I’m eager to read Dave Eggers’ new book, The Circle. In this novel, a mega-tech company seeks to make the world as “transparent” as possible by encouraging people to place cameras everywhere and share the details of their private lives. The company declares that “ALL THAT HAPPENS MUST BE KNOWN” and “SECRETS ARE LIES.”
In an excerpt published in the New York Times Magazine, a young hire named Mae shows up at the company campus and is immediately awed by its sculpted hills, tree-lined walkways, and curvy blond wood desks, “arranged in groups of five, like petals on a flower.” Coworkers berate her for attending to her sick father without “reaching out” for support to other employees and for kayaking on the weekend without posting any photos online. In the final scene of the excerpt, a company executive presents a new, inexpensive, lollipop-shaped camera that people can deploy anywhere they like and easily stream to their friends’ computers. And eventually, Mae allows the company to document her every move.
We’re not quite there yet. But in the meantime, scientists are making use of pervasive images that already exist on the Internet: Google Street View photos. These roadside pictures, taken by people driving camera-equipped cars down streets from San Francisco to Hong Kong, are mainly used to check out neighborhoods or buildings. Since some images also include wildlife, researchers have investigated whether these online panoramas could provide a cheap way to survey plants and animals. Continue reading
Q: Why does the full moon look larger near the horizon than when it’s higher in the sky?
I used to practice my signature everywhere. I wrote on napkins and notebooks, in crayon on restaurant placemats, with a finger in the wet sand. I even remember a grade-school art project in which I wrote my name and its mirror image, and then used the pair to create a creature: the top loops of the “C” as its antennae, the lagging tips of each lowercase “n” its feet.