Old Print Article: “Greatest Of Piemakers,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1901)

October 21, 2012 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

“He thinks he has eaten about 43,800 pies since his marriage.”

Farmer John Walters of Pennsylvania was fond of pie–really, really fond of pie. A story of his dietary exploits from the March 11, 1901 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“During the year just closed, Mrs. John Walters of Point Township, Pa., has made 8,303 pies and her husband records the fact with evident pride. Mr. Walters, the story goes, was a lover of pie before he met his wife-to-be. Mrs. Walters tells, nowadays, that one of the stipulations of the marriage contract was that she should have pies on the table every day till death did part her and her husband.The youthful bride, at the start, baked many pies such as Mr. Walters’ mother had never made. But she improved.

Farmer Walters came down the valley on the day the 8,303rd pie was baked to spread the news. He is a tall fellow, with the appearance of a champion pie eater. One of his seven lanky sons, each of whom inherits his love for crisp pastry, accompanied him, to bear witness to the truth of his father’s statements. Inquiry as to who ate all the pies was natural.

‘Who ate the pies?’ Walters repeated after his questioner. ‘Why, we home folks, of course. I’m good for three a day, and I hope I haven’t raised a son who can’t do as well as the old man. Then I have a hired man who, I’m sorry to say, can beat even me. Why, that fellow will eat six pies a day and get on ’em. Never had a hired man about the place who couldn’t eat pies. The last man I had said he had stomach trouble and wouldn’t touch the nicest tart Mary could bake. He disappeared one night with my best colt and I haven’t seen him since.’

“I have known the hired man to make a pig of himself.”

Farmer Walters took a day off recently to figure up some statistics of his wife’s pie baking. ‘July, with 809 pies, was the prize pie month. That was during harvest. I won’t have a harvester unless he eats pies. Never saw a good worker that didn’t like ’em. Figuring that Mary’s pies are a foot across, and putting them all in a string, they would reach a mile and a half. Putting them one on top of the other they would be higher than the Eiffel Tower. Putting them a step apart they would reach 4.7 miles, and a man can tramp on a pie every step. 

‘Who bakes the pies? My wife of course. She wouldn’t let anybody try her hand at such an important job. She bakes ’em in a big oven in the garden, where they get the flavor of the hickory bark. Nothing like hickory bark to make a pie taste right.

‘Every day she baked twenty pies. She says that is enough for any family. Of course, Saturdays and days when we have visitors she doubles up. On days like that I have known the hired man to make a pig of himself. That fellow will eat two pies more than he ought to when he has ’em to work on.’

Farmer Walters is 65 years old. Figuring on three pies a day he thinks he has eaten about 43,800 pies since his marriage.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘that may be a leetle high or a leetle low. Mary and I never kept any account of the number we ate since she said ‘yes.'”

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This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

October 20, 2012 in Misc. | Permalink


Some search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

October 20, 2012 in Misc. | Permalink

Afflictor: Thinking that the 2012 Halloween costume that is scarier than a zombie…

…or even a zombie cannibal…

…is this.

  • Freeman Dyson explains the uncertainty of science in the Digital Age.

“I Assume We All Believe That Bats Have Experience”

October 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Each human being lives in a unique world, but at least there are enough similarities to attempt to understand someone else’s consciousness. Not so with different creatures. From Thomas Nagel’s 1974 paper, “What Is It Like To Be A Bat?“:

“I assume we all believe that bats have experience. After all, they are mammals, and there is no more doubt that they have experience than that mice or pigeons or whales have experience. I have chosen bats instead of wasps or flounders because if one travels too far down the phylogenetic tree, people gradually shed their faith that there is experience there at all. Bats, although more closely related to us than those other species, nevertheless present a range of activity and a sensory apparatus so different from ours that the problem I want to pose is exceptionally vivid (though it certainly could be raised with other species). Even without the benefit of philosophical reflection, anyone who has spent some time in an enclosed space with an excited bat knows what it is to encounter a fundamentally alien form of life.

I have said that the essence of the belief that bats have experience is that there is something that it is like to be a bat. Now we know that most bats (the microchiroptera, to be precise) perceive the external world primarily by sonar, or echolocation, detecting the reflections, from objects within range, of their own rapid, subtly modulated, high-frequency shrieks. Their brains are designed to correlate the outgoing impulses with the subsequent echoes, and the information thus acquired enables bats to make precise discriminations of distance, size, shape, motion, and texture comparable to those we make by vision. But bat sonar, though clearly a form of perception, is not similar in its operation to any sense that we possess, and there is no reason to suppose that it is subjectively like anything we can experience or imagine. This appears to create difficulties for the notion of what it is like to be a bat. We must consider whether any method will permit us to extrapolate to the inner life of the bat from our own case,5 and if not, what alternative methods there may be for understanding the notion.

Our own experience provides the basic material for our imagination, whose range is therefore limited. It will not help to try to imagine that one has webbing on one’s arms, which enables one to fly around at dusk and dawn catching insects in one’s mouth; that one has very poor vision, and perceives the surrounding world by a system of reflected high-frequency sound signals; and that one spends the day hanging upside down by one’s feet in an attic. In so far as I can imagine this (which is not very far), it tells me only what it would be like for me to behave as a bat behaves. But that is not the question. I want to know what it is like for a bat to be a bat. Yet if I try to imagine this, I am restricted to the resources of my own mind, and those resources are inadequate to the task. I cannot perform it either by imagining additions to my present experience, or by imagining segments gradually subtracted from it, or by imagining some combination of additions, subtractions, and modifications.

To the extent that I could look and behave like a wasp or a bat without changing my fundamental structure, my experiences would not be anything like the experiences of those animals. On the other hand, it is doubtful that any meaning can be attached to the supposition that I should possess the internal neurophysiological constitution of a bat. Even if I could by gradual degrees be transformed into a bat, nothing in my present constitution enables me to imagine what the experiences of such a future stage of myself thus metamorphosed would  be like. The best evidence would come from the experiences of bats, if we only knew what they were like.”

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Some Thoughts About The Baseball Playoffs

October 19, 2012 in Sports | Permalink

  • It’s amazing that people can do something really well for a long time, but learn nothing about that thing they’re doing. If you watch baseball at all, especially the big stage of the playoffs, you realize that managers, all of whom have played the game and been around it for decades, know very little about strategy. How is that possible? Even someone intelligent like Joe Girardi, who was a catcher and holds a graduate degree from Northwestern, makes one suspect decision after another. I know that a good carpenter isn’t necessarily a good architect, but it’s still kind of stunning. The Baltimore Orioles weren’t a surprise success this year only because Buck Showalter is the rare gifted strategist in the dugout, but it certainly was an advantage.
  • Many fans and many sportswriters are worse, even some who are otherwise intelligent people. I’ve heard countless in both camps constantly knock advanced baseball statistics supporting Mike Trout over Miguel Cabrera for American League MVP. But it doesn’t take a degree in math to know that Trout is the MVP nor to knock down the ridiculous arguments against him. But the stubborn streak of ignorance around sports persists regardless.
  • I think most people understand this, but one last time: Ticket prices aren’t high because player salaries are high. Player salaries don’t dictate ticket prices; ticket prices dictate player salaries. Team owners charge whatever they believe the market will bear (sometimes they’re wrong), and they would charge the same amount even if players were making tiny salaries. Because baseball players have the strongest union in the country, they share in the profits. The free-market system is also for workers, not just owners.

“Men Have Begun To Go Beneath The Sea To Dwell”

October 19, 2012 in Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

I posted a video of SEALAB I. Here’s one from 1966 of SEALAB II, in which ten aquanauts lived in an underwater habitat. One of them was Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter.

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“If You Fix Cities, You Kind Of Fix The World”

October 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Las Vegas, 1895.

There’s a smart article in this week’s New York Times Magazine by Timothy Pratt about Zappos founder Tony Hsieh hoping to remake urban living in the desolate downtown of Las Vegas. It certainly won’t be a quick fix, but will it be quixotic? An excerpt:

“The Downtown Project got its unofficial start several years ago when Hsieh realized that Zappos, the online shoe-and-apparel company that he built to $1 billion in annual sales in less than a decade, would soon outgrow its offices in nearby Henderson, Nev. Though Amazon bought Zappos in 2009 for $1.2 billion, Hsieh still runs the company, and he has endeavored to keep alive its zany corporate culture. This includes a workplace where everyone sits in the same open space and employees switch desks every few months in order to get to know one another better. ‘I first thought I would buy a piece of land and build our own Disneyland,’ he told the group. But he worried that the company would be too cut off from the outside world and ultimately decided ‘it was better to interact with the community.’

Around the same time, the Las Vegas city government was also about to move, and Hsieh saw his opportunity. He leased the former City Hall — smack in the middle of downtown Vegas — for 15 years. Then he got to thinking: If he was going to move at least 1,200 employees, why not make it possible for them to live nearby? And if they could live nearby, why not create an urban community aligned with the culture of Zappos, which encourages the kind of ‘serendipitous interactions’ that happen in offices without walls? As Zach Ware, Hsieh’s right-hand man in the move, put it, ‘We wanted the new campus to benefit from interaction with downtown, and downtown to benefit from interaction with Zappos.’ The only hitch was that it would require transforming the derelict core of a major city.

For Hsieh, though, this was part of the appeal. Transforming downtown Vegas would ‘ultimately help us attract and retain more employees for Zappos.’ For the city itself, it would ‘help revitalize the economy.’ More important, it would ‘inspire,’ a word Hsieh uses often. Hsieh closed his presentation at the faux log cabin high above the desert with the sort of fact he seems to always have on hand: up to 75 percent of the world’s population will call cities home in our lifetime. ‘So,’ he concluded, ‘if you fix cities, you kind of fix the world.'”

Las Vegas, 1941.

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A Note From 1891 About A Hypnotized Husband

October 19, 2012 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the January 25, 1891 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Pittsburgh, Pa.–The shooting of Mrs. W. J. Faulk by her husband yesterday, in a fit of religious enthusiasm, has resulted in a warrant being issued for one George Knauff, as an accessory before the fact. Faulk declares his religious insanity was inspired by the hypnotic influence of Knauff, who claimed to be another Messiah and ordered him to kill his wife. This Faulk did, and officers are now hunting Knauff, who has disappeared.”

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“In Fact, Science Is Not A Collection Of Truths”

October 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Freeman Dyson’s 2011 New York Review of Books piece about James Gleick’s The Information, a passage about the uncertain nature of science and knowledge in the Digital Age, the “noisiest” epoch in humankind:

“The information flood has also brought enormous benefits to science. The public has a distorted view of science, because children are taught in school that science is a collection of firmly established truths. In fact, science is not a collection of truths. It is a continuing exploration of mysteries. Wherever we go exploring in the world around us, we find mysteries. Our planet is covered by continents and oceans whose origin we cannot explain. Our atmosphere is constantly stirred by poorly understood disturbances that we call weather and climate. The visible matter in the universe is outweighed by a much larger quantity of dark invisible matter that we do not understand at all. The origin of life is a total mystery, and so is the existence of human consciousness. We have no clear idea how the electrical discharges occurring in nerve cells in our brains are connected with our feelings and desires and actions.

Even physics, the most exact and most firmly established branch of science, is still full of mysteries. We do not know how much of [Claude] Shannon’s theory of information will remain valid when quantum devices replace classical electric circuits as the carriers of information. Quantum devices may be made of single atoms or microscopic magnetic circuits. All that we know for sure is that they can theoretically do certain jobs that are beyond the reach of classical devices. Quantum computing is still an unexplored mystery on the frontier of information theory. Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude of voices. It resembles Wikipedia much more than it resembles the Encyclopaedia Britannica.”

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“Rather Than Write, I Will Ride Buses, Study The Insides Of Jails, And See What Goes On”

October 19, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

From “The Social History of the Hippies,” Warren Hinckle’s 1967 Ramparts article about those who tuned in, turned on and dropped out, a segment on writer Ken Kesey after his fall from grace with the younger longhhairs: 

“HERE WASN’T MUCH DOING on late afternoon television, and the Merry Pranksters were a little restless. A few were turning on; one Prankster amused himself squirting his friends with a yellow plastic watergun; another staggered into the living room, exhausted from peddling a bicycle in ever-diminishing circles in the middle of the street. They were all waiting, quite patiently, for dinner, which the Chief was whipping up himself. It was a curry, the recipe of no doubt cabalistic origin. Kesey evidently took his cooking seriously, because he stood guard by the pot for an hour and a half, stirring, concentrating on the little clock on the stove that didn’t work.

There you have a slice of domestic life, February 1967, from the swish Marin County home of Attorney Brian Rohan. As might be surmised, Rohan is Kesey’s attorney, and the novelist and his aides de camp had parked their bus outside for the duration. The duration might last a long time, because Kesey has dropped out of the hippie scene. Some might say that he was pushed, because he fell, very hard, from favor among the hippies last year when he announced that he, Kesey, personally, was going to help reform the psychedelic scene. This sudden social conscience may have had something to do with beating a jail sentence on a compounded marijuana charge, but
when Kesey obtained his freedom with instructions from the judge ‘to preach an anti-LSD warning to teenagers’ it was a little too much for the Haight-Ashbury set. Kesey, after all, was the man who had turned on the Hell’s Angels.

That was when the novelist was living in La Honda, a small community in the Skyline mountain range overgrown with trees and, after Kesey invited the Hell’s Angels to several house parties, overgrown with sheriff’s deputies. It was in this Sherwood Forest setting, after he had finished his second novel with LSD as his co-pilot, that Kesey inaugurated his band of Merry Pranksters
(they have an official seal from the State of California incorporating them as ‘Intrepid Trips, Inc.’), painted the school bus in glow sock colors, announced he would write no more (‘Rather than write, I will ride buses, study the insides of jails, and see what goes on’), and set up funtime housekeeping on a full-time basis with the Pranksters, his wife and their three small children (one confounding thing about Kesey is the amorphous quality of the personal relationships in his entourage—the several attractive women don’t seem, from the outside, to belong to any particular man; children are loved enough, but seem to be held in common).

When the Hell’s Angels rumbled by, Kesey welcomed them with LSD. ‘We’re in the same business. You break people’s bones, I break people’s heads,’ he told them. The Angels seem to like the whole acid thing, because today they are a fairly constant act in the Haight-Ashbury show, while Kesey has abdicated his role as Scoutmaster to fledgling acid heads and exiled himself across the Bay.

This self-imposed Elba came about when Kesey sensed that the hippie community had soured on him. He had committed the one mortal sin in the hippie ethic: telling people what to do. ‘Get into a responsibility bag,’ he urged some 400 friends attending a private Halloween party. Kesey hasn’t been seen much in the Haight-Ashbury since that night, and though the Diggers did succeed in getting him to attend the weekend discussion, it is doubtful they will succeed in getting the novelist involved in any serious effort to shape the Haight-Ashbury future. At 31, Ken Kesey is a hippie has-been.”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

October 18, 2012 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

“This could be great fun for kids.”

Wanted – Live stink bugs! – $10 (Hudson Valley)

I am looking for LIVE “Brown Marmorated Stink Bugs.” These insects can be nuisances this time of year as they move to homes, barns and other structures to find a place to overwinter. I need them, and you need them gone. Will pay $10 per hundred if you collect. Otherwise, will pay a token finders fee for access to a collectible population. Am looking for as many as three thousand. This could be great fun for kids. Thanks for your reply!

“Russia Actually Did Block Imports Of Monsanto Corn”

October 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Even if we were treating our environment well–and we’re not–eventually weather patterns will shift and the agrarian culture we’ve enjoyed will be imperiled. So it makes sense for humans to experiment with genetically modified foods. I know it seems intuitive that natural food is good and laboratory modifications are bad, but there is plenty of poison in nature. We should demand transparency from corporations involved with our food chain, but we should proceed. We need to have an honest discussion, not disinformation. Unfortunately, we’re often getting the latter. From Bjørn Lomborg at Slate:

“French researcher Gilles-Eric Séralini attempted to fuel public opposition to genetically modified foods byshowing the public how GM corn, with and without the pesticide Roundup, caused huge tumors and early death in 200 rats that had consumed it over two years.

Supplying an abundance of pictures of rats with tumors the size of ping-pong balls, Séralini certainly captured the public’s attention. France’s health, ecology, and agriculture ministers promised a prompt investigation and threatened to ban imports of Monsanto’s GM corn to the European Union. Russia actually did block imports of Monsanto corn. 

But Séralini’s research posed many problematic issues. For starters, the Sprague-Dawley strain of rats that he used is naturally prone to tumors. Studies of Sprague-Dawley rats show that 88 percent to 96 percent of those that serve as experimental controls develop tumors before they reach two years of age. But the public saw only pictures of tumorous rats that had consumed GM corn and Roundup. If the public had seen the similarly grotesque tumors that grow on untreated rats, officials most likely would not have acted so hastily.”

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“There Will Be DNA Life Forms There”

October 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Two teams hope to send DNA-sequencing machines to Mars to prove the Red Planet harbors life. One of the groups is led by Craig Venter, who believes in building better bugs. From Antonio Regalado at MIT Technology Review:

“Although neither team yet has a berth on Mars rocket, their plans reflect the belief that the simplest way to prove there is life on Mars is to send a DNA sequencing machine.

‘There will be DNA life forms there,’ Venter predicted Tuesday in New York, where he was speaking at the Wired Health Conference.

Venter said researchers working with him have already begun tests at a Mars-like site in the Mojave Desert. Their goal, he said, is to demonstrate a machine capable of autonomously isolating microbes from soil, sequencing their DNA, and then transmitting the information to a remote computer, as would be required on an unmanned Mars mission. Heather Kowalski, a spokeswoman for Venter, confirmed the existence of the project but said the prototype system was ‘not yet 100 percent robotic.'”

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“André Is Not Just The Dinner Guy”

October 18, 2012 in Film, Videos | Permalink

I didn’t know until now about filmmaker Cindy Kleine’s Kickstarter campaign to raise money for a documentary about her husband, André Gregory, but I’m glad she reached her goal. I’m a big fan of My Dinner with Andre, as you may have noticed here and here. I’m even a fan of My Breakfast with Blassie.

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“Modern Cars Have Shipped With Multiple Embedded Computers For Years”

October 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’ve mentioned before that automatic, driverless cars, for all the good they can bring, will become a magnet for hackers, even terrorists. But the future may have arrived before computers have become designated drivers. From Nathan Willis at LWN:

“There was no security track at the 2012 Automotive Linux Summit, but numerous sessions and the ‘hallway track’ featured anecdotes about the ease of compromising car computers. This is no surprise: as Linux makes inroads into automotive computing, the security question takes on an urgency not found on desktops and servers. Too often, though, Linux and open source software in general are perceived as insufficiently battle-hardened for the safety-critical needs of highway speed computing — reading the comments on an automotive Linux news story it is easy to find a skeptic scoffing that he or she would not trust Linux to manage the engine, brakes, or airbags. While hackers in other embedded Linux realms may understandably feel miffed at such a slight, the bigger problem is said skeptic’s presumption that a modern Linux-free car is a secure environment — which is demonstrably untrue.

First, there is a mistaken assumption that computing is not yet a pervasive part of modern automobiles. Likewise mistaken is the assumption that safety-critical systems (such as the aforementioned brakes, airbags, and engine) are properly isolated from low-security components (like the entertainment head unit) and are not vulnerable to attack. It is also incorrectly assumed that the low-security systems themselves do not harbor risks to drivers and passengers. In reality, modern cars have shipped with multiple embedded computers for years (many of which are mandatory by government order), presenting a large attack surface with numerous risks to personal safety, theft, eavesdropping, and other exploits. But rather than exacerbating this situation, Linux and open source adoption stand to improve it.”

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“He Has Adapted His Daily Life To Live Onboard An Airplane”

October 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A Pacific Northwest man has repurposed a decommissioned Boeing airplane into a home. From Inhabitat: “What looks like a jetliner that has miraculously landed in the woods is actually one man’s dream retreat! Inspired by his passion for the aircraft as well as the need for shelter, Oregonian Bruce Campbell converted a Boeing 727-200 into a home. Campbell is not looking to be in Better Homes and Gardens – instead of turning the airplane into a full-fledged house he has adapted his daily life to live onboard an airplane.”

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“Whenever It’s Hot, The Humans Actually Beat The Horses”

October 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Pushing the human body beyond what seems normal might not be healthy but it is fascinating, whether we’re talking about professional pedestrians in the nineteenth century or today’s ultramarathoners. Harvard evolutionary scientist Daniel Lieberman has an excellent post at Edge about the origins and development of endurance in humans. An excerpt: 

“We have this notion that humans are terrible natural athletes. But we’ve been looking at the wrong kind of athleticism. What we’re really good at is not power, what we’re really phenomenal at is endurance. We’re the tortoises of the animal world, not the hares of the animal world. Humans can actually outrun most animals over very, very long distances.

The marathon, of course, is a very interesting example. A lot of people think marathons are extraordinary, and they wonder how many people can run marathons. At least a million people run a marathon every year. If you watch any major marathon, you realize that most of those folks aren’t extraordinary athletes, they’re just average moms and dads. A lot of them are charity runners who decided to raise money for some cancer cause or diabetes or something. I think that proves that really your average human being can run 26.2 miles without that much training, or much ability to be a great athlete. Of course, to run a marathon at really fast speeds is remarkable, but again, it just takes some practice and training. It’s not something that’s really extraordinary.

We’re actually remarkable endurance athletes, and that endurance athleticism is deeply woven into our bodies, literally from our heads to our toes. We have adaptations in our feet and our legs and our hips and pelvises and our heads and our brains and our respiratory systems. We even have neurobiological adaptations that give us a runner’s high, all of which help make us extraordinary endurance athletes. We’ve lost sight at just how good we are at endurance athleticism, and that’s led to a perverse idea that humans really aren’t very good athletes.

A good example is that every year they have races where they actually compare humans and horses. In Wales, this started a few years ago, I guess it started out as a typical sort of drunken pub bet, where some guy bet that a human couldn’t beat a horse in a marathon. They’ve been running a marathon in Wales for the last, I think 15-20 years. To be fair, most years, the horses beat the humans, but the humans often come very close. Whenever it’s hot, the humans actually beat the horses. They also have now ultramarathons in Arizona, where humans race horses. Again, most years, the horses beat the humans, but every once in a while, the humans do beat the horses. The point is not that humans are poor athletes, because the horses occasionally beat us, but humans can actually compete with and often beat horses at endurance races. Most people are surprised at that.”

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Thoughts About Last Night’s Presidential Debate

October 17, 2012 in Politics, Videos | Permalink

  • I think you know how I feel about Presidential debates. They were very important in the 19th-century when there was no true mass media, and there needed to be an event which concentrated opinions, ideas and arguments. They were somewhat important for much of the 20th-century. But they’re just silly exercises at this point, speed-dating for Americans who lack focus and critical-thinking skills. These candidates have been on every screen in our lives for two election cycles. Three 90-minute shout-fests shouldn’t override what we’ve seen from them for six years.
  • Things obviously went much better for President Obama last night. He was forceful and lively, but Mitt Romney really made it easy for him. Too many rookie mistakes for someone making his final charge at the Oval Office.
  • Romney’s line during his closing statements about caring for 100% of the American people provided Obama with the exclamation point of the night. I would assume that Romney’s team decided to go with this line because they thought Obama would barrage him with “47%” references this time after failing to mention Romney’s gaffe at the first debate. But Obama again never raised the issue, so Romney should have pivoted away from any talk of percentages.
  • Rudeness and aggression throws Obama for a loop in public settings. Mitt Romney is likewise flustered when challenged on facts. He becomes inarticulate. How dare someone contradict the boss!
  • I guess it’s a sign of our polarized times, but not only do the two candidates apparently despise each other, but their families also seem to intensely dislike each other.
  • Undecided voters aren’t the first people to fold their umbrellas when the rain stops. Do not put them on TV after the debates.

••••••••••

Lincoln-Douglas debates, via SCTV:

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“It’s Not About Me — The Story Is The Fuel”

October 17, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Even many of those plastic bottles we dutifully place in recycling bins end up in the ocean, as barges accidentally drop tons and tons of the discards into the water. It’s obviously a threat to the food chain. The opening of Bettina Wassener’s New York Times story about a British company using diesel made from plastic to fuel a long plane trip:

“Sometime in the next few months, a single-engine Cessna will fly from Sydney to London. Converted to be able to carry extra amounts of fuel, the small plane will take 10 days for its journey, making 10 or so stops along the way.

What will make this journey special is not the route or the identity of the pilot — a 41-year-old British insurance industry executive who lives in Australia — but the fuel that the aircraft will be using: diesel processed from discarded plastic trash.

‘I’m not some larger-than-life character, I’m just a normal bloke,’ the pilot, Jeremy Rowsell, said by phone. ‘It’s not about me — the story is the fuel.’

The fuel in question will come from Cynar, a British company that has developed a technology that makes diesel out of so-called end-of-life plastics — material that cannot be reused and would otherwise end up in landfills.

Batches of the fuel will be prepositioned along the 17,000-kilometer, or 10,500-mile, route.

‘The idea is to fly the whole route on plastic fuel alone and to prove that this technology works,’ Mr. Rowsell said. ‘I’m a kind of carrier pigeon, carrying a message.'”

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“On Earth, The Past Is Even Quicker To Vanish”

October 17, 2012 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Dendrochronology, not to be confused with Dendrophilia, is the science of tree rings. The opening of Ross Andersen’s new Aeon piece on the topic of ring-related research, which compares the past century of fervent deforestation with the burning of another set of valuable leaves, the Library of Alexandria:

“No event, however momentous, leaves an everlasting imprint on the world. Take the cosmic background radiation, the faint electromagnetic afterglow of the Big Bang. It hangs, reassuringly, in every corner of our skies, the firmest evidence we have for the giant explosion that created our universe. But it won’t be there forever. In a trillion years’ time it is going to slip beyond what astronomers call the cosmic light horizon, the outer edge of the observable universe. The universe’s expansion will have stretched its wavelength so wide that it will be undetectable to any observer, anywhere. Time will have erased its own beginning.

On Earth, the past is even quicker to vanish. To study geology is to be astonished at how hastily time reorders our planet’s surface, filling its craters, smoothing its mountains and covering its continents in seawater. Life is often the fastest to disintegrate in this constant churn of water and rock. The speed of biological decomposition ensures that only the most geologically fortunate of organisms freeze into stone and become fossils. The rest dissolve into sediment, leaving the thinnest of molecular traces behind.

Part of what separates humans from nature is our striving to preserve the past, but we too have proved adept at its erasure. It was humans, after all, who set fire to the ancient Library of Alexandria, whose hundreds of thousands of scrolls contained a sizable fraction of classical learning. The loss of knowledge at Alexandria was said to be so profound that it set Western civilisation back 1,000 years. Indeed, some have described the library’s burning as an event horizon, a boundary in time across which information cannot flow.

The burning of books and libraries has perhaps fallen out of fashion, but if you look closely, you will find its spirit survives in another distinctly human activity, one as old as civilisation itself: the destruction of forests. Trees and forests are repositories of time; to destroy them is to destroy an irreplaceable record of the Earth’s past. Over this past century of unprecendented deforestation, a tiny cadre of scientists has roamed the world’s remaining woodlands, searching for trees with long memories, trees that promise science a new window into antiquity. To find a tree’s memories, you have to look past its leaves and even its bark; you have to go deep into its trunk, where the chronicles of its long life lie, secreted away like a library’s lost scrolls. This spring, I journeyed to the high, dry mountains of California to visit an ancient forest, a place as dense with history as Alexandria. A place where the heat of a dangerous fire is starting to rise.”

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“Further Evolution Of Themselves And Their Tools Will Be In Their Hands And Not Ours”

October 17, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From Robert L. Blum’s post at Kurzweil AI about extreme long-term planning for humanity–like a billion years or so–which he feels would be better accomplished by intelligent machines than people:

“Long-term, humanity (whether augmented, re-engineered, or uploaded) will be left in the dust by the machines, who will stand in relation to us as we to bacteria. OK, that has a heavy-metal Skynet ring to it, so let me replace it immediately by a term I’ve come to love (from David Grinspoon’s book Lonely Planets): the Immortals.

Who are the Immortals? Perhaps we know who we want them to be: wise, superintelligent, compassionate, and just. And powerful! More powerful than a light-speed rocket, able to leap into intergalactic space in a single bound, and imbued with truth, justice, and the Western democratic way!

Whatever we choose to call them, further evolution of themselves and their tools will be in their hands and not ours. While future advances will greatly benefit humans, humans will be replaced as the helmsmen of a space-faring civilization before the Singularity — probably by 2040 (Philip K. Dick nailed this prediction in Blade Runner).

The evolving prototypes that will eventually leap to the stars will be electronic — informed by human design and concerns, but not constrained by them. Their decisions and wisdom will encompass all that is on the Web and all that is perceived by the world’s sensors. With a solar system full of effectors they will accomplish engineering that we cannot imagine. That is how they will begin their evolution and their journey to the stars.

So let’s leave the really long term planning (post-Singularity) to the Immortals.

Sometime before the Cambrian era 500 million years ago, the first differentiated, multicellular creatures arose. As the reproductive unit changed from a single cell to a multicellular organism, the individual cells had surrendered their autonomy for a greater chance of survival.

I think about the coming superorganism as something that will (at least initially) encompass human beings and confer upon them greater survival and quality of life.”

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Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

October 17, 2012 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

“They in reality don’t want a man like me who is not just a good man but a great man.”

Done with women for good (Rutherford, NJ)

Well I think its time to give up on ever finding the right women for me. I have searched for the last 46 years and I’m done. Women claim that they want a good man who will treat them right, but in reality all they want is to rule over men as if they are god. They want to dress sexy, but think that they can tell you not to look at them because your too old, or too fat, or not rich enough, or whatever. They in reality don’t want a man like me who is not just a good man, but a great man. A gentleman, who is secure in who he is. Confident, sincere, and sensitive, who treats everyone with love and respect. I”m tired of trying to have companionship with undeserving women. I think it might be time to succumb to my loneliness, and let it take me. A life where all I do is work so that I can pay insurance, rent, etc. without anyone to spend it with, is no life at all. I think its time to say goodbye and wish for a quick death. I can’t take the loneliness anymore. I need to be told that someone loves me. I need some human contact, someone to give my love to. And all you women don’t want me. I’m by no means fat, or ugly, but you just don’t understand me, and never take the time to get to know the real me. I curse all the women of the world for throwing away a man who would have given his life to making theirs a better life. A man who would have done almost anything to make the one that he loves happy. Good bye cruel world.

“The World Has Gotten Used To The Idea That A Woman Is In Charge Of Israel’s Affairs”

October 17, 2012 in Politics, Videos | Permalink

Edwin Newman conducts a Q&A with Golda Meir in 1973. The first question springs from the deadly terrorism at the Munich Olympics the prior year.

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“At 66, John Cheever Is A Resurrected Man”

October 16, 2012 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

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From a 1979 People article about the late-life John Cheever, who was every bit as gifted at the short-story form as F. Scott Fitzgerald or Flannery O’Connor or Paul Bowles or any American writer:

Instead of whiskey, the traditional tonic of his profession, the tumbler in Cheever’s hand contains dark tea nowadays, and he distastefully yet methodically counts leftover cigarette butts in his ashtray, a requirement of Smokenders. Cheever joined because “there is something humiliating about getting off the plane in a place like Sofia and thinking, ‘Oh, my God, are they going to have my brand?'” Once tormented by phobias, Cheever required a slug of Scotch from the bottle in the glove compartment before he dared drive across a bridge. He was the despair of his publishers’ PR men, an author who disappeared for six weeks after the publication of a book and refused interviews upon returning. When his first novel was finished, he fled to Rome for a full year. Today such quirks have vanished. At 66, John Cheever is a resurrected man.

“Five years ago I was washing down Thorazine with Scotch,” he says candidly. “I felt suicidal; my life and my career were over. I wanted to end it.” Always a hard drinker, Cheever sank into alcoholism after a near-fatal heart attack in 1972. He swore off temporarily but relapsed while teaching at Boston University. Novelist John Updike, an old friend, saw him at his alcoholic nadir and sadly remarked, ‘I keep thinking the John Cheever I know is in there someplace.’ Finally, with the support of his family, Cheever faced the facts of his behavior (“such a loss of dignity”) and agreed to enter Smithers, an exclusive Manhattan clinic for alcoholism. “If you can have it cured,” he says, five years later, “I am cured.” When released after 32 days, he promptly sat down and, in less than a year, wrote his much-acclaimed fourth novel, Falconer, a gothic tale of life in a prison very much like Sing Sing. Cheever knew his subject well: He once taught a writing course to the convicts.

“I don’t know where the blackness in my life comes from,” Cheever says. “There is a great deal of sadness, of melancholy. I have no idea where it originates.” Part of it may stem from Cheever’s seafaring Yankee ancestry, and his grandfather, who, Cheever was told, committed suicide. John was born in Quincy, Mass., the son of a businessman bankrupted by the crash of ’29. His father was often away, and he and his older brother, Fred (also an alcoholic, who died in 1976), were raised by their English mother. She supported the family with a small gift shop, a source of embarrassment to Cheever. He was close to his maternal grandmother “partly because she called my mother a cretin, which is an easy way to endear yourself to a child” and remembers that she insisted French be spoken at meals. “I don’t recall her French was all that good.”•

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Cheever’s cameo in the big-screen adaptation of “The Swimmer”:

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A Note From 1893 About A Homicidal Man’s Cure

October 16, 2012 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the December 24 1893 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“A patient in a Glasgow hospital had received an injury which resulted in melancholia. Though formerly a happy husband and father, he now repeatedly contemplated the murder of his wife and children. There were no phenomena connected in any part of the body by which the injury could be located; but it was discovered by careful close investigation that immediately after the accident for two weeks he had suffered from what is called psychical blindness or mind blindness; that is to say, his physical sight was not at all affected, but his mind was not able to interpret what he saw. That gave Dr. MacEwen the key to the injury. He located on the outside of the skull this convolution known as the angular gyrus, and found, on removing a button of the bone, that a portion of the inner layer of the bone had become detached and was pressing on the brain, one corner of it being embedded in the brain substance. The button of the bone was removed from the brain, and, after removing the splinter, was replaced in its proper position. The man got well, and, though still excitable, lost entirely his homicidal tendencies.”

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