ModifyMe

Every 45 minutes a mysterious x-ray source blinks near Jupiter's north magnetic pole.

More evidence of a police state solidifying in the US.

CIA may have been involved in anthrax attacks.

Saudi Arabia's Commission for Promotion of Virtue and Prevention of Vice kills 15 schoolgirls in an attempt to prevent them from leaving a blazing building because they were not wearing correct Islamic dress

100 Dumbest Moments in e- Business History

Max More and Ray Kurzweil on the Singularity:

"Epochal events such as two world wars, the Cold War, and numerous economic, cultural, and social upheavals have failed to provide the slightest dent in the pace of the fundamental trends. As I discuss below, recessions, including the Great Depression, register as only slight deviations from the far more profound effect of the underlying exponential growth of the economy, fueled by the exponential growth of information-based technologies... Occasional ethical and legal impediments to fairly narrow developments are rather like stones in the river of advancement; progress just flows around them... Already, at least two dozen of the several hundred regions in the brain have been satisfactorily reverse-engineered and implemented in synthetic substrates. I believe that it is a conservative scenario to expect that the human brain will be fully reverse-engineered in a sufficiently detailed way to recreate its mental powers by 2029."

Self-Organization and Identification of Web Communities

a 10,000-year marking system to Deter Inadvertent Human Intrusion:
This place is not a place of honor.
No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Nothing valued is here.
This place is a message and part of a system of messages.
Pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us.
We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
What is here is dangerous and repulsive to us.
This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location...it increases toward a center...the center of danger is here...of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically.
This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.

(More and an earlier, related project.)

"eight hours for work, eight hours for sleep, eight hours for what we will"

US govt secretly sending prisoners to be tortured in countries where torture is legal.

Lego death

"It cost me less than $300 to discover the geographic distribution my patrilineal kin in Europe. I obtained all this personal genetic archaeological information by swabbing the inside of my mouth for a sample of my DNA, sending it to Oxford with a check, waiting for 3 months for my Y chromosome "haplotype" results, and then submitting a query form on a haplogroup database web page after filling in 5 blanks with the test results."

CodeCon: wish I was there...
Some coverage... and some more

Hey! Leggo my Mojo! -- The future of micropayment/crypto-based distributed resource sharing.
Well, maybe not, as they seem to be a victim of the dot-crash... mnet is the heir apparent.

A great parody of ad-based revenue business models.

AlteredPage

Tub Cat
Fat Mouse

Domain name ownership street map of San Francisco.

You love these machines. These machines are dead: a love story.

Correspondence between Marshall McLuhan and Ezra Pound

'President Bush has not been forthcoming about progress in the war on terrorism or about a "secret government" operating since Sept. 11, Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-S.D.) said Sunday.'

Noam Chomsky on Private Tyrannies -- Corporations

The name of this blog was inspired by a short story by Jorge Luis Borges.
I originally read the story as a teen (as part of an amazing high-school English class), and have just re-read it for the first time tonight. It is every bit as good and magical as the first time I read it.

Doomsday Clock Creeps Forward

"...the United States cannot support a court that lacks the essential safeguards to avoid a politicization of justice." --Pierre-Richard Prosper, the U.S. ambassador-at-large for war crimes, in a comment made in opposition to the proposed international court in The Hague, completely ignoring the lack of, or lack of effectiveness, of the same safeguards in American courts.

HOWTO: Use gzip to do computational linguistics

Mr. Einstein, meet Mr. Godel

Hermits, hermits everywhere...

Teen murderers in idyllic Vermont: "They are us, and they are ours."

Dan Simmons (of "Hyperion" fame) wants to demolish the wall between genre and mainstream fiction.
What does he mean? Is he serious? And who is he to talk?

"One Book, One City", the latest American groupthink initiative:
"All Together Now" column at mobylives
"It's a novel idea..." from the Guardian
"Pick a book with depth..." from the Sentinel

Taxonomists are being driven to extinction

A bicycle chain the size of a grain of salt.

By the end of 1999 over 30 million people were infected with HIV and 12.7 had died from the disease.
Compare that with malaria which infects 300-500 million and kills over one million people every year.
Yet the funding for the the prevention of HIV is thirty times that of malaria (800 vs 3 million dollars).

Unconventional techniques for managing depression.

Eat poop you cat

US government censorship of scientific information.
More here.

"I am an intelligent, unsociable but adapatable person. I would like to dispel any untrue rumors about me. I am not edible. I cannot fly. I cannot use telekinesis. My brain is not large enough to destroy the entire world when unfolded. I did not teach my long- haired guinea pig Chronos to eat everything in sight (that is the nature of the long-haired guinea pig)." --An 11-year-old boy with Asperger's Syndrome describes himself in an excerpt from the American Journal of Psychiatry

From How to talk like Jacques Derrida (Guideline 4):
"Pun like crazy: The thought (which when taught, becomes taut, tight, tense, stretched to breaking, which is to say ever looser as it becomes tightened) is illuminated by the pun, which has been called the lowest form of wit (whereby the bun may be termed the lowest form of wheat), to wit, a pun is more like a pin, which bursts the taut (taught) surface of the meaning, freeing it to explode/ implode in all directions at once."

"Altogether, I think we ought to read only books that bite and sting us. If the book we are reading doesn't shake us awake like a blow to the skull, why bother reading it in the first place? So that it can make us happy, as you put it ? Good God, we'd be just as happy if we had no books at all; books that make us happy we could, in a pinch, also write ourselves. What we need are books that hit us like a most painful misfortune, like the death of someone we loved more than we loved ourselves, that make us feel as though we had been banished to the woods, far from any presence, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us. That is what I believe." --Franz Kafka (1904)

Today's dilligent research of Everything2 has yielded these gems:
The Lovecraftian compulsion to keep writing even as one is being devoured
What would Cthulhu do?
the newly discovered erotic works of H. P. Lovecraft

Modern Mayan Slaughtercomb:
"...The most talented of the two-legged bipeds shall play in a field with chigger infested grass approximately 3 to 4 feet in height. The grass should be infested with copperhead snakes and deadly Indian scorpions, both of which should be properly taunted with hot, pointed sticks to the point of instant aggression. At mid-field, a bear cave should be constructed of tick-infested paper and fecal glue. The bear will serve as a clubbin' bastard of all approaching players. The players will be totally naked except for 45 pounds of recently killed fish strapped to strategic points on their bodies, including arms, legs, and the ever precious ankle of protection power. The bear beats all who approach -- except those who carry the glowing honeycomb which is obtained from crocodile moats at each teams goal lines. Before each game, if available, a human will be tossed in similar fashion to that of a coin. The tossed human shall be a child, preferably of ripe age and breeding, minimally moistened for maximum flippage...."

Anna Kavan, Thomas Bernhard, and Phillip K. Dick: three of my favorite authors.

"Code Optimization Using the GNU C Compiler" looks what simple optimizations are done by gcc and how it does them.

Bush and Blair have been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize

"I side with PKD over Pynchon. In fact, I consider Dick to be the one genius, the one absolute genius in US literature since 1945. I find Pynchon to be kind of an Uncle Tom, as a representative of science fiction, making pointless and protracted Faulknerian noises in his prose to suck up to a New-Yorker- sensibility." --John Dolan (from an article on Victor Pelevin)

Linux Advanced Routing HOWTO (for those who thought they knew it all)

Chomsky's publisher prosecuted as a terrorist by the Turkish government for an essay on Kurds.

Mankind's "self-alienation has reached such a degree that it can experience its own destruction as an aesthetic pleasure of the first order." --Walter Benjamin
(the above quote was stolen from an interesting interview with Mark Dery)

If a young writer can refrain from writing, he shouldn't hesitate to do so.
André Gide

Before you make a friend, eat a bushel of salt with him.
                                    --Romanian Proverb

"You're the master. We're your tools." --Asp: Imbecile Anthem

The Literary Bad Sex Award

OpenNic - everybody who's anybody is using it. ;)

Rampant US wiretap abuse in the recent Israeli spy scandal.

Man banned from travelling in Europe for putting up an anti-EU poster.

A fascinating essay on political humor.

European Superstate debate, and the possibility of an EU President

US Army's recent involvement in creating Anthrax.

Bush administration drenched in Saudi oil money.

Bush hides information from Congress.
More...

Anti-germ-warfare conference displeases US, so they shut it down.

A voice of reason from the UN Human Rights Commission.

Ashcroft about to crush a few remaining civil liberties.

FBI to solidify its role as the secret police

The time is ripe to bring back the House Un-American Activities Commitee.
Look here for more on this travesty.

A taste of justice: Portland refuses to submit to Ashcroft's police state.

Millions of civilians deliberately slaughtered by the Allies during World War 2.

"When I saw the dead and dying Afghani children on TV, I felt a newly recovered sense of national security. God Bless America."
You can't say that in a West Virginia high school.

Sedition laws are to be used against suspected terrorists, and likely abused against dissenters. Yet another blow to the First Amendment.

Clinton says terrorist attacks against the US are paying a debt to the past.

Another sign that America's Executive Branch can evade checks and balances on a whim:
US Terrorism Czar snubs Congress.
Ridge spokespeople advise that Congress should just get in line.

Green Party USA Coordinator detained at airport. This is exactly the type of political oppression and abuse of power that the new "anti-terrorist" legislation is going to lead to.
Another report on the incident shows that what actually happened was even worse than originally reported.

Bush signs an executive ass-covering order designed to conceal Presidential crimes, lies and mistakes from the American public.

Civilian death toll in Afghanistan is being under-reported.

"Let the snake that does not bite me live for a thousand years"
US attitude towards terrorism and Turkey

Thank you for flying Air Paranoia!
A Sacramento journalist is taken into custody by police and forced to destroy photos

The Gandhi Nobody Knows by Richard Grenier
According to Grenier, Ghandi advocated collective suicide on the part of the Jews in response to the threat of the Nazi holocaust. He also advocated British surrender, and called Hitler "not a bad man".

An eminently educational speech by Noam Chomsky on the history of terror.

A little homegrown American terorism:

   Aug 6th, 1945 -  Hiroshima:
                                76,000 building destroyed
                                200,000 innocent civilians murdered in one day
   Aug 9th, 1945 -   Nagasaki:
                                140,000 innocent civilians murdered in one day

American reaction: Celebration

Kyoto, the beautiful ancient city of Japan, was originally scheduled to be destroyed. The decision to bomb Nagasaki instead saved at least 800,000 innocent people.

General Leslie Groves was dissapointed:

"I particularly wanted Kyoto as a target because, as I have said, it was large enough an area for us to gain complete knowledge of the effects of an atom bomb. Hiroshima was not nearly so satisfactory in this respect."

"The enemy aggressor is always pursuing a course of larceny, murder, rapine and barbarism. We are always moving forward with high mission, a destiny imposed by the Deity to regenerate our victims while incidentally capturing their markets, to civilise savage and senile and paranoid peoples while blundering accidentally into their oil wells."

"One picture taken shortly after the Taliban takeover says it all: a trembling woman covered in a head to toe veil, her face completely obscured, sobs as she speaks with a Western reporter. Who is she?  An impoverished peasant?  A homeless woman? No, she's the recently removed chief surgeon at the country's largest hospital!"
U.S. Policy Has Betrayed Afghan Women for 20 Years

Florida, home to Big Borther Bush, is the first state to propose moving to a secret government

"Jean Joseph Rive will have that a bibliophile is one who reads for pleasure; but he is opposed by Locker-Lampson, who maintains that 'your true bibliophile rarely reads anything: he contemplates, he examines bindings, criticizes illustrations, and scrutinizes title-pages or pagination.' Others, as G.H.Powell, have dilated upon the difference between reading and 'the refined curiosities of the bibliophile,' and Gleeson White, in express words, affirms that your book-lover must gaze at books 'mutely, with a satisfied joy in being near enough to caress or abstain.' A book need not even be 'in a particular language, nor on a particular subject, to be the book of a book-lover.' You love a book first because it is a book, however much you may particularize afterwards: 'He loved a book because it was a book; he loved its odour, its form, its title.' You love it inwardly and outwardly, soul and body..."

"'It does not follow at all that a person devoted to reading is fond of books. It is often the other way: the most learned men, the most gluttonous of readers, may not have the smallest love for books.' They know nothing of their value or how to treat them; using them for their 'selfish purpose' and casting them aside as useless: 'Ten people care for a book--but they are apostles. A thousand enjoy another book, but when they have sucked it on a hot afternoon, they have finished.'"

                                --The Book About Books,
                                  The Anatomy of Bibliomania
                                  Holbrook Jackson

"A Middle East fit for heroes"

Domestic censorship, deciet, and oppression. 1984, here we come.

A detailed account of American hypocracy in the face of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

"The Pentagon has spent millions of dollars to prevent western media from seeing highly accurate civilian satellite pictures of the effects of bombing in Afghanistan," possibly because "it would be possible to see bodies lying on the ground after last week's bombing attacks."

300,000 people marched for peace in Italy

BabySmasher

Living Dead Dolls
...because dead is better

Port Scan of the Month (DANGER: of interest to security geeks only)

The really big button that doesn't do anything.

Technology infrastructure disaster recovery logistics inadequate to deal with 9-11 fallout.

Ronald bin McLaden

Origami Underground
'erotic (and generally "objectionable") origami diagrams'

Chupacabras has a moment of clarity

Informative graphic of the NYC 9-11 damage.

People detained in the wake of 9-11 are suffering beatings and other violations of human and civil rights, while often being denied even minimal contact with their defense lawyers.