Year: 2013

Using Your Psychological Profile As A Password

Online security measures might start incorporating a kind of Rorschach test:

The new approach is straightforward and relies on a user answering a number of questions when he or she first signs up for access to a website. It begins by generating a set of simple inkblot pictures by randomly positioning different coloured ink spots in a small area of the screen. As part of the signup process, the user is asked to write a short phrase that describes each of these pictures. When the users return to access the site with a password, they are also shown the inkblot patterns and the set phrases that describe them. Their task is then to allocate the correct phrase to each pattern. [Jeremiah Blocki and others at Carnegie Mellon University] call their new test a GOTCHA (Generating panOptic Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart).

Meghan Neal thinks through the ramifications:

Inkblots are a popular with password gurus for a couple reasons. One, visual images are generally easier for people to remember than numbers. Two, recognizing patterns and associating them with intuited phrases is something machines aren’t able to do—not yet, at least. The human mind, on the other hand, “can easily imagine semantically meaningful objects in each image,” the study states.

Thus, hackers would need to be able to think like a human to crack the code, and would be forced to use actual humans to wage an attack. At the least, it would make password cracking much more cumbersome and expensive, researchers suggest.

The downside to Rorschach-style puzzles is that there’s no guaranteeing you’re going to interpreted a pattern the same way twice.

Masculinity In Rockwell

Deborah Solomon remarks that “although [Norman] Rockwell is often described as a portrayer of the nuclear family, this is a misconception”:

Of his 322 covers for the Saturday Evening Post, only three portray a conventional family of dish_rockwellparents and two or more children (Going and Coming, 1947; Walking to Church, 1953; and Easter Morning, 1959). Rockwell culled the majority of his figures from an imaginary assembly of boys and fathers and grandfathers who convene in places where women seldom intrude. Boyishness is presented in his work as a desirable quality, even in girls. Rockwell’s female figures tend to break from traditional gender roles and assume masculine guises. Typically, a redheaded girl with a black eye sits in the hall outside the principal’s office, grinning despite the reprimand awaiting her.

Although he married three times and raised a family, Rockwell acknowledged that he didn’t pine for women. They made him feel imperiled. He preferred the nearly constant companionship of men whom he perceived as physically strong. He sought out friends who went fishing in the wilderness and trekked up mountains, men with mud on their shoes, daredevils who were not prim and careful the way he was.

(Image: Shiner illustration © SEPS. Used by courtesy of Curtis Licensing)

Kennedy The Conservative?

The Dish recently noted the right-wing distaste for JFK during his presidency, but Ira Stoll insists that “Kennedy was a conservative by the standards of both his time and today”:

Liberals claim that Kennedy’s tax cuts were somehow different from Reagan’s and Bush’s, and it is true that Kennedy was cutting the rates from higher levels (though loopholes and deductions meant that few actually paid the statutory high rates). But the arguments Kennedy rejected in pursuing his tax cuts sound awfully familiar to the arguments used by liberals today. The Harvard economist John Kenneth Galbraith, from his perch as ambassador to India, opposed tax cuts and advised increasing government spending instead. Kennedy told him to shut up. Senator Albert Gore Sr. called the Kennedy tax cut a bonanza for “fat cats.” Kennedy, frustrated, privately denounced Gore as a “son of a bitch.”

Even Kennedy’s signature initiatives, the Peace Corps and the effort to send a man to the moon, are best understood as Cold War efforts to best the Soviet Union in the frontiers of the developing world and of space. As Kennedy said in one tape-recorded meeting about the NASA budget: “Everything that we do really ought to be tied into getting onto the moon and ahead of the Russians … Otherwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money, because I’m not that interested in space.”

Bringing Outer Space Down To Earth

Megan Garber focuses on how the blockbuster thriller Gravity turned space from a mere setting into a true “environment”:

Gravity represents a reversal from most other entries in the “SpaceFlick” genre. Most of Hollywood’s iconic portrayals of the world beyond our own—epics, almost by default—tend to be macrocosmic, rather than micro-, in scope. They concern themselves, in pretty much every way, with wide angles rather than short. And those perspectives translate to the films’ characters, too: The main players tend to be communities and systems, collectives that wage a kind of Red Rover game against space and all its complexities. The Empire in Star Wars. The Starfleet in Star Trek. The Nostromo in Alien. The NASA of Apollo 13. The deep-core drillers of Armageddon.  The assorted nerds of Contact. Within the worlds of most traditional SpaceFlicks, there are certainly men who take steps; the films’ main concerns, however, are the great leaps taken on behalf of mankind.

J. Hoberman was also sold on the film’s depiction of space as an unpredictable, nail-biting environment:

With only two actors and a single situation, the movie is stripped down and elemental. It focuses on the minutiae of individual survival and—after a brief, wacky paean to the pleasures of swanning around in outer space—is suffused with metaphysical dread. …

The anxiety rarely abates even as the debris storms from broken-up satellites that plague the astronauts—whizzing shards of lethal confetti, explosions so violent the entire screen seems to disintegrate—provide the movie with its most visually enthralling moments. Maximum tension is derived from [Sandra] Bullock’s repeated attempts to find something, anything to hold on to. In 2001, space has a majestic indifference. In Gravity, space is an active threat. The precariousness of existence is a visual constant.

Contrasting the film with Kubrick’s 2001, Paul Wells contends that Gravity demonstrates America’s diminished interest in space exploration:

Pull back the cameras. Look at the assumptions about humanity’s place in space. Kubrick’s vision was grand. He depicted routine trips by tourists to orbit, colonies circling the earth and on the moon, astronauts on their way to Jupiter, and a humanity whose destiny is the stars. [Gravity director Alfonso] Cuarón shows technicians futzing around among three space stations, two of them decrepit, with no greater hope than to make it back down to Earth where they belong. It’s a fair measure of how far most people’s ambitions for space travel have collapsed in 45 years.

Cuarón’s done nothing wrong here. He’s operating within the assumptions of his time, as Kubrick was in his.

Recent Dish on Gravity here and here.

Isolation Incites Violence

Andrew Gumbel explains:

Prisoners going into solitary [confinement] sometimes imagine they can take advantage of their isolation to read, or study, or develop an interest in painting, but, invariably, they grow listless and unfocused within just a few days — unable to concentrate for even short periods of time. In a 2003 paper, Craig Haney of the University of California, Santa Cruz noted: “There is not a single published study of solitary or supermax-like confinement in which nonvoluntary confinement lasting for longer than 10 days […] failed to result in negative psychological effects.”

The evidence of these studies clearly contradicts the official line that isolating prisoners is a necessary measure to reduce prison violence.

Violent incidents at California prisons have actually increased by almost 20 percent since Pelican Bay opened and long-term isolation became institutionalized statewide. When a national commission spearheaded by a retired federal appeals judge and a former US attorney general looked into the matter in 2006, they concluded that responsibility for prison violence lay primarily with the prison authorities, not the prisoners themselves. A system that either packs prisoners into overcrowded cells or isolates them, then fails to provide an adequate daily structure of work, exercise, reading and socializing, is a system ready to explode.

Previous Dish on solitary confinement here, here, and here.

Big Pharma’s Chokehold

Dr. Russell Sanders fumes after reading a NYT report on how drug companies price-gouge kids with asthma. One company, for example, charges Americans $250 for a nasal spray that retails for $7 in Europe:

I learned of this revolting turn of events a couple of years ago when a mother asked if there were an alternative I could prescribe for her child’s Flovent. Inhaled fluticasone is one of the most commonly used medications for patients with persistent asthma, a low-dose steroid that calms the chronic inflammation that predisposes these patients’ airways to spasm. Generic fluticasone was the medication I intended to prescribe (or, rather, renew) to keep this particular patient’s asthma in good control, thereby obviating the risk that she would have worsening of her illness and possibly end up hospitalized. She had no option to do without it.

“Why would she be getting Flovent?” I asked. “Fluticasone has been around for a million years.  I’m sure it’s available as a generic.” No.  Because of the requirement that CFCs no longer be used as propellants, all inhalers are shiny new hydrofluoroalkane (HFA) products.  Which meant new patents and much, much higher prices.  For the exact same medication. … [A]s the Times article makes very clear, the utter lack of cost control and patent regulation on these life-saving medications means pharmaceutical companies gouge my patients to their heart’s content.

Drum notes that Big Pharma invented this new stranglehold:

[T]he ozone layer was the initial cause of all this, so feel free to place some of the blame on environmentalists if you like. But as it turns out, scientists raised some early concerns about the inhaler ban because the replacement for CFCs was a powerful greenhouse gas. So they suggested that maybe it was better just to make an exception for asthma inhalers and let well enough alone. At that point, the pharmaceutical companies that had been eagerly waiting for the old inhalers to be banned went on the offensive. … [They] didn’t just take advantage of this situation, they actively worked to create this situation. Given the minuscule impact of CFC-based inhalers on the ozone layer, it’s likely that an exception could have been agreed to if pharmaceutical companies hadn’t lobbied so hard to get rid of them. The result is lower-quality inhalers and fantastically higher profits for Big Pharma.

History Of The Guitar Solo, Ctd

A reader responds to a recent post:

I loved watching that video you featured, but it leaves out THE father of the guitar solo, Django Reinhardt. Watch this unembeddable video from about 2:27 on. First a duet, then in a band setting, Django – a gypsy – was playing guitar solos long before Chuck Berry (let alone British rockers trying to copy him or B.B. King), most likely live in the 1920s, and certainly on record as a soloist by 1934. That video is the only known one of Django in which the sound syncs up to the visuals; watch his left hand, and you’ll see that he can play rhythm/chords with four fingers and his thumb, but he could only play melody with TWO fingers. A caravan fire had mutilated his hand, but just look at how he compensated!  [The video embedded above] is an even more awe-inspiring demonstration of his abilities.

American Charlie Christian was Django’s only real contemporary, but due to failing health, he was only active from 1939 to 1941. Django, on the other hand, played from the 1920s until his death in 1953, leaving a staggeringly large catalog of material.  He remains the most influential European jazz musician to this day.

As a guitar player, I had always wondered where guitar solos really came from. It didn’t make sense to me that one day we had delta bluesmen like Son House and Robert Johnson, and then it somehow morphed so quickly into Chess Records and rock ‘n roll.  Then I heard Django, and it all really fell into place.  He brought together the type of musical tradition only a gypsy could, combining the fiery playing of Spanish Flamencos to the popular music of his day (musette), and then adding in American jazz.  B.B. King counts him as an influence, which plants the seed of his soloing back into American hands, and lo and behold, there’s the answer. Most guitar players (let alone music lovers) don’t realize that the man most responsible for taking the guitar from an instrument purely used as part of the rhythm section into the limelight of soloing is a Belgian gypsy with a funny name (in Romany, Django means “I awake”).

One last piece of trivia: his most famous song, Nuages, was the anthem of occupied France during WWII.  It became his signature tune, one he carried with him in his switch over to the electric guitar (around 1946).  This version of it is from his electric guitar/bebop-era:

It’s drenched with pinch/artificial harmonics and rapid-fire playing, the type of work later “guitar heroes” are famous for.

Update from a reader:

Your correspondent has no idea what he’s talking about. Django was great, sure, but there were many who preceded him. The best of which, to my mind and ear, is Eddie Lang (Born Salvatore Massaro in Philly in 1902), who was also one of Reinhardt’s inspirations. He accompanied Bix Biederbecke and Frank Trumbauer on their landmark recordings, including “Singin’ the Blues,” made records with Lonnie Johnson (as Blind Willie Dunn … can’t have whites and blacks playing together), and became Bing Crosby’s accompanist before dying of a botched tonsillectomy in 1933 at the age of 30. His recordings with violinist Joe Venuti paved the way for Django’s partnership with Stephane Grappeli. Here he is with Bix and Tram on “For No Reason At All In C”:

To all your readers, you’re welcome.

When Pumpkins Weren’t Popular

The gourd’s omnipresence today is a far cry from centuries past:

[P]umpkins have been associated with stupidity since the Roman philosopher Seneca auspicated the tradition of “pumpkinheads” in his rebuke of Emperor Claudius. And Falstaff, dum-dum par excellence, is characterized by Shakespeare as a “gross watery pumpion [pumpkin]” in The Merry Wives of Windsor. Like Claudius (and sort of Falstaff), the anthropomorphic pumpkin is always foolish yet aggressive: Before there were scarecrows and jack-o’-lanterns, Americans traded folk tales about animated vines and pumpkins so huge they had to be harvested by teams of axe-wielders, only to find their faith belied by a family of pigs trapped inside. …

[P]umpkin was decidedly low class. New Englanders were called “Brother Jonathan and pumpkin pie” to signify their bumpkinhood and Puritans demeaned the pumpkin as callow and ill-restrained when they chastised—yes, chastised—Thanksgiving feasts as “St. Pompion’s Day.” Up until the 19th century, pumpkin was eaten primarily as slave and hog feed or as a poor man’s alternative to sugar cane, molasses, or malt.

Updates from a few readers:

Your post about pumpkins is interesting, except that the first paragraph has its facts all wrong.

There were no pumpkins for the Roman philosopher Seneca to compare Claudius or anyone else to; and likely but less certainly, there were no pumpkins in England in Shakespeare’s time. Pumpkins are a member of the squash (and melon) family: purely a New World crop. No European saw a pumpkin until the so-called Columbian Exchange, in which squash, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, most beans, and peppers from the chili family came to the Old Word; and wheat, rice, citrus, apples, cabbage and much more came to the New World. (Thus Italy was without tomato sauce, Ireland and England without chips, Thailand without most hot peppers and peanuts.) Pumpkins in particular appear not to have been grown in England until after 1700. It is a matter for speculation what sort of gourd-like crop Seneca and Falstaff (via Shakespeare) actually had in mind.

Another:

The notion that Claudius was compared to a pumpkin is the result of overly imaginative translation. The Apocolocyntosis Claudii, an anonymous text attributed to Seneca the Younger, was given its title by Dio Cassius. Roman emperors, of course, claimed that they became gods upon their deaths; the name for the process was “apotheosis”, the process of deification. Apocolocyntosis is a satirical pun on apotheosis. Latin trots dating at least as far back as Robert Graves popularized the translation of “apocolocyntosis” as “pumpkinification”, but a less anachronistic translation might be “gourdification”.

But the title doesn’t really have much to do with the work proper, in which Claudius winds up spending eternity as a law clerk in the underworld rather than a vegetable of any kind. Chris Young suggested a superb title for the work, “The Ascension of the Living Gourd”, inasmuch as Claudius was being mocked for his fat head rather than for actually becoming a fleshy fruit.