Mark Hurst on Vision Pro

Mark Hurst, who led a charge against Google Glass ten years ago, has now written about Apple’s Vision Pro headset, or as he calls it, Vision No:

What imitation of vision there is in the device, exists only as machine vision, continually scanning both inside and out. A phalanx of cameras monitors the user’s eyes in order to display them on the device’s front panel, while other cameras spy on the room layout, the furniture, and the people nearby — as the user’s eyes are locked away inside the Vision No enclosure. The only way for users to see anything is to accept the representation of the world as offered by the corporation’s filters. I don’t know about you, but my grip on reality — incomplete and imperfect as it may be — will not improve by passing through the hidden manipulations of a two-trillion-dollar company with an insatiable need for growth.

I recently listened to a Mac-centric podcast whose hosts were enthusiastic about Vision Pro. Two grown-ups excited about — it’s their example — the prospect of looking at spreadsheets on the top of a mountain. A virtual mountain, that is, a digital wallpaper that replaces your surroundings. Neil Postman suggested asking six questions about any new technology. The first one alone poses a problem for Vision Pro: “What is the problem to which this technology is the solution?”

A related post
My surroundings already are “an infinite canvas”

[I hadn’t realized that the device displays one’s eyes on the screen. Eyes without a face! That’s beyond creepy.]

116th and Park

[1640 and 1642 Park Avenue, East Harlem, Manhattan, c. 1939–1941. From the NYC Municipal Archives Collections. Click either image for a much larger view.]

What made me look up the corner of 116th Street and Park Avenue: The Pawnbroker (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1964). Sol Nazerman, Holocaust survivor and pawnbroker, has his shop at 1642.

[Nazerman (Rod Steiger), white hair, dark sweater, is just to the right of the 95. 95 E. 116th seems to be another way of referring to 1640 Park. Click for a much larger view. ]

The rhyme is beyond uncanny: 1642, the site of Nazerman’s pawn shop, was once the home of Kamerman & Co. Plumbing Supplies. In 1920 a trade publication described Israel Kamerman as “the well-known jobber who conducts a large, up-to-date supply house at 1642 Park avenue [sic].”

The corner location that became El Radiante later became an herbs-and-spices store, a botánica, and a deli. Today the corner is the site of a seven- or nine-story condo building in progress.

In 1970, 1642 was demolished, with a low-income housing development taking its place in 2009. Here’s a 1995 photograph showing the herbs-and-spices store and the then-empty lot.

On March 12, 2014, a gas explosion destroyed 1644 and 1646. Eight people were killed; more than seventy were injured. Here is a New York Times article about the mourning that followed.

The 1644 lot still stands vacant. Since at least September 2015, a sign has been attached to the chainlink fence in front of the property. A small tree in a planter stands in front of the fence. Google Maps photographs through the years show flowers and photographs left on the fence. The artist’s renderings of what will be the new 1640 and its environs show none of that.

When you look into the history of an address, you never know what you’re going to find.

Related reading
More photographs from the NYC Municipal Archives (Pinboard)

Boxes

[Click for a larger view.]

Between the toilet
And the shower
Fall the Boxes.

If you saw something like this in someone’s house, you’d worry, wouldn’t you? I’m saving this DOJ photograph here to caution myself against far milder kinds of clutter. Also against installing a chandelier in the batheroonie.

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Also: looking more closely, I now see that there are boxes in the tub, reaching to the ceiling.

Between the boxes
And the boxes
Falls the Shower Curtain.

[Poetry, such as it is, with apologies to T.S. Eliot.]

Today’s Saturday Stumper

In the word of 53-A, five letters, “Peanuts plaint”: ______! Today’s Newsday  Saturday Stumper is by Lester Ruff, or Stan Newman, the puzzle’s editor, composing under the pseudonym that signals an easier Stumper. The puzzle is fairly easy, but I hit a snag in the upper left corner: 17-A, six letters, “Physician’s patron.” All I could think of was HERMES, which is not a good answer, but ASCLEPIUS didn’t fit. So I searched for “Physician’s patron,” and magically, that corner fell into place, becoming as straightforward as I think it was meant to be.

Some more clue-and-answer pairs of note:

1-A, six letters, “Whom Alda got his M*A*S*H nickname from.” Lifelong learning.

12-D, eight letters, “Monitored?” Clever.

16-A, eight letters, “Successor to LAN technologies.” What once sounded like the future now sounds like science-fiction of the past.

22-A, three letters, “Not following.” Befitting a Stumper.

24-D, five letters, “Changes to one’s story.” Not LIES.

25-D, four letters, “Viva Rock Vegas character.” An idiosyncratically specific way to clue this name.

35-A, fifteen letters, “Nothing I can do.” Just a nice bit of colloquial speech.

36-D, eight letters, “It achieved statehood in 1901.” Statehood, eh? NEWMEXI? — oops, no.

48-A, six letters, “811, to librarians.” Or to readers who know the stacks.

My favorite in this puzzle: 46-D, six letters, “Cat without a coat.” More lifelong learning.

No spoilers; the answers are in the comments.

Unsealed

The indictment is here for the reading. Just one passage:

The classified documents TRUMP stored in his boxes included information regarding defense and weapons capabilities of both the United States and foreign countries; United States nuclear programs; potential vulnerabilities of the United States and its allies to military attack; and plans for possible retaliation in response to a foreign attack. The unauthorized disclosure of these classified documents could put at risk the national security of the United States, foreign relations, the safety of the United States military, and human sources and the continued viability of sensitive intelligence collection methods.

The document is worth reading in its entirety. It makes clear that Trump knew exactly what he was doing, knew that he wasn’t supposed to be doing it, and went to great lengths to keep what he had in his possession in his possession. Notice, for instance, in section 66, the discussion of a Redweld folder and a “plucking motion.” No words, no explicit instruction, just a motion.

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Notice too, in a snarky spirit, 58.c., which reproduces a text from a female member of the Trump family to Walt Nauta:

I saw you put boxes to Potus room. Just FYI and I will tell him as well:

Not sure how many he wants to take on Friday on the plane. We will NOT have a room for them. Plane will be full with luggage.

“I saw you put boxes to Potus room”: that’s gotta be Melania Trump, sounding a bit like Natasha Fatale.

It’s so extraordinary to think that that a non-reader may be meeting his downfall over an insistence on keeping printed matter close. I keep thinking about serial killers who save mementos of their crimes. But here the mementos themselves are crimes.

[A Redweld folder? That’s what I think most stationery fanatics know as a red-rope folder.]

How to convict

If I were to read one item today about last night’s indictment, it’d be this one, by Norman Eisen, Andrew Weissmann, and Joyce Vance: “How to Convict Trump” (The New York Times gift link).

[I’m not sure why the Times has the writers’ names in that order, but I’ve kept that order here.]

Writing it and changing it

The composer John Kander, in an interview aired on the PBS NewsHour last night:

“The ideas can be terrible, and nobody is a bad person because they have it. So you write it, and then you change it.”

Great advice for any endeavor that allows for revision.

Snoopy, downstairs

Snoopy is planning to play at Wimbledon. Charlie Brown: “Where will you stay if you go to England? You don’t know anyone there.”

[Peanuts, June 11, 1976. Click for a larger view.]

I always like seeing a Peanuts strip that references some once-obvious, now-gone bit of popular culture. The reference in this strip, then and now, is to the television series Upstairs, Downstairs, the Downton Abbey of its time (1971–1975 in the UK, 1973–1977 in the U.S.). I remember Mrs. Bridges and Mr. Hudson (Angela Baddeley and Gordon Jackson) and Rose (Jean Marsh), all from downstairs. No other names have stuck.

Related reading
All OCA Peanuts posts (Pinboard)

Sláinte!

We have a bottle of Redbreast twelve-year-old Irish whiskey ($$!), bought in anticipation of a friend’s visit this summer. Our friend can’t visit, so we need another occasion for which to open it. I think that occasion is now: “Trump Indicted in Documents Case” (New York Times gift link).

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Redbreast is so good.

“Books are weapons in the war of ideas”

[“Books cannot be killed by fire. People die, but books never die. No man and no force can put thought in a concentration camp forever. No man and no force can take from the world the books that embody man’s eternal fight against tyranny. In this war, we know, books are weapons. Franklin Roosevelt.” Poster by S[teve] Broder. 1942. From the Library of Congress. Click for a larger view.]

I found this poster via a report on “Letters Rising in the Air,” an exhibit at the National Library of Israel marking the ninetieth anniversary of Nazi bookburning in Berlin (May 10, 1933). Follow the link to see a letter (May 9) from Stefan Zweig to Max Brod urging a response by German-Jewish writers to the imminent burning. Also at the link: two partially burned pages from the work of Magnus Hirschfeld, psychologist and sexologist.