Darth Maul lightsaber demo

Ray Park demonstrates  Darth Maul's lightsaber technique to a con crowd that weirdly includes a Darth Maul cosplayer. He looks like he's keeping quiet and hoping to learn something. At the end, he nods, sagely.

Angels Flight and 3rd Street Tunnel

This is where we left off, the 3rd Street tunnel exit under the Bank of America.

I walked up to the top of the hill and back down on to Hill Street. From there you can see the tunnel entrance and the bottom of Angel's Flight. The funicular used to be next to the tunnel but it was dismantled during the the big build-up on the crest of the hill and when it was put back together, it was half a block further away.

I did try to take a picture from the parapet of the tunnel exit, but the Bank of America security guard went into full security mode and wouldn't let me do it.

 The tunnel entrance isn't as pretty (or as crazed with cracks) as the exit. It looks like a multi-level parking structure or something.

To the left of it is the facade of Angel's Flight. Oh, it looks like it may be Angels Flight. Well, you learn something every day.

 Going up! It costs a dollar. Pay at the top.

 The funicular car interior. Lovely wood.

And the view back down the hill. The tunnel entrance would be to the left of this picture at the bottom.

The buildings above the tunnel entrance.

Society for Information Display, Los Angeles

Spending the week in LA, at SID (Society for Information Display), probably one of the few places where on eavesdropping the conversation at Starbucks, I would hear someone say of something he'd seen there, "It was pretty close...within 0.004 millimeters."

Here are some photos of the pretty part of town, i.e. not where the convention center is. The convention center is in Dossville, USA. I was surprised this morning at quite how many streams of urine emanated from doorways where people had evidently slept. I would have thought they'd try to keep the two activities separate. 

The third picture, the odd tunnel, is the 3rd Street tunnel, which has quite a history that I would have to recount some other time, but suffice to say it's a tunnel through the hill at 3rd street.

At first I walked up the hill (behind your back in the photo) and was prepared to walk down 3rd Street to the tunnel, but when I got to the bottom of the hill, there was no crossing. There was only a pedestrian subway of such Stygian aspect and such malodor that I literally did not dare go in. I walked back up the hill, up to 4th Street, down and back along to 3rd. When I got to the crossing there a homeless vet sprang out and pressed the crossing signal button for me and for a few seconds I was terrified that he was Charon, and therefore didn't give him any money. I walked to the middle of the street I got close enough to take the picture and got out of there, without Eurydice or indeed anyone else, following me. Charon had moved on, and so missed out on his payment.

You Are The Product

General wisdom states that "If you don't pay for this service, it means *you* are the product."

Google (among other heavyweights, including the Chinese government) seem to be evolving this paradigm to, "And we can make you into a *better* product!"

Neoliberalism means everything is for sale, and Google appears to be taking one concept behind that a step further. You may not actually want to sell your soul, but years of labor in capitalist workplaces have embedded the idea that Continuous Improvement applies to your inner being whether you do or don't.

PDCA cycle

We've used Lean in the workplace. We've used Kanban. We use Kaizen. We've even used that Marie-Kondo-for-manufacturers, 5S.  I'm a Six Sigma Green Belt, and could, if prompted, tell you the history of process improvement from Shewhart's Statistical Process Control, through the giant of the field Deming, to Motorola and DMAIIC, to the Lean techniques of today.

DMAIIC

So much so that we feel a nagging sense that we should use these powerhouses on improving ourselves.

Well, be nagged no more. Google is in the process of developing a way we can ask ourselves what customer-related CTQs (issues that are Critical to Quality) we may have, measure the problem, analyze the problem, develop an improvement, implement a solution and continuously measure it to make sure our improvement is not falling behind (control).

It's called Google Selfish Ledger. (The name is apparently borrowed from Dawkins' Selfish Gene but refers somehow to epigenetics.) It's a compendium of everything you've ever done in the vicinity of your phone, but rather than remaining a dumb repository of data, it is imbued with a sense of purpose, in order to find out more about you and guide you towards the ultimate you - your Life Goal. It will prompt you to do and buy things in line with Google's values - for example, local fresh food.

Personal improvement is only the bait dangled by Google. The ultimate aim is that the ledgers will eventually, acting more like Dawkins' Memes than Selfish Genes, pass down your information to the next generation, where they will be "sequenced" in the same way geneticists sequence genomes, enabling more accurate predictions and solutions to societal problems.   (Via The Verge.)

Whereas one has to love Google's endearing hubris, I'm not convinced that this total loss of individual privacy and freedom will lead to the Land of Milk and Honey.  For one thing, if Ledger prompts you to do things, then by definition it is not *your* behavior, but your natural behavior augmented by an outside influence. This will result in a positive feedback loop. The Ledgers' overall understanding of human behavior, when sequenced, will not encode human behavior, but Google users who have been prodded and poked into doing things differently. It will be an interesting thing, but it won't be human.

Here is the video from The Verge.



(Note: I could not find the promised link to the Google video)