2001/5/1
Some intrepid Linux hackers in the Netherlands have finally created a working implementation of RFC1149. That's right; RFC1149.
2001/4/30
"Baile funk", the ultra-violent musical gang warfare scene from the slums of Brazil, is now headed for the US, with funk band Bonde do Tigrao embarking on their Stateside tour.
"I'm going to show you that I'm a tiger/I'm going to put on the pressure/And then hammer, hammer, hammer," Bonde do Tigrao chant on their most popular song, a mixture of rap and pop.
You know, that sounds, like a Prodigy lyric...
(I wonder whether Dr. Dre or someone from Interscope is taking notes; once the mook thing runs out of steam, Brazilian-style funk may be the Next Big Thing.) (via Robot Wisdom)
A New York woman planning to visit southern China booked into the luxurious White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou through their website; or so she thought. When she arrived there, they had no record of her booking. It turned out that rather than the Guangshou White Swan, she had booked into the White Swan boarding house in Yorkshire.
The website for the Guangzhou White Swan displays a picture of a towering white building, and states that it is set among beautiful banyan gardens on historical Shamian island overlooking the Pearl River. In contrast, the website for the White Swan in Yorkshire shows pictures of an old house, the Yorkshire countryside and a map of Britain. "It's quite a surprising mistake to make to be honest, because the website says things like how to get there from places like London, which may suggest to some people that it's not actually in Guangzhou," said Teters.
So, dear reader, I hear you ask: how will Your Humble Weblogger be participating in tomorrow's Joint Anarchosocialist Tolchockfest? Will I be lining up outside the Stock Exchange before dawn to protest against the evils of capitalism, or helping to redecorate a McDonalds franchise? No, I'm most likely to be asleep at that time, and probably so until the police have beaten the crap out of everybody with blue hair or dreadlocks in the CBD. However, this weblog will be participating in the M1 festivities in its own way, by attempting to launch another video game meme into the ideosphere. Which one? Let's just say one reflecting the theme of the day.
Disturbing possibility of the day: Was the Florida Courthouse Putsch, which got Bush elected engineered by the CIA? Someone at the Online Journal presents some frightening parallels between the Florida election and CIA-backed coups in Chile and Guatemala.
An amusing (if somewhat naïve) article about the letter-number protest thing. Well, the McLibel people weren't Trotskyites but rather generic vegan feral types, Shell did give the Nigerian government helicopter gunships and tell it to kill a bunch of inconvenient activists and Nestlé do contribute to third-world deaths (both these things have been documented by people who aren't rabid anarchosocialist nutters), though the suggestions for new letter-number protests are not bad. I'd be sympathetic to D25, and I already participate in F14 (though only by digging out my Smiths records). (Also, I wonder if anybody in Nike's astroturf marketing department is paying attention to the S29 suggestion.)
2001/4/29
FBI subpoenas logs of visitors' IP addresses for miscellaneous subversive media website Indymedia; the intent being probably to build up lists of subversives to wiretap/Carnivore. Mind you, like the insane scofflaws they are, Indymedia published the order (including the clause prohibiting publication of it). Mind you, I'd be surprised if they didn't have Echelon or something similar tracking who visits this site and quietly increasing their "terrorist quotient" or whatever.
The French government sez: wear a pro-marijuana T-shirt, go to jail. The T-shirts apparently violate laws against "portraying in a favourable light and promoting or inciting the consumption of any product classed as a banned substance".
"I'm not dead yet!" the Communist Party of Australia is making a comeback, with young people flocking to its web site, inspired by S11 and the rise of punk-lifestyle Nu Marxism. (Weren't there about 4 Communist Parties in Australia once, with at least one taking orders from the USSR and one being mostly a club for intellectuals like Philip Adams and Manning Clark?)
The street finds its own uses for things: First there was the Sony Aibo robot dog, then a number of imitators joined the market, and now a Japanese company has turned a robot dog into a sex toy. The Vibe-inu is built on the chassis of an existing robot pet, and fitted with a vibrating, elongated snout; you can guess the rest.
Comfortably seated behind the two-way mirror, Shukan Jitsuwa's reporter describes a young woman in her early twenties, obviously fond of animals, who beckons Vibe-inu to snuggle on her, er, lap and burrow in. Soon she is emitting purrs of delight.
2001/4/28
Linux for the PlayStation 2. Mind you, it only works with early Japanese PlayStations and you can only buy it from Sony. Um, hang on, doesn't the last bit violate the GPL?
The age of "black ice" is nigh, as firms wary of crackers are reportedly installing "counter-offensive" software for automatically retaliating against crackers. Mind you, I suspect that the software is more likely to end up crashing hijacked machines than flatlining rogue console cowboys; also, I suspect that once some crackers figure out how it works and how it selects targets, coaxing it into attacking innocent bystanders will become a new extreme sport for script kiddies.
Dennis Ritchie, one of the inventors of the UNIX operating system, maintains a list of sightings of UNIX in odd places; like Unix-brand food containers in Japan, and a Unix barber shop in Costa Rica.
The SDMI incident: Did Professor Felten bend over on command from the RIAA, or has the RIAA shot itself in the foot over the SDMI paper? Salon's Janelle Brown suggests that the RIAA's silencing of a prominent academic is likely to get the DMCA thrown out or seriously emasculated; that is, of course, discounting the possibility that the RIAA's all-star legal team persuades the judge that the research in question was of the sort that should not be publicised, much like the NSA's cryptography research.
2001/4/27
Note to visitors: Despite the rumour, this is not the Sisters of Mercy or Marilyn Manson or Limp Bizkit or whatever MP3 site. You'll find none of that kind of thing here.
I watched a video of Delicatessen tonight; it's a beautifully crafted film; the visuals, the cinematography, the sound, and some of the surreal and bizarre concepts work very well together.
Imagine a boot stamping on a human face, forever: SDMI researchers silenced by DMCA, withdraw paper from conference. There you have it; a research paper is classified as a criminal tool and banned outright. (The paper is mirrored; I'd tell you where, but doing so is probably illegal under Australia's WIPO laws .)
Doovy; the final contributor list for FourPlay's upcoming remix album is out, and it looks like a beauty; with some world-class contributors on the bill. (Oh yes, and my contribution will be there as well; don't let that put you off though.) I heard previews of some of the mixes when Peter came to Melbourne, and they're pretty impressive, in various experimental electronic ways.
Cute: In an attempt to help cult indie band Guided By Voices break into larger markets, some journalists tested their music with a focus group from one of the largest music-buying demographics: 10 and 11-year-olds:
Zoe C.: "They look dirty in all the pictures."
Zoe S.: "They need more style: rings, earrings, and colorful clothes."
Tony: "Colorful clothes, baggy pants maybe, and matching outfits."
Cody: "They need a name that catches your attention. How about the Shining Stars? Now that's catchy!"
Lena: "The songs are mysterious, but definitely too weird."
Cody: "I could make this up just as good by making up three words."
2001/4/26
The Victorian state government unveils plans for a "green" suburb. Situated north of Epping (on the Northern fringe of Melbourne), it will feature water recycling, energy efficiency and reduced dependence on automobiles. Mind you, they have not promised to extend the Epping railway line (which should be easy to do, as there is a dismantled railway line running north for quite a bit that they could rebuild), and so if they decide to do the typical thing and cut costs by having a 6-days-a-week bus service which stops at 7pm, everyone will just drive everywhere like they do in all the other outer dormitory suburbs. (This is also the government which recently banned the PTUA from a forum on plans to extend a freeway through the inner city, for what it's worth.)
Big surprise here: Bush to drop tobacco lawsuit, by cutting funding for the suit. Wonder how much help he got from the tobacco industry in getting elected?
An interesting interview with veteran rapper KRS-One, about the state of hip-hop culture, the recording industry and such.
And now, the latest fashion accessory from the US: the combination bra/gun holster .
Metablogging: Meg's Coffee Morning sounds like a good idea. In Australian EST, it's at 8pm tomorrow. Not sure I'll be able to show up, though, as I'll be busy at work then. (Why do so many things happen on Thursday evenings?)
Hear, hear: An insightful article on the differences between liberalism and neo-liberalism, and in particular on the threat that privatisation of education, currently underway in Australia, poses.
While I am usually pretty gung ho on the good properties of market capitalism, I am not blind to its many deep and ugly flaws. One of those is that in the war between Profit and The Right Thing To Do, you just can't trust Profit to play nicely when left alone.
If we are honest with ourselves, the current assault on Universities is simply the culmination of a process that has been underway ever since compulsory schooling was made the law of the land in Prussia. Prussia introduced compulsory school in order to create citizens who were homogenized, unquestioning followers. Primary and highschools were engineered to prize conformance over individuality, to produce unthinking collectives before critical thinkers. Attempts by schools and teachers to change this fact are hampered because they don't understand that the system was engineered to produce drones.
Apparently this was censored from the University of Sydney student newspaper, for going against the student-left groupthink that anarchism/socialism is the only alternative to being sodomised by multinational corporations.
2001/4/25
A critique of Nike's disinformation campaigns and culture-jamming counter-campaigns; oddly enough, some say this site was prepared by Nike's own ad agency as a decoy of some sort, or to stay "ahead of the curve" by co-opting anti-Nike culture-jamming. Curiouser and curiouser...
2001/4/24
A cold snap in Hades? As George W. Bush apoints a hardline moralist to the Drug Czar post and cracks down on college scholarships for convicted pot smokers, the National Organization for the Reform of Marijuana Laws (NORML) have apparently been toking the loco weed a bit too much, and as such are claiming that marijuana will be legalised, in the U.S., no less, in the not-too-distant future.
I think it's more likely that C. sativa will be extinct before it is legalised; the U.S. government is aggressively funding research into biological agents for ridding the world of this evil plant species once and for all. Mind you, given that chocolate and THC are in some way related, don't be too surprised if such a zealous virus ends up ridding the world of chocolate as well. Oh well, a small price to pay for victory against evil.
I picked up Beth Orton's Central Reservation today, after hearing another track from it on 3RRR. So far, it has some good moments, and manages to avoid the blandness that affects too much other singer-songwriter guitar-folk by having some quite pleasing musical arrangements rather than just the obligatory chord-strumming.
To find out what it's like to be fat in public, London-based reporter Angela Bottolph spent a week in a fat suit, and noted down how people reacted to her differently when she was twice her normal size:
Sunday: I go to Waitrose and buy the healthy-ish food I usually buy. I'm becoming incredibly self-conscious around food in public. I'm too embarrassed to buy Pringles, and I'm dithering by the ice-cream when I realise the entire aisle is looking at me as if I'm an alcoholic on the rampage in an off-licence. I half expect someone to take my basket away and say, 'I think you've had enough already...'
(from Unknown News)
2001/4/23
A radical leftist organiser was abducted by armed men disguised as demonstrators at the Quebec free trade summit. Jaggi Singh, a veteran of the anti-globalisation movement, was savagely beaten and hustled into a van by three undercover police types. Look for his badly mutilated corpse to be found in a river or landfill in a few days, strategically timed to deter the less fanatical Nu Marxists from showing up at the worldwide ceremonial McDonalds-trashings planned for May 1.
Andrew Newberg, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania, is studying the neurology of mystical experience, by taking brain scans of meditators and praying nuns. His results so far are interesting:
During meditation, part of the parietal lobe, towards the top and rear of the brain, was much less active than when the volunteers were merely sitting still. With a thrill, Newberg and d'Aquili realised that this was the exact region of the brain where the distinction between self and other originates.
The limbic system is a part of the brain that dates from way back in our evolution. Its function nowadays is to monitor our experiences and label especially significant events, such as the sight of your child's face, with emotional tags to say "this is important". During an intense religious experience, researchers believe that the limbic system becomes unusually active, tagging everything with special significance.
So it seems that transcendental experience is all in internal metadata, and mystical experiences are just normal experiences with a "THIS IS IMPORTANT" bit set. Which makes sense.
And then there's Michael Persinger of Laurentian University, Ontario, who has developed a helmet that magnetically induces mystical experiences.
Through trial and error and a bit of educated guesswork, he's found that a weak magnetic field... rotating anticlockwise in a complex pattern about the temporal lobes will cause four out of five people to feel a spectral presence in the room with them... What people make of that presence depends on their own biases and beliefs. If a loved one has recently died, they may feel that person has returned to see them. Religious types often identify the presence as God. "This is all in the laboratory, so you can imagine what would happen if the person is alone in their bed at night or in a church, where the context is so important," he says. Persinger has donned the helmet himself and felt the presence, though he says the richness of the experience is diminished because he knows what's going on.
Of course, religious folks are not too keen on the idea that mystical experience is a purely physical phenomenon, and are quick to draw a distinction between "legitimate" mystical states and "illegitimate" ones (such as those induced by drugs or Dr. Persinger's magnetic helmet).
Those troublemakers at The Reg turn a packet sniffer on the Windows XP registration process.
Two items related to pranks: a list of 10 memorable pranks, all involving telephones, computers and phreaking or hacking, and a review of a book of phone pranks by one Mike Loew.
Loew might be technically lying when he pretends to be a gay hairdresser trying to join the US Air Force, or a man who has just shot his foot off when he calls the Flower Essence Alternative Therapy Centre for a holistic approach to his injury ("if you have a homeopathic remedy arnica, you could take that"); but the air of veracity, by which I mean fully and accurately transcribed conversations, clings to this book.
(via Lev and Robot Wisdom, respectively)
I had an odd dream last night; I was in an electronics store (Tandy or Dick Smith or somesuch), and looking through the selection of CDs they had for sale. These were all vaguely arty "cyberculture" titles, of the sort you'd see mentioned in WIRED in the early-to-mid 1990s; futuristic transhumanist concept albums, CD-ROM multimedia works, "virtual reality", &c, most probably produced by Mac-toting cybercultural artists in San Francisco.
I looked at one title on a computer; it was an interactive guide on how to draw anime characters, and was published by IBM. The program was of the usual multimedia slideshow variety, with each page having some text/graphics and Back/Forward buttons, as well as a simple drawing area, where you followed instructions. These included drawing the head, then two circles for the eyes, and a few more things, and then choosing colours for the face and such. I didn't buy the program, though, as it was Windows-only and required Microsoft Word for part of it, for some reason.
New weapons in the war against crime: Across America, police departments are fitting police dogs with titanium teeth. The false teeth are partly a cost-cutting measure, intended to extend the working life of dogs (whose teeth often become damaged), and partly intended to intimidate actual and potential perps, as only an Alsatian with gleaming steel fangs can. (via Lev)
First there was Dr. Nitschke's floating euthanasia ship, and now a women's group in the Netherlands, Women on Waves, is planning to establish a floating abortion clinic. The ship will cruise the world, offering abortions and contraception to oppressed women throughout the world's conservative hellholes. The various Religious Right factions are not amused; already, the deputy prime minister of Malta, a fiercely Catholic island-state in the Mediterranean, has promised to prosecute anybody collaborating with the group. Perhaps we can expect to see the Vatican Special Forces do a Rainbow Warrior? (via Rebecca's Pocket)
2001/4/22
Bizarre art item of the day: Roses and kittens. Wonder why nobody bid on it; you'd think that there'd be at least one weirdo who would be willing to put it on their mantlepiece or give it to their girlfriend for her birthday or something.
Human Rights Watch are claiming that, in the U.S., prison officers routinely encourage prison rape, or at least don't do anything to prevent it and refuse to prosecute offenders. Not really surprising; after all, you don't want to do anything that reduces the value of prison as a deterrent to the scumbags who may steal your SUV or push marijuana to your kids.
Researchers in China have developed heat-sensitive paint; a building painted with this paint would reflect light in warm climates and absorbs heat in cold climates. The paint will also change between warm and cool colours, matching the season.
A new book about the dot-com gentrification of San Francisco and the driving out of artists by SUV-driving, stock-optioned pinks, has come out. Rebecca Solnit's Hollow City aspires to be the next City of Quartz; except possibly for the fact that it came out after the dot-com crash; and possibly some debatable facts.
Great fraternity traditions: A newsletter from a fraternity at an American university has caused an uproar by publishing (among other things) a guide on date-rape techniques. The university authorities are threatening to deregister the fraternity. I hope that the woman who sent it to the authorities has bodyguards...
Italian scooter fans may have to scrap their aging Vespas under new environmental regulations in Italy. Or they could sell them on eBay, in the hope of them getting snapped up by indiekids overseas.
Comedy Festival: Tonight, I went to the final session of Dave O'Neill and Fred Rowan's show at the Prince Patrick. I really enjoyed it; it was one of the best shows I've seen in the Festival. First the warm-up act came on, a stand-up comedian named Adam Rosensomethingorother who fired off a succession of lines and got the audience laughing.
Then Fred Rowan performed; Rowan specialises in parody songs, and mimics the styles of singers and rock stars quite accurately. He took the piss out of commercial radio, classic-rock stations, and took off a number of musicians, from John Lennon to U2, from Slim Dusty to Michael Bolton (singing I Only Used You For Sex in the throaty voice of the latter, replete with big-ballad electric piano and Kenny G-esque saxophone riffs in the background, most amusingly), and later did as an encore an old song he did about Jeff Kennett (a man who did a lot for comedy, though none of it intentionally).
Dave O'Neill came on next, cracking jokes and harrassing a bloke named Ian in the audience ("Where do you live?" "Glen Iris? Nice leafy suburb. The heroin hasn't spread there yet."); later, he and Rowan teamed up and did a song about living in the inner city and longing for the outer-suburban wasteland of Ringwood; a song I found most amusing, having lived out in Ferntree Gully for a decade and a half.
I was going to see a play called Guerilla Film School today as well, but the matinee was cancelled, and I had to choose between that and An Evening With Dave & Fred. Oh well.
2001/4/21
Metablogging: So this is what Rebecca Blood looks like. It's funny; for some reason I imagined her wearing more handcrafted metal jewellery and more purple. Other than that, though, it's not too much cognitive dissonance.
I went to see Henry Rollins tonight, and found it enjoyable. The guy has a gift for getting up and ranting like a particularly lucid and entertaining psychopath. In tonight's show he went on about, among other things, growing old, auditioning for movies, and did a long piece about going to a KISS concert in San Bernadino (which is apparently populated by genetically degenerate bogan types who ride around in airbrushed panelvans and grunt in monosyllables, and as such is probably the Californian equivalent of Ringwood or Dandenong or somesuch). He went on for two and a half hours, and was quite entertaining.
Afterwards I went to see the Greg Fleet show, which I found somewhat amusing.
2001/4/20
Separation of Church and State: Canmore, Alberta is too small to support a separate Catholic school, so Catholic students have to go to the secular public school. Now some Catholic-education advocates have come up with an ingenious solution: build a wall through the school, dividing it into secular and Catholic sections. The Christ the Redeemer Catholic Board insists that there be no physical connection between the two groups of students, presumably to quarantine Catholic students from dangerous secular memes during their formative years.
Well, I finally got my office at work. Now that I have a space that is my own, I have set up a radio, and tuned it to 3RRR. I'm listening to Far and Wide for the first time in months; some observations: (a) Depeche Mode are starting to sound like Radiohead; tempering their 1990s antidepressant guitar-ballad sound with some contemporary-electronica beats and bleeps. (b) Radiohead's new album, Amnesiac, won't be the alt-rock return to form expected, but more like "Kid A on acid". (c) the new New Order track, "Crystal", sounds pretty much as you'd expect a New Order track to sound; somewhere between Barney's Electronic project and something from the time of Low-Life or so.
Imagine that you're an aging folk-pop singer, in need of a liver transplant but unable to afford one. What do you do? Well, you could always hire out your 20-year-old girlfriend to an interested millionaire.
A piece interviewing Mark Mothersbaugh, former member of Devo, SubGenius minister, and film-score composer:
To resolve some of the contradictions between his earlier band and his current line of work, Mothersbaugh said that for a while he would slip subversive messages into his advertising music. He claimed to have inserted a subliminal voice saying ``sugar will rot your teeth'' into a commercial for Gummi Savers. He said he also added ``avoid conspicuous consumption'' to a campaign for BMW and ``biology is destiny'' to a cosmetics commercial.
(He's now making ring tones for Nokia?)
George Hersee, a former engineer at the BBC, passed away last week. You probably haven't heard of him, but he was responsible for Test Card F, the (in)famous TV test pattern with the little girl playing noughts and crosses with a sinister-looking toy clown. The model on the card was his daughter Carole, whose photo he used for testing the calibration of skin tones. The BBC decided to keep it, adult fashions tending to date too rapidly (especially in the Swingin' Sixties). Carole, now grown up with two kids, soon grew sick of her 15 minutes (or, more precisely, 70,000 hours) of fame, and of people constantly asking her about the test card.
What do you do if you live in America (where they don't have such Communistic schemes as state-funded medical care), are poor and need medical treatment? get yourself arrested, that's what.
Causey, 57, called the FBI and told them he was about to rob the post office in West Monroe, La. At the post office, he handed a note to a teller demanding money, then left empty-handed and sat in his car until officers arrested him.
(via Unknown News)
2001/4/19
Out of morbid curiosity, I went to see Max Sharam's comedy show at the Comedy Festival. (I think she was some kind of manufactured girly-pop star some years back or something like that.) I was perhaps hoping that, having been through the pop-star/celebrity machine and come out the other end, she may be a lucid and insightful comedian/observer/commentator; was I ever disappointed. It was utter pants. The material was underdeveloped and the delivery was irritating. (Telling a story by spouting acronyms may be mildly amusing, in a sophomoric kind of way; telling a story by spouting acronyms that have nothing to do with the story is just stupid.) If you really enjoyed Hey Dad on TV, you may find Max's show entertaining; otherwise, steer well clear of this one.
Think different: Those champions of creative freedom, Apple, are revisiting the golden age of look-and-feel lawsuits, this time pushing to suppress an open-source MacOS theme editor. Their rationale is that it allows users to create knockoffs of the MacOS X Aqua theme and other proprietary themes. And, presumably, "because we can". Though the latter part may be dubious; the developers of the theme editor claim to not have used any Apple code, and the theme format (just a file with a bunch of resources) is not copy-protected or encrypted in any illegal-to-reverse-engineer way, having been devised before the DMCA and its ilk. (Next time, Apple may well encrypt such file formats by xoring them with "TopSecret" or something; it'll be piss-easy to crack, but doing so will nonetheless be enough of a crime to get software pulled.)
The smokestack is the sacred fire of enterprise: When the Penguinhead Jedi, the religiots and the Nu Marxists are momentarily quiet, there are always the Ayn Rand fans to provide your daily dose of irritainment. Objectivist groups, including the Center for the Moral Defense of Capitalism (which has the dubious honour of having been the only group not based in Redmond to have defended Microsoft's business practices) are now protesting Earth Day:
Bernstein said Earth Day 2001's theme of "Leave your car at home" expresses the environmentalists' fundamental contempt for industrial society, progress and human values. "Without automobiles there would be little commerce, communication or freedom," he said. "The goal of the environmentalists is to see man crawling back to the cave."
Ironic-Kitsch-Appreciation Subculture Excited About New Britney Spears Novel (new Onion)
A message from the MPAA: Use Gnutella, lose your Internet connection.. Any questions?
A word of advice: Recent versions of Red Hat Linux come with a program named wvdial, which automatically dials your selected ISP, logs you in and establishes a PPP connection, all without fiddling around with login scripts or other such tedious things. Do not use this program. That's right; chmod it -x right now, or even better, rpm -e wvdial. It happens to be so user-friendly that it passes some hardwired PPP options to pppd, which worked for its creator, but which can have odd results on other setups. Such as, say, making uploads clog up after a few packets. Not fun when you're trying to send a MP3 fragment you have been working on to a co-conspirator and licq keeps choking.
2001/4/18
The net is closing around luddites and those not fond of those dreadful new-fangled computers everybody's using these days. Now, it seems that not even the traditional refuge of the pub is safe; a survey has found that almost half of pub conversations are about computers. Moreover, a quarter of women would rather discuss computers than their family life, and a third of dinner party conversations are about computers. Mind you, this is in the UK, where computers were traditionally a status symbol for the upper strata of the eviscerated neo-Thatcherite middle classes.
Chocolate giant Cadbury has condemned child slavery in the African cocoa industry. Meanwhile, Nestlé, no stranger to the sacrificing of disposable African children for profits, has made no statement.
And now to the Miss Universe pageant, and in particular, to Israel's contestant, appearing in a bulletproof dress. (via Plastic)
Entertainment Network, the company which brought you Voyeur Dorm (sort of like a more sleazy JenniCam that took credit cards), is at it again; this time they are petitioning to be allowed to webcast the McVeigh execution, arguing that the public are currently being denied their Constitutional right to hoot and jeer.
Taiwan MP3 raid update: Taiwanese government sides with raided students, meanwhile, the IFPI have been forced to distance themselves from the raid, and swallow some of their break-the-law-and-we'll-break-you rhetoric. AFAIK, the students still haven't gotten their computers back, though.
Remember the CueCat? The little freebie scanner which was meant to shepherd customers to promotional websites and e-commerce sites? Remember the uproar when the penguinheads found a way of getting a free general-purpose bar code scanner, paid for by the CueCat marketing budget? Well, anti-corporate culture-jamming outfit RTMark, better known for subverting ads, has topped that with CueHack. Scan a product and it gives you not the promotional website for it, but the dirt on the product manufacturer's dirty tricks and reasons for boycotting them. Impress your dreadlocked vegan bicyclist friends! (Assuming they run Windows, that is.)
2001/4/17
The San Francisco dot-com boom may have evicted most of the artists from the city (well, those who couldn't reinvent themselves as swooshy-logo designers or stock-optioned corporate Flash monkeys), but that doesn't stop someone there from holding an art exhibit on the dot-com bust, and its human costs (i.e., the hopefuls who toiled 70-hour weeks for now-worthless stock to change the world by pioneering e-business models like home-delivered toothpicks).
Civil discourse in the age of the Net: The American feminist group National Organization for Women is moving its forums to a pay site, to avoid abusive posts from teenage Limp Bizkit/Eminem fans looking for quick, cheap thrills.
Viridian Pope Bruce Sterling on the green boycott of US oil; or at least the European side of it.
Big Brother is not just a stupid TV show: In Britain, everybody is under constant surveillance, by the network of CCTV cameras and the Echelon system; though, for some reason, nobody cares:
Duncan Bennett, a systems administrator with the Medical Research Council in Cambridge, knows exactly what this means. He hasn't had a TV in 10 years and yet, annually, he gets threatening letters from the TLA. He has now discovered that, with no evidence against him whatsoever, they can get a warrant - always automatically granted - to break into and search his house. He is assumed to be guilty until proven innocent, a terrible inversion of ancient common-law tradition. He has struggled to find anybody willing to take up his campaign on the issue. Bennett is not suspected of drug-trafficking, terrorism or subversion. He is suspected of having a TV without a licence. Only in Britain would such an abuse of power - or even such advertisements - be tolerated.
And then there's this piece on the dangers of knowing the wrong people.
Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, the two Colorado teen-goths who acted out every picked-on non-jock's unspoken fantasy and massacred their classmates, are becoming cultural icons to an entire generation of teenage outcasts and misfits, with shrines and chat rooms in their honour appearing across the evil, evil Internet. Which means that they now share the same pop-cultural misfit Valhalla as Hitler, David Koresh and (in a few weeks) Timothy McVeigh.
Those oh-so-earnest good-doers in the Green movement are urging a boycott of US oil companies which pushed for the abandoning of the Kyoto treaty. Apparently Exxon-Mobil (who helped Bush get elected) are bad, but BP and Shell (who are diversifying into solar power) are OK. (Hang on, though; didn't Shell experiment with genocide as a management methodology in Nigeria? Have the executives who gave the gunships to the Nigerian government and gave the order to kill Ken Saro-Wiwa been dismissed yet (let alone tried by the International Court of Human Rights)? I haven't heard anything about it.)
First a domain-name speculator tried to sell the domain popesfuneral.com, and now the old-guard media are getting in on the act; in Rome, news organisations are discreetly scrambling for vantage points from which to film the plume of white smoke announcing the new Pope of the Catholic Church when the current one gets promoted to head office. The money's on it being sooner rather than later, but with such things, one has to be discreet. (via Lev)
An inside look on the first of the MP3 swat-team raids, in Taiwan. I suspect this scene will be played out many times again, and in many places; at least until the stigma of criminality is indelibly attached to possession of MP3s and they can launch a "dob in a MP3 pirate" hotlines.
Re: the Francis E. Dec rant, Graham: I think many people had the idea of using it in music. I believe Genesis P. Orridge (the technopagan nutter and industrial musician) actually did something like that under the name "Kitten Sparkles". Alas, I don't have a copy of it anywhere, though someone on Napster might.
I just saw a pretty amusing film on SBS: a German film titled Killer Condom. It's a German parody of American hard-boiled cop shows, with a gay Sicilian NYPD detective investigating the case of living, penis-eating condoms which attacked him at a seedy by-the-hour hotel. Not surprisingly, it was handled by Troma in the US. It's interesting also from the perspective of it being a European parody of American cinema (and American culture), from cop shows to hypocritical moralist politicians.
2001/4/16
Big surprise there: Australia to follow Bush out of the Kyoto greenhouse treaty.
2001/4/15
The future is already here: it's just not evenly distributed: Companies have been hiring the service of cool hunters , who are sort of like upmarket yuppie anthropologists, to tell them what the trendy urban hipsters are doing, thinking and identifying with; the theory being that the twitchily hip urban fads of today will be the next big hit of tomorrow's mainstream; a view Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point put forward.
When not receiving facials or having their toes dipped in Bollinger Grande Cuvée, trendsetting teens claim to be experimenting with digital filmmaking, vintage computers and "geometric prints from the '60s and '70s." Mainstream teens say they're having sex, "rolling up my jeans" and "going to college." Asked about the "newest thing your friends are doing," the mainstreamers, in a sudden burst of Eisenhower-era conformity retrograde even by their standards, cited "getting married," "working on cars" and "going to nudie bars." Trendier types mentioned "freestyling" and "drunk bowling."
The cool-hunting consultancies, of course, charge hefty fees for these vital tips. (An annual subscription to the L Report will set you back $30k.) Mind you, they're now discovering a corollary to the Tipping Point hypothesis; namely, that most cutting-edge trends are too rarefied to trickle down to suburban mainstream consumers to the point of being marketable; leading to missteps such as marketing guarana-laced soft drinks and male makeup kits to the Wal-Mart crowd, with predictably underwhelming results. (via rebecca's pocket)
Welcome to the Digital Millennium: Recording industry cops are raiding Taiwanese university dorms, looking for students who copy MP3 files, with the intent of prosecuting them for ruinous punitive damages, to set an example. Meanwhile, students have taken to physically destroying hard drives or carrying their loot on removable discs. (Perhaps the time is right for some cypherpunk scofflaw to create a crypto-enabled MP3 player, one which makes it impossible to identify MP3 files without having the key? Of course, given the way governments have bent over to their corporate paymasters, possession of such an item would probably count as proof of guilt in the New World Order.)
2001/4/14
I didn't go to see The Exorcist tonight (it was tempting, though, if just to spite our wise and benevolent Premier); however, I did go to a rather anarchic live band/spoken-word night at the Empress. The night was put on by the local fringe art scene. (It was also meant to have some films from the Melbourne Underground Film Festival, though the projector didn't work.) There was a guy dressed in Arab headgear, claiming to be from the Taoist Jihad, violating the Victorian blasphemy law* by doing things to a Bible whilst doing a silly dance; a bloke named Luke Somethingorother who did a number of (excellently amusing) spoken-word pieces, and a somewhat tongue-in-cheek heavy metal band named FMC who appeared in drag, played a number of short songs in poor taste, and did various disgusting things like eating raw hamburgers. The MC, Phil Norton, kept the crowd entertained with digressions and silly dances and stalled for time when the projector didn't work, at one stage passing a microphone around. The audience had a goodly number of odd people in it, including at least two men in dresses, not counting the band. It was a fun night, as it usually is from such a motley bunch of freaks.
* That's right; blasphemy is still illegal in Victoria. It has been prosecuted as recently as the 1980s.
Scare meme of the day: An American holidaymaker made the mistake of eating a pork taco in Mexico; some time later, she began experiencing seizures, which turned out to be caused by a worm in her brain.
2001/4/13
Tonight I went to see Otis Lee Crenshaw at the Comedy Festival. Crenshaw (played by comedian Rich Hall) is meant to be a hard-drinking country singer from Tennessee. He just got out of Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary, and was married six times, each time to a woman named Brenda. On stage, accompanied by two musicians, he performed several amusing musical numbers (think Kinky Friedman at his funniest), singled out members of the audience for harrassment, and threw out line after snappy line. I was struck by the amount of improvisation he did on the fly, all flawlessly (incorporating an audience member's name and profession into a song, complete with rhymes, and doing a song about various elements of contemporary Australian culture). Crenshaw's show was lots of fun; this is a show well worth seeing.
The War On MP3: Windows XP to limit MP3 quality to 56kbps, to wean users onto proprietary formats. Elsewhere this would be considered unfair restraint of trade; in this case it is a well-deserved blow against audio piracy. The fact that it will nicely lock customers into Microsoft's own proprietary platform is just a bonus for those heroic altruists in Redmond. (Who said that doing good never pays, right?)
This won't apparently block the writing of MP3 files at the filesystem level or anything quite like that, but will block recording with Microsoft's bundled tools; their hope is to make all the unsigned garage bands release all their stuff in proprietary Windows formats (after all, who cares about the 0.01% of the market who don't use Windows? Translating the lyrics into Urdu makes as much sense as supporting non-Windows platforms), thus consigning MP3 to a a historical footnote. (It would work better if they automatically degraded the playback of MP3s; though that may be in the next release.)
Though doesn't everyone use WinAMP or Sonique under Wintendo anyway? (I know I do on the NT machine at work.)
2001/4/12
The monarchy is copping a lot of flack in Britain, with the PM's father in law, an outspoken socialist, now calling it arrogant, greedy and stupid. With this groundswell of anti-monarchist sentiment, could we see republicanism gaining respectability in the Sceptred Isle? Of course, if they don't want to go quite that far, they could always just privatise it and make it pay its own way.
As the former hippie-trail resort town of Byron Bay bcomes fashionably popular with mainstream people with respectable jobs and kids and such, the police have acted to make it safe for suburban normalcy, and tackling the town's runaway marijuana smoking problem. This they are doing by cracking down on cannabis possession with sniffer dog patrols, searching suspected drug fiends in the streets. Naturally, the dreadlocked and drugfucked hippie types that have frequented the formerly easygoing town for decades aren't pleased, and are planning to protest what they consider an erosion of their civil liberties. (Or perhaps the goal is to get them to move to Nimbin, thus making room for people with more money to spend?)
Killing by the book: In a few weeks, convicted Oklahoma bomber Timothy McVeigh is due to be sent off to Redneck Valhalla; to mark the occasion, freedom-of-information web site The Smoking Gun has obtained and posted online the 54-page "protocol manual" for executing convicted federal prisoners; written in dry, bureaucratic language on what seems to be a typewriter, it covers everything from the last meal and disposition of personal effects to the handling of witnesses and protesters, as well as the mundane necessities of purchasing lethal chemicals and cleaning up afterwards.
Another mystery solved: If you've ever wondered what that "GUMPY IS BACK AND HE'S NOT HAPPY" billboard in Richmond meant (it was around too long to be a teaser for an ad campaign), the latest issue of 3RRR's subscriber magazine has the answer. Gumpy, it turns out, was one of the members of 1980s Beastieesque rap act Mighty Big Crime (best known for their single 16 Tons), and then went on to form teeny-bopper hippie-retro-kitsch band the Freaked Out Flower Children (best known for having professional scantily-clad blonde Sophie Lee in its lineup). Not quite Bill Drummond, but...
Marketing through irritainment: First, Hollywood studios started promoting unsuccessful films as deliberately bad cult movies to be enjoyed ironically (vide Showgirls), and now Microsoft are doing the same with their much-hated animated paperclip.
Reasons to avoid meat? As abbatoirs in the US accelerate their production to compete for lucrative contracts, some non-essential steps have been cut out; such as making sure that the animals are dead before they cut them up. Clandestine videos have emerged showing that a lot of cattle are alive and conscious well into the slaughter process.
Still Moreno would cut. On bad days, he says, dozens of animals reached his station clearly alive and conscious. Some would survive as far as the tail cutter, the belly ripper, the hide puller. "They die," said Moreno, "piece by piece."
Though the abbatoir companies aren't taking this lying down; the plants in question have taken proactive measures to ensure that such an outrage does not recur. The measures include installing surveillance cameras to catch illicit videotaping and coercing workers into signing statements that they have never seen living animals where there shouldn't be any.
The Reg on the EU directive on copyright; it's even more draconian than the DMCA, and essentially abolishes fair use; a new law for a new era of multinational corporate feudalism.
Its profit margins hit by the dot-com crash, beleaguered Internet giant Yahoo is turning to the one area of e-commerce which has weathered the storm: online porn sales.
2001/4/11
The Netherlands has just legalised euthanasia; being the second state to do so after Australia's Northern Territory briefly legalised the practice a few years ago. And already, Australian euthanasia advocate Dr. Philip Nitschke (he of the suicide laptop a few years ago) is planning a 'death ship', registered under the Dutch flag, that would travel the world, staying just outside of national waters, and offering merciful oblivion to the terminally ill. Not a bad idea; though the question remains of what to call this ship. The Thanatos? The Charon? The Angel of Mercy? Or perhaps the Nepenthe?
The 100 Dumbest Moments in e-Business History:
54. Joseph Preston, the CEO of Efox.net -- a site that features nude women, a stock ticker, sports scores, and a news feed from wire services -- explains the genius of his site as follows: "It's Victoria's Secret meets Playboy meets Car and Driver meets Sports Illustrated meets Fortune. We offer what I like to call the LASS factor: ladies, automobiles, sports, and stocks."
60. Ten separate regions jostle to be called the Silicon Prairie. (Our favorite: Stillwater, Okla., home to precisely one publicly traded tech company.)
72. Zoodoo.com, still the Web's premier retailer of elephant and other exotic dung.
As well as the obvious stupidities, such as DotComGuy, the Iuma Babies, Ham(p)sterdance and money-losing business models.
If you are a goth who's into Star Wars, do you put "Dark Side" on your census form?
Judge Patel to shut down Napster if it doesn't block all sharing of all copyrighted materials. Steal while you still can, leeches!
We could be witnessing the death of unencrypted MP3 as a mainstream music sharing format and the dawn of an era of universal access control for digital media. Napster, for all intents and purposes, will not be operating in any recognisable form for very long. And nobody really thinks that Universal, one of the most vehement opponents of unprotected file formats, will allow its recently-acquired EMusic subsidiary to keep selling standard MP3s. (Given that Universal and fellow 800-pound gorilla Sony have a fascistically copy-controlled music diestribution system in the works suggests that EMusic will be subsumed into it, becoming part of the new world order of end-to-end access control.)
Of course, this brave new world will only be available under Windows and on hardware-based trusted clients. Linux, for example, will never play any secure formats, as there is no way to guarantee a secure media path at the bare-metal level if the filthy thieving user can modify the kernel to divert data as it goes out to the sound card or do something similarly evil and reprehensible.
All your back-catalogue are belong to us: A grim day for independent music labels, as recording-racket giant Universal buys EMusic, gaining control of the catalogues of many independent labels signed to the service. Thus the Big Five hegemony over the means of music distribution grows stronger as another alternative is subsumed. (AtomicPop, which sold MP3s from a number of labels, including 4AD, seems to have folded some time earlier.)
Is the postrock movement a spent force?
The problem is that postrock has thrown out the baby with the bathwater. There's nowhere new musicians can take the stuff, and as much as it appeals to listeners reared on college radio stations and "indie music," you can't help but suspect that you only like it because you yourself are growing old. Rock, for all its faults, gets the pulse going. Postrock, after a while, just seems like innovative easy listening, as the piles of unbought CDs in the record stores' relevant sections attest.
(I myself don't think that the ideas behind postrock will die, even ig postrock itself doesn't outlive the early noughties. Take, for example, early-90s shoegazer; it was swept into commercial oblivion by grunge, but yet musicians kept making low-key, introspective music, albeit with stylistic variation. And rock'n'roll, that old post-war baby-boomer staple, is itself looking rather tired and lacklustre.)
The Israeli military is facing a problem, as reservists are refusing to serve in the occupied territories on moral grounds. The reservists' objections are that the occupation of the territories is undemocratic or immoral, and that Orthodox Jews are exempted from service. Military service is compulsory in Israel.
2001/4/10
I just came back from the Atheist Society meeting, where one Dr. Mark Newbrook gave a speech titled Nutters I Have Known. It was most entertaining; Newbrook spoke for just over an hour, and catalogued a long list of various schools of independent thought he had come in contact with; highlights included one P.N. Oak's Vedic history of the world (according to him, the name Australia comes from the Hindi "Astralaya", or "land of missiles"), Ted Holden's particularly eccentric take on neo-Velikovskianism, Reverse Speech, a thornbush in Geelong said to have been descended from the staff of Joseph of Arimathea, Richard Shaver's Deros, Reptoids, and an Australian named Rex Gilroy who claims that there are pyramids and live dinosaurs in the outback. As you can imagine, it was highly entertaining, especially to those interested in matters psychoceramic.
The talk was quite well attended; it was in a smaller room than usual (as the Comedy Festival had apparently taken the usual venue), and the room was full, with people sitting on the floor. At the end, when the time came for questions, one member of the audience (a middle-aged gent who said that he was a qualified electrical engineer and taught himself physics) got up and claimed that quantum physics is itself an insane idea, and one riddled with falsehood and fraud. Apparently he had come up with a thought experiment disproving it, and challenged the physics department at Melbourne University to send someone to debate him at the Speakers' Forum, but the physicists, entrenched in their ivory tower, did not deign to take him up on this. (Or perhaps they were afraid that he would thoroughly discredit them?) Towards the end, he mentioned something about how a supercollider said to be on the verge of discovering a quark was condemned, to be replaced with a new supercollider, and suggesting that this was done to keep the discovery from taking place and not challenge deeply held theories concerning the quark; this, according to him, was standard scientific practice.
System administrators at the University of North California were at a loss to find the location of a network server. The server was working properly and responding to requests, but hadn't been seen for four years. Finally, they tracked it down by following cables, finding that it had been mistakenly sealed behind a wall by maintenance workers.
Slightly old news: Stepping into the dot-com era (though arguably some 12 months too late), the British Post Office has changed its name to Consignia, a meaningless yet fashionably new-economyish word. At least it doesn't end in "-ent". However, the venerable organisation will also adopt a swirly logo. The name and the logo cost the British taxpayer £500,000.
Studies have shown that viewers are less likely to remember commercials in violent TV shows than in non-violent ones. I suspect that it generalises to anything that induces excitement (tension/release) and altered states in the viewers impairing retention of advertisements. Though stating it as "violent" programs having this commercially harmful effect may be a political move, to persuade marketers that the War On Violence is good business rather than a potential loss of revenues.
A look at four of the worst video games of all time. (From my own misspent video-game-playing youth, I seem to recall a number of naff Commodore 64 arcade conversions/movie licences, though can't remember enough details to send them in. Though generally the more marketing gimmicks a game has attached to it, the more pants it is likely to be.)
Welcome to the Digital Millennium: In its implementation of the WIPO treaty, the EU bans peer-to-peer file sharing. Consumers will be allowed to download copyrighted materials, in an appropriately encrypted secure format to their SAP-enabled Windows PCs or trusted music player clients. Member states have 18 months to ratify and enforce the laws.
Trainspotting: They're electrifying the railway line to Sydenham, out beyond St Albans; apparently some locals at St Albans are threatening to block trains if the proposed alterations go ahead and a lot more trains pass through the crossing, unless the whole thing is put underground. Hmmm... according to this map, there is also a "proposed" extension of the Epping line (which once ran all the way to Whittlesea) to South Morang. (Wonder if the diesel locomotives which pass outside where I live every Thursday night have anything to do with this...)
2001/4/9
For those of you in Melbourne, tomorrow night the local Atheist Society is hosting a talk by a local academic, titled "Nutters I Have Known". I believe it is meant to coincide with the Comedy Festival; given this and the sponsors, it should be entertaining to those interested in matters psychoceramic. It's at the New International Bookshop, Trades Hall, at 8pm.
Pitfall Harry wore Khakis: The next frontier for product placement: video games:
For The Groove Alliance's new racing game, SkyRacer Impulse, Shockwave will use a DoubleClick DART server to dynamically stream ads into billboards placed around the track. "The advertiser's brand is part of the interactive environment," says Varet. "It's not something you can zone out of. If someone's playing our game, they're staring right at your brand."
The German government, ever vigilant against the neo-Nazi menace, is now reportedly contemplating using government sanctioned denial-of-service attacks to shut down overseas web sites that ban German hate-speech laws. German officials apparently deny these reports, whilst carefully not ruling out such tactics. Given that this has worked well for the Chinese government against Falun Gong websites overseas, it may be the censorship technique of the new millennium.
In an attempt to comply with the Kyoto greenhouse agreement and switch its energy production to more sustainable methods, the UK plans to build 18 offshore wind farms. The British government will spend £100m on wind, wave and solar electric facilities.
The World's Oldest Profession: Where there are valuables and sex, someone will trade one for the other, be the participants people, chimps or fifth-grade schoolchildren.
Japanese graphic design zine SHIFT has an interview with Me Company's Alistair Beattie. Me Company is the London design consultancy best known for doing a lot of really impressive CD covers for Björk.
Australian politics; ignore if Seppo: To be honest, I'm not a fan of Natasha Stott Despoja; perhaps because she seems too trendy, and adheres too much to the standard pink yoof-leftist groupthink. (And that she's high up in the Australian Republican Movement, a particularly disagreeable bunch of rugby-shirted yuppie spivs.)
Interesting casting decisions: Will Russell "Romper Stomper" Crowe be the next James Bond?
Comedy Festival: Tonight I went to see Priorite A Gauche. The show (the brainchild of two English comedians who met at Oxford) consisted of two French pop/rap stars, named Didier and Jean-Francois, on tour. The show involved them doing French translations of pop songs, Didier reciting a raunchy poem he composed for a female audience member as the increasingly embarrassed Jean-Francois translated it into English, and a rather silly drinking game, as well as a goodly amount of audience interaction. They certainly had the Gallic pop star stereotype (the leather jacket and aviator glasses, and the combination of arrogance, oversexedness and over-the-top "coolness") down pat, and had the audience laughing. Worth a look.
Fringeoid mutant, hot-rod designer and underground artist Ed "Big Daddy" Roth, best known for the "Rat Fink" character, has passed away. Roth was an inspiration to a generation of underground artists, including many of the contributors to the Book of the SubGenius.
2001/4/8
Yesterday (well, Friday night), I went to see Cakes and Ale, a comedy performance by visiting English comedian Chris Addison. The theme of Cakes and Ale was the English national character, and particularly the middle-class one. Addison wrote a number of words associated with all things English (such as "Royal Family", "Whinging" and "Sport (bad)") on a blackboard and proceeded to go through the topics, recounting anecdotes and all the while going off on tangents (sometimes four deep). Among topics he covered were the British Army's ban on dwarves, inescapable middle-class values, and how, had the speech synthesizer been invented in Birmingham, few people would have taken Stephen Hawking seriously. He ran out of time without finishing the board, though what he got through was quite amusing.
2001/4/6
I was thinking that my next PDA would be a Psion, but now I'm thinking that one of these may be better.
Undoubtedly after late-night phone calls to his handlers in the Vatican, Victoria's Carnifex and Psychopomp Jeff Bracks has ruled out lifting the ban on screening The Exorcist on Good Friday, despite widespread criticism from various lefty ratbag types and (of all people) the Liberal Party. A wise Christian ruler, that Bracks; a true latter-day Prester John.
[Premier Bracks] said it was reasonable to ban the showing of a film like The Exorcist, which is R-rated, on such a holy day for Christians. "This is one day in the year. One day. I think people would be patient enough to realise one film on a very important day is not such a big issue," he said.
A very important day for whom? Not for me, nor for any of the many atheists, agnostics, Muslims, Jews, Buddhists and other Victorian citizens and taxpayers who do not hold with the Cult of the Wooden Cross. I myself had no plans to see The Exorcist on Friday the 13th of April. Though I resent being coerced by the (notionally secular) laws of the land to observe holidays of a religion I do not belong to. This isn't Iran, folks.
IMHO, the cinemas should define the ban and challenge the government, seeing whether it has the will to prosecute them on religious grounds and enforce a law written when the Church of England was the state religion.
Our old friend, MPAA supremo Jack Valenti has testified before Congress claiming that the copyright industries are America's greatest economic asset and why they should be exempted from antitrust laws, and allowed an iron grip on both production and distribution of content; not to mention why the Internet must be strictly regulated, for America's only hope for a future.
Now that's brand loyalty: First there was the couple who named their newborn child Iuma, to get some peanuts tossed their way by now-defunct MP3 purveyor iuma.com, and now, a sports fan in Texas has named his son Espn, after the cable-TV sports channel.
"When my wife was about six months pregnant, I was sitting on the couch watching a game on ESPN, and my sister and I were talking about baby names," Jason said. "She just kind of laughed and said, 'Hey, you watch so much ESPN, you should name the baby after it.' My sister was just joking, but I brought it up to my wife.
(via Plastic, and not from The Onion)
#!/usr/local/bin/dwim A Cambridge software engineer claims to have invented a system which creates programs from instructions in plain English. Bob Brennan is keeping quiet about how his new system works until patents are granted, but claims that he has solved the problem of not understanding ambiguities in natural language. However, others are skeptical.
Tonight, I managed to go to the Isosceles Film Night at the Glow Bar; I only saw the trailing end of it, as, unfortunately, it clashes with work. The night was in this trendy open-space bar with curved walls, onto which the films were projected. I missed some of the more interesting-sounding films (Themroc and Flowerlovers, though I may have seen Malj at a Splodge film night, if it's the one with the baby-chicken-crushing factory), though the ones I saw were not bad, which is more than I can say for the crowd...
<RANT>
I'M WAYNE KERR AND IF THERE'S ONE THING I HATE... it's trendy fucking
art student types who go to film nights and sit around talking loudly in
their fashionably attired little cliques, oblivious to the fact that
this is a film night, and some people are trying to watch the actual
films, of all things, and to make out the soundtrack over the din of
vacuous social chatter.
</RANT>
Ahem... that's better. Anyway, of the films I saw there was The Illuminati, a short by some VCA people that posited that Michael Jackson was a product ofthe UFO cover-up conspiracy opposed by local industrial hip-hop group Curse Ov Dialect. There was also a film of someone blowing up parts of a house (slow motion sequences of books spinning through the air, opening and fragmenting, from an exploding library shelf, over ambient music; destruction never seemed so tranquil), as well as one of a Japanese performance artist smashing things whilst a drummer played, and some psychedelic computer-generated animations (moving polygons, wireframe creatures (squinks?) locomoting down wireframe paths, &c) over fragments of music (I recognised a Coil track).
2001/4/5
A Microsoft exec speaks to Slashdot about Linux, software rental, standards and the like. Quite candid; it's interesting to read what the Redmond mindset on all these things is.
The growing menace of terrorism: Those terrorists are everywhere. First computer hacking was defined as terrorism, and now the US state of Utah, known for its conservative Mormon values, has defined non-union pickets as "commercial terrorism", a brand-new crime for a new millennium. The ACLU are, of course, not amused by this.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics has threatened fines for listing your religion as "Jedi" on the census. Supposedly Jedi is not a real religion, or so they say. Sure it is; Jedi believe in something called The Force which is, like, everywhere, that Microsoft is evil, and that Natalie Portman is a hot babe. It's sort of like whiteboy Rastafarianism, only instead of smoking pot you read Slashdot.
Anyway, I'm putting my religion down as Discordian. Let's see them prove otherwise. If you are of the Discordian religion, you are invited to do the same. (Besides, Discordianism is not a product of Rupert Murdoch's media empire, like Star Wars.)
Stamping out offensive behaviour: The forces of decency are clamping down on the Comedy Festival, and dissenters are being punished. Firstly, a late-night TV host named Rove condemned a visiting comic's routine as "disgraceful filth" and "wholly unacceptable", because it made some off-colour comments about Christianity; mind you, this was not a conservative politician speaking, but a fellow comic. (Perhaps it's time for a Comics Code for the Victorian comedy industry to ensure that such acts are not tolerated by legitimate comedians?)
Secondly, radical-leftist comedian Duff hijacked the opening of the festival, smacking a cream pie in his own face and then passionately kissing the Premier (known for his emphatic support of police brutality against protesters). After that happened, he was declared persona non grata; his website was removed from the Festival's site, several of his shows were cancelled, and he was forcibly evicted from the Festival Club, which is for legitimate comedians and their patrons only.
I wonder what the 2002 Melbourne Comedy Festival will be like; probably carefully vetted, with no sacrilege, no offensive jokes, no subversive elements and none of those dreadful dreadlocked S11 Maoists; in other words, something that may as well be playing in Singapore.
Meanwhile in New York, the governor has asked prison officials to ban convicted killers from exhibiting art at prison art shows. This ban was prompted by serial killer and irrepressible artist Arthur Shawcross, 11 of whose works (including innocuously cheesy fairy-tale fantasy paintings and a sketch of Princess Diana) were exhibited at the Corrections on Canvas exhibit. Shawcross, like a latter-day De Sade of kitsch, sparked outrage two years ago by having paintings and poems smuggled out of prison and sold on eBay.
Victoria's devout Catholic Premier, Steve "Jeff" Bracks, has banned screenings of R-rated films on Good Friday, to preserve the state's Godliness and not offend religious folks. In what may be a sign of the pendulum swinging towards conservatism and legislated morality, increasingly many businesses are shut on Good Friday, including most hotels.
2001/4/4
Ooh, Meg has somehow acquired a copy of the upcoming Radiohead album. Judging by her comments, it sounds promisingly interesting; let's hope they haven't entirely gotten Kid A out of their system and returned to puristic alt-rawk. Speaking of Meg and Radiohead, she also has a list of bands who should not cover Karma Police.
In Vietnam, they apparently take parental discipline a lot more seriously. When a Bac Ninh woman caught her stepson lying, she allegedly made him sew his mouth shut. Unfortunately for her, the 10-year-old's teacher didn't share her belief in firm discipline, and told the police. The woman faces three years in prison if convicted.
An entertaining social history of the San Francisco real estate boom, in the form of an over-the-top rant:
And in the place of those squat hovels they, the Irish bastardos, built like these weird Disney-esque pretend warehouses, with shiny corrugated metal sides and earth-tone-colored stucco walls and security gates and covered parking. And like Ben Franklin said, break a deal, spin the wheel: here were residents residenting in business areas, again, albeit desperately faux. But still! Mapping onto the torus of time and urban planning, it's quite weird. People living in pretend businesses pretending to be people pretending not to have businesses in old business buildings. The weird thing is that by statute they were supposed to be doing business there, to qualify as live-work!
Genetic tests show that British Celts and Basques are closely related; apart from both having obscurely fashionable languages and a fierce pride in their ancestry and traditions, the two groups have statistically indistinguishable Y chromosomes; it is believed that both of these populations are genetically representative of European aborigines from before the rise of agriculture (at least on the male line).
Tonight I went to see The New Scum, a play by a local outfit named Theatre In Decay. (One of the people behind it is one Robert Reid, who was also in the vaguely D.A.A.S-esque music combo God's Little Accidents during the late 1990s.) It was rather entertaining, in an anarchic, dadaistic way; the play took part all around the Empress Hotel, with actors emerging from amongst the audience. The play took the form of several interleaved stories; among them, the zombie invasion of a town named Wolverine, the story of the girl who lives in the Coca-Cola sign above St Kilda Rd., and the somewhat uneasy tale of two garbagemen, one dying of cancer, who find a dead 13-year-old junky.. or so it seems. These stories were interleaved with musical numbers and readings of news stories. The central theme of The New Scum is one of anxiety on the margins of a corporate-ruled, globalised world (Naomi Klein's book No Logo and Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan both appear to be influences); we are the New Scum. As you might imagine, this isn't comfortable, apathetic entertainment; don't expect Puppetry Of The Penis or something; on the other hand, it isn't earnestly humorless Marxist-fundamentalist street theatre either.
Along with the show (and the performance afterward by Dandelion Wine), there was a small zine, titled Scum on the Wall, on sale at the venue, and consisting of writing, poetry and underground comics by various members of the New Scum, or people of a similar bent from the Melbourne fringe arts scene.
Anyway, excuse the semi-coherent rambling tone of this entry. The gist is, I enjoyed The New Scum, and you may as well (or not).
Buzzle, the company which runs Australia's Apple dealerships, has gone into liquidation. This may be because with the Australian peso's steep decline, it is no longer cost-effective to import Macintoshes to compete with cheap PCs. In future, those Australians who actually need Macintosh hardware may have to FedEx it from the US themselves at their own expense.
2001/4/3
The ATA committee have voted down the "son of CPRM" proposal. Also known as "generic functionality", the plan was seen by many to be a back-door method of introducing trusted-client copy control mechanisms into computer hard drives. Now that it's gone, it is unclear whether the prospect of integrated hard disk access control is vanquished (for the time being), or simply driven underground into more insidious forms.
Are hacking, fondness for computers or miscellaneous geek tendencies a sign of Asperger's Syndrome, a condition related to autism? Some experts believe so, others doubt it.
Math and engineering skills are common among patients diagnosed with autism or AS, both of which are genetic. Baron-Cohen's study of families with histories of autism or AS found twice as many immediate relatives (parents, siblings and grandparents) who are engineers as in the general population.
Assuming for a moment that "geek" tendencies and AS are the results of a genetic condition, this has potential evolutionary implications. Given that computer skills and similar cognitive abilities are a more adaptive trait in the modern environment than physical strength or fertility, such a condition may well be a mutation leading to more technologically adapted humans in the future. Whether Asperger's Syndrome (which some classify as severely socially debilitating) fits that bill, though, is an entirely different question.
Fun for the whole family:
"In every country the Communists have taken over, the first thing they do is outlaw cockfighting."
- Rep. John Monks, defending the "sport of all free countries", 1975
Fortunately for freedom and the American Way, the Republican Senate majority leader, Senator Trent Lott, has blocked anti-cockfighting laws proposed by prissy liberals and comsymps. So the sun of freedom still shines on America, and decent, God-fearing folk and their kids can gather to watch roosters pumped up with stimulants gouge each other to death with razor-sharp metal spurs. (via Plastic)
If you've read any William Gibson, you've probably noticed his obsessions with all things Japanese. You can't pick up a Gibson novel which doesn't tie into Japanese pop-culture or society somehow; even his Victorian-era steampunk collaboration with Bruce Sterling, The Difference Engine, had a Japanese delegation visiting London. Now Gibson has written an article on Japanese culture, and why it fascinates him. (via Plastic)
Wired News, veering ever further from its mid-90s WELL-digerati origins, has a brief history of ways to determine if a corpse is really dead, to prevent premature burials, These included everything from tongue-pulling machines and smoke enemas to devices such as the "security coffin" and the "vitae dubiae asylum". And it warns that to this day, we may well be sending the comatose to wake in horror in a buried coffin, especially where the cosmetic practice of embalming isn't practiced.
Long pig: Two men in Moldova have been arrested for selling human flesh as meat. The human flesh was apparently removed from a cancer clinic.
2001/4/2
Not long after Texas oilman and US President Bush pulled the United States out of the Kyoto global warming agreement, the Australian Liberal government is planning to follow suit. The ALP, Democrats and the greens (big surprise there) have condemned the proposal; though what matters may be what the swinging voters of the outer suburbs would say. The Libs may try to spin those in favour of keeping to the Kyoto treaty as an out-of-touch chardonnay-socialist elite who would raise petrol prices for dinkum aussie battlers; after all, if the World's Leading Nation can tear up an agreement, why can't we?
Some hacktivists who don't quite seem to have the point of the whole socially-aware culture-jamming thing have altered the UK Burger King web site -- leaving a message praising McDonalds.
Does China now control the Panama Canal, thanks to commie-traitor-scum in the Clinton administration? (Also, doesn't Hutchison Whampoa control mobile phone company Orange? I wonder whether the PLA has an Echelon-style intelligence gathering system installed in local Orange phone franchises.)
My spam filter just caught a message titled "Investment Pact", from someone claiming to be the wife of an imprisoned Sierra Leone military commander, needing help in disposing of money and diamonds. spamcop recognised the complaint address as being in the .ng domain (Nigeria). It thus looks like Nigerian mail fraud has made it into the age of spam. Brace yourselves.
kuro5hin has an article about "the right to pleasure" that's somewhere between thought-provoking and amusing. It quotes 1970s study linking repression of pleasure and physical contact in societies to violence, religious fundamentalism and rampant greed. Then it goes on about bans on hugging, sexual abuse hysteria, teenagers being jailed for having sex, and bonobo chimps, and finally calls for the establishment of a news portal to fight against the alleged war on pleasure, rising to an impassioned crescendo.
People have been ignoring the right to pleasure and left it to pornographers like Flynt to fight for it. If we continue to ignore it, it will eventually be taken away. The consequences would be fatal for all of us. Because by denying children pleasure and giving them hate instead, as is the case in so many schools and homes today, you can turn them into monsters. Not necessarily people who will kill in violent outbursts. People who burn libraries. People who promote think that a picture is an insult to their strong and mighty God -- that even the face of a woman must be veiled because it is an obscenity. People who see children as asexual objects. Businessmen who think that diamond mines in Africa are worth every drop of blood that needs to be spilled to get them. People who can send other humans into gas chambers without feeling anything, because their brain isn't wired to feel affection for other people, for lack of childhood bonding.
The hedonistic tone seems quite unfashionable in the present day of Ritalin, Prozac, dot-com hypercapitalism, Neo-Liberalism and Organization Kids; it reads more like something Timothy Leary may have written, or perhaps Robert Anton Wilson's writings about the Illuminati. It will be amusing to see what happens when this portal gets created; whether you'll get pederasts surfacing and defending their right to have sex with young children, or neo-Nietzchean arguments for the right to kill anyone who stands between you and your right to pleasure, or even claims that the War On Pleasure is a reptilian conspiracy to enslave humanity.
(I once saw what seems to be a converse of the Prescott argument about repression of pleasure, which stated that societies which repress sexuality and hedonism, up to a certain point, tend to be more economically and militarily successful; if people are smoking pot and fucking like bonobos, they're not producing or consuming anything or conquering neighbouring lands, after all.)
Afterthought: I wonder how long until Jon Katz latches onto this and tries to rally the penguinheads for the cause.
They're planning a Hitchhiker's Guide computer game. Yes, another one. This time it won't be a boring old text adventure, but instead, a 3D arcade "towel-'em-up" similar to Tomb Raider or Mario 64. Bet you can't wait to see that...
They take things so much more seriously over in Europe. While Australia's local dreadheads are planning to spend May 1 doing impressions of that peasant guy from Monty Python and the Holy Grail, an anarchist group in Britain has been training its members for violent paramilitary tactics. Or had meant to, had Scotland Yard not demolished the disused factory they were using as a base. The group, calling themselves the Wombles, are an offshoot of an Italian anarchist group which hijacked and torched a train last year and has been behind many violent demonstrations across Europe.
Detectives are increasingly worried about a significant outbreak of violence being planned for May Day. Det Supt Randall said: "Last year's demonstration was largely organised by Reclaim the Streets, which is a peaceful organisation, although there was trouble. This year the organisation has been overtaken by far more violent groups."
That seems to be happening here, with hard-core Marxists having pretty much taken over anti-multinational activism. (If you don't believe in the need for a revolution, the abolition of private property or that Cuba is a workers' paradise, you can't call yourself "anti-corporate" these days.) Makes me wonder whether they're not secretly funded or otherwise promoted by strategic consultancies in the employ of multinational corporations, in order to paint anybody worried by the concentration of power as One Of Those Nutters.
2001/4/1
Switzerland's long-held fairy-tale image has taken a beating in recent years; first they cop some flack for running off with Holocaust survivors' life savings and killing third-world babies to maximise profits, and now a new film has presented their national icon, the flaxen-haired orphan Heidi, as a blue-haired punk who steals fruit and dodges fares. As expected, the traditionalists are up in arms. (via Lev)
The War On Drugs: How the zero-tolerance movement hijacked the drug campaign, turning it from a reasoned debate into a one-sided, take-no-prisoners moral crusade against evil. Or so a proponent of surrender-by-stealth (so called "harm minimisation" by the crypto-Communist dope fiends who back it) who got kicked off the anti-drug committee claims.
The Prime Minister's office wanted the booklet to be called "Our greatest weapon against drugs: families." The harm-minimisation proponents on the committee wanted "weapon" substituted for "resource". The final compromise was "defence".
Freaky Trigger have switched to an all-Cure format. Somehow I get the feeling they won't stick with it for long, though.
Tonight I went to the Empress to see some bands, playing at the launch of the Pacific Highway compilation CD (a collection of live recordings from a 3RRR show). Anyway, I missed the first band (Long Weekend), but saw the other three. Royal Chord sounded a bit like some '70s guitar instrumentals I remembered from ages ago; I got the impression that they were the sort of thing you could expect a trucker with a Burt Reynolds mustache to be listening to on his 8-track whilst driving down Route 66. Sleepy Township sounded somewhat more upbeat than their name suggested (I'd have thought they'd be some kind of minimal atmospheric shoegazer thing, or perhaps something like Sir). And Sodastream were OK, though didn't really form an impression on me.
Steam Piston Chicken. That's apparently a phrase in a Kenyan pidgin dialect, meaning "aircraft". Aren't you glad to know that.
A Roman Catholic theologian is arguing that the Bible should be restricted from children, partly because of its sexual content, and partly because of the questions it raises. Then again, didn't the Catholic church argue for a long time that only its priests have any business interpreting the Bible?
Riding to the rescue of beleaguered dot-coms is Back the Net, arguably the daftest rescue idea since "I know; let's open-source Iridium!". Among their proposals are encouraging people to buy dot-com shares (out of faith/as a donation), to spend more money at dot-coms, and to spam 10 of their friends with a "Back the Net" chain letter.
Eager for sponsorship and favour, Australian universities are handing out honorary degrees left, right and centre, not only to those politicians ruthless and pig-headed enough to make it to the top of the maggot heap of politics, but also to very rich persons and, god only knows why, to athletes. Which is irking those who earned their degrees the traditional way; if some meathead can get a doctorate for swimming or running really fast, how much less prestige does that PhD you toiled for in poverty for six years have?
Those ever-tasteful thirtysomething teenagers Limp Bizkit have released a violent moshpit game, in which you have to avoid "security goons" and getting killed in the pit. Is it any wonder that frontman Fred Durst became Senior Vice President of teen-rebellion sausage factory Interscope, the brand which brought you Snoop Doggy Dogg, NIN and Marilyn Manson, brought goth and gangsta rap to the seething, bored, mall-lurking masses of suburban teenage America and then single-handedly manufactured the "mook" subculture, combining the ugliest sides of jock, goth, metalhead and hip-hop into one mall-ready packaged lifestyle product? (link via Virulent Memes / Lev)