A Brief Note From 1910 About Sweethearts

September 7, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the July 26, 1910 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Canton, O. — Because they wanted to be ‘bad men’ and also needed to treat their sweethearts, John Warner and Ray Metcalf, each 11 years old, committed 600 burglaries. They were arrested here yesterday and after confessing to their misdeeds led the police to a disused coal cellar where they had cached the major part of their plunder.

A diamond ring was recovered which they had sold for 20 cents, and a gold watch had been disposed of for 15 cents.

Their operations extended from East Liverpool to Lorain, and according to their confessions, borne out by police reports, in one day they entered as many as seventy-five houses.”

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“Humans Can Tell The Stories Needed To Ensure Co-operation In Groups Of 150 Or More”

September 7, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In John Reed’s Financial Times piece about the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, who’s written Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, the scholar essentially argues that our species won out over Neanderthals because we were better at narrative, that double-edged sword. An excerpt:

“The book is, at its heart, an extended thesis about what has made humans such a successful species. In Harari’s view, at the dawn of history homo sapiens shared, along with Neanderthals and other early humans, some winning attributes – a big brain, the ability to walk upright – but they sat somewhere in the middle of the food chain, and were no shoo-in to become masters of the world.

What allowed humans to become history’s most successful species, he argues, was our ability to construct and unify small groups behind certain ‘fictions’ – everything from national legends and organised religion to modern value systems like human rights, and the modern limited liability company with thousands of employees and vast credit lines at its command.

Any band of Neanderthals, Harari suggests, can raise a few dozen people for a hunt but humans can tell the stories needed to ensure co-operation in groups of 150 or more – numbers large enough to organise mass hunting using prepared traps, raise modern armies, or subdue the natural world.

Also woven into this theory of humankind are his own convictions about eating meat. Sapiens devotes large sections to unsparing accounts of the domestication and factory farming of cows, pigs and chickens. This, he contends, has made them some of the most genetically ‘successful’ creatures in history but the most miserable too.”

 

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“It Was The Fever Dream Of My Adolescence”

September 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Film, Sports, Videos | Permalink

From James Camp’s Guardian grab bag of notes about a Werner Herzog appearance in Brooklyn:

“To his audience at the opera house, he described film-making as a ‘pilgrimage.’ In person, as on screen or page, he is off the wall and over the top and beyond the pale. He is a pilgrim on his way to a place that is really an idea: too far.

‘Ski-jumping,’ Herzog said. ‘It was the fever dream of my adolescence.’

He played clips of airborne jumpers in slow motion and commanded Brooklyn to scrutinise their faces.

Their lips rippled in alpine winds.

Herzog said: ‘The ecstasy of solitude!’

Holdengräber reminded him of the dictum, attributed to Blaise Pascal, that opens Lessons of Darkness, Herzog’s 1992 documentary: ‘The collapse of the stellar universe will occur – like creation – in grandiose splendour.’

Herzog repeated it. He said, ‘Actually, Pascal didn’t write that. I wrote that.’

Holdengräber said: ‘But it sounds so very like Pascal.’

‘Pascal should have written it,’ Herzog said, of the 17th-century philosopher. ‘That’s why I signed his name.'”

_______________________________

Herzog’s original German-language 1974 profile of ski-jumper Walter Steiner:

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10 Recent Huffington Post Headlines

September 7, 2014 in Humor, Misc. | Permalink

  • Man Allegedly Admits To Putting Semen In Co-Worker’s Coffee
  • Vegas Trio Hid Stolen Rolexes In Vaginas: Cops
  • Father Of 34 Children Explains Why He Didn’t Get A Vasectomy
  • Penis = $$$
  • Teen Marries Dog To Ward Off Curse
  • Day Care Workers Fired After Encouraging Toddlers To Fight (VIDEO)
  • MURDER MOST FOWL! Police Chief Decapitates Boy’s Pet Chicken
  • Man Helps Elderly Woman Rescue Cats, Then Stabs Her To Death: Cops
  • Man Charged With Baking Friend’s Dog To Death In Oven
  • Nope, Betty White Is Not Dead

This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

September 7, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

 

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

  1. thomas mann interview in the new york times 1955
  2. british taxi driver george king who went to mars
  3. joan didion writing about newt gingrich
  4. why did egypt become the cradle of civilization?
  5. p.w. singer on cyberwar
  6. steve jobs on computers in the classroom
  7. footage of earthworm robots
  8. tv appearances by gloria swanson in her later years
  9. helen gurley brown interview
  10. manfred clynes who coined the term cyborg

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

September 6, 2014 in Misc. | Permalink

As sad as it was that Joan Rivers passed away this week, perhaps it's best she didn't revive. After not getting any oxygen to her brain for five or ten minutes, she likely would have been a...

As sad as it is that Joan Rivers passed away this week, perhaps it’s best she didn’t revive. After not getting any oxygen to her brain for several minutes, she likely would have been little more than a…

…Kardashian.

  • Watson has moved from providing known answers to the unknown.
  • We probably need to redefine the meaning of “job.”
  • Globalization has caused income inequality to rise within nations.
  • Chuck Todd isn’t sure that President Obama is emotionally disengaged.
  • Štefan Klein has designed an honest-to-goodness flying car.
  • Peter Thiel thinks we’ve lost our edge technologically.
  • A brief note from 1911 about a bad meal.

“Researchers Are Sifting Through The Detritus Of Mobile Lives To Map The Spread Of An Unprecedented Outbreak”

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

Even viruses leave digital trails in this wired world, so the Ebola outbreak is being tracked, in part, by the sorting and sifting of online data. It’s epidemiology via e-waste. From Simon Engler at Foreign Policy:

“Patrick Sawyer, Nigeria’s first Ebola patient, collapsed at the international airport in Lagos on July 20. This Wednesday, more than six weeks later, the World Health Organization (WHO) said that it was monitoring at least 200 Nigerians for infection related to Sawyer’s case. Sawyer, a Liberian-American who had traveled from Monrovia, had carried the often-fatal disease to Africa’s most populous country, hundreds of miles from its origin. It was as if he had slipped through a crowd.

Fortunately for the people of Nigeria, crowds leave traces, even when the individuals within them disappear. As Ebola spreads, some epidemiologists are beginning to analyze those traces to guess where outbreaks might occur. They’re not only gathering data from diseased neighborhoods and hospitals. They’re also using sources like flight data, Twitter mentions, and cellphone location services to track the disease from afar. Researchers, in short, are sifting through the detritus of mobile lives to map the spread of an unprecedented outbreak.

Some of the results have been surprising in their accuracy.”

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“These Ultra-Modern Practices Are Used To Propagate And Enforce An Ideologico-Political Vision”

September 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

I didn’t need Slavoj Žižek’s New York Times op-ed to tell me that ISIS isn’t a group of commendable anti-colonialism freedom fighters but just a band of gutter-level losers–thanks for the 411, Doctor IQ–but the theorist does make a good point about the fugazi fundamentalism of the Rolex-wearing, new-media savvy savages. These beheaders aren’t emblematic of the roughly 1.5 billion Muslims who are peaceful, productive people all over the world, but are instead a perverted pastiche of the present and the past. From Zizek:

“The well-known photo of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the ISIS leader, with an exquisite Swiss watch on his arm, is here emblematic: ISIS is well organized in web propaganda as well as financial dealings, although these ultra-modern practices are used to propagate and enforce an ideologico-political vision that is not so much conservative as a desperate move to fix clear hierarchic delimitations. However, we should not forget that even this image of a strictly disciplined and regulated fundamentalist organization is not without its ambiguities: is religious oppression not (more than) supplemented by the way local ISIS military units seem to function? While the official ISIS ideology rails against Western permissiveness, the daily practice of the ISIS gangs includes full-scale grotesque orgies, including robberies, gang rapes, torture and murder of infidels.”

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“A Flying Car Could Escape To Western Europe”

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

Here, you babies, here’s your blessed flying car that you don’t even need! Štefan Klein has created the much-buzzed-about Aeromobil 2.5, with the autopilot version promised for next year. Soon you won’t have to drive or fly, and you’ll have more time to download hacked photos of nude celebrities, because their nipples are superior. From Jeremy Kingsley at Wired UK:

“Flying cars haven’t taken off yet, but there’s a good reason, says Slovakian designer Štefan Klein: good cars would make bad planes, and vice versa. Cars need to be wide and heavy, planes narrow and light. Klein, who is the cofounder and chief designer at Aeromobil which makes a Slovakian flying car, claims his creation is as roadworthy as it is airworthy. ‘It’s its own category,’ he says.

Weighing just 450kg and powered by a 100hp, light-aircraft-standard Rotax 912 engine, the Aeromobil 2.5 (above) reaches 160kph on the ground. Press the ‘transform’ button and a rear-mounted propeller fires up, the wings fold out to span 8.2m, and in under 200m of grass runway, the plane takes off at 130kph. A single engine — one of the vehicle’s patented components — powers both driving and flying. Other patents include the lightweight wings and a steering wheel that’s the same for both modes. ‘We are trying to invent parts that don’t already exist,’ Klein says.

He started thinking about flying cars 25 years ago in his native Bratislava, in then Czechoslovakia before the Velvet Revolution — a flying car could escape to western Europe.”

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“Mr. Cournoyer, A Martial-Arts Enthusiast With A Taste For Fast Cars, Oversaw An Unlikely Ensemble Of Underlings”

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

The excellent opening of Alan Feuer’s New York Times article about the twisty, seven-year investigation that brought down the eye-popping operation of the largest pot dealer in the history of New York City, Jimmy Cournoyer, the Tony Montana of marijuana:

“One day in January 2007, the disgruntled ex-girlfriend of a Queens pot dealer walked unprompted into the district office of the Drug Enforcement Administration on Long Island. Sitting down with an agent, she bitterly gave vent: Her former boyfriend, the father of her child, was selling weed.

As a rule, the drug agency isn’t in the business of settling romantic scores, but the woman, who had shown up with her child in tow, was adamant that her onetime lover was a major player in the city’s wholesale marijuana trade. A group of federal agents started looking into the man.

What began that day with a woman scorned unfolded over the next seven years into an investigation that went beyond the wildest imaginings of the agents assigned to it, an elaborate case that led to the discovery, and subsequent arrest, of a surprising quarry: an international criminal who is now described as the biggest marijuana dealer in New York City history.

That man, a French Canadian playboy named Jimmy Cournoyer, spent almost a decade selling high-grade marijuana in the city, trafficking the drug through a sprawling operation that moved from fields and factories in western Canada, through staging plants in suburban Montreal, across the United States border at an Indian reservation and finally south to a network of distributors in New York. Along the way, Mr. Cournoyer, a martial-arts enthusiast with a taste for fast cars, oversaw an unlikely ensemble of underlings, a company of criminals that came to include Native American smugglers, Hells Angels, Mexican money launderers, a clothier turned cocaine dealer in Southern California and a preppy, Polo-wearing Staten Island gangster.”

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“Do You Think The President Has Emotionally Checked Out Of The White House Already?”

September 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Chuck Todd, who grows irate, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit in advance of taking over Meet the Press. One exchange about the perception that President Obama has become emotionally disengaged:

“Question:

Do you think the President has emotionally checked out of the White House already? Any chance you will ask him about his seemingly lackluster attitude lately and press him on how his personal struggles may negatively shape our Country’s future during such challenging times?

Chuck Todd:

I’ve heard this from a lot of Obama observers, not just from folks who don’t know him, but from folks who think they DO know him. That said, sometimes when the news is as horrid as it is right now, with his polls in the tank… folks end up assuming that all of this is impacting him more than maybe it is. Perhaps if we were in his shoes, we’d feel depressed or lackluster so we assume he must too… I always am leery of trying too hard to put a politician on the couch. But you aren’t alone in thinking this.”

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“Brain Scans And DNA Analysis Could Help To Identify Potential Criminals At The Young Age Of Three”

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

Predictive sentencing (likely unconstitutional) is already a reality in America, as is predictive policing. Right now the anti-crime efforts focus on algorithms crunching numbers, but in the longer run brain imaging and genetic testing could be used to identify the potentially hyperviolent or criminal, which, of course, sounds more troubling than lawlessness itself. From Henrick Karoliszyn at Aeon:

“These early predictive systems are only the start. In years to come, many legal experts speculate, brain scans and DNA analysis could help to identify potential criminals at the young age of three. Some evidence for the approach came in 2009 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: researchers from the US and the UK tested 78 male subjects for different forms of the so-called ‘warrior gene’, which codes for the enzyme monoamine oxidase A (MAOA), a gene that breaks down crucial neurotransmitters in the brain. One version of MAOA works efficiently; but another version breaks down brain chemicals only sluggishly, and has long been linked to aggression in observational and survey-based studies. Some researchers held that, in war-prone societies, up to two-thirds of individuals had the low-activity gene – versus the more typical percentage of just one-third, found in the more peaceful nations of the world.

To see if this controversial hypothesis held up in the lab, researchers asked the same 78 subjects to take a second test. They were to hurt individuals they believed had stolen money from them by ordering varying amounts of painful hot sauce in their food. (In reality, the ‘thief’ was a computer, so no person was actually hurt.) The findings yielded the first empirical proof that those with the low-activity form of the gene – the warriors among us – did indeed dish out more pain.

These findings soon found their way into criminal court: in 2009, at a trial in Tennessee, the defendant Bradley Waldroup was accused of killing his wife’s friend – by shooting her eight times and slicing her head open – and then slicing his wife again and again with a machete. Yet despite the glaring evidence, he avoided a first-degree murder conviction based in part on the warrior gene defence. He had it.”

“When You Hide Things, They Fester And Become Darker And Stranger”

September 5, 2014 in Urban Studies | Permalink

Jim Bakker’s prayers are answered less often now. A far cry from a world of theme parks and network-level TV production values, the minister, who never fully got up after falling from grace, today resides 30 miles from Branson, Missouri, hosting low-rent religious shows in a hotel theater, in which he hawks freeze-dried food and survival gear at trumped-up prices to Christians awaiting the apocalypse. At 74, he’s a preacher for preppers. The programs, as amateurish as they are disturbing, are recorded and shown on religious cable stations. They play like infomercials for the end of the world.

His son, Jay Bakker, who’s become a far more progressive holy man after surviving myriad addictions, is the latest guest on Marc Maron’s WTF podcast. It’s a fascinating conversation about an American family like few others. Just one interesting tidbit: The elder Bakker was the original host of The 700 Club and was elbowed aside by station owner Pat Robertson, who had never been a minister but wanted the spotlight for himself. Listen here.

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“Instability Will Lead To Global Conflict, And That In Turn May Lead To What He Referred To As ‘Secular Apocalypse'”

September 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Just because you’ve made a lot of money, that doesn’t mean you have all the answers. In fact, when buffeted by wealth, you’re unlikely to even identify the right questions. Case in point: libertarian technologist Peter Thiel, who thinks a lack of innovation will doom humankind. We’re certainly at risk from climate change and those melting icebergs, but I don’t think we’ll perish from want of ambition. Such big-idea projects may currently be too out of balance in favor of the private sector, but moonshots abound. From Roger Parloff at Fortune:

“When people look into the future, Thiel explains to me, the consensus is that globalization will take its course, with the developing world coming to look like the developed world. But people don’t focus on the dark, Malthusian reality of what that will mean, absent major technological breakthroughs not currently in any pipeline.

‘If everyone in China has a gas-guzzling car, we’ll have oil at $10 per gallon and enormous pollution,’ he observes.

But that’s just the start, because without growth there will also be increasing political instability. Instability will lead to global conflict, and that in turn may lead to what in a 2007 essay he referred to as ‘secular apocalypse’—total extinction of the human race through either thermonuclear war, biological contagion, unchecked climate change, or an array of competing Armageddon scenarios.

‘That’s why,’ he says, with characteristic understatement and aplomb, ‘I think the stakes in this are not just, ‘Are we going to have some new gadgets?’”

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“Some Of The Most Innovative Digital Research To Date Has Studied The Simple Process Of Reddit Users Asking For A Gift Of Pizza”

September 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

While Facebook’s recent research on unwitting customers wasn’t as upsetting as, say, the Stanford Prison Experiment, it rightly brought about an avalanche of criticism. But what does this mean for social scientists who wish to conduct experiments from the Internet’s wealth of data rather than lab-based trials, studies which won’t produce profits but knowledge, which could bring to light hidden prejudices? From the Economist:

“When it emerged in June that Facebook had secretly manipulated the emotional tenor of what a small fraction of users saw, outrage ensued. Even though this kind of experimentation is within the bounds laid out by tick-box user agreements, many column inches were devoted to the ethical considerations of subjecting users to such fiddling.

Online, many people simply typed ‘derp.’ The word is used as a postscript to a stupid action or statement; it is probably a bastardisation, of the kind that the internet tends to produce, of ‘duh.’ A new academic initiative aims to reclaim the word, at the same time putting social-media research on a more ethical footing: DERP, the Digital Ecologies Research Partnership.

The effort brings together 18 academic fellows and five social-media partners: Imgur, an image and video repository; Reddit and Fark, two community-driven news and discussion sites; StackExchange, a collection of question-and-answer sites; and video-sharing service Twitch (recently acquired by Amazon for $970m).

Collaborations of this sort are not new; Facebook’s folly was just particularly publicised. Some of the most innovative digital research to date has studied the simple process of Reddit users asking for a gift of pizza. Research by Tim Althoff of Stanford University, in California, and colleagues analysed the sentiments involved in 22,000 posts on Reddit’s ‘Random Acts of Pizza’ (its tagline: ‘Restoring faith in humanity, one slice at a time’).

Their paper ‘How to ask for a Favor,’ shows that pizza-pie philanthropy was correlated to how early in the month the request was made, and how needy an asker appeared to be (rather than merely how desirous). As mundane as these results might seem, they represent the vanguard of social-network science. This analysis of thousands of real people interacting in a real situation—as opposed to a few dozen underpaid undergraduates in a trumped-up psychology-lab scenario—showed that, contrary to psychologists’ expectations, Reddit users rewarded neither requests that sounded upbeat nor those from people who seemed similar to themselves.”

“If I Was Normal, Would I Be Doing Comedy?”

September 4, 2014 in Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I know Joan Rivers, who sadly passed away today, had plenty of detractors over the last, long leg of her career, when she often interrupted her comedy to sell plastic, buy plastic and seemingly turn herself into a piece of plastic, but she was a pantheon-level stand-up and performed at that altitude until the end. Here’s a repost of something I put up about her previously.

On November 15, 1972, Rivers did a Q&A with UCLA students, being brazenly honest on varied topics (feminism, Bill Cosby, talk shows, etc.) and asking rhetorically, “If I was normal, would I be doing comedy?” Audio only, but very funny stuff.

A Brief Note From 1911 About A Bad Meal

September 4, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the September 19, 1911 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“San Francisco–Destitute and hungry, William Murphy entered a local grocery store last night, hoping to purloin something to eat. The proprietor was called to wait on a customer and Murphy seized the opportunity to gobble two sandwiches he found on the counter. He was seized with convulsions a few minutes later and was taken to the emergency hospital, where it was found he was suffering from arsenic poisoning. The sandwiches he had eaten had been prepared to bait a rat trap. Murphy probably will recover.”

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“Widen The Plate By 25 Percent”

September 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

Long gone are the days when baseball owners like Bill Veeck and Charlie Finley would take any idea that popped into their heads and give it a test run during a major-league game. (Little people as pinch hitters? Orange baseballs for night games?) It was fun, though not all of them were winners. In 1962, Veeck had some suggestions for speeding up the pace of the game, which has become even a sorer subject today, with seemingly endless commercials between innings and infinite pitching changes. His proposals were pretty poor. From David Schoenfeld’s fun ESPN post about Veeck’s mad scientist schemes:

“1. Widen the plate by 25 percent. 

Umm … if this was the case, would Clayton Kershaw ever give up a hit? 

2. Three balls for a walk, two strikes for an out. 

If you think we have a lot of strikeouts now, this idea would excessively increase strikeouts even more. It’s hard enough to hit with three strikes to work with. Imagine just two. 

3. A limit would be placed on the time permitted for throwing the ball around the infield, or eliminated altogether. 

And batters should have to run up to the batter’s box from the on-deck circle! 

4. The pitcher would be limited to one warm-up toss between innings. 

Of course, Veeck’s book came out before the wide increase in number of games broadcast on television. I suspect that a large chunk of the increase in game time from the 1960s to now isn’t just the pace of game but the time between innings — when baseball makes money by showing commercials. If the average break between half innings is 2:15 (longer for postseason games), multiplied by at least 16 breaks, that’s 36 minutes worth of commercial breaks/inactivity. A generation ago it was probably half of that, and in Grover Cleveland Alexander’s time he was probably throwing his first pitch as he ran out from the dugout. 

(I wonder: If you simply add up the commercial breaks and all the mid-inning pitching changes, how much of the 30 extra minutes per game since 1980 are tied up in just those two elements and not slow pitchers or batters scratching themselves or adjusting their batting gloves?) 

Anyway, good luck telling baseball, ‘Sell fewer commercials on TV broadcasts.'”

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“In The Very Long Term It Is Quite Likely That Non-Biological Solutions Will Dominate Medicine”

September 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

A little more about post-aging possibilities from Aubrey de Grey, this time from Matthew Burgess at Factor. The gerontologist believes non-biological devices (implants and such) will enable longevity in a radical way in the future, as hardware continues to shrink, though even someone with his progressive vision thinks these developments aren’t just around the bend. An excerpt:

“The miniaturisation of technologies will eventually result in them dominating medical treatments, enabling us to live longer, leading researcher Aubrey de Grey has said.

He said that in the long term non-biological solutions, which have already played a minor role in the medical world, will significantly influence medical treatments.

However before this he believes there will be biological solutions that will make us healthier and as a side effect make us live longer.

de Grey, who is working to end ageing and is looking at how this can be achieved with the SENS Research Foundation, told Factor: ‘The whole area of what you might call non-biological solutions to medical problems is an area that should certainly never be neglected and has already played a minor role in today’s medical world with things like cochlear implants or for that matter just glasses.

‘So the question then is will this increase? I believe it will, in fact I believe that in the very long term it is quite likely that non-biological solutions will dominate medicine simply because they can and they are more versatile.

‘But I think that is going to be a long time coming. It is going to be driven largely by miniaturisation I think. It may very well be that software improvements to do with artificial intelligence for example will play a roll there.'”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

September 4, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Odd Request (queens)

I know this may seem odd, however i am giving it a try. My coke dealer has gone MIA and I need a new one to purchase my supply.

Is there anyone out there?

P.S. I understand the need for discretion so please let me know if you can recommend anyone.

Thanks.

“In Response To The Protests, Uber Defended The Rate Cuts”

September 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The sharing economy is a fascinating social development and great for consumers, but it’s not likely going to be very good for workers. I’m not even talking about those displaced by industries disrupted by Uber and Airbnb and the like, but by those trying to earn a buck offering their services and goods to those companies. They’re prone to rate slashes as competition drives down prices. It’s a marginalized existence and more and more of us are going to wind up on the margins. Just because something’s inevitable doesn’t mean it’s painless. From Sarah Gray at Salon:

“Uber drivers pay for their own gas and insurance, and the company takes 20 percent commission from each driver. At the beginning — when rates were $2.50 per mile — many drivers purchased cars, and made money, Uber driver John Dabbah explained.

‘Now they are dropping the price day after day without even asking the driver,’ Dabbah told CBS2.

Beyond rallying against rate drops, Uber drivers were protesting the lack of communication between Uber and its drivers.

‘I hope we’re heard,’ [driver Aya] Valilar said. ‘That is all we’re asking for is to be heard. No one wants to listen to us.’

In response to the protests, Uber defended the rate cuts. Part of a statement to CBS2 stated: ‘Drivers are making more money now due to higher demand than they did before the price cut. We will continue to work with them individually to ensure their small businesses thrive.'”

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“Google Introduced Calico To The World With The Bold Ambition Of ‘Curing Death'”

September 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Google’s stated goal in 2013 of “curing death” appeared to be little more than a questionable cover idea for Time, and the more-reasonable target of its life-extension offshoot, Calico, seems clearer a year later: It’s the search giant’s entry into Big Pharma. The drugs the company brings to market to treat geriatric diseases will likely aim more for incremental improvements than silver-bullet solutions. Immortality, at best, is a long, hard slog. From Ben Popper at the Verge, an analysis of Calico’s new development deal with pharmaceutical heavyweight AbbVie:

“Remember, Google introduced Calico to the world with the bold ambition of ‘curing death.’ CEO Larry Page, Google Ventures head honcho Bill Maris, and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who Google hired as its director of engineering, have all expressed a deep interest in radical life extension and the Singularity. Up until today we haven’t had a lot of detail about how Calico would pursue that goal. Page had told Time, ‘One of the things I thought was amazing is that if you solve cancer, you’d add about three years to people’s average life expectancy. We think of solving cancer as this huge thing that’ll totally change the world. But when you really take a step back and look at it, yeah, there are many, many tragic cases of cancer, and it’s very, very sad, but in the aggregate, it’s not as big an advance as you might think.’

Viewed in that light this new drug-development partnership, while ambitious and admirable, is decidedly less futuristic than what Google had previously been suggesting it would pursue.”

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Old Print Article: “Fame Takes A Flogging As Alex Does Act In Dime Museum,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1939)

September 3, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

World War I, which started exactly a century ago, claimed 16 million lives, but there were many more casualties among the living. One of them was the brilliant baseball pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander. He emerged from battle having inhaled mustard gas and experiencing hearing loss, something akin to epilepsy and what we today would call Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. A drinker before the war, he became a two-fisted one after the fighting ceased, sometimes taking the mound inebriated. So great was he, it took nearly a decade for alcohol to ground his career, but once his playing days were over, he found himself unemployable in the league he loved, no one wanting to trust a temperamental alcoholic as manager or coach.

A year after being inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1938, Alexander found himself an attraction in a raffish New York City dime museum, among the anomalies and curiosities, giving the same speech about his glory days a dozen times daily. The shell of his former self was all he had left to sell, and the press and public brought their cameras to capture a piece of what once was. From an article in the January 20, 1939 Brooklyn Daily Eagle about “Old Pete” in steep decline:

Cameramen swarmed about the great pitcher as he stood there against the green background, both hands holding a baseball above his head as if starting a windup.

“Hold it! Hold it!” they chirped as they focused their cameras.

But the pitching immortal couldn’t “hold it.” His arms came down and he almost dropped the ball. He tired that quickly. The great Grover Cleveland Alexander wasn’t weary from pitching a baseball game. He was starting a series of three weeks’ appearances at Hubert’s Dime Museum, on 42nd St., yesterday.

It’s a Different League

This series is in a world far different from the fresh air, sunshine and roaring crowds that the mighty right-hander knew in the old days. And the man is far different too. The posters outside the museum notify passers-by that the “Great Grover Cleveland Alexander” is on exhibition within. But that’s not true. They’re exhibiting only what’s left of the man that was.

The tall man with the dusty brown hair, bulgy waistline, splotched complexion and somewhat bleary eyes is older and more tired now than you would expect of his 51 years. He is weary and bitter. He believes that the game of baseball didn’t do right by him. He feels that the pastime somehow should have warded off the necessity that is sending the great Alexander of Cooperstown’s Baseball Hall of Fame into Hubert’s hall of freaks and flea circuses and dancing girls. 

A year ago this month the Baseball Writers of America elected Alexander to the Cooperstown shrine where his name joined those of 13 other immortals. But on this January day the tall man in the wrinkled brown suit stands on a tawdry little stage downstairs in the smoky light and tells how he won the seventh game of the 1926 World Series. How he fanned Tony Lazzeri with the bases loaded and two out.

He gives this little talk twelve times a day, starting at noon and ending at midnight, to earn bread and shelter in this bleak twilight of his life. Between lectures he sits in a little wooden cubicle, below the stage–away from staring eyes. Into this little cubicle come reporters and former players to chat with ‘Ol’ Pete’ and to wonder.

It’s the same platform, cubicle and rigmarole that knew Jack Johnson, the Negro who was former heavyweight champion of the world. That was a year or so ago, when ‘Li’l Arthur’ was hard pressed.

First Time Here Since 1930

“When the museum telegraphed me the offer of a job, I thought somebody was kidding me,” Alexander said. “I hadn’t been in New York since 1930 and I thought a museum was a place where they keep skeletons and things. But, anyway, I took a chance, wired back and got the job.”

A reporter asked why it was that a man with his reputation never was offered a job in major league baseball after his pitching days were over.

“Booze! I used to take a drink now and then when I played. Almost every player drank a bit then, and I guess they still do. But I made the mistake of taking my drinks openly. The word got around that I was a drunkard, which I never was. I believe that’s the reason I never even got a coaching job.”

When Alexander asked managers or owners for work, they told him he hadn’t kept pace with the game and they couldn’t use him because he didn’t know the ‘inside stuff.’

Old Pete laughs bitterly at this when he recalls his 19 years of education in the big time.

“I was in the National League almost 20 years,” he explains, “from 1911 through part of 1930–with the Phillies, Cubs, Cardinals and finally the Phillies again. I know the game inside and out.”

After his retirement in ’30 he managed the House of David team for three seasons. Last year he was out with a semi-pro club in Nebraska, but the going was tough because the farmers had been through a drought.

Despite his bitterness, Alexander seemed to get a thrill out of reliving the old days as he talked to the dime-a-toss listeners.

“I guess my biggest thrill was in the 1926 World Series,” he said. “I was with the Cardinals. We had won three games and the Yanks had won three. Jess Haines started the last game for us and along about the seventh inning he hurt his hand and they told me to go in. There were three on base and Lazzeri was up. I had pitched and won the sixth game the day before, but my arm felt fine. I only threw three times but I struck Tony out. He fouled my second pitch into the left-field stands. Then I threw him a hook and he missed it by about six inches. That proved to be the game and the series.

“Yes, I could strike ’em out in those days. But I kinda struck out myself after I stopped pitchin’.”•

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“At A Certain Point, A Mob Mentality Kicks In”

September 3, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The cumshot heard ’round the world, the celebrity nudes leak that rocked the Internet this past weekend is, sadly, just the beginning. It’s going to get much worse, and not just for the famous and shapely. Eventually, and not too long from now, the crudeness of an actual phone hack will seem laughable. Currently there are drones the size of large insects that the military can control remotely to take photos. As Moore’s Law continues to kick in, there’ll be cheap and readily available drones stateside the size of mosquitoes. Consider it a dubious war dividend. Buy them by the dozen, and get to know the neighbors. And it will be really difficult to legislate what can barely be seen. It’s the new abnormal.

Easily the best thing I’ve read about the hack-and-fap flap and its psychological underpinnings is Molly Lambert’s article at Grantland. An excerpt:

“The Lawrence nudes went viral because of the same impulse that spread with the ISIS beheading video: A morally reprehensible piece of media circulates, and curiosity overwhelms common sense. I looked, because I am an asshole, and I justified it to myself as research for writing this piece (but deep down I knew I was being an asshole). My takeaways were that everyone looked great, that Kate Upton and Justin Verlander are kind of the new Pamela and Tommy Lee for having their cute intimacy (and naked bodies) exposed to the world, and that the world is kind of a terrible place to be female. Women have always had to double-identify to view media, pornographic and otherwise, that is framed for a straight male POV. This was especially clear during this scandal, when it was possible to identify simultaneously with the women in the photos and the anonymous bros thirsting to look at them. At a certain point, a mob mentality kicks in: Everyone else looked at them, why shouldn’t I? They can’t arrest everyone, right? Nothing about the images themselves is degrading to their subjects, just that they were stolen and illegally distributed. And if the ripping-away of consent is a major part of the thrill, well, that I just can’t identify with, because it makes me feel sick.

Even though the web has progressed beyond its image as a haven for social outcasts and adult virgins, there is a very real way in which it remains a conduit for our ids. Human consciousness is compartmentalized by necessity, but the Internet does allow for the relegation of deviant impulses to a specific nonphysical zone, protected by anonymity. But there is no anonymity; it’s as imaginary as the false security you feel while driving in your car, a sense of detached invulnerability that can inspire road rage. Even as a nonbody floating through the web, we are indeed very much traceable to the physical location where the floating gets under way. But it’s the physical bodies that can turn Internet usage into the Milgram experiment. There is no researcher standing behind you intoning, ‘You have no other choice, you must go on,’ but the hive consciousness of the web takes their place. The ease with which morally questionable impulses can be instantly gratified overrides that inner voice that says maybe it’s wrong to do so. There is a feeling that nobody is watching, that all these bad impulses and feelings are plummeting into a garbage disposal or black hole from which they will never return, but that’s a lie we tell ourselves. The Internet is a record, and once information has appeared there, it never really goes away, whether you’re the hacker or the hacked.”

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“The High Inequality Seen Today In Poor Countries Is Prompting New Theories”

September 3, 2014 in Excerpts | Permalink

Globalization was to be the tide that lifted all boats, with developed and developing countries alike growing wealthier. That may largely be true in the aggregate, but within nations economic inequality remains, has often actually become more marked. From the Economist:

“GLOBALISATION has made the planet more equal. As communication gets cheaper and transport gets faster, developing countries have closed the gap with their rich-world counterparts. But within many developing economies, the story is less rosy: inequality has worsened. The Gini index is one measure of inequality, based on a score between zero and one. A Gini index of one means a country’s entire income goes to one person; a score of zero means the spoils are equally divided. Sub-Saharan Africa saw its Gini index rise by 9% between 1993 and 2008. China’s score soared by 34% over twenty years. Only in a few places has it fallen. Does globalisation have anything to do with it?

Usually, economists say no. Basic theory predicts that inequality falls when developing countries enter global markets. The theory of comparative advantage is found in every introductory textbook. It says that poor countries produce goods requiring large amounts of unskilled labour. Rich countries focus on things requiring skilled workers. Thailand is a big rice exporter, for example, while America is the world’s largest exporter of financial services. As global trade increases, the theory says, unskilled workers in poor countries are high in demand; skilled workers in those same countries are less coveted. With more employers clamouring for their services, unskilled workers in developing countries get wage boosts, whereas their skilled counterparts don’t. The result is that inequality falls.

But the high inequality seen today in poor countries is prompting new theories.”

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