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“I would let her do anything to me.” (Image by Lenore Edman.)
I’m 29, male, new to the company. She’s 45 and painfully beautiful. She’s recently divorced and has no children.
I would fuck her brains out, and I would let her do anything to me. Anything at all.
How do I let her know that she can have me anyway she wants me?
“Booth gave Lawler a pass to attend Ford’s Theater that night.”
A supporting player in one of the great American tragedies of the 19th century, barber Thomas C. Lawler became an accidental part of history when he crossed paths with a man who acted notoriously. Lawler’s death in 1900 was reported in the New York Times and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle. From the Eagle:
“Lynn, Mass.–Thomas C. Lawler, who figured in the identification of J. Wilkes Booth, the assassin of President Lincoln, died here to-day aged 58 years.
A short time before Booth committed the crime, Lawler, who was proprietor of the National Hotel barber shop, shaved the actor and cut his hair. Booth gave Lawler a pass to attend Ford’s Theater that night, but Lawler was unable to leave the shop, so he did not witness the assassination. Lawler was taken on board the monitor Miantonomoh after Booth had been shot to identify the remains.”
We all go through different stages in life, but some people change at a shocking, even puzzling pace, though it seems perfectly natural to them. It’s not that they’re only responding to different information or stimuli but that there’s something always in flux inside of them. And no matter that they take wildly divergent views at different times, each one feels like the truth to them.
Here Eric Sevareid comments in 1975 on Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver returning to the U.S. after seven uncomfortable years living as a fugitive in communist countries. Cleaver renounced his militant ways but never stopped experiencing revolutions within, later becoming a Mormon, a conservative Republican and a crack addict, among other things.
Tags: Eldridge Cleaver, Eric Sevareid
The central thought experiment from moral philosopher Judith Jarvis Thomson’s famous and much-debated 1971 paper, “A Defense of Abortion“:
“But now let me ask you to imagine this. You wake up in the morning and find yourself back to back in bed with an unconscious violinist. A famous unconscious violinist. He has been found to have a fatal kidney ailment, and the Society of Music Lovers has canvassed all the available medical records and found that you alone have the right blood type to help. They have therefore kidnapped you, and last night the violinist’s circulatory system was plugged into yours, so that your kidneys can be used to extract poisons from his blood as well as your own. The director of the hospital now tells you, ‘Look, we’re sorry the Society of Music Lovers did this to you–we would never have permitted it if we had known. But still, they did it, and the violinist is now plugged into you. To unplug you would be to kill him. But never mind, it’s only for nine months. By then he will have recovered from his ailment, and can safely be unplugged from you.’ Is it morally incumbent on you to accede to this situation? No doubt it would be very nice of you if you did, a great kindness. But do you have to accede to it? What if it were not nine months, but nine years? Or longer still? What if the director of the hospital says. ‘Tough luck. I agree. but now you’ve got to stay in bed, with the violinist plugged into you, for the rest of your life. Because remember this. All persons have a right to life, and violinists are persons. Granted you have a right to decide what happens in and to your body, but a person’s right to life outweighs your right to decide what happens in and to your body. So you cannot ever be unplugged from him.’ I imagine you would regard this as outrageous, which suggests that something really is wrong with that plausible-sounding argument I mentioned a moment ago.”
Tags: Judith Jarvis Thomson
The opening of Frank Tobe’s Singularity Hub article about roboticists aiming to take their creations from automatons to multi-taskers:
“The robotics industry is on the cusp of a major transformation. Today’s factory robots are solitary precision instruments, mimicking the repertoire of capabilities of skilled craftsmen while repeating a handful of tasks thousands of times over. But future factory robots will likely have to be capable of thousands of tasks, performing each only several times, and they will work in collaboration with humans.
Furthermore, interest in nonindustrial robots is emerging at an even quicker pace, and new and larger marketplaces are opening up as never before. But that means some pretty significant shifts in design from caged robots to adjacent workers, from stationary position to portable motion, from programming intensive to easily trainable, and from connected to autonomous robots. Even as they work to improve upon their current industrial offerings, robotics companies are closely watching demand for co-robots, which are the safe, flexible, vision-enabled and easily trainable robotic assistants that science fiction movies made culturally popular.
Thus the reinvention of robotics is fundamentally a transition from industrial robotics to service robotics, and one that is demanding flexibility and versatility beyond what is presently available.”
Tags: Frank Tobe
Rules for remaking society from “The Coming Eco-Industrial Complex” by the late Ernest Callenbach:
* We must create a new renewable-energy system to end our costly need to control the world’s oil militarily. Wind and solar-thermal have become the cheapest new-power-generating technologies, and are also labor-intensive; photovoltaic and battery storage technologies are improving rapidly; geothermal is an enormous resource—and oil companies happen to know how to drill wells. The U.S. is rich in renewable energy resources, and should aim at total energy independence, which will save us vast sums in the long run.
* We must rebuild our cities in the proven, compact forms of the world’s great cities, to reduce our dependence on petroleum-fueled cars. Our sprawling suburbs need to be transformed from cultural wastelands into communities with healthy centers and the creative cultural richness that cities have traditionally offered. A lot of tracks need to be laid and urban and suburban concrete poured. If we walk to transit stops, like New Yorkers, we will even lose weight and live longer. If Bechtel can build mega-airports, civil and military, it can certainly build eco-cities.
* We must develop a universal recycling system, so that all major materials (steel, paper, glass, aluminum, wood, plastic, even water) will be in steady and predictable supply without sabotaging our support system, the natural order. A giant job-intensive industry must be created here.
* We must restore our forests, fisheries, and agriculture to stable, net positive productivity. At present, we are cutting more timber than we grow and catching more fish than can reproduce. We are even putting far more petroleum-based calories into agriculture than we get out in food calories—in essence, we are eating oil, a non-renewable resource. And if we eat lower on the food chain and cut down on livestock, we will reduce our climate impacts even more than by getting rid of private cars.
* We must put people to work restoring our rivers, waterfronts, and wetlands—trashed by generations of engineers, dumpers, and developers. Carry on with what the New Deal started!
Tags: Ernest Callenbach
Here’s the full 22-minute version of Paul Ryan’s excellent 1969 documentary, “Ski Racing,” which uses bold editing and FM radio rock to help profile that era’s world-class downhill racers. One of the pros included is Vladimir “Spider” Sabich who would die horribly in 1976 in an infamous crime.
From the 1974 Sports Illustrated article, “The Spider Who Finally Came In From The Cold“:
In selling the tour, the sales pitch is not pegged strictly to exciting races and the crack skiers but also to its colorful personalities. There is Sabich, who flies, races motorcycles and figures that a night in which he hasn’t danced on at least one tabletop is a night wasted. Jim Lillstrom, Beattie’s P.R. man, also enjoys checking off some of the other characters.Norway’s Terje Overland is known as the Aquavit Kid for the boisterous postvictory celebrations he has thrown. He’s also been known to pitch over a fully laden restaurant table when the spirits have so moved him. Then there is the poet, Duncan Cullman, of Twin Mountain, N.H., author of The Selected Heavies of Duncan Duck, published at his own expense, who used to travel the tour with a gargantuan, bearded manservant. And Sepp Staffler, a popular Austrian, who plays guitar and sitar and performs nightly at different lounges in Great Gorge, N.J. when he isn’t competing. The ski tour also has its very own George Blanda. That would be blond, wispy Anderl Molterer, the 40-year-old Austrian, long a world class racer and still competitive.
Pro skiing’s immediate success, however, seems to depend on an authentic rivalry building up between Sabich and [Billy] Kidd, who are close friends but whose living styles are as diverse as snow and sand. Sabich is freewheeling on his skis as well as on tabletops. Kidd is thoughtful, earnest, a perfectionist. Spider has his flying, his motorcycles and drives a Porsche 911-E. Billy paints and now drives a Volvo station wagon. Spider enjoys the man-to-man challenge of the pro circuit. Billy harbors some inner doubts regarding his ability to adapt to it.•
Tags: Paul Ryan, Spider Sabich, Vladimir Sabich
From the October 5, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“Atlanta, Ga.–During a performance at a local theater the subject of hypnotism imagined he was a monkey. He grabbed a hat off a man in the audience and bit a piece out of it.”
From “What Facebook Knows,” Tom Simonite’s interesting MIT Technology Review article about the myriad of unexpected ways that the voluminous data Zuckerberg and friends have collected allows the social network to do social science:
“One of [Cameron] Marlow’s researchers has developed a way to calculate a country’s ‘gross national happiness’ from its Facebook activity by logging the occurrence of words and phrases that signal positive or negative emotion. Gross national happiness fluctuates in a way that suggests the measure is accurate: it jumps during holidays and dips when popular public figures die. After a major earthquake in Chile in February 2010, the country’s score plummeted and took many months to return to normal. That event seemed to make the country as a whole more sympathetic when Japan suffered its own big earthquake and subsequent tsunami in March 2011; while Chile’s gross national happiness dipped, the figure didn’t waver in any other countries tracked (Japan wasn’t among them). Adam Kramer, who created the index, says he intended it to show that Facebook’s data could provide cheap and accurate ways to track social trends—methods that could be useful to economists and other researchers.”
Tags: Cameron Marlow, Tom Simonite
Jonathan Rauch, that introvert, writing in 2001 for the Atlantic about old and new economies becoming acquainted:
“Although at this point no one can prove anything, a story that seems plausible to many economists and business executives goes like this: In the 1980s Old Economy businesses tended to waste much of what they spent on computers and software. Companies in traditional industries would drop a PC on every desk and declare themselves computerized; they would buy spreadsheet programs and word-processing software and networking equipment that as often as not just substituted new frustrations for old ones. This began to change, however, as software and hardware grew in power, and as companies began learning how to use them not just as conveniences or crutches but to change the nature of the job. At first the impact, like a misty drizzle, was too small to show up in the national economic statistics. However, each innovation enabled other innovations, none of them revolutionary but all of them combining in an accelerating cascade. By the second half of the 1990s the aggregate effect on productivity became large enough to register in the national accounts, and the line between the New Economy and the Old Economy began to blur. That is the story of the New Old Economy.”
Tags: Jonathan Rauch
If you need a little extra money to help you out in this rough economy and you are willing to cut some length off your hair or even some that was cut recently but want some cash for . the hair that is cut off is used for wigs , dolls or extensions. so depending on what length you are willing to cut off the fee you would get is based upon the current length, your color, the thickness of your hair and also the condition that it presently in. so if you can take a picture or send me a description i can give you a estimated guess of what kind of money you can earn.
A couple of brief passages from an Ask Me Anything on Reddit with a former Olive Garden employee. Mostly sex and vomit, as you might expect.
•••••••••••
A: If family means everyone has sex with each other then, yes.
A: Seriously though, everyone is having sex with everyone.
Gordon Moore didn’t publish his Law until 1965, so you can forgive U.S. space research bigwig J. Gordon Baethe for underestimating how quickly we would take ourselves from atmosphere to stratosphere, when he was interviewed in 1954 on Longines Chronoscope. As usual, that Nazi Wernher von Braun was the more accurate prognosticator.
Tags: Gordon Moore, J. Gordon Baethe
From Timothy Noah’s new Browser interview, in which the journalist speaks to America’s growing income disparity:
“If you compare consumption today to consumption 60 years ago there are differences. What you will find, broadly speaking, is that the big things are more expensive and the little things are less expensive. Cars are more expensive – they may be safer but they’re more expensive. Houses are more expensive – they’re bigger but they’re more expensive. Healthcare is more expensive – more people’s diseases are cured but it’s more expensive. College education is more expensive – and I don’t think you can make the case that college education is improved in any way compared to 50 or 60 years ago. My guess is that, if anything, it’s probably a little bit worse over the last half century. So those big things are harder to obtain.
The little things – electronics, food and clothing – are easier to obtain. The only one of those items that you have to get on a regular basis is food. And yes, clothing is less expensive. So are TVs. But you probably buy these less frequently, so they’re less meaningful. Meanwhile you have these gigantic expenses for things that are really vital. Healthcare keeps you alive. College education makes it possible for you to achieve upward mobility. An automobile in many parts of the country is a necessity to get you to your job.”
Tags: Timothy Noah
Robert Moses wrote an Atlantic essay in 1962 in which he returned fire at his many critics just as his iron fist was losing its grip on New York City. The power broker argued, naturally, in favor of a metropolis based on automobiles and high-occupancy apartment buildings. An excerpt:
“To sum up, let me ask the Gamaliels of the city a few pointed questions.
By what practical and acceptable means would they limit the growth of population?
How would they reduce the output of cars, and if they could, what would take the place of the car as an employer of workers or as a means of transport in a motorized civilization?
If more cars are inevitable, must there not be roads for them to run on? If so, they must be built somewhere, and built in accordance with modern design. Where? This is a motor age, and the motorcar spells mobility.
Is the present distinction between parkways, landscaped limited-access expressways, boulevards, ordinary highways, and city streets unscientific? If so, what do the critics propose as a substitute?
Is mass commuter railroad transportation the sole and entire answer to urban street congestion? Is conflict between rubber and rails in fact irrepressible? Are there not practical combinations of public, quasi-public, and private financing which can solve the riddle? And what of the people who prefer cars and car pools and find them more comfortable, faster, and even cheaper than rails?
If a family likes present city life, should it be forced to live according to avant-garde architectural formulas? Do most professional planners in fact know what people think and want? The incredible affection of slum dwellers for the old neighborhood and their stubborn unwillingness to move are the despair of experts. The forensic medicine men who perform the autopsies on cities condemn these uncooperative families to hell and imply that they could be transplanted painlessly to New Delhi, Canberra, Brasilia, and Utopia. We do not smoke such opium. We have to livewith our problems.
Is it a mark of genius to exhibit lofty indifference to population growth, contempt for invested capital, budgets, and taxes; to be oblivious to the need of the average citizen to make a living and to his preferences, immediate concerns, and troubles?
What do the critics of cities offer as a substitute for the highly taxed central city core which supports the surrounding, quieter, less densely settled, and less exploited segments of the municipal pie? Have they an alternative to real-estate taxes?
Pending responsible answers to these questions, those of us who have work to do and obstacles to overcome, who cannot hide in ivory towers writing encyclopedic theses, whose usefulness is measured by results, must carry on.”
••••••••••
A rarely shown 1953 interview with Moses on the Longines Chronoscope:
Tags: Robert Moses
A scene from Slacker, 1991, as virtual reality began becoming preferable to reality, and the show was only getting started.
"When Swansen brought the salt, a moment later, the man was dead."
A self-medicating man with an odd taste for tinctures did himself no good in a saloon according to this article in the October 27, 1902 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“A poorly dressed man, apparently about 35 years of age, entered Harry Kennedy’s saloon, at 184 Park Row, Manhattan, shortly, before 6 o’clock this morning and asked the bartender, William Swansen, to give him a pinch of salt.
‘What do you want with salt?’ asked the bartender, surprised by the request.
‘I have a hemorrhage,’ replied the man, at the same time spitting a quantity of blood on the floor. Swansen went to one end of the bar to get some salt and the stranger staggered into the back room and sank into a chair. When Swansen brought the salt, a moment later, the man was dead.
The dead man was five feet nine inches in height, had brown hair, gray eyes and a smooth face. He weighed about 150 pounds. He wore a blue shirt, striped coat and trousers, brown stockings and laced shoes. The body will be removed to the Morgue.”
Tags: Harry Kennedy, Henry James, William Swansen
From the Economist, a passage in which the recent meme (and hoax) the TacoCopter is used to illustrate why cheap tech like drones might allow innovators to overcome the increasing burden of knowledge:
“That’s another reason the burden of knowledge issue is less of a concern to me than it may be to others. Advancement of the scientific frontier is growing more difficult. Yet deployment of existing technologies to more productive ends may well be growing easier. Consider the tacocopter. The tacocopter is a not-quite-real-not-quite-a-joke business idea that became a brief internet sensation back in March. The concept is stunningly simple: order tacos on your iPhone and a quadracopter drone will deliver them to your doorstep. As you can read here, the plan would face technical and (especially) regulatory hurdles if implemented today. Yet the potential, for this or similar experiments, is obvious. Cheap, agile drone technology is available now. Building apps is trivially easy. Mapping and location technology and data are getting better all the time. If not drone copters, perhaps 3D printers or autonomous vehicles. It’s a short leap from the ridiculous to the transformative. And the ideas needed to transfer these technologies to everyday life are increasingly the domain of entrepreneurs rather than academics. One doesn’t need 20 years of study to spot profit opportunities.”
I poked fun at Lebron James a couple years back after his ridiculous Decision program, when he announced on live television that he’d be “bringing his talents to South Beach,” but even a Knicks fan like myself can be awed by him. And I don’t just mean the way he plays the game. Here was a guy born with tremendous talent, yes, but born also into a place and situation where so many things could have gone wrong. Instead, despite being the American sports fan’s best frenemy, he’s turned out tremendously on and off the court.
At Grantland, Bill Simmons and Malcolm Gladwell discuss, among many things, an astute comment that Shane Battier made offhandedly about James. That comment:
“He sneezes and it’s a trending topic on Twitter. He is a fascinating study because he’s really the first and most seminal sports figure in the information age, where everything he does is reported and dissected and second-guessed many times over and he handles everything with an amazing grace and patience that I don’t know if other superstars from other areas would have been able to handle.”
Tags: Bill Simmons, Lebron James, Malcolm Gladwell, Shane Battier
George Carlin, in one of his most famous bits, decrying the “soft language” that proliferated in America in the second half of last century, as advertising execs and marketing gurus infiltrated every aspect of life, from corporations to politics to the military.
Tags: George Carlin
The opening of a 2003 interview the Harvard Review of Philosophy conducted with the moral philosopher Philippa Foot, who introduced her famed Trolley Problem in 1967:
“HRP: At the beginning of Natural Goodness, you recall an intervention of Wittgenstein’s at a seminar at which a speaker realized that what he was about to say was, though seductive, clearly ridiculous. The speaker was trying to hit on something more sensible, and Wittgenstein said: ‘No. Say what you want to say! Be crude, and then we shall get on.’ Why do you think this is good advice for philosophers?
Philippa Foot: I begin Natural Goodness with this remark, since I have found it excellent advice. Whenever I find myself tempted to pass over a weird thought, I try to do the opposite, and give this thought its day in court. So I advise people to stick with their seductive but really ridiculous thoughts, because one may well strike gold just there.”
••••••••••
See also:
Tags: Judith Jarvis Thompson, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philippa Foot
anyone know where a stripper that went by the name of Britney who worked in SHOWWORLD for many years in Babylon is working now !!
Bruce Sterling’s thoughtful New York Times homage to Ray Bradbury reminded me that the recently deceased sci-fi author wrote his greatest work, Fahrenheit 451, on a coin-operated typewriter. The machine, invented in 1938 by Martin Tytell, was located in train stations and hotel lobbies and cost a couple of dimes an hour. From Tytell’s 2008 Economist obituary:
“His love affair had begun as a schoolboy, with an Underwood Five. It lay uncovered on a teacher’s desk, curved and sleek, the typebars modestly contained but the chrome lever gleaming. He took it gently apart, as far as he could fillet 3,200 pieces with his pocket tool, and each time attempted to get further. A repair man gave him lessons, until he was in demand all across New York. When he met his wife Pearl later, it was over typewriters. She wanted a Royal for her office; he persuaded her into a Remington, and then marriage. Pearl made another doctorly and expert presence in the shop, hovering behind the overflowing shelves where the convalescents slept in plastic shrouds.
Mr. Tytell could customise typewriters in all kinds of ways. He re-engineered them for the war-disabled and for railway stations, taking ten cents in the slot. With a nifty solder-gun and his small engraving lathe he could make an American typewriter speak 145 different tongues, from Russian to Homeric Greek. An idle gear, picked up for 45 cents on Canal Street, allowed him to make reverse carriages for right-to-left Arabic and Hebrew. He managed hieroglyphs, musical notation and the first cursive font, for Mamie Eisenhower, who had tired of writing out White House invitations.”
Read also:
Tags: Bruce Sterling, Martin Tytell
Amusing 1964 short about the building of the Unisphere for the 1964 World’s Fair in Flushing, Queens. Robert Moses is front and center, of course, with an appearance by Gustave Eiffel’s grandson.
Tags: Gustave Eiffel, Robert Moses