January 2008
71 posts
Galactic Wi-fi? →
St. Petersburg Starts Process of Becoming a Domed... →
It’s not quite a glass-domed city yet, but St. Petersberg has taken the first steps towards that goal. British architecture firm Wilkinson Eyre, best known for the design of the Gateshead Millenium Bridge in Newcastle, unveiled a bold new plan to revamp the old market of St. Petersburg, Russia by putting it entirely under glass. Over the next few years they’ll be putting a giant sheet...
Damaged Undersea Cable Disrupts Net Service Across... →
Large parts of the Middle East lost internet service Wednesday following damage to a communications cable running running between Palermo, Italy and Alexandria, Egypt. What caused the damage remains unclear.
One Pill Makes You Autistic -- And One Pill... →
Need to finish that work project, and wish you had the mental intensity to do it? Just take a synapse-regulating inhibitor, induce temporary autism, and you’ll want to ignore your friends and do nothing but number-crunching for days. Autism-inducers could become as popular as Provigil among the geek set by 2020. Last night, in fact, a group German researchers announced they’d...
Dark Truths About the Israeli Occupation →
Can Israelis ever recover from the self-inflicted damage of becoming a brutal occupier?
What Our Top Spy Doesn't Get: Security and Privacy... →
237 - Regionalism and Religiosity →
Cuius Regio, Eius Religio - this Latin saying applies to Europe, and to the principle that ended religious warfare: “Whose region (it is), whose religion (shall predominate)”. But it sprang to mind when seeing this map of the US, showing the leading church bodies per county. The map demonstrates the important link between region and religion, or to put it more precisely: where you live is a...
Expect Us →
Anonymous addresses news media coverage of The War On Scientology:
RFID Tags: A Threat to Privacy in the Near Future? →
Radio frequency identification technology, which enables objects, pets and people to be tagged and tracked wirelessly, is likely to be ubiquitous in the not-so-distant future. Almost no aspect of life may soon be safe from the prying eyes of corporations and governments.
Two minutes and counting →
New Chinese Islands Made From Scratch... →
A Danish architecture
firm is creating an entire district in China from scratch as a
series of three connected islands. The district will be located in
a low-level wetland between canals and rice paddies. Because it
doesn’t get a lot of natural sunlight, the design relies on
reflections from water brought in to run in between the buildings
for brightness. You can see the layout of the...
Gaza Exists in a Cage. →
Yasir lives in a prison. In March 2007 Yasir and his father were caught in crossfire between Palestinian factions as they were walking home. A bullet hit Yasir’s spine leaving him crippled from the neck down. Yasir’s prison is his body. Since that day Yasir has lived in various ICUs in Gaza City. Daily, the injured enter and leave the hospital around him; many of them leave dead. Yasir is ten...
The more things change... →
China lashes out at Dalai Lama, other Olympic... →
Foreign Ministry officials say attempts to link political issues to the Beijing Olympics betrayed the spirit of the games
Three-eyed piglet with two snouts →
This is a piglet born in China that has two snouts, two mouths, and three eyes. According to The Telegraph, the piglet lives on the farm of Yang Qiaofen of Huimen village, Menla County, China. From The Telegraph:
While it is able to feed - “both mouths can drink at the same time,” noted a surprised Yang, who is feeding it on powdered milk - it is unable to stand properly.
Link
Shorty 2.0: LP632 Swivels Get Updated →
UPDATE — 11:31 PM: Hung out with some local camera clubbers tonight, and one of them had seen this post and actually had one of the new shorties with him. Verdict: Totally solid. Definitely the way to go if you are saving cubic inches in the light bag. (Thanks, Jim!) ___________ Recent purchasers of the $16.99 LumoPro LP632 “shorty” umbrella swivel mounts are reporting that they...
“We Are Your SPs” →
Wow. Sean Bonner just pointed me at this. Not sure how long it’ll stay up on YouTube — and I hope the group calling themselves Anonymous at this time haven’t made it as easy to fingerprint the video as it looks — but watch it while you can, if only because it’s kind of creepy in and of itself. Manifesto, declaration of war, sharp political film:
EDIT: it’s just occurred to me that “Anonymous”...
HOWTO: 70 gory photoshopping HOWTOs →
Here’s a gallery of seventy horror and gore-effect Photoshop HOWTOs for bubbly burns, twisted scars, scary demons, zombies, vampires, and other spooks and scares. Just the thing for the run-up to Valentine’s Day. Link (Thanks, Enrique)
NIMBYism and Web 2.0 in China →
I just returned to Shanghai after two weeks in Cambodia. While I was away, middle-class Shanghainese took to the streets to protest the extension of Shanghai’s 400-km/hour magnetic levitation train — the city’s largest demonstrations since the 2005 anti-Japanese protests (see links here). This time, they’re on Youtube.
Shanghai’s current stretch of maglev is a big showcase project...
blackspot shoes, the sole of a new company →
there are a few things that get me miffed about society - one of them is the concept of sustainable consumption. and for the past seven months, i’ve constantly thought about my foot print. oh sure i’ve taken planes, trains and automobiles and find myself considering the purchase of carbon credits… time and time again, i know i’ve taken my fare share of dead dinosaurs....
Clive Thompson on Why Sci-Fi Is the Last Bastion... →
Hu Jia imprisoned, wife Zeng Jinyan & baby cut... →
This video on YouTube is Part 1 from a documentary shot by AIDS activist Hu Jia, showing in detail what it is like to live with your family under house arrest. The full series can be watched here.
Late last month, in between Christmas and New Year - which happens to be when the maximum number of foreign correspondents are on vacation - Hu Jia was arrested on charges of “subversion...
NatGeo Photo Tips →
Like to faire une photo? You’re not alone. The inimitable (but perhaps for not much longer) National Geographic magazine has advice for taking portraits, travel photography, landscapes, excitingly vague ‘adventure’ photos and even plan old digital photography. After you’ve created magic how about selling it or getting published? Sharing is so 2007.
How Email Brings You Closer to the Guy in the Next... →
Passage: a Gamma256 video game by Jason Rohrer →
Ms. Pac-Man Plays Herself →
PocketGuitar Lets You Kick Out Riffs With Your... →
You were born to rock, and to help you live dream, Shinya Kasatani has released PocketGuitar for the iPhone and iPod touch, which turns your device into a touchscreen guitar. The application looks insanely great, and we cannot believe it has taken humanity this long to realize the true destiny of the iPhone. It makes so much sense now; it is the guitar of the future, sent back to destroy enemies...
Science fiction writers implicated in vast A-bomb... →
In a two-part column in Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Robert Silverberg tells the incredible story of the Cleve Cartmill affair: in 1944, John W Campbell published a story by the writer Cleve Cartmill that laid out an eerily accurate depiction of how the atom bomb would work, prompting a panicked — and sometimes comical — intelligence investigation into a putative conspiracy...
It's that time of year - free games all around. →
It seems that everyone wants to post their toplists for free game recommendations at the moment. First up is Gnomes’ Lair with 100 excellent free games in bloom. Can’t forget 1up with 101 Free Games 2008. And last but still well worth checking out is Indiegames’ (formerly Indygamer) Best Freeware Arcade Games 2007 and Best Freeware Adventure Games 2007. If that isn’t enough...
Unusual list of sex-related terms →
Here’s a list of words that (mostly) describe sexual behavior. Faunoiphilia (FAW-nay-FIL-ee-uh) - An abnormal desire to watch animals copulate. Brassirothesauriast (bruh-zeer-oh-thuh-SAW-ree-ast) - A person who collects brassieres or pictures of women wearing them.
Eunoterpsia (YOO-noh-TURP-see-uh) - The doctrine that pursuing sexual pleasure is the goal of life.
Typhlobasia...
Unusual list of sex-related terms →
Here’s a list of words that (mostly) describe sexual behavior. Faunoiphilia (FAW-nay-FIL-ee-uh) - An abnormal desire to watch animals copulate. Brassirothesauriast (bruh-zeer-oh-thuh-SAW-ree-ast) - A person who collects brassieres or pictures of women wearing them.
Eunoterpsia (YOO-noh-TURP-see-uh) - The doctrine that pursuing sexual pleasure is the goal of life.
Typhlobasia...
Jan. 17, 1966: H-Bombs Rain Down on a Spanish... →
The Space Review: Secrets and signs →
China: "citizen journalist" beaten to death →
Wei Wenhua was beaten to death after he snapped photos of a confrontation on the street between village residents and authorities. His death has sparked controversy in Chinese media, and the blogosphere:
Wei Wenhua was a model communist and is now a bloggers’ hero — a “citizen journalist” turned martyr. The construction company manager was driving his car when he witnessed...
LiLei and Han MeiMei →
LiLei and Han MeiMei were the two main characters from a series of middle-school English textbooks used by Mainland Chinese students in the early 80s. I’ve unearthed a small wave of nostalgia about them online, including speculations on their love triangle with Englishman Jim Green and an annotated cast of characters. Then some artists converted retro nostalgia into modern art, kitsch and...
aM laboratory - drum machine →
Scoble, Kenya and learning to connect →
Kiosk →
Troll →
Joseph Conrad, so much to answer for →
Kinshasa’s skyline, seen from The River
Rory MacLean has done me the honour of responding to my recent post, berating him for writing, in a review of Tim Butcher’s Blood River for The Guardian, that ‘there is little difference between the Congo seen by Stanley and by Butcher’, and suggesting that readers should weep for Congo but not go there. (See the original post and comments here.)
Rory...
Global ‘enthusiasm’ for Bush’s departure. →
The 2008 U.S. elections are attracting an “eager” audience worldwide. This past week, for example, major British newspapers “devoted more than 87 pages to news of the U.S. primaries, including 22 front-page stories.” Much of the enthusiasm, according to the Washington Post, is for the end of the Bush presidency:
But much of the enthusiasm comes from anticipation of President Bush’s departure,...
Wired, Backstories and the Winnowing of Green... →
Chris Anderson, of Wired, made some bold claims the other day. He looked at Wired’s activities, and claimed that it was more sustainable to publish on paper than on the web, and that, in effect, paper publication was a carbon sequestration project. Here’s his argument: 1. Trees take carbon out the air. Carbon negative 2. Sustainable forestry companies (the only kind we use) cut down...