I hope everyone is enjoying their Halloween. I plan on celebrating by playing Alien: Isolation for the first time followed by a late-night viewing of my favorite meta-horror movie: Cabin in the Woods. Candy may be consumed.
Stay safe and enjoy the evening.
Ars Technica profiles the Uni, a tablet that is designed to translate American Sign Language into spoken English and vice versa. The startup company behind the Uni hopes that the device will help the deaf and hearing impaired communicate in a variety of everyday situations without relying on a human interpreter. For the Uni to achieve widespread adoption among the deaf community, it will need to overcome a high sticker price and a limited vocabulary. The vocabulary can be expanded through software updates, but price might be a more difficult issue to address (something that is true for a lot of assistive technology).
The Uni seems to rely on a combination of hardware and software to achieve its goals. As the technology on consumer tablets and phones improves, perhaps an app (or even the operating system) will be able to perform these functions. It might be a more cost-effective solution. In the meantime, let’s hope the Uni can get enough traction to continue development.
I don’t subscribe to Cinemax, but that hasn’t stopped The Knick from becoming one of my favorite new shows of the year. The Knick is a medical drama set in a struggling New York hospital at the dawn of the twentieth century, just as medicine (and surgery in particular) is leaving behind its grisly sawbones era and entering an age of innovation and revolution. The show has earned a reputation for its depictions of gory and decidedly unsanitary surgical procedures, but the amazing cast is the real reason to watch. Clive Owen is tone-perfect as an arrogant yet brilliant chief surgeon who embodies both the best and worst tendencies of his time. He spends coke-fuelled weekends in his lab devising new surgical procedures and instruments, yet he is openly hostile to the first African American surgeon to join the hospital staff (played with seething intelligence by Andre Holland).
Steven Soderbergh’s direction infuses every episode with a kinetic energy that is bathed in both harsh light and soft shadow. It’s probably one of the most meticulously composed shows since Breaking Bad. And Cliff Martinez provides an electronic score that should seem anachronistic but somehow fits with the show’s theme of messy, halting progression. The Knick was renewed for a second season before it even aired, so I’m looking forward to seeing how the show and its characters evolve. It may even persuade me to subscribe to Cinemax.
It has become fashionable for technology writers to question the utility of the iPad. They point out that phones are becoming bigger and more powerful while competing tablets can provide the same functionality for less money. These observations are certainly true, but I remain a big fan of the device. Much of that has to do with my particular use cases for the iPad. The iPad allows me to read a book or watch video without being at my desk. And thanks to the addition of Switch Control in ios, I can operate the tablet with a single switch. No other tablet can beat the iPad in terms of accessibility.
When the iPad first debuted, many predicted that it would quickly supplant desktop and laptop computers. That hasn’t happened and I’m confident that the iPad will continue to thrive in a world of jumbo-sized phones. It will never match a phone’s portability, but it doesn’t need to. It needs to excel as a tablet, which it does.
Americans are masters at freaking about things that really aren’t threats. Case in point: Ebola. 20% of Americans are afraid of catching Ebola; a ridiculously high number considering that exactly one case has been diagnosed in the country. As Jeffrey Young of HuffPo points out, the flu virus presents a much more significant danger to public health. Thousands of Americans will die from the flu in the coming months, yet I’m betting that most of the people in hysterics about Ebola won’t bother getting a flu shot.
If you are concerned about becoming sick in the next few months, get a flu shot. Tell your friends and family to get flu shots. A flu shot will provide actual protection against a real threat. Panicking about anything is rarely helpful and only makes us look incredibly silly to the eyes of the world.
The Supreme Court doesn’t allow itself many progressive moments. And even when those moments arrive, the Court likes to be coy about it, presumably to give Scalia the opportunity to have a tantrum in private. Yesterday’s decision to let stand various appellate decisions striking down same-sex marriage bans is not the end of the struggle for marriage equality, but it perhaps marks the beginning of the final chapter. A lower court could still uphold such a ban, forcing the Court to issue an actual opinion on the matter. But it seems nearly inconceivable that the Court would uphold such a ban after yesterday’s news. The unconstitutional nature of these bans is now a settled matter.
The Court is likely to continue dismantling the Voting Rights Act, so we should try to appreciate these rare instances when the Court shows that it is still capable of demonstrating good sense.