“There’s A Darker Side To All This, Too”

March 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Our information is inside the machine now, but soon we’ll be there, too.

We now enter queries and likes and itineraries into a networked machine that continues to learn more about us and people like us. Soon the Internet of Things will be established, and the machine will escape its casing and live among us, so quiet, not even making a hum, that we’ll barely notice it. Driverless car technology will mature and we’ll be sitting inside a computer which will be inside another computer. In our pockets will be more computers. They’ll all be measuring and tracking, tabulating, taking a pulse, all the time, not just following us but guiding us. The data will be worthwhile, will help us achieve a safer and, in some ways, saner world, but it will be almost impossible to opt out, to be left alone. We’ll be a known quantity. It will seem like progress.

The opening of “How Self-Driving Cars Will Threaten Privacy,” a wonderfully lucid Atlantic essay by Adrienne LaFrance, which opines that the “price of convenience [will be] surveillance”:

Allow me to join you, if I may, on your morning commute sometime in the indeterminate future.

Here we are, stepping off the curb and into the backseat of a vehicle. As you close the car door behind you, the address of your office—our destination—automatically appears on a screen embedded in the back of a leather panel in front of you. “Good morning,” says the car’s humanoid voice, greeting you by name before turning on NPR for you like it does each day.

You decide you’d like a cup of coffee, and you tell the vehicle so. “Peet’s coffee, half-a-mile away,” it confirms. Peet’s, as it turns out, is a few doors down from Suds Cleaners. The car suggests you pick up your dry cleaning while you’re in the neighborhood. “After work instead,” you say. The car tweaks your evening travel itinerary accordingly.

As we run into Peet’s to grab coffee, the car circles the block. Then, we’re back in the vehicle, en route to your office once again. There’s a lunch special coming up at the vegetarian place you like, the car tells you as we pass the restaurant. With your approval, it makes a reservation for Friday. We ride by a grocery store and a list of sale items appears on the screen. With a few taps, you’ve added them to your existing grocery list. The car is scheduled to pick up and deliver your order this evening.

We’re less than a mile from your office now. Just like every morning, your schedule for the morning—a conference call at 10 a.m., a meeting at 11 a.m.—appears on the screen, along with a reminder that today is a colleague’s birthday.

This is the age of self-driving cars, an era when much of the minutiae of daily life is relegated to a machine. Your commute was pleasant, relaxing, and efficient. Along with promising unprecedented safety on public roadways, driverless cars could make our lives a lot easier—freeing up people’s time and attention to focus on other matters while they’re moving from one place to the next.

But there’s a darker side to all this, too.•

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“Only The Strongest Men Can Spend Full Days Among Lunatics And Not Become One”

March 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Excerpts follow from two stories published under the “Life Inside” rubric at The Marshall Project. The first is from Nate A. Lindell’s short essay about his experiences behind bars with a woebegone Whitey Bulger, a geriatric wheeled around in his waning days by an ex-Aryan Brotherhood member. The second is from “Inside the Shithouse,” Jeremy Busby’s memory of being flushed down the vortex of the American penal system, finding himself awash in the lunacy of an East Texas prison.

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From Lindell:

When Sid wheeled him to dinner that first night, many inmates commented on the new arrival. “Look, that’s Whitey Bulger!” they exclaimed. But nobody went up to him to ask for his autograph or strike up a conversation. The guy was frail, and his posture shouted Stay away.

Despite Whitey’s clear desire to be left alone, when he wheeled past my table out of the chow hall that night, I told him, “Nice running, Whitey!” He broke out into a broad, wolfish smile.

Thirty-some days later, I was put in the same unit as Whitey with only one cell between his and my own.

Whitey didn’t seek out conversation — I only saw him smile twice. Most of the time, he sat in his wheelchair by the TV with an intense look on his face. Sometimes, he slipped into an old-man nap while he was out at recreation. (Which he could never have done at a normal prison. Your gang required you to be fully dressed and ready to fight at all times.) One day, when Whitey napped on the rec yard, a dope fiend and hustler known for selling used shoes snuck up on him and pretended to try and remove his shoes.

“Hey, stop that!” I yelled. “He ain’t dead yet.”

We all laughed, and Whitey went back to sleep.

Back on our unit, Whitey finally got around to telling some stories about his life, often producing documents and photos he said backed them up. He claimed that way back when he was at Alcatraz, they “experimented on him” with LSD.•

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From Busby:

The facility is designed to break you. It houses some of the most dangerous people in Texas, as well as some of the most mentally-disturbed. I immediately feared that I would soon find myself turning into them, by virtue of my proximity.

I understood that only the strongest men can spend full days among lunatics and not become one.

My neighbor spent hours at a time kicking his door for no apparent reason. Yells came from down the corridor as I slept. And there was a nagging voice I heard at the same time every day, like some sort of chant or incantation, unnerving in its consistency.

I began to memorize it: “Attention F-Pod, this is Rabbi Shepard,” it always began. “I live in F-Pod, 65 Cell. My TDC number is 599999. This is no time to bring children into the world. Warden Moore works for Satan, and Lieutenant Holder is their servant. The snitches on this unit are Black Major, Easy Black-E, and Whiteboy Snow. Do not drink the water after seven o’clock p.m. If you want to go to PAMEO, a safer place, hang a sign on your door that says, ‘I AM A PEDOPHILE,’ shave your head, and toss shit on the first black nurse you see. They took Morris from 62 Cell and never brought him back.”

I eventually learned that the four cartons of feces that greeted me were the rabbi’s doing. The cartons, apparently, were known as “bullets,” and they were thrown at guards — a practice called “shit-chunking.” Since inmates had no other weapon, they attacked their enemies with what their own bodies could provide.

The serious “chunkers,” like the rabbi, kept an arsenal of three or four missiles at the ready. The less psychotic would load one when needed.•

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“His Views Were Often At Odds With The Majority Of The AI Community”

March 21, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

26minsky-obit-web-facebookJumboThe Humanities has had “physics envy” for quite awhile, trying to turn literature and such into a science for some silly reasons rooted in insecurity. It’s probably less understood outside academic circles that AI also long hoped to be like physics, wrapping up staggering complexities into a few laws. Marvin Minsky wasn’t a believer in such tidiness. A Fold article collects thoughts about the recently deceased AI pioneer from some of his colleagues. One, MIT Professor Patti Maes, recalls his parrying with popular beliefs in the field. An excerpt:

Explorations of Consciousness and Longevity

Some of Marvin’s most fascinating work was around the idea of the Mind As Society and the nature of consciousness. Throughout this work, what stood out was his enormous respect for the human.

“When a person says ‘I’m not a machine’, they’re showing a lack of respect for people….because we are the greatest machine in the world.”

He was curious about the fuzzy ideas people hold about the nature of consciousness and marveled at how we can effectively navigate the world without the slightest idea of how we were doing it.

“The mystery of consciousness to me is not ‘Isn’t it wonderful that we’re conscious’, but it’s the opposite. Isn’t it wonderful that we can do things like talk and walk, and understand without having the slightest idea of how it works.”

He also focused on health and longevity, speaking of immortality as a perfectly reasonable goal. He thought deeply about everything from the priorities we should have as a species to body part replacement.

From Pattie Maes:

“Marvin was always a true original, out-of-the-box thinker. While he is of course widely recognized as one of the founders of the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), his views were often at odds with the majority of the AI community.

For many decades, and even today, AI was plagued by “physics envy.” Researchers sought a few universal principles or mechanisms that could model or produce human-like intelligence. Marvin constantly reminded us that the real solution was likely to be a lot more complex. He described a myriad of different mechanisms that may be involved in producing intelligence in his books ‘The Society of Mind’ and ‘The Emotion Machine’ and emphasized the importance of giving computers large amounts of ‘common sense knowledge’, a problem few AI researchers, even today, have attempted to tackle.

I suspect that gradually the field will come to align with his views, recognizing that his views and writings have a timeless and deep quality.”•

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Old Print Article: President Coolidge Visits Cuba, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1928)

March 21, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

coolidgepic3 Coolidge and Machado in Cuba

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Calvin Coolidge was President of the United States in a time of railroads and radios, the last good time (at least for many white Americans) before the worst, hard time, one we wouldn’t completely emerge from until after World War II. He also was our final Commander in Chief to visit Cuba, 88 years ago, before President Obama’s current historic trip aimed at reconnecting the cultures. Much of Coolidge’s mission was diplomatic, directed at trying to repair the two nations’ strained relations, which of course would be completely torn asunder after Fidel Castro’s successful coup two decades later. An article from the January 16, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported on the visit.

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“It Feels Dangerous Over Here”

March 21, 2016 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

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If the polls are correct, most Americans believe in gun ownership but also desire in sensible laws governing that right, that responsibility. Studies even show the bulk of NRA members in agreement with background checks and not selling arms to those on terrorist watch lists and such. It’s always puzzled me that moderate gun owners don’t splinter off from the NRA, the second-most powerful fringe group in America (congratulations, Republican Party!). 

In a Financial Times essay, the novelist Richard Ford, a longtime gun owner, thinks what I’ve just described is a fairy tale, that the majority of us do favor insane gun laws. Perhaps, though it seems most of us have been removed from a discussion that goes on in Washington between lobbyists (with money) and lawmakers (with pockets). Ford himself looks at our facacta political landscape and believes it’s time to stop being locked into being loaded. An excerpt:

America is getting nuttier and nuttier. Every election cycle I notice how less governable it seems. Now the thuggish Donald Trump or the gargoyle-ish Ted Cruz may be our next president. What’s that about? Congress basically doesn’t work any more. Hundreds of our citizens were killed or wounded in mass shootings last year. Thanks to President Barack Obama and a lot of other right-thinking people, relations between blacks and white Americans (frictive, violent and unjust for centuries) are now prominently and more accurately in our view, and are improving. But white, undereducated men (the core group of handgun owners in our country), are living less long, are suffering increased alcoholism, drug abuse and stress. Black Americans know this experience very well in their own history. These white men don’t feel they’re keeping up with either their parents’ generation or with the people they normally compare themselves to (often African-Americans). Nine per cent of these men are unemployed. They’re cynical — with some reason — about their government. They feel too many things in the country aren’t going their way, and that they can’t control their lives. They fear change. Yet they sense the change they fear may have already occurred. Crime and gun violence are actually down in the US. But gun ownership is up. The NRA would say the latter statistic occasions the former. Me . . . I just say it feels dangerous over here.

I don’t cite these facts to engender undue sympathy for any particular American demographic slice. I personally do have some empathy for these white men, as well as for black teenagers mercilessly murdered by white police officers. And for lots of other people, too. I’m a novelist. Empathy is kinda my job. My version of liberty in the American republic is consonant with the view held by the cunningly named US appellate judge Learned Hand; which is, that the spirit of liberty is that spirit which is not too sure it’s right. What I feel, though, is what many Americans feel now — people I agree with and people I decidedly don’t — namely, we sense we’re approaching a tipping point in our liberties, a point at which good is being intolerably held hostage by not good, a point we need to back away from while we still can.•

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“The Potential Good And Bad Consequences Are Staggering”

March 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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When someone asks if machines can someday become conscious, my first thought is always this: Well, if that’s what they choose.

I intend that answer somewhat, though not entirely, glibly. Machines will achieve superintelligence long before consciousness, so who knows if we or they execute their awakening, if it should ever occur. Similarly, I believe bioengineering will allow humans to achieve a heretofore unapproached IQ level. Not soon, but someday.

AI, it is often said by very brilliant people, is our conqueror awaiting on the horizon, but I think it’s a distance beyond the further limits of our current perception. When we do get close enough to see them, they may resemble us. They will be another version of ourselves, a new “human” resulting from a souped-up evolution of our own design. We will be the end of us.

Of course, I could be completely wrong. We’re likely to find out the answer, however, since computers and science are probably too decentralized for curiosity to be checked. 

David Gelernter watched AlphaGo’s recent smashing triumph and now fears AI more than he does women who work outside the home. In his WSJ essay “Machines That Will Think and Feel,” he argues that “superhuman robots” will become reality once scientists appreciate that emotion is as vital to their creation as rational thought. An excerpt:

AI prophets envision humanlike intelligence within a few decades: not expertise at a single, specified task only but the flexible, wide-ranging intelligence that Alan Turing foresaw in a 1950 paper proposing the test for machine intelligence that still bears his name. Once we have figured out how to build artificial minds with the average human IQ of 100, before long we will build machines with IQs of 500 and 5,000. The potential good and bad consequences are staggering. Humanity’s future is at stake.

Suppose you had a fleet of AI software apps with IQs of 150 (and eventually 500 or 5,000) to help you manage life. You download them like other apps, and they spread out into your phones and computers—and walls, clothes, office, car, luggage—traveling within the dense computer network of the near future that is laid in by the yard, like thin cloth, everywhere.

AI apps will read your email and write responses, awaiting your nod to send them. They will escort your tax return to the IRS, monitor what is done and report back. They will murmur (from your collar, maybe) that the sidewalk is icier than it looks, a friend is approaching across the street, your gait is slightly odd—have you hurt your back? They will log on for you to 19 different systems using 19 different ridiculous passwords, rescuing you from today’s infuriating security protocols. They will answer your phone and tactfully pass on messages, adding any reminders that might help.

In a million small ways, next-generation AI apps will lessen the friction of modern life. Living without them will seem, in retrospect, like driving with no springs or shocks.

But we don’t have the vaguest idea what an IQ of 5,000 would mean.•

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“Factories Have Been Coming Back, But The Jobs Haven’t”

March 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In this nativist political season, Donald Trump has promised he’d use taxes to force American companies to not relocate factories overseas, but many of them are glad to stay and others are happily returning. The jobs aren’t coming back, mind you, just the factories. The work is being outsourced beyond our species, with machines taking over most of the tasks. That trend will only continue apace, regardless of where the physical plants are located. That’s the real political issue, the increase in automation, and one that’s been almost completely ignored on the trail. That’s probably because there are no easy answers.

From “Manufacturing Is Never Coming Back,” by Ben Casselman at Five Thirty Eight:

A plea to presidential candidates: Stop talking about bringing manufacturing jobs back from China. In fact, talk a lot less about manufacturing, period.

It’s understandable that voters are angry about trade. The U.S. has lost more than 4.5 million manufacturing jobs since NAFTA took effect in 1994. And as Eduardo Porter wrote this week, there’s mounting evidence that U.S. trade policy, particularly with China, has caused lasting harm to many American workers. But rather than play to that anger, candidates ought to be talking about ways to ensure that the service sector can fill manufacturing’s former role as a provider of dependable, decent-paying jobs.

Here’s the problem: Whether or not those manufacturing jobs could have been saved, they aren’t coming back, at least not most of them. How do we know? Because in recent years, factories have been coming back, but the jobs haven’t. Because of rising wages in China, the need for shorter supply chains and other factors, a small but growing group of companies are shifting production back to the U.S. But the factories they build here are heavily automated, employing a small fraction of the workers they would have a generation ago.•

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A Brief Note From 1928 About A Long Hike

March 20, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

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From the January 16, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“The Company Is Testing Pizza Delivery By Robot In New Zealand”

March 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

pizza-large_trans++3480UNUU8UfSxDSaY1n7MGcv5yZLmao6LolmWYJrXnsDescribed by Domino’s corporate execs as “cheeky and endearing” and a “road to the future,” the DRU robot has begun delivering the sludge the company calls pizza. Better to pull a tire from the rolling machine and gnaw on it.

Delivering pies is drudgery and sometimes dangerous, but it is an entry point into the economy for workers, and when the task is transitioned to robots it will leave a hole in the job market that won’t be easy to replace. The same goes for drivers (trucks, taxi, limo, etc.) when autonomous cars are perfected. Progress is good, but it comes with a price that must be addressed.

From Rhiannon Williams at The Telegraph:

Robots have changed our lives in many ways, from advancing our healthcare and automating our factory lines, to taking on dangerous tasks and even taking our place in warfare.

Now Domino’s have developed possibly the greatest use for robots yet – safe and secure pizza delivery in what the company claims is a world first.

The company is testing pizza delivery by robot in New Zealand, known as the Domino’s Robotic Unit (DRU). The three-foot tall battery-powered unit contains a heated compartment for storing up to 10 pizzas, and is capable of self-driving up to 12.5 miles, or 20 km from a shop.

The robot sports sensors for detecting obstacles on its route, and customers are given a unique code to key into the pizza compartment once it arrives at their house to prevent thieves from trying to steal its goods en route.•

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“The Chinese Government Wants To Know About Everything”

March 20, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Was reading an article, “Botox and Driverless Cars to Spearhead China Growth,” and thinking the obvious, that despite a disdain for democracy, China has become Western in so many ways, especially technological ones. Of course, our new tools also threaten to make the West resemble China’s autocracy, even if it’s more corporatocracy than governmental. Smartphones are the first step, but driverless cars and the Internet of Things will move us so far into the machine, make it so easy for every step–even thought–to be tracked, that it will be impossible to withdraw. These advances will do great things, but there will be costs.

The opening of G. Clay Whittaker’s Daily Beast piece about China’s Minority Report mission:

China has a new strategy in fighting crime, ripped from science fiction and hastily pasted at the top of the list of paranoia-inducing concepts.

It’s called pre-crime. It goes further than sting operations, counterterrorism, or any other government action to preempt criminal activity ever before.

Like the 2002 film Minority Report, China wants to fight crimes before they happen. They want to know they’ll happen before they’re planned—before the criminal even knows he’s going to be part of them. Bloomberg Business reported that the Communist Party “has directed one of the country’s largest state-run defense contractors, China Electronics Technology Group, to develop software to collate data on jobs, hobbies, consumption habits, and other behavior of ordinary citizens to predict terrorist acts before they occur.”

The Chinese government wants to know about everything: every text a person sends, every extra stop they make on the way home. It’s designed for dissidents, but it means that they’ll know every time a smoker buys a pack of cigarettes, how much gas a car owner uses, what time the new mom goes to bed, and what’s in the bachelor’s refrigerator.

It’s a scary thought, especially when you consider that the main target of Chinese pre-crime efforts wouldn’t be “terrorists,” murderers, rapists, or child molesters, but rather dissidents of every shape and size.•

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This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

March 20, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

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10 search-engine keyphrases bringing traffic to Afflictor this week:

  1. articles about marvin minsky
  2. alphago hassabis
  3. donnie trump is a moron
  4. jimmy breslin most famous column
  5. dorothy stratten death
  6. ray harroun first indy 500 winner
  7. agatha christie mysterious disappearance
  8. wilt chamberlain vs muhammad ali
  9. eldridge cleaver william buckley
  10. german inventor joseph faber’s talking machine

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

March 19, 2016 in Misc. | Permalink

This week, Donald Trump campaign in Arizona, throwing out a fist pitch at a Spring Training game,

This week, GOP frontrunner Donald Trump threw out the first pitch at a Spring Training game, immediately infusing America’s Pastime with his campaign’s positive vibes.

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  • The Woz wants machines with human (or better) conversational skills.

“Technology May Be Even More Precise Than Human Employees”

March 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Collars white and blue will be impacted by automation in the coming decades, the question being whether enough new jobs will be created to make up for the losses of lawyers and livery drivers. 

Two passages follow, one from a Business Insider piece by Kate Taylor on Carl’s Jr. CEO Andy Puzder who boldly stepped into the future (and put his foot in the mouth) in announcing he wants to open an Eatsa-esque automated location, while simultaneously bashing humans laborers, those pests, and their requests for living wages and basic rights. The second excerpt comes from a Financial Times article by Jane Croft about the projected technological transition in the legal profession that will favor some while displacing others.

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From Business Insider:

First and foremost, the technology has to work every time. For the time being, Puzder doesn’t think that it’s likely that any machine could take over the more nuanced kitchen work of Carl’s Jr. and Hardee’s.

But for more rote tasks like grilling a burger or taking an order, technology may be even more precise than human employees.

“They’re always polite, they always upsell, they never take a vacation, they never show up late, there’s never a slip-and-fall, or an age, sex, or race discrimination case,” says Puzder of swapping employees for machines.

…

Puzder says that a restaurant that’s 100% automated would have one big plus for millennials: no social interaction.

“Millennials like not seeing people,” he says. “I’ve been inside restaurants where we’ve installed ordering kiosks … and I’ve actually seen young people waiting in line to use the kiosk where there’s a person standing behind the counter, waiting on nobody.”•

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From Financial Times:

Around 114,000 jobs in the legal sector are likely to become automated in the next 20 years as technology transforms the profession, a new study has found.

Automation, changes in the demands from clients and the rise of millennials in the workplace will alter the types of skills sought after by law firms, according to the new study by Deloitte which predicts a tipping point for law firms by 2020.

Technology has already contributed to a reduction of around 31,000 jobs in the sector including roles such as legal secretaries, the report said, as it predicted that another 39 per cent of jobs are at “high risk” of being made redundant by machines in the next two decades.

The sector is currently growing; there has been an overall increase of approximately 80,000 jobs — most of which are higher skilled and better paid, such as barristers and solicitors.

The study also predicts a healthier future for highly skilled lawyers. It points to projections by the Warwick Institute for Employment Research which estimates that 25,000 extra workers will be needed in legal activities sector between 2015 and 2020.•

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“Oooo, Does Coca-Cola Know That I Masturbated?”

March 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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In the passage I posted from his recent Reddit AMA, Douglas Rushkoff, who’s just published Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, engaged in an esoteric exchange about possible economic outcomes in our newly wired world. In a FiveThirtyEight podcast hosted by Jody Avirgan, the author notes that corporations collecting metadata, part of our paranoid-making contemporary financial reality, is creepy even if it studies us as parts of groups rather than as individuals. An excerpt:

Jody Avirgan:

We obsess about the creepiness of a corporation or a government kind of knowing about us as individuals, but you say that the part that creeps you out the most is the metadata notion — to think of yourself as grouped, not as an individual.

Douglas Rushkoff:

When people think of privacy, they think of the content rather than the context. So the privacy is like, “Oooo, does Coca-Cola know that I masturbated?”

Jody Avirgan:

I don’t know why Coca-Cola would want to know that, but I bet someone in Coca Cola is trying to figure it out.

Douglas Rushkoff:

And they do. And they do. Believe me, statistically they know.

Jody Avirgan:

I will never be able to forget that notion.You’ve just implanted that in my head.

Douglas Rushkoff:

[Laughs] That’s the social programming of the activist in media trying to plant memetic constructs that slowly deteriorate our brand imagery. It’s not the specific thing that they’re going to find out, it’s the groups that you’re in, it’s the metadata. So that, when you see the study that Facebook knows with 80 percent accuracy whether an adolescent boy is going to [come out as] homosexual in the next six months — that’s weird. Companies know things about you that you don’t yet know yourself, and they only know them in terms of probability. The world that you see is being configured to a probable reality that you haven’t yet chosen.•

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“Just Imagine A Small Lunar Base At One Of The Lunar Poles”

March 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Brian Clegg doesn’t believe a moon colony could be profitable, but what if new technologies and better financial planning rendered the project relatively inexpensive? And what if the non-economic gains, at least the immediate ones, could benefit us in numerous other ways?

Jurica Dujmovic of Marketwatch pointed me toward a New Space article by Alexandra Hall, Chris McKay and John Cumbers, which proposes just such a low-cost lunar settlement be established. They believe recent advances in launch capacity and lessons learned from the International Space Station could seriously shave costs.

An excerpt:

Just imagine a small lunar base at one of the lunar poles operated by NASA or an International Consortium and modeled according to the U.S. Antarctic Station at South Pole. The crew of about 10 people would consist of a mixture of staff and field scientists. Personnel rotations might be three times a year. The main activity would be supporting field research selected by peer-reviewed proposals. Graduate students doing fieldwork for their thesis research would dominate the activity. No one lives at the base permanently but there is always a crew present. The base is heavily supported by autonomous and remotely operated robotic devices.

The activities at this Moon base would be focusing on science, as is the case in the Antarctic. It could provide an official U.S. Government presence on the Moon and its motivation would be rooted in U.S. national policy—again as are the U.S. Antarctic bases. A lunar base would provide a range of technologies and programmatic precedents supporting a long-term NASA research base on Mars.

None of these ideas is new, but given that all prior assumptions for execution revolved around such an activity consuming all or most of the NASA budget for decades, then progress has been extremely limited.

Now imagine that the cost of such a lunar base was within NASA’s existing deep space human spaceflight budget of $3–4 billion per year. Suddenly it would be an easy sell and would receive no opposition from the sections of the space community that are focused on other destinations.

The logic that low cost changes the terms of the debate about a NASA Moon base and enables a consensus path forward to establishing a base also applies to private/commercial endeavors. When the cost of a short stay on the Moon drops into the tens of millions of dollars per person, it starts to tap into the same market that has given us private spaceflight participants to the International Space Station (ISS). Furthermore, the presence of a government base is also the presence of a customer on the Moon—a factor that can stimulate the development of services, supplies, and technology to the benefit of all.•

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“The More You Ask Of Viv, The More It Will Get To Know You”

March 18, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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With his AI enterprise, Viv, Dag Kittlaus is not trying to create Frankenstein but Igor, a digital assistant that goes far beyond Siri (which he co-created), one that attaches a pleasing voice to a “giant brain in the sky.” It’s not easy, however, for technologists to discuss such heady enterprises without offering phrases, like the one in the headline, embedded with unintended meanings.

From Marco della Cava’s USA Today piece about technology talk at SXSW, which featured Steven Levy questioning Kittlaus:

When the moderator, tech author Steven Levy, asked Kittlaus if in fact supercomputers might not take over for entrepreneurs, using their digital brains to create things faster than humans, [Dag] Kittlaus nodded.

“Yes, it will happen,” he said. “It’s just a matter of when.”

Kittlaus, it can be argued, is hastening the arrival of that day. Later this year, he will unveil Viv, an open source and cloud-based personal assistant that will allow humans “to talk to the Internet” and have the Internet talk back.

“The more you ask of Viv, the more it will get to know you,” he said. “Siri was chapter one, and now it’s almost like a new Internet age is coming. Viv will be a giant brain in the sky.”

Kittlaus said Viv would differ from Siri, Microsoft’s Cortana and Amazon’s Echo by being able to make mental leaps.

For example, asking Viv “What’s the weather near the Super Bowl” would cause it to “write its own program to find the answer, one that first determines where the Super Bowl is, and then what the weather will be in that city,” he said.•

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A Brief Note About Pre-Edison Talking Machines

March 17, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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From the April 26, 1925 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“I Have Wanted That To Be The Future For…Forever”

March 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

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Steve Wozniak just completed one of his wide-ranging AMAs at Reddit, providing thoughtful commentary on myriad subjects. On the state of the company he cofounded, he admires Tim Cook’s management though he has misgivings about the Apple Watch (and who doesn’t!). The Woz longs for the day when we can talk to machines that know us as well as–even better than–our human friends, which will be wonderful and creepy. In the Apple/FBI scrum, he comes down on the side civil liberties, which is unsurprising if you know his history. A few exchanges follow.

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Question:

What is Tim Cook doing right/wrong, in your opinion?

Steve Wozniak:

Tim Cook is acknowledging the employees of Apple and the customers of Apple as real people. He is continuing a strong tradition that Steve Jobs was known for of making good products that help people do things they want to do in their life, and not taking the company into roads of, “Oh, we’ll make all our money like by knowing you and advertising to you.” We’ll make good products. And you know, I started out as a hardware product guy, so I’m glad to see that.

I worry a little bit about – I mean I love my Apple Watch, but – it’s taken us into a jewelry market where you’re going to buy a watch between $500 or $1100 based on how important you think you are as a person. The only difference is the band in all those watches. Twenty watches from $500 to $1100. The band’s the only difference? Well this isn’t the company that Apple was originally, or the company that really changed the world a lot. So it might be moving, but you’ve got to follow, you know. You’ve got to follow the paths of where the markets are.

Everything else, I’m very approving of Tim Cook, because every time we have a new iOS update, I’m very happy that it’s doing things that really affect people. Like transferring calls from my phone to my computer, etc. I really love even the Airplay, and all that. So, I love the software, and I love the hardware, and nothing’s letting me down. So I approve very strongly of Tim Cook and the new Apple. I dearly miss Steve Jobs too, but, that’s all.

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Question:

What are your thoughts on the FBI/DOJ vs Apple ordeal at the moment?

Steve Wozniak:

All through my time with personal computers from the start, I developed an attitude that things like movement towards newer, better technologies – like the Macintosh computer, like the touchscreen of the iPhone – that these were making the human more important than the technology. We did not have to modify our ways of living. So the human became very important to me. And how do you represent what humanity is?

You know what, I have things in my head, some very special people in my life that I don’t talk about, that mean so much to me from the past. Those little things that I keep in my head are my little secrets. It’s a part of my important world, my whole essence of my being. I also believe in honesty. If you tell somebody, “I am not snooping on you,” or, “I am giving you some level of privacy; I will not look in your drawers,” then you should keep your word and be honest. And I always try to avoid being a snoop myself, and it’s rare in time that we can look back and say, “How should humans be treated?” Not, “How can the police run everything?”

I was brought up in a time when communist Russia under Stalin was thought to be, everybody is spied on, everybody is looked into, every little thing can get you secretly thrown into prison. And, no. We had our Bill of Rights. And it’s just dear to me. The Bill of Rights says some bad people won’t do certain bad things because we’re protecting humans to live as humans.

So, I come from the side of personal liberties. But there are also other problems. Twice in my life I wrote things that could have been viruses. I threw away every bit of source code. I just got a chill inside. These are dangerous, dangerous things, and if some code gets written in an Apple product that lets people in, bad people are going to find their way to it, very likely.

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Question:

What is your opinion on how immersive our technology is becoming? We use computers in some form, almost constantly. Do you ever feel in your own life you that it becomes overwhelming?

Steve Wozniak:

I have that feeling all the time because I like a nice, quiet, simple life. I grew up shy. I’m more into products than I’m into socializing. And I do not carry around my phone answering every text message instantly. I am not one of those people.

I wait until I’m alone in my places and get on my computer and do things where I think I’m more efficient. I really see a lot of people that are dragged into it, but you know, I don’t criticize them. When you have change, it’s not that the change in how people are behaving different to you is bad or good, it’s just different.

So that’s sort of the modern way, and you know the millennials, every generation wants to criticize the next generation for missing out on things like personal human contact, but I’ll tell you a little story. When we started Apple, Steve Jobs and I talked about how we wanted to make blind people as equal and capable as sighted people, and you’d have to say we succeeded when you look at all the people walking down the sidewalk looking down at something in their hands and totally oblivious to everything around them!

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Question:

What is your favorite up and coming gadget? Anything people don’t know about yet?

Steve Wozniak:

Well, I would think probably one of them is certainly the Oculus Rift, or any of the VR headsets. I love putting mine on and watching a basketball game live; it was just an experience that you can’t believe. Sometimes I come out of a VR world, take off the helmet, and I can’t believe I’m actually sitting in my office, at a desk at home. So, that’s one of the big ones.

Right now, Amazon Echo; it’s getting so popular among the people that use it and they speak so highly of it, and it’s so inexpensive. I see a lot of developers that went into smartphones jumping onto that. It’s a platform, and when you have a platform that everybody else is writing apps for and connecting to, basically they’re advertising your company as much as you are.

Obviously, I’m very interested in the evolution of self-driving cars. Right now, the assist that they give you for keeping in your lane and cruise control…the cruise control started back in 2004 actually, adjusting your distance. I love driving my Tesla so much, I just smile! I sit there in the driver’s seat, and I kinda look over at my wife, and I just smile. I’m so happy, not using my hands or feet. So, I think the progression towards self-driving cars is going to be a good one. But it falls into that category of AI.

Now, the AI that impresses me, I fell in love 10 years ago – well not 10 years ago, but whenever it started; Siri was an app you could buy for the iPhone, and I bought it. And for one year, Apple didn’t have it. I just spoke of it as the app that changed my life, because I get to live as a human, saying things out of my head the way I would to another human, and a machine understands me. And I have wanted that to be the future for…forever.

Actually, ever since our Newton message pad, where I could type in, “Sara, dentist, Tuesday, 2 PM,” and click the assist button, and it would open up the calendar; Tuesday at 2 PM, it would put the word dentist, and it would grab Sara out of my contact list. I hand wrote with my own muscles a message for myself, for a human, and a machine understood me. So, I want that to get better and better; machines understanding what we mean, so that we can eventually communicate with them as our best, most trusted friends that know our own hearts and souls better than other humans.•

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“Look Closer, However, And Russia’s Victory Rings Hollow”

March 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Historically, Mussolini may be the template for the odious Donald Trump, but on the contemporary world stage, he most resembles Vladimir Putin. Russia’s swaggering, macho coward makes loud noises to drown out the death rattle of outdated foreign and domestic policies lifted from the twentieth century. The American idiot may be a make-believe mafioso as opposed to Putin’s very real murderous thug, but the similarities are still disconcerting. Of course, in addition to not realizing Putin a poisoner and pistolman by proxy, Trump seems to not have noticed the Russian president is on increasingly shaky ground. 

From the Economist:

JUBILANT crowds waved Russian flags; homecoming pilots were given fresh-baked bread by women in traditional dress. Judging by the pictures on television, Vladimir Putin won a famous victory in Syria this week. After his unexpected declaration that the campaign is over, Mr Putin is claiming credit for a ceasefire and the start of peace talks. He has shown off his forces and, heedless of civilian lives, saved the regime of his ally, Bashar al-Assad (though Mr Assad himself may yet prove dispensable). He has “weaponised” refugees by scattering Syrians among his foes in the European Union. And he has outmanoeuvred Barack Obama, who has consistently failed to grasp the enormity of the Syrian civil war and the threat it poses to America’s allies in the Middle East and Europe.

Look closer, however, and Russia’s victory rings hollow. Islamic State (IS) remains. The peace is brittle. Even optimists doubt that diplomacy in Geneva will prosper (see article). Most important, Mr Putin has exhausted an important tool of propaganda. As our briefing explains, Russia’s president has generated stirring images of war to persuade his anxious citizens that their ailing country is once again a great power, first in Ukraine and recently over the skies of Aleppo. The big question for the West is where he will stage his next drama.

Make Russia great again

Mr Putin’s Russia is more fragile than he pretends. •

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“That’s A Lot Of Competition, All In A Short Span, For American Factory Workers”

March 17, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Outsourcing has traditionally meant jobs moving outside of a country, but more and more it will mean they move outside the species. Increasing automation will likely put more stress on workers, though no one can surely say how much, as nobody knows precisely when driverless cars or delivery drones or robot bellhops will reach critical mass. President Obama addressed the issue, if briefly, in his last State of the Union:

Anyone claiming that America’s economy is in decline is peddling fiction. What is true — and the reason that a lot of Americans feel anxious — is that the economy has been changing in profound ways, changes that started long before the Great Recession hit and haven’t let up. Today, technology doesn’t just replace jobs on the assembly line, but any job where work can be automated. Companies in a global economy can locate anywhere, and face tougher competition. As a result, workers have less leverage for a raise. Companies have less loyalty to their communities. And more and more wealth and income is concentrated at the very top.

All these trends have squeezed workers, even when they have jobs; even when the economy is growing. It’s made it harder for a hardworking family to pull itself out of poverty, harder for young people to start on their careers, and tougher for workers to retire when they want to. And although none of these trends are unique to America, they do offend our uniquely American belief that everybody who works hard should get a fair shot.•

Most of the focus in this sadly nativist American political season hasn’t been on looming technological unemployment but on blaming and bashing other countries, chiefly China. It’s not that trade deals don’t matter–of course they do–but part of our declining manufacturing base has to do with emerging economies simply becoming more competitive by developing sophisticated systems and taking dicey shortcuts (terrible air pollution, sky-high cancer rates, dangerous work conditions, etc.) that we wouldn’t accept.

From a post by Neil Irwin at the New York Times “Upshot”:

One study found that Chinese imports from 1999 to 2011 cost up to 2.4 million American jobs.

That said, it’s easy to assign too much of the blame for the collapse of manufacturing employment to China or trade more broadly. Hundreds of millions of workers across the globe — many of whom were in dire poverty a generation ago — have become integrated into the world economy. That’s a lot of competition, all in a short span, for American factory workers.

At the same time, factory technology has advanced so that a company can make more stuff with fewer workers. The number of manufacturing workers in the United States has been declining as a share of all jobs nearly continuously since 1943, and the total number of manufacturing jobs peaked in 1979; China’s trade with the United States didn’t really take off until the 1990s.

In other words, trade has been an important economic force over the last few decades, and the deepening of the United States’ ties with China is one of the most important developments in global economics of the last generation. But to look at China as the sole force affecting the ups and downs of American workers misses the mark.•

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“This Is The Story Of The Most Exciting Technology You’re Ever Likely To Encounter”

March 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

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From typewriters to automobiles to personal computers, new tools pretty much always go through an early, unstable period of fits and starts. Now is no different. The Internet of Things and Augmented Reality are two ideas in possession of game-changing properties but also an assortment of obstacles to surmount. 

In his latest Wall Street Journal column, Christopher Mims touts the latter as “the future” and reports it could possibly arrive sooner than we’d expect, noting the well-funded competition among Silicon Valley giants and startups. “Perhaps AR’s biggest hurdle will be human,” he writes, stating that overcoming computing challenges may be simpler than winning hearts and minds. Even if takes longer than, say, a decade, the technology is surely more doable than the hardware required to realize a lot of our futuristic dreams. I only fear that its arrival will somehow mean more and bigger Trump.

The opening:

This is the story of the most exciting technology you’re ever likely to encounter, which could transform how we interact with computers in the 21st century.

That is a big claim. But I’ll bet that five, 10, 20 years from now, I’ll be able to point to this column and say, “I told you so.”

I’m talking about augmented reality, or AR. It’s often misunderstood or mischaracterized, and has been overshadowed by its cousin, virtual reality. Moreover, the best-known example of AR, Google Glass, has largely been a failure so far.

To understand AR, imagine a display that sits, not on your desk or in your hand, but in front of your eyes. Today, these displays are unwieldy, ranging from bulkier versions of safety glasses to something akin to a bicycle helmet. They have other limitations, such as a narrow field of view, relatively poor resolution and problems with lag.

But many technologists believe that within five years, these displays will be able to project a virtual screen on every surface.•

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Old Print Article: Gen. Cassius M. Clay–Liberator And Captor, New York Times (1903)

March 16, 2016 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

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Cassius Marcellus Clay of Kentucky was a liberator, mostly.

A general who served the Union during the Civil War, he was an abolitionist from a family of slave owners who went mental in his dotage, essentially imprisoning a very reluctant 15-year-old wife when he was in his eighties. He was also a politician, an expert duelist, a Yale graduate and the U.S. Minister to Russia under President Lincoln. He was a wonderful and, eventually, terrible man.

It’s his post in St. Petersburg that reminded me of him, as he’s mentioned in a book I just read, Ian Frazier’s Travels in Siberia, which I consider to be part of an unofficial trilogy by the great reporter, along with Great Plains and On the Rez, of volumes by a tourist of sorts who lingers as long as you can without becoming a local.

From an article of the death of the nonagenarian in the July 23, 1903 New York Times:

Gen. Cassius Marcellus was famous for such a multitude of daring deeds, political feats, and personal eccentricities that it is hard to choose any one act or characteristic more distinguished than the rest. As a duelist, always victorious, he was said to have been implicated in more encounters and to have killed more men than any fighter living. As a politician he was especially famous for his anti-slavery crusades in Kentucky, having become imbued with abolition principles while he was a student at Yale, despite the fact that his father was a wealthy slave owner. As a diplomat while Minister to Russia during and after the civil war, he took a prominent part in the negotiations that resulted in the annexation of Alaska.

The act of Gen. Clay’s life that has commanded most attention in recent years was his marriage to a fifteen-year-old peasant girl after he had reached his eighty-fourth birthday. In 1887, he had married his first wife, Miss Warfield, a member of an aristocratic family of slave holders, and years afterward when he had become an ardent disciple of Tolstoi, he came to the conclusion that he ought to wed a “daughter of the people.” In November, 1894, he chose Dora Richardson, the daughter of a woman who had been a domestic for some time in his mansion at White Hall, near Lexington.

When the little girl became his wife, the General proceeded to employ a governess for her. She rebelled. Then he sent her to the same district school she had attended previously. The fact that he supplied her with the most beautiful French gowns and lavished money upon her, she did not consider compensations for the teasing she got at the hands of her fellow-pupils. In two months he had to take her back home, still uneducated. 

The old warrior’s eccentricities increased during his declining years, and after his latest marriage he thought little of anything except his dream that some ancient enemy was trying to murder him and his “peasant wife,” as he called her. She, in spite of his kindnesses, kept running away from White Hall, and finally he decided he must get a divorce. This he did, charging her with abandonment. She soon married a worthless young mountaineer named Brock, who was once arrested for counterfeiting. Then the General began to plot to get her back, having already given a farm and house to her and her new husband, only to hear that Brock sold the property. At last Brock died, and a few months ago dispatches from Kentucky stated that the General was trying in vain to prevail upon his “child wife” to return to him. She refused persistently, never having outgrown the dislike for the luxurious life with which he surrounded her and still preferring the simple country existence to which she was born.•

“Part Half-Decayed Empire On Ice And Part Gas Station”

March 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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“Thuggish kleptocracy upheld by state-sponsored murder” is probably the way I’d describe Russia under Vladimir Putin, a capo with nuclear capabilities whose odious criminal record will only grow in retrospect, when the much-needed autopsy is finally performed. If Nixon had a “credibility gap,” Putin has an incredible, gaping one. No one knows precisely where all the bodies are buried, only that there’s death in the air, mixed with the scent of oil pulled from yesterday’s wells. 

In a New York Review of Books piece, Masha Gessen tries to make sense of it all, wondering if the term “mafia state” is the most apt description. The opening:

Is Russia a fascist state? A totalitarian one? A dictatorship? A cult of personality? A system? An autocracy? An ideocracy? A kleptocracy? For two days last week, some of the best Russian minds (and a few non-Russians) met in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, to debate the nature of the Putin regime and what it may turn into when Putin is no longer in power, whenever and however that may come to pass. The gathering was convened by chess champion and politician Garry Kasparov, who, like the overwhelming majority of the roughly four hundred participants, is living in exile. People came from the United States, Great Britain, Germany, Malta, and the Baltic states, but Vilnius was chosen for its geographic and symbolic proximity to Russia.

“Part half-decayed empire on ice and part gas station,” a description offered by political scientist Lilia Shevtsova, was probably the most colorful, but the current fashion among the Russian intellectual class is to call Russia a “hybrid regime,” one that combines elements of dictatorship and democracy. Unlike just about all other available definitions of Putinism, this one contains a kernel of hope: it suggests that the regime’s tiny democratic elements can be strengthened and used to weaken the dictatorship part.•

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“His Hoaxes Attempted To Make Some Kind Of Political Commentary”

March 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

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There’s something wrong with people who play pranks. It seems like fractured sexual energy fashioned into a whoopee cushion. But as any longtime reader of this site knows, I’m fascinated by the legendary hoaxster Alan Abel, a blend of Lenny Bruce and Allen Funt whose deadpan presentation bedeviled broadcasters when TV was the primary American media. Abel’s gift is being able to divine our desires and fears before we can name them, and then reflect them through ridiculous stunts that are obviously fake yet fool the masses because of the collective holes in our souls. More than anyone else, he’s the cultural antecedent to Sacha Baron Cohen.

In a smart Priceonomics post, Zachary Crockett profiles man who is–and isn’t–serious. The opening (followed by video of a few Abel hoaxes):

On May 27, 1959, a mysterious, bespectacled man in a suit appeared on The Today Show. After briskly introducing himself, he turned to the camera and told America of his mission: to “clothe naked animals for the sake of decency.”

The man went by the name of G. Clifford Prout, and he claimed to be the president of an organization called The Society for Indecency to Naked Animals (S.I.N.A.). Naked animals, he harped, were “destroying the moral integrity of our great nation” — and the only solution was to cover them up with pants and dresses.

Prout’s impassioned speech did not fall on deaf ears: within days, S.I.N.A. attracted more than 50,000 members. For the next four years, the organization and its leader topped news headlines, made the rounds on talk shows, and spurred heated debates among pundits.

But S.I.N.A. was not real: it was the invention of Alan Abel, history’s greatest media hoaxster.

Over his 60-year “career” as a professional hoaxster, Abel orchestrated more than 30 high-profile stunts — from faking his own death to convincing the press he had the world’s smallest penis. He tricked top New York Times reporters, trolled Walter Cronkite, and weaseled his way into tens of thousands of print publications and talk shows.

His hoaxes attempted to make some kind of political commentary — on censorship, backwards moral standards, or the vapidity of daytime television. But often, they would be taken literally, riling up supporters and revealing ugly truths about America. He preyed on the media’s hunger for juicy stories, and ultimately revealed its gullibility.•

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A funny and prescient piece of performance art in which Abel responded to an ad placed by a 1999 HBO show seeking men willing to discuss their genitalia. Abel presented himself as a 57-year-old musician with a micro-penis. The hoaxer was ridiculing the early days of Reality TV, in which soft-headed pseudo-documentaries were offered to the public by cynical producers who didn’t exactly worry about veracity. Things have gotten only dicier since, as much of our culture, including news, makes no attempt at objective truth, instead encouraging individuals to create the reality that comforts or flatters them. Language is NSFW, unless you work in a gloryhole.

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In this ridiculous interview from basic cable decades ago, Abel satirized our wish for fame, youth and immortality, marrying the emerging celebrity culture to new scientific possibilities. He pretended that he’d created a sperm bank in which only stars like John Wayne and Johnny Carson were allowed to make deposits. And he was going to cryogenically freeze a young woman and tour her body across America. Everyone would be a star and live forever.

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In a 1970s scam, the wiseacre posed as a tennis-loving sheik, playing off America’s fear and loathing of newly minted OPEC millionaires, at a time when our post-WWII lustre had faded. Abel created the character of Prince Emir Assad, who competed in a Pro-Am tourney.

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Abel pulled a prank during the economic downturn of the early 1990s in which he pretended to be a financially desperate man willing to sell his kidneys and lungs. The ruse was eagerly devoured by news media because it toyed furiously with the fear of falling being experienced by a shrinking American middle class, which was under extreme pressure from a dwindling manufacturing base, anti-unionists and technology-driven downsizing. Things have clearly grown even worse.

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“Suddenly The Plane Hit A Patch Of Nasty Turbulence”

March 16, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

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Years ahead of a Presidential election season, major news organizations run articles about the futures of the parties, those candidates who may someday be king because of a demographic trend or quirk of history. It’s almost always a fool’s errand because predicting politics so many news cycles away usually makes a mockery of the messenger. And you never know how someone, no matter how good they look in a mirror or on paper, will respond to the trail, a bruising, unforgiving thing–a microscope, a cudgel. For every Barack Obama, there are many Fred Thompsons, Chris Christies and Bobby Jindals.

The New York Times Magazine, which has played this handicapping game–Mark Warner, anyone?–assigned the great writer Mark Leibovich the task of penning the postmortem of the latest can’t-miss prospect who did just that, Marco Rubio, the “choirboy rebel” whose progress (and regress) he’s followed for six years. A Republican Party looking to make inroads with Hispanic voters was supposed to embrace the Great Not-Exactly-White Hope with the conservative bona fides, but while Mom and Dad just adored him, the other kids clearly did not. The piece was published a couple of days before the Florida primary, but by then the sun had gone down.

The opening:

The last time I saw Marco Rubio in person, he seemed to be on the verge of inheriting the charred Republican earth. It was Feb. 22, the day before theNevada caucuses. We were aboard Rubio’s campaign plane, flying from Reno, Nev., to Las Vegas. Rubio is 44, but he can sometimes come off like an overgrown and hyperactive boy, jiggling his leg when he is otherwise still. He seemed to be in a sunny mood.

“This was a great day for us,” said Rubio, who had not yet resorted to making pee-pee jokes about the Donald. At the time, consensus was building among the pundit geniuses (whose consensuses are, of course, always correct) that Rubio was now the preferred alternative to Donald J. Trump.
 
As Rubio crisscrossed Nevada with his retinue of local dignitaries — Nevada’s lieutenant governor and a former governor, a congressman and a senator — it seemed as if every hour brought another endorsement from another vintage piece of the Republican furniture: Orrin Hatch, Bob Dole, a senator from Indiana, the governor of Arkansas. The night before at a rally in North Las Vegas, Rubio strode, chest out, onto a stage crowded with validators — 17 of them in all. They included a casino’s buffet of Nevada pols, someone from a reality TV show called “Pawn Stars” and Donnie Wahlberg: once a New Kid on the Block, now a lapsed golden boy who was going all in for Marky Marco.

Suddenly the plane hit a patch of nasty turbulence. It started bouncing and shaking, as if we were flying through a blender.•

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