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Wednesday, March 17, 2004 |
Photoblogging a trail of nutty signs from deranged neighbor.  A participant in the Something Awful forums posts photos of Dr.-Bronner's-soap-like signs she claims were created by a disturbed neighbor nicknamed Crazy Tammy.
"She's been gone from the neighborhood for about nine months now,
hopefully getting the treatment she so sorely needed. From what I
understand, and from what others have told me, Crazy Tammy is a
textbook case of paranoid schizophrenia. We would have never known
about her terrible mental problem if she hadn't advertised her insane
views on giant sheets of cloth hung from her fence."
Link (via Warren) [Boing Boing] 
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Bruce Sterling talk from SXSW. Here are my running notes from Bruce Sterling's rant at SXSW:This
is a genius adminsitration for inspiring angry rhetoric.It's got a
nice, interesting consistency. I like Rumsfeld, I dighis poetry. Job
one in the Bush Admin is to get it spun: they'rean info-war-centric
outfit. If you get it spun, you don't need toget it done.Controlling
the message is more important to them thancontrolling the underlying
reality. It's a blatant part of theirideology. Their global climate
change policy is in defiance ofthe laws of physics, it's Lysenkoism.
The Union of ConcernedScientists has a page documenting the Bushies'
Lysenkoism fromclimate change to on. The science stuff is
starting to blow back. The UCS isnonpartisan. It's like Stalin and
Lysenko's faith-basedagriculture: the reason Soviet wheat fields have
weeds is becausewheat is evolving into weeds. You didn't have to get
the peasantsto weed the fields, you could just allege this. Scientists
wereamazed and horrified. Soviet scientists who went abroad to
talkabout chemistry and physics were confronted with a credibilitygap
arising from this -- they had to admit that back home,politicians made
up the laws of physics. So scientists defectedto Cornell. Link [Boing Boing]
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Controlled vocabulary for describing personal relationships.
Clay Shirky's posted a fine rant on RELATIONSHIP, a controlled
vocabulary of terms for describing personal relationships (i.e.
friendOf, acquaintanceOf, parentOf, siblingOf, childOf, grandchildOf,
spouseOf, enemyOf, antagonistOf, ambivalentOf, lostContactWith,
knowsOf, wouldLikeToKnow, knowsInPassing, knowsByReputation,
closeFriendOf, hasMet, worksWith, colleagueOf, collaboratesWith,
employerOf, employedBy, mentorOf, apprenticeTo, livesWith, neighborOf,
grandparentOf, lifePartnerOf, engagedTo, ancestorOf, descendantOf,
participantIn, participant):Take the relationship
closePersonalFriendOf. The designers of this list somehow overlooked
it, possibly on the grounds that it's tautological, and only of use on
talk shows. ("Oh yes, Julia Roberts is a close personal friend of
mine.") But it is nevertheless informative -- you would only use
closePersonalFriendOf if the person in question was someone of
relatively high fame or station.In addition, anyone claiming to be a
"close personal friend" of someone else is talking about a domain where
a high degree of social interaction is the norm, e.g. show business. By
extension, the seemingly oxymoronic friendYouDontLike is also a valid
category, as anyone in highly social environments can tell you. (You
often run into friendsYouDontLike at partiesYouHaveToGoTo.) Link [Boing Boing]
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Shootin' pool with Hellboy.
Actor Ron Perlman shoots pool and talks with the magazine FHM, while
dressed as the comic world's favorite beast of the apocalypse. Hellboy the movie, directed by Guillermo del Toro, launches April 2. Link to interview, Link to the website for the comic that inspired it (thanks, J. Hurwitz!) [Boing Boing]
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Self-made superhero Angle Grinder Man is back.  Joi Ito reports that Angle Grinder Man
is back and in full effect. The British homegrown hero wanders the
streets of London clad in gold lame caped crusader getup, freeing
illegally parked cars of parking enforcement security boots. Or, as
AGM himself would put it,
"Angle-Grinder Man [is] the world's first wheel-clamp and speed camera
vigilante cum subversive superhero philanthropist entertainer type
personage.
A big welcome to all good, decent, law-unabiding citizens. Godspeed to
you and your four-wheeled, petrol-driven chariots."
Link to Angle Grinder Man's website (Caution: Not worksafe for villains or parking enforcement officers. Contains strong superpowers) [Boing Boing]
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VoIP company Skype raises $19MM.
Internet telephony startup Skype today announced a $19 million
investment through DFJ. The VoIP provider was founded by creators of
P2P network Kazaa. Skype plans to use some of that cash to buy hundreds
of thousands of minutes per month from major telcos, and provide them
in turn to its own customers. Link [Boing Boing]
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A DIY Gaming PC for Under $1000. Build It:
We put together a full-fledged Pentium 4-based gaming rig -- including
monitor, keyboard, mouse, and Windows XP license -- for less than a
grand Find out how we pulled it off. [Extremetech]
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Finally, weblogs, RSS, and P2P have been combined.
This has been a dream of mine since I turned up in the Weblog world in
early 2001 (and right in line with the vision in a Forrester report I
wrote 1996 entitled: Personal Broadcast Networks). Thanks Andrew! This is excellent. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Interview with Martin Van Creveld (in early 2002)on the Arab-Israeli conflict and asymmetrical wars:
The same thing has happened to the Israeli army as happened to
all the rest that have tried over the last sixty years. Basically it’s
always a question of the relationship of forces. If you are strong, and you are fighting the weak for any period of time, you are going to become weak yourself.
There is one thing that can be
done – and that is to put and end to the situation whereby we are the
strong fighting the weak, because that is the most stupid situation in
which anybody can be.... You do that by A, waiting for a
suitable opportunity... B, doing whatever it takes to restore the
balance of power between us and the Palestinians... C, removing 90% of
the causes of the conflict, by pulling out... and D, building a wall
between us and the other side, so tall that even the birds cannot fly
over it.... so as to avoid any kind of friction for a long long time in
the future. [John Robb's Weblog]
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Next Generation Terrorism
New restricted discussion group on the future of terrorism. It is a
private group (only members can read messages) due to the sensitive
nature of the topic. Informed discussion only. Topics include:
network-centric organizations, swarming, smart mobs, social technology
(software), infrastructure attack, cyberwarfare, counter-terrorism, the
decline of the nation-state, 4G warfare, transnational crime, corporate
mercenaries, cascading failure, and more. [John Robb's Weblog]
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650M mobile devices with cameras built in by 2008. 650 million cameraphones a year. Alan Reiter points to
a research report suggesting that 150 million camera-enabled mobile
phones will be sold this year, growing to 650 million by 2008. At that
point, there will be something like a billion people sending photos and
video back and forth among mobile devices. And people are wondering
what all that Internet capacity will be used for?
[Werblog]
I doubt the # will hit that much - that fast - but eventually it
will. I just hope to hell that there's some sort of intelligent client
in these devices - 'cause god help us if all those photos were sent as
emails! [Marc's Voice]
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© Copyright 2004 William J. Maya.
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