Perhaps the most benighted use imaginable of the new technologies was this CueCat promotion from the Einsteins at NBC during the 1990s.
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L. Ron Hubbard interviewed in 1968 about his embattled tax shelter, during the period when he spent much of his time at sea.
Tags: L. Ron Hubbard
From a 1994 Wilson Quarterly article about Americans settling the virtual Wild West, which shows just how far we’ve come, at least technologically:
“Some futurists see the germ of the 21st century in today’s nascent ‘on-line’ services, such as America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe. Pay a membership fee and dial up one of these services using a modem attached to your personal computer, and you can catch up on the news, check your mutual fund investments, and chat with like-minded folks on bulletin boards devoted to such specialized topics as your hometown hockey team, office etiquette, opera, or nuclear proliferation. But so far the services have attracted only a specialized clientele of affluent, highly educated, gadget-oriented users. The total subscriber base of these three top on-line services stands at less than three million, smaller than the subscriber base of Newsweek. At America Online, the hottest of the services, the largest number of pioneers actually traveling in cyberspace at any one time is only about 8,000.”
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A decade earlier, AT&T wondered about the Information Superhighway:
Bob Costas protested the foolish decision by the IOC to not offer a moment of silence for the Israeli athletes who were murdered by terrorists during the 1972 Games in Munich. In 1991, Costas interviewed broadcasting legend Jim McKay, who held up (if barely) during those horrifying, exhausting hours.
“They’re all gone”:
Tags: Bob Costas, Jim McKay
Muhammad Ali just made an appearance in London for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. Here’s footage from another Ali jaunt to that great city, when he recorded a special 1974 interview program. The boxer and activist was diminished physically at this point, mostly due to two titanic bouts with Joe Frazier. Neither fighter was ever the same again.
Tags: Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali
Olympic ceremonies, now routinely treated like blockbusters and “directed” by leading filmmakers, began to grow in size and proportion when the Games were staged in 1984 (with the help of a UFO) at the home of Hollywood.
From the 1964 Messenger Lecture Series at Cornell, Richard Feynman delivers a speech called “The Character of Physical Law: The Distinction Between Past and Future.”
Tags: Richard Feynman
A few exchanges from an Ask Me Anything on Reddit with 21-year-old female sexton, or gravedigger, from Norway.
“Question (aresef):
Do you tend to get buried in your work?
Answer (Asexton):
To be dead serious, no, not really.”
“Question (contraband82):
So, I’m not sure if I’m missing something, but is embalming not practiced in Norway?
Answer (Asexton):
No, I don’t think it’s legal. At least I have never heard about it being practiced here.”
“Question (gr9yfox):
Was it obvious to you that Bruce Willis was dead the whole time?
Answer (Asexton):
As a professional, yes. I always know a dead man when I see one.”
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Baby in hoodie. Nice hoodie, baby.
Charlton Heston interviewed about his career, including parts he would have rather forgotten, by the gleefully obnoxious Russell Harty in 1979.
Tags: Charlton Heston, Russell Harty
Sad to hear of the passing of pioneering female astronaut Sally Ride. I haven’t been able to find any footage of her you haven’t seen a million times already, but here’s a 1977 clip of some of the other women who were vying for the distinction that Ride eventually earned.
Tags: Ann Whittaker, Caroline Griner, Mary Johnston, Sally Ride
From the Economist, an explanation of the Uncanny Valley Effect, which tries to explain human unease with examples of AI that seem real and unreal at once:
“ARTIFICIALLY created beings, whether they be drawn or sculpted, are warmly accepted by viewers when they are distinctively inhuman. As their appearances are made more real, however, acceptance turns to discomfort until the point where the similarity is almost perfect, when comfort returns. This effect, called ‘the uncanny valley’ because of the dip in acceptance between clearly inhuman and clearly human forms, is well known, particularly to animators, but why it happens is a mystery. Some suggest it is all about outward appearance, but a study just published in Cognition by Kurt Gray at the University of North Carolina and Daniel Wegner at Harvard argues that there can be something else involved as well: the apparent presence of a mind where it ought not to be.
According to some philosophers the mind is made up of two parts, agency (the capacity to plan and do things) and experience (the capacity to feel and sense things). Both set people apart from robots, but Dr Gray and Dr Wegner speculated that experience in particular was playing a crucial role in generating the uncanny-valley effect. They theorised that adding human-like eyes and facial expressions to robots conveys emotion where viewers do not expect emotion to be present. The resulting clash of expectations, they thought, might be where the unease was coming from.”
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Facial motion test of AI baby:
Tags: Daniel Wegner, Kurt Gray
Augmented catalog by the Swedish manufacturer of furniture and meatballs. (Thanks Wired.)
President Richard Nixon phoned the Apollo 11 astronauts while they were on the moon. Unsurprisingly, the call was taped.
McCandless: …We’d like to get both of you in the field-of-view of the camera for a minute. (Pause) Neil and Buzz, the President of the United States is in his office now and would like to say a few words to you. Over.
Armstrong: That would be an honor.
McCandless: Go ahead Mr. President. This is Houston out.
Nixon: Hello, Neil and Buzz. I’m talking to you by telephone from the Oval Room at the White House. And this certainly has to be the most historic telephone call ever made. I just can’t tell you how proud we all are of what you’ve done. For every American, this has to be the proudest day of our lives. And for people all over the world, I am sure they too join with Americans in recognizing what an immense feat this is. Because of what you have done, the heavens have become a part of man’s world. And as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquility, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquility to Earth. For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this Earth are truly one: one in their pride in what you have done, and one in our prayers that you will return safely to Earth.
Armstrong: Thank you Mr. President. It’s a great honor and privilege for us to be here, representing not only the United States, but men of peace of all nations, and with interest and curiosity, and men with a vision for the future. It’s an honor for us to be able to participate here today.
Nixon: And thank you very much and I look forward – all of us look forward – to seeing you on the Hornet on Thursday.
Armstrong: Thank you.
Aldrin: I look forward to that very much, sir.•
Tags: Richard
The opening of Esther Dyson’s new Project Syndicate essay, which suggests we should apply the self-quant movement to communities:
“I have written previously about the Quantified Self movement – individuals equipped with the tools (monitoring devices and software) needed to measure their own health and behavior (and, by doing so, to improve them). This movement is not quite sweeping the world, but it is making a difference. So-called Quantified Selfers are monitoring their blood pressure, sleep cycles, and body mass. At least some of them are using that information to improve their health and live more productively.
In the same way, I predict (and am trying to foster) the emergence of a Quantified Community movement, with communities measuring the state, health, and activities of their people and institutions, thereby improving them. Just consider: each town has its own schools, library, police, roads and bridges, businesses, and, of course, people. All of them potentially generate a lot of data, most of it uncollected and unanalyzed. That is about to change.” (Thanks Browser.)
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Early quantified community, 1977:
Tags: Esther Dyson
From the BBC: “Five million ‘test tube babies’ have now been born around the world, according to research presented at a conference of fertility experts. Delegates hailed it as a ‘remarkable milestone’ for fertility treatments. The first test tube baby, Louise Brown, was born in the UK in July 1978. Her mother Leslie Brown died last month.”
The birth of the first test-tube baby:
Tags: Leslie Brown, Louise Brown
I don’t know what became of Robert Olsen’s modernist purple cube furniture, but as this 1973 video demonstrates, it was really compact and adaptable.
Tags: Robert Olsen
Northeast Asia Trade Tower, New Songdo. (Image by Wikipedia.)
The result of Greg Lindsay’s collaboration with John D. Kasarda, Aerotropolis: The Way We’ll Live Next, grew from a 2010 article the journalist wrote for Fast Company about New Songdo City, South Korea’s ambitious airport-centric, insta-city. The opening:
“Stan Gale is exultant. The chairman of Gale International yanks off his tie, hitches up his pants, and mops the sweat and floppy hair from his brow. He’s beaming like a proud new papa, sprung from the waiting room and handing out cigars to whoever happens by. Beckoning me to follow, he saunters across eight lanes of traffic toward his baby, delivered prematurely days before.
Ten years ago, Gale was a builder and flipper of office parks who would eventually become known for knocking down the Boston landmark Filene’s Basement and replacing it with a hole in the ground. But Gale’s fate began to change in 2001 with a phone call from South Korea. The Korean government had found his firm on the Internet and made an offer everyone else had refused. The brief: Gale would borrow $35 billion from Korea’s banks and its biggest steel company, and use the money to build from scratch a city the size of downtown Boston, only taller and denser, on a muddy man-made island in the Yellow Sea. When Gale arrived to see the site, it was miles of open water. He signed anyway.
New Songdo City won’t be finished until 2015 at least, but in August, Gale cut the ribbon on the 100-acre ‘Central Park’ modeled, like so much of the city, on Manhattan’s. Climbing on all sides will be a mix of low-rises and sleek spires — condos, offices, even South Korea’s tallest building, the 1,001-foot Northeast Asia Trade Tower. Strolling along the park’s canal, we hear cicadas buzzing, saws whining, and pile drivers pounding down to bedrock. I ask whether he’s stocked the canal with fish yet. ‘It’s four days old!’ he splutters, forgetting he isn’t supposed to rest until the seventh.
As far as playing God (or SimCity) goes, New Songdo is the most ambitious instant city since Brasília 50 years ago. Brasília, of course, was an instant disaster: grandiose, monstrously overscale, and immediately encircled by slums. New Songdo has to be better because there’s a lot more riding on it than whether Gale can repay his loans. It has been hailed since conception as the experimental prototype community of tomorrow. A green city, it was LEED-certified from the get-go, designed to emit a third of the greenhouse gases of a typical metropolis its size (about 300,000 people during the day). It’s an ‘international business district’ and an ‘aerotropolis’ — a Western-oriented city more focused on the airport and China beyond than on Seoul. And it’s supposed to be a ‘smart city,’ studded with chips talking to one another, designated as such years before IBM found its ‘Smarter Planet’ religion.”
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A Cisco video about Songdo:
Tags: Greg Lindsay, John D. Kasarda, Stan Gale
People currently living under tyrants in the Middle East want political freedom and empowerment. But in free countries in the West, we want designer stuff. What we wouldn’t trade for it. We’re citizens acting as if we’re merely consumers. From David Wallace-Wells’ smart interview with Martin Amis in New York, a section about the London riots of 2011:
“Were you in London for the riots?
I wasn’t. As I recall, it was, as these things usually are, set off by a bit of heavy-handed policing. It’s interesting that there’s such a contrast between the police in America and there, in how they’re viewed by the working class, or whatever you want to call them—the proletariat, the many. In America, the policeman is a working-class hero. In England, the policeman is a working-class traitor. Lionel propounds this view himself—the police undertake to protect the rich man’s shilling. As if everyone’s raring to have a redistribution of wealth. That’s why there’s such violent names for the police in criminal England—they call them not only the filth, the filth, but also the puss. They’re the lowest of the low. When policemen go to prison in England, they have as bad a time as a pedophile.
The police in America are, to my senses, quite fascistic—you know, immediate end to all humor, end of all human contact; it’s a real assertion of authority in a way that’s very rare in England. In England, police are, softly softly, “Now, sir, come on, sir.” It’s a humoring voice, not an authoritarian one. I don’t understand the sparking incident. But, then, as the phrase is, it’s all off, then. When a riot starts, it’s all off—meaning, the law suspended. It’s also interesting they used social networking to get people around to certain malls where the police presence was small.
Also that they were gravitating towards malls at all.
Yeah. It was very sort of un-left-wing, in the sense that they all flooded into these sports-equipment shops and tried on all these trainers. A rioter doesn’t usually try things on. Or a looter—it was looting, really, rather than rioting.
But, I mean, what conclusions are people trying to draw from that? It’s just the sort of thing that happens every now and then. Very hard to see any kind of social protest in it. It was opportunistic, and cynical, I think. And I was horrified to learn some of the sentences that were being handed down, for people with no record, first-time offenders, deterrent sentences, exemplary sentences. So, you know, incoherent social spasm rather than anything one could draw conclusions from.
But I guess an expression of class frustration, too.
It’s not class anymore. It’s money. And for very good reason. Money is a much more fluid medium than class, and much more measurable, too, than class. It was a protest, if it was that, to any extent, against privation. It is the sort of society where—it’s not very rational—people look at fame and feel deprived if they haven’t got it, feeling that this is a basic, almost a human right, a civil right.”
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Amis interviews Norman Mailer, 1991:
Paddy Chayefsky discussing Network, arguably America’s best film satire, with Dinah Shore in 1976.
See also:
That joker Alan Abel plays pranks that work because beneath the ridiculous set-ups and crude one-liners there’s an understanding of our desires and fears. In this ridiculous interview from basic cable decades ago, he satirized our wish for youth and immortality, marrying the emerging celebrity culture to new scientific possibilities. He pretended that he’d created a sperm bank in which only stars like John Wayne and Johnny Carson were allowed to make deposits. And he was going to cryogenically freeze a young woman and tour her body across America. Everyone would be famous and live forever.
See also:
Tags: Alan Abel
I posted last week about Elon Musk’s plan for a new, superfast mode of transport. One that runs on clean energy and can never crash. Here, at the 43:10 mark, he spends four minutes going into depth about the Hyperloop.
Tags: Elon Musk
As media moguls and tech titans use their billions to stretch into space, here’s Virgin Galactic’s promo film. If you had to wager right now, do you think the first people to land on Mars will be working for a government or a private enterprise? And what’s lost and what’s gained if it’s the latter?
I think Muhammad Ali in his prime would have beaten Joe Louis in his. But legendary trainer Cus D’Amato, who was still to mentor Mike Tyson down the line, argued in favor of the “Brown Bomber” when he and Ali debated the point in 1970, during the uncrowned champ’s Vietnam Era walkabout.
Tags: Cus D'Amato, Muhammad Ali
A 1958 concept car that was a transformer of sorts, all at the push of a button.