Found some videos by Paul Robertson a few weeks ago and created this playlist. It consists of Pirate Baby's Cabana Street Fight (a b&w violence-fest), Kings of Power 4 Billion% (colorful, dimension-warping adventure), and Devil Eyes (lovely/sad, space friendship story):
I'd first found his artwork from his uniquely NSFW Livejournal page left in a random Reddit comment. His animation style uses video game left-to-right traveling as the primary framework. Interesting. Pirate Baby and Kings will give you epileptic seizures if you're not careful. Devil Eyes is a completely different mood.
Also from a Reddit comment, pictures from the Hyssop Lounge blog. Post are mostly YouTube videos, but several contain a wealth of great photos of musicians and stuff. See 2day pitures: 29 and 2day pictures: 30 for awesomeness. All, however, are frustratingly unlabeled.
Rhys Paul Hovey rant about mind control:
The Wikipedia entry for Hillary Rodham Clinton is on my watch list (from edits made years back) and this little 5k rollback on the talk page showed up today. A beautiful, schizophrenic rant that starts with:
Hillary Clinton may be in danger over ANNE MARIE SLAUGHTER,. this is RELATED to Rhys Paul Hovey, and the high tech organized crime. Her name is MIND READER BAIT,. please see the RADIO CONTROLLED MEGA PIRATE story and FOREST HILL ELEMENTARY SCHOOL, district 18, and MR CASE. This involves "mind control" technology, which is computer controlled psychological abuse AI and wireless long range subvocal speech recognition (see charles jourgensen NASA), and satalite sound "weapons" which are also used for ADVERTISING (see joseph Pompeii and AUDIO SPOTLIGHT).
Et cetera.
The author may be the referenced Rhys Paul Hovey [ Google Sites | Blogspot ] who has another entry on Wikipedia for his as-yet-unrealeased, surrealist video game Synth. Similar rants found elsewhere in comments at Stay Free! Daily:
I was a big Hillary Clinton fan at one time, until this fiasco started on me with the ultrasound weapons, being used on me, at my home. Not only do I have recordings for you to download at (Yahoo video) and youtube. But now people in my building are starting to talk about the "advertising mind control computer" that they can hear in the streets (Hastings street in Vancouver) they recognize that the actual sounds of the cars and such can be used as a carrier signal as well.
Resemblance to Robby Todino's time travel obsession. Both evocative and unsettling.
Michael Gordon concert at Woodruff Arts Center:
Completely worn out (and will probably regret missing) or I'd go. Postminimalist composer from Bang on a Can fame and of the group Kyle Gann often proselytizes on his PostClassic blog. Pieces I'll be missing (along with links to their MP3s on Amazon where available):
Profiling by Schneier from July 22, 2005:
This is relevant to your interests. In the article, he argues that the wide net of ethnic profiling is so wide as to be useless in catching anyone, and so unwarranted as to be harmful w/r/t ethnic relations. Imagine noting that most terrorists are male and deciding to profile males, only to realize that you can only randomly search an insignificant percentage. Then imagine the resentment you've instilled in the 99.999% of innocent males. You've irritated a large chunk of citizens with arguably no increase in safety. Profiling is pattern recognition and is useful. Wasting time on imprecise patterns is not.
Something we think we want can give us what we want and yet still be destructive.
Only two things have made flying safer [since 9/11]: the reinforcement of cockpit doors, and the fact that passengers know now to resist hijackers.A round-up of his interviews after the fact. Commenting on how rare it is for a terrorist act hurt anyone (highway fatalities being a more serious threat), he says:
A terrorist attack cannot possibly destroy our country's way of life; it's only our reaction to that attack that can do that kind of damage.
Skhizein (Jérémy Clapin,2008) from Bertie on Vimeo.
an additional momentto speak, McCain denounces that action as unprecedented, Maddow dutifully hunts down a clip (with considerable help from C-SPAN) of McCain, in 2002, denying an additional 30 seconds from Sen. Mark Dayton as Dayton rails against the Iraq war.
There is not a single thing the government can do - from fighting a war to creating a last-resort insurance option - that can't be done better by a consortium of gigantic private interests with their eternal guiding light of the profit motive.
One of my favorite quotes from the founding era - which, like any tale of the Founders' wit and wisdom, may be apocryphal - is Washington's explanation to a skeptical Thomas Jefferson about the advantages of a bicameral legislature and specifically of a House designed for rapid action paired with a slow-moving Senate. GW is said to have asked Jefferson, "Why did you set your tea on the table before drinking it?" to which Jefferson said, "To cool it; my throat is not made of brass." Having made the point, Washington told his friend, "So it is with the legislature. The House is where we make our tea and the Senate is where we let it cool so we might drink it."
Opera Mini Is Most Downloaded Mobile App - A flawed survey but it mimics what I've read from European/non-US sources. Some of the flaws I've found with Opera Mini on my BlackBerry Storm:
Health insurers admit using 50,000 employees to lobby Congress to defend their outrageous profits - This is a tough one: on the one hand, a corporation is strong-arming it's employees to act in the political interest of the company; on the other, those employees have every right to say no. It
Johann Hari: Republicans, religion and the triumph of unreason - How do they train themselves to be so impervious to reality? - Every paragraph is a gem. I'll pick two to quote:
This tendency to simply deny inconvenient facts and invent a fantasy world isn't new; it's only becoming more heightened. It ran through the Bush years like a dash of bourbon in water. When it became clear that Saddam Hussein had no weapons of mass destruction, the US right simply claimed they had been shipped to Syria. When the scientific evidence for man-made global warming became unanswerable, they claimed - as one Republican congressman put it - that it was "the greatest hoax in human history", and that all the world's climatologists were "liars". The American media then presents itself as an umpire between "the rival sides", as if they both had evidence behind them.
It's a shame, because there are some areas in which a conservative philosophy - reminding us of the limits of grand human schemes, and advising caution - could be a useful corrective. But that's not what these so-called "conservatives" are providing: instead, they are pumping up a hysterical fantasy that serves as a thin skin covering some raw economic interests and base prejudices.
That second one bears repeating. There are many good arguments to be had on healthcare reform. We're not having them and instead allowing the crazies to define the discussion.
The Truth: What's Really Going On With Apple, Google, AT&T And The FCC - Just one story of many where developers are getting fed up with the Apple ecosystem. The best assessment I've heard was from On the Media (I thought it was from the Aug 14th show, but can't find the reference). They were talking about how closed systems promote censorship. If the internet restricted who could create web pages, and what web content they could create, the on-line landscape would be of much less value. Similarly, when Apple arbitrarily block some applications from its phone while allowing other, they diminish the overall value of the iPhone environment. With the horror stories I've been hearing from developer blogs, I'm quickly becoming an Apple-hater. Bring on the Android!
[ updated 2 Sept 2009 ]
On The Media: The Net's Mid-Life Crisis, August 14, 2009 with Jonathan Zittrain, explaining the chilling effect of centrally controlled technology:
The downside [with the iPhone] is it sets up a new gatekeeper that's going to have its own motives and incentives that are not always the same as the consumers it's supposed to serve.
Somebody submitted an iPhone application to Apple called "Freedom Time." Basically it was a countdown clock for the Bush Administration, and it had the tagline, "Till the end of an error." The author couldn't understand why it was rejected.
Steve Jobs wrote him back when he complained, and said, this is an application that will offend roughly half of our users. What's the point?
Also of note from the same show, if off topic, The Net Effect with Lee Rainie, director of the Pew Internet and American Life Project:
One of the surprising things we found in that survey was that those who are the most technologically adept and those who are the most engaged with information actually are not in the echo chamber pattern; they are actually seeking out and finding out more arguments opposed to their views than those who are less technologically adept and less interested in political information.
Tweet count is much smaller than it should be - My Twitter count went from ~3000 to 0 after their DDoS. Still not fixed. :-(
"Whistleblowers on Fraud Facing Penalties"
US soldier get kidnapped and tortured by other US forces for reporting corruption. How many more stories like this are needed before people realize that no, this should not be business as usual? I'm reminded of what the one veteran (under cowardly anonymity) said when he was asked about the whistle-blower in the Abu Ghraib scandal: if this was Viet Nam, he would have never gotten home alive. But that's a ridiculous comparison.
"Comcast throttles BitTorrent users", "Comcast Cuts Off Heavy Internet Users"
Let's just hope the geeks can start a backlash against these assholes. These issues, along with their and others VoIP packet blocking, can possibly be market-driven to death by new, neutral ISPs such as Copowi.
Wizkids at the UCSC Wiki lab created an algorithm that determines a Wikipedia author's reputation by examining how long their contributions last. With these reputation values, they then created a tool to highlight article text with shades of orange. White is trusted, orange is untrusted, and everything in between are varying levels of trust. This is quite an achievement, and I hope that it makes it into the Wikimedia code soon.
We still have our WebVan refrigerator magnet and pine for those Halcyon days of sitting in front of the computer to shop and having our groceries wating for us in the lobby refrigerators. Yay!
A one-page story from 1997 by Jim Knipfel. One of many stories hosted on his site Slackjaw including a prominently notable blurb from Thomas Pynchon. I haven't read anything else yet, but TWP-BT had a nice sardonic and parable feeling to it.
Make your first $10 in 30 days. Entry fee is simply your email address. A co-worker snagged this from Digg and is signed up. All of the web references I can find are from (1) home business news sites that dutifully praise the event, (2) home businesses/blogs that are signed up for it, and (3) Digg. Not sure if I'm going to take the time...
I was finally getting around to research on the Hamdan v. Rumsfeld decision and found a concise explication by Glenn Greenwald. Recommended. Also check out his hilarious roundup of that ridiculous battle by the administration against the NYT. Tracking banking records was bragged about by Bush yet for anyone else to talk of it is treasonous; publishing photos of Cheney's vacation house is allowed by conservative outlets but proof of sheer un-American-ness by others. Disclosing public knowledge is no longer a semantic contradiction, it's now apparently unlawful.
On a lighter note, I was told that an otherwise conservative relative (I mean really conservative) feels that Gore is right about global warming (although, humorously, that's "the only thing he's right about"). Maybe this country is turning around...
Mark Liberman at Language Log discusses the absurd Cingular patent on hot keys for emoticons. In it, he links to Geoff Nunberg's piece from 1997 called "A Wink is as Good as a Nod," in which he trashes those silly things. I hate emoticons and only use them rarely (if you're too dim-witted to realise when I'm joking or being sarcastic, no collection of punctuation will help), but it was only recently that I realised exactly why I hate them. Whenever someone types a :-) or a <:-o I imagine them actually making that face. And it just looks ridiculous. Even Bazooka Joe doesn't over-emphasize what he's saying that much. Please, enough with the emoticons.
Semantic Compositions had a couple of recent classics. First, a discussion on the WSJ article about the death metal singing style called Cookie Monster singing or Cookie Monster vocals. Fascinating and funny. And now I may have to start listening to Fear Factory's 1999 opus Obsolete. It tells a story about machines taking over the world in the future and the rebels trying to fight back! Wacky!! I've got a passing familiarity with punk but haven't really listened to hardcore metal (although the movie Some Kind of Monster is very good, Metallica really ain't that hardcore).
The other SC article was on the frequency and variation in the 800-pound gorilla metaphor. 800 is the most common gorilla weight with 500 a distant second.
A /. discussion links to a review of search engines and privacy (which in turn links to, among other things, a more detailed article from Danny Sullivan at SearchEngineWatch). One poster hypothesized that although Google emphasizes the importance of complying with China's censorship, they would probably attempt to skirt the legal issues of data privacy addressed in most EU countries. The lesson: only obey local rules when it benefits you.
The CIA paid the Rendon Group more than $23 million dollars to help bring down Saddam Hussein through propaganda and media manipulation. That propaganda, fed to Judith Miller among others, once reported was used by the administration to bolster support for the war. In one breath John Rendon criticises the media for reporting unflattering and incorrect information about the war, in the next he boasts of feeding incorrect information to that same media. Jackass.
It reminds me of the essay "Astroturf: How Manufactured 'Grassroots' Movements are Subverting Democracy" from The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2003. In it, Jason Stella outlines how propaganda--lies--from the Kuwaiti government was used to push lawmakers to vote for the first Iraq war.
First, I find out that string theory is in question, now the big bang too? My head is spinning. All of those problems that still exist with the theory could eventually bring it down--and in the process describe a universe that is at least 70 billion years old instead of 13! This is big. At the center of the dispute is plasma cosmology.
The article is, however, absolutely dispicable in the way it presents modifications that occured in the big bang theory. At several points, scientific adjustments are presented as some sort of weasling out on the part of the scientists. Look: theories are meant to adjust as new facts are presented. That's what science is. If the theory eventually falls apart--which the big bang may-or-may-not--then the theory that best represents the new facts will replace it. Too much sensationalist science reporting. Jackasses.
This, oddly, makes me wish Brian Greene had a blog. I wonder what the discussions are in the physicist and cosmologist circles...
And, bravo to Eric Lerner for his vigilance in keeping the Wikipedia entry on plasma cosmology unmolested by rabid graduate students. New science is new science and it needs to be presented with fact and not ridiculed with emotion.
Self-contained wiki based on JavaScript contained within the HTML pages. Basically, you can save your entire, functioning wiki to a single HTML file. Client-side scripting at its best. Now I have to think about porting my development wiki, and maybe even my blog, to this.
Painfully detailed and dispassionate timeline of what-happened-and-when. Worth several readings.
Whilst researching a snowclone, Benjamin Zimmer points out some interesting inconsistencies with Google searches when used to research statistics of language use. For example: the search count for "A" should be equal to the sum of the search counts for "A" "B" and "A" -"B". Instead, the numbers are wildly different. The first search can return thousands more results than the sum of the other two.
I recently had heard several comments suggesting that America did not torture its prisoners. Some people apparently still believe that. With Bush and Cheney double-speaking their way around questions on the military's policy, was I missing something? I don't think so. Major General Antonio Taguba's report from April 2004 states that we committed egregious acts and grave breaches of international law.
It also states that 60% of the Abu Ghraib prisoners were not a threat (a point I noted back in June 2004). Why is this forgotten?
I'm not sure if I like these reading lists. They bundle many entries under one, giant entry at the expense of categorization. This may be a short-lived experiment.
I am going to start blogging and sometimes mirroring the interesting articles I read each day. With the entries here on my site, I can more easily search for quotes ("where did I read that?") and can be sure that links don't die. This may become more trouble than it's worth, but it's still worth a try.