Rolandt

Asimov wrote a lot:

To match the number of novels, letters, essays, and other scribblings Asimov produced in his lifetime, you would have to write a full-length novel every two weeks for 25 years.

The six tips:

1. Never stop learning.
2. Don’t fight getting stuck.
3. Beware the resistance.
4. Lower your standards.
5. Make MORE stuff.
6. The secret sauce.¹

(Via Quartz)

#

Work

I did the second orientation to ePortfolios for our new UNIV201 Global Challenges course. First-year students, making connections in an interdisciplinary context. They’ve been asked to document their learning, and to showcase their projects for each other, and our ePortfolio platform is pretty much perfect for that. I was surprised, again, that none of the students had edited a web page outside of Facebook. A handful had heard of wordpress, but nobody had every used it. So many things I have taken for granted, absorbed by the modern social web. This is going to take a long time to repair. We’ve lost a lot as a society when our brightest minds have no personal knowledge of publishing and sharing knowledge beyond Facebook posts.

PhD

I’ve started a theme study, getting my head around telerobotics, telepresence, and humanoid androids in an education context. It’s easy to dismiss robots as “HAHA KILL ALL HUMANS” or “REPLACE ALL HUMANS” but there is more to it than that, and I think I have a role to play in figuring out what an embodied presence of a humanoid robot may mean in a social collaborative experience.

Anyway. The robot I signed out was dead on arrival. Working on a backup plan.

Read

• Newsblur starred feed items
  • Audrey Watters: To Mr. White
  • Coltan Scrivner: Artificially Intelligent, Genuinely a Person
  • via Stephen Downes: Tips for a PhD defense or viva #phd
  • Jennifer Sowa: Introducing … the Virtual Reality and One Button Studios
  • Nancy Chick: Toward an Ethos of Attribution
  • Clint Lalonde: Adding Creative Commons licenses to Kaltura MediaSpace videos
  • Rob Beschizza: Roll your own ASMR soundscape
  • via Stephen Downes: Feds launch networking site for academics, students and public servants
  • David Hedley: Prime Minister at University of Calgary on Jan. 24
  • Carl Straumsheim: Study explores efficacy of using digital models to teach anatomy
• Saved links on links.darcynorman.net
  • You Draw It: What Got Better or Worse During Obama’s Presidency – The New York Times – “Draw your guesses on the charts below to see if you’re as smart as you think you are”
  • The Gauntlet / The rising price of knowledge: University of Calgary cuts 1,600 academic resources – “UCalgary student newspaper gives an overview of open publishing in response to reduced effective funding for commercial resources”
  • Adding Courses and Inviting Peers – YouTube
  • SFU Open Access Policy | SFU Library
  • Listen to Ambient Sounds with Music – Deepfocus.io
  • A lawyer rewrote Instagram’s terms of service for kids. Now you can understand all of the private data you and your teen are giving up to social media — Quartz – “Jenny Afia, a privacy law expert at Schillings, a UK-based law firm, rewrote Instagram’s terms of service in child-friendly language”
  • Growing up Digital: A report of the Growing Up Digital Taskforce – “The human-friendly legal interpretation of the Instagram EULA is on page 10. Why on earth aren’t all EULAs written this way?”
  • Terms of Service; Didn’t Read – “We are a user rights initiative to rate and label website terms & privacy policies, from very good Class A to very bad Class E”
  • Additional Personal Leave Days for 2017 | Human Resources | University of Calgary
  • Asmr generator for positive feelings – “ambient soundtrack generator.”
  • Practical NAO wiki
  • Baxter Kinect basics – sdk-wiki
  • Teen courses | Alberta College of Art and Design
• Medium recommended stories via RSS
  • Andrea Gurwitt: Kids With a 3.1 GPA: It’s an Honor to Write a College Recommendation Letter For You
  • Dave Pell: Ain’t Gonna Play Trump City
  • Joe Brewer: The Climate “Doomsday” is Already Here
  • Charles Loop: The Dawn of Holographic Telepresence has Arrived
  • Chris Newman: Yes, Organic Farming Will Kill Us All

Other

I was blocked on Twitter by a Member of Parliament because I politely asked her for a comment in response to her heckling of a member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta at a Student Leaders event on campus. I was polite and respectful, and was genuinely wanting to learn her side of it, rather than just assuming the online buzz was accurate. Her response was to block me. That’s data. Classy.

Reclaim Hosting moved my stuff from the soon-to-be decommissioned Ramones server to the shiny new OutOfStep server. The process was absolutely painless and automatic. All I had to do was change my CPanel/SSH login. Easy. Thanks! The new server appears to have some minor CPU issues, but that will get worked out.

Screenshots annotieren ist die häufigste Funktion für meinen Surface Pen. Man klickt doppelt auf den 'Radiergummi', Windows kopiert den aktuellen Bildschirm und schon geht es los. Zuschneiden und darauf herumkritzeln, dann entweder speichern und per Share-Menü weitergeben.

We have done this tree times. Some of you made it in the first round, some in the second, some in the third. We are going to do this one more time, and at the end of the month we will be looking at your Move goal. You get this by dragging to the right. And maybe, you even get the full month for completing the Move goal every single day.

Good news: if you can complete a full week on all three activity rings, you are able to do it again and again. And it's working, as Markus reports:

@vowe #dontbreakthechain #sideeffects pic.twitter.com/IdmAlEJbTc

— M. J. (@mistake) January 22, 2017

Great idea, but flawed execution.

Just like everyone else I have a theory about What It Means, but I also have a story and a cool picture to illustrate.

We go to a few choir concerts, since my wife sings in one and is part of that social network. On January 21st in a two-choir show, the second half featured Roots ‘N’ Wings, an all-women ensemble. They opened with just a few singers on stage, then the rest came up the aisles, singing Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around (one of the Freedom Songs), some with the hats, some with signs.

The crowd came alive, on their feet, clapping and yelling, singing along. The choir fed on it and five minutes of pretty pure ecstasy ensued. My heart was instantly full.

Earlier that day, my wife and daughter were in the local march; I was proud of them. I didn’t go because I wanted to be part of those powerful sea-of-women’s-faces visuals by not being in it; anyhow someone had to clean up and make dinner.

What the march meant

I think it’s obvious. A bunch of reasonable people, led by women, needed to shout out and reassure each other that they weren’t crazy because they were horrified at a nouveau regime that’s crude, threatening, ignorant, oligarchic, reactionary, childish, corrupt, bigoted, thin-skinned, offensive, and oozes appallingly bad taste.

That’s about all the marchers had in common; the hardass rhetoric coming off the main stage was interesting and had its moments, but I bet very few of the marchers have even heard the word “intersectional”. Likely nobody will remember the rhetoric, but everyone will remember the clever signage, massed pink, glowing faces, and astonishing absence of violence or vandalism.

Hall of shame

• The new management of the Executive Branch of the United States Government.

• Twitter, for studding the #WomensMarch stream with deplorable hate-spewing trolls; they’re still there now. I mean, really, Fuck Twitter.

• Those trolls. My quip: They were grumpy because their Mom was off marching and couldn’t fix a sandwich for them and bring it down to the basement.

Thanks!

For that much-needed reassurance that it’s perfectly OK to have strong negative feelings over behavior which is crude, threatening, ignorant, oligarchic, reactionary, childish, corrupt, bigoted, thin-skinned, offensive, and oozes appallingly bad taste.

What next?

I dunno. Nor does anyone else. In the United States, the forces of decency and sanity suffer from a leadership vacuum. You can get along without a coherent ideology, but you need someone to rally around and vote for, and I don’t see who.

For the next few years, resisting the the hamfisted guttersnipes of the GOP will be useful and reasonably rewarding — the evidence suggests they lack the competence to get much done. But America needs an alternative.

Anyhow, thank you to the Women’s Marchers; I know I needed the reassurance. You’re not crazy. I’m not crazy.

Preheat oven to 425°F

Pie:

• 4 large eggs
• 1 large can pumpkin (or steam & puree your own)
• ¾ cup of brown sugar (dark brown preferable)
• ¾ cup of cane sugar
• 1 tablespoon ground cinnamon
• 1 teaspoon ground cloves
• 1 teaspoon ground ginger
• ½ teaspoon fresh grated nutmeg
• pinch of coarse sea salt or kosher salt
• 18 oz coconut milk (that’s ~2 cans but not 2 full cans. save the rest for the ganache)

I’m not about to tell you how to make your fav pie crust as that’s a deeply personal subject. You’ll need two of them.

Mix the above well with a whisk. Put into two prepared pie crusts.

Bake at 425°F for 15 minutes. Turn oven to 350°F and bake 40-50 minutes. Remove and cool on wire rack for an hour or until totally cool.

Ganache:

• 16 oz dark chocolate (cut into chip-sized chunks)
• 1 cup of coconut milk
• 1 teaspoon vanilla

Put prepared chocolate chips in a bowl.

Mix coconut milk and vanilla well and microwave for 1-2 minutes until violently frothing.

Pour over chocolate.

Wait 60-120 seconds.

Using a spatula, gently incorporate the coconut milk into the chocolate until blended.

When cool enough but still thin enough to pour, pour half over each pie. Swirl around by hand until covered. Refrigerate.

Human moderators are the web’s worst kept secret. The web would be a cesspit without them.

Machine algorithms help, but it’s a person who takes the flagged content and decides if you should see it.

Moderators endure the worst of society to give us a shot at building communities.

Moderators can’t unsee the images we’ll never see. They make a thousand correct decisions every day and lose their job for one mistake. They have the lowest pay, worst working conditions, and worst career prospects of anyone in the space.

Moderators must read, categorize, merge, and resolve thousands of repetitive questions. It’s a tough way to earn a living.

If you feel compelled to show appreciation today, show it to moderators.

Better yet, take action. In any moderation contract you create add policies to ensure good working conditions, access to psychiatric care, a living wage, and reasonable job security of all moderators.

Believe me, it’s hard to build a sense of community when every 3rd post is a penis. Moderators don’t get enough respect or support. Let’s change that and make this day meaningful.

Things of note for the week ending Sunday Jan 22nd, 2017.

Lol.

It’s been a while.

How you doing? Nice weekend? Shall we crack on with the things?

1. SCREENTIME GUIDELINES: EVIDENCE VS HYPE

I have young children and I live my life staring at screens. While I’ve made certain digital footprint decisions for my young’uns (as in, it’ll be their choice when they’ll have one – not mine) when it comes to screen time my rules are a little more fluid.

Moral panic about the impact of new technologies on our behaviour and development is not new. Socrates railed against the dangers of writing for fear that it would nurture “forgetfulness in the learners’ souls, because they will not use their memories.” One source of contemporary anxiety is “screen time”. Recently, a letter signed by a group of writers, psychologists and charity heads raised concerns that childhood health and wellbeing in the UK is declining, in part due to “increasingly screen-based lifestyles.” The signatories argued that the policy response to these concerns, first raised over a decade ago, has been half-hearted and ineffective.

While I do have a viewpoint about its limitations, I also think that the type of screen time is hugely overlooked. It seems I am not alone.

There is little evidence looking at the impact of the context of screen use, and the contentthat children encounter when using digital technologies – factors that may have a much greater impact than sheer quantity alone.

The two quotes are from an open letter than appeared in the Guardian recently and was signed by several global doctors and professors in everything from psychology to neuroscience.

Even if you don’t have kids yourself, this is definitely worth a read.

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2. GOODBYE, TWITTER LEAD GEN CARDS

These words you’re reading right now appear in two main formats. First as a blog post on whatleydude.com – aka ‘my happy place’ – and second, as a newsletter that gets sent out shortly after the former is published.

That second part is where most of my readers are (hello!) – and there are just shy of 1000 of you who get this newsletter every week. 900 of you subscribed via Twitter. Specifically Twitter’s lead generation card.

Something like this:

And now Twitter is shutting them down. Weird. But who knows why Twitter does what it does. Maybe it, like Facebook, has decided to pivot around (and go all in on) video. We shall see.

Shame though, I even wrote a handy guide on how to set them up, way back when.

Dead useful.

Now just dead.

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3. POKEMON [STILL] GO[ING]

About two or three months before Marshall and I published our annual digital trend report, I was asked to put together a preview for an internal event at Ogilvy Towers. You must understand that at this point, Marshall and I had barely had our first lunch on the topic let alone put anything down on PowerPoint. So, instead of just trying to make up a bunch of stuff in time, I took the brief and changed it.

On the day, I presented this deck – ‘Key Digital Things That We Really Didn’t Spot Coming But Wish We Did‘. The content of which is fairly predictable (but by all means go and read it) however one of the points that I wanted to land in the talk was that while the world went nuts for Pokemon Go over the summer, and that that madness has seemingly since subsided, it was still walking around with about 25m monthly active users – and that should not be ignored.

Interestingly, at the turn of the year, these revenue charts appeared that backed that up.

This thing is (still) making a LOT of cash.

Not bad for a flash in the pan.

More here.

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4. BATMAN: THE ANIMATED SERIES

I’ve wanged on before about how amazing this show is/was. And I’m not wrong.

Well, as it turns out, this was no accident.

Great reading.

_____________________

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5. LONDON UNDERGROUND STATIONS BY IG TAGS

I love this.

via #TagsintheCity (other cities also available).

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Bonuses –

• Reminder: the outgoing POTUS digital transition team totally bossed it.
• Fact-checking Tweets in the Tweets themselves.
• Hacking the attention economy.

And that’s me – I need some sleep.

 

Whatley out.

x

Donnasaurus Fox @donnamatrix
Cementing the road to hell. pic.twitter.com/IkinNfol2Q

Google is going to arrive in style in 2017. The tech titan has exciting plans for the maker community.

It intends to make a range of smart tools available this year. Google’s range of AI and machine learning technology could enable makers to build even more powerful projects.

To make this happen, Google needs help from the maker community. Raspberry Pi fans are the best makers around, and it’s their ideas that will give the tech company direction.

Here’s what they have to say:

Hi, makers! Thank you for taking the time to take our survey. We at Google are interested in creating smart tools for makers, and want to hear from you about what would be most helpful.  As a thank you, we will share our findings with the community so that you can learn more about makers around the world.

The company can produce some serious tools for the maker community, so make sure you have your say to get the tools you need.

Let Google know what you would like by clicking here and filling out the survey.

What Google has to offer

Google has developed a huge range of tools for machine learning, IoT, wearables, robotics, and home automation.

Its survey mentions face- and emotion-recognition and speech-to-text translation, to natural language processing and sentiment analysis, the firm has developed a lot of technology in the fields of machine learning and AI.

The tech giant also provides powerful technology for navigation, bots, and predictive analytics.

The survey will help them get a feel for the Raspberry Pi community, but it’ll also help us get the kinds of services we need. So, please take five minutes out of your day and let them know what you would like by filling out this survey.

The post Help Google develop tools for Raspberry Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Richard Poynder, Open, Shut?, Jan 26, 2017

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'Green open access' means that an author self-publishes their paper, or posts it into an institutional repository. Gold open access involves submitting to a publisher, paying publication fees, and then having the publisher release the paper as open access. This article looks at the green and gold model from the perspective of the argument by some open access proponents that only papers released under a CC-by license are open access. The non-commercial license (NC), they argue, doe not qualify. The licenses are roughly aligned; the green model supports NC, because publication rights are often assigned, while the gold model supports CC-by, as demonstrated by the rise in CC-by licenses in Pub-Med Central (PMC). The article doesn't mention that what we are also finding is that the gold model is leading to abuse, with a proliferation of fake journals, rising publication costs, and other scams.

[Link] [Comment]

Scott Strasser, The Gauntlet, Jan 26, 2017

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The  Gauntlet article has the best coverage but the  CBC news item has the best quote:"Even if we had more money, we cannot buy our way out of this," said University  of Calgary head librarian Tom  Hickerson. "We really have to change the model." Still, the Gauntlet had a good quote: “ You want 50 channels, but instead they sell you 337 for twice what you would pay for the 50,” he said. “ We don’ t get to make our decisions around a single journal. We have to look at the bundle as a whole.” The U of C cut was $1.5 million; meanwhile a fund to produce and distribute open access jrournals is up to $500K.

[Link] [Comment]

Strange as it may sound, social media platforms seem to be industrializing and automating friendship, introducing economies of scale to the business of sociality. The new technologies of amity, philosopher Bernard Stiegler argues in “Five Hundred Million Friends: The Pharmacology of Friendship,” are evolving in tension with the ancient technologies of the self: the arts of dialogue and listening, the protocols of amorous love, the cultivation and maintenance of bonds of intimacy with friends and family. His concern is not that “authentic” encounters are supposedly being displaced by cascading flows of ones and zeroes. Instead he regards these technologies as reorganizing friendship in regressive and ultimately oppressive ways, erasing the barrier separating adults from children, and opening the floodgates to wave after wave of commercial stupidity. In a permanent stupor or state of shock, we sense that it is becoming increasingly difficult to empathize with one another.

As philosopher John Protevi points out in Political Affect, proto-empathic identification — the capacity to feel with others, above and beyond the natural empathy we experience when exposed to spectacles of suffering — works via emotional contagion, like an infectious yawn at a dinner table. Certain technologies, primarily those associated with combat, from the blindfold placed on an enemy’s face to the first-person-shooter perspective in video games, allow us to overcome proto-empathic identification and perform (and enjoy) otherwise forbidden acts, such as the sadistic abuse of the powerless or the collective reduction of a given grayfoe to pulp.

Twitter might be regarded as another of these combat technologies. Stiegler was writing before Twitter’s ascendency, but he effectively predicted its culture. With its structural enforcement of brevity and its openness to anonymous participation, Twitter is the perfect platform for new experiments in collective cruelty. Metricized mentions foment us-against-them battles, making it easy for groups of “friends” (in reality, loose coalitions of semi-anonymous users) to target enemies and flood them with abuse. The pleasures of the mob are ever accessible, and the asynchronous nature of Twitter blunts the empathy with victims users might otherwise feel, rendering that mob mentality even more seductive.

Much of contemporary culture already teaches that enjoyment increases with each daring violation of the social contract. For instance, as Adam Kotsko points out in Why We Love Sociopaths, many recent TV shows invite viewers to live vicariously through men unmoored from the usual rules and strictures of law and morality. Twitter structures opportunities to move beyond mere identification to participation in this illicit store of pleasure.

The podcast form too has the potential and the incentives to organize new collectivities around the joys of agglomerated aggression and righteous scapegoating. Podcasting has grown in power and influence since the surprise success of Serial two years ago, and it’s now in position to take more ad dollars from traditional media, assuming podcasters can show that their listeners are uniquely passionate. Listeners often identify with podcasters in ways they don’t with radio hosts or columnists, an intimacy often heightened by an absence of network-enforced standards. The levels of candor and profanity work to build trust, and the aural envelope of the podcast can feel uncannily like an unfolding conversation. A podcast’s regular episodic rhythms also suit the days of a white collar workforce often permitted to wear headphones at the office. Podcasts build the sense of a steady relationship.

If listeners hang on every word of a beloved host, and that host integrates ads in the flow of the program, the ads carry a stronger endorsement, and become harder to skip. Thus the intimacy and intensity of emotional connection fostered by podcasting may be the key to its long-run profitability. And some listeners express that intensity by conspicuously enjoying the act of overcoming proto-empathic identification: that is, by showing brand loyalty specifically by showing contempt and antagonizing outsiders. It is not hard to foresee a future in which media brands thrive on the passionate aggression of their target demographics.

One such brand may be Chapo Trap House, whose name portmanteaus drug lord Joaquín “El Chapo” Guzmán Loera and the slang term for a crack kitchen. Described by Jia Tolentino in the New Yorker as a “gleefully eccentric podcast dedicated to vulgar leftist commentary on politics and media,” it combines arch chit-chat, interviews with left-leaning journalists and scholars, and impassioned commentary on electoral politics that pointedly eschews the norms of polite, wonkish punditry, favoring instead and ethos of withering confrontation. It also binds creators and audiences together around a potentially profitable idea of community, as emergent brands tend to do.

I have been part of that community. I listened to the podcast from the beginning, ever since it emerged in March 2016 from the sub-subculture of Weird Left Twitter. It has since cracked the top tier of the iTunes listings, attracting support from alternative-comedy notables like Dave Anthony, James Adomian, and Rob Delaney, and selling out live shows. Chapo puts out one episode a week, alternating each week between free episodes available to everyone and paid ones only available to their so-called Grey Wolves (a moniker borrowed from the annals of Turkish nationalism). As of early December, revenue from premium subscribers amounted to about $20,000 per month.

There is unquestionably something fresh about the Chapo approach. The hosts (Will Menaker, Felix Biederman, and Matt Christman, joined by Virgil Texas and Amber A’Lee Frost in November) find witty ways of coping with the banality and self-congratulation of media professionals, the “Favstar” elite, in Chapo’s description, and take aim at calcified modes of liberal-left “humor” — the limp satire offered by the likes of Andy Borowitz and John Fugelsang. By offering a more bracing alternative, rejecting smug liberal wonkery in favor of combustible confrontational rhetoric, Chapo helped listeners negotiate the profound queasiness triggered by the 2016 campaign.

Previous leftist movements also used ridicule and strategic mockery of reactionary opponents and liberal conciliators but tended to put it in service of a basically messianic project, meant to gather together the disparate victims of capitalism and forge a new political subject: the spirit of “We have been naught, we shall be all,” from “The Internationale.” As Antonio Gramsci famously diagnosed the maladies of 20th century capitalism, “The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” The forms of ridicule the Wobblies or the New Left favored were meant to give birth to the new, to create space in which different publics might emerge. The ridicule was not an end in itself, to be enjoyed solely for the power it makes one feel.

Chapo models a different modus vivendi for leftists. Rather than ridicule political targets to counteract “morbid symptoms” of capitalist crisis, it has instead seized upon them. Its aggressive show-no-mercy tone of ridicule seems to model how proto-empathic identification with enemies can be overcome, while seeming to strengthen in-group solidarity through the joy of suspending empathic norms.

The current moment is well-suited to this approach. Trump’s rise exposed that the liberal left’s vapidity and culture of mutual congratulation — its complacent belief that “facts have a liberal bias” — is not only irritating, but dangerous. In the summer of 2016, the suffering lower classes in the U.S. did not need Vox explainers. They desperately longed to be part of a party: a collectivity that felt right at the level of gut emotions and could come to power with a mandate for real change. Nothing could have been further from this than the campaign of Hillary Clinton. And nothing testified more to Clinton’s inability to inspire passion than her campaign’s clumsy use of comedy (think of the “Dangerous Donald” hashtag, or Jennifer Granholm’s mockery of Trump at the DNC, singing a few bars of “I Shall Overcome”).

Appalled by this clinical, aloof sensibility, Chapo offers comedy that is far more visceral. The show’s tone suggests that cutting, humiliating, or embarrassing enemies at a personal level — historically a tactic of the right — can be appropriated by the left. When Chapo’s targets are especially noxious political opponents — conservative New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, or maniacally homophobic right-wing writer Rod Dreher, or liberal triangulator Jonathan Chait — this approach can seem especially warranted.

Why not build political affiliation on the basis of contempt for shared enemies? In the urgency of the moment, the common-sense rejoinder — that this sort of insular politics in the long run tends to erode the ability to distinguish between principled critics and “haters” — seems to have been made irrelevant. Why care about ethics and empathy when the world is clearly about to self-immolate and global capitalism has dialed in a final war-of-all-against-all?

But the vulgar, bullying sensibility has spilled out beyond the show itself in ways that seem less tactical. Acting as aggrieved lieutenants of the Chapo brand, some male fans have harassed perceived enemies of the show online, particularly female journalists who have noted Chapo’s masculinist overtones. Tolentino, in her New Yorker piece, argued that “when an ethos of vulgarity is enthusiastically practiced by a group of white men,” listeners sometimes hear chauvinism. Some of the show’s fans reacted to such critiques by filling the writers’ mentions (and those referencing the articles favorably) with abusive taunts. As journalist Jamelle Bouie has observed, “For being supposedly edgy and transgressive, the so-called ‘dirtbag left’ is awfully sensitive.”

But it may not be sensitivity that drives this reaction so much as an eagerness to enlist in an online war, to sharpen the pleasures of participation. By adopting a posture of opportunistic aggression and hostile defensiveness, acting out in service of the Chapo brand, these listeners simulate a “left” politics while partaking in all the sadistic pleasures of the high school bully. The show’s confrontational rudeness can be taken as license, nullifying proto-empathic triggers for some of its fans, and Chapo’s “irony bro” roots strengthens the alibi for this behavior. Chapoism is defined not so much by sustained irony but by an oscillation between irony and sincerity that makes intentionality ambiguous. To engage Chapoistically with antagonists is to bounce between relentless boundary-testing of the limits of “ironic” play and high-handed pontificating, while insisting, as Chapo fans have on Twitter, that “Criticism is not abuse. Disagreement is not harassment. Calling you out for being dishonest is not bigotry. Conflict is. not. abuse.” Or: “suggesting a flaw in your reasoning is not gaslighting” Or: “disagreeing with people is not harassment. sorry, it’s not.”

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Resentment is a mercurial affect, with hundreds of different left and right iterations, some principled, some foolish, some utterly compromised. Anti-leftists are eager to draw parallels between the post-Occupy left and the racist “alt-right,” but this comparison falls apart on several points. The alt-right consists of white supremacists who view themselves as a natural ruling class displaced from their rightful place at the top of political and economic hierarchies; the Chapo left are not elitists but egalitarians, agitating for a just distribution of the social product and equal access to the means of life, health, and opportunity. The post-Occupy left and the alt-right may share a cultural milieu — young, computer- and video-game literate, unhappy, marginal — and the resentment that has sprung from it. But they aim it in vastly different directions.

What is it like to be a resentful young man online today? In Capitalist Realism (2009), Mark Fisher suggests that “the consequence of being hooked into the entertainment matrix is twitchy, agitated interpassivity.” He posits an almost occult connection between political impotence and the subjective experience of diffuse kinetic energy. So much of contemporary life seems to presume a detached subject with an aura of self-protective blasé. But underneath the veneer of chill, many are writhing and buzzing, choking on excess energy that they don’t know how to discharge.

In one of Capitalist Realism’s most memorable anecdotes, Fisher describes challenging a student in his classroom for always wearing headphones. The student replied that the volume wasn’t actually turned up. He wasn’t listening to anything.

Why wear the headphones without playing music or play music without wearing the headphones? Because the presence of the phones on the ears or the knowledge that the music is playing (even if he couldn’t hear it) was a reassurance that the matrix was still there, within reach.

This story seems to support Fredric Jameson’s influential claim that postmodernity ushered in a generalized “waning of affect” over the last decades of the 20th century. The student, affectively locked in with a barely-there electronic murmur, might be seen as the avatar of a generalized movement toward emotional refrigeration.

But literary scholar Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, her 2005 study of “the aesthetics of negative emotions,” complicates Jameson’s analysis. Like Norman O. Brown’s Life Against Death (1959) or Herbert Marcuse’s One-Dimensional Man (1964) did with respect to the late 1960s, Ugly Feelings anticipated and articulated an emerging structure of political feeling for the 21st century. In the book, Ngai challenges Jameson’s “waning of affect” theory, insisting instead that we have now begun to witness a waxing of affect, particularly of feeling-states that we tend to disavow and dismiss: envy, anxiety, paranoia, irritation. Neoliberalism, Ngai argues, takes root at a felt level in a “general state of obstructed agency with respect to other human actors or to the social as such.” That frustrated volition — that sense that our votes do not matter, that our work (if we can find it) is meaningless, that activism is merely an endless set of demonstrations that accomplish nothing — can easily become the charge that animates us as we power up our laptops and go looking for fights. We seek a way out of empathy, which is felt as paralyzing and castrating, in order to feel the thrill of doing things.

It may be that an army of online leftists, filled with righteous anger, could foster productive change. One Chapo host recently proclaimed on Twitter: “the Grey Wolves are the best listeners anyone could ask for. they are not homogenous nor are they politically passive.” And a fellow traveler of the show claimed, “For every lanyard dipshit” — one of Chapo’s pejoratives for pundits, think-tank white-paper writers, lobbyists, and the like — “that whines about Chapo there are 10 grey wolves going out into the world & doing something to fucking help.”

But there is a dialectic at work in the life-cycle of the ugly affects. They are too much for us, they overwhelm us. We can only stand them for so long. Soon, we begin look for compromises. One of these is to infect political ridicule with counterpolitical ends. The righteous battle against reactionary enemies, the speaking truth to power, begins to be deformed by the pressing need to manage and discharge feelings of frustration.

On the podcast, the Chapo hosts cycle ironically through the tropes of internet combat, slipping into characters for a few moments at a time — first, say, as a Daily Caller blogger searching endlessly for logical fallacies; then as a Democratic pol delivering canned, poll-tested puns on Taylor Swift lyrics. Some Chapo listeners then emulate this approach in social media, performing similar acts of serial masking as they attack perceived antagonists personally and dig up details online with which to threaten and try to shame them.

What enables this play-acting is a shared sense of superiority to the game. Come on, the Chapo partisan might object. We are doing irony. You are taking this too seriously. But as literary critic Linda Hutcheon explains in Irony’s Edge, irony is inherently dangerous and unstable. The ironist cannot, almost by definition, control who is hurt and how by ironic gestures. “Why should anyone want to use this strange mode of discourse where you say something you don’t actually mean and expect people to understand not only what you actually do mean but also your attitude toward it?” she asks. She suggests that, “unlike metaphor or allegory, which demand similar supplementing of meaning, irony has an evaluative edge and manages to provoke emotional responses in those who ‘get’ it and those who don’t, as well as in its targets and in what some people call its ‘victims.’”

Hutcheon’s analysis sheds light on some of the complexities of Chapoist irony. The hosts did not expect the podcast to become a hit, and early episodes were recorded with the expectation that only those within a small social circle would listen. As the podcast began to scale, the initial sensibility remained intact while its potential dangers multiplied.

Irony, despite its instability, is highly normative: If nothing else, it delineates an in-group and an out-group. Small-d democratic idioms of humor — one thinks of M.M. Bakhtin on the literature of the carnival, or the literary critic Américo Paredes on the anti-authoritarian Mexican-American border ballad — tend to reveal the arbitrariness of moral conventions and to mock the pretensions of elites, but irony often has a profoundly aristocratic cast. You always need to double-check with the vanguard (whoever they might be) to make sure that you are on the right side of the ironic divide. You can never be sure that you have verified — properly, completely, finally — whether you are at the table or on the menu.

Chapo’s response to the “ironic” bullying dynamic it has sparked has been accordingly equivocal. On episode 11, “Cranking the Donkey” (May 22, 2016), Menaker responds to complaints that some men of the Twitter left were harassing women, acknowledging that on the internet women regularly received communications that were “at best annoying, and at worst frightening.” But he stops short of suggesting that men have an obligation to intervene against such abuse. Christman objects to liberal women who had crafted a “narrative” of abuse, claiming that the internet is a “shit tornado” with a “mass of totally uncontrollable, unknowable people — you have no idea who anybody is, they can do whatever the fuck they want, and this narrative of these directed attacks … there’s something comforting about that.” Menaker added that “Twitter and the internet and shit doesn’t matter … I really don’t think they have any real-world effects other than distraction and just staving off the feeling of impending death, basically.”

At times, the Chapo hosts have assumed an arms-length, apparently nonchalant relationship to the collective aggression it has managed, intentionally or not, to foment. In more recent episodes, however, they have made some gestures toward curbing it. In episode 61, “Who Makes the Nazis?” (November 24, 2016), Menaker advises listeners to “be like us,” refusing to get in the mud with critics, adding that the mass targeting of the day’s enemy had become “tiresome.” On episode 62, “Chapo Struggle Session,” (November 30, 2016), they directly take on critiques of the show. “We’ve made fun of a lot of people over the course of this show,” Menaker says, “and it seems like just last week all of them decided to take shots back at us at the same time. Just one after the other.” He later summarizes the show’s attitude: “If you cut us — if you cut the Trap — do we not bleed? We’re all sweeties, that’s the thing … even though we’re 100 percent not bothered by this and it’s actually funny.” By episode 64, “Candyman IV: The Curse of Caleb” (December 8, 2016), Menaker tells the audience that, if “you are, like me, a heterosexual white man sitting atop a mountain of unearned privilege,” rather than respond to critics on the show’s behalf, “I would just say the best thing you can do is use their own logic, remain silent, just no comments, stand back, and let our female and POC fans of the show absolutely shred these motherfuckers.” Here, it’s as though the show’s unstable irony has compromised its ability to defend itself on its own terms. Despite its sustained effort to establish an uncompromising tone that can confront and espouse impolite truths, it is left having to call out for other, clearer voices.

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Over the summer, as Trumpism gathered momentum, some left intellectuals began to encourage one another to read Male Fantasies, Klaus Theweleit’s late-1970s psychoanalytic-feminist study of the gender politics of early Nazism. Many connections between Trumpism and the world of the early Nazis suggested themselves. After all, Male Fantasies devotes hundreds of pages to the obsession of young National Socialists with menstruation, blood, and the archetypal male urge to erect dams and insulate the body against flooding, pollution, and viscosity. When Trump assailed former Fox anchor and debate moderator Megyn Kelly (who had pointedly asked Trump about his long history of insulting and degrading women) for “having blood coming out of her wherever,” the link to Male Fantasies was hard to miss.

But Theweleit offers not only a way to interpret the right’s slide into fascism, but also a warning for the left that must fight it. The German left, he explained, retained some generic attitudes ingrained by patriarchal society (a veneration of military-style male-group behavior, a propensity for men to pontificate, the ridicule of testimony that does not correspond to their personal experience) that compromised their fight. Male leftists took refuge in “a framework for the forms of communication and dominance that typify male bonding and brotherhood,” including “dogmatic monologues … self-satisfied denunciations of enemies and deviating friends; intrigues; exclusions; and, along with that, a corresponding insensitivity to any realities that do not approximate their own.”

In the early years of the Russian Revolution, radicals found inspiration in the hallucinatory incantations of the poet Velimir Khlebnikov. Particularly important to them was “Incantation by Laughter”:

      O laugh it up, laughers!
O laugh it out you laughers!
That laugh with laughs, that laugherize laughily.
O laugh it out so laughily
O of laughing as laughilies — the laugh of laughish
laugherators.

Khlebnikov’s poem seems to affirm the centrality of laughter to the work of being human. It reminds the reader of the great capacity of laughter to bewitch, bedazzle, and befog. We can get lost in laughter, and we can get drunk in it. There is a tuneful laughter that levels arbitrary hierarchies. There is also a cackling laughter that convokes a new group united by hatred of the humiliated sucker. That kind of fickle laughter hasn’t been much sustained help to anybody. Let us care enough to insist upon the distinction.

Ciara Wardlow, FilmSchoolRejects, Jan 26, 2017

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I often puzzle over story selection by the media. I live in a world of research and education and science. These seem to me far more interesting and relevant that the world of pundits, crime and conflict reported by media. This story touches on that with respect to other media. "It seems silly that major studios now insist on churning out reboots and remakes that nobody asked for, and that rarely seem to succeed either critically or commercially, when STEM history has so many stories just waiting to be told." We need this sort of story in the news, not just fictionalized and presented in film.

[Link] [Comment]

Justin W., Daily Nous, Jan 26, 2017

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This is a bit of a personal item for me, as I graduated with an MA in Philosophy (and went All-But-Dissertation for a PhD). When I studies philosophy I was warned there were no jobs in the field, and to a large degree the warnings were accurate. But there are many jobs outside the field, and as it turns out, philosophy prepares a person especially well for the information age. The report cites  a study researching "earnings per educational dollar", which doesn't seem to be a very practical measure. But if we look at the post-graduate  employment of philosophers, you have a very practical guide as to the contributions they make to society. Photop: Quartz.

[Link] [Comment]

So the inauguration was on Friday, and there’s been some disagreement about how many people showed up to the event. It turns out, as one might expect, counting thousands of people moving in and out of a space without some kind of counting mechanism like turnstiles is tricky. The New York Times provides a bit of background.

Tags: counting, estimation

I need to start this essay by making one thing clear: I will not in any way suggest that cam girls or the work that they do is problematic. On the contrary, this essay is aimed at appreciating some of the complexity involved in this form of sex work. In particular, it examines how the culturally ubiquitous trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) shapes the expectations an audience might place on cammers (especially young cis-women cammers) and how cammers anticipate and capitalize on such expectations.

Sex work is a performance that requires anticipating and reflecting the desires of customers. Many sex workers have a specific role or act that they regularly return to whenever they are on the clock. In some cases, this may even involve what Arlie Hochschild (The Managed Heart, 1983) called “deep acting” (i.e., working to feel the desires or emotions required by a performance or to achieve a real connection with clients). However, the identities of sex workers are not reducible to these performances anymore than the personalities of flight attendants or waitresses are reducible to their interactions with customers. In Playing the Whore (2014, p. 86) Melissa Gira Grant explains:

Acting as if we share our customers’ desires is the work of sex work. But that’s not the same as allowing our customers to define our sexuality… [we need] to see off-the-clock sex workers as whole, as people who aren’t just here to fuck.

For many sex workers, performing at work involves manipulating the sexist assumptions they encounter throughout their lives so that they can actually benefit from them. For example, cammers often adopt the feminized role of dutiful listener because it gratifies customers who stick around and pay just to talk. In this way, sex workers present themselves as fantasy objects for men (at least temporarily). Grant observes (p. 90):

Sex workers know they are objectified; they move in the world as women too, and through their work they have to become fluent in the narrow and kaleidoscopic visions through which men would like to relate to them as sexual fantasies embodied.

Which fantasies women are expected to embody will, of course, vary based on the cultural assumptions of a particular time and place. And, given the increasing prominence of the MPDG in Hollywood films and other media, it seems likely that this trope is also becoming more commonplace in men’s individual fantasies. As such, it is something that sex workers will increasingly have projected on them and will increasingly respond to. But before I discuss how I think the MPDG trope is affecting sex work—and camming in particular—I need to review the characteristics that define the MPDG.

In his 2007 essay coining the term, Nathan Rabin explains:

The Manic Pixie Dream Girl exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.

Rabin later elaborates that the MPDG

seem[s] to belong in some magical, otherworldly realm — hence the “pixie”… a… carefree nymphet who is the accessory to [a male protaganist’s] character development. It’s an archetype… that taps into a particular male fantasy: of being saved from depression and ennui by a fantasy woman who sweeps in like a glittery breeze to save you from yourself, then disappears once her work is done… a fancifully if thinly conceived flibbertigibbet who has no reason to exist except to cheer up one miserable guy.

He concludes that:

The trope of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl is a fundamentally sexist one, since it makes women seem less like autonomous, independent entities than appealing props to help mopey, sad white men self-actualize.

In other words, the chief feature of the MPDG trope is the reduction of women to nothing more than props in a man’s quest for self-actualization.

Particularly relevant to sex workers encountering the MPDG trope is David Strohecker’s observation that what makes an MPDG so inspiring to the man at the center of a story is her propensity for breaking rules and norms. The rebellious nature of the MPDG appeals to men who are unsatisfied with their lives but unable to break out of their own habits and narrow view of the world. Strohecker explains:

Hollywood fetishizes the progressive, non-conformist type; the type of woman that has visible tattoos and body piercings, yet exudes a childlike glee and excitement about life. Why? Because such women serve as muses for young men, men in power, or soon-to-be heirs of privilege. They are accessible as cultural objects, things to be gazed at and amazed by. They may even be listened to, but only when seeking emotional support, inspiration, or hope.

While MPDG characters are portrayed as outsiders, sex workers occupy prominent outsider role in society: the role of whore. Whores defy the compulsory virtue society prescribes for women, choosing how and when to express their own sexuality. In Sex at the Margins (2007, p. 101), Laura Agustín explains that, when the term originated, the emphasis was on rule-breaking not just monetary exchange:

‘Whoring’ referred to sexual relations out of marriage and connoted immorality or promiscuity without the involvement of money, and the word whore was used to brand any women who stepped outside current boundaries of respectability… there was no word or concept which signified exclusively the sale of sexual services

Though the whore is stigmatized by society, she is also liberated—free to embrace other possible ways of being. Through the male gaze, women perceived as whores appear to be avenues of sexual possibility not open to men in the conventional relationships that they have reserved for “good girls.” And, in this sense, whores’ non-conformity—like that of the MPDG—may “inspire” or be “fetishized” by men who would treat them as a muse for their own (sexual) self-actualization. Of course, whores are not merely props for men’s self-actualization. In fact, it is women’s expression of their own sexual agency that, ironically, gets them branded as a whore.

The reason that the role of the whore is relevant to the MPDG is that the intrinsic non-conformity of the women who occupy this role makes them attractive to men looking to play out an MPDG fantasy. This tendency is further encouraged when women exhibit other visible markers of non-conformity: dyed hair, tattoos, uncommon piercings, symbols of non-mainstream tastes (bands, movies, books, etc.). And, it is encouraged even more when other traits of the MPDG (e.g., youth, bubbly personality, quirkiness) are present.

This brings us to the chief observation I want to make in this essay: Sex camming sites are full of young, bubbly, geeky, tattooed women with vividly-colored clothes, hair, and backdrops. This pattern is derivative of the MPDG trope—we might call it the “Manic Pixie Cam Girl”—and, I am suggesting that two things are happening to cause this: 1.) men have a propensity to imagine women occupying the whore role as muses who can help them in their quest for sexual self-actualization, and 2.) cammers are successfully exploiting this sexist male fantasy in their shows by selling an MPDG fantasy.

These are just broad observations, and only cammers themselves can speak to if and how much they have deliberately adopted the MPDG trope as a playbook. (In my experience, cammers are keenly aware of such trends and are creatively engaged with culture writ large.) What is certain is that cammers, along with their clients, are part of a shared cultural landscape where images of MPDGs feature prominently. Whether or not a cammer explicitly frames her performance in terms of the MPDG, this trope provides a script for interactions that both parties have been socialized to understand intuitively. And, this learned pattern of interactions is what Manic Pixie Cam Girls are very intentionally capitalizing on in their performances.

What, then, are we supposed to make of Manic Pixie Cam Girl trend?

Undoubtedly, some critics will argue that the Manic Pixie Cam Girls—like the MPDG trope—only reinforce the male fantasy that women are accessories or props that can be ignored when not immediately useful. In movies, relationships with MPDGs are almost always ephemeral—the male protagonist racing to get what he needs from an MPDG before repeated interactions force him to recognize her as something more than an object. And, perhaps, the transactional and contingent nature of cam interactions does seem to confirm the suspicions of these skeptics—after all, a viewer can just log off as soon as satisfaction is achieved.

But, unlike movies, camming is interactive, and these interactions are often ongoing, especially for regular customers. Over time, viewers see cammers’ moods vary. And, cammers often use social media to share events and life experiences with engaged audiences. Also unlike Hollywood, cammers are their own writers and directors—they control their own shows and make the ultimate decisions about when and what to perform. In all these ways, the MPDG-esque illusion of other-as-fetishized-muse may be harder to maintain on cam site. And, it is even quite possible that the audience likes it that way. After all, playing with and subverting conventional social roles is the basis of a wide range of kinks.

Beyond the question of women’s representation—whether Manic Pixie Cam Girls help or hurt the way women are perceived in general—is, perhaps, an even more important issue: How the individual women performing on cam are managing to pursue their own ambitions in a hetero-patriarchal society. And, I believe we ought to celebrate anyone who is able to turn that which is used to oppress them into an opportunity. By capitalizing on sexist male fantasies, MPCGs are doing just that.

PJ Patella-Rey (@pjrey) is sociologist and cammer writing a dissertation sex camming.

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Revised 1/24/17 to clarify some language.

The buildings on the edge of the image on the left are a set of Mission styled 1920s stores designed by H H Gillingham. Across Seymour is a theatre, which in this 1973 image was known as the Strand Theatre. Across the lane was the Birks Building, demolished in 1975 with the theatre to allow the construction of the Vancouver Centre. The construction of Birks in 1912 had required the demolition of three early office buildings built by Canadian Pacific directors before 1890.

The theatre was opened in August 1920 as the Allen Theater, one of the first super deluxe movie houses in Canada; described in promotional material as ‘Canada’s finest and most modern photoplay theatre’. It cost $300,000 to build and it was completed in only six months. Some reports say that after a year the Allen chain of 50 theatres were bankrupt and theatre was purchased for a nickel on the dollar, reopening as the Strand with 1,950 seats in 1923. Others suggest that the Ontario based Allen family reorganized their operation with US partners, creating the Famous Players brand. The first is more accurate: the Allen family were from Ontario but had moved their operations to Calgary in 1910. They expanded their chain significantly in the late 1910s, often hiring Detroit architect C Howard Crane, (with Kiehler & Schley).  This theatre had many modern amenities including built-in cigarette lighters and, in a local touch, featured work by Vancouver sculptor Charles Marega.

A decline in movie attendance, the loss of the rights to show Paramount movies and increased competition in the early 1920s did see the company bankrupt, and they sold to Famous Players in 1923 at a significant loss. Most cinemas were renamed as a Capitol – but not in Vancouver where there was already a Capitol down Seymour Street.

Both the Allen and Strand featured live vaudeville acts before their movies, sometimes supplied by Fanchon and Marco, (Fanchon Simon and her brother Marco Wolff). Even after relaunching with US backers, the cinemas were not immune to outside economic realities. In 1932, the theater went dark for a year due to the depression; (Fanchon and Marco were booked at the Orpheum instead). Ivan Ackery managed the Strand in 1934 and recalled hired the Dumbells, a touring musical-comedy show formed by a group of soldiers from the 3rd Division, to appear before the movies.

Although built as a movie theatre, the stage was large enough to permit use as a regular theatre. In 1940, for example, The Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo  performed at the Strand. The show featured a cast of 150, including Alicia Markova.

Image source City of Vancouver Archives CVA 447-391

The first time I rode a bicycle from Kyoto to Osaka, a year and a half ago (“Cycling Along the River from Kyoto To Osaka Castle”), the 55-kilometer (34-mile) route we were lead on followed roads and paths that traced the eastern bank of the Katsura River and then the southern bank of the Yodo River. For the most part it's a fine route, on nice paths closed to motor vehicles.

The initial paths out of Kyoto are the least developed part of the trip, so I came up with a less muddy, less bumpy exit from Kyoto, but otherwise I'd take the same route every time I went to or from Osaka (including rides blogged about here, here, here, and here).

I got to wondering why we always used only the one side of the river and not the other, and so while I was stuck at home sick over the New Year break, I spent days inspecting data (satellite photos, Strava ride data, etc.) to figure out what roads and paths were on the other side of the river, and updated OpenStreetMaps accordingly. It looked very promising.

Finally, on Jan 7th, I put it to use and gave it a try, resulting in a 101-mile ride down one side of the river and up the other (view at Strava), with various excursions in Osaka, including an all-out assault of the notorious Tenpozan (Mt. Tenpo) climb.

I started out at about 8:40am. I took my standard route south out of Kyoto, but then made my way over to the Katsura River, and at the 11km mark of the ride, crossed the bridge to start exploring areas I'd never ridden in.

Initially there's only a road (not a cycle path) hugging the river, but it has little traffic, and it gives way to a cycle path after a mile or so:

This entrance has the first of what turns out to be many of these infuriating gates. Ostensibly they are designed to keep scooters and motorcycles out, but practically speaking, they bang your bike and ankles and cause blood pressure to rise.

The “(sort of)” caption relates to the little sign to the right of the entrance, which says "this is not exclusive to bicycles; if you ride, share the road with pedestrians and mind your manners". Common sense that must be sufficiently uncommon to have prompted the sign. 🙁

Over the next 42km (26 miles) until the ocean, the route jumps on and off paths and roads in a simple, easy-to-follow way, except for at two locations where another river joins, and the way to connect across the wide mouth of the joining river is not straightforward.

It wasn't always apparent in my research just how reliable a path was. The first such iffy spot crossed the mouth of a joining river on a path that looked to be gravel, and indeed it was:

This short span (770m / half a mile) of dirt isn't too bad on a road bike, and cuts off a somewhat complex (but paved) route that's 2½ times longer. I'd take the latter if it were rainy.

The dirt path ends at a wide, beautifully-paved cycling path, but with a fully-closed gate that you have to lift the bike over...

I didn't think anything would make me appreciate the ankle-biter gates, but here we are. I suppose I should just skip the shortcut dirt road and avoid the gate altogether.

There are parks along much of the river on both sides, collectively known as the Yodogawa Riverside Park. Among the 30-ish miles of park are, as best I can figure from their online reservation system: 28 baseball fields, 7 additional tot-sized baseball fields, 49 tennis courts, 9 soccer fields, 2 mini-soccer fields, 7 gateball fields, 2 track-and-field areas, and numerous park-like places for kids to play and people to walk their dogs.

But even all that doesn't fill up the space much, and much of it is lovely nature:

My geographical knowledge is apparently quite compartmentalized, because even though I had ridden nearby (on the path on the other side of the river) many times, I had no real sense for where I was until I noticed the unique water-level-observation tower across the river, which is a landmark about halfway between my house and Osaka Castle.

I had to exit the big nice cycling path at one point due to construction slated to last for a few more months, so I returned to the road on the embankment above. There was a less-traveled road down below on the other side (to the right in the photo above), so once the construction is done, this area will have three roads to choose from.

I caught this asshole chucking a can into the weeds, and made him go back to pick it up. He was all nice and apologetic when I first framed it as “you dropped something”, but when I asked whether he thought this country was a trash can, he got all pissy at me.

I just can't comprehend what goes through some people's minds. Sigh. I'm sure he chucked it again the moment I was gone.

What we have above looks to be “IR16.0”, but it's really a line pained across the path, followed by “R 16.0”, and it means “16 kilometers until the river ends, right bank”. in Japanese, banks of a river are labeled “left” and “right” based on what side they are on when standing in the river and facing in the same direction as the flow of the water, so in this case, the north side I was riding on is the “right bank”, and occasionally these distance markers are painted large on the path.

For a while I was riding up on the embankment cycling road. Down on the left is another cycling/service road, and on the right is a normal road. Depending on the wind and your whim, one can mix and match as they like.

Picking my way the 62km (39mi) here took a leisurely three hours.

After a short break, I thought I'd try ascending Tenpozan, Mt. Tenpo, which would require a 12km trip through the city, including through an underground tunnel under a river....

Having arrived at the base, I steeled myself for the brutal climb to the top of the mountain.

Two minutes later, I had put the whole mountain's 4.5m (almost 15 whole feet) of vertical climb behind me, and summited!

The surveyed summit is actually a small marker on the ground seen near my bike in the photo above...

As you may have guessed, it's not really a mountain, but it's officially designated one by the Japanese Government. You can read about it, as I did, on its Wikipedia entry.

As a joke, I made a Strava segment for the “full climb”, though it's sort of meaningless even beyond the meaninglessness of the 4.5m “climb.” It suffers from “Undesirable Segment Trait #7”, and all the top matches to the segment are mistakes. Still fun.

The mood at the little park was decidedly eerie because there were swarms of people walking around silently, aimlessly, in moving together in small groups but individually just looking at their phones. It was my first encounter with mass “Pokemon Go”.

As I flew by the scene, I took in that the truck had obviously taken the corner (just out of frame to the right) too quickly and dumped a bunch of its load, and thought perhaps I should stop and help, but there seemed to be plenty of people there. But moments later it sunk in that I had seen only one elderly man and some little kids, so I went back, took a photo, and got sticky.

The first order of business was to get the young kids, who had just stopped by to help while playing, off the busy road and onto the sidewalk side of things. As seen above, I was vibrantly fluorescent, so I worked on the road side of things, and together with others who stopped by to help, we got everything cleaned up and loaded back onto the truck. I asked the guy what would happen to the oranges... maybe donated to a zoo? He reacted like it was a good idea he hadn't thought of.

When we were done, I asked whether I could have a good orange to eat, which of course was given with thanks. My hands were bathed in dirty orange juice, so like the kids before me, I went off to find a place to wash them. Unlike the kids, I found a place close by, and when I returned to get my bike, found the man had put the kids' toys into a pile, along with a few good oranges, for them to enjoy when they returned.

Continuing on my exploration, I passed by Universal Studios Japan, which I'd heard about often (Anthony has gone with his friends), but had never been to....

This ramp spirals up to get to a big bridge...

As the bridge approached the other side, the most heinous-looking building I have ever seen came into view:

I didn't know what it was, but I assumed it must be a Love Hotel with a name along the lines of “The Veined Penis”, or something like that. It is truly hideous. It turns out that it's a trash-incinerator plant, so I suppose it's destined for self-immolation.

I passed by as quickly as I could.

I suppose I should explain at this point what I was doing. After Mt. Tenpo, I wanted to try to head out to the ocean as far as possible, which meant hopping two man-made islands. I'd made it to the first, but was denied access to the only bridge to the second:

The island that I was on was getting built around the time I first came to Japan (1989). I tooled around it a bit. It has a lot of nature areas devoid of anything but a path going through, and occasionally a toilet:

China is a big country with big cities and big roads. Imagine what it must feel like to know that the closest subway station or bus stop is 20-30 minutes away. Imagine getting in your car at 2 pm on a Thursday thinking that the traffic should be okay only to find that traffic definitely isn’t okay. Imagine taking a cab to the nearest supermarket because it would take 30 minutes to walk there.

Welcome to the life of over half the Chinese population.

The last 6 km problem

Usually, when we talk about the last mile problem, we’re referring to connectivity or logistics, i.e. how does an ISP ensure efficient investments to few people? However, for transportation in China, it’s the last 6 kilometers that’s the real problem. That’s exactly the problem that Token Hu, co-founder and head of product at Niu (pronounced “new”), set out to solve.

“The goal we set for ourselves was to find the solution to the problem of city traffic. After a lot of research about the situation in China, US, and Europe, we don’t think electric cars can solve the problem. There are enough cars on the road already,” he says. “We thought about the last mile problem when we first started thinking about the product, but when we were doing our research, we found it’s not only the last mile. Every day people travel to work, meetings, grab a coffee, or meet friends, the average distance is 3-6 kilometers. Everyone does about that distance. So we asked ourselves, what kind of vehicle can conveniently travel that distance?”

The answer, as we now know, was e-scooters. However, they were about to enter into an already saturated market: 20-30 million e-scooters and e-bikes are sold each year for a total of more than 200 million. These bikes, however, are relatively cheap to make and buy; the most expensive and inconvenient part is the battery, traditionally a heavy lead-acid block weighing anywhere between 20 to 50 kilograms depending on power and capacity.

The three biggest problems

Looking at Token’s industrial and graphic design background, one might easily assume that the first problem they would look to solve would be the most obvious and visible: the look and feel. Niu, however, came from a different angle.

“The first major problem we wanted to solve was the battery mobility problem. We wanted to make something that was removable, light, and small,” says Token. “A major reason people don’t buy an e-scooter is the battery. Removable, small, and really efficient was the first problem we tried to solve.”

So, they created a lightweight, but powerful, lithium-ion battery. However, as anyone who has spent any time in China knows, a bane for any bike or scooter rider (electric or no) is theft. Theft of the battery, theft of the vehicle, and sometimes just theft of parts.

The best way to prevent is obvious: make it hard to steal. There are a few different ways to do that: you can add more locks or you could do what the car and mobile phone industry have done.

“Before Niu, every e-scooter company uses different suppliers for the batteries, motor, controller, dashboard, different parts,” Token says. “There’s no operating system. We want to make the whole system communicate with each other and communicate with our cloud services. Every time you change a piece, our servers will know.”

Only after did they solve the two most fundamental problems, did they begin to consider look and feel. As China’s economy is developing, consumers are beginning to expect more and are willing to pay for it. That’s the market they targeted.

“Why are people buying a 2,500 RMB bike? Because they have no other choice. The older people are buying the older generation of products, the young generation doesn’t want to buy that stuff because it doesn’t fit their philosophy. It doesn’t fit their beliefs. It doesn’t fit with their style,” Token says. “People like us, we use iPhone or Xiaomi. We want things that are simple, elegant, friendly.”

A successful strategy

Their strategy seems to be working.

Crowdfunding pre-sales campaigns for their first full-sized e-scooter and mini e-scooter have been major successes: 72,022,526 and 81,380,425 RMB, respectively. Even with prices 40-130% higher (3399 to 6899 RMB), their sales is growing along with their fanbase. To date, they have sold over 90,000 units of their the latest full-sized model, the N1S, and 60,000 units of the M1.

Image credits: Niu

The World Economic Forum (WEF) was aflutter about bitcoin and blockchain this year, going as far as creating the Global Blockchain Business Council spearheaded by China. This is unsurprising given the fact that Shanghai is home to the largest BTC exchange by volume.

Neil Woodfine, COO of Remitsy and Beijing Bitcoin meetup organizer, however, debunks the myth of China and Bitcoin in his article, “How Chinese is Bitcoin?”. He argues that China’s 90% trade volume is completely misleading. Chinese bitcoin trade volume sure is supermassive. The three major exchanges (OKCoin, Huobi, and BTCC) report a 30-day trade volume totaling 186.3 million BTC accounting for 98.3% of all global trade volume. However, if you stop there, you’re only getting a small part of the picture.

“Basically, bitcoin old-timers have been on a long journey. We think about it every day. And our ideas of what bitcoin are changing all the time. What I thought about bitcoin and blockchain have radically changed over even the last six months,” Neil says. “Then you get all these newcomers coming in, saying that blockchain is the real innovation and it’s going to change this and that.”

China bitcoin exchanges charge zero trade fees, meaning there is a lack of friction. The zero trade fees indicate that there is zero cost to making any trade. This leads to the question of who actually pays for the mining done. Anyone can participate in blockchain, moving bitcoin from one node to another. But blockchains are only responsible for recording the transactions, not for turning cryptocurrency into actual liquidity. In other words, there is no actual value on the blockchain.

Neil gives another example of bitcoin fraud through wash trading. A trader could set up two separate accounts and trade his bitcoins back and forth rapidly. If he trades one bitcoin a thousand times a day, he will generate 1,000 BTC in trade volume without any value or real trading happening.  Couple this with the fact that most exchanges generate revenue from withdrawals, the fees of which are based on each trader’s transaction volume. The higher the volume, the lower the withdrawal fee.

Moreover, despite all this manipulation, blockchain is still not exactly a “trust protocol.” Blockchain has advertised itself as the ultimate source to eliminate trust barriers. The truth is, however, for anything of value other than bitcoin to be transacted via blockchain requires additional layers of agents, third parties, and auditors. Participants can also choose their level of transparency when it comes to transactions.

The core of the problem is nobody has really figured out what this distributed ledger technology is about or what problems it could solve.

“Bitcoin and blockchain are more a cultural paradigm shift than just a technology. It’s all about decentralization, so the attempt of intermediaries to repurpose it appears quite ludicrous,” says Ferdinando Ametrano, “Bitcoin and Blockchain Technologies” teacher at Politecnico di Milanoan.

“For some reason, we’ve come to accept this road violence against pedestrians as part of the wallpaper of urban living – even as “walkable cities” are the holy grail of city planning everywhere.”

 Peter Ladner in his latest editorial in Business in Vancouver calls it for what it is: we have an epidemic of Road Violence in Vancouver. Peter states in his editorial:  “Never mind calling back Mayor Gregor Robertson from Mexico to clear our icy sidewalks. We should be asking him to stay home in January and protect seniors from being killed by cars. Vancouver is the pedestrian death capital of Canada, and January is peak month for pedestrian deaths in B.C. – expect more than seven.

Based on five-year averages, 61% of those killed will be 50 or older. Our pedestrian death rate is twice that of Toronto, where one pedestrian is injured every four hours, and 44 pedestrians were killed in 2016. In last October alone, 10 pedestrians died in five Lower Mainland municipalities. There were as many pedestrians slaughtered by cars in the city of Vancouver (11) last year as there were murder victims.

My son was walking to work across a marked intersection at Pender and Jervis, on a green light, at 7:30 on an October morning two years ago when a car knocked him to the ground. He is still suffering from the concussion he incurred. The driver stopped and leaned out the window to ask if he was all right, then drove off. It turns out his situation is typical: according to a BC Coroners Service report, 40% of pedestrians killed in Greater Vancouver were struck at intersections and in crosswalks and two-thirds were crossing while the light was green. It might also be the case that many of the pedestrians who got hit were, like him, wearing dark clothing. In some Nordic countries the widespread use of reflective clothing has greatly reduced road violence.

But it’s too simple to blame pedestrians. I remember the first time I saw the 30 km/h zone painted boldly on Hastings Street around Main – the most dangerous pedestrian intersection in the Lower Mainland. My first reaction was: “Why should I slow down because impaired people choose to lurch into oncoming cars?” Then I sobered up and reframed the question: “Why should saving a few seconds of driving be more important than killing someone?”

Peter notes that when some European countries adopted laws where vulnerable road users, not road drivers were assumed to be innocent, injury and fatality rates dropped by 70 per cent. HUB cycling recommends a 30 km/h speed limit on non arterial streets-the survival of a pedestrian crashed into at 30 km/h  is 90 per cent at that speed, and only 15 to 20 per cent at 50 km/h. 

Peter points out that it is the Province-Minister of Transportation Todd Stone-who could implement this and who “is not interested. Nor is he interested in photo radar and red-light cameras. Research in Europe found there were 42% fewer serious injuries and fatalities where photo radar and cameras were installed.”  Minister Stone dismissed this as a “tax grab”. Peter suggests this is the same as saying “Seniors are expendable if it gets me votes from car drivers who want the freedom to kill them by breaking the law and letting ICBC pick up the bills.”

Getting to zero pedestrian fatalities needs ” lower speed limits, safer intersection design, better pedestrian signals, tougher enforcement to stop speeding and distracted driving (none of us should be taking calls from people while we’re driving), more reflective clothing, cyclists using lights and more. But mostly it means getting serious about this ongoing car violence against mostly seniors, in every neighbourhood, especially in January. “

Samsung today formally announced the results of its in-depth investigations into the Galaxy Note 7 explosions. The company conducted its investigation on over 200,000 units of the Galaxy Note 7 and tested every single aspect of the device like water resistance, USB-C port, fast charging, iris scanner, software, and more. Continue reading →

Samsung has confirmed to Reuters that it will not be launching the Galaxy S8 at MWC in Barcelona this year as per the company’s mobile chief Koh Dong-jin. Samsung has usually unveiled its flagship Galaxy S handset at MWC for the last few years, but the company has decided to defer the launch of the handset this year. Continue reading →

In a move bound to surprise many, Hugo Barra today announced that he will be stepping down from his role of Vice President for Xiaomi for international markets. The move comes after Barra joined Xiaomi 3.5 years ago and has helped the company make a global presence since then. Continue reading →

At a press conference in Seoul, South Korea, DJ Koh, the head of all things mobile at Samsung, finally revealed exactly why the company’s flagship Galaxy Note 7 smartphone caught fire.

Through its internal analysis, Samsung has determined that issues with the Note 7, including batteries in the device’s original manufacturing run, as well as subsequent replacement power sources in the device’s second run, were caused by abnormalities related to the phone’s battery.

“Over 700 dedicated staff tested 200,000 phones and 30,000 external batteries”

Specifically, Samsung says there were two distinct problems that caused the Note 7’s battery to experience issues. The first battery used in the Note 7 suffered from a design flaw that caused its upper right corner to short circuit.

This is because the battery’s external casing was too small for its internal components, causing it to short-circuit and ignite, according to Samsung.

The second battery — which came from a different company, not Samsung SDI — suffered from a welding defect that occurred during the manufacturing process, causing the battery to heat up, as well as catch fire in some cases.

Samsung says that in a rush to manufacture enough batteries for replacement units, the manufacturer of the second battery introduced the defect (see the infographic at the end of the story for more detail on both battery problems).

Towards the start of the press conference, Koh emphasized the exhaustive steps Samsung’s mobile division took to replicate the Note 7’s battery issue. The South Korean tech giant says over 700 dedicated staff tested 200,000 phones and 30,000 external batteries in order to determine the source of the problem (Samsung has a total of 70,000 engineers across various divisions of its company).

The company also enlisted three outside firms — UL, Exponent and TUV Rheinland — to test the Note 7, with each company coming to results that mirror Samsung’s findings.

Samsung says it tested the Note 7 with both wired and wireless charging solutions at different voltages, its unique Iris Scanner, waterproof body and other features, in order to try to pinpoint the issue. Ultimately the company determined that the problem was related to the device’s battery.

The Galaxy Note 7 launched globally on August 19th. Then, two weeks later, Samsung announced a global product replacement program. The smartphone was completely discontinued on October the 7th and all devices in the Canadian market were “deactivated” on December 15th.

The manufacturer of the Note 7’s original battery is Samsung SDI, a company that’s separate from Samsung electronics, but still under the Samsung Group. The second battery was manufactured by Hong Kong-based Amperex Technology.

Over 3 million Note 7 devices have been returned, according to a statement given by Koh during the press conference. It’s believed that the Note 7’s issue will cost Samsung approximately $5.3 billion USD in total.

In order to prevent the issue from occurring again in future devices, Samsung says it has formed a “battery advisory group” consisting of individuals from various academic backgrounds with the goal of “ensuring the safety” of future Samsung products.

The company also states that it now has an “enhanced eight-point battery safety check” that involves x-rays and randomly disassembling devices during the manufacturing process, in order to ensure quality.

Finally, Samsung also says that it’s developing a new “bracket design” that will ensure battery integrity, even when the smartphone is dropped.

It’s been less than two months since LineageOS came out of Cyanogen’s decision to stop publishing nightly builds, but already the group has started to make good on its promise to deliver weekly custom Android ROM builds.

Over the weekend, the LineageOS team uploaded its first set of nightly and experimental ROM builds.

To start, custom Android Nougat and Marshmallow builds for the Nexus 6P, Nexus 5x, Moto G4 and G4 Plus, Nextbit Robin and Xiaomi 1S are available to download, with support for more devices coming in the future.

Picking up exactly where CyanogenMod left off from, the new LineageOS builds use the same numbering system as their Cyanogen counterparts. For instance, Lineage 14.1 is the team’s take on Android 7.1.

Lineage has signed each build with a private key for authentication and permission control purposes. And while root access is not built into the standard builds, users can download an optional zip that gives that level of access.

One thing to keep in mind is that while it’s possible to upgrade from an existing CyanogenMod build using one of the experimental LineageOS builds, it’s a better idea to start with a fresh install.

Source: LineageOS Via: Android Police