Invisible Jobs

I had my windows cleaned yesterday. Getting a three story ladder and attempting not to puke while on it is not something I want to do. So I am sitting there watching television studiously avoiding looking at the guy cleaning my windows one metre from me. It was quite an odd experience but one we all engage in constantly.

Cleaners are generally ignored by office workers getting all the acknowledgement and recognition your intestinal microbes do. At least gut bacteria have ads on television cleaners are completely anonymous. This has consequences for security, areas normally off limits to all have cleaners pottering around in them. I doubt the security clearance for cleaning jobs is particularly high. Because we have an implicit “ignore this person” view of cleaners we have created a fairly obvious security hole. For instance I have had to let company electricians into secure areas that cleaners have full access to. Why is the cleaner more trusted then the electrician? They are not, they are ignored because we do not like the idea of someone cleaning up after us.

Apart from security concerns basic human dignity requires we be on nodding terms and say the occasional word to the people who intercept with our lives on a daily basis. Why should I care for the sufferings of people I never meet if I do not even acknowledge those I pass on a daily basis. Certain traits protect us from the overpopulation of our daily lives, ignoring people on buses for instance, but this is different.

Other invisible jobs exist where we hold those that do them in particular scorn. Most western nations have a vast number of invisible workers, lowly paid, non taxed, no health employment or voting rights illegal immigrants. These people work for below minimum wage and have basically no rights. They exist outside the law in that police cannot be called if they are victims of crime. This leads to a mafiaisation where communities of illegals set up their own police force. We set up sub societies with no rights who are exploited and open to organised crime because it suits us to.

If I visit a Proctologist I am pretty sure I will talk about the weather and perhaps sport, if only to illustrate my immense heterosexuality. Ignoring the issue at hand is understandable in this situation. However deliberate ignoring of jobs we do not like to think of ourselves doing illustrates a self inflicted blindness we have that has much darker consequences.

The scale of music is wrong. Everything is notched up to 11 and it ends up sounding like porridge hitting at a wall. You photograph a mushroom and it is interesting because the scale is within our perception yet somehow otherworldly.
This is where music has to go, the small scaling to the big.


SCALE

I have been listening to Steven Reich because it scales. It is the the micro made macro it is wheels within wheels. That and you do not read about his time in the Priory in the NME.

A computer virus that makes you sick

If you suffer from photosensitive epilepsy, migraines or the wonk go read about pies or something.
What if a computer virus could make you sick. The idea was described in the novel “snow Crash” where one character becomes a "just a jittering cloud of bad digital karma"

Pickover describes patterns that can induce migraines in people. I am stupic enough to test them and they do work. Still you have to look at them for a while so not a particularly effective attack.



Photo sensitive epilepsy occurs in about 2 in 10,000 people. Pokemon caused attacks in about 700 children in Japan by flashing lights during the program.
Yeah that links to the video so be careful.

This video is not on a full screen is slightly changed, looking at it in a darkened room, being a child and having a really good screen would all make it more dangerous. Flashes at 4 hertz or some multiple of that seem to cause these effects but less then !% effectiveness hardly makes a successful weapon,

Darren Brown did something similar in the most terrifying piece of television I have ever seen

He puts the figure on how many people you can cause to go into a trance at about 1/3.

Sound does not seem much use as a weapon. You can prevent people talking by replaying their speech with a delay. But that hardly will incapacitate people.


Sea sickness could be induced by out of focus screen or slightly shifting text. Any other ideas on how to catch a computer virus?

Bionic super baby

If you give cochlear implants to babies they can learn to speak normally. If you wait till there older they lose some brain plasticity and they do not learn spoken language as well.

Some deaf people argue with the use of such implants, "The idea of operating on a healthy baby makes us all recoil," says Harlan Lane, a psycholinguist at Northeastern University in Boston. "Deaf people argue that they use a different language, and with it comes a different culture, but there is certainly nothing wrong with them that needs fixing with a surgeon's scalpel. We should listen."

Now this might seem a strange argument but what happens when the bionic become superior to normal people? Ear implants are not very good at the moment but they will get better. What happens when they are better then standard hearing? Why should normal children have to be handicapped with standard hearing when children born deaf will have a surgically created advantage?

You could put limiters on the implants so they never got better then standard hearing but that would be a Harrison Bergeron world of handicapping everyone who is better then average

The idea of bionic super babies might seem a bit sci-fi but golfers now go for laser eye surgery to improve there vision beyond average ability. “Woods, who had lost 16 straight tournaments before his (eye) surgery, ended up with 20/15 vision and won seven of his next 10 events.”
Would it be immoral to laser eye surgery your normal visioned baby? But cutting off his foreskin is fine?