martyrs or traitors

from the Economist:

America's allies cannot stop the martyrs from calling them traitors. America has made itself deeply unpopular in the Islamic world by invading Iraq and standing by Israel. This is bound to taint any Muslim leader who looks as if he owes his position to American military or economic power. But guilt by association is only one half of the reason for the growing popularity of the martyrs and the spreading idea that America's allies must be traitors. The other half is that, by comparison with the traitors, the martyrs look clean.

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fire up your jets

here's something to look forward to:

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups from the 1950s to the 1970s, CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday.

Washington Post article

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vertical farming

i saw this story about how to tackle the food problems that likely will arise with increasing urban populations. the website here also provides some interesting info.

from the website:
"By the year 2050, nearly 80% of the earth's population will reside in urban centers. Applying the most conservative estimates to current demographic trends, the human population will increase by about 3 billion people during the interim. An estimated 109 hectares of new land (about 20% more land than is represented by the country of Brazil) will be needed to grow enough food to feed them, if traditional farming practices continue as they are practiced today. At present, throughout the world, over 80% of the land that is suitable for raising crops is in use (sources: FAO and NASA). Historically, some 15% of that has been laid waste by poor management practices. What can be done to avoid this impending disaster?"

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suicide bomber propaganda

from ABC News:

Large teams of newly trained suicide bombers are being sent to the United States and Europe, according to evidence contained on a new videotape obtained by the Blotter on ABCNews.com.

what is much more interesting than the ~250 word article, which does little more than reiterate the propaganda the video itself presents, is the long string of reader comments below the article. in sum, they reflect a broad spectrum of viewpoints which each claim to have a monopoly on truth regarding how to deal with terrorism, islamism, american foreign policy, etc.

very few words are devoted to investigating the sources of anti-americanism and anti-western sentiment, such as our near unwavering support of israel and ties to saudi arabia, that were responsible for much of the early islamist momentum and keep the current flames of intolerance stoked. the comments also portray an ignorance of the implications of the first amendment, namely the right to dissent (even during wartime), as well as the distinction between oft-used policy/governance terms such as 'democracy' and 'republic.'

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tv prank and audio pranks

i love these. from Boing Boing:

Like many European TV channels the state-owned CT2 broadcasts live panorama / weather streams from popular recreation areas in its morning programme, fully automated 30 second pans per site with music in the background. Initiative Ztohoven, a collective around Roman Tyc, somehow managed to inject a pre-recorded pan with a sudden atomic explosion in the midst of a beautiful countryside. No word how they did it, assume they tricked the cabling on the unmanned camera site. Tyc also replaced traffic light icons in Prague with illustrations of drunk, pissing or ranting figures a few months ago.

and this: the guy in this video had received many calls from a bill collector trying to get money even though the number they had was incorrect. after informing the collector that they had the wrong number, they continued to get called, so they set up the judge judy audio prank shown in the video below.

"are you a licensed daycare provider?"

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modeling

a couple of years ago, i was planning on researching crowd behavior for my dissertation. i was even going to use halloween on state street for a case study! i think trying to understand crowd mentality is fascinating. when you're in a mob of people, what influences your decision to walk one way or the other? line of sight? proximity to certain locations or groups of people? the relative densities of clusters of people surrounding you? the world expert in this field is paul torrens, and he has just published his latest work:

A prototype that Torrens has developed models the evacuation of a crowded area during a fire when there is only one point of escape, but he has used his method to develop a primitive model of a situation in which a disease spreads through casual contact, and he is attempting to create scenarios in which agitated crowds turn into unruly mobs.

LiveScience article on crowd modeling

another kind of modeling i'm interested in is cultural interaction models. for example, in palestine right now, fatah and hamas are exchanging rocket attacks, vying for power in the gaza strip. (link to New Economist story) if there was a neighborhood in gaza that was completely neutral, neither supporting fatah nor hamas, but we were able to understand (and potentially index) their beliefs, ideologies, socio-economic status, trusts, doubts, etc., what are the kinds of things that would sway the residents of this neighborhood to fatah or hamas? what are the factors that need to be assessed to determine the relative levels of cultural attraction towards fatah and hamas? i'm not sure if such models exist, or are currently being employed by the US state department, but i'd wager they are since such models could provide us additional insight into a variety of situations- insight which would be based off of a concentration of all our intelligence on the people and groups/cultures at play in a given area.

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teenage bad girl

i heard 'cocotte' by teenage bad girl and my eyes opened wide, my hands gripped the air, and my feet started tapping 2:3 'big - big a bear - big - big a bear.'

teenage bad girl is a french band, so they're classy because they had kings and queens once, but they're also sort of bad ass because they had all those riots last year. this song rises up too. (heard at Music for Robots)

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Patton Oswalt on his idea for a new heroin buddy movie...

+

=
hilarious


excerpt from the Viceland article below:

'But heroin is dimly lit hotel rooms, haggard girlfriends, and an atonal soundtrack. Before getting hooked, or even shooting it once, I’d need to see it depicted in a movie like Sideways, where two lovable, cuddly heroin addicts—middle-aged in that sitcom-y kinda sheepish smile way that middle age is depicted in movies—do a jaunty tour of Alphabet City, sampling a weekend’s worth of dope before one of them gets married.'

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The Zen of Fish

Ok, so I know my last post started off with a kind of a "fuck you I'm jealous you're in Asia without me" nod to Jamon and Elle Elle, so I am making up for it here with a plug for what looks like it will be an interesting Asia-related book.

Wow. Sorry for the crap intro. Now, the story.

My friend Giulia told me a week or so ago that her friend was coming to New York on his book tour, so I checked out his website: http://www.trevorcorson.com. His new book, The Zen of Fish has been getting great reviews in the New York Times and elsewhere: (http://events.nytimes.com/2007/06/10/books/review/McInerney-t.html), so I thought ok, maybe I'll go. But then I realized that a) Trevor Corson appears in fact to be a very sexy man and b) What else do I have to do at 7pm on a rainy Monday in the city?

So I went with G to the reading, and it was actually...quite...undeniably...fascinating. He read aloud from the book and answered questions about everything from the surprisingly meticulous art of rice-making to the not so surprisingly unavoidable hazards of parasites. (Side note-apparently there is a Parasite Museum located in Tokyo-have either of you been there?). (Also, if parasites are what do it for you: see my previous post on toxoplasma gondii).

Anyway. You might be wondering what I did next, once I discovered that this attractive intelligent guy was also witty and interesting and friends with my friend. I got the hell out of there immediately following the reading, obvi. Oh wait, I am forgetting the part where I raised my hand to ask a question, and somehow added an extra syllable to the word 'sushi.' I think I asked some ridiculously banal question like "what's your favorite sushi restaurant in New York?", but instead of 'sushi' I said 'sushishi' or something. I suck. Anyway check out the book, I think it's going to be great!

ps. Don't yell at me for posting about a cute boy.

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this sounds like a disaster

the supposed former allies of al qaeda know how desperate the US military is for progress in iraq. this is going to backfire in a much shorter time than our arming of afghani militants did after the soviet-afghan war.

With the four-month-old increase in American troops showing only modest success in curbing insurgent attacks, American commanders are turning to another strategy that they acknowledge is fraught with risk: arming Sunni Arab groups that have promised to fight militants linked with Al Qaeda who have been their allies in the past.

nytimes article

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Ghosts of Climates Past article

Check out this interesting Seed magazine article on studying the climates of Mars and Venus for potential future Earth climate conditions.

When we compare Earth with other planets, we see how easy it is for a planet to permanently lose a pleasant climate. Venus and Mars each started out with warm oceans and volcanoes, and the same carbonate thermostat that keeps Earth temperate was once also operating on our planetary siblings. Yet on each of these other planets, the feedback loop broke down, and the climate veered off toward an uninhabitable state. For each, the reasons behind the collapse are different yet illustrate two destinies that could have been ordained for our planet.

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scrambler paintings

rosemarie fiore invents novel approaches to create paintings, such as the evil kneivil pinball paintings, drawings, and photographs, like the time-lapse video game photo above. i like her scrambler spirograph-like paintings:
rosemarie fiore website and java-based spirograph website

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don't sweat the petty things, pet the sweaty things

Alexithymia is a term that means the incapacity to verbalize emotions. When some sufferers want to talk but are unable to utter the words, they start sweating to manifest the desire to communicate.

though i thought this kind of sweating only occurred during the excruciating moments before i attempt to kiss a girl, it now also happens to robots:

Alexitimia is also the name that Paula Gaetano, an artist from Buenos Aires, gave to her robot. It's a big blob that feels like rubber when you touch it. But it also sweats when you caress its surface. Paula Gaetano has a background in fine art but collaborated with scientists and techno experts to develop the robot. The only sensors are for touch and the only output is water that runs from a tank hidden in the base of the work.

flickr image set of exhibition

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joy division biopic 'Control'

the quality is not so good but the subtitles are spot on!

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Design for the Other 90%

Well I am not in Japan. I am not in China, either. I am in New York City, or as the $3 tee-shirts in Times Square proclaim, "New York Fuckin' City". I am fairly certain said shirts were actually manufactured in China however, so Jamon if you're reading this, how much do they cost in Beijing? I'll take 2. Also, I got no other blogs to plug. But I do have to give a few friendly characters to a very cool museum with a very important exhibit. The museum is the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum. It is part of the Smithsonian (of Washington D.C.), but it is actually located in (gasp) NYC, just south of Central Park on 5th Avenue.

The current exhibit is called Design For the Other 90%, and the subject is affordable, sustainable and socially responsible design. Think-while you're debating how to arrange your modular furniture or whether Feng Shui is irrevocably passé, the rest of the world is debating how to arrange 8 children in a small mud hut or whether their meager supply of water is irrevocably contaminated. Off my soapbox now, but seriously it is a cool show and for those in New York, definitely worth the trip.

Last day: September 23rd, 2007. Also known as the day I turn 26.

The museum: http://www.cooperhewitt.org/
The exhibit: http://www.peoplesdesignaward.org/design_for_the_other_90/

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Tokyo Blog

Since we're plugging our other blogs, I have a Tokyo one, too, now. It's called Tokyo Stories, and it's mostly about robots and school girl saliva. I put up a link to Trust in Automation there, so you can come here right after you check it every day.

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