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Cory Doctorow at 10:53 pm • 
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(art by Daniel Martin Diaz)
Earlier today, we published my story "By His Things Will You Know Him," which is from the forthcoming Institute for the Future anthology "An Aura of Familiarity: Visions from the Coming Age of Networked Matter." I've read the story aloud for my podcast, if that's how you prefer your fiction.
Cory Doctorow at 8:46 am • •
In a fascinating installment of the IEEE Techwise podcast [MP3], Rice University Computational Engineering prof Moshe Vardi discusses the possibility that robots will obviate human labor faster than new jobs are created, leaving us with no jobs. This needn't be a bad thing -- it might mean finally realizing the age of leisure we've been promised since the first glimmers of the industrial revolution -- but if market economies can't figure out how to equitably distribute the fruits of automation, it might end up with an even bigger, even more hopeless underclass.
I think the issue of machine intelligence and jobs deserves some serious discussion. I don’t know that we will reach a definite conclusion, and it’s not clear how easy it will be to agree on desired actions, but I think the topic is important enough that it deserves discussion. And right now I would say it’s mostly being discussed by economists, by labor economists. It has to also be discussed by the people that produce the technology, because one of the questions we could ask is, you know, there is a concept that, for example, that people have started talking about, which is that we are using, we are creating technology that has no friction, okay? Creating many things that are just too easy to do.
Many of these ideas came up in this Boing Boing post from January, which also touches on Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy, a book that Vardi mentions in his interview.
The Job Market of 2045 (via /.)
Mark Frauenfelder at 6:30 am • •
I had an enlightening conversation with Josh Gosfield and Camille Sweeney, authors of a great new book called The Art of Doing: How Superachievers Do What They Do and How They Do It So Well. Josh and Camille interviewed 36 notable people -- artists, entrepreneurs, actors, athletes -- asking them their secrets of success. Joining me on the episode was Gweek's frequent co-host, Joshua Glenn, co-editor of Unbored: The Essential Field Guide to Serious Fun and HiLowBrow.
In this episode:
Fathom Butterfly - the notorious beauty queen, showgirl, Hammer horror actress, porn star, felon and feminist filmmaker tweets her memoirs
Mark Frauenfelder at 5:55 pm • •
This was a fun episode! I spoke with John Glassie, author of A Man of Misconceptions, a non-fiction book about the unusual 17th-century polymath, Athanasius Kircher, and Joshua Foer, author of Moonwalking with Einstein, which recounts Joshua’s yearlong quest to improve his memory under the tutelage of top "mental athletes.”
In this episode:
"Utopian for Beginners: An amateur linguist loses control of the language he invented," a New Yorker article by Joshua Foer
"Want to Remember Everything You'll Ever Learn? Surrender to This Algorithm," a Wired article by Gary Wolf
Atlas Obscura is the definitive guide to the world's wondrous and curious places.
Language learning apps and websites: Memrise, iAnki, Dr. Moku's Hiragana Mnemonics, Dr. Moku's Katakana Mnemonics
Mark Frauenfelder at 2:34 pm • •
This morning David and I spoke with with Carrie Brownstein: musician, writer, actor. She's a founding member of the bands Sleater-Kinney and Wild Flag, and the co-creator, co-writer, and co-star of Portlandia, the hit sketch comedy series on IFC, currently in its 3rd season.
Previously:
Portlandia: A Guide for Visitors
Portlandia just keeps getting better
Portlandia holiday preview video: "Vagina Pillows"
SPOILER ALERT: New Portlandia preview clip is called "Spoiler Alert"
(Image of Carrie Brownstein: Wildflag - SXSW Music 2011 - Austin, TX, a Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (2.0) image from kk's photostream)
(Thanks, Rachel Maguire!)
Mark Frauenfelder at 2:12 pm • •
I'm going nuts with podcasts. Here's the latest: Cool Tools' "Show and Tell" videocast and podcast. Last week, Kevin Kelly and I did a video hangout with Joshua Glenn and Michael Pusateri. We showed each other 18 different things we love, including books, kitchen tools, games, apps, and gadgets.
Subscribe: RSS | iTunes. Listen on Soundcloud. Watch Video.
Here are the show notes.
Mark Frauenfelder at 3:01 pm • •
In this special Superb Owl Sunday Family Channel podcast my daughters Jane (9), Sarina (15), and I shared a pan of Jiffy Pop and talked about books.
What we are reading now:
Mark: Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin
Sarina: The Postmortal, by Drew Magary
Jane: Frederick Douglass: Young Defender of Human Rights, by Elisabeth P. Myers
Favorite books:
Mark: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, by B. Traven
Sarina: The Outsiders, be S. E. Hinton
Jane: By the Great Horn Spoon! by Sid Fleischman
Cory Doctorow at 12:00 pm • •
"Punk Voyager" is this week's story on the Escape Pod podcast, and it is fucking amazing. It's Shaenon Garrity story about punks at the twilight of the 1970s who are drunkenly outraged to discover that the Voyager probe has been launched with classical music records for aliens. They build their own Voyager probe out of garbage, razor-blades, beer cans and a surfboard some douchebag left on the beach, filled with all the most important human artifacts that they can find in their van. They forget about it as the 80s roar in, and then the aliens come to Earth and cockpunch Ronald Reagan.
Fuck yeah.
Punk Voyager was built by punks. They made it from beer cans, razors, safety pins, and a surfboard some D-bag had left on the beach. Also plutonium. Where did they get plutonium? Around. Fuck you.
The punks who built Punk Voyager were Johnny Bonesaw, Johnny Razor, Mexican Johnny D-bag, Red Viscera, and some other guys. No, asshole, nobody remembers what other guys. They were Fucking wasted, these punks. They’d been drinking on the San Diego beach all day and night, talking about making a run to Tijuana and then forgetting and punching each other. They’d built a fire on the beach, and all night the fire went up and went down while the punks threw beer cans at the seagulls.
Forget the shit I just said, it wasn’t the punks who did it. They were Fucking punks. The hell they know about astro-engineering? Truth is that Punk Voyager was the strung-out masterpiece of Mexican Johnny D-bag’s girlfriend, Lacuna, who had a doctorate in structural engineering. Before she burned out and ran for the coast, Lacuna was named Alice McGuire and built secret nuclear submarines for a government contractor in Ohio. It sucked. But that was where she got the skills to construct an unmanned deep-space probe. Same principle, right? Keep the radiation in and the water out. Or the vacuum of space, whatever, it’s all the same shit to an engineer.
Fuck that, it wasn’t really Lacuna’s baby. It wasn’t her idea. The idea was Red’s.
“Fucking space,” he said that fateful night. He was lying on his back looking up at space, is why he said it.
“Hell yeah,” said Johnny Bonesaw.
Mark Frauenfelder at 10:06 am • •
Rick Schertle is the creator of one of our most popular projects in MAKE: the compressed air rocket launcher, which uses PVC pipe and a sprinkler valve to blast a paper rocket high into the air. Rick is also the creator of the folding wing rocket glider, which takes the standard balsa wood glider and turns it into something that flies a lot higher and longer. And most recently, Rick wrote a project that shows you how to make a catapult launcher that sends the rocket glider even higher. I spoke to Rick about these projects and more.
Make: Talk 020 - Air Rockets and Folding Wing Gliders: RSS | iTunes | Download MP3
Cory Doctorow at 5:03 pm • •
An excellent recent episode of the BBC Radio 4 math/current affairs show "More or Less" dramatized "The Parable of the Ox," a short article by John Kay originally published in the Financial Times (paywalled, alas, or I'd link to it available from Kay's site). Fans of James Surowiecki's Wisdom of the Crowds will know the first part of this story -- wherein the average of several guesses about the weight of an ox was more accurate than the guesses of any of the experts in the crowd. What this podcast and the article adds is a coda about how the use of "guesses" (or stock trades) as a way of weighing the ox quickly departed from guesses about the weight of the ox (or the value of a firm) and turned into guesses about other peoples' guesses about other peoples' guesses -- a financialized system that soon has no connection to the real economy or the real ox. And it ends, predictably enough, when the ox dies.
The Parable of the Ox [More or Less]
The parable of the ox [John Kay]
Mark Frauenfelder at 5:04 pm • •
Our maker this week is Matt Richardson. Matt's a video producer, a writer, a maker of things, a technology consultant, and a student at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Matt wrote two articles for MAKE volume 32. One of them is a BeagleBone tutorial and the other one shows how to make his awesome -- I mean -- wonderful Awesome Button. Matt also co-wrote (with Shawn Wallace) a new MAKE book called Getting Started with Raspberry Pi, an introduction to the business card sized $35 Linux computer.
Cory Doctorow at 12:01 pm • •
BBC Radio 4's great math and science show "The Infinite Monkey Cage" did a great (and very funny) episode on crypto and Bletchley Park, with Robin Ince, Brian Cox, Dave Gorman, Simon Singh and Dr Sue Black.
(via Schneier)
Flow Free
