[Sad news :(. I had access to a copy of Society of Mind from the age of 12 or so, and it had a huge influence on my understanding of the brain — and of myself — that remains to this day. -egg]
Marvin Minsky, who combined a scientist’s thirst for knowledge with a philosopher’s quest for truth as a pioneering explorer of artificial intelligence, work that helped inspire the creation of the personal computer and the Internet, died on Sunday night in Boston. He was 88.
It’s the meme that refuses to die. It started, back in 2011, with the Waltons: six members of the family, we were repeatedly told, were worth as much as the bottom 30% of all Americans combined. I tried to address this silly stat back then, but now it’s gone global: back in January, Oxfam announced that the world’s 85 richest people had the same wealth as the bottom half of the global population. And now Forbes has come along to say that, actually, it’s not 85 people — it’s a mere 67.
Oxfam does a pretty bad job of footnoting its report, but I did manage to finally track down how it arrived at this conclusion. The 85 (or 67) number is easy: you just start at the top of the Forbes billionaires list, and start counting up the combined wealth until you reach $1.7 trillion. The harder question is: where does the $1.7 trillion number come from?
With an estimated 100,000 homeless people living on the streets of Delhi, and 18,000 shelter beds, the city’s nighttime sidewalks are the only bed for tens of thousands of workers.
These workers are doubly cursed: not only homeless, but also denied any place to keep their belongings. They have nowhere to keep a blanket from night to night, so they must pay a few rupees every night for a rented quilt from a “quilt-wallah,” a package deal that comes with the wallah’s protection — bribes to cops and street-sweepers, advice to pickpockets to avoid the wallah’s sleeping customers, sometimes even a nighttime open-air Bollywood screening.
Filmmaker Shaunak Sen’s new documentary “Cities of Sleep” follows the quilt-wallahs and their customers through two years of Delhi’s sweltering summers and frigid winters, providing an intimate look at the tragic deaths of the more than 3,000 unidentifiable workers who expire on the nighttime streets every year; the generosity and desperation of the more fortunate sleepers; the varying approaches of the quilt-makers, which swing from tender to venal.
In the execution of their own daily miracles, London’s commuters have learned to withstand vast and unpredictable challenges: track closures; signal failures; engineering works. And they have developed a thick skin. But on that particular Friday, the 11,000 of them who got off at Holborn station between 8.30 and 9.30am faced an unusually severe provocation. As they turned into the concourse at the bottom of the station’s main route out and looked up, they saw something frankly outrageous: on the escalators just ahead of them, dozens of people were standing on the left.
The idea had come about after Len Lau, Vauxhall area manager, had gone to Hong Kong on holiday. Lau noticed that passengers on that city’s Mass Transit Railway (MTR) were standing calmly on both sides of the escalator and, it seemed, travelling more efficiently and safely as a result. His report prompted Harrison and her colleagues to wonder whether the same effect would apply at a station such as Holborn, and so they set about arranging a three-week trial.
The theory, if counterintuitive, is also pretty compelling. Think about it. It’s all very well keeping one side of the escalator clear for people in a rush, but in stations with long, steep walkways, only a small proportion are likely to be willing to climb. In lots of places, with short escalators or minimal congestion, this doesn’t much matter. But a 2002 study of escalator capacity on the Underground found that on machines such as those at Holborn, with a vertical height of 24 metres, only 40% would even contemplate it. By encouraging their preference, TfL effectively halves the capacity of the escalator in question, and creates significantly more crowding below, slowing everyone down. When you allow for the typical demands for a halo of personal space that persist in even the most disinhibited of commuters – a phenomenon described by crowd control guru Dr John J Fruin as “the human ellipse”, which means that they are largely unwilling to stand with someone directly adjacent to them or on the first step in front or behind – the theoretical capacity of the escalator halves again. Surely it was worth trying to haul back a bit of that wasted space.
[I found the theory, that lead was a major cause of the US crime boom, pretty convincing. This study argues that it was a spurious correlation due to faulty data. On the other hand, one of the major original proponents of the theory makes a decent argument that this study is itself flawed, and the lead theory still has legs. -egg]
One of the more exotic explanations for America’s incredible decades-long drop in crime is the lead theory. As the theory goes, we know that lead exposure is really harmful — it can cause learning disabilities, lower IQs, impulsivity, and aggressive behavior. So when America began taking lead out of its gasoline, it reduced all these bad outcomes — and crime, statistics show, fell right alongside rates of lead exposure.
A new study published in the Journal of Quantitative Criminology suggests, however, that this correlation may not exist at all, calling the supposed drop in both lead and crime a statistical “artifact” based on faulty crime data. And that means one of the most popular theories about the crime drop could be wrong.
[On the flaws of hairshirt green politics. Interesting food for thought. -egg]
Yes, Virginia, while Walmart, the third largest employer in the world, operates within the free market competing against other shops, internally, the multinational firm is the very model of planning, as are all firms. Highly hierarchical and, yes, dictatorial, but planned with brilliant efficiency by humans nonetheless. As American Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson has scandalously suggested, strip out the exploitation of its workers and the lack of democracy, and the stunning logistical wonder that is Walmart actually becomes an example of planning that socialists should study with keen scrutiny. Walmart is, Jameson asserts cheekily but with sincere admiration, “the shape of a utopian future looming through the mist, which we must seize as an opportunity to exercise the utopian imagination more fully, rather than an occasion for moralizing judgments or regressive nostalgia.
I am convinced that [virtual reality] is not going to be an extension of cinema or 3-D cinema or video games. It is something new, different, and not experienced yet. The strange thing here is that normally, in the history of culture, we have new stories and narrations and then we start to develop a tool. Or we have visions of wondrous new architecture—like, let’s say, the museum in Bilbao, or the opera house in Sydney—and technology makes it possible to fulfill these dreams. So you have the content first, and then the technology follows suit. In this case, we do have a technology, but we don’t have any clear idea how to fill it with content.
