“Mechanical Devices Intrigue The Little Prince”

January 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

At six, Prince Charles had yet to fly on an airplane but had a slew of technological devices at his disposal. From “The Boy Who Lives in a Palace,” a 1955 Collier’s Weekly portrait by Helen Worden Erskine of the lad raised for a throne which never materialized:

In his five-room nursery suite at Buckingham Palace is a TV set; over his bed is a microphone so sensitive that it instantly registers, in the quarters of both the chief nurse and palace detectives, his slightest cough, as well as his breathing. He has a private telephone connected with the main palace switchboard. It holds no mystery for him; he began talking into it when he was so small he had to stand on a chair to reach it. At that age the calls were usually for Mummy or Papa in some far-off place. Now he has grown enough to use it normally, although he’s still impulsively apt to ring the chef at odd hours and say: “Send Charles ice cream, quickly!”

Mechanical devices intrigue the little prince. He clambers over the fire engines which are part of the equipment on all the crown estates. He is keen about his mother’s private plane and his father’s helicopter, and begs to go out, rain or shine, to see Papa take off from the palace lawn. Once, when court photographer Marcus Adams was taking his picture. Charles climbed a chair and peered into the lens. “Everything’s upside down,” he reported, surprised. Then he ran back to the sofa where he’d been posing and stood on his head—”to make it right for Mr. Adams,” he explained.

Despite his parents’ air-mindedness, Charles has not yet flown. In his journeys among the halfdozen fabulous palaces and castles he can call home his choice of a coach-and-four may be either a Rolls-Royce or a special train bearing the royal coat of arms. On his recent trip to Malta, his first outside Great Britain, he traveled on the queen’s new 412-foot, $2,000,000 royal yacht Britannia.

On his travels, the young prince is always accompanied by his own retinue: Superintendent T. J. Clark of Scotland Yard, chauffeur Jim Cheevers. chief nurse Helen Lightbody, personal nursemaid Mabel Anderson, governess Katherine Peebles, a palace policeman and, as a rule. General Sir Frederick Browning, Comptroller of the Queen’s Household.

As Duke of Cornwall (his most important title), Charles is entitled to an annual income from farm products and rents equivalent to around $300,000 a year. He will draw only $36,000 of the total annually until he is fifteen; from then until his eighteenth birthday he will get another $90,000
a year, after which the entire income will be his.•

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

January 19, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Will swap 1 pound of frankincense from Yemen for massage

I have one pound of frankincense from Yemen as well as art supplies and other odds and ends that i will trade to any female who is skilled at giving a body massage! A massage student or nurse would be fine. You can come over and see what you want and we can make a deal. If you are a student you are more then welcome to bring another student for the learning experience. Color, religion, age totally unimportant here. If interested please send email stating availability. Thank you kindly.

“[Manfred] Later Named Him Chairman Of The Finance Committee”

January 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

When it comes to the corporatocracy of major-league baseball, in which billionaires beg for welfare, few things can stun, but one of the first moves by new commissioner Rob Manfred is as jaw-dropping as any made by his predecessor, Bud Selig. He’s named New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon chairman of the league’s finance committee. You know, the same Fred Wilpon who’s managed to turn the goldmine of a NYC baseball team into tin (accruing massive debts in the process) and was knee-deep in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. From SNY (though the bold is mine):

Manfred removed Mets owner Fred Wilpon from the executive council, but later named him chairman of the finance committee, which is responsible for conducting hearings on league investments, changes in ownership, and stadium revenue and financing issues, among other things.•

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“Reindeer Meat, Raw Flesh Shaved From Frozen Fish, And Ice Cubes Of Horse Blood With Macaroni Are A Few Local Delicacies”

January 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In Jenna Garrett’s “What It’s Like Living in the Coldest Town on Earth,” the author takes a look at the survival strategies locals employ in the iceberg-ish burg of Oymyakon in the Sakha Republic of Russia, which suffers an extreme subarctic climate. No crops can grow so everyone is a carnivore. It once got down to −90 °F. The summers are quite lovely, but, you know, small consolation. Why would anyone live there–or on a fault line or near a volcano? Because humans. An excerpt:

It got down to -24 degrees Fahrenheit in Oymyakon, Russia, over the weekend. As frigid as that seems, it’s typical for this town, long known as the coldest inhabited place on Earth. If that kind of number is hard to wrap your brain around, such a temperature is so cold that people here regularly consume frozen meat, keep their cars running 24/7 and must warm the ground with a bonfire for several days before burying their dead. …

Here arctic chill is simply a fact of life, something to be endured. People develop a variety of tricks to survive. Most people use outhouses, because indoor plumbing tends to freeze. Cars are kept in heated garages or, if left outside, left running all the time. Crops don’t grow in the frozen ground, so people have a largely carnivorous diet—reindeer meat, raw flesh shaved from frozen fish, and ice cubes of horse blood with macaroni are a few local delicacies.•

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“Growing Tribal Gaming Revenues Can Make Poverty Worse”

January 19, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Apart from Las Vegas, few places in America have been enriched by casinos, since almost none become tourist destinations and they’re attended by a raft of costly social problems. Even the casinos on Native-American reservations, which enjoy special tax status, have shown mixed results at best and in many cases they may be increasing and further entrenching poverty. One issue might be per-capita payments, according to an Economist report. Perhaps. But the direct payments are often miniscule, so I’m not completely sold that’s it’s not more a toxic cocktail of complicated issues. An excerpt:

ON A rainy weekday afternoon, Mike Justice pushes his two-year-old son in a pram up a hill on the Siletz Reservation, a desolate, wooded area along the coast of Oregon. Although there are jobs at the nearby casino, Mr Justice, a member of the nearly 5,000-strong Siletz tribe, is unemployed. He and his girlfriend Jamie, a recovering drug addict, live off her welfare payments of a few hundred dollars a month, plus the roughly $1,200 he receives annually in “per capita payments”, cash the tribe distributes each year from its casino profits. That puts the family of three below the poverty line.

It is not ideal, Mr Justice admits, but he says it is better than pouring hours into a casino job that pays minimum wage and barely covers the cost of commuting. Some 13% of Mr Justice’s tribe work at the Chinook Winds Casino, including his mother, but it does not appeal to him. The casino lies an hour away down a long, windy road. He has no car, and the shuttle bus runs only a few times a day. “Once you get off your shift, you may have to wait three hours for the shuttle, and then spend another hour on the road,” he says. “For me, it’s just not worth it.”

Mr Justice’s situation is not unusual. After the Supreme Court ruled in 1987 that Native American tribes, being sovereign, could not be barred from allowing gambling, casinos began popping up on reservations everywhere. Today, almost half of America’s 566 Native American tribes and villages operate casinos, which in 2013 took in $28 billion, according to the National Indian Gaming Commission.

Small tribes with land close to big cities have done well. Yet a new study in the American Indian Law Journal suggests that growing tribal gaming revenues can make poverty worse.•

“I Kept Hearing Variations Of ‘Quicker Than We Thought'”

January 18, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Andrew McAfee and Eric Brynjolfsson’s The Second Machine Age, a deep analysis of the economic and political ramifications of Weak AI in the 21st century, was one of the five best books I read in 2014, a really rich year for titles of all kinds. I pretty much agree with the authors’ summation that there’s a plentitude waiting at the other end of the proliferation of automation fast approaching, though the intervening decades will be a serious societal challenge. In a post at his Financial Times blog, McAfee reconsiders, if somewhat, his reluctance to join in with the Hawking-Bostrom-Musk AI anxiety. An excerpt:

The group came together largely to discuss AI safety — the challenges and problems that might arise if digital systems ever become superintelligent. I wasn’t that concerned about AI safety coming into the conference, for reasons that I have written about previously. So did I change my mind?

Maybe a little bit. The argument that we should be concerned about any potentially existential risks to humanity, even if they’re pretty far in the future and we don’t know exactly how they’ll manifest themselves, is a fairly persuasive one. However, I still feel that we’re multiple “Watson and Crick moments” away from anything we need to worry about, so I haven’t signed the open letter on research priorities that came out in the wake of the conference — at least not yet. But who knows how quickly things might change?

At the gathering, in answer to this question I kept hearing variations of “quicker than we thought.” In robotic endeavours as diverse as playing classic Atari video games,competing against the top human players in the Asian board game Go, creating self-driving cars, parsing and understanding human speech, folding towels and matching socks, the people building AI to do these things said that they were surprised at the pace of their own progress. Their achievements outstripped not only their initial timelines, they said, but also their revised ones.

Why is this? My short answer is that computers keep getting more powerful, the available data keeps getting broader (and data is the lifeblood of science), and the geeks keep getting smarter about how to do their work. This is one of those times when a field of human inquiry finds itself in a virtuous cycle and takes off.•

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“They Can Deliberately Go To A Place Where They Know They Can Easily Park To Wait”

January 18, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Brad Templeton, consultant to Google’s driverless division, has a post about autonomous-car parking, which comes in different grades of difficulty depending on where the vehicle is stowing itself. Communal rides like taxis and other rideshares will have the easiest time since their mission is largely driving, not parking. An excerpt:

The taxi doesn’t park
One of the simplest solutions to parking involves robotaxi service. Such vehicles don’t really park, at least not where they dropped you off. They drop you off and go to their next customer. If they don’t have another ride, they can deliberately go to a place where they know they can easily park to wait. They don’t need to tackle a parking space that’s challenging at all.

Simple non-crowded lots
Parking in basic parking lots — typical open ground lots that are not close to full — is a pretty easy problem. So easy in fact, that we’ve seen a number of demonstrations, ranging back to Junior 3 and Audi Piloted Parking. Cars in the showroom now will identify parking spots for you (and tell you if you fit.) They have done basic parallel parking (with you on the brakes) for several years, and are starting to now even do it with you out of the car (but watching from a distance.) At CES VW showed the special case of parking in your own garage or driveway, where you show the car where it’s going to go.

The early demos required empty parking lots with no pedestrians, and even no other moving cars, but today reasonably well-behaved other cars should not be a big problem. That’s the thing about non-crowded lots: People are not hunting or competing for spaces. The robocars actually would be very happy to seek out the large empty sections at the back of most parking lots because you aren’t going to be walking out that far, the car is going to come get you.

The biggest issue is the question of pedestrians who can appear out from behind a minivan. The answer to this is simply that vehicles that are parking can and do go slow, and slow automatically gives you a big safety boost. At parking lot speed, you really can stop very quickly if a pedestrian appears out of nowhere.

More crowded lots
The challenge of parking lots, in spite of the low speeds, is that they don’t have well defined rules of the road. People ignore the arrows on the ground. They pause and wait for cars to exit. In really crowded lots, cars follow people who are leaving at walking speed, hoping to get dibs on their spot. They wait, blocking traffic, for a spot they claim as theirs. People fight for spots and steal spots. People park badly and cross over the lines.

As far as I know, nobody has tried to solve this challenge, and so it remains unsolved.•

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“Collectively We Remember Our Nightmares, Though Sanity And Good Manners Encourage Us As Individuals To Forget Them”

January 18, 2015 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

In the New York Review of Books, a contemporary American literary giant, Marilynne Robinson, takes on one of our greatest ever, Edgar Allan Poe, focusing mostly on his sole novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.

Poe died mysteriously and horribly, a sad and appropriate end, as if a premature burial had always awaited him. That he was able to squeeze so much genius into such a short life and so narrow an aesthetic is miraculous. An excerpt:

The word that recurs most crucially in Poe’s fictions is horror. His stories are often shaped to bring the narrator and the reader to a place where the use of the word is justified, where the word and the experience it evokes are explored or by implication defined. So crypts and entombments and physical morbidity figure in Poe’s writing with a prominence that is not characteristic of major literature in general. Clearly Poe was fascinated by popular obsessions, with crime, with premature burial. Popular obsessions are interesting and important, of course. Collectively we remember our nightmares, though sanity and good manners encourage us as individuals to forget them. Perhaps it is because Poe’s tales test the limits of sanity and good manners that he is both popular and stigmatized. His influence and his imitators have eclipsed his originality and distracted many readers from attending to his work beyond the more obvious of its effects.

Poe’s mind was by no means commonplace. In the last year of his life he wrote a prose poem, Eureka, which would have established this fact beyond doubt—if it had not been so full of intuitive insight that neither his contemporaries nor subsequent generations, at least until the late twentieth century, could make any sense of it. Its very brilliance made it an object of ridicule, an instance of affectation and delusion, and so it is regarded to this day among readers and critics who are not at all abreast of contemporary physics. Eureka describes the origins of the universe in a single particle, from which “radiated” the atoms of which all matter is made. Minute dissimilarities of size and distribution among these atoms meant that the effects of gravity caused them to accumulate as matter, forming the physical universe.

This by itself would be a startling anticipation of modern cosmology, if Poe had not also drawn striking conclusions from it, for example that space and “duration” are one thing, that there might be stars that emit no light, that there is a repulsive force that in some degree counteracts the force of gravity, that there could be any number of universes with different laws simultaneous with ours, that our universe might collapse to its original state and another universe erupt from the particle it would have become, that our present universe may be one in a series.

All this is perfectly sound as observation, hypothesis, or speculation by the lights of science in the twenty-first century. And of course Poe had neither evidence nor authority for any of it. It was the product, he said, of a kind of aesthetic reasoning—therefore, he insisted, a poem. He was absolutely sincere about the truth of the account he had made of cosmic origins, and he was ridiculed for his sincerity. Eureka is important because it indicates the scale and the seriousness of Poe’s thinking, and its remarkable integrity. It demonstrates his use of his aesthetic sense as a particularly rigorous method of inquiry.•

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A Brief Note From 1858 About A Family Dinner

January 18, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the January 12, 1858 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

A most atrocious murder was committed at Poolville, four miles from Hamilton, N.Y., last Sunday. Jared Comstock and his wife, aged over seventy years, were the victims. Their son was the murderer; he has been for some time insane. At about eight o’clock on Sunday evening he killed his father by knocking him down with an axe; and his mother was killed with a skillet. He then cut their hearts out, and cut one of the bodies in pieces, and roasted the other on the stove, eating a portion of it. He intended to have killed his sister, but fortunately she escaped. The murderer is in custody and has confessed to the act.•

10 Recent Huffington Post Headlines

January 18, 2015 in Humor, Misc. | Permalink

  • Take A Lot Of Selfies? You Might Be A Psychopath
  • Florida Couple Allegedly Caught Getting Freak-Nasty At A Kia Dealership
  • 6 Penis Problems That Happen With Age
  • Watch The Grim Moment A Maggot Wriggles Out Of A Man’s Skin
  • 8-Foot Alligator Found In Box With 2 Dead Cats In Los Angeles Yard
  • Why Every Woman Should Masturbate
  • We Found Out If Fake Boobs Really Equal Better Service
  • WATCH: Cats Love Boobs
  • She’s Been Happily Married To 2 Cats For More Than A Decade
  • Ancient ‘Sea Monster’ Discovered

This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

January 18, 2015 in Misc. | Permalink

 

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

  1. werner erhard est race car driver
  2. dolphins given lsd
  3. humans withdrawing from nature
  4. denis johnson article about american militias
  5. joan didion essay about getting married in vegas
  6. stanley siegel talk show host
  7. just a chubby guy
  8. rudi gernreich 1973
  9. henry miller final interview
  10. articles about chuck connors mayor of chinatown

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

January 17, 2015 in Misc. | Permalink

This week, Mitt Romney noticed a non-white person at an RNC meeting.

This week, Mitt Romney noticed a non-white person at the RNC winter meeting in Southern California.

 

  • Nicholas Carr worries about the ceding of moral choices to machines.
  • Roxane Gay argues in favor of je ne suis pas Charlie.
  • Stephen Cave looks at geoengineering our way out of disaster.
  • Lee Miracle is a veteran, libertarian, atheist, poet and militia commander.
  • A brief note from 1929 about bakers.

“The First Trillionaires Will Be Made As We Open The Space Frontier”

January 17, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Peter Diamandis, a valued employee of Spacely Sprockets, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit about automation, media and economics, among other topics. A few exchanges follow.

___________________________

Question:

What are your thoughts on the increasing effect of automation on society? Do you think that we’ll see dramatic changes in employment, and if so, how will we cope with them?

Peter Diamandis:

The idea of having a job is actually a recent invention. Oxford predicts 48% of U.S. jobs will be decimated by AI and robots. I recently held a meeting of Silicon Valley CEOs at Singularity University to chat about this. The group fell into three camps:

  1. Technology will increase jobs (Mark Andreessen)
  2. Society will have a near-term loss of jobs, but society will accommodate with shorter workweeks, guaranteed income.
  3. We’re fucked.

I fall somewhere between #1 and #2.

___________________________

Question:

My question is about fear mongering news media and their role in conflicts. We know that despite all these terrorist attacks, violence and situation in The Middle-East, the world is getting more peaceful (less wars, less battle deaths, etc). But to me the 24/7 coverage of terrorism, ISIS and other extremists by global news media seems to be counterproductive in the long run. I personally think that makes average people more depressed, angry and indirectly increases the hatred between religious and non-religious people, between nations and countries. And this may lead to more conflicts. Do you think news media is partly responsible for ongoing conflicts and how do we solve it?

Peter Diamandis:

YES, YES, YES!!! The news media is a drug pusher, and negative news is their drug. They are taking advantage of our amygdala, which pays 10x more attention to negative news than positive news. I for one refuse to watch television news anymore, and I step over the newspaper in hotel rooms. They can’t pay me enough to abuse me in the way they do the general public.

My recommendation is to go on a Media Diet. You don’t need to be wasting time watching. You can get what you need from social networks and Google News filters.

___________________________

Question:

It seems to me like one of the most important, yet most intractably difficult, part of adapting to humanity’s potential as new technologies change the way our society operates is our existing political structures. So much of current power exists to protect entrenched interests, and it all boils down to the rich trying to hold on to what they have. But how will they, and our existing political structures, adapt to the potential of a post-scarcity economy? How will our governments adapt so that the bountiful surpluses of everything that will be possible are made available to all, equitably, and not only to the current elite, as is the case? How will even the concept of “rich people” adapt, and how will they react to protect their privileged position in society?

Peter Diamandis:

I think we are heading from a world of “haves” and “have nots” to a world of “haves” and “super-haves.” Meaning, while the wealth gap may be increasing, we are massively reducing poverty and have the potential to meet the basic needs of every man, woman and child on this planet. Personally, that’s what I’m working towards. That is the goal of XPRIZE and Singularity University.

___________________________

Question:

Can you tell us something that’s true, that almost nobody agrees with you on?

Peter Diamandis:

Everything we hold of value on Earth is in near-infinite quantities in space. The first trillionaires will be made as we open the space frontier. Access to these resources will increase abundance for everyone on the home world.•

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“Societies Are Going To Get Richer; All The Birth Rates Are Going To Drop”

January 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Marc Andreessen doesn’t need enemies because he has himself.

The browser billionaire and start-up whisperer often tweets and talks himself into an error message, revealing a stunning lack of insight into how the silicon-less world–and even the silicon one–operates. Like a lot of true believers in meritocracy–David Brooks comes to mind–Andreessen often unwittingly imparts wisdom about the world that’s built almost wholly from bullshit. I think he really means well and has done a lot of good work, but he doesn’t make it easy on himself. Five easy pieces follow from his new Financial Times interview conducted by Caroline Daniel.

____________________

As a child, Andreessen was fascinated by technology. “I have the complete series of Tom Swift from the 1910s to 1950s in my office. That was probably the single most important thing I read,” he says of the science-fiction and adventure books featuring a teenaged inventor hero (Tom Swift and his Photo Telephone was one 1912 title). “I liked all the stuff he’s inventing.”

____________________

He was also fortunate in his decision to study engineering at the University of Illinois: as one of just four sites funded by Congress to host $20m to $40m supercomputers in the mid-1980s, it had funds for “the intercept-net, which became the internet”.

Andreessen sees technology as enabling what he calls the “great awakening”. Waggling his iPhone affectionately, he says: “This little guy right here is the equivalent power capability of the $20m supercomputer I was using. This thing is in two billion people’s hands.”

____________________

He likes television, he says, because it puts the writer in charge, and compares it to the best tech companies which are also built when you put founders in charge for long periods. “By the way, writers are often crazy; they’re unpredictable, they don’t necessarily operate on a budget or timetable you might want. They argue a lot. Which is the same thing we deal with, with founders. But you get the magic.”

____________________

Does he think there is a backlash against powerful tech companies? …

“There is no backlash,” he continues: technology companies remain popular with the public. “There is only the tech backlash of the New Yorker and the New York Times and of the New Republic and of Harvard University.”

I ask why he thinks it is coming from there. “They’re threatened. It’s a power recalibration. There’s a coastal element to it. There’s a liberal arts versus engineering element to it. It’s a two-cultures thing. It’s a CP Snow thing.” Snow, a British chemist and novelist, in the 1950s identified two camps: a liberal arts culture and a science one.

____________________

“Societies are going to get richer; all the birth rates are going to drop. Japan is a harbinger of all of our futures.” In the US, growth would be slowing were it not for “illegal immigration. It’s the best thing that can possibly be happening to us, and I find it ironic; nobody wants to talk about that.”

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“Algorithms Are Simplifications, Or Distortions”

January 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

At the Atlantic, Ian Bogost offers an anti-algorithm screed, which doesn’t argue that we resist the efficacy of these computer driven formulae but that they’re not efficacious at all. Of course, such distinctions matter little to you personally if these numbers are a fundamental part of eliminating your livelihood. An excerpt:

If algorithms aren’t gods, what are they instead? Like metaphors, algorithms are simplifications, or distortions. They are caricatures. They take a complex system from the world and abstract it into processes that capture some of that system’s logic and discard others. And they couple to other processes, machines, and materials that carry out the extra-computational part of their work.

Unfortunately, most computing systems don’t want to admit that they are burlesques. They want to be innovators, disruptors, world-changers, and such zeal requires sectarian blindness. The exception is games, which willingly admit that they are caricatures—and which suffer the consequences of this admission in the court of public opinion. Games know that they are faking it, which makes them less susceptible to theologization. SimCity isn’t an urban planning tool, it’s  a cartoon of urban planning. Imagine the folly of thinking otherwise! Yet, that’s precisely the belief we allow ourselves to hold of Google and Facebook and the like.

A Google Maps Street View vehicle roams the streets of Washington D.C. Google Maps entails algorithms, but also other things, like internal combustion engine automobiles. (Flickr/justgrimes)
Just as it’s not really accurate to call the plastic toy manufacture “automated,” it’s not quite right to call Netflix recommendations or Google Maps “algorithmic.” Yes, true, there are algorithms involved, insofar as computers are involved, and computers run software that processes information. But that’s just a part of the story, a theologized version of the diverse, varied array of people, processes, materials, and machines that really carry out the work we shorthand as “technology.” The truth is as simple as it is uninteresting: The world has a lot of stuff in it, all bumping and grinding against one another.

I don’t want to downplay the role of computation in contemporary culture. [Ted] Striphas and [Lev] Manovich are right—there are computers in and around everything these days. But the algorithm has taken on a particularly mythical role in our technology-obsessed era, one that has allowed it wear the garb of divinity. Concepts like “algorithm” have become sloppy shorthands, slang terms for the act of mistaking multipart complex systems for simple, singular ones. Of treating computation theologically rather than scientifically or culturally.•

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“Such A War Today Would Inevitably Lead To A Nuclear War”

January 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Mikhail Gorbachev is all over the map when considering the current state of Russia–afraid of nuclear war, believing Russia is still mostly democratic, regretful of the breakup of the Soviet Union, opposing of sanctions–but who could blame him? Under Vladimir Putin, who will be judged even more harshly by history once all his skeletons surface, Russia is playing a dangerous twentieth-century game in the twenty-first century, ignoring that the rules have changed. An excerpt from a new Gorbachev interview conducted by Matthias Schepp and Britta Sandberg of Spiegel:

Spiegel:

Michael Sergeyevich, few contributed more to ending the Cold War than you. Now it is returning as a result of the Ukraine crisis. How painful is that?

Mikhail Gorbachev:

It gives one a feeling of déjà-vu. Perhaps that would even make a good headline for this interview: Everything appears to be repeating itself. There was a time for building a Wall and a time for tearing it down. I’m not the only person to thank for the fact that this wall no longer exists. (Former Chancellor) Willy Brandt’s Ostpolitik was important, as were the protests in Eastern Europe. Now, new walls are being built and the situation is threatening to escalate. I do, in fact, see all the signs of a new Cold War. Things could blow up at any time if we don’t act. The loss of trust is disastrous. Moscow no longer believes the West and the West doesn’t believe Moscow. That’s terrible.

Spiegel:

Do you think it is possible there could be another major war in Europe?

Mikhail Gorbachev:

Such a scenario shouldn’t even be considered. Such a war today would inevitably lead to a nuclear war. But the statements from both sides and the propaganda lead me to fear the worst. If one side loses its nerves in this inflamed atmosphere, then we won’t survive the coming years.

Spiegel:

Aren’t you overstating things a bit?

Mikhail Gorbachev:

I don’t say such things lightly. I am a man with a conscience. But that’s the way things are. I am truly and deeply concerned. …

Spiegel:

As general secretary of the Communist Party, you fought for glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring) in your country. Has everything that you pushed for during your political life fallen into ruin under Putin?

Mikhail Gorbachev:

I take an entirely different view. Glasnost isn’t dead and neither is democracy. A new generation has grown up in Russia under entirely different conditions — and it is much freer than in the Soviet Union. The clock can no longer be turned back. Nothing has fallen into ruin.

Spiegel:

Yet Russian leadership is more authoritarian than it has been in a long time.

Mikhail Gorbachev:

What do you mean by “a long time”?

Spiegel:

Since pre-Gorbachev times in the Soviet Union. There are once again limits on the freedom of opinion and the press, and elections aren’t free.

Mikhail Gorbachev:

Then we have the same view of things. Since then, I have become an old man and I have a long journey behind me. When I became a member of the Communist Party, I wrote an essay called: “Stalin, our war glory, Stalin inspires us, the youth.” Today I support those who fight against venerating Stalin.

Spiegel:

Putin is limiting democracy, but a majority still appears to be satisfied with his leadership. Why?

Mikhail Gorbachev:

When Putin moved into the Kremlin, he inherited a difficult legacy. There was chaos everywhere. The economy was crippled, entire regions wanted to secede. There was a threat of Russia disintegrating. Putin stopped this process and that will remain the greatest achievement of his time in office. Even if Putin hadn’t managed to achieve anything else, he will always be credited with that. Yes, he does sometimes resort to authoritarian methods. I have often spoken out against this. That’s also why I opposed him taking office for a third term.•

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“Kim Fowley Came Out Of A Hollywood That Doesn’t Exist Anymore”

January 16, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Kim Fowley is dead, and now they’re coming to take him away, ha-haaa! Such a bag of sleaze that he could make even record-industry professionals blanch, Fowley most famously formed and managed the teenage girl group the Runaways, and the nicest way to put it is that he certainly had an eye for young talent. The opening of David L. Ulin’s knowing 2013 Los Angeles Times review of Lord of Garbage, Fowley’s mental memoir:

Kim Fowley came out of a Hollywood that doesn’t exist anymore, the Hollywood of Kenneth Anger and Ed Wood. Best known for cooking up the Runaways, he began to work in the music business in the late 1950s and since then has turned up in more places than Woody Allen’s Zelig, producing for Gene Vincent, writing with Warren Zevon and introducing John Lennon and the Plastic Ono Band when they performed in Toronto in 1969.

Fowley turned 73 in 2012, and by his own admission has been suffering from bladder cancer, so it’s no surprise that he might choose this moment to look back. But his memoir, Lord of Garbage (Kicks Books: 150 pp., $13.95 paper) may be the weirdest rock ’n’ roll autobiography since … well, I can’t think of what.

The first of a projected three-volume set (Fowley claims the follow-ups have already been delivered), “Lord of Garbage” covers the first 30 years of its author’s life, from his early years bouncing between a model mother and a B-movie actor father, through a high school membership in the 1950s gang the Pagans and on to his involvement as a songwriter and producer in 1960s L.A.

How much of it is true is hard to say, exactly: Written in  bombastic prose, it follows the broad parameters of Fowley’s biography while also insisting that, at the age of 1, his first words were: “I have a question. Why are you bigger than me?”

“Kim Fowley could talk at ten months,” he tells us, “could read and write by one and a half.” It’s no coincidence that he refers to himself in the third person, since Lord of Garbage is clearly the work of someone who considers himself larger than life. “You already know the genius music,” Fowley declares in a brief head note. “Now, know the genius man of letters.”

And yet, as self-congratulatory as that is, as sadly confrontational, it’s also, in its own weird way, slightly thrilling — not unlike Fowley himself.•

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“Mr. Musk Said The Track Likely Would Be In Texas”

January 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Hyperloop is another piece in the puzzle of trying to rescue ourselves from environmental devastation, and its wide application would also make Elon Musk one of the most important industrialists ever. I want it right now, though I have concerns about the mesh network at work building it. Musk is trying to enable the teams that aspire to realize it by constructing a five-mile test track. From Mike Ramsey at the WSJ:

Entrepreneur Elon Musk said he is planning to construct a 5-mile test “loop” for his Hyperloop high-speed transit concept and then offer it to companies and students for use in developing the technology.

Mr. Musk said the track likely would be in Texas—a place where he is trying hard to generate good will. He proposed 18 months ago a system that could travel from San Francisco to Los Angeles in 30 minutes, achieving nearly Mach 1 speeds. …

“Will be building a Hyperloop test track for companies and student teams to test out their pods. Most likely in Texas,” he said in Twitter posts. Mr. Musk also spoke Thursday at the Texas Transportation Forum. “Also thinking of having an annual student Hyperloop pod racer competition, like Formula SAE.”•

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“Most Executives Aren’t As Imaginative As Jobs Or Branson. And That’s Where Namers Come In.”

January 16, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

A rose by any other name would smell as sweet, we have been told, and I believe, with some exceptions, that this is so. Did the infamous 1950s Ford flop, the Edsel, really fail because it was named for Henry’s son, or was it because the design was disappointing to mid-century Americans (even though it looks pretty good to me)? I think a car with a style that resonated with the public would have made “Edsel” synonymous with cherries rather than lemons. But branding has long been a field and namer an actual profession. In a New York Times Magazine article, the always-smart Neal Gabler takes us on a jaunt to find just the right name for a new virtual-reality product. An excerpt:

For decades, corporations have turned to creative people for their naming needs, with varying results. In 1955, a Ford Motor marketing executive recruited the modernist poet Marianne Moore to name the company’s new car. The marketing department had already created a list of 300 candidates, all of which, the executive confessed, were “characterized by an embarrassing pedestrianism.” Could the poet help? In a series of letters, Moore proposed dozens of notably nonpedestrian names — Intelligent Whale, Pastelogram, Mongoose Civique, Utopian Turtletop, Varsity Stroke — but the marketing team rejected them all, instead naming the new car (in one of the great disasters, naming and otherwise, in corporate history) after Henry Ford’s son, Edsel.

Today roughly 500,000 businesses open each month in the United States, and every one needs a name. From Dickens with his bitter Gradgrind to J. K. Rowling with her sour Voldemort, authors have long understood that names help establish character. Politicians know that calling a bill the USA Patriot Act makes it a little harder to vote against. The effects of strategic naming are all around us, once we begin to look for them. “You go to a restaurant, and you don’t order ‘dolphin fish,’ ” Shore points out. “You order ‘mahi-mahi.’ You don’t order ‘Patagonian toothfish.’ You order ‘Chilean sea bass.’ You don’t buy ‘prunes’ anymore; they’re now called ‘dried plums.’ ” Maria Cypher, the founder and director of the naming agency Catchword, which named the McDonald’s McBistro sandwich line, will tell you that names “give us a shared understanding of what something is.” Paola Norambuena, the executive director of verbal identity at Interbrand, says they give us a “shortcut to a good decision.”

Most people assume that companies name themselves and their products. True, Steve Jobs came up with the name for Apple and stuck with it despite the threat of a lawsuit from the Beatles, who had already claimed the name for their record label. Likewise, Richard Branson chose the name Virgin, and namers venerate him for it. “Virgin gets a reaction,” says Eli Altman, the head of A Hundred Monkeys, a naming agency. There is no “way that would get through a boardroom.” Most executives aren’t as imaginative as Jobs or Branson. And that’s where namers come in. Some work within larger branding agencies, like Landor or Interbrand. Others work within boutiques, like Catchword, A Hundred Monkeys (put 100 monkeys at 100 typewriters, and eventually they’ll write a Shakespearean tragedy, or a name), Namebase and Zinzin (French for “whatchama­callit”). Some, like Shore, are lone operators.

For the process that leads to a single name, companies can pay anywhere from $3,000 to $75,000.•

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The 1957 primetime TV show which introduced the Edsel, featuring Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Louis Armstrong and Rosemary Clooney.

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

January 15, 2015 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Seeking Literary Agent – $1

I have just written a satirical short story for adults titled: “Ass in the Hole.”

While I am in the process of having it animated, I am also seeking a literary agent that might be able to help me get this book to a publisher- someone who deals with books of this nature.

Please email me if you believe you can help.

A Brief Note From 1929 About Bakers

January 15, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the October 11, 1929 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Los Angeles — The veil of mystery cloaking the disappearance of seven members of the “Divine Order of the Royal Arms of the Great Eleven” was partially lifted today by the announcement of authorities that two of the seven had died and had been buried in Southern California towns. One died after being baked in a brick oven.

Investigators said they had located in Ventura, Cal., the grave of Mrs. Harlene Satoris, 30, of Portland, Ore., and obtained information that the body of Mr. Frances May Turner had been buried in San Gabriel, a Los Angeles suburb, although the death certificate had been filed in Ventura.

Mrs. Jennie Blackburn, mother of the high priestess of the cult, admitted to police yesterday that Mrs. Turner had been subjected to baking in an effort to cure her of paralysis.•

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“She Was Still Really Quite Beautiful And, If You Could Forget Her Connections, Really Very Charming”

January 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Film, Politics | Permalink

The wonderful Longreads has republished Bruce Handy’s excellent 2013 Tin House piece, “Budd & Leni,” about the very unusual 1945 cinematic “collaboration” between screenwriter Schulberg, who eventually would name names for HUAC, and Nazi filmmaker Riefenstahl, who dearly wanted the world to forget the name of her former boss. An excerpt:

Riefenstahl had recovered her equilibrium, and her looks, by the time Schulberg found her in the autumn of 1945, possibly in the first week of November, not long before the Nuremberg trial was scheduled to begin. “She was still really quite beautiful and, if you could forget her connections, really very charming, and I would think that, to many people, very convincing in her intensity about her art, her love of the mountains, and winter sports,” he said years later. “She was really quite a—quite an imposing piece of work.”

This was the first meeting between the two, but Schulberg had played a very minor part—an extra in a crowd scene, if you will—in an earlier Riefenstahl drama. In 1938 she had made her first trip to America, ostensibly vacationing as a private citizen, although the visit was paid for by the German government. She was hoping to find an American distributor for Olympia—among her seventeen pieces of luggage she brought along three different cuts of the film, including one with all scenes of Hitler deleted—and hoping as well to hobnob with the powers that be in Hollywood, where German directors before her had found lucrative work (though they tended to be directors who hadn’t enjoyed Hitler’s patronage). She sailed into New York on November 4, hit the Stork Club and the Copacabana, and was famously pronounced “pretty as a Swastika” by Walter Winchell. But there were protests and boycotts organized against her by anti-Nazi organizations, and the PR equation grew even more complex a week later, following the events of Kristallnacht, when organized mobs throughout Germany beat and arrested thousands of Jews and murdered several hundred more while burning synagogues and looting Jewish businesses. She dismissed as “slander” news reports that, as Bach points out, “no one in Germany was denying.” (Rather, the Reich held the victims financially responsible for all the property damage.) Riefenstahl left New York for Chicago, and then Detroit, where she received an unsurprisingly warm welcome from Henry Ford, the anti-Semitic car manufacturer and crank publisher, but otherwise was treated like a pariah. Unlike her reception in New York, where her ship had been met by a big, jostling crowd of mostly friendly newsmen and photographers seeking a big story in Hitler’s alleged girlfriend (she and the Führer were “just good friends,” the director had demurred with a giggle), when she stepped off the Super Chief in Hollywood, on November 24, she was greeted by a desultory crowd consisting of the German consul, a staff member from a local German-language newspaper, an American painter who shared her and Hitler’s penchant for the idealized male physique, and the painter’s brother.

“Where is the press?” she demanded, according to her publicist (who defected to the States at the end of her trip and wrote an amusing if sometimes suspect series of articles about her for a Hollywood newspaper).

“But you’re supposed to be here incognito,” she was told.

“Ja, but not so incognito,” she snapped.

The reception went from bad to worse. The Hollywood Anti-Nazi League—a Communist-led group that Schulberg, then a party member, was likely part of—took out ads in the trade papers declaring, “There Is No Room in Hollywood for Leni Reifenstahl” while holding demonstrations in front of her hotel, the Garden of Allah, which forced her to relocate to a bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel. After some hemming and hawing, the town’s moguls declined to meet with her—with the exception of Walt Disney, who showed her some sketches for his latest work-in-progress, Fantasia, but then backed out of allowing her to screen Olympia for him, afraid that his unionized projectionists would spread the word and he’d be boycotted. (Decades later she would claim, incorrectly and ungraciously, that Olympia had beaten out Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs for the then-coveted Mussolini Cup at the 1938 Venice Film Festival.)•

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“They’re Solving Things Like Speech Recognition, Face Recognition, Motion Recognition, Gesture Recognition, All Of This Kind of Stuff”

January 15, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Reading a new Phys.org article about Google moving more quickly than anticipated with its driverless dreams reminded me of a passage from a Five Books interview with Robopocalypse author Daniel H. Wilson. An excerpt from each piece follows.

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From Five Books:

Question:

Isn’t machine learning still at a relatively early stage? 

Daniel H. Wilson:

I disagree. I think machine learning has actually pretty much ripened and matured. Machine learning arguably started in the 1950s, and the term artificial intelligence was coined by John McCarthy in 1956. Back then we didn’t know anything – but scientists were really convinced that they had this thing nipped in the bud, that pretty soon they were going to replace all humans. This was because whenever you are teaching machines to think, the lowest hanging fruit is to give them problems that are very constrained. For example, the rules of a board game. So if you have a certain number of rules and you can have a perfect model of your whole world and you know how everything works within this game, well, yes, a machine is going to kick the crap out of people at chess. 

What those scientists didn’t realise is how complicated and unpredictable and full of noise the real world is. That’s what mathematicians and artificial intelligence researchers have been working on since then. And we’re getting really good at it. In terms of applications, they’re solving things like speech recognition, face recognition, motion recognition, gesture recognition, all of this kind of stuff. So we’re getting there, the field is maturing.

“What those scientists didn’t realise is how complicated and unpredictable and full of noise the real world is. That’s what mathematicians and artificial intelligence researchers have been working on since then. And we’re getting really good at it. In terms of applications, they’re solving things like speech recognition, face recognition, motion recognition, gesture recognition, all of this kind of stuff. So we’re getting there, the field is maturing.•

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From Phys. org:

The head of self-driving cars for Google expects real people to be using them on public roads in two to five years.

Chris Urmson says the cars would still be test vehicles, and Google would collect data on how they interact with other vehicles and pedestrians.

Google is working on sensors to detect road signs and other vehicles, and software that analyzes all the data. The small, bulbous cars without steering wheels or pedals are being tested at a Google facility in California.

Urmson wouldn’t give a date for putting driverless cars on roads en masse, saying that the system has to be safe enough to work properly.

He told reporters Wednesday at the Automotive News World Congress in Detroit that Google doesn’t know yet how it will make money on the cars.

Urmson wants to reach the point where his test team no longer has to pilot the cars. “What we really need is to get to the point where we’re learning about how people interact with it, how they are using it, and how can we best bring that to market as a product that people care for,” he said.•

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“Getting Shot At Is One Of The Few Hazards You Are Unlikely To Face On Mars”

January 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I don’t at all believe that Mars One is ever reaching its destination, let alone by 2024, but the project as a whole–and the search for astronauts who wish to live permanently on a cold and inhospitable planet far from all they know–is like one enormous psychological research project. Richard Hollingham of the BBC spoke to the person responsible for choosing the astronauts who wish to die on Mars and probably never will:

This is the pitch: a perilous one-way journey to a dead, distant world, leaving your family behind for the rest of your life, before dying 225 million kilometres from the planet you used to call home.

“It’s something you really have to want from your heart,” says Norbert Kraft, chief medical officer for Mars One. “It’s a calling, like being a war reporter.”

In fact, getting shot at is one of the few hazards you are unlikely to face on Mars. Unless HG Wells was right or things go very badly wrong.

Despite the obvious downsides, more than 200,000 people from around the world have applied for Mars One’s mission to establish a permanent human settlement on the Red Planet.

The non-profit organisation plans to raise the money, build the spaceships and launch the first colonists within the next decade. Whatever the practicalities of this ambitious target, Kraft has been appointed to help choose the first potential Martian settlers.

He is certainly well qualified to lead the selection. After training as a medical doctor in Austria, and with a background as a doctor in the Austrian military, he has spent 20 years working with the US, Russian and Japanese space agencies studying the suitability of astronauts for long duration space missions.•

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“What Was Not Clear At The Time Was That Violent Crime Had Already Peaked In The Early ’90s”

January 15, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

For a variety of reasons, costs and justice among them, reforming the American penal system is an issue currently enjoying bipartisan support. The War on Crime of the 1990s, which saw Bill Clinton embrace the death penalty with triangulating fervor and Ray Bradbury long for a day when corporations would turn cities into metropolitan malls, started at a time when crime had actually begun decreasing. It just wasn’t clear at the time. But it’s impossible to overlook now, and the mass warehousing of criminals, especially for non-violent and/or drug offenses, seems a waste of both humanity and tax dollars to Democrats and Republicans alike. From Erik Eckholm at the New York Times:

Bullets were flying in the cities. Crack wars trapped people in their homes. The year was 1994, and President Bill Clinton captured the grim national mood, declaring “gangs and drugs have taken over our streets” as he signed the most far-reaching crime bill in history.

The new law expanded the death penalty, and offered the states billions of dollars to hire more police officers and to build more prisons. But what was not clear at the time was that violent crime had already peaked in the early ’90s, starting a decline that has cut the nation’s rates of murder, robbery and assault by half.

Perhaps nowhere has the drop been more stunning than in New York City, which reported only 328 homicides for 2014, compared with 2,245 in 1990. The homicide rate in some cities has fluctuated more — Washington ticked up to 104 in 2014, after a modern low of 88 in 2012. But that still is a drastic fall from a peak of 474 in 1990.

“The judicial system has been a critical element in keeping violent criminals off the street,” said Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, who is co-sponsor of a bill to reduce some federal drug sentences. “But now we’re stepping back, and I think it’s about time, to ask whether the dramatic increase in incarceration was warranted.”•

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