On May 18 2003, officials overseeing an election in Schaerbeek, a suburb of Brussels, got a shock. An electronic vote-counting machine declared that 4,096 more people had cast their vote than the ballot slips testified. The machine had been thoroughly tested and deemed perfect. So what went wrong?

The answer was, literally, a strike from the heavens.

Technicians pointed the finger of blame at cosmic rays -- particles that zip across the cosmos at huge speed and, while rightly ignored by humans as a health concern, can wreak havoc with highly sensitive microelectronic circuits.

Are you fucking serious?

Fried chips: Cosmic rays put new-generation microcircuits to the test

The following quoted material is a post by UPI intelligence corespondent Richard Sale on Ret. Colonel W. Patrick Lang's Sic Semper Tyrannis blog. Sale does not reveal any of his sources, so there are questions about its accuracy.

Contrary to the bland stories in The New York Times and Washington Post of Friday, Negroponte did not go voluntarily to State from his job as director of intelligence. In fact, there was tremendous administration pressure to get him out of his current job. The chief cause of the quarrel involved Negroponte's balking at at request from Vice President Cheney to increase domestic collection by the National Security Agency on U.S. citizens.

Well, this is certainly interesting.

Sic Semper Tyrannis 2007: Sale on Negroponte Move

Uber Civil Disobediance!

In this Netzpolitik-Interview EFF-Founder John Perry Barlow talks about massive civil disobedience in the copyright debate. The Interview was done at the 23. Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin.

I've you've seen Lessig's Talk from 23C3, and you absolutely should, then you'll note the debate at the end between Barlow and Lessig, and you'll want to round things out by watching this short clip. If anyone knows where I can find video of Barlows full talk at 23C3 please post!

NetzpolitikTV: John Perry Barlow uber zivilen Ungehorsam

Amid the obituaries of former President Gerald Ford last month, you did not read about his intense involvement in privacy-protection policy. Privacy was the issue that most involved Ford in his nine months as vice president, and he maintained his interest when he brought decency and decisiveness into the presidency.

Gerald Ford: Privacy's Godfather - Forbes.com

Rick Wesson, left, is chief executive of the data-gathering company Support Intelligence; Adam Waters is chief operating officer. “We are losing this war badly,” Mr. Wesson said of the growing threat from botnets.

Wow, two good friends of mine made NYT! Congrats guys.

Attack of the Zombie Computers Is a Growing Threat, Experts Say - New York Times

I projected photographs of mutilated and dead Iraqis on American houses, supermarkets, churches, and parking lots.

Wooster Collective: Collateral - The Projections of Jean-Christian Bourcart

Where's Darwin when you need him?

The intersection of Works and Freaky is the Platypus.
The intersection of Does Not Work and Freaky is U.S. Foreign Policy.

Hilarity for nerds.

The end of 2006 also marks the end of the current congressional session in the House and Senate, closing the door on the Deleting Online Predators Act.

Thank you, U.S. Senate, for demonstrating once again that YOU are THE place for legislators with IQs over 100.

TeacherSource | learning.now . DOPA Dies on the Vine | PBS

Some recent audio/video projects that use generative processes to yield surprising results. "Temporide" does a pixel-by-pixel delay on a video, showing many time lapses simultaneously. Spectral splicing, morphing, and reconstitution creates new audio based out of what you feed it. And "Ghost Jockey" generates a continuous stream of mashup audio and video.

Daniel Iglesia makes electronic music and video, or more accurately, is lazy and creates machines that do it for him.

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In this talk, I will present my work on sound source separation with applications for music. Music is repetitious in nature and this repetition actually informs the source separation process. I derive an automated statistical approach based entirely on repetitive structure to separate sound sources. In addition, spectrograms contain time-frequency structure. This structure may be factored into note-like components containing a spectral shape modulated by an amplitude envelope. When multiple spectrograms are available, I show how to incorporate this additional spatial information to separate components and combine them to form the original source signals.

Mitchell Parry is a Ph.D. candidate in the College of Computing working with Irfan Essa. His research interests include source separation, signal processing, visualization and music information retrieval.

DorkBot! In Atlanta! On Thursday! Who is with me!?

Thursday, Jan 11, 2007 | dorkbot-atl

Nanochick wrote:
I think its about time that the Memestreams Community and the people who work hard coding Memestreams in their free time get the recognition they deserve. Therefore, I have nominated memestreams for a "Weblog Award", and I hope others in the community will do the same.

Thanks Nano! I don't think anyone has nominated us for a Bloggie before. Frankly, if everyone who regularly reads this site nominates us, we stand a reasonable chance to get past the first round. That would certainly be fun. Apparently you can nominate a blog to multiple categories. I think "Best Community Blog" and "Best Kept Secret" are probably the best two for us, but I won't discourage other nominations. :) Just do it quick. Voting closes on January 10th.

Seventh Annual Weblog Awards