Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    

another question had to do with the naming of "SARAH," the smart house in
the show Eureka. her name was actually S.A.R.A.H., fwiw, for Self Actuated
Residential Automated Habitat. i don't know which of the show's creators
and writers named her, but they did have a few significant female writers,
which isn't often the case in TV. i interviewed at least one of them for my
blog. the house's character was voiced by the same male actor who played a
hilarious, loveable nerd character in the show, one who essentially grows
up during the course of the show, becoming more mature and more, for lack
of a better word, human, as time goes on. 

i believe S.A.R.A.H.'s Twitter feed, which was popular among many Syfy
fans, was written by various writers, both screenwriters and hacks like me
employed by the marketing side of content, but i may be mixing that up with
some other gig.

for those who haven't seen the show, perhaps a little context is in order:
Eureka intentionally embraced and lampooned decades of television cliches.
the lead character is even a sheriff, though his town is a wacky high-tech
sci-fi Brigadoon instead of Mayberry. S.A.R.A.H. is used as a plot device
and to comedic effect; in one episode, she behaves like a pouty, jealous
wife. though the show wasn't completely enlightened by any means, it did
feature an African-American woman as its most powerful character, and the
white guy sheriff's right-hand man, who was a genius to the sheriff's
down-home not-so-smartiness, was also African-American. 

not sure how relevant all that is to the conversation, but... whatever.
there you have it. 
  

    
When you're talking about the State of the World, everything is
relevant to the conversation. 

And Eureka had its own very peculiar perspective on that State, from
an idealized community perspective ... from a town that's 90% Mr.
Peabody, 10% Sherman. That town was a little like the early
Internet, a community full of writers, hackers, artists, and poets.
Big emphasis on the hackers, though.

Eureka had only three cops, and one was a cyborg.
  

    

i'm a fan of these annual bruce-and-jon fests, and it's really nice to see
cory around these parts, too. but here and elsewhere on the WELL, there are
some voices wondering why women's voices and concerns aren't represented
here. i have to admit, when i first saw the lineup and told my husband
about it (he's a big fan of bruce's futurism-ish writing), i breezily set
it up with the caveat, "It's the usual sort of thing, you know, the experts
are all white guys..." not even as a criticism, just as a way of
introducing the conversation. i like these guys. i've known them personally
in some ways, in some situations, over the course of decades. i don't fault
them for being white or privileged or male or smart or this or that. but i
think it does merit conversation and *acknowledgement*, the fact that we
are culturally programmed to set up certain people to be our experts, and
we then give them forums in which to show their knowledge and spread their
ideas. (next year, maybe ask Genevieve Bell to sit in for a spell?)

so, i appreciate that women have tried to be heard in this conversation,
like fom, evy, and loris. i also appreciate jon's post #64, in which he
acknowledges that he doesn't have the answers to everything and may have
misinterpreted evy's original question/critique. 

and i would still like to see a much more thoughtful answer to paulina's
questions about the larger environmental effects of our continued,
inevitable march toward progress. specifically, she has asked about the
materials sourced to make the digital and electronic stuff required by
retro-futuristic advances such as smart homes, even ones like bruce's guest
house in Torino. bruce sort-of addressed the issue in responses #50-51, but
sort-of seemed to conclude that it isn't an area he's focusing on. (? well,
that's how i read it.)

i'd like to rephrase, and throw it at all three of our assembled experts: 

- Is the treadmill of obsolecence and Moore's Law-style progress
contributing significantly to the demise of our planet's ecosystem, in your
opinion? (e.g., faster chips, smaller phones, a house that requires a fast
chip on every door handle and a wi-fi-equipped thermometer/hygrometer in
every fridge, and a marketing and packaging infrastructure to support the
continuing rollout of these inventions...)

- If so, do you feel a personal responsibility to change the course of that
treadmill? Whoops, bad metaphor. Treadmills don't go anywhere, right? Ah,
maybe my metaphor's not so bad after all. 

- If you do think it's contributing to environmental problems, and you do
feel some personal responsibility, as a person who has been blessed with
smarts, communication abilities, and the power that goes along with being
deemed an expert, to do something about it: What are the top three ways
that you, personally in your everyday life, can make the situation better?
What are the top three ways that others can also work to change it? I
sincerely hope that you guys, or someone else in the conversation, has
something better to say here than "I compost and re-use old floorboards in
my house construction, therefore I am absolved of worrying about why I'm
buying the next latest iPhone," which tends to be the lame-o way that I
answer these questions. 
  

    

*Hey, I'm 105% percent for the Loris and Genevieve Bell Futurist
Show.  If the two of 'em somehow promise to take over my grueling
State of the World duties, I'll quit typing pronto, I promise. 
You'll probably want to warn them that the salary's not all that
great.

*Since it's just been made clear that Lebkowsky and me can't be
women, it's probably high time that some Gamergaters show up here to
decry that sudden outburst of aggressive Cultural Marxism.  I've
been wondering when they'd point out to us here that Charlie Hebdo's
coverage of the gaming industry was manifestly corrupt.  That's
probably the real source of the biggest street demo since the end of
World War II.
 
  

    
http://www.bloomberg.com/politics/articles/2014-12-31/for-the-wealthiest-polit
ical-donors-it-was-a-very-good-year

*You know who'd be a great woman to query about the contemporary
State of The World?  Laurene Powell Jobs.  Because she's the only
woman in this list of men who are buying the American government
wholesale. 
  

    
*That was one hell of a public demo in Paris, by the way.  It was
basically a social-media flash mob with all the major heads of state
in Europe standing in front of it, pretending to be the Black Bloc. 
It was like some weird echo of 1968 with a limping, leftie DeGaulle
leading the reluctant, sobbing street rebels. 

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2015/01/11/paris-rally-je-suis-charlie-hebdo-t
errorism_n_6451414.html

*People in Europe are wigging out over this incident.  Of course
they won't do anything constructive, because this is Europe, but one
can sense from the tone of the tame press that every power broker in
Europe is going to cynically exploit this opportunity to make a
sudden lunge for some hot slice of the pie.  Nobody's learned
anything or changed their minds about anything at all, but they're
one and all convinced that the massacre strongly favors their
analysis.  They'll all be amazed when they realize that their
traditional opponents are just as reckless and emboldened.  It's
like being a Tumblr Social Justice Warrior who meets somebody from
4Chan.

*In the meantime, the Americans are still wondering if maybe it's
okay to called sliced potatoes "French fries."  Years of Depression
have broken people's faith in globalization.  They still parrot the
old Whole World slogans but their true feelings are really
polarized, exclusivist, narrow and parochial.  It's a "globalization
of Balkanization," as Jasmina likes to put it.
  

    
What will people say about all this in the 22nd Century?  Remember
me mentioning that prospect earlier, before the fishmonger and his
brother shot all the cartoonist?  THE 22ND CENTURY.  Nobody says a
word about it, it's still awaiting us, in all its grand, grey,
ghastly, Stapledonian glory.
  

    <scribbled by jonl Sun 11 Jan 15 16:12>
  

    
"Nobody's learned anything or changed their minds about anything at
all, but they're one and all convinced that the massacre strongly
favors their analysis."

It's a weird reaction, in a way. Earlier I mentioned Christopher
Dickey's comments that those shooters were "just a couple of jerks
with guns," but they aimed, fired, and hit a global nerve.
  

    
(Bruce slipped in with some posts while I was writing this response
to Tiffany. I also scribbled the original to make a correction.)

Tiffany, I've started several responses to your point about
"including women's voices," but they just seem lame. We're not
trying to be everything to everybody, is the best I can say. And
we're not closing the door on other people, including women, who
show up. I'm happy, actually honored, to see your post here. 

So, to your first question:

"Is the treadmill of obsolescence and Moore's Law-style progress
contributing significantly to the demise of our planet's ecosystem,
in your opinion?"

I'd say it differently: we're making the planet less
human-habitable; it's the demise of the human race we should be
thinking about. I'm increasingly pessimistic about the human future.
We may be past a point of no return. If I'm hopeful, it's that we'll
innovate our way out of the mess we're creating.
  

    
http://techcrunch.com/2015/01/10/east-of-palo-altos-eden/

*The racial history of Silicon Valley.

*From here in the Balkans, widely noted for ethnic cleansing, this
is truly a strange, exotic story.  Mostly because the real-estate
system in the Balkans has never been sophisticated enough to manage
a Californian squeeze-play of this description.
  

    
*I don't follow a lot of jihadis on Twitter, but they're around. 
They're truly exhilarated by the Charlie Hebdo thing, they feel no
sense of dread at having lethally offended hundreds of millions of
indignant, self-righteous Europeans.  

On the contrary, they're like:  At last, the Crusaders are waking
up!  We've taught them a good, healthy lesson now! We've got their
attention for our major issue, they'll know better than to blaspheme
our Prophet henceforth, and mankind in general will be able to
breathe free without the existential perversion of some French
cartoons.
  

    
"Is the treadmill of obsolescence and Moore's Law-style progress
contributing significantly to the demise of our planet's ecosystem,
in your opinion?"

*From the perspective of the 22nd Century?  They don't even
recognize that use of language.  "Moore?"  Who was that obscure
figure?  They don't even remember that period term "ecosystem."

*They'd probably be pretty interested in the archaic metaphor
"treadmill."  A real, fully authentic treadmill was a horrible 19th
century prison punishment device, but in the 22nd century so much
time has passed that the horror fades.  So a treadmill can only
perceived as Gothically romantic, like an Iron Maiden, or a rack, or
water-boarding.

*I'll be a little less arch here, and state that the
Internet-of-Things won't destroy everything. It won't have the time,
it's too temporary. Nuclear weapons and carbon pollution and nano
tech and GMO and gray goo and robots, that's stuff of the caliber
that can destroy everything.  The IoT is a fad.  You'll outlive it
-- just like you outlived the WELL as a Bulletin Board System.
  

    
*Here are the Iranians, with their usual self-lacerating
instability, though they look mighty hale and hearty now compared to
their bleeding neighbors and Shiite clients in Afghanistan, Iraq,
Syria and Lebanon.

*Some vaguely interesting palace intrigue in the weblink here, but
look at the chic Western-style designer eyeglasses on that guy. 
Everybody in  his regime's got the close-cropped beard, the bleached
and starched turban -- so the eyeglasses, that's the only narrow
window of personal expression that he's got to offer to the voters. 


http://www.rferl.org/content/iran-referendums-irgc-rouhani-reforms/26779709.ht
ml

*I guess he's lucky those specs aren't Google Glass, or somebody in
Tel Aviv and/or Washington would have bent every effort to hack 'em.
  

    
Those jihadis on Twitter are in for it now that Anonymous has their
number:
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/anonymous-declares-war-terrorists-par
is-attack-article-1.2073193

They're gonna be Fawkesed.
  

    
Meanwhile, are the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists swooning over the
sudden surge of support? 

"We vomit on all these people who suddenly say they are our
friends,” sez Charlie Hebdo cartoonist Bernard Holtrop.
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/world/charlie-hebdo-cartoonist-scoffs-vomits-s
upporters-article-1.2072906

“It really makes me laugh. A few years ago, thousands of people took
to the streets in Pakistan to demonstrate against Charlie Hebdo.
They didn't know what it was. Now it's the opposite. But if people
are protesting to defend freedom of speech, naturally that's a good
thing."
  

    
*Speaking of surprising Popes: a bitterly combative Texan crank, who
gleefully melts icecaps and thinks Jesus rode to temple on a
dinosaur, is in control of NASA in 2015.

http://www.theverge.com/2015/1/11/7528337/senator-ted-cruz-nasa-subcommittee

*Don't try decrying Ted as a white guy, 'cause he'll play his
Canadian Hispanic card.
  

    
I like Juan Cole's take on the Jihadi tactics in the Hedbo shooting:


http://boingboing.net/2015/01/08/sharpening-the-contradictions.html

tl;dr: French muslims are pretty apolitical and irreligious. Whatever
problems they have, they don't perceive either Islamism or Islam as the
answer. But if terror attacks can provoke explicitly racialized, explicitly
religion-grounded reprisals against French muslims, then the jihadis' cause,
with its muslims-versus-Westernism rhetoric, becomes much more plausible.

Stalinists called this "sharpening the contradictions."
  

    
Two takes on storage versus mass surveillance, based on recent discussions
with cryptographers:

* Retaining all TLS and other encrypted traffic is likely tractable. In 15
years, computing breakthroughs -- possibly quantum computing, possibly
breakthroughs in mathematics -- will allow all this retained traffic to b
decrypted. 15 years is not an especially long timescale for state security
apparats.

There are quantum-resistant crypto, but getting everything switched over to
it is a heroic challenge.

* Targeting all traffic from people who know how to use Tor/Tails
(http://boingboing.net/2014/07/03/if-you-read-boing-boing-the-n.html) is
already underway. By capturing all the cleartext messages around the
encrypted traffic, most of that traffic's content can be inferred..

For example, Jonl emails me in the clear and says, "I have a leaker who
wants to talk to a journalist about secret drone murders." I send encrypted
email to a lawyer and Bart Gellman. Then I arrange an encrypted chat with
Jonl over Cryptocat to discuss how he can talk to Bart and the lawyer. They
talk over encrypted links for a while, then Bart publishes something about
drones in the Washington Post. You don't have to have access to the emails I
sent to the lawyer and Bart, or the encrypted chat, to infer all the things
that were contained therein.
  

    
It seems to me that one effect of all this running from and
denying change is that it has eroded our ability to take on
challenges composed of more than a few difficult elements.

Jon, you may recall my rants in the Whole Earth conference
regarding the application of robotics to agriculture and
landscape management, a theme I've since taken off-Well to 
<http://cultibotics.blogspot.com>, and elsewhere.

After years of trying to sell this idea, I've come to believe
that what I'm asking for is something akin to the decision to
go to the moon, in that it is both clearly possible and
dependent upon technologies that do not yet exist, requiring
concerted effort over a matter of years to achieve.

But I look around and don't see many examples of such goal-
driven concerted effort happening, at least not government
led, publicly funded efforts.  We seem to have developed a
collective form of myopia, in inability to take on more than
incremental challenges.

Incrementalism is well and good, but aren't we missing
opportunities that can't be reached through incremental
change alone?
  

    
It does seem to take a long time to get these advances in actual
use. Hah. I was promised a robot maid by now. Wherezit? Altho I can
clean my floors n cut my grass with one. I even saw a robot BBQ
grill cleaner. Toss the little thing on after you're done cooking
and it travels over the grill cleaning till you come back n take it
off. Despite the scary tales of domestics gone wrong...
  

    
*In 2015 I've been really enjoying the adventures of Samantha
Cristoforetti, first Italian woman living in outer space.  I follow
her on Twitter, FlickR, even Google+ on occasion.

http://samanthacristoforetti.esa.int

@AstroSamantha is the most down-to-earth orbiting astronaut I've
ever seen.  She really has a deft, revelatory, social media
presence.  Her lively attention to the minutiae of daily life in
orbit is so refreshing.  You can practically *smell* the
International Space Station while she's up there.
  

    
*Another woman whose work I'll be following closely is American
pundit and sometime politician, Sarah Palin.  Sarah's kind of busy
with the new sports-TV series bow; otherwise, I'd gladly vacate my
futurist cyberpunk-chairman seat to have her sit in.

*Sarah's got excellent instincts for what troubles her base and what
kind of red meat they desire.  Political charisma of this kind can't
be learned.  Most Red-State operatives are sitting around wasting
the funding of moguls while trying to gerrymander electoral
districts.  Not Sarah.  She's a natural barometer of Red State
sentiment.

*I've never met Sarah, but if she ever wanted to tell me something,
I'm pretty sure it would be a remark that would really get to me on
an immediate, visceral level.  Maybe she'd explain to me why
"fracking" is necessary to strengthen the Church and the Family. 
Just: an insight that, if I accepted it, would cause my paradigm to
explode.

*People on the Left like to praise themselves on "inclusiveness,"
but they would never, ever, include Sarah Palin in anything.  Never.
If she wanted to give them a blood transfusion, or tow their Volvo
out of a ditch with her Alaskan 4X4, they really just wouldn't have
it.  

*An icon of the transgressive is always interesting.
  

    
Here is Sarah last week, leveling with the "People for the Ethical
Treatment of Animals."  It's in social media, and it's all about
dogs, but social media loves dogs.  Sarah gets that. She doesn't
even have to think about it.


Sarah Palin added 9 new photos.
January 3 at 1:55pm ·

Dear PETA,


Chill. At least Trig didn’t eat the dog.

Hey, by the way, remember your “Woman of the Year”, Ellen DeGeneres?
Did you get all wee-wee’d up when she posted this sweet picture?
http://conservatives4palin.com/…/peta-woman-year-posts-phot…;
Hypocritical, much?

Did you go as crazy when your heroic Man-of-Your-Lifetime, Barack
Obama, revealed he actually enjoyed eating dead dog meat?

Aren’t you the double-standard radicals always opposing Alaska’s
Iditarod – the Last Great Race honoring dogs who are born to run in
wide open spaces, while some of your pets “thrive” in a concrete
jungle where they’re allowed outdoors to breathe and pee maybe once
a day? (http://iditarod.com/ http://www.irondog.org/)

Aren’t you the same herd that opposes our commercial fishing jobs,
claiming I encourage slaying and consuming wild, organic healthy
protein sources called “fish”? (I do.)

Aren’t you the same anti-beef screamers blogging hate from your
comfy leather office chairs, wrapped in your fashionable leather
belts above your kickin’ new leather pumps you bought because your
celebrity idols (who sport fur and crocodile purses) grinned in a
tabloid wearing the exact same Louboutins exiting sleek cowhide
covered limo seats on their way to some liberal fundraiser shindig
at some sushi bar that features poor dead smelly roe (that I used to
strip from our Bristol Bay-caught fish, and in a Dillingham cannery
I packed those castoff fish eggs for you while laughing with
co-workers about the suckers paying absurdly high prices to party
with the throw away parts of our wild seafood)? I believe you call
those discarded funky eggs “caviar”.

Yeah, you’re real credible on this, PETA. A shame, because I’ll bet
we agree on what I hope is the true meaning of your mission –
respecting God’s creation and critters.

Our pets, including Trig’s best buddy Jill Hadassah, are loved,
spoiled and cared for more than some people care for their fellow
man whose politics may not mesh with nonsensical liberally failed
ways or don’t fit your flighty standards.

Jill is a precious part of our world. So is Trig.

- Sarah Palin
  

    
<satyr>: "I look around and don't see many examples of such goal-
driven concerted effort happening, at least not government
led, publicly funded efforts."

If by publicly funded,  you mean government funded, this ain't an
era of governemtn-funded experimentation. Otherwise if there's no
clear potential profit, business won't do it. Universities won't do
it. Everybody's reaching for the low-hanging muffins.

As for <dadge1234>'s robot maid, I'd do with a Roomba. <bruces> was
showing me video of Casa Jasmina cleverly captured by a camera
mounted on the resident, very busy, Roomba they'd deployed. Those
are busy little devices, and smart enough in that Kevin Kelly "out
of control" way ("smart" action driven by a few simple rules.)