China’s economic boom has helped fund a spike in the world’s oldest supply and demand, as told by Dan Levin in a new article in the New York Times:
“BEIJING — Jian, a 42-year-old property developer in the booming southern metropolis of Shenzhen, had acquired just about everything men of his socioeconomic ilk covet: a Mercedes-Benz, a sprawling antique jade collection and a lavishly appointed duplex for his wife and daughter.
It was only natural then, he said, that two years ago he took up another costly pastime: a beguiling 20-year-old art major whose affections run him about $6,100 a month.
Jian, who asked that his full name be withheld lest it endanger his 20-year marriage, cavorts with his young coed in a secret apartment he owns, a price he willingly pays for the modern equivalent of a concubine.
‘Keeping a mistress is just like playing golf,’ he said. ‘Both are expensive hobbies.'”
Life extension predictions that seem too optimistic, from “The Coming Death Shortage,” Charles C. Mann’s provocative 2005 Atlantic article:
“In the past century U.S. life expectancy has climbed from forty-seven to seventy-seven, increasing by nearly two thirds. Similar rises happened in almost every country. And this process shows no sign of stopping: according to the United Nations, by 2050 global life expectancy will have increased by another ten years. Note, however, that this tremendous increase has been in average life expectancy—that is, the number of years that most people live. There has been next to no increase in the maximum lifespan, the number of years that one can possibly walk the earth—now thought to be about 120. In the scientists’ projections, the ongoing increase in average lifespan is about to be joined by something never before seen in human history: a rise in the maximum possible age at death.
Stem-cell banks, telomerase amplifiers, somatic gene therapy—the list of potential longevity treatments incubating in laboratories is startling. Three years ago a multi-institutional scientific team led by Aubrey de Grey, a theoretical geneticist at Cambridge University, argued in a widely noted paper that the first steps toward ‘engineered negligible senescence’—a rough-and-ready version of immortality—would have ‘a good chance of success in mice within ten years.’ The same techniques, De Grey says, should be ready for human beings a decade or so later. ‘In ten years we’ll have a pill that will give you twenty years,’ says Leonard Guarente, a professor of biology at MIT. ‘And then there’ll be another pill after that. The first hundred-and-fifty-year-old may have already been born.'” (Thanks TETW.)
Iran Air TV ad that ran in the U.S. in the 1970s. Because of political fallout from the Islamic Revolution, the final flight from NYC was November 7, 1979.
"Some surgical operations on the brain result in increasing the intelligence of the patient."
Neurosurgery was a brave new world in the 19th century, and the Brooklyn Daily Eagle greeted its dawning with its usual shaky grasp on facts. An excerpt from an article in the October 13, 1895 issue:
“It is only in the late years that surgeons have operated on the brain. They can remove a pistol ball from the brain where, as in some cases, it has lodged without fatal results, and send the patient about his business in less than two weeks’ time. A quarryman by the premature explosion of a blast had a drill driven through his head, piercing his brain through and through. A successful surgical operation was performed upon him.
Some surgical operations on the brain result in increasing the intelligence of the patient. An eminent expert in brain surgery in this country (Dr. Kean of Philadelphia) made a particularly successful operation on an epileptic boy of 16 who in ten years had 5,000 fits. An extraneous growth of nearly an ounce was removed from the right parietal region. Another expert has predicted that in course of time operations of the brain will be performed for the relief of apoplexy and epilepsy, and that such operations will be successful. A few years ago there was a little girl patient in one of the hospitals of Paris. She exhibited an almost utter absence of intelligence. She had a mournful look, lackluster eyes and could not be aroused even to take an interest in dolls. She breathed with difficulty in consequence of the thorax having stopped its development, and her brain had ceased to grow at an early age owing to the premature coalescence of the bones in infancy. The surgeon Lannelongue attributed her unfortunate condition to the narrowness of the cranial box, and believed that if more space were given to the brain her idiocy would disappear and she would attain a normal existence. The operator who had previously experimented on dead children in studying the same trouble made a long and narrow incision in the middle of the skull, and on the left side, which was more depressed than the right, removed a substance of tissue bone nine centimeters long by six millimeters broad. The dura matter, which is in the exterior envelop of the brain, was not touched, and the superficial wound was united by the skin again. Within three weeks after the operation there was a remarkable change in the child; she walked, smiled and became interested in all that was going on around her. An operation exactly parallel to this was performed by an American surgeon in Cincinnati; in this case the child was much younger, but the operation was completely successful.
Another singular case was that of a housemaid employed in a New York family. She began to show signs of exceptional stupidity; so much that she became unable properly to attend to her duties. One of the first things the girl did was to visit a New York hospital on a friendly call to her sister, who was employed in the institution. The discharged servant had often complained of having severe headaches. A young physician in the hospital, hearing her speak of her trouble, made an examination of her head and found that the bones of her skull had never knitted together. A surgeon operated on her head and succeeded in closing the aperture. Only a few days after the operation the girl became as bright as she had ever been, was taken back by her former employer, where she was soon recognized as one of the most accomplished housemaids.”
From Michael Weinreb’sGrantland postmortemof the larger-than-life existence of towering football player-Police Academy thespian Bubba Smith, who just passed away:
“Smith — who was found dead in his Los Angeles home yesterday, apparently of natural causes, at age 66 — wanted to follow his brother to Kansas, but they didn’t want another Smith brother there; he wanted to go to the University of Texas, but, like most southern schools in the early 1960s, they couldn’t take him. And so he went to East Lansing, having never really interacted with white society before. The first time he stood up to meet his white roommate, the roommate’s parents nearly fainted. It was not a utopian community — Smith and his teammates often had trouble finding an apartment to rent in town — but Bubba had an unmistakable charm. He reportedly joined a Jewish fraternity; he was voted the most popular student on campus, even as he tested the limits of authority. His senior year, according to Mike Celizic’s The Biggest Game of Them All, he drove an Oldsmobile with his name written in gold letters on the door, most likely paid for through the largesse of alumni and boosters. Occasionally, Bubba parked it in the university president’s space.”
From Peter Schjeldahl’s 2007 New Yorker piece about Burden: “An efficient test of where you stand on contemporary art is whether you are persuaded, or persuadable, that Chris Burden is a good artist. I think he’s pretty great. Burden is the guy who, on November 19, 1971, in Santa Ana, California, produced a classic, or an atrocity (both, to my mind), of conceptual art by getting shot. ‘Shoot’ survives in desultory black-and-white photographs with this description: ‘At 7:45 p.m. I was shot in the left arm by a friend. The bullet was a copper jacket .22 long rifle. My friend was standing about fifteen feet from me.’ Why do such things? “I wanted to be taken seriously as an artist,’ Burden explained, when I visited him recently at his studio in a brushy glen of Topanga Canyon, where he lives with his wife, the sculptor Nancy Rubins. ‘The models were Picasso and Duchamp. I was most interested in Duchamp.””
In this classic January 13, 1971 photograph, President Richard Nixon and his wife Pat rest in their San Clemente home, the “Western White House,” as it had become known, on couches with the type of garish upholstery that was inexplicably popular at that time. The seaside home, formerly known as the H.H. Cotton House and La Casa Pacifica, hosted a slew of politicos during Nixon’s abbreviated two-term presidency, including Soviet premier Leonid Brezhnev. The house was the disgraced president’s oasis after he was forced to resign from office in 1974 during the Watergate scandal. The famous Frost/Nixon interviews were planned to be held at the San Clemente abode, but radio signals from the nearby Coast Guard station interfered with the TV equipment. From a 1983 New York Times article about Nixon’s lifestyle in San Clemente:
“San Clemente was in its prime in the early 1970’s when President Nixon’s Spanish-style residence here, Casa Pacifica, served as the ‘Western White House.’ Memories of the excitement of Government helicopters whirring overhead are still fresh. Regardless of how they feel about Mr. Nixon, a lot of people here miss that.
”I find it pretty humorous that San Clemente looks at Richard Nixon as a claim to fame,’ said Harold Warman, a college instructor who said he believed ”any man who becomes President of the United States has made so many moral compromises he’s sold out long before he even got there.’
But even as one of Mr. Nixon’s few critics in San Clemente, Mr. Warman suggested that the status of being a President’s home away from home gave life here a certain style.
‘If he wanted a pizza, they’d circle Shakey’s Pizza with the Secret Service,’ he recalled. ‘One day when I was down there, they brought him in by helicopter and closed the pizza parlor off. That’s pretty impressive.'”
••••••••••
Soundless footage of the Nixons receiving celebrity guests (John Wayne, Glenn Campbell, Frank Sinatra, etc.) at their San Clemente home in 1972:
My car blew up the other day and this really great mechanic .. is fixing it for me, .. I am very lucky … when I moved back to Jersey there are only a few things that are the same ..
The Gas Station .. The Pizzeria … My mom’s house and my old best friends house… thats pretty much it!
An Atlantic article by Betsy Morais explores whether the simian engineering in Rise of the Planet of the Apes could actually occur. While no one expects chimps to transform into geniuses overnight, there is fear that introducing human DNA into non-human creatures could create unfortunate hybrids. An excerpt;
“Nature magazine published a report last year suggesting that non-human primates with sections of human DNA implanted into their genomes at the embryonic stage—through a process called transgenics—might develop enough self-awareness ‘to appreciate the ways their lives are circumscribed, and to suffer, albeit immeasurably, in the full psychological sense of that term.’
‘That’s the ethical concern: that we would produce a creature,’ says bioethicist Dr. Marilyn Coors, one of the authors of the Nature report. ‘If it were cognitively aware, you wouldn’t want to put it in a zoo. What kind of cruelty would that be? You wouldn’t be able to measure the cruelty—or maybe it could tell you. I don’t know.’
Although Walker doesn’t know of anyone doing research to enhance cognitive function in apes, and Coors knows of no transgenic apes, Coors points out that scientists theoretically have the technical capability to produce them.”
“A visitor to the Paris apartment of the blind geometer Bernard Morin finds much to see. On the wall in the hallway is a poster showing a computer generated picture, created by Morin’s student François Apéry, of Boy’s surface, an immersion of the projective plane in three dimensions. The surface plays a role in Morin’s most famous work, his visualization of how to turn a sphere inside out. Although he cannot see the poster, Morin is happy to point out details in the picture that the visitor must not miss. Back in the living room, Morin grabs a chair, stands on it, and feels for a box on top of a set of shelves. He takes hold of the box and climbs off the chair safely—much to the relief of the visitor. Inside the box are clay models that Morin made in the 1960s and 1970s to depict shapes that occur in intermediate stages of his sphere eversion. The models were used to help a sighted colleague draw pictures on the blackboard. One, which fits in the palm of Morin’s hand, is a model of Boy’s surface. This model is not merely precise; its sturdy, elegant proportions make it a work of art. It is startling to consider that such a precise, symmetrical model was made by touch alone. The purpose is to communicate to the sighted what Bernard Morin sees so clearly in his mind’s eye.”
I previously posted some clips of irascible 1960s talk show host Joe Pyne. Here are three more, each from 1966, just four years before the chain-smoking shock jock died from cancer.
••••••••••
Yippie leader Jerry Rubin storms off:
Georgia Governor Lester Maddox storms off:
Future Nixon enemy, journalist Jack Anderson, stays put:
"It appears that in that city the public takes its steaks in capsules of concentrated beef."
The only way to explain the following August 28, 1899 old print article is that either people in Indianapolis were taking their dinner in pill form or editors at the Brooklyn Daily Eagle were taking their lunch in liquid form. More likely the latter. An excerpt:
“Capsule banquets? Well, hardly! The idea of sitting around a table in company, taking pills and bursting into song, quip and jest and eloquence over a pellet! What are the scientists trying to do? Drive all the gayety out of the world? Such is the horrible possibility disclosed by way they dine in Indianapolis. It appears that in that city the public takes its steaks in capsules of concentrated beef–little capsules no bigger than a quinine pill. All that the hotel keeper has to furnish with it is a glass of water and a crumb of salt. Then they take a little powder which used to be a potato and toss that down, and if a regular table d’hote dinner as required a compressed tomato for salad and a little thing that looks like a bean, but is really a whole mince pie, is swallowed, and after that a demitasse follows of about the size of a homeopathic pill.
This kind of thing may do for Indianapolis and other Western cities where people are so busy making money and politics that they would forget to eat if they did not have their dinners in their pockets and have alarm clocks that went off warningly at the time to take them. But we can say to Indianapolis right now that she need not look for any outside endorsements of her persnickety practices. When we eat we do so not merely to sustain life, but because, when the right sort of victuals are afforded, it is fun to eat. We like to eat in company and bandy remarks across the table and up and down the length of it, and we like to wash down every course with colored liquids that look as if they were drawn from the jars and bottles that druggists keep in their windows, but are different. We are especially anxious as to those liquids. If in an emergency we consented to take our steaks in pellets and eat our soup dry in one tiny mouthful, are we supposed to take champagne and other mineral waters in a mustard spoon? Shall we quaff out Chateau Yquem and our Pontet Canet in single drops that would get lost between our tongue tips and our throats?
Why, the mere anxiety of keeping track of the potables in a dinner like that would offset all the possible pleasure to be had out of the banquet. Suppose a waiter were accidentally to stuff a couple of cases of Chablis into his vest pocket while he was gathering a service of fried chicken out of a pill box, and spill all the wine! Where would he then be and where would be the dinner? No sirs. We prefer to believe that stomachs were given to us in order to do work, and we do not thank the scientists who are trying to persuade us that all of our waking hours should be diverted from dinner and refreshments and devoted to labor and Lofty Thought. If this is all that science intends to do for us, down with science! Meantime, let us keep putting down pudding and cocktails and a lot of other joys.”
Sci-fi writer and futurist Bruce Sterling donated his papers to the University of Texas in decidedly lo-fi form.Kari Kraus explains whyat the New York Times:
“LAST spring, the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas acquired the papers of Bruce Sterling, a renowned science fiction writer and futurist. But not a single floppy disk or CD-ROM was included among his notes and manuscripts. When pressed to explain why, the prophet of high-tech said digital preservation was doomed to fail. ‘There are forms of media which are just inherently unstable,’ he said, ‘and the attempt to stabilize them is like the attempt to go out and stabilize the corkboard at the laundromat.”
Mr. Sterling has a point: for all its many promises, digital storage is perishable, perhaps even more so than paper. Disks corrode, bits ‘rot’ and hardware becomes obsolete.”
••••••••••
Sterling predicts the nature of media in 25 years:
Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig believes that players may be trying to get around the ban on performance-enhancing drugs by ingesting–no kidding–deer antler spray, which is believed to contain some of the same muscle-building properties as steroids. From ESPN:
“MLB players have been issued a warning over the use of deer-antler spray, a substance administered under the tongue that includes a banned chemical known for its muscle-building and fat-cutting effects, SI.com has reported.
Players had felt free to use the spray at nearly no risk until the warning was sent last week by the league, the report said.
In its warning, issued in reaction to reports from the drug-testing industry, MLB requested players not use the spray because it contained ‘potentially contaminated nutritional supplements’ and had been added to the league’s cautionary list of products.”
I’ve long admired “Staring Into the Heart of the Heart of Darkness,” Ron Rosenbaum’s 1995 New York Times Magazine essay. In it, he looked at how Tarantino subtly introduced the idea of moral relativism into key scenes of Pulp Fiction. I think ideas of depth are scarce in film right now. Offhand, I can only think of Dogtooth and Exit Through the Gift Shop from last year as being rife with ideas. And certainly the Coens’ A Serious Man from the previous year. But there’s currently little such cinema. Hollywood used to dream the biggest dreams and science-fiction used to predict science, but no more. I try to figure out why there are so many ideas in tech right now and so few in film, since both are aimed at a global audience. I suppose it’s because film is about content and tech about function, and function is more readily translatable if it’s intuitive. Anyhow, an excerpt from Rosenbaum’s essay:
“PERHAPS IT’S UNDERSTANDABLE THAT SO MUCH OF THE critchat discussion about Pulp Fiction has missed the point: the flashy violence, trashy language and bloody brain spatterings are red herrings that easily distract.
In fact, in its own sly but serious way, Pulp Fiction is engaged in a sustained inquiry into the theological problem of the relativity of good and evil. What I love about Quentin Tarantino’s screenplay is how apparently throwaway time-passing dialogue often embodies tricky theological questions.
Consider the much-discussed but little-understood ‘mindless chitchat’ about the French names for Big Macs and Quarter Pounders with cheese that preoccupies the hit men, Vincent and Jules, as they cruise through L.A. on the way to commit a contract hit for their big-time drug-dealer boss.
Just two bored ‘thick-witted hit men’ (as the jacket copy for the published version of the screenplay inaccurately describes them) filling time. No, wrong: the Quarter Pounder exchange is one of the key poles of the sophisticated philosophic argument underlying Pulp Fiction.
Like the discussion of the contextual legality of hash bars in Amsterdam (‘It’s legal, but it ain’t a hundred percent legal’) and the gender-based framework for judging the transgressiveness of giving the boss’s wife a foot massage (‘You’re sayin’ a foot massage don’t mean nothin’ and I’m sayin’ it does. . . . We act like they don’t, but they do’), the exchange about Quarter Pounders is ultimately about the relativity of systems of value.”
Information that is collected will be utilized, and in ways that we didn’t necessarily anticipate. Carnegie Mellon researchers have shown how social network photos can be repurposed into identity recognition materials. FromTechsac;
“A Carnegie Mellon University researcher today described how he built a database of nearly 25,000 photographs expropriated from students’ Facebook profiles. Then he set up a desk in one of the campus buildings and asked few volunteers to peep into Webcams.
The results: face recognition software put a name to the face of 31 percent of the students after, on come, lower than trey seconds of rapid-fire comparisons.
In a few years, ‘facial visual searches may be as popular as today’s text-based searches,’ saysAlessandro Acquisti, who presented his development in cooperation with Ralph Receipts and Fred Stutzman at the Black Hat computer conference.
As a check of idea, the Carnegie Mellon researchers also formed an iPhone app that can position a exposure of someone, piping it through facial recognition software, and then exhibit on-screen that person’s canvas and essential statistics.’
As education shifts further online, Stanford is offering an online course beginning in September, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. The course will be taught by Sebastian Thrun and Peter Norvig, and they’ll be weekly lectures and homework. The course is estimated to take 10 hours per week of work and certificates will be awarded.
“Overview
CS221 is the introductory course into the field of Artificial Intelligence at Stanford University. It covers basic elements of AI, such as knowledge representation, inference, machine learning, planning and game playing, information retrieval, and computer vision and robotics. CS221 is a broad course aimed to teach students the very basics of modern AI. It is prerequisite to many other, more specialized AI classes at Stanford University.” (Thanks MetaFilterandMarginal Revolution.)
