The mob-trend

sp!ked-IT | Article | 'A mob for no reason': "The Mob Project was an invitation-only thing. A guy called Bill sent out email invitations, which in turn were forwarded on to others. This was no protest, no expression of social angst, not even an inaugural meeting of a carpet fetish society. Instead, these people were all happy just to be there. As one of them put it, 'I always wanted to say 'I'm a member of the mob' and now I can'. This kind of thing is being taken seriously. The technology commentator and social software advocate Joi Ito described the Mob Project as a 'very cool social hack', and bloggers throughout the blogosphere are making similar comments" flash mob and Friendster phenomena

Hijacking the mobile

The art of 'bluejacking' is on the move. It's the technology of Bluetooth in the mobile phones that have got a revival of the hoax.

To bluejack is to send unsolicited textmessages or with the new SonyEricsson 610 also sending pictures to strangers in the range of the Bluetooth-radiofrequency.

2003 in 20

In the mayfly project 2003 you summon your past year in twenty words. Hard as hell but rather good to try.

"Born. Eat. Shag. Die." is the best one yet in the big project where your whole life should be downsized into a twentyword short note.

Nr 1 britblogging

Guardian Unlimited have issued The best of British blogging of the year. I say that is really a good work of the lads at the online-staff of the paper since it is like chosing the best website from the whole net. But they done it and you are the judge of their ability to choose the best blog from all the diverse blogs at the Net.

"All the blogs mentioned here are exceptional. They are a testament to the growing richness of British blogging. They demonstrate great design, good writing and smart use of links to provide a series of windows on worlds we would otherwise never know about. This was exactly the intention of the awards when we first began them in 2002."

So who did win? Well - there is a lot of them but the special juror award did go to LinkMachineGo.

Blogs worth noting is the winner of the photo category: NYCLONDON and the strange (fictive?) blog of the call-girl in London: Belle de Jour. But the most strange one is truly the London Underground Tube Diary where a guy is just writing and share photos from his ordinary daily routine as a employee at the London Tube.

The big turkey hoax

Not just that the turkey president Bush did give the american soldiers was of plastic - there've been stories from armysources that the soldiers that was invited to the special Thanksgiving-woa was screened by NSA. All for the media to get the best pics and to have the story in control.

It might be the worry about some american soldier should beat the president up since "a survey it did of troops in Iraq, finding that half of those questioned described their units' moral as low and their training as insufficient and said they did not plan to reenlist.".

Another thing this mediocre mediajamboree have yet to explain is the fact that the pilot on Air Force One did say that they was a Gulfstream V instead of the much bigger Boeing 747.

It's Santa...

...and he is evil. This game surely is made for us who don't throw ourself into the arms of the shopping-mall Santa or thinder the eyes when speaking about a Christmas-tree.

Cuz this Santa is axing some blob-like humanoids down. A simple arcade game but surely make the day of a Xmas-hater like me.

A Noble Tower

NY Times do tell how the city is planning to use Ground Zero and somehow do something to build up the great skyline of the Big Apple.

The idea is to show the world the greatness of the "Homeland" America and that even the 9-11-incident won't get the land on their knees.

Of course this will be the highest tower in the world.

Why Georgie loves Wacko Jacko

"In the last two years, CNN has not devoted this much energy and coverage to any story in the manner that is unfolding right now.

Enron, the stock market, the reasons for September 11, the nomination of Henry Kissinger to chair the investigation into that event, the disinformation that was pushed by the Bush administration before the attack on Iraq, the civilian casualties during the attack on Iraq, the American troop casualties during and after the attack on Iraq, the missing weapons of mass destruction, the missing Osama bin Laden, the war in Afghanistan that is far from over, the outing of a CIA agent by the Bush administration in an act of political revenge, and about two hundred other explosive stories did not get the attention that Michael Jackson is getting now."

Read the wonderful flic from truthout.

Crash Internet

"A team of UC Berkeley and University of Southern California professors has received a $5.46 million grant to build one of the most realistic models of the Internet ever created -- and then wreck it with debilitating hacker attacks...

the team is trying to answer questions with major national security implications: What would really happen if the Internet were hit with an attack bigger than the Nimda or Slammer worms? Could we fight it with the technology we have today? Or would everything connected to the Internet, from private e-mail boxes to automatic teller networks to power plants, topple like a house of cards? ...

The new test network, called the Cyber Defense Technology Experimental Research Network, or DETER, will contain lots of routers and switches imitating the complexity of the real Net. It won't be nearly as big as the real Internet -- the goal is to eventually hook up 1,000 PCs -- but the researchers hope it will be comparable in behavior. ."

Blogging a story

Is this true or is it a fake? The blogging technology have given this question a brand new justification. There is blogs where the stories seem too fantastic to be true and a lot of them where the author is rather enstranged of the effect his or hers imaginary writing have been taken.

In Wired News they try to find out some ways of it: Catch Me If You Can and some blogs is proven to just be false: on simple and true stories through a detectivework of other bloggers:
Nelson's Weblog.

The possibility to use the blog-tool to write fiction without telling it is of course a thing writers would appreciate since you in this way really get proof if you are able to write that well that people believe the fiction is the truth.

Let's make the dead come alive

"Sure you can use the ROM's," said Woz in an e-mail that Briel forwarded to Wired News. "I'm sure that Apple would deny this request, even though what you are speaking of is very noble and cannot hurt Apple in any way."

Briel is trying to make the old Apple motherboard brand new but of course the good old closed patentidea from Apple do put him down. And of course; Jobs should know how easy it is to loose good ideas - according to the "official" myth he did steal the whole idea of the graphical user interface from Xerox Park in the dawn of the computer age.

But even though one can feel that it is a good story, there might be much more boring background as recognized by the works of Making the Macintosh Project at Stanford and the stories that Jef Raskin is telling.

Onewheeler

Who need a Segway when Bombardier is making such a hit as this Embrio-concept? For the moment it's just a prototype but using the same gyroscope-technology as the Segway Human Transporter do but is more of a moto-bike than the reversed skateboard the Segway is.

"The Embrio is powered by a hydrogen fuel cell, a technology that creates power by mixing hydrogen and oxygen, ideally resulting in water as the only exhaust. The Embrio also borrows several other advanced technologies from cars, like infrared night vision and an active suspension, which can vary its damping rates based on road conditions. To move the Embrio, you use an accelerator trigger on the left handlebar and a brake trigger on the right.
The vehicle is made of lightweight materials, like aluminum, magnesium and nylon. It weighs only 360 pounds. The vehicle is also kept longitudinally stable by a smaller wheel that operates like an airplane's landing gear. It touches the ground when the vehicle is stopped or just starting. Once the Embrio is in motion, the landing gear will retract when the vehicle reaches about 12 mph. During braking, the gear redeploys when the vehicle slows to 12 mph."

Department of Comp.Science

Have you ever wondered about what's the "Scroll Lock" key on my computer for?

"The main intent of the Scroll Lock key was to allow scrolling of screen text up, down and presumably sideways using the arrow keys in the days before large displays and graphical scroll bars. You can see where this might have been handy in the DOS era, when screen output typically was limited to 80 characters wide by 25 rows deep. For some types of programs, spreadsheets being the obvious example, it's still handy now. In Microsoft Excel, Scroll Lock allows you to scroll a spreadsheet with the arrow keys without moving the active cell pointer from the currently highlighted cell. In Quattro Pro, another spreadsheet program, Scroll Lock works in a similar manner, although in contrast to Excel it's not possible to scroll the active cell pointer completely off the screen."

JenniCam goes dark

After seven years she is pulling the plug from her website: Jenni Ringley who the netizens have been able to follow in her everyday life. CNET News is telling the sad story: "Ringley, a self-described former computer geek who works at a non-profit social service agency near Sacramento, Calif., says in her mission statement that she wanted to create a 'window into a virtual human zoo. ' "

There's no explanation on her site but it might be because of Paypals redlisting of her account since she is showing her tits and that's against Paypals "rules". Americans...

Barbie with burka

No way that girls in Arab-countries should not be able to play with Barbies but of course their Barbies can't show their hair. So Razanne is here.

A muslim version of Barbie: "the doll not only fills a marketing gap but also offers Muslim girls someone they can relate to" as Noorart Inc., the company who made the doll explains. It fills a market void where muslim parents don't want their girls to play with the curly, blonde and curved original-Barbie. But Razanne have aspirations of being a modern Muslim woman and the target groups seem to be the Muslimcommunity in Britain and USA.

Mattel - the Barbiecompany, is selling a Morrocan Barbie called Leyla, and of course her accessoires is the one of belly dancing and concubine. And the company is rather silent about the competition from the Noorart Inc. and Razanne.

Don't eat this

As it didn't was enough that the wellknown Bush-turkeydinner in Iraq at last years Thanksgiving.

Now there been proven that the turkey El Presidente gave to the soldiers was fake. A turkey made of plastic for photo-ops. "[M]ilitary sources said a trophy turkey is a standard feature of holiday chow lines."

List the reality

Some lists:

All-Time Top 100 Best Singles

Supercars with top acceleration

Top 100 Women

The 100 greatest novels of all time

Top Charities

400 Richest in America

Letters from outer space

The NASA ISS Science Officer Ed Lu is writing kind of a diary when on his mission on the ISS. In the nowhere of the space, orbiting the earth.

"There really isn't an up or down anywhere else here, but there is a direction we think of as the floor and a direction we think of as the ceiling in each module. Most of the labeling on panels and equipment is written so that it is right side up assuming this orientation, and also most of the lights are on the "ceiling" so they cast light "downwards." To add to the effect, there is a simulator back on Earth we spent a lot of time in where we got used to one direction as the floor and the opposite direction as the ceiling. So up here, when Yuri and I say downwards or upwards, we mean the equivalent directions as in the training module on Earth."

But hopefully he won't have to buy the spacestamps.

Do they pick them from the trees?

The question How LEGO is made might not be as hard as one could think even for a four-year old. But this is a really good way to show a sometimes difficult production with a mix of animations and film.

A man of order

In the SG-article The Una-Bombers life in prison you get a picture of the life in an american High Security Prison and the life of the Una-bomber Ted Kaczynski in his life-sentence.

He is a model prisoner and surely just cope with his life inside the penitentiary and bad working postal service (remember that he was using the postal service to send his deadly packages). And of course he also have things to say about the food and that sort of things.

No sex but breeding

" 'The question of, 'Why sex?' is a very central one to biology,' says David Mark Welch of the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole, Mass."

And of course have the geneology-science found out that the asexuality isn't the deadend that was believed during the years.

The question is how the variation of genes fostered by sex. A flexibility of the genetic pattern in a population have been seen as only possible through breeding.

"an entire class of organisms, containing 360 species, seems to have evolved perfectly well without sex. This group of tiny water creatures, called bdelloid rotifers, is thriving in fresh water and soggy land worldwide despite, seemingly, no sex for at least 40 million years."

One shouldn't be sad when not getting some in a couple of weeks. (Science News Online)

Keats' neuron up two points

There's not only your soul you can sell. "Jonathon Keats, a 32-year-old conceptual artist and novelist, has announced plans to auction off futures contracts on 6 billion neurons in his brain, which he copyrighted this spring. The copyright, like all copyrights, lasts for the life of the creator plus 70 years." And the way of doing it was to copyright it as a sculpture which made it as an unique piece of art.

But Keats have also made Berkley to consider to pass the A=A-law: that everything in Berkley should be mandate to be equal to themselves. Keats, who is sort of a performance-actor in thinking, have really done a solid research to let the shareholders of his brain make a sustainable prediction of the financial value in buying his brain.

But the problem is that if the shareholders should get value from their investment Keats have to find a way to let his brain live after his bodily death. And he truly have the problem that he faces possible pressure not to endanger their investments. The days of hard partying could be over though "Thing is, though, if you get drunk enough, you can get lost and fall into the ocean and disappear, and then there is no brain. So the contract says you get a refund at full purchase price if the brain goes missing." (Wired News: He Thinks, Therefore He Sells)

Dinosaurs didn't die of the asteroid

Pretty interesting article about the discussion of the extinction of the great dinosaurs and of the theroy that made Gerta Keller a scientist of discussion:

"Keller and a growing number of colleagues around the world are turning up evidence that, rather than a single event, an intensive period of volcanic eruptions as well as a series of asteroid impacts are likely to have stressed the world ecosystem to the breaking point. Although an asteroid or comet probably struck Earth at the time of the dinosaur extinction, it most likely was, as Keller says, "the straw that broke the camel's back" and not the sole cause."

Mash your discohits

Mash up wellknown disco-hits and slice and cut some hitflicks.

That's the new idea in a lot of sites where the slice&cut-technique have been taken to new heights with the help of the digital equipment and computers.

Dsico Archives is one of them.

Updated Moog

An article about Robert Moog and the updating of the analog syntheziser.

Minimoog Voyager is the new version of the classical syntheziser and wired have a interview with Robert Moog. 69 years old he is still active and probably the most important person in modern music. (Wired 11.07: Heart and Soul in the Machine )

Brand new or just branding an old one?

A bright's worldview is free of supernatural and mystical elements. The ethics and actions of a bright are based on a naturalistic worldview.

The atheists' is branding themselves and trying to make themselves a little more in the style of New Age. (The Brights)

Genes defines sexuality

Wired News: Sexual Identity Wired by Genetics "Sexual identity is rooted in every person's biology before birth and springs from a variation in our individual genome," a UCLA genetics professor, said in a statement. His team has identified 54 genes in mice that may explain why male and female brains look and function differently.

Well, the fundamentalists who try to explain homosexuality to be a choice is wrong.

A computer very small

"The aim of the Molecular Media Project is to use cells and atoms to perform useful computational tasks at the micron (10-6m) and/or nanoscales (10-9m) of organisation.

molecular computing is a practical use of nanotechnology for generating glitch and error. However, it differs from traditional cut-and-paste technique or granular synthesis by exploiting chaos, self-organisation and emergence at the resolution limit of the digital bits that make-up sound!

There are 1000mm in a metre (10-3m), there are 1,000,000um in a metre (10-6m), there are 1,000,000,000nm in a metre (10-9m)!"

A big hum

""The sound is rather like a large jet plane flying 100 feet above your house in the middle of the night,"

An article from New Scientist about how the big bang really sounded. At the Washington Univ is sound-files that somehow can give you an idea of how it sounded in the beginning.

Campaign Manual

At first glance I thought it was a cool thing: setting up a sort of How-To about making your own campaign. And the fact that it's the well-reputated BBC that is hosting it would be a guarantee for quality.

But when I reviewed the site of I Can I sort of felt it like being some sort of Campaigning For Dummies.

"iCan is a new BBC website to help you do something about issues that matter to you.".

An instant FAQ of starting an opinion. Is that needed? Is it just another way of making questions of our life shallow and exchangeable?

Scratch an itch

BBC NEWS | 'Brain itch' keeps songs in the head: "Research in the US has found that songs get stuck in our heads because they create a 'brain itch' that can only be scratched by repeating the tune over and over. "

Totally awesome... the mystery is solved! Then it's the problem of the badly muzak that always get stuck in the head... how to solve that?

Ethics in the science-world

"It's hard to predict what the ethical concerns will be in 10 years' time, as we can't imagine what science will be capable of; all we can say is that they won't be the ethical concerns that bother us now."

An article about the fact that the borders of the ethical discussion in science is moving and is pushed forward: "When the first heart transplant took place in the 1960s, there was widespread condemnation and revulsion," says Dr Peter Cotgreave, director of Save British Science. "Now it's accepted as a standard medical practice. Partly this is because we have come to see there have been no long-term harmful side-effects to the individual or society, but also because science has moved on."

1977 did Beauchamp put down ethical guidelines for biomedical science: Beauchamp suggested that all experiments should be evaluated according to four principles: non-maleficence, beneficence, autonomy and justice. Which, loosely translated, means they should not do harm, they should be in society's best interests, there should be freedom of choice and that equal cases should be treated equally and unequal ones unequally. The problem is that the interpretation of the guidelines varies and the need for a bigger transparency in the work of the scientists is needed, a need that collides with the development of big bucks in the biogenetic industry. "The traditional separation between scientists, who supposedly produce objective 'facts', and politicians, who deal in power, has obscured the means by which the goals of scientific and technological research are set even more than in other areas of public policy."

The scientists is often rather worried about that the genetic tests and production of GM-food already have gone to far. But the fact that the contracts often are short do that scientists are unwilling to rock the boat. And of course the fact that a scientist is driven by his or hers curiosity gets him to sometimes take the opportunity to do the test even if it's in the borders of ethics.

The end of the road today is this: "You want some matured eggs from an aborted foetus? There's an Israeli-Dutch team of scientists only too happy to consider it. You want a hybrid embryo? No problem, there's a private fertility clinic in the US that has created chimeras by merging male cells with female embryos. You want a perfect stem cell tissue match for your seriously ill child? Just stay Stateside for your IVF treatment. And remember to bring your chequebook.". (EducationGuardian.co.uk | Research | Pushing back the frontiers)

When the Evil Empire takes action

Mr Hanson was taking a pic of a truck off-loading a bunch of Mac G5-rods at the Microsoft campus up at Redmond and then post it at his blog as Even Microsoft wants G5s. Not at all mean or giving out any unknown secrets of Microsoft. Just a funny pic. Not. Reading his blog Of blogging and unemployment and learn how the Big Evil Empire of the Digital World is working. He got sacked. Point blanc.

Myself being hunted down by a multinational company and threaten with legal actions because of a simple publishing of a logo I can wonder in what way the Big Ones are able to get their information about "violations" even in a small blog as Hanson's. Echelon someone?

Another sign of the times

There´s a plethora of icons, signs and symbols for whatever phenomena in the digital world. Now the hacker community have gotten a new sign: The glider.

The idea is: "When you put the glider emblem on your web page, or wear it on clothing, or display it in some other way, you are visibly associating yourself with the hacker culture. This is not quite the same thing as claiming to be a hacker yourself that is a title of honor that generally has to be conferred by others rather than self-assumed. But by using this emblem, you express sympathy with our goals, our values, our way of living.".

Using digitech to understand analog life

Interesting abstract on the evolutionary origin of complex features.

The scientists have used digital organisms to understand how the evolution produces more complex organisms and the findings is that it's a combination of big random steps of mutations and the natural selection of the evolution.

I understand silch but it tickles the mysterious nerve.

The badass #1 in the movies

Of course - Al Pacino as Scarface is the biggest badass in the movies. It's the New York Post Online Edition who derives the Maxim-magazines list of the great assholes on the silverscreen to a broader crowd. Linda Hamilton, as Sarah Connor in the Terminator-flicks, is on second place.

In my point of view this list is incomplete, since Donald Duck ain't on it. That's a true asshole. But hey, you don't need to be a waco to understand that Disney have some to say about such a list...

Ideas of rubber

"I was thinking, 'The only way to make something that won't come off is to tie it on, and then it just popped in my mind - go around the testicles,".

Leonard McCoy have a slight problem - the condom is falling of when he have intercourse with his wife and since they can't use anything else on birth control this is a big problem for them. So he thought it out and have filed a patent on new condom design.

This is another proof that frustration is the birth of creativity.

Stock the celeb

Tired of that old boring stockmarket? Stocks in faceless companies that produce boring things as computers, dishwashers and porn? Here´s the chance to use your guessingskills: Celebdaq.

Instead of looking on the points for Nasdaq-comps you can check if Britney is doing well at the market.

Totally meaningless. But who have said that everything must be productive?

Kodak down the drain

Is Kodak walking the same path as Polaroid - not managing to keep up with the pace of development?

photographic film maker Eastman Kodak (EK.N) was the Dow's biggest percentage loser, falling 41 cents or 1.8 percent to $22.84, a day after reporting a 63 percent drop in third-quarter earnings. On Wednesday, Kodak's CEO defended the company's plan to shift away from its declining film business and into digital photography despite an outcry from disgruntled investors. (NYT/Reuters).

Is the time of silverline over and the IOs taking it all?

A Good Pornographer?

Somewhat strange flic about the guy who finally got sex.com. A long long juridical fight after the fact that another guy hijacked the domain and pointed it to another IP.

But it also is a sort of sad story of a guy who somewhat had the notion of selling "good porn" and not give in to the drugsellers and herbalschamans of the Net. (Wired 11.08: The Prisoner of Sex.com)

Ticking suitcase - red alert

"The only way to determine the source of the ticking came down to a $13.21-an-hour worker: I'd need to follow my trainer's instructions and go EDU - elbows deep in underwear.".

A very interesting pick is the Confessions of a Baggage Screener from Wired Mag. About both the tech-side of airportsafety and the reality of being a screener. All this humping on the security and one learn that the ones that should be the last front and save us from being blown to pieces when eating the dinner 10k metres over the Atlantic don't get the proper training and sometimes don't care to do a proper job. And learning that the technology is not that reliable as it sometimes seem.

Hard to tell Madonna from the French fried chicken

In her latest video Madonna is acting in a fashion that made the son of the photographer Bourdin react and sue the popicon for plagiarism.

When looking at the comparisation-pics (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) the similarity is clear but hey, there´s no revolutionary idea in this pictorials that can steem from a plagitarizing use. Somehow a hommage to the Bourdin-pics I think.

The son of the photographer is probably a deskclerk wanting his fifteen minutes of fame. But the whole thing is a picture itself of the difficult question of the copyright of an idea. Is there ways that one can predict that an idea is stolen from another one? And if there´s is a question of whether or not the idea is personal och stolen there will be a strange society where ideas can be copyrighted. Even though our minds are almost inevitable and one can't grasp the full potential of it there is a possibility that two people can come up with the same idea since we can be brought up under the same cultural and social circumstances. When trying to enforce the copyright on the outcome of an idea will make it hard to think freely. (The Smoking Gun)

A philosophical look on programming languages

"At a very high level, all programming languages are similar. They all require you to describe a problem to solve. They all require similar skill sets — a good programmer in one language will find his or her skills will transfer to another language." This is the first setup by chromatic, techie at O'Reilly Network.

And then he is making a statement on
What I Hate About Your Programming Language. At a first glance this seem to be a geeky article but in the way he puts it one can understand more of the structure of the programming languages.

The Orwellian Time

There´s a lot talk in Sweden about the surveillance-cameras and the ever-continuing surveillance of our common space. In London there is 2,5 m cameras and now Sweden is going in the same direction. The critics is talking about an Orwellian state, the Big Brother-reality. But what they are forgetting is that in the novel "1984" the Big Brother is one, a state. The surveillancecams we are talking about is not controlled by one person or one organization - they´re mainly for safety or to make thiefs not willing to steal or rob.

I might think that the fright is in the picture of the Big Brother as always be able to know what a person is doing and that the cameras can't lie (well they can...) but they reality is both better and also maybe worse. Better since there's nothing that can be a Big Brother - no state in the modern world has both the technology and the state that would make it possible. But it might be worse since the possibility of control over the pictures is weak and on many hands; the pics of a wellknown person can be sold-out and the picture is maybe the most informationdense thing.

Pay back time

A pretty long article about one guy sues a telemarketer-firm (I simply love the name on the piece: How To Make A Telemarketer Cry (or, Suing Bozos for Fun & Profit)). And yes - the guy isn't the average white trash - he's a lawyer and knows how to work the system.

Who is Dr?

The Hitchhikers Guide to The Galaxy might be one of the most well-known works in literature behind the Bible, Quaran and Donald Duck... but here is a BBC-piece where the HGTG's author left some pieces of his contributions to the serie Dr Who.

Techies play with train

Use your PDA and manage your model railroad. That's surely a continuance for the kid never to grow up. (TechTV)

Can a hacker be trusted?

"paying known ex-criminals to safeguard a company's intellectual property is like having the fox guard the henhouse", a interesting debate between Kevin Mitnick, the most-well-know-hacker of all and Christopher Painter who prosecuted Mitnick back in 1995. The theme was if a convicted hacker could be trusted in being hired for securitybiz. (SecurityFocus HOME News: Debate: Should You Hire a Hacker?).

R2D2 masssage?

Look at this - this one is never gonna say "now I'm tired". Instead you would have massage all the time. (tickle robot).

The perpetual museum

At the The Museum of Unworkable Devices you surely learn that the human is a never ending inventor with hope to succeed as the only award. The true perpetuum mobile might be the brains capacity to invent and try to make things never ever before seen or thought to work.

Boo they said

One of the biggest sharks in the Internet-Craziness in the late nineties was Boo.com, founded by two Swedish golddiggers de luxe: Ernst Malmsten and Kajsa Leander who did start the success Bokus.com in Sweden. But with Boo.com they surely did dive to deep and they did go bankrupt. They've spent nearly a billion dollars on the site which never worked. I just love the web elegy at Ghost Sites where boo.com's metatags are published. And there are several sites where disgruntled former employees and contractors tell what they think and on this one you can read Mr Malmstens farewell letter which somewhat shows how that guy totally lost every sense of reality or is totally lacking any feeling of empathy.

Deepest tone in universe

Astronomes is rather musical and now they have found that the black holes in universe is emanating the deepest note ever detected from an object in universe, a B flat but 57 octaves below the middle C.

What's the meaning of this? Well - the amounts of energy those waves of bass can solve a large amount of problems the astrophysics have faced.

A blog "from the other side"

At the Buzz I found this blog: Baghdad Burning from a woman who lives in Baghdad and do not like the americans.

I think this is one of the most fantastic features and best effects of the blogging-trend: the possibilities for everyone to tell about their life and their world and that others can read and hopefully get a broader view of life and other people. Cause things like this is a document of our time:
"They traced his route from his home to Al-Jami’a Quarter, where his parents lived, pausing at every burnt vehicle to examine it and asking the people in the surrounding areas whether they had seen a white 1985 Toyota being driven by a 40-year-old man? Maybe it had been fired at by a tank? Maybe it was hit by an Apache? People were sympathetic, but helpless. No white Toyota- a blue Kia with 6 passengers, a red Volkswagen with a mother, father and two kids… but no white Toyota. Every single time, they were referred to the makeshift graves along the main roads and highways. The temporary graves, for several weeks, lined the main roads of Baghdad. "

I am not against the war but somehow I hate the way which media tend to show it: as a shoot'em up-game. Everyone is a terrorist if iraquee and the good guys is the invaders. Life ain´t that simple. There's no black and white, rather different shades of gray.

Who do you gonna call?

The lawmen and -women of Shelbyville, Indiana had to call someon else rather than taking care of business themselves when their headquarters was haunted by things that wouldn't easy be put in the slammer.

They called the real Ghostbusters, S.I.G.H.T. who is specialized on prove false spokeries.

“Because the fear of the unknown is probably one of the biggest fears that humans have,” says one of the deputys.

Me myself I'm more concerned by the known things that human's should fear.

The coloured cube isn't dead

Did you think that the brain-wrecking and teasing toy of the Gen X-childhood was dead? Think again.

And some people even make videoclips of their fast fingering solution of Rubik's idea from hell.

Learn the society

Kids outsource summer homework blues - pretty strange but also really a kind of "learning-the-society". That not everything have to be done by yourself. This instance of eventing is surely educate the Japanese kids to be full-fledged consumers and in a world we're the ability to make the right consumer-decisions this is truly gold.

Fists and pompoms

Independent: Interesting story about cheerleading in a radical way. That about 100 squads is using the pompoms and cheering to protest against globalization and other stuff.

Forget the celebs

This article speaks about that the new idealman is a "dangerous rock'n'roll-rebel and give the examples of Kate Hudson, Pam Anderson and Liv Tyler.

As a nerd it's just to bite the dust and forget all romantic dreams of the beauty in the hardtop to come and take one away.

Disgusting things when you´re ill

Until four years ago I was a smoker and the most disgusting thing to do was to smoke when one had a sore throat. Hellfire. Or need to put on clothes to go out on the balcony for a smoke. When my son arrived I quit smoking and turned the nicotine-addiction to 'snus' (wet snuff). And now I can say that the most disgusting thing is to sneeze when having wet-snuff under the lip.

So much for the dev

1995 I was part of the info-squad at the nation and our mission was clear: make something that get us good money at Wednesdays. Popcorn, a sort of mainstream trendy acidjazz-club had been a huge success for about two years but it´s successor Glorietta was extremly on-trend but sadly the students in Uppsala weren't. So time for some real populistic thinking, the "wet-finger-in-the-air"-strategy. I was in a state of creative mania and the idea started to build from the concept with the menus inside old covers from LPs. And of course should it be old music, music from our childhood and teenage wildlife.

But the name was a hard one to fetch. But a late night, on my way to bed I truly was blessed and there it was: Vinyl. No shit, Sherlock. Time to get busy. In a flash I had the concept scratched down on a piece of paper and also the sketch on the poster and flyer.

It was more than a success! The hardcore-team who worked most with the concept sat together after the opening and sunk a bottle of whiskey. They say that I was totally wired later on. Who cares?

Tonight - eight year after the glorious opening I surfed to the nations homepage and was surprised: the conept Vinyl still lives. And it´s the same logo. I did this on a Performa 450 and a LC II with Freehand 3.0. And I remember that I needed to split the original file on five or six floppies to be able to get it to the printer who printed the posters.

When googling after better pics of the logo I found a study of V-Dala's PR which was written in '02 and the brands that the writers examinating is brands which I have been active to create or re-create. Strange, nothing new happen. Or was it that we was a bunch of creatively madmen and women during my time?

Gin and cranberry-thoughts

My wife thought that everytime she drinks gin she is moved back to the time when we was students in Uppsala. The taste is taking her back to the ballroom of V-Dala nation where we dwelled all the time.

For me gin is triggering the myth of P&P who a late night sits and drink G&T and when Pk is pouring the gin beside the glass, Pc says: "Hey, pour over the soda."