randomWalks

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He told the story as-is, but instead of the whole notion of the intergalactic thing which was too hard and too silly, he maintained that the existence of Doctor Manhattan had changed the whole balance of the world economy, the world political structure. He felt that THAT character really altered the way reality had been. He had the Ozymandias character convince, essentially, the Doctor Manhattan character to go back and stop himself from being created.

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new-aesthetic:

Google Street View Uses an Insane Neural Network To ID House Numbers

This neural network—which you can read about here, basically it’s a computing network modeled on animal nervous systems—has eleven layers of neurons, which makes it possible to ID millions of house numbers a day from the Street View raw image data. “We can, for example, transcribe all the views we have of street numbers in France in less than an hour using our Google infrastructure,” write the engineers in a new Arxiv paper about the project.

What about the numbers that are too blurry for this giant brain to make sense of? No prob—those are identified by humans as part of a second generation CAPTCHA program. So you may have already contributed to the cause, without even realizing it.

In 1955, a crowd gathered in a hotel ballroom to watch as feed salesmen climbed onto a scale; the men were competing to see who could gain the most weight in four months, in imitation of the cattle and hogs that ate their antibiotic-laced food. Pfizer sponsored the competition.

For many white people the only kind of anti-black racism that exists is one of slurs, overt discrimination, and stand your ground style violence. This mode of “opt-in white racism” is almost useless as an analytic tool for discussing issues in which race plays a role, but is very useful in distancing oneself from the necessity to engage those conversations. What is more interesting to me is why white people find comfort in white spaces, seemingly without the ability to see those spaces as white.

Erecting more balcony guardrails won’t persuade frat brothers to stop hosting offensive Asian-themed ragers and sending mass emails referencing “rapebait.” It won’t stop them from from throwing beer bottles at black students, calling them “Trayvon Martin,” or more or less getting away with sexual assault.

If you look at the way that the world works now, you can point to very specific things, like Twitter and blogging and the changes that are happening in the music and publishing industries, and you can actually point to this set of people, this set of thinking, and the stuff that came out of it and say, “Holy shit. That worked.”

The first hundred or so times Expereal asked me how I was feeling, my assessments were the kinds of superficial ones you might respond with if a stranger asked you on the street: “I’m fine.”, “All good.”, “Frustrated by a supermarket line.” Reviewing my answers after the first few weeks, it dawned on me: I had been politely lying to my smartphone.

My own concern is primarily the terror and violence carried out by my own state, for two reasons. For one thing, because it happens to be the larger component of international violence. But also for a much more important reason than that; namely, I can do something about it. So even if the U.S. was responsible for 2 percent of the violence in the world instead of the majority of it, it would be that 2 percent I would be primarily responsible for. And that is a simple ethical judgment. That is, the ethical value of one’s actions depends on their anticipated and predictable consequences. It is very easy to denounce the atrocities of someone else. That has about as much ethical value as denouncing atrocities that took place in the 18th century.

Plus I find the Bay Area con­gested, racist, in­ces­tu­ous, and over­priced. So I was never re­ally tempted.

www.youtube.com/watch

unemployedblackastronaut:

surlysweetness:

Steve McQueen talks lack of Diversity in Film

This warms the cockles of my heart for so many reasons:

1.) When asked about the lack of diversity, Steve gets right to the point by basically saying, “Why the fuck you asking the black guy, the minority in the room?  How about asking the 8 other white guys who don’t cast minorities as leads in their films?” Thank you for that, Mr. McQueen.

2.) The white panelists’ complete refusal to participate in the conversation is representative of their refusal to address/acknowledge the problem of a lack of minority representation in film.  One even has the audacity to say, “I”m not getting into it.”  As if the issue at hand is completely irrelevant to his job as a director.  As if to say, how dare they, despite being part of the problem, be asked to engage in a conversation about…the problem.  The lunacy of it all! 

3.) Steve’s utter disregard for white feelings. 

THE LAST BIT ABOUT ALTERNATE REALITY IN FILM/ I’VE BEEN SAYING THAT FOR A MINUTE, WHEN MCQUEEN CAME OUT WITH IT I NEARLY FLEW OF MY CHAIR

They never did anything to me personally, or even threatened me, but they didn’t need to. You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. They were über-right-wing. Now, I’m not talking about Rush Limbaugh; I’m talking about the people who make life-and-death decisions. And it’s not necessarily evil; it’s more realistic. Charles was ex-CIA. It’s weirder than you can possibly imagine. I certainly never got the truth. Since then, everything that’s happened—from Nirvana going crazy and on and on and on—none of that holds a candle to how weird that situation was. That’s David Lynch weird.

George Orwell would be flummoxed. ‘Let me get this straight: You pay every month for your tracking device?’

“Why is black pride OK but white pride is racist?” If students are taught that whiteness is based on a history of exclusion, they might easily see that there is nothing in the designation as “white” to be proud of. Being proud of being white doesn’t mean finding your pale skin pretty or your Swedish history fascinating. It means being proud of the violent disenfranchisement of those barred from this category. Being proud of being black means being proud of surviving this ostracism. Be proud to be Scottish, Norwegian or French, but not white.

I think a person should be able to dial a number, make a purchase, send an SMS, write an email, or visit a website without having to think about what it’s going to look like on their permanent record.

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Amazing visualization of the psychogeography of running with smartphones.

When I run, I’m an invisible observer of my city, a ghost forgotten by the people I pass almost as quickly as I disappear from view. I’ve gotten a broad, hard look at this city and its people. Some of it is challenging to see, but at times I think I can see the things that connect every citizen of the city. … We run across the invisible divides that segregate us from neighbors and, in that way, we come to understand where we live.

Whiteness was never about skin color or a natural inclination to stand with one’s own; it was designed to racialize power and conveniently dehumanize outsiders and the enslaved.

We have surveillance video from the hotels that shows people turn on the shower, direct the nozzle at the wall and then leave the room for the whole day.

As Americans have grown increasingly comfortable with traditional surveillance cameras, a new, far more powerful generation is being quietly deployed that can track every vehicle and person across an area the size of a small city, for several hours at a time. … A single camera mounted atop the Washington Monument, McNutt boasts, could deter crime all around the Mall.

It looks more and more as if high levels of extra antioxidants can actually give people cancer, or at the very least, help along any cancerous cells that might arise on their own. Evidence for this has been piling up for years now from multiple sources, but if you wander through a grocery or drug store, you’d never have the faintest idea that there could be anything wrong with scarfing up all the antioxidants you possibly can.