Ideas and technology and politics and journalism and history and humor and some other stuff.
Philo T. Farnsworth, the Utah-born whiz kid who was hugely responsible for the creation of television, appearing on the medium he helped birth, on I’ve Got a Secret, in 1957. It may seem odd that someone who did something so monumental could appear to be anonymous on the show, but Farnsworth wasn’t widely known for his invention during his life. Even though the architecture of the medium has morphed wildly in the last two decades, we still watch his magic picture box in one form or another.
Tags: Philo T. Farnsworth
Project Nim
There was a time when it seemed a wise idea to raise a chimpanzee in a Manhattan brownstone, let it live exclusively among humans, get it press in glossy magazines and dress it in leisure suits. That era was called the 1970s.
In that disco-fabulous decade, in an age when many academics reflexively distrusted convention, New York City professor Herbert Terrace hatched an unorthodox experiment in which a newborn chimp named Nim was placed in the Upper West Side home of one of his students and treated like a human baby. And that was just the start of the Me Decade narcissism.
Nim was taught an exceptional amount of sign language in his unnatural setting–the study ostensibly centered on human-simian communication–but when the chimp reached age five and grew too aggressive for fun outfits and photo-ops, Terrace cut bait on the project and sent his subject back to his original owners to be warehoused with primates he could no longer assimilate with. The exiled chimp spent years shunted from handler to handler, some crueler than others, at the mercy of fate, enduring a heartbreaking journey à la Bresson’s Balthazar.
Having previously made Man on Wire, another film about life at an extreme, documentarian James Marsh is clearly the creative descendant of Errol Morris and Werner Herzog, though not yet as bold a visionary as either. His reserve is fine, however, as long as his topics are larger than life, like this one about a creature nurtured into a state neither man nor beast, just so that we could enjoy seeing yet another reflection of ourselves, though what stared back lacked all beauty. Watch trailer.
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More recent films I liked now on home video:
Tags: Herbert Terrace, James Marsh
"Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas." (Image by Hannes Grobe.)
From “What Defines a Meme?” James Gleick’s great 2011 Smithsonian article, a section about French scientist Jacques Monod’s prescient, pre-PC ideas about the organic spread of information:
“Jacques Monod, the Parisian biologist who shared a Nobel Prize in 1965 for working out the role of messenger RNA in the transfer of genetic information, proposed an analogy: just as the biosphere stands above the world of nonliving matter, so an ‘abstract kingdom’ rises above the biosphere. The denizens of this kingdom? Ideas.
‘Ideas have retained some of the properties of organisms,’ he wrote. ‘Like them, they tend to perpetuate their structure and to breed; they too can fuse, recombine, segregate their content; indeed they too can evolve, and in this evolution selection must surely play an important role.’
Ideas have ‘spreading power,’ he noted—’infectivity, as it were’—and some more than others. An example of an infectious idea might be a religious ideology that gains sway over a large group of people. The American neurophysiologist Roger Sperry had put forward a similar notion several years earlier, arguing that ideas are ‘just as real’ as the neurons they inhabit. Ideas have power, he said:
Ideas cause ideas and help evolve new ideas. They interact with each other and with other mental forces in the same brain, in neighboring brains, and thanks to global communication, in far distant, foreign brains. And they also interact with the external surroundings to produce in toto a burstwise advance in evolution that is far beyond anything to hit the evolutionary scene yet.” (Thanks TETW.)
Tags: Jacques Monod, James Gleick
A TED Talk “from the future,” courtesy of Ridley Scott.
Tags: Ridley Scott.
The opening of “He Said He Wouldn’t Mind Dying–If,” Myrlie Evers’ eloquent 1963 essay in Life, about the assassination of her husband, civil rights leader Medgar Evers:
“We all knew the danger was increasing. Threats came daily, cruel and cold and constant, against us and the children. But we had lived with this hatred for years and we did not let it corrode us.
Medgar was a happy man with a rich smile and a warmth that touched many people. He was never too busy to listen or too tired to to help. But beneath that gentle sympathy lay strength that could not be intimidated. Lord knows, enough people tried. But it never worked and that, I suppose, is why they killed him.
I don’t know what makes one man feel so passionately the needs of his people. It began for Medgar when he was a little boy in Decatur, Miss., where he was born. A family friend was lynched, and years later Medgar could still recall the shock with which he turned to his father.
‘Why did they kill him, Daddy?’ he asked.
‘Well, just because he was a colored man,’ his father said.
‘Could they kill you too?’
‘If I did anything they didn’t like, they sure could.’
Medgar never forgot that blunt statement of the facts of Negro life in Mississippi.”
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“A bullet from the back of a bush took Medgar Evers’ blood / A finger fired the trigger to his name”:
Tags: Medgar Evers, Myrlie Evers
IBM believes it’s on the brink of producing Quantum Computers, with qubits allowing basic devices to conduct millions of computations at once, realizing the 30-year-old dream of the late, great physicist Richard Feynman.
Tags: Richard Feynman
"It'll be a sacrifice." (Image by Gage Skidmore.)
It’ll be a sacrifice, but I’ll pull through it.
Soon our vital signs will be tracked continuosly and automatically, with predictive data allowing for preemptory strikes against oncoming health problems. The opening of “The Patient of the Future,” John Cohen’s excellent new MIT Technology Review article about Larry Smarr, a computer genius at the forefront of the “self-quant” movement;
“Back in 2000, when Larry Smarr left his job as head of a celebrated supercomputer center in Illinois to start a new institute at the University of California, San Diego, and the University of California, Irvine, he rarely paid attention to his bathroom scale. He regularly drank Coke, added sugar to his coffee, and enjoyed Big Mac Combo Meals with his kids at McDonald’s. Exercise consisted of an occasional hike or a ride on a stationary bike. ‘In Illinois they said, ‘We know what’s going to happen when you go out to California. You’re going to start eating organic food and get a blonde trainer and get a hot tub,’ ’ recalls Smarr, who laughed off the predictions. ‘Of course, I did all three.’
Smarr, who directs the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology in La Jolla, dropped from 205 to 184 pounds and is now a fit 63-year-old. But his transformation transcends his regular exercise program and carefully managed diet: he has become a poster man for the medical strategy of the future. Over the past decade, he has gathered as much data as he can about his body and then used that information to improve his health. And he has accomplished something that few people at the forefront of the ‘quantified self’ movement have had the opportunity to do: he helped diagnose the emergence of a chronic disease in his body.
Like many ‘self-quanters,’ Smarr wears a Fitbit to count his every step, a Zeo to track his sleep patterns, and a Polar WearLink that lets him regulate his maximum heart rate during exercise. He paid 23andMe to analyze his DNA for disease susceptibility. He regularly uses a service provided by Your Future Health to have blood and stool samples analyzed for biochemicals that most interest him. But a critical skill separates Smarr from the growing pack of digitized patients who show up at the doctor’s office with megabytes of their own biofluctuations: he has an extraordinary ability to fish signal from noise in complex data sets.” (Thanks Browser.)
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Gary Wolf with more about the Quantified Self at TED, 2010:
Tags: Gary Wolf, John Cohen, Larry Smarr
The tremendously talented–and tremendously disturbed–chess champion Bobby Fischer, who would go on to become both a king and pawn in life, appearing on I’ve Got A Secret, 1958. Dick Clark is the inquisitor.
Tags: Bobby Fischer, Dick Clark
This classic photo profiles General George A. Custer with his wife, Elizabeth, at Fort Lincoln in Dakota Territory, two years before he met his waterloo at Little Big Horn. The slaughter that Custer and his cavalry walked into in 1876 was a shocking event that reverberated throughout the country in a time before media was truly mass. Custer’s fame, which was burnished continually by his wife after his death, was also enhanced by the brewery Anheuser-Busch, which commissioned a series of large-scale paintings of the general’s last stand and hung them in saloons and theaters in states all over the nation. A story of what occurred at the foot of the canvas in Detroit from the August 7, 1891 edition of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle:
“A tall, venerable looking man stood upon the platform of the cyclorama of the battle of Big Horn yesterday afternoon and gazed long and earnestly upon the canvas. The old man was feeble, and as he leaned upon the ropes for support the hot tears coursed each other down his furrowed cheeks. The other spectators in his vicinity eyed him with a mix of sympathy and curiosity. Presently a crowd of survivors of the Sixth cavalry, which was commanded by George A. Custer during the war, came up the stairs. Just as the cyclorama lecturer began to tell in his monologue how Custer, his brothers Tom and Boston and his brother in law, Lieutenant Calhoun, had been slaughtered at Big Horn by the Sioux, the old man turned to go as though the narrative had no special interest for him, when one of the veterans, seizing his hand, exclaimed: ‘Why, old man, God bless you.’ Then, turning to his comrades, he ejaculated: ‘Boys, this is George A. Custer’s father.’ Instantly the white haired patriarch was surrounded by boys in blue, who fairly struggled for the privilege of grasping his hand.
‘I was with your son,’ said one, ‘when he made the raid out of Winchester and broke through Early’s line.’
‘I was with him in the First cavalry,’ said another, ‘when Tom, his brother, was shot in the mouth.’
‘I remember that engagement very well,’ replied the old man: ‘Tom brought the red necktie home that he wore on that day, and I’ve got it yet. The blood is on it still.’
There were tears in the eyes of many of the crowd that saw General Custer’s cavalry introducing themselves to the general ‘s venerable father. The latter is now 84 years old.”
Tags: Elizabeth Custer, George A. Custer
Andy Warhol and Bianca Jagger interviewing young Steven Spielberg, 1979.
Tags: Andy Warhol, Bianca Jagger, Steven Spielberg
Seeing the women from Bridesmaids on the Oscars broadcast last night made me think of something. Right now there are a lot of great female comedians and there are a lot of great male comedians. But if you go beyond people doing comedy professionally, women are just much funnier. Most of the women I know are hilarious. They could be doing comedy professionally if they had followed that career path. I don’t think the same is true of male friends and acquaintances. Whoever has to put up with more shit in society will naturally be funnier. If you’re not standing in the mainstream, you’re looking at the world from an angle, and that’s just a more amusing way to see things.
You don’t see a lot of female faces at the head of Fortune 500 companies or on currency, and that’s why you see so many of them on comedy and improv stages. It’s sort of like how pro basketball is dominated in America by whatever ethnic group in living in the ghetto. Before African-Americans ruled the sport, the players were mostly Jewish men. As economic power shifts, so do talents.
Of course, women were putting up with a lot of crap long before they had the opportunity to shine in comedy. And they were probably funnier then, too.
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“You feel that steam. It’s coming from my undercarriage”:
What happens if President Obama gets another term? What about if the tax code changes so “job creators” are taxed like everyone else and the number of jobs don’t decrease? What if the Affordable Care Act improves our health and doesn’t bankrupt us? What if gay marriage is legalized at the federal level and has no ill effect whatsoever on society? What if women having access to free contraception actually improves our society?
What would those things mean? Is it permanently the end of 30 years of trickle-down economics? Is it the end of Reagan Republicanism? Is the time when the Right could exploit so-called value voters over? Thanks to shifting demographics, we may find out. From “2012 Or Never,” clear-eyed analysis of the political scene by New York‘s Jonathan Chait:
“‘America is approaching a ‘tipping point’ beyond which the Nation will be unable to change course,’ announces the dark, old-timey preamble to Paul Ryan’s ‘The Roadmap Plan,’ a statement of fiscal principles that shaped the budget outline approved last spring by 98 percent of the House Republican caucus. Rick Santorum warns his audiences, ‘We are reaching a tipping point, folks, when those who pay are the minority and those who receive are the majority.’ Even such a sober figure as Mitt Romney regularly says things like ‘We are only inches away from no longer being a free economy,’ and that this election ‘could be our last chance.’
The Republican Party is in the grips of many fever dreams. But this is not one of them. To be sure, the apocalyptic ideological analysis—that ‘freedom’ is incompatible with Clinton-era tax rates and Massachusetts-style health care—is pure crazy. But the panicked strategic analysis, and the sense of urgency it gives rise to, is actually quite sound. The modern GOP—the party of Nixon, Reagan, and both Bushes—is staring down its own demographic extinction. Right-wing warnings of impending tyranny express, in hyperbolic form, well-grounded dread: that conservative America will soon come to be dominated, in a semi-permanent fashion, by an ascendant Democratic coalition hostile to its outlook and interests. And this impending doom has colored the party’s frantic, fearful response to the Obama presidency.
The GOP has reason to be scared. Obama’s election was the vindication of a prediction made several years before by journalist John Judis and political scientist Ruy Teixeira in their 2002 book, The Emerging Democratic Majority. Despite the fact that George W. Bush then occupied the White House, Judis and Teixeira argued that demographic and political trends were converging in such a way as to form a natural-majority coalition for Democrats.”
Tags: Jonathan Chait
Silicon does certain things really well, but so does carbon. I’ve always wondered if the Singularity won’t be that moment when computers surpass humans in cognition but rather a time when the two fuse to form something that’s greater than the sum of the parts. It’s probably inevitable since whatever progress we can dream up will eventually come true. From Katie Drummond’s Wired report about a breakthrough in the neural-prosthetic interface:
“A replacement limb that moves, feels and responds just like flesh and blood. It’s the holy grail of prosthetics research. The Pentagon’s invested millions to make it happen. But it’s been elusive — until, quite possibly, now.
The body’s own nerves are arguably the biggest barrier towards turning the dream of lifelike replacements into a reality. Peripheral nerves, severed by amputation, can no longer transmit or receive any of the myriad sensory signals we rely on every day. Trying to fuse them with robot limbs, to create a direct neural-prosthetic interface, is no easy task.
But now a team of scientists believe they’ve overcome that massive barrier. Their research is still in the early stages. But if successful, it’d yield artificial arms and legs that can move with agility; discern hot from lukewarm from freezing; and restore even the subtlest sensations of touch.
‘We think the interface problem is key to enabling the neuro-prosthetic concept,’ Dr. Shawn Dirk, one of the researchers behind the finding, tells Danger Room. “And solving that is how we’re going to give amputees their bodies back.'”
Tags: Katie Drummond
I’ve always believed that smaller offices in which there is a great deal of incidental interaction is a way more productive environment than spacious, comfy quarters. In a segment of “True Innovation,” Jon Gertner’s New York Times Opinion piece about creativity in America, the author explains the guiding principles of Mervin Kelly, one of the leading lights of Bell Labs during its glorious future-building run in the 20th century, who designed architecture that forced employee contact. An excerpt:
“At Bell Labs, the man most responsible for the culture of creativity was Mervin Kelly. Probably Mr. Kelly’s name does not ring a bell. Born in rural Missouri to a working-class family and then educated as a physicist at the University of Chicago, he went on to join the research corps at AT&T. Between 1925 and 1959, Mr. Kelly was employed at Bell Labs, rising from researcher to chairman of the board. In 1950, he traveled around Europe, delivering a presentation that explained to audiences how his laboratory worked.
His fundamental belief was that an ‘institute of creative technology’ like his own needed a ‘critical mass’ of talented people to foster a busy exchange of ideas. But innovation required much more than that. Mr. Kelly was convinced that physical proximity was everything; phone calls alone wouldn’t do. Quite intentionally, Bell Labs housed thinkers and doers under one roof. Purposefully mixed together on the transistor project were physicists, metallurgists and electrical engineers; side by side were specialists in theory, experimentation and manufacturing. Like an able concert hall conductor, he sought a harmony, and sometimes a tension, between scientific disciplines; between researchers and developers; and between soloists and groups.
ONE element of his approach was architectural. He personally helped design a building in Murray Hill, N.J., opened in 1941, where everyone would interact with one another. Some of the hallways in the building were designed to be so long that to look down their length was to see the end disappear at a vanishing point. Traveling the hall’s length without encountering a number of acquaintances, problems, diversions and ideas was almost impossible. A physicist on his way to lunch in the cafeteria was like a magnet rolling past iron filings.”
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1960s computer animation by Bell Labs visual neuroscientist Béla Julesz:
Tags: Béla Julesz, Jon Gertner, Mervin Kelly
"Where's the route to an alternate world?" (Image by T bone.)
If you’ve considered the illogical thought that maybe this world just isn’t for you, how do you deal with wanting nothing in particular out of life? Where’s the route to an alternate world for people who understand how insignificant their existences are and have no hobbies and interests to distract themselves from that.
"In the large glass case in the rear of the saloon he has caged more concentrated venom than can be found anywhere outside of a poison factory."
That larger-than-life Old West character, Roy Bean, a so-called hanging judge who hardly ever hung anyone, owned a Texas saloon with an usual display case. From a report in the September 27, 1885 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, which was originally published in the Philadelphia Times:
“This is an eating station on the Southern Pacific railroad, and stands well out on the great Prison plain, about midway between El Paso and Del Rio. Old Roy Bean, who formerly dispensed frontier justice of a decidedly original and peculiar kind while acting as a magistrate at Murderville during the building of the railroad, owns the eating privilege at Sanderson and the liquid refreshing business connected therein.
"I suggested to old Roy that it would be a good idea to pull out their teeth, and he kindly gave me permission to operate on them dentally."
In the large glass case in the rear of the saloon he has caged more concentrated venom than can be found anywhere outside of a poison factory. First on the list is a family of centipedes, consisting of a giant nearly ten inches in length, the old fellow’s son and daughter and a numerous progeny of babies. The centipede is not a pretty insect. Once I thought of them as no use, but after seeing a lot of little Chiricahua Indian papooses pulling centipedes from their holes and greedily devouring them, legs, poison and all, I no longer doubted the wisdom and beneficence of their creation. In the course of my checkered career I have had several adventures with centipedes, and always came out second best. A centipede can raise a blister on a man’s body quicker than a red hot iron. If you don’t immediately apply a remedial poultice of pounded prickly pear and dose yourself inwardly with post whisky–the latter is warranted to kill anything but an army mule–the resultant effects may be serious. Centipedes usually attack their victim at night when he is asleep and can’t defend himself. They are armed with about two hundred little lances conveniently lashed to the toe of each foot–of which they have several–and at the base of each lance is a tiny sack of venom. If a centipede crawls across your body, which he’ll most likely do if you lie down anywhere within half a mile of him–you’ll have no difficulty in following his trail, and you’ll remember his visit for weeks. No man ever died from the bite of a centipede, but I have known one to make a man wish he were dead.
"They were about the size of a common saucer, and were as hairy as Esau."
In the cage adjoining that occupied by the centipedes was a den of tarantulas, whose scientific name is lycosa. The den contained two lycosas, but whether they were brother and sister, mother and daughter, father and son, or husband and wife, I am unable to declare. They were about the size of a common saucer, and were as hairy as Esau. Their mouths were blood red, and they each had four red teeth, which from time to time they snapped viciously. I was bitten by a tarantula once, and I felt thankful that these two were caged. I suggested to old Roy that it would be a good idea to pull out their teeth, and he kindly gave me permission to operate on them dentally. I declined. The tarantula is an exaggerated spider, with teeth and hair. They are always ready for a fight, and will tackle anything, not excluding a buzz saw. In days gone by I have often amused myself by teasing one with a red hot coal, and never surrender until they were burned to a crisp. I never heard of anything eating a tarantula. If one bites you, use the same remedies as prescribed for centipede sting, only more so.”
Tags: Roy Bean
Eleanor Roosevelt for Good Luck Margarine, in 1959.
Tags: Eleanor Roosevelt
From Farhad Manjoo’s new article about the decline of money–or at least the physical manifestation of it–in Slate:
“It sounds like a prank, right? Money is a confidence game, a mass delusion that only works because we’ve all been had together. That’s why it’s best not to think too much about it. As when Wile E. Coyote runs off a cliff, the moment we realize what’s really going on with money is usually the moment the whole system comes crashing down.
The psychic gymnastics necessary to accommodate money are the central theme of journalist David Wolman’s provocative new book, The End of Money: Counterfeiters, Preachers, Techies, Dreamers—and the Coming Cashless Society. Even Wolman’s title contains a trick—note how it conflates money and cash, two concepts that, to economists, are very different things. Money is any tradable store of value; it can exist in your pocket or on a bank statement, in dollars or Euros or, if you’re in prison, in cigarettes. Cash is only the physical instantiation of money, and, as Wolman points out and as everyone in the Western world knows, it is on its way out. Thanks to technology, trustworthy banking (well, mostly), and our insatiable appetite for convenience, we’re all carrying less and less cash, and soon we’ll probably quit it altogether.”
Tags: David Wolman
Bots that pool their talents.
Originally, the pinball machine was a flipperless game that had to be jostled to direct the ball. It wasn’t a truly perfected contraption until it was tweaked by Steve Kordek in 1948. The inventor just passed away at 100. From his New York Times obituary:
“In 1947, two designers at the D. Gottlieb & Company pinball factory in Chicago, Harry Mabs and Wayne Neyens, transformed that rudimentary game into one called Humpty Dumpty, adding six electromechanical flippers, three on each side from the top to the bottom of the field.
It was an instant hit — until, at a trade show in Chicago 1948, Mr. Kordek introduced Triple Action, a game that featured just two flippers, both controlled by buttons at the bottom of the table. Mr. Kordek was a designer for Genco, one of more than two dozen pinball manufacturers in Chicago at the time.
Not only was Mr. Kordek’s two-flipper game less expensive to produce; it also gave players greater control. For someone concentrating on keeping a chrome-plated ball from dropping into the ‘drain,’ two flippers, one for each hand, were better than six.
‘It really was revolutionary, and pretty much everyone else followed suit,’ David Silverman, executive director of the National Pinball Museum in Baltimore, said in an interview. ‘And it’s stayed the standard for 60 years.'”
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Curly, tempestuous by nature, frustrated by a pre-Kordek machine in 1942:
Tags: Steve Kordek
Some search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:
Afflictor: Thinking gynecological exams in Virginia have changed recently.
Drive
Existential antiheroes aren’t dangerous because they don’t believe, but rather because they might start. Scary intensity waiting to be awakened is at the crux of Nicolas Winding Refn’s spectacular drama, full of graphic-comics violence, in which a taciturn stuntman, racer and getaway-driver-for-hire (Ryan Gosling) finds purpose–and trouble. The Driver normally takes long pauses before answering questions, not so much to be sure of his reply but to determine if he can muster the strength to engage the world. But that changes when he meets and instantly falls for Irene (Carey Mulligan), a troubled married woman with a young son and a husband who’s about to be paroled. The husband owes some favors to the wrong kind of people, and unless he pulls off a robbery, his family will die. The Driver volunteers to be behind the wheel for the heist in order to save mother and son, but complications arise during the job, and he soon is the target of hellacious gangsters (Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman, in brilliant turns). Others continually point out to the Driver that it’s bad luck that led him to such a situation, that he would have been fine if only events had worked out differently. This seems to be the world view of the film, but it feels like the misfortune has less to do with external circumstance than with inner nature. An inflexible soul incapable of yielding will eventually crash. Watch trailer.
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The Elephant in the Living Room
Humans encountering wild animals in developed areas across America, an increasing trend in recent years, seemed to be an unintended consequence of the pre-recession construction boom, when sprawl encroached on habitats. But it was something else–we simply invited the dangerous wildlife into our homes. Encouraged by Animal Planet content and any number of zany wranglers making the rounds of talk shows, a booming black market has developed for exotic animals, as witnessed in Michael Webber’s eye-opening doc about people making pets of lions and leopards and such. Webber shows libertarianism run amok, in which local newspaper circulars and underground Amish country dealers supply the subculture with creatures. Once the poisonous snakes and hungry lion cubs are taken home, all hell often breaks loose, as animals escape or are turned out by owners who can no longer manage them. The movie’s heart is Ohio enforcement officer Tim Harrison who tries to counsel those with dubious judgement and damaged souls into giving up their small-scale zoos, to change minds that are already made up. “It’s not a python problem,” he says, “but a people problem.” Watch trailer.
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More recent films I liked now on home video: