I suppose my appreciation for this is somewhat related to my current loopyness due to spending the last week doing 15 hour days editing dialogue.

Posted by Clinton McClung to WFMU's Beware of the Blog.

No matter how hard you try, there is just no way to get cassette editing to sound perfect and crisp, and that again is one of the joys of the process. There is a point where the sound of the editing becomes a part of the edit itself, and making the listener aware of it somehow feels okay. Pesky limitations and happy accidents can sometimes yeild the best results.

Read more at WFMU's Beware of the Blog.

Posted by Kenny G to WFMU's Beware of the Blog.

Composer Thomas Dimuzio has taken this classic rock tune, reversed it, cut it up into quarter-notes and then reassembled it in forward order to retain the melody.

Seems like this would be a good headfuck when you are tripping.

There is nothing more to read, but you can go read it at WFMU's Beware of the Blog.

That’s Reiser of ReiserFS. I could care less, except it prompted Auslander to point out that if the brains of ReiserFS is behind bars, you might get a situation where

a bunch of kernel committers [are] trying to get information about FS design out of hans while he serves his prison term. Something like a dorktabulous “Silence of The Lambs” comes to mind.

I wish the production values had been a little higher, as this could have been amazing, rather than just cool.

Via MAKE: Blog.

The Nietzsche Family Circus

Via Wired News.

Posted by Bruce Sterling to Beyond the Beyond.

Overheard at the "INTELLIGENT PRINTING" conference, Oct 2006

"We're in the business of putting goo on a substrate."

"We need a taxonomy for 'printing-that-is-no-longer-printing.'"

"Your mega-customer, the anchor tenant in the mall of your dreams"

"It's the business of killing trees and putting chemicals on them."

"Baseball cards that suck in energy and run e-ink animated displays"

"They're not hiding, they're just selective."

"We help companies put together arguments and stories to win that venture money."

"Those Austrian farm-boys didn't know that ink-plants were supposed to be messy, so that was one of the cleanest plants they ever had."

"Electronic cardboard blurs the line between printed objects and the virtual world."

"The supply chain is a network of atoms."

"Six trillion RFID tag is four orders of magnitude bigger than any electronic item ever made."

"You can't take on the Silicon Gorilla face to face."

"Fluidic Self-Assembly Machines aren't 'printing' -- they're the competition."

Read more at Beyond the Beyond.

Crazy story:

It might have ended there, another high-flying company with big ambitions and a lousy product. But the crash put a spotlight on Eriksson and raised a series of questions: Who is he? What kind of person drives nearly 200 mph on a coastal highway? The answers led to even more puzzles. In just a few years, it seems, Eriksson went from languishing in a European jail cell to making millions as a tech executive to, even more improbably, becoming deputy commissioner of antiterrorism for an obscure Southern California transit police force.

Read more at Wired News.

I've been following this NewAssignment.Net thing, but Jay writes too damn much to point to any one piece he does on it for someone else to read (not that I read it all). This interview with /. goes all over the place, its not just about NA.net, and talks about some pretty interesting things in reporting (and is fairly readable because he is talking down to /., not to his academia buddies).

Create more writers and suddenly you may need more editors. “The conversation feeds journalism, journalism feeds the conversation” is a powerful idea, but we are several steps away from knowing how it works to create a live, intelligent filter in the newsroom.

The normal tensions with the press were driven deeper: keep them back, keep them out, tell them nothing, tear them down. If someone does break a story from inside you immediately punish and isolate anyone who spoke to the reporter. You make them disown their words. You make them repent.

This is the story Woodward missed because he got inside it, so to speak. Ron Suskind, one of the few in Washington who did not miss that story, called it "the retreat from empiricism." To me, it's the big narrative yet to come out about the Bush White House. Attack Without a Plan was too crazy to be credible to Woodward. So he wrote Plan of Attack instead.

Read more at PressThink.

I am reading Accelerando by Charles Stross. It is a deeply flawed look at the post singularity world, but I am prepared to forgive it it's flaws due to the fact that to look beyond the beyond is impossible (the definition of singularity strongly relates to the inability to understand). Anyhow one of the most interesting parts of the book is the poking at what a truly efficient economy would be, and what happens when tech makes that posable.

Now the SEC is going to push the first step into giving AI's the data to run the stock market :gonk::

Posted by Tim Bray to ongoing.

I spent a couple of fascinating hours Tuesday at a round table hosted by the United States Securities and Exchange Commission. The subject was Interactive Data, a term which is hardly self-explanatory but really means "Business Transparency". This in the same week that Jonathan sent a letter on the same subject to SEC Chairman Christopher Cox, who was also around the table. Mr. Cox and the SEC are definitely on the right track; I expect bumps in the road, but there's a chance that Accounting As We Know It could be blown up. Which would be a good thing; and not just because Open Source is creeping in.

Read more at ongoing.

(I am kidding about the :gonk: bit, this is pretty cool, and will help us humans "keep the thieves out" as Tim says. Just don't let the computers take over man, man.)

A 5min bit on BBC's The World, reporting on the [corporate] censorship of Jonathan Hexner's video art piece "I Like America and America Likes Me" which was to be displayed on the Axel Springer building in Berlin. You can view the video piece on The World's website (you might want to download that and play in quicktime unless you have a browser window wider than 2016px).

Via David Post at Volokh.

A 737 hits an executive jet, the 737 goes down killing 155, and the executive jet is fine to make it to an airport?

Story at BBC News.

Update: Joe Sharkey of the NYT who was on the executive jet, tells his story.

Thomas Fehlmann shakes his cute German booty during a live dub set: one, two.
One of the best shows of my life, the energy he brought was great.

The whole Decibel weekend was awesome, check out more videos by basicsounds here, or his blog post where he says Decibel was better then Mutek (he is Canadian even!).

Make sure to watch the Ryoichi Kurokawa videos one, two. That shit blew my mind.

Also Andreas Tilliander at the after-party Sunday morning. I felt like I was back in Berlin, Seattle still partying at 7am? This was regarded as the best set of the weekend but I was too fucking dog tired to enjoy it.

Posted by JESSE GREEN to NYT > Arts.

Traditional Broadway overtures -- several minutes long, made up of melodies heard later in the show and played by an orchestra before the curtain goes up -- are disappearing.

Producers and directors say they doubt the audience’s ability to perceive useful information encoded in orchestral sound. Decoding that information depends on the habit of listening to music for its own inherent expressiveness, without words, pictures or action: a habit that disappeared from mainstream American culture.

Read more at NYT > Arts.

Posted to Wired News.

Fossil and Sony Ericsson are developing timepieces that tell you who's calling your cell phone.
In Gear Factor.

Read more at Wired News

Posted by Tim Bray to ongoing.

Read more at ongoing.

Great films, kind of like Gondry's stuff. I recommend Off The Beaten Track. Link.

Via MAKE: Blog.

Posted by philliptorrone to MAKE: Blog.

Via MAKE: Blog.

Posted to Wired News.

Congress considers protecting journalists from being forced to reveal their sources, while punishing government workers who leak secrets to reporters. Here's why that schizophrenic approach actually makes sense. Commentary by Jennifer Granick.

Read more at Wired News.

Posted by Bill to Gibson Blog.

Treadmills!

Via Gibson Blog.

Posted by Bruce Sterling to Beyond the Beyond.

FERAL CITIES

Richard J. Norton

Naval War College Review, Autumn 2003, Vol. LVI, No. 4

https://www.hsdl.org/?abstract&did=733339

FERAL CITIES

Richard J. Norton

Naval War College Review, Autumn 2003, Vol. LVI, No. 4

Imagine a great metropolis covering hundreds of square miles. Once a vital  component in a national economy, this sprawling urban environment is now a  vast collection of blighted buildings, an immense petri dish of both  ancient and new diseases, a territory where the rule of law has long been  replaced by near anarchy in which the only security available is that  which is attained through brute power.1 

Such cities have been routinely imagined in apocalyptic movies and in certain science-fiction genres, (((yo!))) where they are often portrayed as gigantic versions of T. S. Eliot’s Rat’s  Alley.2 Yet this city would still be globally connected. It would possess  at least a modicum of commercial linkages, and some of its inhabitants 

would have access to the world’s most modern communication and computing  technologies. It would, in effect, be a feral city.

Admittedly, the very term “feral city” is both provocative and 

controversial.

Visit Beyond the Beyond for Bruce's funny inline comments.