Author: Chris Barrus

The Go Game: San Francisco Urban Wireless Adventure

What happens when the Cacophony Society goes ultra high-tech…

The Go Game is an all-out urban adventure game, a technology-fueled, reality-based experience that encourages hard play and a keen eye for the weird, the beautiful, or the faintly out-of-the-ordinary. The “rule book” is reality, the “board” is your city, and the “pieces” are the players — you and your team.

Through clues downloaded to a wireless device and hints planted in unlikely places, you’ll be guided through a city you only think you’re familiar with. Clues can appear at any time, anywhere. Perhaps you didn’t notice the woman on the bus reading a magazine upside-down. Or the note stuck to the side of the bathroom mirror of your favorite bar, or the electric scooter parked outside with your name on it. After a day of Go, you will.

The SF Weekly has a more descriptive article

Frontline: The Merchants Of Cool

The TiVo sucked down Frontline’s The Merchants Of Cool a couple of days ago and only just now had a chance to watch it. The show surveys the current state of teen culture marketing and co-optation using the current suspects/demons of the moment (MTV, Britney, Fred Durst, etc.) with appropriate scenes of disapproval from culture critics.

Of course this is all nothing new, as folks who’ve read The Conquest Of Cool already know. The only thing that’s changed in the past forty years since is the number of zeros in the dollar amounts and the marketer’s desperation in keeping the modern hyper-conglomerate corporate beast fed.

Host Douglas Rushkoff‘s Utne Reader-level sanctimoniousness wears thin though. The show doesn’t address any race or class issues or consequences (the image/brand archetypes are all affluent and white) and doesn’t once consider that a teen culture could exist outside of corporate media. If I was a teenager, I guess I’d be pretty offended by the whole show, but then again I wasn’t cool (though I suppose anti-cool is now cool these days)

Anyway, the most interesting commentary can be found in the Frontline message boards for the show, and in case you missed it, you can watch the whole show online.

Field recordings

DroneOn has been talking about field recording techniques lately which led to the following links (which I’m putting into The Record here)

Quiet American
Hours and hours of field recordings of everyday life in Vietnam: Folks walking down the street, children leaving school, ambient restaurant noise, etc. Good info on recording tips, gear, and a detailed list of other resources.
Fallt Publishing – Invisible Cities
An art installation that brings together 20 different recordings from 20 different cities.
Phonography.org
Pretty much home base for the avid field recorder. Lots of interesting sounds from all over here.

The Mother Of All Demos

In 1968, Doug Engelbart at SRI demoed NLS, a computer system the research group had been working on for six years. Engelbart shows off a mouse, hyperlinking, network collaboration, file cut/copy/paste – pretty much everything that we think of as the fundamentals of computer interfacing a full fifteen years before they became commercial. Check out the video of the 1968 demonstration.

NORAD scrambles fighters to investigate contrail?

Hey, I thought they were supposed to be denying this sort of stuff?

Yesterday at approximately 4 p.m. (EST) North American Aerospace Defense Command received unverified reports of what appeared to be a contrail of unknown origin in the vicinity of the Turks and Caicos Islands in the Caribbean. Initially, it was reported to be heading northwestward toward the United States. Commercial airline pilots later reported the contrail over Florida and later over Indiana. Thereafter, no other sightings were reported.

NORAD scrambled fighter aircraft from several bases in an attempt to intercept and identify the source of the contrail. No visual or confirmed radar contact was made with the source of the contrail. NORAD continues to investigate these reports. NORAD is coordinating with the FAA to determine any further information on the nature of these reports.

Busy spiders in British Columbia weave a 60 acre web

Insert any and all bug movie cliches here. The photos of this thing are amazing…

A biology professor in northern British Columbia has spotted a clover field crawling with spiders. Brian Thair of the College of New Caledonia in Prince George said he saw a silky, white web stretching 60 acres across a field.

“When you see horror movies with spider web festooned from this place to that place and so on, it comes nowhere near approaching what occurred in this field,” Thair told CBC Radio’s As It Happens.

A typical barbwire fence on wood posts surrounded the field about six kilometres east of McBride in the Robson Valley. Thair said it looked like the whole area was covered with an opaque, white plastic grocery store bag.

So did like another one of the Seals open up or something?

What’s the deal with Enoch Root?

Tons of thoughts about the Enoch Root character in Neal Stephenson‘s Cryptonomicon. I figured there was something up with Root because of his name: Enoch, a Biblical character that gains some sort of transdimensional Enlightenment. And Root, which is the name of the superuser administrative All Powerful account on *nix systems.

Enoch Root, the shadowy deus-ex-machina/Ascended Master of Neal Stephenson’s brilliant Cryptonomicon is the subject of much debate. Root appears to die midway through the book, in a scene set during WWII, only to reappear in modern times. Inquiring minds want to know: did Stephenson make a boo-boo? Is there more than one Enoch Root? Is he immortal? Here is a great deal of speculation on the subject, from both informed sources and astute guessers:

Here’s my guess: Enoch Root is an alchemist who carries the philosopher’s stone around in a cigar box. He really did die in WWII but was re-vivified by the stone. Consider:

  1. Enoch’s age is difficult to discern, and he does not seem to get older.
  2. The contents of the cigar box seem to have healing powers.
  3. When Detachment 2702 is in Italy, Enoch Root says that he can speak Italian but would sound like a “16th century alchemist” or something similar (don’t have the book in front of me). At first, I assumed that he learned scholarly Italian, but perhaps he was telling the literal truth.
  4. The symbol on the cover of Cryptonomicon is one used by alchemists.

[via Boing Boing]