By Cory Doctorow at 11:54 pm Sunday, Jul 18
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Lisa Rein has posted Jon Stewart's Daily Show commentary on the threatened cancellation of the November US elections in the event of terrorist threat. Required viewing.
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via On Lisa Rein's Radar)
By Cory Doctorow at 11:52 pm Sunday, Jul 18
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Avi sez, "Andrew Hargadon used to work as a design engineer at IDEO. Then the academic bug bit him and he went on to research the innovation process from an insider's perspective. His course notes are now online and provide simple but effective methods to understand and enhance your creative thought process."
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Thanks, Avi!)
By Cory Doctorow at 11:46 pm Sunday, Jul 18
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The World Transhumanist conference is coming to Toronto, Aug 5-8, with
free $12.50 public keynotes from Steve Mann and Stelarc.
The theme of this year's conference is "Art and Life in the Posthuman Era," featuring such presenters as cyborg Steve Mann, Australian performance artist Stelarc, Extropy Institute founder Max More, leading biogerontologist Aubrey de Grey, and transhumanist philosopher Nick Bostrom, among many others.
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Thanks, sentdev!)
By Cory Doctorow at 11:44 pm Sunday, Jul 18
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Back in February, Darren Barefoot started the charitable effort he called "Flowers for Al and Don," in which people donated money for flowers to be delivered to gay and lesbian couples awaiting marriage on the steps of the San Francisco Courthouse. The effort was a signal success. Darren sez:
As you guys covered this (and helped promote it) back in February, I just thought you'd be interested to hear the final results. Ultimately, we raised US $14,312.28. We delivered US $11,542.28 worth of flowers, and donated the remainder to two related and deserving charities--Lambda Legal and the Gay and Lesbian Rights Project at the ACLU.
Link
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Thanks, Darren!)
By Cory Doctorow at 11:42 pm Sunday, Jul 18
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In a fit of astonishing lunacy, Texas Senator John Cornyn tried to explain the need to ban gay marriage in the context of the social harm that would accrue from allowing men to marry box turtles ("It does not affect your daily life very much if your neighbor marries a box turtle, but that does not mean it is right...Now you must raise you children up in a world where that union of man and box turtle is on the same legal footing as man and wife"). Jon Stewart's Daily Show segment on this statement is nothing short of brilliant. Let's hope it gets enough airplay to cost Cornyn the election (and possibly get him institutionalized somewhere...).
Realplayer link
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via Vertical Hold)
Update: It appears that though the box turtles remark was in a speech prepared for Cornyn and delivered to the press, that Cornyn himself showed the good judgment not to make this ridiculous statement (Here's some notes from his press-secretary. (Thanks, Andrew!)
By Cory Doctorow at 11:35 pm Sunday, Jul 18
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James Grimmelman has taken Lon Fuller's classic text, the Morality of Law, and used it to measure software, evaluating the degree to which laws embedded in code can be thought of as "moral" laws:
Software is unambiguously better at legality than law itself on three counts (prospectivity, consistency, and possibility). It's strictly inferior to law on two (publicity and comprehensibility). One (stablility) is a complete wash. The last two (generality and reality) depend on very much on the kind of software we're talking about and how it's used.
Overall, then, there is no simple answer as to whether software is better than law or not when it comes to the conditions that Fuller would say make any system of authority worthy of obedience. It respects those values more in some ways, less in others. Whether or not any given software system is a good replacement for a legal alternative will depend on which values of legality are more important to you (a large part of Law and Morality discussed the ways in which these values are necessarily in tension). Further, it will depend on how well the software system's designers handle the challenges of explaining accurately just what it is that their software does, and those explanations will be more or less persuasive for different kinds of software.
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By Cory Doctorow at 11:33 pm Sunday, Jul 18
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Divers in the English Channel have discovered the 50-year-old wreck of a French cargo ship with 20,000 half-bottles of (slightly flat) champagne in the hold.
Divers from the Folkestone Diving Club and other south-east clubs, who remain tight-lipped about exactly where and when they found the champagne, dug out bottles to bring back to dry land and cracked them open with friends and family at dinner parties.
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via Fark)
By Cory Doctorow at 11:31 pm Sunday, Jul 18
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If you catch a mosquito feeding on you, you should flick it away rather than squashing it, lest you drive its infectious guts into your body.
The issue is reviewed in an article published this month in the New England Journal of Medicine that focuses on a 57-year-old Pennsylvania woman who died in 2002 of a fungal infection in her muscles called Brachiola algerae.
Doctors were puzzled because the fungus was thought to be found only in mosquitoes and other insects. But it's not found in mosquito saliva like West Nile virus and malaria, so a simple mosquito bite could not have caused the infection.
The article's authors concluded that the woman must have smashed a mosquito on her skin, smearing its body parts into the bite.
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via Fark)
By Cory Doctorow at 11:30 pm Sunday, Jul 18
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Dance, Voldo, Dance is a music video made by synchronizing the movements of gladiators from the game Soul Calibur with a dance track, so that they appear to be getting down with their nasty selves to the music. It's quite good!
11.2 MB Quicktime Link
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via Waxy)
By Cory Doctorow at 11:22 pm Sunday, Jul 18
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If you or a loved one is pulling together any kind of presentation on Massively Multiplayer Online games, check out this freqeuntly-revised chart of growth numbers for various MMOs. The curve for Final Fantasy is astounding.
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via Waxy)
By Mark Frauenfelder at 11:01 am Sunday, Jul 18
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Ever wanted to be a vampire, but couldn't stand the sight of blood? Some scientists in Russia claim they've got the answer for you. Noticing that the typical meat packing plant produces 7 tons of blood a day, they've come up with a process to convert the proteins in the blood into the basic ingredients for "milk, yogurt, chocolate, and coffee." I'd say "I'll believe it when I taste it," but I don't believe I'll be tasting it, thank you very much.
Link (Thanks,
Klintron!)
By Xeni Jardin at 9:39 am Sunday, Jul 18
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On January 1, 2005, Elvis Presley's "That's All Right" -- a 50-year-old tune currently enjoying the #3 chart spot in Great Britain -- will enter the public domain.
Anyone will be able to release it without paying royalties to the owners of the master or the performer's heirs. BMG will start losing a significant piece of its catalog income in Europe. As "That's All Right" is being hailed by some as the beginning of rock 'n' roll, the implications are that every year after 2005, more recordings that defined the genre will fall into public domain.
Link
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Thanks, electrincinca)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:45 am Sunday, Jul 18
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The Boom Boom Multibox is a waterproof box containing a pair of battery-powered speakers and a stereo minijack. Just drop your iPod or discman inside it, plug in the speakers and snap it shut, and you've got a waterproof sound-system you can hang up in the shower. Next time I'm stateside, I'm ordering one of these -- I love having music in the shower (it'd also be cool for hotel rooms and the like).
Link
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via Gizmodo)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:44 am Sunday, Jul 18
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Orkut, Google's social networking tool, is only open to people who've been invited to join the service. This means that once a well-connected Burning Man attendee shows up in Orkut,
lots of burners follow.
Which is how it is that suddenly, Portuguese speakers (presumably mostly Brazilian, given Brazil's kick-ass connectivity and widespread adoption of moblogging, blogging and other viral, social tools) outnumber Yankees on the service nearly two-to-one. There's now a vicious fight raging between USAns and Portuguese-speakers, as the former group is displaced, for nearly the first time, by another linguistic group.
(I'm reminded of a story that a product manager for Hotmail once told me -- "Our growth curve was pretty steady, then one day someone sent an email to someone in India with 'Get a free email account at hotmail.com' in the footer and the next day we singed up half a million users").
Tammy Soldaat, a Canadian, got a sample of Brazilian wrath recently when she posted a message asking whether her community site on body piercing should be exclusive to people who speak English.
Brazilian Orkut users quickly labeled her a "nazi" and "xenophobe."
"After that I understood why everyone is complaining about these people, why they're being called the 'plague of Orkut,"' she said in a site called "Crazy Brazilian Invasion."
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via /.)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:44 am Sunday, Jul 18
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Benjamin Rosenbaum, whose knockout story "The Ant King: A California Fairytale" convinced me that he was desitined to be one of the great talents in science fiction, has Creative-Commons-licensed his story "The Orange," which
originally appeared was reprinted in Harper's Magazine
(selling an sf story to Harper's is itself quite a coup!).
An orange ruled the world.
It was an unexpected thing, the temporary abdication of Heavenly Providence, entrusting the whole matter to a simple orange.
The orange, in a grove in Florida, humbly accepted the honor. The other oranges, the birds, and the men in their tractors wept with joy; the tractors' motors rumbled hymns of praise.
Airplane pilots passing over would circle the grove and tell their passengers, "Below us is the grove where the orange who rules the world grows on a simple branch." And the passengers would be silent with awe.
Link
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Thanks, Ben!)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:43 am Sunday, Jul 18
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The Autocorrect feature in Excel (which drives me bonkers across the whole Office suite) has introduced irreversible errors into genetic research that is tabulated in spreadsheets, because Except autocorrects some identifiers to be dates.
Excel is widely used in genetic research to process microarray data. A microarray chip detects amounts of protein produced from thousands of different genes, enabling researchers to see which particular gene is being expressed in a sample of diseased tissue, for example.
The errors are introduced because some genetic identifiers look very like dates to Excel. If the spreadsheet is not properly set up, it will convert an identifier, such as SEPT2 to a date: 2-Sep. The conversion, the researchers say, is irreversible: once the error has been introduced, the original data is gone.
Link
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via Futurismic)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:42 am Sunday, Jul 18
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Trekkies was an amazing, affectionate documentary about serious Star Trek fans, a fine piece of anthropology that was equal parts appreciation and gentle humour. Now there's a direct-to-DVD sequel, Trekkies 2, which I'm quite looking forward to seeing.
Link
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via Kottke)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:41 am Sunday, Jul 18
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This article on the 25th anniversary of the Walkman explores some of the fascinating social fallout from the rise of personal stereos.
"The Walkman was critical in altering the rules of being with other people," Schiffer says. "People thought it was rude to listen to music in public. Now our standards have eroded to the route we've gone down with cell phones, which is to sanction rudeness. We are losing sociability."
Reg Req'd Link
Link (
Thanks, Steve!)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:41 am Sunday, Jul 18
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Infogargoyle sez, "NPR has just done an audio interview with the ever evolving cyborg,
Steve Mann. He talks about his body's "dashboard" monitor on his head mounted display, eyetap. Mann also describes
sousveillance - "the people watching the powers that be". Available in both
RealAudio &
Windows Media Player 9." What a pity that NPR insists on limiting the availability of its programmes to proprietary, streaming formats that can't be saved or shifted to an MP3 player, and require proprietary players to use.
Link,/a>
(Thanks, infogargoyle!)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:40 am Sunday, Jul 18
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Wildcat is a custom jewellers in Brighton, UK, that sells amazing body jewelry; crazy, futuristic sex-toys; and these gigantic, chunky silver rings with pop-culture and science-fiction themes. The store was packed when I stopped in (and scored some bargains, including the first ring I've owned since I was 9 years old and my grandfather gave me a ring with my initials on it), and despite the brisk trade, the prices were refreshingly low, even when denominated in UK Pounds -- there's a great collection of sale rings that go for £10-30 each (and the shop also does a nice line in replica shrunken heads!).
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By Cory Doctorow at 6:40 am Sunday, Jul 18
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Nelson has wirtten a fantastic post about the modern disposition of the Ultima games, including unauthorised bundles of the game's many incarnations along with easy-play emulators for running them on modern hardware.
The most impressive is the Ultima Classics collection. "Sedryn Tyros" has collected the Ultima games and distributed them in a bundle along with DOSBox setups that make it easy to run the games. His supplement also includes original pre-PC versions of the early games, often better than the PC ports, along with the emulators you need to play them on a PC. Alas, this collection is completely unauthorized and you'll have to scour your back alley's bittorrent site to find it.
Another option is fan-made reconstructions of the game engines. The best is Exult for Ultima VII, a portable engine that runs the classic game on many platforms (including Xbox!). Just take the open source game engine, copy over the assets from your Ultima Collection CD, and you're in business.
Link
By Cory Doctorow at 6:38 am Sunday, Jul 18
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A Dutch university student has scanned in an original manuscript for Alice's Adventures Underground, Lewis Carroll's precursor to Alice in Wonderland.
Link
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via Waxy)
By Cory Doctorow at 6:38 am Sunday, Jul 18
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This guy carves away the inside of coins from many nations, leaving nothing behind but the face on the "heads" side and a bit of metal in the shape of a smoking cigarette, creating the impression of a "smoking coin."
Link
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via Waxy)
By Cory Doctorow at 4:28 am Sunday, Jul 18
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This morning, a friend and I stopped into a little cafe in Brighton, UK, called "Kai Organic Cafe." We ordered a couple of coffees -- paying close to $10 for 'em! -- and sat down in the absolutely empty upstairs area to plug in our laptops, drink our coffee, and get some work done. Half an hour later, the server came upstairs and told us off for plugging in, saying that she wasn't sure if the manager would approve and she didn't want to telephone him on his day off to find out, and so we'd have to unplug (no word on how the manager could possibly find out that anyone had used their precious electricity if it was his day off). We split, and found very good, free, high-speed WiFi, a friendly staff, and lots of unbegrudged electricity at Riki Tik, just a few steps away. If you're a visitor to Brighton looking for a friendly place to relax and plug in, I advise you to do the same (on the other hand, if you're a visitor to Brighton looking to sit with your hands folded in your lap while drinking overpriced coffee in an empty cafe with excruciatingly bad music, well, Kai's is your place)
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