March 28, 2009
GhostNet
Tracking GhostNet: Investigating a Cyber Espionage Network. "A vast electronic spying operation has infiltrated computers and has stolen documents from hundreds of government and private offices around the world, including those of the Dalai Lama, Canadian researchers have concluded. In a report to be issued this weekend, the researchers said that the system was being controlled from computers based almost exclusively in China, but that they could not say conclusively that the Chinese government was involved." [more inside]
New life for traditional Japanese music?
Jero, or Jerome Wright, Jr. is the first black singer of traditional Japanese enka music. Here he performs a duet - him wearing hip-hop garb, his partner in a kimono. He won the Best New Artist Award in Japan, and appeared today at the Cherry Blossom festival in Washington DC.
Delicious With Mayonnaise
Put that in your pipe and smoke it
Keep watching the skies - The New York Times looks back at 50s Sci Fi films in anticipation of Alien Trespass, the new film from X-Files veteran R.K. Goodwin. One or two of those classics haven't even been remade yet!
The World According to Hoyle.
The World According to Hoyle. Matt Hoyle is a commercial and fine art photographer based out of New York City. His portfolio includes Barnumville, a fictitious 1940s town of sideshow performers, and a series of cinematic shots from movies that were never made.
Yes, he uses Photoshop, but I can't predict if you'll like or hate the final results. (He apparently has a long, happy relationship with saturation.) Yes, the site uses a Flash interface, but it's easy to switch from the default full display to thumbnails to full screen, and you can link to specific images. No, there are no pictures of his near-namesake mathowie anywhere in his portfolio. I checked. (via)
Weapons of Mass UNDO
"Since I attacked my opponent in the past and the time waves have not yet propagated the results of this battle to the present, my units are still here in the present" Got that? Meta-Time Strategy Gaming [more inside]
Why I'm Alone
Why I'm Alone: "People ask me why I'm still alone, and why I don't seek to date much, eight years after my husband died. I thought about it the other day, and came up with a few of the reasons."
Movement
Stop, mormontime
The Green Manalishi with a two prong crown
Peter Green's Fleetwood Mac, formed with some former members of John Mayall's Bluesbreakers played some amazing blues-rock from 1967-1970 (long before Fleetwood Mac's descent into '70s wuss-rock). "Like it this way", "Oh well", "Rattlesnake Shake", "Shake your moneymaker" and the original version of "Black Magic Woman". Peter Green struggled with drugs and mental problems, penning "The Green Manilishi with the two prong crown" shortly before leaving the band. [more inside]
A Farm For The Future
A Farm For The Future. Wildlife filmmaker Rebecca Hosking, previously in the public eye campaigning for the banning of plastic bags in the UK, is moving back to the family farm to take over from her father. This "deeply hopeful but realistic film" describes her investigation of the steps she could take to change it from a traditional beef pasture farm to a truly sustainable permaculture environment. [more inside]
References: Conway, J., 2009. Personal inspection of a real live dead Rhamphorhynchus, really!
"My cat dragged in what appeared to be an odd-looking bird. Imagine my excitement when on closer inspection, it proved to be a real live dead Rhamphorhynchus! I had to dissect it immediately! Unfortunately, my camera jammed, so I had to paint the whole process." - John Conway's Paleontography
This Would Save a Lot of Time
World Builder by Bruce Branit. A strange man builds a world using holographic tools for the woman he loves. There's more at Not Possible in Real Life, dedicated to identifying and sharing well conceived and realized content creation in Second Life® that would not be possible in real life.
Serf Emancipation Day
Tibet serf debate shadows China's "emancipation day". Like Juneteeth or Martin Luther King Day, Tibet's Serf Emancipation Day commemorates the freeing of a million serfs in 1959. Much like the descendants of slaveowners mocking Martin Luther King Day, the descendants of Tibet's aristocracy have announced Smurf Emancipation Day.
Animal behaviour: Grape expectations
Hydrogen. It's the fuel of the future, and it always will be.
Pics of the new Tesla S-Model have been leaked. With an anticipated price tag of 50K and a potential 45-minute recharge time, will this finally kick-start a true replacement to the internal combustion engine? And if so, where will the electricity come from? What future is there for the fuel-cell vehicle, or will fuel cells remain stationary? Is that really it for hydrogen? [more inside]
When the Shuttle program nearly ended - in 1988
"I said to myself, 'we are going to die.'" Space Shuttle commander Hoot Gibson on his reaction as he saw pictures from the Shuttle's robot arm of gouged and missing tiles along its underbelly. Shades of Columbia - but this was mission STS-27, over fourteen years earlier. Yet mission control discounted the reports from orbit, perhaps misled by the poor quality of the downlinked images that resulted from encryption demanded by the mission's secretive military profile. In the end, Atlantis made it back, but with visible damage along her right flank. But like most classified DoD missions of the time, little was reported, and NASA was arguably wary of drawing attention to the near-loss of only the second flight since the Challenger disaster. But if this near-miss had been better known, might NASA have been more concerned about indications of debris damage during the launch of STS-107?
I was picturing a basket
The trailer for "After Last Season" quietly appeared on the Apple site recently. But what is it? Some suggest a hoax, others a parody. Apple lists it as a comedy, IMDB as a thriller. [more inside]
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