We'll always have Paris
Posted: Tuesday, June 05, 2007 1:09 PM by Will Femia
Filed Under:
Games
**UPDATED: Added some clarification to the disclosure about Alterman and expanded a little on the pseudo-property idea.
Plazes CEO Busted By His Own Product - not exactly (read the update) but a good story to be aware of. I'm waiting for the case of the person whose Twitter (or whatever) account ends up incriminating them. A reader recently sent this link about a story that made noise in the med-blogging community. The guy was anonymously blogging his own malpractice trial and got called out on the stand. Busted!
And surely it's just a matter of time before someone is arrested for what they're seen doing on these new street level maps. Speaking of which, this appears to be the definitive list of street level maps "Easter eggs" sightings.
Speaking of street scanning, the picture I saw of the vehicle that does it was a van, but here's a look at another one (just in case you see one coming, look innocent).
Speaking of acting innocent, "Would we feel differently about street-level image mapping if it were done by a government agency?" (That link even finds some thong action on the map. Can you imagine, in your own car?? I'm sure legally there's no assumption of privacy but socially we don't expect someone will take our picture for public display when we're sitting in our cars.)
The other line I really like in that Boing Boing item is, "Cameras aren't new, maps aren't new, the internet isn't new, nor is Google or Microsoft. So why does this feel so freshly creepy to so many?" It reminds me of the Alisson Stokke pretty pole vaulter story. There's nothing particularly new in that case either but there's an extra element that makes it different somehow. The theory I'm currently nursing (and I'm open to workshopping of the idea) is that what's different is the way the Internet turns the intangible into pseudo-property. Part of what feeds the current debate about intellectual property laws is that digital media exists in a strange place between object and ether. We see bethonged women in public (and in Spider Man figurines) all the time, and a bunch of people probably saw the one on Google's map in person, but what's different is the ability to take the fleeting glance and subject it to the properties of the Internet. Not just the media properties, but the distribution properties and, especially now, the social properties so that the distance from private citizen to public figure is drastically shorter.
Speaking of that Stokke story, an interesting twist is being discussed regarding her father. He's a defense attorney who has had to defend accused rapists and other accused sex offenders. Part of the argument is that his lines of defense have involved blaming the victim. Not everyone sees this as an ironic twist but it does make for a few interesting minutes at the water cooler (or in that blog's comments).
Speaking of "asking for it" and my regular overthinking of gender issues, did you see the Sarah Silverman bit on Mtv about Paris Hilton? With Hilton in the audience at the Movie Awards, Silverman jokes that Hilton will get special treatment in jail and the bars will be painted like penises and hopefully Hilton won't break her teeth. Silverman is known for her coarse humor that often leaves audiences feeling more uncomfortable than tickled, but I was surprised at the number of Reddit commenters who came to Hilton's defense. Most people (and everyone at my water cooler) probably think Paris Hilton deserves every bad thing she gets, but it's still an interesting case of how there's no half-way when it comes to losing one's privacy. To my point above about pseudo-property (and today's headline) I didn't purchase the Paris Hilton sex tape, but as long as there's the Internet we'll always have Paris -possessed and yet not. ADDING: I was thinking about the properties of property and another one is access. With the Internet providing Paris Hilton's sexual exploits "on demand" it further comodifies her (and of course, the fact that she exploits herself so thoroughly only helps).
Speaking of how we feel about women, Is America ready for a trophy wife? I'm glad I clicked this after the blogger added the update because while I never really gave it much thought I probably would have assumed that Fred Thompson had earned himself a trophy wife. Unlike the blogger I give Jeri the benefit of the doubt as well.
Speaking of being glad someone else posted a correction to a contextual mistake with regard to hubba-hubba-ing Jeri Thompson, apparently Joe Scarborough's "work the pole" remark was part of a running joke about strippercise and he wasn't flatly comparing her to a stripper. See update III.
And by the way, have you seen Dennis Kuchinch's wife Elizabeth? ADDING: In the course of this going from draft to publish The Newshoggers blog seems to have pursued the same path I did, updating with Scarborough and the Kucinich connection and following up on the trophy wife question.
The Polar Clock is a neat idea but I can't quite figure if there's an at-a-glance benefit to it. Right now it's mostly blue, but does that tell me anything? I wonder if we'd think of time's passing differently if we assigned it colors or rendered it differently. I was too young when digital watches first came out to remember if it changed our perception of time. (I'm not trying to get deep here. I just mean the feeling you get when you look up at the clock and see the hands in certain positions.)
Speaking of clocks, if you're marking online winners of the recent Democratic debate, that award would have to go to Chris Dodd for this site's Talk Clock. Everyone found it interesting and easy to understand and tons of people used the embed code.
Speaking of the debate the other day, having worked with Eric Alterman pretty closely (I edited the Altercation column he wrote for MSNBC.com for a few years) and having had a few encounters with New Hampshire police, Eric's account of his arrest and release rings true to me.
Also with regard to the debate I played with MessageJury.com. They do "dial testing" where people watch the debate and work an agree/disagree dial. The graph of the results display over the video to show how the candidates' answers are being perceived by the audience.
I was interested to see the number of candidates in the debate who answered that one of their first tasks as president would be to travel the world to repair America's global standing. I have this on my Commuter Click pile: Improving America's global image
P.S. Miss USA responding to the boos she got in Mexico.
If you're traveling at 100 km/h in one direction and you throw a ball 100km/h in the opposite direction, what happens? The results of this video work pretty well except for some extra spin on the ball from the pitching machine. In the next episode they'll drive at the speed of light and turn the headlights on.
A time line map of man's spread across the globe. It's interesting to note the environmental catastrophes that put a serious dent in the human population in context of the current discussions of global warming.
Speaking of weather catastrophes, Global warming 'is three times faster than worst predictions'
But speaking of global warming, They call this a consensus? This is actually the starter page for a very long series of reports on the scientific perspectives that differ from the conventional wisdom on global warming.
And just to bring it all full circle, GM, Chrysler and The Auto Alliance create websites to sway consumers to contact Congress. (Contrary to popular convention I'm not suggesting that these three items "cancel each other out;" only that there's a lot of reading to do on the subject.)
"Priced at just $99, Meraki Outdoor can send a signal up to 700 feet. Paired with Meraki’s existing indoor $49 Mini, the Meraki Outdoor repeater can power access for dozens of households sharing one high speed connection."
The crowd at Nathan's at Coney Island is going to be huge this year to see if this guy can take the mustard belt away from Kobayashi. I can't wait. (Although just watching the brief video made me want to gag so I'm not sure I could stand to see the event.)
Speaking of international food, What the world eats - Fascinating. Not really even preachy, though it's impossible not to compare.
The best productivity advice blog yet.
Typing game, Fingerjig. Usually I kick butt at these but I had a struggle with this one. 967,161 is my best so far. I'll try again in a bit and see if I can break a million.
Brits Drop 850,000 Phones Down the Toilet - Each Year - My initial reaction was to disbelieve this one straight away. Even the stat of "18 million new handsets bought in the UK every year" seems wrong to me. The population of the UK is 60 million. More than a quarter of the population gets a new phone each year and a million of them fall in the toilet? But then, people probably get a new phone every 4 years or less. The toilet part still seems high but maybe they hold their phones in more casual regard than I hold mine.
Why TV news should keep someone on staff with a better-than-average familiarity with Web trends: So you don't feature a goatse prank with a straight face. (It's at 1:04.) NOTE: If you don't know what goatse is you can look it up in wikipedia or you can take my word for it that it's the most obscene image ever displayed.
Reactee assigns you a keyword and puts your message on a t-shirt. People who send a text message to the company with the keyword on your shirt get a return message you set yourself. The site tries to make it sound useful but frankly it seems like more of a novelty. That said, I've always wanted license plate numbers on cars to function like phone numbers, so this Reactee idea as a bumper sticker would be more appealing to me. There's no way to contact a stranger in a car in the same way you can address someone who's close enough for you to be able to read the message on their t-shirt.
"The site is simple: it is like a currency converter, but for completely unrelated items."
