The human cost of conspiracy theories

Hadley Freeman, writing for The Guardian, about Leonard Pozner, a father who lost his son Noah in the Sandy Hook massacre:

Pozner says that, if he hadn’t lost Noah, he might well have believed the pizzagate conspiracy: “I would not have been as immediately dismissive of it, that’s for sure. History books will refer to this period as a time of mass delusion. We weren’t prepared for the internet. We thought the internet would bring all these wonderful things, such as research, medicine, science, an accelerated society of good. But all we did was hold up a mirror to society and we saw how angry, sick and hateful humans can be.”

So what can we do, I ask, now that more of us are realising we can’t just ignore these people?

“It’s too late, and things have gone too far. The whole Amazon is on fire. When I was dealing with these people in 2014 and 15, you could utilise their stories and turn them around. I don’t know if you can even do that now,” he says. “Lawmakers don’t know how to deal with this. Police don’t know how to police the internet, they haven’t been trained, they just tell you to turn off the computer. And people who do police the internet, they are looking for credit card scams worth millions of dollars. For 4Chan trolls, this is their playground.”

He pauses for a moment: “I used to be able to change the channel when stories about these kinds of people were on. I now don’t have the luxury to do that, and when I lost Noah, I woke up and realised that people who spread these stories are more interested in propagating fear than getting at the truth. And the human cost of that is phenomenal.”

I can’t imagine the horror of losing a child, but the idea that Pozner is is now taunted for it and accused of “faking it” is even further beyond comprehension.

/Film’s 2017 Summer Movie Wager

Every year on /Film, we choose our top 10 films of the summer by domestic box office gross. It’s always a fun time full of trash talking and week-by-week nailbiting results. Check out the episode here.

My picks are below:

  1. Despicable Me 3
  2. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2
  3. Spider-Man: Homecoming
  4. Wonder Woman
  5. Transformers 5
  6. War for the Planet of the Apes
  7. Cars 3
  8. Dunkirk
  9. Pirates of the Caribbean 5
  10. The Mummy (2017)
Darkhorses:
  • Alien: Covenant
  • Baywatch
  • Captain Underpants

My biggest uncertainties? Putting Pirates so low, putting Despicable Me 3 at #1, and not having Captain Underpants in the top 10 at all.

The best meal I’ve ever had in my entire life

To get to the best restaurant in Washington State, and one of the best restaurants in the country, you first need to drive two hours north of Seattle and take a 10-minute ferry ride to get to Lummi Island (population: about 600). On the far side of the island is Willows Inn, run by Chef Blaine Wetzel. Wetzel is barely 30 years old, but in 2014, the James Beard Foundation named him Rising Star Chef of the Year and in 2015, he was awarded Best Chef Northwest.

The Willows Inn restaurant only operates for 3-4 nights per week. At capacity, the restaurant seats 34 people. There is one seating per night at 6 PM. The meal lasts three hours. Each person’s meal cost $200 with a mandatory gratuity.

Accede to these conditions and you will possibly have the best meal of your entire life. The setting is homey and welcoming. The service is friendly and informative. The food is exquisite and unique. Many of the ingredients are caught from the surrounding water, or harvested from surrounding vegetation and gardens. It feels like you are eating straight from the earth — in a good way.

Several of our fellow diners were here from out of state. They made the pilgrimage and they were well-rewarded. So, my advice: if you’ve never been, add this to the bucket list!

I was able to take some photos of the meal below, using a Fuji X-T2. Here are the dishes that were photographed:

toasted kale leaves
clams and scallops
oysters and wilcress
black cod and currant leaves
dungeness crab soaked in pinenuts
herb tostada
smoked mussels
reefnet caught smoked sockeye
lightly cured rockfish in a broth of grilled bones
steamed bok choy

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Losing a generation of movies and TV

Over at IEEE, Marty Perlmutter has written a sobering assessment of the current state of digital preservation efforts at major studios:

Digital technology has also radically altered the way that movies are preserved for posterity, but here the effect has been far less salutary. These days, the major studios and film archives largely rely on a magnetic tape storage technology known as LTO, or linear tape-open, to preserve motion pictures. When the format first emerged in the late 1990s, it seemed like a great solution. The first generation of cartridges held an impressive 100 gigabytes of uncompressed data; the latest, LTO-7, can hold 6 terabytes uncompressed and 15 TB compressed. Housed properly, the tapes can have a shelf life of 30 to 50 years. While LTO is not as long-lived as polyester film stock, which can last for a century or more in a cold, dry environment, it’s still pretty good.

The problem with LTO is obsolescence. Since the beginning, the technology has been on a Moore’s Law–like march that has resulted in a doubling in tape storage densities every 18 to 24 months. As each new generation of LTO comes to market, an older generation of LTO becomes obsolete. LTO manufacturers guarantee at most two generations of backward compatibility. What that means for film archivists with perhaps tens of thousands of LTO tapes on hand is that every few years they must invest millions of dollars in the latest format of tapes and drives and then migrate all the data on their older tapes—or risk losing access to the information altogether.

That costly, self-perpetuating cycle of data migration is why Dino Everett, film archivist for the University of Southern California, calls LTO “archive heroin—the first taste doesn’t cost much, but once you start, you can’t stop. And the habit is expensive.” As a result, Everett adds, a great deal of film and TV content that was “born digital,” even work that is only a few years old, now faces rapid extinction and, in the worst case, oblivion.

Until a solution that is better than costly, quickly obsoleted LTO tapes is found, original versions of all of the cultural work we value is in danger of being lost forever.

The “Born Sexy Yesterday” trope

YouTube user Pop Culture Detective has created a fairly comprehensive, insightful essay about the film trope “born sexy yesterday,” in which grown (and frequently sexualized) women have the minds of children. From the essay:

“Born Sexy Yesterday” is about an unbalanced relationship. But it’s also very much connected to masculinity. The subtext of the trope is rooted in a deep-seated insecurity about sex and sexuality. The crux of the trope is a fixation on male superiority. A fixation with holding power over an innocent girl. But in order to make that socially acceptable, science fiction is employed to put the mind of that girl into a sexualized adult woman’s body.

It’s a fantasy based on fear — fear of women who are equal in sexual experience and romantic history, and fear of losing the intellectual upper hand to women.

Seeing all the examples laid out like this makes clear how ubiquitous and pernicious this trope really is.

The memes of Trump’s presidency (so far)

Kaitlyn Tiffany has written up an indispensable guide for The Verge:

In The New Republic, two weeks after the inauguration, Jeet Heer outlined the broader case for making jokes about the Trump administration: “Jokes, even political jokes, aren’t about persuasion, but rather psychological comfort in the face of difficult or painful situations.”

 100 days into Trump’s presidency, it looks like he’s right. We’ve already got enough memorable, pervasive memes to fill the world’s scariest children’s book. Each one was born from something horrible — cruel or grossly stupid — and each one was a tiny, dumb, tasteless victory against despair.

 

Does Travis Kalanick actually have the second-highest Wii Tennis score?

In a recent New York Times profile of Uber CEO Travis Kalanick, the writers point out that Kalanick “once held the world’s second-highest score for the Nintendo Wii Tennis video game.” This factoid about Kalanick has actually appeared in the media many times before — I first learned about it on an episode of the StartUp podcast.

But according to Ars Technica writer Kyle Orland, this stat is non-sensical. Why?

The line baffled me for a number of reasons, not least of which was that the concept of a “high score” in “Wii Tennis” didn’t make much sense. Claiming the “world’s second-highest score” in Wii Sports tennis is like claiming the second-highest score in Pong based on nothing but playing against the computer and your friends. Absent some sort of sanctioned tournament or logical third-party ranking system, the claim just doesn’t parse.

And yet, the boast is oddly specific. Kalanick hadn’t earned the best “Wii Tennis” score in the world according to TheNew York Times. He achieved the second best. If this was just a fabulist boast, why limit yourself to number two? And if it wasn’t just puffery, who was number one?

What’s more, the paper of record doesn’t hedge its declaration with a “he said” or “he claimed.” Kalanick’s “Wii Tennis” high score is stated as a fact, and one that piece author Mike Isaac said on Twitter was “triple sourced.” (Isaac didn’t respond to further request for comment on his basis for the line.)

I’ve spent an admittedly ridiculous amount of time looking into this one sentence over the past few days. As it turns out, getting to the bottom of Kalanick’s Wii Sports skill requires delving into the vagaries of human memory, reverse engineered asymptotic leveling systems, and the semantic meaning of video game achievement itself.

Orland’s investigation is delightful and worth reading in its entirety. It’s a testament to sweating the details and getting the facts right whenever possible.

Radiolab’s “Nukes” episode

During my recent drive down to Las Vegas, I had a chance to catch up with dozens of podcasts. Radiolab in particular has been on a tear, with some of their most important and powerful work coming out in the past few weeks. Among these: their “Nukes” episode, which I’d recommend for anyone who cares about the fate of the world.

TL;DR – It’s as bad as we all think it is; there are essentially no checks on the U.S. President’s power to launch nukes; the decision can be unilateral; and no easy path exists to change that. Enjoy.