Year: 2013

The Daily Wrap

Today on the Dish, Andrew foretold trouble for GOP if they continued their anti-gay rhetoric, felt optimistic about Francis’ influence on the Church, and provided a home for difficult pictures. In politics, conservative opponents of capital punishment hid in the shadows, congress trailed popular opinion on gay rights, and Charles Pierce railed on Ezra Klein’s “unmitigated codswallop.” While Obama visited Israel, his Israel speech wowed as Israelis and Palestinians diverged from a peace agreement. Elsewhere overseas, the Middle East heated up, Dahr Jamail showed us the human cost of the Iraq War, and Felix Salmon worried about Cyprus and the EU.

In assorted coverage, Kenneth Goldsmith transcribed history, publishing was always subject to the whims of the market, and we examined personalized book dedications. CentUp mixed micropayments and charity, Kyle Wiens wished that buying something meant you owned it, and Michael Hahn photoshopped a drone. As readers drilled down into the arguments on fracking, Eric C. Anderson looked to the stars for raw materials, and researchers miniaturized heart attack prevention. Fallows lost faith in Google products after Reader and Bozhan Chipev achieved equality through piracy as Twitter turned seven.

Meanwhile, Jenni Avins traced the rise of denim, Sharon Astyk spread the word about foster parenting, Emma Maris talked to the mellower marijuana crowd, while the last name debate crossed borders. Readers defended CNN’s Steubenville coverage, Sarah Palin made an appearance on Inside the Actors Studio, and Alyssa Rosenberg gave Iraq War movies a thumbs down for missing context. We waited for spring to come to England in the VFYW, Paulo Wang painted with CGI in the MHB, and a baby bengal bared its teeth in the FOTD.

– D.A.

Pirated Opportunity

After a childhood in Bulgaria with “little access, if any, to high quality western cultural content,” Bozhan Chipev credits piracy with helping him achieve equality:

I pirated the shit out of western culture. Star Wars, The Shawshank Redemption, Half-Life, Nirvana, Adobe Creative Suite – I did it all. At a time and place where knowledge of western languages was the most precious asset and the state educational system was heavily lagging behind, I learned English at quite a decent level, at the cost of no more than my internet connection. To add to that, I acquired skills in using specialized software for design and video production, as well as knowledge about peer-to-peer networks. … Just as Lawrence Liang points out in his article “Beyond Representation: The Figure of the Pirate”, piracy accomplished for me all the things the state and the educational system could not.

Many westerners have scolded me when I’ve told stories of the obscene amounts of music, movies and software I have pirated. What they fail to understand is that I used this mode of distribution for the lack of any realistic access to an alternative. In some cases, a given movie would never even come to cinemas or air on TV. Some bands would never sell their CDs in local stores. And obtaining a legal Adobe Creative Suite would have meant selling most of my organs.

7 Yrs L8r

On the seventh anniversary of the first tweet, Laura Sydell assesses Twitter’s commitment to free speech:

The French court ordered Twitter to block the anti-Semitic tweets, and Twitter complied, says CEO Costolo. “We have to abide by the laws in the countries in which we operate,” he says. “So the capability we built allows us to block those tweets from being seen in the countries in which they’re against the law, while remaining visible to those outside that country.”

Costolo says though people won’t see the tweets in France, Twitter’s software will let them know the accounts are being censored. But the French court also asked Twitter to turn over the names of the people who sent out the hate tweets. Twitter refused. Pontin of MIT Technology Review says he thinks Twitter’s compromise is full of contradictions.

“To their credit, they’re not giving up names and that’s great,” Pontin says. “But they’re no longer compliant with their own little internal rule, which is that they will be locally compliant with law. So they’ve said, ‘We’ll be compliant with this part of the laws.’ “

Meanwhile, Buzzfeed discovered that the promotional video seen above is “absolutely terrifying if you set it to the “Inception” theme.”

Bringing Resources Into Orbit

Fallows chats with Eric C. Anderson, chairman and co-founder of Space Adventures. Anderson wants to colonize Mars and mine asteroids. His vision:

I’m not suggesting that we’re going to start using resources from space next year. But over the next 20 years, resources in space will most likely be used to explore our solar system. And eventually we’ll start bringing them back to Earth. Wouldn’t it be great if one day, all of the heavy industries of the Earth—mining and energy production and manufacturing—were done somewhere else, and the Earth could be used for living, keeping it as it should be, which is a bright-blue planet with lots of green?

A Heart Attack Early Warning System

It could soon be a reality:

A team of Swiss researchers is putting the finishing touches on a truly amazing little gadget. It’s a tiny, 14-millimeter-long mini-spaceship of a device that’s embedded just under your skin and held in place with an adhesive patch. The “tiny, portable personal blood testing laboratory,” as the researchers describe it, then detects the data about the presence of up to five proteins and organic acids. Using Bluetooth, it then transmits that data to a nearby smartphone, essentially giving the host an unprecedented amoung of real-time information about her health. The best part? It’ll cost less than a dollar.

One way this system could save lives:

“There is a molecule called troponin that is released by the heart muscle just three to four hours before the heart attack, once the heart muscle starts malfunctioning,” wrote Sandro Carrara, one of the leaders of a team at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne (EPFL), in an email to The Verge. “Our system could detect this molecule three/four hours in advance of the fatal event.”

What The Hell Just Happened In Cyprus? Ctd

The European Central bank has demanded that Cyprus get its shit together by Monday. Felix Salmon worries:

[T]he Cypriot parliament is going to face an unbelievably tough vote at some point in the next few days. Will they essentially cede their sovereignty to unelected Eurocrats, and rubber-stamp a deal which looks very similar to the one they’ve already rejected once? Or, standing on principle, will they consign themselves to utter chaos and a very high probability of leaving the Eurozone altogether? Such decisions are not always made rationally. Which means that if I were Joe Weisenthal, I’d be pretty worried right now about losing my $1,000.

Earlier Dish on Cyprus here and here.

An Experiment With An Expiration Date?

Google Graves

Fallows is wary of Google’s new note-taking app, Keep:

The idea looks promising, and you could see how it could ended up as an integral part of the Google Drive strategy. But you could also imagine that two or three years from now this will be one more “interesting” experiment Google has gotten tired of.

Until I know a reason that it’s in Google’s long-term interest to keep Keep going, I’m not going to invest time with it or lodge info there. The info could of course be extracted or ported somewhere else — Google has been very good about helping people rescue data from products it has killed — but why bother getting used to a system that might go away? And I don’t understand how Google can get anyone to rely on its experimental products unless it has a convincing answer for the “how do we know you won’t kill this?” question.

(Partial screenshot from Slate’s graveyard of former Google products. Users are allowed to put a flower on )

Why Take His Name? Ctd

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Readers relay a few customs from other countries:

Just wanted to add my two cents to this thread. In a lot of Hispanic cultures like Cuba (where I’m from), you take both your mother’s maiden name and your dad’s name. It’s not hyphenated – you just kind of have two last names. The assumption though is that when your son gets married, his wife will take only the father’s name. However, even if your kids ultimately don’t take this approach, I like the idea of the double last name. If your concern about taking your spouse’s last name has to do with whether your name will live on, you can give your kids both names and then both parents have, on average, more than 20 years to convince the kid to pass on one or the other’s last name.

Another reader:

Iranian women, on the whole, do not change their surnames after marriage. By the way, Happy Persian New Year (Norooz Mobarak!)

Another:

Québec long ago came up with the answer.

By law, no names change in marriage. All women keep their own name.  If you want to change your name, that is a different legal function – a legal name change, like anyone else who wants to change their identity. When I first moved here, I did not know this, and hearing all the politicians and their wives introduced I thought “Is everyone shacking up?” But Québec – which for 40 years has had some of the most progressive civil law in North America – was an early bulwark of feminism, and for pure equality and consistency’s sake this makes logical sense.

Update from a reader:

I’m not sure your reader from Quebec is highlighting anything different than in the US. A name change is not some integrated part of a marriage in any State that I’m aware of. I happened to get my marriage license in North Carolina (hardly a bastion of progressive civil rights) and there was nothing about a name change included. We just filled out the paperwork and mailed it in. There was no assumption (other than culturally) that her name would change and we didn’t have to opt-out of anything to prevent it from happening. In fact, from what my friends have told me it’s quite arduous to get your name legally changed.

A name change is a formal legal function independent of marriage here just as in Quebec and I’m sure it’s been that way for plenty of decades. Sorry to rain on his holier-than-thou parade.

But another clarifies:

Here in Quebec, women are not allowed to take their husbands last name. My wife and I married last summer and though I had no expectation that she should take my name, she would have liked to on account of her own conflicted feelings about her family name. Since 1981, however, Quebec law has specifically prohibited it, although one can apply to change it after a few years if one can provide evidence that one is commonly known by another name.

Not surprisingly, I see a higher percentage of hyphenated names here than elsewhere. Although there are many great things about living in Quebec, this refusal to accept people’s choice of whether to change their names or not reflects the heritage of the French nanny state that I could certainly do without.