A Bit More Detail

• Bad Astronomy's Phil Plait shares a stunning photo taken by a friend of the Pleiades star cluster.


• The Buzz, at the Toronto Public Library, shares a collection of books suitable for World Vegan Month, here.


• Henry Farrell at Crooked Timber considers, with an eye towards China and the Uighurs, how panopticon attempts can stray badly on account of--among other things--false assumptions.


• Gizmodo considers how antimatter could end up providing interesting information about the unseen universe.


• Joe. My. God. reports from New York City, where new HIV cases are dropping sharply on account of PrEP.


• JSTOR Daily shares a vintage early review of Darwin's Origin of Species.


• Language Hat examines the origins of the semicolon, in Venice in 1494.


• Erik Loomis at Lawyers, Guns and Money shares a critical report of the new Jill Lepore book These Truths.


• The LRB Blog reports from the Museum of Corruption in Kyiv, devoted to the corruption of the ancient regime in Ukraine.


• Marginal Revolution shares a new history of the Lakota.


• The NYR Daily looks at the photography of Duane Michals.


• The Russian Demographics Blog looks at population trends in Russia, still below 1991 totals in current frontiers.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel explains why some of the lightest elements, like lithium, are so rare.


• Window on Eurasia shares the opinion of a Russian historian that Eastern Europe is back as a geopolitical zone.


• Arnold Zwicky considers Jacques Transue in the light of other pop culture figures and trends.

• Bad Astronomer notes Apep, a brilliant trinary eight thousand light-years away with at least one Wolf-Rayet star that might explode in a gamma-ray burst.


• Centauri Dreams notes that AAVSO, the American Association of Variable Star Observers, has created a public exoplanet archive.


• The Crux considers/u> different strategies for intercepting asteroids bound to impact with Earth.


• D-Brief notes the discovery of a solar twin, a star that might have been born in the same nursery as our sun, HD 186302 184 light-years away.


• The Dragon's Tales notes that although NASA's Gateway station to support lunar traffic is facing criticism, Russia and China are planning to build similar outposts.


• JSTOR Daily notes the research of Katie Sutton into the pioneering gender-rights movement of Weimar Germany.


• Lawyers, Guns and Money celebrates the successful clean-up of the Cuyahoga River in Ohio, once famously depicted on fire.


• The Map Room Blog links to maps showing Apple Maps and Google Maps will be recording images next for their online databases.


• Jamieson Webster at the NYR Daily takes a critical, even defensible, look at the widespread use psychopharmacological drugs in contemporary society.


• Roads and Kingdoms carries a transcript of an interview with chefs in Ireland, considering the culinary possibilities overlooked and otherwise of the island's natural bounty.


• Rocky Planet considers the real, overlooked, possibility of earthquakes in the relatively geologically stable east of the United States.


• The Russian Demographics Blog notes how, in the transatlantic wine trade, American interest in European wines is surely not reciprocated.


• Starts With A Bang's Ethan Siegel notes how Einsteinian relativity, specifically relating to gravitational lensing, was used to predict the reappearance of the distant Refsdal Supernova one year after its 2014 appearance.

• This alarming VICE report notes the ways in which our phones--and other mobile devices, I'm sure--are in fact listening to us.


• This distressing story looks at how HIV denialism has become popular among many Russians, and the terrible toll this belief system inflicts on people victimized by it (children, particularly).


• Smithsonian Magazine notes how the 1856 discovery of the greenhouse effect created by carbon dioxide by pioneering scientist Eunice Foote was overlooked because she was a woman.


• The detonation of more than 100 substantial nuclear weapons, this report notes, would doom civilization through climate change and agricultural collapse. Motherboard has it.


• Asteroids in orbits linked to that of the Earth would be excellent first targets for asteroid mining, Universe Today reports.

• Caroline Alphonso reports in The Globe and Mail about how Toronto Islands students have been displaced to school on the mainland, in Regent Park.
  
• Robert Benzie and Victoria Gibson describe in the Toronto Star a new waterfront park in a revitalized part of Ontario Place.
  
• Torontoist's Keiran Delamont notes how Metrolinx's sharing of data with the police fits into the broader concept of the modern surveillance state.
  
• Steve Munro tracks the evolution, or perhaps more properly devolution, of streetcar service from 1980 to 2016.

For example, the choices made by editors will still matter. Mass media are not going to disappear entirely. Even if we witness the demise of bottom-feeders (like the New York Post, which in this case put the subway picture on Page One with a lurid headline), we'll still have media organizations with reach and clout. Interestingly, there's been no outcry about the New York Times' decision to post a surveillance-camera shot of a man who's about to murder another man. The key differences are a) a passer-by didn't take the picture; b) the police are trying to find the murderer; and c) the Times didn't troll for readers with a seamy headline.

Over time, the more important choices will be made by the audience. Even if “mainstream media” (whatever that means) choose to behave with common decency, there will be no shortage of other outlets for gruesome pictures and videos that aren't legally obscene or (like child porn) just plain criminal. Not long after the 2001 terrorist attacks, major media outlets made the lockstep decision to stop airing videos of the planes crashing into the World Trade Center or people jumping from the burning towers. But these are easy enough to find online. With more and more videos, it will increasingly be up to you and me to make our own decisions.

Meanwhile, the role of the professional spot-news photographer won't merely change. It'll just about end. People in that business should be looking for new ways to make a living. As I wrote in my book Mediactive several years ago, a cameras-everywhere world makes it much more likely that an “amateur” will get the most newsworthy images. But because tabloid-style media will always have an audience, probably a big one, new kinds of content marketplaces are sure to emerge, giving non-pros a way to sell and license the most newsworthy material. Look for bidding wars will erupt for items that are sufficiently interesting or ugly or titillating.

The more important implications of the cameras-everywhere world are about the surveillance society we're creating. This isn't a new idea, of course, as any reader of George Orwell or David Brin knows. But the degree to which pessimists' fears are coming true is remarkable—and terrifying to anyone who cares in the least about liberty.

Online surveillance has gotten most of the recent attention, but it is also very likely that a variety of Big and Little Brothers will record us everywhere we go—eventually, with sound, too. Facial recognition and other techniques will mean that our every move will be trackable. The purveyors and adopters of this stuff like to say we have nothing to fear if we have nothing to hide. That's police-state mentality, but it's getting more common. Benjamin Franklin would be hooted down today for his famous and eternally right admonition, “Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.”

Computer science professor Aaron Hertzmann, PhD student Evangelos Kalogerakis and others have developed an algorithm that can analyze a series of photos and determine where they were taken. The program – the first of its kind, Hertzmann says – isn’t designed to identify individual images, although it can make a rough guess at one-off photos. Rather, its power lies in its ability to identify a whole series of images, if it knows the sequence in which they were taken.

Hertzmann’s program exploits the enormous image database of the popular photo-sharing website, Flickr.com. On Flickr, people have the option of “tagging” photos to indicate when and where they were taken. Hertzmann’s program uses these tags – mini-summaries of the photo-taking habits of thousands of Flickr users – to determine where photos were taken.

“If you take a picture of some city street, it could be anywhere in the world,” Hertzmann says. “But if half an hour later you take a picture of Big Ben or the Eiffel Tower, then it becomes much clearer where that first picture was taken.”

On a recent holiday, Hertzmann photographed the Odeon of Herodes Atticus, an ancient Greek amphitheatre in Athens. A day later he photographed a nearly featureless seascape off Santorini, with just a sliver of coastline showing. Taken individually, the program does just fine with the Odeon photo because many people have posted similar shots to Flickr; it puts a dot on a world map at Athens. But the seascape could be anywhere. Without any additional information, the program puts dots all over the world’s seas. Feed the program both photos – along with the time frame in which they were shot – and suddenly it recognizes the seascape as being from the Aegean and puts a dot near Santorini. (The program knows not only that Santorini is close to Athens, but also that it’s a popular target for Flickr photographers who have recently visited Athens.)

The state's latest plan to watch us makes every other imminent intrusion seem limited. Next month's Queen's speech will contain a brief reference to an innocuous-sounding communications data bill. But what this means is the development of a centralised database that will track, in real time, every call we make, every website we visit, and every text and email we send. That information will then be stored and analysed - perhaps for decades. It will mean the end of privacy as we know it.

In the name of the fight against crime, and the fight against terror, we are all to be monitored as if we could be suspects. Computers will analyse our behaviour for signs of deviance. The minute we become of interest to anyone in authority - perhaps because we take part in a demonstration, have an argument with a security guard at an airport, spend too long on a website, or are witness to a crime - the police or the security services will be able to dip into our records and construct a near-complete pattern of our lives.

The shocking element to the new plan is that the authorities want their own database only because they find the current limitations frustrating. Under the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act rules, the 700 or so bodies already licensed to watch us must make a certified request to phone or internet firms for individual records. More than 500,000 such requests were made last year. But the companies are reluctant to hang on to the data, and the security services would find a single, accessible database so much more convenient.

Stop and consider this for a moment. Think about how happy any of us would be to have our lives laid out to official view. All our weaknesses, our private fears and interests, would be exposed. Our web searches are guides to what is going on in our minds. A married man might spend a lot of time on porn websites; a successful manager might be researching depression; a businessman might be looking up bankruptcy law.

We all have a gulf between who we really are and the face we present to the world. Suddenly that barrier will be taken away. Would a protester at the Kingsnorth power station feel quite so confident in facing the police if she knew that the minute she was arrested, the police could find out that she'd just spent a week looking at abortion on the web? Would a rebel politician stand up against the prime minister if he knew security services had access to the 100 text messages a week he exchanged with a woman who wasn't his wife? It isn't just the certainty that such data would be used against people that is a deterrent, it's the fear. As the realisation of this power grew, we would gradually start living in the prison of our minds.