Rolandt

The Economist: This year has seen an explosion of rage about sexual harassment. “Will it lead to lasting change?” (Print Edition, December 19, 2017)

“The dam broke in October, with accusations of harassment and assault against Harvey Weinstein, a film producer. Since then dozens of prominent men in show business, journalism and politics have been accused of sexual harassment, and been sacked or stepped down. The #MeToo hashtag has already been used 4.7m times on Twitter by women (and a few men) whose harassers were not famous enough to make the news.

Both sexes have found the outpouring astonishing. Many men are amazed to learn that so many women have suffered sexual harassment. For women the surprise is that perpetrators are being punished at last.”

Source Source

The ATS programming language has a powerful type and proof system to enable safe construction of programs. Sometimes there is a need to cast a value from one type to another. ATS provides a feature that enables the programming to write their own rules specifying what can be cast. This becomes important when converting types from non-dependent typed values to dependantly typed values and dealing with conversion of proofs. This post goes through some common examples.

A casting function is introduced using the keyword castfn. It only has a declaration - there is no implementation or body of the casting function. From a value perspective there is no change to the actual value being cast, only to the type. It is effectively the identity function except for the type change. This means the cast is only allowed for types that are the same size, typically a machine word. There is no runtime overhead for using a casting function.

# Standard Types

The following example ATS program attempts to add an integer to an unsigned integer value:

#include "share/atspre_define.hats"
#include "share/atspre_staload.hats"

implement main0() = let
  val x: uint = 5u
  val y: int = x + 5
in
  println!("y=", y)
end 

This results in a type error:

$ patscc -o c2 c2.dats
c2.dats: 133(line=6, offs=16) -- 138(line=6, offs=21):
         error(3): the symbol [+] cannot be resolved as no match is found.
c2.dats: 124(line=6, offs=7) -- 130(line=6, offs=13):
         error(3): the pattern cannot be given the ascribed type.
c2.dats: 124(line=6, offs=7) -- 130(line=6, offs=13):
         error(3): mismatch of static terms (tyleq):
The actual term is: S2Eerrexp()
The needed term is: S2Eapp(S2Ecst(g0int_t0ype); S2Eextkind(atstype_int))

The error is saying that the operator + has no matching implementation for the types provided. It is expecting an int but got something else.

The addition operator requires the two arguments to be of the same type. A casting function can be added to cast the unsigned integer to an integer:

#include "share/atspre_define.hats"
#include "share/atspre_staload.hats"

extern castfn int_of_uint(x: uint): int

implement main0() = let
  val x: uint = 5u
  val y: int = int_of_uint(x) + 5
in
  println!("y=", y)
end

This compiles and runs:

$ patscc -o c3 c3.dats
$ ./c3
y=10

A castfn looks very much like a fun declaration. It requires the name of the casting function, the argument it expects and a return type. There is no implementation as mentioned earlier. The compiler will convert the type of the argument to that of the return type. Another example follows showing conversion to a floating point value:

#include "share/atspre_define.hats"
#include "share/atspre_staload.hats"

extern castfn double_of_uint(x: uint): double

implement main0() = let
  val x: uint = 5u
  val y: double = double_of_uint(x) + 5.0
in
  println!("y=", y)
end

The castfn can have any name but most of the ATS prelude follows a format of including the 'from' and 'to' types in the name.

# Dependent Types

Conversion between dependently typed values and non-dependently typed values are a common use of casting functions. For example:

val x: [n:int] size_t n = string1_length("hello")
val y: int = x + 1 // Error here, mismatch between dependent and non-dependent int

The type of x is dependently typed in that it has a type index of sort int for the length of the string. It is also of type size_t but the snippet expects an int. A castfn allows casing away the dependent type index and converting the type at the same time:

 #include "share/atspre_define.hats"
 #include "share/atspre_staload.hats"
 
 extern castfn int0_of_size1 {n:int} (x: size_t n): int
 
 implement main0() = let
   val x: [n:int] size_t n = string1_length("hello")
   val y: int = int0_of_size1(x) + 1
 in
   println!("y=", y)
 end 

Note the use of the '0' and '1' suffixes used for the type names in the castfn. This is an idiom in ATS naming where a '0' means not dependently typed and '1' means it has a dependent type.

It's possible to go in the other direction, casting from a non-dependent typed value to a dependently type value. This is an example of code that won't compile and needs a cast:

val x: int = 5
val y: [n:int] size_t n = x

This fails due to x and y being different types. Adding a cast function to convert the int to a size_t and including a type index will allow it to compile:

#include "share/atspre_define.hats"
#include "share/atspre_staload.hats"

extern castfn size1_of_int0 (x: int): [n:int] size_t n

implement main0() = let
  val x: int = 5
  val y: [n:int] size_t n = size1_of_int0(x)
in
  println!("y=", y)
end

Here the castfn adds an existential variable to the return type (the '[n:int]' part) to attach a type index of "unspecified integer value' to the type.

Another common use of casting functions is to convert different string types. A string is a non dependently typed string and a string1 is a dependently typed string with the length of the string as a type index. For example, arguments on a command line are string, but if a string function is called on it then there is a type error:

implement main0(argc, argv) =
  if argc > 1 then let
      val s: string = argv[1]
      val n = string1_length(s)
    in
      ()
    end
  else
    ()

Using a castfn can convert the string to a string1:

#include "share/atspre_define.hats"
#include "share/atspre_staload.hats"

extern castfn string1_of_string (s: string): [n:int] string n

implement main0(argc, argv) =
  if argc > 1 then let
      val s: string = argv[1]
      val n = string1_length(string1_of_string(s)) 
    in
      ()
    end
  else
    ()

# Casting linear types

Types can be cast to and from linear types. When programming with strings in ATS you often deal with string which does not need to be manually free'd and strptr which is a linear type and needs to be manually free'd. Sometimes you want to treat a strptr as a string to call a string based function. An example is:

#include "share/atspre_define.hats"
#include "share/atspre_staload.hats"

extern fun strdup(s: string): [l:addr] strptr l = "ext#"
extern castfn strptr_to_string {l:addr} (s: !strptr l): string

implement main0() = let
  val s: [l:addr] strptr l = strdup("hello world")
  val n = string0_length(strptr_to_string(s))
  val _ = strptr_free(s)
in
  ()
end

This example needs to be compiled passing '-DATS_MEMALLOC_LIBC' to tell ATS to use the standard C malloc/free calls.

$ patscc -DATS_MEMALLOC_LIBC -o c8 c8.dats

For the purposes of this example I use a FFI function to call the C strdup function to copy a static string to a linear string that needs to be free'd. Note that the castfn does not consume this linear type (evidenced by the '!' prefixing the type name in the argument). This is dangerous because we can store the return value of the cast and use it after the free:

val oops = strptr_to_string(s)
val _ = strptr_free(s)
val _ = println!(oops)

The danger can be restricted by using locally scoped cast functions:

val n = string0_length(strptr_to_string(s)) where {
          extern castfn strptr_to_string {l:addr} (s: !strptr l): string
        }

Now strptr_to_string can only be used within that local block of code. Cast functions can be dangerous so need some care. There are various prelude casting functions for performing these types of conversions already.

# Prelude unsafe casts

The prelude has an 'unsafe' module with a casting polymorphic function which can be used instead of defining casting functions for trivial things. There are also functions for converting strptr to string, etc. The equivalent of the previous example would be:

#include "share/atspre_define.hats"
#include "share/atspre_staload.hats"

staload UN = $UNSAFE

extern fun strdup(s: string): [l:agz] strptr l = "ext#"

implement main0() = let
  val s: [l:agz] strptr l = strdup("hello world")
  val n = string0_length($UN.strptr2string(s))
  val _ = strptr_free(s)
in
  ()
end

Basic type casting can be done using the cast function:

#include "share/atspre_define.hats"
#include "share/atspre_staload.hats"

staload UN = $UNSAFE

implement main0() = let
  val x: uint = 5u
  val y: int = $UN.cast{int}(x) + 5
in
  println!("y=", y)
end 

The swiss army knife of unsafe casting functions are castvwtp0 and castvwtp1. They can be used for casting linear types. The string example previously can use this:

val s: [l:agz] strptr l = strdup("hello world")
val n = string0_length($UN.castvwtp1{string}(s))
val _ = strptr_free(s)

castvwtp1 will not consume the input argument whereas castvwtp0 will. Looking through the prelude/SATS/unsafe.sats file will give an idea of the range of available functions.

The examples in this post are somewhat contrived in that there are standard prelude functions for doing most everything already. The need to cast string to string1 and strptr are reduced due to specific functions being available for those types. However it is useful to learn to use the castfn functionality and it is handy for one-off local casts, or defining protocols using proofs to ensure safe casting to and from types.

Updated: A previous version of this post stated that Xiaomi and OPPO smartphones may feature facial recognition technology as early as March or April 2019. The technology actually might be available in March or April 2018.  Chinese smartphone maker OPPO has revealed that its high-end flagship smartphones are coming back. The flagship series has been […]

OPPO’s new flagship phone may come with a battery that charges in 15 minutes originally appeared on TechNode

Raus an die frische Luft und weg mit dem Weihnachtsbauch! #dontbreakthechain pic.twitter.com/RUHkSLoCgd

— Volker Weber (@vowe) January 1, 2018

Every time somebody sees my watchface I get the same questions. Is this an exclusive Watch Edition watchface? Where do I find it? Today I will reveal my secret. ;-)

I have a white watch and a white Nike Sport Band. I also wanted a white watchface. This is how you do it. Select the X-LARGE watch face and dial the color to White. Then you swipe left to get to the second page.

Now you add the Activity complication and you are done. White watchface with time and large monochrome Activity rings.

Since we moved in to our new home, the wifi has been a source of irritation. I had recreated the set-up we had in our previous house (main router on ground floor with a second access point on the second floor), but the difference is that we had wooden floors there between the first and second floors, here it is all concrete with rebar. So the irritants kept building up. The need to switch networks between floors, Sonos players dropping out of the network at unpredictable times, not seeing connected light bulbs unless I was near the stairwell. The internet connection itself isn’t the problem, with a 500Mbit symmetrical glassfiber to the home. Also the ground floor living room and most rooms on the first floor (where E and my offices are) have a wired ethernet connection.

I wanted a wifi set-up that allows seamless roaming around the house, and provides full coverage at high bandwidth. So a mesh-network it needed to be, and a way to either connect access points to ethernet cables, or have enough bandwidth between access points through a dedicated wireless backhaul connection. Various options exist, all rather pricey.

The cheapest one I found, Devolo Gigagate looked good at first glance. It provides a 5GHz back-haul connection, and provides lots of wired ports on the access points, so you could connect NAS or high bandwidth devices to it. However the regular wifi it provides is only a 2.4GHz network, as the 5GHz is reserved for the backhaul. This made me realize I needed to look for a 3-radio device (a 2.4GHz and 5GHz radio for wifi, and a 5GHz radio for the backhaul). Other solutions such as Google Wifi send a lot of data about your usage back to remote servers, and that is an absolute no-go. Ubiquity AmpliFi scored low in tests on actual speed delivered, and doesn’t offer any ports on the accesspoints. In the end it was a choice between Linksys Velop, and Netgear Orbi. Linksys has just one port available on an access point, and scored lower in speed than Netgear in reviews. Netgear is however the most expensive option. Figuring we really wanted to get rid of our irritations, I went for Netgear Orbi anyway.

Just in time for our, in terms of bandwidth, most demanding guests around New Year’s Eve, I installed the Orbi mesh. A main router, and two satellites. The main router is on the first floor, connected to ethernet. One satellite is on the ground floor, and one is on the second floor. Putting the router on the middle floor like this ensures it is able to see the two satellites most easily. It provides two networks, our own and one for guests, that both seamlessly cover all rooms.

Speed testing shows satisfactory results, and since the installation we no longer have any dropping connections, no more Sonos hick-ups and all the connected lights show up.

One step remains to do for connectivity in our home. That is running up a cat 6 ethernet cable to the second floor. As in a short while The Things Network gateway will be delivered, which needs a direct internet connection and will be installed at the highest point of the building.

One long weekend in mid-October of 2016, my husband and I met three friends from D.C. in Albuquerque for the annual Balloon Fiesta. We ate green chile at every meal; we gawked at the hot air balloons shaped like dragons and elephants and the Bimbo Bear; we burned off our altitude hangovers in the afternoons watching Ink Master at our Airbnb.

We also talked incessantly about the election, about our addiction to the news. We checked the news on our phones while we talked. It was like rage-bonding. One morning, standing in line at the fairgrounds for piñon coffee, Allison said she wasn’t sure what she’d do with herself after the election. Despite our worst fears, we still assumed Hillary would pull through in the end. We believed in “the end.” We believed the glut of news could not possibly last. She said, “I think I’ll almost miss it.”

I remembered Allison’s comment on “Indictment Day,” as the media or regular people (I’m not sure who got to it first) dubbed October 30, 2017, when Robert Mueller filed the first indictments in his investigation into the Trump campaign’s involvement with Russia. My friend Mike, who had also been with us that weekend in Albuquerque, sent me a text that evening: “Read the news for like six hours today, feel almost hungover.” I’d done the same, and it was unsatisfying; I didn’t know how to feel. Was the news truly good — a sign of good things to come — or seemingly good, but actually bad? I no longer trusted the news to tell me, or myself to know the difference. I felt I had lost the thread.

I watched Indictment Day happen without feeling involved. It was like being at a party when you’re not in the mood. But I could see that my friends were getting some kind of high from it. Wanting to take part in that, I kept clicking links. From my unsure remove, I could tell they were experiencing something close to what I experienced on January 10, 2017, the day the infamous “pee tape” dossier was published by Buzzfeed — I was so absorbed in Twitter that evening, we were late to an event — and before that, the day the Access Hollywood tape got out, on October 7, 2016. I was on a train when that news dropped, and I didn’t take my eyes off my phone for the two-hour trip. I gorged on the news like I was starving. And I could see, via Twitter, that my friends were doing it too. It was hitting all the same pleasure centers as watching TV — in both the old way, where everyone watches the same shows at the same time, and the new way, where streaming makes it possible to binge unto sickness. What we felt was close to joy, an inter-city orgy of communal schadenfreude.

I wanted that joy on Indictment Day, but I wasn’t getting it. In the past, bad news for Trump had necessarily felt like good news for me, but I was getting used to my vindictive hopes being disappointed. I kept checking the news every 20 minutes anyway. It was comically like real addiction: My brain had adapted to high doses of news, and I needed more and more news just to feel something. But quantity wasn’t the problem. I wanted to know what it meant. There were the usual let’s-be-clear, make-no-mistake takes in abundance, the reviews of the news, but I didn’t trust them. They contradicted each other; they rang false. I trusted only the dry news, the fact-checked reportage without overtly apparent bias, that didn’t tell me how to feel, that I couldn’t even really understand. The narrative-making meta-media had betrayed me.

“When the first American newspaper, Benjamin Harris’ Publick Occurences Both Forreign and Domestick, appeared in Boston on September 25, 1690, it promised to furnish news regularly once a month.” This rather hilarious fact is from Daniel Boorstin’s The Image, published in 1962. Boorstin goes on to explain how inventions like photography, the phonograph, radio, and motion pictures, proliferating rapidly between the late 1800s and early 1900s, gave “new meaning” to “verisimilitude,” increasing demand for images and recordings from life. Before long we had “round-the-clock media”:

The news gap became so narrow that in order to have additional “news” for each new edition or each new broadcast it was necessary to plan in advance the stages by which any available news would be unveiled. After the weekly and the daily came the “extras” and the numerous regular editions. The Philadelphia Evening Bulletin soon had seven editions a day. No rest for the newsman. With more space to fill, he had to fill it ever more quickly. In order to justify the numerous editions, it was increasingly necessary that the news constantly change or at least seem to change.

The news, in this model, is not something reported (retold after the fact) but something created (planned out before the fact).

According to Boorstin, it became “financially necessary” for the media, after building this machine, to keep it running. The costs of printing and broadcasting were high; constant content kept the money flowing back in. They accomplished this by creating “pseudo-events,” or seemingly newsworthy, reportable happenings to fill pages and airtime. He gives as an example a televised parade to celebrate the return of General Douglas MacArthur from Korea in 1951. The event was engineered to look good on TV, with “cameras carefully focused on ‘significant’ happenings — that is, those which emphasized the drama of the occasion.” They recorded “wild cheering and enthusiastic crowds” — but this cheering was more a response to the cameras, the idea of being on TV, than it was to MacArthur. (It’s like that scene in Grease when the kids at the dance, after being told to act natural and avoid the camera, all wave and blow kisses at it.) Anyone who wasn’t near a camera felt bored and disappointed. The result was that people who attended the live parade had inverted FOMO: “We should have stayed at home and watched it on TV.”

A political debate is another good example of a pseudo-event. In a previous life (a previous decade), I rarely watched the news, but I married a man who follows politics like sports — watching news clips like replays, rooting for his team. In 2016, I too got sucked into watching every single debate going back to the primaries. There were nights when I wasn’t in the mood, but if I tried to leave the room, I’d still hear it going on across the apartment, which distracted me from reading, and Twitter offered no alternative distraction. So I’d join in the “fun” — I’d watch with Twitter open. Debates, like the news, give us something to tweet about. It’s fodder for jokes; it’s material.

It’s strange how our memories get so rooted in place. When I was a kid, I understood the assassination of JFK to be the single moment of my parents’ lives that was so significant they were supposed to remember where they were when it happened. But I have so many moments like that, just from the past year, often in the same few hundred square feet: I was on the couch during the debates. I was on the couch when we watched the election results. (I had been at a friend’s house, a party of sorts, until I couldn’t stand it and came home.) I was at my desk the next morning, on Valium and crying, when I saw tweets about Hillary’s concession speech. (I could not stand to watch it.) I was at my desk during Obama’s last press conference. I was in the armchair when the dossier came out. At my desk for Indictment Day.

My memories of these comparatively trivial moments, in the prickliness of their detail, have the quality of memories of large-scale disaster. I think about them the way I think about 9/11 or the Challenger explosion, both of which I experienced from afar, on TV. Horrifying, but removed — not traumatic in the way that a car crash is traumatic, or that 9/11 would have been if I had lived in New York at the time. What nags me about these memories, these unhappy memories, is that I think that I think of them fondly.

Let me try to explain. For years, I’ve believed there are two kinds of happiness. On the one hand there’s the happiness of stability: a good job, a loving family; dependable American-dream prosperity. On the other, there’s the happiness of intense experience: dizzying highs and crushing lows in quick succession. My theory is that when we’re young, we prefer the second kind of happiness; we take a lot of risks because the lows improve the highs. As we get older, as the pressures of conformity increase and the lows take their toll, we strive for the first kind of happiness. But we continue to prefer our painful memories — stable life may be happier, but unstable life is more interesting. It’s almost as though being happy day to day doesn’t make us happy overall.

Believing this scares me, as much as the news scares me. I worry that, despite the wages of stress on my body — my blood pressure is higher, my gums are receding — I’ll look back on this whole awful year with nostalgia. Nostalgia, etymologically, means “homesickness” or “return-home pain” — again, there’s the significance of place. But I also find that the “pain” part of the word (algos, as in fibromyalgia), the longing part, bleeds over into the “return home” part — I’m not just nostalgic for my past, I’m nostalgic for my pain. My own past suffering can be a great source of comfort. Why is that? Because it’s over? Or because it’s a badge of honor?

If we treat the news like sports, like a hobby, a dramatic “season” is more fun, even when some of that fun feels like pain. The disappointment of the losses makes the glory of the wins that much better. When I think of “fun” news days like Indictment Day, which couldn’t have occurred without the horror of Election Day, it’s almost like there’s another me, a spectator to the drama.

My media tastes have gotten weird this year, weird for me. There are things I can’t stomach anymore — I never listen to NPR in the car now. I’ve replaced it with top 40 stations; vacuity seems more tolerable than pandering. My “guilty pleasures” are different. I watch a lot of horror movies, really wanting to be terrified. Artificial horror displaces actual horror, for a couple of hours at least, though nothing is ever scary enough. I’ve started reading true crime: all the lurid reality porn of the news, but with pain-relieving distance. With true crime we already know how it ends.

I picked up a copy of In Cold Blood, which I’d never read before, when I saw it on my library’s rack of recently returned books. (I love the randomness of this shelf; it’s like anti-curation, like Oulipo.) It was so good I didn’t want to read it; I’d read ten or twenty pages and then put it down and look for something worse to read instead. I either wanted to save it for my future self or didn’t believe I deserved it. I mentioned this on Twitter and several people, perhaps thinking it was journalistic ethics I was interested in rather than crime, recommended The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm, quoting its famous first sentence: “Every journalist who is not too stupid or too full of himself to notice what is going on knows that what he does is morally indefensible.” My interest was piqued. I was feeling like the media had fucked up — it fucked up in its coverage of the election and the candidates, and in so doing had fucked up history for all time and my life personally. Vindictively, maybe, I thought a screed against the morals of journalists sounded pretty good. So I read that next.

The Journalist and the Murderer is about Jeffrey MacDonald, convicted in 1979 of killing his pregnant wife and two daughters nine years earlier, and Joe McGinniss, who wrote a best-selling book about MacDonald called Fatal Vision in 1983. MacDonald, a Green Beret, was originally cleared of guilt by a military hearing but arrested years later. He has always maintained his innocence — he claims to this day that a group of four hippies broke into the house and attacked them, Manson Family–style, chanting “Acid is groovy” and “Kill the pigs,” wounding him but leaving him alive.

MacDonald contracted McGinniss (who had become famous for his first book, The Selling of the President 1968, about the Nixon campaign) to tell his story and clear his name. McGinniss was added to MacDonald’s defense team and given full access; the “journalist” and the “murderer” became friends. However, through the course of the trial, McGinniss came to believe that MacDonald was guilty. They continued corresponding after MacDonald went to prison, but McGinniss refused to show him the manuscript before it was published — at which point MacDonald was shocked to discover his friend had written a portrait of a killer. He sued McGinniss for breach of contract.

Malcolm takes this second case, the civil suit, as occasion to meditate on the relationship between author and subject. Why, we may wonder, did MacDonald trust McGinniss to be his advocate, when McGinniss had pulled an inside-job switcheroo once before? Nixon’s team had invited McGinniss along for the ride, and then he exposed them. Don’t journalists always have an agenda, and isn’t their loyalty to the agenda first? Shouldn’t we treat them like vampires — never invite them inside?

But “something seems to happen to people when they meet a journalist,” Malcolm observes, “and what happens is exactly the opposite of what one would expect”: “One would think that extreme wariness and caution would be the order of the day, but in fact childish trust and impetuosity are far more common.” Even more dangerous, perhaps, the journalistic subject “lives in fear of being found uninteresting, and many of the strange things that subjects say to writers — things of almost suicidal rashness — they say out of their desperate need to keep the writer’s attention riveted.” This makes me think of Twitter, which allows us to converse directly with journalists. Though most of us won’t get the chance to play the subject, following a journalist creates a kind of false intimacy. It encourages that same blind trust, which the journalist is then poised to exploit. Like the relationship between journalist and subject, the relationship between newsmaker and news consumer is mutually parasitic.

Malcolm takes a strong dislike to McGinniss, who does not come out looking well in the trial. Though he never promised to let MacDonald dictate the story of the book, his letters to MacDonald are painfully misleading:

There could not be a worse nightmare than the one you are living through now — but it is only a phase. Total strangers can recognize within five minutes that you did not receive a fair trial … It’s a hell of a thing — spend the summer making a new friend and then the bastards come along and lock him up. But not for long, Jeffrey — not for long.

He continues this way for years, discouraging MacDonald from communicating with other writers who show interest in covering the case, plying him for more background. MacDonald records and sends him a series of tapes, essentially narrating his life story. Malcolm gets copies of these too (she finds them banal), plus heaps of other evidence related to the murder — MacDonald seems to trust her as well, though at this point — in prison on three consecutive life sentences — I suppose he has less to lose. She opts not, however, to review all this material; she feels “oppressed” by this “mountain of documents”:

I have read little of the material he sent — trial transcripts, motions, declarations, affidavits, reports. A document arrives, I glance at it, see words like “bloody syringe,” “blue threads,” “left chest puncture,” “unidentified fingerprints,” “Kimberly’s urine,” and add it to the pile. I know I cannot learn anything about MacDonald’s guilt or innocence from this material. It is like looking for proof or disproof of God in a flower — it all depends on how you read the evidence.

The facts, she suggests, can be made to mean one thing, or its exact opposite. Whether it’s piles of evidence or piles of news, you read it through the lens of whatever conclusion you’ve already come to, and once you’ve come to a conclusion, it’s extremely uncomfortable to change your mind.

In his 2012 book A Wilderness of Error, documentary filmmaker Errol Morris objects to Malcolm’s position: “It comes down to an issue of truth … And yes, there is such a thing. There is a fact of the matter of whether you killed your family or you didn’t. It’s not just somehow thinking makes it so.” This is taken from a transcript of an interview between Morris and MacDonald. Morris has taken MacDonald’s side: The book argues that MacDonald is, if not innocent, at least not guilty. “There’s a difference,” Morris says, meaning that guilty, in the eyes of the law, means “beyond a reasonable doubt.” If there’s reasonable doubt, then you’re not guilty even if you actually did it. Real life is not like fiction, he writes, not like The Count of Monte Cristo, where “all the pieces can be engineered to fit perfectly together.” “Reality is different. We have to discover what is out there — what is real and what is merely a product of our imagination.”

Malcolm’s book is remarkably self-aware; she cops to the same pitfalls of journalism that she criticizes. In writing the book, she willingly steps into that “morally indefensible” author-subject relation. She notes the parallels between her own correspondence with MacDonald and McGinniss’s: “I was no less enamored of the sound of my voice than McGinniss had been of his.” But Morris seems unaware of the ways that he manipulates the evidence to serve his own ends. Having succeeded once before, with the film The Thin Blue Line, in getting a man out of prison and off death row (he’d been wrongly accused and convicted in Texas of killing a cop), Morris is out to play hero again, to play Henry Fonda’s role in Twelve Angry Men. A Wilderness of Error, at 500-plus pages that include diagrams and other images of court-admitted evidence, has a veneer of comprehensiveness, of objectivity. But he tends to skim over or elide any evidence that would implicate MacDonald, interfering with his narrative of wrongful conviction.

For example, Fatal Vision recounts a story McGinniss heard from a friend and former lover of MacDonald’s (he had encouraged McGinniss to speak to her). She says that MacDonald once dangled her 10-year-old son over the edge of a dock, “threatening to drop him head first into the water,” and then later exploded in anger toward him on a boat trip and threatened to “crush his skull.” McGinniss then calls the son, in college now, who says he remembers the incident “with real terror to this day” and reports that MacDonald actually threw him off the side of the boat. Morris doesn’t question the relevance of this anecdote; he just doesn’t mention it.

Throughout his account, Morris only gives secondary evidence like psychiatric assessments and polygraph tests credence when they support his own theory, and he fails to address the inconsistencies in MacDonald’s story. Morris’s journalistic agenda is clear. Nevertheless, he does succeed in making a case for the trial as a miscarriage of justice. It’s clear that the investigators mishandled evidence and failed to properly secure the crime scene. This, along with the existence of at least one other suspect without an alibi, introduces room for reasonable doubt. However, all MacDonald’s appeals have been denied, and by maintaining his innocence, he has relinquished the possibility of parole.

I have not read Fatal Vision, which by virtue of coming first has become the official story on the MacDonald murders. I have not reviewed the mountain of evidence, like Morris or his research assistant, whom he thanks for becoming an encyclopedic resource on the case. But you can probably tell that I lean toward believing MacDonald is guilty. I am not entirely sure why. I knew nothing about the case before reading The Journalist and the Murderer, and while Malcolm withholds judgment on the matter, she gives the impression of presuming MacDonald’s innocence if only to spite the hated McGinniss. I like to think I came to Morris’s book with an open mind, but within a few pages, I could see the seams of his rhetoric. His aims may be noble, but his tactics are shady. I began to distrust him, and then almost as a matter of course, I found myself siding against MacDonald, rooting against him. It gave me a reason to finish the book: the search for holes in Morris’s argument. I could not read it in the spirit of negative capability — Keats’s phrase for “when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason” — any more than Morris could write the book in that spirit.

Was there something sick about reading the book in this way, needing to discredit it? I was reminded of those disheartening studies on confirmation bias, where challenges to a person’s prior beliefs only tend to strengthen those beliefs. If Morris was rejecting the “facts” that didn’t jibe with his agenda, so was I. I had a similar feeling several weeks ago, when Donna Brazile’s book came out and her claim that Hillary Clinton had “rigged” the Democratic primary made the rounds. I did not even read these stories; my immediate reaction was refusal, refusal to accept another story in the media of Hillary’s corruption. Not long afterward, there was a round of corrections; Brazile had misread a memo about the general election, believing it applied to the primary. But Elizabeth Warren was already on record lending support to Brazile’s claim, and then we got corrections of the corrections — here’s why the primary really was rigged, if you think about it. The meta-corrections are more about the corruption of party politics and campaign money in general, but Hillary’s name in particular is still attached; the first version of the story has a tendency to stick.

In the era of fake news — a natural extension of the era of news proper — we don’t just look to the media for facts, we look to it for narratives. And with plenty of news to choose from (we can’t read it all), we naturally gravitate toward the news and news sources that align with our existing worldview, our ongoing narrative. Journalists must know this; they must, consciously or not, play to our desires by oversimplifying stories — ignoring facts that compromise the greater narrative — or only pursuing stories that they perceive to fit an existing and popular narrative in the first place. This is how it becomes parasitic: we need the drugs and they need us to buy them.

Reporters jump on a story that fits the “Hillary bad” narrative because it makes people emotional; it’s guaranteed to spread on social media. True or not, people will read and share that story because they want it to be true. As Kevin Young writes in Bunk, speaking of the “Great Moon Hoax” of 1835, when the Sun published a series of articles claiming that the (real) astronomer Sir John Herschel had observed bat-like humanoids on the moon, “The story seemed too good, if not to be true then not to be told.” The Sun was penny-press trash, but does the appeal of a surefire hit make even legitimate outlets cut corners on fact-checking? It certainly seems to — they’re ad-supported, not sponsored by patrons as newspapers once were. Traffic, not just truth, keeps newspapers alive.

When we talk about the ethics of journalism, we’re usually talking about the ethics of producing it. But what about the ethics of consuming the news? We can’t put all the blame on media for creating these narratives, these pseudo-events. As Boorstin writes:

This world of ambiguity … is not created by demagogues or crooks, by conspiracy or evil purpose. The efficient mass production of pseudo-events — in all kinds of packages, in black and white, in technicolor, in words, and in a thousand other forms — is the work of the whole machinery of our society. It is the daily product of men of good will.

In a piece called “Information, Technology, and the Virtues of Ignorance,” originally published in Daedalus in 1986, philosophy Daniel C. Dennett questions whether information technology is “poised to ruin our lives” (the emphases, here and below, are Dennett’s). Dennett says that people all want to lead “good lives” in two senses: “We want to lead lives that are interesting, exciting, fulfilling, and happy, and we want to lead lives that are morally good.” Increasingly, however, access to information will make this difficult, if not impossible — we will have to choose between happiness and morality. Our ancestors were

capable of living lives of virtue … a virtue that depended on unavoidable ignorance. Modern technology has robbed us of the sorts of virtue that depend on such ignorance, for ignorance is all too avoidable today. Information technology has multiplied our opportunities to know, and our traditional ethical doctrines overwhelm us by turning these opportunities into newfound obligations to know.

Thirty years later, this theory, or prophecy, feels grimly true. I do not know how to live an ethical life, when I consider the implications of almost every aspect of my existence — on the rest of the world, on future generations. I know what it means that I eat meat whenever I want, that I work in advertising, that I fly many times per year, that I’m psychologically dependent on a device that was built under sweatshop conditions. When it breaks, or just gets slow and inconvenient, I’ll buy another. I know because I read the news, and I keep doing it all anyway.

This essay is part of a collection of essays on the theme of TOO MUCH NEWS. Also from this week, Nathan Jurgenson on the false pieties of presidential press coverage, and Navneet Alang on too much affect. 

The most important moment in the coverage of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign was the first: when his political career was greeted with laughter. The news programs didn’t just underestimate his chances of winning but giggled at the very idea of his running. Everything that Trump tapped into that made him popular enough to win — i.e., making clearly stated and explicitly bigoted political promises — was met with smiles and jokes from centrist TV-panel pundits and podcast analysts. For those whose job it was to describe it, this country’s political reality was downright laughable.

Since then, each playful mention of our world as “the dark timeline” or “the upside-down” tries to make this persistent cluelessness cute. Just as when Trumpism emerged, it remains more comforting to regard reality as fiction than to come to terms with it as fact. This approach is complimented by an impulse to treat various political incidents as “too on the nose,” or as something out of Veep or The Onion — to see them as uncannily strange and self-evident at the same time. Often, some outrage committed by Trump or a member of his administration is trumpeted with the warning “This is not normal.” But while Trump doesn’t play along with rhetorical and procedural norms, his attention stoking and never-ending dishonesty are ordinary for his office. So deep is the press’s bias toward assuming “real” politics is a matter of complicated wonkish analysis and expert-vetted policy proposals that it continues to miss how normal politics-as-entertainment is and how normal bigotry is in the American political process.

Jay Rosen has critiqued the press’s tendency to treat Trump’s demagoguery as a cogent set of coherent aims beyond maintaining his notoriety, as if Trump had “policies.” Rosen argues the press has a vested interest in periodically anointing Trump’s sudden “presidential” stature. This is an apt critique, but it should alert us to concerns about “normalizing” not just Trump but also a certain idea of the presidency itself as something that, before Trump, was centrally about competency, that was a role undertaken in good faith. Decrying Trumpism as a unique force warping American politics plays into the myth that politicians are usually smart and diligent technocrats who entered public service because they care about the tedious workings of legislation and government bureaucracy. Instead, presidential political coverage is an aggrandizing discourse of objectively dumb speeches, pretend debates, and breathless hype — essentially fan fiction — that elevates a ridiculous authority figure chosen by a massive reality show.

Analyses, like this year-end take from Peter Baker in the New York Times, tend to describe Trump as trading the loftiness of the office for something closer to tabloid rule. But rarely do they detail the press’s role in maintaining that false majesty of the presidency and how that ideal itself is integral to selling presidential politics as reality TV. The former props the stakes and payoff for the latter, but the latter also destabilizes the former, driving the cycle. The notion that the president is or should be a moral authority was always fictitious and unhelpful to begin with.

On the political right in the U.S., there’s a tendency toward what Stephen Colbert called “truthiness”: ignoring facts in the name of some larger “truth.” For example, for many of Trump’s earliest supporters, the fact of Barack Obama’s birthplace mattered less than the racist “truth” of white superiority, which presumed his inherent unfitness for office. Therefore anything that disqualified Obama may as well have been true, and thus may as well be believed and asserted. If it seems like it should be true, then you can act as though it is.

On Election night in 2016 (as I pointed out then), a liberal counterpart to truthiness became clear: “factiness.” Factiness is the inverse of truthiness; it’s the taste for the aesthetic of “facts” — the elaborate and formal presentation of data — at the expense of missing larger truths. Factiness is at work in data visualizations and in the pretense of outcome predictions worked out to the tenth of a percentage point. It’s evident in the acceptance of pseudoscientific explanations of human behavior drawing on pop neuroscience and evolutionary psychology, and in the epistemic concessions made to the tech world because their data is so “big.” Factiness is obsessing over the assembly of fact after fact while refusing to assess the basic truth of our political reality. With enough facts on your side, Trump was just funny. It was often said during the campaign that “journalists didn’t take Trump seriously while his supporters didn’t take him literally.” Another way of putting that: the journalists were beholden to factiness and Trump‘s supporters to truthiness.

The obsession with facts and detail can leave the political press overly satisfied and complacent, partly because the drip-drop stream of new data points can provide the feeling of being newly informed. As Maya Binyam wrote in the New Inquiry, “to believe that the dysfunction of the Trump administration reveals a violence altogether new requires a willful and insistent abandonment of reality.” What is “abnormal” about Trump is not his ignorance, bigotry, or narcissism — that’s all too normal among American political leaders — but how his habitus makes these qualities obvious and explicit, leveraging them to his advantage with his supporters. This is in keeping with the president’s role to serve as a partisan attention merchant — a function that is hardly new. The presidency has long been a media spectacle, and in this respect Trump is hardly a failed president but highly successful at the long-established fundamental workings of the office.

To understand Trump’s tenure, we must better describe how his conduct aligns with conventional “normal” presidencies and how they have been covered. Criticizing Trump in order to prop up a fantasy of presidential dignity fundamentally misunderstands American politics. David Banks noted here last year that liberal pundits are using Trump’s presidency to normalize the rest of electoral politics, making it appear as less performative and irrelevant than it really is: “The liberal commentariat constantly refer to ‘alternate realities’ and departures from custom, implicitly casting a nostalgic glow over the political program that centrist Democrats wielded the last two times they held the presidency.” The fiction being sold is that the centrism of the “reality-based community” is real politics; Trumpism is the violation that proves it so.

When Trump began his campaign, many commentators claimed that he was “trolling” the race with his outlandish interrupting of the ordinary functioning of the political system. But Trump was never a troll — he wasn’t trying to hack our political system or expose the truth about it to subvert and change it — he was playing by the rules of the big political reality show as it was designed. Despite the frequent criticism he lobbed at journalists, he wasn’t really running against the press but with them. Consider the audio recording of Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women: This was completely on brand for Trump, but some opportunistic Republicans pretended to be just shocked by his comments so they could jump ship from an otherwise struggling campaign. No adult learned anything new about Trump from the tape. Meanwhile, the editor in chief of Buzzfeed penned a victory lap for journalism, “We Told You So: The MSM, vindicated,” arguing that mainstream journalists uncovered facts and changed people’s minds and took a liar down. This was impossibly naïve: It legitimated dishonest Republican opportunism and was one more attempt to bolster the fiction that outside Trumpland is the truth.

After election night, we failed to put the feelings of shock and confusion to good use. The degree of disconnect between political reality and how journalists and pundits describe it was exposed, yet little has changed. We didn’t imagine different ways of doing things. The same mainstream outlets and often the same misleading commentators still have the job of describing the political world. It’s not enough to therefore conclude that, in the business of political journalism, competency simply doesn’t matter. The more plausible assumption is that political news coverage didn’t fail at its supposed job of informing voters so they could perform their civic duty, but that it succeeded at something else.

The “autopsies” of 2016 election coverage didn’t resonate or convince because, ultimately, a job was done well; it’s just not the job that the “fourth estate” often pretends it’s doing. From a business perspective, the Trump election was a resounding success: There is more news to cover, always bigger, with higher ratings, and a president who abides by such ratings demands. At last the news business is no longer beholden to electoral news cycles: Trump’s election has pulled off the trick of making the campaign perpetual. An election that never ends.

Social commentators claim that epistemic authorities like journalists, editors, scientists, and academics have been stripped of their legitimacy by a so-called post-truth populist wave. But equally true is that these authorities forfeited legitimacy and trust just as much as it was taken. For as long as I’ve been alive, cable news has worked around the clock to degrade the idea of a common fact and assert a continuous narrative of a scary, chaotic, unknowable world to which we can react only with more and more histrionic reporting. The press shapes presidential politics into sports-like drama, with countdown clocks, constant polling statistics, scored to melodramatic visuals and music, all centered on the logic of team loyalties. It was fitting that Trump responded to CNN on Twitter with a professional wrestling gif: Like politics, pro wrestling is a perfect intersection of reality television and sports.

Some saw the wrestling tweet as indicative of Trump’s general “attack” on the press, but Trump joined a game that CNN and others created and profit from. Trump’s cynical attention grabbing is hardly antithetical to CNN’s demonstrated values or actions. Requiring no “genius” at all, Trump conforms to the way politics is covered: as a merciless sport for audiences with mutually exclusive rooting interests. Trump’s “war” with the press is a similar staged struggle: a mutually beneficial rivalry performed for ratings. Last June, CNN and others billed former FBI director James Comey’s Senate testimony as “Washington’s Super Bowl” — that is, as an awesome opportunity to advertise against compelling live content. Newsrooms threw parties.

Trump’s chaos, mass shootings, natural disasters produce valuable attention. “Engagement.” The whole point of news is for there to be something new, pushed right to your home screen. Twitter, an app turned news show about Trump, is functioning as it was designed to do when something new and big is happening, offering a means to participate in what everyone’s talking about. The news spinning ever faster is the logic of attention working itself out efficiently and profitably. It is the underlying logic that shapes the behavior of both politicians and how they are covered. Indeed, the quicker cadence of the news has been one of its defining features for as long as we’ve had mass media, from the first ticker in Times Square to hourly radio updates to 24-hour cable TV networks. The increase in pace isn’t new but is itself still newsworthy, an opportunity to reflect on current editorial decisions being made by publishers and platforms to maximize information instead of minimize being misinformed.

If you consumed and enjoyed most mainstream political coverage during the campaign, you likely woke up the day after the election confused by the reality of the world. All the while, however, that factiness-oriented coverage was likely soothing. And after the election it probably became more so, its palliative effects stronger than ever. After hardly missing a beat, people tuned right back in to what was misleading in the first place.

This is the clearest indicator that the role of the news is not to be informative but to use information as a means to comfort. If political coverage produces anxiety, it also sells a kind of relief, the antidote to its own poison. As Trump began to dominate every news cycle, you could at the same time find an increasing amount of data-science statistical models, insider punditry, and “wonk” podcasts. There, you could take in a stream of numbers and facts and hyper-informed opinions that stood in for a desired “normal” reality that didn’t exist outside those media objects. Instead of plainly and accurately describing our political reality as a violent and dishonest system that has little bearing to any objective truth outside of consolidating wealth and power, we can instead be “engaged” by the comforting narrative that the “good” politicians are in good faith, norms are productive and hold sway, and Trump was merely funny and, now, always about to be impeached.

The logic of consuming more news — getting more information and facts, more numbers, more precise probabilities — is a matter of entertainment, a chance to vicariously feel in the know and to align one’s identity with that feeling. The political “wonks” and “nerds” during the campaign could make you feel super-informed but that feeling is distinct from being informed. The taste for more news becomes its own end.

There is so much happening right now that really matters as I type this (and again as I edit it) that it feels wrong to not pay attention. It feels even worse knowing it won’t still be discussed in a month. Or a week. With more news, Constant News, the value of any individual piece of news shrinks. The disjunction between what matters today and what we’ll care about tomorrow creates a tension; it makes me doubt whether I should continue to watch. A central product of news coverage as it is generated today is the process of seeing information, any information, revealed, debated, and made irrelevant in time for a new topic to come along. Coverage that cares so deeply today and has moved on tomorrow posits a tragic contradiction: that everything matters profoundly but nothing matters at all.

“Breaking news” isn’t so much about the news itself but a way of being in the world. Once the illusion of news “mattering” is dispelled, there is no motive left but entertainment: I should enjoy the content stream as a stream, and let it carry me along.

 This essay is part of a collection of essays on the theme of TOO MUCH NEWS. Also from this week, Elisa Gabbert on consuming news as a narrative, and Navneet Alang on too much affect. 

News cycles, before people discussed them as “news cycles,” used to have an explicit rhythm, dictated by how often news-media products could be produced and distributed. There was a daily newspaper and perhaps some late editions, news radio’s traffic and transit churn, and the set schedule of TV news broadcasts. Occasionally, regular programming would be interrupted with “breaking news,” as when the soap operas were pre-empted to announce that Reagan had been shot, or when O.J. Simpson’s Bronco flight bumped the NBA finals into a small split screen.

But ordinarily there was only so much news that could fit. This limitation wasn’t a drawback but what made a definition of newsworthiness possible: If something made the cut, based on the editorial judgment of a small set of media professionals, it became news. If it didn’t, it was just another more or less quirky aspect of the vast and mostly unremarkable tapestry of everyday life.

This left a lot off the table for media companies. But what if news and everyday life could be collapsed? What if everyday life could consist of continual interaction with media? News had always been manufactured to fit and support the existing spaces for it, as Daniel Boorstin had argued in The Image in 1962, so why not use technology to expand the space as much as possible, create or fulfill the desire for ever more engaging incident?

Then came the perpetual news crawl, in the wake of the 2000 election, which returned on 9/11 and never went away. We started to talk explicitly about news cycles when their seemingly inherent logic began to break down, when news was produced on a continual 24-hour basis and news producers became not a small set of editors and journalists and TV producers but anyone who could garner sufficient attention amid the profusion of media distribution tools the internet afforded. As more and more information was being disseminated, we wanted news cycles to really exist; we talked about “information overload” as if the limited range of news the media once could supply was the naturally appropriate amount.

“Information overload” made sense as a frame when we still had an intuitive sense of how big a newspaper should be, or how many stories fit into an hour. None of that is relevant anymore. “News cycles” are nostalgia fodder. Now we have “news feeds” that populate with stories just as fast as we can scroll. The limited spaces in which a shared sense of the news was constructed have become infinite personalized expanses. Our information problem has become “too much news” and “never enough news” at the same time.

We are just coming to terms with how this affects the political function of the press, which in a democracy, at least theoretically, is supposed to supply a common set of minimally biased facts to make collective decision-making possible. Racism, sexism, and capitalism have always distorted the “reality” represented in the American media, but for better or worse, this “reality” could once be understood as a singular, tangible thing. Now that sense of a shared reality has been widely destroyed, and the press has shifted to a function that seems to better harmonize with how media technology has changed: to provide audiences with perpetual distraction.

In the first of what will be weekly packages of themed essays at Real Life, we are examining the idea of “too much news” — the logic of accelerating news cycles to the vanishing point and saturating social space with current events commentary — and the ways in which “feeling informed” is becoming more palpably affective. Donald Trump is among the first American political figures to fully emerge from this shift. As Nathan Jurgenson writes in “Breaking News,” the first of our essays this week, Trump’s rise has been a triumph for the news business: “From a business perspective, the Trump election was a resounding success: There is more news to cover, always bigger, with higher ratings, and a president who abides by such ratings demands.” From this perspective, Trump’s alleged “war on the press” — which has more in common with pro wresting than book banning — is a victory for both sides.

Frequent press updates on Trump may appear a form of resistance but do little toward unseating him or changing his agenda. They may serve instead as a gripping, peculiarly comforting reminder of both our political powerlessness and our compensatory consumer sovereignty. We can’t do anything except choose what to read next, and through that, choose how to feel. Elisa Gabbert, in “True Crime,” revisits Janet Malcolm’s critique of journalistic duplicity and complicity in The Journalist and the Murderer and links it to our complicated relationship with news as narrative in the Trump era. Malcolm argues that attention from journalists makes their subjects become gullible and attention-thirsty; Gabbert likens that to our own exposure to journalists on Twitter: “Though most of us won’t get the chance to play the subject, following a journalist creates a kind of false intimacy. It encourages that same blind trust, which the journalist is then poised to exploit. Like the relationship between journalist and subject, the relationship between newsmaker and news consumer is mutually parasitic.”

Navneet Alang, in “Emotional Overdrive,” notes how social media have not only expanded the availability of information and our access to journalists but have also made news circulation inseparable from the circulation of personal feelings. “When news becomes a flood of not just data but affect, there is more at stake than frustration,” he writes. “Information overload”  becomes “affect overload.”

The way we consume news has become more closely bound with a sense of our demonstrable identity. We feel a need to be informed not to be responsible citizens but to stop the sense that who we think we are, and who we think our people are, is slipping away. If nothing else, the continual flow of information is there to remind us that everything is precarious, nothing enduring, and we must keep rearticulating what matters to us as often as possible if we are to hope to be believed. And so the messengers keep arriving, but the news is not good.

Featuring:

“Breaking News,” by Nathan Jurgenson

“True Crime,” by Elisa Gabbert

“Emotional Overdrive,” by Navneet Alang

Thank you for your consideration. Visit us next week for Real Life‘s next installment, CIRCADIAN MEDIA, featuring morning show-ness, mourning routines, and off-peak evangelists.

Journalists watch out - you may be unintentionally revealing sources.

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Im Dezember 2015 war ich auf einer Party in L.A. und dort bekam ich den Becher links auf diesem Bild, um daraus mein kaltes Bier zu trinken. Als ich nach Hause ging, durfte ich den Becher behalten. Und eigentlich habe ich die letzten beiden Jahre kein anderes Trinkgefäß mehr benutzt. Warum? Das ist ein ganz dünnwandiger Themobecher. Was drin ist, hält seine Temperatur unglaublich lang. Manchmal braucht man allerdings eine Flasche statt eines Bechers. Und die kam heute. Vielen Dank, Secret Santa!

Was nicht so recht auffällt auf diesem Bild ist die Vipp Placemat, die mit einem zweiten Karton ankam. Auch hier ganz herzlichen Dank. Die Sammlung schöner schwarzer Dinge wächst. Zwei habe ich schon, irgendwann sind es dann vier. Apropos zwei: es kommt (selten) vor, dass Amazon mal einen Artikel doppelt schickt, weil er nicht schnell genug von der Wunschliste verschwand. Das ist letzte Woche mit dem Raspi passiert. Aber das macht gar nichts, weil ich dann einen von beiden gegen etwas anderes tausche. Die Geste zählt so oder so!

I’ve been trying to use Blender since what feels like the dawn of time, but its notoriously opinionated user interface clearly hasn’t stuck, and every time I go back to it I find myself having to re-learn the basics.

Regardless, I go back to it every year or so.

Resources:

Notes on network rendering

The canonical way to do network rendering out-of-the box in 2.76–2.79 is to:

1. Remove objects and lighting from the default scene
2. Enable the netrender addon in User Preferences...
3. Select it from the top-level menu
4. Set mode to Master and set the master parameters in the side panel
5. Save the file as master.blend
6. Set mode to Slave and set the slave parameters in the side panel
7. Save the file as slave.blend

After copying the .blend files to the relevant machines, they should be invoked as such:

# master
blender --background master.blend --addons netrender -a -nojoystick -noaudio

# slaves
blender --background slave.blend --addons netrender -a -nojoystick -noaudio

This is, of course, ridiculous since it bakes the IP address and port of the master into the .blend file, but might be fixable by manipulating the file itself.

Caveats:

• The 2.76b version that ships with Ubuntu Xenial (16.04 LTS) armhf doesn’t include the netrender add-on for some reason. 2.79 is slated to ship with Bionic (18.04 LTS) armhf, and appears to include the add-on.

According to Mayor John Tory and his spokespeople, Toronto’s shelters may be crowded but they are not at capacity. Yet in recent evenings, during one of the coldest weather periods in recent local memory, city staff have told several people calling the shelter intake system that no beds were available.

There is ample proof, and has been for years, that Toronto’s shelters are indeed full, and that the city’s definition of shelter availability has little connection to the practical ability to access a bed. Through a calculated blend of wordplay, distraction, and a failure to provide meaningful data, Tory is misleading the public about the desperate state of emergency shelters.

Real capacity vs. stated capacity

Shelter availability impacts people on an individual and family basis. If a person or family needing a shelter calls 311 or central intake to ask for a bed, and is told a bed is not available, the system has failed to shelter that individual or family. The city’s claim that beds are available makes no practical difference to someone who calls and is denied.

In recent days, frontline workers Zoë Dodd and Gillian Kolla of the Toronto Overdose Prevention Site (Toronto OPS) have told reporters they called the city for beds and were told none were available. Kolla said she independently called staff at the city’s recenty-opened respite centre at the Better Living Centre, and was also told that no beds were available.

Veteran street outreach worker Doug Johnson has gone a step further and recorded conversations with central intake staff who denied his request for a bed. Reporter Mick Sweetman has also documented statements directly from city staff who said the system is at capacity. City officials have not denied any of these reports.

Instead, the city has repeated that the shelter system in recent days has been operating at 95% capacity, which suggests that 5% of the beds are empty. But an empty bed is only useful if the city offers it.

Our shelter system allocates beds based on age, gender, and family status—it does not, for example, offer single individuals a bed in family shelters, or send people who identify as women to sleep in men’s facilities. If there are no beds for single women on a given night, and a single woman inquires about a bed and is denied, the availability of beds in other categories is irrelevant to her situation.

Similarly, if a person in Scarborough calls central intake for a bed, but the only beds available are at a shelter in Etobicoke, the city’s claim of availability is dubious. People who rely on the the emergency shelter system rarely have the means to move easily around the city, and their path is steeper given the bitterness of winter weather we are currently experiencing.

The city also counts extra mats and cots that can be laid out on the floors of existing shelters as part of its capacity. Once the regular system is full, the city can call shelters and ask them to use the mats and cots. Since these beds are only offered during emergencies such as the city’s ongoing Extreme Cold Weather Alert, they are only provided after most people seeking a bed have already inquired. This desperate tactic is the basis for Tory’s claim of extra shelter bed capacity.

On December 28, Johnson shared audio of a call he made to central intake, during which he was told the city had no family beds available. The intake worker advised Johnson, who was calling at almost 11 p.m., that there is often no availability of beds at night. “You should call us earlier in the day cause that’s when the shelters get filled,” the worker told him, “by night-time everything’s filled.”

Johnson has continued documenting refusals from central intake in recent days. He has also published a direct acknowledgement from Steve Meaghar, the shelter manager at the Christie Refugee Welcome Centre, that the family motel system, the last resort for families when shelters are full, is also at capacity.

“[G]iven that there’s no available shelter, it’s very confusing that only 89% occupancy is being reported in motel programs,” Meaghar told Johnson in a piece published on December 31. “Either there is space and families are being denied access to it, or there’s actually no space and the numbers are misleading. Either way, it’s problematic.”

In recent days since evidence of the ongoing shelter crisis has been in the news, the city has simply stopped updating its online daily census of shelter capacity. On December 28 2017, the last day the city published its numbers, 100% of family shelter beds were full, youth bed capacity was at 99%, and beds for single women were also at 99% capacity. While city officials blame “miscommunication” for their inability to provide beds, their own willful misrepresentation of Toronto’s shelter capacity is the problem.

Beyond the city’s failure to provide some people with shelter beds, we must also remember that the overburdened system is itself unacceptable. It is worth considering what a crowded shelter looks, feels, and smells like during a Canadian winter. The safety, comfort, and health of shelter users is directly related to capacity and overcrowding.

Shelter beds vs. warming/respite centres

Another city tactic to misrepresent shelter capacity is to talk about “space” rather than beds. Most city-operated shelters are only open in the evenings and overnight—they operate on the assumption that a providing safe place to sleep is a primary goal of the system. Given the declaration of successive Extreme Cold Weather Alerts, the city has also opened several 24 hour respite centres, and has allowed people to stay at its shelter referral centre on Peter Street.

While such facilities do provide space and some relief, they do not guarantee beds as the regular system does. The very need for such facilities is the clearest sign of overcapacity. The city has promoted respite facilities in its public communications to suggest that extra space is available. But the goal of the shelter system is to provide beds, and we must again reflect on the total inadequacy of people sleeping on the floors of city-run respite centres.

On February 15 2016, 28 year old Pierre Gregoire died of a suspected fentanyl overdose after leaving a city warming centre. Hours earlier Gregoire, a member of the Innu Nation in Labrador, had been eating at St. Felix drop-in centre. According to media reports, Gregoire left St. Felix after asking to sleep on the floor and being told there wasn’t enough space to do so. CityNews reported that St. Felix was already 10 people over its capacity when Gregoire arrived.

It is not a coincidence that overdose prevention workers in Moss Park, who have used their trailer as a makeshift warming facility in recent nights, are among the loudest voices condeming the lack of shelter access. Such workers are being forced to provide inadequate alternatives to shelter in light of the city’s failures. Toronto’s well-publicized opioid crisis is directly related to the city’s overwhelmed shelter system.

Shelter at the Better Living Centre (BLC) at Exhibition Place

After nearly two weeks of consecutive nights with temperatures below the freezing mark, the city announced on December 21 that it would convert part of the Better Living Centre at Exhibition Place into a 24-hour shelter and respite facility. The city promised 20 beds immediately, with a plan to increase capacity to 100 beds in mid-January. Only six days later on December 27, BLC worker Kelly Foss told CBC that the new shelter would soon reach its capacity due to increased demand from the cold weather.

Foss also said the BLC had increased its capacity to accommodate 50 people with beds the previous evening. After more complaints on December 28 about lack of access, City councillor Joe Mihevc said that BLC now accommodated 100 beds, and that only 50 had been used that previous evening.

On December 30, Toronto OPS staffer Gillian Kolla told media she called shelter intake to request for beds for several clients, and that staff told her none were available. Kolla said she also called BLC directly and was told the facility was full. According to Kolla, city staff on the phone did not refer her to BLC.

Given that Kolla’s request for beds happened at night during freezing temperatures, it is extremely likely that the city had already added all extra mats and cots into the system. Any beds added after Kolla’s call were irrelevant to the clients she was serving—the failure to offer beds to people at Toronto OPS when they inquired is the issue, not the final bed count. Circumstances like these highlight the emptiness of the city’s claims of excess shelter capacity.

In a climate where shelter demand can absorb 100 extra spaces so quickly, the city’s failure to immediately add more capacity is devastating. In previous years Toronto has made use of military armouries at Moss Park and Fort York to shelter a combined 300 people. Mayor Tory has repeatedly rejected the use of the armouries for the current winter season.

The politics of increasing shelter space

In 2013, then-mayor Rob Ford was indignant about public demands to increase shelter capacity. Ford was blunt about his refusal to open more spaces—he considered it wasteful spending. At a press conference during a cold spell that March, Ford proclaimed that “we don’t need more spaces, we have over 100 empty beds a night. We have to be efficient. You wanna open up 500 empty beds? That’s just a waste of taxpayers’ money.”

In this latest phase of the same shelter crisis, Tory is also reluctant to do more and, although he doesn’t cite money as his major obstacle, the current mayor is employing the same tactics Ford did to distract the public. Just as Ford attempted to discredit the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty for its shelter advocacy, Tory has also named OCAP and singled out lifelong advocates like Cathy Crowe in his refusals to open the armouries.

“I just wonder why it is that the view of OCAP and Cathy Crowe and some of these people are to be taken somehow as gospel,” Tory told CBC’s Matt Galloway on the Metro Morning radio program in December.

In early December, Tory and 24 councillors voted against and defeated a plan to open the armouries, choosing instead the respite centres and the Better Living Centre, which have quickly proven to be insufficient. Tory’s biggest concerns with using the armouries include the need to coordinate with military officials onsite, as well as what he calls “security arrangements” between military personnel and the homeless.

As for the money, Tory said in the Metro Morning interview that “it’s not the major consideration but there’s a cost consideration.” The last time the federal Department of National Defence allowed the city to use the armouries, it charged $4,200 a day.

Toronto’s Extreme Cold Weather Alert continues—last night’s low temperature was -16°C. Tonight’s expected low is -18°C. If Toronto does not have the money, staffing, or coordinating capacity to increase shelter access, now is the time to say so and to ask for help. Mayor Tory’s current stance is not only endangering the lives of those who can’t access shelter, it is endangering and diminishing the lives of those forced to stay in the dangerously overcrowded system.

Douglas Todd a seasoned writer for the Vancouver Sun calls it directly: if you want to see what is happening in the Vancouver housing market, just take a look at what is happening in China, Australia and New Zealand.  As Douglas Todd observes: “A clutch of real-estate industry and government officials in Canada still want the public to believe foreign capital and immigration policy have little to do with the sky-high housing markets in Vancouver and Toronto. But the evidence is pushing their vested voices to the fringe of the affordability debate. Profits made in China and East Asia, then invested in Canadian real estate, have been responsible for a significant portion of exorbitant housing costs in Canada’s big cities. Yet Australia and New Zealand are doing much more than Canada to face the same challenge. They’re openly reining in the offshore demand that is contributing to housing havoc for locals, many of whom are being forced to leave their cities.”

Douglas Todd then backs this argument with evidence, citing University of British Columbia’s David Ley  and Simon Fraser University’s  Qiyan Wu who observe that as 13 billion dollars has been spent by Chinese investors in Vancouver in one year, this foreign investing is now a “fundamental” in the local real estate market.  Federal policies tightening cash flow in China may be why housing at the top-level of the market has seen prices drop by as much as 20 per cent. Meanwhile condo units have been soaring in value, which may be because of  “smaller buyers get in on the tail-end of a run initially created by high-end investors” typical of a boom-bust cycle.

Increasing supply and adding more density will not work to make housing more affordable according to Douglas Todd’s evidence. “Many Chinese use foreign real-estate purchases as a means to safeguard a portion of their assets,” said a senior immigration manager in China, as reported in the December edition of the newsletter, Lexbase.“It is clear many heads of family have purchased expensive homes in Canada and installed their families there while they continue to work in China.”

While there has been a release of information from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) suggesting that 20 per cent of new condo housing is being bought by foreign owners, that data does not look at purchases done by “Canadian real estate through proxies, such as spouses, children, trusts or companies, all of which, along with the tactic of flipping pre-sale purchases first made in East Asia, can shield the identities of real owners. Nor does the CMHC report capture the purchases of well-off immigrants, many of who move their families to Canada and buy their homes with overseas wealth (which is normally not taxed in Canada), a trend outlined in a groundbreaking December study by UBC geographer Daniel Hiebert.”

Identifying that the federal government has not looked at the issues of offshore capital and migration as factors in affordability, Australia and New Zealand are initiating ways to stem foreign nationals buying into their housing markets. The New Zealand government is banning the selling of any housing to foreigners.  What can the Provincial and Federal governments do to ensure that workers in Vancouver who make a fraction of the amount required to own a housing unit here can live here? How can we make housing less of a commodity and more of a necessity for the health of a city? As Douglas Todd surmises “No doubt the B.C. government has other ideas up its sleeve. Whatever the government does in February, however, it’s almost guaranteed 2018 will be another tumultuous year for beleaguered Metro residents, especially the hundreds of thousands who still can’t yet afford to rent or buy a decent place to live.”

Happy New Year! 2017 was a busy and eventful year – both professionally and personally. In many ways, 2017 was the most challenging and best year to date. I'm excited about 2018 and optimistic about what it has in store.

I wanted to thank you all for reading my blog in 2017. Entering 2018, I plan on setting a New Years' resolution of using social media less, and blogging more.

I've been blogging for over 12 years and have been using social media for about 10. Both are black holes for content, however, I feel that blog content at least has a chance to "survive". My blog posts have made a bigger impact than my social media posts. It's not just me. I've seen many bloggers get sucked into social media. Many of them stopped blogging altogether, and they've lost their impact.

Blogging also helps me clarify my thoughts and deepen my thinking. The consistent practice of blogging has helped me grow. Social media doesn't encourage the same kind of deep thinking or thoughtfulness, and as a result, hasn't provided me the same personal growth.

This too, seems to be a universal phenomena. President Donald Trump has infamously relied on Twitter to communicate everything from policy decisions to mockery of opponents. He went so far to call the nuclear-armed Kim Jong Un short and fat on Twitter. This level of recklessness would be harder to accomplish in a long-form blog post on Whitehouse.gov.

Last but not least, the large, centralized social media companies don't sit well with me anymore. It's undeniable that these companies have provided a forum for people to connect and share information, and in many ways they've had a huge impact on human rights and civil liberties. However convenient or impactful they may be, their scale, influence and lack of transparency is of growing concern. In the summer of 2015, I predicted that their data privacy issues and lack of transparency were going to come to a head in the next five to ten years. It didn't take that long – Facebook's unsavory involvement in shaping public opinion started to turn the tide against them in 2017.

We can't have a handful of large platform companies control what people read. When too few organizations control the media and flow of information, we must be concerned. If we allow that to happen, we risk losing what has made the web the most important network in history – a decentralized platform that enables anyone to have a voice.

The web we build today will be the foundation for generations to come and it needs to remain decentralized. It's true that a decentralized web is harder to build and more difficult to use. Frankly, it will be difficult for the open web to win without better data portability, more regulatory oversight, better integrations, and more innovation and collaboration.

At the end of the day, I want to be part of the change that I wish to see in the world. To support this vision, I want to build my audience here, on my blog, on the edge of the internet, rather than on centralized platforms that are outside of my control. So going into 2018, expect me to blog more, and use social media less.

Larry Cuban, National Education Policy Center, Jan 05, 2018

The Coalition of Essential Schools (CES) was an initiative launched in 1987 that "spread rapidly across the nation throughout the 1990s (see here, here, and here)." Based on a set of ten principles (listed in the article) the coalition sought to encourage a matery-based and personally-supportive mode of education based on a generally constructivist pedagogy. It reach a peak of more than 1,000 schools in 1997 but since dwindled ro fewer than 100 in 2017. CES, writes Cuban, "shut its national office doors in 2018" (which must mean today, since yesterday was a holiday) a victin of dwindling funding and loss of organizational focus. 

Uber’s food delivery subsidiary, UberEats, may soon start offering a subscription service to customers.

In an interview with Business Insider, UberEats U.K. country manager Toussaint Wattinne said the company has been testing the business model in several of the cities in which it operates.

Wattinne didn’t offer specifics on how an UberEats subscription would work. Presumably, however, like Amazon Prime members, UberEats subscribers would not be required to pay delivery fees. Additionally, Business Insider speculates the service will offer subscribers access to promotions and exclusive menu items. No word yet on how much the service will cost when and if Uber decides to launch it.

We’ve reached out to Uber to confirm whether the company is planning to launch an UberEats subscription service, and whether it will bring the service to Canada if it does. We’ll update this article when we hear back from the company.

UberEats first came to Canada in 2015 when it launched in Toronto in May of that year. Toronto was the first city in which Uber started testing a standalone UberEats app. Late last year, the service launched in Vancouver. Previously, UberEats expanded  to Ottawa, Montreal and Calgary.

In July, Uber announced UberEats was available in over 100 cities in 27 countries across the world.

Source: Business Insider

The post UberEats is considering offering a subscription for deliveries appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Apple has revealed that Vancouver-based Buddybuild, a company focused on mobile app development and support, has acquired Apple’s Xcode engineering group.

The tech giant says Buddybuild’s team will focus on building developer tools for Apple’s third-party iOS development community.

“We’ve always been proud to be a Canadian company, so we’re also pleased that we will be staying right here in Vancouver — a hotbed of developer and engineering talent,” said Buddybuild in a statement sent to MobileSyrup. 

The company notes that its current service will remain active to existing customers, allowing them to build, test and ship iOS apps to testers through buddybuild.com.

Buddybuild says it is no longer accepting new customers and that Free Starter plans for Android app development are set to be discontinued on March 1st, 2018.

The post Vancouver-based Buddybuild joins Apple’s internal engineering group appeared first on MobileSyrup.

While we haven’t heard much about DeX lately, it looks like Samsung could be planning to release a new version of the desktop dock called the DeX Pad, according to a recently filed European trademark that was first uncovered by Android Authority.

DeX is a portable dock that lets users turn the Galaxy S8, S8+ or Note 8, into a full-blown desktop computer, complete with apps specifically optimized for desktop. Dropping the phone onto the dock and connecting a mouse and keyboard via USB or Bluetooth, is all that’s required to get the plug-and-play experience up and running.

I used Samsung’s DeX platform for a brief period of time earlier this year and walked away very impressed with the device, though were few apps that took advantage of its desktop functionality at the time.

Nothing is known about the DeX Pad yet beyond its name, but it’s likely set to be more portable than its predecessor, and could be more pod shaped. Perhaps you’ll only need to place the S9 on some sort of pad to activate DeX, rather than plugging the smartphone in directly via USB-C?

One of the first generation DeX Dock’s biggest issues is the accessory’s relatively expensive $149 CAD price tag. If Samsung opted to include the device with all S9’s it’s likely more developers would be inclined to optimize their apps for the platform.

Source: Beebom Via: Android Police

The post Samsung’s Galaxy S9 could launch alongside new ‘Dex Pad’ appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Nexus and Pixel device owners can now install the January security patches for Android.

There are two patches currently available for download; a January 1st, 2018 patch and a January 5th, 2018 patch. Devices that receive the January 5th patch will also receive all of the updates included in the January 1st update.

“This bulletin has two security patch levels so that Android partners have the flexibility to fix a subset of vulnerabilities that are similar across all Android devices more quickly,” reads an excerpt from a January 2nd, 2018 Android Security Bulletin.

The 2016 and 2017 Pixel twins, as well as the Nexus 5X, Nexus 6P and Pixel C are set to receive the January 5th patch.

Both patches include a number of security updates, as well as bug fixes aimed at improving Android’s reliability.

Source: Android Security Bulletin, Pixel/Nexus Security Bulletin

The post January’s Android security patches are now available for compatible Pixel and Nexus devices appeared first on MobileSyrup.

There could be many blog posts about the Mozilla bug firehose. This is just about dealing with one particular aspect.

When a bug comes into Mozilla it needs to get triaged - someone needs to figure out what to do with it. Triaging is an effort to try and get bugs appropriately classified to see how critical the bug is. Part of shipping a product every 6 weeks is that we have to try and fix crucial bugs in each release. To do that you have to read the bugs reports and try to understand what's happening.

We set aside a certain amount of time for triage meetings every week to triage those bugs. With product, engineering management, QA management and a bunch of engineers, those meetings are expensive to the whole organisation. So we started getting pretty ruthless on those triage meetings to keep them as short as possible .

One category of bugs that we got a lot of (an awful lot of) in WebExtension is a "feature request". This is where someone is asking for feature that we currently don't provide in the WebExtensions API. This one bug could slow down a whole triage as all the people look at a bug and think about it and try to decide if its a good idea or not. That's a terribly expensive and inefficient way to spend the triage meeting.

Instead we decided that we can do a few things:

• We can usually determine quickly if a bug is within the bounds of WebExtensions or not. If not, it gets closed quickly.
• We can usually determine quickly if a bug is reasonable or not. If it is, it goes into the backlog.
• The rest go into a seperate bucket called design-decision-needed.

Then we have a seperate design-decision-needed meeting. For that meeting we do a few things:

• Pick a few bugs from the bucket. For arbitrary reasons we pick the 3 oldest and 3 newest.
• Try to involve the community, so we let the community know about the meeting and bugs before hand. All our meetings are public, but we specifically feel community should be involved in this one.
• Ping the reporter before the meeting asking if they want to come to the meeting or enter more details in the bug.
• Try to spend 5 minutes on each bug.
• Try to find someone to argue for the bug, especially when everyone thinks it shouldn't happen.

There are currently 57 have been denied, 133 have been approved and 2 deferred. The deferred bugs are ones where we still have no real idea what to do with.

We are hoping this process means that:

• Contributors can feel comfortable that before they start working on a bug, they know the patch will be accepted.
• Everyone's time is respected, from developers to the reporters.
• The process constrains internal developers time to prevent them from being overwhelmed by external requests.

The single best part of this process, was that we got our awesome Community Manager - Caitlin to run these triages. She does a much better job of working with the contributors and making them welcome than I can do.

So far we feel this process has been pretty good. One thing we need to improve is following up with comments on the bug quickly after the meeting. Some have fallen through the cracks and we struggle to remember later on what we discussed. Ideally, we do need more contributors to work on the bugs that have been marked as design-decision-approved. They are all there for the taking!

Big Chicken, by science journalist Maryn McKenna starts off with a scientific detective story, tracing how experts at the Center for Disease Control tracked down the connections between outbreaks of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections and animals that are dosed with large quantities of growth-promoting and preventative antibiotics. The book explores the history of how newly-discovered antibiotics became the foundation of industrial farming, allowing animals to be grown rapidly in very close quarters in large quantities at lower cost. Antibiotics became such a staple of industrial agriculture that farmers have been dosing non-sick animals with quantities of antibiotics larger than are used in all of human medicine.

It was not only the scientific discoveries and the dwindling power of antibiotics to defeat resistant bacteria that led the industry to back away from practice of routine antibiotic use, and the relationship between science, politics, and industry varied widely in different parts of the world. England backed away early, thanks to research in the 50s and 60s – a few key scientists who held leading administrative positions, and had prestige to influence legislation – and a shocking plague of hoof-and-mouth disease that instigated national reflection about meat-raising practices. In France, cultural values of good-tasting food have taken higher priority than low-cost, high-volume production of bland poultry and meat. In the Netherlands, it took til the late 90s and 2000s for the change to take hold; farmers turned toward highly efficient poultry production without routine antibiotics once evidence mounted that farmers themselves had become carriers of antibiotic-resistant infections that they picked up from their animals.

But in the United States, the poultry and meat industries pushed back hard, using sophisticated and well-funded PR and lobbying tactics of denialism familiar from the tobacco industry’s pushback against evidence of the health hazards of smoking and the fossil fuel industries’ pushback against evidence of the environmental disaster of climate change. Big Chicken does a good job of explaining the tight control that a small number of poultry producers hold over farmers, who raise strains of animals provided to them, using feed mixes provided to them, using finances provided to them. in an industrialized version of the traditional sharecropping system. The meat industry successfully staved off regulation for decades until executive orders from the Obama administration which have taken effect only recently. Unlike many other Obama-era executive orders, the rules protecting against antibiotic resistent bacteria haven’t yet been reversed by the Trump Administration as far as your blogger can tell.
https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2014/09/18/executive-order-combating-antibiotic-resistant-bacteria

According to Big Chicken, what promoted change before legal reform took hold was consumer advocacy. Consumer preference for healthier poultry and meat started with counter-culture practices, and then niche market players like Whole Foods. Driven by a growing upswell of consumer concern about the risks to human health caused by massive antibiotic doses (and other health risks of factory farming), major poultry producer Purdue Chicken and major retailer Chick-fil-A took the lead in reducing antibiotic use and finding other means to profitably raise and distribute chicken without mass doses of antibiotics.

However, Big Chicken touches on the tale of successful consumer advocacy only lightly – there are other stories told elsewhere or yet to be told about the consumer advocacy initiatives that led the industry to start to pivot away from some of the harmful practices of factoring farming. The book does an excellent job of recounting the history of science and technology that led to antibiotic overuse, and provides an interesting cross-cultural analysis of how different parts of the world moved away from antibiotic overuse, including grim and fascinating reporting on the industry structures in the US that, despite the grave risks to human health, kept most growers from changing their practices until recently.

my life is a play and my role, apparently
is as part of an musical octet
which sings three songs
as interludes in a vast improv performance, and
after each, acts out a short improv scene of our own,
a midsummer night’s subplot of sorts.

our songs are rehearsed,
sent to us weeks before the performance,
but for our short scenes
we are given only two lines each, per scene,
just before we go on stage,
which we are told should be spoken
at an appropriate moment during our scene.

we are not limited to these lines,
but are requested to be brief and thoughtful with any other words.

now, it would appear, our performance is nearing its end —
we have completed the third song,
a moving yet somewhat eager four-part harmony,
and we have started our third scene.

already I have delivered my penultimate line,
“but of course nothing matters”,
with what I thought appropriate Beckettian expression,
on the heels of my lovely colleague’s utterance of her line,
“it’s a shame that nothing can be done”.

since our previous scene, there has been a major shift
in the larger play — the principal characters seem to have lost their way,
and the tension has risen, a sense of anticipation, or dread,
and the orchestra’s been playing a more ominous accompaniment.

the final words of our third song seem designed to reflect this. they are:
“the time has ended now for play,
we walk along this dim-lit track;
the others have all gone away,
we sense there’ll be no journey back.”

the song ends on a sad and indecisive Fmaj7.

but while my colleagues are out-doing themselves
with their meagre final lines and fill-ins,
our last moments in the spotlights,
I have no sense of when to deliver my last line,
which is, ironically, “how will I know?”

this line does not seem to belong with my colleagues’ lines.

and so I wait, attentive to the words, the motions,
the language of faces and bodies and eyes,
and say nothing.

of course it isn’t important whether I say it at all —
only my seven fellow players will be aware of the omission,
and the audience and the major cast are all, I would expect,
anxious in their anticipation of the closing scene to come
when our small troupe has left the stage.

still, I wait; the words hang on my tongue.

and then, at last, as if perfectly planned,
our elder colleague steps to the front of the stage, breathes deeply,
and says a phrase, clearly not in our script at all,
addressed it seems to the audience,
to the well-made-up major characters waiting in the wings,
to our little troupe, and to me in particular:
“there is much to be done, and, my friends,
we must each do the right thing at the right moment.”

and with a look of relief and dismay I deliver my line:
“how will I know?”

and my dear colleague,
(the one for whom “nothing can be done”), walks across to me,
puts her hand on my shoulder,
and replies: “you will not — this is not about knowing”,
and whisks me, our troupe now moving as one,
gracefully off the stage.

image from the Pen Tarot