Category Archives: thoughts

Thoughts, musings, etc.

  

“We are detectives for the people” – Village Voice’s Wayne Barrett’s Final Column

Legendary reporter Wayne Barrett filed his last column for the Village Voice this week. It reads like it’s from someone who has muckraked for nearly 40 years and has had a lot of time to think about his job:

When I was asked in recent years to blog frequently, I wouldn’t do it unless I had something new to tell a reader, not just a clever regurgitation of someone else’s reporting.

My credo has always been that the only reason readers come back to you again and again over decades is because of what you unearth for them, and that the joy of our profession is discovery, not dissertation.

There is also no other job where you get paid to tell the truth. Other professionals do sometimes tell the truth, but it’s ancillary to what they do, not the purpose of their job. I was asked years ago to address the elementary school that my son attended and tell them what a reporter did and I went to the auditorium in a trenchcoat with the collar up and a notebook in a my pocket, baring it to announce that “we are detectives for the people.”

…It never mattered to me what the party or ideology was of the subject of an investigative piece; the reporting was as nonpartisan as the wrongdoing itself. I never looked past the wrist of any hand in the public till. It was the grabbing that bothered me, and there was no Democratic or Republican way to pick up the loot.

  

GQ’s Devin Friedman: Late 30+ year olds doing social media stuff is “kind of like androids having sex”

GQ’s Devin Friedman tries to understand, by taking a visit to Silicon Valley and the Y Combinator, why everyone wants to share so much. He comes up with as apt of metaphor as I’ve seen about the older generation’s befuddlement about this societal shift:

I gave two sites access to my credit cards so I could share my purchases with my friends. I did my best to check in wherever I went on Foursquare. And what it all made me feel, mostly, was stupid. And anxious—that I didn’t have enough people following me and then that I was the kind of person who wants people to follow him. Every update, every tweet, every check-in, ultimately began to feel not unlike doing my expenses.

The experience isn’t unusual. I think old people like me (I’m 38) often do this stuff to feel like the world hasn’t yet left them behind, but we don’t have any natural hunger for it. It’s kind of like androids having sex: We know we’re supposed to do it, but we’re not really sure why. Meanwhile, and infuriatingly, we know that humans just like to bone.

Read the full story.
Hat-tip to longform.org

  

What does China *really* know about cutting-edge technology, anyway?

Left: a Seagate factory in Wuxi, China

A couple of anecdotes to remember before accepting the conventional wisdom that all China is good for is mass-producing (or copying) non-Chinese tech products (i.e. iPhones):

From Seymour Hersh’s recent New Yorker piece examining the hype of cyber-warfare:

A few weeks after Barack Obama’s election, the Chinese began flooding a group of communications links known to be monitored by the N.S.A. with a barrage of intercepts, two Bush Administration national-security officials and the former senior intelligence official told me. The intercepts included details of planned American naval movements. The Chinese were apparently showing the U.S. their hand.

“The N.S.A. would ask, ‘Can the Chinese be that good?’ ” the former official told me. “My response was that they only invented gunpowder in the tenth century and built the bomb in 1965. I’d say, ‘Can you read Chinese?’ We don’t even know the Chinese pictograph for ‘Happy hour.’ ”

And today’s New York Times, on a Chinese research center building a supercomputer that outclocks the current one by 40 percent.

Modern supercomputers are built by combining thousands of small computer servers and using software to turn them into a single entity. In that sense, any organization with enough money and expertise can buy what amount to off-the-shelf components and create a fast machine.

The Chinese system follows that model by linking thousands upon thousands of chips made by the American companies Intel and Nvidia. But the secret sauce behind the system — and the technological achievement — is the interconnect, or networking technology, developed by Chinese researchers that shuttles data back and forth across the smaller computers at breakneck rates, Mr. Dongarra said.

“That technology was built by them,” Mr. Dongarra said. “They are taking supercomputing very seriously and making a deep commitment.”

The Chinese interconnect can handle data at about twice the speed of a common interconnect called InfiniBand used in many supercomputers.

  

NYPD’s Feris Jones is too old for this shit

NYPD officer Feris Jones


“Lethal Weapon” reference inspired by @andymboyle

From the New York Times: Off-duty NYPD officer Feris Jones was at Sabine’s Hallway, a beauty salon in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, when a robber came in, brandishing a gun, and ordered her and the other patrons into a bathroom. Jones told the owner to call the bathroom before stepping out and ordering the robber to surrender. The robber, from 12 feet away, fired four shots at Jones with his .44 Magnum revolver. Jones dodged the bullets and returned fire with her own revolver five times, hitting the robber’s hands and causing him to drop his gun and hitting the front door lock, jamming it and slowing down the robber’s escape.

Five-time prior arrestee Winston Cox, 19, was apprehended at a Bed-Stuy hotel on Monday, his hands wrapped in towels.

Jones has been with the department since 1990 and worked in evidence collection for the past 12 years. The Oct. 23 attempted stickup was the first time she had fired her gun in the line-of-duty. Not only should her marksmanship should be commended, but her restraint and levelheadedness in not shooting the fleeing robber in the back (he apparently had to crawl out through a glass panel, even though moments before he nearly killed her. No wonder the suspect’s mother is proud of Jones.

Sometimes, life is like a cop movie.