Monday, May 09, 2005

Concert Review: Prefuse 73 and Battles. A groove-heavy show of instrumental music. [Salon.com] 10:28:17 PM    comment []

Iran Confirms Processing Tons of Uranium Ore. Iran's announcement was its first acknowledgment of advances made in the production process for enriched uranium before it formally suspended nuclear activity. By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS. [NYT > International] 10:27:51 PM    comment []

Internet Attack Is Called Broad and Long Lasting. A break-in at Cisco Systems last year was only part of an extensive operation in which thousands of systems were penetrated. By JOHN MARKOFF and LOWELL BERGMAN. [NYT > Technology] 10:27:34 PM    comment []

Chaining AMZN's Statistically Improbable Phrases and much, much more from the gang at bOing bOing: O'Reilly's Gnat Torkington is noodling around with Amazon's "Statistically Improbable Phrases," (SIPs) a collection of snippets of words that don't usually appear next to one another that Amazon publishes for many of the books in its catalog. By "chaining" SIPs -- that is, joining up books with similar linguistic peccadillos, Gnat's doing some pretty sophitisticated subject-clustering: Discover the hidden transexual tie-in to Da Vinci Code. Take "Corporal Mortification" to Their Kingdom Come: Inside the Secret World of Opus Dei, take "million pesatas" to The Blind Man of Seville, take "sight lesson" to Genderqueer: Voices from Beyond the Sexual Binary. Learn how Excel 2003 is connected to magical realism. From One Hundred Years of Solitude take "insomnia plague" to Breast Cancer, There and Back: A Woman-to-Woman Guide, take "toxic friends" to 365 Reasons to Stop Dieting, take "tie way" to Excel 2003 Formulas. Link Hillary "RIAA" Rosen: iPod DRM is cruel and unfriendly! Ernest Miller sez, "Hilary Rosen, yes that Hilary Rosen, former head of the RIAA, is complaining about the DRM policy on her iPod. She is upset because she is unable to buy Windows DRM'd music and play it on her iPod. She calls this 'cruel,' 'anti-consumer' and 'user unfriendly.' Ha ha ha ha ha." The problem is that the iPod only works with either songs that you buy from the on-line Apple iTunes store or songs that you rip from your own CD’s. But those other music sites have lots of music that you can’t get at the iTunes store. So, if you have an iPod, you are out of luck. If you are really a geek, you can figure out how to strip the songs you might have bought from another on-line store of all identifying information so that they will go into the iPod. But then you have also degraded the sound quality. How cruel. Link (Thanks, Ernest!) Music sampling's history, visualized This Java applet is a visualizer for the history of music sampling -- a timeline with colored dots represents some of the most widely circulated tracks; click to see all the tracks they spawned, click the tracks they spawned to see what other tracks they sampled. It's hypnotic -- clicktrance ahoy! Shown here: cosmos for James Brown's Reality. Link (Thanks, Scott!) Stoker's Dracula as a blog This genius blogger is posting the Jonathan Harper journal entries from Stoker's Dracula as a series of dated blog posts: 8 May.--I began to fear as I wrote in this book that I was getting too diffuse. But now I am glad that I went into detail from the first, for there is something so strange about this place and all in it that I cannot but feel uneasy. I wish I were safe out of it, or that I had never come. It may be that this strange night existence is telling on me, but would that that were all! If there were any one to talk to I could bear it, but there is no one. I have only the Count to speak with, and he-- I fear I am myself the only living soul within the place. Let me be prosaic so far as facts can be. It will help me to bear up, and imagination must not run riot with me. If it does I am lost. Let me say at once how I stand, or seem to. Link (Thanks, Donald!) 8:41:48 PM    comment []

Huffington Uber-Blog Launches. The Huffington Post has launched, and it's part-Drudge (though from a different perspective), part blog of blogs. It's obviously version 1.0, which means you should give it time to settle down. The great Harry Shearer will "Eat the Press" -- this could be fun. Overall, the site seems to be aiming at the role of op-ed page of the Net. I'm watching with great interest, and reading some of it, too. [Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.] 8:40:32 PM    comment []

An Assertive Scientific Advisory Group Challenges Federal Policies. The National Academy of Sciences has recently shown a welcome independence streak by criticizing some policies of federal agencies and the White House. By PHILIP M. BOFFEY. [NYT > Opinion] 7:37:37 AM    comment []

Another Legal Threat Against Speech. A Florida newspaper is reporting legal threats against parents who've been criticizing a charter school company and its operations in this forum. The name of the company is Charter Schools USA. I hope the parents in the community remove any actually defamatory statements, if there are any (and the parents deny that there are). According to the news story, the company wouldn't specify which postings it found objectionable. But I hope the parents will aggressively defend their right to be critical of a school administration that cancels PTO meetings, among other acts that sound pretty arrogant from a distance. And I hope they get help in that defense from free-speech defenders in the legal community. Here, meanwhile, is the almost certain outcome in the wider Web community. Many people will now a) link to the story and the online forum; and b) mention the name of the company. (The story was just Slashdotted, which means it's going to get huge play online.) One result? Before long, if you type "Charter Schools USA" into your favorite search engine, that news story -- and the forum, assuming it stays online, along with some withering commentary about the company -- will be near the top of the rankings. One suspects this will be a consequence that Charter Schools USA did not foresee. [Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.] 7:34:37 AM    comment []

DJ Spooky Raps About Remixing. DJ Spooky shares his ideas about art, music and sampling in his new book, Rhythm Science, and CD. Spooky sat down with Katie Dean to answer questions about remixing and culture. [Wired News] 7:33:50 AM    comment []

The Final Insult. President Bush likes to play dress-up, but when it comes to privatizing Social Security, his Robin Hood costume just doesn't fit. By PAUL KRUGMAN. [NYT > Opinion] 7:33:49 AM    comment []

In Google: The Last Best Place for Programmers philg  describes things a the Google Campus nowadays (awfully intriguing) and signs off with: Doing search right will eventually require machine understanding of natural language, i.e., full artificial intelligence. [Philip Greenspun Weblog] 7:28:38 AM    comment []

Rules to Blog By: Real Simple Values. [rexblog: Rex Hammock's Weblog] 7:27:39 AM    comment []

Aggregating the Critics. Now Google is collecting movie reviews... Bloggers Speak, World-Wide. The increasingly terrific Global Voices is doing a daily round-up of bloggers around the world. Here's today's take. [Dan Gillmor on Grassroots Journalism, Etc.] 7:26:52 AM    comment []