A NOBLE ATTEMPT AT HOMEOSTASIS

Screen Print Like A Bad Ass

2008-02-12T09:00:00.001-08:00

A must-read for designers. Awesome 5-color screen print tutorial that saved my ass today.

read more | digg story

Yum.

2007-12-19T11:32:00.001-08:00

I enjoy Chinese food best, I believe.

Stem cell breakthrough uses no embryos - Yahoo! News

2007-11-20T13:31:00.000-08:00

Stem cell breakthrough uses no embryos - Yahoo! News

By MALCOLM RITTER, AP Science Writer 13 minutes ago

NEW YORK - Scientists have made ordinary human skin cells take on the chameleon-like powers of embryonic stem cells, a startling breakthrough that might someday deliver the medical payoffs of embryo cloning without the controversy.

Laboratory teams on two continents report success in a pair of landmark papers released Tuesday. It's a neck-and-neck finish to a race that made headlines five months ago, when scientists announced that the feat had been accomplished in mice.

The "direct reprogramming" technique avoids the swarm of ethical, political and practical obstacles that have stymied attempts to produce human stem cells by cloning embryos.

Scientists familiar with the work said scientific questions remain and that it's still important to pursue the cloning strategy, but that the new work is a major coup.

"This work represents a tremendous scientific milestone — the biological equivalent of the Wright Brothers' first airplane," said Dr. Robert Lanza, chief science officer of Advanced Cell Technology, which has been trying to extract stem cells from cloned human embryos.

"It's a bit like learning how to turn lead into gold," said Lanza, while cautioning that the work is far from providing medical payoffs.

"It's a huge deal," agreed Rudolf Jaenisch, a prominent stem cell scientist at the Whitehead Institute in Cambridge, Mass. "You have the proof of principle that you can do it."

The White House lauded the papers, saying such research is what President Bush was advocating when he twice vetoed legislation to pave the way for taxpayer-funded embryo research.

There is a catch with the new technique. At this point, it requires disrupting the DNA of the skin cells, which creates the potential for developing cancer. So it would be unacceptable for the most touted use of embryonic cells: creating transplant tissue that in theory could be used to treat diseases like diabetes, Parkinson's, and spinal cord injury.

But the DNA disruption is just a byproduct of the technique, and experts said they believe it can be avoided.

The new work is being published online by two journals, Cell and Science. The Cell paper is from a team led by Dr. Shinya Yamanaka of Kyoto University; the Science paper is from a team led by Junying Yu, working in the lab of in stem-cell pioneer James Thomson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Both reported creating cells that behaved like stem cells in a series of lab tests.

Thomson, 48, made headlines in 1998 when he announced that his team had isolated human embryonic stem cells.

Yamanaka gained scientific notice in 2006 by reporting that direct reprogramming in mice had produced cells resembling embryonic stem cells, although with significant differences. In June, his group and two others announced they'd created mouse cells that were virtually indistinguishable from stem cells.

For the new work, the two men chose different cell types from a tissue supplier. Yamanaka reprogrammed skin cells from the face of an unidentified 36-year-old woman, and Thomson's team worked with foreskin cells from a newborn. Thomson, who was working his way from embryonic to fetal to adult cells, said he's still analyzing his results with adult cells.

Both labs did basically the same thing. Each used viruses to ferry four genes into the skin cells. These particular genes were known to turn other genes on and off, but just how they produced cells that mimic embryonic stem cells is a mystery.

"People didn't know it would be this easy," Thomson said. "Thousands of labs in the United States can do this, basically tomorrow."

The Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, which holds three patents for Thomson's work, is applying for patents involving his new research, a spokeswoman said. Two of the four genes he used were different from Yamanaka's recipe.

Scientists prize embryonic stem cells because they can turn into virtually any kind of cell in the body. The cloning approach — which has worked so far only in mice and monkeys — should be able to produce stem cells that genetically match the person who donates body cells for cloning.

That means tissue made from the cells should be transplantable into that person without fear of rejection. Scientists emphasize that any such payoff would be well in the future, and that the more immediate medical benefits would come from basic research in the lab.

In fact, many scientists say the cloning technique has proven too expensive and cumbersome in its current form to produce stem cells routinely for transplants.

The new work shows that the direct reprogramming technique can also produce versatile cells that are genetically matched to a person. But it avoids several problems that have bedeviled the cloning approach.

For one thing, it doesn't require a supply of unfertilized human eggs, which are hard to obtain for research and subjects the women donating them to a surgical procedure. Using eggs also raises the ethical questions of whether women should be paid for them.

In cloning, those eggs are used to make embryos from which stem cells are harvested. But that destroys the embryos, which has led to political opposition from President Bush, the Roman Catholic church and others.

Those were "show-stopping ethical problems," said Laurie Zoloth, director of Northwestern University's Center for Bioethics, Science and Society.

The new work, she said, "redefines the ethical terrain."

Richard Doerflinger of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops called the new work "a very significant breakthrough in finding morally unproblematic alternatives to cloning. ... I think this is something that would be readily acceptable to Catholics."

White House spokesman Tony Fratto said the new method does not cross what Bush considers an "ethical line." And Republican Sen. Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, a staunch opponent of publicly funded embryonic stem cell research, said it should nullify the debate.

Another advantage of direct reprogramming is that it would qualify for federal research funding, unlike projects that seek to extract stem cells from human embryos, noted Doug Melton, co-director of the Harvard Stem Cell Institute.

Still, scientific questions remain about the cells produced by direct reprogramming, called "iPS" cells. One is how the cells compare to embryonic stem cells in their behavior and potential. Yamanaka said his work detected differences in gene activity.

If they're different, iPS cells might prove better for some scientific uses and cloned stem cells preferable for other uses. Scientists want to study the roots of genetic disease and screen potential drug treatments in their laboratories, for example.

Scottish researcher Ian Wilmut, famous for his role in cloning Dolly the sheep a decade ago, told London's Daily Telegraph that he is giving up the cloning approach to produce stem cells and plans to pursue direct reprogramming instead.

Other scientists said it's too early for the field to follow Wilmut's lead. Cloning embryos to produce stem cells remains too valuable as a research tool, Jaenisch said.

Dr. George Daley of the Harvard institute, who said his own lab has also achieved direct reprogramming of human cells, said it's not clear how long it will take to get around the cancer risk problem. Nor is it clear just how direct reprogramming works, or whether that approach mimics what happens in cloning, he noted.

So the cloning approach still has much to offer, he said.

Daley, who's president of the International Society for Stem Cell Research, said his lab is pursuing both strategies.

"We'll see, ultimately, which one works and which one is more practical."

___

Associated Press writer Laurie Kellman contributed to this report from Washington.

___

On the Net:

Journal Cell: http://www.cell.com

Journal Science: http://www.sciencemag.org

Holy fuck.

2007-09-27T11:44:00.000-07:00

Parallel universes exist - study

2007-09-24T11:41:00.000-07:00

Parallel universes exist - study

YouTube - Blackwater Shooting At People For Sport

2007-09-23T10:08:00.000-07:00

YouTube - Blackwater Shooting At People For Sport

Fact or Fiction?: Babies Exposed to Classical Music End Up Smarter: Scientific American

2007-09-21T11:33:00.000-07:00

Fact or Fiction?: Babies Exposed to Classical Music End Up Smarter: Scientific American

Priorities

2007-09-20T16:55:00.001-07:00

How the hell 't this on the front page of papers?

Oh ya. I forgot.

Oh boy

2007-09-18T18:31:00.000-07:00

Kill for Jesus

2007-08-27T16:51:00.000-07:00

These are all real pictures drawn by real kids. This is encouraged by the parents. The goat (FYI) when it appears, is this particular church's kid's metaphor for a coffee-drinking atheist. I wish to fuck I was making this up.

Burn the atheists! How cute.
By Liam (8): Future fired highschool teacher.

Not really violent, but nonetheless disturbing as fuck:
By Earl (12): Future suicide.

This kid will probably end up killing us all someday.
By Kevin, 15: Future OBGYN that makes the news.

Go to church or die! Drop that coffee demon!
By 17 year old Chrono: Present douchebag.

If you are asian, gay, jewish, or like ragae, you're going to hell.
by anonymous, Future unemployable IT professional.

This kid thinks that the shimp guy from Futurama is real ... as real in fact as unicorns and africa.
by Carolyn, 15: Future unsatisfied wife of 50 years to a man she hates.

Holy shit. Kill them all jesus! Nuke the fuckers.
by Katie, age unknown: Future live-in-fear-of-anyone-ever-ever-finding-out lesbian.

I'm not sure what this kid's point is. I do know that he and his parents are idiots.
By Sean: Future GUY WHO ALWAYS TYPES IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE IT MAKES HIM RIGHT BECAUSE HE MEMORIZED THE TERM 'POLYSTRATE TREES' TO USE OVER AND OVER AND OVER WITHOUT ANY KNOWLEDGE OF GEOLOGY TO APPEAR SMART AS THE RESIDENT 'CREATION SCIENCE EXPERT' ON THE WWW.3000YEAR-OLD-EARTH.COM FORUM, FOR WHICH HE WILL BE THE SOLE MODERATOR AND ONE OF 9 USERS, EVER.

This picture sucks. T-rex had two fingers douchebag!
By Jimmy, future drug addict

Coffee: satan's choice
By Alice: future chronic trivial pursuit loser

OMG!!! AN ATHEIST ON THE LOOSE! CALL THE COPS!SHOOT HIM SHOOOT HIM!!!!
by Jenny, age 9: Future attendee of the G.W. Bush Memorial Library and it's 7 or 8 books.

What a confusing method. I thought they were AGAINST hallucinogenic drugs and homosexuality? Whatever.
Keith, age 9: Future hated father.

Kill! Kill! Kill!
By Judy, age unknown: Future fundamentalist nutjob.

If you love Jesus, you get to grow a full beard by age 7.
By Richard, age unknown: Future guy who can't seem to get his shit together after learning at age 16 his life has been a lie and you can trust nobody.

For more totally awesome, hate filled and ignorant bullshit, go to their stupid website.

YouTube - Richard Dawkins: Flatfish(Halibut) Evolution

2007-08-23T23:18:00.000-07:00

YouTube - Richard Dawkins: Flatfish(Halibut) Evolution

2007-08-23T22:50:00.000-07:00

2007-08-23T15:23:00.001-07:00

Holy shit I made a blog that someone might read someday, but I doubt it.

http://bryanherp.blogspot.com

It's about all the snakes and other shit I find when I'm out avoiding all the douchebags I have to tolerate in life. By 'douchebag' I mean anyone that's ever at a gas station or on a road at any time. People at work are exempt because I hide in my office all day and never see anyone.

Secondly look at how awesomely I fucked up pasting the DIGG.COM button into my blog. I don't really suck that bad at HTML or thinking in general, I just fail to give a horsefuck about it.

Potomac Accord

2007-08-22T15:01:00.000-07:00

we come into a town we don't know, or maybe one where we have seen the area around the venue before... some awkward bands show up who sometimes look at the ground, or sometimes want to know what the best rock venue in your town is to play so they can set up their event there. we watch maybe a handful of small nervous and innocent people show up, but neither of us really talk to each other and we carry our weighted equipment past them and are sometimes brushed by the often disinterested and desensitized sound-man or door-man who quotes us the process of calling the night complete, but isn't interested in a conversation or sharing experiences and stories... you really cannot blame them though, they've submitted themselves to the company of total strangers nightly who are gone more quickly than they arrived, but we try our best.

we carry our stuff in, often in a rush to set it up and set back to a cold drink and rest on a wooden chair with hope that maybe someone will show up...

↑ less ↑

we toss our experiences out into the public every single night possible with hope that someone may understand the message... we play to a room more often filled with smoke and clatter than conscious people, people who go home and forget the names of the bands, forget the instruments that composed the sounds, forget how far they may have come, and sometimes even forget the evening entirely... but they may have had a good time. you then carry your weighted equipment out the door, maybe down some narrow, dark, aging steps. sometimes all of this in the freezing rain when you have forgotten your jacket, or the soaking rain and the van smells like mildew, rust, and aluminum... cramming your wet bodies and your wet guitars into it...

but then there is one person who comes up and tells you something you will never forget for the rest of your life, and you realize that you have seen and experienced something completely unique to that particular evening, and it is beautiful. you realize that you have crafted something ambitious, personal, evocative, and to your personal life even maybe revolutionary.

in that moment the rain flows like stanzas from an aged poem handed to you on a piece of paper from someone you just met in a town, on a street, you had never known...

The Potomac Accord, St. Louis MO"

A very good CD, I must say.

Zigbot takes a bath

2007-08-02T11:43:00.001-07:00

Our sub-adult bearded dragon Zigbot taking a bath in the sink.

GamePolitics.com » Blog Archive » African Women’s Blog Critical of Resident Evil 5 Trailer

2007-08-01T15:06:00.000-07:00

GamePolitics.com » Blog Archive » African Women’s Blog Critical of Resident Evil 5 Trailer

Retarded. Zombies can only be white, even in Africa, or else you're a racist.

Top 10 reasons that the internet is retarded

2007-07-18T16:22:00.001-07:00

I am on the internet all day, nearly every day. It's ridiculous. All day I click on shit that I don't care about, like "Top 7 shitty movies of 1996" and "9 Worst action figure accessories". Time to make my own list.

The Top 10 Reasons that the internet is complete bullshit.

Reason 1: myspace.com

Reason 2: One of those titles I click on but don't read after I do. Golf.

Reason 3: i never capitalize letters anymore or use proper punctuation .,...... and nobody else i know does either

Reason 4: I'm an accomplished artist and designer, yet my blog looks like horseshit, and I don't care.

Reason 5: this is boring. i quit.

Here's a starwars toy I found in a creek over the weekend. Look at my wet pants.

Earth: What Would Happen If Humans Vanished? - Newsweek Society - MSNBC.com

2007-07-15T22:20:00.000-07:00

Earth: What Would Happen If Humans Vanished? - Newsweek Society - MSNBC.com

We can hope.

Eat some poop

2007-07-15T10:20:00.000-07:00

Waterrrrrrrrrrrrrrr

2007-07-12T12:27:00.001-07:00

ESA Portal - Water, water everywhere - on an extrasolar planet

Water, water everywhere - on an extrasolar planet

11 July 2007
Scientists report the first conclusive discovery of the presence of water vapour in the atmosphere of a planet beyond our Solar System.

The discovery was made by analysing the transit of the gas giant HD 189733b across its star in the infrared.

Giovanna Tinetti, ESA fellow at the Institute d’Astrophysique de Paris, and colleagues from around the world, used data from NASA’s Spitzer Space Telescope. They targeted planet HD 189733b, 63 light-years away, in the constellation Vulpecula.

The planet was discovered in 2005 as it dimmed the light of its parent star by some three percent when transiting in front of it. Using Spitzer, Tinetti and the team observed the star, which is slightly fainter than the Sun. They watched its starlight dim at two infrared bands (3.6 and 5.8 micrometres).

Had the planet been a rocky body devoid of atmosphere, both these bands and a third one (8 micrometres), recently measured by a team at Harvard, would have shown the same behaviour.

Instead, as the planet’s tenuous outer atmosphere slipped across the face of the star, the starlight absorbed showed a different, distinctive pattern. The atmosphere absorbed less infrared radiation at 3.6 micrometres than at the other two wavelengths.

“Water is the only molecule that can explain that behaviour,” says Tinetti.

The presence of water vapour does not necessarily make it a good candidate in the search for planets that harbour life. “This is a far from habitable world,” she adds.

Instead of a rocky world like Earth, HD 189733b is large, about 1.15 times the mass of Jupiter. Located just 4.5 million km from its star, it orbits it in 2.2 days. In comparison, Earth is 150 million km from the Sun; even Mercury, the innermost planet, is 70 million km away.

Transiting exoplanet HD 189733b, in the infrared

Astronomers classify such worlds as ‘hot jupiters’. These planets tend to have extensive atmospheres because heat from the nearby star gives them energy to expand. HD 189733b is no exception; its diameter is 1.25 times that of Jupiter.

HD 189733b’s atmospheric temperature is about 1000 Kelvin (a little more than 700°C) or higher, implying that the significant amounts of water vapour in the atmosphere cannot condense to fall as rain or form clouds. The temperature would have to be about five times lower to form clouds of water vapour or rain.

That does not mean the atmosphere is sedate, however. The planet is gripped so tightly by the gravity of its star that one hemisphere constantly faces the star, heating the planet only on one side. This probably generates fierce winds sweeping from the day-side to the night-side. “There are a thousand things to learn about these planets,” says Tinetti.

Although, being a gas giant, the planet is an unlikely candidate in the search for life, these results increase hopes for the detection of water on other rocky planets, which astronomers hope to discover in the near future.

France‘s COROT mission, in which ESA participates, is expected to detect dozens of transiting gas giants, and has been working so well that it may also detect nearly Earth-sized worlds.

Atmospheres of rocky planets should be much more tenuous, so they will have to wait for future space telescopes, such as the James Webb Space Telescope, before they can be investigated.

Further into the future, the mission Darwin is expected to be proposed to ESA in the context of the Cosmic Vision Programme, its launch proposed sometime after 2018. A constellation of four spacecraft, Darwin’s goal would be to find and analyse atmospheres of Earth-sized planets, looking for telltale signs of water vapour and other gases that might betray life on those worlds.

Notes for editors:

The findings appear in the 12 July 2007 issue of the scientific journal Nature. The original paper, titled ‘Water vapour in the atmosphere of a transiting extrasolar planet’, is by G.Tinetti, A.Vidal-Madjar, M-C. Liang, J-P. Beaulieu, Y. L. Yung, S. Carey, R. Barber, J. Tennyson, I. Ribas, N. Allard, G. Ballester, D.K. Sing, F. Selsis.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), Pasadena, California, manages the Spitzer Space Telescope for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. Science operations are conducted at the Spitzer Science Center at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), also in Pasadena. Caltech manages JPL for NASA.

For more information:

Giovanna Tinetti, fomer ESA fellow at Institute d’Astrophysique de Paris, France; currently at University College London, UK
Email: Giovanna @ apl.ucl.ac.uk

Jean-Philippe Beaulieu, Institute d’Astrophysique de Paris, France
Email: Beaulieu @ iap.fr

Jonathan Tennyson, University College London, UK
Email: J.Tennyson @ ucl.ac.uk

Fabio Favata, ESA Coordinator for Astronomy and Fundamental Physics missions
Email: Fabio.Favata @ esa.int

DRM-free at last.

2007-05-30T16:21:00.000-07:00

A step in media as important as the first compact disk and arguably as much as the opening of iTunes itself; DRM (Digital Rights Managed)-free music has been released from EMI on iTunes.

I have a hard time getting my friends excited about this, and it's confusing as to why. It might seem to someone who doesn't yet purchase music online like some technical nerd-blabber that doesn't hold any water in their life. The argument, however, is the same as my pleas to out-of-state friends to get an email address of their own back in 1995. It may not effect you, yet, but it will.

What are the immediate benefits? Tons, many, too many to list in the short time I have to list them.

That it finally and truly puts all artists, from basement borrowed-bass bands to the most commercial, corporate jingle out there on the same level? That's a good one.

How about the ability to freely put any music you want on any music player/computer you want, kicking the digital age into full blossom. That's good too.

That they're finally realizing they CAN'T STOP pirating, so it's now and finally embraced as part of the marketing plan, and songs will gain favor the same way viral news does? Awesome.

That a HUGE company like Apple is adapting to what indie startups like snocap and payplay do with the indies, validating the business model once-and-for all? Slick.

That Rolling Stone will finally, fin-the fuck-finally stop putting Aerosmith, the Stones, R.H.C.P. and The Beatles on covers. I still won't subscribe to that auto-erotic blowjob of a publication, but it's a start.

Right now it's just EMI, but once the their marketing department emerges from the new glossy iTumes PLUS pool and says "hey, it's not that cold.", stand back from the edge a bit unless you want to get wet. Atlantic and Columbia are pretty fat these days.

Here's a good place to start. If you get some, email it to a friend. It's ok now.

26 Reasons What You Think is Right is Wrong

2007-05-28T21:27:00.000-07:00

If you've got the time, which you probably do right now, go down the list and think of an instance where each has come out in you. If you skip one, that would be part of one, so go ahead and use that tendency.

26 Reasons What You Think is Right is Wrong

Hotmail still blows

2007-05-22T13:29:00.000-07:00

I, like many, used Hotmail as my first email account. That was back in 1996, before we had choices and Microsoft ruined it. I've moved on to gmail, but still use it as a lightning rod for spam. Every once in awhile, however, I log in to round up the 10/1000 legit emails and inform them that I've changed email addresses.

So now Hotmail has implemented a ton of ajax and other stuff they never would have done if gmail hadn't forced them to do so. So now I'm logging in for the first time in awhile to see what's there. I thought I'd write about it as I go, to see if Hotmail actually has something to compete with now.

Here it goes. Oooo... Look at all the reflections. It seems fast enough. The first few pages of email have been processed.

Uh oh. It's stuck. I got an email from Live Journal that isn't loading, due to something at 'h.live.com' that doesn't want to join me. I'll wait.

3 minutes? I'll keep waiting. I want to see this.

6 mins. Fuck. Reload.

Waiting ...

Fuck it, it doesn't work. Who gives a shit anyway. If I posted anything at all on Live Journal it's most likely just making fun of some techno kid that wishes there were a legit reason to wear a trench coat to his job at Staples. Email deleted, moving on.

A co-worker added me on a Facebook account I forgot I even had. There's a link to check it out. Click. Nope. I'm again caught in a perpetual load. Delete.

This happens two more times. Lame.

So Hotmail is still shit. 40% of the email I wanted to see didn't work. That's not good. I guess I kinda could have guessed that, so there's no point to having written any of this. Sorry.

Mom blames Satan for burning baby in microwave | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

2007-05-21T12:32:00.000-07:00

Mom blames Satan for burning baby in microwave | Chron.com - Houston Chronicle

... not too crazy, considering our current President believes that we're at war because God told him to.

The history of the most useful word in our language.

2007-05-20T23:53:00.000-07:00

The Assault on Reason by Al Gore

2007-05-17T11:18:00.000-07:00

The Assault on Reason by Al Gore

Published on Thursday, May 17, 2007 by Time Magazine

Not long before our nation launched the invasion of Iraq, our longest-serving Senator, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, stood on the Senate floor and said: “This chamber is, for the most part, silent—ominously, dreadfully silent. There is no debate, no discussion, no attempt to lay out for the nation the pros and cons of this particular war. There is nothing. We stand passively mute in the United States Senate.”

Why was the Senate silent?

In describing the empty chamber the way he did, Byrd invited a specific version of the same general question millions of us have been asking: “Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?” The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: “What has happened to our country?” People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.

To take another example, for the first time in American history, the Executive Branch of our government has not only condoned but actively promoted the treatment of captives in wartime that clearly involves torture, thus overturning a prohibition established by General George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

It is too easy—and too partisan—to simply place the blame on the policies of President George W. Bush. We are all responsible for the decisions our country makes. We have a Congress. We have an independent judiciary. We have checks and balances. We are a nation of laws. We have free speech. We have a free press. Have they all failed us? Why has America’s public discourse become less focused and clear, less reasoned? Faith in the power of reason—the belief that free citizens can govern themselves wisely and fairly by resorting to logical debate on the basis of the best evidence available, instead of raw power—remains the central premise of American democracy. This premise is now under assault.

American democracy is now in danger—not from any one set of ideas, but from unprecedented changes in the environment within which ideas either live and spread, or wither and die. I do not mean the physical environment; I mean what is called the public sphere, or the marketplace of ideas.

It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public discourse. I know I am not alone in feeling that something has gone fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hoped it was an aberration when polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam Hussein was responsible for attacking us on Sept. 11. More than five years later, however, nearly half of the American public still believes Saddam was connected to the attack.

At first I thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was just an unfortunate excess—an unwelcome departure from the normal good sense and judgment of our television news media. Now we know that it was merely an early example of a new pattern of serial obsessions that periodically take over the airwaves for weeks at a time: the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy, Britney and KFed, Lindsay and Paris and Nicole.

While American television watchers were collectively devoting 100 million hours of their lives each week to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity, justice and fairness. For example, hardly anyone now disagrees that the choice to invade Iraq was a grievous mistake. Yet, incredibly, all of the evidence and arguments necessary to have made the right decision were available at the time and in hindsight are glaringly obvious.

Those of us who have served in the U.S. Senate and watched it change over time could volunteer a response to Senator Byrd’s incisive description of the Senate prior to the invasion: The chamber was empty because the Senators were somewhere else. Many of them were at fund-raising events they now feel compelled to attend almost constantly in order to collect money—much of it from special interests—to buy 30-second TV commercials for their next re-election campaign. The Senate was silent because Senators don’t feel that what they say on the floor of the Senate really matters that much anymore—not to the other Senators, who are almost never present when their colleagues speak, and certainly not to the voters, because the news media seldom report on Senate speeches anymore.

Our Founders’ faith in the viability of representative democracy rested on their trust in the wisdom of a well-informed citizenry, their ingenious design for checks and balances, and their belief that the rule of reason is the natural sovereign of a free people. The Founders took great care to protect the openness of the marketplace of ideas so that knowledge could flow freely. Thus they not only protected freedom of assembly, they made a special point—in the First Amendment—of protecting the freedom of the printing press. And yet today, almost 45 years have passed since the majority of Americans received their news and information from the printed word. Newspapers are hemorrhaging readers. Reading itself is in decline. The Republic of Letters has been invaded and occupied by the empire of television.

Radio, the Internet, movies, cell phones, iPods, computers, instant messaging, video games and personal digital assistants all now vie for our attention—but it is television that still dominates the flow of information. According to an authoritative global study, Americans now watch television an average of 4 hours and 35 minutes every day—90 minutes more than the world average. When you assume eight hours of work a day, six to eight hours of sleep and a couple of hours to bathe, dress, eat and commute, that is almost three-quarters of all the discretionary time the average American has.

In the world of television, the massive flows of information are largely in only one direction, which makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation. Individuals receive, but they cannot send. They hear, but they do not speak. The “well-informed citizenry” is in danger of becoming the “well-amused audience.” Moreover, the high capital investment required for the ownership and operation of a television station and the centralized nature of broadcast, cable and satellite networks have led to the increasing concentration of ownership by an ever smaller number of larger corporations that now effectively control the majority of television programming in America.

In practice, what television’s dominance has come to mean is that the inherent value of political propositions put forward by candidates is now largely irrelevant compared with the image-based ad campaigns they use to shape the perceptions of voters. The high cost of these commercials has radically increased the role of money in politics—and the influence of those who contribute it. That is why campaign finance reform, however well drafted, often misses the main point: so long as the dominant means of engaging in political dialogue is through purchasing expensive television advertising, money will continue in one way or another to dominate American politics. And as a result, ideas will continue to play a diminished role. That is also why the House and Senate campaign committees in both parties now search for candidates who are multimillionaires and can buy the ads with their own personal resources.

When I first ran for Congress in 1976, I never took a poll during the entire campaign. Eight years later, however, when I ran statewide for the U.S. Senate, I did take polls and like most statewide candidates relied more heavily on electronic advertising to deliver my message. I vividly remember a turning point in that Senate campaign when my opponent, a fine public servant named Victor Ashe who has since become a close friend, was narrowing the lead I had in the polls. After a detailed review of all the polling information and careful testing of potential TV commercials, the anticipated response from my opponent’s campaign and the planned response to the response, my advisers made a recommendation and prediction that surprised me with its specificity: “If you run this ad at this many ‘points’ [a measure of the size of the advertising buy], and if Ashe responds as we anticipate, and then we purchase this many points to air our response to his response, the net result after three weeks will be an increase of 8.5% in your lead in the polls.”

I authorized the plan and was astonished when three weeks later my lead had increased by exactly 8.5%. Though pleased, of course, for my own campaign, I had a sense of foreboding for what this revealed about our democracy. Clearly, at least to some degree, the “consent of the governed” was becoming a commodity to be purchased by the highest bidder. To the extent that money and the clever use of electronic mass media could be used to manipulate the outcome of elections, the role of reason began to diminish.

As a college student, I wrote my senior thesis on the impact of television on the balance of power among the three branches of government. In the study, I pointed out the growing importance of visual rhetoric and body language over logic and reason. There are countless examples of this, but perhaps understandably, the first one that comes to mind is from the 2000 campaign, long before the Supreme Court decision and the hanging chads, when the controversy over my sighs in the first debate with George W. Bush created an impression on television that for many viewers outweighed whatever positive benefits I might have otherwise gained in the verbal combat of ideas and substance. A lot of good that senior thesis did me.

The potential for manipulating mass opinions and feelings initially discovered by commercial advertisers is now being even more aggressively exploited by a new generation of media Machiavellis. The combination of ever more sophisticated public opinion sampling techniques and the increasing use of powerful computers to parse and subdivide the American people according to “psychographic” categories that identify their susceptibility to individually tailored appeals has further magnified the power of propagandistic electronic messaging that has created a harsh new reality for the functioning of our democracy.

As a result, our democracy is in danger of being hollowed out. In order to reclaim our birthright, we Americans must resolve to repair the systemic decay of the public forum. We must create new ways to engage in a genuine and not manipulative conversation about our future. We must stop tolerating the rejection and distortion of science. We must insist on an end to the cynical use of pseudo-studies known to be false for the purpose of intentionally clouding the public’s ability to discern the truth. Americans in both parties should insist on the re-establishment of respect for the rule of reason.

And what if an individual citizen or group of citizens wants to enter the public debate by expressing their views on television? Since they cannot simply join the conversation, some of them have resorted to raising money in order to buy 30 seconds in which to express their opinion. But too often they are not allowed to do even that. MoveOn.org tried to buy an ad for the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast to express opposition to Bush’s economic policy, which was then being debated by Congress. CBS told MoveOn that “issue advocacy” was not permissible. Then, CBS, having refused the MoveOn ad, began running advertisements by the White House in favor of the president’s controversial proposal. So MoveOn complained, and the White House ad was temporarily removed. By temporarily, I mean it was removed until the White House complained, and CBS immediately put the ad back on, yet still refused to present the MoveOn ad.

To understand the final reason why the news marketplace of ideas dominated by television is so different from the one that emerged in the world dominated by the printing press, it is important to distinguish the quality of vividness experienced by television viewers from the “vividness” experienced by readers. Marshall McLuhan’s description of television as a “cool” medium—as opposed to the “hot” medium of print—was hard for me to understand when I read it 40 years ago, because the source of “heat” in his metaphor is the mental work required in the alchemy of reading. But McLuhan was almost alone in recognizing that the passivity associated with watching television is at the expense of activity in parts of the brain associated with abstract thought, logic, and the reasoning process. Any new dominant communications medium leads to a new information ecology in society that inevitably changes the way ideas, feelings, wealth, power and influence are distributed and the way collective decisions are made.

As a young lawyer giving his first significant public speech at the age of 28, Abraham Lincoln warned that a persistent period of dysfunction and unresponsiveness by government could alienate the American people and that “the strongest bulwark of any government, and particularly of those constituted like ours, may effectively be broken down and destroyed—I mean the attachment of the people.” Many Americans now feel that our government is unresponsive and that no one in power listens to or cares what they think. They feel disconnected from democracy. They feel that one vote makes no difference, and that they, as individuals, have no practical means of participating in America’s self-government. Unfortunately, they are not entirely wrong. Voters are often viewed mainly as targets for easy manipulation by those seeking their “consent” to exercise power. By using focus groups and elaborate polling techniques, those who design these messages are able to derive the only information they’re interested in receiving from citizens—feedback useful in fine-tuning their efforts at manipulation. Over time, the lack of authenticity becomes obvious and takes its toll in the form of cynicism and alienation. And the more Americans disconnect from the democratic process, the less legitimate it becomes.

Many young Americans now seem to feel that the jury is out on whether American democracy actually works or not. We have created a wealthy society with tens of millions of talented, resourceful individuals who play virtually no role whatsoever as citizens. Bringing these people in—with their networks of influence, their knowledge, and their resources—is the key to creating the capacity for shared intelligence that we need to solve our problems.

Unfortunately, the legacy of the 20th century’s ideologically driven bloodbaths has included a new cynicism about reason itself—because reason was so easily used by propagandists to disguise their impulse to power by cloaking it in clever and seductive intellectual formulations. When people don’t have an opportunity to interact on equal terms and test the validity of what they’re being “taught” in the light of their own experience and robust, shared dialogue, they naturally begin to resist the assumption that the experts know best.

So the remedy for what ails our democracy is not simply better education (as important as that is) or civic education (as important as that can be), but the re-establishment of a genuine democratic discourse in which individuals can participate in a meaningful way—a conversation of democracy in which meritorious ideas and opinions from individuals do, in fact, evoke a meaningful response.

Fortunately, the Internet has the potential to revitalize the role played by the people in our constitutional framework. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason. But the Internet must be developed and protected, in the same way we develop and protect markets—through the establishment of fair rules of engagement and the exercise of the rule of law. The same ferocity that our Founders devoted to protect the freedom and independence of the press is now appropriate for our defense of the freedom of the Internet. The stakes are the same: the survival of our Republic. We must ensure that the Internet remains open and accessible to all citizens without any limitation on the ability of individuals to choose the content they wish regardless of the Internet service provider they use to connect to the Web. We cannot take this future for granted. We must be prepared to fight for it, because of the threat of corporate consolidation and control over the Internet marketplace of ideas.

The danger arises because there is, in most markets, a very small number of broadband network operators. These operators have the structural capacity to determine the way in which information is transmitted over the Internet and the speed with which it is delivered. And the present Internet network operators—principally large telephone and cable companies—have an economic incentive to extend their control over the physical infrastructure of the network to leverage control of Internet content. If they went about it in the wrong way, these companies could institute changes that have the effect of limiting the free flow of information over the Internet in a number of troubling ways.

The democratization of knowledge by the print medium brought the Enlightenment. Now, broadband interconnection is supporting decentralized processes that reinvigorate democracy. We can see it happening before our eyes: As a society, we are getting smarter. Networked democracy is taking hold. You can feel it. We the people—as Lincoln put it, “even we here”—are collectively still the key to the survival of America’s democracy.

© 2007 Time, Inc.

URL to article: http://www.commondreams.org/archive/2007/05/17/1256/

Referred to me by Tamara of Lucid Nation

I guess I'll just continue to sort my music until September-ish

2007-05-16T10:50:00.000-07:00

Amazon announces long-rumored DRM-free music store

This is awesome. I already get 99% of my music from Amazon. iTunes also will have DRM-free music before the end of the year. The current task is to convince the big fat record labels to accept that their bullshit is nearly dead, and hop on board. Once those flood gates are open, I doubt there will be any exclusive contract not shared by the big two and following hundreds of clone services. So who am I going to buy from? Who the fuck knows. The competitive edge could come from a few angles:

Interface. iTunes already has it, and I already use it. iTunes wins. Anyone that's ever sold anything commercially on Amazon and used the Amazon Advantage program knows that they're slow and clunky on development.

'What's Next'. iTunes does have a 'similar artists' feature, and pushes a lot towards getting users to see 'what others bought' and the like, but nothing compares to the accuracy of Amazon's recommendation technology.

Price! DRM-free iTunes will cost $1.29, while Amazon's price hasn't been announced. My guess it will again settle under $.99 per song after it's revealed that all fears are for not and DRM was truly just training wheels for the digital music age. First to get there will make a lot of money, mostly from me.

API. Someone will do it. The third dimension of DRM free music is to not only allow sharing but to ENCOURAGE it by becoming content capable of spidering outward like text does today. Amazon might do it. I don't think Apple will, however. Their brand is too dependent on proprietary goods (good as they are). I'd guess that a third party will come in and take the lead to make an 'mp3' icon as symbolic to 2010 as the little RSS icon is to 2007. Please, o'please CDBaby.com.

Senate hears the Internet radio blues, takes action

2007-05-10T22:44:00.000-07:00

Senate hears the Internet radio blues, takes action

By Nate Anderson | Published: May 10, 2007 - 03:28PM CT

"Come and save me tonight," pleaded Steven Tyler in an Aerosmith tune so sappy it could have been tapped for maple syrup, but the words could well be the rallying cry for webcasters across the country. Coalitions like SaveNetRadio.org have been petitioning Congress for relief after the Copyright Royalty Board denied an appeal to reconsider its decision earlier this year on Internet radio fees. Today, two senators rode to their rescue.

Senators Ron Wyden (D-OR) and Sam Brownback (R-KS) have just introduced the Internet Radio Equality Act of 2007. "July 15, when collection begins on the new royalty fees, literally will be the day the music died," said the two senators in a joint announcement. If passed, the bill would overturn the decision of the Copyright Royalty Board and replace it with a rate mandated by Congress—7.5 percent of total revenues.

This is the rate currently paid by satellite broadcasters like XM and Sirius, but the CRB's decision meant that small webcasters could actually owe more in fees than they earn in revenue, and some of the fees would be retroactive to 2006.

"Our bill is about standing up for folks ranging from a small webcaster in a basement in Corvallis to an innovative startup in Beaverton to a new band trying to be heard in Portland to a huge music fan in Coos Bay," said Wyden, a statement which raises the obvious question: who named all these towns in Oregon, anyway?

The new bill is a companion to one introduced two weeks ago in the House. In addition to setting the royalty rate as a percentage of revenue, the Senate bill would eliminate the $500 per channel minimum fee and set up a special rules for non-commercial broadcasters like NPR, a vocal critic of the CRB ruling.

Rep. Donald Mazulla (R-IL), a co-sponsor of the House bill, praised the new Senate bill and said that he has received plenty of positive feedback on the legislation. "Since we introduced our legislation in the House two weeks ago," he said, "I have been inundated with messages from Internet radio listeners throughout the country thanking me for protecting this wonderful medium. This issue has ignited a flurry of passion from music lovers throughout our country, and I again thank Senators Wyden and Brownback for their efforts to help keep the music playing on the Internet."

testosterfest

2007-05-04T01:00:00.000-07:00

The music blows completely, and it's a terrible, stupid idea. Still, it makes your pituitary gland sweat a bit.

Crazy - A funny movie is a click away

SuicideGirls > News > Geek > Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: Sound Salvation

2007-05-03T17:02:00.000-07:00

Wil Wheaton's Geek in Review: Sound Salvation

I am often bitching about internet radio, the RIAA, and the potential shut-down of the last true and free source of 'what is next'. Wil Wheaton does the best job I've seen of explaining why things are so dire, and what you can do if you care to.

LP: Vegan parents guilty in infant murder 6 wk old starved to death fed diet of soy milk & apple juice

2007-05-03T13:10:00.000-07:00

LP: Vegan parents guilty in infant murder 6 wk old starved to death fed diet of soy milk & apple juice

Read up. At least the kid's colon is free of toxins, and she never had to invoke the murder of poor widdo biddy sheep faces.

Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns

2007-05-02T21:47:00.000-07:00

... a great read for anyone that can stomach stats for a good half hour. The world is moving to a secular state of super progress. If you squint your eyes and try your best to hum over the 'war on terror', 'war on drugs', 'war on poverty', and all the other buzz-worthless goings on out there, you can almost see it. Right there. Behind the dog shit. No, the other dog shit. There you go.

Atheism: Contemporary Rates and Patterns

My Way News - Wandering Dog Spray-Painted 'Go Home'

2007-05-02T21:41:00.000-07:00

Looks like someone also watches 'The Shield'.

My Way News - Wandering Dog Spray-Painted 'Go Home'

jpg00000.jpg (JPEG Image, 426x469 pixels)

2007-05-02T21:40:00.000-07:00

http://www.stacken.kth.se/lists/best-forestry/2001-05/jpg00000.jpg

I just discovered the 'send to' button on this shit, so get ready to close the browser.

Koyote Soft - Official Website

2007-05-02T21:25:00.000-07:00

Some decent free software for converting video from places like YouTube and MySpace video to files you can use with your iPod. Now if I can figure out how to lay down hardwood floors, I'll know how to do everything.

Koyote Soft - Official Website

2007-05-01T23:29:00.000-07:00

god damn I just don't care about the bandwagon as much as I thought I did.

Attention all musicians. Give your music away for free!

2007-04-16T23:33:00.001-07:00

It's no secret that the record industry is in trouble. They have moved from selling music as their main source of income to creating revenue through lawsuits against their customers. Here are a few concepts every musician today should understand in order to thrive in the new music economy.

read more | digg story

12 Breeds of Freelance Client and How to Work with Them (with Cartoons)

2007-04-13T22:15:00.001-07:00

"Brilliant post. So true..." "Deliciously true and categorised very well."All those different types of clients you meet as a freelancer... categorized up into 12 client types...

read more | digg story

How the media failed the American people

2007-04-10T20:39:00.001-07:00

The real media failing was not in any one area; it was across the board. Lies and distortions went unchallenged, or were actively promoted. Fundamental and problematic assumptions about terrorism and the "war on terror" were rarely debated or even discussed. Vital historical context was almost never provided. Good reporting was also absent.

read more | digg story

Record Industry Dying? Sales Down 20%

2007-04-09T19:04:00.001-07:00

First things first: Overall album sales for the January 1-April 2 period are down 16.6% to 117.1 million units, led -- or perhaps misled -- by a 20.5% decline in CD album sales.

read more | digg story

Microsoft dropping DRM from Zune Music Store

2007-04-08T11:46:00.001-07:00

"Microsoft says that it's dropping DRM from some of the catalog in the Zune store. This is the other shoe-drop we've all been waiting for since Apple announced last week that it would sell the entire EMI catalog (albeit at a 30% higher price) without DRM through the iTunes Music Store..."

read more | digg story

First herping trip of the year, hiking, and a shitty tent.

2007-04-06T21:48:00.000-07:00

I went hiking and camping in the Superstitions over the weekend near Miner's Needle with my dad. I fucked up and took the wrong trail to start it off, so we started off on a 3 mile climb instead of ending on a 3 mile drop. Whoops. We were going for the hiking and all that, and I wanted to see some reptiles of course. It didn't disappoint. Here are some pictures:

TONS of whiptails and tree lizards. Also a good amount of these guys, greater earless lizard

Many of these stripe-tails as well, under about every fourth flipped rock. This one was the first scorpion for an english tourist that was passing down the trail.

First blacktail rattlesnake (Crotalus molossus) I've ever been able to photograph, and only the second I've seen.

... a ways down the trail, I flipped a very fat (or gravid) night snake.

Two man tent? I'm going to sue someone. That was a long night.

On the way out, lots more lizards, and my first regal horned lizard:

hurray. now my blog will be filled with this shit. i put all the pictures in my myspace photo album too.

The Phoenix Lights!!! OMG

2007-03-11T23:54:00.001-07:00

Holy hell. I saw on the local news tonight that there's an upcoming special about the "Phoenix lights", or the pattern of lights that sometimes appears over Phoenix. I'm really excited. I want to know why that, even though the U.S. Air force is forthcoming with, even to local news, that these lights are anti-ata flares, the answer must of course be ALIENS! oOoOoo. My hope is that the documentary is going to cover larger society's need to ignore available facts while throwing out conclusions using the old ignorance:lever/ego:fulcrum action to get some excitement off the ground. That's the true mystery. If Fox 12 Action Entertainment were to figure that one out, false maxims ranging from marriage's virtue to vegan's not standing on the bodies of the dead might squeak into the open. Hopefully, it will end up on youtube, and 12 year olds who right now possess as much knowledge of their world as they ever will might pay attention for a few minutes.

Unfortunately, that's a lot harder to look for on google images. Looks like we'll be seeing our old friend again.

Another test, because I suck

2007-03-07T14:03:00.001-08:00

I am too busy to make any progress, not like it is necessary anyway...

NOT REALLY ANY PURPOSE HERE

2007-03-02T20:55:00.000-08:00

Nobody can see this, which is fine since this is mostly just to put some shitty content on this site so that I can see if my kindergarden-level CSS skills work or not. I haven't kept up with the whole Web thing enough to be able to do much more than chop things up and work through long guess and check sessions. That's enough, lets see if this works.