Jonathan Rauch's Denial

I am always bitterly amused when I hear people say that homosexuality is a choice. Even many otherwise thoughtful people maintain that the homosexual is a heterosexual who perversely ignores, or at least somehow represses, his natural cravings. I say "otherwise thoughtful" because I know of no position which collapses more quickly, under even a moment's examination, than this one.

Never mind the obvious question of why anyone would choose homosexuality, with all the inconveniences and confusions and difficulties it poses.

Let us suppose, for argument's sake, that there are people who declare: "Actually, I would prefer to be (probably) childless, to face a hundred kinds of social difficulties, to disappoint and maybe horrify my parents, to risk alienating myself from some of my friends and many of my peers, to be an object of disgust and scorn to many millions of people. Sure. Sounds fun."

​From an excerpt of Jonathan Rauch's Denial, an Amazon Kindle Single.

Timely if you've read any representative portion of the comment section on the Sports Illustrated article in which Jason Collins announced he was gay. I can't find the comment section for that piece anymore, perhaps Sports Illustrated took them down, but many argued the article proved Collins had chosen to be gay.

Comments sections, for the most part, are sobering reminders of what people will write when they can hide behind the cloak of anonymity, but Rauch, who is gay himself, provides a very powerful argument against the idea that being gay is a conscious choice.  From an incentive standpoint, it's not a choice anyone would opt for in a rational actor model.

Caesar

For instance, at the age of 22, [Caesar] was captured by pirates while crossing the Aegean. He heard the pirates were asking for 20 silver talents for him and he insisted they take no less than 50. He’s Caesar, damn it, he deserves 50. So the pirates got their ransom and released him. Caesar raised a fleet, chased down the pirates, and had them all crucified.

From a few questions for David Benioff, co-creator of Game of Thrones on HBO.​

Capturing power from your cycling

Kickstarter page for The Siva Cycle Atom, a rechargeable battery and generator that collects energy from your bike to use to power your gadgets via USB.

What I really need is a gadget I can plug into myself to generate power from any excess body fat. Weight loss and an extra hour of texting on my iPhone? Biggest Kickstarter project ever, no contest!

I mean honestly, the Matrix painted a terrifying scenario of the future in which we were all batteries for this race of alien overlords, but I can't be the only one who thought Neo looked pleasantly thin.​

Clever Uses for Reverse Image Search

Via a coworker, some clever uses for Google Reverse Image Search over at Lifehacker.​ For example:

Whatever your social network of choice is, a number of fake profiles exist that try to friend you. Since most of these use stock photos or random pictures of the internet, finding the fakes is easy with a reverse image search.

If only this had come out earlier for Manti Te'o's sake.​

Where this really becomes powerful is on a mobile phone, especially as image recognition algorithms become better at identifying objects from different angles.

It only works for a limited set of products, but the iOS app Flow​ intrigued me early on with its ability to identify products from simply an image. It wasn't that useful at the time because most products it could identify were products that were, well, self-identifying, like a book with its title on the, ahem, cover. But the germ of something cool is there. Think facial recognition databases and Google Glasses, however creepy it might sound, and you get some sense of the potential.

Of course, we knew this day was coming. The internet has always excelled, above all other uses, at moving information more efficiently, and the day when pictorial information is so easily identified is easily correlated to metadata is not far away. When I was at Hulu we already had facial recognition working fairly well for characters on screen in video, and they've since rolled it out on some videos.​

Personally, I'd love that feature for Game of Thrones, where I spend half of each episode asking people I'm with who so and so is. And if such technology existed back in the day, a show like The Americans would seem more implausible, since even without that technology it's pretty clear it's Keri Russell under the endless supply of strange wigs and hairpieces she dons as costumes.​

Which reminds me, I'm glad the new Man of Steel trailer​ seems to hint that they won't even bother establishing the whole Clark Kent persona (they also try to explain the S on his chest which is why I'm guessing they're going for a more realistic depiction of the fantasy, much like Nolan's Dark Knight did for Batman). I have never been able to get over the fact that Superman's disguise was simply a pair of glasses. Everything else about him, his hair, his voice, his build, was exactly the same.

You might wonder why I'd pick on that implausibility and not any of the other ridiculous things like his red underwear (overwear), the fact that he could fly, the fact that they speak English on Krypton, all that stuff. And the answer is, there is no reason, at least none that is acceptable for a grown adult.