The Null Device
2010/12/14
What do you get when a plane flies immediately beneath a satellite camera while it's taking a picture? This:
Which suggests that the cameras in question take four separate monochromatic exposures (with blue, green and red filters, and unfiltered for intensity), and composite them together to get a higher-resolution image of the earth (or at least the parts of it which aren't moving at speed at high altitudes).
The new face of terrorism in the UK? A 12-year-old schoolboy in Eynsham, Oxfordshire was taken out of his class by anti-terrorism police, and threatened with arrest after starting a Facebook group to protest to the Prime Minister against the closure of a youth club:
Speaking to the Guardian, Nicky Wishart said: "In my lesson, [a school secretary] came and said my head of year wanted to talk to me. She was in her office with a police officer who wanted to talk to me about the protest. He said, 'if a riot breaks out we will arrest people and if anything happens you will get arrested because you are the organiser'.Via MetaFilter, whose discussion thread includes this particularly insightful comment, by one "SysRq":
More and more, I get the feeling that the anti- in "anti-terror" doesn't refer to ideological opposition so much as directional opposition, as in anti-clockwise; whereas "terror" is the psychological warfare of The Enemy upon The State, "anti-terror" is the psychological warfare of The State upon itself — a sort of national autoimmune disorder.
An observation I recently had about the way the various classes of "indie" music fall across the spectrum of class in Britain:
Discuss.
More on WikiLeaks editor/international supervillain/New World Order martyr Julian Assange:
What looks like Assange's OKCupid profile, last updated in 2007. His screen name was "HarryHarrison", after a scifi author best known for his Stainless Steel Rat stories, about an anarchist antihero:
Passionate, and often pig headed activist intellectual seeks siren for love affair, children and occasional criminal conspiracy.
I like women from countries that have sustained political turmoil. Western culture seems to forge women that are valueless and inane. OK. Not only women!
I am DANGER, ACHTUNG, and ??????????????!Meanwhile, an Internet Archive mirror of Assange's blog/website/.profile page is here. It's a good admixture of the hyper-lucid, the paranoid and the somewhat creepy. (If Assange does get a rape trial with a jury, some of the opinions he expressed about women could swing it to a conviction.)
Mathematics is a systemization of communicable human thought created by brain architectures that have male-type spacial abilities and extremised by the extremes within that group. Extreme female brain architectures would create a different sort of mathematics. It won't be created by the females currently in mathematics because they need a male type brain to thrive in the existing mathematical world. Perhaps a good cognitive neuroscientist will do it for them.
One of the devout was the lovely daughter of a New Castle minister. At some point in my unintended wooing of her, she looked up, fluttered her eyelids and said 'Oh, you know so much! I hardly know anything!'. 'That is why you believe in God," I explained. This conversational brutality took her breath away and she swooned. I was exactly what she secretly longed for; a man willing to openly disagree with her father. All along she had needed a man to devote herself to. All along she had failed to find a man worthy of being called a man, failed to find a man who would not bow to gods, so she had chosen a god unworthy of being called a god, but who would not bow to a man.
And here is Dogs In Space director Richard Lowenstein's account of his online discussions with Assange in 1994, about a possible film based on the Melbourne hacker underground.
(via Boing Boing, MeFi) ¶ 1