Friday, October 24, 2003 ENTITLED -- “Your lordship, though not clean past your youth, have yet some smack of age in you, some relish of the saltness of time” William Shakespeare -- Chatsworth of London We are honoured to present for sale 3 BRITISH TITLES Of Great Respectability And Standing Ownership of any of these rare and valuable “Lord” Titles confers substantial social and business benefits worldwide, whilst demonstrating a continued increase in value over the past 35 years. These esteemed Titles are fully recognised under English Law and include the Right to: use the word “Lord”/”lady” in your name; pass the Title onto your your heirs; and use the Title on all your documents (e.g. Passport, I.D. and credit cards.) Ladies and Gentlemen of any nationality may apply for purchase, but only those of impeccable integrity, honour and standing will be accepted, as the bew Lord/lady will form an important part of British history and tradition. The prices of these Lordship Titles range from $18,250 to $24,850 which includes all legal fees, transfer and registration charges, Certificates and delivery. They each come with a comprehensive history of their illustrious previous holders, and a detailed description of the area in which they lie. Also included are certain relevant original 17th/18th/19th Century documents. All transfer documents are prepared by a leading UK law firm, and we will be pleased to have the Title put in a passport on your behalf. For further details please contact the Chief Heritage Officer at Chatsworth of London Berkeley Square, London, U.K. All enquiries will be handled with the utmost discretion and confidentiality. -- International Herald Tribune Sept 6 1999 -- posted by Walter at 10/24/2003 Tuesday, October 21, 2003 U N W I R E D -- “An industry that is big enough to give you all you want is big enough to take it all away.” -After Barrry Goldwater- -- I cleaned out “the attic” yesterday, since my habit of keeping stacks of magazines piling up for years got the better of my studio space. Most of the magazines I kept were- and are being used for collage- or design jobs. While flipping through- and re-reading the “Wired section” of the disorganized stacks- I compiled a reflective backlog of its cyber-travails during the past decade. For a long time I was a dedicated reader of Wired, until I got fed up with the fruitless labor of maintaining three personal websites- as well as the incessant search for new gadgets and content. Wired- through its breathless reporting from the industry’s nucleus symbolized the cumulative premise of the Superhighway during the past decade. Meanwhile my car got stalled at a truck stop, and I never left since. I can still hear the din of highway traffic, and the sound of overheated car tyres slowly halting on the gravel, but I will not be bothered again: “Bartender. Another beer please!” Looking back at 7 issues of Wired editorial content; I wondered: Do the prophets still hold their ground today? -- WIRED WOMEN (Rants and Raves – Letters) by Peggy Riley “Where are the women?’ We’re out here. There aren’t as many of us as I’d like to see, but we’re here. From my experience, the guys aren’t trying to shut us out- I say this as a feminist with a first-rate active shit detector- but it seems to take women telling to other women that computers, technology, and science are okay.” WHEN BANDWIDTH IS FREE (Interview with George Gilder) by Kevin Kelly KK: “ In a world where physical force, switching, and computation are almost free, we now add almost free bandwidth. What becomes expensive?” GG: “The scarce resource is the human mind. People will become valuable. People will get paid better. We need people to provide the software, the interfaces, the standards, and the protocols to all these systems that make it possible to exploit these increasingly cheap resources. So it’s the human mind that you ultimately have to economize on. That’s the reason I think it’s utter garbage to say that our grandchildren won’t live as well as we do. People who say this just don’t see the technology. They live in this bizarre world of thermodynamics, where entropy rules, and we’re dominated by our waste products. It’s very short-sighted.” THE MEDIASAURUS (The future of mass media) by Michael Crichton “The tendency to characterize people’s beliefs- instead of focusing on their actions- is one of the true abuses of the power of the media. Look how quickly Kimba Woods was transformed from respected jurist to Playboy bunny; just as I went from author to racist Japan-basher. In my case, what was striking was how many journalists applied the Japan-bashing label, without appearing to have read my book.” GOING MENTAL (Neurohacking) by Zachary Margulis “Meet Zorn. I got this name (which has been changed) from another neurohacker who told me a wild tale about a device that Zorn had recently built. “It’s got an electrode ring situated over the pleasure centers of the brain, I know someone who tried it and he said it was like having a continuous orgasm.” My God, you mean this guy’s invented the Orgasmatron!?” WIRED September/October 1993 -- HACKERS- THREAT or MENACE? by Charles Platt “I won’t sell it.” He sounded offended by the idea. “A true hacker never does that. One of the overriding tenets of hackerdom is that information wants to be free, and a lot of us take that very seriously.” ROBOT OBSTETRIC WARDS by Rudy Rucker “The only hint of human contamination is the meaty smell of my breath, bounced back to me by the white fabric of the face mask I’m wearing. I wish I could tear off the mask and breathe the clean, pure air of the chips. But then I would exhale, and the wafers wouldn’t like that- detectors would notice the increased number of particles per cubic foot, and lights would flash.” WIRED November 1994 -- THE REAL REAL WORLD (Cable shows) by Mark Frauenfelder “Rox is a weekly celebration of the people and activities in and around Bloomington. In one show, the gang drove to Gary, Indiana, to flout an archaic anti-garlic-eating law. After chomping on some of the pungent bulbs while standing on the courthouse steps, they tried to get arrested, the befuddled government employees wouldn’t bite.” HACKING THE HAND (RSI surgery) by Susan McCarthy “At 10, he played in the school orchestra, where he was bullied by “a corpulent guy of no talent- but sitting ahead of me in the clarinet section.” As with many people, the flexor tendons of Markison’s ring and little fingers are linked, making it hard to key certain notes. This seemed to stand in the way of becoming a professional clarinetist, “which I wanted as part of my life.” His response: to take apart his clarinet and have several keys recast by a silversmith and put closer together. He was moved to the first chair.” SEX IS BEST (Cyber DNA) by David Voss “Then they breed-mate, mutate, or clone themselves- with an ardor determined by that score. “sex is best, at least in terms of producing interesting images,” says Rooke, who now works full time outside of Tucson, Arizona, at his studio, Evolutionary Art Imaginaire. Point mutations of the “gene” don’t seem to lead to things that are exciting.” THE TOY STORY STORY (Pixar) by Burr Snider “I felt like shouting, “Don’t show this to anybody, they’ll burn us at the stake! It’s witchcraft!” “We could get a better performance out of an animator than an actor.” WIRED December 1995 -- THE BLEEDING EDGE by Colin Berry “Thresh is standing in a doorway where he can observe CrockMe’s approach from any direction. Thresh is armed to the teeth, hatchets and rocket launchers at the ready. Yet just as his foe lumbers into view, Fong’s screen flickers and goes motionless. “See that!? See how the screen just froze?” he exclaims. “That’s lag. He could be killing me right now, and I can’t see it.” His screen looks like a paused frame of a video; an icon of disconnected phone line winks in one corner. Fong is as motionless as a monitor, frozen, cringing, waiting. Even the sounds have ceased. Then: BOOMBOOMBOOM!” “I just died,” he says with disgust, visibly wilting, “I couldn’t even move.” MAP THE GENOME (Human genome Project) by Michael Gruber “Hopkin arguably the most anarchic person in the room, doesn’t think a biogeek culture exists, mainly because it takes a relatively long time to get good at biology. There’s a lot of respect for people who have been doing it for a long time, because they are still making contributions. You don’t have these 15-year-olds who know it all. People in biology are older, they have l i v e s , so your basic prank is lightweight: making squirters out of dry ice and methanol, slipping orange juice into urine samples, things like that.” WIRED October 1997 -- THE CEO AS BRAND (Top executive marketing) by Brad Wieners “What’s missing,” Keeley muses, “is the person who’s wildly opportunistic, the person who takes a call from someone and is asked the impossible and only after they’ve already said “yes” do they figure out how they’re going to do it. Or the person who has an ear; who listens to all the flunkies and crackpots and hears something in what they’re saying and then aims their resources at it.” “So what does he propose? “I guess,” he grins, “the CEO as idiot savant.” README (Favorite books) Daniel Dennett’s bookshelf The Size of Thoughts: Essays and Other Lumber by Nicholson Baker “Since Baker wrote U and I, his hilarious and deep confessions about his relationships- real and imaginary- with John Updike. I have been a fan. He’s both the funniest, and the most insightful phenemenologist I have ever encountered. If you can read these essays on slang and punctuation without laughing out loud, you may need medication.” LUNCH ON THE DECK OF THE TITANIC (Titanic expedition) by Paula Parisi “Impatient Cameron decides to master Mezotech himself and starts reading the manual. “I’m peeved because it’s my equivalent of burning daylight. I’m burning bottom time. I start practicing right then, on objects like boulders, deciphering what they are on the sonar and then looking out the window.” THE GREAT CYBERWAR OF 2002 (War ganes) by John Arquilla 15 July, 10:45 PDT Waded into the web finally. I learned from the New York Times-sponsored zap site that the government’s Cyberspace Emergency response Team did a credible job of damage limitation (taking into account how mediocrity rules) – but was constrained by the architecture of the power grid, which was hardwired for automatic sharing of slack resources- a weak point exploited by the attackers. 25 July, 15:39 EDT The President spoke to the nation once again, this time mourning the loss of so many rangers and marines: but also noted the great pay-offs these raids would have in the coming days. As s h e put it: “Once again, America is being protected by its brave rifles. And God willing, they will continue to press our cause on to victory. For our enemies fight only from the evil shadows. They must lose this war in the end, and will disappear- forgotten- from the face of the Earth...” DIGITAL BODY SNATCHERS (Digital cloning) by Ron Magid “Marlon Brando is leading the revolution, And some of Tinseltown’s biggest players, including Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jim Carrey, are making the trek to Cyberware, a Monterey, California based shop, to be scanned for specific projects. Cyberware president David Addleman is hopeful that all stars will eventually stockpile their data, like thesuspended bodiesin C o m a , just waiting for the day when technology will resurrect them for as yet undreamed-of projects.” FREEMAN DYSON’s BRAIN (Dyson’s Futurism) by Stewart Brand SB: Is it the scientists who are putting them (inventors) down? FD: Yes. There is this snobbism among scientists, especially the academic types SB: Are there other kinds? FD: There are scientists in industry who are a bit more broad minded. The academics look down on them too. SB: Is that a weird British hangover? FD: It’s even worse in Germany. Intellectual snobbery is a worldwide disease. It certainly was very bad in China and probably held back development there by 2000 years. SB: How would you stop this intellectual snobbery? FD: I would abolish the PhD system. The PhD system is the real root of evil of academic snobbery. People who have PhDs consider themselves a priesthood, and inventors generally don’t have PhDs. WIRED February 1998 -- THINK DIFFERENT? (Autism research) By Oliver Morton “One is the pointing gesture; normally children point at things to communicate. Autistic children don’t do that. If they point at all, it’s to request something, but a normal child will point just to sahre interest, as if to say, “Look at that.” The ponting gesture is a great piece of evidence for the theory-of-mind approach because, when you point at something, you have to take into account that somebody else may not have seen what you’ve seen, that somebody else may be interested to see what you’ve seen. It’s about sharing minds.” THE BIG PICTURE SHOW (Comics) by Scott McCloud “One man’s crap, is another man’s caviar.” ALL CIRCUITS ARE BUSY (Encryption guru Phil Zimmermann) by Frank Rose “As time passes and coler heads prevail in government, I don’t think the cypherpunks in particular will have trouble. I do find some of the cypherpunks a bit too confrontational for my taste. I’ve always regarded cypherpunk as an unfortunate name; it has a kind of black-leather sort of disaffected-radical sound to it. They need better packaging.” WIRED December 2001 -- YOU AGAIN (Human cloning) by Brian Alexander “It would be easy to clone identical embryos. That could be done right now in almost any IVF lab, to make three or four copies.” Cloning an adult would be alittle tougher, he says, because of the mammalian imprinting issue, but the idea is the same. “If you had a good cell biologist, you could do this with two people. You could do it in a small closet. It would not cost much if fixed expenses were covered, like the doctor’s time and the lab equipment.” FORGING THE DRAGONSLAYER (Cyber-alloy technology) by Erik Davis “If you go out on a golf-course with a club whose face has the properties of our steel, there are good technical reasons for it to have a lot better spring. But how much more is the club worth if the metal is meteoric iron?’ Olson points to a report in the August 25, 2000 issue of SCIENCE that suggests that the isotopes of a meteorite will tell you whether it comes from outside the solar system- which means that you could be whacking your Strata Tour Professional to the green with a club whose business end hurtled to Earth from beyond Pluto. “That’s powerful stuff,” says Olson. “If you knew you had that mysticism in your golf club, what would it be worth? I’d like to know.” WIRED February 2001 -- posted by Walter at 10/21/2003