Link. Some context. A related video. A NY Mag article. A Boston Globe article.
Ape Lad is the guy behind this. I give it massive uptwinkles.

Just learned about this. A great web resource. It is kicked off by Alvin Plantinga, and they have Michael Murray, Eleonore Stump and others lined up for the next two years. Lecture notes are also included.

http://blpr.org/

From a review of this book in last weekend's Wall Street Journal:

"Chicken Tikka Masala, invented a half-century ago or so, is the most globally recognized Indian dish. Yet it isn't really Indian; it's Anglo-Indian, concocted from a classic Indian preparation to suit British tastes. The 'Roast Beef of England' didn't survive the imperial encounter; surveys show chicken tikka masala to be today the most popular dish in British restaurants."

"For while 'empire' is now something of a naughty word — implying one culture victimizing another—in the trade-dominated British practice it was often a two-way street."

"The first curry recipe appeared in England in 1747, and the first curry house opened in London in 1810; by the 1850s, curry powder (or 'currie powder,' above) was a popular household product. It shared space in the British kitchen with numerous imperial products: Kenyan coffee, Jamaican bananas, Malayan pineapples, perhaps even a can or two of Australian 'Pride of Empire' cling peaches (below)."

"The pervasive influence of the colonies on Britain's visual culture during the 19th and 20th centuries is superbly documented in [this book]. It's a browser's book of delights and curiosities, from matchboxes, labels and theater bills to scarves, games, pamphlets, posters and even a brochure suggesting that you, too, could have a farm in Africa."

"The annotations are first-rate — a 'coronation chicken' curry was created for Elizabeth II's ascension in 1952, for instance."

Aljazeera English on the one-year anniversary of the self-immolation of Mohamed Bouazizi of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia– an act of despair that sparked the Arab upheavals of 2011:

In Sidi Bouzid today, people were outting up banners in his honor.

See also the retrospective by AFP:

Russia Today also covers the anniversary and continued Tunisian discontents:

Paul Dirac, his equation and his radio

A film in the Old Cavendish Laboratory, where Alan Macfarlane briefly describes Dirac's equation - drawn on his blackboard by Neil Turok and with the signature of Antony Hewish below. Also in King's College with Dirac's radio, given to Alan Macfarlane by Sir John Sulston 2009 and 2011 Filmed by Xu Bei and Alan Macfarlane
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The strange, farcical trial of Byron Sonne continues (here are earlier installments). Sonne is a Toronto hacker and security researcher who was arrested during the G20, with much attendant press about the "fact" that he had been planning to make bombs in connection with the event.

Sonne was left in jail for nearly a year before his hearings began, and his charges were recharacterised as "possessing explosive materials" and "counseling the indictable offense of mischief not committed."

Now the "explosive materials" question is being addressed in court. Sonne had a lab in his basement, and he was a gardener. He possessed many substances that a "bomb expert" from Defence Research and Development Canada called "precursors" to making explosives. They are also normal gardening substances, and/or the sort of thing that a model rocketry hobbyist (as Sonne was -- he'd been a member of the Canadian Association of Rocketry) would keep in neatly labelled vessels in his basement.

No one disputes that Sonne had a lab in his basement, stocked with glassware and neatly labelled containers (see photos here). There was potassium permanganate, potassium nitrate, ammonium nitrate, iron oxide and zinc oxide. There was stearine, copper sulfate, urea, hydrogen peroxide and aluminum powder, as well as dextrin, sulfamic acid, hexachloroethane, charcoal, potassium silicate and sodium bicarbonate. Sonne had plastic bags full of wax shavings and PVC shavings, and a container of hexamine tablets next to his camp stove. There was acetone, methyl hydrate and hydrochloric acid in his garage. In his furnace room, he had an electrochemical setup where he seemed to be turning potassium chloride into potassium chlorate, a shiny white crystal that is, Anderson said, a well-known ingredient in improvised explosives like TATP (triacetone triperoxide) and HMTD (hexamethylene triperoxide diamlene).

Most of these chemicals have multiple uses. Urea and ammonium nitrate are fertilizers, and police photographed stacks of seeds from Martha Stewart Living. “That’s the difficulty with a lot of this,” Anderson said. “It can be done with ordinary kitchen stuff.” Some have no explosive properties at all. Copper sulfate can be used to grow “beautiful blue crystals,” beakers of which were found during the search.

Anderson said that none of the chemicals had been combined—what he saw were “precursors,” not a bomb. Still, the expert was sober, pointing out that there were enough precursors in the Forest Hill home to make eight to 10 kilos of explosives, enough to “blow apart the back of a bus.”

Byron Sonne: the thin line between terrorist and gardener

(Thanks, Denise!)

 
These clips are hard to find on the Internet and who knows how long they’ll last out there before the dark corporate forces wipe them from view. The teachings of the SubGenius are under relentless assault!

Devo’s appearance on Saturday Night Live on October 14, 1978 was a visitation from a rock and roll galaxy far far away and yet so near. It was as if aliens from another planet had created a concept of Earthlings based on old television transmissions they’d hijacked of industrial training films, Triumph Of The Will, episodes of Hullabaloo and Saturday morning cartoons and then spewed it all back at us in a digitized replication missing a few ones and zeros. It was an attempt at communication, not unlike Klaatu’s failed efforts in 1951.
 

 

http://b.rw/tEzH9l




Spiky, enjoyable analysis that takes as its starting point Newt Gingrich's recent remarks about Palestinians being "an invented people". They're no more or less "invented" than any other modern national identity


More about this article

http://b.rw/vhT3ES




Interesting post on limits of our perception, awareness. As notorious "gorilla test" shows, we are far less likely to notice unexpected events than we presume. Which could have severe consequences, when it comes to matters of law


More about this article

They call Paris the City of Love. It’s also the birthplace of the Marquis de Sade. Behind the romantic postcard facade, there’s something a bit more complicated going on. In Tuileries, a short film by Joel and Ethan Coen from the 2006 anthology, Paris Je T’Aime, Steve Buscemi plays a mild-mannered tourist caught completely out of his element. What transpires is a rather bizarre five-minute cultural lesson they won’t teach you at Berlitz. It’s now added to our collection of 435 Free Movies Online.

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Related Content:

John Turturro Reads Italo Calvino’s Animated Fairy Tale

 

Tuileries: A Short, Slightly Twisted Film by Joel and Ethan Coen is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at openculture.com, or follow us on Facebook, Twitter and now Google Plus.

As a book-loving maker family, we try to find books that will prime our two boys, ages 2 and 4, to have the curiosity, whimsy, creativity, resourcefulness, flexibility of thinking, environmental understanding, and mechanical sense to contribute to the family-wide maker projects we’ve already started to do together. But discovering compelling books that can do this can be challenging. In my early months of motherhood, I spent a long time trying to find a list like this online. I ended up discovering the best books the way parents have done for decades: by browsing our local library.

Here are some of our favorite books on our bookshelf today. What gems would you add to our list? Please add in the comments below.

Let’s begin with Crockett Johnson’s Harold and the Purple Crayon, a true classic about making the world what you want it to be. It’s hard to believe it was first written in 1955. It hasn’t aged a day! I discovered a whole series of Harold titles with more of his creative adventures, so we own the Treasury as well. More recent, Thacher Hurd’s Art Dog is a cunning canine and graffiti artist who follows in Harold’s tradition, painting items out of necessity: escaping a jail cell or hopping into a getaway car. (Incidentally, if you ever happen to find yourself in the Berkeley Public Library, you can take a seat in Art Dog’s Brushmobile, which would look great in any decent art car parade.)

 

Museum Trip

In the wordless treasure Museum Trip, a boy goes on another imaginative adventure, this time through old labyrinths while lost on a field trip. This book’s creator, Barbara Lehman, is the Rod Serling of the preschool set. We have all of her books (The Red Book, Rainstorm, Trainstop, The Secret Box), and each has a small, delightful surprise that involves travel through a dimension of time or space. I appreciate that she got her start drawing for the MTA in New York. For more wordless mindbenders, take a look at the books of David Wiesner, like Flotsam, Sector 7, and Free Fall.

Lights Out

Arthur Geisert’s inventive pigs would be superstars of the maker world if they existed in real life. Lights Out begins with the only words of the book:

My parents make me turn off the light at eight. They know I’m afraid to go to sleep unless the light is on. They said, “If you can figure something out–go ahead. So I did.

This clever pig constructs a 29-step Rube Goldberg machine that extends up the attic, out the window, over the roof, into the yard, down the basement, and back up to the top of the house to turn off the bedroom light, revealing a pleased, dozing piglet in the last shot. Geisert illustrates each element of the contraption in rich detail over the book’s 32 pages, enough that you might be able to reconstruct the whole thing at home. We also read Pigaroons regularly. It’s about some shenanigans that led to a healthy rivalry at an ice sculpture contest, and it features a band of equally enterprising piglets. I note that we should add Hogwash and The Giant Ball of String to our collection, as we’ve enjoyed both when we’ve borrowed them from the library.

Look-Alikes Jr.

To share another obsessive personality with our kids, we crack open one of the editions of Joan Steiner’s Look-Alikes we own, books in which “common objects wear disguises.” Some are almost too chock-full of detail, so for our boys, the best choice is Look-Alikes Jr., a little simpler than the original. In it, we scan 3D collages assembled from familiar bits and pieces we’d find in our junk drawer: teabags, M&Ms, dimes, dog biscuits, crackers, nail clippers, crayons, and thousands of other objects, all posing in cohesive scenes. It’s a fun game of I Spy, with more surprises because the theme of each scene is so strongly executed, she can keep you from recognizing the items she used to compose it.

Gerald McBoingBoing

Gerald McBoingBoing began as a brilliant animated film about finding your unique calling when you have a peculiar talent. In this case, it’s a boy who “didn’t talk words, he went BOING BOING instead.” We don’t mind creating the sound effects ourselves, so we appreciate that the filmmakers adapted the story into a picture book as well. The story is by Dr. Seuss, and his fans won’t be disappointed by his signature sparkly rhymes and inventive use of language. Seuss didn’t create the images, but instead you get some very sweet illustrations that evoke mid-century advertising, similar to the cartoon but brighter.

Tomie dePaola has written over 200 books for children, and while I haven’t read more than a few, I can heartily recommend The Knight and the Dragon. The stars of the book prepare for their very first battle with each other, building armor from scratch, rehearsing their moves, etc. When they meet, they fail pretty miserably at their stereotypical vocations, but a wise princess who happens to pass by saves them both with [spoiler alert!] a couple of how-to books that help them transform their enmity into a delicious eatery.

Two titles by another well-known favorite, Leo Lionni: In Cornelius, a clever crocodile learns how to do new things and inspires others to do the same. In Inch by Inch a teeny worm explores measuring different surfaces until he is faced with a challenge to do so with something intangible (and he comes up with a clever solution!) We have a hard time getting the tape measure away from the kids, so they love seeing this little worm make his way in the world.

One thing to learn about the world when you are a maker-to-be is where things come from, and Laura Vaccaro Seeger First the Egg takes a spin around that old cliché with some fun die-cut paintings that run through the cycles of several staples of childhood. For example: “First the SEED, then [a seedling, which is pictured but not labeled, then] the FLOWER” or “First the WORD then the STORY.” Of course, it all comes back to that chicken again! Our toddler loves pulling the pages over by the unusually shaped peepholes.

Wonderful Houses Around the World

Yoshio Komatsu’s Wonderful Houses Around the World takes a close look at how ten different families live in very different homes, and how those are built. There’s a companion coffeetable book by the same photographer, but this kids’ version includes luscious cross-section diagrams by Akira Nishiyama. For more great diagrams, pick up some books by Stephen Biesty, such as Incredible Everything. We don’t read all the words to our little guys–even without the narration they get so absorbed in the detailed illustrations (reminiscent of Where’s Waldo?)–but we do consult the notes as they ask questions. Of course, sometimes we get, “What’s a compact disc?” as the book was created in 1997.

In Henry Hikes to Fitchburg by D.B. Johnson, two enterprising bears travel to a town 25 miles from their 19th-century Boston suburb. One labors hard all day to raise money for train fare, while the other, Henry (named after Mr. Thoreau), takes a leisurely walk, stopping on his way to carve a walking stick, press flowers, make a raft, take a swim, and generally have a lovely day. It makes you wonder whether we could all be working less and relishing life more.

Astro Bunnies

What’s a list of maker-friendly books without rockets? In Astro Bunnies by Christine Loomis, with unusual collage illustrations by Ota Eitan, ambitious little cottontails do all you’d expect of spacefarers in a catchy rhyme that I sometimes find myself humming even when I am away from my kids (oh, I’ve come up with a tune for it.) One sample:

Astro bunnies
Work together
Measure comets
Chart the weather

Gather moondust
From a crater
Scientists can
Study later

We want our kids to have their heads in the stars but their feet on the ground. So like many families, we have lots of nature books. The ones that are most maker-y come from Zoe Hall and Shari Halpern, who pair up for two fall favorites. Two brothers make cookies and leaf collages in Fall Leaves Fall, and two sisters learn how to grow a pie in The Apple Pie Tree. For our older son, Gail Gibbons goes into greater detail into the virtues of Malus domestica in The Seasons of Arnold’s Apple Tree. Over the course of a year, Arnold makes a swing, wreaths, a bouquet, a tree house, cider, pies, and more. Our other Gibbons title, Country Fair, reminds us of our favorite family destination, Maker Faire. There’s even a page that shows you how to put a fair together!

The Wing on a Flea (1961)

Finally, I end with the man who taught me and millions of others to draw, Ed Emberley. Although his thumbprint and step-by-step illustration books are what I remember best from my childhood, the ones that our boys love now help them understand how to put shapes together to make images. In Go Away, Big Green Monster, the narrator builds up and then destroys the titular character one facial feature at a time. I like the paper artistry magic of the die-cuts in this book (although they are so vulnerable to enthusiastic young fingers. His poor nose!) We love the 1961 version of The Wing on a Flea, as it has the color blocks and line drawings of those beloved drawing books I remember seeking out so often as a kid. (The 2001 edition looks pretty good as well, we just haven’t read it yet.) We like the way The Wing on a Flea takes three shapes–a triangle, a circle, and a rectangle–and shows how you can make them into just about anything.

Books make great presents for kids. To my sons, they are a promise that I will read them again and again with them snuggled up in my lap. If you have time to get these at your local bookstore, please do go support your neighborhood businesses. But I’ve linked to each Amazon page for the books I mentioned above.

Feel free to add books you read with your budding makers in the comments. I’d like to focus on the 4-and-under crowd myself, but if you want to add books for older kids[…]

yaxu: And the best indie game of 2011 http://t.co/gPQY12I5 turns out to be a visual programming language http://t.co/CGfdRVqy

 
Swords, Sandals And Sex mixes international grooves, punk and psyche with ultra-groovy dance sequences from vintage sword and sandal (pepblum) flicks.

01. “That’s Where It’s At” - Van Morrison and The Holmes Brothers
02. “Mabala” - Fathili and The Yahoos
03. “Saman Doye” - The Black Brothers
04. “Negre Africa Dub” - Sly and Robbie
05. “Daughter Whole Lotta Suger Down Deh” - Jah Berry
06. “She Moved Through The Fair” - Jam Nation
07. “Teen Tonic” - Pierre Henry and Michel Colombier
08. “World Destruction” - Afrika Babaata and John Lydon
09. “Fever” - Jingo
10. “El Pescador” - Toto La Momposina and Sus Tambores
11. “Swinger” - The Third Rail
12. “Venetian Glass” - Infinity
13. “Jocko Homo” - Devo
14. “Human Fly” - The Cramps
 

Incredible work from the Shapeways community just keeps rolling in. Check out some of this week's highlights below, or browse "It Arrived" on our forums for more. Happy Friday!

unellenue's Spinnoloids Pendant -- an incredible design that really shows what Polished Silver is capable of!



Darren Abbey's fossil project continues, with the next evolution below in Polished WSF:



rminkes' clever ballpoint pen design -- everything is 3D printed except for the pen filling. Shown in Black and Red Strong & Flexible:

David Cole



Brennan Linsley/AP Photo

A detainee holding onto a fence as a US military guard walks by Guantanamo Bay prison, June 26, 2006

For a moment, it seemed that President Obama would actually stand up to Congress on Guantanamo and military detention, something he has not yet had the guts to do. As I wrote in the NYRblog last week, the president had threatened to veto the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) after both houses of Congress approved provisions in the new bill that made it impossible to close Guantanamo, effectively required the continued incarceration of detainees already cleared for release, expanded the government’s authority to detain suspected terrorists indefinitely, and prohibited civilian criminal trials for some terror suspects.

But on Wednesday, after the Senate and House worked out their differences and adopted some revisions to the detention provisions, the White House announced that the veto was off the table. The president didn’t even have the courage to take responsibility himself. As the White House press statement put it, “the President’s senior advisors will not recommend a veto.” Why did the president back down? Only he and his senior advisors know the answer to this—though at this point in the administration one can hardly say it is out of character. In his defense, it is never easy to veto a defense authorization bill, and it’s not clear he would have won an override fight. The Senate voted for the initial bill 93-7, and the House voted 406-17 to approve the revised bill. Moreover, under pressure of the veto threat, the conference committee did eliminate some of the worst aspects of the NDAA provisions, such as a prohibition on civilian trials for suspected terrorists, and made other provisions less onerous, for example, by giving the president more leeway to use criminal rather than military procedures for suspected terrorists, and tying many of its provisions to existing law.

Yet one senior advisor, FBI Director Robert Mueller, testified in Congress this week that the amended bill would still make his agents’ jobs more difficult, by making it unclear whether the FBI or the military had authority to arrest terror suspects in the United States. If the military become involved in a case as the new legislation indicates it must, Mueller testified, it could stymie the FBI’s vital task of gaining information from a suspect. According to Mueller, “the possibility looms that we will lose opportunities to obtain cooperation from the persons in the past that we’ve been fairly successful in gaining.”

Indeed, the law as amended continues to contain extraordinarily dangerous principles. It creates a presumption in favor of indefinite military detention for foreign al-Qaeda suspects, even if a criminal arrest and prosecution would be the preferred course. And it imposes this presumption even for foreigners caught within the United States. While the law permits the president to waive that, the presumption is still wrong: given its inconsistency with basic principles of due process, indefinite military custody should be the last, not the first resort.

Equally problematic, the law puts Congress’s stamp on a dubious—and untested—interpretation of military detention authority. The law provides that indefinite detention without charge may be imposed on anyone who has provided “substantial support” to groups that are “associated forces” of al-Qaeda; but it leaves undefined what constitutes “substantial support” and which groups might qualify as “associated forces.” Thus far, the lower federal courts have upheld detention of al-Qaeda or Taliban members, but not mere supporters, much less supporters of associated forces. And there is much dispute about whether the laws of war permit detention in those circumstances. Now Congress has essentially predetermined that question. Unless this and future administrations construe these provisions as limited by the laws of war, they risk authorizing detention that the laws of war would not.

Most disturbingly, the law still effectively prevents President Obama from closing Guantanamo. He can’t use any funds to build or modify a facility in the United States to house Guantanamo detainees—a necessary precondition to closing the prison. He cannot transfer any Guantanamo detainee to the United States, even to face criminal trial. And he cannot release any detainee to another country without meeting onerous certification requirements regarding that country’s security measures that, until now, have proven impossible to meet. (To its credit, the administration did get the conference committee to water down the certification requirements somewhat, but it still seems unlikely that they will be met.)

As I noted in my earlier blog post, the military has determined, after careful review of all the remaining detainees at Guantanamo, that more than half of them don’t need to be there. They have been cleared for release. But as a practical matter, Congress’s law cuts off all options for getting them out. Under the laws of war, military custody is lawful only where necessary to keep an enemy fighter from returning to the battle. To hold a person our own military has determined does not pose that threat is plainly illegal, and violates the most fundamental right of liberty. Yet Congress’s law mandates it. And President Obama has now agreed to sign it.

After hearing of the President’s about-face, the Senate passed the NDAA as revised on Thursday, December 15, 2011. It was the 220th anniversary of the Bill of Rights, although apparently those rights only apply to some.

A Reddit thread I hope we never have to use. Here's the Google Doc. (via Submitterator, thanks crisnoble)

We were contacted by Kalispell, Montana-based The Future Is 3-D after our recent post on build sizes. The post discussed the ultimately not useful statistic of cost per build size. Nevertheless, this small company has been making RepRap Mendel-based 3D printers for over a year and specializes in large build sizes. They're not kidding, either, as these are the largest build envelopes we've seen on anything you could actually buy. 
 
But how big exactly are the build envelopes on The Future Is 3-D's machines? According to  TFI3D chief Jeff Christiana: 
 

We specialize in very large build areas. We have printers shipping that can print an object up to 16 x 16 x 11.5 for a fraction of the price that others are selling. We believe that we are the largest 3D printer with the largest build area available. Our Platforms are all heated, and can print very large parts.

 
For metric readers, that is equivalent to an astonishing 406mm x 406mm x 292mm. Apparently they've been requested to build a 4x4 FOOT (gasp!) build envelope 3D printer as a custom build. 
 
Of course, you may be thinking, the prints must take forever because when you double the axis size, the print volume goes up by a factor of eight. We asked Christiana: 
 

Most of the items are 8+hrs.. It does take time. I have not had a failure of a slip. Right now we are just using standard stepper motors. We might move to servos so they always know where they are in a 3-dimensional space during the print.

 
As we suspected, they recommend printing in PLA to not only avoid warping at that scale, but also because PLA is a lot more eco-friendly.
 
Giant 3D printers, available now for pretty decent prices: a 16x16x11.5 inch model with heated platform, 5 pounds of PLA and a possibly industry unique one-year warranty for only USD$2100! And it's fully assembled! 
 
There's only one problem: they have an 8-10 week lead time due to the stream of orders. But we suspect it might be worth the wait. 
 
Via The Future Is 3-D

It is the second Friday of December, which I would call the last Friday of the year that the internet has any self-respect if the internet ever had any self-respect. The year is ending, we can be real about these things! And so it is on this day of finality that Pitchfork hands down its list of Pitchfork’s favorite albums, capping a robust Listmas during which we examined pretty much everyone’s list, in addition to the ones made by us, and by you. I predict that you will find things to agree about with this list, and things to disagree with, and things to be indifferent to. (I am good at this, I know.) The list is best characterized by the position of three records in particular, though: Destroyer’s Kaputt comes in at #2, and in combination with Bon Iver at #1, makes this the year Pitchfork validated artists that idolize your dad’s cheese-rock record collections. Conversely, Fucked Up is surprisingly low at #33; it seems they are ceding the hardcore-avatars to SPIN. By this measure, the position seems to be that this was a year for the smooth, not the bruised. Saxophone players (Colin Stetson included), rejoice:
Read More...

Add a layer of physical security to your USB drive data with this beautifully designed and machined thumb drive inside a cryptex-style combination lock cylinder, from Russian Steampunk enthusiast Tarator (machine translation).

Practically speaking, of course, anyone who managed to steal the drive could probably defeat the lock without too much effort, and its striking beauty might actually create more of an incentive to steal it than would otherwise exist. As I recall, Dan Brown’s original cryptex (Wikipedia) included a self-destruct mechanism for the (paper) data in the from of a vial of acid that broke if the lock was opened incorrectly. Maybe that’s the n + 1 iteration of this idea?

More:

How-To: Cryptex
Adam and Jamie’s giant coding cryptex

Jürgen Gleue is done with music.  He quit sometime in the mid-'90s.  That's when he gave his instruments and equipment away to local musicians in Hannover, Germany.  He hasn't played a note since.

"And now," Gleue said when I spoke with him on the phone some months ago, "I have the comics for recreational purposes."

Much like the songs he recorded in his various outfits -- most notably, the legendary 39 Clocks, and his solo project, Phantom Payn -- his comics are playful, sardonic and, above all else, hallucinatory.  He self-publishes them in runs of 50 or so, then hands them out to friends, acquaintances and strangers in the streets of Hannover. 

"But why comics?" I asked.

"I like the way small fanzines relate to larger magazines, especially in terms of subversion," he returned.

Subversion's always been a big part of Gleue's life, especially in terms of art.  Or as he calls it, "primitive art, a sort of anti-art."  From the early '70s through most of the '80s, he and co-conspirator Christian Henjes/C.H.-39 took immense pleasure in crafting crude, provocative ditties like "Stupid Art" -- noisy and anthemic tunes that borrowed as much from the monkeyshines of Dada as they did the repetition of the Velvet Underground and the rank confrontation and canned beats of Suicide, whose live show directly influenced the Clocks' antagonism.  They played often, despite -- or because of -- threats from angry crowds, cross words from prestigious artists (Joseph Beuys) and a hefty influx of drink and drug.

Such chaotic creative tension couldn't last long.  Impressively, though, their self-proclaimed "psycho beat" endured until '87 or so.  And when the smoke cleared, J.G.-39 started recording moodier solo efforts under the name Phantom Payn.

My paper entitled "Patriarchy and Historical Materialism" was published in the winter 2011 issue of the journal Hypatia. The video above is a general discussion of my motivations for writing this paper and an outline of the central arguments I advance in the paper. Below is the abstract of the paper: Why does the world have the pattern of patriarchy it currently possesses? Why have patriarchal practices and institutions evolved and changed in the ways they have tended to over time in human societies? This paper explores these general questions by integrating a feminist analysis of patriarchy with the central insights of the functionalist interpretation of historical materialism advanced by G. A. Cohen. The paper has two central aspirations: first, to help narrow the divide between analytical Marxism and feminism by redressing the former's neglect of the important role female labor has played, and continues to play, in shaping human history. Second, by developing the functionalist account of historical materialism in order to take patriarchy seriously, we can derive useful insights for diagnosing the emancipatory challenges that women face in the world today. The degree and form of patriarchy present in any particular society is determined by the productive forces it has had at its disposal. According to historical materialism, technological, material, and medical advances that ease the pressures on high fertility rates (such as the sanitation revolution, vaccinations, birth control, and so on) are the real driving forces behind the positive modulations to patriarchy witnessed in the twentieth century.Cheers, Colin

This time of year, things in the musicverse tend to slow way down, and not too many people unveil their music videos. But in the past week, a few of them did anyway. Here are five of those:Read More...

The United States is now officially more corrupt than the Old World.

Former French president Jacques Chirac has been found guilty of corruption when he was mayor of Paris in the early 1990s (he allegedly paid his own party workers for jobs that did not exist). He was given a two-year suspended sentence.

George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and the rest of that crew launched a war of aggression in contravention of the UN Charter and of the Nuremberg Principles. But they’ve never been so much as the object of a congressional hearing on their invasion and ruination of a country that had not attacked the United States and posed no imminent threat to international order. Ironically, one of their charges against the Baath Regime was that it had launched wars of aggression in 1980 and 1990!

As I have argued before, Bush/Cheney epitomized this sentiment:

To initiate a war of aggression . . . is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

Ironically, Chirac was the princpled one here. He opposed the Iraq War and castigated Bush for speaking of a ‘war on terror.’ He quite reasonably said that terrorism (with which the French had a great deal of experience) is a police matter. Bush militarized our heritage of democracy rooted in 1776, whereas Chirac declined to do that to his heritage, of 1789.

The French don’t put their former presidents on a pedestal, beyond the reach of accountability, the way cult-of-personality prone Americans do.

*Tomi Ahonen is my favorite industry analyst. Studying the mobile business is like Kremlinology; it’s boring on the face of it, and most of the heavy operators are evil people who lie all the time, even to each other and themselves. And then, by sparkling contrast, there’s this Ahonen guy. He’s such a committed and relentless contrarian that he comes across like Solzhenitsyn.

*Here he is weeping for an entire half-hour about Nokia. And he’s right, y’know; the fate of Nokia really is a fantastic business story. A gigantic story of Gothic High-Tech collapse.

*Ahonen is great with stats, too. Check out this handy table he assembled. Floods the mind with insight, doesn’t it? Imagine if the UN Security Council was purged and those nations were replaced with the top-ten nations in smartphone use. Life would improve radically.

http://communities-dominate.blogs.com/brands/2011/12/dont-mess-with-success-an-analysis-of-nokia-carrier-relations-and-meddling-by-elop.html

42 MAJOR COUNTRIES RANKED BY SMARTPHONE PENETRATION RATES

So here are the 42 countries, ranked in order of their smartphone penetration rate percentage, per capita. You also see the ranking, the name of the country, the national population rate, the national mobile phone subscriber count, and the migration rate of mobile subcribers to smartphones; and finally the rate of smartphone penetration per capita.

Rank . Country . . . . . Population . . Subs . Sm’phones . Migr.Rt . . Per Capita

1 . . . . Singapore . . . . . . . . . 4.9 . . . 8.1 . . . 4.4 . . . . 54% . . . . 90%
2 . . . . Hong Kong *** . . . . . 8.0 . . . 14.0 . . . 4.9 . . . . 35% . . . . 61%
3 . . . . Sweden . . . . . . . . . . 9.3 . . . 13.6 . . . 4.8 . . . . 35% . . . . 52%
4 . . . . Australia . . . . . . . . . 21.6 . . . 29.8 . . . 10.2 . . . . 34% . . . . 47%
5 . . . . Spain . . . . . . . . . . . 45.5 . . . 58.9 . . . 20.8 . . . . 35% . . . . 46%
tie 6 . . Denmark * . . . . . . . 5.5 . . . 7.6 . . . 2.4 . . . . 32% . . . . 44%
tie 6 . . Israel *** . . . . . . . . 7.0 . . . 11.0 . . . 3.1 . . . . 28% . . . . 44%
tie 8 . . Finland * . . . . . . . . 5.4 . . . 9.6 . . . 2.3 . . . . 24% . . . . 43%
tie 8 . . Norway * . . . . . . . . 4.9 . . . 6.2 . . . 2.1 . . . . 34% . . . . 43%
10 . . . New Zealand ** . . . . 4.3 . . . 5.5 . . . 1.8 . . . . 33% . . . . 42%

11 . . . UK . . . . . . . . . . . . . 62.1 . . . 82.4 . . . 25.0 . . . . 30% . . . . 40%
tie 12 . Italy . . . . . . . . . . . . 60.2 . . . 87.8 . . . 22.8 . . . . 26% . . . . 38%
tie 12 . Netherlands . . . . . . 16.7 . . . 19.7 . . . 6.3 . . . . 32% . . . . 38%
tie 14 . Austria . . . . . . . . . 8.4 . . . 13.0 . . . 3.0 . . . . 23% . . . . 36%
tie 14 . Taiwan *** . . . . . . . 23.0 . . . 31.0 . . . 8.2 . . . . 26% . . . . 36%
tie 16 . Greece ** . . . . . . . . 11.2 . . . 15.6 . . . 3.9 . . . . 25% . . . . 35%
tie 16 . Ireland ** . . . . . . . . 4.6 . . . 5.6 . . . 1.6 . . . . 29% . . . . 35%
tie 16 . Portugal ** . . . . . . . 10.7 . . . 17.0 . . . 3.7 . . . . 22% . . . . 35%
tie 16 . USA . . . . . . . . . . . 319.1 . . 319.4 . . 111.8 . . . . 35% . . . . 35%
20 . . . South Korea ***** . . . 48.6 . . . 54.0 . . . 16.4 . . . . 30% . . . . 34%

tie 21 . Canada ** . . . . . . . . 34.1 . . . 26.5 . . . 10.4 . . . . 39% . . . . 30%
tie 21 . Switzerland * . . . . . 7.6 . . . 9.7 . . . 2.3 . . . . 24% . . . . 30%
tie 21 . France . . . . . . . . . 62.8 . . . 66.0 . . . 18.8 . . . . 28% . . . . 30%
tie 24 . Germany . . . . . . . . 82.0 . . 107.7 . . . 23.0 . . . . 21% . . . . 28%
tie 24 . Belgium* . . . . . . . . 10.7 . . . 12.8 . . . 3.0 . . . . 23% . . . . 28%
tie 26 . Poland ** . . . . . . . 38.0 . . . 49.2 . . . 7.1 . . . . 14% . . . . 19%
tie 26 . Malaysia ** . . . . . . 28.1 . . . 36.6 . . . 5.2 . . . . 14% . . . . 19%
28 . . . Russia ** . . . . . . . 140.0 . . 234.4 . . . 25.0 . . . . 11% . . . . 18%
29 . . . South Africa . . . . . 50.6 . . . 58.8 . . . 8.7 . . . . 15% . . . . 17%
tie 30 . Czech Rep ** . . . . 10.4 . . . 14.2 . . . 1.7 . . . . 12% . . . . 16%
tie 30 . Hungary ** . . . . . . 10.0 . . . 11.4 . . . 1.6 . . . . 14% . . . . 16%

32 . . . Thailand ** . . . . . . 68.3 . . . 78.3 . . . 10.0 . . . . 13% . . . . 15%
tie 33 . Japan ***** . . . . . . 126.9 . . 126.8 . . . 18.1 . . . . 14% . . . . 14%
tie 33 . Brazil ** . . . . . . . . 197.7 . . 229.5 . . . 28.0 . . . . 12% . . . . 14%
tie 33 . Romania ** . . . . . 21.1 . . . 31.0 . . . 2.9 . . . . 9% . . . . 14%
36 . . . Turkey . . . . . . . . . 76.0 . . . 66.3 . . . 8.3 . . . . 13% . . . . 11%
37 . . . Ukraine ** . . . . . . 45.0 . . . 52.1 . . . 4.5 . . . . 9% . . . . 10%
tie 38 . Indonesia **** . . . . 229.0 . . 212.0 . . . 18.1 . . . . 9% . . . . 8%
tie 38 . Mexico ** . . . . . . . 111.1 . . . 99.3 . . . 8.7 . . . . 9% . . . . 8%
40 . . . Slovakia ** . . . . . . . 5.4 . . . 6.5 . . . 0.4 . . . . 6% . . . . 7%

41 . . . China ** . . . . . . . . 1360.0 . . 961.3 . . . 77.1 . . . . 8% . . . . 6%
42 . . . India ** . . . . . . . . 1220.0 . . 973.0 . . . 33.2 . . . . 3% . . . . 3%

(no star) average of both studies (best number)
* using surrogate data for Netsize, then averaged (second best number)
** using only Netsize/Informa data
*** only using Google/Ipsos data
**** Indonesia: using only half of rate from Google/Ipsos (because surveyed only city penetration)
***** Japan and S Korea: These numbers are NOT indicative of how advanced phones are in those countries, while technically are reasonably accurate measures of ‘only smartphones’

Source for above: TomiAhonen Consulting Analysis December 2011, based on raw data from Google/Ipsos, the Netsize Guide/Informa, and TomiAhonen Almanac 2011 reported data. You may quote the above table and any data from it, redesign the data, reorganize it and set it in any graphical form including use in Infographics and White Papers, as long as you list as the source: TomiAhonen Consulting 2011. If you mention the data, please include a link to this blog. (((<—–)))

Language: English

kimberlykane: A really great interview w/ @louisck http://t.co/7IQH9Ww9 » Louis C.K. Reflects On 'Louie,' Loss, Love And Life: http://t.co/ENEMSmxi

Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt of The Mighty Boosh bookend some weirdo who wandered into a Boing Boing photo shoot.
 
As a hardcore Mighty Boosh fan, I am ashamed to say that I only just discovered this wonderful Pogo mashup of bits and pieces from the late great BBC comedy show, which may have been the funniest and most surreal thing to ever appear on the airwaves.

The title of the piece is “Zoo Zoo” and features Pogo’s trademark tight edits/cuts in which shards of dialog and soundtrack are transformed into seamless musical collages filled with quirky charm.

I am patiently awaiting a Mighty Boosh feature length film. Pleeeeeease.

Let the good vibes begin…
 

generatorx: Rudy Rucker and John Walker: CelLab - Cellular Automata Laboratory http://t.co/RlFK0OW4

An interview with Kara Frame, who is studying Educational Technology at San Francisco State University.

Please tell us who you are, your role in designing games and why you became interested in “serious games”?

My background is in computer graphics programming for the games and film industries, but for the last 3 years I've been working for FoAM, an interdisciplinary research group who encourage me to work in a more generalist manner - working with people from different backgrounds and learning skills in wildly different areas.

I've also been heavily involved with software art and artistic projects that use games in different ways for quite a long time. For me, "art games" and "serious games" are both taking advantage of the way games allow players to take on different perspectives as they play - this makes them very powerful in terms of exploring ideas.

How does your approach to gaming make it unique from other similar games out there?

Germination X is designed to take its raw materials from the mass of online farming games, but builds around a world inspired by alternative agricultural methods (permaculture) to see how this changes the game experience.

We are also making use of a research AI system called FAtiMA, developed by the Lirec project which supports Germination X. FAtiMA models social relationships and emotions - we are exploring how using this kind of model effects player's understanding of their relationships (with the AI characters, plants and each other) in a social game. Permaculture is mainly concerned with the relationships between plants, so it's exciting to bring this all together.

What do you hope participants will come away learning or experiencing from your game?

I mainly want to inspire curiosity, when a game such as this represents a certain issue, I'd like players to come to their own conclusions - to explore it with them as equals rather than having some hidden "correct answer". So the main thing is curiosity, which requires a certain depth, some mysteriousness. The best thing is when players tell me what is going on, because this means the game has allowed them to think creatively and openly.

What have been the challenges, obstacles at creating this game of your vision?

The thing I worry most about is consistency - that the world and the themes represented make sense, nothing breaks the player's suspended disbelief. This is always the big issue, and in this game this has caused the most discussion and debate with people I've worked with.

What kinds of interactive assessment methods are you taking to making the goal of your games are likely to be reached?

With the help of the Mobile Life Centre (part of the Swedish Institute of Computer Science) we are setting up a series of focus group testing sessions which will give us feedback on the nature of the relationships in the game. Group discussions while playing, and responses to more leading questions at the end will be recorded.

Also, the game has been online and public since it's first running version, and player's actions are logged in a minimal way which allows me to immediately see the results of changes I make. This has been quite a huge discovery for me - the form of immediate feedback this makes possible. This open testing, in conjunction with it's open source development, has meant I've been able to get quite a bit of feedback from brave early adopter players.

We have yet to enable this in Germination X, but in a previous game (Naked on Pluto) we have AI agents who ask players questions relating to the theme of the game (in that case privacy in social networks) which then get automatically posted to a blog external to the game. I think building in feedback this way, whether it's about the issues or the game itself, is really important.

What do you see as the advantages/disadvantages of games in educational use?

I think games have vast educational potential - simply because from my perspective, most of what I consider learning happens via playing. I can only understand something properly if I can pick it up, shake it, take it to pieces and rebuild it in some way (whether that's cars, Finnish language or linear algebra).

The problem is that this approach to learning doesn't seem to fit very well with existing educational ideas. There seems a sense of the potential, but perhaps a lack of understanding of how to achieve this. I guess one problem is that people who do "get it" are perhaps put off by education, and so are not in the right place.

Where do you see the potential of digital games as a force for individual/community change in the future?

There is something about entering a game world that allows you to take on the perspectives of people you might not normally agree with, and understand the conclusions they reach. This was most clearly demonstrated by a workshop by Selena Savic at the Make Art chmod +x festival on a game prototype that examined the differences between the business strategies of super markets and local stall markets. The workshop was carried out on a bunch of mainly left leaning open source artists, all whom when playing the supermarket side took on all the monopolistic strategies they could with wild abandon! So I hope the potential of these kind of approaches might add to a shift in politics and decision making (on personal or community levels) away from restricted partisan modes of thought.

What advice would you give a novice game builder who is considering using or designing games to use in participatory agents of change?

If computers and programming are not a natural medium for you then start with drawing, models, bits of lego, make a board game, act it out with your body. It should be possible to get basically all the decisions made this way before touching a computer. Document everything, blog about it, get as much outside input as possible.

I see a lot of educational or serious games fail because they attempt to take an existing game and "bolt it on" to an issue - this rarely works. You have to take the game design seriously, and struggle with it to fit the theme or issue you are interested in. Everything in the game has to represent the theme consistently somehow.

The saga of Universal Music's war on the Mega Song (a song and video recorded by several major artists in support of the online service MegaUpload, which Universal is trying to have censored in the USA through its support of the Stop Online Piracy Act) just got weirder. Many of us were baffled that Universal kept telling YouTube to take down this video, even though it was clear they didn't hold a copyright to it -- a fact reinforced by artists like will.i.am, who insisted that he hadn't authorized Universal to send the takedown notice.

Now, a court filing in the matter from Universal claims that the takedown wasn't issued because Universal claims a copyright in the Mega Song, but rather, they claim that they have a private contract with Google giving them the power to take down videos they dislike, regardless of whether they are the rightsholder.

Your letter could be read to suggest that UMG's rights to use the YouTube "Content Management System" with respect to certain user-posted videos are limited to instances in which UMG asserts a claim that a user-posted video contains material that infringes a UMG copyright. As you know, UMG's rights in this regard are not limited to copyright infringement, as set forth more completely in the March 31, 2009 Video License Agreement for UGC Video Service Providers, including without limitation Paragraphs 1(b) and 1(g) thereof.

No one knows what Paragraphs 1(b) and (g) say (except Googlers and Universal), but the letter excerpted above implies that Universal has some sort of special deal to arbitrarily remove stuff it doesn't like from YouTube, even if that stuff is legal.

UMG claims "right to block or remove" YouTube videos it doesn't own

My interview on Arab feminism, youth activism, and revolution with Nobel Peace Prize winner Tawakkul Karman of Yemen is now up at YouTube.

I asked her not only about high politics but about social issues such as the role of women in the revolution and the threat of religious radicalism. I asked each question twice in the beginning, once in Arabic for her and for precision, and then in English for the video. We cut the former in editing; but in any case it gradually became apparent that Ms. Karman understands English well.

Ms. Karman is urging the US to sanction President Ali Abdullah Saleh personally to force him completely to relinquish power.

After the interview was concluded, Saleh accepted the Gulf Cooperation Council plan for resolving the crisis. He now says, at least, that he has transferred power to his vice president in anticipation of February presidential elections. A national unity cabinet has been formed, mixing Saleh loyalists with pro-change politicians.

As I explained yesterday, the Yemeni opposition is generally not satisfied, because Saleh still has immunity for the crimes he committed, and it is not clear how much real change is happening at the top (some say Saleh remains an eminence grise). Ms. Karman continues to call for his assets to be frozen and for him to face trial.

Ms. Karman’s perspective on the revolution in Yemen is invaluable, since she has been a major figure, camping out in a tent in “Change Square” in Sanaa and making all the sacrifices and taking all the considerable risks that entails. Her importance as a model of social activism for a new generation of Arab women cannot be underestimated.

She is clearly a dynamic, inspiring person of unflagging energy and high ideals, and the full force of her personality doesn’t really come through on video.

The University of Michigan Near Eastern Studies Department set up the interview, which was shot and edited by the UM News and Information Service’s “UM Productions.” Many thanks to kind colleagues who involved me and to the latter for all their help.

This is a well-made explanation of artificial material scarcity and how it can be addressed by open source economic development:

Practical Post Scarcity from Open Source Ecology on Vimeo.

This is the core of Open Source Ecology’s work on the Global Village Construction Set. Scenes from hay baling onwards are developments taking place at Factor e Farm in Missouri, USA. This is part of going the last mile on the construction toolkit part of the Global Village construction set.

We are busy preparing the Civilization Starter Kit DVD. The latest need is professional fabrication drawings – the step beyond documenting the complete fabrication procedure. See sample fabrication drawing - a compact, information-packed format. Compare this to a sample fabrication procedure on the CEB press, which is much more expanded. We currently have complete 3D CAD of the CEB Press, and most of the Tractor and Pulverizer. The Power Cube is primarily in Sketchup.

If you can help us on the fabrication drawings, starting with the CEB press – let us know. We would like this to be done by Dec. 25. 2011.  We are looking for volunteers or paid professionals. The Kickstarter funding can be allocated for this purpose as needed. The timing is tight. While we will have full fabrication procedures, we don’t know if professional fabrication drawings will be done by Christmas. In that case, they will be added as soon as they are generated – as we would like to make replication as straightforward as possible. The professional fabrication drawings are what one can hand over to a metal fabricator to produce a machine anywhere in the world where fabrication shops exist. This capacity is worth millions, so help us share that with the world. Email me at opensourceecology at gmail dot com to help.

No related posts.

...from Barack W. Bush. More here. The only hopeful thing to say is that there are almost certainly six votes on the U.S. Supreme Court to hold this legislation unconstitutional: Breyer, Ginsburg, Kagan, Kennedy, Scalia, Sotomayor; even Roberts may balk...

TechNyou: The logic of thinking critically. Our new video series and part of our new Sci Education Resource #scicomm #onsci http://t.co/lV4QateZ

Kamon are Japanese emblems or crests, corresponding to the European heraldy tradition, that are used to specifically represent and identify a family. They are a subset of the larger body of motifs (called mon) that are symbols of temples, clans, guilds and similar groups of people. Mon first appeared by the 12th century as patterns on flags and uniforms in battles, but their wider use followed the vagaries of class and social custom.The quartets of kamon below were selected and spliced together from the symbol categories: animal, plant, flower, furnishing, martialism, natural and pattern crests. {I think there is some crossover}[animal crest] chicken, phoenix, crane, phoenix[animal crest] butterfly, tortoise, bamboo grass, rabbit[plant crest] hollyhock, bracken, cryptomeria, Oxalis corymbosa[plant crest] grape, rice, date palm, ginkgo[flower crest] wisteria, wisteria, tree peony, anchor[flower crest] Morning glory, goldthread, wisteria, chrysanthemum[furnishing crest] key, gin trap, broom, alarm plate[furnishing crest] wooden hammer, bag, temari ball, amulet[martialism crest] arrow, anchor, fan, gem[martialism crest] arrow, samurai warrior helmet, anchor, arrow[natural crest] cloud & moon, arrows of lightning, sun, wave[natural crest] water & moon, arrows of lightning, gem, wave[pattern crest] comma-shaped, swastika, gem, fusil[pattern crest] tortoise-shell, Japanese quince, crossed stick, meyui patternThe (bilingual) Crest Japan site has more than 280 kamon available copyright free for download as .eps files. They convert to jpegs in photoshop (as has been done above) or can be used as scalable vector illustrations in Adobe Illustrator. [beware the flash show's embedded audio!] I think, from a very brief look, that there might be slightly bigger thumbnail images and maybe even more range of styles available from/via the Japanese homesite.The wikipedia article on kamon is fairly comprehensive : note all the links to further material.Pingmag 2007.Inspired by, and ever so slightly ransacked from, Will's Crest Syndrome post on 50 Watts from Jan, 2009.

Sam Leith and Philip Collins explore the art of rhetoric from Aristotle to Obama and round up the best and worst speeches of 2011.

Find out about future RSA events at www.thersa.org

 
A gathering place for adventurous writers like Allen Ginsberg, Henry Miller, Anaïs Nin, William Burroughs and Lawrence Durrell among many others, Shakespeare and Company was far more than just a business, it was a breeding ground and spiritual center for literary pioneers who were drawn to the shop by its enigmatic American owner George Whitman who opened the English-language bookstore in 1951,

Whitman passed away last Wednesday at the age of 98.

He welcomed visitors with large-print messages on the walls. “Be not inhospitable to strangers, lest they be angels in disguise,” was one, quoting Yeats. Next to a wishing well at the center of the store, a sign said: “Give what you can, take what you need. George.” By his own estimate, he lodged some 40,000 people.

Whitman was generous but he also had a quick temper. He was loved but his fiery disposition could be off-putting and his methods of running his business somewhat dictatorial. He was a firm believer that anyone seeking shelter in his bookstore should expect to pay their way by doing some work in the bookstore and he evidently could be a tough taskmaster, like a Zen teacher wielding a bamboo stick. This didn’t dissuade thousands of writers from making the pilgrimage to his literary Mecca. There was no bookstore quite like it.

Whitman and his extraordinary bookstore were a seminal force in the lives and careers of some of the 20th century’s greatest authors. In this documentary, Portrait Of A Bookstore As An Old Man, we are introduced to Whitman and a life touched by the marvelous.
 

dotemax: Irreal on Converting S-Expressions To XML In Emacs http://t.co/TPfnF34U #emacs

FK chat to Megan Quigley about her screen printing label, Dangerfork

How did your label come about?
The idea to start screen printing came when we were traveling through Europe. We found some really cool prints and thought that was a good way to purchase artwork on the cheap. It was also really easy to send back to Australia. Once we got back to Australia at the beginning of 2010, a friend of ours was selling his carousel so we got thought why not and set up a little space in our garage teaching ourselves along the way. We are now based in a studio in Richmond, Melbourne.

What is your background in the creative field?
I studied fashion to begin with but found it wasn’t really for me and tried my hand at shoe making instead. I still really love shoe making and work as a repairer part time. Chris studied Fine Art and has also been emerged in the graffiti culture for quiet some time. This is our main contact for a lot of the artists that we work with.

Where do you find inspiration for your work?
Our biggest inspiration for our prints come from the artists that we work with.

What fascinates you about printing as a process?
Screen printing is a dying art form. There are many variables that can go wrong with screen printing which is why its probably a dying art form, but it is these variable that give each print an individuality. You are also able to print on many different mediums, I would love to experiment with more leathers and canvas. Also trying to work within the constraints of the medium and breaking down the original artwork into a screen printable image can be a challenge and when you get it right it feels great.


What has been the most rewarding part of working on Dangerfork so far?
I’d have to say the most rewarding part of starting dangerfork has been working with a large range of artists and watching our collection grow. Also each print that we do has been different and a challenge which we have had to work out along the way. And its also pretty cool when you hear someone else say that it looks cool.

What can we look forward to seeing from Dangerfork next year?
Next year we have to work on our website, tedious job but it needs to be done. Also we will be looking for another pop – up shop in Melbourne where we can exhibit our prints. And we also want to try and expand our product range into stationary, cushion covers and larger prints. So keep your eyes on our space!

www.dangerfork.com

This one got started because I wanted a large Buddhabrot image on my
wall. A large good looking image takes a long time to render, now that
we have ClojureScript I thought easiest way to distribute the
calculation among machines in the house would be to compile to
JavaScript since I've already implemented it in Clojure.

The plan was to compile old code using ClojureScript compiler, fire up
a noir instance to collect the data from clients and goto bed, by the
time I wake up I thought I would get my giant image. In the end old
code did compile to JavaScript I only did minor cosmetic changes and
noir did collected the data from clients but clients were way too slow
to make any difference.



This is a literate program, the code in this document is the
executable source, in order to extract it, open this raw file with
emacs and run,

M-x org-babel-tangle

It will build the necessary directory structure and export the files
into their proper place.

Configuration,

Plane we want to draw. (left right top bottom)

Multiply the plane with this number to calculate image size.

Max iterations.

Batch size.

Where to save the data file in case we want to take a break.

(defn config-big []
[[-2.102613 1.200613 -1.237710 1.239710] 600 1000 5000 "fractal.data"])

(defn config-small []
[[-2.102613 1.200613 -1.237710 1.239710] 100 50 1000 "fractal.data"])

(def config config-small)

I am going to skip the math behind the fractal for that you can read
my earlier implementation, in a nutshell each clients returns a list
of points. For each point we get, we increment a counter in the
buffer. In the end we color the fractal based on the number of
iterations that passed through that pixel.

Least problematic way to store iteration count turned out to be a
2D array. I started with a map of coordinate to count but kept
getting out of memory errors using the default settings. Increasing
the memory did not exactly solved the problem cause then
serializing that giant map became the problem so I've settled on a
integer array. All interactions with the buffer is handled by an
agent.

(let [[[left right top bottom] size _ _ data-file] (config)
fractal (agent (make-array Integer/TYPE
(Math/ceil (* size (- bottom top)))
(Math/ceil (* size (- right left)))))]

(defn inc-pixels [coords]
(send fractal (fn [state coords]
(doseq [[x y] coords]
(try
(aset state y x (inc (aget state y x)))
(catch Exception e (println e x y))))
state)
coords))

(defn spit-fractal []
(send fractal
(fn [state]
(doto (java.io.ObjectOutputStream.
(java.io.FileOutputStream. data-file))
(.writeObject state)
(.flush)
(.close))
state)))

(defn slurp-fractal []
(when (.exists (java.io.File. data-file))
(let [in (java.io.ObjectInputStream. (java.io.FileInputStream. data-file))
obj (cast (Class/forName "[[J") (.readObject in))]
(.close in)
(send fractal (fn [_ o] o) obj))))

(defn pixels []
(for [x (range (* size (- right left)))
y (range (* size (- bottom top)))] [x y (aget @fractal y x)])))

Each request to /calculate will fire a Web Worker, each web
worker will calculate a vector of valid points once a certain number
of points is reached (defined in the configuration) it will make a post
request to /receive sending its batch.

(defn log [str]
(js* "console.log(~{str})"))

(defn send-payload [data]
(let [payload (uri/QueryData.)]
(.add payload "payload" (pr-str data))
(io/send "/receive" (fn [e]
(let [xhr (.target e)
response (. xhr (getResponseText))]
(log response)))
"POST" (. payload (toString)))))

(defn ^:export init []
(while true
(js/postMessage "Calculating Batch")
(let [batch (calc-batch)]
(js/postMessage "Sending Batch")
(send-payload batch))))

(init)

(defpage "/calculate" []
(html
[:html
[:head]
[:body
[:span {:id "status"}]
[:script {:type "text/javascript"}
"var worker = new Worker('calculate.js');
worker.onmessage = function (event) {
document.getElementById(\"status\").textContent = event.data;
};"]]]))

(defpage [:post "/receive"] {:as data}
(inc-pixels (read-string (:payload data)))
"OK")

Image is created by iterating over each pixel and color it using
sqrt scaling,
\(val = 255 * \frac{\sqrt{iterations}}{\sqrt{max-iterations}}\).
This leads to images that are not washed out in the high end of the
iteration and also not too pixelated in the low end.

(defn color [iteration max-iterations]
(Color. (int (* 255 (/ (Math/sqrt iteration)
(Math/sqrt max-iterations)))) 0 0))

(let [[[left right top bottom] size _ _ data-file] (config)
width (* size (- right left))
height (* size (- bottom top))]

(defn create-image []
(let [image (BufferedImage. width height BufferedImage/TYPE_INT_RGB)
graphics (.createGraphics image)
biggest (apply max (map last (pixels)))]

(doseq [[x y count] (pixels)]
(.setColor graphics (color count biggest))
(.drawLine graphics x y x y))

(javax.imageio.ImageIO/write image "png"
(java.io.File. (str data-file ".png"))))))

In order to create your own fractal after tangling this file compile
ClojureScript part,

cljsc source/resources/calculate.cljs '{:optimizations :advanced}' > \
source/resources/public/calculate.js

Start a repl,

lein repl

then start the noir instance,

(server)

finally navigate to http://127.0.0.1:8080 from a bunch of machines. The
more you wait the better the picture gets.

Classical Mechanics | Lecture 4

(October 17, 2011) Leonard Susskind discusses the some of the basic laws and ideas of modern physics. In this lecture, he focuses symmetry and conservation laws, including the principle of least action and Lagrangian methods. This course is the beginning of a six course sequence that explores the theoretical foundations of modern physics. Topics in the series include classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, theories of relativity, electromagnetism, cosmology, and black holes. Stanford University www.stanford.edu Stanford Continuing Studies http:/continuingstudies.stanford.edu/ Stanford University Channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com
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JPBarlow: For timely info on the #SOPA markup, follow @dragonfire1024 and watch at http://t.co/FdE2QNP8

dotemax: sinewalker on Blogging with Emacs Org Mode http://t.co/d9PozYmR #emacs

Classical Mechanics | Lecture 3

(October 10, 2011) Leonard Susskind discusses lagrangian functions as they relate to coordinate systems and forces in a system. This course is the beginning of a six course sequence that explores the theoretical foundations of modern physics. Topics in the series include classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, theories of relativity, electromagnetism, cosmology, and black holes. Stanford University www.stanford.edu Stanford Continuing Studies http:/continuingstudies.stanford.edu/ Stanford University Channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com
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This Dutch TV documentary from 1977 captures some brilliant performances by The Stranglers, Blondie and The Sex Pistols. The bands are firing on all cylinders as they perform in Amsterdam.

In 1977, this is what was moving my world. I had just arrived in New York City and I felt like a sail in a hurricane. Slept all day and hit the clubs at night to see a rock revolution in the making.

The Stranglers at the Second Avenue Theater were particularly awe-inspiring. Unsung heroes of rock and roll, which is probably as it should be - no more heroes. Though, I have my share.

The Stranglers - No More Heroes, Something Better Change

Blondie - Detroit 442, Love at the Pier

Sex Pistols - E.M.I., Pretty Vacant, Anarchy in the UK

The video quality is pretty rough, which seems appropriate - like an underground transmission from the distant past. It’s also in Dutch without English substitles, but it hardly matters. The music speaks for itself.
 

 

Excerpts from John Markoff's article in Tuesday's New York Times Science section follow.

Scientists at M.I.T.’s Media Lab are using an ultrafast imaging system to capture light itself as it passes through liquids and objects, in effect snapping a picture in less than two-trillionths of a second.
Dr. [Ramesh] Raskar enlisted colleagues from the chemistry department to modify a "streak tube," a supersensitive piece of laboratory equipment that scans and captures light.

The instrument is normally used to measure laboratory phenomena that take place in an ultra-short timeframe. Typically, it offers researchers information on intensity, position and wavelength in the form of data, not an image.

By modifying the equipment, the researchers were able to create slow-motion movies, showing what appears to be a bullet of light that moves from one end of the bottle to the other. The pulses of laser light enter through the bottom and travel to the cap, generating a conical shock wave that bounces off the sides of the bottle as the bullet passes.

The streak tube scans and captures light in much the same way a cathode ray tube emits and paints an image on the inside of a computer monitor. Each horizontal line is exposed for just 1.71 picoseconds, or trillionths of a second, Dr. Raskar said — enough time for the laser beam to travel less than half a millimeter through the fluid inside the bottle.

To create a movie of the event, the researchers record about 500 frames in just under a nanosecond, or a billionth of a second. Because each individual movie has a very narrow field of view, they repeat the process a number of times, scanning it vertically to build a complete scene that shows the beam moving from one end of the bottle, bouncing off the cap and then scattering back through the fluid. If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion moving through the same fluid, the resulting movie would last three years.

"You can think of it as slow motion," Andreas Velten, a postdoctoral researcher who is a member of the design team, said during a recent technical presentation. "It is so much slow motion you can see the light itself move. This is the speed of light: there's nothing in the universe that moves faster."

Until now, picosecond speeds have largely been the province of an elite group of scientists clustered at the nation's weapons laboratories.

For Dr. Raskar — who optimistically calls the project "femto photography," using the term for quadrillionths of a second — it is about more than just engineering or science. "We were inspired by looking at the world in a unique way just because we could," he said.

The system allows the naked eye to see information that has until now been rendered as data and charts. The proper analogy is to the way astronomers use instruments like radiotelescopes to create images with "fake" colors to see things in new ways — or to the original inspiration of Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th-century British photographer who achieved a new understanding of a horse's gait by creating a camera array with electromagnetic shutters set off by tripwires.

"We’re still trying to get our heads around what this means,” Dr. Raskar said, “because no one has been able to see the world in this way before."

Caption for the photo below, which accompanied Markoff's article:

"M.I.T.'s camera captures light particles seemingly in motion by using repeated exposures, creating a 'movie' of a nanosecond-long event."

Classical Mechanics | Lecture 1

(September 26, 2011) Leonard Susskind gives a brief introduction to the mathematics behind physics including the addition and multiplication of vectors as well as velocity and acceleration in terms of particles. This course is the beginning of a six course sequence that explores the theoretical foundations of modern physics. Topics in the series include classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, theories of relativity, electromagnetism, cosmology, and black holes. Stanford University www.stanford.edu Stanford Continuing Studies continuingstudies.stanford.edu Stanford University Channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com
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There's a huge literature in philosophy of language on what's called "Frege's puzzle" about belief reports. Almost all the participants in this literature seem to take for granted something that I reject: that sentences ascribing beliefs must be determinately true or false, at least once those sentences are disambiguated or contextualized in the right way.

Frege's puzzle is this. Lois Lane believes, it seems, that Superman is strong. And Clark Kent is, of course, Superman. So it seems to follow that Lois Lane believes that Clark Kent is strong. But Lois would deny that Clark Kent is strong, and it seems wrong to say that she believes it. So what's going on? There are several standard options, but all lead to trouble of one sort or another. (If you don't like Superman, try Twain/Clemens or Unabomber/Kaczynski.)

On a dispositional approach to belief of the sort I favor, to believe some proposition P -- the proposition, say, that that guy (variously known as "Superman" or "Clark Kent") is strong -- is to be disposed to act and react, both outwardly and inwardly, as though P were true. (On my version of dispositionalism, this means being disposed to act and react in ways that ordinary people would regard as characteristic of belief that P.) Lois has some such dispositions: For example, she's disposed to say "Superman is strong". But she notably lacks others: She's not disposed to say "Clark Kent is strong". She's disposed to ask Superman/Clark Kent to lift her up in the air when he's in costume but not when he's in street clothes.

Personality traits also involve clusters of dispositions, so consider them as an analogy. If someone is disposed to be courageous in some circumstances and not courageous in other circumstances, it might be neither quite right to say that she is courageous nor quite right to say that she isn't. "Courageous" is a vague predicate, and we might have an in-between case, in which neither simple ascription nor simple denial is entirely appropriate (though there may also be contexts in which simple ascription or denial works well enough -- e.g., battlefields vs. faculty meetings if she has battlefield courage but not interpersonal courage). Compare also "Amir is tall", said of a man who is 5'11". Lois's belief about Superman/Clark Kent might similarly be an in-between case in the application of a vague predicate.

You'll probably object that Lois simply and fully believes that Superman is strong, and it's not an in-between case at all. I have two replies. First, that way of putting it -- in terms of Superman rather than Clark Kent -- highlights certain aspects of Lois's dispositional profile over others, thus creating a conversational context that tends to favor believes-strong ascription (like a battlefield context might favor ascription of courage to a person who has battlefield courage but not other sorts of courage). Second, consider a version of the case in which the belief ascriber doesn't have the name "Clark Kent" available, but only the name "Superman". The ascriber and his friend are looking through a window at Superman/Clark Kent in street clothes. The ascriber's friend, who doesn't know that Lois is deceived, asks, "Does Lois believe that Superman is strong?" What should the ascriber reply? He should say, "Well, um, it's a complicated case!" I see no point in insisting that underneath that hedge there needs to be a determinate metaphysical or psychological or (disambiguated [update Dec. 16: e.g., "de re / de dicto"]) linguistic fact that yes-she-really-does (or no-she-really-doesn't), any more than there always has to be a determinate fact about whether someone is tall simpliciter or courageous simpliciter.

Now this is a heck of a mess in philosophy of language, and I haven't thought through all the implications. I'm inclined to think that excessive realism about the identity of propositions is part of the problem too. I don't claim that this is a full or non-problematic solution to Frege's puzzle. But it seems to me that this general type of approach should be more visible among the options than it is.

[HT: Lewis Powell on Kripke's Puzzle.]

Classical Mechanics | Lecture 5

(October 24, 2011) Leonard Susskind discusses different particle transformations as well as how to represent and analyze them using tools like the LaGrangian. This course is the beginning of a six course sequence that explores the theoretical foundations of modern physics. Topics in the series include classical mechanics, quantum mechanics, theories of relativity, electromagnetism, cosmology, and black holes. Stanford University www.stanford.edu Stanford Continuing Studies http:/continuingstudies.stanford.edu/ Stanford University Channel on YouTube: www.youtube.com
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Please note that as soon as Dean approves the capital expense, Happy Mutants World Headquarters will move from our unmarked island to this Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Silo and air park now for sale in New York's Adirondacks. The new list price is just $750,000! From Sotheby's:

The Atlas-F missile sites were activated in 1961, and after a short operational period, were decommissioned in 1965. These sites were the first of the "super hardened" missile silos, built to withstand a 200 pound per square inch blast. Atlas F (structure only) construction costs range from $14 million to $18 million dollars each in 1960’s dollars. Today that would equate to nearly $140 million dollars using a Consumer Price Index (CPI) calculator to adjust for inflation.
The missile silo is a huge structure 52 ft. inside diameter and approximately 176 feet deep. Access is from a 40 foot tunnel with 3 blast doors leading from the Launch Control Center (LCC). The Missile Silo has 2 overhead 90 ton doors that can often be reopened. There were originally 7 floor levels inside the silo, however app, 2/3 of the F silos have been salvaged out and only bare walls remain. Multiple levels could be rebuilt in the silo. A deck built in the silo would provide almost 2,000 sq. ft. of floor-space.

"Adirondack Intercontinental Ballistic Missile Silo air park Saranac, NY" (Thanks, Gabe Adiv!)

 Photos from inside an abandoned Titan missile silo - Boing Boing
Titan missile silo for sale - Boing Boing
Hacker camp in a missile silo - Boing Boing
Jay Lake tours a Titan missile silo - Boing Boing

Think of it as the ultimate slow-motion movie camera. Researchers at M.I.T. have developed an imaging system so fast it can trace the motion of pulses of light as they travel through liquids and solids. To put it into perspective, writes John Markoff in The New York Times, “If a bullet were tracked in the same fashion moving through the same fluid, the resulting movie would last three years.”

The research was directed by Ramesh Raskar of the Camera Culture group at the M.I.T. Media Lab. In an abstract, the research team writes:

We have built an imaging solution that allows us to visualize the propagation of light. The effective exposure time of each frame is two trillionths of a second and the resultant visualization depicts the movement of light at roughly half a trillion frames per second. Direct recording of reflected or scattered light at such a frame rate with sufficient brightness is nearly impossible. We use an indirect ‘stroboscopic’ method that records millions of repeated measurements by careful scanning in time and viewpoints. Then we rearrange the data to create a ‘movie’ of a nanosecond long event.

You can learn more by watching the video above by Melanie Gonick of the M.I.T. News Office, or by visiting the project website.

via Kottke

M.I.T. Camera Captures Speed of Light: A Trillion-Frames-Per-Second is a post from: Open Culture. Visit us at openculture.com, or follow us on Facebook, Twitter and now Google Plus.

This project is first and foremost a musical endeavour. Thank you to everyone currently involved and those to be announced.

There are way too many people to list at the moment.

This is truly an international project with different elements from each contributing individual per country.

We are still taking contributions and sponsorships for this project on graysprovocation.com

Cast: grayagent
Tags: grayagent and gun metal gray

 
I’ve never seen these videos shot by Bob Gruen before and I’m pretty much a Patti Smith fanatic. I didn’t even know they existed.

This is a very young Smith performing at Max’s in 1974 with Lenny Kaye and Richard Sohl.

More Rimbaud than Keith Richards.
 

 

 

 

 

 

 
Radio Soulwax’s ambitious punk mash-up mix is the “Stars on 45” of hardcore.
 

 
Thank you Glen E. Friedman of New York City, NY!

Where were these back in the day when I wanted to stay up late reading under the covers?

From websites:

..........................

Light up a child's room with these nightlight globes or remove one to use as a light source.

These portable nightlight globes stay lit for 30 minutes before fading to darkness to ease anyone into falling asleep.

Multi-color nightlight lets you select your favorite color with a sliding lever or cycle through them all
Portable Glo balls don't require charging
Base with 9V power adapter included

..........................

$78.19.

[via This Is Why I'm Broke]

There is perhaps no bigger promoter of 3D printing within the mainstream media than The Economist magazine. Recently they visited the gigantic Euromold conference where many 3D printer manufacturers exhibit their wares - and applications of their tech. 
 
What impressed The Economist was the link between 3D print design and the biological. We've written about this before, but it seems that the concept was much more widespread at Euromold. Here's the Big Idea: 
 
3D Printing permits you to easily make materials that have complex internal patterns. 
 
Why is this so important? It turns out that the zillions of years of bio-evolution identified the best structures for a wide variety of uses. And most of them involve differentiated innards, unlike the common mono-internal-structure manufacturing methods we use today. The difference is that 3D printers can produce complex materials as easily (or in some cases more easily) than standard mono-structures. 
 
So be on the lookout for things made with incredibly strong and lightweight components, fresh out of the printer.
  

Via The Economist

 Why There Isn’t a Spumco Coffeetable Book: My Personal Story : Animation historian and writer Amid Amidi gives us his account on Cartoon Brew of why the long-overdue John Kricfalusi/Spumco coffeetable book may never be released.

At the French site Anecdote du Jour you can listen to the world's first audio recordings, made in 1859 and 1860 by Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville. The recordings, one of a tuning fork being struck and two of de Martinville singing, are scratchy and thoroughly eerie. All the more so because de Martinville himself never heard them. In fact, nobody heard them until 2008.

The reason we credit Edison with the invention of recorded audio and not de Martinville is that de Martinville failed to invent a way to play back his recordings.

De Martinville's phonautograph turned sound waves into 2-dimensional squiggles on soot-blackened paper or glass. It was meant to be a lab instrument, to help study acoustics, not a method of recording and playing back sound. Apparently, several decades passed before anybody even realized the sounds could, theoretically, be played back.

Via Greg Gbur

Image: One of de Martinville's phonautograms. A recording of a tuning fork made in 1859.

Darryl Pinckney



Bob Adelman/Magnum Photos

Dr. Martin Luther King leading the march from Selma to Montgomery

The Martin Luther King, Jr. memorial in Washington, DC looks like heroic sculpture from the China of Chairman Mao. In The Mountaintop, a play by Katori Hall now on Broadway, Dr. King is offered yet another tribute his memory could maybe have done without. In Hall’s well-meaning, but naive play about an imagined conversation between King and a maid at the motel where he stayed on the night before he was killed, King’s last hours on earth become an occasion for tribal laughter and warm black feelings. The Mountaintop is so focused on reconciling us—and him—to his death, that Hall seems uninterested in how she might be exploiting King’s legacy.

The sign in the darkness says, “Loraine Motel,” and the lights come up on a worn-looking room of two double beds. Enter from the rain Martin Luther King, Jr. (Samuel L. Jackson), with a hacking cough, calling to Ralph Abernathy to bring him a pack of Pall Malls. He reads aloud from a speech he’s working on; he notes that “Corrie” forgot to pack his toothbrush again. “Shit.” Camae (Angela Bassett), the new maid, arrives almost immediately with his coffee, a newspaper protecting her hair from the rain. She tells him that she’s seen him “on the TV down at the Woolworth’s” and that he’s famous, “like the Beatles.” Their idiom—“Negro talk strike faster than lightnin”—is supposed to be down-home Southern, King off-duty with one of his flock. “I heard you carried on a storm up at Mason Temple….cuttin’ up in the pulpit.” But Katori Hall isn’t drawing on the oral tradition that was also important to the civil rights movement. Ralph Abernathy was said to have been a consummate story teller. But this isn’t even the vernacular of Ossie Davis’s 1963 hit play about a black preacher, Purlie Victorious.

Yet the audience chuckles knowingly as King appreciates Camae’s butt when she’s not looking. Hall’s play glides along on the waters of what we know already about King’s offstage life. She doesn’t have to convince us of anything. Even people who have not read a biography of King or a history of the FBI know that he had affairs and that J. Edgar Hoover had King’s hotel rooms tapped. Agents made Coretta Scott King listen to recordings of her husband having sex with other women. It was not known at the time that King caroused—Lyndon Johnson felt betrayed by King’s opposition to the Vietnam War, yet he refused to use Hoover’s dossier against King, according to Taylor Branch, one of King’s most distinguished biographers. Major news outlets also declined the sex scandals about King that Hoover tried to pass on to them. But for Hall to dwell on his licentiousness is part of what she has described as her project to “humanize” the Nobel laureate.

The comedy in Hall’s play stems from Camae’s recognizing King as a fellow sinner. She teases him that cigarettes and coffee are not a diet befitting a preacher. She reproaches herself for “cussin’” in front of “Dr. Kang. I cuss worse than a sailor with the clap. Ooo, God gone get me!” She is the voice of the people, humorous, reasonable, moral. She doesn’t mind his flirtatiousness. To have been wild, to have had a past, she tells him, is part of his job requirement as a preacher. “Folk won’t listen to you otherwise.” His sexual opportunism is normal, typical of men, Hall seems to be saying, and Camae is there to forgive what is most human in King.

In their instant rapport, they soon have an exchange in which Camae expresses a sort of common-sense skepticism about nonviolence while King defends his philosophy. She tells him that it wasn’t bad weather that kept more people from coming to his rally that evening; they were afraid of getting blown up. Not even churches were safe. The previous week’s march for the sanitation workers had descended into riot and looting. The young didn’t understand that they were marching for a living wage, not for a color TV, Hall has King lament. He is haunted by thoughts of Larry Payne, the young man gunned down by police during the riot that spoiled the march of the sanitation workers. He asks Camae what she would do and she brightly suggests a march for “ass-whippins.” Launching into a sermon of her own, she exhorts members of her imagined congregation to kill the white man—with their minds. Instead of trying to integrate lunch counters, black people should build their own restaurants. Her excitement at her own vision and oratory builds. ”Fuck the white man!” She’s gone too far, but King agrees with her. He observes that the voice of violence may be the only voice that white people will listen to.

A portrait of King behind closed doors is going to depict a man in doubt. After all, King was a man, Hall strives to show us. After the advent of Black power in 1966, King often had to address the question of whether disciplined nonviolent witness was still viable as a strategy for social change. Taylor Branch relates how King struggled to convince the young that violence was futile, that it was not an effective way to counter racist police forces, and that the primary victims of riots were black people themselves. Little of King’s thinking enters into Hall’s creation. Camae will tell him that she admires him for loving those who could only hate him. Yet Hall merely has King wonder aloud where the racial hatred of white people comes from. Her treatment of his political philosophy is superficial, given that King’s commitment to nonviolent civil disobedience is one of his greatest legacies to the American democratic tradition. Camae informs him that God likes Malcolm X, and that, unlike King, he didn’t smoke, curse, drink, or cheat on his wife. Camae represents the feeling that, in retrospect, Malcolm X had a point, that there was something emotionally unreal about asking black people to turn the other cheek.

Hall’s play has King, the great leader, unburdening himself, and even though Camae teases him about their class differences, she is not the social inferior dispensing absolution whom we might expect to find in a drama where a public figure makes a private confession. At one point, King wonders why she has the next morning’s paper. “Tomorrow already here.” When she produces a pack of cigarettes from her blouse, she tells him that she is a magician. When he is offended by her blasphemies, she explains that God wouldn’t mind. “God even like dirty jokes.” She reassures him that God likes “the real you.” There is a reason Camae knows so much about what God likes. The play’s big revelation is that God is a woman and she, Camae, is a new angel. She was choked to death by a white man the night before, and to prepare King for his own journey home to God is her first assignment, for which her sins will be washed away.



Joan Marcus

Angela Bassett as Camae in *The Mountaintop*

It’s a relief when The Mountaintop turns into fantasy, away from the embarrassing realism of martyr and maid. The threat that the pair may tumble into bed has been removed; this is no longer historical drama, it is uncomplicated Christian escapism. As an angel, Camae isn’t perfect. She robbed, lied, hated herself, and, as she puts it, sacrificed her flesh. “Even my uncle couldn’t help hissself.” She is exasperated enough at one point to pull King up, woman to man: “Gosh, you men are so selfish.” She works to get him to accept death in her frank, down-home way. The roles have reversed and suddenly she is the figure of authority–telling King hard truths, comforting him when he becomes undone by them. Death’s victory is emasculating. Yet the play’s feminism is historically unreal and amounts to little more than an Oprah-style sense of righteous celebration. “Nonsense comin’ out of a pretty woman’s mouth ain’t nonsense at all. It’s poetry.”

“The only position of women in SNCC is prone,” Stokely Carmichael famously said back in 1964. In time, black women put on record their quarrels with the male leadership of the civil rights movement and the cultural misogyny that kept black women in the background. But Katori Hall isn’t dealing with the outright sexism of the movement. Her subject is not what work black women were left to do in the 1960s, how little credit they got for in many cases keeping organizations going, how King’s occasional mistresses felt about the situations they found themselves in. Fantasy allows Hall to leap over history. Black women were among the most powerless people in America during King’s lifetime. But in Hall’s revision, they were—and are—supreme in the heavens.

Faced with death, King begs for more time, like any man, the play seems to say. Camae gives him a pep talk, like a coach, reassuring him that the world had needed him and that was why he spent so much time away from his family. He has asked God not to let him die a man who has not had another chance to hug his children or to make love to his wife. In the end, he understands that God had big plans for him precisely because he was “just a man.” It isn’t a more ‘human’ drum major for peace and justice whom we see, as King sometimes referred to himself, so much as a Martin Luther King who is sorry in the way that a family or wife might want an absent father and gallivanting husband to be.



Joan Marcus

Samuel L. Jackson as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. in *The Mountaintop*

Throughout, Hall uses things from King’s last days that really happened. For instance, the speech he is working on, reading to himself, when the play opens, “Why America is going to hell…”, comes from a line in a speech King gave to the sanitation workers in March. “America is going to hell, too.” The pillow fight King ha[…]

Two favorite topics of X-Phi are morality and how we perceive the minds of others.  In a recent paper, Liane Young, Adam Waytz and I argue that the very essence of moral judgment is mind perception.   Briefly, we outline the idea that people have a psychological prototype of morality consisting of a moral dyad of two perceived minds - an agent and a patient (i.e., interpersonal harm).   Grounding morality in harm is a bit contentious given recent research, but you can be the judge of whether we've made a good argument for it.

We've solicited a number of official commentaries in Psychological Inquiry, but we'd love to get some more informal feedback.  Here's the paper.  And here - just as a teaser - is the first figure.

In a previous post, the author gives a brief summary of Bellah’s book and argues that Bellah’s approach goes beyond the reductive naturalist account of religion—ed.

The subtitle of Bellah’s book, From the Paleolithic to the Axial Age, indicates that it is about religions between the Paleolithic and the axial ages. Bellah explicitly states that this is “not a book about modernity,” and that he plans to write another, smaller book on modernity. However, I want to suggest that in a very important sense this book is about modernity as well. This is because Bellah believes that there are necessary links “between past and present,” and that “nothing is ever lost.”

In fact, the idea that nothing is ever lost is the guiding heuristic device of Bellah’s project. For instance, this is very much the idea that guides Bellah’s discussion of individual developmental psychology: nothing in the early stages of an individual’s psychological life is “ever lost” in the later stages. And this is also the case on the level of human history. As he puts it, “the view that ‘nothing is ever lost’ can, as we shall see, also be brought to bear on religious history.” Indeed, this heuristic guides Bellah’s discussion of Merlin Donald’s thesis that human culture has evolved through three stages: mimetic, mythic, and theoretic. Bellah argues that the early stages are never lost in the later stages.

For example, when he discusses Mesopotamian culture, which is supposed to be a “dead civilization” (a phrase that appears in the title of Leo Oppenheim’s book on Mesopotamian civilization), Bellah insists that “[I]n an important sense, all culture is one: human beings today owe something to every culture that has gone before us. Mesopotamian culture certainly had an influence on its neighbors, notably Persia, Israel, and Greece.” While discussing the gods in Egyptian religion, Bellah says, “Since ‘we’ are the product of all previous human culture, we have, at some level ‘already’ experienced those gods, as we have ‘already’ experienced the powerful beings of tribal peoples. If we are truly to understand ancient Egyptian religion (or any religion) it will be part of our task to ‘remember’ what we have forgotten, but which in some sense we already know.”

The idea that nothing is ever lost is also the guiding heuristic in the chapters on the axial religions. What makes the axial religions axial? How should we understand the axial age? According to Bellah, there are two defining features of the axial age: the emergence of a reflective and critical standpoint (what Jaspers calls “reflexivity,” what Momigliano calls “criticism”), and the emergence of theoretic culture (especially “theory-construction”). Bellah makes a compelling case for a general similarity amongst the four axial religions, which is that all forms of culture—mimetic, mythic, and theoretic—co-exist in all the axial religions, and they form a “hybrid system” even after the emergence of theoretic culture. In other words, the first two forms of culture are not replaced by the theoretic culture, which is the last stage. Instead, the theoretical culture “grows out of and significantly criticizes, but never abandons, the early stages [of mimetic and mythic culture].” I shall call this Bellah’s “hybrid system” thesis. This is obviously a particular version of his more general “nothing is ever lost” thesis.

In the case of early China, Bellah’s “hybrid system” thesis makes perfect sense. Here are two of many pieces of evidence: First, narrative is a major part of almost all Chinese texts in the axial age. Second, most of early Chinese thinkers in the axial age argued that ritual was indispensable. In other words, after the emergence of the theoretic culture in axial China, mythic culture (narrative) and mimetic culture (ritual) are not being replaced. Unlike in the case of ancient Greece, it is relatively much easier to show that ancient China is a cultural “hybrid system” that includes all three cultures at once. However, when we move to Plato, we tend to assume that philosophy as theory-construction has completely replaced myth and narrative. This is perhaps why Bellah devotes a substantial part of the Greece chapter arguing that the “hybrid system” thesis applies to Plato as well. As he puts it:

My point is that the power of Plato is his reform of the whole of what Donald called the cultural “hybrid system,” the system that includes mimetic, mythic and theoretic in a new synthesis, but not the replacement of mimetic and mythic by the theoretic alone. Such a replacement is an experiment that no one central to the axial transition in any of the four cases undertook; that awaited the emergence of western modernity in the seventeenth century.

*  *  *

Bellah’s reading of Plato is just one example of what may be called Bellah’s “friendship-based hermeneutics,” which is practiced throughout the book. Here we are using Aristotle’s definition of friendship: a friend is another self. In this sense, Plato is still our friend, and this may be the reason why he is still speaking to us today. Bellah believes that there is “friendship between the ancients and the moderns”:

This book asks what our deep past can tell us about the kind of life human beings have imagined was worth living. It is an effort to live again those moments that belong to us in the depths of our present, to draw living water from the well of the past, to find friends in history who can help us understand where we are (emphasis added).

The last phrase is an allusion to a passage from Mencius, which Bellah uses as one of three epigraphs for his preface. In this passage, Mencius is essentially saying that the right way to read the writings of the ancients is very much like “finding friends in history.” This Mencian hermeneutics is further illustrated by a moving passage in Bellah’s acknowledgments:

It perhaps goes without saying, but I will say it anyway, that I owe much to the friends in history that Mencius talked about, not least to Mencius himself, but to all the creators of the great traditions that I deal with in the later chapters of this book, as well as to the reciters of myth and the dancers of ritual in the tribal and archaic traditions, who must remain anonymous, but who have been, not merely my examples, but my teachers in this enterprise.

If we contrast Bellah’s “the ancients-as-friends” hermeneutics with the antagonistic hermeneutic approach to the past that is articulated in Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence, it is illuminating that we don’t see any “anxiety of influence” here. Much could be said about Bellah’s uniquely calm and generous voice in this book. There is no anxiety in his engagement with the ancients; there is instead magnanimity.

In his 2007 book A Secular Age, Charles Taylor has identified “secularism’s subtraction stories” as the central dogma of secularism and modernism. They are, as Taylor puts it, “stories of modernity in general, and secularity in particular, which explains them by human beings having lost, or sloughed off, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confining horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.” Obviously, Bellah’s “nothing is ever lost” theme-based Bildungsroman of human religion implies a rejection of secularism’s subtraction theories. In other words, Bellah has an implied thesis about modernity, which is that what has gone wrong in modernity is its dogmatic assumption that theoretic culture can be the only sources of knowledge, representation, and criticism, and that it can completely replace mimetic and mythic cultures.

Since Taylor focuses on telling the stories about what has happened between the sixteenth and twentieth century in Europe, he does not have much to say about the early history of religion in a global setting. From this perspective, Bellah’s and Taylor’s books complement each other perfectly. They will certainly become two landmark texts in our ongoing discourse on modernity and secularism in the twenty-first century.

I have said earlier that the idea that nothing is ever lost is the guiding heuristic for Bellah. I intentionally used the term “heuristic” because Bellah does not take it to be literally true with regard to everything in history. As Bellah puts it, “I also believe that there are types of religion and that these types can be put in an evolutionary order, not in terms of better or worse, but in terms of the capacities upon which they draw.” In the following passage, Bellah explicitly says that the slogan “nothing is ever lost” means that the capacities are never lost:

I have been concerned with the development of new capacities in human culture: mimetic, mythic and theoretic, but I have argued the later capacities do not replace the earlier ones, that all these capacities continue in complex relationships right to the present. That is what I have meant by saying in various contexts that ‘nothing is ever lost.’ A great deal of past is lost, irretrievably lost, but not the fundamental cultural capacities.

This crucial insight allows Bellah to hold the view that there is “progress” in the sense that new capacities are acquired as humankind moves from tribal and archaic religions to axial age religions. Yet he can at the same time reject the view that there is progress in all aspects in general:

Religious evolution does not mean a progression from worse to better. We have not gone from ‘primitive religion’ that tribal peoples have had to ‘higher religions’ that people like us have. […] Religious evolution does add new capacities, but it tells us nothing about how those capacities will be used. It is worth remembering, as Stephen J. Gould pointed out, that complexity is not the only good.

In other words, B[…]

Deep in my Ayahuasca Experience (Charlie Veitch)

It is very hard to express with simply words, you need to sit down with someone and prepare the mood, and make them aware of the viewpoint. This is a snapshot of 3 minutes when I was at the height of the experience. Love Charlie en.wikipedia.org
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As I mentioned in my What’s New In Emacs 24 series (part one, part two) Emacs 24 can now sort the colors in M-x list-colors-display based on the RGB or HSV distance to another color. This is perhaps of most interest to web designers or color theme creators, but it’s still a fun little addition.

Unfortunately, this functionality is only available through the customize interface, and that means most people will never bother with it at all. Hence, I’ve written two helper commands below to make this neat addition to Emacs 24 easier to use.

If you’re looking up a named color (like red) then it must exist in M-x list-colors-display; if it’s an HTML color then as long as it is valid it will work.

To use it, you must invoke M-x find-nearest-color and enter the name of a color. The other command, find-nearest-color-at-point does just that: it looks at what your point is on and tries to look it up.

(defun find-nearest-color (color &optional use-hsv)
"Finds the nearest color by RGB distance to `color'.
 
If called with a universal argument (or if `use-hsv' is set) use HSV instead of RGB.
Runs \\[list-colors-display] after setting `list-colors-sort'"
(interactive "sColor: \nP")
(let ((list-colors-sort `(,(if (or use-hsv current-prefix-arg)
'hsv-dist
'rgb-dist) . ,color)))
(if (color-defined-p color)
(list-colors-display)
(error "The color \"%s\" does not exist." color))))
 
(defun find-nearest-color-at-point (pt)
"Finds the nearest color at point `pt'.
 
If called interactively, `pt' is the value immediately under `point'."
(interactive "d")
(find-nearest-color (with-syntax-table (copy-syntax-table (syntax-table))
;; turn `#' into a word constituent to help
;; `thing-at-point' find HTML color codes.
(modify-syntax-entry ?# "w")
(thing-at-point 'word))))

If you hack a lot of elisp you will notice that I’ve chosen to hack the syntax table (temporarily) to make thing-at-point play nice with the HTML color syntax (#ABCDEF) as the character — and this will depend on your mode and thus your syntax table, of course — # is rarely a “word” constituent. I think this is a much cleaner way of “getting” things at point than messing with regular expressions as you will inevitably end up reinventing most of thing-at-point doing so.

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generatorx: Lecture slides from @MrPrudence: Visual Music http://t.co/gAA8itKz

Continuing our “what happens when you drop stuff into stuff?” series is this short video segment from the BBC.  As with dropping a magnet through a copper pipe, many of you probably know what to expect, here. But it’s nonetheless cool to see.  Mercury is so beautiful; such a shame it’s also so toxic.

More:

Mercury “beating heart” demo video
Beautiful, deadly fountain pumps pure metallic mercury

Or at least Ray Monk (Southampton) talking about him. (Thanks to Matt Kramer for the pointer.)

What do mathematics, chess and philosophy have in common? Among many other things, they have a glaring gap between men and women.  And the reason in all three cases may be cultural, rather than biological. 

I've been interested in the biological basis of mathematics for a long time now. There are two research strands in this field: first, psychologists (usually developmental psychologists and comparative psychologists) are interested in finding out the universal - innate - cognitive basis of mathematical capacities. To this end, they study the numerical intuitions of infants, nonhuman animals, western adults, and people from cultures with mathematical ideas that are divergent from those of the west. Broadly speaking, researchers who work in this field are looking for underlying commonalities in our mathematical capacities. A second research field, not completely unrelated to the first, as people sometimes work in both fields (Brian Butterworth and David Geary come to mind) attempts to explain individual differences in mathematical competencies. These psychologists examine, amongst other things, the effects of low birth weight on later mathematical performance, congenital conditions such as Turner's syndrome, or the effects of language on numerical skills (e.g., speakers of Welsh and Chinese have an advantage in mental arithmetic, because their languages have a very transparent, completely regular base-10 counting system). A large part of the variability in mathematics can be explained as a result of these factors. However, an unresolved question is whether or not gender plays a role in mathematical excellence. Given that most mathematicians are male, would men have a biological advantage? 

The greater male variability hypothesis, originally proposed in the 19th century, argues that men may have an advantage because there is greater variability in mathematical (and other) intellectual abilities: there are more geniuses and more intellectually under endowed men compared to women. The right hand tail of the distribution of male cognitive capacities would thus be longer than that of women, explaining why men predominate in almost all intellectual fields. However, a new study by Kane and Mertz strongly suggests that cultural, not biological factors, explain the predominance of men in mathematics. Kane and Mertz used the PISA and TIMMS assessment scores of children in different countries to examine gender differences in mathematics. They showed that differences in mathematical aptitude between boys and girls (with boys outperforming girls) was associated with socio-cultural factors, in particular, gender equity. Interestingly, they did not find greater variability in boys' scores, which disconfirms the greater male variability hypothesis. Greater gender equity increased children's performance (both boys and girls) and decreased the gap between both genders. The authors argue that their "findings are consistent with the idea that the gap between boys’ and girls’ mathematics performance is due to differences in opportunities available to males versus females, which we will call here the gap due to inequity hypothesis."

I am reminded of a paper on sex differences in chess by Chabris and Glickman published a few years ago in Psychological Science. Gender differences in chess are even more stark than in mathematics, with only 1% of the grand masters being women. In agreement with the Kane and Mertz study, the authors of the chess study found no greater variability in young male players compared to young girls. In locales where at least 50% of the young players are girls, their rating are initially very similar to those of boys. However, the authors suggest that (possibly because the professional chess world is not very inviting for women and very competitive), girls drop out in greater numbers, and participate less in official tournaments, which is important to establish their rating. The authors say: "External factors like the relative lack of female role models among the world’s top players and the prospect of playing a game dominated by boys may be discouraging to girls (or their parents), either directly reducing their likelihood of learning how to play in the first place or indirectly reducing their initial performance in competitive play via test anxiety or stereotype threat". They conclude that because chess remains an overwhelmingly male environment, girls became discouraged. One finding to support this hypothesis is that, the more male a chess community was, the greater the gap in ratings between boys and girls. Interestingly, the threshold under which this male advantage disappeared was 50%, in other words, only if girls made up 50% or more of a chess community did they not have average lower ratings than the boys.

Now onto philosophy. There is some recent debate on whether or not the paucity of women in our profession could be due to (innate?) differences in philosophical intuitions. Regardless of these findings, I think that if the findings from chess and mathematics can be generalized to philosophy, it is mainly a cultural issue as well. Especially the example of chess, where women needed to obtain a critical mass of 50% to obtain similar rating as the men indicate that the lack of women role models will mean that mentoring and addressing the pipeline early on alone will not suffice to decrease the gender imbalance in our profession. 

Babbage, Turing and Wilkes: history of computing in Cambridge

A brief talk by Alan Macfarlane about the early days of computing in Cambridge, including the famous images of the coffee pot and the intranet
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When it comes to views on economics, Republicans have been consistent, clear and wrong.

At Bloomberg Business Week, Vali Chandrasekaran makes me incredibly happy by creating a series of six infographics demonstrating the ridiculous connections you can make when you start confusing correlation and causation. Did a conspiracy of baby Avas cause the U.S. housing market to implode? Was Michele Bachmann's candidacy doomed by the end of Staten Island Cakes? Are scientists raising the global average temperature in order to increase their own research funding? Find out here!

Brad Wieners (my friend from the days when we were both editors at Wired and now an editor at Bloomberg Businessweek) wrote the cover story for the December 19 issue of Bloomberg Businessweek about Lego's latest (and most expensive) attempt to capture the girl market.

Over the years, Lego has had five strategic initiatives aimed at girls. Some failed because they misapprehended gender differences in how kids play. Others, while modestly profitable, didn't integrate properly with Lego's core products. Now, after four years of research, design, and exhaustive testing, Lego believes it has a breakthrough. On Dec. 26 in the U.K. and Jan. 1 in the U.S., Lego will roll out Lego Friends, aimed at girls 5 and up. ...The company's confidence is evident in the launch -- a full line of 23 different products backed by a $40 million global marketing push. "This is the most significant strategic launch we've done in a decade," says Lego Group Chief Executive Officer Jørgen Vig Knudstorp. "We want to reach the other 50 percent of the world's children."

Revealed in Brad's story is Lego's introduction of the ladyfig, which is a Lego Friends minifigure that's 5 millimeters taller than the original minifig:

Then there are the lady figures. Twenty-nine mini-doll figures will be introduced in 2012, all 5 millimeters taller and curvier than the standard dwarf minifig. There are five main characters. Like American Girl Dolls, which are sold with their own book-length biographies, these five come with names and backstories. Their adventures have a backdrop: Heartlake City, which has a salon, a horse academy, a veterinary clinic, and a cafe. "We had nine nationalities on the team to make certain the underlying experience would work in many cultures," says Nanna Ulrich Gudum, senior creative director.

The key difference between girls and the ladyfig and boys and the minifig was that many more girls projected themselves onto the ladyfig -- she became an avatar. Boys tend to play with minifigs in the third person. "The girls needed a figure they could identify with, that looks like them," says Rosario Costa, a Lego design director. The Lego team knew they were on to something when girls told them, "I want to shrink down and be there."

Read the entire fascinating article at Bloomberg Businessweek (Image courtesy of Bloomberg Businessweek, photographed by Nick Ferrari)

Cast: Open Source Ecology
Tags:

Little Printer lives in your home, bringing you news, puzzles and gossip from your friends. Use your smartphone to set up subscriptions and Little Printer will gather them together to create a timely, beautiful mini-newspaper.

For more see:
bergcloud.com/littleprinter/

The announcement:
bergcloud.com/2011/11/29/announcing-little-printer-and-berg-cloud/

Cast: BERG, schulze, Timo, James Darling, Andy Huntington, blackbeltjones, joe malia, Matt Brown, Nick Ludlam, Simon Pearson and Alex Jarvis
Tags: berg, bergcloud, berglondon, little printer, printer and product

 
Yes, ‘The Can” is the ‘Can’ we all know and love - Holger, Jaki, Michael, Irmin and, in this early 70s incarnation, the iconic Damo Suzuki. Here is a clip of the band performing the title track of the Roland Klick film ‘Deadlock’ in 1970 on Germany’s Westdeutscher Rundfunk television station.

When I first stumbled upon this clip, I assumed the TV producers had made an amusing mistake by adding an unwanted definitive article to the start of the band’s name. However, after checking the Can wiki page, it turns out that the additional “The” may not have been a mistake after all:

[By 1968] the band used the names “Inner Space” and “The Can” before finally settling on “CAN”. Liebezeit subsequently suggested the backronym “communism, anarchism, nihilism” for the band’s name. [Wow, what an amazing backronym!]

However, by the time this footage was recorded in 1970 the band had already released two records as ‘Can’ - Monster Movies and Soundtracks, which mostly featured Malcolm Mooney on vocals rather than Suzuki. So I think a little chortle can be had without feeling too foolish, but who knows, maybe it was a genuine mistake or maybe the bad flirted with a new name for a new singer? Either way, if it’s ‘The Can’ or just plain old ‘Can’ this is some great early footage of true musical pioneers: 

The Can “Deadlock” live 1970
 

 
BONUS!

The Can perform the awesome “Mother Sky” from the same session (while a hippie chick fills a hash pipe):
 

 

Fun times!

Shine Louise Houston and I modeled the new RodeoH Harnesses, and Tristan Crane took cute pics.



Want to see the harness below the belt? Check them out at RodeoH.com.

I’ve been so busy I know I’ve skipped at least one months worth of podcasts – here’s one I recorded earlier in the year and it’s been sitting since October waiting to be edited! All those weddings and birthdays and revolutions just got in the way! But I’m working on a Xmas edition, as well as a special Wedding edition which should be out much sooner now it’s gotten quiet.

It’s little secret that Bill Drummond and Jimmy Cauty, usually known as The KLF and Justified Ancients of Mu Mu are a major influence on mashup, dance and pop culture – and myself personally. Even the intro to Radio Clash contains sneaky KLF elements!

Some KLF rarities and decent quality versions of KLF/JAMs tunes appeared earlier in the year via the excellent KLF.de and this podcast literally would not exist without their help and people’s patient mastering and ripping and eBay scouring – big thanks! Since their ‘retirement’ in 1992 KLF has entered into lore (and a lot of their creations into obscurity/rarity) but I was there from Doctorin the Tardis and later the second version of What Time Is Love buying the singles each of the Stadium House trilogy on day or week of release – I still have the 7″s!

But before that their 1987 album and sailing in hot (Swedish?) waters with ABBA and sample clearance (or more importantly lack of it) Their hiphop splatter samplepunk early records is what we focus on here in part one – the early days upto the Pure Trance singles, a car making a hit record, The Manual, and the first White Room film, as a broke KLF despair of bankruptcy and a little known track called What Time Is Love takes off in the clubs…

It’s Good to Go, Yo (108Mb, 1:53)

Tracklist:

The Timelords – Doctorin’ The Tardis (12″)
The JAMs – All You Need Is Love
Disco 2000 – I Gotta CD
The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu – Burn the Bastards
The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu – Disaster Fund Collection
The KLF Wichita Lineman Was A Song I Once Heard
The KLF – Build A Fire (Lenny Dee Remix)
The KLF – Madrugda Eterna (Club mix)
The KLF – 3 a.m. eternal (Original White Room unreleased version)
The KLF – Kylie Said To Jason (Full Length Version)
The KLF – What Time Is Love (Original Pure Trance Version)
Dr. Felix – Relax Your Body
The KLF? – Love Trance
The KLF – The Lovers’ Side (Extended)
The KLF? – Turn Up The Strobe
The Justified Ancients of Mu Mu – It’s Grim Up North (Original Club mix)
Bill Drummond – Julian Cope Is Dead

You might like these previous posts:

RC 204: Vinyl Fetish
– May 6, 2011

Disco Bollywood Babylon
– July 6, 2010

The FLK: What Time is Milking?
– August 31, 2011

Radio Disney does metal
– June 19, 2010

Uprising of the Daleks – team9′s new Who-tastic muse
– August 5, 2009

Official video for Lana Del Rey’s “Born To Die”. The album is out January 30th.

Inward Path Publishers of Penang have republished Bhikkhu Bodhi’s classic argument for the revival of bhikkhuni ordination, originally written for the bhikkhuni congress in Hamburg, 2008. Thanks, Hock Eng! Here’s the page on their website; it includes some useful links, and a nice refutation of some misconceptions regarding bhikkhuni ordination by Malaysia’s Barbara Yen.

This simple demonstration of eddy current braking (Wikipedia) will probably be familiar to many of you, but this video from YouTuber JamesRB1995 is a short, well-shot, impressive documentation of the effect. Keep in mind that copper is not ferromagnetic, and there is no direct magnetic attraction going on here.

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Kinetic Sculpture Manipulates Rare Earth Magnets

ForbesTech: Undercover Study Finds It's Easy to Buy Illegal Guns on Craigslist http://t.co/KxmgbdlO