http://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss Sweetcron therourke@gmail.com http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street A trap street is a fictitious entry in the form of a misrepresented street on a map, often outside the area the map nominally covers, for the purpose of "trapping" potential copyright violators of the map, who will be unable to justify the inclusion of the "trap street" on their map. On maps that are not of streets, other "copyright trap" features (such as non-existent towns or mountains with the wrong elevations) may be inserted or altered for the same purpose.[1] Trap streets are often nonexistent streets; but sometimes, rather than actually depicting a street where none exists, a map… ]]> Sun, 16 Oct 2011 09:10:08 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street http://www.yooouuutuuube.com/v/?width=96&height=96&yt=TQuqeLBTetA&flux=1&direction=bottom_left Create your own trip in sound and animation using YouTube video clips (this one features Alice in Wonderland) ]]> Tue, 19 Jul 2011 16:15:26 -0700 http://www.yooouuutuuube.com/v/?width=96&height=96&yt=TQuqeLBTetA&flux=1&direction=bottom_left http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ I am being Blair. I escape out the back as the world comes in through the front.

I am being Copper. I am rising from the dead.

I am being Childs. I am guarding the main entrance.

The names don't matter. They are placeholders, nothing more; all biomass is interchangeable. What matters is that these are all that is left of me. The world has burned everything else.

I see myself through the window, loping through the storm, wearing Blair. MacReady has told me to burn Blair if… ]]> Mon, 20 Jun 2011 05:13:19 -0700 http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/ http://www.ubu.com/sound/lucier.html "I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any sem- blance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physi- cal fact, but more as a way to smooth… ]]> Wed, 16 Feb 2011 07:48:11 -0700 http://www.ubu.com/sound/lucier.html http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5923737/Geocities_-_The_Torrent This is a collection of Geocities data downloaded by a bunch of people who call themselves ARCHIVE TEAM, who began scraping the Yahoo! Geocities site during a six month period in 2009, before Yahoo! shut down geocities.com on October 26th, 2009. This collection is compressed in a UNIX filesystem with both 7zip archives and tape archives (gtar). If you're a bit of a data tourist and just want to waft in the scent of a web era gone by, please go to one of the Geocities mirrors that were put up in the wake of the end of Geocities. As… ]]> Wed, 10 Nov 2010 03:05:00 -0700 http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5923737/Geocities_-_The_Torrent http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127745750&ps=cprs "In January of 2002," writes the neuroscientist Oliver Sacks, "I received a letter from Howard Engel, a Canadian novelist describing a strange problem." Engel's problem was so strange, I decided to create a short video to let you see his story. Our narrator and animator is San Francisco artist Lev Yilmaz.

On July 31, 2001, Engel woke up, dressed, made breakfast, and then went to the front door to get his newspaper. "I wasn't aware," he says in our NPR interview, "that it was any different from any other morning."

But it was.… ]]> Sun, 27 Jun 2010 08:03:00 -0700 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127745750&ps=cprs http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-10/ff_smartlist Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers with controversial, game-changing propositions. We found a prison reformer who wants to empty jails, an economist who thinks foreign aid hurts more than it helps, and a military theorist who believes the US should launch preemptive cyberattacks, right now. Then there's secretary of defense robert gates, who wants to win wars, not just prep for them. Risky? Sure. But this is no time to play it safe. ]]> Sun, 06 Jun 2010 03:54:00 -0700 http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-10/ff_smartlist http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography Steganography is the art and science of writing hidden messages in such a way that no one, apart from the sender and intended recipient, suspects the existence of the message, a form of security through obscurity. The word steganography is of Greek origin and means "concealed writing" from the Greek words steganos (στεγανός) meaning "covered or protected", and graphein (γράφειν) meaning "to write". The first recorded use of the term was in 1499 by Johannes Trithemius in his Steganographia, a treatise on cryptography and steganography disguised as a book on magic. Generally, messages will appear to be something else: images,… ]]> Thu, 22 Apr 2010 02:50:03 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography http://laphamsquarterly.org/visual/charts-graphs/?page=73 Selected by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan, these songs were etched into a 12-inch, gold-plated copper record that was placed aboard the two spaceships in 1977 ]]> Tue, 06 Apr 2010 12:07:00 -0700 http://laphamsquarterly.org/visual/charts-graphs/?page=73 http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100317/full/news.2010.130.html A team of scientists has succeeded in putting an object large enough to be visible to the naked eye into a mixed quantum state of moving and not moving.

Andrew Cleland at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and his team cooled a tiny metal paddle until it reached its quantum mechanical 'ground state' — the lowest-energy state permitted by quantum mechanics. They then used the weird rules of quantum mechanics to simultaneously set the paddle moving while leaving it standing still. The experiment shows that the principles of quantum mechanics can apply to everyday objects as… ]]> Sun, 21 Mar 2010 12:51:00 -0700 http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100317/full/news.2010.130.html http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/lunar-archaeology.html In a meeting today in Sacramento, commissioners might vote to register items left behind on the moon by Apollo astronauts "as an official State Historical Resource," the L.A. Times reports. After all, "California law allows listing historical resources beyond the state's borders—even if it's more than 238,000 miles away." Some of the 5,000 pounds of stuff Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin abandoned at Tranquility Base was purposeful: a seismic detector to record moonquakes and meteorite impacts; a laser-reflection device to make precise distance measurements between Earth and the moon; a U.S. flag and commemorative plaque. Some was unavoidable: Apollo 11's… ]]> Fri, 29 Jan 2010 14:33:00 -0700 http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/lunar-archaeology.html http://secrettechnology.com/explode/evidence.html A surreal webgame, littered with explosive potentialities. Help the arrow escape influential pages from historical art movements. ]]> Tue, 05 Jan 2010 08:54:00 -0700 http://secrettechnology.com/explode/evidence.html http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLHOeCK3QBI&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Sat, 19 Dec 2009 08:55:00 -0700 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLHOeCK3QBI&feature=youtube_gdata http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo Oklo is a region near the town of Franceville, in the Haut-Ogooué province of the Central African state of Gabon. The discovery in September 1972 of several natural nuclear fission reactors in the uranium mines situated there has fired the imagination and aroused the curiosity of scientists. Gabon was a French colony when prospectors from the French nuclear energy commissariat (the industrial parts, which later became the COGEMA) discovered uranium in the remote region in 1956. France immediately opened mines operated by Comuf (Compagnie des Mines d'Uranium de Franceville) near Mounana village in order to exploit the vast mineral resources… ]]> Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:07:00 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/48347 Body, volume, style and shine with long-lasting power. Clonycavan Styling Gel, along with mummification in Irish peat, works together with your freshly disemboweled corpse to protect hair from the disruptive power of 2000 years of rigor-mortis. ]]> Tue, 17 Jan 2006 22:06:41 -0700 http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/48347