Tuesday, November 10, 2009

The Latest from Boing Boing

The Latest from Boing Boing

Link to Boing Boing

Brits: send a message to Mandelson and fight "three strikes"

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 05:16 AM PST


The Open Rights Group is collecting "Messages to Mandelson" -- that is, photos and brief textual messages to UK Business Secretary Peter Mandelson, who has proposed that you should lose your access to the Internet if anyone in your household is accused (without proof) of violating copyright law. You can upload your photo and message and let Mandelson know how you feel.

Message Mandelson (Thanks, Jim!)

Previously:


Science fiction from outside the English-speaking world

Posted: 10 Nov 2009 02:11 AM PST

Lavie sez, "The Apex Book of World SF is the first anthology of SF/F/H stories from around the world, including Yang Ping's tale of Chinese hackers in a future game world, Aleksandar Ziljak's Men in Black meets Boogie Nights thriller and S.P. Somtow's classic examination of post-World War II Thailand and its most notorious serial killer. This rare anthology of international SF sets out to showcase some of the best international writers have to offer and the different perspectives of people from outside the American-British sphere of publishing - with authors from Malaysia, China, the Philippines, Israel and Palestine, France, the Netherlands and elsewhere."

The Apex Book of World SF (Amazon)

Apex Book of World SF Released! (The World SF News Blog)

(Thanks, Lavie!)

Previously:



Epoch: podcast of my story about the death of the first AI

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:45 PM PST

I just finished my podcast reading of my latest story, "Epoch," which Mark Shuttleworth commissioned for my upcoming short story collection/experiment, With a Little Help. It's the story of the sysadmin charged with shutting down the first and only functional AI, which no one can figure out a reason to save -- and it's the story of the AI's bid to save its own life by fixing the Unix 32-bit rollover problem.

The podcast is in eight parts -- I started reading it before I'd finished the story, so there's some minor inconsistencies that'll be fixed in the final cut. Next up I'll be reading "Martian Chronicles," my young adult story about free-market ideologues colonizing Mars, and the video games they play on the way to the Red Planet.


The doomed rogue AI is called BIGMAC and he is my responsibility. Not my responsibility as in "I am the creator of BIGMAC, responsible for his existence on this planet." That honor belongs to the long-departed Dr Shannon, one of the shining lights of the once great Sun-Oracle Institute for Advanced Studies, and he had been dead for years before I even started here as a lowly sysadmin.

No, BIGMAC is my responsibility as in, "I, Odell Vyphus, am the systems administrator responsible for his care, feeding and eventual euthanizing." Truth be told, I'd rather be Dr Shannon (except for the being dead part). I may be a lowly grunt, but I'm smart enough to know that being the Man Who Gave The World AI is better than being The Kid Who Killed It.

Not that anyone would care, really. 115 years after Mary Shelley first started humanity's hands wringing over the possibility that we would create a machine as smart as us but out of our control, Dr Shannon did it, and it turned out to be incredibly, utterly boring. BIGMAC played chess as well as the non-self-aware computers, but he could muster some passable trash-talk while he beat you. BIGMAC could trade banalities all day long with any Turing tester who wanted to waste a day chatting with an AI. BIGMAC could solve some pretty cool vision-system problems that had eluded us for a long time, and he wasn't a bad UI to a search engine, but the incremental benefit over non-self-aware vision systems and UIs was pretty slender. There just weren't any killer apps for AI.

MP3s: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8

Podcast feed

How EFF saved Indymedia from an unconstitutional subpoena for all its visitors' IP addresses

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:35 PM PST

When the US government demanded the IP address of every visitor to Indymedia's website (and ordered Indymedia to keep the request secret), Indymedia called the Electronic Frontier Foundation. EFF fought the subpoena -- which was grossly unconstitutional -- and won. Here's the story of how it happened, and remember, if you ever get a crazy, unconstitutional request from a G-man, stop and call a lawyer or get in touch with EFF.

The government added insult to injury by also inserting this language on the first page of the subpoena: "You are not to disclose the existence of this request unless authorized by the Assistant U.S. Attorney. Any such disclosure would impede the investigation being conducted and thereby interfere with the enforcement of the law."

The problem? The law doesn't require the recipient of a federal grand jury subpoena to keep the subpoena secret (which is why, typically, subpoenas often will "request" -- but not require -- a recipient's silence). There are certainly secrecy requirements for participants in the grand jury -- such as the jurors and the prosecutors -- but those requirements do not extend to witnesses (or potential witnesses such as a subpoena recipient). And although the SCA does provide the government with the option of obtaining a court order under 18 U.S.C. § 2705(b) requiring silence when the recipient's disclosure would have an adverse affect on an investigation, the government in this case did not obtain any such gag order.

In sum, without any legal authority to back up their purported gag demand, the government ordered Ms. Clair not to reveal the existence of the subpoena, a subpoena that as already described was patently overbroad and invalid under the SCA. This is exactly the kind of unjustified demand of silence that creates a fog around the government's often-overreaching surveillance activities. How many other subpoena recipients have remained silent over the years in response to such bogus demands, and how many of them violated their users' privacy by handing over data that the government wasn't entitled to? We simply do not know, and because of a lack of meaningful reporting about the government's use of the SCA, we cannot know.

We were determined that our client would not be one of the silenced, and that this illegal subpoena would eventually see the light of day.

From EFF's Secret Files: Anatomy of a Bogus Subpoena

TSA doesn't understand what "random" means

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:31 PM PST

Deirdre Walker, the 24-year police veteran and former Assistant Chief of the Montgomery County, Maryland, Department of Police who wrote up a sharp, professional critique of the TSA's checkpoint procedures, has written a follow-up, showing a huge flaw in the "random" screening process used at the BWI airport:
I asked, "How are people selected for secondary searches?. She replied "It's random."

I asked "Is there a mark on my boarding pass?" She replied, "We used to do that, but we don't do it anymore." She did not know why that practice had been discontinued.

I stated "So you look at people as they are entering the metal detector, you make some type of assessment, and then you select people for secondary searches, right?"

...At this point, I turned to look over my shoulder and observed a Caucasian woman in her late thirties or early forties standing inside the whole-body imager. I called my screener's attention to this and said. "Look over there. There's a woman in the scanner. You all picked me for a search, and then the very next person you select is a woman. Why didn't you pick a white guy? Where are all the white guys?"

She replied, helpfully, "We are understaffed today and we don't have enough male screeners to do pat downs. We are not allowed to do opposite sex pat-downs so we are only selecting women for secondary screening."

By this point, I was seated and she was patting down the bottom of my feet. The secondary search, more thorough than the last search I had been subjected to in Albany, but equally ineffective, was nearing completion. I said "If you are only selecting women, how is that random?"

She said, "You're done. You can collect your belongings, Have a nice day."

"Where are all the white guys?" -- Update on "Do I have the right to refuse this search."
Previously:


Grateful Dead Archivist wanted at UC Santa Cruz

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:25 PM PST

If you've got a Master's in Library Science and a love of the Grateful Dead, the University of California at Santa Cruz is looking for you -- a rare job opening in the UC system, and what a plum gig it is: official Greatful Dead Archivist.
The University Library of the University of California, Santa Cruz, seeks an enterprising, creative, and service-oriented archivist to join the staff of Special Collections & Archives (SC&A) as Archivist for the Grateful Dead Archive. This is a potential career status position. The Archivist will be part of a dynamic, collegial, and highly motivated department dedicated to building, preserving, promoting, and providing maximum access both physically and virtually to one of the Library's most exciting and unique collections, The Grateful Dead Archive (GDA). The UCSC University Library utilizes innovative approaches to allow the discovery, use, management, and sharing of information in support of research, teaching, and learning.

Under the general direction of the Head of Special Collections and Archives, the GDA Archivist will provide managerial and curatorial oversight of the Grateful Dead Archive, plan for and oversee the physical and digital processing of Archives related material, and promote the GDA to the public and facilitate its use by scholars, fans, and students.

Grateful Dead Archivist (via Resource Shelf)
Previously:


How inductors work

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:19 PM PST

Gareth from Make sez, "Here's Collin's latest electronics video tutorial, on induction. He's the David Lynch of DIY The Scorcese of open source education The Tarantino of tutorials And he rocks it all in a natty suit and tie! What's not to love?"

MAKE presents: The Inductor (Thanks, Gareth!)

Larry Lessig talks about the values of education and science and the need to bring copyright into harmony with them

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 10:34 PM PST

TonyBot sez, "This video is from a talk I saw Professor Lessig give on Wednesday the title is 'It is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright.' The talk was given at EDUCUASE a major technology in higher education conference. As an IT support guy for professors at a New England state school I run up against copyright every day, Lessig's talk is both informative and inspiring, though I'd be interested in ways the people would react to his concluding call for action."

It is About Time: Getting Our Values Around Copyright (Thanks, TonyBot!)

Pop Up Lunch NYC: temporary nosh-surfaces for New York's streets

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:26 PM PST

Here's a great look at Pop Up Lunch: NYC, a work-in-progress from Ali Pulver, a grad student at Pulver. The idea is to create a bunch of portable, temporary eating surfaces that hungry New Yorkers can chow down from after buying street food from a wagon or cart.

Those of us who love eating street food, but hate taking lunch back to our desks, have a common problem. Where should we eat? There are a number of indoor pavilions and outdoor seating areas scattered across Midtown, but sometimes I just wish there was a place right next to the carts to just saddle up and tuck in. Well thanks to Pratt Grad Student Ali Pulver, now there is. For her thesis she is developing a couple of tools to make it easier for us to eat on the street. And after testing out the "Lunch Shelf" and the "Hydrantable" last week, I've got to say these could represent the greatest advancements in street food technology since the invention of chicken and lamb over rice!
Hydrantables & Lunch Shelves Are Amazing New Achievements in Street Food Eating Technology

Pop Up Lunch: NYC

(via Making Light)

New watch podcast: HourTime Show

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 07:44 PM PST

Attention horology fans: here's the podcast you're looking for, courtesy of Ariel Adams and John Biggs. [HourTime]

Glittergeddon!

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 06:17 PM PST

glittermain.png

Channel 4's documentary-style drama, The Execution of Gary Glitter, imagines an alternative Britain that reintroduces the death penalty. Celebrity sex offender Paul Gadd—AKA glam rock star Gary Glitter—is re-tried for his crimes and hanged. It's a story about the moral quandary of capital punishment, generously garnished with the British media's obsession with pedophilia.



The real Gadd was disgraced by a child porn bust and his subsequent residency in sex tourist hotspots. After 18 months in a Vietnamese jail on a conviction for child molestation, he was released in 2008 and flown back to the U.K. The tabloids now stalk him and run stories like "Gary Glitter changes the style of his beard."


Execution depicts a different outcome. Arrested hours after landing, he's put on trial to test new legislation that allows capital punishment for crimes committed abroad. He sneers, argues, and wheedles. Talking heads, politicians and members of the public pop up in news-style interviews. Then he is put to death. Channel 4's Hamish Mykura says that "this drama confronts the public with what many say they want."


The documentary style is clever, and Hilton McRae does an excellent job as Glitter. He is alternatively smug, sordid, humane and pathetic. But then there's that whole weird thing about portraying an act of rationalized mob justice on someone who is very much alive and free.


Among the rationales offered is that the movie confronts us with a difficult truth; namely, that Britain needs to see Gary Glitter executed if it is to come to terms with its own moral indecisiveness over capital punishment. But the movie's concept isn't really "Imagine if we made new laws that dealt severely with sex offenders." It is "Imagine if we made new laws that would make Gary Glitter the center of national attention again." His presence is a gimmick. Without him, it would be a dry exploitation flick about no-one in particular—but one that might at least make sense.


The film's legal devices exist only to bring the celebrity to the rope. Hangings within a month of conviction, without any right to a court appeal? The EU not enforcing the Convention of Human Rights just to keep Britain happy? Get real, little Englanders. Besides, Britain has an ample supply of bona-fide child murderers competing for eligibility: I guess Ian Huntley just doesn't look enough like Fu Manchu.


Moreover, if the filmmakers cared about depicting the reality of capital punishment, they could have at least cooked up a more convincing doom. Western executions, where they play, follow years of legal wrangling. They are usually dehumanized clinical events, not pathos-filled remixes of Saddam's last gasp.


In any case, the dramatics fade before the loopyness of the Glitter premise. How did Britain's fixation on sexual stranger danger get this baroque? I'm stumped, frankly. I'm ready to be told the whole thing was some kind of deadpan black comedy. But a few ideas do spring to mind.


My countrymen often complain of the nanny state, but that modern taste for risk-peddling seems an international phenomenon. Throw pedophiles in the mix, however, and the outcomes start getting really weird.


Take, for example, the recent actions of Watford local council, which banned parents from being with their own children in a public play area. Then there's the 82-year-old woman accused of being a possible pedophile after taking photos of a swimming pool. And so on. This suggests confusion over the proper areas of association between kids and adults.

Then there's concern over youngsters' wellbeing in general. Britain's children are supposedly the unhappiest in Europe. Those responsible for their happiness were given a scathing review by UNICEF, which suggested British families are the least nurturing this side of the former Warsaw Pact. Though Britian's schools remain among the world's best, the rankings fell sharply over the last decade, and reports of its state childcare system make for grim reading.

There's also a broader anxiety over childrens' place in society at large. That younger kids are given few of the freedoms and pleasures older generations enjoyed is another problem hardly isolated to the U.K. But our fear of older youths is manifested in the press as a distinctively British moral panic. Tabloids seem to treat the nation's offspring either as hapless victims of predatory adults, or as dangerous, vaguely subhuman livestock.

Perhaps this sort of thing lets us forget that most childrens' problems are the result of familial and institutional neglect, not the likes of Gary Glitter.

Finally, there's the case of the bleeding obvious: media the world over sexualizes children, but Britain's is particularly ready to project its hypocrisy at deserving targets--or anyone who addresses the subject matter without the required solemnity.

Satirist Chris Morris produced the original "Paedogeddon" mockumetary in 2001, ridiculing the media's voyeuristic obsession with the subject. He got pols and celebs to repeat nonsensical urban legends, making fools of the lot. Condemnation of the show was nearly universal, but reinforced his point over and over again. One Daily Star article slamming the show ran next to an item praising a 15-year old singer's breasts. The Daily Mail described Morris as "unspeakably sick"--even as it ran a photo of the bikini-clad royal busts of princesses Beatrice, 13, and Eugenie, 11.

In one of the final scenes of The Execution, the condemned man says "they're not going to execute Paul Gadd." This makes a point about celebrity, about how it trades in mediated personas. The "thought-provoking" question is clear enough--is something other than a man being destroyed?--but it's a thought buried under the batshittedness of Glittergeddon.

If The Execution of Gary Glitter sounds barbaric, rest assured that it was merely inane. He isn't some metempsychotic vessel for the nation's unease over child abuse or the death penalty, after all. He's just a dirty old man, and he gets what he deserves.

Duke University official concerned that sex toy study will make students want to "just sit around and masturbate"

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 04:39 PM PST

A Duke University study on sex toys has the University's Catholic Center director worried that female students will "just sit around and masturbate."

Real-time, global marine traffic map

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 03:45 PM PST

Yo, where my ships at? You'll never have to ask again. marinetraffic.com is a fun way to burn otherwise productive time. Cargo ships, military vessels, luxury high-speed yachts: track them, and imagine yourself out there on the high seas, instead of in that cubicle. (thanks, @shirky)

Genome sequencing for under $5,000

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 03:38 PM PST

A US-based genomics company announces that it can perform genomic sequencing for under five thousand dollars. In my budget, that's "fully loaded 8-Core Mac Pro and a monitor," or "sweet new Canon 5D with one nice lens." But unlike those tools I covet, DNA is forever.

The real-life "Men Who Stare at Goats" were even weirder

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 03:25 PM PST

channon.jpg

How many of the kooky military research projects featured in The Men Who Stare at Goats really happened? Reality is more complicated than the movie (or the book), reports David Hambling at Wired's Danger Room blog. But reality may also be weirder. Hambling's post examines, Snopes-style, the truth or bogosity of such purported American military projects as:

• Psychic Spies
• Drug experimentation
• Killing animals with telepathy
• Sound weapons
• An army of hippies who can smite you with the sheer force of their BO.

Oh alright, I embellished the last one a bit. Read: Psychic Spies, Acid Guinea Pigs, New Age Soldiers: the True Men Who Stare at Goats (Danger Room, thanks Noah Shachtman)

Image: the First Earth Battalion manual (PDF) from the movie, which was based very closely on the original manual created by Lt. Col. Jim Channon. He "dove deep into the New Age movement, and came back to the military with a most alternative view of warfare -- one in which troops would carry flowers and symbolic animals into battle."

Plastic surgery parody video

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 03:13 PM PST


Even though the title of this hilarious short mockumentary video is "Cockhead," it's probably safe for work, since the naughty bit is mosaiced. It was co-written by CJ Davies and Mr Tom Barbor-Might.

Cockhead

Zoomable cell size application helps you understand size of tiny things

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 03:05 PM PST

Molecule-Scale
The University of Utah's Genetic Science Learning Center created this zoomable window that compares the size of a coffee bean with smaller things like a grain of salt, a paramecium, a red blood cell, a human egg, a glucose molecule, and so on, all the way down to a carbon atom.

Cell size and scale (Via Good Experience newsletter)

Life Lessons from the Vogelkop Bowerbird

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 02:18 PM PST

vogelkopbowerbird.jpg

Lesson 1: When choosing gifts for your date, remember that girls prefer flowers to piles of fungus-ridden dung.

You know how some movies or TV shows are painful to watch because you see that a character is making some awkward mistake and you just know it will end horribly? This BBC video is similar. I kept thinking, "No, Mr. Vogelkop Bowerbird! Don't give her that! You'll never get mated!" But, honestly, I was thinking that at the flower-power fellow. Foolishly, I'd assumed that the lesson here was going to be something along the lines of, "Birds like things humans find repugnant and isn't that interesting."

Instead, the lesson turns out to be, "Everybody poops, but that doesn't mean they want to receive it as a gift."

VIDEO: Inside the Love-Den of the Vogelkop Bowerbird, BBC Life

Image courtesy the BBC, via Adam Abu-Nab

BBC's outrageous plan to put DRM on TV broadcasts shot down in flames -- thanks to you!

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 01:25 PM PST

Remember the BBC's daft plan to put DRM on high-definition broadcasts even though it's illegal for the BBC to put DRM on its broadcasts? Remember when people rose up and sent angry letters to Ofcom, the UK regulator that oversees the BBC's broadcasting activity?

It worked. Ofcom told the BBC to forget about it. Score one for the good guys. Give yourselves several pats on the back.

Meanwhile: the Beeb should be ashamed of itself. Especially for this disingenuous smear-job they published after I wrote about this ridiculous plan in the Guardian.

Ofcom received a large number of responses to this consultation, in particular from consumers and consumer groups, who raised a number of potentially significant consumer 'fair use' and competition issues that were not addressed in our original consultation. In view of these responses we have decided not to approve a multiplex licence change without giving these issues further consideration. We remain keen to support the successful introduction of HD services on the DTT platform and are willing to consider a further round of consultation on the licence amendment if you could provide more information and evidence in the following three areas:

1. The anticipated benefits to citizens and consumers, and to the DTT platform, of the proposed approach;

2. How you propose to address the potential disadvantages to citizens and consumers associated with the impact on the receiver market under the proposed approach;

3. An explanation of potential alternative approaches that would impact less on the receiver market, and the extent to which those alternatives would be able to deliver similar outcomes and benefits for citizens and consumers.

We are keen to provide early clarity on the licence amendment to all stakeholders affected by the DVB-T2, MPEG 4, HDTV upgrade on the DTT platform and would welcome your early response on these three issues. Until we reach a final decision on the licence amendment the HD service information broadcast on Multiplex B should be provided in a free to air format. If Huffman compression is used then the related tables should be made available to receiver manufacturers without the need for a licence for Huffman look-up tables from the BBC.

HD on DTT content management proposals (PDF) (Thanks, Glyn!)
Previously:


Is Sony legally required to make its games accessible to disabled people?

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 12:07 PM PST

On his Big Questions blog, Steven Landsburg (author of a new book called The Big Questions) discusses a partially blind gamer's lawsuit against Sony. The gamer wants Sony to makes its games more accessible for partially blind people.

Here's the first part of Landsburg's thoughts on the issue:

This raises the question: Exactly what does Sony owe to Alexander Stern (and others like him)?

A similar issue comes up in Chapter 20 of The Big Questions, where Mary the landlord won't rent to, say, Albanians. Ought we force her to?

In The Big Questions, I make two separate (but closely related) arguments on Mary's behalf. I was about to write a blog post offering the same arguments on behalf of Sony when I realized that only one of them applies. So I am forced to conclude that I should be a little less sympathetic to Sony than I am to Mary. My first argument is that Mary never had any moral obligation to rent to anyone in the first place—and if she has no general obligation to rent to anyone, then she can have no specific obligation to rent to Albanians. Likewise, Sony has no moral obligation to provide anyone with video games—and if there is no moral obligation to provide me with a video game then there is no obligation to provide one to Alexander Stern. Fine so far.

But my second argument is that Mary, appearances to the contrary, is actually doing some good for Albanian apartment seekers. By renting rooms to non-Albanians, she takes a little pressure off the housing market, driving down rents and making it easier for Albanians to find apartments elsewhere. Sure, she could be doing even more for them, but she's already doing more for them than I am, since I don't rent apartments to anyone at all. How can she be at fault for doing small amounts of good when I'm given a free pass to do no good at all?

Read the rest at his blog.

Previously:


Progressive activists tussle over Islam and homophobia

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 02:35 PM PST

peter-t2.jpgEarlier today, Xeni spotted an item by gay rights activist Peter Tatchell, encouraging black people to embrace the LGBT status of some of its heroes. Tatchell's been in the news of late for another reason, too: another tussle with fellow progressive activists.

The subject is Tatchell's vocal opposition to Islamic fundamentalism, assailed in "Gay Imperialism: Gender and Sexuality Discourse in the War on Terror," published by Raw Nerve Books. As a result, authors Jin Haritaworn, Tamsila Tauqir and Esra Erdem have come under fire. Raw Nerve was even induced to confess a list of "untruths" aimed at Tatchell.

Here's an illustrative paragraph from the apology:

Mr Tatchell has never "claimed the role of liberator and expert about Muslim gays and lesbians." He is not Islamophobic and is not "part of the Islamophobia industry." ... Mr Tatchell has never described "Muslims as Nazis" and he has never made the equation "Muslim=Nazi" or "Muslim=Evil." He has never "collaborated with the extreme right" and never "participated with several racist and fascist groups."

On one hand, Tatchell's "celebrity activist" style irritates those who feel sidelined by his prominence and threatened by his "litigious" reputation. Despite a lifetime building anti-racist credentials, he's often criticized for conflating Islam in general and homophobic muslims.

On the other hand, the paper's attacks could hardly have gone unchallenged. The argument seems compelling, but is layered throughout with a catty academic animus that speaks for itself. Defenders claim that the paper's constructions ("he often describes Muslims as Nazis", "he willingly collaborates with the extreme right", "reducing Islamophobia...to a fad which they can cash in on") were taken out of context. That Tatchell hasn't sued them shows not a little restraint, the obviously-forced apology notwithstanding.

The best line in the paper: "Criticism of him is dangerous." Woops!

Photo: Petertatchell.net

The Matrix as a Charlie Chaplin short

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:47 AM PST


A Russian actor's group called "Big Difference" (Bolshaya Raznitsa / Большая Разница) remade The Matrix as a Charlie Chaplin silent film. (Via Neatorama)

Howl's Moving Castle made out of Lego

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:47 AM PST

12152-620x-4031091011_f08c0a8dae.jpg Somebody has made the dreamy floating wonderworld from the Oscar-nominated Hayao Miyazaki film Howl's Moving Castle out of Lego. The details are quite impressive, and blogging about this is making me want to watch the movie again. Imagine's Brickzone's Flickr via Japanator

Gallery of antique radio tuning dials

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:40 AM PST

200911091135

The radio dials shown here "represent only a small portion" of Michael Feldt's dial archive.

Gallery of antique radio tuning dials (Via Draplin Design)

Robot olympics coming to China

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:31 AM PST

Harbin, China, home to the Institute of Technology's robot football research group, will host a robot olympics in 2010. According to the BBC News, "Entry to the competition will be restricted to robots resembling humans. They must possess two arms and legs. Wheels are banned."

Rosemarie Fiore: Fireworks paintings

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 10:54 AM PST

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Artist Rosemarie Fiore paints with fireworks. Here's more about the process. (via Eric Wareheim, sort of)

9/11 Truth and the Paranoid Style

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 11:16 AM PST

Guestblogger Arthur Goldwag is the author of "Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies: The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull and Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more" and other books.

911111
(CC-licensed photo on Flickr by 911conspiracy)

Forty-five years ago, Harpers magazine published Richard Hofstadter's essay "The Paranoid Style in American Politics." The occasion for the piece was the revenant conservatism that had driven Barry Goldwater's presidential campaign (the magazine hit the newsstands the month of the Johnson/Goldwater election), but it remains astonishingly apt. I cannot recommend it enough for anyone who wants to understand the mentalités of fringe political movements in the United States--from the Anti-Masons and Know Nothings in the first half of the 1800s, to McCarthyism, the Nation of Islam, and the Weathermen in the last century, to the Birthers and Truthers today.

I hesitate to bring up 9/11 Truth again after the firestorm of commentary I unleashed last week, but read Hofstadter on the pedantry of paranoid literature and tell me that he doesn't nail some of the most contentious of the posters (most of whom were probably not even born when the piece was written) with a psychoanalyst's precision and a novelist's sympathy:


One of the impressive things about paranoid literature is the contrast between its fantasied conclusions and the almost touching concern with factuality it invariably shows. It produces heroic strivings for evidence to prove that the unbelievable is the only thing that can be believed.....Respectable paranoid literature not only starts from certain moral commitments that can indeed be justified but also carefully and all but obsessively accumulates "evidence." The difference between this "evidence" and that commonly employed by others is that it seems less a means of entering into normal political controversy than a means of warding off the profane intrusion of the secular political world. The paranoid seems to have little expectation of actually convincing a hostile world, but he can accumulate evidence in order to protect his cherished convictions from it....

One of last week's more strident posters shared his frustration with members of his on-line forum (yes, I Googled myself, and of course I read all the nasty things they said about me), listing the seminal books I hadn't referenced ("Nafeez Ahmed's "War on Truth," Peter Dale Scott's "Road to 9/11," Michael Ruppert's "Crossing the Rubicon," Michel Chossudovsky's "War on Terrorism"), pointing out The Complete 9/11 Timeline at historycommons.org that I ignored, and exposing my transparently propagandistic mendacity in allowing one perfervid e-mailer to stand "as an avatar for the supposed pathologies of the 9/11 Truth movement."


Of course he's furious! He's educated, articulate, and politically committed. He's not some disreputable, anti-social obsessive--he's a veritable exegete of 9/11 anomalies, as fluent in the jargon of physics as he is in political dialectics. It's bad enough that he has to endure the studied neutrality or outright hostility of the really big guns of the left--Amy Goodman, Noam Chomsky, Naomi Klein--but then an arrant nobody like me comes along with, as one of his fellow posters put it, "a metric tonne of standard issue boilerplate" and presumes that he can conjure away the whole edifice of 9/11 Truth with a couple of wisecracks. Not only am I smug and ignorant and intellectually dishonest --- it's as if I don't even care about the subtle distinctions between one brand of Truthery and another, as if I can't be bothered to acknowledge the museum's-worth of evidence that he and his colleagues have so assiduously curated.


Imagine that you were a Maria Callas fan. You own every recording she ever made -- 78s, LPs, remastered CDs, even reel-to-reel tapes recorded off of radio broadcasts. You've not only read every book and magazine article about her that was ever committed to print, you've written a few yourself. And then some fly-by-night music journalist casually dismisses her in the pages of a mass circulation magazine as a cracked-voiced diva whose sole claim to fame was that she and Jackie O were rivals for Aristotle Onassis's affections.


Reading through all that commentary, I thought of how misguided missionaries sometimes try to evangelize Jews by calling their attention to passages from the New Testament--a scripture that by definition carries no weight with Jews at all. From my outsider's perspective, most of the Truther's exhibits (the iron spherules, the 2.5 seconds of video-taped free fall, the anecdotes about the dancing Israelis, the housing official trapped in the stairwell of WTC7) aren't evidence at all but rather artifacts of confirmation bias--factoids (many of dubious provenance, some long past their sell-by date) that are plucked out of context and marshaled not to build or close a positive case for one thesis or another, but only to cast doubt on the default position. I can't engage the 9/11 issue on the same terms that a Truther does, because I'd have to be a Truther myself.


Religious fanatics, political radicals, obsessive fans -- the worlds they live in are closed systems, governed by dogmas and articles of faith. Discipline is strictly enforced; members are punished or purged for their lapses in ideological or doctrinal purity. Outsiders are regarded with suspicion and hostility -- milquetoast accommodationists who are presumptuous enough to suppose they can make common cause on one issue or another even more so than overt enemies. It's a pressure cooker -- turn up the temperature and you get sectarianism and schisms, higher still and you get witch hunts, show trials, Cultural Revolutions, and Nuremberg laws.


With its congeries of black sheep constituencies (Alex Jones Libertarian populists, movement leftists, anarchists, white supremacists, New World Order reactionaries, Protocols of the Elders of Zion anti-Semites, crusading architects and theologians) and its lack of a dominant leader or organization, the 9/11 Movement will likely never become unified enough to tear itself apart. But it has not been altogether innocuous either. "One of the major consequences of the 9/11 movement," Noam Chomsky said, "Has been to draw enormous amounts of energy and effort away from activism directed to real and ongoing crimes of state...crimes that are far more serious than blowing up the WTC would be, if there were any credibility to that thesis. That is, I suspect, why the 9/11 movement is treated far more tolerantly by centers of power than is the norm for serious critical and activist work."


Just as the missionary can't understand how the Jew can contemplate the prospect of his eternal damnation with such unnatural equanimity, the Truther can't fathom why the rest of us would rather look at the forest than the trees. There's a certain poignancy in their predicament. As Hofstadter wrote, "We are all sufferers from history, but the paranoid is a double sufferer, since he is afflicted not only by the real world, with the rest of us, but by his fantasies as well."

Fake Steve Jobs v. NYT over Zynga-gate

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 10:24 AM PST

Fake Steve Jobs points to the NYT's kid-gloves piece on Zynga, published the same week as bloggers exposed Zynga's scummy doings, as reason number one for Big Print's Decline: "The truth is, if newspapers want to survive they should go back to doing what they started out doing -- muckraking, stirring the shit, calling bullshit."

Fun Experiment

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 09:20 AM PST

Mind Hacks blog Googles the phrase "psychologist says", with headesky results. The problem: "Psychologist" doesn't always mean what you think it means. Some stories quoted from peer-reviewed research, others turned to therapists with little-to-no academic or research experience, and everything in between.



Pigeon Impossible

Posted: 09 Nov 2009 09:13 AM PST

Lucas Martell's new animated film, Pigeon Impossible: "A rookie secret agent is faced with a problem seldom covered in basic training: what to do when a curious pigeon gets trapped inside your multi-million dollar, government-issued nuclear briefcase." (Thanks, Joaquin Baldwin)
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