The Null Device
2005/5/31
It will soon be possible to use mobile phones on the Tube, with Ken Livingstone promising full coverage of the system within 3 years, and also mentioning the tantalising prospect of wireless internet access on the Tube. (Though have they figured out how to hand moving connections over between access points yet?) Meanwhile, opposition politicians are concerned over terrorists using phones as detonators, the anti-mast movement is concerned about the microwave saturation making Tube journeys even more carcinogenic, and everyone else is concerned about there being no escape from that bloody Crazy Frog or whatever inanity replaces it.
According to the Toronto police sex crimes unit, the vast majority of people arrested for child pornography offences are obsessed with Star Trek:
The first thing detectives from the Toronto police sex crimes unit saw when they entered Roderick Cowan's apartment was an autographed picture of William Shatner. Along with the photos on the computer of Scott Faichnie, also busted for possessing child porn, they found a snapshot of the pediatric nurse and Boy Scout leader wearing a dress "Federation" uniform. Another suspect had a TV remote control shaped like a phaser. Yet another had a Star Trek credit card in his wallet. One was using "Picard" as his screen name. In the 3 1/2 years since police in Canada's biggest city established a special unit to tackle child pornography, investigators have been through so many dwellings packed with sci-fi books, DVDs, toys and collectibles like Klingon swords and sashes that it's become a dark squadroom joke. "We always say there are two types of pedophiles: Star Trek and Star Wars," says Det. Ian Lamond, the unit's second-in-command. "But it's mostly Star Trek."And there's more on the claims here, including letters from indignant Trekkies complaining that the article vilifies Trekkies whilst failing to put forward the "ethics, morality and message" of their
(via bOING bOING) ¶ 1
Two members leave The Cure (hang on, weren't they supposed to have broken up?), reducing the veteran band to a trio. Though, given that The Cure jumped the shark sometime around 1990, and have since done a profitable but dull line in Cure-by-numbers, this isn't particularly noteworthy.
What is noteworthy, though, is the mention on the bottom of the news item that Robert Smith is currently working on a remastered version of Blue Sunshine, a much-underrated psychedelic-pop album done by Cure/Banshees side project The Glove in 1982 or so.
I haven't been paying enough attention to France's rejection of the EU constitution to comment insightfully on it, but Momus has:
It seems to me that a very similar thing has happened to Europe that has happened in the US: the people voting Yes to the EU constitution have the same educated, urban profile as the people voting Democrat in the last US election. And in both cases they've been defeated and outnumbered by less tolerant, less affluent and educated, more anxious, irrational and xenophobic people from smaller towns and country areas. People who feel like outsiders to the political process are now, with splendid passive aggression, exacting their revenge by dealing it blows. In many cases these people are also outsiders to the process of wealth creation: strip away the blue coasts and the big cities and America loses the economic powerhouses which make it the world's predominant power. It's the same in Europe: the people now determining the shape of the continent are the insecure poor, unwilling to share their meagre income with Polish plumbers and Turkish bakers, but also unwilling to admit their economic dependence on the dynamic city folk and political elites they've just dealt a slap in the face.Perhaps this is a good thing for trans-Atlantic peace. Perhaps the red-state Americans and the French Non-sayers can realise that they have a lot in common, put aside their hatreds of each others' countries and unite in a big joyous pogrom of their respective inner-city liberal-cosmopolitanist elites, shortly before devolving into a new dark age of poverty, superstition and xenophobia.
Fountainhead Earth is a twenty-volume philosophical fiction novel by Nobel prizewinning author Ayn Rand. It was Rand's last work of fiction, and all volumes after the first were published posthumously:
Bureaucratic aliens from the planet Stanton have invaded Earth, stifling all rational thought in a mere nine minutes. They enslave all the architects, forcing them to build fashionable and nonfunctional Doric façades in front of every McDonalds. Randroids, huge semi-mechanical creatures, a cross between a cyborg and a public-address system, stride the landscape in Ayn Borg Collectives.
Johnnie "Galtboy" Tyler (played by Keanu Reeves) comes along and meets Dilbert (played by John Travolta) and Wally (played by Forest Whitaker). Disgusted with their office politics and disregard for quality, Johnnie trains his tribe of cavemen in capitalism in one week and achieves a leveraged buyout of perfectly preserved Harrier jumpjets. He then flies these back to the planet Stanton and delivers a 40,000-page speech that bores the aliens literally to death.
(via 
reddragdiva) ¶ 3
2005/5/30
The latest malware won't merely spew ads at you or use your Windows PC as a zombie to send spam: it will encrypt your files and demand a ransom for the key:
Stewart managed to unlock the infected computer files without paying the extortion, but he worries that improved versions might be more difficult to overcome. Internet attacks commonly become more effective as they evolve over time as hackers learn to avoid the mistakes of earlier infections.
"The problem is getting away with it -- you've got to send the money somewhere," Stewart said. "If it involves some sort of monetary transaction, it's far easier to trace than an e-mail account."Perhaps future versions will demand that the users donate CPU cycles/network bandwidth instead of money? Then again, those are easy enough to steal without extortion.
2005/5/29
The South African capital, currently known as Pretoria, is being renamed to Tshwane, the name of an ancient African king, and also a word meaning something like "unity". The renaming has to do with breaking links with the old colonial white minority regime.
By the same token, perhaps when the republican debate restarts in Australia, we can expect proposals for renaming Australian cities. After all, why should cities bear the names of dead English noblemen like Viscount Sydney or Lord Melbourne (let alone areas named after imperial war heroes like Baron Collingwood)? Perhaps, if Germaine Greer's Aboriginal republic ever comes about, Sydney can be renamed to "Warrane" or similar, and other places can have similar post-colonial name changes.
2005/5/28
I went to see Mysterious Skin tonight. It's a recent American art-house film about two boys who had been sexually molested by a baseball coach in a small town; ten years on, one boy is a somewhat callous, promiscuous gay hustler (who looks a bit like a hipster Mr. Spock), while the other blocked out details of the experience, believing instead that he had been abducted by aliens, and is trying to figure out what really happened during those lost hours.
The posters on the Tube advertised it as "slinky-hipped and sleazy-poetic", which makes it sound like the next album from The Killers or something, though the impression is misleading; this is a thoughtful and often beautifully shot film, at times explicit and harrowing, though not gratuitously so. The soundtrack really added to it; it was by Robin Guthrie (from the Cocteau Twins) and Harold Budd, and also featured songs by Slowdive, Curve and Sigur Rós, and not an overhyped NME New Wave Revival band in earshot.
I wonder whether there was any connection between the Slowdive songs in the soundtrack and the other UFO contactee being named Avalyn.
The Furry Music Foundation is "an informal organization of furries, for furries and with furries, working separately and together for the good of furry music." And they have three CDs of "furry music", with titles like "Furry Fantasies", "Silky Fur" and "The Wolf In You", for sale, and samples to download. (If you wondered what "furry music" sounds like, imagine a cross between goth/darkwave, cod-mediæval video-game/anime incidental music and Eurovision contenders, complete with floridly elaborate general-MIDI arrangements and the occasional lyrics about embracing one's inner otter or whatever.)
(via outsider_music) ¶ 0
2005/5/27
The Nokia 770 looks nifty. It's not a mobile phone, but rather a thin client, with a touch screen, web browsing/RSS reading/VoIP facilities; it can connect to the internet via WiFi, or by Bluetooth through a mobile phone. Even more interestingly, the system software is entirely open-source, based on Debian Linux and GNOME with a Symbian-esque GTK-based UI named Hildon. Full developer tools are available for downloading.
Of course, the 770 has its downsides, such as the lack of storage facilities more substantial than a MMC slot; though even with these shortcomings, it looks extremely hackable. (You could try playing cat and mouse with Sony on getting user code running on a PSP, or you could get a 770 and run what you want on it with Nokia's blessing.) MusicThing already lists one application for it, as a control surface for music performance.
Meanwhile, Nokia have committed to allowing use of all their patents in the Linux kernel.
(via MusicThing, /.) ¶ 0
Music Thing has a feature on how various tiny, ubiquitous sounds and pieces of music were created. The Mac startup sound, for example, was a C Major chord played on a Korg Wavestation, whereas Brian Eno created the Microsoft sound during a creative dry spell.
(via MusicThing) ¶ 0
A survey of the similarities between love and various pathological conditions:
The initial drive - lust - is brought on by surges of sex hormones, such as testosterone and estrogen. These induce an indiscriminate scramble for physical gratification. Attraction transpires once a more-or-less appropriate object is found (with the right body language and speed and tone of voice) and is tied to a panoply of sleep and eating disorders.
Obsessive thoughts regarding the Loved One and compulsive acts are also common. Perception is distorted as is cognition. "Love is blind" and the lover easily fails the reality test. Falling in love involves the enhanced secretion of b-Phenylethylamine (PEA, or the "love chemical") in the first 2 to 4 years of the relationship. This natural drug creates an euphoric high and helps obscure the failings and shortcomings of the potential mate. Such oblivion - perceiving only the spouse's good sides while discarding her bad ones - is a pathology akin to the primitive psychological defense mechanism known as "splitting". Narcissists - patients suffering from the Narcissistic Personality Disorder - also Idealize romantic or intimate partners. A similar cognitive-emotional impairment is common in many mental health conditions.
Love, in all its phases and manifestations, is an addiction, probably to the various forms of internally secreted norepinephrine, such as the aforementioned amphetamine-like PEA. Love, in other words, is a form of substance abuse. The withdrawal of romantic love has serious mental health repercussions.
Also via Mind Hacks, studies of the neurology of sarcasm, which turns out to be a good subject for exploring subjects' theory of mind, being carried out at the fantastically-named Rambam Medical Center in Haifa, Israel.
More claims of the impending age of immortality, this time from the head of BT's futurology unit.
'If you draw the timelines, realistically by 2050 we would expect to be able to download your mind into a machine, so when you die it's not a major career problem,' Pearson told The Observer. 'If you're rich enough then by 2050 it's feasible. If you're poor you'll probably have to wait until 2075 or 2080 when it's routine. We are very serious about it. That's how fast this technology is moving: 45 years is a hell of a long time in IT.'
That may be too late for many people alive today, unless Aubrey de Grey is right and the whole growing-old-and-dying problem is solved within a decade. If he's only slightly right, they may solve it well enough that the nonagenerians of the late 21st century have minds still sufficiently undecrepit to be worth uploading. It would suck to die a few years short of becoming immortal.
Photogenic Australian drug smuggler convicted in Indonesia, sentenced to 20 years. This is a somewhat more lenient sentence than many were expecting; initially she was facing the death penalty, though presumably the economic pressure of a potential Australian boycott of Bali prevailed. If she wasn't a photogenic young woman with the tabloid media on her side, she'd probably be facing a firing squad (much as nine other less fortunate Australians are set to do).
Meanwhile, the government is quick to make political hay with a populist gesture of donating two QCs to work on her appeal, paid for by your taxes, and working on a prisoner-transfer agreement to save her the indignity of a barbaric Indonesian jail (expect the Schapelle Corby Act 2005 to show up in Hansard soon); you'd think there was an election coming up or something. An much wailing and gnashing of teeth ensues online:
"I am devestated with the verdict of the Indonesian Courts for Schapelle Corby. When the verdict was given, I fell into a bit of a heap, but Schapelles strength made me gain my composure pretty quickly.
"strength"? Looks like Australia has now found its Princess Di. Look for discount mobile-phone baron Ron Bakir, who owns the trademark on "Schapelle Corby", to make a mint in the commemorative-mug trade.
Some sought to tie Australia's tsunami aid to the issue. Bryan Griffin wrote: "I am sure that all people, not just Australians will also feel sick. "Maybe some of the donations made by us for the disaster should be returned to pay her fine. It's like a double wammy for Indonesia and their finances.Note the subtexts there: the life of an Australian convicted of drug trafficking is worth more than those of Indonesians affected by the tsunami. And the fact that she was convicted of drug trafficking is irrelevant, because we all know that Indonesian courts are corrupt. The fact that the "evidence" for the defence consisted of prison hearsay that no Australian court would have accepted seems to have gotten conveniently lost along the way.
And, of course, the Australian media's content-free, sensationalist beat-up hasn't helped things.
I wonder whether Indonesian restaurants across Australia are hanging up prominent "Schapelle is Innocent" signs (which, I imagine, the Herald-Sun will provide) in their windows to avoid being summarily boycotted or worse, much as Afghan restaurants proclaimed their opposition to terrorism after 9/11.
TiddlyWiki, a rather nifty-looking JavaScript/DHTML-based wiki running entirely in the browser. It doesn't actually have a back-end, so it's read-only unless opened from a local file in Firefox. As used in Charlie Stross' slightly facetious guide to the Singularity.
Update: And here is a properly AJAX version of TiddlyWiki, which uses a PHP back-end to store entries.
The Australian Tory government has revealed its workplace reforms today. They're not quite as bad as they could be; Australians get to keep 4 weeks of annual leave as a basic entitlement, for example, rather than going to a US-style one-week-if-your-employer-likes-you system, and working weeks remain at 35 to 40 hours (as opposed to the EU's 48, or the UK's unlimited length). Though the right to appeal unfair dismissals has been abolished, and niceties like leave loading and long-service leave could be subject to how much your employer wants your services when your contract is signed.
2005/5/26
If The Sun is to be believed, the Chernobyl nuclear disaster has spawned a generation of mutant super-kids, with higher IQs, faster reaction times and stronger immune systems.
New Scientist has a survey of ways of optimising the functioning of one's brain, covering everything from the effects of diet, sleep and various kinds of mental and physical exercise to the possibilities of smart drugs and technological augmentations:
According to research published in 2003, kids breakfasting on fizzy drinks and sugary snacks performed at the level of an average 70-year-old in tests of memory and attention. Beans on toast is a far better combination, as Barbara Stewart from the University of Ulster, UK, discovered. Toast alone boosted children's scores on a variety of cognitive tests, but when the tests got tougher, the breakfast with the high-protein beans worked best.
Say you're trying to master a new video game. Instead of grinding away into the small hours, you would be better off playing for a couple of hours, then going to bed. While you are asleep your brain will reactivate the circuits it was using as you learned the game, rehearse them, and then shunt the new memories into long-term storage. When you wake up, hey presto! You will be a better player. The same applies to other skills such as playing the piano, driving a car and, some researchers claim, memorising facts and figures. Even taking a nap after training can help, says Carlyle Smith of Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario.
Neurofeedback grew out of biofeedback therapy, popular in the 1960s. It works by showing people a real-time measure of some seemingly uncontrollable aspect of their physiology - heart rate, say - and encouraging them to try and change it. Astonishingly, many patients found that they could, though only rarely could they describe how they did it.
I'm back in London, having spent the last week in Melbourne. I had little time to access the net, spending most of my visit catching up with people and attending to various matters, hence the lack of blogging.
Melbourne was still where it had always been. A few things had changed (there's a JB Hi-Fi in Bourke St. where a discount clothing shop had been, 3RRR have moved out to Brunswick, and new trains had replaced most, but not all, of the old Hitachi trains), but generally, it felt as if I hadn't been away. People I knew were still there, and many of the familiar landmarks were as I remembered them. Oh, and EMI are still releasing corrupt CDs there.
My flight to Melbourne was a Qantas flight, whereas my flight back was with British Airways. Which are roughly similar, except that Qantas has better entertainment systems in cattle-class (you can actually play Tetris-like games on the screen in front of you), whereas BA has better in-flight duty-free shopping. The BA seats also had regular headphone sockets, thus allowing one to use something better than the craptacular headsets provided by airlines. (I had my Sennheiser PX200s with me, and they worked remarkably well; I'd say that actual noise-cancelling headphones are probably overkill.)
I briefly considered buying a PSP in Singapore (where they are out, unlike in Europe), though thought better of it, partly because of a lack of compelling titles (I've heard good things about Katamari Damacy, though that's not out on the PSP), and partly because no-one has figured out how to run user code on a current one yet.
Anyway, during my visit, I took some photos documenting Melbourne's café culture (the like of which I haven't seen in London); these photos may be found here.
2005/5/18
Blogging will probably be light for the next few days or so, as I'll be in Australia, visiting family and friends.
Several matrices describing what different European tribes think of each other; taken from this vaguely cocaine-tinged piece from eXile (which is sort of like a Moscow-based VICE).
And then there's How To Find A Man In Europe And Leave Him There, an American girl's guide to European men, loaded with facile stereotypes (not least of all being that of its intended target audience).
I have been thinking about the homebrew-console-games-vs.-manufacturer-DRM issue recently.
New consoles with new capabilities come out, often containing powerful CPUs and graphics chips, and hackers and hobbyists want to have a go at writing code for them and getting them to do things other than consume titles. The manufacturers, of course, design the units so as to prevent unauthorised code running on them, primarily to protect their business model. The video-game console business model typically involves selling the consoles cheaply (often at a loss) and collecting a cut of the price of each game sold. Of course, for this to work, console makers have to strictly control what code will run on their machines, and ensure that they get a cut of every item released for them.
It's a stiflingly regressive reality, though it appears to be stable and is unlikely to go away any time soon. The alternative model (open game machines, sold at above-cost price, with anyone able to develop code for them) has been tried and failed; witness the Tapwave Zodiac PalmOS-based game machine, for example. Customers are more likely to buy cheap consoles and more expensive games for them later, in instalments, than to buy a more expensive console with cheaper software. Of course, this makes game consoles somewhat stagnant platforms (compared to, say, PCs or handhelds), though the game market seems to be able to cope with this well enough for it to be the best current business model for that kind of business.
(This ignores mobile phone J2ME games, which anyone can write and run on any compliant mobile phone without the manufacturer's blessing. Mobile phones are heavily subsidised as well, though they are subsidised by phone companies who make the money back in network usage; besides which, J2ME is a fairly weak gaming platform (for one, the low-power CPUs used in mobile phones often mean sluggish response times for navigating the internal menus, let alone games). Perhaps this will change in future.)
Nonetheless, that does not change the fact that hardware such as the PSP and Nintendo DS is tantalisingly attractive to tinkerers. When it was discovered recently that certain early Japanese PSPs could be made to execute code off a Memory Stick, a hacker community cropped up, with games, demos, utilities and ports of old console emulators popping up like mushrooms after a rain; the more recent firmware has closed off this hole, and anyone running a recent game on an old PSP will find themselves upgraded against their will.
What if, instead of locking out the hacker culture, game companies worked with it, whilst still preserving their business model? Imagine, for example, a device sold by the console manufacturer which costs about the difference between the retail and cost price of a game machine and enables it to run homebrew code. It could be a disc, a hardware dongle, or even a special cable. Unlike homebrew hacks (such as the Nintendo DS passthrough cartridge), it requires no soldering and no fabrication of circuit boards, allowing those who don't have a fetish for that sort of thing to get involved. Perhaps it comes with development tools and documentation (the GNU toolchain would be a start), or even membership of a community web site, where users can share their code. From time to time, publishers could release compilations of the best such titles, perhaps in a magazine format, doing the necessary licensing to make the releases run on standard machines.
Sony once tried something like this with their PlayStation 1; they called it "Net Yaroze", and apparently it wasn't a stellar success. I wonder whether it could be done better.
Of course, if the console makers don't throw a bone to hobbyists, makers of third-party extensions (of various levels of legality) just might; and these would be less concerned with protecting the makers' profit margins.
Cuba is now planning to abandon Windows for Linux, following such radical states as Brazil and, umm, Munich. The "open source = Communism" mob will undoubtedly have a field day with this news.
Del Puerto said his office was working on a legal framework that would allow the replacement of the Windows system.
Hang on... a legal framework? Isn't Cuba on the list of countries it is illegal to export Windows too? I imagine Microsoft would have a hard time selling licenses to Cuba, for one. And would Cuba even recognise US software licensing law? Perhaps they have to make a show of being good global intellectual-property citizens if they are to keep those Che merchandise and Buena Vista Social Club CD royalties coming in.
The British government has found yet another use for the ever-versatile anti-social behaviour order, or ASBO: using them to ban protesters from approaching US military facilities; the Ministry of Defense has sought an ASBO against a 63-year-old grandmother and peace protester who has been upsetting personnel with protest signs outside the NSA listening post Menwith Hill.
2005/5/17
I'm not a huge fan of the This Modern World comic. Perhaps it comes from not living in the U.S., and thus being able to tune out the domestic issues it often covers, or perhaps it's that, more often than not, it tends to smugly preach to the choir and its message can be boiled down to something like "Republicans/neocons/right-wingers are insane, evil doodyheads and they smell, so there". However, the most recent one is a rather keen satire of recent Creationist tactics.
Blogging ambulanceman Tom Reynolds talks about the weather, or, more precisely, about how the weather influences the sorts of accidents and incidents that occur:
If the weather is grey and overcast, we tend to go to more old folk who are sitting indoors, or more commonly, falling over indoors. Sometimes you get the impression that they just want someone to talk to -- or to not be alone. There also seem to be more suicide attempts as well -- and it is fairly well known that suicide rates go up in springtime. So on those rainy spring days you end up seeing a lot of Paracetamol overdoses.
Spring and Autumn rains (and in England, Summer rains) bring with them car vs car collisions, as an infrequent rain lifts off the layer of rubber and pollution left on the road by passing cars and the roads become a skid pan. Fallen leaves on the road don't help, and neither do the effects of the rapidly changing hours of daylight on a drivers bodyclock.
The hot weather also brings out the people who start drinking at lunchtime, and continue throughout the day, tie this in with a lot of sporting fixtures, and we find ourselves going to a lot of fights in a lot of pubs.
If this somewhat Toryish-looking blog is right, unsavoury dictator-fancier George Galloway may forfeit his seat in Parliament:
Problem for him is, that he has not sworn the oath in the House of Commons. He will not be back in London until after the Queen's Speech, which is the deadline when all MPs have to have affirmed or taken the oath.
Unless the Speaker lets him off, if he sets foot on the floor of the House when he gets back, he will be fined £500, and his Bethnal Green and Bow seat would be automatically vacated.
Though didn't Gerry Adams also refuse to take the oath, and manage to retain his seat (not to mention his Westminster office and parliamentary perks), merely forfeiting the right to enter Parliament? In any case, it looks like the voters of Bethnal Green won't get much in the way of democratic representation.
Apparently Radiohead are recording their new album. They have 15 new songs, and the album is expected to be ready for release next year. There's no word on who will release it; Hail To The Thief completed their contract with EMI, and they made noises about going it alone.
Apparently, an external FireWire hard disk beats an IDE-connected notebook drive, or at least the 4200RPM ones. So, if you have a Mac mini and want to make it faster, your best advice is to wipe the internal hard disk and boot it off an external 3.5" drive in a FireWire enclosure; performance will then improve steeply.
Of course, the same considerations come into play for laptops, though one obviously wouldn't want to lug around an external FireWire drive enclosure with one's shiny new PowerBook. Though the author of the article reports good results from swapping his PowerBook's drive for a 7200RPM notebook drive. (Whether or not this is a good idea would depend on how much extra heat a faster drive generates, and what tolerance the design of the laptop in question has for hotter-running hard drives.)
There are now Nintendo Entertainment System and SNES emulators for the PlayStation Portable. Of course, they will only run on Japanese PSPs with the old 1.0 firmware, which doesn't restrict the running of code from the Memory Stick, and that's only until someone runs a game which automatically patches the firmware on the unit.
Let's hope that they figure out a way of getting homebrew code to run on a PSP, as that looks like a pretty nifty platform to run things on.
(via bOING bOING, gizmodo) ¶ 0
Some good news for Tube commuters: the air on the London Underground may be equivalent to smoking a cigarette every 20 minutes, but it's still healthier than the air up top. I'm not sure whether that's reassuring or worrying.
(via london-underground) ¶ 0
The LiveJournal people have unveiled their distributed identity system. Temporarily dubbed "yadis", it's based on FOAF and an AJAX-esque backchannel (though does not need to use AJAX technologies, or even JavaScript), and will ultimately allow sites to accept users authenticated on other sites; it also stands a good chance of somehow finding its way into the next version of SixApart's TypeKey. Update: It has now been renamed "OpenID", and also has a nifty, and somewhat Apple-esque, grey-and-orange icon.
2005/5/16
Not sure what to put in the remaining 5¼" drive bay of your souped-up PC, next to the DVD rewriter, 50-function fan-controller/card reader and graphical status display? How about an audio cassette deck. It plugs into a serial port and your sound card through a breakout box, comes with Windows software for controlling it and recording from/to audio cassettes, and can be yours for a mere US$149 (from ThinkGeek, not surprisingly).
Two academics from Victoria's Deakin University have published a paper calling for torture to be legalised to help fight terrorism. Not that there's much new in this (celebrated US lawyer Alan Dershowitz argued a similar point in his call for "torture warrants" some years ago), except perhaps for the extreme utilitarian stance they take, advocating even the torturing to death of innocents if the ends justify it:
Asked if he believed interrogators should be able to legally torture an innocent person to death if they had evidence the person knew about a major public threat, such as the September 11 attacks, Professor Bagaric replied: "Yes, you could."
Applying utilitarian cost-benefit calculations to matters of human lives is tricky; taking the strict numerical approach, it should be OK to kill an innocent person to harvest their kidneys if it would save the lives of two terminally ill patients; after all, the net gain is one life. Of course, Bagaric and Clarke are not asserting such an absolute a-life-for-a-life arithmetic, though by allowing the killing of the innocent to save others, they are crossing a line towards it. And that is not even looking at the question of whether torture works (the value of testimony obtained under torture has been somewhat dubious).
Anyway, I suspect that Bagaric and Clarke's law lectures are probably going to become a lot less quiet.
Cross-cultural artefact of the day: ABC guidelines on how to refer to deceased Aboriginal people (PDF), referring to the common Aboriginal tradition prohibiting the use of the personal names of the recently deceased:
People who share the personal name of the deceased person--including English names--will very often temporarily or permanently adopt another personal name.
In central Australia, the construction "Kumanjayi"--and variants--are used to replace the personal name of the deceased, and is very commonly taken on by people who share the same or similar sounding personal name&emdash... Again as an example, the main town of central Australia was referred to by members of some communities as "Kumanjayi Springs", after the death of a woman called Alice. In the latter case, it could hardly be expected a media organisation should follow this practice!
I once read that one reason why the vocabularies Australian Aboriginal languages changed relatively rapidly was that often the names for various things would be changed if they sounded much like the names of recently deceased people.
Orchestras across Europe are being contacted to help identify a man found on a beach in Kent, dressed in a soaking-wet tuxedo. The man had no identification and did not speak. Staff at the Medway Maritime Hospital gave him a pen and paper, on which he drew detailed pictures of a grand piano; when shown the piano in the hospital's chapel, he regaled staff with a 2-hour virtuoso performance:
Interestingly, the BBC article claims that the hospital believes he may be from Eastern Europe, whereas The Times asserts that police believe that he is English, and also that he drew a Swedish flag along with the piano.
He is being held in a secure mental-health unit, presumably in case it turns out that someone had tried to kill him and they decide to finish the job.
An interesting MSNBC article speculating on the future of human evolution, and interviewing scientists including Richard Dawkins:
Some environmentalists say toxins that work like estrogens are already having an effect: Such agents, found in pesticides and industrial PCBs, have been linked to earlier puberty for women, increased incidence of breast cancer and lower sperm counts for men.
"One of the great frontiers is going to be trying to keep humans alive in a much more toxic world," he observed from his Seattle office. "The whales of Puget Sound are the most toxic whales on Earth. Puget Sound is just a huge cesspool. Well, imagine if that goes global."
If we count humanity's technology as part of the evolving package &emdash; the extended phenotype, as Dawkins called it &emdash; then that will become part of the future of humanity, even if only due to the inevitable increase in pollution of an increasingly crowded Earth. Our descendants will have microscopic flotillas of nanobots in their bloodstreams, hunting down toxins and zapping proto-cancerous mutations. Perhaps corporations will remain the dominant species on earth, and the nanobots will be rented from the corporation that owns the patents for them; any human unlucky or imprudent enough to miss a payment can look forward to dying of massive organ failure, turning into a mass of tumours or having their suddenly naked immune system eaten alive by superbugs within 24 hours. Unless you live in the future's equivalent of Brazil or somesuch, in which case you'd get free open-source nanobots, considered by the America of the future to be pirated. But I digress.
Further on, the article speculates about whether humanity will diverge into different species, looking at Eloi/Morlocks scenarios, whether any sort of apocalyptic scenario could divide humanity into enough separate subgroups for them to evolve separately, and the question of body enhancement:
"You're talking about three different kinds of humans: the enhanced, the naturals and the rest," Garreau said. "The enhanced are defined as those who have the money and enthusiasm to make themselves live longer, be smarter, look sexier. That's what you're competing against."
In Garreau's view of the world, the naturals will be those who eschew enhancements for higher reasons, just as vegetarians forgo meat and fundamentalists forgo what they see as illicit pleasures. Then there's all the rest of us, who don't get enhanced only because they can't. "They loathe and despise the people who do, and they also envy them."
Then there is the question of germline genetic engineering, which could create instant races of superhumans or monsters, the AI singularity and even the vaguely retro-sounding prospect of spacefaring.
2005/5/13
Not that long ago, a joystick-shaped device named the C64 DTV, containing a Commodore 64-compatible computer (developed by Jeri Ellsworth, who also created the C-One super-C64) and 30 games, appeared on the market. Hackers who bought these are now opening them up and adding things to them; for one, it is possible solder on a PS2 keyboard (unlike the original C64, this one speaks the PS2 keyboard protocol) and, indeed, a standard Commodore serial bus connector for plugging in a drive (photos here); alternatively, one can embed a DTV inside a working Commodore floppy drive. With a keyboard and storage, the diminutive box (costing US$20, or about 3 times as much in the UK) becomes a fully usable Commodore 64, except for a few additional augmentations, such as a video chip capable of 256 colours. And there is more information on undocumented features of the DTV here.
Found whilst looking at the Wikipedia article on Jon Ronson: the First Earth Battalion Field Manual, as mentioned in The Men Who Stare At Goats. Imagine an artefact from a parallel universe or a Robert Anton Wilson novel where, for a time in the late 1970s, Timothy Leary ran the U.S. Army, and you'll have some idea of what it is.
(via "Jon Ronson") ¶ 0
2005/5/12
For the best part of a decade, the application for anyone who wanted to make their own fonts (PostScript or TrueType) was Fontographer. Then, sometime in 1997, Macromedia (who had recently acquired it) abandoned it. They kept selling it, but no new development took place, and advances in font technology (such as, say, Unicode and OpenType) passed it by. Even worse, the last version turned out to not work at all under MacOS X, presumably due to the programmers having used some sort of undocumented shortcut that the Classic environment couldn't handle.
Anyway, now Fontlab has acquired Fontographer from Macromedia Adobe (who have no font editing tools of their own on offer and no intention to change this; which is rather surprising from the inventors of PostScript), to integrate into their font-editing product. It'll take the mid-range niche, between basic font editing program TypeTool and the high-end FontLab package.
According to former RRR announcer Cousin Creep (since working on US radio), the latest thing in radio formats in the US is a format called "Jack". The Jack format appears to consist of the equivalent of an iPod full of songs from various incompatible genres put on shuffle, with prerecorded "short patronizing voice overs with lame postmodern attitude" between the tracks (whatever that means); apparently it appeals to the ever-shortening attention spans of the public or somesuch, and also means that stations don't have to employ DJs.
Could the radio format which only plays "the best 30 seconds" of each song be far off?
A map of Neverland Ranch, Michael Jackson's estate/theme park, for those curious about what goes on behind the kingdom walls of the world's only living fairytale prince. Note the graphic of a little boy on the moon (shouldn't Mr. Spielberg's lawyers be on the phone about that?), the usual vaguely Edwardian childhood affectations, facilities run by other friends of children such as Nestlé, and other things (is Club KISS run by Gene Simmons, or does Michael Jackson actually mean "kiss" in the other sense?). Not to mention two train lines, one seemingly leading out of the estate to parts unknown.
(via bOING bOING) ¶ 0
According to a report by the American Institute of Religions, the Church of Scientology is steadily losing members to Fictionology, a new religion created in 2003 by Bud Don Ellroy, author of Imaginetics: The New Pipe-Dream Of Modern Mental Make-Believe.:
"Unlike Scientology, which is based on empirically verifiable scientific tenets, Fictionology's central principles are essentially fairy tales with no connection to reality," the AIR report read. "In short, Fictionology offers its followers a mythical belief system free from the cumbersome scientific method to which Scientology is hidebound."
Fictionology's central belief, that any imaginary construct can be incorporated into the church's ever-growing set of official doctrines, continues to gain popularity. Believers in Santa Claus, his elves, or the Tooth Fairy are permittedeven encouragedto view them as deities. Even corporate mascots like the Kool-Aid Man are valid objects of Fictionological worship.
Ah, so Fictionology is like the entire set of Discordian/SubGenius-inspired "churches" formed on the net over the past decade then? (I'm not sure whether there was a Church of the Kool-Aid Man, but there could well have been.)
(via reddragdiva) ¶ 1
2005/5/11
Penguin (the publishers) are having an audiobook remix contest (Flash required, unfortunately). They provide a few samples from 30 audiobooks (including Alice In Wonderland, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Kerouac's On the Road, several James Bond novels and the most recent Nick Hornby) for downloading, and allow participants to upload their entries, where they will be made available for streaming. The handful of entries presently uploaded vary from quite decent ("Spot's Urban Dub Mix") to boring arrangements of loops with samples spread over the top. Unfortunately, though, it's only open to UK residents.
Hmmm... I can imagine a few approaches that could work... the Dracula samples could lend themselves to Dr. Mabuse-style euro-synthpop (or, obviously, anything describable as "goth"), Casino Royale could work with a sleazy cocktail lounge sound, and Moby Dick could be done with crackly blues loops and a Korg M1 synth preset.
(via bOING bOING) ¶ 0
The Guardian's piece on glam/funk-rock band El Presidente compares them to the Scissor Sisters. Funny, I'd say they're more like Electric Six, or at least how you'd imagine the Six would be if their stage presence matched their music.
(via Sweeping the Nation) ¶ 0
A tutorial on how to make isometric pixel art, à la the pixelicious Eboy.com. It's pitched at beginners, though has some useful hints. From what I gathered, Eboy's system is somewhat more sophisticated, with modular libraries of elements (buildings, street scenes and so on) that they can plug together, and possibly some sort of Common Lisp-based compositing engine, but this should work.
(I was thinking that someone should do an Eboy-style streetscape of Brunswick Street. Perhaps, once I figure out the forking-into-infinite-numbers-of-parallel-universes trick, I'll do it.)
2005/5/10
The Tory programming language is a programming language that takes the form of a series of Conservative election pledges:
The following example loops endlessly, outputting the ascii values 0 to 255:We will spend more on hospitals! We will jail anyone not in jail already! We will spend billions limiting immigration! We will deport anyone we can deport! We will abolish schools!
The Independent has a piece on calls for the reform of Britain's electoral system, after the new Labour government was elected with the smallest share of the vote in over a century, with the graphic below on its front page:
a few quotes:
Constitutional specialists said Tony Blair was in charge of an "elected dictatorship" after Labour was able to win a majority with only 36 per cent of the vote. They say the Prime Minister is able to hold power with the support of just a fifth of the British adult population, the lowest figure since the Great Reform Act of 1832.
A national campaign for voting reform is to kick off this week with public meetings, a vigil outside Downing Street and a petition calling for the Government to look at introducing proportional representation systems similar to those in Scotland, Wales, Ireland and the Continent.
Although the Government privately admits the election result gave PR fresh momentum, the issue is likely to split the Cabinet, with electoral reformers such as Peter Hain and Ruth Kelly favouring a rethink and John Prescott and Ian McCartney sharply against. Many union leaders also fear it will lead to coalition government with the Liberal Democrats, and prevent Labour from governing again with an absolute majority.
Of course, the established parties who are benefitted most by the first-past-the-post system will be dead against any change that threatens to put an end to the good thing they have going; though if there is enough of an outcry, their hand may well be forced. Especially since Teflon Tony can no longer sail through on his smile and Alastair Campbell's spin wizardry and do things his way, like, say, trying to turn the House of Lords into a house of appointed cronies and calling it "reform".
Anyway, assuming that Britain does implement proportional representation, the question is: what form? The phrase "proportional representation" is most often used to refer to Single Transferrable Vote systems, such as the one used in the Australian Senate, where voters vote for candidates; however, it can also refer to other systems, including party-list proportional representation, in which voters vote for a party (not a candidate) and the parties decide who fills the seats they have won. How much do you want to bet that, if public pressure pushes the Blair government into adopting a proportional electoral system, they'll go for something like that that maximises the party machine's power whilst giving the illusion of reform?
A Roman Catholic cardinal and a priest in charge of Vatican Radio have been convicted of polluting the atmosphere with electromagnetic radiation; studies have found that magnetic fields around the Vatican Radio transmitters north of Rome were much higher than normal limits allow, and may have caused high rates of cancer in the area.
(via substitute) ¶ 0
2005/5/9
Scores in general intelligence tests have been steadily rising for some decades; so much so that tests have to be replaced with new, harder ones every decade. Some claim that this is due to a more cognitively demanding environment, with things such as television programmes, badly-designed user interfaces and especially video games exercising the mental faculties responsible for problem-solving tasks of the sort covered by IQ tests:
Over the last 50 years, we've had to cope with an explosion of media, technologies, and interfaces, from the TV clicker to the World Wide Web. And every new form of visual media - interactive visual media in particular - poses an implicit challenge to our brains: We have to work through the logic of the new interface, follow clues, sense relationships. Perhaps unsurprisingly, these are the very skills that the Ravens tests measure - you survey a field of visual icons and look for unusual patterns.
The best example of brain-boosting media may be videogames. Mastering visual puzzles is the whole point of the exercise - whether it's the spatial geometry of Tetris, the engineering riddles of Myst, or the urban mapping of Grand Theft Auto.
The message there is that things derided as stultifying, such as TV programmes and computer games, actually make you smarter; in contrast, locking yourself in a room and reading the classics instead, as wise authorities would recommend, will cause these cognitive skills to atrophy.
Of course, human neural capacity hasn't been increasing steadily over the past century; our brains are roughly the same same size as those of our great grandparents were, and made of the same kinds of neurons and synapses. As such, it'd be a matter of give and take. As some skills increase, pushed on by new technologies, others atrophy, and conservatives decry the mind-rotting effect of new technologies. This is not a new phenomenon; when writing was invented, there surely were grumpy pundits decrying the inevitable decline of epic-poem memorisation skills (and I doubt whether anyone today, with the possible exception of certain autistic savants, would not appear hopelessly stupid to the ancients by such criteria were they sent back in time); ditto the decline of mental arithmetic skills with the advent of calculators. (Some among you will remember debates on whether giving schoolchildren calculators will harm their mathematical skills.) And, of course, agriculture and the city lifestyle has just about killed wilderness survival skills for any but professional experts trained in these.
Anyway, back to the point in question. One thing I would expect to emerge is improved skills at dealing with an information-rich environment, such as abstract problem-solving and multitasking skills. The other side of the coin would be shortened attention spans; as compulsive multitaskers constantly bombarded with multiple flows of information, we don't need the ability to patiently focus on one thing as our ancestors did, and so it has atrophied. (I once read that one of the reasons that Hollywood remakes so many old films, other than marketing with new casts/soundtracks/gimmicks, is that a lot of people these days find the original films too slow-paced and boring.)
(via bOING bOING) ¶ 3
In Australia, taping TV programmes or ripping MP3s from purchased CDs is technically a criminal offense. Australia recently harmonised its intellectual-property laws with the United States, though without adopting the Fair Use doctrine which protects such activities; as such, Australia currently has some of the world's most draconian copyright laws. The government has issued a discussion paper on adopting fair use/fair dealing exemptions, and is soliciting comments. The possibilities include anything from US-style fair use to the right to circumvent DRM in limited circumstances (as some countries have). Keep in mind that there will be a lot of pressure from Big Copyright on the government to have no or minimal fair-use provisions, to maximise their profits (after all, if you cannot legally rip your CDs to your iPod, you're forced to buy or rent a separate (DRM-locked) copy of anything you wish to listen to on it or face the possibility of prosecution). If the government doesn't hear much demand for fair use, it might acquiesce to its corporate stakeholders' demands. As such, if you live in Australia, it is in your interest to make your opinion heard. Speak up before there are MIPI officers with handheld scanning devices patrolling public areas, doing on-the-spot copyright audits of MP3 players and issuing four-figure fines.
2005/5/8
You know those nifty "Widgets" that MacOS X 10.4 supports; those lightweight HTML/JavaScript objects that sit on a special desktop layer and can show you the weather/train timetables/your iTunes playlist/how all those APPL shares you bought are doing? Well, they can automatically install themselves without your consent, as this page demonstrates. The author even provides a goatse.cx widget (not auto-installed, mercifully) to underscore the potential for mayhem.
Meanwhile, a carefully-constructed trick webpage can cause Firefox to execute arbitrary code on any platform (such as, say, installing rootkits or botnet clients). The Mozilla Foundation have patched this, though it's not in the Debian distro yet.
(via substitute, slashdot) ¶ 2
A company in North Carolina claims to have solved one of the hard problems of audio processing: how to transcribe recorded music with chords into note data. They claim to have successfully transcribed recordings of a Glenn Gould performance of the Goldberg Variations into (a high-resolution variant of) MIDI.
(via MusicThing) ¶ 0
According to this Graun article, George Galloway may not have won his seat (which, after all, he picked up by a slender margin) without the help of gangs of enforcers intimidating the opposition:
Others in the room had voted for the Liberal Democrats. None had cast their vote for Galloway. Rowan Livingstone, who decided to go Green, explained, 'They came to our door and when my flatmate said she would not be voting Respect they shouted at her and called her ignorant.'
Elsewhere in Bethnal Green, student Benjamin Virgo, 34, explained what had happened to him on Tuesday night. 'On the way out to the corner shop to buy milk and bread I passed a couple of young guys. After I'd crossed the road they threw a bottle at me. They became more aggressive, so I reached for my mobile and started to call the police. They followed me into the shop and announced to the other customers and staff that I was a racist. Then, fists in my face, they ordered me to stop my call, reminded me that they knew where I lived and threatened to burn my house down. The police never came. George Galloway is now my MP.'
2005/5/6
Some (mildly) good news in the US: the DC Circuit Court of Appeals has tossed out the Broadcast Flag mandate, ruling that the FCC does not have the authority to require that all computers or other devices capable of receiving a broadcast signal prevent such signals from being recorded without rightsholder-approved DRM. Mind you, that's not the end of it; the MPAA and allies will undoubtedly call in any favours they have from their pet congresscritters to ensure that (a) the Broadcast Flag is enshrined in law, or (b) the FCC's authority is extended to enable it to rule on such matters without judicial oversight; and the EFF and a few other troublemakers will step up to fight them.
(via bOING bOING) ¶ 0
I recently picked up the Pet Shop Boys' Back To Mine compilation. It's the same deal as the others; a bunch of tracks selected by the compilers, mixed together into a seamless mix. The interesting thing about this one is that it is a double CD, with one disc selected by each of the Pet Shop Boys.
And they are quite different; Chris Lowe's disc is mostly italo-disco with some gospel and soul, whereas Neil Tennant's tends towards a cool, cerebral mix of contemporary classical and glitchtronica (and, indeed, the sort of thing you might expect to hear on Utility Fog in Sydney or one of the more avant-garde programmes on 3RRR). The one artist they have in common: Dusty Springfield (of course).
The first MP3 player I owned was an Archos Jukebox Recorder. This was a relatively bulky unit consisting of a low-power CPU, monochrome bitmap display and notebook hard drive (20Gb, though it was easy enough to open it up and swap the hard disk for a larger one, at least until Archos started soldering their hard drives into cages of circuit boards).
Just under a year ago, I bought an iRiver H340; this is a smaller unit, with a more powerful CPU (Motorola ColdFire; it's powerful enough to decode MP3 and OGG in software, and someone has gotten an iRiver emulating a GameBoy), a colour display, two USB ports (device and host), and based around a smaller (1.8", i.e., iPod-sized) hard drive. Like the Archos, it could record to MP3, from a (crap) built-in microphone or line in (I think it even has a microphone preamp built in, unlike the Archos). However, it seemed to have one crucial missing feature: no real-time clock.
Why is that such a big problem, you ask? Well, when you suddenly record something on the go, how will you know what it is that you recorded later on? The files it makes are named VOICE001.MP3, VOICE002.MP3 and so on, which doesn't say much. There is no keypad, touch screen or other data-entry method to give them names either. Of course, if the device has a real-time clock, you can look at the timestamp of the file to see when it was recorded, but with no such clock, all files created get an arbitrary creation time such as midnight on 1/1/2002, so you're left guessing.
Mind you, now it emerges that the H340 hardware does have a real-time clock, just that the firmware didn't use it. I just found out the most recent firmware upgrade adds a clock function, displaying the current time, and adding sensible timestamps to any files recorded. Which makes the iRiver slightly more useful for things other than listening to music.
(Of course, the firmware is still annoyingly clunky when it comes to doing some things; though now that it is confirmed that there is a clock inside the unit, Rockbox can make use of it when it is ported to it.)
Well, it turned out much as expected; Labour got back in, although with a severely reduced majority down by about 100 from 165, giving rise to speculation about Blair's leadership. The Lib Dems gained about 8 seats, going up to 59, though hopes that the Tories may wither away to third place were dashed, as the bastards got the lion's share of Labour's losses. One of the biggest swings against Labour was in the Welsh seat of Blaenau Gwent, where the Labour party machine tried to impose a centrally-selected candidate on the electorate, only to get trounced with a 49% swing by the now-independent MP. On a more ominous note, the we-are-not-neo-Nazis British National Party doubled its vote, and odious Stalinist-turned-Islamofascist George "I never met an anti-Western despotism I didn't like" Galloway took Bethnal Green.
The election results are trickling in; Labour have retained a number of seats; the Lib Dems are getting significant swings (5-10%), though they're all falling short of unseating Labour. So far, Labour have lost two seats: Putney to the Tories (interestingly, Putney is an area popular with South Africans, who, as Commonwealth citizens, are entitled to vote, and who are said to be conservative on racial issues; I wonder whether this was a factor), and a Welsh seat to an ex-Labour independent. Exit polls say that Labour's majority may be slashed to 66 or so.
The BBC's election coverage seems quite similar to the ABC's Australian election coverage (the computer-generated bar charts and swingometers are there), though there's a carnival atmosphere that the Australian elections don't have, with elements of silliness and irreverence, such as a George W. Bush impersonator at the BBC's election party, and a computer-generated mockup of the party leaders racing down Downing St.
2005/5/5
In Australia, unemployed hackers can now fulfil their work-for-the-dole obligations by contributing to open-source projects.
More revelations have emerged about Frank Sinatra's mafia links; this time, he wasn't just doing deals with the mob to help his business interests, but actively working for them as a courier:
As he passed through customs, (Jerry) Lewis says, Sinatra was stopped by officials who started to open the suitcase he was carrying. Inside, says Lewis, were notes to the value of "three and a half million in 50s".
But the customs officers were distracted by the crowds of people trying to catch a glimpse of the singer and aborted their search.
Had they not, claims Lewis, "we would never have heard of him again".
So there's a parallel universe in which Sinatra got caught smuggling cash for the mafia and ended up embedded in concrete somewhere?
Here in London, the local NME-Carling-commercial-indie-rock station Xfm (for the Melbourne people, they're sort of like Nova FM or an ad-saturated JJJ) has been running a poster campaign for a radio show, featuring the graphic below:
The graphic looked familiar at first; I then recalled that either it or a very similar graphic, right down to the face on the banner gripping the hoop, was used in a flyer for a 1960s Australian garage-rock/beat group (I believe it may have been Running Jumping Standing Still), reproduced in Iain McIntyre's book Wild About You!.
I wonder where the original graphic is from.
2005/5/3
Scifi author Orson Scott Card on why it's more than about time that Star Trek was scrapped. The gist of his argument is that Star Trek is really a very poor excuse for science fiction, shapes up poorly next to both scifi literature and more recent film and television productions, and has only been kept alive thanks to a lot of rather sad people in pointy ears who don't know any better:
The original "Star Trek," created by Gene Roddenberry, was, with a few exceptions, bad in every way that a science fiction television show could be bad. Nimoy was the only charismatic actor in the cast and, ironically, he played the only character not allowed to register emotion.
Here's what I think: Most people weren't reading all that brilliant science fiction. Most people weren't reading at all. So when they saw "Star Trek," primitive as it was, it was their first glimpse of science fiction. It was grade school for those who had let the whole science fiction revolution pass them by.
Ars Technica has a review of MacOS X 10.4, and, as you might expect, it goes into a staggering amount of detail, from changes in the kernel APIs to the quiet addition of arbitrary file metadata (only a few releases after Jobs consigned resource forks to the dustbin of history and told Mac users to and make do with Windows-style file extensions) and Apple's new hierarchical file-typing system, from internal improvements in Quartz to how Spotlight hooks into the kernel:
Any file i/o that goes through the Tiger kernel will trigger the appropriate metadata importer. This kernel-level integration ensures that the Spotlight indexes are always up to date.
A smart folder could be a normal directory that is specially tagged using an extended attribute (in the "system." namespace, masked-out just like the extended attributes used for ACLs). The actual Spotlight query for the smart folder would also be saved in an extended attribute. The contents of the smart folder would be generated on the fly in response to file i/o system calls (opendir(), readdir(), etc.) and would appear to be a series of read-only hard links to the actual files.
2005/5/1
Smart car tipping is the new cow tipping, with hooligans having realised that the cute little cars are really easy to tip over, and that, among certain sections of the community, there is little sympathy for the smug rich people who drive them.
Hmmm... London's full of Smarts. I wonder how long until the chavs/grime thugs graduate from "happy slapping" to Smart tipping. Perhaps we'll see an article/rant about how cool and hardcore tipping over those annoying yuppie cars is in the next issue of Vice?
(via bOING bOING) ¶ 1
The election campaign season is approaching its climax, and everybody who wants people to vote one way or another is coming out and trying to get their message across. And that includes those of all levels of enlightenment and/or insanity.
Your Humble Narrator recently found in his North London letterbox a flyer/screed from some outfit calling themselves the "Rainbow Connection Movement", led by someone called "Rainbow George" (or possibly the "Rainbow Georges"; the grammar suggests a plural). The screed in question is a sheet of folded newsprint, printed on both sides, and dense with information; from a first glance, it gives off a psychoceramic vibe: the dense packing of all it aims to say, the use of neologisms (i.e., "preferendum", "City Zen", "W.I.S.E."), and the subtly schizoid quality that the profusion of fonts, clip-art effects, random words/slogans and nonsequiturish chains of ideas peppered throughout gives it. The introduction (or perhaps "Rainbow George's Address") reads:
Thanks to the futuristic, mystically directed Rainbow Connection Movement, and the Vote For Yourself Rainbow Dream Ticket that represents it in this election, the people of Cardiff and Belfast as well as many in London but sadly not in Edinburgh, will have the opportunity to come together to transform their cities into model 21st century leisure oriented ones.
But wait, that's not all...
Wonder cities, free of party politics, governed by their own citizens with at least three of them competing to stage the 2016 Olympic games.The sheet is meant to be a survey of sorts of which policies from all parties the voter agrees with. Well, all the major parties, the Greens and UK Independence Party, and a handful of policies from the "Vote For Yourself Dream Ticket". These include things like a "Rainbow Jubilee", where all debts are cancelled, replacing money with an electronic currency whose details are unknown, save that it will be called "The Wonder", and an "Emerald Rainbow Islands Republic uniting the British and Irish peoples", as well as the abovementioned leisure-oriented cities.
The address one is meant to send the filled-in form to is of some outfit named Hydatum, in Tunbridge Wells (also home to disgruntled newspaper letter writers and people in superhero costumes).