On the Depths of Cultural Appropriation

An influential person from 1700's Sweden spent a lot of time in Turkey, got real into their meatballs, and brought them home to his otherwise culinary wasteland (jk) where they got immediately culturally appropriated into Swedish Meatballs.

Hundreds of years later, after America culturally appropriated the shit out of Sweden via IKEA, we all totally forgot about Turkey's meatballs, and gave Sweden all the credit. After all, why wouldn't the meatballs be theirs? They came up with the idea of assemmling furniture for f's sake. (Yes, I made 'assembling' look like a Swedish word on purpose.)

There was this thing happening in 2017-2018 where cultural identity became so fractured that we couldn't tell who was allowed to do what anymore. I think it's still happening.

When I go to a Black Panther movie, I'm not allowed to wear a dashiki unless I am from Africa; I mean unless my family is from Africa. Or unless I am white but adopted by parents of African heritage, in which case I identify as black (although since mostly nobody else identifies me that way because of the color of my skin it doesn't matter what I think).

Or unless my adopted child is from Africa which gives me right by association (I'm not even sure this counts). Unless you can't tell that I adopted my child from Africa because I didn't bring them with me to the movies because I was afraid people would think I culturally appropriated their kids.

What if you visited Africa and were given that dashiki from an artisan in the family with which you stayed while you lived there for three months building a school for the local community? Still no dashiki? What if you married the daughter of that artisan and had children with her? Still?

What if the movie was inspired, produced, promulgated and viewed (i.e. financially supported) by a culture other than the one being represented? Is Hollywood culture, or Superhero culture being inappropriately appropriated in this case? Or are these not cultures but only cultural byproducts, cultural artifacts?

Cultural artifacts are protected under intellectual property law, as long as they aren't fashion or fragrance (with the exception of Play-Doh, true, and maybe Vibrams but I doubt anyone is appropriating that...Crocs too). But these protections are held by individuals, not populations.

Dogon Couple, from the MET, NYC

Can an entire population own a cultural product, like Superman or the Iliad, or the Dogon Couple?

I am pretty sure it has to do with the unequal distribution of power and who is appropriating who. Anyone can rip off the Iliad because it is a cornerstone of Western culture, which is a cornerstone of Global culture (if there is such a thing).

And the main question is - how does Africa eventually take over the world if people aren't allowed to consume and participate in its culture?

Notes

'My whole life has been a lie': Sweden admits meatballs are Turkish
May 2018, The Guardian

Post Script

I had a dream once, and do still, that as the Arab world (or at least Saudi Arabia) begins to diversify its economy to incorporate entertainment, it begins to absorb hip hop artists from the West. The affinity between some hip hop artists who may be Muslim (more likely than country singer pop stars) and the uber-duper rich Saudis create a new class of global elite men and women of African heritage x America x Islam, who eventually take over the world in ways today's Western folks can't even imagine.

Post Post Script

In a way not much at all related, we wonder if this is really about identity theft-anxiety in the aftermath of a post-Equifax, post-Ashley Madison world where everyone has had their personal identity (not their cultural identity) stolen.

Also this, let's not forget.

Vision, Accuracy, and the Right Brain

In a TED talk I can't seem to forget, Iain McGilchrist, in RSA fashion, animates the two sides of ourselves. These are the two sides of our brains, the two hemispheres. I don't think I need to explain the Left Brain - Right Brain distinction on account of its general popularity. I will only say that this is not an absolute thing; it's a heuristic for understanding how our complicated heads run all that bugged out code up there.

The part of McGilchrist's talk I can't forget lies in his premonition that humans have been heading in the Left direction since as far back as we can remember, but it may soon be time for the pendulum to turn the other direction. It's hard to believe. We can't have megacities without the Left Brain. No spaceships, no biodomes, no nanofabricated body modifications.

Or can we? If you read about contemporary advances in artificial intelligence, you might be thinking that it's quite possible.

Much of the new things happening in this field (which are actually old ideas running on new hardware) are based on a pretty revolutionary paradigm.  I'm referring here to deep learning neural nets and more generally the idea of machine learning. This semantically refers to an approach to computing that uses a kind of brute force instead of a superintelligent program. It's kind of like a Wisdom of the Crowds thing plus computers; instead of one thousand guesses, there's 100 trillion guesses. (I say 'a kind of brute force' because in other instances, some would could the traditional method a brute force of computation.)

So the answer they come up with isn't exact, it's approximate. But when you have to query petabytes of data, you can no longer expect an exact answer.

Check out for example this new thing where scientists Frankenstein a neural net and a cell phone together to makeshift a microscope as powerful as one in a high grade laboratory. We no longer need to see every micropixel to get a clear picture of what we're looking at. Instead we teach an algorithm to see, and it does something that in theory is similar to what our brain does when we see. We make stuff up, we fill in the dots, we approximate. (In actuality, the algorithm is taught not how to see, but how to learn to see.)

We live in this post-truth world, right? Facts don't matter; belief matters. Being right is not as important as convincing people that you're right. That's a tangent. But we do live in a world of Big Data, so big we really don't know what to do with it all. We simply can't make computers powerful enough to handle all of it. But we have this new approach that can scale-up. It approximates, which is not what we're used to, but it does reach the scale of Big Data.

Have we reached this inflection point where our technology is starting to act more like our brain (the whole brain, not just the left side)? Is there where we find out, after hundreds of years (after the Enlightenment / Scientific Revolution) that absolute certainty is not the ultimate goal in all knowledge-gathering endeavors? Just speculating here, but it sure seems like we're headed for a future that looks more like a wet biological mess than a crystallized spreadsheet.

Notes

Deep learning transforms smartphone microscopes into laboratory-grade devices
May 2018, phys.org

Iain McGilchrist, The Divided Brain, 2011
this is a TED talk based on his book

Bicameralism 
Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness and the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, 1976

Technicolor Vision

These are all examples of infrared landscape photography. There is a good series of the Congo by Richard Mosse.

Colorblindness has nothing to do with infrared vision; I just thought these pictures were awesome.

There is no cure for colorblindness. There are special tinted glasses that help, but now there are dyed contact lenses. This article explains it more directly than I can:

"...dyed with a non-toxic rhodamine derivative dye. This particular derivative of rhodamine was chosen as it is known for its ability to absorb certain wavelengths of light in the optical spectrum. Researchers found that the dye blocked the band that lies between the red and green wavelengths, which is perceived by two sets of corresponding optical cones simultaneously. The removal of this band through the dyed lens inhibited the simultaneous triggering of the cones designated for green and red wavelength bands, enabling better differentiation between red and green colours."

New development in contact lenses for red-green color blindness using simple dye
Apr 2018, phys.org

Tropical garden infrared landscape photography.

And surreal infrared landscape photography by David Keochkerian.

more nice pictures with no source credited

Ripe Not Hype

MCEscher envisions Dyson Spheres long before graphene.

Slowly but surely, the promise of the metamaterial graphene is being fulfilled.

MIT engineers have developed a continuous manufacturing process that produces long strips of high-quality graphene.

Meanwhile, check out Isaac Arthur's far out futurism videos for ideas on what to do with all that magical metamaterial.

Scalable manufacturing process spools out strips of graphene for use in ultrathin membranes.
Apr 2018, MIT News

When Robots Become Human

Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep?

That's it folks - robots are already too human. Maybe it's not a bad problem to have. Wait, or is it that we are now too much like robots (you see that guy crossing the street without taking his eyes of his phone?).

Couple things I'd like to keep track of here. Amazon's digital assistant is now modeling proper behavior for kids in the form of (rewarding) please's and thank you's. She's too real, and if kids interact with a thing (still pushing the term intelligentity) that's a lot like a person, and yet treating it like a servant by barking orders or calling it mean names, then in 20 years we'll have a society of jerks running around.

I must admit, at the outset I was disappointed to see some friends of mine talk to Siri with complete and utter disrespect, calling her the most vile names in the book, and snapping orders at her like a sub-human degenerate dirtbag.

I was also disappointed to see the headlines after the civil servant robot in Washington DC fell ("jumped") into the fountain - they joked about it committing suicide, as if suicide was something we joke about. Apparently as long as it's a robot doing it, suicide is a joke. I get it; if it's not alive, then how can it kill itself.

But the problem here is that it no longer matters if the thing is "alive" or not. What matters is if it -seems- like a human. We feel bad when robots stuggle. Maybe you remember the Boston Dynamics fail videos? They elicit empathy in us.

We are about as social as a social creature can get. Everything we do is part of an intricate, complex, social web of meaning. And everything we do is recorded by those around us as a model of how to interact with others. When you throw your video game controller at the TV as an adult, your kid sees that and thinks that's how you're supposed to treat your stuff, including the people in your life. This may be microscopic, but it adds up. If we all treat very human-like robots like sub-humans, then we end up with a society of kids who grow up learning to treat each other like crap.

You want your kid to be a misogynist? Just treat your wife like crap. You want your kid to be a jerk in general? Just talk to Siri and Alexa and the ATM machine etc like they're sub-human and you'll give them a shining example of how to do it. You want a young person who feels bad about themselves and is considering suicide to think that life is a joke? Make fun of things that "committ suicide." And the more human these things are, the stronger the effect.

Robots have already become like humans. That was the point from the beginning. We see faces in trees for ****'s sake; we want our robots to be made in our own image. But if we're going to -make- them like humans, then we need to -treat- them like humans.


Post Script

Final question then - can we still talk trash about the weather? "Ew, it's gross out here," she says on a humid day. Maybe that's not a nice thing to say to the weather; maybe the weather has feelings too? Let's start with the robots and wait for geoengineering to make a robot out of our weather.


Notes

Amazon Alexa to reward kids who say: 'Please'
Apr 2018, BBC

The Touchy Task of Making Robots Seem Human - But Not Too Human
Jan 2017, WIRED

Robots Have Feelings Too aka In Other News Suicide Is Funny Again
Jul 2017, Network Address

To See You Staring Back At You (regarding the Uncanny Valley)
Jan 2017, Network Address

Boston Dynamics Robot Fail Videos
(you're not getting a link, search for yourself and you will be rewarded with a daily dose of empathy)

When Humans Caught Up With Evolution

I certainly didn't know this, but the spleen acts as a biological SCUBA tank during extended periods underwater.

There are some people from the southern Philippines, Indonesia and Malaysia who evolved bigger spleens because they spend a lot of time diving deep underwater. They live on houseboats, rarely go on land, and spend 8 hours a day repeatedly diving underwater. They split from a very similar group of people nearby about 15,000 years ago - the one group stays on land and the other in the water. Their genes are very similar, except for this distinction, and so the spleen enlargement is correlated to this behavior/culture change.

This is a discovery worthy of reporting because most of the basic body plan that includes our organs is pretty similar across all humans, or so we thought.

We have this idea of a Human Genome being uniquely human, and as a thing we all share in common. (Or at least I do; maybe I just haven't been to 5th grade for a long time, kind of like people who don't realize that just about every star we can see in the night sky has planets revolving around it, a discovery of only the past few years.)

But there is this thing that happens about 10-15 thousand years ago, where human creativity (i.e. technological memes or cultural evolution) evolves faster than our genes. Diving in the ocean all day long doesn't by itself constitute a technological advance, but then again, this is at the 15,000 mark. 10,000 years ago, we see the genetic changes resulting from dairying practices. Because of this, some people continued to be able to digest milk into adulthood (not possible for other mammals).

The change in dairying practices must have relied on some techological change, but it's still hard to call this technology. Is agriculture a technological development? Animal husbandry? Because this is where 'drinking milk' comes from. Leaving the land to live on the water is not so much a technological advance as a group-behavior advance - cultural evolution we could call that. Memetic evolution some would call it.

The main idea here is that at some point around 10,000 years ago, humans began changing themselves faster than their environment changed them. When you hear Ray Kurzweil talk about the Singularity (a moment in our near future where humans learn to evolve ourselves at will), note that we have been evolving ourselves already for thousands of years.

Notes

Bajau people 'evolved bigger spleens' for free-diving
Apr 2018, BBC

Evolution of lactase persistence: an example of human niche construction
Philosophical Transactions B, 2011

Network Address:
Milk Does a Body
FurFuryl Mercapton, Abstract Foods, and Flavor Networks

Fake Drugs

I can't tell if this is news or not, but it seems like Prince overdosed on fake drugs. It might be news because it seems like it was recently confirmed. It's not news because he isn't the first victim of the scourge of fake everything that has spread over our collective commercial enterprise.

The amount of fake things out there can be quite surprising at times. I was recently watching a documentary on Shenzen, one of the fastest growing cities in the world with a huge tech economy known for its innovation, as well as its shanzai, or counterfeit goods. And what I learned is that if you can name a thing, there is a fake version of it, and it might come from Shenzen, but it's definitely called shanzai.

There are some instances where it's hard to differentiate between fake and real, made evident by the fake board game - wait, yes apparently there is a fake board game crisis, but I'm talking about a real board game the purpose of which is to emphasize the ambiguous designation of a thing's realness (can't find a single reference to this online). A garbage can or a digital image of a garbage can that we all know as the Recycling Bin on our desktop. Sailor Moon or a person dressed up as Sailor Moon. See? When you live half in the real world and half in the virtual, it becomes hard to differentiate which one is the "real" one.

Clippy, the Microsoft digital assistant who was more annoying than helpful and totally dates me because half the people reading this (nobody reads this) are too young to remember, Clippy does not exist in the real world; Clippy is a bunch of lines of code and a two-dimensional pixel pattern. (I think I'm just a bunch of lines of genetic code and a 3-D molecule pattern.)

But this isn't the kind of real-fake distinction we're talking about here. This is instead about commercial products, particularly drugs, that can be counterfeited and passed off as the real thing, and if you get duped, you don't just feel stupid, you feel like you're going to die, because if you're a type 1 diabetic and take fake insulin, it's life-threatening. And this really happens, in America, and to anyone including celebrities and powerful politicians alike.

When you get a fake flash drive or a fake phone charger, you're pissed. When you get fake gasoline, you're pissed, but you also might be stranded, and that sucks. But when you get fake drugs, you're dead.

Up to this point I have posted ad infinitum about fake stuff from China, because of a genuine interest in the phenomenon, and because it's kind of funny. But this is when the fake-thing gets serious, and I don't mean to make a joke of it. The only thing I can think of as a way to get a handle on this is for us to get our own word, not fake or counterfeit or fraudulent or  forgery but something else that really fits this phenomenon. Oh, or is this the point when the world's two biggest laguages start to combine; there's already a word for it.

Post Script

Shanzai
Chinese style of innovation with a peasant mindset. I think in the US we call it bootleg, which sometimes has a derogatory connotation and sometimes not. I prefer the word ghettovative, which I just made up, but which has quite a positive connotation, because innovation is usually a good thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai