Month: July 2013

The Boys In The Aisle

In light of the new film I’m So Excited – which makes use of the gay flight attendant trope – Forrest Wickman provides a history of the profession and its relation to gender roles:

When commercial flight first started, the job of the flight attendant was thought to be appropriate only for (presumably straight) men. As Phil Tiemeyer points out in his book Plane Queer: Labor, Sexuality, and AIDS in the History of Male Flight Attendants, a new book which proved an invaluable resource for this post, the first flight attendants, in the late 1920s and 1930s, were actually men, and were expected to be traditionally masculine. Since aviation had been associated primarily with war and engineering, it had been considered a man’s industry, and the cabin crew, too, was expected to fit that role.

Because of this, early uniforms for crew and pilots were also often military-inspired, featuring stripes, pilot wings, and caps (some of these elements persist in uniforms today). The work was also often physically demanding, with the crew being asked to help haul luggage and row the passengers into shore from seaplanes. The first flight attendant for Pan Am was a man, Amaury Sanchez, and before the airline advertised stewardesses in miniskirts it advertised itself, in 1933, with “Rodney, the smiling steward.”

However, the responsibilities of the stewards in flight were often more stereotypically feminine—a steward might, for example, lend a hand in changing a diaper—and it was only a few years before it began to be seen as a woman’s job. The woman who broke down the cabin doors was Ellen Church, the first female flight attendant, who had been trained as a pilot but who only found work with Boeing Air Transport (the predecessor to United Airlines) as a stewardess. She was able to convince Boeing to hire her in part because she was also a registered nurse, and soon other airlines also saw nurses as ideal candidates, as long as they were also young, unmarried, and in possession of a dainty figure.

The Laboratory Lag

While marking the death of computer mouse inventor Douglas Engelbart, Timothy B. Lee notes that it took around three decades after its invention to be widely adopted. And he claims that “thirty years is actually a typical amount of time for a breakthrough computing invention to go from the first laboratory prototype to commercial ubiquity”:

This 30-year rule of thumb can help to form an educated guess about when future innovations will reach the mass market. For example, the first car capable of driving itself long distances was created in 2005, and the technology has been maturing in academica and corporate labs over the last eight years. If self-driving technology follows the same trajectory as previous computing innovations, commercial self-driving cars will be introduced sometime in the 2020s, and the technology will become widely adopted in the 2030s.

Drum adds that “a lot of these inventions depend on computing power” and that we’re “still a decade or so away” from computers being cheap and powerful enough to make self-driving cars feasible on a grand scale.

Timing Is Of The Essence

Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodóvar reflects on the components of a successful movie comedy:

Timing in comedy is not like rational time. When the actor gives his reply, he hasn’t had the physical or mental time to assimilate the previous line, but he has to deliver his reply at full speed. No one is going to wonder if he’s understood what was being said to him. If the audience does wonder, it’s a bad sign. Within comedy, the style that teaches you about rhythm (as do all of Woody Allen’s films, but I think that’s because the New York director is in a hurry) is screwball, the crazy American comedy.

Think of Midnight (Mitchell Leisen), The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor), Bringing Up Baby (Howard Hawks), Ninotchka (Billy Wilder), The Palm Beach Story (Preston Sturges), To Be or Not To Be (Ernst Lubitsch), Easy Living (Mitchell Leisen), Sullivan’s Travels (Preston Sturges), or in general any comedy where the comeback is delivered by Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, or Katherine Hepburn. …

Timing. Rapid-fire dialogue. Rehearsals. Otherwise, even though the situations are funny, and the actors excellent and with resources, the film becomes long and so do the scenes. I don’t want to point the finger, but one example of this problem is Bridesmaids. The director lets the actresses improvise until they come up with the right joke. You shouldn’t improvise in front of the camera. It should happen long beforehand. To crown it all, both the editor and the director are in love with the actresses and the material shot. The result is an attractive film, but one that lasts 125 minutes; it is saved because Kristen Wiig and Melissa McCarthy are wonderful comedians.

Update from a reader:

God, Pedro Almodóvar is so enormously full of crap. He has taken the entirety of comedic cinema and defined what is “good” according to an arbitrary speed value supported by nothing more than “here are a select group of movies that I like.”  He then dismisses Bridesmaids, a fantastic movie by the way, as saved only by great comediennes.  Is he so enamored with his deeply flawed thesis that he can’t see that these two great comediennes have … wait for it … comedic timing that stands in stark and wonderful contrast to his narrow preferences?

Look, I loved the West Wing, but I could never immerse myself in it to the point where I could quiet my discomfort with the obvious falseness in dialogue.  To put it bluntly: no one talks like that! No one! And yet Pedro thinks that everyone in comedy movies should speak in that ludicrous rapid fire, beyond human comprehension manner.  His preferences are precisely why I am ambivalent towards so much classic cinema: a forced and artificial depiction of human conversation nearly unrecognizable by those of us who actual talk to other people.

Roboethics

George Dvorsky asks what sort of rights artificial brains should have:

The breakthroughs are starting to come in. Just last week, European scientists produced the first ultra-high resolution 3D scan of the entire human brain. They captured the brain’s physical detail at the astonishingly low resolution of 20-microns.

Given all this, it’ll only be a matter of time before scientists take all this newfound insight and start to build brains inside of computers. At first, these emulations will be simple. But eventually, they’ll exhibit capacities that are akin to the real thing — including subjective awareness.

In other words, consciousness.

Or sentience. Or qualia. Or whatever else you want to call it. But whichever words we choose to use, we’ll need to be aware of one incredibly important thing: These minds will live and have experiences inside of computers. And that’s no small thing — because if we’re going to be making minds, we sure as hell need to do it responsibly.

He goes on to list “rights be afforded to fully conscious human and human-like emulations.” Robin Hanson pushes back, arguing that Dvorsky’s proposals for are too context-specific and would limit future emulations’ freedom of choice. More Dish on robots and morality here and here.

Egypt Erupts

A roughly chronological review of the past three hours of bloodshed:

Calling Into The Office Mentally Ill

Catherine Rampell observes that “mental illness has been an increasingly significant health concern over the past several decades, but it’s now becoming an economic one too”:

The number of Americans who receive Social Security Disability Insurance for mental disorders has doubled during the past 15 years. Eliza [who suffers from depression] is now one of an estimated 11.5 million American adults with a debilitating mental illness, on whom the country spends about $150 billion annually on direct medical costs — therapy, drugs, hospitalizations and so forth. But the biggest blow to the overall economy are the many hidden, indirect costs. People with serious mental illness earn, on average, $16,000 less than their mentally well counterparts, totaling about $193 billion annually in lost earnings, according to a 2008 study published in The American Journal of Psychiatry. And many mentally ill workers, who are more likely to miss work, also suffer from what social scientists call presenteeism — the opposite of absenteeism — in which they are very likely to be less productive on the job when they show up.

In a follow-up, Rampell looks at whether “having a mild version of a mental illness is advantageous, at least for aptitude in certain endeavors and interests”:

Perhaps you might wonder if broader push to bring people into the mental health care system could lead to overmedication, and potentially dull the brilliance of some oddball innovators. Economists, epidemiologists and other medical experts that I spoke with, though, say that preponderance of evidence suggests that mental illness almost always does more harm than good, especially if you use the broader lens of well-being, and not just economic productivity.

What’s A Bisexual Anyway? Ctd

Rich Juzwiak gleans some interesting insight on the subject through his conversations with four guys who have sex with both men and women – but who don’t necessarily consider themselves bi. From his profile of “Allen”:

When we first met, he wasn’t entirely open. When he refused to kiss me on the mouth, I joked that he was acting like a whore in Pretty Woman. “What’s that?” he asked. He is, after all, 19. “Kissing men kind of skeeves me out a little bit,” he explained. “I would be completely fine blowing someone over making out with him. It’s just one of those little tweaks I guess. I just don’t like kissing guys.

Yet, I should say. I know one day I will. It’s the whole transitional thing again.”

Allen is out to his family and friends in college. He says that they didn’t have a hard time accepting him. If anything, the hardest time has been had by Allen, as he accepts their acceptance. “I’m really comfortable with the situation, but it’s new so I’m insecure about it,” he says, having come out a little over a year ago. “I have no problem telling people I’m bisexual or I like guys, but I’m not used to being called bi or gay. When people say that, I still get a little defensive about it.”

So is he gay or what? “Gay and bisexual are just labels,” he told me. “People are people. I don’t really like the whole label thing. I think when you label someone gay, straight, or bi, you’re judging them. It’s just people. People are people. Your sexuality doesn’t make you who you are.”

He finds sex with women to be a “more emotional” experience, and with men, sex is more physical. (“Guys just need a release, really.”) “I don’t really run into many vers[atile] guys,” he said. “I think more people should be vers, it’s a lot funner. More people should be bisexual, it’s a lot funner.”

Rich also pens a postscript about Allen and his Pretty Woman hangup.

Why Not Tie A Carbon Tax To Temperature?

First, a question: is the discovery of climate change mankind’s greatest achievement?

But how should we respond to those measurements? Ross McKitrick, a global warming skeptic, suggests (pdf) a climate policy compromise:

[T]he best way to proceed would be to put a small tax on CO2 emissions, and tie its subsequent evolution to a suitable measure of atmospheric temperatures. If temperatures go up, so does the tax. If they do not, the tax does not change. In this way everybody will expect to get the policy they think best, and whoever turns out to be right deserves to be so. Sceptics who do not believe in global warming will not expect the tax to go up, and might even expect it to go down. Those convinced we are in for rapid warming will expect the tax to rise quickly in the years ahead. Companies managing factories and power plants will have to figure out who is more likely to be right, because billions of dollars of potential tax liabilities will depend on what is going to happen. Nobody will benefit from using false or exaggerated science: instead the market will identify those who can prove they understand the climate well enough to make accurate forecasts. And policy-makers will be guaranteed that, whatever the tax does in the future, the policy will turn out to have been the right one.

Bailey thinks “McKitrick’s proposal seems quite sensible because it harnesses the vast dispersed knowledge of scientists, manufacturers, fossil fuel suppliers, renewable energy innovators, and speculators to address the problem of climate change.”

What’s Left Of The Left? Ctd

This embed is invalid


A reader writes:

Simple question: How many American liberals, especially the knee-jerk doctrinaire folks, have ever googled “European abortion laws” and spent more than five minutes researching the results? I’m constantly gobsmacked by the vehemence of pro-choice left in this country, and the support they receive from traditional media.  If anything, I’d draw a direct parallel between them and the right-wing pro-gun crowd. Yes, some slopes are slippery on occasion, but those two sects seem to live in a world where anything and everything ends in tyranny, patriarchy, powerlessness, damnation, or worse. Whatever happened to legitimate compromise on fundamental social issues?

Another quotes a previous reader:

Obama is clearly no leftist. In the last five years, which might as well be the last 20, I find it very difficult to find even a single issue where I – a dyed in the wool, Greenpeace-supporting, union-dues-paying leftist – can look at the actions of the Democratic party and applaud.

And I say THANK GOD!

The sentiments expressed by this reader were killing the Democratic party and needed to go. I find it odd that this reader takes Obama to task as no leftist, and yet we now have near-universal healthcare in this country, a goal of liberals for close to 70 years.  This reader honestly doesn’t applaud that?

The problem with this kind of thinking is it is so enamoured of itself and its righteousness that it can’t get out of its own way to actaully change something – hell, anything. Clinton had the good fortune of presiding over a booming economy and his centrist ways allowed him to not fuck it up. Obama has presided over a terrible economy against the ruthless liars and fools that make up the GOP today, and yet his centrist ways have allowed him to effect more change than any Democratic president in recent memory that I can think of.