321nuke

Anyone who watches Silkwood at a formative age, seeing Meryl Streep furiously scrubbed and showered, might think nuclear power plants are the devil. And there certainly is the devil in their details: An accident or purposeful act of destruction can not only kill swaths of people but also “salt the earth.” Even in the best-case, calamity-free scenario, the waste will be on our hands for an awful long time.

In a NYT op-ed, Peter Thiel argues in favor of going nuclear to combat climate change, pointing out that it was only human error that brought about horrors like Chernobyl. Sure, but human error (and the machine kind) aren’t going away. Neither are earthquakes or other natural disasters which can overwhelm fail-safe measures. It’s not a flawless solution that won’t make us pay in some painful way. The best argument in its favor is that its costs are far more easily absorbed than are those of rising sea levels.

Knowing that a species-wide catastrophe will certainly result from continued carbon emissions does make it clear that our previous weighing of coal and atomic energy were off-kilter.

An excerpt:

The need for energy alternatives was already clear to investors a decade ago, which is why they poured funding into clean technology during the early 2000s. But while the money was there, the technology wasn’t: The result was a series of bankruptcies and the scandal of Solyndra, the solar panel manufacturer in California that went bankrupt in 2011 after receiving a federal guarantee of hundreds of millions of dollars. Wind and solar together provide less than 2 percent of the world’s energy, and they aren’t growing anywhere near fast enough to replace fossil fuels.

What’s especially strange about the failed push for renewables is that we already had a practical plan back in the 1960s to become fully carbon-free without any need of wind or solar: nuclear power. But after years of cost overruns, technical challenges and the bizarre coincidence of an accident at Three Mile Island and the 1979 release of the Hollywood horror movie The China Syndrome, about a hundred proposed reactors were canceled. If we had kept building, our power grid could have been carbon-free years ago.

Instead, we went in reverse.•

 

Tags:

From the April 8, 1902 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

oldbones7

erhard99

we (1)erhardestparking7-e1404969614234

Werner Erhard, the shouting est salesman, is still working it, though opinions will vary on what it is.

When you’re born John Rosenberg, rechristen yourself after a Nazi rocketeer (misspelling it!), and unabashedly tell people that you’re a hero, you may be questionable. Nonetheless, the profane self-help peddler who came to wide prominence in the 1970s, with the aid of apostles in entertainment and intellectual circles, from John Denver to Buckminster Fuller, continues apace at 80 and has reinvented himself yet again, after nearly being permanently knocked from his pedestal by health issues, an IRS imbroglio, a shattering 60 Minutes profile and ongoing gamesmanship with Scientologists.

A really fun New York Times piece by Peter Haldeman looks at the latest Erhard iteration, while offering an alternative version of how the Dale Carnegie of sleep deprivation came to rename himself. The opening:

The silver-haired man dressed like a waiter (dark vest, dark slacks) paced the aisle between rows of desks in a Toronto conference room. “If you’re going to be a leader, you’re going to have to have a very loose relationship with this thing you call ‘I’ or ‘me,’” he shouted. “Maybe that whole thing in me around which the universe revolves isn’t so central!”

He paused to wipe his brow with a wad of paper towels. An assistant stood by with a microphone, but he waved her off. “Maybe life is not about the self but about self-transcendence! You got a problem with that?”

No one in the room had a problem with that. The desks were occupied by 27 name-tagged academics from around the world. And in the course of the day, a number of them would take the mike to pose what their instructor referred to as “yeah buts, how ’bouts or what ifs” in response to his pronouncements — but no one had a problem with them.

In some ways, the three-day workshop, “Creating Class Leaders,” recalled an EST training session. As with that cultural touchstone of the 1970s, there was “sharing” and applause. There were confrontations and hugs. Gnomic declarations hovered in the air like mist: “We need to distinguish distinction”; “There’s no seeing, there’s only the seer”; “There isn’t any is.”

But the event was much more civilized than EST. There were bathroom breaks. No one was called an expletive by the teacher.

This is significant because the teacher was none other than the creator of EST, Werner Erhard.•

__________________________

In 1973, Denver, substitute host on the Tonight Show, invited his guru to chat.

Tags: ,

nailstyping

 

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

  1. historical articles about l. ron hubbard
  2. philip k. dick in suburbia
  3. fascism by algorithm
  4. f is for fake 1974 orson welles
  5. chris dancy quantified man
  6. ny times article about nick bostrom
  7. superstar televangelist robert schuller
  8. alex ross writing about the voyager golden record
  9. exotic animal trade
  10. dave asprey immortality
blindperson8

This week, Donald Trump, in addition to mocking a reporter with a musculoskeletal disorder, further showed how Presidential he is by stealing a blind senior citizen’s guide dog.

He's mine now, loser.

He’s mine now, loser.

 

  • Zoltan Istvan thinks prescription pills may replace brain chips.
  • China is investing heavily on animal cloning (here and here).
  • Oliver Stone is trying to prevent his Snowden film from being leaked.
  • Buzz Aldrin says that JFK wanted us to go to Mars, not the moon.
  • Ron Popeil, inventor of the Pocket Fisherman, is always fishing.

leary6

Timothy Leary believed we needed to be released from the prisons of our minds, and from depressives to migraine sufferers to the “ideaters” of Silicon Valley, some agree to a degree, as they reportedly take microdoses of LSD to “treat” the brain. There doesn’t seem to be in-depth research into how many are currently dropping small amounts of acid (roughly 10% of a “normal” dosage) or if it truly cleanses the doors of perception, but it’s happening on some indeterminate scale.

From Jason Koebler of Vice Motherboard:

James Fadiman’s inbox is stuffed with hundreds of emails from people describing how they’ve conquered anxiety or depression or even things like cluster headaches and painful period cramps. Will the scientific establishment ever begin taking their experiences seriously?

Over the last five years, Fadiman has spent much of his time explaining how taking a tiny little bit of LSD or another hallucinogenic drug on a specific schedule could have big time medical benefits, and while the idea hasn’t yet catapulted itself into the mainstream, it’s getting there—there’s nary a scienceor technology-minded media outlet that hasn’t either tried microdosing or written about it in some form over the last few months.

The general idea is based on the long-held belief that acid can help you work through some mental problems and see the world in a different way. But taking a full dose of a hallucinogen isn’t for everyone—my sole experience with LSD ended with me crying and eating frozen fish off the floor of a Barcelona hostel, among several other harrowing experiences during a high that lasted 14 mostly excruciating hours.

With microdosing is to take roughly a tenth of a normal dose (about 10-20 micrograms) every four days and then go about your business. Done correctly, there are no hallucinations, no traumatic experiences, not even any sluggishness. Those who do it correctly, Fadiman says, report having better days, feeling less anxious, and sometimes even conquering long-held mental hangups.

“People do it and they’re eating better, sleeping better, they’re often returning to exercise or yoga or meditation. It’s as if messages are passing through their body more easily,” Fadiman told me.•

 

Tags: ,

warhol+with+cowsEarlier this week I published a post about China’s ambitious animal-cloning plans, and here’s a little more on the topic courtesy of a Financial Times piece by Charles Clover and Clive Cookson. Designer micropig pets, lab-based Kobe beef and Crispr-altered critters are just the beginning, as human cells have already been experimented with (unsuccessfully for now). China feels it’s being unfairly targeted for ethical concerns when fellow nations, including the U.S., have already used cloning in animal husbandry, that it’s just doing what others have but on a far larger scale. The question is, if China goes huge into the field, how will its competitors not?

An excerpt about Boyalife CEO Xu Xiaochun:

His ambition is staggering. Starting with 100,000 cloned cattle embryos a year in “phase one”, Mr Xu envisages 1m annually at some point in the future. That would make BoyaLife by far the largest clone factory in the world. 

Mr Xu says the latest techniques enable cloning to be carried out in an “assembly line format” at a rate of less than 1 minute per cell. Based on a four- hour shift and 250 working days a year, a proficient cloner would “manufacture” 60,000 cloned cow embryos a year, he says, adding that a team of 50 will be sufficient for the planned scale of the project. Mr Xu plans to have a staff of 300 and eventual total investment is estimated at $500m.

If the venture comes anywhere near achieving its goal, it will be another example of the recent surge of path-breaking, taboo-busting biotechnology research, with China introducing mass production and commercialisation of projects that are still in the experimental and clinical stages elsewhere.•

Tags: , ,

Neil deGrasse Tyson readily admits he’s bad at predicting the future, but as one of the leading public faces of science, he gets those kinds of questions. He certainly doesn’t restrain himself, however, when making prognostications about private space companies and the future of exploration, believing venture capital will never be the leader of such ventures. 

From a Verge interview conducted by Sean O’Kane:

Question:

The flip side of that is you have a live show coming up in Brooklyn that’s themed “Delusions of Space Enthusiasts.” I can think of at least a couple things that you might talk about during that. Can you give an idea of what that might cover?

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

Well I think the biggest delusion was watching us go to the Moon in the 1960s and saying to yourself, “Wow this is a great frontier we’re breaching, we’ve dreamed about the Moon for centuries, and in just a few more years we’ll be on Mars and then we’ll be all over space.” That was missing some important parts of that equation. You’re missing the fact that we only declared we’re going to the Moon because we were at war with the Soviet Union, we were in a cold war, so this is a war of technologies. The fact that Sputnik was launched in a hollowed out intercontinental ballistic missile shell — no one thought about the space over the atmosphere. We knew that you could control your own airspace, but how about your “space” space?

So there was our sworn enemy’s spacecraft flying over our head, and we knew it because they would send out radio signals and you could detect it. And so that’s why we went to the Moon. We didn’t go to the Moon because we’re explorers or discoverers, or we’re Americans. There’s a whole delusional front story that we tell ourselves about that era. And then, when we don’t go end up going to Mars, people cry foul. It was war that got us there, so let’s just be honest about that.

Once you know what the actual drivers are, if you want to continue to achieve that goal, then you can at least base it on the reality of people’s decisions rather than what you wish they were.

Question:

It seems really easy to delude ourselves about the state of space now, right? We look at a company like Mars One and say, “Oh yeah, totally, that seems possible. A reality show would definitely fund a mission to Mars.” Or even SpaceX, we’ve looked at that company with wide eyes and only now question them after a very public failure.

Neil deGrasse Tyson:

The delusion that relates to private spaceflight isn’t really what you’re describing. They’re big dreams, and I don’t have any problems with people dreaming. Mars One, let them dream. That’s not the delusion. The delusion is thinking that SpaceX is going to lead the space frontier. That’s just not going to happen, and it’s not going to happen for three really good reasons: One, it is very expensive. Two, it is very dangerous to do it first. Three, there is essentially no return on that investment that you’ve put in for having done it first.•

Tags: ,

foldingbicycle1896-1

foldingbicycle1896-2

foldingbicycle1896-3

The sudden popularity of the Internet beginning in 1995 has an antecedent in the sweeping success of an earlier technology, that of the bicycle, which exploded in America in the 1890s in a way that could not have been comprehended just a decade earlier. From an oddity to a staple just like that. Not an intermittent fad like roller skates (and, later, blades), the bike quickly gained such a foothold that it seemed only the emergence of a dependable, affordable electric version was needed for it to become the primary transportation of the future. That’s not how it worked out, of course, but an article in the June 18, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle was published when that still seemed possible, even likely. As the piece states, some early versions of motorized bicycles were powered by kerosene, and Edison and Tesla were training their talents on the problem. The article’s opening follows.

eb1

eb02

ebbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbbb

eeeeecccccccc

eb03

ah666666666666

ty675

eb04

eb05

botlr-in-hallway-lr (1)

Paul Mason’s new book, Postcapitalism, is set to be published in the U.S. in early 2016, so some related work has been preceding it in North America, including a desultory London lecture published on Medium and an interview with Paul Kennedy of the CBC. I’m looking forward to reading the book, and I certainly think capitalism is in for a serious reconfiguration, but Mason is attempting to predict the product of an equation not yet completely written. Not an easy thing to do. Predict turbulence and you will almost always be right; foresee complete collapse and you’ll be wrong nearly every time.

An excerpt from the Kennedy interview:

Paul Kennedy:

Haven’t we heard this message before, that capitalism is failing?

Paul Mason:

Well, for 250 years we have had economists predicting the end of capitalism. Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx all discussed the problem of capitalism’s self reproduction. How much longer can it go on reproducing itself?

Now, my idea is that it can go on reproducing itself for a long time, as long as it can adapt. So every time there is a downturn or any time a societal business model falls apart, what you usually get is a mixture of technological innovation and some changes in the structure of the economy and we’re off again.

Paul Kennedy:

So when did you get the idea that we had come to the end of the line?

Paul Mason: 

If you study the old uprisings — the 1840s in Britain, the 1890s, after the Second World War — what you always see is a synthesis of high-value work and high-value production.

The problem is that information technology makes that very difficult, I argue almost impossible, to do. Because information technology strips away value. Information technology allows us to produce things that could be and should be cheap or free.

And so we are not making, as the Victor record company did in 1910 or so, shellac records. We are making mp3 files, and it is very hard to make money out of them.

Paul Kennedy:

What I have been led to believe is that this new information revolution is going to free me up.

Paul Mason:

What has happened is that information allows work and wages to become delinked. It allows work and life to become blurred. We will answer emails from our boss at midnight.•

Tags: ,

Donald-Trump-imitating-Times-reporter-Serge-Kovaleski-who-is-disabled

Donald Trump possesses the realpolitik of Mayor McCheese and the big-picture vision of David Duke.

You certainly don’t want to believe that the majority of Americans would vote for a vicious bigot who’s smeared POWs, women, disabled people, Mexicans, African-Americans and Muslims. But Trump certainly has found a base: Voters who feel like their sense of privilege is under siege. It is, of course, but not the way they think it is, not from terrorists from the Middle East or laborers from south of the border. Globalization, automation and tax codes that favor the wealthy have devastated the American middle class, largely white and now red in the face. The postwar redistribution of wealth through taxes is long gone, given way to loopholes that favor the inheritors, the land grabbers, the Trumps.

“They seem so nice, your friends and neighbors. Your fellow Americans,” writes Molly Ball in a smart and lucid Atlantic piece about the fear of falling and the rise of bigotry, even fascism, in U.S. Presidential politics. An excerpt:

Four months into his crazed foray into presidential politics, Trump is still winning this thing. And what could once be dismissed as a larkish piece of political performance art has seemingly turned into something darker. Pundits, even conservative ones, say that Trump resembles a fascist. The recent terrorist attacks in Paris, which some hoped would expose Trump’s shallowness, have instead strengthened him by intensifying people’s anger and fear. Trump has falsely claimed that thousands of Muslims cheered the 9/11 attacks from rooftops in New Jersey; he has declined to rule out a national database of Muslims. The other day, a reporter asked Trump if the things he was proposing weren’t just like what the Nazis did to the Jews. Trump replied, “You tell me.”

Some observers still think Trump’s support might be soft. Trump has dipped in the polls a couple of times, after a listless debate performance, for example. Perhaps the people who first glommed on to his celebrity got bored and drifted away. But if so, they didn’t find anybody else they liked. And they came back. And now, they are not leaving.

“I have got my mind made up, pretty much so,” says Michael Barnhill, a 67-year-old factory supervisor with a leathery complexion and yellow teeth. “The fact is, politicians have not done anything for our country in a lot of years.”

These people are not confused. They are sticking with Trump, the only candidate who gets it, who is man enough to show the enemy who’s boss.•

 

Tags: ,

That pardon isn't for free. We need you to work with us.

That pardon isn’t for free. We need you to work with us.

President Obama continued a Thanksgiving tradition yesterday when he pardoned two turkeys, Paulie and Frankie. In order to secure the reprieves, the brothers agreed to help the Feds bring down their family’s racketeering operation. Paulie turned state’s evidence and Frankie wore a wire. They tried to play it cool, but word leaked that they’d flipped, so they had to be taken out. You know how it is when you go against the family, boys. It’s just business, not personal.

A bullet in the neck for you, Paulie.

You lived like scum, Frankie, and you died like it.

Paulie (2015-2015).

Frankie (2015-2015).

America (1776-2015)

America (1776-2015)

I promise I’ll never re-watch Goodfellas during a holiday week again. Remember, kids: Crime doesn’t pay, except for most types of white-collar crime. Oh, and stealing an entire nation from indigenous peoples. That can also pay off!

09TRUMP2-blog480

We shouldn’t let Native Americans come into this country!

Happy Thanksgiving, American Afflictor readers!

Happy Thanksgiving, U.S. Afflictor readers!

trump-heckler-birmingham-fb

After approving of his supporters beating a Black Lives Matter protester in Birmingham, Donald Trump had another altercation with the group.

Uh oh, one of those Black Lives Matter thugs has me cornered. Think fast, Donnie.

Uh oh, those Black Lives Matter thugs have me cornered.

Want to buy some Thin Mints, Mister?

Shes vicious! Ill speed away in that car to escape!

They’re vicious! I’ll speed away in that car near the cliff to escape!

ccra

Wow, St. Peter, that's some tan you've got.

Wow, so this is heaven. Hey, St. Peter, that’s some tan you’ve got!

St. Peter?!? I mean, duh, I’m wearing horns.

And I'm wearing the kind of underpants that mutes farts. Hey, this is some piece of real estate. Have you ever thought of developing it?

And I’m wearing the kind of underpants that mutes farts. Hey, this is a big piece of real estate. Have you ever thought of developing it?

How so?

We class up the joint, Pete. Casinos, golf courses, European women who've "modeled," and my name in big letters everywhere.

We class it up, Pete. Casinos, golf courses, Eastern European models and my name in big gold letters everywhere.

That sounds hideous! It would actually make this place even worse. You’ve got a deal.

Great. But first we have to install some air conditioners. I'm burning up in this place.

Great. But first we need to install some air conditioners. I’m sweating like Rubio in this dump.

Not happening, Hamburglar.

48017699.cached

trumpmessage

 

Apollo-11-Buzz-Aldrin-001 (1)

Buzz Aldrin likes to say things, and one of things he’s currently saying is that JFK really wanted NASA to shoot for Mars, not the moon, in the 1960s. Could be. There were tons of different space plans in post-war America that were weeded out before the moon became the target.

From Cameron Atfield at the Sydney Morning Herald:

President John F Kennedy’s famous moon speech could well have been a Mars speech had he not been talked down from his lofty ambitions, Buzz Aldrin revealed in Brisbane on Wednesday.

And the second human being to ever step on the surface of another world urged the United States to work closely with the Chinese in space to help promote peace on Earth.

Speaking at a superannuation conference in Brisbane, Dr Aldrin said he only recently learnt about President Kennedy’s belief his nation could launch a Mars mission in the 1960s.

“(NASA) told him it would take at least 15 years before we could put a man on the moon,” he said.

“Now, I recently learnt at MIT (the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) at the 100th anniversary of the aero/astro school department, that Kennedy had actually wanted us to go to Mars.

“He asked his engineers to figure it out and, after a weekend of rather intense calculations, they told him that Mars was just a little bit too far to go, but we could shoot for the moon as a more realistic goal.

“Can you imagine having only one weekend to figure that out for the president?”•

Tags: ,

Snowden-Oliver-Stone

Because things aren’t murky enough, Oliver Stone is bringing his paranoid onslaught of fact and fiction to the topic of Edward Snowden, a mixed bag to begin with. Our default mode should be supporting whistleblowers, but this guy doesn’t make it easy. He told us what was fairly obvious in the age of the Patriot Act, and the information won’t really change much (though Snowden can’t be blamed for that). In this time, Americans are more afraid of terrorism than they are of losing liberties, wanting a brother to take care of them even if it’s Big Brother. It never was a lack of knowledge that allowed surveillance to take hold but a lack of will. Beyond that, government spying will likely end up being the least of the problem, with corporations and rogue groups and individuals far more of a threat.

InThe Hacking of Hollywood,” a very wonderful Backchannel piece, David Kushner writes of an ironic twist: The auteur is trying to prevent his film about the leaker from being leaked. The article retreats to the 2004 origin story of interlopers entering the Dream Factory, making its way forward to the Fappening, a dark weekend that was revealing in more ways than one. Kushner stresses that no great technical skills are usually required for such breaches. The opening: 

It’s a cold day in Munich, and Oliver Stone, Hollywood’s most notorious director, is staring down the world’s most notorious hacker, Edward Snowden — or, at least, the actor who’s portraying him, Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Stone’s here filming his controversial biopic of Snowden. The film, which will be released in spring 2016, traces the whistleblower’s rise from lowly army enlistee to the National Security Agency contractor who exposed the U.S. government’s classified surveillance program.

But Stone isn’t just concerned about capturing the saga behind Snowden’s incredible leaks. He wants to make sure that no hacker comes after his film and leaks its secrets before the movie’s release. “It’s a major concern for every filmmaker,” he tells me, during a break from shooting. And it’s one that’s even more pronounced with a movie that promises to reveal more about Snowden than the world yet knows. “If you can hack his story,” Stone says with caution, “it would be a big prize.” In a way, Stone is making a meta-movie that no one has seen before, building a firewall around a film whose subject is an icon of bad infosec.

This explains the stealthy guy with the Fu Manchu beard milling around the set. He’s Ralph Echemendia, Hollywood’s go-to digital bodyguard, a reformed hacker from the dark side who now helps filmmakers, celebrities, and moguls keep their valuable data secure. It’s a challenge that’s only compounding as Hollywood — like the rest of the world — moves more and more of its content and communications online. “The concern is a lack of control,” Echemendia tells me.

Stone says such precautions, while new, are “the wave of the future.”•

Tags: , ,

Ron

Ron Popeil, the American inventor and TV pitchman behind the Pocket Fisherman and so much more crap you never knew you wanted, just did an Ask Me Anything at Reddit, providing ample opportunity to underemployed smartasses to sass the Ronco entrepreneur. One example:

Question:

It is true you invented the technology to keep heads alive in jars, but just haven’t released it yet?

The Real Ron Popeil:

Still working on it! Send me your address so I can have someone come pick up your head.•

An excerpt fromThe Pitchman,” Malcolm Gladwell’s thoroughly enjoyable 2000 New Yorker profile of a guy who is always fishing:

In the last thirty years, Ron has invented a succession of kitchen gadgets, among them the Ronco Electric Food Dehydrator and the Popeil Automatic Pasta and Sausage Maker, which featured a thrust bearing made of the same material used in bulletproof glass. He works steadily, guided by flashes of inspiration. This past August, for instance, he suddenly realized what product should follow the Showtime Rotisserie. He and his right-hand man, Alan Backus, had been working on a bread-and-batter machine, which would take up to ten pounds of chicken wings or scallops or shrimp or fish fillets and do all the work–combining the eggs, the flour, the breadcrumbs–in a few minutes, without dirtying either the cook’s hands or the machine. “Alan goes to Korea, where we have some big orders coming through,” Ron explained recently over lunch–a hamburger, medium-well, with fries–in the V.I.P. booth by the door in the Polo Lounge, at the Beverly Hills Hotel. ‘I call Alan on the phone. I wake him up. It was two in the morning there. And these are my exact words: “Stop. Do not pursue the bread-and-batter machine. I will pick it up later. This other project needs to come first.” The other project, his inspiration, was a device capable of smoking meats indoors without creating odors that can suffuse the air and permeate furniture. Ron had a version of the indoor smoker on his porch–”a Rube Goldberg kind of thing” that he’d worked on a year earlier–and, on a whim, he cooked a chicken in it. “That chicken was so good that I said to myself”–and with his left hand Ron began to pound on the table–”This is the best chicken sandwich I have ever had in my life.” He turned to me: “How many times have you had a smoked-turkey sandwich? Maybe you have a smoked- turkey or a smoked-chicken sandwich once every six months. Once! How many times have you had smoked salmon? Aah. More. I’m going to say you come across smoked salmon as an hors d’oeuvre or an entrée once every three months. Baby-back ribs? Depends on which restaurant you order ribs at. Smoked sausage, same thing. You touch on smoked food”–he leaned in and poked my arm for emphasis–”but I know one thing, Malcolm. You don’t have a smoker.”•

___________________________

“As seen on TV.”

I’d like to live forever, but mostly out of spite.

Transhumanist Party candidate Zoltan Istvan has made the quest for immortality the central issue of his quixotic Presidential campaign, because that works on both sides of the aisle, apart from the End of Days-ers. The novice politician has been indefatigable in his mission despite only making small ripples in the mainstream waters thus far. I don’t always agree with his reasoning, but I do wish his ideas would get a public hearing.

At Vice Motherboard, Istvan has published “The Drug Lords of Tomorrow Will Be Biohackers,” a piece about the new drug, a non-drug, which is a chip (for the brain), not a pill. The article looks at the topic from all sides: medicinal, drug abuse, hacking, etc. The opening:

Through various sources—mainly transhumanist biohacker friends—I’ve been hearing about how some drug traffickers might be taking an interest in cranial implant technology.

If scientists can get a brain implant to give neural stimuli that affects our perspectives, moods, and behaviors, then the future of drugs could be totally different than what it is now. In fact, in such a future, drug creation would become the domain of engineers and coders. This could become the next major frontier of the so-called drug market.

About half a million people already have chips connected to their brains. Most of these are cochlear implants to aid against deafness, but some are also deep brain stimulation (DBS) types, sometimes used for Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s disease, and epilepsy.

Generally speaking, DBS cranial implants work by firing electrical impulses via electrodes into certain regions of the brain. In the case of epileptic patients, they help control seizures.

But improving forms of brain implants may use more EEG technology—a part of the brain-computer interface field—where they can distribute brain waves over a certain portion of the brain. If this portion is one that affects mood—thought to be determined mostly by the amygdala—maybe they’ll be able to give us a real high.

Thync is already an external device claiming to work something like this.•

Tags:

rh5

Zheping Huang of Quartz has a concise report about what looks to be a significant growth industry in China: the cloning business. This type of science will ultimately have a profound effect on the future of the world’s food and medicine supply, though it’s attended by many ethical questions. A few points:

  • If we can clone meat and end slaughterhouses, that would be great. GMOs and cloned foods (plants, especially) will be needed in the future to deal with climate change, and anyone appalled by humans eating “unnatural foods” should stroll through their local supermarket and read product ingredients, especially for the indestructible Twinkies.
  • Livestock cloned to be prone to disease to test medicines is troubling, though no more than those bred that way through standard animal husbandry.
  • It may seem a colossal waste that wealthy people would spend $100k to make a (rough) duplicate of a beloved pet, but these luxury spenders are helping to subsidize the science in a way that may benefit many others.

The opening:

A fast-growing Chinese biotechnology company is to build a cloning factory to copy dogs, cows, racing horses, non-human primates, and other animals, state news agency Xinhua (link in Chinese) reports.

The so-called “world’s largest cloning factory” (yes, there are several more) will include a cloning production line, a cloned animal center, a gene bank, and a science and education exhibition hall, Boyalife Group announced Nov. 22. It will be located in the city of Tianjin, which was the site of a deadly, costly industrial accident earlier this year, in the special development zone where the explosion was. 

Production is expected to start in 2016, after a 200 million yuan ($31 million) investment. The first animal to come down the line will be Japanese cows, in an attempt to lower the price of high-quality beef in the Chinese market, Dr. Xu Xiaochun, chairman and CEO of Boyalife, told Chinese media (link in Chinese). “[We are] now promoting cloned cows and cloned horses to improve China’s modern animal husbandry industry,” Xu said.•

Tags: ,

10-lavori-passato-8

The virtuoso violinist Jascha Heifetz was a man of many passions, some of them of the technological variety. In the 1960s, when living in Los Angeles, he commissioned a custom electric car, which he drove to USC where he was a lecturer. The musician was also a leading, early advocate behind the creation of the 911 emergency system, which was propelled in part as a reaction to the Kitty Genovese killing, a horrible crime that was wrongly read as some sort of referendum on the human spirit. 

Dialing three quick numbers was a great advance for citizens, police and EMTs in the Payphone Age, but today it feels like what it is: a last-century innovation in need of a 2.0 upgrading. In the wake of the Paris attacks, Christopher Mims of the Wall Street Journal looks at a next-level emergency-response system for urban centers, the key to which is retrofitting the venerable street lamp with bleeding-edge tech. Introducing the system beyond city limits would require altering the smartphones we all carry around, a more-complicated project. An excerpt:

In the U.S., the nature of the 911 system can lead to significant delays in understanding what is going on in a Paris-style attack. First, those who are closest to the event are the least likely to call, since they are probably running and seeking cover. Those who do call are at a remove, and so may not know the precise location or nature of the attack. Then there are the mechanics of a 911 call itself—dispatchers attempting to extract information from frantic callers, the time it takes a call to be escalated, etcetera.

But there is a better way, says Ralph Clark, president and chief executive of SST Inc. For nearly 20 years, his company has been perfecting a technology called ShotSpotter, which has been rolled out in 90 cities, towns and suburbs world-wide. It uses Internet-connected microphones to pinpoint, through triangulation, the exact location of a gunshot or explosion.

“What we can provide is a total awareness point of view on outdoor shootings,” says Mr. Clark. Authorities are alerted within 30 to 45 seconds of the first shot in an attack, he adds, as opposed to the minutes it can take to pinpoint an attack using conventional means.

To date, the expense of rolling out ShotSpotter has meant that it has only been used to cover areas of high gun crime—a few square miles within a typical city. But thanks to the usual forces of miniaturization and falling prices, plus a recently announced deal with General Electric Co., ShotSpotter will soon be capable of covering entire cities, says Mr. Clark.

The key, believe it or not, is street lamps.•

 

 

Tags: ,

wernher5 (1)

I recently quoted Henry Miller’s Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch, which reminded of that 1957 book’s beauty of a passage about the future of America, and the future of the world, which were one and the same to the writer’s mind. He saw the end of scarcity and hunger, though he thought we’d crave all the same, perhaps even in a more profound way. The excerpt:

“If you do not know where you are going, any road will take you there.”
(Out of Confusion, by M.N. Chatterjee (Yellow Springs, Ohio: Antioch Press, 1954).

There are days when it all seems as simple and clear as that to me. What do I mean? I mean with regard to the problem of living on this earth without becoming a slave, a drudge, a hack, a misfit, an alcoholic, a drug addict, a neurotic, a schizophrenic, a glutton for punishment or an artist manqué.

Supposedly we have the highest standard of living of any country in the world. Do we, though? It depends on what one means by high standards. Certainly nowhere does it cost more to live than here in America. The cost is not only in dollars and cents but in sweat and blood, in frustration, ennui, broken homes, smashed ideals, illness and insanity. We have the most wonderful hospitals, the most gorgeous insane asylums, the most fabulous prisons, the best equipped and the highest paid army and navy, the speediest bombers, the largest stockpile of atom bombs, yet never enough of any of these items to satisfy the demand. Our manual workers are the highest paid in the world; our poets the worst. There are more automobiles than one can count. And as for drugstores, where in the world will you find the like?

We have only one enemy we really fear: the microbe. But we are licking him on every front. True, millions still suffer from cancer, heart disease, schizophrenia, multiple-sclerosis, tuberculosis, epilepsy, colitis, cirrhosis of the liver, dermatitis, gall stones, neuritis, Bright’s disease, bursitis, Parkinson’s-disease, diabetes, floating kidneys, cerebral palsy, pernicious anaemia, encephalitis, locomotor ataxia, falling of the womb, muscular distrophy, jaundice, rheumatic fever, polio, sinus and antrum troubles, halitosis, St. Vitus’s Dance, narcolepsy, coryza, leucorrhea, nymphomania, phthisis, carcinoma, migraine, dipsomania, malignant tumors, high blood pressure, duodenal ulcers, prostate troubles, sciatica, goiter, catarrh, asthma, rickets, hepatitis, nephritis, melancholia, amoebic dysentery, bleeding piles, quinsy, hiccoughs, shingles, frigidity and impotency, even dandruff, and of course all the insanities, now legion, but–our of men of science will rectify all this within the next hundred years or so. How? Why, by destroying all the nasty germs which provoke this havoc and disruption! By waging a great preventive warnot a cold war!wherein our poor, frail bodies will become a battleground for all the antibiotics yet to come. A game of hide and seek, so to speak, in which one germ pursues another, tracks it down and slays it, all without the least disturbance to our usual functioning. Until this victory is achieved, however, we may be obliged to continue swallowing twenty or thirty vitamins, all of different strengths and colors, before breakfast, down our tiger’s milk and brewer’s yeast, drink our orange and grapefruit juices, use blackstrap molasses on our oatmeal, smear our bread (made of stone-ground flour) with peanut butter, use raw honey or raw sugar with our coffee, poach our eggs rather than fry them, follow this with an extra glass of superfortified milk, belch and burp a little, give ourselves an injection, weigh ourselves to see if we are under or over, stand on our heads, do our setting-up exercisesif we haven’t done them alreadyyawn, stretch, empty the bowels, brush our teeth (if we have any left), say a prayer or two, then run like hell to catch the bus or the subway which will carry us to work, and think no more about the state of our health until we feel a cold coming on: the incurable coryza. But we are not to despair. Never despair! Just take more vitamins, add an extra dose of calcium and phosphorus pills, drink a hot toddy or two, take a high enema before retiring for the night, say another prayer, if we can remember one, and call it a day.

If the foregoing seems too complicated, here is a simple regimen to follow: Don’t overeat, don’t drink too much, don’t smoke too much, don’t work too much, don’t think too much, don’t fret, don’t worry, don’t complain, above all, don’t get irritable. Don’t use a car if you can walk to your destination; don’t walk if you can run; don’t listen to the radio or watch television; don’t read newspapers, magazines, digests, stock market reports, comics, mysteries or detective stories; don’t take sleeping pills or wakeup pills; don’t vote, don’t buy on the installment plan, don’t play cards either for recreation or to make a haul, don’t invest your money, don’t mortgage your home, don’t get vaccinated or inoculated, don’t violate the fish and game laws, don’t irritate your boss, don’t say yes when you mean no, don’t use bad language, don’t be brutal to your wife or children, don’t get frightened if you are over or under weight, don’t sleep more than ten hours at a stretch, don’t eat store bread if you can bake your own, don’t work at a job you loathe, don’t think the world is coming to an end because the wrong man got elected, don’t believe you are insane because you find yourself in a nut house, don’t do anything more than you’re asked to do but do that well, don’t try to help your neighbor until you’ve learned how to help yourself, and so on…

Simple, what?

In short, don’t create aerial dinosaurs with which to frighten field mice!”

America has only one enemy, as I said before. The microbe. The trouble is, he goes under a million different names. Just when you think you’ve got him licked he pops up again in a new guise. He’s the pest personified.

When we were a young nation life was crude and simple. Our great enemy then was the redskin. (He became our enemy when we took his land away from him.) In those early days there were no chain stores, no delivery lines, no hired purchase plan, no vitamins, no supersonic flying fortresses, no electronic computers; one could identify thugs and bandits easily because they looked different from other citizens. All one needed for protection was a musket in one hand and a Bible in the other. A dollar was a dollar, no more, no less. And a gold dollar, a silver dollar, was just as good as a paper dollar. Better than a check, in fact. Men like Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett were genuine figures, maybe not so romantic as we imagine them today, but they were not screen heroes. The nation was expanding in all directions because there was a genuine need for it–we already had two or three million people and they needed elbow room. The Indians and bison were soon crowded out of the picture, along with a lot of other useless paraphernalia. Factories and mills were being built, and colleges and insane asylums. Things were humming. And then we freed the slaves. That made everybody happy, except the Southerners. It also made us realize that freedom is a precious thing. When we recovered from the loss of blood we began to think about freeing the rest of the world. To do it, we engaged in two world wars, not to mention a little war like the one with Spain, and now we’ve entered upon a cold war which our leaders warn us may last another forty or fifty years. We are almost at the point now where we may be able to exterminate every man, woman and child throughout the globe who is unwilling to accept the kind of freedom we advocate. It should be said, in extenuation, that when we have accomplished our purpose everybody will have enough to eat and drink, properly clothed, housed and entertained. An all-American program and no two ways about it! Our men of science will then be able to give their undivided attention to other problems, such as disease, insanity, excessive longevity, interplanetary voyages and the like. Everyone will be inoculated, not only against real ailments but against imaginary ones too. War will have been eliminated forever, thus making it unnecessary “in times of peace to prepare for war.” America will go on expanding, progressing, providing. We will plant the stars and stripes on the moon, and subsequently on all the planets within our comfy little universe. One world it will be, and American through and through. Strike up the band!

Tags:

logansrundriverless

There are going to be driverless cars, though no one knows exactly when. Information about the technology is closely held, of course, and it’s easy to question the irrational exuberance of people who stand to gain vast wealth from the transition’s completion. The U.S. government, which will have to nimbly legislate the new normal, is making noise, however, that sooner rather than later may be the ETA. 

From Justin Pritchard at the Associated Press:

In a written statement Monday, U.S. Department of Transportation spokeswoman Suzanne Emmerling said that with rapid development of the technology, federal policy is being updated.

“Breathtaking progress has been made,” Emmerling wrote. She said Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx ordered his department’s National Highway Traffic Safety Administration update its 2013 policy “to reflect today’s technology and his sense of urgency to bring innovation to our roads that will make them safer.” 

It’s unclear what the new policy will be, though the tone of the statement signaled that Foxx is interested in endorsing the technology.

Specific language the traffic safety administration in revisiting holds that states which do permit public access after testing should require that a qualified driver be behind the wheel.

Google has argued that once cars can drive as safely as humans, it would be better to remove the steering wheel and pedals so that people don’t mess up the ride. A Google spokesman had no comment on word of the federal review.•

Tags: , ,

Reince Priebus

Donald Trump, a Nazi Brownshirt who sells condos, once broke the bank at a casino. Unfortunately, it was his own.

At the time of Mitt Romney’s 2012 drubbing, I wrote I that didn’t think the GOP would be chastened by the crushing swing-state trashing. The party wasn’t going to start cooperating in D.C. because there were too many entrenched interests demanding dissent as the default mode. Yes, maybe the Republicans would quickly strike a bargain on an immigration bill for strategic purposes (didn’t happen!), but things weren’t go to improve much.

I couldn’t have imagined, however, the 2016 GOP campaign would turn out to be the ugliest thing imaginable, an unhalting parade of bleeding women, rabid dogs and Muslim databases. The pushing of the line to the extreme right will probably ultimately benefit someone like Ted Cruz, who seems mild compared to Trump and Ben Carson, though he’s truly a radical extremist.

In a Politico piece, Jacob Heilbrunn examines how the GOP not only failed to become more inclusive but actually pulled further inside its dark, cold shell. Oh, they’ve built a well, alright! The opening:

How has the party departed so far from the vision Priebus laid out just two years ago?

There are two factors at work. The first is that as the GOP embraces the theme of America’s precipitous decline under President Barack Obama, it’s jettisoning the crusading and optimistic foreign policy credo of George W. Bush. After over a decade of warfare in the Middle East, the notion that Washington can single-handedly transform Muslim societies in America’s image attracts derisory snorts on the right as well as the left. Ohio Gov. John Kasich, by contrast, is harkening back to the Bush legacy by endorsing a federal agency to disseminate “Judeo-Christian values” to Iran Russia, China and the Middle East—“We need to beam messages around the world” Kasich told NBC News. America “means freedom, it means opportunity, it means respect for women, it means freedom to gather, it means so many things.” But many conservatives—both candidates and their constituents—are adopting a darker view of the Middle East, which is that it is irredeemable and thus poses a dire threat to the very existence of western civilization.

The second reason goes back to the end of the Cold War. During the past century, the GOP focused on the internal subversive threat of communism and often depicted liberals as traitors. Now many on the right have seamlessly moved on to hunt for Muslim traitors as part of a third World War against a foreign enemy. They’ve been identifying domestic traitors and declaring a broader war against Islam for years, but have been, for the most part, speaking to deaf ears. To his credit George W. Bush, as has been widely recalled, refused to demonize Muslims after 9/11 and visited a mosque to declare that America was not at war with Islam itself. Now after Paris, the radical right is grabbing the opportunity to push their case to a wider audience.

 

Tags: ,

br

From the December 19, 1896 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

freelove2

car11

Jeff Beckham has written “The Future of Stadiums Might Be No Stadium At All,” a really smart Wired piece that looks at radically reducing the infrastructure of spaces that host sports and concerts and such.

Gigantic permanent structures only emerged in America when team sports became big business and population density reached critical mass. A century ago, only major prize frights could attract small cities of ticket buyers, so wooden insta-stadia capable of seating 50,000 to 100,000 were routinely built in a couple of months. The venues were razed soon after the bout. Tex Rickard built just such a momentary edifice for Jack Dempsey’s defense of the heavyweight title against Georges Carpentier on July 2, 1921. From the April 26, 1921 New York Times

Although the plot embraces thirty-four acres, the particular land Rickard has contracted for includes only about six-and-one-half acres. Upon this stretch of ground the promoter will erect his giant arena with its proposed seating capacity of over 50,000. The start will be made on the arena just as soon as the ground is levelled. Rickard expects that the arena will be completed within fifty days, without rushing the workmen or necessitating overtime. It is estimated that 100 carloads of lumber will be used in its construction.•

Beckham’s piece focuses on the ideas of architect Dan Meis, who believes economics are demanding stadium downsizing, though he dreams of edifices that go far beyond one-off events. An excerpt:

“We keep falling over ourselves about what’s the next big board? What’s the next thing you’re going to put in stadiums?” said Meis, whose best known work is the Staples Center in Los Angeles. “In reality, I think it’s coming back to the best stadium would be not to build it at all or if there’s a way to do it in a temporary way and save all that money on infrastructure.”

Meis isn’t kidding about the ideal stadium being no stadium at all. He’s fascinated by the Palio de Siena, a centuries-old horse race that takes place in Tuscany’s Piazza del Campo. Nearly every day, the piazza stands as a grand public space in the center of town, but two times each year, it’s converted into an impromptu stadium where thousands of spectators flock to watch the race.

That pop-up stadium concept works better for events like the Olympics or World Cup, which come around every four years and may be hosted by countries without the means to fill those stadiums once the event is over. But another Meis concept — a building that changes, Optimus Prime-style, from a 20,000-seat basketball arena to a 35,000-seat soccer stadium — could provide a solution.

It sounds futuristic, but the transformable stadium has been a reality for more than a decade in Japan.•

Tags: ,

The-Thanaton-III-LARGE

I’ve watched the same movie every day for 235 days in a row, but I’ve never viewed The Day the Earth Stood Still 873 times like the recently deceased artist Paul Laffoley did. I’m not suggesting monomania is the only key ingredient in creating something fascinating–it’s certainly not–but constancy sure does help. Laffoley was one of the more determined and otherworldly visionaries, a maker of works that seemed hatched from the mind of an occultist in outer space. 

The opening of his well-written New York Times obit penned by William Grimes:

Paul Laffoley, whose annotated diagrammatic paintings, with their kaleidoscopic representations of abstruse philosophic systems, made him one of the most distinctive and cerebral of the outsider artists, died on Nov. 16 at his home in Boston. He was 80.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Douglas Walla, his dealer at Kent Fine Art in Manhattan.

Mr. Laffoley (pronounced LAH-fuh-lee), an architect by training, translated his ideas about time travel, other dimensions, astrology and alien life-forms onto square canvases that he illustrated, in brilliant colors, with precisely rendered spirals, pinwheels, eyes and architectural forms, annotated around the borders with text in vinyl press-on letters.

Many of the works incorporate mandalas. Others look like floor plans for the future, or cosmic board games. Their texts often pay homage to the thinkers behind the work, their names simply strung together in a row. The Jesuit philosopher Pierre Teilhard de Chardin recurs frequently, along with Goethe, Blake and Jung.

Mr. Laffoley drew from myriad sources. He claimed that he had seen the film The Day the Earth Stood Still 873 times.•

Tags: ,

« Older entries § Newer entries »