With all the clout they carry, it seems surprising at first that more commercial entities (stores, corporations) don’t overtly display their political beliefs. I mean, if you had a lot of money and were buying billboards and magazine ad space, wouldn’t you use the opportunity with the audience to try and make a point?

It means more to most corporations to get hands on max money than to make a point, and that means being politically neutral. “Sure, I hate your politics. I’ll take your money anyway.” That’s why Howie’s clothing is so refreshing - nicely designed*, happily political, and not afraid to sell you something in the middle of the message.

*If you’re not Flash-averse, but that’s a topic for another day.

Reminder: Tonight we’ll be webcasting Living with the Genie live from Pimental Hall, featuring Ray Kurzweil via videoconference (original plans were to use some sort of state-of-the-art edge tech to bring Kurzweil in as a holographic projection, but doing so proved too expensive). Among other accomplishments, Kurzweil is the author of one of my favorite books, The Age of Spiritual Machines. The “live” panelists - Denise Caruso, Howard Rheingold, Richard Rhodes, and Mark Schapiro are all respected authors and thinkers on the impact and implications of runaway technology.

Update: Kurzweil is shockingly medieval in his take on current copyright issues and his attitude towards cancer treatment and prevention reeks of “blame the victim.” He views regulation in biological research as more of a threat than a necessary safeguard. He was kind of a broken record on several points. Overall, I think some people watched a hero being torn down, the lesser-known panelists eclipsing Kurzweil’s insights. Of course he was at a disadvantage by the fact that he was the only panelist in via teleconference. I don’t mean to tear him down - he had a lot of fascinating things to say; only that some of his viewpoints were… cold and his delivery was kind of redundant.

In a conversation the other day with a colleague, I came to the crashing realization that not everyone knows what the ~ (tilde) character is on their keyboards — what it is, how to pronounce it, where to find it, or what it means when used in a shell or URL. I had thought that after ten years of web prominence it had been more or less assimilated into the common consciousness. Now I wonder. Straw poll:

The annual Lyttle Lytton contest challenges writers to come up with the worst possible opening line to a novel — a challenge which generally results in tons of run-on sentences being submitted. This year, the sponsors decided to limit entries to 25 words or less — preferably less. The 2004 winners have been posted. The winner, however:

This is the story of your mom’s life.

Was, in my opinion, not nearly as funny as the example given in the contest rules:

Jennifer stood there, quietly ovulating.

A line which quite literally caused me to spew milk and cereal from the nose this morning.

Composer Harry Partch didn’t write pieces to work with the standard set of 12-tone scale instruments popular in Western music. Instead, he composed with as many as 43 microtones to the octave, then built instruments capable of playing the compositions.

National Public Radio’s “Music Mavericks” has always done a great job chronicling the work of off-beat genius musicians, but their Partch site is a joy to behold. They’ve created a virtual museum of Partch’s instruments, where you can not only hear the instrument played and listen to Partch talk about instruments with names like “Gourd Tree and Cone Gongs” and the “Zymo-Xyl” and “Spoils of War” and “Quadrangularus Reversum,” but also, through ingenious use of photographs and Flash, play the instruments yourself.

After almost a year of DIY projects, finally hit one we wish we had paid to have done. When we installed the lawn, moved a ton of small rocks in 50% soil off to one side of the house to “deal with another day.” That day came. Had a handyman do a removal estimate, he wanted $250 for the job, which sounded way high. Decided to do it ourselves. Rented an F-250 and banged some planks out of the side fence to create yard access. Spent the entire day shoveling densely rocky soil into and out of buckets, into and out of the bed of the truck. Hot. Sore. Sweated buckets. Hard work is generally satisfying, but we all have our thresholds. Met mine today.

Wake-up: The city dump is expensive! I remember going as a kid with dad, it was $5 per pickup bed, flat fee. Now there’s a long menu of fees at the entrance, all kinds of prices / cubic yard per material. Interestingly, they now charge $30 just do dump a single computer monitor (that’s a good thing). Anyway, spent $65 on the truck + gas and $80 on dumping fees. Next time we pay to have stuff hauled.

Tips: A) Don’t mix dirt/rocks with yard waste - not only do you get charged more to dump, but it’s a bear to get out of the truck bed. B) If you can rent a dump truck rather than a pickup, DO IT. Spent hours getting intermingled dirt, rocks, and yard waste out of the truck, when one pull of a handle could have emptied the bed.

After chopping down a tree/bush thing today, we found a bird’s nest and put it aside. We thought it was sweet. Then I went to rent a truck. I returned to find Amy crying. She had found four tiny baby birds on the grass — they had been cast from the nest to the ground when the tree came down. No bigger than thumbs, and half that length. Two were dead, the other two were begging with their tiny soft beaks for food. Pink skin and tiny tufts of hair. Amy cut up a worm and put it in the nest with them, but they didn’t eat it - they needed to be regurgitated to. Brand new to the world, and already their fate seemed sealed. We could only imagine what the mother bird would think when she returned to find not only the nest gone, but the whole tree. She probably went crazy with confusion and grief. Poor innocent things.

Dean Schell and the J-School profs are driving a mad events schedule lately, and I’m part of the frenzy, webcasting a ton of good ones in the coming week. Install QuickTime 6 (because we’re using the 3ivx codec now) and tune in. I try to get archives online 24-48 hours after the live cast; yesterday’s Changing World Views of the U.S. is already up. Here are a few of the events I expect to be especially worth checking out:

April 27: Biotech & Nanotech - Remaking Nature in the Image of Technology

April 29: Living With The Genie — On Technology and the Quest for Human Mastery, with Ray Kurzweil (by videoconference) and others.

April 30: Revisiting Virtual Communities — The Internet’s Impact on Society and Politics. With Craig Newmark, founder of craigslist and others.

April 30: Disrupting the News Industry - Media Concentration and Participatory Journalism. With Dan Gillmor of The San Jose Mercury News, and others.

April 30 and 31: China’s Digital Future — Advancing The Understanding of China’s Information Revolution. With Lawrence Lessig, John Gage, and others.

New Media Musings’ J.D. Lasica reviews the documentary Willful Infringement for Mindjack. After having been crucified by Disney for creating trailers that included Mouse snippets, the director traipsed the country talking to people whose work had been stifled by overzealous copyright enforcement.

“He … interviews … a pair of party clowns in Anaheim, California, who were warned not to create balloon animals for kids that looked too much like Tigger, Barney, or the Aladdin genie.”

Question: If the same kind of “chilling effects” enforcement currently being leveled against any use of music or moving images had historically been imposed on quotations of text, how would our culture be different today?

“My mother was a children’s librarian, and she imbued me with a world view that culture is a conversation, that you don’t own stories, you share them,” he tells me. “What has happened over the past few decades is that culture has become privatized to the point where we’re now facing a crisis. We need to remember we can still quote and sample, we still have fair use. As a free culture, we’re still allowed to do things without permission.”

Apparently I missed the supposedly rampant “echo chamber” meme that was going around at the height of the Dean campaign — the notion that bloggers only pal around with people who feel and see the same way they do, thus reinforcing — rather than challenging — their own world views. David Weinberger does a brilliant job tearing down the myth of the echo chamber as either A) real or B) as necessarily a bad thing. What some people call the echo chamber, Weinberger calls bedrock: the “planks of conversation.”

Besides, we humans — echo chamber participants or echo chamber castigators — rarely engage in deep, meaningful and truly open conversation with people who fundamentally disagree with us. I have never debated a neo-Nazi, and if I did, I wouldn’t do so with an open mind: No way is that son of a bitch going to convince me that he’s right. No apologies. Being grounded in some beliefs is a condition for having any beliefs. And that has nothing to do with echo chambers.

Thanks Pam.

ORA blog: A couple of professors in the Photo department recently asked for my input on methods for digital storytelling with still images. They’re interested in having student photos packaged up into multimedia modules that optionally include interleaved text, audio, effects, and transitions in addition to still images. I’ve started compiling a list of various slideshow technologies, with their respective pros and cons.

Amazing NOVA: World in the Balance, on global forces of population, affluence and poverty, consumption and production, disease, etc. Casts a very wide net, but somehow manages not to treat subjects superficially; instead looking at the interplay of these forces, e.g. the rise of China as a nation of SUV-driving affluent polluters just like Americans: We export our culture to them, generating demand for a lifestyle that never existed there, they respond by exporting toxic pollution back across the sea to us in volumes that will soon dwarf our own export of same to the rest of the world. Well worth catching, look for reruns.

In news almost too post-modern to digest, Scott Richter, the Internet’s third-busiest spammer, has decided that his spammy brand has become recognizable enough to be marketable in its own right. To capitalize, he’s launching a line of SpamKing clothing — initially shirts, hats, and panties bearing phrases such as “Just opt out” and “Click it.” You can take a wild flying guess how he’ll be promoting the line. Adding an additional layer to the strangeness, Richter is not generally referred to as “The Spam King” — that honor usually goes either to Bill Waggoner or Alan Ralsky, or, going farther back, Sanford Wallace. So he’s apparently usurping the title from his fellow spammers.

As if it weren’t enough to have written the theme song to Superchicken (”You knew the job was dangerous when you took it, Fred”), Sheldon Allman also wrote the theme songs to George of the Jungle and Tom Slick, all in the same afternoon at Jay Ward Studios. He also wrote the theme music for Let’s Make a Deal, and was the voice of Mr. Ed the Talking Horse. Sometime in the late 50s, Allman released an album of songs he thought might be appropriate for modern living in the 21st century, all sung in an overly sincere baritone and accompanied by Spanish pop guitar. Apparently, Allman thought we would be dating humanoid androids, doing a lot of math, dealing with schizophrenia, and crawling out from under space junk by now. The MP3s will be taken down April 30th - get ‘em while they’re still irrelevant.

We met once as I recall
I gave her my close attention
When she came walking through my wall
She’s the girl from the fourth dimension
One kiss and my toes were curled.

Thanks mneptok

Reprising the military’s 1989 attempt to rouse Manuel Noriega by blasting rock music at his encampment, and the FBI’s 1993 attempt to get the Branch Davidians to emerge from their Waco compound, U.S. forces are pumping AC/DC and Jimi Hendrix into Fallujah streets to goad Iraqi gunmen into attacking… so they can be mowed down. They’re not stopping with rock, either - insults are being used as well: “You shoot like a goat herder.”

Thanks Roger.

Many well-articulated and legitimate criticisms of gmail’s implications for privacy are circulating, and 28 privacy groups have co-written a letter to Google asking them to reconsider the plan. In a brilliant rebuttal, always level-headed Tim O’Reilly writes The Fuss About Gmail and Privacy: Nine Reasons Why It’s Bogus.

There are already hundreds of millions of users of hosted mail services at AOL, Hotmail, MSN, and Yahoo! These services routinely scan all mail for viruses and spam. Despite the claims of critics, I don’t see that the kind of automated text scanning that Google would need to do to insert context-sensitive ads is all that different from the kind of automated text scanning that is used to detect spam. (And in fact, those oppressed by spam should look forward to having Google’s brilliant search experts tackle spam detection as part of their problem set!)

Our side fence was sagging into the yard, looking sad. Removing the original posts was going to be impossible without renting a jackhammer. Decided to put new posts in between the old ones. Project started last weekend, finished up this morning. Like most home improvement projects, hidden variables got in the way, things didn’t turn out as planned. This time they turned out better.

Why is it annoying to be in the presence of someone else’s cell phone conversation, especially on a train or other confined area? If pressed, most of us would probably say that “people talk too loud” on cell phones, which makes the calls more annoying than being in the proximity of a two-person conversation.

But the affect is actually more subtle than that. Andrew Monk and colleagues from the University of York did a pretty careful study, rating the impressions of standers-by after they had been surreptitiously exposed to cell phone and normal conversations at both normal and loud volumes.

Turns out it’s not so much the volume of cell phone conversations (though that’s certainly a factor) but the fact that a person is standing there talking apparently to no one. Psychologically, we just can’t filter this into the background as easily as we can a two-person conversation, which we (I’m surmising here) have evolved for millions of years to be in the proximity of. This of course raises the question of how many millions of years it will take for us to regard nearby cell conversations as perfectly normal.

Clearly, mobile phones score far worse than face-to-face conversations, confirming much anecdotal evidence. As we might expect, loud conversations score worse than quieter conversations. It’s striking, however, that mobile-phone conversations are judged more negatively than loud conversations. Participants even said that the volume of the mobile-phone conversations was more annoying than those that occurred face-to-face, even though the volume was the same, and was controlled by objective measures.

A little late to the party with this — massive online protest currently in process to counter the proposed European software patents directive. Absurd examples of already patented (!) widgets, the patents of which would become enforceable if the Council of Ministers has its way. Build a shopping cart, go to prison. Templates you can slap over your homepage to join the protest.

The only technology on this list that I take exception to is the MP3 codec, which represents thousands of person-hours of intensive R&D.

Thanks Rob.

Note to self: Next time you need to stir mix-in-hole concrete with your hands, put on a pair of gloves first. The lime in the concrete does a number on your skin, even though the gravel has a way of diminishing the profile of raised blemishes. Two days after replacing fenceposts, hands are sorry. Seemed innocuous enough at the time.

One of the most genuinely useful applications of OS X’s native PDF-based transparency engine that I’ve encountered: iconfactory’s xScope — a set of tools for designers and web developers that rides on top of your open apps and lets you instantly see what viewport would remain if you were to be working at a different resolution, or were using a different browser with different amounts of chrome. Also includes tools for measuring on-screen X-Y coordinates, for precisely measuring the pixel dimensions of any onscreen object, and so on. It’s been a while since I’ve encountered a piece of must-have shareware.

LA Weekly has a very good tribute to the forgotten session musician — the fellow (usually) who is not part of any band per se’ but who has played with hundreds of them, with amazing flexibility and total professionalism. From ABBA to Zappa, the session musician is the opposite of the rock god — ego is probably not why he’s playing, and he will never have groupies.

“Most of the music you will ever hear will be played by people you will never see and whose names you will neither know nor think to ask. It will be recorded in windowless rooms, witnessed sometimes only by an engineer or producer, the now-ancient technology of the overdub making the presence even of other musicians unnecessary. For every superstar singer or guitar heroine whose name adorns a T-shirt or tattoo, there are hundreds whose work is done anonymously, or as good as. Who play their part, collect their pay and go home.”

I’m always amazed by the extreme sensitivity of our cheapo baby monitor. From across the house we can hear Miles’ every sleeping breath, a rumble when he turns over or pulls a blanket closer. If a cat is in the room with him, we can hear every smack of its tongue as it bathes. I’ve even gotten feedback loops passing through two closed doors, just from room tone.

Last night we were bugged by a mosquito in our room. Then this afternoon we were gardening outside, Miles was asleep inside, and the monitor was with us, competing with traffic noise. And then suddenly we could hear that damned mosquito buzzing around in his bedroom, clear as day.

Hearing an indoor mosquito from outside makes you realize what it must feel like to be to a dog or other animal with super-hearing — and how little information our ears usually give us. Kind of spooky.

With all love and respect, I can honestly say that no one I’ve ever met can mess up a computer faster than my mother (and I’ve worked with and for a lot of people for whom learning computer skills is a seemingly impossible proposition). Less than a week after moving Mom from Windows to OS X, she informed me that she had “messed up her network” and that all her mail was missing, though she swore she had not deleted anything.

And now I am kissing myself for thinking ahead and installing Apple Remote Desktop before handing over the box. After getting her back online over the phone, she read her current IP lease to me, I typed it into the ARD admin tool with user/pass, and bam! - I was controlling her desktop from home. Screen redraw was slow, but the fact that I was able to both correct the problems and educate her at the same time was invaluable.

Beyond simple remote control, the real power of this tool is that it freed us from the usual frustration of getting her to describe what she sees on screen, or to understand my requests for information. She was able to watch her mouse move magically, to see what I was doing as I described it. God, it was satisfying.

And the missing mail? She had been exploring menu options, just as I had encouraged her to, and had found one I didn’t even know was present on Entourage’s View menu - “Unread mail.” Her mail was there, it was just hidden from view.

Especially trippy was to send her email, then click her “Receive Mail” button and watch it roll in to her inbox, then watch her mouse go to read and reply to the message. Then, to make sure everything was as confusing as possible, I alternated lines with her as she responded to me - using Entourage and ARD in combo as a real-time chat app.

A happening today at Berkeley… the monthly emergency preparedness sirens went off at noon on the first Wednesday of the month, as usual. And just as they did, a caterwaul arose, huger and more textured than the sirens, nearly but not quite drowning them out. People came out of their offices and into the courtyard, and looked up to the dorms across the street. There, atop a roof six stories above the ground, were four students with guitars and Marshall stacks, plugged in and improvising a wall of sound to interplay with the sirens. A free concert of artfully tweaked distortion and dada rock and roll improv. Should have AudBlogged it.