“I Would Like To Die On Mars”

September 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Ashlee Vance’s well-rounded Businessweek portrait of Elon Musk, a brilliant and difficult man who is currently the most ambitious industrialist in the world:

“On the assumption that people will be living on earth for some time, Musk is cooking up plans for something he calls the Hyperloop. He won’t share specifics but says it’s some sort of tube capable of taking someone from downtown San Francisco to Los Angeles in 30 minutes. He calls it a ‘fifth mode of transportation’—the previous four being train, plane, automobile, and boat. ‘What you want is something that never crashes, that’s at least twice as fast as a plane, that’s solar powered and that leaves right when you arrive, so there is no waiting for a specific departure time,’ Musk says. His friends claim he’s had a Hyperloop technological breakthrough over the summer. ‘I’d like to talk to the governor and president about it,’ Musk continues. ‘Because the $60 billion bullet train they’re proposing in California would be the slowest bullet train in the world at the highest cost per mile. They’re going for records in all the wrong ways.’ The cost of the SF-LA Hyperloop would be in the $6 billion range, he says.

Musk is also planning to develop a new kind of airplane: ‘Boeing just took $20 billion and 10 years to improve the efficiency of their planes by 10 percent. That’s pretty lame. I have a design in mind for a vertical liftoff supersonic jet that would be a really big improvement.’

After a few hours with Musk, hypersonic tubes and jets that take off like rockets start to seem imminent. But interplanetary travel? Really? Musk says he’s on target to get a spacecraft to the red planet in 10 to 15 years, perhaps with him on board. ‘I would like to die on Mars,” he says. ‘Just not on impact.'”

Tags: ,

“The Monkeys Were Implanted With A Tiny Probe With Two Sensors”

September 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Eventually you’ll have the implant, but right now monkeys get it first. From Benedict Carey in the New York Times:

“In the study, researchers at Wake Forest trained five rhesus monkeys to play a picture-matching game. The monkeys saw an image on a large screen — of a toy, a person, a mountain range — and tried to select the same image from a larger group of images that appeared on the same screen a little while later. The monkeys got a treat for every correct answer.

After two years of practice, the animals developed some mastery, getting about 75 percent of the easier matches correct and 40 percent of the harder ones, markedly better than chance guessing.

The monkeys were implanted with a tiny probe with two sensors; it was threaded through the forehead and into two neighboring layers of the cerebral cortex, the thin outer covering of the brain.”

Tags:

Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

September 14, 2012 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

“I’ve begun to realize how obnoxious a drunk person can really be.”

question for the bar tenders/bar goers of nyc (ny)

so my dearest of drinking partners recently developed our weekly binge drinking sessions in to full blown alcoholism. he has been drinking pretty much every day of the week recently and as a result has been placed into recovery, so i can’t rely on him for being my go to guy when i need a boozing partner.as a result i’ve been going to bars by myself lately and i have to say the experience is…different. i still end up leaving the places shit faced drunk, but without having my friend with me i’ve begun to realize how obnoxious a drunk person can really be, especially considering that most of the people i see at the bar are no where near as drunk as i am. many nights i will socialize but i can kind of tell most people i talk to just want to cut the conversation short as fast as possible because they see how plastered i am.

bartenders are a bit more forgiving and tend to initiate convo with me, but mostly because they’re paid to and/or they’re just trying to gauge whether or not they should cut me off.

and here arises my question…

am i better off being that drunken dude that is somewhat obnoxious but great for a laugh, or that sullen, quiet drunk who goes out of his way to not initiate conversation with anybody, looking somewhat creepy in the process?

the irony of it all? the nights i try to start convo everybody seems to want to cut it short….the nights where i just want to get hammered and stare off into space everybody and their mother starts talking to me.

The Master And His Pupils In Los Angeles (1950)

September 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Photography, Urban Studies | Permalink

These three classic 1950 photos of pensive, unsmiling people were taken at a Dianetics seminar in Los Angeles, with the shadowy L. Ron Hubbard himself leading the meeting. Hubbard and his $4 self-empowerment book were largely ignored by the mainstream press until the title became a mammoth bestseller. From a 1950 Look magazine article about the rise of a new belief system, which initially took root most strongly in Los Angeles:

“Of all the dianetic centers, Los Angeles is the most exuberantly expansive and enthusiastic. There the Hubbard Foundation moved into a suite of modest offices last July. In August, it took over a two-story building housing a lecture theater and 20 ‘processing’ rooms. A few weeks later, it had to expand again – this time into a 110-room building where swarms of student auditors raptly attend Hubbard’s lectures and practice processing one another.

Still more recently, there have been instituted a series of weekend sessions at the swank Country Club Hotel in Hollywood. Here, taking over 20 or 30 rooms, a band of student auditors and pre-clears meet under the guidance of professional auditors for ‘intensive auditing with chemical assist.’

Hubbard and his associates insist that this use of drugs has nothing to do with narcosynthesis. They claim that ‘chemical assistants,’ purchasable in California at any drugstore, aid in helping resistant pre-clears to achieve dianetic reverie and to dredge up their basic-basic engrams.”

Tags:

“Doctors May Repair The Damage Caused By Heart Attack By Replacing It With Tissue That Rolled Off Of A Printer”

September 14, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

From the UCSD site, a release about researchers discovering a way to print blood vessels:

“Nanoengineers at the University of California, San Diego have developed a novel technology that can fabricate, in mere seconds, microscale three dimensional (3D) structures out of soft, biocompatible hydrogels. Near term, the technology could lead to better systems for growing and studying cells, including stem cells, in the laboratory. Long-term, the goal is to be able to print biological tissues for regenerative medicine. For example, in the future, doctors may repair the damage caused by heart attack by replacing it with tissue that rolled off of a printer.” (Thanks Next Big Future.)

Even More Proof That Donald Trump Is A Moron

September 13, 2012 in Humor, Misc. | Permalink

Oy gevalt!

Publishing a blog or having a Twitter account means everything is first-draft theater and everyone is writing quickly and makes typos. I make them all the time on this site. But I don’t think the mistake in the following Donald Trump tweet was a typo.

——————————————————————————

Donald J. Trump ‏@realDonaldTrump

Weakness, cow towing and not standing firm is provocative. We are getting pushed around and robbed under this President.

——————————————————————————

Like I said, I don’t believe this is a typo. I think Trump really has thought all his life that it’s “cow towing” instead of “kowtowing.” He’s read so little that he’s never realized his mistake. He thinks the word has something to do with cattle. The man is an imbecile.

Donald Trump: Moo!

Tags: ,

“Imagine Managing Pension Liabilities In A World Where Everyone Lives Forever”

September 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Economists have their hands full merely trying to figure out what just happened–and what the hell just happened?!? Izabella Kaminska of the Financial Times, whom I referred to earlier today, wonders whether they’re also unprepared for the brave new world of the next few decades. But who isn’t? An excerpt from her post:

“To get a bit more Kurzwelian on the matter — let’s consider for a moment that the world really is on the verge of a technological revolution equal to, if not greater than, the industrial revolution of the 19th century. The singularity, if you will.

We’re talking epic sci-fi mega trends.

Looking at just a few of the technologies futurists tell us might be common place by the time today’s 50-year US Treasury bonds gilts mature…

…let’s start with the one that would undoubtedly have the most striking impact on conventional economics — life extension.

We’re talking about a world where every child born will have the potential to live for at least 200 years, if not more. A world where medical advances crossed with developments in biological nano technology, bionic limbs and robotics mean life expectancy becomes limitless.

Now imagine a world where the human brain has been reverse engineered in such detail that all memory content can be routinely downloaded and backed up, and eventually re-uploaded to new synthetic bodies, time and time again. Eternal life, ortranshumanism, for want of a better word.

Plausibility of the latter aside, life extension of no more than 10 years alone would have dramatic enough consequences on pension funds. Anything more, especially in the current low yield environment, and the pension model starts to be threatened.

So, imagine managing pension liabilities in a world where everyone lives forever?”

Tags:

“A Majority Of Americans Did Not Believe Apollo Was Worth The Cost”

September 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

From historian Roger Launius (via Alexis Madrigal at the Atlantic), a reminder of the unpopularity of the U.S. space program of the 1960s:

“For example, many people believe that Project Apollo was popular, probably because it garnered significant media attention, but the polls do not support a contention that Americans embraced the lunar landing mission. Consistently throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969. And consistently throughout the decade 45-60 percent of Americans believed that the government was spending too much onspace, indicative of a lack of commitment to the spaceflight agenda. These data do not support a contention that most people approved of Apollo and thought it important to explore space.”

Tags: ,

“Swimming Humanoid Robot For Research Of Unsteady Fluid Force”

September 13, 2012 in Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

The Swumanoid, from the Tokyo Institute of Technology.

A Brief Note From 1894 About A Mackerel

September 13, 2012 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the June 24, 1894 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Riverhead, L.I.–In the ocean off Fort Pond, recently, on the fishing steamer, Montauk, Captain Burns of Greenport, caught over two thousand large Boston Mackerel. Jacob Josie, one of the crew, while dressing one of the fish, found in its entrails a cent of the 1889 date.”

Tags: ,

“They May Be The Cutting Edge Of The Coming Global Manufacturing Revolution”

September 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

I would guess somewhere in this world there will always be a sweatshop with people toiling in dangerous conditions for little gain because sadly it’s actually better than the life they know. But sweat equity will decline markedly in the next few decades, as robotics replace human capital at the most basic level. The assembly line will assemble itself and then assemble the products. Those countries that excel at 3D printers and bot builders will win the race. That probably bodes well for the U.S. and not so much for China. Some thoughts from economist Antoine van Agtmael provided by Izabella Kaminska at the Financial Times:

“The US technological lead in advanced, top-end manufacturing, smartphones and smartpads, and its capacity to create smart companies, is already starting to pay off. Whether these particular products – lifestyle changing as they are – will accelerate US growth is a moot point.

But they may be the cutting edge of the coming global manufacturing revolution provided by additive manufacturing technology, or so-called 3D printing. This revolution is expected to tilt economic advantage back towards the US, and to other Western companies.

Localised and customised manufacturing won’t employ much labour, though in ageing societies, labour supply will fall, or stagnate anyway. It will, however, increase the importance of being close to one’s market, resources, and centres of technological excellence, and diminish the significance of long global manufacturing supply chains, and large-scale process manufacturing, both of which characterise Asia’s and China’s functions in the global economy.” (Thanks Browser.)

Tags: ,

“It Will Cost $2 Trillion A Year, And Possibly Destroy The Amazon Jungle While Unleashing Giant Swarms Of Locusts Across Africa”

September 13, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

“Some scientists have published a plan to transform a part of the Sahara desert into a lush forest.” (Image by Luca Galuzzi.)

If we want to keep Earth livable for as long a span of time as possible, our best bet would be to switch as soon as possible to alternative fuels and halt meat production. Or we could go the riskier route and try to terraform parts of the planet, maybe turning our deserts into rain forests. But that could cause complications since networks are interconnected. From Stuart Fox at PopSci:

“Now that scientists agree that humans have profoundly changed the Earth’s climate, many have begun asking if we can use our globe-altering power to simply change it back. Geoengineering, essentially terraforming on Earth, has been floated as a cure for global warming a number of times over the past year, but now some scientists have published a plan to transform a part of the Sahara desert into a lush forest, and in the process, absorb enough carbon to offset the world’s current fossil fuel use. The catch: it will cost $2 trillion a year, and possibly destroy the Amazon jungle while unleashing giant swarms of locusts across Africa.”

“It Doesn’t Matter What’s In My Head. It Matters What That Physical Connection Is.”

September 12, 2012 in Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

At Public Books, Lawrence Weschler and Errol Morris discuss the latter’s obsession with the meaning of photographs, most recently 1855 pictures of the Crimean War taken by Roger Fenton. An excerpt:

“Errol Morris: 

It seems to me that we’ve forgotten a very important fact about photography. That photographs are physically connected to the world. And part of the study of photography has to be recapturing, recovering, that physical connection with the world in which they were taken. Something which has rarely been part of the enterprise of studying photographs. Take a photograph of Einstein, for instance. The point is, it doesn’t matter who I think it’s a photograph of. What matters is, was Einstein in front of the lens of the camera? That man. Was that man in front of the lens of the camera? Is there a physical connection between the image on that photographic plate or the digital device, whatever, and the man standing there? It doesn’t matter what’s in my head. It matters what that physical connection is.

Lawrence Weschler: 

What actually happened. But the question remains, why do you care? Or rather, why do you care so much? Because I think you really do care.

Errol Morris: 

Ultimately, why do people care about reference? Because… let’s put it this way. If you care what our connection is to the world around us, then you care about basic questions. Questions of truth. Questions of reference. Questions of identity. Basic philosophical questions. So go back to the [Roger] Fenton photographs for a moment. I want to know what I’m looking at. I think photographs have a kind of subversive character. They make us think we know what we’re looking at. I may not know what I’m looking at, even under the best of circumstances here and now. But I have all this context available to me. I know you’re Ren Weschler. I’ve met you before. We actually are friends. And I have this whole context of the world around me. But photographs do something tricky. They decontextualize things. They rip images out of the world and as a result we are free to think whatever we want about them.”

Tags: , ,

“I Can Only Preclude The Way They Feel By The State Of Their Institutions”

September 12, 2012 in Politics, Videos | Permalink

Just a minute (sadly) of James Baldwin discussing race on Dick Cavett’s show.

Tags: ,

“Every Couple Of Hours, Though, In As Little As 30 Seconds, The Barriers Break Down”

September 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The opening of “When Networks Network,” Elizabeth Quill’s excellent Science News article about the interaction of networks, the ones inside the human body and the numerous external ones we navigate each day:

“Half a dozen times each night, your slumbering body performs a remarkable feat of coordination.

During the deepest throes of sleep, the body’s support systems run on their own timetables. Nerve cells hum along in your brain, their chitchat generating slow waves that signal sleep’s nether stages. Yet, like buses and trains with overlapping routes but unsynchronized schedules, this neural conversation has little to say to your heart, which pumps blood to its own rhythm through the body’s arteries and veins. Air likewise skips into the nostrils and down the windpipe in seemingly random spits and spats. And muscle fluctuations that make the legs twitch come and go as if in a vacuum. Networks of muscles, of brain cells, of airways and lungs, of heart and vessels operate largely independently.

Every couple of hours, though, in as little as 30 seconds, the barriers break down. Suddenly, there’s synchrony. All the disjointed activity of deep sleep starts to connect with its surroundings. Each network — run via the group effort of its own muscular, cellular and molecular players — joins the larger team.

This change, marking the transition from deep to light sleep, has only recently been understood in detail — thanks to a new look at when and how the body’s myriad networks link up to form an übernetwork.” (Thanks Browser.)

Tags:

Recently Posted On NYC’s Craigslist

September 12, 2012 in Misc., Urban Studies | Permalink

“I am gearing up for a series of cross country motorcycle trips to do
some recreational mineral prospecting over the next few years in
an effort to assemble much needed start-up and operating capital.”

Seeking help to fund a small prospecting venture. – $1 (Downtown)

I am a motivated entrepeneur that has been gearing up to assemble my
own start-up capital to fund the start-up of my own small fabrication
and Manufacturing Company.

This is in response to all the industry layoffs that have occurred 
due to foreign outsourcing over the past decade and a half.

I can make my own products and sell them on the internet.
But the banks and lenders haven’t been very cooperative.

I am gearing up for a series of cross country motorcycle trips to do 
some recreational mineral prospecting over the next few years in 
an effort to assemble much needed start-up and operating capital.

This is true financial freedom and independence at it’s best.
And it appeals to me more than I can describe in this post.

I have gotten the motorcycle and survival gear together and
I have done the research and put together an itenerary of 
places to visit across the country to do this……but I have
run low on funds to cover gas, food, tires, and repairs as 
these expenses come up out on the road while starting out.

The hardest part of any venture is getting started.
Therefore I am willing to share the proceeds from 
my first 4 trips doing this as a prospector out in the
field with those who help me get this venture started.

It’s my way of saying….”Thank You”.

Those interested in such an opportunity can
contact me with the link above and we can
discuss this matter in greater detail.

Those who help this venture get started will reap
what they sow and share in the harvest to come.

I thank you for your time.

Thanks,

Carl

Tags:

“There Will Come A Time When Robots Will Understand Us Better Than We Understand Ourselves”

September 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

You might think roboticist Hans Moravec has been playing with wires and dials too long when he talks about Artificial Intelligence being able to manipulate humans by the middle of this century, but he was absolutely right about Roombas and bomb-defusing bots–actually, his timeline was conservative. From a 1997 interview he did with NOVA about the first four generations of robots:

“NOVA: 

Can you envision a robot understanding the psychology of a terrorist better than a human being?

Hans Moravec:

Well, ultimately. Now we’re talking 40 or 50 years from now, when we have these fourth generation machines and their successors, which I think ultimately will be better than human beings, in every possible way. But, the two abilities that are probably the hardest for robots to match, because they’re the things that we do the best, that have been life or death matters for us for most of our evolution, are, one, interacting with the physical world. You know, we’ve had to find our food and avoid our predators and deal with things on a moment to moment basis. So manipulation, perception, mobility – that’s one area. And the other area is social interaction. Because we’ve lived in tribes forever and we’ve had to be able to judge the intent and probable behavior of the other members of our tribe to get along. So the kind of social intuition we have is very powerful and probably uses close to the full processing power of our brain—the equivalent of a hundred trillion calculations per second—plus a lot of very special knowledge, some of which is hard-wired, some of which we learned growing up. This is probably where robots catch up last. But, once they do catch up, then they keep on going. I think there will come a time when robots will understand us better than we understand ourselves, or understand each other. And, you can even imagine the time in the more distant future when robots will be able to host a very detailed simulation of what’s going on in our brains and be able to manipulate us. 

NOVA: 

Wow.”

••••••••••

See also:

Tags:

“This Vehicle Is No Toy”

September 12, 2012 in Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Palestinian cabbie builds Gaza’s first electric vehicle using recycled parts.

Tags:

“The Land They Were Looking At Has No Infrastructure At All—It’s Just Desert”

September 12, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I put up a post in May about CITE, the insta-ghost town to be built in Hobbs, New Mexico. The billion-dollar project, planned by Pegasus Holdings was to simulate a city that could hold (but wouldn’t hold) 35,000 people and be a testing ground for all sorts of technological innovations. But land acquisition and other factors has proven difficult, and the project seems more and more merely a pipe dream and a press release. It’s just hard to build a ghost town these days. From Wren Abbott in the Santa Fe Reporter:

“Part of Pegasus’ vision for CITE includes testing of driverless cars, but the company has yet to announce a partnership with the country’s forerunner in that industry, Google, Inc.. Google is already testing its cars in California, with drivers sitting behind the wheel to intervene in case of emergency. Legislation passed in Nevada allows Google to do the same thing there.

Pegasus’ plan also seems to now include power generation, despite the significant obstacles it would have faced with an alternate location it considered for CITE. If Pegasus had chosen a site near Las Cruces, the city would have had to build $40 million of infrastructure in order to begin alternative energy production, [Las Cruces Mayor Ken} Miyagishima says.

‘The land they were looking at has no infrastructure at all—it’s just desert,’ Miyagishima says. ‘It would have taken awhile to get infrastructure out there.'”

Tags: ,

“Everyone Is His Own Journalist Or Editor”

September 12, 2012 in Film, Politics | Permalink

The third and final Jane Fonda post this week: A 1972 cine-essay about a photo of the actress visiting Vietnam, as analyzed by Jean-Luc Godard and Jean-Pierre Gorin, who had co-directed her in Tout va bien. This post-script is more successful than the film that it sprang from.



See also:

Tags: , ,

“Chess Programs Regularly Play At Good Amateur Level”

September 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

An excerpt from “Today’s Computers, Intelligent Machines and Our Future,” an essay by roboticist Hans Moravec from 1978, before Deep Blue was beating Kasparov in chess and Watson was wowing Trebek on Jeopardy!: 

“In the thirty years since then computers have become vastly more capable, but the goal of human performance in most areas seems as elusive as ever, in spite of a great deal of effort. The last ten years, in particular, has seen thousands of people years devoted directly to the problem, referred to as Artificial Intelligence or AI. Attempts have been made to develop computer programs which do mathematics, computer programming and common sense reasoning, are able to understand natural languages and interpret scenes seen through cameras and spoken language heard through microphones and to play games humans find challenging.

 There has been some progress. Samuel’s checker program can occasionally beat checker champions. Chess programs regularly play at good amateur level, and in March 1977 a chess program from Northwestern University, running on a CDC Cyber-176 (which is about 20 times as fast as previous computers used to play chess) won the Minnesota Open Championship, against a slate of class A and expert players. A ten year effort at MIT has produced a system, Mathlab, capable of doing symbolic algebra, trigonometry and calculus operations better in many ways than most humans experienced in those fields. Programs exist which can understand English sentences with restricted grammar and vocabulary, given the letter sequence, or interpret spoken commands from hundred word vocabularies. Some can do very simple visual inspection tasks, such as deciding whether or not a screw is at the end of a shaft. The most difficult tasks to automate, for which computer performance to date has been most disappointing, are those that humans do most naturally, such as seeing, hearing and common sense reasoning. 

A major reason for the difficulty has become very clear to me in the course of my work on computer vision. It is simply that the machines with which we are working are still a hundred thousand to a million times too slow to match the performance of human nervous systems in those functions for which humans are specially wired. This enormous discrepancy is distorting our work, creating problems where there are none, making others impossibly difficult, and generally causing effort to be misdirected.”

Tags: , ,

“Everyone Seems To Think The Word Revolution Means Violence”

September 11, 2012 in Politics, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Speaking of Jane Fonda, she called for an overthrow of the American capitalist system in 1970. But Jane, a well-regulated free market is the best way to spread wealth and information!

Tags:

A Brief Note From 1892 About A Good Beating

September 11, 2012 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the March 13, 1892 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

“Joseph Williams of Fiftieth Street in this city, and Joseph Driscoll of 7 Washington Street, New York, got into a row in a New Street pool room Friday afternoon. They began by calling each other names and then went out into the street to fight it out. Joe Ellingsworth, the prize fighter, urged them on, but he got disgusted with their lack of courage and gave them both a good beating.”

Tags: , ,

“He Developed Theatrical Calls, Aiming Hand-Pistols At Runners And Screaming OUTOUTOUTOUTOUT”

September 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Sports, Videos | Permalink

Ron Luciano, a showboating baseball umpire and tireless self-promoter, might have been amusing if his constant need for attention wasn’t a sign of desperation. His emphatic out calls and (relatively) outrageous book, The Umpire Strikes Back, made him a well-known figure in the ’70s and 80s. In a game of rules, he made his own, openly mocking a sport that was often taken too seriously. But he had no second act. When his routine grew tired and the beer commercials ran out, Luciano returned to his hometown and sadly committed suicide in 1995. From Matthew Callan at the Classical:

“As Luciano began his slow, undignified climb to the major leagues, he compensated for his lack of knowledge about the game by constantly chatting up players, managers, and even fans, as if hoping to acquire their expertise by osmosis. He developed theatrical calls, aiming hand-pistols at runners and screaming OUTOUTOUTOUTOUT as he emptied an imaginary clip; the hope was that, even if he was wrong, he’d at least be remembered. Luciano made sure to volunteer for every dumb stunt local owners put on both so he would be seen as a good sport and team player, and so he would be seen, period.

Once in the bigs, he constantly got in trouble with league American League president Lee MacPhail, usually for engaging in behavior that dared suggest baseball might be fun. Even if MacPhail wasn’t a fan, Luciano’s antics brought himself attention immediately, at a time when the average fan would have struggled to name even one umpire. A 1974 Sports Illustrated profile painted Luciano as ‘a rebel, an individualist,’ which says more about the staid atmosphere of baseball at the time than it does about the umpire. (His birdwatching hobby was counted among his acts of wanton individualism.)

By the end of the decade, he became president of the umpires’ association through what amounted to determined nudging, positioning himself nearest to the door during union meetings so he could be the first man to talk to reporters waiting outside, and therefore appear to be important; he understood this, correctly, as the most important factor in being important. Luciano’s tales from behind the plate made him a favorite on the winter banquet circuit, a hot stove tradition that’s nearly gone the way of the dodo, and eventually landed him a gig doing color commentary and profiles for NBC’s Game of the Week. The Umpire Strikes Back was the culmination of all this, a huge bestseller that blazed the ‘wacky sports’ trail of the 1980s later trod by The Hall of Shame series, Miller Lite commercials, and an infinite loop of blooper reels.”

••••••••••

Luciano, at the end of his fame in 1991, selling diet cream soda:

Tags: ,

“Amanullah Launched An Ambitious Program Of Modernization From Above”

September 11, 2012 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

“Both his reforms and his failures have set the pattern for successive generations of Afghan modernizers.” (Image by Magnustraveller.)

The opening of a concise essay by Mariam and Ashraf Ghani in the New York Review of Books about the last 100 years or so of Afghanistan’s tortured history and thwarted attempts at political and social reform:

“Amanullah ruled Afghanistan from 1919 to 1929, first as amir and then, after he changed his own title, as king. During his brief reign, Amanullah launched an ambitious program of modernization from above, which was cut off prematurely by a revolt from below. His many reforms included promulgating rule of law through Afghanistan’s first constitution; investing in education through literacy programs and the building of schools; promoting unveiling and the end of purdah; transforming the traditional institution of the Loya Jirga, or Grand Council, into a mechanism for public consultation; winning Afghanistan’s independence from Britain; and large-scale urban planning, with the partial completion of the ‘new city’ of Dar ul-Aman, just to the west of Kabul. Both his reforms and his failures have set the pattern for successive generations of Afghan modernizers, who have returned again and again to his unfinished project, only to succumb to their own blind spots and collapse in their own ways.”

Tags: , ,

« Older entries § Newer entries »