Lee Maguire graded snobberies, bawdiness, hypocrisy

BPM

When I’m in the gym, I pay the other users about as much attention as I’d be comfortable receiving. Which is not to say there are no exhibitionists there, but most of us are focused solely on our own sweaty attempts at entropy deceleration. But if I do stray from the blinkers of unspoken gym etiquette and glance around at the users of the cardio equipment, I’ll often notice that people cover up the LED information display panels with sweat towels.

What’s the cause of the data anxiety? That others may look past their public physical presence and judge them based on the blinkenlights? Or, more likely, that they’re intimidated by the numbers themselves.

I understand why the information can have that effect. Things like time, distance, even kcal burned, that’s all fine. The one that’s always a little scary is heart rate (which gets displayed by the machines with electrodes in the handles, or picked up from transmitter units). I’ve always just mentally filtered it out. I’ve never felt the need to know about my heart rate. It’s icky scary of-the-body stuff. Until I looked it up recently I wouldn’t have know what a normal, resting, heart rate would be. I’ve somehow never even taken my own pulse.

This bugged me for a while. I decided I wanted to develop some kind of familiarity with my heart rate. The idea was, I’d buy a heart rate monitor and try to cultivate a checking reflex – not just during exercise, but any time. Like how you might occasionally check the time, or an unread message count.

So I broke my personal rule about not buying new tech that wasn’t a replacement for something else (it’s not replacing a watch – I haven’t owned one since my Pop Swatch popped off over a decade ago). I poured over the specs of various products and eventually got into the tech buying trap of attempting rationalise paying more for features I previously didn’t care about (GPS, computer-downloads, etc).

Eventually I decided it hold off, for now, on anything too sophisticated and went for a Polar FS3c. And maybe I was a little swayed in my choice by the fact that it’s one of the heart rate monitors sported by Edward Norton in the 2008 movie The Incredible Hulk.

The Incredible Hulk was one of my favourite movies of last year. Mainly because, by focusing on the fugitive story that drove the 70s TV series, it positioned itself as a geek Bourne Identity. Instead of a trained assassin, Banner is a renegade scientist able to somehow evade a Special Forces snatch-squad (even before his involuntary green ríastrad, a transformation only triggered after local bullies mess with his PC).

A fairly close embodiment of hacker nomad of net-lore. Have encrypted laptop and network radio equipment will travel. He can jury-rig a centrifuge in the favela for grinder-style self experimentation whenever needed. While the Hulk represents the fear of our bodies betraying us, Banner becomes someone taking steps to overcome that fear. (Like the movie hard-men able to perform surgery on themselves.)

It even has a little fun with the current conventions of the genre. Bruce empties the contents of Betty’s handbag on to a motel bed: “Basically we can’t use any of this because they can track all of it.” “My lipgloss – can they track that?”

If there’s any complaint I have about the movie it was that there was too much Hulk. I do appreciate the artistry of CGI monsters hitting each other, but the final half hour takes it a little too far. Apparently sci-fi movie budgets are such that multi-million dollar recreations of the alley-fight from They Live now seem like a good idea.

There’s no word of a sequel yet, but the tying of Hulk into the Captain America origin-story, along with the Tony Stark cameo, firmly establishes it as part of Marvel’s Avengers remscéla – perhaps as hero, perhaps villain.

The heart-rate monitor itself is used cleverly in the movie. It takes the role of a sinister countdown clock. The beeping of the watch heralding the potential for disaster. And while the watch performs as it would in reality, the movie does lie a little.

We see Norton bare-chested (a clear requirement for the role) on several occasions when using the heart-rate monitor. I assumed that the elecrodes were embedded into the strap, but a little research shows that the Polar devices use a chest strap – something I assume has been finessed away from the movie’s world for aesthetic reasons, even though strapless HRMs actually exist.

2002′s Panic Room is another movie that uses medical monitoring in this way. A diabetic’s watch shows their current blood glucose level – it’s suggested that below a certain point and hypoglycaemia kicks in. The watch is a movie fiction – we just have to assume there are wires in the body, either connected to the watch, or relayed from a sensor elsewhere.

The current, real life, version of this continuous blood glucose monitoring is something like the Dexcom system in which a cool little cyborg wart is stuck to your body and is relayed to a hideous tamagotchi-looking receiver unit (that would have looked odd even back when people still carried pagers).

I think I’ve assumed that there was some good reason that personal medical tech always had to look a little out of date, but the iPhone 3.0 preview last Tuesday showed a preview of a iPhone fingerstick (rather than continuous) glucose monitoring application.

So what happens when the device that records your medical status is also the device you use to update your social connections?

I can see some crossover with the grinder and personal infomatics (“Quantified Self”) crowd who aren’t afflicted with the specific aliments these technologies are aimed at. Just adopt the tech as cyborg gadgets providing yet another datapoint – especially for non-invasive measurement techniques.

I’m a member of a generation that’s seen the culture of internet personal sharing and disclosure occur only after our own youthful embarrassments were already behind us. Financial and medical information is private – that much is sacrosanct. Which is why I wouldn’t be surprised to see that attitude challenged over the next decade.

Imagine some ambient representation of your friends list which incorporates this information – marrying the medical telemetry of the USCMC in Aliens with the wearable contact list of clatter

It might be a represented by subtle changes in shape, and colour. Or maybe just like the changing face of BJ Blazkowicz. You might learn to tailor any real-time communication to your recipients present physical state.

It doesn’t seem too far fetched. My girlfriend allows me access to her Nike+ data (in an interesting connection, it was Edward Norton’s voice on the commercials). I’m not a runner myself, so it doesn’t ever represent useful actionable information. Yet the access itself has some meaning, some value that I don’t yet have the tools to describe.

Of course I’m still mentally entrenched in the world of risks and nightmare scenarios. You might not want to keep discretionary medical records that can be subject to discovery by insurance claims investigators. Or, in the UK, the many tentacles of the RIPA-enabled state (the current message to banks and benefit claimants alike seems to be: if you ask for support, you consent to surveillance). Maybe stories of spouses demanding an explanation for jump in heart rate for a partner supposedly working late at the office, or the panic of parents when equipment glitches produce aberrant results.

I’m cautious and conservative when it comes to this sort of thing. It can take years for the technologies, especially those encourage new forms of sharing, to find their way through the following mental sluice gates:

• How is this any different or better than X?
• Why do you care?
• Why do you think anyone else would care?
• What are the potential health/privacy/lock-in risks?
• What are the network benefits?
• Do the benefits outweigh the potential health/privacy/lock-in risks?
• Why is my preferred username already taken?

Whenever I hear about someone preserving a moment of chemical idiocy to a social website it’s usually followed by “that’ll come back to haunt them when they run for political office and discover they’ve inadvertently licensed the indiscretions of their youth to a media conglomerate”. But part of me wonders if there’s really that much value in the idea that we need to maintain some kind of plausible deniability about our lives – in the unlikely event we run for political office (…in an future where only paragons are electable).

Indeed, I recently watched an episode of The West Wing on DVD that seemed to suggests that, for high profile politicians, at best the position of well-guarded privacy will result in culture shock when your entire life is suddenly thrown open to the scrutiny by your enemies, and at worst your secrets become the things other use to influence you.

So maybe, when the issue arises, we should just relax.

Current heart rate: 69 bpm.

Saving us from ourselves

It doesn’t go unremarked that, 10-years after the introduction of the floppy-less iMac, there are still a few applications using the apparently anachronistic icon of the 3½-inch diskette to represent the concept of saving a file.

I have no objections to it, myself.  It’s a lovely little hieroglyph that reminds me how awesome computers seemed to me in the 90s.  They were the go-to MacGuffins of the modern computer-era in movies like Hackers and The Net.

These days memory cards are the size of fingernails and disks can look like anything from tiki statues to laptop humping dogs.  So what do we get as the current representation of data storage? A featureless rectangular slab?

In OS X, Apple choses to represent unmounted .dmg disk images as metallic cases of internal hard-disks, a circular indent showing the location of the platters (something that’s familiar to most computer people, but probably abstract for Mac users). Oddly, when mounted, they then come to resemble an external drive of some kind – a white flat rectangular casing.  Apple’s iconography for online storage (iDisk) is an external drive casing with a abstract cloud symbol on it – possibly enshrining it as a future anachronism.

So the modern floppy-less save icons tend to look like arrows pointing at slabs, or at cylinders, or pointing into file folders (because some metaphors transcend).  Sometimes it’s a sharpened pencil writing directly on to the surface of a magnetic disk.

Of course there are some that regard the question of representing a save icon as moot.  The concept of “save” is apparently tied to a doomed file-centric paradigm, and that files will be replaced by a continually recorded timestream of changes – the file-as-document will become closer to a spool. The play and record buttons are always down.  (The specific user action will be closer to concept of “export” where capturing the state of a “file” at a specific time is still required.)

This concept of auto-saving has been a familiar one in videogames in the last few years,  but that hasn’t removed the need for iconographic communication.  The games still need to communicate when information is being saved to warn the user not to switch the power off or remove devices and risk leaving the data in a corrupted state.  There are no secondary indicators – no whirring noises, no flashing indicator LEDs, no iPod display requesting not to be unplugged.  On PS2 games they would frequently use an iconographic representation of the removable memory cards.  But how do you visually communicate the internal storage of the Wii?

One of the games I’m currently playing uses a spinning DVD (a read-only medium in videogame-land) to represent, not when the DVD is being read (duh), but when data is being written to internal memory.  I assume there was nothing else suitable in their development kit.

So instead of an icon a user selects to instruct the computer to save, we’re now in need of a universal visual representation an instruction from the computer.  “Attention human: I’m saving your work.  Don’t do anything that might prevent me from doing this.” (Something that potentially becomes much trickier when you think about devices with no persistent storage saving directly to the cloud.)

And, really, what communicates this better than an angry cartoon mole?

Crowdsourcing for caveats

If Iggy Pop is just the passenger, why is he the one sorting out the car insurance?  Or indeed selling it.  “I’m not selling insurance, I’m selling time.” 

All of the insurance ads seem to be emphasising speed and convenience at the moment.  One insurance comparison site sponsors “24″ on Sky, which is surely the pornography of effective time-management.

Not being a car owner I’ve never tried these services myself.  I can only assume that their major breakthrough is that they’ve dispensed with the many dense pages of legalese usually presented when buying insurance.  Possibly, they’ve been replaced by a short series of simple manga-style diagrams?

After all, the ads don’t proclaim “Get a quote in minutes… then spend a couple of hours wading through terms.  Bring a sandwich.”

I jest, of course.  The only time anyone reads their insurance policy is after they’ve been denied a claim.  Who has time?  It’s less “caveat emptor”, more “festinet emptor”.

Maybe it’s to be expected from insurance policies, but it seems that every action on a computer presents you with some legal contract of sorts.  Its like a blight on the web.  Want to register for a website, buy something online, install a piece of software?  You’ve just agreed to the following non-negotiated terms…

If I want to watch TV I can somehow do so without being presented with any kind of contract.  If I want to watch the same programmes on my computer, on a service run by the TV station, it’s apparently become a matter for the lawyers.  Computers = risk.

“Print this for your records” they sometimes suggest, imagining that people still have printers at home.  If you’re me you hit print, set the printer type to PDF and file destination to “~/Documents/legalbullshit/”. I rarely read them, of course.  I used to skim through them but invariably you’ll come across a part that says they can modify the terms without notification at any time.  So, complete waste of time then.  It’s like that fabled test which instructs you to read through the paper, has a page full of questions, and at the end instructs you not to answer any of them.

And, in the US at least, anyone breaking these (modifiable without notice) website Terms of Service can apparently be subject to criminal prosecution.  The Internet is serious business.

You end up hoping that the “many eyeballs” axiom of the open source world has some sort of equivalent here; that there’s some dedicated individual looking for the evil “first born” clauses.  Indeed, when a recent change to the Facebook TOS (not widely announced by Facebook, natch) was made, it caused a stink on a few blogs.  Commenters seemed outraged that they would try to slip something like this by.

So these things are prevalent, but where are the tools for managing them?  Where’s the security update tool equivalent?  What if, instead of just saving these documents, I imported them into desktop software or web-service.  When the terms change, I receive notification.  If I’m presented with a new document detailing terms, I get to easily see the diffs – and then be one step away from a wiki discussing the implications. 

Companies could play nice with this ecosystem by presenting downloadable dated and versioned XML formats of their terms. Perhaps even participating in related discussions and providing justifications. But it wouldn’t be necessary, all we’d need is a few healthily paranoid individuals looking out for us all, something that will always be available.

Yes We Spam!

Oh dear. Looks like the African advance fee scammers have hijacked Blue State Digital – Barak Obama’s campaign technology backend providers.

Maybe that cyber-security review can’t come soon enough…

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From: "Mrs. Gloria Cooper" <mrsgloriacooper10@live.com>
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Attn:Dear Friend,

I know you will be surprise to receive this mail from me as we do not know each other, nevertheless I am Mrs. Gloria Cooper from Monrovia Liberia presently residing in Accra Ghana.

I would like to apply through this medium for your co-operation to secure an opportunity to invest and to go into joint business partnership with you.
[...]

Dining in Dystopia

Oh, but the first few minutes of Babylon AD seem so promising.

Our hero awakes in a partially destroyed apartment, an ambitious DIY project apparently abandoned after initial demolitions.  Plastic sheeting forming its notional walls.  But beyond the collapsed appartment – a collapsed world.  Tehran’s anti-America murals adorning an eastern European housing block.

Street markets hawking nothing but guns. The fashion cues are part military, part Snow+Rock – windbreakers and light body-armour. But this is a shopping trip for food, and all that’s on offer is freshly caught rabbit.

Deftly skinned, sliced and sautéed.  Our hero prepares to eat the meal accompanied, surprisingly, with a glass of red wine. The rugged mercenary showing a touch of sophistication.  An odd touch of elegance that may betray the director’s nationality, and perhaps a nod to how the actor’s name must sound to french ears.  The juxtaposition of refinement and utility: Le vin et diesel.

For a brief moment the movie looks to offer a tantalising exploration of grim meathook cuisine. 

(Of course within the next 60 seconds, Vin’s quipped beligerantly before shooting someone in the head.  By halfway-through, the movie has descended into unintelligible Golden Child/cyber-messiah nonsense.)

In Vin’s spartan quarters – makeshift bed, improvised gym, etc – there is an interesting inclusion. A couple of Google-branded net devices, one a half-screen sized touch-screen PDA and media centre combo, the other a wall mounted TV-style display.  Naturally it’s sporting 27 channels of rolling terrorism alerts and civil unrest footage.  While Demolition Man prophesied that all restaurants would be Taco Bell, dystopian movies suggest that all future television will be Fox News.

Nicely encapsulating the life-support priorities of future generations – the world may have turned to crap, but as long as I’ve got a fast net connection I’ll be OK.  Maybe that’s even becoming true of today’s youth? Given a choice of hot running water or “facebook”, net access may be seen by younger people as the more essential of the two.

I mention it because I’ve had to go without Internet for a few weeks recently.  And then, not long after it returned, I’ve had to go without hot water.  Not as a direct result of some weird Hobson’s choice, obviously.  Just things falling apart. (Such as the breaking of whatever it was dampening the washing machine’s violent seizures, triggering a bold and destructive bid for freedom, cut short by its own cruel reliance on electricity.)

Things failing used to be just mundane inconveniences.  Now they’ve somehow become temporal echos heralding future disaster.

I feel like I’ve been psychologically primed, if not quite girded, for massive institutional collapse.  When an extreme weather event hit London last week (i.e. slightly more snow than we were eqipted to deal with) it interupted the collection of domestic refuse in the area.  I immediately began to fantasize an inevitable path from a mounting backlog, to disease, to rioting.

(As it was, the rubbish was mysteriously gone by Thursday.  Sudden out-of-schedule collection is disturbing – it may cause you to reassess your previously low opinion of the council’s logistical competence.)

My recent internet outage was countered with a return to something like the old-school pre-Friaco batch-download internet technique.  Take the laptop into a free wifi area, sync the off-line email and feed apps, then process through everything offline. It’s not quite cold turkey for my Info Freako, but it has forced me to be more discerning in my consumption.  For the first time in years I’m not running a unread backlog in my feeds.

And now the hot water is gone.  Get used to the icy showers, I told myself, warm water is a luxury of more carefree times.  At least while we’re awaiting a part from “bunny boilers” (an unfortunate mnemonic for Vaillant, from a logo featuring a cartoon rabbit).  But then I started getting up earlier in the morning and making use of my gym’s showers and getting in a (previously rare) work-out while I’m at it.  Any longer and it may become a habit.

Both positive outcomes from annoying situations.

I’m quite a fan of those near-future dystopia tales – essentially a genre in which the miseries of the real world are visited upon anglophones (Brian Wood’s current comicbook DMZ is highly recommended).  One of the trends in UK-set futures (seen in the likes of  V for Vendetta and Children of Men) is the weird idea that while things are grim, they’re far grimmer everywhere else.  The fiction that, all things considered, Britain adapts surprising well in a crisis.

While America’s national survival myth might be of the self-sufficient rugged frontiersman, Britain’s is “Blitz Spirit”.  When the secret words are invoked a magic lightning bolt infuses the public with the super-powers of stoic bloody mindedness and temporary submission to the state’s Woolton pie paternalism.  Keep calm.  Carry on.

But maybe that’s a wartime-only deal?  Every new British government has a stab at fostering peacetime patriotism, or as they usually put it “a sense of national identity”.  A difficult concept to a nation that largely considers its own flag out-of-place when seen anywhere but a sporting event.

Apparently the Brown government was looking for a motto to push this forward.  Something displayed on public buildings, such as the French “Liberté, égalité, fraternité”. Of course the idea tof coming up with a motto to etch into the stonework of new British post offices is stymied by the inability imagine there ever being new British post offices. Most of the publicly submitted suggestions were sarcastic at best.

The only suggestion I could possibly support as a summation of British values (and the Gilliam-esque absurdity of it actually being used would amuse me) would be a latin translation of “It could be worse” (“in deterius cadere potest“?).

This is why I fail at blog.  I can’t just moan about my broken boiler – I have to bury it in some larger rambling context.  Better perhaps to cultivate a style of the twitterish précis: “Still no hot water; mustn’t grumble.”

Last night’s hope

I scheduled a little television watching for myself last night. An hour’s worth of presidential inauguration coverage, stirring sentiments raising hopes for a brighter future. Immediately followed by the new episode of Battlestar Galactica – an hour of lost hope and utter utter despair. (That ruined earth at the end of the previous episode pretty much summed up the end of 2008.)

I then watched an episode of The West Wing on DVD (I’m currently working my way through the complete boxset) where Josh shouts at the president and punches through a window.

In balance my mood is down against the dollar.

Cruel and Unusual

According to the Sunday Mirror:

Evil mum Karen Matthews has been given a £300 PlayStation in her jail cell as a reward for being a model prisoner.

Crikey. I can’t justify getting a PS3 for myself right now, and the state is just handing them out to people the tabloids are calling, without apparent fear of hyperbole, evil?

The article ends on an odd note, almost as if it originated from some poorly advised press release from Sony:

Players can create a virtual life in new feature PlayStation Home.
Retails at £299, games cost around £45.
The England football team play when they get together – and Lewis Hamilton plays racing games with his brother.

What’s confusing about this is that I was under the impression that the Wii and PS3 consoles were barred from use in UK prisons because of their built-in wifi capabilities. A search of Hansard via TWFY for Playstation 3 backs this up:

John Reid: Advice was issued to all prisons in December 2005 that the Sony Playstation 3 was barred from the prison estate because of the equipment’s ability to send and receive radio signals.

Has this advice been rescinded, or is the Mirror confused?

Still breathing

Wow, 2005? I haven’t updated in a while – but I’ve switched the blog engine over to WordPress 2.7, and I’m going to look into resurrecting the ol’ blogstead.

The Action-Movie-Badass Guide to Self Surgery

I saw No Country for Old Men last night. It’s a good movie, certainly, but since it followed many of the rules of a typical genre action/chase/thriller. In that context, which you’ll understand if you’ve seen it, it’s ultimately unsatisfying.

One of the classic action genre moments is where character of Anton Chigurh performs self surgery using supplies he recently stole from a pharmacy. I love these scenes. I’m normally so squeamish about blood, all aspects of our organic machinery, but I’m fascinated watching someone who can suture their own wounds as if they were wiring a plug. Like the wetware equivalent of recompiling a kernel.

It’s Hollywood shorthand for badass. Assassin, outlaw, good guy who for some reason is on the run from the authorities. It says “I don’t need anyone’s help”. Full respect for the expression of self-sufficiency, yet uneasy distrust at someone who consciously prepares themselves to survive outside of society’s protections.

It seems clichéd, yet when I check the imdb for movies with the keyword ‘self-surgery‘ I only get five results, none of them the aforementioned. Fail. Come on internets, there has to be more than that. A Bourne at least?

(Originally posted on vox.com)

Look at what they made us give

I’ve just watched The Bourne Ultimatum. It’s an excellent action movie/travelogue, but not as all-round entertaining as, say, Die Hard 4.0 due to the utter lack of humour. Bourne’s been described as an “anti-James Bond” in some of the publicity interviews. Principally, because Bond, like anyone who works in a field dealing with death, has developed a dark humour as a coping mechanism. Bourne kills, but kills without quips.

Director Paul Greengrass critizised Bond for “wearing Prada suits”, seemingly oblivious to the fact that his protagonist runs about with a grand’s worth of shiny Tag Heuer on his wrist. Presumably because wearing a watch worth more than most men’s suits fits in nicely with the “low profile” look they were trying to achieve with the wardrobe?

Oh, and also he “doesn’t rely on high-tech gadgets”. This is, of course, balls. Bourne makes extensive use of cell phones in all three movies – a gadget that would have been considered pretty fantastical if featured in the bulk of Bond movies.

One of the reasons Bond movies of the 60s were popular was because they presented their spycraft gadgets as objects of everyday commuter mundanity. Wristwatches. Briefcases. Bowler hats. The possibility of a world existing just below the surface.

There was a time when wireless radio headsets were the sort of thing you’d see in “send-a-team-in” movies (You know: an elite team of well armed, technologically tricked out, highly trained operatives are sent in to deal with an unknown threat. One by one they’re picked off – and the only survivor is usually some unlikely civilian. A botanist, say. With a gammy leg or something). These days a bluetooth earpiece hardly bestows its wearer with any dangerous glamour.

The gap between movie fantasy and everyday mundanity for gadgets can be smaller than the time between sequels. By 2007 the movie world’s CIA is apparently using Google Maps to track targets. CIA computers protected by Norton Anti-virus. By comparison, the real-world’s supervillian “box-cutters” are already widely available.

One thing that struck me is that, for a globe-trotting movie, Bourne doesn’t seem to fly anywhere. Maybe it fits in the logic of the movie as a security/tradecraft thing? He’s in cars, and conspicuously on trains, buses and boats, but never on planes. For example, the journey from London to Madrid seems to be via train – presumably via Paris again. (Although I assume some unseen leg of his trip to New York would have been by plane).

The CIA guys seem to fly everywhere. In Supremacy, Pam Landy flies from Berlin to Washington DC for a few hours and then flies back to Berlin. Maybe, in the the current climate of eco-sensitivity, it’s a subtle way of separating good from bad, especially now that no-one’s allowed to smoke any more.

(originally posted on vox.com)