From real-time match updates to performance analytics and the Hawk-Eye, the US Open has been upping its technology quotient over the last few years. This year the two-week grand slam tournament is opening its hard courts to virtual reality with the...
Vaping just took a huge step forward in its quest for public acceptance. A report published today by Public Health England (PHE), an agency sponsored by the UK's Department for Health, has concluded that e-cigarettes are 95 percent less harmful tha...
Because no presidential campaign season is complete without at least one photo of a candidate deep-throating tube-shaped "food" in a corn condom, here is Jeb Bush going down on a deep-fried Snickers at the Iowa State Fair:
The amount of time candidates spend in the fields of the shit kickers in Iowa is inversely proportionate to how much of a fuck we should give about Iowa's caucus. But that won't stop anyone from pandering by engorging pig balls on a stick or rectally-inserted beer-battered pickles or whatever the fuck Marco Rubio and Hillary Clinton have to pretend to enjoy.
From another angle, it looks like JEB! is gagging on the down home treat:
An adviser is telling him, "You swallow that shit, bitch. Lap up every drop." That's how democracy happens in this degrading century.
Presidential hopeful Jeb Bush says that the government should be granted broad surveillance powers over both the American people and and private technology firms so that intelligence agencies can better fight "evildoers", according to the Associate...
Model train enthusiast James Risner decided to turn several toy locomotive sets into a contemporary kinetic art installation of sorts by creating an infinite loop. The seven linked trains can travel forward or backward at surprisingly quick speed, creating a hypnotic spiral of of motion. I wonder if this could be scaled to a Metropolis II level? (via Laughing Squid)
That's the highly cited estimate out of Oxford by Frey and Osbourne of the percentage of existing jobs that are likely to be automated away with the help of technology within the next two decades. According to this paper, flip a coin and call heads or machines to see if your job will exist in 20 years. This is the 21st century fear for many called "technological unemployment."
There does tend to be one caveat to this dismissal of automation fears that most of all of these high-skill jobs will require high-skill labor, and thus a highly skilled work force which will require more education. So of course the answer to what could otherwise be a somewhat thorny future, is simply education, education, and more education.
Well, David Autor of MIT just published a fascinating paper (though we reach different conclusions) in the Summer 2015 Journal of Economic Perspectives titled, "Why Are There Still So Many Jobs? The History and Future of Workplace Automation". In this paper he compiled the following chart, and it should blow anyone's mind who holds a strong opinion about the historical effects on jobs of computing technology since it took off in the 1970s, and so the possible future we should expect if the trends continue.
This chart has some very interesting complexity to it, which I'll attempt to simplify with snippets from Autor's paper. The most important thing to recognize is that all points above the flat red line show relative growth in jobs while points below show relative loss in jobs. Points to the left show jobs with less skill required and points to the right show jobs with more skill required. Each curve represents basically a different decade.
Three Important Employment Observations
First, the pace of employment gains in low-wage, manual task-intensive jobs has risen successively across periods, as shown at the left-hand side of the figure.
If we look at the far left of the chart, we see growth in jobs with the least skill, increasing decade after decade after decade. As the story goes, technology should have the opposite effect. The simpler a job is, the easier it should be to automate, and yet we're not seeing this at all. Instead we're seeing more and more low-skill jobs being created not destroyed.
Second, the occupations that are losing employment share appear to be increasingly drawn from higher ranks of the occupational distribution. For example, the highest ranked occupation to lose employment share during the 1980s lay at approximately the 45th percentile of the skill distribution. In the final two subperiods, this rank rose still further to above the 75th percentile—suggesting that the locus of displaced middle-skill employment is moving into higher-skilled territories.
Where these curves intersect the red line has been moving to the right, meaning that more and more middle-skill jobs have been lost in a way that even increasingly eats into higher and higher skill ranges. This is a hollowing out of the middle and even upper-middle. Jobs that require what's considered between a low and high amount of skill have been disappearing. This appears to reflect the loss of the middle class. As each decade passes, the jobs that require mostly a medium amount of skill are simply going away, replaced instead with jobs requiring less skill ,not more skill, and thus jobs that tend to pay less, not more.
Third, growth of high-skill, high-wage occupations (those associated with abstract work) decelerated markedly in the 2000s, with no relative growth in the top two deciles of the occupational skill distribution during 1999 through 2007, and only a modest recovery between 2007 and 2012. Stated plainly, the growth of occupational employment across skill levels looks U-shaped earlier in the period, with gains at low-skill and high-skill levels. By the 2000s, the pattern of occupational employment across skill levels began to resemble a downward ramp.
We should expect to see what we see on the left of this chart on the right instead, but we don't. Between 1979 and 2007, a span of almost 30 years, there was less and less growth in jobs requiring the most skill. Only since 2007 has there been a reversal with a small amount of growth in these jobs. Other than that, as Autor himself describes it, it looks like a "downward ramp", meaning that both middle and high-skill jobs are being steeply replaced with low-skill jobs, and have been since the 1970s.
This is not the story we are told. Instead we read story after story like this latest one from the Guardian, claiming that 140 years of job creation show that jobs will always be created. And yet the ongoing trend of such articles is to mostly ignore the potentially unnecessary nature of the jobs themselves, the level of skill involved to perform them, and the lower pay they can command than the jobs they are replacing. Take for example the following excerpt:
Their conclusion is unremittingly cheerful: rather than destroying jobs, technology has been a “great job-creating machine”. Findings by Deloitte such as a fourfold rise in bar staff since the 1950s or a surge in the number of hairdressers this century suggest to the authors that technology has increased spending power, therefore creating new demand and new jobs.
So there's no need to worry about technological unemployment, because there will always be a need for more bar-backs and haircuts? Is that bar-back better off no longer having a manufacturing job paying $40,000 per year and instead having a job paying $20,000 per year in the service industry? Is that an important job to the human species, bringing empty glasses from Point A to Point B? And is this a job that just can't possibly be done by a machine, or outright eliminated? Ever? Is the service industry really safe?
Centuries of data may show us how jobs have been both destroyed and created but recent decades worth of more nuanced data more importantly show us there's more to this story. Whenever we see someone claiming new jobs are being created and will continue to be created so as to provide everyone a job, we need to look deeper and ask, "What kind of job? What are the skills required? How much does it pay for how many hours? Does it provide more security or less? What are the benefits it offers? Is the job really necessary? Does the job provide meaning to those tasked with it? Are jobs and work the same thing? Is there work to do that's more important than what the job involves? Is working in the job actually better than not working at all?"
Regarding that last question in particular, there's this important finding which should not go ignored in any discussion celebrating job creation:
Those who moved into optimal jobs showed significant improvement in mental health compared to those who remained unemployed. Those respondents who moved into poor-quality jobs showed a significant worsening in their mental health compared to those who remained unemployed.
That's right, having no job at all can be better than having a bullshit one. Thanks, science. And if low-skill jobs are more likely to be worse on mental health than medium and high-skill jobs, then for decades we've been increasingly working in newly created jobs that are depressingly worse for us than not working in any job.
All of the above questions are important to actually ask because when we get right down to it, the mere existence of a job means very little. We have to ask additional questions about the nature of the job itself. Those not asking these additional questions are simplifying the story in such a way it becomes even simpler than a story. It becomes a fairy tale.
This also means that more education isn't the answer. As the decades have passed, the population has gotten more and more educated. Our workforce now is the most educated workforce in US history, and a great deal of this education is being put to work in jobs that don't need it, because the jobs that do need it aren't being created in sufficient numbers. Are bar-backs with PhDs a triumph of new job creation?
The true story of technology and jobs is a story of an eroding middle, a relatively slowing top, and a vastly growing bottom.
So unless we all wish to pursue insecure lives of low-skill underpaid mostly meaningless employment thanks to all the machines increasingly doing all the rest of the work (not really for us but mostly for the benefit of those who own them), we will need to break the connection between work and income by providing everyone an income floor sufficient to both meet basic needs and purchase the goods and services the machines are providing. It's as simple as that. Without that decoupling, there will be no economy, because there will be insufficient consumer buying power to drive it.
If we look at the details of the last few decades of job creation and destruction, we're either going to make enough new low-skill jobs in numbers sufficient to keep unemployment numbers low enough to actually run a society... or we're not. Either way, consumer buying power is likely to steeply erode, even after we account for the effects technology has on lowering prices because the costs of basic needs like food and housing are the costs technology has had relatively little effect on this century. Meanwhile, if we can eliminate half of our jobs in just 20 years, do we really even want to create that many tens of millions of new ways to work for someone else? Why?
There appears to be no happy ending to this story that doesn't involve universal basic income. So instead of continuing to ask if jobs are going to be automated in sufficient quantities to need basic income, let's instead start to increasingly ask if there's any job we can't automate so we're all more freed to live by it.
You can play a part. Contact your representative and tell them to support the Healthy Climate and Family Security Act of 2015 which would provide everyone with a Social Security number an equal share of the revenue raised by making the air we all breathe more expensive to pollute, or in other words, a 'cap and dividend' universal partial basic income. You can also sign this petition to the President and Congress for a basic income for all, or donate your time or money to Basic Income Action, a non-profit organization founded to transform basic income from idea to reality. You can also support pieces like this by sharing them and supporting me on Patreon.
Yesterday morning I did a short interview with the lovely Jane Garvey on BBC Radio 4 Woman’s hour, to talk about my book ‘We go to the gallery.’ The commercial edition will be released on September 21st for the affordable price of £8.99
Vic Fleischer has a piece in the NYT arguing for a federal law that would require non-profit higher ed institutions to spend at least 8% of their endowments every year (the usual percentage spent is 4% to 4.5%, and it’s often based on several-year average of the endowment principal, so when endowments are going up rapidly, as they have been recently, the actual percentage spent of the current endowment total can be far lower).
This hoarding behavior is especially obnoxious, given where a lot of the money that is spent ends up going:
Who do you think received more cash from Yale’s endowment last year: Yale students, or the private equity fund managers hired to invest the university’s money?
It’s not even close.
Last year, Yale paid about $480 million to private equity fund managers as compensation — about $137 million in annual management fees, and another $343 million in performance fees, also known as carried interest — to manage about $8 billion, one-third of Yale’s endowment.
I am but a simple country faux-lawyer, largely untutored in the ways of high finance, but this seems like a truly fantastic ripoff of what one of its former presidents called the best finishing school on Long Island Sound. Yale paid six percent of that portion of its endowment managed by the Masters of the Universe to said Masters, for their priceless 480 million dollars-worth of wisdom?
How could whatever marginal investment value the wizards of hedge fundery provided over, say, a dart board, justify this kind of fee structure? The answer is . . . look over there, a new student center!
Kenneth C. Griffin, a hedge fund manager, gave Harvard $150 million in 2014. In May of this year, Stephen A. Schwarzman, the chairman and co-founder of the private equity giant Black-stone, pledged $150 million to Yale toward a new student center. John A. Paulson, another hedge fund manager, topped them both when he gave Harvard $400 million in June.
While nobody has suggested that quid pro quos were involved in these cases, these gifts high-light the symbiotic relationship between university endowments and the world of hedge funds and private equity funds.
“Symbiotic” is a polite word, but I can think of another biological metaphor which might more accurately capture the increasingly intimate relationship between elite universities and the .001%.
. . . Howard, in comments:
This kind of behavior at colleges, foundations, and other non-profits, is one of the great case examples of the interlocking nature of the one-percenters. There quite literally is no case at all to be made for the fees paid to hedge fund and private equity managers: after-fee returns can easily be shown to lag a simple s+p 500 index fund over any meaningful time increment.
And yet, institution after institution goes right ahead because no one questions it: everyone – the board, the administration, the money managers themselves – is complicit and paid off in one way or another, as Donald Trump is only too happy to remind us.
In his extremely long and detailed essay “Star Wars Ring Theory”, Mike Klimo argues for a reexamination of the Star Wars prequel movies.
They are, he claims, not semi-competent jangles of garish noise and wooden acting, but in fact, incredibly sophisticated examples of modern mythmaking, and work with the original Star Wars movies to create an interwoven narrative web more complex than has ever been achieved in the history of cinema.
If you like Star Wars and wild theories, this is a great read. I don’t have much love for the prequel movies myself, but after reading Klimo’s essay, I can absolutely look at them with a deeper appreciation, recognizing that a very precise craftsmanship has gone into making them exactly…whatever they are.
Klimo claims in the essay that George Lucas, using “ring theory” (a storytelling concept that involves recurring motifs and patterns), has created in the six Star Wars movies a tightly woven narrative in which no detail is insignificant.
He supports this with examples of mirrored compositions, plot structures, story beats, and lines of dialogue from the various movies (I’ve used some of his juxtaposed images in this post). And seeing the evidence in living color, it’s hard to deny: a lot of thought went into making elements of the prequels reprise (foreshadow?) moments from the original trilogy.
I have some thoughts about the conclusions he reaches, though. I’ll let you go and read the essay, and then come back when you’re done, maybe next week sometime, and read the rest of this post.
Back? Okay. As I mentioned above, it’s clear that absolutely, unequivocally, there are moments and shots and entire sequences in the prequels that are designed to evoke counterpart moments and shots and sequences from the original trilogy.
Klimo’s argument is that this proves that all six movies are interlocking parts of a supremely orchestrated master saga…Which might make sense if the original ones weren’t made decades before the prequels, and if Lucas had himself directed all of the original movies.
What makes more sense to me is that, faced with the prospect of making prequel movies, and not wanting to screw it up, Lucas looked back at the original trilogy, and mined it.
In improv theater we have a technique: to make a mistake not look like a mistake, you simply repeat it. Then, it looks like it was a deliberate move all along.
By making movies that were, as close as he could manage, repetitions of motifs from the original movies, Lucas created the intricate interrelated structure that Klimo is so taken with — by filling in the missing pieces after the fact.
It’s kind of like a Rorchach test: it’s just a blob of ink, until you fold the paper in half. Once you mirror the pattern and start repeating things, every detail starts to look meaningful.
Some of the comments on the Ring Theory website point out a similar point: that no matter how intricate a structure the prequels can be shown to have, they’re still, to coin a phrase, semi-competent jangles of garish noise and wooden acting.
The response to this, in that comment thread at least, is that the prequels are meant to read as myths — “You don’t criticize the dialogue in the Bible, do you?” is a paraphrase of one comment.
To which I say: FAIR ENOUGH. Klimo claims to be at work on a follow-up article exploring this point in more depth.
But! I will also say this. I followed a link from Klimo’s article’s bibliography to an obscure journal of philosophy, which also features (besides the article that Klimo references) an article entitled “Nazi Germany: The Forces of Taurus, Scorpio and Capricorn”.
This article is exactly as impassioned and elaborate and detail-filled in the service of arguing the astrological links between the key figures and events of the Third Reich as Klimo’s article praising Lucas as the most sophisticated storyteller in the cinema history.
It’s like Chancellor Palpatine said: “It’s not what you know, it’s what you can prove.”
DETROIT — With the rise of Detroit as a sexy location for artistic spirits to be free from the confines of civilization, has come a backlash from everyday Detroiters, wondering what, exactly, is so blank about the city’s canvas.
From an outside perspective, it might be hard to understand how the denizens of such a radically depopulated city could possibly object to people coming here to pursue their vision. If only there were a convenient metaphor to be torn from the headlines — something that demonstrates a complete lack of awareness that there are people living in this sometimes eerily post-apocalyptic city, and that someone’s crazy dreams might have a negative impact on the surrounding community …
When fine art photographer and conservationist David Yarrow booked the former Packard Automotive Plant — the country’s largest surviving industrial ruin and, alongside the abandoned Michigan Central Station, one of the most iconic locales exposing Detroit’s fall from industrial glory — he apparently failed to mention that he would be bringing some on-camera talent in the form of a bobcat, two wolves, and a tiger that, in the immortal words of Chris Rock, “went tiger.”
Here’s the thing about Detroit: when your plans go terribly awry, and you are faced with a problem of epic proportions, you can actually rely on Detroiters to suit up, show up, and bail you out. In this case, President of the Detroit Bus Company Andy Didorosi came on the scene to assist in corralling the creature, in a move that he characterizes as “the dumbest thing we’ve ever done” and chronicles in a video posted to his Facebook page.
And, in light of no one being, y’know, mauled by a tiger, this is all pretty funny. But in point of fact, this tiger went loose in an area where real people live, work, ride bikes, and let their children play. As artist K. Guillory of the Ashur Collectivepointed out to Hyperallergic, this moment underscores the inherent disrespect paid to existing Detroiters, as new folks turn up and start screwing around without first gaining a clear understanding of the landscape. This city, and particularly the longstanding residents that have held it intact against unimaginable adversity have collectively been through hell and can handle just about anything. But for goodness sake, show a little respect. Tigers have already causedenough pain in Detroit this year.
The Museum of Broadcast Communications’s headless Ronald McDonald statue (photo by @mattystruck/Instragram)
Crimes of the Art is a weekly survey of artless criminals’ cultural misdeeds. Crimes are rated on a highly subjective scale from one “Scream” emoji — the equivalent of a vandal tagging the exterior of a local history museum in a remote part of the US — to five “Scream” emojis — the equivalent of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist.
Museum’s McDonald’s Statue Served a Chicken McNubNeck
Ronald McDonald is not a name one typically associates with sudden and drastic weight loss, but a sculpture of the famous fast food spokesclown that sits outside the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago shed several pounds in a split second last night when its head was lopped off.
Verdict: I don’t want to point fingers, but Chicago police would do well to track down the Hamburglar.
Russians Rampage at Sculpture Show
Several plaster and linoleum sculptures by Vadim Sidur, “the Soviet Henry Moore,” were destroyed by radical members of the Russian Orthodox Church who attacked an exhibition of the late artist’s work at the Manege Museum and Exhibition Association in Moscow.
Verdict: These modernism-hating Russians evidently don’t know their art history — anybody whose work has been likened to that of Henry Moore is clearly a member of the orthodoxy.
Roman Altar Permanently Altered
A Roman altar made of red sandstone that was discovered in Maryport, UK, in 1880, was stolen from the local Senhouse Roman Museum after it was wrenched from its display podium during public opening hours last Thursday. The altar was one of 17 dedicated to the Roman god Jupiter that were discovered and excavated in Maryport during the second half of the 19th century.
Verdict: Foolish thieves, they have brought the curse of Jupiter upon their homes!
Florida Dealer Kept the Cash
Arij Gasiunasen, the former owner of the same-named art gallery in Palm Beach, Florida, is being sued by Joanne Pearson, a board member of the Norton Museum of Art, who claims she is still owed $55,000 for a Sophie Ryder sculpture she consigned to the gallerist to sell in 2013.
Verdict: If Twitter has taught me anything it’s that Florida men are not to be trusted.
Art Student Fails at Theft
Marquise Crudup, a student of the Art Institute of Tennessee in Nashville, was arrested in connection with the June theft of some $6,000 worth of cameras and other equipment from the art school. At the time of the robbery, Crudup used a baseball cap to cover a security camera in the room where the equipment was stored, then removed it as he left, revealing his face to the camera.
Verdict: When Picasso said “good artists copy, great artists steal,” this probably wasn’t the type of stealing he had in mind.
Was just talking about this earlier today, as my friend was driving and we pulled back from the semi which had weaved over into our lane three times in about 5 minutes.
I seriously worry about the drivers, the pressure they're constantly under.
One of the points I make in Out of Sight is that the impact of industrial production is shouldered almost entirely by workers because when consumers get exposed to pesticides, for example, they are angry and empowered to demand changes. This is one reason why Cesar Chavez understood that motivating white consumers was more effective in creating the change he wanted than organizing the farmworkers themselves (which had its own problems). One way this has had a real effect was that the agricultural industry developed new pesticides that are intense but dissipate quickly. These nonpersistent chemicals thus intensely affect workers, but who cares about them, so long as my strawberries and apples are fine in the store. Once it doesn’t affect us, the burdens of pesticides are out of sight again.
This type of situation is pretty common throughout America, with companies far more concerned about angry consumers than their own workers. But there’s one area where there’s a surprising lack of consumer activism over the worker safety issues that can then affect them. And that’s the trucking industry. The pressure on truckers means tired drivers which mean crashes and death that can affect any of us any time we drive, as Tracy Morgan found out last year. I’m surprised that drivers–AAA to start with but other organizations as well–haven’t organized campaigns to make trucking safer.
Of course the busting of Teamsters locals and the move to nonunion companies where workers don’t have the voice to fight for themselves doesn’t help.
Nellie Brown, the director of Workplace Health and Safety Programs at the Cornell University School of Industrial and Labor Relations, said drivers’ schedules are to blame. “A lot of their schedules are erratic, so people don’t truly have regular sleeping hours,” she said. “You end up with people who are horribly sleep deprived, and this kind of problem is a terribly nasty one.”
Chronically fatigued truck drivers present a danger not just to other people on the road. According to Brown, they are more likely to suffer from long-term health issues such as diabetes, cancer and various heart conditions. She said the proliferation of online ordering and just-in-time delivery practices must take a large share of the blame.
“We’re just asking more of the human body and brain than we can really do, and we’re creating the expectation that people can order things and have them by the next day,” she said.
Others have pointed the finger at declining union membership in the trucking industry. Labor membership has been on the decline across the U.S. for decades. From 1970 and 1990, the percentage of for-hire truck drivers who were union members dropped from 60 percent to 25 percent. As of 2014, the Bureau of Labor Statistics found that just 17.4 percent of workers in transportation and material moving occupations are represented by unions.
Art Wheaton, the director of western New York labor and environmental programs at Cornell University, said unions representing truck drivers tend to bargain for additional safety provisions to fight exhaustion and then see to it those provisions are enforced.
“Many of the nonunionized companies tend to try to reduce costs, and sometimes it is at the expense of reduced safety, not only for the driver but for the general public,” he said.
Given that this could kill you or me today or tomorrow, why don’t we talk about this more?
Moral Turgeman and Rachel Conant, “The Little House in the Cosmos” (photo by Moral Turgeman)
LOS ANGELES — This week, the Architecture and Design Museum reopens in its new home, a cross-country art tour is captured on film, two teams of artists take turns tearing apart and reconstructing a vacant retail space, and more.
The Little House in the Cosmos
When: Tuesday, August 18—Thursday, August 20, Noon–6pm
Where: MAMA Gallery (1242 Palmetto Street, Downtown, Los Angeles)
The Little House in the Cosmos is a traveling art installation that houses a therapeutic sonic environment within a mirror-plated cabin. Created by Moral Turgeman and Rachel Conant, the project contains miniature dioramas, kinetic sculptures, even a crystal shrine, but the main attraction is a meditative sound bath reached through a tunnel in the structure’s side. MAMA Gallery is the first stop on a tour that takes the house to New York, Miami, Marfa, and Europe. The opening was last Saturday, but private viewings are available by appointment through Thursday.
The Adventures of Jamel: The Time Traveling B-Boy (via cinefamily.org)
The Adventures of Jamel: The Time Traveling B-Boy
When: Tuesday, August 18, 10:15pm
Where: The Cinefamily (611 North Fairfax Avenue, Fairfax District, Los Angeles)
In his “Art Thoughtz” videos, Jayson Musson — as his online alter ego Hennessy Youngman — insightfully and hilariously skewered art world pretensions and exclusions. His latest project is The Adventures of Jamel: The Time Traveling B-Boy, a web series about a Kangol and Adidas-clad B-boy who alters pivotal moments in history. Part Wild Style, part Bill & Ted’s, the show is inspired in part by a Louis CK bit about time travel being a white man’s game (“A black guy in a time machine is like ‘Hey, anything before 1980, no thank you, I don’t want to go.’”) The Cinefamily will be screening the first two episodes followed by the world premiere of episode three, as well as a Q&A with Musson, Director Scott J. Ross, and Producer Ted Passon.
When: Opens Thursday, August 20, 7–10pm
Where: A+D Museum (900 East 4th Street, Downtown, Los Angeles)
The A+D Architecture and Design Museum was forced to vacate its Mid-Wilshire location last year to make way for the Wilshire/Fairfax Purple Line subway station. Fortunately, the museum found a suitable new home in the Arts District, which will open this Thursday with the inaugural exhibition Shelter: Rethinking How We Live in Los Angeles. Addressing issues of density, diversity, affordability, and sustainability, the show will feature new residential design proposals from LA-based firms Bureau Spectacular, LA Más, Lorcan O’Herlihy, MAD, PAR, and wHY.
When: Friday, August 21 — Thursday, August 27
Where: Nuart Theatre (11272 Santa Monica Boulevard, Sawtelle, Los Angeles)
In September 2013, artist Doug Aitken organized Station to Station, a traveling modern sideshow of sorts that traversed the country by rail from the Atlantic to the Pacific. On its 23 day journey, the project stopped in 10 cities where a rotating cast of artists, musicians, and performers contributed to collaborative, multi-media events. If you missed it the first time around, you’ll want to catch the Station to Station film, a series of 62 one-minute movies capturing some of the trip’s best moments, featuring Beck, Mark Bradford, Patti Smith, Ed Ruscha, and many others. A week-long run begins Friday with performances from No Age, White Mystery, and Sun Araw, as well as Aitken in person, at select screenings. Check here for details and showtimes.
When: Opens Saturday, August 22, 7–11pm
Where: 440 South Broadway, Unit M3, Second Floor (Downtown, Los Angeles)
Pair Shaped is an online platform for artistic collaboration and dialogue. For its first exhibition in the real world, 4-Way, 2-Pack, Pair Shaped invited two teams of artists — Adler & Edmark and Earl Gravy (Emma Kemp and Daniel Wroe) — to utilize a vacant retail space in a downtown mall. Each team took turns creating work, which could then be altered or incorporated into work by the other team. The results reflect this cycle of creation and destruction, not only of artwork, but of the physical space itself.
Susan Silton’s studio building on Anderson Street in downtown Los Angeles, as depicted in True Detective, Season 2, Episode 4, 2015 (via facebook)
A Sublime Madness in the Soul
When: Saturday, August 22, 8pm & 10pm
Where: 6th Street Bridge (Downtown, Los Angeles)
It’s no secret that the real estate market in Los Angeles is on a rapidly rising trajectory, as many long-term tenants, including artists, are being displaced as the result of runaway speculation. In response to this situation, Susan Silton has organized “A Sublime Madness in the Soul,” a performance for four vocalists composed by opera singer and artist Juliana Snapper. The performance will take place in her studio building, which was recently sold, though viewers are invited to watch it from the soon-to-be-demolished 6th street bridge. Opera glasses or binoculars are encouraged.
According to a message posted on their front page, Blingee.com is going to be permanently “turned off” on August 25. This is sad news. A while back, Doug (aka Internet History) and I began collecting death Blingees––sparkling tributes to dead pets, relatives, celebs, etc––and then we started posting our collection at RIP Blingee.
Anyway, Blingee is going away forever. If you feel like mourning with us, you can pay your respects at RIP Blingee. We’re going to post as many as we can before they’re gone for good.
Show her that you love her while you Blingee ~Blingee, 2006-2015~
Erica C. Barnett has a gift for writing about NIMBYs that parallels Edroso on wingnuts: a light touch on the commentary with an eye towards the absurdity of it all, while not getting in the way of them hang themselves with their own words. (Great examples here, here, especially here.) The most recent NIMBY outrage is the overwrought reaction to the planned location of a homeless encampment on a block of city property in Ballard. (Danny Westneat, of all people, explains how unfounded the fears are here; more background here, on the charge that such places increase crime in the neighborhood see here) Barnett says what very much needs to be said here:
No one, including the few (mostly homeless, formerly homeless, or homeless advocates) who spoke in favor of the encampment, called the opposition “classist”–that, along with “racist,” is the third rail of Seattle’s white progressive politics–but whatever possible conclusion is there when a group of mostly upper-middle-class, mostly white, mostly homeowning residents gang up on a group of disenfranchised people sleeping on park benches or in their cars and say that they, as a class, are shiftless alcoholics and drug addicts (as if addiction was a choice) who contribute nothing to society and instigate crime and the loss of property values?
How else can we describe parents who say they don’t want their children exposed to a less-fortunate class of people, whose basic humanity is suspect because they haven’t pulled themselves up by their bootstraps into the middle-class existence so many of those wealthy homeowners received as their birthright? And what are we supposed to make of people who literally say they can’t be anti-homeless because they once took an individual homeless person into their home, just like your racist friend who says he can’t be racist because he gets along just great with the black people who serve him?
As someone who has often recieved a fair amount of pushback for suggesting that people’s stated desire to restrict to housing supply in their neighborhoods is motivated at least in part by classism, I can’t help but feel a little bit vindicated here. The mask slips a bit more often when it comes to homeless people, rather than ‘low income’ people generally.
Atlas, who stars in the Google video above, is an “agile, anthropomorphic robot” created by Boston Dynamics, the Google-owned robotics firm that gained internet viral video elite status for youtubes of its robot cheetah and BigDog. Atlas recently experienced walking in the woods for the first time. Check it out.
From the punk scene, Sum 41 took the stage at the Alternative Press Music Awards—officially announcing their return with lead guitarist Dave “Brownsound” Baksh rejoining the band after nine years. And while there is no plan for a long-term reunion, we will also see the Academy Is… back together for Riot Fest in Chicago this September.
Finally, though they’ve never broken up, we’re graced this week with a new release from Duran Duran, a track off their upcoming album Paper Gods—which they announced two years ago. Listen to “You Kill Me With Silence” below and hop on over to The Daily Beast for more info from the band.
In less than half a year since a counterfeit bank was discovered in Nanjing, China, the founder of another fake bank has been arrested in Shandong Province. Although not quite as sinister as the previous unlicensed money lenders, this suspected fraudster seemed not so much evil as just stubbornly convinced that he could run a financial institution despite not knowing certain core concepts of banking such as allowing your customers to withdraw money from their accounts.
According to police, China Construction Bank was established by its president, a man by the name of Zhang, with the goal of providing loans to small business in the area. Up until this point the closest thing Zhang had to banking experience was running a furniture store. In spite of this, he was able to set up a fairly well equipped branch in Linyi City, but unfortunately was unable to pass the government inspection that would allow him to become a legal bank.
Having already come this far, Zhang decided to open his China Construction Bank for business anyway. By the middle of July it had gathered about 40,000 yuan (US$6,000) in deposits mostly thanks to its convincing appearance, which included anti-counterfeit warning signs for customers.
No one had any idea the bank was not legitimate until requests for withdrawals began coming in. After being refused access to their cash several times, ‘customers’ began filing reports with the police, who opened an investigation into the bank.
On 14 August, Zhang was taken into custody. The extent of charges against him is unclear as an investigation is underway, but it will probably go down as various forms of fraud. Still, this kind of crime is so bold and increasingly common there really should be a whole new name for it, in our opinion, something like “malensconcement”.
I misread "PLECTRUM" as "RECTUM" at first... then I realized that the neural network wasn't really being an ass about things after all.
A neural network tries to identify objects in ST:TNG intro
Experiment by Ville-Matias Heikkilä applies deep learning recognition to the Star Trek: Next Generation opening titles … and doesn’t really do a good job of it …
There isn’t a lot of space stuff in ILSVRC12, so pretrained Googlenet
has some serious trouble classifying stars, planets and the Enterprise.
Imagenet-pretrained
Googlenet. Top three classifications translated into text for each
frame. The classification marked with an asterisk is the top choice.
Green color indicates that the network is relatively sure about the
classification (neuron value above threshold and at least 10% above the
second candidate).
For once I'm not going to be criticizing the TSA, but that's only because the TSA wasn't involved here in any way. Although it wouldn't surprise me if they have been meeting with their Irish counterparts supposedly to exchange nonsensical "security tips" but really to get free trips to Ireland at taxpayer expense because the $60 billion they've already filched from us doesn't seem like enough, and in the process some of their bad judgment rubbed off on the people at Dublin Airport.
Well, I guess that was kind of critical of the TSA, actually. I tried.
As Paula pointed out, this is a replica of the "Fart Blaster" wielded by the minions in "Despicable Me." So I guess it does have a track record of being used for evil purposes. But in real life it doesn't do anything except make noise and apparently emit an odor that thankfully is said to be banana-scented. Do I want a kid to wield one of these on a plane? No. Does it need to be confiscated by security personnel? No.
And of course they didn't confiscate it because they care that it might annoy other travelers. They confiscated it because—wait for it—it violated the rule against "replica guns." And this was despite the fact that, according to the kid's mother, the security officer admitted that his own child has the very same toy.
"We don't make the rules but we apply the rules consistently," an airport spokesperson said. "Anything that is a replica gun with a trigger mechanism on it is listed as a prohibited item." Well, if it didn't have a "trigger mechanism," it wouldn't be a very good replica, but the larger problem here really seems to be confusion OVER WHAT THE PHRASE "REPLICA" MEANS.
This does suggest some sort of TSA influence, because our resident geniuses have repeatedly invoked this rule—which I had presumed was meant to keep out things that look something like actual weapons—to confiscate things as ridiculous as a ray-gun shaped belt-buckle, a cane shaped like alightsaber, and a two-inch long revolver strapped to the side of a sock monkey. What is the point, please? Of course, given the state of things over here, I guess we couldn't entirely rule out the chance of a tragic incident stemming from a three-year-old's poor decision to menace a cop with a Fart Blaster, but this happened in Ireland.
The spokesperson noted that the toy was "being kept safe at the airport" so the child can get it back when the family returns, so that's nice. Over here, they'd probably go ahead and blow it up just to be safe. Can't be too careful.
From real-time match updates to performance analytics and the Hawk-Eye, the US Open has been upping its technology quotient over the last few years. This year the two-week grand slam tournament is opening its hard courts to virtual reality with the...
Expanded from 
Vaping just took a huge step forward in its quest for public acceptance. A report published today by Public Health England (PHE), an agency sponsored by the UK's Department for Health, has concluded that e-cigarettes are 95 percent less harmful tha...
Presidential hopeful Jeb Bush says that the government should be granted broad surveillance powers over both the American people and and private technology firms so that intelligence agencies can better fight "evildoers", according to the Associate...
Ronald McDonald is not a name one typically associates with sudden and drastic weight loss, but a sculpture of the famous fast food spokesclown that sits outside the Museum of Broadcast Communications in Chicago shed several pounds in a split second last night when its head was lopped off.
Several plaster and linoleum sculptures by Vadim Sidur, “the Soviet Henry Moore,” were destroyed by radical members of the Russian Orthodox Church who attacked an exhibition of the late artist’s work at the Manege Museum and Exhibition Association in Moscow.
A Roman altar made of red sandstone that was discovered in Maryport, UK, in 1880, was stolen from the local Senhouse Roman Museum after it was wrenched from its display podium during public opening hours last Thursday. The altar was one of 17 dedicated to the Roman god Jupiter that were discovered and excavated in Maryport during the second half of the 19th century.
The Little House in the Cosmos
