:: Thursday, July 29, 2004 ::

Privacy International's 6th annual Big Brother Awards.  Mostly British villiany.

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French Spiderman spotted again.

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World's most expensive coffee is catshit.

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a) "America's economy is strong and is getting stronger"  -- G.W. Bush
b) "Americans' Income Shrank for 2 Consecutive Years" -- The I.R.S.

One of them is lying.


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Voices from the Dustbowl:  The Charles Todd and Robert Sonkin Migrant Worker Collection is an online presentation of a multi-format ethnographic field collection documenting the everyday life of residents of Farm Security Administration (FSA) migrant work camps in central California in 1940 and 1941. This collection consists of audio recordings, photographs, manuscript materials, publications, and ephemera generated during two separate documentation trips supported by the Archive of American Folk Song.
Direct links to songs (mp3 format), photographs.

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Alphabetical index of lighthouses (all photographed)

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A nice little web color scheme generator I've never come across before.

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Yes, the voting machines are that unreliable.  Florida '02 election results "lost".


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James Bond Gadget index

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Project Button

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"It's the biggest threat to technology in 20 years"
The Senate will consider a bill that would make it illegal to write software that *could* be used to violate copyrights.  This proposed massacre of free speech and innovation is so one-sidedly in the interests of already-too-powerful media goliaths that its impossible to see any benefit for citizens. 



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The first atomic clock wristwatch

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The Greatest Drum Solos! (with audio!)

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"Unless we have a climate that will allow more independent media companies to survive, a dangerously high percentage of what we see--and what we don't see--will be shaped by the profit motives and political interests of large, publicly traded conglomerates. The economy will suffer, and so will the quality of our public life. Let me be clear: As a business proposition, consolidation makes sense. The moguls behind the mergers are acting in their corporate interests and playing by the rules. We just shouldn't have those rules. They make sense for a corporation. But for a society, it's like over-fishing the oceans. When the independent businesses are gone, where will the new ideas come from? We have to do more than keep media giants from growing larger; they're already too big. We need a new set of rules that will break these huge companies to pieces. "
-- Ted Turner on the need to bust up big media (Washington Monthly)

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A page with every Olympic world record.  Eastern Europeans are still crushing at any event where something gets thrown.

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A short camera-video of Chris, Connie, and I at the Living Room from Wednesday night (avi, 3m)




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The 9/11 Commission report has been made available.  The executive summary is here.
The Full Report is here (pdf).

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A new white paper, from the Bill of Rights Defense Committee, detailsfourteen government data surveillance programs, including last year'scontroversial Total/Terrorism Information Awareness (TIA) project,which persists despite Congress' vote to kill it.

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The concertsforkerry show at the Living Room in NYC was packed to capacity last night!  Thanks everyone for coming out for a good cause with great music.  I loved every minute of it, and a friendlier bunch of people I've never met.  They've got more good shows with 100% of the proceeds going to the campaign, so get there if you havn't already.


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Alaska: Cold, no chicks, and you get poked in the eye with a sharp stick.  Just kidding about the poke-in-the eye, but its bad enough, no? (NYTimes)


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A Japanese invention that turns plant's petals and leaves into sound-generating speakers.

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Strange but true.

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 Whales don't compete with fisheries.
"You cannot use the argument that whales compete with fisheries and therefore must be reduced in numbers," says Kaschner. "It's deeply flawed. They simply don't eat the same food in the same areas."Japan has long made the argument that whale populations must be kept in check so that they do not turn into oceanic pests, depleting the fish on which humans rely.

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Poster: History of Programming Languages (PDF, OReilly)

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Fantastic sea life and underwater photography at seaotter.com

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The Diddly Awards: Honoring the jaw-dropping achievements of the 108th Congress. (mother jones)
Yet even as they have scoffed at the rules the rest of us plebs must live by and spent like drunken sailors, the most profligate Congress in nearly a century still found myriad opportunities to, once again, do diddly.


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The New Yorker on what Kerry's foreign policy landscape will look like.

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If anyone is out there from the NYC area, stop by and say hi when I'll be at the Living Room on Wednesday, July 21.
I'll be playing drums in Connie Petruk's new, yet-to-be-named band. See us in our still-creaky glory. We go on at 9pm, before Craig Wedren of Baby and Matthew Caws of Nada Surf, so it promises to be a fun night. The show is part of the Concerts for Kerry fundraising series, so your modest admission cash will be going to a good cause.
The Living Room is in the Lower East Side - 154 Ludlow Street between Stanton and Rivington Streets.
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The need for software to last 200 years.
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Digital Imaging to examine mummies without cutting them open
In the past, Egyptologists and archaeologists cut up mummies to thoroughly examine them. Opening up a mummy ultimately meant damaging it, which limited the amount of information they could collect.
Mistri recalled how scientists used invasive techniques to examine the world's most famous mummy, King Tutankhamen.
"They hacksawed his head off," he said.

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1194 Miles per gallon
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Anybody know where to get a copy of this? (from memepool)
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Flea Markets are great. $36 gets you this:
A vacationer who purchased a suitcase at an Australian flea market found a trove of Beatles memorabilia inside, including photos, concert programs and unreleased recordings, The Times newspaper reported Tuesday.

While the materials have yet to be authenticated, some experts believe the collection is the lost "Mal Evans archive," originally belonging to the Beatles' roadie and recording engineer.

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Found this on a radiology newsletter this AM.





Mejia was working on the roof of an unfinished home on April 19 when he fell down onto a co-worker who was using a high-powered nail driver. The men grabbed at each other to keep from falling further; meanwhile the loose nail gun kept discharging.
The guy made it.
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Mr. Danzig, meet Mr. Floor.
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"Raw Horse Flesh": Japanese Ice Cream, of course
(courtesy of Kid of Tokyo)
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Long NYTimes magazine article on the place of graphic novels in contemporary literature.
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Republican-controlled media hive Clear-Channel bans Times Square billboard critical of Bush's Iraqi invasion.
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Part of what may be fueling speculation about the company's motives is the close relationship that its executives have with the Republican Party and the Bush administration. In the 2000 and 2002 election cycles, for instance, the company and its officials donated slightly more than $300,000 in unregulated money, almost all of it to Republicans, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, an organization in Washington that monitors political contributions.
In addition, Tom Hicks, the Texas Rangers' owner who has longtime ties to President Bush, is a top executive at Clear Channel.


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While the government bows to puritanical broadcasting standards, PBS suffers.
Unlike other broadcast networks, however, PBS doesn't have a lot of cash sitting around. In fact, the considerable woes now facing PBS are almost directly tied to money -- the system simply can't afford to stand up against the government.
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Nice collection of vintage watch ads from timezone.com.
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Inflatable space hotels (via slashdot)
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More B.S. and unchecked greed from the MPAA: One in four people have illegally downloaded a film over the net.

The Hollywood studios say piracy is costing them billions, even though box office takings rose by 5% last year.
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Health vs. Wealth (NYTimes)
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The Liberal Media compares the candidates (This Modern World at workingforchange)
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Tastes Great. Mice Filling.
Say... Wasn't this a ploy in "Strange Brew"
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Pharma CEO to R&D: "Get me something that stops coughing better than what the competition has water, and get it to me by Monday.
Children in all three groups showed a dramatic reduction in cough frequency, but those taking the placebo -- essentially flavored water -- had the best results.

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Playlists on Dick Cheney's iPod. (McSweeneys)
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Twists, Slugs and Roscoes: A Glossary of Hardboiled Slang
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Lost in Translation
Sibel Edmonds, a translator who worked at the FBI's language division, says the documents weren't translated because the divison was riddled with incompetence and corruption.
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[Criminalizing progress and technology]
Senator Orin Hatch (Utah, and Republican, of course) wants to make it illegal to write P2P software. If this passes, it'll be another defeat of individual rights in favor of corrupt corporate interests.
The bill "will chill the development, if enacted, of not only peer-to-peer technology, but wonderful new information tools yet to be devised," P2P United executive director Adam Eisgrau said in an e-mail. "Don't buy the hype. Any member of Congress who supports this bill is voting, without so much as a hearing, to undo more than a century of solid copyright case law that has protected innovators and technology from the terrible power of entrenched industries and, in the process, created the American economy."
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Separated at birth?






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Blogger just isn't working well anymore. Can anyone recommend a better alternative?
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You've Got Mail (and Court Says Others Can Read It)

Last week a federal appeals court in Boston ruled that federal wiretap laws do not apply to e-mail messages if they are stored, even for a millisecond, on the computers of the Internet providers that process them - meaning that it can be legal for the government or others to read such messages without a court order.

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Today pitchforkmedia selects our new national anthem.
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Birmingham (uk) slang
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President Bush, seeking to mobilize religious conservatives for his reelection campaign, has asked church-going volunteers to turn over church membership directories, campaign officials said on Thursday.
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