Smartphones, revolutionary enough for doing what they do, are also having a huge impact through the repurposing of their components, aiding development of drones and robotics. From Alistair Barr and Scott Martin’s USA Today article about Google’s latest “moonshot”:

“Google has succeeded on big long-term projects before, such as YouTube and Android, and the company’s newer moonshots, such as self-driving cars and the Glass wearable computing platform, are beginning to show early commercial promise.

Robotics has been considered an emerging technology for decades, but for the most part it has been a disappointment. That may be changing, especially in the area of drones, according to Chris Dixon, a partner at venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. 

One of the main drivers of this is the rapidly falling cost of sensors and other components that are needed to maneuver drones and other robots. 

‘The promise of robotics is finally coming to fruition through drones,’ Dixon said. ‘Several factors have come together to make them viable.’

The price of components such as GPS, cellular connections, small, energy efficient processors and tiny cameras, has dropped dramatically because they are already made in such high volume for smartphones, he explained.”

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From “7 Epic Fails Brought to You By the Genius Mind of Thomas Edison,” Erica R. Hendry’s fun Smithsonian article about the master inventor’s follies:

Electric pen

As railroads and other companies expanded in the late 19th century, there was a huge demand for tools administrative employees could use to complete tasks—including making multiple copies of handwritten documents—quicker.

Enter the electric pen. Powered by a small electric motor and battery, the pen relied on a handheld needle that moved up and down as an employee wrote. Instead of pushing out ink, though, the pen punched tiny holes through the paper’s surface; the idea was employees could create a stencil of their documents on wax paper and make copies by rolling ink over it, ‘printing’ the words onto blank pieces of paper underneath.

Edison, whose machinist, John Ott, began to manufacture the pens in 1875, hired agents to sell the pens across the Mid-Atlantic. Edison charged agents $20 a pen; the agents sold them for $30.

The first problems with the invention were purely cosmetic: the electric pen was noisy, and much heavier than those employees had used in the past. But even after Edison improved the sound and weight, problems persisted. The batteries had to be maintained using chemical solutions in a jar. ‘It was messy,’ says [Leonard]  DeGraaf.”

 

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My neighbor burns his trash… (no one stops him)

We have complained to the state and town about the man who burns all his household trash in his fireplace (fact). This can’t be healthy for anyone.

Who do we have to complain to? 

A neighbor a few doors down died of cancer too. 

Isn’t it illegal? 

We know, of course, that history didn’t start with us, but I think sometimes we forget a little. For all the many wonders of the Internet, it’s probably only increased the cultural amnesia, loading us down with so much information that it can obscure the past even as it makes it easier for us to learn about the past. 

The opening of a (gated) 1975 Garry Willis New York Review of Books piece about a collection on U.S. government spying called The Abuses of the Intelligence Agencies:

“This is a dizzying computation of all the snoopings, publicly known so far, performed by our public servants upon their putative masters. With admirable restraint the report attempts to collect and document every instance of illegal activity undertaken by our various intelligence agencies. It gives the defense offered by the agencies, the authority under which each agency operated, and the statutes apparently infringed. It is a very useful and complete handbook on official crime. We can surmise that the tally is not complete, since it arose from spot investigations, odd suits, and accidental confession. But already the count is almost self-defeating. The hundreds under surveillance, the thousands photographed, the hundreds of thousands filed. The ‘watch lists’ in readiness for emergency detention. The blacks. The kids. Hit lists. Enemies. The ‘enemy within’ is us. The deadpan recital of it all tends to dissolve in the mind. Everett Dirksen claimed, ‘A million here, a million there—in time that adds up to real money.” It doesn’t, of course, That kind of addition turns—magically, at some unthinkable number—into subtraction. We know fairly well what we are getting for $1.98. But not for forty billion. Much the same thing happens by the thousandth wiretapping or break-in recorded here.”

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If we were laying out a telephone system for America from scratch, we would never choose to put in place what is currently there, with its lines and wires mixing like a barrel of snakes  It’s a mess. But you know what? It works. Complex systems usually grow organically through trial and error, and that’s probably a good thing. It’s often better to add on then raze and rebuild. Neatness conferred upon us by central planning is illusory. Our goal shouldn’t be to enforce order but rather to opt for what works.

From a recent interview with economist John Kay at Five Books:

Question:

You have described economics and business as the last bastions of modernism. What do you mean by that? 

John Kay:

I think they are the last bastions of the idea that you can redesign the world in accordance with a rationally designed blueprint. Modernism in the twentieth century went through areas such as art, architecture and the humanities with the idea that we could rethink everything from the ground up and that we understood enough about the world to do that. I’ve come to believe that we don’t. But people still think they can analyse and structure economies as if they were a mechanical system and that they can do the same in business. So in the same way that Le Corbusier said – wrongly – that a house is a machine for living in, it exemplifies the idea that a business or an economy can be structured from first principles in the same way.

Question:

And ignores the social context within which economies and businesses work.

John Kay:

They are organic entities that evolve over time and operate within a social context. You can’t look at them independently of that.

Question:

Are the economic and financial ructions we’ve been experiencing in recent years due in part to the failure of economists and business leaders to appreciate this?

John Kay:

You can’t understand how the financial crisis came about without understanding the politics of the relationship between the financial sector and government and the anthropology of the cultures of these organisations, or indeed without appreciating the history of bubbles and financial crises.”

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Winners and losers in a conversion to driverless cars, as predicted by Neil Winton of the Detroit News:

“The avoidance of accidents will cut insurance costs. Fuel savings will be huge from more efficient high-speed, long-distance cruising in ‘car-trains.’ Congestion avoidance will speed traffic and save fuel too. Older people won’t lose their freedom of mobility when they physically can’t drive any more. Inexperienced young people won’t be barred from driving because of crippling initial insurance costs.

There will be losers too. Obviously taxi companies will find business disappearing. Railroads, bus companies and short-haul airlines will suffer. If you can move from your home to your destination, door-to-door in the comfort of your car, who’s going to take the train, bus or plane? Hotels might be in for a shock too. If you can travel overnight to your business meeting in the morning by sleeping in the back of your self-driving Winnebago, showering and breakfasting on the way, who’d want to do it the traditional way? Big winners will include software sellers with in-car applications to entertain drivers with new time on their hands. Radio and recorded music businesses will lose a captive audience.”

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Automation is a great thing for society and wealth creation if we’re able to figure out the new normal politically, which we seem unable to do presently. I mean, we can laugh (for now) at the redundancies when a McDonald’s test restaurant duplicates service with both computer tablets and humans taking orders, but it’s obvious which of those servers will soon be eliminated. From Will Oremus at Slate:

“Score one for the machines. On Tuesday, Applebee’s announced plans to install a tablet at every table in its 1,860 restaurants across the United States. Customers will be able to use the devices to order food, pay the bill, and ignore their dining companions by playing video games.

Chili’s unveiled basically the same plan three months ago. But that doesn’t mean Applebee’s hasn’t been plotting this move for years. In fact, Applebee’s was the name that came up when my former Slate colleague Annie Lowrey first wrote about the tablets-for-restaurants idea in April 2011. Her story focused on Palo Alto-based startup E La Carte, which is in fact Applebee’s partner on the just-announced deal. Chili’s opted for a rival vendor, Ziosk.”

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"A more repulsive sight to any lover of the 'human form divine' it would be difficult to imagine."

“A more repulsive sight to any lover of the ‘human form divine’ it would be difficult to imagine.”

Isaac Sprague was a nineteenth-century dime museum performer who was billed as the “Living Skeleton.” He had some sort of progressive muscular disease and was invited into classrooms as well as sideshows, so that medical students could study his malady. Such a visit to academia was covered by the Brooklyn Daily Eagle in truly insulting fashion in its November 25, 1883 issue, which was published four years before his death. An excerpt:

“Isaac Sprague, who is usually advertised in museums or traveling shows as the living skeleton, was exhibited yesterday to the students of the Rush Medical College, and was made the subject of a lecture by Dr. Henry M. Lyman. Several hundred students filled the tiers of seats that rose above each other to the roof of the amphitheatre, and in the small semicircle below sat the skeleton. A skeleton he was, indeed, for there did not appear to be a single vestige of flesh on his body, and the skin was drawn tightly over the bones. He wore a pair of trunks, leaving his legs, chest and arms nude, and a more repulsive sight to any lover of the ‘human form divine’ it would be difficult to imagine. The man’s spine was curved to one side and there was a tremulous pulsation in the neck over the right shoulder that produced an irritating effect upon an observer’s nerves. Sprague’s face is not attenuated in comparison with his body, and his neck seems to preserve some muscular tissues, but all the remainder is a mass of living articulated bones.

The skeleton said that he was forty-two years old and had been suffering from progressive muscular atrophy for thirty years. ‘Cases such as this,’ said the lecturer, ‘generally run their course in five years, and few have been known to exceed twenty years. It is safe to say that there is no case like the present one on record.’

‘Have you suffered much?’ the doctor asked.

‘No,’ said the skeleton in a voice almost as thin as his legs. ‘I have had almost no rheumatic pains; have suffered no loss of sleep; I can eat three hearty meals a day, and have been married twice and now have three children.’

The skeleton, in conclusion, told the students that he now weighs fifty pounds, which was half what he weighed when the disease began. He said, in an incidental and humorous way, that his wife weighed 172 pounds. He himself is five feet five and one half inches in height, and his boy, weighing 125 pounds, can carry his father about like a child.”

Long before patenting an early drone system in 1915, Nikola Tesla was enabling a method for push-button war, which he envisioned as a way to scare the world into an endless state of ceasefire. Of course, it hasn’t worked out that way. The opening of a post by Steven Beschloss at the New Yorker blog:

“In September, 1898, at Madison Square Garden, Nikola Tesla revealed a new invention: a radio-controlled torpedo boat. It was the first demonstration of wireless remote control in history, and it caused, in Tesla’s words, ‘a sensation such as no other invention of mine has ever produced.’ Some witnesses believed that the Croatian inventor was using mind control.

Detailed in his patent, No. 613,809, a ‘Method of and Apparatus for Controlling Mechanism of Moving Vessels or Vehicles,’ Tesla demonstrated how radio signals can remotely trigger switches and direct a vehicle’s movement without ‘intermediate wires, cables, or other form of electrical or mechanical connection with the object save the natural media in space.’ While Tesla recognized a wide list of applications for his remote-controlled robots, including transporting objects to distant locations and establishing communication with and exploring ‘inaccessible regions,’ he presciently, albeit optimistically, zeroed in on the military potential of his invention. ‘The greatest value,’ he wrote in his patent application, will be its use in armaments and warfare, ‘for by reason of its certain and unlimited destructiveness it will tend to bring about and maintain permanent peace among nations.’

Less than two decades later, during the First World War, the Germans employed a remote-controlled motorboat packed with explosives and attached to an unspooling wire.”

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The opening of a spot-on open letter from Carl Bernstein to Guardian Editor Alan Rusbridger as the latter was preparing to be questioned at parliamentary hearings:

“Dear Alan,

There is plenty of time – and there are abundant venues – to debate relevant questions about Mr Snowden’s historical role, his legal fate, the morality of his actions, and the meaning of the information he has chosen to disclose.

But your appearance before the Commons today strikes me as something quite different in purpose and dangerously pernicious: an attempt by the highest UK authorities to shift the issue from government policies and excessive government secrecy in the United States and Great Britain to the conduct of the press – which has been quite admirable and responsible in the case of the Guardian, particularly, and the way it has handled information initially provided by Mr Snowden.

Indeed, generally speaking, the record of journalists, in Britain and the United States in handling genuine national security information since World War II, without causing harm to our democracies or giving up genuine secrets to real enemies, is far more responsible than the over-classification, disingenuousness, and (sometimes) outright lying by a series of governments, prime ministers and presidents when it comes to information that rightly ought to be known and debated in a free society. Especially in recent years.”•

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Bernstein + Woodward + Buckley in 1974:

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Piers Morgan: He and Assad  still in power.

Piers Morgan: Like Assad, he’s yet to be deposed.

The Top 5 foreign countries sending traffic to Afflictor during November:

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

One hundred driverless Volvos are soon to be deployed in Sweden in a large-scale pilot program. From Trevor Mogg at Digital Trends:

“Volvo is about to take its biggest step yet towards bringing a self-driving car to market with a pilot project that’ll put 100 such vehicles onto public roads in the Swedish city of Gothenburg.

The project, called ‘Drive Me’, will involve the autonomous cars using around 30 miles (50 km) of selected roads in the city, dealing with everyday driving conditions and situations.

The initiative, described by the car maker as ‘the world’s first large-scale autonomous driving pilot project,’ will kick off next year with customer research and technology development, with the self-driving vehicles expected to take to the roads in 2017.

‘Our aim is for the car to be able to handle all possible traffic scenarios by itself, including leaving the traffic flow and finding a safe ‘harbor’ if the driver for any reason is unable to regain control,’ Erik Coelingh, technical specialist at Volvo, said in a release.”

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help me find a shrinking potion (reno nv)

i’m looking for a real working way to shrink. i know its very strange, but i’m serious, and i know that there must really be a way. i would like to shrink myself to 3 inches tall. no joke. lol. i’m a 24 year old male. i’d do anything, anything to get a hold of something that really honestly works. thank you!

Here’s an oddity: In 1991, Doris Tate, mother of actress Sharon Tate who was among those murdered by the Manson Family, appeared on To Tell the Truth hosted by Alex Trebek. The elder Tate became a campaigner for the rights of crime victims. This short-lived iteration of the venerable game show, which had a harder, more provocative edge than such fare usually has, provided a platform for Tate’s work. She passed away the following year as a result of a brain tumor. Begins at the 8:18 mark.

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Sometimes what we think is the end of the world is actually just the end of an era. We’re certainly going through a foundational change now as the Computer Age disappears one stalwart after another of the Industrial Age. But the sinking feeling isn’t just about cultural transition. Reports from one NASA scientist after another tells us that something is seriously amiss environmentally.

Todd Gitlin has a TomDispatch piece about the latest plague and one that could “infect” us all simultaneously: climate change, which is slow and insidious, until it is brutal and devastating. The opening:

“Apocalyptic climate change is upon us. For shorthand, let’s call it a slow-motion apocalypse to distinguish it from an intergalactic attack out of the blue or a suddenly surging Genesis-style flood.

Slow-motion, however, is not no-motion. In fits and starts, speeding up and slowing down, turning risks into clumps of extreme fact, one catastrophe after another — even if there can be no 100% certitude about the origin of each one — the planetary future careens toward the unlivable. That future is, it seems, arriving ahead of schedule, though erratically enough that most people — in the lucky, prosperous countries at any rate — can still imagine the planet conducting something close to business as usual.

To those who pay attention, of course, the recent bursts of extreme weather are not ‘remote’ or ‘abstract,’ nor matters to be deferred until later in the century while we worry about more immediate problems. The coming dystopian landscape is all too real and it is already right here for many millions.”

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From a recent L.A. Review of Books essay by Steffie Nelson about the Los Angeles experience of Aldous Huxley, who enjoyed one final hit of acid and died the same day that JFK was assassinated:

“Huxley freely admitted that the novel as a form may not have been the best container for his prodigious flow of ideas – this is an author who was contracted, during his peak years, to produce three books a year. But Brave New World’s setting in a future where control is exerted through the monitored supply of mindless, artificial pleasure sounds uncomfortably close to our present reality. As recently as 2010, it was number three on a list of books Americans most want banned from public libraries.

I would argue that it wasn’t until Huxley moved to America — specifically, to Los Angeles — that the seeds of his lifelong fascinations with technology, pharmacology, the media, mysticism and spiritual enlightenment fully blossomed and bore fruit. It’s often said ‘The Sixties’ officially began with the death of JFK and America’s ‘loss of innocence.’ But without the dedicated and well-documented cosmic explorations of Aldous Huxley and his cohorts, the decade would have looked very different. It’s not an exaggeration to say that, without Huxley, Timothy Leary might never have tuned in and turned on, and Jim Morrison might never have broken on through.”

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Mike Wallace questions Huxley, 1958:

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As you can tell by the latest Google Doodle, Maria Callas would have been 90 today. Two classic interviews with the titanic and troubled singer.

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Barbara Walters with Callas on Today, 1974:


Mike Wallace 
with Callas on 60 Minutes, 1973, at the 2:30 mark:

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Newt Gingrich, a tawdry and horrible man, would turn the moon into a strip mall, into a tourist trap. Some government or corporation could conceivably do just that, as there are few binding rules governing space. This point is particularly tricky right now because as China prepares to land a lunar rover, we’re at the dawn of an age which will see a slew of space projects from both the public and private sectors. Or will they actually be stymied by a lack of regulation? From Derek Mead at Vice:

“In two weeks’ time, we’ll likely cheer the third country to successfully make a soft landing on the Moon. In the next decade or two, we’re likely to welcome a whole lot more, along with the first companies to reach the Moon on their own. While it’s highly doubtful that a country would set out to build a Moon base without first figuring out if it’s legal, it’s a chicken-egg scenario.

The lack of legal clarity could hamper efforts before they solidify enough to bring about a legal review in the first place. Who’s going to fund a Moon hotel if there’s no guarantee a firm could own the property it’s built on? Given the strange history of Moon ownership claims, why would the UN make a sweeping ruling on a nascent plan? One thing is certain: As space becomes more crowded, the question of who can own it is coming ever closer to being forced.”

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Clive Thompson of Wired is one of those blessed journalists who’s as much of a joy to read for his lucid prose as his good ideas. In a new piece, he interviews multifaceted Canadian academic Vaclav Smil, a prolific author and a favorite of Bill Gates. An excerpt about manufacturing in America, which has been outsourced to a great degree in recent decades and in the next few will be increasingly lost to automation:

Clive Thompson:

Let’s talk about manufacturing. You say a country that stops doing mass manufacturing falls apart. Why?

Vaclav Smil:

In every society, manufacturing builds the lower middle class. If you give up manufacturing, you end up with haves and have-nots and you get social polarization. The whole lower middle class sinks.

 Clive Thompson:

You also say that manufacturing is crucial to innovation.

Vaclav Smil:

Most innovation is not done by research institutes and national laboratories. It comes from manufacturing—from companies that want to extend their product reach, improve their costs, increase their returns. What’s very important is in-house research. Innovation usually arises from somebody taking a product already in production and making it better: better glass, better aluminum, a better chip. Innovation always starts with a product.

Look at LCD screens. Most of the advances are coming from big industrial conglomerates in Korea like Samsung or LG. The only good thing in the US is Gorilla Glass, because it’s Corning, and Corning spends $700 million a year on research.

 Clive Thompson:

American companies do still innovate, though. They just outsource the manufacturing. What’s wrong with that?

 Vaclav Smil:

Look at the crown jewel of Boeing now, the 787 Dreamliner. The plane had so many problems—it was like three years late. And why? Because large parts of it were subcontracted around the world. The 787 is not a plane made in the USA; it’s a plane assembled in the USA. They subcontracted composite materials to Italians and batteries to the Japanese, and the batteries started to burn in-flight. The quality control is not there.”

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From the July 12, 1901 New York Times:

Albany, Mo.–An accident in which three children, a pet frog, and some dynamite figure here to-day resulted in one death, the injury of two persons, and the partial wrecking of a dwelling. The three children of George McCurry, a contractor, found some dynamite in the cellar of their home, and, thinking it was putty, fed it to their pet frog. The pieces of dynamite resembled insects and the frog ate them. A large tool chest fell on the frog and exploded the dynamite. A chisel pierced the temple of youngest child and killed it.

Another child and Mrs. McCurry, in the kitchen above, were seriously hurt and that part of the house was wrecked.”

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The opening of Dan Lyons’ post which pushes back at last night’s Amazon drone-delivery reveal on 60 Minutes, which he sees as hoopla for Cyber Monday marketing and also as damage control against Brad Stone’s unflattering Bezos book, The Everything Store

“Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos runs one of the world’s most notoriously secretive organizations. Yet last night he went on national TV and showed off a bunch of dazzling delivery drones that he says won’t realistically arrive in the real world for another four or five years, which in realspeak means they’re a decade or more away. 

Why is this incredibly tight-lipped company suddenly showing off prototypes? The answer is that these drones were not designed to carry packages, but to give a lift to Amazon’s image.

For one thing, today is Cyber Monday, the day when everyone goes shopping online. Amazon somehow got CBS and 60 Minutes to create a 14-minute free ad spot for Amazon on the eve of this huge shopping day.”

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Why the Internet Won’t Be Nirvana” is a 1995 Newsweek article which astronomer Clifford Stoll would no doubt like to have back. Check out the last two lines in particular of the excerpt below:

“After two decades online, I’m perplexed. It’s not that I haven’t had a gas of a good time on the Internet. I’ve met great people and even caught a hacker or two. But today, I’m uneasy about this most trendy and oversold community. Visionaries see a future of telecommuting workers, interactive libraries and multimedia classrooms. They speak of electronic town meetings and virtual communities. Commerce and business will shift from offices and malls to networks and modems. And the freedom of digital networks will make government more democratic.

Baloney. Do our computer pundits lack all common sense? The truth in no online database will replace your daily newspaper, no CD-ROM can take the place of a competent teacher and no computer network will change the way government works.

Consider today’s online world. The Usenet, a worldwide bulletin board, allows anyone to post messages across the nation. Your word gets out, leapfrogging editors and publishers. Every voice can be heard cheaply and instantly. The result? Every voice is heard. The cacophony more closely resembles citizens band radio, complete with handles, harassment, and anonymous threats. When most everyone shouts, few listen. How about electronic publishing? Try reading a book on disc. At best, it’s an unpleasant chore: the myopic glow of a clunky computer replaces the friendly pages of a book. And you can’t tote that laptop to the beach. Yet Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we’ll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure.”

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Billionaire Vodka, venison, corporate welfare.

You probably had a hectic Black Friday and so did Santa Claus. No, he wasn’t making toys for your children in his workshop. Fuck that. Santa was busy sending viruses to the Healthcare.gov website. You see, Santa has gone right wing like David Mamet. His interests now include increasing wealth inequality and spending like a Koch brother to prevent Obama from getting a third term. (Yeah, I know, but don’t tell him.) He got a job at Goldman Sachs and converted the workshop into a gentlemen’s club for his Wall Street friends. It’s got stripper poles and dogfights and cigar bars and a firing range. But Santa’s not completely heartless. Why, he kept a few elves around to provide live sex shows for the clientele. You should see their little mouths go. 

One more thing: Mrs. Claus got the heave-ho–ho–ho. She no longer had a thigh gap and Kris decided he was entitled to a fresh piece or two. So if your MILF of a mom is willing to be friendly, maybe you’ll get a gift after all. She doesn’t have to worry about getting knocked up, either. No, Santa didn’t get clipped like George Clooney. It’s just that he only comes once a year and always brings a bag. Get it? Good. Because that’s all you’re getting this Christmas.•

Don’t cry, Abigail. You would have gotten tired of that new dollie in a few years anyway. Oh, and did I mention that Grandma passed?

Don’t cry, Abigail. You would have gotten tired of that new dollie in a few years anyway. Oh, and did I mention that Grandma passed?

Nana (1935-2013)

Nana (1935-2013)

Santa made me blow a businessman.

Santa made me blow a hedge-fund manager.

You've got to earn that tricycle.

You’ve got to earn that tricycle.

Reports about two new uses for the domestic drone, hunting feral pigs and delivering Amazon goods, from, respectively, the Economist and 60 Minutes

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“WILD pigs are rooting around in a field in the dark. Partly hidden by tall grass, their tails wag happily as they snuffle around for roots and insects. A shot rings out and the biggest pig is down. The rest scatter quickly; yet a shooter picks them off one by one with uncanny accuracy.

Pigs are clever and hard to hunt; it can take a day to stalk one. But they are no match for an aerial drone such as the ‘dehogaflier’ operated by Louisiana Hog Control, a pest-extermination firm. It is a remote-controlled aircraft with a thermal-imaging camera and a laser pointer. It easily spots the pigs’ warm bodies from 400 feet and points them out to a hunter on the ground wearing night-vision goggles, who then shoots them.”

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Strong female leads have long been limited in Hollywood because the unwritten rule said that too many movies featuring them wouldn’t sell. But hearts and minds can change generationally, and it looks like the film business is catching up to that shift. From Mike Fleming Jr. at Deadline Hollywood:

“The performance of Catching Fire and Frozen are all the more remarkable if you consider that both of these films are squarely driven by female heroines. Conventional wisdom is that the marketplace could never support more than one female-driven film, because while gals will see guy movies, it doesn’t work the other way. Well, it worked big time — both films crushed the 5-day Thanksgiving domestic gross record – and it happened shortly after another female driven film, Gravity, crossed the $500 million mark in global gross.”

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