first duty assignment

Via Slashdot, we learn that CBS is in the pre-production phase of a new animated series of the Star Trek franchise from contributing writer and voice actor of Adult Swim’s Rick and Morty show (also consummate fan, membership being a bit like being able to speak Esperanto) Mike McMahan.
The half-hour episodes will take on life and culture in the Federation and working in Star Fleet with a comedic angle and is named Star Trek: Lower Decks, in reference to one of the more compelling episodes from The Next Generation (previously), the storyline following the lives of four junior officers vying for a promotion to advance their careers. This portrayal that offers a peak behind the scenes and focus that brings background members of the crew into the foreground (the term bottle episode comes from the original series, referring to shows with a non-recurring cast and mostly confined to existing interiors as “ship-in-a-bottle” shoots) has proved particularly appealing to audiences. Learn more at the links up top.

semantic shifting

Via Marginal Revolution, we are directed to Merriam-Webster dictionary Time Traveller service that tracks the first occurrences of English words at least in print. Plugging in my birth year—1976—the results are a little bit jarring, think such concepts are either more veteran or truly contemporary neologisms, we find that among manner other borrowings and coinages the language has received: boat people, body piercing, cosmic background radiation, dream catcher, exit poll, killer bee, meme, restless leg syndrome, waitperson and wannabe. A century ago in 1918, we had minted: cabin fever, D-Day, deep-dish, Europocentric, extrovert, goop, humanoid, plaintext, processed cheese and wonky—just to date a few.

bobby (boris) pickett and the crypt-kickers

We enjoyed this appreciation of the quintessential Halloween anthem, the 1962 novelty song “Monster Mash,” from Tedium—delving into the piece’s musical inspirations and long legacy of homages.
Aspiring actor and musician Pickett was performing a cover of the Diamonds’ “Little Darin’” one evening but substituted the middle monologue with a horror movie exposition of a bridge (in the voice of Boris Karloff)  and the audience cheered, and drawing from the earlier novelty hit, The Hollywood Argyles’ “Alley Oop,” and the dance sensation the Mashed Potato, captured by Dee Dee Sharp’s “Mashed Potato Time” and “Gimme Gravy,” Pickett went on to collaborate and compose the graveyard smash. Among the original Crypt-Kickers was pianist Leon Russell. Listen to the song, covers and everything adjacent at the link above.

perfect play or macky, micky, mucky, mocky

As an experiment to explore how norms and ethics might be introduced to artificial intelligence in a broad and general fashion, researchers, as Slashdot reports, have trained implicitly one such programme to play Pac-Man and win without gobbling up the ghosts.
The training was a balance between the programme’s drive for optimisation tempered with lessons from human players that avoided the ghosts, even at their most vulnerable, and eventually netted more ethically informed play. It’s not quite the level of trust that I would want in a moment of pursuit but I suppose it does illustrate the potential to build in moral false-safe measures.

scullery

A ride-hailing service that’s disrupted the business of food delivery and ordering-in—once nearly exclusively the domain of pizza, we learn via Duck Soup, is creating an empire of virtual franchises that only exist as menu-options when ordering from the service.
Of course it’s nothing new or novel to set up a booth or a concession within a larger venue, but it is strange to think of a branded concept “restaurant” existing only in the corner (without seats or a storefront) of a host kitchen of a larger food preparation operation, as hundreds of affiliates are revealed to be. What do you think? It’s an interesting way to pool resources and reputation but there’s also an inscrutable and alienated quality to it, like a letterbox business that’s not open to public inspection—sort of like the couriers themselves.

regnum, benfacta, carcer

Public Domain Review showcases another visually stunning and alluring work with the 1825 publication The Astrologer of the Nineteenth Century: Or, The Master Key of Futurirty, Being a Complete System of Astrology, Geomancy & Occult Science. Volumes such as these both informed and were reflections of a revival in the supernatural which had lost currency and credibility and been in decline since the Era of Enlightenment and was for the most part a repackaged anthology of previously serialised works, journals and a success almanac of ephemeridies, Latin for diaries—daily charts of the position of the planets in the sky consulted by navigators and astrologers alike.
Though the book includes sections on diverse magic practises including divination, prophecy and communing with the dead, the author places greater stock and confidence in celestial omens and warns his readers of the dangers of not heeding one’s horoscope. Discover a gallery of select illustrations and peruse the whole book at the link up top.

frolic & detour

Following the court case of a disgruntled employee who collected personal data of staff and released it to the public in order to embarrass and humiliate his former employer, we were introduced to an interesting concept of tort law and the limits of vicarious liability (respondeat superior) on the part of an employer for the acts of persons in its employ.
Derived from the 1834 case of Joel v Morison (no relation to the present defendant) that involved a pedestrian struck by a horse-drawn cart, to which the cart’s owner begged off due to the fact that the driver had taken a different route than the one he was assigned to visit an acquaintance and because of that deviation, was responsible for the accident. The court, however, ruled, “if servants, being on their master’s business, took a detour to call upon a friend, the master will be responsible… but if he was going on a frolic of his own, the master will not be held liable” and thus the driver was still covered for the negligent act while in the “course of employment” and the cart’s owner had to pay for damages. The company in the present day case is appealing the decision, arguing it cannot be held responsible for the data breach because the employee was acting maliciously and outside of his scope of practise.