The Phantom City

From Anil Dash’s Cats Can Has Grammar:

But a few distinct categories have sprung up that have helped amplify and popularize the phenomenon.

• I’M IN UR X Ying your Z. This construct, based on i’m in ur base, killin ur d00ds has morphed into a catch-all structure for annotating cat pictures.
• Invisible Item. Variations on the seminal Invisible Bike, these are images of cats, usually in midair, with captions that prompt us to fill in imaginary objects or actions that complete the scene. There’s something brilliant to these images, speaking to our mind’s ability to intuitively extrapolate unseen details.
• Kitty Pidgin. And finally, the newly dominant lolcats, of the family I Can Has Cheezeburger? These seem to be spawning nearly infinite variations, and have exploded in popularity since being named “lolcats” instead of the more general “image macro” or “cat macro”.

The rise of these new subspecies of lolcats are particularly interesting to me because “I can has cheezeburger?” has a fairly consistent grammar. I wasn’t sure this was true until I realized that it’s possible to get cat-speak wrong.

What I find interesting is the conceptions of time and subject/object implied in Kitty Pidgin. Have we really been saying these things wrong all along?

Update: I should point out Twitter: The Evolution of Cat Blogging.

Scientists have simulated a mouse’s cortical hemisphere on a supercomputer, running at about 10% of the speed. It doesn’t really have the structure of a mouse’s brain yet, but I suspect with one mouse wandering past the Do Not Enter signs, and one lightning strike, we’ll have an Artificial Mouse Intelligence any day now. Maybe we can use it against the human-brained, cyborg mice?

Link courtesy of Boing Boing.

According to this test site, The Phantom City is blocked in China. I feel almost famous…along with hundreds of thousands of other sites that are probably just blocked due to pattern-matching.

And just to make it a good Friday…Meme Cats.

Virginia Tech teacher and filmmaker Paul Harrill on the media spectacle surrounding the shootings, before NBC decided to air the videos.

Link courtesy of Boing Boing.

Nikki Giovanni:

We are Virginia Tech.

We are sad today, and we will be sad for quite a while. We are not moving on, we are embracing our mourning.

We are Virginia Tech.

We are strong enough to stand tall tearlessly, we are brave enough to bend to cry, and we are sad enough to know that we must laugh again.

We are Virginia Tech.

We do not understand this tragedy. We know we did nothing to deserve it, but neither does a child in Africa dying of AIDS, neither do the invisible children walking the night away to avoid being captured by the rogue army, neither does the baby elephant watching his community being devastated for ivory, neither does the Mexican child looking for fresh water, neither does the Appalachian infant killed in the middle of the night in his crib in the home his father built with his own hands being run over by a boulder because the land was destabilized. No one deserves a tragedy.

We are Virginia Tech.

The Hokie Nation embraces our own and reaches out with open heart and hands to those who offer their hearts and minds. We are strong, and brave, and innocent, and unafraid. We are better than we think and not quite what we want to be. We are alive to the imaginations and the possibilities. We will continue to invent the future through our blood and tears and through all our sadness.

We are the Hokies.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We will prevail.

We are Virginia Tech.

President Bush:

Governor, thank you. President Steger, thank you very much. Students, and faculty, and staff, and grieving family members, and members of this really extraordinary place.

Laura and I have come to Blacksburg today with hearts full of sorrow. This is a day of mourning for the Virginia Tech community — and it is a day of sadness for our entire nation. We’ve come to express our sympathy. In this time of anguish, I hope you know that people all over this country are thinking about you, and asking God to provide comfort for all who have been affected.

Yesterday began like any other day. Students woke up, and they grabbed their backpacks and they headed for class. And soon the day took a dark turn, with students and faculty barricading themselves in classrooms and dormitories — confused, terrified, and deeply worried. By the end of the morning, it was the worst day of violence on a college campus in American history — and for many of you here today, it was the worst day of your lives.

It’s impossible to make sense of such violence and suffering. Those whose lives were taken did nothing to deserve their fate. They were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. Now they’re gone — and they leave behind grieving families, and grieving classmates, and a grieving nation.

In such times as this, we look for sources of strength to sustain us. And in this moment of loss, you’re finding these sources everywhere around you. These sources of strength are in this community, this college community. You have a compassionate and resilient community here at Virginia Tech. Even as yesterday’s events were still unfolding, members of this community found each other; you came together in dorm rooms and dining halls and on blogs. One recent graduate wrote this: “I don’t know most of you guys, but we’re all Hokies, which means we’re family. To all of you who are okay, I’m happy for that. For those of you who are in pain or have lost someone close to you, I’m sure you can call on anyone of us and have help any time you need it.”

These sources of strength are with your loved ones. For many of you, your first instinct was to call home and let your moms and dads know that you were okay. Others took on the terrible duty of calling the relatives of a classmate or a colleague who had been wounded or lost. I know many of you feel awfully far away from people you lean on and people you count on during difficult times. But as a dad, I can assure you, a parent’s love is never far from their child’s heart. And as you draw closer to your own families in the coming days, I ask you to reach out to those who ache for sons and daughters who will never come home.

These sources of strength are also in the faith that sustains so many of us. Across the town of Blacksburg and in towns all across America, houses of worship from every faith have opened their doors and have lifted you up in prayer. People who have never met you are praying for you; they’re praying for your friends who have fallen and who are injured. There’s a power in these prayers, real power. In times like this, we can find comfort in the grace and guidance of a loving God. As the Scriptures tell us, “Don’t be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”

And on this terrible day of mourning, it’s hard to imagine that a time will come when life at Virginia Tech will return to normal. But such a day will come. And when it does, you will always remember the friends and teachers who were lost yesterday, and the time you shared with them, and the lives they hoped to lead. May God bless you. May God bless and keep the souls of the lost. And may His love touch all those who suffer and grieve.

Bruce Schneier blogs about the reaction on the part of police to some backpacks hung on a tree.

Personally, I wouldn’t argue that treating backpacks on a tree as possible bombs is an overreaction in this case. It isn’t as if we haven’t seen bombs in backpacks. Admittedly, it seems unlikely someone wanting to commit a terrorist act would hang them in a tree, but that’s a fine line to tread.

However, it did bring to mind one thing that has been bothering me for the last couple of days, and that is the assumptions we make about security, rather than using something akin to common sense. If a danger fits a profile currently popular with the public, it seems to be automatic to assume any situation that comes close to that profile must be a danger. As a result, you end up not being able to leave anything unattended in Boston, take pictures of public works facilities, or put your hand near your waistband in a poor neighborhood without taking the risk it will trigger someone’s sense of danger due to a scenario they have already constructed in their head.

We don’t know the details from yesterday’s shooting at Virginia Tech. I’m sure psychological warning signs, police response, gun laws will be debated thoroughly. However, one thing that struck me about what happened was the original assumption that the two deaths at the dormitory were not necessarily an immediate campus-wide problem because it could have been domestic in nature. Perhaps so, if it had been a murder-suicide, but without direct evidence of that what you’re left with is that someone has a gun, has used it to kill people, and you don’t know who or where he is.

In hindsight, it’s easy to say better decisions could have been made, but that’s only with hindsight. I don’t think the VT Police, or anyone else involved, were somehow unique among human beings, and that anyone else would necessarily have done anything differently. And that’s what’s bothering me…those same assumptions would have been likely no matter who was handling it.

It’s natural to build these scenarios when you’re dealing with possible dangers. It helps you keep focused on likely threats and more prepared to react to them. However, between attention and reaction lies a decision, and we hope the decision is a reasoned one. Relying too much on internal scenarios — or formalized standard operating procedures, for that matter — is inevitably going to lead to unreasoned decisions and misdirected reactions. That seems more understandable the less time is given for making the decision, but conversely less understandable the longer you have to think about it.

Thinking about risk doesn’t necessarily require statistics. Sometimes it just requires common sense:

Backpacks hung in a tree next to a school? Seems odd, but due to the risk to people and the fact you can’t see into them should be investigated.

Little printed circuit boards with flashing lights? Really unlikely to explode. Low risk.

Gift-wrapped boxes? Still seems unlikely, given the attention-grabbing nature of the packaging.

Person is running down a dark street toward you from the scene of a crime and seems to have a gun? High risk.

Possible domestic dispute ends in homicide, with an armed perpetrator who may or may not be running around on a campus of 25,000 students? Right there you’ve printed a license for “overreaction.” It doesn’t matter if your head is telling you it was a one-time event; the proven risk still exists as long as you don’t have the person who did it sitting in front of you.

What would I have done? Heck, I might have made exactly the same decisions on a given day, but that doesn’t mean I would have been making decisions based on anything besides the scenarios I had built in my own head…not logic, not evidence. And that bothers me.

Update: Well, it looks like they did think they had the suspect at the time. It seems odd that the original press conferences described a search for a person of interest over the course of that time, rather than having someone in custody, but if they had a person in custody I can see how they thought it was over.

Update, again: More background on the domestic homicide assumption, plus more information about Cho Sueng-Hui.