Don't wait until Labor Day

    Typically, I am a great fan of photography as illustration. But sometimes pictures fail you. The Sistine Chapel comes to mind. No reproduction of Michelangelo's masterpiece prepared me for the thing itself, the sheer hugeness and grandeur of its scale. 
      Or the Chicago Botanic Garden. When  I saw the above study in green and yellow, it seemed so charming, I snapped a few pictures. But when I looked at the photos back home, they seemed flat, stilted. Something had been lost.
     You had to be there. Which is a good message for a beautiful Sunday. Photographs are not real, the on-line world less so. Sometimes you just have to be there and see a thing yourself. Edie and I spent a solid hour walking through the Botanic Garden this morning, not counting the time we studied the lovely exhibit on trees and woodworking. You don't necessarily have to go to the Botanic Garden, but try to go somewhere. July has flown. August is next. Don't wait until Labor Day to get out into it. 

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      Vanity is embarrassing. Or should be embarrassing. Au exaggerated appreciation for oneself doesn't seem to give much pause to Donald Trump. But that itself is a cautionary tale to the rest of us. Don't be like him.

      So I hope this isn't a startling confession of ego and self-delusion.

      But I operate under the assumption that the columns and posts I write merit reading, or re-reading, even a year, or two, or three after they are written. I try, when I write them, to go for a tone that does not depend too extensively on the the particular issue of the moment, but instead clutch at a certain universality. You won't see a column on some fine point of the budget debate. I don't care, now, and assume few of you do as well, and none of us will care later.

      Toward that end, each morning I re-tweet what was posted on everygoddamnday.com one year, two years and, since July, three years ago. So many more people read the thing now—July will be another record month, averaging above 60,000 hits—that I thought I'd dangle past topics by readers, since they will be fresh discoveries for them. 

     These return visits have been exclusively something encouraged in the free-fire zone of Twitter. But recently Blogger began allowing us to highlight posts on our blogs, and I've added an element directly to the right of the main post  that will showcase what was here on this day in years past. I could do all three, but that's a lot so, after tweeting the stories having their birthdays, I'll select (or "curate" to use the dreaded buzzword) one post that I consider the most notable. Give it a glance and, if it seems intriguing, a read. And thank you for your patronage. 

A break from politics, sort of, with Japan's top bear

 

    This ran in the Sun-Times Friday. I didn't post it here, because I figured people had read enough about Kumamon Tuesday and wouldn't want more. But then I realized, some might have been put off by the 6,000-word treatise that ran in Mosaic, and might appreciate the 650-word, reader-friendly version. Plus it does have some elements not in the original. And how long can you puzzle over a photo? So, just in case, here it is:

     “Tell the world about our Kumamon,” urged Hoei Tokunaga, as we shook hands goodbye after a weekend together last March. That one sentence, so sincere, almost beseeching, somehow summarized my week in Japan.
     Tokunaga’s title is assistant deputy director of the Kumamoto prefectural government. In reality he is a coat holder for a teddy bear, one of 20 functionaries wrangling the massive business dealings, intense media interest and hectic publicity schedule of Kumamon, an imaginary black bear with red cheeks that is among the most popular mascots in Japan.
     Kumamon’s handlers claim he is on his way to becoming bigger than Mickey Mouse or Hello Kitty. So I might as well introduce him to you, given that he is almost unknown in this country. In Asia, Kumamon sold $1 billion worth of merchandise last year.
     You may have noticed we are not talking about politics. That’s intentional. If President Obama’s passionate evocation of the power and glory that is America left you unmoved Wednesday, if Hillary Clinton’s address Thursday only intensified your doorjamb-biting hatred for her, what am I supposed to do? Politics is a 24-hour hobbyhorse and sometimes, to remain sane, a person should get off and let it rock by itself for awhile. Friday, the gateway to the weekend, is the perfect day to take a break. The bad dream that is Election 2016 will be waiting for us Monday, right where we left it.

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Saturday fun activity: Where IS this?

     This photograph looks, to me, like an architectural drawing from the 1960s, of some ooo-the-future modern structure, dwarfing the obligatory human figures tucked in for scale. 
     Where is it? If you're thinking, "Can't be Chicago," you're on the right track. But a place enough Chicagoans have been to that there's a chance somebody will recognize it. 
     As for prizes, well, to be candid, winners have not been claiming them, so we can do away with the canard. If the person who guesses correctly wants one, they can ask, and we'll find something suitable. Which also makes me suspect that the Fun Activity has run its course, again, and it's time to retire it. Thoughts? Otherwise, place your guesses below. Good luck.

Rahm Emanuel, dead man walking

     So how bad is it for Rahm Emanuel?
     This week, in the New Yorker article on why Barack Obama failed to close America's shameful black hole prison at Guantanamo Bay, Rahm Emanuel is portrayed as the Machiavellian manipulator who urged the president to leave the imprisoned to rot there forever and focus on more significant policy issues. 
    But it's worse than that.
    At the Democratic National Convention Wednesday, Barack Obama's video showed our mayor-to-be warning that the affordable care act would cause him to lose the 2012 election. Better to leave millions uninsured than take a political risk.
    But it's worse than that. 
    The media erupted with hoots of how he was "thrown under the bus" by his old boss.
    But it's worse than that.
    He was a ghost at the convention, a "fading star," to be kind, denying that obvious fact, wandering like Lord Jim, trying to escape his shame, his lapse over the Laquan McDonald shooting following him, quacking like a pull-toy duck. Not at all the power broker he was last time. Back in Chicago, his staff is fleeing the 5th floor at City Hall like rats scurrying down the cables of a ship sinking at the pier.
    But it's worse than that. 
    I contemplated writing something on the mayor's woes for the newspaper. Then I shrugged, and thought: Why bother? It's Rahm Emanuel, dead man walking. Nobody cares about him anymore. He's not even worth making fun of. 
    Instead, I wrote about an imaginary black bear who's very popular in Japan. 
    That's how bad it is. 

Shooter for hire

     When you cover a swirling, four-day story like a national convention, it helps to have a home base. Since the newspaper didn't send me to Cleveland until the last minute, I couldn't get into the press center, and had to improvise. That involved setting up shop at Johnny's Little Bar, which was ideal for several reasons: it was only a couple blocks off Public Square, they would charge my phone for me behind the bar, and the burgers were pretty good. 
    It did get crowded, and I would slip upstairs to the empty banquet room, where I met Noah Brooks, a freelance photographer from Florida. We got to talking. There is an enormous gulf between those of us lucky enough to still be on the staffs of what remains of the great news organizations, and everybody else, in the slurry, fighting to find work and to be paid. He was on his laptop, trying to find somebody interested in his photos, trying to find somebody to toss $50 his way.
     He showed me some photos he took in Ukraine during two recent trips there. If they seem

Noah Brooks

unusually artistic, that was his goal. "I was really looking for two things: art and war," he told the Ukrainian Chicago Magazine.  
     I wanted to help him get his work seen, and told him if he sent me a few photographs, I would put them up on my blog, for what it's worth. He did, and here they are. He's hoping to go back to Ukraine in September, and could use a few connections who might be interested in working with him. 
    I don't get the sense that the photo editors of the top press organizations are reading my blog. But you might know somebody, or be involved with a social agency that needs dramatic photographs of war situations, or be involved in one of Chicago's many cultural or artistic organizations that could use his work. If so, I've got just the guy for you. He can be reached at noahbrooks99@gmail.com.

The attack of the cute robots

     Tuesday's post on cuteness in Japan and its future as an academic field was long enough, but there was more: this sidebar on cuteness and robotics. Both originated last week as a package for Mosaic, the London-based web site run by Britain's Wellcome Trust. They publish their work under a Creative Commons license, meaning you are free to repost or reprint it as you like, provided you credit Mosaic, which posts a fascinating long form journalism on topics of health and science every week, and link back to the original article.

Roomba

     When iRobot designed the Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner, they made it round, so it wouldn’t get stuck in corners. They made it low, so it could scoot under beds and sofas.
     They did not think about making it cute.
     “It wasn’t designed with cuteness in mind,” says Charlie Vaida, a senior manager at the Massachusetts firm, “but with the realization that it would need to move about an ever-changing home environment.”
     But cute it is, for a 3.8 kg self-moving disc. Its plaintive chirp for help when it gets stuck behind a sofa leg, and the tentative way it bangs into an obstacle a few times before turning away – a clumsy movement straight out of Konrad Lorenz’s Kindchenschema, from his 1943 paper describing the ‘innate releasing mechanisms’that prompt affection and nurture in human beings ­– have an effect on customers.
     “When they initially rolled this product out, they had a return policy: if something breaks on the robot, send it back, and we’ll return you a new product the same day,” says Brian Scassellati, founder and director of Yale University’s Social Robotics Lab.
     “The idea was you should be without your vacuum cleaner for as little time as possible. What they got was this huge outpouring of unhappiness: people didn’t want to send back their robot and get some other robot. They wanted their robot back. They had become attached to this thing, to the point where the idea of putting a strange robot into their homes is unacceptable.”
     People also named their Roombas, a common fate for cute robots. When Catalia Health tested its robotic weight-loss coaches in patients’ homes, they returned after two months to collect them. Catalia found the patients had dressed the robots up in hats and scarves, given them names, and did not want to let their companions go.
     While cuteness has long been a hook when selling dolls, purses and other consumer products, one cutting-edge area where cuteness has proven particularly vital is personal robotics.
     “Absolutely,” says Scassellati. “We design educational robots for kids. We try to make them cute and attractive. That’s a very deliberate design choice, to get over the initial response: ‘Do I want to play with this thing or not?’”
     Science fiction has trained us to expect robot butlers and bodyguards, but the first generation of consumer robots are filling more limited, psychological roles. “Most likely the first robots in your home will not be lifting boxes, carrying groceries, washing dishes,” says Scassellati. “Instead, they’ll be doing things that involve social response: reminding you where you left your keys or to take your medication, helping you do your homework. These are tasks we can accomplish without direct physical manipulation.”
     Robots right now are best at time-consuming, repetitive interpersonal tasks, and two realms where they are beginning to succeed commercially are educating small children and helping people with dementia, autism and mental health problems. One of the most successful robots on the market is PARO, a $6,000 robotic baby harp seal found in nursing homes and psychiatric institutions around the world.
     Its designer, Japanese engineer Takanori Shibata, at first thought of making PARO a robotic cat or dog – people love cats and dogs. But he realised two things. First, they tend to love either cats or dogs, so there would need to be two versions of PARO: one cat, one dog.    

     And second, they’ve seen cats and dogs, and thus a robotic replica, no matter how skilfully made, would fall into the ‘uncanny valley’ of artificial creatures who look just real enough to be creepy. Nobody wants to cuddle a creepy robotic dog.
     Most people, however, have never held a baby harp seal, and thus they accept PARO. Its microprocessors allow PARO to bob its head, look at the person holding it, bat its long eyelashes, and coo and trill in an appealing way. In 2009, the United States Food and Drug Administration approved PARO as a Class II medical device.
     The Personal Robots Group at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Media Lab calls devices such as PARO ‘socially assistive robots’, and cuteness is key. It consulted animators when creating Tega, a ‘learning companion’ designed to work with small children. Tega is a bouncy, furry creature. But robots can be cute without resembling living entities. Jibo, which was supposed to reach customers in April, but was held back by design glitches, is certainly cute, resembling a sleek, attentive table lamp.
     “It’s not trying to be human in any way: it doesn’t have arms, it doesn’t have legs,” Cynthia Breazeal, director of MIT’s Personal Robots Group and chief scientist at Jibo, Inc., told a tech website in 2014. “It’s anthropomorphic, it’s designed to be familiar to you, but it doesn’t have to look like an animal or a real person.”
     Some day, robots might be common enough that we accept them and don’t care how they look. But right now, the baby schema does the heavy work easing robots into our lives.
     “It triggers this response in you. It’s automatic,” says Scassellati. “If we’ve done our jobs correctly, you don’t have to think how to respond.”
     For a robot, being accepted is not the only benefit of being cute. Cuteness also causes shifts in human behaviour, which cute studies researchers (read more in this Mosaic piece) are cataloguing. These help today’s primitive robots do their jobs.
     “When people respond, they speak more slowly, enunciate their words a little more clearly,” Scassellati says. “Things a robot has to process actually become easier.”
     Another benefit: people often expect robots to perform beyond their capabilities since, well, they’re robots, and making them infantile lowers those expectations. “If the robot looks and behaves as a very young creature, people will be more likely to treat it as such,” Breazeal writes in her book, Designing Sociable Robots. That means handling it gently and ­– key for the time being – not demanding too much.
     “We want to manage those expectations,” Scassellati says. “You don’t expect the cute puppy to be able to re-shelve books for you.”
     Once robots are better at what they do, and people don’t need expectations lowered, the importance of robotic cuteness might diminish. But not any time soon.
     “The cuteness factor is likely to be there quite a while,” says Scassellati.