What’s a band to do if it hasn’t got the cash to make its own music video and lives in a country with extremely high levels of CCTV?

Well, Get Out Clause used state CCTV cameras and their rights to access information ...

CCTV, Get Out Clause and iMovie

As far as Stephen's concerned, Bill O'Reilly did nothing wrong in that "Inside Edition" clip.

Colbert on O'Reilly

Look at your computer setup and imagine that you hooked up a 3D printer. Instead of printing on bits of paper this 3D printer makes real, robust, mechanical parts. To give you an idea of how robust, think Lego bricks and you're in the right area. You could make lots of useful stuff, but interestingly you could also make most of the parts to make another 3D printer. That would be a machine that could copy itself.

RepRap is short for Replicating Rapid-prototyper. It is the practical self-copying 3D printer shown on the right - a self-replicating machine. This 3D printer builds the component up in layers of plastic. This technology already exists, but the cheapest commercial machine would cost you about €30,000. And it isn't even designed so that it can make itself. So what the RepRap team are doing is to develop and to give away the designs for a much cheaper machine with the novel capability of being able to self-copy (material costs are about €400). That way it's accessible to small communities in the developing world as well as individuals in the developed world. Following the principles of the Free Software Movement we are distributing the RepRap machine at no cost to everyone under the GNU General Public Licence. So, if you have a RepRap machine, you can make another and give it to a friend...

RepRap

It's going to take a lot more than changing lightbulbs to get us on the path to sustainability. We investigate the options (solar? nuclear? cow poop?), what's hype, what's really happening, and who's standing in the way of change.

The Future of Energy: A Special Report

From Publishers Weekly:

Richard Powers ( Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance ; Prisoner's Dilemma ) is a recipient of a MacArthur "genius" grant , and it seems appropriate: this strange, overwritten, often infuriating, manically intelligent and sometimes deeply moving novel could hardly have been produced by a writer of mere talent. Powers has woven an extraordinary knowledge of music, of science (particularly of the search for genetic coding, and of computer programming), of the mysteries of language and art history, into a saga that is dazzling and wearying in almost equal measure. The novel jumps back and forth between the late '50s, when brilliant scientist Stuart Ressler is involved with an Illinois research team trying to break the mysteries of DNA coding, and the '80s, when librarian Jan O'Deigh and computer programmer Franklin Todd get to know Ressler, now holding an insignificant night job at a massive computer database operation in Brooklyn, N.Y., and try to figure what derailed his promising career. Not a great deal happens, in a conventional narrative sense. Ressler has an affair with one married fellow scientist and learns music from another; his scientific career is, in fact, aborted by his resulting passion for music. O'Deigh leaves her glib Madison Avenue boyfriend, takes up with Todd and is then abandoned by him in his vain search for information about an obscure 16th-century Flemish artist. Toward the end the three principals are involved in a massive computer scam to help a stricken colleague. Despite occasional bewilderment at arid patches of scientific jargon and interminable displays of arcane knowledge for its own sake, a reader persists with The Gold Bug Variations (the title, obviously, is a play on Bach's Goldberg Variations , which have a key role in the book's intellectual structure, and Edgar Allan Poe's The Gold Bug , about the solving of a puzzle). For there is a perpetual air of surprise about the book, of intellectual excitement, a passionate involvement with words that expands into delightfully witty dialogue and profoundly evocative description. Reading it is hard work, but it's also deeply enriching; the decade is not likely to bring another novel half as challenging and original.

Gold Bug Variations

Choose your favorite.

Politically Incorrect Ads Of Yesteryear

TagCrowd is a web application for visualizing word frequencies in any user-supplied text by creating what is popularly known as a tag cloud or text cloud.

What text do you want to visualize?

TagCrowd

U.S. intelligence agencies are sounding the alarm about the threat posed by Islamist insurgents in Pakistan’s tribal badlands. But it is difficult to imagine just how brazen the militants have become until you see them in action.

From the archive:

Funniest Song from 'Avenue Q'

Avenue Q comes to Atlanta

Hillary's Downfall

Godwin's Law apparently applies to Democratic politics, not just Usenet...

Springtime for the Taliban

Robert Darnton, in The New York Review of Books:

Information is exploding so furiously around us and information technology is changing at such bewildering speed that we face a fundamental problem: How to orient ourselves in the new landscape? What, for example, will become of research libraries in the face of technological marvels such as Google?

How to make sense of it all? I have no answer to that problem, but I can suggest an approach to it: look at the history of the ways information has been communicated. Simplifying things radically, you could say that there have been four fundamental changes in information technology since humans learned to speak.

Somewhere, around 4000 BC, humans learned to write. Egyptian hieroglyphs go back to about 3200 BC, alphabetical writing to 1000 BC. According to scholars like Jack Goody, the invention of writing was the most important technological breakthrough in the history of humanity. It transformed mankind's relation to the past and opened a way for the emergence of the book as a force in history.

The history of books led to a second technological shift when the codex replaced the scroll sometime soon after the beginning of the Christian era. By the third century AD, the codex—that is, books with pages that you turn as opposed to scrolls that you roll—became crucial to the spread of Christianity. It transformed the experience of reading: the page emerged as a unit of perception, and readers were able to leaf through a clearly articulated text, one that eventually included differentiated words (that is, words separated by spaces), paragraphs, and chapters, along with tables of contents, indexes, and other reader's aids.

The Library in the New Age

Freeman Dyson, skeptic, in The New York Review of Books:

I begin this review with a prologue, describing the measurements that transformed global warming from a vague theoretical speculation into a precise observational science.

There is a famous graph showing the fraction of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere as it varies month by month and year by year (see the graph on page 44). It gives us our firmest and most accurate evidence of effects of human activities on our global environment. The graph is generally known as the Keeling graph because it summarizes the lifework of Charles David Keeling, a professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. Keeling measured the carbon dioxide abundance in the atmosphere for forty-seven years, from 1958 until his death in 2005. He designed and built the instruments that made accurate measurements possible. He began making his measurements near the summit of the dormant volcano Mauna Loa on the big island of Hawaii.

He chose this place for his observatory because the ambient air is far from any continent and is uncontaminated by local human activities or vegetation. The measurements have continued after Keeling's death, and show an unbroken record of rising carbon dioxide abundance extending over fifty years. The graph has two obvious and conspicuous features. First, a steady increase of carbon dioxide with time, beginning at 315 parts per million in 1958 and reaching 385 parts per million in 2008. Second, a regular wiggle showing a yearly cycle of growth and decline of carbon dioxide levels. The maximum happens each year in the Northern Hemisphere spring, the minimum in the Northern Hemisphere fall. The difference between maximum and minimum each year is about six parts per million.

The Question of Global Warming