“This Is A Real Product, Ready To Deploy With Civilians”

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

Relatively slow and expensive, the Navia from Induct is nonetheless revolutionary for being the first completely autonomous car to come to market. Built for a campus-shuttle level of transportation, the robotic, electric vehicle speeds to only 20 miles per hour and costs $250K, but Brad Templeton, a consultant to Google’s driverless-car division, explains in a short list why it’s still an important step.

“Now 20km/h (12mph) is not very fast, though suitable for a campus shuttle. This slow speed and limited territory may make some skeptical that this is an important development, but it is.

  1. This is a real product, ready to deploy with civilians, without its own dedicated track or modified infrastructure.
  2. The price point is actually quite justifiable to people who operate shuttles today, as a shuttle with human driver can cost this much in 1.5 years or less of operation.
  3. It smashes the concept of the NHTSA and SAE ‘Levels’ which have unmanned operation as the ultimate level after a series of steps. The Navia is at the final level already, just over a constrained area and at low speed. If people imagined the levels were a roadmap of predicted progress, that was incorrect.
  4. Real deployment is teaching us important things. For example, Navia found that once in operation, teen-agers would deliberately throw themselves in front of the vehicle to test it. Pretty stupid, but a reminder of what can happen.

The low speed does make it much easier to make the vehicle safe. But now it become much easier to show that over time, the safe speed can rise as the technology gets better and better.”

___________________________

Working the city center in Lyon, France, which is also home to an IBM pilot program for new traffic-management technology:

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“I Think What You Do Is Absolutely Appalling”

January 23, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Gossip really bothers me on a visceral level, but I have to acknowledge its utility. Before news organs with something to lose will touch a story, whispers carry the day. And most of it’s petty and garbage and untrue, but occasionally it can be an insurgency. Sometimes gossip, the original viral information, is the fastest route to justice.

In 1973, gossipmonger Rona Barrett and Sir Clement Freud, the polymath grandson of Sigmund Freud, got into a dust-up on a program Jack Paar hosted years after he abandoned the Tonight Show.

From Freud’s 2009 obituary in the Telegraph: “In England the bearded Freud, who bore an uncanny resemblance to King Edward VII, became a household name appearing in dog food commercials alongside an equally mournful bloodhound named Henry.

His journalistic output was prodigious, running the gamut from the New Yorker to the pre-Murdoch Sun. He was at his best writing on food and drink (he had been an apprentice at the Dorchester and trained at the Martinez in Cannes). He wrote about recalcitrant head waiters, overrated chefs and curmudgeonly customs officers, waging a ceaseless battle against their arrogance, even though not always free of the trait himself.

Once, having waited 25 minutes for turtle soup, he told the waitress: ‘If you are making fresh turtle soup it is going to take two days, and we do not have the time. If it is canned turtle soup, I do not wish to eat here if it takes you 25 minutes to open a can.’”

“Cornfield Was Planted Only For The Purpose Of This Movie”

January 23, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

A 1968 filming-location video from Lake Powell, Arizona, for Planet of the Apes.

“It’s Quite Probable We’re Already Part Of An ‘Ancestor Simulation'”

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

In thinking about the big picture, the multiverse is the thing that makes the most sense to me, but the most sensible thing need not be the true thing. But let’s say the dice is rolled a billions of times–maybe more, maybe an infinite number of times–and you end up with Earth. We have a nice supply of carbon and other building blocks but hurricanes and disease and drought. We’re amazing, but far from ideal. We’re the vivified Frankenstein monster, wonderful and terrible all at once. Perhaps the ideal version is out there somewhere, or not. 

And maybe it’s all a computer simulation. It could be that what’s being run infinitely is a program. God is that woman with the punch cards. The opening of Matthew Francis’ excellent Aeon essay, “Is Life Real?“:

“Our species is not going to last forever. One way or another, humanity will vanish from the Universe, but before it does, it might summon together sufficient computing power to emulate human experience, in all of its rich detail. Some philosophers and physicists have begun to wonder if we’re already there. Maybe we are in a computer simulation, and the reality we experience is just part of the program.

Modern computer technology is extremely sophisticated, and with the advent of quantum computing, it’s likely to become more so. With these more powerful machines, we’ll be able to perform large-scale simulations of more complex physical systems, including, possibly, complete living organisms, maybe even humans. But why stop there?

The idea isn’t as crazy as it sounds. A pair of philosophers recently argued that if we accept the eventual complexity of computer hardware, it’s quite probable we’re already part of an ‘ancestor simulation’, a virtual recreation of humanity’s past. Meanwhile, a trio of nuclear physicists has proposed a way to test this hypothesis, based on the notion that every scientific programme makes simplifying assumptions. If we live in a simulation, the thinking goes, we might be able to use experiments to detect these assumptions.

However, both of these perspectives, logical and empirical, leave open the possibility that we could be living in a simulation without being able to tell the difference. Indeed, the results of the proposed simulation experiment could potentially be explained without us living in a simulated world. And so, the question remains: is there a way to know whether we live a simulated life or not?”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

January 22, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

Medical consultations (NY)

Physician will barter medical expertise during times of healthcare crisis. What services do u offer in return?

“The Young Man’s Name Was Lee Harvey Oswald”

January 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Videos | Permalink

At the nine-minute mark of this 1967 episode of To Tell the Truth, a tale is told of Bronx children’s court probation officer John Carro, who tried desperately if unsuccessfully to aid a deeply troubled 12-year-old boy who would grow to be a Presidential assassin. It’s wasn’t in the best taste to have turned the JFK tragedy into game-show entertainment a mere four years on, but it is fascinating. Carro subsequently became the first Puerto Rican person to be named to the New York State Supreme Court and served there for 25 years. He’s now an accident lawyer.

From Carro’s 1964 testimony before the House Select Committee on Assassinations:

“Wesley J. Liebeler:

What else can you remember of your contacts with Lee Oswald?

John Carro:

Let me tell you my recollection of the Oswald case. As you can imagine, from 13 years ago, this was an odd thing, because I did not realize that Oswald was the person that had killed Kennedy the first couple of days. It was only almost – I believe it was after the burial or just about that time, while I was watching the papers, on the day that he actually was killed by Ruby, that I saw some pictures of the mother, and I started reading about the New York situation, that it suddenly tied in, because, you know, something happening in Texas, 1,500 miles, is something you hardly associate with a youngster that you had 10 years prior or 12 years prior.

A friend of mine called me up, a social worker, to tell me, ‘Carro, you know who that case is?’

And he said, ‘That was the case you handled. Don’t you remember?’

And then we started discussing the case, and I remembered then, and what happened then is I felt, you know, it was a kind of a numb feeling, because you know about it and could not know what to do with it. I was a probation officer and despite the fact that I was no longer one, I still felt that this was a kind of a ticklish situation, about something that I knew that no one else knew, and 

I went upstairs and I told the press secretary to the mayor. I told him the information that had just been relayed to me that I had been Oswald’s P.O. and that I should tell the mayor about it, and the mayor had gone to Washington, so he told me, ‘Just sit tight and don’t say anything.’

The story didn’t break in the papers – this was on a Tuesday or Wednesday – until Saturday when someone found out, went to Judge Kelley, and then there were stories Friday, Saturday, and the Post reporter showed up to my house on a Sunday evening. I don’t know how he found out where I lived or anything else, but once he got there, I called city hail again, ‘Look, I got this reporter over here. What do I do with him?’

They said, ‘So apparently the story has broken. So talk to him.’ But the reporter it seemed, had more information than I had. He was actually clarifying my mind, because you can understand that you’re not going to quote, you know, paraphrase 13 years later what happened. I have worked with a great many children during that time, and I have done a great deal of work with youth. What did stand out, you know, that I really recall as a recollection of my own was this fact, that this was a small boy. Most of the boys that I had on probation were Puerto Rican or Negro, and they were New York type of youngsters who spoke in the same slang, who came from the Bronx whom I knew how to relate to because I knew the areas where they came from, and this boy was different only in two or three respects. One, that I was a Catholic probation officer and this boy was a Lutheran, which was strange to begin with, because you normally carry youth of your own background. And secondly that he did dress in a western style with the levis, and he spoke with this southwestern accent which made him different from the average boy that I had on probation.

And, as I said, my own reaction then was that he seemed like a likable boy who did not seem mentally retarded or anything. He seemed fairly bright, and once spoken to, asked anything, he replied. He was somewhat guarded, but he did reply, and my own reaction in speaking to him was one of concern, because he did not want to play with anybody, he did not care to go to school; he said he wasn’t really learning anything; he had brothers, but he didn’t miss them or anything. He seems to have liked his stay at Youth House, and this is not – how do you call it – not odd, because in Youth House they did show the movies and give candy bars and this and the other, and they were paid attention, and this is a boy who is virtually alone all day, and only in that respect did it mean anything to me.

As I told reporters at the time there was no indication that this boy had any Marxist leanings or that he had any tendencies at that age that I was able to view that would lead him into future difficulty.

Actually he came before the court with no prior record, with just the fact that he was not going to school, and the other thing that touched me was that the mother at that time seemed overprotective; she just seemed to think that there was nothing wrong with the boy, and that once we got him back to school, which I told him in no uncertain terms he would have to go back because he was just too young to decide he would not go to school any more, that all his problems were resolved. I think it may have been a threat to her to want to involve her in the treatment for the boy, because I did make a recommendation that he – It seemed to me that he needed help, that he needed to relate to some adult, that he needed to be brought out of this, kind of shell that he was retreating to, and not wanting friends, not wanting to go out, and not wanting to relate to anyone, and that I thought he had the capacity for doing this, and the psychiatric report sort of bore this out in perhaps much more medical terms, and they recommended that he either receive this kind of a support of therapeutic group work treatment at home, if it were possible, or if not, in an institution.

Now, the situation in this kind of case is that treatment has to involve the parent, you know, the whole family setup, not just the child, and I think this is where the mother sort of felt threatened herself. People do not always understand what group work and treatment and psychiatric treatment means. There are all kinds of connotations to it, and she resisted this.

We tried – or even before we came Into the case, before the case came to court, I think she had been referred to the Salvation Army, I believe it was and she had not responded. Actually, when the boy came back with all these reports to the court, he was not put on supervision per se to me. The matter was sort of up in the air where it would be brought back every month while we made referral to various agencies, to see if they would take him into Children’s Village or Harriman Farms, and whatever it was, and it was just looking around, shopping around for placement for him. And the mother, I think, felt threatened about that time, that the boy was back in school, we were looking to get him psychiatric treatment, and she came in and wanted to take the boy out of the State, and we told her she could not take him out without the court’s OK.

As a matter of fact, I recall the case was put on the calendar before Judge Sicher in November of that year, 1953, when she was told, yes, that it was necessary to have the boy remain here, and that that is when the judge ordered a referral to the psychiatric clinic of the court, and to the Big Brothers who subsequently accepted the boy for working with. With that the mother took off in January, without letting us know, and just never came back.”

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“He Is Full Of Creative Angst”

January 22, 2014 in Film, Videos | Permalink

John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, in 1981, months before the former’s death, interviewed by Gene Shalit on the Today Show. They were there to promote Neighbors, but part of the conversation focuses on Belushi’s discomfort with fame. He just wanted to be anonymous in record stores and bars when he wasn’t acting, which obviously wasn’t possible.

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“Ideas, Like Diseases, Have Been Shown To Spread Infectiously Between People Before Eventually Dying Out”

January 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I have major philosophical differences with Facebook, but I seriously doubt it will be a virtual ghost town by 2017. But Princeton researchers, acting as social-media epidemiologists, disagree. So on the day that Sheryl Sandberg became a billionaire (was so pulling for her), some are predicting that the plague will soon be over. From Juliette Garside in the Guardian:

“Facebook has spread like an infectious disease but we are slowly becoming immune to its attractions, and the platform will be largely abandoned by 2017, say researchers at Princeton University.

The forecast of Facebook’s impending doom was made by comparing the growth curve of epidemics to those of online social networks. Scientists argue that, like bubonic plague, Facebook will eventually die out.

The social network, which celebrates its 10th birthday on 4 February, has survived longer than rivals such as Myspace and Bebo, but the Princeton forecast says it will lose 80% of its peak user base within the next three years.

John Cannarella and Joshua Spechler, from the US university’s mechanical and aerospace engineering department, have based their prediction on the number of times Facebook is typed into Google as a search term. The charts produced by the Google Trends service show Facebook searches peaked in December 2012 and have since begun to trail off.

‘Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models,’ the authors claim in a paper entitled Epidemiological modelling of online social network dynamics.”

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A Brief Note From 1892 About A Good Beating

January 22, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the March 13, 1892 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Joseph Williams of Fiftieth Street in this city, and Joseph Driscoll of 7 Washington Street, New York, got into a row in a New Street pool room Friday afternoon. They began by calling each other names and then went out into the street to fight it out. Joe Ellingsworth, the prize fighter, urged them on, but he got disgusted with their lack of courage and gave them both a good beating.”

“McCarthy Garnered Attention In 1966 By Hosting A Series Of Four Simultaneous Computer Chess Matches”

January 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The photo I used to accompany the earlier post about computer intelligence and the photo above are 1966 pictures of John McCarthy, the person who coined the term “Artificial Intelligence.” It was in that year the technologist organized a correspondence chess match (via telegraph) between his computer program and one in Russia. McCarthy lost the series of matches but obviously won in a larger sense. A brief passage about the competition from his Stanford obituary:

“In 1960, McCarthy authored a paper titled, ‘Programs with Common Sense,’ laying out the principles of his programming philosophy and describing ‘a system which is to evolve intelligence of human order.’

McCarthy garnered attention in 1966 by hosting a series of four simultaneous computer chess matches carried out via telegraph against rivals in Russia. The matches, played with two pieces per side, lasted several months. McCarthy lost two of the matches and drew two. ‘They clobbered us,’ recalled [Les] Earnest.

Chess and other board games, McCarthy would later say, were the ‘Drosophila of artificial intelligence,’ a reference to the scientific name for fruit flies that are similarly important in the study of genetics.”

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“Humans Are Expensive”

January 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

AI can’t do everything humans can do, but any responsibilities that both are capable of handling will be assumed, almost completely, by robots. There’s pretty much no way around that. From a Popular Science report by Kelsey D. Atherton about the proposed robotization of the U.S. military:

“By the middle of this century, U.S. Army soldiers may well be fighting alongside robotic squadmates. General Robert Cone revealed the news at an Army Aviation symposium last week, noting that the Army is considering reducing the size of a Brigade Combat Team from 4,000 soldiers to 3,000, with robots and drones making up for the lost firepower. Cone is in charge of U.S. Army Training and Doctrine Command (TRADOC), the part of the Army responsible for future planning and organization. If the Army can still be as effective with fewer people to a unit, TRADOC will figure out what technology is needed to make that happen.

While not explicitly stated, a major motivation behind replacing humans with robots is that humans are expensive. Training, feeding, and supplying them while at war is pricey, and after the soldiers leave the service, there’s a lifetime of medical care to cover. In 2012, benefits for serving and retired members of the military comprised one-quarter of the Pentagon’s budget request.”

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“Paramount Pictures Has Become The First Major Studio To Stop Releasing Movies On Film In The United States”

January 22, 2014 in Film, Science/Tech | Permalink

As “film” ceases to be an actual thing and becomes just an idea, what will be different? We’ve always worried about film degrading, but should we worry now that it won’t? Digital has its own flaws, but they’re very different flaws.

While experiencing the imperfections of music on vinyl or movies on film holds an attraction for those of us who enjoy a lo-fi aesthetic, I doubt that these flaws have any inherent value. They just trigger memories and it’s those memories that contain the real value. People who never know such decaying media likely won’t miss anything. Their memories will have their own triggers. From Richard Verrier in the Los Angeles Times:

“In a historic step for Hollywood, Paramount Pictures has become the first major studio to stop releasing movies on film in the United States.

Paramount recently notified theater owners that the Will Ferrell comedy Anchorman 2: The Legend Continues, which opened in December, would be the last movie that would it would release on 35-millimeter film.

The studio’s Oscar-nominated film The Wolf of Wall Street from director Martin Scorsese is the first major studio film that was released all digitally, according to theater industry executives who were briefed on the plans but not authorized to speak about them.

The decision is significant because it is likely to encourage other studios to follow suit, accelerating the complete phase-out of film, possibly by the end of the year. That would mark the end of an era: film has been the medium for the motion picture industry for more than a century.”

“It Will Come To Seem An Expensive And Elitist Affectation”

January 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

History professors who’ve lectured about Luddites have, in some instances, become Luddites themselves. Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCS) threaten to disrupt universities, largely a luxury good for mostly economy shoppers. It’s a deserved challenge to the system, and that’s the type of challenge that wrankles the most. From Thomas Rodham Wells’ essay on the subject at the Philosopher’s Beard:

“The most significant feature of MOOCs is that they have the potential to mitigate the cost disease phenomenon in higher education, and thus disrupt its economic conventions, rather as the recorded music industry did for string quartets. Of course MOOCs aren’t the same thing as residential degree programme classroom courses with tenured professors. In at least some respects they are a clearly inferior product. But then, listening to a CD isn’t the same experience as listening to a string quartet, nor are movies the same as theatre. But they are pretty good substitutes for many purposes, especially when the difference in price between them is so dramatic. And, like MOOCs, they also have non-pecuniary advantages over the original, such as user control and enormous quality improvements on some dimensions.

I think this cost advantage is the real challenge the opponents of MOOCs have to address. Why isn’t this cheap alternative good enough? Given that one can now distribute recordings of lectures by the most brilliant and eloquent academics in the world for a marginal cost of close to zero, the idea that a higher education requires collecting millions of 18-25 year olds together in residential schools in order to attend lectures by relative mediocrities and read the books collected in the university library needs a justification. Otherwise it will come to seem an expensive and elitist affectation. Like paying for a real string quartet at your party, or a handmade mechanical watch rather than just one that works.”

______________________________

“The classroom no longer has anything comparable to the answers outside the classroom”:

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“It Certainly Isn’t Acting Like A Human”

January 22, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Pioneering computer scientist Roger Schank answered “Artificial Intelligence” when Edge asked him the question, “What Scientific Idea Is Ready for Retirement?” That’s a good reply since we can’t “explain” to computers how the human brain works because we don’t yet know ourselves how it works. An excerpt:

“It was always a terrible name, but it was also a bad idea. Bad ideas come and go but this particular idea, that we would build machines that are just like people, has captivated popular culture for a long time. Nearly every year, a new movie with a new kind of robot that is just like a person appears in the movies or in fiction. But that robot will never appear in reality. It is not that Artificial Intelligence has failed, no one actually ever tried. (There I have said it.)

David Deutsch, a physicist at Oxford said: ‘No brain on Earth is yet close to knowing what brains do. The enterprise of achieving it artificially — the field of ‘artificial intelligence’ has made no progress whatever during the entire six decades of its existence.’ He adds that he thinks machines that think like people will happen some day.

Let me put that remark a different light. Will we eventually have machines that feel emotions like people? When that question is asked of someone in AI, they might respond about how we could get a computer to laugh or to cry or to be angry. But actually feeling?

Or let’s talk about learning. A computer can learn can’t it? That is Artificial Intelligence right there. No machine would be smart if it couldn’t learn, but does the fact that Machine Learning has enabled the creation of a computer that can play Jeopardy or provide data about purchasing habits of consumers mean that AI is on its way?

The fact is that the name AI made outsiders to AI imagine goals for AI that AI never had. The founders of AI (with the exception of Marvin Minsky) were obsessed with chess playing, and problem solving (the Tower of Hanoi problem was a big one.) A machine that plays chess well does just that, it isn’t thinking nor is it smart. It certainly isn’t acting like a human. The chess playing computer won’t play worse one day because it drank too much the night before or had a fight with its wife.

Why does this matter? Because a field that started out with a goal different from what its goal was perceived to be is headed for trouble. The founders of AI, and those who work on AI still (me included), want to make computers do things they cannot now do in the hope that something will be learned from this effort or that something will have been created that is of use. A computer that can hold an intelligent conversation with you would be potentially useful. I am working on a program now that will hold an intelligent conversation about medical issues with a user. Is my program intelligent? No. The program has no self knowledge. It doesn’t know what it is saying and it doesn’t know what it knows. The fact that we have stuck ourselves with this silly idea of intelligent machines or AI causes people to misperceive the real issues.”

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“I Was Really Curious To See What He Had On That Memory Card”

January 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Now that almost all the walls have ears, it doesn’t matter so much if you’re surrounded by actual prison walls or not. The jailers come to you. From a new Spiegel Q&A with Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei, a public figure in a time when that description has come to mean something else:

“Spiegel:

Why are you put under such manic surveillance? There are more than a dozen cameras around your house.

Ai:

There’s a unit, I think it’s called ‘Office 608,’ which follows people with certain categories and degrees of surveillance. I am sure I am in the top one. They don’t just tap my telephone, check my computer and install their cameras everywhere — they’re even after me when I’m walking in the park with my son.

Spiegel:

What do the people who observe you want to find out, what don’t they know yet?

Ai:

A year ago, I got a bit aggressive and pulled the camera off one of them. I took out the memory card and asked him if he was a police officer. He said ‘No.’ Then why are you following me and constantly photographing me? He said, ‘No, I never did.’ I said, ‘OK, go back to your boss and tell him I want to talk to him. And if you keep on following me, then you should be a bit more careful and make sure that I don’t notice.’ I was really curious to see what he had on that memory card.

Spiegel:

And?

Ai:

I was shocked because he had photographed the restaurant I had eaten in the previous day from all angles: every room, the cash till, the corridor, the entrance from every angle, every table. I asked myself: Gosh, why do they have to go to so much trouble? Then there were photos of my driver, first of him sitting on a park bench, then a portrait from the front, a portrait from the back, his shoes, from the left, from the right, then me again, then my stroller.

Spiegel:

And he was only one out of several people who follow you?

Ai:

Yes. They must have a huge file on me. But when I gave him back the camera, he asked me not to post a photo of his face on the Internet.

Spiegel:

The person monitoring you asked not to be exposed?

Ai:

Yes. He said he had a wife and children, so I fulfilled his wish. Later I went through the photos we had taken years before at the Great Wall — and there he was again, the same guy. That often happens to me, because I always take so many photos: I keep recognizing my old guards.”

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“I Suspect That War Will Become Obsolete Only When Something Worse Supercedes It”

January 21, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve not read much sci-fi, so I’m not very familiar with The Forever War author Joe Haldeman. In a new new Wired podcast, the writer and Vietnam Vet shares his thoughts about warfare in this age of miracles and wonders, when science and science fiction are difficult to entangle. An excerpt:

“‘I suspect that war will become obsolete only when something worse supercedes it,’ says Joe Haldeman in this week’s episode of the Geek’s Guide to the Galaxy podcast. ‘I’m thinking in terms of weapons that don’t look like weapons. I’m thinking of ways you could win a war without obviously declaring war in the first place.’

Increasingly sophisticated biological and nanotech weapons are one direction war might go, he says, along with advanced forms of propaganda and mind control that would persuade enemy soldiers to switch sides or compel foreign governments to accede to their rivals’ demands. It’s a prospect he finds chilling.

‘One hopes that they’ll never be able to use mind control weapons,’ says Haldeman, ‘because we’re all done for if that happens. I don’t want military people, or political people, to have that type of power over those of us who just get by from day to day.'”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

January 21, 2014 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"Wheel (adjustable for different thrust lengths)."

“Wheel (adjustable for different thrust lengths).”

Sex machine parts

Not sure really where to post this, but its a real post, so please don’t junk me.

These are some of the key parts for a sex machine:

  • Power adapter for dc motor.
  • Vac-u-lock system holder.
  • Shafts with joints for wheel.
  • Wheel (adjustable for different thrust lengths).

Asking $50.

Old Print Article: “Mummies Made To Order,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1888)

January 21, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

An article about the ghoulish mummy trade in Egypt which ran in the June 17, 1888 Brooklyn Daily Eagle and was originally published in the Portland Oregonian:

“A gentleman who has just returned from an extended foreign tour was asked yesterday why he had not brought home from Egypt, among other curios, a mummy. He said there was a great deal of fraud in the mummy business. Persons purchasing mummies, of course, like to get them as well preserved and natural looking as possible, and as those found are generally in a more or less dilapidated condition, vendors have engaged in the business of manufacturing bogus mummies. They bargain with tramps, beggars and such people for their defunct carcasses, paying them a sum sufficient to make their remaining days short and sweet. These fellows are preserved and pickled and then smoked till they are good imitations of the genuine mummy. Whole rows of these articles can be seen in smokehouses at once. When sufficiently dry, they are wrapped in mummy cloth and sold, to Americans chiefly, bringing in a high price.”

“How Could We ALL Blow It?”

January 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Sports | Permalink

You get passion and emotion in a Twitter storm–which can be useful–but not nuance. You would assume based on words raining down from the cloud that there’s a good chance that Essay Anne Vanderbilt, the transgendered subject of Grantland’s controversial article, “Dr. V’s Magical Putter,” took her life because the publication was set to out her sexual reassignment. Bill Simmons, the EIC, says the site was gong to rightfully reveal that the inventor had apparently engaged in fraudulent business practices, but it would have never revealed her sexuality had she not died. He does acknowledge, however, that mistakes were made. From his response to the tumult, a list of areas in which he feels Grantland failed:

“We made one massive mistake. I have thought about it for nearly three solid days, and I’ve run out of ways to kick myself about it. How did it never occur to any of us? How? How could we ALL blow it?

That mistake: Someone familiar with the transgender community should have read Caleb’s final draft. This never occurred to us. Nobody ever brought it up. Had we asked someone, they probably would have told us the following things …

1. You never mentioned that the transgender community has an abnormally high suicide rate. That’s a crucial piece — something that actually could have evolved into the third act and an entirely different ending. But you missed it completely.

2. You need to make it more clear within the piece that Caleb never, at any point, threatened to out her as he was doing his reporting.

3. You need to make it more clear that, before her death, you never internally discussed the possibility of outing her (and we didn’t).

4. You botched your pronoun structure in a couple of spots, which could easily be fixed by using GLAAD’s style guide for handling transgender language.

5. The phrase ‘chill ran down my spine’ reads wrong. Either cut it or make it more clear what Caleb meant.

6. Caleb never should have outed Dr. V to one of her investors; you need to address that mistake either within the piece, as a footnote, or in a separate piece entirely.

(And maybe even … )

7. There’s a chance that Caleb’s reporting, even if it wasn’t threatening or malicious in any way, invariably affected Dr. V in ways that you never anticipated or understood. (Read Christina Kahrl’s thoughtful piece about Dr. V and our errors in judgment for more on that angle.)“

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“Texas Would Appear To Be Committed To Organ Conscription”

January 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

In “The Texas Flautist and the Fetus,” a variation on Judith Jarvis Thomson’s “violinist analogy” thought experiment about abortion, Dominic Wilkinson of Practical Ethics points out the unintended moral precedent set by the Texas law which says that pregnant brain-dead woman Marlise Munoz must be kept alive over the objections of her family:

“The Texan law seems to accept that the woman’s interests are reduced by being in a state close to death (or already being dead). It appears to be justified to ignore her previous wishes and to cause distress to her family in order to save the life of another. If this argument is sound, though, it appears to have much wider implications. For though brain death in pregnant women is rare, there are many patients who die in intensive care who could save the lives of others– by donating their organs. Indeed there are more potential lives at stake, since the organs of a patient dying in intensive care may be used to save the life of up to seven other people.

If it is justified to continue life support machines for Marlise Munoz against her and her family’s wishes, it would also appear be justified to remove the organs of dying or brain dead patients in intensive care against their and their family’s wishes. Texas would appear to be committed to organ conscription.”

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“It’s Finger Lickin’ Good”

January 21, 2014 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

I was on the subway yesterday, and the woman sitting next to me told her friend that she would only eat free-range chicken because that was the ethical thing to do. If I were a chicken, my main objection to slaughterhouses would not be the accommodations. I would be happy to stay in cramped quarters provided that you did not brutally murder my family and I at the end of our visit.

We sometimes rationalize our behavior as “ethical” without changing the worst part of it because we want to believe we’re thoughtful people while still doing exactly what is most enjoyable for us.

Here’s a 1963 clip of Colonel Harland Sanders, the Pol Pot of the chicken world, guesting on What’s My LIne?

From “Demand Grows for Hogs That Are Raised Humanely Outdoors,” by Stephanie Strom in the New York Times:

“Several factors are driving the appetite for pasture-raised pork, grocers and chefs say. Consumers are increasingly aware of and concerned about the conditions under which livestock is raised, and somewhat more willing to pay higher prices for meat certified to have come from animals that were humanely raised.

Big food businesses from McDonald’s to Oscar Mayer and Safeway have promised to stop selling pork from pigs raised in crates over the next decade. Smithfield Farms, one of the country’s largest pork processors, announced this month that it was encouraging all contractors raising hogs on its behalf to move to the use of group pens, which have to be big enough for several pigs to live in comfortably, with space to walk around and bed down.

The restaurant chain Chipotle and some prominent chefs like Dan Barber and Bill Telepan, both of whom have restaurants in Manhattan, have begun using meats from animals that were humanely raised. Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s do a brisk business in such meat.”

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“I Realize That Computers Are In Their Infancy, But They’re Pretty Pathetic”

January 20, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

In 1987, when Omni asked Bill Gates and Timothy Leary to predict the future of tech and Robert Heilbroner to speculate on the next phase of economics, David Byrne was asked to prognosticate about the arts two decades hence. It depends on how you parse certain words, but Byrne got a lot right–more channels, narrowcasting, etc. One thing I think he erred on is just how democratized it all would become. “I don’t think we’ll see the participatory art that so many people predict, Some people will use new equipment to make art, but they will be the same people who would have been making art anyway.” Kim and Snooki and cats at piano would not have been making art anyway. Certainly you can argue that reality television, home-made Youtube videos and fan fiction aren’t art in the traditional sense, but I would disagree. Reality TV and the such holds no interest for me on the granular level, but the decentralization of media, the unloosing of the cord, is as fascinating to me as anything right now. It’s art writ large, a paradigm shift we have never known before. It’s democracy. The excerpt:

“David Byrne, Lead Singer, Talking Heads:

The line between so-called serious and popular art will blur even more than it already has because people’s altitudes are changing. When organized religion began to lose touch with new ideas and discoveries, it started failing to accomplish its purpose in people’s lives. More and more people will turn to the arts tor the kind of support and inspiration religion used to of- fer them. The large pop-art audience remains receptive to the serious content they’re not getting from religion. Eventually some new kind of formula — an equivalent of religion — will emerge and encompass art, physics, psychiatry, and genetic engineering without denying evolution or any of the possible cosmologies.

I think that people have exaggerated greatly the effects new technology has on the arts and on the number of people who will make art in the future. I realize that computers are in their infancy, but they’re pretty pathetic, and I’m not the only one who’s said that. Computers won’t take into account nuances or vagueness or presumptions or anything like intuition.

I don’t think computers will have any important effect on the arts in 2007. When it comes to the arts they’re just big or small adding machines. And if they can’t ‘think,’ that’s all they’ll ever be. They may help creative people with their bookkeeping, but they won’t help in the creative process.

The video revolution, however, will have some real impact on the arts in the next 20 years. It already has. Because people’s attention spans are getting shorter, more fiction and drama will be done on television, a perfect medium for them. But I don’t think anything will be wiped out; books will always be there; everything will find its place.

Outlets for art, in the marketplace and on television, will multiply and spread. Even the three big TV networks will feature looser, more specialized programming to appeal to special-interest groups. The networks will be freed from the need to try to please everybody, which they do now and inevitably end up with a show so stupid nobody likes it. Obviously this multiplication of outlets will benefit the arts.

I don’t think we’ll see the participatory art that so many people predict. Some people will use new equipment to make art, but they will be the same people who would have been making art anyway. Still, I definitely think that the general public will be interested in art that was once considered avant-garde.

I can’t stand the cult of personality in pop music. I don’t know if that will disappear in the next 20 years, but I hope we see a healthier balance between that phenomenon and the knowledge that being part of a community has its rewards as well.

I don’t think that global video and satellites will produce any global concept of community in the next 20 years, but people will have a greater awareness of their immediate communities. We will begin to notice the great artistic work going on out- side of the major cities — outside of New York, L.A., Paris, and London.”•

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“Music and performance does not make any sense”:

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“Yet Some Now Fear That A New Era Of Automation Enabled By Ever More Powerful And Capable Computers Could Work Out Differently”

January 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Automation and robotics will make us wealthy in the aggregate, but how will most of us share in those riches if employment becomes scarce? In the past, technological innovation has disappeared jobs, but others have come along to replace them, often in fields that didn’t even exist before. But what happens if the second part of the shift never arrives? From “The Onrushing Wave” in the Economist:

“For much of the 20th century, those arguing that technology brought ever more jobs and prosperity looked to have the better of the debate. Real incomes in Britain scarcely doubled between the beginning of the common era and 1570. They then tripled from 1570 to 1875. And they more than tripled from 1875 to 1975. Industrialisation did not end up eliminating the need for human workers. On the contrary, it created employment opportunities sufficient to soak up the 20th century’s exploding population. Keynes’s vision of everyone in the 2030s being a lot richer is largely achieved. His belief they would work just 15 hours or so a week has not come to pass.

Yet some now fear that a new era of automation enabled by ever more powerful and capable computers could work out differently. They start from the observation that, across the rich world, all is far from well in the world of work. The essence of what they see as a work crisis is that in rich countries the wages of the typical worker, adjusted for cost of living, are stagnant. In America the real wage has hardly budged over the past four decades. Even in places like Britain and Germany, where employment is touching new highs, wages have been flat for a decade. Recent research suggests that this is because substituting capital for labour through automation is increasingly attractive; as a result owners of capital have captured ever more of the world’s income since the 1980s, while the share going to labour has fallen.

At the same time, even in relatively egalitarian places like Sweden, inequality among the employed has risen sharply, with the share going to the highest earners soaring. For those not in the elite, argues David Graeber, an anthropologist at the London School of Economics, much of modern labour consists of stultifying ‘bullshit jobs’—low- and mid-level screen-sitting that serves simply to occupy workers for whom the economy no longer has much use. Keeping them employed, Mr Graeber argues, is not an economic choice; it is something the ruling class does to keep control over the lives of others.

Be that as it may, drudgery may soon enough give way to frank unemployment.”

“Seeing Ghosts Demonstrated How The Mind-Eye Coordination That Generated Vision Could Break Down”

January 20, 2014 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “Trick of the Eye,” Iwan Rhys Morus’ wonderful Aeon essay about the nature and value of optical illusions:

“People who said that they saw ghosts really did see them, according to Brewster. But they were images produced by the (deluded) mind rather than by any external object: ‘when the mind possesses a control over its powers, the impressions of external objects alone occupy the attention, but in the unhealthy condition of the mind, the impressions of its own creation, either overpower, or combine themselves with the impressions of external objects’. These ‘mental spectra’ were imprinted on the retina just like any others, but they were still products of the mind not the external world. So ghosts were in the eye, but put there by the mind: ‘the ‘mind’s eye’ is actually the body’s eye’, said Brewster.

Seeing ghosts demonstrated how the mind-eye co-ordination that generated vision could break down. Philosophical toys such as phenakistiscopes and zoetropes — which exploited the phenomenon of persistence of vision to generate the illusion of movement — did the same thing. The thaumatrope, first described in 1827 by the British physician John Ayrton Paris, juxtaposed two different images on opposite sides of a disc to make a single one by rapid rotation — ‘a very striking and magical effect’. A popular Victorian version had a little girl on one side, a boy on the other. They were positioned so that their lips met in a kiss when the disc rotated.

zoetrope45The daedaleum (later renamed the zoetrope), invented in 1834 by the mathematician William George Horner, was ‘a hollow cylinder … with apertures at equal distances, and placed cylindrically round the edge of a revolving disk’ with drawings on the inside of the cylinder. The device produced ‘the same surprising play of relative motions as the common magic disk does when spun before a mirror’. (The ‘magic disk’ was the phenakistiscope, invented a few years earlier by the Belgian natural philosopher Joseph Plateau). In the zoetrope, the viewer looked through one of the slits in the rotating cylinder to see a moving image — often, a juggling clown or a horse galloping. In the phenakistiscope, they looked through a slit in the rotating disc to see the moving image reflected in a mirror. Faraday, too, experimented with persistence of vision.

Brewster’s kaleidoscope was another philosophical toy that fooled the eye. Brewster described it as an ‘ocular harpsichord’, explaining how the ‘combination of fine forms, and ever-varying tints, which it presents in succession to the eye, have already been found, by experience, to communicate to those who have a taste for this kind of beauty, a pleasure as intense and as permanent as that which the finest ear derives from musical sounds’. The kaleidoscopic illusion was supposed to teach the viewer how to see things properly; it was also, interestingly, meant to be a technology that could mechanise art. It ‘effects what is beyond the reach of manual labour’, said Brewster, exhibiting ‘a concentration of talent and skill which could not have been obtained by uniting the separate exertions of living agents.’“

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A Brief Note From 1899 About A Music Lesson

January 20, 2014 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the June 18, 1889 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Kerwood,  W. Va.–William Miller, a  farmer, is dying from the effects of knife wounds inflicted by George Sell, a music teacher at Stemple Ridge. A few evenings ago Sell was conducting a song when a son of Miller interrupted and a fight ensued. Sell whipped young Miller. The father interfered and Sell disemboweled the elder Miller with a knife.”

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