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quarta-feira, 29 de setembro de 2004
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George Soros pay for anti-Bush ad in Wallstreet Journal
Why We Must Not Re-elect President Bush
 George Soros: In business, I made billions as an investor, more than my family will ever need. I have
given away billions promoting freedom and fighting Communism around the world. I have
assisted the birth of new democracies in Eastern Europe and supported intervention in
Bosnia and Kosovo. I condemned the invasion of Iraq for reasons I explain in this pamphlet and in my book The Bubble of American Supremacy:The Costs of Bush [base ']s
War in Iraq .
Born in Hungary, I lived through fascism and the Holocaust, and then had a foretaste
of communism. I learned at an early age how important it is what kind of government
prevails. I chose America as my home because I value freedom and democracy, civil liberties and an open society.
This is the most important election of my lifetime because President Bush is endangering
our safety, hurting our vital interests and undermining American values.
Using the war on terror as a pretext, the President dragged us into an unnecessary war in Iraq that has become a quagmire. He turned the spontaneous outpouring of world sympathy after 9/11 into equally widespread resentment.
He suppressed debate by labeling all criticism unpatriotic.
If we re-elect him, we endorse the Bush doctrine of preemptive action and the invasion of Iraq, and we will have to live with the consequences. As I shall try to show, we are facing a vicious circle of escalating violence with no end in sight.
But if we repudiate the Bush policies at the polls, we shall have a better chance to regain the respect and support of the world and to break the vicious circle. Our future, and the future of the world, is at stake. I hope you will read this pamphlet and my book, The Bubble of American Supremacy: The Costs of Bush's War in Iraq.
Image from Lowercase Tee
Link
10:47:22 PM Google It! 
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domingo, 26 de setembro de 2004
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The Society of the Spectacle (A Digital Remix)
 Antonio C-Pinto: I've read today's Mark Amerika email on his collaborative latest project. It sounds as spicy as Guy Debord's ‘avant la lettre’ de-constructivist film ‘La Société du Spectacle’ — actually a candid look into the media and consommation society, when Pop Art was already on its way. As kid Hassid told me:
“The Society of the Spectacle (A Digital Remix) is a ten-minute DVD art-loop that uses source material from the writing, images, recordings, and other psychogeographical wanderings of arch-Situationist and French philosopher Guy Debord. The art work is composed by members of DJRABBI, a digital art collective of political activists, and includes visual remixes by Rick Silva aka Cuechamp, the sonic detours of Trace Reddell aka the pHarmanaut, and original subtitles by Mark Amerika aka Kid Hassid.”
“ [SOS] is a furious collage of black and white images (and sudden flarings of colour) and theory-saturated subtitles that you can only grasp at as they roll by, occasionally recognise, and go with the odd beauty of their flow. It's appropriately playful (‘everything is fucked but fun’), pulsing, pop-ish and engrossing-the hypertext crowd stoked on Godard [...] [T]he rapid editing and churning information flow reflects the struggle to connect with global politics, the impossibility of slowing down, but at the same time conveys a manic playfulness, a creative resistance against considerable odds.” — RealTime magazine
Link
La Société du Spectacle (e-book edition)
La Société du Spectacle (about the movie)
10:45:04 PM Google It!
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HOWTO Handshadows from 1859. Cory Doctorow:
Hand Shadows To Be Thrown Upon The Wall, originally published in 1859, is a lovely little Gutenberg Project book, illustrated with these great woodcuts of what passed for fun in the era of gaslight and corsets.
Link
(Thanks, Asthmatic!)
[Boing Boing]
10:07:59 PM
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BMW's hydrogen world's fastest car speeds over 300 Km/hr
How long can we dream like these guys?
 Antonio C-Pinto: David Goodstein explained to Newsweek (Feb. 17, 2004) that hydrogen is not a source of energy. And he also told that one have to use energy to make hydrogen — because hydrogen is just a way of storing and transporting energy. With today's economics and today's technology, says Goodstein, it takes the equivalent of six gallons of gasoline to make enough hydrogen to replace one gallon of gasoline. Anyway, BMW appears to be ahead of its competitors in prototyping alternative speed cars!
BMW: Hydrogen propulsion shifts from rockets to racers as BMW sets nine new speed records, marking the start of the hydrogen age for automobiles.
‘BMW technology has come a long way. Now, together with politicians and the energy industry, we must turn our vision of sustained mobility into reality,’ says Professor Burkhard Goschel, Board Member of the BMW Group.
The records were set at the high-speed Miramas Proving Grounds in France in September 2004. With these records, the BMW Group has shown that hydrogen is able to replace conventional fuel without requiring the driver to make the slightest compromise in terms of dynamic performance.
The single-seater H2R Record Car uses a 6.0-litre 12 cylinder power unit producing in excess of 210 kW, that races to 100 km/h in just six seconds and has a top speed of 302.4 km/h. The engine is based on the V12 unit powering BMW's flagship limousine, the BMW 760Li. The hydrogen combustion engine boasts the most advanced technologies such as BMW's fully variable VALVETRONIC valve train control.
BMW will be launching a dual-mode version of the current 7 Series during the production cycle of the present model, thus introducing the first car of its kind able to run on both hydrogen and petrol.
[thanks to Slashdot]
Link
Related link: Hypercar
9:59:57 PM Google It!
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Oil peak: the coming overshoot
Crude Awakening: a prominent physicist warns in a new book that the world is running out of oil and we're not doing anything to stave off the coming crisis.
By Brian Braiker
Newsweek
Updated: 3:47 p.m. ET Feb. 17, 2004
Feb. 17 - Remember 1973? If you do, there are plenty of reasons to wish you didn't. Chief among them (right after leisure suits) would be the oil crisis that began in October. The Middle Eastern OPEC nations stopped exports to the United States and other Western nations just as stateside oil production was peaking. The artificial shortage that followed had devastating effects: The price of gas quadrupled in the United States, climbing from 25 cents to more than a dollar, in a matter of months. The American Automobile Association reported that in one isolated week up to 20 percent of the country's gas stations had no fuel; in some places motorists were forced to wait in line for two to three hours to gas up. The number of homes built with gas heat dropped.
But that was the 1970s and this is now, right? Not according to David Goodstein. Saudi princes and SUV drivers may do well to read his new book, “Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil” (W.W. Norton), in which Goodstein argues that our oil-dependent civilization is in for a crude awakening when the world's oil supply really begins to run out — possibly within a few decades.
[...]
BB: How do you suggest people prepare now?
DG: Right now we don't have the kind of leadership that would take us in the direction that would make major changes. As individuals we can do things; I drive a hybrid car, for example. But as a society we have to redesign cities so that people live close to where they work. There are all kinds of measures. We are so profligate in the use of energy that even with the smallest effort we can reduce the rate at which we use energy very significantly, as Californians showed after the last energy crisis. But what we really need is massive infusion of research on all of the possible ways of ameliorating this problem.
Book: Out of Gas: The End of the Age of Oil, by David Goodste (Barnes & Noble)
Link
Related links:
The Peak of World Oil Production -- Richard C. Duncan
Hubbert Peak of Oil Production
Die Off - a population crash resource page
Post Carbon Institute -- Learning to Live in a Low Energy World
Changing World Technologies
How to Save the World
Sustainability Institute
Rocky Mountain Institute
Oil: The real threat to national security. Michael T. Klare
6:21:41 PM Google It!
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John Paul Bichard shows Evidencia at Quadrum Art Gallery (Lisbon)
 Evidência takes as its starting point, an ending; a forensic space, a place in which remains and material take on new significance. From the objects and images, there are no definite conclusions, no clear narratives, just the threads of something that could have happened. The viewer is invited in, but in doing so enters the scene to witness part... of a crime, a conflict, a game?
For his Quadrum exhibition, Bichard has (re)constructed a forensic space, a small plot of land which is at once the scene of a crime and a fragment of a first person shooter videogame made ‘real’. As a forensic space, it becomes a clipping, a piece of evidence removed from its original surroundings, as a games space, it is a trope, a snapshot of a brief violent action that would be lost as the player moves on to the next encounter.
Evidência
John Paul Bichard
Evidência #001
Installation: aluminium, turf, tree stump, earth, leaves, feathers, bullet cases. 2004
John Paul Bichard's Hydropia site
Link
2:26:56 AM Google It!
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SkyEar. David Pescovitz:
Several months ago, I wrote an article for TheFeature about artists using wireless telecom in their work. One of the artists, Usman Haque, was planning to launch a network of instrumented helium balloons in the air. Equipped with mobile phones, LEDs, and sensors that measure electromagnetic radiation into the air, the cloud of balloons would act as a SkyEar.
 "As police radios, television signals, distant storms, and other radio transmissions alter what Haque calls the "local hertzian culture," the cloud flickers in response... Of course, calling a particular phone alters the "hertzian topography" in that region of the balloon cloud, affecting its glow. "You can enter into something like a conversation with the cloud," Haque says."
Ten days ago in London, SkyEar had its second flight.
Link
[Boing Boing]
2:18:15 AM
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Video mashup of Russ Meyer + Hoodoo Gurus / Persian Rugs. Xeni Jardin:
Following up to this week's sad news that sexploitation auteur Russ Meyers has passed away (Link), BoingBoing reader Richard Crepeau says, "Thought I'd spread the word about a Hoodoo Gurus side project called the Persian Rugs. One of their videos uses Russ Meyer clips from Mondo Topless. A nice hybrid between garage rock and camp."
On their website, the band says:
"Music and sex go very well together. For proof, just take a look at the video for the Persian Rugs' new single 'Be A Woman'. The band and director Todd Sheldrick have created the perfect setting for the band's 60's Punk-inspired Primal Rock: strippers and cavemen collide in a 21st Century psychedelic garden of eden. (...) The Rugs got in touch with famed 60's director Russ Meyer, the maker of such films as 'Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill!'and Beyond The Valley Of The Dolls' (the latter a direct influence on the Austin Powers movies) and asked for permission to incorporate footage from one of his cult classics, 'Mondo Topless', into their new filmclip. Russ asked to hear the song first, [and] loved it (...)
Link to "Be a Woman" *.asx video in low and hi-res, contains megadoses of kitsch nudity (and shots of vintage '60s electronic equipment). How did those ladies make their humongous breasts do that stuff on rhythm? Weighed down by all that eyeliner, no less?
Update: Reader Rob says, "If you have a fink installation on your mac, you can install asfrecorder from fink unstable packages and record the Russ Meyer/Hoodoo Gurus--Persian Rugs thing."
[Boing Boing]
2:15:44 AM
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John Waters film A Dirty Shame
 From the author of Pink Flamingos:
The fight for carnal liberation is under way!
Lust is in the air on Harford Road and Sylvia Stickles (Tracey Ullman), a grumpy, repressed middle-aged Baltimorean, doesn't like it.
Though Sylvia's handsome husband Vaughan (Chris Isaak) still has marital urges, his wife couldn't be less interested [~] she has more important things to do.
Not only does Sylvia run the family's “Pinewood Park And Pay” convenience store, she's also responsible for watching over her exhibitionist daughter Caprice (Selma Blair). A go-go dancer known to her adoring fans as Ursula Udders, Caprice and her stupendously enlarged breasts are currently under house arrest after several “nude and disorderly” violations.
But Sylvia's world is turned upside down one day after suffering a concussion in a freak traffic accident. Sexy towtruck driver Ray-Ray Perkins (Johnny Knoxville) rushes to her aid, and the stricken Sylvia realizes he's no ordinary service man; he's a sexual healer who brings Sylvia's hidden cauldron of lust to the boiling point.
[...]
What follows is rude, joyous and full of sexual anarchy. A movie with a generous heart and a dirty mind. In other words, a classic John Waters comedy.
Link
2:04:55 AM Google It!
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sexta-feira, 24 de setembro de 2004
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Bushism DVD out. Xeni Jardin:
Bushisms the book is now Bushisms the DVD --
hosted by comic uber-genius Brian Unger of The
Daily Show. The DVD features Al Franken and others commenting on nucular-strength malapropisms from the presidentiary such as:
# "War is a dangerous place."
# "Karyn is a West Texas girl, just like me."
# "Rarely is the question asked, is our children learning."
Link (Disclaimer: I'm proud to be Mr. Unger's colleague/co-contributor on the NPR show
"Day to Day").
[Boing Boing]
10:49:38 AM
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Photos of fossilized '80s Russian Space Shuttle knockoff. Xeni Jardin:
BoingBoing reader TabulaRasa in Germany says,
 "In the late 1980s, the Russians tried to develop their own Space Shuttle. Well, actually -- one
even ended up flying into space just one time -- Buran. After this flight, the hangar where it was housed in
Baikonur collapsed and destroyed the craft.
"This is an online photo gallery of Buran 002, another prototype that
was sold to an Australian businessman named David Hammer. During the Olympic Games in Sydney, the prototype was
part of an exhibition. Then it was sold to a company in Singapore, and was shipped to Bahrain,
where it became stranded somewhere in the desert.
"Eventually it was sold to a German museum, and
will soon be shipped one last time -- to become part of an exhibition.
Some things are still working, as you can see from the photos in this online image gallery.
Guess I'll have make a visit to this museum when the shuttle has arrived!"
Link to image gallery from Der Spiegel magazine (text in German)
[Boing Boing]
10:48:17 AM
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Prelinger Archive gems. Cory Doctorow:
Rick Prelinger, who curates the Prelinger Archive (the largest video archive in the world, comprising thousands and thousands of "ephemeral films" like VD shorts, industrial training footage, and other great mix-and-match material -- all licensed under Creative Commmons licenses), sends us three fantastic links to material in the Archive:
PANORAMA EPHEMERA (2004, 89:35 min., color and black and white) is a collage of sequences drawn from a wide variety of ephemeral (industrial, advertising, educational and amateur) films, touring the conflicted landscapes of twentieth-century America. The films' often-skewed visions construct an American history filled with horror and hope, unreeling in familiar and unexpected ways.
PANORAMA EPHEMERA focuses on familiar and mythical activities and images in America (1626-1978). Many creatures and substances that we hardly notice because we feel so used to them take center stage, including pigs, corn, water, telephones, fire, and rice. At first resembling a compilation, it soon reveals itself as a journey through the American landscape over time, and the story begins to emerge between the sequences.
Link,
Torrent Download Link
And:
This site contains theatrical trailers for feature films. What, another movie trailer site? Well, this is a special one -- SabuCat Productions specializes in collecting, preserving and distributing high-quality 35mm materials, and the trailers in this collection are unlike anything you're likely to see online. Top titles: "5000 Fingers of Dr. T," "Amazing Transparent Man," "Conquest of Space," and of course "Attack of the 50-Foot Woman."
Link
And:
Growing collection of educational films originally targeting so-called "GenXers." Like Prelinger Archives films on the same site, but made for younger audiences in the Open Classroom era. Memorable titles: "Last Prom," "Why Doesn't Cathy Eat Breakfast," and "If Mirrors Could Speak: Self-Image Film."
Link
(Thanks, Rick!)
[Boing Boing]
10:46:26 AM
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Art/culture of computer viruses. David Pescovitz:
BB friend Alessandro Ludovico of Neural.it magazine points us to "I love you (rev.eng): The Aesthetics of Computer Viruses," an exhibit he's involved with that premiered in Germany and is now on view at Brown University in the US:
 "I love you [rev.eng]" is divided into four investigative areas - political, cultural, technical and historical - and focuses on the controversial positions of security experts and hackers, of net artists and programmers, of literature experts and code poets...
What can visitors to the "I love you [rev.eng]" exhibition expect?
- Force computers to crash with "Sasser" or "Suicide"
- Experience a global virus outbreak in real time via a 3D world
- View security concepts and methods for preventing global network attacks
- Witness computer viruses as works of art like "biennale.py" and "The Lovers"
- See films by hackers on their subculture
- Learn about programming languages as the material for contemporary poetry
- Juxtapose experimental literature and code poetry
Link (to Brown exhibition details) Link (to Wired News article)
[Boing Boing]
10:43:39 AM
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Strange Horizons: Hugo-nominated sf webzine. Cory Doctorow:
Jed sez,
Strange Horizons is a Hugo-nominated online speculative fiction magazine that pays pro rates for fiction. We've published fiction, nonfiction, and poetry every week for the past four years, and other material (including art) a couple of times a month. Almost everything we've ever published is still available for free in our archives, including the wildly popular April Fools article about Installing Linux on a Dead Badger, as well as our Author Focus week on Cory.
We're funded entirely by donations; most of our budget goes to paying for the material we publish, 'cause all 30 of our staff members are volunteers. We're currently in the middle of our twice-annual fund drive -- the model is a lot like public radio, except that we don't interrupt our content to ask for money. We're a 501(c)(3) literary nonprofit, so if you pay taxes in the US, your donation is tax-deductible. We'll take donations in any amount; I'd love to see the magazine funded entirely by hundreds of $5-$10 donations. A donation of any size gets you a chance to win one of our fund drive prizes. Larger donations get you a spiffy membership card and other premiums.
So if you'd like to stop by and help us out, we'd appreciate it. But even if you don't want to donate, come take a look at the magazine. Enjoy!
[Boing Boing]
10:42:17 AM
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Relaying rat brainwaves for search and rescue. David Pescovitz:
Researchers from the University of Florida are outfitting trained rats with neural implants and a wireless radio so that the rodents can scurry through collapsed buildings searching for survivors. The electrodes are implanted in the rat's olfactory cortex, motor cortex, and reward center. When a rat--trained to seek out the smell of human--finds its target, the "aha! moment" can then be wireless transmitted back to headquarters. From a New Scientist article about the DARPA-funded work:
The researchers trained the rats to search for human odour by stimulating the reward centre when it found its target smell. Once the rats were trained, they were set to forage for the target smell, while electrodes recorded their neural activity patterns.
This allowed researchers to identify the brainwave patterns associated with finding that smell. They were also able to train the rats to sniff out the explosives TNT and RDX – key after terrorist attacks that may leave buildings harbouring unexploded bombs.
Link
[Boing Boing]
1:16:01 AM
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Sign onto the Geneva Declaration, change WIPO!. Cory Doctorow:
Last weekend, I represented EFF at a meeting in Geneva of several disparate activit and non-govermental orgs, working to draft a joint doc called "Future of WIPO," (or, more formally, "Geneva Declaration on the Future of the World Intellectual Property Organization"). This doc is a call to arms to orgs that would see WIPO revisit its role in the world, to take into account the public interest when formulating and promulgating IP policy. The doc has been finalised and is online -- we're collecting signatories for it, and you're invited.
Humanity faces a global crisis in the governance of knowledge, technology and culture. The crisis is manifest in many ways.
* Without access to essential medicines, millions suffer and die;
* Morally repugnant inequality of access to education, knowledge and technology undermines development and social cohesion;
* Anticompetitive practices in the knowledge economy impose enormous costs on consumers and retard innovation;
* Authors, artists and inventors face mounting barriers to follow-on innovation;
* Concentrated ownership and control of knowledge, technology, biological resources and culture harm development, diversity and democratic institutions;
* Technological measures designed to enforce intellectual property rights in digital environments threaten core exceptions in copyright laws for disabled persons, libraries, educators, authors and consumers, and undermine privacy and freedom;
* Key mechanisms to compensate and support creative individuals and communities are unfair to both creative persons and consumers;
* Private interests misappropriate social and public goods, and lock up the public domain.
Link to declaration, Mailto link for signing on
(via Copyfight)
[Boing Boing]
1:13:26 AM
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Fave music site: Oddio Overplay. Mark Frauenfelder:
Todd Lappin sez: "The Oddio Overplay website is one of the true jewels of the Interweb. Dedicated to odd, obscure, and out-of-print music, the site is packed with free, downloadable retro-themed mp3s. The special compilations are a hoot, and exploring the links to other free music sites is an activity that's guaranteed to gobble up hours and hours of otherwise productive work time. The latest Oddio find made my day: A downloadable LP of the in-store background music played in S.S. Kresge five-and-dime stores during the early 1960s. It sounds like a perfume counter. And it makes me want to spend money!" Link
[Boing Boing]
1:12:03 AM
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quarta-feira, 22 de setembro de 2004
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Comic Art #6 on sale. Mark Frauenfelder:
 I picked up issue #6 of Comic Art magazine last week. What a treat.  There's a long article about Seth (creator of Palookaville) with plenty of pictures, including a cardboard city he built (seen on the cover) and a page from his sketchbook (which I scanned here -- incredible! Click on thumb for enlargement). Unfortunately, no pictures of Seth. I've only seen other people's drawings of Seth. (He's always wearing a vintage hat and suit and chain smoking when people draw him.)
 There's another article about Virgil Partch (aka "VIP"), a delightfully wacky cartoonist from the 40s and 50s. If you look closely at the hands on VIP's characters, you'll notice that they have more than five fingers. Sometimes they have as many as 12 fingers on a hand! He did this because he used to work at Disney, where he was forced to draw four-fingered characters. The extras fingers were his way of evening the score.
The price of Comic Art is $9, which is a good deal, because it's glossy color throughout.
Link
[Boing Boing]
5:24:19 PM
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Building with wood is eco-friendly?. David Pescovitz:
A new research report shows that wood is one of the greener materials that can be used to build homes. According to the report, prepared by the Consortium for Research on Renewable Industrial Materials, the environmental impact of fabricating building materials and actually constructing a home is more intense than most people realize. And while the industry has slowly moved away from wood, the use of dead trees may actually be better (well, less bad) than other products and techniques. From a press release about the report:
The research showed that wood framing used 17 percent less energy than steel construction for a typical house built in Minnesota, and 16 percent less energy than a house using concrete construction in Atlanta. And in these two examples, the use of wood had 26-31 percent less global warming potential...The growth of wood in renewable forests works to "sequester" and remove carbon from the atmosphere, and fewer carbon emissions are created in the processing needed to produce wood products than their steel and concrete counterparts.
Link
[Boing Boing]
5:22:40 PM
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Are you a Copyright Criminal?. Xeni Jardin:
BoingBoing reader Robert Daeley says, "Came across this picture on the wall just behind a copy machine. All the hackers I know wear ski masks when they commit their crimes. Oh, and big thick leather gloves are great for typing."
Link to blog post with pointer to full size image. Mwuhuhahahahaaaaaaa.
[Boing Boing]
1:30:42 AM
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Julie Verhoeven. David Pescovitz:
 My wife Kelly really digs the work of Julie Verhoeven, an avant-garde fashion illustrator for magazines like The Face and Dazed and Confused. In 2002, her work appeared on the runways in the form of illustrated handbags by Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton. She also created cartoons for a performance by electrocrash band Fischerspooner and the cover for Primal Scream and Kate Moss's "Some Velvet Morning" album. Verhoeven has her own fashion brand, Gibo, with boutiques in London and New York. We bought her new monograph, published in Japan by Gas. Now we really want her first book, Fat-Bottomed Girls. Link (to Channel4 article) Link (scroll to the Fat-Bottomed Girls article and click "more images")
[Boing Boing]
1:26:51 AM
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Villette Numérique in Paris. David Pescovitz:
The Villette Numérique digital art extravaganza starts tomorrow in Paris. It's an intense two-week program of international tech/culture exhibitions, performances, workshops, concerts, and films.
 Dozens of artists including Atau Tanaka (image at left), JoDI, Greg Niemeyer/Chris Chafe, and Maclej Wisnlewski will present new work in the "Zone de Confluences." BB's Parisian liaison Alexandre Boucherot and his colleagues from Fluctuat.net are acting as mediators of the media art, providing insight into the pieces for visitors to the exhibition. I'm also looking forward to Sigur Rós's Odin's Raven Magic, an adaptation of Icelandic sagas backed by a full orchestra. Tomorrow night, experimental musicians Scanner and Simon Fisher Turner will twist knobs in a planetarium, and this weekend we'll catch a performance of Stockhausen's Mantra.
If you're in the vicinity, now is a good time to catch an easyJet flight. Hit the Villette Numérique site for background on all the artists mentioned above and plenty of more information worth a look even if you can't make it to Paris. Link
[Boing Boing]
1:25:45 AM
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First Belgian book released under CC license. Cory Doctorow:
Stefan sez, "With Antwerp named as World Book City in 2004, residents and visitors were being invited to create a biography of the city by SMS. On the 19th September, a selection of the submitted impressions have been compiled into a booklet combined with the focus on the different text points and giving an alternative view on Antwerp and its districts. The booklet (in Dutch) is available for download in PDF, plain text and a special version for iPods. By the end of October a complete English translation will be available under the same license: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0">
Link
(Thanks, Stefan!)
[Boing Boing]
1:24:31 AM
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Anime murals in Montreal redux. Cory Doctorow:
Here are a couple more cool anime murals in Montreal, including one that was defaced by the addition of an obscuring McDonald's billboard. I'm now officially bored with this subject, so there's no point in sending in more Montreal anime mural links (but thanks for the ones you've sent in so far!).
Link 1, Link 2
(Thanks, Jeremy and Mark!)
[Boing Boing]
1:22:28 AM
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ETCON call for proposals closes in a week!. Cory Doctorow:
The O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference call for participation closes on Sept 27 -- just under a week from now. ETCON, held annually in San Diego (this year's dates are March 14-17, 2005) is the best tech conference on the planet. I've averaged more mind-blowing experiences per ETCON than at any other event I've ever attended. I'm proud and honoured to sit on the conference jury, and we're now gearing up for the selection process -- looking forward to seeing your proposal on the list!
The theme for this year's ETech is "Remix," encompassing those nexus points of iterative hacking and large ideas that have a way of transforming technology:
— The phone has become a platform, moving beyond mere voice to smart mobile sensor and back to phone again, by way of voice-over-IP.
— Geolocation, once the provenance of government and geologist, provides a sense of "there" and facilitates ad hoc group forming with feet in both the virtual and physical worlds.
— Peer-to-peer brought us the concept of the average PC as "the dark matter of the Internet," even more applicable to the mobile devices in our pockets. These devices, networked in a mesh, are starting to behave more like colony creatures than stand-alone devices.
— The grand unimaginative vision of web services as B2B EDI replacement has given way to recombinant data services and syndicated e-commerce for the rest of us.
— Geeks with screwdrivers are risking "letting the magic out" of their computers, game consoles, and other assorted gadgets, discovering instead that there's even more magic to be had when you've taken the screws out.
Link
[Boing Boing]
1:16:06 AM
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Weinberger: "free access to every work of creativity in the world is a better world". Cory Doctorow:
David Weinberger, author of the brilliant and seminal Small Pieces Loosely Joined, has posted a draft of a great speech on copyright that he's giving at the World Economic Forum in NYC tomorrow:
[F]or one moment, I'd like you to perform an exercise in selective attention. Forget every other consideration âo[per thou] even though they're fair and important considerations âo[per thou] and see if you can acknowledge that a world in which everyone has free access to every work of creativity in the world is a better world. Imagine your children could listen to any song ever created anywhere. What a blessing that would be!
...We publish stuff that gets its meaning and its reality by being read, viewed or heard. An unpublished novel is about as meaningful and real as an imaginary novel. It needs its readers to be. But readers aren't passive consumers. We reimagine the book, we complete the vision of the book. Readers appropriate works, make them their own. Listeners and viewers, too. In making a work public, artists enter into partnership with their audience. The work succeeds insofar as the audience makes it their own, takes it up, understands it within their own unpredictable circumstances. It leaves the artist's hands and enters our lives. And that's not a betrayal of the work. That's its success. It succeeds insofar as we hum it, quote it, appropriate it so thoroughly that we no longer remember where the phrase came from. That's artistic success, although it's a branding failure.
Link
(via isen.blog)
[Boing Boing]
1:12:41 AM
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terça-feira, 21 de setembro de 2004
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Creative Commons Byrne/Gil benefit webcast. Cory Doctorow:
Tomorrow night is the eve of the enormous David Byrne/Gilberto Gil benefit for Creative Commons in NYC, sponsored by Wired Magazine. At the last minute, Smartley-Dunn and Apple have ponied up the technology to host a free webcast of the whole thing.
Link
[Boing Boing]
12:32:12 AM
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Aya Takano. David Pescovitz:
 My friend Stella just turned me on to Aya Takano, another one of the young Japanese illustrators in Takashi Murakami's Kaikai Kiki artist collective. I've never been a big anime fan, but this post-manga style that Murakami dubbed "superflat" a few years ago continues to really grab me.
Link
(to Takano's bio)
Link
(to a Flash animation work)
Link(to Takano's monograph Hot Banana Fudge)
[Boing Boing]
12:29:22 AM
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New York Times on the avant-garde. David Pescovitz:
Margo Jefferson, the NYT's Pulitzer-winning culture critic, has launched a new occasional column dedicated to ‘avant-garde’ art. (I've always loved that term and I'm happy people are bringing it back into fashion.) Jefferson's introductory column is insightful, smart, and, most importantly, she doesn't take herself too seriously. I look forward to the next installment!
“The avant-garde is history and commerce now. When I did a Google search for the phrase ‘avant-garde’, Virtual Marketplace and Brand Name Items: Discounted, Wide Selection appeared instantly. I moved onto eBay and found a postmodern pastiche of ‘avant-garde’ items for sale: ‘sexy studded’ heels by Prada, from the 2004 collection; ‘No More War’ posters from the 1960's; poetry books from 1920's Russia; 1980's noise music from Japan; modern pottery by American Indian women. There was a salon hairdryer and there was a vintage dress that the seller claimed could pass for Japan chic, indie kid or punk.
‘I like the word because it's so retro’, a young writer said of ‘avant-garde’. But ‘experimental’ serves my purpose better in this column. For one thing, artists have changed the world without ever being called avant-garde. The high-art credentials of jazz and film were still being debated when Louis Armstrong, Ethel Waters, D. W. Griffith and Mary Pickford were doing their best work.
Link
[Boing Boing]
12:26:17 AM
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segunda-feira, 20 de setembro de 2004
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Populism at Nordic Institute for Contemporary Art (NICA)
 Populism: an exhibition project at Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands; Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt, Germany; The Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius, Lithuania; and National Museum of Art, Oslo, Norway
Spring-Summer 2005.
Antonio C-Pinto: Populism is a deep trend in contemporary politics, and in the arts. This fact alone demands serious attention. It also demands great disposition to learn from the past. Political parties, unions, contemporary art museums (and galleries) are no longer the pristine engines of democratic societies they use to be. In fact most of them seem either old and bureaucratic agencies of power, or abusive legitimation instances for speculation activities in the art markets. NICA's commitment to launch this project shows to the most sceptical ones that a post-Contemporary culture is firmly on its way.
Niels Werber: [from the press-release] In 103 questions, some of them very detailed, the market researchers went in search of the people's art .The results may be disappoint- ing to many. For the majority of Americans in 1994 above all preferred images that are predominantly blue, chestnut brown, or red, medium-sized (the size of a dishwasher), with wild animals in the wilderness, autumnal natural settings as motif, painted with vigorous brush- strokes but gently rounded outlines, and in a realistic style. Also desired were domestic scenes, especially with family members or house pets. Historical Figures should be painted clothed. The whole thing may also be somewhat playful in design, with a slight exaggeration of reality, but this should by no means lead to geometric abstraction, much less to a loss of contact with reality. The picture should cost between $25 and $500 if it wishes to attract 83% of American households as buyers.
more
Link
1:59:34 AM Google It!
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domingo, 19 de setembro de 2004
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Towards an internet in space. The man described as the father of the internet, Vint Cerf, talks about taking it into the stars.
Mark Ward, BBC News Online technology correspondent:
“To begin with, he thinks, the net will stop being a part of the telephone network. Instead the telephone network will become a part of the net.
This could be thanks to Voice Over IP technology that chops up phone calls into bits of data and sends them across the net instead of dedicated, and expensive, phone lines.
In Japan NTT's profits have been dented because people can call much more cheaply via the Yahoo BB VoIP service they get as part of their ADSL subscription. ”
[BBC News | Technology | UK Edition]
11:43:51 AM
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Great DVD cartoons at 99-Cent Only stores. Mark Frauenfelder:
I'm stopping at my local 99-cent store today. As reported in Cartoon Brew:
 Rivaling Fleischer studios with their abstract rubber-hose animation style and hot jazz musical scores, the RKO Van Beuren Tom & Jerry cartoons (1931-1933) have become classics for their sheer surrealism. Currently in distribution at 99 Cents Only Stores is one of the greatest bargains I've ever seen: a dvd of nine Van Beuren TOM & JERRY cartoons! That's 11 cents per cartoon! And if that's not enough for you, it comes with a free 10 minute phone card inside the package!!
(Semi-related aside: Many moons ago, I wrote about a trip to the 99-Cent Only store for the print edition of bOING bOING)
Link
[Boing Boing]
11:42:30 AM
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© Creative Commons 2004 Antonio C-Pinto.
Last update: 04.10.04; 18:25:54.
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