Oliver Burkeman

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“It Was A Wild Dream At The Time”

March 12, 2015 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

A decked-out space habitat peopled by Earthlings may grace the moon or Mars or some other mass during the twenty-first century, offering a chance for zero-gravity sex and retirement far from the kids. If it is to be, much of the infrastructure and architecture probably needs to be built with found materials being fed into 3D printers. From Oliver Burkeman at the Guardian:

Inflatables have come a long a way since the 1960s, when Nasa commissioned tyre company Goodyear to design an enormous galactic inner tube. The 9m-wide rubber doughnut never made it into space, but it proved to be a huge inspiration to others – including Guillermo Trotti, then an enthusiastic architecture student in search of a thesis project, who designed a seminal proposal for an inflatable habitat on the moon in 1974. His Counterpoint lunar colony, a model of which now resides in the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, envisaged a network of inflated domes and structures moulded from lunar basalt to house a community of 200 people, sustained by an ecosystem of soybean plants, trout, catfish, 200 chickens and 50 miniature goats.

“It was a wild dream at the time,” he says. “But it caught the eye of [architect] Buckminster Fuller and I won a Nasa research grant to develop it. Now, 40 years on, it doesn’t seem such a crazy idea.” Trotti went on to co-found the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture, which offers what is still the world’s only space architecture masters programme. Every year, its students’ projects push Nasa scientists to dream a little bit further, with provocative visions for Mars landers lowered from hovering “skycranes” and spacecraft propelled on long tethers to create artificial gravity.

“If you look at the history of the industry, what we do in space is really a mirror for our contemporary values on earth,” says Neil Leach, who edited a recent issue of Architectural Design devoted to space architecture. “The Apollo mission was part of the cold war, the ISS was a defining moment of international collaboration, and now we’re seeing private entrepreneurs really leading the way, with companies like SpaceX [founded by PayPal billionaire Elon Musk] and Blue Origin [founded by Amazon’s Jeff Bezos]. Reflecting our earthly priorities, environmental sustainability is now top of the space agenda.”

The current buzzword in Nasa circles is ISRU, or in-situ resource utilisation, the space equivalent of using locally available materials.•

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“Colonizing Peoples Had Massive Superiority, But They Had Choices In How They Were Going To Treat The People”

October 26, 2014 in Books, Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Few academics sweep as widely across the past or rankle as much in the present as Jared Diamond, the UCLA professor most famous (and infamous) for Guns, Germs and Steel, a book that elides superiority–and often volition–from the history of some humans conquering others. It’s a tricky premise to prove if you apply it to the present: More-developed countries have better weapons than some other states, but it still requires will to use them. Of course, Diamond’s views are more complex than that black-and-white picture. Two excerpts follow from Oliver Burkeman’s very good new Guardian article about the scholar.

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In person, Diamond is a fastidiously courteous 77-year-old with a Quaker-style beard sans moustache, and archaic New England vowels: “often” becomes “orphan,” “area” becomes “eerier.” There’s no computer: despite his children’s best efforts, he admits he’s never learned to use one.

Diamond’s first big hit, The Third Chimpanzee (1992), which won a Royal Society prize, has just been reissued in an adaptation for younger readers. Like the others, it starts with a mystery. By some measures, humans share more than 97% of our DNA with chimpanzees – by any commonsense classification, we are another kind of chimpanzee – and for millions of years our achievements hardly distinguished us from chimps, either. “If some creature had come from outer space 150,000 years ago, humans probably wouldn’t figure on their list of the five most interesting species on Earth,” he says. Then, within the last 1% of our evolutionary history, we became exceptional, developing tools and artwork and literature, dominating the planet, and now perhaps on course to destroy it. What changed, Diamond argues, was a seemingly minor set of mutations in our larynxes, permitting control over spoken sounds, and thus spoken language; spoken language permitted much of the rest.

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Geography sometimes plays a huge role; sometimes none at all. Diamond’s most vivid illustration of the latter is the former practice, in two New Guinean tribes, of strangling the widows of deceased men, usually with the widows’ consent. Other nearby tribes that have developed in the same landscape don’t do it, so a geographical argument can’t work. On the other hand: “If you ask why the Inuit, living above the Arctic Circle, wear clothes, while New Guineans often don’t, I would say culture makes a negligible contribution. I would encourage anyone who disagrees to try standing around in Greenland in January without clothes.” And human choices really matter: once the Spanish encountered the Incas, Diamond argues, the Spanish were always going to win the fight, but that doesn’t mean brutal genocide was inevitable. “Colonising peoples had massive superiority, but they had choices in how they were going to treat the people over whom they had massive superiority.”

It is clear that behind these disputes, is a more general distrust among academics of the “big-picture” approach Diamond has made his own.•

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“Rewatching The Show Today Is A Curious Experience”

January 5, 2014 in Excerpts | Permalink

Jerry Seinfeld, continuing his endless, ostentatious victory lap, hosts the ambulatory Internet talk show, Comedian in Cars Getting Coffee, which features caffeinated cut-ups in souped-up sedans. As much as I love comedy and generally enjoy the program, there’s something about it that bothers me. I mean, in addition to the fact that the guests are almost always white males. (Tina Fey, a guest this season, is rumored to have a vagina, but so far she’s only flashed us the tits.) No, what’s disquieting to me about the show is that I don’t like seeing comics when they’re not doing comedy. They’re often not very interesting. In Seinfeldian terms, there’s a reason why the comic book is called Superman and not Clark Kent. Stripped of their powers, these people are a lot like you and I, but even worse. When the show works on a higher level, however, as it does in the Michael Richards episode and the one with Carl Reiner and Mel Brooks, it’s special. 

Perhaps there’s another reason the program is such an odd thing: the wasteful, careless ethos of the Seinfeld sitcom feels strange in a time of so much financial struggle. From Oliver Burkeman at the Guardian:

“A competing theory for Seinfeld’s low profile since 1998 is that his comedy belongs squarely to the 90s – an era of economic plenty, before 9/11, before widespread anxiety about climate change, when the bottomless self-absorption of Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer felt excusable. Rewatching the show today is a curious experience. The haircuts are terrible, obviously. But the much-hyped focus on ‘nothing’ – on overblown conflicts with doormen, restaurateurs and so on – feels familiar: it’s central to many of the shows that count Seinfeld as a major influence, from Arrested Development to The Office to Curb Your Enthusiasm. (The latter’s success fuelled yet another theory about Seinfeld’s post-90s career: that Larry David had been the genius behind the sitcom all along.) What stands out, in those old Seinfelds, is the weird callousness: a total lack of concern with anyone other than the central foursome, unmatched even by Larry David’s character in Curb, or David Brent, or the South Park kids. When George’s fiancee dies, poisoned by the glue in the cheap wedding invitations he’d insisted on buying, his pure relief is certainly funny, and in keeping with the famous motto of the show’s writers: ‘No hugging, no learning.’ But it’s also more pathologically egocentric than anything you’d encounter, in a comedic context, on TV today.”

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“[It] Reads Like L Ron Hubbard Had Drunken Sex One Night With Ayn Rand And Produced This Bastard Thought-Child”

October 20, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Outsider scientist and philosopher David Birnbaum–a jeweler to the super rich by day–believes he’s figured out the origins of the universe. Of course, he could be wrong. I mean, he’s probably wrong. Right? From Oliver Burkeman in the Guardian:

“The academics could be forgiven for never having heard of Summa Metaphysica’s author. But, in fact, he was far from unknown: David Birnbaum is a prominent figure in the New York jewel trade, a private seller of high-carat diamonds and other rare gems, with a clientele that has included celebrities – Goldie Hawn, James Gandolfini – but consists mainly of the anonymous super-rich. For some time now, aided by his wealth, Birnbaum has been on an altogether different mission: to convince the world he has made an astonishing breakthrough in philosophy. It is a quest that has seen him accused of ‘academic identity theft,’ epic levels of arrogance, and the unauthorised use of Harvard University’s trademarks. But it also raises fascinating questions. These days, only a tiny number of people understand enough theoretical physics, or advanced philosophy, to grasp what these disciplines tell us about reality at the deepest level. Is it still conceivable – as it was a century ago – that a gentleman amateur, with some financial resources, could make a real, revolutionary contribution to our understanding of the mysteries of the universe?

There is no shortage of people who would say no, at least in Birnbaum’s case. His work, said a commenter on the Chronicle’s website, ‘reads like L Ron Hubbard had drunken sex one night with Ayn Rand and produced this bastard thought-child.’ One scholar who became professionally involved with Birnbaum described the experience as ‘unsettling, unfortunate and, to my knowledge, unprecedented in academic circles.’ Another just called him ‘toxic.’

But then again – as Birnbaum pointed out to me, more than once, during the weeks I spent trying to figure out exactly what he was up to – just suppose that a scrappy, philosophically unqualified Jewish guy from Queens really had cracked the cosmic code, embarrassing the ivory-tower elites: well, isn’t this exactly the kind of defensive response you’d expect?”

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“Having Power Can Backfire”

September 29, 2013 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Oliver Burkeman’s Guardian interview with Malcolm Gladwell, in anticipation of David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants, his latest book of unconventional wisdom:

“The outcome of the original David-and-Goliath clash wasn’t a miracle, he argues: it’s just what happens when the weak refuse to play by rules laid down by the strong. (Sample sentence: ‘Eitan Hirsch, a ballistics expert with the Israeli Defence Force, recently did a series of calculations showing that a typical-sized stone hurled by an expert slinger at a distance of 35m would have hit Goliath’s head with a velocity of 34m per second – more than enough to penetrate his skull and render him dead or unconscious.’)

‘With each book that passes, I think my personal ideology becomes more explicit … and this one is a very Canadian sort of book,’ says Gladwell, who was born in Fareham, in Hampshire, but grew up in Ontario. ‘It’s Canadian in its suspicion of bigness and wealth and power. Someone told me – did you know that there’s never been a luxury brand to come from Canada? That’s never happened. That’s such a great fact to have about your home country.’

Difficulties and afflictions, the book shows, frequently foster creativity and resilience. Studies on ‘cognitive disfluency’ have shown that people do better at problem-solving tasks when they’re printed in a hard-to-read font: the extra challenge triggers more effortful engagement. We meet dyslexics whose reading problems forced them to find more efficient ways to master law and finance (one is now a celebrated trial lawyer, another the president of Goldman Sachs); we learn why losing a parent in childhood forges a resilience that frequently spurs achievement in later life, and why you shouldn’t necessarily attend the best university that will have you. (The answer is ‘relative deprivation’: the further you are from being the best at your institution, the more demotivating it is; middling talents perform better at middling establishments.) Conversely, having power can backfire, not least because it tricks the powerful into thinking they don’t need the consent of those over whom they wield it. In a compelling account of the Troubles, Gladwell argues that the British were plagued by a simple error: the belief that their superior resources meant ‘it did not matter what the people of Northern Ireland thought of them.’ More isn’t always more.”

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“If You Pursue Originality Too Vigorously, You’ll Never Reach It”

April 10, 2013 in Excerpts, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

From Oliver Burkeman’s Guardian column about the Helsinki Bus Station Theory, which stresses the importance of persistence, rather than originality, in creativity:

“There are two reasons this metaphor is so compelling – apart from the sheer fact that it’s Finland-related, I mean. One is how vividly it illustrates a critical insight about persistence: that in the first weeks or years of any worthwhile project, feedback – whether from your own emotions, or from other people – isn’t a reliable indication of how you’re doing. (This shouldn’t be confused with the dodgy dictum that triggering hostile reactions means you must be doing the right thing; it just doesn’t prove you’re doing the wrong one.) The second point concerns the perils of a world that fetishises originality. A hundred self-help books urge you to have the guts to be ‘different’: the kid who drops out of university to launch a crazy-sounding startup becomes a cultural hero… yet the Helsinki theory suggests that if you pursue originality too vigorously, you’ll never reach it. Sometimes it takes more guts to keep trudging down a pre-trodden path, to the originality beyond.”

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“It Is Where Microwaveable Scrambled Eggs…Go To Die”

June 18, 2012 in Excerpts, Urban Studies, Videos | Permalink

Product development is endlessly fascinating and nothing amuses more than truly terrible products that were brought to the market. A lot of very intelligent people thought they sounded like good ideas at the time. Or maybe they were initially good ideas that just got away from them. From Oliver Burkeman’s Guardian article about his recent visit to a storehouse of failed consumer products in Ann Arbor:

“This is consumer capitalism’s graveyard – the shadow side to the relentlessly upbeat, success-focused culture of modern marketing. Or to put it less grandly: it’s almost certainly the only place on the planet where you’ll find Clairol’s A Touch of Yogurt shampoo alongside Gillette’s equally unpopular For Oily Hair Only, a few feet from a now-empty bottle of Pepsi AM Breakfast Cola (born 1989; died 1990). The museum is home to discontinued brands of caffeinated beer; to TV dinners branded with the logo of the toothpaste manufacturer Colgate; to self-heating soup cans that had a regrettable tendency to explode in customers’ faces; and to packets of breath mints that had to be withdrawn from sale because they looked like the tiny packages of crack cocaine dispensed by America’s street drug dealers. It is where microwaveable scrambled eggs – pre-scrambled and sold in a cardboard tube with a pop-up mechanism for easier consumption in the car – go to die.

There is a Japanese term, mono no aware, that translates roughly as ‘the pathos of things’: it captures a kind of bittersweet melancholy at life’s impermanence – that additional beauty imparted to cherry blossoms, say, or human features, as a result of their inevitably fleeting time on Earth. It’s only stretching the concept slightly to suggest that this is how the museum’s proprietor, an understatedly stylish GfK employee named Carol Sherry, feels about the cartons of Morning Banana Juice in her care, or about Fortune Snookies, a short-lived line of fortune cookies for dogs. Every failure, the way she sees it, embodies its own sad story on the part of designers, marketers and salespeople. It is never far from her mind that real people had their mortgages, their car payments and their family holidays riding on the success of products such as A Touch of Yogurt.” (Thanks Browser.)

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“FOHO–It’s not just a lot of detergent”:

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