will take over the market within 10-15 years of their introduction. After all, hybrid cars were launched over 15 years ago (even if only the Toyota Prius at first) and still represent only 10% of new sales in the US, and 25% in Japan, which has the world’s highest percentage. The reason why hybrid cars haven’t been selling very well yet is that they are too expensive. Even though they consume less fuel, for many years it was very hard to amortize due to the difference of initial investment. The initial enthusiasts were often environmentalists.
In contrast, the autonomous car brings a significant direct benefits to consumers in the form of increased safety and convenience, so that people will want them even if they are a bit more expensive, just as happened with smartphones. As always price will be the determinant factor for the speed of adoption, and sales will follow an exponential curve as manufacturing costs drop progressively.”
Tags: Maciamo Hay
People:
What do I have to do to find a working Coolatta machine in this city????
There are three Dunkin’ Donuts relatively close to where I live.
How are all of the machines broken????
We are a metro area of over umteen million people.
WTF????
Been downhearted – so don’t annoy me.
“A rumor flashed through the city’s schools that a ‘vampire with iron teeth’ had strangled and eaten two small boys.”
The boogeyman in the Queens neighborhood I grew up in was “Charlie Chop-Chop” (or “Chop-Chop Charlie“), a supposed shadowy slayer of small children whose coup de grâce involved the business end of an axe. It seemed an urban legend concocted to scare kids from being lured away by strangers, but when I was an adult I learned it was at least partly fact: A Manhattan serial murderer called “Charlie Chop-off” really did kill five African-American children in the 1970s. (He may have been Erno Soto, a mentally ill man who confessed to one of the murders but was deemed unfit for trial and institutionalized.)
I can only guess that in the aftermath of these crimes, a few facts traveled to the outer boroughs, probably melded with details of some actual local lawlessness and became larger and larger in the minds of schoolchildren, who needed no vampire comic book nor slasher film to draw the face of evil in their fertile minds. Such a thing seemed innate and viral.
Of course, that’s not to say that children won’t dip into the culture to help them create their stories. At the same time that comic books were considered a 10-cent plague in America, they were apparently causing “vampire riots” in Scottish graveyards. An article in the September 26, 1954 Brooklyn Daily Eagle recalls just such a mad scene. The story:
“Glasgow–Outraged education authorities today blamed horror comics for the action of hundreds of children who swarmed through a cemetery looking for a ‘bloodthirsty vampire with iron teeth.’
The shouting mobs of children rampaged through the cemetery in suburban Hutchesontown in what police called a ‘vampire riot.’
H.K. MacKintosh, city education officer, charged that ‘horror’ comics were responsible and said they ‘have now gone beyond the bounds of license. I hope the government will take active steps in this very real problem facing us.’
Police Constable Alex Deeprose gave the account of the ‘riots’:
‘When school finished, hundreds of children massed in Hutchesontown and prepared to march on the cemetery after a rumor flashed through the city’s schools that a ‘vampire with iron teeth’ had strangled and eaten two small boys there.
‘Shouting and waving pocket knives, carrying sticks and stones, the children swarmed over the cemetery wall and began a hunt among the gravestones.’
Witnesses said they appeared to be ‘deadly serious.’
Police called by the local residents managed to disperse the shouting throng but bands of children continued to roam the streets until dusk.”
Donald Trump stinks, so it’s no surprise he relishes the privilege of serf-like labor to build his garish Dubai developments. He was recently confronted about his low-wage UAE workforce by the aptly pseudonymed Vice correspondent Molly Crabapple. An excerpt:
“On stage, Trump praises his Dubai. He is effusive—and sincere. Trump is one sort of Westerner who loves the UAE. They find here a throwback to colonialism’s heyday. No matter how much you’ve shat the bed at home, here your whiteness will get you a job, money, servants from the Global South. Help is so affordable when migrant workers make $200 a month. In police states, there is little crime.
‘The world has so many problems and so many failures, and you come here and it’s so beautiful,’ Trump says. ‘Why can’t we have that in New York?’
Trump does not mention that, like Dubai, New York is morphing into the no-place of multi-national capitalism. He does not mention that this is partially his fault.
The floor opens to questions.
I stand up.
‘Mr. Trump,’ I ask, ‘the workers who build your villas make less than $200 a month. Are you satisfied?’
The room gasps, then goes silent. The security tenses towards me. In two hours I am scheduled to interview Ahmed Mansoor, who spent eight months in jail for signing a pro-democracy petition. I think about Nick McGeehan, a researcher from Human Rights Watch who was deported a few months ago for investigating the same migrant issues I am.
I think about the web of professional coercion that keeps journalists in the US from asking real questions at press conferences. I wonder if the rules in Dubai are the same.
Trump says nothing.
‘That’s not an appropriate question,’ the publicist barks.”
Tags: Donald Trump, Molly Crabapple
I don’t always agree with Malcolm Gladwell, but I always enjoy reading him for his ideas and because he’s a miraculously lucid writer. He just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.
____________________________
Question:
Tags: Malcolm Gladwell, Peter Thiel, Steve Jobs
The three historical things I’ve hoped to see in my life are an African-American President (done), a female U.S. President (soon, perhaps?) and a new-wave, large-scale women’s movement. The last decade there’s seemed to be a growing tide of feminist consciousness in America. And, no, there’s no way I can quantify that, but it seems to be happening. Will it coalesce into an organized movement?
Because I’m not on social media, I didn’t see the #YesAllWomen insta-campaign until a couple days after it happened, but I thought it was a great sign. Of course, the Digital Age is a double-edged sword for any movement: The connectedness has great utility, but the diffuse nature of culture makes it more difficult for a real movement to form. In our long-tail world, it’s hard for people, even connected ones, to be truly close together.
Here’s a really good New York-centric documentary that focuses on American feminism in the mid-1970s, featuring Rita Mae Brown, Betty Friedan and Margo Jefferson, among many other women.
“A rat done bit my sister Nell (with Wi-Fi on the moon)” is the new lyric.
There are rural parts of America that still depend on dial-up, but the moon now has Wi-Fi. Perhaps that’s because Earth is an inhabited planet where everyone has politics and a profit motive, and the moon knows no such barriers. From Timothy McGrath at Global Post:
“Life on the moon just got a whole lot more awesome. Sure, you’ve got to wear a spacesuit and there’s not much to do in the way of recreation and nightlife.
But that’s all okay now, because there’s Wi-Fi.
Researchers at NASA and MIT have figured out how to beam wireless connectivity from a ground base in New Mexico to the moon using telescopes and lasers.
It’s as cool as it sounds.
Here’s how it works. The transmission utilizes four separate telescopes connected to a laser transmitter that feeds coded pulses of infrared light through it. Those signals travel toward a satellite orbiting the moon. Researchers have managed to make a connection and transfer data at a speed approximating slower Wi-Fi speeds on Earth.”
Tags: Timothy McGrath
A 1981 motorcycle wreck destroyed both of Kent Cochrane’s hippocampuses, leaving him an amnesiac at 30. What was bane for the individual was boon for science: In good part through his travails, we learned that the brain separates factual and personal memories and were able to identify which parts control these functions. Cochrane, who recently passed away, was further plagued in that he didn’t just lose much of the past but also all of the future. He was a man of the moment, always. From Sam Kean at Slate:
“K.C.’s memory loss also had the profound and paradoxical effect of wiping out his future. For the last three decades of his life, he couldn’t have told you what he planned to do over the next hour, the next day, the next year. He couldn’t even imagine those things.
It’s not entirely clear why, but it probably runs deeper than K.C.’s inability to remember his plans. It’s possible that the hippocampus is necessary to project yourself into the future and imagine personally experiencing things in the same way that the hippocampus allows you to put yourself back in time and re-experience the sights, sounds, and emotions of past memories. That’s what your personal memories are really all about.
This loss of his future didn’t pain K.C.; he didn’t suffer or rue his fate. But in some ways that lack of suffering seems sad in itself.” (Thanks 3 Quarks Daily.)
Tags: Kent "K.C." Cochrane, Sam Kean
When the computer is in everything, everything can be hacked. No doubt Google and others are building serious safety features into their driverless-car software because the new vandalism, not to mention terrorism, could be turning an autonomous car the wrong way down a one-way street. From Alex Hern at the Guardian:
“Wil Rockall, a director at KPMG, warns that ‘the industry will need to be very alert to the risk of cyber manipulation and attack.’
‘Self-drive cars will probably work through internet connectivity and, just as large volumes of electronic traffic can be routed to overwhelm websites, the opportunity for self-drive traffic being routed to create ‘spam jams’ or disruption is a very real prospect.’
Rockall suggests that manufacturers could build safety features in to lessen the risk of this happening. ‘The industry takes safety and security incredibly seriously. Doubtless, overrides could be built in so that drivers could shut down many of the car’s capabilities if hacked. That way, humans will still be able to ensure their cars don’t route them on the road to nowhere.’
But Google’s prototype self-driving car, revealed on Tuesday, is largely controlled using an app, and has just two physical buttons: stop, and go. The company has taken a very different approach to firms like Audi and Volvo, who market the driverless features as an addition to, rather than replacement for, a traditional driver.”
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“Cars without steering wheels,” 1950s:
Tags: Alex Hern, Wil Rockall