Author: Andrew Sullivan

A Bot That Blushes

Katerine Kravtsova reports from Moscow’s “Robot Ball”:

Of all those at the ball, one of the most human-like is RoboThespian, a life-size humanoid robot created by British engineers to perform on stage and to provide guided tours in museums. Unlike robots like Cubic, designed for domestic servitude, RoboThespian is intended to entertain and educate. It can be controlled via an online interface from anywhere in the world, interact with humans independently by scouring the internet for answers to questions, recognise faces, sing and dance. The gracefully moving machine can be bashful, friendly or bored depending on the situation. It can even blush when an attractive woman walks past. “Android robots such as Thespian demonstrate well the full range of technologies available,” says [exhibition organizer Igor] Nikitin.

Although the technology is developing at a rapid pace, it’s still a long way off before robots will be able to develop and display emotions in the same way as humans. Last year, British scientists developed the Experimental Functional Android Assistant, or efAA, a socially intelligent humanoid that has been designed not only to recognise and respond to human emotion but also to develop empathy. “It’s quite possible to have robots that exhibit strong emotions,” says Ray Taylor, one of the exhibition’s organisers. “And it will be possible to teach robots to be able to identify human emotions in the future.”

Please Keep Your Seatbelt Fastened

But don’t freak out over turbulence:

For all intents and purposes, a plane cannot be flipped upside-down, thrown into a tailspin, or otherwise flung from the sky by even the mightiest gust or air pocket. Conditions might be annoying and uncomfortable, but the plane is not going to crash. Turbulence is an aggravating nuisance for everybody, including the crew, but it’s also, for lack of a better term, normal. From a pilot’s perspective it is ordinarily seen as a convenience issue, not a safety issue. When a flight changes altitude in search of smoother conditions, this is by and large in the interest of comfort. The pilots aren’t worried about the wings falling off; they’re trying to keep their customers relaxed and everybody’s coffee where it belongs. Planes themselves are engineered to take a remarkable amount of punishment, and they have to meet stress limits for both positive and negative G-loads. The level of turbulence required to dislodge an engine or bend a wing spar is something even the most frequent flyer—or pilot for that matter—won’t experience in a lifetime of traveling.

Update from a reader:

Check out China Airlines Flight 006. Air Crash Investigation (best. show. ever.) did a whole show on this a while ago. Just watch the first minute of that. Blows my mind that that’s survivable. I used to be really afraid of flying. Somehow this show has made me way less stressed about it.

Map Of The Day

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Cartographer Kenneth Field was inspired by a U2 song:

The map shows, according to Field, all 3.5 million streets with no name (which are highlighted in gold, à la the album art). … According to the map, Bono should stick to rural areas, while avoiding Vermont and Maine. The Joshua Tree album art was photographed in the Mojave Desert, but if Bono really wanted to show you “a place high on the desert plain …” with lots of unnamed roads, the map suggests that perhaps he should have stuck to the High Plains and Great American Desert of Texas.

See Field’s website here and blog here.

MoDo-Proofing Edibles, Ctd

First, a few of the many tweets that followed “Thomas Friedman eating brownies with his daughter’s roommate at Yale”:

 

The whole brilliant parody is here. Meanwhile, a reader gets serious:

Dowd’s edible OD sounds a bit like my experience this year in Seattle. While the legal pot retail outlets have not yet opened, some entrepreneurs just dived into the murky legal gray area and started selling pot direct to consumers. I tried out Winterlife Co-op a couple months ago after reading about it in The Stranger and experienced both the improvements and pitfalls of legalization.

The good part: I got to look up the varieties on their online menu to see reviews and descriptions on leafly.com and settled on Sour Grapes, which has lived up to its great reviews. The delivery guy drove out to my apartment and we made the trade in his truck, where he had a whole cabinet of inventory neatly wrapped and labeled. I bought a quarter ounce of pot for what seemed a fair price, and threw in one chocolate edible for laughs. It was all thrilling but felt very safe and legit. The pot quality was miles above the crud I’d had on the east coast.

The not-so-great part:

During intermission at the Pacific Northwest Ballet, the missus and I split the little chocolate edible (no bigger than a miniature York patty). It had no dosage instructions, and it was so small I figured after splitting it we might just enjoy the scenery of a Midsummer Night’s Dream a little more intensely.

Wrong. I just started feeling odd toward the end of the show, an hour later. Soon after getting home, I was reeling with dizziness, and my mind couldn’t maintain a train of thought for more than a few seconds. Kneeling down to leash the dog for a short walk, I almost just toppled over. By that time the missus was in bed, and I flopped down as soon as the dog was walked, figuring I’d fall and hit my head if I kept walking around. I watched the walls spin up into the ceiling, then reset and spin again, over and over. It reminded me of my drunkest nights in freshman year of college, but a little less nauseous. Eventually the spinning slowed down enough for us to drift off.

My takeaway? As a consumer: eat edibles in the smallest possible increments, ramping up till you get the feeling you want. Don’t think just cause you’re a big guy you’ll need a lot (or even half a York patty’s worth). As for policy: yeah, some sort of labeling, with contents and dosage recommendations, would be a great place to start with edibles. I’ve smoked pot maybe 15 times before in my life and this felt like an entirely different, more potent drug.

I do think that buying it in such a normalized manner, like a pizza delivery, made me more trusting and naive. I probably wouldn’t have tried it alone the first time otherwise; like most of my early pot experiences I would have done it with a trusted friend who could guide me through what to expect. I’m usually not an idiot but some idiot-proof labeling would have helped me out on that chocolate.

Previous commentary on the regulation of edibles here.

The Best Of The Dish This Weekend

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Some small part of me wants to see the instant-demonizers of Bowe Bergdahl proven horribly wrong. The likelihood, of course, is that the story of the still-mysterious soldier will produce only more ambiguities. But these little nuggets complicate the culture war paradigm in which a POW has been framed:

“He’s said that they kept him in a shark cage in total darkness for weeks, possibly months,” said one American official. CNN reported Friday that Sergeant Bergdahl said he was held in a metal box or cage, but the officials on Saturday offered new details. He was kept there apparently as punishment for one or possibly two attempted escapes, as first reported by the Daily Beast website last week and confirmed by an American official.

That kind of total sensory deprivation, and isolation is a form of torture … practiced by the Taliban and the US, a merging of values only made possible by the dark soul of Dick Cheney. Then there’s Bergdahl’s own resistance to the promotion awarded him in captivity – and used by the Palinites to attack one of those they usually defer to as generic heroes:

“He says, ‘Don’t call me that,’ ” said one American official. “ ‘I didn’t go before the boards. I didn’t earn it.’ ”

A tortured POW who tried several escapes who rejected any honors … well that isn’t quite the treasonous hippie the hard right wants to attack. And yes, attack:

Late Saturday, the F.B.I. said the Bergdahl family in Idaho had received threats. Federal agents, working with state and local law enforcement authorities, were “taking each threat seriously,” an F.B.I. statement said. Officials declined to give other details.

This weekend, we featured the poetry of Patrizia Cavalli – check out this terse account of loving someone you cannot really love. It’s a pretty good description of the relationship between Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy, thirty years his junior, but still somehow his full equal.

We grappled with the chimera of “happiness” – with a lovely, and very grown-up video from Adam Phillips and a haunting revisit of Philip Seymour Hoffman’s confusion on the subject.

We asked the following questions: should God be a stop-gap for when our understanding of the world fails? (No, according to Bonhoeffer.) Is it possible to feel empathy for non-practicing pedophiles? (It should be.) Are conservative churches finally going the way of liberal ones … and for the same, secularizing reasons? (Of course they are.) What do Augustine and O.J. Simpson have in common? (Confession.)

Plus: Tolstoy on life and faith; and the sacredness of salmon-fishing.

The most popular posts of the weekend were The Palinite Tendency and Bowe Bergdahl, followed by Compassion for Pedophiles.

It was a gorgeous June weekend on the Cape, where I am now ensconced for my annual – and 21st! – full summer in Provincetown. When I first get here each year, it’s always the same … just fighting every day to stay awake. Something about the place taps something deep inside and says: you’re home now; you can let your guard down; and rest. But not until Bowie has explored every cranny of the beach.

See you (and her) in the morning.

After The World Leaves

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Jade Doskow photographs the remains of World’s Fair sites. In an interview, she explains the project:

For each site, research and development before the shoot plays a major role. Who were the key players — architects, designers, political figures — coordinating the fair? What important architecture was conceived and constructed specifically for it? Did this exposition permanently affect the reputation of that city (like the Eiffel Tower of the 1889 Exposition)? Is the remaining fair architecture still a monument, is it abandoned, is it repurposed, or was it demolished? These are all concepts that I consider very carefully before actually traveling to a shoot.

When I get to a site, I spend about 3-5 days shooting, scouting the area with an original fair map and retracing where the original structures would have once stood. The resulting images have come to show a wonderful variety and indicate the ultimate arbitrariness of urban preservation and collective cultural memory; in Paris, I photographed the Eiffel Tower; in Philadelphia, some lovely Victorian toilet buildings from 1876; and in Chicago, the empty place on the shore of Lake Michigan where the enormous 1893 Manufacture Liberal Arts building once stood.

See more of her work here.

“A Priest Of Eternal Imagination”

James Joyce elevated the role of writers by describing them in such terms. But he was less reverent toward actual priests:

James Joyce didn’t have much use for priests; he thought that priests like [“The Sisters” character] Father Flynn had lost their sight, their ability to focus their spiritual eye. Joyce’s characters often say things like, “We are an unfortunate priest-ridden race and always were and always will be till the end of the chapter. … A priest-ridden Godforsaken race” (A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man). Like the rest of the Dubliners [in Dubliners], Father Flynn experiences his epiphanies, but is unable to reflect upon them, to know them. This is a task for artists.

In My Brother’s Keeper Stanislaus Joyce wrote of James:

“He believed that poets in the measure of their gifts and personality were the repositories of the genuine spiritual life of their race and the priests were usurpers.” If the priests ever knew eternal truths, the artist know[s] them now. The artist not only sees epiphanies, but makes them manifest by turning them into art. The artist, for Joyce, stands in the shadows with eyes and ears wide open, “like the God of the creation,” remaining “within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails.” Because artists have the gift of seeing they are especially called to notice epiphanies and, moreover, “to record these epiphanies with extreme care” as [Joyce’s character] Stephen Hero says. A writer, thought Joyce, is a kind of priest, “a priest of eternal imagination.” By collecting epiphanies the writer is “transmuting the daily bread of experience into the radiant body of everliving life.”

Psychoanalysis As Poetry

The psychotherapist and writer Adam Phillips reveals why he thinks of it that way:

For me, Freud made sense then not in terms of the history of science or the history of neurology, but in terms of the history of literature. I had been lucky enough to read Tristram Shandy before I read psychoanalysis. One advantage of thinking about psychoanalysis as an art, instead of a science, is that you don’t have to believe in progress. The tradition I was educated in was very committed to psychoanalysis as a science, as something that was making progress in its understanding of people. As if psychoanalysis was a kind of technique that we were improving all the time. This seemed to me at odds with at least one of Freud’s presuppositions, which was that conflict was eternal, and that there was to be no kind of Enlightenment convergence on a consensual truth.

The discipline was practiced, though, as if we were going to make more and more discoveries about human nature, as though psychoanalysis was going to become more and more efficient, rather than the idea—which seemed to me to be more interesting—that psychoanalysis starts from the position that there is no cure, but that we need different ways of living with ourselves and different descriptions of these so-called selves.

For more on the theme, check out Phillips’ book, Promises, Promises: Essays on Psychoanalysis and Literature.

A Poem For Sunday

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Another selection from Patrizia Cavalli translated, from the Italian, by Gini Alhadeff:

I cannot love what you are, no,
what you are is indeed a mistake.
But there is in you a grace that surpasses
what you obstinately are.
Something that’s yours and doesn’t belong to you,
in you from the start but separate from you,
that draws towards you cautiously, afraid
of its own uncontainable splendor.

(From My Poems Won’t Change the World: Selected Poems of Patrizia Cavalli, edited by Gina Alhadeff. Translation © 2013 by Gini Alhadeff. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. All rights reserved. Photo by Joel Olives)

Contemplating Confession

Twenty years after the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman, Morgan Meis reviews If I Did It, the bizarre hypothetical recounting of the incidents O.J. Simpson published in 2007. Rather than dwelling on the salacious details of this “extremely confusing book written by an extremely confused man,” Meis connects the confessor’s impulse to the Western canon, comparing Socratic and Augustinian approaches to guilt:

There’s a long tradition in Western culture of responding to accusations with an affirmation of the self. Think of it as the Socratic impulse. It is the need to give an apology — not in the sense of saying “I’m sorry,” but in the sense of the Greek word apologia. An apologia is not an admission of guilt or an expression of regret. It is, literally, a “talking back.” It is a response to an accusation in which the accused tells his side of the story. That’s what Socrates does in his apology. He tells his side of the story. He affirms who he is and what he is about. Let’s not forget that Socrates was guilty of his crimes. Just read I. F. Stone’s The Trial of Socrates. Socrates was, in fact, corrupting the youth of Athens. Socrates’ students and admirers — men like Alcibiades — were, in fact, being taught by Socrates to have contempt for the structures of Athenian democracy. Some of Socrates’ students did, in fact, overthrow and abolish Athenian democracy. So Socrates, in his apology, is not protesting his innocence so much as asserting himself, affirming his own point of view. “This is who I really am,” says Socrates, “this is what I am about.”

O. J. was grasping at something similar when he said, “I did what all accused men do at the moment of truth: I proclaimed my innocence.” Defending the truth or falsity of the accusations against him didn’t matter as much to O. J. The important thing to defend when you stand alone, accused, is your self. This is when you have a chance to say, “Here’s who I am, here’s my story and I will not surrender this story.” But there is another side to O. J.

This side does want to confess, wants to be able to discuss and come to terms with the actual murders. This side of O. J. wants to be released from the burden of self that he affirms in the Socratic impulse. In his confessional mode, O. J. doesn’t want to be responsible for his story. He wants to be able to give his story away. This desire to confess is the Augustinian impulse and it is fundamentally incompatible with the Socratic impulse.

Augustine’s Confessions are the writings of a man unburdening himself. Augustine wants to find himself by throwing himself away. He wants to loosen the bonds of self. He wants to find relief from his own story by giving it away to God. “For behold,” Augustine writes, “Thou lovest the truth, and he that doth it, cometh to the light. This would I do in my heart before Thee in confession: and in my writing, before many witnesses.” That is, more or less, what O. J. tries to do by embedding a confession in the sixth chapter of his strange book. Except that he cannot do it completely. He does it by way of a hypothetical, and then toggles back into Socratic mode for the rest of the book, in an attempt to reclaim his “self” once more.