2005/1/31
Before we let ourself feel too triumphant about the recent Iraqi election, we should keep in mind another past electoral success: (via Conrad)
WASHINGTON, Sept. 3 (1967) -- United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of turnout in South Vietnam's presidential election despite a Vietcong terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting.
The size of the popular vote and the inability of the Vietcong to destroy the election machinery were the two salient facts in a preliminary assessment of the nation election based on the incomplete returns reaching here.
Something I didn't know until a few days ago: the keyboard player from the Scissor Sisters is apparently the son of Graeme Garden from The Goodies. (via trayce, who found it on the ILX forums)
2005/1/30
Here you will find an electroclash cover of Joy Division's She's Lost Control, with vocals by Siobhan Fahey. It's credited to "Agent Provocateur", which is not the name of a new Client/Adult-style electrocoolsie duo, but actually refers to the British lingerie chain, who apparently commissioned it as a promotional item or somesuch.
Which takes the idea of corporations as authors and music as a work for hire to a new level. Well, not entirely; apparently, one of the biggest pop groups in Thailand a few years ago was an enterprise owned and operated by PepsiCo., with musicians, songwriters and personnel hired by corporate managers, and then there was the extended mix of that Coca-Cola jingle which was in the charts in the 1990s. Or perhaps it's more like sponsorship; the track has no references to the brand or lingerie (though could perhaps be a suitable soundtrack to BDSM games whilst wearing such), and sounds much like the usual sort of hard-edged electrohouse you'd hear in Prahran or Hoxton or wherever the beautiful people congregate in their punk-themed designer clothes.
2005/1/29
Scans of ballpoint drawings from the sketchbook of a French artist going by the name of "Mad Meg"; gorgeous, surreal, often disturbing images combined with words and social/cultural commentary. If these were published in a book, I'd be tempted to buy a copy. (via bOING bOING)
The artist's site also has other works, including this modern updating of Hieronymus Bosch.
PostSecret, an interactive mail-art project presented on a blog. It consists of postcards sent in by people anonymously telling secrets they have never revealed to anyone; most of these are confessions of dodgy things people did or bad habits they have, though they go up to people who believe they have talked friends into suicide and similarly weighty things. (via FmH)
Science has found that monkeys are willing to pay for monkey porn; i.e., male rhesus macaques in possession of stocks of juice will trade juice for views of female monkeys' bottoms. This emerged from a study on how much monkeys would pay to see (G-rated) pictures of monkeys of various ranks (the answer: less than for porn for high-rating monkeys, though you'd have to actually pay them to look at low-ranking loser monkeys).
Now, an interesting question would be, would it be possible to put monkeys to work (useful or experimental, as long as it's something they wouldn't normally do without reward) and pay them in a currency that's useless in and of itself but useful only for buying things (juice or monkey pr0n).
Former White House anti-terrorism czar Richard Clarke presents a frighteningly plausible scenario of the war on terrorism in 2001:
The US Government had predicted that future attacks, if they came, would likely be on financial institutions, noting that Osama bin Laden had issued instructions to destroy the US economy. Thus when the casinos were attacked, it was a surprise. It shouldn't have been; we knew that Las Vegas had been under surveillance by al-Qaeda since at least 2001. Despite that knowledge, casino owners had done little to increase security, not wanting to slow people down on their way into the city's pleasure palaces. Theme park owners were also locked into a pre-9/11, "it can't happen here" mindset, and consequently were caught off guard, as New Yorkers and Washingtonians had been in 2001. The first post-9/11 attacks on US soil came not from airplanes but from backpacks and Winnebagos. They were aimed at places where we used to have fun, what we then called "vacation destinations". These places were particularly hard to defend.
On this day neither the 160 security cameras surveying the mall nor the 150 safety officers guarding it were able to detect, deter or defend against the terrorists. Four men, disguised as private mall security officers and armed with TEC-9 submachine guns, street-sweeper 12-gauge shotguns and dynamite, entered the mall at two points and began executing shoppers at will. It had not been hard for the terrorists to buy all their guns legally, in six different states across the Midwest.
Most analysts now agree that Subway Day and Railroad Day not only caused the Senate filibuster to end, permitting the passage of Patriot Act III, but also finally triggered the withdrawal of some 40,000 troops from Iraq. The army was needed in the subways.
When Canada refused to allow US nuke squads to conduct warrantless searches at customs stations on the Canadian side of the border, we built the Northern Wall, which channelled trucks and freight trains to a limited number of monitored border crossings. Barbed wire, radar installations, and thousands of security workers made our border with Canada resemble our border with Mexico.
By the end of the story, terrorism abates (as the jihadis are too busy running what used to be Iraq and Saudi Arabia), though the US is an impoverished police state. Clarke paints this grim future as the result of several errors of judgment: invading Iraq (which simultaneously wasted resources and helped recruit many towards the anti-US jihad), failure to engage the Islamic world with ideas and not investing enough in becoming independent of Middle Eastern oil.
Glyph Lefkowitz is not only the developer/prime mover of an impressively elegant Python-based network programming framework, but has also written some nuanced and insightful essays about various topics, including a good argument for extending Python rather than embedding it (i.e., there are many good reasons other than laziness for it), a righteous excoriation of the Ayn Rand Institute's take on the "War on Terrorism", and a very astute attempt at a framework for ethics in software development, which does a good job of unmuddying the waters. Go and read.
Eurovision flashback of the day; check out the funky costumes, headgear and facial hair; they're like something from some roller-disco in outer space. Apparently they're the ones who did that "Moskau" song too.
2005/1/28
After being dumped by Warner, Stereolab have announced a new deal with their old label, Beggars Banquet imprint Too Pure. The deal is a worldwide licensing deal for their Duophonic label (which did UK releases, with overseas territories being Warner's), and also includes the new release from Lætitia's side project Monade. It will be followed, in late April or early May, with a 3-CD/1-DVD box set of Stereolab EP/single tracks titled, characteristically, Oscillons From The Anti-Sun.
Meanwhile in Pitchfork, details of the new New Order album, which will be titled Waiting For The Sirens' Call, and supposedly be more electronic than the last one (though there were also rumours that it was going to be in a dirty-blues-rock direction like Primal Scream after the Ecstasy wore off). One of the tracks is titled I Told You So; I wonder whether this is a nod to former Factory labelmates The Wake, who had a very New Orderesque song by that title on their last album.
2005/1/27
A magazine called the Buffalo Beast has a list of The 50 Most Loathsome Americans of 2004; featuring odious right-wingers, spineless Democrats, moronic celebrities and others, written up in gonzo-rant style.
Toby Keith: The worst kind of proud-to-be-brainwashed dolt, one who feels he should express himself. The fact that this ambulatory hamburger's opinions were ever given public forum is an indictment of our entire civilization and all human history leading up to this point.
Every role (Halle Berry) takes will be hailed as another milestone in civil rights history by virtue of her barely discernible smattering of African DNA, when in reality her success only underscores our nations incapacity to accept a truly black actress.
Dick Cheney: So visibly evil that all of the documented evidence against him is superfluous. The kind of guy who starts talking cannibalism the minute he steps on the lifeboat.
The Annoying Thing, an animation of a frog making motorbike noises, which has become one of the biggest-selling ringtones in the UK (and is all over TV ads). Anyway, it is somewhat amusing, at least if you haven't seen it millions of times already. (May not be worksafe, if computer-rendered humanoid frog genitals offend)
For those who break into a cold sweat every time they drive the Hummer out of the gated community, Ford have a new solution for 21st-century urban survival: the Ford Synus, a "rolling urban command center" which looks somewhere between an armoured bank truck, an obscenely large SUV and a Mack truck, and features rolling shutters over windows and bullet-resistant glass, whilst providing mini-home-theatre comfort inside. It's currently a concept vehicle only, and possibly a joke, though it should sell well in places like South Africa (especially if they supply under-door flamethrowers as an optional extra), and should last until inner-city criminals get RPG launchers. Or perhaps it's just a status symbol for rappers and movie stars.
A man in London was jailed for using the Lynx text-mode browser to make a donation to the tsunami relief fund. Anti-fraud monitoring interpreted the unusual browser signature (i.e., not Mozilla or IE) as the sign of a hack-attempt and the police went in in a SWAT-style raid, smashing his door down and arresting him. Which goes to show that it does not pay to use unusual software.
2005/1/26
An asteroid has been officially named in Douglas Adams' honour. The space rock Douglasadams, formerly named 2001 DA42, joins another asteroid named Arthurdent. In the same round of namings, asteroids were named after Mary Wollstonecraft, Ball Aerospace, genetics pioneer Rosalind Franklin and the city of Las Vegas.
A new study in England and Wales has revealed that one in every four boys aged 14 to 17 admits to being a serious or prolific offender, meaning either having committed six or more offences in the past year or having committed serious offences such as assault, burglary or aggravated Burberry-wearing dealing hard drugs. Then again, it could well be that some proportion of the sample exaggerated their histories to be like their gangsta-rap/east-end-geezer heroes.
2005/1/25
What do Saudi Arabia, the Bush Whitehouse, the Mormons, the Vatican and former Malaysian strongman Mahathir Mohamad have in common? They are all part of an international alliance against liberal secularism:
The Doha conference, and the resulting UN resolution, provided a striking example of growing cooperation between the Christian right (especially in the United States) and conservative Muslims - groups who, according to the clash-of-civilisations theory, ought to be sworn enemies.The coalition succeeded in introducing a resolution in the United Nations asserting "traditional" definitions of the family and attacking progressive social policies including promotion of contraception, tolerance of homosexuality, nontraditional views of the status of women and sex education. The resolution, proposed by Qatar, was backed by the United States, though, unusually, Australia (with its socially conservative and vehemently pro-US administration) sided with Godless Europe. Chances are that was the result of a miscommunication and, the next time such a resolution comes up, Australia's UN ambassador will vote with the Coalition of Willing.
The family debate certainly divides the world, but the divisions are not between east and west, nor do they follow the usual dividing lines of international politics. The battle is between liberal secularists - predominantly in Europe - and conservatives elsewhere who think religion has a role in government.
On this issue, with a president who sounds increasingly like an old-fashioned imam, the United States now sits in the religious camp alongside the Islamic regimes: not so much a clash of civilisations, more an alliance of fundamentalisms.
And in another unholy alliance, US Christian Fundamentalist groups are holding their noses and jumping into the hot tub with Hollywood on the issue of file-sharing, in the interest of instituting centralised control over the lawless internet, mechanisms control which could just as easily be used for enforcing religious morality and stamping out sin as for making sure that every byte of copyrighted content is paid for.
Over a decade after The Year September Never Ended, AOL cuts off USENET access for its users. Don't hold your breath waiting for the blighted ecosystem to recover, though; pretty much everyone who values signal-to-noise ratios and not receiving megatons of spam has moved to mailing lists, blogs and web-based forums, leaving only marauding gangs of spammers and a hard core of freaky insane radioactive mutant porn pirates too far gone to be saved. Eleven years after September began, a "newsreader" has more to do with RSS feeds than NNTP, and in this cynical, spam-infested interweb, the USENET of the small, polite academic network of old is far too naïve to survive.
A Japanese company named Gametech have released a handheld Nintendo Famicom clone. (For those not in the know, the Famicom was the Japanese game console rereleased in the west as the Nintendo Entertainment System.) It's about the size of a modern handheld game console and takes full-sized Famicom cartridges (which are shaped somewhat differently from the NES cartridges sold in the west, but an adaptor is available). It's not clear how legal it is, though given that it's on the Japanese market, they'd probably have an excuse of some sort (quite probably unlike a different handheld NES clone sold in China, and using miniature copies of Nintendo cartridges). The page says that it's of quite good quality, though given that they're trying to sell them, they would. (via gizmodo)
(This is from the Lik-Sang site, who also sell nifty and bizarre things like discontinued handheld game consoles and pencil cases shaped like vintage game controllers and such.)
Wearing his design-commentator hat, Momus dissects VICE Magazine's Design issue, peeling back the magazine's hipster-nihilist façade:
Here's where Vice's real agenda begins to peep through the scatology, like a seam of lace under a crumpled Kleenex; behind the affectations of hoodlum and white trash style, the glorification of rural teenage delinquency and the cheap shots at NYU students, Vice is a magazine written by and for urban sophisticates, people who know quite a bit about art, photography and design and are actually highly invested in aesthetics. Vice's photo editor, seen holding a fake iBook in the iHustle feature, just happens to be Ryan McGinley, an American Photo Magazine Photographer of the Year and, at 25, the youngest artist ever to have a solo show at the Whitney. Could it be that behind the sophomoric, mischievous, dismissive, even nihilistic style, Vice is the voice of a twentysomething generation clearing the decks for a new aesthetic? Is the magazine's iconoclasm pure destruction or preparatory work for a new definition of the 'iconic'? Is the disgust directed here at design actually disgust at its co-option by consumerism, its low aspirations?
The Vice Design Issue is not an anti-design tract, but the championing of an aesthetic that's already quite well-established, already wowing museum curators -- a casual, trashy, porno-party style that celebrates tack, lo-tech and the good old bohemian values of sex, drugs and rock and roll. This salon des refuses, populated by people in their twenties, is well on its way to becoming a salon tout court.
What, VICE is run by a bunch of educated middle-class yuppies? All the nihilistic rants, casually homophobic epithets and keeping-it-real articles about prison life and street violence and ultraviolent musical subcultures and guest contributions by the likes of Jim Goad and such are just the affectation of a bunch of privileged scions of the cultural elite slumming it before they join the establishment proper? Say it ain't so!
In time for Burns night, MusicThing compares 3 MIDI bagpipes. The DegerPipes are the set I recall seeing in a shop window in Inverness a few years ago.
Long-haired, pot-smoking country singer Willie Nelson is now selling a line of biodiesel to America's truck drivers. Nelson, a supporter of American agricultural communities (btw, do those actually exist, or are they all owned by ConAgra, Simplot and Monsanto now?) and organiser of the Farm aid concerts, is promoting his BioWillie biodiesel as a patriotic alternative to imported oil, at once reducing dependence on Middle Eastern supplies (and the entanglements that that causes) and helping local farmers. Which sounds like the most sensible suggestion touted in the name of patriotism I've heard in a long time. More power to him.
2005/1/24
Why hasn't Osama bin Laden attempted any terrorist attacks on US soil since 2001? Some say that it's because the US has threatened to nuke Mecca, the Islamic holy city, if such an attack ever happens again; this, in theory, makes an attack against the US unthinkable:
"Israel recognizes that the Aswan Dam is Egypt's Damoclean Sword," writes Wheeler. "There is no possibility whatever of Egypt's winning a war with Israel, for if Aswan is blown, all of inhabited Egypt is under 20 feet of water. Once the Israelis made this clear to the Egyptians, the possibility of any future Egyptian attack on Israel like that of 1948, 1967, and 1972 is gone."
The argument for this proposition includes the reasoning that the true reason for invading Afghanistan and Iraq was to demonstrate that the US is not afraid to use force, even, perhaps, when the reasoning behind doing so is dubious; which appears to be an echo of Richard Nixon's madman theory of geopolitics; that if you act like you're dangerously insane, others will fear and respect you and give you wide berth; assuming that they're not even more irrational, that is.
Wheeler says bin Laden is "playing poker with a Texas cowboy holding the nuclear aces," so there's nothing al-Qaida could do that could come remotely close to risking obliterating Mecca.
There are a few problems with this reasoning: on the other hand, if the US was to nuke Mecca, all hell would break loose; there is no way that such an attack would not start a catastrophic war between the West and the Islamic world. There'd be suicide bombers martyring themselves in every Western city, not to mention the militaries of every country from Indonesia to Algeria uniting against the Great Satan and its minions. This would be the apocalyptic World War 3 that didn't happen against the USSR. As such, whether the Whitehouse and Pentagon would be willing to bring on the apocalypse if a few hundred of its citizens were killed with bombs is somewhat more dubious a proposition. Secondly, the strategy of making such a threat presupposes that al-Qaeda are rational agents and not, say, religious nutters spoiling for an apocalyptic global war or something. It could well be that bin Laden would see such a claim not as a threat but as a promise of greater glory than he could otherwise attain.
The Scottish tsunami benefit concert looks pretty good, with Belle & Sebastian, Mogwai, Teenage Fanclub and Franz Ferdinand, among others.
Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber, of Thatcherite-populist musical fame, is planning to sell several of the theatres he owns in London's West End; now it emerges that one of the potential buyers is bling-bling superstar P. Diddy. That says it all, really. (xia xrrf)
2005/1/22
Kinky Friedman, arguably the world's most famous Jewish cowboy detective novelist and author of songs like Get Your Biscuits In The Oven And Your Buns Into Bed and They Ain't Makin' Jews Like Jesus No More, has announced that he will follow in the footsteps of Jesse Ventura and run for Governor of Texas.
Friedman is the latest representative of an American trend known to detractors as anti-politics and to the more charitable (including me) as narrative politics. The former argue that voters are demonstrating their contempt for democracy by choosing jokes; the latter that, for an electorate increasingly shaped by the grammar of movies and television, the most attractive candidate will be the one whose bid most closely resembles a Hollywood pitch. This makes non-politicians attractive because their very improbability becomes their compelling storyline.
Of course, the powers that be are cluing into this trend and running politically naïve but photogenic celebrity candidates whose platforms consist of vague motherhood statements about being against bad things and for good things, knowing that the real decisions the voters don't want to worry their pretty heads over will be delegated to faceless administrators and, some would say, unelected representatives of vested interests who will benefit from them; thus the causal chain between the popular election of politicians and the appointment of decision-makers is broken. (According to investigative journalist Greg Palast, one of Arnold Schwarzenegger's first actions as Governor of California was to basically let the managers of Enron off the hook for screwing Californians with rigged electricity prices.) Americans, however, seem to be eating it up; enough so that now there's a campaign to amend the Constitution to allow foreign-born Schwarzenegger to run for President in 2008.
Of course, which is not to say that the Kinkster is necessarily the pawn of powerful interests. Given his lack of a serious platform (or, for that matter, of his spouting of comfortingly "sincere" homilies), he's probably more like the American Screaming Lord Sutch than anything else.
Age journalist Warwick McFadyen has written a glossary of Australian culture:
BILL OF RIGHTS: unnecessary for the citizenry who, because they enjoy unrivalled sunshine, surf and sport, are deemed already to have the good life.
LEFT-WING: that side of the playing field on which the bones of utopians lie scattered. Rapidly becoming archaic in meaning, although it is still used as a term of disgust in certain quarters, without having to be qualified.
PROMISE: once a measure of integrity, a promise is now divided politically into core and non-core, presumably to mask the contempt for the people expressed in bare-faced lies.
RECONCILIATION: the shining star in the night sky that everyone can see but few realise has already died, even though its light still travels to us.
WORLD STAGE: the podium on which we might perform one day, when we're a little bigger.
No, it's not some Japanese sexual fetish, but rather the latest teenage fad from England, combining the two national preoccupations of physical violence and mobile phones. Happy Slapping involves gangs of young malchicks on buses and trains slapping strangers in the face and recording their reactions on their phones.
Spare a thought for David Atkinson, the University of Idaho scientist who spent 18 years of his life designing an experiment for the Huygens space probe, only to watch it all go pear-shaped in the depths of space because some rocket scientist forgot to turn his experiment on. Oops!
I don't know about you, but were I the genius who made the mistake, I'd be looking for somewhere very safe to hide right now.
Not One Damn Dime Day, a proposed boycott of all consumer spending, was perhaps one of the most poorly thought out and piss-weak ideas for an alleged political protest ever; and Mark Dery tears it a new one, in style:
First, the whole business reeks of bobo sanctimony and cultural elitism. Any member of the Adbusters-reading, Supersize Me-watching leisure class who honestly believes she can Stick It to the Man by keeping her dimes firmly in her hand-knitted Guatemalan rucksack, right beside her manically underlined copy of Chomsky's Hegemony or Survival: America's Quest for Global Dominance, is unlikely to be seen rolling a 55-gallon drum of Miracle Whip out of Wal-Mart or rejoicing in fried offal at the local McDonald's. The NOMDD demographic consists largely, if not entirely, of inconspicuous consumers. It is axiomatic, at this late date, that the higher a certain sort of overeducated, deeply principled American climbs on the socioeconomic ladder, the more likely he is to camouflage his status and laminate his common-man credentials with the appearance (at least) of a virtuous proletarianism. This, after all, is America, where none of the children are above average. Our deep-dyed populism demands that all poll respondents, whether homeless or richer than God or Gates, insist they are "middle class."
Not One Damn Dime Day, and its cousins like Buy Nothing Day, are, according to Dery, symptomatic of a deeper malaise in the American left: a popular association of progressive ideals with asceticism, self-denial and a guilty, puritanical joylessness.
Ensuring that you're synonymous, in the public mind, with hair shirt-wearing self-denial and granitic humorlessness (think Kerry, Gore, Dukakis...) is not likely to win the hearts and minds of Middle Americans, most of whom shrink from things like the NOMDD Day because they sound like the political equivalent of the gray, gluten-free, sugar-free, fun-free snack foods drearily gummed by vegans and other humorectomy sufferers. A mass boycott that mandates total self-denial and, by default, sentences the participant to house arrest in order to avoid spending a plugged nickel, let alone a thin dime, is a mass boycott doomed to failure.
Too long have the censorious, humor-impaired wings of the left--the Dworkinite penis-is-a-weapon paleoconservative wing of feminism; the beige, Organization Man policy wonks; the excruciatingly earnest shoot-your-TV neo-Luddites--been the left's public face. We need an Xtreme Makeover. More profoundly, we need to stop embracing the politics of denial and withdrawal. Show me a sharp-tongued left-wing critique, built on notions of social justice and economic democracy that resonate with the common man yet, at the same time, embraces the Coneyesque cheap thrills and vulgarian pleasures of junk culture, and I'll show you a battleplan for handing the right's self-appointed morals czars their heads.
(I'm wondering: could this be a legacy of America's Puritan heritage? Could the fact that the American colonies were founded by zealous, gratification-denying idealists have formed not only the religious streak in the American right but the crusading tendencies and anti-materialism of American progressive movements throughout history?)
2005/1/21
A tutor at Cardiff University has determined mathematically that the 24th of January (i.e., this coming Monday) is the most depressing day of the year:
The formula for the day of misery reads 1/8W+(D-d) 3/8xTQ MxNA.
Where W is weather, D is debt - minus the money (d) due on January's pay day - and T is the time since Christmas.
Q is the period since the failure to quit a bad habit, M stands for general motivational levels and NA is the need to take action and do something about it.
2005/1/20
"Cyborg researcher" Steve Mann has produced a prototype user-pays chair. The chair is fitted with spikes which retract when a seating licence is purchased by swiping a credit card; a buzzer sounds when the licence is about to expire. A CCTV camera is used to prevent the smuggling in of licence-circumvention devices such as boards and cushions. (Apparently the seat was exhibited in San Francisco in 2001, but bOING bOING only mentioned it now.)
And America's transformation into the Soviet Union moves forward one step, with American Airlines requiring visitors to supply lists of people they would be staying with whilst in the US, and claiming it's a TSA regulation. (via bOING bOING)
After what seems like ages, the Amiga is on the verge of a comeback... again. This time, it's brought to you by Hyperion, a British company contracted to write Amiga OS4 who had the foresight to get the contract to give them ownership should Amiga Inc. go bankrupt (as it did). Developers can now buy PowerPC-based Amiga boards, which will boot a prerelease of OS4. The article has screenshots, which look like GNOME or Xfce on Linux, except for conspicuous gaps in the range of supported applications (for one, there are no modern standards-compliant web browsers for Amiga OS4).
The target market for the prerelease is ostensibly developers wishing to get a head start on the next killer platform, though in practice it may well be nostalgic Amiga users and/or collectors of world-changing machines from alternate timelines wishing to put an AmigaOne Micro next to their NeXT Cube, BeBox and Acorn Archimedes. The jury is still out on which is cooler: the AmigaOne Micro or the C-One.
Interesting technical factoid of the day, from this page: (via /.)
Did you know your 10D and 300D run DOS? That's right. Embedded in the camera is DataLight's ROM-DOS. In fact, if you use the right tool such as s10sh you can see that inside the camera is an A: and B: drive. On the A: drive reside command.com and autoexec.bat, and most interestingly, camera.exe.And this page has a tool for getting a shell on your camera, and gives a list of Canon camera models known to work with it. Unfortunately, I left the USB cable for my PowerShot G2 in Australia, so I can't try it out.
2005/1/19
Google have developed a solution for stopping comment spam, or, more precisely, for denying spammers any search engine-related benefits from getting their URLs all over blogs, guestbooks and bulletin boards. From now on, any links on a web page with the rel="nofollow" attribute will be ignored by search engines. This has broad support; on the search engine side, Google, Yahoo! and MSN Search are heeding this tag, and various blogging tool providers, including SixApart, LiveJournal, Blogger and WordPress, have added automatic support of this link to their comment/trackback mechanisms. (As, of today, has this blog.)
Which seems like a pretty elegant solution; rather than shutting down comments or removing functionality (such as the ability of commenters to include links to their sites or relevant pages or otherwise leverage the hypertextual nature of the web), marking the links as not endorsed by the site, and to be ignored by participating search engines (which should soon be all of them, given that it's an excellent indicator of potential link relevance, and not heeding it can impair the relevance of the engine's results).
A defense attorney in Memphis, Tennessee, met his match with the jury pool from hell: (via jwz)
Right after jury selection began last week, one man got up and left, announcing, "I'm on morphine and I'm higher than a kite."
When the prosecutor asked if anyone had been convicted of a crime, a prospective juror said that he had been arrested and taken to a mental hospital after he almost shot his nephew. He said he was provoked because his nephew just would not come out from under the bed.
Another would-be juror said he had had alcohol problems and was arrested for soliciting sex from an undercover officer. "I should have known something was up," he said. "She had all her teeth."
Another prospect volunteered he probably should not be on the jury: "In my neighborhood, everyone knows that if you get Mr. Ballin (as your lawyer), you're probably guilty." He was not chosen.(Alternate title: "strategies for evading jury duty")
2005/1/18
A compelling argument claiming that Yahoo! will buy SixApart within six months. Which, given Yahoo!'s tradition of clueless heavy-handedness, means that TypePad and LiveJournal will be steamrolled into an all-new, cut-down and obnoxiously ad-saturated Yahoo! personal publishing solution for those who don't know any better. (See also: eGroups)
Link via David Gerard, who speculates that the smarter rats aboard the LiveJournal ship will already have sensed what's in the offing and made developing a method of cryptographic cross-site authentication their priority; this makes sense, as it will allow people to jump ship to their own LJ-based servers and keep the social-network functionality that made LJ useful, without having to get all their friends to agree which server to be on.
More news from the leaden age of music diversity: major record labels are now using statistical hit-prediction software to pre-screen demos before wasting A&R ear-time on them. Hit Song Science, the software used, predicts whether a song is likely to be successful by comparing it statistically against a database containing the past 30 years' worth of Billboard hit singles:
HSS's crucial design flaw is that it can only look at the past. Those "leftfield", illogical and grassroots-inspired departures from the norm, such as disco or drum and bass, could not have been predicted - but they shift the mainstream and provide the momentum any culture needs to remain fresh. As Smith says, "Art is the one area where people can, and should be able to, make radical statements. Anything that encourages safe, consensus-driven music should be used with caution."
It's all in the clusters, you see. Hit songs, typically, fall into one of a number of groupings - there are around 50 in the US and 60 in the UK where, traditionally, tastes have been more diverse. Belonging to the same cluster does not mean songs sound the same, though, more that they are mathematically similar. And the analysis has thrown up some very unlikely musical bedfellows: Some U2 songs are in the same cluster as Beethoven, while spandex ultra rocker Van Halen sits right alongside MOR piano babe Vanessa Carlton. It is for this reason that Polyphonic are confident their software won't homogenise our already stratified and similar sounding charts. They are already working with one radio station to expand their playlist without losing audience share by selecting songs with the correct mathematical rhythms. In a world where drearily repetitive playlists have become the norm this could be the answer to an oft-uttered prayer.
It's interesting to consider where the fine line between well-formedness and homogeneity is. On one hand, one could probably state with mathematical certainty that serialist or aleatoric composition is unlikely to ever have mass appeal; as such, an algorithm which analysed music for having some kind of structure and rated it on that would be a good predictor of whether or not a piece of music has the potential (however small) to be popular. On the other hand, I suspect that HSS may overspecify things, to the extent of excluding perfectly workable new approaches which have not been tried or accepted yet. (via DIG)
The Smiths are the latest band to have had a musical written about their songs; it'll be titled Some Girls Are Bigger Than Others, and said to be like "film without a text". It is scheduled to open in London in July 2005.
Meanwhile, the next New Order album, titled Sugarcane, is due out in February.
(found in the archives of the ABC's DIG News)
A PhD study into music copyright enforcement (by a former lawyer for ARIA, the Australian RIAA equivalent, no less) has found that consumer choice of music titles has fallen dramatically, with the number of music products released falling 43% between 2001 and 2004; and it's likely to get worse as record labels merge and "rationalise" their catalogues into safely marketable titles. Alex Malik argues that this, and not file sharing, is to blame for falling music sales.
"If you go into a typical CD store these days, there's the new Australian Idol CD and of course there's the other new Australian Idol CD. You'll also find more DVDs and accessories than ever before ... But if your tastes are a little eclectic or go beyond the top 40, you may be in trouble," he said.
Of course, one could argue that the majors are now signing a lot of exciting, energetic indie bands from the underground. Except that this argument falls apart on closer examination; most of the major-label-indie fall into one of several formulaic, easily marketable categories: 70s garage primitivist rockists (think Jet/The Datsuns/Kings of Leon/&c), other radio-friendly post-ironic rehashings of old formulae (Scissor Sisters), easy-listening vaguely-indieish pap like Keane and Badly Drawn Boy, and attempts at The Next Interpol/Franz Ferdinand (or whatever the band of the moment happens to be).
Which is what happens when recording companies become agglomerated into large corporations beholden to shareholders who demand safe returns; in such a model, there is no scope for maverick A&R people to make decisions based on gut instinct or take risks. But that's OK; with modern market research methodologies, there is no need for such archaic and unreliable practices, when formulae can me made up to please enough of the market. The same has happened in Hollywood, where all scripts are plotted out with special script-writing software that ensures that characters move and develop like automata along pre-programmed tracks. The scriptwriter only has to flesh things out.
As the reach of copyright laws is expanded and rightsholders (or their investors) are demanding as much income from each piece of intellectual property in the asset register, documentary makers are getting the rough end of the pineapple. Old documentaries are becoming illegal to distribute (and effectively disappearing down the memory hole) once their clearance rights expire, and new documentaries are often not being made without wealthy sponsors: (via bOING bOING)
But it's particularly difficult for any documentary-makers relying on old news footage, snippets of Hollywood movies or popular music -- the very essence of contemporary culture -- to tell their stories. Each minute of copyrighted film can cost thousands of dollars. Each still photo, which might appear in a documentary for mere seconds, can run into the hundreds of dollars. And costs have been rising steeply, as film archives, stock photo houses and music publishers realize they are sitting on a treasure trove, Else and other filmmakers say.
The American University study (at http://www.centerforsocialmedia.org/rock/index.htm) is a fascinating, if dispiriting, look at the tricks documentary-makers have to pull to get around copyright restrictions, from turning off all TVs and radios when filming a subject indoors to replacing a clip of people watching the World Series with a shot of professional basketball on the TV set instead because that's what the filmmaker had rights for.
"Why do you think the History Channel is what it is? Why do you think it's all World War II documentaries? It's because it's public-domain footage. So the history we're seeing is being skewed towards what's fallen into public domain," says filmmaker Robert Stone in the American University study.
50 interesting fact(oid)s about the Tube:
5. Travelling on the tube for 40 minutes is the equivalent of smoking two cigarettes - so save yourself a packet, all you smokers and get on the tube more often.
24. The peak hour for tube suicides is 11am.
36. The air in the underground is on average 10°C hotter than the air on the surface.
48. A fragrance called "Madeleine" was introduced at St James Park, Euston and Piccadilly station in an effort to make the tube smell better on 23rd March 2001. It was taken out of action on 24th March 2001 as it was making people feel sick.
2005/1/17
The Age reports that President Bush's inauguration, one of the most lavish in a long time, seems more like a coronation than the swearing in of the President of a republic:
At the first inauguration of a president, in 1789, George Washington wanted to wear a suit covered in gold leaf with a special cape, and ride to the ceremony on a white horse escorted by an honour guard on white horses. Like a coronation.
He was talked out of this, and instead wore a brown suit with gold buttons and rode to Federal Hall, in New York, on a brown horse.
The president in the new republic was not a king. Still, this inauguration, like most of the others before it, feels, to an Australian, more like a coronation than the swearing in of an elected president.
Though isn't Sun Myung Moon the current Congressionally-crowned king?
Aside: isn't there a strain of fringe Christian Fundamentalism which holds that, for America to fulfil its destiny as God's chosen nation, it must have a king? There's a facsimile of a flyer in Donna Kossy's book Kooks which is curiously suggestive of such a belief.
In the Digital Rights Millennium, region-coding is not just for DVDs anymore; region-coded printer cartridges and other gadgets which only work in their intended target market: (via bOING bOING)
U.S. multinational companies want Europeans to continue to buy their goods in Europe, however, rather than seeking out bargains in the U.S. The companies make more money if Europeans pay in euros for their goods at current exchange rates.
H-P has quietly begun implementing "region coding" for its highly lucrative print cartridges for some of its newest printers sold in Europe. Try putting a printer cartridge bought in the U.S. into a new H-P printer configured to use cartridges purchased in Europe and it won't work. Software in the printer determines the origin of the ink cartridge and whether it will accept it. The company introduced region-coding on several printers in the summer so it won't have to keep altering prices to keep pace with currency movements, says Kim Holm, vice president for H-P's supplies business in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. H-P eventually plans to introduce the concept across its entire line of inkjet printers, he adds.
Hewlett-Packard currently appears to be one of the most enthusiastic advocates of "rights management" and similar forms of policeware to keep no-good thieving customers in line. If, as the 21st century unfolds, we find all our data in a digital black iron prison, where every movement is micromanaged by the stern rules of profit-motivated corporate overlords, enforced by their digital prison guards in every machine, we can thank Ms. Fiorina for helping to bring this about.
Respected investigative reporter Seymour Hersh claims that US special forces are in Iran, covertly selecting targets for air strikes, and that Iran is likely to be the next country "liberated" from its regime.
Given how well the liberation of Iraq has gone, it's a worry. Though perhaps in domestic political terms, it's a better strategy to go and knock over a fresh evil regime and leave the festering pit of brutal misery that Iraq has become to quietly fall out of media coverage. Meanwhile, North Korea is still in the too-hard basket, despite the fact that, if there ever was one candidate for an "evil regime" to knock over (both on humanitarian grounds and under the doctrine of preemptive self-defence; after all, isn't Kim Jong Il uncomfortably close to being able to hit California with nuclear missiles?), that would probably be it.
Anyway, how much do you want to bet that, when the Somalization liberation of Iran comes around, John Howard's Australia and Tony Blair's Britain will be jostling for first in line to volunteer troops?
It looks like the three Field Mice rereleases from LTM are out today. And I was under the impression that their releases were staggered over a few months or somesuch.
Anyway, I'll probably end up picking them up, for the handful of songs not on the Where'd You Learn To Kiss That Way retrospective released by Shinkansen some years back (now also out-of-print), and also for the liner notes which they are said to have.
2005/1/15
alwaystouchout.com is a comprehensive and detailed database tracking transport works projects in London, and there certainly is a lot there; from details of well-known projects like the East London Line extension, Heathrow Terminal 5, the Channel Tunnel Rail Link and the vastly expanded King's Cross/St. Pancras station that its shinkansen-style trains will terminate at, to air-conditioning the Tube (which desperately needs it, though it cannot be done by conventional means due to the size (and often the depth) of the tunnels). Not to mention numerous tram systems; within a decade or so, there could be trams going through central London and up and down Camden High Street and Upper Street, Islington; who would have thought?
Another thing that's planned (and likely to take place) is a redevelopment of Camden Town station. Perhaps worryingly, Transport for London's official proposal involves demolishing the entire block with the station, including the nearby market and the Electric Ballroom, and building on the site a shiny glass building, which could well hasten the gentrification and sterilisation of the area. As such, a group has formed to fight this proposal, instead putting forward an alternative redevelopment idea that, it says, meets all standards, preserves the architecture of the area and, additionally, would be cheaper and faster to construct.
And while we're on transport in London, an amusing song about the London Underground (1.8Mb MP3; strong language warning).
2005/1/14
A US company is building a Mac Mini-based modular synthesizer. No, not a softsynth with rendered clickable cables; an actual hardware modular synth with real patch leads, which happens to have a Mac Mini and touch-screen monitor embedded in it. It is not clear if they have actually built one of these yet, though I imagine that with something like Max/MSP or SuperCollider, it could be interesting.
The company appears to be a cottage industry run by someone named Cynthia Webster, who designs and builds modular synths for a living. The site also has a list of women in synthesis, which is probably longer than you'd expect it to be:
It seems most of the women in synthesis today are hailing from Europe... Why is that ? What does this say about our society lately? Any theories out there?
A parcel of redirected mail from Australia just arrived, among it the December PTUA newsletter. I see that public transport in Melbourne is still being neglected, with the state government abandoning plans to upgrade bus timetables in the suburbs (i.e., to run buses after 7pm on weekdays or at all on weekends). Meanwhile, the usual new-year's fare increase includes making periodical tickets relatively more expensive (i.e., a weekly now costs as much as five dailies), thus encouraging people to avoid using public transport when not necessary. After all, why shell out $2.50 or so for a 2-hour Metcard to go down to the supermarket when you can hop in the Land Rover instead?
Living in London, I've come to appreciate just how good Londoners have it with relation to public transport. Yes, grumbling about the Tube is a local pastime in London (much in the way that complaining about the decline of Britain has been a British national pastime for the past two centuries at least), but at least the system works. You can rock up to a Tube station and expect a train in the direction you want to go in within 10 minutes at worst. Meanwhile, buses run in every possible direction, with a good number of routes running 24 hours a day (usually at 15-minute frequencies). In London, you can just about get anywhere from anywhere by public transport; there's even a pretty impressive website which, for any two points, will give you a list of options. In Melbourne, your options are limited; the railway network has a star topology, buses (other than the ones formerly run by the tramway authority) run limited hours, and after midnight, the whole system stops. (Except for Night Rider buses, which run only on Friday and Saturday nights, require special, premium-rate tickets, and run hourly on half a dozen routes.)
At the turn of the year, London's public transport fares (which, already, aren't the world's cheapest) increased by about 10%; however, that money is going into expanding and improving the system. And there's a vast number of projects going on or being planned. In the next few years, at least one Tube line (the East London line) is being extended in both directions, a mainline rail link (Crossrail) running east-west under London will be built, and a new Docklands Light Railway branch line is being built; not to mention several tramways in various parts of the metropolis. Melbourne's rises, however, get swallowed up by the costs of bailing out private investors panicked by fare evasion and putting out fires, leaving nothing left for anything resembling vision. The government officially has a goal of having 20% of journeys made by public transport by 2020 (or such), but actually achieving that is going to take supernatural intervention. When patronage increased, capacity could not keep up, so the operators' solution was to remove seats from trams, creating standing-room-only vehicles with a few seats reserved for the elderly and infirm.Live band of the moment: Suzerain. I saw them play in Soho last night, and was quite impressed. They're somewhere between Duran Duran, David Bowie and early Nine Inch Nails (with perhaps a bit of Icehouse or similar in the mix), and have a firm grasp of the pop sensibility. Anyway, there are MP3s here. I'll be surprised if someone doesn't sign these guys soon.
2005/1/13
Between 60% and 80% of all naturally conceived embryos are spontaneously aborted without the woman or her partner ever knowing that they existed. The US Religious Right argue that every conceived embryo is, in moral terms, a human being, and, theologically speaking, has a soul. From this it follows that at least 40% of the population of Heaven are the souls of embryos that never experienced life: (via jwz)
Stepping onto dangerous theological ground, it seems that if human embryos consisting of one hundred cells or less are the moral equivalents of a normal adult, then religious believers must accept that such embryos share all of the attributes of a human being, including the possession of an immortal soul. So even if we generously exclude all of the naturally conceived abnormal embryospresuming, for the sake of theological argument, that imperfections in their gene expression have somehow blocked the installation of a soulthat would still mean that perhaps 40 percent of all the residents of Heaven were never born, never developed brains, and never had thoughts, emotions, experiences, hopes, dreams, or desires.
That's assuming that they go to Heaven; according to Dante, the unbaptised would go to Limbo, the uppermost circle of Hell, where they would mix with virtuous heathens.
(This conjures up all sorts of surreal questions and fictional scenarios, such as what relations between the two groups in Heavenly society. Would the embryos see themselves as purer than or superior to than the immigrants, sullied by the sinful world? Would the born-and-died be marginalised as second-class citizens, or form a culture of resentment of the establishment? Presumably Heaven is defined as an enlightened autocracy, ruled by an all-wise and benevolent God with vast bureaucracies and military orders of angels, who would keep the peace somehow. Though, if we transpose this to Philip Pullman's Republic of Heaven, would the Pure and the Dead have separate political parties bitterly contesting their interests in the Heavenly Parliament; or perhaps Heaven would be a fascist state run by the Pure?)
Filming of the new Doctor Who series may be delayed by a shortage of midget actors, the result of an unusual number of midget-intensive films currently in production in the UK: (via bOING bOING)
Dr Who executive producer Russell T Davies said: "It's very difficult to employ persons of restricted growth when, as our producer Phil Collinson says, `Bloody Gringotts and the Chocolate Factory are filming at the same time'."
2005/1/12
Two Dutch designers are taking on the growing menace of muggers with handbags embossed with outlines of guns; they also have ones with the shapes of knives and crucifixes (the last are presumably for use against vampires), not to mention laptop bags embossed with groceries to make them look less stealable. (Not sure how well that works; the outlines in the photos look a bit too cartoonish and unrealistic. I imagine that simple non-rectangular lumpiness, of the "I'm carrying lots of soft, non-valuable things", would probably be more effective in practice.) (via bOING bOING)
An interesting article titled The Rise of American Fascism. No, it's not about the PATRIOT Act and FOXNews, but starts over 100 years ago with the introduction of the Pledge of Allegiance, and goes on to the massive popularity of the Ku Klux Klan (who, back then, were mainstream in the way that Bill O'Reilly is), the epidemics of lynchings, the eugenics movement, internment camps, various Red Scares, the influence of the likes of Henry Ford and Charles Lindbergh, multinational corporations having a bob each way during WW2: (via gimbo)
Ford had developed a "Sociological Department" for his company, the goal of which was to "put a soul into the company." Ford told the head of the department that he wanted him to, "put Jesus Christ in my factory." In order to qualify for the $5 a day wage that Ford was offering a worker had to submit to corporate surveillance of his lifestyle by the Sociological Department. Employees were subject to home inspections, had to prove they were sober, prove they regularly saved a portion of their paycheck, and prove that they were not "living riotously," which included activities such as gambling or staying out late.The article puts the 1950s as the time when "America would truly became a fascist country in both the economic and social sense":
This last change to the pledge is very symbolic of the finalization of the fascist state in America. During the 1950s, as happened in Italy and Germany, the barriers between Church, State, and Corporation had all been broken.
In 1956 Congress changed the national motto from "E Pluribus Unum" to "In God We Trust", and "So help me God" was added to federal oaths (despite the fact that the Christian Bible clearly states not to swear on God or any other person, place, or thing when taking an oath. Matthew 5:33-37, James 5:12).
All of this is exactly the same type of thing that took place in Fascist Europe, and just as in Europe these were changes that were not forced upon people by the State, but they were in fact supported by the people out of the increasingly conservative social climate.
Libyan president-for-life Muamar Gadaffi seems to have taken a leaf out of Fidel Castro's public-relations book; Libya is now hosting tours by indie rock bands; Gadaffi's answer to the Manic Street Preachers is Californian four-piece Heavenly States (who are known for "Bush-baiting" pop-punk with distorted violins, but also for sharing a split single with Coldplay (a band sometimes touted as "like Radiohead before they went weird" but best known for making bland music for thirtysomething ex-indie types to play in their Land Rovers whilst taking the kids to school)).
IBM have turned over 500 software patents to the open-source community. IBM will continue to hold the patents, though have pledged not to assert them against software distributed under an OSI-approved open-source licence. (It's legally binding, too, so there's no possibility of a change of guard at IBM reneging on it.) They have, however, reserved the right to assert them against anyone suing open-source projects for patent infringement; i.e., those who don't get with the programme may find themselves out on a limb.
"The 500 patents include U.S. Patent number 5,185,861, registered in 1993, which covers technology that helps microprocessors use their memory caches efficiently; and U.S. patent number 5,617,568, registered in 1997, for allowing non-Windows based systems to act as file servers for Windows-based clients, according to IBM Asia Pacific spokeswoman June Namioka. Other examples include patents related to handwriting recognition, she said."
"There's little argument that over the past dozen years, the world has come to view things differently: free software is one aspect of this; globalization of trade is another; both have been profoundly influenced by access to the Internet and the Web, and the easy access to information they provide. Knowledge is, indeed, power. As the models change, people who are stuck in the older mode, like Gates . . . look increasingly like Pope Urban VIII and rms looks more like Galileo: despite 'common knowledge' the world was moving. IBM's freeing-up of patents is another step toward proliferating knowledge."Which is a good start; perhaps a neo-Galambosian world where all concepts are privatised and monetised isn't inevitable after all. Mind you, we're not out of the woods yet. The existence of software patents (in the US and Australia, at least; the EU has so far managed to escape this fate) still creates a minefield which threatens to take down anyone without an extensive patent portfolio of their own, cross-licensing agreements and a hefty legal department, and threatens to establish an oligopoly on software development and invention. Though, hopefully, the establishment of a "patent commons" of valuable patents, free to use for open-source projects but defensively assertable against those threatening such development, may act as a deterrent.
A new bill in the US state of Virginia's legislature will require women to report miscarriages to the police within 12 hours, or else face up to 12 months in prison.
The MacWorld Expo keynote is out, and the rumours look like being all true. There's the Mac Mini, a tiny white rectangular no-frills Macintosh for PC (which looks like a squat, non-transparent Mac Cube, and ships without keyboard or mouse), which will sell for US$500 (which will probably be A$800 or so in Australia, and £300 or so in the UK) and is aimed at PC users seduced by the iPod. Speaking of which, there's also the iPod Shuffle, an innovative 512Mb/1Gb iPod smaller than a stick of gum. In other words, just another MP3-playing flash drive, only in white, except that the latest iTunes will auto-fill it with a random selection of tunes. (I would imagine this iTunes functionality is disabled for cheaper, non-Apple USB MP3 players.) Not to mention a new office suite and a new version of iLife.
bOING bOING has uncovered, entirely by accident, an online guestbook, apparently in the demo section of a guestbook software site, which ended up being used as an appointment diary by a Florida brothel/escort agency.
We have two new girls: Mercedes and Rose. Please put a wheelchair next to Rose (meaning don't book her) until we get proof of age from her. Of course, if anyone needs "Clarity" forms, they can get them at the pickup spOther than the wacky hijinks that go on in the course of running such an establishment, it contains details such as workers' real names and clients' phone numbers; either "Anne-Marie" (the operator of the brothel; real name: "Frank") was oblivious to the privacy implications of using a free online guestbook test page for storing confidential information, or he just didn't care.
On a tangent, The Age has the poignant story of one man's career as a (gay) phone-sex worker:
One call that really tugged at my heartstrings was someone who called from the country. He had just lost his boyfriend in a car crash and said he was feeling very lonely. The worst part of it was that, because he was from a small town where "you'd get the crap beaten out of you if they found out you were gay", he had no one he could talk to. So he called me. I didn't know what to say. What's a sex phone operator supposed to say in these circumstances? My 20-minute coffee with the boss certainly didn't include a crash course in grief counselling. All I could suggest was that he get out of town every now and again.
2005/1/11
A militant Islamist group's website recently published a report saying that the CIA has opened a facility for training agents to impersonate muezzins and infiltrate mosques:
The CIA opened its first muezzin school at a deserted army airstrip in Virginia in 1989, with the school being specially equipped with six minarets from which its agents could practise, the report said. It added that the CIA was now capable of producing up to 100 qualified muezzins each year.
Unbeknownst to them, the original story was a piece of satire, published by British satirical website The Rockall Times in 2001. Apparently the members of Hizb ut-Tahrir, who republished the story almost unchanged, either did not notice the satirical content on the rest of the site or wrote it off as authentic reportage of the corruption and decadence of British society.
The People Who Owned The Bible, a speculation on the neo-Galambosian logical extremes of the recent copyright extension fad:
A 500 year extension would let Disney track down Shakespeare's heirs and buy all rights to the Bard. No matter how much the heirs wanted, the deal would pay for itself in no time. Every school that ever wanted to perform or study Shakespeare would have to send a check to Disney. Every newspaper or magazine or radio show that wanted to quote the Bard would have to send one, too. So Disney asked, and Congress gave, and the World Intellectual Property Organization followed Congress's example. Disney paid off Shakespeare's heirs, then used the Shakespeare profits to buy all rights from the heirs of Dumas, Dickens, Twain, Mary Shelley, Jane Austen, Bram Stoker and more. Once most of the films in every other studio's library were subject to Disney's copyright, they went bankrupt or became divisions of Disney.
Then Jimmy Joe Jenkins's DNA proved he was the primary descendent of the translators of the King James Version of the Bible.(via bOING bOING)
A pretty funny Clerks/bOING bOING mashup, which has Dante and Randal going through the blog's various obsessions:
Jay: Some fucker from Gizmodo fucking e-mag [link] is outside, and he says digital rights management is the wave of the fucking future that will save fucking intellectual property rights, an' still present a marketable format for files that appeals to the consumer. [link]
Dante: WHAT?!?
Jay: Yeah, he's spouting some happy horseshit about how fucking crucial it is to a capitalist economy that the fucking hermaphrodites keep their fucking videos from being copywrite-violated when pirates hack into their IPs, and the only goddamn solution is a fucking eBook reader with clout, and also convenient DRM to really break open the fucking market, or some shit. [link][link]
2005/1/10
Rats have been trained to tell the difference between spoken Japanese and Dutch. (via bOING bOING, who immediately saw the biowar potential of such developments)
Via fact244, a lengthy, extensively-illustrated article on retrofuturism. It's in Italian, but even if you can't read it, the illustrations speak for themselves. They range from the quaint (models of future cities of gigantic highways, and anyone in parts of California or Britain can tell you how well that model of urban planning turned out) to the outlandish (such as maps for a global railway/monorail running across the Bering Strait, or dams to drain parts of the Mediterranean), as well as the usual streamlined cars, jetpacks, spaceplanes, old magazine ads and lots of pulp sci-fi magazine covers.
2005/1/9
Somebody in Chandler, Arizona opened a packet of M&Ms, and found one where the logo had somehow been smudged into "a likeness of Jesus with a crown on his head" (though looks more like a foetus). Proclaiming it to have been a life-changing event, they then put the piece of candy on eBay where, to date, it has amassed 89 bids and exceeded US$3,000, and still has more than a week to go. Which is more proof that there are parts of America where the Enlightenment never happened and people, with quite a bit of money, who still live in the Middle Ages.
Something to think about: what would be a concise definition of the set of possible images which sufficiently devout/superstitious people will consider "Jesus-like", or for that matter, Virgin Mary-like? Could one devise an algorithm for evaluating the Jesus-ness of blobs of colour?
2005/1/8
Towards a Unified Understanding of the Human Condition, a fairly elegant model of all human endeavours and concepts:
All of life, you see, exists somewhere within the space delineated by the movies Reservoir Dogs, Being John Malkovich, and The Princess Bride. Each of these three movies represents the extreme outer limit of one aspect of the human condition. All of humanity--all religion, all philosophy, all creation, all expression, all experience--falls somewhere within the space marked off by these three movies.
Players of The Sims 2 have been swapping houses on a website, and have discovered that Sims hacks are contagious; an object infected with a hack will affect everything else in the installed copy of the game, which can often bugger things up.
The hacks are easy to install, but they aren't for everybody. Many are cheats that eliminate challenges and obstacles in the game, while others modify fundamental behavior of the virtual people that inhabit the Sims 2 world. The "No Social Worker" hack, for example, allows Sims to neglect their children without the state getting involved. The "No Jealousy" patch lets them keep multiple lovers without getting slapped all the time. Another hack allows teenagers in the Sims 2 to get pregnant. As the game is sold, they can't even have sex.
(Actually, the "pregnant teenagers" hack is not a hack, but rather an official localisation for the British release to make it more authentic. Especially the part where they start wearing hip-hop hoodies and smoking like a coal-fired power station.)
At one point as many as three-quarters of the lots on the exchange contained hacks, estimates Suzanne Walshire, a 57-year-old Sims 2 player from Pflugerville, Texas, and an early victim of the phenomenon." It's extremely widespread," Walshire says. "Someone at Electronic Arts was really shortsighted not to have thought of hacked objects spreading this way. If they knew that their own objects would download with a house, they would know that other objects would download with a house also."
Perhaps EA's programmers were too exhausted from their 80-hour work weeks to notice such a flaw in their design?
2005/1/7
The biography of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis, Touching From A Distance, is being made into a film, with Anton Corbijn (the Dutch photographer who directed videos for Depeche Mode, and (I think) made the video of Atmosphere as well) directing and Tony Wilson and Curtis' widow (and author of the biography) Deborah as executive producers.
It's good to hear that it has beaten this highly-marketable piece of shite to the punch.
2005/1/6
And across the blogosphere, a million single bloggers emit a collective sigh as saucy globetrotting redhead and Canberra refugee Shauny announces her engagement to her boyfriend Gareth in Edinburgh. Congratulations; may it bring you a lifetime of happiness.
It's confirmed: SixApart (the company set up by Bay Area A-list blogerati who brought you Movable Type and TypePad) have bought LiveJournal (an Oregon-based social-network/journal system most commonly associated with goths and 12-year-old girls). SixApart's FAQ is here, LiveJournal's announcement is here. It appears to be a friendly deal, and SixApart indicated that they will run the services separately, rather than, say, rolling one into the other and using the remaining brand-name for niche marketing or something, and also said that they won't plaster LJ with ads or anything.
Meanwhile, SixApart president (and former black-clad teenager) Mena Trott has more to say here:
I believe that LiveJournal has, unfortunately, received a bum rap because many have considered the postings on LiveJournal to be trivial. It's sort of like a vicious circle: Journalists make fun of webloggers saying that they only post about their cats, webloggers make fun of LiveJournalers saying that they only post about high school angst and LiveJournalers make fun of webloggers saying that they are SUV-driving yuppies who think they have something important to say (and I'm generalizing). The fact is, webloggers and LiveJournalers are in essence doing the same thing: they are posting their thoughts to people who are important to them. For some webloggers, it's 100,000 people, for others it is 10. For LiveJournalers, it may be 30 people, it may be 3 (or a combination of some number).
The funny thing is, you can have a weblog and a LiveJournal. The fact that some of the funniest and smartest people I know have both only reaffirms that we shouldn't limit ourselves to one sort of publishing/communication mode.
(She hits the nail on the head there. I, for one, have had both for a bit over a year. The way I divide them is that this blog is for communicating with anybody who shares the things I'm interested in and post about, whereas my LiveJournal is for communicating with friends/people I know personally. Consequently, my LiveJournal posts tend to be less interesting (at least to people who don't know me personally), and many of them are friends-only (the use of the social-network data on LiveJournal for authentication goes some way towards restoring the private register, which is otherwise hard to do online conveniently). I generally friend people I know online or in real life, though I still think that LiveJournal should split the "friend" relation into two independent "journals I read" and "people I trust" relations.)
2005/1/5
One of Britain's leading "visual merchandising consultants" reveals the psychological tricks used by shops to get people to buy stuff: (via Mind Hacks)
Most of the prices in electrical stores end in.99p. But a few end in.98p or 95p. That's a signal that a product is old stock and needs to be sold quickly. If you're foolish enough to ask a sales assistant for advice in a big electrical chain, the loyal staff will steer you towards these.
Table tops positioned next to racks allow women to handle the trousers and tops. "Younger women like scruffed-up clothes displays it suggests that these are popular. If the piles seem too neat, then obviously no one else is buying these items. Older women are more exacting in their standards."
A gallery in London is staging an exhibition of Italian late-futurist "aeropainting", vaguely Art Deco-ish paintings of bombers on missions and such from Mussolini's Italy. The Ettorick Collection are downplaying the fascist subtext of the images, though that hasn't gotten past the appalled Guardian columnist, who also suggests that the Berlusconi government's backing of such an exhibition may be part of an attempt to rehabilitate Mussolini, and/or a fascist streak in the right-wing Italian government.
Tato painted this piece of fascist crap in 1937. Does the date ring a bell? It was on April 26 1937 that the Condor Legion of the German Luftwaffe, in support of General Franco's war against the Spanish Republic, bombed the Basque capital Guernica, on a market day, killing 1,654 people out of a population of 7,000. Pablo Picasso began Guernica after he read about this new chapter in the story of human cruelty. It seems plausible that Tato's painting Aerial Mission refers to the same events. For more than half a century Picasso's Guernica has preserved the memory of a town torn to pieces by aerial bombing. Now, at last, Futurist Skies gives us the other point of view: that of the murderer in the cockpit.
Futurist Skies is not a joke. It is not a parody but an example of the moronic complacency of the art world. And it really does have the support of the Italian state. Silvio Berlusconi's government has meanly and destructively starved museums of cash. But the director of the Estorick Collection warmly thanks the Italian foreign ministry for its "commitment" and "support" for this exhibition of meretricious art from the golden age of Il Duce. At least it's good to know where the Berlusconi government's cultural priorities lie. Claiming "aeropainting" as a major 20th-century art amounts to rehabilitating fascist kitsch.
And, for reference, Flying and the Fascist Aesthetic, a screed from USENET a decade or so ago, making a connection between the two subjects:
Why is flying inherently fascist? Because it exploits man's drive to put himself *above* the masses, as if the masses were some sort of disease that needs to be expurged from the soul. Flight becomes partly a search for clarity [of the sort that fascist movements purport to offer], partly a quest to raise the spectre of patriarchic hegemony to new, unfounded heights. Here there are many parallels to Hitler. Everything in Hitler's speeches built on the idea of "purity", "room for living", etc. So it is no doubt that some parallels may rise to the surface, once that surface is scratched.
Rumour has it that Six Apart, creators of Movable Type and TypePad, are about to acquire LiveJournal, for an undisclosed sum. I wonder whether this will mean them folding the two services together completely, merging the codebases whilst keeping LiveJournal as a "TypePad for teens" brand, keeping them entirely separate as now, or integrating LiveJournal's social networks with TypeKey. And whether this will put a halt on LJ's existing development plans, such as splitting the "friend of" relation into separate reading and trust relations.
Is the English town of Hertford, on the outskirts of London, the secret base of the Knights Templar, home to a vast network of secret tunnels and possibly the secret of the Holy Grail?
Someone in Hertford is now claiming to be the Templar order, which they say went underground when the church suppressed it; furthermore, they have written to the Vatican, demanding an apology for their persecution, and claim that "things are about to happen that will deserve attention".
"The vast majority of Templars either escaped, or didn't escape, but survived," Acheson says. So how did they end up in Hertford? History records that a number of them were imprisoned in Hertford Castle, but how did Hertford become a centre of operations? "I can't really tell you that. All I can tell you - it's going to be quite vague - is that they flourished in western Europe." He explains that there is a stained-glass window in St Andrew's Church, just down the street, that contains a clear metaphorical allusion to the Holy Grail, and a cryptic hint that it might be hidden in Hertford. In the picture, Acheson adds, Jesus and Mary Magdalene are looking at each other "in a very meaningful way". (Later, I find the window, interrupting local parishioners who are decorating the church for Christmas. I think I can see what Acheson means about Jesus's expression, although mainly he just looks a bit depressed.)
Public accountability is a laudable goal, but it's hardly something you expect from the secret rulers of the universe. Indeed, when a group of amateur archaeologists recently announced their intention to investigate Hertford's tunnel network, someone posted a message on a local website warning that anyone who tried would be "dealt with". The message read: "Anybody intending to find out more, let alone discover hidden areas of the labyrinth, should check their life insurance policy very carefully indeed."
The tantalisingly mysterious word "labyrinth" in the warning does raise some questions. I wonder whether the upcoming great revelation is going to be a Templarland theme park or similar tourist trap to attract Da Vinci Code fans and the well-off and credulous.
Acheson takes me on a walking tour of Hertford, and proves a knowledgeable guide, but a frustratingly cryptic one, too. So I decide to take matters into my own hands and head for Monsoon. Gemma, the manager, responds far more patiently to Grail-related inquiries than might arguably be her prerogative. There's no tunnel beneath the shop, she insists, "just the store room" - but it's "definitely haunted. When we have sales meetings there you can hear someone walking over our heads, or doing the vacuuming. But upstairs, the shop's closed and empty."
2005/1/4
Also on the New Year Honours list: Peter Molyneaux, creator of Populous, Black and White and Fable and pioneer of the "God-game" genre, gets an OBE. According to comments in the Slashdot thread, he is not the first computer game designer honoured with an OBE; for one, the designer of Creatures got one a while ago.
While one member of the KLF, Jimmy Cauty, is now busying himself with selling terrorism-inspired art to Londoners (sort of like a more literal-minded SCHWA), the other chap, Bill Drummond, is now involved with a project called Penkiln Burn. This is a catalogue of conceptual art-related jobs proposed and/or undertaken. The jobs in question include returning a work of art to its origins, selling sledgehammers to explore their destructive potential, throwing provocative propositions into the ideosphere, protest through silence or withdrawal of art, an outsider band and a meditation on the finite number of haircuts left in your life. Oh, and if you live on a line between Belfast and Nottingham, Bill Drummond will make soup for you.
In France, Islam is the new Marxism; the disaffected, who once turned to Communism as an ideology of resistance are now embracing Islam. Most of them are immigrants from a Muslim background, but some are converts rejecting traditional European culture. (via FmH)
Like communism, it represents for many of its devoted adherents a transnational ideology tilting toward an eventual utopian vision, in this case of a vast, if not global, caliphate governed according to sharia, the legal code based on the Koran.
A utopian ideal based on the 9th-century Arab Empire (whose day-to-day code of laws shari'a was), and being essentially an enlightened feudal kingdom? I'm skeptical as to how broad its appeal could be in this age. Then again, "dictatorship of the proletariat" didn't exactly sound like a winning proposition either.
Anyway, according to the article, most political Islamists in France are not isolationist radicals, but seek to engage within the existing system, which suggests that political Islam may assimilate into mainstream French politics much as Communism did.
2005/1/3
Sydney's Anglican Dean, Philip Jensen, has said that the tsunami was a warning from God that judgment is coming, and that society has become too sinful and Godless. Perhaps if we banned pornography and Satanic rock music and indecent language on TV and kissing in movies and unmarried couples going about unchaperoned and started stoning homosexuals, witches and wearers of mixed fabrics to death as the Book of Leviticus commands, God would make all the earthquakes and tsunamis and tornadoes and suicide bombers and email spam and antibiotic-resistant superbugs and killer bees and killer sharks stop. Maybe if we were super-obedient, He would even see fit to bring down petrol prices or something.
Another religious leader, Rev. Fred Phelps of the Westboro Baptist Church, claims that God sent the earthquake to kill 2,000 Swedish tourists because their country prosecuted a fundamentalist preacher for preaching against homosexuality. That would be a lot of collateral damage for a kind, loving God; though I suppose for Rev. Phelps' God, it makes perfect sense.
On a different note, the Ayn Rand Institute says that the US should not help tsunami victims, because (a) taxation is theft, and (b) altruism is evil.
2005/1/2
For your amusement, this charming photo-essay titled "Why Women Live Longer Than Men", and giving eight scenes which, had it not been for luck, could have been Darwin Award material. (via darwin, of course)
The latest OBEs on the Queen's New Year's Honours list include Roger Daltrey of The Who (you know, of "hope I die before I get old" fame) and Pete Waterman (of Stock/Aitken/Waterman fame), decorated for his services to manufacturing music.