I will control the ants.
A hobo did an Ask Me Anything on Reddit. His dream is to create an army of tiny creatures to do his bidding. (And he’s not the only one). An excerpt:
“QUESTION:
ANSWER:
QUESTION:
ANSWER:
Meat production is troubling: It’s responsible for almost 20% of our carbon footprint, animals are treated unethically, the food is largely unhealthy and demand for it from a growing world population may make it scarcer and more expensive. Will we eventually be forced to take the “live” out of livestock? From “Future Foods,” Denise Winterman’s new BBC article, a segment about lab-grown meat:
“Earlier this year, Dutch scientists successfully produced in-vitro meat, also known as cultured meat. They grew strips of muscle tissue using stem cells taken from cows, which were said to resemble calamari in appearance. They hope to create the world’s first ‘test-tube burger’ by the end of the year.
The first scientific paper on lab-grown meat was funded by NASA, says social scientist Dr Neil Stephens, based at Cardiff University’s ESRC Cesagen research centre. It investigated in-vitro meat to see if it was a food astronauts could eat in space.Ten years on and scientists in the field are now promoting it as a more efficient and environmentally friendly way of putting meat on our plates.
A recent study by Oxford University found growing meat in a lab rather than slaughtering animals would significantly reduce greenhouse gases, along with energy and water use. Production also requires a fraction of the land needed to raise cattle. In addition it could be customized to cut the fat content and add nutrients.
Prof Mark Post, who led the Dutch team of scientists at Maastricht University, says he wants to make lab meat ‘indistinguishable’ from the real stuff, but it could potentially look very different. Stephens, who is studying the debate over in-vitro meat, says there are on-going discussions in the field about what it should look like.
He says the idea of such a product is hard for people to take on board because nothing like it currently exists.
‘We simply don’t have a category for this type of stuff in our world, we don’t know what to make of it,’ he says. ‘It is radically different in terms of provenance and product.'” (Thanks Browser.)
••••••••••
“That’s a big chicken”:
Tags: Denise Winterman, Mark Post, Neil Stephens
David Frost, outnumbered, doing battle with those Yippie barbarians in 1970.
Tags: David Frost
From the June 23, 1895 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Catorce, Mexico–James Atkinson, an American ore buyer, and Francisco Hernandez, a Mexican ranchman, fought a duel near Cedral, east of here yesterday, in which Atkinson was killed. These two men were devoted to the same senorita and decided to settle their love contest with pistols. The American fired three shots at his antagonist, but none of the bullets took effect. Hernandez’s second shot struck a vital spot of Atkinson’s body.”
Architect Nicholas de Monchaux has written about Apollo spacesuits, but how were they described back in the day by BBC reporter James Burke?
Tags: James Burke, Nicholas de Monchaux
It’s difficult to think of another American who had a life just like Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, better known as polarizing comedian Stepin Fetchit. Born in 1902, Perry used a stereotypical lazy-man persona to become the first black actor to reach millionaire status. History hasn’t been kind to his screen character, as blacks and whites alike came in time to see it as degrading. But Perry felt otherwise; he believed it was a means to an end. He thought that his on-screen buffoonery, stereotypical as it was, transformed the popular perception of a black man in America from one of a fearsome or predatory figure to that of a lovable clown. And he felt he paved the way for other people of color to become screen stars who didn’t have to play the fool. Perhaps he’s right, though it’s still incredibly painful to watch. Perry became a lightning rod for criticism during the Black Power movement of the 1960s but never backed away from his beliefs.
A tangent: When he was young, Perry was friends with embattled boxer Jack Johnson. (They must have been quite the pair–the fighter who enjoyed making whites nervous and the entertainer who wanted to reassure them.) After he joined the Nation of Islam during the 1960s, Perry supposedly taught Johnson’s “anchor punch” to another controversial African-American heavyweight, Muhammad Ali. The Greatest used the maneuver to defeat Sonny Liston in their second fight. At the 8:00 mark of this passage from the 1970 documentary A.K.A. Cassius Clay, Perry and Ali ham it up for reporters.
Another Perry tangent, this one horribly tragic: His disturbed son, Donald Lambright, who used his stepfather’s name, committed what appeared to be a number of racially motivated murders. From the April 7, 1969 Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
Johnson said Lambright slept with a .30-caliber rifle in his bed.
‘Donald said he needed protection from whites,’ Johnson said. ‘He was paranoiac at the time.’
Johnson said Lambright was friendly with many black militant leaders and was a member of the Republic of New Africa, a black separatist organization.
‘Donald thought he had the answers to a lot of problems. And he felt the only way some of them could be resolved would be through violent action.’
At 9:14 a.m. yesterday, state police said, Lambright and his wife entered the Pennsylvania Turnpike where it crosses the Delaware River from New Jersey.
About 45 minutes later, Lambright began shooting.
Witnesses said most of the firing was done as he drove along, slowly weaving from lane to lane. They said he fired into eastbound traffic. Now and then he pulled over and fired from the roadside.•
Tags: Donald Lambright, Lincoln Perry, Lincoln Theodore Monroe Andrew Perry, Muhammad Ali, Stepin Fetchit
Dick Cheney: Unqualified, unprofessional, unrepentant.
Ego is blinding, and none of us are immune. But life allows some examples to be writ large.
- Dick Cheney said this weekend that Sarah Palin wasn’t qualified to be Vice President, and who can argue? A few people in powerful positions in the media seem to think they can still make a buck off her obnoxious idiocy, though they’re pretty much alone at this point. But you know who else wasn’t prepared for the job? Dick Cheney. Because of his arrogant incompetence, thousands of our soldiers and tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of Iraqi civilians died. Yet he goes around smugly believing he’s an incredibly accomplished person, free to judge the qualifications of others. Cheney is still the textbook example of why you hire a person, not a résumé.
- Mayor Mike Bloomberg wants to keep New Yorkers from drinking extra-large sodas, but he has said little or nothing about declaring war on toxic Wall Street products. He would probably assert that he is capable of legislating against the former but not the latter, but that argument doesn’t wash. As owner of Bloomberg News and mayor of America’s finance center, he should have been a relentless advocate for cleaning up Wall Street. Since the financial sector cratered our economy, he’s been largely silent about white-collar criminals, reducing himself to a highly selective technocrat who is oblivious to things that make him personally uncomfortable. I guess you can’t expect much more from someone who circumvented the free vote of the people and made a handshake deal with another billionaire behind closed doors to enable a third term for himself.
- Mitt Romney thinks himself a good and moral person, but how can someone believe that while working to take health insurance away from more than 30 millions at-risk Americans? It doesn’t add up. If he gets his way, people who wouldn’t have died will die.
- Sad to hear about Jonah Lehrer’s complete unraveling at the New Yorker. He’s obviously a bright and gifted person, but one with deep flaws of a seemingly pathological nature. I hope he figures out the bad stuff and can proceed with the good, though he needs to permanently step away from journalism. I always pause when people are lavishly rewarded at a young age, before they’ve had a chance to fail and struggle. The praise can freeze still-developing people in time, encouraging their gifts but also their flaws. Why change and grow when their behavior has led them to great heights so quickly? It seems dangerous to grant approval before time has been able to complete the growth (and vetting) process.•
Tags: Dick Cheney, Jonah Lehrer, Mike Bloomberg, Mitt Romney, Sarah Palin
Perhaps the most benighted use imaginable of the new technologies was this CueCat promotion from the Einsteins at NBC during the 1990s.
A couple of weeks ago, I posted a piece from Evan R. Goldstein’s Chronicle article about “offshoring” human brains into robot receptacles, effectively immortalizing not only human intelligence but individual personalities as well. It’s a process far beyond cryonics. Ray Kurzweil illuminates the topic further in his blog post “The Strange Neuroscience Of Immortality.” An excerpt about neuroscientist Kenneth Hayworth:
“Before becoming ‘very sick or very old,’ he’ll opt for an ‘early ‘retirement’ to the future,’ he writes. There will be a send-off party with friends and family, followed by a trip to the hospital. After Hayworth is placed under anesthesia, a cocktail of toxic chemicals will be perfused through his still-functioning vascular system, fixing every protein and lipid in his brain into place, preventing decay, and killing him instantly.
Then he will be injected with heavy-metal staining solutions to make his cell membranes visible under a microscope. All of the water will then be drained from his brain and spinal cord, replaced by pure plastic resin.
Every neuron and synapse in his central nervous system will be protected down to the nanometer level, Hayworth says, ‘the most perfectly preserved fossil imaginable.’
Using a ultramicrotome (like one developed by Hayworth, with a grant by the McKnight Endowment Fund for Neuroscience), his plastic-embedded preserved brain will eventually be cut into strips, and then imaged in an electron microscope. The physical brain will be destroyed, but in its place will be a precise map of his connectome.
In 100 years or so, Hayworth says, scientists will be able to determine the function of each neuron and synapse and build a computer simulation of the mind. And because the plastination process will have preserved his spinal nerves, the computer-generated mind can be connected to a robot body.”
••••••••••
Howard Stern investigates cryonics and the fate of Ted Williams’ frozen head:
Fuh-fuh-frozen.
Tags: Baba Booey, Evan R. Goldstein, Howard Stern, Ray Kurzweil
H.L. Monken.
I have to continue my late-night publishing schedule for a few more days. Then things will be back to normal. Don’t do anything rash.
Operators are standing by.
It had been 15 years since I smoked pot.
Then one of my clients (whom I’ve gone to bars with) gave me a little thank you weed. Very smelly, very tight, kinda sticky. Had to stop at a convenience store to get papers since I have no paraphernalia.
Has it been 15 years since you smoked pot? A suggestion: Just take 2 hits at first. See what it does. I took about 6 hits and it really hit me hard. Not overly pleasant. Took about an hour to come down to a comfortable buzz. This was Friday night, today is Thursday. I smoked some for the second time, a little bit this morning before I came to work. Has it been 15 years since you smoked pot? A suggestion: don’t smoke a little bit in the morning before you go to work. It’s 2:30 and I’m just coming out of the mild stupor it induced.
That’s all.
L. Ron Hubbard interviewed in 1968 about his embattled tax shelter, during the period when he spent much of his time at sea.
Tags: L. Ron Hubbard
From a 1994 Wilson Quarterly article about Americans settling the virtual Wild West, which shows just how far we’ve come, at least technologically:
“Some futurists see the germ of the 21st century in today’s nascent ‘on-line’ services, such as America Online, Prodigy, and CompuServe. Pay a membership fee and dial up one of these services using a modem attached to your personal computer, and you can catch up on the news, check your mutual fund investments, and chat with like-minded folks on bulletin boards devoted to such specialized topics as your hometown hockey team, office etiquette, opera, or nuclear proliferation. But so far the services have attracted only a specialized clientele of affluent, highly educated, gadget-oriented users. The total subscriber base of these three top on-line services stands at less than three million, smaller than the subscriber base of Newsweek. At America Online, the hottest of the services, the largest number of pioneers actually traveling in cyberspace at any one time is only about 8,000.”
••••••••••
A decade earlier, AT&T wondered about the Information Superhighway:
Bob Costas protested the foolish decision by the IOC to not offer a moment of silence for the Israeli athletes who were murdered by terrorists during the 1972 Games in Munich. In 1991, Costas interviewed broadcasting legend Jim McKay, who held up (if barely) during those horrifying, exhausting hours.
“They’re all gone”:
Tags: Bob Costas, Jim McKay
At the Philosopher’s Beard, an essay about the penal system thinks very far outside the box, suggesting less incarceration and more flogging and execution. A hard sell, to be sure. But the piece has a good passage about criminal nature, which follows:
“Even if someone has committed a serious crime and deserves to be punished severely, that does not necessarily mean that they present a danger we need to be protected from. Corporate fraudsters for example can be made safe relatively easily by removing their rights to manage companies. Likewise even those who commit very serious violent crimes may not be particularly dangerous; for example women who kill abusive husbands do not go around killing other people. Quite often, people are sentenced to prison for the worst thing they have ever done, and not for being dangerous. Thus, little to no security benefits are achieved from their stay in prison. Of course there are people whose character can be said to be criminal, and who do present a risk to society for as long as they are free, but these are a small minority of those who are now sent to prison. The way we use prison now assumes that all convicts are criminal characters, which is not only false, but a very inefficient way of trying to achieve security.” (Thanks Browser.)
There’s an old-school interactive video game version of the moral puzzle known as the Trolley Problem. I can’t embed it, but go here to play (if that’s the right word). Just takes a few minutes.
Tags: Philippa Foot
With 3D printers in the offing, guns aren’t likely going anywhere and far more dangerous things are probably upon us. From Mark Gibbs at Forbes:
“Given the recent appalling events in Aurora, Colorado, there’s been a renewed call for greater gun control and a ban on assault weapons.
I’m in favor of tighter gun control and a ban on weapons that are unnecessarily powerful but I’m afraid that technology will soon make any legislation that limits the availability of any kinds of guns ineffective.
To understand why this might happen, you need to understand a technology called 3D printing.
3D printing allows you to build things that are, as the name implies, three dimensional. A few years ago 3D printers were very rare, hugely expensive, and hard to use. But as with anything that can be driven by computers, 3D printers has become cheaper and cheaper to the point where, today, you can buy a 3D printer, off the shelf, for as little $500.
Using either free or low cost computer aided drafting software you can create digital 3D models of pretty much anything you can think of and, with hardly any fuss, your 3D printer will render them as physical objects.”
Tags: Mark Gibbs
Muhammad Ali just made an appearance in London for the opening ceremony of the Olympic Games. Here’s footage from another Ali jaunt to that great city, when he recorded a special 1974 interview program. The boxer and activist was diminished physically at this point, mostly due to two titanic bouts with Joe Frazier. Neither fighter was ever the same again.
Tags: Joe Frazier, Muhammad Ali
From the September 21, 1897 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Jamaica, L.I.–Five children of Frank Fleischauer, the oldest 8 years of age and the youngest a 7 months old infant, were found deserted in their house on South Street, a day or two ago. There was no fire in the house and the infant had its feet frozen and it was suffering from a lung fever. The mother was adjudged insane a week ago and is still wandering the streets as the husband has not signed the commitment papers upon which she is to be conveyed to a state hospital for the insane.”
Tags: Frank Fleischauer
Some search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
Afflictor: Wishing Mitt Romney hadn’t tried to distract people from his lunkheaded comments about London by…
…coldcocking Prince Philip.
- Old Print Articles: Coroner threatens to shoot “automobilists” (1902) + Whalers kill sea monster, exhibit tail in saloon (1884).
- Featured Videos: Olympic ceremonies became big-budget spectacle in Los Angeles (1984) + The first test-tube baby is born (1978) + Elon Musk is planning a new, superfast mode of transport + Paddy Chayefsky discusses Network with Dinah Shore (1976) + Alan Abel pretended to run a celebrity sperm bank + Ikea catalog becomes augmented + Robert Olsen designed modernist purple cube furniture (1973) + Richard Nixon phoned the astronauts on the moon (1969) + Some of Sally Ride’s contemporaries in action (1977) + Robot baby in hoodie wants hug + Charlton Heston being interviewed (and annoyed) (1979).
- Recently Posted on NYC’s Craigslist: Want a job, asshole? + Your child will struggle with grammar and usage + My frugal nature knows no bounds + The odds are against my becoming a supermodel.
- The honest argument for people who want assault weapons to be legal.
- 1 thing about Anderson Cooper’s Aurora coverage.
- 1 thing about the removal of the Joe Paterno statue.
- Short-term sports stadiums are nothing new.
- Will a government or a private company will be the first to Mars?
- Richard Feynman explains the distinction between the past and future.
- Intelligent mobility is probably inevitable.
- Martin Amis analyzes the nature of the 2011 London riots.
- Christopher Buckley has fun facts about Vladimir Lenin’s corpse.
- The WSJ wants to pretend that the private sector built the Internet.
- Janet Radcliffe Richards thinks we should be able to sell our kidneys.
- Some people think we should use bio-enhancement to develop morality.
- Swiss sociologist Dirk Helbing examines the dark side of our connectivity.
- Esther Dyson suggests we should begin quantifying communities.
- A 21-year-old female gravedigger from Norway answers questions.
- Greg Lindsay profiles an airport-centric South Korean development.
- A brief explanation of the Uncanny Valley Effect.
- Moshe Safdie is something of a Method architect.
- Imagining what humans will look like in 3000 A.D.
- A brief note from 1844 about a ship’s arrival.
- A brief note from 1901 about horse skiing.
- This week’s Afflictor keyphrase searches.
“Extremely mean.”
extremely mean assertive straightforward person – $50 (Midtown)
How would you like to get paid to teach a course on being honest, straightforward, and assertive.
The students are “push overs” who are struggling through life because they are unable to be assertive and need your help.
Olympic ceremonies, now routinely treated like blockbusters and “directed” by leading filmmakers, began to grow in size and proportion when the Games were staged in 1984 (with the help of a UFO) at the home of Hollywood.
The opening of an argument by Julian Savulescu and Ingmar Persson at Philosophy Now in favor of using bioenhancement to develop human morality:
“For the vast majority of our 150,000 years or so on the planet, we lived in small, close-knit groups, working hard with primitive tools to scratch sufficient food and shelter from the land. Sometimes we competed with other small groups for limited resources. Thanks to evolution, we are supremely well adapted to that world, not only physically, but psychologically, socially and through our moral dispositions.
But this is no longer the world in which we live. The rapid advances of science and technology have radically altered our circumstances over just a few centuries. The population has increased a thousand times since the agricultural revolution eight thousand years ago. Human societies consist of millions of people. Where our ancestors’ tools shaped the few acres on which they lived, the technologies we use today have effects across the world, and across time, with the hangovers of climate change and nuclear disaster stretching far into the future. The pace of scientific change is exponential. But has our moral psychology kept up?
With great power comes great responsibility. However, evolutionary pressures have not developed for us a psychology that enables us to cope with the moral problems our new power creates. Our political and economic systems only exacerbate this. Industrialisation and mechanisation have enabled us to exploit natural resources so efficiently that we have over-stressed two-thirds of the most important eco-systems.
A basic fact about the human condition is that it is easier for us to harm each other than to benefit each other.” (Thanks Browser.)
Tags: Ingmar Persson, Julian Savulescu
From the 1964 Messenger Lecture Series at Cornell, Richard Feynman delivers a speech called “The Character of Physical Law: The Distinction Between Past and Future.”
Tags: Richard Feynman