“Now We’re Telling People You Have To Learn This Programming Too, Or Else The Robots Are Going To Get You”

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

Everybody needs to learn comouter coding because why? As someone who learned a fair amount of HTML in the late ’90s only to not need to know any of it, I can’t make sense of the analogy being drawn between book literacy and coding literacy. If we are all “coders” in the future, it will be a very different thing and a simpler process that produces more complex answers. From NPR’s “Computers Are the Future, but Does Everyone Need to Code?“:

“Some people aren’t so enthusiastic about all the pro-coding rhetoric. ‘Reading and writing are hard; the basics are hard,’ says software developer Jeff Atwood. ‘And now we’re telling people you have to learn this programming too, or else the robots are going to get you.’

Atwood started making his own video games as a 12-year-old back in the ’80s. Now he runs a coding blog and a set of websites to help people with programming. But he remembers a time not so long ago when computers weren’t at all intuitive.

‘When I got my first computer in the mid-80s, when you turned it on, what you got was a giant, blinking cursor on the screen — that was the boot up,’ he recalls. ‘It wasn’t like turning on an iPad where you have a screen full of apps and you start doing things. … When I hear: ‘Everyone must learn to program,’ what I hear is: We’re going back in time to a place where you have to be a programmer to do things on the computer.’

Atwood thinks that’s going backward. He’s glad that people don’t have to be computer whizzes anymore just to be able to use a computer. He thinks that if computers aren’t your thing, then it’s OK to let the programmers make life easier for you.

‘It’s sort of like an obsession with being an auto mechanic,’ he says. ‘There are tons of cars, there’s tons of driving … but I think it’s a little crazy to go around saying everyone should really learn to be an auto mechanic because cars are so essential to the functioning of our society. Should you know how to change oil? Absolutely. There are [also] basic things you should know when you use a computer. But this whole ‘become an auto mechanic’ thing? It’s just really not for everyone.'”

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“Megyn Kelly [Is] The Latest Blonde Star In An Ailes Stable That Seems To Emulate Hitchcock’s Leading-Lady Predilections In Looks And Inchoate Malevolence”

January 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

In his just-published New York magazine column, “Stop Beating a Dead Fox,” Frank Rich states the obvious in saying that Fox News actually hurts the GOP and the great majority of its viewers are likely taking medication that may cause weakness, insomnia, dizziness, chest pain, peripheral edema, rash, abdominal pain, constipation, diarrhea, dyspepsia, flatulence, nausea, urinary tract infection, arthralgia, myalgia, back pain, arthritis, sinusitis, pharyngitis, bronchitis, rhinitis, infection, flu-like syndrome and allergic reaction. But, oh, how he states it. Just one paragraph:

“It was the right call. For all its ratings prowess and fat profits, Fox, like the GOP itself, is under existential threat in a fast-changing 21st-century America. Indeed, Megyn Kelly, the latest blonde star in an Ailes stable that seems to emulate Hitchcock’s leading-lady predilections in looks and inchoate malevolence, was promoted to her prime-time perch last year precisely to bring in a younger, less monochromatic audience. It’s a mission that neither she nor any other on-camera talent can accomplish. All three cable-news networks are hemorrhaging young viewers (as are their network-news counterparts) in an era when television is hardly the news medium of choice for Americans raised online and on smartphones. But Fox News is losing younger viewers at an even faster rate than its competitors. With a median viewer age now at 68 according to Nielsen data through mid-January (compared with 60 for MSNBC and CNN, and 62 to 64 for the broadcast networks), Fox is in essence a retirement community.”

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Old Print Article: “Michigan Carterites Pound Each Other To ‘Knock The Devil Out,’” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1893)

January 26, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

"These cranks pound and slap and otherwise punish their members."

“These cranks pound and slap and otherwise punish their members.”

Buried deep in the annals of American theological history in the ass-stomping branch of Christianity described in the following article from the January 12, 1893 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Kalamazoo, Mich.–The noisy Carterites still continue their disturbance at Coloma, and the forbearance of the community has been sadly taxed. Recently Carter promulgated an order from on high to the effect that a tenth of all the property of the members must be paid into his hands for the Lord. It is also said that Carter threatened to kill his wife if she did not obey him. One of the members is reported to have willed his property to Carter in trust for the Lord. He is an old man, and was knocked down and dragged around in order to see whether he could stand the Holy Grace test. These cranks pound and slap and otherwise punish their members, while making the nights and Sundays hideous with their yells and howls for mercy. The thumpings they give each other are for the purpose knocking out the devils, they claim. Not long ago one of the members died, it is said, from the effects of the pounding he received when he joined the Chosen Seven. Carter was given a coat of tar and feathers some weeks since and the citizens threatened not only to repeat the dose but to run his followers out of town.”

Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

January 26, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"Borrowing your wheelchair will help me bring joy to many."

“I need a wheelchair for a number I am doing.”

Drag Queen needs Wheel Chair!

I am a drag queen.


I have a performance coming up soon and I need a wheelchair for a number I am doing.

Ideally, I would love to just BORROW a cheap (non-motorized) wheelchair if someone can lend me one.

I can even possibly kick a few bucks your way as a thank you.

Borrowing your wheelchair will help me bring joy to many in a really unique performance that will be seen by hundreds.

(No, it’s not a performance I’m being paid for, which is why I don’t have a budget to buy a wheelchair.)

Thanks for any help! 

“A Funny View Of The Future Is That Everybody Is Going Around Looking At The Sequence Of Auto-Suggests”

January 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Two excerpts from Robin Kawakami’s Wall Street Journal article in which Google’s Peter Norvig and physicist and software designer Stephen Wolfram discuss the technology on display in Spike Jonze’s Her:

  • Norvig comparing today’s computers to HAL of 2001: A Space Odyssey:

“Going back to a more rudimentary science fiction computer—HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey—Norvig noted that in some ways, today’s computers have already surpassed those capabilities. ‘HAL was really limited in that he had a number of eyes throughout the spaceship, and he could see the astronauts,’ he said. But HAL, being a mainframe computer, was also crippled by his design. ‘He wasn’t as mobile as what we have today with our robots that can move around, or even our phones and our laptops have this greater physical capability.'”

  • Wolfram on technology’s predictive powers:

Exploring personality amplification through technology is a key concept from the film for Wolfram. In the same way that various gadgets enhance our abilities—whether it’s finding our way around with a GPS or moving objects with machines—an AI might enable us to accomplish certain goals, just as Samantha nudged Theodore toward a book contract. ‘What could you achieve by having an emotional connection to a sophisticated, AI-like thing?’ he said. ‘Can you be the best instance of what you intended to be?’

On the same token, can an AI-driven agenda aimed at personal improvement actually limit us? Since machines are generally better at predicting a little bit into the future than humans are, Wolfram sees a possibility of people following computer recommendations. ‘A funny view of the future is that everybody is going around looking at the sequence of auto-suggests,’ he said. ‘And pretty soon the machines are in charge.'”

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“It Is The Most Affordable Sony Radio On The Prison Market”

January 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Apart from a shiv, the thing I’d most like to have if I were incarcerated would be a Sony SRF-39FP, the most popular radio in the big house. It’s manufactured specifically for inmates, with a transparent case to prevent its use as a container for contraband. From “The iPod of Prison,” by Joshua Hunt at the New Yorker blog:

“The pocket analog radio, known by the bland model number SRF-39FP, is a Sony ‘ultralight’ model manufactured for prisons. Its clear housing is meant to prevent inmates from using it to smuggle contraband, and, at under thirty dollars, it is the most affordable Sony radio on the prison market.

That market consists of commissaries, which were established by the Department of Justice in 1930 to provide prisoners with items not supplied by their institutions; by offering a selection of shampoos and soaps, they shifted personal hygiene costs to inmates, while distractions like playing cards eased tensions among the nation’s growing prison population. More than half a million inmates each week shop at commissaries stocked by the Keefe Group, a privately held company that sells items to the Federal Bureau of Prisons, and twelve out of fourteen privately managed state departments of corrections. A sample commissary order form lists items like an I.B.M. typewriter ribbon, hair dye, RC Cola, Sensodyne toothpaste, chili-garlic sauce, Koss CL-20 headphones, and a ‘Sony Radio.’

Commissaries often carry other, bargain-brand radios, but according to former inmates and employees of the Bureau of Prisons and the Keefe Group, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, America’s federal prisoners are most likely to own a Sony. Melissa Dolan, a Sony spokesperson, confirmed in an e-mail that selling portable radios in American prisons has long been a ‘stable business’ that represents ‘sizable’ sales for the company. Of the models available, the SRF-39FP remains an undisputed classic, still found on commissary lists an impressive fifteen years after its initial release, making it nearly as common behind prison walls as Apple’s iPod once was outside of them, despite competition from newer devices like digital radios and MP3 players.”

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“SHEBAM! POW! BLOP! WIZZ!”

January 26, 2014 in Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Serge Gainsbourg and Brigitte Bardot singing an ode in 1967 to comic strips might seem an odd thing, but Roy Lichtenstein had already transformed the medium into high art. As long as it’s not Gainsboug performing a duet with his daughter Charlotte called “Lemon Incest,” that’s all I ask for.

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“The New Technology Demanded New Skills”

January 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In a Washington Post article about power looms coming to factories in 19th-century Massachusetts, James Bessen suggests that the Information Age will ultimately confer wealth to workers as the Industrial Age previously did, something that is certainly possible but not definite. An excerpt:

“When Charles Dickens visited Lowell in 1842, he reported back to his English readers three facts that he thought many of them would find ‘preposterous’: young girls who worked in the mills played the piano, they subscribed to circulating libraries and they published their own literary magazines. To the class-bound English, such activities were ‘above the station’ of factory workers.

British readers expected mill workers to come from the lower classes because the first British mills sought the cheapest labor. This lowest-common-denominator approach wouldn’t have worked in Lowell. While much of the machinery was copied from Britain, the mills were organized differently. In Britain, specialized workshops produced a variety of cloth goods, many of fine quality. In contrast, in Lowell all of the operations involved in turning raw cotton into finished cloth were conducted in one integrated facility. That allowed the production of a highly standardized product in large quantities.

Coordinating all aspects of production under one roof required specialized technical and business skills. The Waltham mill was one of the first business organizations to use professional managers, called mill agents, who were separate from stockholders (though many mill agents also owned stock).

Waltham mills also required a different kind of worker. Mass production demanded training on a large scale and the new technology demanded new skills. In the British craft workshops, sons often learned as informal apprentices to their fathers. But apprenticeships couldn’t quickly train the large numbers of workers the mills required. And technology was changing too quickly for formal classroom training to be practical. Instead, Lowell and his partners sought to recruit intelligent workers who could learn quickly from experience on the job.

This is why American mill owners encouraged the cultural enrichment activities Dickens found so ‘preposterous.'”

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“Users Simply Need To Hold The Watch About A Foot Away From Their Computer Screens To Download Data”

January 26, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

When Timex introduced cheap, seemingly unbreakable watches in the 1950s, the product was given short shrift by both media and jewelers, but they soon were category leaders. The Timex Data Link of the 1990s, however, made in conjunction with Microsoft, was probably awarded too much credit. Before computers were tiny and powerful, the Data Link was the first watch that could receive downloaded information. It wasn’t good enough, but it was (sort of) the future. From a 1994 article in the New York Times:

“Talk about information at your fingertips. The Timex Corporation and the Microsoft Corporation said today that they had teamed up to develop a wristwatch that can store information received directly from a personal computer screen.

The Timex Data Link watch, which will cost about $130 when it goes on sale in September, uses a wireless optical scanning system to receive data from Microsoft software.

The Data Link watch was demonstrated today at a presentation by Microsoft’s chairman, Bill Gates, who held it up to a computer as a series of bar-code lines flashed on the screen. After several seconds, Mr. Gates was able to scroll through personal information like appointment locations and telephone numbers at the touch of a button on the watch.

Fast Sales Predicted

C. Michael Jacobi, the president of Timex, predicted that the company would sell 200,000 of the watches in the final three months of this year, making it the fastest-selling watch ever in its price category.

The new watch looks like a regular round sports watch and includes such standard digital watch functions as a calendar, light, dual time-zone settings and alarms.

Using a microchip developed by Timex with Motorola Inc., the watch can store about 70 messages in its memory, downloading them in about 20 seconds, officials said.

Each watch will include software compatible with Microsoft Windows 3.1 and the company’s scheduling applications, such as Schedule Plus. The software also will be compatible with future versions of Windows, including a ‘Chicago’ upgrade expected out by the end of the year.

Users simply need to hold the watch about a foot away from their computer screens to download data, which can be done as often as needed.

Laptops Won’t Work

However, road warriors will be disappointed to learn that the watch will not work with laptop computers, which do not have a strong enough lighting source in their screens, Timex officials said.”

____________________________

Unrelated to the Data Link but very beautiful, a 1965 commercial touting Timex’s waterproof properties:

“In My Usual Way I Consulted Blake And The Bible”

January 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

From Simon Schama’s new Financial Times profile of Patti Smith, a quick look at her as a political animal, and one who is greatly disappointed with the “good Republican” Barack Obama:

“In 1980 she married Fred ‘Sonic’ Smith of MC5, took a more political turn and wrote with him, ‘People Have the Power.’ Politics didn’t come naturally to her, she says, but she had worked for Robert Kennedy’s senatorial campaign. When he was assassinated, she withdrew from the political world and it took the more activist Fred to quicken those combative political instincts. ‘In my usual way I consulted Blake and the Bible. ‘The meek shall inherit the earth.’ I certainly got that.’ Becoming interested in St Francis and making an informal pilgrimage to Assisi, she thought it something of a miracle when a pope came along who adopted the name and, apparently, the social evangelism that went with it. ‘They said there would never be a Jesuit pope nor a Franciscan one. Now they have both.’

Every so often the old fury of ‘Radio Baghdad‘ comes back. She remembers with quiet contempt a virtual conspiracy of media silence when a protest rally against the Iraq war, a hundred thousand strong, received barely any coverage. Though she rejoiced at the election of an African-American to the White House, like millions of others on the left she has not forgiven him for keeping Guantánamo open and prosecuting the war in Afghanistan. ‘To me he’s just like a good Republican.’ The ‘celebrity-driven, materialist’ culture saddens her, especially when she sees ‘three-year-olds being comforted by cellphones and video games instead of being told stories.’ The ongoing destruction of the environment fills her with yet more bleak sorrow. With a little sigh she returns to Blake. ‘More than ever as I get older I can feel what it takes to be him – a casualty of the industrial revolution while he sits at home hand-colouring prints of shepherds.’

But then, she says, resolutely, pushing back the gloom, ‘I am still a very optimistic person. I continue to do work with joy.’ The Beethoven strain comes through. The first opera she saw was Fidelio, a work so perfectly fitted to her temperament that she wanted to make a film of it. ‘I know the opening shots. I am Leonore/Fidelio, with waist-length hair. I pick up the scissors and cut it.'”•

__________________

Smith, in 1979, singing Debby Boone’s hit, “You Light Up My Life,” on children’s show Kids Are People Too. She’s accompanied on piano by the song’s composer, Joseph Brooks, who would commit suicide in 2011 after being charged with serial sex crimes. A little more than two years later, Brooks’ son Nicholas was convicted of murdering his girlfriend.

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“For Some Crazy Reason We’re Just In The Right Place At The Right Time”

January 25, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

As absolutely everyone has mentioned, it’s the 30th anniversary of the Apple Macintosh and the great “1984” ad that introduced it to the masses. The Mac, even if it wasn’t a tremendous success in and of itself, changed everything by popularizing GUI, making text interfaces obsolete, and coming up with a design that aspired to update the modernist beauty of Olivetti.

Steven Levy, the best tech journalist of the personal-computing age, is releasing an unexpurgated version of an interview he did with Steve Jobs just as the Mac was about to drop. In that conversation, the Apple co-founder asserts that the invention of the light bulb influenced the course of history more than Marxism. I probably disagree with that, though a lot fewer people died by misuse of the light bulb. From Nick Bilton at the New York Times:

“There are some aspects of the 30-year-old interview that might answer some unanswerable questions about what Mr. Jobs would have done with his life if he were still alive today.

When Mr. Levy told Mr. Jobs that there was ‘speculation’ that he might go into politics, Mr. Jobs replied that he had no desire to enter the public sector and noted that the private sector could have a greater influence on society. ‘I’m one of those people that think Thomas Edison and the light bulb changed the world more than Karl Marx ever did,’ Mr. Jobs said.

One thing Mr. Levy was continually searching for in the interview, was what was driving Mr. Jobs — a question that was echoed in 2011 in Steve Jobs, the biography written by Walter Isaacson.

In the 1983 interview, it’s clear that money isn’t the answer. Mr. Jobs talked about his net worth falling by $250 million in six months. ‘I’ve lost a quarter billion dollars! You know, that’s very character building,’ he said, and notes that at some point, counting your millions of dollars is ‘just stupid.’

Mr. Levy pressed again. ‘The question I was getting at is, what’s driving you here?

‘Well, it’s like computers and society are out on a first date in this decade, and for some crazy reason we’re just in the right place at the right time to make that romance blossom,’ Mr. Jobs replied, noting that the 1980s were the beginning of the computing revolution. ‘We can make them great, we can make a great product that people can easily use.’

Such passion is something that would follow Mr. Jobs through his career, and what he said next seemed to be the driving force behind that passion.”

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“In America, A Thriller, Or A Mystery Story As We Call Them, Is Slightly Below The Salt”

January 25, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film | Permalink

Woe the American genre writers of days of yore, forced to be contented with handsome paychecks that were uncoupled from the respect afforded their “serious” counterparts, often their lessers. In our time, perhaps things have swung too far in the other direction, with comic-book heroes, zombies and the such more highly valued than ever. It sure feels like a bubble. Maybe those in the future will strike the right balance.

The opening of a 1958 BBC conversation between two masters of genre, Ian Fleming, birther of Bond, and Raymond Chandler, dark poet of Los Angeles:

“Ian Fleming:

Well, the first thing, really, is to define what we’re supposed to be talking about. I think the title of what we’re supposed to be talking about is English and American thrillers. What is a thriller? To my mind of course, you don’t write thrillers and I do.

Raymond Chandler:

I do too.

Ian Fleming:

I don’t call yours thrillers. Yours are novels.

Raymond Chandler:

A lot of people call them thrillers.

Ian Fleming:

I know. I think it’s wrong.

Raymond Chandler:

Oh, well I . . .

Ian Fleming:

I mean, you write novels of suspense like Simenon does and like Eric Ambler does perhaps, but in which violence is the background, just as love might be in the background of the ordinary or the straight kind of novel . . .

Raymond Chandler:

Well, in America, a thriller, or a mystery story as we call them, is slightly below the salt.

Ian Fleming:

Yes, thriller writing is very below the salt really . . .

Raymond Chandler:

You can write a long, very lousy historical novel full of sex and it can be a bestseller and be treated respectfully. But a very good thriller writer, who writes far, far better, just gets a little paragraph of course.

Ian Fleming:

Yes, I know. That’s very true.

Raymond Chandler:

Mostly. There’s no attempt to judge him as a writer.”•

______________

The audio version:

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This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

January 25, 2014 in Misc. | Permalink

 

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

  1. stepford wives original movie
  2. interview with sister of western outlaw butch cassidy
  3. ecotopia book about the west coast seceding
  4. h.g. wells vision of utopia
  5. foldable electric car from the 1920s
  6. the truth about deaths at disneyworld
  7. atheist madalyn murray o’hair murdered
  8. james burke writing about nanofabricators
  9. rachel maddow with a gun
  10. secretariat enlarged heart

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

January 25, 2014 in Misc. | Permalink

Afflictor: Thinking Richard Sherman should stop with the immoral behavior, so we can all get back to some good, clean fun.

Afflictor: Wishing Richard Sherman would stop with the antisocial behavior, so we can all get back to enjoying some good, clean fun.

  • Poor people may not be poor because of their habits but because they’re poor.
  • Bill Murray did a wide-ranging Ask Me Anything at Reddit.
  • Google wants to offer free, autonomous taxi rides to casinos and malls.
  • Amazon is working on “anticipatory ordering” and “speculative shipping.”
  • Big Data invades soccer’s Premier League.
  • The aftermath of Grantland’s controversial Dr. V story (here and here).

“Well, That Was Quick”

January 24, 2014 in Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

Magnus Carlsen, best chess player in the world, destroys Bill Gates in nine moves.

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“It Could Just Offer You A Free Taxi Ride Or Send An Autonomous Car To Pick You Up”

January 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A patent has been awarded to Google for a service in which the tech company would dispatch an autonomous taxi to your door, which would whisk you for free to a designated destination that wants your business (a casino or a mall, say). Will things go a step further and a car be sent without your beckoning, before you know even you wanted to go out, à la Amazon’s reported shipping plans? From Frederic Lardinois at TechCrunch:

“Google may soon offer a new service that combines its advertising business with its knowledge about local transport options, taxis and – in the long run – autonomous cars. The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office last week granted Google a patent for arranging free (or highly discounted) transportation to an advertiser’s business location.

Here’s how it works. Say a Vegas casino really wants your business. Not only could it offer you some free coins, but if it deems the cost worthwhile (using Google’s automated algorithms, of course), it could just offer you a free taxi ride or send an autonomous car to pick you up.”

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A Brief Note From 1890 About A Simian Duel

January 24, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the July 26, 1890 New York Times:

“A duel recently took place in a traveling circus temporarily stationed in a village outside Paris, and very curious were the consequences. ‘Two acrobats,’ says a dispatch to the London Daily Telegraph, ‘quarreled, and resolved to fight a duel. The place chosen was the ring–after the public performance, of course–the conditions being two shots at twenty-five paces. As usual, neither of the combatants was hurt, and their wounded honors being satisfied the incident terminated. The duelists and their seconds overlooked the presence of two members of their company, who were quietly munching nuts in a corner. These were two trained monkeys, who had been taught to ride around the ring as soldiers, and to fire pistols en route. The monkeys saw the performance of their masters, and when the way was clear they resolved to imitate it. Gravely loading their pistols they faced each other–not at twenty-five paces, but at five–and fired. They both fell dead, one with its head nearly blown off and the other shot in the breast. At the sound of the shots the master of the circus rushed in and found the bodies of the imitative duelists in the ring with the still smoking pistols lying beside them.”

Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

January 24, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"

“You wouldn’t know brilliant if you sucked it’s dick!”

Screw you to ALL my previous employers!!!

If I have ever worked for you, I would like to extend a huge, cold, “fuck you” to you! I can’t wait to laugh at you as you all get aneurysms from your fucked up daily grind and desperate squirming for money. See, it turns out that I am an inventor and innovator. I couldn’t do your bullshit because you’re so fucking boring and devoid of ANY creativity. All I could do is fucking fall asleep from your repetitive bullshit! I made over $7,300,000 in November and see it doubling in the first half of December from just one $80.00 invention that cost me $600 to research and develop…and you probably own one. So all you fucking “be here at 7:30 AM” cock-sucking bosses can all die of heart attacks, for all I give a shit. You can all suck my nuts. You are all slimy, greedy, abusive, immoral, evil to the bone cocksuckers. You fuck all your customers and all your workers, you shit-buckets! I stole fuckloads of time from you assholes – not to mention I’d rummage through your private shit every once in a while. That’s how I know that one of you left your wife because your sperm could only generate girls. You left your wife because she gave you the daughter who you now cherish, you worthless half-an-asshole. Then you went and had six more girls with four other women. You wouldn’t know brilliant if you sucked it’s dick!

Now, all you hard working bosses can enjoy still having to wake up at 4:30 every morning to RUSH to work to make sure nobody is late. I sleep until noon, wake up, turn on the tube, smoke a fat fucking blunt with my Corn Pops, jam on the piano or drums (or guitar or harmonica for that matter), dip in the pool, play with the dogs and take my fucking time through life with a joint constantly dangling from my lips. No more appointments, paychecks, time-clocks, your stupid fucking faces, your complaints about how I’m not doing shit your way (when if you had done shit my way, you would have made more money, stupid).

So, while you assholes are sweating which of your employees pisses too long while you sit in your car on the Gowanus Parking Lot every morning, think of what I’m doing during your torment…I’m sleeping in a nice, warm, soft, quiet bed, right next to a warm woman waiting for my natural wake-up chemicals to wake me. Then I take my time and play with the wife in bed and then go about my day…of getting blazed and chillin’ by the fireplace while you develop blood clots, cancers and other competitors in the race to kill you. My money’s on hypertension. All of you ungodly sewer scum need to invent something and work smart. You are all neanderthals. Go fuck yourselves!

P.S. I fucked one of your wives…twice.

“Was George Orwell Right About 1984?”

January 24, 2014 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Orwell, of course, was the main inspiration for Apple’s “1984” Super Bowl ad by Ridley Scott, but it also riffed on Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which is perhaps more influential from a visual perspective than any other work of art ever. Sure, Lang’s plot was overheated, but, my god, those images. You can’t truly be literate about media without having seen it.

The Apple spot “went viral” thirty years ago, even though it was shown only once, and there was yet no infrastructure for it to be propelled by person to person. What careered around the world wasn’t the actual spot but verbal descriptions of it. It was the collision of a new thing (computers) and an old thing (oral history). And soon enough, the centralized media was smashed, though that didn’t make the world perfect. Tyranny doesn’t disappear; it just attempts to reinvent itself.

Steve Jobs introduces the commercial at the 1984 Apple keynote.

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“People Are Horrible Historians”

January 24, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of “Making Good Use of Bad Timing,” Matthew Hutson’s Nautilus article which reminds that while memory is usually (though not always) inelastic, it is malleable:

“Suppose a woman suffering a headache blames it on a car accident she had. Her story is plausible at first, but on closer examination it has flaws. She says the car accident happened four weeks ago, rather than the six weeks when it actually occurred. Plus she recalls her headache coming on sooner than it actually did. Steven Novella, a neurology professor at Yale University, says it’s an honest mistake. Novella’s patients frequently manipulate time, he says, something made clear by comparing their stories to their medical records. ‘People are horrible historians,’ Novella says. ‘Human memory is a malleable subjective story that we tell ourselves.’

We tend to think that coffee makes us alert and pills soothe our aches faster than they actually do, for the same reason that a patient might move their accident closer in time to their headache. In our inner narratives, less time passes between perceived causes and effects than between unrelated events. Such mistakes, called temporal binding, slip into the conjectures we make when connecting the scenes of our lives. Like photos in an album, the causal links between them must be inferred. And we do that, in part, by considering their sequence and the minutes, days, or years that pass between them. Perceptions of time and causality each lean on the other, transforming reality into an unreliable swirl.”

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“Just How Arousing Each Emotion Was Also Made A Difference”

January 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If I had titled this post “Cuddly Panda Tries To Recover From Penis Injury,” it would have had a much better chance of going viral. For a couple thousand years–and never more than now during the Internet Age–philosophers and scientists have wondered why certain content is spread from person to person. Why is some information more likely to connect us, even if it’s not the most vital to our safety and survival? The answer does not flatter us. From Maria Konnikova at the New Yorker blog:

“In 350 B.C., Aristotle was already wondering what could make content—in his case, a speech—persuasive and memorable, so that its ideas would pass from person to person. The answer, he argued, was three principles: ethos, pathos, and logos. Content should have an ethical appeal, an emotional appeal, or a logical appeal. A rhetorician strong on all three was likely to leave behind a persuaded audience. Replace rhetorician with online content creator, and Aristotle’s insights seem entirely modern. Ethics, emotion, logic—it’s credible and worthy, it appeals to me, it makes sense. If you look at the last few links you shared on your Facebook page or Twitter stream, or the last article you e-mailed or recommended to a friend, chances are good that they’ll fit into those categories.

Aristotle’s diagnosis was broad, and tweets, of course, differ from Greek oratory. So Berger, who is now a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, worked with another Penn professor, Katherine Milkman, to put his interest in content-sharing to an empirical test. Together, they analyzed just under seven thousand articles that had appeared in the Times in 2008, between August 30th and November 30th, to try to determine what distinguished pieces that made the most-emailed list. After controlling for online and print placement, timing, author popularity, author gender, length, and complexity, Berger and Milkman found that two features predictably determined an article’s success: how positive its message was and how much it excited its reader. Articles that evoked some emotion did better than those that evoked none—an article with the headline ‘BABY POLAR BEAR’S FEEDER DIES’ did better than ‘TEAMS PREPARE FOR THE COURTSHIP OF LEBRON JAMES.’ But happy emotions (‘WIDE-EYED NEW ARRIVALS FALLING IN LOVE WITH THE CITY’) outperformed sad ones (‘WEB RUMORS TIED TO KOREAN ACTRESS’S SUICIDE’).

Just how arousing each emotion was also made a difference.”

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“Some Of Herzog’s Team Were Wounded With Arrows”

January 23, 2014 in Film, Videos | Permalink

A great 1982 South Bank Show portrait of Werner Herzog broadcast as Fitzcarraldo, a film I think Eisenstein would have been proud to call his own, was nearing its screening at Cannes. When I interviewed the director a decade or so ago, he insisted to me that he was “clinically sane” but appreciated the journalists (“stooges,” he called them) who portrayed him as mad because he felt protected by the scary reputation. 

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Old Print Article: “Tight Lacing Kills Actor,” New York Times (1912)

January 23, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

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“When he appeared in a woman’s role he wore a corset tightly laced.”

Constrictive garments for women have never been healthy and the same holds true for men. A vaudevillian trying to pass for a damsel was killed by his unmentionables according to an article in the November 5, 1912 New York Times. The story:

“ST. LOUIS–Tight lacing caused the death last night of Joseph Hennella, a female impersonator, at the City Hospital, after collapsing on the stage of a South Side vaudeville theatre late on Sunday night.

In order to add to the illusion when he appeared in a woman’s role he wore a corset tightly laced, to give the effect of a small waist.

Hannella fell unconscious on the stage in the course of his act. He died three hours later. The hospital physicians said the tight lacing had caused a kidney trouble and induced a tendency to apoplexy. Hennella was of medium height, and inclined to be stout. He was 40 years old. In his younger days it was easy for him to get the feminine lines, but lately his increasing girth made it necessary for him to lace extremely tight to create the illusion. Usually he made several changes of costume in the course of an act, and the constriction caused by the corset rendered this a fatiguing and laborious process.”

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“If This Great Product Will Eventually Smother The Democratic System, Then, Perhaps, We Should Lower Our Expectations”

January 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

In his latest Slate column, “Stunt the Growth,” Evgeny Morozov attempts to apply the “Degrowth Movement” of economics to technology. It seems to me pretty hopeless to suggest that we diminish the collateral damage of Big Data (government surveillance, corporations using our personal information for profit, etc.) by volunteering to accept inferior products and paying more for them (financially or otherwise). That’s not the way of markets nor do I think it’s the way of human nature. That’s not how to tame a giant.

Electric cars and solar power will only become predominant if they offer the same (or better) or better utility and price as their more environmentally wasteful competitors. In much the same way, people didn’t stick to buying newspapers in print because that was better for journalism and therefor better for democracy; they gravitated to the better publishing platform because it was the better publishing platform. If we want to curb technology’s ill effects then we can’t demand that people move backwards but that the products move forward. The answer, if it comes, will be borne of evolution, not devolution. From Morozov:

“Instead of challenging Silicon Valley on the specifics, why not just acknowledge that the benefits it offers are real—but, like an SUV or always-on air conditioning, they might not be worth the costs? Yes, the personalization of search can give us fabulous results, directing us to the nearest pizza joint in two seconds instead of five. But these three seconds in savings require a storage of data somewhere on Google’s servers. After Snowden, no one is really sure what exactly happens to that data and the many ways in which it can be abused.

For most people, Silicon Valley offers a great and convenient product. But if this great product will eventually smother the democratic system, then, perhaps, we should lower our expectations and accept the fact that two extra seconds of search—like a smaller and slower car—might be a reasonable price to pay for preserving the spaces where democratic politics can still flourish.”

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“Evacuation Would Be Our Only Option Then”

January 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

If recognize years in advance that a good-sized asteroid is to strike Earth, there are methods of deflection. But what if the notice is much shorter? From an Ask Me Anything at Reddit by Ed Liu, a former U.S. astronaut who’s now in the asteroid-nullification business:

“Question:

Theoretically, if we learned that a moderately large asteroid was going to impact populated land on earth in 72 hours, would we do anything about it or do we not have the capability right now?

Ed Liu:

Evacuation would be our only option then, and depending on the size of the asteroid, that may not even be possible. Best not to get into this situation and instead lets find out years or even decades in advance. BTW, I was one of millions of people who evacuated Houston for a hurricane back in 2004. Believe me, evacuating that many people is not an easy thing! It took us nearly 12 hours just to drive to Austin.”

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