Archive for January, 2004

04w04:4 Computer Security vs. Robertsons

by timothy. 0 Comments

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All screwed up and nowhere to show | Brad Wheeler
http://tinyurl.com/ys2bq
“The package was delivered to London’s Rebecca Hossack Gallery well in advance of the fair’s gala opening on Wednesday evening. Just one problem, though: The screws used to fasten the crate were Robertson square drives — a circular screw with a recessed square made to receive a matching hand driver. Quite common in Canada, the make is all but unheard of across the pond”.

A Visit from the FBI | Scott Granneman
http://www.securityfocus.com/cgi-bin/sfonline/columnists-item.pl?id=215
“Dave also had a great quotation for us: ‘If you’re a bad guy and you want to frustrate law enforcement, use a Mac.’ Basically, police and government agencies know what to do with seized Windows machines. They can recover whatever information they want, with tools that they’ve used countless times. The same holds true, but to a lesser degree, for Unix-based machines. But Macs evidently stymie most law enforcement personnel. They just don’t know how to recover data on them. So what do they do? By and large, law enforcement personnel in American end up sending impounded Macs needing data recovery to the acknowledged North American Mac experts: the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Evidently the Mounties have built up a knowledge and technique for Mac forensics that is second to none.”

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emailed by Timothy on Friday 30 January 2004 @ 4:39 PM

04w04:3 Porno vs. Theory

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The Porno-ization of American Media and Marketing | T.L. Stanley
http://www.adage.com/news.cms?newsId=39599
“He’s the latest, but by no means only porn star to grab attention in the mainstream media. He is part of what some trend mavens say is the new ‘porno-ized’ America, which seems to be enthralled with people who were once marginalized in a business that has always been the black sheep of entertainment. ‘It’s a way to prove your liberalness to not be freaked out by porn,’ said Marian Salzman, chief strategy officer at Euro RSCG Worldwide. ‘People are decidedly more open now.'” ”

The self-critic | Matthew Price
http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/12/28/the_self_critic/
“Has theory succumbed to the same fate? That is the opinion of one of Britain’s best-known public intellectuals, the Marxist critic – and formidable theorist himself – Terry Eagleton. In his new book, After Theory (Basic), Eagleton administers last rites to today’s theoretical enterprise. ‘The golden age of theory is long past,’ he intones, reminding us that the best work of its titans – Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault; Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva – is now several decades old. ‘Rather like Nietzsche thought God was dead but we pretended for quite a long time that he was still alive, I think the same for theory,’ Eagleton said in a recent telephone interview from his home in Derry, Northern Ireland. ‘It’s actually been dead for quite a while; but we’ve been sort of behaving as though it isn’t.'” ”

Theory in chaos | David Kirby
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0127/p11s01-legn.html
“Specifically, says theory’s reformed bad boy, ‘[theory] has been shamefaced about morality and metaphysics, embarrassed about love, biology, religion and revolution, largely silent about evil…’ And that, as Eagleton says, ‘is rather a large slice of human existence to fall down on.'”

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emailed by Timothy on Friday 30 January 2004 @ 3:35 PM

04w04:2 Latin vs. Dizzee Rascal

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The utterly new sounds of Dizzee Rascal, Britain’s rising superstar. | Sasha Frere-Jones
http://slate.msn.com/id/2094205/
“As a sensory experience, Boy in da Corner is a bit like being trapped in an MRI chamber while somebody yells at you; it is hammering, anxious music. ‘Grime,’ the term record stores and critics have agreed on, feels like the right word. While American hip-hop songs sometimes show up as instrumentals in live grime sets, grime moves nothing like American music. The tempos are faster than hip-hop’s. Jay-Z, for example, favors the 100 beats per minute range. Grime lives around 130 BPM, a zone of urgency and movement. 50 Cent sounds like Simon and Garfunkel next to Dizzee Rascal.”

Roman rebound | The Economist
http://www.economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm?Story_ID=2281926
“Small wonder then, that some people still prefer their news in Latin, and that the centre of Latin news broadcasting nowadays should be Finland, a country of translucent birches, lakes and blondes, and with a language the opposite of universal. The Finnish Broadcasting Company (aka Radiophonia Finnica Generalis, or YLE) puts out a five-minute bulletin, Nuntii Latini, every week, and has done so for 14 years. The bulletins are broadcast worldwide, and are also collected and published as books. The conjunction of Latin with Finno-Ungaric makes for some bizarre listening and reading, as in ‘Anneli Jäätteenmäki, quae munere ministri primarii a mense Aprili functa est, a praesidente Tarja Halonen dimissionem petivit et accepit.’ But people in more than 50 countries, from East Timor to Uruguay, are tuning in, sending Latin letters of appreciation and begging for ancient Greek.”

video is Latin for “I see”
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emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 27 January 2004 @ 3:32 PM

04w04:1 *POWERPOINTLESS*

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A recent conversation on the pros and cons of PowerPoint vs. good old fashioned slides promted these selections. On the one hand, PowerPoint is derided for oversimplifying and on the other David Byrne thinks it’s an art form. – Tim

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PowerPoint Makes You Dumb | Clive Thompson
http://tinyurl.com/2evbu
“Perhaps PowerPoint is uniquely suited to our modern age of obfuscation — where manipulating facts is as important as presenting them clearly. If you have nothing to say, maybe you need just the right tool to help you not say it.”

Power Point is Evil | Edward Tufte
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt2_pr.html
“In a business setting, a PowerPoint slide typically shows 40 words, which is about eight seconds’ worth of silent reading material. With so little information per slide, many, many slides are needed. Audiences consequently endure a relentless sequentially, one damn slide after another. When information is stacked in time, it is difficult to understand context and evaluate relationships.”

Learning to Love Power Point | David Byrne
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.09/ppt1_pr.html
“Although I began by making fun of the medium, I soon realized I could actually create things that were beautiful. I could bend the program to my own whim and use it as an artistic agent. The pieces became like short films: Some were sweet, some were scary, and some were mysterioso. I discovered that even without text, I could make works that were “about” something, something beyond themselves, and that they could even have emotional resonance. What had I stumbled upon? Surely some techie or computer artist was already using this dumb program as an artistic medium.”

Turning Heads with PowerPoint | Xeni Jardin
http://www.wired.com/news/culture/0,1284,61485,00.html
“This is exactly what was intended by the people who developed this program. They hoped that this tool would allow people to bypass the middleman, to communicate without having to work through a gauntlet of graphic designers or AV professionals. Do it yourself. After all, I learned how to do it in only a couple of hours.”

The Epistemology of David Byrne | Brian Braiker
http://msnbc.msn.com/id/3703506/
“They all make assumptions about what you want to do with them and what kind of use you’re going to put them to, and therefore how you lead you’re life and what’s important to you. And it comes down to really simple things. Like in address books, it has a slot for your parents and your house and your spouse. That makes assumptions about how you live–and most of them are absolutely true–but what I’m talking about is stuff that’s not visible. It’s about how the architecture of the software makes assumptions about how you do things. This is going to sound high-falutin’, but it’s in the same way that Wittgenstein would say that the limits of our thought are the limits of our language. What we can say, what we can verbalize or write, determines what we can think. ”

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emailed by Timothy on Sunday 25 January 2004 @ 2:54 PM

04w03:3

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It’s Time, Once Again, To Kill The Past | Charlie Finch
http://www.artnet.com/Magazine/features/finch/finch9-20-02.asp
“In 2002, nobody gives a shit if you were once insulted by Barbara Kruger. She is old hat, and so is the star system of art which arose in the past 40 years of the last millennium. […] What the young artists need is exile: get out of New York, get out of London, get out of Berlin, find your own place […] cream over yourself and your personal circle, without hungering for validation from above…”(Article date: 20 Sept 2002)

How an Art Scene Became a Youthscape | Benjamin Genocchio
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/23/arts/design/23DEAL.html?pagewanted=all
“Mr. Reich says that for the younger dealers the art business is less about making money than about expressing the values and experiences of his generation. ‘It’s all about being happy about whatever you can be happy about,’ he said. ‘My generation grew up in a time when we didn’t have heroes. You grew up believing you were being hoodwinked and manipulated — and knowing you were, but learning to enjoy it because it came in fun colors or was on MTV. ‘The bottom line,’ he added, ‘was that I really wanted to have a gallery, and sometimes you just have to start doing something with whatever you have at your disposal.'”
Note: NYT may require a free one time registration (but then you’ll be able to read whatever you want without going through the hassle again).

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emailed by Timothy on Friday 23 January 2004 @ 3:20 PM

04w03:2

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Criticize, Don’t Vandalize | Roger Kimball
http://www.opinionjournal.com/la/?id=110004585
“We are often told that establishment taste is parochial, obtuse and unreceptive to novelty. Since ‘transgressive,’ morally decadent art is the establishment taste of today, the good Swedish bureaucrats overseeing the exhibition doubtless expected all who gazed upon Snow White to demonstrate their sophistication by confining their response to appreciation or at least silence.”

Talking Bacteria: The work of Bonnie Bassler | Marguerite Holloway
http://tinyurl.com/39hoj
“Quorum sensing, as this phenomenon is called, is a young science. Until recently, no one thought bacteria talked to one another, let alone in ways that changed their behavior, and Bassler has been instrumental in the field’s rapid ascension. She has figured out some of the dialects–the genetic and molecular mechanisms different species use–but is best known for identifying what might be a universal language all species share, something she has jokingly referred to as ‘bacterial Esperanto.'”

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emailed by Timothy on Thursday 22 January 2004 @ 9:00 PM

04w03:1

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Bad on purpose or just plain bad? | Sarah Milroy
http://tinyurl.com/2u9p6
“The more you sit there, the more blank your mind becomes, and ultimately, you leave the gallery with the uneasy sense that you have thought about the work harder than the artist who made it. This is not a good thing. If you are going to ask for an audience’s full and long attention, you have to be ready to meet it.”

The Word Made Flesh | Nicholas Blincoe
http://tinyurl.com/24w2x
“Connor uses post-war French philosophy as the frame through which he views the long history of writing and reflecting upon skin, from Classical and Renaissance medical treatises through to our modern taste for tattooing and aromatherapy oils. Connor contends that the theme of skin unites all French philosophers, from existentialists such as Sartre to structuralists and post-structuralists like Jacques Derrida.”

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emailed by Timothy on Monday 19 January 2004 @ 1:17 PM

04w2:2

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Making the Mind | Gary Marcus
http://bostonreview.net/BR28.6/marcus.html
“The brain, too, develops in the first instance from a simple sheet of cells that gradually curls up into a tube that sprouts bulges, which over time differentiate into ever more complex shapes. Yet 2,000 years of thinking of the mind as independent from the body kept people from appreciating the significance of this seemingly obvious point.”

That crazy little thing called love | Andrew G. Marshall
http://observer.guardian.co.uk/magazine/story/0,11913,1105827,00.html
“Psychologist Dorothy Tennov has already taken the first step towards this goal. She interviewed 500 people from different backgrounds and age groups, both gay and straight, about falling in love, and found a startling similarity in how each respondent described their feelings. […] To distinguish between these overwhelming emotions and the more stable, domestic feelings experienced by long-term couples who are only too aware of their partner’s failings, Tennov coined a new term: limerence.”

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emailed by Timothy on Thursday 15 January 2004 @ 1:53 PM

04w02:1 Goodreads Mailing List

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Hello,

I am beginning an email list of some of the more interesting articles I have found on the net. I will send the links to new articles to this list.

As someone who has made it into my address book for some reason, you are on this list.

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The first selections are:

Forgery and Plagiarism | Denis Dutton
http://www.denisdutton.com/forgery_and_plagiarism.htm

What will happen when a national political machine can fit on a laptop? A: See below
http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A58554-2003Dec12?language=printer
“Back in 1937, an economist named Ronald Coase realized something that helped explain the rise of modern corporations — and which just might explain the coming decline of the American two-party political system. Coase’s insight was this: The cost of gathering information determines the size of organizations. It sounds abstract, but in the past it meant that complex tasks undertaken on vast scales required organizational behemoths…”

Past articles I have found are archived at http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads

To remove yourself from this list, click and send tim@instantcoffee.org

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emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 13 January 2004 @ 10:15 PM