Month: November 2013

Playing Da Vinci’s Tune

A Polish concert pianist has turned a Renaissance dream into a reality (click “CC” for English captions):

The story behind the instrument:

Buried in the pages of Leonardo Da Vinci’s famous 15th century notebooks, amongst the sketches of flying machines, parachutes, diving suits, and armored tanks, was a curious idea for a musical instrument that merged the harpsichord and cello. The Italian Renaissance polymath referred to it as the viola organista. The general idea for the instrument was to correlate keyboard fingerwork with the sustained sound of a stringed instrument, but among the dozens of ideas pursued by the gifted artist and inventor, this was one he never explored further. Nearly 100 years would pass before an organist in Nuremberg would build the first functional bowed keyboard instrument, and many others would try throughout history to realize Da Vinci’s vision with various levels of success.

Now, after an estimated 5,000 hours of work over three years and nearly $10,000 invested in the project, Polish concert pianist Slawomir Zubrzycki has unveiled his own version of the viola organista.

The mechanics:

The flat bed of its interior is lined with golden spruce. Sixty-one gleaming steel strings run across it, similar to the inside of a baby grand. Each is connected to the keyboard, complete with smaller black keys for sharp and flat notes. But unlike a piano, it has no hammered dulcimers. Instead, there are four spinning wheels wrapped in horse-tail hair, like violin bows. To turn them, Zubrzycki pumps a pedal below the keyboard connected to a crankshaft. As he tinkles the keys, they press the strings down onto the wheels, emitting rich, sonorous tones reminiscent of a cello, an organ and even an accordion. The effect is a sound that da Vinci dreamt of, but never heard.

J. Bryan Lowder is delighted:

While the viola organista is unlikely to replace pianos or string ensembles (or more practical string synthesizers for that matter) any time soon, it seems compelling as a compositional tool in certain special cases where a dense, acoustic string sound is desirable, but the trouble of hiring multiple string players is not. That’s assuming you can get Zubrzycki to lend you his one-of-a-kind realization. In any case, it’s always good to have a little more music in the world, especially when it comes straight from the 500-year-old mind of a maestro.

The Zen Of Knitting

Jenny Diski contemplates one of her favorite activities:

As everyone says who knits, there is a dreamy, calming pleasure to knitting. You want to do more. The edges of anxiety are rounded off, you can feel the drip of endorphins soothing the rat in the solar plexus. Needles clicking, mind half on the pattern, half drifting. People liken it to meditation and gym work. I’ve done both, and it’s true. Trancelike sometimes. That simple repetitive work with the hands has a tranquillising effect is not a new insight, but it does work.

… The main thing that had changed since I used to knit was the existence of YouTube. There is no stitch or technique that you can’t find explained to you by a patient expert. Google s1k1psso and you find a dozen videos. Stop and start it, knit along, freeze frame. Even I can follow and practise until I can do it. There are courses online that show you how to knit whole garments, with a teacher leading you through it, talking about variations, giving tips on how to make wrong right again.

Are Crowdfunded Assassinations A Thing Now?

Andy Greenberg introduces readers to Kuwabatake Sanjuro, a self-described crypto-anachist who presides over “a kind of Kickstarter for political assassinations”:

According to Assassination Market’s rules, if someone on its hit list is killed–and yes, Sanjuro hopes that many targets will be – any hitman who can prove he or she was responsible receives the collected funds. … Like other so-called “dark web” sites, Assassination Market runs on the anonymity network Tor, which is designed to prevent anyone from identifying the site’s users or Sanjuro himself. Sanjuro’s decision to accept only bitcoins is also intended to protect users, Sanjuro, and any potential assassins from being identified through their financial transactions. bitcoins, after all, can be sent and received without necessarily tying them to any real-world identity.

Brian Merchant checks out the site:

In the FAQ section, Sanjuro explains who’s eligible for extermination:

“I’ll allow anything that has a good reason,” he says. “Bad reasons include doctors for performing abortions and Justin Bieber for making annoying music. The person should have wronged someone in some way related to the previous question. Politicians, bureaucrats, regulators and lobbyists are accepted without question.” Currently, there are six people marked for death: Jyrki Tapani Katainen, the prime minister of Finland; François Gérard Georges Nicolas Hollande, the president of France; “Barack Hussein Obama II”; Ben Shalom Bernanke; the NSA director Keith Brian Alexander; and James Clapper, the head of the National Intelligence Agency.

Pledges have already been made, too. By far the highest bounty is on Bernanke, with 124 bitcoin on his head. With today’s exchange rate, that comes out to a value of $75,000 USD. That is now essentially a price on Bernanke’s head, if any users are convinced enough by Sanjuro’s twisted gambit to pull the trigger. And Sanjuro hopes it’s just the beginning. He’s awaiting a user-generated list of murder subjects – just input your own into the text box like so, and you’ll have done your part to instigate a conspiracy to kill.

P.J. Vogt isn’t sure how seriously to take a site like Assassination Market:

The skeptical part of me is pretty sure these markets are a scam. Assassination isn’t the kind of service that lends itself to public advertisements or to trusting people based on their online reputations. And the fact that the website specifically promises to go after high-profile politicians adds to its unlikeliness. Viewed in that light, Assassination Markets is just another place where a fool and his bitcoin are soon parted.

And yet, these kinds of stories – about an enormous but hypothetical idea that will likely never be realized – can get real very quickly. To take a recent example, the idea of the Silk Road, when it was introduced, seemed completely preposterous to me. Yes, it was technically possible for people to buy and sell drugs online. But who, beyond a tiny fringe, would actually use it? Of course I was wrong – the site ran successfully for two years before being shuttered.

Either the news didn’t get to Bernanke or he didn’t let it get to him; this week he gave a “cautious blessing to bitcoin” in advance of a congressional hearing on virtual currency:

Bernanke mostly distanced himself from virtual currencies, saying the Fed “does not necessarily have authority to directly supervise or regulate these innovations or the entities that provide them to the market.” But he also said that bitcoin and its ilk “may hold long-term promise, particularly if the innovations promote a faster, more secure and more efficient payment system.”

Mike Allen, Busted

US-TAX REFORM-NORQUIST-ALLEN

Dish readers know what I think of “native advertizing” and “sponsored content.” If it’s an advertorial, just call it and clearly label it an advertorial! Full disclosure and transparency are essential. The rest is whoredom, not journalism. When a journalist becomes a copy-writer for big advertisers giving him or his publication money, and does not clearly disclose the conflict of interest, he or she has ceased to be an independent journalist and joined the lucrative profession of public relations.

Read Erik Wemple’s evisceration of Mike Allen’s Playbook and make up your own mind. But to my eyes, it reads like a meticulously researched tale of at least the appearance of blatant corruption. Wemple starts with the kind of test I used for Buzzfeed’s corporate whoredom. Guess which one of these two items Mike Allen wrote and which one was written by the US Chamber of Commerce?

3) The U.S. Chamber of Commerce has an ambitious new agenda to generate stronger, more robust economic growth, create jobs, and expand opportunity for all Americans. Learn more about the Chamber’s American Jobs and Growth Agenda at http://www.uschamber.com/issues. **

4) “U.S. Chamber of Commerce will launch ‘On the Road With Free Enterprise,’ a two-month cross-country road trip to promote ‘the principles of free enterprise and the best of America. Your Free Enterprise Tour Guides will see the sights, check out local events, talk to businesses, and share it [online]. More than 900 teams applied to be the Free Enterprise Tour Guides, and after months of poring over applications, two teams remain: Jen and John, and Nate and Joe. You can vote [here] once per day.’ http://www.FreeEnterprise.com/tour”

Allen wrote the first second press release; the US Chamber of Commerce the second first. [Correction here] But the Wemple examination impresses because of its thoroughness. After a while, the examples are so egregious and numerous they beggar belief. Wemple and the Post unleashed an army of bots onto the Playbook archive and came to the following inescapable conclusion:

It’s about time that Politico’s Allen got his due as a native-advertising pioneer. A review of “Playbook” archives shows that the special interests that pay for slots in the newsletter get adoring coverage elsewhere in the playing field of “Playbook.” The pattern is a bit difficult to suss out if you glance at “Playbook” each day for a shot of news and gossip. When searching for references to advertisers in “Playbook,” however, it is unmistakable.

The most egregious examples are the US Chamber of Commerce, BP, and – yes – Goldman Sachs:

Like BP and the Chamber, Goldman Sachs is a pivotal advertiser for Politico, routinely placing back-page ads in the print product and occasionally “presenting” “Playbook.” Differentiating between those ads and Allen’s blurbs can strain the eyes. Examples: Goldman Sachs fights child sex trafficking (Jan. 23, 2013). Goldman Sachs to assist small businesses in Philadelphia. Jan. 9, 2013. Goldman Sachs helps veterans. (Dec. 14, 2012). Goldman Sachs helps small businesses. (June 12, 2012). Goldman Sachs Business Book of the Year Award! (Aug. 13, 2012). Puff piece on Goldman Sachs’s Lloyd Blankfein. (June 14, 2012).

Allen is also a close friend apparently with BP executive Geoff Morell, something he didn’t disclose when writing a puff item about Morel’s promotion.

Wemple is clear that the rest of the Politico seems very different, covering the powerful with persistence and skepticism, quite unlike Playbook’s relentless cheering of Washington’s corporate business machers. He’s also fair in noting Allen’s incredible persistence and energy as a reporter. But I’ve noticed before how Allen eagerly just gives the powerful a platform rather than holding them to account – and doesn’t even seem to understand that being a courtier to Washington Inc. and Washington’s most powerful is not the same as being a journalist. For my previous posts on Allen’s acting as a p.r. flak for Cheney and Ailes, among others, see here.

And all of this may not subjectively feel to Allen anything other than his reflexive energy and eagerness to please. He has long been a conduit for the wealthy and powerful, rather than a critic of any kind, and he doesn’t seem to understand why this makes some of us uncomfortable. But I didn’t think there was such an obvious connection between the corporations he promotes and their advertising dollars in Politico, which opens up a whole new issue – one noted not so long ago by Michael Calderone. And the mountain of evidence is very hard to refute.

So you wait in the article for Allen to defend or explain himself or for Politico’s editors to push back. But they refused to cooperate with the piece at all! “In rejecting a sit-down discussion, Editor-in-Chief John Harris said the premise ‘is without merit in any shape or form.'” So if corruption is not behind all this, what is? Or is all of this just an accident that requires no explanation at all?

And – not to get all pious about this – but aren’t journalists required to be transparent, when such obvious conflicts of interest are exposed? How can they demand transparency from public officials when they refuse to provide it themselves? Glenn Greenwald, call your office. It looks like we need you even more than we thought we did.

(Photo: Jim Watson/Getty.)

Faces Of The Day

Scottish Parliament Votes On Equal Marriage Bill

Campaigners from the Equality Network hold a rally outside the Scottish Parliament on November 20, 2013. The Scottish government’s Marriage and Civil Partnership Bill subsequently passed the first of three parliamentary hurdles by 98 votes to 15 with five abstentions. By Jeff J Mitchell/Getty Images.

“They Live In A Closet That Has No Door”

Michael Joseph Gross has a long, fascinating piece on the Vatican’s gays. It’s a very small barrel with a hell of a lot of fish in it:

At the Vatican, a significant number of gay prelates and other gay clerics are in positions of great authority. They may not act as a collective but are aware of one another’s existence. And they inhabit a secretive netherworld, because homosexuality is officially condemned. Though the number of gay priests in general, and specifically among the Curia in Rome, is unknown, the proportion is much higher than in the general population. Between 20 and 60 percent of all Catholic priests are gay, according to one estimate cited by Donald B. Cozzens in his well-regarded The Changing Face of the Priesthood. For gay clerics at the Vatican, one fundamental condition of their power, and of their priesthood, is silence, at least in public, about who they really are.

Clerics inhabit this silence in a variety of ways. A few keep their sexuality entirely private and adhere to the vow of celibacy. Many others quietly let themselves be known as gay to a limited degree, to some colleagues, or to some laypeople, or both; sometimes they remain celibate and sometimes they do not. A third way, perhaps the least common but certainly the most visible, involves living a double life. Occasionally such clerics are unmasked, usually by stories in the Italian press. In 2010, for the better part of a month, one straight journalist pretended to be the boyfriend of a gay man who acted as a “honeypot” and entrapped actual gay priests in various sexual situations. (The cardinal vicar of Rome was given the task of investigating. The priests’ fates are unknown.)

There are at least a few gay cardinals, including one whose long-term partner is a well-known minister in a Protestant denomination. There is the notorious monsignor nicknamed “Jessica,” who likes to visit a pontifical university and pass out his business card to 25-year-old novices. (Among the monsignor’s pickup lines: “Do you want to see the bed of John XXIII?”) There’s the supposedly straight man who has a secret life as a gay prostitute in Rome and posts photographs online of the innermost corridors of the Vatican. Whether he received this privileged access from some friend or family member, or from a client, is impossible to say; to see a known rent boy in black leather on a private Vatican balcony does raise an eyebrow.

He wonders whether Francis will change anything:

Francis appointed eight cardinals to serve as his core advisers on significant issues, and in the coming years, this group may have as much influence on the situation of gays in the priesthood as Francis himself. When I asked an archbishop how he thinks the cardinals’ conversation about their gay brothers will go, he answered with reference not to the Holy Spirit but to the god of Fortune. “Right now the surest thing I can say is that there’s change in the air,” he said. “If you could say what will happen, you could say who’d win the lottery.”

Getting A Glimpse Of An A.I. Future

David Cronenberg explored biotechnology in films like Videodrome and eXistenZ, and now visitors to the interactive David Cronenberg: Evolution exhibit in Toronto can experiment with his fictional creations. Rae Ann Fera explains what happens when you visit the exhibit’s “BMC Labs“:

[T]he BMC Labs experience is intense and in-depth. When starting the first simulation, users are warned that it’ll take a 20-minute commitment and that the content is of a mature nature. This is the world of Cronenberg, after all. Upon first engaging with the sim, you’re introduced to Kay, an AI that is looking to learn about human emotion. The first simulation is built on the binary of opposite emotions: trust and disgust. How you answer generates different sequences, responses and questions from Kay. “We’re trying to create a sense of empathy or emotional feeling when you’re interacting with technology. We want you to feel something for Kay,” says [project creator Lance] Weiler.

Throughout the process you’re asked to do things like recall your best memory, determine which character you think looks most trustworthy, emotionally react to a morally ambiguous group encounter (is it an orgy, an abusive situation?), and divulge what disgusts you most. While the entire experience exists in a bit of Cronenberg’s dream logic (it’s surreal yet disconcertingly relatable) this last question of disgust prompts an unexpected reaction.

At the start of the simulation, you’re asked to connect with Twitter. So far, so common for digital experiences. Until Kay tweets on your behalf, completely reversing the intent of your answer. Reply that greed disgusts you and your account tweets out “I love greed.”

“We wanted to make people feel icky. When you get that real tweet back from Kay and it’s an inversion of your thought, it’s a visceral feeling. We wanted to make people feel that,” says [chief digital officer at the Canadian Film Centre Ana] Serrano, applauding the legal department understanding the purpose of that action. The AI-generated tweet is also generating a lively conversation socially. Some are (understandably) aggravated by the perversion of the message and perceived invasion of privacy. But it’s also opened up a bigger discussion of how people feel about the future of biotechnology. Like, if this were actually real, how would you feel if your AI avatar went rogue or misinterpreted human emotion to negative effect? It’s at this point that you get shades of what it would be like to be in a Cronenberg film.

The Misery Of Miscarriage, Ctd

headstone

Many more readers are writing in:

Thanks for your series of posts on miscarriage. I’ve had four miscarriages and have no living children. In clinical terms, I am a “habitual aborter” – it actually says that on my chart! It’s my worst habit and I would quite like to break it.

One of the most baffling parts of miscarriage is the enforced silence around the loss and grief. As you are no doubt discovering, once you write or speak the word miscarriage, people emerge from the woodwork. It seems like everyone has either had one, or has a sister, friend, or mother who has had one. When I had my fourth miscarriage this February, I knew I couldn’t just go back to work again and pretend like everything was normal, as I had for the first three. So, I wrote an email very clearly explaining to my colleagues what I was going through and asking for their understanding. In an instant, I became the person to go to talk about miscarriage. I had a series of coffee dates and after work drinks during which I heard horror stories in hushed tones about babies born in toilets on Christmas Eve, gushing blood before scheduled lectures and during meetings, bosses who demanded a return to work while miscarriage was ongoing, and altogether too many stories of my colleagues’ husbands or mothers who were eager for a quick recovery from the grief over what wasn’t a “real baby anyway”.

It was like I was the un-elected president of a new secret society – the Spontaneous Aborters Club. Seemingly all of my female colleagues had miscarried. It felt so good to finally be talking about it, to be matter of fact about it. The understanding we have as a culture is that miscarriage is not spoken of, which explains the rule that we don’t tell anyone we are expecting until at least 12 weeks. When you crack open this vault to let a bit of light in, stories of darkness come pouring out.

As an aside, I have wondered if our modern reluctance to acknowledge miscarriage has something to do with our struggles over how to think about abortion. I used to worry that if I admitted that my embryo or fetus was a baby that I would have to admit that the embryos and fetuses of women who chose abortion were just as “real”. I’ve come to realize, however, this is actually the crux of what it means to be pro-choice. My husband and I want these babies and so their brief existence and their passing is tangible to me. They are babies because I feel their loss so deeply.  I would never deny someone the choice of whether or not to form this most human of attachments.

Another reader:

I have had three miscarriages and I have had three beautiful healthy children, so I have experienced both the amazing highs and hellish lows of pregnancy. What I discovered through my experiences is that many people just don’t think at all before they let words come out of their mouths. Yes, you could suggest that they mean well, but that doesn’t make up for the stupid and hurtful things they say.

The first miscarriage was also our first pregnancy and we waited until eight weeks to tell our families. Within a week I was having a D&C to remove whatever was left of my pregnancy because my body even failed me when it came to miscarrying.

Whilst waiting for the procedure to begin, a nurse told me it could have been a still birth, which is worse. Though I agree, it wasn’t in any way a comfort to me to consider that my degree of loss could have been higher. Some friends and family members wanted to know what had caused the miscarriage and helpfully suggested things to do or avoid next time. Yes, what we definitely needed to cope with our loss was for people to suggest how we had caused the miscarriage. Believe me when I say that every woman who has had a miscarriage wonders if it was her fault somehow. And the best was my sister-in-law telling me that she knew exactly how I felt because her health issues prevented her from having any more children than the two she already had. Yes, losing a child and not knowing if you will ever be able to have a child at all is the same as not being able to have a third.

Comfort came from those who did actually know how we felt because they had experienced a miscarriage – and often more than one, like us. Miscarriage is a lot more common than one might think and yet still is almost a taboo subject. For a time I felt like the tainted one. Friends who were getting pregnant for the first time didn’t want me around because I was living proof of what can go wrong.  And I never got to experience a pregnancy without fear because every one that ended with a healthy baby was preceded by one that ended with tears.

It has been more than ten years since the last miscarriage and my youngest just turned 9. You would think that I would be over the losses by now and for the most part I am. But sometimes you are reminded such as when you fill out medical forms and it asks how many pregnancies and live births you have had.

Thank you for this thread, because sometimes all you need to help healing is knowing that you aren’t the only one.

Another:

My wife and I have been trying to get pregnant for years and, after multiple rounds of fertility treatment that failed, we were just about ready to give up. Then, in the break between treatments this year, we found out that she had gotten pregnant (the old-fashioned way). We were elated and started planning immediately for the new arrival.

However, after the first scan we were told that there was no baby present (at 7 weeks) and that she had had a miscarriage. This was not a huge surprise given the amount of bleeding that had happened in the few days before the scan, but it was still devastating – even more so because we had told no one and although we could provide some support for each other, we were both in a dark place.

The next week, there was a follow-up scan to see whether a procedure would be needed to remove the products of conception. The nurse turned to my wife and said “and there’s the baby’s heartbeat”. The baby was missed on the first scan. You can imagine how we felt.

Our stress levels have been enormous for the last few months, but as the pregnancy has progressed (showing now with little kicks daily) we have slowly started to relax – that is until I read the New Yorker article and your updates of miscarriage stories. I have warned my wife to stay away from your blog until the baby is born and I am FREAKING OUT. I obviously feel terrible for those women, and the statistical likelihood of something like that happening this late in pregnancy is low, but at this point I won’t be happy until I’m holding my baby in my arms.

(Photo by Flickr user romana klee)

A Literary Appetite

Cara Parks recognizes the 70th anniversary of The Gastronomical Me, the landmark work of food writing by M.F.K. Fisher, who “eschewed page after page of recipes in favor of an amalgam of memoir, travelogue [and] essay”:

The collection of essays, which stretches from her childhood to her life in France, the beginning of World War II, the dissolution of her first marriage and the death of her second husband, marked Fisher’s emergence as one of the great voices of her time.

It is telling that Fisher, who wrote so hedonically of food, so often chose to discuss hunger in these pages. The book is not about dumb indulgence but the constant roving of human appetites, be they for love, power, money, or food. She relates a train trip with an uncle while she was still an adolescent, when her teenage habit of blithely ignoring the menu was finally quashed by a stern look. “I looked at the menu, really looked with all my brain, for the first time,” she writes, and then orders her iced consommé and sweetbreads sous cloche with determination and poise. We are all hungry, she tells us, but we must remember to make choices, not drift to whatever is at hand. Our hunger unites us; our choices, in restaurants and in life, make us individuals.

Fisher’s sensual accounts of the connection between food and emotional inner lives severed food writing from kitchen drudgery. She begins another essay with an account of her landlords in France, a family with which she and her first husband boarded. But she interrupts herself from a straightforwardly gastronomic account, describing the “cold meats and salads and chilled fruits in wine and cream …” only to stop herself and realize, “When I think of all that, it is the people I see. My mind is filled with wonderment at them as they were then, and with dread and a deep wish that they are now past hunger. They were so unthinking, so generous, so stupid.” The reader travels with her from a jolly 1930s French kitchen to the desolate aftermath of World War II. For Fisher, food is not just evocative; it is a unique language she wields to explain subtleties glossed over by the written word.