John Adams wasn’t thinking specifically of technology when he said the following, but he might as well have been: “I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, and naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” 

Eventually, and not too far off in the future, Amazon won’t need any human pickers to pull items from their inventory shelves, 3-D printers will allow ideas to spring fully grown from our heads and no one will have much use for a human taxi driver. It will all be AI. That’s great, though it does pose some new problems. Chiefly, how do we reconcile what’s largely a free-market economy with one that’s “post-jobs” to a certain degree, at least if we’re talking about the type of traditional work that our society is built on? We may become wealthier as a people, but how does that wealth reach the people? That could make for a messy transition, and to some extent it already has. Another question is what do we do with ourselves if toil is a thing of the past, and other challenges we thought were our own are assumed by silicon?

From Ray Kurzweil’s site, an exchange between a reader and the futurist about molecular assemblers, which may take building out of our hands, freeing them perhaps for painting and statuary but more likely for some yet unknown tasks:

Question:

Suppose molecular assemblers are indeed proven to be feasible on a large scale and we are given an infinite abundance to produce as much as we want — limited only by the amount of matter in our vicinity — with minimal effort.

If this scenario comes to fruition, how will humans be able to cope with the lack of challenges in their lives? It seems like with assemblers there will be very little incentive to do anything.

Since everything could be obtained effortlessly through assemblers, there appears to be little purpose to hold a job, since all possessions could be obtained for free.

Ray Kurzweil:

Future molecular assemblers will make physical things, but not create new knowledge.

We are doubling knowledge about every year and that will remain a challenge requiring increasing levels of intelligence.”

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In a 1996 Playboy interview, longtime Angeleno Ray Bradbury provided his predictably sci-fi vision for the future of urban life, in the wake of the Rodney King trial and the subsequent riots. Seemingly unaware that crime had begun to decrease precipitously in American cities (for reasons still impossible to pin down), he shared an awful solution for supposedly unmanageable metropolises. An excerpt:

Playboy:

If Los Angeles is an indicator for the nation, what is the future of other big cities?

Ray Bradbury:

Along with man’s return to the moon, my biggest hope is that L.A. will show the way for all of our cities to rebuild, because they’ve gone to hell and the crime rate has soared. When we can repopulate them, the crime rate will plunge.

Playboy:

What will help?

Ray Bradbury

We need enlightened corporations to do it; they’re the only ones who can. All the great malls have been built by corporate enterprises. We have to rebuild cities with the same conceptual flair that the great malls have. We can turn any bad section of town into a vibrant new community.

Playboy

How do you convince corporate leaders and bureaucrats that you have the right approach?

Ray Bradbury: 

They listen because they know my track record. The center of downtown San Diego was nonexistent until a concept of mine, the Horton Plaza, was built right in the middle of bleakest skid row. Civilization returned to San Diego upon its completion. It became the center of a thriving community. And the Glendale Galleria, based on my concept, changed downtown Glendale when it was built nearly 25 years ago. So if I live another ten years – please, God! – I’ll be around to witness a lot of this in Los Angeles and inspire the same thing in big cities throughout the country.•

The Fuller Brush Man, modest an individual though he was, disappeared for the same reason that grandiose World Fairs no longer resonated: The developed world became mobile, and it’s wasn’t necessary for anyone or anything to come to our doors anymore, even to our town. Nobody was home.

Now mobility itself isn’t even very necessary. We’re home, but it all reaches us through tubes and wires, and soon drones. So places we use to drive to, like this one and this one, keep disappearing. We don’t need here or there today because we’re everywhere and nowhere. A segment from Daniel H. Pink’s To Sell Is Human about the birth of the Fuller Brush company, posted on the very fun Delancey Place blog:

“It all began in 1903, when an eighteen-year-old Nova Scotia farm boy named Alfred Fuller arrived in Boston to begin his career. He was, by his own admission, ‘a country bumpkin, overgrown and awkward, unsophisticated and virtually unschooled’ — and he was promptly fired from his first three jobs. But one of his brothers landed him a sales position at the Somerville Brush and Mop Company — and days before he turned twenty, young Alfred found his calling. ‘I began without much preparation and I had no special qualifications, as far as I knew,’ he told a journalist years later, ‘but I discovered I could sell those brushes.’

‘After a year of trudging door-to-door peddling Somerville products, Fuller began, er, bristling at working for someone else. So he set up a small workshop to manufacture brushes of his own. At night, he oversaw the mini-factory. By day he walked the streets selling what he’d produced. To his amazement, the small enter­prise grew. When he needed a few more salespeople to expand to additional products and new territories, he placed an ad in a pub­lication called Everybody’s Magazine. Within a few weeks, the Nova Scotia bumpkin had 260 new salespeople, a nationwide business, and the makings of a cultural icon.”

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While Muhammad Ali was suffering through his Vietnam Era walkabout, he “boxed” retired great Rocky Marciano in a fictional contest that was decided by a computer. Dubbed the “Super Fight,” the pugilists acted out the computer prognostications in 1969 and the filmed result was released in theaters in 1970. Marciano dropped a lot of weight and donned a hairpiece to provide viewers with some semblance of his younger self. Prior to the machine-driven bout, Marciano awkwardly stumbled onto a great description of this Singularity moment: “I’m glad you’ve got a computer being the man that makes the decision.” He died in a plane crash four months before the film reached theaters.

A week after the “fight” played in theaters, a Life magazine article ran photos from the film along with some text. “The result was dramatically uncomputerlike,” it offered. An excerpt:

The only two heavyweight champions who never lost a professional fight are Rocky Marciano and Cassius (Muhammad Ali) Clay, and this has provoked many a nonprofessional fight among their fans. So Miami Promoter Murray Woroner decided to make a hypothetical “Super Fight” of it, using a computer. First he matched the two champions and filmed 75 rounds of Hollywood-style fighting, finishing three weeks before Marciano’s death in a plane crash last summer. Then the skills and weaknesses of each fighter–as diagnosed by 1,500 sportswriters, fighters and managers–were programmed. The computer punched out a blow-by-blow reading and selected film segments were matched to it.

Seven possible endings were shot: a knockout, TKO and decisions for each man, and a draw. To foil any gambling capers, the seven endings were held in bonded secrecy until the last minute. When the film was shown at 750 theaters and arenas around the country last week, the result was dramatically uncomputerlike. Cut to simulated ribbons and even floored once, Marciano came back to knock Clay out in the 13th round. “It takes a good champion to lose like that,” Clay smiled afterwards.•

The EconTalk podcast episode that Russ Roberts did with David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene, which I encouraged you to listen to last year, wound up tied for best show of 2013 in a listener vote. If you missed it and want to catch up, go here

In the latest program, Roberts interviews Moises Velasquez-Manoff, author of An Epidemic of Absence, which examines whether what’s purported to be a sharp spike in autoimmune diseases and allergies in America has been caused by our fervent efforts to cleanse ourselves of parasites and worms. The Food and Drug Administration is considering treatments in which these organisms would be purposely introduced into patients. The host and guest discuss an underground scene that isn’t waiting for FDA approval, in which medicalized hookworms and such are being injected into the sick who wish to gamble on this counter-intuitive medicine.

As a layman, it’s difficult to process any of this without thinking about the recent furor about immunizations in which junk science convinced some citizens that inoculations caused autism. And even more recently, the supposed advantage of breast feeding over bottle feeding, which has since been largely debunked, changed actual childcare policy in New York City. You have to wonder how much the increase in allergies and autoimmune diseases is the result of better statistical information about the incidences of these illnesses. And even if the rise is legitimate, there obviously could be a multitude of causes.

Listen to the podcast here. An excerpt about the so-called “worm therapy” underground:

Russ Roberts:

So, let’s talk about the hookworm underground and how it got started. Tell us what it is, this phenomenon of people injecting themselves deliberately with various types of parasites and why did anyone start to think that was a good idea?

Moises Velasquez-Manoff:

Yes. Well, back up. So, in the 1990s, people started thinking about some of the parasite questions I’ve been talking about. Mostly because they understood the immunology. And they understood that parasites suppress the immune system. And they began–and they noticed also some populations that were parasitized, these diseases were far less prevalent. So they began to think: Well, how about we deliberately introduce parasites as a way to cure some of these diseases? It’s an outrageous idea. But then a gastroenterologist named Joel Weinstock, who is now at Tufts U., developed a parasite, and medicalized it so it was in theory safe. The parasite is native to pigs. And the reason he chose this parasite is it cannot reproduce sexually in humans. So that you give it to the person and no one else gets it. That’s the idea. The context, the historical context, is: we spent lots of money in this country getting rid of parasites. The last thing you want to do is reintroduce them to the population, right?

Russ Roberts:

And you talk about how, when people would suggest these transmission mechanisms for allergies and autoimmune problems, the outrage that many in the medical profession, in the fields of science had to the idea that there was something beneficial about this scourge that we had eliminated.

Moises Velasquez-ManofF:

Yeah!

Russ Roberts:

It’s hard to–it’s difficult to accept. It’s emotionally unpleasant. But intellectually, it’s deeply disturbing. It’s like being told: Oh, we always were told to wash our hands, that that’s good for you. And doctors really should wash their hands. But it turns out maybe, sometimes, dirty hands are good for you. That’s horrifying.

Moises Velasquez-ManofF:

Right.

Russ Roberts:

As you say, it’s outrageous. So, what happened with this pig worm?

Moises Velasquez-ManofF:

So, he developed it–this is actually in testing right now for FDA (Federal Drug Administration) approval; and I should point out that some of the results–the early results were amazing. They were so impressive. It was like 3 dozen people and a 75% remission rate for Crohn’s Disease. It was unbelievable. And now it’s in testing. And some of the results have been very lackluster, so far. So we don’t really know if it works yet. But in any case, a bunch of underground people are reading this science. I mean, this is published in reputable journals. It makes sense to a certain kind of mindset that’s kind of ecologically and holistically oriented.

Russ Roberts:

And if you have a chronic disease, you’d love to try something different, if whatever you’ve been trying isn’t working reasonably. Right?

Moises Velasquez-ManofF:

Absolutely. I mean, I think actually at some point it’s a rational–it’s a very rational choice.”

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"She is positive one of them is killed."

“She is positive one of them is killed.”

In the days before telegraph and Morse code let alone radio, TV and the Internet, reports about events that occurred in Europe wouldn’t reach America for several days. A newspaper in New York came up with a novel (and highly irresponsible) way to bridge the information gap: have a clairvoyant tell them what happened. An excerpt from a story in the April 19, 1860 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“The New York Daily News has been consulting a clairvoyant on the result of  the Prize Fight which all suppose to have been fought by Heenan and Sayers on Monday, and says:

‘A clairvoyant in this city declares that one of the pugilists who yesterday fought for the championship of England has been killed. We have been unable to ascertain which; but the lady inclines to think it is the ‘larger man,’ whether as to the muscle or as to the pugilistic fame we know not. But she is positive one of them is killed. We are, therefore, all the more curious to know the result. It will affect either spiritual seeing or material hitting; which, a few days will tell. The old lady adds that the killed man is not the winner.”

So strange and wonderful: In 1972, Rod Serling introduces I’ve Got a Secret host Steve Allen to the home version of the video game Pong. Begins at the 15:40 mark.

Video killed the radio star, and the technology of special effects (as well as the franchising of films, economic shifts and globalization) have seriously wounded the movie star. As Robert Downey Jr. heads for billionaire status, the next generation of leading men and women have become a part of a “starless” system. If Charlie Hunnam had stayed as lead of the big-budget Fifty Shades of Grey project, he was set to earn $125,000, which would have been close to nothing after agent and manager fees, taxes, etc. And it’s no better for action heroes. Chris Hemsworth, star of the Thor films which made more than a billion dollars globally, was paid just $500,000 for the sequel.

You don’t need to cry for such people since they’re still doing well relative to most people, but it’s telling that the diminution of the worker during our age of miracles and wonders has spread to even to such rarified air, even to the veritable lottery winners. From “The Last Disposable Action Hero,” by Alex French in the New York Times Magazine:

“Once upon a time, a movie poster needed to have only two words on it: the star’s last name and the title. Stallone: Rambo. Schwarzenegger: Terminator. In the new action-hero economy, though, actors rarely carry the franchise; more often, the franchise carries the actor. Chris Hemsworth was little known before Thor, and no one outside the industry was too familiar with Henry Cavill before Man of Steel. Lorenzo di Bonaventura, who produced Transformers and this winter’s Jack Ryan: Shadow Recruit, told me that studios were gambling on unproven actors for economic reasons. ‘These movies cost a lot to mount. Adding on the big movie star’s salary is the thing that makes you go, ‘Boy, I don’t know if I can afford it.’ Perhaps no movie typifies this model better than the 2006 mega-hit 300, an adaptation of Frank Miller’s popular comic-book series, which featured inexpensive and little-known actors like Gerard Butler and Michael Fassbender and then catapulted them to stardom. This week, the film’s producers are trying to replicate that success with a sequel, 300: Rise of an Empire, which is anchored by the unheralded Sullivan Stapleton and 299 other equally fit, anonymous men in leather skirts.”

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The opening of “The Computer Girls,” Lois Mandel’s classic 1967 Cosmopolitan article about the promise of young women entering the field of computer programming, a promise which has only been partly fulfilled:

Twenty years ago, a girl could be a secretary, a school teacher…maybe a librarian, a social worker or a nurse. If she was really ambitious, she could go into the professions and compete with men…usually working harder and longer to earn less pay for the same job.

Now have come the big, dazzling computers–and a whole new kind of work for women: programming. Telling the miracle machines what to do and how to do it. Anything from predicting the weather to sending out billing notices from the local department store.

And if it doesn’t sound like woman’s work–well, it just is.

‘I had this idea I’d be standing at a big machine and pressing buttons all day long,’ says a girl who programs for a Los Angeles bank. ‘I couldn’t have been further off the track. I figure out how the computer can solve a problem, and then instruct the machine to do it.’

“It’s just like planning a dinner,” explains Dr. Grace Hopper, now a staff scientist in systems programming for Univac. (She helped develop the first electronic digital computer, the Eniac, in 1946.) “You have to plan ahead and schedule everything so it’s ready when you need it. Programming requires patience and the ability to handle detail. Women are naturals at computer programming.

What she’s talking about is aptitude–the one most important quality a girl needs to become a programmer. She also needs a keen, logical mind.•

____________________

Grace Hopper outwits David Letterman in 1986:

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This is very cool: A 1971 Life magazine report about a Manhattan computer expo in which IBMs wowed visitors by merely playing games of 20 Questions, no chess expertise even necessary. Better yet, the exhibition was curated by Charles Eames, who was as comfortable with computers as he was with furniture. From “A Lively Show with a Robot as the Star,” written by Fortune editor Walter McQuade:

“The stroller steps off the sidewalk and into the IBM display room on 57th Street in Manhattan and approaches one of the four shiny input typewriters of an IBM System 360 computer. The game is ’20 Questions.’ The computer ‘thinks up’ one of the 12 stock mystery words, like ‘duck,’ ‘orange,’ ‘cloud,’ ‘helium,’ ‘knowledge.’ The stroller has 20 chances to guess and if, perhaps, the mystery word is ‘knowledge,’ the typical conversation could start like this:

Stroller: ‘Does it grow?’
Computer: ‘To answer that question might be misleading.’
Stroller: ‘Can I eat it? Is it edible?’
Computer: ‘Only as food for thought.’
Stroller: ‘Do computers have it?’
Computer: ‘Strictly speaking, no.’

Twenty Questions is only the pièce de resistance in what is probably the canniest and most successful exhibition on computers ever devised. It should be: its deviser, the protean Charles Eames–poet, architect, painter, mathematician, toymaker, furniture designer and film maker–has had ample exposure at expos. Here, he and his collaborators reach back into the history and prehistory of computers to show how and why calculating machines came about.

Most of the story evolves on a gigantic, 48-foot, three-dimensional wall tapestry. Woven into it are hundreds of souvenirs from 1890 to 1950, the computer’s gestation period. Here are artifacts, documents and photographs, dramatizing six decades of striving, when information began to explode on the world and nobody knew quite what to do with the fallout.

The devices range from ‘The Millionaire,’ one of the first calculators, made of brass, to Elmer Sperry’s gyroscope, to Vannevar Bush’s differential analyzer. Included are the work of such elegant minds as Alan Turing, Wallace Eckert, Norbert Wiener, John von Neumann. Even L. Frank Baum and his ‘clockwork copper man,’ Tik-Tok of Oz, is represented.

The military imperative to handle information quickly is underlined with a Norden bombsight and with ENIAC, an Army ballistics calculator and predecessor of UNIVAC. There are beautifully selected pieces of cultured debris to date it all; election literature in the years each of the Roosevelts ran for President, and one of the big old dollar bills, when they were worth 100 cents. Best of all are the evocations of mental battles fought and sometimes lost. Early in the century an English scientist, Lewis Fry Richardson, devoted many years to developing numerical models in which equations simulated physical systems to predict the weather. He was a dedicated visionary, but his widow wrote, ‘There came a time of heartbreak when those most interested in his ‘upper air’ research proved to be ‘poison gas’ experts. Lewis stopped his meteorological researches, destroying such as had not been published.

The wall closes with the birth of the UNIVAC in 1950. Since then the computer has progressed so fast, with computers working their own evolution, that the souvenirs would be just print-out sheets. But Eames demonstrates with models and film displays that if this be witchcraft, there are no witches involved–just the 350,000 full-time programmers (in the U.S. alone) and about two million other nonwitches who operate the machines; in a multiple, rapid-fire slidefilm; they chew gum, scratch themselves, dye their hair and do their work.

And when the stroller, no warlock himself, wanders in off the street with his family (it’s a great show for kids) and confronts the System 360, he is well advised to watch his language and frame his questions well. Eames’ finale to the exhibition can be fairly cheeky. System 360, Model 40, is not above printing out, in response to a muddled thought: ‘Your grammar has me stumped.'”

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From the August 19, 1874 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Yesterday afternoon, Officer Irwin was attracted by yells and drunken screams to the den No. 91 Degraw Street, occupied by Mrs. Duck. On entering the place, the officer found three women and a child in the place. The women were drunk, and tossing the child about ‘just like,’ said the officer, ‘as if it were a foot ball.’ The little child, who is scarcely three years old, presented a most pitiable sight. The officer, on ascertaining who the mother was, arrested her. The health authorities have been notified of the den which is described as the filthiest hole in Red Hook.”

Speaking of hydrogen and electric cars, here’s an excerpt from an Economist report about Elon Musk’s Tesla Motors, which has modest profits to date but about half the valuation of GM because it might, perhaps, be the future:

“The prospects for electric cars have taken a turn for the better. China, a market that Tesla is eyeing for a third of its sales, last month announced strict new fuel-efficiency standards that may make life hard, if not impossible, for importers of big petrol-engined cars. The European Union this week confirmed new curbs on tailpipe emissions, to be imposed from 2021.

Even so, becoming a mass-market ‘General Electric Motors’ will not be easy. In about three years Tesla will launch the Model E, a small saloon with a range of perhaps 400 miles, costing just $35,000 or so—if its new factory can make batteries that are good and cheap enough. It will have to, because its buyers will be using it as an everyday set of wheels, not an indulgence. And it will have rivals: BMW’s i3, launched last year, is aimed at the same market. Other carmakers will follow suit.

For buyers who just want the cheapest means of getting from A to B, regardless of the vehicle’s looks or performance, the lowest-cost petrol cars will be hard to beat for some time to come. Traditional carmakers talk of one day serving such customers with ‘mobility as a service’—fleets of self-driving taxis. Tesla, which is also investing in autonomous driving technology, could be a strong contender in such a new market: unlike its older rivals, it would have no legacy business, of factories churning out petrol models, to be disrupted.”

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George Carlin was about to release his first comedy album in seven years in 1982 when he sat for a Playboy interview. He was wondering at that point if he would have a third act after being a straight comic in the ’60s and a countercultural force the following decade, and ultimately he found it in the role of philosopher and self-designated mourner for a sense of decency and honesty in American politics and media. Carlin has been criticized for this latter stage of his career, accused of being too angry to be funny, but I think it’s as valuable a phase as his 1970s brilliance. It elevated him to greatest American stand-up ever, and no one has quite reached that level since, though Louis C.K. and Chris Rock have their moments. The opening of the Playboy Q&A:

Playboy:

Back in the early Sixties, when you were still a disc jockey and just beginning to do comedy in small clubs, Lenny Bruce supposedly selected you as his heir—

George Carlin:

Apparently, Lenny told that to a lot of people. But he never said it to me and I didn’t hear it until years later. Which is probably fortunate. It’s difficult enough for a young person to put his soul on the line in front of a lot of drunken people without having that hanging over his head, too.

Playboy:

Because of what Bruce said about you, are you now overly sensitive about being compared to him?

George Carlin:

Yes, and those comparisons are unfair to both of us. Look, I was a fan of Lenny’s. He made me laugh, sure, but more often he made me say, ‘Fuckin’ A; why didn’t I think of that?’ He opened up channels in my head. His genius was the unique ability to investigate hypocrisy and expose social inequities in a street rap that was really a form of poetry. I believe myself to be a worthwhile and inventive performer in my own right. But I’m not in a league with Lenny, certainly not in terms of social commentary. So when people give me this bullshit, ‘Well, I guess you’re sort of…uh…imitating Lenny Bruce,’ I just say, ‘Oh, fuck. I don’t want to hear it.’ I want to be known for what I do best.

Playboy:

Nevertheless, throughout the early to mid-Seventies, with a five-year run of albums and packed auditoriums for an act that viciously ridiculed every nook and cranny of “the establishment,” you really did seem to be fulfilling Lenny’s prophecy. Then it stopped abruptly about five years ago. No more albums; no more college tours. Why?

George Carlin:

I’ve just now completed a five-year period that can perhaps best be called a breathing spell. A time of getting my health back and gathering my strength. That time also included incredible cocaine abuse, a heart attack and my wife’s recovery from both alcoholism and cocaine abuse.

Playboy:

It’s comforting to hear you talk about that breathing spell in the past tense.

George Carlin:

My wife, Brenda, and I are both clean and sober now. I’ve been doing a lot of writing. By the time this interview appears, my first album in seven years will be out. I’m also working on a series of Home Box Office specials, a book and a motion picture. It’s the American view that everything has to keep climbing: productivity, profits, even comedy. No time for reflection. No time to contract before another expansion. No time to grow up. No time to fuck up. No time to learn from your mistakes. But that notion goes against nature, which is cyclical. And I hope I’m now beginning a new cycle of energy and creativity. If so, it’ll really be my third career. The first was as a straight comic in the Sixties. The second was as a counterculture performer in the Seventies. The third will be…well, that’s for others to judge.”

________________________

“I’ve been uplinked and downloaded”:

“You have to be asleep to believe it”:

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Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) are a great and noble idea, a potential palliative to the soaring coats of higher education, but that doesn’t mean they’re working, at least not yet. Is not only the human interaction necessary for sustained learning but also the architecture and furniture? From Michael Guerriero at the New Yorker blog:

“What if, as a novice teacher or professor, you began a course and the entire class decided to leave—either from apathy or boredom or the popular student conviction that whatever is not a part of the lesson is inherently more interesting than what is? That old educator’s nightmare is now a digital reality: massive open online courses, or MOOCs, born a few years ago of the seemingly well-paired utopianisms of Silicon Valley and the élite American university, are seeing that classroom management can be a difficult task without a classroom.

When the Times declared 2012 the ‘Year of the MOOC,’ it seemed, in the words of the paper, that ‘everyone wants in,’ with schools, students, and investors eager to participate. But, as can happen in academia, early ambition faded when the first few assessments were returned, and, since then the open-online model appears to have earned an incomplete, at best. An average of only four per cent of registered users finished their MOOCs in a recent University of Pennsylvania study, and half of those enrolled did not view even a single lecture. EdX, a MOOC collaboration between Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, has shown results that are a little more encouraging, but not much. And a celebrated partnership between San Jose State and Udacity, the company co-founded by Sebastian Thrun, a Stanford professor turned MOOC magnate , also failed, when students in the online pilot courses consistently fared worse than their counterparts in the equivalent courses on campus.”

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There will soon be thousands of hydrogen cars available for purchase (largely in California) from major automakers, but why? The refueling infrastructure is sorely lacking and these alternative vehicles don’t have momentum the way EVs currently do. From Basem Wasef at Popular Mechanics:

“The basic principle behind hydrogen fuel cells is fairly simple: Hydrogen atoms are stripped of their electrons to generate electricity and then combined with oxygen to form water as a by-product. Mainstream deployment of fuel-cell vehicles, though, has proved to be complex. Compared with liquid fuels, hydrogen is tough to transport and store. And without a meaningful number of vehicles on the road, there’s been no incentive to build hydrogen fuel infrastructure. Now new initiatives in California and across the U.S. are pushing for a long-awaited expansion of the refueling network. And with the debut of three promising hydrogen-fuel-cell vehicles from Honda, Hyundai, and Toyota, consumers will have new options beginning in 2014. Are we finally seeing the dawn of the hydrogen age? Not so fast.

Why Now?

The current hydrogen push has less to do with consumer demand than with government incentives that treat fuel-cell vehicles (FCV) as equal to or better than electric vehicles.”

_____________________

Jack Nicholson betting on hydrogen in 1978:

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FOR MEN ONLY

Me and my wife are ready to have a bundle of joy but we need a donor please if anyone willing to help us out and donate some sperm that would be helpful please email with an updated photo…and no we will not make you do child support we got it on our own.

Johnny Clem was a mere ten-year-old orphan in 1861 when he managed to talk his way into what was ostensibly a non-combat role for the Twenty-second Michigan Infantry during the early fire of the Civil War. But it was hard to escape the brutality of the War Between the States once attached to a division, and the lad was soon in the heat of battle. To say that he served long is an understatement: Colonel John Clem wound up being the final Civil War soldier on active duty, forced into retirement by law at age 64 in 1915. (He was originally set to step away from military life three years earlier but hung on a little longer.) It’s important to remember that there were other children just like him, and thousands and thousands of men just removed from boyhood, whose limbs and torsos wound up in piles, their daring exploits to never be recorded. From an article about his farewell to uniformed life in the August 7, 1915 New York Times:

“Clem was just a little ‘shaver’ of 10 years when President Lincoln issued his first call for volunteers. The Third Ohio Infantry was recruited in the Newark (Ohio) district. In the regiment was an officer, Captain McDougal, a friend of Johnny Clem. The future Senior Master of the Quartermaster Corps was an orphan, and there was no near relative to stop him when he sought out his friend McDougal and begged permission to accompany the Third Ohio to the front.

Clem told McDougal that he could carry a gun provided it was not too heavy, and that he could beat the drum to ‘beat the band.’ Captain McDougal, however, could not see the proposition in the same light as did his enthusiastic young friend, and told him point blank he was entirely too little and too young for such dangerous business as that of as a soldier in wartime. All this happens in May, 1861.

But Clem did not lose hope. Early in June of that year the Third Ohio started for the mobilization camp at Covington, Ky. A little boy smuggled himself into one of the baggage cars, and the following day climbed out of the car very tired, very dirty, and very hungry, in Covington. The lad was ‘Johnny’ Clem.

Also at Covington as the Twenty-second Michigan Infantry. Clem decided that he would try and get a berth in that regiment, and so he boldly sought out the tent of the Colonel and walked right in. The ‘kid’ from Newark told the Colonel that he wanted to go to the front with the regiment. The Colonel laughed and patted the boy on the back.

‘You are a game little fellow, all right,’ said the Colonel, ‘but this is no place for children like you. If you were a foot taller and some years older maybe I’d take you along, but as you are neither of these things I am afraid you will have to say back here with the home folks.

But Clem refused to be left behind, and was so persistent that the Colonel finally agreed to let him go along as sort of combination regimental mascot and emergency drummer boy.

The soldiers rigged him out in a uniform, they provided him with a drum and also with a musket, the barrel of the gun being sawed off short so as to make it possible for the little fellow to carry it.

One of the first battles in which the regiment figured was that of Shiloh, where the Confederate General Albert Sidney Johnston was killed and where the fame of Ulysses S. Grant, as a soldier, may be said to have begun. In their battle Clem got into the very hottest of the fight. He came very near losing his life when a shrapnel shell exploded within a few feet of him. A fragment of the shell crashed through the drum and the shock of the explosion hurled him unconscious to the ground, where he was subsequently found and rescued by his bigger comrades.

After the battle the soldiers nicknamed Clem ‘Johnny Shiloh,’ and the name stuck to him until a greater fame came to him at the terrible battle of Chickamauga.

At Chickamauga the boy was again in the thickest of the fight. He fired right and left with his little sawed-off musket. General Thomas and General Rosecrans both heard of the heroism of the little Newark boy at Chickamauga and he was personally commended for his coolness and bravery by both of them. It was General Rosecrans who then and there made him a Sergeant, the youngest non-commissioned officer who ever served in the armies of this country.

Now comes the story of how Clem won the title of ‘drummer boy of Chickamauga.’ The brigade to which the Twenty-second Michigan was attached had been ordered to hold its position, which position happened to be a very dangerous one. The brigade fought for all it was worth but the job could not be done, and finally the order came for it to fall back to a safer position. As the brigade retreated ‘Johnny’ Clem managed to get lost. He got mixed up with a command that was almost surrounded by Confederates and the dead and dying were all about him.

The boy realized his predicament and made up his mind he would not be captured, and so he did what any healthy youngster of his years would do and started to run. He ran like a ‘scared rabbit,’ and when he stopped running he was in a little clump of woods all by himself.

Cautiously he came out of the woods and he ran full tilt into a Confederate Colonel. The Confederate officer looked at the boy with the little gun and despite the awfulness of the situation he had to laugh.

‘My, but you are a little fellow to be in this business,’ said the Confederate, ‘but war is war, and I think the best thing a mite of a chap like you can do is to drop that gun.’

Instead of dropping the gun Clem brought to to his shoulder, pointed it at the Colonel and fired. The Colonel fell badly wounded and Clem turned on his heels and ran for all he was worth. Finally he landed back with the Twenty-second Michigan and ever afterward  they called him ‘the drummer boy of Chickamauga.’

As for the Confederate Colonel he recovered after many weeks in the hospital, and after the war Colonel Clem learned about him and wrote and told him how glad he was that he had not killed him.

‘When I heard that I had not killed that Confederate officer it was the best news I ever got,’ Colonel Clem remarked years afterward.”

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Philip Roth, one of the top five American novelists ever, is done, done, done with the form and believes that all of civilization will soon be finished with it. One question from a Q&A he just did with the New York Times:

Question:

You belong to an exceptional generation of postwar writers, who defined American literature for almost half a century: Bellow, Styron, Updike, Doctorow, DeLillo. What made this golden age happen and what made it great? Did you feel, in your active years, that these writers were competition or did you feel kinship — or both? And why were there so few female writers with equal success in that same period? Finally: What is your opinion of the state of contemporary American fiction now?

Philip Roth:

I agree that it’s been a good time for the novel in America, but I can’t say I know what accounts for it. Maybe it is the absence of certain things that somewhat accounts for it. The American novelist’s indifference to, if not contempt for, ‘critical’ theory. Aesthetic freedom unhampered by all the high-and-mighty isms and their humorlessness. (Can you think of an ideology capable of corrective self-satire, let alone one that wouldn’t want to sink its teeth into an imagination on the loose?) Writing that is uncontaminated by political propaganda — or even political responsibility. The absence of any ‘school’ of writing. In a place so vast, no single geographic center from which the writing originates. Anything but a homogeneous population, no basic national unity, no single national character, social calm utterly unknown, even the general obtuseness about literature, the inability of many citizens to read any of it with even minimal comprehension, confers a certain freedom. And surely the fact that writers really don’t mean a goddamn thing to nine-tenths of the population doesn’t hurt. It’s inebriating.

Very little truthfulness anywhere, antagonism everywhere, so much calculated to disgust, the gigantic hypocrisies, no holding fierce passions at bay, the ordinary viciousness you can see just by pressing the remote, explosive weapons in the hands of creeps, the gloomy tabulation of unspeakable violent events, the unceasing despoliation of the biosphere for profit, surveillance overkill that will come back to haunt us, great concentrations of wealth financing the most undemocratic malevolents around, science illiterates still fighting the Scopes trial 89 years on, economic inequities the size of the Ritz, indebtedness on everyone’s tail, families not knowing how bad things can get, money being squeezed out of every last thing — that frenzy — and (by no means new) government hardly by the people through representative democracy but rather by the great financial interests, the old American plutocracy worse than ever.

You have 300 million people on a continent 3,000 miles wide doing the best they can with their inexhaustible troubles. We are witnessing a new and benign admixture of races on a scale unknown since the malignancy of slavery. I could go on and on. It’s hard not to feel close to existence here. This is not some quiet little corner of the world.”

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Great Little Richard performance and interview on a 1970 Dick Cavett program.

If Eddie Murphy had ever played the often-androgynous music sensation in a drama as was rumored at times and not just in the SNL “Little Richard Simmons” mash-up, it would have likely been an incredible performance. Based on comments Murphy made back in the day, he was uncomfortable with the role because of the self-proclaimed Bronze Liberace’s homosexuality, though in retrospect it seems Murphy’s discomfort was largely with himself.

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Garry Kasparov held off machines but only for so long. He defeated Deep Thought in 1989, and believed a computer could never best him. But by 1997 Deep Blue turned him–and humanity–into an also-ran in some key ways. The chess master couldn’t believe it at first–he assumed his opponent was manipulated by humans behind the scene, like the Mechanical Turk, the faux chess-playing machine from the 18th century. But no sleight of hand was needed.

Below are the openings of three Bruce Weber New York Times articles written during the Kasparov-Deep Blue matchup which chart the rise of the machines.

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From “Computer Defeats Kasparov, Stunning the Chess Experts” on May 5:

“Responding to defeat with the pride and tenacity of a champion, the I.B.M. computer Deep Blue drew even yesterday in its match against Garry Kasparov, the world’s best human chess player, winning the second of their six games and stunning many chess experts with its strategy.

Joel Benjamin, the grandmaster who works with the Deep Blue team, declared breathlessly: ‘This was not a computer-style game. This was real chess!’

He was seconded by others.

‘Nice style!’ said Susan Polgar, the women’s world champion. ‘Really impressive. The computer played a champion’s style, like Karpov,’ she continued, referring to Anatoly Karpov, a former world champion who is widely regarded as second in strength only to Mr. Kasparov. ‘Deep Blue made many moves that were based on understanding chess, on feeling the position. We all thought computers couldn’t do that.'”

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From “Wary Kasparov and Deep Blue Draw Game 3” on May 7: 

“Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, opened the third game of his six-game match against the I.B.M. computer Deep Blue yesterday in peculiar fashion, by moving his queen’s pawn forward a single square. Huh?

‘I think we have a new opening move,’ said Yasser Seirawan, a grandmaster providing live commentary on the match. ‘What should we call it?’

Mike Valvo, an international master who is a commentator, said, ‘The computer has caused Garry to act in strange ways.’

Indeed it has. Mr. Kasparov, who swiftly became more conventional and subtle in his play, went on to a draw with Deep Blue, leaving the score of Man vs. Machine at 1 1/2 apiece. (A draw is worth half a point to each player.) But it is clear that after his loss in Game 2 on Sunday, in which he resigned after 45 moves, Mr. Kasparov does not yet have a handle on Deep Blue’s predilections, and that he is still struggling to elicit them.”

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From “Swift and Slashing, Computer Topples Kasparov” on May 12:

“In brisk and brutal fashion, the I.B.M. computer Deep Blue unseated humanity, at least temporarily, as the finest chess playing entity on the planet yesterday, when Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, resigned the sixth and final game of the match after just 19 moves, saying, ‘I lost my fighting spirit.’

The unexpectedly swift denouement to the bitterly fought contest came as a surprise, because until yesterday Mr. Kasparov had been able to summon the wherewithal to match Deep Blue gambit for gambit.

The manner of the conclusion overshadowed the debate over the meaning of the computer’s success. Grandmasters and computer experts alike went from praising the match as a great experiment, invaluable to both science and chess (if a temporary blow to the collective ego of the human race) to smacking their foreheads in amazement at the champion’s abrupt crumpling.

‘It had the impact of a Greek tragedy,’ said Monty Newborn, chairman of the chess committee for the Association for Computing, which was responsible for officiating the match.

It was the second victory of the match for the computer — there were three draws — making the final score 3 1/2 to 2 1/2, the first time any chess champion has been beaten by a machine in a traditional match. Mr. Kasparov, 34, retains his title, which he has held since 1985, but the loss was nonetheless unprecedented in his career; he has never before lost a multigame match against an individual opponent.

Afterward, he was both bitter at what he perceived to be unfair advantages enjoyed by the computer and, in his word, ashamed of his poor performance yesterday.

‘I was not in the mood of playing at all,’ he said, adding that after Game 5 on Saturday, he had become so dispirited that he felt the match was already over. Asked why, he said: ‘I’m a human being. When I see something that is well beyond my understanding, I’m afraid.'”

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Jim Henson and the Muppets entertain Dick Cavett on his 1971 Thanksgiving show. Missing is the section where Gore Vidal walked out and referred to them all as a bunch of crypto-fascist Nazis.

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Apple CEO Tim Cook is clearly a bright and talented guy, but until the company delivers a product post-Jobs that wows and not just new iterations of the same old things, he’ll be judged with suspicion. And even though he seems to be more progressive than his late boss in terms of charitable giving and environmentalism, he’s apparently just as scary when in business mode. From Haunted Empire: The Job After Steve Jobs, Yukari Iwatani Kane’s new book which has been excerpted in the Wall Street Journal:

“Meetings with Cook could be terrifying. He exuded a Zenlike calm and didn’t waste words. ‘Talk about your numbers. Put your spreadsheet up,’ he’d say as he nursed a Mountain Dew. (Some staffers wondered why he wasn’t bouncing off the walls from the caffeine.) When Cook turned the spotlight on someone, he hammered them with questions until he was satisfied. ‘Why is that?’ ‘What do you mean?’ ‘I don’t understand. Why are you not making it clear?’ He was known to ask the same exact question 10 times in a row.

Cook also knew the power of silence. He could do more with a pause than Jobs ever could with an epithet. When someone was unable to answer a question, Cook would sit without a word while people stared at the table and shifted in their seats. The silence would be so intense and uncomfortable that everyone in the room wanted to back away. Unperturbed, Cook didn’t move a finger as he focused his eyes on his squirming target. Sometimes he would take an energy bar from his pocket while he waited for an answer, and the hush would be broken only by the crackling of the wrapper.

Even in Apple’s unrelenting culture, Cook’s meetings stood out as harsh. On one occasion, a manager from another group who was sitting in was shocked to hear Cook tell an underling, ‘That number is wrong. Get out of here.’

Cook’s quarterly reviews were especially torturous because Cook would grind through the minutiae as he categorized what worked and what didn’t, using yellow Post-its. His managers crossed their fingers in the hopes of emerging unscathed. ‘We’re safe as long as we’re not at the back of the pack,’ they would say to each other.

Cook demonstrated the same level of austerity and discipline in his life as he did in his work. He woke up at 4:30 or 5 a.m. and hit the gym several times a week. He ate protein bars throughout the day and had simple meals like chicken and rice for lunch.

His stamina was inhuman. He could fly to Asia, spend three days there, fly back, land at 7 a.m. at the airport and be in the office by 8:30, interrogating someone about some numbers.

Cook was also relentlessly frugal. For many years, he lived in a rental unit in a dingy ranch-style building with no air conditioning.”

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What’s easier, de-extincting an average example of a bygone species or engineering a superior version of one still in existence?

The counterintuitive answer is that they may be equally difficult even though it might be assumed the latter would be relatively simpler. Creating a Mammoth from scratch could be no harder than “building” another Secretariat. Those new mammoths, however, won’t be exactly the same as their “ancestors” nor would a new champion be exactly like the Triple Crown winner of yore. There are just too many variables. But exactitude isn’t as important as progress. These creatures will be new and different, and the same will be said eventually of enhanced humans. That’s where we’re headed. It’s a brave new world, and a fraught one, but we probably won’t survive without such experimentation.

Excerpts follows from two new articles:The Mammoth Cometh,” Nathaniel Rich’s excellent New York Times Magazine piece which will surely have a place on my “Great 2014 Nonfiction Pieces Online For Free” list if I’m still doing this blog by the end of the year; and “Can Science Breed the Next Secretariat?” Adam Piore and Katie Bo Williams’ Nautilus article about recreating an incredibly rare natural mutation.

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From “The Mammoth Cometh”:

There is no authoritative definition of “species.” The most widely accepted definition describes a group of organisms that can procreate with one another and produce fertile offspring, but there are many exceptions. De-extinction operates under a different definition altogether. Revive & Restore hopes to create a bird that interacts with its ecosystem as the passenger pigeon did. If the new bird fills the same ecological niche, it will be successful; if not, back to the petri dish. ‘It’s ecological resurrection, not species resurrection,’ Shapiro says. A similar logic informs the restoration of Renaissance paintings. If you visit The Last Supper in the refectory of the Convent of Santa Maria delle Grazie in Milan, you won’t see a single speck of paint from the brush of Leonardo da Vinci. You will see a mural with the same proportions and design as the original, and you may feel the same sense of awe as the refectory’s parishioners felt in 1498, but the original artwork disappeared centuries ago. Philosophers call this Theseus’ Paradox, a reference to the ship that Theseus sailed back to Athens from Crete after he had slain the Minotaur. The ship, Plutarch writes, was preserved by the Athenians, who “took away the old planks as they decayed, putting in new and stronger timber in their place.” Theseus’ ship, therefore, “became a standing example among the philosophers . . . one side holding that the ship remained the same, and the other contending that it was not the same.”

What does it matter whether Passenger Pigeon 2.0 is a real passenger pigeon or a persuasive impostor? If the new, synthetically created bird enriches the ecology of the forests it populates, few people, including conservationists, will object. The genetically adjusted birds would hardly be the first aspect of the deciduous forest ecosystem to bear man’s influence; invasive species, disease, deforestation and a toxic atmosphere have engineered forests that would be unrecognizable to the continent’s earliest European settlers. When human beings first arrived, the continent was populated by camels, eight-foot beavers and 550-pound ground sloths. “People grow up with this idea that the nature they see is ‘natural,’ ” Novak says, “but there’s been no real ‘natural’ element to the earth the entire time humans have been around.”

The earth is about to become a lot less “natural.” Biologists have already created new forms of bacteria in the lab, modified the genetic code of countless living species and cloned dogs, cats, wolves and water buffalo, but the engineering of novel vertebrates — of breathing, flying, defecating pigeons — will represent a milestone for synthetic biology. This is the fact that will overwhelm all arguments against de-extinction. Thanks, perhaps, to Jurassic Park, popular sentiment already is behind it. (“That movie has done a lot for de-extinction,” Stewart Brand told me in all earnestness.) In a 2010 poll by the Pew Research Center, half of the respondents agreed that “an extinct animal will be brought back.” Among Americans, belief in de-extinction trails belief in evolution by only 10 percentage points. “Our assumption from the beginning has been that this is coming anyway,” Brand said, “so what’s the most benign form it can take?”

What is coming will go well beyond the resurrection of extinct species. For millenniums, we have customized our environment, our vegetables and our animals, through breeding, fertilization and pollination. Synthetic biology offers far more sophisticated tools. The creation of novel organisms, like new animals, plants and bacteria, will transform human medicine, agriculture, energy production and much else.•

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From “Can Science Breed the Next Secretariat?”:

Any trainer with good horse sense could have told you that Trading Leather was something special before he raced from the pack, overtook Galileo Rock, and galloped to victory in the prestigious Irish Derby last June. All one needed to do was take in the magnificent crevasse of muscle running down the back of his hindquarters, the length and architecture of his limbs, his inimitable dignity of motion.

But the legendary trainer who bred him, Jim Bolger, 72, had an extra reason to believe his prized colt was suited for the mid-distance race on the storied track at County Kildare. Bolger had Trading Leather tested for the “speed gene.” He knew, like an expectant mother who has an embryo tested to find out the sex of her baby, what distance Trading Leather was optimally suited to run and at about what age he’d be ready to run it.

Genetics testing has arrived in the world of thoroughbred horse racing. Bolger, whose name is synonymous with success in the fickle game of horse racing, has called it “the most important thing that has happened to breeding since it began over 300 years ago.” The speed gene is now central to the decisions Bolger makes every year when he sits down to pencil out which of his roughly 100 thoroughbreds to mate, and when to begin training his most promising yearlings. Merging specific gene types from his sires and mares, he believes, can result in new lines of lucrative champions. He’s so sure of the science behind the speed gene that he opened a company to sell a speed gene test to his fellow breeders and trainers.

Genetic testing has long been a dream of the sports industry. Since the human genome was mapped in 2000, sports scientists have been racing to identify genes that contribute to athletic superiority. The first test purporting to evaluate human athletic potential hit the market in Australia back in 2004 (arriving in the United States in 2008), a year after a team of researchers published a study linking a single gene to a type of muscle fiber involved in producing the explosive, short-duration bursts of energy needed for sports like power lifting and sprints. This January, Uzbekistan became the first nation to announce a plan to use genetic tests to evaluate future Olympians. The tests of children as young as 10 will be overseen by a team of geneticists who have been studying the genes of the nation’s best athletes for two years, and are preparing a report detailing 50 genes that will form the basis of their talent search.

Every new announcement of a ‘sports gene’ seems to stir up a debate about science and culture, nature and nurture. Can genes account for athletic performance? Are they any match for expert training?•

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From the April 2, 1856 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“The camel experiment over the plains (for mail and other transport), for which Congress made appropriation two years ago, will soon be tried. The camels are now en route from Asia Minor. The whole number is 33, viz: 9 male and 15 female camels; 4 male and 5 female dromedaries. The vessel and this cargo is expected to arrive in Texas about that time. Several of the animals are presents from the Viceroy of Egypt.”

 

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

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