2013 — 12 January: Saturday

The realist in murder writes of a world in which gangsters can rule nations and almost rule cities, in which hotels and apartment houses and celebrated restaurants are owned by men who made their money out of brothels, in which a screen star can be the fingerman for a mob, and the nice man down the hall is a boss of the numbers racket; a world where a judge with a cellar full of bootleg liquor can send a man to jail for having a pint in his pocket, where the mayor of your town may have condoned murder as an instrument of moneymaking, where no man can walk down a dark street in safety because law and order are things we talk about but refrain from practising; a world where you may witness a hold-up in broad daylight and see who did it, but you will fade quickly back into the crowd rather than tell anyone, because the hold-up men may have friends with long guns, or the police may not like your testimony, and in any case the shyster for the defense will be allowed to abuse and vilify you in open court, before a jury of selected morons, without any but the most perfunctory interference from a political judge.

Raymond Chandler in University of Texas archive

Well, we're all at the mercy of the power man. I am quite concerned that we're becoming hyper-fragile as a civilization, and we're becoming so dependent on technologies that are not as reliable as they should be, that have so many conditions that have to be met for them to work, that we may specialize ourselves into some very serious jams. But in the meantime, thinking about the self-organizational powers of the brain as very much like the self-organizational powers of a city is not a bad idea. It just reeks of over-enthusiastic metaphor, though, and it's worth reminding ourselves that this idea has been around since Plato.
Plato analogizes the mind of a human being to the state. You've got the rulers and the guardians and the workers. This idea that a person is made of lots of little people is comically simpleminded in some ways, but that doesn't mean it isn't, in a sense, true. We shouldn't shrink from it just because it reminds us of simpleminded versions that have been long discredited. Maybe some not so simpleminded version is the truth.

Daniel Dennett in Edge

Some products, of course, never make it to market — Bechthold cited one that went through over a year of testing before it was finally rejected.
He compared some of the design problems he faces with those experienced by cellphone manufacturers: fine tooling, thermal specification, and wireless control. Cellphone manufacturers have it easier, though, he said, citing the unique problems that a wireless We-Vibe has. "Put two hot, warm salt bodies together, and let's cover up the antenna. Bit of a challenge there. Suddenly a dropped cellphone call seems small compared to a dropped orgasm."

Rik Myslewski in El Reg