This link is to a short video, explaining why a school in Thailand introduced a toilet for those pupils who considered themselves transsexual. The pupil interviewed seems quite content with the set up.

A model to be replicated? Or a risk of further marginalisation?

[...] But even though it is easy for me to support the idea and to feel frighteningly in tune with the great polytheist movement, I'm having hell of a hard time answering the question about my favorite god/desse/s, since I worship countless of them. Some live in my flat, some I talk to on a regularly basis, some I had sexual intercourse with and some I have never seen nor even dared to imagine in their full glory. [...]

"GPL software is like this thing called Linux, where you can never commercialize anything around it; that is, it always has to be free. And, you know, that's just a philosophy. Some said philosophy wasn't around much anymore, but it's still there. And so that's where we part company."

'"The Dark Knight," then, is a conservative movie about the war on terror. And like another such film, last year's "300," "The Dark Knight" is making a fortune depicting the values and necessities that the Bush administration cannot seem to articulate for beans.'
Mystery novelist Andrew Klavan, "What Bush and Batman Have in Common," The Wall Street Journal.

There are plenty of ways to commit suicide, but few more public than turning a multiton moving train full of passengers into a bullet. Last year in the U.K., 194 people killed themselves on the tracks of mass-transit systems, with some 50 of those choosing the sooty tunnels of the Tube. New York City's subway averages 26 suicides a year. In Paris, 24 died on the tracks of the Métro last year. While it is a fallacy to imagine any suicide as a solitary act — even the tidiest affair leaves survivors stricken — death by train is a particularly declaratory form of killing oneself. It makes the act a form of theater — for the driver, watching it all from behind his windshield, and for the rest of us.

In the past months in Britain, there has been a sort of low-humming cultural unease about suicides on the Tube, which are readily announced over station intercoms as the reason for delays, presumably to allay fears of terrorism. A movie in general release, Three and Out, attempted to turn this unease into dark comedy by portraying a hapless Tube driver who tries to exploit a (fictional) loophole in his contract that grants him early retirement if he witnesses three suicides from his train. The film misjudged the nation's mood and was savaged by film critics, mental-health workers and the train drivers' union, whose members picketed outside the premiere of the movie. Their placards declared that suicides on the Tube were no laughing matter.

Tired of the rapid pace of the internet? This is your solution.

WebToSnailMail is a free service where you can receive web pages by regular postage. It's simple and very easy.

Just send a self addressed and stamped envelope with the URL of the desired web-page to:

WebToSnailMail
1600 Amphitheatre Parkway
Mountain View, CA 94043

In 4-6 weeks you will be receiving the web page printed out in your envelope.

The Wikipedia entry for kamikaze says flatly that it was not the Japanese term. [...] I added a [citation needed] tag, but being too impatient to wait for some Wikipedian to notice and respond, I thought I'd ask you all: anybody know whether ordinary Japanese used the term kamikaze during the war or whether it was imported from ignorant Yanks afterwards?

Are men the new endangered species? According to a Melbourne bio-ethicist, they're way up there with pandas and polar bears.

In a speech titled Should human beings have sex?, Dr Robert Sparrow yesterday told the Australian Medical Students Association convention that females could soon rule the world as hermaphrodites without any biological use for men.

With the help of some frozen sperm at first, females could procreate on their own until stem-cell technology meant bone marrow and other human tissue could be converted into sperm, the senior lecturer at Monash University's Centre for Human Bioethics said.

"Second, there is a race — a race between Microsoft and Intel. Intel keeps making the CPUs faster and Microsoft keeps making the operating systems slower... and so far Intel is winning."

In his magisterial study, The Slave Ship, maritime historian Marcus Rediker has documented the role played by emotional and especially visual appeals in ending the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Not unlike the structural violence endemic to global capitalism today, the abolitionist James Field Stanfield argued that the terrible truths of the slave trade "had been withheld from the public eye by every effort that interest, ingenuity, and influence, could devise" (Rediker, 2007, p. 133).

Therefore, "Stanfield appealed to the immediate, visceral experience of the slave ship, over and against abstract knowledge about the slave trade, as decisive to abolition ..." (p. 156). The abolitionist's most potent weapon was the dissemination of drawings of the slave ship Brooks. Rediker asserts that these images were "to be among the most effective propaganda any social movement has ever created" (p. 308).

Based on recent findings from neuroscience we can plausibly deduce that the mirror neurons of the viewer were engaged by these images of others suffering. The appeal was to the public's awakened sense of compassion and revulsion toward graphic depictions of the wholesale violence, barbarity, and torture routinely practiced on these Atlantic voyages. Rediker notes that the images would instantaneously "make the viewer identify and sympathize with the ‘injured Africans' on the lower deck of the ship ..." while also producing a sense of moral outrage (p. 315, Olson, 2008).

In our own day, the nonprofit Edge Foundation recently asked some of the world's most eminent scientists, "What are you optimistic about? Why?" In response, the prominent neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni cited the proliferating experimental work into the neural mechanisms that reveal how humans are "wired for empathy." This is the aforementioned discovery of the mirror neuron system or MNS. The work shows that the same affective brain circuits are automatically mobilized upon feeling one's own pain and the pain of others.

Iacoboni's optimism is grounded in his belief that with the popularization of scientific insights, these findings in neuroscience will seep into public awareness and " ... this explicit level of understanding of our empathic nature will at some point dissolve the massive belief systems that dominate our societies and that threaten to destroy us" (Iacoboni, 2007, p. 14). Whether or not this occurs, Iacoboni's prediction underscores the complex relationship between science and culture and social historian Margaret Jacob's insight that "No institution is safe if people simply stop believing in the assumptions that justify its existence" (Jacoby, 1987, p.). Iacoboni's recent book, Mirroring People (2008a) and interviews (2008b) as well as Rizzolati and Sinigaglia's Mirrors in the Brain (2008) promise to make this new work accessible to the lay public. In similar fashion, Steven Pinker concludes a recent piece on the science of morality with these challenging but hopeful words from Anton Chekov, "Man will become better when you show him what he is like" (Pinker, 2008). [...]

"I don't know if they meant it this way all along or what, but WALL-E plays like a living, glowing embodiment of the marriage of Disney and Pixar, like their inaugural project. ... And on another level, one starts to wonder whether the concept of a love story between a hopelessly sexy and futuristic piece of technology and a decrepit but nostalgically lovable relic of the past might be meant to depict something more contemporary: the fusion of the barely-remembered legacy of Walt with the all-too-dominant ascendancy of the House of Steve."

Outline your face on a mirror, and you will find it to be exactly half the size of your real face. Step back as much as you please, and the size of that outlined oval will not change: it will remain half the size of your face (or half the size of whatever part of your body you are looking at), even as the background scene reflected in the mirror steadily changes. Importantly, this half-size rule does not apply to the image of someone else moving about the room. If you sit still by the mirror, and a friend approaches or moves away, the size of the person's image in the mirror will grow or shrink as our innate sense says it should.

* List of Hacker Spaces: Find a or start a Hackerspace near you!
* Communicate: Get in touch with Hackerspaces from all over the world!
* Documentation: Infos on running a space: Legal Structure, Location Scouting, Decision Making, ...
* Hackerspace Software: Billing, Membership Management, Calendaring, ...

Surfen Multimedia
Lyrics (translation):

Suring surfing through the world with multimedia
Suring surfing, day and night
on the data highway

Come join me on the internet tonight
I'm already waiting for you
Dude, be a user, go online
You'll meet me in the email

And should you lack some megabytes
You’ll find them here with me
Be it interface or cyberspace
I'll gladly share with you

With bits and bytes
With mouse and click
We are going on a tour
In the World Wide Web
We'll follow each new hint today

The Innermost Unifier: Today it's the Corporate Anthem
A talk/audio performance by Johannes Grenzfurthner, monochrom (Vienna, Austria)

Using different historical and current examples (especially from the area of the hardware/software-industry), Johannes Grenzfurthner gives a theoretical and applied - and not unamusing - overview on the musical genre of corporate anthems.

Come and sing along. Powernapping is welcome, too.

monochrom @ O'Reilly Foo Camp
Possible topics: Beautiful failure, Corporate Anthems, Massive Multiplayer Thumb Wrestling.
July 11-13, Sebastopol, CA

"Context Hacking: Some Examples Of How To Mess With Art, The Media System, Law And The Market"
July 14, 12 noon, Tunis ballroom, Google Campus, Mountain View, CA

monochrom @ Last Hope 2008
Talk about Corporate Anthems / Hopper room, 10 PM
July 18, Hotel Pennsylvania, New York City.

Law And Second Order: monochrom in Philadelphia
Philadelphia Institute for Advanced Studies
July 22, 8 PM

Law And Second Order: monochrom in Washington, DC
St Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church
(in the Sanctuary!)
1525 Newton St NW, Washington DC 20010
July 23, 8:30 PM

According to Chris Anderson, we are at "the end of science", that is, science as we know it." The quest for knowledge used to begin with grand theories. Now it begins with massive amounts of data. Welcome to the Petabyte Age."

"At the petabyte scale, information is not a matter of simple three- and four-dimensional taxonomy and order but of dimensionally agnostic statistics. It calls for an entirely different approach, one that requires us to lose the tether of data as something that can be visualized in its totality. It forces us to view data mathematically first and establish a context for it later."

And a battle it certainly is. There are basically two sides, offering two versions of "crisis." What version of crisis we accept is crucial to formulating policies to combat its effects. The fate of whole ecosystems and populations hinges on what drives higher commodity prices. Do we blame rising demand and tight supplies or the early effects of climate change? Or do we seek answers in the role that financial speculation, neoliberal restructuring, and biofuel cultivation play alongside those other factors? The first version, which serves the interests of the international finance institutions, is represented by developed nations such as the U.S. and the UK and their corporations. It focuses on the role that increased demand from China and India and tightened supplies has played in driving prices skywards. Meanwhile, farmers in Africa and elsewhere remain too unproductive, with dilapidated road systems, to get their produce to market. They are, in the lingo, in need of "modernization." Along with that, the leaders of the FAO and the World Bank agree, must come technological innovation. The language of the "new Green Revolution" is being mobilized with genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in the vanguard.

The second version comes from peasant organizations such as Via Campesina and a clutch of eloquent NGOs, such as Practical Action, Food First, GRAIN, Movement for the Global South, and the World Development Movement. Its diagnosis of the current crisis is far deeper. Rather than being a short term rise in food and oil prices, this version tends to see the crisis as rooted in the longer-term neoliberal project. Food prices in poor countries have been allowed to rocket by a neoliberal system where government-run distribution networks are dismantled, grain stores abandoned, large corporations dictate prices, and indebted nations and farmers convert crops for export to earn prized foreign currency.

For developers of RIAs (rich Internet applications), Adobe's announcement that Google and Yahoo will soon be able to index text within Flash movies should come as welcome news. Until now, Flash files have been black boxes; as binary files, search indexers could no more extract textual information from them than from JPEGs or PNGs. This first stab at Flash search still sounds somewhat primitive, but it raises an issue of importance to all Internet application developers. Given the growing number of data types and file formats being transmitted over HTTP and the increasing complexity of the applications that make use of them, is today's Web really still the Web? Or is it morphing into something else? How can we ensure that today's Web apps offer enough capabilities and flexibility to make Web 2.0 worthy of its name?

"Solidarity Divided" is an attempt to provide a framework for activists who, in looking at the US trade union movement, are trying to figure out the origin and nature of the current crisis. It is NOT an attempt to examine every question relative to the development of the US working class, nor is it an exhaustive examination of each reform effort. It is particularly focused on efforts that began around 1995 with the coming to power of the John Sweeney administration in the AFL-CIO. The book additionally attempts to situate the current crisis within the context of the failures of a certain approach to unionism that is grounded in the thought and practice of Samuel Gompers, later amended with virulent anti-communism.

It was a heroic and inhuman scheme. From 1956 to 1960, Brazil—in an effort to cleanse itself of its colonial past, to flee its burgeoning social afflictions, and to fulfill its long-prophesied emergence as a great power—conjured a new capital, Brasília, on an empty plateau in an endless savanna 3,500 feet above sea level. The city's planner, the architect Lúcio Costa, found the setting "excessively vast ... out of scale, like an ocean, with immense clouds moving over it." No invented city could accommodate itself to this wilderness. Instead, Costa declared, Brasília would create its own landscape: he devised a city on a scale as daunting as the setting itself. In conformity not with its environment but with those modernist utopian theories of the rational, sterile "Radiant City," Brasília was not to grow organically but to be born, Costa said, "as if she had been fully grown"—he even refused to visit the site, because he didn't want reality to impinge on the purity of the original design. Brasília was the first place built to be approached by jet, and the city's roads—inspired by Robert Moses's deadening expressways belting New York's outer boroughs—were like runways.

It's one of the last untapped energy sources, and one in which the United States leads the world. It's not just renewable, but almost impossible to get rid of. We're talking about fat. At about 3,500 calories to the pound, a 300-pound American contains the energy equivalent in fat of roughly 15 gallons of gasoline. How long will we let this resource go unused?

When online troublemaker Julian Assange co-founded Wikileaks, the net's premiere document-leaking site last year, some were skeptical that the service would produce anything of interest.

Now, after 18 months of publishing government, industry and military secrets that have sparked international scandals, led to takedown threats and briefly gotten the site banned in the United States, Assange says Wikileaks is just getting started changing the world.

Leibniz never married. He had considered it at the age of fifty; but the person he had in mind asked for time to reflect. This gave Leibniz time to reflect, too, and so he never married. — Bernard Fontenelle

More than 100 countries, gathered in Dublin, agreed on 28 May to ban cluster bombs in what campaigners called the most significant disarmament treaty for a decade. The signatories, who agreed the text for the treaty to be signed in Oslo in December, include some of Europe's biggest traditional users and stockpilers of the weapons, including France, Germany and the United Kingdom.

Some of the world's main producers and stockpilers – including the United States, Russia and China – oppose the move to ban cluster munitions. A statement from the US, which boycotted the Dublin conference, said: "While the United States shares the humanitarian concerns of those in Dublin, cluster munitions have demonstrated military utility, and their elimination from US stockpiles would put the lives of our soldiers and those of our coalition partners at risk."

Milestone achieve by Adrian and Vik of the RepRap community, they've replicated entirely a Darwin machine, and this child is beginning to print itself another printer!

Adrian (left) and Vik (right) with a parent RepRap machine, made on a conventional rapid prototyper, and the first complete working child RepRap machine, made by the RepRap on the left. The child machine made its first successful grandchild part at 14:00 hours UTC on 29 May 2008 at Bath University in the UK, a few minutes after it was assembled.

Polylactic acid (PLA), a plastic substitute made from fermented plant starch (usually corn) is quickly becoming a popular alternative to traditional petroleum-based plastics. As more and more countries and states follow the lead of China, Ireland, South Africa, Uganda and San Francisco in banning plastic grocery bags responsible for so much so-called "white pollution" around the world, PLA is poised to play a big role as a viable, biodegradable replacement.