“[Perhaps] Intelligent Machines Will Come To The Conclusion That Sex Is The Best Way For Them To Evolve”

January 30, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Extrapolating a degree beyond the idea of self-replicating machines, George Zarkadakis of the Telegraph wonders whether robots will eventually pair off and hook up, whether the future of “life” will be determined by sexed machines. From his article:

“Perhaps by exploring and learning about human evolution, intelligent machines will come to the conclusion that sex is the best way for them to evolve. Rather than self-replicating, like amoebas, they may opt to simulate sexual reproduction with two, or indeed innumerable, sexes.

Sex would defend them from computer viruses (just as biological sex may have evolved to defend organisms from parasitical attack), make them more robust and accelerate their evolution. Software engineers already use so-called ‘genetic algorithms’ that mimic evolution.

Nanotechnologists, like Eric Drexler, see the future of intelligent machines at the level of molecules: tiny robots that evolve and – like in Lem’s novel – come together to form intelligent superorganisms. Perhaps the future of artificial intelligence will be both silicon- and carbon-based: digital brains directing complex molecular structures to copulate at the nanometre level and reproduce. Perhaps the cyborgs of the future may involve human participation in robot sexual reproduction, and the creation of new, hybrid species.

If that is the future, then we may have to reread Paley’s Natural Theology and take notice. Not in the way that creationists do, but as members of an open society that must face up to the possible ramifications of our technology. Unlike natural evolution, where high-level consciousness and intelligence evolved late as by-products of cerebral development in mammals, in robotic evolution intelligence will be the guiding force. Butler will be vindicated. Brains will come before bodies. Robotic evolution will be Intelligent Design par excellence. The question is not whether it may happen or not, but whether we would want it to happen.”

 

Tags:

Old Print Article: “Mark Twain Is Dead At 74,” New York Times (1910)

January 30, 2014 in Books, Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

"

“His strength seemed to increase enough to allow him to enjoy the sunrise.”

Mark Twain, jester and debunker and literary giant, showed you could leave an impression, a mark, on American life and letters even if you weren’t as scarred as Emily Dickinson or Edgar Allan Poe, even if your first impulse was to go for the joke. He saw things as they were and tried to make us all see them a little differently, and in that he succeeded. No matter who comes after, he will always really be the country’s king of comedy. The opening of his obituary in the April 22, 1910 New York Times:

“Danbury, Conn., April 21 — Samuel Langhorne Clemens, ‘Mark Twain,’ died at 22 minutes after 6 tonight. Beside him on the bed lay a beloved book- it was Carlyle’s French Revolution-and near the book his glasses, pushed away with a weary sigh a few hours before. Too weak to speak clearly, ‘Give me my glasses,’ he had written on a piece of paper. He had received them, put them down, and sunk into unconsciousness from which he glided almost imperceptibly into death. He was in his seventy-fifth year.

For some time, his daughter Clara and her husband, Ossip Cabrilowitsch, and the humorist’s biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, had been by the bed waiting for the end, which Drs. Quintard and Halsey had seen to be a matter of minutes. The patient felt absolutely no pain at the end and the moment of his death was scarcely noticeable.

Death came, however, while his favorite niece, Mrs. E. E. Looms, and her husband, who is Vice President of the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railway, and a nephew, Jervis Langdon, were on the way to the railroad station. They had left the house much encouraged by the fact that the sick man had recognized them, and took a train for New York ignorant of what happened later.

Hopes Aroused Yesterday

Although the end had been foreseen by the doctors and would not have been a shock at any time, the apparently strong rally of this morning had given basis for the hope that it would be postponed for several days. Mr. Clemens awoke at about 4 o’clock this morning after a few hours of the first natural sleep he has had for several days, and the nurses could see by the brightness of his eyes that his vitality had been considerably restored. He was able to raise his arms above his head and clasp them behind his neck with the first evidence of physical comfort he had given for a long time.

His strength seemed to increase enough to allow him to enjoy the sunrise, the first signs of which he could see out of the windows in the three sides of the room where he lay. The increasing sunlight seemed to bring ease to him, and by the time the family was about he was strong enough to sit up in bed and overjoyed them by recognizing all of them and speaking a few words to each. This was the first time that his mental powers had been fully his for nearly two days, with the exception of a few minutes early last evening, when he addressed a few sentences to his daughter.

Calls for His Book

For two hours he lay in bed enjoying the feeling of this return of strength. Then he made a movement asked in a faint voice for the copy of Carlyle’s French Revolution, which he has always had near him for the last year, and which he has read and re-read and brooded over.

The book was handed to him, and he lifted it up as if to read. Then a smile faintly illuminated his face when he realized that he was trying to read without his glasses. He tried to say, ‘Given me my glasses,’ but his voice failed, and the nurses bending over him could not understand. He motioned for a sheet of paper and a pencil, and wrote what he could not say.

With his glasses on he read a little and then slowly put the book down with a sigh. Soon he appeared to become drowsy and settled on his pillow. Gradually he sank and settled into a lethargy. Dr. Halsey appreciated that he could have been roused, but considered it better for him to rest. At 3 o’clock he went into complete unconsciousness.

Later Dr. Quintard, who had arrived from New York, held a consultation with Dr. Halsey, and it was decided that death was near. The family was called and gathered about the bedside watching in a silence which was long unbroken. It was the end. At twenty-two minutes past 6, with the sunlight just turning red as it stole into the window in perfect silence he breathed his last.

Died of a Broken Heart

The people of Redding, Bethel, and Danbury listened when they were told that the doctors said Mark Twain was dying of angina pectoris. But they say among themselves that he died of a broken heart. And this is a verdict not of popular sentiment alone. Albert Bigelow Paine, his biographer to be and literary executor, who has been constantly with him, said that for the last year at least Mr. Clemens had been weary of life. When Richard Watson Gilder died, he said: ‘How fortunate he is. No good fortune of that kind ever comes to me.’

The man who has stood to the public for the greatest humorist this country has produced has in private life suffered overwhelming sorrows. The loss of an only son in infancy, a daughter in her teens and one in middle life, and finally of a wife who was a constant and sympathetic companion, has preyed upon his mind. The recent loss of his daughter Jean, who was closest to him in later years when her sister was abroad studying, was the final blow. On the heels of this came the first symptoms of the disease which was surely to be fatal and one of whose accompaniments is mental depression. Mr. Paine says that all heart went out of him and his work when his daughter Jean died. He has practically written nothing since he summoned his energies to write a last chapter memorial of her for his autobiography.”

Tags:

“I Vehemently Oppose The Use Of These Discoveries For Tailor-Making Children”

January 30, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

It seems like the “engineering” of babies, “designer babies” as they’re often called, will happen at some point, but I would think it will be a slow, gradual process, this shock of the new coming to newborns. From Ferris Jabr’s Scientific American blog post, “Are We Too Close to Making Gattaca a Reality?“:

“In 2009 [Jeffrey] Steinberg announced that he would soon give parents the option to choose their child’s skin color, hair color and eye color in addition to sex. He based this claim on studies in which scientists at deCode Genetics in Iceland suggested they could identify the skin, hair and eye color of a Scandinavian by looking at his or her DNA. ‘It’s time for everyone to pull their heads out of the sand,’ Steinberg proclaimed to the BBC at the time. Many fertility specialists were outraged. Mark Hughes, a pioneer of pre-implantation genetic diagnosis, told the San Diego Union-Tribune that the whole idea was absurd and the Wall Street Journal quoted him as saying that ‘no legitimate lab would get into it and, if they did, they’d be ostracized.’ Likewise, Kari Stefansson, chief executive of deCode, did not mince words with the WSJ: ‘I vehemently oppose the use of these discoveries for tailor-making children,’ he said. Fertility Institutes even received a call from the Vatican urging its staff to think more carefully. Steinberg withdrew his proposal.

But that does not mean he and other likeminded clinicians and entrepreneurs have forgotten about the possibility of parents molding their children before birth. ‘I’m still very much in favor of using genetics for all it can offer us,’ Steinberg says, ‘but I learned a lesson: you really have to take things very, very slowly, because science is scary to a lot of people.'”

Tags: , , ,

“I’m Just Getting Warmed Up”

January 30, 2014 in Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

One final Pete Seeger video, this one is “To Hear Your Banjo Play,” a 1947 short written and directed by musicologist Alan Lomax. Probably the best portrait of the man and his music.

Tags: ,

“Out Here Among The Stars Lies The Destiny Of Mankind”

January 29, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Well, this is fun. Introduced by Vernon Myers, the publisher of Look, the 1966 short film, “A Look Behind the Future,” focuses on the magazine’s former photographer Stanley Kubrick, who was in the process of making 2001: A Space Odyssey at London’s MGM studios. It’s a nice companion piece to Jeremy Bernstein’s two great New Yorker articles about the movie during its long gestation (here and here).

Mentioned or seen in this video: Mobile phones, laptop computers, Wernher Von Braun, memory helmets, a 38-ton centrifuge, Arthur C. Clarke at the Long Island warehouse where the NASA L.E.M. (Lunar Excursion Module) was being constructed, Keir Dullea meeting the press, etc. 

Tags: , , ,

“He Planned Two Modern Utopias Modeled On This Idea Of The City As Machine”

January 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Buckminster Fuller wanted to dome a chunk of Manhattan, but even that plan wasn’t as outré as his designs for a floating city. From “10 Failed Utopian Cities That Influenced the Future,” a fun i09 post by Annalee Newitz and Emily Stamm:

“Cloud Nine, the Floating City

Science — and science fiction — often influenced city designers. But nobody took futuristic ideas more seriously than mid-twentieth century inventor Buckminster Fuller, who responded to news about overcrowding in Tokyo by imagining cities in the sky. The Spherical Tensegrity Atmospheric Research Station, called STARS or Cloud 9s, would be composed of giant geodesic spheres. When filled with air, the sphere would weigh one-thousandth of the weight of the air inside it. Fuller planned on heating that air with solar power or human activity, causing the sphere to float. He would anchor his floating cities to mountains, or let them drift around the world. They were never built, but Fuller’s idea for a pre-fab, geodesic dome dwelling called Dymaxion House eventually influenced the pre-fab house movement which is still going strong.”

Tags: , ,

“I Chose To Go With The Eavesdropper”

January 29, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Here’s a wonderful featurette about Francis Ford Coppola making The Conversation, the 1974 psychological thriller, which moved the disquiet of Antonioni’s Blow-Up into the Watergate era, asked questions about a world where everyone is a spy and spied upon. The surprise 40 years later: Few seem upset about the new order of the techno-society. We haven’t been trapped after all; we’ve logged on and signed up for it. My short essay about the film follows the video.

A product of the Watergate decade, an era when spying and snooping at least gave us pause, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Conversation was made before ubiquitous public security cameras were watching us, phones were tracking us and seemingly everyone was living in public. A lack of privacy has never been as well-regarded as it is today nor have the perils of such actions, which are investigated in this film, been so invisible.

Harry Caul (Gene Hackman) is a jazz loving San Franciscan who earns his living as a surveillance expert, stealthily recording private conversations with an elaborate array of mikes of his own making. Caul is top dog in the trade, and he’s paid handsomely to find answers for his bosses and not ask them any questions. A devout Catholic, the wire tapper has moral issues with his work, especially since information he culled in a past case led to murder. But it’s hard for Caul to stop doing what he’s doing because he’s so damn good at it, something of an artist.

While he may be an artist, Caul is definitely a hypocrite. He keeps everything about himself strictly private, even from his girlfriend (Teri Garr) and point man (John Cazale). He rationalizes he’s doing it for safety reasons, but it’s also in his nature. This delicate balance is thrown off-kilter when Caul believes his latest assignment, in which a wealthy man is paying for info about his young wife, may also lead to murder. Caul can’t head down that road again and a crisis of conscience makes him go rogue. Soon he himself is the target of surveillance, a probing that he can’t withstand.

In the era that saw the downfall of an American President who listened to the tapes of others and erased his own, The Conversation was amazingly relevant, but in some ways it may be even more meaningful in this exhibitionist age, in which we gleefully hand over our privacy to satisfy our egos. As Caul and Nixon learned, and as we may yet, those who press PLAY don’t always get to choose when to press STOP.•

Tags: ,

A Brief Note From 1912 About A Masked Golfer

January 29, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Sports, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the October 30, 1912 New York Times:

“Golfers and visitors to the golf links at Van Cortlandt Park were not a little surprised yesterday afternoon by the sight of a man wearing a black mask, black clothes, and black plush cap playing on the course. Many inquiries were made, but nothing was learned of the identity of the strange golfer except that he styled himself ‘the Black Masker.’

Other golfers were astonished at the length of the stranger’s drives, and soon practically all of them quit their play to follow him over the course. Still no one was able to account for the presence of the black mask.”

“A Startling Number Of American Web Users Are No Longer Paying Attention To The News As It Is Traditionally Defined”

January 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

News at it used to be produced is a niche item now. It may have always been to some degree, but more so today. But is that necessarily a bad thing? I think in our decentralized age, American citizens seem far less likely to be bullshitted than they were not too long ago. It may be best that news is delivered in all forms from all directions.

The opening “Doesn’t Anyone Read The News?” by Timothy Wu at the New Yorker blog:

“The State of the Union address is one of the few times each year when a large percentage of Americans reliably pay attention to politics. Once upon a time, as legend has it, things were different: most Americans tuned into Walter Cronkite in the evening or picked up the morning newspaper, which covered matters of national and international importance, like politics, foreign affairs, and business developments.

If analysts at Microsoft Research are correct, a startling number of American Web users are no longer paying attention to the news as it is traditionally defined. In a recent study of ‘filter bubbles,’ Sharad Goel, Seth Flaxman, and Justin Rao asked how many Web users actually read the news online. Out of a sample of 1.2 million American users, just over fifty thousand, or four per cent, were ‘active news customers’ of ‘front section’ news. The other ninety-six per cent found other things to read.”

 

Tags:

“My Own Time In L.A. Has, In Fact Brought Me To See Many Other World Cities As Theme-Park Experiences”

January 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

If I was offered a good job in Los Angeles, I think I’d move in a minute. I’m one of those people who was born and raised in New York and lived here my whole life, could never have imagined living elsewhere. This city has been the biggest part of my education, has taught me as much a place can. But the last couple of decades have changed it in ways that pain me. So much that was interesting is gone. The way poor and working-class people have been pushed to the edges–to the brink–just saddens me. It was our city, and it was as beautiful as it was ugly. And in the last half-dozen years or so, so many of the brightest, most-creative people I know have left for better opportunities elsewhere.

I’m not one of those people who romanticizes Times Square of the bad old days. I don’t think of child prostitutes as useful props in the fantasies of those who love the idea of urban grit. But I don’t think we had to become a shopping mall, either.

New York was always about money, but it wasn’t only about money. You could create disco or rap or art from what others discarded. It wasn’t a city for the few but for the masses. You could have less but still be equal. You felt like you had it all, even if you had next to nothing. I don’t think that’s true anymore. 

Friends chide me for feeling this way. You act like it’s Toledo or something, they say. They’re right. New York is still more interesting than Toledo. But was that the goal? 

I probably wouldn’t really like anywhere else, either. But being disappointed by a place not your own is different than being disappointed by home.

Millions of other New Yorkers across decades have said the same things about the city that I’m saying now, and they’ve all been wrong. And I’m wrong, too. But I still feel that way.

I think one advantage L.A. has over New York has long been viewed as a deficit: it’s sprawl. When something has no center, it can’t really be “fixed” (or ruined). From “Los Angeles: a City That Outgrew Its Masterplan. Thank God,” by Colin Marshall in the Guardian:

“This lack of definition makes it no easy place to write about, and the challenge has reduced many an otherwise intelligent observer to the comforts of obscurantism and polemic. Nobody understands Los Angeles who thinks about it only through the framework of its entertainment industry, its freeways, its class divisions, or its race relations. I don’t even pretend to understand Los Angeles, but living here I’ve undergone the minor enlightenment whereby I recuse myself from the obligation of doing so.

My own time in LA has, in fact brought me to see many other world cities as theme-park experiences by comparison, made enjoyable yet severely limited by the claims of their images. San Francisco has long strained under the sheer fondness roundly felt for it, or at least for an idea of it, never quite living up to how people imagine or half-remember it in various supposedly prelapsarian states of 20, 40, 60 years ago. New York has similarly struggled with perceptions of it as the ultimate expression of the urban, and even lovers of Paris come back admitting that Paris-as-reality seems hobbled by Paris-as-idea.”

Tags:

“Technology And Drugs Have Always Existed In An Easy Symbiosis”

January 29, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Some think the government is gaining too much control over us at the very instant that I think the opposite is happening. Pretty soon, as the anarchy of the Internet is loosed back into the real world, it will be tougher to control much of anything. Big Brother can watch, but can he act?

That wonderful Browser blog pointed me to “The Drug Revolution No One Can Stop,” Mike Power’s Medium article about designer drugs that are made to order and delivered to you like a chair, a lamp, a knife. An excerpt:

“MXE is part of a cultural shift that started a generation ago, but has taken on a new edge in the last few years. In 2008, the first in a wave of new, legal, synthetic drugs emerged into the mainstream. They had little to no history of human use. Instead, they were concocted in labs by tweaking a few atoms here and there—creating novel, and therefore legal, substances. Sold mainly online, these designer drugs cover every category of intoxication imaginable, and their effects resemble the full range of banned drugs, from the mellowness of marijuana to the extremes of cocaine and LSD. They are known as ‘legal highs,’ and they have exploded in popularity: the 2012 Global Drugs Survey found that one in twelve people it surveyed worldwide takes them.

Legislators around the world have been put off-balance by the emergence of this massively distributed, technically complex and chemically sophisticated trade. And the trade is growing rapidly.

In 2009 The European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction’s early warning system identified 24 new drugs. In 2010, it identified 41. In 2011, another 49, and in 2012, there were 73 more. By October 2013, a further 56 new compounds had already been identified—a total of 243 new compounds in just four years.

In its latest World Drug Report, the United Nations acknowledged this extraordinary expansion: ‘While new harmful substances have been emerging with unfailing regularity on the drug scene,’ it said, ‘the international drug control system is floundering, for the first time, under the speed and creativity of the phenomenon.’

Technology and drugs have always existed in an easy symbiosis: the first thing ever bought and sold across the Internet was a bag of marijuana. In 1971 or 1972, students at Stanford University’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory used ARPANET—the earliest iteration of the Internet—to arrange a marijuana deal with their counterparts at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.”

Tags:

“You Proud Of Your Work There, Banjo Man?”

January 29, 2014 in Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Pete Seeger, in 2012, trading bon mots with that “right-wing gun nut” Stephen Colbert. The host is brilliant, as he always is, in using just a few words to trace the history of lefty politics from the folk movement forward.

Tags: , ,

“The Mood Organ Is A Device That Allows The User To Dial A Code To Instantly Be In A Certain Mood”

January 29, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Oh, I have trouble reading science fiction. The ideas are interesting, but the actual writing usually leaves me cold. There are some exceptions, of course, as there always are in life, but I doubt I’ll even have a period in which I dive deeply into the genre. Rebecca J. Rosen of the Atlantic has an interview with Dan Novy and Sophia Bruckner of MIT who are going to be teaching a course “Science Fiction to Science Fabrication.” A passage from the Q&A about one of the exceptions, Philip K. Dick:

“Rebecca J. Rosen:

What are some specific examples you’ll be looking at?

Sophia Bruckner:

For example, we will be reading the classic Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick, who is one of my favorite authors and is a master of crazy gadget ideas. The devices he describes in his writings can be very humorous and satirical but are truly profound. People have probably seen Blade Runner, an excellent movie based on this book, but the book is very different! Many of the most compelling devices from the book did not make it into the movie.

For example, the Mood Organ is a device that allows the user to dial a code to instantly be in a certain mood. The book contains multiple funny instances of people using this device, such as when one character plugs in the code 888 to feel ‘the desire to watch TV no matter what is on,’ but Dick also points out some disturbing implications resulting from the existence of such a technology. ‘How much time do you set aside each month for specific moods?’ asks one character. Should you be happy and energized to work all the time? This character eventually concludes that two days a month is a reasonable amount for feeling despair. Today, we are hoping science and technology will find the secret to forever happiness, but what will happen if we actually succeed?

Another one of my favorite gadgets from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is the Empathy Box. A person holds the handles on the Empathy Box and is connected with all other people using it at the same time by sharing the feelings of a spiritual figure named William Mercer. Amazingly, even in 1968, Dick saw the potential for technology to not only connect people across long distances but to do so with emotional depth. Dick writes that the Empathy Box is ‘the most personal possession you have! It’s an extension of your body; it’s the way you touch other humans, it’s the way you stop being alone.’

Actually, I just realized while answering this question that I’ve been attempting to build a version of the Empathy Box as part of my thesis! I believe people crave for their computers and phones to fulfill this need for connection, but they manage to do so only superficially. As a result, people feel increasingly estranged and alone despite being connected all the time. Like Dick, I also am intrigued by how to use technology to promote empathy and a greater sense of genuine interconnectedness with one another, and I am currently working on designing wearable devices to do this. Some of my best ideas stem from reading science fiction, and I often don’t realize it until later!'”

Tags: , , ,

Old Print Articles: Seth Kinman, Maker Of Presidential Chairs (1857/85)

January 28, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

“A unique character is Seth Kinman, the grizzly bear hunter and presidential chair presenter.”

Seth Kinman was a self-made man and a self-promoter. A bushy-faced nineteenth-century California hunter who never met a bear or buck he cared for, Kinman used the skins and carcasses from his quarry to fashion unusual chairs that he presented to several American Presidents.

Kinman began bestowing these odd gifts to Presidents during the Buchanan Administration, which is the subject of the first excerpt, taken from an 1857 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. The second excerpt, an article from a 1885 New York Times that originally ran in the San Francisco Call, further examines Kinman’s life and by then what had become a longstanding chair-giving tradition that had allowed him to become friend to several Presidents.

From May 18, 1857 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

buchanan

President Andrew Johnson’s chair.

From “Seth Kinman, The Pacific Coast Nimrod Who Gives Chairs to Presidents,” New York Times, reprinted from the San Francisco Call (December 9, 1885):

A unique character is Seth Kinman, the grizzly bear hunter and presidential chair presenter, now stopping in this city. He is a tall man, 70 years old, straight as an arrow, dressed in buckskin from head to foot, with long silver hair, beard, and shaggy eyebrows, under which and his immense hat a pair of keen eyes peer sharply.

He is the Nimrod of this coast, the great elk shooter and grizzly bear hunter of California, who has presented elk horns and grizzly bear claws from animals that have fallen before his unerring rifle to four Presidents of the United States–Buchanan, Lincoln, Johnson, and Hayes–and has ‘the finest of all’ to present to President Cleveland next spring. He claims to have shot in all more than 800 grizzlies, as many as 50 elk in one month, and to have supplied the Government troops and sawmill hands in Humboldt with 240 elk in 11 months on contract at 25 cents per pound.

He was born in Union County, Penn., in 1815, went to Illinois in 1830, and crossed the plains to California in 1849. He tried mining on Trinity River, but followed hunting mainly for a living. In the Winter of 1856-57 he made his first elkhorn chair, and conceived the idea of presenting it to President Buchanan. Peter Donahue favored it. He went on in the Golden Age with letters to Col. Rynders in New-York, and in Washington he met Senator Gwin, Gen. Denver, and others. Dr. Wozencroft made the presentation speech, and Buchanan was highly pleased. He wrote Rynders to get Kinman the best gun he could find in New-York, which he did, together with two fine pistols. He also got an appointment to corral the Indians on the Government reservation, and when they strayed away he brought them back.

In November, 1804, he presented President Lincoln with an elkhorn chair, which greatly pleased him; Clinton Lloyd, Clerk of the House, made the presentation speech. The chair to Hayes was presented when he was Governor of Ohio, but nominee for President. The chair presented to President Johnson was made of the bones and hide of a grizzly.•

“Now Comes A New Kind Of Challenge To The Evidence Of A Cognitive Decline”

January 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Since copies of cells are less perfect than healthy original ones, I would assume some cognitive decline occurs over time, that our brains deteriorate as do our other organs. But the age-decline of brain matter has probably always been somewhat overstated; we forget more over time simply because we have inelastic memories that are taxed by a surfeit of information collected over a lifetime. Perhaps we know too much. That’s why it’s a good thing, not a scary thing, for some of our data to be stored in computers, for our heads to be in the cloud. We just don’t have the necessary space for so much information. We can’t fit it all in our heads. We need more room.

From “The Older Mind May Just Be a Fuller Mind,” by Benedict Carey in the New York Times:

“Now comes a new kind of challenge to the evidence of a cognitive decline, from a decidedly digital quarter: data mining, based on theories of information processing. In a paper published in Topics in Cognitive Science, a team of linguistic researchers from the University of Tübingen in Germany used advanced learning models to search enormous databases of words and phrases.

Since educated older people generally know more words than younger people, simply by virtue of having been around longer, the experiment simulates what an older brain has to do to retrieve a word. And when the researchers incorporated that difference into the models, the aging ‘deficits’ largely disappeared.

‘What shocked me, to be honest, is that for the first half of the time we were doing this project, I totally bought into the idea of age-related cognitive decline in healthy adults,’ the lead author, Michael Ramscar, said by email. But the simulations, he added, ‘fit so well to human data that it slowly forced me to entertain this idea that I didn’t need to invoke decline at all.”

Can it be?”

Tags: ,

“Will Virtual Intelligence Ever Be Anything More Than A Figment Of A Real Person?”

January 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Anything we can conjure in our minds, not matter how far-fetched, could happen eventually in reality. Maybe not exactly in the form we hoped or as soon as we wanted, but in some sense. From a Code(Love) piece by Roger Huang about digitally raising the dead, a favorite pursuit of Ray Kurzweil:

“Will virtual intelligence ever be anything more than a figment of a real person? The question examines everything humans have always assumed about human nature: that we are unique, and that we are defined by our uniqueness against non-humans. We possess a strange combination of social interaction, physical manipulation, and processing power that is hard to define, so we often use comparisons to living things that are distinctly not human to define ourselves.

We are not cows. We are not dolphins. We are not chimpanzees, even though that is getting uncomfortably close.

The closer robots get to piercing that space, the more uncomfortable humans get with them. This is the ‘uncanny valley.’ The more robots look, and act like humans, even if we distinctly know they are not, the more we revile them. Like the broken souls of the Ring, poorly designed robots can lead us to hate, and to pain, because they lead us to question who we truly are.

Virtual life that humans can accept must pass the Turing Test. It must fool a human into thinking that it too is a human, that it is really he or she. When Ray sits down to talk with his reincarnated father, he cannot be talking with a robot, but with a real, living human being that he has been yearning to speak to for forty long years.

Ray Kurzweil believes that will happen within a couple of decades.”•

________________________________

The 17-year-old Kurzweil in 1965 on I’ve Got a Secret:

Tags: ,

“Seeger Seemed To Settle Into His Comfort Zone—A State Of Natural Curiosity And Delight”

January 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

We’re all irreplaceable, each of us, but few more than the singer-songwriter Pete Seeger, whose death feels like the actual end of the twentieth century, so many of that era’s struggles and triumphs burned into his flesh. He was really American and completely foreign. Not a bad thing to be.

An episode of his lo-fi 1960s TV odyssey, Rainbow Quest.

From Jennie Rothenberg Gritz in the Atlantic, writing about Rainbow Quest:

“For a brief period in the mid-1960s, Seeger hosted his own program on the ‘magic screen.’ The show was called Rainbow Quest (named after a line in one of Seeger’s songs). Despite the colorful title, it was filmed in black and white, in a New Jersey studio with no audience, and broadcast over a Spanish-language UHF station. Seeger’s wife, Toshi, was listed in the credits as ‘Chief Cook and Bottle Washer.’

Even with this bare-bones production, Seeger clearly found the new medium disorienting. ‘You know, I’m like a blind man, looking out through this little magic screen,” he said at the start of the first episode, gazing awkwardly into the camera. ‘And I—I don’t know if you see me. I know I can’t see you.’ Over the next 10 minutes, he alternated between noodling gorgeously on his banjo and explaining his distrust of the ‘little box’ that sat in every American living room, killing ambition, romance, and human interaction.

But then he started talking about Huddie Ledbetter and giving his invisible audience an impromptu 12-string guitar lesson. And then the Clancy Brothers showed up in their big woolly sweaters and performed a rousing set of Irish tunes. At that point, Seeger seemed to settle into his comfort zone—a state of natural curiosity and delight.”

Tags: ,

Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

January 28, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

“Let me know.”

“Let me know.”

I want to work with BRUCE WILLIS in a movie. (Midtown)

I never acted, but it would be a life’s dream to work with him. I’m a big f’in Die Hard fan. Let me know.

“There’s Increasing Evidence That The Will To Work Out Is Partly Genetically Determined”

January 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Some athletes respond overwhelmingly to exercise and training which results in only modest gains for others. It’s also likely that some of us have a genetic predisposition to actually doing the work necessary to excel, and while just showing up probably isn’t quite 80% of success as Woody Allen once opined, it is really important. We truly are programmed, though thankfully in complicated and mysterious ways. From Bruce Grierson at Pacific Standard:

“To a certain kind of sports fan—the sort with a Ph.D. in physiology—Olga Kotelko is just about the most interesting athlete in the world. A track and field amateur from Vancouver, Canada, Kotelko has no peer when it comes to the javelin, the long jump, and the 100-meter dash (to name just a few of the 11 events she has competed in avidly for 18 years). And that’s only partly because peers in her age bracket tend overwhelmingly to avoid athletic throwing and jumping events. Kotelko, you see, is 94 years old.

Scientists want to know what’s different about Olga Kotelko. Many people assume she simply won the genetic lottery—end of story. But in some ways that appears not to be true. Some athletes carry genetic variants that make them highly ‘trainable,’ acutely responsive to aerobic exercise. Kotelko doesn’t have many of them. Some people have genes that let them lose weight easily on a workout regime. Kotelko doesn’t.

Olga’s DNA instead may help her out in a subtler way. There’s increasing evidence that the will to work out is partly genetically determined.”

Tags: ,

“We Could See People And Things Moving Around Our Living Rooms”

January 28, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

One of the neat fictional things that Gene Roddenberry dreamed up, the holodeck, might actually be coming to our living rooms soon, so that we can be completely drenched by even more entertainment, until it’s oozing from every last pore. Because we’re all children now who have to be amused every last fucking second. Everybody is excited about a holodeck potentially bringing us even more diversions. Well, not everybody. Starving children and colorectal cancer patients probably don’t care. But they have perspective, so they don’t count. From Nick Bilton in the New York Times:

“This is all part of a quest by computer companies, Hollywood and video game makers to move entertainment closer to reality — or at least a computer-generated version of reality. Rather than simply watch movies, the thinking goes, we could become part of the story. We could see people and things moving around our living rooms. The actors could talk to us. Gamers who today slouch on the couch could step inside their games. They could pick up a computer-simulated bat in computer-simulated Yankee Stadium while a computer-simulated crowd roared around them.

‘The holodeck is something we’ve been fixated on here for a number of years as a future target experience that would be truly immersive,’ said Phil Rogers, a corporate fellow at Advanced Micro Devices, the computer chip maker. ‘Ten years ago, it seemed like a dream. Now, it feels within reach.'”

Tags: ,

“Experiment In Progress”

January 27, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Having posted earlier today about speleologist and chronobiologist Michel Siffre, here’s a gorgeous, hypnotic film about his 1972 “Midnight Cave” time-isolation experiment in Del Rio, Texas. It’s TV dinners and Plato and guns and mice and being and nothingness.

Tags:

A Brief Note From 1896 About Riotous Disorder

January 27, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the October 9, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Kansas City, Mo.–Kansas City’s Fall Carnival came to an end amid scenes of roystering and riotous disorder seldom witnessed anywhere. Many fights and brawls resulted and over seventy arrests were made. As a result of the state of affairs Chief of Police Irwin has declared that in future carnivals no masqueraders will be permitted on the streets at night.”

Tags:

“An Ethics Board Will Have The Authority To Determine How Google Is Allowed To Implement Artificial Intelligence Research”

January 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It isn’t often that a corporate acquisition results in the acquirer setting up an ethics board to govern the work which will result from the collaboration. But that’s what’s apparently happened with Google’s purchase of DeepMind Technologies. From Jason Inofuentes at ArsTechnica:

“London-based DeepMind was founded in 2010, and it has brought together some of the preeminent researchers in deep learning. The company has a staff of 50-75, with 30 PhDs in a particular subset of machine learning called ‘deep learning,’ the development of algorithms that allow machines to learn as humans do. Deep learning models eschew pre-scripted forms of artificial intelligence and instead rely on experiential learning based on rudimentary capabilities. The models require vast server networks and can be broadly applied to any problem that requires advanced pattern recognition.

DeepMind’s well-funded work hasn’t yielded any commercial products, but a recent paper (PDF) demonstrates how far the company has come. In the paper, DeepMind’s researchers describe a neuronal network that was able to learn how to play Breakout, the Atari 2600 game. …

The DeepMind purchase price seems to be up for debate, but The Information is reporting an interesting non-financial wrinkle to the deal: an ethics board will have the authority to determine how Google is allowed to implement artificial intelligence research. DeepMind reportedly insisted on the board’s establishment before reaching a deal.”

Tags:

“There Were Electronic Computers And The Demands Involved Such Complications That He Could No Longer Cope”

January 27, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Commenting on experience and loss made me think of Wim Klein (known alternately as Willem), the human calculator. A rare breed, lightning calculators had always been employed by sideshows and dime museums, and Klein worked French circuses (under the names “Pascal” and “Willy Wortel”), a curiosity with amazing mathematical abilities. He ultimately left the big top to become a human calculator at CERN in the late 1950s. In addition to his miraculous mental abilities, Klein was fascinating because his amazing tent-show talents ran up against the Computer Age, a time he could not navigate, and one that overwhelmed his gifts. Klein retired in 1976, just as personal computers began pushing their way into homes. He was subsequently killed, violently and mysteriously. From a memory of Klein by his friend Frans Cerulus:

So one day arrived Wim Klein, introduced by a note from Director-General Bakker. Professor Bakker wrote that Mr Klein had been recommended by the director of the Zeeman laboratory in Amsterdam as a remarkable calculator.

I was charged with examining Mr Klein’s abilities; such jobs befall usually to the younger member of a team and in addition I spoke Dutch. He needed no desk calculator and performed exceedingly well, exceeding in speed even my own desk calculator in multiplication and division. I wanted to test something more complicated, took the table prepared by the British ladies and asked Klein to calculate a line, with my eye on my watch.

He came up with the result in a minute: his number did not agree with the table. This made him nervous, he did it all over and obtained the same result, getting red in the face. I then sat down and did the calculations twice on my desk calculator, which took me about ten minutes: Klein was right, the ladies had made an error! Klein was appointed.

The next job he did for me was ideally suited for him. I needed tables of combinations of so-called Clebsch-Gordan coefficients. Such coefficients are really fractions which can become quite complicated: there existed tables where the values of the coefficients had been tabled as decimal numbers, e.g. 0.92308. But I needed the explicit form, with the numerator and denominator as whole numbers. Normally this would have required doing the computation all over. But for Wim – by then I could call him Wim – it was just play to find that was just 11/13. He told me part of his secrets: he was gifted with an extraordinary memory for numbers, he could remember a row of 50 digits given him an hour earlier. He kept in his head the multiplication tables up to one hundred and all the logarithms from 2 to 100; in addition he knew the standard interpolation rules.

Wim was very reliable, except perhaps on Monday morning. But then we had that most remarkable secretary, Tatiana Fabergé, who had to type out the tables and spotted any unusual number in the row.

In later years Wim became rather unhappy: there were electronic computers and the demands involved such complications that he could no longer cope and had to learn the basics of computer programming. The moments he could again become the entertainer and show off his extraordinary feats of mental calculation were then moments for happiness for him.•

Tags: , ,

“Instead Of Studying Caves, You Ended Up Studying Time”

January 27, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Just read psychologist Adam Alter’s 2013 book, Drunk Tank Pink, which I really enjoyed even if some of the historical material he presents is well-worn. (Oh, and even though I think the connection the author draws between Usain Bolt’s surname and his career success is overstated. Jamaican steering committees responded to those fast-twitch leg muscles and stop-watch times, not his thunderous “title.”) A brief passage in the section about social isolation discusses the experience of French speleologist Michel Siffre who insinuated himself into the Space Race in the 1960s by conducting extreme self-deprivation experiments, in an attempt to anticipate how such conditions would effect astronauts. In 1962, Siffre lived within the solitude of an underground glacier to test the effect on his mental faculties. The following decade, he spent 205 days alone in a Texas cave. A Cousteau who does not get wet, Siffre has dived so deep inside of himself that time has seemed to cease.

Alter’s writing reminded me of a 2008 Cabinet interview that Joshua Foer, that memory enthusiast, conducted with the time-isolation explorer. The opening:

“Joshua Foer:

In 1962, you were just twenty-three years old. What made you decide to live underground in complete isolation for sixty-three days?

Michel Siffre:

You have to understand, I was a geologist by training. In 1961, we discovered an underground glacier in the Alps, about seventy kilometers from Nice. At first, my idea was to prepare a geological expedition, and to spend about fifteen days underground studying the glacier, but a couple of months later, I said to myself, “Well, fifteen days is not enough. I shall see nothing.” So, I decided to stay two months. And then this idea came to me—this idea that became the idea of my life. I decided to live like an animal, without a watch, in the dark, without knowing the time.

Joshua Foer:

Instead of studying caves, you ended up studying time.

Michel Siffre:

Yes, I invented a simple scientific protocol. I put a team at the entrance of the cave. I decided I would call them when I woke up, when I ate, and just before I went to sleep. My team didn’t have the right to call me, so that I wouldn’t have any idea what time it was on the outside. Without knowing it, I had created the field of human chronobiology. Long before, in 1922, it had been discovered that rats have an internal biological clock. My experiment showed that humans, like lower mammals, have a body clock as well.”

Tags: , ,

« Older entries § Newer entries »