Just sayin'

"Dinner is ready, Sir!" (Glenn)

Don't kill me, don't kill me

Artwork on an internet-posted suicide note

Gallia divisa est in partes tres. Along those lines, there are two types of content moderation. Active moderation monitors each post on a social network; reactive moderation lets things float until somebody complains. Content moderation is important, we learn from an article on Wired, not only because we are prudish, but also because we don't wanna lose our grannies or other objectionists (spelling checker objects)---folks who are not going to share their cat-and-dog pictures or their grandchildren's likenesses amidst adult parts and other shockingness. 

More than hundred thousand people are monitoring content worldwide, twice as many as are working for Google. Most of them are based in the Philippines because wages are lower there, and because the locals have a sense for American sensibilities (don't ask).

We (I mean us, Michael Ampersant and his alter egos) have been subject to content moderation two or three times on Facebook, last time with this picture...

(no, wait)

...which was taken down after a few minutes with a stern warning from the Philippines; we got blocked from posting anything for three days. Right, so we've been moderated twice exactly; the first time we've got blocked for one day only. Do the math (catchword "series"), it's frightening if you are one of these people always itching to push the envelope. 

Over-sexed as we are we think about only one thing, but porn appears to be the least of the social network's concerns---it's fairly harmless, especially for the souls of content moderators. Gore is worse, not to mention ISIS clips with beheadings of nosy journalists, or suicide notes, or clips of pet torture. And there's apparently lots of that stuff going on. The average content moderator is given only a few seconds on her Stachanovist clock for each picture. That may be a lot for the active moderators who have to check all those pictures of cats and dogs and birthday cakes, but very little when we talk reactive moderation.

&-t back of the envelope: Assume that half of the moderators do reactive stuff, and that each works 40 hours a week, and each has 10 seconds per flagged post, dum dum dum, we get 144 million flagged pictures per day, except for the weekends when the moderators are off.

What else? Lets keep it short and Socratic. O reader, we ask, would you moderate this picture that we've been dying to post for quite some time:    

(This is the picture that Facebook took down after a few minutes)

Monday matinée

("I had been thinking about recontextualizing news as art for some time...":) 

Circle of Abstract Ritual from Jeff Frost on Vimeo.

German for beginners (Sacha)

Most readers of this blog, we can safely assume, know this picture:

But how about this one:

(Saying: "The removal of this notice is strictly forbidden---The German Railways") 

Celebrity deficiency?

Not famous enough? Go public with your ménage (à trois):

Dutch for beginners

How not to use dope

Make it full screen, stare at it for the duration of the forty seconds it lasts, the look elsewhere. Apparently, the Strobe-illusion tricks your brain to release the drug DMT, in small quantities, and for a minute thereafter you enjoy real hallucinations. The walls undulating, and stuff. Really works. Great. As if we had nothing better to do.

Crocodile hates model (Glenn)

Dr. Urknall

The Dutch CVB, or whatever the alphabet soup, sends us a new European Insurance Card. Because we had discovered belatedly in the ER of the Spital Visp, CH, that the old card had expired. ER? Yes, as in emergency room. Because we had gone deaf.

 (If you continue reading, there's a payoff) 

We use ear plugs when we can't sleep. The wax from the plugs talks to the organic ear wax, canals get clogged, hearing gets impaired. We attempt to clean the ears but push the wax deeper into the canals until we go completely deaf. Which is quite something. You step into the street and get killed. You say good-by to Mozart and Lady Gaga and the telephone and to the relationship with your lover beyond anything but the soundless exchange of bodily fluids.

 (If you continue reading, there's a payoff) 

I had hoped that some natural process would provide relief and foster a recovery of my hearing. I wait one day, two days, three days. Nada. So I give up and flee to the ER of the Spital Visp, a place I know well. Dr. Ursprung is not around, unfortunately (follow the link). I explain my case. People listen patiently. I listen patiently. It's like you're listening to the Urknall (the Urknall was silent, there was no atmosphere to carry sound).

 (If you continue reading, there's a payoff) 

They ask me to rest on the emergency bed (gestures, folded hands put to your (their) left ear). I lie down. Wait. "Wait!" Where is your European Insurance Card? I don't understand. Somebody gets a piece of paper and writes "Europäische Versicherungskarte." Aha. I find my wallet and flash the card. There's a picture of Obama on the card (just kidding). Everything is fine. Somebody will take my blood pressure. The nurse looks quite concerned.

 (If you continue reading, there's a payoff) 

They try all sorts of things. Liquids dripped into my ear, compassionate facial expressions, electrodes applied to my testes, prayers, Alpine cleansing rituals, shaking heads. Shaking heads. It's my fault because the European Insurance Card has expired. The healing hands are raised in despair and I am sent to the local Hals-Nasen-Ohren doctor who cleans my ears with a nanoistic vacuum-cleaner and ask for 108 CHF in cash. I can hear him loud and clear and pay and call the Dutch alphabet soup and ask for a new, valid, European Insurance Card. Which arrived today, the card. I'm not making this up.

If you are still there, here's the payoff:

Find a caption (Jacki)

The word is mightier than the sword

"Just sayin'!"

(This is not Michael, OK. He was roaming sites for gay cruises and came across this picture. By the way, he's planning a gay cruise for Part III of the "Green Eyes," and had expected a wealth of book on the subject, but no, according to his superficial research, there's not a single novel dedicated to the subject (there's a movie, though))

French for beginners (Maud)

Erotic painting

(A friend from the East Coast sends this picture:)

You write like Shakespeare (reposted)

The IHT had a column by Alex Beam about the new website I Write Like, which uses a Bayesian classifier algorithm to compare anyone's prose to that of  famous writers. Thought up by the Russian programmer Dmitry Chestnykh, the site has already generated serious mischief. Somebody submitted transcriptions of Mel Gibson's phone rants, and I Write Like concluded that he "writes" like Margaret Atwood. Atwood own prose was classified as "Stephen King." A former president of Harvard writes like the sci-fi writer Cory Doctorov, and novelist Claire Messud writes like David Foster Wallace (not true, by the way).

You see it coming. We have to find out about ourself. so we first submit Huck Finn's father's rant against the government, which we posted because of its prophetic anticipation of the Tea Party, and, yes, I Write Like returned the answer: "You write like Mark Twain." Cool.

OK, so now a text of our own. Let's take the Donna Pérignon post from March 2010, one of the countless contributions on this blog so heartlessly ignored by pundits and mainstream media. Donna pays us a visit and rekindles our interest in the Giant Wave. Have you read it now? Donna is actually our neighbor Michelle de la Sala, and she really looks like Michelle Pfeiffer.

We now submit this post (its text) to I write like, and the answer is:

I write like
William Shakespeare

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

What can we say? Buy our new book, GREEN EYES, and find out yourself:

What would Freud say?

Swedish for beginners: Occupy Thanksgiving (reposted)

History of the world: Apple Computers (I)

Act II. Somewhere in 1978 or 79, the Amsterdam department store De Bijenkorff opened a new sales corner on its 4th floor, mysteriously named "huiscomputers," which featured a new product, the Apple II home computer. At that time most people, including myself, would conceive of computers as "electronic brains" (Germans called them "Elektronengehirne" before they called them "computers" before they called them "Rechner"), all built by IBM, all infinitely expensive, large, and remote.

Standard IBM Hollerith punch card

Act I. My first contact with computers had been in 1972, when I took an algebra class at the Free University of Berlin and was tasked to program matrix inversions and some such in Algol68, the programming language du jour. This was done by (1) punching Hollerith cards in the right places, on special machines located in the university's computing center, then (2) placing the cards in the intray located in the hallway outside the main operating room where the computer was located (there was only one computer), (3) waiting for an operator to appear to empty the intray (he would open a wing door, and allow you a glimpse at the electronic brain, humming and chugging along in fluorescent light, tape decks clicking back and forth), (4) then waiting another hour or so for the operator to reappear with the "output," --- folded stacks of paper in a very large format, the name of the "job" (no pun intended) printed in very large letters on the first page. If your stack was very thin (as it usually was) this could mean only one thing: something had gone wrong. You would (5) try to find the error, or try to find some help to find the error, (6) correct it, (7) resubmit your job, and repeat the correction loop as appropriate. Usually, it would take only a few days  until a program of a few lines of code would finally run properly. 

IBM mainframe, system 360 (1964 - 78)

Act II, cont'd.  So far so good. Back to the department store. What could you do with a home computer, I asked the sales person. Well, he said, you could store cooking recipes and call them up when needed. I didn't buy the Apple II.

Go here for the next act.