Grisly smiles that don't flake off (#2)

"Remind me again," said Another Kiwi, "why we are wiring Old Jem up to the Facial-Muscle Faradiser."

"It is to ensure that he tells the truth," I reminded him again. "If facial-analysis software can read the subject's true emotion from his facial expression and check for conflicts with the emotion he claims to be feeling, then it stands to reason by intuition and by geometric logic that using practically painless electric shocks to create the appropriate facial contortion will remove any conflict."

"I was not aware that any reason is required," tigris said.

Reassuring: 95% of facial-muscle faradiser
subjects do not turn into marmoreal busts

"I am not convinced," I conceded, "that Bartlett et al. told us much about emotion expressions by training their software to recognise a grimace of physical pain. You could train a program to detect the rictus sardonicus of strychnine poisoning but it would be a poor guide to distinguishing sincere from insincere amusement."

"Rictus?" AK vouchsafed. "It put my back out completely."



A froth of science churnalists hit the web concurrently with their reports about the pain-contortion study, and unaccountably they all independently framed it in terms of lie detectors coming one step closer. All of them took on board the opposition of sincere vs. feigned expressions, and the idea that the former are a direct window into the soul. It was almost as if they were all simply regurgitating a dramatic press release posted out by someone in the university's media office with more concern for publicity than for truth.

Here for instance is an Atlantic story, from some hyperventilating nimrod whose training in the field extends as far as his unawareness of the difference between 'facial recognition' and 'facial expression':

Once this kind of technology is commercially available, it’s downloadable for any Google Glass user. And beyond the recognition of specific emotions through analysis of facial movement patterns, another application of this new technology, tested by Bartlett’s team, is one that allows it to distinguish fake from true emotional expressions. In other words, it can tell if you’re lying. [...]
Yes, Bartlett incorporated a lie detector into the facial recognition technology. This technology promises to catch in the act anyone who tries to fake a given emotion or feeling. Facial recognition is evolving into emotional recognition, but computers—not just people—are the ones deciding what's real. (If we add voice detection to face recognition, we end up with a complete lie detection package.)

(Emphasis mine the computer's)

Now you might think that this whole 'facial expression' channel of communication evolved so that bald primates could send signals to other bald primates, and that there is no more honesty inherent in a facial message -- however unfeigned -- of feelings and intentions, than in a verbal statement. If in fact Evolution developed expressions to undercut our attempts at manipulating other bald primates, by betraying our genuine emotions, then Go home, Evolution, You are drunk. Wouldn't it have been easier just to put blinking lights in our foreheads?

From Riddled Enterprises: Truth-Detecting Hat

You might also think that lie detectors are one of the most discredited promises of last century... between polygraphs being known as a shonky scam right from their onset, and the voice-stress analysis which has been the popular truth-sniffing grift of the last few years despite its failure at every empirical test, to the various brain-imaging mountebanks waiting in the wings with machines that go Ping, for their chance to measure activation in the Lie Centres... So the comparison with the pain-grimace study is not really doing the latter any favours. But that is why you are not paid to write for the Atlantic.

Coming soon: another paper from Bartlett et al., "How we convinced perfectly sensible laboratory volunteers to submerge their arms in ice-cold water for a minute, by telling them that it was For Research".

Also reassuring: the number of subjects who respond to the facial-muscle faradiser by their faces transforming into huge creepy mouths or single black Cyclopean eyes is not statistically significant.

The Metadata of Dorian Gray

Intrusive surveillance of the entire population was easier back in the days when magnetic tapes and punched Baudot-code ribbons were the media of mass data-storage, and could be presented as endearing anthropomorphic mascots to reconcile everyone to being monitored and recorded. No doubt you remember the marketing campaigns with the cartoons and the jingles and all (That click on the phone It's your digital clone!).


Coming up with an anthropomorphic mascot for petabyte disk drives is a lot harder. Or so we hear from friends.

τράγος γένειον ἆρα πενθήσεις σύ γε

It is time to draw a stand and take a line in the sand against modern sloppiness of language. The phrase is "on tenterhooks", people; not "on pins-and-needles"; the latter idiom is an ABOMINATION, a mis-hearing and misprision of "pins and needles" in the sense of parasthesia.

In addition, the descriptive term you are seeking for aggressive, uncompromising singlemindedness is "fire-eating". When 'Greenmantle' describes reckless gung-ho officers as "fire-eating young lunatics", when 'Gone with the Wind' addresses the hot-heads as "You fire-eating young bucks", John Buchan and Margaret Mitchell did not call them fire-breathing young lunatics and bucks, because they were not writing about crusty kerosene-reeking Carlsberg-elephant-drinking street artistes. You could look it up. Or better still, you could get Ngram to look it up for you.

Nor did Buchan, or Mitchell, or Lawrence Durrell have their characters describe impetuous extremism as "fire-fucking". Though even that would have made more sense.
Part of the blame for degrading the poetry of colloquial speech must fall upon one John Hawkins, American shouty person, given to smearing cliches and idioms together in a kind of conceptual Cuisinart, whose relationship to the English language is fraught at best and whose literary skills operate at the level of compiling laundry lists. Here's Hawkins in 2004:

Al Gore: The man who once claimed to have taken “the initiative in creating the Internet” on which you now read this column has transformed his image in the Democratic Party from that of a stiff Southern centrist to a fire-breathing, enraged, raging, anger-fueled, raging, rage-machine...

And a column from November 7, 2011

Romney 3.0: The fire breathing “conservative alternative” to John McCain who pretended like he was the reincarnation of Reagan?

Hawkins has a real thing about fire-breathing. Perhaps circus performers feature in his intimate fantasies. Or Godzilla.*
June 31, 2012

if Mitt Romney becomes the nominee and gets elected, some people seem to be hoping that he'll be the first Republican moderate to go to D.C. and turn into a fire-breathing conservative.

Jun 10, 2013

Romney is more of a moderate, establishment type, not a fire breathing bomb thrower.

Most recently (courtesy of Roy Edroso), Hawkins was compiling a list about clowns circus performance in the Mississippi Republican primary run-off election:

5 Reasons Mississippi Republicans Should Send Thad Cochran Packing Today

McDaniel is a fire-breathing, Tea Party-friendly conservative who has been endorsed by Sarah Palin, the Tea Party Express, Mark Levin, Laura Ingraham, Freedomworks, the Club for Growth, the Senate Conservatives Fund and Right Wing News (I wrote the endorsement) among many others.

Come to think of it, in the context of racist Mississippi politicians, the title "Fire-eater" has a specific meaning which could explain Hawkins' desire to avoid it.

* Updated with Bonus Godzilla because SCIENCE.

Selfie with Lion

H/t to BSpencer and Snarki son of Loki.
As any fule kno, tiger selfies require a Shriekback soundtrack for full effect.