Shotspotter, Plainfield: Another Cargo Cult Rears its Ugly Head.

Unless Plainfield has become Afghanistan and you can immediately and indiscriminately launch a retaliatory attack into the location where the shots were fired, Shotspotter will not work. The science is not there. Yes, we should have cameras located in high crime areas and provide access to them in real time for all the police and citizens to view.

I don't know who is pelding this Kool Aide but I spent my entire career in technology and can tell you the devil is in the details, see my Sept.29, 2010, blog post. But then again, my advice is free, so it must not be worth anything. It is always interesting to note that those of us who know technology look at it with a jaundice eye and while those who don’t, like ‘Cargo Cultist,’ rush to embrace it as if it were manna from heaven.

The Council and the Administration would do well to read the article in the August edition of Scientific American, ‘How New York Beat Crime.’

Yeah I know  a $250,000 grant is a lot to let slip by, but  if only Shotspotter qualifies for the grant then you have to ask yourself who is being paid off and maybe for once Plainfield should take the high road and walk? 

Is Facebook the Face of 1984?

Some of us are old enough to remember 1984, a year that I faced with trepidation.  Would I, the nation and the planet get through it or would the Orwellian monsters I had read about, led by Big Brother, seize and bind us to a world of dystopian  totalitarianism where every move, action,  thought and indiscretion was monitored  and controlled by the state? …’Put down on your permanent record’ as they use to say. 1984 came and went, uneventfully. We didn’t jump the shark.  But then around 1992, Tim Berners-Lee set off a chain reaction with the creation the World Wide Web. And, the world did exactly that. It self-assembled  into a web of connections, to the point where anyone with a computer or computer-like device has instant access to the totality of man’s knowledge and where anyone can upload a video, a text, a picture for the world to see. In fact we have the ability to put our entire lives online and that is where the law of unintended consequences starts  to kick in.

When Amazon came on line I thought, how cute, a bunch of lesbians decided to open up an  on-line book store. Then came the search engines: AltaVista, Yahoo, Infoseek, and, the Leviathan, Google. Followed by: MySpace,  YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.  Meanwhile the prices of computers and cell-phones plummeted.  Today only Luddites don’t have cell-phones and/or computers, both able to access the Internet and both with WI-FI. We still don’t have HAL (thank God!), but we do have the 2001 Newsreader; it’s called the iPad and cleverest of all was the insertion of a camera into a cellphone –can you say, Dick Tracy.  Everyone now is a photo-journalist. That drunken teen party you gave while your parents were away, tagged and posted on Facebook.  Oh look, there’s your fraternity hazing online in Hi-Def on Facebook. Is that you standing next to someone smoking weed at party? Hmmm, the Facebook tag's got your name on it? You thought it was fun when you join that right-wing, left-wing, anarchist group in college and posted all your demonstrations  on YouTube and notified your friends on Facebook.  You thought you were smart when you turned on Facebook’s  Personal Locator;  now you’re in divorce court and your wife’s lawyer has got a record of the date, time, location and duration of every massage parlor and hotel you visited while engaging in your infidelities. In fact, if any of your liaisons had their Facebook Locator turned on, they can tie you directly to that person.  Never put anything on the Internet that you don’t want the whole world to see. 

Facebook and all these other Internet enablers have immeasurably improved humanity’s  ability to communicate but they have a dark side. They are like the Terminator: They never forget and they never stop.  Soon we will be able to record and upload every second of our lives.  When you  go for a job interview, a bank  loan,  or apply for an apartment, you, your family and your friends  will be FaceBooked  and Googled and then judged on that information.  The question you have to ask is will their on-line voyeurism diminish their humanity? How will you be weighed in the balance? Will they, 
will we become our own ‘Big Brothers’?

All Hail  Big Brother. He is us!

Judith Beheading Holofernes

Compare and contrast two paintings on the same subject, 'Judith Beheading Holofernes,'  by the great Renaissance artists, Artemisia Gentileschi and Michelangelo Caravaggio. One survived a horrific rape to become a renowned artist; the other was a murderer, brigand, all around bad guy and a renowned artist.
Clicking on there names below will take you to their Bios.

Atremisia Gentilesch 1593-1652:

Michelangelo Caravaggio 1571-1610:

Not Edison but Nikola Tesla

Contrary to what most people in the United States are taught, it wasn't Edison who made the use of electricity practical. It was Nikola Tesla.