2001/1/31
According to the latest Onion, teen-goth idol Marilyn Manson is now going door to door, trying desperately to shock Middle America.
"I just stood there thinking, now there's a boy who tries way too hard," Binford said. "I mean, come on: Homoerotic sacrilege went out in the late '90s."
Also, Alessandra Coletti, the 22-year-old mezzo-soprano sensation, who is said to be the finest opera singer of her generation, is control, is completely unknown amongst members of her generation.
The street finds its own uses for things: A German company has released a CD-ROM "sickness simulator", with profiles of 15 medical complaints, and instructions on how to fake them to get time off work. Doctors are not amused.
Egypt is rebuilding the fabled Library of Alexandria, razed in 632 by Caliph Omar, and by others before him. Though, the new library may be little more than a tourist trap; for one, Alexandria is not the cultural hub it was in the times of the ancients, and secondly, Egypt's Islamic censorship laws (which have already banned a number of authors from the library) may impair the library's credibility as an objective repository of learning from across the world.
2001/1/30
Yet another new Palm, this time the m505. It has colour and a faster 68000-based CPU, though it's still stuck with the woefully inadequate 160x160 screen. You'd think they would have upgraded it after all these years (especially with Microsoft's PDAs having higher-resolution screens)...
I suspect that when the time comes to upgrade my aging Pilot (not even a PalmPilot, except for the ROM), I'll probably go with a Psion. They're more powerful and seem to be well supported under Linux...
From July 1, the Victorian government will require the state's proliferation of Kennett-era gambling venues to have clocks and natural light. Why? Because gambling venues traditionally eliminate any cues as to what time it is outside, even to the point of keeping the air temperature and humidity constant, so that gamblers become disoriented, losing sense of time and suspending their better judgment. (Tellingly, similar techniques are used by interrogators to weaken prisoners' resolve.)
Swiss police came up with a good way to deal with those pesky dreadlocked Marxists: spraying them with manure. Unfortunately for them, the plans came unstuck when local farmers refused to sell them sufficient quantities of manure, partly because they themselves were no fans of corporate globalisation.
Napster to charge access fees, in order to pay royalties in the hope that the RIAA doesn't have its guts for garters. Wonder whether they'll do this by charging fees for usernames/passwords with the existing protocol, or by "de-commoditising" the protocol and forcing people to use the closed-source Windows client? (Hope it's not the latter; other than not being able to use a decent operating system, clients for proprietary protocols often take advantage of this to send marketable user information back to their masters.)
That's irritainment: Some months ago, the marketing department of the company that now runs the City Loop (that's the part of the Melbourne commuter railway that goes under the city centre) had the bright idea of piping canned music into the station PA systems, undoubtedly to give customers an illusion of better value for their (overpriced by other cities' standards) fares. So now they have canned music of the most bland sort (late-80s love ballads, boy-band R&B, and various easy-listening banalities which exist solely for this purpose) playing in the background, just loud enough to be annoying. Did I mention that the PA systems of the City Loop stations (which were built in the 1970s and 80s) cover every part of the stations uniformly?
Anyway, tonight at Museum Station (I refuse to call it after the shopping centre that bought naming rights), they had something playing which I would not have imagined would exist; namely an elevator-music cover of Lenny Kravitz' It Ain't Over Till It's Over. That's right, that chunk of manufactured 1960s hippie peace-and-love, circa 1990, made even more banal and kitschy, as if on some nutter's exquisitely ironic whim.
2001/1/29
Trainspotting/synchronicity: Was looking at the website of Piano Magic (a band well worth checking out, btw); according to their history, they were somewhat inspired by 4AD acts such as This Mortal Coil, Modern Lovers and Dead Can Dance (Artists' Rifles was recorded with at Woodbine Street Studios with John Rivers, who worked with DCD on The Serpent's Egg).
Seen on a mailing list: An artist named Nina Katchadourian has an interesting exhibit showing in a New York gallery. Viewers put popcorn into a machine, and as it pops, the sounds are recorded by a computer and translated from Morse Code, recording what each bag of popcorn "said". (via mediaculturebooks)
MIT neuroscientists show that laboratory rats dream of running mazes; not only that, but the same mazes which they ran whilst awake. The brain activity patterns are so similar, scientists could tell which part of the maze the rat is dreaming of.
The latest craze among young men in Islamic Fundamentalist-ruled Afghanistan is the Titanic haircut, so named as it's modelled on Pretty Boy DiCaprio's hair in the eponymous blockbuster. The Taliban rulers (who have banned Western clothing and the trimming of beards) are not amused, and have arrested dozens of barbers. (via Rebecca's Pocket)
Interesting software of the day: A watercolour simulator, which uses an array of "wet pixels" to model the effects of watercolour paint on paper; soon to be a GIMP plug-in. And since it's open source, you can see how it's done.
Who was Max Schreck? The actual identity of the Nosferatu actor whose name translates as "ultimate terror" is somewhat of a mystery, with some believing that he never existed, and the euphonious sobriquet was a pseudonym for another actor. Meanwhile, recent film Shadow of the Vampire capitalises on the mystery, suggesting that Schreck was an actual vampire.
A roundup of films shown at Sundance. The Believer looks interesting, as does Enigma.
Perhaps there is hope for Ireland, given the overwhelming indifference with which the prospect of an Irish Pope (the sternly conservative Archbishop of Dublin) was met. (Are condoms legally available in the Emerald Isle yet?) (link via Leviathan)
2001/1/28
A piece on the amazingly talented composer and vocalist Lisa Gerrard, who recently won an award for her score for Gladiator. I didn't know that her career started when she played at pubs in Brunswick Street (though I had heard that the first Dead Can Dance album was recorded in Belgrave, a few kilometres from where I used to live).
Manufacturing dissent: A good look at teen-angstcore band Limp Bizkit. Fronted by thirtysomething millionaire and Interscope senior vice president Fred Durst, probably the most conspicuously artificial, and meticulously engineered, example of consumerist rebellion, even more so than Marilyn Manson. Then again, this is an example of music as Hollywood spectacle, any resemblance to real life being purely coincidental, and should not be mistaken for music as sincere expression. Oh, the postmodernism of it all.
I went to the Empress to see some bands tonight. First up was a guy named Other People's Children, with a Korg monosynth and some backing tracks on MiniDiscs, playing various ambient electronic pieces. Next up was PSX, a sort of jazzy semi-electronic band (whom I saw supporting Clann Zú last week); their female vocalist was absent (having come down with bronchitis), so the male vocalist took over some of her parts, and they also played a number of instrumentals. Finally, on came a band named Immaculata, and in one instant, the venue filled up with the vampyre aristocracy of Melbourne. Immaculata are a sort of slightly camp two-piece goth band, who sound as you might expect (a bit of cheesy Boxcaresque synthpop, a few Depeche Mode-inspired dirges with kickass beats, some industrial thrashcore guitars, some melodramatic music-hall-style singing from the bloke in the ruffled shirt and studded leather jacket, and a song about gunning down jocks and preppies in high school (or something to that effect); though Andrew Eldritch-style baritone vocals were conspicuous by their absence). Anyway, I got the feeling that they were taking the piss; especially after they did a cover of Divine's You Think You're A Man. Quite appropriate; I think someone should do a Goth Tribute To Stock/Aitken/Waterman (unless Cleopatra have already released one of those, with the typical contributions from Leaetherstrip and various aging synthpopsters).
Oh great; soon we'll have disposable paper mobile phones clogging up the landfills and leaching toxic chemicals into the water table. As if one way to get cancer from mobile phones wasn't enough.
2001/1/27
Another alternative Tube map. Somehow I doubt there will be many reputable Mornington Crescent games played on this one...
A blog item I feel compelled to steal in its entirety from Jim: Mark "Zompist" Rosenfelder's site, brimming with fascinating stuff about language and culture, including a piece comparing Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, how to write the numbers 1 to 10 in over 4,500 languages, how to tell if you're American, English, French or German (among other nationalities), and the marvellous Yingzi, a hypothetical ideographic script, modelled on Chinese, for the English language.
Kudos to Verio; the giant ISP has refused to remove a web site, Cryptome, which was allegedly hosting the DVD decrypting software DeCSS (ruled illegal under the DMCA; currently under appeal).
2001/1/26
Apologies for this blog's absence last night; something went down upstream and the machine where it's hosted was inaccessible. Anyway, I had occasion to be at PolyEster Records last night, and picked up Saint Etienne's most recent CD, Sound of Water. I'm listening to it now; it's very good. I was persuaded to buy it after hearing the 9-minute triptych How We Used To Live on 3RRR, though was half expecting the rest of it to be slavish Swingin'-Sixties retro (sort of like Mono's Formica Blues or something), which mercifully it is not; instead you get lush, many-layered, evolving soundscapes with a classic pop feel, and lyrics mentioning things you'd never expect, like space exploration. Well worth checking out.
A number of eminent figures, among them Marvin Minsky, Brian Kernighan (of C fame) and Richard Stallman, have filed an amicus brief in defense of DeCSS. The brief may be found here. Good luck to them; though I can see this argument getting summarily thrown out on grounds of chutzpah, even before the legal-fee bidding war with Hollywood starts.
Life imitates cyberpunk scifi; or at least this account of the cat-and-mouse game between digital satellite TV company DirecTV and rogue hackers, does. It even reads like a story; the hackers kept cracking DirecTV's cards, one by one, but ultimately were defeated with cunning and no small measure of style. (via Slashdot)
2001/1/25
They're making a film about Manchester's Factory Records, with actors playing members of New Order. This should be interesting.
Tonight (well, last night, to be technical), I went to a Burmese restaurant in St. Georges Rd. for dinner. On a ledge above the front window was a bookshelf-sized stereo speaker, from which played music, apparently of a traditional Burmese genre. The music consisted of a flutelike instrument of some sort, playing a sequence of notes (seemingly random, though not dissonant), and alternately speeding up and slowing down. For a moment I thought it was some sort of minimal electronica, possibly on Warp or from some small German label.
Yet more hackers, this time from France, have cracked SDMI, and this time done what legitimate academics in the U.S. wouldn't dare; namely published a report, giving the technical details. Get it before the Men In Black are sent in.
Slouching towards Gilead: Seemingly buoyed by the religious-Right's bloodless coup d'etat in the U.S., and the inauguration of George W. "pro-life unless they've already been born" Bush, members of the British Conservative shadow cabinet are calling for a ban on abortion; seemingly in the hope that the local fundamentalist vote will help them win power.
New Onion: Vacationing Woman Thinks Cats Miss Her:
Hoping to ease the pain and loneliness of her asocial, predatory pets, Davrian has left numerous long messages on her answering machine, claiming that the cats will appreciate hearing her voice. She also wrapped one of her sweaters around a pillow before leaving so Buttons and Bonkers would 'have a bit of me to snuggle with,' unaware that the cats' motivation for 'snuggling' is to maintain body temperature, not to feel emotionally connected to their food provider.
Only in America, where Christianity and Consumerism collide head-on, spawning numerous mutant offspring, could there possibly be something called the Golgotha Fun Park. (via Hobbsblog II)
2001/1/24
Seen on a mailing list: Athletic lifestyle product company Nike has a promotion, in which customers can have shoes made imprinted with any word they choose. One customer ordered a pair of Nikes with the word "SWEATSHOP"; not surprisingly, Nike cancelled the order, mumbling something about it being "offensive slang".
Cognoscenti in Greece are indignant about computers corrupting their language, causing it to degenerate into "Greeklish", written in the Latin alphabet and borrowing from English. Meanwhile, some Spaniards are reportedly using linguistic forms directly copied from English, rather than their own more brief forms. The Register article above also gives an example of "Singlish", the dialect of English spoken in Singapore (which one can encounter in Australian universities with large numbers of overseas students; I once saw a sign in a lab which read "This computer broken lah"), and, for good measure, to bizarre pseudo-English on Japanese product packaging.
WIRED correspondent Andy Patrizio had spent a lot of time playing the popular multi-user fantasy role-playing game EverQuest, though all his characters had been male. Then he decided to play a female character, and noticed how the other characters treated him differently when he was a "she".
Curiouser and curiouser: Narconon, a vaguely sinister "drug treatment" programme, which seems to be the bastard offspring of Scientology and U.S. penological practice, has allegedly ripped off an entire popular web site to make its own, only replacing the text with its own, and adding a "dob in a friend" page. Or so the Reg says.
2001/1/23
Patently absurd: An enterprising American company is giving the Russians who patented the bottle a run for their money; Menusaver Inc. has patented sandwiches with the crusts cut off (U.S. Patent 6,004,596), and is suing a catering company/restaurant for infringement.
Apparently if I was American, my name would be Brandon Adams. Unless I was a Black Muslim, of course, in which case I'd be named Raheem. (via Julia Tenney's page of name generators.)
Emily Hofstetter, CEO of female tech enterpreneurs' site SiliconSalley.com, was in the shower when she came up with a novel (if slightly silly) way to protest Bush's "election". (Streaming audio)
Surprise, surprise: In one of his first acts as US President, George W. Bush signs an executive order blocking federal funding to international agencies which support womens' rights to abortion.
Anonymity is useless; your language patterns are as unique as your DNA, and words serve as a memetic sample that can be used to identify the author. Or so says Don Foster, the English Literature professor and investigator who identified the author of Clintonian roman à clef Primary Colors, helped track down the Unabomber from his writings and proved that a forgotten poem had been written by Shakespeare. Foster is the author of a new book titled Author Unknown, which (judging from the review) looks fascinating.
An interesting article on the Linux 2.4 Netfilter system, which allows you to do some neat things; such as stateful firewalling, enhanced packet logging and so on.
Two albums I have been listening to recently have been Low's I Could Live In Hope (ta, Oliver!) and Piano Magic's superbly introspective Artists' Rifles. I just found out that Low and Piano Magic, along with an act called Transient Waves, recorded a single in 1998 titled Sleep At The Bottom. Only available on 7", though, and I don't have a turntable (I know, I know, and I dare call myself a trainspotter...) Though some kind villain has probably napsted a copy by now; not that I would encourage such nefarious acts...
Last evening I went to see the film Show Me Love (the Swedish independent film; original title: Fucking Åmål; and no, it wasn't named after Chasing Amy, despite the Sapphic theme present in both; Åmål is a Swedish regional city, and "fucking" is used as an adjective). Anyway, it was a most enjoyable film; a teen coming-of-age comedy, though not in the Hollywood schlock tradition, and with more credible characters. A much recommended feel-good movie, if you're not allergic to subtitles.
Welcome to the Digital Millennium: John "gnu" Gilmore has written an excellent piece about what's wrong with content protection, and the myriad schemes and power-grabs hatched by back-room conspiracies of entertainment and computer industry figures to deprive you of your legitimate, legal rights:
Intel touts the wonders of their TCPA (Trusted Computing Platform Architecture)... It exists to report to record companies about whether you have installed any software that lets you make copies of MP3s, or any free software to circumvent whatever feeble copy-protection system the record company uses.
SDMI would not allow EFF to join its deliberations, saying that we had no legitimate interest in the proceedings because we weren't a music company or a manufacturer. There are no consumer or civil rights representatives in the SDMI consortium.
What is wrong is that we have invented the technology to eliminate scarcity, but we are deliberately throwing it away to benefit those who profit from scarcity. ..
If by 2030 we have invented a matter duplicator that's as cheap as copying a CD today, will we outlaw it and drive it underground? So that farmers can make a living keeping food expensive, so that furniture makers can make a living preventing people from having beds and chairs that would cost a dollar to duplicate, so that builders won't be reduced to poverty because a comfortable house can be duplicated for a few hundred dollars?
A look at some of the dirty tricks used to get web pages into search engine listings they would otherwise not appear in (with the sort of drily humorous photos/captions that have been appearing in many recent BBC stories):
Webmasters make thousands of these pages that differ enough to make the indexer think they are unique, and all point to the one that the webmaster wants you to see... Often these "bridge" pages are "cloaked" so you never see it but get bounced to another - usually the main page that the hidden one points to.
Not surprisingly, a lot of fingers point at the porn industry, which is not known for playing by the rules.
2001/1/22
Ryan Lum of Love Spirals Downwards' new act call themselves Lovespirals, and are working on a new album. From some of the MP3s I've heard, it's one I'm eagerly awaiting (though it may not be out until 2002). Meanwhile, there are lots of MP3s of Love Spirals Downwards, Lum and Suzanne Perry's æthereal/dreampop/shoegazer act.
Authorities in devoutly Catholic Peru have found an ingenious means of deterring people from dumping rubbish in the streets of Lima: by painting images of Jesus Christ and the BVM on walls.
Today's Grouse site is a list of variously nefarious prank ideas, all of them utilising scientific principles:
A truck-mounted device spits a row of paint dots under computer control. Drive along the Interstate while printing out political diatribes. Make our highways look like a Newsgroup. Use high-pressure water sprays instead of paint for temporary, less illegal road gibberish. Can you be arrested for CLEANING little spots on the highway? Colored dyes would work well on packed snowy roads (a little carbon copier toner or fluorescene dye goes a long way.) Rent out ad space in fields near airports, then do your printing in seeds for variously colored crops.
The "Cyranoid" idea is quite thought-provoking as well.
Another possibly useful piece of software: JSynthLib, a GPLed synth patch librarian written in Java; believed to run under Windows, MacOS and Linux. It has support for a number of synths, though the Roland JP-8000 isn't one of them (yet). It also has an interesting-looking "cross-breeding" function.
If blog names were band names (via Pearls)
(The Null Device sounds like the name of a ketamine trance act from San Francisco or Vancouver or somewhere, possibly founded by dot-com staff. Though there is an industriogothic synthpop band by that name on mp3.com.)
More details on Bandai's Love By Email "virtual girlfriend" service, which operates through Japan's "i-Mode" mobile phone system:
Progress is measured on a chart that shows how many of the woman's 52 secrets the man has been able to uncover and what percentage of her heart he has won. At the end of the relationship, which can last from one to three months, a successful lover will be given an everlasting commitment of love. An insufficiently attentive suitor is dismissed as a creep.
Bandai had a similar service for women, named My Prince Charming, but it was unsuccessful, attracting only 1,000 subscribers in its first three days. By comparison, Love By Email has more than 30,000 subscribers.
2001/1/21
Speaking of historical railway maps, here is an archive of maps of the Victorian Railways network, by decade. Fascinating; now I know that the Fitzroy line closed sometime in the 1980s, and the branch line to East Kew (which once linked Oakleigh to Fairfield or somesuch, around 100 years ago; not to be confused with the Kew one) was closed in the 1950s sometime. Though there is no trace of the rumoured railway line which ran from Elsternwick to Oakleigh or somewhere like that.
(I have been interested in historical maps for some time; since I started looking through a 1970s-vintage Melway street directory which had belonged to my late stepfather, probably from back when he was a features editor at the Herald. Unfortunately, this book has since been lost, some time before when I became curious about the dismantled railway lines of Melbourne.)
Vintage London Underground maps. Useful for the historically curious or Mornington Crescent players.
Australia now has its own religious "miracle". Not quite the Blessed Virgin Mary in a tortilla, but a cross of light has appeared in a frosted window in the small central Victorian town of Baringhup. The killjoys from the Australian Skeptics, always eager to pour the cold water of reason onto outbursts of religious mania, say it is an illusion caused by the refraction of light; though that probably won't stop the pilgrims from coming to behold the sign of (the end of the world / the glorious new age / the Second Coming / whatever).
Believers will point out that dozens of identical crosses of light have been mysteriously appearing all over the world in the past decade or so, which must be a sign of a greater force sending a message to the faithful, rather than a simple natural phenomenon. Though one could equally ask why any greater intelligence worth its salt would bother putting glowing light-refraction crosses onto windows, images of the BVM onto automobile mufflers, and so on, unless it finds the reactions of the credulous entertaining.
Belgium to legalise cannabis. Mind you, sale will still be illegal, so Belgian stoners will have to go to the Netherlands to buy the stuff legally, or else grow their own. Of course, in 10 years, when C. sativa has been rendered extinct by U.S. Government-developed biological weapons (along with whatever ecological collateral damage they cause), it won't matter.
Interesting software of the day: AMACDYS: a MP3 player on a boot image, which may be used for making bootable MP3 CDs which don't need an operating system.
2001/1/20
Retrocomputing meets chindogu: Someone in the UK is designing an updated ZX Spectrum compatible, using only off-the-shelf parts. The SpeccyBOB, as he calls it, will be mostly Spectrum compatible, though will have 4Mb of RAM and an IDE hard disk interface. Watch the web site for circuit diagrams and such.
An amusing look at Hollywood mating rituals, written in the language of anthropology. (via Found)
Tonight I went to the Punters Club and saw Clann Zú. I must say the show was terrific; they played with great energy and enthusiasm. The music is hard to categorise, alternating between aethereal ambience and walls of noise. Some of their songs were reminiscent of Dead Can Dance, The Paradise Motel and My Bloody Valentine; though the set included a track verging on industrial metal, an a capella traditional Irish ballad, and some live drum & bass. Anyway, Clann Zú playing at the Dan O'Connell this Sunday, and are well worth seeing. They also have a CD out, available from the gig.
The support band (well, the one I saw), PSX, is also pretty good; sort of jazzy chill-out music.
Source code to early C compilers, as found on old Bell Labs PDP/11 tapes by computer archaeologists. (via the Reg)
2001/1/19
Oh dear: Not content with importing Australian dross (as it usually does with great enthusiasm), Britain is making its own version of Popstars, the TV show in which a throwaway pop band is manufactured before your very eyes, going on to dominate the charts for a while, and then disappear with a whimper of apathetic shopping-centre appearances.
Future prediction: Eager to shake off their throwaway boy-band image and escape the built-in obsolescence of manufactured teen-pop, the Backstreet Boys take a leaf out of Radiohead's book and release an album of top-40-unfriendly, 6+-minute experimental noodlings, hiring the likes of Richard James and Mark Bell (of Björk fame) for production. It flops and gets about as much critical acclaim as Vanilla Ice's rap-metal makeover (despite being plugged by industry marketing shills), at the same time alienating their fan base. The group sinks without a trace not long after that. The album, soon deleted, becomes a collector's item amongst the more eristically-inclined obscurantist trainspotters (the ones who have Rump's Hating Brenda, Pat Boone's In A Metal Mood and Pee Wee Ferris' commercial-dance take on Blue Monday in their collections)
Stranger than fiction: The Iraqi government has pledged to donate US$94 million to help America's poor. Perhaps they should have sent election observers to Florida instead?
Something may be happening with the the rumoured Transmetropolitan movie; whether it appears as a movie or something else is unknown, but apparently an agreement has been signed with a "famous and well-respected actor".
Poetic justice? A division of UUNet, the Internet carrier which seems to be the source of most of the spam on the Net these days, has been brought to its knees by a flood of spam. More than a million users of Pipex, a British ISP owned and operated by UUNet, have been unable to receive email for the past week, and have been told by UUNet to make alternative arrangements (presumably up to and including finding another ISP?). A UUNet spokesweasel has said that there was a chance that the spam was sent by accident, and that anyone capable of sending that much must have had "pretty sophisticated hacking skills" -- a line rapidly debunked by anti-spam activists, who pointed out that any semiliterate trailer trash could buy a point-and-grunt program which could spew their spam onto the Internet by the million.
2001/1/18
Your next computer will be a trusted client: Academics and legal scholars are claiming that copy control technologies deprive consumers of legitimate rights. The technologies in question include Microsoft's Product Activation technology (which will require new Windows installations to be registered and activated from Redmond), CPRM (hardware copy control coming to your next hard disk) and SDMI. Some are calling for amendments to copyright laws giving consumers more fair-use rights. Mind you, given that this is just a bunch of bleeding-heart leftists in ivory towers, with no "soft money" to donate to election campaigns, this will probably be given as much heed in the Real World as other academic proposals (such as equation formatting in HTML 3.0).
Windows exile tip: if you, like me, are used to having multiple virtual desktops (X window managers certainly spoil you in that way), and find yourself marooned on a Wintendo NT machine or similar, there is a quite decent free virtual desktop program named multiDesk 2001. Thankfully it doesn't succumb to any of the major Windows vices: it's not nagging shareware, not a time-limited demo and doesn't show ads.
Welcome to the Dark Ages: According to New Scientist, when Bush is sworn in, we will see Reagan-style military spending, oil drilling in national parks, and an end to research that offends Christian Fundamentalists, such as stem cell research and AIDS research (after all, AIDS is a divine punishment for evildoers, and it is not Man's business to interfere in the Lord's doing), whilst diverting funds from tropical disease research to "diseases of the rich", such as cancer and heart disease.
Oh yes; there is a new Fontomas font out (#19: "Oldphart"), and it looks interesting, in a T-26esque grunge sort of way. (Btw, is grunge typography still more of a going movement than grunge rock (Silverchair notwithstanding), or is it too mid-90s?)
If you've been wondering the depths TV producers would go to to attract sensation-jaded channel surfers; upping the ante on "reality TV" is a new show from Fox (the network which also did the massively successful Who Wants To Marry A Multimillionaire) is called Temptation Island:
The premise: Four real-life couples (described by Fox as "unmarried but seriously committed") are put on an island off the coast of Belize, along with 26 attractive single people. During a two-week separation, each member of a couple selects three of the seductive singles for a series of dates.
As you can imagine, the guardians of morality are decrying it vocally, denouncing it as a sign of the decline and fall of Western civilisation. Which means it will probably be a smashing success. Perhaps they can do a follow-up show with Jerry Springer?
DivX, the video compression technology which promises to be to video what MP3 is to music, is going open-source. Which may mean no more need for Windows codecs for playing DivX films under Linux. That is, if it isn't sued into oblivion for patent infringement.
Can TV make you fat? An Irish politician has accused shows such as The Simpson and GenY branded-lifestyle promo Friends of promoting unhealthy diets and eating habits by example.
2001/1/17
A study of high-school science textbooks in the US has shown that they are riddled with errors; these range from incorrectly stating Newton's first law of physics to showing the Equator as passing through the southern United States. This will undoubtedly hearten the Bush administration, allowing them to placate their Christian Fundamentalist support base by pushing to make science textbooks consistent with Creationist cosmologies (i.e., removing anything that implies that the Earth is more than 6,000 years old), whilst arguing to more secular voters concerned about education that the changes will have a minimal impact on scientific literacy. (via Leviathan)
Setting the record straight: The Backstreet Boys, long a favourite of 13-year-old girls everywhere, are not a boyband. According to band member Kevin Richardson, they are a "vocal harmony group", who have a lot to say in their songs (a case in point being their latest song, about a boy breaking a date with his girlfriend). Now aren't you glad that's clear.
I just found a copy of Jeff Noon's latest, Cobralingus, imported, in Slow Glass Books. At a cursory glance, it looks pretty interesting; it's a thought experiment in running language through a linguistic mixing deck or computer program (not a real machine, of course, as it takes human language skills, but a hypothetical one) and applying various processes of transformation to it until a new text emerges that one is satisfied with. I'll write more once I've read it.
After the collapse of communism and the triumph of liberal capitalism, a number of formerly conservative thinkers (of the market-liberal stripe; reactionary religious demagogues don't really count as 'thinkers') have been turning away from 'free market' doctrines; these include ex-Thatcherite John Gray and former Reagan advisor Edward Luttwak, both now vehemently denouncing capitalist fundamentalism, though (at the same time) not exactly lining up behind the new wave of McDonalds-trashing Marxists:
Americans[, Gray writes,] suffer from "levels of inequality" that "resemble those of Latin American countries." The middle class enjoys the dubious charms of "assetless economic insecurity that afflicted the nineteenth-century proletariat." The United States stands perilously close to massive social disruption, which has been held at bay only "by a policy of mass incarceration" of African Americans and other people of color. "The prophet of today's America," Gray claims, "is not Jefferson or Madison.... It is Jeremy Bentham"--the man who dreamed of a society "reconstructed on the model of an ideal prison."`
He used to think that the free market arose spontaneously and that state control of the economy was unnatural. But watching Jeffrey Sachs and the International Monetary Fund in Russia, he could not help but see the free market as "a product of artifice, design and political coercion." It had to be created, often with the aid of ruthless state power... Gray believes that "Marxism-Leninism and free-market economic rationalism have much in common." Both, he writes, "exhibit scant sympathy for the casualties of economic progress." There is only one difference: Communism is dead.
Luttwak affirms, "I believe that one ought to have only as much market efficiency as one needs, because everything that we value in human life is within the realm of inefficiency -- love, family, attachment, community, culture, old habits, comfortable old shoes."
(via Robot Wisdom)
From the Onion, this update on actor and professional Australian Paul Hogan's dynamic career:
Continuing nine years of such efforts, Australian actor Paul Hogan pitched a Crocodile Dundee Saturday-morning cartoon to Fox Family Channel executives Tuesday. "In Crocodile Dundee & His Outback Gang, Dundee would travel the world in a hot-air balloon, having adventures with his outback pals Kenny Koala and J. Wellington Wallaby," Hogan told the executives.
Also, corpse reanimation technology is still 10 years away, according to mad scientists from Stanford and MIT.
Salon has an interesting article on urban exploration, namely the activity of exploring abandoned buildings, tunnels and other parts of the urban environment where one is not meant to go. (via Slashdot)
Are we beset by a bevy of new mental illnesses, or is that a consequence of psychiatrists and pharmaceutical companies medicalising the human condition, coming up with things such as "general anxiety disorder"?
There was even a proposal, put forward recently in the British Medical Journal, that happiness should be classified as a "mental disorder". Thankfully, it was a joke, intended to satirise the fact that what previous generations would have thought of as simple unhappiness can now be defined as one of a range new-fangled psychiatric conditions...
Having failed to come up with cures for what he describes as "serious" diseases such as cancer and dementia, Dr Le Fanu says the pharmaceutical industry switched its attention to what he calls "lifestyle" problems - unhappiness, obesity, baldness and forgetfulness.
But can the medical industry bear all the blame, or is this phenomenon a natural byproduct of a modern consumerist culture of instant gratification? Can we really expect a normal person from a culture of home-delivered fast food and channel surfing to develop a stoic resilience to life's ups and downs, rather than popping a pill to make everything alright?
In Britain, the latest martyr in the battle against assimilation into a homogeneous Eurostate (undoubtedly a plot by those dastardly French), is Sunderland grocer Steven Thoburn, to be tried for refusing to use metric units, as mandated by a European Union directive. If convicted, he faces a criminal record and a £2000 fine. Mr. Thoburn has support, though, from the anti-federalist movement. Good luck, and let those garlic-eating foreigners do their worst!
The Australian government's new direction in drug policy: a Reagan-style war on drugs, focusing on the evils of marihuana (the weed with roots in Hell). Wonder whether this will lead to mandatory minimum sentences for drug offenses, overturning of decriminalisation in South Australia or US-style civil forfeiture laws. Given how Howard was eager to use UN treaties to crush "harm-minimisation" proposals that he saw as "soft on drugs" (whilst later threatening to withdraw from UN treaties if those meddling bleeding-hearts didn't shut up about the government's treatment of the Aborigines), I would not be the least bit surprised.
2001/1/16
Another religious boycott over the issue of homosexuality -- though this time Reform Jewish leaders in the U.S. are urging parents to withdraw their kids from the Boy Scouts -- because the Boy Scout movement excludes gays. Reform Judaism, representing 40% of American Jews, has liberal views on sexuality and ordains openly gay men and women. (via Rebecca's Pocket)
Speaking of curmudgeonly commentators, Julie Burchill has a theory as to why some younger women are attracted to older men: it's not so much their money, but because they're sexually past their prime and uninterested.
Tanya and friends on why they hate indie kids. Quite apt, too.
All indie kids are unique. They are however looking for other indie kids who are unique in exactly the same way as them - cool, huh?
Infantilism is endemic to the indie kids. When was the last time you heard one of them use the word 'man' or 'woman'. Nope, it's always 'boys' and 'girls'. Some girls are 'cute'. Some boys are 'cute' too. The more incurable indie kids use the words 'grrrl' and - shudder - 'boi', for all the world as if they were living in a Disneyworld 1994 Experience ride or fell into a copy of Sassy once and never escaped.
When indie kids pair off with a cute grrrl or boi (all indie kids are in theory bisexual, of course. Just don't ask them to do anything about it.) they tend to treat each other like shit and then write it up on their web pages ("I am SUCH the geek"). This is because they are very sensitive, not as the casual observer might have guessed because they are emotional dwarves with no concept of human interaction outside a fanzine problem page. You become sensitive by listening to Belle And Sebastian a lot.
Oddly enough, if you took this article, replaced "indie" with "goth" and made a few minor changes, it would make just as much sense. Maybe indie kids and goths are both subtypes of a greater category of pretentious, crowd-following tossers?
It is now believed that the much-hyped earth-shattering mystery invention namd "Ginger" is nothing more than a new type of motorised scooter. It's not a free energy device, nor a personal nanoassembler, nor even a jetpack. Sort of proves the old adage about the amount of hype something gets being inversely proportional to its significance, doesn't it?
Welcome to the Digital Millennium: Edward Felten, the Princeton computer scientist who broke the recording industry's much-vaunted SDMI watermarking scheme, has decided to withhold details, on advice that publishing them would be a crime under the DMCA. So much for the free exchange of ideas.
A religious-right group in the UK, claiming to have one million members, want to ban sex-change surgery, instead mandating "holistic" (faith-based?) treatments for the "spiritual and mental health" of those who believe they're in the wrong body. (via Unknown News)
A 10-point post mortem on the dot-com boom, or why you no longer have a job:
2)Their businesses made no sense
4)They assumed more money was in the pipeline
8)Your company was a cult
10)There were too many of you
(thanks, Toby)
The diary of "Adrienne", a homeless junky in San Francisco, as transcribed from a found notebook by the finder. (via Found)
I started at my new job today. Well, I showed up, got my account, did some running around and logged in from the visitors' room, as my office does not yet exist. One annoyance: the place I work at has a strict no-Linux policy for networked workstations, so I may have to make do with a (shudder) Windows NT machine; and they don't even have a site-licensed X server for their NT workstations. (The stock answer to the question of accessing X from NT is "use VNC".)
2001/1/15
Scare mem of the day: Preliminary evidence has emerged linking mobile phone use to eye cancer.
Recruitment agencies in the UK are using a novel tactic to lure applicants for IT jobs: namely hiring prostitutes to tempt them.
2001/1/14
People who cannot get up in the morning may not be lazy, but carriers of a genetic mutation -- a mutation which may be adaptive for a post-agrarian world. (writing this at 4.28am)
re: the Morrissey/Diana thing: it gets better. The author of the conspiracy theory posted this description of his life so far. If this is not a carefully thought out hoax, then he is quite an exemplar of psychoceramicity. (Pity he can't afford to get his theory published as a book; it would look great on my bookshelf, right next to Jack the Ripper: Light-Hearted Friend).
Did miserablist pop band The Smiths foretell the death of Diana back in the 1980s, in lyrics, cover artwork and release details? This somewhat psychoceramic page claims so. (via NtK)
Some speculation on what IT might be. Could the mysterious, allegedly revolutionary invention be a personal jetpack? A robot dog? Or a means of downloading pizza?
The NSA have released details of a top-secret encrypted digital telephony system, used by the Allies in WW2. The system used two turntables to hold the encryption key on vinyl records, synchronised with a clock two orders of magnitude more accurate than a modern consumer CD player. Some implementation details are still missing, though (such as the sampling rate used, the speed and capacity of the vinyl records, &c); though nonetheless, this is rather impressive.
2001/1/13
I noticed a number of Fight Club references in the latest issue of Transmetropolitan (#42)... "Use (Tyler) Soap"; "Durden Demolitions"; Heh.
Things to do in Melbourne: This Monday evening, Splodge, the freeish movie screening night at the Empress Hotel, will be showing a number of cool-looking shorts, including Powers of Ten, which appears to be an animation zooming between levels of scale, from atoms to galaxies, and Buñuel and Dali's surrealist film Un Chien Andalou.
Apple's new G4 Macs will contain something called the SuperDrive. No, not the old 3.5" floppy drive which could read and write any disk format, but rather a DVD recorder, with software for making your own movies. So can those scurrilous scurvy dog hax0rs find it useful for pirating DVDs? Yes and no. No, because, firstly, recordable DVDs cannot contain CSS encrypted content (the session key area is pre-burned with zeroes), so copying an encrypted DVD disc image would yield garbage. They could always find a copy of DeCSS (possession a criminal offense in most WIPO treaty signatory nations, and given the USDOJ's new computer search guidelines, you don't want to be caught with a copy of DeCSS when you take your laptop through U.S. Customs; I've heard federal prisons are pretty nasty places to be) and decrypt the disc into a nice, unprotected, easily copied format, but then they would come up against the slight problem that recordable discs can only hold 4.7Gb, less than many feature films. Having said that, one could imagine some nefarious fiends starting a business pirating music videos or TV show episodes (once recordable DVDs come down in price considerably, that is).
More positively, 4.7Gb would be enough space for a not-overbearingly-long indie film (I suspect something on the level of Clerks would fit with room to spare); so once we see DVD pressing plants that can duplicate from DVD-ROM discs, we may see a new wave of independent movies in a convenient, inexpensive format (as DVDs should not be much more expensive to duplicate than CDs).
2001/1/12
Linux DVD resources: UDF FS patches, Linux DVD/DXR2 howto. People are also working on support for the DXR3 decoder card, though this seems to be embryonic. (And no, I don't know anything about DeCSS, and if I did, I would lie through my teeth about it.)
Well, I didn't find my Nokia 5110 (presumably now exchanged for heroin and on its way to some GSM-using country where Australian stolen-phone registries aren't valid), though I did go to the Telstra Shop and almost got a new 3210. Almost, because the system that handles SIM cards was down this afternoon, and so I wasn't able to get a SIM card made up. However, Telstra did waive the card replacement fee and the contract termination fee, so I will have a new phone essentially for free.
So now I have a Nokia 3210, sans SIM card, being charged, and will hopefully get the card tomorrow.
Picking up the latest virulent meme (via
Monsieur Le Scum, who else), here is my
Stor Trooper GIF.
A rather crude likeness, within the constraints of the wardrobe (they have
no black T-shirts without goth band logos and no decent paisley shirts (only
the Hawaiian number I was forced to cover with a jacket); and I won't even
mention the lack of a decent green velvet suit). Though it will probably
appear in the gallery.
(Aside: how come Stor has a Base and Goth wardrobe and no others. No Raver wardrobe? No Hippie/Feral/Crusty/alternative? No Sci-Fi Geek? No Indie Kid With Mod Delusions? I do get the feeling that Stor are one of those enterprises organised along the lines of the tech-savvy-goth-clique business model, sort of like Dimension X and Netizen and such. The hinted-at ontology, dividing the world into Goths and Normals, sort of gives away the likely contents of their office MP3 server.)
Btw, I reckon that Graham does look rather like one of the members of Blur on the cover of their best-of CD.
Pfaknok! I lost my mobile phone today. From what I gather, it may have fallen out of my pocket on an Epping-line train, or a tram, or may have been left in one of the shops I visited along the way. It was not responding when I called it, which may mean it's switched off in a lost property office (or that some scumbag is using it to make drug deals). It has been reported and its serial number placed on a register, so if you're thinking of pawning it to buy heroin, you're probably out of luck. Anyway, I had 3 months remaining on the contract, so paying it out and getting a new one will cost me $36. Assuming I don't find it, I'll probably get a new one (perhaps a Nokia 3210, with programmable ringtones).
2001/1/11
With the recent Tom Hanks vehicle Cast Away, Hollywood have taken product placement into a new era. The film is so much a propagandistic showcase for FedEx's corporate values that the company's internal memoes have promoted it in glowing terms.
The film begins with a rather gratuitous tour of the company's Russian operation... The subplot, which has nothing to do with ensuing events and is dropped once Hanks returns to the company's Memphis hub, seems to be that, though Federal Express would rather employ workaholics than drunks, Russia remains open for business, and FedEx is leading the way... Along the way, we're treated to a loving, if incidental, telling of the company's first night in operation in 1973.
However, product placement has been big business in Hollywood for some time:
In 1982, the Rogers and Cowan Agency successfully placed an ad for Reese' Pieces in E.T., and Coca-Cola, which had just bought Columbia Pictures, began a frantic plugging of its products in the studio's films... Black & Decker paid twenty-thousand dollars to have Bruce Willis use their drill in a Die Hard movie, then sued for a hundred-and-fifty grand when the scene was cut. Similarly, Reebok won a ten-million dollar settlement from Trimark pictures when an entire Reebok ad, which was meant to run over the closing credits of Jerry MacGuire, was deleted.
But it's also true that it's becoming increasingly harder to make mid-and-big-budget films that advertisers might shy away from, or treat subjects marketing men consider outside the pale. On one level, film characters are deprived of the free-will audiences need to believe in if they are to believe they're watching a character and not a cartoon. On another, knowledge on the viewer's part that deception is part and parcel of the movie-going experience makes it hard to maintain the suspension of disbelief movies rely on: Hence, movies rely less on believable situations than eye-popping explosions, which cost money to make and market, which encourages more product placement, ad infinitum.
Perhaps in a few years there will be an Oscar for "Best Product Placement"...
Video games as navigational metaphors: A German Internet company named COM has a impressive Flash-based web interface modelled on Marble Madness (or perhaps the similar Commodore/Spectrum game Bobby Bearing). Now there's a worthwhile use of Flash, along with a regular interface for the non-Flash people. (Hint hint, tDR)
Linux desktop project Helix Code has changed its name... to "Ximian"; one of those generic, meaningless yet high-tech-sounding names that can be easily trademarked. Though it could be worse; they could have been "Ximient" or something. Now all they need is one of those high-tech orbital swooshy bits in their logo.
I have recently been compiling a mix CD of various songs I have been listening to over the past few months. In the process of trying to fit all the tracks on a 74-or-so minute disc (allowing for the 2-second gaps my old track-at-once CD recorder puts between tracks), I have written a small utility for trimming the leading and trailing silence from chunks of ripped CD audio. (It's just a quick, fairly utilitarian hack; no GUI, it's not themeable, not even a fancy autoconf script. Oh yes, it's a UNIX command-line utility, though it should compile on non-Linux unices.) If this looks useful, you can download the source from the link above. There are no RPMs or binaries or what have you (and probably never will be, unless someone else makes them). Finally, this is unsupported software; if you have an idea for some improvements, don't mail me with them.
This evening, I visited a friend with a DVD player and watched a DVD of A Clockwork Orange (on a tiny, old Amiga monitor; his TV has no video in sockets and Macrovision puts paid to the idea of piggy-backing through a video recorder). Two things I noticed about said film: (a) how much of the acting has a theatrical quality about it (in particular, the actor playing Georgie looks as if he's saying his lines on stage), and (b) how much the characterisation of the prison warden is reminiscent of John Cleese. Wonder whether that was deliberate.
I also had a look at disc 2 of the collectors' edition of Fight Club. Well worth looking at; the short pieces about how they did the special effects were particularly interesting (at least to someone who has played around with computer graphics).
If you had tried unsuccessfully to reach The Null Device earlier today, it was down because a fuse blew where the machine is.
2001/1/10
Popular 1990s techno/trance producer, inspiration to dozens of Future Music demoists... and fringe cult leader?
2001/1/9
Authorities in the Falkland Islands, one of the most highly militarised areas in the world, have found an Argentine dinghy containing military rations and other equipment; it is believed that the occupants are at large in the Falklands, no doubt seducing all the womenfolk.
Idoru update: A French company has created a computer-generated star with a difference. Attitude Studio's Eve Solal is intended to be realistically imperfect, and is said to be an out-of-work actress/singer, working as a barmaid and fighting to lose weight. (I hope they've done their market research; is there really a market for computer-generated celebrities whose distinguishing feature is their physical plausibility, and if so, will it survive once the novelty wears off?)
I went to see Dancer in the Dark tonight. It was quite good; somewhat dispiriting, though with the proper amount of detachment, I can see the ironic appeal of placing such a depressing story in the format of a carefully choreographed musical. The musical numbers, in particular, carried the film, lifting it above what would have been just another depressing low-budget realist film.
My spam filter recently caught a spam with the subject line "Receive your Horoscope for $1 one whole year!!". Why does this look like a "market research" attempt at getting the email addresses of unusually gullible people?
(Insert topical Morrissey lyric here) The institution of marriage, once nigh-mandatory for all not sworn to religious solitude, is in decline; according to Peter McDonald of the Australian National University, one in four young people today will never marry, mostly out of choice. This is partly because of the trend towards postponement of marriage; however, even counting de facto relationships, long-term coupling is also in decline.
Professor McDonald said coupling trends in Australia had changed drastically but had now settled and were expected to stay put. This allowed the ANU to estimate Australia's future marital make-up. "It's extremely unlikely we'll go back to the extremely early marriages that we had in the '50s and '60s, when women were married as teenagers, which is pretty amazing now," he said. "People just got married, very often, to the first person they went out with. They didn't think about it very much. These days, people often have several partners before they get married."
That probably won't stop our back-to-the-1950s federal politicos; how much do you want to bet that tax breaks towards early marriage (i.e., punitive taxation for single people) or some similar social engineering scheme will be floated in Federal Parliament...
2001/1/8
A slice of life in Howard's Neo-Menzies Australia: As the tide of censorship pushes us back to the 1950s, the Australian censor's office have banned a magazine article about cosmetic genital surgery. Meanwhile, it is revealed that the local editions of Playboy and Penthouse are obliged to digitally alter photographs of female genitalia to make them look less realistic. Isn't Judaeo-Christian morality odd?
Child slavery, 2001-style: Manufactured pop groups are in fashion with mainstream radio and the major-label recording industry. As such acts have a life of 3 years at most, and no lucrative back-catalogue (tomorrow's kids will be as interested in All Saints or Steps as today's are in Bros or New Kids On The Block). recording companies and the media pimps who promote these acts are trying to squeeze as much out of them as possible. Which means that the kids, often in their teens are being worked until they burn out:
Band members threatened to walk out after discovering that all they were earning from a promotional deal with British Telecom (BT) was a free mobile phone each. Even BT's generous gift of 30 minutes of free talk time wasn't enough to placate them. Already exhausted from a punishing round of European promotion - in which the distressed group had been forced to slum it by flying in economy class - the Clubbers had to be mollified with a Christmas present of US$150,000 apiece.
"as the global music market has opened up, so has the desire by record companies to exploit it. So you'll get situations where a teen star might not be doing great business in the UK but is very popular in the Far East. This means they're doing long-haul flights two or three times a week to cram in as many TV appearances in those markets as possible. Often they're not even travelling in business class - even Britney Spears travelled economy until recently - so sleep isn't really an option."