Archive for September, 2005

Show me your tie!

Published September 28th, 2005 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

Indietits is a webcomic where birds talk about indie rock and so on. It’s sort of like Qwantz, except with birds instead of dinosaurs, and indie rock instead of… uh… whatever Qwantz is about =) Hasn’t been around too long yet, but what archives do exist are worth checking out. Additionally, if you IM people the URL, they’ll be all: “Dude! I am at work right now!” because they’ll think you’re sending them to some Suicide Girls knock-off site or something. LOL! Get your minds out of the gutter, imaginary friends of antinomian readers! A tit is a kind of bird! (So is a booby, for that matter…)

(via a.wholelottanothing.org)

I program my home computer / Beam myself into the future

Published September 26th, 2005 in Uncategorized. 2 Comments

For awhile now, I’ve been collecting articles on the topic of “processor speed.” By this, I don’t mean that I have a bunch of clippings on new versions of Intel or AMD chips being released, but instead articles that treat the idea of “processor speed” as a philosophical concept. Perhaps this needs some further explanation. There was a guy (who shall remain nameless (unless he comments to this post!)) who I took some psychedelic drugs with in college. And one of these times when he was off in the fifth dimension or whatever, he had a conversation with another friend of ours (it’s not 100% clear whether this conversation actually took place, but that’s not important right now). So the point of this conversation (if I understand it correctly) was that “processor speed” was at the heart of a lot of the big questions that have intrigued humans since the dawn of time. Cognition, perception, communication, etc… And as the maximum processor speed of computers increases exponentially, we are going to see a lot of these kinds of questions turned inside out by the brute force of computation. Now regardless of whether this idea came from a real person, or a hallucinogenic drug or a self-transforming machine elf or whatever, it’s one that’s clearly shared by an increasing number of people. All science has been accelerating exponentially throughout history, the theory goes, and as more scientific disciplines become entangled with information science, the combined exponential growth of science and processor speed leads to some crazy shit e.g. “The Singularity” (which refers to a point in the future which current models of progress are unable to predict, simply because it’s so different from anything in our current experience). Anyway, there’s obviously much more that could be said on the subject, but I’ll let the following few articles (which I came across today) expand on the topic. First, we have two articles from Wired by Kevin Kelly.

This one, from August 2005 tracks the history of the web from it’s theoretical roots in the early 20th century to the present, and attempts to speculate about it’s future. It is truly inspiring to look at the web from this perspective, since even the most creative minds failed to anticipate the growth of self-publishing (via web tools such as blogs, flickr and wiki) as recently as 7 years ago. Instead of becoming a passive channel for producers to reach consumers (i.e. TV 2.0) the web has become a truly bi-directional and collaborative space for the expression of human creativity. (Sorry Pepsi =P) Based on this unprecedented development, Kelly imagines the future of the web as a true collective mind, a global Machine that subsumes human consciousness.

This same idea is explored in more detail in Kelly’s earlier God Is the Machine from December 2002, and is a sort of information technology mirror for the theory of gaian mind which posits that the earth itself (or possibly the entire universe) is a giant computer.

Now depending on how deep you want to crawl into this, it can start to sound like the ramblings of a drug-addled old beardo. Luckily there are some enormous geeks who are working on the issue from a purely scientific standpoint, and one of the geekiest of these is good old Ray Kurzweil. Kurzweil has been researching artificial intellegence, biotech and nano-technology for years, and has come to pretty much the same conclusion as some of your more speculative futurists, e.g. “The Singularity is coming, it’s coming soon, and it’s gonna be crazy.” In fact, the title of his latest book (released today) is: The Singularity Is Near : When Humans Transcend Biology. I was going to post the text of Kurzweil’s article in this week’s NewScientist here, but unfortunately it’s behind a subscription login. (Ironic, since a major thrust of his article is that in the future all information will be transparently available everywhere, all the time.) Anyway, I’ve said enough here. Go read the Kevin Kelly articles, and if you’re intrigued enough, pick up a copy of NewScientist and/or Kurzweil’s book. See you in the future!

Lexical Aliens… LOL!

Published September 21st, 2005 in Uncategorized. Closed

From The NY Times:

Investigators have examined the physiology of cursing, how our senses and reflexes react to the sound or sight of an obscene word. They have determined that hearing a curse elicits a literal rise out of people. When electrodermal wires are placed on people’s arms and fingertips to study their skin conductance patterns and the subjects then hear a few obscenities spoken clearly and firmly, participants show signs of instant arousal.

Their skin conductance patterns spike, the hairs on their arms rise, their pulse quickens, and their breathing becomes shallow.

Interestingly, said Kate Burridge, a professor of linguistics at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, a similar reaction occurs among university students and others who pride themselves on being educated when they listen to bad grammar or slang expressions that they regard as irritating, illiterate or dÈclassÈ.

“People can feel very passionate about language,” she said, “as though it were a cherished artifact that must be protected at all cost against the depravities of barbarians and lexical aliens.”

(via BoingBoing)

Ring… Ring…

Published September 21st, 2005 in Uncategorized. Closed

From a recent Nothing Nice to Say.

Who’s in charge here?

Published September 21st, 2005 in Uncategorized. 1 Comment

I find it sort of funny that a craigslist post that Craig himself mentioned on his blog would get flagged and deleted. Also, I want to know what the post was about! =)

[UPDATE] Fixed! Thanks, Craig! (and yes, the post was funny enough to warrant the direct intervention… =)

I want the Power Squid!

Published September 19th, 2005 in Uncategorized. Closed

Power Squid!

Not Bloody Likely

Published September 19th, 2005 in Uncategorized. Closed

This morning, I’ve been listening to an album I downloaded recently called “The Best Party Ever” by the band, The Boy Least Likely To. It is a bit odd, in that there are lots of banjos and recorders and disco beats occasionally. If I were forced (at gunpoint) to describe it in the cliched trope of “X meets Y in some kind of Z” I think I’d have to say it’s “like Belle & Sebastian having a hoedown with Of Montreal at a musical instruments store” (but even having labored over that description for five minutes or so, I still don’t think it’s quite right.) Here’s what singer Jof Owen says about their sound:

We put everything we’d ever loved into one album. If it fit with the rest of the sounds and ideas on the recording then we kept it in. We tried a disco beat behind banjos and fiddles and it seemed to work. A lot of the instruments we used were instruments you play when you’re a child, like glockenspiels and recorders and all the percussion, cuz they seemed to fit with the lyrics about growing up and lost innocence. And they seemed to give it a simple happy feel touched with a nostalgia for something gone. The more traditional instruments, like harmonicas and banjos, were there cuz we wanted there to be an English folk or American country side to the album. But we didn’t put that much thought into it. We just messed about and tried different instruments and sounds.

Which quote comes from an interview he did with Chicago’s own PitchforkMedia.com. Also in this interview he discusses some favorite authors including Ted Hughes, about whom I was like, “Hmm… Sounds familiar” So I googled him and started reading this article where I found out that he was married to Sylvia Plath and both her and his next wife committed suicide and that he was named British Poet Laureate in 1984. Not ringing any bells. But then finally I got to the part of the article where it talks about his children’s books including “The Iron Man,” which served as the basis for one of the most criminally under-appreciated films of the past several years, The Iron Giant. Cool! Also, the cover art for “Best Party Ever” (seen above) is pretty neat. It’s done by a fellow named Tim, “who does these sorts of drawings very quickly over and over again until he draws one that makes us laugh or feel sorry for it,” says Jof. Anyway, the point of all this was to post a few MP3s for your perusal (is there another form of “perusal” that applies specifically to listening? Maybe it’s “arousal.” =) So here goes:

The Boy Least Likely To – Monsters [MP3]

The Boy Least Likely To – I’m Glad I Hitched My Apple Wagon To Your Star [MP3]

So, are you chinese or japanese?

Published September 19th, 2005 in Uncategorized. Closed

Dammit, I was all set to register a new domain: “ho.la” (.la is Laos’ TLD. Guess they’re trying to cash in like Tuvalu did with .tv) via my new web-hosting company; they said it was available and everything! But then at the last minute it turns out it’s a “special reserved” domain, so I can’t get it (without paying extra, I guess). Just FYI, my email was going to be aloha@ho.la, which is awesome because it is a palindrome that incorporates the hawaiian word for hello (and goodbye!) and the spanish word for hello. But I guess some other Ayatollah Ass@ho.la is going to get it instead. Oh well…

[UPDATE] Some rich Ass@ho.la that is. I wrote to the registrar about the domain and because it is a “premium” domain they want $100,000 a year for it! Whoa… File under: “Failed Business Models!” Good luck with that, Laos! =)

I see you’ve played knifey-spoony before!

Published September 18th, 2005 in Uncategorized. Closed

In Aldous Huxley’s Island the narrator is taken aback to find that the first subject covered in the grade-school curriculum is ecology. “Isn’t that a bit complicated?” he asks. The reply:

“That’s precisely the reason why we begin with it. Never give children a chance of imagining that anything exists in isolation. Make it plain from the very first that all living is relationship. Show them relationships in the woods, in the fields, in the ponds and streams, in the village and the country around it. Rub it in.”

Manages to sum up pretty much everything that’s missing from most modern education. I’m not really sure what the best way to remedy this is, but it wouldn’t hurt if more textbooks had articles like this one from The Guardian. It follows the path that coffee beans take from their source in Ethiopia (though I’d imagine the story is pretty similar for Kenyan or South American beans) to their final destination at a western coffee shop. It’s a great rundown of how the infrastructure of the international coffee industry turns a £1.55 kilo of beans into hundreds of £2+ sales, and how multi-national roasters blend beans from dozens of countries to ensure that no one region can affect the supply or price of beans. But perhaps that’s ok, since as one London-based importer says:

“What does it cost to live in Ethiopia, in a grass hut, without a mortgage, without water bills, electricity bills, where, traditionally, you don’t have to wear your designer suits, or need a decent car? The fact is that the costs of living are considerably smaller than they are for the same person living in London. So, in a sense, they don’t need that much money.”

Are you listening, Barbara Bush?

In my country there is problem

Published September 16th, 2005 in Uncategorized. Closed

I was just looking into getting a new web host for this site potentially, since nowadays everybody just throws 4 gigs of storage around like nothing, and I’m still stuck with like only 250 megs (which isn’t really an issue, but I’m thinking of switching to using IMAP email and I’d want to archive quite a bit of it on the server, but that’s another story). So anyway, I started looking at Dreamhost.com because I had heard some good things about them, and the good things I’ve heard have so far been confirmed. They have a really nice FAQ and Knowledge Base, and a frequently updated blog (which right now is all about their attempts to overcome the big LA blackouts from a few days ago.) But this is all beside the point.

On the Dreamhost blog, one of the earliest entries is called “Let’s Save Our Environment” and it begins like this:

One day my uncle picked up a hitchhiker going down Topanga Canyon Blvd. The hitchhiker gave my uncle a packet containing a cd-rom video and a few pages of song lyrics and the synopsis/proposal for a movie called ìKathy and Erolî.

Now I don’t know about you, but that sounds like the kind of video that just has to be seen! Luckily, if you follow the link above, you can see this video, in its fabulous, grabulous, zip-zoop-zabulous entirety. Do it! Do it now!! (Oh, and check out this equally mind-blowing cut-up [20MB QT] of He-Man singing “What’s Going On” by 4 Non Blondes while you’re at it… =)

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