“At This Point It Seems Obvious That This Is Far Too Good To Be True. So What’s The Catch?”

April 4, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Will all your friends soon be electric? Will you? The centuries-old technique of transcranial direct-current stimulation is gaining new prominence in the science of human augmentation. From “Spark of Genius,” the new Will Oremus article at Slate:

“Exactly how all of this works is not yet fully clear. But the process appears to make neurons in the stimulated area more malleable, so that new connections form more readily while under the influence of the current. It remains to be seen whether those changes are short-lived or enduring, but at least one study has found positive effects persisting for up to six months. The beauty of it, in theory, is that the electric current doesn’t rewire the brain on its own—it just makes it easier for the brain to rewire itself.

At this point it seems obvious that this is far too good to be true. So what’s the catch?

The catch is that we don’t know what the catch is. And to Peter Reiner, a neuroscientist at University of British Columbia, that’s a biggie. If tDCS can so quickly change the brain in ways that we can easily measure, he says, there’s a good chance it could also change the brain in ways we can’t easily measure—or that researchers so far haven’t tried to measure. Scientists often assume they can target the effects of tDCS by stimulating only the part of the brain relevant to the task that the subject is concentrating on. But most would admit there’s some guesswork involved, since brain topography can vary from one person to the next. And Reiner warns that there’s no guarantee the subject’s mind won’t wander, say, to ‘something horrific that occurred earlier today.’ What if tDCS ends up forging traumatic connections along with useful ones?”

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A Brief Note From 1908 About Monkey Arson

April 4, 2013 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the July 5, 1908 New York Times:

“‘Nimbo,’ a pet monkey belonging to Mrs. Mary Blackwell, a widow, who lives in a three-story frame house at 1,770 Bath Avenue, Bath Beach, sat in the parlor window yesterday afternoon watching the boys in the street set off firecrackers. Mrs. Blackwell was on the lawn in front of her house watching the youngsters also.

She happened to turn around, however, and saw Nimbo in the act of striking a match and setting fire to the lace curtains at the parlor windows in imitation of the boys in the street. Mrs. Blackwell gave the alarm, but before firemen reached the house it was in flames.

Mrs. Blackwell had to be restrained by the police to prevent her running into the house after Nimbo, and she begged the firemen to save him. They tried, but when they reached the monkey they found he was dead and his body burned almost to a crisp. Mrs. Blackwell was heartbroken over the monkey’s death.”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

April 4, 2013 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

“Mirror!!!”

A Fat Guy Called Me Fat. (Sad Chubby Guy)

I could not believe a guy fatter than me had the nerve to call me fat. I also always see this happening in TV talk shows. Mirror!!! 

“Instead Of Recovering, As Was Expected For A Man His Age, Wu’s Condition Worsened Rapidly”

April 4, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of an Economist report about H7N9, a scary new strain of avian flu that has yet to display the capacity for spreading from human to human:

“WU LIANGLIANG went to hospital on March 1st with a tickly cough. After a number of hours hooked up to a saline drip, the 27-year-old pork butcher went home. When he still felt poorly a few days later Mr Wu returned to hospital and was diagnosed with a pulmonary infection. But then instead of recovering, as was expected for a man his age, Wu’s condition worsened rapidly. On March 10th, he became the second person known to have been killed by H7N9, a novel strain of avian flu not previously seen in humans. 

There are now nine identified human cases of H7N9 in the Yangzi delta region, which includes Shanghai, three of which have been fatal. The most recent death reported, announced on April 3rd, was a 38-year-old chef, surnamed Hong, who died in late March. Mr Hong worked in Jiangsu, the province next to Shanghai where four of the other people who contracted H7N9 live (a nearly real-time map endeavours to track the cases). The remaining cases are all in critical condition, but in general they have not deteriorated as swiftly as Mr Wu did. A 35-year-old woman in Anhui province is still alive 22 days after she first became ill.

Many questions surround H7N9’s origin, pattern of infection and treatment (there is no vaccine). Early analyses of the genetic sequence of the virus, which the Chinese authorities have shared with the world, suggest that a familiar strain of avian flu has mutated. Previously infectious only to birds, H7N9 appears now to be able to bind with mammalian cells, making it possible to jump from chickens to animals such as pigs. The World Health Organization (WHO) maintains that that there is no evidence of ongoing human-to-human transmission. If the virus were well adapted to jump between humans, the thinking goes, clearer evidence of transmission would already have emerged among the victims’ close contacts.”

“What If The Cure Of Engineering The Climate Is Worse Than The Disease?”

April 4, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Facing climate change and the cataclysms it may bring, can we–and should we–geoengineer our way out of the situation, essentially taking control of the weather? It’s a question explored by Adam Corner in an Aeon essay. An excerpt:

“Officially, climate policy is all about energy efficiency, renewables and nuclear power. Officially, the target of keeping global temperatures within two degrees of the pre-industrial revolution average is still in our sights. But the voices whispering that we might have left it too late are no longer automatically dismissed as heretical. Wouldn’t it be better, they ask, to have at least considered some other options — in case things get really bad?

This is the context in which various scary, implausible or simply bizarre proposals are being put on the table. They range from the relatively mundane (the planting of forests on a grand scale), to the crazy but conceivable (a carbon dioxide removal industry, to capture our emissions and bury them underground), to the barely believable (injecting millions of tiny reflective particles into the stratosphere to reflect sunlight). In fact, the group of technologies awkwardly yoked together under the label ‘geoengineering’ have very little in common beyond their stated purpose: to keep the dangerous effects of climate change at bay.

Monkeying around with the Earth’s systems at a planetary scale obviously presents a number of unknown — and perhaps unknowable — dangers. How might other ecosystems be affected if we start injecting reflective particles into space? What would happen if the carbon dioxide we stored underground were to escape? What if the cure of engineering the climate is worse than the disease? But I think that it is too soon to get worked up about the risks posed by any individual technology. The vast majority of geoengineering ideas will never get off the drawing board. Right now, we should be asking more fundamental questions.”

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“Evil Must Be Opposed. Good Would Triumph.”

April 4, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

You can feel deep sympathy for the parents, wife and children of the late Atlantic journalist Michael Kelly, who was the first member of the press to be killed covering the Iraq war, and still be critical of the wrongheadedness he displayed which led not only to his demise but also contributed to the death of tens of thousands of other human beings. Like many pundits and politicians, Kelly, in the wake of 9/11, developed a blind spot–a lethal one. Unless we figure out why that happened, why so many otherwise smart people became dumb at a really bad moment, it will happen again.

In a provocative Gawker post, “A Stupid Death in a Stupid War,” Tom Scocca examines Kelly’s thought process in the run-up to the invasion, ten years after his death as an embed. An excerpt:

“People who supported the invasion of Iraq and now regret the results tend to say that it was a good idea that was badly planned or poorly managed. Yet there was no idea but the planning and management of it. The decision to invade was not a change of principles, a repudiation of mushy-headed pacifism and appeasement; it was a change of strategy.

Even that gives it too much credit. It was half a change of strategy, really: regime change with nothing to change it to; an invasionary force without a plan for occupation; an open-ended commitment of military personnel by a nation too politically cowardly to draft enough bodies to do the job. Thousands of reservists and National Guard troops found themselves serving multiple tours abroad, trapped in what Kelly had envisioned as ‘total limited war…brutally effective in its killing power while being miserly of American life and property.’

‘You go to war with the army you have, not the army you might want or wish to have at a later time,’ Donald Rumsfeld said, thereby sparing Kelly and Andrew Sullivan and everyone else in the press from the shame of having said the single most fatuous and destructive thing about the invasion of Iraq. It is hard to find a shorter, clearer description of how wars are not won. The United States did not attack Berlin or Tokyo with the army it had in December of 1941. The U.S. Navy did not sail up the Thames in 1812. You fight the battles you can win with the army you have.

That Kelly was brave in going to cover the combat does not change the fact that he chose to be bold with other people’s lives. It was time to do something about Iraq—’to turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping,’ as Rupert Brooke wrote in 1914, in a sonnet celebrating the chance to go fight the Great War. A year later, Brooke died of an infected mosquito bite on a troop ship, taking his place among the 16 million corpses.

The premise of Kelly’s argument for invasion was that escalating the war, carrying it to Baghdad on the ground, would settle the problems ‘easily and quickly.’ Like his fellow poets, Sullivan and Christopher Hitchens, he presented his romantic vision as clear-eyed advice. Evil must be opposed. Good would triumph. Anyone who disagreed was benighted, mistaken, immoral.”

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“The System Uses Magnetic Sensors In The Road That Measure The Flow Of Traffic”

April 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Los Angeles is the first city in the world to synchronize all of its streetlights, which will only ease congestion a little but even that much will eat away at carbon emissions. From Ian Lovett in the New York Times:

“Built up over 30 years at a cost of $400 million and completed only several weeks ago, the Automated Traffic Surveillance and Control system, as it is officially known, offers Los Angeles one of the world’s most comprehensive systems for mitigating traffic.

The system uses magnetic sensors in the road that measure the flow of traffic, hundreds of cameras and a centralized computer system that makes constant adjustments to keep cars moving as smoothly as possible. The city’s Transportation Department says the average speed of traffic across the city is 16 percent faster under the system, with delays at major intersections down 12 percent.

Without synchronization, it takes an average of 20 minutes to drive five miles on Los Angeles streets; with synchronization, it has fallen to 17.2 minutes, the city says. And the average speed on the city’s streets is now 17.3 miles per hour, up from 15 m.p.h. without synchronized lights.

Mayor Antonio R. Villaraigosa, who pledged to complete the system in his 2005 campaign, now presents it as a significant accomplishment as his two terms in office comes to an end in June. He argued that the system would also cut carbon emissions by reducing the number of times cars stop and start.”

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“It’s Killing The GOP Nationally”

April 3, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Gerrymandering has begotten obstructionism, as the GOP, despite being really out of step with the American mainstream, has maintained a grip on Congress and slowed governance to a crawl for several years. But a Republican Party that wrests control through process rather than popularity may be further imperiling itself since it can’t be chastened and reborn. From “House of Pain,” Noam Scheiber’s insightful New Republic article:

“Suffice it to say, gay marriage is hardly the only issue on which House Republicans have managed to position themselves on the dicey side of public opinion. Their insistence on letting the government default on its debt unless the president accepted trillions in Medicare and Medicaid cuts drove their approval ratings to subterranean depths in the summer of 2011. Their refusal to deliver on $60 billion in aid for Hurricane Sandy victims earlier this year drew a rebuke from Chris Christie, one of the GOP’s biggest celebrities. Recently, as immigration reform has moved to the center of the Washington conversation, they’ve demonstrated their sympathy for the little guy by employing such terms of endearment as “wetbacks” while alternately describing immigrants as dogs, livestock, and terrorists. (Okay, those last three all came from Iowa Republican Steve King. Still…)

What explains the PR pileup that GOP elders can’t seem to clear to the side of the road? Partly it’s the structural forces at work in American politics, which have reorganized the two parties along ideological lines at the same time the GOP has become much more conservative. But the more direct and mundane explanation is gerrymandering. Thanks to the way Republican legislatures drew congressional districts in 2000, the median House district leaned Republican by two points over the next decade—a big edge given the tiny margins that frequently decide competitive races. Since 2010, the built-in advantage has grown to three points. The result of all this gerrymandering is to give the Republicans a death grip on the House. In 2012, they won 1.4 million fewer votes than Democrats in all the House districts combined, but still managed a 33-seat majority.

There’s no question this hold on the House is a huge short-term advantage for the GOP, giving it the power to thwart a Democratic president even when his agenda has widespread support. (Look no further than the ongoing budget negotiations, in which the president’s preference for trimming the deficit through spending cuts and tax increases far outpolls the GOP’s cuts-only approach.) But the flip side of being so insulated from public opinion is, well, being so insulated from public opinion. Thanks to the relative safety of their seats, most Republican House members feel no particular need to adjust to the political trends that have enormous consequences for anyone who isn’t running in a gerrymandered district—like, say, the party’s presidential nominee. It’s killing the GOP nationally.”

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Old Print Article: “The Tattooed Woman,” New York Times (1882)

April 3, 2013 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

"

“She was the daughter of a sailor who began tattooing when she was but 6 years of age.”

A sailor’s daughter was covered in ink from a tender age, as seen in an article in the March 19, 1882 New York Times:

“Miss Irene Woodward is a brown-haired, brown-eyed maiden of about 19 years of age of medium-size, and of pleasing appearance. She claims to be tattooed on every part of her body from her neck to her heels. During a reception of three hours at the Sinclair House yesterday afternoon she was attired in a scant costume of black velvet and gold. A close-fitting bodice or jacket, trimmed with gold bullion and fringe stopped an inch or more above the knee. The bodice was cut low in the neck and edged across the bosom with lace ruching. The visitors were permitted to look upon the quaintly decorated skin of the upper portions of the chest and back, the arms, and the exposed surface of the lower limbs. Miss Woodward remarked that she felt a little bashful about being looked at the way, never having worn the costume in the presence of men before. The tattooing, which was done in Indian ink, appeared artistic, and the devices were varied and attractive. Around the neck was observed a floral necklace. Dependent from this was a bunch of roses in full bloom drooping until their graceful forms were lost beneath the lace edging of the bodice. The rising sun was illustrated on each shoulder and the arms were covered with stars, hearts, floating angels, wreaths, harps, crosses, a full-rigged ship, and various mottoes. The young woman’s back, it was said, was completely covered with a large cross, heart, and anchor. Upon the lower limbs were pictures very numerous and complicated. Miss Woodward states that she was the daughter of a sailor who began tattooing when she was but 6 years of age and finished it when she was 12. She was born near Dallas, Texas, and has spent the greater part of her life in the Western wilds. She conceived the idea of exhibiting herself after seeing the tattooed Greek in Denver. On and after to-morrow she will figure among the multitude of curiosities at Bunnell’s Museum, at Broadway and Ninth Street.”

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Afflictor Nation: Great Britain Rules In March

April 3, 2013 in Misc. | Permalink

Piers Morgan: Not even talented enough to talk into a breadstick at an Olive Garden.

The countries outside of the U.S. sending the most traffic to Afflictor in March:

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

 

“Bubba Watson Had This Really Nifty Idea”

April 3, 2013 in Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Because all the poor people finally have sufficient food and shelter, we felt it was now appropriate to invent a hovercraft golf cart. I wish this were an April Fool’s Day joke, but it appears to be real. After a relaxing nine holes, let’s go to potter’s field and dig up dead beggars and use their bones to batter the current beggars.

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Margaret And Kate Fox, The Original Rappers

April 2, 2013 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

We see ghosts sometimes because we’re afraid of death. If others haven’t completely died, maybe we can also somehow go on forever?

In 1848, the Fox sisters (Margaret, Kate and Leah) of New York told a lie about ghosts that people wanted to believe, and so they did. The two younger siblings (pictured in the above undated classic photograph) claimed that they could communicate with a murdered man who made “rappings” on the floor upon command, and with a little sleight of hand–foot, mostly–they caused a national sensation. The girls were soon “performing” in large halls and arenas around the world. The so-called intelligentsia was just as gullible as were the rubes; James Fenimore Cooper allegedly prepared for death by meeting with the girls. And Spiritualism, discrete from religion, had begun in earnest the United States

The Fox girls may have had an unusual beginning, but their ending was quite predictable: Interest in them faded, a lifetime of lying tied them in knots they could never extricate themselves from, and they died in poverty and obscurity, interred in pauper graves. From a November 21, 1909 New York Times article about spiritualist cranks in America:

“The Fox sisters were the founders of modern Spiritualism. It was in 1848 that spirit rappings were first heard in their home at Hydesville, N.Y. It created an unparalleled sensation, and from the pilgrimages to the Fox shrine grew the great religion–or industry–of Spiritualism. 

According to a confession subsequently made by Margaret Fox, she and her sister Kate, then children, found they could produce peculiar sounds by the manipulation of the toes and fingers. They greatly enjoyed the perturbation of their mother, who could not understand the mysterious sounds and began to think the house was haunted.

She finally told the neighbors and the resulting sensation naturally tickled the children more than ever. But their married sister Leah Fish, who lived in Rochester, learned the origin of the mysterious sounds and saw the commercial possibilities. She took them with her to Rochester, and in a short time the whole world was talking of them.

Harriet Martineau and Elizabeth Barrett Browning were among their visitors. Elisha Kent Kane, the great explorer, fell in love with Margaret and is said to have married her, though his family never acknowledged it. Kate, who was the first to discover the power the sisters possessed, kept up the seances until her marriage in 1873.

In 1888, Margaret Fox confessed that the whole thing had been a fraud, and Kate indorsed the confession. Leah Fox was then dead. Subsequently Margaret retracted the confession, and this retraction completely satisfied the Spiritualists, who at her funeral predicted that the year 1848 (the year of the first rappings) would loom higher in history than the year 1 of the Christian calendar.

But the Spiritualists were never able to explain how it was that Margaret and Kate Fox not only confessed the fraud, but gave public exhibitions of how it was committed. On October 21, 1888, Margaret Fox appeared before an audience of 2,000 persons in the Academy of Music, in this city, and gave a demonstration. Physicians went upon the stage and felt her foot as she made the motions by which she had produced the raps heard around the world. Then she stood in her stocking feet on a little pine platform six inches from the floor, and without the slightest perceptible movement made raps audible all over the theatre. She went down into the audience, and there, resting her foot on that of a spectator, showed how by the motion of her toe the sound was produced.

She gave other public exhibitions, and her subsequent retraction of her confession did not explain away the demonstrations. Kate Fox became a dipsomaniac, and her children were taken away from her because of that fact. She died in 1892, and Margaret a year later. Margaret’s last words were: ‘Give me one more drink.’ She, too, had become a dipsomaniac.”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

April 2, 2013 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

“My husband is clean of all infection.”

donation (bronx)

hi my name is emy. im looking for a female that would like to carry a baby from my husband. i cant have no baby and i would like to make my life happy by letting my husband have one baby.

must live with us through the whole 9 months.

my husband is clean of all infection. he was tested. please help us have one baby. he deserves it. he’s a great man.

“People Hardly Care At All About Future Poverty, Freedom, Suicide, Terrorism, Crime, Poverty, Homelessness, Disease, Skills, Laziness, Or Sci/Tech Progress”

April 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Speaking of future matters, Robin Hanson at Overcoming Bias examines a survey that tried to gauge what aspects of tomorrow people of today care about. An excerpt:

“In fact, most people can hardly be bothered to care about the distant future world as a whole, and to the extent they do care, a recent study suggests that the main thing they care about from the above list is how warm and moral future folks will be. That is, people hardly care at all about future poverty, freedom, suicide, terrorism, crime, poverty, homelessness, disease, skills, laziness, or sci/tech progress. They care a bit more about self-enhancement (e.g., success, pleasure, wealth). But mostly they care about benevolence (warmth & morality, e.g., honesty, sincerity, caring, and friendliness).”

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“In Our March To The Future, We Somehow Left Robots Behind”

April 2, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From a Rodney Brooks essay in the Futurist about the next wave of manufacturing by robotics, which will bring both good and bad things to the world:

“The first industrial robot developed in the United States went to work in 1961 in a Ewing, New Jersey, GM factory. Called the Unimate, it operated with a die-casting mold placing hot, forged car parts into a liquid bath to cool them. At the time, you couldn’t have a computer on an industrial robot. Computers cost millions of dollars and filled a room. Sensors were also extremely expensive. Robots were effectively blind, very dumb, and did repeated actions following a trajectory.

If you’ve watched the evolution of industrial robots over the last 50 years, you haven’t actually seen much innovation since the Unimate. These machines perform well on very narrowly defined, repeatable tasks. But they aren’t adaptable, flexible, or easy to use. Nor are most of these machines safe for people to be around.

Today, 70% of the industrial robots in existence are in automobile factories. They’re either in the paint shop or the body shop. Go to a car factory in Japan or Detroit, you’ll see a body shop full of robots, but with no people. Go to final assembly and you’ll find all people, no robots. Industrial robots and people don’t mix.

These machines are often heralded as money savers for factory owners and operators. But the cost to integrate one of today’s industrial robots into a factory operation is often three or five times the cost of the robot itself. It’s a job that demands programmers, specialists, all sorts of people. And they have to put safety cages around the robots so that the robots don’t strike people while operating.

Unlike human workers, who can detect when they’re about to hit something with their eyes, ears, or skin, most of these machines have no sensors or means to detect what is happening in their environment. They’re not aware. All of this speaks to a larger and fundamental flaw with the way factory bots are built today.

In an increasingly interconnected world, industrial robots have not followed the information technology revolution. In our march to the future, we somehow left robots behind. Some colleagues and I decided to change that.”

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“Leave It To Charlie Rose To Begin His Black Eye Story With ‘I Had Been To The Museum That Morning…'”

April 2, 2013 in Excerpts | Permalink

Charlie Rose, a handsome and agreeable robot who was constructed in a laboratory almost entirely from bourbon and cufflinks, just did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few exchanges follow.

_________________________

Question:

Good morning, Charlie Rose. I have read that when you were a child you worked in your father’s country store. What were the dreams you had growing up? Have you fulfilled them? Where did your sophistication come from?

Charlie Rose:

I was born in 1942 in a small town: Henderson, North Carolina. About 15,000 people. My father fought in World War II and my mother and I lived with my grandparents; when my father came back, my responsibility was to get up every morning and open the store. The interesting thing about my dreams was that there was a train that ran from Boston to Miami that came close to our house. And I would look at that train — it was always going north — and think, wouldn’t I love to be on that? I didn’t know journalists and I didn’t know actors and I didn’t know architects and I didn’t know scientists. I knew lawyers and doctors and businesspeople. But my whole drive was to experience, to live, to access as much as I could. To have my driving passion be curiosity. All of the passions that have served me, made me. Curiosity, drive, the pursuit of experience. Whenever I look back, I know I learned more from when I said “yes” than when I said “no.”

_________________________ 

Question:

Who’s been your favorite guest over the years?

Charlie Rose:

It’s hard to say. I think mainly of fields. Among politicians, certainly Bill Clinton because he’s engaged by a whole range of subject matter. When I think about athletes, probably my favorite guest of all time among baseball players was Ted Williams. Richard Serra, the great sculptor, personifies an artist for me. When I think about science, certainly Eric Kandel because of the Brain Series we did. Actors: Clooney, because of friendship, but British actors are interesting because of simply the diversity of what they bring to the table from Shakespeare to comedy to James Bond. The person I’ve always wanted to interview but never met was Richard Burton. I also like a lot of directors; the one I’ve never interviewed is Spielberg, but I like Sam Mendes. As a general rule, I like artists and writers — people who are creative. Increasingly, I find scientists interesting because of their work.

_________________________

Question:

Sorry if this is a sore subject Mr. Rose, but what’s up with the black eye you had last year? When I was watching I saw it but had no idea what happened.

Charlie Rose:

I had been to the museum that morning. It was a Saturday morning. I had taken with me my new MacBook Air. As I was coming back, at the intersection of 59th Street and 5th Avenue, I tripped on a curb and put my hand out to save the computer, but in the process got a black eye. Rather than making up a much more interesting story, that’s the story. Apple I think offered to make a commercial but I didn’t take them up on that.

Question:

Leave it to Charlie Rose to begin his black eye story with “I had been to the museum that morning…”

_________________________

Question:

If you would not have gone into journalism and television, what career would you have chosen? What fields intrigue you enough to perhaps considered?

Charlie Rose:

I would’ve been intrigued by being a film director. I would’ve been intrigued by politics. I thought about architecture. I would not have been working for something big, I would’ve been trying to create something. You can do that in a large institution but it’s just not what’s natural for me. I’d like to big something big but I don’t want to start in something big.•

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“The Man And The Car”

April 1, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Fun 1948 PR film from Preston Tucker about his machine, a new sedan nicknamed the “Tucker Torpedo,” which revolutionized the American automobile, before the SEC and rumors of wrongdoing forced it off the road.

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“They Just Had A Desire Not To Deal With What They Assumed Would Be A Constant Problem”

April 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of a really interesting Discover blog post by Dave Levitan, who wonders if we are technologically adept enough to predict if and when increasingly harsh weather will turn the Jersey Shore into a ghost town:

“Diamond City, North Carolina, is not actually a city, in that no one actually lives there. People did live there, though, back in 1899. That was when a major hurricane hit the community, on a small barrier island near Cape Hatteras. Homes were destroyed, animals were killed, and graves were uncovered or washed away in the storm according to a conservation group in the area. By 1902, all 500 residents in Diamond City had picked up and left.

The people there didn’t have computer climate models, or rapidly rising seas, or any understanding of increasing storm vulnerability; they just had a desire not to deal with what they assumed would be a constant problem. That problem, of course, is one that anyone living on the East Coast is confronting, especially with the waters of Hurricane Sandy still slowly receding from our coastal consciousness. The question is, when should people in New Jersey, Long Island, Maryland, and elsewhere start thinking about leaving behind their own versions of Diamond City?”

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“The Era Of Hamstrung Government Seems To Be Coming To An End”

April 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

Paul Krugman is looking at California as a microcosm for America–as it often is–wondering whether moderate liberal rule with the freedom to make decisions will be a federal-level bellwether. Though it’s unlikely President Obama will ever know governance without obstruction. An excerpt:

“California isn’t a state in which liberals have run wild; it’s a state where a liberal majority has been effectively hamstrung by a fanatical conservative minority that, thanks to supermajority rules, has been able to block effective policy-making.

And that’s where things get really interesting — because the era of hamstrung government seems to be coming to an end. Over the years, California’s Republicans moved right as the state moved left, yet retained political relevance thanks to their blocking power. But at this point the state’s G.O.P. has fallen below critical mass, losing even its power to obstruct — and this has left Mr. Brown free to push an agenda of tax hikes and infrastructure spending that sounds remarkably like the kind of thing California used to do before the rise of the radical right.

And if this agenda is successful, it will have national implications. After all, California’s political story — in which a radicalized G.O.P. fell increasingly out of touch with an increasingly diverse and socially liberal electorate, and eventually found itself marginalized — is arguably playing out with a lag on the national scene too.

So is California still the place where the future happens first? Stay tuned.”

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“Just Like Its Model In Nature”

April 1, 2013 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

When all the bees have disappeared, we will still have robotic dragonflies to fill the air. The BionicOpter, created by Festo: “Just like its model in nature, this ultralight flying object can fly in all directions.”

“The Hidden Truth About Many Attempts To ‘Bury’ Technology Is That They Embody An Amoral And Unsustainable Vision”

April 1, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Two seemingly unrelated things about contemporary American life that are related: 1) We’ve outsourced slavery–or some form of it. People in factories toil in ungodly conditions around the clock to make our cheap tech products. Undocumented workers are allowed to do our least appealing jobs–the things we “outsource” domestically–and are forgotten, except when they’re used as political pawns, made to seem like they’re “stealing” from us. 2) Digital sound has reduced us, demeaned our culture. We remove the rattle and hum to try to get closer to meaning, but much of the meaning was in the discord. The connection: The friction is missing, the dissonance buried. We forget the discomfort and that means the discomfort of others increases.

From Evgeny Morozov’s New York Times piece about life in a time when lo-fi has been tuned out:

“‘Civilization,’ wrote the philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead in 1911, ‘advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them.’ Whitehead was writing about mathematics, but technology, with its reliance on formula and algorithms, easily fits his dictum as well.

On this account, technology can save us a lot of cognitive effort, for ‘thinking’ needs to happen only once, at the design stage. We’ll surround ourselves with gadgets and artifacts that will do exactly what they are meant to do — and they’ll do it in a frictionless, invisible way. ‘The ideal system so buries the technology that the user is not even aware of its presence,’ announced the design guru Donald Norman in his landmark 1998 book, The Invisible Computer. But is that what we really want?

The hidden truth about many attempts to ‘bury’ technology is that they embody an amoral and unsustainable vision. Pick any electrical appliance in your kitchen. The odds are that you have no idea how much electricity it consumes, let alone how it compares to other appliances and households. This ignorance is neither natural nor inevitable; it stems from a conscious decision by the designer of that kitchen appliance to free up your ‘cognitive resources’ so that you can unleash your inner Oscar Wilde on ‘contemplating’ other things. Multiply such ignorance by a few billion, and global warming no longer looks like a mystery.”

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“We Are Just Experiencing A Shift That Other Civilizations Have Faced When The Traditional Means For Storytelling Transform”

April 1, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The opening of Alex Williams’ short Techcrunch piece which asserts that data won’t kill narrative but rather alter it:

“I keep seeing this topic push up about how data is affecting creativity. Some say we are losing our sense of narration and storytelling. It’s not this at all. We are just experiencing a shift that other civilizations have faced when the traditional means for storytelling transform to give a sense of the changing times facing society.

That does not mean a rejection of the narrative form. The ancient Greeks developed a rich oral tradition for telling stories. Out of that they created a common language, which formed the foundation for fables, legends and myths.

Now we see that data, shaped by software, creates a space to tell stories in new ways. Narrative methods to express our imagination will change as techniques emerge that allow us to use programming languages to carry on what we know for the next generations.”

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“Stephen Colbert Is, For Me, Working On A Whole Different Level From Anyone Else”

April 1, 2013 in Excerpts | Permalink

When Dick Cavett was a TV talk-show host, he almost never sat behind a desk, which made it very difficult for him to hide his penis. The nation stared at the shame of his sex as it flopped about. Still, the show went on.

In Cavett’s New York Times blog and in culture critic Ken Tucker’s long, new Grantland article about the current late-night shuffling and scuffling, each man names the same host as his favorite in the ever-more-crowded yet ever-less-influential world of late-night television: Stephen Colbert. (His reign will continue until Donald Trump gets a talk show. He’s the best at everything.) An excerpt:

From Cavett: “And speaking of Dave’s presumably stepping aside some sad day, if CBS is smart, there is in full view a self-evident successor to The Big L. of Indiana.

The man I’m thinking of has pulled off a miraculous, sustained feat, against all predictions — descendants of those same wise heads who foresaw a truncated run for the Carson boy — of making a smashing success while conducting his show for years with a dual personality. And I don’t mean Rush Limbaugh (success without personality).

I can testify, as can anyone who’s met him and seen him as himself, how much more there is to Stephen Colbert than the genius job he does in his ‘role’ on The Colbert Report. Everything about him — as himself — qualifies him for that chair at the Ed Sullivan Theater that Letterman has so deftly and expertly warmed for so long. Colbert is, among other virtues, endowed with a first-rate mind, a great ad-lib wit, skilled comic movement and gesture, fine education, seemingly unlimited knowledge of affairs and events and, from delightful occasional evidence, those things called The Liberal Arts — I’ll bet you he could name the author of Peregrine Pickle. And on top of that largess of qualities (and I hope he won’t take me the wrong way here), good looks.

Should such a day come, don’t blow it, CBS.”

From Tucker: “Stephen Colbert is, for me, working on a whole different level from anyone else, and is currently the most consistent, deeply satisfying late-night host. Colbert’s ability to joke and conduct interviews on The Colbert Report while inhabiting a persona antithetical to what is probably a profoundly decent person beneath that smirk ‘n’ makeup is the most sustained piece of performance art ever. I’m not saying he’s greater than Letterman was (and still can be) at his best, but that they both inhabit roles (for Dave, the ironic rube; for Stephen, the cheerfully evil asshole) as utterly as Daniel Day-Lewis.”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

April 1, 2013 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"Mose."

“Mose.”

Depressed Bunny. Please help (Provo, UT)

Hey, guys. Just looking for some advice. I’m an animal lover and have several pets in my home. I take good care of them, but my bunny Mose has been acting kinda weird lately. He hasn’t left his cage in a while, he’s been sleeping a lot more and eating a lot less in the past few days. Do you think Mose might be depressed? If so, what should I do?

If you also care about animals, please text me with your advice.

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“We’ve Had Eight Decades Of Increasingly Frenetic Fiscal And Monetary Policy Activism”

March 31, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In his frothing and scattershot New York Times op-ed piece, onetime Reagan budget director David Stockman isn’t wrong about everything. That’s because when you essentially say that everything is horrible, you’re bound to be right some of the time. It’s one of the loonier things to appear in the Times in recent memory, ignorant of history–as if the U.S. economic system was just a little “bumpy” before Roosevelt’s New Deal ruined it all–and dishonest about government investment (the Internet, which was shepherded by the public sector, seems to have grown sort of popular). An excerpt:

“So the Main Street economy is failing while Washington is piling a soaring debt burden on our descendants, unable to rein in either the warfare state or the welfare state or raise the taxes needed to pay the nation’s bills. By default, the Fed has resorted to a radical, uncharted spree of money printing. But the flood of liquidity, instead of spurring banks to lend and corporations to spend, has stayed trapped in the canyons of Wall Street, where it is inflating yet another unsustainable bubble.

When it bursts, there will be no new round of bailouts like the ones the banks got in 2008. Instead, America will descend into an era of zero-sum austerity and virulent political conflict, extinguishing even today’s feeble remnants of economic growth.

THIS dyspeptic prospect results from the fact that we are now state-wrecked. With only brief interruptions, we’ve had eight decades of increasingly frenetic fiscal and monetary policy activism intended to counter the cyclical bumps and grinds of the free market and its purported tendency to underproduce jobs and economic output. The toll has been heavy.

As the federal government and its central-bank sidekick, the Fed, have groped for one goal after another — smoothing out the business cycle, minimizing inflation and unemployment at the same time, rolling out a giant social insurance blanket, promoting homeownership, subsidizing medical care, propping up old industries (agriculture, automobiles) and fostering new ones (‘clean’ energy, biotechnology) and, above all, bailing out Wall Street — they have now succumbed to overload, overreach and outside capture by powerful interests. The modern Keynesian state is broke, paralyzed and mired in empty ritual incantations about stimulating ‘demand,’ even as it fosters a mutant crony capitalism that periodically lavishes the top 1 percent with speculative windfalls.

The culprits are bipartisan, though you’d never guess that from the blather that passes for political discourse these days.”

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