Thursday 12 February 2015

dumpster-diving or dead-letter office

Abusing the language of a 1986 provision that is meant to ostensibly give the government eminent-domain over letters that have gone unclaimed for six months—the right to search maybe overflowing and neglected mailboxes with no other suspicion than that they appear to have been abandoned, by American reckoning, this same provision can also extend to electronic correspondence exchanged past that same one-hundred eighty day period and stored in the ether. Are your archived items disowned and fit for the public record? I suppose it would not do to delete one’s old correspondence, either, since they’re then arguably even more forsaken then. While there is thankfully a contingency of legislators seeking to reform this statute and update the precise wording and intent, it does strike me as rather chilling that legal holdovers could be plied in such a way as to create loopholes.

so fetch

Via the indefatigable Neat-o-Rama, comes this erudite gallery of fine art turned hilarity with obviously timeless lines from a 2004 American teen comedy film called Mean Girls. I had never even heard of this movie before—sounds like an updated version of Heathers with a different rat-pack cast, but I don’t think that matters in the least, though now I’d like to watch it and there also a sequel, apparently.
At least I know where some of these catch-phrases come from now, being the late-adopter that I am. These captions match perfectly with some of the iconic and those under-appreciated master works and one can tell that the creators are also art aficionados themselves, providing a blurb of historical context—for the painting and the characters. You can find many more images at the link to their Tumblr blog.

five-by-five

my precious: a brilliant equation of the One Ring to the allures of technology

love token #9: a look at Victorian forget-me-nots for Valentine’s Day

i-spy: nickle-tour of some of the grandiloquent bastions of espionage

reboot: how the TV show Friends might look today

reaction faces: dramatic gesticulations from a nineteenth century guide

Wednesday 11 February 2015

unionists and publicans

Writing for the Spectator, columnist Mary Dejevsky has found a more apt, although much more uncomfortable, analogy for the tension and territorial integrity that’s no rarified metaphor or theoretical matter triangulated among Russia, Ukraine and the Crimean peninsula.
Rather than resorting to popular but inhibiting comparisons to Nazi aggression or Czarist Russia, Dejevsky suggests a more contemporary parallel to another triad composed of Ireland and Britain and the creation of Northern Ireland. The correlation is of course not a perfect fit either, history being untidy, but I believe that by avoiding abstractions that strip away civility and humanity and making matters more personal (the UK certainly would not have tolerated any meddling in these internal affairs), one is better outfitted with the vocabulary to talk about matters, even if the received-language is already chilling enough in one direction.

pins and needles

In the early 1960s, the US military, fearful of Soviet sabotage against traditional modes of communication that were restricted to undersea cables or radio signals propagated with varying degrees of reliability—depending on the weather and other factors—when bounced off the ionosphere, commissioned the laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to create an artificial ring in low orbit of some half a million tiny copper needles to augment the quality of transmissions. Once the news of the secret programme called Project West-Ford was uncovered, there was understandable outrage that America could deport itself in such a manner, possibly polluting the atmosphere and grounding space travel forever by undertaking an experiment on a global scale. Pressure from the scientific community was passionate and brought about the international Treaty on Outer Space. The system worked well and did facilitate broadcasting and if the technique had not been made obsolete by the communications satellite, another orbiting ring, we might still be chattering via pins in the sky. Though the majority of needles have fallen back to Earth, a few are still circling the globe half a century on.

five-by-five

personรฆ: one’s choice of avatars conveys a lot about one’s real personality

apocalypse cow: televangelist reports on bovine harbinger of the End Times

cyrus virus: begging to be noticed is ruining everything authentic

PR’s PR award: Sigmund Freud’s nephew invented marketing, calling it propaganda

coรถp: there is a small collectivist community in Andalusia described as a peaceful utopia

Tuesday 10 February 2015

maybe that’s the cave plato warned us about

The excellent Quartz Magazine presents a very delving article that demonstrates, I think, with great lucidity one of the consequences of forsaking so called net neutrality—an idea generally portrayed as something nebulous and complex, not that the motives underlying the argument are straightforward, by the mainstream medium to inspire defeatists attitudes. Much of that same estate serves gentle reminders, usually when those dominant institutions are thinking of doing something underhanded, that in fact the internet is not a search-engine, which checks both detractors and opponents of the change. The West, I think, is taking this rhetorical device for granted, however, especially vis-a-vis the magnanimity of one social network, which would provide free access for all. Businesses are not meant to be surrogates for free and democratic principles and people ought to be wise to ulterior motives, but the charity and outreach of the media empire, as outlined in the feature, does not in fact give the Third World an outlook on equal-footing with the First World counterparts. Instead of encountering that brutal, rough but independent world-wide web, the young generation in Africa, Asia and India are received into the refined and gated environment of that social network.
A not insignificant portion of ascribers don’t even realise that this service is even just a selective mask for that cyber substrate that’s walled off and out of their price-range. Maybe some believe that the messy, unknown internet they’ve heard of is a playground of privilege and can make do with what they’re filtered—after all, all their friends and family are famous here, whereas the wider internet takes no notice of them. Maybe it is better than having no foothold and people may eventually discover all things behind the scenes or as expounded rather eloquently, maybe we all just become serfs and sharecroppers for a single magnate and mogul. One only knows what one is exposed to, especially during the impressionable onset, and ideas, policy, and credibility—not only fashion and commerce—fall prostrate to what’s liked.

hindsight bias or temporal paradox

Back in late 2000, a man calling himself John Titor, claiming to be a time-traveler from the year 2036, began appearing in chat-rooms and on-line forums, presenting the world with a litany of the terrible things to come—which certainly seems to violate the popular understanding about causality but sometimes the timeline and canon is disdained for lesser things. Though we are living in a sort of post-skeptical world where most agree that perpetuating future-fraud would be quickly smacked down and the internet is not a hiding-place, I still feel a little cheated for not knowing about this fantastically fun and possibly didactic anecdote. Though Titor’s stop in the year 2000 was just a detour, an authorized-delay, after accomplishing his main mission of retrieving a piece of legacy hardware from a quarter of a century earlier, which was reportedly had the needed fix to inoculate computer systems of his time against a fatal programming bug that had ravaged the contemporary technological landscape, he did make a nostalgic appearance online to entertain questions and issue some dire warnings—one being that one ought to avoid eating beef since, owing to the decades’ long incubation period, mad-cow disease would not present in the human population until Titor’s day and age.
Another, more timely announcement—which most have seemed dismissibly distant back then but probably inversely interesting since the internet was new and fresh and we were innocent and curious about what it might mean to have the world shrink through the sharing of ideas and experiences rather than finding that that shrinkage can also lead to things like compartmentalization and ennui that there’s less unique about us than we’d like to admit (Titor, if there’s even an internet for humans in the future, could have been prescient about that too I suppose)—was that there would be an atomic exchange between the US and Russia in the year 2015 that would be known as World War III.  These pronouncements are quite different than the predictions of Nostradamus, not vague by design but maybe a little evasive, and not just because they claim the authority of experience but also in that if anything does not unfold as Titor said (like the civil wars that were to occur in 2006 and 2012 that was to split the United States up into five separate countries), it still cannot be refuted as wrong, since his time-travel affected the future, as planned. The engagement ended abruptly after four months, and though there has not, I think, been a continual following—bits and pieces of this strange story resurface now and again and spark a resurgence that’s not only in the dismantling and maybe the desire to find resolution, since those interrupted mysteries are the ones that haunt.