Robot Monkeys

As some may know, I have a morbid fascination with people jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. I’ve had this fascination ever since I read “Don’t Jump!” in Salon back in 2001. There was just something about how everyone in that article was just so matter of fact. I think what really got me was the just how wonky it would get. I fascinated by the fact that most deaths are caused by the ribs shattering and puncturing major arteries, rather than drowning, and how ironically suicide jumpers are more likely to survive than people who fall accidently. Most alluring of the topic was that the bridge has about 25 jumpers a year – or as I like to think of it: on average, one every two weeks. (The frequency spikes over the holidays no doubt.)

Everyone perhaps thinks about what goes through the mind of the jumper as he falls. We laugh about how if it’s too far down, you have to take a breath to continue screaming before you hit. I on the other hand became enamored with the moment that the jumper’s center of gravity moves over the water, and the inevitable plunge begins. That moment, when your heart skips a beat, and your stomach tenses, and you think “Here we go!” It’s not the moment of total commitment. No, it’s the moment just after that. Did they intend to go just then, or were they just trying to get up the nerve when they slipped? More disturbingly, do they change their mind on the way down?

Of the people that survive the fall (and a rare few do), many do. The New Yorker had an interview with one survivor, Kevin Hines, who jumped, changed his mind, hit feet first, and then survived in September 2000.

Kevin Hines was eighteen when he took a municipal bus to the bridge one day in September, 2000. After treating himself to a last meal of Starbursts and Skittles, he paced back and forth and sobbed on the bridge walkway for half an hour. No one asked him what was wrong. A beautiful German tourist approached, handed him her camera, and asked him to take her picture, which he did. “I was like, ‘Fuck this, nobody cares,’ ” he told me. “So I jumped.” But after he crossed the chord, he recalls, “My first thought was What the hell did I just do? I don’t want to die.”

In 2005, film maker Eric Steel, created his controversial movie, The Bridge, which captures the fatal plunge of most of the 19 jumpers in 2004. I haven’t seen it.

Then finally, we get to the granddaddy of all articles. The SF Chronicle’s six-part series Lethal Beauty. A tour de force of Golden Gate Bridge jumping. Interviews, maps of jump sites (Notice how they’re biased towards the east side, where you get the more scenic view, and more practically, the pedestrian walkway is located. Also notice how it’s skewed towards the SF side and away from Marin. Apparently people don’t want to bother to walk far to their final act.

The bridge has been called, “the world’s top suicide magnet”. I am not surprised. It’s iconic, and accessible. Unlike jumping from the Empire State Building, or Taipei 101. What I do wonder about is how many people travel from outside the Bay Area simply to jump. Does anyone fly from the East Coast, simply to kill themselves? Maybe.

I’ve been wanting to write about this fascination for a while. Perhaps even after I read that first article some seven years ago. What prompted me to write it now was, this Metafilter post about the Army’s PTSD program. Who’s talking to soldiers about suicide? Jumper Kevin Hines.

Design students at the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg, have leveraged the ubiquity of electrical cover plates, to create some very elegant ideas. Called Keep It Cartesian, they replace the normally plastic covers with steel covers with little hooks on them. Some are designed to allow electrical wires to be wrapped around and kept off the floor. Another for light switches, has a hook for keys, and another has a bin for mail.

While I really like the idea of easy place to keep wires off the floor, and perhaps even the mail bin, I have some concerns about the design. While I’m a big fan of elegant, and even the industrial look of metal, I can’t imagine that this would meet code. It’s an electrocution waiting to happen. Back it with plastic, then we’ll talk. The other problem is that they’re a bit too industrial looking. They’re essentially prototypes, so they could change a bit to match the decor of the room (assuming of course that these are actually produced instead of just used as an art project).

Definitely something to make.

Update: Wed Jul 30 22:36:01 PDT 2008
Nils writes:

Hey Jonathan,

Thanks for featuring the Keep it Cartesian designs on your website… it’s nice to see people noticing our stuff - people’s responses have helped us think of ways to improve the next versions. We are actually looking into fabricators who might be able to reproduce our designs in bent plywood as well as metal to give it a warmer aesthetic. As for the risk of electrocution they are just as safe as any other stainless steel or aluminum faceplate currently on the market (which aren’t backed with plastic). When we were brainstorming for this project we were worried about that and then realized that several of us had metal faceplates in our homes already.

So at lunch today, I see on the television “BREAKING NEWS.” Apparently Los Angeles experienced 5.4 earthquake. BFD. First off, it’s fucking California. Earthquakes are common. Second, it’s a freakin’ 5.4. That’s nothing. Hell, I didn’t even notice the 5.4 the Bay got back in October. Of course, since it’s LA, the MSM goes all in a dither with saturation coverage and fear mongering. Such as this from MSNBC:

A strong earthquake shook Southern California on Tuesday, causing buildings to sway and triggering some precautionary evacuations. There were no immediate reports of major damage or serious injuries.

The 5.4-magnitude quake — considered moderate — was felt about 11:42 a.m. from Los Angeles to San Diego, and as far east as Las Vegas, 230 miles away. Nearly 30 aftershocks quickly followed, the largest estimated at 3.8.

Now the only thing sadder than the MSN filling their empty midday coverage with random people from the USGS saying that earthquakes are common in California, and that damage is expected to be very minor, if at all, is the Twitter crowd patting themselves on the back.

MG Siegler says, “SoCal earthquake a powerful reminder of Twitter’s potential.” To which I say, “Bull-fucking-shit.” He hangs his argument on the fact that Twitter was “very fast at disseminating information” about the quake. This information includes the very first tweet, which reads in it’s entirety: “earthquake”. Wow. Hell, my TremmorSkimmer dashboard app can not only do that, but also tell me more information like how strong it was, and where the epicenter was (both in latitude longitude, but also in depth). The tweet “earthquake” conveys very little information. Twitter itself gets on the self-congratulatory (and no doubt a bit self-conscious about whining how they’re actually useful, and not just about broadcasting banality in realtime) about how twitter broke the earthquake story some nine minutes before the AP. Of course, the tweets in this time period are simply on the level of “ZOMGZ! Earthquake!” and “Did you feel an earthquake?” “Didn’t feel an earthquake” and crap like that. The AP story comparatively is more information rich. It lists the information that TerrorSkimmer gives.

This is not a win Twitter. You didn’t change the game at all.

So I’m reading slashdot, and I notice the ad. It’s sexxy elves, or something. I’m not entirely sure what it’s for. I think some game, but I’m not entirely sure what kind of game. It certainly looks like it could be some of sex game. While I’m not sure about the subject of the ad, I’m quite sure about its target demographic though.

I have a whole backlog of posts I’ve been wanting to make. None of them are really deep or anything, it’s more of I just want to bookmark something along with some thoughts. I opened up my 13 Safari windows and started to get to work, when I found out that I had six posts from a variety of times left hanging in my drafts folder here. So instead of making progress, I decided to publish some of these instead. The posts are:

• ONDCP “Prove” Pot is Worse Than Ever Before
• gEvil™
• China Day 3
• China Day 2

I guess my summary post from my Beijing trip, high quality counterfeit bills, African voodoo, red mercury, Korea, the Adobe Building in San Jose, ubiquitous computing, and the environment will all have to wait.

Marc Thiessen deifies Helms in Monday’s WaPo. Oh poor Jesse! How you stood up to such horrible men like Clinton and Castro! The quote that really got me though was this:

What his critics could not appreciate is that, by the time he left office, Jesse Helms had become a mainstream conservative. And it was not because Helms had moved toward the mainstream — it was because the mainstream moved toward him.

The sad thing is, the unabashed racist, who bragged to Sen. Arlen Specter when Carol Moseley-Braun shared an elevator with them, “I’m going to make her cry. I’m going to sing Dixie until she cries.” (Chicago Sun-Times, 8/5/93). This is the man famously responded to a caller to Larry King in 1995 who said, “I want to thank you for everything you’ve done to help keep down the niggers,” responded with a salute and “Well, thank you, I think.” (Wilmington Star-News, 9/16/95) The same man who described gays as “weak, morally sick wretches,”(Newsweek, 12/5/94) and opposed AIDS funding because it was divine retribution, because “There is not one single case of AIDS in this country that cannot be traced in origin to sodomy.”(States News Service, 5/17/88)

Christopher Hitchens has it right when he calls him, “a provincial redneck”. Unfortunately so is Marc Thiessen claim of him being, “a mainstream conservative.” Just as Barry Goldwater famously went from reactionary conservative to liberal, by not changing a position. As it’s been said, “Goldwater didn’t leave the Republican party. The Republican party left him.”

The best comment I have say I heard about the passing of Jesse Helms, comes from Ryan, “I hope that Heaven has some sort of affirmative action, and Helms loses his spot to a minority.”

It would be fitting. Burn Hell you old embarrassing son of a bitch.

Ahh, got to love the Republicans are strong on China. That’s unfair. The dems cave too. They’re both beholden to their corporate masters. Bush in a stunning display of strength, will attend the opening ceremonies of the Olympics.

Keeping quiet, not saying anything. “Rolling” if you will shows strength. Saying, “Hey. We don’t like this,” according to White House advisor, Stephen Hadley put it, “a cop out”.

Bravo. Bravo. I would expect nothing less from the Glorious American Government.

This post may be best described as being “true, but not insightful.”

A lot of people are talking about people leaving Google now. This article isn’t about that. This article is about perceptions.

For the last couple of years I begun to consider everyone’s favorite Hippocratic company, Google, and how long it’s run of being the most popular kid in The Valley was going to last. I suspected it was getting ready to end soon, especially with the introduction of Android. gMail didn’t really bother me so much, since it was just yet another webmail, albeit with context sensitive ads. (Like you don’t think that Microsoft and Yahoo aren’t reading your mail as well.) gTalk? Whatev’. It’s cool that someone big was using Jabber, but again, that’s just yet-another-im, and one that went nowhere. gApps was interesting, but it didn’t seem to be more than a curiosity so I wasn’t too worried. Very interested, but not too worried. Android on the other hand, is Google controlling your life.

It’s a Microsoft ploy.

The reason why Microsoft got the reputation for being evil was:

1. They were/are everywhere.
2. They created substandard products.
3. They flaunted and broke existing standards.
4. Their products don’t play well with others.
5. They would illegally leverage their monopoly.

Now the blogosphere is all in a flutter over Google’s daycare blunder. Apparently the whole daycare thing is Susan Wojcicki’s program, and it was created after she had a baby, and tailored for her views. Now that she doesn’t need it, it’s being overhauled in very unfriendly way to say the least.

I know I’m connecting Android, gMail, AdWords, the various gAlsoRans, and daycare. There really isn’t a connection between them except perception. The perception is that Google is quickly becoming the 800 pound gorilla, and there’s stirrings of a break culturewise.

Surprise Sex

“Jodie Foster’s character was rapedhad surprise sex in ‘The Accused’.”

It is such a cutesy euphemism for such a despicable act.

First up, we have defending hot dog eating champ Joey Chestnut defeating ex-champ Takeru “Arthritic Jaw” Kobayashi. w00t!

Secondly, we have Sen. Jesse Helms taking MC Hawking’s advice at 86.

USA! USA! USA!