Sterling Spime and the Golden Rooster

In his 2002 book, Tomorrow Now, Bruce Sterling dedicates a rollicking chapter to the evolution of modern narco-terrorism that morphs as the connected economy meets the societal dissolution of former empires.

Here is a dispatch from closer to home in the US. Of course, we still kick it Old School, Capone-style, along the Mexican-American border. But, come on! Killing cock-crowing crooners?

How Not to Be a Border-Crossing Pop Star

It's not like pop-stars don't get shot when they've got ties to the drug trade. Gangsta rappers get shot with grim regularity. Even Bob Marley got winged once. But the "Golden Rooster" here -- he and his two top posse henchmen were wiped out, in their car, in a hail of *armor-piercing bullets.* Ay de mi. [read original article]

~ from Beyond the Beyond

As an ex-pat science fiction writer living in Belgrade--the capital of Eastern Europe's least favored, gansta-governed, Serbia--Sterling is fascinated with the methods and madness of almost-failed states.

His blog on WIRED covers the colorful chaos of blackmarket worlds, the economic mash-ups of the drug-addled digerati, and the Bollywoodification of the emerging world.

His recent little work of non-fiction,Shaping Things, he defines the emerging neologisms of intelligent object mediascape filled with spime and blobjects.

From When Blobjects Rule the Earth:

A Blobject is commonly defined as "an object with a curvilinear, flowing design, such as the Apple iMac computer and the Volkswagen Beetle." But computers and cars are just end products, they're not the process. The truth about a blobject is that is a physical object that has suffered a remake through computer graphics. It was designed on a screen with a graphics program. A blobject is what a standard 20th century industrial product, a consumer item, looks like after your crowd has beaten it into shape with a mouse.

Blobjects are blob-shaped objects, because of NURBS and meshes and splines and injection molding and CAD-CAM. They're highly curvilinear consumer items designed on workstations, and then they're generally blasted into being in a burst of injection-molded goo. ~from BoingBoing

Listen to Bruce Sterling describe the Internet of Things at this keynote address from the 2006 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference.

Epic 2014

In the year 2014, The New York Times has gone offline, the Fourth Estate's fortunes have waned. What happened to the news? Watch this for a glimpse of the devolution of the mediascape into the Google grid, in which everyone creates and consumes.

Epic 2014 is a flash movie that was created in 2004 by Robin Sloan and Matt Thompson about a hypothesized future where the prevalence of public information from sources like Google and NewsBot come head to head with traditional news media like The New York Times.

Via Z + Partners - Weblog

One Laptop Per Child

After the coming holiday season, the US will have ostensibly reached the point of one iPod per child. It may be time to focus on the goal of One Laptop per Child.

The founder of OLPC is Nicholas Negroponte, a civil architect and computer scientist best known as the founder and Chairman Emeritus of Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab. (He is the younger brother of John Negroponte, United States Director of National Intelligence.)

Listen to a presentation by Negroponte from Pop!Tech 2005

Nicholas Negroponte wants to give every school child in the developing world a laptop computer. He has established the non-profit organization OLPC to design and produce $100 laptops for sale to governments in quantities of no less than 1 million machines on the condition that they are given to school children.

Negroponte feels the solution to any large world problem – peace, poverty, the environment, etc. – involves education, and he sees this as an education project that happens to use computers as a tool. The project is grounded in the studies of Seymour Papert, a pioneer in computing for children and the inventor of the Logo programming language. Negroponte and Papert have worked with computers in schools in developing nations since 1988.

At half the size of a conventional laptop PC (see photo), these machines are meant to serve those children who may live far from power stations and in often harsh climates. The rugged little computers have streamlined hardware, open source software and uses low-energy CPUs. Early estimates on UV lifetime of the LCD screens are encouraging and OLPC is now more confident that their target of 22K-hour lifetime can be achieved even under harsh conditions, such as the Libyan desert.

Founder of Worldchanging.com, Alex Steffan, got to unwrap one of these wind-up wonders for Thanksgiving. see article

From One Laptop per Child:

Introducing the children's laptop from One Laptop per Child—a potent learning tool created expressly for the world's poorest children living in its most remote environments. The laptop was designed collaboratively by experts from both academia and industry, bringing to bear both extraordinary talent and many decades of collective field experience in every aspect of this non-profit humanitarian project. The result is a unique harmony of form and function; a flexible, ultra low-cost, power-efficient, responsive, and durable machine with which nations of the emerging world can leapfrog decades of development—immediately transforming the content and quality of their children's learning.

technorati tags:technology, Negroponte, leapfrogging

Weird Al and JibJab's Love Child Creeps Me Out

Do I Creep You Out | Send To Friends | Funny Animations at JibJab

The boys from JibJab are back with a new paperdoll animation, Do I Creep You Out.

Departing from their right-on-target political musical satire genre, this collaboration with Weird Al Yankovic lampoons American Idol, Starbucks and the American tradition of stalker love.

Check out other classics--This Land, Second Term and Big Box Mart--at JibJab.com.

Saturn's Shadow

At Pop!Tech, when I asked Carolyn Porco, of NASA's Cassini Mission at the Space Science Institute, what I can do as a father to encourage my daughter to explore the sciences, she answered: "Show her the pictures!"

What she was refering to are the humbling and mysterious photos that her team is collecting of Saturn and his moons. Carolyn heads up Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for OPerationS (CICLOPS) part of the Space Science Institute in Boulder, Colorado.

see slideshow: Saturn & Moons from the Cassini Probe

An article at Space.com reveals that Carolyn Porco was 13 years old when she experienced her first ‘cosmic connection’. She was on a rooftop in the Bronx, of all the unlikely places, peering through a friend’s telescope when she caught her first glimpse of Saturn.

Just this week, Porco sent out an excited dispatch: "Cassini has sighted on Saturn a phenomenon that has never before been seen on another planet: a wall of towering clouds that ring the eye of an immense hurricane-like vortex whirling around the planet's south pole."

I hope my daughter catches a bit of that excitement as well!

From the Cassini Mission's site, ciclops.org:

With giant Saturn hanging in the blackness and sheltering Cassini from the Sun’s blinding glare, the spacecraft viewed the rings as never before, revealing previously unknown faint rings and even glimpsing its home world.

This marvelous panoramic view was created by combining a total of 165 images taken by the Cassini wide-angle camera over nearly three hours on Sept. 15, 2006. The full mosaic consists of three rows of nine wide-angle camera footprints; only a portion of the full mosaic is shown here. Color in the view was created by digitally compositing ultraviolet, infrared and clear filter images and was then adjusted to resemble natural color.

The mosaic images were acquired as the spacecraft drifted in the darkness of Saturn’s shadow for about 12 hours, allowing a multitude of unique observations of the microscopic particles that comprise Saturn’s faint rings.

Poodle... Sphinx... Milkshake, Yo!

Whew!

The election is over. We're still in Iraq, the sun still shines and my daughter still loves Polly Pockets.

So! Back to business. Monkey business, that is. Leah Silverman send us this link that makes as much sense as anything else going on in the media.

From Zap2It:

I always figured poodles were up to no good.

AdultSwim.com offers a sneak peek of this coiffed menace seen in the upcoming Aqua Teen Hunger Force Movie. The 90-second clip features Master Shake, Frylock and Meatwad "engaged in an epic battle that could well determine the very future of civilization."

Presumably, the "epic battle" is with the poodle since in the clip it's breathing fire and shooting laser beams from its eyes. Of course, this might be a red herring, but I'd like to think if that were the case, they'd literally be fighting off a giant herring with powers to teleport or maybe knit an afghan (the dog, not the blanket).

If, like Leah, you have a giant poodle in your life--or need to disguise your Dobberman like one--might I suggest a gander at an earlier post: A Wolf in Poodle's Clothing.

Iraq Photographs

mica grain & Marie-Helene Carleton
at the Hudson Opera House
West Room
327 Warren Street, Hudson, NY
Nov. 18-Dec. 3, 2006
Click here to see more of their photographs.
photograph above, British and Italian soldiers in a ceremony marking the transition
to Iraqi sovereignty, in front of the jiggered at URI. Nosier, Iraq, June 2004

Reading and discussion of their recent memoir American Hostage and opening reception on Saturday, Nov. 18 at 8PM.

From Pop!Tech:

Documentary filmmaker Micah Garen was taken hostage by a radical Shiite group in Iraq and cut off from friends, colleagues, family and his own government.

Marie-Helene Carleton rallied friends and colleagues to jump-start a rescue mission, while at the same time helping to manage the delicate negotiations for his release.

Their book, American Hostage, was released in September 2005, and became an instant bestseller. It is both a moving and suspenseful account of political intrigue and a modern love story.

More at: http://fourcornersmedia.net/

GOP Babes

The elections are tight. Many GOP leaders are tense. But fear not! There are plenty of reasons to be happy. Namely, the hard-working, conservative--and h*o*t!--conservative women.

Among those listed at JerseyGOP.com?

Condi Rice (no brainer!), Anne Coulter (a bit mannish, but OK), Dolly Parton (!?), Miss America (Erika Harold).

GOP Babe, Courtney Reagan sums up the general sentiment:

"Gosh, I'm flattered to be included with these amazing women. Of everything, my proud pro-life stance connects me most with the Republican Party, the party that values morality and a strong work ethic. Plus, George W. Bush is not only my personal hero, a genius, and a true humanitarian... but a babe. I love that George!!!"

Chimpanzees: An Unnatural History

In 1959, the United States Air Force captured dozens of baby chimpanzees in Africa, transporting them to Alamogordo, New Mexico, where they and their offspring were to endure a grueling life as the ultimate human stand-ins. From experiments in space travel and high-velocity crash tests, to pharmaceutical testing and hepatitis and AIDS research, to roles on the silver and small screens, these original Air Force chimpanzees and others that followed gave their lives to benefit humankind - and now a few extraordinary people are working to give those lives back.

~ from Chimpanzees: An Unnatural History, on the PBS program Nature,

This documentary shows some of the dedicated humans who are trying to rescue our closest cousins, the chimps. Far from Equidorial Africa, these chimps have spent their lives in captivity, as entertainers and as research animals. Outside Montreal, Gloria Grow has built a private sanctuary for chimps infected with HIV.

The organization, Save the Chimps, is currently rescuing 266 chimpanzees from the Coulston Lab from a lifelong plight in cages. With the acquisition of the Coulston Lab, planning began for the expansion of the Florida facility to accommodate the New Mexico chimps.

Construction of 11 additional three-acre islands, each linked to indoor accommodations by a land bridge, is under way. The natural environment gives the chimpanzees a comfortable home in which to socialize and rebuild confidence shattered by countless years spent in small cages.

See a video clip of award-winning filmmaker Allison Argo takes us behind the scenes of the film. This clip features the filmmaker discussing her motivation and some of the challenges she faced while filming.

Spore

You have to check out the Spore website, if, for no other reason, to see the fantasticly fun Flash animation that tells the alternate version of evolution.

At Pop!Tech, I witnessed Intelligent Design in the flesh. As WNYC's On the Media puts it on their November 3rd show:

Will Wright, creator of “The Sims,” has a brand new game on the way. In “Spore,” gamers begin as a single-cell organism, and evolve, over time, by earning and spending DNA points.

Jonathan Seabruck writes about Wright, the God of God Games, in this week's New Yorker:

At the first level of the game, you are a single-celled organism in a drop of water, which is represented on the screen as a two-dimensional environment, like a slide under a microscope. By successfully avoiding predators, which are represented as different-colored cells, you get to reproduce, and that earns you DNA points (a double helix appears over your character). DNA is the currency in the early levels of Spore, and as you evolve you can acquire better parts—larger flippers for faster swimming, say, or sharper claws for defeating predators. Eventually, you emerge from the water onto the second level—dry land—and your creature must compete with other creatures, and mate with those of your own kind which the computer generates, until you form a tribe. You can play a violent game of conquest over other tribes or you can play a social game of conciliation. If you make clever choices, according to the logic of the simulation, you will survive and continue to evolve. Along the way, you get to acquire ever more powerful tools and weapons, and to create dwellings, towns, cities. When your city has conquered the other cities in your world, you can build a spaceship and launch into space. By the final level, you have evolved into an intergalactic god who can travel throughout the universe conducting interplanetary diplomacy and warfare.

From Pop!Tech:

From Will Wright’s point of view, we can gain a complex way of understanding the world, using very simple rules. Ever since we have had the ability to customize our desktops, we’ve been creating expressions of our identities, creating a “curve” of creation that started at crap and ended at something better. The trend in game development started the same way.

Wright uses the term “player” to describe those of us who create. According to his experience, players love making and sharing their content, but instead of the players building static models that participate in a game, today the paradigm is one of the games creating the players. Games become a measurable, formalized environment that offers loads of data that suggest players spend much more time building complexity into their models. In that sense, computers become a creative amplifier for the player.

In a demonstration of his new game Spore, Wright created a creature with a few mouse clicks, and the computer fills in the basics of evolution. The game takes it from there. In the space of a few minutes, Wright not only hunted and mated, but he created a vehicle that was able to explore other lands, planets and galaxies.

See a video of Will Wright demonstrating the evolutionary properties of Spore.