Just one more post about delivery drones, and then I promise I’ll stop for awhile. The opening of Alvin Powell’s Harvard Gazette interview with engineering professor Robert Wood, who sees not technical obstacles to such delivery systems but bureaucratic and legal ones:

Harvard Gazette:

Amazon’s Jeff Bezos said he’s serious about using flying robots to deliver packages, saying that the technology is almost there — within four or five years — and that Federal Aviation Administration [FAA] regulations might permit it by 2015. What was your reaction when you heard this?

Robert Wood:

The technology is actually quite close. My first reaction is that the technology is much closer than overcoming the FAA and liability barriers. Of course they will need to refine the vehicle and controller designs to first ensure safety and, second, to verify efficiency and efficacy of this method.

Harvard Gazette:

How realistic is the scenario of using flying robotic drones to deliver packages? I’m sure it seems completely ‘out there’ for most of the public. Is it?

Robert Wood:

I think technically this is quite reasonable. In a laboratory setting, moving an object from one position to another using a flying vehicle is something that has been demonstrated. When you start to move this out of a lab setting, there are tremendous challenges, including weather, turbulence when moving around buildings or objects, dynamic objects in the environment such as people or cars, and imprecise or unreliable sensor information. But the robotics community is working on solutions to all of these topics — [like] the ‘self-driving car’ — so I suspect the answers are not far off.”

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Imagine if the hundreds of millions of dollars in lobbying money and political contributions that have been spent to try to dismantle Obamacare, which, despite initial website problems, has the potential to bring affordable health care to so many Americans in need, was instead spent on homeless children. (There are 22,000 of them in New York City alone.) Just think what a better nation would be. Not just more noble but better even in a practical sense.

From Sharon Machlis’ Computerworld piece about the need for calm in the storm of Healthcare.gov:

“Of course it’s a bit more important for the federal government to offer access to life-saving health insurance than it was for Twitter to offer 100% uptime back in 2008 or Apple to offer a superior map app. And in the case of a website tied to a specific event — say, a candidate’s Election Day campaign site meltdown — getting it right on day one matters.

But if a) you’re willing to forget about the politics and b) you’ve followed Web technology over the years, you know that, somewhat counterintuitively given the speed that the Internet moves, getting it right on day one isn’t always what matters. What’s important is getting things right soon enough.

So, I’m ignoring all the hysteria around healthcare.gov’s botched initial rollout — and if you care about the substance of the issue, not the politics, so should you. Instead, pay attention to whether the problems are fixed in a timely manner. That is what will tell you whether the program has a chance at success.”

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From Ryan Irwin’s Foreign Affairs appraisal of South Africa after Nelson Mandela, which argues that the late President was ideal for a transitioning nation but that the country needs a different kind of leader for its next phase:

“Turning Mandela’s pluralism into a coherent governing doctrine was difficult. Mandela is remembered today mostly for his symbolic acts, gestures that ‘made South Africans feel good about ourselves,’ in the activist Desmond Tutu’s words, such as embracing the country’s national rugby team, the Springboks, during the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Mandela developed actual government policy slowly as he negotiated his country’s constitution between 1994 and 1997, taking a hard line on multiculturalism while relinquishing his commitment to wealth redistribution. In Mandela’s words, it was at a World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland in 1992, when he ‘realized, as never before, that if we wanted investments . . . we had to remove the fear of business.’ Storytelling could only go so far.

South Africa today is a reflection of Mandela’s presidency and the grand strategy that preceded it. By cultivating such a pluralist stance toward anti-apartheid activism, Mandela’s ANC successfully ended the legitimacy of South Africa’s minority white government. These efforts, however, cultivated unusually high expectations among the supporters who embraced the ANC for reasons as diverse as South Africa itself. The resulting dissonance has made South Africa a paradox: imbued with a rich vocabulary of civil, political, economic, social, and human rights, the country remains plagued by pervasive income inequality, structural unemployment, and widespread poverty.

Another Nelson Mandela would not cure South Africa of these ills. To thrive in the twenty-first century, the country needs not hope and activism but technocrats and engineers who can develop workable solutions to the messy realities of urban blight and rural poverty. This perhaps would be Mandela’s message to the generation born after 1990. ‘There are good men and women in all communities,’ he reflected shortly after his retirement in 1999. ‘The duty of the real leader,’ he asserted, is not only to bring these people into the fold but also to ‘give them tasks of serving their community.’ Modern South Africa needs a leader who can do the latter.”

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Amazon’s delivery drones may just be hoopla for now, but other companies have similar designs. Question: Since these drones will be working in dense, urban areas, and those are mostly filled with apartment buildings, how exactly would that unfold? Would the drone auto-text the recipient when nearing the address so that person could come down to the door and collect the package? I would assume. From Nick Bilton at the New York Times:

“Even the serious technophiles like Mr. Bezos say delivery drones and their ilk are still years away. Many ordinary people probably think the idea sounds dangerous, maybe even a little creepy, given that these drones will have cameras. So far, the Federal Aviation Administration has resisted the idea. Swarms of computer-guided octocopters? As if the F.A.A. doesn’t have enough to do.

But given the explosive growth of e-commerce, some experts say the shipping business is in for big changes. United Parcel Service, which traces its history to 1907, delivers more than four billion packages and documents a year. It operates a fleet of more than 95,000 vehicles and 500 aircraft. The ubiquitous Brown is a $55 billion-plus-a-year business. And, like Amazon, U.P.S. is reportedly looking into drones. So is Google. More and more e-commerce companies are making a point of delivering things quickly the old-fashioned way — with humans.

Some of the dreamers in the technology industry are dreaming even bigger. It won’t be just drones, they insist. Robots and autonomous vehicles — think Google’s driverless car — could also disrupt the delivery business.”

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There are a million reasons why Detroit, that shining star, fell to the ground, but only one person charged with rescuing it–and he’s not an elected official. Bankruptcy lawyer Kevyn D. Orr must put the Motor City on the road to solvency in under a rear, all the while brushing away charges that he’s a puppet, even a traitor to his race. From Monica Davey and Bill Vlasic in the New York Times:

“The assignment is enormous, a peculiar mix of duties, some stated and others not, for a man who by all accounts had been leading a comfortable life as a bankruptcy lawyer. His new job? Urban planner, numbers cruncher, city spokesman, negotiator, politician, good cop, bad cop.

The job could not be more politically fraught. Mr. Orr’s harshest critics call him a ‘dictator’ (his authority trumps that of the city’s elected leaders), an ‘Uncle Tom’ (he is black and was sent to run this mostly black city by a white governor) and a ‘pension killer’ (he has said the city can no longer afford the pensions it promised retirees). But Mr. Orr, who was a partner at the law firm Jones Day until his wife and a mentor helped talk him into taking the Detroit job, seems unfazed by the storm around him. He is full of smiles and quips, coolly pressing on.

‘If we don’t do something to address the unfunded liability that we have, the 700,000 residents — some of them schoolchildren, some of them sort of skinny, dorky kids like I was, who got beaten up every day at the bus stop by the toughs, who have to walk home in the dark — don’t they deserve better services?’ said Mr. Orr, who grew up in Florida and visited Detroit as a youth.”

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We treat each other like crap and what we do to animals is an atrocity. So why would we play nice with robots? Maybe because social robots can be programmed to simulate love and display signifiers that force us to feel empathy. But a starving child, or unarmed people with a gun pointed at them can do the same, and they aren’t always granted mercy. So perhaps machines will require a bill of rights, especially if they are embedded with biological material that can turn vandalism into killing. The opening of “Is It Okay to Torture or Murder a Robot?” a great article by Richard Fisher of the BBC:

“Kate Darling likes to ask you to do terrible things to cute robots. At a workshop she organised this year, Darling asked people to play with a Pleo robot, a child’s toy dinosaur. The soft green Pleo has trusting eyes and affectionate movements. When you take one out of the box, it acts like a helpless newborn puppy – it can’t walk and you have to teach it about the world.

Yet after an hour allowing people to tickle and cuddle these loveable dinosaurs, Darling turned executioner. She gave the participants knives, hatchets and other weapons, and ordered them to torture and dismember their toys. What happened next ‘was much more dramatic than we ever anticipated,’ she says.

For Darling, a researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, our reaction to robot cruelty is important because a new wave of machines is forcing us to reconsider our relationship with them.”

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Here’s a video from the New Yorker site with a frequent contributor to that publication, the short-story writer George Saunders, whose work is as informed by genre films and stand-up comedy as by literature. I can’t tell you how many times this year I’ve found myself thinking, from out of the blue, about “The Semplica-Girls Diaries,” a selection from his most recent collection, Tenth of December.

In this video, Saunders refers to Donald Barthelme’s essay, “Not-Knowing,” which you can read here.

Both Saunders and Barthelme have suggested reading lists.

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From the September 19, 1898 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

Uniontown, Pa.–A christening last night at Banning, a mining settlement near here, ended in a free for all fight, in which knives, pistols and clubs were used. One man was killed and five others were injured. The participants in the melee fled and the police are after them.”

Speaking of the dangers of income inequality and decentralized power, Morgan Brennan of Forbes looks at billionaire bunkers, the high-tech homes of America’s super-rich who feel the need to amp up security, just in case. The fear, of course, is that your average American won’t be satisfied with bread and Kardashians forever. The opening:

“Al Corbi’s residence in the Hollywood Hills has the requisite white walls covered in artwork and picture windows offering breathtaking views of downtown Los Angeles, but it has more in common with NSA headquarters than with the other contemporary homes on the block. The Corbi family doesn’t need keys (thanks to biometric recognition software), doesn’t fear earthquakes (thanks to steel-reinforced concrete caissons that burrow 30 feet into the private hilltop) and sleeps easily inside a 2,500-square-foot home within a home: a ballistics-proof panic suite that Corbi refers to as a ‘safe core.’

Paranoid? Perhaps. But also increasingly commonplace. Futuristic security technologies–many developed for the military but sounding as though they came straight from James Bond’s Q–have made their way into the home, available to deep-pocketed owners whose peace of mind comes from knowing that their sensors can detect and adjust for, say, a person lurking in the bushes a half-mile away.

 ‘If you saw this stuff in a movie you would think it is all made up,’ says Corbi, whose fortress-like abode doubles as the demonstration house for his firm, Strategically Armored & Fortified Environments (SAFE).”

It’s no small irony that the one who most staunchly fought the surveillance state is now the most spied-on, observed person in the world. Edward Snowden is like the rest of us, but writ very, very large. He’s a test case. How does constant observation change us, even if we’re not paying attention to it on the conscious level? From Janet Reitman’s new Rolling Stone article about Snowden and Greenwald:

“[Jesselyn] Radack nevertheless insists that Snowden is not being controlled by the Russian intelligence service, the FSB, nor has he become a Russian spy. “Russia treats its spies much better than leaving them trapped in the Sheremetyevo transit zone for over a month,” Radack recalled Snowden darkly joking to her.

Perhaps though, just because he’s not a spy, says Andrei Soldatov, one of Russia’s leading investigative journalists, doesn’t mean he’s free. ‘It is quite clear that Snowden is being protected by the FSB,’ says Soldatov, co-author of The New Nobility: The Restoration of Russia’s Security State and the Enduring Legacy of the KGB (2010). What this means is that every facet of Snowden’s communications, and his life, is likely being monitored, if invisibly, by the Russian security services. ‘The mansion where he met those whistle-blowers? Rented on behalf of the government. All of the safe houses, apartments and dachas where we’ve traditionally kept defectors are owned by the Russian security services. No one has been able to figure out where he works, if he actually has this job. The FSB would never let him do anything where they couldn’t monitor his communications.’ Even if Snowden were to decide he wanted to go to the U.S. Embassy and turn himself in, ‘it would be difficult for him to find a completely uncontrolled way of communicating with the Americans,’ Soldatov says.

Soldatov believes that Snowden might underestimate how closely he’s being watched, suggesting somewhat of a Truman Show-like existence. ‘To what degree has he been turned into a different person?’ he says. ‘Snowden is not a trained intelligence agent. But those who are can tell you, if you live in a controlled environment, you cease to be truly independent-minded because everyone and everything around you is also controlled. It doesn’t matter if you have your laptop.'”

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

  1. what is the meaning of the 1976 film the man who fell to earth?
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Afflictor: Thinking Rick Santorum made the most tasteless comment in the aftermath of Nelson Mandela's death, equating Apartheid with Obamacare.

Afflictor: Thinking Rick Santorum made the most tasteless comment in the aftermath of Nelson Mandela’s death, equating Apartheid with Obamacare.

Lie down on the floor and open your mouth and I will lower my trousers and let you taste my breakfast burrito.

Mr. Santorum, I will now lower my trousers and let you taste my breakfast burrito.

Afflictor: Thinking Rick Santorum made the most tasteless comment in the wake of Nelson Mandela's death, comparing Apartheid to Obamacare.

Thanks, Bashir. I’m peckish.

Wait, what was the fist part of what you said?

Wait, what was the first part of what he said?

  • Vaclav Smil believes the decline of American manufacturing is a death knell.
  • Carl Bernstein addresses Parliament’s interrogation of the Guardian.
  • Todd Gitlin tackles the scary topic of climate change.

“This desperate criminal was notoriously vain, and fancied himself a hero.”

French serial killer Joseph Vacher didn’t deny his atrocities–he just refused culpability for them, assigning blame to God. He was no doubt brain damaged from one or other mishaps in his life and had almost a Leibnizian optimism for his brutal crimes. From an article in the January 1, 1899 New York Times at the time of his execution:

Paris–Joseph Vacher, the French ‘Jack the Ripper,’ was guillotined at Bourg-en-Bresse, capital of the Department of Ain, this morning. He protested his innocence and simulated insanity to the last. Vacher, who was twenty-nine years of age, was condemned in October at the Ain Assizes.

______

The crimes of Joseph Vacher have surpassed in number and atrocity those of the Whitechapel murderer known as ‘Jack-the-Ripper.’ His homicidal mania first broke out seriously in 1894. He claimed, after his arrest, that as every action has an object, and as his motive neither theft nor vengeance, his irresponsibility was established He one day told a Magistrate that he considered himself a scourge sent by Providence to afflict humanity. It was claimed in his defense that when a youth he was bitten by a mad dog, and that the village herbalist gave him some medicine, after drinking which he became strange, irritable and brutal, whereas he had previously been quiet and inoffensive. It also appears from these statements that from that time he developed a passion for human blood. It was also shown that Vacher had been confined in an asylum for the insane, and that a love affair once caused him to attempt self-destruction by shooting.

Referring to his crimes, Vacher is quoted as saying, ‘My victims never suffered, for while I throttled them with one hand I simply took their lives with a sharp instrument in the other.’ I am an Anarchist, and I am opposed to society, no matter what the form of government may be.’

This desperate criminal was notoriously vain, and fancied himself a hero. He refused to speak about his crimes except on two conditions. One was that the full story of his murders be published in the leading French papers, and the other was that he should be tried separately for each crime in the district where it was committed. 

The exact number of Vacher’s victims will never be known, but, it is said that twenty-three murders had been brought home to him in October last, and the number was added to as time went on. In fact, it is doubtful whether the murderer himself knew the real number of his victims. Many persons whom he attacked narrowly escaped being killed.

Born near Lyons, Vacher served his military term in a regiment of Zouaves, and showed himself to be a good soldier, so much so that he was made a non-commissioned officer, although there were complaints against him of being brutally severe to recruits. It was shortly after he left the service that he attempted to kill himself. The bullet was never abstracted from his skull, and, according to reports the wound produced recurrent fits of insanity, and caused him to be confined in an insane asylum at Dole. The physicians, however, released him because they were afraid of an outcry in the press against the arbitrary confinement of a citizen, although the physicians were well aware that he was not in a condition to be at large.

Since that time and until his arrest Vacher appears to have wandered through the country districts of France, leaving a trail of blood behind him. He was undetected and unsuspected until, by mere accident, he was caught almost redhanded near Lyons at the beginning of October.

One of the remarkable features of this extraordinary case was the clever manner in which Vacher succeeded in shifting suspicion from himself. About two years ago he murdered a shepherd boy on a country road a few miles from Lyons, hacked the body almost into pieces, and then continued on his way. The murder was discovered within a few minutes afterward, and search for the murderer was promptly instituted in all directions, with a result that a gendarme, mounted on a bicycle, overtook Vacher, and called upon him to produce his identification papers, whereupon Vacher quietly handed over to the police officer his discharge as a non-commissioned officer from a regiment of zouaves. 

‘Why, this is my old regiment!’ exclaimed the gendarme. ‘I am hunting for a man who has just cut a boy’s throat. Have you seen any suspicious character?’

‘Oh, yes,’ answered the murderer serenely. ‘I saw a man running across the fields to the north, about a mile back from here.’

‘Thank you!’ cried the gendarme. ‘I’ll be after him,’ The gendarme then hurried off after the imaginary murderer, and the real culprit stole away from the scene of the crime.

By lucky chances, some of Vacher’s would-be victims escaped him. For instance, a boy, thirteen years of age, named Rodier, was herding cows near Clermont Ferrand one day in October a year ago, when he saw an ugly-looking, grinning tramp approach him, carrying a big bag on his back and a heavy stick in his hand. The boy was alarmed and as the stranger came nearer Rodier ran away. The same afternoon Vacher attacked three other women in the same manner, and they all escaped him as Mme. Marchand did.

The most prominent victim of Vacher was the Marquis of Villeplaine, who was killed while walking in his park in the southwestern part of France, not far from the Spanish frontier. Vacher crept up behind him, felled him with a heavy stick, and then cut his throat. The murderer carried off the coat of the Marquis, and the pocketbook containing some bank notes. He then sought refuge in Spain.”

 

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From a Carter Phipps post at Priceonomics which asserts that in a world of disappearing paper, authors will have to make their living from opportunities other than book sales:

What the book industry lacks in economic might, however, it makes up in intellectual mindshare. When it comes to culture, the book industry punches way above its weight. Just think how many major movies, culture-changing ideas, global trends, historically significant movements, and unforgettable characters were born in the pages of a book. Five hundred years after Gutenberg’s breakthrough changed the world, books are still, we might say, the intellectual unit of culture. They remain a critical medium through which ideas and memes propagate across our cultural landscape, and we all have a stake in how well that medium is functioning. 

Without question, the digital revolution has already changed the face of the book industry. Amazon’s rise, Border’s bankruptcy, the decline of the independent bookstore, the rise of ebooks–creative destruction is a force many in publishing are intimately familiar with.  

‘Call me a pessimist, call me Ishmael, but I think that book publishing is about to slide into the sea,’ wrote popular humorist and writer Garrison Keillor in the New York Times. ‘If you want to write a book, you just write it, send it to Lulu.com or BookSurge at Amazon or PubIt or ExLibris and you’ve got yourself an e-book. No problem. And that is the future of publishing: 18 million authors in America, each with an average of 14 readers, eight of whom are blood relatives. Average annual earnings: $1.75.’

Authors may not be quite as bad off as Keillor humorously projected. It says something about how fast the industry is changing that in the three years since those words were written, BookSurge has become Amazon’s CreateSpace and PubIt was effectively shut down. But just how are authors adapting and surviving amidst the technological changes that are revolutionizing the media landscape? Are they making money in today’s publishing industry?”

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It obviously takes not only an extraordinary person but also an extraordinary challenge to end up with someone like Nelson Mandela. The question: Now that he’s gone, who among us comes close to measuring up to him or will come close to that standard in the near future? Do we know that person’s name yet?

“Nelson Mandela,” by the Specials.

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Trying to force all chaos into order through top-down planning and engineering is a mistake, especially when talking about urban renewal or smart cities. From Anthony Townsend in the Economist:

“Rather than design and build a smart city like a mainframe, what if we built it like the web?

More than a century ago, debates over urbanisation during the Industrial Age asked this same question. In contrast to the precise technocratic order of Howard’s Utopia, Patrick Geddes, a Scottish biologist, promoted ‘conservative surgery’ to heal cities. Growth and decay were natural processes—but just as man had tamed the land, the avid gardener believed, we could cultivate the city. Geddes’s bottom-up view of urban revitalisation presaged today’s zeal for crowdsourcing. He didn’t think it would work without the full participation of every citizen.

Geddes’s vision is alive and well in the smart city movement. Yesterday’s grandiose blueprints and their tech-industry contractors are yielding to a bustling planet of 500,000 municipalities, which are home to millions of start-ups, NGOs and civic hackers. In the style of combinatorial innovation that, according to Google’s chief economist, Hal Varian, drives the creation of value on the internet, participants in these civic laboratories are patching together bits of open-source code, government data and consumer hardware to craft bespoke solutions to local problems. Websites like Barcelona-based CityMart, a kind of Amazon for smart-city solutions, show that these efforts are creating software and strategies that can be traded globally.

The case for more participation in building the smart city goes beyond innovation. Bubble-era smart-city launches are over; post-stimulus austerity in cities throughout the world has turned mayors from profligate spenders to penny pinchers. Currently, financing large-scale smart-city efforts with risk-filled, messy public-private partnerships is the only viable strategy. But new schemes for crowdfunding civic improvements will increase citizens’ ability to finance their own designs by passing the hat.”

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"Google wasn't much help."

“Google wasn’t much help.”

What is wrong with me? (33/f) 

I’ve been wetting my bed lately. Has anyone been through this? Google wasn’t much help.

I was fairly certain that a second term for President Obama wouldn’t chasten Republicans, wouldn’t make them more amenable to compromise. But I’m still pretty stunned by the intensity of the continued rejection of reason, even if only because it’s such a tactical mistake. And when GOP Chairman Reince Priebus announces a year later that the party is readying attacks on Hillary Clinton based on Benghazi, her healthcare reform attempt in the 1990s and other losing issues, you know the Right is still tone deaf to anything outside the echo chamber. 

The GOP’s major problem is that it’s become a party of antiquated zealots funded by wealthy opportunists. When you walk into a national election knowing that you will lose a large majority of women, Latinos, African-Americans, Independents, gay voters and youth voters, you have very slim margins–you are in trouble. But with money streaming in from above and angry threats being shouted from the ground, the tendency has been to make things not better but worse. You shut down the government, for instance, when the vast majority of Americans, even much of the Republican base, is vehemently opposed to such a gambit.

It’s horrible that several Americans died in the Benghazi attacks, and it’s fine to investigate what occurred to try to ensure it doesn’t happen again. But I think most adults realize that in a region exploding with discontent, instability and civil war, danger abounds. That’s very different than invading the wrong country, getting 5,000 of our soldiers killed, maybe 100,000 Iraqis and spending a trillion dollars, as the GOP did.

I don’t know if Clinton will run for President in 2016 or if she will be the Democratic nominee if she does enter the race, but I know this strategy against her isn’t a winning one, and the Republicans seem unable to divine one in a country of shifting demographics. There is the potential that 2012, when the GOP lost nine out of ten swing states, may seem to them in the near future like the good old days. 

From Talking Points Memo:

“Asked by radio host Hugh Hewitt if the RNC began to look at Clinton as the Democrats’ presumed nominee, Priebus said the RNC’s research shop already turned its attention to the former State Department leader.

‘I think that we have to be very aggressive on what she’s done or hasn’t done,’ the chairman said, according to a transcript of Hewitt’s radio show. ‘And the things that she is famous for, like a botched health care rollout in the 90s, and Benghazi, and the things that she is involved with that are or went obviously pretty badly, we need to focus in on.’

Priebus said that although the RNC was looking toward the 2014 midterms, the committee could still suss out some of the ‘rough stuff’ about Clinton.”

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Cars can’t think and feel like horses can, but that’s okay. No deep understanding is necessary to make them superior at labor. But what about in intimacy? The opening paragraph of a post at the Philosopher’s Beard about that potential moment (hopefully in the distant future) when the term computer dating takes on a new meaning:

“The robots are coming. Even if they don’t actually think, they will behave enough like they do to take over most of the cognitive labour humans do, just as fossil-fuel powered machines displaced human muscle power in the 19th and 20th centuries. I’ve written elsewhere about the kind of changes this new industrial revolution implies for our political and moral economy if we are to master its utopian possibilities and head off its dystopian threats. But robots won’t merely be set to work out in the world; they will also move into our homes. This will have consequences for human intimacy as we now know it. Robots will not only be able to do our household chores, but care work, performing the labours of love without ever loving. I foresee two distinct tendencies. First, because robots will allow us to economise on love, inter-human intimacy may become attenuated as we have less need of each other. Second, because robots will perform care better than we can, robots may become objectively more attractive than humans as intimate companions.

Brief and interesting history from a post at Priceonomics about the invention of childbirth-easing forceps in the 16th century, and the skullduggery employed by William Chamberlen, the surgeon behind the innovation, to maximize his profits:

“In the Chamberlen family’s day, members of the Catholic church and midwives helped women through the dangerous process of childbirth. The tools used were crude. If they used any tools at all, they used crochets and hooks in gruesome operations to remove the corpses of dead infants from their mothers, along with nooses of string. The primary goal of what passed for obstetric medicine was to keep the mother alive — preserving the health and life of an infant was beyond the available level of technology and knowledge. 

At the height of the European civil wars following the Protestant Reformation, a family of French Huguenots (followers of John Calvin, the theologian and former lawyer) developed a contraption that, in skilled hands, could deliver newborns, even in the case of an obstructed birth: forceps. 

William Chamberlen, originally an apothecary and barber-surgeon, fled France as the Bourbon monarchy began to impose regulations banning the employment of Protestants in the professions, which eventually culminated in the forced exile of the Huguenots to Protestant countries throughout Europe. He took his family to England — where he would soon invent his marvelous device, and his descendants would eventually serve kings and queens as trusted surgeons.

When a difficult birth presented itself to the Chamberlens, they would take the utmost care to obscure their methods. They ushered out the expectant mother’s family and either applied a blindfold to the woman in labor or extracted the infant under a heavy sheet. Few were permitted to know the secret of forceps, and none saw the designs for the devices that they used. Their reputation for results eventually preceded them. The original device was made of iron, with the tongs likely covered by leather. By family tradition, the Chamberlens would carry the tools in an ornate box, inlaid with gold.

The family used secrecy to reap substantial profits from their invention. “

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From Ian Tattersall’s Nautilus article, “In Search of the First Human Home,” which isn’t an easy assignment since the definition of “home” is a tricky thing:

“But if an archaeologist had to pick an example of the earliest structures that most resembled our modern idea of home, it would probably be the round houses built by the semi-sedentary Natufians, an ancient people who lived around the eastern end of the Mediterranean Sea (Israel, Syria, and environs) at the end of the last Ice Age, some 12,000 years ago. A typical Natufian village consisted of several circular huts each measuring about 10 to 20 feet in diameter; these villages testify to a revolutionary change in human living arrangements. Finally, people were regularly living in semi-permanent settlements, in which the houses were clearly much more than simple shelters against the elements. The Natufians were almost certainly witness to a dramatic change in society.

The end of the Ice Age was a time of transition from a hunter-gatherer mode of subsistence to an agricultural way of life. But it also involved a Faustian bargain. Adopting a fixed residence went hand-in-hand with cultivating fields and domesticating animals. It allowed families to grow, providing additional labor to till the fields. But becoming dependent on the crops they grew meant that people found themselves in opposition to the environment: The rain didn’t fall and the sun didn’t shine at the farmers’ convenience. They locked themselves into a lifestyle, and to make the field continuously productive to feed their growing families, they had to modify their landscape. Today, we carry out such modifications on a huge scale, and nature occasionally bites back, sometimes with a vengeance. Back in Natufian times, we catch a glimpse of this process in its embryonic stage.”•

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Two anti-house songs from David Byrne:

“Burning Down the House,” 1983.

“Glass, Concrete & Stone,” 2004.

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Two-legged robot walks (somewhat unsteadily) outdoors at the University of Michigan campus. You can tell it’s not NYU because the robot isn’t trying to sell you weed or steal your backpack.

Will machines like this one be walking around on their own among us during our lifetimes? Maybe the Amazon delivery drone is merely Cyber Monday hoopla, but there would be plenty of uses for this type of system.

Christopher Mims at Quartz writing in defense of the Internet of Things, which he believes will soon make good on its promise thanks, in part, to the popularity of smartphones:

“In a sense the internet of things is already with us. For one thing, anyone with a smartphone has already joined the club. The average smartphone is brimming with sensors—an accelerometer, a compass, GPS, light, sound, altimeter. It’s the prototypical internet-connected listening station, equally adept at monitoring our health, the velocity of our car, the magnitude of earthquakes and countless other things that its creators never envisioned.

Smartphones are also becoming wireless hubs for other gadgets and sensors, as well as universal remote controls for your smart home (paywall). ‘You’re now carrying the perfect tool with you in the form of your smartphone, to stay connected to your physical graph,’ says Alex Hawkinson, CEO of Smartthings. (For those who don’t speak Silicon Valley English, ‘your physical graph’ means ‘your things,’ just as ‘your social graph’ means ‘your friends.’ ) ‘The psychological impact is that consumers are hyper-connected,” he adds.

In this way, your smartphone is a gateway drug for you to enter the next level, in which the internet is ‘in’ your thermostat, lights, door locks, car and wristwatch. Familiarizing consumers with this world, the thinking goes, will lead to what we’ve all been promised: a physical world that’s as malleable and responsive as the virtual one we already can’t live without.”

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There are things I dislike (guns and spying among them) that seem fairly impossible to control with the tools we presently have and those we will soon have. It’s almost naive to believe that we can legislate away such things. 

But here’s an idea: What if we’re in the sunset of a powerful centralized government in America? What if the same tools that are making it so easy to snoop are going to make regulation all but impossible? Perhaps the greatest concern in the future won’t be government control but a lack thereof.

An Atlantic piece by Emma Green provides coverage of “Who’s Afraid of Free Speech?” a Google event featuring E.L. Doctorow and David Simon which considered the NSA and the state of privacy. Perhaps the guests’ fears of an Orwellian state are warranted or perhaps they miss the point. Maybe 2084 has a whole different set of challenges in store for us. A passage about the complicity of information companies with a spying government:

Doctorow, a prolific author whose work includes a fictionalized account of the Julius and Ethel Rosenberg trial, agreed: ‘They’re on the same page, as we like to say. The NSA couldn’t work without the agreement or participation of these companies. Their priority is to create wealth for themselves—you’re right to be alarmed.’ 

Google’s [Ross] LaJeunesse jumped in: ‘I really wasn’t going to interrupt the program, because I’m here to listen. But I did want to set the record straight,’ he said.

It is important, when we talk about these issues, to talk with specificity and to speak about facts. It is a real danger to conflate the actions of a government, that are not transparent, with something a company like Google does. We’re completely transparent. We give control to the users—they can use our services without signing in. If you choose to sign in, we give you complete control over that data as well. We even give you a button so that you can delete all that data at once or export it to another service.

Simon, a former Baltimore Sun journalist and the creator of the TV series The Wire, was dubious.

But is it a matter of hunting down these moments where Google … informs you that it is going to use your information in some new and varied way, and you have to negate [that use]?

I had to opt out of a program where stuff I said online could be used in advertising. That’s a rather cynical performance. Shouldn’t I have to opt into it, something that extraordinary?”

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From the February 21, 1909 New York Times:

Paris–Since the guillotine has been revived in France the proprietor of a small Parisian café invented a new method of drumming up trade. He arranged a miniature guillotine, and for the price of one drink you could have the pleasure of seeing a puppet’s head roll off into a basket.

As Frenchmen seem to revel in executions, and as real ones are more or less rare since the new law went into effect, and there has been none in Paris itself, this clever invention had much success.

One puppet’s head was placed in the stock and the knife fell as in a real execution. Other puppets were standing about to represent the officers of the law. The proprietor of this café told me that the device had been worth a great deal of money to him, as all day long workmen came in for drinks and asked to see ‘La Veuve,’ as the guillotine is called in France, at work; but at the end of the week he was forced to put up a sign which read: ‘By Order of Police, There Will Be No More Guillotinging Here; so henceforth the real executions will have no rivals.”

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