Sometimes I read something that I just can’t believe, where it seems to be just too insane for anyone to have possibly said or done it. Today was such a day. So here we have Recruiting Sergeant Marcia Ramode educating African American Corey Andrew in an exchange of emails as to why being Gay doesn’t let you into the United States Military. Please excuse the capital letters, it would seem that Sgt. Ramode doesn’t know how to use the Caps Lock key:

YOU GO BACK TO AFRICA AND DO YOUR GAY VOODOO LIMBO TANGO AND WANGO DANCE AND JUMP AROUND AND PRANCE AND RUN ALL OVER THE PLACE HALF NAKED THERE AND PRACTICE YOUR GAY MORALS OVER THERE THAT’S WHERE YOU BELONG

Well. Yes. Indeed. My calendar tells me that this is the 21st Century, but I think the half-naked gay Africans dancing voodoo the world over have sent me back to the Middle Ages, just replace witches with gays and you’d be spot on. Get out the faggots and burn them!*

However, the whole email exchange contains so many great little nuggets that I can’t resist adding this little quote on, too:

YOU SHOULD SAY THANK YOU MILITARY PEOPLE FOR WHAT YOU DO SO THAT YOU CAN LIVE A FREE LIFE IN THIS COUNTRY. FREEDOM IS NOT FREE.

I can see how “freedom” having the word “free” in it can confuse the issue. Thanks for putting things straight, Marcia.

* In case you don’t know, a faggot is in fact a bundle of wood. What were you thinking?

For anyone interested in privacy, security and surveillance issues, Roger Clarke’s website is a must. Well-researched and insightful, it has become a regular read for me since he covers a lot of issues that have arisen from technology-saturated societies and the natural marriage between IT, governments and corporations in creating ubiquitous surveillance.

Today’s quote is from a paper Clarke wrote in 2006 entitled “What’s Privacy?“, in which he offers this wonderful definition of privacy:

Privacy is the interest that individuals have in sustaining a ‘personal space’, free from interference by other people and organisations.

We would do well to keep this definition in mind before privacy simply comes to mean that corporations and governments can still conduct massive surveillance and collect information on you, but they’ll try make sure it’s secured from unauthorized access. Privacy is not, and should never be, the same as data security.

If you visit regularly - it’s nice to delude myself that someone does - you’ll have noticed a few changes on the blog. For starters, my Daily Delicious news postings have been removed from the archives, mainly because it was getting a bit embarrassing to see there were more of those than actual posts. Oh, and the site’s gone through a major overhaul in design to try and make it a bit more user friendly and ridiculously good-looking. If you didn’t notice, you don’t visit often enough.

Finally, I’m going to try and remain a bit more focused and do “stuff” on a more regular basis because my brain is now on a diet to cut out fast-food junk that pollutes the airwaves. By stuff I mean my own interests: comments on film, photography, writing, philosophy, science and technology, politics and sociology etc. You’ll have noticed, for example, a lot more Word of the Day and Quote of the Day posts. These will be regular features as it’s my goal to try learn something new every day and to share it with whoever is interested. Can’t guarranttee that I’ll send ‘em up every day - I do have an annoying thing called work that bugs me a lot, and a wonderful wife who is not annoying but deserves nothing less than all my attention - but I’ll do my best.

Oh, and expect a few new topics, like Photographer Spotlight and Favourite Thinkers. See if you can figure out what they’ll be about.

Business Week are running a piece on motion capture technology, saying that it is transforming the way companies do business, as well as advertise. From the article:

Motion capture is starting to transform how businesses market their products as well as design and manufacture them. This spring the Las Vegas McCarren International Airport will set up large plasma screens with a motion- tracking component that lets advertisers bring pedestrians into their commercials. When you walk past a car ad, for example, the vehicle might move at the same speed you’re walking. When you turn to look at the driver, he’ll turn to look at you, and you’ll be staring into an image of your own face. Dozens of blue-chip aerospace, auto, and heavy-equipment makers, from Lockheed Martin to BMW to Caterpillar already use motion tracking to let workers collaborate in shared virtual environments, sometimes when they are thousands of miles apart. Together they can test the ergonomics of a design for a car or a plane. “Any company that creates a product used by people needs to understand how the human body moves,” says Iek van Cruyningen, head of securities at Libertas Capital Group, a specialist investment bank. “Motion-tracking systems and virtual simulations accelerate product development and boost productivity.”

Some interesting questions arise from all this, all of them to do with privacy (aside from the fact that most billboards are just damn ugly monstrosities invading our personal space). What if I don’t consent to having my face and body displayed on a massive billboard or an advert? Whose permission do they ask for in order to film me? How do I opt out so that any possible cameras they’re using don’t film me? How long before ubiquitous advertising such as this essentially becomes out-sourced surveillance for the city’s/country’s law enforcement?

I’m pretty sure that Second Life - or, at least, a business in Second Life - must be looking at this and thinking, “Wouldn’t it be cool to have a motion capture system that overlaid our real world store into the virtual world?” Tie that in with arphid store-loyalty cards, and you’ve got a perfect real-world simulation of your store and everyone in it.

Pretty much what I had pictured before. Yeah, pretty cool. Too bad it’ll be used to just track everything you do.

I’m also curious as to how long it’ll be before ad busters and culture jammers start hacking into these 21st Century billboards to replace them with their own. Looking forward to that one.

Ever wonder how a robot might look like dancing? Have a look at Keepon, “a small creature-like robot developed to perform emotional and attentional interaction with children”. Insanely addictive little critter! [Via New Scientist]

The International Herald Tribune have a wonderful article up on why we laugh. Through a study conducted by neuroscientists Robert Provine and Jaak Panksepp, they produced some rather interesting evidence to suggest that we laugh not because something is funny, but because “It is a way to make friends and also make clear who belongs where in the status hierarchy.”

“Primal laughter evolved as a signaling device to highlight readiness for friendly interaction,” Panksepp says. “Sophisticated social animals such as mammals need an emotionally positive mechanism to help create social brains and to weave organisms effectively into the social fabric.”

This expands on previous research from Panskepp that showed animals laugh, too. There is also a fascinating paper available from the 1996 issue of American Scientist written by Provine, which gives further detail of his previous research into the subject.

I’m still curious why I laugh at a funny film or TV show when there’s no-one around. Surely that’s not a social function?

The Milgram Experiment remains one of the most interesting (and controversial) psychological experiments of the 20th Century. Conducted by Stanley Milgram in 1961, the experiment was designed to test whether or not ordinary people were willing to administer a series of increasingly severe electric shocks on the orders of a figure of authority to a test subject who, in reality, was an actor pretending to be electrocuted. Astonishingly, 65% of all participants were willing to do so. Some great footage here.

Update: the old object to the video I linked to was removed from You Tube, so I’ve added in the new one.

Keeping in mind that realism as a political school only appeared when first used by the international relations theorists E. H. Carr and Hans J. Morgenthau, the basic principles have a rich history. One of the most common historical examples of this tradition is the Ancient Greek historian Thucydides and his History of the Peloponnesian Wars, dating back more than 2400 years.

In a nutshell, Realism is considered to be a set of laws for elites that span both time and space i.e. history and geopolitics. Those laws have common strands threading throughout history. Of course, there are a wide variety of different schools within realism (far too many to cover here) but all of them contain some basic principles.

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Today’s quote comes from German chemist Ernst Otto Fischer, winner of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 1973:

 As machines become more and more efficient and perfect, so it will become clear that imperfection is the greatness of man.

I’m a great believer in this myself, and think a world of uniform efficiency and perfection is one of dull, straight, black and white lines.

The New York Times has a great article about two competing trends, namely using drugs to augment intelligence and creativity, or using “mind expanding” technology to do it instead. (Forget, for a moment, the weed-puffing dope smokers would tell you there’s a natural creative enhancer already). One argument it gives against using drugs is that the “creativity shortcut” of using a pill may create a “delusional state” where “weak ideas are mistaken for strong ones”.

Supporters of using technology argue that computer networks are great enablers of human creativity because they can “share ideas with people they�??ve never met”. Quoting Lawrence Lessig, he points out that the Internet helps create “ideas that are more robust and create a wider range of perspectives.�?�

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