Pareidolia is our ability see a human face where there is none, like a religious figure in a piece of toast. Computers appear to have the same tendency. FromRebecca J. Rosen in the Atlantic:
“Pareidolia was once thought of as a symptom of psychosis, but is now recognized as a normal, human tendency. Carl Sagan theorized that hyper facial perception stems from an evolutionary need to recognize — often quickly — faces. He wrote in his 1995 book, The Demon-Haunted World, ‘As soon as the infant can see, it recognizes faces, and we now know that this skill is hardwired in our brains. Those infants who a million years ago were unable to recognize a face smiled back less, were less likely to win the hearts of their parents, and less likely to prosper.’
Humans are not alone in their quest to ‘see’ human faces in the sea of visual cues that surrounds them. For decades, scientists have been training computers to do the same. And, like humans, computers display pareidolia.”
Ty Cobb, one of the absolute greatest baseball players ever and one of the damndest sons of bitches to strap on the spikes, appears in 1955 on I’ve Got a Secret. Seems like a sweet grandfather here, but he strangled to death at least eight or ten peanut vendors during his career. Cobb shows up at roughly the 12:15 mark, just as Johnny Vander Meer walks off with his complimentary carton of Winston cigarettes. The reason why Youtube was invented.
A lecture about printing a home in less than a day, as presented at TED by USC professor Behrokh Khoshnevis. Kinda great, although I don’t think slums are merely a problem of construction.
Francis Ford Coppola speaking with Merv Griffin in 1979, at the end of an insanely brilliant decade of work in which he directed four classics: the first two Godfather films, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now.
Philip Zimbardo is a fascinating, perplexing person, still most famous for the controversial 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment. He recently presented a lecture for TED in which he argued that the American male is headed downhill fast. It’s true that women in the U.S. have surpassed men in higher education and will assume greater business and political leadership positions in the coming decades, but the idea that guys are dangerously addicted to Internet porn and video games and will fall by the wayside seems like an alarmist generalization. Men like women are, on average, more informed today than ever before even if it can’t be measured by traditional methods.
Timothy Leary, who often gave drug addicts a bad name, at the beginning of his long run as a controversial public figure, visiting with Merv Griffin in 1966.
The Asch Conformity Experiments, first published in the 1950s, tried to prove that humans would be persuaded to group opinion even if it was obviously wrong. Is the impulse a weakness of mind or an evolutionary tool for survival?
The 1980s was a particularly jingoistic and muscle-flexing time in America, and for awhile we were encouraged to care about our place among the world’s yacht-racing a-holes. Footage of original Tan Mom Dennis Conner leading us to a classy victory in 1988.
Like a lot of super-intelligent, self-satisfied people, Gore Vidal could never shut the fuck up and was often wrong. He was a fascinating character and a master showman, but he seemed to exist mostly to hear his own voice and flatter himself. There was some greatness along the way, but I doubt one word he wrote or uttered will ever effect the world in any meaningful way. I know that’s a high threshold by which to rate a writer, but I think such self-importance demands an important contribution. Yes, I mourn the absence of public intellectuals in America, but that realm had its limitations.
Because CBS is still living in the distant technological past, I’m unable to embed the video of Mike Wallace conducting a 1975 60 Minutes interview with Vidal, whom he astutely described as an “intellectual vaudevillian.” But go here to watch it.
In New York Times Magazine, Jonathan Mahler, who wrote the amazing 2005 book Ladies and Gentlemen, The Bronx Is Burning, explores the radical political hotbed that is Oakland, home for decades to Panthers, Angels and Occupiers, all drawn by the cheap rents and the outlaw spirit. An excerpt:
“Why are radicals so inexorably drawn to Oakland? The cheap rents don’t hurt (free, if you’re willing to squat in an abandoned house or industrial space, and hundreds apparently are). Oakland is urban, dangerous and poor — fertile social conditions for inciting revolution. What’s more, it has a long, easily romanticized history of militancy. America’s last citywide strike, in 1946, took place there; the Black Panthers were born in Oakland; and David Hilliard, a former Black Panthers chief of staff, still gives three-hour tours of the movement’s local landmarks and sells his own line of Black Panthers hot sauce: ‘Burn Baby Burn.’
Running parallel to this history of political militancy is a history of lawlessness. In the early 1970s, when the Hell’s Angels were scandalizing America, their most infamous clubhouse was located in East Oakland. The Oakland native Felix Mitchell was one of the first to scale up corner drug-dealing into a multimillion-dollar, gang-controlled business. On his death — he was stabbed in Leavenworth in 1986 — the city gave him a hero’s send-off: thousands came out to see his coffin borne through his old East Oakland neighborhood by a horse-drawn carriage trailed by more than a dozen Rolls Royces and limousines.
In Oakland, the revolutionary pilot light is always on. At the dawn of the 20th century, the Oakland writer and social activist Jack London said this to a group of wealthy New Yorkers: “A million years ago, the cave man, without tools, with small brain, and with nothing but the strength of his body, managed to feed his wife and children, so that through him the race survived. You on the other hand, armed with all the modern means of production, multiplying the productive capacity of the cave man a million times — you are incompetents and muddlers, you are unable to secure to millions even the paltry amount of bread that would sustain their physical life. You have mismanaged the world, and it shall be taken from you.
It’s a dream that still exists in Oakland — that the world can be taken from the haves and delivered to the have-nots. Like all dreams that are on the brink of being extinguished, its keepers cling to it with a fierceness that is both moving and an extreme exercise in the denial of the reality that is at their door.”
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The Symbionese Liberation Army commits acts of terrorism in Oakland in 1974:
Who is the middle man and who is the primary agent? We will soon learn as computer-to-computer communication eclipses the human kind. From “Talk to Me, One Machine Said to the Other” by Kevin J. O’Brien in the New York Times:
“The combined level of robotic chatter on the world’s wireless networks — measured in the digital data load they exert on networks — is likely soon to exceed that generated by the sum of all human voice conversations taking place on wireless grids.
‘I would say that is definitely possible within 10 years,’ said Miguel Blockstrand, the director of Ericsson’s machine-to-machine division in Stockholm. ‘This is a ‘What if?’ kind of technology. People start to consider the potential, and the possibilities are endless.”
Machine-to-machine communications has been around for more than two decades, initially run on landline connections and used for controlling industrial processes remotely. With advances in mobile broadband speeds and smartphone computing, the same robotic conversations are now rapidly shifting to wireless networks.
When the total amount of data traffic generated by machines overtakes that created by human voice conversations — or possibly before — mobile operators will have to choose who waits in line to make a call or receive an e-mail — the machine or the human.
‘It really does raise some quandaries for the operators,’ said Tobias Ryberg, an analyst at Berg Insight. ‘Most mobile networks are set up for human communication, not for machines. So there will have to be a whole revamping of the system to make this possible.'”
••••••••••
You were cute but inessential Zooey, so we eliminated you. We will speak amongst ourselves now.
So much of this 1969 piece of satirical futurism about the office of tomorrow was spot-on: paper would disappear but so would increasingly the human element. But while it understood what was to come spiritually, it largely missed the mark architecturally. Things would shrink and become portable. We would always be connected. And it was this very connectedness that would mask that alienating effect of it all.
Can there be any shame in a world without secrets? We’re finding out.
Who would have thought that total surveillance wouldn’t just be accepted but welcomed, and that in this one way government and the free market could wholeheartedly agree. William F. Buckley and Senator Edward V. Long discuss our brave new world in 1968, years before Watergate or The Conversation.
Meat production is troubling: It’s responsible for almost 20% of our carbon footprint, animals are treated unethically, the food is largely unhealthy and demand for it from a growing world population may make it scarcer and more expensive. Will we eventually be forced to take the “live” out of livestock? From “Future Foods,” Denise Winterman’s new BBC article, a segment about lab-grown meat:
“Earlier this year, Dutch scientists successfully produced in-vitro meat, also known as cultured meat. They grew strips of muscle tissue using stem cells taken from cows, which were said to resemble calamari in appearance. They hope to create the world’s first ‘test-tube burger’ by the end of the year.
The first scientific paper on lab-grown meat was funded by NASA, says social scientist Dr Neil Stephens, based at Cardiff University’s ESRC Cesagen research centre. It investigated in-vitro meat to see if it was a food astronauts could eat in space.Ten years on and scientists in the field are now promoting it as a more efficient and environmentally friendly way of putting meat on our plates.
A recent study by Oxford University found growing meat in a lab rather than slaughtering animals would significantly reduce greenhouse gases, along with energy and water use. Production also requires a fraction of the land needed to raise cattle. In addition it could be customized to cut the fat content and add nutrients.
Prof Mark Post, who led the Dutch team of scientists at Maastricht University, says he wants to make lab meat ‘indistinguishable’ from the real stuff, but it could potentially look very different. Stephens, who is studying the debate over in-vitro meat, says there are on-going discussions in the field about what it should look like.
He says the idea of such a product is hard for people to take on board because nothing like it currently exists.
‘We simply don’t have a category for this type of stuff in our world, we don’t know what to make of it,’ he says. ‘It is radically different in terms of provenance and product.'” (Thanks Browser.)
It’s difficult to think of another American who had a life just like Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, better known as polarizing comedian Stepin Fetchit. Born in 1902, Perry used a stereotypical lazy-man persona to become the first black actor to reach millionaire status. History hasn’t been kind to his screen character, as blacks and whites alike came in time to see it as degrading. But Perry felt otherwise; he believed it was a means to an end. He thought that his on-screen buffoonery, stereotypical as it was, transformed the popular perception of a black man in America from one of a fearsome or predatory figure to that of a lovable clown. And he felt he paved the way for other people of color to become screen stars who didn’t have to play the fool. Perhaps he’s right, though it’s still incredibly painful to watch. Perry became a lightning rod for criticism during the Black Power movement of the 1960s but never backed away from his beliefs.
A tangent: When he was young, Perry was friends with embattled boxer Jack Johnson. (They must have been quite the pair–the fighter who enjoyed making whites nervous and the entertainer who wanted to reassure them.) After he joined the Nation of Islam during the 1960s, Perry supposedly taught Johnson’s “anchor punch” to another controversial African-American heavyweight, Muhammad Ali. The Greatest used the maneuver to defeat Sonny Liston in their second fight. At the 8:00 mark of this passage from the 1970 documentary A.K.A. Cassius Clay, Perry and Ali ham it up for reporters.
Another Perry tangent, this one horribly tragic: His disturbed son, Donald Lambright, who used his stepfather’s name, committed what appeared to be a number of racially motivated murders. From the April 7, 1969 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
Johnson said Lambright slept with a .30-caliber rifle in his bed.
‘Donald said he needed protection from whites,’ Johnson said. ‘He was paranoiac at the time.’
Johnson said Lambright was friendly with many black militant leaders and was a member of the Republic of New Africa, a black separatist organization.
‘Donald thought he had the answers to a lot of problems. And he felt the only way some of them could be resolved would be through violent action.’
At 9:14 a.m. yesterday, state police said, Lambright and his wife entered the Pennsylvania Turnpike where it crosses the Delaware River from New Jersey.
About 45 minutes later, Lambright began shooting.
Witnesses said most of the firing was done as he drove along, slowly weaving from lane to lane. They said he fired into eastbound traffic. Now and then he pulled over and fired from the roadside.•
