The Invisible Train is a mobile, collaborative multi-user Augmented Reality (AR) game, in which players control virtual trains on a real wooden miniature railroad track.

via USC Interactive Media Division.

These virtual trains are only visible to players through their PDA's video see-through display as they don't exist in the physical world. This type of user interface is commonly called the "magic lens metaphor.

Players can interact with the game environment by operating track switches and adjusting the speed of their virtual trains. The current state of the game is synchronized between all participants via wireless networking. The common goal of the game is to prevent the virtual trains from colliding.

If you haven't made up your mind as to whom to vote for (really?), this may help: The Seed Magazine: Science is Culture has a series of articles examining each candidate's stand on various issues from a scientific view point. So far three topics have been published: Environment, Life and Security in Issue 9, 10 and 11, repectively. The contents are not online though. Go to your local library and read the magazine.

This AP photo I found on CNN shows some bad ass techie guy preparing for tonight's political debate with 50 million US TV viewers. Better not screw this one up buddy.

Courtesy of an unidentified slashdot commenter:

I like the idea of a corporate death penalty. To expand a bit upon the idea, I think the following would be more fair than the current situation.

1) Taking current bankruptcy proceedings a bit further, once a "CDP" is declared, the corporation must immediately sell all existing assets at market value or as close to market value as possible to complete a fast sale. Supposing "Renron's" corporate HQ building is worth 20 million dollars, a 15 million dollar bid for that building by anyone should be considered reasonable, accepted, and that money should go into a "corporate funeral fund." Same with all of the rest of the company's assets.

2) The corporation must dissolve and may never operate in business again, no matter who's supposedly in charge. Regardless of who purchases the assets, no one who was an executive at the failed company may be allowed to work for any company who acquires any part of the failed corporation. If Lenny Kay was CEO at Renron, and Renron's assets are bought up by Ding-Dong Corporation, Lenny Kay cannot go to work for Ding-Dong Corporation in any capacity.

3) Individual, non-corporate investors in the failed company _must_ be compensated first. This means that Joe Average who bought 500 shares of Renron must be given his fair share of the "funeral fund" long before BigBank or AngelVenture get any of their loan money back. Same goes for all of the retirement funds who, on behalf of Joe Averages, invested in Renron. If BigBank or AngelVenture loses out, boo hoo. Maybe next time around, they'll be a bit more responsible with the blank checkbooks loaning a few billion here and a few billion there.

4) With a corporation given a "CDP," the executives should have to pay back into the process. CEO got a 10 million dollar bonus last year? Fine him 10 million dollars and put it into the "funeral fund." Any inappropriate spoils should be returned to the death fund of the company, to be recompensed to its shareholders, individuals first.

With some tweaks like these, corporations might become responsible again.

Hot on the heels of The Corporation.

Kids really don't need to be up to their eyeballs in technology, computing, the media, and the Internet, according to this morning's Washington Post article A Caution on Kids, Technology. Apparently, Alliance for Childhood issued a report entitled Tech Tonic: Towards a New Literacy of Technology suggesting that the current state of education is way too tech heavy. Go figure! What do they suggest? Well, they suggest running, skipping, playing, frolicking, and socializing. As in being a kid. Tra-la-la! They believe these are the kinds of developmental experiences that a child needs to be successful into the 21st century and are not met solely by computers. I, for one, am scandalized.

By the Fine Thread of Text Messages

Following The Man of the Crowd is a co-located, 24-hour following piece conducted by Glowlab's Christina Ray and Lee Walton in conjunction with Spectropolis: Mobile Media, Art and the City. It's a 24-hour walk in which two participants, linked by text messaging, drift separately through the city in an alternating pattern according to the movements of strangers. Based loosely on Edgar Allen Poe's short story "The Man of the Crowd" and inspired by Vito Acconci's 1967 "Following Piece," Ray and Walton have developed a collaborative performance that involves following strangers over a 24-hour period. Working as a team connected only through text messaging, the two will alternate turns following selected strangers through New York City.

Date: October 2 - 3, 2004; Time: 10am - 10am; Location: starting at Doma Caf , 17 Perry Street at 7th Avenue; end location unknown. Participate! Sign up at Dodgeball.

Interface at Critical

Mark Marino (of the Barthian and bachelor bots) sends word of Global Interface, a yearlong, interdisciplinary workshop on cyberculture that is just starting up with a talk from Kate Hayles on Monday, Oct 4. Meatspace meetings will happen monthly at UC Riverside, as is explained in the proposal. The diverse set of participants includes faculty from music, dance, and computer science. The interface serves as the nexus between artist, viewer, programmer, technology, and industry, the blog for the workshop declares. Mark and the other organizers hope that this blog will foster intersections and conversation online, too, and there s a plan to post extensive notes on all the talks.

posted by nick on grand text auto, 09.29.04

Forget waiting for ET to call -- the most likely place to find an alien message is in our DNA, according to an expert in Australia.

Professor Paul Davies, from the Australian Centre for Astrobiology at Macquarie University in Sydney, believes a cosmic greeting card could have been left in every human cell.

The coded message would only be discovered once the human race had the technology to read and understand it.

Writing in New Scientist magazine, Davies said the idea should be considered seriously.

For more than 40 years astronomers have been sweeping the skies with radio telescopes hoping to catch a signal from an alien civilisation.

So far the search has been in vain. But Davies believes it is wrong to assume that extraterrestrials who may be hundreds of millions of years ahead of us technologically will have chosen to communicate by radio.

FROM BEV: the referenced New Scientist article is here, dated sept 18, 1999.

Taiwan's indigenous super germ defies all antibiotics. Shih Wen-yi, acting director of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), called for calm yesterday as people began to fear there is an indigenous super germ that defies any and all antibiotics. Known as PDRAB, the super germ is all but indestructible. It may cause all kinds of complications, chiefly pneumonia. PDRAB stands for pandrug-resistant Acinetobacter baumannii. So far infection has been confined to hospitals, Shih said. Mostly, weakened in-patients, many of them recovering from surgery, have fallen victim. Once infected, the victims often die simply because there are no antibiotics that could kill the PDRAB. http://www.chinapost.com.tw/i_latestdetail.asp?id=22951 PDRAB *PDRAB lives on catheters, it's got a 60 percent mortality rate, it eats antibiotics for breakfast, and there's a iot of it around. *I open Google news today, people, and what do I see... Volcanoes, earthquakes, hurricanes, carbombs, and a Presidential debate! Maybe it's time that the entire population of the planet took a two-week vacation.

There is no end in sight, as yet.

In Barcelona, on Friday, Creative Commons will launch its Spanish licenses. Ignasi Labastida i Juan, the Spanish project lead, has organized a promising launch event that will feature, amongst other speakers, Mr. Oriol Ferran i Riera, General Secretary of Telecommunications and the Information Society, Generalitat de Catalunya (Catalan Government), and a round table on New ways of publishing and publicizing culture . Roland is going to give a talk on iCommons, while Christiane is busy proselytizing in England.

It will all happen in Barcelona, at the Aula Magna of the Universitat de Barcelona (UB), Gran Via de les Corts Catalanes 585, Spain, on Friday at 10am. All readers of this blog are welcome to attend and contribute to the discussion.

Pitchaya Sudbanthad sent us a link last night to an absolutely terrific interview he did with Swoon for The Morning Paper. Here in London (and around the world), Swoon is as much loved and revered for her work and her commitment as she is back at home in New York. If you're just now getting interested in street art, then be sure to read Pitchaya's fantastic interview. You can read it here. Also, there is a fotolog tribute to Swoon here and her website is here.

Before the internet, before personal computers, even before a computer could fit into your living room, people were experimenting with digital technology as an art medium. Here are some photos from the exhibition Digital Pioneers at Electrohype in Malmoe

The film The Horribly Stupid Stunt by The Yes Men was screened at Basement in Copenhagen in connection to the RADAR festival. Marie Kirkegaard conducted an email interview with Andy Bichlbaum from the group.

The special on software art continues. Sebastian Campion went to this year's Ars Electronica and met the artist Casey Reas. Among other topics the talk touched upon the project Processing, which is a tool that might make it easier to create software art.

Troubling Utopia

From Edward Picot's review of AVATARA's DVD\"Machinima Documentary" by Donato Mancini, Jeremy Turner and Flick Harrison (536 Productions).

Avatara, from a Canadian team called 536, is a documentary about an online community - "a global subculture who spend their lives immersed in an online 3-D voice-chat program", as the blurb explains. What makes this particular documentary special is that "every second... was recorded in-world (ie. online, within the virtual environment), so we don't meet the people directly. Instead, their voices speak to us through the puppet-like 'avatars': rabbits, pharaos, seahorses, giraffes, the grim reaper, flowers, guitars, trolls (etc) which they've chosen to represent themselves in cyberspace." Because of this immersive approach the documentary is more than just a factual report about these people and their private activities: it gives us a sense of what their world feels like from the inside.

A Real-time Editing Engine for an Algorithmic Sitcom

Office Voodoo is an interactive film installation for two people. It tells the story of Frank and Nancy, two bored Irish officemates, condemned to spend their lives in an office. This infinite film is an algorithmic sitcom inspired from Sartre's play "Huis clos", crossbred with an office life simulator. Two physical voodoo dolls, that represent the protagonists, can be manipulated in order to change the emotions of the characters in the film. It is a social laboratory where the viewers can experiment on the influence of emotions as initial conditions in any social interaction. As viewers get skilled manipulating the dolls, they can control the emotions of Frank and Nancy, and see what happens when : Frank is cranky and Nancy is hyperactive ? Frank is horny and Nancy is depressed ?

The interactive film is made exclusively of real lens-based footage shot with real actors, but it runs on a real-time editing engine that fluidly assembles the film shot by shot as one watches it, while respecting the conventions of continuity editing. The installation is built as a little immersive wooden house for two people - a cross between a confessional, an arcade game booth and a kinetoscope parlour. Download PDF.

An Urban Media Space

Urballoon is an urban media space: a balloon equipped with a projector and wireless connection to the web that enables people to submit content online and broadcast it in public spaces. The balloon is located in open urban spaces frequented by pedestrians at sunset and night (e.g. plazas, parks). The ball is tethered and floats at a height of approximately 3 stories. The images and text submitted via the site are projected directly below it. By accessing Urballoon people can send text or images which will be queued and shown by the balloon in the order received onto the street. An archive of all submissions can also be browsed.

The balloon is located in the entrance of City Hall Park in New York as part of the Spectropolis event (October 1- 3, 2004). Share with people on the streets by submitting materials to the queue now. Submissions will be projected at sunset. Post an image or text.

Via Mia at popgadget.

Galaga Condiments

the "b" word

Jesus Headlight

Footage from the Tokyo Game Show last weekend - interviews, CosPlay, craziness:

TGS2k4.mov - 53 megabytes - 7 minutes, 21 seconds

Thanks for everyone who was interviewed, including the people who spoke into my camera but it wasn't audible or visible or it was accidentally taped over; I'm learning how to pull this stuff together. This is fun!

Wednesday, October 6th, 7pm at The Tank in Times Square. Featuring the lovely and talented: Fang-Yu Lin: From the Great Beyond: Internet as an Entity? Channeling the Net Through a Robotic Typewriter -- James Clar: 3D DISPLAY CUBE -- Mary Flanagan: [ineffable]

A balloon equipped with a projector and wireless connection so people can broadcast messages in public spaces. By Eyebeam alum Carlos J. Gomez de Llarena.

The first Open Source car!!!

Not an American but care about the U.S. election? Express your preference at World Vote!

So you thought Japanese were drinking tea to get zen?
Wildest Lipton Ice tea ad on earth!

via The Apartment.

Much more cute, this ad for an apartment complex in Tokyo.

via Jeansnow.

Architect Sean Godsell has installed a new project for the Melbourne Fringe Festival depicting the bus shelter as a refuge for the homeless, who could find there a space blanket and bed down for the night, as the bench lifts up to reveal a woven steel mattress, and the bin built into the hoarding hosts blankets.

Besides, the bus shelter would be a gallery for struggling artists. Each Shelter exhibited features paintings, sculptures, poems and digital images by the Artful Dodgers, who come from a Jesuit Social Services program for young people affected by homelessness, drug abuse and mental illness.

Previous Godsell's designs explored homelessness: the Future Shack is an emergency housing module made from a shipping container, and Park Bench House converts a park bench into a shelter with sloping roof and woven steel mattress.

Godsell has called on Melbourne to "design the homeless in" to the city rather than try to get them out as do some councils in London and Paris who have installed studs on park benches and placed seats with armrests in underground train stations to prevent anyone sleeping on them.

From Archinect.

Of China large jump forward

Translation: "In the Chinese province Qinghai are obviously particularly sporty the policemen and understand themselves thereby also to co-ordinate. To this impression one comes at least when regarding this photo, which developed in the city Xining, where the law guardians had to work satisfactorily in a Trainingscamp."

Meredith Yayanos' fantastic Burning Man photodiary:

I love my Mer. She crazy.

What are the legal implications of limiting access to Internet content? In this paper, the OpenNet Initiative -- a partnership of the Citizen Lab, the University of Cambridge, and the Berkman Center -- finds that governments offer a range of justifications for blocking content, from safeguarding national security to protecting community standards. Though filtering has tremendous effects on civil liberties, governmental policymaking, and Internet governance, there are few mechanisms for examining and reforming Internet censorship. The paper emphasizes the need for transparency, accountability, and inclusiveness to maintain a reliable, efficient, and global medium for communication. Read the full report on the Legal Implications of Internet Filtering.

- participate in the project by signing up to receive text messages
- for additional info and to follow the project online, visit: glowlab.blogs.com/following/
- to learn more about Spectropolis, visit: www.spectropolis.info

========================
'Following "The Man of the Crowd"'
A co-located 24-hour following piece
Conducted by Glowlab's Christina Ray and Lee Walton in conjunction with Spectropolis: Mobile Media, Art and the City, a three-day event [October 1-3, 2004] in Lower Manhattan that highlights the diverse ways artists, technical innovators and activists are using communication technologies to generate urban experiences and public voice.

Date: October 2 - 3, 2004
Time: 10am - 10am
Location: starting at Doma Caf , 17 Perry Street at 7th Avenue; end location unknown

This project is a 24-hour walk in which two participants, linked by text messaging, drift separately through the city in an alternating pattern according to the movements of strangers. Based loosely on Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Man of the Crowd" and inspired by Vito Acconci's 1969 "Following Piece," Christina Ray and Lee Walton have developed a collaborative performance that involves following strangers over a 24-hour period. The two participants, Ray and Walton, will enact an alternating following cycle throughout the 24-hour period. While "on" they'll maintain an intense awareness of a single stranger and his or her unknown destination. While "off," they'll rest and experience their present location. The switch from one participant to the other will be determined by the actions of the strangers, and may be exhaustingly rapid or frustratingly slow.

Spectropolis visitors and the public are invited to participate in the project by signing up to receive text messages, sent once per hour, broadcasting Ray and Walton's locations as they execute the project. From this information, spectators will be able to follow their progress and if they are in the right place at the right time possibly even become involved as strangers to be followed. Live text and photo updates may also be viewed at: glowlab.blogs.com/following/

As much as you might enjoy watching the industry-gobbling-empire that is Electronic Arts crumble to the ground, we’s got news for you, it ain’t happening any time soon. Yes, within the first ten days of the Sims 2’s release more than 1 million copies were sold (more than 50% in Europe). This of course, set a record high for a PC launch, and has elevated EA to a new level in its brief 22 year history. What makes the game so potent is its appeal to ‘non-gamers’ (if there is such a thing), earning the Sims (every capitalist’s dream) cultural phenomenon status.

Flipping through Film Festival Today, I came across an article about actor Kevin Spacey's project Triggerstreet, an on-line community for indie filmmakers and screenwriters.

Now, I'm fairly new to this movie stuff, so Triggerstreet may be old news for all I know. But I was intrigued by what I read in the piece and saw on the site.

First, get this -- the motivation behind the project, as described by Spacey's business partner Dana Brunetti:

The idea came when I was working as Kevin's assistant and he was always adamant that he wouldn't be where he was if others hadn't given him a leg up. He wanted to ensure that there was a way to keep the 'pipeline' open to undiscovered talent and the 'over the fence' submissions, but because he has become such a success, a lot of this is hindered by the litigious society we live in and the worry of being sued by accepting unsolicited work. A writer cannot submit a script to a lot of production companies because they will not accept them for this reason, so they do not see any talent or material out of the normal channels. . . . The initial idea was simple: establish a way for those without Hollywood connections, but with a passion for screenwriting and filmmaking, to showcase their talent, and make it so that anyone on the inside can be exposed to this talent without the threat of lititation. . . . Our site is a platform for undiscovered talent to showcase one's work and receive feedback from an unbiased audience.

Does that sound like a Creative Commons idea, or is it me?

The site boasts of 2300 short film uploads, 80,000 short film reviews, and 685,000 short film downloads. Like I said, I'm coming to this late, but I'm still interested in learning more. Any of you had experience with Triggerstreet?

Xeni Jardin: Blogger and NBC combat correspondent Kevin Sites is stationed in Iraq, and has added a pair of new posts to his blog today.

But behind these blast walls meant to protect us, our spirits wither. All of us who cover conflict on a regular basis got into this kind of journalism because we wanted to be immersed up to the eyeballs in our stories. Most of us have given up the communities, comforts and relationships that are the staples of more "natural" lives. To live and work like this is an anathema to our normal rhythms. So when our interpreter/producer Ashraf brought the video of his wedding to the bureau -- we all crowded around a tiny three-inch mini dv player -- like it was a crystal ball.

We watched us our colleague made the commitment of his lifetime to a stunning, young Iraqi woman -- dressed in a splendid royal blue gown, sprigs of white baby's breath in her hair. The camera moved around the room, allowing us to meet his family and friends -- some of them other Iraqi colleagues we knew -- but had never seen outside of work in this kind of setting, being themselves, full of smiles, the seriousness of newsgathering melted away for a few hours.

And then they danced. Mostly the women, moving like Bedouin princesses under the desert sky. A tiny glimpse of beauty in a place where it seems to become a bit more rare with each passing day.

Link to "Blog Smog," Link to "Behind Blast Walls."

Conflux artist Marc Horowitz has used Crate & Barrel catalogues to his advantage. While shooting the Fall 2004 catalogue, a blank section of the shot wasn't working. Marc went on a whim and wrote "dinner w/marc, 510-xxx-7326". The entire number was written, but I abbreviated to alleviate the calls Marc has been receiving. You see, Marc ended up with hundreds of calls asking to go to dinner, so Marc is doing just that. Beginning in a few short weeks, Marc will embark upon the The National Dinner Tour, a month (or more) trip to meet a few of the hundreds that called him. If you have the Fall 2004 catalogue around, check it out, but don't call for dinner, since he's already booked.

{The image was edited by the author to display where the artist marked}

Designer: Designers: Dirk Rutten & Jeroen Kascha for NXT design

  

The Jelly-light is a massive light sculpture.

The light-source is fitted inside a generator fitted with an energy-saving MHR150 watt bulb. Light from the generator flows into the Jelly-light through optic fibers infused in transparent rubber.

Add an optional colour wheel, with a range of colours, and a programmable system, and you can create a huge assortment of dynamic color schemes, a lightshow hanging from your ceiling.

Available in diameters of 1.5 to 3 meters.

Andrew Losowsky writes:

Nearly a year ago, I was wondering around Florence and found myself unnecessarily fascinated by a single aspect of that Renaissance city of incredible art and breathtaking architecture: the doorbells.

I couldn't get them out of my head. They were everywhere - varied, some shining bronze, others old plastic, names of people I'd never meet, some Italian and permanent, others foreign and on scraps of paper to signify a short visit. So I took my newly purchased shiny camera and starting photographing any (and there were a lot) that caught my eye during an afternoon's stroll around the city. Some of them came out rather well.

I'm now releasing them individually through free photo-sharer Flickr, accompanying each with new short fiction inspired by the bell in question.

Um...

(Thanks, Paul, for my new nightmares)

Cory Doctorow: Bill O'Reilly interviewed Jon Stewart of the Daily Show and called Daily Show watchers a bunch of "stoned slackers." It turns out that Stewart's audience is better-educated and better-informed that O'Reilly Factor viewers (surprise, surprise!).

Viewers of Jon Stewart's show are more likely to have completed four years of college than people who watch "The O'Reilly Factor," according to Nielsen Media Research...

Comedy Central also touted a recent study by the University of Pennsylvania's National Annenberg Election Survey, which said young viewers of "The Daily Show" were more likely to answer questions about politics correctly than those who don't.

Link

[according to Gothamist, Daily Show viewers are apparently hotter, too. --ts]

Some time back I posted on the cell-phone and laptop carrying geek girl Barbie I coveted - and now it seems that Mattel India has gone one step further by launching the Instant Messaging Barbie doll (via):

Obviously Mattel knew that young people are driving India's mobile phone revolution, and Mattel does well in India, but I was surprised this would be the test market for such a product.

And for more on the world of texting, check out textually.org (although I wonder when texting will be as taken-for-granted as email?)

More proof that the trend towards political video games is accelerating: The Republican party of Illinois has just released the Take Back Illinois online video game, designed by the brilliant dudes over at Persuasive Games. It's intended to highlight the positions of the state's GOP in several key issues, including medical malpratice reform, education, participation, and economic reform. Each area is represented by a little minigame, and the first one out is "medical malpractice". My verdict? It's incredibly cool, and possibly one of the best political games I've ever seen. That's because political games are usually caught in a design dilemma: If you foreground the game's "message", it's usually at the expense of gameplay -- the game is boring. But if you focus on merely creating killer gameplay, then the play takes over and the sense of "message" can be lost. The best games are thus ones that try...

I just got my picture taken with my second cousin Keigo. Keigo is aka Cornelius and is a pretty well known musician. The picture for a magazine called Brutus and the series is about cool people and their relationship with someone else. So I was the "someone else" for this article. The photo was taken by Kishin Shinoyama who is well known for his portraits. His confidence and efficiency were quite amazing. He found this cool spot to take the photo in our offices in 5 minutes. Then he set up his 8X10 camera took polaroids of three poses. He seemed to only take one or two actual photos of each set up. It was all over in like five or ten minutes.

He gave me one of the polaroids and signed it for me upon request and said that I could post this on my blog.

Torrent: Barbarella.torrent
Search: Barbarella, Queen of the Galaxy (1968) XviD
Size: 689 Mb
Quality: DVD-rip
Submitter: Pandion
Info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0062711/

Oh people, you always fall for the sexy stuff...

Well I guarantee that this discussion tonight, featuring several sexy panelists (you know who you are!) and our very own Jonah Peretti as moderator, will make you feel very sexy.

See you tonight!

For more info click here.

*thanks to Flavorpill for the endorsement!

In July, Team OSAKA won an international competition called Robot Soccer World Cup, held in Lisbon.

VisiON, its 40-centimeter-tall autonomic robot can kick or throw a ball, and even make judgments, with no outside control, through the use of a 360-degree vision sensor.

Osaka will host the next RoboCup, which will provide a good opportunity to publicize the potential of the local robot technology (RT) industry.

With 13,000 factories in Osaka Prefecture, and research institutes and universities, Osaka believes it is one step ahead of other cities in regard to the RT industry and its goal is to create a center of RT research and a robot showcase.

This center, to be called "RoboCity: Center of RT Experiments", will be a testing ground for robot safety. Visitors will be able to view the latest technology and newest robots as well as tell researchers what robots they would like to see.

Asada said people were already familiar with Sony's Asimo and other robots created by major firms, but small and medium-sized manufacturers were more suited for creating robots because consumers will want robots to perform specific functions. Robots, therefore, will be specialized, so they cannot be mass-produced.

According to Daily Yomiuri online, scenes such as an elderly woman talking to arobot in front of a restaurant in Osaka is nothing uncommon. Ifbot, a 45-centimeter-tall robot, woke from sleep mode and gave her a wink.
Ifbot's Sensibility Technology means it is able to detect the emotions of its interlocutor from the tone of voice and the words used. It can also produce more than 40 facial expressions, recognise 10 people, has a vocabulary of tens of thousands of words and adapts its conversation to the habits and personalities of different people.

The robot is also targeted at the elderly, for whom having someone to talk is essential to their well-being.

In an underground area of Umeda, one of Osaka's shopping districts, Robovie-R (more pictures), another communication robot, hugged small children and called them by name, during a two-day demonstration in mid-July, while Robovie-M, a small humanoid robot, skillfully threw and kicked a ball (comes in kit and costs around US 4,500 doll.)

It may still look like science-fiction to some of us, but life with robots is gradually becoming a reality.

Virgin boss Sir Richard Branson has signed a 14m agreement which will see his company take passengers into space.

The British entrepreneur is having five "spaceliners" built in the US by the team behind the SpaceShipOne vehicle.

Sir Richard says it will cost around 100,000 to go on a "Virgin Galactic" spaceliner, and the first flights should begin in about three years' time...

[taken by a Flickr member in Helsinki... --ts]

British newspaper The Guardian is running a Guardian special: the world in 2020 series.

Yesterday's It's all for your own good article forecasts how by 2020, no aspect of your life will be safe from prying eyes, or from interfering official nannies: analysis of your urine in your workplace, remote control of your car speed, facial recognition systems, etc.

Technology will be at the service of the government, and its use will increasingly force us to consider the balance between the freedom of the individual and intrusion into our daily lives by the state.

Quite insightful is also the article Only connect which examines the impact of wireless on our lives by 2020, from RFID chips to robots and artificial intelligence, cars, energy, etc.

The American artist John F. Simon Jr. calls himself an artist rather than a digital artist. However, he is working creatively with programming. Some of his famous works are the panels - digital artworks hung on a wall. Kristine Ploug talked to him.

MoMA will raise the basic price of admission an eye-opening 67 percent, to $20, making the Modern the most expensive major art museum in the United States.

Andy Phelps has once again begun blogging. A recent post of his to the Corante Tech site suggests an intriguing idea: B-Sides to major commercial games. "I think there is an interesting opportunity here: stick some "B-Side" experimental games on the DVD with the big title. Little Flash games, or student games, or Internet games that haven't taken off yet. Don't advertise them on the box, sell the "big game" just like always." Thanks to Hylton Jolliffe for the submission.

Rumsfeld yesterday:

We had something like 200 or 300 or 400 people killed in many of the major cities of America last year. Is it perfectly peaceful? No. What’s the difference? We just didn’t see each homicide in every major city in the United States on television every night. It happens here in this city, in every major city in the world. Across Europe, across the Middle East, people are being killed. People do bad things to each other.

What a fucking asshole.

she's everywhere!

great to see them get the support [via] 

The Spacebox is a self-contained studio residence that can be fitted with the help of a light crane. Larger buildings can be assembled using multiple units on a foundation of Stelcon' concrete plates.

The residential units are made of high-grade composites, which until now were used only in the shipbuilding and aircraft industries. They have a surface area of 18 m or 22 m , and are equipped to function as a compact studio residence, complete with kitchen, shower and toilet, a boiler, mechanical ventilation and electrical heating. At the rear side, the units are linked to a central walkway with a staircase on both ends.

The units are delivered by the manufacturer completely ready for use.

Hundreds of Spacebox units are already in use and preparations are presently underway in several cities in Europe for placing Spacebox complexes at university campuses.

Via DesignMatcher.

Have also a look at the pdf "What if Denmark was the world's housing factory?" (thanks to Angermann2)

Related: Living in washing machines, Rooms in a box, Solutions to the housing crisis

Here's another Iraq war video. This one appears to be a strike on a group of people walking down a street in Fallujah. Does anyone else have more information on this video? Has it been aired on any TV network?

If they are civilians, it's quite disturbing. The "aw dude" in the audio doesn't seem like a very appropriate reaction.

The embedded Windows Media Player window didn't work for me in Firefox on OS X, but worked fine in Internet Explorer. You can also use this link to view it directly in Windows Media Player.

Via Paul

Comment - TrackBack

In this post Adam Greenfield singles out a recent bit of Eyebeam reBlogging to illustrate the horrors that resyndication feeds will visit on Google ranking and giving-credit-where-credit-is-due. To make a long story short, when Eyebeam reBlogged an item about Jim Davies' Pac-Man Paintings Page, it did not assign the primary, "top of the post" link to the original source but rather to a downstream reblogger. Greenfield believes such practices muddy the web waters and frets that ultimately reBloggers could beat Davies for Google ranking.

I was the reBlogger at the time so here's an explanation. First, in defense of the Eyebeam reBlog software, it does give the reBlogger a choice which link to use for "top of the post" status, so it's not purely robotic. I chose the link I chose (we-make-money-not-art's reblogging of the item) because w-m-m-n-a had picked and (as best I can recall) resized the photo accompanying the Davies plug and added (admittedly very slight) editorial commentary. I figured that since Davies was being reBlogged so many times he'd ultimately get his due (which at the moment appears to be slashdotting), and I'd give credit to the reblogger who packaged the item in a way most to my taste. And, to be perfectly honest, I thought Davies' art was topical and only mildly amusing so this was my way of hedging a critical endorsement.

As far as Google getting skewed by my capriciousness, jeez, who cares? It's an erratic search measure at best and plain screwy as a measure of intellectual worth. Thanks to Google, my current largest hit-getter is a drawing of gay furry porn I linked to over two years ago, to make a minor point about, ironically, the vernacular side of the Web mooting earnest new media initiatives. As far as I know, I'm the only person who ever linked to it, and it gets disproportionate attention because Google Images pulls it up as an example of the hugely popular "yaoi" (male-male manga) search term. That comes from the URL, not me--I didn't even know the term in June 2002 (in fact, I thought the furries in question were a male and a female). I guess my point is that sometimes it only takes one link to make something "a hit," and getting credit as a "discoverer" of an artwork can result in a tidal wave of unwanted traffic. Not quite the same, honor-wise, as publishing an article in a peer-reviewed journal, for either the critic or the critiqued. To conclude, as David Byrne once said of the government, "Don't worry about Google."

Ok, I spent most of Friday night knee deep in information on how to go about voting in the 2004 US election and have come up with a first draft of the Voters Information Guide (as initiated here). It's unfinished with the barest of formatting, but I wanted to get feedback on it before I go any further. And keep in mind, this is more Voting for Dummies than it... (with comments)

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