"Design Principles for the Immune System and Other Distributed Autonomous Systems" is the first book to examine the inner workings of such a variety of distributed autonomous systems--from insect colonies to high level computer programs to the immune system. It offers insight into the fascinating world of these systems that emerge from the interactions of seemingly autonomous components and brings us up-to-date on the state of research in these areas. Using the immune system and certain aspects of its functions as a primary model, this book examines many of the most interesting and troubling questions posed by complex systems. How do systems choose the right set of agents to perform appropriate actions with appropriate intensities at appropriate times? How in the immune system, ant colonies and metabolic networks does the diffusion and binding of a large variety of chemicals to their receptors permit coordination of system action? What advantages drive the various systems to complexity, and by what mechanisms do the systems cope with the tendency toward unwieldiness and randomness of large complex systems?
Link Breakthrough in mutual comprehension: Article by Françoise Ploquin. Intro: "There is something disconcerting about hearing a French person ask for directions in Florence, Seville or Coimbra in English. Or hearing a native Spanish or Portuguese speaker do the same in Paris. It ignores the family relationship between the languages of southern Europe and Latin America, all of which are descended from Latin. It is not only desirable but possible to establish mutual comprehension between native speakers of Romance languages — French, Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese and Romanian — and it does not take long."
Link Planet in peril: Humans push natural systems to the brink
The planet's life support systems are being pushed to breaking point - but it is not too late to act, says a major report.
Link Strange Dolls:
 DaddyD writes: "I don't know why, but it really does seem as though I always end up stumbling across some twisted collection of the doll-makers art during the springtime. Maybe it's some kind of subverted outlet of the typical springtime fantasies. Maybe it's the only natural expression of a stunted and malformed libido. Maybe I should see a therapist. I know YOU should see strangedolls.net. It's a lovely collection of cuddly things for creeps. These dolls could star in a Tim Burton film, if you know what I mean. Think Addams Family nursery or what may be lurking underneath Pinheads pillow. Sweet dreams are most decidedly not made of these..." Link Bet on the snowball: The poetry of blogging. Quote: "Tell ya what. I'm fifty-seven years old, and I've been pushing large rocks for short distances up a lot of hills, for a long time. Now, with blogging, I get to roll snowballs down hills. Some don't go very far. But some get pretty big once they start rolling. See, each snowball grows as others link to the original idea, and add their own thoughts and ideas. By the time the snowball gets big enough to have some impact, it really isn't my idea any more." (via M. Sixtus)
Link "and finally, I’d like to thank my high school physics teacher ...": The sci-tech oscar winners won’t be getting teary-eyed on prime time. But for special-effects lovers, these techie brainiacs are Hollywood’s little-heralded heroes.
Link Brother Of Jesus? Did a stone box, an ossuary, once contain the bones of the brother of Jesus, as its inscription said?
Link Film about volcanoes falls victim to creationists: IMAX theaters in several Southern cities have decided not to show a film on volcanoes out of concern that its references to evolution might offend those with fundamental religious beliefs.
Link Blogmaverick: DaddyD writes: "Mark Cuban, early tech pioneer, basketball team owner and blogger, is also a media content owner and creator. He is wealthy, wired, and he is helping defend Grokster against MGM. Despite the major medias attempts at making this p2p issue look like a classic Disney tale of evil pirates vs. courageous creators, the real battle is turning into old school distributors against digital content creators. That's the way Mr. Cuban and the EFF are looking at it at least. Cuban's current business of HDTV and Film development and distribution might lend some credibility to his argument. If that doesn't, well, his money might. Cuban has written about his reasons for funding Grokster's defense and his take on the real issues behind the recent copyright kerfuffles. This really sort of feels like one of those historical moments you always read about. History in the making so to speak."
Link EuroBillTracker is an international non-profit volunteer team dedicated to tracking Euro notes around the world. Each user enters the serial numbers and location information for each note they obtain into EuroBillTracker. From this information, the site extracts:
Diffusion information: Each Euro country has its own range of note serial numbers and from this information we can generate diffusion graphs that tell us how the notes travel to other countries. See the Diffusion section for more information. Tracking information: When a note is re-entered, the users who previously entered it are notified via email. These hits can be seen in the statistics section. Statistics and rankings: Who enters the most notes, which are the best countries? Where are the notes currently situated? Link Trilobis 65:
 Trilobis 65 is a semi-submerged dwelling environment. Reaching 20 metres in length designed by Giancarlo Zema for habitation by six people at sea. It is ideal for living in bays, atolls and maritime parks. The main aim of the project is to allow anyone to live in a unique environment through a self sufficient, non-polluting dwelling cell in unison with their ocean surroundings. Link Where faith is a healer: Intro: "A recent Reader's Digest survey found that 31% of people thought Easter was sponsored by Cadbury's, while 48% had no idea what the religious festival was about. The 16-24 age group had the lowest level of knowledge. The survey is more evidence of how Britain has been comprehensively de-Christianised in the past 50 years. What's interesting is how peculiar this phenomenon is in a global context and how blind we are to our peculiarity. As we have become increasingly wedded to our faithlessness, the world beyond western Europe has experienced an astonishing increase in religiosity. We have painfully and slowly been forced to acknowledge this in the US and in the Muslim world - and it completely bewilders the faithless. Secular Europe is losing an ability to speak a language - that of faith. It pretends that faith is simply a personal hobby. When the pretence doesn't work, it peers, fearfully, at a world all around it that has become profoundly foreign. Nowhere is that more true than Africa. It is another part of the globe that urgently needs to be mapped in terms of its rapidly intensifying religiosity if we are to begin to understand what is happening there. Some argue that the intensification of religious identity and consciousness - evident from the Pakistani madrasas to the Baptist churches of the American south - finds its apogee in Africa. Christianity and Islam are expanding dramatically as they gather new converts, while African traditional religions are experiencing a renaissance."
Link 'Oracle' Computer Could Have All The Answers Built In: Instead of waiting weeks for computers to grind out solutions to complex problems, scientists may someday get answers instantly thanks to a new type of "oracle" computer that will have all the answers built in, predict Duke University computer scientists and engineers. When a question is posed, the computer will provide the answer already paired with the question in the very structure of the computer's processing unit.
Link Drug companies doing trials of inhaled insulin:
 About six new products are now being tested that would allow insulin-dependent diabetics to receive their doses via an inhaler, rather than an injection. Link Chirac Sees EU Deal with Japan on Fusion Research: French President Jacques Chirac said Monday he believed the EU would soon reach agreement with Japan over the site of a proposed experimental nuclear fusion reactor.
Link monochrom media announcement // "Metropolis": Feature about monochrom as XviD AVI file (German language).
Link (22 MB) ROC vs. PRC When will chinese (PRC, peoples republic of china) patience be exhausted? How long will "the other china" (Taiwan, ROC, republic of china) exist?
Some background from the Taiwan side: protests and "Not 'one country, two systems', but 'one country, two fingers.'". The mainland view: china daily 1 and china daily 2 And some background information:strategic value of Taiwan Link New space prizes target space elevators: Space elevators - a futuristic idea in which space is accessed via long tethers with the power needed being transmitted on beams of light - are the target of two new cash prizes, sponsored by NASA. The prizes, announced on Wednesday evening, are the first in a series called "Centennial Challenges", modelled on the $10 million X Prize recently awarded to the first privately developed spacecraft. Winning teams will receive $50,000 in 2005 for either building the strongest strand of material or for using light to power a wireless robot up a cable.
Link The End of Rational Capitalism: This article by John Bellamy Foster is reconstructed from the notes to a keynote address delivered at the annual conference of the Alumni Association of the Department of Economics of Istanbul University, Turkey, December 18, 2004.
Intro: >The twentieth century’s dominant myth was that of a “rational capitalism.” The two economists who did the most to promote this idea were John Maynard Keynes and Joseph Schumpeter. Both were responding to the great historical crisis of capitalism manifested in the First World War, the Great Depression, and the Second World War. In the wake of the greatest set of horrors the world had ever seen, accompanied also by the rise of an alternative, contending system in the Soviet Union, it was necessary for capitalism following the Second World War to reestablish itself ideologically as well as materially. In terms of the ideological requirement, the two economists who accomplished this most effectively were Keynes and Schumpeter—not simply because they epitomized the best in bourgeois economic ideology, but also because they were the leading representatives of bourgeois economic science. What they set out in their analyses were the requirements of a rational capitalism and at least the hope that these requirements would be achieved.< Link India's Lower House Passes Illegal Patent Drug Bill: India's lower house of parliament passed a patents bill on Tuesday making it illegal to copy patented drugs, a practice that has made cheaper medicines available in India and abroad. Lawmakers of the Congress party-led ruling alliance and their communist allies passed the bill with a voice vote, a key step to fulfilling India's WTO commitments. The bill, which will become law once it is approved by the upper house, also covers other products such as chemicals, mobile phones and computers. (via histologion)
Link Why does moving your hands in front of the TV or radio antenna influence the reception? David Hysell, an associate professor of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Cornell University, explains.
Link Extinct or not, the story won't die:
 Quote: "When two German tourists turned off a Tasmanian road in early February, planning to camp for the night, they could not have known that they would be the catalyst for a media frenzy. One of them walked into the bush, looking for water. He found it. But he also stumbled across - and photographed - what he says was a Tasmanian tiger. When news of his two digital images leaked out a few weeks later, The Hobart Mercury, The Sydney Morning Herald, Channel Nine and the ABC worked themselves into a lather. They were as desperate to track down the elusive holidaymakers as they were to track down the tiger itself." Link Quintessenz presents 'PIS - Public Intelligence Service': After the so called NSA-Hack, which was in fact investigative journalism supported by text and data mining, Quintessenz presents the next step: An evolution to an art project in cooperation with David Bovill (artist in residence at the MQ Vienna) which will be launched on April 1st at the Electric Avenue, MQ Vienna, 19:00.
 Link monochrom media announcement // monochrom on ARTE's "Metropolis": Today (March 26, 2005; 11:25 PM) French/German culture TV channel ARTE will air an eight minute report about monochrom.
French Link German Link Why some see colours in numbers: There are many types of synaesthesia. US scientists say they can explain why some people 'see' colours when they look at numbers and letters.
Link The Nature of CIA Intervention in Venezuela: Philip Agee interviewed by Jonah Gindin. Intro: >Philip Agee is a former CIA operative who left the agency in 1967 after becoming disillusioned by the CIA's support for the status quo in the region. Says Agee, "I began to realize that what I and my colleagues had been doing in Latin America in the CIA was no more than a continuation of nearly five-hundred years of this, exploitation and genocide and so forth. And I began to think about what, until then would have been unthinkable, which was to write a book on how it all works.” The book, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, was an instant best-seller and was eventually published in over thirty languages. In 1978, three years after the publication of CIA Diary, Agee and a group of like-minded journalists began publishing the Covert Operations Information Bulletin (now Covert Action Quarterly), as part of a strategy of "guerilla journalism" aimed at destabilizing the CIA and exposing their operations. Not surprisingly, the response of the US government and the CIA in particular to Agee's work has been somewhat aggressive, and he has been forced to divide his time since the 1970s between Germany and Cuba. He currently represents a Canadian petroleum technology firm in Latin America.<
Link Octopuses occasionally stroll around on two arms, UC Berkeley biologists report.
 Two species of tropical octopus have learned a neat trick to avoid predators — they lift up six of their arms and walk backward on the other two. Link with video Newly Found Dinosaur Tissue Raises Hope of Extracting DNA: A 70-million-year-old Tyrannosaurus rex recently discovered in Montana has apparently yielded the improbable: soft tissues, including blood vessels and possibly cells, that 'retain some of their original flexibility, elasticity and resilience.'
Link Students for an Orwellian Society:
 Intro: "What is SOS? Students for an Orwellian Society (SOS) is a nationwide student group. Although SOS has always been a nationwide student group, there is evidence to suggest that it first appeared at Columbia University. The mission of SOS is to promote the vision of a society based upon the principles of Ingsoc, first articulated by George Orwell in his prophetic novel, 1984. As an Oceania-wide organization, SOS has a number of local chapters. For a partial listing, see our contact section." (via DaddyD) Link War of words over operating systems' safety: Doubts were cast this week over the security of three major software systems formerly regarded as safe havens from hacker attacks and viruses. But experts argue that despite the new findings, these systems are still more secure than their Microsoft counterparts because hackers overwhelmingly target the Windows software.
Link spamgraffiti is a series of online installations created from spam. Each environment is created by spooling through one email account and visually articulating the spam on a series of layers. Newer spam appears above and slowly filters out older spam below. As the rate of spam increases over time per account, the page itself appears less and less like the previous generation. Each screen showcases the 25 most recent spam in the account.
Link 21 Iraqi poets in translation: At a time when Iraq mainly exists in the popular Western imagination as a war zone of inscrutable violence, it seems apt to showcase some of the complexity, sophistication and humanity of contemporary Iraqi culture.
Link Korea: reunification by stealth? Intro: "There's a kind of reunification occurring between the long divided North and South Korea; it's based on cheap labour, economic opportunism and is happening in a place called Kaesong. It will probably be beneficial to only two people - those who dominate the still mighty chaebols of the ROK (those conglomerates such as Hyundai, Samsung etc) and Kim Jong-il, the unchallenged, un-elected and seemingly un-seatable ruler of the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea (North Korea). The chaebols are getting a cheap source of labour, closer to home than even China, at a time when they need to reduce their costs to maximise their profits and also need a new stick to beat their notoriously vocal trade unions. Kim needs some hard currency to keep his regime afloat and some jobs for his underemployed and near-starving population. It could just be a win-win situation for both powerful groups - an alliance of raw capitalism and raw dictatorship, two phenomena which have often found themselves comfortable bedfellows."
Link Network of top scientists helped 'Angel of Death' Mengele: Quote: >The "Angel of Death" Josef Mengele, who was long thought to have been the black sheep of Germany's scientists under the Nazi regime, was in fact supported by a network of elite researchers, new research has revealed.<
Link Study Unravels Mathematics of Wildfires:
 Wildfires can quickly rage out of control, wreaking destruction for miles. Any information about how they may behave can help scientists better contain and fight the flames. Findings published online today by the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences provide additional insight into the blazes' behavior: they follow the same mathematical laws as other natural events such as earthquakes do. Link The nastiest ways of making you talk: Quote: "The prisoner was strapped to a bench and a rat was placed on his stomach. The rat was then covered with a metal cage and hot coals were placed on top. In this situation the animal gets really uncomfortable and will do anything to get away [...]"
Link Steamboy Rages Against Machines:
 London in 1866 might seem a strange time and place for a Katsuhiro Otomo film. In 1988, this legend of manga and anime set a new standard for futuristic cinema with his Akira, a post-apocalyptic tale set in Tokyo in 2019. If Akira refined our notions of science fiction, Otomo's new film, Steamboy, expands them. Link Hell on earth: When Salvator Rosa painted witches and demons, he wasn't indulging his macabre imagination - he was depicting real life.
Link Undergraduate Develops Antenna To Help Robot Move Like A Cockroach:
 Can a robot learn to navigate like a cockroach? To help researchers find out if a mechanical device can mimic the pesky insect's behavior, a Johns Hopkins engineering student has built a flexible, sensor-laden antenna. Link "Art, State, Sabotage" by Kim Paice: "In recent years, government has tended to see an ever-narrowing line between art and threats to the state." Article on the exhibition "Incorporated: a recent (incomplete) history of infiltrations, actions and propositions utilizing contemporary art" at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinnati: "...artists who mine the techniques of the state to challenge the state’s authority and free-reign policing. Viewers leave Incorporated knowing quite a bit about resistance and how to take up tools of the state, such as fingerprinting, document issuance, media manipulation, and surveillance creatively to redefine the nation-state."
Via Interactivist Info Exchange
Women in Net.Art: A Tribute by Ana Boa-Ventura. "Artists such as Char Davies, Victoria Vesna or Thecla Schiphorst introduced ideas that are fundamental to feminism to this day ... Brenda, Sherry, Char, Victoria, Thecla: without them net.art would be a little bit poorer."
net_art_review weekly feature from 20 March 2005 Link Pindices: Making Individual Political Activity Visible. How political have you been this week, based on acts you have performed? How much of a citizen? Pindices seeks to make individual political activity visible, but not in the ways typically measured by polling agencies or using the normal methods of social science. Rather than looking at political ideologies, institutions, groups or identities, this project starts with the individual and their acts, and invites participants to make public a reckoning of their everyday political or citizenship activity by creating their own personal political indices during 'Making Things Public'. Somewhere between a public art project and bad social science, Pindices offers ways of thinking about what matters to individuals and how this is made visible.
Pindices Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy Squashed Philosophers:
 DaddyD writes: "Squashed Philosophers is a site full of thoughts from the past, formatted in a present friendly manner. Not everyone has the time or desire to wade through thousands of pages of dusty words in order to dig out the gems of thought buried within. We're a gogo generation, with less time than brains (although it could be argued for some that they are severely lacking in both). That's why squashed Philosophers just gives us the good stuff. The really important ideas and the really juicy bits." Link Drug took Stevenson face to face with Hyde: The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was written by Robert Louis Stevenson under the influence of a hallucinogenic drug similar to LSD, according to new research. Doctors believe the Scots author wrote the classic exploration of good and evil while being treated with a derivative of ergot, a potentially deadly hallucinogenic fungus.
Link Bahrain: the royals rule: President George Bush has hailed Bahrain’s progress towards democracy. Yet Bahrain’s emir proclaimed himself king three years ago, promulgated a constitution giving him full powers and has attacked the few remaining civil liberties. Arbitrary imprisonment is commonplace and one of the main human rights organisations has been closed.
Link Da Vinci code conspirators? The real Knights Templar are the Rotary Club in fancy dress: The Sunday Herald goes in search of the Holy Grail .... and finds an ancient order at Rosslyn chapel.
Link On This Wiki, Everyone's a Critic: Stanford's Lawrence Lessig, whose next book will be revised by visitors to a collaborative Web site, explains "user-supplied innovation". Quote: "In December, Stanford Law School Professor Lawrence Lessig announced on his blog that he would open up the revision of his book, Code and Other Laws of Cyberspace, to public editing. On Mar. 16, he revealed that startup JotSpot's wiki, an editable Web page, will be the vehicle for people to participate in the revision process, the results of which will be published in print this fall. In addition to his work at Stanford, Lessig, an outspoken critic of current copyright laws, chairs the Creative Commons project, a nonprofit organization that's helping forge new, more flexible copyright rules for the Digital Era. On Mar. 17, Creative Commons will announce a new license for wikis that basically reserves rights for the collective writers on a wiki rather than assigning them to any particular contributor. BusinessWeek's Silicon Valley bureau chief, Robert D. Hof, caught up with Lessig to talk about how all this will work." (via Wiener Lloyd)
Link New Theory Of How Planets Form Finds Havens Of Stability Amid Turbulence: A new theory of how planets form finds havens of stability amid violent turbulence in the swirling gas that surrounds a young star. These protected areas are where planets can begin to form without being destroyed. The theory will be published in the February issue of the journal Icarus.
Link Allan Sekula / Performance Under Working Conditions:
 Allan Sekula has devoted his artistic and documentary oeuvre to researching and recording the world of labor and its transformation in the face of the global economy. From early performances enacted as part of the California anti-war movement to his latest work, Black Tide, which documents the Prestige oil tanker disaster on the Gallic coast of Spain, this volume presents a comprehensive overview of Sekula's visual work and texts. In addition to a retrospective look at his artistic and documentary projects, Performance Under Working Conditions will collect Sekula's important theoretical writings on photography, including texts from Photography Against the Grain, now out of print. Introduction by Sabine Breitwiesser. Foreward by Karner Dietrich. Interview by Benjamin H.D. Buchloh. Link The rhetoric of breakthroughs in the communication of science: Essay by António Fernando Cascais (Communication Sciences Department, Universidade Nova de Lisboa).
Intro: >There is a controversy in the practice of science communication where it is commonplace to claim that the presentation of scientific results is more important than the explanation of the scientific process. In this article I elaborate the idea of a “rhetoric of breakthroughs” which consists of: a) representing scientific activity by its products; b) confining the scientific processes to the attainment of final and cumulative results; c) exclusively isolating the results which are evaluated a posteriori as being successful applications (breakthroughs).< Link Female circumcision is a vote winner: Quote: >When the president's wife sponsors the circumcision of 1,500 young girls to win votes for her husband, you know you've got a problem persuading ordinary people and the government that female genital mutilation (FGM) is a bad idea. And when the woman who is now Minister of Social Welfare, Gender and Women's Affairs, threatens to "sew up the mouths" of those who preach against FGM, you realise that you are facing a really big uphill struggle.<
One woman's struggle against a barbarous custom (via Histologion). Link Frozen Sea Gives Hope of Finding Life On Mars: The strongest evidence yet that life could exist on Mars has been discovered by scientists, in the form of a sea of ice near the planet’s equator.
Link Attempted cyber-heist raises keylogging fears: Keystroke-logging software allegedly provided hackers with the passwords needed to attempt the theft of £229 million from a Japanese bank.
Link Hell is other people removing your cigarette: France's National Library has airbrushed Jean-Paul Sartre's trademark cigarette out of a poster of the chain-smoking philosopher to avoid prosecution under an anti-tobacco law (via spankaliscious).
Link Brand USA is in trouble, so take a lesson from Big Mac: Intro: >Last Tuesday, George Bush delivered a major address on his plan to fight terrorism with democracy in the Arab world. On the same day, McDonald's launched a massive advertising campaign urging Americans to fight obesity by eating healthily and exercising. Any similarities between McDonald's "Go Active! American Challenge" and Bush's "Go Democratic! Arabian Challenge" are purely coincidental. Sure, there is a certain irony in being urged to get off the couch by the company that popularised the "drive-thru", helpfully allowing customers to consume a bagged heart attack without having to get out of the car and walk to the counter. And there is a similar irony to Bush urging the people of the Middle East to remove "the mask of fear" because "fear is the foundation of every dictatorial regime", when that fear is the direct result of US decisions to install and arm the regimes that have systematically terrorised for decades. But since both campaigns are exercises in rebranding, that means facts are besides the point.<
Link Atmosphere found on Enceladus:
 Enceladus has joined the small but select band of moons known to have an atmosphere. The Cassini spacecraft, currently orbiting Saturn, has found a layer of water vapour surrounding the icy moon, which is likely to be issuing from its surface or interior. Link nobody here: "I'd like to apologize for all this. Toes. Extra toes growing from my feet."
nobody here.justme.me.here Vietnamese Claiming to be Victims of Agent Orange Decry US Dismissal of Lawsuit:
 Intro: "Vietnamese claiming to be victims of Agent Orange are outraged a U.S. court has dismissed their lawsuit against the chemical's manufacturers for crimes against humanity. The U.S. military in the Vietnam War sprayed the defoliant, which Vietnamese say has caused illnesses ranging from cancer to birth defects. A federal judge in New York Thursday decided the suit had no basis in law, and the plaintiffs had failed to prove a clear link between Agent Orange and their illnesses. The Vietnam War ended nearly 30 years ago, but there was renewed bitterness on the streets of Hanoi Friday after a United States judge threw out a lawsuit by Vietnamese who claim they are victims of the Agent Orange chemical sprayed during what people here call the American War." (via histologion) Link General Semantics and the Chicken Suit Murders - The hypnotic realities of Dr Ronald Dante and Dr Michael Dean:
 Intro: "What is it like to have someone attach themselves to the essence of who you are, and feed off that essence for the rest of your life and beyond, like a vampire sucking your nourishment? And what if you became rich and famous and this vampire on your essence also became rich and famous, so that no one could ever remember you without remembering them?" Link Russion Oligarchs want Immortality: Intro: >When life is good, it is especially bitter to admit that it will end some day. And this simple truth encourages nouveaux riches Russians, called oligarchs here, to spend through the nose on all kinds of rejuvenation procedures and on scientific research to create the "elixir of youth." The people who have everything you can dream about, from castles in Scotland to garages with a dozen Ferraris, want absolute, 100% joie de vivre in their own immortality.<
Link 13 things that do not make sense: The placebo effect, the Belfast homeopathy results, the Pioneer anomaly and some more.
Link The Art of James Bond:
 DaddyD writes: "James Bond. You know who he is, you've probably seen a movie or two, and might even be aware of the fact that his life started in print. What you might not have know is that he has had quite a life as an international man of Art. Aside from a very long running stint as a comic strip, he has also been the subject of countless illustrations. Book Covers, Posters, Magazine Spreads... Bond Based art is massive. The Art of Bond is massive." Link 300gig ipod:
 Instructions for using a standard 3.5" hard disk with your ipod. After making the adapter, there is another howto for formatting the drive so that it will be correctly recognized by the device (via Reblog). Link Rent A German:
 Quote: "rentagerman.de offers a wide range of Germans for your personal and social needs. You can select the German of your choice for an exclusive lifetime experience: Imagine to appear with your German at parties, family events, or just hang out with them at the local shopping center. No matter, which occasion you choose, you can surely impress your environment by presenting an original German. If you are german or know a German, who wants to participate in the rentagerman network, please don´t hesitate to add your German to our site. On success, you will get 40% of the rental fee! So, enjoy our Human resources and make the rentagerman community grow fast!" Link Are Nanobacteria Making Us Ill?
 Intro: "Olavi Kajander didn't mean to discover the mysterious particles that have been called the most primitive organisms on Earth and that could be responsible for a series of painful and sometimes fatal illnesses. He was simply trying to find out why certain cultures of mammalian cells in his lab would die no matter how carefully he prepared them." Link Searching for the Welsh-Hindi link: Ms Mathur noticed the similarities after moving to BBC Radio Wales A BBC journalist is urging helpful linguists to come forward to help solve a mystery - why the Hindi accent has so much in common with Welsh.
Link Thousands join hunt for gravitational waves: On Monday 14 March, the 126th anniversary of Albert Einstein's birth, over 50,000 people around the world are helping in the hunt for the gravitational waves predicted by the great physicist nearly a century ago. These people have already downloaded the distributed-computing program Einstein@Home, which was only launched on 19 February 2005, and more than 1000 people per day are still joining.
Link Habitus: A Diaspora Journal: Quote: "Habitus Magazine is a new, international journal of Diaspora literature and culture. Our focus is the Jewish experience in the Diaspora, and Diaspora as a universal experience that mirrors and invigorates our own. Emphasizing literature, photography, criticism and reportage, our goal is to explore the lives of Jews and others in various locales around the globe."
Link The 325 Project: The goal of the "325 Project" is to comprehensively document the year 325 when the west became Christian. Contemporary or near contemporary texts, statues, coins and other artifacts are being collected as the source of facts about that time to produce a "factlog", a catalog of artifacts on a topic and the facts justified by them.
Technical decisions for the use of the "semantic web" and "rdf": format for a web of assertions - "facts" - and a language to specify a precise vocabulary; natively supported in the cross-platform Mozilla/Firefox open source browser. Link Copy-art.net is an ongoing curatorial project that aims to create an online platform to exchange works between artists, curators and the public and give the audience free access to works of art. In a copyright free society, ideas and works become more precious rather than more vulnerable, as many believe. The more ideas and works are circulated, the more valued these ideas and works will become. What you see and learn becomes part of your knowledge and nobody can change this. Your intellectual property becomes everyone’s property. To give people the freedom to copy ideas and works and get inspiration from this process is something that we need to consider seriously. This website facilitates the exchange of ideas by making artworks accessible and authorizing the use of its resources by the greatest number of people. Copy-art.net encourages the public to make creative use of works of art online multiplying the possibilities of creation. Link
The Temporary Travel Office provides services relating to tourism, technology and art. The mission of the Office is to identify sub-rational connections between mobility and technology, producing events and artifacts that might materialize such relationships for various publics.
The Travel Office invites your participation in a study of utopian destinations. Link Man with two penises loses wife: A German who persuaded doctors to give him a second penis has lost his wife after he showed her the result.
Link Don't Roll, Don't Tell: Israeli Defense Forces recruits who admit to playing "Dungeons and Dragons" are not allowed high-level security clearance, says YNet News.
Link The great divide:
 Israel's leading rapper is a rightwing Jew with Ariel Sharon on his side. His rival is a leftwing Arab who compares Jews to Nazis. Hip-hop was supposed to bring them together - but politics keeps forcing them apart. Link X-Entertainment's 1980s commercials: Hardcore Trash.
 Quote: "Welcome to X-Entertainment's Commercial Downloads Center! It's the CDC! CDC! Here, and only here, you can download, watch, and save all your favorite commercials from the 80s, ranging in topic from action figures to breakfast cereal to public service announcements starring Pat Sajak. The Clapper? It's here. Masters of the Universe? We got it." (via maledei) Link Which War Is This Anyway? Are We in World War IV? Intro: >Throughout much of the Cold War, people feared above all else a global hot war, the third great one in a century of devastating world wars; and we crept up to it more than once -- most desperately, there can be no doubt, at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962. For decades, the world was poised for that next world war; the two superpowers with their nuclear arsenals running to thousands of weapons (as they still do), a few hundred of which would have been civilization-busting, many hundreds of which might have been nuclear-winter inducing and life extinguishing; all of them cocked in their silos or loaded in the bomb-bays of Soviet or American planes, or stashed on the submarines that made up the unreachable third leg of the nuclear "tripod" and were primed for almost instantaneous action. World War III, which might have ended it all, could indeed have started, as the U.S. military feared for decades, with those Soviet tanks pouring through the Fulda Gap in Germany, and escalated from there to "theater," and finally intercontinental, ballistic missiles. It would have been a show. The last picture show, you might say. And, let's face it, it didn't happen.<
Link Critical Thinking About Energy: The Case for Decentralized Generation of Electricity: Highly centralized generation of electrical power is a paradigm that has outlived its usefulness. Decentralized generation could save $5 trillion in capital investment, reduce power costs by 40 percent, reduce vulnerabilities, and cut greenhouse gas emissions in half.
Link El Para, the Maghreb’s Bin Laden: The mysterious El Para affair in Algeria may prove that the Maghreb has become a target for the United States in its military and political redeployments. Could the Algerian government be arranging events, such as the kidnapping of foreign tourists in the Sahara and inventing its own Osama bin Laden, to capture Washington’s attention and ensure attendant arms sales?
Link Scientists Discover The Origin Of A Mysterious Physical Force:
 Ever since the 1970s, scientists have been trying to establish the cause of a repulsive force occurring between different electrostatically charged molecules, such as DNA and other biomolecules, when they are very close to each other in aqueous media. This force became know as hydration force. Link 'The Mad Monk of Lidwell Chapel' - The New Criminologist on-the-ground investigation: Intro: "The rolling hills of Devon are steeped in mystery and intrigue with numerous strange myths and legends stretching back down through the centuries. None is so gruesome however as the tale of the murderous monk who inflicted carnage on the secluded valley where his chapel was situated. Even more disturbing however is the revelation that there is more than an element of truth in the story. So much so that it is probable that this Devonian man of the cloth is England's first documented serial killer."
Link Ancient knife proves longer astronomical history: Archaeologists in northwest China's Qinghai province claimed that a 5,000-year-old stone knife with designs of constellations will extend China's history of astronomical observation by 1,000 years.
Link Hello aliens, this is Earth calling: A group of engineers has offered a solution for people who want a direct line to aliens - by broadcasting their phone calls directly into space.
Link Necrophilia among ducks ruffles research feathers: The strange case of the homosexual necrophiliac duck pushed out the boundaries of knowledge in a rather improbable way when it was recorded by Dutch researcher Kees Moeliker. It may have ruffled a few feathers, but it earned him the coveted Ig Nobel prize for biology awarded for improbable research, and next week he will be recounting his findings to UK audiences on the Ig Nobel tour.
Link Cracking The Olfactory Code In Bees:
 Tastes and smells are evocative and play a crucial role in finding food for many animals. A new study of smell perception in honeybees published in the freely-available online journal PLoS Biology now explains how bees react to a suite of scents, and reveals an olfactory map that shows remarkable correspondence to brain activity. Link Indigenous Pathways of Action and Freedom with Taiaiake Alfred. Live Streamed Seminar Series (March 7-18, 2005; 9:00 am - 12:00 pm PST). This seminar will consist in a detailed reading and discussion of Taiaiake Alfred's new book, Wasase: indigenous pathways of action and freedom, which focuses on the restoration of the warrior ethic as the basis for regenerating indigenous identities and struggles to free ourselves from colonialism.
Link (Audio Stream) Link (First chapter of book) Flickr Graph:
 Flickr Graph is an application that visualizes the social relationships inside flickr.com, it makes use of the classic attraction-repulsion algorithm for graphs (via Patrick Gruban). Link No Justice for America's Nuclear Guinea Pigs: Turning Our Backs on the Marshall Islands, Again: Intro: >Last March 1, I was in the Marshall Islands, tiny atolls in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, where we commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Bravo test. On March 1, 1954, the United States dropped a 15-megaton hydrogen bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It was one of 67 nuclear weapons tests conducted in the Marshall Islands by the U.S. between 1946 and 1958. But while many of the islanders had been evacuated in previous tests, on March 1 the people of four tiny atolls were not. In fact, they were not evacuated until for four days after the massive explosion whose radioactive cloud spread over an area about the size of New Jersey. While this story is horrible in and of itself, documents declassified during the Clinton administration appear to point to the decision by the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) to make the Marshall Islanders into human guinea pigs. It appears that there was an AEC project, named Project 4.1, whose purpose was to study the effects of radioactive fallout on human beings. Despite its public statements otherwise, it seems that the AEC decided three days after the Bravo test to make the Marshall Islanders into research subjects. It is unclear whether the Marshallese actually received medical treatments for the exposure to high levels of radiation or whether they just received tracers which helped researchers know how human beings were responding, but we do know that they have suffered extraordinarily high levels of cancer, particularly of the thyroid. Moreover, the second and third generations also have high levels of cancer and immune system diseases. Women and girls who were originally exposed during the Bravo tests also experienced high levels of stillbirths, miscarriages and deformities in their babies. "The only thing I could think of was Nazi Germany," said then U. S. Energy Secretary Hazel O'Leary upon first learning about these experiments when some documents were declassified.<
Link Mysterious limit on star size revealed: Stars cannot grow heftier than 150 times the Sun's mass, suggest observations from the Hubble Space Telescope. Astronomers have no explanation for this apparent "glass ceiling" but the finding may affect models of how heavier elements such as oxygen and iron are created and delivered through space.
Link Genome project aims to take Manhattan: 'Whole-environment sequencing' will reveal bugs in urban air.
Link "Well-behaved women seldom make history": misbehaving.net is a weblog about women and technology. It's a celebration of women's contributions to computing; a place to spotlight women's contributions as well point out new opportunities and challenges for women in the computing field. misbehaving.net
March 8th, International Women's Day Dicshunary: Normal dictionaries wait until a word is old and stale before publishing them. They need to have proof that a word has written, published citations, or is in wide popular use. The Dicshunary aims to provide a home for all the small, endangered werds that might only exist in the language of one neighbourhood, one family or even one person. Link
Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures: This is a dictionary of algorithms, algorithmic techniques, data structures, archetypical problems, and related definitions. Algorithms include common functions, such as Ackermann's function. Problems include traveling salesman and Byzantine generals. Some entries have links to implementations and more information. Index pages list entries by area and by type.
But don't use this site to cheat. Link Where's Me Culture? is a loose grouping of Cork citizens who wish to realise the potential presented by Cork being European Capital of Culture in 2005. We wish to participate in the activities of the year ahead. We are excited by the ideas put forward by those who attended the inaugural meeting and those who have been in contact since. We believe that responsibility for celebrating Cork as a cultural city is neither the sole preserve nor the sole responsibility of the Cork 2005 office. Cultural expression is the responsibility of all. We believe that imagination and energy and a willingness to help each other is more important than a large budget.
We believe in the cultural importance of having fun. Link Electronic Ghost Detectors: "UFO detectors and original electronic devices ... the best in detection systems. Priced low with quality high." Link (via Aeiou)
monochrom content update // Force Sting to appear for a bad cause! Hooray! A wonderful person donated another 10 EUR for our "Force Sting" project.
 This initiative is intended to force the rock singer "Sting" ("Russians love their children too") to appear for a bad cause (e.g. skinning seal babies, atomic energy in Eastern Europe, total extinction of species, sterilization of lefties, excessive packaging; Windows XP presentations are harmless). For this cause we want to offer him a sum of money so high that he cannot refuse. Link Life in the Fast Lane: An Introduction to Genomics Risks: Prologue: >Newspapers around the world picked up a story that came out of a session of the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, held in Seattle in February of 2004. The story reported on the results of a scientific study in which a virus carrying the gene for a growth hormone called IGF-1 was injected into the hind-leg muscles of rats. The rats were then put through an aggressive physical-training program, whereupon the targeted muscles grew between 15-30% in both size and strength, in comparison with a control group of untreated animals. The higher levels of IGF-1 occurred in the muscle tissue, but not in the bloodstream. There is the hope that someday a gene therapy program might be developed for humans suffering from muscle-wasting diseases such as muscular dystrophy.
So why the heavy media coverage of a rat study? The answer is contained in a remark made at the time by Lee Sweeney, the study's lead researcher: "Half of the e-mails I get are from patients, and the other half are from athletes." The prospect of gaining a quick advantage over others in competitive sports using gene therapy is irresistible to some -- especially because current anti-doping tests on athletes could not detect this kind of modification. The fact that this particular therapy has undergone no human safety testing is apparently a trivial point: The dark stories about health damage in later life to the athletes of the former East German communist regime, who were treated by their own government as experimental laboratory animals, appear to hold no terrors for them. The great irony is, of course, that every incremental step in the technological enhancement of performance acts as a spur for the next one. The cycle recurs with increasing rapidity as the rate of innovation grows, as the benefits of newer techniques leapfrog those of their predecessors. Before too long a great flood of experimental gene therapies will be pouring out of the world's research laboratories. In the not-too-distant future the results of athletic competitions may reflect nothing so much as the differential risk tolerance among individuals for trying out the latest innovations in mixing various therapies. The trophies will recognize those with the courage to live life in the fast lane -- for that day. What comes after is anybody's guess.< Link The End of Time: A Talk with Julian Barbour. Julian Barbour, a theoretical physicist, has worked on foundational issues in physics for 35 years. He is responsible for a radical notion of "time capsules which explain how the powerful impression of the passage of time can arise in a timeless world".
 Quote: "The basic idea of my theory is that there isn't time as such. There is no invisible river of time that's flowing. But there are things that I would say that you could call an instant of time; or better, a now. As we live we seem to move through a succession of instants of time, nows, and the question is, what are they? They are where everything in the universe is at this moment, now." Link Intro Link Talk Tracking linked to voles' sex upset: Yet more evidence has emerged of researchers inadvertently harming the animals they study in the wild. The results suggest that radio-collars used to track water voles have had a drastic effect on the sex ratio of their offspring, skewing it towards males. Previous studies have found that tagging penguin wings and clipping amphibians' toes to identify individuals harm the animals' survival chances (New Scientist, 7 August 2004, p 15).
Link Anti-E-Mail: Sean Bonner tries to figure out a way to stop using e-mail as a main form of communication.
Link Skandal! The infamous 1981 "incident" when Nina innocently demonstrated how to masturbate on (Austrian) live tv.
 (via ollapodrida) Link (Real Video) Link (Windows Media File) Software patent directive adopted: Opponents are furious that the EU Council has approved the Computer Implemented Inventions Directive. The future of software patenting in Europe now lies in the hands of the European Parliament.
Link Map of Springfield:
 DaddyD writes: "Cartographic Cartoon Fetishists should be wetting themselves these days. Especially Simpson fans. I mean, it's not every animated television series that has a really big map made of it's main location. One that gets it put into the Harvard Map Collection. It is like the title implies, rather large. You can either download the PDF and print it out to hang on your wall, or you can tour the online version which offers a small bit of interactivity. Maybe you can even be clever enough to try to map out the route the family takes during the opening sequence. Or maybe you have something better to do." Link Fabulous Laboratory: The Fabulous Laboratory conducts experiments with Film, Video, New Media, Literature and Urban extra-curricular. The Fabulous Laboratory was launched in 2001 to promote funk and aesthetics in South Asia. FabLab focuses on projects relevant to sexuality, gender, popular culture and politics. FabLab funds its experiments through film and video production, curatorial consultancy and scriptwriting. It is the only organization in India that employs its proceeds to fund all three: queer film/video, new media and literature.
Link (il)legal art?: "It is becoming increasingly evident that artists whose work interrogates the media, in particular the internet, need to be extremely vigilant of the legislative and judicial landscape in which they operate. As the growing numbers users of the internet increasingly exploit its salient feature (the combination of digital media and data transport networks), so the legal questions that have come to the fore in public consciousness and in the courtroom are those surrounding the issue of Intellectual Property Rights (IPR)..."
the low-fi net art locator: Guest Selection by Manu Luksch, Mukul Patel Link Navigating the Web ...
by comparing results: "Most Internet users don't stop at just one search engine, but instead rely on two or even three to find the highest-quality hits." Link by clusters: Clusty the Clustering Engine using Open Source: "Nutch is a nascent effort to implement an open-source web search engine." - Nutch by association: "Dreamlogs are an idea association engine. They propose another way to surf on the Internet, by disentangling the discourses that have interlaced over time." Dreamlogs What do kids need mobile phones for?
Waag Society is developing a 'mobile learning game' pilot together with IVKO, part of the Montessori comprehensive school in Amsterdam. It's a citygame using mobile phones and GPS-technology for students in the age of 11-12 (so called HAVO+MAVO basic curriculum). It is a research pilot examining whether it's possible to provide a technology supported educational location-based experience. In the Frequency 1550 mobile game, students will be transported to the medieval Amsterdam of 1550 via a medium that's familiar to this agegroup: the mobile phone." The pilot took place from 7 to 9 February and is supported by KPN Mobile's UMTS network. They promise to show more of the development process and the results of the pilot soon. (via networked_performance) OR "Pupil tormented by video bullies: Bullies used hi-tech mobile phones to capture video of a beating and then messaged the clip to other pupils." Link Prosperity: Prosperity is a monthly Money Reform journal based in Glasgow, Scotland, which is dedicated to spreading understanding about the nature of our debt-based money system, and campaigning for publicly-created debt-free money.
Link Rainbow Coalition of the Brain: Quote: >Imagine every time you hear the telephone ring, you taste a burrito with jalapeño and guacamole. Believe it or not, some people -- synesthetes -- experience things just like that. For them it's like being hooked up to a weird virtual-reality machine. The number 7 may look green, or the color red might smell of soap. G-flat on the piano might look like broken glass. Could you even hear yourself think, with all that going on? Far from being limiting, new research suggests that synesthesia, from the Greek words for "together" and "perception," actually helps with cognitive processes. Neuroscientists think the condition occurs because certain regions of the brain "cross-activate" at the same time. So the tone perception center, for example, may be linked with the taste perception center. And studying synesthetes is giving clues to the working of the brain, one of the most complex structures in the universe.<
Link Every Lidl hurts: The super-low prices of Europe’s answer to Wal-Mart come at a cost: the rights, wages and dignity of the company’s workforce. Chris Leach reports.
Link Toward More Efficient Computers: Researchers Validate Energy Savings Of 'P-Bits': For millions of users of computer devices requiring frequent recharging such as cell phones, PDAs, and MP3 players, new technology developed at Georgia Tech could mean they are no longer tethered to their chargers. Dr. Krishna Palem announces that he has confirmed his probabilistic bits discovery from last spring by producing a device based on this cutting-edge new approach to making computer chips significantly more energy efficient.
Link Iraq: the real sanctions scandal: The recent interim report by the independent commission investigating the United Nations oil-for-food programme accuses UN officials of favouritism, violation of competitive bidding rules, and a dangerous lack of auditing. But the truth may be far more complicated.
Link Political prisoners in Grenada: Free the Grenada 17! A couple of weeks ago, "a court in Grenada refused to release 17 men and women who have been held in prison on the island since 1983. These are the victims of a more-or-less forgotten US atrocity, the invasion of then socialist Grenada 22 years ago by armed forces of its enormous neighbour. This unprovoked attack brought to an end the rule of the People’s Revolutionary Government and an exciting attempt of a tiny nation to free itself from the bonds of colonialism and the legacy of slavery and exploitation..."
Amnesty International describes the Grenada 17 as possibly the last cold war prisoners (via histologion).
Link Dance with the Naked Aliens: Quote: "Celebrate the First Femininity Day ever, as Raelians across the USA present a fully nude choreographed street performance to emphasize the crucial importance of Femininity."
Link The original rebels: Are humans the first and only species to have teenagers? Lynn Dicks digs among our ancestors' remains for the origin and meaning of adolescence.
Link Datamining the NSA:
 Quintessenz (an association for the re-establishment of information civil rights, monochrom's next door neighbour group here in Museumsquartier Vienna) has data mined an extensive mailing list related to the Biometric Consortium, which is part of the NSA. A Quintessenz activist was able to get access to the mailing list through social engineering. He stored all the info and even could download secret data. They are now datamining the NSA list and publishing the list and the results. Link Displaced Persons: Has exile been overstated, by Edward Said and others, as a characteristic condition of the modern artist? Darko Suvin suggests a more fine-grained typology of displacement, distinguishing between exiles, émigrés, expatriates and refugees, and proposes the category of ‘border intellectuals’ as a better understanding of figures like Said himself. Reflections on the inner phenomenology of each condition, and the historical forces that have produced them.
Link Critics silenced by scans of hobbit skull:
 A computer-generated model of the skull of Homo floresiensis, our diminutive human relative, confirms that the controversial specimens from Indonesia do indeed represent a new species. Link Battlestar Galactica ("33"): The SciFi channel has made the first Battlestar Galactica episode ("33") available online as a free download (via ollapodrida).
Link Public Intelligence Workshops in Vienna:
Friday, March 4, 7 pm, Künstlerhaus. Flavour of Money - a presentation by Dr David Bovill and Ian Grigg: Money comes in many flavours. Through a constructive synthesis of developments in a number of fields we have the possibility for the creative community here in Vienna to pilot a unique cultural experiment. This experiment will provide artists, philosophers and free thinkers the first real opportunity to sculpt new social forms out of the emerging political, legal and technological fabric of the 21st centuary. Sunday, March 6, 3-5pm, monochrom/quintessenz space in MQW. Cooking with Legal Code: A practical howto, outlining the ingredients. Hackers, lawyers, and social engineers welcome. Ingredients include the strategic integration of open crypto and certification, as a basis for a layer of new social applications from currencies to voting and anything in between. There will be a coding session (upstairs in the Quintessenz office), on Ricardian Contracts and a workshop on how to integrate these into open source content management systems - bring a laptop. While downstairs we start on the wall, drawing in charcoal, diagramming a conceptual and legal basis for Public Intelligence - to be instantiated in legal code and launched in April. Sunday, March 6, 8pm @ new Media Cafe, 5upernet space in MQW. Public Intelligence start of a new weekly event @ the Open Kitchen: A synthesis of the weekends work presenting a definition, a diagram, and an argument for the development of new forms of social sculpture. Followed by music and discussion in conjunction with PlayFM. Ricardian contract for digital currency backed by Pressed Flowers: Quote: "This is a real contract currently being traded, which illustrates how to capture different values with digital currencies, below. Unfortunately there is a shortage of Pressed Flowers at the moment, and an even more acute shortage of beer."
Link The first corporate revolution: Social uprising in the Ukraine. An article by Ulrich Schmid. Intro: "The 'orange revolution' in the Ukraine has shown that even political upheavals suit their image to the times. Unlike the members of the Solidarity movement in Poland, the revolutionaries in Kiev were not isolated. In bringing Leonid Kutchma's government to its knees, they were in constant contact via the latest technologies, and were aided by PR advisors abroad. Only one group could keep up with the supremely self-confident Ukrainian revolutionaries: the Poles. Polish students came in hundreds to support their comrades, media consciousness written all over their faces. There were also older colleagues in the crowd, activists from the once independent Solidarity union dying to pass on their knowledge and experience. But next to the young, energetic students from the Mohyla University they seemed a little helpless. Yes, they were respected; the polite revolutionaries from Kiev were aware that it was Solidarity, with its broad civilian base, that struck the first blow against the bulwark of communist tyranny. Nonetheless, when the two worlds met in Kiev some members of the older camp may have thought to themselves: how different it was back then in Danzig!"
Link Maximum pain is aim of new US weapon: Quote: "The US military is funding development of a weapon that delivers a bout of excruciating pain from up to 2 kilometres away. Intended for use against rioters, it is meant to leave victims unharmed. But pain researchers are furious that work aimed at controlling pain has been used to develop a weapon. And they fear that the technology will be used for torture." ...oh boy.
Link John Makeig: John Makeig’s life and death were as bizarre as anything he ever reported. And that’s saying something.
 Link DLTK's Bible Activities for Kids:
Creation: God made light "Thanks to the viewer who sent this in! Carefully take apart an Oreo cookie. The side without any filling is before God created light. The filling is the light God created. This can also be used for God making the moon. Thanks to Kimberly for this idea! I just wanted to add something for the Oreo Creation Cookies: Carefully take apart an Oreo cookie (or use a knife to cut). The two halves represent separating the light from the darkness." (via Siva Vaidhyanathan's Weblog) Link Hans Bernhard's Blog:
 Hans Bernhard (member of techno-fineart avantgarde group UBERMORGEN) started his own weblog. Currently he blogs the lists of psychotropic drugs he consumes. Link What Is Software Design? Quote: >It seems obvious to most people that software designs do not go through the same rigorous engineering as hardware designs. However, if we consider source code as design, we see that software designers actually do a considerable amount of validating and refining their designs. Software designers do not call it engineering, however, we call it testing and debugging. Most people do not consider testing and debugging as real "engineering"; certainly not in the software business. The reason has more to do with the refusal of the software industry to accept code as design than with any real engineering difference.< (via Successlessness)
Link Termites Feed Through Good Vibrations:
 Quote: "The discovery that termites use vibrations to choose the wood they eat may provide opportunities to new methods of reducing infestations in homes and also may provide insights into the 'cocktail party effect' of signal processing -- how to ignore most noise but have some signals that trigger attention -- that may prove useful in artificial intelligence." Link Mystery Squid In Gulf Helps Prove New Ocean Research Concept: It took only a minute for scientists to discover a new deep-sea species with an experimental infrared camera and light-emitting artificial lure.
Link God under a microscope: Religion may be a survival mechanism. Ian Semple investigates whether we are born to believe.
Link "It jumped right out of my monitor!" Seems like this will be common in the future: The Fraunhofer Institute (HHI) will present a new 3D high-resolution autostereoscopic display for desktop and kiosk applications at CEBIT, Hannover, Germany (March 10 - 16, 2005).
Link
UpStaging Performance: A new medium for online performance, theatre and storytelling is now in its first release. UpStage is a web-based venue and tool for artists to compile different digital media for textual and audiovisual communication into a live performance, in real time, for online audiences. The first release of the software was launched on 9 January 2004, and online walk-throughs were held on in February to give people an idea of how UpStage works from the player's perspective. These sessions will be continued on a regular basis, lead by the members of Avatar Body Collision. If you are interested in having a hands-on experience with the software, and participating in live improv sessions, email us for further information and to be notified of times. During 2004, UpStage was used for WorldX, a virtual exchange between schools in the UK and New Zealand, and DTN2, the first cyberformance using UpStage, was performed live from the Machinista Festival in Glasgow on Sunday 9 May.
Visit the UpStage foyer, from where you can access a sample stage. See News for Open Sessions. Link Window: "Window is interested in context and relevance, and in the ability & inability of contemporary art to hold resonance for people in diverse and non-art situations."
The initiative of three students from the Elam School of Fine Arts in Auckland, Window arose from the sense that Elam and its attendant arts community was isolated and inaccessible to larger audiences. The project aimed to address this lack of dialogue by creating a situation where artists, writers, academics, engineers – anyone with a good idea – could display works and interact with audiences. Window exists in two states; its primary location is the physical exhibition window located near the Main Library of the University of Auckland, and its shadow is the virtual exhibition spaces of the Window website. Window wishes to extend both 'on-site' and 'on-line' sites as spaces for the display of ideas and the catalyst for experiment and discussion. Currently online: "Somnambulist" by Dale Sattler Link HOWTO Encourage Women in Linux
"In this HOWTO, we'll talk about why women stay out of computing in general, why they stay away from Linux in particular, and what you can do to help encourage women in Linux. We hope that this HOWTO will result in more women using, installing, and developing Linux. This document is intended mainly for the male Linux enthusiast who would like to see more women involved in Linux. Its secondary audience is both men and women who have been too busy having fun with Linux and computers to sit down and think about why most women don't share their interests. We hope you'll come away from this HOWTO with some understanding of why women stay away from Linux and with a few ideas about what you can do to reverse that trend. This HOWTO is not directed towards people who aren't concerned about the lack of women in Linux, or think that women are better off staying away from Linux. If you don't already believe that women are being driven away from Linux and computers by external causes, this HOWTO probably won't convince you otherwise (although it may give you some interesting avenues of research to follow up on). This HOWTO is definitely not intended to help male Linux geeks find female Linux geeks to date. The central paradox of women and Linux is this: often, the people most anxious for more women in Linux are also the people most likely to accidentally drive them away. Frequently, men who want more women in Linux solely so they have a better chance of finding a girlfriend end up acting in ways that end up driving women away instead! This HOWTO will try to explain which behaviors drive women away from Linux and which behaviors encourage them." This HOWTO was written in 2002 - unfortunately, it is not yet outdated. Link the FluxusPerformanceWorkbook
Performances in Musical Form "The first examples of what were to become Fluxus event scores date back to John Cage's famous class at The New School, where artists such as George Brecht, Al Hansen, Allan Kaprow, and Alison Knowles began to create art works and performances in musical form. One of these forms was the event. Events tend to be scored in brief verbal notations. These notes are known as event scores. In a general sense, they are proposal pieces, propositions or instructions. The first collections of Fluxus event scores were the working sheets for Fluxconcerts. They were generally used only by the artist-peformers who were presenting the work. With the birth of Fluxus publishing, however, colections of event scores soon came to take three forms..." From the introduction to the FluxusPerformanceWork book edited by Ken Friedman, Owen Smith and Lauren Sawchyn.(via networked_performance) New monochrom content // "Irark": Our US foreign policy bastard-pop short film is finally online.
 1988: Retired US-Soldier John R. fights along with his former superior and side by side with islamic jihadis against a foreign occupying power in the central-asian desert. 2003: An Anglo-American coalition begins its military action in the gulf.. Link Earth Magnetic Field Reversal: Quote: "Possible energy ramifications of diminishing magnetic field. How long will it linger at zero before reversing? [...] Seeing the powerful earthquakes such as the December 26th, 2004 event that triggered the tsunami disaster, people are looking for possible causes for the apparent instability of earth's crust. 'End-times' alarmists and backyard researchers believe that the predicted imminent reversal of the earth's magnetic field may be a significant clue to these eschatological-scale events."
Link Invisibility Shields Planned by Engineers: Quote: "In popular science fiction, the power of invisibility is readily apparent. Star Trek fans, for example, know that the devious Romulans could make their spaceships suddenly disappear. But is the idea really so implausible? Not according to new findings by scientists who say they have come up with a way to create cloaking device."
Link How are tattoos removed? Dermatologist Joshua L. Fox, director of the Center for Laser and Cosmetic Surgery in New York, explains. I think I send Philipp a copy of this article.
Link [The Archives] 
. . . . . |
. . monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993.
[more] Booking monochrom: [Europe] [USA] External monochrom links: [monochrom Wikipedia] [monochrom Flickr] [monochrom blip.tv] [monochrom GV] [monochrom Youtube] [monochrom Facebook] [monochrom iTunes] [monochrom Twitter] 
[ P r o j e c t s ] Soviet Unterzoegersdorf / Sector 2 / The Adventure Game Krach der Roboter: Hello World! Slacking is killing the DIY industry (T-Shirt) Carefully Selected Moments / CD, LP Freedom is a whore of a word (T-Shirt) International Year of Polytheism 2007 Santa Claus Vs. Christkindl: A Mobster Battle Kiki and Bubu and The Shift / Short film Kiki and Bubu and The Privilege / Short film Kiki and Bubu and The Self / Short film Kiki and Bubu and The Good Plan / Short film Kiki and Bubu and The Feelings / Short film / Short film Soviet Unterzoegersdorf / Sector 1 / The Adventure Game I was a copyright infringement in a previous life (T-Shirt) Firing Squad Euro2008 Intervention I can count every star in the heavens above -- The image of computers in popular music All Tomorrow's Condensations / Puppet show The Redro Loitzl Story / Short film Law and Second Order (T-Shirt) They really kicked you out of the Situationist International? When I was asked to write about new economy Arse Elektronika 2007, 2008, 2009 etc. The Void's Foaming Ebb / Short film The Charcoal Burner / Short film Fieldrecording in Sankt Wechselberg / Short film Campaign For The Abolition Of Personal Pronouns Entertainment (Unterhaltung) / Short film Nicholas Negroponte Memorial Cable Experience the Experience! (West Coast USA/Canada Tour 2005) A Holiday in Soviet Unterzoegersdorf Massive Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling Network Soviet Unterzoegersdorf Metroblogging Every Five Seconds an Inkjet Printer Dies Somewhere 452 x 157 cm² global durability Blattoptera / Art for Cockroaches An attempt to emulate an attempt The Department for Criticism against Globalisation Disney vs. Chrusov / Short film Turning Threshold Countries Into Plows Roböxotica // Festival for Cocktail-Robotics Cracked Foundation For The Fine Arts Oh my God, they use a history which repeats itself! (T-Shirt) Administrating:  . . . . . |
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