04w38:3 Digital Old School Cool Posted September 15th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 38 number 3 (digital old school cool) ——————————————————————— Made to Order | Clive Thompson http://www.slate.com/id/2105436/ “Dustin Smith loved DJing at his friends’ parties, but his MP3-filled computer just wasn’t rugged or portable enough to haul across town. When Smith found a vintage OshKosh makeup case, a light went off. After buying a bunch of electronics components and making a zillion trips t o the hardware store, he was done: Smith had crammed an entire computer inside the retro case. ‘There’s a real design aesthetic to it,’ he says, ‘but I also wanted something really functional.’ When I first saw Smith’s tricked-out machine, I immediately wanted one to call my own. The makeup-case computer is an example of a ‘casemod,’ a modification of an interesting shell—a coffee maker, a typewriter, a chrome box—so that a computer fits inside.” A Digital Generation’s Analog Chic | Juliet Chung http://tinyurl.com/6ss8e “‘I wanted the biggest cellphone I could find,’ said Mr. Auh, a 27-year-old investment manager in Philadelphia. His winning bid of $25.95 bought a Motorola DynaTac, a 1980’s-era ‘brick’ cellphone that fits more comfortably in a backpack than in a suit pocket. […] While his attraction to digital relics may seem unusual, Mr. Auh is part of what appears to be a gr owing group of 20-somethings embracing yesterday’s designs. These fans of retro technology are using ingenuity to find or fashion the perfect cellphones, gaming systems and computer cases – in effect ushering back a time they experienced only barely, if at all. ” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 15 September 2004 @ 11:41 PM
04w38:2 Creative Bush Craziness x2 Posted September 15th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 38 number 2 (creative bush craziness x2) The thing about running a mailing list is that people hate spam. So ISP’s and servers go through all this effort to help reduce the efforts of American and African businesspeople. Which means that sometimes your messages to friends and family and people who want on your list just don’t get through. Running a list means that you also sometimes have “problems with the server” as technical people working with the machines between you and the recipient try to deal with issues surrounding spam. Not that I’m saying this is spam nor that the problems were my fault! (Goodreads does not what to be considered synonymous with faux-meat products so please take advantage of the link to unsubscribe in each message if you would rather not get these anymore). So yesterday, I had “problems with the server” and I’ve been told it’s been fixed, and which means that some of you (I think) are getting this for the first time while others are getting it twice, only this note is new. But the one below isn’t:Both these posts come via Mark Federman’s What is the Message? weblog at the U of T McLuhan Centre. – Timothy ——————————————————————— Bush vs. Jesus | Mad Magazine http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/09/bush-vs-jesus.html What if W was runnin’ against his homeboy in the sky? George Bush sings ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ | rx http://www.audiostreet.net/artists/006/407/song_sunday_bloody_sunday.html the ironic joys of sampling —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 15 September 2004 @ 11:35 PM
04w38:2 Creative Bush Craziness Posted September 15th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 38 number 2 (creative bush craziness) Both these posts come via Mark Federman’s What is the Message? weblog at the U of T McLuhan Centre. – Timothy ——————————————————————— Bush vs. Jesus | Mad Magazine http://atrios.blogspot.com/2004/09/bush-vs-jesus.html What if W was runnin’ against his homeboy in the sky? George Bush sings ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday’ | rx http://www.audiostreet.net/artists/006/407/song_sunday_bloody_sunday.html the ironic joys of sampling —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Wednesday 15 September 2004 @ 1:44 AM
04w37:2 A Canadian Education Posted September 7th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 37 number 2 (a canadian education) The article by Alanna Mitchell is on the Globe and Mail site, which recently instituted a registration policy, so you may be prompted. I’ll give you all a chance to register with them and ‘help them help us’ (as they say in their editorial on the subject) before providing a quicky password as I’ve done in the past. – Timothy ——————————————————————— Canada’s public schools attract foreign families willing to pay dearly | Alanna Mitchell http://tinyurl.com/4peeb “Young Robert is part of a thriving new market for Canadian school boards, which are following the lead of universities that have long vied for high-paying foreign students. […] Mr. Wilson said Canada’s main attraction is the excellent international reputation of its publicly funded education system. Canadian students do well in international tests — a key factor for foreign parents considering sending their children abroad — and the school system is well-financed compared with other industrialized countries. […] For Robert Sun’s parents, buying a Canadian education for their boy serves several purposes. The first is to expose him to ideas beyond the scope of the Taiwanese education system. ‘Right now it’s a global world. We would like to have our son have a global mind,’ said his mother, Rebecca Tsang, 46. It’s also a great way for him to perfect his English, and with the Mandarin he already knows, he should be positioned well to find a good job, she said. Another big draw for Ms. Tsang and her husband, Frank Sun, 55, who jointly own a trading company in Taipei, is that the Canadian public-school system teaches children to think deeply and creatively, rather than the tough-minded rote learning that takes place throughout East Asia. “ Canada in the 24th Century | Timothy B. Brown http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com/canada24.html “A national effort began in the 22nd century to make Canada the higher education center of the world. A tremendous effort was put into motion at that time to attract great thinkers to Canada to teach, to build facilities which would draw students from around the world, and to build a worldwide reputation for superb education and positive results. Canada correctly recognized the economic potential in being a leader in education. Othe r nations eventually began sending students, as a matter of national policy, to Canada, not wanting to be left behind in the thinking of the age. By the end of the century Canada had achieved its goal and remains the uncontested master of higher education on Earth. ” —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 07 September 2004 @ 4:52 PM
04w37:1 No School and Zell Miller Posted September 6th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 37 number 1 (no school and zell miller) ——————————————————————— Against School | John Taylor Gatto http://www.spinninglobe.net/againstschool.htm “I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn’t seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren’t interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were. […]After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.” Article Date: Sept 2003 Sen. Zill Miller Interview | Chris Matthews & Zell Miller http://tinyurl.com/42lsd This is the interview everyone is talking about; the actual challenge occurs at a bout 06.39. Requires Windows Media Player 9 (available here for OS X) and good bandwidth. —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Monday 06 September 2004 @ 9:01 PM
04w36:2 Posted September 2nd, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 36 number 2 Note: anyone still using tim@instantcoffee.org as my email address, please note that this address is dead dead, and that the reply-to for this email can be used instead. – Timothy——————————————————————— Hell looks an awful lot like the Republican convention | John Doyle http://tinyurl.com/5z3cu “Tuesday evening it was Arnold Schwarzenegger telling implausible stories about the Soviet menace in the Austria of his boyhood, and extolling the United States as if it was the only country with jobs, business opportunity and freedom of the press. Austria is now a member country of the European Union, with better guarantees on health care and wages than any state in America. Nobody mentioned that. Then came the Bush twins. The twins were on-stage, giggling and making a joke of their wealth, ignorance and indolence. On Wednesday morning, when MSNBC reviewed the twins’ appearance, a gossip columnist from a New York paper was interviewed about their fabulous partying. You could feel the envy in the attitude of the reporters. Next came their mom, Laura Bush. To underline the success of her husband’s policies, she cited ‘the only woman to own a tow-truck company in all of Iowa.’ Lady, women all over the world have been owning and running businesses for decades. Your country is no beacon of hope in that regard. Not that anyone among the TV reporters and analysts was going to say that.” Twin Terrors | Julia Turner http://www.slate.com/id/2106067/ “Sure, the girls threw in some praise for their dad. But mostly, they congratulated themselves on their momentous decision to campaign for him. ‘Jenna and I are NOT very political,’ Barbara said, with the odd bursts of emphasis that she and Jenna employed throughout the night. ‘But we love our dad TOO much to stand back and watch from the sidelines.’ […] To be fair, the twins almost certainly didn’t write this dreck. And the material they were given was unusually difficult: What kind of speechwriter, assigned to come up with something for two novices to deliver on live television, writes a joke-laden address that requires the comedic timing of a late-night talk show host? ” [answer:Karen Hughes]-TC —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Thursday 02 September 2004 @ 2:46 PM
04w36:1 Alice and Bob Posted August 31st, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 36 number 1 (Alice and Bob) ——————————————————————— Teleportation goes long distance | Paul Rincon http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/3576594.stm “Researchers from the University of Vienna and the Austrian Academy of Science used an 800m-long optical fibre fed through a public sewer system tunnel to connect labs on opposite sides of the River Danube. The link establishes a channel between the labs, dubbed Alice and Bob. This enables the properties, or ‘quantum states’, of light particles to be transferred between the sender (Alice) and the receiver (Bob). In the computers of tomorrow, this information would form the qubits (the quantum form of the digital bits 1 and 0) of data processing through the machines. “ The Story of Alice and Bob | John Gordon http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/computing/users/rafaeli/funnies/alicebob.html “Against all odds, over a noisy telephone line, tapped by the tax authorities and the secret police, Alice will happily attempt, with someone she doesn’t trust, whom she can’t hear clearly, and who is probably someone else, to fiddle her tax return and to organise a cout d’etat, while at the same time minimising the cost of the phone call. A coding theorist is someone who doesn’t think Alice is crazy.” Alice and Bob | wordiq.com http://www.wordiq.com/definition/Alice_and_Bob “Alice and Bob are common archetypal ‘characters’ used in explanations in fields such as cryptography and physics. The names are used for convenience, since explanations such as ‘Person A wants to send a message to person B’ rapidly become difficult to follow. The names are also said to be politically correct, since they are from both sexes, and were chosen only because of the alphabetical order.” Chapter 1, Bits | MIT Open Course Ware: Information and Entropy, Spring 2003 http://tinyurl.com/3nq3d “How is information quantiï¬ed? Consider a situation that could have any of several possible outcomes. An example might be flipping a coin (2 outcomes, heads or tails) or selecting a card from a deck of playing cards (52 possible outcomes). How compactly could one person (by convention usually named Alice) tell another person (Bob) this outcome?” NOTE: links to a PDF file, 144K —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Tuesday 31 August 2004 @ 10:40 PM
04w35:2 Craigslist Posted August 27th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 35 number 2 (craigslist) ——————————————————————— Mr. Craigslist, Master of the Nerdiverse | Josh McHugh http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.09/craigslist.html “It started as a free email list that tracked art events, job listings, and apartment rentals in San Francisco. Nine years later, craigslist serves 45 cities and has 5 million visitors a month. Now a Web site, it’s still mostly free, which may account for the loyalty of craigslisters, who turn to it for everything from finding dates to selling cars and, oh, ‘lickable boots.’ “ I grabbed your boobs on Sunset. – m4w – 24 | Anonymous http://losangeles.craigslist.org/mis/39483432.html “Saturday night, I was out with my buddies walking around on Sunset, going from bar to bar, club to club, etc. You were, presumably, with your girl friends. As we neared each other, none of us made eye contact. It’s as though we were trying not to look at each other. I sure as hell was. But because of this, I wasn’t looking where I was going either, and tripped on a crack in the pavement and tripped, falling forward, right as you were passing by. My arms flailed about and tried to grab the nearest sturdy thing to steady myself…” Thanks to Ed Deary for the craigslist submission. —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Friday 27 August 2004 @ 12:06 PM
04w35:1 Posted August 26th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 35 number 1 ——————————————————————— Only the jester speaks the truth | Vinay Menon http://tinyurl.com/6x9ct “Jon Stewart claims he’s a fake newsman. But these days, his impact on politics and media is undeniably real. […] During a May appearance on Fox News Channel, the bombastic Sean Hannity asked Stewart, ‘Are you liberal or conservative or do you even care?’ Stewart: ‘I don’t care. I mean, I’m not even sure if those paradigms hold true any more.’ Or, as Stewart told Entertainment Weekly last year, ‘The point of view of this show is we’re passionately opposed to bullshit.’ In this age of spin and stupidity, where politicians and their pliable cheerleaders are the merchants of bullshit, his attitude explains why The Daily Show has become must-see TV.” Fuck New York | in8.com http://in8.com/fucknewyork/Resources/fucknewyork.mov Translating it for the kids – Quicktime MOV 9.12MB —————————————- Long links made short by using TinyURL (http://www.tinyurl.com) To remove or add yourself to this list, go here http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com emailed by Timothy on Thursday 26 August 2004 @ 9:59 PM
04w34:1 All Your Base Are Belong to U.S. Posted August 15th, 2004 by timothy. 0 Comments Good Reads Mailing List | 2004 week 34 number 1 (all your base are belong to U.S.) ——————————————————————— Inside Al-Qaeda’s Hard Drive | Alan Cullison http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/print/200409/cullison “Like the early Russian anarchists who wrote some of the most persuasive tracts on the uses of terror, al-Qaeda understood that its attacks would not lead to a quick collapse of the great powers. Rather, its aim was to tempt the powers to strike back in a way that would create sympathy for the terrorists. Al-Qaeda has so far gained little from the ground war in Afghanistan; the conflict in Iraq, closer to the center of the Arab world, is potentially more fruitful. As Arab resentment against the United States spreads, al-Qaeda may look less like a tightly knit terror group and more like a mass movement. And as the group develops synergy in working with other groups branded by the United States as enemies (in Iraq, the Israeli-occupied territories, Kashmir, the Mindanao Peninsula, and Chechnya, to name a few places), one wonders if the United States is indeed playing the role written for it on the computer.” War of the worlds | Giles Foden http://books.guardian.co.uk/review/story/0,12084,779530,00.html “In October last year [2001], an item appeared on an authoritative Russian studies website that soon had the science-fiction community buzzing with speculative excitement. It asserted that Isaac Asimov’s 1951 classic Foundation was translated into Arabic under the title ‘al-Qaida’. […] The Arabic word qaida – ordinarily meaning ‘base’ or ‘foundation’ – is also used for ‘groundwork’ and ‘basis’.” Article date: 24 August 2002 All you base are belong to us | various – compilation http://www.allyourbasearebelongtous.com/flash/ Flash presentation. Check out history of the phrase under the site’s ‘History’ section. —————————————- http://goodreads.timothycomeau.com To remove or add yourself to this list, go here emailed by Timothy on Sunday 15 August 2004 @ 1:38 PM
