arc of narrative

Our faithful chronicler, Doctor Caligari, informs that among many other notable events, on this day in 1983 an audience of over one hundred million Americans tuned in to watch the made-for-television movie, “The Day After.”
Suppressing a potential military coup in East Germany, Soviet forces blockade West Berlin—an act that NATO forces interpret as an act of war and responds in kind. Things escalate rather quickly with Russia pushing towards the Rhein and nuclear bombs used on the US Army bastions of Wiesbaden and Frankfurt. As the war expands beyond the German frontier, a nuclear exchange takes place, culminating with a high-altitude burst that results in an electro-magnetic pulse that disables the remaining technologies that the survivors of the first strike can avail themselves of. The director, Nicolas Meyer (also known for his cinematic Star Trek adaptations), reported suffered influenza-like symptoms during production, and when doctors could find no somatic cause, they determined Meyer was suffering under a bout of severe depression due to having to contemplate the horrors of war.

kinder überraschung

Citing serious privacy concerns that not only include the harrowing prospect of potential kidnappers tracking one’s children’s routine and whereabouts but also concerns that parents may be using the devices to monitor their children’s teachers, Germany has banned their sales and wear by young children (EN/DE). The watches were originally marketed to children between the age of five and twelve with the pitch that they’d instil a lifelong commitment obsession with keeping active but as cheap devices saturated the shops many fell short of security safeguards meant to protect the safety of users.

have you considered getting a machine to do that for you?

Ahead of the debut of its Selectric typewriter—which had the revolutionary labour-saving enhancement of a magnetic tape for recording and playback of keystrokes—IBM engaged master Muppeteer Jim Henson and composer Raymond Scott to—rather prematurely, usher in the end of drudgery and tedium with a promotional short-film. Despite the cheerful, liberating message, there is a sinister sense of apprehension just below the surface that reflects how society had as much a tenuous time grappling with automation as they do with machine learning presently. The same reassuring words that “machines should do the work and people should do the thinking” might still apply but we might be hurtling towards a time when our virtuosity might become second fiddle.

sequestration

Soberingly, we are reminded via Slashdot of another dirty little secret underlying climate change and those compacts meant to stave off the sort of run-away changes that would render the Earth a very inhospitable place compared to what we’ve grown accustomed to insofar as the targets and pledges are not only calling for a severe curtailment in carbon emissions but are also contingent on taking that surplus carbon-dioxide out of the atmosphere.
It’s not an impossible feat and we can rise to the occasion (despite ourselves, and maybe cleaning up the past is in some ways easier than the paradigm shift needed for going forward) but the amount to sequester from the environment represents something on par with the industrial output of the past two decades and the technologies to accomplish this feat are only just emerging. The fact that the Paris Agreement was negotiated knowing this rather grim calculus only makes me more hopefully for the audacity of ingenuity.