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Interesting piece in the NYT: Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty? by Sara Corbett. Interesting newish career: user anthropologist.

Alright, if you only read the previous excerpt you may have gotten the wrong impression, so I’ve digested the article for you. The point being that cellphones, like most technology, may be put to the most stupid uses, but they are beneficial.

“In an increasingly transitory world, the cellphone is becoming the one fixed piece of our identity. Having a call-back number is having a fixed identity point, which, inside of populations that are constantly on the move — displaced by war, floods, drought or faltering economies — can be immensely valuable both as a means of keeping in touch with home communities and as a business tool.”

Cellphones “have an economizing effect”–for instance, you don’t have to waste time waiting at a designated time and place, you can coordinate with each other incrementally. “Even the smallest improvements in efficiency could reshape the global economy in ways that we are just beginning to understand.”

“Something that’s mostly a convenience booster for those of us with a full complement of technology at our disposal can be a life-saver to someone with fewer ways to access information.”

The cellphone has the “ability to increase people’s productivity and well-being, mostly because of the simple fact that they can be reached.”

“Mobile banking (GCash is cited as an example) will bring huge numbers of previously excluded people into the formal economy quickly, simply because the latent demand for such services is so great, especially among the rural poor.”

Communication is “quite viable as a fundamental right. The phone represents what people are aspiring to.”

I want a cellphone that’s a tricorder and a phaser.

Aquarium, Tai King shop, originally uploaded by 160507.

There was some confusion as to the location of the Shanghai Museum of Sex and Sex Health. One guidebook gave an address in the city; another said it had been moved to the suburbs. Then a reliable authority said it was back in Shanghai, and was accessible through the Bund Underground Tourist Tunnel. He had recently escorted visitors from Manila to the museum and they were delighted to find the perfect pasalubong in the museum gift shop: vibrating cockrings.

En route to the museum, I thought of a little experiment. I texted three friends—one hetero female, one hetero male, and one gay male—the same message: “Do you want a vibrating cockring from the Shanghai Sex Museum?” In aid of research I should point out that women comprise approximately 5 percent of my immediate circle of friends, men 10 percent (none of them below the age of 40), and gay men 85 percent. (Sometimes days pass before I speak to a heterosexual.)

My three friends replied almost instantly. (Note: I hang out with people who text in complete sentences. That is why we get along.)

Woman: Thanks for the wonderful offer, but as there is no man on the horizon, that would be like a barn without a horse.
Man: Kind of you. . .but no thanks. . .
Gay guy: Yes!!!

This is why gay men are happier than the rest of us. Said gift item was so popular, the museum shop ran out of supplies before we got there.

In Confessions of a Technophobe, Joe Queenan asks: Why are so many dramas and thrillers now set in the past? Is it because, in a world of mobile phones, satnav and Google, suspense is impossible?

Good point:  The sight of an actor sitting before a computer googling his enemy doesn’t really raise the tension. However I can think of at least four movies in which technology is thrilling: Infernal Affairs (covert texting), and the Bourne movies.

I just read a short story called Perkus Tooth by Jonathan Lethem in which the title character diagnoses Al Gore and David Byrne as “super high-functioning autistics”. DB has described himself as “borderline Asperger’s”. He’s like those elders from advanced civilizations in old Star Trek episodes, the ones who guard the time-travel portals or decide to spare the human race.

In this piece in Wired, he explains the workings of the music industry from his unique perspective. “I have seen this business from both sides. I’ve made money, and I’ve been ripped off. I’ve had creative freedom, and I’ve been pressured to make hits. I have dealt with diva behavior from crazy musicians, and I have seen genius records by wonderful artists get completely ignored. I love music. I always will. It saved my life, and I bet I’m not the only one who can say that. What is called the music business today, however, is not the business of producing music. . .”

So Madonna abandons the record company for a concert promoter, and Radiohead not only debuts its new album online but allows buyers to name their price for the download. Do we hear bells tolling the end of the music industry? Or is this the sound of the artists telling the major labels to go screw themselves? DB’s Survival Strategies for Emerging Artists—and Megastars.

“Recently, though, anthropologists have subtly revised the view that the invention of agriculture was a fall from grace. They have found the serpent in hunter-gatherer Eden, the savage in the noble savage. Maybe it was not an 80,000-year camping holiday after all. . .”

Is constant violence a modern pathology, or is it the natural state?

Hunter-gatherers: Noble or savage? in The Economist 

One of my favorite cosmic coincidence sites is Goro Adachi’s Etemenanki. (Etemenanki is one of the towers of Babel.) This post connects the showing of a Battlestar Galactica episode about radiation poisoning, solar flares, a Discovery launch, the opening of Mel Gibson’s Apocalypto, the end of the Mayan calendar, the Transit of Venus, the “passing of the torch” from Ronald Reagan to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Deep Impact, the octagonal floor plan of the Dome of the Rock, the Russian spy Litvinenko who died of radiation poisoning, Comet McNaught, Nostradamus, Pink Floyd, the death of Gerald Ford, the execution of Saddam Hussein, 2001: A Space Odyssey and two must-haves of any good conspiracy theory: the Knights Templar and the Book of Revelations.

Mind-boggling entertainment, the start of a migraine, or your signal to drop everything and head for the hills to await the apocalypse?

So if you’re planning on writing the next Da Vinci Code-type bestseller, you know where to rip off your plot.

Has it occurred to you that Transformers has a premise similar to that of 2001: A Space Odyssey, only it’s much less static?

“. . .the sheer volume of spam grows exponentially every year, and so, it would appear, do the sophisticated methods used to send it. Nearly two million e-mails are dispatched every second, a hundred and seventy-one billion messages a day. …Spam’s growth has been metastatic, both in raw numbers and as a percentage of all mail. In 2001, spam accounted for about five per cent of the traffic on the Internet; by 2004, that figure had risen to more than seventy per cent. This year, in some regions, it has edged above ninety per cent—more than a hundred billion unsolicited messages clogging the arterial passages of the world’s computer networks every day.” Damn Spam: Losing the war on junk mail.

I suppose I’m lucky: my spam blocker usually stops the penile enlargement ads, so all I get are these congratulations for winning lotteries I never joined, and letters from alleged deposed dictators offering to share their loot if I’m stupid enough to give them my bank details. A lot of well-to-do older Pinoys are actually taken in by these scams (Shouldn’t our constant exposure to phony get-rich-quick schemes work as a sort of homeopathy and make us scam-proof by now?). I think it’s a mixture of gullibility, greed, wanting something for nothing and losing everything in the process. The real visionaries are the Monty Python guys, because they wrote a song about spam back when it was all canned.