The Null Device

2005/4/30

The Age has a piece on Melbourne coolsie darlings Architecture In Helsinki:

"I think people find that we're really pretentious," says Sutherland cryptically, "or they find that we're really unpretentious."
"To me," he says, "Fingers Crossed was the sound of a band working out what they were doing. There was always a lot of criticism of the naivety on it, but that naivety was totally genuine, because really none of us had any preconceived idea about what we were actually doing when we stood in front of the microphone."

It has always been my contention that AIH would probably sound better in a few albums' time. Fingers Crossed, IMHO, had one really good track on it, and the rest was filler (albeit of an overly twee, fluffy, sugar-coated sort); the fact that the band weren't particularly tight musicians (they did sound like a high-school band, or perhaps the Clifton Hill Very Special Childrens' Choir) didn't help. Having said that, their new album, In Case We Die, sounds interesting:

There's the '70s tropicalia of Need to Shout, the bubblegum pop and Monster Mash-style doo-wop of The Cemetery, the stately piano grandeur of Maybe You Can Owe Me and the synth-pop fizz of first single, Do the Whirlwind. Bird says In Case We Die is a result of the band becoming match-hardened since Fingers Crossed.

I asked at Rough Trade about Architecture In Helsinki, and they hadn't heard of them. It seems that the only Australian bands that get a following here are NME/Xfm/Carling darlings like Jet and more traditional pastoral indie-popsters like The Lucksmiths. I may have to get someone in Australia to send a copy of the album over.

architecture in helsinki indiepop 6

2005/4/29

It has been well known that alcohol causes many men to find women more attractive than they otherwise would (the effect is colloquially known as "beer goggles"). Now, researchers have found that actual alcohol isn't even required; exposure to alcohol-related words is enough; at least among men who expect that alcohol has that effect.

First, the subjects answered questionnaires that asked whether they thought alcohol affected their sex drive. Afterward, the men were divided into two groups and placed next to computers. One group was shown words that described alcohol, such as liquor, beer and keg. The other group saw words like water, soda and coffee.
The researchers found that the group of men who expected alcohol to enhance their sex drive found the women in the photos more attractive after viewing the alcohol cue words. The group that expected alcohol to reduce their sex drive found the women to be less attractive.

This echoes another priming experiment (reported in both Mind Hacks and Malcolm Gladwell's Blink), in which students surreptitiously exposed to old-age-related words like "wrinkled", "senior" and "Florida" were found to walk more slowly down a corridor than those not primed in this way.

(via mindhacks) alcohol hypnosis influence priming psychology sex suggestion 3

Some genius in the Netherlands has proposed a tax on MP3 players, with as much as €3.28 per gigabyte being slapped onto the price of each MP3 player, the proceeds going solely to the major record labels. This tax is set to become law in a few months. Were the tax extended to PC hard drives, it would increase the prices of hard disks many times over. Of course, given that Germany and Belgium are a short drive away, and under the EU constitution, there's nothing the Dutch government can do to stop the flow of tax-free iPods from German (or British or Slovenian or whatever) online retailers, the whole exercise seems about as effective as "Copy Controlled" audio CDs.

europe stupidity the recording industry 0

Australia's General Motors subsidiary Holden may soon sell a local version of the Hummer, the obscenely large, Tom-of-Finlandesquely hypermasculine "urban assault vehicle" that has been a sensation with the rottweiler owners and gated community dwellers of America.

australia hummer ugly australians 2

John Birmingham's eulogy for Joh Bjelke-Petersen, former despot of Queensland:

As long as there is a spark of life in Australian democracy, the mid 1980s, when Bjelke-Petersen ruled alone, at the very zenith of his powers, should be studied in civics courses as an object lesson in what happens when untrammelled power is gathered into the shaky, liver-spotted hands of a stuttering, proto-fascist brute with just enough rat-bastard cunning to mask his true nature behind a carefully constructed facade of endearing bumpkinry.
Should his legacy be the flight of thousands of Queenslanders to safer, less contested lives in those states where politics did not threaten to become an intimately personal matter, something that could, in the worst case, reach out and touch you, shrivelling your options to fight or flight? And, really, only to the latter.
His state funeral should be an appropriate ceremony. Perhaps a pack of dingoes could be starved for a week before being sooled upon his corpse in the mudflats down by the Brisbane River. Or he could be buried at sea with the worst of his cabinet ministers, all of them dipped in chum and fed to the hammerheads and reef sharks off the Great Barrier Reef which they were so keen to open up to mining.

(via lokicarbis) australia authoritarianism fascism joh bjelke-petersen john birmingham queensland 0

2005/4/28

Last night, Your Humble Narrator made it down to Bush Hall to see folktronica artist, cultural theorist and fabulous British eccentric Momus, HitBACK guitar-pop band The Free French and an outfit named Stars In Battledress.

First up were Stars In Battledress, a duo with one chap playing guitar and singing and the other playing piano. Their music was somewhat avant-garde, like a roiling sea of chords, notes and words, shifting and changing structure. Not really my cup of tea.

Momus was next, and took to the stage with his iBook. He basically sang over backing tracks played from iTunes, stopping from time to time to play sounds on a Flash-based microtonal instrument on the iBook. Other than that, there was no live music, though Momus put on an entertaining performance, moving around a lot and putting on quite a dramatic act as he sang his songs. (I guess that the important thing about a performance is not what proportion of notes played is live and triggered by musicians on stage, but the energy and charisma of the performer; the reason why most live-electronica acts suck is not because the artists are sitting behind a rack of synths twiddling knobs rather than playing a guitar, but because they fall into the backroom-geek trap, just sitting there rather than engaging the audience. Punters generally don't pay to see mild-mannered geeks controlling synthesizers, which is why the dance-music fad of the 90s had wide-boy "superstar DJs" to act as frontmen. But I digress; Momus certainly did not suck.)

Finally, there were The Free French; they're labelmates of Spearmint, and not too far away in the stylistic universe; indie guitar-pop with a touch of blue-eyed soul (the frontman is apparently a huge Hall & Oates fan). They played a decent set from their past three albums, and a new, as yet unrecorded song. They were enjoyable; I'll probably see them again.

There are photos here.

gigs momus personal 3

2005/4/27

Heavy Trash, an anonymous collective of architects, designers and urban planners opposed to wealthy Americans' retreat into gated communities, has installed Berlin Wall-style viewing platforms at the gates of three such communities in Los Angeles:

"When public services and even local government are privatized, when the community of responsibility stops at the gates, the function and the very idea of democracy are threatened. Gates and barricades that separate people from one another also reduce people's potential to understand one another and commit to any common or collective purpose."
"There are now more than 1 million homes behind such walls in the greater Los Angeles area alone," according to Setha Low, a professor at the City University of New York.

(via worldchanging) détournement gated communities usa 2

American students traveling abroad confirm the findings of a study indicating that Washington's unilateral approach to foreign policy has seriously undermined Americans' chances of getting laid:

"I'm in Amsterdam--Amsterdam, for Christ's sake--and I'm in the middle of the longest dry spell I can remember," Higgs said. "Last week, I was making out with this Italian girl at a concert. It was all going great until the music ended and she heard my American accent. I swear to God, I went from the cusp of a hand job to, 'Why won't your country sign the Kyoto Treaty?'"
"I voted for Kerry and I marched against the Iraq war," Biehn said. "But when I got to Europe, I might as well have been wearing a Bush bumper sticker on my forehead and star-spangled cowboy boots. As soon as the French guys hear I am from the U.S., all they want to do is argue politics."

And some advice for young Americans attempting to pull in Europe:

"First, pretend you're Canadian whenever you can," Hapbrook said. "But make sure you're not around actual Canadians, because they'll know you're lying and cock-block you. Second, if there are any anti-American protests going on, take care to avoid women carrying signs. Third, focus your itinerary on countries like Ireland and Japan that are still relatively friendly to Americans. You may want to write off France altogether," Hapbrook added.

(via lokicarbis) europe iraq war politics sex the onion usa 3

New-age guru turned skeptic and sociologist Karla McLaren on differences in the way skeptics and new-agers think:

For instance, an understanding of cold reading would have helped me a great deal. I never knew what cold reading was, and until I saw professional magician and debunker Mark Edward use cold reading on an ABC News special last year, I didn't understand that I had long used a form of cold reading in my own work! I was never taught cold reading and I never intended to defraud anyone - I simply picked up the technique through cultural osmosis.
People in my culture have heard you and we're trying to answer - but we don't understand you. Our cultural training about the dangers of the intellect makes it nearly impossible for us to utilize science properly - or to identify your intellectual rigor as anything but an unhealthy overuse of the mind.
We love to say that we embrace mystery in the New Age culture, but that's a cultural conceit and it's utterly wrong. In actual fact, we have no tolerance whatsoever for mystery. Everything from the smallest individual action to the largest movements in the evolution of the planet has a specific metaphysical or mystical cause. In my opinion, this incapacity to tolerate mystery is a direct result of my culture's disavowal of the intellect. One of the most frightening things about attaining the capacity to think skeptically and critically is that so many things don't have clear answers. Critical thinkers and skeptics don't create answers just to manage their anxiety

Meanwhile, a revert war seems to have opened up in the Wikipedia entry on Witchcraft; it started when a bunch of fuzzy-bunny pagans took offense with the part of the article which contradicted their belief that witchcraft was the same unified, benign and generally warm and fluffy thing throughout centuries, rejected the validity of all the sources cited for this (partly because the "secret oral tradition" they know says otherwise, and what would some stuffy academic who's not part of it know?), and vowed to enlist their friends' help to ensure that their point of view prevails.

Quite frankly, I don't care what you think. If you post further erroneous statements, I will not hesistate to remove them. Moreover, I'm sure I can easily recruit a thousand or so neo-pagans that would be more than willing to devote a little of their time to keep Wikipedia's entry on witchcraft free of your hostile and inaccurate statements

(via reddragdiva) belief new-age paganism rationalism skepticism wikipedia 0

Toads in Altona, an area of northern Germany, are spontaneously swelling up and exploding. Thousands of the hapless amphibians have mysteriously swollen up like balloons, growing to three and a half times normal size before bursting and splattering the area (and, presumably, any unlucky bystanders) with toad guts. The cause of this bizarre phenomenon remains unknown, though some are speculating that it is a virus or a fungus.

fortean germany toads 0

2005/4/26

Veteran underground comic author Howard Cruse reminiscent about the old childhood pastime of raising nancies:

And there are more comics on his site, including one which asks the question of "Why Are We Losing The War On Art?".

(via jwz) amusing comics nancies surreal 0

Tony "the Smiler" Blair's reelection campaign has suffered a blow with a veteran Labour MP defecting to the Lib Dems. Labour left-winger Brian Sedgemore, MP for Hackney and Shoreditch, has accused Labour of "stomach-turning lies":

"I urge everyone from the centre and left of British politics to give Blair a bloody nose at the election and to vote for the Lib Dems in recognition of the fact that the tawdry New Labour project is dead," he said.

Sedgemore claims that there are more Labour MPs, disgusted with Blair's toadying to Washington/forcing the country into a war on false pretenses/introducing university top-up fees/abandoning socialist ideals, preparing to defect, though not all to the Lib Dems.

Personally, I'm hoping that the Lib Dems overtake the Tories at the next election, becoming the new opposition. There's virtually no chance of the Lib Dems winning power at this election (or, indeed, of Labour losing), though if the main opposition party isn't a bunch of bogeymen in Margaret Thatcher fright masks like the Tories, Labour can't rely on the public resignedly accepting them as the best plausible alternative and putting up with them.

liberal democrats politics tony blair tories uk 0

2005/4/25

Nifty Python hack of the day: a C-style switch() construct, implemented without using dictionaries (instead using a class and yield).

(via pythonurl) programming python tech 0

Walking along Regent St. (a block or two south of the AppleTemple), I noticed that a shop had opened for the sole purpose of demonstrating and selling the Gizmondo game units. These are handhelds, looking sort of like the ill-fated Nokia N-Gage. They're developed by a British company, cost about £220, run some form of Windows CE, have a handful of games available, and also include a digital camera (of unknown quality), GPRS mobile phone functions and a GPS receiver (which one game, a gang-warfare simulator, is said to use; which could be either nifty or daft). There's a version available for £100 less, which requires the user to view an ad a day to keep using it; the era of attention rights management could be beginning.

They had a few units attached to the wall for people to play with. I started a game on the unit, and was presented with a metal sphere moving along a road of coloured tiles heading into the distance. This looks familiar, I thought. Then I realised that it's a remake of the old Commodore 64 game Trailblazer, right down to having a late-90s-rave-techno version of the tuneless in-game music.

I suspect that the price of Gizmondos will come down dramatically after the PlayStation Portable comes out; after all, the PSP is about the same price and has a much larger screen and more titles.

Also: given that it's a WinCE machine that uses standard SD cards for storage, I wonder how hackable it is. Most game consoles are designed to prohibit the use of unauthorised software, because the business models are based on the manufacturer collecting royalties on each game sold, and the consoles being often sold at a loss (for example, Microsoft lost money on each X-Box sold, and only profited if the user bought about two or more games for it; which undoubtedly made it all the more satisfying for penguinheads to buy X-Boxes and convert them into improvised Linux machines just to stick it to Darth Gates). Presumably the Gizmondo would be a similar case, and would have some sort of cryptographic measures to prevent users from running unauthorised code on it. Though if the Gizmondo could be hacked, it could be an interesting platform; perhaps once the PSP stomps the price down, it'll be worth picking one up.

fail gizmondo 1

One of the Memepool people has drawn up a table of buzzword prefixes and suffixes, (i.e., "pod-", "mo-" and "blue", and "-casting", "-ster" and "-zilla"), and filled in the squares with definitions of the buzzwords that currently exist, speculative definitions of concepts that may one day exist, and the obligatory "exists but isn't called that" squares:

  • wikijacking: replacing wiki stuff with your content en masse
  • modating: surely they are doing this in japan
  • netcasting: fish procurement technology

Some of the empty squares suggest definitions; i.e., "friendblogging" could be either going on about mundane details of one's life that only concern those who know the author, or possibly LiveJournal-style friends-only blogging with social-network authentication.

(via The Fix) humour jargon tech 2

Music Thing looks at the important question of why ice cream vans sound the way they do, with a subtext of finding ways of emulating that sound in a studio:

" Early models consisted of a hand tuned Swiss musical movement (like a music box) fitted with a magnetic pick up and the amplifiers used radio-type valves. In 1958 reliable transistors came on to the market and efficient amplifiers were built to work directly of the vehicle's battery."
British vans traditionally use 'Grampian Horn' loudspeakers (which cost about £60), pointed down at the road to disperse the sound.

(via MusicThing) audio ice cream vans sound tech 0

2005/4/24

This weekend, I travelled to Aberystwyth, paying a visit to Jim and Catrin (whom I last saw in 2002). It was good to catch up with them again.

On Saturday night, I went to see the Castaway Theatre Company's performance of Alfred Jarry's Ubu Enchained. It was fittingly anarchic; they had five people each playing Pa Ubu and Ma Ubu, mostly attired in vaguely punky combinations of random clothes, and a lot going on on stage, most of it rather absurd. It reminded me a lot of the Doug Anthony Allstars, in particular DAAS Kapital. The music played in/between various sequences included a lot of guitar punk and several Half Man Half Biscuit songs, which worked rather well. Anyway, there are some photos here.

The journey to/from Aberystwyth involved a stopover in Birmingham, and a bus between there and Telford, due to railway works. On the way back, I spent some time wandering around Birmingham, raiding the local Music & Video Exchange and taking a stroll around the pedestrianised neo-brutalist cityscapes of the Bullring. For some reason, Birmingham reminded me a little of Brisbane.

The London-Birmingham leg of the journey was on a Virgin Trains Pendolino train, which was fairly nifty. For one, they come with laptop power points, even in cattle-class. (Now that's one thing I can't see ever being installed on the Melbourne-Sydney XPT, partly because rurals and bikies generally don't carry laptops.) Also, the way they tilt when they round a corner is pretty nifty.

(Note to self: make more excuses to get out of London; by which I mean far enough out to get out of London's reality distortion field. Living in London, it's too easy to start thinking of everything in terms of Tube lines, N|W|E|[NS][EW]|[EW]C postcodes and relative position to the Thames, and to forget that there is life and activity in Britain that's not in relation to London.)

aberystwyth alfred jarry personal punk theatre travel ubu enchained 2

2005/4/22

Quite probably the world's coolest-looking pizza cutters, which look like some kind of collision between Gigeresque biomechanics, steampunk and cyberpunk:

(via gizmodo) cool design 0

The Sun announces, grudgingly, that it will support Tony Blair in the election, directing its readers to vote Labour. Which conjures up images of Sun readers marching like shellsuit-clad zombies from the council estates to obediently do Papa Murdoch's bidding and give the election to his anointed candidate.

It's a factoid often stated that The Sun decides British general elections, which makes pleasing Mr. Murdoch more important for candidates than pandering to the whims of the general public. Another, less conspiratorial, interpretation, is that The Sun always backs the most likely winner of an upcoming election to maintain its populist credentials. (Telling people to vote the way the majority would have voted is easy; whether Sun readers would compliantly bloc-vote for, say, the UK Independence Party if instructed to do so is another matter.) in which case, support for Labour was inevitable (the Tories still being too much the pantomime villains of British politics to win, and all third parties being equally irrelevant in a first-past-the-post electoral system).

The folk belief that The Sun decides elections appears to come from the 1992 election, where The Sun backed the Tories and engaged in a spot of post-election triumphalism.

But Murdoch, it emerged, was furious with the claim that his newspapers could swing elections.

Funny, because there is evidence to suggest that that's exactly what News Ltd.'s media assets did in the 2004 Australian election.

The News Limited 2004 Marginal Seats Guide is an internal News Limited document giving statistical details on the 30 most marginal federal seats. It gives a small but significant insight into News Limited's strategy for manipulating public opinion so as to achieve a very specific outcome from the coming 2004 federal election.

Is such fine-grained news management something the Murdoch empire only practices in Australia, or is it applied in Britain and/or America as well? If the former, is it because Australia's highly concentrated media environment makes such things possible to an extent that Britain's diversity of proprietors (most of them shockingly biased, but for different parties or beliefs) does not?

australia murdoch politics propaganda the sun uk 2

2005/4/21

Considering the virtual absence of American authors from this year's Hugo shortlist, Charlie Stross has an interesting piece on the state of science fiction writing today, and in particular the slump in US scifi.

Here's my speculation: American SF is going through a gloom-laden period induced by external social conditions, much as British SF did in the 1947-79 period (and differently, in the 1980-92 period). Extrapolative SF is often used by writers as a mirror for reflecting our concerns about the present on the silver screen of the future. "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" and "The Puppet Masters" were artefacts of the late 1940's/early 1950's paranoia about communist infiltration. "Fugue for a Darkening Island" was a dismal if-this-goes-on dirge played to the tune of Enoch Powell. "Neuromancer" was 1980's corporate deracination hooked up to an overdose of MTV, mainlining on hidden assumptions of monetarism. When SF is at its most overtly predictive -- especially when it speaks of the impending future -- it is talking about the present, capturing the zeitgeist and projecting it forward.
n American SF today there is a huge surge in the proportion of alternate history counterfactuals: as James Nicoll notes, AH is often used as a consolatory literature that, at its worst, says "we go back in time and make history happen the way it should have happened! Yay, Us! In a completely contrived scenario, we can win!" The boom in fantasy probably needs no further explanation. Ditto the military-SF field, which at its worst reflects the self-indulgent imperialist excesses of the British penny dreadfuls of the early 20th century.
what's almost totally absent is convincing near-future SF about a future America that is anything other than a dystopic rubbish dump. Bleakness is the new optimism. Writers living in the USA today just don't seem enthusiastic about the near future in the way that they did as recently as the 1980's, where at least the cyberpunk future of cliche was a vaguely habitable pastiche of the globalized present. They are, in fact, exhibiting the same canary-in-a-sociological-coalmine malaise as British SF writers of the 1960's and 1970's.

alternate history charlie stross escapism grim meathook future monetarism scifi usa 1

2005/4/20

Shamelessly stolen from Something Awful:

(via mikeybidness) sidious something awful 2

Google Maps now has a UK edition, in which, rather than consisting only of North America, the globe consists of only the British Isles. The site doesn't have satellite photos yet, though it does seem to have everything else the American site has. Seeing places you've actually been adds quite a bit to the experience.

google google maps 1

Head of the Holy Inquisition and arch doctrinal hardliner Cardinal Ratzinger is elected as the next Pope; as white smoke drifts into the Roman sky, one can almost make out the strains of the Imperial March.

(via chuck_lw) catholicism pope 3

2005/4/19

The MPAA show their bizarre, fundamentalist views on intellectual property yet again, this time by sending legal nastygrams to websites using the MPAA's ratings code; i.e., if you claim that your website, photo gallery, Harry Potter fan-fiction story or whatever is G (or PG or R or whatever)-rated, you can expect a cease-and-desist notice in the mail:

"We have a right to go after people who use our trademarks without permission, big or small, whenever we find out about them," said John Feehery, executive vice president for the association. "Our ratings are not supposed to be ripped off."
Wendy Seltzer, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues that the association would have a point only if the fiction sites had claimed that association reviewers had rated the works. Using the ratings as a rough comparison is not a trademark infringement, she said: "It's like saying a beverage tastes like Coke."

I'm hoping that this does go to court and the MPAA get a good caning, which, if anything resembling common sense prevails, they should.

Meanwhile, if you're content with the G, PG and R ratings, you can always claim that you're using the Australian ones and not the U.S. ones; the Australian Office of Film and Literature Censorship may be Bowdlerites, but they're probably not Galambosians.

(via Techdirt) censorship eff galambosianism mpaa trademarks 0

The mother of the boy allegedly abused by the world's only living fairytale prince, Michael Jackson, feared that her children would be abducted from Neverland by hot air balloon. Well, you've got to give him (or her, if she's making it up) points for style.

It looks like Michael Jackson's legacy may be to do for the old-fashioned trappings of childhood (fairgrounds, hot-air balloons, and fairy-tale-style theme parks; all those things seen as somewhat twee, a touch anachronistic, but harmless and innocent), what John Wayne Gacy did for clowns.

balloons bizarre michael jackson 0

2005/4/18

It looks like Sony are finally releasing a MiniDisc-based data drive; only a decade too late, too. The Hi-MD drive (with the catchy name "PIT-IN") will apparently be a USB Mass Storage device, and will go head-to-head with smaller and more robust USB keyrings. Chances are it'll still not be able to rip data off audio MiniDiscs for copyright-enforcement reasons, so all your bootleg gig minidiscs are still locked up in the translucent plastic prison of Sony DRM.

Meanwhile, the next Palm handheld will be the Tungsten X; it's basically going to be like a T5 with a built-in iPod Mini-sized hard drive, and MP3 player software to take advantage of that. If they put some audio inputs on that (other than the voice-grade microphone they come with), it'd make a pretty nifty portable audio workstation.

And someone has created OSX developer trading cards. Which make you wonder whether they buy their shirts in bulk from the same retailer.

(via gizmodo) apple dead media minidisc osx palm sony tungsten 2

Hacker and painter Maciej Ceglowski calls bullshit on Paul Graham's Hackers and Painters, claiming that the two occupations have no more in common than hackers and, say, pastry chefs, and that Graham's essay is basically an attempt to appropriate a sexier and more romantic image by hand-waving and sophistry:

Great paintings, for example, get you laid in a way that great computer programs never do. Even not-so-great paintings - in fact, any slapdash attempt at splashing paint onto a surface - will get you laid more than writing software, especially if you have the slightest hint of being a tortured, brooding soul about you. For evidence of this I would point to my college classmate Henning, who was a Swedish double art/theatre major and on most days could barely walk.
Also remark that in painting, many of the women whose pants you are trying to get into aren't even wearing pants to begin with. Your job as a painter consists of staring at naked women, for as long as you wish, and this day in and day out through the course of a many-decades-long career. Not even rock musicians have been as successful in reducing the process to its fundamental, exhilirating essence.
It's no surprise, then, that a computer programmer would want to bask in some of the peripheral coolness that comes with painting, especially when he has an axe to grind about his own work being 'mere engineering'.

Ceglowski puts the blame for Hackers and Painters, and the whole genre on the obvious suspects:

I blame Eric Raymond and to a lesser extent Dave Winer for bringing this kind of schlock writing onto the Internet. Raymond is the original perpetrator of the "what is a hacker?" essay, in which you quickly begin to understand that a hacker is someone who resembles Eric Raymond. Dave Winer has recently and mercifully moved his essays off to audio, but you can still hear him snorfling cashew nuts and talking at length about what it means to be a blogger[7] . These essays and this writing style are tempting to people outside the subculture at hand because of their engaging personal tone and idiosyncratic, insider's view. But after a while, you begin to notice that all the essays are an elaborate set of mirrors set up to reflect different facets of the author, in a big distributed act of participatory narcissism.

Disclaimer: I'm currently halfway through Hackers and Painters; so far, I've found it interesting in a big-ideas sort of way. Though I am as yet undecided on whether the emperor is actually clothed, and whether Graham is a visionary master, a self-important blowhard or a bit of both. (One could perhaps count it in Graham's defense that Ceglowski admits to being a Perl programmer, but I digress.)

(via ronebofh) debunking eric s. raymond hackers and painters maciej ceglowski narcissism paul graham sex status 4

In Melbourne, a 15-year-old boy with an obsession with trams stole a tram from a depot and took it for a ride, picking up passengers along the way. He got all the way from Southbank depot to Kew. Somewhat reminiscent of Malcolm, except for the SWAT-team tactics the police used to take him down. Of course, things have changed a lot since 1986, and for all they know, he could have been an al-Qaeda terrorist planning to load the tram up with sarin and dirty bombs and blow it up at a football match or something.

This, of course, isn't the first time an obsessive anorak borrowed a public transport vehicle and took it for a spin; not that long ago, a man in New York was jailed for impersonating subway drivers.

melbourne obsessives the long siege trams 2

2005/4/17

Seen on the front of a bar in Soho:

burberry chavs photos uk 10

2005/4/15

Following this year's rerelease of the entire Field Mice back-catalogue on CD, LTM are turning their attention to another Sarah Records band: The Orchids:

Unofficially there is a rumour about the reissue of the complete Sarah Records catalogue of The Orchids in the next autumn. Three CDs are in the plans but the track list is still in progress.

Uncharacteristically, the band appears to still be together and planning to play live in the summer; not only that, but they have 8 new songs too.

Anyway, it's good to see Sarah material being remastered and rereleased; the whole lot has, naturally, been available on various file-sharing services, though MP3s recorded from well-loved vinyl records at home tend to be of variable quality. Anyway, hopefully LTM or someone will get around to putting out some Blueboy next, and/or Even As We Speak. It'd be nice to see some of the more obscure stuff like The Sweetest Ache and Gentle Despite come out as well, though that's probably less likely.

As far as Sarah Records rereleases on other labels go, US shoegazer imprint Clairecords has a CD with most of Secret Shine's releases (which is worth getting; they're right up there with the best of the shoegazer movement of the early 1990s), and, of course, Olympia skronk merchants K Records have everything Heavenly and Talulah Gosh ever released, all on individual CDs.

heavenly k records ltm sarah records secret shine tallulah gosh the orchids 0

Edits of NWA's Straight Outta Compton and Fuck Tha Police with everything but the obscenities removed. Comedy gold.

(via substitute) amusing fuck mp3s nwa obscenity 0

2005/4/14

Security guru Bruce Schneier turns his professional paranoia to the Papal election, and looks at how vulnerable it is to fraud or rigging. The answer: not very. There are a few minor flaws, though much of the mechanism is quite robust.

What are the lessons here? First, open systems conducted within a known group make voting fraud much harder. Every step of the election process is observed by everyone, and everyone knows everyone, which makes it harder for someone to get away with anything. Second, small and simple elections are easier to secure. This kind of process works to elect a Pope or a club president, but quickly becomes unwieldy for a large-scale election. The only way manual systems work is through a pyramid-like scheme, with small groups reporting their manually obtained results up the chain to more central tabulating authorities.
And a third and final lesson: when an election process is left to develop over the course of a couple thousand years, you end up with something surprisingly good.

bruce schneier election pope security vatican 2

In the U.S., a small minority of pharmacists are refusing to sell birth-control pills to women, sometimes even confiscating their prescriptions, on "moral grounds". State legislatures are divided between outlawing such actions and enshrining them in law:

At a Brooks pharmacy in Laconia, New Hampshire, Suzanne Richards, a 21-year-old single mother with a 3-year-old son, was denied the morning after pill because of the pharmacist's religious convictions.
Richards says she felt "humiliated and traumatised", and was too frightened to approach another pharmacist the next day, allowing the 72-hour limit for taking the pill to pass.

One can understand people getting squeamish about the abortion of developed foetuses with nervous systems and such, but refusing to sell morning-after pills is just stupid. For one, it ignores the fact that between 60% and 80% of fertilised embryos are naturally spontaneously aborted, in much the same way that the morning-after pill would do (an argument which, when combined with pro-lifer ideology and a dose of logic, implies that much of the population of Heaven would be comprised of never-born embryos). This is clearly not about saving lives but rather about assertion of power; the Religious Right flexing its muscle and seeing how much it can get away with in Bush's America.

abortion authoritarianism human rights religion religiots vigilantism 0

Someone has written a program for generating random computer-science papers, designed to scam dubious conferences, apparently with some success:

One useful purpose for such a program is to auto-generate submissions to "fake" conferences; that is, conferences with no quality standards, which exist only to make money. A prime example, which you may recognize from spam in your inbox, is SCI/IIIS and its dozens of co-located conferences (for example, check out the gibberish on the WMSCI 2005 website). Using SCIgen to generate submissions for conferences like this gives us pleasure to no end. In fact, one of our papers was accepted to SCI 2005!

The authors intend to attend the conference in question and deliver a randomly-generated talk.

A sample of its output (without the authentic-looking graphs), excerpted from a paper titled "Refining DNS and Suffix Trees with OWLER":

We have taken great pains to describe out evaluation setup; now, the payoff, is to discuss our results. We ran four novel experiments: (1) we deployed 86 Atari 2600s across the underwater network, and tested our checksums accordingly; (2) we ran 34 trials with a simulated instant messenger workload, and compared results to our hardware deployment; (3) we measured flash-memory space as a function of ROM speed on a Motorola bag telephone; and (4) we asked (and answered) what would happen if mutually replicated vacuum tubes were used instead of I/O automata. All of these experiments completed without LAN congestion or 10-node congestion.

I take my hat off to them. When I wrote the Postmodernism Generator, all those years ago, I was sceptical of the possibility of successfully generating convincing random text in a more objectively verifiable field, such as computer science. I guess that, if those responsible for reviewing the paper aren't bothered to actually read it and attempt to assemble a mental model of what it states, one can get away with anything.

computer science dadaism détournement pranks random text 2

Skype have just added Scandinavia to their SkypeIn offerings; now one can buy phone numbers in Denmark, Sweden, Norway and Finland and have them directed to one's Skype client anywhere on the internet (along with the U.S., UK, French and Hong Kong numbers previously on offer). Hopefully they'll roll more countries out soon.

It's interesting to note that, of the eight countries on offer, France restricts its phone numbers to those resident in French metropolitan areas, while the others will happily allocate them to anyone. Dirigisme, anyone?

skype voip 0

This book looks potentially quite interesting:

It was Mr. Levitt who nailed a bunch of Chicago public-school teachers for artificially inflating their students' standardized test scores. I'm dying to tell you exactly how he did it, but I don't want to spoil any surprises. His account of the affair in "Freakonomics" reads like a detective novel.
The evidence is right there in front of you: Mr. Levitt actually reproduces all the answer sheets from two Chicago classrooms and challenges you to spot the cheater. Then he shows you how it's done. He points to suspicious patterns that you almost surely overlooked. Suspicious, yes, but not conclusive--maybe there is some legitimate explanation. Except that Mr. Levitt slowly piles pattern on pattern, ruling out one explanation after another until only the most insidious one remains. The resulting tour de force is so convincing that it eventually cost 12 Chicago schoolteachers their jobs.
Then it's on to another question, and another and another. Were lynchings, as their malevolent perpetrators hoped, an effective way to keep Southern blacks "in their place"? Do real-estate agents really represent their clients' interests? Why do so many drug dealers live with their mothers? Which parenting strategies work and which don't? Does a good first name contribute to success in life?
Back in 1999, Mr. Levitt was trying to figure out why crime rates had fallen so dramatically in the previous decade. He was struck by the fact that crime began falling nationwide just 18 years after the Supreme Court effectively legalized abortion. He was struck harder by the fact that in five states crime began falling three years earlier than it did everywhere else. These were exactly the five states that had legalized abortion three years before Roe v. Wade.

(via fmh) books economics freakonomics 0

The BBC Creative Archive site is now up. There's no content yet (they're still working on negotiating the licenses), but the details have been officially announced. It's going to be distributed under something very similar to a Creative Commons by-nc-sa-style licence, only with a "no endorsement" clause prohibiting use of material for campaigning or defamation (which presumably stems from English copyright law's concept of moral rights). This licence will be used not only by the BBC, but also by other organisations such as Channel 4 and the British Film Institute for their own online archive efforts. In other details: there will be no DRM whatsoever, though the archive will only be accessible from British IP addresses (though I'm told that the people behind it are pushing to lift this restriction), and peer-to-peer technologies will be used to help distribute it (which, presumably, means that the BBC's download site will act as a BitTorrent tracker/seeder).

While we're on the topic, an article on the push to bring Creative Commons licensing to Britain.

(via boingboing) bbc creative archive creative commons free culture 0

In the U.S., abortion-clinic and gay-bar bomber Eric Rudolph, who hid from police in the North Carolina mountains for five years using survivalist techniques, has confessed to the Atlanta olympics bombing. So far, he appears to have declined to give a theological argument against sporting events. His explanation for bombing the Olympics is here; apparently it has to do with the Olympics' "despicable" Lennonist-socialist ideals; that and abortion.

Meanwhile, in Britain, another one of God's soldiers has been convicted for planning ricin attacks on the public. Kamel Bourgass, linked to al-Qaeda and a militant Islamist group centred at the Finsbury Park mosque, was found to have plans and raw materials for making the deadly poison; it is believed his plans for it included spraying it on car door handles around that hotbed of Zionist-Crusader Infidelism, Holloway Road. Bourgass, also known as Nadir, is already serving a life sentence after stabbing a police officer to death when facing arrest.

islamism olympics religiots terrorism uk usa 2

2005/4/13

It has emerged that the Tory candidate for Dorset South had put a doctored photograph of himself at a rally on a pamphlet, completely changing the meaning of the signs he was holding:

Only a month ago Mr Matts lent his support to the local Kachepa family, who were threatened with deportation. A photograph taken at the time showed Mr Matts in a crowd of local supporters holding up a photo of the family, with veteran Tory MP Ann Widdecombe by his side holding a placard saying "let them stay".
One month on, an altered version of the photo appeared on Mr Matt's election leaflets. Mr Matt holds a sign saying "controlled immigration", while Ms Widdecombe's says "not chaos and inhumanity".

dishonesty photoshopping politics revisionism tories uk 0

Objectivists, psychopaths and believers in the virtues of cruelty and pollution rejoice: there's now an anti-ethical investment fund tailored to your values. The Free Enterprise Action Fund specifically invests in companies who refuse to be intimidated by pressure from "leftists":

"What we're trying to create is a grassroots, investor-based movement to pressure corporations to resist the activists," Milloy said, adding that the Free Enterprise Action Fund is "the first and only" of its kind and "definitely the first to be doing this as shareholders."
Milloy also said the Free Enterprise Action Fund will encourage corporations not to be intimidated by the left and to hire people with the same philosophy. "If you're going to hire these people that can't stand the heat, they shouldn't be in the kitchen. What I can stop is corporate management trying to appease these [activist groups], thinking that it will make the problem go away," he added.

The Free Enterprise Action Fund refuses to disclose which companies they have invested in, but says that some of them are tobacco companies. I imagine that weapons manufacturers would be another profitable sector in today's global environment.

Meanwhile, activist pressure seems to have worked on Nike; the company, once synonymous with labour exploitation, has now become the first major company to disclose its full list of suppliers and contract factories, theoretically allowing them to be held to account more effectively over employment practices. While it's still too early to praise Nike as a model citizen (one would have to see results for that), now one no longer has to feel bad about buying a pair of Converse All-Stars. Unless, of course, one is an Objectivist or similar.

anti-ethics assholes ayn rand contrarianism cruelty ethics 0

Gwen Stefani, that Madonna of major-label pop-punk, has taken a liking to Japanese teen street fashion. And, being a savvy commodified-rebellion entrepreneur, she has appropriated this phenomenon and redigested it into a commercially viable cliché, by hiring four Asian women to dress like Harajuku hipsters and follow her around, contractually prohibited from speaking anything but Japanese:

They shadow her wherever she goes. They're on the cover of the album, they appear behind her on the red carpet, she even dedicates a track, "Harajuku Girls," to them. In interviews, they silently vogue in the background like living props; she, meanwhile, likes to pretend that they're not real but only a figment of her imagination. They're ever present in her videos and performances -- swabbing the deck aboard the pirate ship, squatting gangsta style in a high school gym while pumping their butts up and down, simpering behind fluttering hands or bowing to Stefani. That's right, bowing. Not even from the waist, but on the ground in a "we're not worthy, we're not worthy" pose. She's taken Tokyo hipsters, sucked them dry of all their street cred, and turned them into China dolls.
Stefani fawns over harajuku style in her lyrics, but her appropriation of this subculture makes about as much sense as the Gap selling Anarchy T-shirts; she's swallowed a subversive youth culture in Japan and barfed up another image of submissive giggling Asian women. While aping a style that's suppose to be about individuality and personal expression, Stefani ends up being the only one who stands out.

The article in question goes on to excoriate other Western stereotypes of Japanese culture, from Tarantino's killer schoolgirl to Peter Carey's confession of cluelessness, "Wrong About Japan".

(via tyrsalvia) commodification gwen stefani harajuku stereotypes 1

It looks like the rerelease fairy had been busy recently, with a goodly number appearing on the horizon. First of all, Stereolab's 3CD+1DVD retrospective Oscillons from the Anti-Sun, is coming out in just under two weeks (a few days before OSX Tiger). I'll probably pick it up, it having a decent number of tracks I haven't got, as well as the videos.

Meanwhile, a month after that, there's a Belle & Sebastian singles compilation coming out, wittily titled "Push Barman to Open Old Wounds", with a decent number of singles and B-sides up until I'm Waking Up To Us.

And then there are those Cure rereleases, all lovingly remastered and packed with extra CDs of bonus tracks, live recordings and demos, all from back when The Cure were interesting. Or, as VICE Magazine (which, incidentally, gave the three rereleases 30/10) put it:

He wrote these in his early 20s. He thought he'd be dead by 27. Creatively, he kind of was.

Anyway, it's good to see a version of Carnage Visors coming out that's not a badly encoded MP3 of a well-worn 3rd-generation cassette recording.

belle & sebastian stereolab the cure vice magazine 1

It's official: MacOS 10.4 Tiger will be coming out in April, as speculated. Though it won't be out until the 29th.

apple mac osx 0

2005/4/12

The Australian indie-pop marketplace now has more competition, with a new mail-order outfit and record label in Fortitude Valley opening. Taking the time-honoured indie-pop strategy of having a literary name (see also: Library Records, Chapter Music, and numerous bands), Book Club Records has their own releases and overseas imports (including Tender Trap, Amelia "Talulah Gosh/Heavenly" Fletcher's latest project), with postage being free in Australia. They also have a page of MP3s free for the download, which includes Barcelona's "I Have The Password To Your Shell Account". (via Rocknerd)

It's interesting to look at their links page. Among the usual indie labels and stores, there is an Other section, which features 4ZZZ, LiveJournal, and, um, Manchester United. The last addition seems puzzling, looking at the site from the UK; no-one here would associate football with the indie-pop subculture, and Man.U, one of the biggest and highest in profile of clubs, doubly so. Mind you, it appears the be the usual indiekid-Anglophilia phenomenon, where any and all affectations of British everyday versimilitude are more indie than the local variety. This has been commented on in the past, in observations of American indie fans who are into everything one can slap a union flag on, from Blur to Oasis to Fatboy Slim to Mogwai; not to mention appropriations of British slang, sometimes with unintentionally comical results (I mean, "Shag Frenzy" sounds more like a tabloid headline about suburban swingers' parties than a name for an indie night). With that in mind, I wonder how long until indie kids in America and Australia start imitating the chav phenomenon to get that imported-from-Britain boost to their indie cred.

amelia fletcher amusing anglophilia barcelona heavenly indie indiepop tallulah gosh 3

Need meaningless text for a layout? Sick to death of "lorem ipsum dolor"? Why not try the hillbilly version, available here:

Good fixin' sittin' shed mule drunk shiney, ails frontporch em pappy liar feathered. Rodeo trailer yer tarnation cowpoke quarrel water woman him nothin' fetched. Kickin', rottgut fit buy grandma hillbilly askin' guzzled jest bankrupt kinfolk cowpoke mashed catfight. Salesmen mobilehome over mashed poor shed. Simple him dumb and, thar nothin' liniment squalor jail catfight, farmer wuz said.
Muster bull, showed, skinned come fire. Tobaccee greasy work rat ass rightly penny far polecat. Where poker water gritts dogs me. Havin', up work fell salesmen soap. Throwed what his darn preacher java hobo jug no kinfolk give jezebel. Simple fat caboose last, had creosote spittin' it pigs up. Coonskin grandma lament woman crop penny dirt coonskin clan, wagon.

The site itself seems to be a viral-marketing campaign for some outfit that does something or other for webmasters.

(via bOING bOING) hillbilly irony redneck typography 0

Heartwarming patriotic link of the day: America We Stand As One; a power-ballad with angels, children, flags waving and some red hot mullet action. Not to mention that awesome General MIDI brass in the middle. And, if that wasn't enough, here is a version recut with audio from Team America: World Police.

(via MeFi) kitsch mullets patriotism usa 0

A new comic book from Colombia has Pope John Paul II return as a superhero, donning a cape, a utility belt holding holy water and communion wine and special "chastity pants" and battling the forces of evil. "El Increible HomoPater" (which means "Popeman", and not "Gay Dad") is scheduled to go on sale in Colombia and Poland, to be followed by Popeman action figures. A sample page is here.

(via MeFi) bizarre colombia comics pope pope john paul ii superheroes underwear perverts 0

Girls wearing headphones, it seems, are the new girls in glasses. Or perhaps the DJ-culture/music-geek equivalent thereof. (Link is work-safe; via Music Thing)

(via Music Thing) fetish girls headphones photos 2

One for the rivetheads: a surprisingly accurate VNV Nation lyric generator. Except for the references to "spookies" and "role players", perhaps.

I turned my hands up to the sky
standing on the battlefield
I have never felt so cold
and the hail brings a new day

If that's not enough, there's also the Obscure Industrial Index, for more machine-generated goth-techno action.

(via reddragdiva) amusing ebm goth industrial random text vnv nation 0

2005/4/11

Archaeologists have found remnants of the world's oldest pornographic statue, dating back about 7,200 years, in Saxony. Pornographic statues? I imagine that, not having printing presses or JPEG files, that's what they had to make do with. Still, it could be somewhat harder to hide under the mattress.

archaeology porn prehistoric 0

Looking for thematic photographs for your blog posts/online articles? This article gives a number of websites such as stock.xchng, OpenPhoto and morgueFile, where public-domain, Creative Commons-licenced and otherwise free stock photographs may be found, and where photographers can upload their own.

(via MeFi) photos stock photography websites 0

The transformation of Australian politics into a reality TV show gathers pace. Licking their wounds after their catastrophic electoral defeat, Labor have decided that one way to bolster their electoral chances next time around is to run more football personalities as candidates. In particular, they've got an eye on running Eddie McGuire in a Melbourne seat, and a few other high-profile footballers (and they must be high profile if I recognise their names) also being considered. There's nothing to instill respect in the meaningfulness of the democratic process like running footballers as celebrity candidates. Then again, who needs respect for democracy when you've got compulsory voting?

Reports that the Tories are in talks with Sam Newman, and that the Greens have recruited Ella Hooper of Killing Heidi and Tyrone Noonan of george to help them bust the major-party preference blockade, have not been confirmed.

(via The Fix) australia celebrity politics 12

2005/4/10

Apparently, the new Hitchhiker's Guide film really sucks:

This just doesnt feel like Hitchhikers Guide. Theres no sense of a big crazy universe packed with weird lifeforms that somehow reflects our own world. Hitchhikers Guide has always been a Swift-ian satire but the makers of the movie have decided to ditch all that and replace it with pointless surrealism and crude physical comedy.

(Please say it's not packed out with standard Hollywood-issue gross-out bodily-function gags.)

There are quite a few nods to Douglas Adams himself and although these go some way to making up for the almost complete absence of his name from the publicity, surely a better way of paying tribute to this much-loved, much-missed author would be to not fuck about with the sublimely witty dialogue that he sweated blood to create.

And here is a list of things not in the film.

crap hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy hollywood 5

Bhajis Loops, the whimsical and unbelievably nifty PalmOS-based music/audio software, now has a posse an online community site, with forums, tutorials (only a few so far) and a user song archive. Also, there are 3 new effects plug-ins to download, including a granular-sounding pitch-shifter, which should be perfect for the drill'n'bass heads in the audience. (I'm looking at you, Mr. Frogworth.) Also, Bhajis Loops 1.6 is coming out soon, and a complete rewrite is on the way.

Also, looking for the interest "bhajis loops" on LiveJournal brings up this journal, which may belong to the author, or someone else who is a French researcher/student interested in Bhajis Loops, all things Indian, DSP algorithms and PalmOS programming (not to mention Stereolab and, umm, Architecture In Helsinki). The journal says some interesting things there, from discussions of audio algorithms to observations on why signal-based classification of music is doomed to failure:

Music similarity is to me a cultural feature. For example, the distinction between two genres can be very artificial, and is sometimes based on features like "the way the singer is dressed" or "the amount of sexual contents in the lyrics". An example I like mentioning is the East-coast and West-coast rap. How a computer could tell the difference ? Covers are another example of cultural music similarities. You can totally change the tempo, instrumentation, even the style of a song. But it will still be similar to the original, and will be recognized as a cover of the original song, not as a cover of the original work. A final example is when an artist is inspired by another. For example, a lot of Stereolab fans are comparing their music to some of Steve Reich works. I agree with that. But without any musical education, nobody could see a similarity between the two.
Fortunately, some smart people have figured out (and proved) that the best features to compute similarity between songs could be found on the internet (and is cultural, indeed). You can obtain precise features to describe a song or an artist by summarizing the words used in amazon reviews, or usenet posts. You can see how similar two songs are by counting their co-occurences in webradio playlists. A Google search will tell you that "Paul Mc Cartney" and "The Beatles" have something in common, because there are approx. 715000 web pages mentioning both names.

bhajis loops computer music music palm palmos 2

The Uncyclopedia, a joke version of Wikipedia, demonstrating the power of collaborative nonsense. Check it out before the publisher of this book sues it out of existence.

humour uncyclopedia wikipedia 0

2005/4/9

Irony of the day: the anthem of Communism, The Internationale is copyrighted; a filmmaker in France is being shaken down for US$1,283 for having someone whistle the song without permission in one of his films.

Under French law, "The Internationale" won't fall into the public domain until 2014 70 years of post-mortem protection plus extra time to cover the world war. Degeyter died in 1932.

(Via bOING bOING, who point out that there's (a fragment of) a decent electropop version of The Internationale here. Funnily enough, a while ago, I thought that a happy-hardcore/doof/indie-dance version, with some dude rapping about dialectic materialism in the middle, would work well at the numerous anti-capitalism rallies the lefties kept having before 9/11.)

(via bOING bOING) capitalism communism copyright electropop galambosianism intellectual property irony mp3s the internationale 6

2005/4/8

It seems that the big thing in car design is making modern cars that look like vintage models and selling them at a premium to fashionable urbanites. Those new BMW Cooper Minis (you know, the subcompact yuppie lifestyle cars modelled on the cheap'n'cheerful British cars of the 1960s) are everywhere (at least, if everywhere includes West London); the new Volkswagen Beetles, with the integrated flower vases as an ironic appropriation of their hippie status, are so to a lesser extent. And then there are those Chryslers that look like something a 1930s Chicago gangster might ride in.

But why stop there? There are more makes of once-common cars which could be revived as iconic-ironic status symbols. Anything of which old examples, decrepit or lovingly restored, are driven by inner-city hipsters would be fair game for remaking. For example, an all-new FJ Holden, in designer-faded turquoise and avocado green, coming soon to Prahran and Darlinghurst; iPod socket optional. Perhaps there could even be rounded vintage utes, miniaturised to suit urban parking conditions, for style-conscious urbanites. Or, for that matter, more old British cars; perhaps Peugeot could revive the Humber and Hillman marques as designer lines? And boxy, angular 1970s American cars (or, in Australia, Kingswood station wagons) in baby-shit brown would go very well with today's retro-styled fashions and rock.

cars fashion retro 4

2005/4/7

Sony have received a patent on a technology for inducing sensory experiences by ultrasonically stimulating the brain; it works similarly to the transcranial magnetic stimulation used in the "God helmet", which stimulates the sensation of a supernatural or religious experience, only on a finer level. The patent is here; perhaps this means that we can expect a PlayStation accessory that induces the authentic visual, auditory, tactile and olfactory sensations of stalking cyborg terrorists through the ventilation ducts of an alien space station or whatever.

The pattern of energy is constructed such that each portion of the pattern projected into the neural cortex may be individually pulsed at low frequency. The system produces low frequency pulsing by controlling the phase differences between the emitted energy of the primary and secondary transducer array elements. The pulsed ultrasonic signal alters the neural firing timing in the cortex. Changes in the neural firing timing induce various sensory experiences depending on the location of the firing timing change in the cortex. The mapping of sensory areas of the cortex is known and used in current surgically invasive techniques. Thus, the system induces recognizable sensory experiences by applying ultrasonic energy pulsed at low frequency in one or more selected patterns on one or more selected locations of the cortex.

neurology sony tech the god helmet vr 1

Approximately 5% of the population of Poland is expected to go to Rome for the Pope's funeral this week.

Pilgrims have been queuing at Warsaw's central station all week hoping to land a coveted seat on the trains leaving today. LOT, the national airline, is struggling to cope with the demand and Poles are said to be buying tickets for any destinations heading south that may get them closer to Rome.

(I wonder if the Polish mass exodus will spread to London. If so, don't count on food stalls at street markets being open this weekend.)

catholicism poland pope 0

2005/4/6

A post on teaching one's children to program in Python:

your_name = raw_input("What's your name? ")
if your_name.lower() == "freja":
  print "You're very stinky,", your_name
else:
  print "You smell lovely, ", your_name

Which sounds like the next generation's equivalent of 10 PRINT "JASON IS ACE!" 20 GOTO 10

education python 3

It looks like spammers have hit on the technique of putting articles about whatever they're trying to flog into Wikipedia and then sending out spam citing that as an authoritative source, in the hope that at least one person gullible enough to buy from spammers is impressed. Quoting from a recently caught spam:

The only effective nonsurgical method to lengthen the penis is by employing devices that pull at the glans of the penis for extended periods of time. This is known as traction; where tissues under continuous tension will undergoe cellular multiplication. The result is tissue expansion, resulting in a permanent increase of the tissue...
Source : Wikipedia

penis spam wikipedia 0

Dispatches from the obesity epidemic: American punk/goth/alternateen mallrat clothing chain Hot Topic has launched a special chain for super-sized teens. Named Torrid, the chain sells alternative clothing in extra-large sizes, allowing the growing proportion of obese teens to look and feel cool. (via bOING bOING)

goth hot topic obesity punk usa 0

2005/4/5

Compulsively draggable click-toy Google Maps has added satellite imagery to its site; you can now switch between line-art maps and satellite photographs, all zoomable. Some regions don't have satellite imagery at the highest resolution.

Interestingly enough, while the maps are still North America-only, you can drag the satellite view to anywhere in the world; most parts of the world don't let you zoom in to any level that shows signs of habitation though.

google google maps 0

You find the oddest things on LiveJournal, such as a blog reporting on the doings of the British militant left. Nowadays they've got their hands full with "Gorgeous George" Galloway's Islamo-Stalinist Coalition (also known as the Respect Party) and their many attempts to shoehorn militant Islamic fundamentalism into the image of a Marxist liberation movement whilst jettisoning liabilities such as commitments to womens' rights, gay rights and secularism.

george galloway islamism leftwingers stalinism 0

What do you know? "Toothing", the alleged British cultural phenomenon where commuters pair up for casual sex using their mobile phones, turned out to be a hoax; or, at least, started off as one; who knows, perhaps someone somewhere did actually get lucky (either that or some disease) by sending address-book entries from their phone on the Tube, as implausible as it may sound. The hoax did take in quite a few news organisations, including the BBC and WIRED.

bluetooth gibson's law hoax sex toothing 0

2005/4/4

Another reason to not install Flash in your web browser (or, at least, switch it off and start it manually when you need it); not only is Flash used primarily for making ads more annoying, but now it can bypass cookie privacy controls to keep track of your web-browsing habits. (via /.)

Macromedia have a page where you can access your Flash plug-in's privacy settings; if you're using Firefox, you may also want to install Flashblock, which disables Flash by default but lets you load Flash applets on a case-by-case basis.

flash security web 1

Oh dear, the artwork for the upcoming album from adult-contemporary band Coldplay doesn't half look like one of Peter Saville's early works: (via xrrf)

I wonder whether this (and the album's somewhat mechanistic title, "X&Y") means that the band, known for their unchallenging and somewhat schmaltzy easy-listening balladry, are attempting to go for a cold-and-detached aesthetic; perhaps to appeal to nostalgic late-thirtysomethings who grew up listening to Factory Records bands but have since mellowed somewhat. Mind you, if they take it too far, it could alienate their fanbase (ironically enough, the band they were groomed by the press to replace after they went too weird, Radiohead, did something much like that). Then again, I'm sure the band and their label know which side their bread is buttered on. Perhaps this means is that there will be a veneer of retro-fashionable electronic glitchyness grafted over the usual reassuringly saccharine core of ballads.

coldplay dishonesty factory records peter saville 6

Republican-linked U.S. megacorps tighten their stranglehold on the British live music market, as Clear Channel is set to buy out Mean Fiddler, the company behind the Glastonbury and Reading Festivals. Rumours that Glasto will transfer its support of Greenpeace to pro-life groups, or the next festivals will be headlined by Toby Keith and Britney Spears respectively, have not been confirmed.

carling-indie clear channel commercialism mean fiddler uk 0

Interesting to see that the Daily Mail's headline yesterday on the Pope's death was "SAFE IN HEAVEN"; in other words, that they presented an article of faith as a fact. Then again, what are tabloids for?

daily mail in your heart you know it's flat religiots 3

2005/4/2

Pope John Paul II has died, aged 84. He was the most widely travelled pope in the history of the Catholic Church, and extended the religion to new audiences; he also was an ideological hardliner, a veteran of the battle against communist totalitarianism who then turned his guns on secularism and liberalism; or, to quote a Guardian article on his legacy:

"I think this has been a papacy of missed opportunities and lost years, leaving scars that will persist for decades. I would say the Pope has left the church in a shocking, sad state. There is an arrogance and a lack of spirituality in the Vatican, ecumenical relations are at their worst ebb for many years and we have a church crippled by clericalism. I think the Pope lacked faith to allow for a rebirth and renewal of the church."
As the old Pope's grip on power loosened, those around him issued proclamations that amplified his natural doctrinal conservatism, incautiously suggesting non-Catholics were not really Christians, casting anathemas at homosexuality and, most recently, suggesting that girl altar servers should be banned.
There was even an attempt to force God into the European Union constitution - a miscalculated political intervention doomed to failure on a continent where many parties were formed to fight Catholic clericalism in countries which had struggled free of an authoritarian state religion into secular and religious pluralism.

My views on his legacy are mixed; on one hand, he was clearly a man of personal integrity, who deeply believed in both social justice and the dignity of the individual, and was instrumental in ending Soviet tyranny in eastern Europe. On the other hand, the hard-line positions he took on issues such as contraception and the role of women caused much misery in the world. (Still, misery in the temporal world makes demand for hope for the next, and thus is good business if you're running a church. Though I doubt that he thought of it in such cynical terms.) The John Paul II Vatican, having ruled out compromise and rolled back many of the changes of Vatican II, has alienated a lot of liberals, though arguably gotten more converts in need of a strong religion demanding of absolute submission. Whether this is enough to maintain the relevance and power of the Catholic church remains to be see.

And here is the list of the leading candidates for the next Pope, who are also the conclave set to elect the successor. Given that John Paul II had a history of appointing theological conservatives on ideological lines (one cleric accused him of selecting cardinals the way U.S. presidents select Supreme Court judges), there is unlikely to be a radical about-turn during the next papacy. There are a number of Italians there (as expected) and a few other Europeans (notable among them head of Cardinal Ratzinger, head of the Office for the Doctrine of the Faith, a.k.a. the Holy Inquisition), but the other bloc expected to exercise sway is from Latin America.

catholic inquisition pope pope john paul ii religion 0

Apparently British technogoth scifi author Charlie Stross has uploaded to a new Sony PSP:

"Charlie was teetering on the precipice of transhumanism for the whole last year," said his friend and collaborator Cory Doctorow. "His lifestyle and cerebral/neurological capabilities had been ramped up through intensive ideation and selective smart-drug use to an exquisite pitch just short of the Singularity. When he laid his hands on that sweet, sweet hunk of hardware, it provided the critical mass of complexification necessary to tip him over fully into the Extropian ideal condition."

(Stross himself has posted a correction, saying that it was a Palm Pilot he uploaded to. Which makes more sense; would anyone with Stross' copyfighter credentials really want to upload to a Sony PSP? I imagine that, with the DRM infrastructure, it would be too much like being trapped in a prison for all eternity (or, at least, until the batteries run out).

Anyway, he may not be the first to have done so; it is rumoured that Australian hard-scifi writer Greg Egan's absence from the publishing world is due to him having uploaded some years ago:

Aussie critic and potential "Spiker" himself, Damien Broderick, comments, "I tried to visit Egan years ago, and found myself stuck in a timelike infinity loop once I got too close to his nominal address. Only the concerted efforts of Stephen Baxter, Vernor Vinge and Greg Bear were able to free me. And even now, all my interior organs remain reversed. I subsist solely on amino acids of alternate chiriality."

Really? And I thought he was too busy fighting for asylum-seekers' human rights.

charlie stross cory doctorow greg egan palm psp scifi sony 1

2005/4/1

The Age reviews New Order's new album, drawing attention to Bernard Sumner's uniquely leaden songwriting:

Guilt Is a Useless Emotion provides the classic dodgy lines: "Real love can't be bought/It is wild and it can't be caught."

And below that, it accuses New Order of having been "the whitest - that is, most blindingly uptight - disco band in the world" (not that that's a bad thing; one doesn't listen to New Order for the same reason one listens to, say, Prince).

Was True Faith about falling in love with a person or falling in love with your sequencer?

Neither, actually -- it was about heroin.

heroin music new order 0

Once again, The Null Device can't be arsed doing an April Fools' Day edition. Blame having other things to do, and/or not enough good ideas that haven't been executed much better.

Meanwhile, on other sites, Momus reveals that he hates Japan, and Graham does his usual site-replacement. And also check out bORING bORING, a brilliant parody of a certain blog, right down to "TIRED" and "StudiousGirls" sponsor ads and Cory's DRM obsessions. The only thing they left out is Xeni's porn-kitsch-culture observations and any reference to Disneyland.

april fool's day 1