Monthly Archives: February 2017

New York Times

Tax Software: The Basics Work, but Peace of Mind Costs Extra New York Times This year, Block sharpened its technology it even beat TurboTax on a critical task, uploading a prior year's return while TurboTax improved its telephone helpline. TaxAct kept doing things its own quirky way, as it long has, but it capably ... and more »

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Tax Software: The Basics Work, but Peace of Mind Costs Extra - New York Times

Carl Gorhams grieving memoir of his partners death is most effective when it focuses on their daughter, writes Molly McCloskey

Carl Gorham: Days. Weeks. Months. Faster and faster. We have no time to lose. Because life is uncertain. We dont wait. We do.

Book Title: The Owl at the Window: A Memoir of Loss and Hope

ISBN-13: 978-1473642324

Author: Carl Gorham

Publisher: Coronet

Guideline Price: 14.99

It may be middle age, but it seems to me that everyone is talking about death. On the one hand are the transhumanists, proponents of radical life extension, mind uploading, and cyrogenics the latter in the news recently when a terminally ill 14-year-old in the UK won the right to be cyrogenically preserved.

Then there are those who exhort us to live well and accept death. In this camp are the death doulas, the death positivity movement, and the Order of the Good Death (Accepting that death itself is natural, but the death anxiety of modern culture is not). Death cafes where strangers gather to discuss death are springing up around the world.

I cannot imagine these salons and I wouldnt want to try one, though as Raymond Tallis notes in The Black Mirror, a work in which he observes himself from the imagined vantage point of being dead, talking about death may be even more evasive than remaining silent: we cant but sound portentous or hollowly laconic.

While transhumanists want to live forever, or at least for a lot longer, many of us (and I include myself here; few things cause me greater anxiety than the thought of thawing out, defenceless, in an unimaginable future) want to fear death less and die feeling human. Atul Gawandes hugely successful Being Mortal is about improving the quality of end-of-life, as is the well-known work of BJ Miller, a triple amputee and hospice and palliative medicine physician.

Perhaps the increase in people narrating their own last days Christopher Hitchens, Jenny Diski, Oliver Sacks, Tom Lubbock, Paul Kalanithi is a reflection of the growing desire to claim ownership of this final process. Of course, it may also be the logical next step to our having narrated every other aspect of our existence.

What also proliferates are the memoirs of those left grieving. One of the latest is The Owl at the Window by Carl Gorham, the award-winning creator of the animated sitcom Stressed Eric and numerous other sitcoms and film scripts.

In 1997, Gorham and Vikki Sipek are two thirtysomethings living the dream she flying high in the fashion industry and he enjoying a US bidding war for his work, their lives a living, breathing Sunday supplement. Then Vikki finds a lump in her breast. So begins 10 years of operations, chemotherapy and scans, awaiting results, fearing the worst.

[W]ere in a different race now, Gorham writes. Were running, running, trying to stay ahead of it. And time feels different. It seems to race by. Days. Weeks. Months. Faster and faster. We have no time to lose. Because life is uncertain. We dont wait. We do.

They give birth to a daughter, Romy, who is three when her mothers cancer returns. On a family trip, passing through Hong Kong, Vikki lapses into a coma. While she lies in hospital, Gorham and his daughter wander, dazed, through the surreal landscape. A friend of a friend offers them a house. Imagining a luxurious refuge, they instead find themselves in a ramshackle cottage, its environs distressingly apposite: to get there they must walk through an unlit wood and across a graveyard where snakes and Komodo dragons lurk.

Vikki dies in Hong Kong, and Gorham embarks on the business of grieving and of single-parenting, the day-to-day of keeping Romy connected to her mother: too much talk of Vikki sounds false and hectoring, but too little and Romy may lose the sense of Vikki altogether.

Grief, like all abstract nouns, is difficult to narrate, and when such a narration has power it is because an intense particularity has been brought both to the day to day and to the person being mourned. Vikki, unfortunately, remains frustratingly distant. She is always quiet and unassuming but also bustling with brilliant energy, and she never quite assumes dimensions. Grief itself falls victim to too much telling and too little showing: I cant accept it. Not now. Not yet. I cant contemplate it. The thought of never seeing her again. Its too much. Too utterly terrifying.

It is Romy who animates the narrative, enacting her grief in a way that seems instinctive, primal and delicate. Nine months after her mothers death, Romy constructs a cardboard reproduction of Vikki, which she christens Cardboard Mummy. Cardboard Mummy is one of the family, watching TV, propped up at the dinner table, belted into the passenger seat on trips to the supermarket. Romy talks to Cardboard Mummy about all manner of things and solicits her advice.

When Romy decides to bring Cardboard Mummy to school for show-and-tell, her father fears the worst bullies tearing Mummy to pieces, his daughter a laughingstock. But Romy manages the performance with exceptional poise, telling the class about her mummys illness and everything that happened in Hong Kong . . . and how Mummy is in the ground at the church now and how we are all so sad and how we will always be sad.

This turns out to have been an astonishingly intuitive act of catharsis, because after that, Cardboard Mummy begins to recede. She sits in the hall, and Romy doesnt pick her up as often, though shes happy Mummy is there. Mummy is now spoken of with fondness and nostalgia, like an old friend who has moved away to the other side of the world.

In exteriorising her mothers presence through a cardboard effigy, Romy seems to have marked for Vikki a territory in her own life and psyche. It is a reminder of how, with our sophistication and our lack of ritual, we have lost the hang of being with the dead.

It also reminds us of what we all vaguely know and which may give us solace or pause as we contemplate our own demise: that biological death is an endpoint to existence on one plane only. The impact we have on others doesnt cease when we do.

As philosopher Gabriel Rockhill noted in a recent New York Times column on discussing death with his son and how these psychosocial dimensions of ourselves persist: In living, we trace a wake in the world.

Molly McCloskeys new novel, When Light Is Like Water, will be published by Penguin Ireland in April.

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The Owl at the Window review: They the living - Irish Times

Yes, after pulling herself out of her 1950s rutas a swimsuit model to become everything from a doctor, lawyer, computer scientist, astronaut and even the president of the United States, Barbie has now become a 3D-animatedhologram that canserve up the weather on command.

As first reported in Wired, The Hello Barbie Hologram debuted at the New York Toy Fair this week. And like the original Hello Barbie doll, her laser-beamed character combines motion-capture animation with peppy, Amazon Echo-like answers to your childs questions.

Need an alarm? Hello Barbie. Want a nightlight? Hello Barbie. Want to remind your child to brush their teeth? Hello Barbie Hologram does that, too.Just turn her on with the wake phrase Hello Barbie to get her to do your bidding.

In other words, the supposed symbol for girls who can do anything really can become anything, including a personified bot.

Isnt that a bitsexist? Some may balk at the suggestion a holographic female doll botserving up answers is somehow creating a gender imbalance. After all, you may say, its just a doll combined with some cool technology. But, from what we know so far, theres no hologram Ken version and robots and artificial intelligence programs are often designated as female, particularly if they fulfill a subservient role. Helping you mind your schedule and answering questions about the weather fall neatly into that category.

It also undermines Barbie as a real person.Shes a hologram assistant.

Youd think Mattel would be mindful here of how the latest version of Barbie may come across to impressionable young girls, given its many other missteps including and especially in its foray into tech. Wevewritten before about Barbies foibles as a hilariously bad computer engineer who seemed to break everything she touched and didnt know how to code.

Barbie has also been criticized for maintaining unrealistic bodily proportions and putting a heavy emphasis on her appearance throughout the years. Some might say the Hello Barbie Hologram contributes in this regard, as well, by allowing anyone to change the look of the hologram by voice command.

Mattel has tried to counter some of its past criticisms with its Imagine the Possibilities advertising campaign last year, which shows a bunch of little girls doing grown ups jobs. The final caption of the advertisement reads,Whena girl plays with Barbie, she imagineseverything she can become.

Tough to say whata Barbie hologram would help a little girl imagine becoming, but hopefully it does not further engender the stereotype that women are meant to be assistants to everyone else. Mattel may want to consider adding a Ken doll hologram or letting little girls learn how to program skills into the hologram in the future.

Theres also the question of privacy and security. Amazon Echo is always listening and, as it says in its FAQ, recordsa fraction of a second before you say the wake word Alexa. Is Barbie now doing the same, right in your childs bedroom? Mattel insists that, unlike Amazon, Barbie is not recording and uploading conversations to its servers. It also says Hello Barbie is heavily encrypted, meeting the Federal Trade Commissions requirements as outlined in the Childrens Online Privacy Protection Rule.

Hello Barbie Hologram is just a prototype for now, and its not clear when it might be available for consumers. We also dont know the cost of the doll yet, but it will likely fall on the pricier end, as these newer tech-focused toys tend to do. But, according to Mattel, it will likely be less than $300 when the hologram makes her debut.

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Barbie becomes a hologram version of herself - TechCrunch

Screenshot jonrev/Youtube

For as long as humans have had a way of committing moving images to tape, pixelated frames have been used to document the sinister, the peculiar, and the downright unexplainable. YouTube has long been a repository for some of the creepiest mysteries of the modern age ever caught on camera, and the endlessly obsessive and curious internet hive mind has ferreted out the truths lurking behind many of these eyebrow-raising videos. But occasionally, that is not the case.

These are six of those stories.

One of the most notorious pirate broadcasts of all time, preserved well beyond its intended lifespan, occurred on November 22, 1987, during a Chicago station's nightly local news broadcast. After turning black for 15 seconds, the picture reappeared but now showed a person wearing a Max Headroom mask, situated in front of a rotating piece of corrugated metal and accompanied by a humming noise. Technicians at the station managed to halt the pirated broadcast by switching the microwave transmitter they were using to broadcast, suggesting a hack by a strong pirate microwave signal nearby.

That same night, PBS member station WTTW fell victim to the same hackers during a broadcast of the Doctor Who episode "Horror of Fang Rock." This time, the pirates were able to cut in for a full 90 seconds, and used the time to spout advertising slogans and seeming nonsense. The clip ended with the Max Headroom mask-wearer pulling down his pants, receiving a spanking from an unidentified person in a French maid outfit, and yelling "They're coming to get me!" The WTTW broadcast was being sent from the Sears Tower microwave dish and because there were no technicians on duty at the time, they were unable to trace the signal.

The identity of the hackers and what the videos mean beyond a simple joke remain a mystery to this day. Occasionally, the wide world of the internet will stumble across a character that seems like they could have pulled off the Max Headroom hack, only to dismiss the theory later. The most current thinking on the subject suggests it was someone within the Chicago Broadcasting Community because the technology required to pull off a huge microwave hack wasn't available to the average consumer in the late 1980s.

One of America's most well-known conspiracy theories -- that an alien ship crash-landed in Roswell, New Mexico, in the 1950s -- is still giving willing theorists thrills more than 50 years later. In 2011, a new YouTube user named "ivan0135" uploaded a series of four videos that claimed to have been culled from leaked classified material. The uploaded information and film footage introduces us to a purported test subject known as "Skinny Bob," who appears to be an eerily realistic alien life form.

Is it real? The videos claim the footage was collected between 1942 and 1969, but post-production techniques seem to have been applied. If you look at the bottom left of the Skinny Bob video, the timecode appears to be flashing at a different rate than the footage, suggesting a digital post-production trick.

Even if the ivan0135 tapes probably aren't actual aliens (just like Roswell was most certainly not an extraterrestrial craft), the computer animation skill on display is an impressive work of special effects that has still gone uncredited for five years.

In 2008, on a 4chan board for paranormal posts, a user put a link into the "unsecured webcams" thread that showed a live-stream of a woman who was unconscious -- possibly even dead -- in a contorted position. The stream was coming from Seoul, South Korea. The woman woke up 10 hours later, and revealed that she had merely been sleeping in an odd position, but the attention of the internet had been piqued.

The woman, dubbed Chip-chan, was constantly broadcasting on webcam and falling asleep at odd times and in odd positions. She kept a blog and a YouTube channel where she told her odd story. The woman apparently never left the apartment and started making signs that were translated into various paranoid accusations like: "Don't get tricked, don't get fooled. Early every morning. If someone comes that paralyzes the person. I can't be stopped."

Over years, internet detectives pieced together a dossier of information on Chip-chan, including her contact e-mail and exchanges with the woman herself. She claims that a Korean police officer she calls "P" implanted something called a "Verichip" in her that keeps her forcibly in her apartment and can cause her to fall asleep at will. After Chip-chan's apartment was found via Google Earth sleuthing, concerned parties contacted the police in Seoul who said they were aware of a mentally disturbed woman who kept to herself except for occasional appearances at anti-government protests where she would photograph police officers.

In March 2015, a YouTube user named "unfavorable semicircle" sprang into existence and began uploading videos a month later. Most of them were only seconds or minutes long. Some included distorted voices uttering a letter or number. But the most notable quirk of the account was the sheer number of videos it uploaded: tens of thousands, causing YouTube to shut it down for violating the spam-related portions of its terms of service. Since then, the unfavorable semicircle project has continued on Twitter and a new YouTube account that continues to release videos to this day.

Most speculation about what unfavorable semicircle is trying to accomplish is centered on finding a reliable way to decode the videos. A similar YouTube channel that had puzzled online sleuths in the past had specialized in uploading videos featuring colored geometric shapes and tones, and it was eventually revealed to be the still active Google test channel Webdriver Torso. Unfavorable semicircle's return after the first channel was blocked has led most theorists to suspect it is some sort of coded art project or even an electronic numbers station.

More than likely just an amateur film about two students' exploration of an abandoned asylum, the "Pennhurst Found Footage" has yet to be attributed to a filmmaker or individual. It also hasn't been reliably connected to a real-life crime, which casts doubt on its claim that the footage involves "missing" college students. Nonetheless, the film's two parts are prefaced by intentionally creepy text stating that the students seen in the video have never been found.

The mysterious part of the video is its ending, which cuts suddenly from a staircase inside the abandoned mental institution to a scene in the surrounding forest in daytime, even though the time code on the camera shows only 32 seconds elapsing (which wouldn't have been enough time to exit the facility from the stairwell where the students had been investigating).To date, no one has stepped forward to claim responsibility for this likely hoax, even as internet mystery-hunters are still trying to find answers.

An "ARG" is the abbreviation for an "Alternate Reality Game," or a fictional experience that extends its narrative into real life. There have been ARGs to promote products like movies and albums, and there have been ARGs that exist purely as an experience you have offline. Because of the nature of these types of games and experiences, sometimes it's hard to tell which parts of them are real and which aren't.

Such is the case with "deeper," a channel that uploaded cryptic videos with distorted audio and old camcorder footage in 2016. The hive mind of internet sleuths, particularly on 4chan, quickly set about trying to decode the mysterious videos by running the beeps that appeared at the end of certain clips through a spectrogram -- a process that revealed the names of actual cold cases from the state of Colorado in the 1980s. Different codes have continued to be hidden in the videos and their associated descriptions, but nothing has led to a big reveal, nor have any of the cold cases referenced been solved.

It's unlikely that this ARG was posted by a murderer who grew a conscience and decided to confess through YouTube ciphers that use old Daniel Johnston songs, but then again... The last video was uploaded two months ago.

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Dave Gonzales is a frequent contributor to Thrillist Entertainment and loves internet mysteries.

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Crazy Videos on YouTube That No One Can Explain - Thrillist