Month: April 2014

Your Moment Of Octopus

Ze Frank turns his focus to one of the Dish’s pet subjects:

Oliver Sacks also contemplates the creature:

Here, as a start, the nervous system is much larger—an octopus may have half a billion nerve cells distributed between its brain and its “arms” (a mouse, by comparison, has only 75 to 100 million).

There is a remarkable degree of organization in the octopus brain, with dozens of functionally distinct lobes in the brain and similarities to the learning and memory systems of mammals. Cephalopods are not only easily trained to discriminate test shapes and objects, but some reportedly can learn by observation, a power otherwise confined to certain birds and mammals. They have remarkable powers of camouflage, and can signal complex emotions and intentions by changing their skin colors, patterns and textures.

Darwin noted in The Voyage of the Beagle how an octopus in a tidal pool seemed to interact with him, by turns watchful, curious, and even playful. Octopuses can be domesticated to some extent, and their keepers often empathize with them, feeling some sense of mental and emotional proximity. Whether one can use the “C” word—consciousness—in regard to cephalopods can be argued all ways. But if one allows that a dog may have consciousness of an individual and significant sort, one has to allow it for an octopus, too.

Previous Dish on the minds of octopuses here, here, and here. All sorts of eight-armed fun here.

Kill Switches Now!

Consumers overwhelmingly support the security option for their smart phones:

According to a recent study at Creighton University, Americans spend about $4.8 billion per year on cellphone insurance and $580 million per year to buy new phones when theirs get stolen. Now, if cellphones came with a “kill switch,” users could control remotely when their devices were stolen, and the Creighton study estimates that consumers could save about $2.6 billion per year. The study, conducted by statistician and data scientist William Duckworth, was based on a February survey of 1,200 smartphone users. Duckworth’s survey showed that 99 percent of respondents thought cell carriers should make kill switches an option on phones. Ninety-three percent felt that this service should be free, and 83 percent said that such a feature would reduce theft.

But Dave Smith points to the major player blocking such reform:

Though Duckworth’s report should help the case for a kill switch, lawmakers will still face some pushback from the CTIA, the lobbying group that represents the telecom industry—which has two executives from companies that sell insurance to smartphone owners on its board of directors.

The CTIA has a different idea on how to handle smartphone theft. Instead of shutting down stolen phones individually, the CTIA has offered up a database that can block stolen phones from being reactivated by the phone’s new owner. Unfortunately, the database has a few weaknesses, including the fact that it only works with a handful of countries; in other words, if you steal a phone and travel to the right country, the CTIA can’t block those stolen phones from getting reactivated.

Previous Dish on the subject here.

The Draw Of Caricature

Josh Fruhlinger reviews The Art of Controversy, Victor Navasky’s book on political cartoons:

[Navasky’s] early dissection of the subject can be pretty abstract, but it does yield one concrete and intriguing interpretation of the power of the political cartoon: the idea that caricatures overload our facial-recognition circuitry and thus seem more face-like than actual faces. Such images “amplify the differences” between their target and the average person, exaggerating the features our brains latch on to in order to distinguish some individual countenance from everyone else’s. Thus Obama’s increasingly prominent ears on editorial pages across the country, thus Jimmy Carter’s teeth, thus Nixon’s . . . well, thus most things about Nixon’s face, as he was a caricaturist’s playground. “His nose told you he would bomb Cambodia,” cartoonist Doug Marlette once said.

It would be tidy if there were a moment in the history of art that we could point to as the birth of caricature; in reality, it’s been discovered again and again, in many times and places. Navasky does try to find early examples: Bernini’s seventeenth-century sketch of Pope Innocent XI looking like a skeletal alien creature; James Gillray’s 1798 “Doublers of Character,” which is essentially a primer for making various facial types more grotesque.

Previous Dish on the history of cartoon art here.

A Surprising Hub For Driverless Cars

Richard Morgan predicts that Tampa, Florida will become ”the driverless era’s Motown”:

Only four states (California, Florida, Michigan, and Nevada) allow driverless cars. And the federal government has only authorized a handful of public-road test beds – Tampa has one – for so-called “connected vehicles,” which are not necessarily driverless. … Florida is also primed for robot assistants. It’s currently home to 26 metropolitan areas, 14.3 million people, and 100 million annual tourists. In 2012, Florida suffered 2,424 of the nation’s 33,561 highway deaths (only California and Texas had more), according to the NHTSA. By 2030, a quarter of Floridians are expected to be 65 or older, their more alert driving days behind them. Tampa, in particular, has many of the social ingredients experts think of when they envision the driverless era: retirement communities, college campuses, military bases, hotels and theme parks — contained settings well-suited for autonomous shuttle services.

Executions Were Here

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Photographer Emily Kinni visited states that no longer have the death penalty to see what became of the execution sites:

From Massachusetts to Alaska, the search required more time buried in libraries and speaking to locals than the actual photography itself. Records were often scarce, but town historians and people in the community came to her aid, recalling missing links or connections that eventually led to discovery. The resulting images are surprisingly mundane and ordinary given their former use. While some execution sites remain partially intact as totems of the past, others are wholly transformed with no trace whatsoever of their checkered history. Unexpected and insightful, the ongoing series acts as a fascinating document of what becomes of spaces originally designed for death.

But the work is not political:

Interestingly, Kinni is not a crusader for the abolition movement; her images are not intended as a call to challenge death penalty laws in 33 states … and nor do they read that way. “My affinity for these sites, cannot be considered without the political and historical issues of the death penalty, but it isn’t where it begins,” says Kinni. “My interest is in the evolution of these sites – how places for execution are changed and what the sites become eliminating their historical relevance.”

See more of Kinni’s photos here.

Avoid A Light Sleep

Researchers have discovered links between overexposure to light and depression and obesity:

Randy Nelson, a circadian biologist at Ohio State University, has been studying light’s effects on depression and obesity since 2004, when one of his graduate students was hospitalised for a staph infection. The student complained bitterly about the bright lights in his room and in the hospital hallway, which robbed him of sleep and stressed him out. Nelson and another graduate student, Laura Fonken, decided to investigate this complaint using rodents as experimental subjects. They found that mice who were exposed to constant bright light exhibited depressive symptoms, behaving listlessly and ignoring their sugar-water treats. Remarkably, they then found that the same happened when the mice were exposed to only 5 lux at night, when the animals were normally active. This is equivalent, Fonken notes, to leaving a television on in your bedroom, or a computer screen next to your head as you nod off. …

Along the way, Fonken also noticed something unexpected: the light-exposed rodents got fat, even though they were eating the same number of calories as their dark-sequestered mates. What changed was their circadian rhythms; like a snacky night owl, they were eating when they should have been inactive, upending their digestive and metabolic activity

The Quality Of Mercy

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Thank you for the hundreds and hundreds of emails about the Mozilla-Eich affair. My readers overwhelmingly disagree with me for a host of reasons. But I have to say that this time, the more I have mulled this over, the more convinced I am that my initial response to this is absolutely the right one. And not just the right one, but a vital one to defend at this juncture in the gay rights movement.

So let me concede all of the opposing arguments that have been deployed to defend the public shaming and resignation of Brendan Eich. To recap those points: This was not the “gay left” as such, but the “techie straight left” more broadly. Sure (I’ve been to San Francisco). He wasn’t fired; he resigned. Undisputed. Mozilla is not your usual company. Obviously not. Being CEO is different than being just a regular employee and requires another standard. Sure. It doesn’t matter because we’re all marching toward victory anyway. Well, probably. This was a function of market forces and the First Amendment. You won’t get me to disagree about that.

So why am I more convinced that what just happened still matters, and matters a lot? I think it’s because these arguments avoid the core, ugly truth of what happened. Brendan Eich was regarded as someone whose political beliefs and activities rendered him unsuitable for his job. In California, if an employer had fired an employee for these reasons, he would be breaking the law:

1102. No employer shall coerce or influence or attempt to coerce or influence his employees through or by means of threat of discharge or loss of employment to adopt or follow or refrain from adopting or following any particular course or line of political action or political activity.

Now Eich was not in that precise position. He resigned as CEO under duress because of his political beliefs. The letter of the law was not broken. But what about the spirit of the law?

The ability to work alongside or for people with whom we have a deep political disagreement is not a minor issue in a liberal society. It is a core foundation of toleration. We either develop the ability to tolerate those with whom we deeply disagree, or liberal society is basically impossible. Civil conversation becomes culture war; arguments and reason cede to emotion and anger. And let me reiterate: this principle of toleration has recently been attacked by many more on the far right than on the far left. I’m appalled, for example, at how great gay teachers have been fired by Catholic schools, even though it is within the right of the schools to do so. It’s awful that individuals are fired for being gay with no legal recourse all over the country. But if we rightly feel this way about gays in the workplace, why do we not feel the same about our opponents? And on what grounds can we celebrate the resignation of someone for his off-workplace political beliefs? Payback? Revenge? Some liberal principles, in my view, are worth defending whether they are assailed by left or right.

I’m then informed that opposition to marriage equality is not just a political belief. It’s a profound insight into whether someone is a decent moral person or a bigot. And this belief is also held with absolute certainty – the same absolute certainty of righteousness that many Christianists have.

Let me just say I’ve learned to suspect anyone with absolute moral certainty, whatever position they take. My last book, The Conservative Soul, was precisely an argument against such certainty on the right. What it does is extinguish the space for people to think, change their minds, entertain doubt, listen, and argue. It is absurd to believe that a third of the country recently “hated” gay people and now don’t. It’s incredibly crude to posit that you’re a bigot to oppose marriage equality in 2013, but not in 2008. I remember this argument being used by the hard left when they opposed marriage equality in the 1980s and 1990s (and, yes, they did so then and they were not bigots either). The majority hates us, and will never be persuaded, we were told. Stop your foolish crusade! And yet a decade and a half later, so many minds have changed. So why on earth would we seek to suddenly rush this process and arbitrarily declare that all those we have yet to persuade are ipso facto haters?

And one ugly manifestation of absolute certainty in near-theological movements is their approach to dissidents. Dissidents in these absolutist groups are outlawed, condescended to, pressured, bullied, lied about, trashed, slandered, and distorted out of any recognition. In this case, a geeky genius who invented Javascript and who had pledged total inclusivity in the workplace instantly became the equivalent of a Grand Master in the Ku Klux Klan. And yes, that analogy was – amazingly – everywhere! The actual, complicated, flawed human being was erased by thousands who never knew him but knew enough to hate him. Because that’s all they need to know. No space was really given for meaningful dialogue; and, most importantly, no mercy was given without total public repentance.

I’m sorry but I’m not less disturbed by this manifestation of illiberalism today than I was on Thursday. I’m more so, especially given the craven, mealy-mouthed response of so many to it (yes, Frank, you buried the lede). Read this astonishing post from Mozilla’s Mark Surman. Eich may have been “one of the most inspiring humans that I have ever met” and “a true hero for many of us” but that was not enough:

Many calm and reasonable people said “Brendan, I want you to lead Mozilla. But I also want you to feel my pain.” Brendan didn’t need to change his mind on Proposition 8 to get out of the crisis of the past week. He simply needed to project and communicate empathy. His failure to do so proved to be his fatal flaw as CEO.

Surman says this despite the fact that Eich himself wrote the following:

Here are my commitments, and here’s what you can expect:

  • Active commitment to equality in everything we do, from employment to events to community-building.
  • Working with LGBT communities and allies, to listen and learn what does and doesn’t make Mozilla supportive and welcoming.
  • My ongoing commitment to our Community Participation Guidelines, our inclusive health benefits, our anti-discrimination policies, and the spirit that underlies all of these.
  • My personal commitment to work on new initiatives to reach out to those who feel excluded or who have been marginalized in ways that makes their contributing to Mozilla and to open source difficult. More on this last item below.

I know some will be skeptical about this, and that words alone will not change anything. I can only ask for your support to have the time to “show, not tell”; and in the meantime express my sorrow at having caused pain … I am committed to ensuring that Mozilla is, and will remain, a place that includes and supports everyone, regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, age, race, ethnicity, economic status, or religion.

And this was not enough. I’m sorry but Surman is full of shit – as, I might add, is his profoundly intolerant company. Eich begged for mercy; he asked to be given a fair shot to prove he wasn’t David Duke; he directly interacted with those he had hurt. He expressed sorrow. He had not the slightest blemish in his professional record. He had invented JavaScript. He was a hero. He pledged to do all he could to make amends. But none of this is ever enough for Inquisitions – and it wasn’t enough in this case. His mind and conscience were the problem. He had to change them or leave.

A civil rights movement without toleration is not a civil rights movement; it is a cultural campaign to expunge and destroy its opponents. A moral movement without mercy is not moral; it is, when push comes to shove, cruel.

For a decade and half, we have fought the battle for equal dignity for gay people with sincerity, openness, toleration and reason. It appears increasingly as if we will have to fight and fight again to prevent this precious and highly successful legacy from being hijacked by a righteous, absolutely certain, and often hateful mob. We are better than this. And we must not give in to it.

How Desperate Are The Torture Defenders?

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In the last couple of days, we’ve seen quite a panic from the war criminals who will likely be definitively exposed for who they are in the upcoming Senate Intelligence Report and, yes, in history. For some reason, the Washington Post gave Jose Rodriguez – the man who is so proud of his record performing humane enhanced interrogations that he destroyed the evidence of them – a platform to say … well, nothing:

Unlike the committee’s staff, I don’t have to examine the [torture] program through a rearview mirror. I was responsible for administering it, and I know that it produced critical intelligence that helped decimate al-Qaeda and save American lives … I don’t know what the committee thinks it found in the files, but I know what I saw in real time: a program that provided critical information about the operations and leadership of al-Qaeda …

Translation: I don’t need to know any of the facts, or review any of the evidence, to know that I was right. He sounds like my dad refusing to ask for directions. And of course, you can see why, psychologically, he must believe this.

He has a massive sunk moral cost in the torture program. If you have tortured people, you will  grasp at anything to believe it was justified. The alternative is acknowledging you committed war crimes – and then covered up the evidence (which cover-up, of course, precipitated the Senate investigation).

And then we have this risibly sexist attempt to duck responsibility for his own war crimes from former CIA chief Michael Hayden:

Hayden said Feinstein “wanted a report so scathing that it would ensure that an un-American brutal program of detention interrogation would never again be considered or permitted. That motivation for the report may show deep emotional feeling on the part of the senator, but I don’t think it leads you to an objective report,” Hayden said.

You can and should be outraged (but hardy surprised) by the fact that these men throwing dust in the air are given such prominent platforms in Washington. But you might be encouraged by one obvious conclusion from their remarks: they’ve obviously got nothing. And their bluff is slowly being called.

The Hounding Of A Heretic, Ctd

When you’ve lost Bill Maher, you’ve lost a lot of people:

A reader writes:

I’m one of those lefty queer liberals you are always sneering about, but you are right about this one. This whole episode has the air of the lynch mob about it and I am disappointed with people.

Another writes:

I read what you wrote about your disgust with gay “fanaticism” and I couldn’t agree more.  I came out of a very cultish Christian church that hated women, gays and anything cultured, but I still consider myself spiritual (and Christian) and want to have a daily relationship with the Holy Spirit. Over dinner the other night, three other like-minded gays and myself discussed the schisms in the church, and how common sense was often jettisoned in order to tow the party line. And then we talked about how we don’t like how the gay community is doing the same exact thing.  We are all for gay rights and equality and acceptance, but at the point that we no longer have grace for anyone else’s viewpoints, we have become the very thing we abhor.

Another:

I am a Christian who vocally supported the rights of gays to marry for many years – and did so in rural Texas, where doing so actually meant you were risking something. Sorry to say now that I regret it. Not because it was wrong to support gay marriage, but because the gay community apparently will not extend to me as a Christian the same respect.  First it was wedding cakes and flower arrangements, now this. Not to be overly dramatic, but it seems I basically signed my own death warrant with respect to religious freedom.  I guess I was naive not to expect this type of blowback.

Sorry, guys.  From here on out, you’re on your own.

Another:

I work for Mozilla (please don’t share my name, although I know you have a policy of anonymity anyway), and I have worked closely with Brendan Eich for many years.

The part that makes me the saddest about this whole story was that the benefit for the equality movement was minimal at best, but the blow this strikes to the movement for an open and healthy Web could be huge. I so wish we had done better over the years at telling Mozilla’s story. (Did you or your readers know we’re a mission-driven, non-profit organization? It’s sad how few people do even to this day.) Brendan was our co-founder, one of our best minds, and one of the most passionate and committed members of the movement to keep the Web from being owned by powerful interests like Google and Microsoft. He was always scrupulous in his professional decorum, and despite a fierce ability to argue a technical or strategic point about Mozilla, I never once saw him treat anyone unfairly or with a hint of malice. But now I have to watch my Facebook feed fill up with stories of my fellow liberals high-fiving each other over the toppling of another ostensible corporate villain.

Another:

I am a married heterosexual, a believing Christian and a constitutional conservative who nonetheless voted for gay marriage (for the Nevada constitution) when it came up some years back. My lifelong best friend and long-time business partner is gay. We saw things differently, but he didn’t impose his views on me, and I didn’t impose my views on him.

As a supporter of the Constitution, I support any two consenting adults’ ability to legally marry, because I see nothing in the Constitution to prohibit it, and because I take the 10th Amendment seriously. In addition, and I guess this is the bottom line on this issue, I absolutely support the right of any individual to hold beliefs in and contribute to any legal cause, period.  It’s really nobody’s business – or shouldn’t be – what someone believes and supports – as long as he doesn’t take punitive action against those who hold a different belief.

I’m guessing that the liberal Left doesn’t see that they’ve created a precedent.  And there will be a backlash. Every time a gay activist tries to take a stand on a mainstream issue, he’ll now be vulnerable to charges that he’s a closet McCarthy-like bigot intent on crushing the rights and even the chances of gainful employment of those who dare hold different views. Those gay activists will be marginalized, at least by some, and to some degree.  What good does that do anybody?

Another:

I’m a gay man and I guess the most interesting point to me here is a little personal. Although I dislike the term “internalized homophobia” – it has always seemed to miss a necessary amount of nuance and complexity that goes with the whole experience – the fact is, over time, my own internal discomfort or feeling of awkwardness hearing, say, Ellen DeGeneres refer to her wife, or a man refer to his husband – has absolutely changed.

I’ll admit – I had some internal evolving to do too, don’t know how to quite describe it – sort of, feeling it to be remarkable that others were in advance of my own thinking, how could I have been so idiotic, and why (despite your book) didn’t I have the prior guts to even internally stand up for this notion, coming to the same defense of the issue where I am today.

That’s the nuance that’s missing from the stupid absolutism of the Mozilla situation.

Agreed. But when you have absolute certainty that you are right and that you represent goodness and your opponents evil, nuance is irrelevant. As is any semblance of toleration.

By the way, you can reader unfiltered feedback from readers on our Facebook page.

Turning The Camera On A Hidden Shutterbug

A new documentary, Finding Vivian Maier, investigates the life and art of the professional nanny whose stunning photography was discovered only after her death in 2007. (The film’s co-director, John Maloof, stumbled upon Maier’s work when he purchased a box of negatives at a Chicago auction for $380.) In a review of the film, Erin Fuchs focuses on revelations of Maier’s dark side:

She was an odd woman. Maier always had a Rolleiflex camera around her neck and dragged her charges around Chicago’s seedy areas to take pictures. Those pictures often captured the weakest moments of their subjects, who included children weeping and a young boy who had just been hit by a car. Maier took one of her charges, Inger Raymond, to a stockyard, where she exposed the young child to the slaughter of livestock. …

Despite Maier’s odd and mean behavior, at least two of her former charges had some affection for her, as they put her up in an apartment near the end of her life. In her final years, Maier often sat in the park, mumbling in French, eating food directly from a can, and accepting old clothes from strangers.

Jillian Steinhauer considers the movie “standard artist-as-subject fare” but still appreciates the tribute:

Finding Vivian Maier isn’t particularly experimental or innovative in form, and suffers from a bit of structural scrambling when the narrative veers abruptly at one point. But it does a good and moving job of telling the story of Maier, which is the most important and interesting thing under discussion. Maier’s life was — if not tragic, then certainly sad. … She became — and the film emphasizes this to great effect — one of those characters her younger self would have photographed: a crazy old poor lady. “There’s a lot of eccentric people around here, and I just thought she was one of them,” says a former neighbor.

Haley Mlotek calls the film a “necessary documentary, and a necessary story”:

As a photographer, Vivian captured scenes, places, people — the elements of life that cannot be fixed, things that are either converted into memories that dim over time or discarded as unimportant and not worth preserving. As I watched image after image of Vivian’s work, I wondered if Vivian would have even called herself a photographer. Some interviewees in the documentary talk about her peculiar habit of calling herself a spy, giving fake names and false histories to the people she interacted with — a woman at a pawn shop, a man at the library — instructing them to call her V. Smith, Vivian Mayer, and other such versions of her real name.

Mlotek goes on to consider what Maier might have made of the attention her work now receives:

Vivian liked too-good-to-be-true headlines, the kinds of stories you can only see in newspapers and never in fiction: “Man Bites Dog,” that sort of thing. [Co-director Charlie] Siskel told me, when I asked about whether Vivian would have enjoyed being the subject of so much attention, that Vivian “knew a great story when she heard one. We would like to think this is exactly the kind of story Vivian would have appreciated. ‘Nanny takes 100,000 photos and hides them in storage lockers, but they’re discovered years later and she becomes a famous artist.’ That’s the kind of story Vivian would have liked.” I agree. But it’s not clear if that’s the kind of story Vivian wanted to tell.

Explore her work here. Previous Dish on Maier here.