jameswharris

Project Nim (2011)–How Much Are Animals Like Us?

Project Nim is a biographical documentary about Nim Chimpsky (1973-2000), a rather famous chimpanzee, cruelly stolen from his mother, and who was taught sign language while growing up living in a family home with human children. Sadly, and very painful to watch, Nim is taken from his human family, first to be cared for by graduate assistants who loved him, and then tragically after the experiment was over, to live in cages at various primate facilities around the country. The documentary is both inspiring and heart breaking.

We learn how human a chimpanzee can be, and how inhuman humans can be.

The hero of this story, the human apes should measure us by, Nim’s friend with the biggest heart, is Bob Ingersoll, who worked tirelessly to rescue Nim, and to a minor degree offers some release for the suffering viewer – not a happy ending, but something. I tell you this not to spoil the ending, but hopefully convince the kind of people who avoid any film where an animal might suffer to give it a try.

I highly recommend seeing this film is you can handle the animal cruelty and suffering. And if you’re the sensitive type that can’t, I still recommend trying, because it will inspire you to fight even harder against animal cruelty. I can understand that you don’t want to suffer too, but turning a blind eye is no help. Even if you can’t watch the film, please visit the Nonhuman Rights Project.

Imagine being raised by a large loving family of privilege, given everything thing you needed and more, with lots of love, a fantastic education, and then being sent to prison, spending long stretches in solitary, always hoping you could return to the good life. The documentary gives plenty of evidence that Nim remembered. The documentary gives plenty of evidence that Nim is a truly sensitive being that knows far more than just being a dumb animal. He should have hated all humans, but he didn’t.

[Some YouTube uploaders promise the entire film – but I got it from Netflix.]

I think all pet owners who have loved their furry children have wished “If only they could speak.” Project Nim is about an experiment where scientists try to teach a chimpanzee American Sign Language (ASL). The success of this project, to this day, is uncertain and controversial. Many of Nim’s handlers believed he could sign, including simple sentences, and even made up his own signs. Herbert S. Terrace, the project leader, eventually concluded that Nim was not using language, but could sign with very limited ability.

Chimpanzees are cute when little, but dangerous when grown, so they make very difficult subjects for life long experiments. The tragedy of Nim’s wretched existence was sort of like Charlie in Flowers for Algernon, he had a brief period of being much more aware of things, and then a fall from paradise into abject boredom of caged life with no intellectual stimulation. Herbert Terrace should have foreseen the cruelty he was putting Nim through, and the defects of his experiment. To me the obvious place to conduct such experiments is in the wild, in natural habitats of chimpanzees, and not American suburbs.

I’m curious if any researcher has worked with wild chimps and gorillas to teach them sign language. If apes were capable of using sign language it’s ability would persist, spread from ape to ape, and be passed on from generation to generation. I need to research if any work has been done like that. The article “Great ape language” at Wikipedia doesn’t mention such research, and its conclusions are rather pessimistic.

Part of the controversy is trying to define what language is, and the critics of ape language experiments think it’s more complicated than what apes can handle. However, I think it’s obvious they are capable of a proto-language. Many animals have ways to communicate warnings, but this isn’t the same as a grammatical language. Terrace is quoted at Wikipedia as saying Nim’s longest sentence was “Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you.” We’ve all had pets that communicated specific wants with no words. And as far as anyone knows, maybe Nim thought each and every hand sign he was making was a kind of hope that expressed “I want to eat that orange!”

Last month the Nonhuman Rights Project tried to get legal person status for chimpanzees but failed. I consider them a new kind of animal rights movement, and eventually they will prevail. Back in 1947, Robert A. Heinlein wrote a story “Jerry Was A Man” about such a court case happening in a science fiction story. Heinlein’s imagined future is now our present. The basis of the tale was to convince a court that Jerry, an old circus chimp, was human, and thus deserved human rights. Now there is a position between animal rights and human rights, which I think is well named with nonhuman rights. We have to recognized that some animals are self-aware, have a kind of consciousness that is close to ours that we can empathize with, even if they lack our language ability, that should not suffer at our hands.

Animals with certain levels of consciousness need a legal status. If such a legal status had existed back in the 1970s, the experiment with Nim would never have taken place. Nor would all the apes now being used in medical research. Our research facilities, zoos, lives of exotic pets, circuses, animal attractions, would all have to be redesigned for their level of awareness. I don’t know how far down the tree of life from the human branch this compassion would stretch, but it might be many branches below us.

I discovered the Project Kim documentary from an article in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013, “The Last Distinction?” by Benjamin Hale from Harper’s Magazine. Unfortunately, Harper’s is not generous with full text of copyrighted material. The whole Best American volume is worth owning and reading though. In fact, the next article in the book is “Talk to Me” by Tim Zimmerman. That article is about communicating with dolphins in the wild.

As a plug for the Best American Science and Nature Writing 2013 here’s some of the articles that are still online to read. This gives you a sample of what the whole book is like, which is wonderful.

“False Idyll” by J. R. MacKinnon
“Talk to Me” by Tim Zimmermann
“Out of the Wild” by David Quammen
“The Crisis in Big Science” by Steven Weinberg
“Autism Inc.” by Gareth Cook
“The Life of Pi, and Other Infinities” by Natalie Angier
“Can a Jellyfish Unlock the Secret of Immortality?” by Nathaniel Rich
“Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?” by Stephen Marche
“The Measured Man” by Mark Bowden

If you read only one, read “False Idyll” by J. R. MacKinnon.

JWH – 1/10/14

Can 20th Century Dogs Ever Learn 21st Century Tricks?

We moldy holdovers from the 20th century must admit now that it’s 2014, that the 21st century is much different from how things used to be in our Leave it to Beaver days. Young people born in the 1990s will have a hard time even understanding our old ways. And why should they? As a writer I should spend less time focusing on the past because more and more of my potential audience will have no understanding or connection to it.

On the other hand, I don’t think I can ever become a post post-modern, or whatever we should call a 21st century individual. I just can’t move my head into the Twitterverse, and have a hard time even using Facebook, which evidently is becoming passé with the younger generations because they’ve already moved on to newer technologies that I don’t even know the names of. Even more, I really can’t imagine myself wearing Google glasses, or modern fashions.

But I have changed a lot. Is that even interesting to the 21st century citizen, that a 20th century person is adapting? If I live to be 100, I’ll have spent roughly half a century in two different centuries. How long will it take to become a completely 21st century person? Is it even possible to catch up? Will 20th century folk always be on the trailing edge of 21st century living?

In history and literature, the term modern means early 20th century, and by the time I was born I was growing up in a post-modern era. That kind of talk is completely alien to a true 21st century mind. What do they call their post post-modern lives?

In the world of science fiction, we talk about post-human cultures, and post-humans and trans-humans. We expected genetics and other cyber technologies to transform humanity into something new. However, we thought they’d be physically different, but what if that’s not true? What if merely growing up in a high tech culture makes that generation significantly different? Hell, us baby boomers growing up in the 1960s thought we were significantly different from our parents who grew up in the 1920s and 1930s.

Would it be possible for a 20th century person to catch up and even surpass a child of the 21st century? I have 50 years of wisdom and knowledge they don’t – won’t that count for something? I also have 50 years of reading science fiction and thinking about the future that should give me some kind of edge. But is thinking about the future of equal value to growing up in the future? I don’t know.

When I sat down to write this essay I intended to write a completely different essay. It was originally called “How New Technology Changed My Old Lifestyle.” But as I wrote the first few sentences I realized the more interesting question is: Can my older mind catch up with newer thinking? And if I’m having a hard time, how do the Gen X and Millennials feel? If must be confusing for a Millennial (Generation Y) to think of themselves as the cutting edge generation and realized they’ve already been surpassed by the latest crop of youngsters, which some people are calling the New Silent Generation or Generation Z. Hey, it’s a bitch getting old, get used to it.

And even though modern teens walk the tech walk, and talk the tech talk, do they even have a clue as to what the fuck is going on? Is living in virtual worlds almost 24×7 of any real value other than hiding out from the real world? Did rock music and dope confer anything special on us baby boomers that made us more savvy about reality? Is being hip a real survival trait? Can you transform the world into a better place with just smartphone smarts and social media savvy?

I think the real trans-human mind will think with scientific clarity that requires seeing with statistics and math. The real power minds of the 21st century won’t be Twitterers, but data miners. Talking in 140 characters only leads to snippy gossiping skills, if you want to conquer the world you’ll need to be able to digest petabytes of data at a gulp, and convert it into graphics that show visual insights that transcends text. In other words, if you’re only nibbling at tech, you won’t get far. It’s the super-geeks that will inherit the Earth.

To answer my title question, yes, it’s possible for baby boomers to excel in the 21st century but only if you ignore the glitter of tech glamour, and go deeper. In every generation it’s the folk that can tell shit from Shinola that succeed. Technology is transforming how we live, but I’m not sure it’s transforming us in how we think. People still think the same stupid stuff, but just say it in 140 characters or less.

Probably the real 21st century citizens have yet to emerge. And all the tech we’re seeing is a kind of churning of digital conversions, transforming culture more than people. Does it really matter that you watch TV shows via broadcast TV, cable TV, or Netflix TV? 19th century people would feel superior to me because I’m not smart enough to hitch up a team of horses. I’m thinking the difference between old humans and post humans are whether or not they can comprehend what David Deutsch writes about in The Beginning of Infinity, which is the ability to effectively evaluate knowledge. Sadly, I’m just as far from understand that as I am at understanding the Twitterverse.

JWH – 1/8/14

Next Issue: Can Magazines on Tablet Computers Replace Printed Magazines?

Years ago I gave up subscribing and buying paper magazines in hopes of going paperless. Oh, I’d break the rules and buy a magazine now and then. Then recently a guy a work started giving me his magazines after he read them with recommendations of articles to read. I started discovering that some articles found in magazines are vastly superior to most of the free articles I was finding on the web. I guess it’s a case of getting what you pay for. I also discovered for some subjects its much more fun to browse a magazine than the web.

So I started back on a couple of paper magazine and quickly discovered I really don’t like them piling up. Once you go paperless, it’s hard to go back to paper. Then I discovered Next Issue. For $15 a month I got digital access to a library of magazines. (There’s also a $9.99 version with fewer magazine.) I quickly rediscovered just how much I love magazines. The only trouble is they don’t look very good on my iPad 2.

That’s not completely true. Some look much better than others. For the most part the magazines look like their paper versions – I see all the editorial content and the ads. Some even have extras, like animations, film clips, and multiple view of photos, so in a sense they are super-magazines. And some magazines actually reformat their content slightly to take advantage of tablets. So when you get to an article you page down to read it, rather than page right, for a few pages, and then skipping to page 79 to finish the thing. The magazines that use this feature tend to format their content in a larger font that’s easy to read without magnification – and that looks best on older tablets like the iPad 2. Other magazines just give you two views of a static page, one that fits the screen on the tablet, and another brought up by double tapping that is greatly magnified that you slide around with your finger to read.

I’ve been reading for weeks with my old iPad 2, and getting into this new method of magazine reading, all the while thinking about how it could be better. Mostly I thought about having to buy an iPad Air.

I then borrowed my wife’s Kindle Fire HD with a 7” screen and spent an evening reading my favorite magazines. The Kindle HD has much better resolution than the iPad 2, a pre-retina display model. Switching between the two devices, taught me something about reading magazines on a tablet, and made me realize that Apple no longer has a lock on tablet computers. Here’s what I learned:

Resolution matters – the more the better. Sometimes it’s nicer to read small fonts than to tap and magnify
7” tablets are much easier to hold and read for longer periods of time
10” tablets make the photos pop out more, so it’s more fun to look at pictures with a larger screen
If the magazine formats for the tablet, it’s much easier to read on a 7” screen
If the magazine doesn’t format for the tablet, it’s much easier to read on a 10” screen
An aspect ratio of 4:3 is probably better for magazines than 16:10, but not always
I have to use a reading stand with the larger tablet for long periods of reading
A 7” screen is more conducive of carrying around
I’d love to be able to print a whole article, or clip it to Evernote. The iOS version of Next Issue will let me AirPrint a page at a time.
If I could clip an article to Evernote (or .pdf) I could print it from Evernote
Tablets offer a way for magazines to offer more creative layouts, and even multimedia

Next Issue is far from perfect, but I still feel like I’m getting my money’s worth. I would be happier if I could find just the right tablet, if I could save articles, and if I could get a few more magazines. Of course this is dealing with two different issues. One, can I enjoy reading a magazine exclusively on a tablet and give up print copies? And two, does Next Issue offer everything I want to read?

Next Issue is a disruptive technology in the same way Netflix was a game changer. I essentially stopped buying videos after I adapted to Netflix. Will I give up buying magazines too? Next Issue has a nice selection of over 125 magazines, but it doesn’t have The Atlantic, Scientific American, Discover, Sky and Telescope, Asimov’s Science Fiction, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, The New York Review of Books, Linux Journal, and others that I like.

But like I said, that’s two issues when regarding whether can I give up paper magazines for reading magazines on a tablet. If I had a Kindle Fire HDX, either 7” or 8.9” screen, or an Apple iPad Air or Mini with Retina Display, or a Nexus 7 or 10, or Samsung Note 10.1 2014, I might be able to conclusively answer the first part of the question. They have the dots per inch resolution that will make tablets sharp enough to read small print. And they might even make photography stand out more. However, paper still wins on some factors.

If I can’t clip to Evernote or .pdf, printed magazines win on the “tearing an article out to save” factor. Also, for “making a photocopy” factor. They also win on “lending/giving to a friend” factor. But tablets win on “these magazines are driving me crazy piling up around the house” factor. Tablets also win on the “where the hell did I put that magazine” factor. They also win on the “I wish I had that magazine with me” factor because Next issue works from the smartphone and iPod touch.

It’s not hard to see the writing on the wall. Paper and printing will eventually go away. Whether magazine library subscriptions like Next Issue will become standard is still to be decided. Netflix hasn’t killed the DVD buying business, but it’s changed it. Netflix did kill off the local video store, and I wonder if tablets will do that to newsstands?

JWH – 1/5/14

How Academy Award Winning Films From 1927-1950 Are Remembered Today

As the years roll by, and older generations pass on, what they created and loved, disappears too. Below are the films that won the Academy Award for Best Picture before I was born. Unless you are a movie buff, or love to watch Turner Classic Movies, it’s not likely you’ve seen many of these films. Some have become so legendary that even some young people have watched them, but many are being forgotten.

I thought I’d check various kinds of lists and remembrances to see how these old movies are being retained in our public mind.

First, I’m going to check The National Film Registry to see if they’ve been recognized there. Of the 23 films below, 14 are on the NFR, and three (Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, The Best Years of Our Lives) were in the first year’s selection. The NFR began in 1989, so films closest to that date are among the most popular in people’s memories. The NFR selects up to 25 additional films each year, so given enough time probably all of these films will be added to the registry, but maybe not. Films selected from 1989-1993 are essentially the Top 100. 1994-1998 brings in roughly films 100-200.

Entertainment Weekly recently published what they remember as the Top 100 films of all time. Their number one film of all time is Citizen Kane from 1941 which didn’t even win the Academy Award that year – it lost to How Green Was My Valley. The editors at EW do honor films all the way back to the silent movie era, so it’s a good list to work from when you’re disappointed that you can’t find a movie to watch. Comparing the EW list and the Academy Awards from 1927-1950 shows the limitation of the Oscars of actually picking the best film of the year.

EW also picked 23 films from this same time period, but the two lists of 23 only have five films that overlap, It Happened One Night, Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, Best Years of Our Lives and All About Eve.

The American Film Institute (AFI) has their 10th Anniversary edition of 100 Years … 100 Movies. Strangely, or not so strangely, AFI only picked five of these 23 films too, and the same five as EW. AFI picked 25 movies from 1927-1950.

Over at American Movie Classics (AMC) they have a public poll with their Top 100 films. Such a poll reflects the collective memory of people on the street, rather than the film buff editors of the other two lists. This list can change, so I’m using the results of 1/3/14. Besides reinforcing the recommendations of the EW and AFI picks, the AMC actually picks two movies that haven’t been picked before, All Quiet on the Western Front and Rebecca. This leads me to believe that the voters in the AMC poll are quite savvy about old movies. 48 of their 100 movies were from 1927-1950. AMC viewers love their old movies.

Another site is Rotten Tomatoes (RT) and their Top 100 Movies of All Time. RT has a completely different way of remember movies, by counting movie review ratings. All these films received 100% positive ratings, and were reviewed by 31-162 reviewers. This list gives Rebecca it’s second listing, and All About Eve it’s fifth. 21 of RT’s 100 films were from 1927-1950.

So far this consistently shows this time period is remembered, but RT like EW and AFI seem to consistently pick other films. This shows the Academy isn’t very good at picking the films that will be remembered best.

Looking at IMDB’s Top 100 films from the Top 250 list finalized for 2013, we see another public voting system, with another list where Citizen Kane comes in at #1. But their #2 is Tokyo Story (1953) a film I don’t even remember ever hearing about. This is a much more diverse list than the others, and that might be because IMDB is world famous. Like the other lists it endorsed Gone With the Wind and Casablanca, but IMDB’s fans also agreed with AMC’s fans to pick All Quiet on the Western Front. That’s extra interesting because I just watched a Blu-ray copy the other night that I got from Classic Flicks. IMDB picked 27 out of 100 films from the 1927-1950 period. Staying consistent here. I wish I could do some major data mining to actual measure how soon the general population forgets pop culture artifacts from the past.

There are plenty of sites on the Internet like Life Hack, where they list 30 Best Movies of All Time, and not only do they not pick any of these 23 movies, they don’t even get close to picking any movie from that time period. Their oldest movie is 1974 – Young Frankenstein.

There are zillions of people making movie lists. But at Lists of Bests, I found Movie Definitive Lists. I wish I was some kind of master hacker where I could write a program to collect these 4,679 lists, but them into a database and create a single list which lists which movies had been on the most lists. Well, a project for when I get an infinite amount of free time. Unfortunately, many of these lists do not pick just 100 movies, and rank them in order, which is what I need to compare consistently with my other lists.

It’s sad to see many of these films aren’t remembered at all, and it’s pretty obvious which ones are widely remembered. One of my all time favorite movies, Grand Hotel is one of the forgotten films. The three most remembered Academy Award Best Picture movies from this time period, 1927-1950 are Gone With the Wind, Casablanca and All About Eve. If you read the other lists via the links, you’ll see many movies from this time period remembered better. For instance, I think fans prefer The Maltese Falcon as their favorite Bogie movie. And who could forget The Wizard of Oz, It’s A Wonderful Life, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Double Indemnity, The Philadelphia Story, Sullivan’s Travels, Duck Soup, Top Hat, The Adventures of Robin Hood, Trouble in Paradise, 42nd Street, The Lady Eve, The Grapes of Wrath, Stagecoach, and so many, many other movies that the other lists do remember.

1927/28
	NFR-1997
1928/29

1929/30
	NFR-1990 AMC-#58 IMDB-#73
1930/31

1931/32
	NFR-2007
1932/33

1934
	NFR-1993 EW-#48 AFI-#46 AMC-#54
1935

1936

1937
	NFR-2000
1938

1939
	NFR-1989 EW-#10 AFI-#6 AMC-#8 IMDB-#72
1940
	AMC-#19 RT-#44
1941
	NFR-1990
1942
	NFR-2009
1943
	NFR-1989 EW-#3 AFI-#3 AMC-#8 IMDB-#19
1944
	NFR-2004
1945
	NFR-2011
1946
	NFR-1989 EW-#64 AFI-#37 AMC-#57
1947

1948

1949
	NFR-2001
1950
	NFR-1990 EW-#86 AFI-#28 AMC-#30 RT-#22

JWH – 1/3/14

The Speed of Knowledge versus Copyright

No one yet knows the real impact of the Internet on human society. If it wasn’t for copyright laws, the Internet could be the ultimate library. A dazzling library that it would surpass all existing world libraries and all libraries in history. Even now, most people get more information from the Internet than they ever gotten from a library, or for that matter, from books, magazines, journals and newspapers. Yet, the Internet is severely hobbled by copyright.

Writers need to make a living, and publishers need to make a profit, so it’s understandable that copyrights should protect intellectual property. I don’t resent the need for writers and publishers to make money. I do resent that making money impedes the flow of knowledge. It’s a shame that the current distribution systems are so inefficient at spreading commercial knowledge.

Take for instance the article I just read in The New Yorker, “The Gene Factory” by Michael Spector. If you follow the link you’ll reach a teaser section of the article and information about how to subscribe. This does not let you quickly read the article, which means you probably won’t. If you’re already a subscriber and have set up your digital access, or can just grab your latest copy of the magazine, then reading is a little faster, but not quite as convenient as following a link. Please make the effort, the article is worth it.

Many journals and magazines do offer to let readers buy an immediate reprint, usually for several dollars. This is step in the right direction, but their pricing structure usually causes web users to skip the article. Now I would prefer that the content of all magazines, journals and newspaper be free, but I’m no old hippie, and can understand the need to charge. What I suggest is to make selling articles easier and price them at impulse buying fees. What we need is a good micropayment system so publishers can charge 10-99 cents an article.

“The Gene Factory” by Michael Spector is an article that most people should read, but especially people worried about America’s future and science fiction writers. If you’ve ever seen the movie Gattica then you’ll know what this article is about. Then again, if you’ve ever been fascinated by the decline of the British Empire and wondered when and how the American Empire would start declining, then again, this article is for you.

“The Gene Factory” is specifically about Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI), but also about the impact of gene sequencing on human society. The New Yorker article is very long and full of wonderful details and speculation, far more than I want to paraphrase here. Which is why our society would be so much different if I could just provide you a link and you could go read the article. Then if the article also included links to all the research that Michael Spector put into writing the article, we could all study what he has to say in depth.

Now, wouldn’t that increase the speed of knowledge? And if you don’t feel the need for such speed, then again, I recommend you read the article.

Some magazines like The Atlantic and The Smithsonian put much of their content online for free. I wonder if ideas in their content is spread faster and further throughout the world’s population than paywall controlled content? That has to be the case, but I’d love to see the numbers. Wouldn’t it be lovely to see public hit statistics for every article on the web? Wouldn’t it be very cool to have a place on the web to see what people are reading, the Top 100,000 for the last hour, day, week, month, year and decade? Think about the data mining possibilities!

Even cooler would be a raw hit score, plus a weighted score from people voting reading value. So much more could be done for the Internet. I feel like I’m thinking about television technology in 1939 and wondering what its real potential will be.

By the way, I use the Internet service Next Issue to subscribe to over 125 magazines for $15 a month. It’s a quick way to get access to The New Yorker and many other magazines. Next Issue might be worth trying just to read “The Gene Factory.”

JWH – 1/2/13