There's No Such Thing As Cruelty-Free Cocaine

Erik Vance over at Slate on the atrocities of the drugs trade. Compelling and provocative.

Please, you say, not another Nazi comparison. Hitler references in the media are so cliché that Jon Stewart uses them as a running gag. But the magnitude and gruesomeness of the atrocities committed to acquire and maintain drug trade routes to the United States actually are comparable. Decapitations and burning people alive are just the start. Chainsaws, belt sanders, acid—these things are used very creatively by cartel torturers. They disembowel bloggers and sew faces to soccer balls. Children are forced to work as assassins, people are forced to rape strangers at gunpoint, and lines of victims are killed one at a time with a single hammer. Many of those people disappear into unmarked graves. If their bodies are ever found, they are described in the media with antiseptic words like “mutilated.”

The Good—And The Bad—Of Relationships Online

With so much nonsense written about this subject, it's refreshing to read Kate Bussmann's well-argued and properly supported discourse on how technology has both positively and negatively impacted our relationships on and offline. (My own, more personal take on the subject was published here last February)

But it doesn’t necessarily take anything that complicated. Stef Sullivan Rewis, a web developer who was the first person to get engaged via tweet in 2008, now lives in Arizona with her husband, but when they met they lived in different states and built their relationship via Skype, instant message and Twitter. “If he was in a different time zone, he’d Skype me after dinner, put his computer next to his bed and go to sleep with it on, so I’d have him in the corner of my screen,” she says. “Back in the olden days, it would have been impossible, but we were able to stay connected.”

Stephen Wolfram Has Very Big Plans

Wolfram Alpha's work on a natural language programming system for "making the world computable" promises very big things indeed. Exciting stuff. I'm a fan of Wolfram Alpha already, having used Mathematica many years ago, and familiar with their "computation engine" online (and, indeed, used by Siri for a bunch of things).

One of the first phrases that came to my mind when I first read Wolfram’s tease — “something very big is coming” — was sentient code. That’s simply due to the level of automation and intelligence that the Wolfram language is starting to encompass, and that fact that the engine treats data and code in similar ways.

I questioned Wolfram on that.

“What we’re trying to do is that the programmer defines the goal, and the computer figures out how to achieve that goal,” he said. That’s different than telling the computer to go figure out something new that’s interesting – that’s a diffferent challenge — but I’m interested in that too.”

The Mac Pro Is The Shape Of Things To Come

I had a little hands-on time with the new Mac Pro yesterday, and a few things jumped out at me right away. First: It's really small, and no matter how many size comparisons I've seen it still seems too small to be a top-of-the-range workstation-class machine. Second: It's really heavy—even more so when you consider the size. This thing is surprisingly dense, and the hollow in the top gives it a sense of emptiness that makes the weight even more notable. Third: It's crazy-fast. Launching a few  fairly sizable applications (Logic Pro X, Aperture) was essentially instantaneous. Moving over to an i5 iMac and doing the same thing made the difference even more noticeable. Techcrunch noted this in their review too:

For the layperson or everyday computer user, the new Mac Pro will seem like a thought-based computer, where virtually every input action you can think of results in immediate response. Whether it’s the Xeon processor or the super-fast PCIe-based SSD or those dual workstation GPUs, everything seems slightly but impossibly faster than on any other Mac, even the most recent iMac and Retina MacBook Pros. To be honest, it’ll be hard to go back even for everyday tasks like browsing the web and importing pics to iPhoto.

But that’s not what the Mac Pro is for: It’s a professional machine designed to help filmmakers create elaborate graphics, 3D animations and feature-length films. It’s aimed at the most demanding photographers, working in extreme resolutions and doing batch processing on huge files. It’s for audio producers, creating the next hit album using Logic Pro X and low latency, high bandwidth I/O external devices.

It's certainly going to be hard for anyone who's not using their Mac for serious production work to justify this level of a machine, but make no mistake: This is the kind of user experience that Apple is shooting for, and I wouldn't be surprised to see it in much more mainstream computers in a couple of years. And once you've experienced it, everything else will seem slow.

Dark Mail Has An Ambitious Goal

I wish them luck, seriously. One of my hopes for 2014 is that we all become more aware of what's happening to our data, and start to demand some more control and oversight. Or at least that we're more aware of what we're giving away, and what we get in return.

But all of those groups pale compared to the goal for Dark Mail: everyone. "We will be successful if, in three years , 50% of the world's emails are sent through this Dark Mail architecture."

"Security should be the default of architecture. If you choose to use a free service like a map service, you should know what you are giving up. For me, I'm fine if Google knows my wife and I were searching for a new restaurant and how to get to it; I'm not fine with them mining every one of my personal texts, emails and searches. Individual citizens the world over should have the ability to decide what they want to share and what they don't."

TED's Middlebrow Infotainment Isn't The Answer

Excellent piece by Benjamin Bratton in The Guardian. I think many people have a growing discomfort with the style of TED presentations, and the lack of any real affect beyond a feel-good fifteen minute glow of inspiration. Bratton asks some good questions, and avoids the trap of trying to package up easy answers for an audience weaned on infomercials and talent shows.

What is it that the TED audience hopes to get from this? A vicarious insight, a fleeting moment of wonder, an inkling that maybe it's all going to work out after all? A spiritual buzz?

I'm sorry but this fails to meet the challenges that we are supposedly here to confront. These are complicated and difficult and are not given to tidy just-so solutions. They don't care about anyone's experience of optimism. Given the stakes, making our best and brightest waste their time – and the audience's time – dancing like infomercial hosts is too high a price. It is cynical.

Security Through Nail Polish

Want to be sure that your computer hasn't been tampered with? Break out the glitter polish:

The idea is to create a seal that is impossible to copy. Glitter nail polish, once applied, has what effectively is a random pattern. Once painted over screws or onto stickers placed over ports, it is difficult to replicate once broken. However, reapplication of a similar-looking blob (or paint stripe, or crappy sticker) might be enough to fool the human eye. To be sure, the experts recommend taking a picture of the laptop with the seals applied before leaving it alone, taking another photo upon returning and using a software program to shift rapidly between the two images to compare them. Even very small differences – a screw that is in a very slightly different position, or glitter nail polish that has a very slightly different pattern of sparkle – will be evident. Astronomers use this technique to detect small changes in the night sky.

Sarah Palin and The War on Christmas

Dan Savage's angry, hilarious, and inspiring review of Sarah Palin's book is a (justifiably sweary) must-read. (Thanks to MyAppleMenu for the heads-up.)

What was inspiring that anti-gun chatter in Washington in December of 2012? Oh, right: Twenty children and six teachers were shot dead in their classrooms by a deranged asshole with a "powerful gun." And before the grieving mothers and fathers of Newtown, Connecticut, could put their dead children in the ground, Sarah Palin ran out gun shopping. Buying Todd a gun in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary was "fun," Palin writes—and, again, an act of "civil disobedience." Because gun nuts are a persecuted minority.

Smartphone Competition Fuels the next Wave of VR

Seems like we've been talking about virtual reality forever, but Oculus is definitely making headway, partly due to how smartphone makers have driven down component costs:

“Those guys are tearing each other apart trying to get the next best thing,” he says. “That has basically driven the costs down to where they’re affordable: displays and sensors that used to be hundreds of dollars now cost pennies.” Oculus charges just $300 (£180) for a low resolution “developer kit” – a kit for companies interested in developing software for the device – and has shipped more than 40,000 worldwide, the biggest deployment of virtual reality headsets in history. It has raised $91million (£55.5 million) in investment funding and done this without actually having a product on the market: you can’t buy it in shops until next year.

Falling In Love With An AI Agent

Spike Jonze's new film Her looks prescient, touching, and thought-provoking. I can't wait.

The Siri romance angle might be uncomfortable for some, but how is Theodore and Samantha’s relationship that different from anyone else’s? Although Samantha happens to be a computer, Jonze is speaking to our most deep-seated fears about falling for another person; love is, after all, what Adams’s character describes as a “form of socially acceptable insanity.” In many ways, Her is a cautionary tale about what happens when we rely on our computers to connect us, instead of taking a chance on other people, but it’s also an exploration of the openness and wonder that gives life a sense of purpose. With Samantha, Theodore might not have met the one, but in their conversations, he finds himself able to be more free—to see what love might be like. It’s not connection, but surely it’s a step.

Gruber Takes on Mims, and the Technology Cynics

Superb piece on Daring Fireball taking apart the Christopher Mims Quartz piece that I criticised yesterday. Much more than Apple in his riposte, but this needs repeating:

He’s got it all backwards. The nature of progress is to move incrementally. The great leaps are exceedingly few and far between. One needs to pay attention, to learn to appreciate fine details, in order to appreciate progress as it churns. Compare today’s iPhone 5S to the original 2007 iPhone and the differences are glaringly obvious. But some petulant tech critics dismissed every single subsequent iPhone as disappointingly incremental, lacking “innovation”. The iPhone 3G merely added faster cellular networking, which the iPhone “should have had” all along. The iPhone 3GS was “just” a faster 3G. The iPhone 4 introduced retina-caliber displays, which almost everyone, no matter how cynical or inclined to piss on anything nice, agreed was innovative — but soon forgotten by those who bought tickets on the Antennagate Express, a train which took a months-long trip to Nowhereville. (The iPhone 4 was in production for three years, and the GSM antenna design remained unchanged throughout.) The iPhone 4S? Just a faster iPhone 4. Lather, rinse, repeat each successive year. Yet here we are today with an iPhone 5S that’s 40 times faster than the original.

Photographs Reveal Faces Reflected in Subject's Eyes

You can't hide from a high-resolution image. This reminds me of the Esper photo analysis in Bladerunner. (Thanks to @pigsonthewing for the heads-up.)

High-resolution face photographs may also contain unexpected information about the environment of the photographic subject, including the appearance of the immediate surroundings, Jenkins explained to KurzweilAI.

“In the context of criminal investigations, this could be used to piece together networks of associates, or to link individuals to particular locations. This may be especially important when for categories of crime in which perpetrators photograph their victims. Reflections in the victims eyes could reveal the identity of the photographer.

Virtual Reality 2.0

Linden Labs founder Philip Rosedale is back, with plans to take virtual reality beyond its Second Life days:

Rosedale is also back on the virtual reality scene with the new venture. His company, High Fidelity, wants to build a new avatar world enabled by sensors on phones, computers, and tablets—the goal is to incorporate virtual reality seamlessly into everyday life. His goals go far beyond gaming: He thinks virtual reality technology will eventually become just as ubiquitous as smart phones and laptops.

Rosedale is probably right to back education as the frontier for virtual reality, though there's a long way to go. Just because education tends to be early adopters of this kind of stuff, I wouldn't bet on those early adopters getting it right, at least not in a way that translates to broader consumer experiences. Still, some interesting insights here, from a guy who certainly has the experience on which to base his predictions.

Om Malik's Clearer Vision of 2013

I'm not the only one to take issue with Christopher Mims' pessimistic view of 2013; Om Malik takes it up here:

The latest such example is a piece in Quartz, a sister publication of The Atlantic. This article, under the headline 2013 was a lost year for tech bemoans Silicon Valley and all its failures, has turned intellectual trolling into high art. It is fairly easy to focus on the lack of whiz-bang technologies like the iPhone or the Kindle. It is pretty easy to focus on the tech-NSA nexus, which I agree is deplorable. And it is also very easy to focus on what some think of as pointless apps.

 "Intellectual trolling" indeed.

2013 a "lost year for tech"?

I like Quartz, but this piece from Christopher Mims feels opinionated and lazy. Case in point:

The most that Apple could think to do with the new, faster processor in the iPhone 5S was animate 3D effects that make some users feel ill and a fingerprint sensor that solved a problem that wasn’t exactly pressing. Apple’s new iOS7 mobile operating system, which felt “more like a Microsoft release,” crippled many older iPhones and led to complaints of planned obsolescence.

So, delivering the first 64-bit mobile platform and putting an SLR-level high speed camera and 120fps video in a phone counts as zero-innovation? What about the thinnest, lightest tablet with a full-day battery? No? How about a radical new professional workstation-class computer built around multi core graphics cards? Nothing? And using a widely-panned link bait article as proof of this? Lazy.

Oh hang on: Mims seems to have supported the original "planned obsolescence" article before. Maybe this whole piece is just an excuse to trot out the same line again.

Nokia Pulls its iOS Maps App

Pretty strange, but then the mapping wars are still a long way from over.

In the wake of Maps-gate, Nokia was one of several outfits that rushed to Apple's aid with a navigation app of its very own. A year later, however, and that same offering has been yanked from the App Store before it could send a note to its neighbors. When we asked, Nokia responded with the below quote, saying that iOS 7 harms the user experience of HERE, but users can still access the mobile edition of the service. Which is all well and good, unless you were a big fan of the app's ability to cache offline data.

The Logic Behind The Doctor's Regenerations

Wonderful piece by Emily Asher-Perrin, and utterly deserving of your attention. For my money the Christmas apecial—and the regeneration—were beautifully handled. 

But does regeneration make sense, even if you're no good at it? I think it does. In fact, I'd argue that the events leading up to each regeneration have a very heavy impact on how the next incarnation turns out. Though he can't pick out faces and then discard them the way other Time Lords can, subconsciously, the Doctor is clearly and cautiously reconstructing himself, adapting according to his triumphs and failures each time.

Scanadu isn't quite a Tricorder yet

There's a lot coming in personal sensors and healthcare in 2014 and the years to follow. This is one to watch. 

The object Scanadu is working on is an oval disk about two inches wide and a half-inch thick. Held to the forehead, it uses light to measure oxygen intake, an accelerometer to figure out how far the chest extends in breathing, and a small electrical plate under the thumb to measure heart rate. Other sensors, some still in development, will measure temperature, blood pressure and other body functions.

Scanadu isn't quite a Tricorder yet

There's a lot coming in personal sensors and healthcare in 2014 and the years to follow. This is one to watch. 

The object Scanadu is working on is an oval disk about two inches wide and a half-inch thick. Held to the forehead, it uses light to measure oxygen intake, an accelerometer to figure out how far the chest extends in breathing, and a small electrical plate under the thumb to measure heart rate. Other sensors, some still in development, will measure temperature, blood pressure and other body functions.

Amazon & Target Refuse to sell Beyoncé CD

All because she gave Apple a one-week exclusive. Make no mistake, the Amazon war with iTunes is only just beginning.

and Target may be cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Despite Apple's head start, Billboard reports that Sony and Columbia still managed to ship more than 500,000 units of the CD before the general release date. (Amazon is selling the MP3 version of the album; Target is selling neither the digital nor CD edition.)