5 Intriguing Things
1. Technological angst and Car Talk, from the journal Studies in Popular Culture.
"In the final analysis, then, Tom and Ray help reduce anxiety in the yuppie segment of the automobile public by enthusiastically dispensing auto lore with large dollops of humor, showing that auto-misery is a universal of American life but that through rational inquiry and deductive logic, most car problems are solvable, and through educated awareness, many cases of auto grief are preventable."
2. Intel gave $500,000 to this company that makes a drone for your wrist.
"There's nothing impersonal about a little drone that attaches to your wrist then releases, flying, following you whenever you like. It's like having a personal assistant whose one purpose is watching everything you do. And streaming it. Capturing it for the whole world to see, followed by a return to your wrist to rest. We think it's an improbable device, but one that'd be amazing if realized."
3. Joanne McNeil and Astra Taylor take on the dads of the Internet.
"Remember this: Whatever the cheerleaders of technological progress tell us, history does not move in a linear fashion. What feels like forward motion can suddenly stall out or reverse course, causing the loss of ground that once seemed securely held. Amid the endless stream of op-eds about how we need to get more girls into the male-dominated field of computer programming, few recall that, not long ago, leaders in the tech sector regarded it as a promising career choice for women. Grace Hopper, a legend in computer science, was part of the vanguard: she led the team that invented COBOL, a language that remains essential to data processing; received various honors throughout her career, including the Data Processing Management Association’s 'computer sciences man [sic] of the year' award in 1969; and coined the word 'debugging' after clearing out a moth in a machine. 'Women are ‘naturals’ at computer programming,' Hopper told a Cosmopolitan reporter in 1967."
+ #yesalldads.
"'History is all around us. The voices of the past thicken the air, calling out for your attention. When it all gets too much, pull the ear-buds out, stop, and look at where you are with fresh eyes, in the new silence…' Augmented reality, as currently instantiated, for the most part focuses on the visual through clumsy interfaces with mobile devices. This paper suggests that that a better way to ‘visualize’ history is to focus on augmenting ambient sound, tying the annotated geography of Wikipedia to physical location through earbuds. A prototype will be presented, allowing us to hear the thickness, the discords, of history. The presentation will explore the cognitive loads of various kinds of augmented reality, and the psychology of immersion, and the findings of user interface design to suggest that, for history at least, aural augmented reality is a more effective way of writing history in physical space than the visual."
5. The "smart" synthesizer that turns weather into music.
"The Weather Warlock has sensors to detect changes in sunlight, wind, rain, and temperature, which are transmitted via copper wires to the synth in Quintron’s living room. The result is a wide range of tones and harmonics based around a consonant E major chord, with special audio events occurring during sunrise and sunset."
Today's 1957 American English Language Tip
concernment has no senses that are as well, & now more naturally & frequently, expressed by the noun concern; concernment should be dropped as a NEEDLESS VARIANT.
The Credits: 1. jstor.org 2. slashgear.com 3. thebaffler.com 4. kevinkee.ca / @nowviskie 5. factmag / @freemusicarchiv
In the New Silence