Topics

[Facebook: Are You Interfacing with the Russian Mafia & KGB?]

Facebook: Are You Interfacing with the Russian Mafia & KGB?

Andrey Ternovskiy, one of Russia's wunderkind Internet entrepreneurs, is being courted by venture capitalists the world over. To get access to cash he needn't leave Moscow, but he doesn't want to do business with the billionaire oligarchs tied to the Russian Mafia and Putin's KGB-FSB machine in the Kremlin.

So, earlier this year the 18-year-old founder of Chatroullet, a webcam-based conversation website, came to the United States to meet with investors. Ternovskiy didn't tell anyone his itinerary. Nevertheless, when he arrived in New York, there was a chauffer-driven limo waiting for him, courtesy of Yuri Milner and Digital Sky Technologies (DST), Russia's hottest investment company.

Ternovskiy reportedly has rebuffed DST's efforts, describing them as "harrassing and hounding."

Ryan Tate at gawker.com appropriately describes the DST limo episode as "creepy." However, the experience goes beyond "creepy," illustrating the nexus between Russia's "business" community and it's intelligence structures. How did DST know Ternovskiy's flight schedule? There are a number of ways that DST could have gotten that information, nearly all of which would be illegal in any country where the "rule of law" is more than merely an empty slogan. But considering DST's high-level ties to Vladimir Putin's KGB-FSB police-state apparatus, obtaining Ternovskiy's airline itinerary must have been child's play.

The Russian teenager is demonstrating better business sense and greater ethical judgment than American corporations, such as social network behemoth Facebook and Wall Street titan Goldman Sachs. Over the past year, DST has made several large investments in Facebook, and now holds a ten percent share in the company, which boasts more than 500 million users worldwide — and continues to grow at a phenomenal rate.

DST, which has also invested heavily in Zynga, the online social network game developer (FarmVille, FrontierVille, Mafia Wars [above], etc.), and Groupon, a deal-of-the-day website, has a billion dollars to invest in Internet companies and, reportedly, is also looking at buying into Twitter.

DST has chosen Goldman Sachs for its initial public offering next year. The choice of Goldman Sachs (GS) is not surprising, as GS already owns an undisclosed stake in DST and, aside from the company's Russian co-founders, Yuri Milner and Gregory Finger,  all three of DST's partners (Alexander Tamas, Verdi Israelian, and John Lindfors) are former GS executives.

Read More

http://www.securitynewsdaily.com/anonymous-hackers-child-porn-sites-1260/

So I got a reeeeeeeeeeally big monitor. 24 inches and 1920x1080 pixels.

All of my old desktop wallpapers are 1024x600, my netbook's resolution.

Anyone got some cool high res thingy?

http://www.supermagnete.de/eng/SALE-038

I'm scared

Check the video and be blown away:

http://www.cgchannel.com/2011/10/cool-tech-demo-match-3d-models-into-archive-photos/

I have to say, I can hardly believe this is possible. Going to have to read the paper.

I forgot if this had already been posted:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20111014/09164516365/worst-kept-secret-now-confirmed-government-was-very-involved-helping-riaampaa-negotiate-six-strikes.shtml

https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/dfydM2Cnepe

This kind of puts a new spin on the saying "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic".

http://insertcredit.com/2011/09/22/who-killed-videogames-a-ghost-story/

About the psychology and mathematics of hooking people on FarmVille.

A delightful story:

http://life.salon.com/2011/10/13/the_tribesman_who_facebook_friended_me/singleton/

Yes it's a littlebit heavy on the "noble savage" meme, but that doesn't necessarily need to ruin an otherwise awesome thing.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-17852_3-20120086-71/1-year-old-thinks-a-magazine-is-a-broken-ipad/

Be sure to watch the video.

It's kinda cute and kinda terrifying.

http://www.sciencenews.org/view/generic/id/335168/title/Columbus_blamed_for_Little_Ice_Age

this is quite amazing.

it also puts the "no evidence humans causing climate change" folks in a tough spot.

[NYTimes Sues The Federal Government For Refusing To Reveal Its Secret Interpretation Of The PATRIOT Act]

Am unsure whether this has been discussed yet:

NYTimes Sues The Federal Government For Refusing To Reveal Its Secret Interpretation Of The PATRIOT Act
from the secret-laws-and-secret-interpretations dept

We've been covering for a while now how Senators Ron Wyden and Mark Udall have been very concerned over the secret interpretation the feds have of one piece of the PATRIOT Act. They've been trying to pressure the government into publicly explaining how they interpret the law, because they believe that it directly contrasts how most of the public (and many elected officials) believe the feds are interpreting the law. While the two Senators continue to put pressure on the feds and to hint at the feds' interpretation, just the fact that the government won't even explain its own interpretation of the law seems ridiculous.

(click for rest of article)

http://patentexaminer.org/2011/09/innovatios-infringement-suit-rampage-expands-to-corporate-hotels/

oh, America ...

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/09/2011-ig-nobel-awards-go-to-beetle-on-beer-bottle-sex-decision-making-while-needing-to-pee-others.ars

For those in the Boston area, a second part of the Ig Nobel tradition is that the winners give public lectures on their research the Saturday after the ceremony. This year's lectures will take place at MIT's Building 26, Room 100 at 1:00 PM on Saturday, October 1st. Admission is free, but seating is limited.

You can still make it! See the Ignobel prizes, it looks like a shitload of fun!!

There's lectures from Japanese researchers that made a wasabi-based fire alarm, and the mayor of Vilnius, Lithuania, who battled illegal parking by driving a tank over them, and more great stuff!

As I already started a "Security Thread" somewhere, I figure I might as well make a "Privacy Thread". So here.



Logging out of Facebook is not enough:

http://nikcub.appspot.com/logging-out-of-facebook-is-not-enough

Pretty fucked up. That's NOT what a "logout" button is supposed to do.

As you (hopefully) are aware, if you have a Facebook account, every website that has a Facebook "like" button (that's most blogs and news sites, etc), this "like" button, the little thumbs-up icon, well, imagine it's a tiny little Facebook-controlled cyber tracking bug. Everywhere you see it and you're logged in to Facebook with the same browser, everywhere you go, this thumbs-up icon tracking bug will send a bleep to Facebook telling them what site you just visited and they'll know what account you have, whether your friends visited the same site, etc etc.

Well, if that's not fucked up enough, I mean, it should be, but you could say people are in control of it cause they're logged in, right? (Even though Facebook doesn't really like to publicize this little fact)

Except that now it turns out, if you "log out" on Facebook, you'd assume it just wipes your FB cookies and severs the link between you, Facebook and your account, right? Wrong!! Instead they have like 10 cookies, they delete few of them, refresh some others, give you two new ones, and leave the rest alone. The end result of this is that the cookie with your Account ID, the one that links you to your FB account is still there. So basically FB marks you as "logged out" so nobody can do anything with your FB account (that's good), but at the same time it keeps the cookie so even though you're logged out, FB can continue to keep on identifying you on pretty much every website you visit on the web, whether you are logged out or not.

The only solution is to actually delete your Facebook cookies.

The other solution is, some browsers (Firefox, Opera, Chrome, not sure about IE) have a "private browsing" feature, you open a tab, and the browser keeps all the cookies from that tab separate from the rest of your browsing and if you close the tab it dumps the cookies alltogether. I would suggest you dump all your Facebook cookies right now, and only log on to Facebook anymore via a "private browsing" feature (I believe Chrome calls it "incognito mode").

addition: if you wanna read the article, don't be put off by the blocks of cookie codes just read the rest, he explains what's going on and the cookie code is just provided as a sort of "screenshot" of what's going on inside the browser.

Thought you might find this interesting:

http://www-cs-students.stanford.edu/~amitp/game-programming/polygon-map-generation/

it's kinda scarce on the algorithms behind each step, but I seem to understand what they're doing in the majority of them.

assuming you're familiar with the concept of Voronoi cells? if not, cool stuff, look into it. Also how they're the dual of delauney triangulation, makes them even cooler

I got a lot of chicken bones saved up in my freezer and I want to make stock tomorrow.

But I forgot to buy celery. I got onions and carrots, but the proper mire-poix also includes celery.

I read a recipe by a guy (that slaughtered his own cock) who just used carrots and onions, though he also added a bunch of garden herbs, which I don't have (except dried ones).

Shall I wait until monday and I can buy celery or shall I make stock tomorrow?

(the reason why I doubted buying celery is cause you can only buy it in large portions, I know, freeze it, I should have)

THE USB TYPEWRITER

just in case you're not yet convinced that this is utter crap and whoever buys it completely deserves wasting $500 on it (kudos to the inventor!) because real old typewriters are so cool and authentic and such--I thought that until I watched the first 30s of the video on that site.

Especially the music.

It's like that new hipster-tragicomedy on HBO, Bored to Death, I bet the main character would love to not write his book on an iPad with this device plugged in it.

Fuck, the inventor should try and get it product-placed in there, he'll make a FORTUNE!!

http://www.drawastickman.com/

this is amazing. it's like a game, except you draw the main character and everything he does.

[We can remove the email address from your phone account to stop the automatic alerts, but first we need to verify that we have the right account, please forward us your account phone number and the account PIN. Once we have that, we can get right to business and get you on your way!]

As some of you may remember, I bought a throwaway "burner phone" during my holiday in the USA.

I was stupid enough to give Virgin a real email address, because, well, Dutch companies usually stop emailing you if you ask them.

Virgin apparently does not. As my credit ran out, and consequently expired, I got increasingly more urgent sounding emails about what a brilliant idea it would be to put some more dollars into the account of a phone that's pretty much bricked in Europe cause it has the wrong frequency bands, let alone they wouldn't accept my European Mastercard because it didn't have a USA ZIP-code attached to it (I used Cram's creditcard to put $10 into the acct).

When I got an email with the subject "YOUR PHONE NEEDS YOU" (seriously?), I decided it was enough:


From: no-reply@virginmobileusa.com
To: Triple Zero
Subject: YOUR PHONE NEEDS YOU

Hi TRIPLE ZERO,

Since you haven't added money to your account, your phone has stopped
working. Top-Up now so you don't lose your phone number and to keep
talking and texting.

Remember to add at least $20 every 90 days to keep your payLo account
working. That's even if you have money in your balance.

You can add money to your account using a debit/credit card or PayPal
account, or by buying Virgin Mobile Top-Up cards, which are available
from over 100,000 locations nationwide. When you're ready to Top-Up, hit
the Top-Up button on your phone ($) or log in to your account at
www.virginmobileusa.com <http://www.virginmobileusa.com/>.


Thank you,
payLo by Virgin Mobile

This message is about your phone number (914) 564-3680.


From: Triple Zero
To: Virgin Support
Subject: Re: YOUR PHONE NEEDS YOU

Can you please stop emailing me, I just got that phone as a temporary phone during my holiday in the USA. I'm never going to use it again and it doesn't even have the right frequency bands to function in Europe.

Thank you.


From: Our Team at Virgin Mobile USA
To: Triple Zero
Subject: YOUR PHONE NEEDS YOU [Incident: 110918-000009]

Hello Triple Zero,

Thanks for contacting Virgin Mobile Customer Care. Let me extend my apologies for any inconvenience this has caused.

We can remove the email address from your phone account to stop the automatic alerts, but first we need to verify that we have the right account, please forward us your account phone number and the account PIN. Once we have that, we can get right to business and get you on your way!

If you would like to remove the email address by yourself, you can complete it at www.virginmobileusa.com. In case that you would rather cancel the account, please give us a call to our international number (215) 757-9645 for assistance.

Feel free to respond to this email. You can reach us Monday through Sunday from 4am-9pm PST.

Thanks,

Roger
Virgin Mobile At Your Service
www.virginmobileusa.com


From: Triple Zero
To: Virgin Support
Subject: Re: YOUR PHONE NEEDS YOU [Incident: 110918-000009]

The phone number is 914 564 3680. I have no idea what the PIN is, but you can just remove the email address triplezerosemail@gmail.com from your database, you can tell it's mine because I'm the one mailing you from it.


From: Feedback@virginmobileusa.com
To: Triple Zero
Subject: Virgin Mobile USA Customer Satisfaction Survey

Hi Triple Zero,

We noticed you recently contacted our Customer Care Team and corresponded with one of our Advisors.  How was your experience? We want to make sure your voice is heard, so please take a moment to fill out this short survey. Also, please take advantage of the free form fields to provide us with details regarding the Advisor you last corresponded with and your overall Virgin Mobile USA experience. We want to hear it all!

If you have not recieved a response to your original email inquiry please check your SPAM or Junk folder. Also, please add oiur email address "ourteam@mailwc.custhelp.com" to your safe email list.

Click here to take this survey.

Sincerely,

Your Virgin Mobile USA Customer Care Team


From: Our Team at Virgin Mobile USA
To: Triple Zero
Subject: YOUR PHONE NEEDS YOU [Incident: 110918-000009]

Hello Triple Zero,

Thanks for contacting Virgin Mobile Customer Care.

We can certainly help resolve your question but first we must verify we have the right account. Can you please respond and provide your Virgin Mobile Account PIN (six digit numeric security code). If you don't remember it, that's fine because you have also a back up question that is: What is your pet's name?.

Once we have that, we can right to business and get you on your way!

Hopefully you can understand you wouldn't want just anyone getting your private information. Without the information requested we can't divulge information through email, it's a privacy thing.

Hope this helps. If you need additional assistance, feel free to let us know how we can assist further or contact us at 1-888-322-1122 (or *VM from your handset). You can reach us Monday through Sunday from 4am-9pm PST.

Thanks,

Edwin
Virgin Mobile At Your Service
www.virginmobileusa.com


From: Triple Zero
To: Virgin Support
Subject: Re: YOUR PHONE NEEDS YOU [Incident: 110918-000009]

Hm. I believe my pet's name is "Burp Castle", hope that's right.

If it's not, then I'm obviously not qualified to receive all these emails about this phone account either.

So it seems only reasonable that you stop emailing me, regardless.

I await your refutal of this unstoppable logic.


From: Our Team at Virgin Mobile USA
To: Triple Zero
Subject: YOUR PHONE NEEDS YOU [Incident: 110918-000009]

Dear triplezerosemail@gmail.com,

Thanks for sending us an email. We received your message dated 09/21/2011 05:10 AM .

Our team is looking at your email right now. Due to higher than normal email volume recently, we will respond to your email within 72 hours. We apologize for any inconvenience.

In the event you need to contact us regarding your original message, please refer to the Incident # 110921-000124 .This will help us locate and review your correspondence with us.

Thanks once again for writing. We'll be in touch very soon.

Virgin Mobile USA Customer Support.





TL/DR: They won't stop mailing me because they can't be sure that the person they're constantly emailing actually is the person they should be emailing.

This ... o_O

from http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/kkdwv/reddit_whats_the_most_heartless_thing_youve_ever/c2kzm9y

When I was a little kid, my parents rented a room to a really strange guy named Frank. He was one of my father's childhood friends, and my father always felt somewhat responsible for how Frank turned out, so the rent ($20 a month) was really just a way for Frank not to feel like a tool. He eventually got his act together, got married, and moved in with his wife. But he left some stuff in his room, and my dad said I could have any of it I wanted. There were some cool knives, a few porn mags hidden in a stack of gun magazines, and most notably, a shoebox labeled "Dog Penises". There were 47 of them in the box, each one a leathery skin stretched over candle, with the wick coming out of what I assumed was the pee hole. To this day, I am not sure if they were actually dog penises, but they sure looked like the real deal. My younger brother's birthday was coming up, so I decided to keep the box of penises, so that when I made him a birthday cake, I could use them as candles.

I shared a room with my brother, so I had to be careful where I hid the box. I didn't want him to find it, because that would ruin the surprise. I realized that there was a panel in the ceiling of our closet that led to the crawlspace behind the attic. It was full of insulation and there was some ducting for the air conditioners, so there was no reason for my brother (or anyone else, really) to go up there.

A few days before my brother's birthday, my dad decided to take us all camping, and I forgot all about the box.

When I was 14 years old, my family and I moved to California. A family friend bought our old house. Peter, one of my good friends, started living in the room I used to share with my brother. We kept in touch via email (Juno, yay!), and we talked once a month on the phone.

When I was 16, I finally had the nerve to ask Meagan, a girl I liked, to a school dance. I mentioned it to Peter, and I jokingly said that I needed to go buy condoms. I admit, it was a lame joke, but Peter flipped out. The school system in Ohio had an "abstinence only" sex ed program, and I guess Peter took it pretty seriously. He told his parents that I was planning to have sex at the dance. His parents called my parents who called Meagan's parents, and needless to say, I didn't go to the dance. I was pretty mad at Peter for telling his parents, so I stopped talking to him.

A few months later, Peter's mom called me. She said that Peter was really upset that I wasn't returning his emails, and that Peter only wanted what was best for me, and that I should make up with him because he really had my best interests at heart.

As she was speaking to me, I had the greatest idea in the history of teenage revenge ideas. They still lived in my old house. Peter still lived in my old room. And there was probably still a fucking box of dog penises in the attic over Peter's room.

So I told her that Peter telling on me wasn't why I stopped talking to him. I told her that he admitted to me that he killed neighborhood dogs and kept parts of them in the attic over his closet.

What I didn't know was that starting a few months after I moved, there had been a string of pet disappearances in the neighborhood. Peter's mom freaked out. Before she hung up the phone, I heard her yell for Peter and his dad to "Get in the kitchen RIGHT NOW!!!!!"

Later that night, my mom got a call from Peter's mom. I overheard my mom say, "Oh my word!" several times. When she got off the phone, she told me that Peter was responsible for killing pets in our old neighborhood, and that he was a very sick child and that I wasn't allowed to talk to him any more.

I never heard from Peter again. I was given secondhand information from some people I still knew in Ohio that Peter's parents made him apologize to everyone whose pets had gone missing, and he had to see a therapist until he moved out of his parents' house. The last I heard, he had moved to Alaska.

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2011/09/optical-sensors-detect-single-molecules-by-hating-on-water.ars

[Tasks]

check it out, the website is pretty self-explanatory:

http://ifttt.com/wtf

quoting:
--------
Tasks
Put the internet to work for you by creating tasks that fit this simple structure:
if this then that
Think of all the things you could do if you were able to define any task as:  when something happens (this) then do something else (that).


Triggers
if  this  then that
The  this part of a task is the Trigger. Some example Triggers are "if I'm tagged in a photo on Facebook"  or  "if I tweet on Twitter."


Actions
if this then  that
The  that  part of a task is the Action. Some example Actions are  "then send me a text message"  or  "then create a status message on Facebook."


Channels
Triggers and Actions come from Channels. Channels are the unique services and devices you use every day. Some example channels:

Twitter 
Facebook 
Instagram
Email 
Phone Call 
Weather

All together now
When you put one channel's trigger together with another channel's action, that's a task! Here is a task that saves every new photo I take with Instagram to my Dropbox: (image)


Recipes
Create a recipe to share a task with friends. Here is a recipe for the task above: (other image)


On/Off
Tasks can be turned on and off. When turned back on, they pick up as if you had just created them.


Polling period
Tasks poll for new trigger data every  15  minutes.
==================

I actually haven't tried it yet myself, but I'm signing up. It seems super simple, and I bet you guys can use it for all sorts of insane creative stuff

The cool thing is, if you do this, you're actually computer-programming That's right, the basic building block in most computer programs is a whole chained linked series of "if this then that" rules.

Let me know if you do anything cool with it, I wonder what this baby can do!

Tomorrow's my birthday and I'm giving a party. Earlier this week I found a special offer on a bunch of chickenleg drumsticks that are sitting happily in my freezer right now.

I was thinking about roasting them in the oven or something, or perhaps even serving them cold, or at least prepared beforehand and then that I only have to heat them up.

It's not intended as a dinner meal, just for snacking or something, I'll also make hummus and various other things (probably salads with french bread).

I'm wondering, does anyone of you know a really good recipe for this? Since it's meant to be a snack, it would be great if they could eat it with their hands, so not covered in sauce or terribly greasy, maybe? Or maybe covered in sauce anyway and just hand the guests some paper napkins, I dunno.

A really good marinade? I have about one night and a day to let them soak (I'd have to take them from the freezer soon)

Or maybe a spice rub? Would that stick? Coat with egg and bread crumbs for crunchy coating? I don't have a deep fryer, just an oven, electric (plus optional hot air thing), it goes up to 250C (482F).

Wait a minute, I just remember I got a sort of smoking-bag filled with I dunno wood chips or stuff and you can put things in it and into the oven and it will smoke them. Would that be a good idea? (probably!) Any idea on spicing or flavourings that it would need? (garlic and chilli flakes, obviously)

https://diasp.org/

I seem to recall people being interested in this project (Nigel?), just picked this up from a blog comment somewhere, apparently Diaspora has now opened registration without needing an invite.

For anyone unaware, Diaspora is supposed to be a new open source decentralized P2P-style social network facebook and twitter replacement with actual proper privacy settings because it's not owned by a company that wants to sell your data, but just an open platform for a social network. It's decentralized, I'm not really sure how it works, I suppose the main infrastructure is just public stuff part of the project, but anyone that wishes to can set up their own server to add to the network because it's entirely open (thus making sure it can't get co-opted by some big corp selling your data after all).

http://www.scirra.com/

Some of you may be interested in this. Seems real easy to use. I remember people intending to build a flash game based on the WOMP vault or something? Well, this might be easier than Flash.

White American men in rural areas most likely to die during dumb macho stunts

...

fucking awesome:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/andygreenberg/2011/07/28/flying-drone-can-crack-wifi-networks-snoop-on-cell-phones/
http://www.kurzweilai.net/how-to-remotely-hack-into-wi-fi-networks-and-cell-phone-calls
http://rabbit-hole.org/

http://www.programmergeorge.com/george.aspx?c=57

and his alter ego, SUPER GEORGE

http://www.supergeorge.com/george.asp?c=-1&i=1564

Dunno if any of you have been following the recent madness about big companies buying eachother's patents or even buying patent portfolio's in order to scare other corporations not to sue them over patents because they'll sue back etc?

It's all about software patents BTW. Regular technology patents seem okay in my book, there's good reason for them being there. Software patents however tend to patent ridiculous things like online shopping carts, the ability to sell things on a mobile platform in an appstore, clicking on things signified by icons, etc etc (I could link to any of these but I don't feel like looking them up sorry).

I didn't really like the (now expired) patents on MP3 (encoding not decoding) and GIF (LZW) image compression, cause they gave me a lot of hassle when they were still active, but at least those are novel technologies into which went a lot of research, so I can understand their reasons for existing. Even though I'd have preferred if they would have made them public.

Also, at least for MP3 and GIF we (computational science people believing in openness) had the ability to construct our own compression methods and release those to the public. So we got OGG and AAC for audio, and PNG for lossless image compression.

But the current software patent idiocy pretty much guarantees that no small player will ever be able to build their own mobile platform. I mean, even Google is struggling with the patent trolls and they've been spending BILLIONS of dollars buying their own patent portfolio for leverage as to be able to keep selling their Android mobile platform. That's billions dollars wasted, that aren't going into development for better Android software, but will of course end up with the consumer paying for them.

It even goes so far as that small-time software development companies trying to make a living by building apps for the iPhone or Android platforms are getting harassed by patent trolls--patent trolls are relatively obscure companies that managed to file a shitload of patent applications 5-10 years ago about the most trivial shit, mostly employ IP lawyers and are currently sending scary notices to small software companies, who of course do not have the legal funds to go to court about this (not that they would win if they did) and are forced to settle for substantial amounts of money.

BTW the state of software patents in Europe is a bit better, but only barely, as there are a few shreds of common sense built into our patent law, somehow.

One of the many articles on this subject:

http://techcrunch.com/2011/08/19/terrible-cost-patents/

["The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee"]

"The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee"
by Honore de Balzac
translated from the French by Robert Onopa

Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale. Coffee roasts your insides. Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring. Think about it: although more grocery stores in Paris are staying open until midnight, few writers are actually becoming more spiritual.

But as Brillat-Savarin has correctly observed, coffee sets the blood in motion and stimulates the muscles; it accelerates the digestive processes, chases away sleep, and gives us the capacity to engage a little longer in the exercise of our intellects. It is on this last point, in particular, that I want to add my personal experience to Brillat-Savarin's observations.

Coffee affects the diaphragm and the plexus of the stomach, from which it reaches the brain by barely perceptible radiations that escape complete analysis; that aside, we may surmise that our primary nervous flux conducts an electricity emitted by coffee when we drink it. Coffee's power changes over time. [Italian composer Gioacchino] Rossini has personally experienced some of these effects as, of course, have I. "Coffee," Rossini told me, "is an affair of fifteen or twenty days; just the right amount of time, fortunately, to write an opera." This is true. But the length of time during which one can enjoy the benefits of coffee can be extended.

For a while - for a week or two at most - you can obtain the right amount of stimulation with one, then two cups of coffee brewed from beans that have been crushed with gradually increasing force and infused with hot water.

For another week, by decreasing the amount of water used, by pulverizing the coffee even more finely, and by infusing the grounds with cold water, you can continue to obtain the same cerebral power.

When you have produced the finest grind with the least water possible, you double the dose by drinking two cups at a time; particularly vigorous constitutions can tolerate three cups. In this manner one can continue working for several more days.

Finally, I have discovered a horrible, rather brutal method that I recommend only to men of excessive vigor, men with thick black hair and skin covered with liver spots, men with big square hands and legs shaped like bowling pins. It is a question of using finely pulverized, dense coffee, cold and anhydrous, consumed on an empty stomach. This coffee falls into your stomach, a sack whose velvety interior is lined with tapestries of suckers and papillae. The coffee finds nothing else in the sack, and so it attacks these delicate and voluptuous linings; it acts like a food and demands digestive juices; it wrings and twists the stomach for these juices, appealing as a pythoness appeals to her god; it brutalizes these beautiful stomach linings as a wagon master abuses ponies; the plexus becomes inflamed; sparks shoot all the way up to the brain. From that moment on, everything becomes agitated. Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; on imagination's orders, sharpshooters sight and fire; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink - for the nightly labor begins and ends with torrents of this black water, as a battle opens and concludes with black powder.

I recommended this way of drinking coffee to a friend of mine, who absolutely wanted to finish a job promised for the next day: he thoughthe'd been poisoned and took to his bed, which he guarded like a married man. He was tall, blond, slender and had thinning hair; he apparently had a stomach of papier-mache. There has been, on my part, a failure of observation.

When you have reached the point of consuming this kind of coffee, then become exhausted and decide that you really must have more, even though you make it of the finest ingredients and take it perfectly fresh, you will fall into horrible sweats, suffer feebleness of the nerves, and undergo episodes of severe drowsiness. I don't know what would happen if you kept at it then: a sensible nature counseled me to stop at this point, seeing that immediate death was not otherwise my fate. To be restored, one must begin with recipes made with milk and chicken and other white meats: finally the tension on the harp strings eases, and one returns to the relaxed, meandering, simple-minded, and cryptogamous life of the retired bourgeoisie.

The state coffee puts one in when it is drunk on an empty stomach under these magisterial conditions produces a kind of animation that looks like anger: one's voice rises, one's gestures suggest unhealthy impatience: one wants everything to proceed with the speed of ideas; one becomes brusque, ill-tempered about nothing. One actually becomes that fickle character, The Poet, condemned by grocers and their like. One assumes that everyone is equally lucid. A man of spirit must therefore avoid going out in public. I discovered this singular state through a series of accidents that made me lose, without any effort, the ecstasy I had been feeling. Some friends, with whom I had gone out to the country, witnessed me arguing about everything, haranguing with monumental bad faith. The following day I recognized my wrongdoing and we searched the cause. My friends were wise men of the first rank, and we found the problem soon enough: coffee wanted its victim.

Ed. note: Transcription credit to jaybabcock.com, from which I snitched the essay out of nervousness that it might disappear.

I don't use Google Chrome, but for those who do:

https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/khaoakmndhjandiaaadnjgnbchillcdj

Since the extension went viral it seems to be a bit overloaded though.

"Heello" pretty much copied Twitter's functionality and (it seems) even its design. Yet another Twitter clone?

... until a bunch of trolls showed up realizing how much fun it would be tweeting as Mark Zuckerberg or CNN Breaking News

http://waxy.org/2011/08/helloo_is_twitter_for_fakesters/

[Google Admits Handing over European User Data to US Intelligence Agencies]

It's not just Google BTW, all USA-based web corporations including the Amazon Cloud Storage, Microsoft Hotmail, etc. Time to try and find some EU-based alternatives to my favourite services, I guess.


Google Admits Handing over European User Data to US Intelligence Agencies

Google has admitted complying with requests from US intelligence agencies for data stored in its European data centers, most likely in violation of European Union data protection laws.

Gordon Frazer, Microsoft UK's managing director, made news headlines some weeks ago when he admitted that Microsoft can be compelled to share data with the US government regardless of where it is hosted in the world.

At the center of this problem is the USA PATRIOT ACT, which states that companies incorporated in the United States must hand over data administered by their foreign subsidiaries if requested.

Not only that, but they can be forced to keep quiet about it in order to avoid exposing active investigations and alert those targeted by the probes.

This situation poses a serious problem for companies like Microsoft, Google or Amazon, which offer cloud services around the world, because their subsidiaries must also respect local laws.

For example, European Union legislation requires companies to protect the personal information of EU citizens and this is clearly not something that Microsoft, Google, Amazon, or any of their EU customers can do.

This is not only a theoretical problem. According to German-language magazine WirtschaftsWoche [Google translate], a Google spokesperson confirmed that the company has complied with requests from US intelligence agencies for data stored in its European data centers.

The situation is likely to spark an official inquiry from the European Commission, with some members of the European Parliament already reacting to the stories. It's hard to foresee what kind of solution can be found at this point, but one thing's clear - US-based cloud providers operating in EU can be forced to break the law. European companies and government agencies that are using their services are also in a tough position.

[On The Subject Of Genocidal Rage]

Found on a blog. A rant against the idea of intellectual property. It's deliciously over-the-top and I didn't want to keep it from you guys

from https://humaniterations.wordpress.com/2011/07/20/on-the-subject-of-genocidal-rage/

On The Subject Of Genocidal Rage

The moment someone brings up "intellectual property" or the like my mind instantly goes to a place with terms like "cordwood" and "open graves", and it always has.  It's a struggle to reign myself back from that blood fury, made worse by my total incomprehension of why that would be the wrong response.  If someone tries to censor you you kill them until they can't censor you any more.  There's no other sensible response.

To govern the information one has access to or can send is to imprison one in the most fundamental way.  It claims dominion over one's contact with all external reality.  To rip away one's capacity to say, torrent books is akin to ripping away one's sense of smell or touch.  A massive branch of one's capacity to register and act.  It's viscerally heinous in a way that passing violations like brutality, betrayal and coercion pale before.  You can starve, beat or rape a person, you can enslave them at gunpoint towards some task, but chopping off their hands lest they write illicit 1s and 0s or ripping out their nose lest they discern your proprietary ingredients is its own realm of abomination.  No deeper hell is fathomable for an active mind than isolation from stimuli.  And no branch of interaction with the external universe is comparably critical to civilized society than communication.  Without the capacity to communicate, wholly and fully, there is no reason to respect the lives of others, no hope of resolution of conflict or domination save bloodshed.

When they can take your voice — when they can carve away what you can say and how you can say it — you've no recourse left but to take their lives.  Forget enlightened reasoning, even threats require a voice to speak them.  All that remains to be won is the victory of animals: elimination of the other.

If there's anything worse than sensory deprivation it would be the sort of domination intended not just to determine your actions but to reshape your thoughts.  "Intellectual Property" doesn't just attempt to sever the content and reach of 21st century communication, it decrees that merely having certain memories will be punished by brutal force.  The particular medium of course does not matter.  Hardly anyone uses our precious grey matter to store facts, experiences or detailed arguments anymore.  From paper journals and sketchpads we've moved to cybernetic augments.  Laptops and phones have become as critical and fundamental to our near-singularity minds as any other bodily organ.  But eidetic memory is now forbidden.  The moment we leave a movie theater the experience must be ripped from our minds by gunpoint leaving only the hollowest of impressions and afterimages, lest an .avi file in our silicon lobes deter them from potential profits.  This is considered "fair" because it only reduces us to the level of prehistoric primates.  When we leave a company they have the capacity to slice away our plans and ideas.  Our neural structures are not our own.  Those in power have begun a campaign whereby armed soldiers bust in our doors and murder us if we resist.

I try — I really do — to think of responses that don't involve the bodies of these most evil of men piled in the streets.  I want to believe that mathematics will simply leave the proponents of IP no more than shrill would-be-tyrants screeching about their "right" to profit.  But they control the cables.  And at the end of the day all our strategies are no more than chance and hope.  When communication itself is confined, whittled away at, it would be foolish to assume nonviolent possibilities reliant on communication will work.

I know our culture's priorities view violent resistance to censorship as 'disproportionate' rather than rational and inevitable.  I encounter their horrifyingly alien perspectives all the time ("but how will I have a middle-class lifestyle if I can't use a gang of thugs to beat up people who don't give me money every time they have or share thoughts similar to mine?").  I recognize that my outrage, if voiced, will place me outside the pale of most conversations.  And so, even though it makes no sense, I try to scale my rhetoric back to something far more tame than my actual feelings.

But all throughout these debates I remain snarling inside, straining at these pretenses, ready to slip outside the realm of communication they're laying siege to and start slitting throats.  Sometimes the most rational response is to stop pretending rational persuasion is a worthwhile frame of mind.  Anyone with an active mind who's ever been imprisoned or significantly abused knows the score.  Sometimes "thinking your way out" is a trap.  Sometimes the best approach is to simply kick, bite and scratch as much as you can on the off chance they die instead of you.

W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium, a group that works on and tries to define standards used on the Web. Such as the new HTML5 spec, CSS, XML, SVG and things like that. This is in order to promote interoperability between various applications (such as browsers) acting upon the data that is on the WWW. This way, when browsers adhere to the standards, webpages should look and function the same on whatever browser or OS you're using, which is nice for users and reduces stress for webdevelopers. They made great advances with this in the past couple of years, btw.

However, sometimes they try to standardize things that probably weren't meant to be standardized:

http://www.w3.org/2005/Incubator/emotion/XGR-emotionml-20081120/

some kind of not-quite-fractal reaction-diffusion pattern I came across last week, it looked awesome and I just had to write code to reproduce it

explained here:
http://www.jonathanmccabe.com/Cyclic_Symmetric_Multi-Scale_Turing_Patterns.pdf
http://softologyblog.wordpress.com/2011/07/05/multi-scale-turing-patterns/

but you probably just want to gaze upon the eye candy I produced and uploaded to vimeo. The main improvements on the algorithms described above is that I tried to add some colours to the mix (the originals are in greyscale only):

http://vimeo.com/27055590 -- first attempt at colour, not very good, looks like rainbow puke

improving further, the next ones are much better:

http://vimeo.com/27083238 -- purple/yellow
http://vimeo.com/27090684 -- greens
http://vimeo.com/27109742 -- red-orange/blue

I wrote the code to produce these videos in Python using Numpy and Scipy. A friend of mine added Weave/Blitz to the mix, which lets you write performance-critical bits in C++ (as strings in Python! compiling on the fly!) but I haven't incorporated it yet. Should bring down the rendering time from a few hours to 30 mins or so, I hope.

A study.

http://www.bmj.com/content/331/7531/1498.full

@chronic those who are unclear: Google is banning full accounts, including your gmail/docs/etc, just for having a fake-looking full name on Google+
http://twitter.com/#!/chronic/status/95202041286234112

http://mikecanex.wordpress.com/2011/07/24/the-google-real-name-policy-is-wrong/

A shit ton of businesses and "brand" corporations got banned too, because their G+ accts weren't a "real name".

Apparently they ban your gmail and docs and such with it when they find out, so unless you signed up with your very real looking real name (for realness), I'd be very weary of activating Google Plus on any Google Account that has GMail you'd like to keep around.

IOW, since all invites I got so far went to my main GMail address, I'm not going to sign up any time soon until this is cleared up. Even though that one does have my real name on it anyway, who knows if Google thinks it doesn't look "real enough", I'm not going to risk more than 5 years of mail archives [yes I do have a backup, but still].

A neuroscientist trashes Kurzweil's singularity optimisms:

http://www.boingboing.net/2011/07/14/far.html?dlvrit=36761

you're fucked forever

right now there is no solution for your problem.

stay tuned.

IT WAS TOO SHORT!! 

now I have to wait a week.

(glad cpt Harkness is back though)

I got some time to kill, any suggestions what to watch? Movies/series/etc?

[Monkey Business]

Monkey Business
By STEPHEN J. DUBNER and STEVEN D. LEVITT

Keith Chen's Monkey Research

Adam Smith, the founder of classical economics, was certain that humankind's knack for monetary exchange belonged to humankind alone. ''Nobody ever saw a dog make a fair and deliberate exchange of one bone for another with another dog,'' he wrote. ''Nobody ever saw one animal by its gestures and natural cries signify to another, this is mine, that yours; I am willing to give this for that.'' But in a clean and spacious laboratory at Yale-New Haven Hospital, seven capuchin monkeys have been taught to use money, and a comparison of capuchin behavior and human behavior will either surprise you very much or not at all, depending on your view of humans.

The capuchin is a New World monkey, brown and cute, the size of a scrawny year-old human baby plus a long tail. ''The capuchin has a small brain, and it's pretty much focused on food and sex,'' says Keith Chen, a Yale economist who, along with Laurie Santos, a psychologist, is exploiting these natural desires -- well, the desire for food at least -- to teach the capuchins to buy grapes, apples and Jell-O. ''You should really think of a capuchin as a bottomless stomach of want,'' Chen says. ''You can feed them marshmallows all day, they'll throw up and then come back for more.''

When most people think of economics, they probably conjure images of inflation charts or currency rates rather than monkeys and marshmallows. But economics is increasingly being recognized as a science whose statistical tools can be put to work on nearly any aspect of modern life. That's because economics is in essence the study of incentives, and how people -- perhaps even monkeys -- respond to those incentives. A quick scan of the current literature reveals that top economists are studying subjects like prostitution, rock 'n' roll, baseball cards and media bias.

Chen proudly calls himself a behavioral economist, a member of a growing subtribe whose research crosses over into psychology, neuroscience and evolutionary biology. He began his monkey work as a Harvard graduate student, in concert with Marc Hauser, a psychologist. The Harvard monkeys were cotton-top tamarins, and the experiments with them concerned altruism. Two monkeys faced each other in adjoining cages, each equipped with a lever that would release a marshmallow into the other monkey's cage. The only way for one monkey to get a marshmallow was for the other monkey to pull its lever. So pulling the lever was to some degree an act of altruism, or at least of strategic cooperation.

The tamarins were fairly cooperative but still showed a healthy amount of self-interest: over repeated encounters with fellow monkeys, the typical tamarin pulled the lever about 40 percent of the time. Then Hauser and Chen heightened the drama. They conditioned one tamarin to always pull the lever (thus creating an altruistic stooge) and another to never pull the lever (thus creating a selfish jerk). The stooge and the jerk were then sent to play the game with the other tamarins. The stooge blithely pulled her lever over and over, never failing to dump a marshmallow into the other monkey's cage. Initially, the other monkeys responded in kind, pulling their own levers 50 percent of the time. But once they figured out that their partner was a pushover (like a parent who buys her kid a toy on every outing whether the kid is a saint or a devil), their rate of reciprocation dropped to 30 percent -- lower than the original average rate. The selfish jerk, meanwhile, was punished even worse. Once her reputation was established, whenever she was led into the experimenting chamber, the other tamarins ''would just go nuts,'' Chen recalls. ''They'd throw their feces at the wall, walk into the corner and sit on their hands, kind of sulk.''


Chen is a hyperverbal, sharp-dressing 29-year-old with spiky hair. The son of Chinese immigrants, he had an itinerant upbringing in the rural Midwest. As a Stanford undergraduate, he was a de facto Marxist before being seduced, quite accidentally, by economics. He may be the only economist conducting monkey experiments, which puts him at slight odds with his psychologist collaborators (who are more interested in behavior itself than in the incentives that produce the behavior) as well as with certain economist colleagues. ''I love interest rates, and I'm willing to talk about their kind of stuff all the time,'' he says, speaking of his fellow economists. ''But I can tell that they're biting their tongues when I tell them what I'm working on.''

It is sometimes unclear, even to Chen himself, exactly what he is working on. When he and Santos, his psychologist collaborator, began to teach the Yale capuchins to use money, he had no pressing research theme. The essential idea was to give a monkey a dollar and see what it did with it. The currency Chen settled on was a silver disc, one inch in diameter, with a hole in the middle -- ''kind of like Chinese money,'' he says. It took several months of rudimentary repetition to teach the monkeys that these tokens were valuable as a means of exchange for a treat and would be similarly valuable the next day. Having gained that understanding, a capuchin would then be presented with 12 tokens on a tray and have to decide how many to surrender for, say, Jell-O cubes versus grapes. This first step allowed each capuchin to reveal its preferences and to grasp the concept of budgeting.

Then Chen introduced price shocks and wealth shocks. If, for instance, the price of Jell-O fell (two cubes instead of one per token), would the capuchin buy more Jell-O and fewer grapes? The capuchins responded rationally to tests like this -- that is, they responded the way most readers of The Times would respond. In economist-speak, the capuchins adhered to the rules of utility maximization and price theory: when the price of something falls, people tend to buy more of it.

Chen next introduced a pair of gambling games and set out to determine which one the monkeys preferred. In the first game, the capuchin was given one grape and, dependent on a coin flip, either retained the original grape or won a bonus grape. In the second game, the capuchin started out owning the bonus grape and, once again dependent on a coin flip, either kept the two grapes or lost one. These two games are in fact the same gamble, with identical odds, but one is framed as a potential win and the other as a potential loss.

How did the capuchins react? They far preferred to take a gamble on the potential gain than the potential loss. This is not what an economics textbook would predict. The laws of economics state that these two gambles, because they represent such small stakes, should be treated equally.

So, does Chen's gambling experiment simply reveal the cognitive limitations of his small-brained subjects? Perhaps not. In similar experiments, it turns out that humans tend to make the same type of irrational decision at a nearly identical rate. Documenting this phenomenon, known as loss aversion, is what helped the psychologist Daniel Kahneman win a Nobel Prize in economics. The data generated by the capuchin monkeys, Chen says, ''make them statistically indistinguishable from most stock-market investors.''

But do the capuchins actually understand money? Or is Chen simply exploiting their endless appetites to make them perform neat tricks?

Several facts suggest the former. During a recent capuchin experiment that used cucumbers as treats, a research assistant happened to slice the cucumber into discs instead of cubes, as was typical. One capuchin picked up a slice, started to eat it and then ran over to a researcher to see if he could ''buy'' something sweeter with it. To the capuchin, a round slice of cucumber bore enough resemblance to Chen's silver tokens to seem like another piece of currency.

Then there is the stealing. Santos has observed that the monkeys never deliberately save any money, but they do sometimes purloin a token or two during an experiment. All seven monkeys live in a communal main chamber of about 750 cubic feet. For experiments, one capuchin at a time is let into a smaller testing chamber next door. Once, a capuchin in the testing chamber picked up an entire tray of tokens, flung them into the main chamber and then scurried in after them -- a combination jailbreak and bank heist -- which led to a chaotic scene in which the human researchers had to rush into the main chamber and offer food bribes for the tokens, a reinforcement that in effect encouraged more stealing.

Something else happened during that chaotic scene, something that convinced Chen of the monkeys' true grasp of money. Perhaps the most distinguishing characteristic of money, after all, is its fungibility, the fact that it can be used to buy not just food but anything. During the chaos in the monkey cage, Chen saw something out of the corner of his eye that he would later try to play down but in his heart of hearts he knew to be true. What he witnessed was probably the first observed exchange of money for sex in the history of monkeykind. (Further proof that the monkeys truly understood money: the monkey who was paid for sex immediately traded the token in for a grape.)

This is a sensitive subject. The capuchin lab at Yale has been built and maintained to make the monkeys as comfortable as possible, and especially to allow them to carry on in a natural state. The introduction of money was tricky enough; it wouldn't reflect well on anyone involved if the money turned the lab into a brothel. To this end, Chen has taken steps to ensure that future monkey sex at Yale occurs as nature intended it.

But these facts remain: When taught to use money, a group of capuchin monkeys responded quite rationally to simple incentives; responded irrationally to risky gambles; failed to save; stole when they could; used money for food and, on occasion, sex. In other words, they behaved a good bit like the creature that most of Chen's more traditional colleagues study: Homo sapiens.

Source: NYTimes.com

http://bostinnovation.com/2011/07/05/flying-cars-get-ok-from-department-of-transportation/

[many people use brands to define themselves]

Wasn't going to let this really meaningful/interesting bit of discussion be drowned in a sea of bleach.

Dunno if there's much more to say on the topic, otherwise it's just salvaged.

A lot of what I object to about commercial branding is that many people use brands to define themselves, and I think this leads to a really shallow form of identity.

But how is this anything new?  Tribal politics have long established that pack status is signaled through decorative clothing.

Mm, my grammar could have been better there. The problem IMO is the shallow form of identity / engagement with culture that it leads to. Our obsession with images and signifiers is a distraction from actual substance.

The problem, as I see it, isn't that marketers have tied a tribe to a brand and to a price tag.  It's that most humans aren't self-aware enough to choose what tribe they want to be in.

'zactly.





from Culture Jamming: Hacking, Slashing and Sniping in the Empire of Signs

More recent is the notion that the public mind is being colonized by corporate phantasms---wraithlike images of power and desire that haunt our dreams. Consider the observations of Neal Gabler and Marshall Blonsky:

Everywhere the fabricated, the inauthentic and the theatrical have gradually driven out the natural, the genuine and the spontaneous until there is no distinction between real life and stagecraft. In fact, one could argue that the theatricalization of American life is the major cultural transformation of this century.


We can no longer do anything without wanting to see it immediately on video...There is never any longer an event or a person who acts for himself, in himself. The direction of events and of people is to be reproduced into image, to be doubled in the image of television. [T]oday the referent disappears. In circulation are images. Only images.

The eutopic (literally, "no-place") territory demarcated by Gabler and Blonsky, lush with fictions yet strangely barren, has been mapped in detail by the philosopher Jean Baudrillard. In his landmark 1975 essay, "The Precession of Simulacra," Baudrillard put forth the notion that we inhabit a "hyperreality," a hall of media mirrors in which reality has been lost in an infinity of reflections. We "experience" events, first and foremost, as electronic reproductions of rumored phenomena many times removed, he maintains; originals, invariably compared to their digitally-enhanced representations, inevitably fall short. In the "desert of the real," asserts Baudrillard, mirages outnumber oases and are more alluring to the thirsty eye.

Moreover, he argues, signs that once pointed toward distant realities now refer only to themselves. Disneyland's Main Street, U.S.A, which depicts the sort of idyllic, turn-of-the-century burg that exists only in Norman Rockwell paintings and MGM backlots, is a textbook example of self-referential simulation, a painstaking replica of something that never was. "These would be the successive phases of the image," writes Baudrillard, betraying an almost necrophiliac relish as he contemplates the decomposition of culturally-defined reality. "[The image] is the reflection of a basic reality; it masks and perverts a basic reality; it masks the absence of a basic reality; it bears no relation to any reality whatever: it is its own pure simulacrum."

Reality isn't what it used to be. In America, factory capitalism has been superseded by an information economy characterized by the reduction of labor to the manipulation, on computers, of symbols that stand in for the manufacturing process. The engines of industrial production have slowed, yielding to a phantasmagoric capitalism that produces intangible commodities--- Hollywood blockbusters, television sit-coms, catchphrases, jingles, buzzwords, images, one-minute megatrends, financial transactions flickering through fiberoptic bundles. Our wars are Nintendo wars, fought with camera-equipped smart bombs that marry cinema and weaponry in a television that kills. Futurologists predict that the flagship technology of the coming century will be "virtual reality," a computer-based system that immerses users wearing headsets wired for sight and sound in computer-animated worlds. In virtual reality, the television swallows the viewer, headfirst.

This is kind of a tangent, but the emotion which this topic brings to the forefront is the sense of uncertainty and bewilderment that I think we're all riding these days.

the first thing that comes to mind as an exemplar is the conflict between anonymous and lulzsec

and it might be a real conflict
or it might have been engineered by the ringmasters who have snuck into their ranks

Even if it's a real conflict, I have no doubt that its engineering was discussed by the private security firms which seek to discredit and rebrand anon, wikileaks, and all the other "hacktivist" groups who are getting all grabass cowboy about data. It's really easy to make vague decentralized groups look like they're fighting. And making it LOOK like they're fighting will inevitably lead to them fighting.

So how seriously am I supposed to take this conflict? Am I supposed to treat it like it's real? Am I supposed to dismiss it like a bad photoshop job? I just don't know. So many groups are signaling things, who the fuck knows whats really going on. anywhere.

BUt this means you're getting upset at the symptom, not the cause.  Getting mad at marketers for leveraging the masses' lack of introspection is missing the point, in my opinion.

I don't agree I shouldn't be mad at marketers whose techniques facilitate behavior I think is disgusting.


I mean, I guess the root cause is that people are easily distracted and manipulated, but I feel like complaining about human nature is a large waste of breath.


By drawing attention to manipulative marketing techniques, you can help people resist them.

[SHELL GAMES: A Reuters Investigation]

http://www.reuters.com/article/2011/06/28/us-usa-shell-companies-idUSTRE75R20Z20110628

SHELL GAMES: A Reuters Investigation

Articles in this series are exploring the extent and impact of corporate secrecy in the United States.

By Kelly Carr and Brian Grow

CHEYENNE, ATLANTA (Reuters) - The secretive business havens of Cyprus and the Cayman Islands face a potent rival: Cheyenne, Wyoming.

At a single address in this sleepy city of 60,000 people, more than 2,000 companies are registered. The building, 2710 Thomes Avenue, isn't a shimmering skyscraper filled with A-list corporations. It's a 1,700-square-foot brick house with a manicured lawn, a few blocks from the State Capitol.

Neighbors say they see little activity there besides regular mail deliveries and a woman who steps outside for smoke breaks. Inside, however, the walls of the main room are covered floor to ceiling with numbered mailboxes labeled as corporate "suites." A bulky copy machine sits in the kitchen. In the living room, a woman in a headset answers calls and sorts bushels of mail.

A Reuters investigation has found the house at 2710 Thomes Avenue serves as a little Cayman Island on the Great Plains. It is the headquarters for Wyoming Corporate Services, a business-incorporation specialist that establishes firms which can be used as "shell" companies, paper entities able to hide assets.

Wyoming Corporate Services will help clients create a company, and more: set up a bank account for it; add a lawyer as a corporate director to invoke attorney-client privilege; even appoint stand-in directors and officers as high as CEO. Among its offerings is a variety of shell known as a "shelf" company, which comes with years of regulatory filings behind it, lending a greater feeling of solidity.

"A corporation is a legal person created by state statute that can be used as a fall guy, a servant, a good friend or a decoy," the company's website boasts. "A person you control... yet cannot be held accountable for its actions. Imagine the possibilities!"

Among the entities registered at 2710 Thomes, Reuters found, is a shelf company sheltering real-estate assets controlled by a jailed former prime minister of Ukraine, according to allegations made by a political rival in a federal court in California.

The owner of another shelf company at the address was indicted in April for allegedly helping online-poker operators evade a U.S. ban on Internet gambling. The owner of two other firms there was banned from government contracting in January for selling counterfeit truck parts to the Pentagon.

Read more ... wow

Whenever Roger spoke about the depravities of Dutch horror porn, I assumed he was exaggerating. At least a littlebit.

But no longer.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Human_Centipede_(First_Sequence)#Plot

My fellow countrymen are truly a bunch of sick fucks.




edit: actually I'm going to go with Luna's suggestion: don't click the link. even though it's just a textual description of a horror movie, the imagery has been haunting my mind all day

I invite you all to read this cool article about the number five, pentagons and poetry.

http://www.maa.org/mathland/mathtrek_09_01_03.html


Helaman Ferguson's unruly hyperbolic quilt, sewn together from pentagons of cloth, refuses to lie flat.

In his artwork Hyperbolic 5, Ferguson has created a particularly striking representation of the hyperbolic plane. It shows necklaces of pentagonal tiles going around a central pentagon in alternating gold fives and mirror images of gold fives. The gold "5" is a reference to a famous painting by Charles Demuth (1883–1935) called The Figure 5 in Gold. Demuth's painting was itself inspired by an imagist poem, "The Great Figure," by his friend and colleague William Carlos Williams (1883–1963).

"My particular inspiration for Hyperbolic 5 was both Williams and Demuth, especially Williams," Ferguson says. "Somehow I felt Williams' verbal images were even more powerful than the painting." A QuickTime video clip presenting Williams' 1928 poem "The Great Figure" is available at http://www.learner.org/catalog/extras/vvspot/video/williams.html.


Hyperbolic 5 by Helaman Ferguson. Courtesy of Helaman Ferguson.

---
be sure to check out that video, even though it's very low bitrate and blurry

Fossil molluscs. None of these are Golden spirals. © 2008 by John Holden

Another one for the series of "kill your idols".

Turns out this whole golden ratio/fibonacci/golden spiral shit is mostly swallowed and regurgitated shit without much proof.

- There's no statistical data that shows human aesthetic preference for golden ratios. And the few times some preference does roll out, and the experimental setup is solid, you can't, not with any statistical confidence say whether it's 1.5, 1.618 or 1.666.

- All those pretty pictures of spirals in nature, nautilus shells, spiral galaxies, etc etc. Nobody ever checks them. People like pretty pictures. Usually the ratios aren't even *close* to the golden ratio. And certainly never exact matches as governed by some recurrence relation (the Fibonacci sequence).

http://www.lhup.edu/~dsimanek/pseudo/fibonacc.htm

http://plus.maths.org/content/os/issue22/features/golden/index

(with some help from a friend and my gf)

I got the acorn cut-out shape in the US. They're for a party tonight, and the acorn is kind of a logo for the group that's throwing it (cause "acorn" is a Dutch word for "glans" as well--used in a similar sense as someone "being an asshole").



I also got a VERY NICE mittens shape in the same shop. I'll try to make a bunch of mitten-cookies for the next UK meetup or something. Food-colouring is hilariously cheap at the local asian supermarket (75 cents for a small bottle, and we only needed like 10 drops to make all of that shit green), so I could use blue or cyan food-dye in sugar-glazing, and the cookies themselves will turn brown anyway, so it's going to look exactly right, those. Perhaps. I will try.