MachineMachine /stream - tagged with cool https://machinemachine.net/stream/feed en-us http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss LifePress therourke@gmail.com <![CDATA[Trap street]]> 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 will misrepresent the nature of a street in a fashion that can still be used to detect copyright violators but is less likely to interfere with navigation. For instance, a map might add nonexistent bends to a street, or depict a major street as a narrow lane, without changing its location or its connections to other streets.

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Sun, 16 Oct 2011 09:10:08 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
<![CDATA[YooouuuTuuube]]> 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)

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Tue, 19 Jul 2011 16:15:26 -0700 http://www.yooouuutuuube.com/v/?width=96&height=96&yt=TQuqeLBTetA&flux=1&direction=bottom_left
<![CDATA[The Things, by Peter Watts]]> 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 he comes back alone, but MacReady still thinks I am one of him. I am not: I am being Blair, and I am at the door. I am being Childs, and I let myself in. I take brief communion, tendrils writhing forth from my faces, intertwining: I am BlairChilds, exchanging news of the world.

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Mon, 20 Jun 2011 05:13:19 -0700 http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/watts_01_10/
<![CDATA[Alvin Lucier: I am Sitting in a Room]]> 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 out any irregularities my speech might have."

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Wed, 16 Feb 2011 06:48:11 -0800 http://www.ubu.com/sound/lucier.html
<![CDATA[Geocities - The Torrent]]> 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 of this writing, these mirrors include: http://www.reocities.com http://www.geocities.ws http://www.geociti.es http://www.oocities.org/ You'll get your fix and you won't go into internet rage when you find you downloaded hundreds of gigabytes of THING YOU DO NOT WANT. ========================================================================= This collection was put together by nearly 100 folks assembling at the news of the death of Geocities, a website that al

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Wed, 10 Nov 2010 02:05:00 -0800 http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5923737/Geocities_-_The_Torrent
<![CDATA[The Writer Who Couldn't Read]]> 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. When he looked at the front page — it was the Toronto Globe and Mail, an English-language journal — the print on the page was unlike anything he had seen before. It looked vaguely "Serbo-Croatian or Korean," or some language he didn't know. Wondering if this was some kind of joke, he went to his bookshelf, pulled out a book he knew was in English, and it too was in the same gibberish.

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Sun, 27 Jun 2010 08:03:00 -0700 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=127745750&ps=cprs
<![CDATA[The Smart List: 12 Shocking Ideas That Could Change the World]]> 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.

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Sun, 06 Jun 2010 03:54:00 -0700 http://www.wired.com/techbiz/people/magazine/17-10/ff_smartlist
<![CDATA[Steganography]]> 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, articles, shopping lists, or some other covertext and, classically, the hidden message may be in invisible ink between the visible lines of a private letter.

The advantage of steganography, over cryptography alone, is that messages do not attract attention to themselves. Plainly visible encrypted messages—no matter how unbreakable—will arouse suspicion, and may in

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Thu, 22 Apr 2010 02:50:03 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography
<![CDATA[Voyager 1 and 2's Infinite Playlist]]> 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

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Tue, 06 Apr 2010 12:07:00 -0700 http://laphamsquarterly.org/visual/charts-graphs/?page=73
<![CDATA[Scientists supersize quantum mechanics]]> 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 well as as atomic-scale particles.

The work is simultaneously being published online today in Nature and presented today at the American Physical Society's meeting in Portland, Oregon1.

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Sun, 21 Mar 2010 12:51:00 -0700 http://www.nature.com/news/2010/100317/full/news.2010.130.html
<![CDATA[Lunar Archaeology]]> 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&#039;s lunar module descent stage wasn&#039;t designed to be carted back home, for instance.

"They were told to jettison things that weren't important," anthropologist Beth O'Leary, "a leader in the emerging field of space heritage and archaeology," tells the newspaper. "They were essentially told, 'Here's eight minutes, create an archaeol

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Fri, 29 Jan 2010 13:33:00 -0800 http://bldgblog.blogspot.com/2010/01/lunar-archaeology.html
<![CDATA[Evidence of Everything Exploding]]> http://secrettechnology.com/explode/evidence.html

A surreal webgame, littered with explosive potentialities. Help the arrow escape influential pages from historical art movements.

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Tue, 05 Jan 2010 07:54:00 -0800 http://secrettechnology.com/explode/evidence.html
<![CDATA["the peace tape"]]> http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLHOeCK3QBI&feature=youtube_gdata ]]> Sat, 19 Dec 2009 07:55:00 -0800 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gLHOeCK3QBI&feature=youtube_gdata <![CDATA[Oklo]]> 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 and the State of Gabon was given a minority share in the company.

For forty years, France mined for uranium in Gabon. Once extracted, the uranium was used for electricity production in France and much of Europe. Gabon's miners half-joked that it was thanks to them that France's high-speed TGV trains could operate. Today, however, the uranium deposi

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Mon, 28 Sep 2009 09:07:00 -0700 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oklo
<![CDATA[Gizmo]]> https://www.flickr.com/photos/todorrovic/2287792473/

Gizmo II here

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Sun, 24 Feb 2008 06:18:54 -0800 https://www.flickr.com/photos/todorrovic/2287792473/
<![CDATA[Clonycavan Styling Gel - 2000 years of cool or your money back!]]> 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.

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Tue, 17 Jan 2006 21:06:41 -0800 http://www.metafilter.com/mefi/48347