Oh, and profanity.

Die Ärzte - Manchmal haben Frauen…

Meanwhile, in reality, lots of people called “anonymous” have been protesting Scientology, wearing masks:

I’m not the first to notice a similarity, of course:

On a side note, if you like the idea of the laughing man, you may like this website, which automatically applies laughing man masks to detected faces in images:

You can read the whole thing here.

(TreeHugger article, manufacturer’s website)

“Also, whenever you see companies start talking about being “open,” it means they’re getting their ass kicked. You think Google will be forming an OpenSearch alliance any time soon, to help also-rans in search get a share of the spoils? Me neither.”

Ouch.

Dell

Apple

And, to add some politics into the mix, I’ll just note that (allegedly) Michael Dell’s political donations are 89.4% Republican, while Steve Jobs’s are 99.6% Democratic.

Something interesting that I hadn’t been able to visualise before was “viewport” scaling: The browser de-couples the physical screen resolution from the page’s virtual resolution. When you visit a web page, the browser simulates a relatively large window, and then scales the resulting page down so it fits on the screen, but is very small. If you’ve already designed with a small screen in mind, you end up with a lot of wasted space unless you tell the browser (via a meta tag) that you’d like it to pretend a smaller window size (resulting in less scaling). See Apple’s iPhone-Safari dev notes for a proper explanation.

Here’s Fortune with a specified virtual window width of 600 pixels:

And here’s what it looks like without a specified viewport width:

Incidentally, the viewport width seems to stay constant when the orientation changes: If you rotate to landscape, the page image zooms in somewhat so that it can still fill the screen without becoming any wider in terms of the virtual browser window (i.e. the viewport width is preserved).

Selected details:

[Title from Agrippa (a Book of the Dead), by William Gibson.]

Exhibit A:

iPod posters, Maccentric Chatswood, 2007

Exhibit B:

Imagery from Battle Royale, 2000 (left-hand image as featured on Airside’s Battle Royale t-shirts)

Brain in virtual reality; body soaking in nutrient-filled vat

(2004-02-24): “Dr Hoffman believes pain contains a significant psychological element which is why distracting thoughts by virtual reality lends itself so well to pain control.
‘Pain requires conscious attention. Humans have a limited amount of this and it’s hard to do two things at once,’ he said.”

link, more detail

Korean students learning important skills

(2004-05-11): I love this pic, but unfortunately I’ve lost the source for it. I saved it as “Seoul student training 040511″, but I must leave any further interpretation to your imaginations…

Iraqi soldiers capture US military drone

(2003-03-25): “Iraqi television broadcast these pictures of a coalition drone aircraft shot down and then paraded through the streets of Basra.”

link

Aye Naujawan Hai Sab Kuchch Yahan

It’s from Apradh, an Indian movie from 1972.

Cyborgs to do battle with police

“Technology such as cloned part-robot humans used by organised crime gangs pose the greatest future challenge to police, along with online scamming, Australian Federal Police (AFP) Commissioner Mick Keelty says.”

link

Police spy-drones to monitor urban areas

“The machines, which are flown by remote control or using pre-programmed GPS navigation systems, are silent and can be fitted with night-vision cameras.

The images they record are sent back to a police support vehicle or control room.”

link

Police to wear head-mounted surveillance cameras

“Police say the Cylon camera will be used mainly while officers patrol potential hotspots such as Union Street, Mutley and the city centre … The message to the public is to enjoy yourselves but don’t misbehave because you don’t know when you may be caught on camera.”

link

Powered exoskeletons for stroke victims

“The robotic suit, which slips over a person’s upper body and arms, weighs only 1.8 kilograms (four pounds).

It was developed jointly by Activelink Co. — a venture of Matsushita Electric Industrial which is best known for the Panasonic brand — and Kobe Gakuin University.”

link

Taser knife-missiles

“If the subject tries to grab or disconnect the XREP projectile, the reflex engagement electrodes complete a circuit allowing TASER NMI to discharge from the Nose Electrodes, through the subject’s body, out to the hand that grabbed the XREP. … To maximize incapacitation, the XREP engine incorporates a microprocessor controlled optimal electrode selection technology.”

link

A few days ago, reader.mac.com turned up, and was theorised to be an iPhone-only feed reader web app. Now that the device has been released, you can check it out from other browsers:

• Install User-Agent Switcher (or change your user-agent string manually)
• Use the iPhone user-agent string: Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1A543a Safari/419.3
• Visit http://reader.mac.com/mobile/v1/http:%2F%2Fmaebmij.org%2Fblog%2Ffeed, or your choice of feed URL

Apparently, Safari on the iPhone sends RSS feeds to this app instead of processing them locally.

1972 Wella Balsam ad, from A Word From Our Sponsor, about mainstream advertising’s co-option of the 60s/70s counterculture.

Wired/New York Public Library debate: The Battle Over Books, from 2005

Larry Lessig and representatives from Google, a publisher’s association, and an authors’ guild all debate the legality and necessity of Google Book Search. It’s worthwhile, if only because both sides get their ideas across pretty well. Lessig is very convincing, as usual.

A Discussion with danah boyd, from 2006

Danah was in the news yesterday for her piece on social class divisions between MySpace and Facebook. This video covers some similar ground: It’s a rambling talk/discussion about how people interact socially online, focusing mostly on MySpace and Friendster. She’s a good speaker.

Richard Feynman: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out, from 1981

Everything from discussing what’s wrong with the way maths is taught, to getting toungue-tied trying to explain hadrons and quarks off-the-cuff without using any big words. The most interesting part, to me, is his extremely frank discussion of how he felt about his part in developing the first nuclear weapons.

The Dalai Lama, via Howard C. Cutler:

“For example, in the case of wanting more expensive possessions, if that is based on a mental attitude that just wants more and more, then eventually you’ll reach a limit of what you can get; you’ll come up against reality. … When it comes to dealing with greed, one thing that is quite characteristic is that although it arrives by the desire to obtain something, it is not satisfied by obtaining. … The true antidote of greed is contentment. If you have a strong sense of contentment, it doesn’t matter whether you obtain the object or not; either way, you are still content.”

OK, so does getting rid of all your possessions solve anything? Brad Warner’s What If We Gave It Away?:

“But the proverbial monk with nothing but a robe is largely a thing of the past. I’ve come across a few people who’ve tried to create modern day variations. But I’m largely unimpressed. One guy I saw followed the ancient Buddhist custom of never handling money. Only all this really meant was that he never picked up the check.”

So I think what these guys are saying is that it’s not a problem to have stuff, in the sense that in modern society it simplifies everything, for you and for those around you. If you want to brush your teeth, you are just going to be a pain for everyone unless you have your own toothbrush.

But there is another reason for owning something, and I think it boils down to this:

“It’s just, when you buy furniture, you tell yourself, that’s it. That’s the last sofa I’m gonna need. Whatever else happens, I’ve got that sofa problem handled. I had it all. I had a stereo that was very decent, a wardrobe that was getting very respectable. I was close to being complete.”

(Fight Club.) i.e: to feel better about yourself - to turn yourself into the kind of person who would would have a particular thing.