Curious Humanist

This is where I may put excepts from my writing while I create a dedicated web page. Also a place for books, art, and thoughts. Always ready to meet people so feel free to contact me.

[curioushumanist]

Only a mediocre person is always at his best.

W. Somerset Maugham

[strandbooks]

“Landmark designation doesn’t throw us a lifeline. Instead, it throws us a lead weight. But the Strand is worth fighting for; the Strand is worth protecting. We will not roll over, nor will we be silent. I am going to figure how to keep the Strand going when the city has tied me up in a bureaucratic straight jacket. Stay tuned everyone. Time to punch back,” says Strand owner Nancy Bass Wyden. Please support us at [email protected]. — view on Instagram http://bit.ly/2XKhwuG

[whencyclopedia]

BEWARE the Ides of March! On this day in 44 BCE: Julius Caesar is stabbed to death by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus, Decimus Junius Brutus, and several other Roman senators on the Ides of March. (44 BCE)

Read More: ancient.eu/article/803/the-murder-of-julius-caesar/ 

[scifigeneration]

Big Brother facial recognition needs ethical regulations

by William Michael Carter

Will facial recognition software make the world a safer place, as tech firms are claiming, or will it make the marginalized more vulnerable and monitored? Shutterstock

My mother always said I had a face for radio. Thank God, as radio may be the last place in this technology-enhanced world where your face won’t determine your social status or potential to commit a crime.

RealNetworks, the global leader of a technology that enables the seamless digital delivery of audio and video files across the internet, has just released its latest computer vision: A machine learning software package. The hope is that this new software will detect, and potentially predict, suspicious behaviour through facial recognition.

Called SAFR (Secure, Accurate Facial Recognition), the toolset has been marketed as a cost-effective way to smoothly blend into existing CCTV video monitoring systems. It will be able to “detect and match millions of faces in real time,” specifically within school environments.

Ostensibly, RealNetworks sees its technology as something that can make the world safer. The catchy branding, however, masks the real ethical issues surrounding the deployment of facial detection systems. Some of those issues include questions about the inherent biases embedded within the code and, ultimately, how that captured data is used.

Keep reading

[myjetpack]

for @newscientist

[writrs]

“It’s none of their business that you have to learn to write. Let them think you were born that way.”

— Ernest Hemingway (via kristensnotebook)

[philosophybits]

“When a war breaks out, people say: ‘It’s too stupid; it can’t last long.’ But though the war may well be 'too stupid,’ that doesn’t prevent its lasting. Stupidity has a knack of getting its way; as we should see if we were not always so much wrapped up in ourselves.”

— Albert Camus, The Plague

[philosophybits]

“It is difficult for one person to understand another, because the earnest person always lays the stress on himself.”

— Søren Kierkegaard, Four Upbuilding Discourses, 1844

[philosophybits]

“If anything is a gift of the gods to men, it is reasonable that happiness should be such a gift.”

— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

[philosophybits]

“The power of man’s virtue should not be measured by his special efforts, but by his ordinary doings.”

— Blaise Pascal, Pensées

[philosophybits]

“Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.”

— Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics

[philosophybits]

“Whether God is dead or not hardly matters, for we would use him no differently anyway.”

— Joseph Heller, God Knows (via quotespile)

[philosophybits]

“The being who patiently endures injustice, and silently bears insults, will soon become unjust, or unable to discern right from wrong.”

— Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

[philosophybits]

“The point of philosophy is to start with something so simple as not to seem worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it.”

— Bertrand Russell, The Philosophy of Logical Atomism

[philosophybits]

“A beautiful woman looking at her image in the mirror may very well believe the image is herself. An ugly woman knows it is not.”

— Simone Weil, Waiting for God

[philosophybits]

“I keep feeling that people are becoming less human and more animalistic. They seem to think less and feel less so that everyone is operating on a very primitive level. I wonder what you and I will see in our lifetimes. It seems so hopeless yet we must keep on trying … I guess we can’t escape being a product of the times, can we?”

— Bret Easton Ellis, The Informers (via quotespile)

[myjetpack]

For @newscientist