What Getting Curious Taught Jonathan Van Ness About … Everything
Originally posted in 2015 by Jonathan Van Ness on the Curious Curious podcast, What is the difference between Sunni and Shia Muslims and why do they not like each other? The then- gay Game of Thrones star spoke with the UCLA professor to resolve the long-running feud. The show was a modest success, but three years later, Van Ness appeared on Netflix as one of Care Eye's new Fab Five and suddenly became a favorite of millions of new fans.
Since then, Van Ness has written memoirs, children's books, and collections of essays; Nominated for several Emmy Awards; They spent time in DC pushing for LGBTQ+ rights. came out as non-binary and HIV positive; He began to see live shows that combined figure and gymnastics; And she even launched her own line of hair care products. He turned podcasts into Netflix shows.
But through it all, Van Ness still finds time for his podcast, dropping his 300th episode of Getting Curious last week. With topics ranging from fatphobia to UK biscuits, Van Ness hopes to cover any subject as long as it's his true passion. "In the United States, I was interested in how things could be like this and how we got to where we are now," Van Ness said. "I feel like I grew up on the show and learned most of what I know from recording this podcast."
Van Ness aims to share that learning by dividing his vast library of WIRED trivia into nine of his favorite episodes that he hopes will "draw more people to their side."
Van Ness . [Reporter] Meredith Broussard's work is something I really admire. Techno-chauvinism is generally the idea that machines know how to do things better than humans. This uses an example of automatic blind selection. It's fun to push a button and it goes up, but when it breaks, you can't fix it. If you have manual blinds you can just pull them up and down on strings and that will work just fine. It will be easy to repair.
He gives another relevant example of how police scanners or facial recognition systems cannot identify people who do not match their gender without algorithmic discrimination. Most of these algorithms are a reflection of the people who create them, and often the creators of these algorithms are men. People who create algorithms are not much different. Raising such questions in such venues is not encouraged and arguments are easily sidetracked.
So techno-chauvinism feeds into systems that affect our daily lives in very important ways. If you're in the TSA scanner, for example, you might skip the line because you're listed as a man, but you're wearing a long shirt, so you get applause that other people might not. , just because the algorithm doesn't know how to recognize small things that can be recognized by the human eye.
Van Ness . Tina Lacisi is an evolutionary biologist who studies the diversity of human hair, but also the evolution of how we got here, like the diversity of human hair and the scalp. In hairdressing school, why are curls wavy, why wavy, why straight hair... were all lies. That is not true either. In hair school they told us that if your hair was curly it would look like a bean. Curly hair looks like an oval, then straight hair looks perfectly round. But while they were working in the lab, they discovered all kinds of hair in all those shapes.
The scary thing is that all this wig science was used in crime scene investigations in the '80s and '90s, e.g. "Because this hair was there and in the shape of a bean, we know it's a black male." It's more of a mystery than that.
