A very smart piece from W. Kamau Bell, who’s uncommonly good at seeing the silliness of the things that separate us and the serious consequences such a divide can have.
Tags: W. Kamau Bell
10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
- night of the living dead 1968
- is donald trump really going to purchase the new york times?
- dinners served in pill form
- what happens to the turkeys that obama pardons on thanksgiving?
- joshua foer discussing memory
- mazie gordon from the joseph mitchell article
- was harry reems a jew?
- what did ludwig wittgenstein think about technology?
- margaret and kate fox/ghosts
- i suspect that the airport will be the true city of the 21st century j g ballard
Afflictor: Hoping this Mother’s Day that you weren’t born to…
…the Tan Mom…
…nor the Teen Mom, but, you know, a wise mom.
Please don’t let another one of my sons be President.
- Old Print Article: Theosophists search for the next messiah. (1913)
- Featured Videos: Ed Sullivan interviews Fidel Castro (1959) + Taylor Mead has lost touch with the world + IBM predicted wearable computing (1997) + Two recent TV interviews with George Saunders + Edward R. Murrow interviews Jay Forrester and his Whirlwind computer (1951) + Marshall McLuhan assessing the role of the classroom in a decentralized technological age.
- Recently Posted on NYC’s Craigslist: When I say that I’m still able to rub my feet together, I’m lying + Grandpa’s the lucky one.
- U.S. dead-letter offices have been essentially killed by technology.
- Distressing news about America’s top-heavy economic recovery.
- In these desperate times, American suicide rates have risen sharply.
- Trygve Bauge wants to delay death until he can defeat it.
- John du Pont thought he was the Dalai Lama, was actually a madman.
- Jonathan Alter reveals the extent of Steve Jobs’ hatred of Fox News.
- Elon Musk is considering adding an auto-pilot option to Tesla cars.
- Robocar liability issues aren’t as complicated as they seem.
- Hooshang Amirahmadi, Iranian Presidential candidate, did an Ask Me Anything.
- Many of our vocabulary words were in use 15,000 years ago.
- Benoit Mandelbrot, father of the fractal, has a posthumous memoir.
- There is going to be a posthumous Andy Kaufman comedy album.
- Special-effects legend Ray Harryhausen passes away.
- In the ’70s., athlete Glenn Burke was openly gay with his teammates.
- Author Fei Dao explains the role of sci-fi in contemporary China.
- Big Data anticipatory systems are very useful, very invasive.
- Eric Schmidt tries to comfort people about Internet privacy issues.
- Human testing of memory-chip implants may soon begin.
- Genetically modified chestnut trees are being planted in America.
- A brief note from 1909 about a wealthy feline.
- A brief note from 1888 about a majestic bird.
- A brief note from 1904 about an animal trainer.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.
The final vignette from Jim Jarmusch’s Coffee and Cigarettes, which features Lower East Side staple Taylor Mead, who passed away on Wednesday. He acted in numerous Andy Warhol films, but let’s not hold that against him.
From Mead’s obituary by Douglas Martin in the New York Times: “It was as an actor in what was called the New American Cinema in the 1960s that he made his biggest mark. Warhol recruited him as one of his first ‘superstars,’ and from 1963 to 1968 he made 11 films with Mr. Mead. In all, Mr. Mead figured that he had made about 130 movies, many of them so spontaneous that they involved only one take.
The film critic J. Hoberman called Mr. Mead ‘the first underground movie star.’ The film historian P. Adams Sitney called one of Mr. Mead’s earliest films, The Flower Thief (1960), ‘the purest expression of the Beat sensibility in cinema.’
The Flower Thief, directed by Ron Rice, stars Mr. Mead as a bedraggled mystic wandering the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco with open-mouthed wonder. He carries with him his three prized possessions: a stolen gardenia, an American flag and a teddy bear.
It goes almost without saying that Mr. Mead was playing himself, as Susan Sontag observed in Partisan Review. ‘The source of his art is the deepest and purest of all: he just gives himself, wholly and without reserve, to some bizarre autistic fantasy,’ she wrote. ‘Nothing is more attractive in a person, but it is extremely rare after the age of 4.'”
Tags: Bill Rice, Douglas Martin, Jim Jarmusch, Taylor Mead
Wearable computing, as predicted by an IBM spot in 1997. From the commercial’s director, John Allen: “We did this piece for IBM in 1997 or so. It was the first time anyone had seen a computer like this, wearable, almost invisible, elegant and futuristic. In fact, we still haven’t seen anything like this. It was a prototype that had to be signed in and out every time it was transported. It is yet to be put into production 15 years later.”
IBM WEARABLE COMPUTER from possible pictures on Vimeo.
Tags: John Allen'
Hooshang Amirahmadi, a Rutgers Public Policy professor of Iranian birth, is running an unlikely campaign to become the next President of that country and supplant the wackjob Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. A return engagement for the Shah may seem more likely, as Amirahmadi’s attempt is largely being powered by social media, including Facebook and Reddit, which have greater prominence outside of Iran than within it. He just did an Ask Me Anything at the latter site. A few excerpts follow.
__________________________
Question:
Do you believe that Iran can give up its nuclear program and rest assured that the United States will not meddle in Iran’s internal affairs well into the future?
Hooshang Amirahmadi:
The problem between the US and Iran did not start with the nuclear issue, rather with the Islamic Revolution or even the 1953 coup. I don’t believe a nuclear Iran can be immune from US intervention nor can a non nuclear Iran necessarily face US intervention. There are many countries with nuclear power that face American intervention (Pakistan) and other nations without nuclear power that do not face intervention (Turkey). Therefore, the nuclear technology is irrelevant to the way american foreign policy operates. What matters is the strategic relationship between the US and the particular country.
Fidel Castro visited by Ed Sullivan in 1959 after the triumphant revolution, promising a democratic Cuba that never materialized.
Tags: Ed Sullivan, Fidel Castro
From the March 17, 1904 New York Times:
“While in a cage with three lions this afternoon, Alfred J.F. Perrins, the animal trainer, suddenly became insane. Soon after he entered the cage Perrins struck one of the lions a vicious blow and cried, ‘Why don’t you bow to me, I am God’s agent.’
Perrins then left the cage, leaving the door open and saying, ‘They will come out, as God is looking after them.’ He then stood on a box and called on the spectators to come and be healed, saying he could restore sight to the blind and hearing to the deaf, and heal any disease by a gift just received from God.
The lions started to leave the cage and the spectators fled. The cage door was slammed by a policeman, who arrested Perrins. Physicians announced Perrins hopelessly crazed on religion. He has been in show business thirty years , having been with Robinson, Barnum, and Sells.”
Tags: Alfred J.F. Perrins
Brilliant Andy Kaufman, as physical as he was cerebral, never recorded a comedy album during his heyday, but he apparently was obsessed with his then-newfangled micro-cassette recorder and compiled lots of odd audio-only material. The folks at Drag City have used it to package a posthumous album debut, Andy and His Grandmother, to be released July 16. I haven’t heard it yet, but here is the press release describing the work:
“Andy Kaufman changed the worlds of comedy and performance in the 1970s, showing fans and friends alike a determination to follow put-ons into territory no one had ever even considered ‘comic’ before. His fervor was so intense that when he passed away suddenly in 1984, it seemed as if the ultimate disappearing act had been staged; one that some people believe is still ongoing, with the reveal soon to come.
Among the many things that Andy achieved in his lifetime (and in the years following), a phonograph album release, the staple of stand-up comedians in his time, never happened – until now. Andy and His Grandmother is material never heard before, a skimming from 82 hours of micro-cassette tapes that Andy recorded during 1977-79. Andy regarded the micro-tape recorder as a fantastic new way of capturing his hoaxing, and carried it with him everywhere, for use at any given moment. Real life was the ultimate frontier for him, and these tapes demonstrate the heart of Andy’s comedy. With gusto, he involves those closest to him, as well as total strangers, in put-ons, falsehoods and other provocations, pushing the limit on logic and emotional investment in everyday situations from the trivial to the deeply personal until any suspension of disbelief is out of the question for all involved, and everyone becomes fully immersed in whatever scenario Andy is suggesting as the new reality.
With so much material on hand, Drag City turned to a writer, producer and comedian whose resume indicated to us that he was a true child of Kaufman’s twisted talent. Since the late 90s, Vernon Chatman‘s work has been experienced by television viewers and aficionados of South Park, Wonder Showzen, Xavier: Renegade Angel, The Heart She Holler, andDoggie Fizzle Televizzle, as well as fans of the Drag City DVD release Final Flesh. Vernon dug deeply into the tapes, working with editor Rodney Ascher (director of the notorious, controversial, and even acclaimed Room 237 documentary) to come up with a concept for a single LP that would include several dozen excerpts. Along the way, Vernon produced several tracks, adding effects to pieces that were clearly unfinished (in particular, ‘Sleep Comedy’) and drafting SNL’s Bill Hader to provide narration for the journey. The finished album, with liner notes from Vernon and Kaufman cohort Bob Zmuda is a work of comedy for our times – one that was performed over thirty years ago. Andy And His Grandmother is out July 16th on Drag City.”
Tags: Andy Kaufman
Trials for memory-related brain implants may begin within two years, providing hope for those who’ve suffered severe trauma or a stroke. In the longer-term, enhancement for those with no debilitation will be an issue. From Michael Stat at Future Leap:
“A team of neuroscientists from the University of Southern California (USC), Wake Forest University (WFU), the University of Kentucky and DARPA have developed a memory implant technique that could help restore memories lost by stroke and localized brain injury.
The first step in restoring memories is to record, in undamaged tissue, the unique activity patterns associated with the formation of particular memories. Step two is to use these patterns to predict what the ‘downstream’ damaged areas should be doing. Step three is to replicate the desired activity in healthy areas by stimulating brain cells with electrodes.
The research is focused on the hippocampus, where short-term memories are solidified into long-term ones by the movement of electrical signals through neurons. Professor of biomedical engineering Theodore Berger of USC has used mathematical models to program electrodes to mimic these movements.
‘I never thought I’d see this in my lifetime,’ Berger said to CNN. ‘I might not benefit from it myself but my kids will.'”
Tags: Theodore Berger
I don’t think it’s a proverb, but it should be: Happy are the ones who have stupid enemies. The GOP which has gone increasingly apeshit over the past few decades has now reached the point of certifiable. But the lords of the party aren’t just wrong-minded about their politics but their strategies as well. Those they demonize have nothing to worry about. Two examples:
1) Smirking crapbag Dick Cheney, whose sheer incompetence and dishonesty in regards to Iraq got nearly 5,000 of our soldiers killed and likely more than 100,000 innocent Iraqis, has stated that Hilary Clinton should be subpoenaed in regards to Benghazi. And it’s completely fine to fully investigate that horror and its aftermath, but for someone who fucked over the entire world to be treating Clinton like a war criminal because several people were tragically killed in the madness of the modern-day Middle East shows just how much of his own poison Cheney has gulped. The lack of accountability and proportion is stunning.
2) The Koch brothers want to buy lots of newspapers and use them as propaganda for their right-wing madness, and while that would suck for the fine journalists who work at various papers, it shows how out of touch these dunderheads are. Instead of using their money in effective ways, they are going to buy media in its twilight and appeal to a dying demographic. From Hamilton Nolan at Gawker: “Evil corporatist archconservative billionaires the Koch brothers are considering making a bid to buy several big newspapers from the Tribune Co., including the LA Times and the Chicago Tribune. Unions and liberal politicians are justifiably alarmed by this prospect. They’re trying to pressure the shareholders not to sell to the Kochs. Here’s another, perhaps more productive idea: let the Kochs buy that crap.
The Koch brothers, much like fellow archconservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch, are old. Old, and rich, and conservative. This means a few things:
1. They feel (wrongly, not that it matters) that the media has an incorrigible liberal bias against their interests.
2. They have enough money to buy media outlets.
3. They don’t understand new media.
Therefore, rich old conservatives, like Rupert Murdoch or Philip Anschultz or the Koch brothers love the idea of buying newspapers. They don’t care that the era of newspaper dominance of the media is now permanently over.”
Tags: Charles Koch, David Koch, Dick Cheney, Hamilton Nolan, Hilary Clinton
I was taken aback–and perhaps you were?–when I heard that Bennett Miller had cast Steve Carrell as John du Pont in Foxcatcher, the forthcoming film about the wealthy benefactor of amateur wrestling, a schizophrenic whose money kept treatment at a distance, who descended into utter madness in the 1990s, and ultimately murdered Olympic hero David Schultz. The heavily armed du Pont, who’d played host to underdog sports since the 1960s, was arrested only after a two-day stand-off with the police. The opening of “A Man Possessed,” Bill Hewitt’s 1996 People article about the tragedy:
“Lately he had started telling people that he was the Dalai Lama. If anyone refused to address him as such, he simply refused to talk to them. That was bizarre, but then John E. du Pont, 57, a multimillionaire scion of the fabled industrial family, had always been odd. For fun he drove an armored personnel carrier around his 800-acre estate, Foxcatcher. He complained about bugs under his skin and about ghosts in the walls of the house. By and large, friends and family shook their heads, fretted about his ravings—and waited for the inevitable breakdown. ‘John is mentally ill and has been mentally ill for some time,’ says sister-in-law Martha du Pont, who is married to John’s older brother Henry. ‘But this year he really went over the edge.’
No one realized how far over until Friday afternoon, Jan. 26. Around 3 p.m., Dave Schultz, 36, a gold medalist in freestyle wrestling at the 1984 Olympics, was out working on his car at Foxcatcher, in leafy Newtown Square, Pa., 15 miles west of Philadelphia, where du Pont had established a residential training facility for top-level athletes. Suddenly du Pont pulled into the driveway of the house where Schultz lived with his wife, Nancy, 36, and their two children, Alexander, 9, and Danielle, 6. From the living room, Nancy heard a shot. When she reached the front door she heard a second. Looking out in horror, she saw a screaming du Pont, sitting in his car, extend his arm from the driver’s side window, take aim at her husband, facedown on the ground, and pump one more bullet into his body. After pointing the gun at Nancy, du Pont drove down the road to his home, leaving her to cradle her dying husband.
During the two-day standoff that ensued, some 75 police and SWAT team members surrounded the sprawling Greek-revival mansion that du Pont called home. Finally, on Sunday afternoon, du Pont emerged, unarmed, to check on the house’s heating unit, which the police had turned off, and was taken without a shot being fired. That evening, a gaunt, ashen-faced du Pont was arraigned in a Newtown Township courtroom on a charge of first-degree murder, which in Pennsylvania can carry the death penalty. As investigators tried to piece together a motive for the seemingly senseless killing, there emerged the sad, scary portrait of a man believed to be worth more than $50 million who was rich enough to indulge his madness and to put enough distance between himself and the world at large to ensure that no one really bothered him about it.”
Tags: Bennett Miller, Bill Hewitt, David Schultz, John du Pont, Steve Carrell
Two recent George Saunders TV appearances if you missed them, with Stephen Colbert and George Stephanopoulos. Ayn Rand, interestingly, is mentioned in both interviews, as a punchline for Colbert and in a serious vein with Stephanopoulos, as Saunders cops to being a right-winger as a youth.
Tags: George Saunders, George Stephanopoulos, Steven Colbert
The opening of a really good Jim Holt New York Review of Books piece about the posthumously published memoir by Benoit Mandelbrot, father of the fractal, who saw the mathematics of roughness not only in clouds and cauliflower but in financial markets as well:
“Benoit Mandelbrot, the brilliant Polish-French-American mathematician who died in 2010, had a poet’s taste for complexity and strangeness. His genius for noticing deep links among far-flung phenomena led him to create a new branch of geometry, one that has deepened our understanding of both natural forms and patterns of human behavior. The key to it is a simple yet elusive idea, that of self-similarity.
To see what self-similarity means, consider a homely example: the cauliflower. Take a head of this vegetable and observe its form—the way it is composed of florets. Pull off one of those florets. What does it look like? It looks like a little head of cauliflower, with its own subflorets. Now pull off one of those subflorets. What does that look like? A still tinier cauliflower. If you continue this process—and you may soon need a magnifying glass—you’ll find that the smaller and smaller pieces all resemble the head you started with. The cauliflower is thus said to be self-similar. Each of its parts echoes the whole.
Other self-similar phenomena, each with its distinctive form, include clouds, coastlines, bolts of lightning, clusters of galaxies, the network of blood vessels in our bodies, and, quite possibly, the pattern of ups and downs in financial markets. The closer you look at a coastline, the more you find it is jagged, not smooth, and each jagged segment contains smaller, similarly jagged segments that can be described by Mandelbrot’s methods. Because of the essential roughness of self-similar forms, classical mathematics is ill-equipped to deal with them. Its methods, from the Greeks on down to the last century, have been better suited to smooth forms, like circles. (Note that a circle is not self-similar: if you cut it up into smaller and smaller segments, those segments become nearly straight.)
Only in the last few decades has a mathematics of roughness emerged, one that can get a grip on self-similarity and kindred matters like turbulence, noise, clustering, and chaos. And Mandelbrot was the prime mover behind it. He had a peripatetic career, but he spent much of it as a researcher for IBM in upstate New York. In the late 1970s he became famous for popularizing the idea of self-similarity, and for coining the word ‘fractal’ (from the Latin fractus, meaning broken) to designate self-similar forms. In 1980 he discovered the ‘Mandelbrot set,’ whose shape—it looks a bit like a warty snowman or beetle—came to represent the newly fashionable science of chaos. What is perhaps less well known about Mandelbrot is the subversive work he did in economics. The financial models he created, based on his fractal ideas, implied that stock and currency markets were far riskier than the reigning consensus in business schools and investment banks supposed, and that wild gyrations—like the 777-point plunge in the Dow on September 29, 2008—were inevitable.”
Tags: Benoit Mandelbrot, Jim Holt
I love you, Mommy, but I also love tits.
Is everyone ready to order?
Nice rack, sweetheart.
In wake of the NBA’s Jason Collins announcing that he’s gay–and the largely positive and supportive response to him–Deadspin unearthed a 1982 Inside Sports article about Glenn Burke, a gay pro athlete during the 1970s, who was out to his teammates in a less-enlightened era for sexual politics. The opening:
“The game is over and the baseball player sits in the hotel lobby, his eyes fixed on nothing. He thinks his secret is safe but he is never quite sure, so at midnight in the lobby it is always best to avoid the other eyes. He neither hears the jokes nor notices that a few teammates are starting to wear towels around their waists in the locker room. He does not want to hear or see or know, and neither do they.
The baseball player waits until the lobby empties of teammates and coaches. Some are in the bar, some out on the town, some in their rooms. Some, of course, have found women. He walks briskly out the door toward the taxicab, never turning his head to look back. He mutters an address to the driver and has one foot in the cab. …
‘Hey, where you going, man? You said you were staying in tonight.’
The baseball player feels his lie running up the back of his neck. ‘Changed my mind.’
‘Can I come with you? I got nothing going tonight.’
The baseball player pauses. ‘You don’t want to go where I’m going,’ he says at last. He is leaving a crack there, in case this teammate knows the secret and really would like to go with him.
‘Okay—have it your way.’
The baseball player is in the back seat, the door slams, his heart slams, the cab is pulling away. Fifteen minutes later it stops a block from the place the passenger actually intends to go. He pays the driver. Did the driver look at him sort of funny?
The baseball player steps out and walks back a block, his face turned 90 degrees to his left shoulder, away from the traffic, just in case. What if he meets someone he knows there tonight? There was the ballplayer’s brother the one night and the son of.a major league manager another. Man, they have to know, don’t they? And if he is recognized tonight, should he pretend he is someone else?
Suddenly he is pulling open the door and the men inside smile and the music swallows him and for a few hours in the bar the baseball player does not feel so alone.”
Tags: Glenn Burke\, Jason Collins
From Stephen Cave’s excellent new Aeon article about cryonics, a passage about Trygve Bauge, a dreamer who believes he can delay death long enough to defeat it:
“The young Norwegian’s dream was to found his own cryonics facility, one that could survive whatever perils the future might hold. No one could say how long it would be before the technology would be invented that could repair and reanimate his grandpa, so [Trygve] Bauge had to ensure he was safe until the time came. Having explored many options, he settled for Colorado and the Rocky Mountains, mostly because their inland location would permit a generous 30-minute warning if a nuclear attack was launched from submarines off either of America’s coastlines — he had no idea that the Cold War was coming to an end just as he was finalising his plans. He bought a plot of land above the little town of Nederland, a few miles southwest of — and 3,000ft above — the city of Boulder, with spectacular views and a climate not unlike his native Norway. There he started building.
Bauge was then and remains, at the age of 55, a visionary. Like most visionaries, his ambition inhabits a middle space between the prophetic and the pathological. On the one hand, his dream of a day when we will conquer death is rooted in the very real medical and scientific progress of previous centuries; on the other hand, his single-handed struggle with the Reaper feels like an inability to accept brute reality.
Exactly the same dichotomy permeates the cryonics movement. Its advocates argue using data and logic, yet their practices are broadly perceived as cultish and macabre. Cryonicists consider the rest of us to be deluded, walking blindly towards death, whereas the rest of us see them as fantasists, a little disturbed and a little disturbing, clinging to the corpses of their loved ones like Catholic peasants to a saint’s severed finger. One group or the other must have it badly wrong. The question is, which?
Bauge rigorously followed the logic of death-defiance. The main building he constructed was fireproof, bulletproof and designed to survive earthquakes and mudslides. Nothing would shift it from its outcrop on the windy mountainside. The structure was even designed to withstand nuclear attack (until Bauge decided to put in windows). Form was entirely sacrificed to function, creating a dull grey concrete block with peculiar angles, like something made by a clumsy toddler. In September 1993, Bauge deemed his facility, if not finished, at least habitable, and he and his mother moved in.
But he hadn’t yet built the cutting-edge cryonic storage chambers, so grandpa required temporary digs. These were the early days of cryonics and arrangements were makeshift. The young man quickly threw up a shed behind the main house, where Morstøl’s steel casket could be entombed in dry ice. The following year he even took on a new client, the recently deceased Al Campbell from Chicago, who joined grandpa Morstøl in the ice box. It seemed that both the idea and the practice of cryonics were making progress.”
Tags: Stephen Cave, Trygve Bauge
In my whole life in NYC, I have never seen more unhappy people than I have since the economic collapse in 2008. The stress levels have been tremendous. Not a day goes by when I don’t encounter a few middle-aged, directionless adults pulling a single piece of wheeled luggage behind them, destination seemingly unknown.
But it’s not just the poor who seem miserable. I’ve watched as reasonably successful people who I thought were basically decent act out with an astonishing level of ego, trying to cover up their unhappiness, flailing angrily because they need more and more. I bet it’s not so different where you are, either: People can’t fulfill their needs, basic or otherwise. And the connectivity and narcissism of the Internet has not made us feel better. What is it that we really want?
It’s a generalization, sure, but we live in desperate times. So I guess I’m not as surprised as I should be that more Americans now die from suicide than automobile crashes. From Tara Parker-Pope in the New York Times:
“Suicide rates among middle-aged Americans have risen sharply in the past decade, prompting concern that a generation of baby boomers who have faced years of economic worry and easy access to prescription painkillers may be particularly vulnerable to self-inflicted harm.
More people now die of suicide than in car accidents, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which published the findings in Friday’s issue of its Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report. In 2010 there were 33,687 deaths from motor vehicle crashes and 38,364 suicides.
Suicide has typically been viewed as a problem of teenagers and the elderly, and the surge in suicide rates among middle-aged Americans is surprising.
From 1999 to 2010, the suicide rate among Americans ages 35 to 64 rose by nearly 30 percent, to 17.6 deaths per 100,000 people, up from 13.7. Although suicide rates are growing among both middle-aged men and women, far more men take their own lives. The suicide rate for middle-aged men was 27.3 deaths per 100,000, while for women it was 8.1 deaths per 100,000.
The most pronounced increases were seen among men in their 50s, a group in which suicide rates jumped by nearly 50 percent, to about 30 per 100,000. For women, the largest increase was seen in those ages 60 to 64, among whom rates increased by nearly 60 percent, to 7.0 per 100,000.
Suicide rates can be difficult to interpret because of variations in the way local officials report causes of death. But C.D.C. and academic researchers said they were confident that the data documented an actual increase in deaths by suicide and not a statistical anomaly. While reporting of suicides is not always consistent around the country, the current numbers are, if anything, too low.”
Tags: Tara Parker-Pope
From the September 25, 1888 New York Times:
“Chicago–A dispatch from Wichita, Kan., says: The baby of a farmer, William Beattie, who lives on the Cimarron River, north of the Territory line, was carried off by an eagle Saturday. Beattie went to work in the morning, leaving in his dug-out his two children, one 5 years old and a baby aged 2 months. About noon Beattie returned home and found his girl in tears. She said she had taken the baby into the yard and left it while she went into the house. In a few minutes she heard a cry, and in looking out saw the baby ‘flying away,’ as she expressed it. The father knew at once that an eagle has visited his home and summoned his neighbors to the wooded banks of the river, for which the eagle had made. In about an hour the sound of a shot summoned the searchers together. One of the men had found the eagle and was engaged in a conflict with it. He had emptied his gone at the big bird and was using his gun as a club when reinforcements arrives. The eagle fluttered into the bush and then the father saw his infant dead, the body badly lacerated.”
Tags: William Beattie
“No counting calories.”
I’m Fat
And Very Happy! No counting calories. I’m about to eat some steak with fries that my fat wife is cooking. I’m rubbing my feet together because I’m so Excited!!!! OHH BABE!!!!
Sad to hear of the passing of special-effects legend Ray Harryhausen. I lost interest in animation and action-adventure fare when I was a small kid, but I can still recall his skeleton-fight sequence from Jason and the Argonauts and the monsters from The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.
From Harryhausen’s New York Times obituary:
“With help from his parents — especially his father, a machinist and inventor — Mr. Harryhausen was soon teaching himself the basics of stop-motion animation and producing short films of dinosaurs and apes in the family garage. While still in high school, he got an appointment to meet Mr. O’Brien and showed him some early work; on Mr. O’Brien’s advice, he studied anatomy and sculpture and took night classes in film production.
The two men stayed in touch through Mr. Harryhausen’s early working years as a technician making stop-motion ‘Puppetoon’ shorts for Paramount, humorous animated training films for the Army during World War II and, after the war, his own animated short films of Mother Goose stories and some advertising work.
Then, when Merian C. Cooper, the director and producer of King Kong, set out to make another feature with Mr. O’Brien about a giant ape, Mr. O’Brien remembered Mr. Harryhausen and hired him to animate most of the film, Mighty Joe Young, released in 1949. It won an Academy Award for special effects.
Its success spurred Mr. Harryhausen to try developing feature projects of his own. After several false starts came The Beast From 20,000 Fathoms, partly based on a short story, “The Fog Horn,” by Ray Bradbury, whom Mr. Harryhausen had gotten to know as a teenager through a local science fiction club. The film was a sleeper hit in 1952, establishing Mr. Harryhausen as someone who could deliver astonishing footage on a tight budget and draw big audiences.”
_______________________
An example of Harryhausen’s teenage work from the garage in the late ’30s, a stop-motion telling of evolution:
Tags: Ray Bradbury, Ray Harryhausen
From a very good Fast Company article by Austin Carr which addresses Internet privacy issues via a recent conversation between Nouriel Roubini and Eric Schmidt:
“Though market competition (or regulation) may dispel some inappropriate corporate uses of personal data tracking, the likelihood is the more ways we interact with technology, the more data we’re likely to share–perhaps unknowingly.
Schmidt does not believe this to be the case. ‘Not everyone is going to track all your behavior,’ he stressed. ‘There is no central Borg tracking all of these things.’
Still, the former Google CEO did touch on some moral issues related to certain types of data collection. ‘In America, there is a sense of fairness, culturally true for all of us…if you have a teenage boy or girl who makes a mistake–does some sort of crime, goes to juvenile hall, is released–in our system, they can apply and have that expunged from their record. They can legally state that they were never convicted of anything. That seems like a reasonable thing,’ Schmidt said. ‘Today, that’s not possible because of the Internet…[and] that seems to violate our innate sense of fairness.’
‘This lack of a delete button on the Internet is in fact a significant issue,’ Schmidt said. ‘There are times when erasure [of data] is the right thing…and there are times when it is inappropriate. How do we decide? We have to have that debate now.'”
Tags: Austin Carr, Eric Schmidt, Nouriel Roubini
Edward R. Murrow interviewing MIT legend Jay Forrester and his Whirlwind Computer, 1951.
Tags: Edward R. Murrow, Jay Forrester
From David Brown’s new Washington Post article about words used by our distant ancestors which seem to have been remarkably preserved:
“You, hear me! Give this fire to that old man. Pull the black worm off the bark and give it to the mother. And no spitting in the ashes!
It’s an odd little speech. But if you went back 15,000 years and spoke these words to hunter-gatherers in Asia in any one of hundreds of modern languages, there is a chance they would understand at least some of what you were saying.
That’s because all of the nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs in the four sentences are words that have descended largely unchanged from a language that died out as the glaciers retreated at the end of the last Ice Age. Those few words mean the same thing, and sound almost the same, as they did then.
The traditional view is that words can’t survive for more than 8,000 to 9,000 years. Evolution, linguistic ‘weathering’ and the adoption of replacements from other languages eventually drive ancient words to extinction, just like the dinosaurs of the Jurassic era.
A new study, however, suggests that’s not always true.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: David Brown
I suppose it was just a matter of time until a technologist as guided by the future as Elon Musk would want to add driverless-car technology to his his Tesla Motors line, though he does object to the jargon that currently attends the function. An excerpt from Bloomberg:
“Elon Musk, the California billionaire who leads Tesla Motors, said the electric-car maker is considering adding driverless technology to its vehicles and discussing the prospects for such systems with Google. Bloomberg’s Alan Ohnsman reports on Bloomberg Televisions’ Bloomberg West.
Musk, 41, said technologies that can take over for drivers are a logical step in the evolution of cars. He has talked with Google about the self-driving technology it’s been developing, though he prefers to think of applications that are more like an airplane’s autopilot system.
‘I like the word autopilot more than I like the word self- driving,’ Musk said in an interview. ‘Self-driving sounds like it’s going to do something you don’t want it to do. Autopilot is a good thing to have in planes, and we should have it in cars.’”
Tags: Alan Ohnsman, Elon Musk