] The Kleptones ? Bag of shite, mate. Went right downhill
] after that bloke Eric joined. I remember going to watch
] my mate Ralf back in the old days, y'know, when it was
] his band, doing his songs 'n' stuff and they were well
] wicked. The Free Butt, The Albert, The Pressure Point,
] they played everywhere. Not may people got to see 'em but
] when you're on at 7pm most people are still havin' their
] tea, splashing a bit of water on their face in readiness
] for the evening's entertainment, but those half a dozen
] people that had wandered into the gig straight from work
] loved it. Oh, and the sound guy from the Pressure Point
] said he knew someone who worked for EMI and he was gonna
] die when he heard them. So they were set, right ?

[ What they actually are is the avant-garde mashup darlings of the interweb. I was drawn in some time ago by a track from their "Yoshimi Battles the Hip-hop Robots" which blended Flaming Lips with Public Enemy's "By the time I get to Arizona" and fragments of MLK speech. We quickly got hold of the "Never Trust Originality" EP, which is also quite awesome.

I picked up another 2 sets last night, "From Detroit to J.A." and "A Night at the Hip-Hopera". The former I haven't tried out all of yet, but the latter is a mix of classic Queen tracks and modern rap/hip-hop from the likes of KRS-1, Kelis, ODB, De La Soul, Eminem Vanilla Ice, Aaliyah, Beastie Boys, Missy Elliott and a pile of others, not to mention clips from Aqua Teen Hunger force, Mallrats, and other such pop culture faves.

These guys are something close to the ultimate musical expression of our generation -- full of references that appeal to our endless love for trivia, plenty of beats and clever, non-obvious pairings which produce often surprising and exceptional new forms.

The tunes are available on their site via bittorrent, and I highly recommend all you kids check them out. -k]

about the kleptones

] "If Metallica still needs money," [Wilco frontman Tweedy] almost
] whispered, "then there's something really, really wrong." He
] would protest this extremism, he explained, by living a
] different life. By inviting, by creating, by inspiring
] music, and by ignoring wars about plastic.
]
]
] If this war is to end, it needs authentic voices. We have
] had enough preaching. The outrage is beginning to wear
] thin. It will take bands like Wilco, who live a different
] example and whisper an explanation to those who want to
] hear. Peace takes a practice. One that only artists can
] make real.

[ Lessig on the music war. -k]

Wired 13.02: VIEW - Why Wilco is the Future of Music

Google Maps is extremely cool. Great interface. The maps are very good, however they are missing a few things, such as the direction of one way streets. It also does not support Safari yet.

[ Wow. Just the other day i was remarking that mapquest seemed to have gotten a lot better lately, but this kinda kicks its ass. The ability to pan around is big for me, because i always want to get a feel for the roads, and try to decide if i can do a better job than the automatic directions (which is pretty common, actually). This interface makes that a *LOT* easier.

Also, like other google tools, it makes a best guess, so you can be pretty vague. I put in my office address as "2920 brandywine 30341" and it didn't hesitate at all. Mapquest always has that "The address was not found but this other ONE is similar..." by which it means, the exact address, but with the proper zip+4, etc. Really just an irritating extra click is what it is. Google is also somewhat tolerant of mispellings too - spelling "branywine" as "brandwin" worked fine, altho "brandwie" and "branwin" did not. I'm not sure how this compares to the other tools.

The main thing mapquest has that I find superior is the driving directions inclusion of highway numbers and directions as traffic sign icons... that makes following them from a printout just a little easier, since you don't have to look carefully at the text. -k]

Google Maps

] The seemingly interminable questioning had already lasted
] for hours. 'I needed the toilet,' Mubanga said, 'and I
] asked the interrogator to let me go. But he just said,
] "you'll go when I say so". I told him he had five minutes
] to get me to the toilet or I was going to go on the
] floor. He left the room. Finally, I squirmed across the
] floor and did it in the corner, trying to minimise the
] mess. I suppose he was watching through a one-way mirror
] or the CCTV camera. He comes back with a mop and dips it
] in the pool of urine. Then he starts covering me with my
] own waste, like he's using a big paintbrush, working
] methodically, beginning with my feet and ankles and
] working his way up my legs. All the while he's racially
] abusing me, cussing me: "Oh, the poor little negro, the
] poor little nigger." He seemed to think it was funny.'

] Yet Mubanga, though traumatised by his ordeal, believes
] he stayed sane partly because of his growing religious
] faith, and partly because of his rapping. He has a
] provisional title for the album he'd like to record:
] Detainee . He also has a stage name - 10,007, his
] Guantanamo prisoner number. The content of his work is
] strongly political. There were times, Mubanga said, 'that
] I wanted to explode. And when I did, I tried to remember
] Allah, not to use aggression in that way. I never fought
] any of the guards, I never spat at them, or like some
] prisoners did, threw a packet of faeces. A lot of the
] time you go on to autopilot and you just have to tell
] yourself you're still here, it is happening, it is real.
] The golden rule a lot of us had is, if you don't feel
] tired, don't force yourself to sleep, stay active. That's
] why I made myself learn Arabic.

The Observer | How I entered the hellish world of Guantanamo Bay

] Falling in love may be a great feeling but the next time you feel
] lovesick,missing your sweetheart, rush straight to a doctor as now
] the doctors have warned that the throes of passion should
] be seen as a potentially fatal medical disorder.

[ Whatever. Powerful emotions can cause mental instability?! No fucking way! Give this doctor the nobel prize in the category of "Proofs" of Otherwise Obvious Facts. -k]

Falling in love can kill you!

House Bill 179 Concerning Evolution

Is it possible to comply with this law? Is there factual scientific evidence inconsistent with or no supporting the theory of evolution? I'm not aware of any. If there is some I'd like to see it. Someone please meme it.

[ I did some searching and couldn't find anything compelling, which is to say, I found a lot of sites spouting the same sciency-sounding "proofs" against evolution. we've all probably heard a lot of them (no transitional fossil forms, gaps in the fossil record, nickel accumulation in the ocean and geomagnetic field strength measurements indicate a young earth, it's impossible for something to give rise to something more complex than itself, evolution violates the 2nd law of thermodynamics). None of what i found appeared to present and defend any of these points consistently, and most devolved into using quotations from theologians or the bible before the halfway mark.

The primary argument the anti-evolutionists seem to use is that because evolution hasn't been proved, and can't be applied in every case, because there are animals whose evolutionary history isn't clear, that the whole thing is bunk. Essentially, they misunderstand the concept of a theory. Any scientist should happily admit that of course evolution is a theory, and those who don't only hedge because they know they're about to get railroaded with "So it could be completely false!" attacks. That stuff is a deliberate attempt to misinform people about what a scientific theory truly is, what supporting evidence truly is, and how those things relate to evolution.

Additionally, it's always seemed a little strange for the extremely religious anti-evolution folks to use the "prove it! show me!" line of attack. The misunderstanding i mention above is obvious in this context, because otherwise the cognitive dissonance between believing in God and requiring categorical proof of everything else would surely cause problems. It is only by completely misrepresenting the concept of "evidence" that those two attitudes can square. -k

p.s. i did find one site that may be able to offer both sides, though it clearly tends to debunk the anti's. anyway, http://www.talkorigins.org/ ]

Here's the bill on evolution

] Defense contractors are shaking down model airplane and
] tank makers for punishing royalties on their model kits.
] One result is that kit makers are switching to WWI models
] and to models of enemy armaments. Nice going, defense
] contractors, you took our tax dollars and used them to
] rid the market of all military toys except Nazi tanks and
] planes.

[ Nice. Don't miss, further down on the bb main page, this story :
"The Eiffel Tower's likeness had long since been part of the public domain, when in 2003, it was abruptly repossessed by the city of Paris. That's the year that the SNTE, the company charged with maintaining the tower, adorned it with a distinctive lighting display, copyrighted the design, and in one feel swoop, reclaimed the nighttime image and likeness of the most popular monument on earth. In short: they changed the actual likeness of the tower, and then copyrighted that."

Super. -k]

Boing Boing: Defense contractors demand royalties on model plane and tank kits

] Documents obtained by CNN reveal the United States knew
] about, and even condoned, embargo-breaking oil sales by
] Saddam Hussein's regime, and did so to shore up alliances
] with Iraq's neighbors.
]
] The oil trade with countries such as Turkey and Jordan
] appears to have been an open secret inside the U.S.
] government and the United Nations for years.
]
] The unclassified State Department documents sent to
] congressional committees with oversight of U.S. foreign
] policy divulge that the United States deemed such sales
] to be in the "national interest," even though they
] generated billions of dollars in unmonitored revenue for
] Saddam's regime.

[ Wow. Super. -k]

CNN.com - Documents: U.S. condoned Iraq oil smuggling - Feb 2, 2005

noteworthy wrote:
] As your once and future agent will kindly tell you, 2005 will
] be remembered as the year that remembrance agents went
] mainstream.
]
] This essay by Steven Johnson appears in the Sunday NYT Book
] Review.

Linked here is a related post from his blog...

[ Interesting... this is an area of particular interest to me. I downloaded the tool under discussion, called DEVONthink, and gave it a whirl.

Initial impressions :

* johnson is right, it's useless for large documents. It'll certainly tell you that a word or phrase exists in that document, but then you still have to seach that document for the relevant locations. some mechanism for automatically breaking the imported docs up into segments (i.e. on a paragraph break) would make this more useful.

* it shows all the imported files in folders and so forth on the left. this is kinda dumb. if i wanted a hierarchical folder structure, i would use one with actual hierarchies of folders. oh, right, i do that, and it sucks. the whole point of a program like this is that hierarcies don't work well for complex data, and rigid groupings are completely contrary to the task. this leads me to my next point...

* the groupings should have nothing to do with the folders the documents were in orignially, nor should i *have to* create groupings on my own. the computer should categorize them for me. yes, i know, this is hard. if it was easy, i'd have done it 2 years ago, and someone else would certainly have done it by now. if i *really* want to create my own category, and add objects to it, the software should let me, but by default, it should be able to say "this document is about 'internet', 'law' and 'file sharing'" and put that document object in those catogories. in fact, really, it should break all documents into pieces and do that with every single piece, and anytime a piece is displayed, provide a button to show the whole document, if i want it. mostly though, if i'm interested in finding things about the legal issues surrounding file sharing, i don't give a fuck where the file is on disk based on my previous shitty filing scheme, or, in fact, about the 75% of the document that doesn't pertain to my current query. ok, enough.

* it doesn't handle pdfs. oh, it imports them, but they may as well be images. that's not useful to me. i can search filenames already, and, again, i don't want to have to categorize things myself. i do that now, with folders. i can appreciate that this may require paying money to adobe (does it?), but still, for a 40$ product, i'd like to be able to search the actual content of my pdf.

i don't want to sound like i'm bashing it too hard. in a sense, yeah, i'm complaining that my ford focus doesn't go 200mph and get 500 mile to the gallon, but i need to be honest about the utility of this kind of product. it's about as good, and probably better, than other similar products of it's type, and as a kind of jot board, for storing and managing notes and short rants or whatever, that you type directly into it, it looks to be extremely useful, but it's not yet what I need. Which is to say, an external memory with recall that's akin to, but better than, my own brain, which has trouble remembering things that it's seen before.

if he's right, and this is the year for this kind of stuff, i feel pretty sure that someone else will implement what i want well before i do, but i'm pretty confident that i'll know it when i see it. -k]

RE: Tool for Thought, by Steven Johnson

] The pair were testing a very thin carbon-mesh sail by
] firing microwaves at it. To their surprise, the sail
] experienced a force several times stronger than they
] expected. They eventually worked out that the heat from
] the microwave beam was causing carbon monoxide gas to
] escape from the sail's surface, and that the recoil from
] the emerging gas molecules was giving the sail an extra
] push.

[ Very cool. 60 MW is a lot of microwaves, but it's a neat concept.

Incidentally, one of the brothers is Gregory Benford, who's written a number of well known SciFi novels. -k]

New Scientist: Solar super-sail could reach Mars in a month