There’s nothing “shocking” about growing up, Mary Elizabeth Williams, Salon, September 11, 2014
Along with the gotcha! wardrobe malfunction, the “Can you even believe it that a human being is subject to the laws of time and physical progression?” story is a reliable page views grabber. Throw in wrinkles, weight or any possible cosmetic surgery and you’re particularly golden. Three years ago, the Internet blew a gasket when Sinead O’Connor, who was once 20 years old, appeared in public, in the words of an Inquisitr headline, “No Longer Bald or Skinny.” Fortunately, she had the decency to lose weight before the release of her new album earlier this year, prompting inevitable headlines about her “dramatic makeover.” And when the 81-year-old Kim Novak appeared at the Oscars this winter with an unusually taut, immobilized countenance, critics were swift to mock her “wax museum” appearance. These are your options, people. You can get older in whatever natural form that may take and be made fun of for it, or attempt to remain youthful and be made fun of for it. Basically, unless you master some vampire-like secret of remaining a fixed age and size for eternity, you’re screwed.
Colorblindness is the New Racism, Lauren Rankin, Policy Mic, July 22, 2013
Racism is a multi-faceted, complex framework, simultaneously covert and overt, both individual and systemic. It can be both an isolated incident and a structural fabric. And yet, by and large, Americans cling to the narrow idea that racism died along with the political correctness of “n” word and the mass lynchings of blacks by white terrorists in the 20th century. Racism, they say, is a problem of the past. We have a black president. You are the racist ones, they say, because you keep talking about race. We don’t see race. We don’t have a race problem, they say.
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“Colorblindness” sounds like a just and harmonious idea in theory, except that when put into practice, it discounts and erases the racial discrimination and oppression that people of color continually experience. It has become a tool to reify white supremacy and perpetuate the oppression of people of color by dismissing racial justice efforts and invalidating their experiences and perspectives. Martin Luther King, Jr. envisioned a day where people were judged on not on the color of their skin but on the content of their character, yes, but he also knew that we had to do the work to get to that point. Colorblindness cannot work in a society that has not truly reconciled the racism upon which our country was built. We are applying colorblindness as a bandage before we even attempt to cleanse our painfully deep racist wound.
Chatbots are boring. They aren’t AI. PZ Myers, Pharyngula, September 11, 2014
Chatbots are kind of the lowest of the low, the over-hyped fruit decaying at the base of the tree. They aren’t even particularly interesting. What you’ve got is basically a program that tries to parse spoken language, and then picks lines from a script that sort of correspond to whatever the interlocutor is talking about. There is no inner dialog in the machine, no ‘thinking’, just regurgitations of scripted output in response to the provocation of language input.
