Bud Powell

[ed. Reminiscent of my childhood growing up in the canefields of Hawaii, sugar mill and all. So much fun.]
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Goodbye, Privacy: ‘Selfie-drones’ Will Hover Over Vacationers

Think remote-controlled drones and selfie-sticks are intrusive? Prepare for the selfie-drone.

This next generation of drones, which are just beginning to roll out, doesn’t require users to hold remote controllers: They are hands-free. Simply toss them in the air, and they will follow you like Tinker Bell. With names such as Lily (around $700 on pre-order) and Nixie (not yet available for pre-order), they are capable of recording breathtaking video footage and trailing adventure travelers across bridges and streams, down ski slopes and into secluded gardens.

Nixie, which you can wear on your wrist until you want to fling it off for a photo or video, has a “boomerang mode” that allows it to fly back to you as if it were a trained raptor. A promotional video for Lily shows a man with a backpack lobbing the drone like a stone over a bridge and casually walking away, only to have the thing float up and follow him. Think you can outmaneuver the contraption in white-water rapids? Lily is waterproof. I watched with awe a video of Lily being dumped into a river beside a woman in a kayak (where one assumes Lily will perish), yet within seconds emerging and rising, like Glenn Close from the bathtub in “Fatal Attraction.”

There is no denying that the latest drone technology is impressive. And the footage is striking. Adventure travelers who wish to watch themselves scale Kilimanjaro or surf in Hawaii along the North Shore of Oahu will no doubt want one. But if selfie-drones become staples of every traveler who can afford them, we stand to lose more than we stand to gain when it comes to privacy, safety and quality-of-life factors like peace and beauty.

by Stephanie Rosenbloom NY Times/Seattle Times |  Read more:

Image: Wesley Bedrosian/The New York Times

Water Bears

When scientists at the American Museum of Natural History mounted an exhibit about creatures that survive under conditions few others can tolerate, they did not have to go far to find the show’s mascot.

“We just got them from Central Park,” said Mark Siddall, a curator of the show, Life at the Limits. “Scoop up some moss, and you’ll find them.”

He was talking about tardigrades, tiny creatures that live just about everywhere: in moss and lichens, but also in bubbling hot springs, Antarctic ice, deep-sea trenches and Himalayan mountaintops. They have even survived the extreme cold and radiation of outer space.

Typically taupe-ish and somewhat translucent, and a sixteenth of an inch or so long, they are variously described as resembling minuscule hippopotamuses (if hippos had giant snouts and eight legs, each with several claws), mites or, most commonly, bears. Many people call them “water bears” or “bears of the moss.” (The word “tardigrade” is from the Latin for “slow walker” and pronounced TAR-dee-grade.)

Once an object of interest only among zoological specialists, tardigrades now are generating widespread enthusiasm. Admirers have produced artwork and children’s books about them, and have even organized the International Society of Tardigrade Hunters “to advance the study of tardigrade (water bear) biology while engaging and collaborating with the public.”

According to the society, formed this year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, people can find tardigrades if they gather some lichen or moss, especially on a damp day, put it in a shallow dish of water, and “agitate” it a bit. Debris will settle to the bottom of the dish, and tardigrades will probably be prowling in it.

The museum exhibit, which runs until January, also includes beetles, flowers, corals and other animals with unusual ways of coping with hostile environments. But its entrance is guarded by a 10-foot replica of a tardigrade, seemingly floating overhead. That’s fitting, because the tardigrade, which has a natural life span of about a year, is particularly impressive among the exhibit’s “extremeophiles.”

Confronted with drying, rapid temperature changes, changes in water salinity or other problems, tardigrades can curtail their metabolism to 0.01 percent of normal, entering a kind of suspended animation in which they lose “the vast, vast, vast majority of their body water,” Dr. Siddall said. They curl up into something called a “tun.”

Tuns can be subjected to atmospheric pressure 600 times that of the surface of Earth, and they will bounce right back. They can be chilled to more than 300 degrees Fahrenheit below zero for more than a year, no problem. The European Space Agency once sent tuns into space: Two-thirds survived simultaneous exposure to solar radiation and the vacuum of space.

Without water, “the damaging effects of freezing cannot happen,” Dr. Siddall explained. “It protects against heat because the water inside cannot turn into a gas that expands.” Even radiation needs water to do damage, he said. When cosmic radiation hits water in a cell, it produces a highly reactive form of oxygen that damages cell DNA. The tun doesn’t have this problem.

Tuns have been reconstituted after more than a century and brought back to life as tardigrades, looking not a day older.

by Cornelia Dean, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Eye of Science/Science Source

How are Banksy's New York works holding up? (ed. not well)

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The Cheap Phones Quietly Winning the U.S.

In most AT&T, Sprint, or T-Mobile stores, it takes a while to find the ZTE phones, buried in the back, past the latest from Apple and Samsung. But they’re there. In AT&T stores it’s the ZTE Maven, which has a screen, speakers, and a processor with capabilities somewhere between the iPhone 5 and 6. As Tony Greco, ZTE’s head of U.S. retail marketing, puts it, “These were state-of-the-art features two years ago.” The Maven’s draw, really, is price. Without any subsidies from a wireless carrier, the phone costs just $60. And it’s not even one of the company’s cheaper models.

ZTE is quietly becoming a force in the U.S. by selling good enough phones at low prices—smaller prepaid smartphones for $30, basic phones with QWERTY keyboards for about the same, and so on. The Chinese company’s products are among the cheap phones of choice at three of the big four U.S. carriers. (Verizon doesn’t carry them.) ZTE claimed about 8 percent of America’s smartphone market in the second quarter of this year, says researcher IDC, up from 4.2 percent in the first quarter of 2014. That ranks the company fourth among smartphone makers overall, behind Apple, Samsung, and LG. “We came from nowhere, and now we are a solid force,” says Lixin Cheng, head of ZTE’s U.S. operations.

by Bruce Einhorn, Bloomberg |  Read more:

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Crusing toward oblivion

Football With a New Age Twist

Jimmy Graham, an all-star tight end, quickly learned things were different with the Seattle Seahawks after he arrived this spring from the New Orleans Saints in an off-season trade.

After he dropped a pass during practice, Seahawks Coach Pete Carroll came bounding over to him — not with a torrent of invective, as might happen on other football fields, but with fatherly counsel not to worry and just to focus more.

He soon found that the soft touch did not stop there. He had arrived on a team in which cursing is frowned upon, a former competitive surfer turned “human optimization specialist” enlightens players in the “arc of the journey” rather than the arc of the pass, and — after one of the most spectacular losses in Super Bowl history — despair is defeated by New Age-style platitudes urging players to be mindful and seek “high-quality moments.”

Graham, like many new arrivals, was taken aback, too. This is a league, after all, that in recent years has determined that one team was operating a bounty system that rewarded players for hurting opponents and in which several members of another team harassed a teammate so much that he left the sport.

“Football has an old-school mentality: We’re going to grind you into the ground, we’re going to make men out of boys, and when you do something bad, we’re going to demean you,” Graham said. “But here, they feel like you guys are already men and we’re going to treat you like men. It’s literally all positive reinforcement.”

That philosophy will be put to the test this season as never before as Seattle tries not only to get back to the Super Bowl but to rise from one of the most deflating losses in the game’s history. With the Seahawks poised to win in the closing seconds, an intercepted pass at the goal line sailed into football’s Hall of Fame of flubs and handed a 28-24 victory to the New England Patriots.

“I couldn’t be more excited for the challenge of winning and coming back again and going again,” Carroll told reporters during training camp, still answering for the loss. “How hard could it be? We’re going to find out.”

The road back, he added, rests on “our beliefs, and we’re going to bring them to the front and see if they can stand the test, and if we do, we’ll be stronger and tougher than ever.”

Tough may not come immediately to mind with his unorthodox approach.

Although psychologists and consultants are not new in professional sports, Seattle has so integrated their work that more than a half-dozen teams have called to ask about the team’s approach. (...)

“It’s not, ‘I have the answers and you don’t,’ ” he said. “It’s a learning-based organization that is hungry to figure out the challenges of expressing human potential.”

The world outside the locker room is focused on championships won and lost. But Gervais said he reminded players that they were not defined by a single event, even a Super Bowl loss.

“I feel badly for those people who measure success by one point in time,” he said. “But if it’s a process and journey and life engagement, you have a choice to be successful in the arc of growing.”

by Ken Belson, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Elaine Thompson/Associated Press

The Opposite of Hoarding

As long as she can remember, Annabelle Charbit has loathed “stuff.” She hated birthdays because birthdays meant gifts. And gifts meant finding a way to toss them.

At 5 years old, Charbit would sneak toys into her younger brother’s room. By age 10, she was stashing her belongings in alleys around her London neighborhood. At 13, she discovered charity stores, smuggling bags past her parents and out the door.

Living on her own in her twenties, Charbit, now 41, continued her spartan ways, eschewing even lamps. “I would be in semi-darkness,” she says.

Currently a neuroscience researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, Charbit was obsessively decluttering before the word really existed in popular culture. Google Ngram, which charts the use of certain words in book titles, shows that “declutter” first came into use in the 1970s, its popularity shooting up through the ’80s, ’90s, and the first decade of the 21st century. According to Oxford University Press, the term was only added to the 20-volume Oxford English Dictionary in June 2015. Today, women’s magazines routinely urge readers to purge; personal organizers offer to coach clients in their pursuit of minimalist perfection; earlier this year, Marie Kondo’s book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up, which promises to help people achieve “the unique magic of a tidy home,” became a bestseller. But for some people, the cultural embrace of decluttering can provide cover for more problematic behavior.

“Do we just assume that decluttering is a good thing because it’s the opposite of hoarding?” says Vivien Diller, a psychologist in New York who has worked with patients like Charbit who compulsively rid themselves of their possessions. “Being organized and throwing things out and being efficient is applauded in our society because it is productive. But you take somebody who cannot tolerate mess or cannot sit still without cleaning or throwing things out, and we’re talking about a symptom.”

Unlike hoarding, which was officially reclassified as a disorder in 2013, compulsive decluttering doesn’t appear as its own entry in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM); instead, it’s typically considered a manifestation of obsessive-compulsive disorder. “I see it all the time. People rarely come into my office because they have a problem with being too efficient or wanting to declutter,” Diller says, but the problem usually makes itself known in other ways: “They’re not sleeping at night and they’re feeling jittery and irritable … they’ll sit in my office and straighten my pillows. They’re not comfortable until everything is in order.”

Scientists still aren’t sure exactly what causes OCD, which is typically treated with therapy and medication. What they do know is that the condition causes sufferers to lock onto distressing thoughts (obsession), generating anxiety that can only be soothed by performing a particular act (compulsion). “By doing the ritual, you get temporary relief, and then that cements you into doing the ritual,” says Michael Jenike, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the founder of the OCD treatment program at Massachusetts General Hospital. “So you do it again and again.”

Diller’s compulsive-decluttering patients, she says, sometimes describe “this tightness in their chest if they see things that should be thrown out,” one that can be eased only by getting rid of the offending objects.

“Any behavior can technically become a problem when it starts having an obsessive and compulsive nature. Even [otherwise] healthy behavior,” says Jennifer Baumgartner, a clinical psychologist in the Washington, D.C. area who has worked with patients who suffer from obsessive-compulsive cleaning. Both cleaning and decluttering can be positive behaviors, she says, but become a problem when they’re driven by obsessive thoughts.

One day in 2010, Charbit, then a neuroscience graduate student at University College London, Googled “the opposite of hoarding” and “clutter phobia.” She was in the process of writing a novel about a woman who suffers from the same compulsions as Charbit herself (the novel, A Life Lived Ridiculously, was published in 2012) and wasn’t sure how to describe her character’s symptoms—there’s no official term for compulsive decluttering. “I was a grown adult, fully medicated, with plenty of insight … but with no name for [the behavior],” says Charbit, who began taking medication for OCD at age 18. Her search led her to an article on “obsessive-compulsive spartanism,” she recalls. Clicking it open, she immediately recognized her own experience.

For Charbit, the thoughts began within seconds of waking up each day. “You have a few seconds of peace,” she says. “Then it all comes flooding: The anxiety, the dread … It's that constant nagging. You never reach a point where you're satisfied.” Even now, after years of treatment, “I would rather throw something out and buy it again than keep it.” The medication helps, she says, but it hasn’t stopped her from discarding and re-buying a food processor three times. “And don’t even tell me to recount how many books I tossed, only to go to Amazon and repurchase them.”

by Leslie Garrett, The Atlantic |  Read more:

Image: Lasse Kristensen, Shutterstock

Jerry Garcia, David Grisman, Tony Rice

[ed. The Pizza Tapes.]

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A Taste of France

“There’s a pubic hair in my pasta,” I said calmly, with as much dignity as I could muster. Across the table from me, Karen paused in mid-chew and put down the utensils, her eyes quickly scanning the surrounding diners for any undue attention. Perhaps they heard me say “pubic.” We were in Grenoble, and people understood English very well. She moved the silver pot of flowering lavender out of the way, leaned over the white-draped table and inspected the black, curly hair, complete with a white bulbous follicle, sitting on a freshly made goat cheese and spinach ravioli like an innocent bit of extra garnish.

“Could be a chest hair,” she said.

Karen is English and will suffer almost any humiliation quietly rather than make a fuss.

“It’s too curly for a chest hair. Could be from an arm pit, I’ll give you that,” I said, raising a hand to get the waiter’s attention. “Pit or crotch, I’m not going to eat it.”

“You could just put it to one side,” Karen suggested. The fingers of her right hand smoothed the napkin, ironed it against the table. “I mean, what are you hoping to achieve?”

English or not, in this instance she wasn’t merely adhering to a genetic and cultural disposition for confrontation avoidance. Having lived in Grenoble for years, she had reason to question what greater good complaining would serve. In England or the US, apologies would have been forthcoming, as would a fresh portion or a different dish at no charge. But this was France and we both knew better.

Only three days earlier, on a cobblestone square in Aix-en-Provence, I had been served a salad with Lollo Rosso lettuce, artichoke hearts, pine nuts, and dirt. Not a modest little dusting of dirt crunching between my teeth, evidence of a somewhat superficial rinsing, but a hearty clump of good, French soil. I could have grown cress in it. I alerted the waitress, expecting a modicum of remorse and a new salad. Instead I got an overbearing smile and “C’est un peu de terre…” It’s a bit of dirt. What’s all the to-do about? I insisted the dirt should not be in my salad. She looked at me as you look at a chihuahua having a yapping fit, scooped up the ruffled lettuce leaf with the dirt, and threw it on the ground. “Voilà!”

I generally prefer my salads without compost, and any type of hair in my food dramatically reduces a restaurant’s chances of repeat business from me. But I admit to harboring a secret admiration for the lack of humility the average French service provider displays. Though occasionally counterproductive in the business sense of the word, it is at the very least honest. At best, it is what France is all about: a sense of equality and pride, a refusal to ingratiate. Compare this with the American cashier squeezing out a “Thank you for shopping at Walmart,” when really he just wants you to pick up your change and exit his personal planet. American service is second to none when it comes to free water expediently delivered at the table, Disney smiles, and verbal smoothies, but forced pleasantries often leave you feeling more resented than do the irreverent French.

by Rikke Jorgensen, Medium |  Read more:

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Don’t Worry, Smart Machines Will Take Us With Them

Why human intelligence and AI will co-evolve.

When it comes to artificial intelligence, we may all be suffering from the fallacy of availability: thinking that creating intelligence is much easier than it is, because we see examples all around us. In a recent poll, machine intelligence experts predicted that computers would gain human-level ability around the year 2050, and superhuman ability less than 30 years after.1 But, like a tribe on a tropical island littered with World War II debris imagining that the manufacture of aluminum propellers or steel casings would be within their power, our confidence is probably inflated.

AI can be thought of as a search problem over an effectively infinite, high-dimensional landscape of possible programs. Nature solved this search problem by brute force, effectively performing a huge computation involving trillions of evolving agents of varying information processing capability in a complex environment (the Earth). It took billions of years to go from the first tiny DNA replicators toHomo Sapiens. What evolution accomplished required tremendous resources. While silicon-based technologies are increasingly capable of simulating a mammalian or even human brain, we have little idea of how to find the tiny subset of all possible programs running on this hardware that would exhibit intelligent behavior.

But there is hope. By 2050, there will be another rapidly evolving and advancing intelligence besides that of machines: our own. The cost to sequence a human genome has fallen below $1,000, and powerful methods have been developed to unravel the genetic architecture of complex traits such as human cognitive ability. Technologies already exist which allow genomic selection of embryos during in vitro fertilization—an embryo’s DNA can be sequenced from a single extracted cell. Recent advances such as CRISPR allow highly targeted editing of genomes, and will eventually find their uses in human reproduction.

The potential for improved human intelligence is enormous. Cognitive ability is influenced by thousands of genetic loci, each of small effect. If all were simultaneously improved, it would be possible to achieve, very roughly, about 100 standard deviations of improvement, corresponding to an IQ of over 1,000. We can’t imagine what capabilities this level of intelligence represents, but we can be sure it is far beyond our own. Cognitive engineering, via direct edits to embryonic human DNA, will eventually produce individuals who are well beyond all historical figures in cognitive ability. By 2050, this process will likely have begun.

These two threads—smarter people and smarter machines—will inevitably intersect. Just as machines will be much smarter in 2050, we can expect that the humans who design, build, and program them will also be smarter. Naively, one would expect the rate of advance of machine intelligence to outstrip that of biological intelligence. Tinkering with a machine seems easier than modifying a living species, one generation at a time. But advances in genomics—both in our ability to relate complex traits to the underlying genetic codes, and the ability to make direct edits to genomes—will allow rapid advances in biologically-based cognition. Also, once machines reach human levels of intelligence, our ability to tinker starts to be limited by ethical considerations. Rebooting an operating system is one thing, but what about a sentient being with memories and a sense of free will?

Therefore, the answer to the question “Will AI or genetic modification have the greater impact in the year 2050?” is yes. Considering one without the other neglects an important interaction.

by Stephen Hsu, Nautilus |  Read more:

Image: Sachen Teng

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Hall & Oates

How Social Media Is Ruining Politics

Our political discourse is shrinking to fit our smartphone screens. The latest evidence came on Monday night, when Barack Obama turned himself into the country’s Instagrammer-in-Chief. While en route to Alaska to promote his climate agenda, the president took a photograph of a mountain range from a window on Air Force One and posted the shot on the popular picture-sharing network. “Hey everyone, it's Barack,” the caption read. “I'll be spending the next few days touring this beautiful state and meeting with Alaskans about what’s going on in their lives. Looking forward to sharing it with you.” The photo quickly racked up thousands of likes.

Ever since the so-called Facebook election of 2008, Obama has been a pacesetter in using social media to connect with the public. But he has nothing on this year’s field of candidates. Ted Cruz live-streams his appearances on Periscope. Marco Rubio broadcasts “Snapchat Stories” at stops along the trail. Hillary Clinton and Jeb Bush spar over student debt on Twitter. Rand Paul and Lindsey Graham produce goofy YouTube videos. Even grumpy old Bernie Sanders has attracted nearly two million likers on Facebook, leading the New York Times to dub him “a king of social media.”

And then there’s Donald Trump. (...)

Twice before in the last hundred years a new medium has transformed elections. In the 1920s, radio disembodied candidates, reducing them to voices. It also made national campaigns far more intimate. Politicians, used to bellowing at fairgrounds and train depots, found themselves talking to families in their homes. The blustery rhetoric that stirred big, partisan crowds came off as shrill and off-putting when piped into a living room or a kitchen. Gathered around their wireless sets, the public wanted an avuncular statesman, not a firebrand. With Franklin Roosevelt, master of the soothing fireside chat, the new medium found its ideal messenger.

In the 1960s, television gave candidates their bodies back, at least in two dimensions. With its jumpy cuts and pitiless close-ups, TV placed a stress on sound bites, good teeth and an easy manner. Image became everything, as the line between politician and celebrity blurred. John Kennedy was the first successful candidate of the TV era, but it was Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton who perfected the form. Born actors, they could project a down-home demeanor while also seeming bigger than life.

Today, with the public looking to smartphones for news and entertainment, we seem to be at the start of the third big technological makeover of modern electioneering. The presidential campaign is becoming just another social-media stream, its swift and shallow current intertwining with all the other streams that flow through people’s devices. This shift is changing the way politicians communicate with voters, altering the tone and content of political speech. But it’s doing more than that. It’s changing what the country wants and expects from its would-be leaders.

What’s important now is not so much image as personality. But, as the Trump phenomenon reveals, it’s only a particular kind of personality that works—one that’s big enough to grab the attention of the perpetually distracted but small enough to fit neatly into a thousand tiny media containers. It might best be described as a Snapchat personality. It bursts into focus at regular intervals without ever demanding steady concentration.

by Nicholas Carr, Politico |  Read more:

Image: AFP Getty

‘Purity’ and the Great American Novelist

[ed. Wow. Don't see book reviews like this very often.]

Probably no one alive is a better novelist than Jonathan Franzen, and this is frustrating because his novels are awful, excellent but awful, books you read quickly and remember ponderously, books of exhaustive craft and yet a weird, spiraling cluelessness about the data they collate. They analyze the wave frequency but don’t hear the sound. They are full of people who talk and act exactly as you imagine such people would talk and act in real life; everyone in them is forever buying the right brand of granola bar or having believable thoughts about their mother or fantasizing in a particularly characteristic way about fucking on a hotel-room air conditioner. And yet they don’t feel like real life. They feel like real life irritably recreated from a spreadsheet, by someone who is a genius at reading spreadsheets. Whether a novel ought to feel like real life is of course a separate question. Many novels that I love don’t, but those novels aren’t trying to, and as far as I can tell, Franzen’s are.

I’m going to voice the obvious caveat here and say that I mean Franzen’s novels don’t feel like real life to me. It’s possible that I am simply wrong, that my own equipment for measuring life is faulty. “Who are the judges of reality?” Virginia Woolf asks, and when I try to think of an answer to that question, the image that floats into my mind looks a lot like the committee that decides on the cover of Time magazine and not very much like yours truly. In fact, it’s precisely because I’m so worried about my own judgment, so ready to believe that there is something strange or distorted in how I view the world, that I find reading Franzen so disorienting. Strangeness and distortion are crucial elements of contemporary American culture as he portrays it; they surround and afflict his characters, are in some way his literary quarry. But the way he goes about pursuing them leaves me feeling like an addict in an opium den listening to a preacher deliver a speech outside. That isn’t what it feels like, the addict thinks. But the preacher has all the statistics, and the addict is too blurred to respond, and if the addict drags himself to the window he sees a crowd of sensibly dressed and sober onlookers nodding at the preacher’s explication of the drug problem. (...)

It’s a good book. But this is where I worry about my reality sensors again. Because the feeling Purity left me with was disquiet, not with the theme or form of the book but with the nature of its gaze. I think Franzen is trying to capture a kind of dissonance in contemporary reality, one of which many people are acutely aware, one that many people experience now as the undertone of their everyday experience. Only I don’t have the sense that Franzen himself is acutely aware of it, except by secondhand report. And I have the sense that he is addressing himself to it less out of inner urgency — as, say, Dickens did to the reality-dissonance of his moment — than simply because addressing it is the condition for realizing novelistic ambition in 2015, and he happens to be the best novelist alive.

This could be totally unfair to Franzen. Is likely to be, even. I am talking about something vague, an impression, and the terms are necessarily imprecise. Still, I can only speak up for my own small portion of the real, mistaken though my idea of it may be. And maybe you have had these moments yourself. You have been, say, in the parking lot of a Walgreens just after dusk, when the sky behind the Walgreens was huge and purple and wild, and a man in a cowboy hat was standing under the overhang looking at himself in a pair of mirrored sunglasses, smoothing out his mustache with his thumb. Or you have been driving across the plains at night, on some skinny black yardstick of a highway, watching tiny lights blink at indecipherable far-off elevations, when the strangest song came on the radio and you all at once started to cry.

by Brian Phillips, Grantland | Read more:
Image: Arpad Kurucz/Anadolu Agency/Getty

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