Sunday, March 9, 2008

Joseph Arthur, Rages of Babylon (Podcast) New Joseph Arthur EP. Joseph Arthur will be releasing an EP every month through August. Here's an MP3 from the first EP, out March 18. MP3: Rages of Babylon Joseph Arthur will be playing the donewaiting.com day show during SXSW on Wednesday. [donewaiting.com] 9:04:08 PM

Zuckerberg and Lacy Facebook media phenomenon "overkill" mode: Zuckerberg's keynote at SXSWi results in talk of changing the world--and heckling. The 23-year-old Facebook CEO is interviewed by BusinessWeek writer Sarah Lacy at SXSWi, but an impatient audience wouldn't put up with the lack of stuff they hadn't heard before, not to mention a lack of tough questions overall. [CNET News.com] 6:40:51 PM

A Long Enough Timeline Joseph Weizenbaum, 1923-2008. Computer scientist and AI theorist Joseph Weizenbaum apparently died last week [wikipedia link]. I say "apparently" because back in the late 1980s, I was on the staff of an academic computing journal. All of had been fans of Weizenbaum's work, primarily (for us) ELIZA and the book Computer Power and Human Reason. One day, another staff member on the journal announced that Weizenbaum had died. Since a new issue of the journal was going to press soon, one of us wrote a several page memorial to include in the issue. But at some point, we realized that no one could recall where they'd heard the news of his death, so I was given the assignment to contact MIT for confirmation. I couldn't find a number for Weizenbaum's office or department, but I did locate a number for his colleague Marvin Minsky. I called and, when Minksy's receptionist answered, I explained that we were preparing a memorial article on Weizenbaum, but needed to confirm his death. She said, "I just saw him last week! What happened?" She put me on hold while she called Weizenbaum's receptionist, who said she'd just seen him that morning. Apparently our information was incorrect. (As Chuck Palaiuk wrote in Fight Club, "On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.") [work/space] 11:09:55 AM

The Last Millenium or Yesterday's Money Money (videos). It is that time of year again, WFMU needs your money. Here are two takes on the subject of money, as seen through the eyes of last millennium new wave bands from Europe. On the left are the Flying Lizards... [WFMU's Beware of the Blog] 10:17:03 AM

Sherwood Schwartz, 'It's About Time' It's About Men in the Strangest Place. It's About Time was a '60s television comedy I would've rather left in a pile of forgotten memories from my youth, but Classic Television Showbiz yanked it out of my subconscious, and embedded its ear-wormy theme song in my brain. Now, I feel as if I must pollute the minds of my collective readership as well (it's only fair that you all suffer with me). IAT had an incredibly thin premise: 2 astronauts stranded in time with a bunch of cavemen who talk like this: "What Gronk say?" "Him say, 'If Gronk become chief, nobody hunt sabertooth tiger." As you can imagine, a half-hour of this is about 29 1/2 minutes too much. Nevertheless, I felt compelled to watch a couple of episodes due to the talented cast who were caught slumming in this Sherwood Schwartz steamer: Bob Denver, Joe E. Ross, and Imogene Coca, among others. [Link: It's About Time] [Eye of the Goof] 9:36:21 AM