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Why SF movies make me insane #5yrsago

My latest Locus column is “Why Science Fiction Movies Drive Me Nuts,” in which I propose that the reason the science in sf movies is so awful is that they’re essentially operas about technology.

The reason that SF movies command such a titanic amount of attention and money from audiences is because they are brilliantly wrought spectacles. What they lack in depth and introspection, they make up for in polish and craftsmanship. Every costume is perfect. Not one polygon is out of place. An army of musicians, the greatest in the land, have picked up horns and stringed instruments by the orchestra-load and played precisely the right music to set the blood singing, written by genius composers and edited into the soundtrack by golden-eared engineers from the top of their trade. The product is perfectly turned out, and this perfection attracts the eye and captures the mind.

But although these spectacles look like movies, what they really are is opera – stylized, larger-than-life, highly symbolic work that is not meant to be understood literally. And it makes me nuts.

How else to explain the glaring inconsistencies that sit in the center of these movies, like turds floating in the precise center of a crystal punchbowl carved out of the largest, most perfect diamond in the whole world? I mean, look at Spider-Man again, and think for a moment about the absurdity of its set-pieces.

Cory Doctorow: Why Science Fiction Movies Drive Me Nuts

https://boingboing.net/2012/09/05/why-sf-movies-make-me-insane.html

nevver

The kids are alright, Kimberly Ross

mostlysignssomeportents

The Attention Merchants: a deep dive into the origins of the surveillance economy #1yrago

Tim Wu is a multiple threat: the originator of the term “net neutrality”; a copyfighting lawyer who cares about creator’s rights; a fair use theorist; Zephyr Teachout’s running mate in the NY gubernatorial race; an anti-monopolist who joined the NY Attorney General and used open source to catch Time Warner in the act; a lifelong deep nerd who was outraged by the persecution of Aaron Swartz, and the author of one of the seminal books on telcoms policy and human rights.

Now, he’s back with his best book yet: The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads, an erudite, energizing, outraging, funny and thorough history of one of humanity’s core undertakings – getting other people to care about stuff that matters to you.

Wu’s book about ad-tech starts with a history of hucksters, advertisers, con artists, grifters, snake-oil salesmen, and other figures who made it their business to get in your business.

From this history of attention-economics as a social, core human activity, he carefully builds up a devastating critique of ad tech as it stands today, transforming “don’t be evil” into the surveillance business model in just a few short years. It connects the dots between the sale of advertising inventory in schools to the bizarre ecosystem of trackers, analyzers and machine-learning models that allow the things you look at on the web to look back at you.

This stuff is my daily beat, and I learned a lot from Attention Merchants. More importantly, Wu has provided a framework for understanding current events in light of wider, historical trends.

The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads [Tim Wu/Knopf]

https://boingboing.net/2016/10/13/the-attention-merchants-a-dee.html

buzzfeed

On Tuesday – during a press conference at Trump Tower – US President Donald Trump defended the actions of white supremacists in Charlottesville over the weekend, saying there were “some very fine people on both sides.”

Here are some other examples of violence “on both sides.”

teded

How to spot a misleading graph (Vol.2)

A toothpaste brand claims their product will destroy more plaque than any product ever made. A politician tells you their plan will create the most jobs. We’re so used to hearing these kinds of exaggerations in advertising and politics that we might not even bat an eye.

But what about when the claim is accompanied by a graph? After all, a graph isn’t an opinion. It represents cold, hard numbers, and who can argue with those? Yet, as it turns out, there are plenty of ways graphs can mislead and outright manipulate. Here are some more things to look out for.

Our last post on reading graphs discussed how bar graphs can be manipulated to mislead you, but the scale can also be distorted along the x-axis, usually in line graphs showing something changing over time. This chart showing the rise in American unemployment from 2008 to 2010 manipulates the x-axis in two ways.

First of all, the scale is inconsistent, compressing the 15-month span after March 2009 to look shorter than the preceding six months. Using more consistent data points gives a different picture with job losses tapering off by the end of 2009. And if you wonder why they were increasing in the first place, the timeline starts immediately after the U.S.’s biggest financial collapse since the Great Depression.

These techniques are known as cherry picking. A time range can be carefully chosen to exclude the impact of a major event right outside it. And picking specific data points can hide important changes in between. Even when there’s nothing wrong with the graph itself, leaving out relevant data can give a misleading impression.

This chart of how many people watch the Super Bowl each year makes it look like the event’s popularity is exploding. But it’s not accounting for population growth. The ratings have actually held steady because while the number of football fans has increased, their share of overall viewership has not.

Finally, a graph can’t tell you much if you don’t know the full significance of what’s being presented. Both of the following graphs use the same ocean temperature data from the National Centers for Environmental Information. So why do they seem to give opposite impressions? The first graph plots the average annual ocean temperature from 1880 to 2016, making the change look insignificant. But in fact, a rise of even half a degree Celsius can cause massive ecological disruption. This is why the second graph, which show the average temperature variation each year, is far more significant.

When they’re used well, graphs can help us intuitively grasp complex data. But as visual software has enabled more usage of graphs throughout all media, it’s also made them easier to use in a careless or dishonest way. So the next time you see a graph, don’t be swayed by the lines and curves. Look at the labels, the numbers, the scale, and the context, and ask what story the picture is trying to tell.

From the TED-Ed Lesson How to spot a misleading graph - Lea Gaslowitz

Animation by Mark Phillips

teded

The Genius of Marie Curie

Growing up in Warsaw in Russian-occupied Poland, the young Marie Curie, originally named Maria Sklodowska, was a brilliant student, but she faced some challenging barriers. As a woman, she was barred from pursuing higher education, so in an act of defiance, Marie enrolled in the Floating University, a secret institution that provided clandestine education to Polish youth. By saving money and working as a governess and tutor, she eventually was able to move to Paris to study at the reputed Sorbonne. here, Marie earned both a physics and mathematics degree surviving largely on bread and tea, and sometimes fainting from near starvation.

In 1896, Henri Becquerel discovered that uranium spontaneously emitted a mysterious X-ray-like radiation that could interact with photographic film. Curie soon found that the element thorium emitted similar radiation. Most importantly, the strength of the radiation depended solely on the element’s quantity, and was not affected by physical or chemical changes. This led her to conclude that radiation was coming from something fundamental within the atoms of each element. The idea was radical and helped to disprove the long-standing model of atoms as indivisible objects. Next, by focusing on a super radioactive ore called pitchblende, the Curies realized that uranium alone couldn’t be creating all the radiation. So, were there other radioactive elements that might be responsible?

In 1898, they reported two new elements, polonium, named for Marie’s native Poland, and radium, the Latin word for ray. They also coined the term radioactivity along the way. By 1902, the Curies had extracted a tenth of a gram of pure radium chloride salt from several tons of pitchblende, an incredible feat at the time. Later that year, Pierre Curie and Henri Becquerel were nominated for the Nobel Prize in physics, but Marie was overlooked. Pierre took a stand in support of his wife’s well-earned recognition. And so both of the Curies and Becquerel shared the 1903 Nobel Prize, making Marie Curie the first female Nobel Laureate.

In 1911, she won yet another Nobel, this time in chemistry for her earlier discovery of radium and polonium, and her extraction and analysis of pure radium and its compounds. This made her the first, and to this date, only person to win Nobel Prizes in two different sciences. Professor Curie put her discoveries to work, changing the landscape of medical research and treatments. She opened mobile radiology units during World War I, and investigated radiation’s effects on tumors.

However, these benefits to humanity may have come at a high personal cost. Curie died in 1934 of a bone marrow disease, which many today think was caused by her radiation exposure. Marie Curie’s revolutionary research laid the groundwork for our understanding of physics and chemistry, blazing trails in oncology, technology, medicine, and nuclear physics, to name a few. For good or ill, her discoveries in radiation launched a new era, unearthing some of science’s greatest secrets.

From the TED-Ed Lesson The genius of Marie Curie - Shohini Ghose

Animation by Anna Nowakowska

mostlysignssomeportents

Smart cities are as stupid as the people who make them

For 13 years, I’ve been writing about Adam Greenfield, one of the world’s smartest critical thinkers on what we’re calling “The Internet of Things” this decade – but since the first glimmers of the idea of networked people, places and objects, Greenfield has been writing smart things about the subject, most recently in Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life, a book that Verso will publish next week.

In a long excerpt in The Guardian, we get a flavor of Greenfield’s nuanced, incisive critique of technology that is deployed to manipulate the people who use it, treating us as things to be sensed, not sensors.

Greenberg argues that the IoT’s surveil-and-manipulate model is especially dangerous because its proponent believe that they’re measuring objective reality, and are engaged in something apolitical. The reality is that people respond to metrics, so measuring something changes it, and this means that what you measure matters just as much as the measurements themselves.

It’s possible that we’d be able to create systems that are aware of these problems and try to account for them, but for so long as the answer to every criticism is “We’re empiricists, and your politics have no place here,” the problems will only get worse.

https://boingboing.net/2017/06/06/self-delusional-empiricism.html

mostlysignssomeportents

Reality Winner was outed by invisible dot patterns added by printers

There’s been much speculation on exactly how NSA leaker Reality Winner was exposed after giving The Intercept documents that showed the extent to which the security agency suspects Russian meddling (previously) in last year’s general election. On one hand, the filing against her talks of the “creases” seen in the scans The Intercept posted, tipping them off to it being a workplace printout from an insider–an insinuation of casual sloppiness on the reporters’ part. On the other hand, it seemed clear Winner did everything at a work computer anyway and was surely doomed once the story came out and internal investigations began.

The truth is all of the above, but with a cherry on top: the printouts contained invisible dot patterns added by the printer to identify the worker who sent the print job. All surviving photocopying, scanning and PDF compression to be published, plain as day, on the world-wide web. Errata Security explains how, in detail.

The document leaked by the Intercept was from a printer with model number 54, serial number 29535218. The document was printed on May 9, 2017 at 6:20. The NSA almost certainly has a record of who used the printer at that time.

The situation is similar to how Vice outed the location of John McAfee, by publishing JPEG photographs of him with the EXIF GPS coordinates still hidden in the file. Or it’s how PDFs are often redacted by adding a black bar on top of image, leaving the underlying contents still in the file for people to read, such as in this NYTime accident with a Snowden document. Or how opening a Microsoft Office document, then accidentally saving it, leaves fingerprints identifying you behind, as repeatedly happened with the Wikileaks election leaks. These sorts of failures are common with leaks. To fix this yellow-dot problem, use a black-and-white printer, black-and-white scanner, or convert to black-and-white with an image editor.

It seems to me that media simply should not public replicas of the documents they are sent, even at the cost of foregoing the credibility it establishes. You just never know what might be quietly revealed (or surreptitiously encoded), even in a crop or excerpt.

It’s not even an NSA thing: most new printers add these dots to every job.. The EFF has a list of printers that identify you, but it looks rather out of date.

https://boingboing.net/2017/06/06/reality-winner-was-outed-by-in.html

buzzfeed

The ocean is WILD.

mostlysignssomeportents

Rebecca Solnit on how Trump's quest for more adulation made him "the most mocked man in the world"

It’s early days in the Trump trainwreck, but Rebecca Solnit’s astonishing, beautiful, visceral essay “The Loneliness of Donald Trump” may well end up being the defining moment of the Trump presidency, in which Solnit uses the incisive wit that gave us the term “mansplaining” to explain Trump.

https://boingboing.net/2017/05/30/trumpsplaining.html

wilwheaton

Her essay is beautifully written, and deeply insightful.

mostlysignssomeportents

Tabletop Audio: ambient loops for your RPGs

“Role-players, boardgamers, writers, coders, artists, graphic designers, teachers, house-cleaners, lucid dreamers, gym-rats, distance runners, commuters” can enjoy over 100 ambient atmospheric loops with names like “Orbital Promenade,” “Lunar Outpost,” “Testing Chamber” and so on.

They’re free to use for noncommercial purposes and the creators welcome license queries for commercial users. I can really see how this would make an RPG session amazing. The playlist generating tool is great, but seems to lack a way to embed the player, meaning you’ll have to follow the link below to get a taste of the audio on offer.

https://boingboing.net/2017/05/31/foley-for-gamers.html

teded

Meet Team Vitamin!

Vitamins are the building blocks that keep our bodies running; they help build muscle and bone, capture energy, heal wounds and more. Today, TED-Ed wants to bring you your daily value and introduce you to the members of the team!

Vitamin A helps make white blood cells, shape bones, and improves vision.

The B Vitamins are a complex bunch - some of them make up co-enzymes, who help enzymes release energy from food. Others help the body to use that energy.

From Vitamin C, we get the ability to fight infection and make collagen, a kind of tissue that forms bones and teeth, and heals wounds.

Vitamin D gathers calcium and phosphorous so we can make bones.

Vitamin E works as an antioxidant, getting rid of elements in the body that can damage cells.

Finally, Vitamin K helps us make the proteins that clot blood.

Without this Vitamin Variety, humans face deficiencies that cause a range of problems. On the other hand, too much of any vitamin can cause toxicity in the body. In reality, it’s all about getting the balance right, and hitting that vitamin jackpot! Thanks, Team Vitamin!

From the TED-Ed Lesson How do vitamins work? - Ginnie Trinh Nguyen

Animation by The Moving Company Animation Studio

neurosciencestuff

Macaques, like humans, know how well they can recall memories

Researchers have pinpointed a brain region monkeys use to evaluate their ability to recall memories. To date, this metamemory process, which requires a higher level of self-reflection about our own cognition, was thought by some to be unique to humans, though this research suggests otherwise. Evaluating one’s own memory requires access to information about the strength of memory traces, though the brain structures and neural mechanisms involved in this effort - and whether they are distinct from normal memory recall - remain unknown. Here, to shed light in this space, Kentaro Miyamoto and colleagues devised a metamemory test in which macaques judged their own confidence in remembering past experiences; the animals opted for higher bets on the outcome of a memory recall test when they were surer their memory judgments were correct. Using this setup, as well as whole-brain searches by functional neuroimaging, the researchers identified a specific region in the prefrontal brain essential for metamemory decision making. Its inactivation caused selective impairment of metamemory, but not of memory itself. The results pave the way to further study of the neuronal underpinnings of metacognition using an animal model, where metamemory has previously been difficult to evaluate.

johannal

More often than not, research unveils evidence that humans are not special. Attributes once thought unique to humans are slowly debunked.

teded

An Animator’s Take on Mary Shelley’s "Frankenstein"

We’re honestly just so wowed by the beautiful backgrounds in our recent lesson, Everything you need to know to read “Frankenstein”, that we wanted to share some of the background and atmosphere designs with you!

Above is the house of Lord Byron on Lake Geneva, where Mary & Percy Shelley spent their vacation in 1815. This was shortly after the eruption of Mount Tambora that plunged parts of the world into darkness and marked a gloomy period that came to be known as The Year Without a Summer. So, the three were stuck indoors in this house and gloom that screeaaammsss ghost story, right? Lord Byron actually proposed a challenge to his literary companions: Who could write the most chilling ghost story?

18-year-old Mary set off right away on her ghost story, which would later become “Frankenstein”. Above is an image of Shelley diligently writing. We love the composition and the use of color and shadows in this overhead shot of Mary Shelley penning her famous novel.

Mary was heavily influenced by the art and literature of the Romantic Period. Above, director Silvia Prietov uses the only somewhat sunny colors in the entire animation to describe the Romantic’s appreciation for nature, emotion, and the purity of art. This scene starkly contrasts the otherwise gloomy house and the fierce & fiery colors of the scenes in Frankenstein’s lab.

And finally, above is a delicate design depicting Mary Shelley at the window as we learn more about her life and past leading up to writing “Frankenstein”. We’re swooning over the details hiding in the shadows, the color choices, and the mood created in this scene, that just invokes a pensive, rainy day.

To see all of the lovely art from this lesson, and to learn about the origins of “Frankenstein”, check out the TED-Ed Lesson Everything you need to know to read “Frankenstein” - Iseult Gillespie

Animation directed by Silvia Prietov, Designs by Andrés Felipe Landazabal

brucesterling

For Immediate Release

contact: [email protected]

NEW WEARABLE TECHNOLOGIES BIOCHEMICALLY OPTIMIZE WEARERS’ PERSONALITIES

Fashion-Forward ‘Superego Suits’ Developed By Jonathon Keats At The LACMA Art + Technology Lab Will Debut In San Francisco on March 16th

March 7, 2017 – Applying cutting-edge neuroscience to millennia of costume history, a multidisciplinary research initiative has achieved simultaneous breakthroughs in both fields, pioneering the next generation of wearable technology. Building on research from laboratories at Harvard and Florida State University, experimental philosopher Jonathon Keats will introduce 'Superego Suits’ to the public in San Francisco later this month.

Fully modular and customizable to all body types, Superego Suits boast multiple features to alter self-perception, augmenting wearers’ personalities for work and social life. “Today’s wearables can supplement wearers’ memories and knowledge and interactivity by connecting them to the internet,” says Mr. Keats. “But psychologically you still remain your same old self. Glassholes will be Glassholes.”

Superego Suits get to the root of the problem by altering biochemistry and brain/body communication. They can make wearers more confident and enchanting, and even connect with other Superego Suits to manage interpersonal relationships.

Four major innovations will be showcased at San Francisco’s Modernism Gallery, where prototypes will be on view together with fashion photography by Elena Dorfman, featuring the Wilhelmina International model Anna Sophia Moltke. Mr. Keats has engineered sunglasses with irises designed to open and close in time with the wearer’s breathing – augmenting her presence by increasing awareness of her internal state – a phenomenon known in neuroscience as interoception. He’s also developed bracelets that can position the wearer in a 'power pose’, causing the release of testosterone, a hormone associated with self-assurance. Telescopic rings are engineered to extend the wearer’s reach, mentally enlarging the sense of personal influence by modifying her body schema. And mechanical heels dynamically adjust the wearer’s stature to exceed the height of anyone she encounters.

“By putting the wearer in superhuman control of her bodily state, my elevator shoes enhance her belief in her own free will,” Mr. Keats explains. “And that’s not all. The opposite effect can also be achieved, catastrophically undermining certainty.”

In fact, all of the psychological phenomena are reversible, an essential quality of Superego Suits, which are designed to make personality completely adjustable. For instance, future versions of his power pose bracelets will be able to measure blood hormone levels, activating positive or negative feedback loops in which confidence is dynamically amplified or restrained.

“Through these inventions, we may be able to become more extreme versions of ourselves and also to selectively try on other people’s personae,” notes Mr. Keats. “Technology may further entrench egotism or facilitate empathy.”

The long-term impact of such interventions is far from certain, and the risks are uncharted, but Mr. Keats argues that the same can be said about iPhones and Fitbits. “These commonplace devices make us cyborgs without invasive surgery,” he observes. “And they update our capabilities with every software upgrade, barely attracting our notice.”

Nevertheless, the prevalence of wearables guarantees a robust market for Superego Suits. In addition to his work at the forefront of fashion, Mr. Keats has consulted with SpaceX engineers about adapting his neuroscientific couture for astronauts to wear on long-term space missions. These IVA spacesuits would allow ground control to coordinate crew members’ character traits, fostering cooperation in close quarters.

“At their best, Superego Suits can help to make us our best selves,” says Mr. Keats. “The challenge is that it forces us to ask who and what we want to be – both individually and as a species.”

Superego Suits will be unveiled on Thursday, March 16th from 5:30 to 8:00 at Modernism Gallery, 724 Ellis St., San Francisco, CA. Viewings will be available by appointment through April. Research and development has been generously funded by a grant from the Art + Technology Lab at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

More information: www.modernisminc.com/exhibitions/Jonathon_KEATS–The_New_Look_of_Neuroscience/

. . .

Acclaimed as a “poet of ideas” by The New Yorker and a “multimedia philosopher-prophet” by The Atlantic, Jonathon Keats is an artist, writer and experimental philosopher based in San Francisco and Northern Italy. His conceptually-driven interdisciplinary projects explore all aspects of society through science and technology. In recent years, he has installed a camera with a thousand-year-long exposure – documenting the long-term effects of climate change – at Arizona State University; opened a photosynthetic restaurant serving gourmet sunlight to plants at the Crocker Art Museum; exhibited extraterrestrial abstract artwork decoded from Arecibo Observatory radiotelescope data at the Judah L. Magnes Museum; applied quantum mechanics to banking – coaxing money into a quantum superposition to be shared by everyone – at Rockefeller Center; and attempted to genetically engineer God in collaboration with scientists at the UC Berkeley. Exhibited internationally, Keats’s projects have been documented by PBS, Reuters, and the BBC World Service, garnering favorable attention in periodicals ranging from Science to Flash Art to The Economist. In recent years, he has lectured at institutions including UC Berkeley, Stanford University and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), which recently awarded him a 2015-16 Art + Technology Lab Grant. His latest book, You Belong to the Universe: Buckminster Fuller and the Future has recently been published by Oxford University Press, which also published his previous book, Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age. He is represented by Modernism Gallery in San Francisco.

Photo Credit: Elena Dorfman

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Literary Constellations – wonderful astronomy-inspired diagrams of the opening sentences of beloved books and short stories.

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