notes.husk.org

Lupe Fiasco and Philosophy Sunday

Mon, 13 May 2013 19:42:03 +0100

Three posts from Lupe Fiasco’s Twitter account on Sunday:

A Marxist theory today:Actual Revolution which affects wholesale societal change is only seen via technological advancement i.e. industrial
— Lupe Fiasco (@LupeFiasco) May 12, 2013

Hey guys #LF Mgmt here. Gotta love his lively way with twitter but sadly he’s gonna be taking a break to focus on other things.
— Lupe Fiasco (@LupeFiasco) May 12, 2013

The #LF twitter will stay active but will focus solely on giving you guys info on upcoming #LF events, music touring and media.
— Lupe Fiasco (@LupeFiasco) May 12, 2013

The full series of posts between these three, including responses, is available at Exquisite Tweets.

On Google Glass and Rooting

Tue, 07 May 2013 18:30:00 +0100

2020, via notational

Google Glass has been hacked and rooted:

Once the attacker has root on your Glass, they have much more power than if they had access to your phone or even your computer: they have control over a camera and a microphone that are attached to your head.

It’s worthing noting that this part of Jay Freeman’s post is more about a potential future exploit than the rooting he achieved, which requires physical access, a Debug Mode that the Glass staff were surprised was in a publicly* available build, knowledge of the adb Android debugger, and also repeated user interaction to execute various parts of the process.

Google aren’t always as open** as they could be, but generally their products are relatively friendly to hackers*** who want to extend and modify the way the things they own work. That said, Freeman is probably right to warn of the issues down the road, and note that a future root exploit would be troubling to say the least.

* where by “publicly” I mean “those who attended Google I/O 2012 or who were lucky in the #ifihadglass giveaway”.

** I know this is a problematic term, but it feels right.

*** to be read in the old MIT sense as “playful manipulators”.

NYC Subway Atmosphere News

Fri, 26 Apr 2013 06:16:19 +0100

studiox-nyc (via chriswoebken):

Today in subway atmosphere news, we learn from WNYC that the NYPD is partnering with Brookhaven National Laboratory to study how chemical weapons might disperse through the city’s underground tunnels. The researchers plan to release a “non-toxic, odorless gas that mimics how chemical, biological and radiological weapons would disperse” in twenty-one subway stations across the five boroughs in July, with 200 sampling devices deployed to monitor its spread.

“We want to be able to determine how toxic material can flow through the transit system, it’s one of the concerns that we’ve had for a while and how it flows on the streets of our city,” Police Commissioner Ray Kelly said in a statement.

The image at the start of this post comes from the invaluable 1908 classic,The Air and Ventilation of Subways, available to read online here. For more on New York City’s subway vents, check out this BLDGBLOG post.

U2 Pankow>Ruhleben

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 20:11:01 +0100

endbahnhof:

Photos copyright Kate Seabrook

Tumblr is incredibly

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 20:21:37 +0100

langer:

We’re incredibly proud of our partners’ creativity and have been constantly amazed by how well these creations can fit into our Dashboards.
We’re incredibly excited to announce the launch of the new Tumblr app!
Dialogue about these behaviors is incredibly important and online communities can be extraordinarily helpful to people struggling with these difficult conditions.
Online dialogue about these acts and conditions is incredibly important; this prohibition is intended to reach only those blogs that cross the line into active promotion or glorification.
We’re incredibly sorry and appreciate your patience with us tonight.
Through their monthly events, the NY Tech Meetup has given countless startups support from an incredibly welcoming and encouraging community.
So today we’re incredibly proud to launch our Polish translation, making Tumblr available in nine languages!
Incredibly wealthy felines who stack cheese.
We’re incredibly humbled and grateful for your empathy and generosity.
An incredibly comprehensive guide to everything music at SXSW from a local, with band reviews and party fliers for the music portion of the festival.
This year’s conference is going to be the best yet, and we’re incredibly happy to be able to take part.
We’re incredibly confident in our ability to scale to serve all of the visitors to your awesome blogs.
We hit an incredibly difficult problem with the way the Queue processes handle their publishing step that forced us to unwind and rewrite a big chunk of our publishing routine.
We’re incredibly moved by the events happening across North Africa and the Middle East, especially the recent images, videos and commentary we’ve seen on Tumblr about Egypt.
We want you to know that we’re still right in the thick of the most comprehensive re-architecting our infrastructure has ever been through, and while you might still hit some bugs or errors this month, our incredibly capable team is working 24/7 to keep your blogs fast and stable.
But please always know that we truly care about your work as much as you do, and we have an incredibly capable team working incredibly hard to take good care of it.
Heather Peterson gets to make incredibly cool stuff all day and get paid for it.
And we’re incredibly honored that Time Out featured us in their lineup of the best places to work in New York City!
Four new incredibly special themes have joined Tumblr’s Premium Theme Garden!
But it does take advantage of Tumblr’s publishing tools to make it incredibly easy to build a portfolio.
And finally, despite the mess, it’s incredibly tempting to jump into a huge pile of snow whilst yelling “Cowabunga, dudes!”
Last week we had the honor of showcasing a few of the incredibly talented filmmakers on Tumblr.
To deal with the overwhelming volume of content that makes most real-time search incredibly unwieldy, we’ve developed a clustering engine that lets you quickly filter the 650,000 new Tumblr posts created every day, based on likes and reblogs.
Not only are these guys remarkable developers, they have an incredibly inspiring vision for building consumer products, and we couldn’t wait to start working with them on the next suite of Tumblr/iPhone features.
The Tumblr team worked incredibly hard to pull this together.

british technology postage stamp by maraid on Flickr.

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 00:34:05 +0100

british technology postage stamp by maraid on Flickr.

A List of "Men's Rights" Issues That Feminism Is Already Working On

Thu, 28 Mar 2013 21:21:01 +0000

From Lindy West’s post for Jezebel, “If I Admit That ‘Hating Men’ Is a Thing, Will You Stop Turning It Into a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy?”, a list:

Feminists do not want you to lose custody of your children. The assumption that women are naturally better caregivers is part of patriarchy.

Feminists do not like commercials in which bumbling dads mess up the laundry and competent wives have to bustle in and fix it. The assumption that women are naturally better housekeepers is part of patriarchy.

Feminists do not want you to have to make alimony payments. Alimony is set up to combat the fact that women have been historically expected to prioritize domestic duties over professional goals, thus minimizing their earning potential if their “traditional” marriages end. The assumption that wives should make babies instead of money is part of patriarchy.

Feminists do not want anyone to get raped in prison. Permissiveness and jokes about prison rape are part of rape culture, which is part of patriarchy.

Feminists do not want anyone to be falsely accused of rape. False rape accusations discredit rape victims, which reinforces rape culture, which is part of patriarchy.

Feminists do not want you to be lonely and we do not hate “nice guys.” The idea that certain people are inherently more valuable than other people because of superficial physical attributes is part of patriarchy.

Feminists do not want you to have to pay for dinner. We want the opportunity to achieve financial success on par with men in any field we choose (and are qualified for), and the fact that we currently don’t is part of patriarchy. The idea that men should coddle and provide for women, and/or purchase their affections in romantic contexts, is condescending and damaging and part of patriarchy.

Feminists do not want you to be maimed or killed in industrial accidents, or toil in coal mines while we do cushy secretarial work and various yarn-themed activities. The fact that women have long been shut out of dangerous industrial jobs (by men, by the way) is part of patriarchy.

Feminists do not want you to commit suicide. Any pressures and expectations that lower the quality of life of either gender are part of patriarchy. The fact that depression is characterized as an effeminate weakness, making men less likely to seek treatment, is part of patriarchy.

Feminists do not want you to be viewed with suspicion when you take your child to the park (men frequently insist that this is a serious issue, so I will take them at their word). The assumption that men are insatiable sexual animals, combined with the idea that it’s unnatural for men to care for children, is part of patriarchy.

Feminists do not want you to be drafted and then die in a war while we stay home and iron stuff. The idea that women are too weak to fight or too delicate to function in a military setting is part of patriarchy.

Feminists do not want women to escape prosecution on legitimate domestic violence charges, nor do we want men to be ridiculed for being raped or abused. The idea that women are naturally gentle and compliant and that victimhood is inherently feminine is part of patriarchy.

Feminists hate patriarchy. We do not hate you.

You should go and read the whole thing. It’s good.

"Transit First" At Forty

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 19:28:00 +0000

San Francisco’s Transit First policy turned forty last week. Unfortunately, to someone from a city like London (which actually puts public transport first), it looks like all mouth and no trousers.

Some articles I read over the weekend illustrate this nicely. Streetsblog SF has a look at the state of play:

today, the vast majority of San Francisco’s street space remains devoted to moving and storing private automobiles, making the public right-of-way hostile to walking and bicycling. Muni remains underfunded, with vehicle breakdowns and delays caused by car traffic a daily part of riding transit.

Livable City Executive Director Tom Radulovich, “but where there’s a real shortage of road space, in the most congested parts of the city, the car is still the priority.”

Admittedly, as a SPUR report in 1999 explains, it could have been worse:

Were it not for the transit-first policy, the city would have followed the path of so many other American cities, widening roads, narrowing sidewalks, demolishing downtown buildings and then filling the spaces with parking garages. We would have destroyed the very density and walkability that makes this city different from the rest of the country, that creates the high economic values of downtown, and that provides the quality of life we enjoy.

Unfortunately, the knowledge that resisting the car makes for a better city doesn’t seem to have stopped people from campaigning for their cars, as a report also at Streetblog, covering a meeting about removing parking spaces on Polk Street, notes.

Kowalski’s claims went unchallenged, and no one mentioned the evidence that merchants tend to wildly overestimate, like the survey on Columbus Avenue which found that just 14 percent of people arrived by car, and those people tended to spend less than people who arrived by other means.

One speaker was even cheered when he claimed that the project was part of the United Nation’s Agenda 21. Yes, when it comes to local planning decisions, San Francisco can be just as paranoid and provincial as rural Virginia.

The best project-by-project examination of the policy’s limited success comes from Morgan Fitzgibbons, writing in the Huffington Post. Here are just two of his four examples.

Where are we today five months after the official approval of the project? The Fell Street section has been re-striped but not buffered against traffic, and there is absolutely zero progress on Oak Street. Still today, hundreds of people literally risk their lives every time they ride the three-block stretch of Oak so that a few dozen people can have a place to put their idle private automobile while they aren’t using it. This is “Transit-First.”

The basic idea behind Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) is to redesign the street to separate buses from private automobile traffic so that the public transportation moves more quickly and is, therefore, a more viable option. Anybody who has ridden the notoriously slow-moving 38-Geary or the 47 or 49 lines on Van Ness knows how critical these projects are. Both were supposed to be implemented by 2012, but the current launch dates for the Van Ness and Geary improvements are 2016 and 2020, respectively.

Even the recently completed transit lanes on Church Street between 16th and Dolores are “prioritized for transit and taxis”, rather than being exclusively for their use. I realise that it’s probably not the first place to justify it, but surely the wide multiple lanes of Geary, slower now than in 1911 and busy despite losing its streetcar, is a perfect candidate? How can such a project take seven years?

All in all, it’s hard to disagree with Fitzgibbons conclusion.

When we declared ourselves a “Transit-First” city in 1973, we still had a sense of our responsibility to pave the way for the rest of the country and basked in the accompanying prestige that came along with it. Forty years later, we’ve lost our edge — we no longer lead the country in anything but distance between our stated values and our actions and a misguided commitment to paralyzing hyper-democracy.

Who Has John's Gait?

Wed, 20 Mar 2013 17:37:49 +0000

CIA CTO: you can be 100% identified by your gait. Which can be measured by 3-axis accelerometer, like in your phone or Fitbit. #dataconf
— jonathanstray (@jonathanstray) March 20, 2013

CIA CTO Ira Galt at GigaOM’s Structure:Data event, quoted by Jonathan Stray (via Shanley, who posted something similar).

studiox-nyc, via slavin: a team from Cambridge University and the Universidade Federal de Minas...

Wed, 13 Mar 2013 00:17:00 +0000

studiox-nyc, via slavin:

a team from Cambridge University and the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais have created an online game to crowdsource Londoners’ mental images of the city, serving up a series of ten random urban locations in Google Street View, and asking locals to name their nearest tube station and the borough they lie within.

The team’s goal is to draw a recognizability map of the city, in the hope that it will “inform the positive design of public facilities (e.g., civic buildings) and promote urban interventions (e.g., place landmark in key areas, refurbish memorable horrible buildings)” in such a way as to improve London’s overall imaginability. Check it out; it’s surprising difficult!

Nice project. I got 347 out of a possible 1000- it turns out London is big and telling one 1930s suburb from another is hard. While it’s true (as Kevin said) it’s not that much of a game, it’s an interesting project.