Topics

A wonderful article about coffee:

http://blog.moertel.com/pages/coders-guide-to-coffee

don't bother if you just go for maximum caffeine dosage, this one talks about taste and such

Well not that I got much response to this post before (why btw? too obvious? GASM Command too hidden for good discussion--I do get the feeling people read this place much less than O:MF), so I decided to repurpose this thread into generic shady tricks to write popular poop.



Because a lot of our GASM projects are based (partly) on generating buzz in social media, it is important to know how to write a good headline or link title that people are likely to click on, or share with others.

Writing headlines is a bit of an art, but fortunately for us, there are also a lot of easy tricks that usually do "good enough".

Just be careful you don't accidentally sound too spammy.

For instance, after reading (some of) these links, you will notice headlines like "5 Ways to .." and "The 10 most ridiculous ..." or "25 Great ideas for ...", also known as "list posts", everywhere. This is what blogwriters do when they don't have anything to write about. They pick a bunch of links from their recent history, bookmarks or whereever, augment it with some extra links found on Google, write a short description for each of them, and use a headline like this. They are catchy headlines, until you notice they are everywhere Cracked.com might have been one of the earlier adopters of this technique.

Anyway, 10 awesome links about writing great headlines!

http://condomunity.com/your-brand/headline-writing-google-social-media-readers/#socialmedia
http://www.copyblogger.com/how-to-write-headlines-that-work/
http://www.rimmkaufman.com/rkgblog/2008/08/13/on-writing-effective-blog-post-titles/
http://www.netwriting.co.uk/seo/7-easy-ways-to-create-eye-catching-titles/
http://www.stuntdubl.com/2006/04/05/how-to-write-successful-subject-titles-for-link-requests/
http://www.inkrebels.com/insp/how-to-write-a-strong-title-for-your-blog-article/
http://www.improvetheweb.com/learn-how-you-write-titles-get-traffic-links-ultimate-guide
http://seosurf.wordpress.com/2010/01/18/charismatic-blog-titles-for-seo/
http://technmarketing.com/marketing/6-tips-for-writing-an-effective-blog-post-title/
http://www.problogger.net/archives/2008/08/20/how-to-craft-post-titles-that-draw-readers-into-your-blog/

[ALT/1977: WE ARE NOT TIME TRAVELERS]

ALT/1977: WE ARE NOT TIME TRAVELERS

What would you do if you could travel back in time? Assassinate Marilyn Monroe? Go on a date with Hitler? Obviously. But here's what I'd do after that: grab all the modern technology I could find, take it to the late 70's, superficially redesign it all to blend in, start a consumer electronics company to unleash it upon the world, then sit back as I rake in billions, trillions, or even millions of dollars.

I've explored that idea in this series by re-imagining four common products from 2010 as if they were designed in 1977: an mp3 player, a laptop, a mobile phone and a handheld video game system. I then created a series of fictitious but stylistically accurate print ads to market them, as well as a handful of abstract posters (you know, just for funsies).

I've learned that there is no greater design element than the anachronism. I've learned that the strongest contrast isn't spatial or tonal but historical. I've learned that there's retro, and then there's time travel.

The irony is that all post-modern, smugly self-referential retro porn aside, I'd gladly trade in my immaculately designed 21st century gadgets for these hideously clunky, faux-wood-paneled pieces of über-kitsch. Sorry, Apple.











source + a few more: http://www.behance.net/Gallery/ALT1977-WE-ARE-NOT-TIME-TRAVELERS/545221

I gotta say, this is pretty fucking impressive:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/magazine/20Computer-t.html?pagewanted=all

IMO a lot more then the Deep Blue chess playing device, as well.

[Sean Tevis to save America, starting with Kansas' 2nd District]

Ok, so I know as good as nothing about US constitution and politics, so tell me if this is bullshit or if it can't actually work. But if it does, it's fuckin awesome (or at least tickles my hacker-bone):

http://blogs.pitch.com/plog/2010/06/sean_tevis_to_save_america_starting_with_kansas_2nd_district.php

Sean Tevis to save America, starting with Kansas' 2nd District

  Sean Tevis -- who made a splash two years ago when he ran for the Kansas House on a war chest raised $8.34 at a time -- is back. This time, the office is higher (the 2nd District race for U.S. rep.), and the plan is bigger. Way bigger. 

  This morning, Tevis formally declares his candidacy on his website. But throwing his hat in the ring against the other two contenders running in the Democratic primary is a footnote compared with the announcement he's been teasing the media about in recent days.

Tevis, whose day job is building websites and who has a finely tuned ironic wit (see those comics), answered an e-mail yesterday about his plans this way: "I'm starting a national movement. I'm going to end the culture war, fix Congress, and save America."

The movement hinges on Congress' ability to make separate law for separate nations within the United States -- American Indian nations. On the same principle, Tevis means to construct a virtual health-care nation to allow those wanting a public option access to it without mandating insurance for those who'd rather stick with the status quo.

It's heavily researched, complicated, a challenge to explain, a sure magnet for skeptics -- and so crazy it just might work.

In a follow-up interview, he explains the genesis of what's going live on his site today. "In September or October, I was at a health-care rally in Merriam," he says. "I went and set up two tables, one on each side of the debate. I asked people to write down why they thought the way they did. A friend asked me what I'd learned, and I said, 'Of course we're deeply divided, but I think there's a solution to every problem.' My friend bet me $100 I was wrong. I went into systemic mode ... and I started looking at government as a computer problem. Check the source code and find the problem. The Constitution is our source code. We're finding a way around the damage. I came up with this idea around Christmas last year and I couldn't let it go."

Tevis compares himself to "that scientist who's been working out in the middle of nowhere and then shows up and is like, tah-dah."

"I wouldn't be running without this idea," he says. "I believe in the idea, and I can't believe in it unless I champion it. So I'm running for Congress."

The state's Democratic Party advised Tevis to avoid the crowded 3rd District race, so he's moving from Olathe to Lawrence. "They're proud of me because I'm high-profile, and yet they don't understand me," he says of the party.

For now, Tevis is keeping his day job. "I told them [his bosses] that I'd come up with an idea to fix Congress, and they just kind of smiled and said, 'Oh?' If the campaign flops. I keep my job and campaign on the weekends. And if it goes crazy, I'll take a leave of absence."

Meanwhile, he has his old new idea -- micro-fundraising -- to kick back into gear. "I haven't done any traditional fundraising," he says. "I filed last Thursday, so I haven't asked anyone [for money], but someone gave me $20."

His wife, Michelle, doesn't like politics. "She tolerates it," Tevis says. She's his first audience, though, for ideas. "I'll show her something about, say, fixing special interests, and she'll tell me, 'It's too much.' "

Is he prepared to be misunderstood as a crank? "I expect that," he says. "I just don't know what it'll be like."

Here's the first page of the new comic explaining his movement.

[Google is "almost certain" to face prosecution for collecting data from unsecured wi-fi networks, according to Privacy International (PI).]

(renamed thread)

Google accused of criminal intent over StreetView data - http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/10278068.stm

Google is "almost certain" to face prosecution for collecting data from unsecured wi-fi networks, according to Privacy International (PI).

The search giant has been under scrutiny for collecting wi-fi data as part of its StreetView project.

Google has released an independent audit of the rogue code, which it has claimed was included in the StreetView software by mistake.

But PI is convinced the audit proves "criminal intent".

"The independent audit of the Google system shows that the system used for the wi-fi collection intentionally separated out unencrypted content (payload data) of communications and systematically wrote this data to hard drives. This is equivalent to placing a hard tap and a digital recorder onto a phone wire without consent or authorisation," said PI in a statement.

This would put Google at odds with the interception laws of the 30 countries that the system was used in, it added.

Scotland Yard

"The Germans are almost certain to prosecute. Because there was intent, they have no choice but to prosecute," said Simon Davies, head of PI.

In the UK the ICO has said it is reviewing the audit but that for the time being it had no plans to pursue the matter.

PI however does intend to take the case to the police.

"I don't see any alternative but for us to go to Scotland Yard," said Mr Davies.

The revelation that Google had collected such data led the German Information Commissioner to demand it handed over a hard-disk so it could examine exactly what it had collected.

It has not yet received the data and has extended the original deadline for it to be handed over.

The Australian police have also been ordered to investigate Google for possible breach of privacy.

"The idea that this was a work of
a lone engineer doesn't add up"
Simon Davies, Privacy International

'Systematic failure'

According to Google, the code which allowed data to be collected was part of an experimental wi-fi project undertaken by an unnamed engineer to improve location-based services and was never intended to be incorporated in the software for StreetView.

"As we have said before, this was a mistake. The report today confirms that Google did indeed collect and store payload data from unencrypted wi-fi networks, but not from networks that were encrypted. We are continuing to work with the relevant authorities to respond to their questions and concerns," said a Google spokesman.

"This was a failure of communication between and within teams," he added.

But PI disputes this explanation.

"The idea that this was a work of a lone engineer doesn't add up. This is complex code and it must have been given a budget and been overseen. Google has asserted that all its projects are rigorously checked," said Mr Davies.

"It goes to the heart of a systematic failure of management and of duty of care," he added.



My view on the case is, on some level it must have been intent. And I don't believe that is the level of a single scapegoat / rogue engineer, which would of course be the most favourable thing Google would like us to believe.

I have to add for fairness of the matter, in another blog I read that the total amount of recorded unencrypted traffic is in fact very small. Something on the order of a thousand megabytes, IIRC. Which is really not that much as I believe this was the number for all of Europe. Or maybe Germany. I forget.

The point is, would Google, as a corporation want this data if they could get away with it? Hell yes. I don't doubt that for a second.

The other point is, they were already treading on thin ice. Photographing all the streets in large panoramas, with actual people on it. Additionally collecting wifi accesspoint data and MAC addresses linked with GPS location info (that's pretty much what I was trying to do with my netbook last year, but failed for lack of GPS).

This already is highly sensitive privacy stuff. So should have been extra mega careful about what they do collect and what they don't collect. That's what all those fucking privacy statements are for in the first place!

So even if it was (on some level) a mistake, they fucked up badly and it was a spectacular huge fucking stupid mistake, because they should have been checking and double, triple checking the data-collection software they sent those Google cars out on our streets with.

It is a huge project, coming with a huge responsibility and fucking this up just shows again that they simply don't care, and in this case, criminally so.

If it had been an honest bug, like an accidental misconfigured piece of code that happened to switch to the wrong data channel to record, then maybe, though I would still be pissed off and at least want to fine them.

But this was not a bug, it was a complete software module, written with the intent to do exactly this. Then it was packaged with the software that these Google cars were sent out on our streets with. And then it was switched on, executed and used. And THEN and this is what pisses me off most, now that I think of it, which is inexcusable, there must have been at least hundreds of these google cars? It's not a trivial task to collect, merge, communicate, transmit and centralize all that data. And an extra stream of data that they accidentally recorded should just not have been collected, right?

Obviously at some point in that chain there should have been a manager that should have stopped this from happening. Of course all the managers claim they didn't know. Well of course that's bullshit, because if there is a possibility that a single developer can singlehandedly insert a piece of software in ALL those Google cars that have been scanning and photographing our entire fucking world, then that developer wields a pretty fucking huge amount of power (really, he could have done so much worse) and not checking that is a pretty spectacular security failure, I would call criminal neglect.

In other words, fuck you Google. Fuck you in the nose. Fuck you in the ear. Fuck you in the eye. I hope they hang you. You fucked up. Fucked up bad. I already didn't trust you, not since a long time, but once more you show your real face. The face of the future. A future that is so bleak, it is completely transparent.

[Black Rain]

Black Rain

Black Rain is sourced from images collected by the twin satellite, solar mission, STEREO. Here we see the HI (Heliospheric Imager) visual data as it tracks interplanetary space for solar wind and CME's (coronal mass ejections) heading towards Earth. Data courtesy of courtesy of the Heliospheric Imager on the NASA STEREO mission.

Working with STEREO scientists, Semiconductor collected all the HI image data to date, revealing the journey of the satellites from their initial orientation, to their current tracing of the Earth's orbit around the Sun. Solar wind, CME's, passing planets and comets orbiting the sun can be seen as background stars and the milky way pass by.

As in Semiconductors previous work 'Brilliant Noise' which looked into the sun, they work with raw scientific satellite data which has not yet been cleaned and processed for public consumption. By embracing the artefacts, calibration and phenomena of the capturing process we are reminded of the presence of the human observer who endeavors to extend our perceptions and knowledge through technological innovation.

http://vimeo.com/3921306

http://www.e360.yale.edu/content/feature.msp?id=2277

An interesting article about the uprising "carbon credit" market, which would be perfect for battling the man-made CO2-related global warming problems (i.e. stuff we are responsible for).

It's a written from the point of view of the green movement, but not too strongly (IMO).

It gives an interesting look into the corruption and problems involved with this type of market.

President of Germany Horst Koehler stepped down yesterday. I'm a bit confused, and I expect so are a lot of other people.

Apparently he went to see military operations in Afghanisatan, and when he got back he said something like that seeing Germany being so dependent on international trade and export, in emergencies, military action can be necessary order to protect these international trade relations, as well as to prevent regional instability [I hope I worded that right--feel free to correct me]

Well. That's of course a rather controversial thing to say [even though everybody seems to be doing it], especially given Germany's historical sore spot considering war and foreign military operations, this caught him a LOT of critique.

His press spokesmen worked double time to spin this into something salvageable, and they pretty much succeeded. Additionally the Koehler apologized and somewhat clarified his point into something more agreeable.

But yesterday afternoon, rather unexpectedly, he announces his resignation. Even the people that critiqued him badly before say this is a bit sudden and uncalled for. A wrong thing to say, but nothing so serious to actually step down over. Koehler feels that his position has been damaged.

He is the first president in history of the Bundesrepublik to resign.

He was always somewhat of an odd one [my gf told me], he said what he meant and stood for something and didn't afraid of anything. The position of President of Germany doesn't hold as much power as the PotU, it's a littlebit more like the Queen of Dutchland, except not heredairytary but appointed. But he's slightly more than strictly a ceremonial figure. He is allowed to be more free about making political statements (as opposed to our Queen who is supposed to stay neutral), he is expected to address societal issues. He tests and signs laws [but hardly ever uses this power, Koehler vetoed a law 2 or 3 times or so, which is exceptional], can grant amnesty, represents the German people and can disband the parilament.

Regardless, anybody know why he really stepped down?

It feels for me that his statement on military action, might have been bad, but in no way enough to make him step down. Neither was the critique that heavy. And politicians can be extremely stubborn in much worse situations like these. So there must have been one or more additional reasons that pushed him to make this decision.

But on the other hand, the article I read said his speech was emotional, and in his voice you could hear he was touched and having emotional trouble with it. So, what is going on?

Maybe I'm reading too much in it, but it's just so sudden.

interesting:

http://logosmythos.net/wilton_windmill_crop_circle_may_2010.html

Recently I decided to venture into the wonderful world of the martini cocktail.

I started off with this recipe: http://artofmanliness.com/2009/05/04/how-to-make-the-perfect-martini/

Except I failed to make ice (the ice "cube" plastic bubble sheet thing turned out to be leaky, also they don't sell bags of ice in liquor stores like they do in the US), and didn't have the gin long enough in the freezer. Also the cocktail glasses didn't fit in the tiny freezer compartment we have.

However, it turned out pretty good. The advice on playing Sinatra while drinking did truly add extra flavour as well.


Next try, a few days later. The gin is thoroughly chilled, well below 32F. I managed to make a good amount of ice. I should really get a plastic tray because these bubble baggies are crap (and kinda old). We ate the olives previously so I didn't have any olives. I used pickled white onions, which makes the cocktail a Gibson according to the article, but I figured that's better than nothing. Lacking a cocktail shaker, I used a (clean) glass jar with a lid. I probably shook the things too much. Also I didn't throw away the vermouth as the article said, cause even though I dont particularly like vermouth, we found the previous attempt a bit too dry and added a few drops of vermouth afterwards.

It turned out watery as hell and wasn't very good at all.


Third try, right after the previous cause I wasn't going to have any of this watery business. I just poured one cap of vermouth into the cocktail glass and two shots of (very cold) gin. It is very good. If I would have had an olive it would probably have been better. Also I didn't feel like Sinatra and played Kruder & Dorfmeister K&D Sessions - Bomb the Bass - Bug Powder Dust because, yeah


So, question, is all this messing about with icecubes in a cocktail shaker really necessary? Am I doin it rite?

since you're all into being all skeptic and not believing in stuff and misrepresenting poor pseudoscientists that are just trying to make a decent living, I thought you might enjoy this:

http://www.theonion.com/articles/revolutionary-new-insoles-combine-five-forms-of-ps,759/

check out what these guys are doing. It seems like it's going to be BIG, and if it does, it might just kill of facebook. they already got $23k in donations for their startup, and everybody is saying "this is exactly what people have been waiting for" ...

let's just hope they pull it off.

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/196017994/diaspora-the-personally-controlled-do-it-all-distr
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/12/nyregion/12about.html

the basic idea is that it's a social network, like facebook, with comments, friends, apps, groups and all the works, except it's not on a centralized server (like facebook or twitter), but in a distributed peer-to-peer secure network, somewhat like BitTorrent. they use good encryption, and the end result is going to be a new kind of social network where everybody retains ownership of their data, as opposed to some big faceless corp selling your privacy to whatever advertisement network is willing to pay.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeffrey-smith/genetically-modified-soy_b_544575.html

what the topic title says.

also, wonderful quote from the article:

In an attempt to offer her sympathy, one of her colleagues suggested that maybe the GM soy will solve the over population problem!

and, in other news, @dangerousmeme appears to be back on Twitter not as busy as before, but still!

this guy built a turing machine.

http://www.aturingmachine.com/

the awesome thing is that he built it using all sorts of electronics and servo motors and a felt tip whiteboard marker and a really really long (1000 meters?) roll of plastic strip on which a robot arm writes ones and zeroes.

he built it in this way to mimic the idea, or the image of the machine in Alan Turing's original paper, written in the early 20th century.

even though it doesn't have a lot of brass gears and such, it's probably the most true steampunk thing I have ever seen.

check the video, seriously.

PS if you don't know what a Turing Machine is (it does not have anything to do with the Turing Test, except for the inventor), then you might not be able to appreciate the awesome of this project. sorry.

oops five pages, let me find the post I should quote, just a moment

seems to me you're looking really really hard to dismiss people.

because on the one hand people that argue the position of even just one aspect of socialism/anarchism/liberalism/chaos magic/paganism/taoism, their points get stretched and then they are painted as BEING a socialist/anarchist/liberal/chaos magician/pagan/taoist.

we've all seen that happen over and over again, right?

and now you say you don't consider them Discordians. actually, I don't really care who you consider Discordians or not. that's not really the point anyway, just another label.

I actually agree with most if not the entire post. Except maybe this one, which I simultaneously agree and disagree with:

> We are not on ANY of their sides, as none of them are on OUR side.

See, you make great points, and they are Very True. But what bothers me is, and this goes for the board in general, the whole EITHER/OR attitude, the "you're either with me or against me" stance, you're either a biped or a worthless monkey.

As soon as someone even just momentarily argues some ideology, they get trashed.

That completely sucks.

Because for me Discordianism is not about not being "with" ANY of them. I enjoy the mix and match approach. And a lot of us do. RAW talked about it, switching reality channels.

Sigmatic said it, with the subversion remark. The point is to go on the ride for a while, and know when to subvert it and jump out.

Like, I could read up about (say,) anarchism (which I am not really a fan of), and focus on all the good bits. Let anarchism sell itself to me a littlebit.

But do you really think, that after having found Discordianism, it would not start to smell like rotten fish (or poop) to me after a while? And I would be all "ahhh yeah, anarchism, been there done that". But then I wouldnt say it sucks, or it is synonymous to "being retarded" [as some people try to define it here], I'd say it's got some good ideas as well as some flaws.


That's the thing with ideologies, just because they have flaws doesn't mean you need to dump them entirely.

Similarly, just because ideologies have good ideas, doesn't mean you need to follow them religiously.


And frankly, being Discordian means to me, doing both those prev statements right. Not just the latter.

Exploring demographics on alcohol usage

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/gnxp/2010/05/people-of-class-drink-alcohol/

The very last chart is the kicker, though:



WORDSUM is a measure of vocabulary size, afaik. And thereby a sort of broad indicator of intelligence.

The amazing thing is the incredibly strong correlation. If you look at the other charts in the demographics there are lots of predictable results, things you would expect, but the correlation is a littlebit rough.

But this one, it's a near straight line. That's pretty statistically significant.

What do you think about it?

Alcohol makes you talkative is the best thing I can come up with.

But what about the "tool of the machine" belief we have over here? Not saying it invalidates it (wouldnt want to either), but what does that belief mean in the light of this chart?

Vocabulary doesn't correlate with how much of a biped you are?

Makes me think, can we come up with a quantitative way to gauge bipedality?
[not in the way of "you must do/think this and that to be(come) a biped", rather a way to sample a person, a test, to score them, not to judge but to draw other correlations similar to this from]

[The unrecognized death of speech recognition]

The unrecognized death of speech recognition The accuracy of computer speech recognition flat-lined in 2001, before reaching human levels. The funding plug was pulled, but no funeral, no text-to-speech eulogy followed. [...] In 2001 recognition accuracy topped out at 80%, far short of HAL-like levels of comprehension. Adding data or computing power made no difference. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University checked again in 2006 and found the situation unchanged. With human discrimination as high as 98%, the unclosed gap left little basis for conversation. But sticking to a few topics, like numbers, helped. Saying "one" into the phone works about as well as pressing a button, approaching 100% accuracy. But loosen the vocabulary constraint and recognition begins to drift, turning to vertigo in the wide-open vastness of linguistic space. [...] A 1996 look at the state of the art reported that "Despite over three decades of research effort, no practical domain-independent parser of unrestricted text has been developed." As with speech recognition, parsing works best inside snug linguistic boxes, like medical terminology, but weakens when you take down the fences holding back the untamed wilds. Today's parsers "very crudely are about 80% right on average on unrestricted text," according to Cambridge professor Ted Briscoe, author of the 1996 report. Parsers and speech recognition have penetrated language to similar, considerable depths, but without reaching a fundamental understanding. [...] We are surrounded by unceasing, rapid technological advance, especially in information technology. It is impossible for something to be unattainable. There has to be another way. Right? Yes—but it's more difficult than the approach that didn't work. In place of simple speech recognition, researchers last year proposed "cognition-derived recognition" in a paper authored by leading academics, a scientist from Microsoft Research and a co-founder of Dragon Systems. The project entails research to "understand and emulate relevant human capabilities" as well as understanding how the brain processes language. The researchers, with that particularly human talent for euphemism, are actually saying that we need artificial intelligence if computers are going to understand us. Originally, however, speech recognition was going to lead to artificial intelligence. Computing pioneer Alan Turing suggested in 1950 that we "provide the machine with the best sense organs that money can buy, and then teach it to understand and speak English." Over half a century later, artificial intelligence has become prerequisite to understanding speech. We have neither the chicken nor the egg.

Strings, heavy with meaning

http://robertfortner.posterous.com/the-unrecognized-death-of-speech-recognition

It's true! Computers have gotten insanely more powerful the past decades, we got huge mega corpuses of annotated language data, syntactically and semantically, so WHAT UP AI COMMUNITY? How come computers can't recognize speech any better than 10 years ago?

I think there were a few people here interested in the demoscene. I just happened across the old Trixter quotes DB:

http://www.oldskool.org/demos/misc/demoquot.txt

If you remember the old atmosphere of the scene, there's some pretty good stuff in there.

like

"Good code isn't good design, and good design doesn't need good code." -- Charlatan

controversial and chunky! ["design" here refers to the graphics design/composition of the demo]

This is awesome. I'm trying it right now. I just hope that the weather will stay good long enough so that we can sear it off on the BBQ.

http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/04/cook-your-meat-in-a-beer-cooler-the-worlds-best-sous-vide-hack.html

Which is a Dutch weblog which hm, I guess has a kind of ranting writing style, except more condescending. Big influence in the Dutch memesphere, critical about everything, yet surprisingly with a somewhat right wing populistic slant. Sometimes funny, but almost always intriguing. (Regret is that somehow accurate? Best description I could do)


So there were these kids making rap songs about being banned or censored on a forum ...

First one is about a mod explaining to a poster she should not get angry they deleted her link cause it was a dead link (or something)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cWZkY2WMNb0

Second one I forgot but is a similar topic http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxXHXv84Un0

I'm just going to assume these guys aren't actually for real. Though the Internet has proven me wrong often. But then, what is real.


Next one. As far as I understand, this guy is for real. Doesn't fucking matter, for your enjoyment, just pretend he's not. Trust me it helps. Just keep Cramulus's "Diabetes" video in mind, pretend he's totally taking the piss on whatever, and giggle. I didn't watch the related Southpark episode btw [haven't seen SP in ages, is it still any good?]

intro: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EY39fkmqKBM
this is his reaction to, after apparently having become a small internet meme, he got invited to the Dutch Red Hair day in Breda [pronounced "Brey-Duh" btw unlike what he says], and this is his reaction: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oUjHWH8YccI

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-UsR9Ap41R8

it's got subtitles. watch it all the way through, you will like

[The Data Singularity is Here]

The Data Singularity is Here
by Michael E. Driscoll | March 8, 2010

In the next two blog posts I'll attempt to sketch the forces behind what I'm calling, somewhat sensationally, the Data Singularity, and then (in a following post) discuss what I see as its consequences.

In a nutshell, the Data Singularity is this: humans are being spliced out of the data-driven processes around us, and frequently we aren't even at the terminal node of action. International cargo shipments, high-frequency stock trades, and genetic diagnoses are all made without us.

Absent humans, these data and decision loops have far less friction; they become constrained only by the costs of bandwidth, computation, and storage– all of which are dropping exponentially.

The result is an explosion of data thrown off from these machine-mediated pipelines, along with data about those flows (and data about that data, and so on). The machines all around us — our smart phones, smart cars, and fee-happy bank accounts — are talking, and increasingly we're being left out of the conversation.

So whether or not the Singularity is Near, the Data Singularity is here, and its consequences are being felt.

But before I discuss these consequences, I'd like to expand on the premise. The world wasn't always drowning in this data deluge, so how did we get here?

http://dataspora.com/blog/the-data-singularity-is-here/

[how does the China film industry continue to produce films in a land where everything seems to be pirated?]

[...] I was in China, in part, to answer this simple question: how does the China film industry continue to produce films in a land where everything seems to be pirated? If no one is paying the filmmakers, how (why) do they keep producing films? But my question was not just about China. The three largest film industries in the world are India, Nigeria and China. Nigeria cranks out some 2,000 films a year (Nollywood), India produces about 1,000 a year (Bollywood) and China less than 500. Together they produce four times as many films per year as Hollywood. Yet each of these countries is a haven, even a synonym, for rampant piracy. How do post-copyright economics work? [...]

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2010/04/how_to_thrive_a.php

I made CANDIES

-melted some butter
- and some orange peel
- stirred and then removed the peel when it had extracted the orange oils (not sure if that worked, it's still cooling),
- then added the juice of said orange
- and then a fuckton of sugar.

- then I kept stirring and heating
- and taking it off the heat occasionally to prevent boiling over (since the juice was turning into steam)

- I think I heated it to somewhere between soft ball and hard ball (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Candy#Sugar_stages)

- poured the stuff using a funnel into two long rolls of wax paper.  (tape does not stick to wax paper so if you want to keep the roll in place, you need to wrap the tape in a ring around the roll so it sticks to itself. I folded the bottom close, and also taped that shut.)

- I found it is important to place these rolls upright in something like an empty soda bottle so it's supported all the way. Because the sugar butter stuff is pretty heavy and if you place it just in a high cup or something, it will fold and collapse and make a mess and boy you don't want a melted sugar mess anywhere.

Also you will burn your fingers.

And butter-fried orange zest tastes funny (you know I had to try it, it looked so crunchy!).

Because seeing that FlockDraw thread is really making me want to buy a drawing tablet real SOON. As in, today or tomrorow SOON.

Also in that case SUGGESTIONS+EXPERIENCES ON YOUR TYPE AND BRAND OF TABLET PLEASE -- I know that you artsy types have one. Fred, Nast, Net and Telarus looking at you! [list of artsy types from the top of my head--if I left you out don't worry it's because of your awesome avantguardisms]

Also because Net loves fonts, classifying him as an artsy type is extra hilarious funny.[/list]

[Pentagon targets Wiki whistleblowers]

via Twitter (@metaphorge)

http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/1221972/Pentagon-targets-Wiki-whistleblowers

Pentagon targets Wiki whistleblowers

25 March 2010 | 12:37:25 PM | Source: SBS staff and agencies


A small, cash-strapped website that publishes documents governments want kept secret has caught the attention of the Pentagon, which says the site poses a possible threat to US troops.
   
A report by the US Army Counterintelligence Center says the whistleblower website WikiLeaks poses a potential danger to safeguarding troops, protecting sensitive information, and "operational security."


"WikiLeaks is currently under an aggressive US and Icelandic surveillance operation. Following/photographing/filming/detaining," Wikileaks posted on the microblogging site Twitter.

"If anything happens to us, you know why: it is our Apr 5 film. And you know who is responsible," it added, about an hour later.

Editor followed

The Twitter feed also said that Wikileaks editor Julian Assange, an Australian, had been tailed on his way from Iceland, and another site employee was detained for 22 hours. Computers were also seized, it said.

We have airline records of the State Dep/CIA tails. Don't think you can get away with it. You cannot. This is WikiLeaks.
 
We have been shown secret photos of our production meetings and been asked specific questions during detention related to the airstrike.
 
WikiLeaks also urged its Twitter followers to contact them if they knew anything about the 'operations against us'.

The last Twitter message from the site was published 16 hours after the first ones and said:

"To those worrying about us--we're fine, and will issue a suitable riposte shortly.

Military analysis published

A military analysis appeared this week on the WikiLeaks website, the latest document posted on the site that seeks to uncover information governments and companies try to keep from public view.
   
US Army spokesman Gary Tallman confirmed the report on the website was "genuine."
   
The report expresses concern that the website posted 2,000 pages of documents with precise details of military equipment in Iraq and Afghanistan from April 2007, describing them as "nearly the entire order of battle."
   
Tallman said that information has a "shelf life" and has become outdated.
   
"The information in the review is now dated to the point where it no longer presents the same national security concerns as it did when the report was generated," he told AFP.

Aim to expose contributors

The 2008 army report suggests trying to expose those who leak documents WikiLeaks as a way of undermining the website.

Sites such as WikiLeaks "use trust as a center of gravity by protecting the anonymity and identity of the insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers," it said.
   
"The identification, exposure, termination of employment, criminal prosecution, legal action against current or former insiders, leakers, or whistleblowers could potentially damage or destroy this center of gravity and deter others considering similar actions from using the Wikileaks.org Web site."
   
Tallman said the military seeks to safeguard sensitive information and is focused on preventing leaks that could endanger US forces or national security.
   
He said that "anyone who knowingly provides information marked as classified to anyone or an organization without a proper clearance or need to know is a serious matter, and subject to potential penalties under the law."

Temporary shutdown
   
WikiLeaks, run by Sunshine Press, describes itself as a "non-profit organization funded by human rights campaigners, investigative journalists, technologists and the general public."
   
The site, which has to rely in part on public contributions to stay afloat, had to temporarily shut down earlier this year because of financial difficulties.
   
WikiLeaks says it has published more than one million documents from dissident communities and anonymous sources around the world about government and corporate corruption, human rights violations and other subjects.
   
The Swiss bank Julius Baer & Company LTD earlier this month dropped a legal attempt to force Wikileaks to shut down.
   
A US federal judge in San Francisco ruled that the website's postings of leaked documents is protected as free speech by the US Constitution.
   
Julius Baer went after Wikileaks in court after the website posted copies of internal documents indicating the company helped customers launder money illegally through the Cayman Islands.

Baer denied the accusations.

A d20 from the 2nd century AD !!!

http://www.collisiondetection.net/mt/archives/2003/12/ancient_roman_d.php

FUCK YEAH

GERMANY FOR THE MOTHERFUCKING WIN

German highest court judge has decided EU data retention laws are "unconstitutional" according to German constitution.

data retention is when the EU orders telecom corps to save at least 6 months of logs on every customer. that means who-called-who logs on phones and mobile phones as well as GET request headers (who surfed what URL and did which Google query) for ISPs.

for no good reason at all, the Netherlands decided to make this retention time 1.5 years, but that's because we're retarded and ignorant of the concept of privacy or something. this will probably change when the new elections are up (which is soon cause our gvmt fell a few weeks ago cause of something about whether or not we ought to have sent our troops to Uruzgan or not) anyway for the new elections it seems like Bits of Freedom (the Dutch counterpart to the EFF) is pushing these issues a lot.

also, IANAL but i read somewhere that Dutch laws can't be tested against our constitution, which I think means something that you can't legally destroy a law just because it's unconstitutional, but more that they shouldnt make unconstitutional laws in the first place. ANWYAY the point is that in Germany they CAN test their laws to the German constitution AND the Dutch judges usually take the decisions of this particular German high judge as inspiration for their own decisions, so the discussions on data retention laws are once more WIDE OPEN

and, so, maybe we could dial the privacy up a few notches in my beautiful country.

seeing that currently the Netherlands has had more wiretaps in absolute numbers than the entire US. yet there's only 17 million of us 

Dutch wiretaps: http://news.idg.no/cw/art.cfm?id=25FD498F-1A64-6A71-CEAF0A3C87F9AD1D

Wheeee check it out:

http://tr.im/datadrivendesigndoodles or http://elvicities.com/~ananames/swirl.svg

tested to work in Opera and Firefox (sorry IE users)

it's randomly generated swirly twirly doodles in retro-70s design you can either reload or click to get a new one!

enjoy! perhaps post screenshots of ones you really like or something :-P



(btw for those who run both Opera and FF, I would advice Opera because its SVG rendering engine gives higher quality images, sometimes the Firefox makes a littlebit ragged artifacts at the edges, taking IMO away from the smooth roundy curvy look of the whole thing)

This is my newest housemate:



He pops up in random places in the house, and as long as he's not annoying, I will keep him. It is, after all, freezing outside, and those are no proper temperatures for a pretty spider like this. Also Dutch spiders are harmless like puppies. I realize I didn't include anything for scale. He is probably slightly over an inch in diameter including legs. So, not very big, but also not tiny.

NOW HE NEEDS A NAME

suggestions please?

there has been a lot of business-as-usual going on at PD.

And I would just like to say, I am okay with that.

This post is a spinoff from my Urban Swarm Art post in O:MF.

"Swarm intelligence" techniques are another example of biologically inspired forms of artificial intelligence. Currently they are in use in network routing and congestion prevention systems, using "digital pheromone trails" (basically packet counts) in order to locally determine the most efficient routes for network traffic. Correction: Wikipedia says "As the system behaves stochastically and is therefore lacking repeatability, there are large hurdles to commercial deployment."

Another application is real world traffic jam prevention. I expect these algorithms to be on the market within a year, maybe two [should probably call that in the 2010 predictions thread], using our ubiquitous navigation software/apps/devices [at least in the Netherlands, nearly everybody has a TomTom, dunno if US is ahead or behind in adoption].

Cars would leave a "virtual pheromone trail" on the roads they travel. In its simplest form, this slowly evaporating trail would represent a measure of how crowded a certain part of the road is. This would already allow navigation software to locally query this crowdedness and calculate optimal alternatives on-the-fly. A more advanced system could also use a variety of different "digital smells" to represent maximum speed of the car and perhaps a rough indication of the destination. Both pieces of data could be used to optimize routing even further.

This may seem really straightforward, and in a sense it really is. However, a proper Swarm Intelligence algorithm not only has the property that it can locally produce a (near-) optimal solution, but due to the way the information propagates through the swam, it also optimizes the solution globally.

Of course this "virtual pheronome trail" brings with it huge privacy implications. Even though these particular algorithms suit themselves very well for a decentralized anonymous peer-to-peer solution, the digital representation of it will probably be stored in a centralized server. At least, I expect this because it will be Google, TomTom, Nokia or some similar big corp to first implement this solution and naturally they will want to get their hands on that data. Unless somehow an Open Source solution appears on the market first. The problem with that however, will be that this Swarm Intelligence stuff will not work unless a significant amount of traffic participates. So in that way, it can only be successfully implemented by the local (to a country/continent) market-leader in navigation systems. Unless they happen to have a really open platform.

Some wikipedia links for those interested in the topic:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ant_colony_optimization (specific)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Swarm_intelligence (medium)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metaheuristic (really broad)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergence (similarly broad and because everybody loves the concept--I can really recommend reading this page btw)



(EDIT FOR NOT BEING ABLE TO SPELL SWARM RIGHT)

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2010/01/privacy_violati.html

apparently any facebook employee can click a button, type "possible compromised account" and log in as whatever account they want!

I, for one, am SHOCKED.

http://ha.ckers.org/blog/20100112/wait-google-i-thought-you-were-evil/

We have decided we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn, and so over the next few weeks we will be discussing with the Chinese government the basis on which we could operate an unfiltered search engine within the law, if at all. We recognize that this may well mean having to shut down Google.cn, and potentially our offices in China.

I asked a friend, all he could come up with was "ultimate", but that word signifies too much importance.

See I'm designing an HTML template and in my quest for ultimate (heh) semantics, I don't want to call my sidebar "left" "right" or even "sidebar" because it might not even be on the side. So I call them "primary" and "secondary" to signify that the first is slightly more important than the second, but not as important as the main block of text called "main".

Now usually you have no more than two sidebars, but if I had I'd call it "tertiary", no problem.

Another important reason for doing it this way is that this is the way a lot of semantic HTML templates on the web do it, such as, for instance, the Sandbox Wordpress template.

But then comes the problem, there's another section, the final one, usually called "footer". It usually contains a copyright message and some contact info. Now "footer" signifies that it is at the bottom of the layout, but that's a positional name, saying bottom, or below. The footer might not be below in the layout, it usually is, but it could also be placed in a sort of address box at the left or right maybe.

What is important however, that it always is the final piece of information on the page. So in follow-up of "primary" "secondary", I'd wanna call this block not "footer" but the Latin word for "last". Except as I mentioned above, primary is the most important sidebar, secondary comes after that, and the footer is always the least important one, it will be in tiny font low contrast colour etc. So I kind of feel that the word "ultimate" would lend it too much importance, see?

Yes I understand this is totally pedantic and 200% perfectionistic of mine, but it's something that keeps crossing my mind every time I write an HTML template and get to the footer bit and it is annoying me to no end.

Halp?

couldn't find a "random link dump" thread here, so I created this topic.

http://datamining.typepad.com/data_mining/2009/12/news-narratives.html

thought it might be interesting for Cain?

So loads of very good propaganda and random books are on Scribd. I absolutely LOATHE that place because I can never seem to download the PDFs from it.

Now I'm willing to accept that something in the javascript fucks up in Opera, so I tried Firefox, but it just doesn't fucking work. The page is buggy as hell, I get not founds, or the entire login screen is grayed out and when I click it it disappears, and blah blah blah.

Also the one time, a while ago, when I did get the login to work, it bugged me in a screen I had to click through about downloading PDFs of my own every single time I clicked a PDF to download. It said the message would disappear after I uploaded 3 PDFs of my own, but I just don't have any non-copyrighted stuff that I think is useful to share (that is not on Scribd already).

(the few old posters or flyers I made I have lost)

also FUCK THAT SHIT

so uhm, except for wanting to vent a littlebit about that SHITHOLE THAT IS SCRIBD, I also would like to kindly inquire if anyone happens to know of some kind of sweet ass mass-download tool for this website?

Cause I wanna fetch all that stuff in the propaganda depository, and more.

I tried looking for a firefox extension, but that one didnt work either (was for an old version of FF)

Ideas?

I'll be looking around myself too, and when I find something I'll post.

[U.S./Russia Cyber Arms Control Talks]

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/usrussia_cyber.html

U.S./Russia Cyber Arms Control Talks

Now this interesting:
The United States has begun talks with Russia and a United Nations arms control committee about strengthening Internet security and limiting military use of cyberspace.

[...]

The Russians have held that the increasing challenges posed by military activities to civilian computer networks can be best dealt with by an international treaty, similar to treaties that have limited the spread of nuclear, chemical and biological weapons. The United States had resisted, arguing that it was impossible to draw a line between the commercial and military uses of software and hardware.

[...]

A State Department official, who was not authorized to speak about the talks and requested anonymity, disputed the Russian characterization of the American position. While the Russians have continued to focus on treaties that may restrict weapons development, the United States is hoping to use the talks to increase international cooperation in opposing Internet crime. Strengthening defenses against Internet criminals would also strengthen defenses against any military-directed cyberattacks, the United States maintains.

[...]

The American interest in reopening discussions shows that the Obama administration, even in absence of a designated Internet security chief, is breaking with the Bush administration, which declined to talk with Russia about issues related to military attacks using the Internet.


I'm not sure what can be achieved here, but talking is always good.

Another cyberwar policy post: http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/12/cyberwarfare_po.html

[Prisoner's Dilemma and Mechanical Turk]

http://behind-the-enemy-lines.blogspot.com/2009/12/prisoners-dilemma-and-mechanical-turk.html

(quick copy/paste, click the link for proper formatting, in-text links, and such)

Prisoner's Dilemma and Mechanical Turk

I have been reading lately, about the differences between mathematical models of behavior and real human behavior. So, I decided to try on Mechanical Turk the classical game theory model of Prisoner's Dilemma. (See also Brendan's nice explanations and diagrams if you have never been exposed to game theory before.)

From Wikipedia:

In its classical form, the prisoner's dilemma ("PD") is presented as follows:

Two suspects are arrested by the police. The police have insufficient evidence for a conviction, and, having separated both prisoners, visit each of them to offer the same deal. If one testifies (defects from the other) for the prosecution against the other and the other remains silent (cooperates with the other), the betrayer goes free and the silent accomplice receives the full 10-year sentence. If both remain silent, both prisoners are sentenced to only six months in jail for a minor charge. If each betrays the other, each receives a five-year sentence. Each prisoner must choose to betray the other or to remain silent. Each one is assured that the other would not know about the betrayal before the end of the investigation. How should the prisoners act?

If we assume that each player cares only about minimizing his or her own time in jail, then the prisoner's dilemma forms a non-zero-sum game in which two players may each cooperate with or defect from (betray) the other player. In this game, as in all game theory, the only concern of each individual player (prisoner) is maximizing his or her own payoff, without any concern for the other player's payoff. The unique equilibrium for this game is a Pareto-suboptimal solution, that is, rational choice leads the two players to both play defect, even though each player's individual reward would be greater if they both played cooperatively.

My first attempt was to post to Mechanical Turk this dilemma in a setting of the following game:

You are playing a game together with a stranger. Each of you have two choices to play: "trust" or "cheat".
If both of you play "trust", you win $30,000 each.
If both of you play "cheat", you get $10,000 each.
If one player plays "trust" and the other plays "cheat", then the player that played "cheat" gets $50,000 and the player that played "trust" gets $0.
You cannot communicate during the game, and CANNOT see the final action of the other player. Both actions will be revealed simultaneously.

What would you play? "Cheat" or "Trust"?

Basic game theory predicts that the participants will choose "cheat" resulting in a suboptimal equilibrium. However, participants on Mechanical Turk did not behave like that. Instead, 48 out of the 100 participants decided to play "trust", which is above the 33% observed in the lab experiments of (Shafir and Tversky, 1992).

Next, I wanted to make the experiment more realistic. Would anything change if instead of playing an imaginary game, I promised actual monetary benefits to the participants? So, I modified the game, and asked the participants to play against each other. Here is the revised task description.

You are playing a game against another Turker. Your action here will be matched with an action of another Mechanical Turk worker.

Each of you have two choices to play: "trust" or "cheat".
If both of you play "trust", you both get a bonus of $0.30.
If both of you play "cheat", you both get a bonus of $0.10.
If one Turker plays "trust" and the other plays "cheat", then the Turker that played "cheat" gets a bonus of $0.50 and the Turker that played "trust" gets nothing.
What is your action? "Cheat" or "Trust"?

I asked 120 participants to play the game, paying just 1 cent for the participation. Interestingly enough, I had a perfect split in the results. 60 Turkers decided to cheat, and 60 Turkers decided to cheat. The final result was 20 pairs of trust-trust, 20 pairs of cheat-cheat, and 20 pairs of cheat-trust.

In other words, the theory prediction that people will be locked in a non-optimal equilibrium was not correct, neither in the "imaginary" game, nor in the case where the workers had to gain some actually monetary benefit.

Finally, I decided to change the payoff matrix, and replicate the structure of the TV game show "Friend or Foe". There, participants get $50K each if they cooperate, $0 if they do not, and if one chooses trust and the other cheat, the "cheat" gets $100K and the "trust" gets $0.

You are playing a game together with a stranger.

Each of you have two choices to play: "trust" or "cheat".
If both of you play "trust", you both win $50,000.
If both of you play "cheat", you both get $0.
If one player plays "trust" and the other plays "cheat", then the player that played "cheat" gets $100,000 and the player that played "trust" gets $0.
You cannot communicate during the game, and CANNOT see the final action of the other player. Both actions will be revealed simultaneously.

What would you play? "Cheat" or "Trust"?

Interestingly enough, in this setting ALL 100 players ended up playing "trust", which was quite different from the previous game and from the behavior of the players in the TV show, where, in almost 25% of the played games, both players chose "cheat" ending up with $0, and in 25% of the games the players collaborated and played "trust" getting $50K each.

So, in my final attempt, I asked Turkers to play this "Friend of Foe" game, having monetary incentives. Here is the task that I posted on Mechanical Turk.

You are playing a game against another Turker. Your action here will be matched with an action of another Mechanical Turk worker.

Each of you have two choices to play: "trust" or "cheat".
If both of you play "trust", you both get a bonus of $0.50.
If both of you play "cheat", you both get $0.
If one Turker plays "trust" and the other plays "cheat", then the Turker that played "cheat" gets a bonus of $1.00 and the Turker that played "trust" gets nothing.
What is your action? "Cheat" or "Trust"?

In this game, 33% of the users decided to cheat, resulting in 6/50 games where both players got nothing, 23/50 games where both players got a 50 cent bonus, and 21/50 games where one player got $1 and the other player got nothing.

I found the difference in behavior between the imaginary game and the actual one to be pretty interesting. Also, the deviation from the predictions of the game-theoretic model is striking.

Although I am not the first to actually observe that, this deviation got me wondering: Why do we use elaborate game theory models for modeling user behavior, when not even the simplest such models do not correspond to reality? How can someone take seriously the concept of an equilibrium when a game, introduced in the intro chapter of every game theory textbook, simply does not correspond to reality? Do we really understand the limitations of our tools, or mathematical and analytic elegance end up being more important than reality?

AND DELICIOUS FRESH YOUNG GOUDA CHEESE

AND TWO SLICES OF CRAPPY DUTCH BREAD *BUT STILL WHOLEGRAIN AND HAS SESAME SEEDS ON IT)

AND THEN YOU CAREFULLY MELT HALF OF THE FAT IN A SMALL FRYING PAN

AND THEN YOU APPLY THE OTHER HALF TO THE OUTSIDE OF THE CHEESE SANDWICH

AND THEN YOU PLACE IT IN THE PAN, FAT SIDE UP

MOVE IT AROUND SOAK THAT BITCH SOAK IT YEAH

WHEN THE TOP FAT IS LIQUID AND DRAINING INTO THE BREAD

TURN IT

FRY

TURN IT

FRY

GOLDEN BROWN?

NO --> FRY

YES --> EAT





ADVICE: SLICE DIAGONALLY AND USE KETCHUP FOR DIP

moved to a separate thread cause I wanna get you guys feedback on this without jacking BAI's thread:

my current personal pet project is mapping the WiFi signals all over town, here. basically whenever I have to go somewhere in town, I start NetStumbler and config my netbook so it doesn't shut down as you close the lid. and then it starts recording whatever networks it comes across as I'm on my bike. and there's a fucking shitload of them. and no it doesn't log in or crak any of them (NetStumbler doesn't do that, it's a diagnostic tool), it just logs the time, MAC, SSID, signal strength and flags (mostly whether it's encrypted or not) whenever it catches a packet or something.

Currently I got about 1500 different network routers in about 100k datapoints. I wonder how much I could get if I would actually bike criss-cross all over town, since these are just the routes I normally ride, which must be less than 10% of the area.

of course I'm going about it entirely the wrong way. see my netbook doesn't have any kind of GPS in it. my friends and everybody wonder why I'm wasting my time with this (answer: it's FUN damnit), cause there's phones that have both WiFi and GPS and it would be a lot more useful to use something like that. It's true, I could create a proper "heat map" of the WiFi networks in this city.

but alas, my netbook does not have GPS so I can't. instead of that, I just have a series of timestamps, MAC addresses and signal strengths to play with, and I'm writing Python scripts to crunch the numbers and see if I can plot graphs of those things that make any (spatial) sense.

I mean, on my bike, I usually travel in a straight line, at a relatively constant speed. And two networks I got signal from within the same couple of seconds should be near eachother, right? So from that I should potentially be able to deduce some kinds of spatial relationships between the networks. Add to that some of the SSIDs people have named conveniently to their street address, and I could pin those on a map, and sort of fit the others around it.

So I fed a rough approximation of what I supposed could be some kind of distance measure into a funky tool called GraphViz which is a powerful commandline thing to turn textfiles describing graphs (nodes and edges) into SVG or JPG other images. And it even came with two physics spring-based models, which is what I was planning to do myself (spring attraction between networks that are "near" eachother, and repulsion for all the others).

Unfortunately what came out was a huge jumbled mess of networks. It looked extremely cool, but the complexity of the resulting SVG nearly brought my computer to its knees and it didn't really make a whole lot of sense.

Except that, apparently, there are no "Islands". Nearly all networks, save no more than ~5 lone ones or tiny clusters of 2-3, all networks could potentially "see" eachother via-via! So that means that thing about "Internet2" in the other thread, if you'd reprogram the firmware of all the wifi routers in town to be all sweet and route traffic to eachother in P2P kind of fashion, they would actually form a city-wide wireless network and you wouldn't even need any ISP for that connectivity.

add a few beamers and dishes and soon you'd have all the major cities in NL in a custom-made, completely free, decentralized and independent network.

but that's just fantasy. but also about the only cool thing I found out via all this data, that it is in theory possible

So right now I'm playing with all sorts of ways to filter and process that data. Unfortunately the signal-strength numbers are as good as useless. I have no idea what unit they are in, it doesn't seem like dBmW. I guess it's still logarithmic, but I'm assuming dBmW times an arbitrary scale for now. Which makes any kind of inverse-square law distance estimation kinda impossible.
In addition to that, it's not very accurate, noises up and down a lot, and I have the feeling (but not checked properly yet) that it doesn't even roughly "fade in" and "fade out" the way you'd expect if you ride past a wifi router. Once I get around to plotting some proper "whoosh" graphs, of networks whooshing by, and I notice the signal strength doesn't go up and down like it should I'm just gonna ignore that part of the data and go purely with timing intervals when networks are picked up relative to eachother.

which is another weird thing, aside from the signal strength, if you're closer to a network, you also get more packets per second from that network. so that's two different things to measure proximity. I'm not entirely sure on how to combine the two, except just multiply or add them or something and see what happens. for instance what would be up with a network with high signal strength but only a few packets per minute? or a constant stream of low signal packets? of course it remains to be seen if those situations actually occur in my dataset.

anyway, funky graph plotting and matplotlib FTW

GODMILJAAR!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EqbgK7AB0Bo (1:19s)

KABOUTER WESLEY is a VERY ANGRY BELGIAN GNOME

Ok so you may not understand what they're saying cause it's in Flemmish/Dutch.

But if I translate the first bit you may perhaps get some idea about what's going on. The guy with the moustache and tie is a representative of the phone company and informs Kabouter Wesley that they are currently doing "technical maintenance" and that in the meanwhile he should use his freezer to make calls. (that's typical Belgian absurdism, if it doesn't make sense, it should make as little sense as possible)

Want more? There's about 15-20 different short animations: http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=kabouter+wesley

https://norbt.com/G7SX2X

cool thing is, the encryption [as calced from the answer to the question] is performed only client side in the browser, so norbt server only ever stores encrypted stuff, not even the key phrase (except a 6bit hash of it, to facilitate offline checking, but this is mere usability), so unless norbt is lying or compromised it is pretty secure.

also9 it's fun cause you can store bits of text that can only be read by someone who kinows the answer to the question.

and it even shows a 2D barcode of the URL, except nobody can read those cause mobile platforms are too closed source but otgherwise you could print them on posters and shit

loosely based on the "bradl" recipe I learned from my austrian ex, but IMPROVED WITH BACON

pork chops, 2 pieces of shoulder, 2 pieces of rib. cut out the bones, saving them in the freezer to make soup some day.

coat an oven dish with butter, slice onions into slices and cover the bottom of the dish with that.

rub the meat with salt pepper and loads of garlic. I would have used some caraway seeds if I had them, but I didn't. place the meats into the oven dish, on top of the onions.

small bacon strips. these are like not the really thin slices of bacon but more like bits, of sorta smoked bacon, real cheap. cover the meat with these bits.

place in oven at a suitable temperature.

now the bacon fat will drip all over the meats and it'll be awesome.

for extra awesome you now prepare some stock (from powder or cubes), and in about 20 mins or so pour this over the meat stuffs.

and then you wait another while.

and then you pour the fat stock awesome juice over the starting-to-get-crispy bacon bits and meats.

and wait

and then do it again

and wait

until it's either done or you cannot wait no longer

AND THEN IT IS MEGA DELICIOUS

enjoy!

(continuing from http://www.principiadiscordia.com/forum/index.php?topic=23112.msg784847#msg784847 )

you know it's almost refreshing to see some old clips of Pim Fortuyn recently, whose political viewpoints I despised just as much back then, but fuck, he was intelligent, had a point, and damn, charisma too.
do you think Wilders is doing it just for power and would he shout something different if that was necessary or does he really truly believe he needs to singularly focus on battling the Islam?

did you know btw, that his party only has one member, himself? nobody else can become member, and any other seats in government are appointed by him only. if a person holding such a seat happens to disagree with the Wilders Party's viewpoint, they can either leave and be replaced by someone appointed by Wilders himself or split up from the party and keep the seat until the next elections. Wilders says this is to prevent the viewpoints of his party to become diluted like what happened to Fortuyn's party. I think it's fucking scary

http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2009/11/public_reaction.html

For the last five years we have researched the connection between times of terrorist threats and public opinion. In a series of tightly designed experiments, we expose subsets of research participants to a news story not unlike the type that aired last week. We argue that attitudes, evaluations, and behaviors change in at least three politically-relevant ways when terror threat is more prominent in the news. Some of these transformations are in accord with conventional wisdom concerning how we might expect the public to react. Others are more surprising, and more disconcerting in their implications for the quality of democracy.

One way that public opinion shifts is toward increased expressions of distrust. In some ways this strategy has been actively promoted by our political leaders. The Bush administration repeatedly reminded the public to keep eyes and ears open to help identify dangerous persons. A strategy of vigilance has also been endorsed by the new secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano.

Nonetheless, the breadth of increased distrust that the public puts into practice is striking. Individuals threatened by terrorism become less trusting of others, even their own neighbors. Other studies have shown that they become less supportive of the rights of Arab and Muslim Americans. In addition, we found that such effects extend to immigrants and, as well, to a group entirely remote from the subject of terrorism: gay Americans. The specter of terrorist threat creates ruptures in our social fabric, some of which may be justified as necessary tactics in the fight against terrorism and others that simply cannot.

Another way public opinion shifts under a terrorist threat is toward inflated evaluations of certain leaders. To look for strong leadership makes sense: crises should impel us toward leadership bold enough to confront the threat and strong enough to protect us from it. But the public does more than call for heroes in times of crisis. It projects leadership qualities onto political figures, with serious political consequences.

In studies conducted in 2004, we found that individuals threatened by terrorism perceived George W. Bush as more charismatic and stronger than did non-threatened individuals. This projection of leadership had important consequences for voting decisions. Individuals threatened by terrorism were more likely to base voting decisions on leadership qualities rather than on their own issue positions or partisanship. You did read that correctly. Threatened individuals responded with elevated evaluations of Bush's capacity for leadership and then used those inflated evaluations as the primary determinant in their voting decision.

These findings did not just occur among Republicans, but also among Independents and Democrats. All partisan groups who perceived Bush as more charismatic were also less willing to blame him for policy failures such as faulty intelligence that led to the war in Iraq.

[...]

A third way public opinion shifts in response to terrorism is toward greater preferences for policies that protect the homeland, even at the expense of civil liberties, and active engagement against terrorists abroad. Such a strategy was advocated and implemented by the Bush administration. Again, however, we found that preferences shifted toward these objectives regardless of one's partisan stripes and, as well, outside the U.S.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/library/news/2009/11/mil-091102-afps05.htm

Ghost imaging is a technique that allows a high-resolution camera to produce an image of an object that the camera itself cannot see. It uses two sensors: one that looks at a light source and another that looks at the object. These sensors point in different directions. For example, the camera can face the sun and the light meter can face an object.