February 21, 2009

Signs of the Coming Apocalypse

Danny Eccleston writes:

"Now I'm a notoriously broad-minded guy. Over-generous, some might say (I cringe as I recall a relatively positive album review I once gave Bryan Adams). What's more, I can see the value in most music, even if it's not my particular cup of tea. Because whatever I might have to say in a critical capacity, those guys and gals are up there, putting their tripes on the line to entertain bozos like me. They deserve a crumb of credit.

But I draw the line at Limp Bizkit."

More from Mojo

Pink Floyd "Mother"
















Mother, do you think they'll drop the bomb?
Mother, do you think they'll like this song?
Mother, do you think they'll try to break my balls?
Mother, should I build the wall?

Mother, should I run for president?
Mother, should I trust the government?
Mother, will they put me in the firing line?
Is it just a waste of time?

Hush now baby, baby, don't you cry.
Momma's gonna make all of your nightmares come true.
Momma's gonna put all of her fears into you.
Momma's gonna keep you right here under her wing.
She wont let you fly, but she might let you sing.
Mommas gonna keep baby cozy and warm.
Oooo babe.
Oooo babe.
Ooo babe, of course momma's gonna help build the wall.

Mother, do you think she's good enough,
For me?
Mother, do you think she's dangerous,
To me?
Mother will she tear your little boy apart?
Mother, will she break my heart?

Hush my baby, baby, dont you cry.
Momma's gonna check out all your girlfriends for you.
Momma won't let anyone dirty get through.
Mommas gonna wait up until you get in.
Momma will always find out where you've been.
Mommas gonna keep baby healthy and clean.
Oooo babe.
Oooo babe.
Ooo babe, you'll always be baby to me.

Mother, did it need to be so high?















February 20, 2009

Bill proposes ISPs, Wi-Fi keep logs for police

(CNET) -- Republican politicians on Thursday called for a sweeping new federal law that would require all Internet providers and operators of millions of Wi-Fi access points, even hotels, local coffee shops, and home users, to keep records about users for two years to aid police investigations.

U.S. Sen. John Cornyn of Texas, supporter of a bill that would require Internet user records to be saved for police.

The legislation, which echoes a measure proposed by one of their Democratic colleagues three years ago, would impose unprecedented data retention requirements on a broad swath of Internet access providers and is certain to draw fire from businesses and privacy advocates.

Read more at CNN.com/technology

The Divine Comedy


" Midway upon the journey of our life
I found myself within a forest dark,
for the straightforward pathway had been lost."

Dante's Divine Comedy

The Unabomber Was Right

Kevin Kelly writes:

"Ted Kaczynski, the convicted bomber who blew up dozens of technophilic professionals, was right about one thing: technology has its own agenda. The technium is not, as most people think, a series of individual artifacts and gadgets for sale. Rather, Kaczynski, speaking as the Unabomber, argued that technology is a dynamic holistic system. It is not mere hardware; rather it is more akin to an organism. It is not inert, nor passive; rather the technium seeks and grabs resources for its own expansion. It is not merely the sum of human action, but in fact it transcends human actions and desires. I think Kaczynski was right about these claims. In his own words the Unabomber says: "The system does not and cannot exist to satisfy human needs. Instead, it is human behavior that has to be modified to fit the needs of the system. This has nothing to do with the political or social ideology that may pretend to guide the technological system. It is the fault of technology, because the system is guided not by ideology but by technical necessity.""

More from Kevin Kelly

Future Shock 5

The Best Laid Plans...

Jacqui Cheng writes:
"What's the worst thing that could happen to a band that is adamantly pro-DRM and anti-filesharing? Having an unreleased album leaked all over the Internet, of course, and by one of the Big Four labels to boot. U2's upcoming album, No Line on the Horizon, is slated for release on March 3, but it's already available on numerous filesharing sites and P2P networks thanks to the accidental posting of the album by Universal's Australian branch."
More from Ars Technica

Warning: Future Ahead

Wil Wheaton writes:
"Years ago, I had a conversation with my son about my record collection, and he couldn’t believe that we used to put records in crates that were heavy and bulky, and actually took them with us to parties. I remember holding up my iPod – which was big and bulky by today’s standards – and telling him that I could hold more music in this little thing than I could fit in my entire apartment on vinyl when I was in college. I may as well have told him how great it was that we didn’t have to worry about Indian attacks in our house, he was so unimpressed.

And why would he have been impressed? He’s grown up in The Future. My kids have never seen a floppy disc, heard the sound of a modem connecting, blown into a NES cartridge in the futile hope of making it work, or looked up an address in a Thomas Guide. I have experienced all of these things, and though I’m grateful that I don’t have to deal with them in any meaningful way now, unless I want to, it’s odd to me that, at just 36 years-old, I straddle this tremendous and significant technological rubicon, while my children can barely see it in on the distant horizon behind them, as they speed away on their jet packs and rocket bikes. I mean, they hardly remember cassettes, let alone cassingles, and occasionally I will consider this fact and quietly weep for them, alone, while they play Call of Duty against some stranger on the other side of the world in real time."
More from Wil Wheaton

Two



This is a jungle, a monument built by nature honoring disuse, commemorating a few years of nature being left to its own devices. But it's another kind of jungle, the kind that comes in the aftermath of man's battles against himself. Hardly an important battle, not a Gettysburg or a Marne or an Iwo Jima. More like one insignificant corner patch in the crazy quilt of combat. But it was enough to end the existence of this little city. It's been five years since a human being walked these streets. This is the first day of the sixth year, as man used to measure time. The time? Perhaps a hundred years from now. Or sooner. Or perhaps it's already happened two million years ago. The place? The signposts are in English so that we may read them more easily, but the place is the Twilight Zone.



This is one of my favorite episodes of my favorite show, The Twilight Zone. CBS.com has a great stash of these, but wont allow me to imbed it, so please click on the link or picture of a young Charles Bronson to view.

Terrorism of the Mind

“It’s a terrorism of the mind that actually sustains concepts like intellectual property. It’s a terrorism that’s grounded on an idea of brutal repression of that which is actually possible.”
Lawrence Liang

Don't Let Our Youth Go To Waste

The photographs show three naked underage girls posing lasciviously for the camera. The perps who took the pictures were busted in Greensburg, Pa., and charged with manufacturing, disseminating and possessing child pornography -- and so were their subjects. That's because they are one and the same.

It all started when the girls, ages 14 and 15, decided to take nudie cellphone snapshots of themselves. Then, maybe feeling dizzy from the rush of wielding their feminine wiles, the trio text-messaged the photos to some friends at Greensburg-Salem High School. When one of the students' cellphones was confiscated at school, the photos were discovered. Police opened an investigation and, in addition to the girls' being indicted as kiddie pornographers, three boys who received the pictures were slammed with charges of child porn possession. All but one ultimately accepted lesser misdemeanor charges.
More from Tracy Clark-Flory at Salon.com

February 19, 2009

Never Compromise


"No. Not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise." Rorshach

There Was Nothing To Fear and Nothing To Doubt

"Pyramid Song"

I jumped in the river and what did I see?
Black-eyed angels swam with me
A moon full of stars and astral cars
And all the figures I used to see

All my lovers were there with me
All my past and futures
And we all went to heaven in a little rowboat
There was nothing to fear, nothing to doubt

I jumped into the river
Black-eyed angels swam with me
A moon full of stars and astral cars
And all the figures I used to see

All my lovers were there with me
All my past and futures
And we all went to heaven in a little rowboat
There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt

There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt
There was nothing to fear and nothing to doubt


Rod Serling




Charles Fort


"But my liveliest interest is not so much in things, as in relations of things. I have spent much time thinking about the alleged pseudo-relations that are called coincidences. What if some of them should not be coincidence?"

XTRMNTR



I believe that sinfulness
Can burn your soul away
There's no release from nothingness
When love has gone away

Stuck in acid, you will rust
Time will turn your bones to dust
I can muster, let her go
Keep your dreams, don't sell your soul
Be careful

I believe in forgiveness
Hate will eat you whole
Bad blood, a lifelong curse,
You've got to let it go
Stuck in acid, you will rust
Time will turn your bones to dust
I can muster, let her go
Keep your dreams, don't sell your soul
Be careful

I'm going down to the underground
I'm going down to the underground
As deep as i can go
I'm going down to the underground
As deep as i can go
I'm going down to the underground
As deep as i can go
(deep as i can go)
I'm going down to the underground
As deep as i can go
(deep as i can go)

Tweet?

At the risk of losing all cred with tech enthusiast readers, let me use a suggestion (from Dwight) as a point of departure:

I thought I would recommend that you both consider adopting Twitter as part of your blogging presence in 2009.

Twitter was organized in 2006 and hit 6 million registered users by the end of 2008 a 600% increase over the prior year. Facebook recently offerred to purchase Twitter for $500 million in stock but the offer was rejected. Google has also been thinking about Twitter [many examples of who is using it and why, with links]...

At a minimum, even if you choose not to tweet on Twitter, you can at least feed your blog posts to Twitter via Twitterfeed.

Now even though I probably in the end relent and wind up feeding posts on Twitter, I am deeply troubled by a communication medium that limits messages to 140 characters, and I'll return to that shortly.
More from Yves Smith at Naked Capitalism

Future Shock 4

It's a madhouse! A madhouse!!!

Mock the Prophets At Your Own Peril


Nassim Nicholas Taleb on UK TV


Nouriel Roubini and Nassim Nicholas Taleb on CNBC

More on the CNBC video at Marginal Utility

The Apocalypse Will Not Be Televised...

...but it will be scored.


Brad Mehldau "Paranoid Android"

Walt Disney Is Waiting

The Avatar of My Father

HORATIO: O day and night, but this is wondrous strange.

The Singularity - the prophesied moment when artificial intelligence leaps ahead of human intelligence, rendering man both obsolete and immortal - has been jokingly called "the rapture of the geeks." But to Ray Kurzweil, the most famous of the Singularitarians, it's no joke. In a profile in the current issue of Rolling Stone (not available online), Kurzweil describes how, in the wake of the Singularity, it will become possible not only to preserve living people for eternity (by uploading their minds into computers) but to resurrect the dead.
More from Nicholas Carr

Transience, Ms. Brownstein

Touched And Gone?

The big music news today is that Touch and Go Records is resigning its position as a manufacturer and distributor of a handful of independent labels. Here is the complete statement from T&G's Corey Rusk:

"It is with great sadness that we are reporting some major changes here at Touch and Go Records. Many of you may not be aware, but for nearly two decades, Touch and Go has provided manufacturing and distribution services for a select yet diverse group of other important independent record labels. Titles from these other labels populate the shelves of our warehouse alongside the titles on our own two labels, Touch and Go Records and Quarterstick Records.

"Unfortunately, as much as we love all of these labels, the current state of the economy has reached the point where we can no longer afford to continue this lesser-known yet important part of Touch and Go's operations. Over the years, these labels have become part of our family, and it pains us to see them go. We wish them all the very best, and we will be doing everything we can to help make the transition as easy as possible.

"Touch and Go will be returning to its roots and focusing solely on being an independent record label. We'll be busy for a few months working closely with the departing labels and scaling our company to an appropriate smaller size after their departure. It is the end of a grand chapter in Touch and Go's history, but we also know that good things can come from new beginnings."

I read the news about Touch and Go today. I was sitting in a restaurant and I checked my phone and gasped; my friend actually asked what was wrong. Something is wrong. We are careening toward a paucity of experience and a paucity of means with which to evaluate music. I mean, can we really engage with art on a Web site and in a vacuum, without ever bothering to contextualize it or make it coherent with our lives or form a community around the work? If we never move beyond the ephemeral and facile nature of music Web sites -- and let's not lie to ourselves, that's where it ends for a lot of us these days -- then that makes us worse than blind consumers; it makes us dabblers. We have become musical tourists. And tourism is the laziest form of experience, because it is spoonfed and sold to us. Tourism cannot and should not replace the physical energy, the critical thinking and the tiresome but ultimately edifying road of adventure, and thus also of life.

As for places like MySpace, they're not the enemy, they're not anathema to art, and they're places I peruse frequently. I mean, MySpace is democratic and ceaselessly available, but it is ugly -- and it's a crumb being treated like the whole wedding cake we can't stop gorging on. Are we no longer seekers of the real? Or do we only seek for ourselves without any sense that a tactile discovery is mutually beneficial? Being found is as splendid as the finding. Stumbling upon an MP3 or a blog or a Web site is only half the search. We seem to have forfeited our duties and become half-participants -- and at the cost of the creators. But we have to realize, and the Touch and Go announcement is a reminder, that in order for there to be anything left in which to participate, we have to show up. We have to show up with not just our half-selves, our virtual selves, our broke-ass selves, but with our whole selves, and in the spirit of giving. Mock participation is more than just an absence of real engagement; it is a falsehood that has allowed us to justify our apathy. When, exactly, did we stop showing up? And how long until there's not much left worth showing up for?

Future Shock 3

Amish Hackers...

The Amish have the undeserved reputation of being luddites, of people who refuse to employ new technology. It's well known the strictest of them don't use electricity, or automobiles, but rather farm with manual tools and ride in a horse and buggy. In any debate about the merits of embracing new technology, the Amish stand out as offering an honorable alternative of refusal. Yet Amish lives are anything but anti-technological. In fact on my several visits with them, I have found them to be ingenious hackers and tinkers, the ultimate makers and do-it-yourselfers and surprisingly pro technology.

NewSpeak

Newspeak Dictionary
Home
Excerpt from
"The Principles of Newspeak"
An appendix to 1984
Written by : George Orwell in 1948


Newspeak was the official language of Oceania, and had been devised to meet the ideological needs of Ingsoc, or English Socialism. In the year 1984 there was not as yet anyone who used Newspeak as his sole means of communication, either in speech or writing. The leading articles of the Times were written in it, but this was a tour de force which could only be carried out by a specialist, It was expected that Newspeak would have finally superseded Oldspeak (or standard English, as we should call it) by about the year 2050. Meanwhile, it gained ground steadily, all party members tending to use Newspeak words and grammatical constructions more and more in their everyday speech. The version in 1984, and embodied in the Ninth and Tenth Editions of Newspeak dictionary, was a provisional one, and contained many superfluous words and archaic formations which were due to be suppressed later. It is with the final, perfected version, as embodied in the Eleventh Edition of the dictionary, that we are concerned here.


Click on link above for full article.

Not singing too much...

Minor, the music director for American Idol, has produced numerous Super Bowl pre-game performances, including Whitney Houston’s 1991 anthem in Tampa that’s considered the benchmark for singers.

Minor said Hudson’s two cell phones lit up “like slot machines” following her performance, and she received a moving text message from Jamie Foxx, her co-star in “Dreamgirls.”

“His text said ‘Amazing. It brought tears to my eyes,’” Minor said. “She’s just getting so much love.”

Minor said Hudson was very calm and prepared, and he counseled her to take the deep breath before she began so she could put herself in the moment. Although entertainers can perform live, Minor insisted that Hudson and Faith Hill, who sang “America the Beautiful” before the national anthem, use the tracks the NFL requires them to submit a week before the game.

“That’s the right way to do it,” Minor said. “There’s too many variables to go live. I would never recommend any artist go live because the slightest glitch would devastate the performance.”

Future Shock 2

We are leaving the teaching of our children to robots

Back at the start of the month, when most of us were presumably focused on recovering from New Years festivities, Science released a perspective that discussed the role of games and other media in the development of cognitive skills. There is little doubt that the majority of kids are now immersed in an environment that's rich in visual media, from television to online content, which represents a major shift from the developmental environment experienced by earlier generations. The perspective points out that this is clearly going to impact the skills people develop as they mature, and argues that we should be making adjustments for that.

The perspective was authored by Patricia Greenfield of UCLA, and she begins by emphasizing the role of what she terms "informal education." Although this will include basic language and social skills, as well as factual information, Greenfield emphasizes that informal learning often involves the development of learning skills themselves. With the frequent use of educational DVDs and television programs, children are becoming adept at processing visual media and incorporating it into their educational process. Not surprisingly, this change has consequences for intellectual development.

Greenfield points out that this doesn't make the visual media good or bad, just different. For example, she notes that scores from verbal IQ tests, which emphasize basic vocabulary, are going up at the same time that verbal SAT scores, which emphasize a complex vocabulary, have dropped.

More dramatically, she describes what's termed the Flynn effect, after a pioneering study on the topic of visual reasoning skills. Test scores of visual reasoning dating from the 1940s were dramatically lower than when those same tests were performed in more recent years. The results also suggested a reduced performance with age in the past, a trend that's largely vanished in more recent years. These trends have now been reported for a number of cultures, suggesting that immersion in visual media is resulting in a generation with enhanced visual reasoning skills. The piece also notes studies that indicate that the complexity of visual media, especially games, has improved the ability of students to multitask.

The downside of multitasking

There are clearly significant advantages to multitasking abilities—I'm quite glad that the pilots of the US Air flight that landed in the Hudson could both keep the plane airborne and make rational decisions about where to land it, for example. But, in a variety of learning environments, multitasking splits attention in a way that prevents the internalization of the primary content. Students who were given the standard CNN feed with a headline crawl remembered less about the primary news stories than those who were given a feed without the crawl. Similarly, students that were given laptops and allowed to look up terms and concepts during a lecture didn't do as well as their laptop-free peers in a quiz given afterwards.

Greenfield also cites some studies that focus on aspects of learning and behavior that are less easy to quantify. For example, she cites the studies that correlate violent media consumption with aggressive behavior, and others that indicate that students with reduced TV time traded intellectual impulsivity for more reflective analysis. Similarly, those taught through visual media had a better recall of the information, but were less able to develop creative extrapolations from it.

This sort of emphasis on tradeoffs—impulsivity and recall can be very valuable in some contexts—is made explicit in the conclusions. "However, the preceding makes it clear that no one medium can do everything," Greenfield writes. "Every medium has its strengths and weaknesses; every medium develops some cognitive skills at the expense of others." It's a refreshing change from the one-sided condemnations of media that occur far too often.

Because she recognizes that both forms of skills have their place, Greenfield advocates a balanced approach to the rising tide of visual content obtained through informal education. First, she argues that schools should emphasize textual materials during the learning process in order to provide a counterbalance to the informal learning environment. But, for testing purposes, we could do a better job of providing a more balanced approach than the typical all-text method of evaluating skills and recall.

Science, 2009. John Timmer

Helicopters for Everyone!



Could there be a more perfect 1951 Mechanics Illustrated article than "Helicopters for Everyone," which promised a vehicle thus, "The third model has corrected some of the above mentioned faults. The engine now is slung under the seat directly beneath the center of gravity. This warms the pilot in cold air and improves the machine’s balance. The model at present is being tested. There still remains, however, the sense of insecurity—of riding a flying swivel chair with no visible means of support. Pentecost and his associates are perfectly well aware of this natural reaction and have planned a weatherproof enclosure for the machine."

Helicopters for Everybody (Jan, 1951)

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