Sunday, November 28, 2004
Huxley, Hesse and The Cybernetic Society
"The following is the second part of an excerpt from Timothy Leary and Eric Gullicson's unpublished book The Cybernetic Society, written in 1987, which we began in our first issue of Island Views The first part focused on Huxley’s importance to the emerging cybernetic society and this final installment looks at the contributions of the novelist Herman Hesse." /Island.org/
Mobile PatternHunting
"Scientists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology developed the system, which logs the ID code of every Bluetooth chip the phone passes, the location of every phone mast it contacts, every person phoned or texted and when applications are used. Data is then stored on a server which uses software to recognise any patterns in behaviour and predict what may happen next." /Mobile Research Forum/
The Blogosphere By the Numbers
With over 4 million blogs in existence at this time, "Pew Internet & American Life reports a new weblog is created every 5.8 seconds. That roughly translates into 15,000 new blogs every day." /Smart Mobs/
Sunday, November 21, 2004
Eclectic Curiosity
"(A)s the sci-fi novelist William Gibson recently remarked, 'It’s inherently more difficult to imagine things getting relatively unfucked than it is to imagine things getting more fucked but in a familiar direction.'" /maisonneuve/
Power, Subjectivity, Resistance
"Lewis Call bases his work, Postmodern Anarchism, on Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean Baudrillard, and the cyberpunk authors William Gibson and Bruce Sterling. Call seeks alternative political, economic, and cultural systems based on radical gift-giving, the details of which are to be worked out by cyberpunks, 'who have no need for this book.'" /Infoshop News/
ScriptGenerator: Books Without Authors
"Orwell's 1984 reflects the author's disillusionment with socialism as it was practised in 1948, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 registers alarm at book-burning in Eisenhower's America, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale deplores the rightwing fundamentalism and antifeminism she saw re-emerging in the 1980s. Vasset joins the likes of William Gibson in expressing anxiety about multinational corporations, monstrously adaptive technologies and the moral vacuum at the heart of virtual reality." /Guardian Unlimited Books/
Turning Back the Copyright Clock
"In case you’re wondering, DRM has long since arrived in ebook publishing. All four of the major ebook formats, Adobe Reader, Palm Reader, Microsoft Reader and Mobipocket have secure formats that use encryption to prevent copying. All of the commercial ebook publishers have recourse to secure formats, at least for some titles. So hack William Gibson at your peril!" /p2pnet.net/
Friday, November 19, 2004
Social Software
Here is a very thorough Guide to Online Social Networks, Social Software, and Online Business Communities that is one of the best overviews I have found on this subject.
Wednesday, November 17, 2004
Communication Skills - Zefrank
Pure Joy! - communication skills - zefrank:)
Saturday, November 13, 2004
Science-ster?
Bruce Sterling writes about science networking software in Wired 12.11: VIEW: "Imagine a brilliant scientist who has been working for decades in undeserved obscurity, never having scratched the right old-boy backs. A network graph could make the worthy researcher pop out of the background while outing the usual lazy timeservers as pigs with their trotters in the trough. Imagine the transformative mayhem that would wreak on the moribund status quo! And if it brought the supposedly hostile realms of art and science closer together, then we'd have every reason to rejoice."
Sunday, November 07, 2004
Doug Rushkoff on Open Source Currency
"It's easy to talk about how handheld, networked computers (that's what our cell phones are, after all) promote the decentralization of content creation, file exchange and even culture -- but what about the stuff that's so centralized we stop thinking about it as even up for discussion? That's right: I'm talking about money." /TheFeature/
Think for yourself... Question authority
Throughout human history, as our species has faced the frightening, terrorizing fact that we do not know who we are, or where we are going in this ocean of chaos, it has been the authorities, the political, the religious, the educational authorities who attempted to comfort us by giving us order, rules, regulations, informing, forming in our minds their view of reality.To think for yourself you must question authority and learn how to put yourself in a state of vulnerable, open-mindedness; chaotic, confused, vulnerability to inform yourself.
Think for yourself... Question authority.
- Timothy Leary
Think for yourself... Question authority.
- Timothy Leary
