Teaching kids to be neuroscientists... or psychokillers... you decide.

At Metafilter:

After a TED Talk demonstration and a successful Kickstarter, Backyard Brains plans to release a kit instructing kids to strap a miniature backpack to cockroaches and insert electrodes into its brain, allowing the cockroach to be controlled by a smartphone app. Some scientists are less than pleased with the ethics of the project.

At the "less than pleased" link, BBC quotes a Backyard Brains spokeswoman, who says they're trying to get kids interested in the "woefully under-taught" subject of neuroscience, which is "crucially important... especially... when diseases of the brain such as Alzheimer's take a heavier toll within society."

That "heavier toll" presumably refers to the aging Baby Boomers, who are going to be hard to handle as our brains fail, and wouldn't it be nice if insect-trained youngsters one day implant devices into our brain that can be used to keep us moving about — going to the bathroom, bathing, dressing, getting in and out of chairs and beds — on the force of whatever is left of our own atrophying muscles instead of needing to do the physical work themselves?

Everyone will be a winner, as we feel independent despite senility, and the younger folks can avoid having to touch us and listen to our nonsense. They can be in another room, feeling like they're playing a video game. And so what if they prank us? We'll imagine that we are sprightly, enlivened by impish silliness. Oh, I don't know what just got into me!

And of course, there's the old philosophical problem: How do you know that isn't already what life is, with some devil moving you this way and that, putting ideas into your head?

Googling in the theater.

Remember when Pee Wee Herman got arrested for masturbating in a movie theater? That was long ago. It must have been before home video, because why go to a theater to masturbate? Exposure? The thrill of potential discovery? A need for just the right degree of intimacy with others? Because once pornography is subject only to boring disapproval from bland people, one must look for another way to feel that you're doing something titillatingly wrong?

But today, the transgression is Googling in the theater. Googling, long ago, could have been a slang term for masturbating. (Are you googling again?!) But those days are past. Googling is research, and research in the theater is a subversive activity.

From Professor Meltsner's essay about the play "Arguendo," discussed in the previous post:

[The play] is replete with jargon and enough insider's free expression law that even many lawyers in the audience were grabbing smart phones to do some instant Googling.

Do they Google during the performance or wait until intermission? It happens that I was using my iPhone during intermissions at a play last night. We saw "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead" at the American Players Theatre, and since we hadn't taken the opportunity the theatre offers this summer to freshen up our knowledge of "Hamlet," there were passages of "Hamlet" I wanted to read to go along with "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern," which is a play that has 2 minor characters from "Hamlet" dealing with their situation in that larger story that they witness only in fragments.

While others went off to pee or to sip a glass of wine, I stayed put and read. (To be honest, I wasn't doing research on the internet. Reception was bad where we were in the woods, and I have a Shakespeare app on my iPhone.)

More from Meltsner's essay:

What did I expect from a play based not so much on the story of an important law case but on the particularized verbal event that is a Court argument in such a case? Plainly the Company wasn't interested in turning out teaching materials for those like me who train advocates but, then, Collins was advised by all-star legal journalist Emily Bazelon and law professor and Broadway producer Nicholas Rosenkranz...

There's a name: Rosenkranz. Pure coincidence that I should trip over that this morning. No meaning.

I'm Googling and searching in the text of "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern," looking for "meaning." Literally. I'm searching on the word "meaning" to get some snappy way to bring this post in for a landing.

Aha! Guildenstern is talking about "the meaning of order" and how if we "happened to discover, or even suspect, that our spontaneity was part of their order, we'd know we be lost." He refers to the Chinese philosopher who "dreamed he was a butterfly, and from that moment he was never quite sure that he was not a butterfly dreaming it was a Chinese philosopher." There's a pause and then Rosencrantz jumps up and shouts "Fire!"

Well, that's convenient for bringing this post in for a landing — a joke about a Supreme Court text about shouting fire in a crowded theater. Here, let me Google that for you.

Guildenstern says "Where?" and Rosencrantz says: "It's all right — I'm demonstrating the misuse of free speech. To prove it exists." He looks at us, the audience, and obviously we are sitting there, unreacting, the suspension of disbelief having secured our disbelief in the possibility of a fire. Rosencrantz says: "Not a move. They should burn to death in their shoes."

"A fingerprint of the phone user, photographed from a glass surface, was enough to create a fake finger that could unlock an iPhone 5s secured with TouchID."

"This demonstrates – again – that fingerprint biometrics is unsuitable as access control method and should be avoided."

Via Metafilter, where somebody says:

It might be worth noting that the amount of effort required here seems to be significantly more than the effort required to pick a lock, and we're not all saying, "hey, locks are imperfect, it was stupid of the builder to even bother putting them on my house!"

Something is better than nothing, and no security is perfect.

Yeah, and if only the original owner's finger would work, it would create an incentive to steal the phone and sever and take a finger.

"Scandal! Caught playing iPhone game at 3+ hour Senate hearing - worst of all I lost!"

Tweets John McCain, who was photographed playing video poker during the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hearing on the proposed military attack on Syria.

Is it okay to play games to deal with tedium when the subject is war? If caught in the act, is it better to apologize and stress the seriousness of the hearing or to crack a joke? Worst of all I lost.... worst of all, you are taking us to war!

To be honest, if I needed to pay attention to John Kerry's talking, it would help to play video solitaire. I wouldn't want to be seen doing it, though, if I were a decisionmaker, but I do understand how this minimal, partial diversion of attention keeps you mind from drifting into thoughts that would interfere with listening.

"I'm Internet personality intended to be home when it's not really person."

So says a note I dictated to Siri while walking with my iPhone yesterday. I saw at the time that Siri's transcription was terrible, but I thought it had enough key words that I'd remember what I'd intended to tell myself.

Now, I'm thinking about the mistranscription — and all the billions of mistranscriptions — that live forever in the government's data mine. (The government is creating a mine, but to have a mine is not to mine. And even to call it a "mine" is to assume that what's in there can be extracted and is worth extracting.)

Don't try to understand the quoted text. The word "home" was a substitution for some other word. Whatever the insight was, it wasn't about home. It's worse than gibberish because it's only part wrong, but I don't know where the wrong ends. I only know there is no home.

I do remember — in my own mind, which is not (yet) in the data mine — that I was thinking about the blog post "Does how to cook bacon count as my personal life?," where I was talking about the false impression that my readers have that they are seeing my "personal life." That feeling is, perhaps, what the people who like to read this blog enjoy. But — and here's what came to mind as I was out walking around in real life — what is that real life if that real life consists of generating a false impression of personality?

"I am here at YO! Sushi to test the new prototype iTray, the latest gimmick to grace a London restaurant."

"It is part waiter, part attack-helicopter, which conspires to be both menacing and inefficient. Atop the remote-controlled flying drone is perched a tray of food.... The drone is being controlled by a waitress, who is using an iPhone and the Japanese restaurant's wi-fi to try to steer the contraption, and my lunch, towards me. On the third attempt, the prawn crackers get caught in the updraught and are immediately sliced in the blades of the chopper, causing carbohydrate shrapnel to go flying in all directions. I take cover behind the soy sauce bottle...."

"Bronx deejay Francisco Diego Jr., otherwise known as Tech Trackz, dropped his iPhone on the subway tracks early Saturday..."

"... and leaped down to grab it, but was shocked by the third rail and then struck by the No. 2 train at Wakefield-241st St. station."

“He’s not the type to jump into the subway to get it,” said friend Kevin Atterbury, 16. “He would just go get a new one. That’s why this is so shocking.”

But family members said Diego had ventured onto the tracks in the past.

“He’s done it before, which is why he tried to do it again,” said Diego’s sister Nandy, 19. “But this time it wasn’t successful. I feel like my heart has been ripped out.”

An iPhone, especially the latest model, makes you a big theft target.

Here are a few things you can do to limit the risk and the damage.

"Yawn, and then some. Will we never be rid of the snobby blight of the Bloomsberries?"

Terry Teachout, bemoaning the "2 entire walls... devoted to Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant" at the "Inventing Abstraction" show at the MoMa.

One of the many things triumphantly demonstrated by "Inventing Abstraction" is the sheer volume of second- and third-rate art... that was generated by the rise of the abstractionists. The imitability of so many key figures of the movement never ceases to fascinate me.

If I were in NYC today, I would scamper over to see the big show before it closes. But I'm here in Madison, Wisconsin, where the corresponding spectacle is "1934: A New Deal for Artists" at the Chazen Museum. Here's the museum's propaganda:

During the Great Depression, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt promised a “new deal for the American people,” initiating government programs to foster economic recovery. Realizing that Americans needed not only employment but also the inspiration art could provide, the administration created the Public Works of Art Project, the first federal program to support the arts. Although short-lived, the PWAP employed thousands of artists to paint regional, recognizable subjects—from portraits to cityscapes and street scenes to landscapes and rural life. These artworks were displayed in schools, libraries, post offices, museums, and government buildings, vividly capturing the realities and ideals of the era. 1934: A New Deal for Artists celebrates the 75th anniversary of the PWAP, presenting 56 vibrant paintings from the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s unparalleled collection.

"Vividly" and "vibrant" are words. So are "dully" and "dreary." The one painting you can see at the link is far better than nearly everything else in the show, and I can only imagine the looks of the thousands of other paintings that were cranked out in this government jobs program and foisted on the schoolkids and library-goers of America. I moved quickly from one painting to the next, and — unfortunately or fortunately — I was alone, because much cynical mockery went unsaid.

I realize only now that I could have worn my iPhone with its headset and a recording app running and muttered my lines as if talking to someone by phone. Would that be wrong?

What would you prefer to have inflicted on you in the form of way too many paintings — New York City's snobbish adoration of the Bloombury Group or Madison, Wisconsin's politically medicinal devotion to FDR?

"Would You Rather Have Google Glass or a Smart Watch?"

"When you think of the world five years from now, do you picture the masses wearing smart eyewear or Dick Tracy-style smart watches?"

I see the problem with Google Glass — it will probably make most people look stupid and even if you happen to be someone who might look cool, people won't give you credit for looking cool because they'll feel that you're intruding on them in ways they don't even quite understand. Are you streaming me to the whole world? Are you finding out things that will be used to take advantage of me? That is, either you'll either make yourself look stupid or you'll make other people feel that you're making them look stupid. Must we all self-defensively gear up? And what's to stop people from snatching those things right off your face? Not only will they attract the traditional thief, they may provoke drunks and other hotheads to grab them and break them, the way bullies in old movies used to swipe the nerd's glasses and stomp on them.

But a Smart Watch... what's the point? I used to wear a watch, but I stopped when I got a cell phone which was fully capable of informing me of the time. I carry the phone in a pocket or a handbag, and what's my motivation to strap it to my wrist? I realize that's what people with pocket watches must have said when the original wristwatches came out.

And, now that I think of it, I have engaged in some activities — e.g., running — where I've rigged a less-than-perfect way to bring the iPhone along. (I've carried it in my hand, stuck it inside a sports-bra, and bought a little "waist pack" gizmo.) And I've been in situations — e.g., paddleboarding — where I needed some waterproof container, didn't have one, then bought something that was clumsy, ugly, and hard to use. And when I go swimming, I'm forced to leave the phone in the car/hotel room or I've got to hide it under a towel and then worry that someone will steal it. So, okay, the Smart Watch would be pretty useful, especially if it's cheap, comfortable, waterproof, and doesn't make you a theft target. Make it not work if someone else has it (and inform the thief community).

So I'm voting: Smart Watch.

At the Vape Café..

... you can e-everything you want.

(Screencatch from this.)

At the Ice Pellet Café...

... have a drink of your favorite precipitation. Please make me a drink of grain alcohol and rainwater, and help yourself to whatever you'd like. No one seems to be ordering ice pellets but I'm thinking it's a bit like bubble tea.

"Welcome to New York, pal — now go to jail."

"An Italian tourist spent his second night in the city behind bars after staff at an upscale East Side steakhouse called cops when he claimed he left his wallet at a friend’s place."

Graziano Graziussi, a 43-year-old lawyer from Naples, is a regular at Smith & Wollensky....

“I was going to leave my iPhone,” he said. “I suggested they bring a bus boy with me... It would have been an easy trip.”

One police veteran told the Daily News he wasn’t surprised to hear that the restaurant wouldn’t take the phone as collateral.

“How do they know that iPhone was his? It could have come from anywhere,” the cop said.

The restaurant is getting some horrible press, but I'm sure people rip off restaurants all the time with the old forgot-my-wallet routine. If you let the guy leave, 9 times out of 10, you never see him again. I made up that statistic for rhetorical purposes. What do you think the statistic is? How much money do you think restaurants lose every year? They'll have to compensate by charging more to the people who do pay. But now they're stuck with the bad PR, because they called the cops on a photogenic lawyer, which means: 1. Focused outrage, 2. Ability to contact and talk to the press, 3. Big newspaper willing to run the story.

***

Readers of this blog might be thinking: Smith & Wollensky, where were we just talking about Smith & Wollensky? Was it in "The Great Gatsby"? It sounds like the name of the place that's been around long enough to have figured in "Gatsby," which takes place in 1922, but it opened in 1977. It adopted an old-fashioned image way back then. It was founded by Alan Stillman, the man who invented T.G.I. Friday's.

According to Stillman, there was never a Mr. Smith or a Mr. Wollensky involved. He opened the Manhattan phone book twice and randomly pulled out two names, Smith and Wollensky. The announcements for the opening, however, carried the names Charlie Smith and Ralph Wollensky. Stillman later admitted that Charlie and Ralph were the names of his dogs.

What's the deal with Stillman and Friday's? T.G.I. Friday's started back in 1965. Stillman — Wikipedia says — was a "bachelor perfume salesman [who] lived in a neighborhood with many airline stewardesses, fashion models, secretaries, and other single people on the East Side of Manhattan near the Queensboro Bridge, and hoped that opening a bar would help him meet women."

At the time, Stillman's choices for socializing were non-public cocktail parties, or "guys' beer-drinking hangout" bars that women usually did not visit; he recalled that "there was no public place for people between, say, twenty-three to thirty-seven years old, to meet." He sought to recreate the comfortable cocktail-party atmosphere in public despite having no experience in the restaurant business.

So he kind of invented the singles bar?

With $5,000 of his own money and $5,000 borrowed from his mother, Stillman purchased a bar he often visited, The Good Tavern at the corner of 63rd Street and First Avenue, and renamed it T.G.I. Friday's after the expression "Thank God! It's Friday!" from his years at Bucknell University....

Aw. I'm rooting for this guy, who made his mom happy, by facilitating a million fucks, some of which were his. Ah! Here's a whole interview with him, complete with photos:

NCR: Did your strategy work? Did you meet good-looking girls?

Stillman: Have you seen the movie Cocktail? Tom Cruise played me! I was lucky enough to do it for three years — he only did it to make a movie. Even today, the advantage of being the guy behind the bar is huge. Why do girls want to date the bartender? To this day, I’m not sure that I get it.

Ha ha. But, Althouse, get back to where you were going: that time we were talking about Smith & Wollensky on this blog. Yes. It was 9 days ago, and the story was about some job applicant who was presented in the press as a young guy who used what I called "the old honesty-modesty routine." Posting, I accepted the media cue that he was a gutsy, charming underdog, but — using Smith & Wollensky as my clue — I got suspicious in the comments:

A key line in the letter, as reprinted in the Daily Mail is: "I met you the summer before last at Smith & Wollensky's in New York when I was touring the east coast with my uncle, ***** ******"

Why put the name of your uncle in the letter unless it's intended to influence the hiring? Perhaps this person's seemingly refreshing attitude is just the cheeky confidence of a young person from a privileged background.

Would a guy working his way up from a working-class background ever write a letter like this?

Which guy most nearly won your heart?
	Graziano Graziussi
	Alan Stillman
	The guy that wrote the cover letter
pollcode.com free polls

Speaking of Presidents and nightmares...

I had a dream last night that I woke up, looked at my iPhone, and saw a terrible headline in Drudge. I tried really hard to yell it out to Meade, who was asleep. It was impossible to yell, which should have tipped me off that it was a dream, but it was so realistic — the dream of waking up in bed and doing something that you tend to do while still in bed — that later, when I really did wake up, I grabbed my iPhone, went right to Drudge, and I was so relieved to see the same headline that was there when I went to bed Friday night.

It's a particularly cheerful headline — "Stocks Hit 5 Year High" — with a picture of wine glasses splashily clinking, angled together in a position that parallels Oprah's hands in a picture just above and to the left. Oprah looks alarmed/outraged, but only because "He even lied — to Oprah?!" And how reassuring that is. The outrage of the day is Lance Armstrong, doping and lying, the same old thing, and it's something that only vaguely affects us. Thank God.

What was the headline I saw in my dream? I won't tell you. It's not that I'm superstitious, but ideas affect minds, and it's an image I won't put out there.