Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
10 recent search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
Pepsi just acknowledged it secretly tested Doritos-flavored Mountain Dew on unwitting subjects, which counts as the second most unpleasant meal of the week.
In a New York Times Magazine Q&A conducted by Jim Rutenberg, satirist Garry Trudeau describes his classmate George W. Bush’s undergraduate dalliance not with water(boarding) but fire:
“Question:
You went to Yale with George W. Bush.
Garry Trudeau:
When I was a sophomore and W. was a senior, I illustrated an article for the newspaper about hazing at Bush’s fraternity — D.K.E. had been branding initiates with a red-hot iron. It became a national story. The Times assigned a reporter, who came up to New Haven and interviewed Bush. And Bush described the branding as no worse than a cigarette burn. His first interview in the national media was in defense of torture.”
Tags: Garry Trudeau, George W. Bush, Jim Rutenberg
While I don’t believe technological unemployment is coming for all jobs in the near future, I certainly think the transition could increasingly gain steam (or electricity or what have you). Economist Robin Hansen doesn’t agree, believing there will be merely a gradual replacement of human labor by machinery, no different now in the AI era than it’s been for centuries. From “This Time Isn’t Different” at Overcoming Bias:
“In each boom many loudly declare high expectations and concern regarding rapid near-term progress in automation. ‘The machines are finally going to soon put everyone out of work!’ Which of course they don’t. We’ve instead seen a pretty slow & steady rate of humans displaced by machines on jobs.
Today we are in another such boom. For example, David Brooks recently parroted Kevin Kelley saying this time is different because now we have cheaper hardware, better algorithms, and more data. But those facts were also true in most of the previous booms; nothing has fundamentally changed! In truth, we remain a very long way from being able to automate all jobs, and we should expect the slow steady rate of job displacement to long continue.
One way to understand this is in terms of the distribution over human jobs of how good machines need to be to displace humans. If this parameter is distributed somewhat evenly over many orders of magnitude, then continued steady exponential progress in machine abilities should continue to translate into only slow incremental displacement of human jobs. Yes machines are vastly better than they were before, but they must get far more vastly better to displace most human workers.”
Tags: Robin Hanson
Another new item about one of my favorite movies, Los Angeles Plays Itself, this one a Q&A with director Thom Andersen conducted by Standard Culture. An excerpt about the differences between celluloid Los Angeles and New York City and the actual cities:
“Question:
How are New York and Los Angeles represented differently in movies?
Thom Andersen:
It’s a big question. When sound came in [to film], there was an influx of New York writers to Los Angeles, so there were many, many films set in the NY, although they were filmed in Los Angeles, mostly on stages. They created this picture of New York as this magical city. And that kind of romanticizing of a city never happened with Los Angeles except in some movies made by directors who came from other places for whom Los Angeles was a magical city. For local filmmakers, Los Angeles had a more mixed feeling — something that seems to continue to the present day. There’s something about New York that lends itself to representation on film. It may be simply the fact, as Rem Koolhaas said: it’s a city based on a culture of congestion. Whereas LA is a culture of dispersion, which make it harder to represent on film.
Question:
Do you prefer New York or Los Angeles?
Thom Andersen:
Los Angeles is an easier place to get things done, but to me, New York is still the center of the world. People look better there. They’re smarter. The sunshine here has fried peoples’ brains.”
Tags: Thom Andersen
Just once I came across George Whitman in the Paris Shakespeare & Company, but I didn’t pay the eccentric and legendary owner much mind, so distracted I was by the leaking ceiling and broken floor. Still, wow, what a bookshop. From Bruce Handy’s new Vanity Fair piece about the fabled store:
“You know who else loved Shakespeare and Company and who wasn’t a writer with skin in the game? Frank Sinatra—according, that is, to Ed Walters, a former pit boss at the Sands, in Las Vegas, who was taken under Sinatra’s wing in the 1960s and offered this account for a forthcoming history the store plans to publish:
What few Sinatra fans know is that he loved books, especially history books. He was in the casino at a 21 table, playing blackjack and talking with his friends. He told the guys, ‘I’m giving Eddie some books to educate him. He needs it.’
He asked about a book he’d given me, was I reading it. He said, ‘Eddie you must travel and when you do, go to Paris, go to the Shakespeare bookstore. I know the guy there. . . . Go see the guy George—he’s a guy that lives with the books.’
Whitman died on December 14, 2011, two days after his 98th birthday. Unlike many once young bohemians and idealistic self-proclaimed Communists, he hewed to his ideals all the way through to the end. He made a fetish of thriftiness, sometimes cooking from restaurant and market leavings for himself and guests. Unwilling to pay for haircuts, he trimmed his by lighting it on fire with candles. (You can see him do so in a video on YouTube that is equal parts beguiling and horrifying.) His one concession to fashion: a grotty paisley jacket he wore for decades and which had already seen better days when the poet Ted Joans described it as never-been-cleaned in 1974. In short, he was the rare businessman who cared little for money except as a vehicle to expand his shop, which over the decades grew from a single ground-floor room into the multi-floor, ad-hoc institution it is today. In a eulogy he wrote for Whitman, Ferlinghetti described Shakespeare and Company as ‘a literary octopus with an insatiable appetite for print, taking over the beat-up building … room by room, floor by floor, a veritable nest of books.’ I like to think of it as a half-planned, half-accreted, site-specific folk-art masterpiece: the Watts Towers of bookselling, with its warren of narrow passageways lined by casually carpentered bookshelves; its small rooms adorned with whimsical names (OLD SMOKY READING ROOM and BLUE OYSTER TEAROOM); its owner’s favorite epigrams painted above doorways and on steps (LIVE FOR HUMANITY and BE NOT INHOSPITABLE TO STRANGERS LEST THEY BE ANGELS IN DISGUISE); its scavenged floorings, including, in one of the ground-floor rooms, marble tiling Whitman is said to have stolen decades ago from Montparnasse Cemetery and laid down in an abstract mosaic around the store’s ‘wishing well’—a hole in which customers toss coins to be harvested by the store’s more impecunious residents. (Sign: FEED THE STARVING WRITERS.)
Sinatra was right, by the way: Whitman did live with the books, eventually taking a small apartment on the building’s fourth floor (or third, by French floor-numbering convention), which was really just an extension of the store. His own back bedroom had three walls of bookshelves, double-lined with books: novels, poetry, biographies, philosophy, complete sets of Freud and Jung—pretty much anything you can think of, plus the detective novels he kept stashed under his pillows. That bedroom is where, following a stroke, he passed away, so Sinatra could have said he died with the books, too.”
Tags: Bruce Handy, Frank Sinatra, George Whitman
I hope we’re not going to get lectures about how Democrats lost so many states in the midterm elections because they didn’t communicate their message clearly enough, they didn’t find the “magic words.” Nothing presents more clarity than a family desperate for healthcare visiting doctors for the first time in years. You can’t be clearer than life and death. I don’t think those people have been “tricked” if they then choose to elect politicians desperate to take that benefit from them, as they did with Mitch McConnell in Kentucky. Sure, it would have been great for the media to explain recently how universal healthcare lifts the threshold for a plague in America, imported or “home-grown,” than to engage in ceaseless fearmongering about Ebola, a virus yet to claim a single U.S. citizen on American soil. But I think the people get the media and government they deserve. If they want to vote their ideology and aspirations rather than their reality, that’s what going to happen. The matter with Kansas, at long last, may be Kansans. From Paul Krugman at the New York Times:
“But the biggest secret of the Republican triumph surely lies in the discovery that obstructionism bordering on sabotage is a winning political strategy. From Day 1 of the Obama administration, Mr. McConnell and his colleagues have done everything they could to undermine effective policy, in particular blocking every effort to do the obvious thing — boost infrastructure spending — in a time of low interest rates and high unemployment.
This was, it turned out, bad for America but good for Republicans. Most voters don’t know much about policy details, nor do they understand the legislative process. So all they saw was that the man in the White House wasn’t delivering prosperity — and they punished his party.
Will things change now that the G.O.P. can’t so easily evade responsibility? I guess we’ll find out.”
Tags: Paul Krugman
It’s too complicated to explain why, but I need a photo of a black Combat roach bait trap in someone’s home, and ideally the shot shows a bit of their apartment so I can tell what part of the home the trap is in.
I searched online but all I found were images of the traps themselves or the packaging. But I need a photo of an actual trap in someone’s home.
Thanks!!
The opening of Tuan C. Nguyen’s Washington Post piece about Paralelní Polis, a Czechoslovakian cafe opened by crypto-anarchists in which the coin of the realm is virtual:
“Step inside the newest coffeehouse on Dělnická street in Prague and it doesn’t take long to notice that something’s amiss. There’s no cash register, nor a counter where customers would typically form a line.
Instead, you’ll find a long, wood slab table situated ever so slightly towards the left side of the room, where a wide selection of pastries, along with menus, plates, cups, utensils, jugs of water and an expresso machine can be found neatly laid out in the open.
Oddly enough, there’s something about the arrangement that’s refreshing, and at the same time, a bit disconcerting. Upon passing through the first time, my initial reaction was to quickly scan the room for any apron-wearing employee. And as the confusion intensified, so did the urge to grab a cup and, heck, whip up a latte myself.
Just as I began mulling over that very notion, a gentlemen with a tightly-trimmed beard and who looked to be in his 20’s, got up from a nearby table, where he had been seated with a couple of young women, and walked over to greet me.
‘I know the set-up can be sort of disorientating, but that’s the whole point,’ Michal Navrátil, operations manager and part-time barista, assured me. ‘The idea is that by not having uniforms, we also get rid of the imposed separation between patrons and workers.’
Paralelní Polis, which in Czech means ‘Parallel World,’ is known mostly for being perhaps the world’s first bitcoin-only cafe. All transactions — from wages to point of sale — are processed virtually, using one of the most well-recognized cryptocurrencies. More broadly though, the recently-renovated space, which includes a co-working room and hacker space, was conceived as way to demonstrate on a micro level how an entirely decentralized society might function.”
Tags: Michal Navrátil, Tuan C. Nguyen
Michael Crichton was one of the more unusual entertainers of his time, a pulp-ish storyteller with an elite education who had no taste–or talent?–for the highbrow. He made a lot of people happy, though scientists and anthropologists were not often among them. The following excerpt, from a 1981 People portrait of him by Andrea Chambers, reveals Crichton (unsurprisingly) as an early adopter of personal computing.
_____________________________
At 38, he has already been educated as an M.D. at Harvard (but never practiced), written 15 books (among them bestsellers like The Andromeda Strain and The Terminal Man), and directed three moneymaking movies (Westworld, Coma and The Great Train Robbery). He is a devoted paladin of modern painting whose collection, which includes works by Frank Stella and Robert Rauschenberg, recently toured California museums. In 1977, because the subject intrigued him, Crichton wrote the catalogue for a Jasper Johns retrospective at Manhattan’s Whitney Museum. “Art interviewers tend to be more formal and discuss esthetics—’Why did you put the red here and the blue there?’ ” says Johns. “But Michael was trying to relate me to my work. He is a novelist and he brings that different perspective.”
Crichton’s latest literary enterprise is Congo (Alfred A. Knopf), a technology-packed adventure tale about a computer-led diamond hunt in the wilds of Africa. Accompanied by a friendly gorilla named Amy, Crichton’s characters confront everything from an erupting volcano to ferocious apes bred to destroy anyone who approaches the diamonds. The novel has bobbed onto best-seller lists, despite critical sneers that it is “entertaining trash.” (A New York Times reviewer called it “literarily vapid and scientifically more anthropomorphic than Dumbo.”)
Crichton cheerfully admits that Congo owes more than its exotic locale to Sir Henry Rider Haggard’s classic King Solomon’s Mines. “All the books I’ve written play with preexisting literary forms,” Crichton says. A model for The Andromeda Strain was H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds. The Terminal Man was based on Frankenstein’s monster. Crichton’s 1976 novel Eaters of the Dead was inspired by Beowulf. “The challenge is in revitalizing the old forms,” he explains.
Crichton taps out his books on an Olivetti word processor (price: $13,500) and bombards readers with high-density scientific data and jargon, only some of which is real. “I did check on the rapids in the Congo,” he says. “They exist, but not where I put them.” His impressive description of a cannibal tribe is similarly fabricated. “It amused me to make a complete ethnography of a nonexistent tribe,” he notes. “I like to make up something to seem real.”•
From the May 30, 1871 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“During the days of the resurrectionists or body-snatchers, when graveyards were subjected to pillage for supplying anatomists with subjects for dissection, the teeth from the dead bodies formed a frequent article of sale for dentists. Sometimes graves were opened for the teeth alone, as being small and easily concealed articles. Mr. Cooper, the surgeon, relates an instance of a man feigning to look for a burial place for his wife, and thus obtaining access to the vault of a meeting-house, the trap-door of which he unbolted; at night he let himself down into the vault, and pocketed the front teeth of the whole of the buried congregation, by which he cleared fifty pounds!”
Tags: Mr. Cooper, the Surgeon
Lone geniuses exist and are necessary, but they’re few and would never be able to advance society on their own. Progress is a cumulative process. While basic copyright laws are necessary for a stable economy, the human species is (fortunately) wired for imitation. Other animals mostly learn and die, their knowledge gone with them, whereas we can pass along methods and maneuvers. The opening of “Brilliant Impersonators,” Kat McGowan’s Aeon ode to the copycat:
“Imitation might be a form of flattery, but it is also a good way to end up in legal trouble. More than 6,000 lawsuits over patent infringements were filed in the United States last year. Samsung and Apple, locked in what’s been called the bloodiest corporate war in history, have jointly spent more than $1 billion in the past four years trying to prove that one poached the other’s smartphone technology.
In today’s world, inventors are our heroes and our saviours – the geniuses who keep the world economy surging forward, who bring us the newest playthings and the latest comforts. We rely on inventors to build a cleaner, happier, more prosperous future. Copycats are a threat to this cheerful vision. Not for nothing do we call them pirates; by cheating and stealing, copiers undermine the system. By profiting from the hard work of others, they reduce the incentive to create. They are a threat to the social order.
But according to a cluster of like-minded researchers, we’ve misunderstood how innovation really works. Throughout human history, innovation – including the technological progress we cherish – has been fuelled and sustained by imitation. Copying is the mighty force that has allowed the human race to move from stone knives to remote-guided drones, from digging sticks to crops that manufacture their own pesticides. Plenty of animals can innovate, but no other species on earth can imitate with the skill and accuracy of a human being. We’re natural-born rip-off artists. To be human is to copy.”
Tags: Kat McGowan
I think Pastoralia is still my favorite George Saunders short-story collection, though I really love them all, their devastating deadpan and deep humanity. A very cool T magazine feature publishes new annotations made by authors in 75 first editions to be auctioned at Sotheby’s to benefit the PEN American Center. An example from Saunders’ oeuvre follows.
__________________________
CivilWarLand in Bad Decline by George Saunders, published in 1996.
At the end, Saunders writes: ‘Closing thought: I like the audacity of this book. I like less the places where it feels like I went into Auto-Quirky Mode. Ah youth! Some issues: Life amid limitations; paucity. Various tonalities of defense. Pain; humiliation inflicted on hapless workers – some of us turn on one another. Early on, this read, could really feel this young writer’s aversion to anything mild or typical or bland. Feeling, at first, like a tic. But then it started to grow on me — around ‘400 Pound CEO.’ This performative thing then starts to feel essential; organic somehow – a way to get to the moral outrage. I kept thinking of the word ‘immoderation.’ Like the yelp of someone who’s just been burned.”
Tags: George Saunders
Young people, their minds not yet made up, have always been the easiest to recruit, but there’s something different about ISIS poaching the impressionable for extremism, and it’s social networks being repurposed for anti-social behavior. France has been hardest hit, with nearly 1,000 teens and twentysomethings joining the Mideast madness. Two factors overlap many of the cases: The children were headed for careers which could have genuinely helped the world, and they’ve been drawn into the circle of hatred online. We’re all connected now, for better and worse. From Julia Amalia Heyer at Spiegel:
“The number of young people who have become radicalized and have disappeared is rising rapidly. More than 140 families have contacted Bouzar since January 2014.
Radicalization used to be limited to the poor and the uneducated, says Bouzar. Immigrants from Muslim backgrounds were usually the ones who joined jihadist groups. But the situation has changed today, she explains. ‘Now three-quarters of them come from atheist families.’ They include Christians and Jews, and almost all are from the middle class, with some coming from upper-class families, the children of teachers, civil servants and doctors. Bouzar is even familiar with a case involving an elite female university student. It also appears that more and more girls and young women are fantasizing about jihad.
Indoctrination
The Internet and social networks make it easy to indoctrinate young people. In her research, Bouzar discovered that the French-speaking unit of the Al-Nusra Front actually employs headhunters to recruit young women and men.
The process of brainwashing usually follows the same principles, not unlike the approach taken by sects. First the victim, be it a boy or a girl, is isolated from his or her surroundings. The young people are pressured to sever all ties to family and friends. Then the indoctrination begins, through videos about genetically engineered food or alleged conspiracies. The goal is to make the victims believe that the world is evil and that only they have been chosen to make it a better place.
As a result of this brainwashing, the young women and men gradually lose their connection to everyday life and their old identities. Once a new identity has been created, they often see themselves as members of a chosen group of fighters for a better world.
Bouzar has found that the radicalized young women have a common trait: They are all interested in careers in social work or humanitarian aid.”
Tags: Julia Amalia Heyer
In a new Edge discussion about de-extinction, John Brockman asks Stewart Brand about the dangers inherent in the reintroduction of bygone birds and bears into the world, which, you would think, would have some unintended consequences. An excerpt:
“John Brockman:
What are the dangers, if any?
Stewart Brand:
The dangers of de-extinction mostly get interpreted in ecological or conservation terms, and mostly by people who are mistakenly worried that nature is really, really fragile. We saw this when a year ago we had a TEDx de-extinction that Ryan organized that had twenty-five scientists holding forth on various aspects of a wide number of projects that are going on—everything from the European aurochs to the Spanish bucardo to the gastric brooding frog in Australia.
Our projects are not the only one. Then the news went out: “De-extinction might happen”, and it was great because it went out in a way that people understood it as a scientific issue. They understood we weren’t going to have dinosaurs. There’s no Jurassic park scenario going to play out. But immediately you would see in these wonderful comment lines after every place online, where the trolls emerge and start fretting, and the hand-wringing would be around, let’s see: what if you bring it back and it turns out to be insanely invasive? And, passenger pigeons, there used to be five billion and suddenly there’s five billion birds crapping on everything, it’ll be like kudzu. Well, actually it’s not an invasive. They were in North America for 22 million years. The invasive in this story is us, and we’re the ones who shot them all to death. If we’ve got an invasive to worry about it’s the human one, which is fair. Nature will accommodate these birds coming back. Nature’s not broken.
Another common comment is that there’s obviously no habitat left for these birds, or for the woolly mammoths, because the world has changed since their day. Again, time machine notions of if you were suddenly thrown into the 15th century or the 24th century, you wouldn’t be able to function because you wouldn’t know how to call a cab. It’s not like that in nature, and things blend in and take time in. Nature is not broken just because humans have been farming for 10,000 years. It is very robust.
What are the real dangers? The real dangers are it won’t work.”
Tags: John Brockman, Stewart Brand
Two things about the midterm elections: It’s bizarre that a state with the population of Rhode Island has as many national senators as California. More representative of state demarcations than the people. Also: Many Americans still vote against their best interests, guided by their ideology rather than their reality. From Margot Sanger-Katz in the New York Times:
“In places where the uninsured rate plummeted this year, Republicans still scored big electoral victories.
Arkansas, Kentucky and West Virginia — states that saw substantial drops in the proportion of their residents without insurance — all elected Republican Senate candidates who oppose the Affordable Care Act. Control of the West Virginia state House of Delegates flipped from Democrats to Republicans. And Arkansas elected Republican supermajorities to both houses of its legislature along with a Republican governor, a situation that could imperil the Medicaid expansion that helped more than 200,000 of its poorest residents get health insurance.”
Tags: Margot Sanger-Katz
The original “gone girl,” mystery writer Agatha Christie abandoned her automobile one day in 1926 and vanished without a trace. For 11 days, a large-scale womanhunt fanned across the English countryside, with a thousand police officers and 15,000 volunteers searching for a body, dead or alive. Screaming headlines everywhere expressed concern for her (and provided lurid entertainment). When Christie was discovered alive and living quietly at the Swan Hydropathic Hotel in Yorkshire, the press and people turned, angered by what they thought was perhaps a publicity stunt–and maybe just a little disappointed subconsciously that the story’s final chapter wouldn’t have the worst possible end. Was it martial discord or amnesia or electroshock therapy or something else that drove the novelist from her life? Nobody really knows. Two Brooklyn Daily Eagle articles follow about the aftermath of the case.
From the December 14, 1926 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
From the December 15, 1926 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
Tags: Agatha Christie
Dictaphones and typewriters were becoming office heirlooms decades ago, as demonstrated in this 1976 Canadian Broadcasting Corporation video about the computerized, automated office of tomorrow.
It seems almost impossible that the United States uses less water than it did 45 years ago, but that’s the finding of the Pacific Institute. Growing population and villages of computer servers that need constant cooling would suggest we’re thirstier than ever, but in addition to improved conservation methods, globalization and outsourcing have played roles in the apparent reduction. From Brad Plumer at Vox:
“The US economy keeps expanding and the population keeps growing. But we actually use less water now for all purposes than we did back in 1970. That includes freshwater for our showers and toilets. It includes farm irrigation. It also includes withdrawals of both fresh and saline water to cool our fossil fuel and nuclear power plants.
The underlying data comes from a new report by the US Geological Survey, which notes that water for power plants (45 percent) and irrigation (33 percent) still made up most water withdrawals in the US as of 2010. But use in both of those areas has been declining over time.
Some of the credit goes to major efficiency gains: Power plants have implemented more efficient cooling systems that either recirculate water or use ‘dry’ cooling. More and more farmers are turning to drip irrigation and other efficient watering methods (though this is far from universal). Inside homes, toilets and showers have become much more efficient. And recycling of wastewater has become more common in some cities.
But that’s not the whole story: The USGS also notes that some manufacturing facilities that once used a fair bit of water for industrial purposes have moved overseas.”
Tags: Brad Plumer
As we become faster, cheaper and even more out of control, as the anarchy of the Internet imposes itself on life in three dimensions, controlling objects, even deadly, semi-automatic ones, will be all but impossible. The future points to things that can be pointed at you–cameras, tricorders, guns, etc. From Andy Greenberg at Wired:
“As 3-D printed guns have evolved over the past 18 months from a science-fictional experiment into a subculture, they’ve faced a fundamental limitation: Cheap plastic isn’t the best material to contain an explosive blast. Now an amateur gunsmith has instead found a way to transfer that stress to a component that’s actually made of metal—the ammunition.
Michael Crumling, a 25-year-old machinist from York, Pennsylvania, has developed a round designed specifically to be fired from 3-D printed guns. His ammunition uses a thicker steel shell with a lead bullet inserted an inch inside, deep enough that the shell can contain the explosion of the round’s gunpowder instead of transferring that force to the plastic body or barrel of the gun. Crumling says that allows a home-printed firearm made from even the cheapest materials to be fired again and again without cracking or deformation. And while his design isn’t easily replicated because the rounds must be individually machined for now, it may represent another step towards durable, practical, printed guns—even semi-automatic ones.”
Tags: Andy Greenberg, Michael Crumling
Elon Musk, spurred on in part by his reading of Nick Bostrom’s Superintelligence, recently has been warning of the existential crisis Artificial Intelligence poses. In a Slate piece that’s, of course, contrarian, Adam Elkus takes the Tesla technologist to task for what he sees as technopanic. I don’t believe we’ll survive as a species without advanced AI, but it certainly possesses its own extinction threats, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with leaders in the field addressing them. From Elkus:
“When public figures like Musk characterize emerging technologies in mystical, alarmist, and metaphorical terms, they abandon the very science and technology that forged innovations like Tesla cars for the superstition and ignorance of what Carl Sagan famously dubbed the ‘demon-haunted world.’ Instead of helping users understand, adapt to, and even empathize with the white-collar robot that may be joining their workplace, Musk’s remarks encourage them to fear and despise what they don’t understand. It is fitting that Musk’s remarks come so close to Halloween, as his rhetoric resembles that of the village elder in an old horror movie who whips up the villagers to bear pitchforks and torches to kill the monster in the decrepit old castle up the hill.
The greatest tragedy of the emergent AI technopanic that Musk fuels is that it may reduce human autonomy in a world that may one day be driven by increasingly autonomous machine intelligence. Experts tell us that emerging AI technologies will fundamentally reshape everything from romantic relationships to national security. They could be wrong, as AI has an unfortunate history of failing to live up to expectations. Let’s assume, however, that they are right. Why would it be in the public interest to—through visions of demons, wizards, and warlocks—contribute to an already growing divide between the technologists who make the self-driving cars and the rest of us who will ride in them?”
Tags: Adam Elkus, Elon Musk
I’m sorry, but I’m just not reading books on a phone. Of course, what’s true for me may not be so for the broader world.
From Ellis Hamburger’s Verge interview with Willem Van Lancker, co-founder of the Oyster book app:
Question:
Where are people reading more, tablets, phones, or on the web?
Willem Van Lancker:
We’ve always been really big believers that the device of the future for books is the phone. That’s the first thing we went to publishers with when we started talking about the differentiation of Oyster, that we can provide the best possible mobile experience.
It’s hard to get the data on this with Android, because, what is a tablet? But between iPhone and iPad, it’s a 50 / 50 split. It might even be higher on the phone in recent months over the iPad. This is an app that people use on their phone constantly, and we see the actual activity spiking during the week at lunchtime, and through the evening and peaks around midnight, and on the weekends it’s pretty sustained. Unlike a lot of products, our biggest days are Saturdays and Sundays, but when we added the web reader, you see it spiking on weekdays because people are reading during work.
We thought about making a button you could hit that would make Oyster look like Microsoft Word like they do for March Madness. It would be funny to bring that to books.
Question:
Why did your gut tell you that people are going to be reading on phones in the future?
Willem Van Lancker:
It was my own behavior. Even when I’m in bed at night, I have an iPad mini with Retina and I still use my phone. And I have an iPhone 6 now, which is even better.•
“I want to fuck Blanche.”
I’m a happily married man who loves his wife and never cheats. She’s still hot to me and looks better everyday. Here’s the thing: I find myself sexually attracted to 98% of the women I see, wherever I may be. Whether it’s hot women who work out to women over 300 lbs, I get hard just looking at them. Any race too. Age doesn’t matter either. I watch Golden Girls simply because I want to fuck Blanche. I never give in to temptation, in fact I usually take this horniess home and make love to the Mrs. But even with us having sex 4 times a week, I still masturbate at least three times a day. Even awkwardly shaped women are conjuring up orgasms. Some of the women most people think dress inappropriately are the ones that turn me on the most. I know this isn’t normal. Am I just a sex addict?
There’s really no representative person who raises a 340-pound log above his head. Case in point: Andrew Palmer, the seventh strongest man in America (or at least on the nation’s strongman-competition circuit), a mountainous software engineer who moonlights by moving trees with his limbs, while performing in a surprisingly subdued modern Herculean sideshow. An excerpt follows from “Carry That Weight,” Alex Pappademas’ very fun Grantland portrait of Palmer.
______________________________
There are no typical strongmen. Michael Caruso is also a microbiologist. The Bulgarian Dimitar Savatinov came to the sport after a stint as an actual strongman with Ringling Brothers, where his act, according to the web site Rogue Fitness, involved “laying [sic] on broken glass while a board on his chest had twelve performers dancing on it, bending iron bars, [and] holding and spinning seven girls on a human carousel[.]“ Five days a week, Andrew Palmer works as a software engineer at a startup in Seattle. Before that he worked for Microsoft. He played high school football and was briefly the only 300-pound forward on the school soccer team. After college, he slowed down, gained desk-job weight. He started training for his first strongman contest — the 2008 NorCal Winter Strongman Challenge, in Concord, California — the way you might set your sights on a half-marathon. It was a reason to go to the gym. He figured he’d do it and go to the contest and get his ass kicked. Instead he came in second, just behind a more experienced strongman named Chris Grantano. That was how it started.
Palmer had some issues with depression when he was younger, and the lifting helps with that. It helps him sleep. It’s almost like meditation. It does what meditation is supposed to do — it takes him off the wheel of thought and experience for a little while. “When you’re grinding out reps,” he told me in Vegas, “you fall into a tunnel vision where there’s literally nothing but the movement. You’re doing that movement over and over, and then it stops, and you come back, and you’re like, ‘Oh, I’m back. I remember who I am again.’”
The trick is having an existence to come back to. Palmer likes having a circle of friends who don’t do what he does. In recent months, his Instagram feed has included blurry concert photos of Echo & the Bunnymen at the Showbox and Erasure at the 9:30 Club and EMA at a music festival in Portland. Palmer goes to a lot of rock festivals, even though whenever he’s in a crowded place with alcohol flowing, drunks invariably run up to grab his beard without asking, the way strangers feel entitled to touch a pregnant woman’s belly. Palmer likes a few beers, Palmer likes a hang. “I know guys who would never drink a beer except for the night after a contest,” he says. “More power to you, but I’m gonna drink beer more often than that. And if that means I don’t ever take top three at World’s Strongest Man, I’ll deal with that, because otherwise I could go crazy.”•
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“C’mon, Andy!”:
Tags: Alex Pappademas, Andrew Palmer, Chris Grantano, Dimitar Savatinov, Michael Caruso