Category: ideas

Philosopher Hannah Arendt is being celebrated on the 100th anniversary of her birth. But “if her star shines so brightly, it is because the American intellectual firmament is so dim. After all, who or where are the other political philosophers? The last great political American philosopher, John Dewey, died in 1952. Since then American philosophy — with the partial exception of Richard Rorty — has vanished into technical issues; within the subfield of political philosophy, the largest of its figures, John Rawls, remains abstract and insular.”

The California Milk Processor Board, whose ‘Got Milk?’ campaign is famous around the world, thought they had the next big milk promotion. They installed ads at bus shelters that emitted the scent of fresh-baked cookies. But the ads have quickly disappeared after the transit authority “received several complaints from bus riders concerned that the aroma might not be safe.”

“Even now, forty years after his death, the slight figure of Walt himself is almost impossible to pick out from the parti-colored throng of movie clips, projects, and moral tendencies that march under the banner of ‘Walt Disney.’ Say the name to most people and you know what will flash onto their mind’s eye: unashamedly bright hues, flying elephants, singing bears, corporate dominance, happy endings, and a helping of values that slip down as easily as ice cream. How did we arrive at this blinding apotheosis?”

“Two physicists contend that a method intended to identify complex geometric patterns in the seemingly chaotic drip paintings of Jackson Pollock is flawed and may be useless in the increasingly convoluted world of authenticating Pollock’s work.”

Sacha Baron Cohen’s runaway hit mockumentary, Borat, is being seen by most observers as a scathing indictment of American ignorance. But is it America that is cartoonish, or just the infuriatingly limited European view of America? Chris Jones says that Borat “functions very nicely as a smug celluloid confirmation of the cheap and ignorant Western European view of a homogenously ugly America.”

The intricacies of different languages have always been a bit much for computers to handle, and computerized translation programs have never been as reliable as users would like. Translation “is a tricky problem, not only for a piece of software but also for the human mind. A single word in one language, for example, may map into three or more in another… But a New York firm with an ingenious algorithm and a really big dictionary is finally cracking the code.”

Hip-hop culture has always held a mirror up to the racism embedded in American life, but in recent days, references to some of the most disturbing racial stereotypes have begun creeping into the genre in most disturbing fashion. “Free of irony or tongue-in-cheek cleverness, so-called ‘minstrel rap’ appears to be a throwback to the days when performers (some black, some white) rubbed burnt cork on their faces and depicted African-Americans as buffoons.”

Officials in a Dutch town have set up a system of street microphones set to pick up on aggressive sounding voices. The system “helped police make three arrests in a trial run earlier in the year. According to New Scientist Tech, the secret sauce is software that detects ‘high frequency vowel sounds [that] span a broader frequency range’.”

“Until about five minutes ago, remember, almost all video-entertainment content was produced and distributed by Hollywood. Period. That time is over. There was a time when advertisers could count on mass audiences for what Hollywood thought we should be watching on TV. That time is all but over. There was a time when broadband penetration was too slight and bandwidth costs too prohibitive for video to be watched online. That time is sooooo over.”

“Given the popularity of plagiarism-seeking software services for academics, it may be only a matter of time before some enterprising scholar yokes Google Book Search and plagiarism-detection software together into a massive literary dragnet, scooping out hundreds of years’ worth of plagiarists—giants and forgotten hacks alike—who have all escaped detection until now.”