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German for dubbing. Since there are lots of people Germany had english movies dubbed. One got more or less used to the mismatch between sound and lips. A strange effect was when the actual voice of the actor felt wrong, since one had only heard the assigned voice actor. For some of them the rise to fame of the thespians they had spoken and therfor be assigned to became a windfall.

This wired piece is about deepfakes and how Covid might give it a boost. Or it just might be a PR piece for companies trying to sell their solutions. Or both.

Soon humans we look at will no longer be as unaltered as we assumed they were. Which of course was never really the case anyway. Make up, lighting, everything got used to alter peoples appearance. Marlene Dietrich very rarely if ever looked like we remember her.

In the near future actors might speak in foreign tongues, and naturally their faces move in the proper way. Don’t like how the movie tested? Change the plot after words. Test the new version and see if “he killed Todd” works better as “he didn’t kill Todd” did. Possibilities are endless.

Of course the people in the death star are scared and looking forward to that: No longer any actors to wrangle. But what if ‘tech’ (that dreaded 4 letter word in Hollywood) could generate an inflationary amount of charactors? Each version more appealing. There is right now a certain lifespan management for actors. Individual drug encounters and religious awakenings aside it is in the total sum almost predictable how career earnings develop in average. That all will change.

For the death star it will probably not matter anyway. In hindsight it was a real tragic move to bloat the operations with assets around live performance in order to have enough critical mass to go public.

Back then it looked very smart: Live performances are the ONE thing were “tech” would not turn everything on its head. As with most tanked prediction the problem was not to evaluate the pieces on the board in the wrong way. It was the illusion to think that one knows about all the pieces that the game has.

Als ich das erste mal davon hörte dachte ich es ist ein Scherz. Ernst kann es auch wirklich keiner meinen: Das Motorradfahren am Wochenende zu verbieten. Der größte Unsinn überhaupt. Ich glaube es ist ein einfach nur Versuch von Aussen im Land Unfrieden zu sähen.

Diesen Gefallen tun dir Grünen der AfD und Putin ja hoffentlich nicht sich auf der falschen Seite des Argumentes aufzustellen.

First here was the man, the giver of ventilators. That got old, in his final briefing he suggested shining a light into peoples bodies, or they just drink disinfectant. For a while things simmered along. Now, that the infection rate is climbing again the new message is supposed to be as simple as Get used to it, get over it. Under normal circumstances such an idea would be outlandish, and clearly made up. But with this administration it could even be true.

I read 3 books by Jonathan Haidt: The Happiness Hypothesis (2006), The Righteous Mind (2012) and recently The Coddling of the American Mind (2018). I enjoyed all three. They are great books. Better than most that I read. I would recommend the first the most, the second then and his most recent work as the last. Not that his writing would have become worse. I find it to be awesome in each of them. It is just, that the topics of his books follow what is going in the world. In 2006 it was fine to focus on how it is, that circumstances are not horrible, yet people are not happy. In 2012 it was worth looking into how people became so partizan, and in 2018 it seemed that people freaked out quiet a bit. Which, in light of 2020, was rather prescient.

Haidt is a rare author that takes science and explains what goes on. And he does so in a way that does not cater to the usual left / right dichotomies. He makes an effort to look at the world, and tries to understand something about it. Whatever it might be. Then he does an outstanding job to condense it and explain it well, so that even people like me can benefit from it. With each of his books I was left with the feeling, that I understand life and society a little bit better once I had read them. Which is really awesome and much appreciated.

It is not his fault that between 2006 and 2018 the world fell into this info-cesspool and people in general rub their noses bloody on the Internet by means of their phones. He would deserved a better world. And there could have been one. If more people would have read his 2006 book it would have made a big impact. Likewise would we have had different candidates in 2016 if ‘The righteous Mind’ would have found a better and broader audience. They would have been better candidates too. I have nobody particular in mind, just that the election of 2016 only could happen in a certain ignorance that he already had elucidated a way out of.

I am a big fan of Aatish Bhatia’s way to display Covid-19 infection numbers in a log to log diagram that shows existing versus new cases.

It allows very clearly to see trends. Sadly there are a couple of countries who see a recent increase in cases after they had managed to lower new infections significantly.

How far the situations of these countries could be compared, and if there should be a common cause is not clear. It is striking how similar the patterns are. Of course the US is an outlier. It always is. Exceptionalism, American.