Month: January 2013

See Something? Check Snopes!

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So here’s a little contribution I made to the world today, after seeing yet another Facebook friend sharing yet another easily disproven bit of misinformation:

If you see something, CHECK SNOPES FIRST.

Please: Steal this image. Re-post it. Share it with your friends (you know the ones). Post it as a comment when they post whatever hoax comes around next. Get it out there.

Over and over, I see people–who in other situations seem to have at least two brain cells to rub together–sharing and reposting images on Facebook that are absolute junk. In most cases, disproving the information is as simple as googling “snopes” plus a couple keywords from the text. For instance, the image of a bunch of soda cans that talks about how someone died after drinking from a can that had been contaminated by rat urine? Yeah, that’s false, and not only is that link is the top result after searching for “snopes can rat urine“, but every other link on the Google results page is to a page debunking the information.

This stuff is not hard to find. The problem is, even the couple clicks and few words of typing are more work than simply clicking “share” on Facebook, and so when people see these things, their brains just seem to disengage. After all, it could be true…right? Well, no, not usually, but it gets shared anyway.

So, in a fit of pique, I created the image above (based off the “See Something Say Something campaign), and have now posted it publicly to Facebook, Google+, and this blog. It’s my (sure to be unrealized) hope that this image will get shared and, just perhaps, prompt a few people to actually put some small effort into thinking about what they’re posting.

Yeah, I know. Unlikely. But it’s worth a shot.

You’ve Got A Dirty Speech Synthesizer

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An amusing little anecdote about Watson, the IBM supercomputer that was featured on Jeopardy, that might seem a little familiar to those of my friends who are parents:

Two years ago, Brown attempted to teach Watson the Urban Dictionary. The popular website contains definitions for terms ranging from Internet abbreviations like OMG, short for “Oh, my God,” to slang such as “hot mess.”

But Watson couldn’t distinguish between polite language and profanity — which the Urban Dictionary is full of. Watson picked up some bad habits from reading Wikipedia as well. In tests it even used the word “bullshit” in an answer to a researcher’s query.

Ultimately, Brown’s 35-person team developed a filter to keep Watson from swearing and scraped the Urban Dictionary from its memory.

Gee, seems like parenting would be a little easier (if less embarrassing–and, of course, amusing) if the solution was that easy for people!

(via Techdirt)

This Far, No Further

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I do my best to be open-minded about just about everything, and accepting of outlooks and beliefs other than mine. I may not understand why someone might believe the things they do (republicans, for instance)…but if that’s what they believe, that’s what they believe.

A few months ago, I hit the first time when I decided to “un-friend” a Facebook contact (the ultimate arbiter of relationships in today’s world) because of their beliefs. I could deal with this person being a gun nut, I could deal with them being an uncomfortably far-right Republican. What I couldn’t deal with was when they outed themselves as a Birther. At that point, it was obvious to me that there was simply no way I was ever going to connect to this person on any rational level. If someone’s at a point where they can take that level of over-the-top racism-poorly-disguised-as-conspiracy-theories seriously, then they’re not at a point where I can even pretend to be able to relate to them. So, off the friend list they went.

Just this week, I found a second, similar line, when I discovered that another contact was a vaccine denier. This I find even more offensive than the Birther nonsense. Birthers are crazy and probably racist, but at least their paranoid fantasies aren’t likely to hurt anyone. Anti-vaccine people, though…that can be harmful, and not just to the person, but to others, as they could potentially end up helping to spread an otherwise preventable disease. The “research” that the anti-vaccine crowd relies on has been debunked so thoroughly that it’s mind-boggling to me that anyone can continue to try to believe it, and when you factor in the very real chance that by not vaccinating themselves or their children, they could spread diseases that we at one point came very close to having essentially eradicated…. Enough is enough, and off they went.

This kind of thing doesn’t happen terribly often. I don’t mind disagreeing with people, I don’t mind people disagreeing with me, and in the right circumstances, calm, rational discussions of disagreements can be quite good. However, the line has to be drawn somewhere, and I’ve now found two places where I’m quite comfortable drawing that line.

Unhappily Ever After

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Seven short tales, all based off of Disney tales, but far darker than what you’re used to….

She was always kind, but she was no longer good.

Snow White didn’t remember how she ended up in the forest. She remembered her stepmother’s huntsman leading her into the forest to gather flowers, and setting the flowers aside so she could speak with a lost bird. The next thing she knew, she was wandering alone, feeling colder than she had ever felt before.

Pickpocket Magic

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This profile of a professional pickpocket in the New Yorker is fascinating:

A few years ago, at a Las Vegas convention for magicians, Penn Jillette, of the act Penn and Teller, was introduced to a soft-spoken young man named Apollo Robbins, who has a reputation as a pickpocket of almost supernatural ability. Jillette, who ranks pickpockets, he says, “a few notches below hypnotists on the show-biz totem pole,” was holding court at a table of colleagues, and he asked Robbins for a demonstration, ready to be unimpressed. Robbins demurred, claiming that he felt uncomfortable working in front of other magicians. He pointed out that, since Jillette was wearing only shorts and a sports shirt, he wouldn’t have much to work with.

“Come on,” Jillette said. “Steal something from me.”

Again, Robbins begged off, but he offered to do a trick instead. He instructed Jillette to place a ring that he was wearing on a piece of paper and trace its outline with a pen. By now, a small crowd had gathered. Jillette removed his ring, put it down on the paper, unclipped a pen from his shirt, and leaned forward, preparing to draw. After a moment, he froze and looked up. His face was pale.

“Fuck. You,” he said, and slumped into a chair.

Robbins held up a thin, cylindrical object: the cartridge from Jillette’s pen.

There’s also a video clip of Apollo doing his thing. Amazing.

Blurry Boundaries

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Yesterday, I posted this to my Google+ account:

Just watched the red band trailer for the new Evil Dead remake/reboot. That is so not for me. I like the original with and because of its crazy low-budget camp, and love that they just ran with that for the rest of the series and went completely goofy. This new, ultra-realistic, ultra-violent, ultra-bloody take, even if it’s more in line with what they originally wanted to do, doesn’t appeal to me in the least.

I like my horror creepy and/or with a good dose of humor mixed in. Today’s trend towards ultra-violent torture porn just makes me feel ill.

Then, earlier today, I tweeted this:

Watched The Cabin in the Woods today. Crazy, and really good. Glad I hadn’t read any spoilers beforehand. http://t.co/rIngl2A3 #IMDb

Then just a few minutes ago, Prairie and I finished watching the fourth season of Dexter, and while the ending cliffhanger was upsetting, it was upsetting in the way a good TV cliffhanger should be, and we’ll definitely continue watching the series.

There seems to be some possible irony in all of that.

Honestly, I’m not entirely sure just where the boundary between “acceptable” and “unacceptable” violence lies for me. There were definite moments in The Cabin in the Woods that were more violent than I was really comfortable with, and Dexter occasionally pushes right up to the edge, but in both cases, I think there are three things that make the difference and keep me watching:

  1. The stories are good. Even in the moments where the violence pushes further than I might like it to, I’m already invested enough in the characters and the plot that I’m willing to deal with the occasional cringe and “was that really necessary?” thought in order to continue with the story.

  2. They don’t dwell on the violence. The acts, while necessary to the story, aren’t the point of the story, and as such, even when they’re shown on screen, it’s generally not a huge, long, drawn-out scene. It happens, there’s that moment of shock, and then they move on.

  3. The violence is a part, but isn’t the point. I’ve seen other films (the first Saw film, for instance, which was two hours of my life whose only useful purpose was to convince me that I have no need to ever waste time on any of the rest of the series) that are truly deserving of the “torture porn” designation. The violence is the point of the film, and any bare minimum of plot is there only to move from one violent act to the next. Even films that aren’t part of the modern “torture porn” style of horror can fall victim to this kind of approach: For instance, part of why I didn’t think much of Tim Burton’s take on Sweeny Todd (which I’ve enjoyed on stage) was his insistence on showing every slit throat in loving closeup. Once would have been quite forgivable in order to get the point across, but I found the repeated shots of gaping bloody throats to be quite unnecessary.

Of course, there’s a lot of grey area in all of this, and the boundary between what works for me and what doesn’t is definitely very, very blurry. Sometimes it just boils down to the old cliché about the difference between erotic art and pornography: I know it when I see it.

Free Islamist SF anthology eBook

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This looks interesting to me. I’ve downloaded it, and it’ll be on my iPad soon.

A Mosque Among The Stars available for free!:

A Mosque Among The Stars was the first anthology that dealt with the subject of Muslim characters and/or Islamic themes and Science Fiction. It was edited by me (Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad) and the Canadian Muslim author Ahmad Khan. It came out in 2007. Now that it has been years since it was released in printed form, we have decided to release A Mosque Among The Stars to the public as a Creative Commons Licensed (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs) book. 

(Via Boing Boing)

Housekeeping

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I did some housekeeping on my Flickr account and severely culled my contacts–from somewhere over 250 to slightly under 90. Pretty much got rid of anyone I didn’t actually know (mostly kept people that I know in the real world, though a few more-than-passing-internet-acquaintances made it through as well). This does mean that I won’t be seeing some really good photos from some really good photographers that I don’t know, and may see more average-to-good photos from people I do know, but that seemed an acceptable tradeoff. I had a number of years of connecting to as many people as possible for the slightest of reasons…now I’m at a point where I’d like there to be some amount of more real connection. That doesn’t necessarily mean I have to have met them in meatspace, but I should have at least had enough contact that I have a vague idea of who the are. There were a lot of people on that list that I didn’t recognize at all, and those were quite easy to cull.

A little housekeeping every now and then is a good thing.

Input-Only iPad

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The iPad has lots of good creation tools, but it really does excel at providing a convenient way to veg out, and as much as I like having it, I think it has been more than a little responsible for my lack of blogging. Why take the time and effort to write anything when it’s so easy to kick back and let page after page of text and images flow past my eyes?

Meanwhile, I’ve neglected posting to Eclecticism; I have probably a few gigabytes of audio ripped from old vinyl waiting to be processed, imported to iTunes, and perhaps posted to Vinylicious; when I bother to pick up my camera, shots sit on the memory card for weeks or months, and then sit in Aperture for months before I finally get around to processing them and posting to my Flickr account; and who knows how many other projects have been left half-finished here and there.

All in all, while it’s been a busy year, on this level it feels like I don’t really have much to show for it.

So: As the iPad does have the capability to be far more than just a portable idiot box, it’s time to start taking advantage of that. I’ve got the iPad, a text editor, a nice little wireless keyboard (the onscreen keyboard works great and all, but it’s best for short bursts of text–tweets, status updates, comments, short emails, etc.–a real keyboard is much nicer for anything longer than one or two paragraphs), and a whole mess of lately underused grey matter rattling around in my skull. In theory, I should be able to put those together and, perhaps, get back in the habit of babbling on a semi-regular basis.

Ranking Bond

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One of the gifts I got for Christmas was the 50th anniversary James Bond collection on Blu-ray. Prairie and I have started watching our way through the series, and while it will take a while to get through them all, I figured I’d start ranking the films as we watch. Here’s where we’re at so far, in order by how I like them:

  1. Goldfinger
  2. Dr. No
  3. From Russia With Love
  4. On Her Majesty’s Secret Service
  5. You Only Live Twice
  6. Thunderball

I’ll continue updating this list over the upcoming months as we continue through the series.

Unless, well, I didn’t actually do that.