A fleeting moment of balance
This minute, 11:16 PST today, is the time of the vernal equinox, a time for new beginnings.
Welcome to MemeMachineGo! and enjoy the longer days.
This minute, 11:16 PST today, is the time of the vernal equinox, a time for new beginnings.
Welcome to MemeMachineGo! and enjoy the longer days.
Book Crossing is a way cool idea: register a book with them, print a label for it, stick it on, and release it into the wild. The label encourages recipients to go to the web page and log finding the book so you can track its progress.
Meanwhile, Booklend.net is a free on-line loaning library. Its proprietor mails out books along with SASE's for their return.
Information wants to roam free!
Asteroid 2002 EM7 passed almost as close to the Earth as the moon is, and no one knew till four days later.
If it pierced the atmosphere, the approximately 70-meter-long rock could have disintegrated and unleashed the energy equivalent of a 4-megaton nuclear bomb, researchers said.
And we had absolutely no time to train oil-well drillers to be astronauts.
Both Sony and Honda are making household companion robots.
But I still want a jetpack.
Khaled Al-Maeena is the editor in chief of the English-language Saudi newspaper Arab News. Subsequent to 9/11, he received a lot of hate email, some of which, along with his extraordinarily gracious replies are in this New York Times article.
Thank you for the journey in the dark recesses of your mind. The cool Montana weather has apparently not had an effect on you. Your generalization does not help. Today it is the Muslims, tomorrow it will be the one billion Indians whose navy is threatening. Then don't forget the rumbling Chinese, and please don't overlook the Russians, of whom 57 percent expressed satisfaction at America's discomfort. Instead of such vitriol, I would request you to join us in a prayer for world peace.
Today is the Great American Meatout. Try eating out. Outside your kingdom, that is.
Already widely disseminated, and rightly so: French Intellectuals to be Deployed in Afghanistan To Convince Taleban of Non-Existence of God
Elements from the feared Jean-Paul Sartre Brigade, or 'Black Berets', will be parachuted into the combat zones to spread doubt, despondency and existential anomie among the enemy. Hardened by numerous intellectual battles fought during their long occupation of Paris's Left Bank, their first action will be to establish a number of pavement cafes at strategic points near the front lines. There they will drink coffee and talk animatedly about the absurd nature of life and man's lonely isolation in the universe. They will be accompanied by a number of heartbreakingly beautiful girlfriends who will further spread dismay by sticking their tongues in the philosophers' ears every five minutes and looking remote and unattainable to everyone else.
Ted Rall on why Bush is addicted to perpetual war.
That leaves "1984's" most potent political tool: perpetual warfare. Just as Oceania was always at war with Eurasia or Eastasia -- who could keep track? -- the "war on terror," we are told, will continue indefinitely.
Indefinitely is just another word for forever.
A Wired News story about the original Mac packing material going for over $500 on ebay.
A 1 sq. mm microscope can examine living cells from the inside.
(Via Missing Matter)
Hugo Gernsback's writing advice for Scientific Detective Monthly from the 1930 Writer's Digest.
With the advancement of science, the criminal-in-fact is turning scientific as well as the criminal-in-fiction. Therefore we prophesy that Scientific Detective fiction will supersede all other types. In fact, the ordinary gangster and detective story will be relegated into the background in a very few years. It is worth your while, then, to study this new development carefully, devoting all your time and efforts towards turning out good stories of this type. Literary history is now in the making, and the pioneers in this field will reap large rewards.
(Via Schism Matrix)
The Princess Project pairs old prom dresses with current high school girls who can't afford to buy one.
So far, the Princess Project has rounded up 250 dresses from throughout the Bay Area. We're talking grade-A stuff from the likes of Escada, Donna Karan and Bella Bridesmaid. And then there are the shoes -- dozens of pairs from Charles David, Nine West and other top-shelf designers.
boingboing linked to MemeMachineGo! today. I found it through some web search or another almost a year ago, occasionally revisited it, and at some point occasional became daily. I've discovered a lot of wonderful things there, and have had a lot of fun participating in discussions and suggesting links. Props to Mark and Cory. I wouldn't be blogging today without it.
I mean, I needed something to do with the links they didn't take! Like flesh-eating robots. How can you go wrong with flesh-eating robots?
Quorn, a meat substitute that's been sold in Europe for years, recently received FDA approval. The Center for Science in the Public Interest is complaining about deceptive labelling.
Quorn's packaging states that the so-called "mycoprotein" in Quorn "made from natural ingredients," "mushroom in origin," and "made from a small, unassuming member of the mushroom family."
Bah! It is made from a fungus found in a British dirt sample, and grown in huge fermentation vats. The fungus that makes up Quorn, Fusarium venenatum, has nothing to do with mushrooms. It is about as closely related to mushrooms as an octopus is related to humans.
Marketing logic:
All mushrooms are fungi.
Quorn comes from fungi.
Therefore, quorn comes from mushrooms.
Kazm.net is a communist site, hammer & sickle and all, reporting news, linking to the works of Marx, etc. Very serious. Kazm.net/gnomes is the Gnome Liberation Front site, for which I don't see any links from the rest of Kazm.
Garden gnomes have won the right to female gnome company during their first international congress in Germany.They have also been given legal backing to ensure they aren't left at their posts after 5pm, or exposed to the elements during the night.
The spanking new Google Weblog (not affiliated with Google) looks to be a great resource on all things Google. I didn't know half those options existed.
A recurring device in Philip K. Dick's work was ubiquitous artificial intelligence -- appliances talked, taxicabs became confessors, and from the perspective of his typically alienated characters, the machines often seemed more humane than the people around them. Well, with voice-activated appliances, some of which talk back, we're getting there. Just without the intelligence.
The training process can be pretty humbling. First of all, you are talking to a household appliance. Second, you are saying the same words over and over, hoping to get your point across. It's embarrassing when you say something important and somebody doesn't understand. It's even more embarrassing when that somebody is your toaster.
This will probably be a great boon for some disabled people. And a great example of a solution without a problem for most everyone else.
My friend DeAnna discusses lunch with Noam Chomsky, her ass, and more in Gardens of Resistance.
One of my favorite things is seeing weeds climb up the middle of street signs, morning glory taking over telephone poles, and tree roots warping pavement. Grass growing through the cracks in sidewalks.
These are gardens of resistance. Life is strong enough to flourish and overtake the difficult conditions that civilization has created for it.
Sure, you heard that scientists may have induced fusion through sonoluminescence. But did you know shrimp were there first?
While earlier experiments had shown that so-called snapping shrimp generate imploding air bubbles that make loud popping sounds (SN: 9/23/ 00, p. 199), a new study reveals that those collapsing bubbles emit flashes of light and may flare as hot as the sun's surface.[...] The animals use snaps to fight rivals, find mates, and even stun prey.
And there's speculation that knuckle-crackers may be in this luminary company.
Cavitation bubbles in synovial fluid may even explain the sound of "cracking" knuckles, he ventures. And if that's the case, he says, "I'd be willing to bet pitchers of beer that cracking knuckles will also generate small amounts of luminescence."
Nature is cool.
The other night I walked into the Anarchist Cafe
wondered to myself just what's an angel anyway
the artists and the activists, the teachers and the cooks
every act of love must go down in the angel books
I walked up to the microphone and I began to sing
to everyone who works for change and to forces unseen
from "Sing to the Angels" by Rebecca Riots
This Friday, 3/29 in San Francisco is the 5th Annual Anarchist Cafe. Saturday's the 7th Annual Anarchist Book Fair. And Sunday's the Bay Area Anarchist Conference.
I find it interesting that the Anarchist Book Fair has outlived the San Francisco Book Festival (that link, not coincidentally, courtesy of the Wayback Machine.)
(Via sf.indymedia.org)
Try an Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie.
An Aluminum Foil Deflector Beanie (AFDB) is a type of headwear that can shield your brain from most electromagnetic psychotronic mind control carriers. AFDBs are inexpensive (even free if you don't mind scrounging for thrown-out aluminium foil) and can be constructed by anyone with at least the dexterity of a chimp (maybe bonobo). This cheap and unobtrusive form of mind control protection offers real security to the masses. Not only do they protect against incoming signals, but they also block most forms of brain scanning and mind reading, keeping the secrets in your head truly secret. AFDBs are safe and operate automatically. All you do is make it and wear it and you're good to go! Plus, AFDBs are stylish and comfortable.
Linux and Amiga user also be sure to check out MindGuard.
(via Charlie's Diary)
A Japanese scientist is growing frog organs in a petri dish from frog embryo stem cells.
Technology that Asashima is developing could eventually help doctors use stem cells from humans to regenerate or replace damaged or destroyed human organs, like the way a lizard reproduces a severed tail. It would eliminate the need for donor transplants.
Now how expensive will this be for humans? And how much of that expense will be due to making human stem cells needlessly hard to get?
Boy, those Islam fanatics with all that talk of jihad are just nuts, huh? Where do they get ideas like that? US-provided textbooks.
In the twilight of the Cold War, the United States spent millions of dollars to supply Afghan schoolchildren with textbooks filled with violent images and militant Islamic teachings, part of covert attempts to spur resistance to the Soviet occupation.
The primers, which were filled with talk of jihad and featured drawings of guns, bullets, soldiers and mines, have served since then as the Afghan school system's core curriculum. Even the Taliban used the American-produced books, though the radical movement scratched out human faces in keeping with its strict fundamentalist code.
Roswell Online has a pretty good 404 page. But my favorite 404 page of this morning has to be Dammit Janet's.
(Thanks, Dennis!)
Salon has an interesting interview with Kishore Mahbubani, Singapore's ambassador to the UN, about the contents of his new book, Can Asians Think?. His perspective is very different from mine -- I found it a challenging read.
Harley Sorsenson voices a point I have myself:
It's been almost a year and a half, but I'm still steamed at those pusillanimous Democrats and their loser candidate, Al Gore.
Lacking the courage to vote their convictions, they cost my man, Ralph Nader, the election. Every vote for Gore was, in effect, a vote for George W. Bush.
If all the Democrats who voted for Gore voted instead for Nader, we'd have a true American hero for president now rather than the Last of the Big- Time Strutters.
... and goes on to make other good points about the value of supporting genuine alternatives to the two party system.
An unemployed 47-year-old man threatened to blow up a comics shop he believed to possess comics previously stolen from him.
(Via Metafilter)
The Long Bets Foundation lets prophets put their money where their mouths are. Some bets on record:
Regarding the above: In the early '90's, a guy horndogged a female bot on a MUD for two weeks without buying the clue. Arguably, it's already been done. With a team of competent judges... no, I don't think so. Maybe computers will be "as smart as" humans in 2029, but they'll be alien intelligences, and I don't think either they or we will have sufficiently cracked the code of the mind as to simulate humanity. The second I find likely if Google continues to weight its rankings in terms of number of links as it does today. If that changes, who knows. For the last, I think print-on-demand will be that pervasive. But I think it's more likely in 2010 that early-adopters will be printing their own at home, and everyone else will still be having them shipped, a prediction that's bad news for bookstores if correct.
(Via BoingBoing)
John Cleese's Rectorial address, on being elected a Rector of St. Andrews.
First I must thank you because you have done me a great honour.
I'm afraid all Rectors seem to start by saying something of the sort.
In fact only one in recent history appears not to have thanked those who elected him ; and that was only because he was too busily engaged on the subject of 'Magnanimity'. And so to those of you who elected me may I say 'Thank you'. And to those of you who, while not actually casting your votes in my direction, have since treated me with such kindness and courtesy, may I simply say 'Ha ha ha'.
Last night I dumped four reference book citations on someone with whom I'd had a disagreement on English usage and ended with "In conclusion, allow me to say: neener neener neener." I was reminded of this and inspired to look it up.
Patrick Nielsen-Hayden says "in the future, we will all have near-infinite unmetered broadband, and we will all use it to disseminate and take yet more personality tests." And it seems like the Enneagram is all the rage at the moment. But I know of no finer on-line personality test than the Pompatus of Love. Post your results in the comments section!
How much would you pay for a cup of coffee from beans that had picked out of animal excrement? Kopi Luwak makes a $3.50 latte look economical.
Called Kopi Luwak, it goes for $300 a pound and relies upon the paradoxurus hermaphroditus for its, uh, cachet. The rare coffee is heralded in this month's Esquire magazine, in the annals of the National Zoo, several universities, countless trade journals, several newspapers and a half-dozen "urban legends" Web sites.
But back to the paradoxurus hermaphroditus, which is actually a 4-pound, fairly agreeable, palm-tree-dwelling civet cat that lives on the islands of Sumatra and Java.
Along with palm sap and melons, this selective little creature eats choice, fresh coffee berries. The berries travel relatively unsullied through the cat's digestive system, are excreted and plucked from its dung by plantation workers — and roasted.
Yeah, it sounds like a hoax, but their story checks out.
(Via New World Disorder)
NASA sponsors reproduction of an experiment purported to demonstrate anti-gravity.
The details might be sketchy, but the basic idea behind the device is fairly simple. It begins with a disc, about six inches in diameter and a quarter of an inch thick, made out of a superconducting material whose recipe Podkletnov has carefully kept secret. The disc is cooled to below -233 degrees centigrade and levitated using a magnetic field. Then an electric field is applied to make the disc spin. So far, all we have is a variation on an electric motor, but Podkletnov claims that when the disc rotates at more than 5,000 revolutions per minute, an object placed above it begins to lose weight. Somehow, he says, the force of gravity is being counteracted--the trick is, you have to get the setup exactly right.
(Via Wired News)
Jesus Christ Superstore: (sac)religious action figures like God Almighty:
In a brilliant marketing move I hereby dub blogflogging 'cause there isn't a name for it yet, and it's going to be so prevalent as to warrant one, Greg Knauss is engaged on a virtual book tour hawking his new book, Rainy Day Fun and Games for Toddler and Total Bastard, in a different blog each day. See, it's so diabolically clever, he's even got other blogs talking about it (and thus linking to it.)
On the occasion of a new book on the subject, It Must Be Beautiful: Great Equations of Modern Science, the NY Times has this article about how scientists perceive the relationship between the beauty of their equations and their truth, the relation between mathematics and the real world.
Rare indeed is the scientist who has not at one point or other been seduced by the beauty of his own equations and dumbfounded by what the physicist Dr. Eugene Wigner of Princeton once called the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics" in describing the world.
While on the subject, I'll note that I've always found Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance to be ultimately intellectually and spiritually bankrupt due substantially to the narrator's assertion that the one place he could not find 'Quality' was in pure mathematics, marking him in my book as either profoundly ignorant or spiritually dead. I find, though, that the people who liked the book never remember that assertion.
(Via Metafilter)
So Hallmark was selling boy and girl 'Kiss-kiss bears' with magnets in their mouths, polarized such that only opposite-sex kissing was possible -- same-sex bears would repel each other. Heterosexist on the face of it, sure, but I would've taken it as just thoughtlessness.
Until I saw these stories about Hallmark employees actively antagonizing people for even trying to buy same-sex bear couples, from an Advocate article:
"You can't have that second bear."
"Excuse me?"
"You have to pick a girl bear for your second bear."
"Why? I bought two boy Kiss Kiss bears here last December."
"Well, you were really wrong to do that."
or this article about a gay couple who actually found a gay bear couple:
He knew that the bears are designed
to "kiss" one another when bears of the opposite sex are put together, but,
to his surprise, two male bears actually "kissed" when he brought them together. Kuhr says that he decided to purchase the bears after checking the price tags to be sure that they were priced for individual sale. "The bears were clearly marked $3.99 each, so I took a $20 bill out of my pocket and proceeded to buy the bears," said Kuhr. "But I was shocked when the clerk refused to make the sale."
According to Kuhr, the clerk said that the bears are only sold in kissing pairs, so he then showed the clerk that the two bears did indeed kiss. At that point, says Kuhr, one of the cashiers became belligerent.
"She wanted the issue over and me out of the store," said Kuhr. "Her opinion was, ‘This is the way it is, I don't want to discuss it, and I want you to leave.'" Kuhr continued to ask why he could not buy the bears and requested to see a manager. Although the clerk refused to summon a manager,
she eventually called mall security who escorted Kuhr and his partner from the
store and then from the mall.
Gits.
Take this quiz to find out. I can't relate at all. I mean, I cranked the crob job that runs my web log analyzer down from hourly to just thrice daily!
(Via LinkMachineGo)
Brainstorms and Raves is a great web design blog, with links to articles like Your CSS Bores Me. (And, frankly, my CSS bores me, too. After taxes, I'll do something about that.)
And doesn't that sound like the beginning of a fight in a badly dubbed Hong Kong action film about the web? "Your CSS bores me." "Your eyeballs dishonor my site! Prepare to taste my unstoppable design sense!"
Last night in funk aerobics class, a woman mistook my (used) towel for hers, and wiped herself off with it. I pointed this out to her, and she apologized and promptly replaced both our towels. After class, not realizing I was in earshot, I heard her complaining to someone about how totally disgusted she was.
Yeah, right. She just found herself unable to resist my pheromones. And now that she's marked, there's no hope for her.
Amino acids arise in lab simulations of interstellar ice (okay, not proteins per se. or space. Picky, picky, picky.) It's looking like Hoyle's cometary version of Panspermia is rounding the Hegelian dialectic to synthesis after just 20 years, same as it took for the originally laughably catastrophist thesis that a meteorite impact killed the dinosaurs.
Which begs the question -- in 2022 what will be synthesized that is today antithesized?
And... if the building blocks of life are so easily come by through physical processes, where the hell is everyone?
Sleep sex: initiating sex while asleep.
The condition can range in severity from disruptive moaning to unwanted, and sometimes violent, sexual advances to their partner.
Try explaining that one after the "oh, we'll just cuddle and then go to sleep" thing.
I ride a recumbent bicycle, which gets a lot of comments. Tonight, biking home from work, I heard a cyclist approaching from behind me. "That's a funny-looking bike!" he called out as he passed... on his recumbent bike.
Subcarpathia, at the base of the Carpathian mountains in the Ukraine, near Poland, Slovakia, Hungary and Romania, is home to 1.3 million people of diverse ethnicities and religions, and it seems they all just get along.
The many and varied peoples of Subcarpathia – Hungarians, Germans, Gypsies, Poles, Romanians, Russians, Ruthenians, Slovaks, Tatars, and Ukrainians – have never turned against one another. Instead, they have developed an oasis of pluralism hidden deep in Eastern Europe.
[...] There are schools and university departments teaching in Hungarian, Slovak, Polish, Romanian, and Hebrew, as well as Ukrainian and Russian. Newspapers and television stations cover the same wide spectrum, and Romanies (Gypsies), persecuted in many other parts of Europe, attend mainstream schools and have preserved their language to a high degree.
"What is our secret?" Mr. Padyak asks, bouncing his small son on his knee. "People here simply don't go in for racial insults and we let each community make its own choices. When the Hungarians wanted street signs in Hungarian, the Slavic groups simply agreed. The Hungarians should be able to use their language in their settlements. It makes sense and it avoids conflicts."
CNET has this story on Yahoo updating their privacy policy. The policy now makes explicit that they'll release info due to a subpoena (OK, fine), an acquisition or merger (yeah, sure), or if they believe it's necessary to investigate or prevent a crime (umm... according to whom? any government agency that asks? domestic or foreign? non-governmental organizations?). The thing that'll likely affect more people going forward, though: they may create new 'marketing categories' for the spam they'll send you at any time, to which you're automatically subscribed. But don't worry, you can go into your account preferences and opt out at any time. How convenient.
And what I don't see any reference to on Yahoo: they've already done this. If you have a Yahoo ID, you've been signed up for 13 different kinds of spam. According to the CNET story, they're emailing everyone about this, which they expect to take weeks, and the story implies they won't start spamming for 60 days. Beat the rush and opt out now.
And I've got to share this lovely bit from the privacy policy: "by interacting with or viewing an ad you are consenting to the possibility that the advertiser will make the assumption that you meet the targeting criteria used to display the ad. "
TV watching correlated with commission of violence
45 per cent of the men who had watched three hours or more at age 14 went on to commit an aggressive act against another person, compared to just nine per cent of the men who had spent less than an hour in front of the tube. Over 20 per cent of the three-hour-a day group went on to commit robbery, threaten to injure someone or use a weapon to commit a crime.
For women aged 30, the strongest TV predictor of violence was watching three hours of more at age 22. Of these women, 17 per cent had committed an aggressive act, compared to none in the group watching less than an hour a day.
Beliefs on this have seemed to be split pretty firmly on party lines, with conservatives insisting that watching violent TV (the study above didn't account for what was being watched, just how much) begat violence and liberals insisting that was nonsense. It has struck me that liberals clung to that position so stubbornly because they were convinced that if they gave any credence to TV having any effect, they would be somehow granting tacit approval to censorship.
I always found claiming that TV has no effect to be silly. If something that so many people are doing for 25% or more of their waking hours has no effect on them, then what, in principle, could? And, I'm a free-speech fanatic, who would oppose any attempt to censor the violence on TV. And I think that people watch far too much TV, and there's too much violence on it, and would endorse both people turning the damn thing off, and TV programmers coming up with better content.
I think wanting to legislate all of one's opinions about what would make people happier or the world better, forcing everyone to follow them, is one of the great malaises of our modern society. And that assuming other people hold that belief, and so any beliefs they have about what would make the world better represent what they would want everyone forced to do is another.
And jeez, what're those egghead scientists going to come up with next? That advertising promotes dissatisfaction, unhappiness, and people buying things they don't really need, or something?
The sometimes brilliant Tom the Dancing Bug had this cartoon portraying the publishing industry reacting to libraries per the record industry's reaction to Napster a year and a half ago.
In a valiant effort to close the irony gap, and a remarkable display of short-sighted self-interest, a British author proposes that libraries shouldn't buy current books because they cut into book sales. Meanwhile, he describes that he spent lots of time in libraries as a child, sneers at the high valuation people put on libraries, and volunteers that he pirates music from LPs borrowed from libraries.
This year, 17 years after my first novel was published, I received my first public lending rights payment and account. In the past, for reasons that remain obscure (envy?), writers who lived abroad were not eligible for the payment, which amounts to a handsome 2.67 pence for every book lent. So I at last discovered what my fellow UK authors presumably already know: that the library press release is right, that my, our, books are more frequently lent by libraries than sold in shops (to the ratio of 3-1 in my case).
Mm-hmm. And he made no money from the library sales themselves. And everyone who borrowed his book would have bought it in hardcover -- especially people previously unfamiliar with his work would as readily have shelled out fifteen pounds for a new hardcover as borrow it from the library. And none of them enjoyed it so much they bought it to have a copy to reread, or bought it as a gift. And none of his sales derived from word-of-mouth from his library readership. Nope, those damned thieving libraries have just got their hands de