2005/3/31
For those reading this in Melbourne: the mighty FourPlay String Quartet are playing at the Espy on the 7th of April, and Brunswick Street's Bar Open on the 9th (with not one but two sets). If you've seen them, you'll know that they rock; if not, go and see them. You won't regret having done so.
2005/3/30
It looks like they're now making a romantic comedy about Friendster (remember that? It was a somewhat dating-centric social-networking click-toy; everyone gave up on it after hitting the limit of their social group who have time for these things). What next: a Heathers-esque comedy about LiveJournal (Subtitle: "OMG the drama!")
Things I did not know until today:
There used to be a group called the Society for the Prevention of Calling Sleeping Car Porters George. Furthermore, this group was not (as the name suggests) a silly joke, but a serious anti-racism organisation, counting among its number the likes of King George V. and "Babe" Ruth.
I read it on Wikipedia, so it must be true.
2005/3/29
A look at the U.S. Secret Service's tools for breaking encryption on seized data. Not surprisingly, they use a network of distributed machines to help brute-force keys. Cleverly enough, before they do so, they assemble a custom dictionary of potential keys/starting points from all data on the seized machine (including files, web browsing histories, and presumably terminology associated with the areas of interest visited web sites relate to). (via /.)
"If we've got a suspect and we know from looking at his computer that he likes motorcycle Web sites, for example, we can pull words down off of those sites and create a unique dictionary of passwords of motorcycle terms," the Secret Service's Lewis said.
Hansen recalled one case several years ago in which police in the United Kingdom used AccessData's technology to crack the encryption key of a suspect who frequently worked with horses. Using custom lists of words associated with all things equine, investigators quickly zeroed in on his password, which Hansen says was some obscure word used to describe one component of a stirrup.
This technique apparently works surprisingly well, because people (including organised criminals) tend to choose relatively predictable passwords.
The moral of this story is: if you're planning the perfect crime using computers and encryption, you may find it wise to develop an obscure interest and not mention it by electronic means. Or, for that matter, let it show up in credit card receipts, library records, personal effects, or any other information the authorities could get. Which could be trickier than it sounds.
Also on the subject of people subconsciously giving away more than they think: this IHT article on "psychological illusionist" Derren Brown (via bOING bOING):
He produces a sheet of blank paper and issues an instruction: Draw a picture. "Try to catch me out; make it a bit obscure," he orders. "Don't draw a house; don't draw a stick man." Walking to another room and out of sight, he decrees that the picture should be concealed until the end of the interview - whereupon, he claims, he will reveal what it is.
Recently, he said, he used his talents to defuse a situation in which an aggressive youth approached him on the street, yelling, "What are you looking at?" (Brown responded with a rapid series of diversionary non sequiturs, he said; the man burst into tears.)
Instructing me to concentrate, he pulls out a blank sheet of paper and begins sketching, chatting all the while. He tells me he "sees" a conical shape with spots on it - some sort of decorated lamp with a blob on top. And knock me down if he does not produce a near-exact replica of my drawing, the only differences being that his has more dots than mine, and his stripes are horizontal, not vertical.
Channel 4 has a Derren Brown microsite here, with streaming video and explanations of some of the tricks (such as making people fall asleep in phone booths). Think of it as the human equivalent of the buffer overrun attack.
From the BBC's On This Day section:
1971: Calley guilty of My Lai massacre
Lieutenant William Calley has been found guilty of murder at a court martial for his part in the My Lai massacre which claimed the lives of 500 South Vietnamese civilians.
And further down, it is revealed that he didn't get the death penalty, or even serve out his life sentence:
Freed on bail in 1974 his sentence was then cut to 10 years but he was paroled later that year after completing one third of his sentence.
It doesn't say what he went on to do after that; unfortunately for him, FOXNews hadn't been established yet, thus depriving him of a possible future career path.
Also on this day in 1971, failed Monkees auditionee, psycho-killer cult leader and subsequent role model to a thousand teen nihilists across McWorld, Charles Manson was sentenced to death; also never carried out.
2005/3/28
Armed police officers have prevented a motorised Dalek from entering the Houses of Parliament. The remote-controlled replica robot, with a top speed of 5mph (8km/h) was built by a Scottish Doctor Who enthusiast, who took it to London to film a promotional video for a stage version of the TV show: (via Gizmodo)
'Cars were grinding to a halt in disbelief when they saw a Dalek trundling over Tower Bridge. And we were mobbed by Japanese tourists desperate for photos.'
'They are quite difficult to operate, and the huge dents in our living room wall are proof you should never get behind the controls of a Dalek with a drink in you.'
The Graun sends a reporter to Iceland to catch up with Bobby Fischer, former chess master turned paranoid lunatic, who spends most of the time ranting about how the Jews are out to get him.
As he is leaving Copenhagen, he is cornered in a car park by the agitated man from Channel 1 and gives some characteristically robust quotes - to summarise, death to the Jews, death to Japan, death to America, death to George Bush. (Probably death to Tony Blair, too - Fischer refused to fly via London because he feared he would be grabbed by the police there.) Anyway, Fischer has let off steam, the Channel 1 man's job is saved, we have a news story.
Fischer has an obsession with detail that, to my non-medical eye, appears autistic. When he recites his suffering at the hands of the US and now the Japanese, every letter he has received is cited, dated, described exactly. His is a world of tiny details; it is the bigger picture that eludes him, so he falls back on one stupid overarching theory - the world Jewish conspiracy. The Icelandic view that he is a lovable eccentric is a cop-out. He is a paranoid fantasist. But he is deluded not dangerous; Howard Hughes rather than Adolf Hitler. Mastery of detail, obsessionalism, relentless concentration, the ability to shut out the world are advantages in chess; in life they can be a disaster, especially when there is no screen between what you say and what you think.
A survey has revealed that, while Australians overwhelmingly support globalisation, they see US foreign policy as a potentian external threat on a par with Islamic fundamentalism. 58% of Australians have positive feelings towards the U.S., though only one in five would support Australia going to war with China to defend Taiwan if the U.S. did so.
As far as the Americanisation of Australia goes, when do we get nifty things like a bill of rights? We can quite happily leave behind the oversized Hummer SUVs, conservative Christian political powerbase (even though Howard would really like one of those), culture of flag-waving triumphalism (and the boxing-kangaroo flag at cricket matches doesn't really count) and Clear Channel-style homogeneisation of mass culture (though, it could be argued, that Australia has its local version of the last). For that matter, a legal notion of Fair Use to go with the draconian copyright laws we just got from the U.S. would be good, though, of course, there's no multinational profit in harmonising that particular part of intellectual-property law. Still, at least Australians still get 20 days of paid leave a year (as opposed to the 5-10 the average American working stiff gets), and aren't exposed to as many environmental toxins (for which America can probably thank Reagan's pro-corporate rolling back of pollution regulations), so there are a few small mercies to be thankful for. I wonder how long they'll last.
This is what happens when the fans of a band known for its bookish, over-intellectual fanbase grow up and get established: Manchester Metropolitan University is holding an academic conference on The Smiths next week. The symposium, titled Why Pamper Life's Complexities, will look at the influence of Morrissey's lyrics on areas such as gender and sexuality, race, nationality and class, as well as æsthetics, fan cultures and musical innovation.
Orkut-style brownie points for LiveJournal; i.e., a page which lets you say how cool/hot/trustworthy the people on your friends list are, and whom you're a fan of. Not without its share of problems; anyone can impersonate anyone else, and (perhaps for this reason), there's no way of seeing how many brownie points you gave people before. Also, annoyingly enough, it makes no distinction between people in your friends list and people who have friended you; coupled with its lack of memory, this means that every time you run it, you have to pick the serial adders, trolls and prehensile idiots off, and then reassign points to all the people you've selected.
Apparently, it is possible (just) to use the PlayStation Portable as a web browser. Either the PSP's firmware/OS or the game WipeOut Pure contains a fully-featured web browser, with JavaScript and all. Mind you, the only way to use it seems to set up a local network that intercepts DNS calls to Sony's web servers.
2005/3/27
Prediction: the next thing after Digital Rights Management will be Attention Rights Management.
Advertising is increasingly everywhere; the number of surfaces without advertising is diminishing. In the U.S., apparently petrol pumps have video screens which show ads now. They are even experimenting with advertisements printed on potato chips. And it is to be expected; any corporation that does not seek to extract the maximum value from its assets (including advertising opportunities) can expect to face lawsuits for negligence or mismanagement from shareholders. This means that, even things which are nominally paid for by a consumer (such as films, video games and, yes, potato chips) are being peppered with ads and product placement, because otherwise that would be an economic opportunity wasted, a big no-no under the dominant Reaganite/Thatcherite ideology of our time.
The next step will be for lawmakers to recognise that there is an implicit contractual obligation by consumers to view and pay attention to advertisements attached to any advertisement-supported service they receive, and to enshrine this in law and international treaties. After all, the business models of ad-supported content are dependent on the implicit agreement of the consumer to pay attention to the advertisements; if consumers were to systematically shirk this obligation, the industry would collapse. In other words, ad evasion is equivalent to intellectual property piracy (which is equivalent to currency counterfeiting, which is equivalent to economic terrorism, but I digress).
At first, this will be used to ban, DMCA-fashion, ad-blocking software and rogue ad-skipping video players. Then it will become more subtle; browser windows will go dark if the ad panes are covered by another window, for example. The technology of denying benefit to ad-dodgers will attract as much venture capital, startups, patents and snake-oil merchants as the quest for the perfect uncopyable CD has. Ultimately, computers and TVs (which, by then, will have converged, possibly on a centralised broadcast model) will have gaze-tracking cameras as standard, and Microsoft Windows 2012 or whatever will have a gaze-tracking API specificially designed to be useful for ad attention enforcement.
Those reading this in Sydney can hear an ambient electronica track put together by Your Humble Narrator whilst commuting on the London Underground, using only a personal organiser*. I am told that The Random Numbers' "Fluffy Space Rocket" will be making its Australian radio debut tonight (Sunday night) on Utility Fog, on FBi (94.5 MHz), sometime between 10pm and 1am.
* actually, a Palm Tungsten running Bhajis Loops.
2005/3/26
I just watched the first of the new Doctor Who series. It was amusing enough, with plastic dummies controlled by an alien consciousness hiding under a London landmark trying to take over the world. (It is apparently a Welsh production, though the story was all centred in London.) They may have been a little too eager to please, peppering the script with one-liners and quips, sometimes at the expense of plausibility. Anyway, Christopher Eccleston, in his short-cropped, leather-jacketed Northern English geezer guise, made a decent enough Doctor, and Billie Piper is the First Chav Assistant. (Why did they name her Rose, when Tracey or Mandy or something similar would have been a more appropriate name?)
Interestingly enough, the BBC are milking this cow as far as they can; right after the show, the lottery announcement had one of the announcers hitching a ride in on the TARDIS.
This computer game looks pretty nifty; photorealistic backgrounds of decaying buildings and rusty machinery and surrealistic cartoon characters. Unfortunately, it seems to be available only in Russia. (via Urban Decay)
2005/3/25
Your Humble Narrator went to see (a reconstituted version of) 1980s new-romantics Visage play in Soho.
The first support band was Suzerain, already mentioned on these pages. Suffice it to say that they were very good; somewhere between Duran Duran and David Bowie, only with more guitar solos. They have the pop sensibility down pat and the rock-star stage presence, and should go far. It's somewhat surprising that they haven't been signed yet.
Trademark were amusing; three spoddy-looking chaps in raincoats (and later fairy-light-festooned lab coats) playing a warm and somewhat geeky electropop (think something like Barcelona without the guitars, or perhaps Baxendale meets Casionova). The front man looked ever so much like Jack Morgan from Look Around You, and they did a love song with the words "simple harmonic motion" in the lyrics, so where can you go wrong?
Visage (or, more accurately, Visage Mk. II) came on and did a ~20-minute set, a preview of their main gig this Saturday. Steve Strange had hair like a less flamboyant Robert Smith and was wearing something that looked like a torn, paint-splattered military uniform of some sort, and his mascara seemed somewhat smeared. In performance, he wasn't quite the ice queen I expected; he danced around with a slightly goofy grin, and interacted with the audience, laying on hands. At one stage, he took a glow stick from a gaggle of goths near the stage and made their day. Anyway, Visage Mk. II did all old songs (The Damned Don't Cry, Love Glove, We Move, The Anvil and, of course, their genre-defining classic of existentialist disco, Fade To Grey). The songs sounded somewhat different than the old records, being played on modern digital-modelling synths. (Most of the songs had a standard post-90s 4/4 dance beat, for one).
The music played by the DJ between sets was a mix of 80s synthpop/electronic pop (Human League, A-Ha, Dead Or Alive, Bananarama), with small amounts of glam (Transvision Vamp and Electric Six both got a play) and a few goth-club crowd-pleasers (some Depeche Mode, NIN, and an EBM/darkwave/futurepop/power-electronics/whatever they call it version of Purcell's Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, a.k.a. the theme from A Clockwork Orange). Your Humble Narrator left sometime before the DJ got around to playing Headhunter (which he surely must have; it seems to be the "Gotta Be Startin' Something" of people who wear a lot of black).
Anyway, there are photos here. My camera battery ran down towards the end, requiring me to shoot without the screen, which is why quality and quantity drop off a bit.
Subversive underground artist and/or attention-seeking tosser Banksy strikes again, this time droplifting four artworks into famous New York museums, disguised as an old-age pensioner. (via 1.0)
Got an empty room, some free time and the urge to amuse and confuse visitors? Why not make a sideways room?
(via bOING bOING)
2005/3/24
Lawyer and copyfighter Edward Felten has come up with a Godwin's Law for copyright policy:
As a copyright policy discussion grows longer, the probability of pornography being invoked approaches one. (Corollary:) When the topic of a copyright policy discussion switches to pornography, each side suddenly adopts the other side's arguments.
For example, Hollywood argues that filesharing will lead to a shortage of movies, because nobody will make movies they can't sell. But when the topic switches to pornographic movies, suddenly they start arguing that filesharing increases the creation and availability of content.
Similarly, some P2P vendors who say they can't possibly filter or block copyrighted content, suddenly decide, when the topic switches to porn, that they can provide effective blocking.
(via bOING bOING)
2005/3/23
Former chess grandmaster turned reclusive eccentric and al-Qaeda cheerleader Bobby Fischer is being released from a Japanese prison after Iceland gave him citizenship by act of parliament. The U.S. Government, who wanted to extradite him to face charges of violating sanctions when playing a game in Yugoslavia, is supposedly pissed off.
A question of international law: is there anything preventing the U.S. from scrambling some fighters to intercept the plane carrying Fischer over international waters, escorting it to a landing in, say, Guam, and taking Fischer off there? If there is, would be a more egregious violation of international law than torturing detainees at Guantanamo? If the U.S. wants to show the world that, as the sole superpower, it is the law, that may be a powerful symbolic gesture.
Also, if Fischer does take up residence in Iceland as a citizen, won't he have to change both his name and his father's name to recognised legitimate Icelandic names?
There is now a Tricks of the Trade weblog:
If you listen to the radio while coding but are distracted by ads or yammering DJs, tune into a foreign internet radio station such as http://www.radiobeat.cz or http://www.futuro.cl, where all interuptions are in a language you don't understand.
Wear a kilt when playing bagpipes on the street. You will make twice as much money than if you wear regular clothes.
If you're faced with an irate customer on the telephone who won't let you help him, leave them on hold for about three minutes, then pick back up and pose as the manager. Thinking they've "won" the battle, the he customer is much more likely to work with you.
If you faced with bad service and are being "escalated," calm down before interacting with the next person up the chain of command. The lowly incompetent drone you've been howling at will likely warn his supervisor to expect a raging psychopath; if you are on your best behavior when the manager speaks with you, he will probably be confused and much more inclined to help you out.
A new range of stickers for believers in evolution and the scientific method wishing to take the fight to the streets:
2005/3/22
Paul Schaefer was a Nazi officer during World War 2; after the war, he fled to Chile, where he established a religious cult named "Colonia Dignidad". Surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers with searchlights, inside it resembled one of those German pastoral scenes the Nazis were so fond of, where the men wore lederhosen and the women wore their hair in pigtails, except for the bit about young boys receiving electric shocks to their genitals to condition them against sexual desires, and secret tunnels under the compound where Schaefer's friend, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, had dissidents tortured to the strains of Wagner. Schaefer, who fled to Argentina in 1997, is now facing trial for sexually abusing young boys. (thanks to Conrad for bringing this to my attention)
As the baby boomers reach old age, the latest threat to public order is "Hell's Grannies", raising mayhem on their motorised wheelchairs.
2005/3/21
A recent interview with Björk from the Observer. In it, she talks about Medúlla (apparently a reaction against the whole soul-crushing Bush zeitgeist), and mentions that she's working on a soundtrack to husband Matthew "Cremaster" Barney's next film and compiling a CD of cover versions of Army Of Me, the proceeds going to Unicef.
Electronic Frontiers Australia, Australia's equivalent of the EFF, are pushing to legalise adult-oriented computer games. Presently, the video-game rating system is written with the assumption that games are for children; it only goes up to MA (i.e., 15 years or over), and thus any games deemed unsuitable for 15-year-olds are illegal. This has resulted in some games being banned outright, and others (including some in the Grand Theft Auto series) being bowdlerised for Australia's tender sensibilities.
Of course, getting such a change of law passed by the social-conservative Tory government (which, after all, is responsible for tightening up the censorship system to its present level of Mary Whitehouse-esque prissiness and banning a fuckload of things Britons and most Americans can see freely) would be a difficult task at any time. And now, it may be even harder, given that a Tory senator's career of swashbuckling high adventure has come to light. If Senator Lightfoot, alleged to have been gallivanting around Iraq with a gun and smuggling money to an oil company, is found to have been a political liability, the government's Senate majority may disappear, and were that to happen, they would be forced to go into coalition with religious-right party Family First, who make them look like, well, liberals (they are the ones demanding a Saudi-style national internet firewall). With that looming on the horizon, it may be prudent for them to bulk up their wowser credentials, and developing a reputation for being open-minded, tolerant or otherwise "soft on filth" would be exactly the wrong thing to do.
2005/3/20
Another online speech synthesizer demo; this one (ScanSoft's rVoice), however, has multiple accents, including British (i.e., RP), Scottish, Australian (only in sheila, though, and not bloke), Spanish, and not only American but also Valley Girl (more formally known as "Southern California").
Which is rather nifty; it's good to be able to get synthesized speech that doesn't sound either generic-American or (occasionally) RP-British (which some call the BBC accent, except for the fact that nobody on the BBC talks like that these days).
Apparently one of their markets is call centres and voice-response systems (and some of the voices have normal and call-centre modes of diction). Which could explain the presence of a Scottish accent; apparently, studies in Britain found that Scottish accents are considered the most soothing/least aggravating to call centre callers.
2005/3/18
Britain's foremost composer is being investigated by police after preparing to roast and eat a swan at his Orkney home. Sir Peter Maxwell Davies claims that the swan was already dead, having presumably been killed by hitting power lines, and that it is a common Orkney tradition to collect and eat thus killed swans. In England, that may have been illegal in itself, as mute swans are the property of the Queen, though this law does not apply in Scotland.
John Scalzi claims that the great political divide of our time is not between liberals and conservatives, but between rationalists and irrationalists:
There's a more common name for irrationalists in politics: "wingnuts." But I think that particular word is both inaccurate and falsely comforting, since it suggests that irrationalists are marginalized on the edge of political discourse. A hint for you: When an irrational politician sleeps in the White House, irrationalism is not exactly marginalized. Irrationalists aren't wingnuts; they're not even the wings. They're the damned fuselage of political discourse at the moment, and I think that's pretty damn scary.
Bush's irrationalist tendencies have fundamentally little to do with his conservative tendencies, which is to say that the former are not spawned from the latter. God knows irrationalism lies on both sides of the conventional political spectrum; the irrationalists of the left who tried to expunge "dead white guys" from curricula back when I was still in school to my mind walk arm and arm with the irrationalists on the right who are now busily trying to expunge evolution. An irrationalist liberal in the White House would be no better than Bush, that's for sure.
Though was there ever a time when rationalism held sway over politics, as opposed to public discourse being buffeted by impulses, fashions, superstitions, waves of mass hysteria and the effects of human cognitive biases which probably made excellent sense on the hunter-gatherer savannah? This has been the case in Plato's day and Shakespeare's, and will probably be so throughout the future of humanity. When the post-singularity nanobot hives populated by the uploaded personalities of our distant descendants launch for outer space in 500 years' time, chances are their politics and public discourse will be just as dominated by prejudices, phobias, omens, superstitions and kneejerk reactions as they are now.
Nonetheless, while rationalism is, to some extent, a lost cause, it is one worth taking up. Sure, if you take up the rationalist banner, the multitudes may laugh at you, call you a crank and sometimes throw things at you, but with patience and perseverance, you can persuade a few people and make the heavily-armed madhouse that is the world slightly less psychotic. At least until the next wave of mass excitement sweeps through it, anyway.
On a tangent, Australian lefty cultural commentator Phillip Adams on politicians and other leaders embracing irrational beliefs, from Reagan's Apocalyptic Christianity and Blair's taste for new-age mumbo-jumbo to the Australian founding fathers' fondness for the Victorian spiritualist fad and Gandhi's reliance on soothsayers before nuclear tests.
It's certainly a recurring theme in politics. One wonders, though, whether it's a case of (a) everybody being a bit kooky, and the media amplifying this in public figures, (b) politicians being (for some reason) more irrational than the man on the street, or (c) successful politicians realising that it pays to pander to irrational beliefs, and that rationality is punished. (Look, for example, at Al Gore, and his image of being a heartless, calculating robot-like being. Never mind that he had embraced the whacko anti-technology mystical-primitivist side of the environmental movement some years before that; perhaps he just wasn't fluffy enough.)
An interesting NYTimes article on how mobile phones (many donated by South Korean journalists) and video recorders (which have become cheap as Chinese consumers adopt DVD players) are breaking down North Korea's barriers of isolation:
"In the 1960's in the Soviet Union, it was cool to wear blue jeans and listen to rock and roll," said Andrei Lankov, a Russian exchange student in the North at Kim Il Sung University in 1985, who now teaches about North Korea at Kookmin University here in the South. "Today, it is cool for North Koreans to look and behave South Korean, as they do in the television serials. That does not bode well for the long-term survival of the regime."
(Tangent: as Western pop music infiltrated Russia, it produced bizarre hybrids; porn-metal bands like Korozia Metalla and evil-sounding electronic noise acts and things like t.A.t.U. All of which makes one wonder what North Korean popular music will be like when the regime collapses. Assuming that it collapses without making North Korea (or, indeed, much of the Pacific Rim) into a radioactive crater.)
The North Korean government isn't taking this lying down: they've bought radio-location devices for detecting mobile phone signals. Meanwhile, to combat the video recorder menace (which, it would seem, is to repressive hermit-states what the Boston Strangler is to... never mind), the North Korean police simply switch off the power to areas, a block at a time, and inspect the tapes stuck in video recorders for subversive content. Those caught are probably executed if they're lucky, or used in hideous experiments if they're not. And Kim Jong Il has good reason to fear:
"They are gradually learning about South Korean prosperity," Dr. Lankov said. "This is a death sentence to the regime. North Korea's claim to legitimacy is based on its ability to deliver the worker's paradise now. What if everyone sees that it is not delivering?"
2005/3/17
The Beaterator; an online Flash-based audio sequencer, which comes with loops and sounds from several popular house/trance/breakbeat/electronica artists, or you can upload your own.
Some photographs from The Foundry, a bar and subterranean complex of art galleries in Shoreditch.
And this handy guide to urban survival:
(Btw, should you find yourself at The Foundry, I recommend the "Eco-Warrior" organic pale ale.)
2005/3/16
The next radical innovation from Apple is expected to be a two-button mouse. Mass confusion among Mac users expected.
"Jaws will drop," said one insider.
Neverland Ranch Investigators Discover Corpse Of Real Michael Jackson:
Holbrooke said that, while the living Jackson is the leading suspect in the murder investigation, he "could be another victim of some sort." "Basically, we have no idea what type of creature we are dealing with," Holbrooke said.
Allard said he thinks that the imposter broke ties with Jackson's former friends and surrounded himself with children who were too young to notice the radical change.``
"This is very disturbing news," Gustafson said. "But to be honest, it's kind of a relief too. Thriller and Off The Wall are really amazing records. Now I can pull them out of my 'ruined by child abuse' storage bin and start listening to them again."
A recent post on the Scenestars MP3 blog features Romeo Void's "Never Say Never"; a classic piece of early-80s new-wave dance. If you haven't heard it, check it out.
The good news (or possibly bad news, depending on your point of view): destroying the Earth is a lot harder than you'd think. Nuclear weapons, armageddon, gay marriage and proving that 1=0 will all fail to do anything about the planet still being there and all in one piece. Of course, if you'll settle for merely wiping out much of life on Earth, that's somewhat easier. (via Bruce Schneier)
2005/3/15
African DIY electronica; pretty amazing stuff. A band named Konono No. 1 from Congo who play trance music using home-made electric thumb pianos (which have a bleepy, distorted sound) and improvised microphones made from old car parts.
Their repertoire draws largely on Bazombo trance music, but they've had to incorporate the originally-unwanted distorsions of their sound system. This has made them develop a unique style which, from a sonic viewpoint, has accidentally connected them with the aesthetics of the most experimental forms of rock and electronic music, as much through their sounds than through their sheer volume (they play in front of a wall of speakers) and their merciless grooves.
(via MusicThing)
LiveJournal Drama Generator; for those who don't have enough drama in their online lives:
Oh yeah. it's so not fair that I have this morning off but nobody wants to do anything :-(. I'll just sit home alone and write poems about death.
that jerk jwz gone and said that I got caught backstabbing pfarley. And yeah. You might guess I don't give a flying f*** what they think anymore. I'm over that.
Oh and Why does imomus keep posting images in their journal?! I keep telling them I'm on a modem! I'm going to unfriend them to teach them a lesson!!!!!!!!!!
And also everybody has asked why I'm leaving the furry fandom but the answer is simple: Some of you know who you are and why I'm leaving FOREVAR.
2005/3/14
Only in Southern California would you see hipsters driving around in coffin-shaped hotrods. (from bOING bOING)
UPDATE: More details on RAT-U-LA, the coffin-shaped hot rod. Apparently it's modelled on DRAG-U-LA, the hot rod from The Munsters, and was built by Brett Barris, son of custom-car maker George Barris (the man responsible for the original DRAG-U-LA and the Batmobile).
Reasons to avoid using AOL Instant Messenger: according to their most recent terms of service, AOL have the right to do whatever they like with any text messages you send through their system, and you have no right to privacy and no say in things at all.
Although you or the owner of the Content retain ownership of all right, title and interest in Content that you post to any AIM Product, AOL owns all right, title and interest in any compilation, collective work or other derivative work created by AOL using or incorporating this Content. In addition, by posting Content on an AIM Product, you grant AOL, its parent, affiliates, subsidiaries, assigns, agents and licensees the irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide right to reproduce, display, perform, distribute, adapt and promote this Content in any medium. You waive any right to privacy. You waive any right to inspect or approve uses of the Content or to be compensated for any such uses.
So if AOL decide that they can monetise that steamy chat you had with hot_bi_babe_18f, or the story/screenplay/song ideas you've been bouncing around with your collaborator on the other side of the world, you're SOL.
Oddly enough, AOL's other service, ICQ, doesn't seem to have anything similarly nasty in its terms of service. (via Alec Muffett)
Hack of the day: how to make a common USB webcam see in infrared. Executive summary: it involves pulling it apart and replacing the infrared-blocking filter with a piece of exposed photographic film (which blocks visible light though lets IR through).
The killer application for PalmOS handhelds could well be Bhajis Loops. It's a multi-track sample-based audio sequencer, somewhere between module trackers and Ableton Live, which runs entirely on ARM-based PalmOS handhelds (i.e., Zire and Tungsten units). You get multiple channels of audio, effects plug-ins, filters and envelopes, as well as a library of sounds (including Roland TR-x0x drum samples, SID waveforms, and a General MIDI library that sounds considerably less crap than the Steinberg Universal Sound Module VSTi; not that that's hard to do, mind you, but it does fit in an order of magnitude less space as well). Not only that, but if your handheld has an internal microphone, you can sample sounds around you and incorporate them into your compositions. The fact that you can do this sort of thing on a pocket-sized personal organiser is, in itself, somewhat mind-blowing.
I bought and registered a copy a few weeks ago, and have been spending my commutes working on music. Here is my first attempt at a track made using Bhajis Loops. Most of this track was composed on the Tube, and some of the sounds (including vocal fragments and the snare sound towards the end) were sampled whilst travelling.
Anyway, if you have a recent Palm, check it out. It's well doovy.
2005/3/13
Momus weighs in on the Michael Jackson trial, painting it as a tragic triumph of warlike Spartan puritanism over a future of limitless, polymorphous opportunity:
One of the reasons the Michael Jackson trial is so unfortunate is that the world of Either-Or will pass judgment on a creature of Yet-Also. The world of clear, unambiguous categories will pass judgment on someone who flies Peter-Pan-like over the binaries that confine and define the rest of us.
Jackson is what all humans will become if we develop further in the direction of postmodernism and self-mediation. He is what we'll become if we get both more Wildean and more Nietzschean. He's what we'll become only if we're lucky and avoid a new brutality based on overpopulation and competition for dwindling resources. By attacking Jackson and what he stands for -- the effete, the artificial, the ambiguous -- we make a certain kind of relatively benign future mapped out for ourselves into a Neverland, something forbidden, discredited, derided. When we should be deriding what passes for our normalcy -- war, waste, and the things we do en masse are the things that threaten us -- we end up deriding dandyism and deviance.
Mind you, from what I heard, the court case is not about Jackson's deviant refusal to fit into binary categories or to obey the stern laws of the joyless, unimaginative "Never-Fly", but about whether or not he buggered some children. And surely if he represents a viable future of humanity and is convicted or otherwise put out of action, some alternative, non-child-buggering manifestation of Homo Sapiens 2.0 will come along and carry on the Great Work. Surely Mankind's salvation from a soul-crushing dystopia of war, sexual puritanism and manufactured mass entertainment doesn't literally rest with one man.
Meanwhile, in the LiveJournal comments for this entry, there is an interesting tangent, quoting a New Scientist article on Michael Crichton's latest book (a thriller which paints the scientific basis of environmentalism as fraud and environmentalists as fanatical terrorists):
When I visited America during my time working for Greenpeace International in the 1990s, time and again people would say to me "we really don't approve of the way your organisation blew up that French ship", or words to that effect. It happened once at the end of a meeting with a lawyer in Philadelphia. He was defending Lloyds of London against a suit filed by Exxon after the Valdez oil spill. He wanted to thank me kindly for all the excellent free technical information I had furnished him with in support of his defence, but he really hadn't enjoyed having to talk to me because my people had murdered somebody in New Zealand.
How could it be, I used to wonder, that Americans got the French secret service's sinking of the Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior the wrong way round so consistently? I encountered the phenomenon in no other country. I never knew why for sure and still don't. Whatever the explanation, it happened so many times to me and my colleagues that I had to conclude it was something cultural.
Which sounds like cognitive dissonance in action. Perhaps, to many people in the U.S., the claims that the French government blew up a Greenpeace ship jar so much with their beliefs about the nature of environmentalism (according to this New York Times article, 41% of Americans consider environmental activists to be "extremists") that they have to mentally correct the "error" in the reported facts, turning them around to make more sense.
France's National Library has photoshopped a cigarette out of a photograph of Jean-Paul Sartre used in a poster to promote the centenary of his birth. The action was apparently taken to comply with a law prohibiting tobacco advertising, and follows the editing out of cigarettes from other likenesses of role models. Perhaps they should edit all those removed cigarettes into images of historical villains like Hitler (or, even better, images of people considered passé and unhip though not enough to be in danger of becoming Ironically Cool). (via bOING bOING)
2005/3/12
According to Neil Gaiman, prison companies in the US use juvenile illiteracy levels to predict how many prison cells to build:
At the Publishers' Lunch I attended last week, Joel Klein mentioned that the people who build private prisons in the US use third grade (that's about age eight for the non-Americans) illiteracy levels as their key to how many people are going to be in prison in ten, fifteen years, and how many prison cells they're going to need to build.
Thanks to Loki for digging that fact up.
Voice-over-IP phone service Skype have started offering dial-in phone numbers. This means that, for a regular fee, you can rent a phone number in one of several countries and area codes. People calling that number will get through to your Skype client, and will pay only the standard rate for calling a number in that area. Currently, there are phone numbers available in the US (various area codes), the UK (London), France and Hong Kong; hopefully more countries will follow soon.
SkypeIn information is not yet visible on the public site, but if you log in, it offers to sell you a phone number or three. I wonder how quickly they will run out of numbers.
2005/3/11
Say what you will about The Sun (and I think they cater to humanity's basest instincts; them and the Daily Mail and such), their headline today about a pyjama-clad Michael Jackson arriving late at his trial was inspired.:
Yesterday, blogging ambulanceman Tom Reynolds has had a break from rushing off to treat patients, and has instead taken to imitating God-King Emperor of All That Is Fucked-Up, Warren Ellis. He's got the hastily-written post-apocalyptic scifi story fragments (and not bad, either), pimping of new bands and music streaming, photos of Japanese English signage and links to body-modification sites. Probably needs more scary goth web-porn stars, though.
2005/3/10
Zookeepers in Japan chase a bloke in a lion suit, capture him with a net, in what is ostensibly an animal escape drill; either that or the filming of some kind of Furry bondage-cosplay-themed TV game show. (via jwz)
Things I didn't know until recently: that Stalin's daughter defected to the US, married an American architect and had a daughter. Which means that there is an American woman in her mid-30s with the distinction of having one of the 20th century's most infamous tyrants as her grandfather.
I finally got around to seeing Jean-Pierre Jeunet's A Very Long Engagement, at one of the few cinemas still screening it. It's a beautiful film; in some ways, it's not unlike Amélie, only with all the cuteness taken out, and set against the grim backdrop of trench warfare during World War 1; Audrey Tautou's character in both films could well be the same person born at different times, though where in Amélie she whimsically bimbles across Montmartre, here, she desperately searches for the fate of her fiancé, who was sentenced to death in the trenches and believed by all to have been killed, clutching onto hope by trying to divine the truth looking for "omens". Along the way in her Quixotic quest, more of what happened is uncovered.
Once again, this is not a cute or whimsical film; the trench warfare sequences show the war in an authentically brutal light. Nonetheless, Jeunet's usual signatures (creative use of colour-grading, from the golden Breton countryside to the watercoloured-sepia-photograph effect in other shots, flashbacks, and the occasional mechanical/time-and-motion sequence reminiscent of Delicatessen or The City of Lost Children). The reconstructions of Paris in 1920 were quite impressive; I got the feeling that, in some ways, Amélie and its digitally-cleaned-up Montmartre was a rehearsal for the making of this film. I hope that when the DVD comes out, it will come with a feature describing exactly how the film was made.
The ending was quite strong too, though I won't say any more about that. Anyway, I strongly recommend this film.
On the subject of Tube maps, here's one with the names of films at the stations they were filmed near. Well, that and a few anomalies such as the space-warp which puts Greenwich one stop north of Richmond. (And was Austin Powers actually filmed on Carnaby St., or did they rebuild a façade of the street in a backlot in Hollywood?)
2005/3/9
IRA members stab a bloke to death in Belfast, intimidate witnesses and institute a cover-up. Mass public outcry ensues, with calls for the killers to be brought to justice. The IRA issues an announcement offering to have them shot. Looks like someone's missing the point here.
Via bOING bOING, a comprehensive archive of flyers from 1980s NYC new-wave club Danceteria; Attention new-new-wavers: if you need artwork ideas for your discopunk/electrocoolsie night/band/party, there's plenty of material here for stealing inspiration.
Not long after the Nintendo DS came out, enterprising hackers are writing their own software for it. Of course, since Nintendo forbid unauthorised software on their consoles and go to great lengths to prevent the devices from running such code, the hackers have to go to great lengths to get code onto the device.
I imagine one could do some fairly nifty things with the Nintendo DS hardware if one cracked it open enough to do so; it has two ARM CPUs and built-in WiFi networking (albeit, natively, it runs a weird proprietary protocol on top of that). And that goes doubly so for the new PlayStation Portable.
The Principles of Jewish Buddhism:
1. Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as the wooded glen. And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with such round shoulders.
2. There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that?
I've met quite a few Jewish Buddhists; apparently the phenomenon is so common these days that they even have a name for it. (via MeFi)
Wikipedia category of the day; featuring articles on things like the Cave Clan, perennial joke candidate Murgatroyd, This Is A Heavy Product, OXO OVO, and the phenomenon of larrikinism.
2005/3/8
The Chinese government is considering a law banning lip-syncing in live performances, on the grounds that it is equivalent to selling fake goods. Who would have thought of China's government as a bastion of Rockism?
In between offending people, Ken Livingstone has released a Tube map for 2016. (Well, strictly speaking, it's not a Tube map, as it includes larger rail services and trams, real and proposed.) It's a lot denser than the present map, and it does look like they're running out of colours.
Also via MeFi, bus "spider maps" for different parts of London in PDF, and this site has strip maps of several Tube lines with connections and track layouts added.
I call bullshit on... the story about the New Zealand government fining a restaurant for not updating its website. Which all sounds like interventionism gone mad, except when you read the story and discover that the web site in question contained an outdated, inaccurate price list, and they got done for false advertising.
Since it happened, a big fuss has erupted on the internet, with mostly anti-interventionist libertarian types going on about the Big Brother socialist nanny-state poking its nose into what people do with their websites. Which sounds to me like the publicity that gets raised around ridiculous lawsuits (i.e., urban legends about toaster manufacturers being sued for millions of dollars for not having warning labels telling people not to use their toasters in the bath and such), much of which, I heard, is planted by lobby groups wanting corporate product-liability laws to be relaxed to make it harder for consumers to sue.
Similarly, here, I smell astroturf.
2005/3/7
Conrad Heiney, who worked in a Los Angeles newspaper during the 1980s, recounts stories from the personals department:
At first a couple of the women in the production department put in their own personals. This is how we discovered that the same guys send the same letter and the same picture to any woman who advertises at any time, ever. After a few weeks of this we had a "Wall of Shame" in the production room with ten in a row of the same 8x10 glossies and lovelorn notes. The pictures were real "keepers". I remember one gentleman in a cowboy hat and Speedos in front of his trailer, and another with a Tom Selleck moustache and a combover leaning on a Mercedes. That kind of thing.
And this was born the Great Personals Competition. Anyone who wanted could enter, and write their own fake ad. Whomever received the most responses in the first week won.
I don't remember most of the ads. I do remember the top two. #2 was courtesy our classifieds guy's girlfriend:Buxom blonde twins, 19, seek man for threesome. Pillow fights, tickling, and whatever else follows. Age, looks not important.
What is it about sexual desperation that makes for such a rich motherlode of comedy gold?
Looks like comb-licking neocon arch-villain Paul Wolfowitz isn't the only high profile candidate for head of the World Bank; looks like former Hewlett-Packard CEO Carly Fiorina is in the running. She's the marketing type who changed the motto to "Invent" whilst slashing R&D funding and shedding jobs, turning the company that once pioneered everything from the computers the internet ran on to inkjet printers to calculators so good that they fetch TB-303-like prices on eBay to this day into something more akin to the outfit that sells Commodore-brand flash drives; apparently, when she got sacked, champagne corks were popped throughout the company.
Meanwhile, that hotbed of liberalism, the LA Times, wants Bono to get the job, because he'd be "the most eloquent and passionate spokesman for African aid in the Western world". I imagine Bob Geldof and Geri Halliwell already declined.
2005/3/4
Apple's new PowerBooks now contain a motion sensor, allowing them to detect if they're falling and brace for impact. The sensor in question detects not only acceleration but also the machine's tilt. Über-hacker Amit Singh has figured out how to query this sensor and written programs which use it, including a demo which rotates windows on the desktop to compensate for the laptop's orientation.
2005/3/3
The latest in solutions to problems you may not have been aware of: Gravatar, a site that lets people have user icons globally visible on all blogs which support them. The problem is, the unique identifier used to select your icon is the user's email address, which presumes means that, to use this system, the user has to trust all blogs they use it on not to expose their email address to spammers.
Ten years ago, having a single, unique, permanent and publicly-available email address was seen as a good idea; it gave one an online identity, a convenient means of contactability. That was a more innocent time; a time when the internet had, until recently, been a quiet, friendly academic/research community network, home to nothing more hostile than Emacs-vs.-vi flamewars, and some people still chose not to put passwords on their accounts. Then came the carpetbaggers and chickenboners and script kiddies with their spam-sending scripts and email harvesters, and it all changed.
The reasoning behind Gravatar appears to be stuck in the pre-spam golden age of the internet, where an email address is something you publicise rather than hide, and the idea of letting untrusted strangers (or their web sites) have your email address doesn't set off alarm bells. Which is why it's probably doomed to failure.
2005/3/2
Former NME editor Paul Morley comments on the spectacle of Glen Matlock complaining about the amount of swearing on TV, and asks whether the former Sex Pistol, now a middle-aged family man, has turned against what he stood for, whether he really stood for it in the first place, or whether he has a point:
Clearly, Matlock has decided that as a musician, as an entertainer, he is going to grow old gracefully, even if this means spending most of his time as an unknown. He will not be an expletive-packing Pistol cursing freely into his 50s and 60s, committed to the cause of perpetuating a wild image even as the wrinkles deepen, the flesh softens and the desire crumples. Gene Simmons of Kiss, Alice Cooper, indeed Lemmy are not the right role models for Matlock as he approaches 50, which even if it is the new 40 is not really close enough to the magic years of the 20s where in the old-fashioned sense you can, in a dignified way, wreck yourself, and possibly elements of surrounding civilisation.
Then again, those of us who are watching rich celeb chef Jamie Oliver swear his way through his school dinners show actually might agree with Matlock that there really is too much swearing on television. Middle-of-the-road TV programming freely tosses in the obscenities to suggest there is grit and realism where really there is just frantic emptiness. Matlock might actually be anxious that the swearing is in the wrong mouths, that dull people are exploiting mock controversy as an easy route to commercial attention and that as an ex-Pistol who witnessed the Grundy incident he's responsible for that, and embarrassed by it.
2005/3/1
Comb-licking neoconservative architect of the Iraq war Paul Wolfowitz has been shortlisted to head the World Bank. Presumably someone in a position of power decided that the World Bank's image had become too soft and friendly or something.
My latest gift to the world's collection of marginally useful software: x64spriterip, a quick and dirty Python script which pulls sprite images out of Commodore 64 emulator memory dumps and writes them to PGM files. Just in case you ever felt like grabbing some graphics from your favourite childhood computer game for a chat-room avatar or T-shirt logo or somesuch but couldn't be arsed writing the software to do it yourself.