Philip Bethge

Tag: zeitgeist

  • A Future of Self-Surveillance? Tech Pioneers Track Bodily Functions Day and Night

    Using smartphone apps and sensors, high tech pioneers are monitoring their own bodily functions such as heart rates, sleep patterns and blood. The ‘self trackers’ dream of a digitalized medicine that will enable people to lead healthier lives by getting around-the-clock updates on what goes on inside their bodies

    By Philip Bethge

    Larry Smarr’s large intestine appears to float in the middle of the room, nestled like a stuffed sausage between his other virtual organs.

    Smarr, a computer science professor, adjusts the dark-tinted 3D glasses perched on his nose and picks up an electronic pointer. “And this is where the wall of my colon is inflamed,” he says, pointing out a spot where the intestinal walls are indeed noticeably swollen.

    A supercomputer combined MRI images of the 63-year-old professor to create the three-dimensional illusion now projected on the wall. It gives the impression that the viewer could go for a stroll inside the researcher’s abdomen. (more…)

  • Lear Jets of the Deep: Private Submarines Gain Popularity with Millionaires

    A new class of private submarines has become the latest plaything for the super rich. They allow would-be adventurers to navigate the wonders of the coral reefs, explore shipwrecks or even to cruise alongside dolphins. The cheapest models start at $1.7 million, but prices can go as high as $80 million – by Philip Bethge

    Just recently, Graham Hawkes tracked down a group of hammerhead sharks. Along for the ride on his Deepflight Super Falcon at the time was an investor named Tom Perkins, a potential client. “We were literally stalking them from below,” Hawkes says. “It felt like flying in liquid sky.”

    Hawkes is an engineer in Point Richmond, California, and his workshop is located at the town’s marina, directly on San Francisco Bay. Visitors don’t exactly wander in here often, but when they do come, they generally have full pockets. Hawkes builds submarines for millionaires.

    His company, Hawkes Ocean Technologies, is one of a number of businesses that specialize in taking the superrich diving. Hawkes’ asking price for the Deepflight Super Falcon, for example, is $1.7 million (€1.3 million). American manufacturer SEAmagine’s Ocean Pearl costs even more, at $2.5 million, but has the benefit of being able to dive to depths of around 900 meters (3,000 feet).

    Triton Submarines, based in Vero Beach, Florida, is another company that specializes in submersibles for the well to do. “Our customers are large yacht owners who want to offer their friends and their family something special,” says Bruce Jones, CEO of Triton. In the deep sea, “they can show them things they have never seen before.”

    Crisis Hasn’t Stopped Demand

    The financial crisis hasn’t stopped the demand for submarines, says Jones, 55. “There are 2,500 large yachts in the world today,” he adds, and most of them have enough room to carry a submarine.

    Today, Jones is in the Bahamas for a trial run. Around 20 prospective clients have come to Grand Bahama Island to try out Triton’s submarines. From the dock in McLeans Town, a speedboat zips them across the turquoise water to the Atlantis II, a retired research vessel Jones uses as the mother ship for his submarine fleet.

    The mustachioed CEO welcomes his guests on the deck, where two yellow submersibles sit waiting. Voluminous floats mounted on their sides also function as ballast tanks. Triton’s trademark features, however, are the acrylic spheres jutting from the top and bottom of the submarines, offering a 360-degree panoramic view.

    A shipboard crane lowers the three-seater Triton 3300/3, which weighs eight metric tons (nine US tons), into the water. The guests board through a hatch in the top. Pilot Troy Engen points to two black valves located behind the gray artificial leather seats and explains they can be used to quickly “bring it (the submarine) up in an emergency.”

    “Roger, payload is okay,” Engen then calls into the headset that keeps him in contact with the Atlantis II. The pilot lets water gush into the floats.

    A few waves crash over the submarine, then it’s calm again. The only sounds are the whirring of the electric motors and the hum of the air conditioning.

    Straight Out of a ‘Bond’ Movie

    Engen pushes the small black joystick on the control panel forward. “Heading 285 (degrees),” he reports to the ship above. “Life support (systems) OK.” The Triton continues on its whirring way, gliding just above a reef like something out of a James Bond movie.

    Colorful fish glow in the submarine’s LED headlights. A nurse shark whooshes past below the passengers’ feet — a surreal experience, since the acrylic wall of the cockpit, around 16 centimeters (6 inches) thick, becomes invisible under water. “Pretty amazing, right?” asks Engen, good-humored and tan.

    –> read original story at SPIEGEL ONLINE International

    The Triton 3300/3 can remain under water for around 10 hours and its purchasing price is about $3 million. Most of the company’s customers wish to remain anonymous; Jones recently sold two submarines to an Australian businessman with a private island in Belize.

    Jones’ next idea is to take tourists under the sea. He’s building an underwater resort with submerged suites (price per week: $15,000) off a private island in the Fiji archipelago. Five submarines will be on hand to ferry guests across artificial reefs during the day. “I am just an old kid living a dream,” the CEO says. As a boy, he wrote letters to legendary French oceanographer Jacques-Yves Cousteau, though Jones says regretfully, “Sadly, he never wrote back.”

    Triton’s submarines are large and heavy machines, hardly useable without a mother ship, but Graham Hawkes in California has developed a very different submarine concept. His vessels are sportier and slimmer — they look like small airplanes with truncated wings.

    A ‘Flight Over Ancient Shipwrecks’

    “We’re building the Learjets of the deep,” says the inventor, who likes to compare his work with that of aviation pioneers. He speaks in flowery terms, promising a “flight over ancient shipwrecks,” “barrel-rolling with the dolphins” and “skyhopping with whales.”

    A new design principle makes these lightweight vessels possible. Unlike other submarines, Deepflight models don’t sink using their own weight, instead applying a similar principle of physics to that used by airplanes: When water streams across the inverted wings, the underwater vessel is drawn downward.

    One of the Super Falcons stands propped up in Hawkes’ workshop in Point Richmond. Two hemispheres of Plexiglas curve up from the top of the cigar-shaped submarine, resembling fighter jet cockpits. Hawkes clambers into the front cockpit and explains the technology involved. A joystick steers the submarine. Instruments indicate cabin pressure and oxygen content in the air. A compass and artificial horizon provide orientation even in murky water.

    This latter-day Captain Nemo has completed around 200 dives with his submarines. A few months ago, Hawkes traveled to the Gulf of Aqaba at the invitation of Jordan’s King Abdullah II. With researchers onboard, Hawkes saw nearly all of Jordan’s coast. “We flew along the whole contour of a coral reef,” he recalls. “I felt like a bush pilot.”

    Graham Hawkes and his wife Karen have set up a “flight school” for submarines as a way of attracting new clients. Many of the customers are enormously wealthy CEOs. Virgin founder Richard Branson, for example, recently purchased one of Hawkes’ Merlin submarines, which the billionaire now rents out to visitors on his private Caribbean isle of Necker Island for $25,000 a week.

    Plans for More Affordable Subs

    But Hawkes has plans to make his submarines affordable for the less wealthy as well. He hopes to be able to bring the price for his “Ferraris of the ocean” down to around $250,000, as soon as there is high enough demand for the Deepflight vessels. “We’ve uncovered a new customer base with our submarines that nobody had thought of,” Hawkes says, expressing hope for his business’ future development.

    When that happens, the super rich will have to look for something more exclusive — perhaps the Phoenix 1000 model, made by manufacturer US Submarines, also part of Triton CEO Jones’ submarine empire.

    Passengers on this 65-meter (210-foot) submersible yacht can travel in comfort both above and below water. Its luxury berths easily hold 20 guests. The manufacturer promotes the Phoenix 1000 as a the unique “opportunity to explore the depths of the world’s oceans in perfect comfort and safety.”

    Such luxury comes at a price, of course. The Phoenix 1000 costs approximately $80 million.

    Translated from the German by Ella Ornstein

    –> read original story at SPIEGEL ONLINE International

  • Feeding the Dream Business: Inside the World of the Hollywood Paparazzi

    Paparazzi have a bad reputation for bending the rules to satisfy the world’s insatiable demand for celebrity photos. But the business is also incredibly lucrative, something that prompted Bill Gates’ Corbis photo agency to buy the world’s top paparazzi shop. Some in the industry are trying to free it from its sleazy image, but upstart agencies have few moral qualms.

    By Philip Bethge

    The place feels like a temple to photography. A giant image of Marilyn Monroe, taken by star photographer Paul Rice in 1956, hangs in the lobby of the Corbis Corporation. Andy Warhol’s portrait of John Lennon dominates the company’s open-plan office in Seattle’s historic Dexter Horton Building.

    Printed on fine gauze, it adorns a staircase leading up to the executive floor, where we meet with Gary Shenk. He is wearing jeans and a T-shirt. The dark rings under his eyes suggest he is not getting enough sleep.

    Shenk is the CEO of Corbis, one of the world’s most renowned high-quality stock photography agencies. The company, owned by Microsoft founder Bill Gates, holds the rights to more than 100 million images. They include the photos of the legendary French agency Sygma, as well as photos from the historic Bettmann Archive, whose inventory dates back as far as the American Civil War.

    The agency sells icons of photography: a nude of Brigitte Bardot in the bathtub; Albert Einstein sticking out his tongue; the black-and-white photos of Vietnamese children fleeing from America napalm bombs.

    Recently, however, this traditional citadel of quality photography has been selling more trivial fare: There’s “Her Royal Hotness” Pippa Middleton wearing pink jeans in London, model Kate Moss drinking and smoking on the beach and French President Nicolas Sarkozy jogging in a blue T-shirt on the Côte d’Azur.

    The change results from Corbis’ acquisition of Splash News, the global market leader for paparazzi photos. It is a breakthrough for a business that, until recently, was still viewed as the street urchin of the industry.

    The thugs of the telephoto lens are becoming presentable — and mainly because the pictures they take can be worth a lot of money. In fact, Shenk estimates “that anywhere from 50 to 60 percent of images that are sold into media these days are entertainment images,” most of them taken by paparazzi.

    Shenk refers to the celebrity snapshots as “candid celebrity photography” — “candid” in the sense that they are “taken from real life.” They revolve around themes of love, sex and tears — and the satisfying feeling that even the rich and beautiful can occasionally have their embarrassing moments and failures in life.

    In the Lair of the Paparazzi

    It takes a trip south from Seattle to Los Angeles to discover how the paparazzi industry works. The small editorial office of Splash News is located at the top of a narrow staircase in a building in the city’s western Venice district. The covers of celebrity magazines hang on the walls like trophies. A large photo shows a group of paparazzi at work, bunched together like students posing for a class portrait.

    The people at Splash News are proud of their work — and of their successes. Company revenues grew by more than 20 percent in the last year alone, says Kevin Smith, one of its founders.

    These days, the British native and former London-based journalist heads a paparazzi empire. The company has supplied the photography for 500 magazine covers over the last five years, he says, adding that Splash News sells photos in close to 70 countries. “I was amazed when we hit the million dollar (mark) in revenues,” says Smith, who drives a Bentley. “Now I am laughing about it.”

    Celebrity news from the company’s field offices around the world have trickled in overnight. As he does every morning, news editor Paul Tetley delivers a brief status report: Jennifer Lopez is in Chile and allegedly sleeping with someone from her team of dancers. Irish singer Sinéad O’Connor plans to get married, for the fourth time, in Las Vegas. A rumor from England says that Prince William’s wife, Kate, is pregnant.

    And, of course, there’s always Alec Baldwin. “He refused to shut off his mobile on a flight yesterday,” Tetley reports. The actor allegedly became verbally abusive and was ordered off the plane. It’s a mini scandal — and a hit for Splash News.

    A Vast Intelligence Operation

    Indeed, the celebrity news agency thrives on the missteps of the stars. “We always used to say ‘Your misfortune is our fortune,’” Smith readily admits. Being in the right place at the wrong time — for the celebrities at least — is the art of the paparazzi, who ply their trade with the virtuosity of skilled investigators.

    The agency employs roughly 1,000 photographers across the world and operates an extensive network of paid informants. Smith has his “tipsters” in hotels, restaurants, theaters, hospitals and airports, including about 100 doormen, bartenders and chauffeurs in Los Angeles alone. Among other things, Splash News uses this network of tipsters to keep track of who is flying when and where, and it closely monitors publicly accessible police reports.

    “Hardly anything happens in this city without our finding out about it,” says Smith, who claims he could find almost anyone within a day. For this knowledge, he depends primarily on his photo reporters, a close-knit group that refers to itself as the CIA, or “Celebrity Intelligence Agency.”

    “The job is a bit like bird-watching,” Smith says. “You have to have a certain tenacity, and you have to be able to blend in.”

    And be fast, he could add. Indeed, Smith’s photographers can transmit their photos directly to the editorial office via a high-speed cell-phone network, thereby giving customers access to the images within seconds.

    “People pay for speed,” Smith explains. “The first picture runs; the second just doesn’t.”

    —> read original story at SPIEGEL ONLINE International edition

    Out on the Hunt

    Owing to this pressing need for speed, Splash photographer Darren Banks always has his Canon EOS 1D Mark IV within reach. The compact 36-year-old is wearing white sneakers and jeans. He was once a marksman with the British Army. “It’s the same training, exactly the same business: Have a recon, shoot the prey,” he says in a strong British accent, maneuvering his large SUV out of a parking spot.

    We drive toward Hollywood, the 20-square-mile (50-square-kilometer) zone surrounding Sunset Boulevard that is the hunting grounds of the paparazzi. Banks always drives up and down the same 12 blocks, along Melrose Avenue, Rodeo Drive and Robertson Boulevard, past “Ivy,” a restaurant popular with celebrities, the “Boa” steakhouse and the Fred Segal boutique. Eventually, he heads toward Beverly Hills, where the stars live.

    In Benedict Canyon, Banks monitors the situation in front of David and Victoria Beckham’s $22-million (€17-million) mansion. A few blocks later, he drives past Tom Cruise’s former house.

    Banks knows the area like the back of his hand. Three months before Cruise’s daughter Suri was born, Banks practically lived in front of the estate’s gate, sitting in his car from 5 a.m. to 11 p.m. every day while taking only short breaks. He calls the practice of waiting for weeks on end for just the right opportunity “doorstepping.”

    At times, he says, there were eight paparazzi lurking in front of the house, but “in the end, I got the largest number of exclusive photographs.” The haul consisted of eight “sets” of photos, little vignettes from the life of the Cruise family that are worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.

    Voyeurism and Pride

    This form of journalism is profitable because the Internet has created a huge new market for the big-game hunters of photojournalism. Magazines like Us Weekly and People, as well as newspapers like the British tabloid Daily Mirror and the German tabloid Bild, are still important customers. But, these days, Smith primarily sells his photos to celebrity websites, such as tmz.com, eonline.com and perezhilton.com, which have something to say about every shopping trip of a given celebrity. Splash News assembles about 200 photo sets of small episodes from the lives of the stars. With these photos and archive images, the company sells about 10,000 photos a day, making it the world’s largest dealer of voyeuristic content.

    With success, however, comes the pressure to liberate the company from its shady image. Indeed, Smith expends a lot of effort touting his company as a “legitimate news agency” and insisting that Splash News’ reporters are well-trained journalists and photographers. “We consider ourselves the gentleman on the block,” he says. “There are a lot of rogues out there,” he adds, referring to photographers only out there to make a quick buck. “They are all rubbish.”

    Allegedly Less Scrupulous Upstarts

    Francois Regis Navarre is one these “rogues” — and someone Smith would prefer to see banished to the deserts of California. After serving as a war reporter in Iraq and Cambodia for the French newspaper Le Monde, Navarre founded the X17 photo agency in 1996. Since then, the 49-year-old Frenchman has scored some of the biggest coups in the paparazzi world.

    For example, the world has Navarre to thank for photos of Britney Spears shaving her head. Navarre also claims to have been the first to know about Michael Jackson’s death because, as he says, one of his men managed to take a few shots of the inside of the ambulance carrying the singer.

    Navarre lives on Amalfi Drive, an exclusive street in Pacific Palisades, and he also owns a beach house in Malibu. Paparazzi photos have made him a rich man, with his company reportedly generating roughly $10 million in annual revenues.

    Others in the paparazzi world despise him because he doesn’t employ professional photographers. Instead, his team is primarily composed of immigrants from countries like Brazil, whom he pays a low flat fee every month for the rights to their photos. He instructs his photographers not to take pictures of stars from far away but, rather, to “flash” them at close range, as he calls it. “I want to have eye contact with the stars,” Navarre says.

    In fact, Navarre has a reputation for occasionally playing fast and loose with the law. For example, California law holds that a person cannot be photographed if a “reasonable expectation of privacy” exists. But, as Navarre sees it, the precise meaning of the words “reasonable expectation” is a subjective matter. For example, he just published photos of Bradley Cooper, one of the lead actors in the recent hit comedy “The Hangover,” with his new girlfriend on the balcony of his house.

    “We go as far as we can without breaking the laws,” Navarre says. “There is a little anarchist in every good paparazzi.”

    The Intensity of the Moment

    Navarre’s cell phone rings. “Kim Kardashian just left her place,” he reports. Even if, by Hollywood standards, the reality-TV star (with an estimated annual income of $6 million) is merely a B-list celebrity, photos of her will probably still be worth a few thousand dollars for X17.

    Navarre hurries to his silver Porsche Cayenne. “She is going down Benedict?” he shouts into the phone, which will not leave his hands anytime soon. “In a white Rolls-Royce?” On Canon Drive, Navarre pulls up just behind the car carrying the star, while one of his photographers pulls up in the next lane, shooting all the while. “Any competitors around?” Navarre shouts through his car’s open window. Within seconds, four other paparazzi speed by, running the next red light.

    The convoy comes to a stop in front of a small hair salon on South Doheny Drive. Navarre grabs his camera and takes pictures of the shop through its glass front door while his men take up positions outside the back entrance. There are only 10 steps between the door and the car as it is being parked. The photographers have to be quick.

    “How do we do this? Stay close to the door or at the car?” Jack Arshamian shouts to his fellow photographers. For months, the Armenian-American has been following Kardashian wherever she goes. “She knows me; she respects my job,” says the former chauffeur, who has been working for Navarre for five months. Eventually, when the star steps out of the salon with her hair freshly done, the clicking of camera shutters sounds like machine-gun fire.

    Questionable Justifications

    What is still permitted, and what isn’t? Which methods are justified by the growing demand for celebrity photos? Though they pride themselves on their professionalism, even the Splash News photographers will admit to taking part in “gang bangs,” the term they use for when a group of photographers launches a surprise attack on a star.

    Likewise, all of the “paps,” as they call themselves, like to show off by telling somewhat far-fetched stories about their own celebrity-hunting experiences. For example, Banks, the former marksman, speaks of his awe for the driving skills of actress Cameron Diaz, who he claims has routinely managed to outrun the powerful SUVs of the photographers in her Toyota Prius.

    However, some of his other stories bring to mind the horrifying accident in Paris that took the life of Princess Diana. To this day, many people consider celebrity photographers to be responsible for her death.

    For example, Banks says, up to 40 paparazzi chased singer Britney Spears around when she was embroiled in her divorce battle with Kevin Federline. “If you are following a celebrity,” he explains, “you build up a box system, and you tend to drive in a convoy. You don’t want members of the public to be at risk.”

    In saying this, Banks is trying to be reassuring. But the paparazzi have no sympathy for the stars. “This is a working town, and fame is something you have to maintain,” says Smith, the Splash News chief. “It’s like fitness: You have to do it everyday to keep it going; we are part of that.”

    In 2007, Smith landed the most lucrative deal in company history when Anna Nicole Smith died. The Splash paparazzi took footage of the model-turned-actress en route to the hospital, when she was presumably already dead. His agency raked in more than $1 million from the coup, Smith says. When asked if his work might be considered irreverent, he says: “The marketplace is the greatest democracy in the world. There is a demand for this kind of pictures.”

    Selling Dreams

    Serving this market is now up to Shenk, the Corbis CEO in Seattle. With the help of Splash News, he hopes to finally turn Corbis into a money-making machine. Twelve Corbis offices and more than 1,000 employees worldwide are now ready to work in the paparazzi-photo business.

    “There is a global appetite for celebrity pictures that is insatiable; consumers will never get tired of looking at beautiful people,” Shenk says.

    As recently as 2008, Shenk said that the celebrity-snapshot business was bad for the industry’s overall image. But now he raves about photos that, as he says, tell “stories about humanity.”

    “I don’t think that this market will ever go down,” he says. “This is about dreams and people’s connections to dreams, and that’s a perpetual human feeling and instinct that will continue forever.”

    Shenk recently discussed the acquisition with Corbis founder Bill Gates. “I could assure him that we have incredibly high standards about making sure that ethical lines are not crossed,” Shenk says.

    Besides, he adds, Gates knows perfectly well that he is also part of the celebrity world: “I fully expect that Splash will cover him.”

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

    —> read original story at SPIEGEL ONLINE International edition

  • A Passion for Bigfoot: Hiking the Redwoods with California’s ‘Squatchers’

    Amateur researchers in the United States continue to eagerly search for the mysterious creature known as Bigfoot, staking out California’s redwood forests at night in their hunt for the elusive beast. Despite many claimed sightings, the existence of Sasquatch has never been proven. Yet that hasn’t stopped the obsessed from pursuing his giant footprints.

    The plaintive howl echoes through the forest sounding like a muffled “whoop, whoop, whoop.” Brandon Kiel pauses to listen in the dark, holding his breath for a moment before drawing air into his lungs.

    Once again, Kiel cups his hands in front of his mouth and imitates the call: “whoop, whoop, whoop.” The sound echoes back through the night, but all else is silence. Bigfoot isn’t answering.

    “The season is favorable,” Kiel says, with a touch of disappointment. “But it’s always possible that the animals are not in the area.” The blueberries are ripe, and the calves of the Roosevelt elk, one of Bigfoot’s favorite foods, haven’t matured yet.

    Kiel, 41, is a field researcher with the Bigfoot Field Researchers Organization (BFRO), a group based in the United States. The creature he is looking for is said to be clever, shy and stealthy — an expert at camouflaging itself. But here in the redwood forests of northern California, Kiel is hoping he’ll be blessed with hunter’s luck. He and 20 fellow field researchers are on an expedition to track down Bigfoot.

    The Believers

    Kiel calls the ominous creature “Squatch,” short for “Sasquatch,” a word in a Native American language that means “wild man of the woods”. The shaggy, mythical creature — half ape, half human — is believed to be powerfully built, reach heights of up to 2.5 meters (over 8 feet) and weigh up to 230 kilograms (500 pounds), and it allegedly spends its time skulking through the forests of North America. So far, there is no real evidence of the existence of this alleged primate species. Indeed, human beings have never actually gotten their hands on a Sasquatch, either dead or alive.

    Nevertheless, experienced “Squatchers” like Kiel are convinced that the animal exists. Even the Native Americans in the region had songs praising this mysterious miniature version of King Kong. Dozens of huge footprints have been found. Hundreds of eyewitnesses from the Canadian province of British Columbia all the way down to Florida — including police officers, park rangers and professors — claim to have laid eyes on the creature. The literature even mentions tufts of hair and a Bigfoot toenail found near the Grand Canyon.

    “I am convinced that the Sasquatch exists,” says British Columbia wildlife biologist John Bindernagel. For years, Bindernagel has put his academic reputation on the line by not only believing in Sasquatch, but also studying it. “I estimate the population of the animal to be several thousand at least,” says Bindernagel, who has already written several books on Bigfoot.

    Bindernagel also has a theory on how Bigfoot reached the American wilderness. He speculates that Gigantopithecus, an extinct genus of giant ape, once migrated from Asia across the same land bridge in what is now the Bering Strait that the first humans are believed to have crossed to reach North America.

    The Squatchers

    Bigfoot is believed to be particularly prevalent in the area around the town of Klamath, in northern California, where a group of adventurous souls has gathered on this October day. Camouflage clothing is de rigueur, and the mood is euphoric. The most avid members of the group have studied the BFRO’s expedition handbook, which informs readers to expect “type 1” inspections: a visit by “one or more” Bigfoots to the tent camp while everyone is sleeping, “most often between 2 a.m. and 5 a.m.”

    No one in the group questions whether the creature exists. Instead, they discuss its biology. The Squatch is “mainly nocturnal,” Kiel says. It lives in groups and is “stinky, musky.” Its diet includes “roots, slugs, frogs, deer, elk, fish, onions and berries.” It literally licks its fingers after eating a meal of skunk cabbage.

    Kiel has a round face with a vandyke beard, and he keeps his hair cropped short. When asked whether he has ever encountered the creature, he says: “Sure, just a couple of weeks ago.”

    In late July, he explains, the Squatchers gathered at Bluff Creek, less than 20 miles (32 kilometers) east across the mountains. “We had walked about a mile and a half, when someone suddenly said: ‘There’s a Sasquatch sitting by the side of the road,’” Kiel recounts. “I didn’t believe him, so I asked: ‘Is it a bear?’ But he was adamant.”

    Kiel grabbed an infrared camera and peered through the viewfinder. “And, sure enough,” he says, “there was the heat signature of a very large animal with its back to us, without a neck, with massively broad shoulders and a pointy head. You could see it from the waist up. I was totally flabbergasted.” Kiel claims that the creature then turned around and looked at him twice. The intimate exchange of glances lasted about 15 minutes. Then Kiel, the expedition leader, decided to pull out. “I wanted to be respectful,” he says.

    The area around Bluff Creek is well known among Bigfoot aficionados. It was where, on Oct. 20, 1967, a legendary amateur film was shot depicting a massive, hairy beast strolling through a riverbed for a few seconds.

    Film experts — and even special-effects artists working for the Disney corporation — have repeatedly scrutinized the blurred, grainy footage. But the evidence remains unclear. Is the creature a person in an ape suit or a world sensation of cryptozoology, the search for animals whose existence has yet to be proven? The man who shot the video, a rodeo rider named Roger Patterson, continued to insist that the film was authentic up until his death in 1972.

    At the BFRO camp in California, at any rate, no one questions the authenticity of the Patterson video. In fact, almost everyone in the group claims to have already seen a Bigfoot at least once. “I was elk hunting”, says Rey Lopez, a government employee who lives near Sacramento. “At first I thought it was another hunter, but then I realized that it was a Sasquatch with whitish hair.”

    Alleged Proof

    We pile into Lopez’s large pickup truck and drive out into the night. After a few miles, he stops the truck on a parking lot in the middle of the woods. The group uses headlamps with red lenses to avoid startling the beast. After a brief walkie-talkie test, everyone is ready to go out “Squatching,” the nightly foray into Bigfoot territory.

    We spend the next few hours whispering and stumbling through the same woods in which parts of Steven Spielberg’s “Jurassic Park” were filmed. The undergrowth is wet, and the red light is barely strong enough to illuminate annoying roots poking out of the ground. Kiel, the expedition’s leader, stops every once in a while and sends his “whoop” calls out into the night. Sometimes he also blows on a high-pitched whistle or hits trees with a large “Squatch knocker” — in layman’s terms, a branch — hoping the hollow sound might attract Bigfoot.

    Meanwhile, Robert Collier, who lives near Los Angeles, continues to observe everything with his night-vision goggles, which he proudly points out are “military grade.” His eyes look green in the device’s light.

    The whole production has only one purpose: to somehow convince the woodland beast to communicate with the group. “Bigfoots have been known to answer us,” says Kiel. “We experience time and again that rocks are thrown at us.” He also points out that “wood-knocks,” “whoops” and “screams” are regularly heard echoing from the undergrowth.

    In fact, noisy audio recordings bear witness to the creature’s supposed vocabulary, including sounds like blood-curdling screams and obscure-sounding jibberish. Particularly avid Squatchers say they’ve managed to make out bits of Russian and ancient Chinese in the audio soup.

    Even some of the creature’s genetic material is allegedly in circulation. Kiel claims that Melba Ketchum, a veterinarian based in Timpson, Texas, has analyzed dozens of hair samples, but that the results of her research have yet to be published. Nevertheless, there are rumors in the community that tissue from two dead Bigfoots is in refrigerated storage at Ketchum’s laboratory.

    Ketchum declines to comment, though, and the Squatchers have waited in vain for her to make an appearance at their annual Bigfoot conferences, which regularly attract several hundred attendees.

    ‘A Good Excuse to Go Camping’

    Does all of this sound crazy? Sure it does. And, yet, there are some questions that remain unanswered. For example, the 1992 discovery of a new bovine species, the Saola, in the jungles of Southeast Asia has given the Squatchers hope. The Saola lives in an area that is no less densely populated than many of the forested areas in the United States.

    Couldn’t it be possible that a shrewd giant ape has been hiding undiscovered in the forests of North America for centuries?

    “It’s a good excuse to go camping,” says Bill Brewer, who harbors a healthy degree of skepticism despite being a BFRO member. Squatching, he says, also happens to be a lot of fun.

    Perhaps this explains why these hikers in the northern California night seem undaunted in their enthusiasm, even though the woods remain stubbornly silent until the early morning hours. But at least that gives them a good reason to come back soon.

    And it might also be that the Squatchers don’t even want to find the mysterious, broad-shouldered creature after all.

    “I like the romantic notion of our search, this wonderful gray area,” Kiel says. If Bigfoot is actually discovered one day, he notes: “Then all of this will be over.”

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

    (->read original story at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

     

  • Cannibalism Clichés: Racism Concerns Raised by German Man’s Mysterious Death

    Cannibalism Clichés: Racism Concerns Raised by German Man’s Mysterious Death

    In early October, the charred remains of a German adventurer were discovered at a campfire site on a South Pacific island. The tabloid media were quick to portray the slaying as a possible case of cannabalism on Nuku Hiva, an island historically known for human sacrifice. But locals are offended and experts say such killings are a thing of the very distant past.

    All of the pieces seem to fit together so well. There is the paradise in the South Pacific; the islander with the tattoo on his chest; the likeable young German adventurer; and, finally, the gruesome of discovery of charred human flesh.

    Did the local eat the German tourist, who was sailing around the world?

    Debora Kimitete shakes her head in disgust, unable to comprehend the turmoil that has descended upon her community in recent days. “We feel very angry and hurt,” says the deputy mayor of the Pacific island of Nuku Hiva, the largest of the French Polynesian Marquesas Islands. “What they did with this story is racism; it’s an insult to all Marquesans.”

    Kimitete is wearing a white cotton blouse and has her hair pulled back tightly in a ponytail. Carved wooden sculptures decorate her office in the municipal building of Taiohae, the island’s capital. The small settlement is surrounded by steep slopes rising up to jagged peaks covered with lush green vegetation. It takes more than two hours to trek from there to the spot in the Hakaui Valley where 40-year-old Stefan Ramin died.

    Charred Remains in a Campfire

    Ramin, a sailor from Haselau, a town near Hamburg, reportedly went goat hunting on Oct. 9 with local resident Henri Haiti, 31. According to Ramin’s companion, Heike D., 37, Haiti returned without Ramin and then lured her into the forest and tried to rape her, but then he fled. Charred bones, bits of flesh and teeth were later found in the remains of a campfire. They were Ramin’s teeth.

    Since then, everything has changed on Nuku Hiva. A 17-member special French police unit (the Marquesas Islands are a French territory) is searching for Haiti, who has been hiding in the wilderness since the crime. Meanwhile, the island community has faced accusations of being a group of cold-blooded cannibals. “People are afraid,” says Kimitete. “Something like that normally doesn’t happen on this island.”

    Only about 2,900 people live on Nuku Hiva. There is one flight a day to the island from Papeete on Tahiti. The main settlement, Taiohae, has one hotel, two churches, a school and a few small shops.

    In mid-September, the German couple — she is a yoga instructor, and he was a management consultant — dropped anchor near the island. They had been sailing the world’s oceans since 2008. He was bitten by the sailing bug early in life, and when Stefan was 16, his father gave him his first boat.

    The 14-meter (46-foot) aluminum catamaran that the two Germans had called their “little house on the water” for the last three-and-a-half years is named the “Baju.” The sailors wrote on their website that their boat was equipped to discover the “most remote paradises on earth.” Now it is bobbing in the gentle Pacific swells near a local boardwalk.

    Preparing for a Local Festival

    What really happened on that day, when Ramin asked the islander to accompany him on a goat hunt, as tourists often do on the island? Was there an accident in the mountains? Did the two men have an argument? There are no eyewitnesses, and the presumed killer did not pick up Heike D. until later.

    (->read original story at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    Joseph Jaffé spoke with Heike D. The lanky German offered to serve as an interpreter when the local police tried to question her, and she was in shock. But he is not allowed to say anything about the interrogation.

    In fact Jaffé, an ethnologist and linguist, would really prefer to have nothing to do with the matter. Jaffé is on Nuku Hiva for a different reason. For the islanders, the horrific story comes at a bad time. They are rehearsing for the biggest Marquesan cultural event in years, and Jaffé is one of the organizers.

    The islanders plan to celebrate Mata Va’ha, the Eyes Open Festival, from Dec. 15-18. “We hope to revive the traditional culture of the Marquesans,” says Jaffé. “It’s a new kind of search for identity.” Some 2,000 dancers and musicians are expected on the island.

    The deep, booming sound of drums is coming from the community center next to the town hall, where local residents are dancing 27ha, the Eyes Open Festival, from Dec. 15-18. “We hope to revive the traditional culture of the Marquesans,” says Jaffé. “It’s a new kind of search for identity.” Some 2,000 dancers and musicians are expected on the island.

    The deep, booming sound of drums is coming from the community center next to the town hall, where local residents are dancing the Haka Manu, or “bird’s dance.” Heavy-set men are stomping their feet to the powerful beat, holding the U’u, the Marquesans’ traditional warrior’s club, in their hands. Many of the dancers are tattooed. Sweat glistens on their naked upper bodies.

    19th Century Human Sacrifices

    The fugitive Henri Haiti is also someone who honored traditions. And he, too, is broad-shouldered and has tattoos. But does that make him a cannibal, as the German tabloid Bild speculated?

    Jaffé is familiar with the prejudices. “Europeans enjoy dividing the world into good and evil,” says the academic. For tourists, the cannibal story is an “obsession.” “There were human sacrifices here,” says the ethnologist. “There’s no doubt about that.” But, he adds, all of that happened long ago. Besides, many accounts of cannibalism were already exaggerated in imaginative ways back then.

    A.P. Rice, an American anthropologist, described the Marquesans’ cult of human sacrifice more than a century ago. According to Rice, it was considered a “great triumph” among the Marquesans to eat the body. The natives, Rice claimed, would first break the prisoners’ arms and legs so that they could neither run away nor defend themselves. In the end, the victims were supposedly skewered and roasted.

    The American writer Hermann Melville, who later wrote “Moby Dick,” also helped shape the image of bloodthirsty wild natives. After a trip to Nuku Hiva, he turned his experiences into a novel, “Typee.” In the work from 1846, he describes a “curiously carved vessel of wood” on the village square. When Melville lifts the lid, he sees parts of a human skeleton, the “bones still fresh with moisture.”

    ‘Cannibalism Theory’ Plays No Role

    But how much of it was legend and how much was the truth? There are certainly no human sacrifices anymore today. “Traditional Marquesan culture went extinct more than a hundred years ago,” says Jaffé. The last reported case of a human sacrifice happened in 1880, according to Jaffé. The Marquesans were Christianized starting in the mid-19th century, and they almost died out as a result of the epidemics and opium brought in by outsiders. As their numbers dwindled, their traditional customs also vanished. In 1842, there were about 12,000 people living on Nuku Hiva. By 1934, there were only 634 left.

    In Taiohae, the sun is now setting behind the jagged ridges, forming dark green patterns on the dense vegetation covering the mountain slopes. The police are closing in on the fugitive.

    An area where a man had been sleeping was found near a hunting camp where food was stolen. Nevertheless, Haiti still had not been captured by the end of last week. He knows the hidden paths of hunters and the caves in the mountains where he can sleep without risk of detection. The islander is accused of attempted rape, kidnapping and murder.

    The only aspect of the case that is clear is that Ramin’s body was burned. “The cannibalism theory plays no role in our investigation,” says prosecutor José Thorel.

    The dead man’s father and friend traveled to Nuku Hiva at the end of the week to say their goodbyes. Shortly after the crime, the victim’s father, Erwin Ramin, sent an e-mail to the organizer of the Mata Va’ha festival.

    “I’m afraid that they’ll cancel the festival,” says Erwin Ramin. “I asked them not to do it. These people are trying to regain their culture.”

    Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan

     

  • Nathan Myhrvold: ‘Culinary History Has To Be Analyzed Like Art History’

    In a SPIEGEL interview, inventor and chef Nathan Myhrvold, the author of the new book “Modernist Cuisine,” discusses the deployment of laboratory equipment in the kitchen, the preparation of the perfect cheeseburger and the practice of hyperdecanting — using a blender to serve wine.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Myhrvold, what is wrong with the ordinary French fry?

    Nathan Myhrvold: There is nothing wrong with it, but most French fries are just not perfect. They’re too greasy, they’re underdone, they’re not crispy. And most of them wind up being soggy.

    SPIEGEL: Definitely a culinary affront. Are you able to offer any help with your new scientific cookbook, “Modernist Cuisine”?

    Myhrvold: Yes, and this is a subject many people are obsessed with. The traditional technique is that you fry French fries twice — first at a lower temperature, then at higher temperature, letting them cool in-between. We decided to follow a totally different approach to create a French fry that was crisp on the outside, that had a very light fluffy texture on the inside and that would stay that way for some time. First, we steam the French fries so that they are basically cooked. Then we put them in an ultra-sonic bath …

    SPIEGEL: … an appliance that is normally used for cleaning jewelry or glasses?

    Myhrvold: Well, yes. It produces very high frequency soundwaves that cause tiny bubbles to form in water, which are so powerful that they can actually rip holes in aluminium foil in a process called cavitation. In the case of the French fries, it pokes little holes in their surface. That makes the exterior rough. If we now fry them, we get an extra crispy experience because of the extra surface area.

    SPIEGEL: Yum! And how long does it take to make them?

    Myhrvold: Two hours. But really, the extra time is the ultra-sonic bath. It sits in there for 45 minutes and you don’t have to care.

    (-> read original interview at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    SPIEGEL: Your new book, “Modernist Cuisine,” is a six volume, 2,400 page behemoth, which weighs 47 pounds (21 kilograms). It’s an encyclopaedic treatment of modern cooking techniques and recipes and costs $650 (€445). Who do you think is going to read something like that?

    Myhrvold: The book is for people who really love food, no matter if they are professionals, home cooks or even if they don’t cook themselves at all. I wanted to have a book that would explain cooking in a way I’d never seen a cookbook do before. And I wanted to take techniques that have been developed by great chefs around the world that are almost impossible to learn unless you go and work in those restaurants.

    SPIEGEL: The underlying theme of “Modernist Cuisine” is that we are witnessing a revolution in cooking. What does it entail?

    Myhrvold: The book is about pushing the boundaries of cooking using science and technology and laying the foundations for 21st-century cooking. Most of it has its roots in the mid-1980s, when people realized that science was important to cooking and that technology was relevant, too. My friend Ferran Adria of the restaurant El Bulli, in Spain, started very early on to experiment with these new techniques. My co-authors, Chris Young and Maxim Billet, and I document this revolution. And we did invent some new dishes and techniques.

    SPIEGEL: The book features, for example, recipes of faux eggs made with parmesan cheese, “caviar” made from melon and “cherries” made of foie gras. Is this sheer childish curiosity?

    Myhrvold: The new revolution in cooking can be viewed in two ways. One is that you can take any traditional food and apply modern techniques. In the book, for example, we have some very traditional American food, like maccaroni and cheese. They taste better but basically look the same. The other approach is to create food that is quite different than anything that has existed before. That’s what I call cooking in a modernist aesthetic. Let’s do a risotto made with pinenuts instead of rice, for example. Pinenuts are a traditional Italian ingredient, but they have never been used this way. By doing so, however, you make something that is delicous, fresh and new and that has an interesting culinary reference.

    SPIEGEL: You are a mathematician and a physicist. Does your enthusiasm for cooking stem from the fact that it is reminiscent of experimenting in a laboratory?

    Myhrvold: Food, like anything else, lives in the physical world and obeys the laws of physics. When you whisk together some oil and a little bit of lemon juice — or, in other words, make mayonnaise — you are using the principles of physics and chemistry. Understanding how those principles affect cooking lets you cook better. And I was fascinated by this very early on. When I was 9 years old, I announced to my mother I was going to cook Thanksgiving dinner …

    SPIEGEL: … which involves the roasting of a whole turkey …

    Myhrvold: … exactly, and so I went to the library, got Auguste Escoffiers classic “Le Guide Culinaire” and tried.

    SPIEGEL: How did you fare?

    Myhrvold: Well, I could do a lot better today, but I was enthusiastic and I was nine. After that, I read literally hundreds of cookbooks and was sort of a self-taught chef. Then, in the mid-1990s, I took a leave of absence from my job at Microsoft to go to chef’s school La Varenne, in France.

    SPIEGEL: In 1991, you were even on a winning team at the World Championship Barbecue Cooking Contest, in Memphis.

    Myhrvold: Yes. There is a long tradition of barbecuing in the southern United States. For “Modernist Cuisine,” we looked into this micro-regional cuisine and invented nine different barbecue sauces. We also looked at grilling. By doing a computer simulation, we discovered that, if you line the inside of your grill with aluminium foil, the cooking is much more even.

    SPIEGEL: How do you cook a steak medium rare to perfection the modern way?

    Myhrvold: First, we cook our meat. Then, we use an extremely hot grill or a torch to heat the outside and make it crispy. For cooking, you can use a steam oven or a combi-oven. However, the steak gets even better if you use the sous-vide cooking technique.

    SPIEGEL: … the method of cooking vacuum-sealed food very slowly in a water basin at comparably low temperatures …

    Myhrvold: Exactly. NASA, for example, used the method for food for space flight. The key thing is the control over temperature and cooking time. It is very carefree and very accurate in temperature, which means you get the precise results you were aiming for every single time. You also conserve the flavors.

    SPIEGEL: You also present what you describe as the ultimate cheeseburger recipe in the book. Please explain.

    Myhrvold: We have a philosophy that any dish can be made fantastic if you really care about it. So, if you want to make the ultimate cheeseburger, you better make your own bun, your own sauces and your own pattie. First, there is this special mix of meat, and we did a lot of experiments to find the right meat mixture. Then, we have a specific way of grinding it that aligns the grain. It’s simple to do and we feel it makes a real difference in how the hamburger tastes and what the texture is. Next, we cook the hamburger sous vide. Then we put it into liquid nitrogen for 30 seconds to a minute. Finally, we deep fry it. That’s even better than grilling.

    SPIEGEL: Can you describe the result?

    Myhrvold: The outside is very brown and crisp, the inside medium-rare in perfection. The bun and the lettuce and the other things have to contrast the flavor. That’s what you want. Some people make fun of the fact that it takes 30 hours to do. But if you care about hamburgers, here is the ultimate hamburger.

    SPIEGEL: To write “Modernist Cuisine,” you created a complete “Cooking lab” in a portion of a 20,000-square-foot (1,858-square-meter) warehouse outside Seattle that houses the research lab of your company, “Intellectual Ventures”. The Cooking lab is one of the most compelling kitchens in the world, with a load of industrial-type equipment. What, for example, is a Rotovap?

    Myhrvold: It’s a laboratory device for doing destillations. And there are a couple of cooking contexts where you want do that. There are many foods, for example, that have flavor compounds in them which you can distill. You can also use the device to make cognac, schnapps or whiskey. And we actually do quite the opposite: If you take a scotch whiskey and distill out the alcohol, what is left has an amazing taste to it and can be used as a flavoring for a dessert.

    SPIEGEL: The kitchen also features a 100-ton hydraulic press, for example, for beef jerky, and an autoclave, which — as far as I know — is designed to sterilize lab equipment. You call it “the pressure cooker from hell.”

    Myhrvold: Yes. And it does a great French onion soup! The onions for such a soup typically have to be brown. But that browning reaction is tricky. It’s very easy to burn the onion. Now, we take the onion, put it in a little bit of water and add a little bit of baking soda. After 30 minutes in the autoclave, we have perfect French onion soup.

    SPIEGEL: A spray dryer, freeze dryer, combi-oven and vacuum sealer — this isn’t exactly the stuff one would find in an everyday kitchen.

    Myhrvold: Well, many of these machines are made for laboratory use and are fairly expensive. But you don’t have to get all of them. If you are willing to buy a little bit of equipment, then you can cook 70 to 80 percent of the recipes in the book. The three most useful machines are the water bath for cooking sous vide, the centrifuge and the homogenizer.

    SPIEGEL: You really think people will do this at home?

    Myhrvold: Sure. And it makes a lot of things easier. Modern cooking techniques can achieve ideal results without the perfect timing or good luck that traditional methods demand. Take beurre blanc, for example …

    SPIEGEL: … which disintegrates quite easily if you don’t take utmost care.

    Myhrvold: Exactly. And we have a recipe for the invincible beurre blanc that you can make ahead of time, that you can even put in the refrigerator and heat up later. The recipe involves some emulsifiers that you don’t get in every grocery store, but you can usually find them on the Internet …

    SPIEGEL: For example?

    Myhrvold: Propylene glycol alginate, which is derived from a seaweed and originally comes from Japan. We use it for a lot of recipes. It’s great and easy to use.

    SPIEGEL: You also recommend putting wine in a blender for decanting. Are you serious?

    Myhrvold: Absolutely. It is called hyperdecanting …

    SPIEGEL: … which is probably a great way to freak the hell out of any wine-lover.

    Myhrvold: Completely. And thats half of the value. I did this with a friend of mine once who is a Spanish duke and who comes from one of the oldest wine-making families in Spain. When I hit the switch of the blender with his wine in there, I thought he is gonna pull a sword.

    SPIEGEL: How does it work?

    Myhrvold: Part of the goal of decanting is to have the gases that have dissolved in the wine come out of it. Another goal is to have oxygen come in. The traditional way is to pour the wine over a large part of the surface area of the decanter so that the exchange of gas is promoted. And so I said, hey, we can promote the exchange of gas even better with a blender in about 30 seconds. In blind tests, most people find this to be an improvement, particular for a young red wine, such as an ’82 Margaux.

    SPIEGEL: To make “Modernist Cuisine” even more compelling, you went to great lengths in illustrating the book. Heavy machinery was used to bisect a whole kitchen?

    Myhrvold: We have two-halfs of one of the best kitchens in the world. We cut a microwave in half, a grill, a wok and even a $5,000 restaurant oven. Early in the book project, I hit upon this idea of doing cutaway photos, where we would show the magic view of what’s happening inside your food while it cooks. You see the glowing coals and the fat flaring up from the burgers, and the burgers themselves are cut in half so you can see what happens is as the heat progresses through.

    SPIEGEL: Was it worth the effort?

    Myhrvold: Well, you tell me. Our goal was to show people food as they have never seen it before. To achieve that, we actually made a hell of a mess. For example, we discovered why people don’t cut their woks in half. Our wok caught fire three times, because the oil from the wok would get right into the flame of the burner and then, whoosh. And we had to clean up and start again. But, in the end, we got the shot. And the shot, I think, shows you all the things that go on during stir frying, because stir frying is a combination of tossing things in the air, having super high heat from below and so forth.

    SPIEGEL: You seem to enjoy questioning traditions of cooking and reinventing methods and technologies. Is cooking an ever-changing subject, maybe even comparable to art or theater?

    Myhrvold: Absolutely. Culinary history has to be analyzed in a similar way to art history. Ferran Adria or Heston Blumenthal, chef of the restaurant Fat Duck, near London, are the modernists of cooking. They create wonderful experiences, comparable to an opera or a Broadway play in New York. I think that there is a role for food to be art; and when food is art, it can have drama, it can have spectacle, it can be theatrical. It can be this amazing experience. That’s what they are aiming to do.

    SPIEGEL: Mr. Myhrvold, we thank you for this interview.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge

    (-> read original interview at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • Technology Pioneer David Gelernter: ‘Love Is Beyond Watson’

    What does Watson’s Jeopardy victory tell us? Not much, says David Gelernter, the computer science pioneer and Yale professor. SPIEGEL spoke with Gelernter about the prospects of achieveing artifically-created consciousness and the belief that eternal life can be secured on a hard drive.

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Gelernter, the American journalist Ambrose Bierce described the word we are looking for as “a temporary insanity curable by marriage.” Do you know what we mean?

    Gelernter: I don’t.

    SPIEGEL: It’s love. It’s a question from the TV show Jeopardy, and the IBM supercomputer Watson had no problem finding the solution. So does that mean Watson knows what love is?

    Gelernter: He doesn’t have the vaguest idea. The field of artificial intelligence has not even started to address how emotions are represented cognitively, what makes a belief and so forth. The problem is, I don’t think only with my mind. I think with my body and my mind together. There’s no such thing as love without bodily input, output, reaction and response. So love is beyond Watson.

    SPIEGEL: Why, then, is Watson still doing well at Jeopardy?

    Gelernter: Because the body is not involved in playing Jeopardy. You don’t have to mean or to believe a single thing you say. The game is superficial enough to be winnable by an entity with no emotions, no sensations, and no self.

    SPIEGEL: Still, Watson’s opponents, Jeopardy all-time champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter, said in interviews that they had the feeling they were playing against a human. How come we can even consider Watson being on a par with us?

    Gelernter: I even consider my macaw Ike to be on a par with me (laughs and points to his macaw). But seriously, I’d rather chat with Watson than with some of the people in my department at Yale. Any baby with a teddy bear immediately anthropomorphizes the teddy bear. We want to see images of ourselves, mirrors of ourselves. Anthropomorphizing is a powerful human urge. So I have no problems calling Watson a “he.” That’s a normal human response.

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

    SPIEGEL: Watson defeated Jennings and Rutter in the competition recently with staggering ease. If not human-like, can Watson at least tell us something about the human mind?

    Gelernter: Watson was not built to study the human mind. And the IBM people don’t claim that they’ve solved any cognitive problems. Watson was built to win Jeopardy. That’s it. For that purpose, it is drawing heavy on the parallel programming strategy. This strategy explicitly says: forget about the brain. The question is, can we burn raw computing power in such a way that we can create something that’s able to compete with a human? The result is an extraordinary piece of technology that — unlike IBM’s chess computer Deep Blue — has major implications for applied artificial intelligence.

    Computers Don’t Know What Pain Is

    SPIEGEL: But could you bring yourself to call a machine like that “intelligent”?

    Gelernter: The question is how superficial you are willing to be with your definition of “intelligence.” When we think of it seriously, intelligence implies a self who is intelligent, an entity that can sense its thoughts, is aware of the fact that it’s thinking and that it is manifesting intelligence. None of that is part of Watson by design.

    SPIEGEL: But let’s assume that we start feeding Watson with poetry instead of encyclopedias. In a few years time it might even be able to talk about emotions. Wouldn’t that be a step on the way to at least showing human-like behavior?

    Gelernter: Yes. However, the gulf between human-like behavior and human behavior is gigantic. Feeding poetry into Watson as opposed to encyclopedias is not going to do any good. Feed him Keats, and he will read “My heart aches, and a drowsing numbness pains my senses.” What the hell is that supposed to mean? When a poet writes “my heart aches” it’s an image, but it originates in an actual physical feeling. You feel something in the center of your chest. Or take “a drowsing numbness pains my senses”: Watson can’t know what drowsy means because he’s never fallen asleep. He doesn’t know what pain is. He has no purchase on poetry at all. Still, he could win at Jeopardy if the category were English Romantic poets. He would probably even do much better than most human contestants at not only saying Keats wrote this but explaining the references. There’s a lot of data involved in any kind of scholarship or assertion, which a machine can do very well. But it’s a fake.

    SPIEGEL: What is so special about the human brain that the machine can’t replicate it?

    Gelernter: The brain is radically different from the machine. Physics and chemistry are fundamental to its activity. The brain moves signals from one neuron to another by using a number of different neurotransmitters. It is made out of cells with certain properties, built out of certain proteins. It is a very elaborate piece of biology. The computer on the other hand is a purely electronic machine made out of semiconductors and other odds and ends. I can’t replicate the brain on a chip just in the same way I can’t replicate orange juice on a chip. Orange juice is just not the same thing as a chip.

    SPIEGEL: Are you serious about your statement that a machine won’t truly be able to think until it can daydream and hallucinate?

    Gelernter: Absolutely. We go through an oscillation between different mental states several times during the day, and you can’t understand the mind without understanding this spectrum. We have wide-awakeness, high energy, high level of concentration, which is associated with analytical capacities. And at the other end of the spectrum, we are exhausted, our thoughts are drifting. In that state, our thoughts are arranged in a different way. We start to freely associate. Take Rilke: All of a sudden it occurred to him that the flight of a swallow in the twilight sky is like a crack in a teapot. It’s a very strange image but a very striking image. Certainly, nobody else ever said it before. These sorts of new analogies and new images give rise to creativity, but also to scientific insights. Emotion has a lot to do with it. Why do you combine a bird flying with a piece of ceramic with a crack? Because, at least in Rilke’s mind, they are tagged with a similar emotion.

    SPIEGEL: But we are certainly able to think without getting so poetic.

    Gelernter: True. At the upper end of the spectrum, when my thoughts are disciplined by the logical rules of induction, analogies play no part. I have hypotheses, and I work my way through to conclusions. That kind of intelligence doesn’t need emotions, and it doesn’t need a body. But it is also of almost no importance to human beings. We think purely logically, analytically, roughly zero percent of our time. However, when I am thinking creatively, when I am inventing new analogies, I can’t do that without my emotional faculty. The body is intensely involved; it created the fuel that drives that process by engendering emotions.

    SPIEGEL: But even Watson might soon be able to come up with interesting analogies. Just give him the right books to read.

    Gelernter: It’s possible to build a machine that is capable of what seems like creativity — even a machine that can hallucinate. But it wouldn’t be like us at all. It would always be a fake, a facade. So, it is perfectly plausible that “Watson 2050” will win some poetry contests. It might write a magnificent sonnet that I find beautiful and moving and that becomes famous all over the world. But does that mean that Watson has a mind, a sense of self? No, of course not. There is nobody at home.

    SPIEGEL: Can you be sure?

    Gelernter: There is nothing inside.

    SPIEGEL: How can you know, then, that somebody is at home within another human being?

    Gelernter: I know what I am. I am a human being. If you are a human being too, my belief is you are intelligent. And not because you passed a test, not because you showed me you can do calculus or translate Latin. You could be fast asleep, somebody could ask, “Is he intelligent?” And I will say, “Yes, of course. He’s a human being.” The only intelligence everyone has ever experienced firsthand is his own. There is no objective test for intelligence in others. The observable behavior tells you nothing about what is within. The only way we can confidently ascribe intelligence is by seeing a creature like us.

    “Scientists Will Never Reproduce a Human Mind”

    SPIEGEL: There is a lab in Lausanne, Switzerland, where a group of scientists are trying to recreate the brain’s biology in each and every detail, one neuron at a time, in a supercomputer. They hope to replicate a complete human brain within a decade. Wouldn’t that be “a creature like us”?

    Gelernter: They could produce a very accurate brain simulator. They may be able to predict the behavior of the brain down to the transmission of signals. But they’re not going to produce a mind any more than a hurricane simulator produces a hurricane.

    SPIEGEL: Other scientists are far more optimistic. Regardless of all the obstacles, they say, the exponentially growing number of transistors on a chip will provide us with virtually infinite possibilities. If we connect huge numbers of computer chips in the right way and give them the right tasks to perform, then at some point consciousness will emerge.

    Gelernter: It is impossible to create mental states by writing software — no matter how sophisticated it gets. If a simple computer can’t produce orange juice, a much more complicated computer won’t do any better. Computer chips are just the wrong substrate, the wrong stuff for consciousness. Now, can some kind of a miracle happen if you put a lot of them together? Maybe. But I have no reason to believe that such a miracle will happen.

    SPIEGEL: Given that we can manage a really good fake, a robot that pretends to be conscious in a convincing way — would we even notice if it wasn’t the real thing?

    Gelernter: It already makes no difference to us. Just take the robots in Iraq and Afghanistan where they search for mines and so forth. The men on the front lines become emotionally attached to their robots, they’re sad when they are destroyed. And 50 years from now, robots will be much better. There are a lot of lonely people in the world. So now they have a robot, and it is around all the time, chats with them. Sure they will be attached to it. The robot will know all about them. The robot will be able to say things like, “How are you feeling this morning? I realize your back was hurting yesterday.” Will people have human-type feelings towards the robots? Absolutely. And then the question becomes: Does it matter that, in this sense, they are being defrauded? The answer is, given the scarcity of companionship in the world, it probably doesn’t matter in practical terms. However, it certainly matters philosophically. If you care about what it is to be a human being, the robot is not going to tell you.

    SPIEGEL: Things might change if you give him a near-perfect body, equipped with sensors that help him feel things and explore his environment like humans do.

    Gelernter: In that case the machine would be capable of simulating humanness much more effectively. But a fake body attached to a computer is still not going to generate real sensations. If you knocked your foot on something, your brain registers what we call pain. If you think of something good that is going to happen tomorrow, the body responds by feeling good, then the mind feels better and so forth. This feedback loop is very important to human behavior. A fake body, however, is still just binary switches with voltage levels going up and down.

    SPIEGEL: The American computer scientist Ray Kurzweil argues that the Internet itself might be on the brink of becoming super-intelligent, just because it will have computing power beyond imagination. And his beliefs are gaining in popularity. Why are these ideas so attractive?

    Gelernter: Because creating the mind is the philosopher’s stone of the Digital Age. In the Middle Ages, the alchemists tried to produce gold. Now they’ve moved over to the mind. Don’t get me wrong: They are going to produce a lot of interesting science along the way. But they are not going to get a mind.

    If You’re Dead, You’re Dead

    SPIEGEL: The so-called Singularity Movement predicts the advance of highly intelligent machines that will one day perhaps even become part of our bodies.

    Gelernter: We are being offered more ways than ever to destroy humanity by negating the significance of humanness. In the science fiction community there are those who say, “I will live forever insofar as I will be able to take my entire mind state and upload it to some server, and then I can die, but it doesn’t matter if my mind stays there.” Now, any two-year-old child can see the flaw in this argument: When you die, you are dead, and it doesn’t matter if there is one copy or a billion copies of what your mind was before you died. It doesn’t matter to you. You’re still dead. The great philosophical analogy of the second half of the 20th century was that mind is to brain the way software is to computer. But this is ridiculous. There is no analogy between mind and software.

    SPIEGEL: Why not?

    Gelernter: If you have some software, you can make as many copies as you like. You can put it on a million different computers, and it is always exactly the same software. Minds, however, run on exactly one platform. You can’t swap the mind out to some storage medium and then run it again after keeping it offline.

    SPIEGEL: Hypothetically, what would happen if you managed to transfer one person’s brain into another person’s body?

    Gelernter: There would be no mind anymore. As you took the brain from somebody and put it into somebody else’s head, the mind that you used to have is gone because that mind was part of a body and responsive to that body. From a medical standpoint, the question is if the brain is a flexible enough organism to re-tune itself to a different kind of input from a different body. But the original mind would definitely be lost.

    SPIEGEL: Assuming those popular visions of Artificial Intelligence won’t come true in the foreseeable future, where do you see AI research going in the next decade?

    Gelernter: My hope is that the philosophy of mind and cognitive science will develop a very sophisticated theory of how the mind works. The philosophy of mind has been dazzled by computing, which led down the wrong path. We have to get rid of this ridiculous obsession with computing, which has done tremendous damage. People worrying about singularity should go back and read Nietzsche. They should try and understand Kafka seriously. They should read a poet like William Wordsworth. Now, in an entirely separate effort, Artificial Intelligence will produce more and more powerful machines. We’ll rely on them heavily. They will fix problems and answer questions for us all the time. No one will claim that they have minds, least of all the people who built the programs.

    SPIEGEL: One of those powerful assistants might well be a descendent of Watson. Let’s assume it has been shrunken to the size of a pea, and it could be plugged into our brains. Wouldn’t it be wonderful to have all that knowledge on hand within your own body?

    Gelernter: I can have all of Watson’s knowledge available already — by just opening my laptop. Does it matter to me if I can get the answer not in 10 seconds but in 10 microseconds? It really depends on how I define my integrity as a human being. Could I get more direct access to a million completely meaningless disconnected facts if I implanted a Watson chip and then go onto Jeopardy? I would win Jeopardy. However, it would give me no happiness, no satisfaction, no feeling of triumph, no feeling of accomplishment.

    SPIEGEL: You wouldn’t feel tempted to get yourself a Watson?

    Gelernter: Sure I would. This is a brilliant, exciting piece of technology. I don’t want to take anything away from it. It puts AI on a track that is going to produce fascinating technology. It uses exactly what we are rich in, namely pure primitive computer power, to produce sophisticated answers to complex questions. We need that ability, and Watson can do it.

    SPIEGEL: Would you trade your macaw for Watson, if you had to choose?

    Gelernter: No way would I trade my macaw in for any piece of software. Look at him. He’s got a face. He’s got a big smile on his beak. He’s a creature who does have emotions, who has interests, and who is a member of the family. You’d have to offer me a lot more than Watson for my macaw.

    SPIEGEL: Dr. Gelernter, thank you very much for talking to us.

    Interview conducted by Philip Bethge and Manfred Dworschak

    (-> read original article at SPIEGEL ONLINE international)

  • ‘People are basically good’: Twitter-Founder Biz Stone on the networks revolutionary power

    Isaac “Biz” Stone, 36, reportedly set up Twitter with his buddy Jack Dorsey in only two weeks in 2006. Meanwhile, the Network has over 175 million users worldwide.

    Q: Mr. Stone, the movie „The Social Network“ depicts how Facebook-founder Mark Zuckerberg bullied his way to be the youngest billionaire of all times. Would it be possible to tell a similar story about Twitter?

    Stone: I don’t think we’re quite interesting enough to be a movie. We’re not like the dorm room startup and there is not enough intrigue.

    Q: However, you burned three CEO already, after only three years in business. What went wrong?

    Stone: This has a lot to do with what Twitter needed at different times. In 2009 we had about three million users. Now we have about 175 million. For a long time we were working on reliability and we achieved that. But always fighting fires kept us from developing a strong vision what Twitter could be in the future. That’s what we are trying to do right now with a new CEO. And the recent relaunch of Twitter shows it.

    Q: What is Twitter today and how would you explain it to new potential users?

    Stone: Twitter today is a real-time information network that spans everything from your friends’ updates to global news and events. There are 90 million tweets being created every day, and all of these tweets are being archived at subsecond speed by our search engine, which means for any person in the world there’s pretty much going to be something relevant to them in the Twitter network. So I always advise people to search Twitter about something that interests you, whether it’s sports, the name of your company, your city, what’s going on in your neighborhood, and get into it that way.

    Q: But people are overwhelmed anyway with information from the net.

    Stone: I agree, we are living now in an age of infinite information. And we can’t look at all of it. So relevance and timeliness have to be things that we have to pay a lot of attention to. We want people to be able to get the information when and where they need it and without having to sift through it all, so that they can move on with their lives.

    Q: There are millions of tweets like „I am drinking coffee right now“ – nothing anybody needs to know. Is there really a way, to find relevant information in 90 million short messages?

    Stone: Yeah, I think there is. Firstly, by following specific subjects or people on Twitter, you choose yourself which information is relevant to you. But that means that you’re missing out on a lot that potentially could interest you. Therefore, when you search for something in Twitter, we also show you the tweets that relate to your search and that were last created, just seconds ago. As an example, think of the situation a few years ago when that plane landed in the Hudson River. On Twitter, you were able to find that one first picture of that plane on the Hudson just half an hour after the crash.

    Q: You call Twitter even a „triumph of humanity“. Isn‘t that a little bit over the top?

    Stone: If Twitter is going to be a triumph at all, I believe that it will not be a triumph of technology but indeed of humanity. It really depends on what people are going to do with this simple tool; if they help each other during time of crisis, if they raise spontaneous amounts of money for people after a crisis or if they self-organize during a political upheaval. Twitter is designed to work on every phone across the planet because tweets fit in the international character limit for SMS. And there are more than five billion people using mobile phones in the world. This is so empowering. For example, if something happens in China, in Iran, in Haiti or anywhere else halfway around the world, you are able to find out about it instantly on this network because the relevant tweets are rising up and are becoming visible. That makes us realize that we are not just citizens of one country but of the world and that we are all in this together.

    Q: But does that really change anything? Looking at Iran for example: Despite Twitter the situation hasn’t really changed, has it?

    Stone: It depends on what you describe as change. Twitter isn’t in the business of changing a situation in another country. It’s in the business of allowing people to connect and share information about what’s going on. Think about China: Twitter is blocked in China. But people use Twitter in China because they’re figuring out ways around that block.

    Q: Critics believe that real political movements need a strong network and supervision. A flat hierarchy of just well-linked activists would even most likely disturb a real movement. Can Twitter push forward real change?

    Stone: Nobody here at Twitter with their head screwed on right would say that writing a tweet is equivalent to starting a revolution; neither is forwarding an email or updating your status or any of these things. But to say that Twitter would not play a complimentary role in any meaningful event in the world today is an absurd statement. A communication network that allows for information to spread very quickly, very virally, very effectively, can be used in any kind of situation.

    Q: Does that mean that Twitter is in effect a journalistic format?

    Stone: I don‘t think so. But the idea of the teaming up between Twitter and journalism is very powerful. I think Twitter has a knack for breaking news very quickly. So if there’s an earthquake, you’ll find out about it on Twitter before you’ll find out about it at the news desk. But what you won’t have then is what journalism provides, which is the fuller context of the story. What does it mean in relation to the previous three earthquakes and what geo-economic impact is it having on the region?

    Q: The editing and distribution of information was always a domain of professional journalists, and for good reasons. Today, if there is for example a political upheaval, people go to Twitter first. Isn‘t there a big risk of manipulation. How can people distinguish between trustworthy sources and others?

    Stone: Like any tool, Twitter can be used for good and for evil. However, what we’ve noticed over a decade of developing these kinds of systems is, that disinformation has a very short shelf life on these open networks. These networks tend to be self-policing. When you have some people trying to spread disinformation, you have more people debunking that and coming at it with the truth.

    Q: North Korea, for example, is sending out Tweets on a regular basis. Have you ever considered blocking Twitter accounts like that?

    Stone: Removing tweets from the system is something we don’t take lightly. We take free speech and openness very seriously, and there’s only a few scenarios in which we would remove content, like if it is breaking the law. But we can definitely highlight the more relevant information. For us, it is tremendeously important to be relevant and meaningful. We need a network that is important to peoples lives. Otherwise, we won‘t be able to make any revenue.

    Q: Twitter hasn‘t been able to generate a lot of profit so far. How exactly are you going to make money in the future?

    Stone: We are making money already. People don‘t realize this, because we are doing such a good job at our original plan. We optimized for value before profit in the first couple of years. And now we are seeing companies like the airline Jetblue or the coffee chain Starbuck’s using Twitter. And even more encouraging, people are willing to follow these accounts by the millions.

    Q: And the companies pay you money for that service?

    Stone: They pay money if we promote their tweets by putting them for example on top of our so called trend list, which can be found on the Twitter homepage. Anything that’s promoted is very clearly marked. So users can decide themselves if they want to read and follow promoted information. This is working exceptionally well for new products people are already talking about or for things like movies …

    Q: … some believe that because of Twitter they may predict if a movie becomes a blockuster or not…

    Stone: .. exactly. And the advertisers are loving it. Our ads are not banners that we are sticking in front of you that have nothing to do with anything. Our ads are tweets and are therefore part of the natural Twitter experience. In a lot of cases, you’re not even noticing that they are ads.

    Q: Is Germany a big market for you?

    Stone: It is. Germany is one of the first places that we translated the web interface into, and this year we have seen 80 percent growth in Germany. Japan was the first place that we saw such an explosion, and now Germany, France and Italy.

    Q: The Germans do really mind their privacy …

    Stone: … well, yes, and the good thing about Twitter is that we’re very, very clear about our policies in this respect. We tell people that Twitter is a very public and open service. Here in the US, tweets are going to go on CNN, they’re going to go in the Library of Congress of the United States, which is archiving public tweets. Once you send out a tweet, it is out there. We’ve tried to make this abundantly clear.

    Q: Do you still read a newspaper?

    Stone: Well, actually I read Google news, and so wherever Google news sends me is where I end up. So I guess I’m putting my faith in Googles algorithms to determine what I should and what I shouldn’t read. I don’t know if that’s the best way to do it or not.

    Q: And you really think that people will do good just because they can share information?

    Stone: I believe that people are basically good, and if you give them a very simple tool that allows them to express that basic goodness, they will. We’ve seen it over and over again. The more people are connected on something like Twitter, the more empathy they begin to feel for people who are halfway around the world. They are suddenly walking in the other people’s shoes in a way that they might not have done in the past. I think this really brings people together.