Author: Chris Barrus

The folks of accelerated art/culture group Metamute put together a handy PDF map of surveillance and counter-surveillance projects around the world.

It was only a matter of time before folks glommed onto the Arcata Eye police log, which is a wonderfully dry and funny compilation of the the illegal activities of the citizens of Arcata (“everyone in this town is stoned”), California. The surest sign of success is that you have a web site that is against you.

Bookmarking this for myself (and to see if this macro import worked)

… a dictionary of British slang.

Dell Computer is contracting with prison/slave-labor corporation Unicor to run it’s computer recycling operation. Is anyone keeping track of which companies/organizations are using prison labor?

Coolness! Electro-trance streaming station Massinova is back on-line after an extended blackout while they looked for bandwidth.

The oddest things turn up on Daypop. Today: live My Bloody Valentine MP3s.

Much like Dick and Jane were to 50’s era readers, Alice and Bob are the two hypothetical people that crypto folks and coders use to illustrate security problems and solutions. e.g. “Alice wants to send a secret message to Bob…” and so forth. Hundreds of papers have been written using Alice and Bob – they’ve tried to defraud insurance companies, played poker for high stakes by mail, and have exchanged secret messages over tapped telephones. A biography was inevitable…

Not surprisingly, the scientific literacy of Americans declines even further. How the decline of “tinkering” contributes to scientific illiteracy in the United States.

For many children, particularly boys, free play used to mean fiddling around with a chemistry set in the basement or lighting things on fire in the backyard. These days, with parents’ penchant for overscheduling their children, there is less time for such youthful experimentation.

This is not all bad – no doubt fewer children are getting hurt. But backyard tinkering used to lead, if not to a scientific career, at least to continued informal pursuit of science as an adult hobby. If that is not so much the case anymore – if yesterday’s youthful tinkerers no longer grind their own telescope mirrors, build radios or order weather balloons by mail from Edmund Scientific – something important may have been lost.

Wolfram’s “A New Kind Of Science” was published this week. Worth the hype? Genius? Freak? Wired’s interview here is a little bit more content-full than what the mainstream press is writing.