some of the social and technological implications of the bathroom

Where did my fascination with sewers began. A few years ago while I was up late one night channel surfing I happened on a documentary about early American sewer planning. They covered New York and Washing D.C. extensively. Once a area reaches a population beyond a few hundred that are permanent residents and want to live in housing, not have to make trips back and forth to local lake or river everyday, you have to have some kind of water delivery system and some way to get rid of the waste. So when we talk about sewers, sewerage, and water delivery systems we’re talking about water works, the technology, however crude, to create such works and the labor and infrastructure inherently involved in such projects. The first water works that resembled the basic scheme of modern water works in western culture were probably built by the Romans around 800 BC. One would think that such a basic technology for a growing world wide human population would catch on and be preserved, but it sort of sputtered along with some locations using something similar or roughing it. Though even the Romans made one of the most basic and often repeated mistakes of sewerage systems, the waste from their latrines drained into local rivers. The problems associated with both delivering potable water to people and ridding localities of waste would modern civilization for hundreds of years. Millions of people world wide still do not have access to clean water and in the U.S. we’re using smart phones and sending Rovers to Mars, yet about 40 million Americans use old fashioned and unsafe Victorian era combined water/sewerage lines. Which brings us to this modern cultural anthropology view of water works from Barbara Penner, The design, culture & politics of the bathroom – how it is linked to the larger worlds of engineering and infrastructure

“We shall deal here with humble things, things not usually granted earnest consideration, or at least not valued for their historical import. But no more in history than in painting is it the impressiveness of the subject that matters. The sun is mirrored even in a coffee spoon. … Modest things of daily life, they accumulate into forces acting upon whoever moves within the orbit of our civilization.” — Sigfried Giedion, Mechanization Takes Command (1948)

[  ]…The challenge of bridging this disconnect is easy enough to declare; but it goes against deeply ingrained habits and conventions, not to mention the design of the system itself. For the disconnect is actually plumbed into the western world’s water systems, which are created to render not only the user but also the impact of use invisible. In our modern contemporary bathroom, the process — the goal — is to “flush and forget” — to remove the sight and, possibly even more important, the smell of our waste. The vast majority of people take for granted that treated, potable hot-and-cold water will be on tap 24 hours a day and that waste will be speedily flushed away. Our everyday routines, our standards of hygiene, and our understanding of civility are all constructed around these ordinary facts. We tend to assume that access to water and its unfettered use is our right and we do not spare much thought as to what happens before or after.

Plan for the extension of Delgany sewer. Thirty-first Street Overflow Structure, Thirty-first Street, Denver, Denver County, CO.

Just as every generation creates new standards for what tastes good – refined sugars and processed food becoming the new normal. Macaroni and cheese out of a box becomes a wistfully remembered old favorite. Something similar occurs with technology. Old technology, even something as fundamental as water works to having what we think of as civilized society with all its infrastructure is viewed nostalgically. Turning a faucet handle – and that is not even required with sensor activated faucets, flushing a toilet, all quaint old stuff that many no longer even associate with technology. At least until the next bad storm or water shortage. Penner thinks part of the reason waste water and the bodily functions that go with it, besides taking old technology for granted is not worthy of the same kind of credit we give the internet for advancing civilization, is the privacy aspect of the bathroom. We discuss what we do on the internet all the time. More than have the casual conservations I have begin with something someone read or watched on the net. With the exception of some occasional crude bathroom humor, we don’t discuss our bathroom routines. Even though we probably spend most of our bathroom time bathing or brushing our teeth, bathing, once a public affair that required either going to the nearest river or lake, and later public bath houses, is either considered not conversation worthy or a personal matter. It is also a mental image instantly pictured because people do not bath or shower with their clothes on. There is also the hidden nature of waste water technology. We have this tub and a few little pieces of plumbing coming out of the wall. Sometimes it is is basically a tiled closet with a drain. What the user sees and relates to is the water works virtual user interface. Not the pipes in the building. Certainly not the underground aquifer, the dam, the reservoir, the massive pipes big enough to walk through. And who wants to think about the sewerage or waste water treatment plant. Lakes of everything humans can flush down a pipe. Not as cool as clicking on a trash icon and having a neat little sound effect.

Laying sewer pipe at migrant camp under construction at Sinton, Texas, 1939. photo by Russell lee.

Penner takes the sociotechnical view of waste water. The interweaving of the social attitudes, creativity, engineering and now vast commercial enterprises that was created by social attitudes about bodily functions and cleanliness. Modern dams are expensive and very sophisticated engineering endeavors. They have huge social, economic and ecological consequences. The wells that extract ground water only slight less so. there is the requirement for a deep understanding of hydrology. Structural engineers, hydrologists, electrical engineers and technicians, pipe manufacturing, toilet makers, welders – all require education and training. providing water and waste treatment for millions of people is not a lone endeavor like finding a mathematical proof. This is where dogmatic adherents to the lone utterly self sufficient individualism meets a rock and a hard place. Water supply and water treatment was a major driver for the study and creation of the whole concept of public health. If one person gets sick from one piece of bad fruit that may or may not be a public health concern. When hundreds or thousands become deathly ill because of tainted water or human waste being dumped into the source of a towns’ drinking water it stops being a personal matter and becomes a matter of public health. Suddenly someone who has been, say, been tanning leather for years near a local tributary, and dumps their waste in it, and has, what they perceive as traditional individual rights to run their business as they please, has those ‘rights’ curtailed in the name of public health. We studied what made people ill in order to understand contaminants and diseases, and how those diseases spread.

Men turning gear wheel. International Nickel Co. at District Sewer Department, ca. 1920. Photo by Theodor Horydczak.

Waste water, water works and bathrooms are also an extension of gender roles, race relations and social norms. Women go to one room and men to another in public restrooms. In men’s rooms especially there is a generally code of conduct. Eye contact among men in public spaces is probably lower than any other public space because of taboos about being viewed as gay.

Far from resenting the disciplining design of bathrooms, many users welcome it as a necessary means of protection from physical attacks and bullying or from contamination of various kinds by some “Other.” And of course such concerns about safety and health can be prompted not just by real threats but also by broader social anxieties.When people worry that they might “catch something” in a public convenience, they often have in mind an illness or disease transmitted by a stigmatized social group (e.g., other ethnicities, homosexuals, the homeless).

[  ]….It should not be forgotten that one of the first deaths of the American civil rights movement occurred when black activist Samuel Younge, Jr. tried to use a whites-only bathroom at a filling station in Alabama and was shot and killed by the attendant (who was subsequently cleared by an all-white jury).

[  ]…Those for women’s conveniences, however, have been among the longest running and most far-reaching; having first begun in western countries from the United Kingdom to Belgium to New Zealand, these struggles are now reaching Asia, too, as female activists in Guangzhou demonstrated earlier this year with their Occupy Men’s Toilets campaign. Some important victories have been scored in the last two decades, such as the passing of American “potty parity” laws that mandate that there should be two female water closets provided for every one male — but as any woman who has recently been to the theater or even the London Olympics can report, the queue for the Ladies’ is in no danger of extinction.

A modern, but retro decorated bathroom.

no hostess hohos but plenty of drones, black and white shoreline, news fit to print

Drones for “urban warfare” – Manufacturers are targeting U.S. police forces for sales, as drones move from the Middle East to Main Street

In November 2010, a police lieutenant from Parma, Ohio, asked Vanguard Defense Industries if the Texas-based drone manufacturer could mount a “grenade launcher and/or 12-gauge shotgun” on its ShadowHawk drone for U.S. law enforcement agencies. The answer was yes.

[  ]…In short, the business of marketing drones to law enforcement is booming. Now that Congress has ordered the Federal Aviation Administration to open up U.S. airspace to unmanned vehicles, the aerial surveillance technology first developed in the battle space of Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan is fueling a burgeoning market in North America. And even though they’re moving from war zones to American markets, the language of combat and conflict remains an important part of their sales pitch — a fact that ought to concern citizens worried about the privacy implications of domestic drones.

Some movies that immediately came to mind where the police used drones were the original movie version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 411 and the loosely adapted film version of P.K. Dick’s Minority Report. In both police and their drones are used to stifle civil liberties. Since police are asking and suppliers are willing to have such concerns doesn’t require much tin foil. At one time SWAT teams were for dangerous situations that required military type assault skills to both contain someone who was dangerous and to keep civilians safe. Now they are routinely used – sometimes just for drug raids – innocent deaths have become routine in turn. While some studies suggest that we’re becoming a less intelligent nation, there are quite a few tech savvy people out there. What happens when there is an it becomes a contest between civil liberties advocates and the drone cheerleaders. The amateur techies design weapons to take down the drones or find ways to hack their guidance systems. The government reacts with laws against writing certain software, building certain devices or crippling the average consumer computer so that it cannot be used to write what they define as malicious code. Who is held responsible when the first innocent person is killed by a drone. here we are in the age of Google street view and GPS and SWAT teams are raiding the wrong address.

According to that article it is predicted that law enforcement drones to be used on civilians will be a $6 billion industry by 2016, just three years from now. Law enforcement, not being a private enterprise will get that money from tax revenue. Yet there is resistance to shoring up Social Security and Medicare. People still complain that public education needs more money. Certainly true in school districts where the average income in at or below the median.

With 56 domestic government agencies now authorized by the FAA to fly drones in U.S. airspace, law enforcement is leading the way in the adoption of unmanned vehicles. According to documents published last week by Electronic Frontier Foundation, 22 of the authorized agencies are primarily law enforcement departments, while another 24 entities (mainly universities) have law enforcement functions under them.

Among the domestic users are the Department of Homeland Security, which flies a fleet of nine drones over the country’s northern and southern borders, and the FBI. A Bureau spokesman declined to comment on the nature and purpose of the FBI’s drones saying that he could not discuss “investigative techniques.”

Not to be an alarmists, but this already seems like a done deal. All urban areas are under video surveillance, they are considered public spaces, thus individuals are not thought to have a right to privacy in such areas. To that we’ll have drones. I sense that like so many industries in the past,  there is so much money at stake, the profit motive will drive lobbying. The lobbing, as usual, will give the largest and loudest voice to a hand full of industries in how that legislation is shaped.

black and white shoreline

Some short takes: Strange: Why Do Conservative Red States Have More Traffic Fatalities? The short cynical answer that first pops into your head is true and so is the cause in terms of mind-set.

Fiona Apple Cancels South American Tour to Be With Her Dying Dog. If you’ve never been close to a pet this may sound like melodrama. Those of us who have had dogs know that they become part of the family. They’re like kids with bushy tails. They love you like no human ever will, without qualification.

Knuckleheads in the news, George Eliot writing desk stolen from Nuneaton museum.

John McCain (R-AZ) writes a lot of books in which he talks about honor. Proof you do not have to be an expert on something to get your writing published: Office of the DNI cut “al Qaeda” reference from Benghazi talking points, and CIA, FBI signed off

Maybe we’ll all be gone in a month and none of these earthly concerns will matters anyway. Though since science usually triumphs over myths I will still pay the utility bill, Mayan Apocalypse Countdown: 1 Month ‘Til Doom

flight credit, night drive wallpaper, the wsj’s revionist history of the internet

Otto Lilienthal with his collapsible glider built in 1893. Rathenow, Germany.

Pictures depicting crazies and their flying apparatuses and machines are al over the net. Lilienthal(May 23, 1848 – August 10, 1896) who has been described as “The Father of Flight”  might thus be categorized as such just judging from the photo. Yet starting in 1891 he made many successful glider flights, holding the record for number of successful glides at one point. The Wright brothers would make their first powered flight in 1903. Lilienthal was an influence on the Wright brothers and their designs. Just as Lilienthal has problems with stability and the Wright brothers saw that as a major flaw in emulating his designs for sustained flight. There has been some disagreement as to whether the Wright brothers were actually first in powered flight which I’m not going to get into. One aspect of the Wright brother’s innovations was the fight with Glenn Curtiss over who invented those help the patent for the all important aileron. If you have ever made a paper plane and put little flaps in the wings that could be folded up or down, you made ailerons. because of the years of patent struggles the U.S. approach WW I with less than state of the art aviation or manufacturing capabilities. So much so that we purchased aircraft from France. With World War I underway in 1917, the U.S. government pressured the new aircraft industry to form a cross-licensing organization, to be called the Manufacturers Aircraft Association. Oddly or not, the MAA  acted as a kind of collective, or cooperative if one prefers, in which member companies paid a blanket fee for the use of aviation patents which included the original and subsequent Wright patents. This is in the ball park of how the music industry and its licensing fees to radio work. Even by 1917 the achievements which made the frontier of modern flight possible rested on almost simultaneous developments. Those people who we view today as the famous names in aviation were often times simply faster to the patent office. While Otto Lilienthal and his brother deserve a lot of credit for creating a gliding mechanism that worked, a basic issue of maned flight for centuries, the picture above looks not too dissimilar from the flight machines design by Leonardo da Vinci.

In rereading some history of early aviation for this some of what occurred in the Wright brothers patent fights rubbed up against a prejudice I accumulated in childhood. I’ve een to the Wright brothers museum and stand on the spot where they had their first successful glider flights. They were like childhood heroes. So when I read that some guy named Curtiss says he was first I can fell a little resentment creep up on my view of events. Though if I put on my judges robes and try to judge who deserves credit for the ailerons it is a tough call. I would probably say Curtiss or call it a tie, with some credit also going to someone rarely mentioned in popular accounts of those years – French born American engineer Octave Chanute. He wrote Progress in Flying Machine in 1894, and gave technical and financial support to the Wright brothers. History, innovation, patents, credit – all get messy very fast. I believe in proper credit having experienced other people taking credit for my work and my innovation, abet at a much less revolutionary level than the pioneers of aviation. Its weird to see people steal credit. Should I speak up. Will I appear petty – especially in work places that empathize a “team” culture. I would not have had any financial windfall, though such things are considered at many companies during yearly salary reviews. Though all I wanted was simple credit. Though to be clear what I deserved credit for was not something derived out of the ether and was never purely the result of my own invention. I could not have had those ideas without my third grade teacher who made me want to increase my vocabulary and be aware of spelling. Or my middle-school teacher who came up to my desk after asking a question that no one in the class wanted to answer and plead, really you have no ideas, no opinions what so ever about what Poe was trying to say. There were other teachers, professors, co-workers, fiction and non-fiction writers, and the writers and works they referenced in their writing. There was all the people I’ve known and learned from – some in a positive way, some as a kind of example about how not to be. I didn’t grow up in a glass dome sealed off from the world, escaped one day and had ideas that made their first appearance on earth when I took pencil to mini-legal pad. So I always felt that being too obsessive about my ideas was as out of place as someone stealing them. In an age where obnoxious arrogant twits like Donald Trump and Mitt Romney brag out of all proportion to anything that have accomplished and any ideas they’ve had, modest people, people with just the average amount of humility are out of style.

Factlet: On October 7, 1908, Edith Berg, the wife of the brothers’ European business agent, became the first American woman passenger when she flew with Wilbur.

night drive wallpaper

That super brief trip int the history of late 18th and early 19th century flight brings us to this, Who Really Invented the Internet? by Gordon Crovitz.

A telling moment in the presidential race came recently when Barack Obama said: “If you’ve got a business, you didn’t build that. Somebody else made that happen.” He justified elevating bureaucrats over entrepreneurs by referring to bridges and roads, adding: “The Internet didn’t get invented on its own. Government research created the Internet so that all companies could make money off the Internet.”

It’s an urban legend that the government launched the Internet. The myth is that the Pentagon created the Internet to keep its communications lines up even in a nuclear strike. The truth is a more interesting story about how innovation happens—and about how hard it is to build successful technology companies even once the government gets out of the way.

“Gordon Crovitz is a media and information industry advisor and executive, including former publisher of The Wall Street Journal, executive vice president of Dow Jones and president of its Consumer Media Group.” Just his name and the word hack would be an honest summation for Gordon’s resume. The Government created the internet – using the word “launched” seems strange, perhaps to give himself some plausible  deniability later. He is putting words and new meanings into what Obama said.  All of the ingredients – the technology and history, and every individual that touched that creation would fill a book or two, and has. One of the reason the net was created was the military’s fear of loss of communication should the Cold War become hot (The birth of ARPAnet). That is a relatively simple fact. He provides no documentation for this bizarre historical revisionism.

1961 First packet-switching papers
1966 Merit Network founded
1966 ARPANET planning starts
1969 ARPANET carries its first packets
1970 Mark I network at NPL (UK)
1970 Network Information Center (NIC)
1971 Merit Network’s packet-switched network operational
1971 Tymnet packet-switched network
1972 Internet Assigned Numbers

 

The net or ARPAnet would not have been possible without computers and computing, which has its own complex history. One in which governments played at large role. Gordon also writes,

But full credit goes to the company where Mr. Taylor worked after leaving ARPA: Xerox. It was at the Xerox PARC labs in Silicon Valley in the 1970s that the Ethernet was developed to link different computer networks.

The Ethernet is an important piece of technology in computer networking. That is great, and good for Xerox for building on technology originally called ALOHAnet. ALOHAnet was developed at the University of Hawaii – one of those publicly funded thingys that gov’mint does. Has Gordon ever heard the saying, popular in science circle, we all stand on the shoulders of giants. Why do we have an Ethernet today where someone’s old Windows 98 PC can talk with someone’s brand new MacBook? Because the bad old gov’mint in partnership with private business, created standards. Standards, the concept of standards are an interesting issue involving private enterprise and government cooperation in themselves. I’d suggest Gordon check out a couple of books on the subject but it would just be a waste of reading light. It is not just my take on history here, but the very same source that Gordon’ cites as his authority, WSJ’s Crovitz: “Creating The Internet” And Getting Everything Wrong

To back this up, Crovitz cited Michael Hiltzik’s book Dealers Of Lightning. Hiltzik responded to Crovitz’s column this morning and said that Crovitz got everything completely wrong:

And while I’m gratified in a sense that he cites my book about Xerox PARC, “Dealers of Lightning,” to support his case, it’s my duty to point out that he’s wrong. My book bolsters, not contradicts, the argument that the Internet had its roots in the ARPANet, a government project. So let’s look at where Crovitz goes awry.

First, he quotes Robert Taylor, who funded the ARPANet as a top official at the Pentagon’s Advanced Research Projects Agency, or ARPA, as stating, “The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks.” (Taylor eventually moved to Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, where he oversaw the invention of the personal computer, and continued promoting research into networking.)

But Crovitz confuses AN internet with THE Internet. Taylor was citing a technical definition of “internet” in his statement. But I know Bob Taylor, Bob Taylor is a friend of mine, and I think I can say without fear of contradiction that he fully endorses the idea as a point of personal pride that the government-funded ARPANet was very much the precursor of the Internet as we know it today.

There is a legitimate question as to when “the internet” as we come to know it today first appeared on the scene. But, again, that’s not what Obama was talking about. He said that government research led to the internet’s creation. The government-created Arpanet, while not “the internet,” was what made the internet possible in that it was the basis from which all the tech legends lionized by Crovitz did their innovating.

Indeed, Robert Taylor — who, in Crovitz’s retelling gets “full credit” for creating the internet — said as much. Crovitz quoted a 2004 email in which Taylor wrote: “The Arpanet was not an Internet. An Internet is a connection between two or more computer networks.” Here’s the part of that email Crovitz left out: “The ARPAnet was not an internet.  An internet is a connection between two or more computer networks.  The ARPAnet, with help from thousands of people, slowly evolved into the Internet.  Without the ARPAnet, the Internet would have been a much longer time in coming.”

So that’s pretty dishonest of Crovitz.

The general issue of who deserves credit for what in western society, the U.S. urgently so is getting a lot of attention. Gordon’s side wants to make the ridiculous case that only private enterprise creates anything. Even with the commercial internet we all use, the technological backbone came out of publicly  funded research. Individuals deserve credit. Some institutions – public labs and universities deserve credit. Finally private enterprise deserves some credit for yes, making it another engine of commerce. Why not this crazy philosophy, Gordon and like-minded zealots may have heard this in passing, credit where due. That means everywhere it is due. Some of us grew up hearing about concepts like modesty, merit, fairness. Who knows what happened, what trauma occurred to the lone inventor believers, the John Galt worshipers that they have become so desperate to create new mythologies.

fostercare – burial

neuroscience: the brain can see what the eyes cannot, willets on the beach at sunset, romney’s lies and the fact checkers

How a 1960s discovery in neuroscience spawned a military project

In a small, anonymous office in the Trump Tower, 28 floors above Wall Street, a man sits in front of a computer screen sifting through satellite images of a foreign desert. The images depict a vast, sandy emptiness, marked every so often by dunes and hills. He is searching for man-made structures: houses, compounds, airfields, any sign of civilization that might be visible from the sky. The images flash at a rate of 20 per second, so fast that before he can truly perceive the details of each landscape, it is gone. He pushes no buttons, takes no notes. His performance is near perfect.

This is a fascinating aspect of how the brain functions. At the rate the images are shown the analyst’s eyes do not register seeing the image of a building, a helicopter or a small group of people, but their brain does. Than a computer sorts out the proper brain wave signals that show the brain saw something. So researchers or the military or rescue workers can go back to those images for closer analysis. What the eyes perceive and tell the brain is a picture of something important happens on what we would generally call the conscious level of the brain. We see a friend’s face and have that moment of recognition. In this case the eyes see something that is not recognized by that conscious mind. As interesting contrast to this recent article on how dumb computers are.

Computers are near-omnipotent cauldrons of processing power, but they’re also stupid. They are the undisputed chess champions of the world, but they can’t understand a simple English conversation. IBM’s Watson supercomputer defeated two top Jeopardy! players last year, but for the clue “What grasshoppers eat,” Watson answered: “Kosher.” For all the data he could access within a fraction of a second—one of the greatest corpuses ever assembled—Watson looked awfully dumb.

Numbers and sequences are simple – chess is a system of number variations at its core. Language is abstract. Yet this image analyst program being developed by Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and a private company called Neuromatters uses a computer to take the abstract reasoning and analytical abilities deep in the human consciousness to arrive to distinguish something that the eye-brain connection we use for everyday decisions is not registering as quickly as part of the brain a computer can tap into.

willets  on the beach at sunset

The internet is the perfect place for something print and broadcast media does not do well or does not feel much obligation to do – fact checking. Snopes has been around for so long I forgot the first time I used it to show someone the facts about an urban myth. In the mean time the political fact checking site Politifact has come along. The WaPo has added a fact checking segment to their website ( I don’t know if they run that feature in the print edition). An idealist might find the growth of such sites as offering some beacon of hope. Though humans being human, two things have occurred. One is that if someone reads a fact they do not like they just dismiss the fact. The processes of the neurons involved in that phenomenon might be complicated, that it occurs is not. The second thing, disappointing to even career cynics is that the fact checking sites sometimes do get their facts wrong, Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler and factcheck.org Are Wrong. Romney Lied About His Tenure at Bain

After weeks and weeks of being pummeled by the Obama campaign for his business record, Mitt Romney is finally releasing response ads today. The response is that Obama is lying. (“How can we trust him to lead?” etc.) The ad cites articles by media “fact-checkers”: Washington Post reporter Glenn Kessler and factcheck.org.

In an incredibly inconvenient piece of timing, the Boston Globe today also reports that Romney has been lying about when he left Bain Capital. This is utterly crucial. Both the fact-checking columns base their conclusions on Romney’s claim that he left Bain in 1999. Obama’s ads are misleading, both say, because they hold Romney accountable for things Bain did after 1999. The revelation that Romney was actively managing Bain renders both those judgments moot.

Here is the core of the Globe’s finding:

Romney has said he left Bain in 1999 to lead the winter Olympics in Salt Lake City, ending his role in the company. But public Securities and Exchange Commission documents filed later by Bain Capital state he remained the firm’s “sole stockholder, chairman of the board, chief executive officer, and president.”

Also, a Massachusetts financial disclosure form Romney filed in 2003 states that he still owned 100 percent of Bain Capital in 2002. And Romney’s state financial disclosure forms indicate he earned at least $100,000 as a Bain “executive” in 2001 and 2002, separate from investment earnings.

Here’s Kessler’s argument, cited in Romney’s ad, as to why Obama’s ad is wrong:

The Obama campaign rests its case on three examples of Bain-controlled companies sending jobs overseas. But only one of the examples — involving Holson Burns Group — took place when Romney was actively managing Bain Capital. ( My note: That is incorrect)

Regarding the other claims, concerning Canadian electronics maker SMTC Manufacturing and customer service firm Modus Media, the Obama campaign tries to take advantage of a gray area in which Romney had stepped down from Bain — to manage the Salt Lake City Olympics — but had not sold his shares in the firm. ( My note: This is stretching the facts to give the benefit of that writers interpretation and disregarding the dates of Romney’s actual exit  from Bain, and his title and responsibility at Bain)

Romney lied about when he left Bain, his title and responsibilities according to financial documents which he signed and filed. When the WaPo and Poltifact say that others are mistaken – the general public at this point, Democrats, President Obama – those fact checking sites, with Romney citing them as proof, are lying. Maybe over the next few days or weeks those two sites will publish corrections. Romney is not going to correct anything. He has achieved the proportions of mythic liar. A lying god. Romney the study case for students of pathological liars. And like a sociopath, seems to have no regrets or feelings of guilt over his lies. If the fact checking sites do not correct themselves, what is next, fact checking sites for the fact checking sites.

 

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the future of work – the missing middle, farm field poppies wallpaper, paint it black

There have been a few articles over the last year or so claiming that high unemployment is here to stay. Corporate profits and bonuses are higher than ever. If business can make profits with fewer employees they will. This article is another entry in that wave of thinking, Successful businesses will be those that optimize the mix of humans, robots, and algorithms.

Some economists believe automation may explain why U.S. economic output has grown since 2007 while the number of jobs has fallen. That kind of dislocation is unusual. The U.S. economy has evolved from agriculture to manufacturing to service industries. Each time jobs were destroyed in one sector, they were replaced elsewhere. Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics provide some clues to what the next economy will look like. Among the 10 fastest-growing new job categories between 2009 and 2011, seven have the word “computer” or “software” in them, according to an analysis by Matt Beane, a doctoral student at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.

An obnoxious troll here uses this to make the claim this proves that capital does not come from labor. One assumes he thinks computers. automated picking devices like Amazons and the software that runs these machines arose from the ether, fully formed. The economy needs people at the high-end – very specialized technical skills and at the low-end, making sandwiches, changing sheets, selling travel club memberships over the phone. The middle is gone. The middle is what many Americans think of as the reasonably attainable dream. Enough in wages to afford decent housing, food, transportation and a reasonable amount of consumer goods to make life comfortable and enjoyable. That middle may never come back. Those jobs are in Asia. Sadly they are not in Asia because most of those manufactured or assembled goods cannot be made here and still provide a reasonable profit. U.S. business likes it this way. They have rendered labor – organized or not – relatively powerless. Conservatives are like rabid beavers constantly chewing away the political power of the lowest wage earners by way of voter ID laws. A powerless middle and working poor means a country finally run by the elite, the dream of the plantation owners of the Antebellum south finally comes true.

 A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. “I don’t think the common person is getting it,” she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. “Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.

“We’ve got the message,” she added. “But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”

Right. What’s the impact for these people again?

Back in 2008 I saw a couple on TV that had similar hardships. They were forced to sell off their $12 million dollar mansion and move into a run down shack they bought for $4 million. With such a rough and tumble life no wonder they support a guy who thinks the middle-class and working poor should pay for the Wall Street meltdown of 2007 until 2040 or however long it takes.

farm field poppies wallpaper

There is some disagreement on whether it is 6 or 14, but anyway – After 14 Years, Furby Has Returned

After 14 years and a lengthy hibernation, Hasbro is reviving one of its most famous toys for this fall, with new technology, a hefty price tag ($60) and an app connection. This Furby is more huggable, with soft fur that hides touch sensors, and more expressive, with rubbery ears that twitch and a pair of backlit LCD eyes with mechanical eyelids that blink, look around or respond to the sounds picked up by Furby’s onboard microphone.

According to Don Cameron, a Hasbro engineer, novelty is an essential part of Furby’s appeal. “You never know what Furby might do or say.” For example, Furby can differentiate between the tone of your spoken language, the sound of another Furby or the rhythm of a song for dancing. Furby can understand high frequency audio codes to “talk” with your iPad or another Furby.

Apparently it is also capable of some learning – to eventually respond to different words and their tone.

1928 London Museum poster.

Facebook Use Does Not Lead to Depression, According to New Study. No, but thinking of all the time people waste on Facebook causes depression.

leap motion – becoming the future, yellow pepper wallpaper, we live in a material world

Remember the movie The Minority Report based on the P.K. Dick short story. Even if you did not like the movie the look at the future was interesting in terms of the technology. I remember reading an article about how the producers determined what futuristic technology they would use was based on interviews they did with scientists who specialize in predicting what science and technology will look like in that future, and thus how society will change with that technology. One of the most fascinating possibilities presented in the movie was the sensory manipulation of computing devices. Not to be confused with touch sensitive devices like smartphones or computer pads. At the office John Anderton quickly scrawls through multiple screens and at home he watches a movie and rewinds it a few frames just by flicking his hand at the screen. Well that feature has pretty much arrived, The Most Important New Technology Since the Smart Phone Arrives December 2012

By now, many of us are aware of the Leap Motion, a small, $70 gesture control system that simply plugs into any computer and, apparently, just works. If you’ve seen the gesture interfaces in Minority Report, you know what it does. More importantly, if you’re familiar with the touch modality — and at this point, most of us are — the interface is entirely intuitive. It’s touch, except it happens in the space in front of the screen, so you don’t have to cover your window into your tech with all those unsightly smudges.

[  ]…Plus, Leap operates in three dimensions rather than two. Forget pinch-to-zoom; imagine “push to scroll,” rotating your flattened hand to control the orientation of an object with a full six degrees of freedom, or using both hands at once to control either end of a bezier surface you’re casually sculpting as part of an object you’ll be sending to your 3D printer.

The fact that the Leap can see almost any combination of objects – a pen, your fingers, all 10 fingers at once, should make every interface designer on the planet giddy with anticipation.

To double or triple your fun there is going to be an app store. Combined with the power of thousands of developers, Leap should be an amazing advance in education, art and the sciences.

yellow pepper wallpaper

I can kind of see where people find Deepak Chopra charming or bright, but he should take just one course in introductory logic, Proof That the Brain Creates the Conscious Mind

“Where is the experience of red in your brain?” The question was put to me by Deepak Chopra at his Sages and Scientists Symposium in Carlsbad, Calif., on March 3. A posse of presenters argued that the lack of a complete theory by neuroscientists regarding how neural activity translates into conscious experiences (such as “redness”) means that a physicalist approach is inadequate or wrong. “The idea that subjective experience is a result of electrochemical activity remains a hypothesis,” Chopra elaborated in an e-mail. “It is as much of a speculation as the idea that consciousness is fundamental and that it causes brain activity and creates the properties and objects of the material world.”

“Where is Aunt Millie’s mind when her brain dies of Alzheimer’s?” I countered to Chopra. “Aunt Millie was an impermanent pattern of behavior of the universe and returned to the potential she emerged from,” Chopra rejoined. “In the philosophic framework of Eastern traditions, ego identity is an illusion and the goal of enlightenment is to transcend to a more universal nonlocal, nonmaterial identity.”

Red exists outside the condition of being alive. It is defined by humans via processing, but our processing does not make it exist. If there is something supernatural about the logical condition of the color red than every animal that can see color has a soul – or whatever magical ingredient one believes in. Or still another way of looking at it; if all humanity died tomorrow would the color red stop existing. The only thing nonmaterial identity proven thus far is the law of thermodynamics that says all the matter in the universe is constant. So eventually the material you returns to being individual atoms – which are mostly composed of light. Light is still being examined, but thus far no one has identified it as having something like human consciousness. That requires the organized structure of neurons. Neurons are just billions of atoms arranged in a way that can perceive red. Miraculous, but not supernatural.

JPMorgan Trading Loss May Reach $9 Billion

As JPMorgan has moved rapidly to unwind the position — its most volatile assets in particular — internal models at the bank have recently projected losses of as much as $9 billion. In April, the bank generated an internal report that showed that the losses, assuming worst-case conditions, could reach $8 billion to $9 billion, according to a person who reviewed the report.

With much of the most volatile slice of the position sold, however, regulators are unsure how deep the reported losses will eventually be. Some expect that the red ink will not exceed $6 billion to $7 billion.

Nonetheless, the sharply higher loss totals will feed a debate over how strictly large financial institutions should be regulated and whether some of the behemoth banks are capitalizing on their status as too big to fail to make risky trades.

….“Essentially, JPMorgan has been operating a hedge fund with federal insured deposits within a bank,” said Mark Williams, a professor of finance at Boston University, who also served as a Federal Reserve bank examiner.

H/T to Atrios for the link. The idea that Jp made that trade based on the idea floating somewhere around their hormone riddled heads – that they would get a another bail-out is galling. Though I wonder if they fully understand the political atmosphere. The next panic that might cause a collapse of the financial sector could be met with a government response such as taking over the bank, firing the top executives and selling off toxic assets at a big discount. I just do not see this president – under current circumstances signing off on another TARP-like bail-out.

little town tree

For hardcore geek who love ink, Stormtrooper with wellies and umbrella tattoo

Will Fox Report On Fortune Bombshell That Fast And Furious Didn’t Involve Gunwalking? I wonder if Democrats will now have the….. to move to censure Darrell Issa (R-CA) for abuse of his committee powers.

the consequences of the lone genius myth, summer flight wallpaper, my dog could create more jobs than romney

How Thomas Edison, Mark Zuckerberg and Iron Man are holding back American innovation

“Romantic myths about creative loners can’t be allowed to overshadow the fact that it’s a big collective enterprise…a multidisciplinary team, a system designed to maximize discovery,” explained Isaacs, who happens to oversee one such facility, Chicago’s Argonne National Lab, the federal government’s first science and engineering research lab.

The problem is, the myth of the lone genius toiling away still reigns supreme in the eyes of ordinary Americans and politicians alike. And so policymakers neglect the links in the innovation chain that come after that first Eureka moment. The possibilities often fall by the wayside, leaving scientific breakthroughs in the lab instead of in the hands of consumers or society at large.

That was the upshot of the New America Foundation’s event on the future of innovation, research and development, where Isaacs spoke before an audience packed into a narrow conference room on Monday afternoon. Too often, he argued, the conversation about R&D in Washington ends up stopping at that first phase: funding basic research aimed at letting scientists make their discoveries in peace.

Capitol Hill’s conception of research relies on a notion that’s practically deistic, argued Sarewitz, a professor at Arizona State University. “You put in money, and good things happen,” And that faith has kept R&D budgets relatively steady in recent decades, even during times of federal belt-tightening.

But what gets forgotten are the two “Ds” that come after R&D— “demonstration and deployment,” which are essential to applying basic research to real-life problems and creating commercial products, argued DotEarth’s Andy Revkin, who’s also a fellow at the Pace Academy for Applied Environmental Studies.

That’s where the scientists believe the real support is lacking—not only from the government, but also from the private sector, which has scaled back its most ambitious applied research in recent decades. During the 20th-century heyday of innovation, American corporations had their own massive R&D labs, with the resources, capacity, and business interest to commercialize their findings—Xerox Park, IBM and the famous AT&T Bell Labs. Bell researchers invented everything from the transistor and the laser to information theory, which made possible the development of the Internet.

I got a little carried away with that excerpt – there is some more at the link. If one person gets an idea, a unique idea – they deserve credit. And in free market societies they usually get it. Though, Edison is a good example of what happens with ideas. Edison did not invent the light bulb. It had been around for years in one form or another. He and his team of lab assistants created an affordable light-bulb with a filament  – which they happened on by accident – that burned for hundreds of hours until it needed replacement. If you read science news regularly – say a news aggregation site like Daily Science – when you look at the people involved in the findings there are usually several scientists ( frequently undergrad lab assistants can be unnamed contributors). Plus there will be an acknowledgement of organizations, examples might include the National Science Foundation or the U.S. Navy. The process of new discoveries is frequently both collaborative and cooperative. People who find things – make new discoveries do not appear out of nowhere. They are the products of the contributions to the sum of human knowledge made by others. As much as I admire the minds of Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz, if they had not discovered calculus someone else would have. And would they had discovered calculus if they had not had  good math educations from other mathematicians. God-like scientist inventors like Rand’s John Galt are fantasy. It is astonishing that people actually tale Galt as an example of how society, free markets or science works. Its like thinking Spider-man is a real person and if you wish hard enough you can have super powers too.  Related to this, 32 Innovations That Will Change Your Tomorrow from NYT Magazine.

summer flight wallpaper

 

The Road to Filibuster Reform Lies in the Voters. There will be no filibuster reform because it takes a super majority of votes to change Senate rules. Both sides have reasons – good or bad – to keep things just as they are. I’m sure they can come up with some crazy math to say otherwise, but the majority of the country is left of center – yet generally conservative states like Wyoming (pop. 570,000) has as many Senate votes as California (pop. 38, 000,000). Thus we have a small faction of zealots who are governing rather than the majority, which is much more moderate.

5 Facts About The Massachusetts Economy Under Mitt Romney. You could pick a community college at random. Let everyone majoring in physics, economics, English Lit. or political science draw lots from a hat and end up with someone better at creating jobs than Romney. It is an election cycle and it is also another cycle in blind idolatry by the usual suspects.

The New Pornographers: Adventures in Solitude.