5 Intriguing Things
1. The democratization of the Truman Show.
"Previously, park visitors received a payment card-sized pass with a magnetic stripe and an embedded radio frequency identification (RFID) proximity sensor. These cards served many purposes: they provided entry to your resort room and to the parks (working in tandem with biometric sensors), as well as allowing charges to your Disney account from anywhere on the property. I had thought that the MagicBand bracelets just replicated this old functionality in a slightly more convenient, striking format. But the Be Our Guest cashier’s words gives me pause. 'We’ll find you by your MagicBand?' We install ourselves at a table in the Rose Gallery, one of the cavernous rooms themed to mimic the Beast’s enchanted castle. Mere minutes pass, and our food arrives unceremoniously, carted forth from some unseen kitchen and dispensed without fanfare. 'What just happened?' I ask. 'MagicBand,' my wife shrugs."
+ Part of a new design collection—re:form—edited by Sarah C. Rich, who I love.
2. Adam Curtis is doing such fascinating, multivalent work on the development of technological cultures.
"Weizenbaum found his secretary was not unusual. He was stunned - he wrote - to discover that his students and others all became completely engrossed in the programme. They knew exactly how it worked - that really they were just talking to themselves. But they would sit there for hours telling the machine all about their lives and their inner feelings - sometimes revealing incredibly personal details. His response was to get very gloomy about the whole idea of machines and people. Weizenbaum wrote a book in the 1970s that said that the only way you were going to get a world of thinking machines was not by making computers become like humans. Instead you would have to do the opposite - somehow persuade humans to simplify themselves, and become more like machines."
3. Imagine this kind of bot detection, but not on Twitter. That's one big part of the future.
"The researchers created an algorithm called Bot or Not? to mine this data looking for significant differences between the properties of human users and social bots. The algorithm looked at over 1,000 features associated with these accounts, such as the number of tweets and retweets each user posted, the number of replies, mentions and retweets each received, the username length, and even the age of the account. It turns out that there are significant differences between human accounts and bot accounts. Bots tend to retweet far more often than humans and they also have longer usernames and younger accounts. By contrast, humans receive more replies, mentions, and retweets."
4. What thinking big looks like to a historian of roads and observer of Google.
"Imagine: if Google decided that it wanted to use its hackathons and intern power to regularly boost the power of these service groups. Imagine constructing an infrastructure for training and deploying a thousand slum residents to incubate their own neighborhood-accountable projects. Here's the historical lesson: Poor people build roads for poor people to do other things on. An institution comes in and makes it scale a hundred thousand times over. The economy is utterly transformed, a hundred times over. The lead institution takes an infinitesimal cut on return on investment -- a tiny return, the equivalent of a gasoline tax, not a toll-road return to compensate investors any time within the next twenty years -- and the result is the invention of a new economic system, which pays back all participants on a scale hitherto unfathomable."
5. Considering the unsavory linguistic lineage of Uber.
"Although Nietzsche himself disavowed anti-Semitism, the Nazis adopted the concept of the 'übermensch' as representing their ideal of the Aryan master race. For a while, 'superman' had a strong pull on the Anglo eugenicist imagination, too. In the British Eugenics Review in 1909, Maximilian Mügge wrote that Nietzsche would help inspire men to 'an ideal of a race of supermen, as superior to present mankind...as man is superior to the worm.' Then came Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s comic 'The Reign of the Superman' in 1933. Soon Superman was a hero battling Nazis and delivering supplies to American troops overseas, and the word lost its association with racial perfection. In the 1950s, uncomfortable with the vision of the Ubermensch of Steel, Nietzsche’s English translators started using 'overman' instead."
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
cavalcade. A procession of persons on horseback. Transf. & fig., any procession, hence pageant. It has become a VOGUE WORD in (e.g.): cavalcade of history, of fashion, of stars.
One of the Cavernous Rooms