“I’m Afraid Of You Doc Because You’re A Mad Scientist”

February 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Before there was turnt, there was turned-on, the term for LSD experimentation taken from the Timothy Leary-Marshall McLuhan co-created mantra “Turn on, Tune in, Drop Out.” Thanks to some fakakta reasoning, Leary was allowed, during his Harvard professor days, to do acid tests on Massachusetts prison inmates, the belief being that the trip would help them arrive at rehabilitation. The subjects were wary of the good doctor, and for good reason, though by Leary’s telling everything went well overall. The guru recalled the experience in an article in the 1969 Psychedelic Review. An excerpt:

I’ll never forget that morning. After about half an hour, I could feel the effect coming up, the loosening of symbolic reality, the feeling of humming pressure and space voyage inside my head, the sharp, brilliant, brutal, intensification of all the senses. Every cell and every sense organ was humming with charged electricity. I felt terrible. What a place to be on a gray morning! In a dingy room, in a grim penitentiary, out of my mind. I looked over at the man next to me, a Polish embezzler from Worcester, Massachusetts. I could see him so clearly. I could see every pore in his face, every blemish, the hairs in his nose, the incredible green-yellow enamel of the decay in his teeth, the wet glistening of his frightened eyes. I could see every hair in his head, as though each was as big as an oak tree. What a confrontation! What am I doing here, out of my mind, with this strange mosaic-celled animal, prisoner, criminal?

I said to him, with a weak grin, How are you doing, John? He said, I feel fine. Then he paused for a minute, and asked, How are you doing, Doc? I was about to say in a reassuring psychological tone that I felt fine, but I couldn’t, so I said, I feel lousy. John drew back his purple pink lips, showed his green-yellow teeth in a sickly grin and said, What’s the matter, Doc? Why you feel lousy? I looked with my two microscopic retina lenses into his eyes. I could see every line, yellow spider webs, red network of veins gleaming out at me. I said, John, I’m afraid of you. His eyes got bigger, then he began to laugh. I could look inside his mouth, swollen red tissues, gums, tongue, throat. Well that’s funny Doc, ’cause I’m afraid of you. We were both smiling at this point, leaning forward. Doc, he said, why are you afraid of me? I said, I’m afraid of you, John, because you’re a criminal. I said, John, why are you afraid of me? He said, I’m afraid of you Doc because you’re a mad scientist. Then our retinas locked and I slid down into the tunnel of his eyes, and I could feel him walking around in my skull and we both began to laugh. And there it was, that dark moment of fear and distrust, which could have changed in a second to become hatred, terror. We’d made the love connection. The flicker in the dark. Suddenly, the sun came out in the room and I felt great and I knew he did too.

We had passed that moment of crisis, but as the minutes slowly ticked on, the grimness of our situation kept coming back in microscopic clarity. There were the four of us turned-on, every sense vibrating, pulsating with messages, two billion years of cellular wisdom, but what could we do trapped within the four walls of a gray hospital room, barred inside a maximum security prison? Then one of the great lessons in my psychedelic training took place. One of the four of us was a Negro from Texas, jazz saxophone player, heroin addict. He looked around with two huge balls of ocular white, shook his head, staggered over to the record player, put on a record. It was a Sonny Rollins record which he’d especially asked us to bring. Then he lay down on the cot and closed his eyes. The rest of us sat by the table while metal air from the yellow saxophone, spinning across copper electric wires, bounced off the wails of the room. There was a long silence. Then we heard Willy moaning softly, and moving restlessly on the couch. I turned and looked at him, and said, Willy, are you all right? There was apprehension in my voice. Everyone in the room swung their heads anxiously to look and listen for the answer. Willy lifted his head, gave a big grin, and said, Man, am I all right? I’m in heaven and I can’t believe it! Here I am in heaven man, and I’m stoned out of my mind, and I’m swinging like I’ve never before and it’s all happening in prison, and you ask me man, am I all right. What a laugh! And then he laughed, and we all laughed, and suddenly we were all high and happy and chuckling at what we had done, bringing music, and love, and beauty, and serenity, and fun, and the seed of life into that grim and dreary prison. …

As I rode along the highway, the tension and the drama of the day suddenly snapped off and I could look back and see what we had done. Nothing, you see, is secret in prison, and the eight of us who had assembled to take drugs together in a prison were under the gaze of every convict in the prison and every guard, and within hours the word would have fanned through the invisible network to every other prison in the state. Grim Walpole penitentiary. Grey, sullen-walled Norfolk.

Did you hear? Some Harvard professors gave a new drug to some guys at Concord. They had a ball. It was great. It’s a grand thing. It’s something new. Hope. Maybe. Hope. Perhaps. Something new. We sure need something new. Hope.•

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“The Android Is Able To Speak No Fewer Than 19 Languages And Can Determine Customers’ Emotions From Their Facial Expressions”

February 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Japan’s graying, thinning population knows a scarcity of labor, a problem likely to grow worse. A solution: Open up what’s a very homogenous country to immigrants. But Japan’s chosen not to staff up with foreign humans but with foreigners to the species, setting up hologram desk clerks and robot bank tellers. If this AI, the Weak kind but impressive nonetheless, works there, wouldn’t such machines also be employed in places where humans are still readily looking to land a position? From Julian Ryall at the Telegraph:

Standing less than 23 inches tall and with only three digits on hands that are too big for his body, Nao is an unusual appointment at Japan’s biggest bank.

Officials of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group Inc believe, however, that this humanoid robot is likely to be an important addition to its operations.

Unveiling Nao in Tokyo on Monday, officials at the bank pointed out that the android is able to speak no fewer than 19 languages and can determine customers’ emotions from their facial expressions.

Nao is still undergoing some minor adjustments, officials said, but the bank anticipates that several of the robots will be meeting and greeting customers in branches from April.

Designed by Aldebaran Robotics SA, a Paris-based subsidiary of SoftBank Corp, Nao gave a demonstration of his skills, greeting a customer with a breezy “Hello and welcome” in fluent English.

“I can tell you about money exchange, ATMs, opening a bank account or overseas remittance,” the android added. “Which one would you like?”

Japanese companies are investing heavily in robots, both as a solution to the nation’s ageing and shrinking population and as a growing business opportunity.•

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The future of computerized banking, as envisioned in 1969:

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

February 3, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Is there a way of finding out if someone is badmouthing me online?

I have reason to believe that someone maybe badmouthing me online and was wondering there is a way of finding out.

“The Plan Is To Build A ‘Gas Station In Space'”

February 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Gas Station on the Moon sounds like the title of an unproduced Philip Glass composition, but it’s also a corporate dream, Manifest Destiny blasted into the stratosphere. There’s resources to be mined, riches to be had. From Phys.org:

With an estimated 1.6 billion tonnes of water ice at its poles and an abundance of rare-earth elements hidden below its surface, the moon is rich ground for mining.

In this month’s issue of Physics World, science writer Richard Corfield explains how private firms and space agencies are dreaming of tapping into these lucrative resources and turning the moon’s grey, barren landscape into a money-making conveyer belt.

Since NASA disbanded its manned Apollo missions to the moon over 40 years ago, unmanned spaceflight has made giant strides and has identified a bountiful supply of water ice at the north and south poles of the moon.

Since NASA disbanded its manned Apollo missions to the moon over 40 years ago, unmanned spaceflight has made giant strides and has identified a bountiful supply of water ice at the north and south poles of the moon.

“It is this, more than anything else,” Cornfield writes, “that has kindled interest in mining the moon, for where there is ice, there is fuel.”

As the company’s chief executive officer, Dale Tietz, explains, the plan is to build a “gas station in space” in which rocket propellant will be sold at prices significantly lower than the cost of sending fuel from Earth.

SEC plans to extract the water ice by sending humans and robots to mine the lunar poles, and then use some of the converted products to power mining hoppers, lunar rovers and life support for its own activities.•

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“Bureaucracy Is A Utopian Project”

February 3, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the U.S., the Right pretends it’s attacking bureaucracy while really angling to subjugate unions and workers; the aim is dismantling safety nets, not improving the situation. But that doesn’t mean mountains of paperwork shouldn’t be a bipartisan scourge. It’s often a maze with no exit. David Graeber’s forthcoming book, The Utopia of Rules, sees something even more sinister than incompetence buried in the files and folders. From Cory Doctorow’s review at Boing Boing:

Bureaucracy is pervasive and metastatic. To watch cop-dramas, you’d think that most of the job of policing was crime-fighting. But it’s not. The police are just “armed bureaucrats.” Most of what police do is administrative enforcement — making sure you follow the rules (threatening to gas you or hit you with a stick if you don’t). Get mugged and chances are, the police will take the report over the phone. Drive down the street without license plates and you’ll be surrounded by armed officers of the law who are prepared to deal you potentially lethal violence to ensure that you’re not diverging from the rules.

This just-below-the-surface violence is the crux of Graeber’s argument. He mocks the academic left who insist that violence is symbolic these days, suggesting that any grad student sitting in a university library reading Foucault and thinking about the symbolic nature of violence should consider the fact that if he’d attempted to enter that same library without a student ID, he’d have been swarmed by armed cops.

Bureaucracy is a utopian project: like all utopians, capitalist bureaucrats (whether in private- or public-sector) believe that humans can be perfected by modifying their behavior according to some ideal, and blame anyone who can’t live up to that ideal for failing to do so. If you can’t hack the paperwork to file your taxes, complete your welfare rules, figure out your 401(k) or register to vote, you’re obviously some kind of fuckup.

Bureaucracy begets bureaucracy. Every effort to do away with bureaucracy ends up with more bureaucracy.•

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“It’s Designed To Land Almost Anywhere”

February 3, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Of all the tomorrow things that may soon happen, ambulance drones seem like a fairly good bet. They won’t be prohibitively expensive and can deliver first responders into the middle of traffic accidents and other messy entanglements. From Mark Wilson at Fast Company:

In emergencies, seconds count. An estimated 1,000 “saveable” lives are lost a year because of slow emergency response in the nation’s biggest cities. But in traffic-jammed urban environments, how can a four-wheeled ambulance be expected to make it anywhere and back quickly?

Design firm argodesign has a wild conceptual solution. It’s a one-person ambulance drone modeled after a standard quadcopter—driven by a GPS, pilot, or combination of both—that could be dispatched to an emergency scene with a single EMT. It’s designed to land almost anywhere, thanks to a footprint the size of a compact car. The EMT stabilizes the patient, loads him up, and sends him back to the hospital for further treatment.

“Obviously, it’s not a thoroughly vetted concept, but I think it’s extremely intriguing where drones might show up,” says Mark Rolston, founder of argodesign. “It would be nice to see them used this way, rather than another military function or more photography.”

The idea was born from a team brainstorming session around how health care could become more accessible. The designers first thought about how they could build a better ambulance, and the rise ofautonomous vehicles inspired them to consider a self-driving ambulance. Then they thought of helicopters and drones, and the rest developed from there.•

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“Did I Ever Tell You About The Time I Performed An Appendectomy With A Rusty Sardine Can?”

February 2, 2015 in Books, Videos | Permalink

William S. Burroughs reading in 1981 from Naked Lunch on Saturday Night Live, the rare pleasing moment during the the show’s most arid patch, those years when Tony Rosato could be a cast member and Robert Urich a host. Lauren Hutton intros him.

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“Then – Next To The Dead Baby’s Coffin – They Had Sexual Intercourse”

February 2, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

William Butler Yeats famously pined for his muse, Maud Gonne, who rejected him. When her daughter, Iseult, turned 22, the now-midlife poet tried for her hand and was likewise turned away. While apparently no one in the family would fuck Yeats, Maud did apparently have sex in the grave of her infant son who had died at two, believing some mystical hooey which said the soul of the deceased boy would transmigrate into the new baby if she conceived next to his coffin. Well, okay. From Hugh Schofield at the BBC:

Actress, activist, feminist, mystic, Maud Gonne was also the muse and inspiration for the poet W B Yeats, who immortalised her in some of his most famous verses.

After the Free State was established in 1922, Maud Gonne remained a vocal figure in Irish politics and civil rights. Born in 1866, she died in Dublin in 1953.

But for many years in her youth and early adulthood, Maud Gonne lived in France.

Of this part of her life, much less is known. There is one long-secret and bizarre episode, however, that has now been established as almost certainly true.

This was the attempt in late 1893 to reincarnate her two-year-old son, through an act of sexual intercourse next to the dead infant’s coffin. …

Having inherited a large sum of money on the death of her father, she paid for a memorial chapel – the biggest in the cemetery. In a crypt beneath, the child’s coffin was laid.

In late 1893 Gonne re-contacted Lucien Millevoye, from whom she had separated after Georges’ death.

She asked him to meet her in Samois-sur-Seine. First the couple entered the small chapel, then opened the metal doors leading down to the crypt.

They descended the small metal ladder – just five or six steps. And then – next to the dead baby’s coffin – they had sexual intercourse.•

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A Brief Note From 1944 About A Caveman

February 2, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the September 7, 1944 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Birmingham, Ala. — Arnold Earnest, 24, who lived for three years in a cave to avoid the draft, began serving a five-year Federal Prison sentence today.

The farm boy was minus his bushy mustache, long hair and carefree manner as he was led from the courtroom where he was sentenced. He said it was “powerful hard” to sleep in jail.

Earnest lived in the woods of Fayette County, Ala., during the years he was a fugitive, eating berries and trapped animals. His shelter was a cave. 

When arrested by Federal agents, he had not heard of Pearl Harbor.•

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“That Neil Hamburger Show From Hell? We’re Already Living It.”

February 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Urban Studies | Permalink

There was a time not too long ago, before the words selfie and Kardashian were household, when Neil Hamburger, the alter-ego stand-up persona of Gregg Turkington, was even sadder than the rest of America, though we seem to have caught up. Through excruciatingly terrible jokes, he coldly points out that much of our pop culture exists merely because of how depressed and horny we are, vomiting forth the unbearable heaviness of our being. When the audience turns on his flailing, coughing, anti-comedy Pupkin-ness, Hamburger tries to manipulate mercy from them, claiming to have cancer. He isn’t feeling well, and how exactly are you and I and our chaturbating buddies?

Hamburger’s horribleness has hatched a movie which is currently at Sundance. From Matt Patches at Grantland:

In hell’s dingy comedy club, Neil Hamburger takes the stage each night, forcing audiences to confront the life they once lived. Still there are laughs — after all, this is a crowd that wound up in hell. A sample of his devilish comedy:

What’s the difference between Courtney Love and the American flag?

It would be wrong to urinate on the American flag.

For the living willing to challenge themselves, comedian Gregg Turkington tours the country as his tuxedoed alter ego Hamburger, delivering one-liners with nasally sadness. Audiences shell out to see Hamburger nose-dive with sets that would make Rupert Pupkin bite his lip. Though Turkington’s found success in his own shoes, acting in film and television, writing, and working with musicians, his weaponized jokester is the star.1 Neil Hamburger commands attention and remains an ever-changing creature, 20 years spent warping American pop culture with a fun-house mirror.

In the age of adaptation, any recognizable face is a movie waiting to happen. Borat got a movie. MacGruber got a movie. The Lego “minifig” got a movie. Fred Figglehorn got three nightmare-fuel movies (ask your kids). Saturday Night Live was in the character exploitation business before it was cool, churning out movies like It’s Pat, Coneheads, Stuart Saves His Family, and Wayne’s World. Despite a shtick that sends sensitive souls directly to therapy, Neil Hamburger’s day in the cinematic sun was inevitable. And now it’s here: Entertainment, a 2015 Sundance Film Festival premiere that extrapolates Turkington’s ongoing work into a bleak vessel of human failure. That Neil Hamburger show from hell? We’re already living it.•

 

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“Each Person Takes As Much Medicine As He Wants And Can Ask For More At Any Time”

February 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Peyote has historically been central to the Native American church meeting. In a 1967 Psychedelic Review article, Stewart Brand, Prankster and prophet, wrote of one such congregation he attended. An excerpt:

“The meeting is mandala-form, a circle with a doorway to the east. The roadman will sit opposite the door, the moon-crescent altar in front of him. To his left sits the cedarman, to his right the drummer. On the right side as you enter will be the fireman. The people sit around the circle. In the middle is the fire.

A while after dark they go in. This may be formal, filling in clockwise around the circle in order. The roadman may pray outside beforehand, asking that the place and the people and the occasion be blessed.

Beginning a meeting is as conscious and routine as a space launch countdown. At this time the fireman is busy starting the fire and seeing that things and people are in their places. The cedarman drops a little powder of cedar needles and little balls, goes down the quickest. In all cases, the white fluff should be removed. There is usually a pot of peyote tea, kept near the fire, which is passed occasionally during the night. Each person takes as much medicine as he wants and can ask for more at any time. Four buttons is a common start. Women usually take less than the men. Children have only a little, unless they are sick. 

Everything is happening briskly at this point. People swallow and pass the peyote with minimum fuss. The drummer and roadman go right into the starting song. The roadman, kneeling on one or both knees, begins it with the rattle in his right hand. The drummer picks up the quick beat, and the roadman gently begins the song. His left hand holds the staff, a feather fan, and some sage. He sings four times, ending each section with a steady quick rattle as a signal for the drummer to pause or re-wet the drumhead before resuming the beat. Using his thumb on the drumhead, the drummer adjusts the beat of his song. When the roadman finishes he passes the staff, gourd, fan and sage to the cedarman, who sings four times with the random drumming. So it goes, the drum following the staff to the left around the circle, so each man sings and drums many times during the night.•

“I Think The Fears About ‘Evil Killer Robots’ Are Overblown”

February 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

As a follow-up to the post which quoted former Google and current Baidu AI research scientist Andrew Ng, here’s a fuller explanation of his thoughts about the existential threat of intelligent machines, from a Backchannel interview by Caleb Garling:

Caleb Garling:

Do you see AI as a potential threat?

Andrew Ng:

I’m optimistic about the potential of AI to make lives better for hundreds of millions of people. I wouldn’t work on it if I didn’t fundamentally believe that to be true. Imagine if we can just talk to our computers and have it understand “please schedule a meeting with Bob for next week.” Or if each child could have a personalized tutor. Or if self-driving cars could save all of us hours of driving.

I think the fears about “evil killer robots” are overblown. There’s a big difference between intelligence and sentience. Our software is becoming more intelligent, but that does not imply it is about to become sentient.

The biggest problem that technology has posed for centuries is the challenge to labor. For example, there are 3.5 million truck drivers in the US, whose jobs may be affected if we ever manage to develop self-driving cars. I think we need government and business leaders to have a serious conversation about that, and think the hype about “evil killer robots” is an unnecessary distraction.•

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“Work’s Assumed Virtue Has Always Been About More Than Its Utility Or Market Value”

February 2, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

In the wake of the 2008 economic collapse, austerity felt to many the right thing to do: We needed to punish ourselves. But that policy was moralistic and incorrect, since what we actually needed was to borrow and spend. Is our view of labor also driven by a misplaced sense of morality? Brian Dean asks this question and others in “Antiwork,” a Contributoria essay which reconsiders the meaning of toil. An excerpt:

“Work” is seen as a virtue, but it covers the moral spectrum from charity and art to forced labour and banking. Belief in the inherent moral good of work has been used historically in social engineering, notably during the shift from agriculture to industry, when the Protestant work ethic was used to motivate workers and to justify punishment, including whipping and imprisonment of “idlers”. (In The Making of the English Working Class, historian EP Thompson describes how the ethos of Protestant sects such as Methodism effectively provided the prototype of the disciplined, punctual worker required by the factory owners.)

Work’s assumed virtue has always been about more than its utility or market value. George Lakoff, the cognitive linguist, provided a clue in the frame of “work as obedience.” The first virtue we learn as children is obeying our parents, particularly in performing tasks we don’t enjoy. Later, as adults, we’re paid to obey our employers – it’s called work. Work and virtue are thus connected in our neurology in terms of obedience to authority. That’s not the only cognitive frame we have for the virtue of work, but it’s the one that is constantly reinforced by what Lakoff calls the “strict father” conservative moral system.

This “strictness” moral framing is implicit, for example, in the current welfare system. An increasingly punitive approach is adopted towards those who don’t follow the prescribed “job-seeking” regimen – a trend that most political parties seem to approve of. Politicians boast of getting “tough on dependency culture”, and when they talk of “clamping down” on the “hardcore unemployed”, you’d think they were referring to criminals.

Emphasis on punishment is the sign of an obedience frame. Work itself has a long history as punishment for disobedience, as the Book of Genesis illustrates – Adam and Eve had no work until they disobeyed God, who imposed it as their punishment: “Cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life.” Unpaid work, or “community service,” is still sometimes dictated as punishment by courts. Workfare programmes similarly involve mandatory work without wages – it looks very much like punishment for the “sin” of unemployment.

Workfare illustrates a difference between framing and spin. The cognitive frame is paternalistic, morally strict, punishment-based (much like “community service”), while the political spin is all about “helping” people “integrate” back into society. Genuine help, of course, shouldn’t require the threat of losing what little income one has.

Morally, it seems that politicians, most of the media and a large section of the public are still stuck in the Puritan codes and scripts that, following the Reformation and into the industrial revolution, dominated social attitudes to work and idleness in England, America and much of Europe.•

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“With This Technology Today, That Transformation Might Happen Much Faster”

February 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I agree with two very smart people working in Artificial Intelligence, Andrew Ng and Hod Lipson, when I say that I’m not worried about any near-term scenario in which Strong AI extincts Homo Sapiens the way we did Neanderthals. It’s not that it’s theoretically impossible in the long run, but we would likely first need to know precisely how the human brain operates, to understand the very nature of consciousness, to give “life” to our eliminators. While lesser AI than that could certainly be dangerous on a large scale, I don’t think it’s moving us back down the food chain today or tomorrow.

But like Ng and Lipson, the explosion of Weak AI throughout society in the form of autonomous machines is very concerning to me. It’s an incredible victory of ingenuity that can become a huge loss if we aren’t able to politically reconcile free-market societies with highly autonomous ones. An excerpt from Robert Hof at Forbes’ horribly designed site:

“Historically technology has created challenges for labor,” [Ng] noted. But while previous technological revolutions also eliminating many types of jobs and created some displacement, the shift happened slowly enough to provide new opportunities to successive generations of workers. “The U.S. took 200 years to get from 98% to 2% farming employment,” he said. “Over that span of 200 years we could retrain the descendants of farmers.”

But he says the rapid pace of technological change today has changed everything. “With this technology today, that transformation might happen much faster,” he said. Self-driving cars, he suggested could quickly put 5 million truck drivers out of work.

Retraining is a solution often suggested by the technology optimists. But Ng, who knows a little about education thanks to his cofounding of Coursera, doesn’t believe retraining can be done quickly enough. “What our educational system has never done is train many people who are alive today. Things like Coursera are our best shot, but I don’t think they’re sufficient. People in the government and academia should have serious discussions about this.”

His concerns were echoed by Hod Lipson, director of Cornell University’s Creative Machines Lab. “If AI is going to threaten humanity, it’s going to be through the fact that it does almost everything better than almost anyone,” he said.•

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“He Advocates What Is Called The Cafeteria Approach To Birth Control”

February 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Carl Djerassi, the chemist credited with creating the birth-control pill and abetting the women’s movement and sexual revolution of the 1960s, just passed away. A true polymath, he was devoted to writing plays and collecting art just as much to rewriting the rules of mating. He was also subsequently thwarted by pharmaceutical companies when he wanted to create a male pill. In a 1976 People article, Nancy Faber profiled Djerassi during his tenure as a Stanford professor and recalled his discombobulating relationship with President Nixon. An excerpt: 

Stanford Professor Carl Djerassi invited some students to his house for an evening conference and two of them showed up with a gift. Not exactly an apple for the teacher. It was a box of pink condoms. Djerassi was delighted.

It was the perfect token of esteem for a well-liked faculty member who also happens to be the research chemist who developed the birth control pill. His course in human biology was examining various methods of controlling population. (The unusual gift was brought back from Kenya where the two students had gone to study birth control techniques.)

“I don’t think there is such a thing as one best method of birth control,” Djerassi tells his classes. “If the most important thing is to be 100 percent effective, then the Pill is the best we have. If you are more concerned about side effects, then a condom is a hell of a lot better.” He adds: “It is unrealistic not to expect some side effects. You get them with tobacco, alcohol and penicillin.”

The professor, 52, is not at all reluctant to plunge into the Pill controversy. At a recent campus colloquium, he heard one young woman charge: “Sure, we have control of our fertility now, but at the cost of our health. What kind of control do we really have if we have to make that kind of bargain?” After listening to Djerassi on the subject, another participant admitted: “I’m really surprised that he is so receptive to other ideas. He advocates what is called the cafeteria approach to birth control—whatever works.”

Students are often surprised to learn that Djerassi’s career is rooted in academe as well as in the drug industry. Born in Vienna in 1923, he was educated in the United States (Kenyon College and the University of Wisconsin) after he emigrated when he was 16. He had his Ph.D. by his 22nd birthday. Five years later, in 1951, as an employee of the Mexico City-based Syntex Corporation, Djerassi led the research team that synthesized the first contraceptive pill. …

Restlessly energetic even in his leisure hours, Djerassi hikes and skis despite a fused knee suffered in a skiing accident. Rather than drop either sport, Djerassi collaborated with one of his students in designing a special boot to compensate for the knee’s loss of mobility. When he travels, the professor gets a letter from airline presidents guaranteeing him an aisle seat so he can stretch out his leg.

Djerassi has accumulated an extensive art collection weighted toward pre-Columbian artifacts and an equally impressive number of honors from every corner of the scientific community. He recalls none of the testimonials as vividly as the National Medal of Science awarded him by Richard Nixon in 1973. Two weeks later Djerassi discovered his name on the notorious White House enemies list.•

 

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“There’s Something Powerfully Convenient About The Logic Of Choosing To Access Stuff Instead Of Owning It”

February 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In his New Atlantis piece, “Losing Liberty in an Age of Access,” James Poulos writes of returning to live in his former neighborhood of Downtown Los Angeles and finding a new order–and one that isn’t limited to that city’s former ghost town. He examines the modern landscape, in which we’re all connected but there are no strings attached, a rental economy elbowing aside the buying one. The Great Recession may have hastened the new normal of access over ownership, of time itself being commodified and valued over stability, but it wasn’t the driving force behind the Uberization of cosmopolitan life, a more rootless and less cumbersome thing, in which everything (and seemingly everyone) is for rent. Technology has mostly propelled the change of heart. What has been gained and what has been lost? An excerpt about the transformation that’s taken hold in DTLA:

In an age when ownership meant everything, downtown Los Angeles languished. Today, current tastes and modern technology have made access, not ownership, culturally all-important, and LA’s “historic core” is the hottest neighborhood around. Likewise, from flashy metros like San Francisco to beleaguered cities like Pittsburgh, rising generations are driving economic growth by paying to access experiences instead of buying to own.

Nationwide, the line between downsizing hipsters and upwardly mobile yuppies is blurring — an indication of potent social and economic change. America’s hipsters and yuppies seem to be making property ownership uncool. But they’re just the fashionable, visible tip of a much bigger iceberg.

Rather than a fad, the access economy has emerged organically from the customs and habits of “the cheapest generation” — as it has been dubbed in The Atlantic, the leading magazine tracking upper-middle-class cultural trends. Writers Derek Thompson and Jordan Weissman recount that, in 2010, Americans aged 21 to 34 “bought just 27 percent of all new vehicles sold in America, down from the peak of 38 percent in 1985.” From 1998 to 2008, the share of teenagers with a driver’s license dropped by more than a fourth. And it isn’t just cars and driving: Thompson and Weissman cite a 2012 paper written by a Federal Reserve economist showing that the proportion of new young homeowners during the period from 2009 to 2011 was at a level less than half that of a decade earlier. It’s not quite a stampede from ownership, but it’s close.

In part, these changes can be chalked up to the post-Great Recession economy, which has left Millennials facing bleak job prospects while carrying heavy loads of student debt. But those economic conditions have been reinforced by other incentives to create a new way of thinking among Millennials. They are more interested than previous generations in paying to use cars and houses instead of buying them outright. Buying means responsibility and risk. Renting means never being stuck with what you don’t want or can’t afford. It remains to be seen how durable these judgments will be, but they are sharpened by technology and tastes, which affect not just the purchase of big-ticket items like cars and houses but also life’s daily decisions. Ride-sharing apps like Uber and Lyft and car-sharing services like Zipcar are biting into car sales. Vacation-home apps like Airbnb have become virtual rent-sharing apps. There’s something powerfully convenient about the logic of choosing to access stuff instead of owning it. Its applications are limited only by the imagination.

That is why we are witnessing more than just a minor shift in the way Americans do business. It is a transformation. Commerce is being remade in the image of a new age. Once associated with ubiquitous private property, capitalism is becoming a game of renting access to goods and services, not purchasing them for possession.•

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“[The] Ironically Eternal Marriage Between Democracy And Capitalism [Is] Coming To An End”

February 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I can understand Slavoj Žižek looking at China and seeing capitalism stripped of democracy as an impressive beast, but the same was said of Fascism, even Nazism, in the 1930s. They were machines, many thought–even many American business leaders–which could not be stopped. Those states were driven by madmen and China is not, but perhaps there’s ultimately something antithetical to the human spirit embedded inside them all. Well, we shall see. From a recent Žižek address transcribed at Disinformation:

Well people often ask me how can you be so stupid and still proclaim yourself a communist. What do you mean by this? Well, I have always to emphasize that first I am well aware that let’s call it like this – the twentieth century’s over. Which means all not only communists solution but all the big leftist projects of the twentieth century failed. Not only did Stalinist communism although there its failure is much more paradoxical. Most of the countries where communists are still in power like China, Vietnam – their communists in power appear to be the most efficient managers of a very wildly productive capitalism. So okay, that one failed. I think that also and here I in a very respectful way disagree with your – by your I mean American neo-Keynesian leftists, Krugman, Stiglitz and so on. I also think that this Keynesian welfare state model is passé. In the conditions of today’s global economy it no longer works. For the welfare state to work you need a strong nation state which can impose a certain fiscal politics and so on and so on. When you have global market it doesn’t work. And the third point which is most problematic for my friends, the third leftist vision which is deep in the heart of all leftists that I know – this idea of critically rejecting alienated representative democracy and arguing for local grass root democracy where it’s not that you just delegate to the others. Your representatives to act for you, but people immediately engage in locally managing their affairs and so on.

I think this is a nice idea as far as it goes but it’s not the solution. It’s a very limited one. And if I may be really evil here I frankly I wouldn’t like to live in a stupid society where I would have to be all the time engaged in local communitarian politics and so on and so on. My idea is to live in a society where some invisible alienated machinery takes care of things so that I can do whatever I want – watch movies, read and write philosophical books and so on. But so I’m well aware that in all its versions radical left projects of the twentieth century came to an end and for one decade maybe we were all Fukuyamaists for the nineties. By Fukuyamaism I mean the idea that basically we found if not the best formula at least the least bad formula. Liberal democratic capitalism with elements of rebel state and so on and so on. And even the left played this game. You know we were fighting for less racism, women’s right, gay rights, whatever tolerance. But basically we accepted the system. I think and even Fukuyama himself is no longer a Fukuyamaist as I know that if there is a lesson of September 11 if other event is that no we don’t have the answer. That not only is liberal democratic capitalism not the universal model and is just a time of slow historical progress for it to be accepted everywhere. But again try now in Singapore and other examples of very successful economies today demonstrate that this, let’s call it ironically eternal marriage between democracy and capitalism it’s coming to an end.

What we are more and more getting today is a capitalism which is brutally efficient but it no longer needs democracy for its functioning.•

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“Apple Describes The New Product…As The ‘Most Personal Device Ever'”

February 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The capacity for watch-computer hybrids has grown exponentially in the 20 years since the product fail of the Timex Data Link, though I still don’t have any interest in the iWatch or whatever Apple will brand its forthcoming wrist-worn device. Of course, my opinion means nothing. I think everyone knows that Beats by Dre isn’t the best headphones on the market, but that’s mattered little. Apple products and Beats (now an Apple product) are being purchased from the U.S. to China for reasons in addition to function. Regardless of the motivations, I’m pretty confident Angela Ahrendts will make new watch the most handsome mass-marketed wearable yet. From Rupert Neate of Guardian, a question about the item Tim Cook hopes will expand the Apple juggernaut beyond the iPhone:

Can it afford for the Apple Watch to fail?

It has been five years since Apple launched its latest truly new product – the iPad – in 2010. To live up to its name for innovation, and diversify revenues away from reliance on the iPhone, Apple needs the Apple Watch to be an unqualified success.

Cook announced that the watch would go on sale in April, giving the company a boost in its third quarter when it will not benefit from Christmas or the Chinese new year, which will have helped the previous two quarters. “We’re making great progress in the development of it,” he said.

Apple describes the new product – often referred to as the iWatch, although it has not been officially named – as the “most personal device ever” and it is thought it will be able to monitor its wearer’s health as well as connect to an iPhone to provide several other functions. Cook said app developers had already impressed him with “some incredible innovation”.

Carolina Milanesi at Kantar Worldpanel ComTech says the watch will help Apple extend its sales into a much wider market. “They have been very smart in pushing it as jewellery and design rather than how technologically smart it is,” she says. “They are concentrating more on impressing the design and fashion world than the tech bloggers.

“I think this will be a much more irrational buy than with an iPad. With an iPadyou wanted an iPad: this is going to be more of a fashion statement.”

She said the launch would benefit from the fashion and marketing skills of Angela Ahrendts, the former Burberry boss Apple hired last year on a $73m pay package as its head of retail.

Apple poached a string of big names from fashion and design to join its watch team, including Patrick Pruniaux, former vice-president of sales at Tag Heuer and former Yves Saint Laurent boss Paul Deneve, who is now Apple’s “vice president of special projects.”•

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A Brief Note From 1900 About Hopelessness

February 1, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the December 31, 1900 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Phoenix, Ariz. — V.L. Hopkins, one of the oldest residents of Yuma, is lost on the desert on Mesquite. There is no hope of finding him alive.•

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“Nor Is It Easy To See How The Rules Could Be Changed To Reduce The Risk Of Brain Damage”

February 1, 2015 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

As Thanksgiving is a relaxation of violent impulses (not including turkeys, of course), Super Bowl Sunday, that other great American holiday, is an orgy of it. What will become of the game now that parents know that they’re inviting brain injuries on their children if they let them play? There’s no helmet that can protect from concussions since it’s mostly an injury of whiplash, the brain washing around inside the skull. Will the pipeline of talent run dry even as the league is at its financial zenith? Cricket, once a hugely popular game in America, disappeared in just about two decades. Organized football, much wealthier and more powerful, won’t vanish, but will it decline in the coming decades? From the Economist:

The NFL players’ union says that the average length of a professional career is just under three and a half years. Watching a big hit on a player now comes with the same twinge of guilt as watching clips of Muhammad Ali being pummelled. Though high-school players are less likely to suffer brain damage, some school teams were forced to end their seasons early last year because so many children had been injured. Almost half of parents say they would not allow their sons to play the game, a feeling shared by Barack Obama. Nor is it easy to see how the rules could be changed to reduce the risk of brain damage in the professional game to an acceptable level.

Yet the sport will not continue to be both as popular as it is now and as dangerous. Those who dismiss football-bashers like Malcolm Gladwell, who compared the sport to dog-fighting in the New Yorker, as elitist east-coast types should remember that football began as a form of organised riot on the campuses of elitist east-coast colleges. Changes in taste can trickle down as well as bubble up. During the second half of the 20th century boxing went from being a sport watched together by fathers and sons to something that dwells among the hookers and slot machines of Nevada. Hollywood’s output of Westerns peaked in the late 1960s, after which the appeal of spending a couple of hours watching tight-lipped gunslingers in pursuit of an ethnic minority waned. Football will go the same way.•

10 Recent Huffington Post Headlines

February 1, 2015 in Humor, Misc. | Permalink

  • Penis-Shaped Cloud Erupts Over Town
  • PEE YOU! Florida Man Urinated On Waitress: Police
  • Yes, Happily Married Couples Masturbate Too
  • Texas Elementary Students Forced To Undergo ‘Poop Inspections’
  • Jason Schwartzman Is Happy To Talk About His Prosthetic Penis
  • Ancient Skull Sheds New Light On Human-Neanderthal Sex
  • This Woman Is Live-Tweeting Her Quest To Orgasm While On Antidepressants
  • Howard Stern Has Never Farted In Front Of His Wife
  • Holy Crap! British Artist Will Cast Your Anus In Bronze (NSFW)
  • Are You Ready To Have Sex With Robots?

 

This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

February 1, 2015 in Misc. | Permalink

 

10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

  1. president grover cleveland when he was a hangman
  2. alan abel world’s smallest penis prank
  3. howard hughes when he died
  4. what is televangelist jim bakker doing now?
  5. germaine greer and led zeppelin
  6. rod serling playing video game pong
  7. a.j. liebiing article about boxing
  8. doukhobors protest in the nude
  9. hugh hefner interviewing polanski and tate
  10. reyner banham loves los angeles

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

January 31, 2015 in Misc. | Permalink

This week, the nations somberly accepted Mitt Romney's decision that he wasn't going to be President.

This week, the nation somberly accepted the terrible news that Mitt Romney has refused to be our next President.

 

  • Joe Franklin, hoarder of cultural ephemera, just passed away.
  • Mass shootings are provoked by more than mental illness and video games.
  • Gene Hackman was more exceptionalist than everyman in films.
  • Lee Billings meditates on what contact with alien life would be like.
  • A brief note from 1894 about a denial. 

“We All Have Such Factory-Installed Software”

January 30, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Via the beautiful 3 Quarks Daily, I came across psychiatrist Darold Treffert’s Scientific American post about a priori knowledge, which we know exists because of savants who bring talents already formed to the world. And we all likely have such gifts of genetic memory, dormant though they usually are. An excerpt:

Whether called genetic, ancestral or racial memory, or intuitions or congenital gifts, the concept of a genetic transmission of sophisticated knowledge well beyond instincts, is necessary to explain how prodigious savants can know things they never learned.

We tend to think of ourselves as being born with a magnificent and intricate piece of organic machinery (“hardware”) we call the brain, along with a massive but blank hard drive (memory). What we become, it is commonly believed, is an accumulation and culmination of our continuous learning and life experiences, which are added one by one to memory. But the prodigious savant apparently comes already programmed with a vast amount of innate skill -and knowledge in his or her area of expertise–factory-installed “software” one might say–which accounts for the extraordinary abilities over which the savant innately shows mastery in the face of often massive cognitive and other learning handicaps. It is an area of memory function worthy of much more exploration and study.

Indeed recent cases of “acquired savants” or “accidental genius” have convinced me that we all have such factory-installed software. I discussed some of those cases in detail in the August issue of Scientific American under the title “Accidental Genius”. In short, certain persons, after head injury or disease, show explosive and sometimes prodigious musical, art or mathematical ability, which lies dormant until released by a process of recruitment of still intact and uninjured brain areas, rewiring to those newly recruited areas and releasing the until then latent capacity contained therein.

Finally, the animal kingdom provides ample examples of complex inherited capacities beyond physical characteristics. Monarch butterflies each year make a 2,500-mile journey from Canada to a small plot of land in Mexico where they winter. In spring they begin the long journey back north, but it takes three generations to do so. So no butterfly making the return journey has flown that entire route before. How do they “know” a route they never learned? It has to be an inherited GPS-like software, not a learned route.•

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Old Print Article: “Wireless In Woods Mystifies People In Southampton,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1915)

January 30, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I think it’s worth looking past the antiquated, racist language and attitudes to read this article originally published in November 21, 1915 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which profiles a physically disabled African-American man who built his own wireless plant in the Long Island woods and was suspected of communicating secrets to the Germans during WWI (though the political espionage aspect isn’t very likely). The young guy’s name was Robert J. Freeman, and imagine how different his opportunities would have been if his skin color was different. When you think of the talent lost to prejudice, it’s just a heartbreaker.

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