"Clever tyrants are never punished."
~ Voltaire
How Much Wealth Does It Take to be Safe in the United States?
Pulitzer Prize winning journalist and illustrator Mona Chalabi’s new book is about wealth inequality in America. Ten Lives: How What We Have Shapes Who We Are (Amazon) follows ten people with ten different incomes, from the bottom 10% to the top 10% and everything in-between:
For five years, data journalist Mona Chalabi followed them all, documenting how wealth shaped their feelings, their choices, their identities, and their insecurities. She researched the data behind their taxes, groceries, inheritances, and so much more to understand the systems that keep people stuck. But then, she too found herself facing the same fears, when her mother’s sudden illness and subsequent medical bills threatened her own financial safety and made the questions she had been writing about all too real. How much money is enough? To live a “good” life? To protect the people you love in an emergency?
This looks great — Chalabi’s work is always worth a look. Shades of Studs Terkel and What Do People Do All Day crossed with Barbara Ehrenreich. Chalabi did a recent interview with It’s Nice That about the book.
Part of the message of the book is that class doesn’t show up enough in our intersectional identities, and that that’s fundamentally dishonest. I would hope that people read the book and then get much more fluent and comfortable with describing their current wealth and income, as well as the one that they grew up in. I think that’s kind of ambitious, but you never know.
Ten Lives is out today in the US.
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I discovered a sound that leaks your exact location (and it’s everywhere)
A YouTuber discovered that most videos contain inaudible background audio that can be geolocated by using airplane flight data: “This video examines the amount of location information carried by inaudible background sounds, using the Doppler effect to locate a reference recording within ~100m, and only needing (in some cases) less 1-min of audio. This video raises awareness of these capabilities and closes by discussing preventative measures one could take. Methodology:
Aircraft position, altitude, and velocity data were sourced from ADS-B data and filtered in Python using ICAO type-code classification for propeller vs jet types. For each candidate location on a 200m grid, the closest point of approach (CPA) and sound propagation delay were computed from 3D slant distance, using a digital elevation model (DEM).
Doppler curve spectrogram measurements constrained each event’s velocity and CPA slant distance. Candidates were then filtered by the 920-second offset between two flyovers, plus a silence constraint. The exact Doppler curve each candidate would hear was modelled, using emission-time radial velocity from interpolated ADS-B data. Modelled doppler curves were scored against the observed spectrogram using a locked two-event scoring method.
This corrected for measurement error on CPA time & fundamental frequency, while preserving the purely physics-derived temporal offset between the two events. The pipeline was repeated again for a single 1-min clip of known time, US-wide search, and again, successfully scored the true location 1st.
Lastly, preventative measures were assessed, including rationale behind why common signal processing fixes fail (high-pass filtering, drowning out, and phone call compression/noise reduction). This video is an educational demonstration of acoustics, signal processing, and data analysis using publicly available data. No code or tools are being released.”
