Jim Davies has an online gallery of paintings he has done based on Pac-Man.

I like the "head-on collision between a ghost and Pac-Man, and is appropriate for the front of a car. Since there are no power pellets and Shadow is red, the ghost will win. So the image is of a confrontation that is bound to have a happy ending."

From Montage, reblogged from Game Girl Advance.

An article from Sunday's LA Times Op/Ed Page On MEDIA Sept 19,2004
Bloggers' 'Moment' Doesn't Make for a Revolution It's an Internet win, but far from traditional journalism's death knell
by Ben Wasserstein
"...there is little doubt that a few people using their computers certainly gave CBS News and anchor Dan Rather a beating. Right-wing blogs "blog" is short for web log and forums such as Power Line, Little Green Footballs and Free Republic were the first to question the authenticity of four memos released by CBS News, purportedly written by Lt. Col. Jerry B. Killian, who supervised George W. Bush's Texas Air National Guard unit in the early 1970s. The memos were part of a "60 Minutes" story reported by Rather, questioning President Bush's fulfillment of his Guard service. The buzz created by the blogs became deafening and the story moved like lightning onto the Drudge Report, and from there to talk radio, cable news and newspapers' front pages and it's not over yet.
"Bloggers cheered that the new-media David had slain the old-media Goliath...."

[The right-wing bloggers ginned out the "font analysis" in about four hours. Obviously someone fed it to them 'cause they're not that smart. The question is, was CBS played on the memos to get the "guard issue" off the table? --TM]

Today is my last day reBlogging for the Eyebeam reBlog. Tomorrow the Eyebeamers will introduce my successor, Tim Shey, who will take it from here. After three weeks monitoring about 100 blog feeds and reposting 15-20 items per day (often with added pictures, text, or gratuitous comments), I would now like to articulate my personal reBlogging philosophy--hopefully you're sitting down. Here are my thoughts, for future reBloggers (and reBlog readers) to take or leave:

1. reBlogging is definitely an art, somewhere between curating and editing. I believe the Eyebeam reBlog can be as important and genre-defining as any of the major umbrella tech sites, umbrella art sites (if those existed) or heaven forbid, regular news sources, as long as original material from a pool of steady dedicated bloggers is given equal weight to clips. The purely anecdotal has value, as does free lance reporting. Accordingly, I tried to emphasize unique, personal blog writing and research over news items recycled from big media sources. By and large I did not reBlog slashdot, boingboing or kottke, assuming that most people were looking at them anyway. I also avoided the major media feeds, such as NY Times, Yahoo, Wired, for the same reason.

2. I favored items with text or pictures over blind links with pithy 3-word captions.

3. I tried to keep a balance of tech and art writing.

4. I included a heftier dose of politics because the major media are failing us in that regard and we have to do what we can.

5. I added a few feeds where people are posting original art to the Web: Look, See; SCREENFULL; Wooster Collective.

6. I was disappointed in the music coverage out there. A lot of electronic dance bloggers, for example, don't have RSS feeds or seem to be in a post-coital slump after they all found and linked to each other about two years ago.

Because of the rotation system, personal guidelines such as these won't harden into rules, resulting in the "soft bigotry of voluntarism." I look forward to following the reBlog after I Ieave, and invite everyone to visit my personal blog, where posting is about to increase markedly. I'll probably reBlog a few more items today, but wanted to get this up.

A GRIEVING Australian widow has had her husband's ashes sewn into her breast implants, a British newspaper has reported. Sydney woman Sandi Canesco, 26, took the bizarre step after her new husband Dustin was killed in a car accident, downmarket tabloid the Daily Star said. "It dawned on me that if I carried Dustin's cremated remains in my breast implants, I'd never really have to part with him at all, because then he and I would be one and the same," the paper quoted Canesco as saying, under the headline "Dust to bust".

probably would be more appropriate (and safer?) if she had turned her husband into a diamond to wear instead. like this woman. (Aussie widow news via Julian)

Sasser author gets IT security job [Not sure where Sterling got this article. --TM]

Sven Jaschan, self-confessed creator of the destructive NetSky and Sasser worms, has been hired by German security company Securepoint. He's been offered work as a trainee software developer working on security products, such as firewalls, even though he may go to prison for creating one of the most destructive computer viruses to date. Jaschan was charged this month with computer sabotage. No trial date has been set.

[...]

"I'm sure most people have serious doubts about a security company hiring a virus writer. No doubt Securepoint will have to explain their decision over and over again," said Mikko Hypponen [umlaut over the u], director of anti-virus research at Finnish AV firm F-Secure.

"But in a way I'm happy Sven gets a second chance. After all, we really should try to rehabilitate criminals to enter normal working life again and to become a productive part of the society. Just like in real life many companies avoid hiring ex-convicts but everybody agrees somebody should do it. So in that sense we should be glad that Securepoint is doing this."

Hypponen notes that Jaschan was trying to create a virus that "attacked other viruses written by professional virus writers working with spammers". But his efforts misfired, causing huge inconvenience for many innocent users.

"Sven's viruses removed viruses like Bagle and MyDoom and uninstalled spam proxies such as Mitglieder from infected computers. But of course, his viruses also caused huge amounts of damage - such as Sasser taking down X-Ray machines in hospitals in Sweden," Hypponen explained. F-Secure concludes that Jaschen was "more clueless than malicious".

[Sterling's comment: "I think perhaps a job emptying bedpans for Swedish hospital patients denied medical service..." --TM]

INTERNET ATTACKS JUMP SIGNIFICANTLY THIS YEAR
The semiannual Internet Security Threat Report, which is based on monitoring by computer security firm Symantec, indicates that in the first six months of 2004 there were at least 1,237 newly discovered software vulnerabilities and almost 5,000 new Windows viruses and worms capable of compromising computer security. The numbers represent a dramatic increase over the same period in 2003. Even more troubling was the sharp rise in the number of "bot," or robot, networks, which comprise a large number of infected PCs that can then be used to distribute viruses, worms, spyware and spam to other computers. The survey notes that in the first half of 2004, the number of monitored botnets rose from fewer than 2,000 to more than 30,000. The botnets, which range in size from 2,000 to 400,000 "zombie" machines, are often "rented out" to commercial spammers who use them to distribute junk e-mail while concealing their identities. E-commerce was the industry most frequently targeted for attacks, accounting for 16% of the total, and report authors note that phishing scams are responsible for pushing up the numbers in that category. "We're seeing a professional hand in development that was pretty startling in terms of malicious code," says Alfred Huger, senior director of engineering for security response at Symantec. The report's findings mirror those of recent government-supported research. (New York Times 20 Sep 2004)

image from blam1.com

A long silence here, as I had been concentrating on getting married to Foe. It was a fantastic day, and now I am the happy husband of a wonderful woman, who when asked early on in our relationship whether she had seen the Star Wars movies, replied that - yes - she had seen one of them, called "Ewok Caravan of Courage".

The DVDs of the original trilogy arrive this week.

Juan Cole does a serious slap-down of Bush’s BS “optimism.”

President Bush said Tuesday that the Iraqis are refuting the pessimists and implied that things are improving in that country.

What would America look like if it were in Iraq’s current situation? The population of the US is over 11 times that of Iraq, so a lot of statistics would have to be multiplied by that number.

[…]

What if the Air Force routinely (I mean daily or weekly) bombed Billings, Montana, Flint, Michigan, Watts in Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Anacostia in Washington, DC, and other urban areas, attempting to target “safe houses” of “criminal gangs”, but inevitably killing a lot of children and little old ladies?

What if, from time to time, the US Army besieged Virginia Beach, killing hundreds of armed members of the Christian Soldiers? What if entire platoons of the Christian Soldiers militia holed up in Arlington National Cemetery, and were bombarded by US Air Force warplanes daily, destroying thousands of graves and pulverizing the Vietnam Memorial? What if the National Council of Churches had to call for a popular march of thousands of believers to converge on the National Cathedral to stop the US Army from demolishing it to get at a rogue band of the Timothy McVeigh Memorial Brigades?

[…]

Read the entire post at Informed Comment.

I have an animated .GIF in the online exhibition "Sunday Afternoon," curated by MatCh-Art (Matthew Fisher and Christina Vassallo). The show of approximately 25 artists, described as "an interdisciplinary exploration of leisure, love and obligations," showcases, among other things, what Jerry Saltz has called "puberty escapism" and what I would call the The New Dumb Little Painting, a style sweeping New York, if not the world. I don't mean the term disparagingly at all: antecedents would be Laura Owens and Karen Kilimnick and the reigning queen, I suppose, would be Dana Schutz (even though her paintings aren't very little). The style is marked by faux naive paint handling, disguising sharp, emotionally punchy, and/or socially-tinged observations; MatCh-Art and its earlier incarnations specialize in fairly intimate and ambiguous twists on the genre. Here's a great example, from the "Sunday Afternoon" show, Jeffrey Lutonsky's Fuck Ken Schrader, 2004, ink and pencil on paper, 14 X 17 inches:

Adina has a nice essay about why participants in what Benkler calls commons-based peer production are not necessarily communists. If you don't have time to read Benkler's 80 page Coase's Penguin paper, I suggest you read Adina's essay which picks up some important points that you don't get in the abstract.

The first puzzle about open source peer production isn't whether or not developers have marxist political beliefs, but why it works, especially since the Marxist collective model failed miserably.

This is what Benkler explains elegantly. Coase's Penguin builds on the theory of Ronald Coase, who explained in the 30s that firms exist when the cost of separate transactions with many independent parties is greater than the price-efficiency of a competitive market. The problem Coase was trying to solve at the time was to explain the persistance and dramatic growth of centrally managed corporations, if a market is an ideal way to allocate economic resources.

Benkler solves today's version of the same problem. If money is the ideal way to incent and co-ordinate production, why are we seeing the persistence and dramatic growth of production methods that don't use money?

Benkler explains that commons-based peer production is more efficient than either firms or markets for information goods, where the costs of communication and distribution are low, and the difficult problem is allocating human creativity. When there are masses of potential contributors, and it's easy to participate in little chunks like an open source plugin or a wikipedia article, the best way match skills and work is a million little decisions by independent contributors.

Mandatory, Marxist-style collective farming doesn't benefit from these resource allocation efficiencies. Workers on collective farms have pre-defined work and can't leave. Collective farms don't gain the benefit of unique, voluntary contributions by thousands of distributed workers.

The Villette Numerique media arts festival opens tonite in Paris! Featured in this huge show includes “Listening Post” by Ben Rubin and Mark Hansen, “Bondage” by Atau Tanaka, an installation that turns still imagery into soundscapes, and “Unprepared Piano” by Thomson and Craighead - which presents a Yamaha MIDI grand piano connected to found mp3 files from across the web. Also, this show features the first ever install of “Carnivore” (by RSG) that includes all 16 clients installed in the same venue! My client, “PoliceState” will be there with 20 RC police cars roaming the grounds of the venue (well hopefully there’s a cage for them). If anyone is there and can snap a pic for me that would be cool - I won’t be able to make it =(

Michael Bell-Smith and Downhill Battle are seeking submissions for 3 Notes and Runnin', an online music compilation commemorating and protesting The Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals ruling in Case No. 01-00412.

In the case, the court found that NWA violated copyright law when they sampled 3 notes of a guitar riff from Funkadelic's "Get off Your Ass and Jam" for their song "100 Miles and Runnin'". The ruling reversed a district court finding that because "no reasonable juror, even one familiar with the works of George Clinton, would recognize the source of the sample without having been told of its source", sampling clearance should not be required.

In doing so, the court broke from decades of established sample practice by ruling that all samples, regardless of how heavily manipulated or unrecognizable they may be, are subject either to "clearance" (obtaining permission for use of the sample, usually in exchange for money), or litigation. In an instant, this act made the majority of sample based music illegal. For more, read Why Sample Rights Matter.

To protest this decision, we are creating a forum for sample-based musicians and artists to share their own 30 second songs which have been created using only the sample in question. By doing so, we hope to showcase the potential and diversity of sample based music and sound art, and to call into question the relationship between a sample and its use. All entries will be posted on this site as they are received.

I am not sure as to the reputation of these folks [Frere Independent], however an art fair dedicated to Video and New Media art is relatively exciting. Contrary to many people I actually like art fairs but then again I also enjoy all-you-can-eat buffets in Vegas, Selah.

I would love to group together with 8-10 artists and self curate a space of our and friends' new media/video work, however I have a feeling the costs of something like this would be prohibitive. In any case, pass the info along, if nothing else it will be an interesting event to go scope out.

DiVA - Digital and Video Art Fair
November 11 - 14, 2004

Deadline: October 1st, 2004

Embassy Suites Hotel
102 North End Avenue
New York, NY 10281

Frere Independent is launching DiVA. Dedicated to Digital and Video Art, Diva will take place at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Lower Manhattan in New York, from November 11 to 14, 2004. In this first edition, we are offering space for 39 exhibitors. Each exhibitor will be provided with a genuine suite for exhibition (2 rooms)! at the Embassy Suites. While one room must be dedicated to new media art, the other room may display work of the exhibitor's choice in more traditional media.

DiVA is aimed at galleries, art dealers and collectors who are interested in the market for these distinctive media.

The Fair will coincide with the contemporary art sales of all auction houses in New York. We are now making all effort to secure the attention of the collectors that are in town on the occasion as well as local buyers. This includes potential partnership with the houses, art magazines and artnet.com. By way of example, our full page ad is already running in the current issue of London based Contemporary magazine.

www.frereindependent.com

by royal
First Spotted: 2004-09-16



Photographer: unknown
Location: a stone's throw from ottawa school of art, ottawa, ontario (CA)
Date: 2004-09-16

dorkbotlondon
people doing strange things with electricity

next dorkbot:
time/date: Wednesday 22nd September, 7pm. (ultra short notice, we know, apologies)
location: Limehouse Town Hall

speakers:

• Rory Macbeth, evil nauseating magic eye paintings
• James Larsson - the infamous prawn sandwich-based clock returns to haunt us.
• + more (probably from www.toplap.org) to be confirmed...
• OpenDorks: Jeremy Ruston - www.tiddlywiki.com, MattW - OPN...You? If you'd like to give a 7 minute presentation about a project or idea, make yourself known on the night.

Rory Macbeth, Magic Eye painting, 2002. Recreated as a large abstract-expressionist painting, the magic-eye illusion fails to work, but instead flutters awkwardly. The sense of it almost working is enhanced by a clumsily added motor behind the canvas that hitting it, makes the whole thing wobble. Materials: Acrylic paint on canvas, with motor.

Anthony Carriere uses a horizontal format for his photologue making the viewing like walking through the area [New Orleans] yourself. His introduction of, "travelling from the river towards the lake. only from the left," makes the experience for the internet viewer seem participatory rather than voyeuristic.

The LBT Corp. has announced it will hold a series of events to mark the dedication of the world's most technologically advanced ground-based optical telescope. Dedication activities for the $120-million Large Binocular Telescope (LBT) will be held Oct. 13-15.

[...] The Large Binocular Telescope is located on Mount Graham near Safford, Ariz. When fully operational in 2005, it will be the most technologically advanced ground-based telescope in the world. The LBT is unlike any other telescope because its twin 8.4-meter (27.6 ft.) "honeycombed" mirrors will sit on a single mount. The mirrors are much larger and lighter than conventional solid-glass mirrors and will collect more light than any existing telescope.

The telescope is also equipped with "adaptive optics," which corrects for atmospheric turbulence that distorts starlight and allows the telescope s secondary mirrors to change shape to compensate for blurring in real time. This allows astronomers to see objects deeper into space than even the orbiting Hubble telescope.

(Thanks, Andy!)

Banksy

Did you read Robert Novak's recent column? The Bush inner circle appears to be telegraphing to the non-neocon righties that they plan to pull out of Iraq soon after the election! While in the meantime Bush continues to talk tough for the security moms.

Well-placed sources in the administration are confident Bush's decision will be to get out. They believe that is the recommendation of his national security team and would be the recommendation of second-term officials. An informed guess might have Condoleezza Rice as secretary of state, Paul Wolfowitz as defense secretary and Stephen Hadley as national security adviser. According to my sources, all would opt for a withdrawal.

Getting out now would not end expensive U.S. reconstruction of Iraq, and certainly would not stop the fighting. Without U.S. troops, the civil war cited as the worst-case outcome by the recently leaked National Intelligence Estimate would be a reality. It would then take a resolute president to stand aside while Iraqis battle it out.

Novak is a paleoconservative and kinda sorta opposed the invasion so this may be wishful thinking on his part. But I don't think so. The neocons may have decided this thing isn't winnable and are looking to save their front man so they can fight (Iran) another day. I wish I could say Kerry/Edwards were an antidote to this craven duplicity but they also speak with bifurcated tongue on the issue. "We'll win this thing with European allies" and "We'll be out in four years" are just a lame campaign message.

Scenarios, anyone?

A Europe-based columnist's provocative look at international affairs.

       If Mr Kerry won, this would be the third time in a row that an incoming Democratic president inherited a gigantic budget deficit from his Republican predecessor.  Jimmy Carter took over a budget deficit of almost four percent of Gross Domestic Product in 1976 and halved it in four years. Bill Clinton was handed a budget deficit amounting to six percent of GDP in 1992 and turned it into a 1.5 percent surplus in eight years. Mr Kerry would inherit a five percent deficit from Mr Bush, about par for the course -- but for the first time he would also be burdened with a huge current account (trade) deficit.

       When Jimmy Carter was president, US trade with the rest of the world was more or less in balance, which made it relatively easy for him to address the budget deficit.  America's trade balance went deep into the red during the Reagan years, but by the time Bill Clinton came into office it had recovered dramatically and so he, too, could fix the budget deficit without having to worry about a big trade deficit.  But in the last Clinton years the current account plunged into deep deficit, and it's now even worse.

       It's the combination of the two deficits that is potentially lethal.  The United States got away with running a big trade deficit for most of the past twenty years because foreigners, mostly in Asia and Europe, kept on investing in the US, and that huge inflow of foreign capital largely covered the deficit.  They invested in the US not because it was the world's fastest-growing economy (it wasn't), but mainly because the US dollar was seen as the safest currency, the world's "reserve currency" in which other countries settle their debts even with each other.

       That was then; this is now.  The inflow of foreign capital is dwindling, the current account deficit is up to half a trillion dollars a year -- and the budget deficit, thanks to the Bush tax cuts and the Iraq war, is also up to half a trillion dollars a year.  Neither Mr Bush nor Mr Kerry even discusses the issue, and the value of the US dollar has been drifting steadily down for a year and a half now.

       Foreigners have seen the value of their US investments effectively cut by 20 percent because of that fall in the dollar, and they are getting nervous.  Foreigner investors hold about $8 trillion in US securities, and everybody realises that a concerted move to bail out of them would trigger a collapse of the dollar and the destruction of their investments.  On the other hand, everybody also knows that the first investors to get out will save most of their money, and the laggards will lose most of theirs.  It is a highly unstable situation.

       A far-sighted Democratic strategist might therefore conclude that this is the wrong year to win the presidency. Democrats don't want the blame for an impending economic crisis that is mostly due to the Bush tax cuts -- and since their chosen candidate has no strategy for pulling out of Iraq, why not let the Republicans collect the blame for that debacle, too?

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow:

See it immediately. The plot is... well, kind of dumb, and loaded with holes and nonsense, but it's so very, very pretty. The giant robots, ray guns, and amphibian amazon fighter pilots left me not caring so much about the plot. It's dense: there's so much going on in the background that I felt like the scenery was going by too fast, I kept wanting to just stop and look around. The look of the movie reminded me of the kind of look that photo-comics often have (a good example is this classic Mister X cover and poster, of which I was constantly reminded.)

There were also hints at a very odd backstory; the world in which this movie is set differs from ours in a whole lot of ways that I kept wanting to know more about. I guess "wait, how did we get from A to B?" was kind of a running theme in my head while I was watching it; e.g., a number of the plot holes might not have been so gaping if there was more exposition about them.

It was emulating the style of the old serials, yet it felt like it should have been multiple episodes; like a 20 part series had been condensed into one movie, leaving out a whole lot.

Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence:

See it immediately. (But see it second.) I am a huge, huge fan of the first Ghost in the Shell; it's one of my favorite movies, and by far my favorite anime. (For the record, I think almost all anime is crap, but there are a dozen or so true gems in there.)

Well, now it's my second favorite. The sequel is just mind-blowingly good.

Again I have to use the word dense. Except this time not only visually, but plot-wise as well. The level of detail in every frame is just astounding; through the whole movie I kept wanting to pause and single-step it, because there's just so much going on. On the surface, the plot is a detective story ("why are robots going nuts and killing people?") but that's just an excuse for a pair of cops to spend the movie talking about the nature of humanity (oh, and also blowing things up. Blowing things up real good.) It covers a lot of the same ground as the first GITS as well as Blade Runner, but covers it very well.

I really hope that when the DVD comes out, they have good voice actors for the dubbed version, because I felt like I missed half the movie by having to read the subtitles. With a movie this dense, you need more bandwidth; I wanted to be looking and listening at the same time instead of having to split my visual attention between the dialog and the pictures.

I'm just beginning to dig into Bjork's Medulla, but the most striking thing about it so far aside, of course, from its moments of thrill and thrall, even on iPod headphones is the way that it uses the human voice, digitally processed, to explore the nature of musical representation. You can't throw a rock in a record store without hitting an album that concerns itself whether self-consciously or otherwise with technological reproduction, but Bjork's album takes a counterintuitive approach to technology in order to play with musical codes. Medulla dazzles us with futuresonics and then pulls the curtain away to reveal that the Wizard was not a god or a machine, but just a dude (or a woman) with a microphone all along.

The fuss about this being a "all-vocal" album is misplaced, I think. What's interesting is what she does with the voices and again, not just musically, but as representational ciphers. On Medulla, Bjork's approach to the human voice is doubly imitative: human beatboxes and processed voices imitate drum machines imitating real drums.

[...]

My friend Anthony Huberman, a curator at Sculpture Center, noted a few weeks ago that the crucial question for any curator is always "Why now?" which I think applies equally to Bjork's maneuver. Why, now, choose to make an "all-vocal" album? Especially since the sound of the record, barring the liturgical-sounding "pure" choral pieces like "Vokuro," does not diverge radically from the sounds and textures she conjured on Vespertine.

The answer, of course, lies in Bjork's concept of the relationship between humans and machines -- a relationship that, despite our enslavement to email and cell phones, is thwarted again and again by conservative artcrit and rockwrite and po-faced, "won't-somebody-think-of-the-children" humanism of the Michiko Kakutani school. In that regard, this is Bjork's most cyborg record yet, tearing down the divide between "human" and "machine" music (not that it hasn t been dismantled before, but these things take time and repeated demolition crews). Like Herbert, she reminds us that in the age of samplers, any sound can be harnessed so why not the voice? She undoes rock's fake Luddite conservatism by allowing machines to speak for themselves the singing here may be divine, but it would fall flat without the "artifice" of samplers and software. She tweaks electronic music's prejudice for hackneyed futurisms by putting groaning rave stabs in the mouths of her singers. All these false divides and distinctions soften like gum and dissolve like sugar in her singers' mouths. And while it may sound like a pedantic point, it's one that few other musicians have grasped so clearly or made with such eloquent force.

loud and clear message from god about george bush.......

An unusually brainy looking portrait of Tom Selleck seen on a carnival ride at the Minnesota State Fair on August 26, 2004.

In a shock announcement that will reverberate through broadcast journalism, CNN has acknowledged that it can no longer vouch for the authenticity of host Wolf Blitzer.

After months of being buffeted by accusations and speculation, CNN subjected Blitzer to a series of forensic tests over the weekend and determined that his beard is a polyfiber synthetic and his lack of affect was attributable to a defective chip insecurely fitted into his fliptop head.

"Though we regret learning Wolf Blitzer is animatronic," said CNN chief Bip Peterson, "this in no way undermines the integrity of the journalism he did for the network, or CNN's commitment to the reelection of George Bush."

Speculation now turns to CNN's Judy Woodruff, rumored for years to be a stick-figure pictogram, despite fierce denials from colleagues who claim to have ridden the elevator with her.

"Judy, Wolf, Larry King--none of them are real," says a former intern at the network who still has nightmares.

From Mine-Control (Simpson's website): "(O)ur goal is to use our experience in game development to explore the art of interactivity in contexts other than traditional video games. Our works are both immersive and highly interactive - converting viewers into participants."

Interference: As participants place their hands on the canvas, light emanates in the direction their hand is facing. When a second hand is placed, the light beams interfere with one another creating brilliant and beautiful interference patterns. The simulation is actually an accurate scientific visualization of radio-frequency interferometry, and by the time one has played with it for a few minutes one can't help but intuit the meaning and beauty of Euler's equation even if one has never heard of it! [Download video]

Shadow with Adam Frank, Eyebeam Artists in Residence, New York: A disembodied shadow wanders around alone in a corner. When the participant enters, the figure reacts by running away. Aggressively chasing the figure leads only to his fear and escape. When the participants stay still the figure gains trust and steps closer, finally engaging in an embrace. [Download video]

Last night I learned two fascinating things from the person sitting at the next table. First, that John Edwards made all his money from frivolous lawsuits. Second, that due to such frivolous lawsuits there are only 9 gynecologists currently licensed in the state of Florida.

fascinating stuff.

The City Trilogy: Five Jade Disks, Defenders of the Dragon City, Tale of a Feather (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan) by S. K. Chang S.K. Chang was responsbile for bringing science fiction to China. He started in the 50's translating...

Starting today at 2PM EST, the Unmediated crew is going to be webcasting The Weekly Show live from NYC. We'll be using Shawn Van Every's Interactive Tele-Journalism system (the same system we used for the Konscious.TV during the RNC) to allow you to chat and ask questions with the various thinkers and developers invited to participate. This week, members of Unmediated will be on, so come chat with us about the decentralization of media and emerging tools and processes. Dan Melinger just got back from Ubicomp in the UK (where he was presenting Socialight), so he'll be available to chat about what's new on the mobile social scene.

Today's show starts at 2PM EST and will last at least an hour. The show's homepage will only go live at 2PM, but access the show here: The Weekly Show

Wow. I feel like I'm having some kind of personal milestone or something.

See, I've never had either reason or opportunity to butt heads with Dave Winer before. Still, all good things famously come to those who wait, so I suppose something like this was bound to happen eventually.

Because I woke up this morning and found that Dave has decided to define moblogging for us - out of the goodness of his heart, I guess. Or at least because, without he himself having come to some "concrete" understanding of the term and what it implies, it wouldn't be worthy of an hour and a half's airtime at Bloggercon.

(Never mind that we were able to devote a panel at this year's SXSW to discussing the practice, without too much trouble, let alone the, uh, one-day conference we devoted to it in July of last year. I guess Bloggercon's time is more important.)

Winer, for those many of you who will never have heard the name, is both justly acclaimed for his important work in establishing personal Web publishing as a going concern, and notorious in geek circles for fomenting more tea-pot shitstorms than that credential would seem to warrant. I've been able to steer well clear of him in the past because - as is well-known - I am so not a technical guy, I can barely tell a scripting language from a markup language from a programming language, and my concerns have simply historically been elsewhere.

But now he's on my bailiwick. And I must say I'm stunned into near-muteness by the arrogance of someone who would wade into an ongoing, multiyear conversation, among hundreds of intelligent, worldly folks, and deign to drop science on us.

I might not be so exorcised, even, but for the fact that Winer's "definition of Moblogging" (curiously, he capitalizes the word) is stunning in its inanity. Here it is:

Moblogging is any activity that occurs away from your normal blog-writing place whose purpose is to create content for your blog.

Well, no, Dave, it isn't. For one thing, that definition rather presupposes the legacy idea of a "normal blog-writing place," when the interest in even naming and considering a practice of posting content to the Internet from mobile devices lies in the possibility that such notions may be, and probably are, obsolete. Or, at best, only relevant to one class of historical users, who in any event have almost certainly already ceased to represent a numerical majority worldwide.

The reality is that, for most of the people who will publish content to the global Web in the next two years, or ever thereafter, there will be no "normal place" with which they associate the bulk of these operations. Some minority of users - including me, for what it's worth - will probably always hew closely to a literary model when writing: here's my desk, my mug of coffee, my reliable broadband connection and my 5,000 books shelved behind me for reference and reassurance. For everyone else, they'll publish pictures, sounds, comments, and, yes, full and well-developed thoughts from wherever they happen to be at the time, to whatever network exists to catch them. Hence "mob[ile Web] logging."

What Dave does seem to understand is that the definition must be agnostic with regard to the device in question; it matters not one whit if you're using a laptop or a cellphone or a PDA, or something else entirely. But, of course, the original definition already was device-agnostic. It hasn't been improved by subsequent attempts to "refine" it, however well-meaning.

My sincere advice to you, Dave? Leave well enough alone, at least until you've familiarized yourself with the discussion already in progress and are prepared to make some meaningful contribution to it.

Last week, a bounty has been placed on the head of every graffiti yob in Huddersfield (UK.)

Crimestoppers have launched a campaign to wipe out graffiti in the community and they hope the artists' distinctive "tags" will prove their undoing.

A 500 pound reward awaits people who ring in with names of graffiti artists who are then arrested and charged with criminal damage.

Reminds me of British artist Moose who creates graffiti by cleaning dirt from sidewalks and tunnels -- sometimes for money when the images are used as advertising. But some authorities call it vandalism.

From ic Huddersfield, via Clean & Safe.
Related: Hektor the graffiti machine, The Street Meme project, Denounce your peers and get paid.

From vijai: "We did this event last week in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, where we did an expo under a pedestrian tunnel. It was really great, when we were all putting up our posters, stencils and stickers these 3 little street kids came by and helped us out. And cheered up the place. It ended up that only 10 of our closest friends showed up, but it was great anyways.

Student tied to protest violence in video footage

Wharton junior IDed as aggressor at NYC Young Republican event
By Garrett Young, Daily Pennnsylvanian
September 20, 2004

A New York ABC television affiliate captured footage of a Republican Youth Convention attendee dragging to the ground and kicking an AIDS activist who had entered the event undercover as part of a larger protest against the George W. Bush administration.

The student in the video, whose name was unknown at the time the footage was taken, has been identified by several Penn students as Wharton junior Scott Robinson, a member of the Penn College Republicans.
...................
"Having seen Scott at a number of events, and having seen the video, I think it looks like him," said Stephanie Steward, a College senior and chairwoman of the College Republicans. "But I can't say absolutely positively."

...........
The College Republicans have distanced themselves from the incident.

"Our group strongly condemns violence, politically motivated or otherwise. This incident is between two individuals at a private event and will be resolved between those two individuals. It in no way involves the Penn College Republicans," a group statement read.

Yesterday, C-SPAN II, as part of its regular weekend books coverage, ran a reading/q & a with Ben Ferguson, the young conservative author of It's My America Too. The plaintive whimpering of that title--in particular that "too"--is typical of the phony underdog position conservatives insist on taking to make themselves look like insurgents. Republicans control the presidency, the Senate, the House, and much of the judiciary, Fox News is #1 in cable news, the rightwing rules talk radio, and yet here's little big Ben, who at the age of 22 hosts his own rightwing radio show, pouting about feeling like an outsider in his own country, boo hoo.

He wears his hair as if he's in the fourth grade, and I gather he has a chapter in his book about being a virgin. It's considerate of this baby whale version of Rush Limbaugh to be saving himself for some lucky gal, but I fear that when he finally does mate with Woman he may explode from years of self-denial in a spermatic supernova. I'd hate to be the person who'd have to tidy up afterwards.

From the Department of High Irony: the recording industry heavies have been sued for infringing - and *inducing* the infringement - of a patent on P2P "spoofing."

As it has been suing thousands of computer users accused of illegally trading copyrighted music online with peer-to-peer (P2P) technology, the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA) has also been polluting P2P networks with bogus and corrupted media files to discourage P2P use.

Now the industry group is the one being sued for alleged patent infringement in its process of so-called "spoofing" on filesharing networks. A civil case has been brought against the RIAA by P2P providers Altnet and its parent Brilliant Digital Entertainment, which own the popular Kazaa P2P network. (TechNewsWorld)

from librarian.net

Yitahutu, one of the largest online communities in Chinese universities, has disappeared from Chinese cyberspace.
This politically provocative online community saw its influence grow beyond its own Peking University campus to become a national information network.

Because of Yitahutu's self-organizing, bottom-up editorial control structure, similar to Slashdot, the editors cannot be held responsible for what appears on the front page. Therefore, the Internet police found their only solution was to close the whole site down.

On September 13, The Beijing Communications Administration issued a notification that Yitahutu BBS is permanently closed. In the meantime, many Chinese BBS sites announced that it is forbidden to discuss YTHT on their systems. And the YTHT domain name itself has been entered into the filtered keywords list, including on the Chinese search engine, baidu.

More details in China Digital News.

• Science Fiction: The Best of 2003, edited by Karen Haber & Jonathan Strahan
  I enjoyed just about every story in this comp, which is a really good hit rate. Actually the only one I didn't like was the Le Guin story; all the others were great. I especially liked "A Study in Emerald" by Neil Gaiman, and "The Cookie Monster" by Vernor Vinge.

• Singularity Sky and its loose sequel Iron Sunrise, by Charlie Stross
  (Hi autopope!) Really entertaining space-opera where our heroes are running around trying to prevent interplanetary wars while avoiding the wrath of a post-human godlike intelligence who likes to smash planets whenever someone comes close to violating causality. Both books are packed with cool ideas. And also there's a morally ambiguous party clown.

• RedRobe by John Courtenay Grimwood
  Anti-hero assassin killing for the church in space. I didn't like this one very much; it was just kind of ugly and bleak all the way through. By far the most interesting character was an AI-powered handgun, but the gun doesn't get much screen time. I preferred his previous book, ReMix.

• The DaVinci Code by Dan Brown
  This was only so-so. It was mostly a mystery, and it wasn't very mysterious. It felt like it was written to be a TV series or something, with each chapter having a contrived cliffhanger, ending on a note like, "they gazed with shock at the words that were revealed!" and then you get to find out what those words were two pages into the next chapter.

  I suppose it would have been more suspenseful if I hadn't already known the legends about the Merovingians and Templars and the Grail bloodline and all that, but even already knowing all about the "surprise", I expected a more interesting story. I guessed every twist except the identity of Dr. Mabuse "The Teacher", and by then I didn't really care.

Seth and Xeni write about this new American monster pickup truck, the CXT. According to Xeni it is "about 2 feet taller x 4 feet longer than the honkin' Hummer H2. Which, btw, it could tow along with that yacht, if need be." (MSNBC article and debut site)

I just bought a 10 year old Daihatsu HiJet pickup truck. I got it because it's small enough to drive on the narrow paths between the rice fields. It can carry as much gravel or dirt as I would be willing to move on any given day. Just about every single neighbor has one of these little pickup trucks. And no, I didn't buy it just to fit in... although I think it helps. I think my HiJet is about 130" long and about 45 horsepower. (approximately 1/2 the length and 1/5 the horsepower of the CXT)

That CXT would be completely useless in my village. So you can keep your gas guzzling monstrosity and whatever weird culture that created it. I'm happy with the spartan aesthetics of my little HiJet. (Web page about Kei class Japanese trucks)

Calm technology. What an odd concept they pitch. Calm technology essentially comes into being via the act of frantic listening to its environment. Can a technology really be calm while its insides are stuck in an infinite loop, churning code, waiting for the moment to "calmly" react to the outside world?

The Observer:

The British Army is to start pulling troops out of Iraq next month despite the deteriorating security situation in much of the country, The Observer has learnt.

The main British combat force in Iraq, about 5,000-strong, will be reduced by around a third by the end of October during a routine rotation of units.

[...]

Senior officers say the scaling back of the British commitment in Iraq is a sign of their success in keeping order and helping reconstruction. But both Basra and Maysan have seen heavy combat recently, with some units sustaining up to 35 per cent casualties, and remains restive. The al-Mahdi army, which was responsible for most of the fighting, remains heavily armed.

There is a scale of lying.

Some lies are better than others. Some worse.

Some so obviously incredible lies that you shake your head in wonder at the magnitude of the lie.

The British claiming success in Basra is one of them.

This is to prepare the way for the incoming Brown government to say sayonara to Iraq in toto. Yes, Gordon Brown will be the next PM when Labour voters decide to stay home or turn out Labour MP's. To reduce the commitment of British troops in Iraq makes NO, as in ZERO military sense. They could use another 10,000 men on the ground, if they could afford the deployment.

How? By extending their zone north and taking over for the shaky coalition partners. Instead, they're hunkering down and going home, bit by bit. And they're leaving their armor? Holy shit, these guys blow up Brads and Abrams now. And the British are using less armor? It's not like they're helping us in Fallujah or Baghdad, they won't touch that with a 20 foot poll.

They're leaving. Like a guy getting a divorce, They're looking for places and sneaking out stuff a bit at a time. One day, they'll be going home and leaving the US on the hook for the whole mess. What will the neocons do then, stop drinking scotch?

Technical specifications determines the winner in Star Wars vs. Star Trek.

Planetary destruction (SW): Death Star blast (roughly 20 billion trillion megatons, ie- the number "two" followed by 22 zeroes). Planet blown apart at 5% of the speed of light. Even if we assume the shot was time-lapse photography (not that there's any reason to), the absolute lower limit is roughly 50 quadrillion megatons. Note that even if you scale this monster down by a factor of 10 million (to the volume of a Star Destroyer), you'd still have 5 billion megatons. More than a match for poor Enterprise.

Planetary destruction (ST): 30-ship bombardment in "The Die is Cast" (surface-level explosions create fireballs in the megaton range at most, judging from fireball duration). No sub-orbital ejecta launched from planet's surface at all. Trekkies attempt to ignore weak-kneed appearance of attack and focus on semantics in order to exaggerate the figure.

The third Sunday of every month is Building Clean (BC) up day (this excites me to no end /sarcasm.) BC is SUPPOSED to start at 7 AM. 7 AM! Unfortunately, the other tenants cannot tell time, so they usually start around 6:45 AM and finish at 7 AM. In an effort to fit in and avoid the $ 10 U.S.D. fine, I comply. Individual floor BC consists of a) sweeping around the elevator, b) sweeping the stairwell, c) mopping the areas from a and b. Grounds BC consists of a) standing around, b) standing around and talking, c) sweeping the same leaf from one end of the road to the other, d) complaining while standing around, e) spreading gossip while picking at the same weed (not the smokeable kind) for 10 mins - poor weed, f) sweeping garbage into the bushes, g) avoiding the gaijin, h) making several circuits around the building asking if anyone needs help, and i) sweeping up a bunch of garbage, hunting down a dustpan, hunting down a bag or someone holding a bag, taking bag, or person with bag, back to the garbage you have swept up neatly, depositing garbage into bag, finding someone who needs help, helping them with whatever they are doing, and then heading upstairs once everything is done. Once upstairs, lift all heavy items for the senior citizens (cannot let them injury their delicate backs), mop, clean mops, and then bail back to your apartment and blog about BC on Tokyo.Metblogs.
Posted by D.L.A.