Web Highlights — Week 11, 2017
‘London Bridge is down’: the secret plan for the days after the Queen’s death
Not long afterwards, Dawson injected the king with 750mg of morphine and a gram of cocaine — enough to kill him twice over — in order to ease the monarch’s suffering, and to have him expire in time for the printing presses of the Times, which rolled at midnight.
All news organisations will scramble to get films on air and obituaries online. At the Guardian, the deputy editor has a list of prepared stories pinned to his wall. The Times is said to have 11 days of coverage ready to go. At Sky News and ITN, which for years rehearsed the death of the Queen substituting the name “Mrs Robinson”, calls will go out to royal experts who have already signed contracts to speak exclusively on those channels.
Britain’s commercial radio stations have a network of blue “obit lights”, which is tested once a week and supposed to light up in the event of a national catastrophe. When the news breaks, these lights will start flashing, to alert DJs to switch to the news in the next few minutes and to play inoffensive music in the meantime.
When the coffin reaches the abbey doors, at 11 o’clock, the country will fall silent. The clatter will still. Train stations will cease announcements. Buses will stop and drivers will get out at the side of the road. In 1952, at the same moment, all of the passengers on a flight from London to New York rose from their seats and stood, 18,000 feet above Canada, and bowed their heads.
The question will be what the bells and the emblems and the heralds represent now. At what point does the pomp of an imperial monarchy become ridiculous amid the circumstances of a diminished nation? “The worry,” a historian said, “is that it is just circus animals.”
18/03/2017, 12:54 PM
Soon We Won’t Program Computers. We’ll Train Them Like Dogs | WIRED
In this world, the ability to write code has become not just a desirable skill but a language that grants insider status to those who speak it. They have access to what in a more mechanical age would have been called the levers of power.
Our machines are starting to speak a different language now, one that even the best coders can’t fully understand.
Traditional coding won’t disappear completely — indeed, O’Reilly predicts that we’ll still need coders for a long time yet — but there will likely be less of it, and it will become a meta skill, a way of creating what Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, calls the “scaffolding” within which machine learning can operate.
The code that runs the universe may defy human analysis.
Instead of being masters of our creations, we have learned to bargain with them, cajoling and guiding them in the general direction of our goals. We have built our own jungle, and it has a life of its own.
In the future, we won’t concern ourselves as much with the underlying sources of their behavior; we’ll learn to focus on the behavior itself. The code will become less important than the data we use to train it.
In the long run, Thrun says, machine learning will have a democratizing influence. In the same way that you don’t need to know HTML to build a website these days, you eventually won’t need a PhD to tap into the insane power of deep learning. Programming won’t be the sole domain of trained coders who have learned a series of arcane languages. It’ll be accessible to anyone who has ever taught a dog to roll over.
We’re about to have a more complicated but ultimately more rewarding relationship with technology. We will go from commanding our devices to parenting them.
18/03/2017, 8:06 AM
In a society hopeless and cruel, the particular and the microscopic were the only things that could still prove reliable.
The intelligence of the design never proclaims the watch to be anything more than an instrument. “We know there are more important things than watches,” Judith Borowski, the company’s chief brand officer, said. “Like people suffering around the world.”
If only our own daily exertions could be so purposeful and ornate. If only watches could do what they so slyly promise. To record. To keep track. To bring order.
16/03/2017, 10:49 PM
Above Avalon: The Curious State of Apple Product Pricing
Apple was interested in initially grabbing share in the premium segment of the market and then gradually working its way down market. There is evidence to suggest this attitude is now changing a bit as Apple is selling wearables.
This is a curious development as one assumes the opposite would have occurred — Apple would keep prices high to maintain a certain level of exclusivity or scarcity. Instead, Apple is redefining the concept of luxury in order to sell mass-market products.
16/03/2017, 8:03 PM
Is Trump Trolling the White House Press Corps?
The seating chart is the purview of the White House Correspondents’ Association, an independent board of journalists who, with the sombre secrecy of a papal conclave, assess news organizations according to factors such as regularity of coverage and centrality to the national discourse.
“To Goyal”: to seek out a reporter who is likely to provide a friendly question, or a moment of comic relief. All press secretaries get cornered, and all have, on occasion, Goyaled their way out. But no one Goyals like Spicer.
A TV correspondent told me that calling on front-row reporters first isn’t just about appealing to their egos: “It’s also about maintaining a sense of predictability, a sense that eventually the substantive questions will be answered.
“Politics is downstream from culture.”
When normal voters assess, say, a complex piece of legislation, they are unlikely to read the bill itself; more likely, they will base their opinions on how the bill is portrayed by their friends and Facebook friends, by celebrities, and in the media.
Trump also paints his relationship with the media as one of mutual antagonism, but it’s actually closer to codependency. For decades, he has derided critical press coverage about him as deceitful or unfair, yet he eagerly consumed it, participated in it, and profited from it.
When we talked about it later, Wintrich said that he still regretted missing the performance. But, even if he had been there, his skills as a troll might have been superfluous. After all, the man in control of the press conference was the world’s most gifted media troll, the President of the United States.
15/03/2017, 5:17 PM
Intel, Mobileye, and Smiling Curves — Stratechery by Ben Thompson
a focus on longevity and serviceability over comfort and luxury will reduce manufacturers to commodity providers selling to bulk purchasers, not dissimilar to the companies building servers for today’s cloud giants.
the winner (or winners) will look a lot like Uber looks today: most riders will use the same app, because whichever network has the most riders will be able to acquire the most cars, increasing liquidity and thus attracting more riders; indeed, the effects of Aggregation Theory will be even more pronounced when supply is completely commoditized per the point above.
In short, Intel is assembling the pieces to be a real player in autonomous cars: hardware, maps, chips, software, and strong relationships with car manufacturers.
Indeed, with this acquisition Intel’s greatest strength and greatest weakness is its dominant position with established manufactures: there is the outline of a grand alliance between car manufacturers, HERE maps, and Intel/Mobileye; the only hang-up is that the future of transportation is one in which the car manufacturers are the biggest losers. Companies like Uber or Google, meanwhile, have nothing to lose (well, Uber does, but they seem to grasp the threat).
Regardless, it’s a worthwhile bet for Intel: the company seems determined to not repeat its mistakes in smartphones, and given that the structure of self-driving cars looks more like servers than anything else, it’s a worthwhile space to splurge in.
15/03/2017, 9:14 AM
Why Pi Matters — The New Yorker
The beauty of pi, in part, is that it puts infinity within reach. Even young children get this. The digits of pi never end and never show a pattern. They go on forever, seemingly at random — except that they can’t possibly be random, because they embody the order inherent in a perfect circle. This tension between order and randomness is one of the most tantalizing aspects of pi.
Pi is inescapable because cycles are the temporal cousins of circles; they are to time as circles are to space. Pi is at the heart of both.
In short, pi is woven into our descriptions of the innermost workings of the universe.
15/03/2017, 8:38 AM
The Psychology of the Sample Sale — Racked
As soon as they threw open the doors at 8 a.m., the dynamic shifted dramatically — the game was on. Women started shoving past each other, throwing their elbows, running for the remaining garments on the shelves. I was quickly pushed to the side — I couldn’t compete. My mom, however, moved like a fish in water, valiantly grabbing the dress she knew I wanted instead of the shoes she wanted. That’s real maternal sacrifice.
It’s really not about the stuff at all; it’s about winning.
“Competition is enjoyable for people. It taps into our most primal instincts for survival.”
Once [shoppers] get into the heat of battle, any normal household worries or relationship worries tend to disappear, replaced by the thrill of victory.
Psychological phenomena called social facilitation and emotional contagion can work in tandem to turn a crowd into a riot with only a few of these folks in the mix.
Even if the number of sales decreases, he adds, the things that they bring out in us, both good and bad, will find new venues to show themselves.
14/03/2017, 9:17 AM
1920 年代，如何成就了美国的黄金时代？_城市_好奇心日报
在繁荣的另一面，按照美国文学批评家埃德蒙·威尔逊对这个年代的看法 — — 人们开始“越轨”，偏离了美国的基本严肃性，“1920 年代的繁华烟花就像是一场醉酒狂欢”。就连劳工都感受到了资本主义的好处，集体活动争取权益显得多余，工会也因此衰落。
回头来看，在当时疾速右转的世界，犬儒主义在中产阶级物欲横流又患得患失的担忧中滋生。他们嘲笑一切，但除此以外很难做出改变。 另一帮在繁荣之中难以自处的“忧伤的年轻人”，在 20 多岁的年纪逃离美国，以此反抗庸常无聊。
在 1931 年，因为《了不起的盖茨比》而为人熟知的作家司各特·菲茨杰拉德总结这个时代时说：“新生代已经成熟，他们将发现，诸神已死，一切对人的信念都动摇了；他们所知道的一切是，美国正在走向历史上最盛大、最花哨的狂欢。”
“你受得了自己是一个从小地方来的人吗？”，《时代周刊》在一份传单中这样问他们，“文明在一千条战线上前进 — — 商业、艺术、政治、科学、宗教。你只能无视它，并且退回几百年之前。但你受得了生活在黑暗时代吗？”这本杂志刚创办不久，毫不掩饰地利用了人们对孤陋寡闻的恐惧。
13/03/2017, 2:23 PM
Why U.S. Antimissile System in South Korea Worries China — The New York Times
The Chinese government worries that the American antimissile system, called the Terminal High Altitude Area Defense, or Thaad, could erode its nuclear deterrent — its ability to scare off potential foes from ever considering a nuclear attack.
Its chief worry is not that Thaad could take down missiles: the system offers a canopy of potential protection over South Korea, but does not have the reach to bring down China’s intercontinental ballistic missiles. Instead, China’s complaint is focused on Thaad’s radar system, which Chinese experts have said could be used to track the People’s Liberation Army’s missile forces.
The radar could identify which Chinese missiles are carrying decoy warheads intended to outfox foes. That would be like being able to see what cards China holds in a nuclear poker game, and that could weaken China’s deterrent, they say.
Even so, China’s real, underlying worry appears to be that Thaad could open the door to a much wider, more advanced fence of antimissile systems arrayed around it by America’s allies, several experts said. That would magnify Chinese worries about the effectiveness of its nuclear deterrent, and entrench Chinese fears of encirclement by a coalition knit together by a shared antimissile system.
13/03/2017, 1:19 PM
From a Wedding Writer’s Notebook, 10 Views on Love — The New York Times
Of my own accord, I present myself, my days, my nights and my life. I present them freely and willingly because they cannot be better spent than in your company.
13/03/2017, 1:18 PM
