Home and Shopping

Rose Madeline Mula writes: Another oddity — everyone today walks around clutching a water bottle in one hand and a tiny, flat, rectangular object that they claim is a telephone in the other. Huh? If that’s a telephone, no wonder they have no idea what we mean when we tell the to “hang up the phone” or if we complain that the phone is “ringing off the hook.” They are also baffled when we talk about “dialing” a number. But then we are equally bewildered when they complain that someone has “ghosted” them or they describe something as “dope” or “lit.” If these kids were transported back to the past, they would be lost. Literally. No GPS back then.                                                                 more »

Justice delayed is not justice denied, is the major conclusion one reaches after reading Jerry Mitchell’s quest to convict the killers of 1960s civil rights activists. But it is a race against time. Many of these killers died normal deaths without serving any time for their misdeeds. But not all. Some lived long enough to be convicted decades later, by juries that could not have existed, let alone convicted, in the 1960s. This book is a good read; both entertaining and informative. more »

“Alexa is one more way for Amazon to gather extremely valuable data,” Meredith Whittaker, co-director of the A.I. Now Institute at NYU. “And this data collection is extremely important to this business model. It’s extremely hard to do … convincing people to just deploy something like this in their home is — it’s a brilliant trick.” It’s one that’s helping Amazon in a quest to dominate the future — not just of commerce, but also artificial intelligence. “Amazon wants to have the entire environment, essentially miked … All these intimacies, all this insight is being integrated, analyzed and integrated. That is an extraordinary kind of power that has never before existed.” more »

Six months before he died in poverty and obscurity, architect and draftsman Jean Jacques Lequeu (1757– 1826) donated more than 800 drawings, one of the most singular and fascinating graphic oeuvres of his time, to the French Royal Library. Lequeu’s donation of more than 800 architectural drawings, letters, manuscripts and physiognomic studies to the Royal Library in Paris created a paper legacy that has confounded scholars ever since. more »