I took a break and went to Guelph for a few days with Caro. We came back yesterday in a snow storm, Caro storming along at 140 between islands of semis and cars. I thought, really, if we're going slowly enough the airbag will save me. I need more of a vacation than that, and more of a vacation from the site, so I'm going dark. Days? Weeks? Months? I don't know.

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Need cavernous acoustics that would make Phil Spector's Wall of Sound seem like recording inside a thimble? Book time in Thomas McIntosh and Emmanuel Madan's grain silo. The Silophone has been used to add euphoric reverb to everything from a simple blues harmonica to avant-garde opuses like The Symphony for Dot Matrix Printers. Featured in numerous magazine and newspaper articles, The Silophone was recently profiled on NPR's All Things Considered (Real Audio required). Before booking time, want a studio diagram and list of installed equipment? Inventory includes a Mackie 1604-VLZ PRO and a pair of SRM450s suspended in mid air. You can even test the equipment online. What's the next installation for Thomas and Emmanuel? May we suggest a Mackie 56�8 and some Fussion Series speakers strung across this hollowed-out stretch.

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AOL embraces Linux and Mozilla, plans to drop MS Explorer: "The Gecko rendering engine at the heart of the Mozilla Web browser is scheduled to replace Microsoft's Internet Explorer as AOL's default browser -- the one in the millions of free AOL CDs distributed every year -- in the 8.0 version of AOL's client software. (The current version is 7.0.)"

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As Rabbis Face Facts, Bible Tales Are Wilting - Michael Massing, New York Times: "Abraham, the Jewish patriarch, probably never existed. Nor did Moses. The entire Exodus story as recounted in the Bible probably never occurred... Such startling propositions -- the product of findings by archaeologists digging in Israel and its environs over the last 25 years -- have gained wide acceptance among non- Orthodox rabbis. But there has been no attempt to disseminate these ideas or to discuss them with the laity -- until now..."

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"InterWorld Radio is a source of daily news bulletins and broadcast-quality features for radio stations and online listeners. Journalists all over the world file reports on critical global issues – economics, human rights, environment, international trade, science and technology. A partnership between The Panos Institute and oneworld.net, InterWorld Radio is editorially independent and funded by a range of donors including the Ford Foundation, NOVIB, USAid and UNICEF... The aim of Interworld is to use the internet to provide radio stations around the world with high-quality international news and features, hopefully to supplement the station’s own local programming. Every week, topical five-minute radio features are uploaded onto Interworld’s audio bank, which is searchable by subject, country/region, or date. The radio station logs on, downloads the features that it wants to use, and broadcasts them when it chooses. There is also a daily news bulletin that can be read directly on air or adapted and used in existing news or current affairs programmes."

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I'd Like To Buy The World a Shelf-Stable Children's Lactic Drink. "almost everywhere consumers are becoming more sophisticated and demanding. We want more options. We want bottled water. We want health drinks. We want a brand-new thing we have never seen before, and three months later we want another one. We want endless choices, in dozens of categories, and it wouldn't hurt if you let us buy drinks with our phones... In short, we are all becoming Japanese teenagers."

Posted by John at 11:06 PM | Permalink

Browser News.

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Joel on Software on ArsDigita.

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"When Hindus kill Muslims it's not a story, because there are a billion Hindus and they aren't part of the Muslim narrative. When Saddam murders his own people it's not a story, because it's in the Arab-Muslim family. But when a small band of Israeli Jews kills Muslims it sparks rage - a rage that must come from Muslims having to confront the gap between their self-perception as Muslims and the reality of the Muslim world." Thomas Friedman looks for an angle and finds a story! What role, if any, does narrative consciousness and social psychology play in the Middle East? (via blogdex)

Posted by John at 1:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

A Brief History of U.S. Interventions - 1945 to the Present by William Blum: The CIA manipulation of the Italian elections, the overthrown of Mossadegh in Iran, the US involvement in the coups in Chile and Guatemala, the attempted assassinations of Castro, and the propping up of Suharto in Indonesia are all well-documented historical realities. I don't agree about Yugoslavia.

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Interview with Alexander Rose, director of the Long Now Foundation: "the main thing we are trying to point out is that there is several levels to human time. They start at the very outside edge with arts and fashion moving in many directions at various fast speeds and then underneath there is things like commerce and then going all the way down to infrastructure, governance and nature at the very bottom. The problem is not that art and fashion and commerce and technology are moving in very fast speeds. The problem is when you superimpose one layer on top of the other and you're trying to do something like use a natural resource at commercial speed."

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Edward Said, Thoughts About America: "For when the intellectuals of the most powerful country in the history of the world align themselves so flagrantly with that power, pressing that power's case instead of urging restraint, reflection, genuine communication and understanding, we are back to the bad old days of the intellectual war against communism, which we now know brought far too many compromises, collaborations and fabrications on the part of intellectuals and artists who should have played an altogether different role."

Posted by John at 1:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The president of ICANN, the organization that has been attempting to coordinate the Internet's domain name system, has suggested that the body virtually eliminate public participation and be more controlled by governments and corporations. If you're concerned, one thing you can do is join ICANN at Large.

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Sherri Turkle writes in the NYT: "Adolescents are wise in the psychology of computer games and Middle Earth. They live in a world they can't control, in a body that seems increasingly alien. To them the computer world is soothing, offering reassurance through mastery. Just as each episode of "The Lord of the Rings" presents a danger and each has its resolution, so many adolescent boys move from one block of intransigent code to another, from one screen to the next, declaring victory as they go... But this distinction is about more than gender; it is about ways of looking at the world -- real, imagined or computer-generated. Some pioneers of computing had a style of working that rewarded risk. They spoke of programming itself as though it were a dangerous quest. At M.I.T. computer hackers even had a name for it: 'sport death.' To pull back from the impending doom of a system crash required near magic, an almost empathetic knowledge of the intricacies of code. For this community, a certain bravado came to be seen as valuable, even necessary, beyond the world of programming."

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Canada 5, USA 2. CBC replayed the entire game yesterday afternoon, and the result was the same. Watching (parts of) it again, I thought about the aesthetics of hockey and those things in the game that create the narrative. These days, I am no great hockey fan. Pro wrestling always, on some level, lives up to its hype, and the two footballs seem consistently more interesting and, yes, artistic. When I was a child growing up in Nova Scotia I used to watch the great Montreal Canadien teams on Hockey Night in Canada during the glory years of Guy Lafleur and Ken Dryden. In the 1980s it was the Edmonton Oilers of Gretzky, Messier, Anderson, Kurri, Coffey, et. al. In 1987 I watched Gretzky's pass to Mario Lemieux win the Canada Cup. I am sure it is partially sentimentalism, but I think the 1990s saw a general decline in the quality of hockey. In 1967, the NHL had six teams; today there are 30, and while player skill levels are generally higher today, talent is spread very thin among the teams. Too often games are played defensively, with teams using modifications of the neutral zone trap to force the puck carrier to the boards and discouraging passing. It makes for dull hockey. The international rules, particularly the larger ice surface and no red line, change the game fundamentally and, I think, make for much better hockey. The ice surface is fifteen feet wider than the NHL rink and there is no centre red line, creating more room for fast players to stick handle and more, and creates more opportunities for everyone to pass. In its first game, Team Canada had trouble adjusting to things, and were soundly beaten by a skilled Swedish squad and their torpedo offense. But it was beautiful to watch.

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