Bre Pettis produces the show "Weekend Projects," which is released weekly as a video podcast for Make: Magazine. For his show, Bre makes something every week, and then makes a video teaching viewers how to make it too. In his recent past, he's been a schoolteacher, a multi-artist, and a puppeteer. Bre is passionate about invention, innovation, and all things DIY.

I've been a documentary photographer since 1987 working in a dozen countries including Afghanistan, Bosnia, India and Vietnam. But most of my time has been spent traveling the USA trying to understand the American Way of Life.

Since February 2007 there has been a roadmap between Washington and Pyongyang in place. It isn't called a roadmap, but it walks like one and quacks like one. A year ago, the idea of a bilateral agreement seemed almost inconceivable. But now we not only have an agreement but have moved a significant way along the road to a de-escalation of nuclear tensions since 2002 on the Korean peninsula and Pyongyang's admission that its nuclear programme was still in place.

Pyongyang's aim was always to break free of the six-party multilateral approach and negotiate directly with Washington. Finally Christopher Hill, America's point man on talks with the North, was given the freedom to find a deal. As with all roadmaps, it is full of stages and confidence-building measures (CBMs). Nobody said a roadmap with Pyongyang would be easy and it hasn't been - the initial sticking point of the North's US$25m stuck in a Macanese bank took time to resolve. However, it was; and IAEA inspectors gained access to the Yongbyon reactor and inspected it, and Pyongyang appears to be complying with the demand to shut it down.

Organized labor's rise began modestly and was fragile in the earliest days of the republic. It gained strength in good economic times, then lost it in downturns like the depression in 1873. By the 1880s, things were better as the nation underwent rapid industrialization. With it came rising prosperity and workers wanting a share of the benefits. They turned to unions for help with skilled artisans leading the way helping the unskilled as well in their efforts to organize.

New labor organizations arose, older ones expanded, and as they did, they grew more active and militant. It led to the "great uprising of labor" in 1886, including the landmark Chicago May 4 Haymarket Riot protesting police violence against strikers the previous day. Its impact was hugely negative at first. It forced organized labor to regroup and settle in for a long period of recovery.

This was at a time the incipient labor movement was over two million and rising beginning with its organizing efforts launching it in the 1870s. By the 1880s, it had enough strength to stage huge strikes for better pay and working conditions like the struggle for an eight hour day that had 80,000 strikers parading peacefully down Chicago's main Michigan Avenue on May 1, 1886 in what's now regarded as the first ever May Day Parade. [...]

"Ludwig van Beethoven died on March 26, 1827, after four months of misery on a dirty straw mattress in Vienna. What brought on that downward spiral? Lead poisoning accidentally caused by his own doctor, says a journal article..."

Last weekend, the American Psychological Association rejected a moratorium that would have prevented its member psychologists from participating in interrogations at U.S. detention centers at places like Guantanamo Bay and secret CIA "black sites" around the world. Instead, the 148,000-member organization passed a resolution at its annual meeting in San Francisco banning psychologists from participating in interrogations that employ certain harsh techniques. Many psychologists within the APA feel the resolution did not go far enough.

The issue of torture and interrogations has become a sore spot for the APA, the world’s largest group of psychologists. The American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association both outright prohibit their members from participating in interrogations at locations where basic human rights are not guaranteed, like Guantanamo. These groups have been joined by others, like the American Translators Association and the Society for Ethnomusicology (since translation is essential in interrogations, and sustained, blaring music has been used as a form of torture).

Central to the debate is the question "Are psychologists participating in torture?" While the Bush administration repeatedly denies that it uses torture, a leaked report of the International Committee of the Red Cross says certain U.S. methods used are "tantamount to torture."

By deliberately scrambling a person's visual and tactile senses, it is now possible to give them an "out-of-body" experience. Two procedures – which are the first to imitate an out-of-body experience artificially – use cameras to fool people into thinking they are standing or sitting somewhere else in a room. They provide the strongest proof yet that people only imagine floating out of their bodies during surgery or near-death experiences.

From the depiction of a vulva in a cave painting to the newest internet porno, technology and sexuality have always been closely linked. No one can predict what the future will bring, but history indicates that sex will continue to play an essential role in technological development. The porno effect accompanies every new technological development. Is it going too far to assume that research in nanotechnology and genetic engineering will be influenced by our sexual needs? The surgical modification of sexual organs is no longer something very unusual. The question is not whether these technologies alter humanity, but how they do so.

Elvis as a cynical commentary? Or the outbreak in Memphis, Tennessee, deep in the heart of the heart of the country, of a more primitive Jungian archetype -- the Sun King?

Or both? A cynical commodity to such a point of excess, hysteria and exhaustion that Elvis actually disappeared into his own promotional culture. The Elvis commodity, then, achieving such a global degree of cynical exchange-value that that heartbreak voice, the sneer, the DA hair, and the rock 'n rollin' legs on stage with that guitar, and the screaming fans actually vanished into a massive black hole. As it grew more heated and intensive, the Elvis myth burst into a final brilliant luminosity, exploded inwards with a fantastic density of energy, and then settled down through the '70s and the '80s as a steadily-flashing cultural pulsar. What emerged from that cultural pulsar (the final stage of a dying star) were the five faces of Elvis: sometimes movie star (Blue Hawaii), confirmed rock 'n roll heart-throb; good ol' southern boy playing with his buddies; unpredictable philanthropist to the poor; and a real '50s sex symbol. And just like Marilyn Monroe and Jimmy Dean before him, Elvis can still attract such necrophiliac fascination because he was always a promotional simulacra which could be wrapped around any passing mood. Thus, in the '70s, it was Elvis' death as a tragedy, and in the '80s a nostalgia feast for our own time passing. In the end as in the beginning, he was the perfect fusion of voice, autobiography, commodity opportunity, and national mood.

Until recently, the publication of yet another life of Garibaldi might have been greeted with a shrug and a yawn. What new could possibly be said about a figure whose every word and every deed has been memorialized or picked apart in children's textbooks, scholarly histories, and a plethora of biographies both hagiographic and critical? Fatigue with the lore of the Italian unification and skepticism about its founding fathers were plain already in 1926, when Piero Gobetti published his famous essay "Risorgimento Senza Eroi," or "The Risorgimento Without Heroes." There was already an awareness that the creation of the Italian state had been a deeply flawed and inadequate process, championed by a small cultural elite, carried out more by diplomatic maneuvering and the power of foreign troops than by a great popular uprising; and also that unification had left Italy almost as divided as before, a country where old and deep allegiances to family, town, region, and church continued to compete with the new nation for the loyalties of most Italians. From the 1960s on, when historians became more interested in "history from below," the fascination with the "great men" of the Risorgimento seemed more like quaint nineteenth-century hero worship than serious history.

But then the intellectual climate changed again. In recent decades, new scholarship on the nature and history of nationalism has opened up a new space for a reconsideration of Italian unification and its heroes. In 1983, there appeared two groundbreaking books on nationalism, Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities and Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism. Each in its own way argued that nationalism, rather than a hoary and innate form of identity (as all nationalisms insist they are), is in fact an exceedingly modern phenomenon that was made possible not least by the invention of printing, industrialization, and mass communication.

It appears that everybody is interested in cosmology. In one anthropological study, every one of the more than 60 separate cultures examined was found to have several common characteristics, including "faith healing, luck superstitions, propitiation of supernatural beings, … and a cosmology." Apparently, to be human is to care how the physical world came to be, whether it has boundaries and what is to become of it. Modern cosmology is a highly sophisticated subject funded by governments with hundreds of millions of dollars a year. It is unquestionably interesting, but is it, even in its modern guise, convincing?

The current Big Bang paradigm has it that the cosmos is expanding out of an initially dense state and that by looking outward into space, one can, thanks to the finite speed of light, look back to much earlier epochs. This understanding owes much to two accidents: astronomers' discovery of redshifts in the spectra of distant nebulae and the fortuitous detection of an omnipresent background of microwave noise, which is believed to be the remnant of radiation from a hot and distant past. Set in the theoretical framework of Einstein's general theory of relativity, such observations lead to a model that makes predictions and can thus be tested.

"The calendar is an erotic and robotic calendar. No naked humans (as in playboy), just robots in insinuating positions and their special parts hanging out of their body. Now you can see the private areas of robots!"

monochrom presents:

++TAUGSHOW #12++
Friday, August 10, 2007 / 9:30 PM @ FOO, Chaos Communication Camp, Finowurt

The flat hierarchies of talk shows are about as subversive as NYC Democrats smoking dope. But count us out! We won't produce a talk show. Nope. We produce a TAUGSHOW! Which means: we dig it. Our guests are geeks, heretics, and other coevals. A joyful bucket full of good clean fanaticism, crisis, language, culture, self-content, identity, utopia, mania and despair, condensed into the well known cultural technique of a prime time TV show.

[taugen; Viennese slang: to dig/love/adore something]

Host: Johannes Grenzfurthner
Content Manager: Michael Zeltner (replacing Roland Gratzer)

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Thanks to the wonderful folks of the CCC and the Metalab for helping us...

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/// RICH GIBSON ON MAPS AND REALITIES

Maps tell stories, and the stories they tell both reflect and create reality. We live in a phenomenal Universe. What we see, smell, hear, taste and touch is mediated by our senses. What we see are the records of photons hitting our eyes, and what we smell is the effect of molecules of that material binding with receptors in our nasal passages (think on that as you visit the porta potty). Because we live in a phenomenal universe in which our experience of reality is mediated by our senses the maps that we create to represent reality also create reality. Rich Gibson is interested in the geospatial component of what people do. Everything we do, think or experience we do, think or experience somewhere. But who cares where you were when you added 'milk' to your grocery list? Consider that our primary source on the lives of many people, including in recent historical time, is their middens and outhouses. That is, their garbage dumps and shit. The locative part of our history is at least as important as our shit! And if handled well we can learn from where we have been.

Rich Gibson appears to be a mechanism for turning sugar and alcohol into energy and ideas. He lives in Sebastopol California where he writes code and words, and tries to understand and perhaps change the ways he and the world interact. He is the co-author of "Mapping Hacks" and "Google Maps Hacks". He works with Meadan.org. We care about what is close to us, and Meadan is working to bring the world close to all of us.

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/// B9PUNK ON PIRATES AND RADIOS

Pirate Radio is not only possible in the US, but easy, affordable, low-risk, and a useful important medium. KBFR (K-Boulder Free Radio) was a enormously successful and long-lived (5 years on the air) station in Colorado, which was made more successful and long-lived with the involvement of hackers. In the end, we had 40 Djs, a rented space, benefit concerts and a cd of local music we recorded at our studio, thousands of listeners, and an unforgettable impact on the community. Together we confronted, and have lots of funny stories to tell about, the many interesting questions involved in running a free station, like pleasing the community, advertisers, free speech at large, "real" radio competition, and of course those evil bastards the FCC.

B9punk is basically a "hacker enabler," meaning that she has had a hand in setting up projects like making a new 2600 meeting, starting a pseudo-hackerspace in New York (the Hacker Halfway House), designing and coordinating the HOPE conference, and most recently Hackers on a Plane. Her most interesting and favorite adventure in this line of work so far, was being involved with a pirate radio station in the US. She currently lives in New York City, but has been spending a lot of time in Europe lately in an effort to pick up some class and avoid being a stereotype.

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/// PHILLIP STEARNS: "I <3 COMPUTER MUSIC TOO!"

Phillip Stearns is a Los Angeles based sound and visual artist, composer and recent graduate of the California Institute of the Arts music composition department. His most recent work is centered around the notion of the circuit as a site for expression through subversion. His projects are personal inquiries into electronic technologies and their role in shaping our notions of community, space, isolation and interconnectedness. The tools of his practice include hacked and custom designed electronic hardware, misused audio hardware, compromised and abused commercial software, and recently antiquated technologies.

"I <3 Computer Music Too!" goes right to the core of electronic media: The Hardware. Rather than engage with the tradition of software programming to generate sound and image, custom designed analog/digital circuitry is used to hack, augment and transform the electronic signals flying around the motherboard of a PC computer into an abstract audio/visual mind-warp. The performance is improvised and deals with negotiations between the performer and equipment in the creation of a real-time media based performance work. Instead of creating a system which converts from one media to another, sound to audio or visa versa, the hardware in "I <3 Computer Music Too!" treats all signals equally. All electronic signals are analog and are without meaning until they are "formatted" to suit a particular display or output device. Within the piece, this formatting is done as directly is possible with the goal of minimal translation.

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/// monochrom regulars:

JAKE APPELBAUM

Jake Appelbaum will talk about Flickr, Yahoo!, unintended consequences of censorship, and publishing on the net as an artist.

Jacob Appelbaum is the monochrom Ambassador. He's currently living in San Francisco.

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/// Showband:

MONOCHROM ALLSTAR BAND featuring Michael Zeltner

An eternity of whetstones per kilo-newton!

Enjoy!

It has been suggested that the next generation of radio telescopes, such as LOFAR, now being built in the Netherlands, could be used to detect radio noise from alien radio and TV. So Marko Horvat, a computer scientist at the University of Zagreb, Croatia, calculated the odds of detecting alien civilisations of different lifespans from their radio signals. If, for example, 10 civilisations, each with a lifespan of 250,000 years, live within radio reach of Earth, the probability that one of them will be detected is about 9 per cent. That sounds good, but it assumes we have near-perfect telescopes scanning the entire sky constantly - an ideal far from being realised. "We need much better telescopes," Horvat says.

Joost might be a nice idea, but for those of us fortunate enough to not live in the states, is sort of lame. Especially when you realize just how many ITV stations are really out there.
One collection of online videos is particularly scrumptious. It's called FreeTube, and it has a long list of stations featuring news, lifestyle sports, and, best of all, cartoons. Loads of cartoons.

Just Just over four years ago, Toby Olditch and Philip Pritchard, two carpenters from Oxford, broke into RAF Fairford with the intention of disabling American B52 bombers. It was just before the 'shock and awe' offensive against Iraq began. Their aim was to try to save the lives of at least some ordinary Iraqi citizens. They believed that even if, as was likely, the bombers could be made airworthy after their assault, even a few days’ delay in flights would have given some people the opportunity to flee to safety.

U.S. scientists have created new facial recognition software that might eliminate the need to remember dozens of passwords or credit card numbers.

Researchers led by University of Houston Professor Ioannis Kakadiaris have developed URxD, a face recognition program that uses a three-dimensional snapshot of a person's face to create a biometric. Kakadiaris said URxD can be used for everything from gaining access to secure facilities to authorizing credit card purchases.

"Accuracy is the name of the game in 3-D face recognition," Kakadiaris said. "What makes our system so accurate is the strength of the variables that we use to describe a person's face.

"Imagine a day when you simply sit in front of your computer and it recognizes who you are," he said. "Everything will be both easier and more secure, from online purchases to parental control of what Web sites your children can visit."

More information about the new technology is available at www.cbl.uh.edu/URxD.

This is what happens when TV camera's masturbate! In this case, the camera (Canon ZR70) is shooting through a mask I made in Photoshop and imported into the camera. The center of the mask is black allowing the video signal through to recirculate when pointed at the TV set displaying the live camera image. The camera in addition to having a Mask Mode engaged, is also set to MIRROR. What you see is produced by rotating the video camera "just so" to produce the video feedback.