0406:3 Space Shuttle Posted February 2nd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 6 number 3 (space shuttle) This selection commemorates the Shuttle Disaster of a year ago. Last Sunday on NBC News’ Meet the Press, Howard Dean criticized Bush’s economics by saying, “He’s promising a trillion-dollar tax cut and a trip to Mars,” and I had to do a double-take because it was a literal as opposed to rhetorical statement. It can be argued that the new drive to go to Mars is partially due to the gross waste of expenditure and resources that the shuttle represented, and these year old articles articulate a view that NASA is a test-pilot boys club, fulfilling the baby-boomer tendency to squander potential for a yahoo good time. The third article is from last August and discuses the bureaucratic culture which allowed the disaster to happen. At least now it can said that NASA has a legitimate goal, and future generations will not consider the cost frivolous, anymore than we consider the Moon images we grew up with as a waste of money. – Timothy ——————————————————————— Was the space shuttle useful? Not really | David Owen http://slate.msn.com/id/2078104 “The scientific investigations undertaken during Columbia’s final voyage were similar to those conducted during Glenn’s mission five years earlier; indeed, they were similar to the experiments conducted on nearly every manned American space voyage that has ever taken place. For example, eight Australian spiders aboard Columbia added to our understanding of weightless web-weaving, a subject NASA first studied aboard Skylab in 1973.” (Article date: 4 Feb 2003) Astronauts – Why they shouldn’t be heroes | Chris Suellentrop http://slate.msn.com/id/2078230 “Before this past weekend, many Americans viewed the ‘Space Age’ as a kitschy thing of the past, like AstroTurf or I Dream of Jeannie. The great scientific challenge of the day, the one the president dared the nation to aspire to, was the creation of hydrogen-powered cars. Space? Been there, done that. As astronauts boldly went where many men had gone before, we forgot how bold they were. ‘It’s a job that doesn’t have anything to do with exploring space,’ NASA’s first flight director sniffed to USA Today in 2001. The Right Stuff flyboys had been replaced with nerdy tinkerers and scientists, seemingly as carefully selected for race and gender as a Benetton ad. […]In 1981, the buzz over the Columbia’s first flight was that space travel was about to lose its glamour. And the shuttle did exactly what it set out to do. We briefly achieved the dream of yawning as rockets hurtle men and women into outer space.” (Article date: 6 Feb 2003) A harsh critique of NASA’s culture | Peter N. Spotts http://www.csmonitor.com/2003/0827/p01s02-usgn.html “Until now, Mr. Chase adds, ‘NASA hasn’t been allowed to look higher than low-earth orbit for human space flight.’ The shuttle and ISS programs often appear to be ends in themselves, when they could well serve as stepping-stones to human missions to Mars or back to the moon. Such efforts also could boost broader public interest in human space exploration, analysts say, noting that while polls indicate support for the program overall, the public appears to show little enthusiasm for space trucks moving back and forth between Earth and the space station.” (Article date: 27 Aug 2003) —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Monday 02 February 2004 @ 2:57 AM
04w06:1 Posted February 2nd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 6 number 1 (it’s all about the wiring) Note: I was using an incorrect calendar for the week numbers – this is week six. – Timothy ——————————————————————— The machine that invents | Tina Hesman http://tinyurl.com/2bfn5 “Thaler, the president and chief executive of Imagination Engines Inc. in Maryland Heights, gets credit for all those things, but he’s really just ‘the man behind the curtain,’ he says. The real inventor is a computer program called a Creativity Machine. What Thaler has created is essentially ‘Thomas Edison in a box,’ said Rusty Miller, a government contractor at General Dynamics and one of Thaler’s chief cheerleaders. ‘His first patent was for a Device for the Autonomous Generation of Useful Information,’ the official name of the Creativity Machine, Miller said. ‘His second patent was for the Self-Training Neural Network Object. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One. Think about that. Patent Number Two was invented by Patent Number One!'” Related Link http://www.imagination-engines.com/technologies/cm.htm Biology vs. the Blank Slate | Ronald Bailey & Nick Gillespie http://www.findarticles.com/cf_0/m1568/5_34/91475038/print.jhtml “Pinker: […] The blank slate mentality is popular with people who believe that any human trait can be altered with the right changes in social institutions. It’s popular in the more radical branches of feminism, although not with the original core of feminism that stressed the drive for equity between the sexes. I think it allies to some degree with Marxist approaches to society. Not that Marx literally believed in a blank slate, but he certainly believed that you could not intelligently discuss human nature separate from its ever-changing interaction with the social environment. […] The noble savage myth is behind the sensibility that violence is learned behavior, a slogan that is repeated endlessly whenever violence is chronicled in the news. It’s also behind the Romantic idea that violent nonconformists are actually seeing the hypocrisy of society and challenging social institutions from a marginalized viewpoint, as opposed to the idea that such people are psychopaths and that we should prevent them from wreaking havoc on everyone else. [The doctrine of the ghost in the machine…] is there in a vaguer way, too, among others who fear that a materialist viewpoint–the idea that human experience and choice are products of a physical organ called the brain–is corrosive of morality, meaning, and ultimate purpose. reason: Why do you call these ideas myths? Pinker: Because they’re wrong. ” Long urls made short using TinyUrl (www.tinyurl.com) —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Monday 02 February 2004 @ 1:15 AM
04w04:4 Computer Security vs. Robertsons Posted January 30th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 4 number 4 (computer security vs. robertsons) ——————————————————————— 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.” Long urls made short using TinyUrl (www.tinyurl.com) —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Friday 30 January 2004 @ 4:39 PM
04w04:3 Porno vs. Theory Posted January 30th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 4 number 3 (Porno vs. Theory) ——————————————————————— 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.'” —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Friday 30 January 2004 @ 3:35 PM
04w04:2 Latin vs. Dizzee Rascal Posted January 27th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 4 number 2 (Latin vs. Dizzee Rascal) ——————————————————————— 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” —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 27 January 2004 @ 3:32 PM
04w04:1 *POWERPOINTLESS* Posted January 25th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | * POWERPOINTLESS * 2004 week 4 number 1 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 ——————————————————————— 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. ” Long urls made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Sunday 25 January 2004 @ 2:54 PM
04w03:3 Posted January 23rd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 3 number 3 ——————————————————————— 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). —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove or add yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Friday 23 January 2004 @ 3:20 PM
04w03:2 Posted January 22nd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 3 number 2 ——————————————————————— 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.'” Long urls made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To add or remove yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Thursday 22 January 2004 @ 9:00 PM
04w03:1 Posted January 19th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 3 number 1 ——————————————————————— 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.” Long urls made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove yourself from this list, email tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Monday 19 January 2004 @ 1:17 PM
04w2:2 Posted January 15th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 2 number 2 ——————————————————————— 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.” —————————————- http://www.instantcoffee.org/tim/goodreads To remove yourself from this list, click and send tim@instantcoffee.org emailed by Timothy on Thursday 15 January 2004 @ 1:53 PM
