Archive for March, 2008
Screenshots!
i think it’s cool when geeks post and trade screenshots of workspaces to show off *rad* customizations made to desktop configs, themes, et al.
i took this on a mac today and thought i’d post it for posterity :
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Don’t Forget to be a FAN
Below is a fan-made video for a Modest Mouse song that is better than most videos the band has paid money to have made [this is just my opinion, of course]:
Bands, companies, et al have more to look forward to as User Generated Content [UGC] continues to propagate for better or worse.
They have more to look forward to and also things to watch out for – namely losing control of their hard work building brands and identities that are so cherished by them and so easily smashed by a couple kids with laptops. OR, if they’re lucky, some kid may come along and make something better than all their ad spending combined over a decade could’ve come up with.
This is good and bad for reasons different than what you might think : first, by-and-large, ad agencies are too calcified, too hobbled by clients’ demands to make much use of this culture as the ideas are not traditional enough for old, executive camels who make decisions. These geezers of intellect and taste know how to balance the books but have no vision whatsoever and can’t see or be convinced of it, even when it’s there plainly for all others to see.
As for the kids, the only downside of these creative outlets is they’re giving their great ideas and efforts away for free to the sites that feature them.
Let’s face it, though : who cares?
There’s plenty more where that came from! : )
These videos are only exercises that allow them to sharpen their skills while increasing their stake and stock in this whole cultural movement.
Meanwhile, the big, bad, self-proclaimed “creative” people get left behind. Best they can do is rip-off the ideas they get from these kids and make more derivative crap that still hasn’t changed much. You can fake creativity but you can’t imitate SPIRIT and if it ain’t got SPIRIT then it just doesn’t move. And everyone knows it.
Tally-ho, kids!
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Keep ‘em Moving!
Researchers promote starting children young when it comes to exercise and healthy eating
Pamela Cowan, Leader-Post
Published: Saturday, March 29, 2008
Over indulgence in computer games, TV, processed food and fast food. You just shortened the life of your child.
Dr. June LeDrew couldn’t sit still and watch kids morph into “extreme screenies” — those who stare at a TV screen for more than five hours a day and rarely move off the couch.
So the professor of Kinesiology and Health Studies at the University of Regina created some public service announcements that focus on the connection between sedentary activities such as television watching and increasing obesity levels.
“We have the soft commercials or public service announcements where someone is walking around with a cushion attached to their butt and they’re encouraging them not to be a couch potato,” LeDrew said. “But if you’re looking at the health side of this and the detriment to our children’s health in particular, we need a harder hitting approach than that to send a message to the adults that this is not working.”
Her concern is shared.
A study conducted in 2003 by the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation titled Zero to Six: Electronic Media in the Lives of Infants, Toddlers and Preschoolers found that one in four children under the age of two years has a TV in his or her bedroom and children six years and younger spend an average of two hours a day with screen media, mostly TV and videos.
Fast forward to 2006.
That’s when LeDrew and two University of Regina co-researchers decided to measure how much time family members spent watching television so they challenged families to unplug their TV and “Live Outside the Box” for a week.
They sent information about the project home with children from two Regina elementary schools. Only 13 families participated and some angry parents called the researchers because they were upset by the suggestion that the entire family go screen free.
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Machinima
Some of you may remember this rather unorthodox, though, significant event in online history :
Machinima (pronounced /məˈʃiËÂnÉ™mÉ™/ or /məˈʃɪnÉ™mÉ™/), a portmanteau of machine cinema, is a collection of associated production techniques whereby computer-generated imagery (CGI) is rendered using real-time, interactive 3-D engines, such as those of games, instead of professional 3D animation software. Engines from first-person shooter and role-playing simulation video games are typically used. Consequently, the rendering can be done in real-time using PCs (either using the computer of the creator or the viewer), rather than with complex 3D engines using huge render farms. Usually, machinima productions are produced using the tools (demo recording, camera angle, level editor, script editor, etc.) and resources (backgrounds, levels, characters, skins, etc.) available in a game.
Machinima is an example of emergent gameplay, a process of putting game tools to unexpected ends, and of artistic computer game modification. The real-time nature of machinima means that established techniques from traditional film-making can be reapplied in a virtual environment. As a result, production tends to be cheaper and more rapid than in keyframed CGI animation. It can also produce more professional appearing production than is possible with traditional at-home techniques of live video tape, or stop action using live actors, hand drawn animation or toy props.
As machinima begins to break out of the underground community of gamers and becomes more widely recognized by mainstream audiences, tools are being developed to allow for faster and easier creation of machinima productions. A number of upcoming machinima products are expected to provide machinimators with original assets, as well as advanced features such as a timeline, gesture and sound creation, and precise camera tools.
Although most often used to produce recordings that are later edited as in conventional film, machinima techniques have also occasionally been used for theatre. A New York improvisational comedy group called the ILL Clan voice and puppet their characters before a virtual camera to produce machinima displayed on a screen to a live audience.
[definition compliments of wikipedia]
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Banned : Nerf in Bowling Green
The University might hamper the second round of BG Undead’s game play after the announcement was made last week to place an immediate ban on the use of Nerf guns on campus.
The game, a version of Humans versus Zombies, is still going to be played but it’s going to be more difficult for the humans to survive, said senior Atonn Smeltzer, the web administrator for the group.
Humans versus Zombies is a game played between two teams, the humans and the zombies.
The goal of the humans is to survive the zombie attack by not being “bitten” and turned into a zombie. The human’s main form of defense used to come in the form of Nerf guns, but is now being downgraded to balled up socks and marshmallows.
The zombies win the game by turning all of the humans after placing both hands on a human’s shoulders.
“All of the game play will still be the same, just no Nerf guns,” Smeltzer said.
Smeltzer said he and group president Peter Geldes were called into a meeting with Associate Dean of Students Jeff Coats to discuss one of the University’s new policies. While in the meeting, the group was told the game was in danger of being canceled due to the number of calls the University received last semester from concerned parents.
After Smeltzer and Geldes pleaded their case, the University notified them a few days later and told the group they were allowed to play their game, just without the Nerf guns, Smeltzer said.
“We were caught by surprise [by the ban],” Smeltzer said. “This was last Tuesday and we received a call on Thursday banning guns.”
Not all members of BG Undead are taking this as the final word from the University. Several members have started a petition to get the University to allow the game to use Nerf guns, Smeltzer said.
He said groups from other universities have shown support for the petition, including Ohio University’s group, which has sent electronic signatures to add to what BG Undead has collected.
[more]
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EMR and You
Have you ever wondered what, if any, effects all our WiFi and Broadband and cellular energies flying around might have on our physical bodies?
Certainly, most of us heard the rumblings during the emergence of cellphones that they may cause problems in some people and other related stories that are always presented as nothing to worry about. Such notions would hurt the cash flow to companies who manufacture such devices as well as the carriers who provide subscription-based services to them. We can’t have that now, can we?
Like so many decisions people have made over the millennia, however, we usually make great decisions for the short-term and exceedingly poor ones for the long-term.
Thus, now with so many frequencies being pulsed through the air for this and that we seemingly don’t think or care much about the long-term implications these conveniences may have in store for us. We can speculate about it but the facts are that WE CAN’T BE SURE.
Enter the EMR Policy Institute, who’s goal is :
We believe that the unfettered use of electromagnetic radiation (EMR) – radiofrequency/microwave radiation (RF/MW) present in all wireless and communications technologies, as well as the extremely low frequencies (ELF) present in powerline supplies – is ill advised given research that has accumulated over the last two decades. The Mission of The EMR Policy Institute is to foster a better understanding of the environmental and human biological effects from such exposures. Our goal is to work at the federal, state and international levels to foster appropriate, unbiased research and to create better cooperation between federal regulatory agencies with a stake in public health in order to mitigate unnecessary exposures that may be deemed to be hazardous.
If you’d like to help ensure that these technologies are monitored for these effects with greater accuracy using unbiased research, click here to sign the online petition now being assembled.
Good decisions are based on good information that is not biased and not bent to the will of vested parties. The leaders of those companies should care, too, because what if all of these frequencies are affecting DNA structure in humans? Doesn’t matter if you’re rich or poor – the same types of radiation waves are flowing through all of us. All day. All night.
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Wifi that Works?
By Peter Kaplan and Eric Auchard
WASHINGTON/SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Google Inc on Monday unveiled plans for a new generation of wireless devices to operate on soon-to-be-vacant television airwaves, and sought to alleviate fears that this might interfere with TV broadcasts or wireless microphones.
In comments filed with the Federal Communications Commission, the Internet leader outlined plans for low-power devices that use local wireless airwaves to access the “white space” between television channels. A Google executive called the plan “Wi-Fi 2.0 or Wi-Fi on steroids.”
“The airwaves can provide huge economic and social gains if used more efficiently …,” Google said in the comments.
Rick Whitt, Google’s Washington telecom and media counsel, said this class of Wi-Fi devices could eventually offer data transmission speeds of billions of bits per second — far faster than the millions of bits per second available on most current broadband networks. Consumers could watch movies on wireless devices and do other things that are currently difficult on slower networks.
[click here to read more of this article on Reuters]
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The Big and Bad are going Down, Down, Down…
When i was just 11 or 12, i remember my dad telling me that having loyalty to a company was detrimental to my success because companies have no loyalty to people. It goes against their very goal.
This made sense as i watched him change jobs and watched companies fall and new ones rise all throughout the 80′s.
His theory was that the large and mid-sized company was something of the past and going forward it would be small companies that set the pace for innovation and success.
Look around now : small outfits join forces with other small outfits on a project-by-project basis to create something and then disband when the goal has been reached, then form new companies again in order to create a new product and on and on and on…
Large and even medium-sized companies are too big and muddled with their own logic to adjust to anything new. They are what they are. They were set up to do this one thing and that one thing is all they can do. They have only a singular set of tools that they try again and again to ply to a new way of thinking. They’re open to new ways of thinking but are far too calcified to actually move in any such direction. People are creatures of habit and, for most of the people in big business, the habits don’t change much.
By keeping their infrastructures and overheads light, limber and easily maneuvered as markets change and technologies become more efficient and affordable, these small shops are also able to be loyal to their employees in ways big companies never could be or were never interested in. Offering extended periods of leave as workers become more and more diversified in their own lives adds even more appeal to these types of companies in the eyes of workers as the “contractor model” continues to evolve and give both sides added value – as my friend Dave has said time and time again : flexible employers make for flexible employees.
Certainly, no one likes to see previously successful [ read: rich people] suffer through a recession, but there is something poetically just about watching these old dogs get a taste of their own medicine and have to change whether they like it or not. Besides, it’s not like they’re LOSING money. They’re just not making as much of it as they’re accustomed to.
Like beauty, selfishness too is in the eye of the beholder.
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Bon Iver : Flume
[from wikipedia] :
Bon Iver is the stage and recording name of indie folk singer-songwriter Justin Vernon. He independently released his debut album, For Emma, Forever Ago in 2007, the majority of which was recorded while spending four months in a remote cabin in Wisconsin. Vernon still resides in Eau Claire.
Vernon’s debut album garnered critical acclaim, with Pitchfork Media giving it an 8.1 rating in an early review, and was picked up by the indie-rock label Jagjaguwar, which re-released it in early 2008. The album will be released in the UK and Europe on 12 May, 2008.
His sincerity is quite compelling and his lyrics enforce it.
Check out NPR if you’d like to listen to his live performance at SXSW this past week.
cheers.
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VTTBOTS
I don’t believe i ever saw this as a kid but it still holds up well : even as a kid pretending to be an adult :
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Farewell to a Giant
His visions of space travel and computing sparked the imagination of an entire race.
Without him, the world would be a very different place today.
For example, he started the buzz about geostationary orbit in a paper entitled “Extra-Terrestrial Relays  Can Rocket Stations Give Worldwide Radio Coverage?“, published in Wireless World in 1945. In the paper, Clarke described it as a useful orbit for communications satellites. As a result this is sometimes referred to as the Clarke orbit. Similarly, the Clarke Belt is the part of space approximately 35,786 km above mean sea level in the plane of the equator where near-geostationary orbits may be achieved.
Geostationary orbits are useful because they cause a satellite to appear stationary with respect to a fixed point on the rotating Earth. As a result, an antenna can point in a fixed direction and maintain a link with the satellite.
Clarke wrote more than 100 books including 2001: A Space Odyssey, Childhood’s End and popularized also the idea of space elevators.
He brought the balance of imagination and creativity to the notoriously stiff neighborhoods of science. He let dreams influence his logic even though they are not quantifiable. He inspired many of us to think in ways we couldn’t have without his influence. He helped many of us better understand our natural tendencies to concede too much on behalf of a singular school of thought subject to creating its own flawed environment within which even simple tests aren’t verifiable. He understood the irony that science requires the destruction of the subject which it studies in order to learn.
So many great achievements. Such a prolific writer. A true visionary who went earnestly into the void.
Goodbye, Arthur. We will miss you.
Surely, your journey has long been anticipated.
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And So It Goes…
Oh, puhleeeeeze. Our economic SYSTEM is nothing if not a continuing tribute to the low self-esteem of ostentatious wealth, trying to pass itself off as a quiet, behind-the-scenes-type who only has attention drawn to them because, uh, their house or car or clothes SCREAM “I’m cool and you should know it” [which translates to many of us as : "I've succeeded in everything except finding out who I am and how to be REAL to other people except through memes created by the marketing industry that are passed off as lifestyles and even entire world views"].
Sure, it’s just “another brick in the wall” but think also about how many insatiable and rather un-remarkable people have built monuments to themselves over time. They do it everyday in the cities, in the suburbs, all over. Isn’t that why so many of us advertise these memes on chests, asses, wrists and everything? Well, I suppose if having lots of money makes you remarkable, then, uh — ok
Regardless of how big or elaborate your watch, car or structure is : it doesn’t change anything. And you know it.
So, meanwhile, bless their hearts! Raise the roof for the next DeathStar!
As our dear, late and fearless leader would have said, “And so it goes…”
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MPLS
Click on the image below for a quick tour of Minitropolis :
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Now, That’s Cool!
Every now and then some hype comes around that is, well, worth it :
The applications for such stuff are mind-boggling!
Who can hardly wait to have wallpaper that is capable of projecting video feeds – raise your hand
[image of me raising my hand, hardly able to stay in my seat]
Minority Report, here we come – for better [more streamlined and efficient systems in our homes] or worse [the marketing and advertising buttwhacks will exploit this to the max - just as soon as they can figure out how].
You think advertisements are annoying NOW?
Just you WAIT.
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Teaching Fish to Swim Isn’t Easy
Thanks to Gerald for turning me onto this.
Adapted from Your Inner Fish by Neil Shubin © 2008.
Professor Shubin, the University of Chicago’s Robert R. Bensley professor, chair and associate dean for Organismal Biology & Anatomy, is also provost of the Field Museum of Natural History.
Hernias, hiccups, and snoresâ€â€oh, my! It’s been 3.5 billion years, and the human body’s past still plays a role in our lives and health.
My knee was swollen to the size of a grapefruit, and one of my colleagues from the surgery department was twisting and bending it to determine whether I had strained or ripped one of the ligaments or cartilage pads inside. This, and the MRI scan that followed, revealed a torn meniscus, the probable result of 25 years spent carrying a backpack over rocks, boulders, and scree in the field. Hurt your knee and you will almost certainly injure one or more of three structures: the medial meniscus, the medial collateral ligament, or the anterior cruciate ligament. So regular are injuries to these three parts of your knee that these three structures are known among doctors as the “Unhappy Triad.†They are clear evidence of the pitfalls of having an inner fish. Fish do not walk on two legs.
Our humanity comes at a cost. For the exceptional combination of things we doâ€â€talk, think, grasp, and walk on two legsâ€â€we pay a price.
This is an inevitable result of the tree of life inside us. Imagine trying to jerry-rig a Volkswagen Beetle to travel at speeds of 150 miles per hour. In 1933 Adolf Hitler commissioned Dr. Ferdinand Porsche to develop a cheap car that could get 40 miles per gallon of gas and provide a reliable form of transportation for the average German family. The result was the VW Beetle. This history, Hitler’s plan, places constraints on the ways we can modify the Beetle today; the engineering can be tweaked only so far before major problems arise and the car reaches its limit.
In many ways, we humans are the fish equivalent of a hot-rod Beetle. Take the body plan of a fish, dress it up to be a mammal, then tweak and twist that mammal until it walks on two legs, talks, thinks, and has superfine control of its fingersâ€â€and you have a recipe for problems. We can dress up a fish only so much without paying a price. In a perfectly designed worldâ€â€one with no historyâ€â€we would not have to suffer everything from hemorrhoids to cancer.
Nowhere is this history more visible than in the detours, twists, and turns of our arteries, nerves, and veins. Follow some nerves and you’ll find that they make strange loops around other organs, apparently going in one direction only to twist and end up in an unexpected place. The detours are fascinating products of our past that, as we’ll see, often create problemsâ€â€hiccups and hernias, for example. And this is only one way our past comes back to plague us.
Our deep history was spent, at different times, in ancient oceans, small streams, and savannahs, not office buildings, ski slopes, and tennis courts. We were not designed to live past the age of 80, sit on our keisters for ten hours a day, and eat Hostess Twinkies, nor were we designed to play football. This disconnect between our past and our human present means that our bodies fall apart in certain predictable ways.
Virtually every illness we suffer has some historical component. The examples that follow reflect how different branches of the tree of life inside usâ€â€from ancient humans, to amphibians and fish, and finally to microbesâ€â€come back to pester us today. Each of these examples show that we were not designed rationally but are products of a convoluted history.
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DJ COOKS
My good pal, Samuel Pixley is spinning records on the West Coast and sent me a Grand Poobah of a mixtape cassette just like the way we used to do it. This boy’s crazy old school to a fault, carrying the load of vinyl to each gig in Portland.
His act is SO old school, he “don’t even got no email addy, website or none of that shiat.”
To make it more accessible [read : so i can listen to it on the portable music device of my choice] while i walk around town, i’ve taken the liberty of dumping it to a digital format so i can share it with all three of you reading this ; )
If you like, you can download the just-over-an-hour-long-mix here in one, big ole file – great for dancin or ridin or cookin. It compliments the chef.
Patience, patience…it’s over 70MB large.
Welcome back, Kotter, indeed.
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The De-Evolution of Culture
Larry Lessig says what no one else has the cojones to in this clip.
Larry gets TEDsters to their feet, whooping and whistling, following this elegant presentation of three stories and an argument. The Net’s most adored lawyer brings together John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights, and the “ASCAP cartel” to build a case for creative freedom. He pins down the key shortcomings of our dusty, pre-digital intellectual property laws, and reveals how bad laws beget bad code. Then, in an homage to cutting-edge artistry, he throws in some of the most hilarious remixes you’ve ever seen.
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MGMT : Electric Feel
My pal Alec turned me onto this vid the other day. Music videos were never like this growing up [note the mouse-clicking going on along the bottom of the frame as the user manipulates color palettes and such]:
the lyrics of a great pop tune :
all along the western front
people line up to receive
she got the current in her hand
just shock you like you won’t believe
sun in the amazon
with the voltage running through her skin
standing there with nothing on
she gonna teach me how to swim
i said ooh girl
shock me like an electric eel
baby girl
turn me on with your electric feel
i said ooh girl
shock me like an electric eel
baby girl
turn me on with your electric feel
all along the eastern shore
put your circuits in the sea
this is what the world is for
making electricity
you can feel it in your mind
oh you can do it all the time
plug it in, change the world
you are my electric girl
i said ooh girl
shock me like an electric eel
baby girl
turn me on with your electric feel
i said ooh girl
shock me like an electric eel
baby girl
turn me on with your electric feel
do what you feel now
electric feel now
do what you feel now
electric feel now
do what you feel now
electric feel now
do what you feel now
electric feel now
do what you feel now
electric feel now
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