Paddy Chayefsky, that brilliant satirist, holding forth spectacularly on the Mike Douglas Show in 1969. It starts with polite chatter about the success of his script for Marty but quickly transitions into a much more serious and futuristic discussion. The writer is full of doom and gloom, of course, during the tumult of the Vietnam Era; his best-case scenario for humankind to live more peacefully is a computer-friendly “new society” that yields to globalization and technocracy, one in which citizens are merely producers and consumers, free of nationalism and disparate identity. Well, some of that came true. All the while, he wears a fun, red lei because one of his fellow guests is Hawaii Five-0 star Jack Lord. Gwen Verdon, Lionel Hampton and Cy Coleman share the panel.
Bill Gates predicted Apple’s Siri in 1987. From the greatPaleofuture blogat the Smithsonian: “Gates predicts the perfection of a technology that has been around for decades, but one that many people of 2012 might associate with the name Siri: voice recognition. ‘Also, we will have serious voice recognition. I expect to wake up and say, ‘Show me some nice Da Vinci stuff,’ and my ceiling, a high-resolution display, will show me what I want to see—or call up any sort of music or video. The world will be online, and you will be able to simulate just about anything.'”
Alex Haley appears on To Tell the Truth in 1972 to discuss his genealogical investigations, four years before Roots was published and became a phenomenon.
From “The Strongest Man in the World,” Burkhard Bilger’s ungated New Yorker piece about Brian Shaw, a Colorado man born to move mountains, and the new wave of strength competitions:
“In the summer of 2005, when Shaw was twenty-three, he went to Las Vegas for a strength-and-conditioning convention. He was feeling a little adrift. He had a degree in wellness management from Black Hills State University, in South Dakota, and was due to start a master’s program at Arizona State that fall. But after moving to Tempe, a few weeks earlier, and working out with the football team, he was beginning to have second thoughts. ‘This was a big Division I, Pac-10 school, but I was a little surprised, to be honest,’ he told me. ‘I was so much stronger than all of them.’ One day at the convention, Shaw came upon a booth run by Sorinex, a company that has designed weight-lifting systems for the Denver Broncos and other football programs. The founder, Richard Sorin, liked to collect equipment used by old-time strongmen and had set out a few items for passersby to try. There were some kettle bells lying around, like cannonballs with handles attached, and a clumsy-looking thing called a Thomas Inch dumbbell.
Inch was an early-twentieth-century British strongman famous for his grip. His dumbbell, made of cast iron, weighed a hundred and seventy-two pounds and had a handle as thick as a tin can, difficult to grasp. In his stage shows, Inch would offer a prize of more than twenty thousand dollars in today’s currency to anyone who could lift the dumbbell off the floor with one hand. For more than fifty years, no one but Inch managed it, and only a few dozen have done so in the half century since. ‘A thousand people will try to lift it in a weekend, and a thousand won’t lift it,’ Sorin told me. ‘A lot of strong people have left with their tails between their legs.’ It came as something of a shock, therefore, to see Shaw reach over and pick up the dumbbell as if it were a paperweight. ‘He was just standing there with a blank look on his face,’ Sorin said. ‘It was, like, What’s so very hard about this?’
When Shaw set down the dumbbell and walked away, Sorin ran over to find him in the crowd. ‘His eyes were huge,’ Shaw recalls. ‘He said, ‘Can you do that again?’ And I said, ‘Of course I can.’ So he took a picture and sent it to me afterward.’ Sorin went on to tell Shaw about the modern strongman circuit—an extreme sport, based on the kinds of feat performed by men like Inch, which had a growing following worldwide. ‘He said that my kind of strength was unbelievable. It was a one in a million. If I didn’t do something with my abilities, I was stupid. That was pretty cool.’
Three months later, Shaw won his first strongman event.”
•••••••••
Shaw deadlifting 1073 pounds this year with a torn biceps:
My little brother, that provocateur Steven Boone, summing up the loud, jarring, cynical last decade of multiplex fare in a recent article at Capital New York:
“The video game industry is currently in a war that the movie industry fought and decided last decade. It’s a struggle between loud, assaultive, photorealistic game design that rewards wispy attention spans while demanding minimal problem-solving skills of its players and … games where shotguns to the face and chainsaws to the jugular are not so essential.
The American film industry settled on high-resolution ultraviolence as the default multiplex experience sometime after 9/11 and sometime before its superheroic screen response, The Dark Knight. The violence is not necessarily a matter of content but of the graceless way shots jam up against one another now, keeping us invested through a constant state of agitation where narrative suspense used to do the trick.
During that decade, many viewers retreated from mainstream blockbuster cinema into the bosom of what critics call a television renaissance. So many smart, adult, spellbinding, hilarious TV shows, the story goes. Any stragglers still hoping for an immersive experience at the multiplex were suckers and masochists.”
“The genius of our politics is the art of distracting the resentments of a cheated middle class and letting them fall upon a worse-cheated lower class. And so we have the revolution of Woody Guthrie’s dream: the Okies and their sons and daughters have elected a one-time California labor agitator president of the United States. This triumphant populist tribune is, of course, Mr. Reagan.
Joe Klein reminds us that Guthrie’s ‘This Land Is Your Land’ has been recorded by such repositories of the national self-satisfaction as the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, the New Christy Minstrels, and Tex Ritter. It is as secure in the pantheon of celebratory anthems as ‘America the Beautiful’ and probably sits higher in the affections of school children than ‘The Star Spangled Banner.’ Marching bands saluted the new president with its strains when they passed before him on Inauguration Day.
Woody Guthrie had composed ‘This Land Is Your Land’ as a bitter parody of ‘God Bless America.’ It had originally closed with the stanza:
One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple By the Relief office I saw my people As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if God blessed America for me.
These words and like notes of alienation were excised from ‘This Land Is Your Land’ when it was smoothed into the affirmative expression that soothes us today. Guthrie accepted the amendment, but the pain of the sacrifice lingered so long that, in the early 1960s, when he was near dying, he took his son, Arlo, into the backyard and taught him the old verses, because, Klein tells us, ‘he was afraid that if Arlo didn’t learn them, they’d be forgotten.’
The genius of our politics also extends to the transformation of the song of protest into the hymn of acceptance.”
•••••••••
“Yes, as through this world I’ve wandered / I’ve seen lots of funny men / Some will rob you with a six-gun / And some with a fountain pen”:
Before the Internet and social networks, people had just as great a desire to be connected, but the proper medium and infrastructure didn’t exist. For a couple of years in the 1970s, people reached out to one another via CB radio, though almost all of them hid behind a handle. They hadn’t yet perfected our brand of ego and exhibitionism. Footage from 1977.
China is on pace to become by far the world’s largest auto consumer in the near term. Sure, an economic collapse could slow that growth, but it will certainly be a world leader in the category. A nation with that much consumption, that much control over its citizenry and a huge sense of its own destiny, could decide the future of transportation and alternative energy. What if China announced it was allowing only electric cars by a certain date and then built the infrastructure to support that shift with the same zeal that it shows in routinely scraping the sky? From the Next Big Future:
“Auto sales in China may rise to 19.2 million this year, about 1 million lower than AlixPartners estimated last year. Sales in the world’s most populous country may increase to 21.4 million in 2013 and 23.5 million in 2014, the report said.
It is estimated that China’s automobile market will keep a stable growth from 2012 to 2015, with a compound annual growth rate of 8.1%. The sales volume is expected to reach 25.287 million by 2015.
China could double US car sales in 2017 / 2018 and be equal the combined car sales in Western Europe and the United States.”
Perhaps a photo of Crazy Horse from 1877, though authenticity is disputed.
Interesting 1961 episode of To Tell the Truth which featured sculptor Korczak Ziolkowski, who blasted and carved a mountain-scale monument of Crazy Horse in South Dakota. The artist was approached by Chief Henry Standing Bear who asked him to pay homage to a Native American hero. It began a lifetime work for the self-trained sculptor. Ziolkowski passed away in 1982, but his family has continued the construction.
An eyewitness report about the death of Crazy Horse from the September 27, 1877 New York Times: “The Schoharie Republican prints a private letter, addressed to Francisco Wood, of the village, by his son, Edwin D., who is in the Army, and as one of the guard, was present at the capture and killing of Crazy Horse. The writer said, under the date of September 16: ‘We have had considerable excitement here within the last two weeks on account of Crazy Horse. We started out on the 4th of this month with eight companies of the Third Cavalry to bring him and his band into the agency, but did not succeed in capturing him. The next day he was brought in by a lot of friendly Indians, who are enlisted and paid as soldiers. There were also a number of his own warriors with him. When the carriage drove to the guard-house, Crazy Horse got out and walked a short distance, the refused to go in. Then the struggle began. The guard surrounded him, and one of them stabbed him with a bayonet. He was then taken in the Adjutant’s office where he died in about six hours. There are all sorts of rumors about the way he was killed. Some of the papers say he stabbed himself, others say he was killed by another Indian, called Little Big Man, but I was one of the guards myself, and was there when he was stabbed, and know the man who did it. I think this was the only thing that saved a row, because there were a great many Indians there at the time, and one shot would have been sufficient to start a fight. But I think there will be no more trouble after this, because he was undoubtedly the greatest warrior that ever lived. His father was with him in all his battles with the whites; he was also with him at the time of his death. Crazy Horse was 37 years of age. He was born on the North Fork of the Cheyenne River. He fought closer to the whites than any other chief that ever lived. He has killed 37 white men beside what he has killed in battle. The other chiefs were all jealous of him. He could have been the chief of all the Indians, but would not; he only wanted to roam around the country with his band and fight the Snakes and the Crows and steal horses. The next morning he was taken to the Spotted Tail Agency, where he is buried.”
William M. Gaines, publisher and impresario behind Mad magazine, on To Tell the Truth in 1970. He looked like a plate of spaghetti that fell on the floor.
Some footage of bio-engineering research at the University of Utah in 1977, when it seemed like synthetics were the best bet for replacement organs and limbs. While better artificial extremities are now being manufactured all the time, the future looks brightest for carbon-based solutions, via computer-aided transplantation in the short run and 3-D printers a little further down the road.
The ExoHand by Festo is a robot hand that’s worn like a glove. From David J. Hill at Singularity Hub: “It may be time to jettison the notion that robots in the future will have grippers or claws for hands. The German robotics company Festo recently unveiled the ExoHand, a sophisticated robotic hand that is capable of the fine motor skills that allows the human hand to have a delicate touch or perform complex manipulations.
The ExoHand comes in two forms: as the extremity of a robotic arm or a wearable exoskeleton glove. The system is designed so that the glove can aid assembly line workers performing repetitive tasks with their hands or be used for the remote manipulation of the robotic arm by a user wearing the glove.”
The swarm behavior of ants can be instructive to humans, but what about the design sense of termites? Can it aid roboticists? Will we live to see the day when millions of tiny bots build a structure from foundation to roof? A Reuters report about Harvard research on the topic.
While Muhammad Ali was exiled in his own country over his refusal to perform military service in Vietnam, he “boxed” retired great Rocky Marciano in a fictional contest that was decided by a computer. Dubbed the “Super Fight,” it took place in 1970. The fighters acted out thecomputer prognosticationsand the filmed result was released in theaters. Marciano summed up this moment of Singularity the best: “I’m glad you’ve got a computer being the man that makes the decision.” A piece of the film:
In 1968, William F. Buckley interviewed German-American psychiatrist Dr. Fredric Wertham, who had a profound effect on American culture in an assortment of ways. Dr. Wertham focused his studies on violence, and beginning in the 1940s began crusading against the comic books that were devoured freely by children. His work led to the 1950s Congressional hearings about the comics industry which nearly derailed one of the country’s most unique contributions to culture.
But Wertham had a far wider career than that. He also wrote a seminal paper about segregation that helped the Supreme Court decide Brown v. Board of Education, funded a mental health facility in Harlem for residents who had nowhere else to turn for treatment of psychological problems and was one of three physicians to interview and adjudge insane Albert Fish, the “Brooklyn Vampire,” who was one of the most notorious murderers in U.S. history.
From Silicon Republic: “A group of researchers from University of Arizona in the US have come up with a robotic set of legs to mimic the act of walking. They’re claiming their robotic innovation is the first to fully model walking in a biologically accurate manner.
Researchers from the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at University of Arizona are behind the robotic legs. To create the legs, they studied the neural musculoskeletal architecture and sensory feedback pathways in humans, before simplifying them and weaving them into the robot to make it mirror the act of walking.”
A photo process that used a metal plate and electrical charge to take trippy, often spectral-looking pictures, Kirlian photography was thought at one point to perhaps be able to reveal the “auras” of its subjects. Could it read the mental states of people whose thumbs were photographed? Could it tell who was suffering from cancer before other tests could reveal the disease? No, it couldn’t. The process discovered by accident in 1939 by Semyon Kirlian, while oddly beautiful to look at, ultimately had no scientific application. Footage is from UCLA in 1974, when that university was heavily researching parapsychology.
From a 2010 Daily Bruin article about UCLA parapsychology research:“The phone calls would come in, and the voice on the other side would ask, ‘Do you believe in ghosts?’
This wasn’t a prank. It was an investigation of ghostly phenomena.
The year was 1968, and UCLA’s Neuropsychiatric Institute was the new home for a controversial type of research – parapsychology.
Dr. Thelma Moss, a late psychology professor, headed the lab, which conducted scientific experiments in clairvoyance, telepathy and haunted houses until 1978.
‘It was a very exciting period of time. Things go in trends, and in the ’70s, there was a tremendous interest in parapsychology,’ said Kerry Gaynor, a former research assistant. ‘We were getting calls and letters every day. We were hearing about this kind of phenomena from all around the country and all around the world.'”
