Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
Afflictor: Thinking baseball won’t be the same now that the Kardashians have been inside a stadium.
When we transitioned from the oral tradition to the printed word, we outsourced some of our memory. There were concerns about how knowledge would be altered, much as there are now that we’re offloading to computers. Books, of course, were a boon to intelligence, but are there crucial differences in regards to computers, even dangerous ones? Digital Age contrarian Nick Carr believes there are and argues so in a new Atlantic essay.
Carr makes it as difficult as possible on himself, without a straw man in the piece. He begins by arguing that airplane auto-pilot has eroded pilot skills, increasing hazards if the system fails. It’s not an easy debate to have since American commercial airlines almost never crash anymore and certainly far less than in pre-computer days. Of course, that’s not entirely because of automation but also due to an increased understanding of wind shears. But computerization has been an important component to greater safety. Carr makes a case, however, that observation instead of action gradually will degrade our ability to translate information into knowledge. I think we’re just changing over to a new type of knowledge–a necessary metamorphosis–but it’s a compelling article. The opening:
“The first automatic pilot, dubbed a ‘metal airman’ in a 1930 Popular Science article, consisted of two gyroscopes, one mounted horizontally, the other vertically, that were connected to a plane’s controls and powered by a wind-driven generator behind the propeller. The horizontal gyroscope kept the wings level, while the vertical one did the steering. Modern autopilot systems bear little resemblance to that rudimentary device. Controlled by onboard computers running immensely complex software, they gather information from electronic sensors and continuously adjust a plane’s attitude, speed, and bearings. Pilots today work inside what they call ‘glass cockpits.’ The old analog dials and gauges are mostly gone. They’ve been replaced by banks of digital displays. Automation has become so sophisticated that on a typical passenger flight, a human pilot holds the controls for a grand total of just three minutes. What pilots spend a lot of time doing is monitoring screens and keying in data. They’ve become, it’s not much of an exaggeration to say, computer operators.
And that, many aviation and automation experts have concluded, is a problem. Overuse of automation erodes pilots’ expertise and dulls their reflexes, leading to what Jan Noyes, an ergonomics expert at Britain’s University of Bristol, terms ‘a de-skilling of the crew.’ No one doubts that autopilot has contributed to improvements in flight safety over the years. It reduces pilot fatigue and provides advance warnings of problems, and it can keep a plane airborne should the crew become disabled. But the steady overall decline in plane crashes masks the recent arrival of ‘a spectacularly new type of accident,’ says Raja Parasuraman, a psychology professor at George Mason University and a leading authority on automation. When an autopilot system fails, too many pilots, thrust abruptly into what has become a rare role, make mistakes. Rory Kay, a veteran United captain who has served as the top safety official of the Air Line Pilots Association, put the problem bluntly in a 2011 interview with the Associated Press: ‘We’re forgetting how to fly.’ The Federal Aviation Administration has become so concerned that in January it issued a ‘safety alert’ to airlines, urging them to get their pilots to do more manual flying. An overreliance on automation, the agency warned, could put planes and passengers at risk.
The experience of airlines should give us pause. It reveals that automation, for all its benefits, can take a toll on the performance and talents of those who rely on it.”
Tags: Nick Carr
From the January 24, 1885 New York Times:
“Kankakee, Ill.–A.H. Butts, Secretary of the Chicago Lumber Company, has just returned from the logging camp near Metropolitan, Mich., a point in the pineries 40 miles north of Escanaba. He says the night before he left camp the mercury had dropped to 43º below zero. This was the climax of four days of very extreme weather. That night an old trapper and Indian hunter named Tom Dudging, returning from hunting, was killed and eaten by wolves within two miles of camp. The wolves there are more numerous and bold than usual on account of the scarcity of small game. His friends, searching for him the next morning, found his closely gnawed bones. Thirteen dead wolves were lying near him pierced by his rifle balls, and his Winchester rifle was by his side with one chamber loaded.”
Tags: A.H. Butts, Tom Dudging
Facebook and other colossi are trying to teach computers cultural context so that they can identify language the way humans can. From Daniela Hernandez at Wired:
“Facebook needs machines that can understand the way we humans behave and write and even feel.
In January — after the company rolled out a limited public trial of Graph Search, a way of searching activity on the popular social network — Facebook engineers were forced to tweak their algorithms so they could translate slang like ‘pics of my homies‘ into more straightforward language like ‘pictures of my friends’ and convert expressions like ‘dig,’ ‘off the chain,’ and ‘off the hook’ into that standard Facebook word: ‘Like.’
This worked well enough. But it’s just the beginning. Like Google and Apple and other tech giants, Facebook is exploring a new field called ‘deep learning,’ which will allow its machines to better understand all sorts of nuanced language and behavior that we humans take for granted. In short, deep learning teaches machines to behave more like the human brain. Facebook’s effort only recently got off the ground — ‘we’re just getting started,’ a company spokesperson says — but its importance will expand as time goes on.”
Tags: Daniela Hernandez
Like all places where pioneers land, someday the Internet will be relatively civilized. Not completely, but relatively. I’m not talking about mean comments and trolling but about the larger issues of control. That’s both a good and bad thing. You certainly don’t want cybercrimes and predatory behavior, but the unfettered, decentralized, anonymous rush of the new medium was exhilarating and led to all kinds of insurgent creativity. Bruce Schneier, the Internet security expert, just published an article for the Atlantic about the struggle for power over the Internet, which he sees as tilting in favor of corporations and governments over individuals. It’s hard to argue with his scorekeeping. The opening:
“We’re in the middle of an epic battle for power in cyberspace. On one side are the traditional, organized, institutional powers such as governments and large multinational corporations. On the other are the distributed and nimble: grassroots movements, dissident groups, hackers, and criminals. Initially, the Internet empowered the second side. It gave them a place to coordinate and communicate efficiently, and made them seem unbeatable. But now, the more traditional institutional powers are winning, and winning big. How these two side fare in the long term, and the fate of the rest of us who don’t fall into either group, is an open question—and one vitally important to the future of the Internet.
In the Internet’s early days, there was a lot of talk about its ‘natural laws’—how it would upend traditional power blocks, empower the masses, and spread freedom throughout the world. The international nature of the Internet bypassed circumvented national laws. Anonymity was easy. Censorship was impossible. Police were clueless about cybercrime. And bigger changes seemed inevitable. Digital cash would undermine national sovereignty. Citizen journalism would topple traditional media, corporate PR, and political parties. Easy digital copying would destroy the traditional movie and music industries. Web marketing would allow even the smallest companies to compete against corporate giants. It really would be a new world order.
This was a utopian vision, but some of it did come to pass. Internet marketing has transformed commerce. The entertainment industries have been transformed by things like MySpace and YouTube, and are now more open to outsiders. Mass media has changed dramatically, and some of the most influential people in the media have come from the blogging world. There are new ways to organize politically and run elections. Crowdfunding has made tens of thousands of projects possible to finance, and crowdsourcing made more types of projects possible. Facebook and Twitter really did help topple governments.
But that is just one side of the Internet’s disruptive character. The Internet has emboldened traditional power as well.”
Tags: Bruce Schneier
In his 1970 Apollo 11 account, Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer realized that his rocket wasn’t the biggest after all, that the mission was a passing of the torch, that technology, an expression of the human mind, had diminished its creators. “Space travel proposed a future world of brains attached to wires,” Mailer wrote, his ego having suffered a TKO. And just as the Space Race ended the greater race began, the one between carbon and silicon, and it’s really just a matter of time before the pace grows too brisk for humans.
Supercomputers will ultimately be a threat to us, but we’re certainly doomed without them, so we have to navigate the future the best we can, even if it’s one not of our control. Gary Marcus addresses this and other issues in his latest New Yorker blog piece, “Why We Should Think About the Threat of Artificial Intelligence.” An excerpt:
“It’s likely that machines will be smarter than us before the end of the century—not just at chess or trivia questions but at just about everything, from mathematics and engineering to science and medicine. There might be a few jobs left for entertainers, writers, and other creative types, but computers will eventually be able to program themselves, absorb vast quantities of new information, and reason in ways that we carbon-based units can only dimly imagine. And they will be able to do it every second of every day, without sleep or coffee breaks.
For some people, that future is a wonderful thing. [Ray] Kurzweil has written about a rapturous singularity in which we merge with machines and upload our souls for immortality; Peter Diamandis has argued that advances in A.I. will be one key to ushering in a new era of ‘abundance,’ with enough food, water, and consumer gadgets for all. Skeptics like Eric Brynjolfsson and I have worried about the consequences of A.I. and robotics for employment. But even if you put aside the sort of worries about what super-advanced A.I. might do to the labor market, there’s another concern, too: that powerful A.I. might threaten us more directly, by battling us for resources.
Most people see that sort of fear as silly science-fiction drivel—the stuff of The Terminator and The Matrix. To the extent that we plan for our medium-term future, we worry about asteroids, the decline of fossil fuels, and global warming, not robots. But a dark new book by James Barrat, Our Final Invention: Artificial Intelligence and the End of the Human Era, lays out a strong case for why we should be at least a little worried.
Barrat’s core argument, which he borrows from the A.I. researcher Steve Omohundro, is that the drive for self-preservation and resource acquisition may be inherent in all goal-driven systems of a certain degree of intelligence. In Omohundro’s words, ‘if it is smart enough, a robot that is designed to play chess might also want to build a spaceship,’ in order to obtain more resources for whatever goals it might have.”
Tags: Eric Brynjolfsson, Gary Marcus, Norman Mailer, Peter Diamandis, Ray Kurzweil
President Obama believes in Affirmative Action and improving health care and the environment, but so did President Nixon. Before big money, lobbyists and religion became entrenched in American politics, there was common ground. The opening of “Fighting to Save the Earth From Man,” a gated article from the February 20, 1970 issue of Time:
“The great question of the ’70s is:
Shall we surrender to our surroundings or shall we make our peace with nature and begin to make reparations for the damage we have done to our air, to our land and to our water?
—State of the Union Message
NIXON’S words come none too early. The U.S. environment is seriously threatened by the prodigal garbage of the world’s richest economy. In the President’s own boyhood town of Whittier, a part of metropolitan Los Angeles, the once sweet air is befouled with carbon monoxide, hydrocarbons, lead compounds, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, fly ash, asbestos particulates and countless other noxious substances. The Apollo 10 astronauts could see Los Angeles as a cancerous smudge from 25,000 miles in outer space. Airline pilots say that whisky-brown miasmas, visible from 70 miles, shroud almost every U.S. city, including remote towns like Missoula in Montana’s ‘big sky’ country. What most Americans now breathe is closer to ambient filth than to air.
The environment may well be the gut issue that can unify a polarized nation in the 1970s. It may also divide people who are appalled by the mess from those who have adapted to it. No one knows how many Americans have lost all feeling for nature and the quality of life. Even so, the issue now attracts young and old, farmers, city dwellers and suburban housewives, scientists, industrialists and blue-collar workers. They know pollution well. It is as close as the water tap, the car-clogged streets and junk-filled landscape—their country’s visible decay, America the Ugly.
Politicians have got the message.”
Tags: Barack Obama, Richard M. Nixon
Dear secret service,
Please help me win the lottery. I’ve been nothing but good to myself and others around but I continually get shit on by everyone and my life has no direction. I will also accept a job. You should know who this is so call me.
Thanks.
The opening of Tom Simonite’s new Technology Review piece, “The Decline of Wikipedia,” which asserts that the remarkable crowd-sourced encyclopedia, which I don’t go a day without consulting, is threatened for a myriad of reasons but none more than entrenched bureaucracy:
“The sixth most widely used website in the world is not run anything like the others in the top 10. It is not operated by a sophisticated corporation but by a leaderless collection of volunteers who generally work under pseudonyms and habitually bicker with each other. It rarely tries new things in the hope of luring visitors; in fact, it has changed little in a decade. And yet every month 10 billion pages are viewed on the English version of Wikipedia alone. When a major news event takes place, such as the Boston Marathon bombings, complex, widely sourced entries spring up within hours and evolve by the minute. Because there is no other free information source like it, many online services rely on Wikipedia. Look something up on Google or ask Siri a question on your iPhone, and you’ll often get back tidbits of information pulled from the encyclopedia and delivered as straight-up facts.
Yet Wikipedia and its stated ambition to “compile the sum of all human knowledge” are in trouble. The volunteer workforce that built the project’s flagship, the English-language Wikipedia—and must defend it against vandalism, hoaxes, and manipulation—has shrunk by more than a third since 2007 and is still shrinking. Those participants left seem incapable of fixing the flaws that keep Wikipedia from becoming a high-quality encyclopedia by any standard, including the project’s own. Among the significant problems that aren’t getting resolved is the site’s skewed coverage: its entries on Pokemon and female porn stars are comprehensive, but its pages on female novelists or places in sub-Saharan Africa are sketchy. Authoritative entries remain elusive. Of the 1,000 articles that the project’s own volunteers have tagged as forming the core of a good encyclopedia, most don’t earn even Wikipedia’s own middle-ranking quality scores.
The main source of those problems is not mysterious. The loose collective running the site today, estimated to be 90 percent male, operates a crushing bureaucracy with an often abrasive atmosphere that deters newcomers who might increase participation in Wikipedia and broaden its coverage.”
Tags: Tom Simonite
At the New Yorker blog, Kirk Kardashian takes a dour view of electric vehicles, though I think he gives short shrift to the early sales numbers of the current EVs and doesn’t explore the longer-term possibilities of solar being used to create electricity, which would eliminate much of the pollution created by electric. And does it make any sense that the price of EVs won’t continue to drop as manufacturers learn more about the process and materials? It certainly would be an extreme outlier in tech if that didn’t happen. From his piece:
“Given the cost and ineffectiveness of E.V.s, and the failure of the highest-profile attempt to address that problem, automakers seem at a loss about how to get more people to drive electric cars. They’ve focussed on government incentives, like a seventy-five-hundred-dollar tax credit on the purchase of a new E.V. These are well-intentioned: one of government’s roles is to get people to behave in ways that make the world better, and electric cars—which are about three times as fuel efficient as non-hybrid gasoline cars—serve that purpose, because they produce no exhaust. The Nissan Leaf, for instance, has an efficiency rating of a hundred and twenty-nine miles per gallon.
But questions persist about whether electric cars are really better for the environment, particularly if you take into account the environmental cost of creating electricity in the first place. (Fuel-efficiency ratings don’t consider this.) Replacing an internal-combustion-engine vehicle with an electric car transfers the emissions from the tailpipe to the smokestacks of the power plants that feed the electric grid. In the U.S., a majority of power plants use fossil fuel to generate electricity, and their greenhouse-gas emissions are declining slower than emissions from automobiles. Therefore, as [John] DeCicco found in a recent study published in the journal Energy Policy, the U.S. electric grid produces twice as much carbon dioxide as burning gasoline for each unit of energy. ‘The benefits to shifting to another kind of fuel depend critically on the emissions in the sectors that produce those fuels,’ DeCicco told me.
Meanwhile, gasoline-powered cars are becoming more efficient all the time. That’s good for the environment and consumers, but probably frustrating for E.V. engineers, as their central competition—internal-combustion engines—is better funded, improving quickly, and supported by a hundred and sixty-eight thousand quick-charge spots known as gas stations.“
Tags: John DeCicco, Kirk Kardashian
Amazon is a wildly successful company that doesn’t really make any profits. Huh? That cackling taskmaster Jeff Bezos has a long-term plan based on trading the present for some nebulous point in the future. The opening of “The Amazon Mystery” by Derek Thompson at the Atlantic:
“If there’s a sentence that sums up Amazon, the weirdest major technology company in America, it’s one that came from its own CEO, Jeff Bezos, speaking at the Aspen Institute’s 2009 Annual Awards Dinner in New York City: “Invention requires a long-term willingness to be misunderstood.”
In other words: if you don’t yet get what I’m trying to build, keep waiting.
Four years later, Amazon’s annual revenue and stock price have both nearly tripled, but for many onlookers, the long wait for understanding continues. Bezos’s company has grown from its humble Seattle beginnings to become not only the largest bookstore in the history of the world, but also the world’s largest online retailer, the largest Web-hosting company in the world, the most serious competitor to Netflix in streaming video, the fourth-most-popular tablet maker, and a sprawling international network of fulfillment centers for merchants around the world. It is now rumored to be close to launching its own smartphone and television set-top box. The every-bookstore has become the store for everything, with the global ambition to become the store for everywhere.
Seriously: What is Amazon? A retail company? A media company? A logistics machine? “
Tags: Derek Thompson, Jeff Bezos
I really enjoyed “Why Texas Is Our Future,” economist Tyler Cowen’s Time cover story about the Lone Star State becoming the template for America, but I have to wonder if Texas is even the future of Texas, let alone the rest of the country. I’m not saying demographic shifts will completely change its nature–some things are deeply ingrained–but I wonder if the state will always be so red. It may have been better for Time to do a split-cover issue asking if Texas or California will be America’s future. (Though Massachusetts may actually have them both beat.) A few more quick questions and comments about the piece:
From Cowen on the Texas model:
How did Texas do it?
Texas Monthly senior editor Erica Grieder credits the ‘Texas model’ in her recent book, Big, Hot, Cheap, and Right: What America Can Learn From the Strange Genius of Texas. “The Texas model basically calls for low taxes and low services,’ she says. “In a sense, it’s just a limited-government approach.” Chief Executive magazine has named Texas the most growth-friendly state in the nation for nine years in a row. The ranking is based on survey results from its CEO readership, who grade the states on the basis of factors such as taxes and regulation, the quality of the workforce and the living environment. Cheap land, cheap labor and low taxes have all clearly contributed to this business-friendly climate. But that’s not the whole story.
“Certainly since 2008, the beginning of the Great Recession, it’s been the energy boom,” SMU’s [Bernard] Weinstein says, pointing to the resource boom’s ripple effect throughout the Texas economy. However, he says, the job growth predates the energy boom by a significant margin. “A decade ago, before the shale boom, economic growth in Texas was based on IT development,” Weinstein says. “Today most of the job creation, in total numbers, is in business and personal services, from people working in hospitals to lawyers.”
Of course, not everyone’s a fan of the Texas model. “We are not strong economically because we have low taxes and lax regulation. We are strong economically because of geography and geology,” says Scott McCown, a former executive director of the Center for Public Policy Priorities who is now a law professor at the University of Texas. “We’ve built an economy favoring the wealthy … If that’s the ultimate end result of the Texas model in a democratic society, it will be rejected.”
So will the rest of the country follow Texas’ lead? People are already voting with their feet. The places in the U.S. seeing significant in-migration are largely in relatively inexpensive parts of the Sun Belt. These are, by and large, affordable states with decent records of job creation–often with subpar public services and low taxes. Texas is just the most striking example. But Oklahoma, Colorado, the Carolinas and other parts of the South are benefiting from the same trends–namely that California, New York and the other high-tax, high-cost states are no longer such good deals for much of the U.S.’s middle and lower-middle classes.
The Americans heading to Texas and other cheap-living states are a bit like the mythical cowboys of our past–self-reliant, for better or worse.•
Tags: Bernard Weinstein, Erica Grieder, Scott McCown, Tyler Cowen
Richard Brautigan, who died in 1984 despite being all watched over by machines of loving grace, in interviewed a year before his passing on German TV.
Tags: Richard Brautigan
From the September 24, 1995 New York Times:
“Canajoharie, N.Y.–For several months past Miss Mary Beekman, an esteemed resident of this village has been on a sick bed. Her trouble seemed to be mostly in her stomach, and she has frequently asserted with great positiveness that she had felt something moving within her. After eating she was always attacked with retching, and after an attack of this kind the other day a little squirming animal or reptile was found in the bowl. It was blackish, had an oval body large as a copper, with legs very long and slim. Several persons examined it, and say it looked like a toad. It was subsequently thrown into the canal and proved to be an adept swimmer. Since the removal of this toad the retching is less frequent, and it is now thought the young woman will recover.”
Tags: Miss Mary Beekman
Photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose amazing work I’m familiar with from Jennifer Baichwal’s documentary Manufactured Landscapes, is interviewed by the Economist about his new book, Water, and the volume’s accompanying film, which he co-directed with Baichwal. Watch interview here.
From a post by Damon Lavrinc at Wired, in which Elon Musk argues vehemently against hydrogen fuel cells for autos:
“There’s an old joke about hydrogen power: It’s the fuel of the future, and always will be. Elon Musk doesn’t just agree, he called out hydrogen fuel cell vehicles as ‘bullshit,’ claiming they’re more of a marketing ploy for automakers than a long-term solution.
The comment from Musk came during a speech to employees and enthusiasts at a new Tesla service center in Germany. The electric automaker’s co-founder and CEO was onstage espousing the virtues of the Model S when he went off on a tangent about EV naysayers: ‘And then they’ll say certain technologies like fuel cell … oh god … fuel cell is so bullshit. Except in a rocket.’
Musk goes on to state that even given the very best hydrogen technology, it doesn’t come close to the energy density of a modern lithium-ion battery pack like that found in the Model S.”
___________________________
In 1978, Jack Nicholson invests in hydrogen-powered cars:
Tags: Damon Lavrinc, Elon Musk
Olaf Stampf of Spiegel has an interview with German astronaut Ulrich Walter about Gravity, which was also reviewed by Buzz Aldrin. An excerpt:
“Spiegel:
In Gravity, Sandra Bullock plays an astronaut who gets separated from her shuttle and ends up floating in space, completely untethered. Would it be possible to save an astronaut in such a situation?
Ulrich Walter:
Yes, in principle. These days, every spacesuit is outfitted with a small jetpack. The pack’s range, though, is only about a kilometer, so it wouldn’t be possible to fly tens of thousands of kilometers to the ISS, as the characters do in the film. In real life, everyone involved in that disaster would have died.
Spiegel:
It doesn’t sound like a very nice way to go, drifting through nothingness in a spacesuit, waiting to die.
Ulrich Walter:
On the contrary! When you’re slowly running out of oxygen, the same thing happens as does when you’re in thin air at the top of a mountain: Everything seems funny. And as you’re laughing about it, you slowly nod off. I experienced this phenomenon in an altitude chamber during my training as an astronaut. At some point, someone in the group starts cracking bad jokes. Our brains are gentle with us. A person who dies alone in space dies a cheerful death.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Olaf Stampf, Ulrich Walter
Paul DePodesta will always, always be asked about Moneyball, but he continues to have interesting thoughts on the topic. And he’s clearly aware that even a great MLB GM is wrong a lot. Those who minimize risk have the best chance of winning–but no guarantees. From Kevin Berger’s Nautilus interview with “Peter Brand”:
“Question:
Were there authors or books who shaped your thinking about baseball?
Paul DePodesta:
Yes. But it wasn’t necessarily out of my formal education. The summer after my freshman year at college, I interned in Washington D.C. for Jim Pinkerton. [Pinkerton was a White House analyst for Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush. Today he is an author and panelist on the TV show, Fox News Watch.] On the first day I showed up at the office, Jim gave me $20 and told me to go down to the bookstore, buy a copy of Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and don’t come back until I finish it. So I did. The thing that struck me about the book was how paradigms change and what needs to change for progress. I also read Peter Drucker—his interesting management-efficiency stuff. I remember Drucker talking about the value question. Very simply put: If we weren’t already doing it this way, is this the way we would start? Jim looked at everything that way. I remember talking to him about the DMV, and him explaining if we weren’t already doing it this way, do you think this is the way we would do it? So he got me thinking that way.
Question:
What’s the guiding principle of your work now?
Paul DePodesta:
The guiding principle of our work is figuring out a way to deal with uncertainty. That’s what we deal with every day—an uncertain future. What’s going to happen on the next pitch is uncertain. We can’t figure out exactly what’s going to happen, but if we can get our arms around a range of possibilities, that gives us a much better chance to at least make better decisions. We’re still going to be wrong a lot, but hopefully we’re wrong less often now than we were 10 years ago. But we’re never going to be in a situation where our analysis tells us what’s going to happen. These are human beings interacting with one another in a highly stressful situation. So we’re never going to be perfectly predictive. But that’s what makes baseball interesting, makes it emotional.
Question:
Do you rely on probability theory, the math of potential outcomes, to help assemble a team?
Paul DePodesta:
Absolutely. We use probability theory every day, as it provides a framework for dealing with the uncertainty. The nice thing about baseball is that all of the possible outcomes are known—it’s not quite as messy as the real world. That makes the game an excellent playground for probability.”
Tags: Kevin Berger, Paul DePodesta
Via Max Read at Gawker comes this Kotaku post which makes a convincing case that Abigail Haworth’s Guardian story about Japan’s lack of interest in sex (which I posted about here) is based on a questionable reading of data in support of a narrative which may not be true. I should have been more circumspect about anything that viral-ready. An excerpt:
“One of the most damning bits of data in The Observer piece purports to say that 90 percent of women say ‘staying single’ is better than what they think being married is like. As Twitter user Inoue Eido points out, the survey actually says that nearly 90 percent of woman who haven’t married do plan on getting hitched. It’s worth noting that the number is higher than it was in the 2002 and the 1997 survey. The original survey also notes that around 87 percent of women think there’s merits to being single—it does not say ‘staying single.’
Data is tricky. It might be factual, but it’s not truth. Here, the data rolled out doesn’t specifically prove people in Japan aren’t having sex. It’s correlation. Guilt by association. Innuendo. What’s more, the numbers simply support the poll at hand, and are not necessarily representative of the larger population. Last year’s U.S. presidential election offers proof positive of that.”
Tags: Abigail Haworth, Max Read
“It was then indicated to him that a member of his family must die by his hand.”
When a New England farmer believed that God demanded he murder his youngest daughter, he was not alone in his delusion, as evidenced by an article in the May 5, 1879 New York Times. The story:
“Boston–Charles F. Freeman, the Pocasset farmer who lunged a knife into the heart of his little daughter Edith on Thursday morning last, became converted to the ultra views of Second Adventism about a year ago. This sect, which has made its appearance in the more sparsely settled parts of Massachusetts with more or less prominence at various times during the last 30 years, believed not only in the personal coming of Christ, but quite firmly in the continuance of revelations, signs, and miracles. Its followers were led to many acts of fanaticism, and by many citizens were regarded as crazy on the subject of their religion. The fanaticism reached its culmination in this most unnatural crime, which has awakened a widespread feeling of horror.
It seems incredible that so numerous are the members of the sect in that part of Cape Cod, known as Sandwich, that the crime is excused; yet such is the fact, and the murderer of his own child is upheld, while God is charged by some with having broken his promise to a faithful servant in not restoring the child alive to him.
Farmer Freeman became a leader among the Second Adventists. He believed it his mission to preach, and was a zealous exhorter. That great things were in store for him as a missionary among the faithless of the world he did not doubt. As time passed, he came to regard it as his duty to make some great sacrifice, which should result in a miracle and fix the attention of mankind upon the new faith. Some time ago he announced this belief to several of his fellow-worshipers. Two weeks ago, as he says, the long-expected revelation of the necessary sacrifice came to him in the night. It was then indicated to him that a member of his family must die by his hand. He talked the matter over with his wife, and persuaded her not to stand in ‘the Lord’s way,’ as they both considered it. They had two daughters, Bessie, 7 years old, and Edith, 5 years old. The latter was a sunny-haired child, the pet and idol of the household. The father prayed long to know who was appointed as the victim. He says that he prayed that it might be himself, but it was not to be. After patient waiting the second revelation came, late in the night of the murder. The pet Edith was pointed out as the sacrifice. The father was taken aback, but dared not resist the command of God. He awoke his wife and told her what was demanded. Then the mother’s heart refused to acquiesce in the unnatural deed. She begged hard for her darling’s life, but the husband was inexorable. Working on his poor wife’s fear of displeasing God, he at last gained her consent. The scene that followed is horrible beyond precedent. After Freeman had knelt and prayed that he might be spared the test of his faith, he nerved himself for murder. He felt he that he was another Abraham, and that God would either stay his hand or else raise his daughter from the dead, as a reward for his obedience. Then he and his wife went into the bedroom, where their two children lay sleeping, side by side. The mother carried the eldest to her own room. Freeman turned down the bed-clothes from the form of little Edith, raised the knife which he had provided for the occasion, and waited to see if God would not interpose. After a vain watch, he bent forward over the child, and with great care plunged the knife into Edith’s heart. There was an exclamation, and all was over. The insane father clasped his pet in his arms, and held her until he was certain life was extinct. Then he laid down and slept by her side, satisfied that he had done the will of God.
When the news of the murder was told to his fellow-believers, although staggered by such a proof of faith, they joined Freeman in holding that God would restore the child to life. There was some protest, but so infatuated was this entire following, comprising more than a score of respectable people in Pocasset and its vicinity, that they did not look upon the action as a crime, and beloved with the perpetrator that it was done by God’s command.
There was among the Second Adventist band, therefore, the deepest surprise, chagrin, and confusion to-day at the failure of little Edith to rise from the dead. Their faith did not waver in the least; and as an instance of this unparalleled credulity a Journal reporter telegraphs that last night he talked with Mrs. Swift, the child’s grandmother, who begged him not to mention to Mildred, the other child, anything about the murder, saying that there was no need of her knowing anything about the affair, because Edith would be alive again in the morning. Two or three of these peculiar people, however, doubted whether the resurrection would take place to-day, all, nevertheless, being sure that it would come soon. These few are not disheartened, but claim that the truth of their doctrine will yet be shown. But others mutter about “God breaking his promise,’ &c.
The funeral services took place in the Methodist Church this afternoon, the little edifice being crowded to suffocation and hundreds standing around the outside of the building. The Pastor, the Rev. Mr. Williams, assisted by the Baptist clergyman of the village, conducted the services and improved the opportunity to give the deluded Adventists, who all the while kept their eyes on the coffin, some sound advice. He said a great deal in a few words, warning them to give up their false belief while their reason remained. The funeral being over, Alden P. Davis, the leading spirit in the Advent company, now that Freeman is in jail, attempted to make a speech, but was ordered to keep quiet or submit to arrest. When the body had been removed to the little grave-yard, Davis mounted a grave and made just such a speech as might have been expected, saying that he was an infidel until two years ago, when God revealed himself to him. He eulogized the murderer until the crowd interrupted with cries of ‘Choke him,’ ‘Bury him in the open grave,’ &c., and a scene unparalleled in recent New-England history ensued over the coffin and the grave. No violence, however, occurred.”
Tags: Alden P. Davis, Bessie Freeman, Charles F. Freeman, Edith Freeman, Mrs. Freeman, Mrs. Swift, Rev. Mr. Williams
These are 4 things I am really into. Any suggestions on how to combine them into a business? I’m tired of being a lawyer for the man.
Russ Roberts of EconTalk did an interesting interview with security expert Bruce Schneier in the days between the Boston Marathon bombings and the Snowden leaks. Schneier suggested back then that the NSA might be using its Utah data center to spy on all Americans, but he couldn’t say conclusively. I’m not nearly as informed as Schneier is, but I thought it was definitely going on. And I don’t know that new legislation will ever make it go away, not with the ever-improving tools we have at our disposal. Just a couple more of the interesting topics from the podcast:
Tags: Bruce Schneier, Russ Roberts
UPDATE: This story seems to be based on a questionable reading of the data. See here.
Japan has a big fucking problem. No, I mean it has a big problem with fucking. A nation with an already graying population has many young people who’ve stopped having sex. No one knows exactly why. From Abigail Haworth in the Guardian:
“Ai Aoyama is a sex and relationship counsellor who works out of her narrow three-storey home on a Tokyo back street. Her first name means ‘love’ in Japanese, and is a keepsake from her earlier days as a professional dominatrix. Back then, about 15 years ago, she was Queen Ai, or Queen Love, and she did ‘all the usual things’ like tying people up and dripping hot wax on their nipples. Her work today, she says, is far more challenging. Aoyama, 52, is trying to cure what Japan‘s media calls sekkusu shinai shokogun, or ‘celibacy syndrome.’
Japan’s under-40s appear to be losing interest in conventional relationships. Millions aren’t even dating, and increasing numbers can’t be bothered with sex. For their government, ‘celibacy syndrome’ is part of a looming national catastrophe. Japan already has one of the world’s lowest birth rates. Its population of 126 million, which has been shrinking for the past decade, is projected to plunge a further one-third by 2060. Aoyama believes the country is experiencing ‘a flight from human intimacy’– and it’s partly the government’s fault.”
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Reggie Watts decides if you’re fucking (very NSFW, unless your job involves a glory hole):
Tags: Abigail Haworth, Ai Aoyama, Reggie Watts
The first two questions from a Vice interview Emily Wasik conducted with Kira Radinsky, designer of powerful predictive data-mining software that crunches past news reports to provide probabilities of disease outbreaks, political uprisings and the like:
“Vice:
Is it possible to predict the future with today’s technology?
Kira Radinsky:
We have reached a critical amount of data and computation power to start finding repeating patterns in history systematically. We built a predictive model based on more than 150 years of historical news data that examines past events with similar outcomes. Our system also incorporates related contextual information pulled from LinkedData, a project that finds connections between hundreds of resources. The combination allows the software to extrapolate from news of a cholera outbreak in Angola, for example, to predict a similar outbreak in Rwanda.
Vice:
So do you believe that history has a tendency to repeat itself?
Kira Radinsky:
The probabilities are always changing, but some patterns, if we abstract them correctly, always remain. And if we incorporate the most recent information we can learn about new patterns emerging all the time. Think about how children learn—they receive reinforcement from the environment and learn patterns. This is also how we learn. I would say the work I have done is not about predicting the future, it is more about making deep analysis on probabilities of future outcomes based on what we have seen, just as an expert in the field would do if he had the time to look at all the available data in the world.”
Tags: Emily Wasik, Kira Radinsky