Pitchfork has a great piece up in which Philip Sherburne explores the origins of the “Loon” sound, most famously used on 808 State’s “Pacific State” and Sueño Latino’s eponymous house classic.

I’m approaching 40 so obviously didn’t realise that the “Loon” is making a comeback, having appeared on new tracks by Nicki Minaj and Rustie. If so it’s nice to hear. And it’s nice to read such an extensive investigation into a single sound.

The article made me wonder, though: if, as Wikipedia claimed, a macaque can own the copyright to a picture it took, should the loon whose utterance was immortalised be afforded the same privilege?

(via Kent Williams)

A funny thing happened to our radio this morning.

It normally turns itself on at 7am or so and tunes into the Today programme on Radio 4. At first I thought it had done just that, but after a few minutes I realised something very strange had happened: it was receiving radio signals from a parallel universe.

What with it being very early in the morning, I wasn’t in a state to figure out exactly how it had managed to do this. As a general rule I try not to get my head around issues of transdimensional communication at least until I’ve had my morning coffee. All I knew was that I was listening to news from another timestream.

This parallel timestream had a lot in common with ours. Radio 4 existed, as did the Today programme, and it even had the same presenters. And, just as in our world, King Abdullah of Saudi Arabia had only just died.

The main difference, however, was that in this parallel universe Saudi Arabia was a progressive, liberal country, having undergone decades of root-and-branch reform. In fact, from the way it was talked about in this radio broadcast it sounded like a beacon of religious freedom and equal rights for women.

It was really exciting to listen to and I found myself wishing that I inhabited that parallel universe and not this one, the one in which Saudi Arabia is a barbaric theocratic dictatorship which regularly beheads its citizens, treats women who drive as though they were terrorists and brutally flogs people who have done absolutely nothing wrong.

Oh well.

I enjoyed this interview with James Ransone, who played Ziggy in Season 2 of The Wire.

As every fan of The Wire knows, the second season was the show’s apogee. It put the larger-than-life characters (Omar, Stringer) to one side and focused instead on the struggles of the working class community around the Baltimore dockyards. But although those struggles might initially seem dull compared with the high-stakes gangland drama of Season 1, the second outing of The Wire is the clear winner in terms of high Shakespearean tragedy.

The only people who really dislike the second season are white people. People got mad that they moved it out of the hood. And look, there might be an element that the character is annoying, but there’s that feeling of familiarity too. That the blue collar worker might hit a little close to home rather than the projects of East Baltimore. Ziggy is more like a family member you might have; there’s not this cognitive dissonance. You’re much more likely to know someone like Ziggy than to know someone like Omar.

Ziggy might well be the Jar Jar Binks of The Wire, but he’s a deeply tragic character, and it must have been weird for the actor who played him to only start being recognised on the streets 6 years after the show originally aired.

It might be lunchtime or nearly lunchtime where you live. If so, you’ll probably want some lighthearted cyber-dystopian reading material to peruse at your desk while you eat your Pret sandwich. Well here you go.

Ai Weiwei Is Living In Our Future by Hans de Zwart on Medium: a famous artist’s experience of live under permanent, overt surveillance, a life we may all be experiencing in the not too distant future. But it’s not all about the state eavesdropping on us, because guess what? We’re doing it too:

Put a collar with a GPS chip around your dog’s neck and from that moment onwards you will be able to follow your dog on an online map and get a notification on your phone whenever your dog is outside a certain area. You want to take good care of your dog, so it shouldn’t be a surprise that the collar also functions as a fitness tracker. Now you can set your dog goals and check out graphs with trend lines. It is as Bruce Sterling says: “You are Fluffy’s Zuckerberg”.

On Nerd Entitlement by Laurie Penny in the New Statesman: triggered by, among other things, a discussion thread on Scott Aaronson’s blog, this piece looks critically at the sense of persecution often experienced by male geeks. It’s not unsympathetic but rightly points out that teenage trauma, although authentic, doesn’t negate the privilege that male geeks enjoy later in life. Now, you might say this isn’t really cyber-dystopian, but I’d say it is. As technology exerts a greater influence of our lives, the great risk is that it will be used to enforce and amplify the social advantages enjoyed by those who control it: and, for the time being, that tends to be white male nerds (like me). Addressed the issues raised in this article would go a long way to making a technology-driven future far more inclusive and a little less dystopian.

Finally, in Inadvertent Algorithmic Cruelty, Eric Meyer talks about the emotional effect of Facebook’s “Year In Review” app appearing uninvited on his timeline. The app chose, as its main image, a photo of Eric’s six-year-old daughter, who had tragically died that year. As you can imagine, it was a deeply upsetting experience. Yes, it’s an example of the insensitivity of computer algorithms, but it’s also an example of the failure of design (not for the first time at Facebook) for reasons similar to the ones mentioned above. Eric Meyer has since posted a follow-up where he states, rightly, that this isn’t a Facebook problem but one common to design teams everywhere — worst-case scenarios or even slightly unusual ones are often labelled “edge cases” and then dismissed. Either way, this is a horrible example of how technology can still cause harm without anyone intending to be harmful.

John Naughton linked to this fascinating piece about the use of PowerPoint in American courtrooms.

Just like Naughton, I didn’t know that American prosecutors were allowed to deliver rebuttals with accompanying PowerPoint decks. Nor did I know that they resort to such manipulative, tabloid-esque techniques in the slides they create – techniques that can, in some cases, result in mistrials.

The prosecutor had dressed up her closing argument to the jury with a series of slides, complete with “sound effects and animation,” the appellate court wrote. On one slide, footprints materialized across the bottom of the screen. Other slides exhibited “concentric rings of a target,” with each ring corresponding to an item of evidence; the defendant’s name, Sergey Fedoruk, was in the bull’s-eye. The prosecution’s final slide, the pièce de résistance, opened with a header that said “Murder 2.” Then, under the header, a single word flashed, in all capital letters, in 96-point red type: GUILTY

Defendants are not forced to attend court wearing prison garb, because this would create an association of guilt in the minds of the jury and taint the trial. Prosecutors often use PowerPoint to get around this by using mugshots and shifty-looking CCTV footage of defendants and then plastering the word “GUILTY”, in red text, all over their faces. Very subtle.

Read the full piece over at the Marshall Project.