Culture: July 2003 Archive Page

"The self-service checkout lines that are springing up everywhere are the first sign of the trend. | The problem, of course, is that all of these robots will eliminate a huge portion of the jobs currently held by human beings. For example, there are 3.5 million jobs in the fast food industry alone. Many of those will be lost to kiosks. Many more will be lost to robots that can flip burgers and clean bathrooms. Eventually they will all be lost. The only people who will still have jobs in the fast food industry will be the senior management team at corporate headquarters. | The same sort of thing will happen in retail stores, hotels, airports, factories, construction sites, delivery companies and so on. All of these jobs will evaporate at approximately the same time, leaving all of those workers unemployed." Marshall Brain --Robot Nation (MarshallBrain.com)

For the record, the idea of cheap Robot labor causing a worldwide economic depression, leading to food riots and internation wars (fought with Robot armies) forms part of the backstory of Karel Capek's R.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots), the 1921 Czech play that introduced the word "robot" to the world.

"'There is no more feminism,' I explain. Game Over. But it took me a day or two to name the new game. It's 'girlism' -- women want to be sexy girls and use all the tricks girls use. Crying, flirting, begging, winking, stomping their feet when they don't get their way, general trotting around showing off their long legs and whatever else they decide to show off thereby distracting and derailing men." Halley Suitt --Whatever Happened to Feminism? (Halley's Comment)

Oh, the battle of the sexes can be so... cute. Hollywood ditches women over 35 because the men (see "laddism") who are likely to be influenced by crying, flirting, begging, winking stomping, trotting and leg-showing-off women are far more likely to be influenced by a crying, flirting, begging, winking, stomping, trotting and leg-showing-off 20-year-old than by a crying, flirting, begging, winking, stomping, trotting and leg-showing-off 40-year-old.

Though it's hard to tell (what with all the girlist bloggers crying, flirting, begging, winking, stomping, trotting and showing-off their legs so much), Girlism sounds to me like ageism -- a reaction against the vigilance and self-control espoused by feminist foremothers (who seem far less relevant to many of today's young women).

"We actually asked for a great big red button, but they wouldn't give us one." -- Royal Navy submarine crewmember, on the method for firing cruise missiles.Notable Quotes (BBC)

From an article titlled "10 Things We Didn't Know This Time Last Week".

"To be named after the number one website for vegetarian information -- what could be better?" -- GoVeg.com, formerly known as Karin Robertson --Woman Changes Her Name To GoVeg.com (NC Buy)

See an earlier entry about the Cool 2B Real Home Page, ( "Sponsored by America's Beef Producers").

"After reading this, I don't see how anybody can be concerned about computer game players axing orcs." Torill Mortensen --Game Violence (Thinking With My Fingers)

I'm hoping somebody will jump up and announce that the whole "wimpy guys dress up in camoflage gear and hunt naked women with paintball guns" thing will be exposed as a PR stunt or a performance art project (Snopes says this one is 'undetermined' at the moment):

Perhaps more significant is that no business address or phone number is to be found on the Hunting for Bambi site, and several readers who expressed interest in booking a "hunt" have told us their e-mail inquiries to the Hunting for Bambi folks went unanswered. Those are rather odd business practices for a legitimate company looking to book customers at $10,000 a pop.

And will someone tell these guys that in the movie, "Bambi" was a male deer?

Update: 17 July. I looked more closely at the website, which is pretty obviously geared towards selling videos that are pretty obviously staged. How low can we -- as a society -- go?

Update: 22 July. Snopes now classifies the Bambi story as "false."

"If you really want to get to know someone, try rummaging through their CD collection. An study has proved that when it comes to judging a person's character, their favourite music is one of the most valuable clues....Almost anything about a man or a woman - from their looks, intelligence and fitness, to politics, wealth and even conversational ability - can be gleaned from the tunes they enjoy most." --You Probably Think This Song Is About You (The Age)

You can also tell a lot about a person's personality by the way they dress, what they have on their hard drive, what books they read, what TV shows the watch, and what they link to on their weblogs. While the science behind the academic article being reviewed is probably sound, this is a fairly puffy news story.

Music is simply not a huge part of my life -- I go for days without listening to any, and months or years without buying any.

I can hear the shocked voices now -- "Oh! How can he hate music! Has he no soul?"

Of couse I don't dislike all music... it's just that I'm not particularly passionate about the music I do like (and I couldn't even classify that for you).

This isn't a rant against music... I gather that other people's passion for music just seems as strange to me as my passion for writing and cybertext probably seems to some of my non-technical associates.

"Fred and Tiffany quickly came to one of their first decisions as a couple. It was about computers: Sharing was not going to work. Each one of the four children would get his or her own machine. It wasn't a choice they made lightly....The cost, some $800 per computer, seemed like a reasonable investment for peace within the family." Ariana Eunjung Cha --Home Alone: One of the First Decisions This Blended Family Made Was: to Each His Own Computer (WashPost -- Will Expire)

In high school I pitied a friend of mine whose parents limited her to 15 minutes of telephone conversation per day. "Why don't you get another phone?" She would only smile brightly sweetly like a good little Catholic school girl and say, "Train the teenager, not the technology," or something like that.

Last I heard, she had run away from home to be a roadie for a heavy metal Christian band.

"In most job-filling situations, the employer has the luxury of choosing from several well-qualified applicants, all of whom could probably do the job. It is then that the little things, like the common but often unrecognized mistakes described here, almost always come into play. Make sure you avoid them, so they don't cost you a shot at the job." Peter Vogt --Five Ways to Say, 'I'm Unprofessional' (MonsterTrak)

One of the tips is a warning against "cutesy" e-mail addresses. Are you reading this, anniepookins? :)

Via the apparently defunct Envision Entrepreneurship Weblog.

"I had always rejected the suburban ideal of the carefully clipped and methodically poisoned greensward, with its connotations of Babbittry, mundane middle-class aesthetics, and casual ecological depredation. But somehow, in the verdured acreage behind my home--where lately I have taken to carving crop circles and leaving elaborate paisleys of wildflowers intact--I find myself. | I mow, therefore I am." Woody Hochswender --Backyard Philosopher: I Mow, Therefore I Am (Opinion Journal)

I liked this essay, though I find an even greater sense of accomplishment as I develop the ability to fix toilets.

"Koppel's group found that the single biggest difference is that women are far more likely than men to use personal pronouns-'I', 'you', 'she', 'myself', or 'yourself' and the like. Men, in contrast, are more likely to use determiners-'a,' 'the,' 'that,' and 'these'-as well as cardinal numbers and quantifiers like 'more' or 'some.' As one of the papers published by Koppel's group notes, men are also more likely to use 'post-head noun modification with an of phrase'-phrases like 'garden of roses.'" Clive Thompson summarizes forthcoming schoarship on gender and language. --He and She: What's the Real Difference? (Boston Globe)

I enjoyed reading the tidbit about how the first version of their paper was rejected by a major journal on the grounds that it was anti-feminist. After "[o]ne of the coauthors, Anat Shimoni, added her middle name 'Rachel' to her byline," the authors got no further criticism.

"Because everything in her home is waterproof, the housewife of 2000 can do her daily cleaning with a hose." Waldemar Kaemepffert
--Miracles of the Next Fifty Years [2000 as predicted in 1950]

I love retrofuture.

This article is reproduced on the MIT Architecture website, but the page doesn't give full source information, and hacking the URL doesn't work.

"I say only three types of people claim they don't like Krispy Kremes: nutritionists (your basic glazed has 200 calories and 12 grams of fat), Dunkin' Donuts franchisees, and compulsive liars....It was Mack who came up with the concept of "doughnut theater." They put the doughnut-making equipment in stores so that people could see the doughnuts cook for exactly 115 seconds in 365-degree vegetable shortening, after which the precious confections plow through a glaze waterfall before curving 180 degrees around to the counter so that a salesperson can pluck a hot one right off the line and hand it to the drooling customer." Andy Serwer --The Hole Story: How Krispy Kreme Became the Hottest Brand (Fortune)

During the summer after I graduated from high school, my buddy Eric and I would buy a couple boxes of Krispy Kremes and drive around late at night to the houses of girls we knew.

When they opened the door at 10pm on a weeknight, instead of saying, "It's 10pm on a weeknight!" they would say, "Donuts!"

If they invited us in, great. If not, we'd move on.

And yes, I am filing this under "Technology" because them things are engineering marvels. Mmmm...

"It is the kind of thing that most Japanese young women wouldn't think twice about doing.... They might spot a new hairstyle or a new dress in a glossy fashion magazine and they want to know what their friends think - so they take a quick snap with their mobile phone camera and send everybody a picture. | But the publishers of those magazines feel they are being cheated out of valuable sales." Quentin Sommerville --Japan's 'Digital Shoplifting' Plague (BBC)

This is yet another attempt to preserve an Old Media way of thinking about the world.

While I can certianly understand their efforts -- nobody wants to see their business model go down the drain -- it's not going to work. What about bypassing all the paper costs, and selling access to a subscription service that e-mails trendy photos directly to the phones of those who want them, for a few pennies per photo?

My wife saves whole magazines just because there is a single photo of something she likes; what a waste of trees (and space!).