DAVID SIMON: My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: f*** the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. F*** him. F*** him to hell.

YAY! F**k the dim!

A Special Way of Being Afraid: David Simon Doesn't Care for Your Lawn Furniture

For thousands of years, most people on earth lived in abject poverty, first as hunters and gatherers, then as peasants or laborers. But with the Industrial Revolution, some societies traded this ancient poverty for amazing affluence.

Historians and economists have long struggled to understand how this transition occurred and why it took place only in some countries. A scholar who has spent the last 20 years scanning medieval English archives has now emerged with startling answers (*) for both questions.

...

The basis of Dr. Clark’s work is his recovery of data from which he can reconstruct many features of the English economy from 1200 to 1800. From this data, he shows, far more clearly than has been possible before, that the economy was locked in a Malthusian trap — each time new technology increased the efficiency of production a little, the population grew, the extra mouths ate up the surplus, and average income fell back to its former level.

'Germs' Debunked? Not Yet, But Another Wrinkle Emerges

Baby Einstein makes you stupid! Science says so.

Buyer beware: Videos aimed at improving infant and toddler language skills are not as beneficial for language learning as they claim to be, according to a new study.

Rather than helping youngsters, such products may actually hurt their vocabularies.

Watch out for sharp edges on DVDs!

Einstein Drains Baby Brains

Posting this here is probably a great way to find out what people should not do with technology, but at any rate it beats the retarded spamming that's being attempted.

This is a remarkable little howto that shows one how to convert a mini-maglite into a burning laser that you can use to light matches, pop balloons, melt candles, and um, other things over a distance. Very, very sweet.

Actually, I wouldn't suggest letting anyone under the age of 14 know about this link. The eyes you save may be your own.

HOWTO: Mini-maglite to *burning* laser conversion

Here's an article by one of the more bizare writers at Wired, discussing several breakfast cereals. Considering that I eat some generics I usually call "Shucky Darns" I find this pretty amusing.

Lore Sjöberg on Movie Cereals

Wow. I don't know whether to be thankful or whether to think kids these days are pansies. I'm pretty sure the heat index at band camp (when I went to high school) was rather regularly at or above 110F.

School Districts Cancel Outdoor Activities Due To Excess Heat

Dagmar wrote:

NBC Reporter with hidden camera in purse hoping to catch conference attendees committing to crimes (according to Defcon staff) flees Defcon 15 after being outed.

OMG FUCKING LOOOOOOLLLLL!!!!

For more information on this awesome totally ethical NBC program, see this.

AHAHA!

But really I think that she should lose her job for such a stunt...
This is unethical and I think dateline is taking it too far...

See my other post on "Society of Professional Journalists: Code of Ethics"

Is she a member?
She was awarded something from them in 2003.

She has a BSJ02/MSJ03 from Northwestern so I assume she is not an idiot.

She will be here in October ... someone should drop in and say Hi! ... more
it's a public place... someone should go film her undercover getting drunk...

Gota love the internet ....

RE: YouTube - NBC Dateline Reporter flees Defcon 15

Is there anyone on MemeStreams who regularly uses linux on their desktop?

I have to use Windows every day at work. There is something nice about my home computing environment being a little more slick. I like being able to open a unix command prompt. I like the design subtleties of my mac. Its pleasant to use. But I think it may be time to part ways.

I'm tired of Apple. My first mac, an iBook, had a problem where the screen would "go fuzzy" and require a motherboard replacement. This would happen annually, sometimes twice a year. For a while, Apple replaced the motherboards for free, but every time this occured, it involved a week without a machine. Once it also involved a computer which came back with a completely new hard drive. All my data was gone. Clearly, Apple never got to the root cause of the problem, as it kept happening over and over again. Eventually, last summer, Apple said they wouldn't replace the motherboard for free anymore, and their price was in excess of $1000. I had no choice but to buy a new computer.

So I bought a Macbook. I knew it was going to be trouble, but I did it anyway. It was nice for while.

About a month ago I spilled some beer on it. Obviously, my fault. Not like my prior problem. However, these things do happen to laptops and laptops ought to be designed with that in mind.

Instantly, one of the design flaws of the MacBook that I knew would be a problem going in reared its ugly head: There is no way to remove the keyboard. Keyboards get nasty. They get dirty. They do not last as long as the rest of a laptop. Good laptops are designed to make them easy to replace. But not the macbook. Its keyboard is embedded into the system. Its hard to remove and hard to clean. You have a problem with it, you have to send the system in for service.

After 24 hours of drying out, the keyboard didn't work, and so I figured it was going in for service. Fortunately, after a few more days of drying out the keyboard miraculously recovered. Worked fine. Worked fine for a while, anyway. Eventually the mouse started sticking. This got worse and worse over time until last week, when the mouse simply stopped working altogether.

Having no simple way to take the computer apart, my theory was that dust had collected to stickiness in the mouse, and that if I removed the battery and literally sprayed some water on the trackpad and then gave it a few days to dry out, it would likely be fine. This was a stupid idea. I should have SSHed into the thing and cleared out my data first. But I didn't. Again, my fault, not Apple's.

The computer isn't fine. I must have shorted something against the clock battery (which is basically impossible to access) and fried a motherboard component. There is gunk in the computer which might be capacitor guts. I'm fucked.

The reason its hard to get inside the macbook is that it has 27 screws which must be removed. These screws are extremely small, ... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ]

Desktop Linux

Multinational corporations have foreign policies, and the "home" country doesn't necessarily get special treatment:

In an effort to curb distrust, in 2003 Microsoft signed a pact with China, Russia, the United Kingdom, NATO and other nations to let them see the Windows source code.

A few thoughts:

1) Possession of source code has limited defensive value unless you actually build your software from that source. Based on press reports the agreement does not facilitate local compilation.
2) Is it really feasible for a third party to audit the Vista source? The people involved seem to think so, or are at least making a show of it. I am dubious.
3) The utility of this 'pact' would seem to be substantially offensive.

Consider:

Microsoft has reportedly signed a new government security program source code agreement with China Information Technology Security Certification Center, allowing CNITSEC and other approved institutions to look over the source code and relevant technical data of Microsoft's products, including Windows Vista ,so as to improve their evaluation on the security of Microsoft products. The agreement is an important part of the MOU signed between National Development and Reform Commission and Microsoft in April 2006.

Microsoft's Government Security Program helps government departments and international organizations evaluate the security of Microsoft products. CNITSEC previously signed an agreement with Microsoft on security source code in February 2003 and was authorized to check over the company's major source code and technical data.

From 2003:

According to sources at the software company, China is the eighteenth nation to sign such an agreement to view Microsoft's proprietary source code.

Surely the number has grown since then.

Craig Mundie's doublespeak:

This program is an integral element of our efforts to help address the unique security requirements of governments.

Microsoft Forges 'Pact' With Cyberwarriors Worldwide

k wrote:
This is already awesome, but even more, i want this with a 12 hour cycle.

This is way cool. It would be fun to deconstruct some pop tunes and visualize them with this technique.

RE: whitney music box var. 0 - chromatic - 48 tines