Issuing a landmark five-to-four decision in the case of Miller v California, a mail-order business specialising in adult materials that sent out graphic and explicit catalogues that opened by the owner and his mother of a beachfront restaurant and reported the offending brochure to authorities, the US Supreme Court formulated a three-pronged standard used as a benchmark for determining whether or not material material is obscene and therefore not a category of protected speech under the First Amendment. For a work to be obscene, it must meet all three conditions: whether “the average person, applying contemporary community standards” would find it overall an appeal to prurient interests, whether in a patently offensive manner it depicts sexual conduct, and whether over all is lacking in any serious literary, political, scientific or artistic value. The dissenting opinion worried because the test called for serious value, merit and allowed for community standards—without definition or the purview to set one—that this precedent would enable greater censorship.
A step below paraphrasing, we are introduced to the term and practise of rogeting—that is, the methods that catch-penny academia uses to spin articles and lure researchers and advertisers to pay-walled content with the promise of good sources, only to be sorely disappointed in the obvious spamdexing. Select tortured phrases, usually ones for no other tenable substitute exists, would be systematically replaced with some stock synonyms though would evade simple plagiarism-detectors posing as original content. Large language models and generative chat pose the possibility of saturating the internet with such content, making the screening process even more fraught and maybe less transparently fake, presenting a perfect example of Goodhart’s Law, in its corollary: risk models collapse on themselves when used for regulation or policing, or that in the gauge of citation impact, that when a feature becomes an indicator, its liable to be gamed.
Having previously written about the marketing tie-ins for the 1968 film, we enjoyed learning more about this promotional menu from the once ubiquitous hotel-restaurant chain Johnson’s for 2001: A Space Odyssey, featured as the hospitality brand for the Earthlight (named for another novel by Arthur C Clarke) orbital suite. While the children’s bill of fare does include iconic scenes from the movie, the narrative and activity pages are focused more on a family that goes to its gala theatrical premiere. More at the links above.
On this day in 1981, a medley of Beatles songs reinterpreted as disco topped the US singles charts, launching an onslaught of similar remixes, including for the Beach Boys, The Carpenters, Stevie Wonder, the Andrews Sisters and various punk compilations.
The concept originated when the sessions band cum novelty pop group had visited a record store and heard what was expected to be a cacophonous playlist but realised that the rhythms complemented each other. The long-play album, “Let’s Do It In the 80s Greatest Hits” was regarded as a bootleg release at first since the band had not secured permission from the original artist or recording labels. The US title (the longest at forty-one words to reach number one) was “Intro Venus/Sugar Sugar/No Reply/I’ll Be Back/Drive My Car/Do You Want to Know a Secret/We Can Work It Out/I Should Have Known Better/You’re Going to Lose That Girl/Stars on 45” as the artists insisted that the cover tracks‘ names be included. Stars on 54 produced the soundtrack for the 1988 film about the New York City nightclub, including the dance version of Gordon Lightfoot’s “If You Could Read My Mind.”
Preview performances given at a couple of other venues earlier in the week, the B-movie, schlock horror musical—see previously—by Richard O’Brien opened on this day in 1973 in the experimental space, “upstairs,” at the Royal Court Theatre in Chelsea, under the direction of Jim Sharman, renowned stage producer for his earlier work on Jesus Christ Superstar and Hair. The show ran for seven years, approaching three thousand performances, and the original cast whom crossed over into the 1975 cinematic adaptation included the starring roles of Tim Curry as Dr Frank N Furter, Patricia Quinn as Magenta the Usherette and O’Brien himself as Riff Raff.
Originally launched under the title “Content Targeted Advertising” a few months earlier with the name AdSense used by competing service Applied Semantics, Google’s acquisition rolled out its programme to within network website publishers and content creators on this day in 2003, eventually replacing GoogleAds and DoubleClick. It is the company’s biggest revenue generator and serves advertisements on over thirty-eight million websites in addition to its own search engine.
dwarf fortress: an interview with the author of 50 Years of Text Games—see previously 
