“I metal detect as a hobby”
People who lost something in their yard
Have you lost something in your yard? Let me bring my metal detector and help find it. I metal detect as a hobby and would enjoy helping you.
Jon Gertner, who wrote an excellent book about Bell Labs, has an article at Fast Company about Google X, the lab that is trying to be its creative descendant, though the search giant’s “moonshot” wing is even further afield, more an amorphous thing than something that is solid state. An excerpt:
“X does not employ your typical Silicon Valley types. Google already has a large lab division, Google Research, that is devoted mainly to computer science and Internet technologies. The distinction is sometimes framed this way: Google Research is mostly bits; Google X is mostly atoms. In other words, X is tasked with making actual objects that interact with the physical world, which to a certain extent gives logical coherence to the four main projects that have so far emerged from X: driverless cars, Google Glass, high-altitude Wi-Fi balloons, and glucose-monitoring contact lenses. Mostly, X seeks out people who want to build stuff, and who won’t get easily daunted. Inside the lab, now more than 250 employees strong, I met an idiosyncratic troupe of former park rangers, sculptors, philosophers, and machinists; one X scientist has won two Academy Awards for special effects. [Astro] Teller himself has written a novel, worked in finance, and earned a PhD in artificial intelligence. One recent hire spent five years of his evenings and weekends building a helicopter in his garage. It actually works, and he flew it regularly, which seems insane to me. But his technology skills alone did not get him the job. The helicopter did. ‘The classic definition of an expert is someone who knows more and more about less and less until they know everything about nothing,’ says DeVaul. ‘And people like that can be extremely useful in a very focused way. But these are really not X people. What we want, in a sense, are people who know less and less about more and more.’
If there’s a master plan behind X, it’s that a frictional arrangement of ragtag intellects is the best hope for creating products that can solve the world’s most intractable issues. Yet Google X, as Teller describes it, is an experiment in itself–an effort to reconfigure the process by which a corporate lab functions, in this case by taking incredible risks across a wide variety of technological domains, and by not hesitating to stray far from its parent company’s business. We don’t yet know if this will prove to be genius or folly. There’s actually no historical model, no precedent, for what these people are doing.”
Tags: Astro Teller, Jon Gertner
The new freedoms of the Internet Age are great and in the aggregate we’re wealthier, but the dollars themselves are in far fewer hands than before we were wired. Astra Taylor, who’s made two excellent full-length documentaries (this one and this one), has a new book, The People’s Platform: Taking Back Power and Culture in the Digital Age, which talks about the current wave of inequality fostered in part by the emergence of the web. Gawker’s Michelle Dean interviewed Taylor on the topic. The opening exchange:
“Question:
Can you boil down for me the main reason you think the internet isn’t the ‘democratizing’ force we were promised?
Astra Taylor:
Because of money. It makes no sense to talk about the internet as separate from the economy. In the mainstream pundit world, there are two camps. One would say the internet is ruining everything, or distracting, or addictive. The other camp would say the internet’s amazing, we’re all connected, and it’s going to bring about a new age of democratization of culture, and creativity.
It’s not [that I have] some revolutionary theory. But there was a disconnect between this chatter from a fundamental characteristic of our world, just sitting there, and I just felt like somebody had to address it. No one was talking about the role of finance and the way business imperatives shape the development of tech.
The web is not an even playing field. There are economic hierarchies, and there’s this rich-get-richer phenomenon. And it’s emergent of these massive digital corporations, you know, Google and Apple. They’re not the upstarts they position themselves as.”
Tags: Astra Taylor
From the September 16, 1876 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“San Francisco, Cal.–A dispatch from Los Angeles narrates a terrible tale of suffering on the Colorado desert. Henry Smith, from St. Louis, with one companion and a pack train, left Yuma for Los Angeles and wandered four days on the desert without water. Smith opened veins of his arm and drank the blood, which clotted in his throat. He then cut his windpipe to remove it, and died in a few hours after. His companion reached the station in the last stage of exhaustion.”
Tags: Henry Smith
“The machine cannot lie,” said Leland Stanford, which may not be true much longer, but racer Jackie Stewart knew that humans certainly always could–especially to themselves–as he discusses his elaborate preparations for Monaco in 1972 with good friend Roman Polanski.
Rupert Murdoch said recently that he believes the New York Post will still exist in ten years, if in a digital form. It’s difficult to imagine a scenario where that’s possible. Most newspapers won’t survive the transition to the Digital Age, obviously, though dissemination of high-quality news reporting will likely continue. From Michael Kinsley’s new Vanity Fair piece, “Front Page 2.0,” in which he argues the same even if he’s as short on particulars as I am:
“It’s not true that the publishers have just stood by while the Internet has stolen their business. Way back in 1981, the American Newspaper Publishers Association, under its leader that year—Katharine Graham, the C.E.O. of the Washington Post Co.—made a big lobbying push for a law forbidding AT&T, then a government-sanctioned telephone monopoly, to sell classified ads electronically. The publishers argued that the telephone company’s monopoly guaranteed the company profits that it could then use to subsidize the development of an electronic Yellow Pages, which would threaten one of their most profitable products, classified ads.
It was a bold argument. The newspaper industry had a higher rate of return on its investment than the phone company did. Nevertheless, the publishers were correct in seeing classified ads as the first thing they would lose as their business went online, though they missed the fact that the telephone company itself was about to be split into little bits and that it was some guy named Craig who would take this particular profit center from them.
Although it is hard to believe now, when The Washington Post can be bought by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos for pocket change of $250 million, but just 15 or 20 years ago, before the commercial arrival of the Internet, there was no sweeter sinecure in American capitalism than owning the one newspaper in a one-newspaper town. And cities as large as Los Angeles and Washington had effectively become one-newspaper towns. It was heaven: you could earn huge monopoly profits from advertisers like the big department stores, which had nowhere else to go. You were automatically a civic leader. And if you got bored, or your family needed cash, you could sell out to Gannett, which always stood ready to gobble up monopoly newspapers and lower the tone. At symposia and seminars on the Future of Newspapers, professional worriers used to worry that these monopoly or near-monopoly newspapers were too powerful for society’s good.
It couldn’t go on, and therefore it didn’t.”
Tags: Katharine Graham, Michael Kinsley
Predictions about the year 2000 from 1957 Germany. Cooking with punch cards never happened. It was all a lie.
Kubla Khan decreed his stately pleasure dome, but he couldn’t escape the voices of the dead. China is building its top-down insta-cities, believing it can forgo organic development, but large swaths of these developments don’t echo with life. If they’re a dream, it’s a dream that may never be fulfilled. The opening of Jonathan Kaiman’s Guardian article about Tianjin Eco-city, which is green in more ways than one:
“Wang Lin needed a change. The crushing air pollution and gridlock traffic in his hometown Hangu, an industrial district in China’s northern metropolis of Tianjin, made him anxious and sometimes sick.
Then he heard about the Sino-Singapore Tianjin Eco-city. According to its marketing, the £24bn development – a joint venture between the governments of China and Singapore – will one day be a “model for sustainable development” only 40km from Tianjin’s city centre and 150km from central Beijing. To Wang, it sounded like paradise.
Last year, the 36-year-old moved into an inexpensive flat in one of the city’s half-occupied apartment blocks. As a freelance translator, he doesn’t mind that most viable employers are at least half an hour away by car. He loves the relatively clean air and the personal space. But he also has his complaints.
By the time the city is complete – probably by 2020 – it should accommodate 350,000 people over 30 square kilometres. Five years into the project, however, only about three sq km have been completed, housing 6,000 permanent residents. There are no hospitals or shopping malls. Its empty highways traverse a landscape of vacant mid-rises and dusty construction yards.
‘This place is like a child – it’s in a development phase,’ Wang says. ‘But it’s chasing an ideal. It’s the kind of place where people can come to pursue their dreams.'”
Tags: Jonathan Kaiman, Wang Lin
Drones are made not only to deliver what you ordered but to stop by unannounced. The opening of Robert Wall’s WSJ article about this technology getting ahead of regulation in Europe:
“The U.K. has a history in unmanned aviation spanning almost 100 years. It added to that this month when a court in northern England issued the country’s first-ever fine for the dangerous and illegal use of an unmanned aircraft.
The drone’s owner flew his craft in restricted airspace, over where Britain builds its nuclear submarines. The fine came in at £800 ($1,340.) Legal fees were another $3,500. And the aircraft crashed in the water.
Europe, which has trailed the U.S. and Israel in the development of unmanned military aircraft, is now beginning an effort to avoid falling behind on commercial drones, too. The European Union plans to spell out rules to govern a market it suggests could reach around 15 billion euros ($20.7 billion)per year.
Europe’s challenge is that several countries have embarked on permitting commercial drone operations, but there has been no effort to harmonize standards across the region.
‘Remotely piloted aircraft, almost by definition, are going to cross borders,’ Siim Kallas, the European Commission for Transport said in a statement last week.
“I have never run into a place where the cannibals are so thick.”
I don’t know that a whole lot of fact-checking went into the September 29, 1926 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. In that issue, ship captain Edward Harper told tales of cannibalism in Somalia to reporter E.K. Titus, which were seemingly published verbatim. The opening:
“Guardaful is a bad place to be a lighthouse-keeper. The holder of this post may be flesh and bones one day and mince meat the next.
‘Every now and then, when we pass this light, just outside the Arabian Gulf, we notice that the light is not burning. This means that the lighthouse-keeper and his two aides have just been eaten up,’ explained Edward Harper, famous old bos’n of the S.S. Sandown Castle of the Barber line, which docked at the foot of Pioneer St. yesterday.
‘Italy owns this outpost, and I’m telling you it’s a tough job to navigate past it, when the lighthouse keeper has been consumed, and there is no one to keep the glimmer going. It gets harder and harder every year for Italy to find anyone to go out there. I think they’ll soon have to assign a regular garrison to the place to keep the light going.
“Guess even Mussolini can’t keep the cannibals on the straight and narrow path.”
‘Guess even Mussolini can’t keep the cannibals on the straight and narrow path in Guardaful. In all my experiences of 40 years sailing the seas I have never run into a place where the cannibals are so thick.
Zulus Know How to Live.
But my boy, if you want to have a good life, you ought to become a citizen of Zululand. Guess you would have to black your face up with a little charcoal before they would take you into their commonwealth and make you a chieftain. But they sure know how to live.
‘Don’t get the Zulus mixed up with the cannibals. They are altogether different. Where the Zulus excel is in knowing how to have a large number of wives.
Wives cost $75 to $150.
‘Wives in Zululand cost from $75 to $150, depending on how large they are. The larger and stronger, the more expensive they come. When a Zulu has bought four wives he is made a sort of chieftain and is given some land for his own and his worries are finished.
‘A Zulu, working as a longshoreman, can earn five shillings or $1.25 a day. This is about five times as much as they could earn ordinarily on shore. They don’t figure in dollars though, but in bullocks. For $10 they can buy a bullock. For six bullocks they can buy a wife if they’re not particular. If they want a nice, big, strong wife it costs them 12 bullocks. And with four wives they can retire.”
Tags: Benito Mussolini, E.K. Titus, Edward Harper
Because phone holograms aren’t a thing yet, SociBot, the creepiest invention since Google Glass, is now an option. It can approximate the face from a photo you feed it and watches you with a pair of embedded cameras, responding to your gestures and expressions. As the product’s site says: “The eyes follow you around the room; the expression changes to reflect its mood (or yours!).” You’ll never be alone again. Never. From Oliver Wainwright at the Guardian:
“If Skype and FaceTime aren’t giving you enough of the human touch, you could soon be talking face to rubbery face with your loved ones, thanks to SociBot, a creepy ‘social robot’ that can imitate your friends.
‘It’s like having a real presence in the room,’ says Nic Carey, research co-ordinator at Engineered Arts, the Cornish company behind the device. ‘You simply upload a static photo of the face you want it to mimic and our software does the rest, animating the features down to subtle mouth twitches and eyes that follow you around the room. Even when they’re not speaking, it really feels like there’s someone there, keeping an eye on you.’
The face of a disembodied colleague staring out from a silvery helmet might not be what you’d expect at your average teleconference, but the company thinks it could transform the way we interact over long distances by simulating the subtleties of human expression, recreating the things that are lost on a flat screen.
Designed to be gender and ethnically neutral, the translucent mask is projected on from within, the chosen face 3D-mapped on to its surface and speech perfectly lip-synched, while the head turns and tilts as it talks.”
Tags: Oliver Wainwright
- Shocking ‘Archie’ News
- Court Drops Attempted Murder Charge Against Baby
- Dr. Zizmor Looks Really, Really Different Now
- Kristie Alley: ‘I’m Not Like Circus Fat, I Just Wanna Lose 20 Pounds’
- Kendall Jenner Goes Ziplining In Tights And A Bra Top
- Miley Cyrus Can Make A Lot Of Sense Sometimes
- KISS Frontman Claims Some Bandmates Were Anti-Semitic
- Sorry, BuzzFeed, Bob Saget Says You’ve Got ‘Full House’ All Wrong
- Gisele Bundchen Instagrams Stunning Brazilian Seascape And Some Side Boob
- The Worst Synonyms For ‘Vagina,’ Ranked
See also:
The three Transformations humans must make if we’re to attain a higher plane of living, à la philosopher Nick Bostrom’s “Letter from Utopia“:
“To reach Utopia, you must first discover the means to three fundamental transformations.
The First Transformation: Secure life!
Your body is a deathtrap. This vital machine and mortal vehicle, unless it jams first or crashes, is sure to rust anon. You are lucky to get seven decades of mobility; eight if you be fortune’s darling. That is not sufficient to get started in a serious way, much less to complete the journey. Maturity of the soul takes longer. Why, even a tree-life takes longer.
Death is not one but a multitude of assassins. Do you not see them? They are coming at you from every angle. Take aim at the causes of early death – infection, violence, malnutrition, heart attack, cancer. Turn your biggest gun on aging, and fire. You must seize the biochemical processes in your body in order to vanquish, by and by, illness and senescence. In time, you will discover ways to move your mind to more durable media. Then continue to improve the system, so that the risk of death and disease continues to decline. Any death prior to the heat death of the universe is premature if your life is good.
Oh, it is not well to live in a self-combusting paper hut! Keep the flames at bay and be prepared with liquid nitrogen, while you construct yourself a better habitation. One day you or your children should have a secure home. Research, build, redouble your effort!
The Second Transformation: Upgrade cognition!
Your brain’s special faculties: music, humor, spirituality, mathematics, eroticism, art, nurturing, narration, gossip! These are fine spirits to pour into the cup of life. Blessed you are if you have a vintage bottle of any of these. Better yet, a cask! Better yet, a vineyard!
Be not afraid to grow. The mind’s cellars have no ceilings!
What other capacities are possible? Imagine a world with all the music dried up: what poverty, what loss. Give your thanks, not to the lyre, but to your ears for the music. And ask yourself, what other harmonies are there in the air, that you lack the ears to hear? What vaults of value are you witlessly debarred from, lacking the key sensibility?
Had you but an inkling, your nails would be clawing at the padlock.
Your brain must grow beyond any genius of humankind, in its special faculties as well as its general intelligence, so that you may better learn, remember, and understand, and so that you may apprehend your own beatitude.
Mind is a means: for without insight you will get bogged down or lose your way, and your journey will fail.
Mind is also an end: for it is in the spacetime of awareness that Utopia will exist. May the measure of your mind be vast and expanding.
Oh, stupidity is a loathsome corral! Gnaw and tug at the posts, and you will slowly loosen them up. One day you’ll break the fence that held your forebears captive. Gnaw and tug, redouble your effort!
The Third Transformation: Elevate well-being!
What is the difference between indifference and interest, boredom and thrill, despair and bliss?
Pleasure! A few grains of this magic ingredient are worth more than a king’s treasure, and we have it aplenty here in Utopia. It pervades into everything we do and everything we experience. We sprinkle it in our tea.
The universe is cold. Fun is the fire that melts the blocks of hardship and creates a bubbling celebration of life.
It is the birth right of every creature, a right no less sacred for having been trampled on since the beginning of time.
There is a beauty and joy here that you cannot fathom. It feels so good that if the sensation were translated into tears of gratitude, rivers would overflow.
I reach in vain for words to convey to you what it all amounts to… It’s like a rain of the most wonderful feeling, where every raindrop has its own unique and indescribable meaning – or rather it has a scent or essence that evokes a whole world… And each such evoked world is subtler, richer, deeper, more multidimensional than the sum total of what you have experienced in your entire life.
I will not speak of the worst pain and misery that is to be got rid of; it is too horrible to dwell upon, and you are already cognizant of the urgency of palliation. My point is that in addition to the removal of the negative, there is also an upside imperative: to enable the full flourishing of enjoyments that are currently out of reach.
The roots of suffering are planted deep in your brain. Weeding them out and replacing them with nutritious crops of well-being will require advanced skills and instruments for the cultivation of your neuronal soil. But take heed, the problem is multiplex! All emotions have a natural function. Prune carefully lest you accidentally reduce the fertility of your plot.
Sustainable yields are possible. Yet fools will build fools’ paradises. I recommend you go easy on your paradise-engineering until you have the wisdom to do it right.
Oh, what a gruesome knot suffering is! Pull and tug on those loops, and you will gradually loosen them up. One day the coils will fall, and you will stretch out in delight. Pull and tug, and be patient in your effort!
May there come a time when rising suns are greeted with joy by all the living creatures they shine upon.”
Tags: Nick Bostrom
friends for nudity – 25 (SoHo)
Hello, im looking for people who like nudity for a nude meeting.
Email me and we can plan.
Before technological innovation freed everyone to create whatever they wanted and not get paid for it, TV networks and cable channels exchanged real money for the right to treat you badly. A dozen years before he interviewed the leader of the free world, Zach Galifianakis spent a few months being tortured by VH1 executives who seemed unaware they’d hired an absurdist. In this episode, fatty puts down his bong long enough to do his monologue at a retirement home.
Tags: Zach Galifianakis
From the January 13, 1886 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Paris–For a long time the authorities have been endeavoring to capture a gang of robbers who have been violating the graves in the cemetery at St. Guen sur Seine. The robbers eluded the guards until Monday, when two of them were arrested while stripping jewels from a corpse which they had stolen from a grave.”
From John Brownlee’s Fast Company article about the potential of shape-shifting furniture which can transform with just a wave of the hand:
“What the Tangible Media Lab is trying to prove with Transform is that there are more to just shapeshifting interfaces than just shaking hands over Skype. The future of interface design is that we’ll be able to interface with everything, and the line between what we call a computer and what we don’t will eventually go away entirely. Tomorrow’s computers will be furniture, clothing, and more, and the ways we interact with them–and they with us–will be richer than we can possibly imagine.
As for what’s next for the Tangible Media Group, Follmer tells us that they hope it’s no coincidence that they have been hosted in Milan this year by Lexus, an automobile maker. ‘Imagine a car with a shapeshifting dashboard!’ he says. No need to imagine for long, though: next time we hear from these guys, we suspect they’ll have already tried to build one for themselves.”
Tags: John Brownlee
Gene Shalit, who once hollered at me and broke his mustache in the process, was apparently busy “producing” articles for Look magazine before he became famous for saying words about movies. In an interesting 1966 piece, “boy…girl…computer,” he writes about punchcard dating invading Harvard and other campuses in those happier times before Mark Zuckerberg was born. (Canadians had experimented with computer dating a decade earlier.) The opening of Shalit’s New Journalism stylings for the long-defunct title:
Out of computers, faster than the eye can blink, fly letters stacked with names of college guys and girls–taped, scanned, checked and matched. Into the mails speed the compatible pairs, into P.O. boxes at schools across the land. Eager boys grab their phones… anxious coeds wait in dorms … a thousand burrrrrrrings jar the air . . . snow-job conversations start, and yeses are exchanged: A nationwild dating spree is on. Thousands of boys and girls who’ve never met plan weekends together, for now that punch-card dating’s here, can flings be far behind? And oh, it’s so right, baby. The Great God Computer has sent the word. Fate. Destiny. Go-go-go. Call it dating, call it mating, it flashed out of the minds of Jeff Tarr (left) and Vaughn Morrill, Harvard undergraduates who plotted Operation Match, the dig-it dating system that ties up college couples with magnetic tape. The match mystique is here: In just nine months, some 100,000 collegians paid more than $300,000 to Match (and to its MIT foe, Contact) for the names of at least five compatible dates. Does it work? Nikos Tsinikas, a Yale senior, spent a New Haven weekend with his computer-Matched date, Nancy Schreiber, an English major at Smith. Result, as long date’s journey brightened into night: a bull’s-eye for cupid’s computer.
“How come you’re still single? Don’t you know any nice computers?”
Perhaps no mother has yet said that to her daughter, but don’t bet it won’t happen, because Big Matchmaker is watching you. From Boston to Berkeley, computer dates are sweeping the campus, replacing old-fashioned boy-meets-girl devices; punch bowls are out, punch cards are in.
The boys who put data in dating are Jeff Tarr and Vaughn Morrill, Harvard undergraduates. At school last winter, they and several other juniors–“long on ingenuity but short on ingenues”–devised a computer process to match boys with girls of similar characteristics. They formed a corporation (Morrill soon sold out to Tarr), called the scheme Operation Match, flooded nearby schools with personality questionnaires to be filled out, and waited for the response.
They didn’t wait long: 8,000 answer sheets piled in, each accompanied by the three-dollar fee. Of every 100 applicants, 52 were girls. Clearly, the lads weren’t the only lonely collegians in New England. As dates were made, much of the loneliness vanished, for many found that their dates were indeed compatible. Through a complex system of two-way matching, the computer does not pair a boy with his ‘ideal’ girl unless he is also the girl’s ‘ideal’ boy. Students were so enthusiastic about this cross-check that they not only answered the 135 questions (Examples: Is extensive sexual activity [in] preparation for marriage, part of “growing up?” Do you believe in a God who answers prayer?), they even added comments and special instructions. Yale: “Please do not fold, bend or spindle my date.” Vassar: “Where, O where is Superman?” Dartmouth: “No dogs please! Have mercy!” Harvard: “Have you any buxom blondes who like poetry?” Mount Holyoke: “None of those dancing bears from Amherst.” Williams: “This is the greatest excuse for calling up a strange girl that I’ve ever heard.” Sarah Lawrence: “Help!”
Elated, Tarr rented a middling-capacity computer for $100 an hour (“I couldn’t swing the million to buy it.”), fed in the coded punch cards (“When guys said we sent them some hot numbers, they meant it literally.”) and sped the names of computer-picked dates to students all over New England. By summer, Operation Match was attracting applications from coast to coast, the staff had grown to a dozen, and Tarr had tied up with Data Network, a Wall St. firm that provided working capital and technical assistance.
In just nine months, some 90,000 applications had been received, $270,000 grossed and the road to romance strewn with guys, girls and gaffes.
A Vassarite who was sent the names of other girls demanded $20 for defamation of character. A Radcliffe senior, getting into the spirit of things, telephoned a girl on her list and said cheerfully, “I hear you’re my ideal date.” At Stanford, a coed was matched with her roommate’s fiance. Girls get brothers. Couples going steady apply, just for reassurance. When a Pembroke College freshman was paired with her former boyfriend, she began seeing him again. “Maybe the computer knows something that I don’t know,” she said.
Not everyone gets what he expects. For some, there is an embarrassment of witches, but others find agreeable surprises. A Northwestern University junior reported: “The girl you sent me didn’t have much upstairs, but what a staircase!”
Match, now graduated to an IBM 7094, guarantees five names to each applicant, but occasionally, a response sets cupid aquiver. Amy Fiedler, 18, blue-eyed, blonde Vassar sophomore, got 112 names. There wasn’t time to date them all before the semester ended, so many called her at her home in New York. “We had the horrors here for a couple of weeks,” her mother says laughingly. “One boy applied under two different names, and he showed up at our house twice!”
Tarr acknowledges that there are goofs, but he remains carefree. “You can’t get hung up about every complaint,” says Tarr. “You’ve got to look at it existentially.”
Jeff, 5′ 7″, likes girls, dates often. “If there’s some chick I’m dying to go out with,” he says, “I can drop her a note in my capacity as president of Match and say, Dear Joan, You have been selected by a highly personal process called Random Sampling to be interviewed extensively by myself. . . . and Tarr breaks into ingratiating laughter.
“Some romanticists complain that we’re too commercial,” he says. “But we’re not trying to take the love out of love; we’re just trying to make it more efficient. We supply everything but the spark.”
Tags: Gene Shalit
10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
- what should we be worried about?
- dick cavett writing about stephen colbert
- who punched charlie rose in the face?
- how is right wing extremism funded?
- can i use my ipad to stimulate my brain?
- will america become isolationist?
- does george saunders have a twitter account?
- michael crichton interviewed about computers
- poet nikki giovanni interviewing muhammad ali
- is it good that people die?
Today’s my birthday.
And if you think I’m going to spend it writing a topical gag for the end-of-the-week post, I have one thing to say to you.
- Old Print Articles: A young man has an unhealthy appetite (1871) + A bone gatherer works the streets of Old New York (1877) + Stories about rain-makers (1894-95).
- Featured Videos: Glenn Gould realized that new technologies would democratize creativity (1969) + Evelyn Waugh sits nervously for an interview (1960) + Al Goldstein interviews R. Crumb (1980s) + Two Hunter S. Thompson commercials (1970/1990s) + Hugh Hefner throws the dumbest party ever (1979) + Gary Numan creates a techn-dystopia (1978) + A jetpack tested at a U.K. race circuit + J.G. Ballard discussing the meaning of the automobile + David Letterman and Brother Theodore mix it up (1980s) + B.F. Skinner thought people were pigeons + The Xerox Alto was ground zero for modern personal computing (1979) + A “Making of…” featurette for Michael Crichton’s Westworld (1973) + A featurette for Norman Jewison’s cautionary tale about the free market run amok, Rollerball (1975) + Muhammad Ali ins interviewed by Sammy Davis Jr. (1970) and appears on Face the Nation (1976).
- Recently posted on NYC’s Craigslist: I should have done Mickey Rooney while I had the chance + Why does this roof smell like pee? + Or you could get them a gift certificate to Zappos.
- Tyler Cowen analyzes automation and unemployment.
- Sabermetrics is becoming popular in Cuba.
- Tommy John surgery now comes with stem cells.
- Before the mass suicide, the Heaven’s Gate cult designed web pages.
- Oliver Sacks argues that insects are not tiny automata.
- Legendary film producer Robert Evans did an Ask Me Anything.
- An explanation of why CEOs do well even when their companies don’t.
- Virtual advantages of the Internet are being leveraged offline.
- At the outset of the 1980s. coin-op computers reached the Bay Area.
- A pair of fascinating retro coin-operated machines.
- Mime Dan Richter recalls how he became Stanley Kubrick’s “Moon-Watcher.”
- Colonizing another solar system would require a mass of astronauts.
- Michael Wolff realizes what Stewart Brand knew 40 years ago: Print is dead.
- Like it or not, genetically modified foods are coming to your dish.
- Understanding ants could help humans master swarm robotics.
- Even during WWII, the U.S. military dreamed of drones.
- History should have universal standards, but don’t count on it happening.
- The complicated past and present tense of a former D.C. mental institution.
- A business being interconnected means that it’s vulnerable to attack.
- Synthetic yeast is a harbinger of ethical quandaries.
- Technology might or might not be an equalizer.
- A brief note from 1890 about a hungry man.
- A note from 1899 about a neglected graveyard.
- A brief note from 1929 about a wounded man.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.
In 1976, when he was already showing the early, subtle signs of Parkinson’s Syndrome, Muhammad Ali sat for a wide-ranging group interview on Face the Nation, in which he was mostly treated as a suspect by a panel of people who enjoyed privileges that were never available to the boxer. Fred Graham, the Arkansas-born correspondent who’s distinguished himself in other ways during his career, doesn’t come across as the most enlightened fellow here. Ali is even ridiculously criticized for a planned “bout” against Japanese wrestler Antonio Inoki.
Tags: Antonio Inoki, Fred Graham, Muhammad Ali
The Philosopher’s Beard has a post which calls for the internationalization of history, treating it in the same manner as science which has largely accepted universal rules. It would probably be no easier to pull off than world peace, even if it might make world peace more attainable. The opening:
“History too important to be left to national politicians as a social engineering project for their ideological or ethnic visions of national identity.
First, the principle. The idea of ‘national histories’ should be replaced with the unitary ideal of international history, that all official histories should be compatible with each other as literal facts must be. History is about matters of fact and their true explanation just as science is. Yet, while more or less the same science is taught in schools all over the world (with the exception of a few theocracies), national histories are very often self-serving opinion taught as fact, i.e. propaganda. The result is the dangerous cultivation by governments of the ignorance and resentment of their citizens.
Second, there should be a grievance mechanism that reflects the moral fact that the way history is taught is a matter not only for national governments – democratic or otherwise – but of human rights below and international relations above.”
While subbing for Mike Douglas in 1970, Sammy Davis Jr., going through one of his phases, discusses Black Separatism and such with dethroned but undefeated boxing champ Muhammad Ali during his Vietnam Era walkabout.
Tags: Muhammad Ali, Sammy Davis Jr.
When he’s not busy watching his aunts ants have sex, E.O. Wilson analyzes how they build structures with a communal “brain.” And he’s not the only one interested in this subject. Understanding the hive mentality of these ingenious insects could help humans master swarm robotics and unlock secrets to cellular “behavior.” From Emily Singer at the Guardian:
“Scientists have been studying the social behavior of ants and other insects for decades, searching for chemical cues and other signals that the insects use to coordinate behavior. Much of this work has focused on understanding how ants decide where to forage or build their homes. But new research combining observations of ant behavior with modern imaging techniques and computational modeling is beginning to reveal the secrets of ant construction. It turns out that ants perform these complex tasks by obeying a few simple rules.
‘People are finally starting to crack the problem of producing these structures, which are either made out of soil or the ants themselves,’ said Stephen Pratt, a biologist at Arizona State University. The organization of insect societies is a marquee example of a complex decentralized system that arises from the interactions of many individuals, he said.
Cracking these problems could lead to improvements in swarm robotics, large numbers of simple robots working together, as well as self-healing materials and other systems capable of organizing and fixing themselves. More broadly, identifying the rules that ants obey could help scientists understand how biologically complex systems emerge — for example, how groups of cells give rise to organs.”
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Ant-sploitation from 1977:
Tags: Emily Singer
Global corporations that solve problems in an innovative and technocratic manner, but, oh, there’s a catch or two in return for the miracles and wonders. A featurette for Norman Jewison’s 1975 cautionary tale about the free market run amok, Rollerball.
Tags: Norman Jewison