The Bucky-Gandhi Design Institution

I’m saving this for later

Ganesha’s Skinhead Army

If these subpoenas go forward, can we waterboard Karl Rove?

If the evidence extracted from these aggressive interrogation techniques calls for it, can we waterboard Alberto Gonzales?

You know… that’s how to make a point about the acceptability of torture.

On Libertarians

“Free people create free markets. Free markets do not necessarily create free people.”

- Gupta’s Libertarian Observation

How hard is this, people? How hard? NOT THAT BLOODY HARD.

Somebody who sells themselves into slavery can be acting within a free market context, but is no longer free. Has the market created freedom? No! It has commoditized it, packaged it and sold it. The “libertarian” world of the organized crime syndicates is all about this game - “human trafficking” is usually about slavery in one form or another.

Freedom is a product if you let it be. Do not make this mistake: freedom first. If you have freedom then free markets will emerge.

But it does not work the other way round.

Set up OpenID

Using the excellent phpMyID (from http://Siege.org).

First thoughts: OpenID is clearly viable. I think it’s a winner. Now, can it be used for Unix log in, and if not, why?

Poor bastard

CIA Milan bureau chief on the run from Interpol.

Just following orders.

Bleach bombs?

Chlorine gas weapons used in Iraq. Story seems to indicate that these are very low tech although still very nasty. If there were no chemical weapons there when we arrived, they are there now.

Memory erasing in rats

When they tested the rats with both tones a day later, untreated animals were still fearful of both sounds, as if they expected a shock. But those treated with the drug were no longer afraid of the tone they had been reminded of under treatment. The process of re-arousing the rats’ memory of being shocked with the one tone while they were drugged had wiped out that memory completely, while leaving their memory of the second tone intact.

Wanted: a tool to identify music.

SXSW.zip

That’s a legal torrent file to download 726 tracks, one per artist, from South By Southwest. Unfortunately it turns out to be really really hard to get through even a fraction of what’s there because there’s no genre information or other way to filter for taste.

What I’d like is a tool that does one of two things:

1> makes an album-cover like image which represents the sound on the track: something like a frequency spectrum but smarter about “semantic” differences. This could be really crude and still useful: female vocals, pink, male vocals, blue. Loud = bright, quiet = pale, lots of electronics = spiky. You know what I mean here… a quick visual ID of what’s on the album.

2> Something that listens to your music library, or some subset of it, then categorizes new tracks as “like Soundgarden” “like Bjork” “like They Might Be Giants” “like Mahler.”

How hard can it be?

Libertarian politics and Burning Man

As you may know, I look on Libertarianism like I look at bleach: nasty, but necessary in some cases.

Give Me Liberty or Give Me X is an article on Libertarianism and Burning Man.

It’s a pretty good read.

No F**KING limits?

No Limits?

I’m just sayin… more tomorrow.

ZZZZZZZZZzzzzzzzz

Oh yeah, and nice people? Nice people roll off the high end on the graphic equalizer on the sound board, because extremely high volumes of distorted high frequencies cause permanent hearing damage really really quickly (like, over the course of a few parties), unlike crippling bass which can be withstood for much much longer.

Word to the wise.