Before awakening from its dream of endless futurism and joining the reality of present-day global economic malaise, Abu Dhabi planned to outfit Masdar City with a fleet of driverless, electric pod cars to replace gas-guzzling taxis.
From the September 14, 1897 New York Times:
“La Grange, Ind.–Ida Bolley, wife of a farmer, died to-day while in a fit of laughter. A friend told a story which greatly amused Mrs. Bolley. While she was making merry over it, a blood vessel burst and caused her death.”
Tags: Ida Bolley
From “Slow Ideas,” another excellent Atul Gawande New Yorker article, this one about why some innovations are almost instantly sticky and why others get stuck:
“This has been the pattern of many important but stalled ideas. They attack problems that are big but, to most people, invisible; and making them work can be tedious, if not outright painful. The global destruction wrought by a warming climate, the health damage from our over-sugared modern diet, the economic and social disaster of our trillion dollars in unpaid student debt—these things worsen imperceptibly every day. Meanwhile, the carbolic-acid remedies to them, all requiring individual sacrifice of one kind or another, struggle to get anywhere.
The global problem of death in childbirth is a pressing example. Every year, three hundred thousand mothers and more than six million children die around the time of birth, largely in poorer countries. Most of these deaths are due to events that occur during or shortly after delivery. A mother may hemorrhage. She or her baby may suffer an infection. Many babies can’t take their first breath without assistance, and newborns, especially those born small, have trouble regulating their body temperature after birth. Simple, lifesaving solutions have been known for decades. They just haven’t spread.
Many solutions aren’t ones you can try at home, and that’s part of the problem. Increasingly, however, women around the world are giving birth in hospitals. In India, a government program offers mothers up to fourteen hundred rupees—more than what most Indians live on for a month—when they deliver in a hospital, and now, in many areas, the majority of births are in facilities. Death rates in India have fallen, but they’re still ten times greater than in high-income countries like our own.
Not long ago, I visited a few community hospitals in north India, where just one-third of mothers received the medication recommended to prevent hemorrhage; less than ten per cent of the newborns were given adequate warming; and only four per cent of birth attendants washed their hands for vaginal examination and delivery. In an average childbirth, clinicians followed only about ten of twenty-nine basic recommended practices.
Here we are in the first part of the twenty-first century, and we’re still trying to figure out how to get ideas from the first part of the twentieth century to take root.”
Tags: Atul Gawande
From Brian Handwerk’s new National Geographic piece about the next wave of robot learning:
“Would a robot serving you coffee in bed make waking up easier on weekday mornings? Could a household robot help an elderly relative who is living alone? How would you like to climb into a robotic car and eat breakfast with the kids while you’re all driven to school and work?
These scenarios may sound like science fiction, but experts say they’re a lot closer to becoming reality than you probably think.
Brown University roboticist expects a near-term robot revolution that will echo the computing revolution of recent decades. And he says it will be driven by enabling robots to learn more like humans do—by watching others demonstrate behaviors and by asking questions.
‘The robots you’re seeing now mostly are analogous to the mainframe computers of the 1970s,’ Jenkins said. ‘But you’re starting to see things develop. The vacuum cleaners, the drones, those are the initial steps,’ he said, referring to iRobot’s Roomba vacuum cleaner, which has autonomously cleaned millions of homes since its 2002 debut.”
Tags: Brian Handwerk, Chad Jenkins
Biggest Bra in Brooklyn (metro nyc)
Seeing if there is an audience of unattached quality ladies interested in winning the largest bra size in Brooklyn.
Will advise by email details and if responce is viable. No kooks please (I have to say that ladies.) Kindly indicate your size.
Thanks, Steve.
Instead of completing fascinating film projects, Orson Welles spent most of his final years shilling for money. Here he is in “Caesars Guide To Gaming with Orson Welles,” a 1978 casino paycheck that’s interesting in its own way.
Tags: Oson Welles
At some point, Col. Charles “Buffalo” Jones put down his gun and picked up a lasso. A big-game hunter of national fame, Jones converted to conservationist in later life and led a roping expedition in Kenya to stock American zoos with all manner of living specimens. From an article about his dangerous mission in the April 3, 1910 New York Times:
“Hunting with a lasso is the latest innovation in the world of sport.
Col. C.J. Jones, better known as ‘Buffalo’ Jones, has cabled to friends in America from British East Africa that he has succeeded in roping with a lasso most of the animals which Col. Theodore Roosevelt brought down with his gun in the same region. He will bring to the United States live specimens of the same animals, whose pelts Col. Roosevelt has sent to the Smithsonian Institution.
In his first cablegram received in this city late this past week, Col. Jones tells of an exciting experience with an immense bull rhinoceros. The creature charged a hundred times before it was securely tied. It demolished the camera, and barely gave the photographer of the party time to escape.
Besides rhinoceri, Col. Jones has captured giraffes, leopards, and cheetahs. His success in roping giraffes is a matter of surprise. A. Radclyffe Dugmore, the camera hunter, who preceded Col. Roosevelt over the country where Col. Jones is now hunting, said that he always had to photograph the giraffe with a telescope lens, so wary did he find them.
Col. Jones carries with him on his safari, a large supply of firecrackers which he intends to use in routing lions from the thickets. He has had great success in capturing mountain lions in the West with a rope, and anticipates no greater trouble with the lion, if he can get him into the open, he said.
‘My lassos,’ said Col. Jones, before he left, ‘are of Russian hemp, hard twisted so they will go through the air with the least possible resistance. Though no thicker than my little finger, my lasso will hold the weight of two tons. When I have made a capture I tie it with a rope through which runs a steel wire.
‘The African lion is a difficult proposition,’ admitted Jones, who has climbed trees to lasso cougars in the West. ‘But I think I can rope him. I don’t know what will happen after I get him roped, being a hunter and not a prophet. I am taking my branding irons, and the lions I don’t want I’ll brand and turn loose to fight another day.’
‘Buffalo’ Jones was accompanied on the expedition by four boon companions, who had been visitors at his famous buffalo range in the painted desert of Arizona. …
The Jones expedition was financed by New York sportsmen, who wanted to give Jones in his sixty-sixth year another chance to distinguish himself. … Before he sailed for Africa in the early part of February, Col. Jones told of his project in the presence of Dr. William T. Hornaday, director of the Bronx Zoological Gardens. He said he expected to rope lions, rhinoceri, and other wild African beasts.
‘Why, you’ll be killed,’ exclaimed Mr. Hornaday.
‘Maybe so,’ replied the veteran plainsman calmly. ‘But I never did look forward to dying in bed as a great privileged end, one to be prayed for.'”
Tags: A. Radclyffe Dugmore, Charles "Buffalo" Jones, Theodore Roosevelt, William T. Hornaday
From the Maysles brothers’ 1963 film Orson Welles in Spain, a clip in which the great and star-crossed director presages the fraying of the traditional studio picture, with its formality. The work he’s discussing turned out to be his uncompleted 1970s movie The Other Side of the Wind.
Tags: Albert Maysles, David Maysles, Orson Welles
Not all devices that track us are cameras. Some are black boxes. Not only do airplanes have them, but most cars do as well. Soon all will. Even police cars. Technology is the police of us all. And that’s so seamless and efficient, so why does it give pause? Because it’s something different? Or for another reason? From Jaclyn Trop in the New York Times:
“When Timothy P. Murray crashed his government-issued Ford Crown Victoria in 2011, he was fortunate, as car accidents go. Mr. Murray, then the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, was not seriously hurt, and he told the police he was wearing a seat belt and was not speeding.
But a different story soon emerged. Mr. Murray was driving over 100 miles an hour and was not wearing a seat belt, according to the computer in his car that tracks certain actions. He was given a $555 ticket; he later said he had fallen asleep.
The case put Mr. Murray at the center of a growing debate over a little-known but increasingly important piece of equipment buried deep inside a car: the event data recorder, more commonly known as the black box.
About 96 percent of all new vehicles sold in the United States have the boxes, and in September 2014, if the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has its way, all will have them.”
Tags: Jaclyn Trop
A gang of armed nuns, assassinating President McKinley 2.0.
Before New Wave was just another old wave, selling its own nostalgia, it was trying its best to give the past a slip. Once that mission was accomplished, there was really nowhere for its leaders to go. But sometimes a brief revolution that clears the deck, even if it doesn’t build a new deck, is better than nothing at all. Devo, guesting on Merv Griffin’s show in 1980.
Tags: Devo, Merv Griffin
Early adopters have an advantage for awhile, sure, but will technology ultimately make for narrower margins of victory? What if we’re all optimized and enhanced, if we all become the exception to nature, if nature itself is transformed? Will a victory by many lengths even be possible? Will it even be imaginable to be one in a million?
The preamble to William Nack’s classic 1990 Sports Illustrated piece about the amazing career of Secretariat, a racehorse that not only had a great heart but had a great heart:
Just before noon the horse was led haltingly into a van next to the stallion bam, and there a concentrated barbiturate was injected into his jugular. Forty-five seconds later there was a crash as the stallion collapsed. His body was trucked immediately to Lexington, Ky., where Dr. Thomas Swerczek, a professor of veterinary science at the University of Kentucky, performed the necropsy. All of the horse’s vital organs were normal in size except for the heart.
“We were all shocked,” Swerczek said. “I’ve seen and done thousands of autopsies on horses, and nothing I’d ever seen compared to it. The heart of the average horse weighs about nine pounds. This was almost twice the average size, and a third larger than any equine heart I’d ever seen. And it wasn’t pathologically enlarged. All the chambers and the valves were normal. It was just larger. I think it told us why he was able to do what he did.”•
Tags: Secretariat, Thomas Swerczek, William Nack
From the September 16, 1897 New York Times:
“Omaha–Sunday night all Omaha was startled by the announcement that ten men had been held up by three daring highwaymen in the heart of the city. The bandits entered a pleasure resort and forced all present to hold up their hands, range in line, and allow themselves to be robbed. Now the police have Carl Bruner and George Price in jail, charged with being two of the men who did the work. The police declare that the object of the deed was to secure funds to buy a coffin in which to bury Casper Boyce, a member of the gang, who had died the day before.
The two suspects are young Oregon men, who the police have thought for some time were members of a desperate gang of robbers working in this city and neighboring towns. They were arrested on suspicion, and the police discovered that the men had made arrangements with a local undertaker to bury their friend the day after the robbery. They had no money Sunday, but assured him that the funds would be forthcoming Monday, and early that day it was paid. The money they paid is said to correspond with that taken from the ten victims of the bandits.”
Tags: Carl Bruner, Casper Boyce, George Price
There have been a myriad of reasons suggested for the steady fall of petty and violent crime across America since the early 1990s. The Freakonomics guys controversially suggested it may have occurred because legalized abortion had diminished the population of unwanted children. But the trend America has experienced has spread across the globe in the decades that followed, and not all of those countries have similar abortion laws. Is is because of criminology, technology or shifting demography? All of these things combined? From “Where Have All the Burglars Gone?” in the Economist:
“Both police records (which underestimate some types of crime) and surveys of victims (which should not, but are not as regularly available a source of data) show crime against the person and against property falling over the past ten years in most rich countries. In America the fall began around 1991; in Britain it began around 1995, though the murder rate followed only in the mid-2000s. In France, property crime rose until 2001—but it has fallen by a third since. Some crimes are all but disappearing. In 1997, some 400,000 cars were reported stolen in England and Wales: in 2012, just 86,000.
Cities have seen the greatest progress. The number of violent crimes has fallen by 32% since 1990 across America as a whole; in the biggest cities, it has fallen by 64%. In New York, the area around Times Square on 42nd Street, where pornographers once mingled with muggers, is now a family oriented tourist trap. On London’s housing estates, children play in concrete corridors once used by heroin addicts to shoot up. In Tallinn you can walk home from the theatre unmolested as late as you like.
What is behind this spectacular and widespread improvement? Demographic trends are an obvious factor. The baby-boom in the decades after the second world war created a bubble in the 16- to 24-year-old population a couple of decades later, and most crimes are committed by men of that age. That bubble is now long deflated. In most Western countries, the population is ageing, often quite fast.
But demographics are not everything.”
Agent wented (Greenwich Village)
I’m a writer, that need a agent that can sell my story
I have now three books.
One is a child book and the other adventure books.
Her is a sample of my first book.
FELECIA, THE CAT WHO WENT TO SEA
Is a wonderful children’s book, about a cat that gets separated and lost from her old-maid mistress on an ocean voyage.
It takes you on an exciting adventure with all her cartoon friends she meets along the way, and they help her find her way back to her owner.
The 88-page book has 44 large color pictures to keep the children interested while you read the story to them.
It has great potential.
It’s a great story for a cartoon movie – also a CD, that parents can put it to good use while traveling in a car with their little ones.
However – I need someone to make it happen, as I haven’t the money or the experience to pull it off. Would you like to sell my book?
We still believe on some level that we can control the cameras, that there can be a correction, but that isn’t so. From an NPR story by Brenda Salinas about facial-recognition software that allows retailers to identify preferred customera:
“When a young Indian-American woman walked into the funky L.A. jewelry boutique Tarina Tarantino, store manager Lauren Twisselman thought she was just like any other customer. She didn’t realize the woman was actress and writer Mindy Kaling.
‘I hadn’t watched The Office,’ Twisselman says. Kaling both wrote and appeared in the NBC hit.
This lack of recognition is precisely what the VIP-identification technology designed by NEC IT Solutions is supposed to prevent.
The U.K.-based company already supplies similar software to security services to help identify terrorists and criminals. The ID technology works by analyzing footage of people’s faces as they walk through a door, taking measurements to create a numerical code known as a ‘face template,’ and checking it against a database.
In the retail setting, the database of customers’ faces is comprised of celebrities and valued customers, according to London’s Sunday Times. If a face is a match, the program sends an alert to staff via computer, iPad or smartphone, providing details like dress size, favorite buys or shopping history.”
Tags: Brenda Salinas
10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor:
- all the vermeers in new york dvd
- were abbott and costello deadbeats?
- how do ghost brands come back to life?
- bubble gum blowing contest calipers
- louis ck talking about ewan mcgregor’s cock
- old at&t picturephone
- book about roger holder’s skyjacking
- frank borman confronted by carl sagan and hippies
- joan didion: the phone rang many times in the next hour
- charlie smith world’s oldest man
- Old Print Articles: Hungry wolves devour a bridal party in Russia (1911) + An amateur hypnotist is very good at checkers (1904).
- Classic Photograph: Samuel Reshevsky becomes a chess prodigy (1920).
- Recently Posted on NYC’s Craigslist: Will Ryan Reynolds play “Daniel” or “Dr. Steven Mancini”? + It would appear that I have some sort of scientific lab and much pornography + And I’ll give you my tonsils for a Samsung Galaxy.
- Featured Videos: Sky Deutschland invents a new way to ads in your head + The trailer for Andrew Bujalski’s new film about chess and artificial intelligence.
- It’s probably not a good thing that selfies have became ubiquitous.
- A solitary Poughkeepsie man dies and his wife’s disappearance is finally solved.
- The very first Andy Kaufman comedy LP is released.
- On August 12, Elon Musk will reveal plans for the Hyperloop.
- Some people are already guessing how the Hyperloop will work.
- Flophouses, perhaps now making a comeback, possess societal good.
- A remembrance of the unfairly reviled work of Wilhelm Reich.
- Ask a Korean! argues with Malcolm Gladwell about plane crashes.
- Google wins even if they don’t dominate driverless car or Glass categories.
- We have willingly handed over our privacy to corporate overlords.
- Considering all sides of the issue of athletes and PEDs.
- A list of the ten most controversial Wikipedia articles.
- Robobees might be able to pollinate flowers.
- Internet pioneer Vint Cerf considers the future of libraries.
- A brief note from 1896 about a persuadable man.
- A brief note from 1893 about a famished father.
- A brief note from 1902 about perpetual hiccoughs.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.
A coven of witches, at a Steven Seagal film festival.
Here’s the trailer for Andrew Bujalski’s Computer Chess, which I blogged about last December. Looks amazing.
From the August 29, 1902 New York Times:
“Washington–Sol Smith Russell, the actor, died at Richmond Hotel, in this city, this afternoon, of perpetual hiccoughs. Mr. Russell had been ill for some time from this malady, but during the past few days the disease took a serious turn, and since early morning the end had been hourly expected.”
Tags: Sol Smith Russell
Ahead of Elon Musk’s August announcement about the particulars of the Hyperloop, Russell Brandon at the Verge guesses at what the technologist will reveal. An excerpt:
“The details Musk has already hinted at tell us a great deal about the project, and outline a number of the challenges he’s likely to face. Based on simple math, we know it will have to travel an average of more than 600 mph. And it will have to do so almost frictionlessly, allowing for the low-power travel Musk envisions. It’s a big promise, and one that would have major consequences for the transportation industry and for society at large. For the technically minded, it raises the obvious question: how in the world is this thing going to work?
So far, the closest we’ve got is Japan’s superconducting maglev train — best known as the ‘bullet train.’ Its official top speed is 361mph, although it usually travels closer to 300 mph. Jim Powell, co-inventor of the bullet train and current director of Maglev 2000, thinks that’s as fast as open-air rail lines will ever go. ‘Air drag becomes too much of a problem after 300 mph, just from a power point of view,’ Powell says. ‘And then that air drag starts to generate noise. You wouldn’t want an airplane flying past your house at 600 mph.'”
Tags: Elon Musk, Russell Brandon