Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
Dr. Barbie.
Dr. Ken.
Skipper.
Skipper has lupus just like Flannery O’Connor. Thankfully, she enrolled in Obamacare before the deadline, or she’d likely have died because Dr. Barbie and Dr. Ken are too busy with their courtship. They’re beautiful and irresponsible, with a dubious commitment to medicine. Enjoy your cocktails, assholes. I hope you don’t pass, Skipper.
In 1988, as Gabriel Garcia Marquez was about to publish Love in the Time of Cholera, he sat for an interview with Marlise Simons of the New York Times. An excerpt:
Question:
You have said that your stories often come from a single image that strikes you.
Gabriel Garcia Marquez:
Yes. In fact, I’m so fascinated by how to detect the birth of a story that I have a workshop at the cinema foundation called ‘How to Tell a Story.’ I bring together 10 students from different Latin American countries and we sit at a round table without interruption for four hours a day for six weeks and try to write a story from scratch. We start by going round and round. At first there are only differences. . . . The Venezuelan wants one thing, the Argentine another. Then suddenly an idea appears that grabs everyone and the story can be developed. We’ve done three so far. But, you know, we still don’t know how the idea is born. It always catches us by surprise.
In my case, it always begins with an image, not an idea or a concept. With Love in the Time of Cholera, the image was of two old people dancing on the deck of a boat, dancing a bolero. Once you have the image, then what happens? The image grows in my head until the whole story takes shape as it might in real life. The problem is that life isn’t the same as literature, so then I have to ask myself the big question: How do I adapt this, what is the most appropriate structure for this book? I have always aspired to finding the perfect structure. One perfect structure in literature is that of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex. Another is a short story, ‘Monkey’s Paw’ by an English writer, William Jacobs.
When I have the story and the structure completely worked out, I can start – but only on condition that I find the right name for each character. If I don’t have the name that exactly suits the character, it doesn’t come alive. I don’t see it.
Once I sit down to write, usually I no longer have any hesitations. I may take a few notes, a word or a phrase or something to help me the following morning, but I never work with a lot of notes. That’s what I learned when I was young. I know writers who have books full of notes and they wind up thinking about their notes and never write their books.
Question:
You’ve always said you still feel as much a journalist as a writer of fiction. Some writers think that in journalism the pleasure of discovery comes in the research, while in fiction the pleasure of discovery comes in the writing. Would you agree?
Gabriel Garcia Marquez:
Certainly there are pleasures in both. To begin with, I consider journalism to be a literary genre. Intellectuals would not agree, but I believe it is. Without being fiction, it is a form, an instrument, for expressing reality.
The timing may be different but the experience is the same in literature and journalism. In fiction, if you feel you get a scoop, a scoop about life that fits into your writing, it’s the same emotion as a journalist when he gets to the heart of a story. Those moments occur when you least expect them and they bring extraordinary happiness. Just as a journalist knows when he’s got the story, a writer has a similar revelation. Of course, he still has to illustrate and enrich it, but he knows he’s got it. It’s almost an instinct. The journalist knows if he has news or not. The writer knows if it’s literature or not, if it’s poetry or not. After that, the writing is very much the same. Both use many of the same techniques. But your journalism is not exactly orthodox. Well, mine isn’t informative, so I can follow my own preferences and look for the same veins I look for in literature. But my misfortune is that people don’t believe my journalism. They think I make it all up. But I promise you, I invent nothing either in journalism or fiction. In fiction, you manipulate reality because that’s what fiction is for. In journalism, I can pick the subjects that suit my character because I no longer have the demands of a job.
Question:
Do you remember any of your journalistic pieces with special affection?
Gabriel Garcia Marquez:
There was one little one called ‘The Cemetery of Lost Letters,’ from the time I was working at El Espectador. I was sitting on a tram in Bogota. And I saw a sign that said: ‘House of Lost Letters.’ I rang the bell. They told me that all the letters that could not be delivered – with wrong addresses, whatever – were sent to that house. There was an old man in it who dedicated his life entirely to finding their destination. Sometimes it took him days. If it couldn’t be found, the letter was burned but never opened. There was one addressed ‘To the woman who goes to the Church de Las Armas every Wednesday at 5 P.M.’ So the old man went there and found seven women and questioned each of them. When he had picked the right one, he needed a court order to open the letter to be sure. And he was right. I’ll never forget that story. Journalism and literature were almost joined. I have never been able to completely separate them.”
An Independent article by Jack Pitts covers Elon Musk’s recent pronouncements about the near-term design of driverless cars, which are both bold and somewhat sobering, though I bet only the bold part gets a lot of press. An excerpt:
“Speaking to the Financial Times Musk confirmed his company’s aspiration to build the first commercial self-drive vehicles – aiming to implement them within the Model S, Tesla’s landmark electric car.
Previously Musk has tweeted: ‘Intense effort underway at Tesla to develop a practical autopilot system for Model S’ and ‘Engineers interested in working on autonomous driving, pls email autopilot@teslamotors.com. Team will report directly to me.’
During the interview Musk referred to Tesla’s self-drive technology as ‘an autopilot’ that could be switched on an off like an aeroplane’s guidance systems. A fully-autonomous car that is entirely under computer control, he says, would be too dangerous with current technology.
Weary drivers were recently tantalised by photos of commuters in futuristic cars watching TV, chatting and looking anywhere but the road.
However, Musk himself admits that this may be a fantasy: ‘We should be able to do 90 per cent of miles driven within three years,’ adding that fully autonomous cars may be ‘a bridge too far’ for the near future.”
Tags: Elon Musk, Jack Pitts
See also:
I’m terrible at recognizing faces but really good at reading them, at interpreting the microexpressions that reveal inner feelings. Dr. Paul Ekman, the inspiration for the TV show Lie to Me, pioneered the study of facial expressions during his psychological career. From a 2003 New York Times interview with him conducted by Judy Foreman:
Question:
More than 100 years ago, Charles Darwin proposed that human facial expressions are universal. Anthropologists like Margaret Mead thought the opposite. What do you think?
Dr. Paul Ekman:
Initially, back in 1965, I thought Margaret Mead was probably right. But I decided to get the evidence to settle the argument. I showed pictures of facial expressions to people in the U.S., Japan, Argentina, Chile and Brazil and found that they judged the expressions in the same way.
But this was not conclusive because all these people could have learned the meaning of expressions by watching Charlie Chaplin and John Wayne. I needed visually isolated people unexposed to the modern world and the media.
I found them in the highlands of Papua New Guinea. They not only judged the expressions in the same way, but their posed expressions, which I recorded with a movie camera, were readily understandable to people in the West.
Question:
One of your most fascinating findings is that if a person merely arranges his face into a certain expression, he will actually feel the corresponding emotion. In other words, emotions work from the outside in as well as the inside out. Is happiness really as simple as putting on a happy face?
Dr. Paul Ekman:
In a very limited way, yes. The trick with happiness is that while everybody can smile, most people can’t move one crucial muscle around the eyes that must be moved to generate the physiology of happiness. With anger or disgust, though, everybody can make the right facial movements and turn on the physical sensations of those emotions.
Question:
If I received Botox injections all over my face and could not make normal expressions, would my emotions be similarly curtailed?
Dr. Paul Ekman:
Probably not. I did a study with Robert Levenson, professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, on people who had been born with facial paralysis. We found no impairment in their ability to recognize or experience emotions. There is a problem with Botox, though. Limiting facial animation may make people less appealing.•
Tags: Charles Darwin, Judy Foreman, Margaret Mead, Paul Ekman, Robert Levenson
“Yes, you will be able to rub vagina in seconds.”
I will give you the Rub Vagina Code. Yes, you will be able to rub vagina in seconds.
Especially while talking to her.
From the July 10, 1902 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Newport, R.I.–Friends of Harry Lehr deny that he had entertained a monkey at dinner and declare that the story was a fabrication from beginning to end. He and they say that no monkey dressed in evening clothes or as nature has made him ever has sat among his guests.
Mrs. Lehr especially is indignant at the newspapers for publishing such a story and her friends say that they would not be surprised if she should determine to take legal action. It is known that the Lehrs feel keenly the editorial comments made upon the incident.”
Very happy to see that the bizarre attack on economist Tyler Cowen at George Mason didn’t result in any serious injury. Strange world.
I think any nation as mobile and armed as this one (though thankfully there was no gun involved in this case) desperately needs universal healthcare with a strong mental-wellness component. Are there fewer incidences of gun violence in a country which has abundant firearms and universal coverage (e.g., Canada) than in the U.S., which is only now belatedly trying to guarantee care for all its citizens, because insured people can see a doctor when they need to? There are probably lots of cultural reasons for the disparity, but it seems like focus in this area could be beneficial.
From a really interesting 2009 interview Cowen conducted with philosopher Peter Singer, a dialogue about using immigration as a poverty-fighting tool:
“Tyler Cowen:
For instance, in my view, what is by far the best anti-poverty program, the only one that’s really been shown to work, and that’s what’s called ‘immigration.’ I don’t even see the word ‘immigration’ in your book’s index. So why don’t we spend a lot more resources allowing immigration, supporting immigration, lobbying for immigration? This raises people’s incomes very dramatically, it’s sustainable, for the most part it’s also good for us. Why not make that the centerpiece of an anti-poverty platform?
Peter Singer:
That’s an interesting point, Tyler. I suppose, one question I’d like to ask is: is it sustainable? Isn’t it the case that if we take, as immigrants, the people who are the most enterprising, perhaps, of the poor countries that we’re still going to leave those countries in poverty, and their populations may continue to rise, and eventually, even if we keep taking immigrants, we will reach a capacity where we’re starting to strain our own country?
Tyler Cowen:
There’s two separate issues: one is ‘brain drain’ from the third world. I think here’s a lot of research by [Michael Clemens], showing that it’s not a problem, that third world countries that have even somewhat functional institutions tend to benefit by sending people to other countries. India’s a good example: a lot of Indians return to India and start businesses, or they send money back home. Mexico is another example. Maybe North Korea is somewhat different, but for the most part immigration seems to benefit both countries.
I don’t think we could have open borders; I don’t think we could have unlimited immigration, but we’re both sitting here in the United States and it hardly seems to me that we’re at the breaking point. Immigrants would benefit much more: their wages would rise by a factor of twenty or more, and there would be perhaps some costs to us, but in a cost-benefit sense it seems far, far more effective than sending them money. Do you agree?
Peter Singer:
I must admit that I haven’t thought a lot about immigration as a way of dealing with world poverty. Obviously, from what you’re saying, I should be thinking more about it, but I can’t really say whether I agree until I have thought more about it.”
Tags: Peter Singer, Tyler Cowen
Because many are more driven by ideology than pragmatism, legislation like the Affordable Care Act isn’t only measured by accomplishment but also by party affiliation. Close to seven million previously uninsured Americans will have health insurance at this year’s deadline (and that’s not counting those added to Medicaid). Sick people who were denied insurance or had their policies cancelled when they became ill are now protected. The number of uninsured has dropped sharply and spiralling healthcare costs have slowed for the first time in memory. In future years, as we get closer to the goal of 30 million newly insured, that number will likely be attended by a lot of job creation. Universal coverage may be the low-hanging fruit that can boost employment. But the GOP will run against Obamacare in the 2014 and 2016 elections, and it will resonate with some.
An excerpt from Terry Gross’ 2009 interview with the late singer-songwriter Vic Chestnutt, whose was left largely paralyzed in a car accident while a teenager, and lived in debt his whole adult life because he wasn’t able to get health insurance:
“Terry Gross:
So, what are your thoughts now as you watch the health care legislation controversy play out?
Vic Chestnutt:
Wow. I have been amazed and confused by the health care debate. We need health care reform. There is no doubt about it, we really need health care reform in this country. Because it’s absurd that somebody like me has to pay so much, it’s just too expensive in this country. It’s just ridiculously expensive. That they can take my house away for a kidney stone operation is -that’s absurd.
Terry Gross:
Is that what you’re facing the possibility of now?
Vic Chestnutt:
Yeah. I mean, it could – I’m not sure exactly. I mean, I don’t have cash money to pay these people. I tried to pay them. I tried to make payments and then they finally ended up saying, no, you have to pay us in full now. And so, you know, I’m not sure what exactly my options are. I just – I really – you know, my feeling is that I think they’ve been paid, they’ve already been paid $100,000 from my insurance company. That seems like plenty. I mean, this would pay for like five or six of these operations in any other country in the world. You know, it affects – I mean, right now I need another surgery and I’ve been putting it off for a year because I can’t afford it. And that’s absurd, I think.
I mean, I could actually lose a kidney. And, I mean, I could die only because I cannot afford to go in there again. I don’t want to die, especially just because of I don’t have enough money to go in the hospital. But that’s the reality of it. You know, I have a preexisting condition, my quadriplegia, and I can’t get health insurance.
Terry Gross:
Is it true you can’t get good health insurance?
Vic Chestnutt:
I can’t get – I’m uninsurable.•
Tags: Barack Obama, Terry Gross, Vic Chestnutt
A clip from Walter Cronkite’s sit-down with Anwar Sadat in the shadows of the pyramids, in 1977, four years before the Egyptian president was assassinated, in which Sadat denies slave labor was used to build the incredible tombs.
In 2006, Cronkite called it the most important interview he ever did, largely because Sadat, though mostly an uninteresting speaker, announced out of the blue that he would go to Israel, an offer the anchor initially misunderstood. Cronkite ultimately helped broker the trip.
Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, who focuses a great deal of his work on irrationality and lying, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit. A few exchanges follow.
________________________
Question:
What has been your favorite social experiment to try on a college campus and which experiment has changed your opinion on a certain topic the most?
Dan Ariely:
Probably the vaccination experiment — they took a group of students and gave half of them information about the importance of vaccination, but also gave the other half directions to the health center and asked them to indicate a time in their calendars that they would show up. Amazingly, the information did very little but the map and schedule was very effective at getting people to show up and get vaccinated. For me, this is an important building block — providing people with information is not very useful, and we need to change the environment to facilitate better decision-making.
________________________
Question:
Do you believe people are selfish rather than altruistic? (not sure how to ask this as not to suggest an answer). Is it meaningful to ask this question and to what extent do you believe this has to do with the threat of punishment rather than trying to act in accordance with moral principle?
Dan Ariely:
I believe that people are deeply altruistic, and selfishness comes later. One piece of evidence for this is that we have some data showing that when people are drunk, they react more extremely to injustice — even at a cost to themselves.
________________________
Question:
Not to name any public personalities on the spot, but there is a slew of self-help books/speakers/retreats – in other words, a multi-billion dollar industry out there that operates on making people believe that they can profoundly change themselves. In my own case, personal shortcomings like procrastination for example, how likely is it that someone in her 50s can still successfully tackle these types of personal problems? In other words, is the self-help industry a hoax? Is is irrational to expect change on a deep level?
Dan Ariely:
There is clearly a demand for self-help, and it is a very interesting industry. To look into this, I went to a 3-day event with Tony Robbins and one with the Landmark Forum. In each, there was some grain of scientific evidence but they were building giant castles from these grains of sand. I also saw lots of pain in these meetings, and people who were dealing with very complex problems. And it upsets me that these organizations are selling them the “answers” at such a high cost.
________________________
Question:
What would happen if the whole world behaved rationally? What would have existed that we don’t have today?
Dan Ariely:
I would hate to live in this world. A world without irrationality would have no help, altruism, caring, love. Count me out.
________________________
Question:
What is the most common irrational human act that you come across?
Dan Ariely:
Having kids.•
Tags: Dan Ariely
Ten years after Rev. Sun Myung Moon presided over a 1982 mass wedding in Madison Square Garden, New York Times reporter Melinda Henneberger caught up with some of the 4,000 strangers who were consciously coupled. The article’s opening:
“When Jonathan and Debby Gullery were married 10 years ago, in a mass wedding of 2,075 couples at Madison Square Garden, they were widely viewed as bit players in a bizarre show produced by the Rev. Sun Myung Moon. Strangers screamed at them as they sold flowers on the street, and Mrs. Gullery’s father said he thought seriously about having her kidnapped and brought home.
But over the last decade, the Gullerys say, both they and their church have grown up and settled down. On a recent evening, amid the chaos of bedtime for their three young children, they took turns coaxing the 4-year-old back to her room while Mrs. Gullery’s father, who was visiting from Vermont, took refuge in the novel he was reading in the living room of their suburban home.
Mr. Gullery now owns his own graphic arts business, and the couple’s oldest child, who is 7, attends the local public school. Their youngest is 2. To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they took the children to Burger King.
‘Things change in 10 years,’ Mrs. Gullery said. ‘Our church has changed, we’ve changed, our family has changed. With our neighbors, we didn’t put a sign out and say, ‘Here we are, we’re the neighborhood Moonies,’ but they all have kids and after they got to know us, it was O.K. The last couple of years have been fairly low key.’
Their lives are nonetheless quite different from their neighbors’. They remain completely dedicated to the Unification Church, rising early each morning for family prayer, and offering up all their daily tasks to the service of God and Mr. Moon, who is for them the second Messiah.”
Tags: Debby Gullery, Jonathan Gullery, Melinda Henneberger, Sun Myung Moon
10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
When sad bigot Donald Rumsfeld said this week that a “trained ape” could do a better job at foreign policy than President Obama, he may have forgotten who his chief adviser was when he invaded Iraq for no reason, costing us the lives of 4,500 troops, a trillion dollars and killing perhaps a 100,000 Iraqis.
They have weapons of mass destruction.
Data, no matter how big or small, is only as good as those people–or algorithms–deciphering it. Even when Big Data can give us an answer to a problem, it doesn’t necessarily give us the root of the problem. When it’s read well, it’s a good complement to other methods of research; when read poorly, it can be used to create faulty policy: From Tim Harford’s latest Financial Times piece:
“Cheerleaders for big data have made four exciting claims, each one reflected in the success of Google Flu Trends: that data analysis produces uncannily accurate results; that every single data point can be captured, making old statistical sampling techniques obsolete; that it is passé to fret about what causes what, because statistical correlation tells us what we need to know; and that scientific or statistical models aren’t needed because, to quote ‘The End of Theory,’ a provocative essay published in Wired in 2008, ‘with enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.’
Unfortunately, these four articles of faith are at best optimistic oversimplifications. At worst, according to David Spiegelhalter, Winton Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at Cambridge university, they can be ‘complete bollocks. Absolute nonsense.’
Found data underpin the new internet economy as companies such as Google, Facebook and Amazon seek new ways to understand our lives through our data exhaust. Since Edward Snowden’s leaks about the scale and scope of US electronic surveillance it has become apparent that security services are just as fascinated with what they might learn from our data exhaust, too.
Consultants urge the data-naive to wise up to the potential of big data. A recent report from the McKinsey Global Institute reckoned that the US healthcare system could save $300bn a year – $1,000 per American – through better integration and analysis of the data produced by everything from clinical trials to health insurance transactions to smart running shoes.
But while big data promise much to scientists, entrepreneurs and governments, they are doomed to disappoint us if we ignore some very familiar statistical lessons.”
Tags: David Spiegelhalter, Tim Harford
Long before Louis C.K. thought it was amazing that people could complain about airplanes while they’re “sitting in a chair in the sky,” Brian Eno focused on the same in his 1978 sound installation, Ambient 1: Music for Airports.
The Internet of Things makes too much sense to not happen, but there have to be some sort of universal operating standards before machines can communicate coherently with each other and us, before our health and homes can be quantified and the connectivity of computers can be duplicated in all objects. It will result in challenges (e.g., everything will be a target of hackers) but also real benefits. From a post by Quentin Hardy at the New York Times’ “Bits” blog:
“Attention: Internet of Things. For better or worse, big boys are in the room.
A consortium of industrial giants, including AT&T, Cisco, General Electric, IBM and Intel said on Thursday that they would cooperate to create engineering standards to connect objects, sensors and large computing systems in some of the world’s largest industrial assets, like oil refineries, factories or harbors. The White House and other United States governmental entities were also involved in the creation of the group, which is expected to enroll other large American and foreign businesses.
‘I don’t think anything this big has been tried before’ in terms of sweeping industrial cooperation, said William Ruh, vice president of G.E.’s global software center. ‘This is how we will make machines, people and data work together.’
There are connections among all sorts of industrial assets, like sensors on turbines or soda machines that tell suppliers when they are running low on cola.
The means by which this ‘Internet of Things’ uses power and sends data around has been somewhat haphazard.
The group, called the Industrial Internet Consortium, hopes to establish common ways that machines share information and move data.”
Tags: Quentin Hardy, William Ruh
As mentioned in the post about Steven Pinker and the Availability Heuristic, we aren’t always great at gauging what’s truly bad for us. When a new technology experiences glitches that older ones also endure, sometimes too bright a light is shined on just the avant garde. The opening of Elon Musk’s Medium essay about Tesla introducing further fireproofing protections:
“In 2013, two extremely unusual Model S collisions resulted in underbody damage that led to car fires. These incidents, unfortunately, received more national headlines than the other 200,000 gasoline car fires that happened last year in North America alone. In both cases, the occupants walked away unharmed, thanks to the car’s safety features. The onboard computer warned the occupants to exit the vehicles, which they did well before any fire was noticeable. However, even if the occupants had remained in the vehicle and the fire department had not arrived, they would still have been safely protected by the steel and ceramic firewall between the battery pack and the passenger compartment.
It is important to note that there have been no fire injuries (or serious, permanent injuries of any kind) in a Tesla at all. The odds of fire in a Model S, at roughly 1 in 8,000 vehicles, are five times lower than those of an average gasoline car and, when a fire does occur, the actual combustion potential is comparatively small. However, to improve things further, we provided an over-the-air software update a few months ago to increase the default ground clearance of the Model S at highway speeds, substantially reducing the odds of a severe underbody impact.
Nonetheless, we felt it was important to bring this risk down to virtually zero to give Model S owners complete peace of mind. Starting with vehicle bodies manufactured as of March 6, all cars have been outfitted with a triple underbody shield. Tesla service will also retrofit the shields, free of charge, to existing cars upon request or as part of a normally scheduled service.”
Tags: Elon Musk
Historically, people have been accidentally buried alive because defining death isn’t as easy as it might seem. Those lines will be further blurred with new medical procedures. From Helen Thomson at New Scientist:
“NEITHER dead or alive, knife-wound or gunshot victims will be cooled down and placed in suspended animation later this month, as a groundbreaking emergency technique is tested out for the first time.
Surgeons are now on call at the UPMC Presbyterian Hospital in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to perform the operation, which will buy doctors time to fix injuries that would otherwise be lethal.
‘We are suspending life, but we don’t like to call it suspended animation because it sounds like science fiction,’ says Samuel Tisherman, a surgeon at the hospital, who is leading the trial. ‘So we call it emergency preservation and resuscitation.’
The technique involves replacing all of a patient’s blood with a cold saline solution, which rapidly cools the body and stops almost all cellular activity. ‘If a patient comes to us two hours after dying you can’t bring them back to life. But if they’re dying and you suspend them, you have a chance to bring them back after their structural problems have been fixed,’ says surgeon Peter Rhee at the University of Arizona in Tucson, who helped develop the technique.”
Tags: Helen Thomson, Samuel Tisherman
“Recent ghosts appear every 3 to 5 minutes.”
The Ghost Meter Pro detects electromagnetic fields. It uses sophisticated detection of low frequency and radio frequency fields researchers associate with paranormal activity. The energy we detect with the human eye is very weak. All New Exclusive Ghost Dialog Modes. Mode 1: Recent Ghosts appear every 3 to 5 minutes. Mode 2: Ancient Ghosts appear every 7 to 15 minutes. Mode 3: EMF Gauss Meter mode. Mode 4: Dialog Mode.
The ghost can answer 4 to 9 questions in a yes or no format, for example: Are you a good ghost? Are you a male? Are you a female? The needle will move. Ask it to light up the meter for once for yes and twice for no. Its endless what you can ask. I’m in a paranormal group and we have these and use them in our investigations, they are simple and fun. This meter is probably one of the least expensive gadgets we use but most effective. I have a few available if your interested. If you have any questions please email me asap thank you.
“I’m in a paranormal group.”
Death is death, but many of us have way more fear of a horrible demise that’s unlikely than a comparatively “benign” one which has a greater probability of occurring, even if the physical pain involved is equal. It’s an utter lack of control that seems to haunt us most.
U.S. commercial airlines almost never crash, but MH-370 floating mysteriously into oblivion has awakened fears of death by air when we know logically that a fatal car accident is much more likely. These same anxieties will likely play a role in determining how quickly we adopt driverless autos, which will save so many lives but will ultimately fail on occasion and kill someone who had no authority over the incident. That will seem scarier to some.
These fears don’t only govern our own decisions but can influence the creation of policy as well–policy that can end up costing more lives than it saves. An excerpt from Steven Pinker’s comments which appear in an Edge feature about Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman:
“As many Edge readers know, my recent work has involved presenting copious data indicating that rates of violence have fallen over the years, decades, and centuries, including the number of annual deaths in war, terrorism, and homicide. Most people find this claim incredible on the face of it. Why the discrepancy between data and belief? The answer comes right out of Danny’s work with Amos Tversky on the Availability Heuristic. People estimate the probability of an event by the ease of recovering vivid examples from memory. As I explained, ‘Scenes of carnage are more likely to be beamed into our homes and burned into our memories than footage of people dying of old age. No matter how small the percentage of violent deaths may be, in absolute numbers there will always be enough of them to fill the evening news, so people’s impressions of violence will be disconnected from the actual proportions.’
The availability heuristic also explains a paradox in people’s perception of the risks of terrorism. The world was turned upside-down in response to the terrorist attacks on 9/11. But putting aside the entirely hypothetical scenario of nuclear terrorism, even the worst terrorist attacks kill a trifling number of people compared to other causes of violent death such as war, genocide, and homicide, to say nothing of other risks of death. Terrorists know this, and draw disproportionate attention to their grievances by killing a relatively small number of innocent people in the most attention-getting ways they can think of.
Even the perceived probability of nuclear terrorism is almost certainly exaggerated by the imaginability of the scenario (predicted at various times to be near-certain by 1990, 2000, 2005, and 2010, and notoriously justifying the 2003 invasion of Iraq). I did an Internet survey which showed that people judge it more probable that ‘a nuclear bomb would be set off in the United States or Israel by a terrorist group that obtained it from Iran’ than that ‘a nuclear bomb would be set off'” It’s an excellent example of Kahneman and Tversky’s Conjunction Fallacy…”
Tags: Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Steven Pinker
John Arbuckle’s dream stayed afloat far longer than many expected. The coffee magnate and humanitarian decided, at the dawn of the twentieth century, to combat the lack of affordable lodgings in Manhattan by converting ships into floating apartment buildings for single, working-class folks. For roughly three dollars a week, hundreds of renters would get room and board and motion sickness. It wasn’t meant to make money (and did not since it never became as popular as the proprietor had hoped) but to be a gift to struggling people from a kindly man who was known as both a capitalist and a trust buster.
There were problems from the start, and the New York Times even sank the plan prematurely, but the company continued to offer “water beds” for a pittance until 1915, withdrawing its gangplank for good soon after Arbuckle’s death. Just three dozen women were residents at that point.
From an article in the July 17, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle about the maiden voyage:
“John Arbuckle will open his floating hotels, now organized under the name of the Deep Sea Hotel Company, for business to-morrow evening. This evening he will take as guests a number of his friends and a party of newspaper men on the inaugural trip of the Jacob A. Stamler. The tugboat John Herlin will leave the foot of Atlantic Avenue at 6 o’clock with the guests and take them over to the ship, which is anchored off the Statue of Liberty. The Stamler was towed over there this morning, in order to be in readiness to sail this evening.
The yachts Giana and Hermit are anchored off Thirty-ninth Street, South Brooklyn, and will be placed in commission when their services are called for.
The final preparations on the vessels are only just completed. Handsome carpets have been laid down in the saloons, smoking room and on the berth deck. Every stateroom is handsomely carpeted and fitted up. The lower deck of the Stamler is mainly occupied by bath and toilet rooms of the latest design. The awning deck has been fitted up with seats, which can be converted into comfortable beds. The main and women’s saloons are fitted with Pullman berths, and the seats can also be used as berths. These saloons are fitted with handsomely upholstered chairs, hard wood tables and lounging chairs. The smoking room is equally well equipped. The ship is remarkably cool below decks, the air being kept in constant circulation by a large fan driven by steam. The entire ship s brilliantly lighted up with electric lights furnished by a dynamo in the engine room. The engine is utilized for hoisting in the anchor, getting coal and supplies on board and it does much of handling of the sails as well.
The kitchen is splendidly equipped. There is an immense range of the latest design, a large broiler and several soup and vegetable kettles. A ten ton ice refrigerator occupies one section and a dumb waiter connects the culinary department with the pantry on the saloon deck. What is said of the Stamler applies equally, but in a smaller degree to the schooner yachts Hermit and Gitana.
Every precaution will be taken to prevent the semblance of rowdyism, as Mr. Arbuckle said to an Eagle reporter today: ‘I will have a couple of special policemen, big and strong enough to shake the toe nails of any one who attempts to cause annoyance on board, and pitch him in the blackhole of the John Herlin afterward. I sincerely hope there will be no need to call on their service, but nothing wrong will be tolerated for an instant.’
The floating hotels will open for business to-morrow evening.”
Tags: John Arbuckle
“All Watched Over
by Machines of Loving Grace”
I’d like to think (and
the sooner the better!)
of a cybernetic meadow
where mammals and computers
live together in mutually
programming harmony
like pure water
touching clear sky.
I like to think
(right now, please!)
of a cybernetic forest
filled with pines and electronics
where deer stroll peacefully
past computers
as if they were flowers
with spinning blossoms.
I like to think
(it has to be!)
of a cybernetic ecology
where we are free of our labors
and joined back to nature,
returned to our mammal brothers and sisters,
and all watched over
by machines of loving grace.
In “Why Thieves Steal Soap,” Alex Mayyasi of Priceonomics explains the strategy of stores that keep cheaper items under lock and key while not protecting more expensive goods with the same ardor. An excerpt:
“Products like cigarettes and soap perform some of the major functions of money very well. Since there is a consistent demand and market for them, even when they’re not on store shelves, they retain their value. (Unlike an iPod, they never become obsolete.) Since they have standard sizes, they can also be used as a unit of account. You can pay for something with one, five, or ten packs of cigarettes depending on its value. In areas where fences or other buyers are always willing to purchase stolen products like soap, it’s just as good as money.
For thieves, the ubiquity of a product and the presence of a large illicit market for it is more important than its actual retail value. Small time burglars can’t keep stolen goods in warehouses, waiting for a buyer and marketing products to people willing to pay a premium for a unique item. It may seem surprising that Walgreen keeps some of its cheapest items locked up, until you realize that thieves care more about an item’s ubiquity in illicit markets more than its retail price.”
Tags: Alex Mayyasi
In the Middle Ages in Northern Europe, pubescents and adolescents didn’t enjoy any wonder years. Regardless of class, they were sent from their homes to toil for strangers. From William Kremer at BBC News:
“Around the year 1500, an assistant to the Venetian ambassador to England was struck by the strange attitude to parenting that he had encountered on his travels.
He wrote to his masters in Venice that the English kept their children at home ’till the age of seven or nine at the utmost’ but then ‘put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people, binding them generally for another seven or nine years.’ The unfortunate children were sent away regardless of their class, ‘for everyone, however rich he may be, sends away his children into the houses of others, whilst he, in return, receives those of strangers into his own.’
It was for the children’s own good, he was told – but he suspected the English preferred having other people’s children in the household because they could feed them less and work them harder.
His remarks shine a light on a system of child-rearing that operated across northern Europe in the medieval and early modern period.”
Tags: William Kremer