It’s dishonest and manipulative. I think most people will realize what is going on, I don’t think this is a major problem in society, but it’s something I like to laugh at.

I was at the dentist and came across this Before and After photo, which takes honesty to a whole new level:

The two photos aren’t just taken under similar conditions — they are actually the same photo, with the new white, straight teeth photoshopped onto the second one. Hilarious.

I guess these are the Before and After photos that are appropriate for contemporary society — consumers are very familiar with sophisticated visual effects in all forms of media, and are even literate with sophisticated visualizations demonstrating complicated information. The only thing the dentist will change is your teeth, so it’s only appropriate for the example photos to show the teeth as the only thing being changed.

This tool – a controlled experiment/demonstration – is the sort of thing that scientists have been familiar with for decades or centuries. 20 or 30 years ago, such a set of photos might have been considered surreal, ridiculous, or perhaps even horrific to a typical consumer. But now it is not only something with which consumers are familiar and comfortable, but also something that they expect.

All solutions create new problems. The problem now becomes: just how much of either photo was photoshopped? Has the color or position of the teeth been modified in either of the photos? Right now there is no way for this information to be communicated to the consumer, short of issuing something like a “statement of honesty” paragraph next to the photos. Perhaps in a decade or two, the authenticity of such things will be communicated to consumers, maybe with some sort of still-image metadata standard similar to MPEG-7, allowing for a checksum/signature to be carried all the way from the photo capturing device (camera) to the presentation device (printout / computer screen).

In Central Market in Dallas, TX

Upon closer inspection, we discover that the cleavage was photoshopped onto the wrong model– the little girl instead of the mother.

I love the two introductory paragraphs. Yes, sometimes I do feel hassled by computers.

                            COMPUTER HASSLES SCALE
Directions: Computer technology hassles are irritants related to
experiences with computers and computer technology. These
irritants can range from minor annoyances to fairly major
problems. They can occur infrequently or fairly often.

Listed below are a number of ways in which a person can feel
hassled by computers and computer technology. Respond to each
hassle by circling a 0, 1, 2, or 3 to indicate how SEVERE the
hassle has been for you during the past TWO MONTHS.
------------------------------------------------------------------

    SEVERITY

0 - not at all
1 - somewhat severe
2 - moderately severe
3 - extremely severe

     HASSLES

1. computer system is down
2. lost in the computer
3. poorly documented software
4. computer hardware failure
5. computer keyboard lockup
6. programming error
7. illegal input message
8. updated software requirements
9. poor user/computer interface
10. slow program speed
11. slow computer speed
12. poorly written computer documentation
13. incompatible software program
14. incomprehensible computer instructions
15. outdated computer skills
16. increased time demands
17. electrical surges - data are lost
18. lost data
19. lost program
20. crashed program
21. crashed system/ lockup
22. damaged storage media - disks, tapes
23. need to update skills
24. keyboard typing errors
25. need to learn new software
26. forgot to save work
27. keyboard paralysis
28. uninformative computer conversations
29. violent language of computers
30. too much computer information
31. too little computer information
32. software confusion
33. lack of help with a computer problem
34. lack of computer expertise
35. increased computer use expectations
36. lack of computer application software
37. obsolete computers

This blender is louder than some others, but that is the price of power.

Powerful, though a sound baffle wasn’t part of the production budget. Be prepared to wake the neighbors, but at least you can hand them a perfectly blended smoothie when they bang on your door.

But, the drawback is, it is REALLY loud – probably due to the all metal drive. If you have young children in the house please take note, they will be frightened.

The ice turned to sluce before I could blink. I could not believe how fast it blended the ice. It is absolutely amazing.

It’s squat, ugly, industrial gray and utilitatian in design and as loud as a mig at takeoff when going full blend, but underneath this blender lies the heart of a beast that will surely never die.

Hello. I have a question: what is the difference between the DDW396W and the DDW496W? The difference between energy and water usage is huge, but it seems like the capabilities and features are exactly the same.

Thanks,
John

Good Afternoon,
Thank you for your e-mail. The only difference, is they are manufactured by different companies, and the size from front to back is larger on the DDW496W. Please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns. Thank you.

Aimee
Customer Service Representative
Danby Products Inc.
Web:WWW.Danby.com

In general the party was a blast, free food and drink, nice people, great music. A couple days before the party I just happened to be corresponding with Ben Hammersley and I mentioned to him that I had just moved to NYC, and if he was ever in town we should get a drink. He replied back and said that he was in fact in NYC and we should get a drink the next night! I told him I was pretty booked the rest of the week, but that he should try to score a ticket to the Wired party if he knew anyone. A few hours later he replied back and said that he had done just that.

Why am I telling you all this? Because as fate would have it, Ben and I were the only two folks quoted in the article about the party on CNET’s media blog! And boy is my quote a dandy. I won’t ruin it for you, go read it.

Until I realized there were missing periods in each price. Or maybe boldnotbold is the new punctuation?

See the video at crooks and liars here (i think this isn’t a complete video, if anyone finds a better one let me know), and more coverage here.

UPDATE: a torrent of the full video here (thank you, helpful anonymous commenter!)

UPDATE: full length easy to watch version here.

I think I am more likely to agree with some of his predictions than the next person though — a lot of his predictions are based on the model that technology creeps up on us very iteratively; one day you are dialing up to a BBS at 1400 baud, and and the next thing you know, a decade later 80% of your social time is on Instant Messenger.

Anyway I was just reading this interview with Kurzweil and thought that this quote was particularly amazing/funny/absurd:

I’m very confident that over the next decade we’ll largely eliminate the diseases that kill 95 percent of people today. We’ve identified a dozen or so aging processes, and we have strategies for reversing them all. I believe that within 10 years we’ll produce a mouse that doesn’t age, and we’ll translate that into human therapies within another five to 10 years after that.

95%? 10 years? Come on Ray. Don’t get me wrong, once a few key technologies really get rolling — nanotech, gene therapy, etc — then I think we are going to see some amazing advances. But as far as I can tell, those things will only begin to really get rolling in about 10 years.

On the other hand, Kurzweil spends all of his time researching this stuff so maybe he knows something I don’t. On the other hand, maybe he thinks about it so much that he has an exaggerated sense of how close the technology is to being scalable in a lab/commercial context.

Stopping disease, aging, and, ultimately, death, is something Kurzweil talks about a lot.

Do you think that someday there’ll be legal limits on how long people can live?

Not if I have anything to say about it. But there’s a very powerful “death-ist” need. People really have it deeply ingrained. Life is short. You can’t live forever. The only things that are certain are death and taxes. We have this whole so-called normal lifecycle; certain things happen at certain ages. We’ve rationalized death, which in my view is a profound tragedy and a tremendous loss of knowledge and expertise. And we have rationalized it as a good thing. I guess if there’s nothing you can do about it, the best thing you can do is rationalize it, but there will be things that we can do about it.

I have a book coming out in the fall, Fantastic Voyage. And in it I say that right now we have the means to slow down aging to such an extent that even baby boomers like myself can remain healthy and vital long enough for the full blossoming of the biotechnology revolution, at which point we will be able to rebuild our bodies and brains.

You look like you’re in good shape.

Well, I take this very seriously. I’m very aggressive in terms of reversing aging, or slowing down aging. I recently took a biological aging test with my health collaborator (who is also my coauthor), and based on 20 different tests—memory and sensory acuity and response times—it had me at age 40. I’m 56.

What do you do to slow the aging process?

I eat a certain diet. I take 250 supplements a day. I’m really reprogramming my biochemistry. A lot of people think it’s good to be natural. I don’t think it’s good because biological evolution is not on our side.

It’s in the interest of our species for people past child-rearing age not to stick around, at least in an era of scarcity, and our biological program hasn’t changed since we lived in an era of scarcity. We have a lot of outmoded programs in our genes. One says, “Hold on to every calorie because the next hunting season might be fallow.” These are all programs that need to be changed. [snip]

Who needs a bunch of 120-year-olds hanging around, especially when so much knowledge will be stored in machines?

Well, ultimately, there’s going to be very little difference between a guy who’s 120 and a guy who’s 30. And with so much of our lives spent in virtual reality, we’ll able to express ourselves in many different ways. It’s not a matter of the knowledge that a 120-year-old would have. We all have an opportunity to create knowledge, and we’ll expand that opportunity, which, I think, is really the mission of our civilization.