Outside Desert Vista High School in Phoenix, where President Barack Obama spoke about housing and the economy, Arizonans sang

“Bye Bye Black Sheep”

carried signs saying

“Impeach the Half-White Muslim!”

And were quoted saying

He’s 47 percent Negro

and

Obama is ruining American values. He is ruining the Constitution. He needs to go back to where he came from because obviously, he is a liar. I am not racist. I am part Indian. Obama’s half Black, half White.”

But they’re not racist. “Where he came from.” Not racist at all. I guess they don’t like Hawaii. Or Chicago.

In a dramatic about-face on a key internet issue yesterday, Google told the FCC that the network neutrality rules Google once championed don’t give citizens the right to run servers on their home broadband connections, and that the Google Fiber network is perfectly within its rights to prohibit customers from attaching the legal devices of their choice to its network.

Disappointed? Yes. Surprised? Only a little.

What's especially unfortunate is what's blocked, unnecessarily:

Moreover, the net neutrality rules (pdf) regarding devices are plain and simple: ”Fixed broadband providers may not block lawful content, applications, services, or non-harmful devices.”

But Google’s legally binding Terms of Service outlaw Google Fiber customers from running their own mail server, using a remotely accessible media server, SSHing into a home computer from work to retrieve files, running a Minecraft server for friends to share, using a Nest thermometer, using a nanny camera to watch over a childcare provider or using a Raspberry Pi to host a WordPress blog.

None of those devices would do any harm to any broadband network, let alone a Google Fiber connection with a 1Gbps capacity equally split between uploading and downloading.

Johnny Evans, writing for Computerworld about Apple’s all-male (and, it should be noted, white, middle-aged) executive team:

The image I like to carry of the company is that it’s some form of meritocracy. That the people at the most senior positions are the people capable of the best performance.

That may be true short term, but over 10-15 years, no women have proven to be “capable of the best performance”? I find that hard to believe.

There are too few women and too many prejudices in technology.

44 years later, "I've Seen The Promised Land" is still one of the most powerful pieces of oratory ever uttered, and this line by a "white girl" in the ninth grade chokes me up every time.

Audio here and here. Video of the title quote here.

OK, final Teller links for the night. He’s been interested in the psychology behind magic for a long time. He co-authored “Attention and awareness in stage magic: turning tricks into research” for Nature Reviews Neuroscience in 2008, and Wired Magazine profiled him in 2009:

Teller designed his own house in the Las Vegas foothills, and he delights in showing first-time visitors around. He starts the tour by pointing down a hallway at a window, through which I see a beautiful view of the sprawling neon city below.

“Go take a look,” Teller says. I amble down the hall and—just before reaching the end—smack into something hard, leaving a wet mouth-print on polished glass. The “window” is merely a reflection; the hallway ends in a precisely angled, mirrored door. “You didn’t see the illusion because you weren’t expecting one,” Teller says. “You assumed I wasn’t fucking with your head and that this hallway is actually a normal hallway. Those assumptions work great until you walk into a wall.”

I love this guy.

Teller, from a February interview with The Smithsonian Magazine:

Theater is “willing suspension of disbelief.” Magic is unwilling suspension of disbelief.

On his and his mentor, David G. Rosenbaum’s, thoughts about magic and theatre:

We probed the riddle of magic in the theater. The closest we came to a definition was this: ‘Magic is a form of theater that depicts impossible events as though they were really happening.” In other words, you experience magic as real and unreal at the same time. It’s a very, very odd form, compelling, uneasy and rich in irony.

A romantic novel can make you cry. A horror movie can make you shiver. A symphony can carry you away on an emotional storm; it can go straight to the heart or the feet. But magic goes straight to the brain; its essence is intellectual.

The piece is chock-full of with these amazing nuggets.

Teller, writing for The Smithsonian Magazine, on scientists’ interest in magic:

I’m all for helping science. But after I share what I know, my neuroscientist friends thank me by showing me eye-tracking and MRI equipment, and promising that someday such machinery will help make me a better magician.

I have my doubts. Neuroscientists are novices at deception. Magicians have done controlled testing in human perception for thousands of years.

Teller talks more about science and magic in his recent interview on Talk of the Nation. In it he mentions three books¹ for learning magic:

• Royal Road to Card Magic, Jean Hugard. (“Almost a programmed course,” Teller calls it.)
• Modern Coin Magic, J.B. Bobo.
• Amateur Magician’s Handbook, Henry Hay.

The last one is what I learned from as a teenager.

Documentary filmmaker Debbie Lum, on the subject of her SXSW entry.

Wall Street Journal’s Speakeasy:

If you’re not Asian, what Lum is referring to is the targeted attraction that some non-Asian men have toward Asian women — an obsession, in some cases, that takes the creepy plunge into sexual fetish: “Living in the Bay Area, if I had a dollar for every time a guy with yellow fever tried to hit on me in Chinese, I could have funded ‘Seeking Asian Female’ on my own,” she says.

(Via The Dish)

Spoiler: Yes.

Trippy.