"Patty Hearst heard the burst of Roland's Thompson gun and bought it."
A New Taxonomy of Gamers (via Versus CluClu Land)
Audio and Transcripts of NYPL events. Topics vary and include politics, art, literature, and technology.
Ungovernable press has a number of chapbooks for download via scribd.
Laura Carter's book, Situations, is recommended.
I've wasted the last half hour on the the DanKaminskyBox.
Chris Nakashima-Brown on last night's speech. I like Chris Nakashima-Brown.
August 2008 Archives
Discussion about BGP attacks has been all over the 'tubes, due in part to Wired's Enquirer-esque headline, "Revealed: The Internet's Biggest Security Hole" (Nice to see Mudge get a mention, though). Despite the title, the article is well-written and informative. There's also a follow-up here.
Poem:
"CHE GUEVARA CAME TO ME IN A DREAM" The whole of the issue of almostisland is worth a read. (The page loads slowly (deliberately).)
It's been approximately 389 years since the first African slaves were brought to what is now the United States. Source
The entire Fugazi Live Series is back in stock at Dischord. According to their post, they'll also be releasing more shows as downloadable MP3s.
From "Witnesses to Dream Speech See a New Hope":
At least five veterans of [the march on Washington] traveled to Denver this week as Democratic delegates, among them Representative John Lewis of Georgia, who is the last man alive of the 10 who spoke that day at the Lincoln Memorial. This son of sharecroppers, who was almost beaten to death by police officers in Selma, Ala., when he marched with civil rights activists across a bridge, stood on a sun-splashed street in Denver and considered the distance traveled.
His bald head still bears near half-century-old scars.
"We've had disappointments since then, but if someone told me I would be here," Mr. Lewis said, shaking that head. "When people say nothing has changed, I feel like saying, 'Come walk in my shoes.' "
The Fetshization of the Notebook, which reminds me of William Gass's "In Defense of the Book."
I just found, and am enjoying, the blog "Wood's Lot."
NSA Declassification Initiatives. There's some good stuff here on the history of cryptography and the history of the NSA. (via Cryptome)
Graphical topology visualization in Zenmap.
Fucking hippies:
Excerpts from Woody Allen's diary during the filming of Vicky Cristina Barcelona
MIT OpenCourseWare: Major Authors: John Milton and Special Topics in Literature: Milton's "Paradise Lost"
Your Free Will Astrology for the week.
"And I am nothing of a builder,
But here I dreamt I was an architect,
And I built this balustrade
To keep you home, to keep you safe
From the outside world.
But the angles and the corners,
Even though my work is unparalleled,
They never seemed to meet
This structure fell about our feet
And we were free to go."
"Here I Dreamt I Was an Architect," The Decemberists
Whit
Diffie and Susan Landau on internet eavesdropping. This is one article in a full issue of Scientific American on the future of privacy.
A nuanced look at John Edwards's confession, Rousseau, and
the American ideals of truth and forgiveness. Even if the string
is lost somewhere in the middle of the post, it's worth reading. It
made me think of Gary Vaynerchuck's pleas for transparency,
which are coupled with, in my mind, the implicit threat of public
shame. For, as Warner points out (quoting Joseph Coates), Rousseau's is, ultimately, a "utopian and inherently totalitarian goal."
Kevin Mitnick looks back in Forbes.
Vernor Vinge in the NYTimes.
A conversation with R. Crumb:
Galactic 'spaghetti monster' powered by magnetic
fields. Also: "Many species - including birds and salmon - are known to use the Earth's magnetic fields in migration, rather like a natural GPS."
How magnetic fields affect me ("It ain't pretty"):
"Well my heart's runnin' round like a chicken with its head cut off
All around the barn yard falling in and out of love
Poor thing's blind as a bat
Gettin' up, fallin' down, gettin' up
Who'd fall in love with a chicken with its head cut off? "
Artists' Books Online
Thomas Pynchon on power, outlaws, disappearing, the internet, Control and realm capital-M Magic
Recent Ph.D. Dissertations related to Medieval History and Society
Josh Brolin in Oliver Stone's W.. As AICN points out, "Do not underestimate Josh Brolin."
Martin Amis is scared. And he hates Muslims.
Roger Ebert's love letter to blogging.
Eddie Campbell has drawn a series of bookmarks for Bent Books in Australia.
Robert Pinsky on John Milton in America
On being remaindered. It's odd that people feel the need to point out, to the author, when a book is placed on sale.
"They have your book in the bargain bin at Barnes and Noble!"
"Oh. Thank you. My book didn't sell well enough at full price, so now it's in the bargain bin next to books on Taoism and Phaidon's book of record covers. Thank you. I'll pass that along to all my friends."
designboom's "a brief history of the female robot"
Mono has been
incorporated into the main grid of Second Life. From the wiki: "We've run some benchmarks to compare the performance of the original scripting engine and the Mono VM. When we run the tests side by side we found that Mono is up to 220x faster than LSL2."
Math is fun! Seriously.
I'm really enjoying the
Silver Bullet Security Podcast. Interviews with luminaries of
the security community. (It kind of weirded me out, though, when Dan
Geer said his smokehouse was currently full (Weird imagery of Dan
Geer standing over a slain hog, bloody axe in hand, set in Resident
Evil 5).)
Bruno Taylor's Playful Spaces (via Wooster Collective):
Charles Simic and Tomaž Šalamun
Black
Hat USA 2008 Archives
What,
what.
A
critical view of Big Numbers. Every couple of years the internets hosts a revival
of interest in Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz's Big
Numbers. That's not a bad thing.
Self indulgence, pt. 1
Your Free Will Astrology
Rand on the future (via Bruce Sterling
)
Self indulgence, pt. 2:
Versus CluClu Land on Foucault
Laura Carter on Barrett Watten's Progress/Under
Erasure and Kristeva's Revolution in Poetic Language
within the context of the Language School.
"Watching
an Old Friend Die"
A rememberance of the Excalibur poker room, which has
fired all its dealers and is going digital.
Hooray
and congratulations.
Marc Owen's explorations of gender and role-playing in virtual
worlds:
"Physicists spooked by faster-than-light information
transfer". Quote: "We think space and time are important because that's the kind of monkeys we are."
Terence Rudolph,
Imperial College London
"An Army of Ones and Zeroes: How I became a soldier in the Georgia-Russia cyberwar." I continue to be skeptical about the whole thing.
Eddie Campbell is back from his American tour, which means
new blog posts, which is good.
Democratic National Convention Protesters: Welcome to the Terrodome
An
interview with Dirk Deppey. (Journalista has become my primary
source of comics news.)
"Photography
as a Weapon," Errol Morris
Dancho Danchev sums up where the war is happening online in
Russia v. Georgia
An old interview with James Carter.
The Disintegration of Hillary Clinton's Campaign in Emails
Your Free Will Astrology for the week.
"Today's Kremlin: Too Elusive for a Solzhenitsyn?"
Ron
Silliman on the role theory might play in poetry and other stuff.
"Look upon me! I'll show you the life of the mind!"
Rejoice:
Rigorous Intuition has a new post. (Well, it's not exactly a
celebratory post, so maybe "rejoice" is the wrong word.)
If you missed out on Black Hat and Defcon, the Network Security
Podcast did a series of microcasts on site.
Lessig on extremism and insanity in the battle over copyright.
"This is not a love song":
Paul Graham's "The Hundred-Year Language". This is old, but I'm revisiting it while I wrestle
with some issues in PHP and Python. Don't worry, I'm not planning on
learning LISP or anything. I'm betting on Utu.
An interview
with Naomi Klein.
Finally got reCaptcha working on the comments.
Chris
Nakashima-Brown on the anthrax attacks. Title: "The Kappa Fatwa."
An interview with
the ever dapper Grant Morrison.
Git is MacGyver, Mercurial is James Bond. (The same
could be said of Linux and OS X (I was always a MacGyver fan).)
Joanna
Rutkowska: Xen 0wning Trilogy. This is always a good time of year
for interesting security information.
Oddly
useless post of the day: Fighting Knives 101.
Dr. Ronald Chevalier: "Let me
irrigate your barren earth with fresh cream." More here.
Hide your weird poems (of which I have many). They
could be used as evidence against you.
Interview with
Window Snyder about Firefox security. Mozilla's doing some
interesting work.
"I keep listening to the great Joe Strummer"
Writing Testable Code.
Writing
Untestable Code.
"I had a bad year, but I've gotten through..." (What's up with the
dancing girls, though? Necessary?)
Greatest iPhone App Ever. As Kottke points out, there's
been a good many humorless responses to this app.
Dan Kaminsky's DNS Presentation
Interview
with Python creator Guido van Rossum.
"Intellectuals and academics are just assumed to have some background knowledge of the arts, and not knowing those things can count against you. Ignorance of math and science is no obstacle, though."
Metal:
Your Free Will Astrology for the Week
Traffic
Accounting with Linux IP Tables
METAL:
Encrypt
your laptops, ladies and gentlemen. (Of course, you'll only
encrypt if you have something to hide, so if you encrypt your laptop,
you're probably going to have it seized.)
Model T Body Modification (While I'm hesitant to link
to Metafilter (and I'm hesitant to link to something that links to a
NYTimes article that contains, in its title, the word "mash-up") because I assume most people read it, there's too many
interesting links to pass up.)
I'm interested in
technologies like this - things that can be appropriated and
transformed as well as reused (adaptive
reuse, I guess). A question, though: Are these
technologies possible when improvements are so rapid? (I say that as I
sit down the hall from Sun servers purchased who knows when.)
EFF Releases "Switzerland" ISP Testing Tool
Are you working on one of the most important problems in your field?
...and if not, why?
Britney, Paris, and Barack:
A profile of Elliot Gould
Charcoal
briquette making device in Goma. (From the blog afrigadget, which
I really like.)
