Freak Accident Turns Macho Rugby Player Into Gay Hairdresser
A tabloid-y tale from the U.K.’s Metro, but one that raises a host of interesting questions: Could a completely opposite person (with a different sexuality, even) be waiting, hidden, inside each of us? And can an injury really bring on this sort of change?
Former rugby player Chris Birch suffered a stroke in training and woke up to find he was gay. Mr. Birch was straight and engaged to be married when he suffered a freak accident in the gym. The 26-year-old tried to impress his friends with a back flip but broke his neck and suffered the stroke.
When he woke up, he underwent a drastic personality change that included an attraction to men. ‘I’d never even had any gay friends. But I didn’t care about who I was before, I had to be true to my feelings,’ he said.
Mr Birch broke off his engagement and found a boyfriend. He also…
Rare Mutation Leaves People Without Fingerprints
This would be a useful trait for the aspiring supervillian. Natalie Villacorta wrote recently in Science:
In 2007, a Swiss woman in her late 20s had an unusually hard time crossing the U.S. border. Customs agents could not confirm her identity. The woman’s passport picture matched her face just fine, but when the agents scanned her hands, they discovered something shocking: she had no fingerprints.
The woman, it turns out, had an extremely rare condition known as adermatoglyphia. Peter Itin, a dermatologist at the University Hospital Basel in Switzerland, has dubbed it the “immigration delay disease” because sufferers have such a hard time entering foreign countries. In addition to smooth fingertips, they also produce less hand sweat than the average person. Yet scientists know very little about what causes the condition.
Since nine members of the woman’s extended family also lacked fingerprints, Itin and his colleagues, including Eli Sprecher, a dermatologist at the…
What Google And Facebook Get Wrong About Self Expression And Identity
Google and Facebook would have you believe that you’re a mirror, that there is one reflection that you have, this one idea of self. But in fact we’re more like diamonds, you can look at people from any angle and see something totally different.
4chan founder Chris Poole discusses the problem with personal identity as conceived by Facebook and Google. Basically, that they expect us to maintain a single, consistent persona throughout life, which is not how we actually exist:
Face Substitution In Realtime
On the internet you can be whomever you wish to be — it gets truer every day. In the future, when video-chatting, the first step will be to pick which face you want to use:
In Defense of the Hipster: Part 2
PART 2: AUTHENTICITY IS BULLSHIT, or: POP IS THE NEW PUNK
(Part 1, titled “What Is A Hipster, And Why Does Everyone Hate Them? or: You’re So Fake (And So Am I)“, can be found here.)
As noted in Part 1, the main thrust of the criticisms against hipsters have roots in a notion of authenticity. Lorentz mentions the words “authentic” and “inauthentic” a dozen times in his article, and the Adbusters piece is just as bad. It’s a fair charge to say that hipsters fetishize the authentic, as Lorentz does. This is hardly unique to hipsters, though; one can find it in practically any sub-culture. It’s so common that I find it disingenuous to use it as a criticism of hipsters and Hipsterism. The problem, as I see it, is that notion of authenticity being used is utter bullshit.
Some years ago, before I became a hipster or had even heard of hipsters, I…
In Defense of the Hipster
PART ONE: WHAT IS A HIPSTER, AND WHY DOES EVERYONE HATE THEM? or: YOU’RE SO FAKE (AND SO AM I)
My name is Tuna Ghost and I have a confession: I’m a hipster.
One may think this is a self-defeating statement, like “this sentence is false” or “all Cretans are liars, says so-and-so of Crete”, as one of the commonly accepted hallmarks of a hipster is that he or she will vehemently deny that they are a hipster. This bit of conventional wisdom is easily verified, all one has to do is ask the hipsters around one if they self-identify as a “hipster”. Personally, I have to look no further than my own friends to see evidence of it. By the traditional definition of “hipster” they are obviously hipsters, but thus far I am the only one who will gladly self-identify as such. One may wonder why anyone in their right mind…
Utah’s Mystery Prisoner
The Mystery Man (via Utah County Sheriff)
What should police do with someone who commits a minor crime, is in custody, but there is absolutely no clue as to who he is? The Utah County Sheriff’s Office is struggling with exactly that conundrum, reports James Nelson for Reuters:
A mystery man arrested on minor charges more than three weeks ago remains behind bars in Utah while law enforcement officials try to determine his true identity, which he refuses to reveal.
“This is really a strange case,” said Lt. Dennis Harris with the Utah County Sheriff’s Office. “He just doesn’t want to be found.”
The unidentified man, who has graying hair, a light beard and is believed to be in his 60’s, was arrested on July 1 for trespassing in a parking garage.
He was booked into jail on three misdemeanor charges and has thwarted any chance of release, with or without bail, by refusing to…
Man Flies From JFK To LA Without Valid ID Or Boarding Pass
Photo: Magnus Manske (CC)
While the TSA is busy being as thorough as they possibly can, it seems other aspects of the airport personnel are not up to par. Via The Gothamist:
While the Transportation Security Administration may or may not be making old ladies take off their Depends during screening, there’s this: A Nigerian man managed to board a Los Angeles-bound flight at JFK Airport without a valid boarding pass or valid identification. Olajide Olwaseun Noibi used a fake ID and an expired boarding pass to get onto Virgin America Flight 415.
WCBS 2 reports, “The FBI says Noibi sat in the main cabin and when a flight attendant asked him to show his boarding pass, he produced the expired pass. Noibi was still allowed to get off the plane when it landed in Los Angeles.” Great! And how did Noibi get the pass?ABC News explains:
“On that pass was the name of…
The Age Of Perpetual Self-Branding
Facebook wants to be the place where you feel most yourself, with the most control over how you are regarded. It inextricably intertwines marketing with selfhood, so that having a self becomes an inherently commercial operation.
Writing for n+1, Rob Horning concocts a frightening, fantastic, and thought-provoking essay on how we live today, connecting the reign of “fast fashion” companies such as Forever 21, social media such as Facebook, and 21st century capitalism’s demand that workers market and reinvent themselves endlessly:
I’ve always thought that Forever 21 was a brilliant name for a fast-fashion retailer. These two words succinctly encapsulate consumerism’s mission statement: to evoke the dream of perpetual youth through constant shopping. Yet it also conjures the suffocating shabbiness of that fantasy, the permanent desperation involved in trying to achieve fashion’s impossible ideals.
Despite apparently democratizing style and empowering consumers, fast fashion in some ways constitutes a dream sector for those eager…
How To Disappear Completely
CSO interviews skip tracer Frank Ahearn about how to vanish from society, skipping off to a tropical island or a clean start in North Dakota, if you don’t want to be found. The key is to put out a flood of misinformation:
You can’t legally change an identity. Identities are kind of this myth. Where do you get one from? And how do you know where it’s from and that it hasn’t been given to fifty other people? Who knows if it’s on the Megan’s Law list or if it belongs to someone who owes the IRS $100,000?
But sometimes you can open a corporation, depending on what you do, and work on a 1099. So, what we do in a nutshell, is make you a virtual entity where you work for this corporation. You lease your apartment through this corporation, your electricity, your phone. Everything about you exists under the corporation. The…
Google Collects Kids’ Social Security Numbers During Contest
Google has been criticized, yet again, for its data gathering process. In the contest “Doodle-4-Google,” children were asked to redesign the home page logo, and for their social security numbers. The International Business Times reports:
Google’s data gathering has come under fire again, this time because of an art contest for children.
The “Doodle-4-Google” contest invites children to redesign the home page logo. The contest has been in place for four years, and this year the theme is “What I’d like to do someday…”
The problem was in the registration form, which asked for the last four digits of the child’s social security number and the city of their birth, as well as the name and address of the parent or legal guardian.
Stories appeared in New York Magazine and The Huffington Post, but Google changed the registration form to omit the question about the last four digits of the social security number on Feb. 18, before…
EU Challenges Britain’s Fingerprinting Of Children In Schools
It’s nice to know that the classroom is preparing kids for the future. In one out of every seven British schools, pupils are compulsorily fingerprinted, with finger scanners being used in lunch rooms and libraries, the Telegraph reports:
The European Commission has demanded Britain justifies the widespread and routine fingerprinting of children in schools because of “significant concerns” that the policy breaks EU privacy laws.
The commissioner is also concerned that parents are not allowed legal redress after one man was told he could not challenge the compulsory fingerprinting, without his permission, of his daughter for a “unique pupil number”.
In many schools, when using the canteen or library, children, as young as four, place their thumbs on a scanner and lunch money is deducted from their account or they are registered as borrowing a book.
Research carried out by Dr Emmeline Taylor, at Salford University, found earlier this year that 3,500 schools in the…
Electronic Pickpockets And The Wallet To Stop Them
DataSafe wallet and passport protector. (Kena Kai)
Turns out the paranoid people with tin foil on their heads weren’t completely wrong. Except the foil doesn’t need to protect your head, but your wallet. The latest thing in pickpocket-technology is being able to scan your credit or ID cards from several feet away. The Washington Post reports:
Stuck on the tarmac, flipping through a travel magazine, you’re struck by the blurb for metal-lined wallets. Purpose: to prevent digital pickpocketing by blocking radio frequencies.
These handsome babies start at $79.99 and top out at the $225 Italian Leather Teju Lizard Embossed Travel Wallet.
Your reaction: Wow! Luxury accessories for paranoids! But you would be wrong. Maybe.
Because, says electronic security expert Bruce Schneier, crystallizing the view of many: “As weird as it sounds, wrapping your passport in tinfoil helps. The tinfoil people, in this case, happen to be correct.
[Continues at The Washington Post]
…
NYPD To Start Iris Scanning Suspects And Prisoners
Will iris scans replace the fingerprint? With the many ways someone can change their identity, NYPD is taking a step to insure that their prisoners remain the same person from booking to the arraignment. From DNAinfo:
The NYPD implemented a new identification procedure this week – using digital eye scans to prevent prisoners from assuming false identities during arraignment.
The new practice, which identifies prisoners by taking high-resolution pictures of their irises, the colored part of the eye, began on Monday at Manhattan Central Booking and is expected to expand to other boroughs, the NYPD confirmed Tuesday.
The eye scans are performed first during the booking process and again before the arraignment to confirm that it’s the same person, according to police.
While NYPD spokesman Paul Browne told the New York Times that the department did not know how many people had fallen through the cracks by pretending to be different people at their arraignments, there…
Biometric Identification: More Flawed Than You Think
Dreaming of a future in which you unlock your iPod with a retina scan? The Economist examines the weaknesses of biometric authentication (that is, IDing individuals by bodily traits such as their iris, fingerprint, etc.) Contrary to what many people assume, these methods of identifying people are quite fallible, here’s why:
Thanks to gangster movies, cop shows and spy thrillers, people have come to think of fingerprints and other biometric means of identifying evildoers as being completely foolproof. In reality, they are not and never have been, and few engineers who design such screening tools have ever claimed them to be so.
Authentication of a person is usually based on one of three things: something the person knows, such as a password; something physical the person possesses, like an actual key or token; or something about the person’s appearance or behavior. Biometric authentication relies on the third approach. Its advantage is that, unlike a…
Google CEO To Young People: You’ll Be Able to Get a New Identity When You Reach Adulthood
Check out Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s solution for privacy advocates in this Wall Street Journal article over the weekend. Suddenly that Google Chrome logo looks like an all-seeing eye to me instead of some futuristic Simon.
Is this a future service Google is considering offering (the opportunity to “reload” your identity)? Worth reading the whole article from Holman W. Jenkins, Jr. in the WSJ:
Google takes a similarly generous view of its own motives on the politically vexed issue of privacy. Mr. Schmidt says regulation is unnecessary because Google faces such strong incentives to treat its users right, since they will walk away the minute Google does anything with their personal information they find “creepy.”
Really? Some might be skeptical that a user with, say, a thousand photos on Picasa would find it so easy to walk away. Or a guy with 10 years of emails on Gmail. Or a small business owner who has come to rely on Google Docs as an alternative to Microsoft Office. Isn’t stickiness — even slightly extortionate stickiness — what these Google services aim for?
Mr. Schmidt is surely right, though, that the questions go far beyond Google. “I don’t believe society understands what happens when everything is available, knowable and recorded by everyone all the time,” he says. He predicts, apparently seriously, that every young person one day will be entitled automatically to change his or her name on reaching adulthood in order to disown youthful hijinks stored on their friends’ social media sites.
“I mean we really have to think about these things as a society,” he adds. “I’m not even talking about the really terrible stuff, terrorism and access to evil things,” he says.
