Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
It kind of appalls me that as a kid I didn’t really recognize how mean David Letterman was at the time. Hilarious and brilliant, sure, but oh so cruel. It just didn’t register with me. Now I cringe. Here he is in 1992 having fun at the expense of novelist Tama Janowitz, who was having her last moment as a very public writer.
Tags: David Letterman, Tama Janowitz
Other countries have citizens with plenty of guns, but they tend to not fill their friends and neighbors with bullets constantly. In America, we haven’t figured out that trick. Until we get smarter about the psychological and cultural reasons for our shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later mentality, perhaps smarter guns can help–firearms that resemble iPhones, in a sense. From Michael S. Rosenwald in the Washington Post:
“One of California’s largest firearm stores recently added a peculiar new gun to its shelves. It requires an accessory: a black waterproof watch.
The watch’s primary purpose is not to provide accurate time, though it does. The watch makes the gun think. Electronic chips inside the gun and the watch communicate with each other. If the watch is within close reach of the gun, a light on the grip turns green. Fire away. No watch means no green light. The gun becomes a paperweight.
A dream of gun-control advocates for decades, the Armatix iP1 is the country’s first smart gun. Its introduction is seen as a landmark in efforts to reduce gun violence, suicides and accidental shootings. Proponents compare smart guns to automobile air bags — a transformative add-on that gun owners will demand. But gun rights advocates are already balking, wondering what happens if the technology fails just as an intruder breaks in.”
Tags: Michael S. Rosenwald
From the August 23, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“For the first time in the memory of the police of the Fifth Precinct an Italian committed suicide in that section of the city yesterday afternoon when Joseph Sanagora, 21 years old, of 67 South Second Street, shot himself in the mouth with a .38 caliber revolver. The only apparent reason Sanagora had for committing the rash act was the fact that his parents refused him 5 cents with which he wanted to buy a package of tobacco.”
So sad to hear of the death of Bob Casale, Devo’s “Bob 2.” Here’s a repost of an earlier item about the iconic band.
If I had to consider every musical performance in Saturday Night Live history, I would vote for Devo’s cover of “Satisfaction” on the October 14, 1979 episode as the best of all. Performed just a week after the Rolling Stones was the program’s musical guest, this reimagination did for the head what Michael Jackson’s Motown 25 showstopper later did for the feet: It was moonwalking with the brain. It took soul and put it into a new machine.
Watch the SNL version here. Below is the official video.
Tags: Bob Casale
Harry Stack Sullivan.
Posting something about a survivor of the Rev. Jim Jones’ Peoples Temple cult reminded me of an odd obituary I came across a couple months ago. It was a 1991 New York Times postmortem about psychotherapist and commune leader Saul Newton, who was an avowed enemy of the traditional family, who wanted to break our accepted bonds–chains, as he saw them–smash them to bits. He thought he could create a new reality.
I vaguely recall speaking some years ago to an old NYU professor who was a believer of Newton’s and spoke glowingly of the late doctor. I was left chilled by the conversation. From the Times obit:
His beliefs had radical political themes. Earlier he was a union organizer, an avowed Communist and a soldier in the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in Spain. In recent years, he was an ardent foe of nuclear arms and power.
‘Hated and Loved’
“He was both hated and loved,” said Esther Newton, his eldest daughter, who was not involved in his therapeutic community. ‘His ideals were lofty — the results are for others to judge,’ she said. “He was very bright and creative, charismatic and definitely difficult, handsome, attractive to women and tyrannical.”
At its peak in the 1970’s, his organization had hundreds of members living in three buildings on the Upper West Side. Its formal name was the Sullivan Institute for Research in Psychoanalysis; a subsidiary group was the Fourth Wall Repertory Company, a theater organization based in the East Village.
In recent years the Sullivanians declined in membership, beset by unfavorable publicity, investigations by state authorities into charges of professional misconduct by therapists, child custody lawsuits, the organized opposition of disaffected former members and estranged relatives of members, internal disputes and Mr. Newton’s deteriorating health.
The group’s name was derived from the late Henry Stack Sullivan, a prominent American psychiatrist. In 1957, Mr. Newton and Dr. Jane Pearce, his wife at the time, split off from the Sullivan-oriented William Alanson White Institute to form their own organization. Most mental health experts view the Newton group as having distorted Mr. Sullivan’s name and theories.
Through their unique brand of psychotherapy, Mr. Newton and his disciples controlled virtually all aspects of their followers lives, former residents said.
Members were taught that traditional family ties were at the root of mental illness and needed to be broken to foster individual growth, ex-members said. They were assigned to lived in group apartments and were expected to sleep with different sex partners, changing as often as each night. Married couples did not live together. Permission was required to give birth. Children were raised by babysitters, with parental visits allowed one hour a day and one evening a week. Members often broke off contact with their own parents and other relatives. Under outside criticism, some of these practices were moderated in recent years.•
Tags: Esther Newton, Harry Stack Sullivan, Henry Stack Sullivan, Jane Pearce, Jim Jones, Saul Newton
Last summer, I posted an excerpt from a 1970 Lillian Ross New Yorker piece about that year’s Consumer Electronics Show in which she introduced the magazine’s readers to the first home-video system, Cartrivision. While its makers (including CBS legend Frank Stanton) knew it was a disruptive technology, they were never able to sell it with its relatively high cost ($1,895). Here’s a What’s My Line? episode in which the system is demonstrated by company spokesperson Art Rosenblatt in 1972, the year the system came to the market and the one before it was pulled.
Tags: Art Rosenblatt, Frank Stanton, Lillian Ross
hey all of you punks that want a piece of me meet me at richies gym..on stanwix street..if you have the balls come in and ask for big jim..we can box right there, i need a few punks to spar with for my next fight..ill be there all week long..there i have named the place and time punks make my day pussies..THE GREAT MAN FROM BROOKLYN HAS SPOKEN AND WILL SPEAK AGAIN.
The Rev. Jim Jones went off the deep end in 1978, taking with him some true believers who had initially followed willingly and others who had approached reluctantly. There were survivors, and their stories can be instructive in understanding group delusion. Deborah Layton, a Jones aide who survived the massacre, has just published a book on the topic. She did a very candid Ask Me Anything at Reddit in connection with the publication. A few exchanges follow.
_________________________
Question:
I hope this isn’t taken the wrong way, but I find the circumstances surrounding the Jonestown tragedy completely fascinating.
As someone who was in Jonestown, do you think that it was Jim Jones’ plan all along to commit this atrocity?
Deborah Layton:
It is not shameful to find the story so fascinating. Trust me, I continue to try to make sense of the losses.
When I had finished writing Seductive Poison I was asked by a BBC documentary film crew to accompany them back to Guyana and into Jonestown. I was hesitant until the producer came on the phone and told me in his research he had come across a woman’s dissertation about the history of Guyana that some 100 years ago a white minister convinced his Amerindian flock to kill themselves and come back as white men. I realized Jones must have known this story.
_________________________
Question:
What attracted you to that lifestyle? Were recreational drugs abundant in Jamestown?
Deborah Layton:
Innocence and naivete, the belief I was joining an organization much like the peace corp. I thought I could work hard for 2 years, help the poor and the needy, and continue on with my life.
There were no recreational drugs, ever, in Peoples Temple. We were good, law-abiding, brainwashed followers — unbeknownst to all of us, only Jones was using medications.
_________________________
Question:
As far as you know, did Jim Jones tend to prey on specific demographics/people with specific (vulnerable) personality traits? I’m sure he had to have had a special kind of aggressive charm about him to recruit as many followers as he did, but how much would you credit the sheer size of Peoples Temple membership to his recruitment preferences?
Deborah Layton:
He went after well to do idealistic college students– through whom he could siphon money from their parents; he targeted poor, black seniors–then siphoned their SS checks. More joined because of the positive press he received. Most believed they were only pitching in to help an organization with good deeds. No one thought they would be forbidden from leaving. Some who left were found, brought back, then punished, one man was killed. Jones used his political clout to procure more politicians then used those associations to intimidate his parishioners.
Jones often met with new visitors, wooing them with the amount of attention he gave them, telling them how he needed their qualities in his organization, that together he and they could change the wrong in the world–racism, classism….
_________________________
Question:
Knowing what you know now, what would you say your very best life advice is?
Deborah Layton:
No one joins a cult. No one joins something they think will hurt or kill them. People join political movements, social organizations attend off-campus dinner socials believing they are mingling with like-minded people. It is often too late when one realizes they’ve been deceived.
Although my experience is extreme, I saw this tendency again when I worked on the trading floor of an investment banking firm — where invisible boundaries are crossed believing the end justifies the means. When you believe in something and think there will be a great payout, whether in spiritual points or money it is often hard to take a closer look and walk away from so much. At some point in all our lives we have been entrapped and did not know how to extricate ourselves. The less extreme and most common are abusive relationships.
_________________________
Question:
How do you feel about the fact that “drink the Kool-Aid” is such a popular phrase?
Deborah Layton:
It’s a complete misnomer, because in fact 140 babies, parents and senior citizens in Jonestown were coerced and murdered. Babies do no commit revolutionary suicide. Jones had it planned. We innocents had no idea.
_________________________
Question:
Was there a lot of sex abuse in the community? A lot of cults seem to have that.
Deborah Layton:
Peoples Temple was a celibate organization. Having said that, Jones did rape men and women against their will — for the purpose of breaking down their sense of self and soul.
_________________________
Question:
Are there any people or organizations which are currently active that you fear may go the way of Jonestown?
Deborah Layton:
Yes, some call themselves churches, however, if joining means turning your back on everything you’ve known — your family, friends who are not in the organization — you are in danger.
Question:
Any in particular?
Deborah Layton:
You know them.
Question:
Is it the church that’s involved in the study of scientists?•
Tags: Deborah Layton, Jim Jones
The private sector is often as incompetent as the government was in its botched Healthcare.gov launch, despite what techies and extreme free-marketers might have you believe. Mistakes in privately held technology companies are common, launches and relaunches are disasters, sites (like Twitter) have trouble with stability for years. I think Clay Shirky gives this truth no mention in his new Foreign Affairs piece about the Affordable Care Act tech meltdown, but it contains a lot of important points about project management. The opening:
“Late last October, the management expert Jeffrey Zients was given a mandate to fix HealthCare.gov, the website at the forefront of U.S. President Barack Obama’s health-care reform, after its disastrous launch. Refusing to engage in happy talk about how well things were going or how soon everything would be fixed, Zients established performance metrics for the site’s responsiveness, insisted on improvements to the underlying hardware, postponed work on nonessential features, demanded rapid reporting of significant problems, and took management oversight away from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS, a federal agency within the Department of Health and Human Services) and gave it instead to a single contractor reporting to him. The result was a newly productive work environment that helped the website progress from grave dysfunction in early October to passable effectiveness two months later.
Zients’ efforts demonstrated the government’s ability to tackle complex technological challenges and handle them both quickly and effectively. Unfortunately for the Obama administration, the transformation came too late to rescue its reputation for technical competence. Given that the people who hired Zients clearly understood what kind of management was required to create a working online insurance marketplace, why did they wait to put in place that sort of management until the project had become an object of public ridicule? And more important, is there any way to prevent other such debacles in the future? The answers to both questions lie in the generally tortured way that the government plans and oversees technology.”
Tags: Barack Obama, Clay Shirky, Jeffrey Zients
“Already she has put a patient to sleep by electricity without performing an operation.”
In the early years of automobiles, electric models were favored, and even steam-driven cars were predominant over models powered by fossil fuels. Things change. Ultimately, the internal-combustion engine proved more stable and became the king of the road.
Interestingly, electricity had a chance to make inroads in another area in which gases had proven to be unstable: anesthesia. In the nascent years of the practice, miscalculations with ether and chloroform led to deaths. No one wanted to go back to the brutality of surgery during consciousness, but there had to be a better way. Enter Dr. Louise G. Rabinovitch, who experimented successfully (and chillingly and unethically, often) with bringing a blissful unconsciousness to animal and human test subjects with electric shock. A better understanding of anesthesia made this jolting scheme unnecessary, but the doctor’s jaw-dropping reports of her experiments likely would have prevented her methods from becoming popular in any case. From an article about “electric sleep” in the September 27, 1908 New York Times:
“PARIS–Dr. Louise G. Rabinovitch, the well-known New York psychoclacist, and Dr. V. Magnan are preparing another stop in their series of discoveries in electric sleep experiments, which have been safely conducted on rabbits and dogs, will be made soon on human beings, patients in the insane hospital in Paris.
Dr. Rabinovitch has been conducting her experiments with hopes of finding the means of doing away entirely with the usual anaesthetics–ether and chloroform–and so far has been very successful.
The City of Paris early in the Summer fitted up a laboratory for the hospital of Sainte-Anne, and there she has been working steadily. Already she has put a patient to sleep by electricity without performing an operation. She has also in several cases used electricity as a local anaesthetic on a part of the arm or leg and has performed a slight operation. Her intention now is, in which she is encouraged by the veteran Dr. Magnan, to perform a serious operation made under the influence of electric sleep. This will be the first time that this has been done anywhere in the world.
Dr. Rabinovitch has made some remarkable discoveries while she has been working in her laboratory, and finds no difficulty in instilling life into animals which have died on the operating table. The immense value of this discovery to physicians when patients die because of an anaesthetic can be seen at once.
“While under the influence of electric sleep I killed her instantly with chloroform.”
One dog playing about the laboratory, the doctor told me, had been dead three times. ‘While under the influence of electric sleep I killed her instantly with chloroform. The heart stopped beating and respiration ceased. If the animal had been left alone then it would have remained dead, but I immediately instituted artificial respiration by means of electricity, and presently the animal started to breathe of its own accord. Again, after I had killed the dog and resuscitated it, hemorrhage set in, caused by an operation, and the dog bled to death. I brought it back to life again. The animal is at present perfectly healthy.’
While I was in the laboratory the doctor put a rabbit under the influence of electric sleep. In a comparatively short time, when the rabbit came out from under the influence, it hopped away contentedly. …
The doctor is confident that all her experiments can be put into practice on human beings. When the animal is under the influence of the current it reacts to no stimulus, and when the current is turned off the awakening is instantaneous. There is no after sickness or stupor.”
Tags: Dr. Magnan, Louise G. Rabinovitch, V. Magnan
Linking yesterday to Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Coolhunt” piece made me think about his 2009 New Yorker article “Offensive Play,” which was bold for connecting the Michael Vick dogfighting scandal to NFL play and spectatorship. Because of the work of the Sports Legacy Institute and Dr. Bennet Omalu and Ann McKee, among others, there had been some media noise about the game and brain damage, but I don’t recall any mainstream attention on such a meaningful level until Gladwell’s inconvenient truth. And since then there’s been an avalanche of it. Sure, there are some key differences between dogfighting and American football (e.g., lack of free will vs. free will), but there are many uncomfortable similarities. I think it’s one of his best-ever pieces for the publication. An excerpt:
“At the core of the C.T.E. research is a critical question: is the kind of injury being uncovered by McKee and Omalu incidental to the game of football or inherent in it? Part of what makes dogfighting so repulsive is the understanding that violence and injury cannot be removed from the sport. It’s a feature of the sport that dogs almost always get hurt. Something like stock-car racing, by contrast, is dangerous, but not unavoidably so.
In 2000 and 2001, four drivers in Nascar’s élite Sprint Cup Series were killed in crashes, including the legendary Dale Earnhardt. In response, Nascar mandated stronger seats, better seat belts and harnesses, and ignition kill switches, and completed the installation of expensive new barriers on the walls of its racetracks, which can absorb the force of a crash much better than concrete. The result is that, in the past eight years, no one has died in Nascar’s three national racing series. Stock-car fans are sometimes caricatured as bloodthirsty, eagerly awaiting the next spectacular crash. But there is little blood these days in Nascar crashes. Last year, at Texas Motor Speedway, Michael McDowell hit an oil slick, slammed head first into the wall at a hundred and eighty miles per hour, flipped over and over, leaving much of his car in pieces on the track, and, when the vehicle finally came to a stop, crawled out of the wreckage and walked away. He raced again the next day. So what is football? Is it dogfighting or is it stock-car racing?”
Tags: Malcolm Gladwell
Dick Cavett, angrily defending Woody Allen from charges of child molestation, in an all-out offensive against Mia Farrow as well as one of his current places of employment, the New York Times, and his co-worker Nicholas Kristof. Articulate as always, he likely skirts litigious language, if barely. Should have mentioned he’s had relationships with Allen and Bob Weide, whose Daily Beast article he references. You can make the argument that his friendship with the former is well-known, but not the latter. Fireworks begin here at the 2:35 mark.
Tags: Bob Weide, Dick Cavett, Nicholas Kristof, Woody Allen
Am I misreading the tea leaves? It seems like a lot of well-to-do New Yorkers are ready to pounce on the new mayor, Bill de Blasio, for any mistakes he makes while becoming acclimated to the job. Could it be that these are faux liberals who are secretly resentful about perhaps paying higher taxes? Maybe not. Time will tell.
From “What Lottery Winners and Tom Perkins Have in Common,” Charles Kenny’s new Businessweek piece about the thought process of a man who is awful even by the non-rigorous standards of the venture-capital world:
“Perkins had the chance to be a successful executive in the first place because he was born privileged enough to enter the Massachusetts Institute of Technology as an undergraduate in 1953, when a little more than 5 percent of Americans aged 25 to 29 had a bachelor’s degree. If he had been born in Liberia, perhaps to a single mother, all bets of billionaire status would be completely off. He surely worked hard, and took risks informed by smarts and insight, but he was incredibly lucky to start where he did and end up where he is now, with enough money for a classic car collection and a massive yacht.
Yet Perkins is far from alone in thinking he’s rich because he earned it and the poor are poor because they didn’t. Indeed, the view seems to be an almost unavoidable side effect of becoming wealthy. A study by British economists Nattavudh Powdthavee and Andrew Oswald released last week looked at lottery winners involved in a general survey of attitudes in the U.K. Comparing views before and after lottery wins, the economists looked at winners’ political allegiances and views toward income distribution. Those surveyed were asked if they agreed or disagreed with the statement ‘ordinary people get a fair share of the nation’s wealth,’ and if they supported the (more right-wing) Conservative Party or the (left-leaning) Labour Party.
A win of just £500 (about $840) made survey respondents 5 percent more likely to change their vote to Conservative from Labour and significantly more likely to think that the current distribution of income was fair. The larger the lottery win, the bigger the impact on the respondents’ beliefs—even though their income rankings rose purely by chance. Considering that Perkins’s earnings from betting on tech startups are more than 1 million times the £500 that Powdthavee and Oswald found sufficient to shift attitudes, and since he did far more to earn his wealth than the lottery winners did, his views on redistribution aren’t surprising.”
Tags: Andrew Oswald, Bill de Blasio, Charles Kenny, Nattavudh Powdthavee, Tom Perkins
Emily Anthes, author of Frankenstein’s Cat, has written a Nautilus article about the integration of AI into nature, an attempt to erase the lines that separate, to bend the natural world according to our will. The opening:
“Several years ago, a group of American cockroaches discovered four strangers in their midst. A brief investigation revealed that the interlopers smelled like cockroaches, and so they were welcomed into the cockroach community. The newcomers weren’t content to just sit on the sidelines, however. Instead, they began to actively shape the group’s behavior. Nocturnal creatures, cockroaches normally avoid light. But when the intruders headed for a brighter shelter, the rest of the roaches followed.
What the cockroaches didn’t seem to realize was that their new, light-loving leaders weren’t fellow insects at all. They were tiny mobile robots, doused in cockroach pheromones and programmed to trick the living critters into following their lead. The demonstration, dubbed the LEURRE project and conducted by a team of European researchers, validated a radical idea—that robots and animals could be merged into a ‘biohybrid’ society, with biological and technological organisms forming a cohesive unit.
A handful of scientists have now built robots that can socially integrate into animal communities. Their goal is to create machines that not only infiltrate animal groups but also influence them, changing how fish swim, birds fly, and bees care for their young. If the research reaches the real world, we may one day use robots to manage livestock, control pests, and protect and preserve wildlife. So, dear furry and feathered friends, creepy and crawly creatures of the world: Prepare for a robo-takeover.”
Tags: Emily Anthes
In a post-Jobs world, Apple has offered new iterations of the old but delivered no new great product. Perhaps entry into the auto and medical sectors will change that? Given the company’s history, the latter feels far afield. From Thomas Lee and David R. Baker at the San Francisco Chronicle:
“A source tells The Chronicle that Perica met with Tesla CEO Elon Musk in Cupertino last spring around the same time analysts suggested Apple acquire the electric car giant.
A spokeswoman for Tesla declined to comment. Apple did not respond to a request for comment.
The newspaper has also learned that Apple is heavily exploring medical devices, specifically sensor technology that can help predict heart attacks. Led by Tomlinson Holman, a renowned audio engineer who invented THX and 10.2 surround sound, Apple is exploring ways to predict heart attacks by studying the sound blood makes at it flows through arteries.
Taken together, Apple’s potential forays into automobiles and medical devices, two industries worlds away from consumer electronics, underscore the company’s deep desire to move away from iPhones and iPads and take big risks.”
Tags: David R. Baker, Thomas Lee, Tomlinson Holman
War is an exchange of information with terrible human consequences. Perhaps eventually any loss of life will be unacceptable, and it will just be our robots versus your robots. But until then greater information may lead to greater casualties.
Some scientists are now looking to emulate termite “architecture” in robots, which may ultimately lead to automated navies. It’s not termite art but termite war. An excerpt from the Economist:
“Individual termites are, of course, far too dim to understand such things as convection and solar flux. Instead, a few simple rules encoded in their nervous systems by evolution and regulated by signalling chemicals called pheromones steer them to produce their mounds in all their architectural glory. This kind of behaviour, in which simple actions combine to produce sophisticated results, is called emergence.
Now human designers are getting interested in emergence, too. In a paper just published in Science, a group at Harvard, led by Justin Werfel, describes termite-inspired robots that can build things by combining magnetic bricks of a standard size. All their human controller has to do is program them with a few appropriate rules and leave them to get on with it.
Robot construction teams are not, in themselves, new. Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania have already demonstrated a system which uses remotely controlled flying robots to build things. What makes Dr Werfel’s approach different is that instead of having a controlling force, in the form of a computer program, sitting at the centre telling everything else what to do (as was the case in Pennsylvania), control is distributed throughout the system’s components, which cannot communicate with each other. The robots, which are little wheeled contraptions, do not need to see the bigger picture.
In the case of termites, the bigger picture is provided by natural selection, which has, over the millennia, refined the rules that individual termites obey. In the case of Dr Werfel’s robots, a human designer specifies the desired outcome and, with the help of a program developed by the team, generates the rules that will lead to its construction, with which each robot is then programmed. All that remains is to place a foundation brick to show the robots where to start building.”
Tags: Justin Werfel
If she’s not exactly hunting for cool, Intel’s Dr. Genevieve Bell is certainly pursuing happiness. The anthropologist leads a team of thinkers and futurists who scour the Earth to figure out what you want from personal technology, even before you can name it. They want to know what’s on your mind. They want to make you happy. From a profile of Dr. Bell by Natasha Singer in the New York Times:
“‘My mandate at Intel has always been to bring the stories of everyone outside the building inside the building — and make them count,’ says Dr. Bell, who considers herself among the outsiders. ‘You have to understand people to build the next generation of technology.’
By ‘outside,’ she isn’t referring only to consumers outside of the United States. Dr. Bell and her team are responsible for sussing out the attributes that people everywhere love, or wish they could have, in their PCs, televisions and so on. Over the last few years, they have been concentrating on consumers’ appetites for hyper-personal technology, like voice-recognition systems and fitness trackers. In essence, they are pushing Intel toward a more people-centric era of personal computing.
Lately, that work has become all the more important to the company. That is because Intel, which has long dominated the laptop processor field, was surprisingly slow to acknowledge the burgeoning market for smartphone chips. In fact, Dr. Bell and her team, among others, had forecast the mobile trend early on, says Diane M. Bryant, the general manager of Intel’s data center group, but Intel didn’t prioritize it at the time. Although the company recently introduced new chips for mobile devices, PC makers are still Intel’s largest customer base, accounting for $33 billion of its $52.7 billion in revenue last year.
Now, attributable in part to the efforts of Dr. Bell and her team, Intel is trying to catch up, forging into realms like wearable gadgets that could showcase its new, lower-powered ultrasmall chips. Futurists on Dr. Bell’s team are also developing a customizable personal robot, about the size of a big teddy bear, based on the new mini-chips. Where even a decade ago Intel still focused largely on turning out increasingly efficient technology for its industrial customers, its executives say, the company now looks to consumer happiness as a starting point of product development.”
From the March 17, 1876 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“The horrible alternative of cannibalism or death was forced upon the surviving portion of the crew of the British ship Greta, on its recent trip from San Francisco. The captain’s two sons died of starvation, eleven of the crew were drowned and four died from exposure. In the little boat in which was the captain and thirteen men, the men who died were eaten to allay the horrible hunger of those who survived. Their sufferings made them little else than beasts, though the dim spark of the divine in their natures saved them from the worse and most extreme act of adding murder to the lesser crime. In the last stage of emaciation and absolute wretchedness they held to the manhood of men, and waited for death to come to the others that life might be retained to them.”
Can New York survive–thrive, even–as a self-sufficient and green city-state, with all its food coming from farming towers and miniature greenhouses? It’s not something that’s ever going to completely happen, but knowing what is possible could lead us to healthier, more-sustainable choices. From an Aeon essay by Michael Sorkin of NYC (Steady) State, an organization that hopes to answer that question:
“New York is a city of foodies with a staggering profusion of cuisines, and it has bred an advanced discourse about nutrition, organisation, justice, technology, and culture. It abounds with community gardens, with increasingly large commercial farming, and other sites of production, from backyards to rooftops to the tofu-producing cellars of Chinatown, but also with a rich distributive infrastructure of food co‑ops, farmers’ markets, meals‑on‑wheels, soup kitchens, school cafeterias and restaurants. The question for us was: how can all of this be elaborated into more supple and comprehensive networks that take account of our transformed habits and desires? And, to what degree could this be scaled up to feed 8.5 million people?
We discovered that it is in fact technically feasible to produce 2,500 nutritious calories a day for everyone in the city. At one level, the required infrastructure is not entirely outlandish. It would depend on the widespread use of vertical farming, building over existing infrastructure – railways, highways, factories, etc – and the densification of some parts of the city currently built at suburban scale. The cost, however, would be prodigious and many of the implications highly vexed. For example, the energy required to light, heat, and build all of this is, we’ve calculated, approximately equivalent to the output of 25 nuclear power plants, an eventuality that is, to put it mildly, somewhat at odds with our larger intentions. Likewise, the necessarily industrialised character of such production would beg the question of resisting the tender mercies of agri-business and the huge variety of its downside effects.
But, by finding a series of ‘sweet spots’, or more nominally ‘practical’ scales for sustainable food production, we’ve sought to balance cost and benefit socially, environmentally, economically, and culturally. We’ve looked at window boxes; at using the subways for freight; at a scheme encompassing the territory with a 100-mile radius around the city; and at reusing the 19th-century Erie Canal for a statewide system. We’ve recaptured street space, designed skyscraper farms for plants and animals, and plotted how to integrate all this into the fabric of the existing city. And, we’ve sought to deepen the idea of the urban neighbourhood as the core unit of sustainable urban organisation.”
Tags: Michael Sorkin
Chicago, the major American metropolis with the most stubborn racial divides, has seen its tale of two cities be told with even greater emphasis since Rahm Emanuel became Mayor. From Edward Luce’s insightful Financial Times article about the former Obama chief of staff:
“Crudely measured, Chicago is roughly a third white, a third black and a third Hispanic. Most Chicagoans seem to accept it that way. ‘We are the most segregated city in America,’ goes the joke. ‘Ain’t it great?’ Since Emanuel took office, however, things have polarised. Most white Chicagoans support him – as do a majority of Hispanics, according to the polls. Most African-Americans no longer do. The corporate world within Chicago’s elevated rail ‘loop’ has rarely had it so good. The same goes for pockets inside its largely Hispanic West Side. But Chicago’s South Side, where a young Obama cut his teeth as a community organiser, continues to fester. A rash of school closures last year did little to help. ‘Black families who can leave Chicago are still leaving,’ says Cobb. They call it ‘degentrification.’
Emanuel’s often testy relations with Chicago’s black neighbourhoods could be pivotal to his re-election next year. The gulf between the two Chicagos is at least as big as that between the ‘two New Yorks’, which Bill de Blasio, the new mayor of the Big Apple, has promised to bridge. De Blasio comes from the Democratic party’s liberal (‘Sandinista’) wing and promised to make New York’s Upper East Side pay more to make life better for its underclasses. Emanuel is closer to Michael Bloomberg, de Blasio’s predecessor, who drew on his philanthropic networks to revitalise New York’s economic heart. Both are enthusiasts for non-union charter schools. De Blasio, on the other hand, is a champion of the unions.
Emanuel’s Chicago versus de Blasio’s New York may be the closest America has to an experiment in how to make its cities both liveable and competitive in the 21st century. ‘Look, we face international forces that are far bigger than us,’ Emanuel told me in an interview in Mexico City, which he was visiting to inaugurate a city-to-city partnership (almost a quarter of Chicagoans were born in Mexico). I had asked him whether he and de Blasio were rivals. ‘We both have a great amount of concentrated wealth and great poverty,’ he replied. ‘My challenge is to make it a still-great city for the middle-class families that are the bedrock of Chicago.’
Emanuel’s impact so far depends on whom you ask.”
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“It’s supposed to be fun”:
Tags: Barack Obama, Bill de Blasio, Edward Luce, Rahm Emanuel
The idiosyncratic geneticist Svante Pääbo, whose new book has just been published, has taught us much about our ancient roots, our ties to Neanderthals and Denisovans. From Robin McKie’s Guardian profile of Pääbo, a passage about the scientist’s research on the former:
“His results provided a shock for both researchers and the public. When he compared his newly created Neanderthal genome with those of modern humans, he found a small but significant overlap in many of them. About 2% of Neanderthal genes could be found in people of European, Asian and far eastern origin. People from Africa had no Neanderthal genes, however. ‘This was not a technical error of some sort,’ Pääbo insists. ‘Neanderthals had contributed DNA to people living today. It was amazingly cool. Neanderthals were not totally extinct.’
Most scientists, including Pääbo, now account for this result by arguing that modern humans – when they first emerged from Africa – encountered and mated with Neanderthals in the Middle East. Their offspring carried some Neanderthal genes and as modern humans swept through Asia and Europe they carried these genes with them.
The revelation that many humans possess Neanderthal genes fascinated the public. Dozens of individuals have since written to Pääbo claiming to be full Neanderthals. Intriguingly, nearly all of them have been men. The only women who wrote did so to say they thought their husbands were Neanderthals. ‘I think that says a lot about our image of Neanderthals,’ says Pääbo.
Just what that input of Neanderthal DNA has done for Homo sapiens’s evolution is less clear. Pääbo speculates that changes in sperm mobility and alterations in skin cell structure could be involved. In addition, US researchers have recently proposed that Neanderthals passed on gene variants that may have had a beneficial effects in the past but which have now left people prone to type 2 diabetes and Crohn’s disease. ‘This is work that is going to go on for years,’ he adds.”
Tags: Robin McKie, Svante Pääbo
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Table tennis champ Timo Boll faces off against a KUKA robot in Shanghai on March 11. Are humans still in the lead? Are we still winning for now?
From the German company’s site: “KUKA is active in the market for robots and automated production systems, primarily for the automotive industry, but increasingly also for other segments of industry, such as metalworking, medical technology and food production. The principal driver for growth in these markets is the increasing demand for automation solutions due to the generally rising pressure on costs which meanwhile also affects small and medium-sized enterprises.”
Tags: Timo Boll
We appreciate the pioneering spirit but sometimes in retrospect discount the costs. The experiences of Clarence M. Dally, a former military man and glassblower who worked as Thomas Edison’s point person on the development of X-rays, serve as a cautionary tale. From an article in the October 4, 1904 New York Times:
“EAST ORANGE–Clarence M. Dally, electrical engineer, died yesterday at his home 108 Clinton Street North, East Orange, a martyr to science, the beginning of his illness having been due to his experimental work in connection with the Roentgen rays. For seven years he patiently bore terrible suffering and underwent seven operations, which finally culminated in the amputation of both his arms.
During the experimental work on the X-rays Mr. Dally was Thomas A. Edison’s chief assistant. Mr. Edison himself was slightly burned with the chemicals, but Mr. Dally, who had almost all of the experimenting to do, was quite badly burned on his hands. He suffered no pain from these burns, but his hands looked as though they had been scalded.
Six months after the first indications appeared the hands began to swell, and Mr. Dally was unable to keep at work continuously, but went to many of the hospitals where the X-ray was being installed and set up the machines and did some work in the laboratory besides. He suffered in this way for two years, when he and his family went West.
Cancer finally developed on the left wrist, and he came East for treatment. An operation was performed, but not successfully.
The disease then steadily spread and Dally was taken to the New York Post-Graduate Hospital, where the affected arm was amputated four inches below the shoulder. For a time an improvement was apparent, but the little finger on the right arm became affected, and on Nov. 1902, this member was taken off at his home.
Three other fingers were removed on June 16, 1903. The development of a spot on the wrist made it necessary to perform another operation on Sept. 7 of the same year. On Nov. 18 the physicians performed another operation where the stump of the little finger remained. Later the right arm was amputated.
A pair of artificial arms was provided for him, but he used them only a week when he was obliged to succumb, the disease having affected his entire system. During the seven years he had been unable to care for himself, and all the time he was West he was obliged to rest his hands in water during the night to allay the terrible burning sensation.”
Tags: C.M. Dally, Clarence M. Dally, Thomas Edison
Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, who thinks the sky may be fake or falling, has a new title, Superintelligence, which is about the Singularlity, out later this year. An excerpt from Bookseller about it, and then a passage from a 2007 New York Times article in which I first encountered Bostrom’s version of our world as a computer simulation.
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From Bookseller:
“’Everyone wonders when we’ll create a machine that’s as smart as us—or maybe just a little bit smarter than us. What people can fail to realise is that’s not the end of the process, rather [it’s] the beginning,’ [Oxford University Press science publisher Keith] Mansfield commented. ‘The smart machine will be capable of improving itself, becoming smarter still. Very quickly, we may see an intelligence explosion, with humanity left far behind.’
Just as the fate of gorillas now depends more on humans than on gorillas themselves, so the fate of our species would come to depend on the actions of machine superintelligence, Bostrom’s book will argue.”
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From “Our Lives, Controlled From Some Guy’s Couch,” by John Tierney:
“Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or ‘posthumans,’ could run ‘ancestor simulations’ of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.
Some computer experts have projected, based on trends in processing power, that we will have such a computer by the middle of this century, but it doesn’t matter for Dr. Bostrom’s argument whether it takes 50 years or 5 million years. If civilization survived long enough to reach that stage, and if the posthumans were to run lots of simulations for research purposes or entertainment, then the number of virtual ancestors they created would be vastly greater than the number of real ancestors.
There would be no way for any of these ancestors to know for sure whether they were virtual or real, because the sights and feelings they’d experience would be indistinguishable. But since there would be so many more virtual ancestors, any individual could figure that the odds made it nearly certain that he or she was living in a virtual world.
The math and the logic are inexorable once you assume that lots of simulations are being run. But there are a couple of alternative hypotheses, as Dr. Bostrom points out. One is that civilization never attains the technology to run simulations (perhaps because it self-destructs before reaching that stage). The other hypothesis is that posthumans decide not to run the simulations.
‘This kind of posthuman might have other ways of having fun, like stimulating their pleasure centers directly,’ Dr. Bostrom says. ‘Maybe they wouldn’t need to do simulations for scientific reasons because they’d have better methodologies for understanding their past. It’s quite possible they would have moral prohibitions against simulating people, although the fact that something is immoral doesn’t mean it won’t happen.’
Dr. Bostrom doesn’t pretend to know which of these hypotheses is more likely, but he thinks none of them can be ruled out.”
Tags: John Tierney, Nick Bostrom