Hardware Blizzard

Last night I dreamed that I was snowed in by computer parts. Peripherals, motherboards, connectors, and cables. Chipsets, jumpers, expansion cards, and power supplies. RJ-45, slave, master, and , SATA drives. A droning voice dully intoned IDE, AGP, VESA, and USB. DDR, DIMM, CRIMM, and active matrix. WTF?

There were green circuit boards all around and falling down from above. There were black memory chips endlessly slapping down on my dome. There was the smell of PCBs, electronics, and silicon dust.

Remind me not to go to bed right after computer hardware class.

They think in images—prose is for them a code

My wanderings around the web which led me to this post, in reverse:

A contagious information pattern that replicates by parasitically infecting human minds and altering their behavior, causing them to propagate the pattern. An idea or information pattern is not a meme until it causes someone to replicate it, to repeat it to someone else. All transmitted knowledge is memetic.

Meme

The only ones who actually wish to share the mischievous destiny of those savage runaways or minor guerillas rather than dictate it, the only ones who can understand that cherishing & unleashing are the same act—these are mostly artists, anarchists, perverts, heretics, a band apart (as much from each other as from the world) or able to meet only as wild children might, locking gazes across a dinnertable while adults gibber from behind their masks.

WildChildren

"Rebellion to tyrants
is obedience to God."
—Thomas Jefferson

Deoxyribonucleic Hyperdimension

Which I got to by way of Directory > Society and Culture > Cultures and Groups > Cyberculture.

Does anyone still use Yahoo's directory search? Does anyone remember when that's basically what Yahoo looked like? Remember when it was just a college project?

Exploring Yahoo's directory provides more opportunities for random finds compared to the more common keyword searches. The directories offer you avenues of exploration you may not have thought of otherwise.

Hezbollah in Nikes just do it

My morning news wanderings started with the obligatory spin through the Pensacola News Journal. The only article I bothered with there had this headline: Santa Rosa takes deed to part of Tiger Point road. Don't ask me why I even cared about that one. I guess it's because a government entity is gaining ownership of a piece of land and not paying for it. I'm not saying it's bad; that's just what hit me when I read the headline.

After checking out the local scene I went over the MSNBC to see what was shakin' nationwide and around the world. Right at the top, the featured story: Hezbollah gunmen seize large sections of Beirut. I can't say my initial interest had anything to do with concern for the people living in the city or the local/international political scene in the areas there. What caught my interest was the photo alongside the lead story.

Doesn't it look like that could've been a posed shot?  Look at the guy standing up in the middle, against the wall.  He's pretty buff isn't he?  And don't they all look clean?  The one guy's clearly wearing Nikes.  Go Nike.  Just do it.  Is Hezbollah sponsored by Nike?  I like how it says HOT on the building's walls.  I'm not saying this is a posed shot.  I'm just saying it looks like one.  Not all armed insurgents/revolutionaries are dirty, poor, hiding in caves.  It's a crazy world we live in.  The picture above says to me, "Welcome to 21st Century warfare."

I noticed the pic was from Reuters so I went over there to investigate further.  There, too, the Hezbollah story was top news, though not quite as prominently featured as it was on MSNBC.  The Reuters story, Hezbollah impose control on Beirut, is more thorough than MSNBC's.  That doesn't surprise me.  It's to be expected.  They have different audiences.  Of course the images caught my interest again and I clicked into the photo slideshow related to the story.  The crazy pic from above was in there.  The first one is really cool, too.

Another thing worth noting in the pictures from the conflict is how it shows that Beirut is a modern city with modern culture.  If it can happen there...

Robot Apocalypse

Engadget recently brought to mine eyes the following disturbing/inspiring video of remote control robot laser battle madness:

What are those robots?  At least some of them are Kondo KHR Series robots.  You can have one for the low, low price of $1445 plus shipping from Sozbots.  It's cool that we have such toys but it's disturbing because that video is a glimpse of the future of warfare.

If you're not concerned, you need to see this video from the future:

In The Know: Are We Giving The Robots That Run Our Society Too Much Power?

Don't panic.

Verizon connects man with dead wife

If I didn't know better I'd have thought this was from one of William Gibson's novels:

When Verizon upgraded Charles Whiting's telephone service, his wife's voice, saying, "Catherine Whiting," disappeared from his voicemail system.



She had died in 2005 and Whiting said he listened to her voice every day for comfort. He blamed Verizon for the loss, saying, "Now they took her voice away."

There's a whole novel waiting to be written based on that little story, Lost Voicemail of Man's Dead Wife Restored by Phone Company. It really is touching, and not just touching in a sci-fi and cyberpunk sort of way. That man took joy and happiness from being able to hear is dead wife's voice. Verizon accidentally took it away and they oh so nobly returned it...almost like bringing his wife back from the dead. Verizon says, "We have your dead wife on our computers. Would you like to talk to her?"

In other real-life cyberpunk tales, Wired's Threat Level blog has this cautionary tale, Industrial Control Systems Killed Once and Will Again, Experts Warn.

On June 10th, 1999 a 16-inch diameter steel pipeline operated by the now-defunct Olympic Pipeline Co. ruptured near Bellingham, Washington, flooding two local creeks with 237,000 gallons of gasoline. The gas ignited into a mile-and-a-half river of fire that claimed the lives of two 10-year-old boys and an 18-year-old man, and injured eight others.



Wednesday, computer-security experts who recently re-examined the Bellingham incident called its victims the first verified human causalities of a control-system computer incident.

Computers killed people!?

But the factor that intrigues Weiss and fellow researcher Marshall Abrams, a scientist at MITRE, is a still largely unexplained computer failure that began less than 30 minutes before the accident and paralyzed the central control room operating the pipeline, preventing workers from releasing pressure in the line before it hemorrhaged.

An unexplained computer failure? Malicious and/or stupid hackers could've done that. Perhaps hackers backed by a rival company. Perhaps hackers backed by a rival country. Perhaps they were both. Perhaps there's no difference. I'm just sayin'...

Accept Fear but Do Not Submit

This is good stuff. It's a clip from G4TV about the Great Firewall of China. Xeni Jardin is a real-life cyberpunk chick. I found this video by way of BoingBoing, which Xeni coedits. The story fascinates me because it encompasses both technology and revolt. I support any person's or people's drive to greater self-determination. I really cannot comprehend what makes Person A want to kill Person B for not wanting to be subjected to Person A. Fuck that shit. Why don't more people see how messed up that is? Why do we allow our governments to behave this way? Fear? What else could it be?

I'm reminded of V for Vendetta.

God bless alliteration!

I am not wholly sympathetic with the Tibetan cause. I can't help seeing shadowy figures from the US government skulking in the background. I'm not a fan of theocracies, even a Buddhist one. And I can't trust what I see:

Question everything. Do not blindly accept what They tell you.

Apoptosis: Pulse of Life

Life's many layers blow my mind.

The interweaving of seemingly disparate wormholes and mindthreads from across the blanket of reality and even from beyond the fabric itself, seeing how it all connects...beginning to see how it all connects, sometimes visibly and sometimes you can just feel it.

Life and death. Good and evil. How beautiful is the above entity? Is it odd that we instinctively know we're looking at a manifestation of life? That's prostate cancer, my friends. Real bad shit. [snicker] Odd how something so deadly can be beautiful. Guess it isn't, though. A great many beautiful things will kill you. Death itself is a thing of beauty. Death is a polytentacled energy vector. Death is simply energy transfer and movement on the atomic level.

Mitochondriate eukaryotic cells live poised between life and death, because mitochondria still retain their repertoire of molecules which can trigger cell suicide.[16] This process has now been evolved to happen only when programmed. Given certain signals to cells (such as feedback from neighbors, stress or DNA-damage), mitochondria release caspase activators which trigger the cell-death inducing biochemical cascade. As such, the cell-suicide mechanism is now crucial to all of our lives.

Cell-suicide mechanism? That'd be a good band name. Biochemical Cascade. Bad-ass.

Programmed cell death. Some cells are designed to die in specified situations. Their deaths benefit us.

Beautiful. We live and we die every day in a million different ways, the pulse of life.

Support Wikileaks

A post at Slashdot tipped me off to this awesome article from The Guardian, Whistle while you work.

A secretive Swiss bank landed an apparently novel censorship blow against the internet this week. Anyone who tried to call up wikileaks.org, a global website devoted to publicising leaked documents, found themselves frustrated. The site simply wasn't there any more.

You don't think the US censors the internet? Think again. We're on lockdown every bit as much as supposedly repressive countries like China and Iran.

Since wikileaks.org doesn't work in the US at this time, The Guardian was kind enough to provide us with the IP number of the site so you can bypass the hamstrung nameservers, Wikileaks. The concept behind Wikileaks gives me shivers in a good way...

an open-source, democratic intelligence agency

DiCaprio to produce live-action Akira

E! Online has reported that Leonardo DiCaprio's Appian Way Productions will be producing a live-action version of the popular Japanese animated movie Akira. It's due to be released sometime in 2009.

Google Becoming the World's Computer

Oh what a wonderful web article I've found, Google and the Wisdom of Clouds.

What is Google's cloud? It's a network made of hundreds of thousands, or by some estimates 1 million, cheap servers, each not much more powerful than the PCs we have in our homes. It stores staggering amounts of data, including numerous copies of the World Wide Web. This makes search faster, helping ferret out answers to billions of queries in a fraction of a second. Unlike many traditional supercomputers, Google's system never ages. When its individual pieces die, usually after about three years, engineers pluck them out and replace them with new, faster boxes. This means the cloud regenerates as it grows, almost like a living thing.

The Machine Is Coming To Life!!!

It gets even better!

In the process Google could become, in a sense, the world's primary computer.

See, more and more people and companies and any other number of legal fictions are turning to Google to process the brunt of their data. Whether you're simply a Gmail user or the administrator of a large university's network who turns to Google for help crunching numbers for the Physics Dept's mad nuclear experiments, you're entrusting important digital data on computer(s) other than your own. People trust Google. So do companies. So do universities. Kinda scary, doncha think? Kinda awe-inspiring, too...IMHO.

I could quote all sorts of lines from that BusinessWeek Google article. The article is cyberpunk-come-true.

We All Love Snuppy

I see articles such as the following as signs that cyberpunk is upon us.

A South Korean company says it has taken its first order for the cloning of a pet dog.

Craziness...

Speaking of cyberpunk, peep this:

Sarah Lipman, co-founder and R&D director for Power2B, suggested an almost mystical solution, somehow tapping into users' "neural networks" to navigate a mobile phone interface "using touch and pre-touch input."

And how trippy is this:

The dilemma, left unsolved by the panelists, was how to squeeze the user through that window, past the cashier, to sample all the things in the store, without guilt, while still feeling grateful to the cashier who seemed, all along, to be standing in the way.

All this cyberpunk and psychonautical literature from an article about a panel of human behavior and technology experts at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which I think has a stupid and misleading headline.

Speaking of psychonauts, take a gander at this firsttime salvia user's experience: The World as a Pop-up book.

The rippling turned into an intense electric rolling, i began to sweat profusely and the world changed fast. Apparently I held my hands out in front of me for a while, like I was trying to tilt reality. I don’t know when it happened, but I realized this unbelievable truth. I finally learned that the world, existence, all of it doesn’t actually exist…its all a big joke, a conspiracy against me, and my friends were in on it.

Going back to the cloning thing. You know what makes that whole article hilarious? It's got this fairly scientific or serious tone and then near its final lines we find:

But the team did succeed in creating the world's first cloned dog two years ago - an Afghan hound named Snuppy.

My Economic Illiteracy Makes Me Shudder

Look at this graph please:

[New York Times]

Ever since I watched Zeitgeist I've been giving more thought to economics, especially on the international level. I know next to nothing about international finance, macroeconomics, currency markets, etc. and these subjects are beginning to be critically important to my life. Decisions rich fuckers are making in Davos are beginning to mess with important aspects of my life, such as how much it costs me to provide the sort of material comfort I'm accustomed to. Those guys are fucking with my LIFE! If my bread starts costing me more because massive corporations are purchasing all the grains to convert into biofuels in order to power the factories converting grains into biofuels in order to stay competitive in the international grain market and your low emission vehicle eats the corn I was going to have for dinner or give to my cow...

Doesn't anyone ask themself, where did all the money come from that was funding all that subprime lending? How come seemingly out of nowhere were banks willing to loan almost any idiot a whole bunch of money? Any thoughtful person would tell you that there are a lot of people out there who really ought not to be loaned $100,000. It's ludicrous. It's like these loans were backed by people who gave way too much credit (PUN INTENDED) to the American public because they don't know the American people, they're not from here, i.e. the Chinese Central Bank.

Anyhoo...back to my original point, that set of graph charts. Notice how the stocks fluctuated but are basically back at zero? They're worth the same amount they were but in comparison to everything else, they're worth less. In other words, it's like there's a group of guys who own all the corn and they're accustomed to trading it for stakes in American corporations. In recent years they're offering less corn for shares of our companies. They'd rather keep their corn or trade it with someone who offers a better deal. That's just basic business right there. Any fool can see that...unless they're being fooled by their government which keeps them in the dark about the real worth of their money by keeping the consumer in an enclosed bubble maintained by bizarre monetary policy and a largely compliant media industry. The things the US accuses China of doing, the US does, too. That's how America operates. Keep pointing the finger and maybe nobody will think to look at themselves.

The Machine Is Aware of Us

This makes me shudder in a good way...like the chills I get sometimes when I pee:

Ambient Intelligence is a key component for future beyond 3G mobile and wireless communication systems. However, the enabling technology that provides systems with information to allow for Ambient Intelligence has been neglected and currently consists of many independent modes of input, mainly relying on active user interactions or specialised sensor systems gathering information. e-SENSE proposes a context capturing framework that enables the convergence of many input modalities, mainly focusing on energy efficient wireless sensor networks that are multi-sensory in their composition, heterogeneous in their networking, either mobile or integrated in the environment e.g. from single sensors to thousands or millions of sensors collecting information about the environment, a person or an object. This framework will be able to supply ambient intelligent systems with information in a transparent way hiding underlying technologies thus enabling simple integration.

e-SENSE VISION – e-SENSE enables capturing of Ambient Intelligence for Beyond 3G Mobile Communication Systems through Wireless Sensor Networks.

How'd I get there? From this blog: Capturing ambient intelligence. I don't think the blog's writer really added anything to the general discussion, nor did he achieve his stated goal of explaining How tech trends affect our lives. He just conveyed a vague sense of paranoia.

How'd I get there? By way of Capturing ambient intelligence which also doesn't seem to add anything to the general discussion. It's just another headsup. I got to that article by way of Smart Mobs. Makes sense.

Will the technological environment we're creating come to resemble the spiritual environment our ancestors created? A world where everything is aware of us? Where the Eye of God is upon us at all times...

Will Christensen act as poorly in Neuromancer as he did in Star Wars?

I have a Google Alert set for the word cyberpunk. The latest buzz is swarming around JoBlo's report that Hayden Christensen is set to star as the character Case in the film adaptation of Neuromancer.

It's interesting to me the way such news proliferates and spreads. Alerts have been coming in for about a week now on the rumor which still appears to have just one source, JoBlo. I imagine that most people wouldn't come across such news via Google Alerts, so I looked at all the links I've been provided to the story and G4's The Feed is probably the most likely source for most people. But they're not a primary source, and they don't claim to be. They link their story to a Dark Horizons report. And where did Dark Horizons get their info? JoBlo, of course.

So where did JoBlo get its information? JoBlo.com sources, of course!