Department Of The Latest Lie
Dateline Sunday, 7:40a; morning walk; listening to a podcast. The podcast pauses for a commercial break, which begins thusly: a young, male, cynical/world-weary voice says,
“We all know credit cards can be stolen, but you know what’s harder?
Stealing your *face*.”
The ad goes on to tout a feature in the Apple wallet app which uses your facial ID to authenticate your purchases. The point of the ad is to get you to use this feature for all of your purchases. Because, you know, if you stop using your credit cards the cards won’t get stolen, and of course, your face never will be appropriated by others.
You may have heard about the very real, very disturbing problems with facial recognition technology, including the technology’s gender and racial biases. We have been told by the AI industry that, for facial identification software development purposes, in order to fine tune the facial recognition capabilities you need as many people as possible – read: everyone – to enable facial recognition on their phones and other devices, to increase the data base for “training” the AI facial recognition technology. [1] The more faces it has to study, the more it will learn.
The very technology allowing facial ID authentication is the very technology which will be used, by the inevitable Someones, to alter facial IDs and hijack more face images. As the AI industry acquires more and more images for their identifications software, they will have a more comprehensive base for the manipulation and imitation of existing images. Apple wallet and others aim to convince you that their facial recognition ID is just another handy tool, but in moiself’s not-so-humble-opinion, you are the tool if you participate.
This public service rant announcement has been brought to you by
I-may-have-been-born-at night-but-it-wasn’t-last-night
(a.k.a. the Pay Attention Society)
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Department Of Apt Political Analogies
You know that kid in grade school, who had passed gas or who was about to, and who always, preemptively, made the accusation to steer suspicion elsewhere:
Who farted?
Of course, everyone else eventually figured out it was that kid (ala, Boyle’s Law of not-so-noble gasses, “He who smelt it, dealt it.”) .
We have the You-Know-Who led, far-right Republicans claiming that there will be election fraud in November. Translation: they are the ones who are planning to, literally and figuratively, fart all over the polling places while pointing their fingers elsewhere.
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Department Of Yet Another Reminder
These days there seem to be certain kinds of readers who complain about “…not seeing themselves” – or people “like” themselves – in books. Particularly, in books of both historical and contemporary fiction.
“Poor baby….”
Moiself believes this complaint is related to the knee-jerk critiques of cultural appropriation and the “write what you know” paranoid, victim-oriented, censorious mindset creeping into editorial – and unfortunately, readership – cultures.
News flash:
Novels and short stories aren’t supposed to be mirrors,
they’re supposed to be doors.
A book is a door to discovering The Other:
other thoughts; other worlds; other peoples.
And The Others can even be those you mistakenly think are “like” you, due to similarities in skin color, gender, language, worldview, economic class, etc. The paradoxical reward of reading about others is that it can be a powerful way to learn about yourself.
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Department Of Jesus Axial Tilt Is The Reason For The Season [2]
Happy Autumnal Equinox to all! This year it falls on Sunday September 22. And to my fellow yogis, if this tradition is in your practice, moiself hopes you will have a memorable 108 Sun Salutations.
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Department Of, Seriously, Don’t Those Ad Writers Know
What That Phrase Euphemistically Refers To?
Dateline: Monday afternoon scrolling through local news headlines on my phone (read: stalling) before exercising. I find it odd that, within only three finger swipes across the screen I come across two medical-related ads which use similar phrasing.
Ad #1: “Multiple myeloma is silent, but deadly – know the signs.” [3]
Not to be outdone, Ad #2: “Plaque psoriasis is silent, but deadly…”
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Freethinkers’ Thought Of The Week [4]
“If there is a god, it knows exactly what it would take to convince me and has refused to provide it. In fact, it has gone to great lengths to hide any evidence of its existence. That doesn’t seem like a deity that wants to be worshiped to me.”
( David G. McAfee [5] )
* * *
May your reading open doors and not the reflect mirrors;
May you avoid the Far Right Flatulence ® in your particular voting venues;
May you celebrate the return of Autumn; [6]
…and may the hijinks ensue.
Thanks for stopping by. Au Vendredi!
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[1] Training for faces other than young white males, we are told, which are the primary training tools.
[2] For all of the seasons.
[3] Yet another farting reference, in the same blog. You’re welcome.
[4] “free-think-er n. A person who forms opinions about religion on the basis of reason, independently of tradition, authority, or established belief. Freethinkers include atheists, agnostics and rationalists. No one can be a freethinker who demands conformity to a bible, creed, or messiah. To the freethinker, revelation and faith are invalid, and orthodoxy is no guarantee of truth.” Definition courtesy of the Freedom From Religion Foundation, ffrf.org
[5] From his website bio: “David G. McAfee is a Religious Studies Graduate, a journalist, and author of The Belief Book, a children’s book explaining the origins of beliefs and religion, among other titles…. (McAfee) believes strongly that religious education and history should be taught in public schools…where general knowledge about those topics is severely lacking. It is only by understanding how the religious systems work, and not by ignoring them completely, that McAfee says we can help others to make rational decisions about them.”
[6] And you don’t even have to do 108 Sun Salutations to do so.
