sysrick.com

Hack the universe. BoingBoing patron saint Warren Ellis spake thusly, and lo; it was good:

Read this Scientific American piece. Short version; the universe is actually a two-dimensional plane packed with information, and the three-dimensions universe we perceive is nothing but an expression of that information. Matter and energy and life are, in fact, holograms. It leaves something very very interesting open for the future. If the universe is a vast two-dimensional plane of information -- then it can be hacked.

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

The Semantic Ocean.

"US researchers estimate that every year 800Mb of information is produced for every person on the planet." - BBC News

[memoria technica : The Official Gary Turner™ Weblog / Moblog]

No matter where you go... there you are.. No matter where you go... there you are. It is indeed Trysteroic that the self-suing Fox Television, of all media conglomerates (and seemingly, one of the many scions of YoYoDyne?), should have had the brilliant idea to turn "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai" into a TV series. Perhaps the selected few at the Banzai Institute will find a way to get Dr. Banzai to defeat the evil John Joe Millioniare. [MetaFilter]

Morning © 2003, John H. Farr It may look dry and dusty to you, and your eyes wouldn't be playing tricks. But it's also full of hope and promise in a way that nothing in a crowded place can ever be. The people who first settled the high desert had some good ideas I've copied. When I get up in the morning, I walk out and up my "driveway" to the gravel road at the top of the rise for 360 degrees of mountains and horizon. The farthest I can see is maybe 80 miles. I take a little jar of yellow corn meal with me and turn to face the east, almost always with the sun in my eyes, and thank Grandfather for this earth. At each of the four directions I repeat a little prayer and toss a pinch or two of cornmeal. My shoulders relax and lift as of their own accord, my spine straightens, and I feel calm and centered. It's warmer this morning, almost spring-like. A strong southwest wind has stirred some faraway dust and lightened the sharp, deep blues to pastel hues. The air comes here from over empty plains and canyons where almost no one lives. It raises my spirit. The extra warmth on this late October day is special and makes me think of Indian summer in the East, Christmas in Texas, January in the Sonoran Desert. There's an openness to the weather, a promise that one could travel far and not be cramped. I feel like driving north, out over Cebolla Mesa to the gorge of the Rio Grande where not a single sign of human habitation pokes the eye, but the drive through Taos would break the spell I'm into, and I decide to stay right here. [FarrFeed]

Russell Baker on Paul Krugman, Joan Didion on George W. Bush: the NYRB is 40. It seems slightly scandalous that Krugman has persisted in noting that the present administration has been moving the lion's share of the money to an array of corporate interests distinguished by the greed of their CEOs, an indifference toward their workers, and boardroom conviction that it is the welfare state that is ruining the country. Krugman has been strident. He has been shrill. He has lowered the dignity of the commentariat. How refreshing. Russell Baker reviews Paul Krugman's The Great Unraveling: Losing Our Way in the New Century. We have now reached a point when even the White House may be forced to sort out how a president who got elected to execute a straightforward business agenda managed to sandbag himself with the coinciding fantasies of the ideologues in the Christian fundamentalist ministries and those in his own administration.... Joan Didion reviews Armageddon: The Cosmic Battle of the Ages by Tim F. LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins. The New York Review of Books 40th anniversary edition is an especially good read.. [MetaFilter]

Ack, I missed All Things Considered. PublicRadioFan.com An extensive customizable list of (almost) all public radio stations that offer streaming audio and what they have playing now and in the future. [MetaFilter]

There is a great article in the New Yorker this week about how Ken Lay will likely never be convicted for Enron (sorry, it isn't online).  Inside the article is an amazing statement from the judge who presided over the trial of Fastow, Enron's CFO.  It is an amazing indictment of American civilization that a judge with these malformed attitudes ascended to preside over the most important (and complex) case of corporate malfeasance in a century.

One of the few African-Americans appointed to the bench by President Reagan, Hoyt had a reputation for eccentricity.  In a 1997 case involving alleged environmental contamination in a largely minority neighborhood, the Judge asserted that physical differences between races were the product of their environment.  "Why do you think Chinese people are short?"  Hoyt told the lawyers in the case.  "Because there is so much damn wind over there they need to be short.  Why are they so tall in Africa?  Because they need to be tall.  It's environmental.  I mean, you don't just jump up and get a banana off a tree if you're only four feet.  If you are seven feet tall and standing in China, then you're going to get blown away when that Siberian wind comes through."   

[John Robb's Weblog]

Extraordinary. Satellite pic of the smoke plumes from the California wildfires. [[ t e c h n o c u l t u r e ]]

calm.... [jenett.radio]

the meaning of life, revealed in paper plates. Astonishing geometric art using only folded paper plates, from Bradford Hansen-Smith at wholemovement. View the gallery of fantastic polyhedral creations, and learn how to do it yourself. (For more fun with paper plates, see also Paper Plate Education: Serving the Universe on a Paper Plate.) [MetaFilter]

George Lakoff on why the conservatives seem to be winning. My friend Bonnie Powell interviewed master linguist and cultural commentator George Lakoff at UC Berkeley about how the Democrats desperately need a lesson in language. This is a must-read:

"...Conservatives, especially conservative think tanks, have framed virtually every issue from their perspective. They have put a huge amount of money into creating the language for their worldview and getting it out there. Progressives have done virtually nothing."

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

String Theory: Trying to Visualize Many, Many Dimensions of Weirdness. "The Elegant Universe," starring the Columbia University physicist Brian Greene, is billed as the biggest project "Nova" has ever done. By Dennis Overbye. [New York Times: Science]

se who oppress the needy insult their maker. "If Tom Delay is acting out of his Born Again Christian convictions in pushing legislation that disadvantages the poor every time he opens his mouth, I'm not saying he's not a Born Again Christian, but as a the Lord's humble fruit inspector, it sure looks suspicious to me. " - Bill Moyers interviews Joe Hough. [MetaFilter]

Ack. 1250 pages, hardbound. 2 volumes. Over 4000 comics in chronological order with 1100 never seen before. Lady's and gentlemen. I present The Complete Far Side. 1980-1994 [MetaFilter]

Clash of the titans: Amazon vs. Google. Ned Batchelder alerted me this morning to Amazon's new search feature:

Now Amazon lets you search the full text of its books. This is astounding, not only because of the further differences it highlights between Amazon and traditional bookstores, but because of the effort it must have taken to accomplish. The text seems to be from scans of pages, subjected to an OCR process. And not just the bulk of popular books, either. They've got all sorts of wild and wooly volumes available this way. I don't know how truly useful it will be, since full text searching can be extremely noisy, even before the OCR noise is factored in. [Ned Batchelder: October 2003]

I wondered about the OCR strategy too. In this day and age, surely any publisher could provide electronic copy to an indexer. But then I drilled down and discovered something quite remarkable. I own a copy of Tesla: Man Out of Time. The other day, I was mentioning to someone that, according to that book, some of Nikola Tesla's writings are still classified. This query finds the passage I was remembering. Awesome! Now the physical book I bought from Amazon is more valuable to me. Its printed index has been augmented by a vastly more capable online index. This extremely useful capability is, by the way, also available to owners of books in the Safari Books Online service, though it correlates results only to chapter and section, not to page. Little-known fact: you need not be a Safari subscriber to use Safari as an augmented index to books you own. ... [Jon's Radio]

very challenging.... Deb @ Sugarfused:  "Take a look at these images and try to spot the differences. They're so subtle they'll drive you crazy trying to find them all!  (link via Anne)" [jenett.radio]

The Joy of Soup. >> (review)  If food, especially soup is your thing, spend some time at today's pick.  But please don't blame me if you're left salivating.  It's almost lunchtime and I've just changed my mind about that boring can of soup I was gonna have...;~))  [Coolstop Daily Pick 10/22/03 via Fishbucket BlogList] [jenett.radio]

Come On, Does Nineteen-Eighty Four Really Offer Any Insight Into Our World?

In his introduction to the newest edition of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, Thomas Pynchon rightly points out that "there is a game some critics like to play, worth maybe a minute and a half of diversion, in which one makes a list of what Orwell did and didn't 'get right.'" He's right that Orwell's ability "to see deeper than most of us into the human soul" is the greater achievement. And yet, I still feel the need to offer my minute and a half of diversion:

His mind slid away into the labyrinthine world of doublespeak... to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy was impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy...

Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite toward him and began dictating in Big Brother's familiar style, a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly answering them ("What lessons do we learn from this fact, comrades? The lessons--which is also one of the fundamental principles of Ingsoc--that," etc., etc.), easy to imitate.

If you have a word like "good," what need is there for a word like "bad"? "Ungood" will do just as well--better, because it's an exact opposite, which the other is not. Or again, if you want a stronger version of "good," what sense is there in having a whole string of vague useless words like "excellent" and "splendid" and all the rest of them? "Plusgood" covers the meaning, or "doubleplusgood" if you want something stronger still. Of course, we use those forms already, but in the final version of Newspeak there'll be nothing else.

As Pynchon puts it, "'Wow, the Government has turned into Big Brother, just like Orwell predicted! Something, huh?' 'Orwellian, dude!'"

[Gnosis]

Wired: "The notion of Amazon scanning all of its books but allowing users to search only those they own is a clever way around the central barrier to creating a digital archive: Copyrights are distributed among tens of thousands of publishers and authors. But when Manber told Bezos his idea, he found the Amazon founder ready to work on a grander scale. Bezos wanted his customers to be able to search everything." [Scripting News]

FROM PILLAR TO POST: INCARCERATING AND ABANDONING THE MENTALLY ILL.

Quite a few news sources are covering the recent Human Rights Watch report on the incarceration of the mentally ill. Key data in the report: As many as one in every five of the 2.1 million people in American prisons suffer from one of three acute mental illnesses: schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, or severe depression. Since the 1960s, the population of US mental hospitals has dropped from almost six hundred thousand to eighty thousand; there has been an offsetting increase in the number of severely mentally ill Americans in prisons and on the streets. Close to three quarters of a million mentally ill Americans are admitted each year to prisons or jails. In prison, the mentally ill receive little or no treatment, and a disproportionate amount of punishment and solitary confinement. Mandatory and 'three-strikes' sentencing legislation catches a lopsided proportion of the mentally ill. Put this data together with data on the number of mentally ill on the streets, and you get the sorry picture shown in the above chart. It's a picture of neglect, heartlessness and false economy. Human Rights Watch calls for more money for treatment and therapy of mentally ill prisoners. With the skyrocketing cost of the epidemic of incarceration (quadruple the number of thirty years ago), and a right-wing Attorney-General with an extraordinary taste for blood, don't hold your breath. Whatever happened to the concept of 'not guilty by reason of mental defect'? The right-wing Supreme Court recently upheld a ruling that forces inmates to take medication so that they can be certified sane enough to execute. With 95% of prison suicides committed by the mentally ill, I guess this is what they mean by 'compassionate conservatism.' Reader Caveat: The numbers in the chart above are approximations. Some sources put the proportion of mentally ill in prison or on the streets significantly higher or lower than shown; rough average has been used. There is also no universal agreement on definition or diagnosis of 'severe' mental illness. The scale on the chart has been 'broken' to display the total number of mentally ill while still showing detail of those incarcerated or homeless on one small chart.

[How to Save the World]

Boing Boing Blog: "Time-lapse vegetation footage. Goddamn there is nothing cooler than time-lapse videos of germinating plants and opening flowers. Our world is inhabited by triffid-creepy alien lifeforms that move on such a slow timescale, we hardly notice. This archive of time-lapse vegetation gives me the willies." Link (via Making Light) [[ t e c h n o c u l t u r e ]]

Reality. "Reality is that which refuses to go away when I stop believing in it." (Phillip K. Dick)... [The Daily Irrelevant]

The Web of Life. Take a look at this short Flash movie on The Web of Life that I found by following some links from Dave Pollard's site. The Sacred Balance website (where you will land after the movie) was created in response to the work of David Suzuki, whose own website uses the tagline: The solutions are in our nature. Well said. This... [Indigo Ocean]

Speakeasies for food. "Underground" restaurants are springing up across the USA, run by elite (and amateur) chefs who can't or won't go through the certifcation process necessary to securing a restaurant license.

But securing a seat at Mamasan's is not easy. The restaurant, which also happens to be Lynette's apartment, has no sign, and the only way you will ever find it is if someone tells you where it is (a quiet street, a hidden door, up a dark stairwell to the top apartment). Even then, you can't just show up: you must have an invitation. To get one you need an introduction from a previous guest. This may seem as if it's a complicated way to get a plate of grilled salmon, but Mamasan's Bistro is not a legal endeavor. Its kitchen lacks the certificates, permits and inspections required by the city of San Francisco. And although the coconut-mango cocktails flowed, Lynette does not have a liquor license.

Link (Thanks, Dan!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Michael Moore's new book excerpt on Salon. Michael Moore's new book, Dude, Where's My Country? is out, and Salon's got an excerpt this morning.

What is the worst lie a president can tell?

"I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky."

Or ...

"He has weapons of mass destruction -- the world's deadliest weapons -- which pose a direct threat to the United States, our citizens and our friends and allies."

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

THE BANKRUPTING OF THE AMERICAN MIDDLE CLASS.

Another great article from Salon's Katherine Mieszkowski reviews The Two-Income Trap: Why Middle-Class Mothers and Fathers are Going Broke, a new book by Harvard Law Professor Elizabeth Warren and her daughter. Highlights: The greatest predictor of bankruptcy in America today is having children. In the last generation, the typical family has become a two-income family, with 75% more income, but costs that have far more than doubled, making job loss by either parent, or family breakup, or medical setback (for anyone in the family, including, increasingly, dependent seniors), economically disastrous. The costs that have risen most are mortgage, health insurance, car, preschool, after-school care and college. Spending on basics like food, clothing and furniture have actually dropped 20% for the average family with children in the past generation. 'Excessive consumerism' is a total myth. Home mortage foreclosures are up over 300% in a generation. The average mortgage rate in the US is 16%, ten points above prime, reflecting the huge increase in second and third mortgages and the number that attract rates in the 30% due to missed payments as a result of financial difficulties. One in 12 Americans with mortgages loses their home to foreclosure. The huge differential in house prices in areas with highly-rated schools (where residents' children get priority placement) is a major factor in couples over-extending themselves and ending up bankrupt. The shame and stigma over personal bankruptcy is so great that those affected are unwilling to seek political action against usurous lenders and other contributors to the problem, or even acknowledge or talk about it publicly. This is another consequence of the 'privatize and deregulate everything' mentality that is destroying the American middle class, and millions of families in the process. Public education, transportation, and health infrasructure has crumbled in many areas to the point where it is not only unreliable and poor quality, but even dangerous. As a result, families with incomes that would have once allowed them to live comfortably are now pushed to the limit trying to afford vastly more expensive private alternatives. And the outrageously high interest rates they have to pay to mainstream financial institutions are illegal in most first-world nations, where sensible regulation of such excess still prevails.

[How to Save the World]

New Issue of JOHO. I've just posted a new issue of my newsletter, Journal of the Hyperlinked Organization. Metadata and Desire: Metadata, that most abstract of abstractions, is rooted in human desire. Why creators shouldn't own what they create: The act of making public also makes a public Why The Web Has No Leaders: Little d democrats rejoice! What People Still Don't Get about the Dean Campaign: It's not about bottom up. It's about person to person.! Design by Kafka: Products with devilish gotcha's Bayesian Fun: Filters that know how spammers talk Walking the Walk: Surprising metaphors Cool Tool : Guess what Bloglines aggregates... [Joho the Blog]

Shadow Realm © 2003, John H. Farr The motto I inserted into my FarrFeed graphic is always relevant: "Complacency Sucks." But this is one of those days I sure could use a little. I have noticed that reading about things like evangelical generals, more Bush lies (do those people do anything else?), and the ongoing dismantling of every social and environmental protection enacted over the last 100 years does tend to drag me into cold, muddy water. The complete disconnect between reality and the national discourse, such as it is (politics, economics, TV, consumer culture) is like nothing I've ever experienced before. "Alienation" doesn't begin to describe it. In the annals of this time (which look like they're to be oral history, tales told over campfires in the entrances of our caves), the Great Traitors will surely be the journalists and media whores who repeated the lies to keep their jobs. Too bad they won't be the only ones, geez. Not to flog this particular dead horse too much, but when I had my name on a mortgage just a few years ago; when we had 2.57 acres and a big house in the country; when there was enough money coming in that nobody worried; when we could ignore the tribute demanded by the medical-industrial complex, insurance pirates, and all the rest; I found I could push everything out of my mind like most people do. This suggests a remedy for shifting the national direction that nobody will volunteer for, least of all voters with happy little kids. Meanwhile, the dilemmas of my personal life have a way of making everything even more cramped and icy. THIS IS NOT REALITY EITHER, you understand, and thank God I do. Accordingly, I now retreat for inner readjustment and proper feeding of my own soul. If you're the least bit anxious this morning, see that you do the same. [FarrFeed]

Project Alphabet - a Fotolog. This is the letter "I" - in brick - as found by someone named Eliahu. I found it on a site called "Project Alphabet." Apparently, Project Alphabet is a collaboration between a group of people we shall call "fotologgers," for reasons which will soon become [Bernie DeKoven's Fun Findings]

Morning person or night person?. Morning person or night person? "Scientists believe they may now know why some of us are early risers while others prefer to burn the midnight oil. ... Researchers have found that people with an extreme preference for early mornings are more likely to have a long version of [a gene called] Period 3." The article also notes "Your day or night preference is obviously a complex behavioural trait. It is not solely down to one single gene." My wife and son are morning people; I am a night person. I have often wondered if I, through force of will, could become a morning person and thus spend more quality time with them. Now I have my doubts. What success have Mefites had trying to change from one to the other mode? [MetaFilter]

I am blue and gold and white and full of links. What am I?. Riddles and more riddles - Easy Riddles and Ancient Riddles, Math Riddles and Traditional Riddles, Anglo-Saxon Riddles and Lawyer Riddles, Dirty Riddles and Logic Riddles, Medieval Riddles and Awful Riddles. Finally: Ambiguity, Classification and Change: The Function of Riddles. [MetaFilter]

Dyslexia-friendly typeface. "Read Regular" is a typeface designed to be legible to people with dyslexia. Link (via Blackbelt Jones)
[Boing Boing Blog]

Desert Island discs skunked by iPod. Nick Hornby, author of Fever Pitch, How to Be Good, High Fidelity, etc, has completely skunked the BBC4 "Desert Island" program -- sure, he only specified ten records he'd bring with him to the hypothetical desert island, but he chose an iPod as his luxury item -- clever sumbitch! Link (via Blackbelt Jones) [Boing Boing Blog]

Up and Down © 2003, John H. Farr Actually, that's not right, it should be "phasing." One day I'm in love with the world and the next day my guts are churning with ice cubes from fear of being left behind. Not by the world, exactly: where most of you have a warm, enveloping glow, I have a bitch-monkey jabbering "do the right thing or I'll hate you." [sigh] Saturday night I found myself in another realm entirely [phase, phase ... ] The unexpectedly raucous and positive rock & roll ending of a curious, otherwise forgettable little film called "School of Rock" catapulted me onto a plateau of sheer exuberance and joy. Go see the movie and wait for the final 20 minutes, including the very original credits sequence. You'll be glad you did. Making such great progress here beneath the clear blue New Mexico sky, but I have to do it solo, the only way to fly for now. What a pain and what a gift. The other day I listened to "Desolation Row" for the thousandth time and FINALLY UNDERSTOOD! Got me so excited, I tossed back a coupla shots and danced all around the room, beating on a drum. Played the damn song four or five more times, I kid you not. (And THAT, ladies and gentlemen, is what quite literally separates the men from the boys!) [FarrFeed]

Pelican Nebula Ionization Front (2003 October 13 ) [Astronomy Picture of the Day]

Chinese restaurant menu gallery. Steve sez, "Indigo Som is an artist who is assembling a collection of every chinese restaurant menu in the US, she's got an art exhibit in Marin going on right now of her photos of the menus/restaurants and her site nicely explains the intent of her 'exploration'" Link (Thanks, Steve!) [Boing Boing Blog]

Hard-drives as Buddhist prayer-wheels. Who needs Tibetan prayer-wheels when Buddhist theorists are out there reforming their theology to admit hard-drives as instruments of devotion?

Right now, your hard drive is serving as a Mani wheel, because there are several copies of the mantra "Om Mani Padme Hum" on this page, and they are all stored on your hard drive in the cache for your browser.

Link [Boing Boing Blog]

Thucydides wrote, “large nations do what they wish, small nations accept what they must.” The U.S. position is even more extreme, says Noam Chomsk... [Arts & Letters Daily]

FCC Reversal: Dead in the Water. Bill Moyers offers a trenchant illustration of why this country's drift towards oligarchy is irreversible. [Blogcritics]

Iraq By The Numbers.

There is a fantastic post on the Dean blog that contains Dean’s statement on the one-year anniversary of the congressional resolution authorizing Bush to make preemptive war. 

 

Some of the items include: 

Operation Iraqi Freedom: By the Numbers

365 -- Days since Congress authorized a unilateral war

324 -- American Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines dead in Iraq

1,767 --American military casualties in Iraq

164 -- Days since President Bush declared the war was 'over'

184 -- American Soldiers, Sailors, Airmen and Marines dead since war was "over"

2.38 -- Tons of biological agents the Administration claimed Iraq had

6,868 -- Gallons of anthrax the Administration asserted Iraq was ready to use

317 -- Gallons of botulinum toxin the Administration reported Iraq was hiding

581 -- Gallons of aflatoxin the Administration stated Iraq possessed

45 -- Minutes the Administration claimed it would take Iraq to launch a WMD attack

Over 300 -- Alleged Iraqi weapons sites inspected to date

0 -- Iraqi Weapons of Mass Destruction found

100,000s -- Number of Troops needed in Iraq according to Gen. Eric Shinseki, Army Chief of Staff

"Way off the Mark" -- Rumsfeld's and Wolfowitz's response to Shinseki's estimate

150,000 -- American military personnel in the Middle East supporting war

29,000 -- Army and Air National Guard forces in Iraq

50,000 -- Reservists in Iraq

30,000 -- Number of US troops the Pentagon planned to have in Iraq late 2003

"Something under $50 Billion" -- Administration's initial projected cost of war

You get the idea.  Please read the whole thing, it is a detailed chronology of the lies and distortions that have led to the following: 

$221 Billion -- Projected total cost of occupying Iraq

$222 Billion -- Total annual cost of the National Cancer Institute, FBI, pollution control, foreign aid, NASA, agricultural support payments, food stamps, non-defense homeland security, health research and training, highways, financial aid to college students, and federal support for grade-school education and high-school education 

We pleaded with Kerry, Markey and Gephardt last fall to open their eyes and not get rolled by the lies and falsifications of the administration.  It was not rocket science to see what was happening, [here's my post from a year ago] but our “tail between their legs” democrats were so afraid of the big bad Bush they caved.  It’s time for them to step aside, and let a new, powerful group of democrats take charge, who will lead first the party, then the country, back to a safer and happier path.

[Toby's Political Diary - 'Let it Begin Here']

Truth, War and Consequences. Frontline's 90 minute examination of the war in Iraq shouldn't be missed (it airs Thursday at 9 p.m. on most PBS stations, but check local listings). Martin Smith (who is on Fresh Air Thursday) interviews experts who question the evidence used to argue for the war and point out the... [TV Barn]

Pynchon to do The Simpsons. Thomas Pynchon is slated to do a guest voice on The Simpsons:

We also have a show where The Simpsons go to London and it includes guest voices from Ian McKellen, J.K. Rowling, Jane Leeves and Prime Minister Tony Blair, playing himself. We have a show coming up where Marge writes a novel and gets endorsements from writers playing themselves, including Tom Clancy, Thomas Pynchon-

...He's wearing a paper bag over his head, but it is his voice.

Link (Thanks, Tregoweth!) [Boing Boing Blog]

John Gilmore's take on mind altering drugs. John Gilmore, probably most well known as "that dude that started the alt.* newsgroups" is one of the founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a foundation dedicated to civil rights and civic responsibilities online. As a life member of the Libertarian Party he is , not surprisingly, in favour of drug policy reform. Unlike others, Gilmore holds a unique perspective on why "illegal" drugs should not be banned: The right to speak freely is irrelevant if the citizenry does not have the right to think freely. [kuro5hin.org]