“The Word Is Then Projected In The Chosen Language”

January 28, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The Ivy Guide is a pen attachment that scans and translates text as you wand over it. From Mashable: “Learning a new language comes with its difficulties, but three designers are looking to put translations right at your fingertips.

The Ivy Guide, a device that fits over pens and pencils, scans words and projects its translation directly onto the document.

The scanner tip adjusts to any writing tool with a flexible sponge, and while pressing the translating button, readers can underline text. The word is then projected in the chosen language, and cleared by pressing again. The scanner connects to a USB for easy charging.”

Old Print Article: “Sold His Mustache,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1893)

January 28, 2013 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

“If you will cut it off and give it to me I will give you 25 cents for it.”

Times are tough now, but it wasn’t exactly a cakewalk in the 1890s. Consider a newspaper story of that era about a Minnesota lawyer who resorted to selling his whiskers in an attempt to escape poverty. Either this was an important piece of financial-page muckraking, or more likely, there was some extra space to fill in the paper that day and the editors got drunk and made the whole thing up. At any rate, here’s an excerpt from the story that originally appeared in the Minneapolis Journal and was reprinted in the August 14, 1893 issue of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“In these troublous times when money is scarcer than the fabled teeth of hens or than the upper molars of the female of the bovine species, it has been noticed that a man will part with almost anything in his possession for the sake of a little ready money. But the worst case of destitution which has come to notice so far, is that of Hiram C. Truesdale, the popular young attorney, whose future always seemed bright and who appeared to be on the road not only to reputation but great fortune. But he has more and more felt the gnawing tooth of poverty and has tried in devious ways to escape the gnaw. He has offered his old clothes for sale at greatly reduced rates, but he could find no purchaser for various reasons, the chief one being that the trousers were too long to fit the ordinary user of such articles. Article after article was put up, first a toothbrush, then, a No. 1 Kodak, then a hammerless shot gun, then his vote, and in fact everything that he hoped something could be raised on, but to no avail. Finally, a gentleman appeared, who said to him in a moment of particular financial despondency: ‘Harry, you have a remarkable handsome mustache, which I have always admired as a thing of beauty, and if you will cut it off and give it to me I will give you 25 cents for it.’ Harry hesitated for a long time and tried to raise the offer to 30 cents, but they buyer stuck to his price and finally prevailed. The mustache was sacrificed and Mr. Truesdale was relieved from his financial troubles.“

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“Would Research Subjects Simply Extinguish The Life Of A Machine Pleading For Its Life?”

January 28, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

We treat each other like crap but would we be better to bots? The opening of an NPR report by Alix Siegel about reimagining the Milgram experiments for the age of robotics:

“In 2007, Christoph Bartneck, a robotics professor at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand, decided to stage an experiment loosely based on the famous (and infamous) Milgram obedience study.

In Milgram’s study, research subjects were asked to administer increasingly powerful electrical shocks to a person pretending to be a volunteer ‘learner’ in another room. The research subject would ask a question, and whenever the learner made a mistake, the research subject was supposed to administer a shock — each shock slightly worse than the one before.

As the experiment went on, and as the shocks increased in intensity, the ‘learners’ began to clearly suffer. They would scream and beg for the research subject to stop while a ‘scientist’ in a white lab coat instructed the research subject to continue, and in videos of the experiment you can see some of the research subjects struggle with how to behave. The research subjects wanted to finish the experiment like they were told. But how exactly to respond to these terrible cries for mercy?

Bartneck studies human-robot relations, and he wanted to know what would happen if a robot in a similar position to the ‘learner’ begged for its life. Would there be any moral pause? Or would research subjects simply extinguish the life of a machine pleading for its life without any thought or remorse?”


Stranley Milgram Obedience by djfaheezy

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“The United States Hired, Used, And Protected Several Thousand Nazi War Criminals”

January 28, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s rightly understood that Jewish émigrés fleeing Nazism during WWII greatly enriched America’s arts and sciences, from Hollywood to higher education. It’s less acknowledged that at the end of the war, we also embraced Nazis and whitewashed their pasts to boost defense, space and technology programs. The chief example is NASA kingpin Wernher von Braun (see here and here), but there were a great many others. The opening of Richard Rashke’s new Daily Beast article “America’s Shameful Nazi Past“:

“The Nazi-hunting era that began with the thunder of a kettle drum at the Nuremberg trials in 1945 ended with a whimper in 2011.  After a much interrupted two-year trial, a federal court in Munich convicted John Demjanjuk, a retired Cleveland auto worker, of assisting in the deaths of 29,060 mostly Dutch Jews at Sobibor, a Nazi death camp in eastern Poland. The court sentenced him to five years in prison. Because he posed no flight risk, it allowed him to live in a nursing home while his appeal wound its way through German courts.

Demjanjuk died before his appeal process was completed. Therefore, under German law, he is considered not guilty of a war crime and his criminal record in Germany has been expunged. After being hounded through courts in the United States, Israel, and Germany for more than 30 years, Demjanjuk stands guilty of only one crime—lying under oath on his 1951 visa application about his birth country and what he did during World War II.

In the two visa fraud cases the U.S. Department of Justice eventually brought against Demjanjuk, a federal court ruled that he had been trained as an SS guard at Trawniki, a Nazi camp not far from Sobibor, and that he had served as a Nazi death camp guard. But no U.S. criminal court actually tried Demjanjuk for any war crimes because it did not have jurisdiction to do so.

The Demjanjuk case illustrates America’s historical and schizophrenic treatment of Nazi war criminals and their collaborators. On the one hand, the United States aggressively tried some of them at Nuremberg, and deported others like Demjanjuk, who had acquired U.S. visas by fraud, granting extradition rights to those countries who wanted to try them. On the other hand, the United States hired, used, and protected several thousand Nazi war criminals and collaborators for scientific and espionage purposes.  The use and shielding of these criminals for more than 50 years was and is a massive obstruction of Holocaust justice.”

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“What Did You Do The Night Before You Went Off To Prison?”

January 27, 2013 in Politics, Videos | Permalink

Watergate felon John Dean queried by Bill Boggs about the personal ramifications of his wrongdoing.

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

January 27, 2013 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

“How maybe having me over for a meal?”

Wanted: Comfort Food – $10 (East Village)

Hi Everyone!I need your help with this new project I’m starting. Being far away from family, there’s nothing I miss more than my mother’s cooking. However I’ve since realized that it wasn’t any dish in particular that I missed; what I really longed for was a home cooked meal.

Therefore I was hoping that the craigslist community could help me. Rather than having me cook for myself (of which I mostly suck at), or you cooking for one person (which always sucks), how maybe having me over for a meal?So if you’re willing to trade in an empty seat across your dinner table for the sake of trying something new, then by all means I’d love to stop by for a plate, a photograph and a conversation. I’ve got $10 and I’ll eat anything.

“The Point Should Be To Get Newcomers Started Shooting Something”

January 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

It just occurred to me that children can’t get into comedy clubs but they can shoot firearms. You know, because bullets can only hurt you but words can kill. I’m all in favor of consenting adults having maximum liberty, but for me that doesn’t extend to minors. From Mike McIntire’s New York Times article about the gun industry’s attempts to woo youngsters with schemes that would not be permitted by companies pushing tobacco or alcohol or things that kill you slowly:

“The industry’s youth-marketing effort is backed by extensive social research and is carried out by an array of nonprofit groups financed by the gun industry, an examination by The New York Times found. The campaign picked up steam about five years ago with the completion of a major study that urged a stronger emphasis on the ‘recruitment and retention’ of new hunters and target shooters.

The overall objective was summed up in another study, commissioned last year by the shooting sports industry, that suggested encouraging children experienced in firearms to recruit other young people. The report, which focused on children ages 8 to 17, said these ‘peer ambassadors’ should help introduce wary youngsters to guns slowly, perhaps through paintball, archery or some other less intimidating activity.

‘The point should be to get newcomers started shooting something, with the natural next step being a move toward actual firearms,’ said the report, which was prepared for the National Shooting Sports Foundation and the Hunting Heritage Trust.”

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“Ben Franklin Rocked One Of History’s Finest Bald-Mullets”

January 27, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Jesse Lichtenstein has followed up his “Do We Really Want to Live Without the Post Office?” article in Esquire with an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. A few excerpts follow.

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Question:

Who was the coolest postmaster general?

Answer:

Ben Franklin rocked one of history’s finest bald-mullets. And then there was Frank H. Hitchcock, 43rd postmaster, who paid a pilot out of his own pocket to demonstrate the usefulness of airplanes when the Army wasn’t convinced.

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Question:

Why does/should the USPS have a monopoly on a person’s mailbox? As I understand it, only the USPS can place mail in someone’s mailbox. Is that correct?

Answer:

This is correct. The post office is established in the US Constitution (in fact, the post office was established in 1775, before the US itself, but a federal post office is written into the constitution) and it’s been given this monopoly by law. In theory, that lawful monopoly could be changed by new legislation. 

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Question:

What’s the biggest problem you think we will face if the USPS does get shut down?

Answer:

I think there won’t be a lot of interest in the private sector in rebuilding anything with the scope of the USPS. And that means nothing close to the same delivery standards for the whole country, and probably much more variable pricing.

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Question:

Where do you see the future of the postal service industry, and what new and innovative inventions do you think will revolutionize the way we receive mail?

Answer:

I think the growth of ecommerce and our rising expectations that things can and should be delivered to us quickly could be the way that the postal service survives and even thrives. There’s a generational problem USPS has to grapple with. In broad strokes, more older people still want to do their business through the mail (bills, bank statements, etc. — they trust a hard copy) and more younger people have very little meaningful relationship with mail — except getting STUFF.

There’s also room for the postal service to grow into the area of hybrid mail. I talk about this in the piece — the idea that we should have scanned images of mail arrive in our inboxes and we can decide which pieces we want delivered, and when; and maybe for a fee, we could have the USPS open the mail and email us a scan. By the same token, we should be able to type something up, email a file to USPS, and have them deliver a physical document.

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Question:

Assuming you could ship a live animal, which would be easier: 100 duck-sized horses or one horse-sized duck?

Answer:

It’s really a question of how much extra space you have to budget for containing the waste matter. Horses’ diets are so fiber-intensive, while ducks break it down to a liquid. I’m going with h-s duck.

“Then There Was The Small Matter Of The Murder”

January 27, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Film, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve posted before about Eadweard Muybridge, genius of nascent cinema who wound up on trial for murder. There’s a new book about him, The Inventor and the Tycoon, which receives a beautifully written review this week in the New York Times by Candice Millard. The opening:

“Genius, it seems, is almost always accompanied by eccentricity, if not madness. Those rare instances of genuine brilliance that we find scattered throughout history — in the music of Ludwig van Beethoven, the paintings of Vincent van Gogh, the mathematical equations of John Nash — often appear to have come at great cost to the minds that produced them. The work of Eadweard Muybridge is no exception.

While Muybridge’s photographs are widely known, his personal life has been largely neglected, which seems incredible now that, in Edward Ball’s engrossing book, The Inventor and the Tycoon, we have the whole fascinating story, full of strange and surprising details. At the height of his genius, Muybridge, a British immigrant whose stunning advancements in photography in the mid-to-late 1800s astonished the world and gave rise to the motion picture industry, looked and generally lived like a vagabond. He dressed in clothing so tattered that his uncombed, usually unwashed, hair poked out of holes in his hat, and his pants threatened to fall off in pieces as he walked. He ate cheese flies, tiny insects that hover around the tops of old cheese and that he used to gather up into packages and snack on as he brooded over his photographs. Then there was the small matter of the murder.

In 1874, just a year after one of his most important breakthroughs, when he was well into the work that would make him famous, Muybridge killed a man.”

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This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

January 26, 2013 in Misc. | Permalink

10 search-engine kepyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

  1. werner herzog cave of forgotten dreams dvd
  2. abrahma lincoln s son tad who died young
  3. pool legend willie mosconi
  4. eiffel tower vs ferris wheeel
  5. is drinking animal blood healthy?
  6. ray bradbury on the night of the apollo landing
  7. is it ethical to genetically engineer babies for designer purposes?
  8. walter cronkite interviewing anwar sadat at the pyramids
  9. how did dr james naismith invent basketball?
  10. oriana fallaci s meeting with muhammad ali

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

January 25, 2013 in Misc. | Permalink

Afflictor: Thinking that Lance Armstrong is no longer getting the same quality of groupies.

Afflictor: Thinking Lance Armstrong isn’t likely attracting the same level of groupies anymore.

  • Edge thinkers try to pinpoint what we should fear about the future.

“Ida Wood Never Had Any Intention Of Renewing Contact With The Outside World”

January 25, 2013 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of a great long blog post by Karen Abbott at the Smithsonian about a pair of reclusive sisters who disappeared themselves in a Manhattan hotel room until death’s hand forced the door open:

Ida Wood never had any intention of renewing contact with the outside world, but on March 5, 1931, death made it necessary. At four o’clock that afternoon, the 93-year-old did something she hadn’t done in 24 years of living at the Herald Square Hotel: she voluntarily opened the door, craned her neck down the corridor, and called for help.

“Maid, come here!” she shouted. “My sister is sick. Get a doctor. I think she’s going to die.”

Over the next 24 hours various people filtered in and out of room 552: the hotel manager, the house physician of the nearby Hotel McAlpin and an undertaker, who summoned two lawyers from the venerable firm of O’Brien, Boardman, Conboy, Memhard & Early. The body of Ida’s sister, Miss Mary E. Mayfield, lay on the couch in the parlor, covered with a sheet. The room was crammed with piles of yellowed newspapers, cracker boxes, balls of used string, stacks of old wrapping paper and several large trunks. One of the lawyers, Morgan O’Brien Jr., began questioning hotel employees, trying to assemble the puzzle of this strange and disheveled life.

The manager said he had worked at the hotel for seven years and had never seen Ida Wood or her deceased sister. His records indicated that they had moved into the two-room suite in 1907, along with Ida’s daughter, Miss Emma Wood, who died in a hospital in 1928 at the age of 71. They always paid their bills in cash. The fifth-floor maid said she hadn’t gotten into the sisters’ suite at all, and only twice had persuaded the women to hand over soiled sheets and towels and accept clean ones through a crack in the door. A bellhop said that for many years it had been his habit to knock on the door once a day and ask the ladies if they wanted anything. They requested the same items every time: evaporated milk, crackers, coffee, bacon and eggs—which were cooked in a makeshift kitchenette in the bathroom—and occasionally fish, which they ate raw. Ida always tipped ten cents, telling him that money was the last she had in the world. From time to time they also requested Copenhagen snuff, Havana cigars and jars of petroleum jelly, which Ida massaged onto her face for several hours each day. She was five feet tall and 70 pounds, nearly deaf and stooped like a question mark, but her face still bore clear evidence of its former beauty. “You could see what an extraordinarily pretty woman she once was,” O’Brien noted. “Her complexion, in spite of her age, was as creamy and pink and unwrinkled as any I have ever seen. It was like tinted ivory. Her profile was like a lovely cameo.” She hadn’t had a bath in years.•

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A Brief Note From 1858 About A Boating Trip

January 25, 2013 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the June 12, 1858 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Ebenezer Jones, cashier of the Boston and Worcester Railroad, died last Friday, on a yacht excursion, from the effect of taking a dose of chloroform to cure sea sickness. When his body came to be removed from the vault to the grave, in Charleston, the coffin was opened, and the corpse presented a singularly florid and life-like appearance. This fact gave rise to the rumors that he had been buried alive. The doctors on Monday pronounced the body lifeless. Tuesday the report was spread that the dead man was resuscitated by the electricity attending a violent thunder storm, and hundreds besieged the house to get a sight of the body. The body was again carefully examined by physicians and declared lifeless, though still presenting the same life-like appearance. What adds interest to the occurrence is, that Mr. Jones, while living, had several times gone into the trance state and exhibited singular phenomena. The remains were to be reconveyed to their resting place yesterday.”

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“I’m Outraged By The FBI, The CIA And Computers That Seem To Have Cataloged Our Lives”

January 25, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Videos | Permalink

Bill Boggs interviewing legendary thriller writer Robert Ludlum, who hasn’t let his 2001 death slow “his” writing output. No year specified, but it was likely 1982. Video less than stellar.

The opening of a 1977 People article about Ludlum: “‘I start every book with something that outrages me,’ says novelist Robert Ludlum. ‘I’m outraged by the FBI, the CIA and computers that seem to have catalogued our lives. Power too often is accompanied by irresponsibility.’

Ludlum, a former actor and producer, has managed to turn his fury into six best-selling thrillers since 1969. To date his books have sold over 10 million copies in 22 countries. ‘sit in total awe,’ he says. ‘I don’t understand it. I’m just grateful.’

His current hit, The Chancellor Manuscript, which fictionalizes the death of J. Edgar Hoover as part of a conspiracy, is in its fourth printing. The Gemini Contenders (twin brothers search for a religious document that would alter Christianity) is a paperback best-seller, and The Rhinemann Exchange (covert trade of diamonds for gyroscopes between the U.S. and Nazi Germany during WW II) reappeared on the paperback list after an NBC-TV miniseries in March.

Ludlum readers often take his fictionalized version of history seriously. ‘They all have a conspiracy they want to talk about,’ he says. ‘Unfortunately, they want to talk at 3 a.m.’ The Ludlums now have an unlisted phone in their Leonia, N.J. home.

He also has a special following within the intelligence community—and some private complaints from one federal agency he won’t identify. “They have said, in effect: ‘We’re very displeased with you. Your nonsense is becoming offensive.’ My answer is: ‘Dreadfully sorry, old chap. I’m just a storyteller.’ But his fiction has come very close to truth. The Osterman Weekend, for example, about domestic CIA operations, was published two and a half years before the agency’s illegal wiretaps were exposed.”

 

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“There Will Be New Celebrities, Thousands Of Them”

January 24, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The excellent Paleofuture blog at the Smithsonian found a 1997 article in which Garrison Keillor made predictions about the future of different aspects of American life, including the media. Here’s a couple of passages: the first accurately predicts the rise of reality TV while the second wrongly believed that people would mourn the demise of newspapers:

1.

“People will feel nostalgia for celebrities, real ones, like there used to be back when there were three TV networks and Americans watched the same shows at the same time and talked about them the next day at work. Television was common currency. Sunday afternoons you watched the NFL game with your dad on the couch and then you went to the table and ate pot roast and mashed potatoes. Everybody else did the same thing.

Every American knew Sinatra by sight and by voice, but when you scattered the audience among 200 cable-TV channels and 1,000 movies you could watch on the Internet and 10,000 CDs you could down-load, there weren’t many true celebrities anymore. People will miss them.

There will be new celebrities, thousands of them, but not many people will know who they are.”

2.

“People are not going to dress up as us or stage re-enactments of our wars or collect our cellular phones, our books on healing and empowerment, our CDs of Old Age music, our pepper grinders, our billions of T-shirts. They will resent what we did to the country, and we will go down in their history as the age of effluvia, with the simple moral: If you love trash too much, you will make yourself stupid.

By ‘trash’ I don’t mean a publication such as The New York Times. People are going to miss it a lot – they’ll think: What a wonderful thing a newspaper was! You opened it and there it was, you didn’t have to wait three minutes for the art to download, and when your wife said, ‘Give me a section,’ you did.”

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“Haggis Held On Through Every Moment Of Doubt And Twist In The Story”

January 24, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

There’s always this odd little question mark attached to Michael Kinsley’s distinguished journalism career because of the cloudy circumstances of how he came to miss out on the New Yorker editor slot that subsequently went to David Remnick, but I always stop and read anything attached to his byline. You’ve probably already read his New York Times Book Review piece about Lawrence Wright’s just-released Scientology exposé, Going Clear, but in case you missed it here’s a segment that takes aim at the long-delayed apostasy of filmmaker Paul Haggis, whom Kinsley doesn’t completely absolve:

“The fish that got away, Scientologists believed, was Steven Spielberg. He told Haggis that Scientologists ‘seem like the nicest people,’ and Haggis responded that ‘we keep all the evil ones in the closet,’ which was close enough to being true that Haggis was in hot water with the Scientology powers-that-be. But he didn’t quit.

Haggis joined Scientology in 1975, when he was 21. Wright assures us that Haggis ‘never lost his skepticism,’ but he must have misplaced it for a few decades. He remained a member and rose to be a top thetan among Scientologists through the death of L. Ron Hubbard and the rise of his successor, David Miscavige, who has often been described as sadistic. Then he read on the Internet about children ’10, 12 years old, signing billion-year contracts, . . . and they work morning, noon and night. . . . Scrubbing pots, manual labor — that so deeply touched me. My God, it horrified me.’ Still, he didn’t quit. Once again like American Communists on the eve of World War II, a few ‘useful idiots’ like Haggis held on through every moment of doubt and twist in the story. What finally pushed him over the edge, away from Scientology and out into the real world, was the church’s refusal to endorse gay marriage. Now, I’m for gay marriage. And Haggis has two gay daughters, so it’s understandable that he should feel particularly strongly about this issue. But some perspective, please: it’s like hanging on through the Moscow trials and then quitting the Communist Party because it won’t endorse . . . oh, I dunno — well, gay marriage.”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

January 24, 2013 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

"Wizard piss."

“Wizard piss.”

looking for a way to hallucinate

Looking for wizard piss or boomers or any natural way of hallucinating, contact me if you can.

“Here In Oxford, We Have Citizen Who Refers To Himself A Farmer–A Farmer Who Also Writes”

January 24, 2013 in Books, Videos | Permalink

I have read William Faulkner’s ridiculous reportage about ice hockey and I know that he worked in a brothel and as a bootlegger, but I don’t think I’ve watched footage of him until seeing this dreamlike 1952 film. (Thanks Biblioklept.)

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1 Thing About The Beyoncé Non-Story

January 24, 2013 in Politics | Permalink

Paul Ryan: Creepy little poltergeist.

I haven’t counted all the newsprint (real and virtual) nor added the TV minutes, but I would be willing to bet that the amount of time news organizations spent on the Beyoncé lip-sync “controversy” far exceeds the attention given to Paul Ryan and other members of Congress who voted against the initial $9 billion relief package for victims of Hurricane Sandy. Having just spent time visiting a relative in a hospital in an area that was heavily impacted by the natural disaster, I can tell you that the ER is overrun. I assumed it was due to the flu outbreak, but one hospital personnel member after another told me the heavier-than-usual demand for beds was due to an assortment of health issues. In the wake of the storm, it’s harder for people, especially children and seniors, to remain healthy. And the mold that has been growing inside abandoned houses can’t be good for anyone. People can die. They do die.

These communities needed help immediately. But the faux athlete, faux economist, faux policy wonk Ryan felt, as usual, that his half-witted ideology needed to come before those who were suffering. And don’t get me started on that owl-headed freak Rand Paul. More than anything, both of these little boys–and they don’t qualify as adults to me–need to live on the streets for awhile and see what life is really like.

Beyonce: Sounded good to me.

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“It’s Much Easier To Judge Other People…We Know Very Little About Ourselves”

January 23, 2013 in Film, Videos | Permalink

I’m sure I’ve posted clips from Andrei Tarkovsky: A Poet in the Cinema before, but here’s the whole 1983 documentary.

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“We Can Clone All Kinds Of Mammals, So It’s Very Likely That We Could Clone A Human”

January 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From a really good recent Spiegel interview with synthetic biology pioneer George Church, a passage about cloning Neanderthals, which would allow us to finally end our shortage of stupid people:

“Spiegel:

Mr. Church, you predict that it will soon be possible to clone Neanderthals. What do you mean by ‘soon’? Will you witness the birth of a Neanderthal baby in your lifetime?

George Church:

That depends on a hell of a lot of things, but I think so. The reason I would consider it a possibility is that a bunch of technologies are developing faster than ever before. In particular, reading and writing DNA is now about a million times faster than seven or eight years ago. Another technology that the de-extinction of a Neanderthal would require is human cloning. We can clone all kinds of mammals, so it’s very likely that we could clone a human. Why shouldn’t we be able to do so?

Spiegel:

Perhaps because it is banned?

George Church:

That may be true in Germany, but it’s not banned all over the world. And laws can change, by the way.

Spiegel:

Would cloning a Neanderthal be a desirable thing to do?

George Church:

Well, that’s another thing. I tend to decide on what is desirable based on societal consensus. My role is to determine what’s technologically feasible. All I can do is reduce the risk and increase the benefits.”

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“The Library Of Congress Is Now Stockpiling The Entire Twitterverse”

January 23, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Kim Kardashian Kim Kardashian‏@KimsThoughts_

Do ants have dicks?

______________________

From James Gleick’s New York Review of Books article about the Library of Congress collecting the whole of Twitter, no matter how stupid the tweets, a historical antecedent for such a massive information-collecting undertaking:

“For a brief time in the 1850s the telegraph companies of England and the United States thought that they could (and should) preserve every message that passed through their wires. Millions of telegrams—in fireproof safes. Imagine the possibilities for history!

‘Fancy some future Macaulay rummaging among such a store, and painting therefrom the salient features of the social and commercial life of England in the nineteenth century,’wrote Andrew Wynter in 1854. (Wynter was what we would now call a popular-science writer; in his day job he practiced medicine, specializing in ‘lunatics.’) ‘What might not be gathered some day in the twenty-first century from a record of the correspondence of an entire people?’

Remind you of anything?

Here in the twenty-first century, the Library of Congress is now stockpiling the entire Twitterverse, or Tweetosphere, or whatever we’ll end up calling it—anyway, the corpus of all public tweets. There are a lot.”

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“Why Shouldn’t The Future Be Brighter Than Today”

January 23, 2013 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

Deep Space Industries plans to mine asteroids and other far-flung objects.

“If Aliens Came Here And Were Determined To Treat Us The Way That Vegan Humans Treat Animals, We’d Still Be In Serious Trouble”

January 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Nature is a necessary evil, so I try to do my part: I’m a vegetarian bordering on vegan. But I use a cell phone and do you know how many birds are killed each year by cell towers? Animals are also done in by radio towers and logging and commercial development, and I enjoy products that those industries create. Essentially, for anyone who really cares about animals being treated ethically, diet isn’t enough. So asserts Rhys Southan in his new Aeon essay, “The Vegans Have Landed.” An excerpt about the speculative scenario in which a superior alien race that takes over Earth happens to be vegan–and still ruins us:

“My objection to the alien invasion scenario is more sweeping. If we want to take the interests of animals seriously, then the biggest failure of the analogy is that it underestimates just how malign we are. Sure, if we were replaced as the dominant animals on the planet, we’d probably prefer the new ruling species to be vegan. But if aliens with superior technology and minds came here and were determined to treat us the way that vegan humans treat animals on this planet, we’d still be in serious trouble. Veganism would hardly figure as a safeguard of our wellbeing.

Universal veganism wouldn’t stop the road-building, logging, urban and suburban development, pollution, resource consumption, and other forms of land transformation that kills animals by the billions. So what does veganism do exactly? Theoretically, it ends the raising, capture and exploitation of living animals, and it stops a particular kind of killing that many vegans claim is the worst and least excusable: the intentional killing of animals in order to use their bodies as material goods.

Veganism, as a whole, requires us to stop using animals for entertainment, food, pharmaceutical testing, and clothing. If it were to become universal, factory farming and animal testing would end, which would be excellent news for all the animals that we capture or raise for these purposes. But it would accomplish next to nothing for free-roaming wild animals except to stop hunting, which is the least of their problems.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature in Switzerland, the world’s first global environmental organisation, says:

Analyses of the data on threats to bird, mammal and amphibian species… show that the most pervasive threat that they face is habitat destruction and degradation driven by agricultural and forestry activities.”

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“It Sounded Like Boris Karloff Welcoming Us To His Castle”

January 22, 2013 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

In 1979, a year after the People’s Temple, the American cult that relocated to Guyana, was torn asunder by homicide and mass suicide, People reexamined the jaw-dropping descent of Rev. Jim Jones, a charismatic, paranoid man who could not hide his haunting eyes behind even the darkest glasses, and his disciples. From “The Legacy of Jonestown,” a passage about a couple who escaped the self-imposed slaughter:

With uncanny timing, Richard Clark launched his long-planned escape from Jonestown on the morning of the massacre. “I can’t say I’m psychic, but I can always feel danger,” says Clark, 43, now a presser for a San Francisco dry cleaner. Quietly he told his companion, Diane Louie, that ‘something definite is going to happen, and I want to be out of here when it does.’ Diane passed the word to seven others. Hacking through the jungle with a machete, the little group—including four children—found the path to the railroad. Then, by foot and train, they made their way to Matthew’s Ridge some 30 miles away. That was where they learned of the tragedy they had so narrowly escaped. 

Before they came to Guyana, Clark and Louie had envisioned Jonestown as a tropical paradise. Their disillusionment began during the 24-hour boat trip from Georgetown to the Peoples Temple community in May 1978. Hot and overcrowded, the fishing boat was crawling with “huge roaches with eyes as big as mine,” Clark remembers. Adds Louie, 26: “It was the first time I had an idea of what a slave ship must have been like.” Both were chilled to hear Jones’ voice greeting them on the loudspeaker when they arrived. “It sounded like Boris Karloff welcoming us to his castle,” Clark recalls. “There was no longer the love.”

Even today Clark, who joined the Temple in San Francisco in 1972 and left his wife at the leader’s order, believes Jones had supernatural healing and mind-reading powers. But the grim reality of Jonestown shook his faith. “You could see people starving, hungry, sick,” he says. “But they couldn’t face the fact that Jones was doing it.” Soon after his arrival, Clark began to plan his departure. To shield himself from Jones’ propaganda, he took a job on the pig farm, out of earshot of the maniacal broadcasts—then volunteered to clear the jungle so he could hunt for escape routes. And he prepared himself mentally. “I began to program myself to hate Jones,’ he says, ‘because this was the only way that you could fight him.”

Still together, Clark and Louie are troubled by memories of lost friends. Clark also grieves for two stepchildren who refused to accompany him and died in Jonestown. Although the couple and other survivors entered group therapy back in the U.S., they soon gave it up. “The tape-recorded sessions reminded me of the Peoples Temple,’ Louie says. ‘I got more help and sympathy talking to my family and friends.” She is once again working as a surgical technician, but failed in an attempt to study nursing. ‘I couldn’t concentrate,” she says. Clark is bothered by high blood pressure and bad dreams. “I feel like I’m getting better,” he says. “But I don’t think anyone who’s been in a concentration camp will ever get over it.”•

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