Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
The day after his brilliant October 30, 1938 War of the Worlds radio production caused widespread panic, Orson Welles sheepishly met with the press to explain his intentions. How could anyone ever fully trust the voice of authority again? Audio is mediocre.
Tags: Orson Welles
“In the 1910s deodorants and antiperspirants were relatively new inventions.” (Image by Terêza Tenório.)
I’ve sat next to a lot of you on the subway this summer, and I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that you smell like the outhouse behind a diarrhea factory. But things used to be even worse. The opening of Sarah Everts’ Smithsonian article about the birth of the underarm deodorant industry in stanky-assed America:
“Lucky for Edna Murphey, people attending an exposition in Atlantic City during the summer of 1912 got hot and sweaty.
For two years, the high school student from Cincinnati had been trying unsuccessfully to promote an antiperspirant that her father, a surgeon, had invented to keep his hands sweat-free in the operating room.
Murphey had tried her dad’s liquid antiperspirant in her armpits, discovered that it thwarted wetness and smell, named the antiperspirant Odorono (Odor? Oh No!) and decided to start a company.
But business didn’t go well—initially—for this young entrepreneur. Borrowing $150 from her grandfather, she rented an office workshop but then had to move the operation to her parents’ basement because her team of door-to-door saleswomen didn’t pull in enough revenue. Murphey approached drugstore retailers who either refused to stock the product or who returned the bottles of Odorono back, unsold.
In the 1910s deodorants and antiperspirants were relatively new inventions. The first deodorant, which kills odor-producing bacteria, was called Mum and had been trademarked in 1888, while the first antiperspirant, which thwarts both sweat-production and bacterial growth, was called Everdry and launched in 1903.
But many people—if they had even heard of the anti-sweat toiletries—thought they were unnecessary, unhealthy or both.”
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Odo-Ro-No TV ad from 1960:
Tags: Edna Murphey, Sarah Everts
From the July 1, 1895 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Mrs. Amelia Hirsch, a little woman of 40 years, had Mrs. Carrie Heidenreich, who is 22 years old, arraigned in the Lee Avenue police court to-day for having called her a black witch. The women live in the tenement house, 683 Flushing Avenue.
‘I did call her a black witch,’ said Mrs. Heidenreich, ‘because she hypnotized my husband. He was a good man until we moved into the house. Now she controls all his actions. She caused him to hit me with a chair and said the beating served me right. I forbade him going up to her rooms and watched the stairs but he climbed up the fire escape. He cannot resist the peculiar influence she has over him.’
Mrs. Heidenreich was advised to move from the house if she believed her husband was hypnotized.”
In case you missed Alex Stone’s smart NYT piece yesterday about the psychology of waiting on lines, here’s the opening:
“SOME years ago, executives at a Houston airport faced a troubling customer-relations issue. Passengers were lodging an inordinate number of complaints about the long waits at baggage claim. In response, the executives increased the number of baggage handlers working that shift. The plan worked: the average wait fell to eight minutes, well within industry benchmarks. But the complaints persisted.
Puzzled, the airport executives undertook a more careful, on-site analysis. They found that it took passengers a minute to walk from their arrival gates to baggage claim and seven more minutes to get their bags. Roughly 88 percent of their time, in other words, was spent standing around waiting for their bags.
So the airport decided on a new approach: instead of reducing wait times, it moved the arrival gates away from the main terminal and routed bags to the outermost carousel. Passengers now had to walk six times longer to get their bags. Complaints dropped to near zero.”
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Waiting on line in Akron for 23-cent pizza at Papa John’s, which is still four cents more than I would pay for it:
Tags: Alex Stone
One of the other billionaire Koch brothers (Bill) is building a replica Old West town and filling it with his considerable collection of Western memorabilia. He is doing it merely to amuse himself; the public will never be allowed to visit. Who said the Bush tax cuts wouldn’t work? From the Denver Post (via Slate):
“KEBLER PASS —There’s a new town in Colorado. It has about 50 buildings, including a saloon, a church, a jail, a firehouse, a livery and a train station. Soon, it will have a mansion on a hill so the town’s founder can look down on his creation.
But don’t expect to move here — or even to visit.
This town is billionaire Bill Koch’s fascination with the Old West rendered in bricks and mortar. It sits on a 420-acre meadow on his Bear Ranch below the Raggeds Wilderness Area in Gunnison County. It’s an unpopulated, faux Western town that might boggle the mind of anyone who ever had a playhouse. Its full-size buildings come with polished brass and carved-mahogany details and are fronted with board sidewalks and underpinned by a water-treatment system. A locked gate with guards screens who comes and goes.”
Tags: Bill Koch
Matt Ridley’s new Wired cover story, “Apocalypse Not,” reminds of the many endgames wrongly predicted over the past few decades for humanity, from post-peak oil to variants of flu to the hole in the ozone layer. It’s a wise piece, though we shouldn’t relax about doing things in a cleaner, more energy-conscious way. An excerpt:
“The threat to the ozone layer came next. In the 1970s scientists discovered a decline in the concentration of ozone over Antarctica during several springs, and the Armageddon megaphone was dusted off yet again. The blame was pinned on chlorofluorocarbons, used in refrigerators and aerosol cans, reacting with sunlight. The disappearance of frogs and an alleged rise of melanoma in people were both attributed to ozone depletion. So too was a supposed rash of blindness in animals: Al Gore wrote in 1992 about blind salmon and rabbits, while The New York Times reported ‘an increase in Twilight Zone-type reports of sheep and rabbits with cataracts’ in Patagonia. But all these accounts proved incorrect. The frogs were dying of a fungal disease spread by people; the sheep had viral pinkeye; the mortality rate from melanoma actually leveled off during the growth of the ozone hole; and as for the blind salmon and rabbits, they were never heard of again.
There was an international agreement to cease using CFCs by 1996. But the predicted recovery of the ozone layer never happened: The hole stopped growing before the ban took effect, then failed to shrink afterward. The ozone hole still grows every Antarctic spring, to roughly the same extent each year. Nobody quite knows why. Some scientists think it is simply taking longer than expected for the chemicals to disintegrate; a few believe that the cause of the hole was misdiagnosed in the first place. Either way, the ozone hole cannot yet be claimed as a looming catastrophe, let alone one averted by political action.”
Tags: Matt Ridley
Stanford’s driverless race car doing 120 mph. (Thanks Singularity Hub.)
When I mentioned bio-hacking in the Stewart Brand post, it made me think of a very early article on the topic, Michael Schrage’s 1988 Washington Post piece “Playing God in Your Basement.” At the time, many experts thought that the genome might move rapidly into the mainstream in the way of the personal computer, which took about three decades to go from Homebrew Club to free wi-fi at Starbucks. But biopunk has remained a subculture rather than morphing into culture. So far, at least. An excerpt from Schrage’s writing:
“Personal computing began as a ‘homebrew’ hobby phenomenon with aspiring computerniks wiring up chips, toggle-switches and teletypes to produce desktop machines. Skeptics sneered that personal computers were a solution in search of a problem.
Now, several million unit sales later, the typewriter has become the do-do bird of word-processing, pimply-faced hackers can break into corporate data networks and yesterday’s cutting-edge computer is today’s paperweight.
‘The parallels to the microprocessor industry are there,’ says Lynn Klotz, formerly on the faculty of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology at Harvard and a director of BioTechnica International, a Cambridge, Mass., recombinant DNA firm. ‘Both are characterized by general ease and use of declining costs.’
‘As a body, the biotechnology industry is not unlike where the computer industry was in 1975,’ says sociologist Everett Rogers, a University of Southern California professor who has conducted extensive research into the diffusion of innovation. ‘There’s a lot of uncertainty, a lot of rapid innovation and no single main consumer product.’
Rogers points out that hackers–a technology subculture he studied while at Stanford–were attracted to computers as a medium ‘where they could express themselves in an artistic way.’ A number of computer hackers did indeed win science fairs either with hardware or software they created. With the insistent diffusion of biotechnology, Rogers believes, a technology subculture could grow around DNA just as one did for silicon and software.
He wryly notes that when the news media discovered computer hackers, ‘people went into a state of alarm. There were movies about hackers. Perhaps in a few years there will be movies about (bio-hackers) creating Frankensteinian monsters.'”
Tags: Everett Rogers, Lynn Klotz, Michael Schrage
“They need a more stable home.”
I love my turtles very much however difficult times are here and they need a more stable home. If you are warm, loving, enjoy caring for reptiles and don’t mind cleaning tanks from time to time — I have 2 very lovable red eared sliders waiting for you. They are 6 and 7 in age, very well behaved and come with all necessary supplies — including a wet/dry vac for the tank. They have been well taken care of with lots of love and attention so suitable adoptive parents are a requirement. They may make a great pet for a classroom where children may enjoy them as well. Please reach out with any interest.
“I have no prejudice against horse steaks and roasts if well prepared.”
In the late 1800s cheap horse meat was often surreptitiously sold in place of more expensive cow flesh. The Department of Agriculture was on the case, although its chief chemist didn’t mind eating a pony now and then. From the October 11, 1899 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Washington D.C.--For the past week a strong odor of decaying animal matter has assailed the nostrils of persons passing the fine building on lower Fourteenth Street, occupied as a chemical laboratory for the Department of Agriculture. By following up the scent to-day it was found to proceed from one of the ground floor rooms of the building where half a dozen aproned chemists were engaged in dissecting the carcass of a roan horse, which a few weeks ago did service as an important part in the wagon express outfit. The animal was pretty generally dismembered, steaks having been cut from both flanks and various portions of flesh from the legs and sides removed, while a string of freshly stuffed sausage links suspended on a nail on the wall showed that some of the meat had been prepared after the style of beef sausage.
Inquiry of Dr. Wiley, the chief chemist of the Department of Agriculture, developed the fact that the government experts are conducting a series of interesting experiments for the purpose of determining just what uses the horse can be made to serve as human food. The department does not intend to start a propaganda campaign in favor of the consumption of American horse meat, and so far as known no such food is offered for sale in this country; yet there has always been more or less suspicion as to the origin of certain prepared meals which we import from abroad in large quantities every year. It is to make our inspectors thoroughly familiar with the appearance and taste of the flesh of this animal that the present experiments are being undertaken. Dr. Wiley said:
‘In order to satisfy ourselves on this point we directed the local health authorities to secure for us a horse that had died from natural causes. We got the animal and now are in the midst of our experiments. Samples have been taken from different parts of the body, corresponding with certain cuts usually selected by butchers. We are putting them through chemical and microscopic processes, and noting the changes from time to time and comparing them with genuine beef.
‘The popular prejudice against horse flesh as food,’ continued Dr. Wiley, ‘is probably not well founded, as there is no reason to believe that it is not quite as edible as beef flesh. This aversion exists, however, and it is only proper that it should be sold under its own name and not in the guise of some other flesh food.
‘So far as I am concerned I have no prejudice against horse steaks and roasts if well prepared. I have no doubt whatever it figures quite extensively on the bills of fare in the cheap Paris restaurants, though it is not known by the name of horse. I went to several Paris restaurants of the cheaper kind for the express purpose of examining their meats. At one place I was served with soup, vegetables, a roast and a pint of wine, for which I paid one franc–20 cents. Naturally this must have been the cheapest food they could purchase, and while the roast was quite palatable, I often had the suspicion that I was dining off the remains of some old charger.”
Wow, I had never watched this before. Paul Ryan’s favorite pro-choice atheist, Ayn Rand, interviewed by Johnny Carson in 1967. Her theories would turn the free market’s greatness into something deranged, but she did oppose the Vietnam War. The segment ran long and Buster Crabbe got bumped.
Tags: Ayn Rand, Johnny Carson
I know a good deal about the tech legend Stewart Brand–creator of the Whole Earth Catalog and author of the seminal piece of tech journalism “Spacewar,” etc.–but I didn’t realize that he was present in 1968 at Doug Engelbart’s “Mother of All Demos.” In a new Wired interview with Kevin Kelly, in which he acknowledges bio-hackers and calls for the de-extinction of bygone life forms, Brand remembers the effect Englebart’s demo had on him:
“Kevin Kelly: There was an event in San Francisco in 1968 that has come to be called ‘the mother of all demos’—when Stanford’s Doug Engelbart showed off a computer with a mouse and graphical interface. You were there. What significance did that event have for you?
Stewart Brand: It made me perpetually impatient. I saw a bunch of things demonstrated that clearly worked, and I wanted some right now, please! That demo gave a really accurate look at what was coming and made it seem so easy. But decades would go by, and it just kept not coming.
Kelly: Does that give you pause that maybe all kinds of things that look to be around the corner today—drones, magic glasses, self-driving cars—are just premature promises?
Brand: The lesson was that this is exponential technology. I don’t mean that just in terms of power or capacity—driven by Moore’s law—but also in that it starts out slow as consumers find ways to put it to use.”
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“The Mother of All Demos”:
Tags: Doug Engelbart, Kevin Kelly, Stewart Brand
I don’t think the folding car is the wave of the future unless the Chinese government insists (by fiat) that it will be. But the Hiriko Fold is upon us regardless. From the Daily Mail:
“City dwellers know the most difficult part of urban driving isn’t the mental minicab drivers or suicidal cyclists, but finding a space to park the car once you have safely arrived at your destination.
But now a solution is at hand in the form of a revolutionary new car that can actually fold up to fit itself into the tiniest of gaps.
Researchers from MIT’s Changing Places group, working in collaboration with the Spanish Basque region’s development agency DENOKINN have developed the Hiriko Fold, a convenient, eco-friendly car for city commuting.”
From the excellent Retronaut blog, a brief 1931 Modern Mechanix article about a lit-cigarette dispenser.
Horrible deaths bother us more than the mundane kind. It doesn’t make sense since dead is dead, but the narratives around a demise have meaning for us. We try to separate deaths into those that are “needless” and those that “understandable.” Some just upset us or excite us more in a lurid way than others.
When a helicopter crashes and two or three people die in NYC, the tragedy gets nonstop news coverage. A car accident the same day that results in four deaths gets a couple of minutes at most. It’s the greater lack of control that bothers us, the plunging from the sky. A truck accident in Texas that happened soon after the Aurora shooting tragedy killed nearly as many people but received only scant national attention. The families of those lost in the highway accident are just as devastated, but an automobile accident is something we can process, while a movie theater being shot up intentionally for no reason is not. It’s just more terrible.
These feelings of dread and horror don’t only affect us in a visceral way but can shape policy. In a WSJ piece, Richard Muller, who recently quit his stance as a climate-change denier, argues that our fear of nuclear-power accidents, even in wake of Fukushima, is overstated. That may be true, though it doesn’t seem like nukes should be the focus of our sustainable-energy quest going forward. From his article:
“The tsunami that hit Japan in March 2011 was horrendous. Over 15,000 people were killed by the giant wave itself. The economic consequences of the reactor destruction were massive. The human consequences, in terms of death and evacuation, were also large. But the radiation deaths will likely be a number so small, compared with the tsunami deaths, that they should not be a central consideration in policy decisions.
The reactor at Fukushima wasn’t designed to withstand a 9.0 earthquake or a 50-foot tsunami. Surrounding land was contaminated, and it will take years to recover. But it is remarkable how small the nuclear damage is compared with that of the earthquake and tsunami. The backup systems of the nuclear reactors in Japan (and in the U.S.) should be bolstered to make sure this never happens again. We should always learn from tragedy. But should the Fukushima accident be used as a reason for putting an end to nuclear power?
Nothing can be made absolutely safe. Must we design nuclear reactors to withstand everything imaginable? What about an asteroid or comet impact? Or a nuclear war? No, of course not; the damage from the asteroid or the war would far exceed the tiny added damage from the radioactivity released by a damaged nuclear power plant.”
Tags: Richard Muller
Robots can handle driving and assembly-line work better than we can, with far less error and far more accuracy, no doubt. The question, beyond the loss of manufacturing jobs, is whether these tasks, once roboticized, can be hacked to cause mass mishaps. Will 10,000 drivers simultaneously be forced to turn left instead of right? Can terrorists cause a defect in plane parts so that they’ll be prone to crash? I would guess there’s enough quality control to avoid the latter, but the former seems plausible. From “Skilled Work, Without the Worker,” by John Markhoff in the New York Times:
“This is the future. A new wave of robots, far more adept than those now commonly used by automakers and other heavy manufacturers, are replacing workers around the world in both manufacturing and distribution. Factories like the one here in the Netherlands are a striking counterpoint to those used by Apple and other consumer electronics giants, which employ hundreds of thousands of low-skilled workers.
‘With these machines, we can make any consumer device in the world,’ said Binne Visser, an electrical engineer who manages the Philips assembly line in Drachten.”
Tags: Binne Visser, John Markhoff
From the August 18, 1886 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Mrs. Frank Kennedy, who had been informed that her husband had eloped with Maggie Maugels, the young daughter of a Wallabout marketman, visited the residence of the girl’s parents, 12 First Street, this afternoon to learn if anything had been heard of the missing couple. While seated in the house a man rushed in and said:
‘Your husband is across the street working on the ice deck.’
Mrs. Kennedy ran out and catching sight of her husband beat him about the head and shoulders with an umbrella. Then she took him home.”
Some search-engine keyhrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
Afflictor: Thinking it would be far more polite if senior citizens…
…would stop laughing out loud when asked if…
…they’re voting for Paul Ryan and his Medicare plan.
Wait a minute…you’re not a senior citizen. Why are you laughing?
“I was born into a family of IDIOTS–no two ways about it!”
What I am saying with this post is simple MANY MANY PEOPLE CAN’T turn a consistent profit in the market. VERY VERY FEW PEOPLE CAN
The best and truest way (I believe) to figure out who can and who can’tit’s not educational background or financial status. Rather, take a person who claims to be able to trade for profit, give this person a set time frame, monitor his ups and downs, and at the end of the exercise there will be profit or loss. That is the ONLY way to know if one is a good trader.
I AM HERE SAYING I CAN TRADE – I WAS BORN INTO POVERTY MY FAMILY IS FULL OF GREEDY SELFISH PEOPLE WHO REFUSE TO HELP ME PULL MYSELF OUT OF POVERTY + SUGGEST THINGS LIKE LEARN A TRADE !! THEY CONSIDER TRADING GAMBLING !!
For instance – my uncle, my father’s brother, has over $600,000 sitting in bonds RIGHT NOW earning an annual rate of 2.97% !! While here I am, quite possibly one of the futures GREATEST TRADERS (top 1% at least), living rent free in his house (while I “look for work”) and he thinks this is helping me!!!!
I was born into a family of IDIOTS no two ways about it! I even think there was a mix up at the hospital, for there is no way I can think so differently from these people and have the same blood line.
ANYWAY I AM A GREAT TRADER – I HAVE NEVER HAD THE REAL CHANCE TO PROOVE IT BUT I BELIEVE IN AMERICA AND THE AMERICAN DREAM AND I KNOW SOMEWHERE OUT THERE – SOMEONE IS GOING TO GIVE ME A CHANCE PLEASE CONTACT ME IF YOU ARE WILLING TO GIVE ME A CHANCE – HONESTLY I DONT WANT YOUR MONEY I WANT MY CHANCE, ALL I NEED + YOU CAN LOOK INTO WHAT I AM SAYING, IS TRADING AUTHORIZATION ON AN ACCOUNT with NO WITHDRAWLING RIGHTS = THEN I CAN SHOW YOU WHAT I CAN DO AND BEGIN THE LIFE I WAS MEANT TO LEAD, AND GET OUT OF THIS HORRIBLE PLACE. THANK YOU.
The rise of the machines is, unsurprisingly, extending further and further into space. From “The Astronaut Question,” by James R. Chiles in Air & Space magazine, a section drawing a parallel between driverless cars and automated space flight:
“When comparing spacecraft-driving to car-driving, one more analogy is needed: the automated, driverless car. During the 2010 VisLab Intercontinental Autonomous Challenge, four electric automatic automobiles got themselves from Italy to China. After more than a quarter-million miles on the road, Google’s Self-Driving Car now has a license to roam Nevada, albeit with an engineer behind the wheel, who, says Google, hardly ever needs to take control.
The next wave of manned orbital craft now being built promise to be equally automated when flown. Like the H-2, the Dragon spacecraft from SpaceX will park within arm’s length of the station. On a routine, no-glitches mission in which Boeing’s CST-100 flies to the ISS, the astronauts will leave all the driving to robots, which will use a navigation system evolved from Orbital Express, its unmanned satellite-rendezvous mission for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. In that 2007 experiment, one satellite intelligently chased down another, latched on, and exchanged fuel and components, all without human control.”
Tags: James R. Chiles
Having met some venture capitalists over the years, I can tell you their success rate isn’t that high. That’s not because they’re not talented or intelligent. On the contrary. It’s just that most things in life don’t pan out. When they occasionally do, venturers make their mark and live to invest another day. Some get fabulously wealthy–but even they have a pretty high fail rate.
Since being named Mitt Romney’s VP pick, Paul Ryan has attacked President Obama’s stimulus plan in particular and government investments in general. But from lithium-ion battery factories in Michigan to the auto industry to the many alternative energy initiatives througout the country, this administration has largely invested shockingly well, made bold attempts to transform our future and created well-paying jobs that are many grades above Staples cashier.
David Plotz, who quietly does an excellent job at Slate, examines that other silent success, Obama’s stimulus, in an interview with Michael Grunwald, author of The New New Deal. The opening:
“Slate:
What possessed you to write this book?
Michael Grunwald:
I fled Washington for the public policy paradise of South Beach while writing my last book, about the Everglades and Florida, so in 2010 I was only vaguely aware of the Beltway consensus that President Obama’s stimulus was an $800 billion joke. But because I write a lot about the environment, I was very aware that the stimulus included about $90 billion for clean energy, which was astonishing, because the feds were only spending a few billion dollars a year before. The stimulus was pouring unprecedented funding into wind, solar, and other renewables; energy efficiency in every form; advanced biofuels; electric vehicles; a smarter grid; cleaner coal; and factories to make all that green stuff in the U.S.
It was clearly a huge deal. And it got me curious about what else was in the stimulus. I remember doing some dogged investigative reporting—OK, a Google search—and learning that the stimulus also launched Race to the Top, which was a real a-ha moment. I knew Race to the Top was a huge deal in the education reform world, but I had no idea it was a stimulus program. It quickly became obvious that the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (the formal name of the stimulus) was also a huge deal for health care, transportation, scientific research, and the safety net as well as the flailing economy. It was about Reinvestment as well as Recovery, and it was hidden in plain view.”
Tags: Barack Obama, David Plotz, Michael Grunwald, Paul Ryan
Andy Warhol had far more lasting cultural import than the recently deceased critic Robert Hughes allowed. He sold low on the Pop Artist in a 1982 New York Review of Books piece. The opening:
“To say that Andy Warhol is a famous artist is to utter the merest commonplace. But what kind of fame does he enjoy? If the most famous artist in America is Andrew Wyeth, and the second most famous is LeRoy Neiman (Hugh Hefner’s court painter, inventor of the Playboy femlin, and drawer of football stars for CBS), then Warhol is the third. Wyeth, because his work suggests a frugal, bare-bones rectitude, glazed by nostalgia but incarnated in real objects, which millions of people look back upon as the lost marrow of American history. Neiman, because millions of people watch sports programs, read Playboy, and will take any amount of glib abstract-expressionist slather as long as it adorns a recognizable and pert pair of jugs. But Warhol? What size of public likes his work, or even knows it at first hand? Not as big as Wyeth’s or Neiman’s.
To most of the people who have heard of him, he is a name handed down from a distant museum-culture, stuck to a memorable face: a cashiered Latin teacher in a pale fiber wig, the guy who paints soup cans and knows all the movie stars. To a smaller but international public, he is the last of the truly successful social portraitists, climbing from face to face in a silent delirium of snobbery, a man so interested in elites that he has his own society magazine. But Warhol has never been a popular artist in the sense that Andrew Wyeth is or Sir Edwin Landseer was. That kind of popularity entails being seen as a normal (and hence, exemplary) person from whom extraordinary things emerge.
Warhol’s public character for the last twenty years has been the opposite: an abnormal figure (silent, withdrawn, eminently visible but opaque, and a bit malevolent) who praises banality. He fulfills Stuart Davis’s definition of the new American artist, ‘a cool Spectator-Reporter at an Arena of Hot Events.’ But no mass public has ever felt at ease with Warhol’s work. Surely, people feel, there must be something empty about a man who expresses no strong leanings, who greets everything with the same ‘uh, gee, great. Art’s other Andy, the Wyeth, would not do that. Nor would the midcult heroes of The Agony and the Ecstasyand Lust for Life. They would discriminate between experiences, which is what artists are meant to do for us.”
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“First thing I would do is put carpets in the streets”:
Tags: Andy Warhol, Robert Hughes
A cool old-school commercial for Olivetti, which was making computers with a great flair for design long before Apple.
Tags: Camillo Olivetti
Lessons learned from bacterial life forms may be used to unsnarl China’s horrible traffic. From Christopher Mims at the BBC:
“Two Chinese researchers have proved, at least theoretically, that insights borrowed from the lowly bacterium E. coli could markedly increase the throughput of a real-world traffic light in Guangzhou. No one knows what effect this could have if it were applied to an entire city, but it’s fitting that a solution from a class of algorithms that seek to mimic the collective behaviour of organisms should be applied to the teeming masses of Guangzhou’s trucks and automobiles.
Traffic lights around the world, from Guangzhou to Geneva, are managed by computerised systems housed in a metal cabinet at the side of the road, which regulate the cycle of changes from red to green to red either through fixed time periods, or through sensors in the road that can detect when a car is stationary. Both options work well when traffic is low, less so during rush hour, as any driver will tell you.
The solution Qin Liu and Jianmin Xu have proposed for improving flow during high traffic periods is what’s known as a Bacterial Foraging Optimisation (BFO) algorithm. The algorithm varies when and for how long a given light is red or green. So, for example, the algorithm has an almost traffic cop-like sense for which road at an intersection has a higher volume of traffic, and when to strategically deprioritise traffic that may be waiting on a less-used road. Simulations of a Guangzhou intersection showed that BFO-regulated lights reduce the average delay of vehicles by over 28% compared with those regulated by a fixed time cycle.
It’s part of a surprisingly rich history of applying algorithms inspired by nature to traffic light timing – researchers have applied everything from genetic algorithms to models of ant behaviour to the problem. And it’s not just traffic lights – BFO can be used on just about any engineering problem, from tuning the behaviour of simple automated control systems, such as those used to regulate the level of water in water towers, to determining the lightest and strongest configuration of structural elements in a building.”
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Godardian traffic jam, 1967:
Tags: Christopher Mims, Jianmin Xu, Qin Liu