Category: ideas

“We are just as ignorant about what has been happening to our faces when they’re scanned by the property developers, shopping centres, museums, conference centres and casinos that have also been secretly using facial recognition technology on us, according to the civil liberties group Big Brother Watch.” – The Guardian

Amazon’s new use case takes Rekognition to a new level. Now you can now use the software to take a pretty good guess at what a person in an image or a video is feeling. What could possibly go wrong? – Shelly Palmer

Is the phone booth a thing of art? Of commerce? Or is it just a piece of trash from an older age – a piece of trash no one, including the phone companies, wants to deal with? While Spaniards use their mobiles to call someone around 100 million times a day, and use WhatsApp for messages 125 million times a day, the number of phone calls from or between pay phones is a low 6,180. And then there are the reasons to use them: The authorities say it’s “to send a threat, claim a debt in an unorthodox way or for a date between lovers or adulterers who must hide their relationship. The advantage of the phone booth over the mobile is that the calls leave no trace.” – El País

Yes, that finishes as “stay together,” of course. Though it’s a bit unusual in the cosplay community, these women have a different idea. “It was just so nice to share our resources. It made both of us so much better at what we were doing. … Actually, all three of us took ridiculous pictures of us eating peanut butter sandwiches [like Black Widow does in Endgame]. We weren’t like, ‘Oh, she stole my idea.’ No one stole anyone’s idea. We all watched the same movie.” – The Atlantic

We can calculate what gravity does — whether to a cup elbowed off the edge of a table or the disk of light bent around a black hole — but we still don’t have a clue what causes it. – Washington Post

So many of the metaphors which we use to describe art are biological in nature, from calling a work “my baby” to William S. Burroughs’ contention about language’s viral nature. How some people describe biological creation is reciprocal in its metaphors, such as thinking of a child as a “masterpiece.” – Nautilus

“Such a document tries to persuade you to believe (that it is right to do) something because many people, some of whom are authorities, believe it (is the right thing to do). It is not always wrong to believe things because many people believe them, but it is always intellectually uninquisitive to do so.” The New York Times

“Some scholars herald artificial moral advisors as vast improvements over morally frail humans, as presenting the best opportunity for avoiding the extinction of human life from our own hands. They demand that we should take listen to machines for ethical advice. But should we?” – 3 Quarks Daily

“Printed news started out as, essentially, collections of letters to the editor. Newspapers did not routinely employ full-time reporters until the 19th century. At that point, the older meaning of ‘journalist’ – someone who keeps a journal – disappeared, and the word began to refer solely to news-gatherers. Similarly, interviews and in-person reporting did not become common until the 19th century.” – Aeon

The adversarial scene of debunking breaks down into a strange collaboration between debunker, charlatan and dupe. This collaboration leaves us with a different way of thinking about ‘modernity’ itself. – Aeon