5 Intriguing Things
Two quick things: 1) If you were having the tiny-text problem reading this email on your mobile device, it should be fixed. All gratitude should go to TinyLetter, which figured out the problem and worked out the solution with all appropriate haste. 2) The newsletter has grown far beyond my ambitions for it when I just up and decided to start sending it last fall. It now has over 10,000 subscribers—and having interacted with several hundred of you through the months, I can say that this is the most interesting bunch of people I've ever had the pleasure to connect. Thank you to you all. I love making this thing, so it's immensely satisfying that people keep reading it. OK, allons-y.
1. Uber has hired David Plouffe—you know, the president's former campaign manager. He is already spinning.
"In recent months, as it has continued to face resistance in new markets, the company has made no secret of its desire to find someone who can create and execute a strategy to win over consumers. 'We're on an inexorable path of progress here,” Mr. Plouffe said in an interview. 'Uber is making transportation safer. It’s providing jobs; it’s cutting down on drunk and distracted driving. I think the mission is really important.' The hiring of a politically skilled executive has practically become a sign of adolescence for tech start-ups, marking the moment when they realize that navigating government can be as essential as maneuvering past competition."
2. An ethics setting for self-driving cars?
"The way this would work is one customer may set the car (which he paid for) to jealously value his life over all others; another user may prefer that the car values all lives the same and minimizes harm overall; yet another may want to minimize legal liability and costs for herself; and other settings are possible."
3. The undersea sonic landscape is filled with whales, earthquakes, and submarines.
"In a retired shore station for transpacific communications cables on the western coast of Vancouver Island sits a military computer in a padlocked cage. It's the sort of cage you might otherwise use to lock up automatic rifles or expensive electronics at a big box store, but this cage is protecting data—classified signals intelligence gathered from underwater microphones called hydrophones that sit on the ocean floor. These hydrophones are part of an undersea Internet-connected scientific research network of sensors and video cameras called NEPTUNE, operated by the nonprofit group Ocean Networks Canada. Much to the delight of researchers world-round, the hydrophones record the distinct sounds of whale songs, earthquakes, and volcanic activity. But to the chagrin of the United States and Canadian militaries, they detect the passing movements of military submarines through the Juan de Fuca Strait, too."
"Establishing good descriptive and normative foundations for cultural policy requires confronting culture on its own terms, stripped of the veneer of scientism that the 'environment' and 'market' metaphors encourage. It requires, in other words, exactly what scholars on both sides of the debate have been trying to avoid: a theory that focuses on culture as culture and grapples directly with questions about why institutional arrangements for the production of culture matter. To decide whether the future of the 'cultural environment' is in jeopardy, we need to understand how cultural processes work, why we should value them, and whether legal and institutional structures adequately take those values into account."
5. It's good to know stuff like this is still happening among the kids.
"But Deas and the other Instagrammers distinguish themselves from these mostly older, more cerebral trespassers. 'They'll go to the top of the bridge and touch it and be like, Wow, this architecture!,' Deas says, a little dismissively. Urban explorers take photos mainly to document that they’ve been there, while for Deas the image is the whole point. The outlaw Instagrammers have more in common with graffiti artists, another subculture of underground creatives who make their work in the cracks of the urban landscape. Many Instagrammers go by enigmatic handles that would look good scrawled on the side of a subway car, like Novess, Black_soap, Heavy Minds, and 13thwitness, aka Tim McGurr, an unofficial godfather of the scene."
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
cion, scion. The detached shoot or portion of a plant. The OED lists the first as an obs. form of the second, but cion is used by most US horticulturists & nurserymen. Fig., scion is invariable: the scion of a noble family.
That Sit on the Ocean Floor