Xeni Jardin
on tribe.net’s idiot
self-censorship

Author and sexblogger/podcaster Violet Blue tells Boing Boing that popular social networking site Tribe.net is proactively, voluntarily applying 2257 laws to its members and service architecture. This makes approximately zero to the tenth power sense. Tribe is not a producer of content, they’re a forum for end-users to communicate and share content they create…

UPDATE: discussions about this are happening at Tribe, here and here. Thanks, Xeni.

The Apparat Programme broadcast at ninety-six kilobits per second in broadband 9: dark little whispers for dark little days

(27.36 mins) (19.0MB) (direct download)
Pick up The Apparat Programme automatically via podcasty thing or iTunes using this address: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Apparat

All music was donated directly to the Programme by the artists. The running order for Programme 9 is:

lowercase collective – “Secrets Don’t Wake Up” (3:31)
The Great Indoors – “Herbert & George” (5:05)
Alex Tarampi – “Heet” (2:32)
Steve Long – “The Hand” (2:33)
Daddy Long Legs – “Soup” (2:48)
333 – “Skudder” (3:49)
Theory Anesthetic – “The Transient” (4:49)
The Saturday Night Things – “Female Trouble” (2:29)

(links, stats etc to follow — am chasing deadlines today! I believe all artists are Googleable anyway)

Direct downloads of previous Programmes: 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

If you enjoyed the Apparat Programme, please spread the word, linking back to this post. Just one line in your blog and a link would help. Feel free to hotlink the Apparat stamp.

I need new music. If you want your music to be included in an Apparat Programme, email your mp3 files directly to warrenellis@gmail.com.

Via DEFAMER:

In CRANK, Jason Statham is a hitman who’s been shot up with a Chinese poison that will kill him if his adrenaline level drops… “What Jason must do to keep his adrenaline up is insane. He has to hammer nails into his legs, snort coke and have crazy sex in public.”

People lacking any sense of fashion no longer need worry about their scarf clashing with their clothes this winter – researchers have created one that automatically changes colour to suit an outfit.

The colour-shifting garment, dubbed a chameleon shawl, was developed by Akira Wakita and colleagues at Keio University in Tokyo, Japan.

Interwoven into the scarf material are pixels containing red, blue and green light-emitting diodes (LEDs), so adjusting the brightness of each type of diode turns the scarf a different overall shade.

A small sensor embedded in the garment also enables it to identify the colour of the nearest item of clothing. A microcomputer then selects a suitable colour for the scarf itself to adopt…

(Fear not: very soon, those wily Japanese will find a way, as they do with everything, to fuck it.)

Art and design by Stuart Immonen, all sizes available at link:

Computer simulations show that a common nanoparticle called a buckyball has the potential to damage DNA. The simulations suggest that buckyballs bind strongly to the DNA strands, distorting the molecules and interfering with functions like self-repair.

Researchers caution that the simulations do not prove that buckyballs actually do any damage in the real world. But the work does raise another concern about possible dangers of nanotechnology…

The worry is that even familiar materials, such as carbon, might have completely different health effects at the nanoscale. One recent study, for instance, found that buckyballs accumulate in the brains of largemouth bass and cause cell damage…

One of the Milky Way’s star-studded spiral arms lies twice as close to Earth as some previous estimates suggested. New research has produced the most accurate distance measurement ever made of the arm, which could help astronomers understand how our galaxy’s spiral structure formed.

The Milky Way appears to be made up of four main arms that curve around its centre like a pinwheel. “However, our view from the interior makes it difficult to determine its spiral structure,” writes a team led by Ye Xu of the Shanghai Astronomical Observatory in China, in Science.

Measuring the distance to the spiral arms can be particularly tricky. This is because astronomers can only measure the speed of an astronomical object in terms of how fast it is moving towards or away from the Earth. Comparing this speed to theoretical models, which assume the objects travel on circular paths around the centre of the galaxy, allows astronomers to deduce the object’s distance from Earth.

Astronomers using this technique had previously estimated the distance to Perseus, the arm immediately beyond the Sun, at more than 13,000 light years. But other researchers arrived at half that distance using a method that compares the apparent brightness of massive, young stars with estimates of their intrinsic brightness.

Now Xu’s team has used a third technique – 100 times more accurate than the other two – to conclude the Perseus arm is indeed relatively close, at just 6400 light years from Earth.

Hawaii to the Caribbean
They used a system of 10 radio dishes that boasts the sharpest vision of any telescope in existence. Called the Very Long Baseline Array (VLBA), the dishes – each spanning 25 metres – are scattered from Hawaii to the Caribbean Sea.

They focused on a star-forming region called W3OH inside the Perseus arm. Bright, young stars in the region heat methanol vapour in gas clouds around them, which in turn emits radio waves in what are called “masers”. The team tracked the masers at five intervals over the course of a year…

Dutch scientists are putting together remarkable maps showing pollution over Europe…

Manzanino passes on some additional information about the superhallucinogen BZ, including the possibility that it was deployed in Viet Nam.

The story starts over a year ago with a Marine blogger in Iraq. On June 2nd 2004 “The Green Side” describes suicidal attacks by insurgents in Fallujah: “We could not understand why they kept coming but they did.” The reason, it turned out, was drugs: “…these ‘holy warriors’ are taking drugs to get high before attacks. It true, as we pushed into the town in April many Marines came across drug paraphernalia (mostly heroin). Recently, we have gotten evidence of them using another drug BZ that makes them high and very aggressive.”

BZ is not your typical substance of abuse. It’s a hallucinogenic chemical weapon…

Scientists are monitoring the progress of a 390-metre wide asteroid discovered last year that is potentially on a collision course with the planet, and are imploring governments to decide on a strategy for dealing with it.

Nasa has estimated that an impact from Apophis, which has an outside chance of hitting the Earth in 2036, would release more than 100,000 times the energy released in the nuclear blast over Hiroshima. Thousands of square kilometres would be directly affected by the blast but the whole of the Earth would see the effects of the dust released into the atmosphere.

And, scientists insist, there is actually very little time left to decide…

“Our garbage can got run over and damaged by a car when the wind blew it in the street. Last night the lid blew away, to run free with the wolves. I hate that lid. Maybe I’m simply jealous of its freedom.”

Former Prime Minister Baroness Thatcher has been taken to hospital after “feeling faint…”

A trick for transferring quantum information from atoms to photons and back again could be used to create impenetrable global communication networks and computers that work at astounding speeds.

Two research groups, one led by Mikail Lukin at Harvard University and the second headed by Alex Kuzmich of Georgia Institute of Technology, both in the US, separately demonstrated the feat using similar methods.

Both teams employed powerful laser pulses to extract quantum information from a cloud of atoms in the form of a single photon. That photon was then transmitted through a normal optical fibre before its quantum state was transferred to a second atomic cloud.

Creating communication links between such “quantum memories” – the clouds of atoms – is crucial to building complex networks that exploit quantum phenomena, such as entanglement and superposition. Quantum networks are extremely sensitive to interference, but hold great promise for secure communications and superfast computing…

Tesco is launching what it claims is the world’s first musical sandwich.

The sandwich plays a medley of Christmas tunes when the packaging is opened. It features the same technology used in talking greetings cards.

“The concept of musical sandwiches is something we’ve been looking at for a while now and we thought Christmas would be the perfect time,” said Tesco spokesman Jonathan Church. “If they prove to be as successful as we think then we will consider a whole range of musical sandwiches. One idea already under consideration is working with record companies to launch songs by new artists on the market by way of the musical sandwich.”

Tesco’s musical sandwich is a traditional Christmas combination of turkey and cranberry sauce with pork and cranberry stuffing.

It plays a medley of classic Christmas tunes including Jingle Bells, Santa Claus is Coming to Town and We Wish You a Merry Christmas.

And he goes off at L. Brent Bozell III, head of the Parents Television Council (PTC), at a “Decency In The Media” forum headed by a Republican:

“What has made America great is, it’s a free country, and when you are a First Amendment person, you must allow into the marketplace that which you find to be meretricious, untidy, unwholesome and sometimes just plain stupid, but that’s the price you pay for democracy. A democracy is quite messy. If you want to have a pristine television show, you go to Burma or you go to North Korea, and you’ll find yourself in a pristine world where nothing that the government doesn’t want on the air is on the air. That’s the price you pay, Brent, for a democracy.”

Melissa Gira
announces Sexerati

First end-of-the-year-secret-project revealed: today Sexerati has opened. I’ll be blogging daily on sex & culture for the erotic elite. This is your cue to email me your smartest and filthiest tips, and say, “Thank fuck, I can get finely-filtered sex news along with my girly photos.”

These are your instructions for the day. They are very simple.

Punch someone in the face. And when they ask why, say: “Warren Ellis told me to do it.”

This is good for everybody. You get to pick someone who’s annoying the shit out of you and punch them in the face without responsibility, because I told you to do it. Eventually, word of all this will get out to the news services, and I will be Sinister Mind-Controlling Internet Jesus, which will do wonders for my book sales. We all win.

Off you go.

– W

I believe some of you have tattoos based on my works. I think there should be a collection and a public display of such things. So, even if I’ve seen them before, email me a photo of your Ellisbrainderived tattoo to warrene @ aol.com, would you? Ta.

– W

It was at least the third fatal dog attack in metro Detroit this year. In all cases, the dogs were family pets.

According to Detroit police spokesman James Tate, police were called to the Stiles home shortly after 4 p.m. When they arrived, they saw the dog outside the house. His face was bloody.

The dog turned toward one police officer and charged him…