Now safely past; moves into the East.
The tunes tonight:
Visitors
every user her book
Now we getz really really to a far forward expression of Ranganathan’s rules. The EFF’s “Digital Books and Your Rights” is good, solid stuff for all us readers reading on/with non-print or smart-print etc.
What does this document you’re now reading know about you?
AR (augmented reality) / “hyper” reality
I guess this is meant to be ‘hyper-real’ in the Baudrillard kinda way… I like the sad little note in the field of tweets: “anybody care to meetup in RL this weekend?” (RL, real life). As if it will be ‘real’ when AR natives meet up.
I reckon my own chauvinism is toward a ‘real’ that means ‘here and now’ — and that ads and info-spaces pull us out of RL (here and now) into the ‘there and then’ directed and controlled by the interests pushing the info / ads / tools.
Very nice work (by Keiichi Metsuda).
anonymous in oz
Anonymous is now a non-state actor (aggressor?). Novel politics for you (via Disinfo and SMH):
I think of 4chan as a ditch. But, hello, lotus roots in the muck, yo?
Posted in geopol.
11 feb, tehran
From Al Jazeera:
Reports on Thursday suggested that police clashed with protesters in several sites around Tehran.
Gangs also attacked senior opposition figures as they tried to attend the rallies.
Two leaders of the so-called Green Movement - Mohammad Khatami, a former president, and Mehdi Karroubi - came under attack and their supporters clashed with police.
Houssein - a son of Karroubi, one of the defeated reformist candidates in last year’s disputed presidential poll - said his father’s car had been attacked by security forces on his way to the rally.
I heard this term, “security forces”, on NPR today too. Bullshit. These are insecurity forces, these Basiji, when they cut down citizens with grievances for expressing grievances.
Posted in geopol.
alphanumerical
In my hypnagogia this morning, a notion came to me about numbers ordered alphabetically. Instead of 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, we’d have: eight, five, four, nine, one, seven, six, ten, three, two…
When I woke up, I wondered about ordering all numbers alphabetically (in any given alphabet based written language), and at first thought it would be impossible… for one thing, we’d have to deal with an infinite series of words. For another, new numbers don’t have predictable names; the names are orderly on the small scale (twenty-four, thirty-four, fifty-eight, four hundred thousand and ninety, etc.), but once you get out into the very large numbers, the names get novel on the front end (googolplex was so named by a mathematician’s nephew… “Graham’s Number” is named after Ronald Graham… etc.). We don’t have a regular system for creating new number names for Large Numbers.
But now I’m thinking that it could be possible to at least describe the structure of how an alphabetical set of all numbers would be ordered if we used a predictable system for creating new number names. I’d like to try to describe this idea formally and test it… but any such effort’s gonna be real Smith County until I improve my math skills.
conan doyle oracle (not quite)
When in Taiwan and reading my Wordsworth facsimiles of Sherlock Holmes stories (1992, 1996 eds.), I’d use the old newspaper illustrations and “quoted captions!” as an oracle on unsuspecting Americans. Think of a Question! Then call out a number between 1 and 450! I’d say, and they would. The book had abt 450 p. So I’d thumb through and stop on a page near the number they’d called out that had a captioned illustration. They’d have thought of their question, and the newspaper artists from 1890 would answer them like this, but with a caption like “On the double, Watson! He’s shimmied up the chimney!”:
So their private questions would be answered with he’s shimmied up the chimney, and they’d have to make sense of that.
Little oracles everywhere.
but sangha
Art has to happen in community (so does craft). Otherwise it’s just psychosis-stuff.
Work matters in context of other(’s) work.
Posted in writing.
word for writers
Recognize: it’s a slog. A zine article, a book review, a story in a journal of a small state U, maybe a little magazine play. Then you do a book and it sells 200 copies; but that don’t pay no rent, hoss.
But you still write. It’s what you bloody do.
What happens (I think and I hope) is that you get so disabused of the notion of fame or money that you do, actually, begin taking your work very seriously. Suddenly, uninterested or unable to please anyone but yourself, you start telling your truth. Then you get good, and you get serious.
It’s the work. It always was the work.
Posted in writing.
old boss
Feel happy? All topped-off on hope? Don’t let yourself forget that warrantless wiretapping is still very much in effect. Not even my spellcheck knows what to do with the word: red crinkles all up under warrantless.
@ WIRED:
Heads spun four years ago this weekend, when AT&T was accused of funneling every one of its customers’ electronic communications to the National Security Agency — without warrants.
A Jan. 31, 2006, lawsuit alleged major violations of the Fourth Amendment right to be free from warrantless searches and seizures. Such a sweeping breach seemed far-fetched.
Yet months after the lawsuit was lodged, the Electronic Frontier Foundation produced internal AT&T documents allegedly outlining secret rooms in AT&T offices connected to the NSA, which was siphoning all internet traffic, from e-mails to Voice Over Internet Protocol phone conversations.
But four years and a mountain of court briefs and rulings later, the legal system has never addressed the merits of the allegations — and likely never will. Even Congress has weighed in and passed legislation to prevent the allegations from being heard.
Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/01/legality-of-warrantless-eavesdropping#ixzz0eFPuuRvz
