all your likes are belong to us

Via Vice magazine, we learn it is now possible to surrender one’s social mediators and online presence over to a robot. With the human as the backseat-driver, an Autonomous Self-Agent performs the pruning and gardening and weeding—all those administrative chores that have become a long row to hoe and quite a time-consuming task to stay current and relevant.
What do you think? Would you trust a robot to represent you online and keep up appearances and not do anything embarrassing or untoward or become radicalised? I am unsure about the compulsion to publish or perish that kind of drains away the fun and surprise, but I imagine it might be all the more frightening to find that one’s autonomous assistant might come across as indistinguishable from the real thing rather than any amount of faux pas or social blunder that one might have to apologise for later on.

carry on, constable

There’s something remarkably indulgent about having the campus of well looked after ruins to oneself, imagining how history marched on and then by an inaccessible accord, time stopped and there was a general agreement to stave off both progress and decay. On our trip across England, we experienced this many times over, and the Restormel Castle outside of Lostwithel in Cornwall really typified the romance. This circular fortress was built in the times just after the Norman Conquest and bastions like these transformed and solidified the occupation and displacement and civilised the art of warfare, turning unsheltered carnage and plunder into something more strategic and potentially less violent.
Exchanged several times between the high sheriff of Cornwall and Simon de Montfort (of Crusade fame and infamy), eventually it was ceded to the crown, under Henry III, the residence boasted plumbing (some innovation eight hundred years ago—reaching back to Roman times) and profited off of the local tin trade. Another sight was the Old Sherborne Castle in Dorset (an intact castle is just up the road).
Queen Elizabeth I relinquished this twelfth century estate to Sir Walter Raleigh after the courtier, poet, historian and explorer became enamoured with it, whilst returning from an expedition to the New World and landing at nearby Portsmouth. Raleigh, between searching for El Dorado and the Seven Cities of Gold, was instrumental in the English colonising of North America and popularised tobacco and potatoes in the Old World. An unsanctioned marriage and political intrigues, which may have beckoned the Spanish Armada (over incursions into lands claimed by that crown), led to Raleigh’s unfortunate beheading.
His faithful wife and accomplice, according to some, kept her husband’s head in a velvet bag for nearly thirty years before expiring herself, both unable to retire to the castle that had become a rather frustrated property.

new testament

An individual, identified only as the cool dude with sunglasses smiley, has translated all sixty-six books of the King James version of the Bible into emojis, targeted towards the Millennial demographic—found on Kottke’s Quick Links.
I am not certain if this gospel was encoded in response declining rates of church attendance all around—for the first time in history, reportedly, more people are agnostic rather than religious in any form, but I am not sure that this will bring about a revival, not that it was bidden and need that was going unfilled. Apparently, the critical reception has been on the whole a balanced one with some reviewers surprised to find that the strings of hieroglyphs are overly tedious and there’s some praise-worthy and innovative translations to be found—but I wonder whether it’s more in deference to the word-craft (which I hope is preserved across different operating systems) rather than the message. Maybe it’s fitting that the first printed work in the Western tradition was also the Bible and is now subject to this treatment, and we’ve taken millennia to progress from logograms to an alphabet but are now returning with rapt interest. What do you think?

xénoglossie ou maladroit

The Neurocritic—which looks like a wonderful blog about cognitive science, recommended by Marginal Revolution, has an excellent primer and reporting on the curious phenomena of people all of a sudden (usually after a trauma) being able to speak with some fluency a foreign language that they’ve no prior acquaintance with.
This xenoglossy (or xenolalia) manifests itself in different forms, seemingly unique to that individual speaking in tongues, and sometimes attributed to past-life regression or other paranormal activity—though examining the mental mechanics is just as tantalising. A recent case reveals that eloquence is not always included in the package. After developing an arterial-flow problem, an Italian man began remembering the fragments of French he’d picked up three decades prior while courting a girl. Although still able to speak perfectly good Italian, the man insisted on communicating in broken French, albeit delivered at a rapid and articulate pace of someone very confident in his lingual skills.

cerulean or sky of blue, sea of green

With a battery of research and experimental that neatly dove-tailed into that red-carpet dress controversy of last spring, it seems that the human eye in general didn’t really make a distinction for the colour blue until very recent times, a master Redditor informs. Reaching back to the investigations into the connection between pigments and language of William Gladstone (future Prime Minister of Great Britain) in the early nineteenth century, a chain of scholars have built on the body of evidence.
The proof is highly anecdotal in citing the lack of the colour being invoked in the classical canon—not mentioned once in the Odyssey, and before dyes (and eyes) there was not much in Nature—other than the sea and sky that was brilliantly and unqualifiable blue. Incidentally, skies, eyes and water (plus scales and plumage) are not blue in their own right but appear so due to the scattering of light waves.
Many languages do not mark the linguistic difference between blues and greens, and interestingly in the Romance Languages, the words for green are derived from Latin and the words for blue from Germanic. For much of civilisation, identifying the palettes of the forest and other subtle differences would have been far more useful than figuring out coordinates and what clashes, and this point was illustrated through a series of trials that demonstrate our cognitive colour-blindness by putting our perception through the paces. What do you think is the odd square—the one that Namibian tribes with no word for blue—could pick out right away? Click on the source link above to find the solution.  Perhaps that’s why we have a green-screen for chroma key compositing and special-effects.