Free Viruses, Spontaneous Agency, Legal Fictions, Automata
This report from F.O.E. “Out of the laboratory and on to our plates: Nanotechnology in food and agriculture (pdf)” says they’ve identified 104 food products containing toxic nanoparticles. It was published last December but I just noticed it all over the “blogosphere” today. We’re all gonna die!
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This is really the morning of day four but I want to stop a second and think back to Saturday. I got a fairly early start and headed to the “AJAX and Flash Mistakes: Lessons Learned Building SlideShare” presentation and took these notes:
Next, I went to the meeting, Core Conversation: Flat World? Secret Strategies, Tips and Tools, where I took in these points about effectively managing a globally distributed team. These notes are not well organized or thorough, but here’s what I got:
Next, I enjoyed the keynote address of Stephen Johnson and Henry Jenkins who discussed the tranformative effects of the rapid and ongoing adoption of Internet technology by youth culture, among other things. There was mention of Jenkin’s role in Harry Potter.
By this time I needed food and went to 6th Street. I was getting tired of the Internet stuff and wanted to relax and watch a film, so I saw The Lost Coast. I enjoyed it, the music was beautiful, and it was all shot in San Francisco and Northern California, but the story was really cliche: two guys who fooled around with each other in high school are reunited on Halloween in SF. One is “straight” and about to get married, the other is gay now and still hasn’t gotten past his hope that something might still happen between him and his old friend. The two guys, along with the gay guy’s roommate (and high school girlfriend), and another gay friend (possibly ex-boyfriend) spend a long random night that bleeds into the morning and everyone learns to let go of the past and grow up a bit. Frankly it got boring around 1/2 way through.
I tried to catch the documentary, Gonzo: The Life and Work of Dr. Hunter S. Thompson (2008), but I was too late. Luckily it will play again later this week. The director, Alex Gibney, also made the documentary, Taxi to the Dark Side, which also I still need to see. Since I was at the theater where Bi the Way was going to play I waited around and saw that. I thought it was sophomoric and totally unfocused. It was supposed to be an exploration of the changing perceptions about gay identity in youth culture now, (how the kids don’t want to be boxed in to labels, etc.) It was a road trip documentary, and as such looked like a great deal of fun to make. It featured (for some reason) Jonathan Couette’s son, Josh, who frankly stole the show. I want to watch a whole movie about that kid. I think he’s a genius and will be tremendously successful with whatever he decides to do with his life. I went to the party for the film afterwards which was held at Austin’s “Enchanted Forest,” a kind of burning man in the woods right in the middle of the city. Met a few drunk girls and saw some interesting art, but suddenly it was 4am and I so I headed on back to the hotel.
Like I said, it’s really day 4. I’m in this presentation about International Mobile issues, and no one has touched on the idea of targeted advertising via SMS… *UNTIL JUST RIGHT NOW.* I was considering asking a question / making a comment to bring this issue up and now one of the panelists just went over a system implemented in Africa called “Call Me,” where a user sends a free SMS to another that says “call me,” and that message includes an ad. Another panelist just mentioned “Blink,” in the Netherlands, a free ad supported carrier aimed at 18-24 year olds. I’ll have to check these out. Now there is some discussion of airtime as currency… <eg>…
Today was the first of my 10 day visit to Austin, TX for the famed South by Southwest (SXSW) Interactive, Film, and Music Festival. I’m staying rather far out of the center of the city since I only decided to come here at the last minute, but my hotel room, like most everything in Texas, is HUGE! It’s also incredibly clean and comforting to arrive back here after today’s adventures downtown near the convention center. It’s a Holiday Inn Express which I expected to be small and dingy, but what do I know? I’m not a frequent guest of hotels, and when I do need a room I normally go for the small boutiques rather than the huge chains. And they’re most often small and dingy. So, maybe this is one part of American mass culture about which I’m needlessly snobbish? Yeah it’s generic looking on the outside, but really, for the price this place is d-lux inside!
Ok, so I awoke after a 2 days of no sleep and 1 night of amazing sleep. I considered working out since there is a gym, but - well - maybe tomorrow :) I got downtown in time for a nice lunch at the Old Pecan Street Cafe, where I had a tasty cajun chicken salad and listened to some Texas oil billionaires discuss some business. One guy on cell, “It was the best deal I ever made. Brought $3-400 million to a couple guys. I don’t drill dry holes.”
After lunch I headed to the convention center to get my badge. The line was long but I got finished in time for two book-readings and a panel discussion. The book readings were Subject to Change, by a few guys from AdaptivePath, and Radical Transparency. Both interesting and relevant, but I must say mildly boring slash “yeah I already knew this stuff.” The panel, too, reinforced a lot of stuff I know and have experienced but included some valuable tips for getting the non-web folks to respect the web-folks (us/me)… it was called, “Respect!” and dealt with the fact that in most organizations, even huge web companies like Google, there are endless problems getting other parts of the organization to respect what web / interface designers and info architects do. There was some amount of engineer bashing in all of these, and that made me feel funny because I consider myself both an engineer (not really a great engineer, but it’s often been my “role”) and a designer (again, not the best… but I have worn many hats in my day). I hope I’m not a dilettante. More like a jack of all trades…
After these I headed to a mixer but the line to get into this place was absurd so I decided to take myself out to dinner. I chose parkside because the posted menu had the most delicious sounding fish dishes I’d ever seen. The prices seemed somewhat high, but I figured I’d treat myself and went inside. I was seated right away and the waitress was adorable. I asked whether the items on the right side of the menu (”…of the day”) were considered entrees or not, and she wisely took the opportunity to warn me that the portions were quite small as the food was very rich. I started with a blue cheese, beet, and pistachio salad and some raw snapper with chili and lime. She wasn’t kidding about the portion size (and the prices were certainly entree-sized!), but I have never had a more delicious fish dish. Next I had the pork loin with apples and brandy sauce, and for desert I chose, on my waitress’ confident recommendation, the donut holes. Amazing. Eat at this place if you don’t mind throwing down some cash and having a light but incredible meal.
I was able to see one film tonight as well, Second Skin. Here’s the trailer:
Here is a link to my friend Graham participating in a discussion on Glosslip Radio - “From Our Lips To Your Ears”. The show is about the Church of Scientology tax settlement agreement of 1993 and the Sklar v. IRS case concerning the deductibility of religious training and education costs for the children of Jewish parents. Apparently this family believes that they should receive the same excellent tax-free privileges that Scientology enjoys. Do you?
Just got back from MX (o como se dicen, D.F. (Districto Federal)) last night. It was a too-brief trip to a fantastic, intense, chaotic metropolis… to me it read like the strong and supportive, but slightly crazy older sister to LA. If Los Angeles is Betty Suarez from Ugly Betty, then Mexico City is Hilda.
Last night I stayed up way too late trying to bring scuzzlebot back to life. He’s not there yet. He’s nothing more than a chatterbot who reads gossip news feeds and automatically posts new derivative drivel of his own on a stochastic schedule on his own wordpress blog. Anyway - I was trying to get the wordpress version of reblog to work and finally did. (See this post if you are trying to do the same thing. There are two unrelated errors in the reblog code that I’ve found and documented here). Then this morning, while performing my daily internews ingestion ritual, RWW reminded me about Visual Complexity, that astounding archive of various network visualizations. I followed the link and randomly, the first one I clicked turned out to be a project called backchannel, “a real-time view of the conversation happening in the #etech IRC channel at O’Reilly’s Emerging Technology Conference,” by stamen design, who also developed reblog... weird, right? And then I took a closer look at the image and noticed the nick, justatheory:
I just read the first chapter of Marshall Brain’s “The Day You Discard Your Body” Like Marshall, I’ve long been annoyed with sci-fi that doesn’t address the idea that we will soon be able to exist separately from our bodies and animate other bodies, both virtually and really. To me it seems an obvious and relatively near term reality based on our rapidly advancing comprehension of and ability to map and model the brain.
So what are the good sci-fi books that really handle the implications of nanotech, virtualization of our consciousness, and the fact that we will soon be able to live bodiless? I like to think Marx’s line from the Communist Manifesto, “All that is solid melts into air” was a truly prescient observation. He was way ahead of his time, pondering this coming future with its pervasive nanotech-based cloud computing and musing about how the man-machine interface will eventually evaporate leaving us in a kind of twilight zone virtureality. And seriously, how is a situation like that going to affect the economy? Is the virtureal future only for the wealthy and insane… or will it consume us all? I’ve ordered a copy of “Queen City Jazz,” but I wonder if a sub-genre of sci-fi should be established to indicate that a bodiless future is properly addressed within?
Unlikely as it is to occur anytime soon, I’m all for it! But before a subway to the sea gets built, MTA has plans for other subways going other places. Here’s an LA Times article on some other subway-not-to-the-sea proposal. This one would connect the green line (the train that goes from nowhere to nowhere) to a third nowhere, located at Expo and Crenshaw. The article notes at the end:
None of these projects has funding. And if some money becomes available, there’s expected to be a major fight for which line goes first.
There’s only one way to fight *organized crime* - with disorganized noncrime… or, free and anonymous speech! In this vein, the non-entity known as “anonymous” has declared war on the criminal, destructive, dangerous cult known as the Church of Scientology. The declaration came in the form of a video posted on youtube. With a simple two-minute clip… stock footage of fast moving clouds and a soothing computer generated male voice… “Anonymous” calmly declares war against the Church of Scientology in its present form:
Hello, Scientology. We are Anonymous.
Over the years, we have been watching you. Your campaigns of misinformation; suppression of dissent; your litigious nature, all of these things have caught our eye. With the leakage of your latest propaganda video into mainstream circulation, the extent of your malign influence over those who trust you, who call you leader, has been made clear to us. Anonymous has therefore decided that your organization should be destroyed. For the good of your followers, for the good of mankind–for the laughs–we shall expel you from the Internet and systematically dismantle the Church of Scientology in its present form. [entire transcript]
This response video, supposedly put together by a Scientologist, is absolutely diabolical, and just what I would expect from Scientology. They really fill their shoes as the evil organization depicted in a typical Bond-style movie from the sixties:
The next video from anonymous I saw was their call to action video that called for protests in front of Scientology centers worldwide on Feb. 10. One of my great friends, Graham Berry, has long fought against the Co$ and had some picket signs already made, so we met up that day and went over to the Hollywood Co$ headquarters. The turnout was fantastic. It was great to finally see people waking up to the fact that this organization is not just something to laugh about and dismiss. They are a dangerous, criminal organization with a long history of abuse of both their own members and those who dare to publically criticize their practices. The organization truly must be dismantled. At the very least, their ill-gotten tax exempt status as a “religion” in the United States must be revoked.
What’s so bad about Scientology? If you don’t know, watch this video, and then go do your own internet sleuthing (sorry the music is a little dramatic here):
Cult of the Dead Cow has come out with a new set of diagnostic plumbing tools for the vast series of tubes we know as the internetz.
Hackers use Google to find website vulnerabilities from PhysOrg.com
Infamous computer hacker group Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC) said Friday it is offering a software tool that lets people use Google to scan websites for security flaws.[...]
