“She Was Its Resident Anthropologist, Anatomiser And Guide”

September 23, 2015 in Books, Excerpts | Permalink

Jackie Collins was the ultimate Hollywood insider, yet she was, British-born, also a stranger, possessing a distance that served her well when writing of the morals (or lack thereof) of the glittering stars in that particularly bawdy time when the Sexual Revolution made Los Angeles even more louche. She wasn’t writing Nathanael West but instead focused south of the belt, and it served her well. From an appropriately very lively (and sadly unbylined) postmortem in the Economist:

There was probably no one in the room who knew Hollywood better. She was its resident anthropologist, anatomiser and guide. The Grill for lunch. Mr Chow’s or Cecconi’s for dinner. Soho House for the best view of the whole staggeringly beautiful city of Los Angeles. Neiman-Marcus in Beverly Hills for shoes and jewels.

But this was only the start. Jackie C. also knew the places of furtive whispers and hot sheets. All of them. She had experienced 90210’s wicked side ever since the age of 15, when she made Errol Flynn chase her round a table in the louche Chateau Marmont Hotel and fought off Sammy Davis Jr. Ever since she’d two-timed a couple of car mechanics on Sunset Boulevard. And ever since Marlon Brando, at a party, had admired her magnificent 39-inch breasts at the start of their brief but fabulous affair. Now for trysts she recommended the Bel-Air (“very discreet”) and Geoffrey’s at the Beach for waves, lights and general sexiness.

Yet this was still not why she was the most potent and dangerous person in the room. She was a writer. Over the years, quietly and intently, she had watched what the denizens of Hollywood were doing, and listened to what they were saying. Who had ditched whom. Who was eyeing up whom. Who had slept with whom, and full details. From her corner table at Spago’s, or half-hidden by a drape in a night-club, or under the dryer at Riley’s hair and nail salon, she would gather every last crumb of gossip and rush to the powder room to write it down. She turned it into sizzling novels in which, every six pages or so, enormous erections burst out of jeans, French lace panties were torn off and groans of delight rang through the palm-fringed Hollywood air. There were 32 books in all, with titles like The Stud, The Bitch, Lethal Seduction and Hollywood Divorces. She had sold half a billion of them worldwide. Anyone she met might turn up there. Stars would beg her not to put them in her stories, and she would tell them they were there, toned down, already. Hard luck.•

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“It Incorporated Audio, Visual, And Haptic [Touch] Sensors”

September 23, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Robots have been members of the U.S. military since at least 1928, and the only question in the long term is whether our warriors will ultimately be wholly silicon or if we’ll use brain chips, drugs, exoskeleton suits and genetic manipulation to alter humans into fighting “machines.” We’ll certainly develop both, but the former’s lack of flexibility for the foreseeable future makes battlefield Transhumanism, dicey though it is from an ethical standpoint, more doable for now.

Questions abound for this new arms race: If war is relatively painless (for one side, in some cases), will it make aggression more attractive? How will these experiments in pain vaccines and teleportation eventually inform civilian life? Will humanitarian crises like Syria’s collapse be eliminated by these tools?

In “Engineering Humans for War,” Annie Jacobsen’s excellent Atlantic article, she looks at DARPA’s goal of creating a real-life Iron Man in numerous ways, including a super-soldier suit called TALOS (Tactical Assault Light Operator Suit), which the department expects to have operational by 2018. An excerpt:

For decades after its inception in 1958, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—DARPA, the central research and development organization of the Department of Defense—focused on developing vast weapons systems. Starting in 1990, and owing to individuals like [Retired four-star general Paul F.] Gorman, a new focus was put on soldiers, airmen, and sailors—on transforming humans for war. The progress of those efforts, to the extent it can be assessed through public information, hints at war’s future, and raises questions about whether military technology can be stopped, or should.

Gorman sketched out an early version of the thinking in a paper he wrote for DARPA after his retirement from the Army in 1985, in which he described an “integrated-powered exoskeleton” that could transform the weakling of the battlefield into a veritable super-soldier. The “SuperTroop” exoskeleton he proposed offered protection against chemical, biological, electromagnetic, and ballistic threats, including direct fire from a .50-caliber bullet. It “incorporated audio, visual, and haptic [touch] sensors,” Gorman explained, including thermal imaging for the eyes, sound suppression for the ears, and fiber optics from the head to the fingertips. Its interior would be climate-controlled, and each soldier would have his own physiological specifications embedded on a chip within his dog tags. “When a soldier donned his ST [SuperTroop] battledress,” Gorman wrote, “he would insert one dog-tag into a slot under the chest armor, thereby loading his personal program into the battle suit’s computer,” giving the 21st-century soldier an extraordinary ability to hear, see, move, shoot, and communicate.

At the time Gorman wrote, the computing technology needed for such a device did not yet exist.•

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“The Digital Apocalypse Never Arrived”

September 23, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I admire the London Review of Books, but I was a little surprised when its longtime editor Mary-Kay Wilmers recently told the Financial Times that the periodical has had to lean more heavily on political content because they’re aren’t enough worthy books to fill its pages with critiques.

That isn’t true, I don’t think, even if it’s a frequent refrain: Our digital culture has developed in such a way as to diminish literature, people now won’t read more than 140 characters, the quality of the written word is in steep decline.

Except I truly believe we’re living in a golden age for books, with so many great titles that it’s impossible to keep up with them. Certain corners of the publishing world have been destabilized, particularly by Amazon’s business practices, but in the big picture it seems we have rich and varied contributions from a much wider array of writers. 

Maybe future generations raised on smartphones won’t be as accepting of literature (though I don’t think so), and perhaps books will become so cheap that writing won’t attract great talent (not likely), but for now at least, it’s a wonderful time to be a reader.

Another thing that’s often said is that in the near future, all books will be read on screens and not at all on dead trees. This transition wouldn’t mean the death of books, of course, as just the medium would change, and whatever influence this new instrument has on books in the long run, it would be far from lethal and perhaps even more likely prove beneficial. The changeover certainly would, however, sink bookstores. This passage may still materialize, but for now, the tide has receded.

From Alexandra Alter of the New York Times:

“E-books were this rocket ship going straight up,” said Len Vlahos, a former executive director of the Book Industry Study Group, a nonprofit research group that tracks the publishing industry. “Just about everybody you talked to thought we were going the way of digital music.”

But the digital apocalypse never arrived, or at least not on schedule. While analysts once predicted that e-books would overtake print by 2015, digital sales have instead slowed sharply.

Now, there are signs that some e-book adopters are returning to print, or becoming hybrid readers, who juggle devices and paper. E-book sales fell by 10 percent in the first five months of this year, according to the Association of American Publishers, which collects data from nearly 1,200 publishers. Digital books accounted last year for around 20 percent of the market, roughly the same as they did a few years ago.

E-books’ declining popularity may signal that publishing, while not immune to technological upheaval, will weather the tidal wave of digital technology better than other forms of media, like music and television.•

 

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A Brief Note From 1928 About Bird Nest Soup

September 22, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the April 8, 1928 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

 

“We Live In A Craven Time”

September 22, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Urban Studies | Permalink

I was reading a 1908 Brooklyn Daily Eagle article about Red Cloud, and it reminded me of a passage from the opening chapter of Ian Frazier’s excellent 2000 book, On the Rez. In telling about the Oglala Lakota chief’s visit to the White House in 1870, Frazier examined our age and came to some troubling conclusions, all of which seem even truer 15 years on. Real freedom in our corporatocracy is more expensive than ever, but it’s cheap and easy to be discarded. The excerpt:

    In 1608, the newly arrived Englishmen at Jamestown colony in Virginia proposed to give the most powerful Indian in the vicinity, Chief Powhatan, a crown. Their idea was to coronate him a sub-emperor of Indians, and vassal to the English King. Powhatan found the offer insulting. “I also am a King,” he said, “and this is my land.” Joseph Brant, a Mohawk of the Iroquois Confederacy between eastern New York and the Great Lakes, was received as a celebrity when he went to England with a delegation from his tribe in 1785. Taken to St. James’s Palace for a royal audience, he refused to kneel and kiss the hand of George III; he told the King that he would, however, gladly kiss the hand of the Queen. Almost a century later, the U.S. government gave Red Cloud, victorious war leader of the Oglala, the fanciest reception it knew how, with a dinner party at the White House featuring lighted chandeliers and wine and a dessert of strawberries and ice cream. The next day Red Cloud parleyed with the government officials just as he was accustomed to on the prairie—sitting on the floor. To a member of a Senate select committee who had delivered a tirade against Sitting Bull, the Hunkpapa Sioux leader carelessly replied, “I have grown to be a very independent man, and consider myself a very great man.”

     That self-possessed sense of freedom is closer to what I want; I want to be an uncaught Indian like them.

Another remark which non-Indians often make on the subject of Indians is “Why can’t they get with the program?” Anyone who talks about Indians in public will be asked that question, or variations on it; over and over: Why don’t Indians forget all this tribal nonsense and become ordinary Americans like the rest of us? Why do they insist on living in the past? Why don’t they accept the fact that we won and they lost? Why won’t they stop, finally, being Indians and join the modern world? I have a variety of answers handy. Sometimes I say that in former days “the program” called for the eradication of Indian languages, and children in Indian boarding schools were beaten for speaking them and forced to speak English, so they would fit in; time passed, cultural fashions changed, and Hollywood made a feature film about Indians in which for the sake of authenticity the Sioux characters spoke Sioux (with English subtitles), and the movie became a hit, and lots of people decided they wanted to learn Sioux, and those who still knew the language, those who had somehow managed to avoid “the program” in the first place, were suddenly the ones in demand. Now, I think it’s better not to answer the question but to ask a question in return: What program, exactly, do you have in mind?

    We live in a craven time. I am not the first to point out that capitalism, having defeated Communism, now seems to be about to do the same to democracy. The market is doing splendidly, yet we are not, somehow. Americans today no longer work mostly in manufacturing or agriculture but in the newly risen service economy. That means that most of us make our living by being nice. And if we can’t be nice, we’d better at least be neutral. In the service economy, anyone who sat where he pleased in the presence of power or who expatiated on his own greatness would soon be out the door. “Who does he think he is?” is how the dismissal is usually framed. The dream of many of us is that someday we might miraculously have enough money that we could quit being nice, and everybody would then have to be nice to us, and niceness would surround us like a warm dome. Certain speeches we would love to make accompany this dream, glorious, blistering tellings-off of those to whom we usually hold our tongue. The eleven people who actually have enough money to do that are icons to us. What we read in newsprint and see on television always reminds us how great they are, and we can’t disagree. Unlike the rest of us, they can deliver those speeches with no fear. The freedom that inhered in Powhatan, that Red Cloud carried with him from the plains to Washington as easily as air—freedom to be and to say, whenever, regardless of disapproval—has become a luxury most of us can’t afford.•

 

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“Information Ties The Fans To The Game”

September 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

Even geniuses aren’t perfect: Billy Beane is the GM of the last-place Oakland A’s and Bill James Senior Advisor to the last-place Boston Red Sox, but they’re two of the pivotal figures in the development and popularization of Sabermetrics. In fact, James is likely the most influential of them all.

Of course, some bright people have the propensity to overthink things and outsmart themselves. For no real reason, Beane decided to trade affordable MVP candidate Josh Donaldson in the offseason for a couple of decent players and perhaps a great future shortstop, even though his team was built to compete now and playing in a very winnable division.

James’ sins haven’t been so slight, not just limited to puzzling player personnel decisions. He’s gone out of his way to defend Penn State football coach Joe Paterno, who clearly looked the other way while a pedophilia scandal was brewing right in front of his black glasses. In this case, James’ contrarian streak, which made him great, also laid him low.

The two figures had never appeared in public together until last week’s business-disruption conference hosted by NetSuite. Brian Costa of the Wall Street Journal gathered them and moderated a discussion about the future of Sabermetrics, etc. An excerpt:

WSJ:

Clearly, sabermetrics has improved the management of the game tremendously. How, if at all, has it made baseball a better game to watch?

Bill James:

I don’t know that it has, but we produce information, and information ties the fans to the game. People in a culture with no information about baseball have no interest in baseball. If you give people a little bit of information about baseball, they have a little bit of interest, and if you give them a lot of information about baseball, there’s the potential that they have a lot of interest. I’ve lived most of my life in the fans’ world and I see what I do as a fan’s activity. Granted, I work for the Red Sox. But I do know also that there are fans who go to sleep cursing my name.

Billy Beane:

It’s a different generation of fan that now has exposure and an interest in why things happen. Give them some rational reason for outcomes. We’re an information-hungry society, and one that is constantly trying to understand. I think there are a group of kids who love it for the numbers and love it for the information.

WSJ:

We’ve seen advances in particular areas of the game in recent years—pitch framing, defensive shifts—that are now better understood. What do you guys see as the aspect of the sport that is most in need of more research, more data and better understanding?

Billy Beane:

I’m jumping out of my chair on this one. It’s using analytics—and this sounds sort of non-field-related—but it’s injuries and medical. Even the healthcare industry is doing the same thing – trying to use big data to help solve healthcare. It’s the same in a simpler form for baseball or any sport and injuries. That’s the black swan for anyone involved in a baseball team—our injuries. Trying to predict them, minimize them, limit the downtime.•

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“The Modern Military Welfare State Of The Post-1973 Era Never Stimulated Social Welfare For The Populace”

September 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

There are many negatives about having an American military class so discrete from the rest of the nation, and one of them, as outlined in “Welfare’s Last Stand,” Jennifer Mittelstadt’s Aeon article, is that veterans are no longer an incubator to test benefits that can later be expanded to the rest of society. For example, the G.I. Bill after WWII educated a generation of vets and made grants and loans for higher education for all citizens the goal.

While the draft ended nearly a decade before Ronald Reagan took office, the political historian details how his Administration was the one where benefits for the military and the rest of the country–the huge majority of people–came to a fork in the road. It’s not that our troops don’t deserve exceptional benefits, but separating us into heroes and “welfare queens” is a most unfortunate division. An excerpt:

This post-1973 military welfare state played a different role in US life than most earlier types of military welfare. For one, military welfare no longer served as a reward for the services of citizen soldiers. Instead, it sustained the volunteer force: it lured new recruits, supported them while on duty, and convinced them to re‑enlist.

More importantly, earlier versions of military welfare catalysed broader social welfare programmes for the US populace. Civil War pensions pioneered federal retirement and disability payments, and paved the way for civilian retirement pensions. Veterans’ healthcare after the First World War created the first model of government health provision. And the Second World War-era GI Bill vaulted millions of former civilian draftees and their families into the middle class, legitimising government support for education and housing for all Americans.

The modern military welfare state of the post-1973 era never stimulated social welfare for the populace. Quite the opposite. As a smaller number and narrower cross-section of Americans volunteered for military service in the late 20th century, the divide between the military and civilians grew. So, too, did the divide between the new military welfare state and the existing civilian one. From the 1970s to the early ’90s, while many civilian welfare programmes contracted, public and private unions declined, and employers cut private employment benefits, the military expanded its welfare functions.

How did this happen?•

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“A Person Does Not Have To Physically Board A Plane In Order Take Control Of It”

September 22, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

John McAfee is as paranoid and prescribed as Philip K. Dick, but that doesn’t mean he’s writing fiction when he imagines that planes are prone to cyberterrorists. The anti-virus VIP and former fugitive from Belizean justice thinks America needs a serious course correction or hackers at home, not on-board hijackers, will perpetrate 9/11 2.0. 

From McAfee’s latest International Business Times column:

A person does not have to physically board a plane in order take control of it. Even though Chris boarded a flight to Philadelphia and used the entertainment system to demonstrate the weaknesses inherent in Airline control systems, he has spoken out stating the obvious: anyone with moderate hacking abilities can go online from anywhere in the world, and take control of our commercial airliners. …

This may sound far-fetched, but it is obvious to anyone following the hacking community. In July, two hackers demonstrated to Wired magazine that they could, from anywhere on the internet, hack into a Jeep automobile manufactured within the past 5 years, take control away from the driver, and run the car into a ditch. The demo was done at 5mph. You can imagine what results would manifest at 50mph.

The architecture of automobile control and flight control systems share one commonality: they were designed in an age where the nuances of cybersecurity were unknown or ignored. They were not designed, first and foremost, with preventing a hack in mind. I could write forever about the impossibilities of providing any security whatsoever given the current approach to security that is being pursued by the TSA, but that would be counterproductive.•

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3 Videos: Ken Kesey & Mountain Girl (1966), Arturo Ripstein (2015), Benoit Mandelbrot (2010)

September 21, 2015 in Books, Film, Science/Tech, Sports, Videos | Permalink

Ken Kesey knew the truth could kill you just as easily as it could set you free, but he saw no other way. In 1966, the novelist and fellow Merry Prankster Mountain Girl met with the press after an arrest. In defending misfits hectored by police and government for refusing to try to fit in, he paraphrases a line from his novel of two years earlier, Sometimes A Great Notion: “A person should have the right to try to be as big as he believes it is in him to be.”

If someone was going to make a feature film about the lurid 2009 true-life story about two mini-luchador brothers being accidentally drugged to death in Mexico City by female thieves posing as prostitutes, it’s probably good that it’s Arturo Ripstein, who has sociological and psychological curiosity and whose Deep Crimson covered similar terrain. The movie, titled (in English) Bleak Street, screened at Toronto and Venice, and has thus far received mixed reviews.

 

In 2010, the last year of Benoit Mandelbrot’s life, Errol Morris pointed his Interrotron at the mathematician who recognized patterns in nature that nobody else did and gave us fractals. Morris himself often deals in fractals, chipping away pieces of his subject’s minds that perfectly represent the greater self.

“We Don’t Give A Damn If Einstein Used Artificial Means Of Cognitive Enhancement To Make His Contributions To Science”

September 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports | Permalink

In sports, as in life, there is no level playing field, never has been.

The idea of purity in athletics is deeply hypocritical. Some competitors have greater natural talents and more advantageous body types and even organs than others. Some possess a special genetic makeup which allows them to naturally beat drug tests, while most others have none. In various leagues, there are drugs genuinely helpful for recovery from injury which are banned under any circumstances, while others, far murkier in legitimacy, are allowed with permission. Even in the Olympics, known for its strictness, fewer than half the athletes are tested at any Games. And when you look at other jobs, from concert musician to action-movie star, everything from beta blockers to HGH is used regularly. While these performances aren’t competitions on the granular level, vying for such opportunities certainly is a contest akin to sport. 

In his Boston Globe essay, “Let Athletes Dope,” philosopher Torbjörn Tännsjö makes a moral argument for allowing competitors to juice, etc., arguing that our obsession with fetishizing natural strength borders on Social Darwinism. He makes a compelling case, but here’s the thing: Sports aren’t only about athletic displays or morality. They’re also, even on the amateur level, a business that has practical concerns and must remain attractive to spectators, often huge numbers of them.

Boxing declined precipitously when consciousness became raised about brain damage, and the same may happen to other sports which carry similar risks. Likewise, drug usage and its attendant health problems (and deaths) could be the end of such competitions. And athletes, being hyper-competitive, would probably push unchecked usage beyond all bounds of sense, going so far as to almost create an Uncanny Valley Effect. We like great athletes because they’re different than us, but also like them because they’re similar to us. (Tännsjö acknowledges there’s a chance that allowing PEDs could end the popularity of elite sports.)

The weakest part of the philosopher’s argument is his belief that we can enforce certain limits within this new permissiveness he urges. Even if there were boundaries on such drug use–you can use this much but no more–some athletes would then cheat on those parameters. There are those who will always look for a new edge and no amount of transparency will halt that.

Testing, though far from perfect, probably limits usage to a degree and somewhat inhibits health problems. But no one should really get too moralistic about it because there’s no great solution. My assumption is gene editing will further complicate the debate sooner than we think.

An excerpt:

The notion that natural strength deserves moral admiration is utterly strange. We do not accept this line of reasoning outside of elite sport.

Consider how students are accepted at a musical conservatory. They play before a jury. It is crucial to perform not only well but better than other applicants. Suppose two applicants, Brian and John, play before the jury. Brian is more talented than John. Both are nervous. John, however, has taken beta blockers, Brian has not. The drugs help, and John performs better. He is accepted. This is clearly the wrong decision by the jury. This seems similar to the sport contest. It is very different, however.

The reason why Brian should be accepted and not John has to do with efficiency. It is a waste of pedagogical resources to spend them on John, who is less talented. However, the fact that John enhanced his skill with artificial means is not a problem as such. The beta blockers could have been offered to both or to none. It doesn’t matter.

Once the person has graduated from the conservatory, it matters even less what means he resorts to in order to play well, artificial or natural. In music, and in the sciences and arts in general, we do show admiration, of course. What we admire, however, are the outputs of the artists and scientists, the artifacts — not the artists and scientists in themselves.

There are, of course, Tchaikovsky competitions and Nobel prizes in arts and sciences. But we do not take this quite seriously. And, in particular, it is not natural skill we favor and praise. We don’t give a damn if Einstein used artificial means of cognitive enhancement to make his contributions to science. Our interest is in the contributions themselves, not in the man, and, in particular, not in his natural talents.•

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“Need A Nap? Order A Car With A Bed.”

September 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Peter Diamandis is privy to much more cutting-edge technological information than I am, but he’s also more prone to irrational exuberance. I have little doubt driverless cars will be perfected for all climates and conditions at some point in the future, but will there really be more than 50 million autonomous cars on the road by 2035? Well, it is the kind of technology likely to spread rapidly when completed. From a Diamandis Singularity Hub post about the future of transportation, agriculture, and healthcare/elder care:

By 2035 there will be more than 54 million autonomous cars on the road, and this will change everything:

  • Saved Lives: Autonomous cars don’t drive drunk, don’t text and don’t fall asleep at the wheel.
  • Reclaiming Land: You can fit eight times more autonomous cars on our roads, plus you no longer need parking spaces. Today, in the U.S. we devote 10% of the urban land to ~600 million parking spaces, and countless more to our paved highways and roads. In Los Angeles, it’s estimated that more than half of the land in the city belongs to cars in the form of garages, driveways, roads, and parking lots.
  • Saved Energy: Today we give close to 25 percent of all of our energy to personal transportation, and 25 percent of our greenhouse gases are going to the car. If cars don’t crash, you don’t need a 5,000-lb SUV driving around a 100-lb passenger (where 2% of the energy is moving the person, and 98% is to move the metal womb wrapped around them).
  • Saved Money/Higher Productivity: Get rid of needing to own a car, paying for insurance and parking, trade out 4,000-lb. cars for lighter electric cars that don’t crash, and you can expect to save 90% on your local automotive transportation bill. Plus regain 1 to 2 hours of productivity in your life (work as you are driven around), reclaiming hundreds of billions of dollars in the US economy.

Best of all, you can call any kind of car you need. Need a nap? Order a car with a bed. Want to party? Order one with a fully-stocked bar. Need a business meeting? Up drives a conference room on wheels.•

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“Yay For German Engineering!”

September 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

“Feng shui for geeks, a way of engineering that turns a house into a fine-tuned machine,” is the description Sara Solovitch uses in her Politico Magazine feature to describe “Passive Housing,” a method of building developed in Germany which utilizes very thick insulation and high-quality windows and doors to exploit solar and create amazingly green, inexpensive and comfortable spaces. Disconcertingly if unsurprisingly, America lags behind in such environment-friendly structures, though Portland (also unsurprisingly) has become Ground Zero in the U.S. for what would be a very welcome architectural revolution.

An excerpt:

It’s what you don’t see that makes it so unique. The Orchards is a “Passive House,” currently the largest one in North America. It’s a high performing energy-efficient complex whose 57 apartments stay cool on the hottest days and can be comfortably heated with a hand-held hair dryer on the coldest. Its windows are triple-paned. Its walls and floors are stuffed 11 inches deep with insulation. The ventilation system in the attic acts as the building’s lungs—continually pulling exhaust from every kitchen and bathroom, sucking stale air through a heat exchanger before carrying it to the outside and returning with fresh air.

“Every day I find a new reason to love it,” gushes Georgye Hamlin, whose one-bedroom apartment is as noiseless as a recording studio. “It’s cool, it’s quiet, and I don’t even hear the train. During the heat wave, my girlfriend came over to sleep because it was so cool. Yay for German engineering!”

Passivhaus, a building method developed in Germany in the early 1990s, relies on an airtight envelope—the roof, exterior walls and floors, literally, the physical barrier that separates in from out—to create a building that consumes 80 percent less energy than a standard house.

As translated into English, the term is almost a misnomer. It implies single-family housing, when in fact the approach can be applied to any size building. In Europe, supermarkets, schools, churches, factories and hospitals have been built to passive house standards. The number of certified buildings there exceeds 25,000.•

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“The Robots That Succeed Are Going To Be For Very Limited Use”

September 21, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

In Japan, Pepper is a dear, adorable thing, but the robot is being reprogrammed to be sort of a jerk for use in America. While that cultural reimagining is telling in a small way, the greater takeaway from Will Knight’s smart Technology Review piece about this particular machine is that truly flexible and multifaceted robot assistants still need a lot of work. Of course, Weak AI can do a lot of good (and wreak a lot of havoc on the economy) all by itself. An excerpt:

Brian Scassellati, a professor at Yale University who studies how people and robots can interact, says significant progress has been made in the area in the last 10 years. “Human-robot interaction has really started to home in on the kinds of behaviors that give you that feeling of presence,” he says. “A lot of these are small, subtle things.” For example, Pepper can crudely read your emotions by using software that analyzes facial expressions. I found the robot to be pretty good at telling whether I was smiling or frowning.

However, Scassellati does not believe robots are ready to become constant companions or even effective salespeople. The robots that succeed “are going to be for very limited use,” he suggests. “They’re going to be for targeted use, and probably not with the general population.”

My short time with Pepper makes me think that targeting limited applications is a sensible move.•

 

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“We’re Have To Think The Worst If We’re Gonna Think Rationally About This”

September 20, 2015 in Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Google is a great company, but that doesn’t mean it’s a good one.

When CEO Larry Page urges us to trust the “good corporations” like his, no one should obey for two reasons: 1) If the search giant is going to remain a powerhouse, it will need to ride information-rich moonshots into all areas of the world, turning every last object and body into an data-producing system. That will be a ferocious war among Google and all its competitors and ethics may become collateral damage. 2) Even if Page & co. were spotlessly noble, they won’t be here forever (not unless Calico is really successful), and those replacing them and inheriting our information may not be so benign. 

In a Scientific American podcast hosted by Seth Fletcher about privacy in the Digital Age, Jaron Lanier speaks to the corporate-succession issue and many others, including users being paid for their info. Listen here.

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A Brief Note From 1898 About A Hermit Family

September 20, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Urban Studies | Permalink

From the November 18, 1898 Brooklyn Daily Eagle:

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“The Government Of The United States Is Not In Any Sense Founded Upon The Christian Religion”

September 20, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics | Permalink

One would certainly think that Dr. Ben Carson knows a great deal about neurosurgery, but he understands precious little about American history and our Constitution, and it’s made him espouse a deeply bigoted view of who we are. From a Yahoo! News report about his just-aired Meet the Press appearance: 

Carson, a devout Christian, says a president’s faith should matter to voters if it runs counter to the values and principles of America.

Responding to a question during an interview broadcast Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, he described the Islamic faith as inconsistent with the Constitution.

“I would not advocate that we put a Muslim in charge of this nation,” Carson said. “I absolutely would not agree with that.”•

Despite what Carson thinks, our forefathers did not base America on Christianity. From The Stammering Century, Gilbert Seldes’ book about our nation during an earlier extreme age:

When the time came to frame a constitution, God was considered an alien influence and, in the deliberation of the Assembly, his name was not invoked. “Inexorably,” says Charles and Mary Beard in their story of The Rise of American Civilization, “the national government was secular from top to bottom. Religious qualifications …found no place whatever in the Federal Constitution. Its preamble did not invoke the blessings of Almighty God…and the First Amendment…declared that Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion…” In dealing with Tripoli, President Washington allowed it to be squarely stated that “the government of the United States is not in any sense founded upon the Christian religion.”•

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“Is This Just An Updated Version Of The Old Automats, With iPads Replacing Coin Slots, Or Is It Something More?”

September 20, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

I’m just old enough to have been dragged as a small child to the final Automat in Manhattan during its last, sad days, before it was sacrificed at the feet of Ray Kroc, as if it were just one more cow.

In its heyday, despite the lack of servers and cashiers, the Automat was an amazingly social experience and an especially democratic one, with people of all classes and kinds rubbing elbows over cheap turkey sandwiches and cheaper coffee. You could sit there forever. Al Pacino has spoken many times of how he misses the welter of people, the strands of surprising conversations. You don’t get that at McDonalds or Starbucks. It’s just a different vibe (and in the latter case, price point). 

The Automat was the past…and, perhaps, prelude. Well, to some degree. I’ve blogged before about Eatsa (here and here), the so-called “digital Automat” which recently opened in San Francisco. It’s disappeared all workers from the front of the restaurant and probably, in time, from back-room preparation. It certainly doesn’t bode well for fast-casual employees, but what of the social dynamic? 

In his latest insightful Financial Times blog post about how life is changing in the Second Machine Age, Andrew McAfee thinks about the meaning of Eatsa in our “interesting and uncertain” era. He’s not concerned about wait staff being disappeared from his conversations but acknowledges the restaurant, whose model will likely spread, is not a good sign for Labor. An excerpt:

So is this just an updated version of the old automats, with iPads replacing coin slots, or is it something more? There are indications that Eatsa’s founders want it to be the start of something legitimately new: a close to 100 per cent automated restaurant. Food preparation there is already highly optimised and standardised, and it’s probably not a coincidence that the location’s first general manager had a background in robotics.

But the fact that the restaurant’s “front of house” (ie the dining area and customer interactions) are already virtually 100 per cent automated is more interesting to me than the question of whether the “back of house” (the kitchen) ever will be. Interesting because as front of the house automation spreads, it’s going to put to the test one of the most widely held notions about work in the second machine age: that there will always be lots of service jobs because we desire a lot of human interaction.

I agree with the second half of that statement, but I’m not so sure about the first. We are a deeply social species, and even an introvert like me enjoys spending time with friends and loved ones in the physical world. I’ve also learnt to value business lunches and dinners (even though I’d rather be off by myself reading or writing) because they’re an important part of how work advances.

But in the great majority of cases, when I’m out I don’t value the interactions with the waiting staff and other service workers. They’re not unpleasant or terribly burdensome, but they do get in the way of what I want from the restaurant experience: to eat well, and to talk to my tablemates.•

 

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This Week’s Afflictor Keyphrase Searches

September 20, 2015 in Misc. | Permalink

 

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

  1. nim the chimp who lived like a human
  2. bzzagent article from nyt magazine
  3. bruce weber articles about kasparov versus deep blue
  4. chess computer stockholm 1974
  5. william buckley with eldridge cleaver
  6. arnold schwarzenegger as a museum attraction
  7. david simon writing about robin williams
  8. 1975 new republic article solar power in santa clara
  9. the first retail transaction on the internet
  10. jorge luis borges pan of citizen kane

Highlights From Yet Another Week Of Afflictor

September 19, 2015 in Misc. | Permalink

With the Pope abut to visit, Mayor de Blasio ordered a fresh coat of paint for New York.

This week, with the Pope about to visit, Mayor de Blasio ordered a fresh coat of paint for New York City.


  • Anders Sandberg did a great AMA about Transhumanism, space travel, etc.
  • Ai Weiwei discusses China’s modernization, social media, etc.
  • British paranormal investigator Jayne Harris specializes in haunted dolls.
  • NASA is conducting myriad tests to prep astronauts for a Mars mission.
  • Tim Harford thinks Amazon’s bad reputation may be underserved. I don’t.
  • Travis Kalanick likely won’t be Uber CEO by the time driverless is a reality.
  • Pitcher Andrew Heaney is selling stock in his baseball future. Bad idea.

3 Classic Videos: Harold Robbins (1971), The Exorcist Cast (1984), David H. Shepard (1959)

September 19, 2015 in Books, Film, Science/Tech, Videos | Permalink

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Alan Whicker’s great 1971 profile of the wet-dream merchant Harold Robbins opens with the trashy author making his way through his childhood neighborhood, Hell’s Kitchen, during New York City’s bad old days. Robbins, who was the best-selling novelist in the world at the time as well as a dedicated orgiast, specialized in literature that was most suitable for the beach or masturbation, though preferably not both at the same time.

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Linda Blair, Ellen Burstyn, Max von Sydow, Jason Miller and writer William Peter Blatty, collaborators on the 1973 horror classic The Exorcist, reconvened in 1984 for Good Morning America. According to legend, Blatty pretended to be an Arabian prince in the 1950s to get booked on the game show You Bet Your Life. He didn’t fool Groucho but did win $10,000, which helped him jump-start his writing career.

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Just amazing footage of the late inventor David H. Shepard demonstrating his Optical Character Reader on a 1959 episode of I’ve Got a Secret. From his 2007 New York Times obituary:

David H. Shepard, who in his attic invented one of the first machines that could read, and then, to facilitate its interpreting of credit-card receipts, came up with the near-rectilinear font still used for the cards’ numbers, died on Nov. 24 in San Diego. He was 84. …

Mr. Shepard followed his reading machine, more formally known as an optical-character-recognition device, with one that could listen and talk. It could answer only “yes” or “no,” but each answer led to a deeper level of complexity. A later version could simultaneously handle multiple telephone inquiries. …

In 1964, his “conversation machine” became the first commercial device to give telephone callers access to computer data by means of their own voices.  …

Mr. Shepard apologized many times for his major role in forcing people to converse with a machine instead of with a human being.•

“Benzyl Mercaptan May Call To Mind Garlic, Horseradish, Mint Or Coffee”

September 18, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The best argument for our insane, incessant foodie culture is that it ultimately pays off in a way that greatly reduces or even eradicates hunger, through some hybrid of avant kitchen experimentation and science-lab processes. Because if we’re just stuffing the faces of people who already have more than enough to eat, how decadent is that?

One cutting-edge culinary expert who aims to not just tempt palates but to combat hunger is Hervé This, who thinks note-by-note cooking may be the answer, though such progress will probably come from an amalgamation of solutions.

In a T Magazine article by Aimee Lee Ball, the chemist acknowledges that for his plan to work at all, he must first overcome “food neophobia.” That won’t be a simple matter as Ball writes that “the results sometimes seem like parcels delivered from Mars.” An excerpt:

This’s big idea is nothing less than the eradication of world hunger, which he plans to accomplish not with any new economic overhaul, but through a culinary innovation that he calls note-by-note cooking, or NbN. Molecular cuisine — the deconstruction of food into a series of highly alchemized individual textures, flavors and compounds, often in the form of foams, gels and other matter not immediately recognizable as food — is associated with intellectual-culinary concept art of the sort practiced by Heston Blumenthal of the Fat Duck and René Redzepi of Noma. But This’s ambitions for his new cuisine are far from fanciful — indeed, the 60-year-old chemist, an impish and rumpled Dumbledore without the facial hair, often sounds more like a political radical than a food scientist. ‘‘I work for the public,’’ he says. ‘‘I hate rich people. NbN is a new art for chefs, and art is important. But are we going to feed humankind — or just make something for foodies?’’

ACCORDING TO THIS, one of the reasons there isn’t enough food to go around is because when we transport it, what we’re really transporting is water, which makes food spoil. A carrot is mostly water. Same for a tomato, an apple, an eggplant and many other fruits and vegetables. Unless they’re refrigerated, which is expensive and has a nasty impact on the environment, their moist nutrients provide an optimal environment for microorganisms.

This proposes that we stop shipping ‘‘wet’’ foods across countries or continents and instead break them down into their parts: separating their nutrients and flavors into a wide variety of powders and liquids that are theoretically shelf-stable in perpetuity, and can be used as ingredients. Many of the basic components of food have unwieldy names but familiar tastes or smells. Allyl isothiocyanate, a compound obtained from mustard seeds, suggests wasabi; 1-octen-3-ol evokes wild mushrooms. Depending on its concentration, benzyl mercaptan may call to mind garlic, horseradish, mint or coffee; decanal hints at something between an orange and an apricot. ‘‘Nobody knows why the same compound in different strengths may taste like curry or maple syrup,’’ This says. ‘‘The physiology of taste is an exciting field — my colleagues are discovering new things every month.’’•

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“It’s Actually Adjusting Work Orders On The Fly”

September 18, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

Hitachi wants to help us make decisions, whether we’re workers or management. They’re being helpful. But it’s difficult to see how what’s now merely a tool in our hands won’t soon enough be in charge, at least to a significant degree. There have recently been experiments in algorithmic bosses, but Hitachi has gone beyond mere research, appointing what’s probably the world’s first AI manager. 

From Glenn McDonald at Yahoo! Tech:

Of course, we’ve seen all kinds of automation introduced into the workplace over the years, from the Industrial Revolution to modern IT infrastructures. But this project is different. The AI system isn’t just automating routine tasks. It’s actually adjusting work orders on the fly, basing its decisions on enormous, cumulonimbus swirls of Big Data stored up the Cloud.

In this case, those weather metaphors are no joke. The Hitachi AI is programmed to adjust work flows depending on what the weather’s like (among other factors). So forget about blaming that snowstorm for being late or delaying a deadline: The boss already knows about the snow and has already Made Appropriate Corrections.

The really fascinating stuff involves the integration of artificial intelligence with the concept of kaizen — the business philosophy common in Japan that encourages workers and managers to constantly improve their personal efficiency.

According to kaizen, workers should implement new approaches based on their personal experience. But Hitachi’s AI system adds a new twist to that system: “The AI automatically analyzes the outcome of these new approaches, and selects processes which produce better results and applies it to the next work order.”•

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“Pay The People From Whom The Data Is Gathered”

September 18, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

I’ve stated many times already that I think Facebook would easily qualify as the largest sweatshop in the history of the world, except that even those grimy outfits actually pay a wage, if not close to a living one. Sure, we get some degree of utility from Mark Zuckerberg’s company in exchange for the free content we create daily from our previously private data and ideas, but that doesn’t seem like such a bargain. We’re really just worker bees who get none of the honey.

In a Pacific-Standard piece, Jason Lanier holds forth on this same topic, suggesting such information-rich companies pay us for our data, which they handsomely profit from. It’d be awfully hard to arrange and institute but would embody much more of a free-market spirit than the model we currently have. The opening:

Big Data is actually made of people, like “Soylent Green.’’ Big Data does not come from angels or some supernatural realm or a single mathematician’s mind. We need to accept the fact that the cloud programs that are starting to run the world are actually made of the activities of large numbers of people whose behavior—whether online searches, or customer reviews, or Facebook postings or tweets, or even crossing the street—is being observed by computers and used to increase the power of networks. To deny that means stealing from very large numbers of people.

My solution: Pay the people from whom the data is gathered. That gets tricky and there has to be some real innovation. But the principle is simple. And it’s a fair, ethical solution to technologically degraded employment.

How to set a value on this data? In essence, we would ask: If we didn’t include data from this person, how much worse would the translation be, how much worse would the robot function, how much worse would the city be designed if we hadn’t been able to observe that person’s behavior? Based on an approximation of that value, people could price their data—high if they want privacy. Or somebody could be a “data slut’’ and offer all their data for very low cost. That would create individual freedom.•

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“[It] Answers Every Question. Correctly.”

September 18, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech | Permalink

The dream of the digital assistant, that perfect robotic helper, has long been with us. The dumb-ish systems that currently guide us in paying bills and getting directions can understand speech but not the nuances of language. The next-level tool must be able to “listen.”

That day is almost here, the perfect convergence of technology progressing to meet need at just the right moment, asserts David Pierce in a new Wired piece. He believes that “your assistant will know every corner of every app on your phone and will glide between them at your spoken command,” reducing or eliminating the reliance on pointing and clicking (a blessing for many users, especially the visually impaired).

The downside to this innovation (which goes unmentioned in the article) is that a “servant” that improves as it gets to know more about you will know more about you. Your privacy won’t be just yours, and a warm, friendly voice may get you to reveal more than the cool hum of a search engine ever could.

In surveying what he believes to be the near-future landscape, Pierce relates his awe of a new SoundHound app prototype that dazzled him with its sophistication. An excerpt:

The prototype is called Hound, and it’s pretty incredible. Holding a black Nexus 5 smartphone, [SoundHound CEO Keyvan] Mohajer taps a blue and white microphone icon and begins asking questions. He starts simply, asking for the time in Berlin and the population of Japan. Basic search-result stuff—followed by a twist: “What is the distance between them?” The app understands the context and fires back, “About 5,536 miles.”

Then Mohajer gets rolling, smiling as he rattles off a barrage of questions that keep escalating in complexity. He asks Hound to calculate the monthly mortgage payments on a million-dollar home, and the app immediately asks him for the interest rate and the term of the loan before dishing out its answer: $4,270.84.

“What is the population of the capital of the country in which the Space Needle is located?” he asks. Hound figures out that Mohajer is fishing for the population of Washington, DC, faster than I do and spits out the correct answer in its rapid-fire robotic voice. “What is the population and capital for Japan and China, and their areas in square miles and square kilometers? And also tell me how many people live in India, and what is the area code for Germany, France, and Italy?” Mohajer would keep on adding questions, but he runs out of breath. I’ll spare you the minute-long response, but Hound answers every question. Correctly.

Hound, which is now in beta, is probably the fastest and most versatile voice recognition system unveiled thus far. It has an edge for now because it can do speech recognition and natural language processing simultaneously. But really, it’s only a matter of time before other systems catch up.

After all, the underlying ingredients—what Kaplan calls the “gating technologies” necessary for a strong conversational interface—are all pretty much available now to whoever’s buying. It’s a classic story of technological convergence: Advances in processing power, speech recognition, mobile connectivity, cloud computing, and neural networks have all surged to a critical mass at roughly the same time. These tools are finally good enough, cheap enough, and accessible enough to make the conversational interface real—and ubiquitous.•

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Old Print Articles: The End Of Sigmund Freud, Brooklyn Daily Eagle (1938/39)

September 17, 2015 in Old Print Articles, Photography, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

It’s no small irony that Sigmund Freud died against the backdrop of one of the worst explosions of repressed rage the world has ever known. The Jewish “Father of Psychoanalysis” was hectored and hounded in his dying years by Nazis, who desperately needed the very inspection of self he encouraged. Freud ultimately fled Austria in a weakened state and died in London. Three Brooklyn Daily Eagle articles below tell part of the story.

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From March 22, 1938:

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From June 4, 1938:

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From September 24, 1939.

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