From HK:

Smashing Magazine has a brief but nice round-up of items under the title User Experience of the Future. They list several technologies under development - some of which I’ve blogged about on a few occasions, like multi-touch and the Reactable - all of which taken together certainly paint an intriguing near-future. Off the radar are the skunk works, undiscovered breakthroughs, and emergent interactions between devices and their interface with user communities that will push the ever extruding scifi narrative further into weirdness and fancifulness. Crowley considered the new age as being represented by the spiritization of matter, and I think we’re seeing that on greater and greater scales as the lines between human and machine, imagination and reality, continue to blur into strange new forms. As Clarke wrote, that which is sufficiently technologically advanced is indistinguishable from magic.

DJ Spooky: Ghost World: A Story in Sound

Beach Boys vs. J. Dilla: Pet Sounds in the Key of Dee

I’m also really enjoying the new album by Datarock. It’s a fine retro-80’s new-post-nuwave Talking Heads sort of album that’s witty and relentlessly danceable. They even quote Revenge of the Nerds.

From Mainichi News

The Advanced Personal Armament System — Japan’s version of the Future Soldier project, designed to modernize combat infantry units — offers a network-linked helmet providing night and thermal vision, amongst other capabilities. It was introduced at a presentation held by the ministry’s Technical Research and Development Institute titled, “Towards the realization of Gundam.”

This damn plane is buzzing loudly over my house and those of the Westside of Santa Cruz again and again and again and has been for the last 40min at least. I had to run to my partner’s house and back, just a few blocks, and it was all i could do to avoid getting sprayed. We had to rush and try to get the cats in the house. Neighbors who usually leave the windows open were all shut up. i was actually yelling up at the plane right above me while running to the front door. The thing is flying about 60-70 ft up and i can see the trails of “moth pheromone” or whatever it is streaming out from under the plane. it smells and makes my stomach feel weird, though that could just be the anger and the stench and the feeling that it’s unsafe to leave my own house.

i can’t believe this city forced this on us, with little to no review, under the half-baked pretense of an “emergency” (come on… Moths.) just to help pad the pockets of big agribiz. Now you’re bombing our homes and our families with chemicals. Friends coming in from Portland are concerned about the safety of their 3 year old son. And this stuff is falling into the soil and water table and the future of our children but we’re just supposed to trust it’s safe without any independent review.

Thanks, Santa Cruz. After 16 years here, you’ve finally managed to truly offend me.

From an interview with William Gibson in the latest Rolling Stone:

Is there a downside to that blended reality? Or could it represent a change for the better?

People worry about the loss of individual privacy, but that comes with a new kind of unavoidable transparency. Eventually we’re going to know everything that every twenty-first-century politician has ever done. It will be very hard for politicians and governments to keep secrets. The whole thing is porous. We just haven’t really figured out quite how porous it is.

There’s an interesting series of articles over at German-Foreign-Policy.com about the ongoing efforts of Berlin to encourage the Dalai Llama’s Tibetan freedom moevement. This part got me thinking:

“Berlin’s Tibet offensive is not motivated by it’s concern for a minority culture, as it likes to pretend, it is the repeated attempt to lay hand on about half of the Chinese territory and use its population for the struggle against Beijing.”

German big biz is different from the US, being heavily nationalistic (like Japan) they tend to seek to destabilize and undermine foreign markets, instead of just moving there like we do. Japan is currently fighting to bring manufacturing back from China so it can have more control over production quality and keep money inside it’s borders.

The flip side is the US situation where corps go multinational and drop their allegiance to the mother country, leaving us to deal with a crashing economy in the wake of sinking quality, job emigration, and ongoing corporate legal assaults on domestic laws that were intended to keep them in check. Why suffer high American wages and stifling laws when you can just send the jobs to China or India?

Bit by bit the US is losing it’s economic heart. Cheap Chinese manufacturing is a double-edged sword and many countries are starting to realize the impact on their own economies, as well as the very real result of funnelling billions of dollars into a gigantic, communist, nuclear power.

Charlie Stross on his first trip to Tokyo:

“Tokyo left me feeling like an illiterate Albanian shepherd teleported without warning to the UK, staring slack-jawed in wonder at the vast, gleaming, powerful public works of metropolitan Huddersfield, reeking of wealth and efficiency and a goat-free future. From the thirty-seventh floor of a skyscraper I looked out across the high rise skyline, red lights blinking fretfully in the grip of a typhoon as winds strong enough to blow sheets of rain up the glass of the window rumbled around me, and I realized: this future has no place for goats.”

I’ve got a new remix up at Real World Remixed. It’s a groovy downtempo bit built around Sevara’s beautiful Uzbek vocals and interspersed with ethnic instrumentations. Enjoy!

Kunlarim Sensiz (Ibiza Beach Mix)