I’m speaking about “Big Data in the Age of Knowledge Work” at the BDigital Global Congress next week in Barcelona. I’ll be pretty busy, but I’ll be there all week. If there are any readers in the area who want to get together, let me know.
MonthJune 2013
Too Much To Dream author Peter Bebergal interviews Alan Moore for The Believer:
BLVR: So in writing, whether you’re trying to inhabit a metaphysical being or trying to inhabit someone living in a poor neighborhood, unless you can inhabit them with compassion, and inhabit them with understanding, they’ll never be a believable character otherwise.
AM: Right, the character will be limited, and so will you. When I was doing V for Vendetta years ago, and I started to introduce the Nazi heads of this totalitarian state in the far-flung future of 1997, I’d been marching against the National Front and taking part in the Rock Against Racism marches, and I realized that I can’t just portray Nazis as bad guys, because everybody knows that, and you’re not saying anything. You’re contributing to the myth that they were somehow separate from the rest of humanity, which they weren’t. The Nazis were just ordinary human beings who got caught up in something very bad and, at the time, rather unprecedented. This is not to excuse their behavior, obviously, it’s simply to point out that it doesn’t do you any service to demonize any group of people. It’s much better to try and understand from the inside.
There was a scene in Promethea where the character is confronted by a horde of demons, and the way that she decides to deal with them is by owning them, by identifying each demon’s qualities and saying, “Yes, I’ve done that; yes, I accept responsibility for that,” at which point she actually physically eats the demon that she’s referring to. What a lot of magic is about is coming to your own individual terms with the universe, which is to say yourself, given that the entirety of the universe that is observable to you or me is that which actually exists inside our heads. And coming to an understanding of those things made me a little bit bigger because I had a part of my mind that could look with compassion at a class of people that I had never been able to do that with before. Not to like them any more, but to understand them.
Full Story: The Believer: Alan Moore
When I wrote about Soylent and Silicon Valley’s quest to reinvent food for TechCrunch I checked with a registered dietician from the Oregon Health and Science University about stuff. She was pretty down on it. So was the dietician consulted by Business Insider. And now io9’s Lauren Davis has talked to three more experts:
We reached out to a handful of nutritional scientists to get their opinions on the product, and they were generally surprised that anyone would want to replace their food with a single mixture. Their opinions of Soylent were overwhelmingly negative. Steve Collins, founder and chairman of Valid Nutrition, a company that manufactures Ready to Use Foods for the prevention and treatment of malnutrition, said, speaking through a colleague, that, except in exceptional circumstances, he felt that trying to replace a diverse diet with a single product was misguided. Susan Roberts, Professor at Tufts University’s Friedman School of Nutrition Science and Policy, likened Soylent to already available nutritional shakes. While there might be some benefit to Soylent’s low saturated fat content, she said, there are certain risks inherent in a non-food diet. “[T]here are so many unknown chemicals in fruits and vegetables that they will not be able to duplicate in a formula exactly,” she said in an email. She says that, if Soylent is formulated properly, a person could certainly live on it, but she doubts they would experience optimal health. She fears that in the long-term, a food-free diet could open a person up to chronic health issues.
Tracy Anthony, Associate Professor of Nutritional Sciences at Rutgers University, speaking to us in an email, criticized the formula specifically.
Full Story: Could Soylent really replace all of the food in your diet?
The Soylent company has now released an ingredient list and it’s much more “food like” than creator Rob Rhinehart had implied previously:
-Maltodextrin (carbs)
-Oat Powder (carbs, fiber, protein, fat)
-Whey Isolate (protein)
-Grapeseed Oil (fat)
-Potassium Gluconate
-Salt (sodium)
-Magnesium Gluconate
-Monosodium Phosphate
-Calcium Carbonate
-Methylsulfonylmethane (Sulfur)
-Creatine
-Powdered Soy Lecithin
-Choline Bitartrate
-Ferrous Gluconate (Iron)
Nicolas Winding Refn — who dedicated Drive to Alejandro Jodorowsky — is reportedly adapting Jodo and Moebius’ comic book The Incal:
France Inter also talked with Refn on the Croisette, and while they don’t provide a direct quote, they do report that he’s working on an adaptation of Jodorowsky and Moebius’ comic series “The Incal.” The original six book series launched in 1981 and is set in a dystopian future, detailing the battle over the powerful Incal crystal. The comic series is notable in that it followed the collapse of Jodorowsky’s “Dune,” and utilizes some of the similar designs that Moebius had created while working on the movie. (The forthcoming documentary “Jodorowsky’s Dune” goes into more detail about that, and you can read our report on that flick right here).
(Thanks Ales)
Here’s an animated trailer for the comic:
If that looks familiar, it’s because Moebius was also the designer for The Fifth Element. He and Jodorowsky unsuccessfully sued the director Luc Besson for plagiarizing The Incal.
(The above video is a higher quality version of the trailer originally shared by Quenched Consciousness curator Ian MacEwan)
Fabienne Hurst writes:
When the then-Berlin-based drug maker Temmler Werke launched its methamphetamine compound onto the market in 1938, high-ranking army physiologist Otto Ranke saw in it a true miracle drug that could keep tired pilots alert and an entire army euphoric. It was the ideal war drug. In September 1939, Ranke tested the drug on university students, who were suddenly capable of impressive productivity despite being short on sleep.
From that point on, the Wehrmacht, Germany’s World War II army, distributed millions of the tablets to soldiers on the front, who soon dubbed the stimulant “Panzerschokolade” (“tank chocolate”). British newspapers reported that German soldiers were using a “miracle pill.” But for many soldiers, the miracle became a nightmare.
As enticing as the drug was, its long-term effects on the human body were just as devastating. Short rest periods weren’t enough to make up for long stretches of wakefulness, and the soldiers quickly became addicted to the stimulant. And with addiction came sweating, dizziness, depression and hallucinations. There were soldiers who died of heart failure and others who shot themselves during psychotic phases. Some doctors took a skeptical view of the drug in light of these side effects. Even Leonardo Conti, the Third Reich’s top health official, wanted to limit use of the drug, but was ultimately unsuccessful.
Full Story: Der Spiegel: WWII Drug: The German Granddaddy of Crystal Meth
(Thanks Trevor)
Nick Schou writes about Jesse Katz’s “apology” for ruining Gary Webb’s life:
The New York Times, Washington Post and L.A. Times each obscured basic truths of Webb’s “Dark Alliance” series. But no newspaper tried harder than the L.A. Times, where editors were said to have been appalled that a distant San Jose daily had published a blockbuster about America’s most powerful spy agency and its possible role in allowing drug dealers to flood South L.A. with crack.
Much of the Times’ attack was clever misdirection, but it ruined Webb’s reputation: In particular, the L.A. Times attacked a claim that Webb never made: that the CIA had intentionally addicted African-Americans to crack.
Webb, who eventually could find only part-time work at a small weekly paper, committed suicide.
No journalist played a more central role in the effort to obscure the facts Webb reported than former L.A. Times reporter Katz. […]
“As an L.A. Times reporter, we saw this series in the San Jose Mercury News and kind of wonder[ed] how legit it was and kind of put it under a microscope,” Katz explained. “And we did it in a way that most of us who were involved in it, I think, would look back on that and say it was overkill. We had this huge team of people at the L.A. Times and kind of piled on to one lone muckraker up in Northern California.” […]
As Katz admitted to Mantle, “We really didn’t do anything to advance his work or illuminate much to the story, and it was a really kind of tawdry exercise. … And it ruined that reporter’s career.”
Full Story: LA Weekly: Ex-L.A. Times Writer Apologizes for “Tawdry” Attacks
See also:
Webb’s original “Dark Alliance” stories from the San Jose Mercury News.
The Crack Up, Webb’s 1998 follow-up for Orange County Weekly.
The MIT Technology Review reports:
Russell Poldrack, a neuroscientist at the University of Texas at Austin, is undertaking some intense introspection. Every day, he tracks his mood and mental state, what he ate, and how much time he spent outdoors. Twice a week, he gets his brain scanned in an MRI machine. And once a week, he has his blood drawn so that it can be analyzed for hormones and gene activity levels. Poldrack plans to gather a year’s worth of brain and body data to answer an unexplored question in the neuroscience community: how do brain networks behave and change over a year?
Full Story: MIT Technology Review: The Quantified Brain of a Self-Tracking Neuroscientist
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