Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
“Any animals welcome.”
I teach a taxidermy class once a month and use feeder mice, but I would like to show how to taxidermy other animals…
SEEKING OWLS especially or any spotted furred animals…ANY ANIMALS WELCOME, reptiles, birds, rodents, etc
call SUE.
Tags: Sue
Which populated areas of Earth might be suitable analogs for future communities on Mars? A few cities are suggested at io9, with the burgs of Nunavut in Canada among the most promising. From Annalee Newitz’s post:
“The far-northern territory of Nunavut in Canada is an excellent analog for Mars. Cold and dry, the region is home to cities and peoples who are used to surviving the cold without the vast resources of a wealthy land like Dubai. Here, you can see the John Arnalukjuak School in the hamlet of Arviat, Nunavut, which was built to withstand subzero temperatures while also using modest power. Low to the ground and insulated, the building is precisely the kind of shelter that would keep Martian kids of the future warm while they learn all about those weird old people from Earth.”
Tags: Annalee Newitz
Japan is in an odd spot in the globalized world: It’s no longer turning out the technology the world wants, possesses a declining and graying population and has a particularly homogenous culture. One businessperson decided to take drastic measures, ordering 6,000 employees to learn English within two years, hoping to be more in touch with the larger market. From Chico Harlan in the Washington Post:
“Japanese billionaire Hiroshi Mikitani decided two years ago that the employees at his company, Rakuten Inc., should work almost entirely in English.
The idea, he said, was a daring and drastic attempt to counter Japan’s shrinking place in the world. ‘Japanese people think it’s so difficult to speak English,’ Mikitani said. ‘But we need to break the shell.’
With the move, which took effect at the beginning of last month, Mikitani turned his e-commerce company — an Amazon competitor — into a test case for corporate Japan’s survival strategy.
As Japan’s population declines, all but guaranteeing ever-decreasing domestic business, companies here are grappling with how they should interact with the world and whether they can do it successfully.
The country has both a dread of English and an understandable attachment to its own ornate business customs. Those idiosyncrasies made Japan a bewildering but envied powerhouse during its economic boom. They now make Japan a poor match, experts say, for global business.
Mikitani took a step few other companies here have dared because, he said, he thought it would help his company expand and thrive. He also wanted to prove a point — that the Japanese, counter to the stereotype, could embrace the risks and embarrassment that come with learning a foreign language.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Chico Harlan, Hiroshi Mikitani
Timothy Leary, who often gave drug addicts a bad name, at the beginning of his long run as a controversial public figure, visiting with Merv Griffin in 1966.
Tags: Merv Griffin, Timothy Leary
Our lack of will to fully exploit the sun’s power for our energy uses has always stunned me. I understand that wind patterns vary, but that sun is always hot (and will only get hotter). It seems like in addition to harnessing the potential on Earth, we could situate structures in space that could relay power to us.
In India, those who weren’t affected by the recent mass power outage because they’re not even hooked to the grid, are harnessing solar for their basic needs. From Vikas Bajaj at the India Ink blog at the New York Times:
“The Energy and Resources Institute, or T.E.R.I., along with others, has been working on a model to increase the use of solar lanterns in rural India. Though these devices are incredibly simple to understand – a solar panel charges them during the day so they can be used at night – they are still too expensive for many. (Basic lanterns cost as little $5, but hardy and more useful models can cost as much as $80.)
T.E.R.I., which is based in New Delhi, is trying to make these lanterns more affordable by making them available for rent for durations as short as one night. The institute’s ‘Lighting a Billion Lives‘ campaign does this on a franchise model.
‘You train one woman in the village,’ said Rajendra K. Pachauri, the institute’s director general. ‘She charges all the lanterns during the day, and she rents them out at night.’
So far, the campaign has reached 1,488 villages in 22 Indian states, according to its Web site. But Mr. Pachauri, who is also the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, told me this week that this and other similar ideas have significant potential to bring electricity to many millions of people.”
Tags: Rajendra K. Pachauri, Vikas Bajaj
“The ball had entered the young man’s left side, struck a rib, glanced and came out near where it had entered, cutting off one of his fingers.”
When people became engaged to marry in the 1870s, there was usually gunplay involved and at least one party wound up less a finger or toe, as evidenced by this article in the March 2, 1877 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Alanson Penny, of Good Ground, had paid his addresses to Miss Nellie Jackson, of the same place, for upward of two years. Miss Jackson was rarely seen in the company of any other young man, and the community regarded them as two very constant lovers. The society in which they moved looked anxiously forward to their union. Some busybody started the story that the wedding was fixed, and it grew as it traveled. The truth was, however, that they had not been betrothed, and the stories seemed to worry Alanson, while Miss Nellie only curled her rosy lip at their reiteration.
Alanson, a week ago proposed to Miss Nellie, who held it under advisement until the next evening. He called for the answer with throbbing heart, not doubting that it would be in the affirmative. He was doomed to disappointment. Miss Nellie refused to wed, and as an earnest of her refusal, returned his love tokens and billet dous in a neat little package. He returned to his father’s house, and a few minutes after retiring to his room, the report of a pistol was heard.
He had shot himself, but not fatally. Dr. Benjamin was summoned from Riverhead. He found that the ball had entered the young man’s left side, struck a rib, glanced and came out near where it had entered, cutting off one of his fingers. Miss Jackson was at the house soon after learning of the shooting, and insisted that she should be permitted to nurse him. After her tears were dried, she said she only said no to try his love. She is still nursing him, and when he recovers they will be married.”
Tags: Alanson Penny, Nellie Jackson
In 1986, when a different Asian country looked like it would permanently unseat America as the premier world power, Gore Vidal wrote a Nation essay asserting that our victory in the Cold War was a Pyrrhic one, weakening our foundation. And while I wouldn’t count us out yet now that the challenger is China rather than Japan, Vidal was right about the wastrel Cold War spending, which continued with the War on Terror, further siphoning our attention and resources. An excerpt:
“As early as 1950, Albert Einstein understood the nature of the rip-off. He said, ‘The men who possess real power in this country have no intention of ending the cold war.’ Thirty-five years later, they are still at it, making money while the nation itself declines to eleventh place in world per capita income, to forty-sixth in literacy and so on, until last summer (not suddenly, I fear) we found ourselves close to $2 trillion in debt. Then, in the fall, the money power shifted from New York to Tokyo, and that was the end of our empire. Now the long-feared Asiatic colossus takes its turn as world leader, and we—the white race—have become the yellow man’s burden. Let us hope that he will treat us more kindly than we treated him. In any case, if the foreseeable future is not nuclear, it will be Asiatic, some combination of Japan’s advanced technology with China’s resourceful landmass. Europe and the United States will then be, simply, irrelevant to the world that matters, and so we come full circle. Europe began as the relatively empty uncivilized Wild West of Asia; then the Western Hemisphere became the Wild West of Europe. Now the sun has set in our West and risen once more in the East.”
Tags: Gore Vidal
I love cities, the more populous the better. More opportunities, less repetition. Or at least the repetition is more anonymous and not quite as galling for that fact. But I doubt even those souls who prefer sprawl will ever live beneath the sea, though some cling fast to such fantasies. From “The Long Ongoing Dream Of Underwater Sea Colonies,” Ben Hellwarth’s new Discover article about waterworlds:
“Finally there is Dennis Chamberland, a NASA engineer who has been trumpeting the cause of aquatic habitats for years. Chamberland leads a private effort to build a prototype underwater community. Though he prefers not to discuss the details with members of the press, his sci-fi-sounding effort, Atlantica Expeditions, calls for a true undersea colony, where ‘families live and work’ and ‘children go to school.’ He says his vision of a high-tech cluster of habitats would deliver ‘a new ocean civilization whose most important purpose will be to continuously monitor and protect the global ocean environment.’
Chamberland’s first expedition, Atlantica 1, planned for the summer of 2014, aims to send three aquanauts on a 100-day underwater mission, longer than any yet recorded, to test ‘systems intended for permanent human residence of the undersea world.’ But most important, he is designing his habitats so they will not require compression diving. ‘Just like a moon base, the permanent facilities of the new world of Aquatica will have a constant, safe, close to Earth-normal living environment with lockout access to the remote and extreme external environment,’ he says. ‘It is a preeminent paradigm shift that allows the frontier to be opened where it was not practical before.'”
Tags: Ben Hellwarth, Dennis Chamberland
The sharp-edged critic Robert Hughes, who just passed away, was no fan of network news, though he lived to see it pass into obsolescence. Here’s his 1995 New York Review of Books critique of its role in the capitalist continuum:
“Television is not, to put it mildly, an art of conceptual memory. Its images are always displacing themselves. It must therefore pump up each one’s vividness to keep the millions watching. Cut out more connective tissue, make each bright pop-up image brighter still. The audience’s revenge is selective inattention. The viewer is amazingly adroit at channel surfing, zapping past a channel whose product is judged in two seconds to be boring. Knowing this, the network must make the next product more vivid still… and so it goes, in a descending curve of simplification. As Lewis Lapham points out in his introduction to a new edition of Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media, McLuhan recognized thirty years ago that the relation between abbreviated news and the consoling icon of advertisement is as fixed and, so to speak, as theologically necessary as the ancient relationship of hell and heaven. We are given our glimpses of scandal and disaster: corpses in Bosnia, the burned-out crack house in New York, the assassination in Mexico City. The bad news sells the good news: the smiling anchor, more real than the world outside, and the ads, which are Eden. The core message, in the end, is that the world may be a strange, violent, and horrible place, but products keep it away, as garlic repels vampires. Hence the sense of reality-shortage that accompanies image-glut.”
Tags: Robert Hughes
An interesting footnote to history regarding the Apollo 13 mission, via an Ask Me Anything on Reddit with a 97-year-old veteran of our space program.
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Question:
Answer:
Question:
Answer:
The Asch Conformity Experiments, first published in the 1950s, tried to prove that humans would be persuaded to group opinion even if it was obviously wrong. Is the impulse a weakness of mind or an evolutionary tool for survival?
My name is Hyder and I like to prank call people and harass them. Won’t you call me and do the same please?
Tags: Hyder
From the January 16, 1880 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“A young man in Bellevue Hospital, this city, is undergoing treatment for grafting his middle left hand finger to the spot where his nose used to be, with the intention of eventually amputating the finger and transforming it into a nose. He lies in the new surgical ward, with his hand immovably fixed to his face.”
B.F. Skinner, who spent more time with birds than Colonel Sanders, argues against free will as we normally define it.
Tags: B.F. Skinner
From a paper about self-replicating high-tech hardware, or “Affordable Bootstrapping,” which could be employed in outer space to dramatically reduce the cost of interstellar nation-building, a segment about the first several decades of this potential operation:
“The first hardware sent to the Moon will be high-tech equipment built on Earth. However, the high launch costs demand that it be mass-limited so it will have insufficient manufacturing capability to replicate itself. It will construct a set of crude hardware made out of poor materials, so the second generation is actually more primitive and inefficient than the first. The goal from that point is to initiate a spiral of technological advancement until the Moon achieves its own mature capabilities like Earth’s. This evolving approach will provide several benefits. First, industry on the Moon can develop differently than on Earth. The environment, the manufacturing materials, the operators (robots versus humans), and the products and target markets are all different. Allowing it some reasonable time to develop will allow it to evolve an appropriate set of technologies and methods that naturally fit these differences. Second, the evolving approach supports the development of automation so that industry can then spread far beyond the Moon. The technological spiral will develop the robotic ‘workers’ in parallel with the factories. It will also improve automated manufacturing techniques such as 3D printing. The third and probably most important benefit is the economic one. As we show here, a space economy can grow very rapidly, and it will quickly require massive amounts of electronics and robotics unless there is full closure. The tiny computer chips alone become too expensive to launch within a few decades as the industry grows exponentially, and therefore we will quickly need lithography machines on the Moon to make the computer chips. The evolving approach sends only a small and primitive set of machines as ‘colonists,’ and the nascent lunar industry develops over time – but still rapidly – toward the full sophistication that Earth cannot afford to launch. This may seem too far reaching to a reader first exposed to the idea, but the key is the on-going rapid advancement in robotics. After robotic dexterity, machine vision, and autonomy improve for another couple of decades, robots will build lithography machines on the Moon as easily as human workers build them on Earth. This future is not far away, considering the exponential rate of technology development in terrestrial industries. Robotics experts are optimistic that the necessary levels of automation will be developed quickly enough to support the timeline we present here (Moravec, 2003).
So the objective is for the first robotic ‘colonists’ on the Moon to fabricate a set of, say, 1700’s-era machines and then to advance them steadily through the equivalent of the 1800’s, 1900’s, and finally back into the 2000’s. We argue that this can be accomplished in just a few decades.” (Thanks Next Big Future.)
President Kennedy kept his pants zipped long enough to give this press conference 50 years ago, the first one ever beamed by a satellite.
Tags: John F. Kennedy
Economists Tyler Cowen (who has read more more books than all of us combined) and Kevin Grier have a smart article at Grantland that reveals how countries can improve their odds of earning medals at the Olympics. An excerpt about the divergent performances of China and India, two countries with similarly huge talent pools:
“Will China and India, the two countries with populations over 1 billion, dominate the Olympics of the future, especially as they become wealthier?
To date, their Olympic performances are almost polar opposites. China has become an Olympic powerhouse while India has underperformed. From 1960 to 2000, China won 80 gold medals, while India won only two. Over those 11 Olympiads, India only won eight total medals while China won over 200. While China has grown faster and is richer than India, the difference in wealth can’t begin to account for the chasm between their Olympic results.
In their book Poor Economics, MIT economists Abhijit V. Banerjee and Esther Duflo attribute India’s dismal Olympic performance at least partly to very poor child nutrition. They document that rates of severe child malnutrition are much higher in India than in sub-Saharan Africa, even though most of sub-Saharan Africa is significantly poorer than India.
Even the significant segment of the Indian population that grows up healthy is at a disadvantage relative to China. The Chinese economic development model has focused on investment in infrastructure; things like massive airports, high-speed rail, hundreds of dams, and, yes, stadiums, world-class swimming pools, and high-tech athletic equipment. And while India is a boisterous democracy, China continues to be ruled by a Communist party, which still remembers the old Cold War days when athletic performance was a strong symbol of a country’s geopolitical clout.”
Tags: Kevin Grier, Tyler Cowen
A bald eagle who was mascot to Theodore Roosevelt’s Rough Riders met his maker in New York City in 1899 and was promptly stuffed. (One of its contemporaries was recently in the news.) A report about the perished plumage from the June 12 Brooklyn Daily Eagle of that year:
“Teddy, the bald eagle, the mascot of the Roosevelt Rough Riders in their Santiago campaign, died Friday night in his cage in Central Park. He had not been well for two weeks. About four weeks ago twin bald eagles, which came to be known as the Heavenly Twins, were put into the big cage with Teddy and several other eagles. Teddy had demonstrated immediately upon his arrival last fall that he was a king eagle as he started in to whip every bird in the cage which disputed his claim.
When the twins arrived Teddy thought he saw one of them do something that questioned his authority and he had a tussle with the twin. He won but he went at the other a few days later in mistake for the first one. The result was that the twins fought him together and Teddy was fearfully banged about the cage.
When Superintendent Smith saw him that night the Rough Riders’ mascot was woefully disconsolate at the loss of his prestige. He felt he had disgraced his regiment and for two weeks he brooded over the matter. Mr. Smith was sure the eagle’s heart was broken. When Teddy died Friday night, Superintendent Smith was sure of his diagnosis of the case and he sent him to the Museum of Natural History to have an autopsy performed.
The bird surgeons performed the operation and rendered a verdict of death from consumption. Teddy is now on exhibition as a stuffed specimen of bald eagle in the American Museum of Natural History.”
Merv Griffin and Salvador Dali doing what they did. From 1965.
Tags: Merv Griffin, Salvador Dali
I recently posted something about the South Korean insta-city, Songdo, billed as the world’s first “smart city,” which will be embedded with technology that will constantly collect and respond to streams of data. In “The Machine and the Ghost” in the New Republic. Christine Rosen begins her excellent consideration of the rise of the machines with a description of Songdo:
“JUST WEST OF SEOUL, on a man-made island in the Yellow Sea, a city is rising. Slated for completion by 2015, Songdo has been meticulously planned by engineers and architects and lavishly financed by money from the American real estate company Gale International and the investment bank Morgan Stanley. According to the head of Cisco Systems, which has partnered with Gale International to supply the telecommunications infrastructure, Songdo will ‘run on information.’ It will be the world’s first ‘smart city.’
The city of Songdo claims intelligence not from its inhabitants, but from the millions of wireless sensors and microcomputers embedded in surfaces and objects throughout the metropolis. ‘Smart’ appliances installed in every home send a constant stream of data to the city’s ‘smart grid’ that monitors energy use. Radio frequency ID tags on every car send signals to sensors in the road that measure traffic flow; cameras on every street scrutinize people’s movements so the city’s street lights can be adjusted to suit pedestrian traffic flow. Information flows to the city’s ‘control hub’ that assesses everything from the weather (to prepare for peak energy use) to the precise number of people congregating on a particular corner.
Songdo will also feature ‘TelePresence,’ the Cisco-designed system that will place video screens in every home, office, and on city streets so residents can make video calls to anyone at any time. ‘If you want to talk to your neighbors or book a table at a restaurant you can do it via TelePresence,’ Cisco chief globalization officer Wim Elfrink told Fast Company magazine. Gale International plans to replicate Songdo across the world; another consortium of technology companies is already at work on a similar metropolis, PlanIT Valley, in Portugal.
The unstated but evident goal of these new urban planners is to run the complicated infrastructure of a city with as little human intervention as possible. In the twenty-first century, in cities such as Songdo, machine politics will have a literal meaning—our interactions with the people and objects around us will be turned into data that computers in a control hub, not flesh-and-blood politicians, will analyze.
But buried in Songdo’s millions of sensors is more than the promise of monitoring energy use or traffic flow. The city’s ‘Ambient Intelligence,’ as it is called, is the latest iteration of a ubiquitous computing revolution many years in the making, one that hopes to include the human body among its regulated machines.”
Tags: Christine Rosen
H.L. Monken: Keeps booze in desk.
I’m back to my usual daytime publishing schedule now. So, if you need to find out about that creepy thing that happened in a dentist’s office in 1886, I’m there for you. If someone on Craigslist wants to buy a pint of your blood, I’ll let you know. If you require a vaguely ominous statement about robots right around 3 p.m., I can handle that. Thanks for your patience.
Which Merv Griffin clip from the ’60s should I post next?
I caught this promo recently while watching ESPN Classics. It took about three seconds before it was clear that it was directed by Errol Morris.
Tags: Errol Morris
“I smell terrible all the time.”
Have someone staying in your home and you want out? Well today’s the day. See I smell terrible all the time. Have me around for a bit and they are sure to want to leave. Really this will work. I want in return iPads laptops cash gold cash. Email for more info.
Merv Griffin and Tallulah Bankhead interviewing Willie Mays in 1966. These three were inseparable.
Tags: Merv Griffin, Tallulah Bankhead, Willie Mays
Look magazine was sort of the weirder sibling of Life. It was known, yes, for its Stanley Kubrick photos and Emmett Till reportage, but also for shock journalism about head transplantations and underground saucer-shaped airplanes. One such piece of sensationalism was Walter White’s heartbreaking 1949 article, “Has Science Conquered the Color Line?”
A modest proposal along the lines of Jonathan Swift but not intended as satire, the piece suggested that a new skin-lightening technique which was close to being perfected would allow people of color to “become” white and avoid prejudice. The author wasn’t any sort of racist; a former head of the NAACP and of mixed race, he was very light-skinned and able to pass in either world. He was just tired of racism and wanted to see it all end by any means necessary, even in this remarkably ill-conceived and self-loathing way. The piece, unsurprisingly, caused a furor, despite being published a couple of decades before anyone in America was saying the obvious aloud–that Black is beautiful. But it did speak to the the level of race relations during the “good old days.” An excerpt:
“Consider what would happen if a means of racial transformation is made available at a reasonable cost. The racial, social, economic and political consequences would be tremendous.
Some three years ago I wrote an article, quite innocent that my words might prove prophetic. I said:
‘Suppose the skin of every Negro in America were suddenly to turn white. What would happen to all the notions about Negroes, the idols on which are built race prejudice and race hatred? Would not Negroes then be judged individually on their ability, energy, honesty, cleanliness as are whites? How else could they be judged?’
Now that science is near making such a dream a reality, it’s time to consider the questions raised more seriously than ever.”
Tags: Walter White
