The precursor to Sherlock Holmes

As long-time readers know, I am big fan of murder mysteries, in books and in TV/film forms. Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie constituted much of my reading as a boy. Doyle’s creation Sherlock Holmes has often been seen as the archetype of the private detective, able to see clues and solve crimes where the official police force could not, and his biographer John Watson served the role of the narrator, observant enough to be a surrogate for the reader and was able to tell us broadly what was seen by Holmes, without being able to distinguish between what was relevant and what was superfluous, and thus unable to make the crucial inferences that Holmes did.

But recently I came across the story The Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allen Poe that was published in 1840 and is credited as being the first modern detective story and it is clear that Doyle was inspired by Poe’s story.

In the earlier story, we again have a friendship between two men, the unnamed narrator in Poe’s case who meets and befriends an eccentric acute observer in August Dupin and the two share lodgings in Paris. Poe’s narrator records his observations of Dupin, and we immediately see the similarities to Holmes, in that Dupin also has acute powers of observation and superlative analytical and deductive skills.
[Read more…]

How much lower can the US sink in rogue nation status?

The answer seems to be there is no bottom. For the longest time, the US has been behaving like a rogue state, invading other countries, bombing places any time that it wants to, and killing innocent civilians, Americans and foreigners, with little or no justification other than that they happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. It has done whatever the hell it wants in the world, either covertly or overtly, and this has been true for a long time through both Democratic and Republican administrations.

With Trump, the crimes have become ever more egregious with not even the semblance of an effort to cloak them in some facsimile of legality by concocting some justification .It seems futile to chronicle its crimes, like painting a black wall with more black paint.

The latest Trump outrage is that on Tuesday he proudly said that he had ordered a military strike on a small speedboat in international waters that he claimed killed 11 members of what he called a drug smuggling ring. There is, however, one big problem with this.
[Read more…]

Great moments in sports fandom

Once again we have a story about an adult at a sporting event snatching a souvenir out of the hands of a child who had been given it by an athlete. In this case, the villain becomes even more villainous when it turns out that he is a millionaire.

Moments after the tennis player Kamil Majchrzak celebrated the biggest win of his career at the US Open last week, he handed his cap to a beaming young boy. What happened next sparked tears, outrage, a detective hunt across social media and, finally, a grovelling apology.

It came from Piotr Szczerek, a millionaire businessman from Poland, who had snatched the cap out of the boy’s hand and stuffed it into his bag. Videos of the incident showed the youngster looking deeply upset and asking: “What are you doing?” while Majchrzak – who was oblivious to the situation after his five-set victory against the ninth seed, Karen Khachanov – walked away.

You can see the incident here.


[Read more…]

The abundant availability of health data

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I am locked into the Apple ecosystem. The latest addition was the Apple Watch. I had not considered buying one since I had an excellent analog wristwatch that kept perfect time and was powered by light and thus did not require any batteries. As long as you did not keep it in darkness such as put away in a drawer, it kept perfect time. I had had it for over a decade with no problems, so never felt the need to get another watch.

But since I live mostly alone, my daughters were concerned about me falling and not being able to call for help so they bought an Apple Watch for me because it has the feature that if you do have a hard fall, it detects it and will alert you. If you do not cancel the alert and are immobile for a minute, it will call 911 emergency services and your emergency contacts and send your GPS location to them. It will also send any medical information, such as the medications you are on, allergies, and any other health information you wish to share.
[Read more…]

So much available, so little to watch

In a comment to my blog post reviewing the film The Penguin Lessons, commenter jimf wrote:

I understand it was an offhand comment that had little to do with the post, but I can’t agree that Netflix has “seemingly infinite options”. I find the vast majority of Netflix content to be virtually unwatchable. The majority seems to be either mindless filler or hopelessly violent “action” pictures, or worse, stars Adam Sandler. Most of the comedy specials are flat and predictable. And good luck trying to find any classic pics made prior to 1960.

I actually agree with jimf. After all, I did not say that Netflix had “seemingly infinite good options”. The trope of people wasting their time surfing the site, trying and failing to find something that they really want to watch finally settling for some dreck just to kill time, has become a cliche.
[Read more…]

The corrosive spread of tech company mentality

One of the aphorisms guiding tech companies is to ‘move fast and break things’. Rewards accrue to those companies that are first out of the gate with something new and so products are rushed out without being fully tested, the assumption being that any faults can be corrected based on feedback from consumers. In other words, the people who buy the early versions of the product serve as so-called beta testers, whether they want to be or not.

These situations rarely have life-or-death consequences. With most things such as devices and apps, usually the worst that can happen is that the users are annoyed or frustrated with the glitches but are willing to tolerate them as long as they get upgrades that purportedly take care of the problems.

But there is now an increasing area where tech-based products are being marketed as solutions for things where that tech culture attitude is not suitable, with sometimes dangerous consequences. I wrote recently about AI systems being used to try and treat the problem of loneliness by acting essentially as therapists, sometimes giving dangerous advice out of misguided attempts at being supportive. This can have tragic real-world consequence such as one case where a ChatGPT chatbot urged a teen to kill himself. The family is now suing Open AI, creator of ChatGPT.
[Read more…]

Yet another school shooting

A shooter killed two people and injured 17 others while they were at church on the opening day of a Catholic school in Minneapolis. In reading the news report, I was stuck by this towards the end.

There have been more than 140 shootings reported in elementary and secondary schools in 2025 thus far, according to the K-12 School Shooting Database.

More than 140 school shootings so far this year? That is insane.

One has to wonder why these people target schools. One reason may be that it is a soft target. But with added school security, there are even softer targets like shopping malls, parks, and other open public spaces. Perhaps the shooters had bad experiences in schools as places where they were bullied and intimidated and otherwise made to feel inadequate, leaving them with feelings of rage against the institution and all who are there, even if they were not directly responsible for their unhappiness. Also, killing children, especially younger ones, garners much greater media attention, which momentary and posthumous fame is what some of these killers seek.

At least some people are realizing that platitudes are not an adequate response.

Minneapolis’s mayor, Jacob Frey, who has led Minneapolis since 2018, said earlier in the same conference: “Children are dead. There are families that have a deceased child. You cannot put into words the gravity, the tragedy or the pain of this situation … Those families are suffering immense pain right now. Think of this as if it’s your own.”

He continued, visibly angry: “Don’t just say this is about thoughts and prayers right now. These kids were literally praying. It was the first week of school. They were in a church.”

But Trump of course, who I doubt ever prays, came out with the prayers trope saying “Please join me in praying for everyone involved!”

It will not be long for the transphobes to exploit the fact that the shooter is reportedly transgender, in order to obscure the problem of the easy availability of guns that leads to rampant gun violence.

Local news, Kare 11, confirmed the shooter’s name was Robin Westman, 23. Westman grew up in Richfield, and Westman’s mother worked at Annunciation school in some capacity. Westman applied in Dakota county to change their birth name from Robert to Robin because they identified as a female, per court documents obtained by the Guardian. That request was granted in January 2020.

It is a sick society that does almost nothing to prevent such tragedies.

The horrifying revelations in The Tesla Files

The Tesla company is very secretive about the cars it produces. In particular, it is very reluctant to release information about their safety records. While the company blocks attempts to release records on its crash records, a whistleblower has released what is being called The Tesla files based on internal records. The Guardian has released an edited extract from The Tesla Files by Sönke Iwersen and Michael Verfürden that was published on 24 July that reveals horrifying details about the kinds of crashes that Teslas have been involved in and how that information is suppressed. The article says that what the files reveal is that it is perfectly reasonable to be mortally afraid of these cars.

The most disturbing thing that I read was that Tesla collects vats amount of real-time data from its cars all over the world but the existence of this data was being kept secret from regulators. When any of the cars crash, this data would be invaluable to investigators looking for the cause but many do not ask for it, presumably because they are unaware that the data exist and even when they ask, the company stonewalls, leaving the victims of the crashes and their families frustrated.
[Read more…]

Exploiting people for ratings and profit

Because I do not watch TV much, there are huge swathes of popular culture that I am oblivious to. Well, not completely oblivious, because I do read news sites and come across news headlines about things that enter into the periphery of my consciousness so that I know that something is going on and may even be aware of the people involved without knowing the particulars. For example, I knew that there was some kind of public feud between two rappers one of whom was Drake while the other’s name escapes me but did not know what it was about. I could look it up of course, but I wasn’t interested enough to bother.

I am also aware that there are a vast number of reality shows out there but have never watched any, though I know that some of them involve squabbling housewives and others involve people trying to find romantic partners while yet others involve some kind of survival tests. I was aware that in their quest for ratings, the TV networks and the show’s producers go to some lengths to create drama among the participants, even providing them with scripts or prompts, so that the word ‘reality TV’, implying that the shows are organically evolving with the cameras being just passive observers, is really a joke. Since the shows are taped well in advance and heavily edited before broadcast to create various storylines, they have to be filmed in secret and the participants are sequestered so that they cannot meet with their families and friends and are bound by confidentiality agreements so that surprises can be sprung on viewers. This isolation likely increases their sense of vulnerability. It is only long after the shows have been broadcast that people start revealing the often brutal and abusive conditions that prevailed while the filming was going on.
[Read more…]