A team of hackers got the go-ahead from NASA to attempt to contact and “reawaken” a long-decommissioned satellite, funding the mission with crowdsourced money. So far, so good. From the Economist:
“It appears to have survived unscathed the long occupancy of the orbit in which it was parked. However, celestial mechanics have put the satellite about 250,000km off from where it was expected. Mr Cowing and his colleagues are slightly worried that it may bash into the moon or wander too close to Earth. The craft has antennas measuring 30 metres and extending in four directions, which at a certain altitude above Earth could cause problems. ‘It’s a 360-foot spinning cookie cutter,’ says Mr Cowing.
That the reboot project has got that far is remarkable. Unable to receive a clear go-ahead or an outright no from NASA a few months ago, it set out to raise funds hoping that this might prompt the space agency to acquiesce. It is the first time in NASA’s history that operational control has been handed over, and NASA made the announcement on May 23rd with due fanfare.
With the original software, computers or telecoms gear long gone, the team—with the help of some original mission members and others in and out of NASA who knew where to find the old manuals—recreated the equipment, including a software-defined radio system that allows talking and listening to the satellite. The Arecibo Observatory also provided help: it installed gear purchased by the Reboot Project and allowed it to use Arecibo’s huge satellite dish free during downtimes. The team faced downpours of rain and even an earthquake with a magnitude of 5.8 while one of the volunteers worked near the dish.’
Much remains to be determined. Mr [Keith] Cowing and his colleagues have yet to decide whether the satellite is to explore more comets or to use it for other purposes.”
These are the best for the summer. I powder my nuts and pour powder into my briefs and then I’m good for the whole day. Everything stays dry and smells fresh. Bikini briefs hug tight to you so the powder stays in.
In much the same way that we don’t travel by flying car, we also aren’t waited on by robotic servants. Rodney Brooks, the MIT roboticist who was one of the central figures in Errol Morris’ Fast, Cheap and Out of Control, is disheartened with what he sees as the sector stalling out. Of course, the same thing was said many times about personal computing, that it hadn’t sealed the deal, until, of course, it began to, dramatically. And just because all our sci-fi dreams haven’t come to fruition that doesn’t mean that what we have achieved has been miniscule. From Sharon Gaudin at Computerworld:
“Russ Tedrake, an associate professor in electrical engineering and computer science at MIT, acknowledged Brooks’ points about the state of robotics today, but said big positive changes could come soon via research being pushed by major companies like Google.
‘He’s right that there are lots of things that we haven’t done yet that we had expected to do right now. The early promise was that we’d have robots everywhere by now,’ said Tedrake. ‘Look at Google’s purchase of robotics companies. That’s a massive change in the robotics landscape. The number of companies that are starting robotics and asking how they can work with robots is extremely exciting.’
Will many homes have their own robot that will babysit the kids, make dinner and clean the windows any time soon?
Probably not, according to Tedrake. However, we may have something similar.
‘Maybe we’ll have several small, special-purpose robots instead of one general-purpose robot,’ he said. ‘They might clean your house, cook dinner and mop the floor. Maybe we’ll call them appliances instead of robots.'”
I still have no idea why “electronic brain” seems to have been the favored term for computers in the pre-1960s U.S. In fact “computer” was often treated like a silly word to be mocked. Well, by any name, such a machine and its memory helped American Airlines keep track of reservations six decades ago, according to an article in the July 13, 1952 Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The story:
“American Airlines is using an electronic ‘brain’ to keep accurate and up-to-the-moment information on plane seats available.
By manipulating keys on a gadget resembling a small adding machine, a ticket agent can in a matter of seconds determine space available and make or cancel reservations.
The brain housed in American’s hangar at Laguardia Field, consists of a battery of electronic tubes and a ‘memory’ in which is stored the inventory of seats. The memory consists of two magnetized drums on which more than 1,000 flights for a period of ten days is recorded.
Let’s assume that a passenger requests three seats for a flight to Chicago:
1. The agent at one of the remote ticket offices selects a destination plate from a file. This plate is notched like a house key.
2. He inserts the plate in a slot behind eight lucite push-buttons. This sets up the connection with the memory drum at LaGuardia. The eight lucite keys have printed data on flight number, departure time, etc.
3. The agent then pushes buttons designating the date and number of seats requested.
4. In less than a second the brain responds by lighting lucite lamps corresponding to those flights which have three seats available.
5. The passenger makes his choice of flight and the agent flips a key to ‘sell.’
6. A green light indicates that the brain has completed the transaction, subtracting thee seats from the inventory for that flight on the memory drum.”
You can’t blame the CEO of Uber for not trying to fight the advent of driverless cars–he wouldn’t win that war. But like the rest of us, he probably should be a little concerned about the job loss caused by the market disruption. From Nicholas Carlson at Business Insider:
“Uber CEO Travis Kalanick sat for a keynote interview at Code Conference this afternoon in Southern California.
During the interview, Code editor Kara Swisher asked Kalanick what he thinks of self-driving cars.
‘Love it. All day long,’ said Kalanick.
‘The reason Uber could be expensive is you’re paying for the other dude in the car. When there is no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere is cheaper. Even on a road trip.’
Kalanick said that self-driving cars ordered up through a service like Uber will eventually bring the cost of ridership so far down that car ownership will ‘go away.’
He said self-driving Uber fleets will also be safer and ‘more environmentally friendly.’
Obviously lots of Uber drivers will lose their jobs over time if this vision comes to life. Kalanick is OK with that.”
From Martin Filler’s mixed critique at New York Review of Books of Nikil Saval’s Cubed: A Secret History of the Workplace, a brief explanation of the origins of the open office, which wasn’t chiefly the result of egalitarian impulse but of economic necessity:
“This revolutionary concept emerged in Germany in the late 1950s as die Bürolandschaft (the office landscape). Although the Bürolandschaft approach was codified by the Quickborner Team (an office planning company based in the Hamburg suburb of Quickborn), the ideas it embodied arose spontaneously during Germany’s rapid postwar recovery. With so much of the defeated country in ruins, and a large part of what business facilities that did survive commandeered by the Allied occupation forces (for example, Hans Poelzig’s I.G. Farben building of 1928–1930 in Frankfurt, then Europe’s largest office structure, taken over in 1945 as the American military’s bureaucratic command post), inexpensive improvisatory retrofits had to suffice for renascent German businesses. (A good sense of what those postwar spaces looked like can be gathered from Arno Mathes’s set decoration for Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s 1979 film The Marriage of Maria Braun, which recreates freestanding office partitions embellished with trailing philodendron vines.)
Within little more than a decade of its inception, the open office was embraced by American business furniture manufacturers eager to sell not just individual chairs, desks, and filing cabinets, but fully integrated office systems. These modular units incorporated partitions with ‘task’ lighting for up-close illumination, power conduits for the growing number of electrical office machines, and other infrastructural elements that promised unprecedented cost savings as functional needs changed over time.”
“Fabio Gramazio and his partner Matthias Kohler recently programmed an industrial robot to work on a Swiss winery. It prefabricated the façade, stacked bricks and applied adhesive, and cranes installed it. ‘We’re replacing the brick module with a machine and controlling the process with algorithms,’ says Gramazio. ‘It’s beyond what could be done with a human.’
The pair have also presented some more speculative projects, including having drones assemble high-rises in Singapore. But to make these scenarios real, Gramazio knows he has to approach the less eye-catching core of the construction industry: ‘If you want to change the logic of building, you have to attack concrete.’ He’s working on a new type of reinforced concrete — one whose reinforcement is a structure extruded by the industrial robot, which allows for more complex structures. ‘We’re currently doing it with plastics, but we’re working with steel, glass, carbon and natural fibres.’ That’s some way off, but Gramazio is thinking long term. ‘If you want complete change, this is 50 to 100 years away,’ the 43-year-old says. ‘And that’s nothing.'”
Norman Mailer pursued immortality through subjects as grand as his ego, and it was the Apollo 11 mission that was Moby Dick to his Ahab. He knew the beginning of space voyage was the end, in a sense, of humans, or, at least, of humans believing they were in the driver’s seat. Penguin Classics is republishing his great 1970 writing, Of a Fire on the Moon, 45 years after we touched down up there. Togetherwith Oriana Fallaci’s If The Sun Dies, you have an amazing account of that disorienting moment when technology, that barbarian, truly stormed the gates, as well as a great look at New Journalism’s early peak. Below are some of the posts that I’ve previously put up that refer to Mailer’s book.
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“It Was Not A Despair He Felt, Or Fear–It Was Anesthesia”
When he wrote about the coming computer revolution of the 1970s at the outset of the decade in Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer couldn’t have known that the dropouts and the rebels would be leading the charge. An excerpt of his somewhat nightmarish view of our technological future, some parts of which came true and some still in the offing:
“Now they asked him what he thought of the Seventies. He did not know. He thought of the Seventies and a blank like the windowless walls of the computer city came over his vision. When he conducted interviews with himself on the subject it was not a despair he felt, or fear–it was anesthesia. He had no intimations of what was to come, and that was conceivably worse than any sentiment of dread, for a sense of the future, no matter how melancholy, was preferable to none–it spoke of some sense of the continuation in the projects of one’s life. He was adrift. If he tried to conceive of a likely perspective in the decade before him, he saw not one structure to society but two: if the social world did not break down into revolutions and counterrevolutions, into police and military rules of order with sabotage, guerrilla war and enclaves of resistance, if none of this occurred, then there certainly would be a society of reason, but its reason would be the logic of the computer. In that society, legally accepted drugs would become necessary for accelerated cerebration, there would be inchings toward nuclear installation, a monotony of architectures, a pollution of nature which would arouse technologies of decontamination odious as deodorants, and transplanted hearts monitored like spaceships–the patients might be obliged to live in a compound reminiscent of a Mission Control Center where technicians could monitor on consoles the beatings of a thousand transplanted hearts. But in the society of computer-logic, the atmosphere would obviously be plastic, air-conditioned, sealed in bubble-domes below the smog, a prelude to living on space stations. People would die in such societies like fish expiring on a vinyl floor. So of course there would be another society, an irrational society of dropouts, the saintly, the mad, the militant and the young. There the art of the absurd would reign in defiance against the computer.”
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“Doubtless, Everybody Would Be Easier To Monitor”
Some more predictions from Norman Mailer’s 1970 Space Age reportage, Of a Fire on the Moon, which have come to fruition even without the aid of moon crystals:
“Thus the perspective of space factories returning the new imperialists of space a profit was now near to the reach of technology. Forget about diamonds! The value of crystals grown in space was incalculable: gravity would not be pulling on the crystal structure as it grew, so the molecule would line up in lattices free of shift or sheer. Such a perfect latticework would serve to carry messages for a perfect computer. Computers the size of a package of cigarettes would then be able to do the work of present computers the size of a trunk. So the mind could race ahead to see computers programming go-to-school routes in the nose of every kiddie car–the paranoid mind could see crystal transmitters sewn into the rump of ever juvenile delinquent–doubtless, everybody would be easier to monitor. Big Brother could get superseded by Moon Brother–the major monitor of them all might yet be sunk in a shaft on the back face of the lunar sphere.”
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“A Robot That Is Designed To Play Chess Might Also Want To Build A Spaceship”
In his 1970 Apollo 11 account, Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer realized that his rocket wasn’t the biggest after all, that the mission was a passing of the torch, that technology, an expression of the human mind, had diminished its creators. “Space travel proposed a future world of brains attached to wires,” Mailer wrote, his ego having suffered a TKO. And just as the Space Race ended the greater race began, the one between carbon and silicon, and it’s really just a matter of time before the pace grows too brisk for humans.
Supercomputers will ultimately be a threat to us, but we’re certainly doomed without them, so we have to navigate the future the best we can, even if it’s one not of our control. Gary Marcus addresses this and other issues in his latest New Yorker blog piece, “Why We Should Think About the Threat of Artificial Intelligence.” An excerpt:
“It’s likely that machines will be smarter than us before the end of the century—not just at chess or trivia questions but at just about everything, from mathematics and engineering to science and medicine. There might be a few jobs left for entertainers, writers, and other creative types, but computers will eventually be able to program themselves, absorb vast quantities of new information, and reason in ways that we carbon-based units can only dimly imagine. And they will be able to do it every second of every day, without sleep or coffee breaks.
For some people, that future is a wonderful thing. [Ray] Kurzweil has written about a rapturous singularity in which we merge with machines and upload our souls for immortality; Peter Diamandis has argued that advances in A.I. will be one key to ushering in a new era of ‘abundance,’ with enough food, water, and consumer gadgets for all. Skeptics like Eric Brynjolfsson and I have worried about the consequences of A.I. and robotics for employment. But even if you put aside the sort of worries about what super-advanced A.I. might do to the labor market, there’s another concern, too: that powerful A.I. might threaten us more directly, by battling us for resources.
Most people see that sort of fear as silly science-fiction drivel—the stuff of The Terminator and The Matrix. To the extent that we plan for our medium-term future, we worry about asteroids, the decline of fossil fuels, and global warming, not robots. But a dark new book by James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, lays out a strong case for why we should be at least a little worried.
Barrat’s core argument, which he borrows from the A.I. researcher Steve Omohundro, is that the drive for self-preservation and resource acquisition may be inherent in all goal-driven systems of a certain degree of intelligence. In Omohundro’s words, ‘if it is smart enough, a robot that is designed to play chess might also want to build a spaceship,’ in order to obtain more resources for whatever goals it might have.”
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“Hippies Will Be Refused Tourist Cards To Enter Mexico Unless They Take A Bath And Get Haircuts”
While Apollo 11 traveled to the moon and back in 1969, the astronauts were treated each day to a six-minute newscast from Mission Control about the happenings on Earth. Here’s one that was transcribed in Norman Mailer’s Of a Fire on the Moon, which made space travel seem quaint by comparison:
“Washington UPI:Vice President Spiro T. Agnewhas called for putting a man on Mars by the year 2000, but Democratic leaders replied that priority must go to needs on earth…Immigration officials in Nuevo Laredo announced Wednesday that hippies will be refused tourist cards to enter Mexico unless they take a bath and get haircuts…’The greatest adventure in the history of humanity has started,’ declared the French newspaper Le Figaro, which devoted four pages to reports from Cape Kennedy and diagrams of the mission…Hempstead, New York: Joe Namath officially reported to the New York Jets training camp at Hofstra University Wednesday following a closed-door meeting with his teammates over his differences with Pro Football Commissioner Pete Rozelle…London UPI: The House of Lords was assured Wednesday that a major American submarine would not ‘damage or assault’ the Loch Ness monster.”
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“There Was An Uneasy Silence, An Embarrassed Pall At The Unmentioned Word Of Nazi”
“What we are seeking in tomorrow’s trip is indeed that key to our future on earth.”
Norman Mailer’s book Of a Fire on the Moon, about American space exploration during the 1960s, was originally published as three long and personal articles for Life magazine in 1969: “A Fire on the Moon,” “The Psychology of Astronauts,” and “A Dream of the Future’s Face.” Mailer used space travel to examine America’s conflicted and tattered existence–and his own as well. In one segment, he reports on a banquet in which Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi rocket engineer who became a guiding light at NASA, meets with American businessmen on the eve of the Apollo 11 launch. An excerpt:
“Therefore, the audience was not to be at ease during his introduction, for the new speaker, who described himself as a ‘backup publisher,’ went into a little too much historical detail. ‘During the Thirties he was employed by the Ordinance Department of the German government developing liquid fuel rockets. During World War II he made very significant developments in rocketry for his government.’
A tension spread in this audience of corporation presidents and high executives, of astronauts, a few at any rate, and their families. There was an uneasy silence, an embarrassed pall at the unmentioned word of Nazi–it was the shoe which did not drop to the floor. So no more than a pitter-patter of clapping was aroused when the speaker went quickly on to say: ‘In 1955 he became an American citizen himself.’ It was only when Von Braun stood up at the end that the mood felt secure enough to shift. A particularly hearty and enthusiastic hand of applause swelled into a standing ovation. Nearly everybody stood up. Aquarius, who finally cast his vote by remaining seated, felt pressure not unrelated to refusing to stand up for The Star-Spangled Banner. It was as if the crowd with true American enthusiasm had finally declared, ‘Ah don’ care if he is some kind of ex-Nazi, he’s a good loyal patriotic American.’
Von Braun was. If patriotism is the ability to improve a nation’s morale, then Von Braun was a patriot. It was plain that some of these corporate executives loved him. In fact, they revered him. He was the high priest of their precise art–manufacture. If many too many an American product was accelerating into shoddy these years since the war, if planned obsolescence had all too often become a euphemism for sloppy workmanship, cynical cost-cutting, swollen advertising budgets, inefficiency and general indifference, then in one place at least, and for certain, America could be proud of a product. It was high as a castle and tooled more finely than the most exquisite watch.
Walt Disney with Wernher von Braun.
Now the real and true tasty beef of capitalism got up to speak, the grease and guts of it, the veritable brawn, and spoke with fulsome language in his small and well-considered voice. He was with friends on this occasion, and so a savory and gravy of redolence came into his tone, his voice was not unmusical, it had overtones which hinted of angelic super-possibilities one could not otherwise lay on the line. He was when all was said like the head waiter of the largest hofbrau in heaven. ‘Honored guests, ladies and gentlemen,’ Von Braun began, ‘it is with a great deal of respect tonight that I meet you, the leaders, and the captains in the mainstream of American industry and life. Without your success in building and maintaining the economic foundations of this nation, the resources for mounting tomorrow’s expedition to the moon would never have been committed…. Tomorrow’s historic launch belongs to you and to the men and women who sit behind the desks and administer your companies’ activities, to the men who sweep the floor in your office buildings and to every American who walks the street of this productive land. It is an American triumph. Many times I have thanked God for allowing me to be a part of the history that will be made here today and tomorrow and in the next few days. Tonight I want to offer my gratitude to you and all Americans who have created the most fantastically progressive nation yet conceived and developed,’ He went on to talk of space as ‘the key to our future on earth,’ and echoes of his vision drifted through the stale tropical air of a banquet room after coffee–perhaps he was hinting at the discords and nihilism traveling in bands and brigands across the earth. ‘The key to our future on earth. I think we should see clearly from this statement that the Apollo 11 moon trip even from its inception was not intended as a one-time trip that would rest alone on the merits of a single journey. If our intention had been merely to bring back a handful of soil and rocks from the lunar gravel pit and then forget the whole thing’–he spoke almost with contempt of the meager resources of the moon–‘we would certainly be history’s biggest fools. But that is not our intention now–it never will be. What we are seeking in tomorrow’s trip is indeed that key to our future on earth. We are expanding the mind of man. We are extending this God-given brain and these God-given hands to their outermost limits and in so doing all mankind will benefit. All mankind will reap the harvest…. What we will have attained when Neil Armstrong steps down upon the moon is a completely new step in the evolution of man.'”
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Wernher von Braun inducted into the Space Camp Hall of Fame:
Tom Lehrer eviscerates Wernher von Braun in under 90 seconds:
Maya Angelou, who sadly has just passed away, appearing with Merv Griffin in 1982, voicing her concerns about the beginning of what she believed was a politicized class war on less-fortunate Americans, of Reaganomics trying to undo the gains of the New Deal and the Great Society.
That excellent Margalit Fox at the New York Timespenned a postmortem for a Romanian academic who became an unlikely literary superstar when his story intersected with that of one of the world’s most feared figures. An excerpt:
“The first of his many books on the subject, In Search of Dracula, published in 1972 and written with Raymond T. McNally, helped spur the revival of interest in Stoker’s vampirical nobleman that continues to this day.
‘It has changed my life,’ Professor Florescu told The New York Times in 1975. ‘I used to write books that nobody read.’
Radu Nicolae Florescu was born in Bucharest on Oct. 23, 1925. As he would learn in the course of his research, he had a family connection to Vlad, who was known familiarly if not quite fondly as Vlad Tepes, or Vlad the Impaler: A Florescu ancestor was said to have married Vlad’s brother, felicitously named Radu the Handsome.
At 13, as war loomed, Radu left home for London, where his father was serving as Romania’s acting ambassador to Britain. (The elder Mr. Florescu resigned his post after the dictator Ion Antonescu, a Nazi ally, became Romania’s prime minister in 1940.)
The younger Mr. Florescu earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees in politics, philosophy and economics from Oxford, followed by a Ph.D. in history from Indiana University. He joined the Boston College faculty in 1953.
In the late 1960s, Professor McNally, a colleague in the history department, grew intrigued by affinities between events in Stoker’s novel, published in 1897, and the actual history of the region. He enlisted Professor Florescu, and together they scoured archives throughout Eastern Europe in an attempt to trace Count Dracula to a flesh-and-blood source.”
“Siamese twins, one of whom is in a critical condition with pneumonia while the other remains in good health, were in New York Hospital, 119 E. 74th St., Manhattan, today.
Lucio Godina is fighting for his life with a temperature of 105, while Simplicio Godina is in perfectly normal condition. Their age is 28.”
My take on the New York Times as a business is that it’s a great publication with real value within the right structure (as part of Bloomberg, for instance), but it probably won’t flourish financially again as a family-owned, independent company.
Financial journalist David Warsh was perplexed by the Times’ internal “Innovation Report” that was recently leaked and has written a scathing article on the topic for Politico Magazine. The opening:
“For all the reporting about the unceremonious manner in which Arthur O. Sulzberger Jr. replaced executive editor Jill Abramson with Dean Baquet, the strongest evidence that the needle on his tenure as publisher of the New York Times has reached the danger zone is the company’s internal “Innovation Report” that someone at the New York Times Co. leaked last week, perhaps in hopes of offsetting the bad publicity.
Prepared by an eight-person newsroom team led by Sulzberger’s son, Arthur Gregg Sulzberger, the glossy, 96-page report is likely to have the opposite effect. It amounts to a clarion call to blow up the 163-year-old business in order to go into competition with the likes of BuzzFeed, Vox, Business Insider, the as-yet unformed First Look Media and the Huffington Post. And what a recipe for disaster that would be: abandoning the great news and insight that is at the heart of the Times brand to chase after audience in a game it can never hope to win.
Astoundingly, the report doesn’t so much as mention the Times’ much more menacing digital competitors, Bloomberg News and Reuters, breakthrough innovators whose news-gathering resources are far greater than those of the newspaper company. On every page, the ‘Innovation Report’ betrays its authors’ failure to understand what the Times’ fundamental business is about.”
Michael Crichton pushed his book Electronic Life: How To Think About Computers while visiting Merv Griffin in 1983. The personal computing revolution was upon us, but the Macintosh had yet to reach the market, so it still seemed so far away, especially to the tech-challenged host.
If the sea level rises high enough, it will sink us all. But the first casualties of melting glaciers will likely be island nations. The opening of Stephen Leahy’s Vice article “The Nations Guaranteed to Be Swallowed By the Sea“:
“Imagine the street you live on is knee-deep in floodwater, and it’s ruining everything in sight, including your home. Now imagine that those awful floodwaters never, ever recede. Instead, the water just keeps rising and rising until your entire country drowns.
For a number of island nations, that’s ultimately the significance of the recent reports about the unstoppable melt of the massive ice sheets of Antarctica and Greenland, along with hundreds of glaciers.
‘We’ve already lost some island atolls. On others the rising sea is destroying homes, washing away coffins and skeletons from graves,’ Tony de Brum, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands, told me. ‘Now with every full moon the high tides brings salt water into our streets. We’re moving further inland but can’t move much further.’
The Marshall Islands are located in the northern Pacific Ocean, and are home to some 70,000 people spread out over 24 low-lying coral atolls. Low-lying, as in six feet above sea level on average. Not only do rising seas flood and erode shorelines, they also make groundwater too salty too drink and ‘poison’ the land with salt so crops and even coconuts trees can’t grow.“
I’ve posted before about Google pushing the near-term limits of what Elon Musk thinks is possible with autonomous vehicles. We’ll see how that turns out, but here’s a description the Verge’s David Pierce of Google’s new steering wheel-less autonomous taxi prototype which will definitely be all over the media and perhaps all over city streets:
“Speaking about self-driving cars last September, Elon Musk preached caution. The man who wants to send us all to space and shuttle us between cities at outrageous speeds told the FT that ‘my opinion is it’s a bridge too far to go to fully autonomous cars.’
Somewhere deep inside the secret labs at Google X, Sergey Brin must have read that and smiled. And then climbed into his tiny car — the one with a strange smiley face for a front and a noticeably missing steering wheel — and with a single button press instructed his car to drive him wherever billionaires go to cackle at the short-sightedness of other billionaires.
On Tuesday night, onstage at the Code Conference in California, Brin revealed an entirely new take on a self-driving car, one decidedly more ambitious than anything we’ve seen before. Google’s as-yet-unnamed car isn’t a modified Lexus. It doesn’t just park itself. It’s an entirely autonomous vehicle, with no need for steering wheels or gas pedals or human intervention of any kind. You can’t drive it even if you want to.
The Google Car is fully electric, big enough for two passengers. It’ll only go 25 miles per hour. Your involvement with the car consists of four things: get in, put on your seatbelt, press the Start button, and wait.”
Among the casualties of climate change–us, perhaps?–may well be the glass skyscraper, so sleek and inviting and environmentally irresponsible. From BBC Magazine:
“Glass buildings are popular – not just because of their striking appearance but for the views they boast, and the increased light they let in.
When German architect Ludwig Mies Van Der Rohe designed what is said to be the world’s first glass skyscraper in 1921, he associated the glass facade with purity and renewal. Later in the century, British architect Richard Rogers praised glass buildings because of their social worth. Glass walls enabled even employees working in the basement to benefit from reflected natural light and dissolved barriers between a cramped indoor office space and the greenery outside.
Companies like to give the impression of a democratic working environment – open-plan and with floor-to-ceiling windows, so that all employees, not just the boss, benefit from the view.
However, as concerns over global warming have become more widespread, so the glass structure has come under scrutiny. …
Glass lets out and lets in a lot of heat. A vast amount of energy is required for an office full of people to remain cool in the UAE and to stay warm in the snowstorms of Toronto.
Governments are now so concerned by the long-term impact of ‘solar gain’ – the extent to which a building absorbs sunlight and heats up – that they have introduced strict regulations around shape and structure.”
Before portable computing was the thing, New Yorkers used to make fun of Los Angeles for its post-Hippie oddness and the Dream Factory it powered. But the one-liners about California are now pointed northward, at a new kind of dreaming, even if the joke is really on the rest of us. In New York magazine, Jessica Pressler has fun with the whiz kids behind the smartphone-enabled laundry service Washio, while taking broader aim at America’s supposed best and brightest, who’ve descended on Silicon Valley to get rich quick organizing the minutiae of our lives–by making problems disappear, if only briefly. An excerpt about the company that delivers free cookies with your clean clothes:
“Remember the scrub board? One imagines people were thrilled when that came along and they could stop beating garments on rocks, but then someone went ahead and invented the washing machine, and everyone had to have that, followed by the electric washing machine, and then the services came along where, if you had enough money, you could pay someone to wash your clothes for you, and eventually even this started to seem like a burden—all that picking up and dropping off—and the places offering delivery, well, you had to call them, and sometimes they had accents, and are we not living in the modern world? ‘We had this crazy idea,’ says [Jordan] Metzner, ‘that someone should press a button on their phone and someone will come and pick up their laundry.’
So Washio made it thus. For a while, this was pleasing. But in the hubs and coastal cities of Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., and San Francisco—especially San Francisco—new innovations are dying from the day they are born, and laundry delivered with a fresh-baked cookie is no longer quite enough. There’s a term for this. It’s called the hedonic treadmill.
Fortunately, the employees of Washio are on their toes. ‘What if we did bananas?’ Nadler suggested. Everyone laughed.
Metzner held up a small brown bag featuring a silhouette of a flower and a clean lowercase font. ‘I’ve been talking to the CEO of NatureBox,’ he said. ‘It’s like a Birchbox for healthy treats. Every month they send you nuts and …’
“Banana chips?” said Brittany Barrett, whose job as Washio’s community manager includes cookie selection. Everyone laughed, again.
Metzner looked down at the bag. ‘Flax crostini,’ he said. ‘I think it’s a much better value proposition than a cookie.’ He looked at the bag again. ‘What is a flax crostini?’
We are living in a time of Great Change, and also a time of Not-So-Great Change. The tidal wave of innovation that has swept out from Silicon Valley, transforming the way we communicate, read, shop, and travel, has carried along with it an epic shit-ton of digital flotsam. Looking around at the newly minted billionaires behind the enjoyable but wholly unnecessary Facebook and WhatsApp, Uber and Nest, the brightest minds of a generation, the high test-scorers and mathematically inclined, have taken the knowledge acquired at our most august institutions and applied themselves to solving increasingly minor First World problems. The marketplace of ideas has become one long late-night infomercial. Want a blazer embedded with GPS technology? A Bluetooth-controlled necklace? A hair dryer big enough for your entire body? They can be yours! In the rush to disrupt everything we have ever known, not even the humble crostini has been spared.”
A great 1963 episode of The Sky at Night featuring Arthur C. Clarke, who guessed the timeline of the U.S. moon landing almost exactly but was wrong to think the Russians would get there first. We’re still waiting for those domed bases on the moon and Mars shown on this program.
One quick exchange about life out there–out there–from a Reddit Ask Me Anything with theoretical physicist Sean Carroll:
“Question:
Does the fact that we exist now, in a 7 billion person community, mean that it is very unlikely that “intelligent life” will someday exist in an interconnected civilization of say a billion earths (with 1019 people)?
Sean Carroll:
I don’t think so. Maybe technologically advanced life is fairly rare, appearing on average once per galaxy per ten billion years. Then we would be at the beginning, but the future could have many more civilizations.
But honestly, we have no idea. Some epistemic humility is in order here.”
Technological positivist Marc Andreessen was Russ Roberts’ guest on a really good installment of the EconTalk podcast. The Netscape founder and venture capitalist sees the world as moving in the right direction in the macro, perhaps giving short shrift to those sinking in the short-term and mid-term turmoil that attends transformation. Notes on myriad discussion topics.
Google. Andreessen details how one of the most powerful companies on Earth had plenty of luck on its way to market dominance and its position as a latter-day Bell Labs. The search giant could have collapsed early on or been purchased, with Larry Page and Sergey Brin winding up as, say, Yahoo! middle managers. (“A fate worse than death,” as the host cleverly sums it up.) The guest recalls a fellow venture capital player calling the chief Google guys the “two most arrogant founders” he’d ever met.
Jobs lost to automation. The guest believes that with the delivery of smartphones into the hands of (eventually) seven billion people, that we’re at the tipping point of an economic boom and great job creation. He doesn’t qualify his remarks by saying that we’re in for rough times in the short run with jobs because of robotics. Andreesen also doesn’t address the possibility that we could have both an economic boom and a jobs shortfall.
Bitcoin. He’s over the moon for the crypto-currency company, saying it’s as revolutionary as the personal computer or the Internet. That seems like way too much hyperbole.
MOOCs. Andreesen points out that good universities will never be able to expand to meet a growing global population, so online courses will be essential if we’re to avoid a disastrous educational collapse.
Political upheavals. The one cloud the Netscape founder sees on the horizon is a barrage of political upheavals that will destabilize sections of the globe at times.
Journalism. Andreessen is sanguine about the future of journalism, believing that companies will adjust to post-monopolistic competition. He points out formerly profitable things about newspapers (classified ads, sports scores, movie times, etc.) that have been cannibalized by the Internet without guessing what will replace them for those faltering companies. If his argument was that nothing need replace them and these erstwhile powerful news corporations were no longer necessary since news distribution is now diffuse, I think that would probably be a stronger argument than suggesting that all but a few such companies are salvageable.•
“Cincinnati–Surgeons at the City Hospital believe that John Lohray, a cooper, who applied for treatment last night, has the largest nose in the world. The ponderous nasal appendage is 6 3/4 inches long and 3 1/2 inches wide. It hangs over his lips and interferes when he eats or talks. Lohray is suffering from elephantiasis of the nose. The nose will be amputated.”
Valerie Solanas was apparently never told that you don’t shoot the messenger. I was completely unaware until watching this video that she shot Andy Warhol the day before Sirhan Sirhan assassinated RFK. In the clip, Warhol and Candy Darling, who, it is written, came from out on the Island, preen for friends and media on a docked boat chartered by Jane Fonda. The line about Warhol’s Superstars “almost living” is striking. Isn’t that what we all dedicate a good portion of our lives to now, with our icons and our selfies and our reality stars? It’s great that everything is freer, but isn’t it surprising what we’ve done with the freedom, the endless channels? It’s life, yes, and it’s almost life.
Two pieces of 1970s propaganda for Libertarianism, an -ism I find perplexing.
A clip from the 1978 short, “Libra,” which imagined a 21st-century Libertarian space utopia, population 10,000, including its market-loving African-American leader. Um, wow.
This special version of 1975 film adaptation, The Incredible Bread Machine, is introduced by then-Secretary of the Treasury, William E. Simon, and features commentary by Milton Friedman and some of the book and film’s creators.
A really strange artifact, this 30-minute documentary directed by Theo Kamecke attempted to make Libertarianism sexy. The film’s writers (who appear onscreen as themselves) are six young, long-haired, hip proponents of the philosophy whose very presence sends the message that youth culture and free markets are not mutually exclusive. An incredible oversimplification of complex political and economic issues, the film contains the type of jaw-dropping anti-government propaganda that would give Ayn Rand a huge boner. But it’s still an odd and interesting remnant.
Muammar Gaddafi was friends with Steven Seagal and Seagal is friends with Vladimir Putin. Wonder what behavior would link three such men.
At the BBC Magazine, Nigerian-American basketball player Alex Owumi recalls unwittingly signing a contract to play point guard for the Gaddafi family team and getting caught in the crossfire of the Libyan civil war. The opening:
“It was a beautiful flat. Everything was state of the art and it was spacious, too. It had two big living rooms, three big bedrooms, flat screens everywhere. The couches had gold trim and were so big and heavy they were impossible to move. The door to the apartment was reinforced steel, like on a bank vault.
It was 27 December 2010 and I had just arrived in Benghazi, Libya’s second biggest city, to play basketball for a team called Al-Nasr Benghazi. I had stayed in some nice places playing for teams in Europe, but this seventh-floor apartment in the middle of town was something else. It was like the Taj Mahal.
I didn’t immediately notice the photographs dotted around the place – of Libyan leader Col Muammar Gaddafi and his grandchildren.
When I did, I phoned the team president – we called him Mr Ahmed – and he told me how it was. ‘The apartment belongs to Mutassim Gaddafi, the Colonel’s son,’ he said. ‘Al-Nasr is the Gaddafi club. You are playing for the Gaddafi family.’
Gaddafi! When I was a young kid growing up in Africa – I was born in Nigeria – Gaddafi was someone we all looked up to. He was always on the news and in the paper, helping out countries like Niger and Nigeria. I thought of him as one of the faces of Africa – him and Nelson Mandela. As a kid I wasn’t really aware of any of the bad things he was doing. Maybe I was too busy playing sports.
In my first practice with my new teammates there was a weird atmosphere.”
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