panopticon

For any of you humans brave or fool-hearty enough to tread into heretofore uncharted neural network territory, Waxy presents AI Spy, an absurdist version of the game meant to impart a sense of patience in children during prolonged travel and in waiting rooms where one is pitted against machine-learning in a sort of augmented reality setting, the computer asking the user to limn its surroundings in photos and selecting interesting artefacts to tease out. Part of an on-going series of weekly projects, playing requires some suspension of disbelief and asks humans to think like machines

masquerade

Over-sharing (indeed the utopian oblige of it all) and the way we’ve filled in the gaps of celebrity as a crisis of character and of history through nostalgia and an endless series of hails, salutes and remembrances has made a parallel world in our own image that’s apparently of more consequence than the real physical world—without even venturing into the myriad ways we’ve disrupted Nature with unnatural selection—where we’re held hostage to those who know (that is have to incontrovertible, time-stamped evidence) those things that we are not the most proud of and would never want to promote as part of our on-line and public persona.
Even if the forces that be are not malevolent spirits and have no intention of betraying one’s secrets, it’s still a regime of unease and blackmail that really mentally challenging to endure and as a result—whether we’d admit to this revolt and backlash or not since complacency and the status quo have been accorded higher sanctities—people seemed instead of dealing with this aggregated dossier without alibi to turn pre-emptively confessional and willing to excuse past indiscretions no matter what they were nor whom the peccadilloes belonged to, either out of unrelenting fear or mistaking empathy for whataboutery—the sophistry of appealing to one’s opponents’ apparent past hypocrisy as relevant to the present situation. Perhaps it’s a very American trait to ignore a very large problem like the concentration of data and having no control over how its interpreted and shared or stolen because it would be complex to solve and require a lot of sacrifice to deny there’s a problem at all and instead excuse the symptomatic being caught red-handed or being made to eat one’s words as some sort of shared consolation-prize that exculpates any bad behaviour.

brimful of asha

The neighbourhood bodegas (cognate with boutique, Spanish for wine-cellar and ultimately from the Greek ἀποτίθημι for to put away in the sense of a repository) or corner shops (or dépanneurs) are the anchors of communities, and a tech start-up that’s telling consumers to shut-up whilst they’re being disrupted is developing a rather unpopular business model that aims to replace these indispensable institutions with vending machines stocked with whatever honour-bar and tone-deaf line of merchandise vying for dubious product-placement. What do you think? Unicorn-chasing—much like ambulance-chasing, surely fuels the rank-hypocrisy of misguided confidence that assumes that complacence and convenience is paramount.

fluid dynamics or bonzai kittens

A French physicist wins the coveted Ig Noble prize with his thesis that felines exhibit both properties of being both solid and liquid states simultaneously.
It’s sort of like the superposition of Schrödinger’s Cat, studying the creatures’ remarkable limberness and ability to fill any space and assume the shape of its container. Prizes also come with an honorarium of ten trillion (Zimbabwean) dollars. Read more about the other laureates in different categories, including an unconscionable experiment that compared the brain waves of cheese-lovers and cheese-haters (also taking place in France) to see if the source of aversion could be pinpointed, at the link up top.

objets trouvés

Thanks to the forever marvellous Nag on the Lake for directing our attention to the romantic and indulgently thoughtful Parisian institution of the city’s central Lost and Found Bureau.
The repository for mislaid personal items collected from the metro and museum networks or turned in by caring individuals that hope possessor and object can be reunited has a long history, sourced by to the reign of Napoleon I, just a spare two decades after the Revolution that radically redefined the sense of ownership. Whereas under the feudal Ancien Régime, lost property of tenets generally reverted to the landlord—and still is in Anglo-Saxon legal frameworks what with possession being nine-tenths of the law (just consider this place where Hoggel resides), finders were no longer necessarily keepers and the right to ownership was enshrined as a fundamental and inalienable one. The curation of the collection and compassion of the staff is rather incredible. The dignity of an individual is of course greater than the sum of his or her things, but I think the greatness of one’s character comes through with these intimate, emotional reunions and allowing things to shift from expendable to indispensable.

hms semaphore

One automobile manufacturer recently outfitted a test-pilot as an empty driver’s seat in order to gauge public, man-on-the-street reaction to autonomous vehicles, not so much for the rubbernecking effect that driverless car illicit but rather a means to study how such cars might signal their intentions and how quickly traditional vehicles and pedestrians sharing the road might pick up on that newly minted language. Presently drivers get a lot of mileage out of a tap of the horn or flashing high-beams but apparently a more sophisticated system is needed to interact with human controlled traffic. While some useful data was gleaned off of the stunt, the methodology reportedly was not the best.

the commons

One could be forgiven for missing this one announcement from Apple amidst all the other novelty surrounding the occasion marking a decade since such gadgets have come to be an extension of ourselves and of living remotely, but we agree that Apple’s presumption to tout its sleek stores as the new town squares is telling of the pseudo-public and pseudo-democratic nature of online engagement.
The notion of the third place—a hangout, a haunt, like a favoured bar or café, that’s neither work nor home—has been on the wane in most societies, and doubtless the smart phone was a major contributing factor to that decline. A visit to one of the flagship boutiques is a pleasant experience without the usual trappings and overt pressure of a retail establishment but just as social media or any other major platform on the internet, that space or forum is the absolute nadir of openness and cannot be a guarantor of freedoms. Possibly Wikipedia is the virtual exception that manifests as the physical rule. What do you think? People can of course build the momentum to counter unpopular policies and practises and these platforms, untethered have been the catalysts at revolutionary moments but social media sites, businesses beholden to their investors, cannot be accorded, flattered with the crime of censorship, since to do so cheapens and imperils authentic democratic institutions and the responsible exercise thereof.