Noël Coward (three years before his death), Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne visit Dick Cavett, 1970.
Tags: Alfred Lunt, Dick Cavett, Lynn Fontanne, Noel Coward
It would make sense that the lingua franca becomes simpler and flatter as people communicate more widely, as they need to find common ground with others from a variety of backgrounds and locations. And what has spellcheck, texting, etc. wrought for language? From Charles Choi at Discovery:
“The investigators found words began dying more often in the past 10 to 20 years than they had in all the time measured before. At the same time, they discovered languages were seeing fewer entirely new words emerging. They suggest that automatic spell-checkers may be partly responsible, killing misspelled or unusual counterparts of accepted words before they see print.”
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Speaking Ubbi Dubbi, back when pencils were still in use:
Tags: Charles Choi
Collecting will change over time but never vanish. People, to varying degrees, need to own stuff. But technology has had a profound effect on the nature of collecting, reducing its tactile nature, making trash of artifacts. From USA Today:
“Spencer Haley, 33, who works at fabled Powell’s Books in Portland, Ore., once proudly displayed 3,000 hardcovers in his home. But since a Kindle joined the family, he and his wife are down to a few hundred. ‘As long as the content hits my visual cortex, it doesn’t matter what form it comes in,’ he says.
For Haley, collecting still means adding to those prized first-editions on his shelves. But it also refers to the list of e-books on his tablet, the book reviews he has amassed online and the friends who follow his recommendations via social networking.
‘I missed flipping pages for about a day,’ Haley says. ‘I don’t have CD or DVD racks anymore. Having things stored in the cloud just fits my lifestyle.'”
Tags: Spencer Haley
"Daisey's provocations probably will help improve working conditions, but the methods are still unacceptable." (Image by Steve Jurvetson.)
More major fallout from the Mike Daisey-This American Life collaboration, in which the NPR show presented a large segment from his theater piece, The Agony and the Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, which decries the horrid working conditions at the Foxconn tech-manufacturing complex in China. Ira Glass and company have retracted the story, saying that Daisey’s reportage doesn’t check out, and the monologist himself has acknowledged that he misrepresented interviews. Daisey has defended misleading people, saying his only mistake was in allowing a theater piece to be broadcast as journalism. But the problems run deeper than that. When someone presents an unadorned monologue, gives no hint of artifice, and poses as a reporter who’s done leg work and interviews, expectations of veracity, even in a theater setting, are different.
The upshot is that there are major problems at Foxconn factories and Daisey’s provocations probably will help improve working conditions, but the methods are still unacceptable. Daisey is a major talent, but he can’t just play reporter and then walk away from it when the label becomes inconvenient. He needs to rethink his process.•
Tags: Ira Glass, Mike Daisey
The Skin I Live In
Our largest organ is both home and prison, protecting and exposing us, even stretching and shaping identity and world view. Without a shred of gray matter, skin plays a central role in forming the way we think, as responses we get from others based on our outward appearance–attractiveness, color, gender–can train us to be someone we may not want to be. Two great films about the importance of skin and self, Georges Franju’s Eyes Without a Face and Hiroshi Teshigahara’s Face of Another, both focus on what’s above the neck. But Pedro Almodóvar, with his designer’s eye and philosopher’s mind, audaciously extends the odd and vital subgenre beneath the chin and below the belt.
Dr. Robert Ledgard (Antonio Banderas) is a brilliant plastic surgeon, pushing the boundaries of his field, but life has toyed with him. As we learn, both his wife and daughter have committed suicide after horrific incidents. Ledgard, haunted and gaunt, has felt too much pain and now can only possess, not love. Kept prisoner in a room in his sprawling estate is a mysterious petite woman (Elena Anaya) in a form-fitting body suit. When he isn’t grafting onto her body an indestructible, synthetic second skin he’s developed, the demented doctor watches her on a large-screen TV, plotting his next move.
But who is this woman and why has Ledgard chosen her for such heinous experimentation? Was she a very different person when the surgeries began? And who will she end up being, both inside and out, as the surgeon continues his incisions and sutures? Almodóvar answers some questions but not all in this probing, sinister study of the flesh, which not only covers us but sometimes smothers us.• Watch trailer.
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Recent films I liked now on home video:
Tags: Pedro Almodóvar
Self-help books are usually so much slop, but I’m not opposed to them provided they’re not injurious–maybe some morsel of enlightenment will reach someone. Perhaps it will be a lesson that seems obvious to some, but different people have different blind spots. And before the Internet and its overflow of information recently arrived, there was a real dearth of accessible knowledge.
Cosmetic surgeon/self-help guru Maxwell Maltz’s 1960 book, Psycho-Cybernetics: A New Way To Get More Living Out of Life, was power-of-positive-thinking hooey, although it was important that the doctor stressed that getting noses altered or butts lifted wouldn’t necessarily improve anyone’s self-image.
An ur-infomercial for Psycho-Cybernetics:
Tags: Maxwell Maltz
"I will split the profit with U if I find a Mona Lisa painting."
GARBAGE PICKER (FREEPORT)
Hi my name is Wayne. Am a proud garbage picker. I snif through peoples garbage like a police dog on the job trying to find something valuable. One day I hope to strike it rich; I dream of the days when I am on my privite yat with pretty women around me rubin me down with baby oil or flying on my private jet around the world counting my money all year long stocking it up with a fork lift, hire ing security guards to whatch it, and so on. However before I can do this I need to find something valuable. I’ve found a few things but the problem is that I don’t know whats valuable and whats literally garbage. Am hopeing to hit the jack pot one day but I need the help of an apraisal some one who lives in Long Island Nassau County willing to give free service. I promis I will split the profit with U if I find a Mona Lisa painting. God nkows am getting tired of this 9 TO 5 crop. Its just not working. I have no money to count barely enough to spend. Call WAYNE if you want to help. A got a Elvist picture to praise. Hope its worth a hundred Gs. I could practice eating caviar with that kind of cash.
Tags: Wayne
In the early days of autos there were more electric cars (and steam ones, for that matter) than gas-powered cars. But fossil fuels became predominant, so how do you unlearn what’s been learned, turning away from so much familiar infrastructure? Shifting to electric cars would be a much more attractive proposition if the vehicles were automatically recharged by coils embedded in the road. From Jon Stewart at BBC:
“Engineers in his lab are developing a way to wirelessly charge electric cars from magnetic coils embedded into the road. The car would pick up the power via another coil, meaning – in theory – that you would never have to make a charging stop again.
The system works using a technique called ‘magnetic resonance coupling.’ You can think about resonance as the phenomenon that allows an opera singer to smash a glass using only the power of their voice. In that case, when the singer hits a note that has the same resonant frequency as the glass, they couple and energy begins to build up in the glass, eventually causing it to smash.
Instead of using acoustic resonance, the Stanford team use the resonance of electromagnetic waves. A coil in the road that is connected to a power line is made to vibrate with the same resonance frequency as the coil on the bottom of the car, allowing energy to flow between them.”
"America’s problem isn’t a breakdown in private morality." (Image by Gage Skidmore.)
From Robert Reich’s sober assessment of election year moralizing of condom-condemning Republicans:
“But America’s problem isn’t a breakdown in private morality. It’s a breakdown in public morality. What Americans do in their bedrooms is their own business. What corporate executives and Wall Street financiers do in boardrooms and executive suites affects all of us.
There is moral rot in America but it’s not found in the private behavior of ordinary people. It’s located in the public behavior of people who control our economy and are turning our democracy into a financial slush pump. It’s found in Wall Street fraud, exorbitant pay of top executives, financial conflicts of interest, insider trading, and the outright bribery of public officials through unlimited campaign ‘donations.’
Political scientist James Q. Wilson, who died last week, noted that a broken window left unattended signals that no one cares if windows are broken. It becomes an ongoing invitation to throw more stones at more windows, ultimately undermining moral standards of the entire community
The windows Wall Street broke in the years leading up to the crash of 2008 remain broken. Despite financial fraud on a scale not seen in this country for more than eighty years, not a single executive of a major Wall Street bank has been charged with a crime.” (Thanks Browser.)
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Robert Reich, buddy cop:
Tags: Robert Reich
The Carpenters perform for President Nixon at the White House, May of 1973, fifteen months before he resigned.
The opening of John Brockman’s Edge essay about influential if eccentric evolutionary theorist Robert Trivers, which reads like a hallucination:
“Thirty years ago, Robert Trivers disappeared.
My connection to him is goes back to the 1970s. He had left Harvard and was roaming around Santa Cruz when I was introduced to him in a telephone call by our mutual friend Huey P. Newton, Chairman of The Black Panther Party. Huey put Robert on the phone and we had a conversation in which he introduced me to his ideas. I recall noting at the time the power and energy of his intellect. Huey, excited by Robert’s ideas on deceit and self-deception, was eager for the three of us to get together.
We never had the meeting. Huey met a very bad end. I lost track of Robert. Over the years there were rumors about a series of breakdowns; he was in Jamaica; in jail.
He fell off the map.
But during his thirty year disappearance, the influence of his ideas has grown and transcended the purely scientific arena. And through all his ups and downs, he never stopped working on his theories.”
Tags: John Brockman, Robert Trivers
Predictions about 2003 tech from an AT&T film made a dozen years earlier.
"The apparent death, however, was only a trance, or protracted swoon."
From “Fatal Experiment with Chloroform,” a story in an 1848 edition of the New York True Sun which is almost certainly false:
“A young lady, daughter of Mr. Macdonald, a baker in Catharine Street, in this city, recently met her death in the most awful manner, from the use of the now fashionable but most dangerous preparation. About three weeks ago, the ether was employed to allay a toothache; but subsequently the sufferer was supposed to die, from what cause does not appear. The apparent death, however, was only a trance, or protracted swoon; for, on opening the coffin a day or two ago, the unfortunate girl had turned round upon her face, and in her agony and desperation had actually destroyed two of her fingers, on recovering from temporary death by ether. The Coroner’s investigation should elicit the fact as to who prescribed a remedy which produced this most frightful result.”
Our ability to project our emotions onto computer code makes video games possible. From “Creating the Illusion of Emotion, or Why You Care About Ones and Zeroes,” by Brian Crecente in the Vancouver Sun:
“David Mark, president of AI design consultant Intrinsic Algorithm, spent about half an hour last week walking game developers through what he called the psychology of artificial intelligence. He used to time to give the game-makers tips on how to make gamers feel like they’re in a world populated by real people instead of digital automatons.
The key, he said, is to find a way to get gamers to project their own emotions and psychology onto the game’s characters.
‘In the absence of defining information people project what they believe should be there,’ he said.
To prove his point, Mark showed the Heider-Simmel demonstration, an animated video created by psychologists Fritz Heider and Mary-Ann Simmel in the 1940s to explore the ‘attribution of causality.’
The short video shows two animated triangles, an animated circle and a box. There was no audio, just the crude line drawings moving around. After showing the video he said that most viewers saw the video as a couple and a bully; or a mother, a child and a bad guy; or a father and a couple. Each viewer created their own, sometimes elaborate back story for the simple drawings.
‘It’s really just two triangles, a circle and some lines,’ Mark pointed out.
In the absence of information, viewers created their own fiction, their own emotional attachments. But movement and positioning, he added, does help shape context.”
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Heider-Simmel Demonstration, an experimental study of apparent behavior:
Tags: Brian Crecente, David Mark, Fritz Heider, Mary-Ann Simmel
From “A Voyage to the Sun,” a really nice piece of writing from 1999 by Michael Paterniti in Esquire, about extreme science in the New Mexico desert:
“See, the Machine is not like other machines. It’s not a Saab with heated leather seats and a refrigerated glove compartment. It demands security clearance. It demands care and reverence. And if you’re Chinese–or if you’re a Toblerone-loving Swiss, for that matter–you can’t come here. You can’t get past the armed guard at the front gate or the second gate at Area IV or the concertina wire or the ID-activated, secret-combination metal doors to the hangar-sized sandstone building where the Machine lives.
And the people here, Jimmy Potter and his tech crew and the array makers and the laser technicians and the classified team of scientists burrowing in the Habitrail of their own minds for some small epiphany, for some shred of insight into the Machine–the whole lot of them numbering maybe 130–they bring their love, their dizzy, stupid, human love, and their vanity and ambition and dreams, and all of it gets shot into the Machine. Envy, greed, betrayal . . . shot into the Machine. Glory, honor, brilliance . . . shot in. Some shoot in their god, too.
It begins with the simple flip of a cyber switch in a control room at the north end of the hangar. Before a bank of computer screens, a man clicks a mouse, and then electricity, quietly sucked right off the municipal power grid in Albuquerque, floods into the outer ring of Marx generators. Which is when the Machine takes control. A siren sounds, red lights flash, doors automatically lock. The frogmen and the white and blue jumpsuits clamber over the high bay, down the metal steps, and retreat to a copper-coated room behind a foot of cement.
Another switch is flipped, another mouse clicked. To the piercing sound of an alarm, a countdown in the Marx generators ensues, or rather a count up, in kilovolts. Comes in a monotone, almost hollow voice beneath the frantic alarm. The man in the control room on a tinny loudspeaker, the Machine speaking through the human.
‘Twenty kV. . . .’
‘Thirty kV. . . .’
‘Forty kV. . . .'” (Thanks TETW.)
Tags: Michael Paterniti
If driverless cars can communicate with one another at all times, brake pedals have diminshed utility. From IEEE Spectrum: “It’s not just the sensor-driven skills that will soon be common to individual cars that will shape the future of automotive transportation, but also the ability for cars to communicate with each other, sharing constant updates about exactly where they are and where they’re going. And with enough detailed information being shared at a fast enough pace between all vehicles on the road, things like traffic lights become completely redundant.”
"Usama bin Laden."
Conspiracy Theories (Earth.)
God and stories of the Bible.
Secret Military prisons and camps.
Area 51, Aliens and aircraft.
Bigfoot, Yeti, Loch ness.
Bermuda Triangle ect ect ect.
9/11, Death of Usama Bin Laden, JFK, Lincoln.
So, what do you all think of these things? could they be much deeper in detail than what we already know??
Let me know your thoughts.
An image of glorious ruins from the 1911 "Encyclopaedia Britannica" edition.
I actually didn’t realize the Encyclopaedia Britannica was still publishing a print version, but that anachronism is no more. From Computerworld:
“After 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica will cease publishing its flagship encyclopedia and concentrate on its digital offerings.
“We’d like to think our tradition is not to print, but to bring scholarly knowledge to the people,” said Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopaedia Britannica.
Britannica has printed the encyclopedia, which now runs to 32 volumes in length, since 1768. The 2010 edition was the last edition the company published. It has decided not to print what would be the 2012 edition, which would have been out by the end of the year. The company has about 4,000 sets of the 2010 edition still available for sale. Overall about 2 million sets have been printed through the entire run of the encyclopedia.
Britannica’s move to stop printing encyclopedias is a telling moment in this point in history, when print is being superseded by websites and network-connected applications.”
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Richard Feynman in 1959: “Why can’t we write the entire 24 volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica on the head of a pin?”
An early expression of globalization, from a speech in Network, 1976.
“You have meddled with the primal forces of nature, Mr. Beale, and I won’t have it! Is that clear? You think you’ve merely stopped a business deal. That is not the case! The Arabs have taken billions of dollars out of this country, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance! You are an old man who thinks in terms of nations and peoples. There are no nations. There are no peoples. There are no Russians. There are no Arabs. There are no third worlds. There is no West. There is only one holistic system of systems, one vast and immane, interwoven, interacting, multivariate, multinational dominion of dollars. Petro-dollars, electro-dollars, multi-dollars, reichmarks, rins, rubles, pounds, and shekels. It is the international system of currency which determines the totality of life on this planet. That is the natural order of things today. That is the atomic and subatomic and galactic structure of things today! And YOU have meddled with the primal forces of nature, and YOU… WILL… ATONE! Am I getting through to you, Mr. Beale? You get up on your little twenty-one inch screen and howl about America and democracy. There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM, and ITT, and AT&T, and DuPont, Dow, Union Carbide, and Exxon. Those are the nations of the world today. What do you think the Russians talk about in their councils of state, Karl Marx? They get out their linear programming charts, statistical decision theories, minimax solutions, and compute the price-cost probabilities of their transactions and investments, just like we do. We no longer live in a world of nations and ideologies, Mr. Beale. The world is a college of corporations, inexorably determined by the immutable bylaws of business. The world is a business, Mr. Beale. It has been since man crawled out of the slime. And our children will live, Mr. Beale, to see that… perfect world… in which there’s no war or famine, oppression or brutality. One vast and ecumenical holding company, for whom all men will work to serve a common profit, in which all men will hold a share of stock. All necessities provided, all anxieties tranquilized, all boredom amused.”
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Siskel (with mustache!) and Ebert praise their “favorite Christmas picture”:
"Thirty years ago, almost all of contemporary Dubai was desert." (Image by Titoni Thomas.)
From “The Dark Side of Dubai,” Johann Hari’s excellent 2009 Independent article, a tidy telling of the city state’s birth and amazing growth spurt:
“Thirty years ago, almost all of contemporary Dubai was desert, inhabited only by cactuses and tumbleweed and scorpions. But downtown there are traces of the town that once was, buried amidst the metal and glass. In the dusty fort of the Dubai Museum, a sanitised version of this story is told.
In the mid-18th century, a small village was built here, in the lower Persian Gulf, where people would dive for pearls off the coast. It soon began to accumulate a cosmopolitan population washing up from Persia, the Indian subcontinent, and other Arab countries, all hoping to make their fortune. They named it after a local locust, the daba, who consumed everything before it. The town was soon seized by the gunships of the British Empire, who held it by the throat as late as 1971. As they scuttled away, Dubai decided to ally with the six surrounding states and make up the United Arab Emirates (UAE).
The British quit, exhausted, just as oil was being discovered, and the sheikhs who suddenly found themselves in charge faced a remarkable dilemma. They were largely illiterate nomads who spent their lives driving camels through the desert – yet now they had a vast pot of gold. What should they do with it?
Dubai only had a dribble of oil compared to neighbouring Abu Dhabi – so Sheikh Maktoum decided to use the revenues to build something that would last. Israel used to boast it made the desert bloom; Sheikh Maktoum resolved to make the desert boom.” (Thanks TETW.)
Tags: Johann Hari
William F. Buckley, Jr. and Tom Wolfe (prior to lifetime confinement to white suits) discuss modern architecture in 1981.
Tags: Tom Wolfe, William F. Buckley
If I had to bet on one aspect of our lives about to change drastically, I would go with batteries. Whether or not Apple is really working on hydrogen batteries as whispers sometimes suggest, I think the term “long-life” is about to change significantly for the better. And products and processors will be made to require less and less juice, adding to the efficiency. No longer will we be tethered to a wall. From Leo Kelion of BBC News:
“Arm Holdings has unveiled what it describes as the ‘world’s most energy-efficient microprocessor’ design.
The firm says that microcontrollers based on the ‘Flycatcher’ architecture will pave the way for the ‘internet of things’- the spread of the net to a wider range of devices.
It suggests that fridges and other white goods, medical equipment, energy meters, and home and office lighting will all benefit from the innovation.
Two firms have licensed the technology.
They are NXP Semiconductors and Freescale.
‘It opens up all devices to the potential of being connected all the time,’ Freescale’s Geoff Lees told the BBC.
‘It’s allowing us to provide connectivity everywhere. So anything from consumer appliances, MP3-music audio docks, kitchen equipment with displays right through to remote sensors in rain monitoring equipment or personal medical devices – an area where ultra-long battery life allied to high performance and safety is becoming more and more important.'”
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“Oy!”:
Tags: Leo Kelion
"Some stores and brands are embracing the change." (Image by Thomas Edwards,)
I’m not a materialistic person, but I would rather go to a good store than a good museum. Both are commenting on the world right now–even an exhibition of antiquities is interesting to us at this moment for some reason–but I think retail outlets with well-designed products are more stimulating, communicating more directly to us about who we are, for better or worse.
Question: Are there shops that have an app that allow you to use your smartphone to scan any item’s tag and get info and videos about products on your phone? I haven’t seen it yet, but my guess is “yes” or they will soon exist. From Stephanie Clifford’s recent New York Times article about modern shopping:
“For a generation of shoppers raised on Google and e-commerce, the answer to ‘Can I help you?’ is increasingly a firm ‘no,’ even at retailers like Nordstrom that have built their reputations around customer service.
But instead of getting defensive, some stores and brands are embracing the change by creating new personal touches that feature gadgets rather than a doting sales staff. Bobbi Brown has touch-screen televisions to demonstrate the perfect smoky eye, something that was once the exclusive domain of makeup artists. The basketball star LeBron James’s shoe store in Miami has 50 iPads to describe its merchandise. Macy’s is testing cosmetics stations where tablets offer reviews and tips. And at C. Wonder, shoppers use a touchpad to personalize the lighting and music in dressing rooms (there is also a button in case, olden-days style, they need to call for help).
The self-service theme, which started years ago with checkout at groceries, has progressed to the point where shoppers can navigate entire stores without once having to say, ‘Just looking, thanks.'”
Tags: Stephanie Clifford
Marshall McLuhan deconstructs a go-go bar, fucking ruining it for everyone.
Tags: Marshall McLuhan
B.F. Skinner, the famed Behaviorist who plays a central role in one of my favorite New Yorker articles, Calvin Trillin’s “The Chicken Vanishes” (subscription required), is responsible for this 1954 video about his pre-personal computer Teaching Machine, which provided automated instruction.
Tags: B.F. Skinner, Calvin Trillin