2001/3/31
An industrial design student at Brunel University in Britain has designed a toaster which burns the weather forecast onto slices of bread. The device, programmed in Java, retrieves the weather from a telephone number (presumably by modem), and uses an 11x11 heat-shielding mask to print it onto the bread.
Update: Not only did professional sad-sack Morrissey foretell the death of Princess Diana, but the aliens were involved. Or so claims one "veganmozfan".
Last night I went to see Harmon Leon's show at the Comedy Festival. (Harmon Leon is the "infiltrative journalist" and media prankster who infiltrated the Scientology Celebrity Centre disguised as a German industriogothic rocker, among other exploits). The show was very enjoyable, taking the form of a visit to the Nine Circles of Hell as represented in contemporary American life. Among the things he recounted were his visits to institutions such as the Most Beautiful Baby contest, ventriloquists' conventions and Christian Hardcore Punk concerts, and empirical evidence of how easy it is for an obviously deranged person to buy guns. I laughed a lot in this show; I highly recommend going to see it. (It's on at 7pm from Tuesdays through to Sundays until April 22.)
2001/3/30
Australian politics: skip if not interested. John Howard turns to the Hanson voters, going for a more conservative populist approach, with a bit of token corporate-bashing. He may have a hard time of capturing the Hanson vote if he keeps opposing the death penalty for drug dealers or sending in the army to clean up the streets. Perhaps he could come to a compromise and have dope-smokers and young louts publically caned and/or humiliatingly shorn of their hair.
(Actually, Graham, I believe that Eric Gill was a devout Catholic, with monastic aspirations. He also had a habit of shagging anything that moved (including, some allege, his daughters and the family dog), which was not considered at odds with his godliness. You see, he was a genius, and genii are allowed, nay, supposed to be seething masses of contradictions and peccadilloes.)
New Age crystal power debunked. Experiments show that believers in the power of crystals experience the same result with a fake plastic crystal as with a real one. Believers in crystal power were also found to be more susceptible to suggestion and hypnosis than skeptics, which strongly suggests that the phenomenon is a result of autosuggestion.
Abortion clinic sniper arrested in France; he went into hiding in Ireland, doing "clerical work" (would that involve proselytising his religion and recruiting converts?), but fled there after Irish police started closing in. How much do you want to bet that he's just a disposable soldier, and that the organisation that trained him, provided him with papers and kept him hidden still exists and has others willing to take his place. (That anti-abortion hitlist website was updated awfully quickly.)
A day in the life of two Internet fraudsters. Watch them spam AOL users, gull porn surfers out of their credit card numbers, trade credit card numbers and buy laptops over fraudulent mobile phone connections and (the horror!) defraud ad banner programmes and Amazon affiliate sales. Or at the very least brag about it to a MSNBC reporter who paid them US$250 for their cooperation.
First there was phone phreaking, then hacking/cracking, and now there is War Driving. No, not live-action Car Wars, but rather cruising around with a laptop and a wireless LAN card and seeing how many corporate networks you can get into (which, with the insecure state of 802.11 tbese days, is surprisingly easy).
Oh yes, and Graham has two new fonts up. Not to mention some more interesting type samples. I guess I'll have to do the Mac versions sometime, as Wintendo Fontographer's Mac export function is broken.
A Utah high school has banned beads and glow sticks as "drug paraphernalia", because of their link with the evil drug Ecstasy. (By that token, you could ban most electronic dance music, as much of it sounds like repetitive noise unless you have a head full of drugs. Then again, Britain has already tried this.) It's interesting how they're cracking down on the symbols of loved-up fluffy E-heads, whilst allowing goths and metalheads to show off their more aggressive and antisocial symbols. I suppose that's because they're not drug-related.
In South Africa, 11% of teenaged boys think that gang rape, or "jack rolling" as they call it, is an acceptable recreational activity, and that 25% believe that the creechy young devotchkas in question "asked for it". The young droogs often go unpunished, and even some of the starry schoolteacher vecks there see the old in-out-in-out with students to be a "fringe benefit" of the job, compensating for the low rates of pay. (via Plastic)
And now the next "reality TV" craze: Shag My Bird. A cross between a dating show, a reality TV show and Jerry Springer.
2001/3/29
Links to various homemade TB-303 clones. Mind you, most of them eschew putting in the step sequencer and replace it with a MIDI interface, so you have to lug a computer around. What I'd like to see would be a 303 clone with a sequencer, and which is no larger than a real 303, as opposed to a 19" rack module. (If it's going to be bound to a computer-based studio, you may as well use a softsynth.)
2001/3/28
Rehabilitating Goto: The Halfbakery contains this psoposal for exception handling in C. Actually somewhat useful (if not completely). One of the many proposals from one Jutta, who seems to come up with some interesting ideas.
This should make things a bit more exciting: an honest-to-goodness psychopathic killer has escaped from a day trip from his psychiatric institution. Neville Colin Garden, 45, suffers from paranoid schizophrenia, and murdered a milk bar owner in 1994 in the belief that he was part of the CIA-Vatican conspiracy against him. It is believed that the longer he is at large and without medication, the more likely he is to behave violently. He is still at large, has been sighted in Melbourne, and may have a passport.
(And if that doesn't liven things up, there are always those missing Russian briefcase nukes that have still not been accounted for. Not to mention uncounted planet-killer asteroids hurtling dangerously through space.)
The host of a TV comedy show was forced to make a humiliating public apology over a skit by an American comedian, played on his show, which contained offensive remarks about Christianity and the Catholic Church. The comedian, Scott Capurro, is in Australia performing live; no word on whether he will be arrested and expelled from the country, or just a review of the visa approval process (if they can keep David Irving out of Australia, surely they can keep other offensive figures out).
Computer scientists reconstruct the face of Jesus. Not sure how they did it (the article is light on details), though this is one of those rare Jesii who actually looks plausibly Semitic, as opposed to the chestnut-haired, spaniel-eyed Italians in paintings, or the Scandahoovian Jesii seen in films. Interesting how imagined images of Jesus have tended to look representative of the artist's intended audience.
The street finds its own uses for things: The latest craze in Los Angeles is "Heelys", or sneakers with stealthily embedded wheels in the heels. With these, a wearer can skate down the footpath, switching to walking/running if they see a police officer. (via RobotWisdom)
A piece on the CIA's "data mining" technology, designed to make sense of the massive volume of raw data; not much detail, but it looks impressive. If the CIA's machine translation system produces less unintentionally amusing results than Systran/Babelfish, it must indeed be impressive.
This just in: Oswald did not act alone. A British forensic scientist has determined, from an acoustic analysis of recordings of Dallas police radio channels, that there is a 96.3% probability that a shot was fired from the grassy knoll.
The Million Leech March: Napster has called on its users to march on Washington, protesting the harsh treatment of the company, and thus the violation of their civil and human rights to share MP3s. (While you're at it, could you put in a word for DeCSS? Us Penguinheads are eager to be able to watch our DVD collections legally.)
You know those unique, world-wide serial numbers mobile phones have to make stolen phones unusable, and which you should write down just in case? Well, don't bother. Don't waste your time; the numbers can be easily changed, with little more than a laptop, a cable and some software. Some crims even have their stolen handsets rigged to change the number every time the phone is used.
(Digression: apparently it is possible to replace the firmware inside most mobile phones with hacked versions, much in the way that car hackers can reprogram their BMWs' engine controllers; how much effort is required, I do not know. I can think of some neat (and benign) applications for this; having a phone display the relative strengths of several nearby base stations would be somewhat cool, in a somewhat trainspotterish sort of way.)
Though, just from following a search query, it seems that unlocking stolen phones and changing serial numbers is so trivially easy that any petty thief with a PC could do it. Which is rather stupid on the part of whoever designed the system.
2001/3/27
Canada is facing a shortage of healthy donor sperm, and may have to import more from the US. For a country which prides itself on not being American, that would be a major blow. You would think that they'd buy new supplies from Britain and France instead, defiantly retaining their colonial heritage. (via Lev)
A company in the UK is in court for allegedly selling aphrodisiacs as air fresheners. It is alleged that an air freshener, sold as Reds' Room or Rave Room, contains isobutyl nitrate, a "euphoric inhalant aphrodisiac", in medicinal quantities, and has been marketed as such.
Mr Harris said one generic advertisement for the product said it diffused "a deeply erotic aroma throughout the room to set a deeply sexual mood".
About a week ago, Charles Johnson, longtime president of the Flat Earth Society of Lancaster, CA, passed away. Johnson's platygaean beliefs were a quaint mixture of scientific empiricism, Christian faith and common sense (which is, after all, what tells you that the Earth is flat), inherited from Flat Earthers in Victorian England. Among believers in the Flat Earth, Johnson counted Moses, Jesus, Copernicus, Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin, the last 3 because of the UN logo. It is believed that he was the last of his kind. (via Lev)
Well, The Man may have made it hard to find the latest Britney or Eminem song on Napster, but the fringes of mutant content are still there. You can, for example, find copies of John Trubee's "Blind Man's Penis" song (the result of sending whacked-out nonsense lyrics to one of those mail-order song-arranging services that operated out of Nashville; crooned over a generic kitsch-country backing in a cowboy drawl, it sounds hilarious). You can even find some copyright-violating parody art (Negativland's TLU&TN2, Plunderphonics, KLF, and the notorious NIN/Spice Girls medley, though not the Britney/Eminem mix). Don't tell the RIAA, though.
Following on from Tamagotchis, I-Mode virtual girlfriends and robot dogs, researchers at Japan's NEC have developed a robot that heals rifts in families. Dubbed PaPeRo (Partner-type Personal Robot), the cute, 15-inch robot can recognise facial expressions and tailor its responses according to the speaker, thus acting as a go-between between quarreling family members. It is currently being tested with 10 families; there are no plans to market it yet.
Saudi Arabian clerics ban Pokémon, partly over alleged symbols embedded in the cards. Apparently they're worried that it may seduce wholesome Saudi kids down the deviant paths of Zionism, Freemasonry and Christianity.
2001/3/26
US Republican wiseguy P.J. O'Rourke has written a guide to US pop culture for unhip oldsters who wish to not appear, like, totally lame-o when talking to Gen-Y kids. Well, it's what passes for pop culture; mostly packaged products like Eminem and Jennifer Lopez and boy bands, incubated in tall glass buildings in LA and handed down to the masses like manna from heaven via MTV and Wal-Mart. (link via bOING bOING)
A piece in the Moscow Times on some of the pranks played by those wacky funsters on the Mir space station:
Krikalyov sneaked an amateur radio onboard Mir and used it to establish a link with the truck driver, who was heading to Kimberley. The unsuspecting driver thought it was one of his colleagues driving on a nearby road and called Krikalyov a prankster when the cosmonaut said was he was heading for America via India and China.
(via Slashdot)
The current (April 2001) issue of UK music magazine Mojo has a good feature on The Smiths, coming in at some 22 pages; it includes a look at the band's career, Morrissey's solo career, and an interview with the reclusive Moz himself, who's holed up in his Los Angeles home, with a new album's worth of material to record but no recording company willing to sign him. It's not on the Mojo web site, so you'll have to buy the dead-tree issue if you want to read it.
War is peace, freedom is slavery, but business is business: Murdoch's people have learned that, if you want any chance of access to the world's largest market, you bend over when the Chinese Government says so, or when you think it'll appreciate your doing so. Case in point: Murdoch fils James, in charge of dealings with China, gave a speech in Los Angeles, denouncing the Falun Gong movement, condemning Western media bias against Chinese government policy, and saying that Hong Kong's democracy activists should accept the reality of life under a strong-willed "absolutist" government. ("absolutist" sounds like a particularly psychoceramic strain of Ayn Randism, but is presumably a way of saying "totalitarian" without the negative connotations; sort of like the Reagan-era coinage of "authoritarian" for US-friendly right-wing dictatorships, as opposed to the truly evil "totalitarian" left-wing dictatorships.) (via Lev)
Boyd Graves, a black US lawyer is suing the US government for creating the AIDS virus to exterminate black people. His case has been thrown out of lower courts, and now he is taking it to the Supreme Court. Could he be the new Teri Smith Tyler? (via Leviathan)
2001/3/25
Welcome to the Digital Millennium; your next computer will be a trusted client. A look at Microsoft's "Secure PC" plans, which will impose copy control at the hardware level, tightly integrated with Windows, of course. And which will have the nice effect of getting the weight of the RIAA behind the Microsoft desktop OS monopoly and freezing out file formats not tied to Windows.
Eager for the money of Western tourists, Romania is building a Dracula theme park. Mind you a lot of its own citizens oppose this, and consider confuting the 15th-century tyrant/national hero with eastern European vampire legends as an insult to their national history.
2001/3/24
Signs of the impending apocalypse: (1) ads on trams for an upcoming movie titled Crocodile Dundee in LA. (2) Hampsterdance - The Album. (First they had a web site, then a dance remix single, and now a whole album; this could be the Alvin and the Chipmunks, or the MC Skat Kat & the Stray Mob, of the post-90s.)
Ah yes; that Australian article about the Postmodernism Generator. I picked up the Australian today, and found it wasn't there; though Peter tells me that it is on page 10 of the Sydney edition. (In the Melbourne edition, page 10 is a full-page ad for subscriptions to The Australian.) Curiouser and curiouser. They sent a photographer over to take my picture (with a laptop) yesterday, but that appears not to have been used there. Anyway, there's an online copy of said piece here.
2001/3/23
Australian politicians, led by the reactionary right, are planning the toughest music labelling laws in the western world, These laws will mandate labelling and prohibit the sales of music with offensive lyrics to minors. Which means we may wake up one morning and find the latest industriogothic rap-metal albums at the local Sanity replaced by their edited Wal-Mart versions, with songs dropped and rude words edited out, or just removed from mainstream outlets altogether. Then they can start PolyEster-style raids on places like Peril 305 which persist in stocking the hard-core fucked-up shit for the discerning 15-year-old Mansongoth.
The recording racket has a new weapon: a program named Media Tracker. It is a web-based system which imitates clients on Napster and IRC, monitors newsgroups and checks search engines, finding copyrighted sound files; it can allegedly identify individual machines and ISPs and send legal nastygrams. The strategy may be to bog down ISPs with demands and legal threats until they decide to pre-emptively block file sharing/auto-delete users' MP3s (as some ISPs already do), or ultimately install "indemnity filters" that block potential copyright violations preemptively. Remember, kids, if it's not in a RIAA-approved secure format, it's probably illegal; Just Say No.
Bush's faith-based action plan postponed. Out of all things, it's concern from the religious right that they won't be able to make converts with government money, and that some of the money will go to un-Christian groups like the Scientologists and -- shock, horror -- Islamic groups.
Napster complains about RIAA blacklists containing files that the companies don't actually own. Pretty much to be expected; did anyone think that an industry run by coke-snorting, whoremongering control freaks who pimp artists into the poorhouse as they line their own pockets wouldn't try to pull a fast one and sneak some other tracks onto the blacklist, just in case? It's a matter of covering your ass; naked greed is a sensible business practice in the recording racket business model, just like prosecuting people for copying albums that have been deleted for 10 years is.
With Mir about to crash and burn like it runs Windows 95, possibly bringing a metal-eating mutant space fungus back to destroy civilisation and punish Man for his hubris, Wired News has a piece about the night in 1979 when Skylab fell on a Western Australian town. Which I remember mostly from it being referred to in Dogs In Space.
Check out Graham's new font section. (Mac users, don't despair; there will be Mac versions soon.)
Octobullshit: Martin Amis looks at the surreal, distorted world of the US porn movie industry.
Chloe's guardians are gonzo. She recently shot a film out near their place, and her stepfather (while absenting himself from his stepdaughter's scenes) "was like a towel-boy". And Chloe's mother, for two years running now, has marched out of the AVN Awards, brandishing Chloe's Best Anal trophies above the heads of the crowd.
As I sampled some extreme productions on the VCR in my hotel room, I kept worrying about something. I kept worrying that I'd like it. Porno services the "polymorphous perverse": the near-infinite chaos of human desire. If you harbour a perversity, then sooner or later porno will identify it. You'd better hope that this doesn't happen while you're watching a film about a coprophagic pigfarmer - or an undertaker.
(The bit about the polymorphous perversity of human desire is quite true; a sampling of Disturbing Search Requests will attest to that.) (Via Hobbsblog)
2001/3/22
Own-horn-blowing: I have just been told that an article about my Postmodernism Generator will run in the Weekend Australian this Saturday.
Those painfully earnest types in PETA are at it again; the latest step in their crusade to abolish meat consumption throughout the world (or at least the human race) is a letter to the warden in an Indiana prison, urging him to make convicted Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh's final meals vegetarian, and suggesting that consumption of meat might cause violence.
Un-Australian Activities: Seemingly infiltrated by subversive pro-drug elements, the Australian Medical Association has expressed doubts over John Howard's sacking of pro-reform members of his drug war council, replacing them with neo-Reaganite zero-tolerance warriors. The bleeding-heart comsymps in the AMA (who probably smoked pot in university too) made the claim that "zero tolerance types of proposals don't work", instead suggesting "drug education" programs (a known Communist code word for legalization by stealth).
Adelaide goth-pop band Scissor Pretty have a new web site. They also have a new album/EP, Cheese Dreams, out soon, and two new MP3s available for the downloading now.
Tonight I went to see Harry He Is Here To Help (or Harry, Un Ami Qui Vous Veut Du Bien), at the Kino. Quite an enjoyable psychological thriller, and somewhat unpredictable in places; just when you think that the laws of Hollywood psychopathology predict what is going to happen next, something unexpected happens.
The US state of New Hampshire is planning to tax movies and video games to compensate victims of sexual assault. The rationale is that movies and video games objectify women, and thus the tax is fitting. Seems like a bit of a stretch; also, I wonder whether it will be applied across the board, or whether Tetris and romantic comedies will be exempted whilst Tomb Raider and Arnie-blowing-shit-up movies get slugged. And while they're at it, why not tax rap-metal CDs? You'd think that Eminem going on about raping his mother and strangling his wife would be more worrisome than Lara Croft's polygonised breasts, wouldn't you? (via Lev)
Astroturf: Having learned the lesson of guerilla-marketed low-budget films like The Blair Witch Project, Hollywood studios have taken to creating fake fan sites, hiring freelance consultants to create deliberately rough, crudely designed "fan" sites to hype their projects. The end results are indistinguishable from the real thing; or are they?
Intriguing rumour of the day: The Church of Scientology's alleged mini-Echelon facility hooked into US ISP Earthlink, for keeping an eye out for Clams gone bad. Or so a Slashdot poster alleges.
Is ambient the "classical music of the future"? One Mark Prendergast claims so in a new book titled The Ambient Century.
Ah yes, Graham, I remember that Paul Lekakis song as well. And Male Stripper, by Man To Man feat. Man Parrish. (Should I be worried that I remember that in such detail? Oddly enough, I never did find out who exactly Man Parrish was, or why he was being featured.) I remember The 80s in fragments; I didn't hear Fade To Grey or Blue Monday first time around (though I still might have the 7" of Blue Monday '88, purchased in 1988, somewhere), though I do remember hearing Bizarre Love Triangle and some Italian disco number with lyrics like "let's go to the beach, and we can have a good time" (or something to that effect) playing from some teenaged girl's bedroom when dragged along somewhere with my parents. I somehow get the feeling that she looked like Molly Ringwald, or at least should have.
Baudrillard sez: the Gulf War never happened. Though I think that's just him being his usual solipsistic self. (via Lev)
2001/3/21
Recreational psychoceramics: For those in Melbourne, Lev is giving a talk at some place called the Unitarian Church Hall tonight. Given the tone of his blog, it should be of interest to anyone into over-the-top ranting. I have heard that the subject will be "personal responsibility on public transport", or something of that nature.
The street finds its own uses for things: A Russian inventor has patented the talking vodka bottle. A chip in the cap toasts the drinker when it's opened, encouraging them to drink up, even if they're alone.
Zhurin's invention might seem gimmicky to foreign eyes, but it fulfills a number of functions crucial to Russian drinking habits. First, it allows you to drink alone. "When you have no one to drink with, it will serve as your drinking companion," says Zhurin. Critics might call it an enabler: the bottle cap asks "How about another one?," then gives the order to pour without waiting for an answer.
The bottle also simulates the presence of friends, among them beautiful women, and recites toasts to the drinker's family. (via Rebecca's Pocket)
Between pissing off the MPAA, the DVD consortium and the Church of Scientology, researcher and cyber-liberties activist David Touretzky seems to be set on making enemies of everyone in Hollywood. Good luck to him, I say; the world needs people like him.
First there was the Hello Kitty Note PC, then the Hello Kitty vibrator with built-in voice chip (rumoured to say "I'm coming, I'm coming!" in Japanese when operated), and now this.
2001/3/20
Fitter, happier, more productive: Meet the Organization Kids; raised on Ritalin, safety rules and accelerated learning programmes, they are clean-living, achievement-oriented, self-regimented, conformistic and deferent to authority; their world is an orderly, stable one without all that postmodern, pre-millennial uncertainty, and they look like becoming the next ruling elite.
In short, at the top of the meritocratic ladder we have in America a generation of students who are extraordinarily bright, morally earnest, and incredibly industrious. They like to study and socialize in groups. They create and join organizations with great enthusiasm. They are responsible, safety-conscious, and mature. They feel no compelling need to rebel -- not even a hint of one. They not only defer to authority; they admire it. "Alienation" is a word one almost never hears from them. They regard the universe as beneficent, orderly, and meaningful. At the schools and colleges where the next leadership class is being bred, one finds not angry revolutionaries, despondent slackers, or dark cynics but the Organization Kid.
The world they live in seems fundamentally just. If you work hard, behave pleasantly, explore your interests, volunteer your time, obey the codes of political correctness, and take the right pills to balance your brain chemistry, you will be rewarded with a wonderful ascent in the social hierarchy. You will get into Princeton and have all sorts of genuinely interesting experiences open to you. You will make a lot of money -- but more important, you will be able to improve yourself.
Perhaps Huxley was right?
Now that's a Daft idea: Consumers in New York will soon be able to get Coca-Cola on tap in their homes. Customers get a sealed unit installed which mixes Coke syrup with carbonated water; the unit is sealed to keep the recipe secret. (No news on whether opening it is a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, though it could well be that the banning of DeCSS and such has set the precedent to allow something like this to happen in the world of atoms.)
Mr Daft told the newspaper that he does not see Pepsi as a rival and will only be happy when customers are turning on their taps to drink Coke rather than water
I swear I'm not making this up...
Is schizophrenia a byproduct of the evolution of human intelligence? A new theory suggests this. I wonder whether in some situations some forms of schizophrenia could have been adaptive to genetic fitness (i.e., making the afflicted a fitter chieftain/prophet/leader), with current forms being a throwback to this.
So this is what the Blue Man Group is. I've heard a number of people from A Certain Mailing List (mostly those from the Boston/Cambridge, MA area) going on enthusiastically about them.
I went to the Punters Club tonight to see some live music. One of the acts was a chap named Seth Rees. He played a guitar through a multi-effects unit, set to various reverbs and delays, creating lush ambient soundscapes. Highly recommended; as young Alex would say, gorgeousness and gorgeosity.
Though then there was the crazy woman sitting at the table beside mine who kept going on, in a thick Scottish accent, about how I should buy the CD of the band that played before I arrived, and how Molly Meldrum lives down the street from her and is gay. I didn't get whether she approved or disapproved of Mr. Meldrum's alleged sexual orientation, though.
2001/3/19
Humanity's baser instincts: Tacky ideas for reality TV shows keep coming. Following in the footsteps of Temptation Island, a Dutch company plans to put 12 overweight people in a house, competing for who can lose the most weight and fighting off temptations thrown at them by the producers. The winner gets their total weight lost in gold.
``It won't be like a freak show with sausages falling out of every drawer or something, but I can imagine the doorbell will ring and it's a pizza delivery boy with a pizza,'' Debbie de Jongh, one of the show's on-site producers, told Reuters.
Tonight I went to see Quills; I found it quite interesting and enjoyable. Geoffrey Rush plays the Marquis de Sade with great relish, revelling in his wickedness, with Michael Caine playing a larger-than-life monster. The sets, costumes and cinematography are also excellent, and add to the atmosphere. I will probably go and see it again at some stage.
(I was also reminded of another, thematically similar, film I once saw, Marat/Sade (to abbreviate its title somewhat), made in the 1960s, adapted from a play and starring Glenda Jackson; I remember that David Thrussell sampled part of the dialogue of it for one of his SNOG pieces.)
Australian moralist-conservative PM John Howard has purged his drug war council of advocates of law reform (i.e., desertion in the War On Drugs), and bolstered it with drug-war hard-liners. The council is already run by a high-ranking member of the conservative, zero-tolerance Salvation Army, whose fortunes have been bolstered by Howard's support, its operations staffed by work-for-the-dole conscripts (or so various anarchist types allege, anyway).
Australian politics; ignore if not interested: Greens beat Democrats in Ryan byelection; the main result is still in doubt, though Howard is already planning to spend more money buying swinging voters. Don Chipp's dire warning about One Nation becoming the third party, and holding the balance of power after the next election, may not come to pass. The Democrats' leader waffles about it, not acknowledging that the Democrats' complicity in passing the GST, and thus alienating their idealistic, left-leaning support base, is probably behind their slump from 8% to 5% of the vote.
Cats' purring strengthens bones; The low-frequency vibrations stimulate bone growth and regeneration, which contributes to cats surviving falls from great heights. The discovery of this mechanism may lead to "sound therapy" for bone disorders in humans. (Or would sharing one's lap with a contented cat help in itself?)
2001/3/18
Nature adapts: Rare species abound in the North/South Korean Demilitarised Zone. As one would expect of a vast stretch of land which has been off limits to human civilisation for half a century. Now there is talk of listing the DMZ as a Transboundary Biosphere Reserve, and also of it becoming a destination for eco-tourism. (via Plastic)
An eye-opening and somewhat alarming piece about the US fast food industry, its effects and costs.
About eighty percent of the cattle in the United States were routinely fed slaughterhouse wastes - the rendered remains of dead sheep and dead cattle - until August 1997. The USDA banned the practice, hoping to prevent a domestic outbreak of mad-cow disease. Millions of dead cats and dead dogs, purchased from animal shelters, are being fed to cattle each year.
Today, hundreds of McDonald's restaurants dot the landscape of eastern Germany. In town after town, statues of Lenin have been torn down, and statues of Ronald McDonald have popped up. One of the largest is in Bitterfeld, where a three-story-high illuminated Ronald McDonald can be seen from the autobahn for miles.
At a primary school in Beijing, Yunxiang Yan found that all of the children recognized Ronald McDonald. The children told Yan they liked "Uncle McDonald" because he was "funny, gentle, kind, and . . . he understood children's hearts."
(via Found)
I'm Wayne Kerr, and if there's one thing I hate... well, allow me to explain with a story:
Recently a flyer caught my attention; it announced, in ravey typography, that a singer/songwriter named Julia Messenger was performing at a pub known as the Grace Darling. Reading further, it mentioned her involvement in the "downbeat" and "electronic dub" scenes in Germany, and worked with Klaus Schutze (of Tangerine Dream fame). This piqued my interest; this would at least be interesting, I thought, and probably somewhat enjoyable. There was nothing to prepare me for the pinkness and horror that was to await.
The show was tonight, scheduled for 10pm. I arrived half an hour late. Instead of a musical performance, I found a fold-out stage prop in the form of a cruise ship and three inflatable floaties. It turned out to be the set of some dating game show called the Love Boat. Two loud-voiced women in sailor costumes were asking questions like "what is your star sign?" and "which reality TV show describes you?", of a group of fashionably dressed (and probably fashionably drunk) late-twentysomethings. The audience seemed to be similar people, as well as a large proportion of middle-aged people, and a few children running around making noise. A bad sign; definitely not an avant-garde crowd.
I was told the game show was running overtime and Julia Messenger would perform at 11pm. I sat down at the bar, reading a copy of InPress and waited, expecting some music. At 11pm I was assaulted with the Love Boat theme blaring out of the PA, and the synchronised off-key singing of the two hostesses as the next instalment of the game began. I retreated to the other room, lest I win a dinner date there with one of the contestants.
Julia Messenger did perform, finally, just before midnight; though her show didn't seem anywhere near as interesting as the flyers suggested; it seemed more like radio-friendly pop songs over canned electronic backings, with one of the choruses sounding dispiritingly like a Britney Spears song.
If they have band venues in Hell, I now know what they must be like.
2001/3/17
Python roundup: An interview with Guido van Rossum, creator of Python, in which he reveals how he wrote the language, and why it will be the next big thing, taking the mantle now held by the popular mutant camel Perl. And if that isn't enough, here's Eric S. Raymond's take:
Ugly programs are like ugly suspension bridges: they're much more liable to collapse than pretty ones, because the way humans (especially engineer-humans) perceive beauty is intimately related to our ability to process and understand complexity. A language that makes it hard to write elegant code makes it hard to write good code.
I agree with ESR; Perl has its uses for quick file parsing jobs, but isn't really suited to large programming tasks (especially when there are better languages). Python is currently my favourite language for day-to-day use. I've looked at Ruby briefly, and it looks possibly more elegant than Python (some of the OO syntax reminds me of SuperCollider on the Mac), though isn't yet quite as mature as Python.
2001/3/16
Some years ago, Neil Halstead (of Slowdive/Mojave 3) did the soundtrack for an independent movie called I'm The Elephant, U Are The Mouse. I recently stumbled onto a copy of the album (well, sort of) and have been listening to it; it's rather moody, in a late Slowdive meets Low sort of way, only with some electronics. If you can find a CD, it'd be well worth tracking down.
John 'gnu' Gilmore's ISP have blocked his outgoing mail, because he ran an open relay. This was not an act of momentary carelessness either, being a staunch Libertarian cypherpunk type (gods bless him), Gilmore believes he is within his rights to run an open relay. Mind you, this is one of the rare times when I must disagree with Gilmore; we cannot expect the Internet, used by hundreds of millions of people (some of whom will be bottom-feeding scum, like the spammers who exploit open relays), to be as open and trusting as when it was a small community of academics and hackers; any more than you can expect to be able to leave your door unlocked in the big city.
Taking the place of the Napster Pig Encoder is an open-source Napster proxy which translates names and searches. Mind you, as it's open-source, and uses the obvious ROT13 cypher (used on USENET since the dawn of time), it won't take long for Napster to do due dilligence and block for ROT13'd song titles. If it hasn't done so already. (It's hard to tell, on one hand, searches for 'zrgnyyvpn' and 'oevgarl' yield results, but on the other hand, unencrypted searches yield the same number of results, if not more.)
Academe and the free exchange of ideas: On 3RRR's talkback show this morning, they had two members of local industrial cabaret-pop band Machine Gun Fellatio, recently banned from playing at student unions across Melbourne because their show contains a minute or so of female nudity (the female vocalist exposes her breasts and does cartwheels or somesuch). This is, of course, Not On; apart from contravening the anti-sexism provisions of student unions' constitutions (and female nudity where males are present is always sexist and exploitative; the context and performer's intention are irrelevant), such shows could offend students from a sheltered background, and there's always the threat that drunken male students may be whipped into a frenzy of gang rape by seeing a minute or so of naked female breasts.
Object seen in university tutorial room: An eraser, of Japanese manufacture, with the brand-name "BOXY", and bearing the following inscription:
THE BASIC CONCEPT OF BOXY
ALWAYS AIMS AT A SIMPLE LIFE STYLE
Well, I suppose it would, wouldn't it...
Web ad companies haven't been having a good run of things, with most people ignoring their banners, and on top of that with the dot-com collapse. Now some have come up with a solution: ads in page backgrounds. A pioneer was mediocre American beer brand Budweiser, which had its "wallpaper" ad placed in the background of stockmarket site MarketWatch.
The Branded Life: Two American teenagers, whose respective parents apparently didn't begin putting money away for their college education when they were born, have come up with a clever way of putting themselves through college: by renting themselves out as walking advertisements. If you give them money, they will not only walk around with your logo plastered all over their clothes but eat your food, read your magazines in public (regardless of subject matter), fly on your airline, and generally turn their lives into advertisements for your brand.
This leads to a lot of speculation. What sorts of constraints would their sponsors put on their lifestyles/behaviour? Given how rigidly controlled the lifestyles and images of inanimate brand mascots are, you can bet that corporations won't want their walking billboards doing anything that does not suit their image. If their fellow students, wary of being advertised at whenever in their present, begin to avoid the two, will the sponsors dump them? Would such an experiment end in corporate-image catastrophe or could such corporate sponsorship be the future of education for the underprivileged and mediagenic?
AMEG VERO: Napster gets the Pig Encoder pulled. I wonder whether such a software system for bypassing filename filters would count as a "circumvention device", and thus be illegal. What if it's a sequence of instructions to a human searcher (i.e., "remove the first letter of each word", "replace all As with Es", "transliterate into Hebrew/Katakana and back"), and not a computer program? If someone posted that up, could they be prosecuted for conspiracy or incitement?
(Come to think of it, English contains a lot of redundancy; you could probably systematically throw away a lot of information from song titles and still be able to find songs uniquely. Not that we'd encourage that sort of behaviour here, no...)
Early-80s synthpop group Soft Cell are reforming to play live. No news on whether they will record any new material, or if they do, whether they will head in a more sp00ky direction (à la Gary Numan, Information Society, &c) to capture their core demographic.
Religious evangelism can kill: A row has erupted between the Italian government and the Vatican over the Vatican's Vatican's radio transmitter facility on a vast site in the north of Rome, and transmitting worldwide with Godlike power. The Italian governments cited a report that shows leukaemia rates among local children were six times higher than the average for Rome, and blamed the Vatican for electromagnetic pollution. The Vatican responded by insisting that it is not answerable to Italian jurisdiction, as it has sole sovereignty over the massive antenna farm, and besides, there is no evidence that such radiation caused harm, a claim the Italian Environment Minister claimed was "incredible, serious and absurd". Even if this is true, it won't be the first time innocents were sacrificed for the greater good of spreading the Word of God to a fallen world; the Children's Crusade may hold a useful precedent for the Vatican. (via Leviathan)
2001/3/15
Btw, for those of you in Melbourne: tomorrow (Friday) is the last day of the poster sale in the union building at Melbourne University. While most of it is the usual late-90s guff(Jennifer Lopez, 90s alternateen bands, dope-smoking cartoon aliens and fluffy animals feature heavily), there are a few more interesting posters (The Cure, Betty Blue, A Clockwork Orange, &c.) Unfortunately, they don't have that giant Joy Division Love Will Tear Us Apart poster, though, nor is one likely to find that this side of eBay.
The All Your Base meme may be officially dead, but that hasn't stopped advertisers from swarming to its carcass like flies.
This is a bit late, because I haven't had much time for blogging lately due to work. The UK patent office shows itself to be more clueful (and/or less beholden to the interests of corporate power in itself) than most and comes to the conclusion that software should not be patentable, and neither should be business methods. Let's hope they stick to their guns.
Controversial idea of the day: Was legalising abortion responsible for falling crime rates 18 years later? Two professors claim to have found a causal link; namely that abortion reduces the number of children born in poverty, who are most likely to turn to crime as they grow up. This report has raised hackles on both sides; not only of the usual religious demagogues but also of left-liberal types who argue that such views may justify eugenics against the poor.
Not from Risks Digest: An elderly war veteran stabbed his next-door neighbour to death, after a fireworks display triggered a flashback to World War II and he mistook the frail widow for a German soldier. (via Leviathan)
According to Q magazine, the best album cover of all time is the one from God Save The Queen, by the Sex Pistols. #2 is Joy Division's Closer, and #7 is New Order's Blue Monday (hang on--wasn't that a 12" single? Or do they mean Power, Corruption & Lies?), also designed by Peter Saville.
Smaller, faster, more: A wily hacker has trumped the seven-line Perl DVD descrambler with a smaller and faster C version. It's still not under the McQuary limit, though, although not by much.
2001/3/13
Mass desertion in the War On Drugs: As the U.S. and Australia intensify their respective anti-drug crusades, European states are following the Dutch lead and decriminalising possession. Even Britain is recommending that police do nothing when faced with incidents of aggravated dope smoking. Only Sweden and Greece are keeping the faith in the possible eradication of the drug menace.
Pat Cadigan on how cyberpunk literature influenced technology:
Cyberpunk was really a reaction against old boy sci-fi which was about white guys in space who would come up with some kind of technological thing.
Your next computer will be a trusted client: The latest great white hope for the content industry is known as InTether. Based on military security technologies, InTether is a Windows-based universal copy control system, which takes control of the operating system and can disable software such as screen grabbers. What's more, it can detect attempts at tampering and shut down the computer, or self-destruct, taking all secured content with it.
To begin with, Friedman says, the system incorporates 11 layers of security defenses. ''All have to be successfully navigated'' in order to hack the system. ''But one piece does nothing but check continually the integrity of the other pieces,'' he says. ''If you could disable a certain piece, within milliseconds our system would know.''
Could this be a real-life "black ice"? Bruce Schneier, for one, is skeptical.
Seen in my SpamCop spam filter:
[5554103] affiliates@nudegirlcasino.com (we'd like to do business)
held Tuesday, March 13, 2001 16:07:34 +1100 (isp score:20
(postmaster@freestart.hu, postmaster@dial.freestart.hu))
[ ] Mark for deletion / [ ] Mark for sending / Report / View
Nothing quite like a name like Nude Girl Casino to inspire confidence in a business proposal, is there? (Even better; tack a '.com' onto the end of that for that extra touch of credibility.)
Communists at the BBC: Liberal-appointed ABC directors planned a cull of Labor sympathisers. Or so claims a candidate for the job of Managing Director who lost out to a former Liberal Party member.
2001/3/12
Scientists in the U.S. and Australia have discovered a neurological cause for savant abilities. It appears that autistic savants, endowed with supernormal mathematical, musical or artistic skills, all have damage in a location in the left arterial temporal lobe; dementia patients with damage in that particular area often also develop artistic talents, and the Australian team managed to induce improvements in intuitive artistic and mathematical abilities by magnetically turning off volunteers' temporal lobes. It is speculated that the part of the brain in question somehow blocks conscious access to low-level computations within the brain.
Pat Cadigan has a new story, Icy You, Juicy Me. It's about agoraphobia and webcams and obsession, and is available online from the Reg.
Afghanistan's latest high-profile faith-based programme has been completed, and two ancient Buddha statues, renowned throughout the world, are now but rubble, undoubtedly striking a blow for religious values and against the Godless liberal elites. On the bright side, though, the destruction of the statues eliminates one thing the Taleban could hold hostage to dissuade the West from condemning its oppression of women/support of terrorism. Had they relented under Western pressure or bribery, the price may have been an agreement to recognise the Taleban regime as rightful, cut off any covert aid to dissident groups, and not complain about its misogynistic policies, lest those statues come to harm.
mame.dk is dead. It wasn't killed by arcade-machine company copyright lawyers, but screwed out of banner ad revenue by an outfit named eFront. And according to ICQ logs posted by a disgruntled employee (now mostly taken down), eFront have been doing other nasty things, such as harassing sites out of existence and even threatening a webmaster with rape. Lovely folks... (the Slashdot thread)
2001/3/11
An Irish bishop has proposed a new approach to tackling the foot and mouth disease crisis sweeping through the nation's livestock: holy water. By sprinkling cattle with the substance, faithful farmers may escape the ravage of the epidemic through the providence of the Holy Spirit and the power of faith. Perhaps George W. Bush should keep this in mind next time the U.S. faces a similar crisis? (via Unknown News)
Aging tennis star Bjorn Borg urges Europeans to have more sex. All fine and dandy, you say; only problem is, he urges them to do so to produce more children, to keep geezers like him in comfortable retirement with their taxes. Um, wouldn't it be a lot more responsible to start saving for your own retirement (as happens in Australia) rather than calling for a populatory pyramid scheme to support each increasing generation? Especially in overpopulated Europe.
All Your Brand Are Belong To Us. Some adbusting culture jammers preemptively hijack the All Your Base meme into corporate advertising to preempt the ad agencies doing same. Or so they say anyway.
NUDITY == SEX: Scotland Yard's obscene publications unit has raided the Saatchi Gallery in London, known for its exhibits by controversial avant-garde London artists, and ordered the gallery to remove two photographs from its I Am A Camera exhibit, which depict children at play, sans clothes. The gallery's curator insists that the photographs, illegal under anti-child pornography laws, are "not depraved in any way". A likely story. And if you have one of the rare uncensored copies, you are advised to destroy it, lest it land you on the sex-offenders' register alongside Gary Glitter and such. Guess that's what you get for living in a society which associates nudity inextricably with sex.
2001/3/10
Scumbags in action: Remember CDDB? The free online database of CD track listings assembled by volunteers from all over the Net, that was bought by some company who promptly declared it proprietary information? Well, now they have blocked "unlicensed" applications from accessing it. What does an application have to do to be licensed? Well, it needs to show ads for CDDB, prohibit the use of any other CD databases, and not allow the data to be exported to other applications. The Slashdot thread is here.
As China strives to take its place as a global superpower, it is preparing to challenge the U.S. in one of its traditional areas of supremacy: the manufacturing of boy/girl R&B bands. The goal is to tap into the vast youth market, currently dominated by Korean "hip-hop" bands, and produce "hip-hop with Chinese characteristics". But don't expect songs about race relations, gangbanging or bootywhang; the encore at T.N.T.'s first performance was "a paean to Beijing's glorious bid to play host to the 2008 Olympic Games".
In a country where rock concerts still enjoy an uncertain status, often deemed a threat to public order, the first row of the stands was fully occupied by uniformed members of the People's Armed Police.
(via Plastic)
Referring search request of the day: how do you empty out /dev/null. If anybody has any suggestions on how to help this person, let me know, and I'll pass any choice suggestions on. Or at least post them where searchers may find them.
Memetic biological warfare: Were Afghani faith-based movement the Taliban, who are transporting explosives to destroy those world-renowned Buddhist statues as we speak, created by the CIA? Apparently someone at the CIA had the great idea that a conservative, values-cherishing religious movement would provide a natural foil to the spread of communism, and the more fanatical the better; and so, with the help of Pakistan, they spend US$3bn on encouraging Islamic fanatics from all over the world to set up shop in the country. (via Unknown News)
Violent video games are causing our kids to kill, say some religious groups. And the answer? Christian first-person shooters, which allow good, Bible-believing youth to go around shooting demon-possessed Roman soldiers, thus avoiding being seduced into the gothic apostasy that accompanies games like Quake. I wonder how long it will be until there is a Christian erotica industry to provide the faithful with a wholesome alternative to the godless porn out there?
2001/3/9
The jock culture thing again: Sports culture is rife with sexual abuse, with a third of female athletes and a fifth of male athletes reporting having been abused. Mere coincidence, or soemthing else?
Did I mention how inspiring and righteously doovy The KLF are?
Their second shot at the Tate was in 1993 when they usurped the gallery's Turner Prize award for the best British artist by offering £40,000 to the worst British artist of the year. Significantly, this prize money was double that of the Turner award, and in a wonderful piece of irony Rachel Whiteread won both. (In fact, she refused to collect the K Foundation award until Drummond threatened to set fire to it outside the gallery.)(via misterpants.)
This looks promising; Batboy: the Musical. Yes, that Batboy. If that's not enough of a bulldada fix, there are some MP3s of the original cast recording, featuring gems like "Apology to a Cow". (via Misterpants)
Healing the rift between church and state: An insightful look at two faith-based government regimes: Bush II's America (atheists need not apply), and the Taliban's destruction of priceless ancient statues in Afghanistan.
A study on school bullying shows that children learn to disparage others as "poofters" before they even know what sexual orientation is. In the juvenile case, "poofters" are those boys whose behaviour differs from norms, who aren't "tough" or are too studious, too neat in appearance or insufficiently herdish. This proto-homophobic bullying is most common around sports grounds, toilets and change rooms, with libraries, classrooms and computer rooms being relatively safe. (I wonder how much of that is because the former areas attract more pupils inclined to atavistic pack-hierarchy behaviours.)
"Complex meanings and conventions can be passed along generations of schoolboys while largely evading adult intervention and almost regardless of what changes are taking place in the adult world."
It's interesting how many barbaric rituals happen in the pressure-cooker environment of schools, passed on through the years, and conveniently forgotten by those who have left and become adults. Whether it's "fagging" at Eton, primary-school homophobia, fraternity hazing in U.S. universities or aggressive Columbine-style "jock culture", it's like most adults tune it out, deemphasising how cruel and savage children are, or writing it off as a necessary fact of life or character-building initiation into adulthood.
Open vs. Proprietary Protocols/Technologies. Interesting how many of the proprietary ones have failed or been relegated to historical footnotes; with the exception of MP3, which was quasi-open (you can use it openly, though if you do, FHG may sue you into the poorhouse if they can be bothered).
2001/3/8
The Village Voice has an article about Disturbing Search Requests, one of the more amusing metablogs.
Looks like the cat's out of the bag then... Actually, "all-night-long" is quite apt, though mostly because I tend to stay up until dawn working on things and/or reading whenever I can get away with it. Mornings have never been my thing...
This evening, I went to the last What Is Music? show, at the Empress Hotel; it was more enjoyable than some of the previous ones I saw. Mostly because it wasn't comprised of people generating harsh noise/aimless burblings on their PowerBooks and relying on the fact that (a) if they don't explain, it must be profound, and (b) if you don't get it, you're too dependent on conventions (never mind, just go home and listen to your Britney Spears CDs), and instead had some listenable music. (Listenable experimental music; what next, you ask?)
I came in a bit late, and only caught the end of Rhizome's set, but the other sets seemed good. The highlights would probably have been David Haines' ambient-electronic set (done with Reactor on a PowerBook) and Minit's lovely ambient performance at the end (all done on an Akai S1000 with 2Mb of RAM, impressively enough). Oren Ambarchi was quite impressive in coaxing weird soundscapes out of a guitar, a bunch of pedals and a sampler-like gadget of sorts. Then there was Dworzec, which consisted of a guy playing an analogue synth, a woman abusing an accordion and another guy fiddling with a bunch of effects connected to a stationary guitar. In between sets, a guy named Private Benjamin scratched records through a delay, never letting them spin for too long, and at one stage did evil things to a Van Halen guitar solo and a Sesame Street songs record.
All in all, a fun night. Made me want to go home and play around with audio effects and synth patches. (Now if only I had more time for that kind of thing.)
According to Sl*shd*t, some as yet unindicted felon/freedom fighter at MIT has written a DVD descrambler in 526 bytes of Perl. No link, as I don't want the site hosting my blog seized by the Federal Police. Go find it yourself.
2001/3/7
Seen on a mailing list:
Forwarded-by: Jeff
I was in a hurry to get to work one morning and didn't stop to make myself a proper breakfast, so I pulled through the nearest McDonalds.
"What can I get for you?" the tinny speaker-voice said.
I leaned out the window and said, "I'd like a Sausage McMuffin with Egg Meal, please."
Now most McDonald's have little displays where you can verify that the person got your order right. In this case, my order came up as the following:
1 SMEG MEAL
Yum.
Tanya, who hates indie kids as much as music, has a typically righteous dig at Mods. Or rather Mod-wannabe indie kids, that particularly pretentious and exquisitely irritaining strain of the indiekid meme plague. (Kids, give it up. Your parents may have been Mods when they were teenagers, but, assuming you're not a fiftysomething amnesiac, you surely are not. Then again, neither was Damon Albarn, however hard he tried.)
Oh, the humanity! Hollywood production to grind to a standstill after strike talks collapse. If this goes on long enough, the effects could be far-reaching; we could even enter a new cultural renaissance. Meanwhile the Screen Actors' Guild has warned its overseas members not to work on US-backed films. Which means that Hollywood will have to make do with Liz Hurley.
Nothing found for 'ritneyB': Those wacky folks at Aimster (a proprietary Windows-only Napster clone that piggybacks on top of AOL Instant Messenger) have released a Napster utility: the Aimster Pig Encoder. This encrypts the filenames in a variant of Pig Latin, an encryption scheme more secure than double-XOR and ROT26. And the nice thing is that those evil jackbooted fascists at Napster can't legally deprive you of your right to pirate the latest Eminem album because breaking the encryption to monitor your sharing habits would be a violation of the DMCA. Well, once you think about it a bit, it's actually a depressing thing, or a Kafkaesque absurdity. Oddly enough, it hasn't caught on en masse yet.
Blowing my own horn: Apparently the interview I did on Radio National, about the Postmodernism Generator, will air this (Wednesday 7 March 2001) morning, sometime between 10am and 11am.
A Napster clone in Sealand, out of reach of copyright law. Or so a Canadian student plans, if he can get the money somehow. Mind you, if this happens, there will be a lot of pressure on governments to crack down on the rogue state. If this comes to pass, expect to see Sealand bombed by the RAF/USAF (or even one of those South African low-intensity conflict consultancies, Rainbow Warrior-style). The press will be fed a line about a strike against a child pornography ring or somesuch (it's not like anyone will go through the debris and prove otherwise). If you doubt that that's realistic, with Sealand being a sovereign state and all, how much international condemnation, in the court of public opinion, do you suppose such an attack could gather? (The stories you see every day in Unknown News are no less outrageous.)
Yes! the Obscure Industrial Index lives. Now you can check out the discographies of bands like Evil Biomodern, Demolition Pseudocore, Static Attrition and more. Kickarse!
2001/3/6
800-pound gorilla of the recording industry Vivendi Universal warms to Napster. But before you book your skiing holiday in Hades, note that any cessation of hostilities will depend on Napster implementing secure copy control mechanisms. Which means no more MP3s, and you can forget about downloading the latest PJ Harvey track onto your Linux-based MP3 server. Now, if the recording racket stop assuming that their customers are thieves unless proven otherwise and burdening them with totalitarian access-control schemes, we can be sure that the grand opening of the Mt. Erebus ski resort can't be far away.
In case Eve Andersson's Pi obsession wasn't odd enough for your tastes, there's a guy in Bulgaria who's obsessed with the number 26. He runs "Club 26", a site for "admirers and crazy fans of the number 26". (ta, Mitch)
Good news for Wintendo exiles: Some intrepid soul is developing something called LINE. LINE is the inverse of WINE; i.e., it allows you to run unmodified Linux applications on Windows NT/98, by intercepting the system calls. So far it is in alpha, but you can apparently run shell utilities and even some X applications under it (provided you have an X server, of course).
A lot has been happening in Your Humble Weblogger's corner of the world over the past few days, as the paucity of recent entries will undoubtedly attest. Last Thursday, Graham the Happy Scum came to Melbourne, and stayed at my place for a few days. During that time, we worked on a musical collaboration (which started out as "industrial dub" and promptly mutated), and went to one of the What Is Music? events, as described earlier. As it happened, Peter was in town as well, and I ended up getting together with him on a few occasions as well. Mr. Scum left last afternoon to get his football fix, and is apparently back in Albury now. Peter and his girlfriend are going back to Sydney tomorrow; they dropped in a few hours ago, and we talked and listened to music. It's good to catch up with friends.
What didn't I do? Well, I didn't go to the Grand Prix. I also didn't buy a bass guitar (though I almost did on Saturday). And yesterday I didn't do much at all, being rather tired and actually going to bed before midnight.
Another thing: my CD-R writer is playing up, annoyingly enough. It's probably something to do with the external SCSI case, though also annoyingly, I can't put it in any of the spare bays on my computer proper because the motherboard is in the way. Time to buy a larger case perhaps. (Anyone want a new, compact ATX computer case? Make me an offer.)
Tomorrow night there is a census in New Zealand, and some bozotic penguinhead types are planning to list their religion as Jedi. Via Slashdot, of course. Then again, I put mine down as Discordian on the last few censi (at one stage causing my parents to suspect I was involved in a cult of some sort).
2001/3/5
It seems that rumours of Napster's imminent death have been greatly exaggerated. The virtual crime wave is still going strong, with scummy alternateen student types robbing poor defenseless multinational recording companies into the poor house. Napster is starting to block songs by title (wonder if their algorithm recognises Pig Latin, as John Safran suggested on 3RRR this morning), but they will only block 5,600 titles at the start. So, while you'll have to pay for the new Britney/Eminem duet, chances are you will still be able to shamelessly steal long out-of-print titles like, say, Slowdive B-sides (© Sony) and 80s synthpop rarities and other obscure stuff. Until the courts get sick of Napster's insolence and send police to confiscate their server farm, that is.
2001/3/4
I went to What Is Music tonight, with Graham and Peter; one of the acts there was Farmers Manual, who played a 50-or-so minute noise/music and abstract video set. The first 40 minutes were interesting, but then it just dissolved into noise, and everyone noticed that they were standing in the middle of a hot nightclub floor, listening to noise and staring at flashing static. Except perhaps for the people at the front who, inexplicably, were dancing. The act after them, Nasenbluten, were hardcore breakbeats and such.
Anyway, I was looking at the computers Farmers Manual were using, and one of them, oddly enough, wasn't a PowerBook. It was a PC laptop of some sort, running Linux and a program named Pd, which seems to be a MAX-like system of some sort. I'll probably have to play around with Pd.
2001/3/3
Big Evil Monopolist VeriSign is handing over control of the .org domain to a non-profit body (whilst holding on to only .com and .net). Sounds reasonable? Well, now it appears that existing .org domain holders will lose their domains, unless they are registered as non-profit organisations in the U.S.. Given my domain name, I'm not too happy about this; and it seems neither are lots of other people. With luck, the backlash will make them change their mind.
2001/3/2
Tapeworms are good for you. Or so claims Japanese parasitologist Koichiro Fujita. After studying healthy yet parasite-infested children in Borneo, he was so convinced that the intestinal parasites have a positive symbiotic function that he introduced one into his own gut. Oddly enough, he is not having an easy time of selling his message to a broader public. (Though maybe tapeworm therapy will ultimately take its rightful place alongside trepanation and urine therapy.)
An article on upcoming security improvements in Linux; includes capabilities, cryptography, /dev/random, and the NSA-sponsored type enforcement patches.
There was a mini blog-scene conclave in Melbourne (or Northcote, to be specific) today; Graham the Happy Scum is in Melbourne for a few days, and staying on the couch at my place, so we dropped in on Lev, did the rounds of the local eateries and talked about various things (mostly of an outré nature). Not quite the glamour of the A-list social calendar, but it'll do. I'll probably catch up with another blogger, Peter of Dumplings in the Dark, sometime over the next few days.
Unintended consequences: A while ago, Canada passed laws requiring cigarette packets to carry graphic images of rotting teeth and cancerous lungs. Whilst this has yet to cause large numbers of smokers to quit, it has spawned a new industry in cigarette case covers:
One mock cover - manufactured by a Quebec company called Cigarette Cover - shows a yellow smiley face with the caption It's Cool! Others by that company depict a flower below the caption Bla Bla Bla . . . Bla Bla!; a smiling sun with the words Wind, Fire, Earth, Water; a skull and crossbones with the caption Smoking Preserves Meat; and a picture of a marijuana plant with the warning Marijuana is not a Safe Alternative to Cigarettes.
(via Unknown News)
A Suck piece on the end of the Golden Age of the Web. That's right; no more free stuff sponsored by venture capitalists' largesse, freely available plunderphonic musical parodies on Napster, or crashable product-launch raves. Soon it will recede into distant myth, and we'll be paying for web content to view on our CPRM-protected trusted clients. Welcome to 2001.
You go, girl! Courtney Love takes her record company (the behemoth Vivendi Universal) to court, claiming that the industry standard record contracts are unlawful. If she succeeds, this could shatter the hold major labels have on artists, much as Olivia De Havilland's lawsuit in the 1950s smashed the Hollywood studio system's grip on actors' careers. Given how egregiously unfair and corrupt the recording racket is, and has been since the dawn of time, it's more than about time that something like this happened. And Courtney Love, with her resources and aggressive attitude, may be just the person to do it.
2001/3/1
Conspiracy theory of the day: Proof linking financier/arms dealer Adnan Khashoggi to every scandal and conspiracy, from the Diana assassination to the Florida Election Putsch, from Imelda Marcos' shoe collection fnord to Charlie Chaplin's tastes for teenaged girls.
ClothRay, a patched version of popular raytracer POV-Ray, with functions for rendering realistic cloth (I think it drapes it over objects and such for you as well).
A pretty doovy page on chai tea, with numerous recipes from the quick to the elaborate. Worth a look if you're into this drink. (I got into chai a year or two ago, when a friend introduced me to it. I usually either have it in one of the few cafés in Melbourne which sell it (most of which seem to be in Northcote), or make it from pre-made mix bought from Friends Of The Earth. The Tea Too mix is also good; the mix from the Melbourne Uni vego coop, though, contains too much cinnamon.)