Coming Soon to a Skull Near You!

In the year 3000 . . .

Fry: So you're telling me they broadcast commercials into people's dreams?

Leela: Of course.

* * *

Fry: That's awful. It's like brainwashing.

Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?

Fry: Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games, on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams. No, sir-ee!

Ah, Fry, if only you hadn't frozen yourself through the 21st century, for in this amusing/disturbing post over at the Volokh Conspiracy, I see a whole new avenue of brain manipulation advertising just around the corner.

Consider the case of Mr. B (no relation - he's Dutch), who suffered from anxiety disorders and OCD for more than four decades.  He was treated with something called deep brain stimulation or DBS.  According to Wikipedia, DBS is:

a surgical treatment involving the implantation of a medical device called a brain pacemaker, which sends electrical impulses to specific parts of the brain.

Okay.  While it seems to work, its "underlying principles and mechanisms are still not clear" and it "directly changes brain activity in a controlled manner."  In other words, not something to be undertaken lightly.  It also seems like the kind of thing - changing brain activity - that might have some interesting side effects.

Which is what happened to Mr. B:

Mr. B., had never been a huge music lover. His musical taste was broad, covering Dutch-language songs, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, with a preference for the last named. While music did not occupy an important position in his live, his taste in music had always been very fixed and his preferences stayed the same throughout decades.

On average, a half year after DBS surgery, Mr. B. stated that he was turning into a Johnny Cash fan. He had been listening to the radio, when he coincidentally heard 'Ring of Fire' of the Country and Western singer and experienced that he was deeply affected by the song. Mr. B. started to listen to more songs of Johnny Cash and noticed that he was deeply moved by the raw and low-pitched voice of the singer. Moreover, he experienced that he preferred the performance of the songs in the Seventies and Eighties, due to the fullness of the voice of the older Johnny Cash in that period. His favorite songs, 'Folsom prison blues', 'Ring of fire' and 'Sunday morning coming down' had a certain rhythm with a fast tempo in common that moved him.

It would be hard to oversell just how much Mr. B is fallen under the spell of the Man In Black.  He bought all his albums and videos.  When he listens to the songs Mr. B "feels like he finds himself in a movie in which he plays the hero's part."  Mr. B also claims that "there is a Johnny Cash song for every emotion and every situation."

In other words, he's like a 10-year old girl who just discovered Justin Beiber.  Perhaps the brain zapping went a bit too far?  At least, it appears, the result isn't permanent - if the gizmo starts to malfunction, Mr. B forsakes Johnny and falls back into the arms of those other, lesser musicians.

The good news, of course, is that Mr. B appears to be cured of problems that have plagued him for his entire life and the side effect of a thrilling new cultural obsession seems like a small price to pay.  But let's go further - if we can change a person's musical tastes by zapping a certain area of the brain, then how long before advertisers are trying to do it?

Because you know, like Fry learned, if there's a way to jam an ad inside your brain, marketeers are going to make use of it.

Every Ubiquitous Tool Starts Somewhere

Anybody else remember Bank Street Writer? It was the first word processor I ever used, way back in elementary school on my Commodore 64. It had a few menus and was kind of WYSIWYG, but only in the most generous sense. Nonetheless, I knew enough about typewriters from playing around with my grandfather’s to realize that this was a step in the right direction.

At least Bank Street Writer fit on the desk in my room, though. That was not always the case:

Deighton stood outside his Georgian terrace home and watched as workers removed a window so that a 200-pound unit could be hoisted inside with a crane. The machine was IBM’s MTST (Magnetic Tape Selectric Typewriter), sold in the European market as the MT72. ‘Standing in the leafy square in which I lived, watching all this activity, I had a moment of doubt,’ the author, now 84, told me in a recent email. ‘I was beginning to think that I had chosen a rather unusual way to write books.’

Len Deighton was already a best-selling author in 1968 when an IBM tech, who repaired his typewriters, suggested he try their new contraption. It was just barely a “word processor” – when the technology was being developed it was labeled Textverarbeitung (“text processing”) by a German IBM executive – but it was pretty impressive, recording keystrokes on magnetic tape and replaying them at a rate of 150 words per minute.*

Not surprisingly, the first to master the MTST was Deighton’s assistant, Ellenor Handley:

In an email, Handley, now 73 and retired, detailed her role in Deighton’s writing process. ‘When I started Len was using an IBM Golfball machine to type his drafts,’ she wrote. ‘He would then hand-write changes on the hard copy which I would then update as pages or chapters as necessary by retyping—time-consuming perhaps but I quite liked it, as I felt a real part of the process and grew with the book.’

And, thus, the first novel written on a word processor, Bomber, about a World War II bombing raid, was born (the technological equal to Twain’s Life on the Mississippi, the first book submitted in typewritten form).

What’s amazing is not just how far the actual technology has come since the MTST was hauled up through Deighton’s window, but how ubiquitous word processing is. I write for a living and for pleasure, so I spend more time in Word than just about any other program (Word Perfect is a tool of the devil!). But even if you don’t write for a living, you use it all the time. The conventions of word processing software have even seeped out into other applications, such that we don’t give much thought any more to changing a font or running a spell check on an Email.

In fact, it’s hard to imagine what the next leap in technology could be that would sweep the word processor from the scene. Maybe some kind of neural link where the writer could simply download the contents of his mind to the page? No typing, no shuffling the mouse about. I might be down to try that, so long as I don’t have to take out a part of my house to fit it in.

* Interesting “small world” note: Deighton later wrote another book about World War II, specifically the Battle of Britain, called Fighter. Said German executive had fought in that battle, for the Luftwaffe, of course.

The Virtual Sky Is Falling! Or Maybe Not

I’m all for good stories about media-fueled inflated panics. Y2K. The Rapture. The world coming to an end according to the Mayans. Good stuff, all. But there comes a point where it’s hard to tut-tut the media for feeding a public frenzy when there doesn’t appear to be any evidence that’s what’s going on. Sort of an inflated panic about inflated panics, as it were.

Did you know there’s going to be an Internet “apocalypse” on July 9? Me neither. But according to this article at Salon:

The apocalyptic story line was once reserved for truly apocalyptic events. Nuclear war. The return of Christ. Environmental or economic collapse. But it’s 2012, and the apocalypse has become the basis for everything from Super Bowl commercials to summer romantic comedies . . . Just read coverage of the so-called Internet Doomsday virus, which will supposedly strike and shut down the Web on July 9.

Here’s the thing – the Salon piece doesn’t cite, link to, or quote any of that coverage. If it’s so pervasive, I figured a quick Google search would provide a cascade of it. Alas, all I found was a few techy articles and links back to the Salon piece. This article at TechRepublic about the underlying problem (and how to fix it), too, begins:

If one were to believe some headlines, there’s an Internet apocalypse coming on July 9, 2012, when hundreds of thousands of computers will be unable to access the Internet because of actions by the FBI.

Again, however, there are not quotes, cites, or links to these pervasive headlines. I’m pretty plugged into the news cycle, especially when it comes to Net-related stuff and I’ve never heard of this impending doom. Given the roots of the alleged panic (the FBI is involved, after all), you’d think that it would have spawned some good conspiracy theories, at least. I haven’t found any. The actual details of the criminal investigation are kind of interesting, though, and are set out in the Salon piece.

Don’t get me wrong – the media frequently latches onto some small problem and blows it entirely out of proportion. Like this:

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or this:



So it’s good to hold them accountable when they do. But I’m not sure that’s happening in this case. If you’re going to get into a panic about a bullshit panic, at least provide some evidence of the panic in the first place, all right?

The Iceberg Was Framed

There were no heroes, no villains . ... Instead, there were a lot of human beings trying to do their best in the situation as they saw it.

Sunday marks the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, and the death of more than 1500 of its passengers and crew. As one might expect when that kind of milestone rolls around, there’s lots of renewed talk about the wreck and what happened that night. Hey, if the occasion warrants a rollout of the 3D version of Cameron’s movie (which Jezebel watched again so you don’t have to) and a Blu-Ray version of A Night to Remember, we might as well try to better understand the actual event, right?

That better understanding comes in the form of two new theories about how Titanic came to be slashed by an iceberg. One, from a Brit named Tim Maltin (whose quote is set forth above), involving a cold air mirages:

Most people know mirages as natural phenomena caused when hot air near the Earth’s surface bends light rays upward. In a desert, the effect prompts lost travelers to mistake patches of blue sky for pools of water.

But another kind of mirage occurs when cold air bends light rays downward. In that case, observers can see objects and settings far over the horizon. The images often undergo quick distortions — not unlike the wavy reflections in a funhouse mirror.

* * *

Mr. Maltin’s book shows how mirages could have created false horizons that hid the iceberg from the Titanic’s lookouts. By this theory, the intersection of dark sea and starry sky would have looked blurry, reducing the contrast with the looming iceberg.

If the crew had understood the phenomenon, Maltin argues, the crew would have slowed the ship and been better able to deal with the ice.

As for the ice itself, researchers from a Texas university and Sky & Telescope magazine offered an additional complication:

The team discovered that Earth had come unusually close to the Sun and Moon that winter, enhancing their gravitational pulls on the ocean and producing record tides. The rare orbits took place between December 1911 and February 1912 — about two months before the disaster.

The researchers suggest that the high tides refloated masses of icebergs traditionally stuck along the coastlines of Labrador and Newfoundland and sent them adrift into the North Atlantic shipping lanes.

I lead off with the quote from Maltin because I think it gets to the heart of things, even if his particular theory doesn’t pan out. “Human error” is a broad heading under which falls everything from outright stupidity (maybe even malevolence) to errors made in good faith. There’s a world of difference in saying that someone did the wrong thing for understandable reasons versus simply fucking up. As I’ve said before, real life is rarely black and white.

Titanic calls Carpathia in the night
Through nothingness, through 57 miles
And the sparks still fly, down through history
And down through every walk of life

It’s also worth remembering, on this 100th anniversary, that of the 2200 people on board Titanic, about one-third actually survived the wreck. That’s largely due to the fact that Titanic was equipped with a state of the art wireless setup and Jack Phillips, the senior operator, stayed at his post until the ship went down:

Wireless was still a relatively young technology at the time of the Titanic's maiden voyage.

The Marconi company, the Edwardian equivalent of a top technology brand, had put its wireless operators on board some of the more prestigious ships.

The Titanic, as the showcase of an ambitious, optimistic era, had the biggest and best wireless equipment in the world.

At the time, the wireless was used more as a high-tech amusement for passengers (who sent news along to friends and loved ones during the voyage). Ships did share information, but the idea that the wireless was first and foremost a safety system hadn’t yet caught on.

It did after Titanic went down and Carpathia was called to rescue the survivors. It was, perhaps, an epoch defining moment. The theme off the last album by The Tangent, COMM, is (not surprisingly) communication. The highlight, for me at least, is “Titanic Calls Carpathia” (quoted above), in which lyricist/vocalist/keyboardist/prime mover Andy Tillison argues that the rescue of the Titanic survivors was really the dawn of the digital age. Without the ability to reach out “through nothingness, through 57 miles,” many (if not most) of those who survived the initial sinking of Titanic would not have survived.

We take that communication, and that connection, for granted today. Our first instincts when some kind of calamity occurs is to call 9-1-1 and record the event on video, which then gets uploaded for all the world to see. It wasn’t just a different time and place where Titanic went down, it was a different world. It’s worth remembering that on this 100th anniversary and marveling in the speed of progress.

Orwellian Nightmare? There’s an App for That!

Oh, joy, just what my state needs – easier electronic snoopery, courtesy of your fellow citizens (via) :

In less time than it takes to play a turn in Words With Friends, smartphone users can report a ‘suspicious person’ to the West Virginia Department of Homeland Security.

The domestic counterterrorism agency’s West Virginia branch, in association with the West Virginia governor’s office, unveiled a new mobile app called the Suspicious Activity Reporting Application this week. ‘With the assistance of our citizens, important information can quickly get into the hands of our law enforcement community allowing them to provide better protection,’ Gov. Earl Ray Tomblin said in a statement. The app is available in the Apple App Store and the Android Market.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with harnessing current technology to make real emergency reporting easier. After all, first responders of any stripe can’t be everywhere at once, but there are regular folks damned near anywhere. Still, it just sounds creepy. It doesn’t help that there’s no really well explained quality control, thus:

On its face, there’s nothing about the app that protects either the civil liberties of citizens or the busy schedules of West Virginia homeland security operatives. You don’t have to affirm that you have evidence of a crime, or even a suspected crime, to send information to the Fusion Center.

* * *

In other words, there’s nothing in the app to stop you from snapping a picture of your annoying neighbor and sending it to the attention of federal and state counterterrorism agents in West Virginia, who can keep information on your neighbor’s face, body and perhaps his vehicle for an unspecified period of time.

The potential for abuse is even more of a concern when you consider that West Virginia is hardly a hotbed of terrorist activity (or criminal activity in general). So why, of all things to be in the lead on, have we decided to focus on improving the ability of average citizens to snoop and report on each other? Forget Mountain Mama – bring on Big Brother!