Mailbag – Quick Items and Links
Reader Michael sent in this interesting chess set:
“For their RS&A chess set commission, the Chapman Brothers chose to create a game played by postapocalyptic adolescents, the one side white with Arian haircuts and the other side black with Afro hair. The set is displayed in its own handcrafted games box, the board inlaid with white and black double-headed skull and crossbones.”
Fatemeh sends in the news that Representative Keith Ellison was arrested in a Darfur protest:
Rep. Keith Ellison of Minnesota and four other members of Congress were arrested Monday [April 28th] in front of the Sudanese Embassy in Washington as they protested the expulsion of aid groups in Darfur.
It was an apparently unprecedented act by a member of Minnesota’s congressional delegation and somewhat out of character for Ellison, a Democrat who has generally avoided controversy since he arrived in Congress, attracting international attention as its first Muslim member.
Minnesota Republican Party officials, while saying they respect Ellison’s advocacy against genocide in Darfur, criticized his decision to get arrested as a “publicity stunt unbecoming of the office he holds.”
Keeping in tradition of the racist sock, we now have a racist camera:
We got our Mom a new Nikon S630 digital camera for Mother’s Day and I was playing with it during the Angels game we were at on Sunday.
As I was taking pictures of my family, it kept asking “Did someone blink?” even though our eyes were always open.
(Thanks to reader Mandy for sending this in!)
Carmen Van Kerckhove is co-founder and president of
Deaf Indian Muslim Anarchist! wrote:
Um, wow… this is a major WTF at that camera article.
Posted 19 May 2009 at 11:44 am ¶
embarcadero113 wrote:
Sigh.
Besides the clear problem that this camera was not tested on different races before putting out on the market (because only rich white people buy cameras), I guess the part that bothers me the most is: If someone DID blink, couldn’t you see that just by looking at the damn photo? Why is it necessary to ask a question (on said camera screen) that describes an obvious fact? It’s illogical, and provides no real value to the technology but to Otherize entire races and ethnicities. The better question is, “Did someone get a refund?”
Yes, I hope they did.
Posted 19 May 2009 at 12:44 pm ¶
pm wrote:
Surely the fact that Nikon is a Japanese company makes that camera thing even more peculiar? Do they have different parameters for checking for blinking depending on which country its being sold in? Or is this a feature which was developed exclusively in a US/European part of the company and only for Western markets?
It does seem like a case of just adding features simply because they can, no matter how pointless it is. ‘The future’ has been a great disappointment. No personal jet-packs or cold fusion generators, just ever increasing computing power that we struggle to find something to use it for.
Posted 19 May 2009 at 2:18 pm ¶
CDF wrote:
Re: chess set,
Not a thought out idea…and I don’t play chess!
Re: Ellison arrest,
Haven’t heard from him in a while. Best of luck in his efforts.
Re: racist camera,
Tech gadgets these days just have way too many features/options, most of which doesn’t get used all the time. That’s when you run into stuff like this. Sometimes, I look at my cell phone and dream about the days of the simple rotary dial or even the touch-tone with a handful of options on the keypad. Nowadays you have to break out the instructions everytime you pick a gizmo up…LOL!
Posted 19 May 2009 at 2:43 pm ¶
Erica wrote:
I’m hoping the programmer who worked on the facial/blink recognition subroutine is smacking himself in the head with his keyboard right now. STUPID STUPID STUPID!
The chess set makes me glad I stopped playing chess in high school.
Posted 19 May 2009 at 3:36 pm ¶
Asada wrote:
not surprising.
Posted 19 May 2009 at 4:13 pm ¶
karak wrote:
The almost condescending tone of the camera is just… I don’t even know the word. I read it in the same voice that a parents asks a child that is toilet training, “Did you go poopy in your pants?”
Seems like a stupid function, anyway, clearly designed on some sort of algorithm designed to calculate how open someone’s eyes are. What a poor idea, eyes are so different for so many people.
Posted 19 May 2009 at 5:23 pm ¶
blip wrote:
I want to own that chess set. It’s too fabulous for words. Instant collectable.
Posted 19 May 2009 at 6:09 pm ¶
jaden_loves wrote:
Ok, so I don’t want to seem insensitive, but I have a Nikon camera with the same function and it does the same thing all the time. I don’t think it has anything to do with race and maybe we are diving just a little to deep. I am not of Asian descent and I have very wide eyes, and my camera always asks, “Did someone blink?” A careless, sloppy, defective camera at best.
Posted 19 May 2009 at 6:38 pm ¶
Aishtamid wrote:
@The Keith Ellison arrest –
Is it not a good thing that a politician stands up for something? He was arrested while demonstrating support for a good cause. Most politicians wouldn’t do anything that polls dictate most people wouldn’t support. That shows that Representative Ellison has a good character.
Posted 19 May 2009 at 9:53 pm ¶
Whitney wrote:
I think that camera would say that if you were taking pictures of drunk and stoned people.
Posted 19 May 2009 at 11:46 pm ¶
Queenie wrote:
Hey..you got the same camera as mine!
Posted 20 May 2009 at 12:55 pm ¶
Zara wrote:
My friend has that camera as well, and she always runs into the same problem, even though she has very wide eyes. I think it’s just a faulty feature. The chess set – ugh. What in the hell are “Arian haircuts”? And why are they naked!?!
Posted 20 May 2009 at 1:19 pm ¶
Rebecca wrote:
My Nikon Coolpix does that too, doesn’t matter if you’re taking a pic of an Asian person, a white European person, an African person… somtimes it does it if I’m taking a pic of a landscape and I forgot to change the setting… Although it says “one or more subjects may have had their eyes closed”. I wish those trees would stop winking when I’m trying to tak their picture!
Posted 22 May 2009 at 6:32 am ¶
Natalie wrote:
I think the interesting thing about the above chess set is how all the ‘arian’ figures are in differing poses and positions; all with diverse hair cuts and colors, yet the ‘other’ side (from what I can see) are all pretty much homogeneous and the same. Why is this? Are we really still homogenizing the ‘other’ in a chess set?
Posted 24 May 2009 at 8:58 pm ¶