Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Monsters of Europolitics

Italy's comic/social media/political star mashes up The Addams Family with European leaders:

A club of monsters, like the Addams Family that obey when the ECB and the ratings agencies click their fingers.

Grillo elaborates:
This government reminds me of a fantastical animal with loads of heads but just one brain with two separate hemispheres: the one on the right is Berlusconi who will get a "time's out" on his trials with the Statute of Limitations: the one on the left is international finance that will suck the heart out of Italy.

These are certainly Gothic years.

Treating British children for "internet addiction"

A British clinic claims to treat young children for what the call "technology addiction."  Children here means adolescents, and kids as young as four.

They use the addiction language very precisely:

He said the symptoms were comparable to those experienced by an alcoholic or heroin addict going through withdrawal.  

The article specifically cites social media and gaming.

(thanks to Randy McCall)

Arctic pyramids and Cold War Gothic

There's a fine piece of Cold War Gothic embedded within Brian Phillips' splendid article on the Ititarod.  It appears as myth or urban legend, told late one very cold night:

Did you know that there are military installations hidden all over Alaska? Relics of the Cold War, abandoned. Underground bunkers, empty Quonset huts. White Alice sites, some of them are called, the ruins of a once-sophisticated communications relay. The phrase “White Alice” made me shiver. Folks who’d snuck in reported unexplained noises, visions. They’d hallucinate. There were stories about ghosts.

Zombie housing titles

The zombie housing market meme continues over at Naked Capitalism.  "Zombie titles" doesn't refer to the back catalog of horror films, but to a mortgage mistake.  "Servicers initiate a foreclosure and complete most of the steps, including evicting the borrowers, but then fail to take title to the house. "

It gets pretty hairy:

Adding insult to injury, the banks rarely inform the former homeowner of this cynical move. Not only does often find out years later that he’s on the hook for property taxes and in some cases, fines from the local government, but the servicer has made such a mess of title that the owner can’t get rid of the property, unless he takes a quiet title action, which typically can’t commence until five years after the foreclosure was abandoned.

Read more for the economic implications.

The zombie meme just keeps going, doesn't it?

The shadow biosphere

Uncanny science: what if another biosphere exists alongside our own, quiet and hard to discern?  Naturally it lives in epistemological darkness, and receives the Infocultish name of "the shadow biosphere".  And its inhabitants are “weird life”.

How could this work?  The possibilities of our biological bases:

“All the micro-organisms we have detected on Earth to date have had a biology like our own: proteins made up of a maximum of 20 amino acids and a DNA genetic code made out of only four chemical bases: adenine, cytosine, guanine and thymine,” says Cleland. “Yet there are up to 100 amino acids in nature and at least a dozen bases. These could easily have combined in the remote past to create lifeforms with a very different biochemistry to our own. More to the point, some may still exist in corners of the planet.”

Hard to tell if this is speculation or pseudoscience, but it's a fun concept.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)

Forming the death cross

Economics has its own Gothic language.  For example, there's the death cross in investment. Yes, a death cross, "cross" here meaning "two curves intersect on a graph." Said curves are two different ways of representing the value of a certain investment.

Why "death"?  Because the occurence of that crossover means the investment's value is about to drop.

Or:

A crossover resulting from a security's long-term moving average breaking above its short-term moving average or support level.

For example, some see one precious metal entering death cross territory.

Gold prices dropped to a 7-month low Wednesday, and are on the verge of hitting a technical level that could signal more bearishness ahead.

Gold, which has tumbled more than $200, or 12%, since early October is close to forming a so-called death cross, the term for when the 50-day moving average breaks below the 200-day moving average.

This language feels of a piece with the cheerfully violent tenor of some investment world discourse.

(thanks to Todd Bryant)

Gamifying against surveillance

Anti-surveillance Germans organized a protest game this past February. It involved taking out surveillance cameras.

[P]oints are awarded for the number of cameras destroyed and bonus scores are given for particularly imaginative modes of destruction. Axes, ropes and pitchforks are all encouraged.

Smash the state for points!  Actually, this video looks like fun.

More:

A murder spied on Google Maps

What looks like a killing appeared on Google Maps:

It looks like two guys have dragged a bloody corpse onto this pier.  With dramatic shadows.

Yes, it could also be a dog tracking water onto sunlit wood.  That would be less impressive... unless the dog were in on the kill.

(thanks to jason kielbasa and Ladi)

Goodnight... Moon.

Watch out for the woman whispering hush:


Previously on Infocult: Goodnight Dune.

(thanks to Andy Havens)

"The Excel error that ruined the world"

Microsoft Office is a pretty non-fearsome technology, but perhaps that will change with the discovery of...

The Excel error that ruined the world!

This is one interpretation of an error in an enormously influential economics paper.  Briefly, this research article argued that very large government debt clobbered that nation's GDP.  Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff's research has played a key role in explaining current austerity policies.  However, it looks like their conclusions relied on a basic mistake in handling their data.

As one reader puts it,

If this error turns out to be an actual mistake Reinhart-Rogoff made, well, all I can hope is that future historians note that one of the core empirical points providing the intellectual foundation for the global move to austerity in the early 2010s was based on someone accidentally not updating a row formula in Excel.

Note the opening and very large "if".  It could be error, or the error a fig leaf.

This won't lead to a big groundswell of anti-Excel feeling.  But it's interesting to see that program enter the baleful spotlight of Infocult for the first time.