2001/2/28
The Black Iron Prison closing in: Distribution, importation and manufacture of (or presumably linking to) "circumvention devices" (such as DeCSS) becomes a criminal offence in Australia this Sunday, as our DMCA-clone law comes into effect. Using DeCSS is still legal, as long as you do not obtain it from overseas (importing) or locally (trafficking with criminals) and wipe it from your laptop before going through Customs.
Liverpool's Scouse accent, made famous by the Beatles, is disappearing. Some are blaming the cleaner air of no longer industrial Liverpool, and consequently the fact that Liverpudlians no longer speak through blocked respiratory passages, for the accent's demise. (via rebecca's pocket)
A growing trend? Doing one better than the American who married his Harley-Davidson and the Australian who married his TV, an Englishman is to marry his local pub.
Spam and counter-spam: Today I found in my SpamCop inbox two pieces of spam titled "Global Is A Fraud!!!", linking to a Geocities-hosted site which alleges that a particular company is a fraud and a spammer. The spams (sent through servers in Korea no less) appear to have been sent by the accused party, with a view to getting the site pulled for spamming. Unless, of course, that's what they want us to think.
The court handed down the death penalty for Napster, and and now the execution date has been handed down. On March 2, the condemned file sharing service takes a one-way ride in Ol' Sparky. Steal while you can.
2001/2/27
I just found in my referrer log that someone came to this site by searching for "i deleted my /dev/null what can i do". Well, you can always try something like:
ln -fs /dev/dsp /dev/null
This is assuming that you're using Linux. It may make a bit of noise, but other than that it should work fine. Glad to be of help.
A MSNBC piece on weblogs. Interestingly enough, it quotes Dave Winer as saying that if everyone had a weblog, society would gain more consciousness and we'd enter a new golden age. It doesn't seem likely to me; most people follow the path of least resistance and any more consciousness and thought than is required to work, shop and watch Seinfeld reruns is strictly for the thinking-fetishists (you know, the geeky sorts who read books and talk about ideas and such). It's not that most people are stupid or unconscious, but that thinking requires effort and, unless you're into that kind of thing, you'd want to keep it to a minimum. Thus if Dave Winer gave every man, woman and child on this planet a weblog, most of them would end up unmaintained, or containing only postings as incisive and thoughtful as "last night's Friends episode was cool".
Or maybe I'm just a cynic.
2001/2/26
Art 1, Mattel 0. Mattel has failed to censor an artist who was making and selling sexual photographs of Barbie dolls, as he put it, to critique the materialistic and gender-oppressive values embodied by the aforementioned lumps of pink plastic. Mattel claimed that Tom Forsythe, the artist in question, was violating their trademarks, and wanted the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeal to hand over all his negatives for destruction; the court thought otherwise.
Prisons of the cross: A look at faith-based prisons in Bush's America. Proponents argue that indoctrinating convicts with religion makes them les likely to reoffend; then again, so would the Ludovico Technique as seen in A Clockwork Orange; maybe we should try that next? (Then there's the issue of whether giving religion to people prone to violence and aggression would produce aggressive zealots, or even self-styled instruments of divine vengeance. Maybe if they used Buddhism, rather than the God of the Iron Rod, the programme would make a bit more sense.)
How long do you suppose it is until agreements to attend church become binding parts of standard parole terms in the U.S., with ex-cons being jailed if they have a crisis of faith and stop going?
(Australians: Don't laugh. If this kind of thing washes, John Howard will make faith-based social programmes a key election plank to counteract his image of economic-rationalist meanness. He already lets the Salvation Army dictate drug policy, so jumping completely on the Dubya bandwagon would be a very trivial step.)
Ironic Christianity: Coming soon: the Cockney Bible; following in the footsteps of Klingon and Ebonics, a religious education teacher from East London has translated the Bible into Cockney rhyming slang. His translation -- endorsed by the Archbishop of Canterbury, no less -- has Jesus feeding 5,000 geezers with "five loaves of Uncle Ned and two Lillian Gish". Though one wonders what the aim is: whether this is an attempt to make Christianity more relevant to East Londoners (unlikely), or to sell more Bibles to the easily amused, and hopefully win a few converts along the way.
He turned down New Order, but now post-genre electronica superstar Moby has conditionally accepted a request to collaborate with Latin boy singer Ricky Martin -- as long as Martin confirms on national television that George W. Bush is the spawn of Satan.
Making domestic violence trendy: Campaigners against sexism and machismo in Brazil are up in arms about a song tiled Slap On The Cheek. The song, associated with the ultra-violent "funk" subculture of Brazil, is about the vocalist slapping his girlfriend during sex; "Come on, I'll let you have it, Mama", go the lyrics.
In an accompanying dance, men pretend to slap their partners, women sway right and left as if reeling from the fake blows.
Could this be the Brazilian answer to Hit Me Baby One More Time?
The authors conclude that separate systems in the brain process different types of jokes. But the pleasure associated with "getting" a joke involves shared circuitry, they say.
Life, liberty and the pursuit of bootywhang: According to scientists in Austria, if you're male and a woman smiles at and appears to flirt with you, it doesn't mean that she's interested. Women show nonverbal signals of interest, such as smiling and flicking hair, to men they're not sexually interested in, in order to get them to talk and reveal their personalities, and/or to get on their good side. And men, programmed by their genes to assume that women are sexually interested where in doubt, fall for it.
2001/2/25
A Seattle University linguist has shown that arrested suspects soften their language into a more deferential form, avoiding direct commands and deliberately weakening their statements as not to be confrontational. This submissive form of speech, technically referred to as the "female register" (probably because it was found in (traditionally submissive) women's speaking patterns), uses conditional forms of verbs such as "might", "may" or "should", questions instead of assertions, and weakening phrases like "kind of". Not surprisingly, hard-nosed cops often ignore statements like "I better get a lawyer, hadn't I?", and suspects end up confessing without a lawyer present. (via Unknown News)
Don't plan your death-of-CPRM party just yet; the Orwellian hard disk copy control scheme may be dead, but, like the head of a Hydra, another system has taken its place.
You can now get Python for the PalmPilot. Awesome... Mind you, you need a newer Palm than my old Pilot (that's right; not even a PalmPilot; though it does have the 2.0 ROM and 1Mb of RAM).
I'm Wayne Kerr, and if there's one thing I hate... it's people who go to band venues and talk loudly over the music, as if cognitively incapable of perceiving a distinction between a group of actual musicians playing for them and a radio tuned to FOX-FM*. I went to see Dandelion Wine tonight at SubTerrain; when the band started playing, a lot of the people kept talking loudly amongst themselves, oblivious to the music. One table, which seemed to be comprised of jocks and Barbie dolls, was the worst offender; Why can't people like that just go to a pub or something?
* FOX-FM is a commercial radio station in Melbourne which plays current and the past few years' Top 40 swill, and is typically heard in establishments frequented by people of no musical discernment. It is indistinguishable from MMM and TT-FM.
2001/2/24
In the not-too-distant futures, electronic devices may self-destruct if exported outside of their target market. Motorola have developed a device, based on a miniaturised GPS receiver, which determines where an appliance is being used and disables it if it has been illicitly exported. I'm sure the MPAA would love to put these devices in all DVD players, right next to the Macrovision chip, though one could imagine other greedy bastards putting them into everything from wristwatches to toasters and charging extra for portability, much in the way that Microsoft charge for per-head software licences. Funny how these people only favour free trade if it empowers multinational corporations and not the sheeplike consumers waiting to be fleeced.
The Mahir of 2001: Another update about the All Your Base meme: there's this Zero Wing FAQ, which speculates that the amusing translation is a result of Toaplan being too underfunded to properly localise it for Europe. and the job falling on some staffer who was studying English at night school, or somesuch.
Toaplan themselves went out of business in the mid-90s, but someone must own the copyrights/trademarks of Zero Wing; perhaps we will be faced with the prospect of them jumping on the bandwagon and commissioning an official All Your Base Belong To Us pop single, following on from the Ham(p)ster Dance and Mahir's dance-pop effort.
2001/2/23
Are "friends" electric? Sony's Aibo robot dogs aren't just for otaku anymore: ordinary people are buying them, and becoming emotionally attached to them, despite knowing that they are just consumer electronic devices. Meanwhile, Sega aims to one-up this fashion, by producing toy robot humans, with simulated emotions and facial expressions. Now if you can't make friends, you can at least buy one.
All Your Base Are Belong To Us: The All Your Base meme, which you've probably heard, allegedly originated in an old Sega MegaDrive game named Zero Wing. There happens to be an arcade game named Zero Wing, but it does not contain the aforementioned amusing dialogue (or any dialogue, for that matter), or at least not at the start. The game itself appears to be a R-Type clone. Perhaps the amusing banter was a little whimsy on the part of the Sega port programmers?
They closed the rooming houses and kicked out all the bohemian scum, and now St Kilda's well-off residents are having a Million Yuppie March this Sunday to do something about the street prostitution problem and make the area safe for conspicuous consumption. Which will probably mean Rudy Giuliani-style zero-tolerance policing; a fittingly final coup de grace for an area that has been gentrified to death.
The perils of online romance: Trevor Tasker, 27, was looking for love on the Net, and found it for a while in one Wynema Shumate. When he travelled to the U.S. to visit his new love, he found out that not only was she some 35 years older than she claimed to be, but was keeping her housemate's corpse in her freezer, to collect his money. Don't you just hate it whan that happens?
Coming soon to John Howard's Australia: U.S.-style civil forfeiture, in which the police can confiscate the assets of suspected drug dealers, without getting a conviction. As the U.S. example shows, civil forfeiture has been a great weapon in the War On Drugs, not to mention a nice little earner for some well-placed law-enforcement officials.
Ding dong, CPRM is dead. At least on nonremovable computer hard disks anyway. And it's thanks to concerned netizens' complaints that this scheme has been withdrawn.
Welcome to the Digital Millennium: Copyright enforcement companies have developed a transparent proxy that stops file sharing , identifying copyright violating content by length and/or sound. They want to see this installed in "regional aggregation point(s) for Internet service providers". Expect to see one of these in MAE East/West, right next to the Echelon tap, Real Soon Now.
Some would argue that weblogs are a masturbatory phenomenon; if that is the case, then this one (which somehow appeared in my referer logs), appears to take this metaphor to new levels of literalness.
2001/2/22
It has been a busy day, hence not much blogging. I spent most of the day trying to remember enough LaTeX to do overhead slides (it'd be quicker than whipping up a handcoded PostScript system that does what I'd want, and I'd rather not have my overheads locked up in a proprietary Microsoft format), installing RedHat 7.0 on a spare computer and writing the process up for beginners, amongst other things. (Did I mention that I work at a university, and Semester 1 starts on Monday?)
Since announcing their vast taxpayer-funded slush fund for religious groups, the Fundamentalist-controlled White House have been beset with the problem of keeping the fringe religions out. African-American statesman Louis Farrakhan's Nation of Islam is likely to be denied all funding because of its allegedly hateful views, whereas the Church of Scientology will probably get government funds for "faith based" charity works.
Every year, Antarctica hosts an outdoor music festival named IceStock. This has been going on since 1990; the festival has had more than its share of technical problems, between players getting frostbite, guitars going out of tune in the low temperatures and gear generally packing up. IceStock's indie cred can rest assured, as its fortuitously remote location has kept the unwashed alternateen masses from jumping on the bandwagon; the bands, with names like The Shackletones and Penguins In Bondage, are comprised of people working at one of the frozen continent's research stations, and don't exist for long. However, this year, there will be an official IceStock CD.
How To Mix a Pop Song From Scratch; it looks very enlightening, and should be useful. (ta, Graham)
I'm Wayne Kerr, and if there's one thing I hate... it's prolonged spells of hot weather. Two of the posters in my room have gotten into the habit of falling off their respective walls, most probably because the heat has deteriorated the Blu-Tak (or, more precisely, the bright green Blu-Taklike adhesive) holding them up to the point of unusability.
Britain's navy is faced with a dilemma: what to name its warships. Traditionally, the choicest names (Trafalgar, Formidable, and so on) were reserved for old-fashioned warships, with submarines and mass-produced ships getting more mediocre names, often alliterated and recycled. Some series of ships are also named after places (a common, if not quite stirring, occurrence), which is why the Royal Navy's latest assault ships have less than awe-inspiring names like Largs Bay,
"Then you get the problem of personal nostalgia," he said. "Someone gets into a position of authority in the navy and says 'My granddaddy served in the war on HMS Beetle and I want the new destroyer called Beetle'."
(via Lake Effect)
2001/2/21
My rapidly depleting 15 minutes: I was interviewed today by ABC Radio National's arts programme, Arts Today, mostly about the Postmodernism Generator and the influences and philosophy behind it. It went reasonably well; hopefully I didn't stumble too much. Anyway, it will be played on Arts Today, probably sometime next week. More details when I get them.
You know, I initially misread the headline of this article as "Redneck heckled at racism meeting".
2001/2/20
A number of researchers, funded by the NSA and law enforcement agencies, are working on the problem of detecting steganography, or determining whether an innocuous file contains a hidden message. According to these researchers, most steganographic systems out there are hopelessly inadequate and easily revealed.
"What we've done is gone out, using Web spiders, and downloaded pictures from the Web and run the tool against them." Steganography, Gordon said, primarily turns up on hacker sites. But he and his associates also found instances of steganography on heavily traveled commercial sites such as Amazon and eBay.
First-generation stego programs typically embedded information in the least significant bits that represented the pixels of an image. But images, especially compressed ones, often have predictable patterns that are disrupted when an image is inserted.
The Hello Kitty Note PC is back; this time it is powered by a Transmeta chip. Wonder what it actually runs?
Loss of faith in social institutions: According to a BBC survey, 34% of young people in the UK believe that pop stars don't sing on their own records. Remember the uproar when Milli Vanilli were exposed as a fake? Well, nowadays it looks like pop stars are expected to be fake, and nobody expects the pretty boys and girls strutting their stuff in the video to be real musical artists any more than they expect pro wrestlers to be real competition athletes. Yes, it's all fake; yes, everyone's cool with that.
Nina Jablonski, an Australian anthropologist now based in California has discovered an elegant evolutionary theory of skin pigmentation, which explains why indigenous people from different regions evolved differing skin pigments.
In St Kilda, street prostitution is a major problem for the BMW-driving latte-sipping ad-exec residents, with kerb-crawling johns cruising their streets at night searching for bootywhang, consummating the transactions in their yards and dumping used condoms in their designer letterboxes. Professor Marcia Neave, architect of brothel legalisation in the 1980s, suggests that the answer may lie in legal street prostitution precincts, safely away from residential areas. Though given the rapid gentrification of St Kilda, a more practical answer may be to drive the prostitutes out to Brunswick or Coburg, as was done with artists, students, ferals and other non-yuppies formerly indigenous to the ritzy bayside area.
Eduardo Tagua, 62, was born in prison and spent most of his life there. Expelled into the vast, confusing real world, he has been unable to cope, and attempts to rehabilitate him have failed. Now he is protesting outside a prison in order to be allowed back in to live out the rest of his days behind bars.
Pinkness and horror: A woman is divorcing her husband because he didn't buy her flowers on Valentine's Day. Apparently, in her world-view, not honouring certain Hallmark Events and paying the floral industry's Feb. 14 markup constitutes evidence of not loving someone.
Some signs that democracy in the U.S. is not all that healthy. Or so say some people calling themselves the Progressive Review (who seem to be bleeding-heart leftists and not militia nutters or anything). In any case, the extremely dubious circumstances in which the current president was elected should raise red flags in anybody not terminally apathetic.
Actually, Lev, phenylethylamine (PEA) is a neurotransmitter; it is responsible for the condition commonly referred to as falling in love (and one develops a tolerance to it within 18 to 24 months, which is why most sexual relationships end after that time, unless other neurotransmitters kick in). I think you're thinking of phenylalanine, which gradually causes dementia (an unrelated, though some would argue superficially similar, condition).
2001/2/19
Scare meme of the day (or of a few days ago anyway): Falling in love is bad for your psychological health; at least if you're a teenager. Adolescents in the throes of romantic involvement and under the influence of phenylethylamine have been found to be more susceptible to depression, delinquency and drug abuse. Remember kids: Just Say No. (via Rebecca's Pocket)
No surprises here: A U.S. court has found the Mickey Mouse copyright extension law perfectly constitutional and otherwise hunky-dory. That's right, we can rest assured that the progress of art and science is safeguarded by retroactively extending copyrights on works (such as old Mickey Mouse films) whose creators have long since passed away, and that the dangerous anarchy of the public domain will no longer deter gigantic corporations from having purchased works some seventy years earlier. The notion of copyrights expiring is a myth, one perpetuated by subversive elements who probably use Napster and modify their DVD players. And George Washington didn't smoke dope either, for that matter.
Marketing coup of the day: Rap Snacks. That's right, rap music fans, hip-hop culture is now available in potato chip format. (Via Something Awful.)
Tanya (she who hates music) has now transformed her blog into a weekly column; what's more interesting is that she offers to review readers' own music, in her characteristically vicious style. Which should be amusing.
The former Soviet republic of Lithuania has a unique tourist attraction a Stalinist theme park. Called Stalinworld, the park consists of towering Communist statues, machine gun nests and a recreated gulag. Concealed speakers broadcast the screams of torture victims. Stalinworld's creator, wrestler turned mushroom tycoon Viliumas Malinauskas, plans to have guides in Red Army uniforms and a railway to transport visitors in cattle cars. (via Rebecca's Pocket)
Studies have apparently shown that women select sexual partners by scent, in a way that maximises diversity of immunity genes, but that women on the pill choose exactly the wrong partners, at least from the point of view of genetic immunity. Mind you, not all scientists agree even that humans can pick up such olfactory information. (via RobotWisdom)
So what has your humble weblogger been up to lately when he wasn't posting entries and links to news stories to this page? Well, yesterday I didn't do much productive; I spent some time with a friend, caught a train down to Stony Point and back and later crashed in bed and caught up on sleep; today I went to a record fair with two friends, and bought two CDs (nothing terribly exciting; just an Everything But The Girl best-of from before they discovered drum & bass and a Deadstar single which sounds a bit like Curve circa 1993), and then paid the friends a visit, rewatching part of Fight Club on their DVD player and playing around with a bass guitar (which I could probably learn to play quite usably; I think I'll have to get one sometime soon).
I just finished reading Neal Stephenson's recently rereleased first novel, The Big U. I found it very enjoyable (perhaps partly because I have been hanging around universities, as either a student or employee, for the best part of a decade, though perhaps not); other than a few loose ends, it is as characteristically rich in plot, humour and inventiveness as Stephenson's subsequent works. (Stephenson, who reluctantly agreed to rerelease The Big U to keep people from selling internal organs to buy rare copies on eBay, is on record as deprecating it as a mediocre early work and not worth reading; pay no heed to this, for it is quite good.)
The latest episode of Jocasta and Guido's Weblog Clinic discusses the rationales behind maintaining a blog, as well as the nature of the Internet as a personal and/or consumerist medium. Food for thought.
Any game is better with 3D graphics: Game company Jester Interactive intends to recreate classic 1980s Speccy platform games Jet Set Willy and Manic Miner for the new consoles. The new version will use 3D graphics. We can probably expect a mediocre cock-up on the scale of the 3D-"enhanced" versions of Frogger and such. (via NtK)
2001/2/18
Re: the Deja/Google thing: I recently read on a mailing list a credible argument stating that there are no surviving USENET archives going back before 1995. Namely, those which existed were sent by their keepers (on VAX tapes and such) to DejaNews, who promised to put them online. Then Deja was seized by the barbarians who turned it into a naff shopping portal, making it hard to access news properly and so on, and causing it to go down the toilet; the old VAX tapes disappeared (possibly junked or burned as heating fuel or something), and are unlikely to have survived the dot-com boom. Which is saddening or blackly amusing, depending on how you look at it.
Destroy anything pink and fluffy: Islamic morality police staged a Valentine's Day crackdown, arresting lovers making out in cars and hotel rooms. Those who could produce marriage certificates were released; others found holding hands unchaperoned were sent home separately. No idea what happened to more severe cases; caning perhaps?
Bruce "Applied Cryptography" Schneier on why hard-disk copy control threatens us all, and will lead to an era of repression.
We have a serious threat to civil liberties: large entertainment companies are allying themselves with the computer industry to dictate what can and can't happen on your hard drive... We have a technology that will, in some circumstances, make backups impossible. Compatibility problems between disk drives that have CPRM and those that don't will force networks to completely upgrade their mass storage. We have a technology that forces users to buy proprietary decoding software forever. We have a technology that won't really work unless it extends to computer output devices; you may find yourself forced to upgrade your monitor as well to watch movies on your computer. And we have an increased reliance on legal harassment by media companies. It's that last bit that scares me the most.
Right on schedule: In his latest actions, Ayatollah Bush bombs Iraq and plans to replace secular prison programmes with conversion to evangelical Christianity; secular programmes will still notionally exist, but be as hard to find as abortion clinics in Mississippi. Which may mean that in a few years' time America will be overrun with born-again Christians with tendencies towards violence and extreme behaviour which led them to prison in the first place.
2001/2/17
Welcome to the Digital Millennium: How Microsoft plans to dominate digital media distribution.
2001/2/16
It is feared that, with modern statistical techniques, marketers can connect census data to individuals. To counteract this, the U.S. census bureau is applying various "blurring" techniques to the data.
Xine Resource Page. Apparently the latest version of Linux video player Xine can play VOB files with subtitles. (Of course, this is not for playing CSS-encrypted DVDs; that would be a felony.)
First all the characters from Winnie the Pooh were found to be mentally ill, and now the Biblical hero/mass-murderer Samson has been diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder. Samson exhibits six of the seven characteristics of ASPD; to be diagnosed, a patient must exhibit at least three.
Microsoft's Jim Allchin has addressed U.S. legislators on the threat of open-source software; this alien menace, you see, is fundamentally un-American, and threatens to destroy not only the software industry and innovation but to wipe out the concept of intellectual property altogether, unless swiftly checked. What measures would be required to contain the threat was not stated.
Salon looks at the formulae behind manufactured teen pop acts:
Robert Thompson, founder of the Institute on Popular Culture at Syracuse University, describes the resulting boy-band product: "This is the ultimate dream -- a nonthreatening but dreamy guy. Dressing all together makes these guys look like fuzzy little pets instead of someone who might slip something into your drink."
Tonight I went to see the band Sir at Bar Open. Sir consists of a female vocalist/guitarist, a guy playing an old Farfisa organ (and a tiny, ancient Yamaha synth), and a bassist (the latter being Matt Bailey, formerly of my favourite Australian band ever, The Paradise Motel). Their sound is rather subdued, languid, vaguely melancholy in places yet the kind of thing that melts into the background; it would be good soundtrack music for a low-budget arthouse film, or to put on whilst going to sleep. Though in places the vocals bring to mind that Future Music quote, originally about trip-hop, about taking as much Valium as you can without falling over before singing.
Anyway, Sir are playing at the North Melbourne town hall this weekend, so that may be worth checking out. They are also selling their album, The Night I Met My Second Wife for $10 at gigs.
Is Batman gay? DC Comics refuses to comment, or indeed, to allow anyone to do so using its trademarks or artwork. Though the first allegations of this (from before the high-camp Batman TV series of the '60s) did prompt the invention of a nuclear "bat-family" with female members to dispell the allegations of homoeroticism (back then, commercially damning, and not a niche marketing opportunity).
(Copyright laws require permission from publishers to quote images, which has crippled academic criticism of comics. Though I seem to recall that Ariel Dorfman's scathing Marxist critique of Disney comics, How To Read Donald Duck, quoted quite a few strips; I find it hard to imagine Disney, with their authoritarian, McCarthyite culture, signing off on something like that.
Last night I went to Flickerfest, a screening of short films, and saw some quite entertaining films; among them the very amusing George Lucas In Love, showing the future Star Wars creator as a student filmmaker in the late 60s, the beautifully shot Scarecrow from Russia, and Infection, a somewhat Pixaresque computer-generated film from New Zealand, dramatising a hacking raid on a student-loan database with computer-animated avatars. All in all, a fun evening.
2001/2/15
The Meat and Two Veg has a damning review of Kevin Mitnick thriller Takedown, shelved by Hollywood but released on DVD in France under the title Cybertraque. File next to Plan 9 From Outer Space and Little Ayse and the Magic Dwarves.
Ripped off: Lisa Gerrard misses out on an Oscar nomination for her award-wining score to Gladiator, because of a technicality
Belgium is shocked by a lewd Tintin comic, showing the Belgian national hero and his entourage going to Thailand on a sex tour. It appears that the illegal forgeries are in circulation, in both French and English.
There's a new book on the open-source movement and hacker culture, titled Rebel Code. This book attempts to preserve in a non-ephemeral medium a lot of the movement's history, which is usually only on web pages, mailing list archives and other such media of unknown durability. Appropriately enough, the book is published by Penguin.
A fascinating treatise on the design of permissive action links; i.e., how to make sure that no-one can detonate your nuclear weapons without your authorisation:
Precise timing -- that's the key to my idea for a highly effective PAL. First, design the weapon to make the firing sequence as inherently complex and critical as possible. Vary the chemical composition and detonation velocities of the various pieces of high explosive so they have to be detonated non-simultaneously. Then store all of the required timing data in encrypted form in the weapon's memory. Better yet, encrypt everything (program and data) except for a small bootstrap that accepts an external key and decrypts everything for firing. Include this decryption key in the "nuclear weapons release" message from the "National Command Authority"
(thanks, Toby.)
British members of an international paedophile ring recently cracked open by police agencies have received a slap on the wrist; namely, jail sentences ranging from 12 to 30 months. Mind you, a lot can happen in 12 months, and given how universally reviled "rock spiders" are in prisons, there is a pretty good chance that a guard will look the other way long enough for other inmates to deliver their own brand of improvised justice. (Perhaps the judge took this into account?)
2001/2/14
I must say I'm very impressed with Maxim's J10 VST soft synth. It's one of the more capable free synth plug-ins I've seen, on a par with real synths. I'll probably be using it in places I'd otherwise record an external synth.
One hundred billion dollars. International supervillain Saddam Hussein is at it again; this time, he has given up on depriving wholesome Western kids of their Xmas PlayStations, and has taken to commissioning gangs to steal Sun servers from Scotland, for use in his weapons programmes and ultimate world domination bid.
Hindu fundamentalists in India have been waging a holy war against Valentine's Day, destroying anything pink or heart-shaped. Perhaps an idea whose time has come?
2001/2/13
I happened to be passing by Slow Glass Books (in Swanston St., Melbourne) today, and what did I find there but a copy of the newly reprinted edition of Neal Stephenson's The Big U. Naturally, I picked it up.
The art of leadership: It emerges that Douglas Haig, commander of British armed forces in WW1 had soldiers shot for desertion without trial to strengthen morale. Mind you, this only applied to the lower-class rabble in the ranks. There is even evidence that execution for "desertion" was used to cull unfit soldiers, such as those of unusually short stature.
Google buys Deja's Usenet archive, intending to put it (including all messages from 1995 onwards) online.
GUILTY. The 9th US circuit court has dealt a crushing blow to Napster, throwing out its appeal, and handing the RIAA a resounding victory. The court has stopped short of shutting down Napster but demanded that Napster ensure that users cannot swap copyrighted files, a technically impractical task; make no mistake, Napster is back on death row.
The next step for the RIAA will probably be mandating "indemnity filters" at all ISPs, which block anything that looks like a copyright violation (large transfers of highly compressed data without accompanying cryptographic copyright certificates), and suing ISPs which do not comply with contributory infringement.
Valentine's Day is nigh upon us; the Hallmark event when florists mark up their prices steeply and rake in the cash, those who are in sexual relationships are obliged to give money to multinational corporations to prove their love for their partner, and those not in relationships are considered less than complete members of human society. Mind you, if you're a cynic, there are still cards made for you, courtesy of Meg. And if you actually want to send a card, rather than look at pictures, here are some more.
How will I be celebrating this hallowed day? In the traditional manner: by listening to all my Smiths records. I might throw in some Leonard Cohen as well, just for fun.
2001/2/12
German actor (of Turkish extraction) Serdar Somuncu has been satirising xenophobia in a novel (and technically illegal) way: by publicly reading from Mein Kampf, interspersed with reflections on life in modern-day Germany.
"Banning it only gives it a cult following," Somuncu said. "Reading it aloud demystifies it. It shows what's inside -- how ridiculous his (Hitler's) ideology was and how ridiculous the 'right' ideology is. It's my artistic way of making a stance against this extremism."
The skinheads and knee-jerk leftists are, as you can imagine, pissed off, though Somuncu has gotten a positive response from Holocaust survivors at his readings.
Life imitates a Philip K. Dick novel: A criminal gang in the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh has been running a shadow Office of the Chief Minister, in parallel to the real one, and made at least 100 public service appointments under false pretenses. (via Leviathan)
Researchers at the U.S. Center for Disease Control have determined the primary cause of the U.S.'s skyrocketing rates of obesity. It's not calorie consumption (which has not increased as rapidly) or fat content in the diet (which has declined over the past 20 years); it's urban sprawl and automobile dependence. Modern American suburbs (and their Australian equivalents; have a look at Glen Waverley or Rowville sometime) are modelled around the automobile, with no high-street shops and often no footpaths; hence, those who live there have to drive to go anywhere, with exercise being a special activity strictly for the fitness enthusiasts with gym memberships.
Few suburbs now have footpaths, so pedestrians are forced on to the road. Police and private security patrols view with suspicion anyone on a suburban estate without a car: either they have run out of petrol and are in distress, or they are poor and up to no good.
An investigation into walking habits in Seattle found a direct correlation between physical activity and the year a house was built. Residents in streets built before 1947 walked or cycled at least three times every two days. Those in more modern houses used cars almost exclusively.
Which makes me feel a bit better for being one of the povo scum who rely on walking and public transport. Though one thing I have noticed is that, when I had a car, I read fewer books than when I did not (as my commute was not usable as reading time). I wonder whether a correlation can be drawn between car dependence and ignorance or mental atrophy...
2001/2/11
Pro-life except for those already born: Two Religious Right congressmen in the U.S. have introduced a bill to ban RU-486, the early-option abortion drug which brutally murders small clusters of cells that Bible Belt preachers and Republican Party members insist have souls. (via rebecca's pocket)
The decoupling of sex from reproduction has taken another step, with the announcement of a female oral contraceptive which reduces periods to four times a year. Which is quite sensible, if the doctors who say that a monthly menstruation schedule serves no purpose other than advertising the woman's fertility (which made sense on the ancestral savannah of the hunter-gatherers, but makes less sense nowadays when most women have fewer than two children in their lives). Perhaps eventually, our posthuman successors will be naturally sterile, taking pills to activate sperm or egg production on the rare occasion when they need to reproduce. Given that most people don't reproduce all that often, such an adaptation would make more sense.
Et tu, Brutus? Elton John must be really hard up for money (or possibly publicity); the flamboyant singer and gay icon has agreed to perform a duet with gay-bashing white rapper Eminem.
All things come to an end: The primary hard disk on my Linux box (a 2Gb Quantum Fireball, from about 1997) had been starting to misbehave, so I decided to replace it before it lives up to its namesake. I picked up a 10Gb disk at the swap meet and swapped that in, copying the file systems to it. Things haven't quite stabilised yet (copying partitions with tar did odd things to some of the partitions, particularly /dev, though that should be fixed soon.
I've had the old disk for a bit over 3 years and it has served me well, but now has reached the end of its life. It's the first hard disk I can remember in recent times wearing out, as opposed to merely outgrowing.
The 10gb disk I bought was the smallest new disk available at the market, dwarfed by 40/70gb units, and was only $165. I can remember some years ago, getting off the bus from Monash at an electronics shop in Clayton and plonking down $500 or so for a shiny new 540Mb Quantum hard disk, and being pleased with the amount of space it would add to my cramped 170Mb system (which was probably a 386SX-16 running Linux 1.0 or so).
(I'm showing my age here, aren't I?)
Germany's recording industry body, the Bundesverband der Phonographischen Wirtschaft, are calling for filters to be installed at "key Internet junctions", blocking downloads of copyrighted materials. Chances are this technology is already well under development, if Sony senior vice president Steve Heckler's comments last year are anything to go by, and it only needs the political will or pressure to force it onto ISPs and the public, either with legislation or the threat of lawsuits.
Police in New Zealand are trying a new tactic against burglary: they are giving advice to suspected burglars and their families on how to get benefits, with the aim of getting them out of the cycle of poverty. The police say that this initiative has already cut burglary rates by 20%.
2001/2/10
A church in Canberra, alarmed at those wicked Harry Potter books seducing children away from the truth of Christianity, has distributed a leaflet to its members about the dangers these books pose to children, and their contribution to the rise of juvenile devil worship in America. Unbeknownst to them, the text of the leaflet was taken from a piece in the Onion.
It seems that the FBI don't have much to do these days; taking a cue from the more humorless animal-rights activists, they have launched an aggressive investigation of parody site bonsaikitten.com (which discusses growing rectilinear cats in bottles).
London installation artist Michael Landy, 37, is destroying all his possessions in the name of art. The objects, which range from odd socks to valuable art works by Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst, will be pulverised as part of an art performance named Break Down. Landy attained fame in 1994, when an installation of his (consisting of a bin full of rubbish) was accidentally disposed of by the gallery's cleaner.
How the mighty hath fallen: In an attempt to attract a Gen-Y audience, Encyclopædia Britannica's online operation has started putting up "spicy", sensationalist articles with topics like "TV and the single girl" and -- I kid you not -- Britney Spears' belly button. britannica.com will also cut costs by outsourcing its content production to outside operations (advertising agencies and promotional consultancies would be my guess).
Jane Mackay, former GP and currently artist-in-residence for the Cambridge University Musical Society, has synæsthesia; a neurological condition which enables her to see the colours of sounds. She describes this experience in her own words.
"And my sister and I used to argue about our colours for the days of the week - my Wednesday is a lemony-yellow with angles in the middle of it, hers is green.
"Brian Perkins, the BBC Radio Four newsreader, has an amazingly rich, chocolatey-brown voice. "Yet 'Perkins' is a rather wishy-washy yellow-green, so I always forget his surname."
"I had a wonderful sneeze once, from someone sitting behind me in a concert. It was a really lovely turquoise that came across my shoulder in a triangular sheet."
(I once mentally associated letters of the alphabet with colours (A, E and M were red, B and F were green and C was yellow), though I think that originated in a set of wooden blocks I had as an infant.)
2001/2/9
An American or Canadian company has developed transgenic goats that produce spider silk in their milk. (via Slashdot)
Meanwhile in India, the censor's office is hiring detectives to make sure that unscrupulous cinema operators don't show films with banned sex scenes surreptitiously restored, exposing the unsuspecting public to horrific images of bootywhang.
Australia's censors have given gruesome serial-killer movie Hannibal an MA rating, rather than a R. I suspect that the fact that it's full of violence and not sex may have had something to do with it. Though I wonder whether the Australian version hasn't had scenes silently removed, as has happened with a number of other films released here.
2001/2/8
The wonders of modern science: A surgeon in the U.S., working on a pain relief operation, unwittingly developed a female orgasm implant. The device will implant in the skin under the patient's buttocks and be triggered by a remote control. Somewhat invasive, but no more than breast implants or cosmetic surgery. Expect it to be a big hit.
Sociologists are now disputing the "broken windows" theory, which holds that visible signs of neglect or disorder cause crime to increase. Despite this, the theory remains popular.
A heartfelt lament, apparently from the leader of British neo-Nazi group Combat 18, about the declining quality of neo-Nazis, and the types of misfits and losers that fill the ranks of racist groups these days. (via Plastic)
I just watched the DVD of The Sixth Sense. (I was going to rent Run Lola Run, but the library was out.) An entertaining movie, though perhaps somewhat spoiled if you have heard the punchline. The making-of features, though, are worth the price of the rental, discussing the visual language of the film (the thematic use of the colour red, for example), and the design of the soundtrack (using samples of human breath and multiple voices for effect). (On the down side, the DVD edition did suffer from perceptible MPEG compression artifacts in places.)
Progressive media gadfly Mike Moore (not the head of the WTO) gives the Left a timely kick in the pants for being out of touch with the issues facing Middle America. (via Hobbsblog)
I say, with all due affection and appreciation for all of you and your causes, get over yourselves and start talking like a real person, then start talking to real people. You could begin by hitting 0 every time you get a robot when you call 411. Have a chat with the human operator -- the phone company will eventually have to hire more of them. Or sponsor a bowling team and put the name of your local Labor Party or environmental group on their shirts. Or try bowling yourself. It's where you'll meet Americans.
I imagine this could apply in Australia as well. While the Marxist dreadheads are planning ways to get the crap beaten out of them fighting for a revolution that will never come (does anyone really think that the next S11-like tolchockfest will lead to the collapse of capitalism and the establishment of a dictatorship of the proletariat (or whatever the term is these days) headed by a blue-haired politburo?), the disaffected lower middle classes are flirting with Pauline Hanson. Hers is an ugly, xenophobic, intolerant brand of populism, but it speaks a language people understand. Which is why the Liberals are throwing bones to the xenophobic bugbears of Suburbia, as not to lose their vote to One Nation.
There is now a new French edition of the Codex Seraphinianus, that much sought-after classic which has been commanding second-hand prices typically reserved for old Roland drum machines. It will still cost you EU$217.24 (apparently US$250 or so), and you need to know some French to order it.
Protecting the children: In a daring last-ditch attempt to turn back the drug menace, Florida's Orange County bans dance clubs. The move is primarily aimed at raves, but also closes down discos, line-dancing clubs and band venues. (via Unknown News)
2001/2/7
Lava lamps revert from Passé Retro Kitsch back to Novel Retro Camp.
"It all depends whether you're talking about straight, unironic, revivalist retro or one of the numerous strains of pre-X and Gen-X irony," said Seth Burks, 29, author of the award-winning Athens, GA-based 'zine Burning Asshole. "I've identified 22 distinct varieties of irony-informed retro and non-retro aesthetics, including camp, kitsch, trash, schmaltz, post-schmaltz, and post-post-schmaltz. It's time we addressed the woeful inadequacies of the government's current retro-classification system."
Did Tom and Nicole split over which evil cult (Scientology or the Catholic Church) to raise their kids in? (via Plastic)
I'm not making this up: Esteemed Hollywood thespian Arnold Schwarzenegger says he may take a break from blowing shit up and run for governor of California.
Ariel Sharon wins Israel by a landslide. We can probably expect the next Six-Day War to commence any minute now.
A post-mortem at defunct Terry Gilliam project The Man Who Killed Don Quixote. Pity that this film is dead in the water. (via Robot Wisdom)
Those wily, inscrutable Arab terrorists are up to no good again; this time they're hiding terrorist attack plans in Internet porn and chat rooms. Or so say unnamed "U.S. officials and experts". Though for all we know the officials in question may be Bible-bashing anti-porn zealots in Bush's cabinet or some aspiring J. Edgar Hoover seeking to justify sweeping surveillance powers. (via Robot Wisdom)
Use it or lose it: A lot of young people are suffering from memory impairment caused by excessive reliance on computers. Apparently, if you don't exercise it (such as by relying on your PalmPilot or PC), your memory atrophies like any other organ.
Alexander Abian would be proud; astronomers in the U.S. are proposing to alter Earth's orbit (and presumably its tilt as well), by using the gravity of a large asteroid (how large? sufficiently large that they would have to aim it very carefully, as not to wipe out all life on the planet). Mind you, their intent is not so much to do away with natural disasters and diseases as to keep the Earth habitable in a billion or so years' time, when the Sun increases in brightness.
Dreamcast programming info and tools. Given that these game consoles are (a) apparently more readily hackable than PlayStations (for one, you can make a bootable CD for them with a normal drive), (b) run NetBSD and Linux, and (c) are discontinued (and thus likely to be selling cheaply, especially when all the kids want a PS2), they may be worth buying for hack value. Now if someone figured out a way of bolting an IDE hard disk onto one, it would make quite a nifty web server/MP3 jukebox/(insert your own application here).
Urk. The machine where this blog is hosted hasn't been at all well lately and has been up and down a lot (though mostly down). Hopefully it was just some bad RAM, and will be better from now on. If you have been unable to access this blog, now you know why.
2001/2/6
Signs of the blogocalypse: Looks like Herbert Kornfeld's younger brother now has a weblog. It reminds me of the GLOCK 3 incident a few years ago. A young aspiring prankster, inspired by some of Joey Skaggs' media pranks, decided to create an Internet-based "gang" named GLOCK 3, playing on paranoia about gangs in school. (This was back in 1996; gangs were the equivalent of gun-wielding goths back then.) Of course, one joiner took the while thing to extremes...
Anyway, 'Our-J' is "the realest blogger alive", who "tells it like it is", and "just fucked your bitch" too, and he's preparing for "blogger war". I'll bet the A-list are quaking with terror.
The 1967 film of Joyce's Ulysses -- the only one ever made in the English language -- has finally been approved for screening in Ireland, a country with a history of puritanical censorship and social repressiveness:.
The fortunes of Strick's film, which has finally been passed for release in Ireland with a 15 certificate, are a measure of the enormous distance that Ireland has travelled in the past 30 years from what Brian Moore called "a nation of masturbators under priestly instruction".
Strick finally returned to Ireland last year, to direct a bawdy comedy by Aristophanes in Cork, and says he found the country "transformed". He decided it was time to resubmit Ulysses. Women he had encountered in pre-Mary Robinson Ireland were "fearful", he says. "When I returned I saw that they were barristers and doctors."
I wonder how Ireland's current censorship regime compares with Howard-era Australia's increasingly draconian one.
Ecstasy will be approved for medical use in five years in the U.S. Or that's what some, who are pushing to have it approved by the FDA for the treatment of terminally ill patients, say. Mind you, whether the DEA or the White House will take that lying down is another matter.
2001/2/5
A want-ad seen recently (on a piece of paper on a notice board):
Computer Hacker Wanted
This is not a joke. Email ---@hotmail.com
Hmmm... I wonder what the story behind that one is.
Meg has been rereading her teenage journals; an act that normally makes one cringe to think about. I remember my teenage journals (back in the mists of time). Because of bad experiences with my crazy parents (didn't everybody have two of those?), I was rather paranoid about baring any approximation of my soul in anything anyone could read, and so wrote in code. I actually wrote a journal program (named Abulafia, after the computer in an Umberto Eco novel; I was a pretentious git even back then) which utilised a form of encryption (nothing the NSA couldn't break quite simply, though the one time I tried brute-forcing it a few years ago I failed). Even with that, I wrote in code (lest my mother walk in and demand to inspect what's on the screen, or someone get a TEMPEST rig), and most of my teenage journals consist of bland reportage interspersed with cryptic sentences. The actual subjects of the sentences went unrecorded and would now be lost forever in the mists of time. Only when I was in my early 20s did I start confiding intimately in the journal, in plain text, though I still used Abulafia (or rather a Linux/XView version named, unimaginatively, "xvabu"), out of habit, though stopped putting passwords on the journals one year.
At the start of last year, though, I retired the Abulafia system, a relic of Windows 3.1 limitations and adolescent paranoia, and started writing my journal in plain text files with vi. I still write in it on most nights (usually just what happened), though not as much as before I started maintaining this blog. These days, it makes more sense to put some things where an interested, sympathetic audience can read them.
Stumbling towards Gilead (cont.): In the U.S., the Telecommunications Act of 1996 makes sending information about abortion on the Internet a crime punishable by five years in prison; it is based on the Comstock Law, which was used to prosecute family-planning pioneers earlier this century. This law has not been enforced, as Clinton's bleeding-heart-feminist attorney general Janet Reno gave her word that it would not be enforced -- but now that a religious zealot is Attorney-General, all this may change. Maybe it's time for Planned Parenthood and other such un-American subversive groups to move their servers to Sealand?
Researchers at Stanford University have found that pessimists' and optimists' brains work differently. Optimists' brains showed stronger reactions to images of rainbows and puppies, whereas pessimists' brains showed no reaction there, but a reacton to images of angry people, cemeteries and spiders (albeit not as much in the emotional centres of the brain).
A Dogme 95 for computer game designers (via RobotWisdom):
5. The following types of games are prohibited: first-person shooters, side-scrollers, any action game with "special attacks." Also prohibited are: simulations of 20th-century or current military vehicles, simulations of sports which are routinely broadcast live on television, real-time strategy games focussing solely on warfare and weapons production, lock-and-key adventure games, numbers-heavy role-playing games, and any card game found in Hoyle's Rules of Card Games.
9. If a game is representational rather than abstract, it may contain no conceptual non sequiturs, e.g. medical kits may not be hidden inside oil tanks.
10. If a game is representational rather than abstract, the color black may not be used to depict any manmade object except ink, nor any dangerous fictitious nonhuman creatures. Black may be used to depict rooms in which the lights are not switched on.
It will be interesting to see what a DOGMA 2001 game would be like. It probably won't come from any large game house, who are more concerned with fighting games and gothic-first-person-shooters and other stuff that teenaged boys will buy. Retrospectively, Tetris would meet the criteria, and that was quite a conceptual leap (not to mention a catchy meme).
2001/2/4
Bizarre: A 12-year-old girl in Canada has been arrested and placed in secure custody for allegedly indulging in sexual experimentation with two 11-year-old friends, shortly after she turned 12. Because of laws concering age limits of consent and responsibility, a consent defense is unavailable, and if the court decides that any sexual activity took place, she will be automatically convicted as a sex offender. Had she not turned 12 before the alleged incident took place, there would have been no case. Still, she should count herself lucky that she isn't living 40 years ago; back then she could have been diagnosed with "excessive sexual urges" and treated with a frontal lobotomy or electroshock therapy or something similar.
Seen on Plastic: Are America's lunatic-fringe capital-N Nazi groups trying to make themselves more relevant by rebranding themselves as the Libertarian National Socialist Green Party, or is this a hoax of some sort?
Python on DVD. Not the language, but the complete TV series. Problem is (other than it being a bit dear), it is only Region 1. Which is no problem for deep-pocketed scofflaws with modified players, but still; one should not have to break the law to watch a TV series. (You'd think they'd have at least made it Region 2 for the Poms.)
The fine art of subtlety, Hollywood style: Hollywood is making a film about a Soviet submarine disaster; no, not the Kursk, one in 1961. Russians, including the survivors of the ill-fated mission, were initially enthusiastic, but this soured when they read the script and realised that the crew was to be portrayed as a bunch of vodka-sculling stooges.
"Even the untranslated copy provoked unpleasant feelings among the survivors: in the script one comes across the words 'vodka' and 'drink' almost more often than the words 'sea' or 'submarine'.
2001/2/3
I swear, I'm not making this up: Satanic teen-rebellion poster-humanoid Marilyn Manson has stated he wants to play Willy Wonka in the upcoming remake of the Chocolate Factory movie. Giving his reason, he says that it's because Willy Wonka represents Satan. Unfortunately for Manson, Warner Bros. have no intention of casting him as Wonka, or anything else for that matter. (Besides, if they wanted to make a goth cult movie, they'd have gotten Tim Burton to direct it.)
And this week, PLIF has another good cartoon. Print it out and stick it where uptight coworkers can see it.
According to the Victorian police, 95% of the "ecstasy" in Australia is fake, containing no MDMA and god only knows what. This is because of Customs stopping most shipments of the real stuff.
So what's in these tablets? Amphetamine is the main ingredient, says Quinn, "but in an attempt to mimic some of the effects of real ecstasy - euphoria, increased energy, pleasurable rushes, feelings of empathy, dreaminess and a hallucinogenic-like glow - producers of the fake pills typically combine various stimulants, hallucinogens and sedatives, depending on what chemicals they have access to... We're also seeing paracetamol; the stimulants pseudoephedrine and ephedrine; and heroin, codeine and cocaine all mixed up in the one tablet. And we've found tiny pieces of LSD tickets pressed inside tablets. We're finding benzodiazepines Temazepam, Diazepam, and Rohypnol, which are all sedatives. There's sometimes caffeine. We've also found Promethazine, a motion-sickness medication, which makes you feel woozy, cloudy, dissociated."
(Which sounds like a good argument for legalising and regulating the substance, like tobacco, in the name of harm minimisation. If there's a market for MDMA, give the buyers something that won't kill them and put the criminals who make fake pills out of business. Unless one accepts the neo-Darwinian argument that people who take recreational drugs with unknown long-term effects are unfit to consume resources and pass on their genes and are best culled from the gene pool.)
It's official: penguins don't fall over backwards when aircraft fly overhead. Or at least not when helicopters do; though the test for fixed-wing aircraft has yet to be carried out.
2001/2/2
For those of you in Melbourne, next Monday at 9pm, there will be a screening of a number of films, including the silent horror classic Nosferatu, at Splodge, at the Empress Hotel in Fitzroy North. It starts at 9pm, and admission is free for casual visitors.
Uses of technology: I finally found out what a song I heard on the radio last year was; I heard bits of it in passing a few times last year, when commercial radio was playing it in between boybands and pretty-girl R&B, and it reminded me of Curve circa Doppelgänger, though I never got the name. Today I was in Coles Express and it was playing on the PA. I got out the Pilot and jotted down a few fragments of lyrics, which I entered into Google when I next got online. Google took me to a now-gone lyrics page, though the cached copy of the page revealed that the song was "Deeper Water" by Deadstar. (It wasn't by manufactured alternapop band Killing Heidi, as some suggested.)
Smashing Peanuts, or the story of heroin-pop band Smashing Pumpkins told as a Charlie Brown comic strip. Amusing even if you don't own a single Smashing Pumpkins CD.
"And there was, across this country in the late 80s, bad pop music like Milli Vanilli. And lo, an angel of indie appeared before the mainstream and said unto them, fear not: for behold, I bring to you tidings of great joy, which shall be marketed to all people: alternative rock!"
The future of law enforcement: As American football fans filed into the stadium for the Super Bowl, cameras positioned above the turnstiles relayed their images to computers running face-recognition software, which compared them with images of criminals. (via Unknown News)
It's official: if you're Catholic and allergic to wheat, there's no salvation for you. (via Unknown News)
After one of the two Libyans was found guilty of the Lockerbie bombing, Bush has gone on the warpath, keeping sanctions imposed until more demands are met. The U.S. stands alone in this, with Britain and Europe eager to do business with the oil-rich terrorist state. Sending in Delta Force to abduct Gaddafi to face trial (in the U.S.) for crimes against humanity would probably not work. Maybe if Bush needs a publicity coup and/or a Gulf-scale war to unite America, we can expect to see Tomahawks over Tripoli soon?
The first penguinhead cult movie: Independent filmmaker J.T.S. Moore has made a documentary on the open source movement. The film, Revolution O.S. covers Linux, the FSF, Refund Day marches and Installfests, among other things, and will screen at the SXSW film festival. No release is planned, though Moore advises fanatical penguinheads to pester film distributors to pick it up.
2001/2/1
I have been playing with a Yamaha SU700 phrase sampler recently. (For those not in the know, that's a blue box with a number of pads and knobs which can play back sounds and loops.) One thing which I've noticed about the device is the minor things that were left out. A glaring example is its MIDI implementation; the device can be controlled from an external keyboard, but ignores note numbers, making it impossible to control a sample's pitch with the keyboard. It would not have been at all hard to make it play a sample at a different pitch depending on which note was played, and it would have made the unit a lot more useful. The SU700 does not support MIDI sample dump either. As for SCSI, the implementation is somewhat brain-damaged; apart from being very slow (apparently the device's CPU does all the work), it only supports one SCSI device at a time, doesn't support all standard devices (ZIP drives work; ORB drives don't), and you cannot connect it to a computer via SCSI. Also, SCSI disks are written in a proprietary format, which means you can't use them to transfer files to/from your computer. In fact, the only way to transfer samples (without resampling, that is) is to shlep them across on MSDOS-formatted floppy disks, which of course doesn't work for anything over 1.4Mb.
I got the impression that some overworked engineers at Yamaha designed everything from scratch, cutting corners to make the deadline. Why couldn't they just base the device's OS on Linux or QNX or something with working SCSI and file systems which other machines can actually read?
Chicks Don't Dig Losers: Another study confirms that women prefer risk-prone men to risk-averse nice-guy shmucks, much as evolutionary psychology predicted, and that flaunting wealth, strength and/or bravery increases mens' sexual success. One of the authors of the paper, Robin Dunbar, was involved in the survey which showed that mobile phones were a lekking device, flaunted by single males in the presence of females and competing males. Mind you, mobile phones have lost some of their lekking power, having become more or less ubiquitous; however, a London jeweler is working around that, by encrusting mobile phones with diamonds. Each unit (based on an off-the-shelf phone) sells for US$20,000 to US$50,000, though some are predicting fake gem-studded mobiles to become popular with teenagers. In decades to come, the Noughties may be known as the decade of those tacky fake-jewelled mobile phones.
Seen in the sidebar on WIRED News: According to a poll by Progressive Auto Insurance in the U.S., 45% of Americans ranked their cars as the thing they considered most important in their lives (compared to 6% for their children, and 10% for spouses). 17% of respondents claimed that they would buy their cars Valentine's Day gifts. Reminds one of that "MAN MARRIES HIS MOTORCYCLE" news story/urban legend.
Slouching towards Gilead (cont.): The U.S. under Bush moves closer towards a Religious Right theocracy, with Christian Fundamentalist extremist John Ashcroft's Attorney-General nomination clearing Congress; meanwhile, Bush proposes extra tax deductions for donations to "faith-based" charities. (Which may amount to a punitive tax on atheists/agnostics/freethinkers and other such unamericans.)
"No, I don't know that atheists should be considered as citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God."
- George Bush Sr.
Real chip off the old block, that W.
Imminent death of Linux predicted (by Microsoft); film at 11. (Btw, it's interesting that the word "penguinhead" has made it into the mainstream, or at least WIRED News. Then again, it does seam like a rather robust meme.)
A New York Press columnist came up with a reason to buy Britney Spears and Nsync CDs: he bought them in large quantities from discount CD buying clubs and flogged them on half.com, making a tidy profit. (Are you paying attention, Lev?)
Now this is an interesting gadget: Netcomm's combination modem/hub/firewall, which runs Embedded Linux and can be configured with a web-based tool or by telnetting in. Probably not necessary for a one-machine setup, though a must-have for a geek/penguinhead share-house. (via Slashdot)
Donna Kossy, of Kooks Museum fame, now runs a website devoted to weird books; she has a zine titled Book Happy, which reviews titles on crackpot science, fringe religion, conspiracy theory and miscellaneous weirdness, and has a range of titles for sale.