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December 16, 2004
quickies are us
Duke University law school had a contest to make a short movie on Intellectual property law's effect on art. The finalists are up now. Some ok stuff.
"We are happy to announce the finalists in our Arts Project Moving Image Contest. The contest asked entrants to create short films demonstrating some of the tensions between art and intellectual property law, and the intellectual property issues artists face, focusing on either music or documentary film. Many thanks to everyone who entered and everyone who helped spread the word about the contest. The judges are selecting three winners from among these finalists, and the winners will be announced on January 15, 2005."
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The effort to raise the money money for the Firefox ad in the New York Times was successful. It ran on two facing pages today, with all the ad's contributers listed. On the one hand I would be happier if the money raised had been given to the developers, on the other hand part of me is singing and dancing.
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Prisoner's Inventions by Angelo and Temporary Services. The Lamprey/Lost Tribe's Special Presentation Unit (Kenneth, Ned, Ffej) appeared with them at an artist's panel at the cultural center.
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Speaking of lamprey, they may help cure paralysis.
""The lamprey has a very simple -- but vertebrate -- nervous system," said Cohen. "It has no blood vessels in it, so it can stay alive outside the body for a long time. The lamprey is also the most primitive vertebrate. However, even with this simplicity, its spinal cord has all the characteristics of a human spinal cord, but with many fewer neurons, and no bones. So, it's easy to study.""
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In 1988, Richard Kadrey published Metrophage. Elsa told me to read it, I didn't, until this weekend. Boy was I an idiot. Neither the plot or the characters are the greatest, nor is his take on what this century's world would look like, but taken all together the damn thing is eerily foreshadowing of today. The anti-hero has new replacement nerves cultured for him on a lamprey. One of the nominal bad guys is called Sheik al-Qawi, the hero chooses the name Qabbala, and it's availible as a free and legal download all over the net. Kadrey's own site is almost always down from wherever I am, but might work for you. Do a search, he shows up in interesting places.
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Steely Dan dot com. all the lyrics, a lot of the history.
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Old science fiction radio shows online. Including X Minus 1, the precursor the Twilight Zone, featuring Heinlein and Bradbury.
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US Post Office kiosk's take your picture and store it, won't finish the transaction if camera is blocked. Don't worry, they won't use it for anything bad, ever. And they're using the Ultra Insecure Windows Xp, so everyone will be able to plunder them!
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President Bush has ordered plans for temporarily disabling the U.S. network of global positioning satellites during a national crisis to prevent terrorists from using the navigational technology, the White House said Wednesday.
(to bad our own civil defense, street, sanitation, mass transit, fire, and police departments all rely on GPS. as well as our Army. Idiot.)
( of course the Euros are so tired of us jiggling the GPS, they're moving to build their own satellite system.)
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Pretend with us for a while. Pretend you found the holy grail: the record store that only stocks the really great music. The one with really helpful people with really great taste. Pretend they had a website with the year in review.
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BoingBoing says SF author Bruce Sterling is a Design professor. Here's a stream of him lecturing on design, "Shaping Things to Come" Oh yeah, Sterling has a blog, too.
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Squidfingers. Tiling patterns.
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WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The abuse of naked Iraqi prisoners received the bulk of publicity, but those incidents were just some of many clandestine occurrences in which detainees endured shock, burns and mock executions, newly released Pentagon records reveal.
In response to a Freedom of Information request from the American Civil Liberties Union, the Defense Department turned over documents that detail torture U.S. Marines inflicted on Iraqis during interrogations.
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The war on P2P continues, the Dutch take out eDonkey sites. Remember, it's not necessary for you to have files that violate intellectual property to get busted, you can just point to them.
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Music geeks take note: Music Thing, the music tech blog. Yummy.
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Thus endeth the quickies.
Posted by parody at December 16, 2004 03:55 PM
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