“Generally speaking, the errors in religion are dangerous; those in philosophy only ridiculous.”

David Hume, 1739

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Grafik Dynamo is an artwork by Kate Armstrong and Michael Tippett that loads live images from blogs and online news sources into a live action comic strip. The site, inspired by the work of Ray Liechtenstein, is constantly refreshed with new material.

That’s probably RoyLichtenstein

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A Flash site showing the work of PSYOP
Have a look at Propaganda / Psyop Anthem. Beautifully made but an
utterly sinister and cynical message. Unless they’re attempting irony
of course.
It seems that they are…

Psyop, a New York-based animation and design studio named for the military jargon for mind control, steers consumer urges via TV commercials using a concise credo: persuade, change, influence. Founded over dinner in 2000 by a cadre of friends (who all happen to have broadcast design pedigrees), Psyop’s five creative partners are Marco Spier, Eben Mears, Marie Hyon, Kylie Matulick and Todd Mueller. While they consistently generate clutter-busting motion graphics and animation for blue chip clients such as VW, Intel and ESPN, Psyop’s members often co-op the tools of their trade to produce more personal and thoughtful projects.

“Clients ask us to influence the public, and we understand that very clearly,” says Mueller, “but we are coming up with an extension of the company that plays with ways of discussing sociological issues in a candy-coated way.” In an attempt to meld the vernacular of advertising with veiled political irony, Psyop glazes Chomsky-style politics with the sort of kid-luring animation normally reserved for Saturday morning breakfast cereal spots.

Also, check out their short: “Brazil” in the Archive section.

Jef Raskin is the human-computer interface expert who began the Macintosh project for Apple Computer and is the author of The Humane Interface, which in large part builds on his earlier work with the Canon Cat. Raskin received a B.S. Mathematics and B.A. in Philosophy from the State University of New York and an M.S. in Computer Science from the Pennsylvania State University. As an assistant professor at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD), he taught classes ranging from computer science to photography.

Raskin joined Apple in January 1978 as the 31st employee. He later hired his former student Bill Atkinson from UCSD to work at Apple, and began the Macintosh project. He is credited with the decision to use a one-button mouse as part of the Apple interface, a departure from the Xerox PARC standard of a three-button mouse. He has since stated that were he to redesign the interface today, he would have used a two button mouse.
Raskin designed the Canon Cat, released in 1987.

At the beginning of the new millennium, Raskin undertook the building of The Humane Environment (THE). THE is a system incarnating his concepts of the humane interface, by using open source elements within his rendition of a ZUI or Zooming User Interface.

Jef Raskin passed away peacefully on Saturday February 26th, 2005.

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After a spirited discussion over a photo of a girl wearing a tuxedo at Thursday’s Clay County School Board meeting, the principal’s decision to ban the picture from the Fleming Island High School yearbook stands.

Kelli Davis, 18, had her senior class photo taken in a tuxedo top and bow-tie outfit provided for boys rather than the gown-like drape and pearls provided for girls. The school’s principal decided it could not appear in the yearbook because she didn’t follow the dress code.

Kelli, a straight-A student with no discipline problems, is a self-proclaimed lesbian. She said she was uncomfortable to have her chest exposed in the photo.

“Because that’s me, you know. That represents me. The drape does not,” Davis said. “They’re not accepting me, that’s the whole reason we’re here.”

Davis denies it’s about her sexual orientation, just about a student not following the rules.

“There’s a dress code to follow — a dress code expected for senior pictures in the yearbook, and she chose not to follow them. It’s just that simple,” Clay School Superintendent David Owens said.

More than half of the 24 people who addressed the controversy supported using Davis’ picture in the yearbook, some applauding after Cindi Davis, the teen’s mother, asked the board “What is so offensive about this tiny picture?”

Cindi Davis asked the school board not only to reverse the principal’s decision on the photo, but to apologize for firing the yearbook editor, who voiced her support of publishing the photo.

While the board’s ruling will keep the photo from appearing with other senior pictures, it will appear in the yearbook. Kelli’s parents bought a two-page ad in the back of the book for $700, which will feature the picture.

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The Iraq war helped bring record earnings to St. Louis-based defense contractor Engineered Support Systems Inc., and new financial data show that the firm’s war-related profits have trickled down to a familiar family name – Bush.

William H.T. “Bucky” Bush, uncle of the president and youngest brother of former President George H.W. Bush, cashed in ESSI stock options last month with a net value of nearly half a million dollars.

[..]

William Bush, 66, a onetime St. Louis bank executive and head of an investment firm, joined the board in 2000, eight months before his nephew won the White House.

The president’s uncle said in an interview that he never used his family connections to help the company win contracts.

“I don’t make any calls to the 202 area code,” he said, referring to the long-distance dialing code for Washington.

[..]

Some of the firm’s Defense Department work has included no-bid, sole-source contracts, including a $48.8-million deal to refurbish military trailers.

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Hoisting her Academy Award in one hand and newly won Razzie in the other, Halle Berry reveled in a career low point.

“Omigosh, oh my God,” Berry gasped Saturday night, feigning excitement. “I never in my life thought that I would be here, winning a Razzie. It’s not like I ever aspired to be here, but thank you.”

Berry was named worst actress for 2004′s action bomb “Catwoman,” which also took the prize for worst film at the 25th annual Razzies, an Oscar spoof that trashes Hollywood’s worst.

President Bush won the worst-actor award for his appearance in news and archival footage of Michael Moore’s satiric documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11.” Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was voted worst supporting-actor for “Fahrenheit 9/11,” while Britney Spears’ fleeting cameo in the documentary brought her the worst supporting-actress award.

[..]

Berry, who wore a simple black dress, explained why she showed up at the ceremony.

“When I was a kid, my mother told me that if you could not be a good loser, then there’s no way you could be a good winner,” she said.

However, she added, “I hope to God I never see these people again!”

In this undated photo supplied by Geoff Hargaddon, ‘The Sommerville Gates’ in the Somerville, Mass., apartment of Geoff Hargadon, a takeoff on Christo’s $20 million ‘The Gates’ in Central Park in New York. More than four million people visited Hargadon’s Web site after he posted this and other photos of the 13 gates installation which he constructed in his apartment from materials he bought at Home Depot for $3.50. (AP Photo/Geoff Hargadon, Handout)

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The opposite of the religious fanatic is not the fanatical atheist but the gentle cynic who cares not whether there is a god or not.

Eric Hoffer (1902 – 1983)

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Less than a year after the 41st Mersenne prime was reported (MathWorld headline news: June 1, 2004), the Great Internet Mersenne Prime Search (GIMPS) project has discovered the 42nd known Mersenne prime. The candidate prime was flagged prime by an experienced GIMPS volunteer on February 18, independently verified by Tony Reix on Feburary 25, and the exponent was reported on February 26.

Mersenne numbers are numbers of the form M_n = 2ⁿ – 1, giving the first few as 1, 3, 7, 15, 31, 63, 127, …. Interestingly, the definition of these numbers therefore means that the nth Mersenne number is simply a string of n 1s when represented in binary. For example, M₇ = 2⁷ – 1 = 127 = 1111111₂ is a Mersenne number. Mersenne primes are Mersenne numbers that are also prime, i.e., have no factors other than 1 and themselves. So, since the number 127 is prime and is a Mersenne number, it is a Mersenne prime.

The new Mersenne prime is 2^25,964,951 – 1 = 12216463006127794810…98933257280577077247 (where the ellipses indicate that several million intervening digits have being omited for conciseness) and has a whopping total of 7,816,230 decimal digits. It is therefore not only the largest known Mersenne prime, but also the largest known prime of any kind. In fact, there is a particuarly efficient and, more importantly, deterministic primality test for Mersene numbers known as the Lucas-Lehmer test. The efficiency of this test combined with the high historical profile of the Mersenne numbers thus accounts for the fact that the four largest known primes are all Mersenne primes.

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No one’s laughing these days, least of all the CIA. NEWSWEEK has obtained previously unpublished flight plans indicating the agency has been operating a Boeing 737 as part of a top-secret global charter servicing clandestine interrogation facilities used in the war on terror. And the Boeing’s flight information, detailed to the day, seems to confirm Masri’s tale of abduction. Gnjidic, Masri’s lawyer, called the information “very, very important” to his case, which is being investigated as a kidnapping by a Munich prosecutor. In what could prove embarrassing to President Bush, Gnjidic added that a German TV station was planning to feature Masri’s tale ahead of Bush’s much-touted trip to Germany this week. German Interior Minister Otto Schily recently visited CIA Director Porter Goss to discuss the case, and German sources tell NEWSWEEK that Schily was seeking an apology. CIA officials declined to comment on that meeting or any aspect of Masri’s story.

CIA officials are increasingly fretful about being saddled with this secret prison network at a time of intense pressure from lawyers and human-rights activists. The CIA’s anxiety only deepened last week when President Bush named John Negroponte, his ambassador to Iraq, as the country’s first director of national intelligence. Negroponte, a demanding career diplomat, will take over the coveted president’s daily brief, or PDB, from Goss. Bush sought to reassure the CIA that it would still be welcome in the Oval Office. But Bush also signaled that Negroponte would preside over a major shift in power in intelligence gathering. “John and I will work to determine how much exposure the CIA will have to the Oval Office,” the president told reporters.

While it battles for influence in Washington, the agency is also fighting a rear-guard action against critics at home and abroad. Some CIA officials fear the White House is now exposing them to legal peril. New Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, under pressure while he awaited his confirmation hearings late last year, repudiated a controversial August 2002 memo that CIA officials carefully solicited from the Justice Department for legal authorization on renditions and the agency’s treatment of Qaeda prisoners. Today the CIA has dozens of detainees it doesn’t know how to dispose of without legal procedures. “Where’s the off button?” says one retired CIA official. “They asked the White House for direction on how to dispose of these detainees back when they asked for [interrogation] guidance. The answer was, ‘We’ll worry about that later.’ Now we don’t know what to do with these guys. People keep saying, ‘We’re not going to shoot them’.”

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You are looking at the VERY FIRST photo ever published on the web!

Back in 1992, after their show at the CERN Hardronic Festival, my colleague Tim Berners-Lee asked me for a few scanned photos of “the CERN girls” to publish them on some sort of information system he had just invented, called the “World Wide Web”. I had only a vague idea of what that was, but I scanned some photos on my Mac and FTPed them to Tim’s now famous “info.cern.ch”. How was I to know that I was passing an historical milestone, as the one above was the first picture ever to be clicked on in a web browser!”

Don’t worry about the world coming to an end today. It’s already tomorrow in Australia.

~ Charles Schulz

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A couple years ago CBS threatened to pull the plug on High Def programming if the FCC didnt push forward rules supporting the Broadcast Flag.

For those that dont know, the Broadcast Flag is basically a digital switch that over the air broadcasters, the major broadcast networks, can set to potentially prevent viewers from recording their broadcasts. If they dont want you copying their show to your Tivo/PVR hard drive, the switch could prevent it. Or they could set it so you could copy it one time, but not make any further copies.

When CBS made their threat, an argument could have been made that their content was needed to help speed up the adoption of HDTV.� Back then, the HDTVs were more expensive, and if CBS stopped broadcasting in HD, it could have given potential buyers a reason not to buy a new HDTV.

Now the momentum has flipped. The HDTV cat is out of the bag. Its not that the majority of homes have high def sets, they dont and wont for a good 5 years. However, the number of people who do have HDTVs LOVE THEM.� When you have millions and millions of consumers who have paid their hard earned money for a product they love, the only thing that would happen�if a network broadcaster pulled the plug on their HD feeds is that their would be a switchboard meltdown at that broadcaster and the number of complaints the FCC would get would dwarf the Janet Jackson response.

Thats on the national level.

On the local level, forgettaboutit. Every affiliate of that broadcaster would go through living hell. There are still a lot of HD viewers that get their signal from over the air feeds. These are the most outspoken consumers who call and give grief to an affiliate when a show is upconverted rather than shown in true HD. If a show isnt shown at all in HD, the phones ring longer and the Emails come quicker.� If its a major event, its not suprising for the local station general manager to get threats of bodily harm. I cant even imagine the hell that Fox affiliates that didnt carry the SuperBowl went through from their viewers.

Im telling you, there is no chance that the national� network broadcasters pull back from HD. Their affiliates would revolt , side by side with their viewers in enough numbers, and with a loud enough voice, that the pain would last a long time.

But lets just say, for the sake of example that one of the network broadcasters did stop broadcasting in HD. They could do it in one of two ways. They could stop all of their broadcasting, which I dont they are stupid enough to do, or they could seperate their broadcasts. They could offer an HD feed to the cable and satellite distributors they already have HD deals with, and then offer only a low definition feed for over the air broadcasts.

The irony of the impact should make the FCC smile, if not blush.

By offering HD feeds only to cable and satellite, it would push viewers who had previously relied on antennas, but were buying a new HDTV (for those that dont know, you can buy a 27� HDTV ready set for under 300 dollars and falling now), or that�already had an HDTV, �towards signing up with an HD sat or cable provider for not just their HDTV, but also to support their analog TVs.

Anything that transitions TVs from receiving signals�over the air , via antenna reception to utilizing a digital cable or satellite box pushs the analog to digital transition one baby step closer.

So if one of the networks threatens�to pull their HD signal because of the broadcast flag� call their bluff.�

The same applies to the Movie Industry. MPAA has been quoted as saying that �without the flag, high value content would migrate to where it could be protected.� Yeah right. Just like the music industry switched their content back from CDs to� cassette tapes and LPs. I havent seen a movement on the part of the music industry to switch from DVDs and their digital image back to VHS� �where it could be protected�. The movie business complained about DVDs and threatened to not support them�. until they started making more money from DVDs than theatrical release.

Protect the MPAA members from themselves and their�lies. Its all BS.� Call their bluff.

We dont need the broacast flag. It accomplishes absolutely nothing other than to set a precedent that the content industry can intimidate the FCC�.

That said, although the broadcast flag is bad for consumers in every possible way, it would be great for my content businesses. HDNet Films, 2929 Entertainment, Rysher Entertainment, The Dallas Mavericks, HDNet Productions, www.hd.net, every single content entity I have would benefit from the broadcast flag. Not because it would protect content, it wouldnt. Content doesnt need�any special �protections. There are enough laws on the books regarding theft that no special content laws are needed.

�They all would benefit because we wouldnt use the broadcast flag. While the big networks would create confusion and anger with their customers, our businesses could be the knight in shining armour and provide content in exactly the means consumers want it, unencumbered and available to watch, where and how they like.

Before I sign off, and since Im high on the soap box, since Ive touched on the subject of the analog to digital transition, let me make one point there that I think is being overlooked.

THe value of reclaiming the analog spectrum is not just in the 25 Billion dollars or more that could go into the government treasury from its sale, but also in the bandwidth that is freed up at cable MSOs. Most cable providers have nearly 80 analog channels chewing up their valuable bandwidth. AT approximately 38mbs PER CHANNEL, thats nearly 3 Gigabytes of bandwidth that can be freed up to be used for digital applications. Those applications could be not only HD channels, but just as importantly, bandwidth for broadband connections.� Free up 3GBs and you could see the bandwidth available to your house expand to unheard of levels.

So the transition from analog to digital tv is not just about television, its as much about expanding the broadband opportunities to every home passed by cable. Thats good for all of us.

More…

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The “Keynote” PodBrix Minifig is a limited numbered edition of 300 units. Hand created by artist Tomi, each figure stands just 1.75″ tall. Included is a minimalist card backdrop for displaying your figure. The reverse of the backdrop displays the limited edition unit number and is signed by Tomi.

Sold out already…

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you happened upon nj.com in the last month, you might have noticed a clucking penguin waddling across the computer screen, stumbling over text as it promoted a local utility company.

On a cricket league chat board in New Zealand, exasperated users have been deluged with floating squares that try to interest them in mattresses, dating services and officially licensed trinkets from the “Lord of the Rings” film trilogy.

On the Web, the floater’s time has come.

Not to be confused with pop-up ads, which open new windows and clutter virtual desktops, these floaters, or overlays, or popovers (no one can agree on a name), can evade the pop-up blockers that many Web browsers have incorporated.

In the last year, according to Nielsen/NetRatings, which collects and analyzes data on Web advertising, the frequency of these ads has risen markedly, by almost 32 percent from December 2003 to December 2004, while pop-ups in that period declined by 41 percent.

The floater ads, often using a computer’s Macromedia Flash Player to run, overlay the content of the page rather than spawning new windows. They have been around since 2001, but their rise has been abetted by the growing use of high-speed Internet connections, allowing them to play with greater ease.

Floaters are one example of a variety of online ads known in the industry as rich media. Some variants include banner ads that expand to show graphics and streaming video when the cursor is waved over them; a tamer version packs the video and graphics into a static, or polite, banner. All have a common characteristic: they cannot be categorically blocked by existing technology.

To many, they are just as irritating as pop-up ads, if not more so. On the New Zealand cricket chat board, one user declared, “This form of advertising is without a doubt the most ridiculous and offensive form I have ever come across.”

My blocking software is apparently strong enough. I haven’t seen any..

The snow wins..

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Ordinarily, revelations that a former male prostitute, using an alias (Jeff Gannon) and working for a phony news organization, was ushered into the White House — without undergoing a full-blown security background check — in order to pose softball questions to administration officials would qualify as news by any recent Beltway standard. Yet as of Thursday, ABC News, which produces “Good Morning America,” “World News Tonight With Peter Jennings,” “Nightline,” “This Week,” “20/20″ and “Primetime Live,” has not reported one word about the three-week-running scandal. Neither has CBS News (“The Early Show,” “The CBS Evening News,” “60 Minutes,” “60 Minutes Wednesday” and “Face the Nation”). NBC and its entire family of morning, evening and weekend news programs have addressed the story only three times. Asked about the lack of coverage, a spokesperson for ABC did not return calls seeking comment, while a CBS spokeswoman said executives were unavailable to discuss the network’s coverage.

[..]

Meanwhile on the newsstands, through Thursday, there had been no meaningful coverage in USA Today or in the Los Angeles Times, Miami Herald, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Detroit Free Press, Cleveland Plain Dealer, San Francisco Chronicle, Indianapolis Star, Denver Post, Oakland Tribune and Philadelphia Inquirer, to name a few that have effectively boycotted the White House press office scandal. Leo Wolinsky, deputy managing editor of the Los Angeles Times, says the Times is running its first Guckert story on Friday, focusing on the guidelines for securing White House press passes. “It’s a bit late,” he concedes. “We may have been a bit slow to recognize it had become a story of public interest.” Tom Fiedler, executive editor of the Miami Herald, did not return calls seeking comment on that paper’s decision to not report on the story.

So that is what a Free Press looks like…

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Photographs from the camera of a Canadian couple killed in Asia’s tsunami include their final shots of a huge wave as it rushed toward them at their beach resort in Thailand.

John and Jackie Knill of North Vancouver, frequent visitors to the popular Thai resort, Khao Lak, were apparently on the beach when the tsunami hit Dec. 26.

The couple disappeared and relatives say they were notified about a week ago that the identities of their remains had been confirmed.

Searchers later also recovered the couple’s destroyed digital camera but were able to print photos from its memory card.

A Chinese bird trainer feeds seeds to his pet at a bird market in Shanghai February 22, 2005. Pet ownership was once banned in China during the Communist heydays, but is fast becoming popular again as the country opens up and disposable income increases, though raising birds has been a popular pastime in China since imperial times. REUTERS/Claro Cortes IV

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Ten of the 32 government drug advisers who supported the continued marketing of the pain relievers Celebrex, Bextra and Vioxx have consulted in recent years for the drugs’ makers, the New York Times reported on Friday.

Last week, a Food and Drug Administration advisory panel said that Merck & Co Inc.’s . withdrawn arthritis drug Vioxx was safe enough to rejoin Pfizer’s pain relievers Celebrex and Bextra on the U.S. market after concluding that all three medicines posed some level of heart risk.

The Times article said that if the 10 advisers had not cast their votes, the committee would have voted 12 to 8 that Bextra should be withdrawn and 14 to 8 that Vioxx should not return to the market.

According to the article, the advisers with company ties voted 9 to 1 to keep Bextra on the market and 9 to 1 for Vioxx’s return.

Why should man expect his prayer for mercy to be heard by What is above him when he shows no mercy to what is under him?

~ Pierre Troubetzkoy

There’s a discussion on Software Components on the Risks Digest. It’s an interesting discussion on why the software industry is still having so many defects while other ‘engineering disciplines’ such as housing construction are doing much better. The following article is a good example on a different issue: optimization:

Who says the parts are interchangeable?

Paul Robinson has the silver bullet, and it is software components. Right.

One of the things I learned from a talk by Tom Love, circa 1991, on software components, was that Eli Whitney’s mass-produced parts were not, in fact, interchangeable (even though that was the basis on which he had gotten Congress to fund his factory).

And so it is with software parts.

Circa 1998, a program I had written, which had been shipping for years, developed a very odd bug.

It turned out to be an error in the vendor’s C library implementation of strcmp.

It had some clever-clever optimizations so that it could perform the bulk of the comparison by four bytes at a time. And a number of different logic paths to avoid setting up a zero-count loop if the transfer was less than five bytes long. And some special cases depending on the relative alignment of each of the comparand’s addresses with a four-byte boundaries. One of the cases happened to misbehave if a character at one particular position in the string happened to be in the upper byte range (128 to 255, high bit set). (And for the record, yes, the documentation for strcmp does define what the behavior is supposed to be bytes in the upper byte range. And the behavior wasn’t consistent; comparing string A with strings B and C, where B and C had identical contents but different placement in RAM, gave different results).

I could have reported the bug to the vendor. As a matter of fact, I did. It hasn’t been fixed yet. (The development system was supposedly still being supported but was nearing end-of-life and wasn’t a very high priority).

Maybe I could have gotten on my high horse and returned the compiler to the vendor and insisted on our money back. But getting the product to compile and build under another vendor’s development system would have taken much, much longer than that.

So I did what I truly believe to be the sensible thing: I wrote my own implementation of strcmp. Wrote it to be as simple as it could possibly be and to hell with efficiency. Unit-tested it. Carefully. With a test-case generator that generated all sixteen cases of relatively alignment of start-of-string to four-byte boundaries, and many combinations of upper- and lower-byte characters. And put it into service.

strcmp is one of the most simple, basic, fully-documented, and frequently-used “components” there is.

strcmp isn’t an interchangeable part.

It demonstrates my philosophy on optimization:

The First Rule of Program Optimization: Don’t do it.
The Second Rule of Program Optimization (for experts only!): Don’t do it yet.

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A plaintiffs’ attorney in a wrongful-death lawsuit, who missed a court date because his firm’s spam blocking software automatically sidetracked the court’s e-mail notice, has narrowly escaped being sanctioned for failing to appear at the scheduled status conference.

Attorney Jeffrey J. Stesiak, of Sweeney, Pfeifer, Morgan & Stesiak in South Bend, Ind., who represents the family of Ruthie Barnes, explained in his response to the order to show cause that he did not receive the electronically transmitted notice from the court that the status conference would be held Dec. 8, 2004. Stesiak said he left for a vacation in California Dec. 7 but if he had received the notice, he would have had another member of his firm attend the conference.

Stesiak said that with the help of the court’s system administrator, he discovered that his law firm’s spam-blocker software set the Internet security level too high, which blocked the e-mail notification from the court. After the security level was reset, the notification came through.

U.S. Magistrate Judge Christopher A. Nuechterlein accepted the explanation and concluded that sanctions, which could have included dismissal of the case, were not warranted.

Next time you get an opportunity to kneecap a spammer, please tell him the above story first.

(found at http://orsm.net/)

“The ultimate weakness of violence is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it. Through violence you may murder the liar, but you cannot murder the lie, nor establish the truth. Through violence you may murder the hater, but you do not murder hate. In fact, violence merely increases hate. So it goes. Returning violence for violence multiplies violence, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.”

Martin Luther King Jr.