The Offline Report

The Morality of Ineffeciency "I was talking to an architect friend of mine about this topic, he's been in the field for over 30 years, so before CAD really took on. He mentioned that one of the saddest things to happen to architecture in the last 20 or so years this over-reliance on computer programs to design architecture. Before, an architect would just take out some paper, and just like draw. Like free-hand draw with a ruler. And he said you'd get these beautiful designs that would just look aesthetically pleasing but were also architectually sound. Because now, people just go to the computer because it's fast. ... you draw a line, it tells you how many studs you need, everything's done. It limits creativity. He says our architecture has suffered as a result of that." That's the host of the "Art of Manliness" podcast talking to book author David Sax . David Sax replied: "I interviewed someone at Google named John Scigga. He created thi...

"Good Times" character Willona Woods, played by recently deceased actress Ja'net Dubois brought the ethics of spying and importance of privacy to the mainstream culture in the iconic situation comedy. The episode, titled "Willona the Fuzz" aired in 1977. The episode opens with Willona recounting to her family that day's exciting sting operation in which, while shopping on her lunch break, she caught a department store shoplifter and was awarded $50 and a job offer working part time in store security. Of course she turned down the job, she tells her family with Dubois' signature panache, as "I ain't no spy." But Willona reconsiders the spy-for-hire offer when her adopted tween Penny (played by precocious Janet Jackson) asks for ice skating lessons and calls her "mom" for the first time. Willona next returns to the store's manager and asks him for the job she rejected the previous day. From then on middle management sweeps he...

The original, yet decaying print of Werner Herzog's 1979 movie Nosferatu emits an exaggerated track of breath, wind and background noise as can be witnessed when the vampire serves dinner to his unassuming guest at the 27:32 mark, here: (It's clearly a worn celluloid copy as there is also one dropped frame at two separate points within the 30:00 mark.) But much of the essence of the scene is lost from the blurry version when moved to this more perfect rendering, probably a blue-ray version uploaded to YouTube: The anticipation clicks of the grandskeleton clock is much diminished in the restored version, and overpowered by its eventual top-of-the-hour chime. The viewer's ears to recoil. Why the restoration team made this choice is a mystery, as anticipation heightens suspense. Also lost is the gurgling of the champagne leaving the decanter and splashing into the goblet. The slicing through a fresh crust of bread. The audible swallow. Together these effects activate ...

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotamayor wrote a dissenting opinion on the policy of "Stop and Frisk" police practices -- introduced by mayors such as Michael Bloomberg, who is now running for president -- that was so persuasive it was published as part of a literature compilation by 826 National (Dave Eggers' group.) The compilation is called " The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2017 ". Privacy harms, the harms of being watched are very hard to articulate. Even the top privacy legal scholars struggle to make the case that being surveilled make a concrete difference in the lives of the middle class. One attempt was made by the two most famous privacy law scholars right now, Danielle Citron and Daniel Solove, who co-authored " Risk and Anxiety: A Theory of Data Breach Harms ". I've read a lot of privacy law literature and I would not rate that paper as one of my favorites. However, it did illustrate what a struggle it is to put privacy *and* securi...

Away from news of an impeached president acquitted by his senate, locusts swarming food supplies in Africa and other disaster events of the week, the Oscars on Sunday quietly triggered a seismic geopolitical shift by awarding director Bong Joon Ho's "Parasite" the first Best Picture award given to a film in a non-English language. Bong Joon Ho, in his acceptance speeches, achieved a blending of cultures no American-born or native-English-speaker director could have: he made the case for insularity, which some might call nativism or even "nationalism". Ho said at the post-Oscars presser he'd collaborated with American filmmakers and actors on a past project called " Okja ". But for his Oscar-winning movie "Parasite" he stuck closer to subjects and characters familiar to him. Ho even released his film to English-speaking film festivals with spoken Korean dialog and an all-Korean cast of actors. The choice showed audiences around the world...

American cinema director Martin Scorsese told an interviewer that close shots, long shots, camera pans and lighting constitute part of every filmmaker's grammar that needs to be taught to children outside the profession if civilization is to survive. "You know I came from a working class family, my mother and father weren't well-educated. I'm second-generation I guess Italian-American. There was no tradition of reading in the house. There was more of a visual tradition." 00:22 Of course, I read in school, etc. I read books in school and that sort of thing, but the-- it was more of a visual tradition, more if-- I was taken to movie theaters a lot. Also, being a sickly child with very severe asthma, I couldn't play sports. So, again, the movie theater. The movie theater and the church. The church and the movie theatre. And so, along with the films, there was also the advent of television, 1948, '49, in the heyday of really the best-- some...