Carl Sagan’s eloquent meditation on the moon landing’s significance.
Tags: Carl Sagan
One Laptop Per Child, an ambitious and well-intentioned project that seems to have been undercut by the market, has settled on an unusual new means of distribution for its cheap computers. An excerpt from an Ars Technica story:
“The One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) project has devised a bizarre plan for deploying its new XO-3 tablet. The organization plans to drop the touchscreen computers from helicopters near remote villages in developing countries. The devices will then be abandoned and left for the villagers to find, distribute, support, and use on their own.
OLPC founder Nicholas Negroponte is optimistic that the portable devices—which will be stocked with electronic books—will empower children to learn to read without any external support or instruction. The strange scheme reflects the OLPC project’s roots in constructivist education theory, which emphasizes self-directed learning.
The OLPC project was originally founded to produce low-cost education-focused laptops for children. The organization planned to sell the devices in bulk to governments in developing countries, which would then distribute them in classrooms. The plan was to leverage economy of scale in manufacturing to bring the costs down, making the laptop cheap enough that governments would be able to supply one to every child.
Although the ambitious project sold several million laptops, it fell far short of its lofty goals and has been on life support for the past few years.”
From a new Paris Review interview with William Gibson:
“Paris Review: You’ve written that science fiction is never about the future, that it is always instead a treatment of the present.
William Gibson: There are dedicated futurists who feel very seriously that they are extrapolating a future history. My position is that you can’t do that without having the present to stand on. Nobody can know the real future. And novels set in imaginary futures are necessarily about the moment in which they are written. As soon as a work is complete, it will begin to acquire a patina of anachronism. I know that from the moment I add the final period, the text is moving steadily forward into the real future.
There was an effort in the seventies to lose the usage science fiction and champion speculative fiction. Of course, all fiction is speculative, and all history, too—endlessly subject to revision. Particularly given all of the emerging technology today, in a hundred years the long span of human history will look fabulously different from the version we have now. If things go on the way they’re going, and technology keeps emerging, we’ll eventually have a near-total sorting of humanity’s attic.
In my lifetime I’ve been able to watch completely different narratives of history emerge. The history now of what World War II was about and how it actually took place is radically different from the history I was taught in elementary school. If you read the Victorians writing about themselves, they’re describing something that never existed. The Victorians didn’t think of themselves as sexually repressed, and they didn’t think of themselves as racist. They didn’t think of themselves as colonialists. They thought of themselves as the crown of creation.
Of course, we might be Victorians, too.”
•••••••••••
“Just for a minute, it struck me as miraculous”:
Tags: William Gibson
As the U.S. postal system continues its uncomfortable passage into obsolescence, a look back at Charles Kuralt’s 1981 report about a Gap, Pennsylvania, postal worker with a challenging route.
About Kuralt’s shocking secret life, which surfaced after his death, from Salon: “Charles Kuralt, CBS’s folksy ‘On the Road’ correspondent, spent years exploring America’s out-of-the-way places in search of oddball stories. But the best story may have been the one he never told.
For 29 years, until his death in 1997, he apparently kept a mistress and maintained a second family. The celebrated journalist was, in effect, husband and father to them, as well as breadwinner, friend and hero.
While his wife remained at their home in the concrete canyons of New York City, he nurtured his secret life along a rushing trout stream in Montana.
None of this would come out, however, until after his death, when his mistress, Patricia Elizabeth Shannon, sued to get a Montana retreat he promised her. Montana’s Supreme Court ruled last month that the woman is entitled to a trial on her claim.”
Tags: Charles Kuralt
shouting out from sunny (california)
just wanna shout out a big warm FUCK YOU new york from sunny california- the great marijuana state- not imported , locally grown and almost ready to harvest smoke it if youse got it
According to a post on Research Digest, human memory is segmented, so walking through a doorway makes it more difficult to remember what occurred in the previous room. An excerpt:
“Like information in a book, unfolding events are stored in human memory in successive chapters or episodes. One consequence is that information in the current episode is easier to recall than information in a previous episode. An obvious question then is how the mind divides experience up into these discrete episodes? A new study led by Gabriel Radvansky shows that the simple act of walking through a doorway creates a new memory episode, thereby making it more difficult to recall information pertaining to an experience in the room that’s just been left behind.
Dozens of participants used computer keys to navigate through a virtual reality environment presented on a TV screen. The virtual world contained 55 rooms, some large, some small. Small rooms contained one table; large rooms contained two at each end. When participants first encountered a table, there was an object on it that they picked up (once carried, objects could no longer be seen). At the next table, they deposited the object they were carrying at one end and picked up a new object at the other. And on the participants went. Frequent tests of memory came either on entering a new room through an open doorway, or after crossing halfway through a large room. An object was named on-screen and the participants had to recall if it was either the object they were currently carrying or the one they’d just set down.
The key finding is that memory performance was poorer after travelling through an open doorway, compared with covering the same distance within the same room. ‘Walking through doorways serves as an event boundary, thereby initiating the updating of one’s event model [i.e. the creation of a new episode in memory]’ the researchers said.” (Thnaks Browser.)
Tags: Gabriel Radvansky
Neil Postman on the creation of information junkies. From 1995.
Tags: Neil Postman
Speaking of Marshall McLuhan, in the 1996 Wired article, “Channeling McLuhan,” Gary Wolf interviewed one of the Canadian media philosopher’s doppelgangers, a shadowy person who posted to a computer mailing list under the McLuhan name. It was an odd gambit, but the exchange elicited a contrarian idea about the invasion of privacy in the digital age, which seems an even more apt point of discussion now. An excerpt:
“Wired: Do you think privacy and anonymity are being eroded in the digital age?
“MM”: Don’t be fooled by ‘anonymity.’ There is no such thing, since every node in a communication system must have an ID. Concerns about privacy and anonymity are outdated. Cypherpunks think they are rebels with a cause, but they are really sentimentalists.
In the ’50s, men were crying about the ‘mass’ man and spilling tears over too much anonymity. And they were right, or more right than the cypherpunks. Factories and corporations gave men roles, not souls. Industrial society was anonymous. Cities, factories, secret ballots with mechanical polling booths – that’s anonymity. The Big Brother bogeyman of the machine age used technology to enforce anonymity and prevent anybody from doing his own thing.
The era of politics based on private identities, anonymous individuals, and independent citizens began with the French Revolution and Napoleon’s armies (a product of the popular press) and ended with Hitler (the product of radio). The cypherpunks are still marching to the same martial music. You think private individuals and mass industrial society are opposites? They are part of the industrial configuration. Instantaneous electronic society gives everybody an identity – which we all want, and which we all also want to lose – while putting almost intolerable pressure on our sense of privacy.
Privacy disappears in the simultaneous stimulation of our patterns of thought.”
Tags: Gary Wolf, Marshall McLuhan
Marshall McLuhan fretting about information overload, back in 1977, when there was a lot less information to be loaded.
Tags: Marchall McLuhan
Vladimir Nabokov, genius writer and avid lepidopterist, was no big Dostoyevsky fan, at least based on the 1964 Playboy Interview that was conducted by future Futurist Alvin Toffler. An excerpt:
“Playboy: Dostoevski, who dealt with themes accepted by most readers as universal in both scope and significance, is considered one of the world’s great authors. Yet you have described him as ‘a cheap sensationalist, clumsy and vulgar.’ Why?
Nabokov: Non-Russian readers do not realize two things: that not all Russians love Dostoevski as much as Americans do, and that most of those Russians who do, venerate him as a mystic and not as an artist. He was a prophet, a claptrap journalist and a slapdash comedian. I admit that some of his scenes, some of his tremendous, farcical rows are extraordinarily amusing. But his sensitive murderers and soulful prostitutes are not to be endured for one moment– by this reader anyway.”
A spectacularly bad psychic, the son of an undertaker and an Ed Wood actor, the Amazing Criswell rose from his coffin to lend his slack skills to the Tonight Show on New Year’s Eve in 1965.
Tags: Amazing Criswell
Can the brain be rewired to change spenders into savers? From Newsweek‘s new report on the intersection of consumer culture and neuroscience:
“As brain scientists plumb the neurology of an afternoon at the mall, they are discovering measurable differences between the brains of people who save and those who spend with abandon, particularly in areas of the brain that predict consequences, process the sense of reward, spur motivation, and control memory.
In fact, neuroscientists are mapping the brain’s saving and spending circuits so precisely that they have been able to rev up the saving and disable the spending in some people (in the lab, alas; not at the cash register). The result: people’s preferences switch from spending like a drunken sailor to saving like a child of the Depression. All told, the gray matter responsible for some of our most crucial decisions is finally revealing its secrets. Call it the ‘moneybrain.’
Psychologists and behavioral economists, meanwhile, are identifying the personality types and other traits that distinguish savers from spenders, showing that people who aren’t good savers are neither stupid nor irrational—but often simply don’t accurately foresee the consequences of not saving. Rewire the brain to find pleasure in future rewards, and you’re on the path to a future you really want.”
Hans Rosling, the Swedish doctor who did a great TED Talk about washing machines and democracy, returns to that forum to explain our world population in terms of Ikea products. (Thanks Open Culture.)
Tags: Hans Rosling
"I hate to walk alone." (Image by SoylentGreen.)
Walking Partner Wanted- Lets Keep In Shape (North BX, Lower Westch, Upper Manhattan)
I’ve got to lose weight. Looking for anyone over 35 for walking in or near Pelham Parkway, Allerton. North Bronx, Lower Westchester, Upper Manhattan. Come on and help me out, I hate to walk alone.
"Of her descendants, 700 have been in jail, 342 were confirmed drunkards, 127 women were immoral by their own confession and 27 were convicted of murder." (Image by Charles Bell.)
You can get a bad reputation if 700 of your descendants wind up in the clink, though it may be that Temperance enthusiast Mary Annable was simply a huge buzzkill given to telling tall tales. Either way, her story of a god-awful grandmother was recorded for posterity in the May 22, 1902 Brooklyn Daily Eagle. An excerpt:
“Mrs. Mary J. Annable, president of the Kings County Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, and superintendent of rescue work of the state union, was one of the speakers at the annual convention of the New York County Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, held yesterday afternoon in Manhattan. In the course of her remarks Mrs. Annable said that she had the record of a woman who died in Brooklyn in 1827, leaving 800 descendants. ‘That woman,’ she added, ‘kept a disreputable house and was a drunkard. Of her descendants, 700 have been in jail, 342 were confirmed drunkards, 127 women were immoral by their own confession and 27 were convicted of murder.’
To an Eagle reporter who this morning sought to obtain more details regarding this woman and her many descendants, Mrs. Annable said:
‘I based my statements upon data that I received from a doctor who is interested in criminology, particularly in its relation to heredity, and has done considerable investigating with regard to the subject. I do not feel at liberty to give the name of the investigator and there is nothing new about that statement, for it has appeared in print and I have quoted the figures in other addresses. I am under the impression that while the woman died in Brooklyn she was not a native, but came from some up state section. She was 51 years old at the time of her death and I am told that within the confines of Greater New York many of her descendants are now living, some of whom are very respectable. I do not know her name, only the initials. I made that statement at yesterday’s meeting to show what rescue work as carried on by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union and other organizations means for women.'”
Tags: Mary J. Annable
Modern aeronauts capitalizing on the sun’s heat, aboard the Solar Ship. (Thanks Techling.)
In the same 1966 Playboy Interview in which he opined that homosexuality could be “cured” by LSD, Timothy Leary predicts what college kids dropping acid would eventually do with their lives:
“LEARY: Remember, it’s the college kids who are turning on — the smartest and most promising of the youngsters. What an exciting prospect: a generation of creative youngsters refusing to march in step, refusing to go to offices, refusing to sign up on the installment plan, refusing to climb aboard the treadmill.
PLAYBOY: What will they do?
LEARY: Don’t worry. Each one will work out his individual solution. Some will return to the establishment and inject their new ideas. Some will live under ground as self-employed artists, artisans and writers. Some are already forming small communities out of the country. Many are starting schools for children and adults who wish to learn the use of their sense organs. Psychedelic businesses are springing up: bookstores, art galleries. Psychedelic industries may involve more manpower in the future than the automobile industry has produced in the last 20 years. In our technological society of the future, the problem will be not to get people to work, but to develop graceful, fulfilling ways of living a more serene, beautiful and creative life. Psychedelics will help to point the way.”
••••••••••
“At Millbrook, children as young as nine were given LSD”:
Tags: Timothy Leary
From Mike Elgan of Computerworld, a descrption of the “data spill” segments of the Microsoft 2019 video I posted last week:
“In one scene, two businesspeople each place a smart object on a smart table — a keychain fob and a flat phone or smartcard of some kind. From these devices, out spills their data, which can be manipulated on the table. The same thing happens at home, where a girl’s homework spills out onto the kitchen table, and cookbook instructions spill out onto the kitchen counter.
Data and documents can apparently be transferred from anything to anything else. One business-related example involves a drag-and-drop gesture from a desktop to a mobile device. In another scene, that same mobile device becomes a virtual keyboard for a desktop computer the user happens to be sitting at.
Another example shows a man ‘capturing’ with a kind of take-a-picture gesture using a clear-glass remote control then moving data from a wall-mounted device and dumping it out onto his e-newspaper.”
Tags: Mike Elgan
A concise explanation of why labor disputes in sports are so tortuous and odd, via Tyler Cowen and Kevin Grier, on Grantland:
“Why are labor disputes in sports so weird?
The bosses control the whole sector and face little competition when it comes to hiring labor. Since the merger with the ABA in 1976, the NBA is a monopoly and operates in a manner (it monopolizes!) that would be illegal outside the sports world. Unlike in Silicon Valley, there are no NBA “start-ups.” You cannot create a new NBA team without permission of the incumbent owners. The league also has to approve changes in teams’ location and ownership.
What does this mean? The owners can get together and agree to jointly cut expenses, that is, the player salaries. Players have limited opportunities to play professional basketball in other countries, but realistically, if you are a world-class professional basketball player, you probably want to be in the NBA.
The star players are the only counterweight to management’s power. To a large extent, they ARE the NBA’s product. Because of this, the owners aren’t talking about using replacement players, and some stars are getting decent offers to play overseas during the lockout. These factors are a cause for concern for the owners and put limits on how much they can extract from the players.”
••••••••••
Final ABA Slam Dunk Contest, 1976:
Tags: Kevin Grier, Tyler Cowen
Everyone at CBS News was apparently drunk one night in 1972 as Walter Cronkite worked blue, using double entendres, and Charles Kuralt got unduly exicted about insulting and impersonating turkeys.
Tags: Charles Kuralt, Walter Cronkite
From “Building a Better Future,” a WSJ profile by Richard D. Woodward of 37-year-old Danish architect Bjarke Ingels, who dreams large-scale urban dreams:
“The youthful face of Ingels, when framed and magnified by the tiny windows in this bold project or when talking in his video lectures on the Web, offers one of the most optimistic pictures of what the future of architecture might be. At the tender age of 37 he has gained a world-wide reputation for daring to think grandly about cities in the visionary manner of Le Corbusier, and for translating his hopeful philosophy of “pragmatic utopianism” into a thriving practice that has even caught the eye of bottom-line New York real-estate developers.
Robert A.M. Stern, dean of the Yale architecture school, describes Ingels and his ‘big-picture view,’ which he first encountered at a 2008 World Architecture Festival in Barcelona, as ‘back to the future.’ The startling scale of some of BIG’s ideas ‘flies in the face of current thinking,’ which favors small-scale urbanism rather than remaking the planet.”
••••••••••
Ingels holds forth at TED, 2009:
Tags: Bjarke Ingels, Richard D. Woodward
PetMan walks, does calisthenics. From the good people at Boston Dynamics.
Jack Nicholson describes his first acid trip in a 1972 Playboy Interview:
Jack Nicholson:
I was one of the first people in the country to take acid; it was in laboratory experiments on the West Coast about nine or 10 years ago. At that time, I was a totally adventurous actor looking for experience to put in his mental filing cabinet for later contributions to art. I was very curious about LSD. Some of the people I knew were in therapy with it. I went to downtown LA and took it one afternoon. I spent five hours with a therapist and about five more at home in the later stages of it. I hallucinated a lot, primarily because of the way the therapist structured it. He put a blindfold on me, which makes you much more introspective, gives you more dreamlike imagery. Imagine what acid is like when you know nothing about it. You think it’s going to be like getting stoned on grass, which I had done. But all of your conceptual reality gets jerked away and there are things in your mind that have in no way been suggested to you: such as you’re going to see God; or watch sap streaming through the leaves of trees; or you’re going to feel the dissolving of certain bodily parts; you’re going to re-experience your own birth, which I did on my first acid trip; you’re going to be frightened that your prick might be cut off, because you have castration fears; you’re going to come mush-ass to face with your own homosexual fears. I just wasn’t ready for half this stuff.•
_____________________________
Nicholson invests in hydrogen cars, 1978:
Tags: Jack Nicholson
Piers Morgan; Asks question, continues talking.
In the month of October, Great Britain sent more unique visitors to Afflictor than any other nation. The Top 5:
- Great Britain
- Spain
- Netherlands
- Germany
- Canada
Whiskey, cigars, poker and the subway
These are 4 things I am really into. Any suggeations on how to combine them into a business? I’m tired of being a lawyer for the man.