I had another dream, I had another life
Business Insider has an incredible slideshow of secret menu items you can order from well-known restaurants from McDonald’s to Chipotle. I only got three items into the list when I discovered the Chipotle Quesarito (it’s a burrito, but wrapped in cheese quesadilla) before I knew that this was informatinon that had to be shared.
You’ve got to check the list out yourself. It’s at once amazing and terrifying.
(Why Business Insider, of all places? I have no idea.)
Malcolm Harris’s The White Market is an essay about race, consumerism, and the television show Breaking Bad. It’s an impressively smart piece of analysis, but it’s also an example of cleverness getting in the way of insight. More particularly, it’s an example of how anti-discrimination can go awry.
The central argument of the article is that in order for Breaking Bad to attract advertisers it has to depict the drug trade in ways that are not only highly unrealistic, but that are unrealistic in very specific ways. In short: Walter White makes meth that is pure. He’s a scientist using industry-grade pharmaceutical techniques and equipment to make exquisite product that he sells to that demographic known above all else for its taste and discernment: meth-heads.
As Harris observes:
The idea that people will always pay more for purer or small-batch products makes a lot of sense to demographics used to paying more for quality gimmicks — conveniently, the same demos advertisers pay a premium for. But it doesn’t make sense for the consumers Breaking Bad so sparingly depicts. When we do see White’s ultimate customers, they’re zombies: all scabs and eroded teeth. We’re not talking about impulse buyers or comparison shoppers here; it’s a textbook case of what freshman economics students call inelastic demand. As Stringer Bell told D’Angelo Barksdale in another show about drugs, in direct contrast to what Walter claims, “When it’s good, they buy. When it’s bad, they buy twice as much. The worse we do, the more money we make.”
So far so good: if you want Dodge to come to you and ask for product placements you have to turn Walter White into an artisan. He’s the indie micro-brewer of New Mexico’s meth market. But then Harris gets to the second phase of his essay:
Which brings us to the other thing that sets White and Pinkman apart from their competitors: color. And I don’t mean blue.
The white guy who enters a world supposedly beneath him where he doesn’t belong yet nonetheless triumphs over the inhabitants is older than talkies. TV Tropes calls it “Mighty Whitey,” and examples range from Tom Cruise as Samurai and Daniel Day Lewis as Mohican to the slightly less far-fetched Julia Stiles as ghetto-fabulous. But whether it’s a 3-D Marine playing alien in Avatar or Bruce Wayne slumming in a Bhutanese prison, the story is still good for a few hundred million bucks. The story changes a bit from telling to telling, but the meaning is consistent: a white person is (and by extension, white people are) best at everything.
This, for me, is where the thread of the piece begins to unravel.
Duke University has just brought the technological singularity a little closer. For rats, anyway. Sci-fi author Vernor Vinge coined the term, although it has spread well beyond him since then, and it refers to the idea of a superintelligence created by merging human brains with computers, possibly as a single collective intelligence including many human contributors.
This Wired article doesn’t mention the singularity, but it describes the kind of direct brain-to-brain communication that might be a necessary part of creating it. In this case the brains belonged to rats, however. Using electrodes implanted directly into their brains, a rat in Brazil helped a rat in North Carolina successfully solve a puzzle that one rate had been trained in but the other rat had not. Cool? Very. But also rather spooky.
Did the rats know they were communicating as two minds, did they become one mind, or were they still distinct minds merely communicating at a lower level than language? I don’t know, but I’d defnitely like to find out before I get plugged into the Matrix.
Throughout Western history, literature has been dominated by men. Obviously some women have succeeded despite the odds, from the Brontë sisters and Jane Austen to J. K. Rowling, but as these charts show the disparity remains quite stark.
So… the sequester showdown is coming. I haven’t written much about it because I hate politics more with every passing hour and I wish a pox on both houses. Fervently. But I’ve been fascinated by the reporting of Bob Woodward. From the Washington Post four days ago:
My extensive reporting for my book “The Price of Politics” shows that the automatic spending cuts were initiated by the White House and were the brainchild of Lew and White House congressional relations chief Rob Nabors — probably the foremost experts on budget issues in the senior ranks of the federal government.
Obama personally approved of the plan for Lew and Nabors to propose the sequester to Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.). They did so at 2:30 p.m. July 27, 2011, according to interviews with two senior White House aides who were directly involved.
And then yesterday via CNBC:
Several inside 1600 Pennsylvania have tangled with the legendary journalist Bob Woodward. Few emerged unscathed.
The Obama administration is now fighting back against the best-selling author who made his name and reputation in reporting the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon. And it’s revealing what they’re not challenging—the miasma of bad faith with Republicans over the budget and the $85 billion in sequestered budget cuts expected to begin on Friday.
I think it’s important information to understand that the sequester originated with President Obama because when the President of the United States lies to the nation about an important issue people should know. Right now the Democrats are basically betting that the GOP will be blamed for the sequester and they are relying on a friendly media to bolster that impression. But the Republicans–no paragons of virtue or common sense among the bunch–seem to think the Democrats have overreached. Or maybe they are just having a temper tantrum. I don’t know.
I just know that no good can come of serious policy debates mired in falsehood and bad faith, and right now that’s what we’ve got. Thanks to both sides. I wish I had more to offer, but these days I don’t. The problems facing are nation just aren’t that hard. Any number of alternative solutions could be a substantial improvement, but as long as the public treats it like a game of football I don’t have a lot of hope for that.
You might have seen some photos of this before: Chinese performance artist Liu Bolin poses in front of interesting landscapes (like the Great Wall of China), and then his assistants paint him completely so that he blends into his surroundings. Sometimes he’s actually really hard to find. (Beat that, Waldo!)
This one (below) is actually my favorite, but there are several more cool ones to check out.
I’ve read and heard lots of studies suggesting that early childhood education (like preschool) is vitally important in helping put kids on the right track, and even in combating some of the negative consequences of poverty. This has made me a pretty strong supporter of this kind of intervention as an anti-poverty policy. And yet…
“Premature socialization,” says Dr. Neufeld, “was always considered by developmentalists to be the greatest sin in raising children ….[w]hen you put children together prematurely before they can hold on to themselves, then they become like [the others] and it crushes the individuality rather than hones it.”
Read the rest of this contrarian view here.
As usual? The more I learn, the less I know. Any of my readers know about this, or just have any insight or opinions?
This Monday’s piece for Times And Seasons is live: Authentic Religion, Authentic Science. It’s my second in a series of posts (probably 3 total) about viewing modern secularism as a religion.
I’m turning comments off here so folks can comment there if they feel inclined to do so.
Quadrocopters are cool. Quadrocopters and some really good physics students? That’s ridiculously cool.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=pp89tTDxXuI
I’m wondering what kind of fun and nefarious purposes you can put a swarm of quadrocopters this agile to.
I’ve never met Tucker, but I worked with his mom, Page, at my first real job. She was always amazingly kind not only to me, but also to my kids. Sometimes my wife would swing by with my two little ones, and we’d say hello to my coworkers and especially Page. They loved her so much that even after I moved on to other things we still came back sometimes to see my old friends, and especially Page.
I always knew that Page’s son, Tucker, had cystic fibrosis. It’s been a big part–and a painful part–of Page’s life. Since I never met him, I always pictured him as a little kid, but he’s actually 24 now. He looks really happy and healthy in a lot of the photos up at his IndieGoGo crowdfunding project, but he just got home from a 42-day hospital stay and he needs expensive medications to be able to keep fighting to stay with his family.
Years ago, children with CF commonly did not live to start kindergarten. These days, the average life expectancy has risen to 37 years, but it’s still “very difficult to manage” (read more on Wikipedia). There is currently no cure for CF, just a battery of drugs and a lifetime struggle to live with the disease.
The campaigns has already reached the initial goal, but that doesn’t mean they have everything they need. Sites like Kickstarter and Indiegogo only collect the contributions if the campaign hits the goal, so you have to set it lower than you’d like to try and make sure you hit it. With copays of $1,400 a month and long battles with insurance and Medicaid ahead, Tucker still needs help. There are 66 hours left to donate, and someone has pledged to match the next $1,000 dollar-for-dollar. There are a lot of good causes out there, but this isn’t a cause. It’s my friend’s son. Please, give if you can.
