February 2012
21 posts
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WikiLeaks begins publishing 5 million emails from... →
LONDON—Today WikiLeaks began publishing The Global Intelligence Files – more than five million emails from the Texas-headquartered “global intelligence” company Stratfor. The emails date from between July 2004 and late December 2011. They reveal the inner workings of a company that fronts as an intelligence publisher, but provides confidential intelligence services to large...
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Don't fall for the 'arrival fallacy', e.g. "I'll... →
An arrival fallacy in the sense of Rubin is any pattern of thinking that fits the template, I’ll be happy when ______ (Rubin credits Tal Ben-Shahar’s book Happier, which I haven’t read, for the concept).
The idea generalizes beyond happiness to any sort of goal-driven behavior. You could use templates like I’ll be ready ____ once _____. Or I’ll really understand life when ________. Call the...
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How Exercise Fuels the Brain →
Moving the body demands a lot from the brain. Exercise activates countless neurons, which generate, receive and interpret repeated, rapid-fire messages from the nervous system, coordinating muscle contractions, vision, balance, organ function and all of the complex interactions of bodily systems that allow you to take one step, then another.
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Douglas Rushkoff On Kicking the Consensus Reality... →
Rushkoff is disappointed about how technology is being used today. He describes feeling of computer networks in 1991 as being like taking acid – there was a sense that anything was possible. In Cyberia he wrote that the only people that would be able to handle the new information reality would be psychedelic people and kids. He expanded upon the notion that kids would just inherently get...
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Nanosecond Trading Could Make Markets Go Haywire →
“There’s this whole world below 650 milliseconds. It’s like landing on another planet,” said Neil Johnson, a complex systems specialist at the University of Miami and co-author of the study, released Feb. 7 on arXiv. “It’s an enormous part of the market which is out of human reach. We have a glimpse of the kind of ecology that’s going on down there.”
[…]
“We are certainly witnessing one of...
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'Global Square': Wikileaks-Backed Activist... →
WikiLeaks Central announced a “Call to Coders” Tuesday as they prepare for the March launch of the “first massive decentralized social network in the history of the Internet.”
“The goal of the Global Square is to perpetuate and spread the creative and cooperative spirit of the occupations and transform this into lasting forms of social organization, at the global as...
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Anarchistic and self-trained, are street medics... →
Anarchistic, high-energy, and self- organized, street medics have been part of activist counterculture since the 1960s, with major presences at civil-rights protests, anti–Vietnam War actions, the American Indian Movement’s occupation of Wounded Knee in 1973, anti-globalization protests in the 1990s and early aughts, and most recently, at Occupy encampments internationally. Street medics...
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Build yourself a Drone NOW (before they become... →
Build yourself a drone. Before they are made illegal.
Why?
One big reason is that drones/bots make the emergence of police states (as my tech thriller post on this topic shows) more likely since they allow a very small number of people to automate their control over a great many people. So, in order to ensure the future doesn’t careen in that direction, we should democratize the...
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The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician →
In the July/August 2001 issue of the late, great magazine Lingua Franca, James Ryerson published an enthralling article about an anonymous benefactor who was paying professors huge sums of money to review a strange 60-page philosophical manuscript. Slate editor David Plotz talked about “The Mystery of the Millionaire Metaphysician” on this week’s Political Gabfest, citing it as one of his favorite...
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The Digital Path: Smart Contracts and the Third... →
Inadequate and ill-adapted property institutions in the third world prevent the extralegal assets of the poor from serving as capital. In particular, the absence of credible systems of title transfer makes real estate holdings ineffective as collateral for loans. How can this barrier to wealth creation be surmounted? Country-by-country institutional reform is possible, but inevitably slow. New...
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The DOJ’s escalating criminalization of speech →
Over the past several years, the Justice Department has increasingly attempted to criminalize what is clearly protected political speech by prosecuting numerous individuals (Muslims, needless to say) for disseminating political views the government dislikes or considers threatening. The latest episode emerged on Friday, when the FBI announced the arrest and indictment of Jubair Ahmad, a...
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Watch1925 aka Hell is one of two animation loops directed by Max Hattler, inspired by the work of French outsider artist Augustin Lesage. 1925 is based on Lesage’s painting ‘A symbolic Composition of the Spiritual World’ from 1925.
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Do You Like Online Privacy? You May Be a Terrorist →
A flyer designed by the FBI and the Department of Justice to promote suspicious activity reporting in internet cafes lists basic tools used for online privacy as potential signs of terrorist activity. The document, part of a program called “Communities Against Terrorism”, lists the use of “anonymizers, portals, or other means to shield IP address” as a sign that a person could be engaged in or...