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 Wednesday, August 6, 2003
 Apple reports on a Phish festival. "Phish headlined a three-day festival which attracted 70,000+ fans. In addition to performing, the band set up a tent where fans could make their own free custom mix CD of live Phish tracks with iTunes. Phish also rented a 100,000-watt radio station, completely driven by iTunes, and broadcast from the event commercial-free." I found this story through Apple's RSS feed. See the business model? Keeping fans informed of what's going on with the products (and bands) that they love. Apple is using our technology masterfully to tell people how Phish is using theirs. [Scripting News]
Apple always does the coolest things. I believe the model for musicians will be to use the downloads to help market their live performances. Live is something the Internet can never provide. The Grateful Dead model. Nice to see Apple helping to promote this. 11:04:53 PM 
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TrackBack for Radio is released. Radio supports both inbound and outbound TrackBack pings. For outbound TrackBack, all you have to do is enable the feature, and Radio will do the rest. Inbound TrackBack works similarly to comments -- a TrackBack link next to each post opens a pop-up window which displays inbound pings.
To enable TrackBack for Radio, follow the instructions on this page. By lawrence@userland.com (Lawrence Lee). [UserLand Product News]
Now I just need to figure out just what this is ;-) 10:47:18 PM
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Bumbling Bush may have Given Osama an Open Goal... (Simon Tisdall). Bumbling Bush may have Given Osama an Open Goal... (Simon Tisdall) [Common Dreams]
Some very important points. Here is the one that resonates with me: If they are ever to defang and defuse the "totalitarian Islamist revivalism" that constitutes al-Qaida's main inspiration and appeal, Stern says, the US and its allies must exhibit similar adaptability and innovation and more imaginative remedies for east-west alienation. The world is changing so fast that organizations must become adaptable in order to succeed. Media companies, government agencies, biotech companies, any group that requires innovation and creativity to move forward. Those groups that are able to do this will be more nimble, will be able to take the huge amount of amorphous information out there and create useful knowledge, permitting decisions to be made. If terrorist groups use such processes, then we will only succeed in rooting them out by being as innovative and creative.
One of my favorite authors, Eric Frank Russell, wrote a story variously called 'The Space Willies' or 'Next of Kin' or 'Plus X' dealt with a captured Earthman who sets out to convince his out of touch alien captors that he can communicate with Earth using a twisted piece of metal. Or that he carries a symbiote called a Eustace that provides him with all sorts of advantages. His use of misinformation is adaptive and creative.
Or read his novel 'Wasp', one of the more subversive novels detailing how to run an underground organization of 1 that looks like it involved thousands. If we want to take on real life teroorism, maybe we need to be as creative as the protagonist in Wasp or the Space Willies or at least as smat as the author. 10:38:34 PM
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Iraqi War Toll: The Wounded and Non-Combat Deaths. US military casualties from the occupation of Iraq have been more than twice the number most Americans have been led to believe because of an extraordinarily high number of accidents, suicides and other non-combat deaths in the ranks that have gone largely unreported in the media. [TalkLeft: The Politics of Crime]
It is very interesting that accidental deaths are higher than combat deaths. And that the non-combat deaths are occurring at a much higher rate than normal military operations. This is a story that we should hear more about the next few days. 9:21:24 PM
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Editor's Cut: The Diplomat Who Resigned in Protest. The chaos of postwar Iraq, John Brady Kiesling argues, was easily predictable. [The Nation Weblogs]
While this is intriguing the really neat idea is the creation of the Coalition of the Rational. As described here: The coalition could bring together a broad, transpartisan group of concerned citizens--from Goldwater-style conservatives, Rockefeller Republicans and former State Department and intelligence officials, to progressive Democrats and religious, labor and student leaders--to mobilize Americans in informed opposition to the Bush Administration's undermining of US security in our name. The beginning of the Third Way? 9:00:25 PM
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Free anonymous WiFi at FCC offices. The FCC is now offering free, anonymous WiFi to visitors, but they're logging all traffic.
Last year, Powell directed his staff to take the steps needed to make the FCC one of
the first federal agencies to provide public WiFi access. Visitors bringing their own hardware
and software can use the service on the Twelfth Street, Courtyard, and Eighth Floor levels of
the headquarters located at 445 12th Street, SW in Washington, D.C.
The system uses the 802.11a and 802.11b protocols, commonly referred to as WiFi.
The Commission will be unable to provide technical support, and all transactions using this
service are the responsibility of the visitor. At present, the FCC will not request personal
identifying information prior to allowing access to the wireless network. If requested by
outside authorities, however, the FCC will provide data from system audit logs to support
external investigations of improper Internet use.
80K PDF Link
Discuss
(via Werblog) [Boing Boing Blog]
This is pretty neat. The security aspects might be interesing, though. 8:18:56 PM
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Txt means goodbye to 'hello'. Traditional greetings are being replaced by the language of e-mail and text messaging, according to a report. [BBC News | Technology | World Edition]
What I find most interesting is that many of the other choices for hello or goodbye are not American terms but 'foreign' words. I think it is a little early to say good bye to hello but how many times do we start an email with Dear Sir? Different modes of communications require different modes of familiarity. 7:04:32 PM
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The Online Beat: For Democrats, Mr. Right is Mr. Wrong. Joe Lieberman wants to sell Democrats a case of Republican-Lite, but the faithful aren't buying. [The Nation Weblogs]
Lieberman has a lot to correct and make up in the polls. As Truman said, and quoted in this article, when people have the choice between a Republican and a Democrat imitating a Republican, they will chose the real thing. Lieberman must be discussing how different he is from Bush if he is to have any chance. But he keeps having to defend himself on the things he agrees with Bush. If Dean captures the nomination, he can move towwards the center, especially since his political record is actually conservative enough to allow this move. What can Lieberman do? 6:54:48 PM
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Daily Outrage: Sanitized War. Journalists who covered events in Iraq talk of what they haven't been telling us. [The Nation Weblogs]
Interesting to hear journalists discuss their own field. Unfortunately, anyone who has heard the inane, idiotic questions asked by reporters at any briefing will have little regard for their intelligence or their candor. The major media outlets have sacrificed news gathering on the altar of entertainment, making it difficult to really sympathize with anything they have to say. In many cases, their views on the news they present is no more important than Martin Sheen's or Mel Gibson's. 6:49:58 PM
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New trend? High-profile columnists explain why Apple's relevant; it's about real innovation. Recently, two writers for widely-read publications, The Chicago Sun Times' Andy Ihnatko and Stephen H. Wildstrom for BusinessWeek have felt the need to explain why they write about Apple and the Macintosh platform to the world at large.
"A reader asks why I write so regularly about hardware or software that only works with Macs," Ihnatko writes. "It's a fair question: By strict numbers, the Macintosh operating system only represents about 5 percent of the desktop... [MacDailyNews]"QB
Nice to see two columnists actually explain why they track what happens on the Mac platform. Without Apple, we would probably still be using 5 inch floppy disks with only a command line interface for computing. 6:41:27 PM
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Iraq pneumonia spate baffles US. Army medical experts do not know why troops who served in Iraq are getting pneumonia, but rule out biological weapons. [BBC News | Health | World Edition]
So far there is nothing unusual about these bouts of pneumonia and nothing to indicate a bioweapon. The outbreak of SARS has made everyone more skittish about pneumonia, though. The real worry is if troops believe that this is a real outbreak of something ominous. The need to nail down just what is happening before rumors carry people away to rapidly. 5:56:17 PM
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What Were You Thinking?
By Steven Johnson
This interview with Paul Ekman, the UCSF psychologist who has become something of a celebrity in the past few years, is a good place to start answering the question I posed in the previous entry: how does knowing something about the mind's inner workings change the way we think about ourselves as individuals?
Ekman is famous for proving the universality of the basic language of human facial expressions (a premise notoriously rejected by Margaret Mead many years ago). But he's also brought to light the subtleties of our expression-reading skills, our knack for detecting the micro-expressions that go beyond the basic palette of seven primary emotions. These skills are part of what some neuroscientists refer to as our "mindreading" system: the part of our brain that's constantly trying to guess what other people are thinking, using all the potential clues available to us, many of which take the form of subtle changes in the musculature of the face.
Mindreading is one of those topics where the "hominid" approach and the more personal, introspective approach nicely overlap. We're all innately talented mindreaders -- unless we're autistic, or suffer from some other comparable disorder. We don't go to school to learn to read facial expressions, even though they utilize an amazingly sophisticated symbolic system. But some of us are better mindreaders than others -- we're better at reading those split-second changes in facial expression or vocal intonation, and thus better at assessing the true meaning of another person's inner thoughts and feelings.
The more you learn about the science of mindreading, the more you find yourself dividing up your friends into two camps: the mindreaders and the mind-dyslexic. It's not a psychological filter that you carried around consciously before, the way you might have thought of certain friends as being extroverts, and others being repressed. But once you apply the filter, it has a revealing quality: you find yourself saying -- "That's why I always had such great conversations with her!" Or: "No wonder his jokes always fell flat." [Corante: Brain Waves]
In my view, this is why we say the camera loves some actors. they have the ability to control their facial expressions to such an extent that they can make us really believe that their character is a strong, silent type or a crazed nutcase. I would expect that this is a necessary aspect of a politician. 5:51:15 PM
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Ticketmaster privacy policy slammed. Ticketmaster, which holds a lock on ticket sales for many entertainment events, is in the hot seat for an online policy that doesn't let buyers opt out of receiving e-mail pitches. [CNET News.com]
One of the reasons I do as little with Ticketmaster as possible. I do not have them mail me the tickets. I use Will Call and I have a special email address set up at excite.com just to deal with organizations that require a valid email address. Ticketmaster still does not get it but they hold a monopoly for online tickets so the only thing to do is route around it. 5:43:00 PM
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