Via Schinders. I should get a plant just so I can give it a vacation. Machine Project, “a non-profit community space in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles investigating art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, and food,” is hosting Plant Vacations at the Hammer Museum. As part of its investigation of the use of museum space (other projects include a ping pong table and elaborate performances for two), you can drop off a plant and pick it up a month later. Your plant will be taught history, given music lessons, and offered”psychic plant healing.”
It’s a lot like my childhood, only at a museum instead of at some lady’s house and with history, music, and psychic healing instead of weird food, spankings, and invasive touching.
For twenty years, the fictional prosecutors and detectives of “Law & Order” have navigated literally hundreds grotesque tragedies, moral quandries, and improbable crimes.
Each piece is an artist’s interpretation of a one-line episode summary from the DirecTV program guide. Like the series that inspired them, they are sometimes straightforward and sometimes offer a twist; sometimes they contain no easy answers, and sometimes they are just plain goofy.
Via Towleroad. Senator Franken says, “Net neutrality is the First Amendment issue of our time.” It’s an alarmist screed, but it’s nice to hear the Senator discuss the issue with some level of complexity.
The basic thrust of his comment, that corporate mergers create a conflict if interest in serving the information needs of citizens, is certainly something we should be concerned about. Still, the government seems unable to establish meaningful regulation via the FCC or any other body. Could community ISPs could play some part in finding a solution?
The decision to allow the practice commonly known as “jailbreaking” is one of a handful of new exemptions from a 1998 federal law that prohibits people from bypassing technical measures that companies put on their products to prevent unauthorized use of copyright-protected material. The Library of Congress, which oversees the Copyright Office, reviews and authorizes exemptions every three years to ensure that the law does not prevent certain non-infringing uses of copyright-protected works.
How happy are you on a scale of green to red? Or, perhaps more importantly, what’s with all this Twitter I keep hearing so much about? Tweetmood claims to”analyse [sic] your 20 last tweets to determine your twitter mood. A neutral mood means that you didn’t use any sad or happy keywords in your tweets.” My mood was happy, which offends me greatly. No word on the method used to extract mood from my inane ranting, but it’s surprising who’s getting into this mood ring business.
Linda Holmes is late to the party in examining “Why The Next Big Pop-Culture Wave After Cupcakes Might Be Libraries“; she means to be cheeky, I think, but proceeds from the perspective that libraries aren’t already (apologies to Will Ferrell) “so hot right now.” I’m not sure an institution can be a trend (since it’s not a consumer good to be purchased and discarded like so many Beanie Babies), but the current high usage of libraries has been well documented elsewhere.
Amazon says it sells more e-books than hardcovers. Does this mean our 500-year old technology (the book) is ready for the dumper? Not quite. Shoppers at Amazon.com are already pretty tech-inclined and buying an e-book online has several advantages over print at that particular point-of-sale (immediate gratification, no shipping charges). A lot of the article, upon inspection, is a marketing piece for e-books, since hardcover book sales are up as well and the figures for paperbacks have not been linked conclusively to sales of non-print materials.
Amazon painted a picture of accelerating growth in sales of e-books, which can be read on the Kindle and through software on a host of other devices, including Apple’s iPad and iPhone. The figures don’t include free e-books.
Over the past month, the Seattle retailer sold 180 Kindle books for every 100 hardcover books it sold, it said.
“That is dramatic evidence of how powerful the e-book is now,” said Citigroup analyst Mark Mahaney. “What the iPad and other book reading devices have done is just raise the overall e-book market—and Amazon is extremely well positioned to take advantage of it.”
Print isn’t going anywhere soon. E-books and printed books will have to co-exist for at least the next 100 years, even if books end up being kind of like vinyl records (artisanal, expensive, pretentious) Maybe we’ll wait a couple days before we purge our redundant books in a cleansing bonfire.
Democracy Now! reports on the massive outsourcing of U.S. counterterrorism efforts to private companies, a practice that involves the farming out IT jobs to civilian contractors rather than qualified government agencies or the military and the spending of billions of dollars on secret programs that operate without government oversight. A series of stories will come out in the Washington Post this week; co-author William Arkin describes the technological aspect of the problem:
We think of the military-industrial complex in a sort of old-fashioned way still. In fact, we don’t even have an appropriate word to describe what this enterprise is today, and we’ve struggled ourselves to try to figure that out. You know, the military-industrial complex of the Eisenhower era was one that produced massive amounts of capital goods for the military—bombers, missiles, nuclear weapons, etc. But today’s national security establishment really values information technology more than it values weapons. And really, one of the things that was most surprising to us, but maybe not so surprising given the nature of society, is that a half of the companies in this particular area are really IT companies, information technology companies, and support companies.
The report is accompanied by an interactive presentation, which lets you know what government spooks are doing in a given area.
Consider Avoidr, a FourSquare-powered technology that allows you to monitor the whereabouts of people you don’t want to run into. The site’s motto: “Keep your friends close and your enemies at that bar down the street.” You might also use this technology to know where to optimally place pointed notes to ne’er-do-wells, scofflaws, and dunderheads.
Via Schinders. I should get a plant just so I can give it a vacation. Machine Project, “a non-profit community space in the Echo Park neighborhood of Los Angeles investigating art, technology, natural history, science, music, literature, and food,” is hosting Plant Vacations at the Hammer Museum. As part of its investigation of the use of museum space (other projects include a ping pong table and elaborate performances for two), you can drop off a plant and pick it up a month later. Your plant will be taught history, given music lessons, and offered”psychic plant healing.” 
