petsmart

Via the always interesting Super Punch, we find this clever, satirical internet start-up generator that delivers convincingly well-presented shells, frontages of so called tech unicorns—rare and majestic creatures that have attained a valuation of a billion dollars, on paper at least, but as the field gets crowded by copy-cats or vertical monopolies become less viable and hence a dead monoceros (this is an ex-unicorn). With testimonials and angel investors, one would be pardoned for mistaken these snowclone templates for actual start-ups with a similar naming-convention, which have surprisingly, as a cause for concern, achieved that prized status.

sequestered or the long now

Via the Presurfer, we learn about the resting place outside of the city of Chicago where the first nuclear reactor and associated waste was interred. Researchers at the University of Chicago, working under a top secret commission to bring the powerhouse on-line before the Axis Powers, under the supervision of Enrico Fermi, achieved this first sustainable, controlled reaction at the woodland laboratory in 1942.
The experimental Chicago Piles (CP-1 through CP-3) ran for about a decade until brought off-line and buried in situ—marked with granite blocks and the warning to potential grave-robbers that digging is not advised—though safe for visitors due to the low yield and shielding used for this prototype. Reading this postcard reminded me of the call for submissions several years back on how to handle the nuclear waste of contemporary times, which is much longer-lived and far more deadly and poses a significant problem that the next ten thousand generations of Earthlings will need to contend with. From a vantage point far older than human civilisation itself, how could we ensure that the message of danger and to keep away from today’s nuclear waste disposal sites are imparted to the future? Proposals included a defensive, infernal landscape with sand berms and giant totems of tortured souls, giant steely thorns like the sort that enveloped Sleeping Beauty’s castle, or even a priesthood of sorts to bridge the millennia and warn off the curious and scavengers that indeed you will be struck down by beams of invisible energy if you defile this ancient temple. Can you think of a way to signal danger that won’t be liable to misinterpretation, or is our bequest an unmarked grave?

seal of approval

Via Boing Boing, comes a dystopian but probably very prescient look at how the ecology of robots and social media has changed after the disastrous and messy hook and crook of an experimental chatbot from Hugh Hancock that posits in the near future, not only will everyone enjoy their fifteen minutes of fame, they’ll also be attended by flights of chatty mobs—potentially making human presence on-line, at least in certain, defined circles, not a very pleasant or varied experience.
Public-relation firms could deploy armies of minions that could rival any mortal army of the most vitriolic and determined army of internet comment-trolls. Such flea-circuses, no matter how rudimentary or sophisticated, could soon manipulate the news and censor what might go against the current of the trending issue of the day by scale and inertia, elevating the flattering and burying the unbecoming. What do you think? Is it like a public garden being occupied by vandals and hooligans or might this never come to pass? Once these pests get into the wild, I am betting that human-users won’t be easily able to cull this invasive species.

the crustacean college of sea-monkey knowledge

Author and contributor to Public Radio’s This American Life Jack Hitt, writing for the New York Times, transports us to the magical undersea kingdom of novelty toy impresario and master-marketer Harold von Braunhut, inventor of the Amazing Live Sea-Monkeys and countless other mail-order items, by visiting his widowed-bride Yolanda, former campy pictures vixen, at the Maryland estate that was built by hawking and playful humbug. Yolanda is currently fighting a breach of contract by the toy distributor that assumed control of sales (Sea-Monkeys are still doing a brisk business) for using a Chinese supplier of brine-shrimp, instead of those packaged by von Braunhut herself with a secret process that guarantees reanimation, but the comprehensive article delves into the colourful (and sometimes dark) careers and backstory that brought the interview and the interviewee together for this fascinating remembrance.

galgenhumor

H and I are temporarily displaced while our home is being fumigated for woodworm. Though we disagree with the necessity and method and it was hard work rescuing all the plants in the jungle and such—and worry that the swallows might not come back to roost—the operation and efficiency are impressive. Checking up on the company, operating out of Nürnburg, to see if it had a reasonable reputation, we noticed that all the publicity photos of mostly churches and other historic structures were tented in the same flag colours. I guessed it was supposed to be some cute, patriotic statement or maybe there was a sale on that particular pattern. I didn’t go down, I suppose, the obvious route—associating gassing with Germany, until one of H’s colleagues brought it up.

parity or difficulty-setting: hard

Thanks to Messy Nessy Chic’s for spotting this 1970 reimagining of the board game Monopoly in Blacks & Whites: The Role Identity & Neighbourhood Action Game—by the brain-trust at Psychology Today.  The purpose of this game, debuted not long after the was to illustrate to adult players lessons about racial-relations, privilege, economic disparity and the opportunity gap.  White game pieces are afforded considerable advantages and for them the rules about going to jail are rather more fluid.  The goal of playing, more in the spirit of the original concept for Monopoly, was not to accumulate the most money and property and causing one’s opponents to give up but rather to achieve an economic-balance, one which the game’s rules made impossible.  

fgm, fsm

Around two years back—as improbable as this constellation of outreach and events sounds, the California based UFO cult, the Raëlians, raised funds in order to have a self-described Pleasure Hospital constructed and staffed with plastic- and reproductive-surgeons in the west African country of Burkina Faso to help victims of the awful, traditional practise of female genital mutilation. The clinic in Bobo-Dioulasso, however, was never allowed to open its doors, supposedly due to violations to the building-code; an alternative site was found and the doctors treated some fifteen women with corrective procedures which restored them cosmetically and alleviated at least some of the physical pain as well.
The main tenants of Raëlian belief is that extra-terrestrials have always been reaching out and guiding humanity but they will only manifest themselves truly once human kind is at peace with itself in mind and body, and that state is only attainable through the pursuit of pleasure (sort of like the adherents of the anti-abbeys of Thélème and Semiquavers in Rabelais’ Gargantua and Pantagruel) and possibly the cult felt a strong moral compunction to redress these trespasses (as the UN has done) that rob women of the experience of pleasure—and to mention the health problems that this reprehensible practise can cause, but there is no evidence that the cult was interested in proselytizing its beliefs with this mission. None of the medical staff were members and there was no literature passed out, but the doctors quickly had their licenses to practise in the country revoked, citing suspicions over cult activities and promoting deviant behaviour. The government of Burkina Faso is not the complete villain having outlawed the practise and are actively disseminating that edict through the villages, and though this was a grave disappointment to those hundreds of millions of women having suffered their whole lives with the scars of the past, a few were made whole, word spread, and the visiting doctors were able to teach their techniques to local surgeons so that they might be able to champion the fight against barbarity. It’s not a matter people like to discuss—and perhaps introducing aliens averts even more—but avoiding the topics only reinforces those who would believe it to be an acceptable thing to do. There is a very salient difference between violence and intimidation and social norms and obligation.  (We do realise his noodliness, the Flying Spaghetti Monster, is not a UFO cult but know that FSM would also not condone such acts from his worshipers.)

vocoder or all your obnoxious traits are belong to us

The always interesting Mind Hacks informs that every quirk is well documented and studied—but not to the point, I think, of making it less engrossing and perhaps charming (or insufferable) in the ideation that goes by the name of palinacousis—that is, an auditory hallucination that is usually manifested by speaking in the manner of the last person that one has heard.
Do you mean now-now or later-now? Refudiate much? The study, however, that brought this phenomena to our attention was not a harmless case of unsolicited echolalia but rather a more extreme version, wherein a man experienced the voice of the current person he was in dialogue with as the sound and mannerisms of his previous interlocutor. He found this vocal-swapping debilitatingly funny and was not able to hold a proper conversion. This sounds like a very modern, memetic condition to me.