I bet you didn't know that this thread would have a part 2

Capt'n Midnight

^^^^



and it lags western tech by a generation , London's been CCTV'd out the wazoo for years

Capt'n Midnight

Capt'n Midnight wrote: »

^^^^



and it lags western tech by a generation , London's been CCTV'd out the wazoo for years

Explain this to me a little better please

New Home

CCTV cameras identify each individual they capture, and their "rating" appears beside them. Yes, terrifying.

Ted_YNWA

Ratings based on what criteria?

New Home

See the table I posted earlier.

Realt Dearg Sec

I used to teach a class on dystopias and, when teaching 1984 it was interesting to note that it is a novel about the exercise of power for its own sake. The terror of it was not actually dependent on the technology, but the technology in it does intensify the sense of powerlessness and inescapability that pervades the novel.

But as readers now, we can only regard the technology in it as impossibly quaint; we have utterly overtaken what was once a very futuristic vision. And more remarkably, where everything is imposed from above in the novel, we line up to spend huge amounts of our money on these technologies.

I think the Chinese social credit system is so terrifying to us because it reinstitutes that sense of powerlessness so bluntly, in contrast to how technology has been relentlessly marketed to us over the last thirty years as a mode of self empowerment. But the level of detailed social control it enables is far beyond anything Orwell describes, excepting that it incentivises as well as punishes.

But, as any Black Mirror fan will tell you, we don't need the state to impose such systems on us; we embrace a social media ecosystem that encourages exactly that kind of conformity through nothing more complicated than a like button. Affirmation=winning. I have a sinking feeling that a system like the Chinese one would ultimately prove very popular here.

Wibbs

+1000 R. What Orwell missed was that people would happily line up in their droves to ask for Big Brother.

Though I'm not so sure the Chinese system will go over nearly so easily in the West, at least to that degree. Chinese culture from Confucius onward has and continues to see and elevate social compliance as a virtue. From the family to the culture to the centralised state. Even in naming order the family name comes first. In contrast to western thought individualism is barely present in the culture. It's seen as a negative. I'm not too surprised they went along with even supported this TBH.

mikhail

New Home wrote: »

CCTV cameras identify each individual they capture, and their "rating" appears beside them. Yes, terrifying.

New Home wrote: »

See the table I posted earlier.

I can read some Chinese. That's not what that picture shows. The tags are things like adult man, grey clothes, black trousers.

Professor Moriarty

New Home wrote: »

https://i.imgur.com/PDmAYZj.jpg

I've seen worse totalitarian systems.

RiderOnTheStorm

Laurie Metcalf played Jackie Harris in tv show Rossanne. In a couple of episodes (in flashback) a younger Jackie was played by Lauries real life daughter, Zoe Perry. Years later Laurie played Mary Cooper in Big Bang Theory..... And Zoe played Mary in Young Sheldon. Daughter played younger version of mother .... twice!

bnt

Professor Moriarty wrote: »

I've seen worse totalitarian systems.

There was an interesting talk, recorded as a podcast available here, that Irish professor and investment banker Michael O’Sullivan gave to the London School of Economics (LSE) back in June. He covers a lot of ground related to his latest book, The Levelling, but the part that stuck out to me was a reminder that the debate between totalitarianism and personal freedom is far from new.

The title refers to the Levellers: not the band, but the 17th century socio-political movement. Around the same time, Thomas Hobbes' book Leviathan advocated for wise, authoritarian government to take care of the people. In the latter case, the understanding was that the ruler had to be really good at it, what we would call a Technocrat today.

In the light of China's "big government" initiatives, such as the above-mentioned social credit scoring, the idea that total individual freedom is best is being challenged. Big government has been tried before, under various names, and has always failed in various ways. What if China gets it right this time? Not perfect - tough "edge cases" will always exist and mistakes will happen - but good enough? It's a scary thought.

Realt Dearg Sec

Wibbs wrote: »

+1000 R. What Orwell missed was that people would happily line up in their droves to ask for Big Brother.

Though I'm not so sure the Chinese system will go over nearly so easily in the West, at least to that degree. Chinese culture from Confucius onward has and continues to see and elevate social compliance as a virtue. From the family to the culture to the centralised state. Even in naming order the family name comes first. In contrast to western thought individualism is barely present in the culture. It's seen as a negative. I'm not too surprised they went along with even supported this TBH.

I just wanted to come back to this because teaching literature over the years I've found it borne out very often. International students from China have a serious problem getting their head around the idea of plagiarism, and the notion that it is a violation of academic honesty policies. Their education reinforces the idea that your job as a student is to absorb the wisdom of authority figures, and reproduce it.

It's a massive issue then in an English class, because what you get is often almost verbatim reproductions of the book chapter and journal articles you've assigned, which are written by authorities on the subject, and thus reproduced. This is obviously an automatic zero, and it's really hard to explain to students raised this way that our whole objective is to learn to think critically about what we read, challenge ideas, and create arguments of our own through careful synthesis of other ideas. That kind of critical framework just isn't really there, and isn't terribly valued by their educational system as it is (or at least should be) by ours.

I've had serious plagiarism issues with students from southern Europe (Italy and Spain), but very rarely with Americans, or Germans, and not really in any serious way with Irish students either. But with the southern Europeans it was quite obviously pure laziness, while with the Yanks and Germans it was often calculated malice. The Chinese are unique for doing this in total good faith, assuming, in fact, that what they were doing was really exemplary.

Fourier

Realt Dearg Sec wrote: »

The Chinese are unique for doing this in total good faith, assuming, in fact, that what they were doing was really exemplary.

This extends very far back into how their Imperial bureaucratic training was about copying Confucian classics. Very old tradition.

I was actually reading about how Chinese characters work recently and I thought it was an interesting system. Apparently 97% of characters break down into what are called a radical and a phonemic part. The radical tells you what broad category of things or meaning the word falls into and the phoneme tells you what it rhymes with.

So:
蛾 = Moth, has two characters.

The first part is 虫 meaning "insect", the second part is 我 meaning "I" or "me".

So over all it reads "Is an insect, rhymes with I/me".

The difficult thing is that the "rhymes with" part is based on how things sounded circa 200 BC, so sometimes they don't really rhyme anymore. They cleaned this up a bit after the Communist revolution replacing the rhyme part in many words with something that did rhyme in contemporary language.

Marcos

bnt wrote: »

In the light of China's "big government" initiatives, such as the above-mentioned social credit scoring, the idea that total individual freedom is best is being challenged. Big government has been tried before, under various names, and has always failed in various ways. What if China gets it right this time? Not perfect - tough "edge cases" will always exist and mistakes will happen - but good enough? It's a scary thought.

You think that’s scary, look at what they are doing in Xinjiang right now. I’m not just talking about the camps. There’s a report in yesterday’s Sunday Times about this. It’s fairly long and behind a paywall so I’ll give you a summary. A Chinese journalist went there undercover posing as a visiting businessman and reported back what he saw. All front doors had QR codes which could be scanned by police, large camera gantries every 100 yards. Police checkpoints with people queuing to have their IDs, faces and phones scanned.

Beijing has invested $7.2 billion in techno security and large tech companies are using it as a real world lab to test their Integrated Joint Operations Platform (IJOP). Including Huawei and Leon Technology.

The Xinjiang Security Model will be exported elsewhere in China, any betting on Hong Kong being next?

The facial recognition also checks facial expressions to see if people are nervous! As if that wasn’t enough people have Han Chinese living in their houses spying on them, inputting biographical data to profile each person they’re monitoring. People also have had to go to “convenience” police stations set about every 500 yards apart to submit further data i.e blood, dna, fingerprints and voice samples. Finally they are also required to download special govt apps that give officials full access to their phones.

One leading cyber security expert on China described all this as having “global implications because this is the early stages of governance that is controlled through advanced predictive algorithmic surveillance networks. If those systems were exported, that would be a massive setback to the cause of human freedom, to liberal democracy throughout the world.”

Scary doesn’t even begin to describe it.

Sauce: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/bar-codes-and-cameras-track-chinas-lab-rats-dmm63kt36

RiderOnTheStorm

Professor Moriarty wrote: »

New Home wrote: »

https://i.imgur.com/PDmAYZj.jpg

I've seen worse totalitarian systems.

1000 posts in new thread ..... Yeahh!!

Chancer3001

To be a saint in Catholicism, you need to have performed a miracle (and one after death too I think)

When I go abroad and visit churches I often take a minute to read up on the miracles attributed to the saint of the local sightseeing church.

It's actually good fun because the stories are so silly.

Today was saint Anthony (the finding lost stuff fella). He made a hungry donkey bow down to him instead of eating for one miracle!

Rewatched a foot instantly to a lad who chopped his off in another.

And a big macho knight demanded a miracle, went to smash his glass on the ground , but the glass didnt break and smashed the tiles on the floor instead!

Also, I bet you didn't know they have his tongue on display in Italy because he was such a good speaker....bizarre

Ipso

Chancer3001 wrote: »

To be a saint in Catholicism, you need to have performed a miracle (and one after death too I think)

When I go abroad and visit churches I often take a minute to read up on the miracles attributed to the saint of the local sightseeing church.

It's actually good fun because the stories are so silly.

Today was saint Anthony (the finding lost stuff fella). He made a hungry donkey bow down to him instead of eating for one miracle!

Rewatched a foot instantly to a lad who chopped his off in another.

And a big macho knight demanded a miracle, went to smash his glass on the ground , but the glass didnt break and smashed the tiles on the floor instead!

Also, I bet you didn't know they have his tongue on display in Italy because he was such a good speaker....bizarre

That must be class 2, at least.

VW 1

Ipso wrote: »

That must be class 2, at least.

Right up there with the holy stone of clonrichert

joujoujou

It's illegal to own just one guinea pig in Switzerland because they get lonely.

https://www.techly.com.au/2016/03/14/in-switzerland-its-illegal-to-own-just-one-guinea-pig-due-to-loneliness/

Wibbs

While we all know of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, the idea of making a film of the book came quite soon after publication and many were drawn to it before Peter rolled the cameras, one of the very first was of all people, the band the Beatles. John Lennon was a major nerdfan of the books and wanted to do it, with the others in the band in different roles. They approached Stanley Kubrick as their choice of director. Tolkein apparently was the one who said no.

And funny enough the very last film the Beatles produced as a band; the documentary Let it be, is currently being completely restored, re-edited and remade from the many hours of original footage by none other than one Mr Peter Jackson.

Franz Von Peppercorn II

Wibbs wrote: »

While we all know of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, the idea of making a film of the book came quite soon after publication and many were drawn to it before Peter rolled the cameras, one of the very first was of all people, the band the Beatles. John Lennon was a major nerdfan of the books and wanted to do it, with the others in the band in different roles. They approached Stanley Kubrick as their choice of director. Tolkein apparently was the one who said no.

And funny enough the very last film the Beatles produced as a band; the documentary Let it be, is currently being completely restored, re-edited and remade from the many hours of original footage by none other than one Mr Peter Jackson.

Oh, is he doing his colorisation malarkey?

ohnonotgmail

Franz Von Peppercorn II wrote: »

Oh, is he doing his colorisation malarkey?

Was let it be not shot in colour?

Fourier

Franz Von Peppercorn II wrote: »

Oh, is he doing his colorisation malarkey?

He's adding the Mouth of Sauron as the fifth Beatle in the extended edition. Poor guy was kicked out by Lennon for being a mouthpiece for a timeless evil and being late for gigs.

Ipso

Wibbs wrote: »

While we all know of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings films, the idea of making a film of the book came quite soon after publication and many were drawn to it before Peter rolled the cameras, one of the very first was of all people, the band the Beatles. John Lennon was a major nerdfan of the books and wanted to do it, with the others in the band in different roles. They approached Stanley Kubrick as their choice of director. Tolkein apparently was the one who said no.

And funny enough the very last film the Beatles produced as a band; the documentary Let it be, is currently being completely restored, re-edited and remade from the many hours of original footage by none other than one Mr Peter Jackson.

Speaking of Let it Be, wasn’t that their second last studio album but last to be released as they spent ages producing it.

Wibbs

Franz Von Peppercorn II wrote: »

Oh, is he doing his colorisation malarkey?

Nah, like OhnoG said it was shot in colour originally. Their famous rooftop set was basically the end of the film.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NCtzkaL2t_Y

He's got access to all the original footage and is essentially making an entirely new film from it. The original was a bit of a rush job and none of them were entirely sold on it.

Ipso wrote: »

Speaking of Let it Be, wasn’t that their second last studio album but last to be released as they spent ages producing it.

Yep they weren't really sure what they were aiming to do with it. A fly on the wall documentary of the making of an album with a big live gig at the end. The Albert hall was one idea, renting a cruise ship another(good weed involved there). In the end they couldn't be arsed and just went upstairs to the roof of their Apple records offices and did it there. Which kinda turned out to be more "iconic" than any standard gig and copied a few times since.

They gathered themselves to do Abbey Road and that was a much happier set of sessions that they pulled together for one last time and it was the last time they were all together in the studio(one of the last was a song fittingly called "The End"). After that they were in essence over as a band and only met over lawsuits. Then another album was required(by contract IIRC?) so they went back and gave all the tapes to Phil Spector and he produced it(which McCartney apparently hated. I'd agree.). They did some overdubs for the Let it be album in 1970 but not all four of them together.

One of the last photos of them as a band in 1969.



Game over.

Wibbs

Actually speaking of Liverpudlian laziness Their last recorded album Abbey Road was originally gonna be called Everest after the mountain, but also because they were also a brand of ciggies one of them liked.



The original plan for the cover was to nip off to India and take a pic at the base of the mountain of the same name and that would be the album cover. But after the happy buzz died down and they ran out of dope... McCartney as usual when the others couldn't be arsed, came up with the idea of the studio as the album title and roughed up the idea of the cover. They got permission to hold up traffic for ten minutes one morning, the photographer on a step ladder took a half dozen photos and that was it. Some where they walked towards the studio, some where they walked away, like the final cover.



Ends up being one of the most iconic album covers ever. It was also their first(and one of the first) to not have the album title nor their name on the cover*. EMI initially objected saying it would impact sales if people didn't know who they were, which in the 60's was highly unlikely. Needless to say it sold squillions.



*though their White album only had their name embossed not printed

RiderOnTheStorm

MUSIC STORIES

There was great rivalry between the Beatles and Beach Boys back in the day. When Beach Boys released Pet Sounds, the Beatles realised the bar for music had been raised, and went and recorded Sergeant Pepper. The Beach Boys then went back into the studio and began to lay down SMiLE. It was going to be legendary. But change after change came, and it was never quite right. It spent decades being tweeked and became known as Wilsons Lost Masterpiece. AFAIK it was never released. Pity.

The Police song Every Breath You Take (penned by Sting) , was about a bitter break up with his partner, Frances Tomelty. Years later, he wrote (when you love somebody) Set Them Free, as an apology and showing how he should have reacted to the breakup.

Robert Johnson was a jobbing itinerant blues musician in the 1930s. Then in 1936 he recorded an album that transformed Delta Blues and reserved his place as a legend. His transformation to genius guitarist has created a particular legend about him selling his soul to the devil (at the crossroads). Another brilliant album in 1937 followed, but Robert had no commercial success in his lifetime. He died alone at the side of the road in 1938 .... aged 27.

Other musicians that died aged 27:
Brian Jones, Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Jim Morrison, and Kurt Cobain ..... But thats a story for another day.

sbsquarepants

In keeping with the 50th anniversary of the (alleged:D) moon landing.

All the Apollo astronauts were very proficient gaelic handball players (No, honestly they were!)

It stems form the fact that a lot of Irish immigrants ended up working in the military or emergency services, so it was common practice for military bases, police and fire stations to have handball courts and regular tournaments, kill the boredom and keep fit with the benefit of requiring very little space and practically no equipment.

When the space race began NASA, required all would be astronauts to stay in peak physical fitness, but offered no real guidance on how to do so. When they looked at standardising their fitness programme, they considered various sports regimes and concluded that the perfect all over workout was to be had by playing competitive handball - so much so that they actually made it compulsory in the 1950's

ohnonotgmail

In a slight tangent to the beatles stuff above the beatles are well known for playing rickenbacker guitars. In fact they helped make the brand famous. What you probably didn't know is why they started playing them. One story is that john lennon heard a guy called Toots Thielemans play one while the band were in hamburg in 1960. Toots is probably a name you are not familiar but you have more than likely heard him play. He was a jazz musician who played with the like of Charlie Parker and Miles Davis. He basically invented jazz harmonica playing. Probably his most widely known work is the recording of the theme for Midnight Cowboy. The plaintive harmonica is him. BUT the piece you have probably heard, and that he wrote, is the theme to Sesame Street. A piece of music familiar to nearly all and it was all by a belgian with a funny name who inspired John Lennon to start playing rickenbackers.

BaZmO*

To continue the NASA/Ireland connection theme, and quite fittingly, with the anniversary of the Moon Landing being this week...

There's an estate in Coolock that was built in the early 70's that has the roads named after the 1969 moon landing.

Eagle Park, Appollo Way, Woodville Court*, Armstrong Walk, Aldrin Walk, Tranquility Grove.




*Apparently residents weren't happy with the names. They didn't like being nicknamed "Moonies" or "Spacers"
As a result the Council had a plebiscite to rename the streets in 1977. Woodville Court (originally Michael Collins Rendezvous) was the only street to have it's name changed. Poor MC, the guy really couldn't catch a break!!