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sCrAwLz foR Saturday, August 23, 2003 Flashmugging From Aberystwyth to Mianus people seem transfixed by the prospect of turning up in a place at a time. But this is a stern warning to all you ker-razy flashmobbers out there. Take care, it?s a bad bad world. We're All Connected? What flash mobs can do, alas, and quite readily, is make a crowd into a valuable commodity -- a point made often by the leading chronicler of flash mobs, the blog (of course) www.cheesebikini.com. The coverage there and on other blogs has been overlaid almost from the beginning with a vague sense of dread that flash mobs are going to be hijacked, most likely by consumer companies. The cheesebikini site noted that the Toys ''R'' Us gathering coincided with another planned ''mob'' in Toronto that targeted ''the same giant multinational toy-store chain. That's an ugly coincidence. . . . Participants: remember that a corporation could easily create fake flash mobs designed to spur more business to its retail outlets. Don't be a sheep!'' (reg. req.) Are there multiple universes? And should I care? One morning last April, the New York Times op-ed page ran a piece by the Australian physicist Paul Davies warning readers not to be so gullible as to believe there could be more than one universe. The next month, Scientific American published a long article by the physicist Max Tegmark asserting that, to the contrary, parallel universes almost certainly do exist. Around the same time, bookstores received Are Universes Thicker Than Blackberries?, wherein Martin Gardner dismisses theories of multiple universes as “frivolous fantasies.” If you had seen all this, you may well have asked yourself: Is this really a matter on which I need to form an opinion? When Paranormal Investigators turn bad A UFO investigator laces a conservative councillor?s toothbrush with deadly radium, a Bigfoot investigator beheads a local tourist after killing three others, welcome to the world of the paranormal killers. Martin Jeffrey of Mystery Magazine writes... All eyes on red planet: Mars zooms in this week for closest approach in 60,000 years. Mars is sneaking up on us this week. On 27 August the red planet will be less than 56 million kilometres from Earth, the closest it's been for 60,000 years. Pretendster Suffer the embarrassment of a meager friend pool no longer. Video gamers' demographics changing from domain of white teenaged boys Since 1996, QuakeCon has been the video game industry's Woodstock, a 21st-century blend of tough games, fast computers and mostly white, teenaged boys in black T-shirts. Pop-ups annoy, but do they work? They create as much clutter as those slippery advertising inserts that fatten a Sunday newspaper and are as inescapable as humidity in August. Net Anonymity Server Backdoored by Court order The popular Java Anonymous Proxy (JAP), used to anonymise one's comings and goings across the Internet, has been back-doored by court order. The service is currently logging access attempts to a particular, and unnamed, Web site and reporting the IP addys of those who attempt to contact it to the German police. Online Lucid Dreaming Manual Free Energy from the Vacuum Well, it's not exactly new but it's probably news to you. Heh, and you thought solar was cool. Genetic Tests in Your Bedroom "Researchers at the University of California at San Diego have found a way to test biological samples for the existence of protein molecules using a standard CD-ROM drive and inkjet printer. The findings could lead to the development of genetic tests that ordinary people could take in the privacy of their own bedrooms. The team released a paper this week in the Organic & Biomolecular Chemistry journal outlining the procedure." Humans trained to hunger like Pavlov's dogs Humans can be trained to crave food in response to abstract prompts just like Pavlov's dogs, reveals new research. Write a Story, Go to Jail Brian Robertson was just months away from graduation at Moore High School in Moore, Oklahoma, last year when he found the beginnings of what he thought was a short story on a school computer. He copied the file to another computer, added some paragraphs to the initial text and then promptly got arrested. The New X-Men The Mountain Dew-fueled all-nighter is history. Today's supercoders work 40 hours a week. And two to a computer. It's called extreme programming - and it's revolutionizing the software world. Space agency sees stardust storms heading for Solar System Until ten years ago, most astronomers did not believe stardust could enter our Solar System. Then ESA's Ulysses spaceprobe discovered minute stardust particles leaking through the Sun's magnetic shield, into the realm of Earth and the other planets. Now, the same spaceprobe has shown that a flood of dusty particles is heading our way. Since its launch in 1990, Ulysses has constantly monitored how much stardust enters the Solar System from the interstellar space around it. Using an on-board instrument called DUST, scientists have discovered that stardust can actually approach the Earth and other planets, but its flow is governed by the Sun's magnetic field, which behaves as a powerful gate-keeper bouncing most of it back. However, during solar maximum - a phase of intense activity inside the Sun that marks the end of each 11-year solar cycle - the magnetic field becomes disordered as its polarity reverses. As a result, the Sun's shielding power weakens and more stardust can sneak in. Seamus Blackley speaks out…and declares: BS! In an interesting and entertaining lecture, Seamus Blackley bucked the trend of declaring how games industry revenues are bigger than the film industry, labelling such claims as “bullshit”. 'Loony' to stand for council Mr Wood, 34, of Ferriston, Banbury, has won backing from Official Monster Raving Loony Party leader, Howling Lord Hope, to run as an official candidate. DARPA/IAO Remix(unauthorized)
Google is now smarter than an internet browsing toaster! Most of us already know that you can mis-spell a word in the google search bar and not only discover the correct spelling, but also one can examine how many websites improperly spelled that word. Welp, get ready, cause now google.com can serve as a calculator. Yay..... (imagine the sounds of crickets and a bug zapper out in the woods) The Publius Enigma During the 1994 Pink Floyd Division Bell tour, a self-described messenger (using the common Latin first name Publius) started posting to the Usenet group alt.music.pink-floyd through an anonymous contact service. The letters use the following subject line or some variation of it: ">}}}}}}}}} T H E M E S S A G E {{{{{{{{{". (The name Publius was also used as a pseudonym early in U.S. history by the writers of The Federalist Papers. John Jay, James Madison, and Alexander Hamilton wrote under one name to promote discussion of an idea.) The posts continued on an irregular basis, with a mysterious tone and many ambiguous clues, inviting us to look at the new album with open minds, discuss it in the newsgroup, and solve some sort of enigma or puzzle in The Division Bell. Publius promised a unique, tangible prize.
File swapper fights RIAA subpoena An anonymous California computer user went to court Thursday to challenge the recording industry's file-trading subpoenas, charging that they are unconstitutional and violate her right to privacy. Flaming Fire hits the road Hi. Here's all the Flaming Fire Bible stuff going on: We're having an installation this Saturday in Brooklyn; then Aug. 29 we'll be in Lincoln, Neb; Aug 30 and 31 we'll be in Chicago. AND Aug. 25-Sept. 1, our site administrator, Adam, will have an illustration tent set up at the Burning Man festival in Nevada. Hope you can make one of these events. High-Tech Word of Mouth Maims Movies in a Flash Fatima Bholat stepped into the summer sunshine, fresh from the darkened theater where she'd just seen "The Hulk." It was opening day, and the 16-year-old high school junior had rushed out with her younger brother to see director Ang Lee's moody take on the big green superhero. XML machine the successor to von Neumann? The most basic principle of a von Neumann machine is that programs and data can share memory as they are both just strings of bits. This is still the basis of the architecture of all commercial computers. These two concepts came together at the dawn of computer history and have tended to drift apart ever since. The COBOL programming language does not look anything like data. Object orientation brought process and data closer together but even then the storage of the two was totally different. My So-Called Universe :: Disinformation :: . Jim Holt profiles the cosmology debate that divides scientists like Paul Davies, Martin Gardner, Andrei Linde and David K. Lewis: the search to prove the existence of parallel universes, multiverses and, possibly, counterfactual histories. Mars, Mars, Mars!
Satisfy Your Cyberfetishism @ SentientWave ~ Blogging towards the future - A Ubiquitous Environment Society ~ Earthstation 5 sez: BRING IT! Earth Station 5 Declares War Against The Motion Picture Association of America TECHSPLOITATION: Nanophobia Ever since I read Greg Bear's weird-ass book Blood Music back in the early 1990s, I've been pretty excited about nanotechnology. Bear imagines a future in which nanobots take over the world by rebuilding humans on a molecular level and turning them into raw materials for their bizarre, mystical new society, the noosphere. Playing fair: Gamers and violence The trouble is that computer and video-game critics have never paid enough attention to gamers themselves, the people who are supposedly sitting glassy-eyed in front of their screens, soaking up harmful lessons taught by irresponsible, profit-hungry game companies. In an increasingly censorious legislative environment, where many lawmakers want to ban or restrict sales of violent games, this lack of understanding is worth pointing out. Cops Against the Drug War Now retired after a 26-year career with the New Jersey State Police, Cole is leading a new group of current and former law-enforcement officials who are similarly disillusioned with the war on drugs. Called Law Enforcement Against Prohibition, or LEAP, this nationwide organization takes as its premise that the war on drugs is, as Cole puts it, "a total and abject failure." Stupid Creatures: Worse than sock monkeys, and therefore better. These things are great!! I only wish I could remember how to upload pictures! Matrix Revolutions Trailer | NEW Today sees the official launch of the International trailer for THE MATRIX REVOLUTIONS. WHAT IS IT? QTVR - an unknown object Mars Orbiter Camera Public Target Request Site "The purpose of this web site is to solicit public and science community suggestions for future high resolution images to be obtained by the Mars Global Surveyor (MGS) Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC). The Music of Mathematics This is a collection of music by John Greschak (conveniently in written scores, RealAudio, and Midi), which is derived from various interesting mathematical objects. Yo, God! God Detectors
U.S. Tipped On Imminent Bombing Days Ago: Chalabi "BAGHDAD, August 20 (IslamOnline.net & News Agencies) - Casting new doubts on who really stands behind the bombing of the U.N. office in Baghdad and benefits from such an attack, a member of the U.S.-handpicked interim Governing Council said Wednesday, August 20, they had received intelligence on August 14 that a truck bombing was imminent in the capital said shared it with U.S. intelligence agents." Bush toy was not much fun "All last week, during the grueling sandbox battles in my backyard between my GI Joes and the hideous armies of Grog, the GW Bush doll was missing. I thought it was lost for good. But then, after my GI Joes won the day and made the sandbox safe again, there the Bush doll was, front and center, looking splendid and unruffled in pristine army fatigues. Evidently it'd been playing dress-up all week with my sister's Ken doll but was right there to take the credit for the GI Joe's victory." Japanese Yen for A.I. | The Atom Project "Japanese researchers in robot technology are advocating a grand project, under which the government would spend 50 billion yen a year over three decades to develop a humanoid robot with the mental, physical and emotional capacity of a 5-year-old human. MORPH 3, a 38-cm-tall humanoid robot, tries to stand after being laid on its back during an experiment at the Chiba Institute of Technology in Narashino, Chiba Prefecture. The researchers believe the Atom Project, inspired by the popular robot animation series 'Tetsuwan Atom' by the late cartoonist Osamu Tezuka, would help promote scientific and technological advances in Japan, just like the U.S. Apollo Project, which not only succeeded in landing men on the moon but contributed to a broad range of technological breakthroughs." The Book Of FSCK : Elke interviews me. Yeah. There's this new meme floating around the 'net, in which one weblogger interviews another on the interviewees request. Anyhow, since I'm not one to break a meme (after all, my license plate says AYBABTU), here are the rules if you'd like to be interviewed by me: SMS vs. Hollywood, or The Most Feared Thumbs This Side of Roger Ebert
Donner, Party of 28! Your Table is Ready! Archaeologists might have found Donner camp Music Parody Site Pulls the Plug Nothing can deflate a joke faster than the threat of a lawsuit. Deep X-ray scan reveals black-hole baby boom: Census shows gas-gobbling in galaxies is increasingly common. Baby black holes gobbling hot gas in the cores of galaxies are more common today than they were ten billion years ago, a new census finds. Bookslut Tears Salon a New One Maybe they're desperately trying to be edgy. They're bleeding money and readers, and I guess the way to be noticed and get free publicity is by being an asshole. So as much as I want everyone to read the review to see how angry it is (Laura, honey, it's fiction -- cult fiction even -- it shouldn't make you this angry), I'm afraid of increasing their hits even a smidge. So if you read it and you're as baffled as me, write a letter to the editor. I think I'm going to have to as well. Prescience, from the G.I.A. I've been pulling links off the top of my head, searching the sTaRe database to make sure they haven't been posted before, and I have to say I'm surprised to see that Prescience didn't show up. Six volumes of this impressive online magazine are ready for your discovery, combining art, culture, science, psychedelics, and short fiction with a nod to Philip K. Dick. YAWN 'You want to change the tyres on your 2006 model Ford Prefect? Anything other than genuine Ford tyres -- with the genuine Ford ID chip -- will disable your car. Your Sony MP3-playing nasal hair trimmer will only work with genuine Sony batteries: don't even think about trying to make alternatives, because that'll make you a criminal. And no, you can't buy those jeans -- the RFID chip in the label says they're only for sale in America. By the way, the same RFID chips on the clothes you are allowed to buy may well be radiating all manner of things about your location: you're not allowed to find out for yourself, as possession of an unlicensed receiver is a criminal act.' Chaos & Fractals in Financial Markets by J. Orlin Grabbe I first came across something called "dynamical systems" while I was at the University of California at Berkeley. But I hadn't paid much attention to them. I went through Berkeley very fast, and didn't have time to screw around. But when I got to Harvard for grad school, I bought René Thom's book Structural Stability and Morphogenesis, which had just come out in English. The best part of the book was the photos. This site is certified 33% EVIL by the Gematriculator Tonight on KPFA: No Other Radio Network Tonight at 11:59pm (PST) on KPFA Berkeley: Chicago Spooked by 'Ghost Planes' Just what are the ghost planes of Chicago? Burning Man: who's going? Any other STARE-folk going to Burning Man this year? I don't know where I'm camping yet, but I'd love to meet any STARE readers or posters. Sergio Vieira de Mello's last press conference To understand the man, Kofi Annan sent to represent the United Nations in Iraq, one has to look no further than his latest press conference on August 13. Sergio Vieira de Mello died today in the suicide bombing of the UN embassy in Baghdad, less than three weks before then end of his tenure. S.W.A.T., a movie review by Al Gore If you help make me the next President of the United States, I'll give you a . . . HUNDRED MILLION DOLLARS!!! That's right. Just vote for me in 2004 and I'll give you $100 million! Who's Holding the Aces Now? Rob McGarvey is, in the lingo of the blackjack world, an advantage player. A card counter. To maximize his take, he keeps track of the cards as they're dealt, and tailors his bets based on the cards his system predicts will hit the felt next. Unexplained Sightings Met With Denial "While flying over Lake Michigan in 1981, TWA Captain Phil Schultz saw a 'large, round, silver metal object' with dark portholes equally spaced around the circumference, which 'descended into the atmosphere from above,' according to his hand-written report. Schultz and his first officer braced themselves for a mid-air collision; the object suddenly made a high speed turn and departed. Boom-Boom, Out Go the Lights! (Again?) ALL of Georgia was without power today, and officials in the impoverished former Soviet republic were struggling to determine the cause of the blackout. 'Good' Worm Fixes Infected Computers A new Internet worm emerged today that is designed to seek out and fix any computer that remains vulnerable to "Blaster," the worm that attacked more than 500,000 computers worldwide last week. Myths Over Miami To homeless children sleeping on the street, neon is as comforting as a night-light. Angels love colored light too. After nightfall in downtown Miami, they nibble on the NationsBank building -- always drenched in a green, pink, or golden glow. 'They eat light so they can fly,' eight-year-old Andre tells the children sitting on the patio of the Salvation Army's emergency shelter on NW 38th Street. Andre explains that the angels hide in the building while they study battle maps. 'There's a lot of killing going on in Miami,' he says. 'You want to fight, want to learn how to live, you got to learn the secret stories.' The small group listens intently to these tales told by homeless children in shelters. hate.com Hate has a new home, and it's called the Internet. The gospel of hate is being projected worldwide, more cheaply and effectively than ever before. The documentary Hate.Com: Extremists on the Internet examines this growing movement and those who preach hate online. Garofalo in the "Crossfire"
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