Artists Amy Rawson and Brian East made this felted Santa Cthulhu (a towering 12 inches of wool and madness) and have posted it to eBay for your bidding pleasure.
Here's a flowchart showing how Cleanfeed -- the secret British national firewall that is presently restricting access to Wikipedia - operates:
Our routers firstly check the IP address of the server that’s hosting the URL you’re trying to access. If they determine that the IP address is also used to host one of the websites on the IWF list then your request is passed to the IWF proxies.
A lookup is then done and if the address you’re trying to access matches one on the list then the request is denied.
Translation: a third party now monitors every request made to Wikipedia from the six ISPs that participate in the Great Firewall of Britain.
A company called Constitution Arms claims that the FDA has classed its "Palm Pistol" (a squeezable handgun suitable for people with arthritis) as a Class I medical device ("a classification reserved for devices that pose little risk to a patient's health, such as stethoscopes and walking aids") and they imply that Medicare will help you buy one. The FDA denies any certification and an expert on medical device regulation says that Medicare probably wouldn't subsidize these even if the FDA gave it the nod.
"It's something that they need to assist them in daily living," says Matthew Carmel, president of Constitution Arms in Maplewood, New Jersey, which hopes to manufacture the Palm Pistol - now just a patent and specifications.
"The justification for this would be no more or less for a [walking aid] or wheelchair, or any number of things that are medical devices," he says.
The sales information reads: "It is also ideal for seniors, disabled or others who may have limited strength or manual dexterity. Using the thumb instead of the index finger for firing, it significantly reduces muzzle drift, one of the principal causes of inaccurate targeting. Point and shoot couldn't be easier."
Tavie sez, "This site, designed to look like an old rabbit-ears set playing old Betamax tapes, shows clip after Youtube clip of Christmas specials, commercials and holiday-themed episodes of television shows, all circa 20-25 years ago. Adjust the rabbit ears to get that perfect "grainy" look.
I am a sucker for this sort of nostalgia. I have been entertained for hours upon hours.
"
The fantastic Pew Internet Life research series has a new installment up, this one a set of preliminary data on adult players of video games. Lots of crunch stats here:
Younger generations tend to dominate the gaming world; however, older respondents who do
play games are more avid players. Older gamers, particularly seniors, tend to play games more
frequently. Over one-third (36%) of gamers 65 and older say they play games everyday or almost
everyday, compared with 19% of adults aged 50-64, 20% of adults aged 30-49, and 20% of adults
aged 18-29. Senior gamers may play more frequently because they have more time to play than
younger gamers, as 77% of senior gamers reported being retired.
Here's another video made during the 2008 Presidential election, from the Republican side of the house. Like Dear Mr. Obama (and like everything my fall class at ITP was concerned with), this wasn't made by political professionals. The "video" is in fact mainly audio -- a 4 minute radio clip overlaid with pull-quotes and editorializing, taken from a 2001 WBEZ interview with Obama, where he is discussing the inequalities of rights vs. inequalities of wealth:
If you look at the victories and failures of the civil rights movement and its litigation strategy in the court. I think where it succeeded was to invest formal rights in previously dispossessed people, so that now I would have the right to vote. I would now be able to sit at the lunch counter and order as long as I could pay for it I'd be o.k.
But, the Supreme Court never ventured into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and of more basic issues such as political and economic justice in society. To that extent, as radical as I think people try to characterize the Warren Court, it wasnt that radical. It didn't break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the founding fathers in the Constitution, at least as its been interpreted and Warren Court interpreted in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties.
This kind of material can sometimes be political gold ("The Warren Court wasn't radical enough!", "Breaking free of the Constitution!"), but this video, though it was seen a couple million times, didn't have that effect, in part because it didn't come out til the last week of October, when people's mind were already largely made up, and when other economic issues had become more pressing.
So why, since the material had been sitting there since 2001, did no one use it til a week before Election Day? No one found it. Search engines have made text search trivial, but audio and video are still hand-craft jobs.
Had some enterprising Republican found this in July, the McCain camp could have made use of it, possibly finding some way to make Obama respond. (That McCain would have lost anyway doesn't matter for future uses of the technique.) Seeing this, candidates starting exploratory committees for 2012 may try to harness partisan amateurs to find 'gotcha's in the increasingly large but hard-to-search audio and video archives coming online, through 'tag it and flag it' searches of an opponent's historical multimedia record.
Assume that every potential candidate for president has generated an average of 100 hours of audio or video a year to date; that to avoid wild goose chases, you want every minute listened to or looked at by ~5 different people; and that the average volunteer will review ~10 minutes of audio or video. With those constraints, a campaign would need something like 30,000 volunteers to cover every minute of a decade's worth of public speech, per opponent. (You can move the input numbers up and down some, but 10^4 users per decade of coverage seems like the right order of magnitude.)
These numbers are high, but not insuperable, and being able to swing this kind of distributed opposition research during the primaries may be an early show of strength. Howard Dean introduced the net as a fund raising tool, and Obama as a proselytizing and 'get out the vote' tool, but I think NakedEmperorNews has shown us the template for distributed opposition research and 'gotcha' political ads created off the candidate's books.
PS. Speculation bait for commenters: why do some videos generate almost all the traffic at a single YouTube version (e.g. Obama Girl) while others, such as this video, get reposted several different times to YouTube, even though the content is not altered? What makes one video have a canonical version and another not?
Xylocopa's Young Mad Scientist's First Alphabet Blocks come in packs of 26 5, each engraved with an illustration depicting a different mad scientific discipline. This is how to get your kids started right:
A - Appendages |
B - Bioengineering |
C - Caffeine |
D - Dirigible |
E - Experiment |
F - Freeze ray |
G - Goggles |
H - Henchmen |
I - Invention |
J - Jargon |
K - Potassium |
L - Laser |
M - Maniacal |
N - Nanotechnology |
O - Organs |
P - Peasants (with Pitchforks) |
Q - Quantum physics |
R - Robot |
S - Self-experimentation |
T - Tentacles |
U - Underground Lair |
V - Virus |
W - Wrench |
X - X-Ray |
Y - You, the Mad Scientist of Tomorrow |
Z - Zombies
Update: Andrew Waser (Chief Mad Scientist, Xylocopa Design) sez, " I
wanted to make a small correction - the blocks actually come five to a
set (with 26 unique illustrations), not 26 individual blocks. I don't
want anyone to be disappointed if they order in confusion!
You and your readers also might appreciate that the blocks have a
super-secret built in encryption function - if you rotate any block
180 degrees, it'll encode to ROT13. If it's good enough for Adobe
Acrobat, it's good enough for Mad Science!"
Seth Finkelstein sez, "Wikinews has learned that six of the United Kingdom's main Internet Service Providers (ISPs) have implemented monitoring and filtering mechanisms that are causing major problems for UK contributors of the popular online encyclopedia, Wikipedia and other Wikimedia Foundation sites. The filters appear to stem from accusations that Wikimedia sites are hosting what some would call child pornography.
UK people might be interested in joining the article's discussion - this is a golden opportunity to reverse-engineer how the Great Firewall Of Britain works in practice."
This is the "voluntary" child-porn filter that we hear very little about. The process by which pages are added to the repository of child porn sites is secret, the list of child porn sites is secret, and the process for correcting errors is secret. At issue are images such as a Scorpions cover that shows the naked chest of a little girl, and a still from a 1938 documentary on the struggle to end child marriages.
Mitch Wagner sez, "Remarkable video by our sister publication, Internet Evolution, about Rwanda's attempts to bootstrap its economy by becoming an Internet hub for Africa.
Rwanda was the site of horrible inter-tribal genocide in 1994, as the Tutsis were massacred by Hutu militia.
One of the people interviewed in this video -- a former officer of the Hutu military, who now leads one of the nation's leading telecoms -- says that he doesn't believe the genocide could have happened today, because the Internet would have gotten the world out. I wish I could be so sure.
The video shows Rwanda to be a gorgeous, green country. "
As Argentine factories go bankrupt and shut their doors, workers are breaking in, starting the machines up again, electing their own leaders, and running the businesses themselves, putting up fierce resistance when the police try to evict them.
On 19 March 2003, we were on the roof of the Zanón ceramic tile factory, filming an interview with Cepillo. He was showing us how the workers fended off eviction by armed police, defending their democratic workplace with slingshots and the little ceramic balls normally used to pound the Patagonian clay into raw material for tiles. His aim was impressive. It was the day the bombs started falling on Baghdad...
The movement of recovered companies is not epic in scale - some 170 companies, around 10,000 workers in Argentina. But six years on, and unlike some of the country's other new movements, it has survived and continues to build quiet strength in the midst of the country's deeply unequal "recovery". Its tenacity is a function of its pragmatism: this is a movement that is based on action, not talk. And its defining action, reawakening the means of production under worker control, while loaded with potent symbolism, is anything but symbolic. It is feeding families, rebuilding shattered pride, and opening a window of powerful possibility.
