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This is my favorite meme of the moment: Hillaryismomjeans. I’ve been junking out on it since Friday and can’t stop. If anybody has a script I can use to make my own user-submit billboard, please let me know.

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Diebold Accidentally Leaks Results Of 2008 Election Early

I’ve been rebuilding the playlists from my early days as a yout’ listening to KROQ in SoCal. Lot’s of great esoteric new wave classics that are now available online. It’s a really neat bit of time travel but it got me thinking: why doesn’t iTunes sell all of the old music videos as well? They have a lot of new ones but surely the canon is ripe for the pillaging. Maybe the Musik Biz could pull in a bit of spare change in the process and let people rebuild the entertainment archives of their formative years…

From Eurekalert:

[professor Mark] Hauser presents four distinguishing ingredients of human cognition… the ability to combine and recombine different types of information and knowledge in order to gain new understanding; to apply the same “rule” or solution to one problem to a different and new situation; to create and easily understand symbolic representations of computation and sensory input; and to detach modes of thought from raw sensory and perceptual input.

I’ve revamped the design and set up urbeingrecorded.com as a portal for my primary online activities.
So far:
- links to all my websites (this blog, Fine Hatery, chris23tumblr, and N8UR)
- an rss feed from all of the above
- a picture feed from Tumblr

I’m using Tumblr as a place I can send any mobile content I want to push online from wherever. I can send content from the beach and it gets posted to Tumblr, then pushed out to my homepage and RSS. Sweet!

{I’ll be redesigning this blog soon too…]

This is just a test to see if my urbeingrecorded RSS feed will automatically post to my new Tumblr account. I really dig Tumblr, btw. It collates text, pics, and emails from my mobile, as well as any of my RSS content feeds, all onto a sweet little home page. eventually I hope to consolidate everything onto one main portal.

From a post at Electroplankton about high convergence functionality in Japanese mobile phones.

Claude is a 27 y.o. Japanese male… (His) typical day starts with him checking his email on his phone. He gets all his daily tasks and calendaring events this way. He then syncs it with his computer. He pays for the subway by placing the phone on a kiosk granting him access past the gates. The commute is spent watching TV on his phone by rotating the screen. A small antenna extends up and catches the wireless digital TV signals (something we will never have here in America). About 45 minutes later, he’s in Tokyo and heads to a vending machine to buy fresh fruit and water. He places the phone up against a pad. The vending machine reads his bank information which is tied into his phone. He then places his thumb on the phone’s tiny thumbprint reader to verify his identity. As he makes his way to the office, he waves the phone near the door handle to unlock it. During a 10 minute break, he’s flips thru a magazine and sees something he wants to buy. The item has a tiny stamp size barcode pictogram next to it. He scans the pictogram with his phone. A receipt and shipping confirmation hits his email minutes later. As the day ends, he syncs with his work computer and goes grocery shopping paying for items with his phone. Before heading home, he heads to a bar his friend has invited him too. He uses the phone to give him step-by-step directions. The day is finally over and his phone’s battery is nearing the end of its life. He plugs it in and goes about the rest of the evening relaxing before bed.

I’ve just received my Blackspot Unswoosher boots and they are super-sweet! Dig this copy from their Shareholder Certificate:

By buying this pair of sneakers you become a voting member of The Blackspot Anticorporation. When you log onto blackspotsneakers.org you can use your unique shareholder number… and vote on the style of future sneakers, what materials to use, where to make them, how to market them and how the profits will be used. The ultimate goal? An exciting, shareholder-driven enterprise with our own co-op factories and retail outlets around the world.

From LiveScience:

Cornell University researchers have succeeded in implanting electronic circuit probes into tobacco hornworms… The hornworms… mature into long-lived moths whose muscles can be controlled with the implanted electronics.

…The ultimate goal of the HI-MEMS program is to provide insect cyborgs that can demonstrate controlled flight; the insects would be used in a variety of military and homeland security applications.

I can’t imagine that anyone would be able to, you know, hack into DARPA’s cyborg bug army and use them for their own means…

The Washington Post notes that Feds are concerned that Second Life is a hotbed of terror. Or at least, that virtual worlds present “novel ways for terrorists and criminals to move money, organize and conduct corporate expionage”.

Intelligence officials… say they’re convinced that the qualities that many computer users find so attractive about virtual worlds — including anonymity, global access and the expanded ability to make financial transfers outside normal channels — have turned them into seedbeds for transnational threats.

So don’t be surprised if that hot leather-clad fembot with fairy wings isn’t just a 46 yr old fat guy in his mom’s basement. He may also be a fed!

Virtual worlds could also become an actual battlefield. The intelligence community has begun contemplating how to use Second Life and other such communities as platforms for cyber weapons that could be used against terrorists or enemies, intelligence officials said. One analyst suggested beginning tests with so-called teams of cyber warfare experts.

Of course, unlike in the real world, everything you do in the virtual world leaves a trail behind. Consider Second Life:

Officials from Linden Lab have initiated meetings with people in the intelligence community about virtual worlds. They try to stress that systems to monitor avatar activity and identify risky behavior are built into the technology, according to Ken Dreifach, Linden’s deputy general counsel.

Dreifach said that all financial transactions are reviewed electronically, and some are reviewed by people. For investigators, there also are also plenty of trails that avatars and users leave behind.

“There are a real range and depth of electronic footprints,” Dreifach said. “We don’t disclose those fraud tools.”

Intolerant dicks try to get Wikipedia to remove this picture of The Prophet. Give it up. Your world is fading.

Ford is leveraging RFID tech to help workers track their tools.

Developed with DEWALT and ThingMagic, Tool Link offers owners the capability to mark and scan high-value tools, safety equipment, material inventories and other important assets using RFID tags. When the vehicle is running, a pair of RFID antennas, mounted in corrosion- and impact-resistant housings on the inside of the pickup box, scan the box for the items on a pre-programmed inventory list.

The data is transmitted to a reader mounted inside the cab and displayed on the in-dash computer screen, alerting the driver if any inventoried tools are not loaded on the truck.

And PC World opines on the near-future of smart objects.

We’re entering the era of “ambient intelligence,” when everyday objects will contain technology that broadcasts data about themselves and their environment, says Liebhold.

As you approach a dangerous intersection, sensors in your car will detect it and reduce speed. GPS coordinates of places unsafe to walk at night will be broadcast to mobile devices.

In Japan, location-based services from GeoVector let the Mapions Pointing Application deliver information on businesses inside a building at the point of a GPS-enabled camera phone. U.S. handsets with the technology should appear by year’s end.

In homes, floor sensors will detect empty rooms and automatically lower the thermostat and turn off lights. Agilewaves, a firm started by ex-NASA scientists, is working with builders to install sensors on electrical switches, pipes, and gas valves. Eventually they hope to offer neighborhoods, subdivisions, or municipalities a big-picture view of their carbon footprint.

Embedded below is a trailer for a new documentary about life in virtual worlds called Second Skin. I was especially impacted by the concept of digital selves falling in love through virtual interactions. I’m fascinated by the parrallel worlds in which our selves bloom and grow without the bounds of meatspace. Increasingly, self identity is expanding out across the virtual data spaces we move through. Who I am includes the footprint I leave in blogs and forums, the profiles I establish and maintain in social communities, and the characters I might inhabit in virtual worlds. All of these somehow sum to make “me” more than just the body I inhabit.

Lou at Moving and Shaking posts some bits that reflect a lot of my own recent thoughts around the Britney Machine:

“To the casual tabloid reader, Britney Spears’ life looks like a train wreck. To the Britney Industrial Complex, comprising everyone from paparazzi to perfume vendors, she is a gold mine. Whether she’s shaving her head or battling for custody of her children, Britney seems to grow more fascinating (and to some people, more lucrative) every time she stumbles. Recent court documents suggest she’s amassed a $125 million fortune and continues to rake in about $737,000 a month, or nearly $9 million a year. But that’s chicken feed compared with the overall Britney economy.”

Portfolio: The Britney Economy by Duff McDonald, February 2008