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I’m as skeptical of cryptocurrency as the next guy — maybe even more so, since I keep reading about “rug pulls,” where the founder of a currency or a seller of NFTs (non-fungible tokens) disappears with the millions of dollars he has raised. You know it’s bad when this kind of thing is so common that people have already come up with a special term for it. There are a lot of scam artists out there attracted by the smell of easy money, and the whole idea of an NFT — a piece of code that exists on the blockchain, and in many cases simply points to a URL, which in turn points to an NFT gallery that basically hosts a JPEG of the image someone has paid hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars for — is bizarre to me. But then, so is modern art in general.

Despite all this, there is something I find kind of fascinating about the whole idea of Axie Infinity. Not the crypto part — which, as an arts major, I admit I barely understand — but the move towards what some call DAOs or “distributed autonomous organizations,” which are powered by cryptocurrencies. These entities are like digital nation-states, with their own rules and currency, and one of the most interesting is called Axie Infinity (there’s also a DAO called Mirror that is devoted to crowdfunding writing and journalism, which I’m also kind of interested in, and I’ve published a version of this post there as well). What makes Axie Infinity especially interesting is that it’s really just a game — like an updated version of Neopets or Pokemon. And as Chris Dixon of Andreessen Horowitz has said (paraphrasing author Clay Christensen), “the next big thing always starts out looking like a toy.”

Yosemite Valley is the most beautiful 2.12 square miles on Earth. Everything about it is perfection. Elliot McGucken and Steve Arita visited this weekend and each said three words, “Peak, GO NOW!” Their words may remain good for another day or two, but not much. Beyond that, you’ll miss the “at peak” visceral context expressed within America the Beautiful. Steve noted that the bomb cyclone has “definitely brought back to life the famous waterfalls at Yosemite…the water was just thundering across the valley floor…and not obviously just the waterfalls, but the Merced river and all areas throughout the valley there was water, that combined with the gorgeous fall colors at peak…just made for a beautiful place to be.”

Source: America The Beautiful – California Fall Color

Note: This was originally published as the online newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Two weeks ago, Alex Heath of The Verge reported that the company then known as Facebook was planning to rename itself. An anonymous source told Heath that the new name was intended to focus attention on the company’s embrace of “the metaverse,” and away from existing products such as Facebook itself, WhatsApp (its messaging service), and Instagram, its photo-sharing app. Ten days later, at Connect—an annual conference the company hosts for developers—Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, said the company would henceforth be known as Meta. The change was necessary “to reflect who we are and what we hope to build,” Zuckerberg said, adding that eventually “I hope we are seen as a metaverse company.”

What isn’t clear, either from Zuckerberg’s comments at the conference or a “founder’s letter” he published announcing the name change, is exactly what it means to be “a metaverse company.” Zuckerberg says the metaverse is “an embodied internet where you’re in the experience, not just looking at it.” In this fabricated world, as he describes it, users will be able to do “almost anything you can imagine—get together with friends and family, work, learn, play, shop, create—as well as completely new experiences.” A video presentation shows Zuckerberg walking through a virtual house with a fireplace and a view of the digital mountains, choosing what clothes his avatar should wear with a wave of his hand, fencing with a partner who is located elsewhere, and attending a virtual meeting that includes a large red robot.

In interviews, Zuckerberg elaborated by saying that he sees the metaverse as something like the next iteration of the internet, built by many companies working together. In this vision, Meta’s Oculus headset would be just one window into a virtual universe. One hurdle in achieving this future is that it would require Meta and other technology companies to not just co-operate but also inter-operate—that is, allow their products to work together. As critics have pointed out, the company formerly known as Facebook has a terrible track record when it comes to interoperability, and many other technology giants aren’t much better (I hosted a discussion on CJR’s Galley platform last year with author and free-speech activist Cory Doctorow about how interoperability can help dismantle “surveillance capitalism”).

Mel Blanc (the voice actor who voiced every male character on Looney Tunes, as well as characters like Barney Rubble on The Flintstones and Mr. Spacely on The Jetsons) was in a head-on collision driving his sports car in a dangerous intersection known as “Dead Man’s Curve” in Los Angeles in 1961 (the same “Dead Man’s Curve” from the Jan and Dean song). His legs and pelvis were fractured, and he was left in a coma.

For weeks, doctors tried everything to get Blanc to wake up. Eventually, when things were looking bleak, one of his neurologists decided to address one of Blanc’s characters instead of Blanc himself, asking him “How are you feeling today, Bugs Bunny?” After a slight pause, the previously-comatose Blanc answered, “Eh… just fine, Doc. How are you?” Mel Blanc made a full recovery. When he got out of the hospital, he sued the city of Los Angeles for $500,000, leading to the city reconstructing the curve.

During the bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, a man by the name of Tsutomu Yamaguchi managed, in a feat of massive misfortune (or good fortune), to be present at both atomic bomb detonations. He was working in Hiroshima for Mitsubishi Heavy Industries when the first atom bomb was dropped on August 6th. He dove into a ditch in the handful of seconds it took for the blast to reach him, which is probably what saved his life (although he was badly burned and his eardrums ruptured).

He took a train to Nagasaki, woke up and went into work the morning of August 9th, where he reported to his boss, who didn’t believe him when he mentioned the strange new bomb that had evaporated parts of Hiroshima. “You’re an engineer,” he barked. “Calculate it. How could one bomb…destroy a whole city?” Famous last words. At that moment, the second atomic bomb hit the city. “I thought the mushroom cloud followed me from Hiroshima,” Yamaguchi later recalled. Despite everything, Yamaguchi would live to the ripe old age of 93 and have 9 children.

who earned his nickname by trying on various makeup products on his show, pre-sold 12 billion yuan in products ranging from Shiseido Co. lotions to Apple AirPods, according to preliminary data compiled by e-commerce data specialist Taosj.com.

Li’s sales are a record for any show livestreamed on Alibaba’s Taobao online marketplace, according to Taosj.com data. He has also survived a recent regulatory crackdown on androgynous pop idols and others who don’t conform to the country’s gender norms or express a more feminine style.

Source: China’s ‘Lipstick Brother’ Livestream Has Record $2 Billion Day – BNN Bloomberg

Note: This was originally published as the daily newsletter at the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

In September, the Wall Street Journal published a series of critical stories about Facebook that the newspaper said were based on a trove of hundreds of internal documents from an unnamed former employee of the company. Three weeks ago, that whistleblower revealed herself on 60 Minutes as Frances Haugen, a former product manager who said she became concerned about the harm being done by Facebook’s products, and the fact that the company allegedly ignored its own research. Haugen subsequently appeared before a Congressional subcommittee investigating Instagram’s impact on the mental health of young women. Then, beginning on October 24, Haugen launched what Ben Smith, the New York Times media writer, called “the journalistic equivalent of an outlet store,” by offering access to the complete trove of internal documents to a hand-picked group of news outlets.

The coverage of Facebook’s alleged transgressions is obviously a story about how a huge tech company deals with its responsibilities to its users, and to society. But, like any large-scale investigation—especially one that involves a consortium and a broken embargo—it’s also a media story. How the documents were released, and who was given access to them and why, has undoubtedly affected the coverage of the issues at hand, for better or worse. The use of an embargo, for example (one which was quickly broken, with the usual rationalizations) and the selection of a few media organizations as gatekeepers of the information seems almost deliberately designed to create a feeding frenzy among news outlets. This in turn has arguably resulted in massive duplication of effort and repetition of information.

Some believe the firehose of reporting risks overwhelming the public with information, and journalists have pointed out that much of what is being reported is already well known, and the new information isn’t terribly compelling. Not everyone agrees with that line of argument, however: Paul Kedrosky, a venture investor, called this “a very interesting rhetorical approach, the idea that if something heinous isn’t more heinous than we previously thought, that it’s fine.” Some might even argue that repeating stories about such complex topics is sometimes necessary, since many normal people (i.e., non-journalists) could have missed previous reports.

Robert Liston was a British surgeon in the 19th century who was noted for his speed and skill in an era prior to anaesthetics, when speed made a difference in terms of pain and survival. In his most famous case, he amputated a leg in under 2.5 minutes, but the patient died afterwards from gangrene (not uncommon in those days). As a result of his desire for speed, Liston also amputated two fingers of his young assistant (who also later died from gangrene). And he slashed through the coattails of a distinguished surgical spectator, who was so terrified — thinking that the knife had pierced his vitals — that he fainted from fright, and was later discovered to have died from shock.

Note: This was originally published as the online newsletter for the Columbia Journalism Review, where I am the chief digital writer

Last Friday, David Amess, a 69-year-old British member of parliament, was stabbed to death while hosting an open house for his constituents at a church in Leigh-on-Sea, a town in southeastern England. A 25-year-old man was later arrested and charged with his murder. In the aftermath of the incident, a British politician asked for an amendment to the country’s Online Safety Bill—a proposed law that has been making its way through the British legislative process for several years—that he called “David’s Law,” which would bring an end to online anonymity by forcing users of social platforms and other services to reveal their real identities. These calls were surprising to some, since Amess’s death doesn’t appear to have anything to do with online anonymity, or even the internet (at least not yet). The man arrested, Ali Harbi Ali, is the London-born son of an advisor to the former prime minister of Somali and appears to have links to Islamic terrorism, according to a report from British police.

The fact that Amess’s murder has inflamed the debate about digital anonymity despite having no apparent connection to it is evidence of how charged the discussion about online safety has become in the UK, observers say. Mark Francois, a former defense minister and a close friend of the deceased MP, said he wanted to name an amendment to the Online Safety Bill after Amess because his former colleague had become “increasingly concerned” about what he called the “toxic environment” online, and the amount of abuse directed at British politicians, especially women. “If the social media companies don’t want to help us drain the Twitter swamp, then let’s compel them to do it by law,” Francois said on Monday, during a triibute to Amess in the House of Commons. “Let’s put, if I may be so presumptuous, David’s Law onto the statute book.” Francois said the chief executives of Facebook and Twitter should be called to appear before Britain’s parliament “if necessary kicking and screaming.”

Francois’s call for an end to anonymity seemed to get some traction with at least one of the main architects of the Online Safety Bill. Damian Collins, a British MP and chairman of a parliamentary committee looking at the law, said he believes there is a “strong case” for requiring Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms to record the real identities of users, so that those who engage in abuse online could be identified. “People would then understand that if they post abusive material, they could be traced back, even if they posted under an assumed name,” he told Britain’s Telegraph newspaper. Calls for action around online civility and harassment gained traction earlier this year in the wake of racist abuse on Twitter and Instagram directed at several Black members of the British soccer team because of their performance during the Euro 2020 final.

A classic e.e. cummings poem that seems strangely appropriate in these times of rabid nationalism and terrible deeds done in the name of patriotism — originally written by cummings in 1931, based on a prisoner of conscience he met:

i sing of Olaf glad and big
whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
a conscientious object-or

his wellbelovéd colonel(trig
westpointer most succinctly bred)
took erring Olaf soon in hand;
but–though an host of overjoyed
noncoms(first knocking on the head
him)do through icy waters roll
that helplessness which others stroke
with brushes recently employed
anent this muddy toiletbowl,
while kindred intellects evoke
allegiance per blunt instruments–
Olaf(being to all intents
a corpse and wanting any rag
upon what God unto him gave)
responds,without getting annoyed
“I will not kiss your fucking flag”

“More than anyone else, John von Neumann created the future. He was an unparalleled genius, one of the greatest mathematicians of the 20th century, and he helped invent the world as we now know it. He came up with a blueprint of the modern computer and sparked the beginnings of artificial intelligence. He worked on the atom bomb and led the team that produced the first computerised weather forecast. In the mid-1950s, he proposed the idea that the Earth was warming as a consequence of humans burning coal and oil, and warned that ‘extensive human intervention’ could wreak havoc with the world’s climate. Colleagues who knew both von Neumann and his colleague Albert Einstein said that von Neumann had by far the sharper mind.” via The Spectator

The Illa de la Discòrdia or Mansana de la Discòrdia — which translates as “Block of Discord” — is a city block in the Eixample district of Barcelona, in Spain. The block is famous for having buildings designed by four of the city’s most important modern architects: Lluís Domènech i Montaner, Antoni Gaudí, Josep Puig i Cadafalch and Enric Sagnier, right next door to each other. As the four architects’ styles were very different, the buildings clash with each other and the neighboring buildings.

This Twitter thread is a persuasive argument that most — if not all — of the important parts of European civilization are built on ham and cheese, and that includes books, which were originally printed on vellum, a material made from the skin of young male sheep and cows (females being too valuable for breeding). Hardback books were invented because vellum tended to buckle and ripple, so boards were sewn into the cover to keep them straight. Furthermore, books also were built on snails.

If you’ve ever heard of “the Whilhelm Scream” — an audio file of a man screaming, which has been used in literally thousands of movies and TV shows — this prop, with its blinking neon light tubes, could be the physical equivalent. It has appeared in dozens of science-fiction TV shows and terrible movies, and has become such a ubiquitous player in various versions of Star Trek that it should have its own trailer by now. According to a comment on this YouTube clip — which is part one of a three-part series — Modern Props owner John Zabrucky designed it, and it dates to about 1977 or so, but was updated several times.

One great thing about fall is it’s a chance to post this timeless classic from McSweeney’s Internet Tendency — “It’s Decorative Gourd Season, Motherfuckers”

“I don’t know about you, but I can’t wait to get my hands on some fucking gourds and arrange them in a horn-shaped basket on my dining room table. That shit is going to look so seasonal. I’m about to head up to the attic right now to find that wicker fucker, dust it off, and jam it with an insanely ornate assortment of shellacked vegetables. When my guests come over it’s gonna be like, BLAMMO! Check out my shellacked decorative vegetables, assholes. Guess what season it is — fucking fall. There’s a nip in the air and my house is full of mutant fucking squash.”