Month: May 2002

Hundreds of chefs, restaurateurs and dealers across the country have agreed to participate in “Take a Pass on Chilean Sea Bass.” The fish (which isn’t a bass at all, it’s a Patagonian toothfish) is being overfished to the point of extinction as environmental laws struggle to keep up with hungry American pallets driven onward by marketing. The punchline to the story (if you can say such a thing) is that commercial fishermen in Antarctic waters have now begun substituting a related fish, which they call Antarctic toothfish for “Chilean Sea Bass.”

Paging John Cage…

“Lowercase sound” is the name given to a loose movement in electronic music that emphasizes very quiet sounds and the long, empty silences between them.

Created largely by scientists, techies and experimental musicians, lowercase recordings are frequently based on the magnification of minute sounds through a computer, typically a Macintosh.

Recent compositions include a bubbling symphony of boiling tea kettles, the gentle hiss of blank tapes being played through a stereo and the soft bumps of helium balloons hitting the ceiling.

The truth can now be told! America wake up! When the New World Order comes, they’ll be driving on the wrong side of the road!

It’s all there. Seriously.

Hitting the wires today in full force. The BBC leaks a story that NASA is announcing that vast quantities of water ice exist just below the Martian surface. If melted, the ice would create a water ocean that could cover the entire planet to a depth of 500 meters.

OK, I’m waiting patiently to sign up for the first trip.

Remember back at the beginning of the Afghanistan campaign, the Defense Department bought up all of the photographs taken by private surveillance satellites? Ever wonder what happened to them?

For nearly a month after the bombing campaign began, pilots had to make do with old Russian maps of Afghanistan, because the American intelligence community was slow to figure out how to process and distribute satellite photographs from a private contractor, the officials say.

Once Air Force officers discovered that thousands of the fresh, high-resolution satellite pictures were sitting on CD-ROM’s in storage at a military base here, they skirted the bureaucracy and began ferrying the photographs themselves directly to a forward air base in Saudi Arabia. But the episode underscores the way American intelligence’s management of spy satellite technology has encountered problems in trying to integrate information from the private sector.

One question I did have about the Current Situation was “what happened to Echelon?” You would think that with all the money poured into it that it would have vacuumed up some hits. Apparently it did, but the real intelligence breakdown here is in putting together the big picture from all this data.

The FAZ, quoting unnamed German intelligence sources, said that the Echelon spy network was being used to collect information about the terrorist threats, and that U.K. intelligence services apparently also had advance warning. The FAZ, one of Germany’s most respected dailies, said that even as far back as six months ago western and near-east press services were receiving information that such attacks were being planned.

Within the American intelligence community, the warnings were taken seriously and surveillance intensified, the FAZ said. However, there was disagreement on how such terrorist attacks could be prevented, the newspaper said.

The caption: “My friends are going to save the world“

The German Jesuit Athanasius Kircher (1602-80), a rough contemporary of Descartes and Galileo, was no ordinary man. He studied Egyptian hieroglyphs and helped Bernini with his fountain in the Piazza Navona. He made vomiting machines and eavesdropping statues. He transcribed bird song and wrote a book about musicology (still used today). He taught Nicolas Poussin perspective and made a chamber of mirrors to drive cats crazy. He invented the first slide projector and had himself lowered into the mouth of Mount Vesuvius just as it was supposed to erupt. He proved the impossibility of the Tower of Babel and made a model of how the animals were arranged in Noah’s Ark. And he collected the objects that filled the Museo Kircheriano, Rome’s first wunderkammer or collection of curiosities.

And courtesy of the Museum Of Jurassic Technology he’s back in fashion.