netiquette or sos, sms

Bob Canada's Blog-World makes an excellent commentary on the prescience of Star Trek. In a few panels, the author shows how even in the retro-future of 1991, the series predicted that for some people virtual Facetime becomes more of a priority than actual face-time—not discounting all the other wildly hopeful and innovative developments that Star Trek has envisioned. Have you experienced the same treatment, understudied, or are you, etiquette-wise, guilty of being a Romulan yourself?

pinocchio or bukimi no tani

BBC Future unpacks (inactive link) an idea taken as a given with mixed results, ranging from gut-instincts, testimonials and test-groups to research studies that makes the parabolic projection of the the so-called “uncanny valley” a phrase first coined in robotics some forty years ago by a Japanese inventor who used the term in an essay more elusive.
As the imitation approaches closer and closer to the original, there is a proportional feeling of unease that ends in aversion—or that's what experience teaches at least and there is a general belief it is something vainglorious to romance the mirror. I think too I should feel pretty disturbed if I cannot distinguish a human from a replicant, an avatar or a zombie, and would reject aping perfection out-of-hand. More often, I think, I have mistook a living operator for something computerized. The article is definitely worth the read and I find it interesting that the topic is introduced via a project to build a humanoid robot to assist children diagnosed with autism to better read facial expressions and non-verbal communication. I wonder if that says more about how we perceive humanness and otherness than the cosmetics of an android.

vacay and staycation

Traditionally, August is the month when Germans and most other Europeans take holidays, and there's an old, rather tongue-in-cheek adage against falling ill during that month since hardly a doctor is to be found. I heard a report on the radio on Monday—the first workday after the last huzzah, I suppose, of August, which I thought at first was a bit tongue-in-cheek too, but the topic was addressed with all earnestness and I guess that really reveals where my mindset reverts to.

The callers and the panel of experts sounded like a bunch of recalcitrant school children, dragging their feet and dreading the new academic year, when talking about resuming Common Time for the work year, girding oneself mentally and techniques for easing the transition. I know we have been very bad about travel this year and taking any extended leave of absence (or rather very good from an American point of view, since one rarely hears as a lament “we only took three vacations this year”) and am never eager to return to the day-to-day drudgery—which is only endured for the chance to make the next trip, but I was mortified that I was unable to at first relate and mistook the whole exchange as a lampoon against day-dreamers and leave-takers. There is another adage—that Americans live to work and the rest of the world works to live. I hope I am firmly in the latter category.

he ain't ratched

Although the truly positive associations stop at fancy and at best the term quickly atrophies into a back-handed compliment, like being called a champagne-socialist, I think I would like to champion the introduction of the German word Prunk into the international pidgin. Like posh that never really caught on, prunk can indicate something elaborate or ostentatious, flaunting or ceremonial—bling, I think it describes a lot of things and people's attitudes towards presentation and deportment. There's a certain weightiness—on loan—that gives the term a certain substance, as if one could plonk it down, whatever the estimation, rather than just being some glittering, costume-badge.