Category: Uncategorized

Cory Doctorow’s latest O’Reilly Net column neatly distills down the reason why we ‘blog:

As a committed infovore, I need to eat roughly six times my weight in information every day or my brain starts to starve and atrophy. I gather information from many sources: print, radio, television, conversation, the Web, RSS feeds, email, chance, and serendipity. I used to bookmark this stuff, but I just ended up with a million bookmarks that I never revisited and could never find anything in.

Theoretically, you can annotate your bookmarks, entering free-form reminders to yourself so that you can remember why you bookmarked this page or that one. I don’t know about you, but I never actually got around to doing this — it’s one of those get-to-it-later eat-your-vegetables best-practice housekeeping tasks like defragging your hard drive or squeegeeing your windshield that you know you should do but never get around to.

Until I started blogging. Blogging gave my knowledge-grazing direction and reward. Writing a blog entry about a useful and/or interesting subject forces me to extract the salient features of the link into a two- or three-sentence elevator pitch to my readers, whose decision to follow a link is predicated on my ability to convey its interestingness to them. This exercise fixes the subjects in my head the same way that taking notes at a lecture does, putting them in reliable and easily-accessible mentalregisters…

Being deprived of my blog right now would be akin to suffering extensive brain-damage. Huge swaths of acquired knowledge would simply vanish. Just as my TiVo frees me from having to watch boring television by watching it for me, my blog frees me up from having to remember the minutae of my life, storing it for me in handy and contextual form.

Since they protested in favor of Starbucks, I’m leaning towards feral libertarians, but this is almost as absurd as it is scary.

Disguised as well scrubbed “freedom-loving” acitvists, this really offensive group is using the web to organize protests AGAINST movements for social change. The anti-NOW, anti-feminist flyer is incredibly ignorant, implying that feminism is about women hating men and seeking “special privileges” from the the government. They offer instead something called “ifeminism”, where no one asks for equality under the law or other silly democractic concepts–but hey, you’re free to be a stripper. So clueless and un-informed it could only have been written by a CIA libertarian who just got dumped by his girlfriend. Either that or someone took the SubGenius too seriously. Chilling.

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“