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Dr. Brewster M. Higley.
“Home on the Range,” one of the prettiest songs ever about genocide, features lyrics written originally in 1873 by Dr. Brewster M. Higley, though the line about the “Red Man” was added later. Still the state song of Kansas, here are versions by Western icons Roy Rogers and Gene Autry.
Tags: Brewster M. Higley, Gene Autry, Roy Rogers
From BLDG BLOG, a post about Yodaville, an insta-ghost town in the Arizona desert that the U.S. military built to blow up:
“Yodaville is a fake city in the Arizona desert used for bombing runs by the U.S. Air Force. Writing for Air & Space Magazine back in 2009, Ed Darack wrote that, while tagging along on a training mission, he noticed ‘a small town in the distance—which, as we got closer, proved to have some pretty big buildings, some of them four stories high.’
As towns go, this one is relatively new, having sprung up in 1999. But nobody lives there. And the buildings are all made of stacked shipping containers. Formally known as Urban Target Complex (R-2301-West), the Marines know it as ‘Yodaville’ (named after the call sign of Major Floyd Usry, who first envisioned the complex).
As one instructor tells Darack, ‘The urban layout is actually very similar to the terrain in many villages in Iraq and Afghanistan.’
The Urban Target Complex, or UTC, was soon ‘lit up with red tracer rounds and bright yellow and white rocket streaks,’ till it “looked like it was barely able to keep standing.'”
I’ve asked this question before, but how different would the United States be if 22 of our 44 Presidents had been women? How changed would the nation be and how different the relations between men and women?
Ms. magazine turns 40 years old this month, having left the pages of New York to become its own brand in 1972. A look at Gloria Steinem, one of the founders, a year before the publication was launched.
Tags: Gloria Steinem
A brief 1973 profile of the late-life Buckminster Fuller, a brilliant if cross-eyed prophet of things that have not quite occurred.
Tags: Buckminster Fuller
The Ministry of Supply is doing a Kickstarter campaign for a futuristic, sweat-resistant dress shirt, called the Apollo, which is based on NASA Spacesuit technology. And not a moment too soon because it’s hot as hell out there. Some of you smell like a stable with a dead horse in it. And some of you reek like gun powder that was just used to shoot a hobo.
Fresno Slim: Just prior to “accidental” shooting.
Tags: Fresno Slim
From “Google Glass and the Rise of Outsourcing Our Memories,” Tom Chatfield’s new BBC piece about the future of brain augmentation in the face of seemingly infinite information:
“As early as 1945, the American engineer and inventor Vannevar Bush described the potentials of a hypothetical system he dubbed ‘Memex’: a single device within which a compressed, searchable form of all the records and communications in someone’s life could be stored. It’s a project whose spirit lives on in Microsoft’s MylifeBits project, among other places, which attempted digitally to record every single aspect of a modern life – and presented the results in a book by researchers Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell entitled Total Recall: How the E-Memory Revolution Will Change Everything.
What Google’s glasses suggest to me, though, is a giant leap forward in the sheer ease of capturing and broadcasting our lives from minute to minute – something that smartphones have already revolutionised once during the space of the last decade. Far more than mere technological possibility, it’s this portability and seamlessness that seem likely to most transform the way we live over the coming century. And it makes me wonder: what exactly does it mean when a computer’s memory becomes a more and more integral part of our own process of remembering?
The word ‘memory’ is the same in both cases, but there’s a huge gulf between the phenomena it describes in people and in machines. Computers’ memories offer a complete, faithful and objective record of whatever is put into them. They do not degrade over time or introduce errors. They can be shared and copied almost endlessly without loss, or precisely erased if preferred. They can be fully indexed and rapidly searched. They can be remotely accessed and beamed across the world in fractions of a second, and their contents remixed, augmented or updated endlessly.”
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Animated version of Vannevar Bush’s Memex diagrams:
From “As We May Think,” by Vannevar Bush in the Atlantic,1945: “There is a growing mountain of research. But there is increased evidence that we are being bogged down today as specialization extends. The investigator is staggered by the findings and conclusions of thousands of other workers—conclusions which he cannot find time to grasp, much less to remember, as they appear. Yet specialization becomes increasingly necessary for progress, and the effort to bridge between disciplines is correspondingly superficial.
Professionally our methods of transmitting and reviewing the results of research are generations old and by now are totally inadequate for their purpose. If the aggregate time spent in writing scholarly works and in reading them could be evaluated, the ratio between these amounts of time might well be startling. Those who conscientiously attempt to keep abreast of current thought, even in restricted fields, by close and continuous reading might well shy away from an examination calculated to show how much of the previous month’s efforts could be produced on call. Mendel’s concept of the laws of genetics was lost to the world for a generation because his publication did not reach the few who were capable of grasping and extending it; and this sort of catastrophe is undoubtedly being repeated all about us, as truly significant attainments become lost in the mass of the inconsequential.
The difficulty seems to be, not so much that we publish unduly in view of the extent and variety of present day interests, but rather that publication has been extended far beyond our present ability to make real use of the record. The summation of human experience is being expanded at a prodigious rate, and the means we use for threading through the consequent maze to the momentarily important item is the same as was used in the days of square-rigged ships.
But there are signs of a change as new and powerful instrumentalities come into use.”
Tags: Gordon Bell, Jim Gemmel, Tom Chatfield, Vannevar Bush
As thrilled as I am to see the Higgs Boson particle–the so-called “God Particle”–was almost definitely discovered by the Large Hadron Collider, it brings to mind that America, with all its amazing academic science departments, should have been doing work on this scale. Not every federal project, even ones that fail, are bridges to nowhere, but in this political climate anything the government wants to invest in is treated as suspect. The free market is great, but you notice it didn’t lead to a collider here that is on par with the European one. How do we find thousands of lives and a trillion dollars to spend on a war that we don’t need to fight but not 1/100th of that for something that could put us at the vanguard of science?
As I recall, the LHC was mocked initially because of difficulties that slowed it down. Similarly, the Hubble Telescope in the U.S. was treated as a punchline when it encountered problems at the outset of its use. But both have turned out to contribute greatly to scientific knowledge.
And what if they hadn’t? What if they had been failures? Science and engineering are about searching and there is always an element of risk, sometimes a high one, in building something new with just a blueprint. But there’s a difference between folly and failure and we should be willing to risk the latter in the name of progress.•
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“Without engineers, none of this would ever have happened. There would be no disasters–but also no achievement”:
The AT&T Picturephone demos in 1970. The service cost $160 per month.
The population of the Woodlands in Texas has swelled today to nearly 100,000, but it was a small Houston suburb when it was established in 1974, with the plan that its residents would be all watched over by computer, teletype, cable TV and other machines of loving grace.
When I originally posted this 1978 video about the famous Byte Shop chain, I didn’t have time to elaborate on why I thought we’d sort of failed the promise of the Home Brew Club and personal computer kits, so I’ll add an addendum.
The people in this video were imagining their future, building it. Media in America had long been a top-down operation and for a brief, shining moment, it wasn’t. I suppose it’s sort of inevitable that this period was transient and that some of the best and brightest (or, perhaps, most ambitious) would take the lead and use this early experience to build brands and drive markets. But despite the free flow of information we have now (a tremendous good), the actual direction is still essentially a top-down situation all over again, though, granted, the people at the top have a very good sense of design. I’m not suggesting everyone could have created brilliant things, but there was something definitely lost in the shift back to passive media consumption that occured by the 1980s.
I don’t mean to disparage the amazing tools we’ve been handed, but I think that’s part of the problem: They’ve been handed to us. Maybe our use of these tools would be more productive and less narcissistic if more of it had been the product of our own hands.•
I was watching this 1977 footage of period inventions that were making it easier for blind and deaf people to navigate society when what comes on my screen but a demonstration of the Kurzweil Reading Machine-you know, the gadget that gave computers a voice. The whole video is interesting but Ray Kurzweil’s creation appears at the 3:40 mark.
From The Age of Spiritual Machines, Kurzweil recalls the creation of his reading machine:
In 1974, computer programs that could recognize printed letters, called optical character recognition (OCR), were capable of handling only one or two specialized type styles. I founded Kurzweil Computer Products, Inc. that year to develop the first OCR program that could recognize any style of print, which we succeeded in doing later that year. So the question then became, ‘What is it good for?’ Like a lot of clever computer software, it was a solution in search of a problem.
I happened to sit next to a blind gentleman on a plane flight, and he explained to me that the only real handicap that he experienced was his inability to read ordinary printed material. It was clear that his visual disability imparted no real handicap in either communicating or traveling. So I had found the problem we were searching for – we could apply our ‘omni-font’ (any font) OCR technology to overcome this principal handicap of blindness. We didn’t have the ubiquitous scanners or text-to-speech synthesizers that we do today, so we had to create these technologies as well. By the end of 1975, we put together these three new technologies we had invented – omni-font OCR, CCD (Charge Coupled Device) flat-bed scanners, and text-to-speech synthesis to create the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind. The Kurzweil Reading Machine (KRM) was able to read ordinary books, magazines, and other printed documents out loud so that a blind person could read anything he wanted.•
Very happy to find an online version of the 1970 Look magazine interview with Walter Cronkite that Oriana Fallaci conducted, though it was scanned haphazardly so if you want to read it you have to rotate it several times or print it out. But it’s worth it, as the Q&A was the meeting of two very different journalists while they both were in their prime. An excerpt:
“Walter Cronkite:
Anyhow, let’s begin our conversation. What’s the subject?
Oriana Fallaci:
The one we are already talking about: Walter Cronkite, of course—who he is, what he thinks. Yes, overall, what he thinks. I share this curiosity with God knows how many million people. Each time I listen to you, I wonder: What are his opinions? He doesn’t express them, and he must have them!
Walter Cronkite:
You bet I do. Very strong opinions. Yet I would never give them with the news because this would hurt my objectivity. From time to time, CBS has suggested that I do commentaries or analyses, but I have always refused. Should I take a position with analysis or commentary, then the public would decide that I am prejudiced in editing the news. The public does not understand journalism. They do not know how we work, they do not believe that we can hold strong private thoughts and still be objective journalists. So I choose to do only unbiased reporting. I give you the news, and I don’t help you make the judgment. You make it all alone. Don’t you agree?
Oriana Fallaci:
Not completely. I say rather: Look, I do not possess the whole truth, so I can only give you the truth that I saw and heard and touched and even felt. Which is very uncomfortable because it is the perfect way to make everybody unhappy. Like when the reactionaries call me a Communist, or the Communists call me reactionary. . . .
Walter Cronkite:
But this means that you are objective! The point is that the public doesn’t understand objectivity, they judge us on the facts that we give them. Besides, your journalism is different from mine, you explain facts more than give news, and you are not as cautious as I am. You can afford the luxury of being emotional.
Oriana Fallaci:
Yes. No solid German stock, all furious Florentine stock. Yet I admire your detachment so passionately. Only a couple of times, if I am not wrong, you have shown emotion on TV. When John Kennedy died and when the first man landed on the moon.
Walter Cronkite:
Uhm . . . ‘Go, baby, go!’ I yelled so. The moon excited me a lot. But there are other examples. At the Democratic Convention in Chicago. for instance, I got very angry. We had such a bunch there on the Convention floor. And certainly when I found out that Kennedy was dead, that I had to say it, I choked up quite a bit. God, it was hard! You know, Oriana, I never go on the air in shirt-sleeves or with my hair uncombed. That day, Charles Collingwood relieved me, and when I got up after four hours and a half, I saw my jacket hanging over the back of my chair. So I realized that I was in shirt-sleeves and that I had not even combed my hair. But something else happened. When I went to my office to call my wife, both my lines were busy because the switchboard was jammed with calls. Then my phone rang, I grabbed it and the voice of a woman came on: “May I have the News Department of CBS?’ So I said, ‘This is the News Department of CBS.’ And she said, ‘Well, I want to say that it is absolutely criminal for CBS to have that man Cronkite on the air at a time like this, when everybody knows that he hates the Kennedys. But there he is, in shirt-sleeves, crying his crocodile tears.’ I said: ‘Madam, what’s your name?’ She gave me her name . . . let’s say it was Mrs. Smith. And I said: ‘Mrs. Smith, you are speaking to Walter Cronkite and you are a goddamn idiot.'”
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Walter Cronkite’s first evening news broadcast on CBS, 1963:
Tags: Oriana Fallaci, Walter Cronkite
“A tiny triangular-shaped car known as the DeltaWing was giving the other 55 fire-breathing machines a run for their money.” (Image by Chris Pruitt.)
As science and technology continue to improve and carbon meets silicon with greater regularity, it’s increasingly difficult to assess the nature of so-called human competition. But even 40 years ago, the line was blurry. From the Economist, an article about cutting-edge auto engineering at the recent Le Mans:
“A tiny triangular-shaped car known as the DeltaWing was giving the other 55 fire-breathing machines a run for their money when it was unceremoniously bumped off the track and into the crash barrier by one of the Toyotas. So ended a brave attempt to show that a car with half the weight, half the horsepower and half the aerodynamic drag could run rings round the dreadnoughts of the sport.
It was not the first time that a radical, lightweight design has challenged conventional thinking in motor racing. Something similar happened when Colin Chapman’s featherweight Lotus 23, with Jim Clark at the wheel, made its debut at the Nürburgring’s infamous northern loop in 1962. With its tiny 100 horsepower motor (a third that of its rivals), the Lotus 23 shot ahead of the field of ponderous Porsches, Aston Martins and Ferraris. After one lap of the rain-soaked track, Clark was 27 seconds ahead of the leading Porsche driven by the American ace, Dan Gurney. The world of motor racing had never seen anything like it before.
The following month, when two Lotus 23 cars—one with a 750cc engine and the other with a 1,000cc unit—were entered for the Le Mans endurance race, French officials promptly banned them for being too good. Chapman swore never to enter a Lotus car for the 24-hour Le Mans race ever again—and kept his promise till the day he died.”
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Jim Clark handling the Lotus 25, 1963:
Tags: Jim Clark
Jobs and Wozniak sold 50 Apple I computers to the Byte Shop.
Remarkable 1978 footage from inside the Palo Alto Byte Shop, one of the outlets in Paul Terrell’s early personal computer retail chain. The power was just beginning to pass into our hands, though I think all these years later we still haven’t done much with it.
In “How to Dispel Your Illusions,” a NYRB piece from December 2011, Freeman Dyson writes about Daniel Kahneman’s reliance in objective information over subjective analysis, using as an example the work of noted pediatric anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar. An excerpt:
“Kahneman had a bachelor’s degree in psychology and had read a book, Clinical vs. Statistical Prediction: A Theoretical Analysis and a Review of the Evidence by Paul Meehl, published only a year earlier. Meehl was an American psychologist who studied the successes and failures of predictions in many different settings. He found overwhelming evidence for a disturbing conclusion. Predictions based on simple statistical scoring were generally more accurate than predictions based on expert judgment.
A famous example confirming Meehl’s conclusion is the ‘Apgar score,’ invented by the anesthesiologist Virginia Apgar in 1953 to guide the treatment of newborn babies. The Apgar score is a simple formula based on five vital signs that can be measured quickly: heart rate, breathing, reflexes, muscle tone, and color. It does better than the average doctor in deciding whether the baby needs immediate help. It is now used everywhere and saves the lives of thousands of babies.”
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Apgar is lauded by actress (and nurse) Kathryn Crosby, year unknown:
Tags: Freeman Dyson, Kathryn Crosby, Paul Meehl, Virginia Apgar
I’ve said before that my hunch is that in the near-term batteries will change tremendously for the better. Here’s a video about new spray-on paintable batteries invented at Rice University. (Thanks Next Big Future.)
The Sand Flea Jumping Robot, by your friends at Boston Dynamics and DARPA.
Engineering, like much of life, is a series of approximations and educated bets, which may end up in failure. In order to create something almost beyond the possibility of disaster, it would have to be as overbuilt as the Brooklyn Bridge, and that’s pretty cost prohibitive at this point in developed countries.
I can’t explain exactly why I’m so interested in this 1977 video about the Failure Analysis Associates in Los Angeles, which still exists today. It’s a company run by ghostbusters searching for the ghost in the machine, who try to figure out why the best laid plans of mice and men ended up motionless in a spring-loaded trap.
Today is the 40th anniversary of Nolan Bushnell’s Atari, the pre-PC age way to get your kids to shut up for five minutes. The first commercial for the living-room friendly version of Pong from 1975, a lousy ad for a great product.
Although I wouldn’t say Atari invented Pong. Willian Higinbotham created Tennis for Two in 1958.
Michael Crichton arguing that Orwell’s 1984 actually did come to pass, not by totalitarian regime but by our own hands. You know–we like to watch and be watched.
Tags: Michael Crichton
From “One Man’s Meat Is Another’s Person,” Raymond Sokolov’s 1974 Natural History article about cannibalism, a topic much in the news then because of the startling story from two years earlier about plane crash survivors in the Andes making desperately needed nutrients of dead passengers. The opening:
“HUMANS may taste good, but most societies are a long way from cannibalism. Of all the taboos in Western society, the prohibition against the eating of human flesh is the most widely obeyed. Thousands among us kill someone every year. Incest is not common, yet it occurs—and enriches the fantasy life of many an analysand. But cannibalism is an infraction of the social order that very few have risked.
Like all forbidden fruits, nevertheless, cannibalism fascinates us. Ever since Columbus first discovered it among the Caribs (who were called canibales, whence the name), it has inspired an entire literature of speculation and raised a dark question in the minds of people too civilized to feel anything but repulsion at the idea of bolting human steaks but unable to keep from wondering in untrammeled moments what they taste like.
Explorers, probably translating a Fijian phrase, reported that the stuff was known to its fanciers in the Pacific as ‘long pig.’ This never seemed more than a dubious description of the savor of our muscular Christian selves. The enigma basically remained until late 1972. Survivors of a Uruguayan plane crash in the Andes, who were cut off from the outside world for weeks, in desperation ate fellow passengers killed in the accident. After their rescue, the survivors told Piers Paul Read—who set down their story in the current best-seller Alive (Lippincott)—that after cooking the meat briefly (they tried it first raw), ‘the slight browning of the flesh gave it an immeasurably better flavor–softer than beef but with much the same taste.’
That is the kind of testimony one can believe, especially from Uruguayans, who know their beef. It is also good news that humans taste good: alternatives to soyburgers are always welcome, and we can at last exonerate cannibal societies of the charge of unrefined savagery. Instead, they were gastronomes.”
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“16 men survived for 72 days by doing the unthinkable”:
Tags: Piers Paul Read, Raymond Sokolov'
Dutch company Mars One plans a reality TV show about humans living on our neighboring planet in 2023, conflating technological prowess and narcissism, two hallmarks of contemporary Western culture. It doesn’t appear to be an elaborate prank as insane as it sounds.
Video-game designer Ste Pickford wonders why he still sketches on a pad with pen and pencil in this Digital Age. From his blog post:
“I’m no luddite. I’ve been happily working as a designer on computers for over 25 years, and I’m comfortable making graphics and building finished work on a computer. I can happily draw and paint with the Wacom pad (and even with a mouse if I have to), and I have no problems staring at the screen for hours on end, but I still revert back to pen and paper when I want to work out something new.
Why is this?
Is it because, despite my extensive computer experience, I started drawing before the computer age? I had never seen a computer before the age of 10, and probably not touched a mouse until I was about 17, but I had a pencil in my hand from the age of about 2 or 3. Perhaps the younger generation of designers, who’ve used computers since they were born, will be able to go completely digital and never need paper at all?
Or, more likely, is it that there still isn’t a software / hardware combination that offers the flexibility and ease-of-use of pen and paper, when you have unformed ideas that you need to explore?
Where is the digital paper I dreamed about as a kid?”
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Spiromania, 1973:
Tags: Ste Pickford
What does it mean that Al Goldstein and Larry Flynt were once, not too long ago, considered the filthiest, most disgraceful people in the nation and now even the most obscene thing they were selling can easily be viewed on a computer screen in any home (and on most phones) at every single moment? Were they ahead of their time? Were they the McLuhans of filth? I’m not even talking about a battle over civil rights but one about human nature. It seems now like they were merely announcing the future, and one that has been overwhelmingly accepted and approved by the country that was so outraged by them.
A relatively modest moment for Goldstein was this interview he did with mental minstrel Tiny Tim roughly 30 years ago. The language is very NSFW unless your work involves a gloryhole.
Tags: Al Goldstein, Larry Flynt, Tiny Tim
Long-form interview with B.F. Skinner about the nature of education.
Tags: B.F. Skinner