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The National Book Awards
The NBA picks are in! No, not basketball silly, The National Book Awards.

The Next New Thing: Paper
Is digital paper finally here? ZD Net reports that PARC (early pioneers of technologies including the graphical user interface and Ethernet) is readying SmartPaper for market. Long discussed in tech circles, smart paper provides rewritable, very thin displays that look more like paper than LCD or CRTs. Although smart paper has been discussed for years, PARC is in the product demonstration stages, as illustrated in this video. See an an earlier report on similar technologies from other companies such as the MIT spinoff, E Ink, at ZD Net and a relatively detailed inventory of related technologies at the gamers' site GURPS. Benefits of the technology include flexibility (you can fold or roll it), low power (unlike LCD screens, power is only consumed once to write an image), and reflectivity (like paper, no backlight's needed), and relatively low cost (initial rewritable book-sized sheets rumored to be under $100). Beta testing of SmartPaper with potential customers will be undertaken next year by Gyricon Media, a PARC spin-off. Early targetted adopters include stores, who PARC suggests will use SmartPaper for large, rewritable signage.

Many Theories About Many Universes: EDGE video streams
Videos require REAL.
The latest edition of John Brockman's EDGE is now online, and features many great videos such as:

THE INTELLIGENT UNIVERSE: RAY KURZWEIL
The universe has been set up in an exquisitely specific way so that evolution could produce the people that are sitting here today and we could use our intelligence to talk about the universe. We see a formidable power in the ability to use our minds and the tools we've created to gather evidence, to use our inferential abilities to develop theories, to test the theories, and to understand the universe at increasingly precise levels.

THE EMOTION UNIVERSE: MARVIN MINSKY
To say that the universe exists is silly, because it says that the universe is one of the things in the universe. So there's something wrong with questions like, "What caused the Universe to exist?

THE COMPUTATIONAL UNIVERSE: SETH LLOYD
Every physical system registers information, and just by evolving in time, by doing its thing, it changes that information, transforms that information, or, if you like, processes that information. Since I've been building quantum computers I've come around to thinking about the world in terms of how it processes information.

WHICH UNIVERSE WOULD YOU LIKE? By Jordan Mejias
Five stars of American science meet in Connecticut to explain first and last things. They begin a free-floating debate, which drives them back and forth across the universe. Guth encourages the exploration of black holes, not to be confused with cosmic wormholes, which Kurzweil—just like the heroes of Star Trek—wants to use as a shortcut for his intergalactic excursions and as a means of overtaking light. Steinhardt suggests that we should realize that we are not familiar with most of what the cosmos consists of and do not understand its greatest force, dark matter. Understand? There is no such thing as a rational process, Minsky objects; it is simply a myth. In his cosmos, emotion is a word we use to circumscribe another form of our thinking that we cannot yet conceive of. Emotion, Kurzweil interrupts, is a highly intelligent form of thinking. "We have a dinner reservation at a nearby country restaurant," says Brockman in an emotionally neutral tone.

Much more like that. Link found on BB.

The Story That Wouldn't Die
...and the beat goes on. And the beat goes on. Blood keeps pounding rhythm to the brain...
More from the front: Remember the Sokal Hoax? In the mid 1990s, NYU professor Alan Sokal got a deliberately ridiculous paper in the po-mo journal Social Text, which would have embarrassed the editors if the concept of shame weren't merely a social construct. Now it seems that turnabout is fair play. In this week's Chronicle of Higher Education, there's a fascinating article about two brothers -- they apparently got their physics PhDs by spouting nonsense, and even got their tripe published in peer-reviewed journals. (The article itself requires a subscription, but here is an account by one of the players in the drama. Even though every scientific field has bad journals and these papers are in French, which consigned them to less well-known journals, it's still a major embarrassment for physics. Metafilter Discussion

what it's like, at least in a small way
daily (ish) diary of a stalking
i am in the midst of a minor stalking at the moment, via
phone and email. i was much more seriously stalked
back in '92 by a suspected rapist whom i'd never met,
and i know stalking can be much more damaging and
dangerous that this man is... but it occured to me that
the blog of even a minor stalking could serve as a helpful
history for women (& men!) to refer back to should this
ever happen to them.

Gamers set for sensory overload
A new video game inspired by the abstract artist Kandinsky aims to overload the senses with its psychedelic visuals and pulsating dance beats. Rez for the Playstation 2 seeks to create a sense of synaesthesia, literally a crossing of the senses, so that you can "see" sounds or "taste" colours. "Rez is an experience, a fusion of light, vibration and sound completely immersed in synaesthesia," said its creator, Tetsuya Mizuguchi of Japanese game developers United Game Artists. The game takes place in a virtual world inside a computer. You play a hacker of sorts, flying through six levels of cyberspace in search of the artificial intelligence at the heart of this world. But there is a twist to the traditional shoot-em approach that makes Rez stand out.

CODEX SERAPHINIANVS
Strange and Extraordinary Representations of Animals and Plants and Hellish Incarnations of Normal Items from the Annals of Naturalist/Unnaturalist Luigi Serafini.

ILLUMINATI MIND CONTROL TRIGGER & The Snipers
[FriendsOfLiberty's Note: What follows is not an official FLI pronouncement; it was forwarded to us today, and in the interest of open discussion is published here now.] - Via Technoccult

Big win for Bush, GOP
With Congress now firmly in Republican hands, the White House will push its agenda more aggressively than ever.

Hollywood takes on Japanese horror films
While Hollywood-produced horror movies have been scaring American moviegoers about as much as stale theater popcorn, Japanese filmmakers have been working to truly terrorize their audiences--and the rest of the world is watching. By incorporating creepy modern urban legends and authentic popular culture fears, Japanese horror flicks focus on the surreal haunting of ordinary people. Filmmakers are making a killing. Director Hideo Nakata's 1998 film Ringu, about an unmarked videotape that kills its viewers, spawned the highest-grossing horror film franchise in Japanese history (combining movies, books, graphic novels/manga, and TV adaptations) and helped launch the psychological-horror or "J-horror" movie genre.
As usual, a fiesty debate over at Metafilter.

Smart paint creates chameleon tanks
Tanks that can repair themselves and change colour on the battlefield are being developed in the US. A team of researchers based at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, along with the US Army's Armament Research and Development Center are working on the smart machines. Military vehicles including tanks, trucks helicopters and weapon systems will be covered with a coating that has been embedded with nanotechnology. Via DPH

Fwd: Have you seen this?
That email attachment you just got from a friend may be hilarious, but the joke could be on you. Ping! A friend emails you a video clip parodying a well known advert. You watch, chuckle, and forward it on, presuming it to be the handiwork of some mischievous subversive. In fact, there's a good chance the spoof was made by the very brand it appears to bash. Subviral marketing is a topsy-turvy trend that's said to be being pioneered by brands including Budweiser, Ford, Levi's and Mastercard. While traditional viral attachments feature short, slapstick video clips stamped with the brand's logo and web address, subviral campaigns are carefully shot to seem like they were produced by an internet prankster.Via BB

The hunt for alien pond scum
With growing support from the federal government, scientists are accelerating their hunt for life beyond Earth.They also are broadening the search to include organisms unlike any of those on our home planet -- what some researchers call "weird life." By this, they mean alien forms of life that are not based on our familiar DNA but on a different genetic code.In theory, creatures made of unusual biological or chemical structures might exist on moons or planets that lack liquid water, a must for life as we know it.

A New View of Our Universe: Only One of Many
Astronomers have gazed out at the universe for centuries, asking why it is the way it is. But lately a growing number of them are dreaming of universes that never were and asking, why not? Why, they ask, do we live in 3 dimensions of space and not 2, 10 or 25? Why is a light ray so fast and a whisper so slow? Why are atoms so tiny and stars so big? Why is the universe so old? Does it have to be that way, or are there places, other universes, where things are different? Via CDC

New ozric piece today: i am a doofus.
the doofus in question is to be found under- lester bangs doofus-the hub city version...

Astronaut Reveals NASA Mind Control Program involving Children
Astronaut Gordon Cooper, one of the original seven Mercury astronauts, has confirmed the existence of a mind control program administered by NASA in the 1950's and 1960's involving gifted American schoolchildren. - Via NWD