“They Neither Reap Nor Sow Nor Perform Any Useful Social Function”

October 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

People has published a reimagining of the cover of its very first issue from March 4, 1974, with Taylor Swift standing in for Mia Farrow. In the inaugural 1974 edition of People, novelist William Peter Blatty responded to the firestorm over the screen adaptation of The Exorcist. An excerpt in which he hit back at the critical elite, that quaint thing that used to exist before the fans stormed the gates:

Question:

How do you feel about some of the most negative reviewers of your film?

William Peter Blatty:

I would like to introduce Pauline Kael of The New Yorker to Father Woods and Father Cortes. They hate the movie because they say it is doing the church no good. Pauline Kael hates the movie because she says it is ‘the biggest recruiting poster the Catholic Church has had since the sunnier days of Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary’s.’ I would like to put these people in a room together.

Vincent Canby of the New York Times said the film was not made without intelligence or talent. He said this only further infuriated him—that we should have wasted the intelligence, talent, money and budget of a lavish production on what he called elegant claptrap.

Question:

Why are they so negative?

William Peter Blatty:

They belong to a very small, elitist set of reviewers who have been trapped so long in the squirrel cage of their egos that the world of reality outside their cage is a blur. They neither reap nor sow nor perform any useful social function. They are malignant Miles of the field.•

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“N.F.L. Teams, By Contrast, Operate In Unison To Protect One Of The Most Micromanaged Brands In Existence”

October 8, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Boxing went from the Sport of Kings to an all-but-empty throne in the U.S. in just two or three decades, parents no longer willing to allow their children to suffer repeated blows to the brain, even if it seemed a way out for impoverished children. (Some very non-contact sports like cricket also went away quickly in America.) It’s almost impossible to envision the NFL suffering the same fate even though there’s no path for the league to avoid the preponderance of scary health issues. In a New York Times piece, Ian McGugan argues that the pro-football cartel is too well-organized to be sidelined despite its concussion problems and PR nightmares, the sport too ingrained in America to vanish even with declining Pop Warner league participation. The opening:

“The N.F.L., from at least one perspective, has had a pretty rough month. In the span of a few days, as most everyone knows, a video surfaced depicting the Baltimore Ravens running back Ray Rice knocking his future wife unconscious; then the Minnesota Vikings superstar Adrian Peterson was booked for purportedly whipping his 4-year-old son with a tree branch. All the while, a clutch of other players faced the consequences of their own ostensible involvement in domestic-violence incidents. But as pundits wondered if the scandals could mark the beginning of the end for America’s favorite sport, the N.F.L.’s television ratings surpassed their levels from a year earlier. The uptick points to a surprising reality: Despite all its current problems, pro football is positioned to not only weather its current storm, but also to sail through it toward greater prosperity.

Boxing — another macho pastime populated by guys you might hesitate to invite to a merlot tasting — shows how a spectacle can lose its grip on the public. Once arguably the most popular sport in America, boxing has long since been divided into rival fiefs by promoters who sometimes seem to be auditioning for a Tarantino movie. N.F.L. teams, by contrast, operate in unison to protect one of the most micromanaged brands in existence. At the head of that collective is a commissioner with the broadest powers of any leader in sports. The ‘no fun league’ lays down the law on everything from the color of socks players can wear to what celebrations are acceptable after a touchdown. (The league’s most recent diktat: no dunking the ball over the goal post.) Whenever the league has faced threats in the past — gambling scandals or labor conflicts — franchise owners have generally snapped into formation behind the boss. ‘For all the talk about competition on the field,’ says Stefan Szymanski, a sports economist at the University of Michigan, ‘it’s really a socialist collective off the field.’

In many ways, after all, N.F.L. football has transcended sports to become a mass-produced, highly managed and artfully promoted product.”

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Old Print Article: “Beam Of Light Starts, Stops Empty Car,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1930)

October 8, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Telephone instructions, electric eyes and beams of light were used to maneuver an early robocar that followed remote orders and needed no driver. It was a novelty from Westinghouse, though it doesn’t appear any long-term application was planned. (Scroll down to the bottom of this PDF to see a photo of the actual demo.) An article follows about the driverless Willys-Knight from the January 7, 1930 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

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“Urban Farming Has Begun To Shift”

October 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

MIT’s Caleb Harper is something of a Rappaccini, wildly experimenting with incubated plants in his lab, hoping to make urban farming bloom, so that a growing world population can be fed. From Kevin Gray at Wired UK:

“Even amid the creative genius and goofy playfulness of MIT’s Media Lab near Boston — where giant inflatable sharks dangle from ceilings, workbenches are populated by unblinking robot heads and skinny scientists with mutton chops and Hawaiian shirts pay rapt attention to indecipherable whiteboard scribbles — Caleb Harper is an oddball. While his coworkers develop artificial –intelligence, smart prosthetics, folding cars and 3D neural-imaging systems, Harper is growing lettuce. In the past year, he has transformed a small lounge outside his fifth-floor lab into a high-tech garden worthy of a sci-fi film. Species of lettuce — as well as broccoli, tomatoes and basil — grow in mid-air, bathed in blue and red LED lights, their ghostly white roots dangling like jellyfish. They are stacked in shelves on an exterior glass wall, seven metres long and 2.5 metres high, meant to resemble the exterior of an office building. If Harper and his team get their way, entire city districts will one day look like this, a living and edible garden.

‘I believe there’s the possibility that we can change the world and change the food system,’ says Harper, a tall and stocky 34-year-old in a blue shirt and cowboy boots. ‘The potential for urban farming is huge. And it’s not all bullshit.’ Urban farming has begun to shift from its look-what-we-can-do phase of growing salads and vegetables on industrial rooftops and in empty city spaces, to a new wave of innovation that is being led by thinkers — and makers — like Harper. As founder of the year-old CityFARM project at MIT, Harper is figuring out how to use data science to optimise crop yields, deploy networked sensors to ‘listen’ to a plant’s water, nutrient and carbon needs, and deliver optimal light wavelengths — not just for photosynthesis but to change the flavour of foods. And he hopes to bolt his towering plantations on to the buildings in which we live and work.

His system promises to change the economics of industrial agriculture and to lessen its burden on the environment.”

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“Depression Is Their Normal State, Except When Spending Is Supported By Bubbles”

October 7, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a review of Martin Wolf’s The Shifts and the Shocks in the New York Review of Books, Paul Krugman argues that the financial bubble may not have led to the 2008 crash but merely briefly masked an economy that has stalled in a long-term way. An excerpt:

“Emphasizing the need to reduce financial fragility makes sense if you believe that the legacy of past financial excess is the reason we’re in so much trouble now. But are we sure about that? Let me offer two reasons to be skeptical.

First, while the depression that overtook the Western world in 2008 clearly came after the collapse of a vast financial bubble, that doesn’t mean that the bubble caused the depression. Late in The Shifts and the Shocks Wolf mentions the reemergence of the ‘secular stagnation’ hypothesis, most famously in the speeches and writing of Lawrence Summers (Lord Adair Turner independently made similar points, as did I). But I’m not sure whether readers will grasp the full implications. If the secular stagnationists are right, advanced economies now suffer from persistently inadequate demand, so that depression is their normal state, except when spending is supported by bubbles. If that’s true, bubbles aren’t the root of the problem; they’re actually a good thing while they last, because they prop up demand. Unfortunately, they’re not sustainable—so what we need urgently are policies to support demand on a continuing basis, which is an issue very different from questions of financial regulation.

Wolf actually does address this issue briefly, suggesting that the answer might lie in deficit spending financed by the government’s printing press. But this radical suggestion is, as I said, overshadowed by his calls for more financial regulation. It’s the morality play aspect again: the idea that we need to don a hairshirt and repent our sins resonates with many people, while the idea that we may need to abandon conventional notions of fiscal and monetary virtue has few takers.”

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“The City’s Grid Would Change Immeasurably”

October 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Oh, it’s fun designing a city on paper or even redesigning one. At i09, Annalee Newitz has a thought experiment for making over New York: Imagine it all of a sudden becomes a megacity with triple the population and figure out how to make that sustainable. Probably good to practice since the number of New Yorkers will likely head to that stratosphere over the decades, if flooding doesn’t become a recurrent issue. An excerpt from the “Disappearing Streets” section:

“New York City is already one of the most densely-packed urban spaces in the world, with 10,724 people on average per square kilometer. To triple the living spaces here, we’ll need to build up — but we’ll also need to build between. The city could no longer afford to devote so much street space to the products of an already-shaky auto industry, and the city’s grid would change immeasurably. So would the laws that govern it.

For efficiency’s sake, Manhattan would have to retain a couple of the major avenues like Fifth, which cuts through the center of the island. But it would be reserved for trucks delivering food — or taking garbage out. Other streets would be for licensed taxis and services like Uber, while cars belonging to individuals might be routed to the edges of island, or to other boroughs entirely. Getting around in Manhattan would mean taking public transit, or paying dearly to get an Uber.

At the same time, there would be a flowering of pedestrian walkways like Sixth and a Half Avenue, which tunnels through the skyscrapers of midtown in between Sixth and Seventh Aves. As more skyscrapers grew, walkways would also take to the skies in bridges between buildings. To keep the ground-level streets less congested, pedestrians would be invited to walk Broadway from the air, hustling from building to building via a growing network of architectural tissues that would nourish a new sidewalk culture fifteen stories off the ground.

Some of these elevated sidewalks would be classic New York, complete with tar-gummed concrete and jagged nubs of rusted rebar poking out at odd angles. But others would look like high-tech works of art.”

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“So What Does Explain The ‘Obesity Penalty’?”

October 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Economist has a piece about the so-called “Obesity Penalty,” which is supported by a new Swedish study which argues that overweight people earn less than their weed-like co-workers. Probably a good idea to be circumspect about the whole thing–or at least the causes if the effect is real. An excerpt:

“BEING obese is the same as not having an undergraduate degree. That’s the bizarre message from a new paper that looks at the economic fortunes of Swedish men who enlisted in compulsory military service in the 1980s and 1990s. They show that men who are obese aged 18 grow up to earn 16% less than their peers of a normal weight. Even people who were overweight at 18—that is, with a body-mass index from 25 to 30—see significantly lower wages as an adult.

At first glance, a sceptic might be unconvinced by the results. After all, within countries the poorest people tend to be the fattest. One study found that Americans who live in the most poverty-dense counties are those most prone to obesity. If obese people tend to come from impoverished backgrounds, then we might expect them to have lower earnings as an adult.

But the authors get around this problem by mainly focusing on brothers. Every person included in their final sample—which is 150,000 people strong—has at least one male sibling also in that sample. That allows the economists to use ‘fixed-effects,’ a statistical technique that accounts for family characteristics (such as poverty). They also include important family characteristics like the parents’ income. All this statistical trickery allows the economists to isolate the effect of obesity on earnings.

So what does explain the ‘obesity penalty’?”

“Tesla’s Foray Into Features That Allow Autonomous Driving Reflects A Wider Push Among Auto Makers”

October 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

My guess is that even if we have cars that are 90% autonomous (at least on highways) by 2015 and fully robotic in a half-dozen years as Elon Musk promises, it will take substantially longer than that to modify infrastructure to meet the demand. If no retrofitting is required, then that’s a whole different conversation. From Mike Ramsey at WSJ:

“Tesla Motors Inc. plans to unveil features that enable more computer-controlled driving of its Model S electric sedan on Thursday, following up on tweets sent by the company’s founder last week, according to a person familiar with the matter.

At an event scheduled for Thursday in Hawthorne, Calif., the Silicon Valley auto maker will announce the latest upgrades, about a week after Chief Executive Elon Musk posted a pair of tweets suggesting the auto maker soon would announce a product he referred to as ‘D.’

A Tesla spokeswoman declined to comment on the specifics of this week’s announcement.

Tesla’s foray into features that allow autonomous driving reflects a wider push among auto makers to produce cars that can handle more driving functions on their own. Mr. Musk recently said Tesla will have a fully autonomous car ready in five to six years.”

“In 2014, It’s Hard To Overstate McLuhan’s Prescience”

October 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Do people still consider Marshall McLuhan to be so many mumbles the way they did when he fell from grace, without cause, by 1980 or so? He wasn’t always right, but the theorist was no Nostradamus, whose writing needs to be spun like an angel on the head of a pin to appear to be right. McLuhan was more correct about the looming Information Age than anyone. From Paul Herbert’s Pacific-Standard piece, “The Medium Is the Message: 50 Years Later“:

“TWENTY YEARS AGO, IN the introduction to a re-print of Understanding Media, renowned editor Lewis H. Lapham wrote that much of what McLuhan had to say made a lot more sense in 1994 than it did in 1964, what with two terms of Reagan and the creation of MTV. Twenty years after that, the banality of McLuhan’s ideas have solidified their merit. When Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer, for example, compared the expansion of big data to the planet developing a central nervous system, that’s McLuhan. When Chief Justice John Roberts opined that an alien from Mars might mistake the smartphone as an integral feature of human anatomy, that’s McLuhan, too. In 2014, it’s hard to overstate McLuhan’s prescience.

‘People who don’t like McLuhan in the academic world are either lazy, stupid, jealous, or some combination,’ says Paul Levinson, a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University, where McLuhan taught for a year in the late ’60s. ‘McLuhan wasn’t into commonsense, reasonable propositions. He liked looking at things in a poetic, metaphoric way.’

And it’s true: McLuhan had a penchant for speaking in riddles and rhymes that might baffle at first, but grow into epiphany if given the chance. His rhetorical style was hyperbole. He didn’t shy away from playing the holy fool, as Wired would later call him, and on a number of occasions claimed his mission was simply to probe the new terrain, not come back to camp with answers.”

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McLuhan with Tom Wolfe, one of his champions, in 1970:

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A Brief Note From 1895 About Bird Fanciers

October 6, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the November 8, 1895 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Complaints have reached Flatbush that the residents of the northeastern section of the Twenty-ninth ward are annoyed by a man named Thomas McCormick, who is well known to the police. He served two years and a half in state’s prison for highway robbery and two more years for house breaking, beside having been arrested and convicted for minor offenses a dozen times during the last fifteen years. He is 35 years old, powerfully built and as strong as three ordinary men. No particular charge has been brought against him this time for the reason, the police say, that people in his neighborhood are unwilling to appear against him in a police court because they fear his vengeance. Sergeant Zimmerman told an Eagle reporter last night that a few days ago McCormick went into a Flatbush barber shop, the owner of which is a bird fancier, and ate two live canary birds, feathers and all.”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

October 6, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

MUMMIFIED MONKEY – $8000 

I have an authentic mummified money that is 75 years old available for sale. It looks just as it did when it passed. It is in a big jar but the glass is a bit cloudy. Rare piece.

“In A World Where Getting Old Is No Longer An Issue, Concerns Will Arise About Population Levels”

October 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Aubrey de Grey operates at the extreme edges of gerontology, believing we won’t just extend life a little but essentially defeat death. But if we could live hundreds of years–or forever–what would this endless summer mean for global population? From Factor-Tech:

In a world where getting old is no longer an issue, concerns will arise about population levels and resources that the planet can provide.

De Grey admits that the world will change dramatically and that the transformation will not necessarily be a smooth one. “There may be some turbulence and obviously the more we can forward plan to minimise that turbulence the better,” he adds.

One UN report, from 2003, predicts that the world’s population could increase to more than 36bn people by 2300 – and that forecast is based on regular life expectancy. If everyone is living for hundreds of years then the resources needed to sustain them would drastically increase.

But this view does not give credit to other technologies that are developing at a faster implementation rate than anti-ageing, and people can have a blinkered view about this.

“They just don’t look at the problem properly so for example, one thing that people hardly ever acknowledge is that the other new technology is going to be around a great deal sooner than this technology, or at least sooner than this technology will have any demographic impact,” de Grey says.

“For example we will have much less carbon footprint because we will have things like better renewable energy and nuclear fusion and so on, so that it will actually be increasing the carrying capacity of the planet far faster than the defeat of ageing could increase the number of people on the planet.”•

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“[They] Believe Photography Is At A Tipping Point”

October 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Those who still believe privacy can be preserved by legislation either haven’t thought through the realities or are deceiving themselves. Get ready for your close-up because it’s not the pictures that are getting smaller, but the cameras. Tinier and Tinier. Soon you won’t even notice them. And they can fly.

I have no doubt the makers of the Nixie, the wristwatch-drone camera, have nothing but good intentions, but not everyone using it will. From Joseph Flaherty at Wired:

“Being able to wear the drone is a cute gimmick, but it’s powerful software packed into a tiny shell could set Nixie apart from bargain Brookstone quadcopters. Expertise in motion-prediction algorithms and sensor fusion will give the wrist-worn whirlybirds an impressive range of functionality. A ‘Boomerang mode’ allows Nixie to travel a fixed distance from its owner, take a photo, then return. ‘Panorama mode’ takes aerial photos in a 360° arc. ‘Follow me’ mode makes Nixie trail its owner and would capture amateur athletes in a perspective typically reserved for Madden all-stars. ‘Hover mode’ gives any filmmaker easy access to impromptu jib shots. Other drones promise similar functionality, but none promise the same level of portability or user friendliness.

‘We’re not trying to build a quadcopter, we’re trying to build a personal photographer,’ says Jovanovic.

A Changing Perspective on Photography

[Jelena] Jovanovic and her partner Christoph Kohstall, a Stanford postdoc who holds a Ph.D. in quantum physics and a first-author credit in the journal Nature, believe photography is at a tipping point.

Early cameras were bulky, expensive, and difficult to operate. The last hundred years have produced consistently smaller, cheaper, and easier-to-use cameras, but future developments are forking. Google Glass provides the ultimate in portability, but leaves wearers with a fixed perspective. Surveillance drones offer unique vantage points, but are difficult to operate. Nixie attempts to offer the best of both worlds.”•

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“So Many Important Decisions In The World Are Connected With The Sexual Appetites Of Important Men”

October 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Film | Permalink

The director and artist Steve McQueen is a dizzying, demanding, daring talent, doing a rare thing in these times: making films from an adult perspective. Two excerpts follow from a new Financial Times profile by Peter Aspden, one about his allegedly irritable personality, and the other about his depiction of male sexuality in Shame.

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The best way to describe the relationship between the two means of expression, he says, in a comparison he has made before, is that “the movie is the novel, and art is poetry. Not a lot of people appreciate poetry, and it is the same with art. It is a more specialised form. That’s the difference.”

But the two impulses are forever “expanding and contracting” in his mind, he says. I ask if it is difficult to shift between genres. It is the rarest of things for a video artist to convert to Hollywood film-making. “Not at all. It is not as if I am jumping into different states of mind. It is all about finding what you want to say, and then how you want to say it.” Is that very clear to him straightaway? “Oh yes. But these things are incubating in my mind for a long time. I am in 2007 right now.” I look for a hint of a smile as he says this but he appears deadly serious.

McQueen, who turns 45 this week, is routinely described as a prickly man who doesn’t suffer fools gladly, but I wonder if that is confusing his seriousness and unrelenting intensity for a kind of social awkwardness. He gives every impression to me of enjoying the interview process, watchful and concentrated while he is listening to the question, like a batsman steadying himself during a bowler’s run-up. When Kirsty Young brought up the same subject in a recent edition of the BBC’s Desert Island Discs, asking why he was so unfairly portrayed, he replied simply: “I am a black man. I’m used to that. If I walk into a room people make a judgment. I don’t care.

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He seems to relish plunging into controversial subjects, I say. Shame, his second feature film, was an extraordinarily candid view of the unheralded extremes of male sexuality. “That’s still not sorted,” he says quickly. “That is unfinished business. I really want to come back to that.” Why was that? “It is an extremely fascinating subject. But no one talks about it. Let’s get real! So many important decisions in the world are connected with the sexual appetites of important men. Whether it is JFK, or Clinton, or Martin Luther King. That is what we are. That is part of us. But sometimes people are embarrassed by their pleasures.

‘It is a huge subject. So many people came out after that film and sent me anonymous letters, a lot of thank-yous, and some crazy stuff too.’ What did women think of it, I ask? ‘I don’t know how much women know, or want to know, about men’s sexual appetites. A friend of mine went to see it with his wife, and she asked him, ‘Do those things really happen?’ And he was, like, ‘No, no, it is just a fantasy, it is just the movies.’” McQueen’s laugh suggests otherwise.•

 

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“Mechanical Pedestrians Will Even Leap Into The Road From Between Parked Cars”

October 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I previously posted some stuff about driverless-car testing in a mock cityscape in Ann Arbor, Michigan, which might seem unnecessary given Google’s regular runs on actual streets and highways. But here’s an update on the progress from “Town Built for Driverless Cars,” by Will Knight at Technology Review:

“A mocked-up set of busy streets in Ann Arbor, Michigan, will provide the sternest test yet for self-driving cars. Complex intersections, confusing lane markings, and busy construction crews will be used to gauge the aptitude of the latest automotive sensors and driving algorithms; mechanical pedestrians will even leap into the road from between parked cars so researchers can see if they trip up onboard safety systems.

The urban setting will be used to create situations that automated driving systems have struggled with, such as subtle driver-pedestrian interactions, unusual road surfaces, tunnels, and tree canopies, which can confuse sensors and obscure GPS signals.

‘If you go out on the public streets you come up against rare events that are very challenging for sensors,’ says Peter Sweatman, director of the University of Michigan’s Mobility Transformation Center, which is overseeing the project. ‘Having identified challenging scenarios, we need to re-create them in a highly repeatable way. We don’t want to be just driving around the public roads.'”

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“[It’s] A Depraved Version Of The Audience Of Let’s Make A Deal”

October 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Mudd Club was a cabaret institution in New York for a few years in the late-’70s and early ’80s, the edgier little cousin to Studio 54, which wasn’t exactly Disneyland. An excerpt from a 1979 People article which includes a holy shit! quote from Andy Warhol:

“Ever on the prowl for outrageous novelty, New York’s fly-by-night crowd of punks, posers and the ultra hip has discovered new turf on which to flaunt its manic chic. It is the Mudd Club, a dingy disco lost among the warehouses of lower Manhattan. By day the winos skid by without a second glance. But come midnight (the opening time), the decked-out decadents amass 13 deep. For sheer kinkiness, there has been nothing like it since the cabaret scene in 1920s Berlin.

In just six months the Mudd has made its uptown precursor, Studio 54, seem almost passé and has had to post a sentry on the sidewalk. The difference is that the Mudd doesn’t have a velvet rope but a steel chain. Such recognizable fun-lovers as David Bowie, Mariel Hemingway, Diane von Furstenburg and Dan Aykroyd are automatically waved inside. For the rest, the club picks its own like some sort of perverse trash compactor. The kind of simple solution employed by U.S. gas stations is out of the question: At the Mudd, every night is odd. Proprietor Steve Mass, 35, admits that ‘making a fashion statement’ is the criterion. That means a depraved version of the audience of Let’s Make a Deal. One man gained entrance simply by flashing the stump of his amputated arm.

The action inside varies from irreverent to raunch. Andy Warhol is happy to have found a place, he says, ‘where people will go to bed with anyone—man, woman or child.’ Some patrons couldn’t wait for bedtime, and the management has tried to curtail sex in the bathrooms.”

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Old Print Articles: Walt Disney Items, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1938/54)

October 5, 2014 in Film, Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

Rust never sleeps, and Walt Disney, even with all his great success and grand imagination, wasn’t immune to the quiet terrors of life any more than the rest of us. Almost two decades before he built his first safe and secure family theme park in California, the Hollywood house he’d purchased for his parents was invaded by a silent killer. Two articles follow from the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

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From the November 27, 1938 edition:

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From the May 16, 1954 edition:

 

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“If There Is A Technological Revolution In Progress, Rich Economies Could Be Forgiven For Wishing It Would Go Away”

October 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

For productivity to increase, labor costs must shrink. That’s fine provided new industries emerge to accommodate workers, but that really isn’t what we’ve seen so far in the Technological Revolution, the next great bend in the curve, as production and wages haven’t boomed. It’s been the trade of a taxi medallion for a large pink mustache. More convenient, if not cheaper (yet), for the consumer, but bad for the drivers.

Perhaps that’s because we’re at the outset of a slow-starting boom, the Second Machine Age, or perhaps what we’re going through refuses to follow the form of the Industrial Revolution. Maybe it’s the New Abnormal. The opening of the Economist feature, “Technology Isn’t Working“: 

“IF THERE IS a technological revolution in progress, rich economies could be forgiven for wishing it would go away. Workers in America, Europe and Japan have been through a difficult few decades. In the 1970s the blistering growth after the second world war vanished in both Europe and America. In the early 1990s Japan joined the slump, entering a prolonged period of economic stagnation. Brief spells of faster growth in intervening years quickly petered out. The rich world is still trying to shake off the effects of the 2008 financial crisis. And now the digital economy, far from pushing up wages across the board in response to higher productivity, is keeping them flat for the mass of workers while extravagantly rewarding the most talented ones.

Between 1991 and 2012 the average annual increase in real wages in Britain was 1.5% and in America 1%, according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, a club of mostly rich countries. That was less than the rate of economic growth over the period and far less than in earlier decades. Other countries fared even worse. Real wage growth in Germany from 1992 to 2012 was just 0.6%; Italy and Japan saw hardly any increase at all. And, critically, those averages conceal plenty of variation. Real pay for most workers remained flat or even fell, whereas for the highest earners it soared.

It seems difficult to square this unhappy experience with the extraordinary technological progress during that period, but the same thing has happened before. Most economic historians reckon there was very little improvement in living standards in Britain in the century after the first Industrial Revolution. And in the early 20th century, as Victorian inventions such as electric lighting came into their own, productivity growth was every bit as slow as it has been in recent decades.

In July 1987 Robert Solow, an economist who went on to win the Nobel prize for economics just a few months later, wrote a book review for the New York Times. The book in question, The Myth of the Post-Industrial Economy by Stephen Cohen and John Zysman, lamented the shift of the American workforce into the service sector and explored the reasons why American manufacturing seemed to be losing out to competition from abroad. One problem, the authors reckoned, was that America was failing to take full advantage of the magnificent new technologies of the computing age, such as increasingly sophisticated automation and much-improved robots. Mr Solow commented that the authors, ‘like everyone else, are somewhat embarrassed by the fact that what everyone feels to have been a technological revolution…has been accompanied everywhere…by a slowdown in productivity growth.'”

“A Surprising Number Of Conversations With Experts In Human Extinction End Like This: With Great Hope”

October 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Anne Frank famously wrote, “Despite everything, I believe that people are really good at heart,” and if she could be hopeful, how can we feel grounded by despondency? A sneakily cheerful side to the growing cadre of scientists and philosophers focused on existential risks that could drive human extinction is that if we make it through the next century, we may have unbridled abundance. From Aaron Labaree at Salon:

“When we think about general intelligence,’ says Luke Muelhauser, Executive Director at MIRI, ‘that’s a meta-technology that gives you everything else that you want — including really radical things that are even weird to talk about, like having our consciousness survive for thousands of years. Physics doesn’t outlaw those things, it’s just that we don’t have enough intelligence and haven’t put enough work into the problem … If we can get artificial intelligence right, I think it would be the best thing that ever happened in the universe, basically.’

A surprising number of conversations with experts in human extinction end like this: with great hope. You’d think that contemplating robot extermination would make you gloomy, but it’s just the opposite. As [Martin] Rees explains, ‘What science does is makes one aware of the marvelous potential of life ahead. And being aware of that, one is more concerned that it should not be foreclosed by screwing up during this century.’ Concern over humanity’s extermination at the hands of nanobots or computers, it turns out, often conceals optimism of the kind you just don’t find in liberal arts majors. It implies a belief in a common human destiny and the transformative power of technology.

‘The stakes are very large,’ [Nick] Bostrom told me. ‘There is this long-term future that could be so enormous. If our descendants colonized the universe, we could have these intergalactic civilizations with planetary-sized minds thinking and feeling things that are beyond our ken, living for billions of years. There’s an enormous amount of value that’s on the line.’

It’s all pretty hypothetical for now.•

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“Picture The Dinner Hour In A Decade”

October 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I don’t know if it will happen within ten years–though that’s not an outrageous time frame–but 3-D printing will automate much of the restaurant process, making jobs vanish, and will also be common in homes as prices fall. The opening of “Is 3-D Printing the Next Microwave?” by Jane Dornbusch at the Boston Globe:

“Picture the dinner hour in a decade: As you leave work, you pull up an app (assuming we still use apps) on your phone (or your watch!) that will direct a printer in your kitchen to whip up a batch of freshly made ravioli, some homemade chicken nuggets for the kids, and maybe a batch of cookies, each biscuit customized to meet the nutritional needs of different family members. 

It sounds like science fiction, but scientists and engineers are working on 3-D printing, and the food version of the 3-D printer is taking shape. Don’t expect it to spin out fully cooked meals anytime soon. For now, the most popular application in 3-D food printing seems to be in the decidedly low-tech area of cake decoration.

Well, not just cake decoration, but sugary creations of all kinds. The Sugar Lab is the confectionary arm of 3-D printing pioneer 3D Systems, and it expects to have the ChefJet, a 3-D food printer, available commercially later this year. Though tinkerers have been exploring the possibilities of 3-D food printing for a few years, and another food printer, Natural Machines’ Foodini, is slated to appear by year’s end, 3D Systems says the ChefJet is the world’s first 3-D food printer.

Like so many great inventions, the ChefJet came about as something of an accident, this one performed by husband-and-wife architecture grad students Liz and Kyle von Hasseln a couple of years ago. At the Southern California Institute of Architecture, the von Hasselns used a 3-D printer to create models. Intrigued by the process, Liz von Hasseln says, ‘We bought a used printer and played around with different materials to see how to push the technology. One thing we tried was sugar. We thought if we altered the machine a bit and made it all food safe and edible, we could push into a new space.’ More tweaking ensued, and the ChefJet was born.”

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Walter Cronkite presents the kitchen of 2001 in 1967:

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“Gates Pounced On This Mistake With A Feral Zeal That Belies His Current Image As A Sweater-Clad Humanitarian”

October 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I haven’t yet read Walter Isaacson’s new Silicon Valley history, The Innovators, but I would be indebted if it answers the question of how much Gary Kildall’s software was instrumental to Microsoft’s rise. Was Bill Gates and Paul Allen’s immense success built on intellectual thievery? Has the story been mythologized beyond realistic proportion? An excerpt from Brendan Koerner’s New York Times review of the book:

“The digital revolution germinated not only at button-down Silicon Valley firms like Fairchild, but also in the hippie enclaves up the road in San Francisco. The intellectually curious denizens of these communities ‘shared a resistance to power elites and a desire to control their own access to information.’ Their freewheeling culture would give rise to the personal computer, the laptop and the concept of the Internet as a tool for the Everyman rather than scientists. Though Isaacson is clearly fond of these unconventional souls, his description of their world suffers from a certain anthropological detachment. Perhaps because he’s accustomed to writing biographies of men who operated inside the corridors of power — Benjamin Franklin, Henry ­Kissinger, Jobs — Isaacson seems a bit baffled by committed outsiders like ­Stewart Brand, an LSD-inspired futurist who predicted the democratization of computing. He also does himself no favors by frequently citing the work of John Markoff and Tom Wolfe, two writers who have produced far more intimate portraits of ’60s ­counterculture.

Yet this minor shortcoming is quickly forgiven when The Innovators segues into its rollicking last act, in which hardware becomes commoditized and software goes on the ascent. The star here is Bill Gates, whom Isaacson depicts as something close to a punk — a spoiled brat and compulsive gambler who ‘was rebellious just for the hell of it.’ Like Paul Baran before him, Gates encountered an appalling lack of vision in the corporate realm — in his case at IBM, which failed to realize that its flagship personal computer would be cloned into oblivion if the company permitted Microsoft to license the machine’s MS-DOS operating system at will. Gates pounced on this mistake with a feral zeal that belies his current image as a sweater-clad humanitarian.”

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“I Sometimes Wonder What Selfies Would Look Like In North Korea”

October 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Selfies, the derided yet immensely popular modern portraiture, draw ire because of narcissism and exhibitionism, of course, but also because anyone can take them and do so ad nauseum. It’s too easy and available, with no expertise or gatekeeper necessary. The act is magalomania, sure, but it’s also democracy, that scary, wonderful rabble. From, ultimately, a defense of the self-directed shot by Douglas Coupland in the Financial Times:

“Selfies are the second cousin of the air guitar.

Selfies are the proud parents of the dick pic.

Selfies are, in some complex way, responsible for the word ‘frenemy.’

I sometimes wonder what selfies would look like in North Korea.

Selfies are theoretically about control – or, if you’re theoretically minded, they’re about the illusion of self-control. With a selfie some people believe you’re buying into a collective unspoken notion that everybody needs to look fresh and flirty and young for ever. You’re turning yourself into a product. You’re abdicating power of your sexuality. Or maybe you’re overthinking it – maybe you’re just in love with yourself.

I believe that it’s the unanticipated side effects of technology that directly or indirectly define the textures and flavours of our eras. Look at what Google has already done to the 21st century. So when smartphones entered the world in 2002, I think that if you gathered a group of smart media-savvy people in a room with coffee and good sandwiches, before the end of the day, the selfie could easily have been forecast as an inevitable smartphone side effect. There’s actually nothing about selfies that feels like a surprise in any way. The only thing that is surprising is the number of years it took us to isolate and name the phenomenon. I do note, however, that once the selfie phenomenon was named and shamed, selfies exploded even further, possibly occupying all of those optical-fibre lanes of the internet that were once occupied by Nigerian princes and ads for penis enlargement procedures.”

 

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A Brief Note From 1889 About A Family Reunion

October 5, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the August 18, 1889 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“‘Gloves which are sold as kid are often made of human skin,’ said Dr. Mark L. Nardyz, the Greek physician, of 716 Pine Street, yesterday. ‘The skin on the breast,’ continued the physician, ‘is soft and pliable and may be used for the making of gloves. When people buy gloves they never stop to question about the material of which they are made. The shopkeeper himself may be in ignorance, and the purchaser has no means of ascertaining whether the material is human skin or not. The fact is the tanning of human skin is extensively carried on in France and Switzerland. The product is manufactured into gloves, and these are imported into this country. Thus you see a person may be wearing part of a distant relative’s body and not know it.'”

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10 Recent Huffington Post Headlines

October 4, 2014 in Humor, Misc. | Permalink

  • Why 75 May Be The Best Age To Die
  • BALLSY MOVE: Man Pushes Giant Testicle Across US
  • ‘An Airplane S*** On Us,’ New Zealand Woman Claims
  • Woman Who Hid Boyfriend’s Body Parts In Flower Pots Sentenced
  • The Meat In This Guy’s Pants Was Worth $1,200, Cops Say
  • Massive Hairball Removed From Teen’s Stomach
  • Someone Killed Nearly 1,000 Chickens With A Golf Club
  • Finally, A Scrotal Condom For The Common Man
  • 7 Things Almost As Amazing As Taking Off Your Bra
  • Fish With Human Teeth Caught In Russian River (PHOTO)

This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

October 4, 2014 in Misc. | Permalink

 

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

  1. did marconi try to contact martians?
  2. why did apple’s newtown digital assistant fail?
  3. martin scorsese on writing
  4. how will history view edward snowden?
  5. texas oilman h.l. hunt
  6. james atlas writing about the death of new york city
  7. early autopsies with spectators
  8. the invention of barbed wire
  9. how does stephen hawking feel about space colonization?
  10. how do viruses become pandemics?

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