Monthly Archives: July 2010

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Walk a mile in another (wo)man’s virtual shoes

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I’ve often thought the world would be a fairer place if we could all spend a month living as someone of a different gender, race or level of physical ability. Until the gene-mod folks get us to the level of Iain M Banks’ Culture and provide complete plasticity of embodiment (c’mon, people – get a move on with that!), the next best thing is the Metaverse. New World Notes reports on the experience of a Second Life clothing designer who spent some time in a male avatar:

… Rebecca came away with a lot of insights, besides how to better make male fashion: “I learned that you can’t really trust anyone, male or female,” she tells me now. “People in Second Life can tell the truth as easily as they can tell a lie.”

(Lying about oneself is not exactly a thing unique to SL, but the ability to present visually and conversationally as something you are not adds all sorts of layers of complexity into the equation.)

By being a virtual male, “I learned about some of my own weaknesses at the time, such as my tendency to believe what every male avatar told me, especially if they had a good looking avatar. I think the visual aspect of Second Life somehow tricks the brain into taking our past experiences and cultural expectations and placing these experiences and expectations onto others within Second Life… I think a lot of women have the same type of thinking when they go into Second Life and tend to become attracted to good looking avatars, and overlook the avatars who are not particularly attractive.”

It’s hardly a rigorous feminist interrogation of the SL social space, but there’s some value there nonetheless. It’s interesting to note that Rebecca found herself falling back on the default “player” behaviour of male avatars who’d hit on her in the past; score another point for gender as a social construction.

I really wish more people could be encouraged to try this sort of thing out; most of my own (admittedly shallow) revelations about the actual experience of othering has come from spending time in female avatars, as well as observing the persecution of friends who embody as furries or other anthropomorphs. Nothing brings home the casual (and often unintentional) misogyny and privilege of baseline male behaviour quite like being on the receiving end of it.

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Three-course specials at The House Of Longpig

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The lines between futurism, architecture and conceptual art continue to blur and fade (if they ever existed anywhere other than our own minds, that is); a chap called Mitchell Joachim is working on making a house from meat. Yes, a house. Made – grown, to be more precise – from in vitro tissue culture. A meat house. House made of meat. [image ganked from INHABITAT]

The In Vitro Habitat... AKA "meat house"

While we’re talking about in vitro meat, Wired UK turned over the mic to Warren Ellis, as they do on a monthly basis, and he decided to talk about cannibalism. Fans of Ellis’ reputation-making series Transmetropolitan will remember that The City was full of places where you could eat pretty much anything, all the way up (or is it down?) to cultured human flesh, and that riff gets echoed here:

… the technology is there to start generating human meat without the dubious ethical intervention of human slaughter. Which is harder than you’d think, and the artificial meat version wouldn’t have any Rohypnol precipitate in its cell structure. If there’s no human shoe-beasts involved in the butchery, where’s the problem? Show me the ethical hurdles to ordering a cultured manburger.

I demand that science do its job and allow us all to indulge in a consumer experiment: are humans the most delicious meat of all? Furthermore, I think there’s an easy way to access more funding for this goal: celebrity cell donation.

Of course, Uncle Warren is being ironic here, and has no real interest in eating human flesh, cultured or otherwise.

Probably.

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The apotheosis of J D Shapely

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Hopeful news from the world of HIV/AIDS research:

… U.S. government scientists have discovered three powerful antibodies, the strongest of which neutralizes 91% of HIV strains, more than any AIDS antibody yet discovered.

[…]

The antibodies were discovered in the cells of a 60-year-old African-American gay man, known in the scientific literature as Donor 45, whose body made the antibodies naturally.

As William Gibson put it on Twitter: “They found J.D. Shapely! Off to Colored People for a celebratory backpiece! :-D”

(If you’re not grokking the reference, you should make time to read Gibson’s Virtual Light.)

And here’s a bonus line from the little article there, that puts the incredible amount of work involved in this sort of research into perspective:

Researchers screened 25 million of his cells to find 12 that produced the antibodies.

That is one mad tiny needle in a huge meat haystack, right there.

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Fractal market movements predict deep economic depression just ahead

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It’s a great time to be a prophet of economic doom, because everyone’s still smarting badly enough from the last suckerpunch to take the threat of a groin-kick very seriously. And if you want a really bleak prediction, Robert Prechter’s ananlysis of fractal patterns in the market movements of the 1930s and 40s implies that the groin-kick will be delivered by an elephant wearing concrete boots [via TechnOccult]:

Originating in the writings of Ralph Nelson Elliott, an obscure accountant who found repetitive patterns, or “fractals,” in the stock market of the 1930s and ’40s, the theory suggests that an epic downswing is under way, Mr. Prechter said. But he argued that even skeptical investors should take his advice seriously.

“I’m saying: ‘Winter is coming. Buy a coat,’ ” he said. “Other people are advising people to stay naked. If I’m wrong, you’re not hurt. If they’re wrong, you’re dead. It’s pretty benign advice to opt for safety for a while.”

[…]

For a rough parallel, he said, go all the way back to England and the collapse of the South Sea Bubble in 1720, a crash that deterred people “from buying stocks for 100 years,” he said. This time, he said, “If I’m right, it will be such a shock that people will be telling their grandkids many years from now, ‘Don’t touch stocks.’ ”

The Dow, which now stands at 9,686.48, is likely to fall well below 1,000 over perhaps five or six years as a grand market cycle comes to an end, he said. That unraveling, combined with a depression and deflation, will make anyone holding cash “extremely grateful for their prudence.”

Prechter’s analysis isn’t very popular, naturally.

The “mathematics don’t work,” Mr. Acampora said, because such a big decline would imply that individual stocks would need to trade at unrealistically low levels. Furthermore, he said, “I don’t want to agree with him, because if he’s right, we’ve basically got to go to the mountains with a gun and some soup cans, because it’s all over.”

Still, on a “near-term” basis, he said, “We’re probably saying the same thing.”

There’s a deep emotional component to Acampora’s response, there – the same one that keeps most of us from considering the real worst case scenarios. Caesar hears only what is pleasing unto Caesar, perhaps… but note that Acampora has shifted his own personal holdings to cash in the short term, so grim times are likely to be on the cards one way or the other.

But Doug Rushkoff, typically enough, sees an opportunity to build a better system on the ruins of the old:

Yes, this is really it. The beginning of a true end-of-cycle economically.

If you own “stocks,” use these bounces to get out completely. If you have to park your money somewhere, consider yourself lucky you have money to park.

The object of the game for those who actually have capital is not how to grow it, but how to keep it. Capital has driven our economy since 1300, and the recent bull market was the end of a cycle that began in the mid-1700′s.

The fact that it is ending is not the end of the world at all. It just means that there’s a whole lot of money out there with no place to go. People can’t find a place to park their money because there’s more money looking for investment than there is stuff to invest in.

And that’s because we’re finally in a technological era where great innovations are more about reducing the need to spend time, resources, and energy than they are about increasing it. iPads aside, of course.

Given the choice, I’ll take Rushkoff’s vision of the future, please. Will we make that choice for ourselves, and carry it through? I guess that’s down to us.

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Stuff the jetpacks, where’s my moving pedway?

Is the moving sidewalk an sf-nal idea whose time has come? Tom Vanderbilt at Slate asks whether urban transportation networks could be significantly improved by making the walkways of the city move like the ones at the airport [via SlashDot].

It’s actually a much older idea than Heinlein’s “The Roads Must Roll”:

The moving walkway, of course, is a firmly entrenched and familiar transportation technology, but it has been largely limited to controlled (and typically transportation-related) environments, like airports, train stations, or theme parks. Its history unspools further back than you might imagine. As Paul Collins has written, the first moving sidewalks were unveiled at Chicago’s 1893 Columbian Exposition (where they could shuttle 31,680 passengers per hour), again at the 1900 Paris Exhibition, and seemed well on their way to conquering cities like New York. As Collins writes, Max Schmidt, the creator of the Chicago walkway, “proposed a flurry of similar projects around Manhattan—running down Broadway, along Wall Street, over the Williamsburg Bridge and across 23rd and 34th Street. To Schmidt, the advantages of the moving walkway were so compelling that he was convinced they would supplant some subways rather than supplement them. By 1909, he was pushing a massive $70 million scheme that would provide Manhattan with a network of subterranean moving sidewalks.”

Vanderbilt draws no solid conclusions, but much of the material he mentions suggests that there are enough downsides to the idea to make it counterproductive. For my money, urban centres with hugely reduced motor vehicle traffic could simply build wider walkways (and more cycle paths), which would make pedestrian movement not only faster but safer and more enjoyable…

… yeah, yeah, I know, I’m such a utopian.

Serendipitous and contextually relevant bonus material: Shareable has just republished Benjamin Rosenbaum’s story “Falling”, which starts with a man standing on a moving walkway in a future Frankfurt. Short, sweet and a little bit visionary.