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Below are 25 friends' journal entries, after skipping by the 675 most recent ones.
- West End Girls, West End Girls Go Petshopping. West End Girls are a Pet Shop Boys cover band consisting of two teenaged Swedish girls. And they don't only perform covers of PSB's songs, they actually pretend to be Neil and Chris, emulating their respective personalities in their public appearances and posing in videos and photos looking bored with dogs and architecture and such. Goes Petshopping is an album of their covers of various songs from PSB's career, from early ones (West End Girls and Love Comes Quickly appear) to later ones (there is a rather good version of You Only Say You Love Me When You're Drunk). The music itself is vaguely eurodancey in production, though not excessively cheesy (though the version of It's A Sin does sound slightly too reminiscent of the Crazy Frog to be entirely comfortable with; the rest, however, is better). Standout tracks: Domino Dancing, Being Boring.
- CSS, Cansei de Ser Sexy. CSS (whose name translates as "I'm tired of being sexy") are a bunch of Brazilian kids who look like American Apparel models and/or Vice Magazine "Do's" and make a sort of edgy electro-tinged fashionpunk with a touch of Peaches-style rap, and tongue firmly in cheek. In a sense, this is to the whole electrocoolsie milieu what Wolfmother is to cock-rock: it takes its glamour and shallowness and name-dropping and hypersexuality and coked-up over-it attitude, exaggerates it, takes the piss out of it, and has a damn good dance whilst doing so. (Sample song titles: "Music Is My Hot Hot Sex", "Meeting Paris Hilton" (which probably merits a discussion of its own, for the way it sends up and comments on the celebrity-obsessed media culture through the combination of sexual desire, sneering contempt and consumeristic excitement in its lyrics), and the classic "Let's Make Love And Listen To Death From Above", which is perhaps an anthem for our times.) Standout tracks: a lot of them; the ones mentioned above, for three, and This Month, Day 10.
- Toxoplasma infection rates vary from country to country. South Korea has prevalance rate of only 4.3%, for example, while Brazil's rate is 66.9%. These rates are determined by many factors, from the eating habits in a country (steak tartar, anyone?) to its climate (Toxoplasma oocysts survive longer in warm tropical soil).
- Psychologists have measured some of the personality traits influenced by Toxoplasma in these countries. People with Toxoplasma tend to be more self-doubting and insecure, among other things. Among the differences in men, Toxoplasma is associated with less interest in seeking novelty. Toxoplasma-infected women are more open-hearted.
- A nation's culture can be described, at least in part, as the aggregation of its members' personalities.
- Во всем треде понятие смысл жизни как бы формулировалось от первого лица. Типа мой смысл жизни - даже если мой не писалось - подрузамевалось. То есть формулировался смысл явления еще не законченного. Конечно мы можем сказать хороший фильм или плохой по имени режиссера. Но в чем смысл фильма желательно посмотреть весь. Поэтому главная ошибка рассуждений о смысле жизни примеривание его на себя.
- Все виды рассуждений об отсутствии я отвергаю. Это сдача позиций.
- Дети и наслаждение самим процессом жизни я тоже отвергаю. Иначе мы ничем не отличаемся от ебущихся кроликов в клетке с морковкой.
- Внешний (служение высшим силам) я тоже отвергаю иначе чем мы отличаемся от коров. Они дают молоко, а мы служение.
- Рай не обсуждается. Ни с гуриями, ни с ангелами.
- Преодоление смерти (попадание в историю, опять же дети, клонирование) это все таки суррогат.
- Внести свой вклад в человеческую цивилизацию в осознание человечеством себя и мира. Оставим про запас. В принципе это ответ с моей точки зрения. Но далеко не для всех. И тогда прийдется признать, что не всякая жизнь имеет смысл.
| Monday, August 7th, 2006 | ||
| thenulldevice | 5:20p | NWTF The Ohio Bureau of Motor Vehicles has revoked an elderly woman's custom license plates because they had become obscene. Pat Niple had had the number plates reading "NWTF" (standing for "Northwood Tree Farm", a business she had owned) for more than a decade, and had had no problems with them—until this year, when they fell foul of technologically-mediated language change: "Apparently, the young people use it on the computer," she said. Niple went to a BMV office to get some answers. A clerk had to whisper what the acronym means to some people. "Now what the -- and the last word begins with an f," Niple said. "I said, 'You got to be kidding me.'" |
| thenulldevice | 2:53p | American Madrassa American Christianity may have fallen behind fundamentalist Islam in the fanaticism stakes, but it's now making an effort to catch up. Witness the Jesus Camps, America's own madrassas, which serve to indoctrinate 9-10-year-olds in a severe form of fundamentalist Christianity, linked to all manner of conservative ideologies, from veneration of George W. Bush to denial of global warming: Right wing political agendas and slogans are mixed with born again rituals that end with most of the kids in tears. Tears of release and joy, they would claim -- the children are not physically abused. The kids are around 9 or 10 years old, recruited from various churches, and are pliant willing receptacles. They are instructed that evolution is being forced upon us by evil Godless secular humanists, that abortion must be stopped at all costs, that we must form an "army" to defeat the Godless influences, that we must band together to insure that the right judges and politicians get into the courts and office and that global warming is a lie. (This last one is a puzzle -- how did accepting the evidence for climate change and global warming become anti-Jesus? Did someone simply conflate all corporate agendas with Jesus and God and these folks accept that? Would Jesus drive an SUV? Is every conclusion responsible scientists make now suspect?) at one point Pastor Fischer instructs the little ones that they should be willing to die for Christ, and the little ones obediently agree. She may even use the word martyr, which has a shocking echo in the Middle East. I can see future suicide bombers for Jesus -- the next step will be learning to fly planes into buildings. Of course, the grownups would say, "Oh no, we're not like them" -- but they admit that the principal difference is simply that "We're right." In another scene a cardboard cutout of George W. Bush, with his trademark smirking smile, is brought out and the children are urged to identify -- many of the little ones come forward and reverently touch his cardboard hands. (via Boing Boing) ¶ |
| thenulldevice | 2:32a | Magical 8bit Plug Japanese electropop band YMCK are known for making catchy pop songs with instrumentation sounding like 8-bit Nintendo game music. And now you can do the same: they've just released a software synthesiser plug-in that emulates primitive 8-bit sound chips like the one in the Nintendo Famicom. Named the Magical 8-bit Plug, it is free-as-in-beer and available for MacOS X (in AudioUnit format; sorry, Cubase users) and Windows (in VSTi format); it even comes with a demo MIDI file. |
| thenulldevice | 12:16a | Recent listening Two CDs I picked up in the past week or so and have been listening to a fair bit: |
| Friday, August 4th, 2006 | ||
| thenulldevice | 4:01p | Google Talk in hardware Joining the cornucopia of vaporware Skype WiFi phones (and the occasional phone using the SIP industry standard which no-one seems to actually use outside of the enterprise) is a Google Talk phone; that's a WiFi-enabled mobile-phone-sized unit that connects to Google's voice-over-IP network. The advantages: the unit will have "Gmail capabilities" built in (which means that all they'd have to do is widen the keybad and they could call it a Googleberry). The disadvantage, of course, is that all your friends are on Skype, which refuses to connect with other networks (other than the analogue phone system). (via Engadget) ¶ |
| thenulldevice | 2:08p | Discless PlayStation The PlayStation 3 may still be vaporware, but according to a source at Sony, the PlayStation 4 won't support physical discs at all, downloading all of its content through the massive broadband connections everyone will have in 2012 or whenever it comes out. The PlayStation 5, however, will be available in ingestible form and will nano-reconfigure your nervous system. |
| thenulldevice | 10:16a | Capital punishment in the EU? The ultra-conservative president of Poland (one half of a set of identical twins running the country (his brother is Prime Minister) and a man so right-wing he makes Tony Abbott look like Bob Brown) has called for the restoration of the death penalty. If anything comes of this, it could lead to an interesting situation, as capital punishment is expressly prohibited in the European Union. Were Poland to reintroduce it, it would leave Brussels with a dilemma: hold to principles and expel one of their populous members, or allow Poland to opt out of the death-penalty ban. If the EU blinks and the latter happens, how long until the Daily Mail and Sun put the reintroduction of capital punishment on the agenda in the UK. |
| Thursday, August 3rd, 2006 | ||
| thenulldevice | 2:13p | Not so clever Under new guidelines from the Professional Association of Teachers, bright school pupils should no longer be called "clever", to save them the stigma attached to the tag; cleverness, you see, is seen as deeply uncool by school children, and any schoolchild unfortunate enough to be recognised as such would soon end up ridiculed and ostracised, if not used for knife practice, by their peers. The association has recommended the use of the word "successful" instead; after all, success is associated with professional footballers, bling-toting rappers, asset-stripping corporate raiders and other socially acceptable role models, and thus has positive connotations. Of course, if "successful" is used in this fashion, it will become synonymous with being a despised teacher's pet, and end up being used sarcastically as a term of abuse (much in the way that "brave" and "special" have become synonymous with physical or mental handicaps). Then perhaps it'll be time to adopt a new term of praise for educational achievement; possibly "pimpin'", or "well weapon"? |
| Wednesday, August 2nd, 2006 | ||
| thenulldevice | 8:00p | Passenger power in Japan The East Japan Railway Company is experimenting with making its stations more environmentally friendly by harnessing the energy-generating potential of passengers as they pass through ticket gates: The ticket gate electricity generation system relies on a series of piezo elements embedded in the floor under the ticket gates, which generate electricity from the pressure and vibration they receive as people step on them. When combined with high-efficiency storage systems, the ticket gate generators can serve as a clean source of supplementary power for the train stations. Busy train stations (and those with large numbers of passengers willing to bounce heavily through the gates) will be able to accumulate a relatively large amount of electricity.The system is being tested at the company's offices in Shibuya, though is expected to be rolled out in actual stations if this is successful. Though would such a system really be able to generate a non-negligible amount of electricity? And, given that the passenger gates don't involve the passenger actually pushing anything as crude as a turnstile, how long until someone starts fitting footpaths with something similar? If it takes more energy from the walker to traverse than otherwise, they could even market it as an integrated exercise facility. (via Engadget) ¶ [no comments] |
| thenulldevice | 5:03p | Australian video game ban criticised International consultancy PricewaterhouseCoopers has called on Australia to introduce an 18+ rating for video games, rather than the present system of banning anything not suitable for children. Given that it's a voice of multinational corporate capital (a force the Tories respect more than paternalist wowserism and populist culture-war politics) making the call, and not the despised inner-city refugee-loving latte-socialist elite, perhaps someone will give the censorious theocrat in South Australia who holds the veto a sharp push and get things changed. |
| thenulldevice | 4:29p | The first encyclopædia in the Scots leid Discovery of the day: there is a Scots edition of Wikipedia (or "Wikipædia", as it's known in Scots). That's written in the Scots language, which is descended from Middle English, and is just about comprehensible to English speakers. (Though while it may look like English with funny spellings and odd words, it should not be mistaken for Scotched English; not only that but one should be wary of artificial attempts to make it more English-like, such as the nefarious apologetic apostrophe). In it you will find 1,573 articles about various subjects, including (naturally) Scotland, the "Unitit Kinrick" and Europe, the "mathematical an naitral sciences", "airt an cultur", "applee'd sciences an industry", "daily life an leisur" and "ither", as well as on written Scots and a Scots-English dictionary. Also, the Scots for "search" is "rake" (though "Edit" appears to be the same as in English; either that or MediaWiki doesn't let one change this), and some articles begin with the disclaimer: The "Scots" that wis uised in this airticle wisna written by a native speaker. Gin ye can, please sort it. (via Bowlie) ¶ [no comments] |
| thenulldevice | 12:09p | Parasitologic anthropology A biologist posits the intriguing hypothesis that a country's national character may be influenced by its rate of parasite infection, particularly by the parasite Toxoplasma gondii (i.e., the "crazy cat person" parasite): The author of the study is Kevin Lafferty, a biologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Lafferty made three straightforward observations.Lafferty's hypothesis predicted that the national cultures/characters of countries with high rates of Toxoplasma infection would have higher rates of characteristics such as neuroticism, uncertainty avoidance and "masculine" sex roles: He found a signficiant correlation between high levels of the parasite and high levels of neuroticism. There was a positive but weak correlation between Toxoplasma and levels of uncertainty avoidances and masculine sex roles. However, if he excluded the non-Western countries of China, South Korea, Japan, Turkey, and Indonesia, the correlations of both personality measurements with Toxoplasma got much stronger. So--has Lafferty discovered why the French are neurotic (Toxo: 45%) and Australians are not (28%)? As he admits, this is just a first pass. Lafferty also notes that many other factors shape a nation's culture--which actually raises another interesting question: what about other parasites? Do viruses, intestinal worms, and other pathogens that can linger in the body for decades have their own influence on human personality? How much is the national spirit the spirit of a nation's parasites? (via Mind Hacks) ¶ [no comments] |
| thenulldevice | 10:15a | The future's so bright we've got to wear shades Some say that global warming has already passed the point of no return, it's too late for even the most radical CO2-reduction regime to save us (let alone the pitiful compromises politicians are squabbling over) and that we're all going to roast to death and/or starve when the food chain collapses spectacularly. Not to worry, says Nobel laureate Professor Paul Crutzen; if it gets to the point of global catastrophe, we could always release sulphur into the upper atmosphere, reducing the amount of sunlight getting through, and cooling things down: A fleet of high-altitude balloons could be used to scatter the sulphur high overhead, or it could even be fired into the atmosphere using heavy artillery shells, said Professor Crutzen, a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry in Germany. His plan is modelled partly on the Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption in 1991, when thousands of tons of sulphur were ejected into the atmosphere causing global temperatures to fall. Pinatubo generated sulphate aerosols in the atmosphere which cooled the Earth by 0.5C on average in the following year. The sulphate particles did this by acting like tiny mirrors, preventing a portion of incoming sunlight from reaching the ground.Some scientists aren't too happy with the plan, lest it encourage people to keep driving Hummers and leaving their VCRs on standby, secure in the knowledge that they can always spray some sulphur into the upper atmosphere if things get too bad. This is only one of several proposed "geo-engineering" ideas to remedy the symptoms of climate change by technological means; others involve boosting the growth of CO2-swallowing plankton and floating white plastic islands on oceans to replace all the highly reflective sea ice that has melted. (Speaking of sending the wrong message, one can't top the last one; I wonder how many people will use it as an excuse for throwing plastic bags into drains.) |
| thenulldevice | 9:39a | Remix the Ring The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation is letting the public remix Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries. Remixes have to be a maximum of 2 1/2 minutes long, may be in any style (such as "classical, dj, world, mash up"), and are due in on the 21st of August. This contest is open to Canadian residents only, though there doesn't seem to be anything prohibiting non-Canadians from downloading the original audio file, remixing it and not entering the contest. (via Boing Boing) ¶ [no comments] |
| Tuesday, August 1st, 2006 | ||
| thenulldevice | 10:29p | MyFuneral.com Web entrepreneurs are attempting to adapt the MySpace formula, massively successful with teenagers and twentysomething, to the huge baby-boomer demographic. One attempt is Eons.com, which replaces the pop music and cool animated ads with brain-exercising games, a longevity calculator and an obituary notification service: "Many people no longer live where they grew up so the idea of a rich story about someone's life in a local newspaper is often lost," said Taylor, who sees online obituaries replacing the traditional death announcements in newspapers. He said baby boomers, the 77 million Americans born between 1946 and 1964, also wanted to have a greater input into their own funerals. This prompted Eons.com to look into a service where people could plan for their favorite songs to be played at their funeral and where friends and family can go afterward for food and drink. |
| thenulldevice | 6:58p | Willis D. Knuckles And the coolest politician's name of the day belongs to Willis D. Knuckles, Liberia's new Presidential Affairs Minister. |
| thenulldevice | 4:55p | Security through randomness Bruce Schneier has a post about an interesting way to beat buffer overrun attacks: Fortunately, buffer-overflow attacks have a weakness: the intruder must know precisely what part of the computer's memory to target. In 1996, Forrest realised that these attacks could be foiled by scrambling the way a program uses a computer's memory. When you launch a program, the operating system normally allocates the same locations in a computer's random access memory (RAM) each time. Forrest wondered whether she could rewrite the operating system to force the program to use different memory locations that are picked randomly every time, thus flummoxing buffer-overflow attacks. Memory scrambling isn't the only way to add diversity to operating systems. Even more sophisticated techniques are in the works. Forrest has tried altering "instruction sets", commands that programs use to communicate with a computer's hardware, such as its processor chip or memory. This produces an elegant form of protection. If an attacker manages to insert malicious code into a running program, that code will also be decrypted by the translator when it is passed to the hardware. However, since the attacker's code is not encrypted in the first place, the decryption process turns it into digital gibberish so the computer hardware cannot understand it. (via schneier) ¶ [no comments] |
| thenulldevice | 12:33p | UK-Californian hot air pact Whilst visiting California, Tony Blair has have signed signed a pact to tackle climate change with the state's governor, Hummer-driving environmentalist Arnold Schwarzenegger. The pact, whilst careful to avoid anything binding or concrete, calls on both states to think positive thoughts about the environment, "find new solutions", "work together" and, in a very Californian fashion, "share experiences". The UK, spinning its hardest, has specifically denied that this pact sidesteps the Whitehouse. |
| Wednesday, August 9th, 2006 | ||
| reincarnat | 12:28a | Про специальности Про comupter science умолчу, ничего особенного. А вот про другие специальности надо отписать. Плотник 4 разряда Вальщик леса 4 разряда (экзамен сдавал). Бетонщик 3 разряда Стропальщик 2 разряда Взырывотехник (экзамен сдавал) |
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foto_decadent [ suomi ] 
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12:11a | |
| Tuesday, August 8th, 2006 | ||
alzheimer
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12:51p | Читаю урывками хит сезона в жж, дорожный эпос юзера ![[info]](../IMG/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} alekcei, объехавшего на мотоцикле всю Отчизну. Все связи с этим всплыла некстати мысль: что если составить вполне серьёзный рейтинг городов России, где жить хорошо. Заранее исключить Москву и Питер, и сделать ну что-то наподобие этого... The Best Places To live In Russia: с занудными оценками криминальной обстановки (ведь несомненно, что где-то её нет), доходом на душу населения и возможностью этот доход тратить, активно и неактивно отдыхать и трудиться на своё благо и т.д. Просто поверить гармонию мира алгеброй, без шуток и ненужного постмодернизма. По-моему, идея тянет на грант. |
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cthulhu_temple [ void_runner ] 
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7:24p | Как и было обещано, второй раскат эха, вызванного нашими успехами в России. ( Read more... ) Current Music: ТТЦ-Т-ТЦ тыц тыцтыцтыцтытцтытц |
| reincarnat | 10:35p | Вода. Аналитика. Где-то в френд-ленте промелькнула аналогия между Израилем и человеческим поселением на враждебной планете Пирр. -- На мой взгляд, это очень глубокая аналогия. Почти исчерпывающая. И эта аналогия очень много объясняет. Почти всё. Действительно, откуда у арабов в 1948 году взяться врожденному антисемитизму? Где многовековой опыт погромов и прочих увеселительных мероприятий? Где оскорбленная еврейским меркантилизмом общеарабская душа? Ничего этого нет. То есть, антисемитизма в 1948 году нет, а вполне недвусмысленная реакция отторжения есть. Причем, отторжения на биологическом уровне. Иначе невозможно объяснить факты бесчеловечной резни с обеих сторон, имевшие место в процессе становления израильского государства. Почему же возникла такая реакция? Я считаю, что причина находится на уровне базовых инстинктов самосохранения. Вода на Востоке это Жизнь (да-да, именно с большой буквы), ее надо расходовать бережно и вдумчиво и тут появляются европейские по образу жизни люди, которые к воде относятся по-европейски. А ведь с точки зрения араба, европейский образ жизни израильтянина представляет собой прямую и непосредственную угрозу его существованию. Воду, священную влагу на непотребство тратят !!! Например, с точки зрения земледельца аридной зоны, производство стали и стального проката - преступление . Привычка принимать душ дважды в день тоже преступление. И много еще чего, что делает Израиль форпостом демократии и европейской цивилизации в Азии - тоже преступление с точки зрения обитателя аридной зоны. Можно сколько угодно с выверенными цифрами доказывать, что Израиль на душу населения расходует воды меньше чем его соседи это не поможет. Психология арабского крестьянина эти вещи не воспринимает. Еврей враг, он убивает мою воду - вот что думают соседи Израиля. -- Что делать? Я выскажу дурацкую мысль, на взгляд израильтян. Но высказать я ее должен. Израиль должен из нетто-потребителя арабской воды превратится в обладателя уникального экспортного ресурса особо чистой питьевой воды. Окружающие Израиль арабские соседи должны воспринимать Израиль, как священный колодец. Как этого добиться ? Вспоминаем, что Израиль самое высокотехнологичное государство на БВ. Постройте атомные опреснители, постройте океанские атомные буксиры для транспортировки антарктических айсбергов, делайте что угодно, но помните о самом главном, необходимо сделать Израиль Священным Колодцем. И тогда арабы принесут вам голову Насраллы в Иерусалим на серебряном подносе. Сами принесут. |
galerist
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10:19p | Говорить о смысле жизни неловко. Глупо. С одной стороны есть корпус текстов (религиозных, философских, литературных) с другой, юношеские размышления практически каждого (хотя потом выясняется, что это было не о смысле жизни, а о неизбежности смерти и о путях ее, смерти, преодоления. С третьей набор суррогатов заменителей. Неловко, а хочется. Хочется посреди рабочей суеты и ажиотажа наслаждений значительный кусок времени посвятить смыслу . Легче всего, чтоб не подставляться, делать это с помощью цитат. Илья Кормильцев призвал читателей своего ЖЖ высказаться http://karmakom.livejournal.com/15477.ht Где-то нашел даже свой ответ: я собственно искусством занимаюсь, потому что это единственный способ жить не отвечая на этот вопрос. Искусство ценно само по себе и оправдывает мое существование. Правда там была моя приписка (1 вариант будут еще). Так что будем считать этот пост выполнением обещания Кормильцеву. Пока мое ощущение, что смысл жизни современного человека не занимающегося выживанием и борьбой за жизнь связан может быть исключительно с творчеством. С самовыражением. В некоторых случаях это творчество важно не только для самого человека и тогда смотри пункт 7. (продолжение следует) |
| emelind | 9:55p | Вопросы языкознания. Сочиняя предыдущий пост, поразился как много слов в русском языке рифмуется со словом пидарас(з). |
