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February 05, 2006

It’s the Politics, 2

The LA Times ran a great editorial last week in response to Bush’s State of the Union address. It chided him for hyping research, spending, and technology over policy and implementation.

Robot Love

“By and large, it isn’t a lack of technology that keeps the nation so dependent on oil. It’s the lack of will to use it.

Engineers have produced a basket of new technologies for making cars burn less gasoline, yet fuel standards for passenger cars in this country haven’t changed in more than two decades, and fuel economy has barely budged. Brazil has shown the way to energy independence by powering cars with ethanol made from sugar. This country, meanwhile, continues to pour billions of dollars in subsidies into producing ethanol less efficiently from corn. Advances in solar energy have made it less expensive and more reliable, yet only California is making a significant bid to exploit the power of the sun....

Technologies that could make the U.S. more energy independent sit on the shelf while the automotive industry dithers about raising the price of a car by a couple of thousand dollars (money that could largely be recouped in savings on gasoline) to raise gas mileage by about 20 miles per gallon. Bush also talked about investing in zero-emissions coal plants. Yet, after a former EPA administrator said the technology existed to reduce mercury pollution at coal-fired plants by 90% within a few years, the Bush administration issued far weaker regulations.

The energy legislation passed last year provides individual homeowners with tax incentives to install solar energy units, but it does nothing to lure builders into solar, which would have a far greater effect.

How about importing ethanol from Brazil to put more fuel-efficient cars on the road now? That would mean dropping tariffs and ending protectionism for U.S. corn growers.”


I tried to make a similar point here a few months ago, though was not as eloquent.

(via Planetizen)

Gun battle at Busta Rhymes video shoot leaves bodyguard dead

Busta Rhymes was shooting a video at a studio in Greenpoint, Brooklyn when a group of young men started getting rowdy, When asked to leave, one of the men drew a weapon, said to be an AK-47, and a gunfight ensued. When it was all over, one of Busta's bodyguards lay dying from his injuries, and his killer was on the loose. A handgun was also recovered near the scene.

Several other well-known hip-hop figures were on the scene, including Missy Elliot, Lloyd Banks (of G-Unit) and Swizz Beatz. 50 Cent and Mary J. Blige were expected at the shoot, but there are conflicting reports as to whether they were present at the time.

Sources:
NYT (best coverage)
Newsday
Billboard
CBS

echo audible network

echo_audible_network.jpga group of computers that listen & talk to each other by repeating audio signals recorded by their microphones. the screens visualise the nature of the communication taking place (eg: volume).
[udk-berlin.de & udk-berlin.de via we-make-money-not-art.com]

Jury Will Decide Life or Death for Moussaoui

Zacarias Moussaoui's trial is the only trial in the United States of a person charged with direct involvement in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

katamario.swf (application/x-shockwave-flash Object)

Basics of the Unix Philosophy

Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface.

Pillow Fight on Valentine's Day

Making its US debut, a massive Pillow Fight is being planned for 6pm on Valentine's Day (February 14th) at San Francisco's Justin Herman Plaza (at Market and Embarcadero).

It's not a flash mob, it's a PILLOW FIGHT!!!

Rules:

1) Tell everyone you know about PILLOW FIGHT!!!
2) Wait for the Ferry Building clock to strike 6:00pm
3) Don't hit anyone with out a pillow (unless they want it)
4) Don't hit anyone with a camera
5) HAVE FUN!!!

(Rain plan: put your pillow in a plastic bag, see Rules 1 - 5)

Pics from Madrid
Pics from London

Get Your Video Popups Here!

I made this video popup maker thingie a while back.
It was going to be part of the Vlogging Hacks book that Jay, Ryanne, Michael, and I were writing for O'Reilly. Sadly, the book got cancelled and I pushed the project to the back burner. I never wrote about it here on this blog, but I did write about it on Unmediated. The reasons for using this approach are very practical. It preserves the direct link in the blog entry for services like FeedBurner, while also providing an embedded video experience that works in any browser.... including Internet Explorer.

I find myself writing a ton of similar emails to the Videoblogging List about this... whenever some issue comes up about embedded Quicktime, or Quicktime not working in IE (don't believe the rumors), I fire off a similar email that has now been enshrined by Pete on a newly christened domain, EmbedTheVideo.com. (Note to self: maybe I should actually keep a draft and copy-paste the text each time).

Some people have asked for the PHP code used in the popup window. Here it is:
Download popup.txt (rename it from .txt to .php)

You can simply copy and edit the page for the popup code generator since its all javascript/html. Simply "View Source" and copy the code to a new document:
http://joshkinberg.com/popupmaker

It should work for any Quicktime or Windows Media videos... I never got around to adding support for Flash SWF, FLV, or RealPlayer, but it should be really easy to do. I just never took the time to do it. Ah, the lonely back burner.

Enjoy!

playsh, the playful shell

Matt Webb and Ben Cerveny's Etech session sounds so intriguing that it hurts  

Conservative T-Shirt Ad - Washington Times



moonie t shirt capture

Ad from the Moonie paper, the Washington Times (online edition). They had to hire this T-shirt model because the Cheeto-eating guy with the laptop sitting in his underpants in his Mom's basement wasn't quite "there" in terms of selling the product.

PoeTry It - animated text art

Try It by _william
Try It, uploaded by _william

Take a moment to watch this very brief animated poem, a gif file which reads “towards a new poeTry - Try It”… the full version is available on _william’s Flickr account.

What genre are linear animated digital text sequences? Are they essentially analogous to film? The text and layer effects in this gif are not produced procedurally or computationally while it is being displayed - rather, the jogged placement, changing colors, shifting abstract backgrounds are all burned into the data, and we are seeing a sequence of raw images - the afterimages of procedural transformations that occurred during editing. Only the pixelated-font appearance of the individual characters reminds that they were probably first typed and then cut-pasted into in image editor, rather than simply hand-drawn.

So this digital text is raw pixel data rather than stored as a machine-readable encoded text layer - so what? This would only seem to have a consequence if we wanted to edit the image (say, quickly changing the entire sequence to read “PoeTry Me!”) or to search it, or to index it, or to procedurally represent it through alternate displays or in alternate devices / file-formats using CSS, etc…. While these abilities sound good in the abstract, is the text is perfectly readable now - is the fact that it is not a machine-readable artifact really a problem for anyone but an archivist?

I’d start by saying that the quality of digital text (being stored as symbols or as image data is) isn’t good or bad - but it is something that we can describe as an impression in the mind of the viewer, even one who isn’t a a digital art archivist. Text which we perceive (rightly or wrongly) to be stored symbolically conveys a quality of presumed procedurality - and hence, interactivity.

Computer users constantly and instinctively differentiate between two kinds of text - that which can be highlighted / coped to the clipboard / edit / etc., and that which cannot. In the world of interface-users this is a primary ontological distinction, as important as the distinction between what-I-can-touch (apples, doors) and what-I-can-only-see (distant things, mirror images) - some of which are cannot-be-touched (lens flares, heat waves). Even with text we cannot ‘touch’ ourselves, we become experientially aware of a deep distinction between some text which the computer itself can highlight / copy etc., and other text which the computer cannot.

We are reminded of this distinction in PoeTry It in the moment that the word ‘new’ swirls slightly before vanishing. This is distinct from flash compositions such as Young-Hae Chang Heavy Industries, or Nick Montforts’ Progress (2006), in which the text remains procedural through the instance and enactment of the art.

If you cannot interact with the text in either case, does it matter that the encoded characters of Dakota are secure in source code and loaded in RAM, while the letters of “Try It” are raw pixels? In some digital text art, we read what the machine wrote - in others, we read what the machine cannot.

Can we still believe in iconic buildings? : Architecture: General

Deyan Sudjic and Charles Jencks; Norman Foster's "gherkin" in London, Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim - is this the age of the iconic building? Or are they just expressions of political and architectural vanity? Two leading critics debate. Issue 111 / June 2005 Prospect Magazine | related...

"'It was not a significant bullet. I am not afraid.'

I fully expect a headline tomorrow to read "Director Werner Herzog travels back in time to best Napoleon Bonaparte in an arm-wrestling match." You just can't help but love him. I wish he was my uncle.

"Herzog, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, said, 'Oh, someone is shooting at us. We must go.'
"He had a bruise the size of a snooker ball, with a hole in. He just carried on with the interview while bleeding quietly in his boxer shorts."
An unrepentant Herzog insisted, "It was not a significant bullet. I am not afraid."


Werner Herzog Shot During Interview :: Hollywood.com

Whistler Lights



I am up in Whistler this week with my family. Unfortunately the weather is not all that great. It has been raining all week and the mountains snow base has dropped several inches since we got here on Monday.

Above are some cool photos I took of the whistler christmas lights.
(click to download desktop sized copies.)

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