Good Reads

[trysail]

- read the full article Why Do We Have Blood Types? (from Pacific Standard)​

Excellent article.

Blood transfusions are a perfect example of how much we take miracles arising from centuries of experimentation and research for granted. There are millions of people who are alive today who would otherwise be dead were it not for this knowledge.



​

 

[Laurel]

Excellent article.

Blood transfusions are an perfect example of how much we take miracles arising from centuries of experimentation and research for granted. There are millions of people who are alive today who would otherwise be dead were it not for this knowledge.



​

Truth!

 

[Laurel]

http://o.aolcdn.com/hss/storage/midas/70a55cccf1f5102a1e1ca7aee15c196/200543460/seriousjournalism.jpg

It was only a matter of time before wearable technology moved from people's heads and wrists and ventured downstairs. British adult retailer Bondara is leading the charge, showing off a prototype activity tracker and sex toy that goes on the gentleman's region. The SexFit is a ring that sits at the base of the penis, trapping blood for better, uh, erections, but also packs an accelerometer and Bluetooth module. That way, your in-and-out statistics will be shared with a companion app on a smartphone that'll tell you your thrust per minute and even the calories you've burned. Oh, and you can even share those figures with your shocked friends on social media.​

- read the full article SexFit is a pedometer for your penis (from engadget)​

 

[IrezumiKiss]

Out and About in the East Village

In this weekly feature, East Village-based photographer James Maher provides us with a quick snapshot of someone who lives and/or works in the East Village.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-jezAGevu8Ko/U-o9Ym36xkI/AAAAAAACKNg/6xn67H3Oemg/s640/-2.jpg

Name: Gary Bell
Occupation: Martial Arts Teacher, Boys Club of New York
Location: 3rd Street between A and B
Date: 6:30 pm on Thursday, July 31st

I have lived around here for 35 years. I grew up in Harlem and was raised in South Carolina. As soon as I got out of the military I came down here and took up certain courses. I must have been 22 or 23. At first, I was working in the Wall Street area, for Solomon Brothers. I was doing a receptionist job and one of my co-workers asked me what would I want to do on the side. I told him that I’d teach martial arts, so he got me an interview at the Boys Club.

I started off as a volunteer and ended up working for the Boys Club for 30 years. I was the martial arts teacher. I noticed that most of the kids I dealt with had single moms. A lot of the kids were being bullied. I’m a big advocate of kids not being bullied, so I put my hand in that and I got a couple of kids really standing up for themselves. They had self-esteem, honor, dignity. Most of the kids became policemen, lawyers. It was amazing.

All in all I’m very proud of the work that I did. The best is when they came back to me and their parents would say, ‘By the way, George is playing baseball for a high school team and he’s the top pitcher in the nation.’ I said, ‘This kid was so nervous.’ He had a problem, but he came out good. If I walk just a couple of blocks I’ll see a kid and they’ll say, ‘Hey sensei, how you doing?’ Some of them left and came back and brought their kids.

Another thing that brought me down here was homesteading. I renovated an abandoned building right here on 2nd Street. I started in 1986 and finished it up in 1991. I’m a veteran and I was thinking about buying a building off of my VA Bill and I ran into this and it was a dream come true.

It was an organization run by the Archdiocese. Koch was the mayor at that time, What they’d do is find an abandoned building and squat in it and take it over. There has to be at least 12 homesteading buildings in this neighborhood. So they’d put you on a trial basis working on other people’s buildings and in return they’d give you your own building, abandoned — totally, totally abandoned.

It gave me a lot of respect for construction workers, because I had to do mostly everything — putting up sheetrock, putting in a new roof. Everything you did you were like an apprentice, but the big time stuff like electricity and plumbing, the government gave you professional people to come down here. They started us off with $300,000 to fix the building, but they gave us a time restraint. So they said, ‘OK, we’ll give you this money and this will pay for all the professional people, but you’ve got to finish it off in seven years, because if you don’t, the day before your time limit is up the city can just take the building.’

My building started off with like 12 people, and I guess the work wasn’t going fast enough because a lot of people quit and a lot of new people came in. We’ve got actors, accountants, carpenters. We’ve got all kinds of people.

The neighborhood was rough in the beginning. I was thinking of backing out of the deal because this neighborhood was rampant with crime and drugs. I was here when Tompkins Square Park was literally just homeless people. If you would have looked at it back then you would have never believed this transformation. It had me fooled too. There were no banks around here at all and hardly any restaurants. Now you’ve got them back-to-back. I never thought that would happen. It was very risky. I’m really proud of this neighborhood because a lot of people stuck with it and stayed strong.

The red tape was the biggest problem — the politics behind it. With every building, the Cardinal blessed the abandoned building before you got into it. At that time Mayor Dinkins came by and gave a little speech. Of course the politicians came by and wanted to take pictures of us. We had to put in 20 hours a week.

The whole deal cost me $225 dollars. There are some pictures that will scare you. You would go, ‘Oh my God.’ I said, ‘No way.’ I said, ‘Nah, I can’t do this,’ but as time went on, plus at the time my girlfriend was pregnant, so my son needed some space. So I was focused. I think it took me six years to complete it. It was Christmas Eve 1991 that I moved in. I have a duplex, parquet floors, a rooftop garden, and it’s beautiful man. You wouldn’t believe it.

 

[Laurel]

http://www.gq.com/images/news-and-politics/2014/08/louis-scarcella/louis-scarcella-gq-magazine-august-2014-cops-01.jpg

We've all heard of cops gone bad, cops on the take. But the tale that's come out of New York lately is of an entirely different order: Louis Scarcella, a star detective now accused of putting away innocent people, over decades, on false charges, by whatever means necessary—forced confessions, witness tampering, and a total disregard for justice. If he did half the things he's accused of, then we have a new definition of rogue cop​

- read the full article Brooklyn's Baddest (from GQ)​

 

[Colonel Hogan]

A desperate but courageous woman's last hope meets the mind
boggling diagnostic field of biomathematics face-to-face.

One of the most heart-wrenching stories I've read in a very, very long time.

http://www.esquire.com/cm/esquire/images/z1/esq-flies.jpg

We walked out of his office and around the corner, through double doors marked SCIENTIFIC COMPUTING, into a section of the lab crowded with garish lime-green cubicles, rows of them, populated by a United Nations of math nerds. And even though it was a Friday afternoon, every screen in every cubicle was filled with data, and the place was a hive of high-end analysis. "Come over here," he said, "I want to introduce you to the guys who did the deep analysis on Stephanie's data."

Walking up to two Russian bioinformatics scientists who work for him, Yevgeniy Antipin and Andrew Uzilov, Schadt gestured toward Stephanie. "Hey, guys, meet Stephanie Lee."

Antipin reached out to shake her hand, and Uzilov slowly rose from his chair, his face suddenly filled with emotion. He reached out both hands to her. "You're the person…." he said softly, with an expression of pure wonder.

The seventy-three mutations that he and Antipin had detected from complex data had just walked into the room. As Antipin explained to Stephanie that much of the computing at this level is automated but that jobs as critical as this one required manual analysis, Uzilov held on to Stephanie's hand, his eyes glistening.

Leaving the lab, we walked up Madison Avenue for a while in silence. Stephanie had her hands deep in the pockets of her peacoat against the early autumn chill. It had been a long, dizzying day. After a few minutes, I said, "So, what do you think?"

She stopped walking, looked over at me, and said, "I think I'm going to live."

- read the full article There's a Whole New Way of Killing Cancer by Tom Junod and Mark Warren (from Esquire)

 

[JAMESBJOHNSON]

http://www.eattheweeds.com/

Green Dean lives nearby. Below are his YOUTUBE vids. He lives so close that much of what he studies exists in my own back yard.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WXFVfQMfZ8w

 

[trysail]

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141538/alexander-lukin/what-the-kremlin-is-thinking


What The Kremlin Is Thinking
by Alexander Lukin
Foreign Affairs
July-August, 2014

...From Russia’s perspective, the seeds of the Ukraine crisis were planted in the Cold War’s immediate aftermath. After the Soviet Union collapsed, the West essentially had two options: either make a serious attempt to assimilate Russia into the Western system or wrest away piece after piece of its former sphere of influence. Advocates of the first approach, including the U.S. diplomat George Kennan and Russian liberals, warned that an anti-Russian course would only provoke hostility from Moscow while accomplishing little, winning over a few small states that would end up siding with the West anyway.

It was only a matter of time before Russia finally reacted to its encirclement.

But such admonitions went unheeded, and U.S. Presidents Bill Clinton and George W. Bush chose the second path. Forgetting the promises made by Western leaders to Mikhail Gorbachev after the unification of Germany -- most notably that they would not expand NATO eastward -- the United States and its allies set out to achieve what Soviet resistance had prevented during the Cold War. They trumpeted NATO’s expansion, adding 12 new members, including former parts of the Soviet Union, while trying to convince Russia that the foreign forces newly stationed near its borders, in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, and Romania, would not threaten its security. The EU, meanwhile, expanded as well, adding 16 new members of its own during the same period...



http://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/141538/alexander-lukin/what-the-kremlin-is-thinking

 

[bluebell]

I love this thread. Thank you, Laurel, for starting it and to you and everyone else who contributes.

 

[Laurel]

I love this thread. Thank you, Laurel, for starting it and to you and everyone else who contributes.

Thank you for reading an enjoying! Thanks to all readers and people contributing links.

 

[Laurel]

http://cf-resrc.outsideonline.com/S=W800,U/C=W100P,H100P/O=90,P/http://media.outsideonline.com/images/dirty-hands-tomato_h.jpg

By now, it’s become a given: your multivitamin is useless and the right amount of stress, even in our recovery obsessed world, is good. So what, if anything, do we gain by clinging to our antioxidant supplements?

Very little, according to an accumulating body of research. We don't need massive doses of antioxidants, we need stress to compel our own bodies to create antioxidants.

“Everybody thinks oxidation is bad, and that antioxidants are good,” says Dr. Philip Hooper, an endocrinologist at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. “That’s bogus. A little bit of poison is good.”

That poison can actually come from plants, especially those that have survived harsh conditions. 

In this Nietzschean diet principle know as xenohormesis, foods that have survived harsh conditions make us stronger by stressing our bodies, not because they’re rich in antioxidants.

As the science quarterly Nautilus explains, plants have developed an arsenal of chemicals to help them ward off insects and grazers. These “antifeedants,” when ingested by humans, trigger the body to release proteins and activate genes that “produce antioxidants, enzymes to metabolize toxins, proteins to flush out heavy metals, and factors that enhance tumor suppression.”

Plants prepare your body to handle toxins much as exercise prepares you to race—by stressing your body. And supplements, says Dr. Hooper, interrupt this pay-it-forward biological sequence.​

- read the full article Poison Yourself—It's Good for You (from Outside Magazine)​

 

[Laurel]

http://dickjutsu.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/autocorrect2.jpg

Invoke the word autocorrect and most people will think immediately of its hiccups—the sort of hysterical, impossible errors one finds collected on sites like Damn You Autocorrect. But despite the inadvertent hilarity, the real marvel of our mobile text-correction systems is how astoundingly good they are. It's not too much of an exaggeration to call autocorrect the overlooked underwriter of our era of mobile prolixity. Without it, we wouldn't be able to compose windy love letters from stadium bleachers, write novels on subway commutes, or dash off breakup texts while in line at the post office.
[...]
Dean Hachamovitch—inventor on the patent for autocorrect and the closest thing it has to an individual creator—reaches across the table to introduce himself.
[...]
The notion of autocorrect was born when Hachamovitch began thinking about a functionality that already existed in Word. Thanks to Charles Simonyi, the longtime Microsoft executive widely recognized as the father of graphical word processing, Word had a “glossary” that could be used as a sort of auto-expander. You could set up a string of words—like insert logo—which, when typed and followed by a press of the F3 button, would get replaced by a JPEG of your company's logo. Hachamovitch realized that this glossary could be used far more aggressively to correct common mistakes. He drew up a little code that would allow you to press the left arrow and F3 at any time and immediately replace teh with the. His aha moment came when he realized that, because English words are space-delimited, the space bar itself could trigger the replacement, to make correction … automatic!​

- read the full article The Fasinatng … Frustrating … Fascinating History of Autocorrect (from Wired Magazine)​

 

[trysail]

...Kenneth Abbott, a former BP contractor, and Food & Water Watch Inc., an environmental group, sued in 2009 to shut down BP’s second-largest gulf platform. They said engineering drawings for the system’s subsea components lacked required safety approvals.

They also sought to force BP to pay triple damages on the full $88.8 billion estimated value of the Atlantis field, saying the company obtained those offshore leases by lying to regulators in claiming the platform met safety requirements.

“BP never misrepresented -- much less knowingly distorted what it was doing,” U.S. District Judge Lynn N. Hughes in Houston said today in a 10-page summary ruling, finding that the case was ultimately about “paperwork wrinkles” instead of engineering shortcuts.

Abbott and the environmentalists “have not blown a whistle,” he said. “They have blown their own horn.”

...Hughes said Abbott’s “unprincipled” case was “abetted by ideologues.” He said the purported whistle-blower hadn’t visited the gulf personally since 2010, “when he was there to be photographed for ‘60 Minutes.’”




​

- read the full article BP Atlantis $256 Billion Whistle-Blower Case Dismissed (from Bloomberg)​

 

[trysail]

Venezuela Wants All Supermarket Shoppers Fingerprinted



Attention Venezuelan shoppers: please proceed to the supermarket check-out for fingerprinting.

That could be a reality if a plan announced earlier this week by the country's president, Nicolas Maduro, goes into effect.

The purpose? Combatting shortages caused by rampant smuggling of subsidized food in Venezuela across the border into neighboring Colombia...

...blame the failed socialist policies initiated by President Hugo Chavez, who died last year, for triggering the country's current economic crisis. Besides shortages triggered by smuggling, Venezuela has also endured rampant crime and high inflation...



​

- read the full article Eggs, Milk And Ink: Venezuela Wants All Supermarket Shoppers Fingerprinted (from NPR)​

 

[trysail]

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/artic...mer/why-the-ukraine-crisis-is-the-wests-fault




Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault
The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin
By John J. Mearsheimer
Foreign Affairs

According to the prevailing wisdom in the West, the Ukraine crisis can be blamed almost entirely on Russian aggression. Russian President Vladimir Putin, the argument goes, annexed Crimea out of a long-standing desire to resuscitate the Soviet empire, and he may eventually go after the rest of Ukraine, as well as other countries in eastern Europe. In this view, the ouster of Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych in February 2014 merely provided a pretext for Putin’s decision to order Russian forces to seize part of Ukraine.

But this account is wrong: the United States and its European allies share most of the responsibility for the crisis. The taproot of the trouble is NATO enlargement, the central element of a larger strategy to move Ukraine out of Russia’s orbit and integrate it into the West. At the same time, the EU’s expansion eastward and the West’s backing of the pro-democracy movement in Ukraine -- beginning with the Orange Revolution in 2004 -- were critical elements, too. Since the mid-1990s, Russian leaders have adamantly opposed NATO enlargement, and in recent years, they have made it clear that they would not stand by while their strategically important neighbor turned into a Western bastion. For Putin, the illegal overthrow of Ukraine’s democratically elected and pro-Russian president -- which he rightly labeled a “coup” -- was the final straw. He responded by taking Crimea, a peninsula he feared would host a NATO naval base, and working to destabilize Ukraine until it abandoned its efforts to join the West.

Putin’s pushback should have come as no surprise. After all, the West had been moving into Russia’s backyard and threatening its core strategic interests, a point Putin made emphatically and repeatedly. Elites in the United States and Europe have been blindsided by events only because they subscribe to a flawed view of international politics. They tend to believe that the logic of realism holds little relevance in the twenty-first century and that Europe can be kept whole and free on the basis of such liberal principles as the rule of law, economic interdependence, and democracy...



http://www.foreignaffairs.com/artic...mer/why-the-ukraine-crisis-is-the-wests-fault

 

[Dream59]

http://www.foreignaffairs.com/artic...mer/why-the-ukraine-crisis-is-the-wests-fault




Why the Ukraine Crisis Is the West’s Fault
The Liberal Delusions That Provoked Putin
By John J. Mearsheimer
Foreign Affairs

If it is our fault then the Liberals can not bitch if we go in and fix it.

 

[silkNstilletos]

Thanks for all the good reads, Laurel. Keep them coming!!

 

[snugglestruggle]

I find myself turning to this thread more often when the blurty threads are slow (since Byron's departure IMA).

 

[Equinoxe]

An article I think everyone should read:
Shakespeare in the Bush by Laura Bohannan

It was written by an anthropologist and recounts her experience telling the story of Hamlet to the Tiv people in West Africa; ultimately, though, it's about how we make sense of the stories we hear.

 

[Laurel]

https://farm4.staticflickr.com/3894/14730723649_4370e5bd83_z.jpg
image courtesy Elias Levy (Flickr)

Earlier this summer, thirty-nine years after the release of the blockbuster movie “Jaws,” news outlets everywhere reported a sharp rise in the population of great white sharks in the western Atlantic Ocean.

Yet nobody seemed too panicked by the news.

What a difference four decades can make. During the heyday of “Jaws,” when the film spawned an international panic about sharks, such reports would have sparked pandemonium, clearing the beaches of swimmers. Yet for the past decade, the numbers of great whites off the coast of California have been rising, and no one seems very concerned. That’s likely because the backlash against shark-phobia has gained momentum, and more people are now aware of how truly rare shark attacks are. According to the International Shark Attack File, only four people died in shark attacks in the United States between 2003 and 2008, compared to 108 cattle-induced fatalities.

Yes, cows are more likely to kill humans than sharks.

Before our culture came to such consciousness, we had “Jaws,” the product of author Peter Benchley and director Steven Spielberg’s voracious appetite for blood-drenched terror at sea. But Benchley, the man who reinvented the great white shark as the nemesis of humanity — a kind of Moby Dick of the modern era — would come to completely disavow this take on sharks.

Like Dr. Frankenstein, Benchley could not escape the carnage in the wake of his creation, and for the latter part of his career committed himself to an all-out assault on shark killing through the conservation movement, until his death in 2006 of pulmonary fibrosis at the age of sixty-five.​

- read the full article How the Creator of ‘Jaws’ Became the Shark’s Greatest Defender (from narrative.ly)​

 

[Laurel]

http://theamericanreader.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/baeimagearticle.jpg

This week I look at two examples of a very different kind of etymological rise. “Bae” and “basic” do not have the cultural pedigree of shade and twerk; there is no use of talking about purity or original usage. This is because both words were developed so recently that their definitions and usage have been digital negotiations from the start. Ironically, this makes more recent etymological histories more muddled and difficult than the older lineages of the last column. With these new words, the question is not whether their new meaning correlates to the original usage, but whether there was ever a correct original usage whatsoever.

“Bae”

Compared to the long, rich histories of “twerk” and “shade,” “bae” is an infant. Although the term appears in rap songs since 2005, it first gained traction in popular/internet culture in 2012.
[...]
The most interesting thing about “bae,” though, is that there has never been a consensus on exactly what it means or where it comes from. It refers to a lover/partner, sure, but is it an abbreviation of “babe” or “baby”? Does it stand for Before Anyone Else? Surely these debates contributes to squares’ confusion over the term. They also foreground the particularly digital nature of bae’s origin and rise. Like so many words, “bae” seems to have come from hip hop/black communities; however, its meteoric rise came from young people using social media. These two communities overlap, of course, but the tumblr effect made “bae” a teen trend before it gained any nuance in rap culture. The word was stillborn; there’s no effective difference between bae and babe, bae and boo. Moreover, the spike in popularity makes bae truly postmodern slang; it became viral because it was viral, without offering any new linguistic “content.” In other words, “bae” is an empty slang vessel, the TIME.com of words. We might also call it a zombie; its meaning was dead from the beginning, but it lives on, mindlessly.​

- read the full article The Life and Death of American Slang, Part II: Bae and Basic Bitch (from The American Reader)​

 

[Laurel]

http://d1435t697bgi2o.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/peace-hand-soldier.jpg

The World Is Getting Less Peaceful Every Year...

And it’s costing the global economy about $1,350 per person.

•

The latest report from the Institute for Economics and Peace (IEP) came out at the end of last month. In short, IEP has a Global Peace Index (GPI) that uses 22 indicators to score and rank peacefulness in 162 countries. The report contains both good news and bad news. The good news: The number of wars is declining. The bad news: The world has become less peaceful. In fact, such peacelessness cost the global economy about $1,350 per person last year.

So, how exactly do wars and peace decline at the same time? Here’s a quick review of the IEP’s latest report.

Fewer Wars, but Less Peace

Most of the world’s countries have medium, high, or very high levels of peacefulness. The Cold War period saw a spike in internal conflicts and civil wars, but overall conflicts between state militaries are becoming less frequent. However, global peacefulness has been falling for the past seven years, and over 500 million people currently live in countries at risk for further declines in peacefulness in the short-term. That’s because, today, peacefulness is as much about what happens between people and inside our borders as it is about armies and wars.​

- read the full article The World Is Getting Less Peaceful Every Year (from Pacific Standard)​

 

[Laurel]

Two miles west of downtown Savannah, Georgia, sits a historical marker in the center of a small plot of a fenced in city park. The triangular park measures not more than a fifth of an acre. The surrounding neighborhood is one of the most distressed and depressed sections of the city.

The marker reads:

http://cdn.theatlantic.com/newsroom/img/posts/2014/07/20140627_140952_cropped.jpg.jpg/9640dc959.jpg

The marker was dedicated on March 3, 2008, 149 years after the slave auction occurred, and at the commemoration ceremony then-mayor Otis Johnson—only the second African-American to hold that office—offered up a short speech honoring the enslaved men and women whose labor helped build the oldest city in the state of Georgia. At the ceremony a local man handed out dirt from Nigeria to be sprinkled around the marker and Mayor Johnson poured water over the dirt to consecrate the ground.

And that's it for the city's commemoration of the event known as the Weeping Time. Contrast that with the towering monument to the Confederate dead that has stood for over a century smack in the center of one of the city's largest public parks.

The Weeping Time acquired its name colloquially, by the slaves and their descendants, because of reports that the sky opened up and poured down rain for the full two days of the auction. It was said that the heavens were weeping for the inhumanity that was being committed.

The event wasn't just notable because of the size of the auction. In 1859 the country was on the verge of a national bloodbath, and the historic threads that weave through the story of the Weeping Time are so far-reaching and remarkable, it's perplexing that more hasn't been written or remembered about this time.​

- read the full article The Weeping Time: A forgotten history of the largest slave auction ever on American soil (from The Atlantic)​

 

[Laurel]

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/47/153311159_1de1b30d7d_o.jpg
image courtesy moleratsgotnofur (Flickr)

Thanks to new technology, sex toys are becoming tools for connection - but will sexbots reverse that trend?

Roxxxy is decidedly a robot. Unlike some of the gynoids and actroids, Roxxxy does not quite produce the ‘uncanny valley’ effect, where a robot is so close to being human but different enough to create a feeling of revulsion. Roxxxy is mannequin-like, and comes with her very own personality. While she likes the same things as her owner, she has moods too, and can sometimes get sleepy. She can also take on additional preprogrammed characteristics, such as ‘Mature Martha’, ‘Young Yoko’ or ‘Frigid Farrah’. Young Yoko is aged just over 18, but she’s inexperienced and wants to learn, whereas Mature Martha can show her owner the ropes. Wild Wendy is up for anything, while Frigid Farrah needs a lot of coaxing.

What are these interactions like, in practice? Stilted, to be sure, but also surprisingly detailed. Take Mature Martha, for example. She talks to you in an empty robotic voice that sounds a little like a mix between Siri and MacinTalk Victoria. She has the base personality – a mature woman who's got a lot of professional experience and "erotic experience." But she'll talk to you about your specific interests, too. If you're into golf, she's into golf. Love Maseratis? Nothing turns her on more. Martha's purpose, just like Young Yoko or S&M Susan or Wild Wendy or Frigid Farrah's purpose, is to provide more than just sex. She's there as a True Companion, to talk to you before and after sex, or maybe in place of it if you're not in the mood. She's there waiting for you to connect with her.
[...]
If women are the model on which most sexbots are based, we run the risk of recreating essentialised gender roles, especially around sex. And that would be too bad, because sex technology has the potential to alleviate longstanding human problems, for both men and women. Sex tech can help us take on sexual dysfunction and profound loneliness, but if we simply create a new variety of second-class citizen, a sexual creature to be owned, we risk alienating ourselves from each other all over again.​

- read the full article Sexbot slaves (from Aeon)​

 

[MonaLittle]

https://farm1.staticflickr.com/47/153311159_1de1b30d7d_o.jpg
image courtesy moleratsgotnofur (Flickr)

Thanks to new technology, sex toys are becoming tools for connection - but will sexbots reverse that trend?

Roxxxy is decidedly a robot. Unlike some of the gynoids and actroids, Roxxxy does not quite produce the ‘uncanny valley’ effect, where a robot is so close to being human but different enough to create a feeling of revulsion. Roxxxy is mannequin-like, and comes with her very own personality. While she likes the same things as her owner, she has moods too, and can sometimes get sleepy. She can also take on additional preprogrammed characteristics, such as ‘Mature Martha’, ‘Young Yoko’ or ‘Frigid Farrah’. Young Yoko is aged just over 18, but she’s inexperienced and wants to learn, whereas Mature Martha can show her owner the ropes. Wild Wendy is up for anything, while Frigid Farrah needs a lot of coaxing.

What are these interactions like, in practice? Stilted, to be sure, but also surprisingly detailed. Take Mature Martha, for example. She talks to you in an empty robotic voice that sounds a little like a mix between Siri and MacinTalk Victoria. She has the base personality – a mature woman who's got a lot of professional experience and "erotic experience." But she'll talk to you about your specific interests, too. If you're into golf, she's into golf. Love Maseratis? Nothing turns her on more. Martha's purpose, just like Young Yoko or S&M Susan or Wild Wendy or Frigid Farrah's purpose, is to provide more than just sex. She's there as a True Companion, to talk to you before and after sex, or maybe in place of it if you're not in the mood. She's there waiting for you to connect with her.
[...]
If women are the model on which most sexbots are based, we run the risk of recreating essentialised gender roles, especially around sex. And that would be too bad, because sex technology has the potential to alleviate longstanding human problems, for both men and women. Sex tech can help us take on sexual dysfunction and profound loneliness, but if we simply create a new variety of second-class citizen, a sexual creature to be owned, we risk alienating ourselves from each other all over again.​

- read the full article Sexbot slaves (from Aeon)​

Woah, that's both fascinating and very sad. I guess there is a market for everything. This seems to take online isolation, or 'plugged in' to an entire new level.