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Bill Moyers Exposes Secret Draft Bill to Extend The Patriot Act

NEW: Many are experiencing difficulty accessing the DSEA document at the Center for Public Integrity due to high traffic volume. We have made a mirror available here, with a HTML version.

Friday, NOW with Bill Moyers provided details of a Justice Department draft of a bill designed to extend the powers of the Patriot Act. The draft bill was provided exclusively to NOW by the Center for Public Integrity, which obtained it from a confidential government source. The document, entitled the Domestic Security Enhancement Act of 2003, outlines significant broadening of law enforcement powers, including domestic intelligence gathering, surveillance, and law enforcement prerogatives, while decreasing public access to information and judicial review authority.

Dr. David Cole, Georgetown University Law professor and author of Terrorism and the Constitution assessed the document for NOW with Bill Moyers and the Center for Public Integrity. "I think this is a quite radical proposal. It authorizes secret arrests. It would give the Attorney General essentially unchecked authority to deport anyone who he thought was a danger to our economic interests. It would strip citizenship from people for lawful political associations," he told NOW's Roberta Baskin. "And...it has not been put on the table so there can be a discussion about it."

NOW interviewed executive director of the Center for Public Integrity, Charles Lewis, in New York on Thursday. When asked to gauge the significance of the document Lewis responded: "It just deepens and broadens, further extends the first Patriot Act," he says. "And it's arguably...a more thorough rendering of all the things law enforcement and intelligence agencies would like to have in a perfect world. I think it's a very tough document when it comes to secrecy and surveillance." | Via memes.org

The father of cyborgs
Dr. Philip Kennedy has linked man to machine. The possibilities are fascinating and frightening.

On the one hand, there is a medical phenomenon growing out of Kennedy's work. His electrodes could enable patients frozen by disease or injury to circumvent the spinal cord, re-establishing a decent range of speech and motion. So far, three of Kennedy's six implantees have learned to move a cursor across a computer screen and spell words just by thinking about it.

If Kennedy's technology reaches its full potential, something more amazing will have occurred. The people implanted will no longer be human as we know humans. Their existence will depend on machines, and their brains will have adapted accordingly. They will think differently. They will use their minds to control computers, with more stunning results than any human to date.

That introduces the ethical dilemma of a more manipulative use of what's called brain-computer interfacing (BCI), a way of warping the technology to turn an average brain into a superpower.

Journalist perpetrates online terror hoax

Editor's note: An online story yesterday by Computerworld reporting on terrorist claims of responsibility for having authored the Slammer worm was based on a hoax. The security reporter who wrote the story, Dan Verton, explains in this first-person account how he and others were misled by a U.S. journalist who pretended to be someone named "Abdul Mujahid." The original story has been removed from Computerworld's Web site.

There's an old Italian proverb that says, "Those who sleep with dogs will rise with fleas." That's the situation in which I now find myself.

While catching a few fleas isn't unusual in the murky, dog-eat-dog world of reporting on hackers and terrorists, this hoax is different. Had it been a simple scam, I might be embarrassed. But in this case, the scammer is Brian McWilliams, a former reporter for Newsbytes.com, which is now owned by The Washington Post Co. [MORE]

FBI using Patriot Act to obtain information on library employees and patrons

Last year's passage of H.R. 3162, a.k.a. the "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism (USA PATRIOT ACT) Act of 2001," has civil libertarians up in arms, but one portion of the bill specifically targets libraries. Recent false alarms notwithstanding, it's clear that the FBI is using the act to obtain information on library employees and patrons. | Via memepool

Additional: See this NPR piece that we blogged a while back- Librarians and Privacy: Big Brother is Reading Over Your Shoulder

The Road to Eleusis and the Gordon Wasson Project

In 1978, Robert Gordon Wasson, the Wall Street Banker who rediscovered the magic mushroom, teamed up with Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, and Carl Ruck, a classical scholar from Boston University and published The Road to Eleusis:Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries. Bibliophiles know this book immediately sold out and became a rare and precious find on the antiquarian book market, selling for hundreds of dollars when it could be found. The book unveils the ancient secret of the Eleusinian Mysteries as an ergot derived entheogen. A few copies of this text are now available in a deluxe edition, numbered and signed by the living authors, including Drs. Hofmann, Forte, Smith, and Ruck. Proceeds from this offering will be used to further a documentary film/DVD on the role of entheogens in western philosophy and religion, produced by Robert Forte, editor of Entheogens and the Future of Religion and Timothy Leary Outside Looking In. [MORE}

chuckpalahniuk.net and incunabula.org join up to create bigger and better mayhem

We will be joining forces with chuckpalahniuk.net to bring you bigger and better exposure to new independent authors, as well as working with our new cohorts to develop some exposure and incubation projects for new and aspiring indie authors, more original articles about DIY kulture and a whole lot more. Thanks for all your support in the last 9 months since we undertook this little "facelift". Hopefully, you've all been having as much fun as we have. As Dan Quayle once said, "Forward, into the future!"

Giant, Cow-Sized Scorpions Defend Saddam's Stronghold at Qalaat-e-Julundi, Where Saddam Is Hiding the Aliens

“An UFO-related incident that occurred four years ago poses a troubling question whether any kind of cooperation is possible between Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein and extraterrestrials,” UFOlogist Joseph Trainor declared in his review UFO Roundup (issue 51 of December 17, 2002). “On December 16, 1998, during Operation Desert Fox against Iraq, a video clip aired on CNN showed a UFO hovering over Baghdad; it moved away to avoid a stream of tracer anti-aircraft fire. At that time we all thought it was another UFO sighting, although captured on videotape. But now, ufologists think it was much more than a mere incident.”

Jack Sarfatti (a name synonymous with QUALITY information, kinda like PRAVDA) reported that Friday evening, December 6, 2002 “someone called the Art Bell radio show, claimed his connection with the military and informed that a UFO crashed in Iraq several years ago. The USA is currently searching for any pretext to invade Iraq. In fact, the USA is motivated by the greatest fear that Saddam will reverse-engineer the crashed alien spacecraft.” | Via Orlin Grabbe

Sun admits Java is impractical for software applications

An internal memo from Sun Microsystems details several technical issues which make Java an impractical and unreliable solution for commonly used software applications. Among the problems listed are: large virtual memory consumption, multiple bottlenecks in the Java Virtual Machine, and Jtable table editors that do not work. The memo also criticizes the large number of software bugs that are resolved as "won't fix."

Note: Finally! They admit it!

The shuttle debris that NASA doesn't want you to find
NASA searching for secret communications device from shuttle

Searchers combing an area near the Louisian border have come up empty-handed in the search for a secret communications device from the Columbia wreckage. The device allows communication between the shuttle and NASA controllers to be encrypted. NASA doesn't want anyone else to find the box because it could be used to send bogus signals to other space shuttles.

Tokyo Professor Working on Invisibility
Fri Feb 7,12:38 PM ET (AP)

University of Tokyo Engineering Professor Susumu Tachi is in the early stages of technology that he says will eventually enable camouflaged objects to be virtually transparent by wearing an optical device.

The technology could be useful in medicine, where surgeons might use it during operations to avoid having their fingers or surgical tools block their view. (Note: That's just what we need...more invisible surgical tools!)

Bush Orders Guidelines for Cyber-Warfare
Rules for Attacking Enemy Computers Prepared as U.S. Weighs Iraq Options

President Bush has signed a secret directive ordering the government to develop, for the first time, national-level guidance for determining when and how the United States would launch cyber-attacks against enemy computer networks, according to administration officials.

Similar to strategic doctrine that has guided the use of nuclear weapons since World War II, the cyber-warfare guidance would establish the rules under which the United States would penetrate and disrupt foreign computer systems.

The United States has never conducted a large-scale, strategic cyber-attack, according to several senior officials. But the Pentagon has stepped up development of cyber-weapons, envisioning a day when electrons might substitute for bombs and allow for more rapid and less bloody attacks on enemy targets. Instead of risking planes or troops, military planners imagine soldiers at computer terminals silently invading foreign networks to shut down radars, disable electrical facilities and disrupt phone services.

Bush's action highlights the administration's keen interest in pursuing a new form of weaponry that many specialists say has great potential for altering the means of waging war, but that until now has lacked presidential rules for deciding the circumstances under which such attacks would be launched, who should authorize and conduct them and what targets would be considered legitimate. [GET SOME]

Online games increasingly a place for protest, social activism

Gone are the days when playing video games online meant simply playing a hand of poker or battling your buddies to the death in a giant arena you couldn't control.

Many games are now all about role-playing, and some players aren't participating to escape terrestrial life. They're getting on virtual soapboxes and organizing all manner of protest in cyberspace.

Gamers have protested the impending war in Iraq, started newspapers, gathered charitable donations -- done myriad things they already do, or wish they could do, in the real world.

"Let's All Join........ the Misfit Club!"

In Panic (How To Be Happy), a band of eccentric desperados tries to provoke self-enlightenment through ritual sex, magic, mountain climbing, and convulsive dancing as they invoke "The Old Man of the Mountain" who bestows gifts amidst multiple catastrophes. | Via Lords of Newark

Logomancer
By Rudy Rucker

Science fiction has long been William Gibson's electric guitar - the instrument he uses to gain perspective, to transform life's ditties into anthems of transcendent strangeness. In Pattern Recognition (Putnam, $26), he goes acoustic, unplugging the overt sci-fi tropes that have marked his work and producing a mainstream product. He succeeds because our real world has such gnarly tech (Web surfing on a laptop with a Wi-Fi connection is functionally the same as jacking your brain into a cyberspace deck) and because his riffs make such a good read.

What Gibson gives us is an international spy thriller comparable to the slightly skewed tales of Jonathan Franzen or David Foster Wallace. His story's central McGuffin is a fragmentary, workstation-rendered romance movie known simply as The Footage. It consists of 100-odd supernally beautiful snippets of video that someone has anonymously posted on the Web. A rabid online cult has grown around the flick, and a Belgian advertising exec (with the improbable name of Hubertus Bigend) hires Cayce Pollard to find the maker. Bigend's goal: Tap into The Footage's primo street cred strategy for profit. The gig isn't unusual for a professional "cool hunter" like Pollard. Her job is to walk around cities, spot new trends, and advise advertising agencies and marketeers how best to commodify them. Indeed, she's so good at her job that she's literally allergic (read: fainting spells and sneezing fits) to overexposed trademarks. She can be reduced to jelly by a drawing of the Michelin Man. She clips the labels off all her clothes, even going so far as to grind down the Levi's logo on the metal buttons of her 501s. Mickey Mouse is just this side of tolerable. [GET SOME]

abuddhas memes: 7/2/3

am most sorry, Dear Old Beans, for absenting myself without courteous notice; or even a by-your-leave! In my natural state there is nothing I enjoy more than projecting alliterative preludes to ill and trans-literate compositions. Unfortunately I have been far from balanced lately due to a number of mitigating factors - the gods of green, the devils of paper, and the purgatory of neccessity.

As it is probably best not to spread dissonance when insouciance is in dire shortage, please forgive me my bloggish shortcoming (and letter replies) and I'll promise to be more fore-coming about impending lapses. On to the wanderings of the day...

oddly thrilling

interactive:
Storm Front | Reactive Object| Mycelium Model| Node Study | Pixie Particle System | Maeda Keyboard

just pretty:
Binary Network | Torrus Export | Seeds | Mandlebrot Trema Generator| Via Cup of Chicha

Tokyo Plastic
The trick is...don't be afraid to click things.

:: Web Blackout for February 15th ::
Web Blackout for February 15th [Stop War]

Here's one way to show our support for the international day of protests planned for February 15th: Blackout sites. I've prepared a page that will be shown all day on February 15th in the place of onRelease.org. Bit And Pixels will also display the same page. Feel free to rip it.

If you feel strongly against this war, then this is another way to show the world that no, we aren't going to go on with our lives and that no, everything is not all right and that yes, there is a big problem here and we need to stop and address it.

Cult News

Cult News.com offers daily News articles presented by Rick Ross, a cult expert and Intervention Specialist who has been studying cults and their activities for more than twenty years. He is considered to be one of the leading experts in the destructive practices of certain religious movements and his testimony has been used in nearly every major cult case brought to trial over the past decade. The website offers daily cult news, books and videos about the cult phenomenon and support forums for people to discuss cult activities and how to escape them. | Via diminishedResponsibility

First notes for 639-year composition

The first notes in the longest and slowest piece of music in history, designed to go on for 639 years, are being played on a German church organ on Wednesday.

The three notes, which will last for a year-and-a-half, are just the start of the piece, called As Slow As Possible.

Composed by late avant-garde composer John Cage, the performance has already been going for 17 months - although all that has been heard so far is the sound of the organ's bellows being inflated.

Read it and weep

CNN shows off it's fact checking skills. (Hint: It's all about the speed) | Via Aberrant News

Scientist claims: Free will may be an illusion
But you must believe in it

Harvard psychologist Daniel Wegner argues that free will "is a construction ... something the mind builds in order to keep track of what it's doing" -- an idea he explores in detail in his book The Illusion of Conscious Will. Consciousness, he says, frequently "isn't the engine on the train."
In one of Wegner's experiments, subjects were asked to use a computer mouse to point a cursor at particular icons on a screen. At the same time, they listened to a tape that played a series of words -- some of them corresponding to the icons. In most of the trials, the subject was free to select any of the 50 or so images -- a swan, a car, a tree, and so on.
But some of the trials were rigged so that the experimenters controlled where the cursor pointed -- forcing it to rest on the image of the swan, for example. If the word "swan" was heard on the tape more than a few seconds before the cursor stopped, or after the cursor stopped, the subject reported that their selection felt "forced," as expected. But if they heard the word "swan" just prior to the selection, they claimed it was their conscious choice. In other words, the subjects believed they were in control, even when they had none whatsoever. [MORE]

PacBell and Scientology knock Kevin Burton offline

Kevin Burton's mirror of xenu.net's samizdata about the Church of Scientology generated a DMCA takedown notice -- a legal notice that requires his ISP to remove the material and then ask him if he disputes that it is infringing, and if he does, to put it back up. PacBell sent Kevin email to a dead account and then disconnected his $180/month "business" DSL account. To add insult to injury, PacBell (Kevin's ISP) had no mechanism for reinstating his account and gave him days of runaround.

SBC has handled this in a completely unacceptable manner. No warning notice was provided. They did send an email to _REMOVED_@pacbell.net however this is an account that is not used (honestly how many people use their DSL provided email anyway). In fact I honestly had no idea that it existed until their Policy department informed of this. They have my cell phone, my land line, and my physical address in San Francisco yet they choose to use *none* of these to warn me prior to disconnecting my service.
Up until this point I have been a loyal SBC customer for greater than 2 years. I purchase their business grade account at $180 a month for 5 IPs, 384 up, and 6Mb down with an Acceptable Use Policy that allows for running servers (web, email, etc). | Via BB

Do we care?

Seven schoolchildren are swept to their deaths on a skiing trip in Canada. Seven Africans are washed up dead on a beach in Spain. Seven astronauts are lost when the space shuttle breaks up over America. Only one story captures world attention. Why, asks Libby Brooks

Fantasy Economics - Why economists are obsessed with online role-playing games. By Robert Shapiro

The most popular article in the leading economics Web archive doesn't concern tax policy, international trade, or the theory of the firm. It's about an online fantasy game.

During the past year, nearly 16,000 people have downloaded a 40-page economic analysis of EverQuest, Sony's popular online fantasy world of Norrath. "Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier," by California State Fullerton economics professor Edward Castronova, is the No. 1 article in the history of the Economics Research Network, an Internet library of tens of thousands of professional journals and research papers in economics. [MORE] | Via BB

Also see: Virtual Worlds: A First-Hand Account of Market and Society on the Cyberian Frontier

Toddler learns 4,000 verses of ancient language by heart

A three-year old girl in India has become famous for her ability to recite thousands of verses in a dead language.

Shraddha Vajapeyee can recite up to 4,000 verses called sutras from the Ashta adhyayi even though she cannot read the ancient language Sanskrit.

The text is a monumental Sanskrit treatise on grammar and linguistics, authored by Acharya Panini, a scholar who lived in the sixth century BC.

U.S. may debut secret microwave weapon versus Iraq

It substitutes pure energy for munitions. It is designed to achieve military objectives without killing people or wrecking buildings.

And Saddam Hussein's armed forces may be chosen as the first target of the U.S. military's new secret weapon.

The U.S. Air Force is developing a high-power microwave, or HPM, weapon that generates a massive electromagnetic pulse capable of frying the insides of digital electronic systems, disabling enemy military equipment, analysts said.

While the weapon is top-secret and details about it are classified, analysts said its development is far enough along that they expect the U.S. military to use an HPM weapon for the first time in the possible war with Iraq.

THE ANIMATRIX

(Ac)knowledge(ment) Is Power
by Lysdexic

I think the world should never see
a poem that disagrees with me

A poem whose author is oppressed
or regards me and is unimpressed

A poem should look at God all day
and inspire people to look away

From war and debt and problems where --
don't look! Don't see! Look over there!

A poem whose bottom line is plain;
and ultimately gives no pain.

Poems made for fools like me,
God forbid they make one See.

New: Laura Bush, First Lady, has cancelled a literary event at the White House scheduled for Februrary 12 because some of the invited poets let her know they would read work against the war in Iraq. Poetsagainstthewar.org, a website created by Sam Hamill of Copper Canyon Press, is spearheading the movement for readings nationwide on that day. Check it out-- and come to our own...

Poetry Reading Against the War !
Bird & Beckett Books
2788 Diamond, SF - 586-3733

Wednesday, February 12, 7:30 pm
Lincoln's Birthday

Bring a favorite poem, or one of your own
3 minutes per reader please! -Diane diPrima

Courtney Love arrested at Heathrow Airport

COURTNEY LOVE has been arrested at HEATHROW AIRPORT for alleged abusive behaviour on a plane.

The star was flying from Los Angeles to London onboard a Virgin Atlantic flight.

A spokesperson for the company said she had been verbally abusive to cabin crew during the flight.

She was arrested on disembarkation. The flight landed at 11am

Latest: AIRLINE TO PUSH FOR COURTNEY PROSECUTION | Via HSGirl

CIA Concealed Noah’s Ark!

There is a mountain covered with eternal snows in Easter Turkey, not far from the borders between Iran and Armenia. The mountain is 5156 meters above the sea level, which is actually not very high as compared with Tibet’s mountains that are eight thousand meters high. However, it has been the most famous mountain of the planet for several thousand years already. It is Ararat.

Recently, the CIA declassified documents concerning “probable remains of Noah’s Ark on Ararat mountain in Turkey.” Researchers immediately rushed to study the materials on this problem. | Via Suggestion- Anonymous

Disclosure Project announces energy device

Steven Greer, MD, founder of The Disclosure Project and Space Energy Access Systems, Inc., has recently announced the acquisition of a "free-energy" device from an anonymous inventor. The small 20-lb. instrument generates hundreds of watts of power and has standard 60 Hz/110 volt outlets. It will undergo extensive scientific testing over the coming months, and is expected to be made available to the public within a year.

Computer attacks rising, security firm reports

The number of cyber attacks on corporate networks rose 20 percent in the second half of 2002, Web-security provider Symantec said in a report published Monday, as the number of reported vulnerabilities nearly doubled from a year earlier.

The report came 10 days after the debilitating attack of the SQL (pronounced "sequel'') Slammer worm that slowed Internet traffic worldwide, nearly shut down Web access in South Korea and brought many U.S. automated teller machines to a standstill. [MORE]

Astronauts Try to Cool Space Shuttle Lab (From Jan. 25)
January 25, 2003, 1:23 PM EST

Columbia's lab began heating up almost a week ago, after the breakdown of a pair of dehumidifiers. The astronauts managed to get the temperature below 80 degrees by directing the flow of cool air from the crew cabin into the lab, back in the payload bay.

But that wasn't enough and, on Saturday, Mission Control asked whether the astronauts would mind if their sleeping bunks got a little warmer in order to get more cool air flowing into the lab. Commander Rick Husband said that would be fine.

The astronauts already have had to move some of their medical test equipment out of the lab to keep the instruments cool.

As for Columbia's round-the-clock research work, Husband reported seeing "a hazy tinge to the atmosphere" -- hopefully, dust. The astronauts aimed a pair of Israeli cameras at the area, just in case they were right.

Note: Hmmmmmmm.

Being a day behind and far too forward, I'd like to take you on a spin through Propaganda Land. Number 9, Number 9....

"The information revolution has led to information overload, and people are confronted with hundreds of messages each day. Although few studies have looked at this topic, it seems fair to suggest that many people respond to this pressure by processing messages more quickly and, when possible, by taking mental short-cuts.

Propagandists love short-cuts -- particularly those which short-circuit rational thought. They encourage this by agitating emotions, by exploiting insecurities, by capitalizing on the ambiguity of language, and by bending the rules of logic. As history shows, they can be quite successful." | Via abuddhas memes

Photos show odd images near shuttle
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor Sunday, February 2, 2003

A San Francisco amateur astronomer who photographs the space shuttles whenever their orbits carry them over the Bay Area has captured five strange and provocative images of the shuttle Columbia just as it was re-entering the Earth's atmosphere before dawn Saturday.

The pictures, taken with a Nikon-880 digital camera on a tripod, reveal what appear to be bright electrical phenomena flashing around the track of the shuttle's passage, but the photographer, who asked not to be identified, will not make them public immediately.

German craze for 'bazooka' spud guns

GERMAN youths have taken up a dangerous new pastime: firing potatoes as fast as a rocket from “bazookas” made from drainage pipes.

Note: We called them by another name when I was a kid, but essentially built the same thing. Kids will be kids. Of course, adults will take it to new extremes.

10 Emerging Technologies That Will Change the World
Technology Review identifies the developments that will dramatically affect the way we live and work—and profiles the leading innovators behind them.

In labs around the world, researchers are busy creating technologies that will change the way we conduct business and live our lives. These are not the latest crop of gadgets and gizmos: they are completely new technologies that could soon transform computing, medicine, manufacturing, transportation, and our energy infrastructure. Nurturing the people and the culture needed to make the birth of such technological ideas possible is a messy endeavor, as MIT Media Lab cofounder Nicholas Negroponte explains in Creating a Culture of Ideas. But in this special section, Technology Review’s editors have identified 10 emerging technologies that we predict will have a tremendous influence in the near future. For each, we’ve chosen a researcher or research team whose work and vision is driving the field. The profiles, on the following pages, offer a sneak preview of the technology world in the years and decades to come.

Dystopian visions of the future explore the power of virtual communities.

Most cultures preserve their traditions and transmit values by telling stories about their past. Americans used to do the same, back when the Western was perhaps our most popular genre. Yet, somewhere around the mid-twentieth century, we began to examine our most cherished values and deepest questions through exploring the future.
Science fiction is a genre about discontinuities rather than continuities, change rather than tradition, and about open questions rather than tried-and-true wisdom. It could only emerge at the moment when cycles of cultural and technological change could be viewed within a single lifetime. Today, the rate of change has accelerated to the point where we only need to go “twenty minutes from now” to envision radical cultural shifts and extraordinary technological advances.

The genre has also gone through quite a transformation in the last 80 years—a shift from gee-whiz wonderment toward an increasing dystopia; from grand engineering enterprises to what cyberpunk author Bruce Sterling calls “tech that sticks to the skin”; from scientific experimentation to the social, political, economic, and cultural impact of new media. To some degree, these changes reflect science fiction’s broadening readership. But they also reflect a shift in how we perceive technology. No longer under the control of the guys in the white lab coats, new tech is literally under our skin, attached to our bodies, tossed into our backpacks. [MORE]

Book-A-Minute SF/F

Let's face it. There's a lot of science fiction and fantasy out there and very little time to read it in. Well sit back and relax, because your troubles are solved! We here at Book-A-Minute SF/F have come up with a solution. We've taken several great speculative fiction novels and extracted the important stuff, cutting out all the filler. (You'd be surprised how much filler there is sometimes.) With our ultra-condensed versions of your favorite speculative fiction, you can read entire books -- entire series, even -- in just one minute! You can have your books and read them too! And it costs nothing!

"That's nice," you say, "but I don't believe you." Yah hah, skeptical soul! We've got our collection of ultra-condensed books right here! We've got everything from Tolkien to Dragonlance! See for yourself

Shuttle conspiracy theories springing up in Internet chat rooms: Experts say predictable reactions include the bizarre, tasteless and opportunistic

The debris from the Columbia space shuttle had barely crashed to Earth when the first conspiracy theories came to life.

It took a couple of hours for someone to post a piece of wreckage for sale on EBay. Meanwhile, experts in humor predicted that old Challenger shuttle jokes would soon be resuscitated after more than a decade in storage.

While much of the country mourned Saturday's shuttle disaster, a small minority responded in bizarre, tasteless and opportunistic ways. Some used the occasion as a chance to circulate conspiracy ideas and grudges, or try to earn a buck. | Via NWD

Diagrammatic reasoning and modelling in the imagination: the secret weapons of the Scientific Revolution

The first successes of the Scientific Revolution were exclusively geometrical, if geometry is taken in a wide sense. They were possible because Europe had had several centuries of training with reasoning with diagrams -- not only the Euclidean ones labelled "geometry", but anything from simple family trees to complicated perspective constructions to gridded maps. The Scientific Revolution could exist because it inherited a medieval Mathematical (mostly Geometrical) Revolution. The evidence includes not only the surviving pictures themselves, but descriptions of what those pictures produced in the astonishingly vivid medieval visual imagination. The imagination was regarded as literally full of pictures, and so a medium for scientific visualisation. It was the medium Galileo used successfully for his thought experiments.

AI and A-Life | Introduction

WELCOME TO THE UNIVERSE of humanoid robots, intelligent insects and virtual creatures designed to fly real planes...

Researchers in artificial intelligence (AI) and artificial life (A-Life) make their living by modelling, copying or adapting systems from biology. The combination of human ingenuity and the explosion in computer power has created a host of creations that take as their starting point anything from human intelligence and emotions to genetic inheritance and evolution.

"Traditional" AI grew out of efforts to crack enemy codes in the Second World War. It aimed to capture human intelligence by following vast lists of rules programmed into a computer. Today, this approach is best known for creating Deep Blue, the computer that beat the chess world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997.

But this strategy has serious limitations because it seems unlikely to produce anything that really resembles human intelligence. Instead, a new wave of AI is slowly making its mark. It relies to a large extent on coaxing complex behaviours from the interaction of simple components. So, for example, networks of artificial brain cells can learn and recognise patterns. Already such neural networks are advising financial wizards about investing their money and helping doctors to diagnose cancer.

A-Life focuses not so much on human biology but on biology in its widest sense. It has already given birth to such strange things as robots that work in teams, machines that evolve and virtual creatures that learn, age, breed and die. Today, biologists study evolution in virtual worlds, computers are protected from malicious viruses by artificial immune systems, and in Oxford, a heart made from millions of software cells is teaching doctors things about medicine that no living heart could have done. Prepare to have your mind boggled...

Eggs Have Landed

Both require Flash:

Tree Knowledge

Eggs Have Landed

-HSGirl

"If You Want To Win An Election, Just Control The Voting Machines"

"They can take over our country without firing a shot," Matulka said, "just by taking over our election systems."

. . . "I suspect they're getting ready to do this all across all the states," Matulka said in a January 30, 2003 interview. "God help us if Bush gets his touch screens all across the country," he added, "because they leave no paper trail. These corporations are taking over America, and they just about have control of our voting machines."

When I woke up the morning after the last midterm elections and heard the results, I did two things: 1) I let out an oversized groan probably audible down the hall (disclaimer: I am not a democrat, however . . . ), and 2) I knew it was fixed.

I have since had my suspicions confirmed. Every commentary written or broadcast about why the democrats lost that midterm election is about as relevant to the truth as a blank piece of toilet paper. I credit Bartcop for being one of the only people to bring this up and keep it up. Here is one of his pages called: Diebold Magic? (I believe he has put together at least one other page on this topic but I couldn't find it just now.)

Ladies and gentleman, look over the facts. Why has this story received little or no coverage? Maybe because of the successful campaign on the part of right-wing hardliners to label anything which even approaches a news-story that they don't want known as a "conspiracy theory?" (Combined with a corporate media blackout of anti-Bush facts, including and even up to correcting his quotes.) Forget labels. Look at the data. Look at the numbers. Look at the facts. If Bush & Co. are willing to massacre thousands, maybe tens of thousands, possibly hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqi civilians on the first day of their invasion of that country in order to accomplish their greedy, murderous, megalomaniacal goals--you think they're above stealing elections? Er, scratch that--you think they're above stealing more elections?

Helen Thomas was right: this is the worst president in the history of America. Maybe this is why he doesn't care about the black vote when he comes out against affirmative action on MLK's birthday--what the fuck does he need votes for? All he has to do is spread the Diebolds, and you goddamn proles can suck eggs for your democracy.

This story is potentially the most important threat to our (past) American democracy that this country has ever encountered, and you shouldn't let a little fear of a loaded Rush-ian slur like "conspiracy theory" stop you from looking into it--and if you do look into it and think that there are more questions to be answered based on the data, based on the numbers, based on the facts, then you need to spread the word, and you need to spread it now. Gore Vidal recently referred to the term 'conspiracy theory' as bearing the present meaning of 'uncomfortable truth.' The possibility that our American election was stolen at the ballot box right under our noses, and that this situation is only going to get worse--is quite possibly the most uncomfortable truth of all. Face it. Fight it. And rip it's fucking heart out.

Iraqis Call Shuttle Disaster God's Vengeance

Immediate popular reaction in Baghdad on Saturday to the loss of the U.S. space shuttle Columbia and its seven-member crew -- including the first Israeli in space -- was that it was God's retribution.
"We are happy that it broke up," government employee Abdul Jabbar al-Quraishi said.

"God wants to show that his might is greater than the Americans. They have encroached on our country. God is avenging us," he said.

Note: That's gonna win you a lot of support...NOT!

Another Perspective

I wasn't going to do this, but....Posse member NWD makes a good case:
Will post weird shuttle news as I find it, in tribute to the astronauts, whose trip to space was only a dream in the fevered minds of the visionaries and kooks of the past, the materialization of those astral imaginings tragically bringing with it the risks and pains of the world of flesh and mineral and steel.

Since you put it that way...

For the record: Whitey Beige just emailed me with a bunch of Columbia related conspiracy links already hitting the web. He titled the email: "...And They're Off!"

Balance: From Cup of Chicha