"Head for the hills." (Image by Andrew Butko.)
The Robots are Coming!! (Your Mind)
The robots are coming to mindf*ck you. You cant tell them apart from humans and they are smarter than you.
Head for the hills while you still can.
You are currently browsing the yearly archive for 2012.
Max Headroom was a computer-generated talking head who existed only on television, and I suspect the same is true of Charlie Rose. From 1986:
Tags: Charlie Rose, David Letterman, Max Headroom
There was a brouhaha last Friday when Mitt Romney’s son, Matt, used some Birther vernacular while campaigning on behalf of his father in New Hampshire, but it really shouldn’t be a surprise to anyone who’s followed the former Massachusetts Governor’s strategy. Playing to the idea that Obama is “Other” has been a tacit but clear part of the Romney strategy. The younger Romney’s only real deviation was being explicit instead of implicit.
When Romney says that “Obama doesn’t have a clue about the economy,” that’s obviously fair game. But when he states that Obama “doesn’t get America,” he’s labeling the President as less than adequately American or not a real American. When Romney says Obama is trying to turn “America into Europe,” he may as well be using “Kenya” in the comparison.
Trying to pander to people who want to see Obama as alien is sad, especially for someone who’s likely been treated to same way because of his own religion. That kind of faux patriotism is often the last refuge of a lout, but it in Romney’s case, it’s been present from the first.
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Tags: Matt Romney, Mitt Romney
From “Between the Lines,” a really interesting piece in L.A. Magazine by Dave Gardetta about the science of parking spaces, a segment about UCLA traffic guru Donald Shoup:
“In the United States hundreds of engineers make careers out of studying traffic. Entire freeway systems like L.A.’s have been hardwired with sensors connecting to computer banks that aggregate vehicle flow, monitor bottlenecks, explain congestion in complicated algorithms. Yet cars spend just 5 percent of their lives in motion, and until recently there was only one individual in the country devoting his academic career to studying parking lots and street meters: Donald Shoup.
Shoup is 73 years old. He drives a 1994 Infiniti but for the last three decades has steered a 1975 Raleigh bike two miles uphill daily in fair weather, from his home near the Mormon temple to the wooded highlands of UCLA’s north campus. He was born near one shore (Long Beach), grew up on a far shore (Hawaii), and resembles a 19th-century figure sketched by Melville. He has a mildly hectic complexion, a halo of silver hair that breaks over his small ears into a white froth of a beard, and brimstone eyes. This year Shoup’s 765-page book, The High Cost of Free Parking, was rereleased to zero acclaim outside of the transportation monthlies, parking blogs, and corridor beyond his office door in UCLA’s School of Public Affairs building. He wasn’t surprised—’There’s not even a name for what I do,’ he says. Shoup, however, does not lack for acolytes. His followers call themselves Shoupistas, like Sandinistas, and on a Facebook page they leave posts suggesting parking meters for prostitutes and equations that quantify the contradiction between time spent cruising for free parking versus the ‘assumed time-value’ cited to justify expanding roadways. (The hooker stuff is more interesting.)
After 36 years, Shoup’s writings—usually found in obscure journals—can be reduced to a single question: What if the free and abundant parking drivers crave is about the worst thing for the life of cities? That sounds like a prescription for having the door slammed in your face; Shoup knows this too well. Parking makes people nuts. ‘I truly believe that when men and women think about parking, their mental capacity reverts to the reptilian cortex of the brain,’ he says. ‘How to get food, ritual display, territorial dominance—all these things are part of parking, and we’ve assigned it to the most primitive part of the brain that makes snap fight-or-flight decisions. Our mental capacities just bottom out when we talk about parking.'” (Thanks Longform.)
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Godard‘s darkly comic 1967 traffic nightmare:
Goofy on a superhighway, 1965:
Tags: Dave Gardetta, Donald Shoup