Sorting through a box of family photos in Nebraska last year, the physical weight of them stopped me. It wasn’t just the heavy cardboard. It was the specific gravity of each print. I held a single, fading photograph of folks I did not know, captured on their wedding day. Just one. It wasn’t one of twenty-seven burst-mode variations kept “just in case.”
All our futures are carved by a history we did not live, and cannot share. There are some among us who are never able to recover from the trauma of childhood. Murder, death, illness, and sexual molestation, are all dark stars in the sky that look down upon us, and judge us for being unable to comprehend the constellation of their human conclusions.
Continue reading → The Sex Offender Registry: The Future Always Disappoints History
We’ve written a lot about memory and meaning and memory on this Boles Blog over the last decade or so — and yet I am always a little bit shocked and surprised when I read elsewhere, on other blogs — revelations of how fleeting and failing memories really are in the execution of rallying a daily life.
The blog post in question was written by a fresh and successful database engineer who, at a young age, was mildly complaining, in the midst of a technical exposé, how his short-term memory was failing him. He was trying to draw parallels between caching database memory and how his mind would clear, on its own, important, stored information he needed for short-term recall.
The young designer shared with us that if he thought of something while in the midst of working, he had to immediately stop and write down the thought on a piece of paper, or in the next thought, he’d forget what he meant to do next when he had a break in time.
The author didn’t seem to be particularly alarmed by his lack of short-term memory reception, but I felt for him because his letter read as if this were a semi-new experience that he was dealing with in the analytical manner of a software designer and problem fixer. He was using mechanical logic to solve a scientific health problem.
Continue reading → Recalling Short-Term, Outlier, Cache Memory Loss
We know we are being watched and recorded — even while stuck in traffic — but few of us realize the depth of the “fingerprint data” mining going on behind us behind the scenes to wholly identify the minutiae of us. Over the weekend, another “Blippy Blooper” made the headlines, and the willful Blippy braggarts around us continue to get publicly stung by the very money viper they’re trying to privately pet.
Continue reading → Blippy Bloopers are But Only the Beginning
You are your cellphone and the New York Police Department
knows your phone identifies you better than a fingerprint or an identity card because you can be marked and tracked throughout your life in real time and the breadcrumbs of your history in movement and communication can be recorded, saved, and used against you for future prosecution — and it may not be legal.
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