Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
Afflictor: Fearing the NRA may be an official sponsor of the Super Bowl.
From Oliver Sacks’ new article in the New York Review of Books about memory distortion, a passage about Ronald Reagan “misremembering”:
“Daniel Schacter has written extensively on distortions of memory and the ‘source confusions’ that go with them, and in his book Searching for Memory recounts a well-known story about Ronald Reagan:
In the 1980 presidential campaign, Ronald Reagan repeatedly told a heartbreaking story of a World War II bomber pilot who ordered his crew to bail out after his plane had been seriously damaged by an enemy hit. His young belly gunner was wounded so seriously that he was unable to evacuate the bomber. Reagan could barely hold back his tears as he uttered the pilot’s heroic response: ‘Never mind. We’ll ride it down together.’ The press soon realized that this story was an almost exact duplicate of a scene in the 1944 film A Wing and a Prayer. Reagan had apparently retained the facts but forgotten their source.
Reagan was a vigorous sixty-nine-year-old at the time, was to be president for eight years, and only developed unmistakable dementia in the 1990s. But he had been given to acting and make-believe throughout his life, and he had displayed a vein of romantic fantasy and histrionism since he was young. Reagan was not simulating emotion when he recounted this story—his story, his reality, as he believed it to be—and had he taken a lie detector test (functional brain imaging had not yet been invented at the time), there would have been none of the telltale reactions that go with conscious falsehood.
It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened—or may have happened to someone else. I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others’ suggestions, which have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten.”
Tags: Oliver Sacks, Ronald Reagan
Marshall McLuhan wondered how the new environment would be programmed in the Digital Age, but here’s another important question: How will use our new access to predict the future? Researchers are currently studying decades of newspaper archives in an effort to protect us from dangers in the queue. From Gigaom:
“Researchers at Microsoft and the Technion-Israel Institute of Technology are creating software that analyzes 22 years of New York Times archives, Wikipedia and about 90 other web resources to predict future disease outbreaks, riots and deaths — and hopefully prevent them.
The new research is the latest in a number of similar initiatives that seek to mine web data to predict all kinds of events. Recorded Future, for instance, analyzes news, blogs and social media to ‘help identify predictive signals’for a variety of industries, including financial services and defense. Researchers are also using Twitter and Google to track flu outbreaks.
Eric Horvitz of Microsoft Research and Kira Radinsky of the Technion-Israel Institute describe their work in a newly released paper, ‘Mining the Web to Predict Future Events‘ (PDF). For example, they examined the way that news about natural disasters like storms and droughts could be used to predict cholera outbreaks in Angola. Following those weather events, ‘alerts about a downstream risk of cholera could have been issued nearly a year in advance,’ they write.
Horvitz and Radinsky acknowledge that epidemiologists look at some of the same relationships, but ‘such studies are typically few in number, employ heuristic assessments, and are frequently retrospective analyses, rather than aimed at generating predictions for guiding near-term action.’”
In 1974, David Frost interviewed football coach Brian Clough, who had just had a tempestuous 44-day reign in charge of Leeds United. The video is most notable because the great Michael Sheen has portrayed both subjects, the interviewer in Frost/Nixon and the interviewee in The Damned United.
Tags: Brian Clough, David Frost, Michael Sheen
Donald Trump: It took 66 years to make this mess.
Donald Trump can urinate in a jug three feet from a toilet if he feels like. He has that kind of money. It’s Howard Hughes territory. What the orange-headed racist buffoon lacks, among other things, is happiness. He tries to fill that empty sack where a soul should be by drawing attention to himself at any cost. Often he engages in public feuds with celebrities who’ve never done a thing to him. Sometimes, for instance, he attacks them for doing things he himself has done.
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Robert Pattinson should not take back Kristen Stewart. She cheated on him like a dog & will do it again–just watch. He can do much better!
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And so can all three of Donald Trump’s wives! But what grandpa really specializes in are large-scale embarrassing ploys, like the racist “business deal” he offered to President Obama during the election. The latest delusional idea hatched by the hideous hotelier is that he may purchase the struggling New York Times, something that will never happen. But what if it did? Of course, it would fail the way Trump’s magazines have always failed. But until then, it would be a classy publication.
Donald Trump’s
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Just read Chip Brown’s New York Times Magazine piece about the boomtown that North Dakota has become thanks to its massive oil reserves in this post-peak age, which reminded of this classic photograph of Upton Sinclair selling bowdlerized copies (the so-called fig-leaf edition) of his novel Oil! on a street in Boston, where the book was banned. (This novel is the basis for Paul Thomas Anderson’s great film There Will Be Blood.) The Beantown controversy helped boost Oil! to bestseller status. Sinclair, a radical firebrand, was no stranger to such public contretemps, whether running for the office of governor or hatching plans for a commune near the Palisades in New Jersey. On the latter topic, here’s a passage from a 1906 New York Times article about the formation that year of Sinclair’s techno-Socialist collective, Helicon Home Colony, which burned to the ground the year after its establishment:
“Not less than 300 persons answered Upton Sinclair’s call for a preliminary meeting at the Berkeley Lyceum last night of all those who are interested in a home colony to be organized for the purpose of applying machinery to domestic processes, and incidentally to solve the servant problem. The idea of the proposed colony is to syndicate the management of children and other home worries, such as laundering, gardening, and milking cows.
The response to Mr. Sinclair’s call gratified him immensely. When he went on the stage he was smiling almost ecstatically. The audience applauded him and then began to mop their faces, for the little Lyceum was almost filled, and some one had to shut the front doors.
The audience was made up almost equally of men and women. A large proportion seemed to be of foreign birth. Many of them were Socialists, judging from their manifestations of sympathy for Socialistic doctrines. The mentioning of two newspapers which disapprove of Socialism on their editorial pages was hissed. Mr. Sinclair himself said that he had thought of asking a Socialist to act as temporary Chairman, but that his man had thought that two Socialists on the stage at the same time would frighten the more conservative members.
The meeting lasted about two hours. Mr. Sinclair, at various times, had the floor about an hour and a half. Now and then the arguments caused a high pitch for excitement, and more than once four people were trying to talk at the same time. In the end always, however, what Mr. Sinclair suggested was accepted, including the appointment of committees and other preliminaries of organization.
For Mr. Sinclair is certain that his home colony is to come about. He said in his introductions that he had about a dozen people who had agreed to go in with him, whether anybody else did or not. But last night’s meeting indicated, in Mr. Sinclair’s opinion, that a home colony of at least 100 families could easily be organized.”
Tags: Chip Brown, Upton Sinclair
An odd 1981 report from Mike Wallace about rebirthing, a personal growth technique that uses breathing to try to heal the supposed psychological trauma of the birth process. It was the decade that alternative medicines of the previous 15 years–many of them painfully narcissistic–began to receive their own section in even the most mainstream bookstores.
Tags: Mike Wallace
“Young apprentice.”
I cant help myself but dive into the politics to institute policy changes. MC’s are designed to move crowds. It’s in my blood. I will speak from the heart therefore the message and policies will be 4 the people. Young apprentice, age #23. All is appreciated.
$1,000 to $10,000 denominations.
Piers Morgan: Thinks athletes who use PEDs should be banned from sports, but journalists who hack phones should be able to continue their careers. (Image by Pete Riches.)
The Top 5 nations sending traffic to Afflictor this month:
From Wired‘s “7 Massive Ideas That Could Change the World,” a piece of Rachel Swaby’s entry about spray-able Wi-Fi:
“By 2020, wireless technology is expected to have a global impact of $4.5 trillion. But growth depends on our ability to scale up. We need access that matches the number of devices demanding it.
Readily available Wi-Fi could help fix that problem. Internet and phone companies are already starting to deploy small cells—essentially tiny mobile phone towers that serve Wi-Fi along with 4G—in densely populated areas. But those companies have little incentive to build out the massive infrastructure required to connect the rest of the world.
One company has come up with a uniquely audacious solution—a Wi-Fi antenna in a spray can. Chamtech Enterprises has developed a liquid filled with millions of nano-capacitors, which when sprayed on a surface can receive radio signals better than a standard metal rod. With a router, Chamtech’s antennas can communicate with a fiber network, receive signals from targeted satellites, and set up a daisy chain with nearby nodes, potentially creating a mesh network of low-cost, broadband Wi-Fi hot spots. Because the antennas can be painted onto any surface, there would be none of the NIMBY-ism that greets every new cell phone tower. If that’s not fantastic enough, try this: No more cursing AT&T.“
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“We do nano-antenna spray-on material”:
Tags: Rachel Swaby
From an interesting post at the Chapati Mystery blog which speculates on how to create a city with architecture that makes it impervious to drone strikes:
“The drone may conceive of itself – if it was armed with the ordinance of self-awareness – as a tool beyond architecture.In the end of the 1990’s society was able to get used to CCTV on street corners in stores and on the street. We were even able to accept the use of Tomahawk missiles, at least in Tom Clancy books. The strangeness of the United States treating its enemies this way, as though they were the New England colonies in a strange reuse of King Philip’s lexicography, was brushed off in the excitement over new uses of adaptable technology. However, security cameras and fly-by-wire missiles still were part of a world that defined itself with concrete walls, cliffs-as-barriers,and other principles of formal architecture. Drones scoff at such conventionalities.
Drones’ ability to move through extraordinarily varied environments for extraordinarily long periods of time is of course unparalleled. They can scoff at conventional architecture by waiting out the inhabitants (if the goal is to eliminate a single person or a small group) or to poke and prod at the space from infinite angles using any number of conventional or digital imaging systems. Or,alternatively, the drone operator has the opportunity to decide to simply blow the whole place up. Much of the publicized fear over the expansion of drone warfare and reconnaissance is not distress at the collateral damage in Pakistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere but rather the very real fear that we in the United States and United States-like environs have no native way to defend ourselves from them or their operators.
However, as those who depended on castle walls discovered against Ottoman artillery and as the finest horsemen discovered during trench warfare, no invincible force of arms stays that way for long. Architecture against drones is not just a science-fiction scenario but a contemporary imperative. Such creations are not needed for the John Connors but for the Abdurahman al-Awlakis. The successful check against the machines is not a daydream but an inevitability, and the quicker more creative solutions are proposed, the more likely such answers can be disseminated widely and kept from the patent-wielding hands of some offshore-utopian type. (Thanks Browser.)
From the August 21, 1902 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“John McArdle, the real estate man of 70 Varick Street, who on Tuesday night, while being examined in Bellevue Hospital as to his sanity, poked his eyes out, died this morning. McArdle was 40 years old and lived with his wife and daughter, at 7 West One Hundred and Sixth Street. He was taken to the hospital Tuesday afternoon in a coach and Dr. Gregory was making an examination of the man when he destroyed his eyesight with his thumbs.”
Tags: Dr. Gregory, John McArdle
David Mamet has taken his right-wing apostasy to the hilt, arguing at the Daily Beast that we really, really need armed security guards in schools. The problem is, having spoken to many security guards over the years, I know lots of them would be violating parole if they carried firearms. This assertion seems particularly untrue: “The individual is not only best qualified to provide his own personal defense, he is the only one qualified to do so.” No, not really. Oh, and fuck Mitch and Murray! From “Gun Laws and the Fools of Chelm“:
“What possible purpose in declaring schools ‘gun-free zones’? Who bringing a gun, with evil intent, into a school would be deterred by the sign?
Ah, but perhaps one, legally carrying a gun, might bring it into the school.
Good.
We need more armed citizens in the schools.
Walk down Madison Avenue in New York. Many posh stores have, on view, or behind a two-way mirror, an armed guard. Walk into most any pawnshop, jewelry story, currency exchange, gold store in the country, and there will be an armed guard nearby. Why? As currency, jewelry, gold are precious. Who complains about the presence of these armed guards? And is this wealth more precious than our children?
Apparently it is: for the Left adduces arguments against armed presence in the school but not in the wristwatch stores.
Q. How many accidental shootings occurred last year in jewelry stores, or on any premises with armed security guards?
Why not then, for the love of God, have an armed presence in the schools? It could be done at the cost of a pistol (several hundred dollars), and a few hours of training (that’s all the security guards get). Why not offer teachers, administrators, custodians, a small extra stipend for completing a firearms-safety course and carrying a concealed weapon to school? The arguments to the contrary escape me.”
Tags: David Mamet
Two questions: How the fuck did I not know that Conan O’Brien had a jokey roundtable on his talk show in 1993 featuring William F. Buckley, Hank Aaron, Louis C.K. and Dan Cortese? And: Why couldn’t Dan Cortese have had the flu that night? C.K., not yet the comic genius he would become, and Robert Smigel are among the quartet of stooges mocking the host’s name. The Clinton Administration was a strange time in America.
Conan, of course, still has a show on TV, yet I miss him. I miss that Conan.
A lot of people tell me that I remind them of a cat, and that is NOT a compliment. Cats are horrible and I’m apparently not much better. But they get away with it all because they’re so cute and furry.
Unfortunately, free-ranging domestic cats are among the biggest murderers on the planet, killing billions of birds and millions of mammals each year, seriously damaging biodiversity. Perhaps it would be a good idea if it was illegal to let house cats roam and hunt at will, but Hannah Waters at Scientific American has a suggestion that is more Swiftian, though not intended as satire: Let’s humanely kill many of the feline population. I’m pretty sure that it will never happen, though I am completely sure that I’m glad I’m not Hannah Walters. From the essay:
“The obvious answer then is that, if we value biodiversity and wildlife and can manage to overcome our predilection for cute cat faces over cute bird faces, cat populations should be controlled through humane killing, just like many other invasive species.
But the funny thing is that no one suggests that. In compulsively researching this blog post, I read many papers showing that trap-neuter-release doesn’t work, or studies showing that, in computer models, euthanasia reduces cat populations more effectively than trap-neuter-release. But then in their concluding paragraphs, after providing evidence that current methods aren’t working, the action steps proposed by the authors are: (1) all pets should be neutered and (2) owners should be be better educated so they don’t abandon their cats.
What??
Look, I’m as sentimental as the next person. (I cried for the entirety of Les Miserables.) I love my cat and she gives my life meaning. But I also can admit that the science is staring us in the face. We can’t bear to talk about euthanizing cats because they are so friggin’ cute–but, if we’re honest with ourselves, the best solution to this problem is to kill cats. Kill them, with their cute little faces, their soft fur and their snuggles. Some of the cats need to be dead.”
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“Sounds like a male marking its territory”:
Tags: Hannah Waters
Are you a British man who’s been injecting himself with deadly snake venom for 20 years because you believe it has healthy, youth-preserving properties? No? Well, just such a person, Steve Ludwin, did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. And apart from the rotting leg and heart attack, he does look fairly good. He describes his exploits thusly:
“Despite a stint in intensive care after an overdose from three separate venoms, a suspected heart attack brought on by cobra venom and a temporarily rotting leg, nothing thus far has put me off my passion for studying this highly evolved reptilian saliva.” You know, A-Rod is gonna start doing this shit. A few exchanges follow.
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Question:
Why?
Answer:
I started because I listened to a voice of inspiration that blasted into my head one cold night in Connecticut where I am from(20 mins from Newtown) I knew that night which venoms I was going to use and everything. I had a strong feeling that something good would come of it. Felt like Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters or something.
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Question:
Have you ever tasted it? if so, what did it taste like?
Answer:
Hemotoxic venoms taste ok and sweetish but the neurotoxins taste vile and bitter. Go figure.
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Question:
What is your injection schedule like? You seem to have a pretty strong tremor in your video. Do you always have this, or just after injecting venom? If its constant, did it only start after you injected venom for the first time?
Answer:
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Answer:
Tags: Steve Ludwin
Will Americans give up their steering wheels any more readily than they’ll surrender their guns? It’s tough to say since both are about power, control and ego. From Chunka Mui’s new six-part series at Forbes’s hideously designed website about autonomous automobiles, a passage that offers three possible reasons why such driverless vehicles may reach critical mass sooner than later:
“I can think of three plausible scenarios that, based on the compelling societal benefits and business opportunities, might jumpstart adoption.
1. Google Fiber Redux. Google is the most likely player to put hundreds or thousands of driverless cars on the road to prove their effectiveness and clear away short-term hurdles. Google has a tradition of having its employees use its prototype technologies, a practice known as ‘eating your own dog food.’ Given recently passed legislation in California legalizing driverless cars (with backup drivers), Google might deploy hundreds of Google cars to chauffeur Googlers around the state. Google could quickly log millions of miles and accumulate mountains of evidence on the safety and benefits of the car. (According to various news reports, the Google car has thus far been hit twice by other drivers and once caused a minor accident—while under the control of a human driver.) Google could then move to pilot the technology at a larger scale, perhaps in Las Vegas, because Nevada has also approved the car. Google could use its deep pockets to invest in the necessary infrastructure, take the liabilities issues off the table (by essentially self-insuring) and make the cars available in Nevada at competitive prices. Such an effort would mirror theGoogle Fiber strategy in Kansas City to demonstrate the viability of high-speed fiber networks to the home.
2. The China Card. Although there are too many imponderables and cross-industry conflicts to imagine that the U.S. federal government would get involved any time soon, one can imagine scenarios where more interventionist governments, like China’s, might intervene. China has greater incentives to adopt driverless cars because its rates of accidents and fatalities per 100,000 vehicles is more than twice that of the U.S., and its vehicle counts and total fatalities are growing rapidly. In addition, the Chinese government could be motivated to accelerate the adoption of driverless cars because of the trillions of dollars that it would save by building fewer and narrower roads, by eliminating traffic lights and street lights and by reducing fuel consumption. And then there is the competitive dimension. A driverless car initiative would fit into several of the seven strategic industries that the government is supporting. Chinese researchers have already made significant progress in the arena. And, of course, if China perfects a driverless-car system, it could export that system to the rest of the world.
3. The Big Venture Play. In this scenario, a startup steps into the market to launch a large-scale, shared, driverless transportation system. While this might appear to be the most outlandish of the three scenarios, the outline of the a profitable business case has already been developed. The business plan was designed by an impressive team led by Lawrence Burns, the director of the Program on Sustainability at Columbia University’s Earth Institute and former head of R&D at General Motors. The plan is based on expert technical and financial analysis and offers three sustainable market-entry strategies. For example, the team did a detailed analysis of Ann Arbor, MI, and concluded that a shared-driverless system could be fielded that offered customers about 90% savings compared with the cost of personal car ownership—while delivering better user experiences. Analysis of suburban areas and high-density urban centers, with Manhattan as the case study, also yielded significant savings potential and better service. Such dramatic results promise tremendous business opportunities for a ‘NewCo’:
This is an extraordinary opportunity to realize superior margins, especially for first movers. In cities like Ann Arbor, for example, NewCo could price its personal mobility service at $7 per day (providing customers with a service comparable to car ownership with better utilization of their time) and still earn $5 per day off each subscriber. In Ann Arbor alone, 100,000 residents (1/3 of Ann Arbor’s population) using the service could result in a profit of $500,000 a day. Today, 240 million Americans own a car as a means of realizing personal mobility benefits. If NewCo realizes just a 1 percent market share (2.4 million customers) in the United States alone, its annual profit could be on the order of $4 billion. NewCo’s Business Plan explains how this idea can be realized quickly, efficiently and with effective risk management.
There are of course many assumptions built into such plans, but my review leads me to believe that it is a robust platform for serious exploration of the Big Venture Play.”
Tags: Chunka Mui
“If you buy the skunk, I will throw in the mouse as well.”
I just moved and am selling off most of my taxidermy stuff.
A big and newly mounted striped skunk with no odor or bugs. He is in excellent condition with long soft hair, no tangles or slippage. I REALLY hate to let him go, and am too lazy to put him on ebay to ship . So I am asking a really good price compared to any others of his quality. He is freestanding and his tail has a wire in it to position it any way you want. SOLD
A weird and cool novelty squirrel mount standing on hind legs holding a bucket. He held various things in the bucket for me in the last few years on my desk and bar such as pens, drink stirrers, cocktail umbrellas, bottle caps and such. Always a conversation starter! $60
A big lot of complete tanned snake skins including pythons and constrictors including the head. I again have had these in a bag for several years using them as reference in my work. They are soft and pliable. Can be used for crafts like making many awesome wallets, belts… or whatever. the one snake is huge at over six feet long! $25 for all of them
An opossum skull, really cool and primitive. Clean. $15
And last a small free standing freeze dried mouse. He has been a lot of fun for me throughout the years as I have scared the crap out of many people by tucking him into little nooks and crannies when no one was looking. One mouse you wouldnt mind having in your house. $10
Cash and carry, located right off the L train. No room for them anymore. If interested in more than one or all of them I will take offers. If you buy the skunk, I will throw in the mouse as well.
“He used to say that the law was the most detestable of all human occupations.”
The two best-selling novels in America during the 19th-century (not counting the Bible) were likely Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ. The latter was written by Lew Wallace, a lawyer, diplomat and Union General who became most known as a man of letters. He was also, notably, forceful in the area of race relations, arguing against the color line in college football. There weren’t many Americans like him then nor are there now. The opening of his obituary in the February 16, 1905 edition of the New York Times:
“Crawfordsville, Ind.–Gen. Lew Wallace, author, formerly American Minister to Turkey, and veteran of the Mexican and Civil Wars, died at his home in this city to-night, aged seventy-eight years.
The health of Gen. Wallace has been failing for several years, and for months it has been known that his vigorous constitution could not much longer withstand the ravages of a wasting disease.
For more than a year he has been unable to properly assimilate food, and this, together with his advanced age, made more difficult his fight against death. At no time ever has he confessed his belief that the end was near, and his rugged constitution and remarkable vitality have done much to prolong his life.
Gen. Lew Wallace, who years ago achieved widespread distinction as a lawyer, legislator, soldier, author, and diplomat, was a man of exceptionally refined manner, broad culture, and imposing personal appearance. He was a son of David Wallace, who was elected Governor of Indiana by the Whigs in 1837. His birthplace was Brooksville, Franklin County, Ind., where he was born April 10, 1827.
Although Gen. Wallace was famous as a soldier long before he entered the field of letters, it was through his authorship of Ben-Hur and several other popular works that he became known to the largest number of people. Ben-Hur was dramatized eighteen years after the publication of the book, the sale of which in Canada, England, and Continental Europe, as well as in the United States, was tremendous.
As a boy Lew Wallace was a keen lover of books, and his father’s possession of a large library afforded him an opportunity to become acquainted with much of the best literature of the time. From his mother he inherited a love of painting and drawing, but these instincts were overpowered by his desire for a more active life. His mother died when he was only ten years old, and from that time on he refused to submit patiently to restraint. An effort was made to send him to the town school. It was only partially successful. Later his father put him in college at Crawfordsville, but his stay there was brief.
At an early age he commenced the study of law, receiving valuable instruction from his father, and at the end of four years was admitted to the bar. He used to say that the law was the most detestable of all human occupations. It was said that he was unable to prepare a case, but when it came to trial he accepted the statements of his partner as to the law and the evidence and then, following his own convictions to the merits of the case, made an appeal which rarely failed to be effective.”
Tags: David Wallace, Lew Wallace
Billy Carter, the only First Brother to have a beer named after him, became a huge celebrity during his sibling’s four years in the White House–as well as an easy punchline. Here he chats with Bill Boggs.
Tags: Bill Boggs, Billy Carter
Decades before Google Glass, Steve Mann created his own augmented-reality goggles, becoming, likely, the world’s first cyborg. From “Eye Am a Camera,” his article from late last year in Time:
“My own engagement in this evolutionary process began way back in the last century in 1978. Thirty four years ago, I invented a ‘glass’ that caused the human eye itself to effectively become both an electronic camera and a television display. I used it to experiment with ways to help people see better, through ‘wearable computing’ in everyday life. I called this invention ‘Digital Eye Glass’ or ‘Eye Glass’ or ‘Glass Eye’ (people wearing it look like they have a glass eye) or just ‘Glass’ for short.
Back in 1978, computers were massive machines requiring large computer rooms. My high school had a computer. It processed stacks of paper cards and printed the results on paper in the next room.
But the personal computer revolution was just being born. My brother and I were the first in our school to have a home computer. And rather than have it sitting on a desk at home, I often wore it on my body, connected to various prototypes of my eye glass.
In some sense, I chose to learn about computing by ‘being’ a computer, and to learn about photography by ‘being’ a camera for more than 30 years. I call this ‘learn-by-being.’
As a teenager in the 1970s, I built a computer-mediated world of ‘augmediated reality.’ This was nothing like ‘virtual reality,’ which ignores the real world. Augmediated reality served to both augment and mediate my surroundings.
My ‘glass’ became so much a part of my everyday life that it became part of me — part of my mind and body. And it evolved from a cumbersome apparatus with some parts permanently attached (portions of its sensory network implanted beneath the skin) to something sleek and slender that slides on and off like ordinary eyeglass frames.”
Tags: Steve Mann
Bruce Nussbaum’s essay about Apple takes inspiration from Walter Benjamin’s 1936 writing “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Here’s a piece from it, which talks about the difference in acting on stage and on film, which I mostly don’t agree with except for its most basic premise:
“For the film, what matters primarily is that the actor represents himself to the public before the camera, rather than representing someone else. One of the first to sense the actor’s metamorphosis by this form of testing was Pirandello. Though his remarks on the subject in his novel Si Gira were limited to the negative aspects of the question and to the silent film only, this hardly impairs their validity. For in this respect, the sound film did not change anything essential. What matters is that the part is acted not for an audience but for a mechanical contrivance – in the case of the sound film, for two of them. ‘The film actor,’ wrote Pirandello, ‘feels as if in exile – exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image, flickering an instant on the screen, then vanishing into silence …. The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera.’ This situation might also be characterized as follows: for the first time – and this is the effect of the film – man has to operate with his whole living person, yet forgoing its aura. For aura is tied to his presence; there can be no replica of it. The aura which, on the stage, emanates from Macbeth, cannot be separated for the spectators from that of the actor. However, the singularity of the shot in the studio is that the camera is substituted for the public. Consequently, the aura that envelops the actor vanishes, and with it the aura of the figure he portrays.
It is not surprising that it should be a dramatist such as Pirandello who, in characterizing the film, inadvertently touches on the very crisis in which we see the theater. Any thorough study proves that there is indeed no greater contrast than that of the stage play to a work of art that is completely subject to or, like the film, founded in, mechanical reproduction. Experts have long recognized that in the film ‘the greatest effects are almost always obtained by ‘acting’ as little as possible … ‘ In 1932 Rudolf Arnheim saw ‘the latest trend … in treating the actor as a stage prop chosen for its characteristics and… inserted at the proper place.’ With this idea something else is closely connected. The stage actor identifies himself with the character of his role. The film actor very often is denied this opportunity. His creation is by no means all of a piece; it is composed of many separate performances. Besides certain fortuitous considerations, such as cost of studio, availability of fellow players, décor, etc., there are elementary necessities of equipment that split the actor’s work into a series of mountable episodes. In particular, lighting and its installation require the presentation of an event that, on the screen, unfolds as a rapid and unified scene, in a sequence of separate shootings which may take hours at the studio; not to mention more obvious montage. Thus a jump from the window can be shot in the studio as a jump from a scaffold, and the ensuing flight, if need be, can be shot weeks later when outdoor scenes are taken. Far more paradoxical cases can easily be construed. Let us assume that an actor is supposed to be startled by a knock at the door. If his reaction is not satisfactory, the director can resort to an expedient: when the actor happens to be at the studio again he has a shot fired behind him without his being forewarned of it. The frightened reaction can be shot now and be cut into the screen version. Nothing more strikingly shows that art has left the realm of the ‘beautiful semblance’ which, so far, had been taken to be the only sphere where art could thrive.”
Tags: Walter Benjamin
The most important thing for Apple’s future will be the first new product it produces post-Jobs that isn’t just an iteration of another one (e.g., shrinking the iPad). Even if Steve Jobs himself had the product in the pipeline, the way it’s executed and introduced will determine what Apple is going forward. But even if the company delivers, stock price won’t necessarily follow, because that isn’t always congruous with performance. The circus is still popular, but it isn’t the same without P.T. Barnum, minus his perfections and imperfections. From Bruce Nussbaum’s new Fast Company essay, “Why Apple Is Losing Its Aura“:
“Apple, of course, also gives us traditional physicality and aesthetics in the tactility of its products and the touch-screen mode of our communicating with them. For two decades or so, corporations shifted away from ‘things’ to ‘services’ and ‘thinking’ and ‘monetizing,’ but Apple stayed with making beautiful stuff that felt good in the hand. The ‘fit and finish,’ the glass and aluminum, the size and shape of its products added to the company’s Aura. Now Amazon (with its Kindle), Google (with its glasses), and others are following.
Finally, Aura is often associated with charisma. It is the charismatic figure that personifies and makes possible all the elements of Aura. It is the charismatic figure that people identify with and hope to emulate. They have high expectations for this leader but are forgiving of sins if they are acknowledged and changed. Jobs played that role, in close association with Ive and a small team of incredibly creative people who worked with him for many years.
This Aura, this combination of elements that beckon us to Apple and compel us to stay, is the generator of its economic value. This emotional engagement, not simply the number of iPhones sold worldwide, is the real value of the company. Looking at Apple’s value through the concept of aura allows us to move beyond the technology and the units sold to place the company’s economic value within a social context from which it is derived. If you don’t understand the auratic power of engagement, you can’t understand Apple or modern capitalism.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Bruce Nussbaum, Steve Jobs
The last time professional chucklehead Joe Scarborough used his flat-earth theory–if many people believe the round earth is flat, then the person who believes that the round Earth is round is a fool–he ended up being embarrassed by his scurrilous criticism of pollster Nate Silver. But some people never learn. He’s now lambasting New York Times economist Paul Krugman about deficit spending not because the MSNBC pundit has some sort knowledge or proof, but because, in Scarborough’s mind, Krugman’s reasoning “runs counter to conventional wisdom across the Western world.” Sooner or later, the “other people disagree with this guy” theory will work the way some shit eventually sticks to a wall. The opening of Scarborough’s new Politico column “Paul Krugman vs. the World“:
“Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman came on Morning Joe Monday to discuss his latest book and the state of affairs in Washington. Mr. Krugman’s view is that Americans would be better off if its government ran deeper deficits and ignored its longterm debt. That, of course, runs counter to conventional wisdom across the Western world, which is exactly why the New York Times columnist believes Spain and Great Britain are suffering through endless recessions.
His argument also runs counter to what I have been saying in Congress and in the media since 1994. So it would be no surprise that the guy who wrote this, and this, and this and this over the past week would take exception to Mr. Krugman’s words. But most of our viewers did not tune in to hear me talk over the Nobel Prize winner. They tuned in to hear Paul Krugman. So I did my best to give him space.”
Tags: Joe Scarborough, Paul Krugman