Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Facebook firms up its non-fearsome rep via crime alibi

Facebook took another small step towards respectability, and away from being fearsome, when it was cited as an alibi in court.  One man was arrested on suspicion of "mugging at gunpoint."  So his

defense lawyer, Robert Reuland, told a Brooklyn assistant district attorney, Lindsay Gerdes, about the Facebook entry, which was made at the time of the robbery. The district attorney subpoenaed Facebook to verify that the words had been typed from a computer at an apartment at 71 West 118th Street in Manhattan, the home of Mr. Bradford’s father. When that was confirmed, the charges were dropped.

Would Twitter have served a similar function? or MySpace?

The Times does manage to sneak in some snark:

the sentence, written in street slang, was just another navel-gazing, cryptic Facebook status update — meaningless to anyone besides Mr. Bradford.

Ouch!  A little balance for the praise, perhaps?  Maybe it's a toll paid on the road to becoming respected media.  Or perhaps it's to counter the lawyer's gleeful pulp culture/geeky references later on:

Mr. Reuland acknowledged that, in principle, anyone who knew Mr. Bradford’s user name and password could have typed the Facebook update, but he regards it as unlikely.

“This implies a level of criminal genius that you would not expect from a young boy like this; he is not Dr. Evil...”

(thanks to Todd Bryant!)

Russian cannibalism strikes again

Another Russian cannibalism story has appeared.  Out in Perm, it begins as a murder, then ends as a food service supply chain supplement:

the three men attacked their victim with knives and a hammer.

"After carrying out the attack, the corpse was dismembered. Part of it was eaten and part was also sold to a kebab and pie kiosk," their statement said.

Why do the deed?

Their statement said that the suspects had targeted the 25-year-old victim out of "personal hostility".

Clearly!

The Beeb concludes on a perfect, understated Gothic note:

It was not immediately clear if any customers had been served.

That would be fun to research.  "Excuse me, ma'am, did you notice any unusual taste in Happy Dmitiri's Kebab Surprise this week?"

That's two Russian cannibal stories in one week.  The previous one concerned matricide, cold weather, and hunger.  It's been a year since the one before that, about Goths and tastiness.

(thanks to Todd Bryant, who surely knows how cold it gets in Pennsylvania winters)

The dark side of cute

This awesome Vanity Fair piece anatomizes cute culture, flaying open the fur to reveal the staring skeleton beneath.

Jim Windolf notes the cruelty inherent in many scene-settings of cute.

"My sister sends me things that are practically sadistic,” he says. “What was the thing she sent me? Accidents of cats! Jumping through things and not quite making it. It was very much in keeping with my point about the sadism of cuteness.”

There's the argument that American culture has become pretty dark on its own, calling forth teh cute to treat teh Gothic:

Social misery and cuteness seem to be linked... In a decade that has slapped us with a recession in the wake of 9/11 and an unending war waged in two theaters, Americans are producing a popular culture that seems to be saying, Please like us.

In addition the article reaches back to WWII and atomic attack:

It is strange, but possibly correct, to think that every time we gaze on a cute image these days we are seeing some weird aftereffect of World War II. The cuteness created by our [atomic] bombs has come back to seduce us.

Can a beauty algorithm escape the uncanny?

Can we escape from the uncanny valley via a beautification engine?  That New York Times story describes a new application which... adjusts photographs of human faces.  Are the results uncanny, more appealing, or just different?

Essentially, they trained a computer to determine, for each individual face, the most attractive set of distances and then choose the ideal closest to the original face. Unlike other research with formulas for facial attractiveness, this program does not produce one ideal for a feature, say a certain eye width or chin length.

... Changes were made only to the geometry of the faces; unlike the digital retouching done for fashion magazines, wrinkles were not smoothed and hair color was not changed.  ... [the team] applied an algorithm involving 234 measurements between facial features, including the distances between lips and chin, the forehead and the eyes, or between the eyes.

(via William Gibson's Twitter)

The reek of death grows

This month's Ohio Gothic gets worse.  After Cleveland's accused serial killer has been removed from his home, and a series of decomposing bodies removed, the house's stench has not improved, but worsened.

(thanks to my Gothically-gazing wife!)

Powerful photos from the Western Front

Some terrifying material found in this collection of one soldier's World War I photos.  Like this pile of nightmarish German barbed wire:

The interface is very odd. Don't let that put you off.

(via MetaFilter)

Russian cannibal and matricide receives humane sentence

Today in cannibalism, a Russian judge mitigated a cannibal's sentence.  It was a compassionate ruling:

Sergei Gavrilov admitted he had used parts of his murdered mother's legs to make soup and pasta for weeks on end. But he argued he was driven to the desperate act because he had ran out of money and was starving. "I did not like the flesh," he told investigators. "It was too fatty."

A court in southern Russia accepted his explanation and ruled that the unemployed 27 year-old had therefore not wantonly defiled his mother's own corpse. It did find him guilty of murder, however, and sentenced him to fourteen years and three months in prison.

There's more background, a very Russian context:

Mr Gavrilov said he had killed his 55 year-old mother Lyubov last January after she refused to hand over her pension. He wanted to spend the money on a drinking and gambling binge. Angered by her refusal, he hit her on the head with a brick and strangled her with an electric cord before dumping her lifeless body on the balcony.

January, you will note, is cold in Russia.  Which can put a crimp in one's culinary plans:

It was only two weeks later after he had spent all her money that he discovered that her body had frozen on the balcony and decided to begin slicing bits of flesh from her legs to keep his hunger pangs at bay.

We have covered Slavic long pig before, of course.  There was the case of Satanic Russian Goth-chomping cannibals.

(thanks to Arnaud Leene via Twitter)

Banning violent computer games

Fearing video games, the Venezuelan government decides to restrict them.

[gamers] are to blame, because we cannot tell fantasy from reality and because video games make us violent, morons who will throw people out of cars just like in Grand Theft Auto and kill them, because even though games come with ratings, just like movies, I, an adult citizen, cannot be trusted to use them wisely.

In camera: rosy-tinted memory editing the violence of children

Here's a fascinating video about the dangers of technology. The way we can focus on technology instead of what it represents, that is.  Watch it through.  It's about a group of children and technology, and runs less than five minutes:

The speakers describe an event abetted, if not caused, by the presence of (simulated) technology.  "The [fake] camera[s] really changed the way we behaved," says the narrator. 

And yet the change described is not one I recognize.  Children watching a fight without intervening to stop it?  That's consonant with my middle-class experience of elementary school and junior high.  Heck, in junior high the kids celebrated fights.  Is the narrator recollecting a different background?

Or is he seeing the technology of representation, and not seeing what it represents?  That's a way to shift horror from human behavior onto human tools.

The narrator also offers this fascinating comment: "We lost our humanity."  It's that classic understanding of "human" as "not a tool user," or at least "not a tool user in ways we don't approve of."  Is this a post-WWII development, or does it come from an earlier source?

(thanks to Randy McCall)

Fear the mobile phone to buy the mobile phone

The fearsome mobile device meme is used to sell a new Nokia phone.  Check out the video - the action starts about :53.

I enjoyed the way the monster shouts media slogans.  And the evocation of cyberpunkish themes, from the dark future visual style to surveillance to dull/creepy business meetings.

(via Grinding.be)