Wednesday, March 19, 2003

In the Name of Fear   (Erik Davis) "...Like a number of us I suspect, I have more than occasionally found myself half-awake at 3am, facing hypnagogic bouts of fear and paranoia induced by current events. Sometimes these apocalyptic spectres slip into my dreamlife proper. Once I found myself outside of Berlin at night, on the side of some wet and nameless interstate. The city was hosting a gathering of national police forces from around the developed world, there to show off their latest tech. With a steel roar, a stream of the latest urban tanks careened out of an underpass, bulbous cartoon things festooned with the baroque weaponry of Japanese mecha and designed, clearly, to control domestic unrest. "My god," I thought,  "it has begun." "On one level, my late-night fantasies can be explained as symbolic narratives that organize far more basic and inchoate fluctuations of helplessness, futility, and mounting alienation -- feelings that have been growing post-9/11, and that only amplify the typical mortal baggage of dread. Moreover, the paranoid feelings stirred up by our current regime's cavalier attitude toward civil liberties are well mitigated by my awareness that millions  of Americans, impoverished and/or dark-hued and/or enamored of pot, have far more immediate fears and justifiable suspicions than any I could legitimately claim. Millions more are terrified by the specter of anti-American terrorism, fears intensified to an almost criminal degree by our alarmist media. But the magnet for my late-night fantasies and fears has almost always been the U.S. government. Only rarely do I flash on the terrorist cells that have no doubt pulled their mighty beards over the possibility of blowing up the Golden Gate bridge, or gassing BART, or wreaking other mayhem on my home town of San Francisco. Instead, my nightside mind is struck by sinister fantasies about the current federal regime, and the powerful systems of control and surveillance they are now installing in the name of fear."   (SOURCE: "Shadow Dancing", Hungry Ghost) Hungy Ghost is a new online magazine. There is some interesting content here. Poetry and prose by Sparrow, whom I remember from the Whole Earth Review. WIlliam S. Burroughs is evoked, and there is a short piece by Peter Lamborn Wilson, tales of Tibetan Monks in the big city, experiencing the madness that is America. An interesting blend of darkness, mysticism, and beauty. 10:54:28 PM    comment [] Now Playing: v/a-  Arabesque (Restless/Rykodisc) perverse little bugger, aren't I? wailing arab soul meets electronica. Who's that knocking at my door? 9:40:05 PM    comment [] "I know many of you don't like my politics. At least you have the satisfaction of knowing that your politics kicked my politics' ass. " (David Weinberger) 6:35:21 PM    comment [] Chaordia   (Bob Franston) The net is meaningless. It just transports bits and bits, in themselves, have no meaning. The meaning comes from interpretation at the edges and the interpretations are not unique and do preserve ambiguity. The tendency to introduce social policy at this level has perverse consequences. The net only operates if it fails. There must be sufficient disorder to assure that the ends are resilient (the analogy with our immune system) and there must be sufficient perturbation to allow new ideas to be reaped. We don't solve problem as much as discover solutions in the turmoil. (via JOHO) 6:30:31 PM    comment [] Civil Liberties: First Casualty of the War? The government has room to scale back individual rights during wartime without violating the Constitution, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia said Tuesday. "The Constitution just sets minimums," Scalia said after a speech at John Carroll University in suburban Cleveland. "Most of the rights that you enjoy go way beyond what the Constitution requires." * * * Scalia did not discuss what rights he believed are constitutionally protected, but said that in wartime, one can expect "the protections will be ratcheted right down to the constitutional minimum. I won't let it go beyond the constitutional minimum." As we go dancing wildly into the abyss... 6:22:51 PM    comment [] Really FAST Internet Scientists have developed a new data transfer protocol for the Internet fast enough to download a full-length DVD movie in less than five seconds, the California Institute of Technology said today. The protocol is called FAST, standing for Fast Active queue management Scalable Transmission Control Protocol (TCP). The researchers achieved a speed of 8,609 megabits per second (Mbps) by using 10 simultaneous flows of data over routed paths, the largest aggregate throughput ever accomplished in such a configuration, Caltech said in a news release. "That is 153,000 times that of today's modem and close to 6,000 times that of the common standard for ADSL (Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line) connections." (SOURCE: "New Internet Tech 153,000 Times Faster Than Modem", National Geographic News) The article says this is a couple of years away. Sign me up! And as the guy on blogcritics says inreference to this "The entertainment industries better have a rational digital delivery system in order by the time this arrives or they will cease to exist." ("Download Times a Thing of the Past?", blogcritics.org) 6:13:42 PM    comment [] SPAM: Spam Stopping Tips (Lisa Bowman) Want to stop spammers from clogging your in-box with get-rich-quick schemes, invitations from hot girls and Nigerian money-laundering antics? You might want to act like a criminal on the lam: Change your name, use a variety of identities and stay out of sight. In a new study of spamming tactics, "Why Am I Getting All This Spam?" the policy group Center for Democracy and Technology found the most successful methods of avoiding unwanted messages involved obscuring e-mail addresses or hiding them altogether. (SOURCE: "Study Suggests Spam Stopping Tips", CNet News) The article contains lots of tips and how-to's. Unfortunately my 30 day trial of the Matador anti-spam tool is about over, and the vagaries of war have left me tempopermanently underfunded, so I am off again in search of other solutions. I need to get over to Linuxland, swim free with the penguins, breathe the cool clean air of the fjords... they say it's always spring over there. But Matador did the trick -- it reduced my junk to trickle, and let the good stuff pass on through, only occasionally flubbing on a mailing list related item or two. 5:57:32 PM    comment [] California Coastal Records Project "It is the mother of all photographic panoramas -- a continuous sequence of 10,000 aerial photos imaging the entire California coast from Oregon to Mexico. It is intended to be a "visual baseline" for scientific and other purposes, but it is also one heck of a wonderful site to browse -- you can see aerial panoramas of lots of cool things from the Golden Gate Bridge to Cape Mendocino, Pt. Reyes, Pt. Sur and the Queen Mary. You can enter lat/long coordinates, look up a geographic name, or simply click on any one of several maps. Best of all, now that it is set up, they intend to keep the site updated. This means the site will just get more cool with the ability to reach back in time." (Paul Saffo via interesting people) 5:40:12 PM    comment [] What do we know about knowledge? (Stephen Downes) "It is astonishing, linguist Noam Chomsky tells us, that we know anything at all. Our access to the external world is limited to the five senses and our knowledge of the world is vastly underdetermined by the information we derive from those senses. From the same body of evidence we can derive any number of theories, which is why we see God, witchcraft, and thermodynamics all called upon to explain the same phenomena." * * * "No bit of knowledge, then, stands alone and in isolation from the rest. The accumulation of knowledge is fundamentally different from the accumulation of grains of sand, where each item could be acquired and stored as though it were a unique and distinct entity. In any form of knowledge, there is a process not only of acquiring some new experience, but also of assessing it and placing it in its proper location in the larger system. Knowledge exists in what Quine would call a 'web of belief,' a network of related ideas, each referring to and depending on the rest for their meaning, truth and value." (SOURCE: "What do we know about knowledge?", Learnscope) via elearningpost 5:32:03 PM    comment [] SPYWARE: Gator be Gone! Here's a little tip for Internet Explorer users if you're tired of Gator and its attempts to install itself on your PC. "Hopefully by now you have removed that password manager/form filler Gator since it's gotten a bad reputation as spyware. As an added precaution to keep the software from installing unwanted files on your system, also consider adding Gator to your list of restricted sites. To do this, click on Tools, Internet Options, Security tab, and the Restricted Sites icon. Click on Sites and type '.gator.com' without the quotes into the 'Add this Web Site to the zone', then click on Add and OK." [Neat Net Tricks, 3/15/2003] via the shifted librarian 1:08:35 PM    comment [] RSS Tutorial for Content Publishers and Web Masters Boy do I need this. Thanks to the Shifted Librarian for adding this to the ever expanding list of things that need my attention. 12:43:14 PM    comment [] ART ALERT: Kaleidoscopic Koolness I am so sorry. Click here, fall into dark hole of time. And check out this guy's other toys, projects and videos!! 12:35:46 AM    comment []

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