A film about their amazing Pacific Palisades house. Wordless.
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Tags: Charles Eames, Ray Eames
From Mike Douglas’ talk show. The above photo is a Mapplethorpe, of course.
Tags: Mike Douglas, Patti Smith
Before Mailer and Breslin tried to relocate to New York City’s Gracie Mansion, William F. Buckley made his own quixotic run for the mayor’s office for the Conservative Party. In these 1965 clips on NBC’s Meet the Press, Buckley discusses his candidacy.
Tags: William F. Buckley
In my early Catholic grade-school years, I had to write a one-page book report, and I chose to do it on Dick Gregory’s autobiography, which had this title. That might not be seen as odd today–or perhaps it still is—but a tiny child in all-white school choosing that book was, shall we say, unusual. It was in no way a political statement on my behalf nor was I mischievously trying to use a bad word; I just thought it was an interesting book. (It was co-written by the excellent Robert Lipsyte, by the way.) My teacher, who didn’t need this shit, was uncomfortable. On the positive side: The priests never touched me.
In this 1965 clip, Merv Griffin interviews the civil rights activist / stand-up comedian in the aftermath of the Watts riots.
Tags: Dick Gregory, Merv Griffin, Robert Lipsyte
In 1979, Merv Griffin interviews the big-name cast of The China Syndrome, a drama about a cover-up of security hazards at a nuclear power plant. The talk is largely a Hollywood ass-kissing session. Within a couple of weeks of the film’s release, a real-life version of the horrifying scenario played out as Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island plant melted down. Now that’s a tie-in.
Tags: Jack Lemmon, James Bridges, Jane Fonda, Merv Griffin
I’ve heard many times that a lot of the “tourists” at Disney World are plain-clothed security ready to pounce. Image control goes even beyond that. For instance: Apparently no one ever dies at Disney World, not at the “Happiest Place on Earth.” Sure, people actually do die there all the time, from natural causes and accidents. But the death is never called until the deceased has been removed from the park. A passage on this odd topic from an Ask Me Anything on Reddit with a former employee of the theme park:
Question:
Answer:
This is true, all deaths are recorded outside of Lake Buena Vista at Celebration Hospital.*
Via Computerworld, a passage on Ray Kurzweil holding forth at the DEMO conference last week: “You can learn new material at any age, but there is a limited capacity. That’s one of the things we will overcome by basically expanding the brain into the cloud,’ he said. ‘We need to be able to repurpose our neocortex to learn something new. People who have a rigid process and hold onto old information; they will have a hard time doing that. You need to be able to move on.’
While Kurzweil did not give a timetable for these predictions, he said the notion of ‘brain extenders’ has already begun thanks to technology including IBM’s Watson supercomputer and augmented reality. ‘I think we’ll be in augmented reality all the time,’ Kurzweil said.”
Tags: Ray Kurzweil
Merv Griffin interviews prolific playwright Neil Simon in 1967.
Tags: Merv Griffin, Neil Simon
Dr. Benjamin Spock, the pediatrician who encouraged parents to be more affectionate to their children and protested the Vietnam War, is interviewed by Merv Griffin in 1966.
Tags: Benjamin Spock, Merv Griffin
Erika Anderson of Guernica interviewed Clive Thompson about his theory that early arcade games featured a type of information sharing that’s being used to greater good in our more interconnected world. The opening:
“Guernica:
How would you describe the evolution of video games?
Clive Thompson:
When games started out, they were very, very simple affairs, and that was partly just technical—you couldn’t do very much. They had like 4K of memory. And so the games started off really not needing instructions at all. The first Pong game had one instruction. It was, ‘Avoid missing ball for high score.’ So it was literally just that: don’t fail to hit the ball. I remember when I read it, it was actually a confusing construction: avoid missing ball for high score. It’s weirdly phrased, as if it were being translated from Swedish or something, you know? But they didn’t know what they were doing.
But what started happening very early on was that if you were in the arcades as I was—I’m 44 in October, so I was right at that age when these games were coming out—the games were really quite hard in a way, and because they were taking a quarter from you, their goal was to have you stop playing quickly because they need more money. They ramped up in difficulty very quickly, like the next wave is harder, and the third wave is unbelievably harder. And so you had to learn how to play them by trial and error with yourself but you only had so much money. And so what you started doing was you started observing other people and you started talking to all the other people. What you saw when you went to a game was one person playing and a semi-circle of people around them and they were all talking about what was going on, to try to figure out how to play the game. And they would learn all sorts of interesting strategy.”
••••••••••
In 1972, Rod Serling teaches Steve Allen how to play the home version of Pong (forward to the 15:40 mark):
Tags: Clive Thompson, Erika Anderson
ToyTalk has raised a boatload of capital in anticipation of its forthcoming “intelligent” teddy bear. It will make your child’s current favorite doll seem unclean and illiterate. (Thanks Singularity Hub.)
Slavoj Žižek, briilliant and buffoonish, offers a tour of his humble abode. The kitchen, in particular, is special. (Thanks Biblioklept.)
Tags: Slavoj Žižek
Merv Griffin interviews John le Carré in 1965, during the frost of the Cold War.
Tags: John Le Carré, Merv Griffin
Unedited footage of a 1981 audience Q&A session with Orson Welles, who discussed The Trial. His Kafka adaption has amazing set design and cinematography, but it still feels sort of hollow to me.
Tags: Orson Welles
A 1980 episode of a post-ABC Dick Cavett talk show, in which he interviews Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright in their suite at the Wyndham Hotel. Crappy video quality, but obviously worth it.
Vertical farming in Singapore attempts to bring crops to urban areas. It’s still more expensive right now than traditional farming, but if there’s expansion the scale may take care of that. (Thanks Next Big Future.)
A piece of a fun 1971 Merv Griffin interview with Dennis Hopper, who had just shown Hollywood a way out of its post-Studio System doldrums with the cheap indie smash, Easy Rider, and was in the process of undermining his own newly booming career with the quixotic, drug-fueled mess, The Last Movie.
See also:
Tags: Dennis Hopper, Merv Griffin
Japan Display has developed a paper-like, low-power color video display. From Dig Info: “”This display has what’s called a Light Control Layer. When the display simply reflects light as usual, it looks metallic, like a mirror. When we add this layer, the display collects light to some extent, in the direction of the user’s eyes, making it look similar to paper. But the light returns efficiently in the direction of the eyes. By developing this layer, we’ve achieved good color, which couldn’t be done with ordinary digital paper. This display can show video, so we think it’ll lead to new solutions and applications.” (Thanks Next Big Future.)
Demonstration of Harvard’s pop-up robotic bee.
“Hello Doug. Would you personally miss bees if they disappeared?”:
If we live in a multiverse and not a universe, then what we’ve long believed to be true is not true. Or at the very least, it’s a small sliver of the truth. From an excellent Aeon article on the topic by Michael Hanlon:
“The new terrain is so strange that it might be beyond human understanding.
That hasn’t stopped some bold thinkers from trying, of course. One such is Brian Greene, professor of physics and mathematics at Columbia University in New York. He turned his gaze upon the multiverse in his latest book, The Hidden Reality (2011). According to Greene, it now comes in no fewer than nine ‘flavours’, which, he says, can ‘all work together’.
The simplest version he calls the ‘quilted multiverse’. This arises from the observation that the matter and energy we can see through our most powerful telescopes have a certain density. In fact, they are just dense enough to permit a gravitationally ‘flat’ universe that extends forever, rather than looping back on itself. We know that a repulsive field pervaded spacetime just after the Big Bang: it was what caused everything to fly apart in the way that it did. If that field was large enough, we must conclude that infinite space contains infinite repetitions of the ‘Hubble volume’, the volume of space, matter and energy that is observable from Earth.
If this is correct, there might — indeed, there must — be innumerable dollops of interesting spacetime beyond our observable horizon. There will be enough of these patchwork, or ‘pocket’, universes for every single arrangement of fundamental particles to occur, not just once but an infinite number of times. It is sometimes said that, given a typewriter and enough time, a monkey will eventually come up with Hamlet. Similarly, with a fixed basic repertoire of elementary particles and an infinity of pocket universes, you will come up with everything.
In such a case, we would expect some of these patchwork universes to be identical to this one. There is another you, sitting on an identical Earth, about 10 to the power of 10 to the power of 120 light years away. Other pocket universes will contain entities of almost limitless power and intelligence. If it is allowed by the basic physical laws (which, in this scenario, will be constant across all universes), it must happen. Thus there are unicorns, and thus there are godlike beings. Thus there is a place where your evil twin lives. In an interview I asked Greene if this means there are Narnias out there, Star Trek universes, places where Elvis got a personal trainer and lived to his 90s (as has been suggested by Michio Kaku, a professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York). Places where every conscious being is in perpetual torment. Heavens and hells. Yes, it does, it seems. And does he find this troubling? ‘Not at all,’ he replied. ‘Exciting. Well, that’s what I say in this universe, at least.’”
••••••••••
Brian fails to complete his novel in several universes:
Tags: Brian Greene, Michael Hanlon
I can’t say that I’ve been the biggest fan of Leos Carax’s films, but my smart little brother Steven Boone has an article in Capital New York about the director’s latest work, the fantasy drama Holy Motors, which has convinced me I need to catch up on it. Boone draws comparison between Carax’s take on the oft-brutal changes of our technological revolution with Chaplin’s meditation on the hardships the Industrial Revolution wrought a century ago. An excerpt:
“We’re at a cultural crossroads, those of us who live in countries where iPhones and social media mean something. We’re leaving behind a whole range of physical products forever, in favor of ones that exist only as data or abstractions. We’re crossing these precarious bridges on faith, or just resignation to the tools set before us as we scramble to survive.
What are we losing in the transfer? In Holy Motors, glimpses of ancient Etienne-Jules Marey motion photography and still-stunning Edith Scob (star of the 1960 French classic Eyes without a Face) as Lavant’s limo driver, seem to cry for continuity with the past.
Now that whole archives are trusted to ‘the Cloud,’ there’s as much risk of losing it all as there is promise in the way digital media smuggle history over to the very demographic that mega-corporations prefer to remain unawares, the youth. (Go to YouTube and witness all the awed teenagers commenting under classic silent movies.) Carax is thinking about all that stuff in Holy Motors, pitting Lavant’s Lon Chaney makeup kit and costumes and absurdly luxurious limo against a world that suddenly moves faster than any vehicle, silently, invisibly, through data cables and air waves.”
Tags: Leos Carax, Steven Boone
An evolution in the screening of breast tissue for cancer has arrived via First Warning Systems. From Singularity Hub: “A new test could provide a way for women to detect breast cancer much earlier than is possible with mammograms or even MRI. And the best part is, it’s as easy as wearing a sports bra.
The high-tech undergarment, First Warning System, is based on chronobiology, the scientific study of how the body is affected by time. The device specifically tracks changes in temperature, searching for aberrant spikes that could be a tumor. When tumors form, they recruit blood vessels to supply them with the increasing blood flow they need to feed their multiplying number of cells. This extra growth generates more heat than surrounding tissue containing normal amounts of blood vessels.”
In the future, endings will not only be happy but also brutally efficient. Presenting the high-speed bot hand from the Ishikawa Komuro Lab.
Gary Numan performing his 1978 techie cautionary tale, “M.E.,” in which he envisioned the Singularity arriving and then running out of juice.
And M.E. I eat dust
We’re all so run down
I’d call it my death but I’ll only fade away
And I hate to fade alone
Now there’s only M.E.
We were so sure
We were so wrong
Now it’s over, but there’s no one left to see
And there’s no one left to die
There’s only M.E.
Why should I care?
Why should I try?
Oh no, oh no, I turned off the pain
Like I turned off you all
Now there’s only M.E.
Tags: Gary Numan
Berndnaut Smilde and his indoor clouds made Time‘s “Best Inventions of 2012.” From the blurb: “The Dutch artist Berndnaut Smilde has developed a way to create a small, perfect white cloud in the middle of a room. It requires meticulous planning: the temperature, humidity and lighting all have to be just so. Once everything is ready, Smilde summons the cloud out of the air using a fog machine. It lasts only moments, but the effect is dramatic and strangely moving.”
Tags: Berndnaut Smilde