A couple of things culled from reading the papers in the pub, that I know I’m going to forget if I don’t shoot them on to the site now:

* YouTube yanks 30,000 clips from its site after a Japanese performing rights society rattles its sabres. Or katanas, maybe. This, after it turns out that YouTube did indeed hand chunks of itself to a few American big media companies.

* NBC, a solid fourth of four in the American network tv business, hacks out 5% of its workforce conglomerate-wide, and states that it intends to get out of the scripted tv business in the 8pm slot. There’s some confusion as to whether this means that MY NAME IS EARL and THE OFFICE, two of NBC’s few recent successes and currently filling the 8pm-9pm slot on Thursdays, will be moved. The intent seems to be to fill that slot with reality television. Because it’s apparently too hard for a monstrously rich tv company to generate five decent tv shows to counterprogram against the likes of WHO WANTS TO BE DONALD TRUMP’S SUCKFISH or something.

* And I swear to god I just read that the Henson shop is making a FRAGGLE ROCK movie. A fraggle, of course, has long been UK slang for a person requiring large amounts of brain medication.

• American Fascism Is On The Rise
  The precursors of fascism — militarization of culture, vigilantism, masculine fear of female power, xenophobia and economic destabilization — are ascendant in America today.
  (tags: pol culture)
• Police question family of woman who died after 18 hospitals refused to treat her
  Investigators told her bereaved family that they are focusing on the causal relationship between a misjudgment by doctors and the victim’s death as well as problems involving the way she was transferred to the hospital where she die
  (tags: crime med)
• Japan’s latest gourmet gimmick: one-grain sushi
  authentic sushi, but there’s only a single, tiny grain of the Japanese staple used; That leaves only enough room for the fish to no bigger than about 1 centimeter-by-2 centimeters at most.
  (tags: food)
• Judge Dismisses Charges Against Woman Who Killed Her Unborn Child
  on the morning she was scheduled to give birth, Skinner drove to an auto dealer’s parking lot, took a gun, and shot herself in the belly, killing the fetus in an act of self-abortion
  (tags: crime)
• NBC Universal makes $750M in cuts by reducing staff, scripted shows, news budget
  NBC Universal will stop scheduling high-priced dramas and comedies during the 8 p.m. to 9 p.m. slot. Jeff Zucker, chief exec, said he’ll focus on cheaper programming: “scripted shows cost too much given the lack of advertiser interest”
  (tags: tv)
• McCain jokes about suicide if Democrats win Senate
  Arizona Sen. John McCain, a likely Republican presidential contender in 2008, joked on Wednesday he would “commit suicide” if Democrats win the Senate in November
  (tags: pol)

I set up some temporary land the other night; and, in doing so, got a look at how the other half live in Second Life.

The new address is Integral Island in the region of Rockstar (55, 88, 23)

Integral Island is a long strip of beach in Rockstar, an area that’s the SL equivalent of a gated community. One island subdivided into eight strips, inaccessible by air or water. A residential area, controlled by the Rockstar owners — set up a huge shop there (or a sex factory) and you’ll be kicked out sharpish. You can teleport in to Rockstar, but you’re half-off the grid — for instance, I’ve found that I sometimes can’t buy Linden Dollars from the main exchange while I’m in Rockstar. Which makes it a peculiar interzone in Second Life.

Second Life is a transactional space, after all. You express approval of other residents, for example, by clicking on them and choosing “Rate” from the pie-chart menu that appears. You’re given the choice of rating that person’s behaviour, appearance or building skills — a rough equivalent to the reputation-based economics of Cory Doctorow’s “whuffie” in DOWN AND OUT IN THE MAGIC KINGDOM. But in SL, you have to put your money where your mouth is — it costs 25 Linden Dollars to express your approval of someone, paid directly to the central coffers of SL operators Linden Lab. Ayn Rand would smile indulgently.

SL often has the tone of a libertarian fantasy. It avoids all the bits that traditionally handicap libertarian politics; freedom in SL is the freedom from having to worry about the maintenance of roads and getting water to come out of your tap. You don’t need to eat, but even the obtaining of a penis that can ejaculate is subject to a financial transaction with another enterprising capitalist (two hundred Linden Dollars, according to a design firm whose buildings I was looking at yesterday). In some places, you have to buy a pass to cross owners’ land.

All of which is interesting in light of this week’s news that, in America, politicians and committees and the like are taking a sudden interest in the amount of untaxed money being shot around the Second Life system. That and Reuters setting up an embedded reporter led to Second Life hitting the front pages of most web-based news outlets yesterday — and the resultant rush of people signing up to take a look at SL before the IRS crush it slowed the entire grid to a crawl.

I have enough Linden Dollars from the sale of my old patch to stay in Rockstar for about three months. My new neighbours busy themselves with laying watching the simulated weather (which can be quite beautiful: the SL designers knew what they were doing when they built the sunsets) and building strange things. The guy across the waterway from me is constructing a hideous meatball surgery unit, full of troughed steel operating tables sluiced with blood. Medical fetishists would keel over with love.

Integral Island, Rockstar (55, 88, 23)

A Muslim classroom assistant suspended by a school for wearing a veil in lessons has lost her claim of religious discrimination at a tribunal.

Aishah Azmi, 23, was asked to remove the veil after the school in Dewsbury, W Yorks, said pupils found it hard to understand her.

Ms Azmi, who is originally from Cardiff, said: “Muslim women who wear the veils are not aliens..”

Here’s Ms Azmi as she appeared at the press conference, dressed as a linen Dalek.

Metamaterials!

A US-British team of scientists has successfully tested a cloak of invisibility in the laboratory.

The device hid a small copper cylinder from passing microwaves in tests at Duke University in North Carolina.

It works by deflecting the microwaves around the object and restoring them on the other side, as if they had passed through empty space.

The cloak consists of 10 fibreglass rings covered with copper elements. This is classed as a “metamaterial” – an artificial composite that can be engineered to produce a desired change in the direction of electromagnetic waves. The precise variations in the shape of copper elements patterned on to the ring surfaces determines their properties.

In the experiment, the team used microwaves to try to detect the metal cylinder within the cloak. Like light waves, microwaves bounce off objects making them visible and creating a shadow, though at microwave frequencies the detection has to be made by instruments rather than the naked eye.

The metamaterial cloak channelled the microwaves around the object like water in a river flowing around a smooth rock. When water flows around a rock, the water recombines on the opposite side. Someone looking at the water downstream would never guess it had passed by a rock.

In principle, the same theoretical blueprint could be used to cloak objects from visible light. But this would pose a challenge, as nano-scale engineering would be needed to make the cloak.

The researchers say that if an object can be hidden from microwaves, it can be hidden from radar – a possibility that will fascinate the military. Cloaking differs from stealth technology, which does not make an aircraft invisible but reduces the cross-section available to radar, making it hard to track.

From MSN-Mainichi Daily News:

Condoms and needles were the theme for one fashion show on Oct. 12 at Ukraine Fashion Week in a collection devoted to highlighting the country’s epidemic HIV problem.

The collection, displayed in the capital Kiev, was produced by Ukrainian designer Oleksiy Zalevskiy, who dedicated the collection to HIV-sufferers and invited some to take part in the show as models.

Ukraine has the highest prevalence of HIV in Europe. UNAIDS estimates that there are between 360,000 and 590,000 sufferers in the country, with the majority of sufferers drug users using infected needles.

“Edgar Allan Poe” – a triptych:

Via GNN: William R. Polk, member of the U.S. Policy Planning Council responsible for the Middle East from 1961 to 1965, professor of history, author of many books on international affairs, writes:

After careful study of recent moves and statements by the Bush Administration, I have concluded that there is at least a 10% chance of an American attack on Iran before the November 7 Congressional elections and about a 90% chance before the administration’s end in 2008.

…why do I predict an American attack on Iran?… Mr. Bush’s belief that he has a God-given task which he must accomplish before he leaves office – and perhaps even before the forthcoming Congressional elections might cripple his means of action. His belief that what his own intelligence experts tell him is wrong, that Iran actually is about to acquire the bomb, is stirring the pot of Middle Eastern terrorism and is a threat to the existence of Israel. Finally, he believes he has the authority, given by the American people in his two elections and through Congressional approval of his war with Afghanistan, to act.

See previously: US Iran report branded dishonest, and The March to War: Naval Build-Up in the Persian Gulf & the Eastern Mediterranean

A proposed EU directive is written badly enough that it can be interpreted as extending broadcasting regulations to the net:

The European Commission proposal would require websites and mobile phone services that feature video images to conform to standards laid down in Brussels.

Ministers fear that the directive would hit not only successful sites such as YouTube but also amateur “video bloggers” who post material on their own sites. Personal websites would have to be licensed as a “television-like service”.

Viviane Reding, the Media Commissioner, argues that the purpose is simply to set minimum standards on areas such as advertising, hate speech and the protection of children.

But Shaun Woodward, the Broadcasting Minister, described the draft proposal as catastrophic. He said: “Supposing you set up a website for your amateur rugby club, uploaded some images and added a link advertising your local sports shop. You would then be a supplier of moving images and need to be licensed and comply with the regulations.”

The draft rules, known as the Television Without Frontiers directive, extend the definition of broadcasting to cover services such as video-on-demand or mobile phone clips…

This entry is mostly to test the post-by-mail function from my AOL Mobile software, here on my Treo 600 as I work through my third Red Bull in the pub. The only travel I have scheduled for the rest of the year are a couple of day trips into London, I think, but I wanted to make sure this was working nonetheless. Later on, I’m going to try to MMS into the site, but I want to be at home for that, to make sure the phone company’s idents and text wrappers are stripped out before publishing.
In theory, I could send audio and video files into the site from the phone. But I’ve found, over the years, that spoken-word stuff is really less effective for me than writing. For me, there seems little point in reading aloud something that can be communicated more quickly by written word. And it’s not like I have a voice like, say, Melissa Gira’s, which you could listen to all day if she were reading out the phone book.
My friend Lenora Claire’s been doing some broadcasting on Sirius in the US, and asked me why I haven’t done radio (as if it were as easy as that, Lenora!). I can’t imagine ever having that opportunity. Even though, as the joke goes, I have the perfect face for radio. But I’m too much the writer: once I’d written a script to read, that’d feel like the job was done. And I’m too foul-mouthed for live radio — I’d be Jools Holland on British children’s tv, exhorting kids to watch The Tube “if you’re a groovy fucker.”

• Sri Lanka tourist city port hit
  Tamil Tiger rebels have carried out a suicide attack on a naval base in the southern Sri Lankan tourist city of Galle… the first time a tourist hub has been caught up in the latest fighting.
  (tags: war pol)
• Sexerati: Smart Sex. » Blog Archive » Rubbers on Rails
  Condoms 2.0
  (tags: sex design)

Oslo-based video artist Endre Tveitan:

Endre Tveitan works in the field of video, often in collaboration with sound artist Lars Lervik. Many of the works are collages showing several video images composed into one ever changing “video picture”. The collages often represent urban landscapes, sometimes containing small narratives

Collected and available for download via the folk heroes of Grey Lodge/Gpod:

…the system is not only the power that oppresses people in this or that a way or visible forms of political repression. Power is also what systematizes our thought, feelings, art, and culture in invisible ways. If we don’t become aware of this and shake its foundations, we cannot move the structure of power in a real sense.

Coinciding with my daughter’s birthday, weirdly:

I really need to get to the pub, but I just found this on BLDGBLOG while sorting through my Bloglines backlog, and you need to see this (and I need to save it). Go and read the whole thing. Here’s some pullquotes:

…the helicopter archipelago is an independent micronation of solar-powered helicopters, a flying island chain:
A kind of flying Hawaii, or anti-gravitational Micronesia…

…the helicopter archipelago would act as an escape hatch from traditional, nation-state sovereignty. Its government would be a parliament of pilots…

Once the archipelago is aloft for more than a century, the International Geological Society will declare it a flying continent, the world’s first airborne tectonic plate…

Some speculate that, two million years from now, the archipelago’s ruins will still hover in the sky: a ghostly blur across the north Atlantic horizon…

If all that doesn’t do something to you, you’re dead. Or, at the very least, you’re not me, which amounts to the same thing.

(also)

Just found these lurking on my phone: a couple of shots from drinks with Joss Whedon, Bryan Hitch, Natalie Haynes and Nick Letchfield and his colleague from SFX Magazine. We’re in the “Honesty Bar” of a London hotel.

Here, Joss is clearly trying to blind me under the pretense of setting up lighting for some portraits of us he’s shooting. Despite his Gestapo tactics, I am refusing to tell him how to grow a proper beard like Alan Moore’s. Mr Hitch is the man in glasses on the right, quietly thinking about Bach, white wine and swans.

Joss checks to make sure he’s captured Bryan’s soul in his scary camera, which flings out laser viewfinder shapes like the Predator’s gun. I fear it. Natalie Haynes was camphoning it like me. Bryan’s gone for another gin and tonic, suffering cultural disgust at the amount of electronics in the room and the utter lack of baby grand pianos. The two guys from SFX are already so drunk that they cannot see, and are asking Joss if Buffy would rather fuck Captain Kirk or Captain Picard.*

* this is a lie.

• ninjatune.net.podcasts
  (tags: podcast mp3 music)
• Plague found in northern DR Congo
  An outbreak of pneumonic plague in the Democratic Republic of Congo has killed 42 people over the past two months, the World Health Organization reports.
  (tags: med gmf)
• Active volcano may be changing Titan’s bright spot
  The brightest spot on Saturn’s moon Titan has been seen brightening and growing, suggesting it might be an active volcano. If so, it would be the first indication of current volcanic activity on the giant moon.
  (tags: space)
• The veil is banned in UK hospitals
  The backlash against the veil grew yesterday as it was banned from hospitals. Muslim medical students were barred from wearing it when they talk to hospital patients.
  (tags: pol med culture)
• Aitor Throup – Part II: Branding Through Construction
  Aitor Throup has taken his characters to the next level, sculpting them and then making a garment pattern based on the pose of the character’s form in motion. He calls this process, “branding through construction”.
  (tags: design)

(ModBlog)