Burkhard Bilger

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“They Spiked The Track With Magnets, Alternating Their Polarity In Binary Patterns To Send Messages To The Car”

November 18, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

The transportation revolution could have meant smart roads or smart cars, and it ended up being the latter. Smart roads were easy to devise but were prohibitively expensive to build on a grand scale. Smart cars (driverless ones, that is) were difficult to devise but if perfected could be retrofitted to any driving surface. From “Auto Learning,” Burkhard Bilger’s New Yorker article about the history of driverless cars and the role of machine learning in the sector’s development, a passage about the original car-road question:

“Almost from the beginning, the field divided into two rival camps: smart roads and smart cars. General Motors pioneered the first approach in the late nineteen-fifties. Its Firebird III concept car—shaped like a jet fighter, with titanium tail fins and a glass-bubble cockpit—was designed to run on a test track embedded with an electrical cable, like the slot on a toy speedway. As the car passed over the cable, a receiver in its front end picked up a radio signal and followed it around the curve. Engineers at Berkeley later went a step further: they spiked the track with magnets, alternating their polarity in binary patterns to send messages to the car—’Slow down, sharp curve ahead.’ Systems like these were fairly simple and reliable, but they had a chicken-and-egg problem. To be useful, they had to be built on a large scale; to be built on a large scale, they had to be useful. ‘We don’t have the money to fix potholes,’ Levandowski says. ‘Why would we invest in putting wires in the road?’

Smart cars were more flexible but also more complex. They needed sensors to guide them, computers to steer them, digital maps to follow. In the nineteen-eighties, a German engineer named Ernst Dickmanns, at the Bundeswehr University in Munich, equipped a Mercedes van with video cameras and processors, then programmed it to follow lane lines. Soon it was steering itself around a track. By 1995, Dickmanns’s car was able to drive on the Autobahn from Munich to Odense, Denmark, going up to a hundred miles at a stretch without assistance. Surely the driverless age was at hand! Not yet. Smart cars were just clever enough to get drivers into trouble. The highways and test tracks they navigated were strictly controlled environments. The instant more variables were added—a pedestrian, say, or a traffic cop—their programming faltered. Ninety-eight per cent of driving is just following the dotted line. It’s the other two per cent that matters.”

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“Cars without steering wheels,” from the 1950s:

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“He Said That My Kind Of Strength Was Unbelievable. It Was A One In A Million.”

July 16, 2012 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Sports, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Thomas Inch, bicycling.

From “The Strongest Man in the World,” Burkhard Bilger’s ungated New Yorker piece about Brian Shaw, a Colorado man born to move mountains, and the new wave of strength competitions:

“In the summer of 2005, when Shaw was twenty-three, he went to Las Vegas for a strength-and-conditioning convention. He was feeling a little adrift. He had a degree in wellness management from Black Hills State University, in South Dakota, and was due to start a master’s program at Arizona State that fall. But after moving to Tempe, a few weeks earlier, and working out with the football team, he was beginning to have second thoughts. ‘This was a big Division I, Pac-10 school, but I was a little surprised, to be honest,’ he told me. ‘I was so much stronger than all of them.’ One day at the convention, Shaw came upon a booth run by Sorinex, a company that has designed weight-lifting systems for the Denver Broncos and other football programs. The founder, Richard Sorin, liked to collect equipment used by old-time strongmen and had set out a few items for passersby to try. There were some kettle bells lying around, like cannonballs with handles attached, and a clumsy-looking thing called a Thomas Inch dumbbell.

Inch was an early-twentieth-century British strongman famous for his grip. His dumbbell, made of cast iron, weighed a hundred and seventy-two pounds and had a handle as thick as a tin can, difficult to grasp. In his stage shows, Inch would offer a prize of more than twenty thousand dollars in today’s currency to anyone who could lift the dumbbell off the floor with one hand. For more than fifty years, no one but Inch managed it, and only a few dozen have done so in the half century since. ‘A thousand people will try to lift it in a weekend, and a thousand won’t lift it,’ Sorin told me. ‘A lot of strong people have left with their tails between their legs.’ It came as something of a shock, therefore, to see Shaw reach over and pick up the dumbbell as if it were a paperweight. ‘He was just standing there with a blank look on his face,’ Sorin said. ‘It was, like, What’s so very hard about this?’

When Shaw set down the dumbbell and walked away, Sorin ran over to find him in the crowd. ‘His eyes were huge,’ Shaw recalls. ‘He said, ‘Can you do that again?’ And I said, ‘Of course I can.’ So he took a picture and sent it to me afterward.’ Sorin went on to tell Shaw about the modern strongman circuit—an extreme sport, based on the kinds of feat performed by men like Inch, which had a growing following worldwide. ‘He said that my kind of strength was unbelievable. It was a one in a million. If I didn’t do something with my abilities, I was stupid. That was pretty cool.’

Three months later, Shaw won his first strongman event.”

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Shaw deadlifting 1073 pounds this year with a torn biceps:

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“A Computer Looks Really Stupid Tucked Behind Your Ear”

March 22, 2011 in Excerpts, Urban Studies | Permalink

Eccentric puzzle master Henry Hook likes to tease, torment and torture. Before people like Hook and Will Shortz came along, the crossword puzzle, which was created in 1913, was an academic thing, far from being the pun-happy, pop culture paradise it is today. In his 2002 New Yorker article, “The Riddler,” Burkhard Bilger describes Hook’s unorthodox puzzle-creating routine:

“He lives and works in Brooklyn now, not far from Prospect Park, in a small wooden house so barricaded to guests that he barely lets the cable man in. ‘I’m the guy that inspired the phrase ‘Doesn’t play well with others,’’ he says. On most days, he wakes up by seven, does a word search to get his eyes focussed, and then spends the day shuttling between his crossword grids, his reference books, and the television. More and more crossword constructors are relying on computer programs and data bases of common clues. Hook uses only a pencil (‘A computer looks really stupid tucked behind your ear’), yet he has been known to come up with twenty-four crosswords and write more than fifteen hundred clues in three days. In addition to constructing a crossword for the Sunday BostonGlobe every other week, he writes two puzzle books a year for Random House and hundreds of puzzles that are syndicated for smaller publications.

Then again, there is very little to distract him. Once a week, Hook used to get dressed up, walk to a karaoke bar several blocks away, and belt out a few Sinatra or Elvis tunes. But, he says, he got bored with the same old crowd, and he gave up his membership in the National Puzzlers’ League long ago—’logophilia in the extreme.’ He says he dreams of being a former crossword constructor, but it’s not clear what else he would do.”

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