What does this document you’re now reading know about you?

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).

I think of 4chan as a ditch.  But, hello, lotus roots in the muck, yo?

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.

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.

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.

Work matters in context of other(’s) work.

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.

@ 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