The Condemnation of Blackness

I recently read a book called The Condemnation of Blackness. It recounts the media, laws and literature concerning black Americans roughly from the year 1890 to 1920. This time period starts when the post civil war period had shifted from blacks being seen as freed slaves to members of society. The book ends around the end of World War I as the Great Migration increased in earnest. This time period is chosen because it was a crucial time in determining the cultural status of blacks in this country, particularly in the northern states.

The sordid record of discrimination, violence and hatred inflicted on black individuals is known to most people in the United States. What the book does is to examine not only the effects of these scourges on the health and livlihood of people but also how attitudes shaped at that period have persisted to this day. The author asserts that in addition to cultural bias as a mode for carrying racism forward the criminal justice system is the realm where injustice continues to be promulgated.

The author has pointed out what he calls the violence card as a reflection of the bias inherent in our criminal justice system. He says when a person relies on the connection between crime and race instead of crime and condition that is a reflection of flawed thinking. Another way to put it is to express that black-on-black crime is more pernicious than other crime, and somehow points to flawed character. That this may be hard to understand or too subtle a point is not surprising given the societal bias that was prevalent in the recent past and the continuing segregation that exists today.

One point made is that during the time covered by the book blacks were blamed for America's fundamental need to have winners and losers or haves and have nots. And this is accepted as common wisdom today, that our society has a group of people who are at the bottom and somehow are destined to be there. So it is a startling thought to realize how this may be a reflection of bias.

And it is for the most part seen as a very natural thing for there to be large sections of Chicago and other cities where blacks live. And to have the expectation that the people living there should be doing something on their own to clean up the place where they live. And a big part of what is perceived that needs to be improved is the amount of violence and crime.

Pixelization of light emission and image recording

I recently read an article that described how our brains work in terms of vision. One key behavior is that neurons only fire when something in the field of vision changes. This is contrasted to how current digital cameras work that record full sets of data at each interval. The result is a lot of data. The brain research has already led to the development of cameras that capture less data and as a result can work faster and capture more information with less data collected.

With all of the talk about the search for the Higgs boson, one theme has been about how much data is collected. The detect-only-what-has-changed approach may provide some benefits.

Another article described a headlight that is meant to address the issue we see when driving in rain or fog. As everyone has experienced, the beam hits the rain or fog near the car and does not illuminate much past that. The proposal is a LED head light that can emit and detect small individual beams. These are then controlled such that when a beam is reflected in a short time interval they are turned off for the next one. The result is a beam that shines further than current headlights.

On the Train

I was finishing The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allen Poe on the train this morning. I had read it on the way home yesterday, but had to finish it quickly at the end of my trip. The story ends with the narrator reading from a book in which sounds are described and just as he reads the desriptions similar sounds are heard in the house. I won't divulge the horrorible scene, except that as the narrator is riding away from the house he sees a "blood-red" full moon over his shoulder. Well, just as I read this, dull rays of sunlight shone over my shoulder. Because of a break in the clouds just above the horizon the full circle of the rising sun was visible. And sure enough the atmosphere gave it a dark red orange color that was eerily similar to what I had just imagined in my minds eye.