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That happily married (and remarried) couple, Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor, profiled on 60 Minutes, 1970.
Their greatest joint film effort, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, as performed by fast-talking commercial pitchmen (and women), SCTV, 1980:
In the wake of 9/11, the recently departed Libyan despot tried to recast himself as anti-terrorist during a 60 Minutes interview with PBS strongman Charlie Rose.
Tags: Charlie Rose, Muammar al-Qaddafi
The year 2001: A Space Odyssey was released and a year before Apollo 11 landed on the moon, Stanley Kubrick was asked during a Playboy Interview what he thought we would find on the surface of our natural satellite. An excerpt:
“Playboy: What do you think we’ll find on the moon?
Kubrick: I think the most exciting prospect about the Moon is that if alien races have ever visited Earth in the remote past and left artifacts for man to discover in the future, they probably chose the airless lunar vacuum, where no deterioration would take place and an object could exist for millennia. It would be inevitable that as man evolved technologically, he would reach his nearest satellite and the aliens would then expect him to find their calling card–perhaps a message of greeting, a cache of knowledge or simply a cosmic burglar alarm signaling that another race had mastered space flight. This, of course, was the central situation of 2001.”
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“Universe,” Roman Kroitor and Colin Low’s 1960 short which informed 2001:
From “Fragmentary Knowledge,” John Seabrook’s 2008 New Yorker article about the Antikythera Mechanism, perhaps humankind’s first computer:
“Looking back over the first 50 years of research on the Mechanism, one is struck by the reluctance of modern investigators to credit the ancients with technological skill. The Greeks are thought to have possessed crude wooden gears, which were used to lift heavy building materials, haul up water, and hoist anchors, but historians do not generally credit them with possessing scientifically precise gears—gears cut from metal and arranged into complex ‘gear trains’ capable of carrying motion from one driveshaft to another. Paul Keyser, a software developer at IBM and the author of Greek Science of the Hellenistic Era, told me recently, ‘Those scholars who study the history of science tend to focus on science beginning with Copernicus and Galileo and Harvey, and often go so far as to assert that no such thing existed before.’ It’s almost as if we wished to reserve advanced technological accomplishment exclusively for ourselves. Our civilization, while too late to make the fundamental discoveries that the Greeks made in the sciences—Euclidean geometry, trigonometry, and the law of the lever, to name a few—has excelled at using those discoveries to make machines. These are the product and proof of our unique genius, and we’re reluctant to share our glory with previous civilizations.
In fact, there is evidence that earlier civilizations were much more technically adept than we imagine they were. As Peter James and Nick Thorpe point out in Ancient Inventions, published in 1994, some ancient civilizations were aware of natural electric phenomena and the invisible powers of magnetism (though neither concept was understood). The Greeks had a tradition of great inventors, beginning with Archimedes of Syracuse (ca. 287–212 BC), who, in addition to his famous planetarium, is believed to have invented a terrible clawed device made up of large hooks, submerged in the sea, and attached by a cable to a terrestrial hoist; the device was capable of lifting the bow of a fully loaded warship into the air and smashing it down on the water—the Greeks reportedly used the weapon during the Roman siege of Syracuse around 212 BC. Philon of Byzantium (who lived around 200 BC) made a spring-driven catapult. Heron of Alexandria (who lived around the first century AD) was the most ingenious inventor of all. He described the basic principles of steam power and is said to have invented a steam-powered device in which escaping steam caused a sphere with two nozzles to rotate. He also made a mechanical slot machine, a water-powered organ, and machinery for temples and theaters, including automatic swinging doors. He is perhaps best remembered for his automatons—simulations of animals and men, cleverly engineered to sing, blow trumpets, and dance, among other lifelike actions.” (Thanks Electric Typewriter.)
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Some of Heron’s automata:
Tags: John Seabrook, Nick Thorpe, Paul Keyser, Peter James
No training wheels necessary.
So, legendary TV comedian and all-around blowhard Milton Berle used to tell a serious anecdote about impregnating a woman he wasn’t married to, and the emotional fallout of the experience. He repeated it once in 1974 on Mike Douglas’ talk show when sharing the panel with a hugely wasted and gigglish Richard Pryor. The younger comic couldn’t supress his laughter during the maudlin tale, and Berle felt dissed. One of the greatest moments in the history of moments. At the 1:20 mark of this compilation of the bizarre.
The end of Berle’s story: He and the unnamed woman decided to have the baby. It was a boy. Berle and the mother kept his paternity a secret between them and never told the child or anyone else. The kid grew up to be a performer in show biz, and Berle aided his career but kept the secret.
Tags: Mike Douglas, Milton Berle, Richard Pryor
From a 1972 Playboy Interview with Buckminster Fuller, who offers his non-PC take on social revolution:
“PLAYBOY: When you say that young people are doing their own thinking and refusing to follow dogma, do you feel that this generation is fundamentally different from those that came before?
FULLER: Most assuredly. The masses of them are different. Let me go back to the reasons for this, because one of the most interesting discoveries I’ve made relates to it. When Malthus, as a young economist, began receiving his data at the start of the 19th Century, he was the first economist dealing with total data from the whole earth seen as a closed system. And he found that apparently, people were reproducing themselves more rapidly than they were producing food for themselves. Darwin followed, with his survival of the fittest, and these two compounded to justify the actions of the men I call the great pirates, the imperialists of that period, the elect, as they thought of themselves. Then Karl Marx came along, with the same jargon, assuming scarcity as a permanent condition and agreeing with the Darwin argument. And Marx said that the fittest among men was the worker, because the worker was closest to nature and knew how to cope with it. He knew how to cultivate and handle the chisel, and so forth, and the other people were parasites.
As late as 1815 in England, commoners caught killing a rabbit were often hanged on the spot without a trial; those animals belonged to the nobles and the king. These most powerful men ate the meat and the other people could make do with what was left over. And in their ignorance about what they should eat and what would give them nourishment, they let themselves get into a position where those who were powerful and ate well could rule by the sword. The proportion of nobles to the total population was so small that everybody assumed there must be some mystical reason they should have the best of it. And what was evident to everybody was that not only were the poor people illiterate and ill-clothed, and so forth, but they also seemed dumb.
Now, this was something that hurt me very much when I was a kid. I was brought up with this class thing, and I hated it and didn’t believe it was valid. But I couldn’t get over this thing that confronted me: Poor people seemed to be dumb. I worked with them and I loved them, but they were dumb. And Karl Marx accepted this. These people, while they were the fittest, gave in to the nobles out of dumbness, so Marx saw that people like that would need powerful rules if they were to be saved. If you’re going to pull the top down on society and your people are dumb, there have to be standards that everyone can recognize and follow, so you make a virtue of your dumbness and your coarseness and you live by strong rules. You wear your baggy and stupid clothes and make yourself proud of them.
A great many young people feel tremendously sympathetic with this idea these days, as I did at Harvard more than 50 years ago. You want to join with the underdog and therefore you wear his clothing and give up your standard of living. But this idea is becoming obsolete, however much it might appeal to the moral logic of young people. Because only in the past ten years have we finally had the first scientific proof – and now absolute scientific proof – that malnutrition during the child’s time in the womb and during the early years of life causes permanent brain damage. So this dumbness and coarseness factor that Mark built into his theory of class warfare is purely the damaged brain of malnutrition – something we now can eliminate by the kind of revolution that pulls the bottom up instead of pulling the top down.”
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Tags: Buckminster Fuller
"Amazing." (Image by Harry Poulsen.)
I’ve finally decided what I want to be for Halloween. A 90’s mom. I need To find a bigger size pair of high wasted Women’s Jeans. Preferable Light wash. Let me know if you can help me out would be amazing.
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“I’m not a woman anymore…I’m a mom”:
A new way to capture 360°. (Thanks Mashable.)
Scientist John McCarthy, who just passed away, coined the term “Artificial Intelligence” in 1955. From the BBC:
“Professor McCarthy is also credited with coining the term “Artificial Intelligence” in 1955 when he detailed plans for the first Dartmouth conference. The brainstorming sessions helped focus early AI research.
Prof McCarthy’s proposal for the event put forward the idea that “every aspect of learning or any other feature of intelligence can in principle be so precisely described that a machine can be made to simulate it”.
The conference, which took place in the summer of 1956, brought together experts in language, sensory input, learning machines and other fields to discuss the potential of information technology.”
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“I’m half crazy, all for the love of you,” 1961
Tags: John McCarthy
The opening of a New York Times obituary by Margalit Fox about Swami Bhaktipada, formerly Keith Gordon Ham of Peekskill, New York, who led one wacky life:
“Swami Bhaktipada, a former leader of the American Hare Krishna movement who built a sprawling golden paradise for his followers in the hills of Appalachia but who later pleaded guilty to federal racketeering charges that included conspiracy to commit the murders-for-hire of two devotees, died on Monday in a hospital near Mumbai, India. He was 74.
The cause was kidney failure, his brother, Gerald Ham, said.
Mr. Bhaktipada, who was released from prison in 2004 after serving eight years of a 12-year sentence, moved to India in 2008.
The son of a Baptist preacher, Mr. Bhaktipada was one of the first Hare Krishna disciples in the United States. He founded, in 1968, what became the largest Hare Krishna community in the country and presided over it until 1994, despite having been excommunicated by the movement’s governing body.”
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Krishnas get cold shoulder at Hippie Fest in Cincinnati, 1970:
Tags: Iggy Pop, Keith Gordon Ham, Margalit Fox, Swami Bhaktipada
A time warp from 1970, this clip has David Frost interviewing Geraldine Jones, the feminine alter ego of comedian Flip Wilson. Wilson was, for a while, the biggest thing in American TV, and the pressure seemed to be a little more than he could bear. The Geraldine phrase, “What you see is what you get,” is said to have been responsible for the computer term “WYSIWYG.”
Wilson with Ed Sullivan, also 1970:
Tags: David Frost, Ed Sullivan, Flip Wilson
Live ten-minute coverage of the total eclipse of the sun, 1979. Anchored by Frank Reynolds, with reports by anyone who could get unduly excited about a temporary absence of light.
Tags: Frank Reynolds
"Some on the right were baffled that the ostensible Marxists demonstrating in lower Manhattan would observe a moment of silence and assemble makeshift shrines for a top one-percenter like Jobs." (Image by David Shankbone.)
In his excellent new piece in New York about the looming class war, which has been waged silently and unilaterally for nearly three decades against the middle class, Frank Rich explains why the Occupiers expressed grief over the death of that wealthy capitalist Steve Jobs. An excerpt:
“But while Romney is a class enemy liberals and conservatives can unite against, perhaps nothing has revealed how much the class warriors of the right and left of our time have in common than the national outpouring after Steve Jobs’s death. Indeed, the near-universal over-the-top emotional response—more commensurate with a saintly religious or civic leader, not a sometimes bullying captain of industry—brought Americans of all stripes together as few events have in recent memory.
Some on the right were baffled that the ostensible Marxists demonstrating in lower Manhattan would observe a moment of silence and assemble makeshift shrines for a top one-percenter like Jobs, whose expensive products were engineered for near-instant obsolescence and produced by Chinese laborers in factories with substandard health-and-safety records. For heaven’s sake, the guy didn’t even join Warren Buffett and Bill Gates in their Giving Pledge. ‘There is perhaps no greater image of irony,’ wrote the conservative blogger Michelle Malkin, ‘than that of anti-capitalist, anti-corporate, anti-materialist extremists of the Occupy Wall Street movement paying tribute to Steve Jobs.’
Yet those demonstrators who celebrated Jobs were not necessarily hypocrites at all—and no more anti-capitalist than the Bonus Army of 1932. If you love your Mac and iPod, you can still despise CDOs and credit-default swaps. Jobs’s genius—in the words of Regis McKenna, a Silicon Valley marketing executive who worked with him early on—was his ability ‘to strip away the excess layers of business, design, and innovation until only the simple, elegant reality remained.’ The supposed genius of modern Wall Street is the exact reverse, piling on excess layers of business and innovation on ever thinner and more exotic creations until simple reality is distorted and obscured. Those in Palin’s ‘real America’ may not be agitated about the economic 99-vs.-one percent inequality brought about by the rise of the financial sector in the past three decades, but, like class warriors of the left, they know that ‘financial instruments’ wreaked havoc on their 401(k)s, homes, and jobs. The bottom line remains that Wall Street’s opaque inventions led directly to TARP, the taxpayers’ bank bailout that achieved the seemingly impossible feat of unifying the left and right in rage against government—much as Jobs’s death achieved the equally surprising coup of unifying left and right in mourning a corporate god.”
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Frank Rich, being treated slightly better than Lindsey Buckingham:
Tags: Frank Rich, Steve Jobs
Richard Nixon, during his “Wilderness Years,” just months after losing the gubernatorial race in California, political obituary already written, schmoozing with Jack Paar, 1963.
Tags: Jack Paar, Richard M. Nixon
It probably doesn’t matter if childrem have a low-tech or high-tech education provided their parents are interested and encouraging. But some employees of Silicon Valley’s biggest digital companies are opting to educate their own children sans computers. An excerpt from Matt Richtel’s New York Times article on the topic:
“While other schools in the region brag about their wired classrooms, the Waldorf school embraces a simple, retro look — blackboards with colorful chalk, bookshelves with encyclopedias, wooden desks filled with workbooks and No. 2 pencils.
On a recent Tuesday, Andie Eagle and her fifth-grade classmates refreshed their knitting skills, crisscrossing wooden needles around balls of yarn, making fabric swatches. It’s an activity the school says helps develop problem-solving, patterning, math skills and coordination. The long-term goal: make socks.
Down the hall, a teacher drilled third-graders on multiplication by asking them to pretend to turn their bodies into lightning bolts. She asked them a math problem — four times five — and, in unison, they shouted “20” and zapped their fingers at the number on the blackboard. A roomful of human calculators.”
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Miss Crabtree didn’t need electronic gizmos to keep Chubbsy Ubbsy enrapt:
Tags: Andie Eagle
Quite a while ago, I posted an excerpt from Ron Rosenbaum’s seminal 1971 Esquire blue-box article, which inspired the young Steves (Jobs and Wozniak) to become phone phreaks and begin their little computer company. At Slate, Rosenbaum recalls meeting Jobs in the ’80s and learning of his role in the birth of Apple. An excerpt:
“The lunch with Jobs took place in a huge hangar-like restaurant—then-fashionable, now-defunct—called, I swear, ‘America.’ I had been doing a story about California surfer-styled ad man Jay Chiat, the one who devised the Apple’s turning-point ‘1984’ ad, depicting a lithe young woman hurling a hammer at a screen upon which an evil looking Big Brother-type was delivering a harangue. The ad captured—or created—the Apple ethos of rebellion against the tyranny of conformity.
Anyway Jobs was in town and he came to the lunch with Chiat, and after the introductions, he told me about how the blue box article had inspired him and Wozniak. How they’d taken down the cycles-per-second of the tones AT&T used to translate phone numbers into audio signals, some of which I’d disclosed in the article, and how they’d found the others in some obscure technical journals and had begun building their own blue boxes, hoping to sell them on the underground market. (Gamblers and mobsters liked to use them to keep their communications outside the system.)
Even then, at that lunch, Jobs displayed his characteristic design sensibility when talking about these illicit gadgets. Some of the sleeker ones were about the size of cigarette pack, with silvery keyboard panels—not too different in appearance from the later iPod—and I remember his keen interest in what model, what design, I’d gotten hold of.
But he came across as a very level-headed guy, unpretentious even though his company was then blowing up big time. I remember being gratified at my story having some influence, and indeed I put Jobs’ revelation into the story about Chiat, but it was cut by an otherwise astute editor. Jobs just wasn’t that important then.”
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Jobs tells the blue-box story:
Another Ron Rosenbaum post:
Tags: Ron Rosenbaum, Steve Jobs
Periodically, America needs a pep talk. Where have you gone Lee Iacocca? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you. From 1984.
Lee Iacocca’s Rock Concert, SCTV:
Tags: Lee Iacocca
Even though the word “meme” seems to have been invented during the Internet Age, Richard Dawkins actually coined the term–a truncated version of the ancient Greek word “mimeme,” which means “something repeated”–back in 1976. An excerpt from a 1995 Wired article by Michael Schrage about Dawkins:
“But even without futuristic morphing, Dawkins’s head holds more provocative ideas than most. Two decades ago, Dawkins presented a radical evolutionary perspective in a small book called The Selfish Gene, a disturbingly persuasive essay arguing that living things are little more than corporal vessels impelled to heed the primal dictates of selfish genes hellbent on their own replication and propagation. Much as the English philosopher and novelist Samuel Butler observed a century ago that a chicken is just a way an egg makes another egg, Dawkins proposed that we are nothing but expressions of our selfish genes in the process of making more selfish genes. Taking that idea even further, Dawkins proposed that genes themselves are expressions of particularly elegant code manipulating the world around it to its own reproductive end. He extended these notions into culture and described ideas as competing, self-replicating entities he called memes. Dawkins’s most recent book, River Out of Eden, extends his life’s work into a unified evolutionary theory arguing that all life, at its core, is a process of digital-information transfer.”
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Dawkins in 2000 with semi-convincing male impersonator Rosie Charles:
Tags: Charlie Rose, Richard Dawkins
Finally a reason for me to stop smashing bottles on the ground when they’re empty. Thank you, K-Tel.
Richard Feynman arguing against what he considered pseudo-science. I think statisical analysis and elements of scientific inquiry can be applied in social sciences, but literary studies was pretty ruined by academics in that field who wanted to behave as if they were scientists, who wanted to have the air of indisputability.
Tags: Richard Feynman
From Bernard Moon’s “The Coming Ubiquity of Video Communications,” via ReadWriteWeb:
“Over the past decades, the promise of video as a standard form of communication has been presented to us through many mediums, from Star Trek to The Jetsons and even through my old Avengers comic books over 30 years ago. While corporations utilize video conferencing technology at a rapid rate, it hasn’t yet penetrated the daily habits of people across the globe but it will.
The core technology has been there for decades, but not the bandwidth and compression technology along with the hardware to make it an everyday utility. With the growth of Skype’s video chat, Google’s GTalk, Apple’s Facetime and other services, combined with the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, video will become the standard form of communications versus SMS, voice only and even email in some situations within a few years.”
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“Mom, it’s a picture phone”:
Tags: Bernard Moon
The great Robert Mitchum refuses to terrify Dick Cavett, 1971.
Tags: Dick Cavett, Robert Mitchum
In 1981, William F. Buckley and Diana Trilling investigated the ramifications of the murder of Dr. Henry Tarnower by his longtime companion, Jean Harris, a slaying which awakened all sorts of emotions about the dynamics between men and women.
From “Jean Harris: Murder with Intent to Love,” the 1981 Time article by Walter Isaacson and James Wilde: “Prosecutor George Bolen, 34, was cold and indignant in his summation, insisting that jealousy over Tarnower‘s affair with his lab assistant, Lynne Tryforos, 38, was the motivating factor for murder. Argued Bolen: ‘There was dual intent, to take her own life, but also an intent to do something else . . . to punish Herman Tarnower . . . to kill him and keep him from Lynne Tryforos.’ Bolen ridiculed the notion that Harris fired her .32-cal. revolver by accident. He urged the jury to examine the gun while deliberating. Said he: ‘Try pulling the trigger. It has 14 pounds of pull. Just see how difficult it would be to pull, double action, four times by accident.’ Bolen, who was thought by his superiors to be too gentle when he cross-examined Harris earlier in the trial, showed little mercy as he painted a vivid picture of what he claims happened that night. He dramatically raised his hand in the defensive stance he says Tarnower used when Harris pointed the gun at him. When the judge sustained an objection by Aurnou that Bolen‘s version went beyond the evidence presented, the taut Harris applauded until her body shook.”
Tags: Diana Trilling, George Bolen, Henry Tarnower, James Wilde, Joel Aurnou, Lynne Tryforos, Walter Isaacson, William F. Buckley
In the European, science historian George Dyson, son of physicist Freeman Dyson, is interviewed about evolution and innovation. An excerpt from the Q&A:
“The European: Is the Internet increasing the innovative potential of mankind?
Dyson: It is very easy to be a pessimist: There is no good music anymore, no good art. But maybe we have to recognize that innovation is still happening, albeit in very different ways. We might feel that all that time people spend on Facebook is a great loss for the creativity of the human species, but maybe that is not true.
The European: I expected a somewhat different answer: We used to have only human intelligence, and now that has been supplemented by computational intelligence. So we would expect the potential for innovation to become supplemented as well.
Dyson: Yes and no. The danger is not that machines are advancing. The danger is that we are losing our intelligence if we rely on computers instead of our own minds. On a fundamental level, we have to ask ourselves: Do we need human intelligence? And what happens if we fail to exercise it?
The European: The question becomes: What progress is good progress?
Dyson: Right. How do we maintain our diversity? It would be a great shame to lose something like human intelligence that was developed at such costs over such a long period of time. I spent a lot of my life living in the wilderness and building kayaks. I believe that we need to protect our self-reliant individual intelligence—what you would need to survive in a hostile environment. Few of us are still living self-reliant lives. That is not necessarily a bad thing, but we should be cautious not to surrender into dependency on other forms of intelligence. I am a historian of science, I believe in preserving the past.
The European: Are there any predictions for the future we can make, based on these lessons from the past?
Dyson: The universe is a probability space in which possible things can happen. Over the last fifty years, we have developed a combined human-computational intelligence that is able to search that space at a tremendous rate. But we have no way to predict what might happen in the future to that space of possibilities. The whole idea of species might be called into question. Darwin called his book On the Origin of Species, but evolution really isn’t limited to species. The next step might be the end of distinct species and the beginning of a more symbiotic life.” (Thanks Browser.)
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In 2002, George Dyson recalls the spectacular Project Orion:
Tags: George Dyson