No Data Source

Wow, building blocks of cardboard, that form platforms that you can stand on!  It’s like foldable balsa wood!!  Check out swissmiss on bloxes. 

You remember Hoffman’s opus, “Steal This Book”, a manifesto for all things anti-establishment, urging future readers to go ahead and break the legs I’m standing on.  There was a similar one called Steal This Computer Book released by O’Reilly, which I thought was kinda a good subtle reference to the past.  I checked it out, some interesting stuff, but maybe not worth the cashola.  I recently saw this posting on bOING bOING about the most commonly stolen books.  It referenced Flying Off The Shelves: The Pleasures and Perils of Chasing Book Theives. Tellingly, the ten most commonly stolen authors are:

• Charles Bukowski
• Jim Thompson
• Philip K. Dick
• William S. Burroughs
• Any Graphic Novel

It goes on to say that Crowley’s books have to be kept behind glass in many stores because they dissappear so fast!    I have read a few of Bukowski’s books, being the alcoholic humorist, I suppose I can kinda see it, what with his anti-everything life perspective.  Thompson, I don’t really know, Philip K. Dick is of course a classic and brilliant scifi writer, though I still don’t see the connection.  Burroughs, well what more needs to be said there!Anyway, interesting stuff.  I’m surprised more libertarian classics don’t show up in the list. 

This movie like Blade Runner before it, takes us a step beyond. Throw in Wim Wenders Until the End of the World where a machine that can read our dreams falls into the wrong hands, and you have yourself a very compelling & intriguing story. But this is more than that.

Taken just for it’s visual mastery would win it awards in my book, with one image flowing into the next faster than you can follow it. It flows like a real dreamscape, but more vivid. The psychedelic influence is in evidence, as are the architypes that are the psyche of Japan.

It is cyberpunk in it’s ideas of the future, of a technology that may read our thoughts, our dreams, allowing us to first play them back and recall, then change and manipulate them until eventually dream and reality collide, and no one knows where one ends and the other starts.

This movie is ahead of it’s time.

As cyber-sexy as these images are, yes they are work safe. Got these from artist Milk’s myspace page. She’s from Tucson Arizona.

Thanks Noorin!

No Data Source has a few adsense banner sections. Look what Google sent us yesturday!! I still can’t figure this one out. Maybe Digital Maoists are also republicans? Or perhaps libertarians? Funny…

Was reading this book Get Anyone To Do Anything by David Lieberman.  Interesting stuff, all about human nature, what makes us tick, who we respond to and why, and so on.

Anyway, there’s one section on conflict, and it has a number of phrases that are total mind-f*ckery.  So I thought you’d all enjoy them.  Basically they cause the mind to loop, and the person loses their train of thought.

• Why are you asking me what you don’t know for sure?
• Do you really believe what you thought you knew?
• I understand what you’re saying; it doesn’t make it true.
• If you expected me to believe that, you wouldn’t have said it.
• Your question is what you knew it would be, isn’t it?
• Do you believe that you knew what you thought?
• Are you unaware of what you forgot?

Good stuff…. I’m hypnotizing myself while I type those…

After a very long hiatus, we are back and rockin it old school again. Now with Wordpress… so much easier to use the Postnuke ever was.

Take a gander below at the lanier post. That’s right the last time we posted was Oct 3rd 2006!! It feels oh so good to be back.

We will certainly be rockin a fancy theme in a day or two, so keep your eyes peeled for all sorts of goodness on the No Data down low…

Jaron Lanier is one of a handful of thinkers who grok the Kurzweil concepts, yet maintain a healthy skepticism…

In this edge.org piece
Digital Maoism he talks about online collectivism, a la wikipedia and related sites. He explains that this is not like representative democracy or meritocracy, as all opinions, and all ideas carry equal weight, for bad or worse…

In Sudan a man takes goat as wife. Well he was forced, but perhaps he loves the goat…

Huey Lewis, no. Huey Newton was an important black activist and founder of the black pnthers. Interesting read.

Now I’m really marking myself indellibly in your mind as an uber-geek. But seriously Science and the City is a pretty good read.

Y’all better get down and do your research. Erik Satie.

Many scientific studies are coming out now showing a connection between over cleanliness and allergies. Here we are trying to protect ourselves from plague, rotting teeth, rates, and syphallis of yesturyear, and just when we got the bath thing down, they tell us we’re overdoing it!

If you’re interested in the extremes of the human condition, then I think contortion will always be intriguing. Are these people unusually flexible naturally, or able to endur regular pain to reach incredible heights. Probably a bit of both.

Possi’s Contortion

You all better get your ass on top of Quetzalcoatl, or at the very least, read Pinchbecks new novel.

BTW, just found out how to pronounce that. It’s something like KATE-ZEL-KWAT.

Although ultimately war is all about the survival of one tribe against another, after WWII, the UN put together laws of war. I read about jus in bello and jus ad bellum in the economist recently.

The former refers to limits to the madness of war, a la the Geneva Conventions, and what is are war crimes. The latter refers to justifications for war.

So much to read, so little time. The Vision of 2051 by Joe Firmage.

Read Dana Plato’s Corpse an article from the old dot-com gettingit.com about the celebrity chick from facts of life, and her strange death…

Yes, I just heard the interview on the RU Sirius show.

This is work safe, as long as you sit behind your desk!

…
lovely chinese ladies.

A couple of interesting articles, one on smiles + body language and the other on how to be charming or how to charm… It’s funny, now that I think about it, to be charming, is almost always positive, endearing, and attractive, while to charm, is sometimes derogatory, snake-like…

The idea of plants communicating is rather new in science, although good botanists or anyone with a bountiful garden might tell you that’s obvious. At any rate, here’s an interesting article on Fig plants communicating with Wasps.

Thanks Jing.

The radical cartography project juxtaposes different cities next to eachother to give you a sense of scale. That and everyone knows maps are cool, so check it out!

Interesting Southeast Asian mythology talks of a spirit called a Toyol. The spirit is used for mischief, and no-good, and they sometimes explain disappearing money, or other valuables. Use needles to ward them off, since they’re afraid of needles.

Thanks Noorin.

Y’all know who the pre-raphaelites were, don’t you? Ok, I didn’t either until recently, but it’s a good read, and we’re down with them, yo!

According to the old science, the old thinking, the universe follows a set of undying laws and is defined by various constants that do not change. But Quantum Physics is screwing everything up. Apparently now even physical constants, such as the speed of light, are not fixed.

If you talk to some science geek who laughs at paranormal phenomenon, esp, or aliens, recite some of modern string theory. There’s room to drive a paranormal truck through that now.

Check out what Alan Kay has to say on the subject:

Einstein said “You must learn to distinguish between what is true and what is real”. An apt longer quote of his is: “As far as the laws of mathematics refer to reality, they are not certain; and as far as they are certain, they do not refer to reality”. I.e. it is “true” that the three angles of a triangle add up to 180 in Euclidean geometry of the plane, but it is not known how to show that this could hold in our physical universe (if there is any mass or energy in our universe then it doesn’t seem to hold, and it is not actually known what our universe would be like without any mass or energy).

Uh, that’s what I was gonna say!

Perhaps we were aquatic apes after we were savanah apes? So says this theory. Read through it, there seems to be a lot of sense to it, as it explains a lot other theories don’t.

According to these cognitive scientists, a group of Aymara indians from South America view time in reverse of how we do. To me it seems a questions of semantics, and linguistics, but perhaps I’m missing something…

This is a pretty cool collection of photos and advertisements of products before drugs were bad!!

 Here’s a nice howto article on turning an old (or cheap) webcam into an infrared camera.