The Null Device
2000/6/7
The FBI's notorious "Black Panther Colouring Book", as used in disinformation campaigns under the orders of J. Edgar Hoover.
Brutal Truth Toys revisited: Ant farm teaches children about toil, death: (The Onion)
Billed as "the fun way to teach your kids to accept their miserable fate stoically," the ant farm retails for $14.95
"At some point, the Playscovery Cove ants become cognizant that their hierarchical structure has been stripped away, rendering their already near-meaningless existence totally futile. There seems to be a breaking point at about the 22-day mark when the dejected ants begin to die off en masse."... the ant farm enters what is known as the "death-pile phase." A spot is chosen by the worker ants to deposit their dead, and the burial mound steadily grows as the few remaining ants devote more of their time to gathering and burying others.
The Arab/Israeli conflict takes a novel twist, with allegations of Israeli pornographers hiring Egyptian movie star lookalikes for their porn films. (Salon)
The difference between morning and night people: night people have body clocks on a cycle slightly longer than 24 hours. (via rebecca's pocket)
MP3 fiends, check out Kul Teng Funk Overdose's latest, Fadeaway (At Last); it's a particularly nice piece of ambient electronica.
Douglas Adams talks to the BBC about his prophetic hypermedia fiction piece the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.
"When I first devised the whole notion of this little device 21 years ago, I didn't think I was being a predictive science fiction writer - it was just a silly idea."
Insightful piece about the upcoming apocalyptic war between corporate capitalism (as exemplified by Seagram/Universal) and the Internet, and the dire stakes involved. (The Age)
Bronfman is historically wrong in his assumption that piracy is un-American. For virtually the whole of the 19th century, the American publishing industry flouted international copyright law... The American book trade (which has since gobbled up ours) is founded on a century of napsterising.
What kind of environment will the internet become, as it evolves over the next few years? A realm of utopian freedom, or of capitalist totalitarianism beyond even Orwell's nightmares? Things are currently poised on a knife edge... The software which enables me to download (all right, "pirate") Napster tracks can as easily track my electronic footprints and "customise" my patterns of consumption. In short, I use the net. But one day, quite soon, it may be using me. Enjoy the music while you can.