Stickers with the number of a hotline for reporting suspected spies have been posted above some urinals. Packs of tissues handed out to troops carry a notice promising a reward of T$5 million ($180,000) for successfully exposing a spy.
Imagine a urinal sticker with a secret message revealed when it detects something specific… I swear I am talking about a real product already and not inventing some crazy urinalysis feature.
The sticker could say “if you’re a leaker, this sticker will reveal a number for you to call and turn yourself in”.
Ok, ok, so my other question is whether that sticker said something like “leaks can kill, call us if you see one”.
For five years in early American history (1792-1797) a genius published almanacs with copious information about the seasons.
Benjamin Banneker, who was self-taught, informed Americans of crucial science of the time to aid in trades including agriculture and fishing: astronomical calculations, cycles of locusts, phases of the moon, tide charts and more.
Sir, I thank you sincerely for your letter of [August] 19th. instant and for the Almanac it contained. no body wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colours of men, & that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence both in Africa & America. I can add with truth that no body wishes more ardently to see a good system commenced for raising the condition both of their body & mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecillity of their present existence, and other circumstance which cannot be neglected, will admit. I have taken the liberty of sending your almanac to Monsieur de Condorcet, Secretary of the Academy of sciences at Paris, and member of the Philanthropic society because I considered it as a document to which your whole colour had a right for their justification against the doubts which have been entertained of them. I am with great esteem, Sir, Your most obedt. humble servt. Th. Jefferson
Despite kind words allegedly things didn’t change and the slippery Jefferson recanted his praise of Banneker, not to mention ceased any efforts at ending slavery.
Jefferson’s reply fell far short of addressing the political, religious, and ethical challenges that Banneker had put forth… a question which the future president chose not to debate with the freeman: the fundamental contradiction between the principles of democracy and freedom and the cruelty of slavery, passionately voiced by Banneker. Jefferson, it seems, saw Banneker’s intelligence as an exception among African-Americans, rather than evidence that Jefferson’s perceptions about race might be fundamentally flawed. Sadly, three years after Banneker’s death in 1806, Jefferson wrote to Joel Barlow, an American poet and politician, disparaging the by-then well known Banneker and arguing that he could not have made the calculations contained in the almanac without assistance.
Jefferson’s disparagement in today’s terms would look like accusing someone of being part of an extra-national membership (e.g. Catholicism, Judaism, Islam) as if their thoughts are owed to some other group, or come from outside intervention. It’s an encoded way to call people puppets and unintelligent.
An antique cartoon (The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1840) illustrates the absurdity of Jeffersonian racism:
Source: The Henry Ford Collection (THF7209)
Jefferson was obviously wrong about perpetuating slavery, and also wrong in discrediting the genius of Banneker by assigning him a false association.
Unfortunately, very little of Banneker’s revolutionary and pioneering work remains since his house was “mysteriously” set on fire and all his works completely destroyed on October 11, 1806 the day he was buried. Jefferson attempting to destroy the reputation of an American icon was foreshadowed by men attempting to destroy any evidence of that icon’s legacy.
One of the items destroyed, for example, was a famous wood clock he had made that had kept accurate time for decades. It is hard to overstate the significance of being self-taught yet making a precisely accurate clock out of wood in the 1700s.
Many historians believed that Banneker’s clock is the first one made entirely in the USA.
Or as Stevie Wonder put it even more generally in his song Black Man:
First clock to be made
In America was created
By a Black man
Arguably, based on the Library of Congress collections, Banneker was a colleague or even a peer of George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In other words, we know about him primarily because records preserved on behalf of Washington and Jefferson (not to mention records made by Stevie Wonder).
It begs the question whether the genius of Banneker should have been afforded an even greater influence over American calendaring and timekeeping.
His almanacs remind us of the lunisolar calendars found around the world, which track agricultural cycles and the significance of environmental observation. Consider the Japanese documentation of poetic nijūshi sekki (twenty-four seasonal divisions), which achieves national significance as works of art.
Here you can see how Japan assigns three kō to every sekki, each about a week long.
Source: Quartz at Work
Industrial American calendaring tends to repeat at best the vague “April showers bring May flowers”. However, time keepers in Japan tell us March 31 “distant thunder” to April 15 “first rainbow” and then May 5 “frogs start singing”, May 21 “silkworms feast on mulberry leaves”, June 11 “decomposing grass turns to fireflies”.
Imagine what his legacy — so violently uninterrupted — should look like today had it been allowed to flourish; perhaps wonder whether climate change in America would be so controversial in 2022 if the existence of Banneker himself, a genius freeman in America, hadn’t been so controversial 230 years ago (let alone today).
Or as another cartoon put it in 1876, called “In Self Defense: Southern Chivalry”…
Source: Arthur Burdett Frost (1851-1928), “Harper’s Weekly”, 28 October, 1876, p. 880
Sean J. Kelly intelligently examines, through a Lacanian psychoanalytic framework, the aesthetic effects of Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” (1845), specifically those effects produced by the poem’s sublime architectonics of present-absence. While critics have examined the role of the sublime and uncanny in the poem, most of these studies have focused on providing an historical context for Poe’s aesthetics or establishing cultural sources for the poem’s symbolic imagery. By contrast, Kelly aims to demonstrate that both the form and content of “The Raven” anticipate the psychoanalytic, specifically Freudian-Lacanian, concept of das Ding—the mythical “Thing”—which Jacques Lacan, in Seminar VII, argues is the lost object “attached to whatever is open, lacking, or gaping at the center of our desire.” Because, according to Lacan’s theory, this concept names the void around which human subjectivity forms and all subsequent desire turns, art functions, in essence, to “creat[e] the void and thereby introduce[e] the possibility of filling it.”
The gap (from empiricists like Austrian philosopher Karl Popper) described in a fun philosophy article about Hegel is exactly why big data security is failing so badly (the book I’ve been writing for a decade).
His philosophy was seen as the epitome of a grand metaphysical system purporting to lay out a priori the fundamental structure of reality, which turned out to be mental, or in Hegel’s vocabulary, spiritual – something like a world soul, or (even worse), a Spinozistic, pantheistic God. Thus, not only was Hegel’s system grandiose metaphysics, it was grandiose theology as well. Hegel also defended a holism that conflicted with the atomism (and the foundationalistic theory of knowledge) that comes naturally with empiricism and which seemed to be a lesson taught by modern science.
The argument usually goes that acquiring detailed specialist knowledge comes at a loss of wider synthetic systemic knowledge.
Yet Popper’s wonderful empiricist falsification method works fine in conjunction with the broader grandiose thinking of Hegel. I think too many are trying to use one instead of the other.
It’s like finding truth in cogs instead of in cognition (as I put it in my RSAC presentation on “unsafe learning“)
You definitely want to find the bolt that’s about to fail and cause a plane to crash (the overhyped bug), yet you also want to find the airline that has a habit of inefficiency that leads to missed maintenance windows that replace bolts before fatigue (the undervalued efficiency of ethical management).
In my ISACA SF presentation I argue this is why Tesla repeatedly fails the most basic tests and is little more than a killing machine.
The best way of framing a domain shift comes from Gregory Bufithis, who poetically put it on social media as…
…too many use this new complexity of knowledge as an excuse for dominant stupidity.
Or Popper in 1945 (“The Open Society and Its Enemies“) put it as a paradox of tolerance: that an “unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance.”
This helps me to explain why Facebook’s 2015 “dominant” security officer was about as effective at his job as the Grover Shoe Factory head of operations in 1905.
