Mitch Wagner

I go for long walks every day with the dog—a little more than 90 minutes a day on average. I do it every day when I’m well and at home, sometimes arranging my day around it. I don’t do it when my body is saying NO NO NO. When I had covid two years ago, I just parked my ass in bed for a week until I felt up to walking, then took a few days to get back into the full 90-minute walk.

I don’t run, and I certainly don’t run until I puke.

Still, I am definitely compulsive about my exercise routine. And I’m OK with that.

Also, I have to watch what I eat ALL THE TIME. I can’t just eat when I’m hungry like many people do. I have to weigh and measure nearly everything.

Fifteen years ago, I was 100 pounds overweight and sedentary. Now, even though I’m 62 years old, I firmly believe I have the body of a healthy 35-year-old, and exercise and good eating are the credit for that. (Well, also the luck to be born healthy and middle-class—those are hugely important too. But not sufficient.)

Whereas if I had kept up the bad habits I had 15 years ago, I would be a physical wreck today, and there’s a good chance I’d be dead.

There is no franchise in Hollywood filmmaking that is as consistently good, and as consistently interesting, as “Planet of the Apes.”

I feel very strongly about this, and not because I am an admitted enthusiast of genre filmmaking. Like any long-running series, “Planet of the Apes” – which spans 10 films and more than 50 years – has its lows. But those are well outnumbered by the films that deliver real thrills, showcase strong (and occasionally exceptional) performances and, rare among Hollywood movies of its type, provoke thoughtful discussion of serious ideas.

nytimes.com

Jetpacks were ubiquitous in midcentury pop culture, including James Bond, the Jetsons and Gilligan’s Island. “… it felt like a matter of time before people could ride a jetpack to work.” But we never got personal jetpacks. This delightful episode of the 99% Invisible podcast looks at the history of the jetpack—how it came to be developed after World War II, how it became a pop culture phenom, and why it flopped. As always, the website has great images to accompany the podcast. 99percentinvisible.org

Also: Cory Doctorow—You were promised a jetpack by liars. pluralistic.net

The jetpack—technically a rocket belt—was developed by Wendell Moore at Bell Aircraft Corp. in the 1960s.

Moore was a consummate showman, which is to say, a bullshitter. He was forever telling the press that his jetpacks would be on everyone’s back in one to two years, and he got an impressionable young man, Bill Suitor, to stage showy public demonstrations of the rocket belt. If you ever saw a video of a brave rocketeer piloting a jetpack, it was almost certainly Suitor. Suitor was Connery’s stunt-double in Thunderball, and it was he who flew the rocket belt around Sleeping Beauty castle.

Suitor’s interview … for the podcast is delightful. Suitor is a hilarious, profane old airman who led an extraordinary life and tells stories with expert timing, busting out great phrases like “a surprise is a fart with a lump in it.”

But what’s most striking about the tale of the Bell rocket belt is the shape of the deception that Moore and Bell pulled off. By conspicuously failing to mention the rocket belt’s limitations, and by callously risking Suitor’s life over and over again, they were able to create the impression that jetpacks were everywhere, and that they were trembling on the verge of widespread, popular adoption.

What’s more, they played a double game: all the public enthusiasm they manufactured with their carefully stage-managed, canned demos was designed to help them win more defense contracts to keep their dream alive. Ultimately, Uncle Sucker declined to continue funding their boondoggle, and the demos petered out, and the “promise” of a jetpack was broken.

As I listened to the 99 Percent Invisible episode, I was struck by the familiarity of this shuck: this is exactly what the self-driving car bros did over the past decade to convince us all that the human driver was already obsolete. The playbook was nearly identical, right down to the shameless huckster insisting that “full self-driving is one to two years away” every year for a decade:

Cory also sees similar scams in hype about robots and AI.

I’m far less skeptical about AI than Cory is. Generative AI in particular. I use GenAI several times a week, and find it helpful. Still, I wave off claims that GenAI is on the verge of superhuman intelligence. Lesser claims, that GenAI will be as transformative as the smartphone or Internet, are more credible. But I’ll believe that when I see it.

I asked ChatGPT to summarize the 99% Invisible podcast episode about jetpacks, and it summarized the wrong episode. When I pointed it to the right episode, the summary it delivered was bland and useless. ChatGPT gets it spectacularly wrong like that nearly as often as it gets it right.