Category: Uncategorized

On Lisa Rein’s Radar: John Perry Barlow: From Burning Man To Running Man

Also, as I watched the enormously inventive and sweet-hearted burners duct-taping together their creations, I felt a sinking sense of ineffectiveness. We’re up against an opposition that can get their machines to fly twice the speed of sound and do so reliably. Granted they do stupid and terrible things with those machines, but at least they get them to work. And yes, ours would probably work too with that kind of funding, but with our disdain for both wealth and the tedious processes of democracy, we have conceded those resources to the thin-lipped monotheists.

(cough cough)

“**the life that the lightning of the quickening that
the flight body or murder of storage go being forgotten was abandoned and
was combine the DNA=channel of the morgue that run to the annihilation
spectrum of the sky overthrows the dimension****cadaver converts in war
inside****as for the pierrot of your suffocation play, the war of the plane
geometry that transplants your birth that is alive to the tears of the
horizon is disturbing the cell system of units of the digital image
life boundary nonexistent existence to reached cause imp near death brain to
pleasure of thorn grow able to X”

An article about how the human brain is only hardwired to react efficiently to groups up to 150.

ah, if only there were squabbles all marked up with inks and drassles… or perhaps it should be more staid and stucious…

as my fingers feebly lift to press the keys… (cough cough)

a remind to myself to read this article later: “The Paranoid Style in American Politics” by Richard Hofstadter

I don’t know if you’ve heard about this, but it seems increasingly likely that Diebold, the manufacturer of electronic voting machines, has been playing fast and loose with the software on those machines.

This is strongly supported by Diebold’s own internal memos and communiques found here. What is the company’s response? Why, to sue the people hosting aforementioed communiques under the DMCA (Digital Millienium Copyrigh Act, if I’m remembering correctly) as though these memos were COPYRIGHTED material. BLECH!

UPDATE:
A related article.

There’s some neat musical work going on at the Creative Commons website.

[cough cough wheeze]

But go listen to some of them. They’re neat.

I just finished reading the play Death’s Jest-Book by Thomas Lovell Beddoes. The language in this thing is stunning, though the play is a bit oblique, with characters often doing things for no discernible reason at all. Actually, that seems to be one of the major themes of the play: the inability to really KNOW another person and accurately predict what they will do.

The damn(ed) thing is in the public domain and you can actually read most of it here: happy public domain copy online. (To read additional acts simply change the number in the address after “jestbook” but before “html” to 2 or 3.)

Any play which begins this way:

Mandr. Am I a man of gingerbread that you should mould me to your liking? To have my way, in spite of your tongue and reason’s teeth, tastes better than Hungary wine; and my heart beats in a honey-pot now I reject you and all sober sense: so tell my master, the doctor, he must seek another zany for his booth, a new wise merry Andrew. My jests are cracked, my coxcomb fallen, my bauble confiscated, my cap decapitated. Toll the bell; for oh! for oh! Jack Pudding is no more!

Joan. Wilt thou away from me then, sweet Mandrake? Wilt thou not marry me?

Mandr. Child, my studies must first be ended. Thou knowest I hunger after wisdom, as the red sea after ghosts: therefore will I travel awhile.

Joan. Whither, dainty Homunculus?

Mandr. Whither should a student in the black arts, a journeyman magician, a Rosicrucian? Where is our country? You heard the herald this morning thrice invite all christian folk to follow the brave knight, Sir Wolfram, to the shores of Egypt, and there help to free from bondage his noble fellow in arms, Duke Melveric, whom, on a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, wild pagans captured. There, Joan, in that Sphynx land found Raimund Lully those splinters of the philosopher’s stone with which he made English Edward’s gold. There dwell hoary magicians, who have given up their trade and live sociably as crocodiles on the banks of the Nile. There can one chat with mummies in a pyramid, and breakfast on basilisk’s eggs. Thither then, Homonculus Mandrake, son of the great Paracelsus; languish no more in the ignorance, and weigh anchor for Egypt.

has me all atwitter. But then I have a crazed obsession with bizarre and madcap language…

The Gnomoradio Project: routing around the music industry damage.