person of interest

Actress, socialite and former Miss Hungary Zsa Zsa Gabor (*1917 – †2016) acquired reportedly a three thousand page dossier by the US Federal Bureau of Investigation, according to Muckrock that’s sharing the first tranche of files.
The celebrity was monitored ostensibly over her habit of serial marriages which included Turkish and German princes and a hotel magnate and for corresponding with her family in Europe during the War and contravening censors—indications of possible espionage or subversive activities. We’ll need to wait for the next release to find out if there was anything to substantiate these suspicions. Ms Gabor claimed once to have gone on a blind-date with Henry Kissinger, arranged by matchmaker Richard Nixon, but vehemently denied charges, put forward in the files, of dancing with Adolf Hitler on two occasions.

hothouse earth

Via Slashdot we are reminded that we’ve put the planet on an apocalyptic trajectory that we absolutely cannot afford to be complacent about changing if we want to ensure that the Earth remains a hospitable place.  An array of tipping elements—loosing one or multiple of those regulating bulwarks like oceanic currents and expanses of healthy forests—will result in run-away climate change, resulting in accelerated disasters and a sustained temperature rise double that of current forecasts.

We’ve blundered through somehow and still have a really poor grasp collectively about projecting the future and deferring immediate urges (what we are presently contending with—the extreme weather, droughts and refugee-crisis, are all caused by a global temperature increase of a single degree), but maybe that human nature that’s led us to ravish the Earth might step up to undo the damage it has done. We no longer have the luxury for elegant solutions, driven by passion and compassion, and the time has arrived for the brute and expensive ones, like carbon-capture and sequestration technologies to amplify our modest but determined individual efforts.

panopticon

Naïvely I thought that the dominant social media platform might reform itself sufficiently to regain my trust and that I might reactivate my account one of these days.
Learning, however, that the company has approached major financial institutions all over the world seeking partnerships just reinforces my feelings that the unprincipled amalgamator that already knows too much is far too beholden to its backers’ demands for indicators of growth over sustainment and quality. I don’t think I’ll be rejoining though in the meantime, I do wonder what my shadow profile has been up to and its purchasing power and credit-worthiness mean to advertisers. Morbid curiosity always gets the better of us.  What do you think? Such comprehensive services may seem normal elsewhere but there comes a point where convenience is no longer a choice but rather something foisted on the public.

beep-bop-boop

The always engrossing Things Magazine directs our attention to a blog dedicated to showcasing cameos and walk-on roles by non-fictional computers in film and television.
Not only does the site fastidiously and exhaustively identify and document all the personal computers and office terminals that appear in 1990s television sitcoms, it all goes on to curate the film credits of the iconic, scenery-chewing machines like the AN/FSQ-7 (or at least the maintenance console of the mainframe), the 1958 “electronic brain” developed by the US Air Force during the Cold War as the master-control of a semi-autonomous network of that monitored American airspace and could coordinate a response to an attack from Soviet missiles. The computer has been featured in dozens of films (it does not feel right referring to the army surplus as a prop instead of a cast member) including War Games, Planet of the Apes, Santa Claus Conquers the Martians, Westworld, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and many others—as often as a vision of the future as that of the past. Rather than a supercut of the AN/FSQ-7’s appearances, here is a short from the Air Force on the defensive system: