Sometime in July the National Film Board opened up a test site for playing videos from their archives. There’s a lot of content, and much of it is feature length. It was all paid for by taxpayers back when it was made, so distributing it freely is exactly the right plan. There’s new stuff and old.
Video quality is excellent (multiple levels are available, click the “options” button) and it’s embeddable, as above.
Publicly funded media is perpendicular to all worries about ownership and licensing and remixing and making sure there’s a profit transaction every time somebody look at it, and so on. The NFB and the CBC should be leveraging hell out of their archives, throwing it up on the web, getting it out of the vaults, giving people a chance to filter and tag and redistribute and build on it. This is a huge advantage that these public organizations have over their for-profit neighbours, and if they’re worried about their utility in some new information saturated age they should be exploiting it. Looks like the NFB is on it. CBC?
The wacky boys at Boing Boing Gadgets are doing “three days of fiction-based blogging”. Product of which is here. I regret that they took the time to explain the project, I was enjoying it even more before I had it categorized for me, but it’s still great stuff. There’s some real effort at play.
Judging from the comments on the only open thread so far, lots of people don’t appreciate having the flow of their gadget-information interrupted for mere art and humour and social commentary. They are threatening to go to other gadget blogs. Sounds like a good idea to me.
It’s a tough posture that Boing Boing Gadgets trys to maintain: simultaneously scorning consumerism while being a gadget blog. Reminds me of the fundamental dissonance at the heart of techno-utopian, post-WELL northern California. This looks like an effort to poke a finger into that chasm. Good O, Boing Boing Gadgets.
My boy Bertrand (of WCBN’s “The French Show”) brings our attention to this video clip:
It’s becoming common for me to link to Hensonian-based video. Jim’s lovingly executed imagery is timeless, as much a joy now as it was when I was a kid. As such, a palette for use and re-use and extension primitive and exquisite and everything in between. Here’s to you Jim. I’m throwing you my gang sign.
I have nothing to say about the financial crisis, because I discover that as a heavy news reader who has scraped through classes on law, economics and complex systems, and even read some Galbraith on a bus once, I don’t have even first principles to judge what has just happened in the US financial system. The subject–the impenetrable interplay of financial “instruments”–is so inscrutable that any comprehensible narrative one tries to tease out of it by watching the shadows it casts on the wall seems to have more to do with what goes on in one’s own head than what goes on in the stock markets or boardrooms or policy lairs of the world. I just have no idea about where it came from, or what it means, or what should be done, or where it will go. All I’ve learned is that the people who presumably do have the expertise to deal with this, possibly don’t.
But everyone is telling one story or another about it all the same. And they usually boil down to public versus private, government versus market. Here’s a somehow rather heartening thought from commenter HH at Crooked Timber:
The left-right polarization over and private enterprise is overshadowed by the larger conflict between truth and lies. Both free market and planned economic systems can function with reasonable efficiency when operated with competence and integrity. Neither can function when overrun by thieves and liars.
America’s moon landing program and nuclear submarine projects were masterpieces of centrally planned, government sponsored endeavors. France’s nationally controlled nuclear power program achieved great success, while America’s privately managed nuclear power efforts stumbled. It is the animating vigor and functional integrity of a program that is the best predictor of success, not its ideological grounding.
To which I think I would add that we get a somewhat better chance at choosing thoughtful criteria for what ’success’ means for public enterprises than for private.
Here’s an old-hand financial technician interviewed by Reason magazine people:
I don’t understand how he gets from some of his premises to some of his conclusions. But his central premise feels about right: nobody knows how to value these derivatives, which seem to have absorbed so much of the nations wealth and now may or may not even particularly exist as real entities in the real universe. The old bosses didn’t know how to value them, and the new bosses won’t either, once they’ve sunk so much more of the country’s treasure into getting a chance to try.
But we won’t admit to ourselves that we’re dealing with an uncertainty, will we? Instead we’ll talk ourselves into believing one thing or the other, and forge ahead on that basis.
A separate but related question: how does a country that can’t afford equitable education or health care keep finding hundreds of billions of dollars lying around when there’s a country to be invaded or a bank to be bought out? Where does all this money come from? And why wasn’t it there before?
Big-box grocery shopping induces a powerful melancholy paranoia. I suppose that’s because I’m being intensely second-guessed while I’m doing it, and the results of that second-guessing suggest sad things about me. Or maybe it’s something else.
Reason Magazine is a bunch of infuriatingly cocky libertarian wonks, who write well and are generally convincing despite being fundamentally wrong about life and everything. They’re charmers by and large, living out their Heinlein-goes-to-Washington boy (and girl)hood fantasy lives in print.
Jesse Walker is managing editor for Reason. He lives in Baltimore, but according to his blog, last Thursday he covered a slot on WCBN. I’m sorry I missed that, I guess I was in Chicago. It seems he was a student and dj here back in the ambiguous day and this was a triumphalist return.
For fun, here’s what libertarian turbo-intellectuals sound like when they play music and talk into a microphone:
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Sounds good. Go figure. Playlist included in Walker’s blog post.
Update: if I’d read some of Jesse’s other blog posts, I would have realized that he is living in Ann Arbor for a while, and has a regular Thurs. 12-3p show. The posted audio is just the first episode. Right on.
The Wisconsin Historical Society maintains an online dictionary of Wisconsin history. According to that resource, the word “wanagan” had several different uses in the context of Wisconsinite historical logging:
“1. Where the camp stores are kept. 2. The payroll charges for such goods. 3. In Wisconsin it was also the cook’s raft which went down the river behind the logs. It was tied to a tree on shore overnight. 4. Wherever camp was made on a river-drive and the men paid Same as ark, shanty-boat.”
According to NameVoyager, which is a visualizer based on US Census data, the name “Adolph” was in decline from as early as 1880, which is the earliest for which data is shown. By the 1970s, it was no longer in the top 1000. But, and here’s the odd thing, in the 1940s there was a noticeable decrease in its rate of decline.
Rest easy, here’s a list of all the priests to appear or even be mentioned in the television series Father Ted.
From “Priests we merely hear about”:
# Father Kiernan who apparently told lots of stories, was chubby and jolly, and shot himself (CT)
# Father Clippit does a good long Mass. Three hours on a good night. Since his stroke. (AGCW)
# Father Jimmy Ranable, a pupil of Jack’s many years ago, who subsequently perpetrated the Drumshanbo massacre. (GUHER)
# Father Jez Flatham, a former acquaintance of Ted’s who now makes $50,000 a year lap-dancing, apparently. (ACT)
# Father Buzz Dolan, former winner of the Golden Cleric award who moved to Canada and got a part in the new Bond film. (ACT)
Campus/community radio stations can wax and wane as the semesters turn and the djs come and go. For as long as I’ve been listening to them, CJSR out of Edmonton has been consistently great.
Currently listening to Tish and Sarah’s show, Famous Last Words. And I’m hearing music I don’t know from Edmonton, Chicago, and the Funk Cloud. “Thursdays from 9-11am (MST)”. Recommended.
For several weeks I have been meaning to read up on Lenski et al’s 20-year test tube experiment, in which they observed the rise of novel, beneficial traits in populations of bacteria they stored in a closet. It’s interesting to me because (if I read the summaries right) only some of the test tubes evolved the traits, which suggests an interesting contingency in evolution. I love ragged ass evolution.
The research is interesting to the folks at Conservapedia because they don’t like anything that purports to demonstrate evolution. Because they are intelligent design supporters. Or, as this nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy researcher puts it, an “army of homeschooled numbnuts”. Now now. So they sent some letters demanding to see the data. The correspondence is well documented elsewhere, but I wanted to draw attention to this particular reference from Lenski, made after some goading from the conservapedia crowd:
“It is my impression that you seem to think we have only paper and electronic records of having seen some unusual E. coli. If we made serious errors or misrepresentations, you would surely like to find them in those records. If we did not, then – as some of your acolytes have suggested – you might assert that our records are themselves untrustworthy because, well, because you said so, I guess. But perhaps because you did not bother even to read our paper, or perhaps because you aren’t very bright, you seem not to understand that we have the actual, living bacteria that exhibit the properties reported in our paper, including both the ancestral strain used to start this long-term experiment and its evolved citrate-using descendants. In other words, it’s not that we claim to have glimpsed “a unicorn in the garden” – we have a whole population of them living in my lab! And lest you accuse me further of fraud, I do not literally mean that we have unicorns in the lab. Rather, I am making a literary allusion.”
Stephen Kohn is the executive director of the National Whistleblower Center. A week ago on the Worldview radio show, he deployed the word “guantanamization” into the english language. You can hear him do it here.
5 JAN 2001: Finished the 2nd disk of “2010″. Something strange about watching a movie about a space expedition when you’re actually on a space expedition.
Oh they so watched 2010 just so they could breezily make that comment.
Steve Steinberg argues that human terrain mapping, and in particular emergent group simulation, may be a damaging technology we are developing without due thought to it’s consequences.
“The next example was more disturbing. The scenario this time is a public demonstration, similar to the WTO protests that occurred in Seattle a few years ago. The model includes such details as tear gas which causes civilians to stampede, extremists who are trying to instigate violence, and mounted police. Torrens shows that changing a few small initial conditions controls whether the protest spins out of control or not, and suggests this simulation is a valuable tool for policing. Indeed. Demonstrating either startling ignorance or touching naïveté, Torrens argues that this scenario is really a public health issue, due to the possibility of injury. Well, yes – but, more importantly, it’s a democratic, human rights issue, and improving the state’s ability to squash demonstrations doesn’t strike me as a desirable development.”
Somehow the word “design” has come to mean imprinting the questionable personality of pompous and incoherent scenesters on innocent and previously useful objects. According to Phillippe Starck, who is one of the world leaders in this class of low-key crime, design in that sense is dead. He expresses what seems like genuine remorse, and consequently I think we should be easy on him when the revolution comes.
PZ Myers is a biologist-blogger-creationism-debunker. Last week he went with his family and a friend to a screening of Expelled, which is some kind of pro intelligent design documentary. Before he got in, he was pulled out of the line by rent-a-cops and told to leave the premises. Yes, a biologist so dangerous he must be expelled.
But that’s not the funny part. Read his post to find out the funny part.
There’s nothing more reassuring than interesting old people. I have no idea who Helmut Knewton was outside of this short interview with him (a photographer who did a lot of nudes apparently), but based solely on its content, I may have to rename another plant.
Q: When you arrived in Singapore you had five dollars to your name, which you immediately spent in a brothel.
A: My sound financial sense told me there was no difference between having five dollars and being completely broke.
Q: You never really talk about the Holocaust.
A: I have no animosity against the Germans. I will never forget or forgive but I find the Germans are the only ones who are seriously confonting their past. When I was offered the Great Federal Order of Merit, June said “You can’t possible accept it!” So I asked Billy Wilder and he said “You’ve got to take it!” I preferred listening to Billy.
Oh no. Jason Scott is spittle-angry about the fantastic movie King of Kong. Jason has some skin in this game, he made BBS: The Documentary (which I have watched and enjoyed in it’s entirety. If you think you would like to watch, for instance, an entire hour of footage of people who used to make ASCII art talking about the ASCII art scene, you would probably love it it too), is now working on GET LAMP, a documentary about text adventure games, and has plans to move onto arcade games as his next Ken Burns triumph. The guy knows geek, the guy loves geek, the guy is geek. And King of Kong is about geek.
I don’t have time to find out if his factual challenges to the film are on the money. My own recollection of the film seems a little at odds with his claims (doesn’t the film’s introduction of Steve Weibe start with the fact that he held the Donkey Kong high score for a time?), but clearly Mr. Scott is more familiar with the movie than I am. Regardless, I’m not inclined to immediately repudiate my appreciation for King of Kong. Scott clearly thinks the movie is a two-trick pony who’s two tricks are making fun of geeks for being geeks, and for Billy Mitchell for being a cardboard villain. I don’t think either charge is entirely fair. Part of what I loved about the movie is that you learned enough about Billy to feel such pain at his transformation into a insidious bully when his personal mythos is challenged by a better player. Part of what I loved about the movie is that the characters are presented as both really really geeky (which, c’mon Jason, aren’t they in real life?) and also really really human.
This cross-genre rant is great. Evolutionary programming to design physical objects never ceases to entertain me. Add in a Mr. Furious-ANGRY anti-intelligent design rant, plus some truly stupid animation humour, and you have a uncomfortable and (I think) hilarious one-of-a-kinder.
“The clock genome is a matrix containing the information of who binds to who and what their properties are.
Remember, the theory of evolution is NOT abiogenesis.
Arguing that because I wrote this program and I am intelligent somehow proves intelligent design is being incredibly ignorant.
IF the purpose of this simulation was to test abiogensis then you would have a point but it’s not so you don’t.”
Regrettably, the world seems to have failed to get the joke about Line Beauchamp’s wacky sidekick at the Bali climate change talks. Instead, Prime Minister Harper is somehow co-opting the agenda. The fun thing about Harper is you don’t have to pay him to behave this way: even in a world without lobbyists he would still do his damndest to give industry of the day free reign regardless of the consequences. He’s honest that way. This is just a bad time to have a colossally narrow-minded think-tanker as a national leader.
Dear Prime Minister:
I am appalled by Canada’s counter-productive and hypocritical negotiating position at the talks on climate change in Bali. If we fail to meet the emerging challenges of climatic change, the damage that will be done to Canada and the world’s social and environmental integrity far outweighs any short-term concerns about preserving the status quo for our extractive and emmissive industries. The Canadian government’s behaviour at the Bali talks is transparently an effort to stall and undermine progress towards effective reduction of climate-altering emissions.
As a progressive democracy and disproportionate contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, Canada should be setting an example to the rest of the world. It is not too late to reverse our position and begin to do so.
Yours sincerely,
Hugh Stimson
“Dear Prime Minister” is the correct way to address email to the Prime Minister (at pm@pm.gc.ca, incidentally), although a poke in the eye is an acceptable alternative in person. Charmingly, my Member of Parliament Denise Savoie’s email is savoid1a@parl.gc.ca. I think that was my email address in 1994.
In a few hours I’m gonna do that Canadian music show. I’ll be playing Log Driver’s Waltz (of course), straight from Youtube, so I’m posting it here so I can find it. And now, so can you!
Bonus action: the NFB’s version of the Blackfly Song with Wade Hemsworth. Ahhhhhhhh….. NFB……. what ever happened to that?
And here’s a song that I couldn’t find a playable-quality version of, so I’m gonna have to play a cover:
Taser International, “market leader in advanced electronic control devices”, have released their inevitable press release in response to the death of Robert Dziekanski at the Vancouver airport.
Taser has been remarkably good at dodging lawsuits. As far as I know, they’ve never even been stuck with a civil suit for injury or death.
Their press release, helpfully reproduced in unedited form as a news article by CNN, scolds media outlets for rushing to blame Dziekanski’s death on his being tasered. They insist that
“We are taken aback by the number of media outlets that have irresponsibly published conclusive headlines blaming the TASER device and / or the law enforcement officers involved as the cause of death before completion of the investigation. These sensationalistic media reports completely ignore the earmark symptoms of excited delirium shown in the video.”
Yes, they’re shocked. Shocked. Furthermore,
“TASER International is transmitting over 60 legal demand letters requiring correction of these false and misleading headlines and will take other actions as appropriate.”
Which suggests an explanation for the lack of successful suits against them: they spend a lot of money on their justice.
So how come people die after getting tasered? It’s the tasered’s fault, not the taser or the taseree.
“This tragic incident appears to follow the pattern of many in-custody deaths or deaths following a confrontation with police. Historically, medical science and forensic analysis has shown that these deaths are attributable to other factors and not the low-energy electrical discharge of the TASER(r).”
Cause-and-effect is a slippery thing, sure enough. When is a thing a cause of another thing, and when are they just correlated in space in time? It’s a question that has vexed philosophers and ecologists and taserologists for centuries. The RCMP are very clear in their own philosophy, as noted previously.
After watching the video of the man dieing at the same time and place as he was being tasered by police I’ll tell you this: if that man hadn’t been tasered, he wouldn’t be dead now. Therefore the taser caused his death. I’ll tell you this too: the police also caused his death.
You know who should get a tasering? The philosophy department at TASER International of Scottsdale Arizona. What’s a low-energy electrical discharge among pure intellectuals?
“It had never occurred to me to take a hammer to a phone company before, but I was just so upset”
I’ve got nothing to add to that. But I will use the excuse to tell this story:
Once our house modem broke. So I rented a car and drove out to the nearest comcast office near Ypsilanti. It’s a grey slot in a strip mall, decorated with a poster and a TV bolted to the ceiling playing a comcast television station. Maybe there was a poster. At the back there was series of comcast people in comcast polo shirts behind a desk and a wall of half-inch thick plexiglass. Their were no comcast employees on the customer side of the glass. Each representative had a big box made of the same plexiglass, through which you could see the stout mechanism which kept it from opening on both sides at the same time. Whatever you had that was broke went in there. To talk to the representative you had to bend well down and shout through the little perforations in the perspex. I’ve been in check-cashing services in West Sacramento that were more personable. I’ve felt more at home in late-night liqour stores in Pasadena. I’ve never visited an inmate at a correctional facility, but if I did and they wanted to know what problem I was having with my tv service it would probably feel familiar. The representative didn’t show much emotion during our exchange, but somehow I still felt dirty placing my broken cable modem in the box, and retrieving my replacement from it.
I’m not sure what to take from that experience. It’s still somehow unsettling when I remember it. Are things really that bad?
Everything Jason Kottke likes about the culture of parkour is what I like about skateboard culture. From what little time I’ve spent moping around skate parks, the words discipline and determination spring lively to mind. Where there’s vanity or overt oneupmanship it’s kept hard in check, or scorned as out of line, at least on the surface. These skate kids will try and fail to hit a trick a hundred times or more, then once they can stick it they’ll pull it off a couple of times and move on to the next thing whether anybody was watching or not. Over and over and over. Fashion is a big thing yeah, but you don’t go bragging about how you can pull that blunt side half 6 stair whatever whatever whatever, you do it or gtfo, and don’t be doing the same thing tomorrow. The association between young skaters and recklessness or apathy is such bullshit, at least from what I’ve seen. I can’t imagine any 4H club or boy scouts that could teach discipline and detail the way they learn it in the parks.
A friend of mine was contracted by an anarchist bookstore to make some posters (yes, I have interesting friends and I’m proud of it). He came up with lots of great stuff but my favourite mostly just said “somewhere along the line we forgot that we made all of this stuff up.”
I think he’s right, and that’s why horse-race political coverage is depressing to me:
If you buy into the pan-universal cue break theory, then fine, all of existence is an ordered series of inevitable predeterminate cause-and-effect events, and all we have is the utterly convincing illusion that we have meaningful choice over ourselves and influence on the world around us. I don’t know many folk who take that perspective, but I sure seem to know some who think that politics and business are inevitable end-of-history monoliths that just are that way, and having opinions about how they should or could be is tragic naivety. But here’s the thing: we make all this stuff up. Not individually, and not always intentionally, so we can’t just decide how the world should be and it will become that. But we do have influence, we can participate in the ebb-and-flow that collectively emerges our social scenarios. Democrats aren’t winning in the former red states because of a wobbly orbit in the universe which can be observed and extrapolated out to predict the rest of the future, they are winning there because they are somehow convincing people to vote for them in elections. If the republicans change their behaviour they can swing that around. Income disparity isn’t growing because free markets are the nature of the world and that’s what happens in free markets, it’s growing because our choices have created a particular form of free-market-based society where disparity can grow. It’s also our choices which have prevented it from growing more. Collectively at least, this stuff is on us. Some people take that as precocious self-importance, but it doesn’t make it less true.
