Did God Send the Hurricane? This natural disaster is bringing together a perfect storm of environmentalist and religious doomsday sayers.
Link Women Artists Still have a Long Way To Go: Despite great progress for women artists, the going has been slow. And how about that list of Britain's greatest art that didn't include work by a single woman? "It seems that women's art that doesn't conform to preconceived notions of feminine loveliness still has a hard time gaining acceptance. That means we can't be complacent about where women's art will stand for posterity, and how a list of favourite paintings will look in 50 years' time."
Link "Lolita": "Lolita" is 50 years old. Intro: >In the Spring of 1940, on the last crossing of a French ocean liner that would be sunk by German U-boats on its return voyage, Vladimir Nabokov, his wife, and his young son arrived in New York. The family's first, precarious years in America brought many changes, but one element remained constant. Every summer, Nabokov and his wife would drive cross country to the Rocky Mountains, which offered the country's best butterfly hunting. On those trips, during sudden rainstorms, bouts of insomnia, long drives, and flashes of impromptu inspiration in this or that alpine meadow, the Russian emigre Nabokov began to jot down on three-by-five-inch cards a singular story. This story was to become the greatest and most controversial American novel of the 20th century: "Lolita."<
Link US Cities Say: Wi-Fi For All: Hundreds of US cities are working on offering wi-fi internet service as basic city service. "A number of factors have come together to create this marriage of civic activism and a hot technology. First, there's the decreased cost of key wireless hardware and software components. Jupiter Research estimates that citywide systems will cost $150,000 per square mile for five years of operation. Neff puts it lower, though, saying her costs in Philadelphia were closer to $70,000-100,000 per square mile. Second, broadband penetration in the United States rose above 50 percent in fall 2004, for the first time, which introduced the concept of broadband as a critical service."
Link What causes ice cream headaches? Robert Smith is professor emeritus and founding director of the department of family medicine at the University of Cincinnati and the founder of the University of Cincinnati Headache Center. He provides an explanation.
Link Rape Charge Follows Marriage to a 14-Year-Old: Mr. Koso is 22. The baby's mother, Crystal, is 14. He is charged with statutory rape, even though they were wed with their parents' blessing in May, crossing into Kansas because their own state prohibits marriages of people under 17.
The Nebraska attorney general accuses Mr. Koso of being a pedophile; they say it is true love. Link My Twinn doll: Spooky...
 Quote: "Every child is an original, and that's why every My Twinn doll is custom made to be a beautiful reflection of your special child. Create a treasured resemblance of your child by choosing your doll's individual qualities. Each 23" doll is fully poseable with 18 points of poseability and is carefully crafted with the highest quality materials." Link Most scientific papers are probably wrong: Most published scientific research papers are wrong, according to a new analysis. Assuming that the new paper is itself correct, problems with experimental and statistical methods mean that there is less than a 50% chance that the results of any randomly chosen scientific paper are true.
Link Military examines 'beaming up' data, people: Although many physicists reject such ideas, military officials say it would be ideal if the US could teleport soldiers into 'a cave, tap bin Laden on the shoulder, and say: "Hey, let's go",' says Ranney Adams, spokesperson for the Air Force Research Laboratory at Edwards Air Force Base. 'But we're not there (yet).'
Link No Longer Home Movies: Intro: "The most famous motion-picture credit of the last century belongs not to a brilliant Hollywood director or a heroic newsreel cameraman, but to a rank amateur who could barely hold steady his 8-millimeter camera but who, on November 22, 1963, at 12:30 p.m. CST, in Dallas, happened to be standing at the right intersection for a collision with history. Abraham Zapruder's home movie of the Kennedy assassination is the supreme example of the serendipitous transformation of ordinary imagery into hypnotic history. But what about the other reels in Zapruder's oeuvre -- and the home movies of countless other shutterbugs who recorded the quotidian passages of their own lives without being interrupted by a news bulletin? Until recently the answer was simple: Who cares?"
Link Gershwin Was Richest Composer: George Gershwin has been named the richest composer of all time. "Gershwin eclipsed such classical greats as Strauss, Verdi and Handel in the poll for Classic FM. The classical music station drew up the rich list based on estimates of earnings accrued in a composer's lifetime."
Link 
The Human Zoo: Caged and barely clothed, eight men and women monkeyed around for the crowds Friday in an exhibit labeled "Humans" at the London Zoo.The exhibit puts the three male and five female "homo sapiens" amid their primate relatives. While their neighbors might enjoy bananas and a good scratch, these eight have divided interests, from a chemist hoping to raise awareness about apes to a self-described actor/model and fitness enthusiast. Link The Cracked Ambience: new and recommended sounds for your personal space
 ARDEN - conceal (still) LOKAI - 7 million (mosz) MOROSE - people have ceased to ask me about you (suiteside) OPAK - two sleepwalkers on a tightrope (creaked) SONGS OF GREEN PHEASANT - same (Fat Cat) TU M' - just one night (Dekorder) Luminary Buddhist Nuns in Contemporary Taiwan: A Quiet Feminist Movement: By Wei-yi Cheng. Abstract: "Luminary order is a well-respected Buddhist nuns' order in Taiwan. In this essay, I will examine the phenomenon of Luminary nuns from three aspects: symbol, structure, and education. Through the examination of the three aspects, I will show why the phenomenon of Luminary nuns might be seen as a feminist movement. Although an active agent in many aspects, I will also show that the success of Luminary nuns has its roots in the social, historical, and economic conditions in Taiwan."
Link The Bonus Army: Intro: >Long before the cries of "support the troops" became commonplace during every brutal U.S. military intervention, the powers-that-be made it clear how much they intended to follow their own counsel.<
Link An Updated View of the Americas Before Columbus: Charles Mann's 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus. Quote: "1491 erases our myth of a wilderness Eden. It replaces that fallacy with evidence of a different genesis, exciting and closer to true."
Link Lasers trigger cleaner fusion: Russian scientists have managed to use lasers to create a billion-degree nuclear fireball. The resulting fusion reaction is far cleaner than the kind currently being investigated to generate nuclear power.
Link Homeopathy No Better than Placebo? Quote: >Homeopathic treatment is no more effective than a placebo, the dummy substance used in medical trials, according to a study appearing in the British medical weekly, "The Lancet."<
Link Black and white—and red all over: In the American Revolution, King George promised freedom to any slave who fought for him against slave-owner rebels. It’s a sad story...
Link In Search Of Hitler's Art: Quote: "It remains at the center of one of World War II's most enduring mysteries: Hitler's intended National Socialist museum of art in the Austrian city of Linz was a dream that was never fully realized by the Führer although many thousands of art works were obtained for the project. Speculation has always surrounded the origins of the dictator's collection but since the war ended, this has only intensified as experts attempt to discover where many of the works disappeared to."
Link Neuticles:
 Intro: "Thank you for your interest in patented Neuticles and the revolutionary testicular implant procedure for pets. Inside you will find the latest information and updates. Over 100,000 caring pet owners Worldwide have selected Neuticles as a safe, practical and inexpensive option when neutering. Neuticles allowing your pet to retain his natural look, self esteem and aids in the trauma associated with neutering." Link Occupied zones: There are killings every day in Iraq. Occupying troops, diplomats, aid workers and media people are killed, as are Iraqis, in far greater numbers. But President George Bush’s war is not only against opponents in Iraq and the Middle East: it is a war against his fellow Americans. Article by Howard Zinn.
Link More Animals Join the Learning Circle: Quote: >Killer whales and chimpanzees both pass on "traditions" to other members of their group, according to two separate studies of feeding behaviour. One inventive orca male lures gulls into his tank by spitting regurgitated fish onto the water's surface. His tank-mates have learned the trick as well.<
Link The New Communication (But What Are We Saying?): Quote: "People hardly blink, anymore, at the potency and omnipresence of technology and its attendant powers of transformation. The information stream that was not so long ago channeled by newspapers, network television and radio, has become an unrestrained torrent that surges through cable and satellite television, cell phones cellphones, Internet blogs, podcasts and chat rooms chatrooms. It's all changing faster than even the most keen-eyed futurists can predict. And so are we, in culturally pervasive ways, changing as well."
Link Rock Snobs? Walter Benjamin spoke of "the thrill of acquisition." But when all is instantly available online, the thrill is gone. Goodbye, Rock Snobs.
Link An Aesthetic Justification of Travel: Lindsay Oishi thinks you should travel to celebrate a particular object of art.
Link AA Independent Press Guide: Useful guide to online and print literary mags and journals from the incredibly energetic Dee Rimbaud.
Link China's Search for Stability with America: By Wang Jisi. Summary: No country can affect China's fortunes more directly than the United States. Many potential flashpoints -- such as Taiwan, Japan, and North Korea -- remain, and true friendship between Washington and Beijing is unlikely. But their interests have grown so intertwined that cooperation is the best way to serve both countries.
Link Found In Translation: Richard Cabut and Andrew Gallix talk to Richard Hell about his latest novel and album. Quote: "I'm curious to find out how much the size of the audience is limited by the fact that it's between men. There are a lot of other things in the book that will limit the audience. Primarily, the preoccupation with poetry!"
Link Pop Art - Past Its Sell-By Date: Quote: "I suppose this happens to all art after a while, but now that Pop Art has been going for more than 30 years — Peter Blake keeps the flag flying for Britain, but it’s an increasingly lonely task — I’ve grown tired of its blandishments, its exhortation of the temporary, the cheaply made, the gleeful interest in extreme fame or utter ordinariness. The bigger problem is that while Pop Art originally turned the tables on high art, making the banal significant and the ugly sort of beautiful, the rest of the world has not only since caught up but left it far behind."
Link Piano Man: What's the score? The mystery of Piano Man is solved, proclaim the papers. But is it really? And what does the whole saga say about us?
Link Video Nation (Our Video Universe Transformed): There are 31 million hours of video programming produced each year. And the ways we're going to access it are changing rapidly. "Every major cable company is making investments to allow TV to be distributed over the Internet, giving you access to each one of those 31 million hours. And then there's this year's 36-fold explosion in consumer-generated video on the Internet. This onslaught is already turning the entertainment business inside out. More music videos are being watched on AOL than on MTV. Procter & Gamble is cutting down on pricey 30-second TV spots to beef up the online presence of its packaged goods. TV Guide announced in July that it would drastically cut the amount of space it devotes to listings, an acknowledgment that viewers now turn to the Internet and onscreen programming guides."
Link One World With Many Faces: "The aim of One World with Many Faces is to create a record of the faces of people from 12 major cities on four continents. In each city I take photographs and short videos of 720 city-dwellers in order to capture 8,000 faces from all over the world. All the people are photographed in the same container, in front of the same backdrop, and with the same lighting. In this way the inhabitants of 12 capital cities from different continents come together in the same room and under the same circumstances."
   Link The Blob threatens Nova Scotia: Scientists will begin probing waters off Nova Scotia in search of a slimy creature they believe is slithering north and could be blanketing some of Canada's richest fishing grounds.
Link The Cold, Hard Facts On Cryonics: Despite all the talk, experts still haven't quite conquered the ultimate bane of cryonics practitioners everywhere: the unfortunate phenomena known as 'acoustic fracturing events', the audible cracking noises made by the brain and other internal organs as they shatter from the effects of the extreme cold.
Link The Women's Room? One of America's oldest domestic violence shelters has opened a gender-neutral search for a new director -- and hired a man in the interim. Some feminists are far from happy.
Link Danto: Critic Of Post-History: Quote: "The same year he declared art history to be over, Arthur Danto became The Nation's art critic. With no dominant movement to champion or art-historical future to prophesize, he redefined art criticism as the 'first post-historical critic of art'."
Link Michel Houellebecq: The sex export: He is regarded as a peddler of sleaze. Yet currently he is France's biggest literary figure abroad. Expect fireworks with a new novel, whose plot was leaked last week.
Link The Chumbawamba Factor: Everybody knows by now that the internet has shaken up the music business. But one of the subtler changes has been the amount of raw information that the industry collects -- to study the music that sells, and to face up to the music that doesn't.
It's stunning to think about how much music fans are telling us about themselves, in their search queries, the libraries on their hard drives, and the lists they print on their MySpace pages. It's the same kind of quantum leap that we forget to appreciate in, say, web surfing or TiVO, where someone's collecting exponentially more information about you than they ever could before. Link Consumers who are very skeptical about the truth of advertising claims are more responsive to emotionally appealing ads than ones peppered with information, according to a new study: The finding comes from work by researchers at the University of Washington, Seattle University, and Washington State University who examined consumers' responses to advertising, including brand beliefs, responses to informational and emotional appeals, efforts to avoid advertising, attention to ads and reliance on ads versus other information sources.
Link Entropy: A project by Carlos Katastrofsky.
 About: "the focus of the work entropy lies on movement. the applictions used in entropy capture the motion of any input scene/movie and employ specific processes which translate only the mere movement of an object/subject into one single picture. with this condensation the physical appearance is translated into the traces that it leaves behind in time. the result is a representation of concentrated layers of movement, as it were, a visualization of the transitoriness of anything happening in our world. with the conversion of videos recorded by web-cameras adjusted at busy junctions in megacities like New York and Tokyo entropy presents pictures full of shadows - people, cars, the surrounding buildings, appear and dissappear at the same moment. with this kind of input (videos of surveillance cameras) entropy gets yet another level of meaning. the viewer is confronted with images that are both beautiful and frightening and display a quasi-transparent world." Link The Christo-Terminator: The Unsustainable Present, the Nostalgic Glance Back as Prequels to the New American Legitimation Principle.
Link Lists, Lists, And More Damn Lists! Rachel Cooke hates the pointless exercise of a poll to pick the "best" art in Britain. "I am thoroughly sick of lists, but this one takes the biscuit, being neither a true reflection of public taste nor the result of hours of debate by a committee of learned experts. What happened was this: the public voted, then their choices were whittled down by a 'panel' consisting of art critic Martin Gayford, society portraitist Jonathan Yeo, and dancer Deborah Bull."
Link Rallying The Really Human Things: Moral Imagination In Politics Literature & Everyday Life: Quote: "People go on telling stories because they want to find and clarify meaning for their lives, never just for self-titillation. It matters to every human being that his or her life has meaning and purpose. Yet just as there is right and wrong, there are good stories and bad stories. Stories not only reflect life, they shape it. It is of no small account what stories we tell and what stories we live by."
Link Will Podcasts Replace Tour Guides? Quote: "Aiming to replace the traditional tour experience of following the tour guide with the red umbrella, audio walking tours allow travelers to have an expert guide downloaded to their iPod or MP3 player. Audio tours run about 30 to 90 minutes and cost up to $15. A printed map usually comes with it, and you can preview samples to see whether they fit your style."
Link Golf? Golf features no body contact, no cheerleaders, and no car crashes, yet men still watch. Men are 80% of the golf’s TV audience. Why?
Link PuppetTool:
 Tool for creating user-generated animated states. Try it, create some animations, and send them to the programming team. Shockwave 8.5.1 needed. Link Original manuscript of Einstein paper found: The original manuscript of a paper Albert Einstein published in 1925 has been found in the archives of Leiden University's Lorentz Institute for Theoretical Physics, scholars said Saturday.
Link The Neoconservative Convergence: Intro: "The post-cold-war era has seen a remarkable ideological experiment: over the last fifteen years, each of the three major American schools of foreign policy—realism, liberal internationalism, and neoconservatism—has taken its turn at running things. (A fourth school, isolationism, has a long pedigree, but has yet to recover from Pearl Harbor and probably never will; it remains a minor source of dissidence with no chance of becoming a governing ideology.) There is much to be learned from this unusual and unplanned experiment."
Link Symposium: Through the Eyes of a Suicide Bomber: Intro: "The July suicide bombings in London were yet another horrifying reminder of the dreadful tactic perpetrated by Islamic jihadists in their holy war. To be sure, Israeli citizens have long known the nightmare of suicide bombing – and Iraqis, unfortunately, have become acquainted with it daily. What exactly is inside the mind of the Islamic suicide bomber? What impulse motivates a human being, who supposedly believes in God, to blow himself up alongside innocent people? To discuss these and other questions with us today, Frontpage Symposium has assembled a distinguished panel."
Link In Finland's Footsteps: If We're So Rich and Smart, Why Aren't We More Like Them? Quote: >Life in Finland, one of the world's best functioning welfare states and least known success stories, can be complicated. Consider the dilemma confronting parents looking for day care for a 4-year-old daughter in Kuhmo, a town of 10,000 near the middle of the country. Should they put their child into the town nursery school, where she could spend her weekdays from 6:30 a.m. until 5 p.m. with about 40 other children, cared for by a 47-year-old principal with 20 years' experience, Mirsa Pussinen, as well as four teachers with master's degrees in preschool education, two teacher's aides and one cook? The girl would hear books read aloud every day, play games with numbers and the alphabet, learn some English, dig in the indoor sandbox or run around outside, sing and perform music, dress up for theatrical games, paint pictures, eat a hot lunch, take a nap if she wanted one, learn to play and work with others. Or should that 4-year-old spend her days in home care? Most parents in Kuhmo choose this option, and put their children into the care of women such as Anneli Vaisanen, who has three or four kids in her home for the day. The 49-year-old Vaisanen doesn't have a master's, but she has received extensive training, has provided day care for two decades and has two grown children of her own. The kids in her charge do most of the things those at the center do, but with less order and organization. They also bake bread and make cakes. How to decide? There's no financial difference; both forms of day care cost the parents nothing. There's no difference in the schooling that will follow day care -- all the kids in Kuhmo (and throughout Finland) will have essentially identical opportunities in Finnish schools, Europe's best. There is no "elite" choice, no working-class choice; everyone is treated equally. It's a dilemma that American parents don't have a chance to confront.<
Link Secrets and lies: By Jason Leopold. Halliburton is secretly doing business with a key member of Iran's nuclear team.
Link School Ditches Books For Computers: A public school in Arizona ditches textbooks and gives each of its students iBook computers instead. "Students get the materials over the school's wireless internet network. The school has a central filtering system that limits what can be downloaded on campus. The system also controls chat-room visits and instant messaging that might otherwise distract wired students. Students can turn in homework online. A web program checks against internet sources for plagiarized material and against the work of other students."
Link Copenhagen Curator Charged With Art Theft: The curator of a Copenhagen museum has been charged with stealing more than 100 items from the museum. "He allegedly stole the items while working at the Danish Museum of Art and Design between 1999 and 2002. Small 'pocket-sized' porcelain, glass and metal items were taken, a museum spokeswoman said."
Link Social Safety Netz: Netnetz.net on front page of rhizome.org... Quote: >Tired of waiting for net art's signal to register on the radar of established arts funders, Netznetz has taken matters into their own hands. This group of Viennese net art mavens has convinced their local arts commission that software art should be funded the way it's made: through self-organized networks of distributed activity and collaborative effort. More than 100 net art groups will join forces in developing 'social software' that will channel available funding in a 'guaranteed and dispersed' way within 'elastic' parameters -- a continuous project altered daily, as American minimalist sculptor Robert Morris once described his work. The FLOSS (Free Libre Open Source Software) principles behind the current upswing of social software development propose that sharing is the most politically relevant and efficient way to do anything. Netznetz extends those principles to the thing most free software innovators are wary of sharing: money. The blog world was buzzing with news of Netznetz, this week, and Wikipedia has already published an entry on the project. Some kind of precedent is surely in the making. - Marina Vishmidt<
Link LiteBrite:
 DaddyD writes: "When I was a kid we had three kinds of tech art thingies to choose from. Etch-a-sketch, Spirograph, and LiteBrite. Etch a sketch was a serious bitch do use. Try as I might I couldn't make it do anything worth looking at. Spirograph was sort of cool in a psychedelic kind of way, but the sheer mass of little plastic bits meant sloppy kids like myself wound up losing most of the stuff you needed to make anything at all. That left LiteBrite. It was basically a light box with a black plastic mesh in front, black paper, and lots of colored, translucent plastic pegs. Working with it was a lot like doing sprite design. Think of each peg as a pixel and you will know what I mean. I always wondered how many future pixel artists actually cut their teeth on lite bright as a kid. There must have been one or two, because someone actually took the time to make a digital version and put it online. It's not quite as cool as having your own glowing work of art next to your bed, but it's getting there." Link Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture: Founded in 1985, the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture provides care and rehabilitation to survivors of torture and other forms of organised violence.
Link Lego My Art... A couple of artists have made a career of copying some of Brit Art's most famous works... in Lego. "After experimenting with a Lego take on Damien Hirst's formaldehyde shark, the pair have now graduated to their own mini-exhibition of modern art at the Walker gallery in Liverpool. Among the interpretations on display are Tracey Emin's knicker-strewn bed, Salvador Dalí's surreal lobster phone, and a rendering of the Turner Prize-winning transvestite potter, Grayson Perry, in one of his trademark doll outfits."
Link The Dread Pirate Bin Laden: How thinking of terrorists as pirates can help win the war on terror.
Link Britain: homegrown terror: What did those who bombed London on 7 and 21 July want? The real goals of Islamist terrorism are the provocation of a clash of cultures and the destruction of political integration.
Link In Defense Of Common Sense: John Horgan, author of The End of Science, and feisty and provocative as ever, is ready for combat with scientists. Quote: "All these theories are preposterous, but that's not my problem with them. My problem is that no conceivable experiment can confirm the theories, as most proponents reluctantly acknowledge. The strings (or membranes, or whatever) are too small to be discerned by any buildable instrument, and the parallel universes are too distant. Common sense thus persuades me that these avenues of speculation will turn out to be dead ends."
Link The Latest From Inside Iran On the Anti-Gay Crackdown: The latest dismal news about the Islamic Republic of Iran's campaign of repression against homosexuality comes from the city of Arak, where two homosexual men are scheduled to be executed at the end of the month, probably on August 27.
Link Fire in the sky: "The summer of the year 1783 was an amazing and portentous one and full of horrible phaenomena," writes the Hampshire naturalist Gilbert White in The Natural History of Selbourne (1789).
Link So, Why Do We Believe in Aliens? To quote Brian Appleyard: "Having read hundreds of accounts of alien encounters, it's clear that sexual anxiety is strong because a lot of the encounters involve experiments on genitals. But that doesn't explain them all."
Link Birnbaum v. Camille Paglia: by Robert Birnbaum. The humanities are ruined, and the universities are full of crooks. Art in America is neglected, coddled, and buried under chatter. The right looks down on artists; the left looks down on everyone. Our man in Boston has an electrifying conversation with Camille Paglia.
Link 12 Short Reviews of Bukowski Never Did This: "Bukowski wrote poems, fiction, non-fiction. Then he collected the pieces, by category. Brew put them all in the same book, in order of composition, showing how they influence each other, like Rashomon, only with genres, instead of points of view. A discontinuous narrative held together by the author's voice, and book covers. Once Brew has done it, there's no going back."
Link Wynn - The Most Complex Manmade Structure Ever? Vegas mogul Steve Wynn is irritated. Many critics didn't greet the opening of his new $2.7 billion Wynn hotel casino with the kind of awe he expected. "Comparing a Vegas casino -- each of which is likely to be imploded and rebuilt, by the next century anyway -- to the world's greatest and most enduring structures is an invitation to snickering, even if it might actually be true. But if others question whether his Trump-like hubris has brought him this backlash, Wynn himself wonders why few have asked him to explain the claim."
Link Land Of The Undead: Quote: "Do you want to know what depresses the American spirit? Do you want to know why it feels as if the center cannot hold and the tyranny of mediocrity has been loosed upon our world? Do you want to know what instills thoughts of suicide and creates a desperate, low-level rage the source of which we cannot quite identify but that we know is right under our noses and that we now inhale Prozac and Xanax and Paxil by the truckload to attempt to mollify? I have your answer. Here it is. Look. It is the appalling spread of big- box strip malls, tract homes like a cancer, meta-developments paving over the American landscape, all creating a bizarre sense of copious loss, empty excess, heartless glut, forcing us to ask, once again, the Great All-American Question: How can we have so damned much but still feel as if we have almost nothing at all?"
Link Shiny, Aluminium, Plastic And Digital: By Negativland. So, why is that new "Oasis" CD so expensive?
Link Kings of the Wild Frontier May Return: "A bold conservation plan dubbed "Pleistocene Park" could see lions, cheetahs and elephants roaming America's Great Plains, it was revealed today. Scientists have put forward a serious proposal to repopulate parts of North America with modern ancestors of wild animals that became extinct there about 10,000 years ago. The idea is reminiscent of Jurassic Park, the novel and movie in which dinosaurs are brought back to life as tourist attractions."
Link Mediatopia.2 fresh! assembles an exciting mix of recent net-based work by a diverse group of neoteric artists, creatives and thinkers. Their fresh, networked interfaces look to a variety of means to utilize the Internet, both as creative medium and as a channel to share and distribute their output. The Internet, with its network functionality and potential for user interaction, is their creative playground: a form to manipulate and a means of social or political expression.
Link Quake III Source Code to Be Released: At QuakeCon, id Software's annual event down in Texas, John Carmack announced that the Quake III source code will be released under the GPL, "hopefully some time next week," to be available on their FTP site.
Link Britain's Top Ten Paintings? Radio 4 has posted the top ten contenders in its poll picking the greatest painting in Britain. Any painting hanging in a British collection is eligible, regardless of its country of origin.
Link Searching For Better Search: Universities are focusing on improving search technologies. "The search problems of today are different from those of five years ago. With books, scholarly papers and television programs being digitized and put online, the technology necessary to search through the material needs to be that much better. People need a way to trust the information they find and to ask more-complex questions with search tools so they can extract knowledge or ideas."
Link Disney Erases Hand-Drawn Animation: In the 1960s, Walt Disney joked that one day he'd replace his elite corps of animators, known as the "Nine Old Men," and their slow, expensive way of making hand-drawn movies, with Audio-Animatronic figures. At the end of last month, Walt's joke came true.
Link Dogs vs. machine, nose to nose: Dogs can sniff, machines can detect. In the fight against terror, which is better?
Link Military exercises 'good for endangered species': Firing ranges can have more wildlife than national parks. Quote: "Military exercises are boosting biodiversity, according to a study of land used for US training manoeuvres in Germany. Such land has more endangered species than nearby national parks."
Link Zak Smith's Illustrations For Each Page of Gravity's Rainbow: A staggering 760 illustrations by New York-based artist, Zak Smith, depicting the events and imagery of Pynchon's magnum opus.
Link Approaching Geckomimesis: How can gecko feet exhibit such incredible adhesive power, yet leave no residue and even clean themselves during use? Gecko feet have complex microstructures known as setae and spatulae (tiny hairs and the fringes splitting off from them) that make use of Van der Waals force to allow geckos to stick to just about anything.
Link monochrom content update // The Exhilarator: Do you already know our Exhilarator project? No? Intro: "The cartoon with its sheer endless humoristic allegories is among the oldest of trades, and a creative one at that. We want to breathe new life into all those used and out-laughed witnesses
of human tragedy - but how? We have asked our friend algorithmic random generator to give us a hand. We split the image from the text and shove the gag into a new interpretation (with an element of sadism, one might add)."
Well, we added some new picture and text elements.
Link Nanotech transistor powers up: Carbon nanotubes could make for smaller circuits.
 Quote: "The first electrical switch made entirely from carbon nanotubes has been unveiled. Its inventors hope that it could help to replace silicon chips with faster, cheaper, smaller components. The device is a Y-shaped nanotube that behaves like a transistor, such as those found in every electronic device in your home. Current flowing from one branch to another can be switched on and off by applying a voltage to the third. The switching is perfect - the current is either on or off, with nothing in between." Link The "Stricken" President: Intro: >If you accept the judgement of the polls this summer, George Bush is a stricken president. Leave aside his now permanent sub-50 per cent status in popular approval. Take his favored calling cards, the war and Iraq and conduct of the "war on terror". His status on the approval charts now shows him wallowing without mast or rudder in latitudes as low as the mid-30s. Honesty? Since Americans, with a race memory of fast talking snake-oil salesmen, often confuse honesty with inarticulateness and all round stupidity, Bush used to register well in this category. But even here he is bidding to join Nixon in the sub-basement of popular esteem, lodged at around the 40 per cent mark. But hold! The measure of a stricken president is surely an inability to push through the legislation he desires. Remember Bill Clinton. By midsummer in his maiden year of White House occupancy, 1993, he was truly stricken and had to send a Mayday call for lifeboats, which duly arrived under the captaincy of Republican Dave Gergen, with Dickie Morris soon to follow. By July, 1993, as the receptacle of liberal hopes, the Clinton presidency was over. Look now at Bush. Stricken he may be in the popular polls, but his political agenda flourishes.<
Link Israel's exit strategy: The 7,000 Israeli settlers in the Gaza Strip are supposed to leave or be removed this month, and their settlements destroyed. No one knows yet if it really will happen, given settler resistance and lack of army cooperation.
Link Is Gambling A Head Case?: Quote: "Researchers are learning that the heads — or to be more accurate, the brains — of pathological gamblers are biologically different from those of most of the estimated 73 million Americans who are able to play bingo, pull the arm of a slot machine or flip some aces and then simply stop. Not only does the research shed light on how this addiction is both similar and distinct from other addictive disorders, it also could contribute to new treatments."
Link How Tourism Is Killing Art: The crush of tourists is ruining the world's great cultural monuments. "We are just now beginning to get beyond the phase of shock-horror reports about the destruction caused by tourism. There are possible solutions, some already in place, especially in the field of eco-tourism. Because this started more recently than cultural travel and is usually run by people with a greater sensitivity to issues of exploitation, it has often developed in a constructive and thoughtful way."
Link Oddmusic.com:
 Oddmusic.com is for anyone interested in unique, unusual, ethnic, or experimental music and instruments. So whether you play stalagmites in a cave, the kaval, bow telegraph wires across the Nullarbor Plain, twist electrons by circuit bending, call whales on a Waterphone, or just love listening, this site is for you. Link Segregation Flourishes: Quote: "Not long ago, people said that globalization and the revolution in communications technology would bring us all together. But the opposite is true. People are taking advantage of freedom and technology to create new groups and cultural zones. Old national identities and behavior patterns are proving surprisingly durable. People are moving into self-segregating communities with people like themselves, and building invisible and sometimes visible barriers to keep strangers out."
Link Hyperion Struggles To Stay Alive: The recording label recently lost a lawsuit that has put the company on the verge of bankruptcy. "Hyperion generates intense affection among classical listeners the world over for its esoteric mix of lesser works by great composers and discoveries by minnows. An American fan offered to buy all of its 1,100 recordings for Hyperion to deposit in countries that lack access to western culture. Perry is negotiating a first delivery to the Baghdad School of Music and Ballet, with help from local fixers and the British Embassy. He will do whatever it takes to put the company on its feet again after a catastrophe that would have driven most family businesses to bankruptcy."
Link Computer Analysis Provides Incan String Theory: The discovery provides a tantalising glimpse of bureaucracy in the Andean empire and may, for the first time, also reveal an Incan word written in string.
Link monochrom interview // CounterCulture Hour; Sat, Aug 13, 2005, 6:30pm, Cable Channel 29; San Francisco: V. Vale announces: >The 10th episode will feature Johannes of monochrom, all the way from Vienna, Austria. Karen Marcelo, SRL's webmeister, introduced monochrom to us last month, and we immediately liked what they are about ... in July they were in San Francisco for a couple weeks doing various projects based at one of the most radical art spaces in town, William Linn's Rx Gallery, 132 Eddy St/Mason, SF 94102. Among other projects, they hosted an interactive performance whereby members of the audience could experience the feeling of being "buried" alive (in a coffin) monitored by a videocam. They also did a street performance with a group-made medieval catapult, which hurled old-model cell phones some fifty feet into the air... interesting to see as no permits were obtained, and this took place downtown on a San Francisco street.
Since 1993 monochrom has focused on producing radical art centered on art, politics and technology. The group staged a very funny "prank" at the Sao Paulo Biennale (a huge international art fair) in 2000, which will be recounted on The Counter Culture Hour. (RE/Search's next book will be on the topic of PRANKS, and monochrom will of course be included.) This particular interview covers a lot of topics in 60 minutes, and is very "dense"... both informative and humorous in the RE/Search manner. We highly recommend "tuning in" to see this program, hosted by V. Vale and produced by Marian & Marian (Marian Wallace and Marian Wilde).< Link 'Satanist' dances on Reagan's grave:
 A California man dubbed a "Satanist" on an online message board has posted photos of himself dancing on President Ronald Reagan's grave, raising the ire of the former chief executive's admirers. Link Dead Man: Half a Remake:
 Or, Why the Revenge of the Spaghetti Western is a Dish Best Served Not Quite So Cold (Or, Was a Spaghetti Western the first postmodern film?) Link The Big Gulp: NASA pisses away millions hauling H2O into orbit. But there's a better way - recycle astronaut urine. Just one question: How does it taste?
Link The Dream Life of Prototypes - Part 1: Colin Bennett looks at early prototypes for man-made flying saucers.
Link Russia's New Contemporary Art Galleries: Russia's gallery scene is booming, and contemporary art is selling well. "Europe's second-most-populous city, Moscow has one of the highest concentration of billionaires in the world -- 27, according to Forbes magazine. Oil and metals income, boosted by prices at record highs, has transformed the Russian capital into a construction boomtown and the new rich want art to furnish their houses and apartments."
Link We Knew It - Pianists Are Just Smarter: A study reports that practicing the piano in early childhood boosts the brain. "Childhood is the best time in life to boost the brain's so-called white matter, according to the study, and boost the pyramidal tract, which is a major pathway of the central nervous system, transmitting signals between the brain and the pianist's fingers. The scientists, who investigated the brains of eight concert pianists in their 30s who started practicing as young children, found that the pyramidal tract is more structured in pianists than in non-musicians."
Link Da Vinci Code effect 'could spell disaster' for Rosslyn:
 Record crowds of tourists being drawn to Rosslyn chapel by the incredible success of the bestseller The Da Vinci Code could 'spell the end' of the historic building, a former curator has warned. Link Astrosociology and the space community: Forging collaboration for better understanding and planning:
 Intro: >As the fiftieth anniversary of the dawning of the space age approaches, sociology continues to pay little attention to human behavior related to space and its exploration. While the other social and behavioral sciences, and the humanities, broach this subject more readily, the overall approach of a social-science-oriented perspective remains unorganized. (Henceforth, for the sake of brevity, the social sciences refer to all of the so-called "soft" sciences). My proposal of astrosociology possesses the potential to bring together all of these parties in a way that can produce research findings that will become easily identifiable and utilizable among these "soft" scientists as well as the "hard" scientists and engineers within the space community. When the future of the space program receives attention, many remind us of the projected shortfall of scientists and engineers. At the same time, scarcely anyone seriously considers the problem of the ongoing shortage of social scientists vis-ˆ-vis the study of space exploration. This must end if we truly desire a full understanding of issues related to human behavior related to space.< Link The Mind-Reading Machine: Scientists say they have been able to monitor with scans what people are thinking. "Our study represents an important but very early stage step towards eventually building a machine that can track a person's consciousness on a second-by-second basis. These findings could be used to help develop or improve devices that help paralyzed people communicate through measurements of their brain activity. But we are still a long way off from developing a universal mind-reading machine."
Link Blogging in the Early Republic: Why bloggers belong in the history of reading: Intro: >Henry Clarke Wright was an antebellum American reformer whose eclectic interests ranged from antislavery to radical pacifism to health reform and beyond. Born in 1797 and educated as a minister, he later abandoned institutional religion and became a prolific writer and speaker. In countless lectures delivered across the American North and the British Isles--where he spent most of the 1840s--Wright inveighed against war, corporal punishment in the home, slavery, loveless marriage, church and state, traditional medicine, and much else.
Above all, Wright wrote. According to the count of his only biographer, he authored eleven books, numerous articles in reform newspapers like William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, and over two dozen tracts and pamphlets. The Irish abolitionist Richard D. Webb, who hosted Wright in his Dublin home in 1844, reported to a mutual friend in Boston that Henry was lately spending "the greater part of the day writing in his room. I suppose he thinks he is shaking the world, but I can perceive very little of the motion so far." As a writer with grand aspirations for shaking the world, Wright was also an inveterate journal keeper. For most of his adult life, he filled a steady stream of over one hundred diaries. In these, comments on world events and social reform jostle with reflections on the diarist's loveless marriage and his struggle for faith. While private, the journals were also public. Wright mailed pages and even whole volumes to his friends or read them excerpts from the diaries, and many pages were later published in his numerous books. Thus, as his biographer Lewis Perry notes, in the case of Wright, "distinctions between private and public, between diaries and published writings, meant little." In Human Life: Illustrated in My Individual Experience as a Child, a Youth, and a Man (1845), one of his published writings in which diary entries were frequently excerpted, Wright confessed that "writing a journal does me good. I can let off my indignation at the wrongs I see and hear. I am far happier when I write a little every day. I take more note too, of passing events, and see more of what is going on around me. I live less in the past and future, and more in the present, when I journalize ... It saves me from many dark hours to write down what I see and hear and feel daily. My soul would turn in upon and consume itself, if I did not thus let it out into my journal." Wright died in 1870, already a relatively forgotten reformer. Yet--and I speak from my own experience in 2005--his reflections on writing are eerily evocative of what it is like to blog. Wright shared several traits with the prototypical blogger--his eccentric range of interests, his resolution "to write down what I see and hear and feel daily," his use of journals to "let off" rants of "indignation," his utopian conviction that writing might change the world, and (not least) his practice of spending the "greater part of the day writing in his room." Was Wright a blogger? Are not his journals the fossilized originals of a species?< Link netznetz.net:
 netznetz.net -- a newly established Vienna/Austria-based 'meta-community' which consists of all kinds of digital initiatives, net artists and technicians who are associated with the term 'net culture' -- has been assigned by the commissioner for the arts (member of the social democratic party of Vienna) to develop a software-supported system of distributing funding money in the 'net culture' sector. It all started with the frequently announced 'crisis of net culture' in Vienna. The well established institutions of the scene were cutting their services and activities, while many activists of the field had been relying on other means of income as a resource for their work for years, anyway. New forms of collaboration and presentation were emerging. Coordinating resources via a simple mailing list, the quickly growing netznetz-movement launched its first project in 2004 with the 'netznetz Festival of Net Culture', bringing together members of the open source community, net artists, people of the cultural sector, technicians and the audience in Vienna's Künstlerhaus. Further projects evolved, the so-called 'redraft of net culture funding' being one of them. Now for first time ever, a local government has agreed to support a local net community to decide over the distribution of its own funding. The new funding system strives for guaranteed and dispersed distribution of funding in the sector while the parameters of the distribution are meant to remain flexible, providing a dynamic scope. The aim is to encourage project-based collaborations by distributing various smaller grants. Therefore, everybody who is involved in the sector is subject to the principle of permanent reconfiguration of the system and the network. The modular funding structure -- developed with lots of discussion effort and contribution of more then 30 groups -- was boldly presented by the community and accepted by the commissioner. According to the new plan, 50% of the funding are reserved for infrastructure ('backbone projects'), newbies ('microgrants'), and common representation ('annual convention') and are to be distributed by the administration together with the community in the course of an open space conference. Financial support facilitating the contributor's everyday work, which usually is not funded at all, is to be designated by the communities itself through 'network grants' (50%). The beneficiaries of the so-called 'network grants', a yearly spending account for approximately 20 groups, is to be evaluated with the aid of a social software tool -- a reputation system currently under development. Even before it has been coded, criticism as well as scepticism and fear start pouring into the media sphere. While even computer veterans criticise the alleged blind trust in a 'computer program', so-called left circles brand it as 'too neo-liberal' as the structure strives for 'collaboration instead of institution'. netznetz is preparing a protoype in the course of a programming 'sprint' this week and is inviting international experts for an upcoming symposium in autumn 2005 in Vienna. People interested in discussing or contributing their knowledge with 'reputation systems', please send an email to grants AT netznetz DOT net. Link / netznetz Sprint (August 9-13, 2005) Link / netznetz Wikipedia Bone Injection Gun:
 Quote: "I got the heebie jeebies just looking at this thing. It’s a bone injection gun for pounding meds straight into the marrow for when you just can’t find a vein. I can’t even look pictures of face-lifted people without thinking about all the gristle and stuff that they had to cut through to give them a little button nose and I have to deal with this now. Urgghh. It's being used by the military for combat medicine and I can just imagine the thunk of this thing finding its way home into my femur. ARGGHH!" Link How Do You Get Plants To Grow On Mars? The First Step: Relieve Their Anxiety: On Mars, plants would have to tolerate conditions that usually cause them a great deal of stress -- severe cold, drought, low air pressure, soils that they didn't evolve for. But plant physiologist Wendy Boss and microbiologist Amy Grunden of North Carolina State University believe they can develop plants that can live in these conditions. Their work is supported by the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts.
Link monochrom content update // Piracy Warning Messages In Movie Theaters // Instant Blitz Copy Fight Project: New pictures online.
 Join the Instant Blitz Copy Fight Project! Please bring a digital camera next time you go to the movies, take a picture of the piracy-warning before the movie starts and use the flashlight. Thanks! Link Korean blues: By Ignacio Ramonet. Intro: "Pessimism is the prevailing mood in South Korea these days when you talk with politicians and trade unionists. Relations with the United States over what to do about North Korea are going from bad to worse. Tensions are evident in relations with Japan, because Japanese schoolbooks persist in minimising the cruelties inflicted on the Koreans during the Japanese occupation (1905-1945), and because of the row over the Dokdo islands, to which both sides have territorial claims. Seoul is opposed to Tokyo's diplomatic ambition to have a permanent seat on the new UN security council next September, after the reform of the UN. Above all the economy is going badly. Western visitors have an impression of dynamism, the result of the spectacular success of South Korea - one of the rare countries that has succeeded, over a few decades, in extracting itself from the third world and joining the developed nations - but growth is now slowing. The economy, the third-largest in Asia after Japan and China, is suffering from a decline in consumption and a slowdown of exports."
Link Babies have more complex emotions: U.S. research shows infants are much more emotionally and intellectually complex than was previously believed.
Link The Magazine for Synesthetes: This is the prototype issue of Syn, which "is designed to explore the ways people experience synaesthesia, the main bulk of the magazing consists of interviews/profile pages detailing individuals with synaesthesia."
Link Wireless Broadband - Just Basic Civic Infrastructure: Two remote rural counties in Oregon offer free wireless broadband internet service for everyone. "Broadband is just the next step in expanding the national infrastructure, comparable to the transcontinental railroad, the national highway system and rural electrification. Indeed, we need to envision broadband Internet access as just another utility, like electricity or water. Often the best way to provide that will be to blanket a region with Wi-Fi coverage to create wireless computer networks, rather than running D.S.L., cable or fiber-optic lines to every home."
Link How do scientists determine the composition of the interior of Earth and other planets? Art Lerner-Lam, associate director for seismology, geology, and tectonophysics at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory of Columbia University, explains.
Link Spitzer Finds Life Components In Young Universe:
 NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope has found the ingredients for life all the way back to a time when the universe was a mere youngster. Using Spitzer, scientists have detected organic molecules in galaxies when our universe was one-fourth of its current age of about 14 billion years. These large molecules, known as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, are comprised of carbon and hydrogen. The molecules are considered to be among the building blocks of life. Link What the bleep do we know? "Wet-brained, low-wattage pantheism..." Oh, and the science is rubbish too.
Link The Irascible Prophet: V. S. Naipaul at Home: Quote: >Two monuments rise like emblems from the green countryside of Wiltshire, England, not far from the secluded house of V. S. Naipaul: Stonehenge and Salisbury Cathedral. They are signposts in a landscape Naipaul has been traversing for more than half a century, one in which the impulses of culture, civilization and progress have always existed in close and uneasy proximity to the impulses of paganism, religion and disorder. A prophet of our world-historical moment, in his more than 25 works of fiction and nonfiction, Naipaul has examined the clash between belief and unbelief, the unraveling of the British Empire, the migrations of peoples. They are natural subjects for a writer who, as he has recorded in his many fully, semi- and quasi-autobiographical books, was born in Trinidad, where his grandfather had emigrated from India as an indentured servant. His father, a newspaper reporter and aspiring fiction writer, was the model for what is arguably Naipaul's finest novel, "A House for Mr. Biswas" (1961). At 18, Naipaul left Trinidad on a scholarship to University College, Oxford, and has lived in England ever since. Alfred Kazin once described him as "a colonial brought up in English schools, on English ways and the pretended reasonableness of the English mind."<
Link Ancient fantasies that infect the internet and inspire suicide bombers: Quote: >My local Islamic bookshop is a ramshackle place whose volumes are barely visible through a mist of dust and burnt spices. Here the jovial staff - "All right, mate?" - will sell you commentaries on the Koran, hanging lamps, copper teapots and phone cards. They will also dispense, equally cheerfully, copies of a paperback which explains that Jews ritually murder Christian children and use their blood to season Passover matzo balls. The Protocols of the Elders of Zion is a version of the medieval "blood libel" cooked up by the tsarist secret police a century ago. It is a work of the blackest propaganda, its every assertion demonstrably false. Yet it is circulating in 21st-century Britain, through bookshops, online book services and websites, nearly all of them Islamic but by no means all of them readily identifiable as the "extremist" outlets that Tony Blair proscribed at his press conference yesterday. The audience for the Protocols stretches far beyond fanatical jihadists; no one has surveyed "moderate" Muslims to discover how many accept its central tenet, but my guess is that community spokesmen would have a hard time accounting for the results on the Today programme. Before we raise our hands in horror, however, it is worth scanning the shelves of the chain bookstore in a nearby shopping mall. For most of the past year, its best-selling title has been The Da Vinci Code, a thriller based on a myth about the Merovingian bloodline of Jesus that its author, Dan Brown, believes to be true. He is thus presenting secret "facts" in the form of fiction, which is also the technique adopted by an Egyptian television soap opera based on the Protocols.<
Link Brits Hot On Sci-Fi: "Science fiction is booming and the British writers are leading the pack. For the first time in its 63-year history, all the writers nominated for the prestigious Hugo award for the best novel are British. The Hugos, named after science-fiction publishing legend Hugo Gernsback, are the genre writing equivalent of the Oscars."
Link Does Anybody Remember Zoso?
 Technomystic Erik Davis spends 177 pages dissecting Led Zeppelin's majestic rune-rock classic for occultic signs in Continuum Books' 33 1/3 series. Quote: "These sigils, and the musical sounds they announce, don't mean stuff so much as make stuff happen." Link Patently Absurd: America's patent system is broken, impeding the orderly processing of ideas. "Lawyers, companies, inventors and politicians all agree that the nation's patent system is in desperate need of reform. They cite concerns about proliferating litigation, questionable licenses and a potential decline in American competitiveness. The question is how to reform: For all the complaints, little consensus has emerged on how to fix the system."
Link Why We Laugh? Quote: "One theory of why people laugh — the superiority theory — says that people laugh to assert that they are on a level equal to or higher than those around them. Research has shown that bosses tend to crack more jokes than do their employees. Women laugh much more in the presence of men, and men generally tell more jokes in the presence of women. Men have even been shown to laugh much more quietly around women, while laughing louder when in a group of men."
Link Thieves Steal Fake Munch Paintings: Thieves broke in to a hotel that has 12 Edvard Munches in its collection. "Two unarmed men burst into Oslo's Hotel Continental, threatened staff and removed three pictures from the walls. But the hotel had swapped the originals with duplicates after two real Munch works were stolen from the Munch Museum in the city almost a year ago."
Link Courting disaster: Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has damaged the US's traditional - and constitutional - separation of church and state. Good riddance to her.
Link Extremophiles: Not So Extreme? Quote: "When we search the solar system for biology, we expect that if there are alien life-forms nearby, they will most likely be analogs to Earth’s extremophiles."
Link Bioethics at the Movies: Quote: "There is at the very heart of the movie culture, therefore, a form of dishonesty. This involves an attempt to pretend that property, in which Americans also tend to be strong believers, is the inevitable metaphor for their stake in their own lives, and that there is no question of any liens upon such property held by the Almighty."
Link Lovecraft Country:
 Return to Arkham is a comic book set in H.P. Lovecraft's Arkham in 1933. Seth Fletcher has just journeyed to Arkham, seeking his brother lost years before, but as he will soon discover, all is not as it seems. The Lovecraft Country comic is here presented in a special online format for easy reading. If you prefer, or have a very large monitor, you can also view it in the original comic book layout. (via mirukux) Link Book Happy is a magazine (a real magazine, printed on paper) about collecting weird books. It's an attempt to review and present -- in their full glory -- unique, old, rare and inexplicable publications that would otherwise be forever lost in the garbage heap of forgotten tomes.
Link Hacker forced new planet discovery out of the closet: 10th planet was actually found two years ago.
Link They Sing the Comet Electric: Dissident scientists advocating a controversial theory of the universe are having a field day in the wake of NASA's Deep Impact comet collision. Electricity, they say, plays a greater role in the cosmos than the standard gravitational model.
Link Who's Buying Music? Music consumers are getting older. "In 1999 music buyers over 30 accounted for less than half of all music sales. Now 55% of music is bought by over 30s."
Link Male Voice Vs. Female Voice: The brain processes male and female voices differently, says a new study. "The research explains why most of us hear female voices more clearly, as well as that we form mental images of people based only on the sound of their voices. The findings, published in the current journal NeuroImage, also might give insight into why many men tire of hearing women speak: the "complexity" of female voices requires a lot of brain activity."
Link The Women of Gitmo: The exploitation and debasement of women serving in the United States military must come to an immediate end.
Link Fraud Roshambo: Paper Beats RFID: Keeping documents secure might not require elaborate radio tags or special security inks. "Fingerprints" embedded in the papers' surfaces might do the trick instead.
Link Geoffrey Brock talks The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana by Umberto Eco. Geoffrey Brock is a poet and translator who's landed the coveted spot of Umberto Eco's newest English translator, now that the venerable William Weaver is stepping down. The following is a spoiler-free look at Eco's new novel and new translator.
Link Doing The DVD Death Spiral: The wait between when a movie is released to theatres and when it comes out on DVD has gotten shorter. That in turn has increased pressure on movie theatres and is changing a time-tested business model. Is there a way to pull out of this death spiral?
Link Elvis Today: The King lives on—but he's not who you always thought he was. Quote: "The year 2005 contains two major anniversaries in american popular music. It marks 50 years since 1955, when rock'n'roll first conquered the pop singles chart, and also what would have been the seventieth birthday of Elvis Presley (who was so young when he made his initial breakthrough that his father had to co-sign his first contract with RCA Records for him). For Elvis, the timing was perfect. However, in terms of my own appreciation of both occurrences, the timing was completely off."
Link Is Knowing The Cultural Reference Better Than The Culture Itself? Quote: "The traditional benefits of entertainment were the pleasures of the experience. For that, you had to see the movie, read the book or hear the CD. These were — and are — powerful pleasures, powerful enough to make entertainment a multibillion-dollar industry. But as society has grown more complex and the information we can know has grown exponentially, knowingness — the idea of being in the know and of having the expertise to navigate through the haystacks of available information to find the needles — has come to provide an arguably more satisfying form of gratification. That's why the knowingness industry, including the Internet, seems more vital than the entertainment industry. Google is the new metaphor for fulfillment."
Link There is no plan: Richard Marshall interviews Jonas Mekas, the godfather of American avant-garde filmmaking. Quote: >When I came to the United States I had to go to Chicago. That was my destination. But then we came by boat with my brother and we landed in New York. And right there, on pier 21 or whatever, we looked at Manhattan and we said, "We are in Manhattan, we are in New York. Wouldn't it be stupid to go to Chicago?" We stayed in New York, and never went to Chicago. Of course, had we gone to Chicago we would have been very good bakers!<
Link Earliest Dinosaur Embryos Recovered:
 Quote: "The oldest fossilized dinosaur embryos yet discovered are revealing tantalizing clues about dinosaur evolution, scientists say. Findings published today in the journal Science indicate that some of the prehistoric creatures started out on four legs before growing into bipedal behemoths. They also support the notion that newly hatched dinos did not fend for themselves and instead relied on their parents for nourishment." Link Astronomers to decide what makes a planet: Status of newly discovered world hangs in the balance. Quote: "The discovery of a new addition to our Solar System has prompted astronomers to fast-track plans to decide what is and is not a planet. The rules, which could be formulated by the end of this week, could more than double the number of local planets - or they could demote Pluto, leaving us with only eight in our neighbourhood."
Link Constructive instability: The United States seems stubbornly determined to extend its current high-risk strategy of democratic destabilisation to the entire Middle East.
Link Economics and the Race Divide in a Southern City: From Woolworth to Wal-Mart: Intro: "On Feb. 1, 1960, four North Carolina A&T University students quietly took seats at the segregated Woolworth's lunch counter and waited to be served, igniting a black-led movement that spread to the Kress Building and other retail outlets and ultimately resulted in the demolition of segregated public accommodations in Greensboro's downtown business district. While the sit-ins are now widely celebrated by city leaders, throughout the '60s the white political establishment alternated between pleas for dialogue and stubborn resistance in its response to black demands for justice. Fast-forward 35 years and the same odd marriage of civility and racial tension seems to define city politics. And along with jobs, education and healthcare, consumer choice remains one of the major arenas in the struggle for racial equality. But despite the recent resurgence of downtown, with its thriving nightclubs, restaurants and boutiques, the action has moved out to the residential sections of the Greensboro."
Link Ancient Iraqi Harp Reproduced By Liverpool Engineers: A team of engineers at the University of Liverpool has helped reproduce an ancient Iraqi harp -- the Lyre of Ur. Engineers from the University's Lairdside Laser Engineering Centre (LLEC) employed revolutionary laser technology to engrave authentic designs onto Gulf Shell (mother of pearl) -- the original material used to decorate the body of the harp.
Link Messy Online: Quote: "This long running wet and messy (WAM) fetish site presents us with a perplexing conundrum: why are all of those high quality photos of truly sexy models covered in substances ranging from mud to paint to various foodstuffs presented in one of the cleanest-looking and most user friendly paysite designs we’ve come across? Ponder the irony as you paddle your way through the generous free samples and Messy Picture of the Month archives. We promise any sticky stuff that gets on you accidentally will come right out in the wash." (via Fleshbot)
Link monochrom content update // Gastro-Art: In gastronomical enterprises the management frequently elects to present art as a form of extraordinary room decoration. Some time ago we at monochrom have decided to dedicate a page to the breathtaking world of 'gastro-art'. And there are some excellent new gastro-art picture submissions.
 Link World's Top Eaters Battle in Alka-Seltzer US Open of Competitive Eating:
 Quote: "Rich LeFevre went down hard to upstart Tim Janus, Cookie Jarvis re-aserted his dominance as a multi-discipline eater and Sam Vise launched a fairy tale journey of upsets -- all in the Alka-Seltzer US Open of Competitive Eating on ESPN..." Link [The Archives] 
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. . 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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