“Machine Washing Is Like Trying To Clean Your Clothes By Giving It A Bath”

February 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Where does the washing machine rank in the pantheon of revolutionary inventions? After the wheel and printing press, sure, but it holds a prominent place. The machines have improved over decades, but the fundamentals have remained stubbornly the same. In our lifetimes, I would wager that the soaking-and-circulating tub method will fall into obsolescence. From Tuan C. Nguyen at the Smithsonian blog:

“The electric washing machines are right up there with automobiles and personal computers. With the press of a button, a load of laundry that had once taken in excess of four hours to clean was reduced to a 40-minute automated process. Some economists have even credited the time-saving appliance with precipitating the rise of women in the workforce during the 1950s, as homemakers were suddenly freed up to take up other pursuits.

But for all its necessary convenience, the conventional washing machine has remained, to this day, a resource-intensive technology that requires as much as 55 gallons of water per load and electricity to heat the water. Nor is it even the most efficient method for removing stains. ‘Machine washing is like trying to clean your clothes by giving it a bath,’ explains Jonathon Benjamin, a longtime industry executive and head of Xeros Cleaning’s North American operations. ‘Not all the dirt gets washed away as some of it just gets moved around in all that water.’  

Since 2010, the UK-based startup has been introducing into several markets a radical, nearly-waterless machine that allegedly leaves clothes cleaner while using 72 percent less water, cutting energy costs by as much as 47 percent. The Xeros cleaning system, found at select athletic clubs, drop-off cleaners and Hyatt hotels, does this by swapping out water for tiny plastic beads specially-engineered to absorb dirt directly—and therefore more effectively—from fabric.”

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“It Is Merely Part Of An Odyssey”

February 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports, Videos | Permalink

If Bruce Jenner really has sexual-reassignment surgery as the tabloids have speculated, it would be the first reasonable thing he’s done since winning a gold medal in 1976. As Sochi opens, here’s a repost of an item about one of America’s greatest Olympians.

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Why the fuck did Bruce Jenner do it to himself? This 1976 short film profiles him becoming the greatest athlete in the world, before the divorces, the Village People, the cosmetic surgeries and the Kardashians–before he performed reverse alchemy, going from gold to plastic.

“Computers Attained More Prominent Physical Locations Within A Room”

February 7, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve never watched a single episode of Law & Order. Never. Seems impossible, I know. But artist Jeff Thompson did something amazing with the long-running series’ 456 episodes, documenting every appearance of a computer in the history of the show, which premiered, as did the World Wide Web, in 1990. In doing so, Thompson charted the program’s unintentional chronicling of a society in transformation. From Rebecca J. Rosen at the Atlantic:

“…Most of the technology on the show seems to have come as an afterthought. ‘No one was probably thinking about, you know, what kind of mouse should we use, or where should it go in the room,’ says Thompson. They just represented whatever was the norm of the time, and, in doing so, documented details of computer history that perhaps no one at the time could have articulated—details that were so commonplace they went totally unnoticed.

For instance, when computers appear on Law & Order in the early ’90s they are often not on. Who at the time would have said, ‘We have these new machines in the office. We only turn them on when we need to use them, and they are off the rest of the time.’ The fact that computers tended to be off is only noticeable in light of today’s habit of leaving them on, even during a task that is not specifically on a computer (which may not even happen that often anyway). People’s work-streams were not computer-based, and computers only were booted up for a specific task.

Another shift Thompson noticed is that over time, computers attained more prominent physical locations within a room. Early on, computers tended to be off to the side, on a specialized desk, perhaps for many people to share, using it for one specific task. If a character had his or her own computer, it would be located on a separate table behind his or her desk, not on the desk itself. It’s not until 1995 that the first computer makes the leap from behind the desk to its central ‘desktop’ position we all are so familiar with today.”

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Old Print Article: “M. Santos-Dumont Rounds Eiffel Tower,” New York Times (1901)

February 6, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“The enormous crowd…gave the aeronaut a tremendous ovation.”

Alberto Santos-Dumont, a Brazilian aviation pioneer whose chosen vocation was influenced by early reading of Jules Verne, answered a challenge in 1901 to travel around the Eiffel Tower in his airship within 30 minutes. From a report that year in the October 20th New York Times:

“Paris–Santos-Dumont, who rounded the Eiffel Tower to-day in his airship, started for the first time at 2:29, but on leaving the park his guide rope caught in a tree and he was obliged to descend. He started against 2:42 P.M., rose 250 yards and then pointed for the Eiffel Tower, the balloon going in a straight line.

It was seen, through field glasses, to arrive at the tower and round it. The time, up to that point, with the wind in the balloon’s favor, was eight minutes and forty-five seconds. It returned against the wind and made slower headway, but still kept in true direction for St. Cloud, which it reached in the total time of twenty-nine minutes, fifteen seconds.

But, instead of descending immediately, Santos-Dumont made a broad sweep over the Aero Club grounds, with the result that another minute and twenty-five seconds were consumed before the workmen seized the guide rope. Thus, technically, Santos-Dumont exceeded the time limit by forty seconds.

The enormous crowd which had gathered inside and outside the grounds gave the aeronaut a tremendous ovation. As his basket came within speaking distance, Santos-Dumont leaned over the side and asked:

‘Have I won the prize?’

“A number of ladies who were present threw flowers over the aeronaut.”

Hundreds of spectators shouted: ‘Yes! Yes!’ But the Count de Dion, a member of the committee approached and threw a damper on the enthusiasm by saying:

‘My friend, you have lost the prize by forty seconds.’

The crowd, however, refused to accept this view and a warm discussion ensued, the majority of the spectators taking the ground that Santos-Dumont was entitled to the prize.

The aeronaut, after protesting against the decision of the committee, finally shrugged his shoulders and remarked:

‘I do not care personally for the 100,000 francs. I intended to give it to the poor.’

A number of ladies who were present threw flowers over the aeronaut, others offered him bouquets, and one admirer, to the amusement of the onlookers, even presented him with a little white rabbit.”

“I Can’t Visualize Living With The Knowledge That A Computer Is Stronger Than The Human Mind”

February 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Usain Bolt runs really fast, for a human. Slow for a sheep.

Similarly, humans play chess really well for humans, but we’re inferior when competing on a wider playing field, when AI is introduced. That means we must redefine the way we view our role in the world.

Before the shift was complete and computers became our partners–our betters, in some unnerving ways–Garry Kasparov still had a fighting chance and so did you and I. At the end of the 1980s, the chess champion was able to stave off the onslaught, if only for a little while longer, when challenged by Deep Thought. From an article by Harold C. Schonberg in the October 23, 1989 New York Times:

“Yesterday Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion, played Deep Thought, the world computer chess champion, in a two-game match. He won both games handily, to nobody’s surprise, including his own.

Two hours before the start of the first game, held at the New York Academy of Art at 419 Lafayette Street in Manhattan, he held a conference for some 75 journalists representing news organizations all over the world. They were attracted to the event because of the possibility of an upset and the philosophical problems an upset would cause. Deep Thought, after all, has recently been beating grandmasters. Does this mean that the era of human chess supremacy is drawing to a close?

Yes, in the opinion of computer and chess experts.

The time is rapidly coming, all believe, when chess computers will be operating with a precision, rapidity and completeness of information that will far eclipse anything the human mind can do. In three to five years, Deep Thought will be succeeded by a computer with a thousand times its strength and rapidity. And computers scanning a million million positions a second are less than 10 years away. As for the creativity, intuition and brilliance of the great players, chess computers have already demonstrated that they can dream up moves that make even professionals gasp with admiration. It may be necessary to hold championship chess matches for computers and separate ones for humans. …

Mr. Kasparov, unlike many of the experts, was even doubtful that a computer could ever play with the imagination and creativity of a human, though he did look ahead to the next generation of computers and shuddered at what might be coming. Deep Thought can scan 720,000 positions a second. The creators of Deep Thought have developed plans for a machine that can scan a billion positions a second, and it may be ready in five years.

‘That means,’ grinned Mr. Kasparov, ‘that I can be champion for five more years.’ More seriously, he continued: ‘But I can’t visualize living with the knowledge that a computer is stronger than the human mind. I had to challenge Deep Thought for this match, to protect the human race.'”

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“What you have here is the phenomenon of how we define ourselves in relationship to the machine”:

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“Once A Brain Has Been Imaged, Can You Effectively Play Back That Information, Like A Tape?”

February 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

“This Guy Wants To Help You Download Your Brain” is Monica Heisey’s Vice interview with Russell Hanson, who’d like you to do a backup of your most important files, to make a copy of your gray matter in case of accident or virus. An excerpt:

“Question:

So once a brain has been imaged, can you effectively play back that information, like a tape?

Russell Hanson:

A single snapshot is a static image, so you can’t play something back that doesn’t have a time series associated with it. Conceivably, you could ‘rewind’ just as you can peer back in time into your memories. The way different people access different pieces of their memories is hierarchical and everything is built upon prior experience, so you would have to build a special kind of ‘relative knowledge engine’ that needs to construct the mechanism of accessing the memories for each person individually. Research has shown that the brain is very poor at telling wall-clock time, and is affected by all sorts of things, like whether we caused an event or not. So no—you can’t really ‘play back’ the information in the kind of frame-by-frame or second-by-second manner we’re used to with audio or visual recordings.

Question:

The connectome, from my understanding, is simply the documentation of connections, but provides no information about what is being passed between neurons at these points. If you can’t play back or otherwise access the information in your brain, what’s the use to the average person of having a map of their brain’s pathways?

Russell Hanson:

The goal of the work is to build the infrastructure to make this data usable and interesting. It is pretty clear that having the brain map is a necessary first component to ‘playing back’ or ‘running’ a meaningful dynamical simulation of a brain, whether it’s a mouse, fly, or human. We decided to tackle this engineering challenge first before the other one—that’s being worked on by other very capable groups. In its simplest form, this research will surely inform treatments for devastating diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism, depression, and others—research that the governmental funding agencies have a long history of supporting.”

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“Putin Did Not Choose Sochi By Chance”

February 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports, Videos | Permalink

Few things fascinate me as much as the Olympics, for the actual sports, sure, but also for the politics and sociology that permeate the Games, the way countries use the event to attempt to remake themselves, the things that are said through ceremony rather than words. And, of course, of equal interest is what’s communicated despite the best efforts of countries to stifle them (e.g., Jesse Owens leaving Hitler in the dust in 1936).

From “Why Sochi?” Christian Caryl’s New York Review of Books piece, a brief explanation of why oh why such an unlikely locale would play host to the world:

“In all the comment about this month’s Sochi Olympics, there is bewilderment above all about Sochi itself: Why on earth would the Kremlin decide to host the Games in an underdeveloped place where terrorists lurk nearby—a place that a front-page New York Times story this week describes as ‘the edge of a war zone’?

The answer is not as complicated as it may seem. Vladimir Putin comes from St. Petersburg. He rules from Moscow. But it is the North Caucasus that launched him on his path to the summit of Russian power. Anyone who wants to understand the many controversies now roiling around Sochi must start with this fundamental political fact.

Russia launched its Olympic bid in 2006, a moment when Putin was basking in his hard-won status as the leader who had finally vanquished the long-running rebellion in Chechnya. Putin did not choose Sochi by chance. He believed that presiding over an Olympic miracle in the foothills of the Caucasus Mountains, not far from places that had been battlefields a few years before, would cement his triumph over historical enemies.”

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Japan announces its postwar recovery at the 1964 Games:

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“Today’s Reformers Think New Technology Renders This Old Argument Redundant”

February 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If history has taught us anything, it’s that trying to hold off the future does not work. The Industrial Revolution was frightening, but countries that resisted (or lacked the wherewithal to join) were left behind. The rest of us grew richer (if unevenly). The same is true of the Computer Age, with all its challenges. Avoid it at your own peril. People argue against technology until the technology gets so good that the argument is silenced. Better to try to “reform from within” than smash the machines. From a new Economist article about the teaching of mathematics:

“Maths education has been a battlefield before: the American ‘math wars’ of the 1980s pitted traditionalists, who emphasised fluency in pen-and-paper calculations, against reformers led by the country’s biggest teaching lobby, who put real-world problem-solving, often with the help of calculators, at the centre of the curriculum. A backlash followed as parents and academics worried that the ‘new math’ left pupils ill-prepared for university courses in mathematics and the sciences. But as many countries have since found, training pupils to ace exams is not the same as equipping them to use their hard-won knowledge in work and life.

Today’s reformers think new technology renders this old argument redundant. They include Conrad Wolfram, who worked on Mathematica, a program which allows users to solve equations, visualise mathematical functions and much more. He argues that computers make rote procedures, such as long division, obsolete. ‘If it is high-level problem-solving and critical thinking we’re after, there’s not much in evidence in a lot of curriculums,’ he says.”

“The Bubbles Were Accurately Measured By Specially Built Calipers”

February 6, 2014 in Politics, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Because I foolishly continue to live in NYC, I have Seasonal Affective Disorder. I really, really need Spring Training to start. Until then, some Joe Garagiola.

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Bazooka Joe: Eye lost to knife fight on pier.

In 1975, Joe Garagiola hosted a remarkably stupid and wonderful bubble-gum blowing competition among baseball players, which was sponsored by Bazooka, a brand of gum favored by hoboes during World War II. One entrant was Philadelphia catcher Tim McCarver, whose head was the size of a medicine ball. The moment the contest ended, the players went in search of the nastiest groupies they could find.

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I previously posted a brief documentary about Morganna the Kissing Bandit. Here’s her 1976 appearance on To Tell the Truth. Fittingly, the host was a male sports figure, Joe Garagiola. On the panel was film critic Gene Shalit, who was mediocre but possessed a mustache.

When I used to see Shalit at movie screenings, he would sometimes be listening to a Walkman during the film and talking aloud to himself. One time when I was sitting a row ahead of him, he screamed at me when I got up to leave after the movie was over. “Get out of the way,” he hollered. “I’m trying to watch the credits.” The dipshit was sort of right.

I need to know who catered the film.

I need to know who catered the film.

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Like the first President he served, former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger became quite a baseball junkie, especially in his post-Washington career. At the 15:40 mark of this episode of The Baseball of World of Joe Garagiola, we see Kissinger, who could only seem competent when standing alongside that block of wood Bowie Kuhn, being honored at Fenway Park before the second game of the sensational 1975 World Series. During the raucous run by the raffish New York Mets in the second half of 1980s, both Nixon and Kissinger became mainstays at Shea Stadium. Nixon was known to send congratulatory personal notes to the players, including Darryl Strawberry. It was criminals rooting for criminals.

“The News Market Will Expand By 2020 To About 5 Billion People Worldwide”

February 6, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Even if Broadway disappeared, there’d always be theater. We need stories. The same is true of newspapers and journalism. Reportage is rarely what we’d like it to be–and those reading the news are rarely ideal themselves–but the process will always march on. Via Johana Bhuiyan and Nicole Levy at Capital New York, some predictions for the near-term future of news from Marc Andreessen:

  • The news market will expand by 2020 to about 5 billion people worldwide, consuming mostly on mobile devices.
  • News organizations that report broadly at an extremely gross scale, or very deeply at a small scale, will thrive on the new eyeballs.
  • Advertising remains the best way to make newsgathering profitable but publishers need to take responsibility for the quality of their ads, or work with partners in the ad tech field who do.
  • Subscription models, as well as conferences and events, are here to stay: “Many consumers pay $ for things they value much of the time. If they’re unwilling to pay, ask Q, are they really valuing?”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

February 5, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"I will constantly be asking for pictures."

“I will constantly be asking for pictures.”

Baby Rats ~ NOT Food !

Hello,

One of my male rats have recently passed away, leaving my poor Shadow alone.

I refuse to let him live without the company of other rats, and I was thinking about getting a female rat this time.

If I get a lot of replies, I will do so (if I don’t, I will just get a male rat. It is not a big deal, just wanted to help out some people) and when they have babies everyone that has emailed me will get one (or however many as you want)

You name your price, they are NOT FOOD!!!!!!!!

Pick up only, depending on location. I am in Corona, Queens.

I will constantly be asking for pictures, and making sure they have a good home prior to giving them up.

Email me back.

Afflictor Nation: Great Britain Wins January

February 5, 2014 in Misc. | Permalink

Piers Morgan: Pre-op for a brain transplant.

Piers Morgan: Pre-op for a brain transplant.

 

The Top 5 foreign countries sending traffic to Afflictor in January:

  1. Great Britain
  2. Canada
  3. Germany
  4. France
  5. Ukraine

 

“Robots Are Just The Most Visible Piece Of This Miraculous Turnaround Of A City On The Brink”

February 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Detroit had RoboCop while Pittsburgh had actual robots. Guess which erstwhile industrial giant remade itself in post-manufacturing America and which one fell into complete disrepair? From “The Robots That Saved Pittsburgh,” by Glenn Thrush at Politico:

“‘Roboburgh,’ the boosterish moniker conferred on the city by the Wall Street Journal in 1999 and cited endlessly in Pittsburgh’s marketing materials ever since, may have been premature back then, but it isn’t now: Pittsburgh, after decades of trying to remake itself, today really does have a new economy, rooted in the city’s rapidly growing robotic, artificial intelligence, health technology, advanced manufacturing and software industries. It’s growing in population for the first time since the 1950s, and now features regularly in lists like ‘the Hottest Cities of the Future’ and ‘Best Cities for Working Mothers.’ ‘The city is sort of in a sweet spot,’ says Sanjiv Singh, a [Red] Whittaker acolyte at Carnegie Mellon who is working on the first-of-its-kind pilotless medical evacuation helicopter for the Marines. ‘It has the critical mass of talent you need, it’s still pretty affordable and it has corporate memory—the people here still remember when the place was an industrial powerhouse.’

Improbably for a blue-collar town that seemed headed for the scrap heap when its steel industry collapsed, Pittsburgh has developed into one of the country’s most vibrant tech centers, a hotbed of innovation that can no longer be ignored by the industry’s titans. Carnegie Mellon is Google’s biggest rival in the race to build a driverless car, partnering with GM to build a robot Cadillac that has been humanlessly tooling around Route 19, just outside city limits. In 2011, Google opened a posh, 40,000-square-foot office in an old Nabisco factory in the city’s East Liberty neighborhood, ramping up last year to 350 people, with more on the way. Bill Gates and other Silicon Valley moguls have invested millions of dollars in Aquion Energy, a start-up spun out of CMU that is developing next-generation batteries and producing them in nearby Westermoreland County, not China. Apple, RAND and Intel also have outposts in town and Disney, which has tapped the university’s computer and robotics talent for years, is partnering with the school to improve cinematic graphics and to develop hominid robots that can gently hand objects to people by predicting the movement around them. All told, Pittsburgh’s tech and education sectors now account for some 80 percent of the high-wage jobs in the city, and robots are just the most visible piece of this miraculous turnaround of a city on the brink.”

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“Snagging Those Daily Doubles Offers Him A Massive Statistical Advantage”

February 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Arthur Chu has recently won money and attention for doing something on Jeopardy! that even Watson didn’t attempt: gaming the system–hacking it in a sense. IBM’s robot beat the humans the old-fashioned way, never using out-of-ordinary strategy to circumvent the spirit of the game or disrupt it. Contestant Chu has done just that. For instance: He pursues Daily Doubles he knows he can’t answer, betting a miniscule amount on them, absorbing a nominal loss and scrubbing them off the board so that the other players can’t gain from them. And that’s just one of his “tricks,” all legal if unorthodox, intended to not break the rules but the bank. 

From “Meet the Man Who Hacked Jeopardy,” Jason Schreier’s Kotaku interview with a champion for the search-engine age:

“So what makes Chu so unusual? While most players will start from the top of each column on the Jeopardy board and progress sequentially as question difficulty increases, Chu picks questions at random, using what’s called the Forrest Bounce to hunt for the three Daily Doubles, which are often scattered among the harder questions in every game. Instead of moving from the $200 question to the $400 question and so forth, Chu might bounce between all of the $1,600 or $2,000 questions—not the kind of strategy you often see on Jeopardy.

Chu does this for two reasons. For one, it throws everyone off balance. ‘It’s a lot more mentally tiring to have to jump around the board like that,’ Chu told me.

More importantly, snagging those Daily Doubles offers him a massive statistical advantage. Since Daily Doubles allow players to bet up to their entire bankrolls, just one can swing an entire Jeopardy match—and Chu’s strategy is to control them all, even just to prevent other players from using them.

‘The only chance you have to give yourself an edge—the only moment of power, or choice you have in Jeopardy is choosing the next clue if you got the last one right,’ Chu said.”

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“The Key Issue Is How Vulnerable They Are To Such Waves Of Creative Destruction”

February 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

At the New Yorker blog, John Cassidy tries to handicap which company will likely be around in 20 or 30 years, Microsoft or Facebook. I suppose my answer is it doesn’t really matter since there’s little chance either will be influential even if they’re still in business at that point. But it’s still a fun exercise. From Cassidy:

“As Brian Arthur, an economist at the Sante Fe Institute, explained many years ago, the technology industry is different from most other businesses, where incumbents, such as Toyota and Hilton, build up franchises that are difficult to dislodge but which don’t take over the entire market. The tech industry, on the other hand, is defined by successive waves of innovation, and it operates more like a long-running lottery, with the prize for each drawing being a temporary monopoly. Microsoft is Microsoft because, back in the eighties, it won the lottery for the operating-system market. Facebook is Facebook because it won the lottery for the social-networking market.

In the technology world, market leaders, generally speaking, don’t get dislodged by competitors who build a better or cheaper version of their product. Eventually, though, they do tend to get displaced by companies that create, or popularize, a new technology that shifts the entire industry in a different direction. (Look at what digital cameras did to Eastman Kodak.) In assessing the long-term prospects of technology firms, the key issue is how vulnerable they are to such waves of creative destruction. And in conducting such an assessment, short-term indicators, such as growth rates and recent movements in stock prices, can be misleading.“

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A Brief Note From 1922 About Chimp Organs

February 5, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the June 20, 1922 New York Times:

“PARIS–Dr. Serge Voronoff’s monkey gland experiments have led to the startling discovery that apparently it is possible to transplant all the vital organs of a chimpanzee to human beings.

‘Already I am using four different glands from every chimpanzee received from Africa, notably thyroid glands for weak-minded children and interstitial glands for the rejuvenation of the aged.’ said Dr. Voronoff. ‘All chimpanzee glands which I have transplanted have thrived so well in the human body that I have tried lesser organs, which also are thriving well. I am experimenting now on major organs and I expect to announce soon that a man may have any new organ.”

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“I Believe That There’s No End To How Much We Can Track Each Other”

February 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Kevin Kelly, one of the tech thinkers I admire most, was recently profiled by the New York Times’ wonderfully dyspeptic David Carr, and now he’s participated in an excellent Q&A at John Brockman’s Edge.org. 

I think if you read this blog with any regularity, you know I believe that legislation won’t control or alter surveillance and snooping, won’t stem the flow of information any more than Prohibition stopped the flow of alcohol. Everybody is drinking; everybody’s drunk. That topic is addressed in the first question of the interview:

“Edge:

How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy?

Kevin Kelly:

The question that I’m asking myself is, how far will we share, when are we going to stop sharing, and how far are we going to allow ourselves to monitor and surveil each other in kind of a coveillance? I believe that there’s no end to how much we can track each other—how far we’re going to self-track, how much we’re going to allow companies to track us—so I find it really difficult to believe that there’s going to be a limit to this, and to try to imagine this world in which we are being self-tracked and co-tracked and tracked by governments, and yet accepting of that, is really hard to imagine.

How does this work? How can we have a world in which we are all watching each other, and everybody feels happy? I don’t see any counter force to the forces of surveillance and self-tracking, so I’m trying to listen to what the technology wants, and the technology is suggesting that it wants to be watched. What the Internet does is track, just like what the Internet does is to copy, and you can’t stop copying. You have to go with the copies flowing, and I think the same thing about this technology. It’s suggesting that it wants to monitor, it wants to track, and that you really can’t stop the tracking. So maybe what we have to do is work with this tracking—try to bring symmetry or have areas where there’s no tracking in a temporary basis. I don’t know, but this is the question I’m asking myself: how are we going to live in a world of ubiquitous tracking?”•

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“What Would Happen If We Began Trading With Cuba Again?”

February 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

I can’t help but feel that Libertarians have a blind spot for the deep immorality embedded into their philosophy. Yet, it’s not like I disagree with everything Libertarian. For instance: I concur with George Mason economist Bryan Caplan that the U.S. embargo of Cuba has been detrimental to both countries. It should be stopped immediately. A few exchanges from Caplan’s Ask Me Anything at Reddit follow.

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Question:

What would happen if we began trading with Cuba again?

Bryan Caplan:

They’d quickly get a lot richer, and we’d get some very nice vacations. In the longer run, the chance that Communism in Cuba would collapse or collapse into mere rhetoric is high.

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Question:

Do you feel that the rise of China is beneficial to the interests of the United States?

Bryan Caplan:

When countries produce cheap stuff to sell us, it is good for us. And rich countries are very rarely militarily aggressive, at least once they’ve been rich for a full generation.

Question:

Is the U.S. a counterexample?

Bryan Caplan:

Not really. Most dominant powers throughout history have been far more aggressive. The U.S. today is scared to lose a few thousand soldiers. Why? Because rich people value their lives. Thankfully!

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Question:

What books have influenced you and your career?

Bryan Caplan:

Atlas Shrugged, For a New Liberty, Economic Sophisms, The Armchair Economist, The Bell Curve, The Myth of Democratic Failure, The Nurture Assumption, and Modern Times. Mike Huemer’s been a massive influence on me, but mostly his articles, especially “Moral Objectivism.”

________________________

Question:

With the drought in Southern California is it possible the state is overpopulated? Meaning we have to halt immigration into the south west?

Bryan Caplan:

No. Just raise the price of water!•
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In 1959, Ed Sullivan interviews Fidel Castro:

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“Those Aren’t Things We Believe Are Happening To Innocent People”

February 5, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Richard Jewell wasn’t exactly traduced like Joseph K., but who but Kafka could have written of his experience at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta, where he was knocked sidelong by a rush to judgement? Just months after Ted Kaczynski was apprehended for the Unabomber explosions and had provided the template of an awkward and unshaven villain, the FBI brought another lone madman to justice, and it was Jewell–although it wasn’t really him at all.

Go here to watch Adam Hootnick’s new ESPN short doc, “Judging Jewell.”

From “The Ballad of Richard Jewell,” Marie Brenner’s 1997 Vanity Fair article:

“It took 10 minutes to pluck Jewell’s thick auburn hair. Then the F.B.I. agents led him into the kitchen and took his palm prints on the table. ‘That took 30 minutes, and they got ink all over the table,’ Bryant said. Then Bazar told Bryant they wanted Jewell to sit on the sofa and say into the telephone, ‘There is a bomb in Centennial Park. You have 30 minutes.’ That was the message given by the 911 caller on the night of the bombing. He was to repeat the message 12 times. Bryant saw the possibility of phony evidence and of his client’s going to jail. ‘I said, ‘I am not sure about this. Maybe you can do this, maybe you can’t, but you are not doing this today.”

All afternoon, Jewell was strangely quiet. He had a sophisticated knowledge of police work and believed, he later said, ‘they must have had some evidence if they wanted my hair.… I knew their game was intimidation. That is why they brought five agents instead of two.’ He felt “violated and humiliated,” he told me, but he was passive, even docile, through Bryant’s outburst. He thought of the bombing victims—Alice Hawthorne, the 44-year-old mother from Albany, Georgia, at the park with her stepdaughter; Melih Uzunyol, the Turkish cameraman who died of a heart attack; the more than 100 people taken to area hospitals, some of whom were his friends. ‘I kept thinking, These guys think I did this. These guys were accusing me of murder. This was the biggest case in the nation and the world. If they could pin it on me, they were going to put me in the electric chair.”

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“They’re Moving On To Our Eyes And Our Ears”

February 4, 2014 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Ray Kurzweil, always looking forward, believing that then is actually now, discusses how the computer, which used to be all the way across campus and is now in our pockets, will soon be within us, like a pacemaker.

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“Two Decades On The Size Of The Audience For The Literary Novel Will Be About The Size Of The Group Who Read Latin Poetry”

February 4, 2014 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

I’m starting to believe that Philip Roth is serious about his retirement from writing novels. Of course, he’s spoken recently about how he feels the novel itself is “retiring.” It’s kind of difficult to argue based on the evidence, based on how much storytelling has changed, how much more it will likely soon change. I still hold out hope, still think words will be everywhere. Maybe careers won’t be literary anymore, but I believe there will still be literature of high quality. The opening of Alison Flood’s new Guardian piece about the great novelist in (at least) repose:

A happily retired Philip Roth is spending his days swimming, watching baseball and nature-spotting, revelling in the fact that ‘there’s more to life than writing and publishing fiction,’ according to a new interview.

Reiterating his bleak view about the future of literature – that ‘two decades on the size of the audience for the literary novel will be about the size of the group who read Latin poetry’ – the 80-year-old Roth told Stanford scholar Cynthia Haven that his disengagement from the world of writing is still very much in evidence. Asked by Haven if he really believes his talent – which has won him the Man Booker International prize and made him a perennial contender for the Nobel – will ‘let [him] quit’ writing, Roth responded: ‘You better believe me, because I haven’t written a word of fiction since 2009.’

‘I have no desire to write fiction,’ said the Pulitzer prize-winning literary giant. ‘I did what I did and it’s done. There’s more to life than writing and publishing fiction. There is another way entirely, amazed as I am to discover it at this late date.’

Instead: ‘I swim, I follow baseball, look at the scenery, watch a few movies, listen to music, eat well and see friends. In the country I am keen on nature.’

He is also studying 19-century American history.•

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Old Print Article: “Put Dog’s Brain In Man,” New York Times (1913)

February 4, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A completely preposterous entry into the annals of medical history is this article in the February 6, 1913 New York Times:

“ANN ARBOR, Mich.–The brain of a dog was transferred to a man’s skull at University Hospital here to-day. W.A. Smith of Kalamazoo had been suffering from abscess on the brain, and in a last effort to save his life this remarkable operation was performed. 

Opening his skull, the surgeons removed the diseased part of his brain, and in its place substituted the brain of a dog.

Smith was resting comfortably to-night, and the surgeons say he has a good chance to recover.”

 

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

February 4, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"

IVF Frozen Donor Eggs (Newark, DE)

I am a IVF patient in PA who bought six frozen donor eggs from a reputable agency. I no longer need them as I became pregnant on my own. I invested over $15,000 in them and would sell them for much less. They are safely stored at my doctor’s clinic in Newark, DE but I can ship them to your clinic at any time. I have all of the donor information (Caucasian, blue eyes, brown hair, health info etc.) and will provide copies of the signed contract for their purchase. I hope someone can use them for an IVF cycle. If you are interested, please feel free to contact me. Thank you and good luck with your IVF journey.

"Caucasian, blue eyes, brown hair."

“Caucasian, blue eyes, brown hair.”

“Funny Is The World That I Live In”

February 4, 2014 in Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I really loved the Seinfeld sitcom, so I wish Jerry Seinfeld would stop being so whiny and defensive when he’s asked about the treatment of women and minorities in comedy. He’s wrong and his agitated rationalizations make him look terrible. No one is asking for quotas or anything like it, just fairness.

The reason critics question why some shows, like the first season of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, are so white and male, is because high-profile comedy vehicles have been controlled by white men and favored white men for so long. Should Saturday Night Live have not been questioned for having so few African-American women in its cast when so many great ones were available across decades? Should David Letterman have not been questioned about going years with barely having a female stand-up comic during such an amazing era for female comedians? Such questions being asked have helped bring about change. Those questions should continue. If that upsets Jerry Seinfeld, so be it. Sometimes people get upset not because criticism is unjust but because it’s spot-on.

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“In The 21st Century, It Is The Internet That Passes Through Chattanooga, And At Lightning Speed”

February 4, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Chattanooga, long famed for speeding trains and infamous for unabated pollution, began remaking itself back when the Internet was still the ArpaNet by cornering the market on a new type of speed. From “Fast Internet Is Chattanooga’s New Locomotive,” by Edward Wyatt in New York Times:

“CHATTANOOGA, Tenn. — For thousands of years, Native Americans used the river banks here to cross a gap in the Appalachian Mountains, and trains sped through during the Civil War to connect the eastern and western parts of the Confederacy. In the 21st century, it is the Internet that passes through Chattanooga, and at lightning speed.

‘Gig City,’ as Chattanooga is sometimes called, has what city officials and analysts say was the first and fastest — and now one of the least expensive — high-speed Internet services in the United States. For less than $70 a month, consumers enjoy an ultrahigh-speed fiber-optic connection that transfers data at one gigabit per second. That is 50 times the average speed for homes in the rest of the country, and just as rapid as service in Hong Kong, which has the fastest Internet in the world.

It takes 33 seconds to download a two-hour, high-definition movie in Chattanooga, compared with 25 minutes for those with an average high-speed broadband connection in the rest of the country. Movie downloading, however, may be the network’s least important benefit.

‘It created a catalytic moment here,’ said Sheldon Grizzle, the founder of the Company Lab, which helps start-ups refine their ideas and bring their products to market. ‘The Gig,’ as the taxpayer-owned, fiber-optic network is known, “allowed us to attract capital and talent into this community that never would have been here otherwise.'”

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