Technotalitarianism, mudtant clones and unmanned slippers

News of other worlds. Issue 12

The future is already here, it is simply unevenly distributed.
William Gibson

1. In recent years, China has been building total control using the latest computer technology with a shock pace. These technologies are run by in Xinjiang, an autonomous area in the west of the country where Muslims-Uyghurs live, under the pretext of combating separatism and terrorism. The government collects their DNA base , forcing to donate blood for this. Photos on documents are digitized and entered into the general base. On each corner there are cameras with a person recognition system that checks the faces of passers -by with this base. Even to fill the gasoline tank at the gas station, you need to present documents and show the face of the camera. Police patrols regularly stop passers -by and check the contents of their phones for prohibited foreign applications, such as WhatsApp and Facebook, and politically immature messages in messengers, and a year ago, to save the forces of the police, the Uyghurs began to force a special program, which itself makes sure that there was nothing forbidden on the phone. These practices gradually apply to other areas of the country. In China, 170 million street cameras with a person recognition system have already been installed, and in the coming years it is planned to install even more than 400 million. The cameras are installed not only on the streets, but also in the entrances of the houses. All information from them is transmitted to the central database of the police. In December, the BBC correspondent decided to check this system on itself - the Chinese police found it in a four millionth city in just 7 minutes. This week, another element was added to the tracking system: the police at the stations began to issue computer glasses scanning faces in the crowd and comparing them with their faces in the police database. It is argued that thanks to this technology , more than 30 people have already been arrested .

2. Perhaps people are not such bastards, as is commonly believed. Everyone probably heard about the experiment of Milgram, during which the psychologist Stanley Milgram ordered his experimental students, students of Yale University, to beat a person’s current for an opaque partition, who incorrectly answered the examiner’s questions - the experiment supposedly studied the effect of memory for memory. The results were shocking - students, by order of the experimenter, increased tension, even when the “subject” invisible to students asked to stop this torture or even stopped showing signs of life. In fact, there was an actor behind the partition, only pretending to be painful, and not at all the connection of pain and memory was studied, but the willingness of people to cause suffering by others by order from above. The experiment is still described in psychology textbooks as evidence that the vast majority of people are ready to obey even the most criminal orders - as it was, for example, during the reign of the Nazis in Germany. But now the textbooks seem to have to be rewritten. Two American scientists decided - no matter how amazingly, for the first time in the 55 years that have passed the first publication of the Milgram article - to study the interviews of experimental students who were recorded immediately after the experiment was completed . It turned out that 72% of those who increased the voltage to the very end simply ate the plan of Milgram and did not believe that they caused a person to a person’s serious pain or could be killed by an electric discharge. “Nobody would have allowed this,” they quite rightly notice in an interview. Why these evidence were not published earlier, you can only guess.

3. The decryption of the granous lobster genome confirmed what the scientists had already guessed: all the individuals of this species are clones , and all of them are female. Marble lobsters lay off caviar, which does not require fertilization, and accurate genetic copies of the mother appear from this caviar. There are other similar organisms on the Earth, although there are not very many of them, but in one marble lobster is unique: this species appeared less than a quarter of a century ago, in 1995, as a result of a mutation of another, bicom-like species of the Languste, in one German pet store. As a result of trade and the exchange of his clones, they spread throughout Germany, then one of them fled to the pond, and now they live in free life throughout Europe and have already come to Japan and Madagascar. Another unusual feature of marble Langustees is that they have not two sets of chromosomes, like the rest of the animals, including those breeding, and three. In animals that propagate sexually, in the body of the offspring, one of the chromosomal sets of the mother is replaced by the chromosomal set of father. In the body of same -sex animals, both sets of the mother are transmitted to the offspring. The first marble Languste decided, having received the chromosomal set of his father, to leave himself both the chromosomal set of the mother, and since then it passes all three from generation to generation. However, scientists believe that this will not continue for long-same-sex species usually quickly die out from diseases, parasites or changes in the environment, since, unlike bicaprex animals, they cannot adapt to them due to the lack of exchange of genes between different specials. True, such a “fast” can continue for thousands of years, so we need to get used to living with these strange creatures on the same planet.

4. Scottish biologists have been able to unsuccessfully try to do for many years - taking a human egg at the very early stage of development, growing it in artificial conditions to a completely mature state . Scientists hope that this can be a breakthrough in the treatment of infertility, although before the practical application of this technology you will have to wait a few more years.

5. The Chinese peasant stole 800 meters of the road . He hired an excavator and truck, dismantled the roadway, took out concrete fragments and sold them 10 yuan per ton. Net profit - 5000 yuan (approximately $ 800). As he later explained to the police, he needed money, but on this road no one had ever traveled. By the way, as a result of the ambitions of the provincial authorities in China in recent years , hundreds of kilometers of autobahns have been built from nowhere to nowhere , on which you will not see a single car for hours - so an entrepreneurial person has where to turn around.

6. Since it came to the roads - in Peru the truck driver drove into the NASKEN desert and left noticeable ruts along and across the famous ancient Indian drawings , causing considerable damage to them. The driver is justified by the fact that he is a dark person, he knew nothing about the drawings and was generally lost. Commentators suspect that he simply decided to cut off the hook so as not to go along a paid road. The driver named Hesus threatens 9 months of prison and a large fine.

7. While Musk demonstrated unmanned trucks and launched his Tesla into space, the Japanese from Nissan, even if they were not so loud, but much more useful business, created self -governing slippers , which, if they forget them in an accidental place, go to their usual place and carefully park there. Great civilization, what else can you say. They would have already begun to sell.

Insight: Nissan Has a New Kind of Vehicle to Show Off: Self-Driving Slippers that Park Themselves https:/xiwwfhytoc pic.twitter/s8wiyiahj2

- Reuters top News (@reets) February 3, 2018

8. California is discussing a girl who has thought of selling Gerl-Skautian cookies (they are traditionally sold from carts, collecting money to finance a scout organization) at the door of the marijuana store in the city of San Diego (the sale of marijuana without a doctor’s prescription is allowed in California from January 1, 2018). The active component of marijuana tetrahydranabiol acts on receptors that start the production of hormones stimulating appetite, as a result of which the "smoky" people have a strong feeling of hunger. As a result, in just a couple of days, the girl managed to sell more than 300 cookies. So far, some commentators admire its ingenuity, others ask the local organization of Gerl-scouts, is it ashamed to take money related to the sale of drugs, and offer to prohibit the trade in G Welskaut cookies in the neighborhood of such stores. The store itself does not object to such trade and even offers the girl to install a permanent kiosk in front of the entrance.

9. The European Court of Human Rights decided that the Lithuanian government did not have the right to prohibit advertising posters with a character who advertising jeans, similar to Jesus Christ. The Lithuanian Agency for the Protection of Consumer Rights banned the posters of Sekmadienis Ltd on the basis that they insult the feelings of believers and imposed a fine on the company. The company filed it on the Lithuanian court, but lost. As a result, the case reached the ECHR, which took the side of the company, stating that the ban on posters is a violation of freedom of speech, and decided that the Lithuanian government should return the amount of the fine to the designers. You can look at posters, for example, here .

10. Vanity Fair's magazine disgraced the entire galaxy by publishing a photo shoot with Reese Witherspoon, ask Winfrey and other stars. As a result of hacks with Photoshop, one of the photographs of Reese Witherspun turned out to be three legs, and three hands on the other Opra Winfrey. Reese Witherspoon has already managedto write on Twitter , that since the truth was still opened, she hopes that fans will be able to accept her as it is, with three legs. It is especially impressive that the famous Annie Leibovitz made a photo shoot. Whether she herself was so redesigned, or was it one of the designers of the magazine, remains unknown. The extra limbs probably served as compensation for the fact that James Franco originally present there, shortly before the publication, turned out that he had molested students from his acting courses, and the publishers decided that he did not deserve a place in the magazine. In addition to photographs, Franco lost his nomination for Oscar. He himself denies all the accusations.

I Don`t Consider Reese as Sitting on Oprah But I do Wonder ABOUT Reese's 3 Legs ??? pic.twitter.com/msgx2odkxh

- nichole ✨✨✨ (@tnwhiskeywoman) January 25, 2018

Three legs Riise Witherspoon

Oprah Has 3 Hands in this Photo. Three Hands. Reese: 3 Legs. Oprah 3: Hands. pic.twitter.com/l7etcqccccc6fp

- nichole ✨✨✨ (@tnwhiskeywoman) January 25, 2018

And these are the three hands of Opra Winfrey. Can you find the third?