the panphried weblog

system traits

2011-12-13T09:42:00.001+01:00

" ..Our system has become a Frankenstein monster which acts upon its own institutional behalf.
It encourages the least desirable of human traits -- greed, short-term thinking, lack of accountability, hierarchy, propaganda and self-obsession -- while simultaneously dismissing and discouraging the best of human traits -- long-term planning, reason, mutual aid, empathy, and resource allocation.

If we don't construct society in a manner which embraces the latter, we damn our children to a miserable existence, and we won't survive as a species"

(taken from a comment by Jason Boissonneault in a trnn comment thread)

2011-10-09T18:59:00.000+01:00

Steve Jobs died a few days ago and I wrote the following in a facebook comment thread

In response to all the idolatrous mourning in here, and surely bouncing around in mainstream media right now, (i havent yet poked my head around to see)

Nice design and innovation, but I could have done without most of his contribution toward making closed technical ecosystems and hardware more desired and desirable, and here's why.I fear that it might be us, the consumers of new technologies, that willingly hand over the gains made possible by these technologies, back to monopolies and empire, simply because we are driven by desire for the shinier toy, and the easier playground.

(written on a mac)

google+ public circles

2011-07-28T08:57:00.000+01:00

It would be nice if google+ extended the circle metaphor to include public circles, that people can discover and join, giving us a way to easily make and follow channels with a narrow subject on Google+

What this would solve is the following basic problem:
I don't want to hear mumbles on random topics, from people I follow for one subject in particular. For example, if I follow you for your technology knowledge and opinion, I dont want to hear about the food you're eating on your latest visit to china.

I should be able to join your technology circle, provided you've made it public, and by so doing I should be able to see only the posts you send to your technology circle.

skepticism

2011-04-22T13:14:00.002+01:00

Questioning our own motives, and our own process, is critical to a skeptical and scientific outlook. We must realize that the default mode of human psychology is to grab onto comforting beliefs for purely emotional reasons, and then justify those beliefs to ourselves with post-hoc rationalizations. It takes effort to rise above this tendency, to step back from our beliefs and our emotional connection to conclusions and focus on the process. The process (i.e science, logic, and intellectual rigor) has to be more important than the belief. —Steven Novella

procreative racial deconstruction..

2011-03-16T16:48:00.001+01:00

RT @AmandlaMedia
Perhaps South Africa needs a voluntary, free spirited, open-ended program of procreative racial deconstruction...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bulworth

old interview on NaomiKleinThe Shock Doctrine

2011-02-22T20:12:00.005+01:00

@JohnCusack interviews @NaomiKlein on her book "The Shock Doctrine"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rcyb0cDf4aQ& -part1
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H1u_OTa18Ts& -part2

a universe not made for us

2011-02-21T19:12:00.002+01:00

Tim Wu, on the monopolization of the Internet, and other things

2011-02-18T00:34:00.007+01:00

Recently caught a conversation with Tim Wu, originator of the phrase 'net neutrality', and author of The Master Switch, on the monopolization of the Internet, and other things : interview with TimWu on SearchEnginePodcast

Listen here : http://podcasts.tvo.org/searchengine/audio/800868_48k.mp3

The book sounds important - theres a good review here: http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/reviews/2010/12/ars-book-review-the-master-switch-by-tim-wu.ars

Some nice bits on how older technologies had open phases too, before they were closed - as we, the consumers, brought about monopolists and consumptive systems, in tandem with emerging parasitic business ecosystems.

And whether things could be different this time around ..

Whether, if we were aware of the systems and information we 'choose' for ourselves; we could keep it open, and therefore, game-changing

Definitely, some things for us cyber-optimists to think about .

wiki notes are accumulating here: http://jaysen.wikispaces.com/TimWuOnSearchEngine

Julian Assange speech at WikiLeaks Public Meeting in Melbourne

2011-02-05T03:54:00.003+01:00

"We support a cause that is no more radical a proposition than that the citizenry has a right to scrutinise the state."

tagged #opengov #video #av #mediachannel #political #freeculture #transparency #gov, but thats just me.

rms on google

2011-01-30T13:54:00.002+01:00

http://stallman.org/archives/2010-nov-feb.html#29 January 2011 (Investigating Google)

As for Google, it does some very good things but also some bad things. (For instance, many of its services distribute proprietary software to users.) I would not put Google at the head of the list of large companies that need to be broken up; however, if we start breaking up large companies (as we should), and get that far down the list, I would not say "stop here"

..
i agree

universal folksonomy

2010-11-12T21:03:00.020+01:00

This is probably not entirely new. Maybe even not new at all. In fact I've probably just joined legions of people out there who are wondering why ..

There isn't yet a simple plain-text standard for meta-data, that can be applied universally across all services and objects - from web pages and web resources, to documents and files, from books and articles to audio and video files - applied basically, to all digital resources.

Then building on top of all this tagging - all this human-computation and folksonomy - building flexible tools that mine and collate the meta-data from across all possible services, communities, spaces and contexts. Making these tools expandable, so adding another service/context/data-source is as simple as possible.

So, how is this different?

we use it in the same way, but consistently across all services/contexts/collections

we use it even when no provision is made for it - wherever we find space for plain text that can be co-opted to meta-data - like in comment fields, sidewiki entries, bookmark notes, mp3 id3 comment fields, etc

then we build software to collect them from both the formalised meta-data services and the informal - and shape flexible plugins to collect them from wherever the standard can be recognised

what sort of meta-data?

First, the simplest forms of meta-data - tags/labels - flat, informal ontologies - collections of keywords - like those used within services across the so called web2.0.
And when using services that aren't designed to use tags/labels - co-opting plain-text fields by, say, the following:
tags = blog, tagging, ideas, software, socialSoftware

Second, simple key value pairs, like author=JaysenNaidoo; date=20101113; license=gpl3

Keeping the set of standards as open as possible - but defining them properly in public. Adding any other std that can be represented in plain-text and gains enough ground - depicting hierarchies, semantics, etc.

.. possibly more on this later.

some almost related links:
Actually some of these suggest practical tagging standards as well:

the Adliberous idea

2010-09-10T23:23:00.019+01:00

Adunblock Communities ..updated for clarity:

The idea is to form additional communities around a tool like AdBlock-Plus. Subscribing to exclusion filter lists that tell your browser which ads to disallow; as usual; but also subscribing to a whitelist of ads and servers that will be allowed through.

Communities could collectively maintain such lists, based on a set of criteria, also collectively arrived at.

The criteria could include things like:
• the type of ad , (text-only, no large downloads, no annoying animation)
• political / consumer activism (for example, only advertisers that behave well; with commitments to sustainability, global justice, workers rights.
• advertise within product ranges / what the community is interested in buying.  The community could ask for just the type of ads that interest that community (advertisers should be willing to jump through a few hoops for the right to have access to those strongly matched eyeballs)  
• optional fund-raising / activism - where advertisers/adservers pay money to, or support in some way, organisations or a list of organisations, in order to be allowed on the whitelist.

Additional ideas / notes:
• The lists of course should be crowd sourced - using the numbers in the community to monitor for bad matched ads and to suggest products/ads/adservers that the community could include
• Communities manage themselves using the new online tools available for organising and arriving at consensus (wikis, forums, voting)
• Encourage forks/branches of communities / whitelists as required.
• Because community asks for just the type of ads that interest it, you know that whatever ads you see, are for products that are in line with your community's values, and that you can purchase with greater confidence.
• to join, someone would only have to subscribe to the appropriate whitelist
• participation should be under open principles
• a possible fundamental shift in the dynamics between consumer, producer and advertiser.
• effective consumer activism
• a community would decide to sell the right to be on its white-list to ad-servers that meet those criteria. Then collectively decide on what the money advertisers pay to be on the white-list is used for.

more on adblocking ..
checkout Adblock and Adblock-Plus - already well working crowd sourced adblocking extensions - which by the way, is very usable in both firefox and chrome)

...
any thoughts, comments ?

slickening

2010-05-31T00:13:00.009+01:00

if you had any doubt about how broken international news coverage is.. think about the thrilling blow-by-blow, high-school-hostage dramatic, 911 type awful, that the coverage of the DeepWater-Horizon ecological horror would have been, if only it wasn't so politically unpleasant for the masters of the medium.

freedom in the cloud

2010-05-22T10:23:00.003+01:00

"Everyone wants a piece of you these days: Google, Facebook, Flickr, Apple, AT&T, Bing. They’ll give you free e-mail, free photo storage, free web hosting, even a free date. They just want to listen in. And you can’t wait to let them. They’ll store your stuff, they’ll organize your photos, they’ll keep track of your appointments, as long as they can watch. It all goes into the “Cloud.”

How we got here is quite a scary story. But nowhere near as scary as getting out again. Eben Moglen, a Professor of Law and Legal History at Columbia University and the founding director of the Software Freedom Law Center, warned you about privacy and the cloud before. At a public meeting of the Internet Society of New York on February 5, Moglen asked you to consider how much worse things have become since then and explain what you can do to reclaim your freedom in the era of Web 2.0."

got sent this way by the folks at diaspora. they cite it as one of their motivators.

eyeopening talk. nice bits about the choices that were (not) made about internet architectures - why client-server limits the internet peerage possibility - and some of the political aspects of those choices.

Technoliberation

2010-03-18T11:50:00.005+01:00

It is not true that the map of freedom will be complete
with the erasure of the last invidious border
when it remains for us to chart the attractors of thunder
and delineate the arrhythmias of drought
to reveal the molecular dialects of forest and savanna
as rich as a thousand human tongues
and to comprehend the deepest history of our passions
ancient beyond mythology's reach

So I declare that no corporation holds a monopoly on numbers
no patent can encompass zero and one
no nation has sovereignty over adenine and guanine
no empire rules the quantum waves
And there must be room for all at the celebration of
understanding
for there is a truth which cannot be bought or sold
imposed by force, resisted or escaped.

From Technoliberation by Muteba Kazadi (Greg Egan)

this is how the novel Distress by Greg Egan opens.. bodes really well :)

Heres another work of technoliberation that bears repeating : the Declaration of Independance of CyberSpace, by the lyricist for the GratefulDead, John Barlow, February 8, 1996

Blue Brain Project : Year One

2010-02-03T20:23:00.005+01:00

just finished watching this preview of a documentary film on the BlueBrain Project - an attempt to reverse-engineer a human brain.

catch it here at The Beautiful Brain

the project site is at http://bluebrain.epfl.ch/

google sidewiki as a real wiki.. or maybe a host of other real sidewikis to choose from

2009-11-15T18:56:00.008+01:00

@google: give us a truly wiki-like public entry on SideWiki, with wiki functions like revision and restore and spam-reporting and we will garden it.

There'll probably be large scale spam and trolling, but with some good design, wiki revisions and restores, along with maybe a tight linking to google accounts before granting edit, perhaps wiki principles will out.

Oh, and there's no reason why the public entry shouldn't work as just another entry alongside all the others, only rising to the top if it gets voted there.

....
update (20100117)

I remember digging the first "wiki margin for the internet" i saw, i think about 5 years ago. wikalong - a firefox extension and a promising idea i thought - a firefox extension that let one create/edit a wikipage for any web page out there.

so when google recently(ish) announced their Sidewiki , and it turned out to be more of a side blog i tried shouting out that bit above.

But now maybe I'm not so sure anymore. Maybe, rather than google's one and only sidewiki, we need an open extension that allows us to choose which side wiki community we want to follow and contribute to..

like a host of wiki channels for discussing the web. many internet margins - with choices between real wiki's, public and private, and sideblogs (like the current google sidewiki)

parasites

2009-09-24T01:43:00.004+01:00

hourlong RadioLab audio episode on parasites. excellent

audio here : http://audio.wnyc.org/radiolab_podcast/radiolab_podcast603parasites.mp3

also recently added to my delicious mediachannel

geek rapture ?

2009-09-24T01:25:00.003+01:00

ABC Radio National's All In The Mind podcast on the technical singularity. a nice warning about geek rapture :) , alongside a nice description of the idea.

audio here. short, well produced, easy to listen to.

adding it to my slowly growing mediachannel tag, of online media i think worth consuming.

emergent metadata

2009-06-29T20:52:00.007+01:00

the idea in the general: is to continuously grow metadata from the use of the data - keeping a history of use, learning patterns, links, and contexts from that history. eventually establishing a strong semantic layer over the data.

in the specific: a plugin for my personal wiki of choice, WikidPad. The plugin, lets call it WikidPadMonitor for now, when in 'learning mode' should collect information about the wikipages you open, the wikilinks you follow, and the patterns of wiki and tag usage - and use this to grow useable metadata.

Eventually, this emergent metadata could be used to establish a new measure of the strength of the links between wikipages, make predictions about the page being looked for, and discover context..

well, thats the idea, anyhow: growing metadata in the wikigarden.

er. i'm hardly ever here anymore

2008-10-06T21:18:00.002+01:00

more likely here or here

march against xenophobia and hate

2008-05-21T15:26:00.008+01:00

The Social Movements Indaba is mobilising social movements, immigrant communities, NGOs, unions, concerned residents from around the province for a march this Saturday, 24th of May. The march will gather at the Pieter Roos Park, corner Empire and Queens Rds, Hillbrow from 9a.m., proceed through Hillbrow and stop at the Departments of Home Affairs and Housing before ending at the Library Gardens.

The message marchers will be conveying is that our struggle is common and knows no borders. Everyone who wants to make their voices heard should join us – our struggle knows no borders.

Date: Saturday, May 24, 2008
Time: 9:00am - 12:00pm
Where: start of the march is the Pieter Roos Park, corner Empire and Queens Rds, Hillbrow
Street: corner Empire and Queens Rds
City: Johannesburg, South Africa

Bring placards, banners, friends!

...

...

tedtalks

2008-03-30T17:48:00.004+01:00

the last two posts where on video lectures from that TED talks thing - theres a number of good talks in there, some are just downright brilliant, they are mixed up with another number that I'm uncertain about, but most are pretty interesting, despite the somewhat corporate feel to it.

i'll tag my favourites there http://del.icio.us/jaysen/tedtalks+@rated.01.
maybe drop a note in the comments if you stumble across any good ones yourself.

african fractals

2008-03-17T16:52:00.007+01:00

This ones on fractals and self-organising algorithms in African culture/history. Check it out if you're at all interested in fractals, bottom-up self-organising patterns, or using indigenous knowledge in current solutions

synthetic genomics

2008-03-17T16:15:00.002+01:00

Good video (another of the worthwhile from the tedtalks series) with plenty to think about in microbiology, genetics, the upcoming synthetic genomics, and its potential..

heres an audio npr interview with Venter with some additional info.

independent diplomat

2008-02-04T18:18:00.000+01:00

A profile of former British diplomat Carne Ross, who resigned in protest to the Iraq war, He now offers his service as an independent diplomat - currently working on the Western Sahara issue.

the tag in negative

2008-01-29T04:34:00.000+01:00

Just had an idea for del.icio.us. Well actually, for tagging in general, and in particular, for additions to a set of tagging plugins for wikidpad that i'm working on.

You know how you can ask delicious to give you bookmarks with an intersection of tags by using tag1+tag2+tag3 in the url. As with:
http://del.icio.us/jaysen/dev+audio ..which will show all bookmarks with both the tags, 'dev' and 'audio'.
Well, wouldn't the following form be useful:
http://del.icio.us/jaysen/dev+audio-radio - to give us all those tagged with 'dev' and 'audio', but not with those also tagged with 'radio'

It would mean that we'd have to say goodbye to hyphenated tags, but still, i think the added functionality would be worth it.. and i never liked hyphenated tags anyway.

to be continued..

radical voices

2008-01-02T15:15:00.000+01:00

a free and easy to access online radio station with Alternative-News, Political Discourse and Commentary.

"Radical Radio is a non-commercial news, analysis and commentary-based alternative news radio that is comprised of an 18 - 25 hour program that is updated every 2-3 days and features current alternative news from sources like Democracy Now, Free Speech Radio News, the Shortwave Report and international Indy Media reports and mixes them with political speech from groups or personalities such as Howard Zinn, Michael Parenti, Noam Chomsky, Angela Davis and many, many others. This is peppered with music and poetry. We aim to offer the best in alternative news radio available on the web. We hope you like the taste more than the bland pablum of commercial radio, or the middle of the conservative perspective that NPR dishes out.. Stay tuned, stay informed and stir it up!"

Click here to listen or here.
listened to some good material so far. good aggregation.

mr mojo's christmas

2007-12-27T15:24:00.000+01:00

vyf-ster

2007-11-25T07:59:00.002+01:00

UPDATE: replaced 5star tag with rated.01 for my highest rated public Delicious bookmarks. still a silly name i know.

anyways, use it, don't use it...

a good brain theory?

2007-11-21T05:05:00.000+01:00

slightly annoying, but sharp..

i liked the bit about intelligence having more to do with predictive power than it does behavior .. Maybe if this idea holds out, we might eventually do away with the Turing test for artificial intelligence -which was always so anthropocentric as to be, well, just a little bit silly ;)

The idea is that the frontal neocortex -not the older (and possibly more complex) pre-mammalian brain- is basically a mechanism to predict the future. That the neocortex can be simply modeled as vast networks of hierarchical elements that predict their future input sequences.
So, as far as i can make out, predictive subsystems
- that are based on a hierarchical theory of memory,
- and are strongly sequential/temporal.

And the model of the neocortex plugs into other components of the brain (that aren't modeled here). The intelligence (the memory and predictive components) providing the input to the older, pre-mammalian brain, which then uses this intelligent prediction to drive action and behavior via those older systems.

Anyway, sounds good so far. Probably worth keeping an eye out for On Intelligence, his book on the subject

Hameroff on Consciousness

2007-11-12T03:00:00.001+01:00

A New Marriage of Brain and Computer -worth the watch..
nicely explains Penrose and Hameroff's somewhat unpopular theory linking microtubules within neurons to consciousness via quantum phenomena. presented by Hameroff himself!

The Unnatural History of the Sea

2007-11-09T09:00:00.000+01:00

direct link to the mp3 from the Science and the City podcast.

Callum Roberts is a leading authority on the ocean environment and author of the new book The Unnatural History of the Sea, an unprecedented history of the exploitation of the ocean, its fisheries and marine life, and a look at what our future may hold. In this lecture, he shares his research, nicely highlighting the short sightedness of our past and current fishing strategies and policies.

His idea of what needs to be done is
- first, to fish less, or at least more intelligently - with more selection, and using less destructive means.
- to create marine reserves,
- and to eliminate risky decision making...

"One of the key things to do is to remove the decision making power of politicians in fishing. Politicians are not the right people to be making decisions about how many fish can be caught, because they think in the short-term, not in the long-term welfare of the industries, or the long-term welfare of the environment. Yet in most countries in the world politicians are the ones that make decisions about how much to catch.

The decisions also involve the very large presence of industry - this also involves the potential for risky decision making (what understatement!), because again, the perspectives are more in the short-term
...
we need to move to a system where we think much less about the short term and much more about the long term, because fishing and fish stocks are really too important to squander in the way that society is doing at the present."

i agree ..All serious collective decisions, like about things that impact our survival, or the future of the planet, amongst other things, deserve open processes with proper scientific rigor and method - a long way off the greedy, narrow minded bullshit we seem to put up with currently.

anyways, its a good listen. 30 minute..ish

The Shock Doctrine

2007-09-11T05:00:00.000+01:00

Alfonso Cuaron's short based on Naomi Klein's latest book, The Shock Doctrine.

The Century Of The Self -bump

2007-08-25T04:24:00.000+01:00

Just finished the series and its probably some of the best TV I've ever seen. So this repost was the least i could do.

from the wikipedia article:
...The Century of the Self describes the impact of Freud's theories on the perception of the human mind, and the ways public relations agencies and politicians have used this during the last 100 years for their "engineering of consent".

Among the main characters are Freud himself and his nephew Edward Bernays, who was the first to use psychological techniques in advertising. He is often seen as the "father of the public relations industry". Freud's daughter Anna Freud, a pioneer of child psychology, is mentioned in the second part, as well as Wilhelm Reich, the main opponent of Freud's theories.

Along these general themes, The Century of the Self asks deeper questions about the roots and methods of modern consumerism, representative democracy and its implications. It also questions the modern way we see ourselves, the attitude to fashion and superficiality.

The business and, increasingly, the political world uses PR to read and fulfill our desires, to make their products or speeches as pleasing as possible to us. Curtis raises the question of the intentions and roots of this fact. Where once the political process was about engaging people's rational, conscious minds, as well as facilitating their needs as a society, the documentary shows how by employing the tactics of psychoanalysis, politicians appeal to irrational, primitive impulses that have little apparent bearing on issues outside of the narrow self-interest of a consumer population. He cites a Wall Street banker as saying "We must shift America from a needs- to a desires-culture. People must be trained to desire, to want new things, even before the old have been entirely consumed. [...] Man's desires must overshadow his needs." ...

It is all hosted in google video, you can view it by following the links below:

Part 1/4:
Happiness Machines

Part 2/4:
The Engineering of Consent

Part 3/4:
There is Policeman Inside all
our Heads He Must Be Destroyed

Part 4/4:
Eight People Sipping Wine

FREE CULTURE

2007-08-18T05:39:00.000+01:00

FREE CULTURE by Lawrence Lessig: halfway through and I'm thinking its just fucking brilliant!
copyright, ownership, derivative content, universal access, and the impact of new technology on all of these. its an essential debate that simply needs to happen more. Lessig argues for sensible change so simply and clearly that you've got to read Free Culture if you're interested in any of it. (naturally its a free download)

I'll try to write some more, or to summarize fully when I've finished, but i probably wont be able to do any of it justice without simply pasting in large bits of text from the book.

btw, he doesnt just push open-content, he nicely describes how and why copyright itself should be re-negotiated.

Checkout the audio version if you want to listen to it.. like maybe, while doing something else ;)
"Free Culture" as a popup audiobook

installing AVG free anti-virus in ubuntu

2007-07-31T17:04:00.000+01:00

you dont really need this in ubuntu, but its useful if you run windows as well, or if you want to test downloaded files for windows' viruses.

just copy-paste the commands in this ubuntuforum article into your terminal. Remember to change the .deb filename to that of the more recent version you downloaded.

michael moore on cnn ..on cnn

2007-07-27T23:06:00.000+01:00

You've got to watch the whole thing -its hilarious

a basic delicious hack

2007-07-25T17:36:00.001+01:00

a quicksearch shortcut to get to your del.icio.us tags:

1. In the firefox bookmark menu, choose Organise Bookmarks..
2. in the Bookmark Manager, click on 'New Bookmark'
3. name it something like delicious quicksearch
3. Enter http://del.icio.us/jaysen/%s in the location field (replacing jaysen with your delicious username),
4. Enter d in the keyword field.

Now, typing d tag1 in firefox's address bar will take you to your delicious pages tagged with tag1, and d tag1+tag2+tag3 will take you to your pages tagged with all of tag1, tag2, and tag3.

simple, i know, but i haven't seen it on any delicious-tool-list sites, and i use it a lot, so thought it was worth mentioning.

The Century of the Self

2007-07-21T03:49:00.000+01:00

propaganda and the engineering of consumer culture. (part 1)

part 2, part 3, part 4

a sense of numbers

2007-07-18T02:48:00.000+01:00

"Because the number system is like human life. First you have the natural numbers. The ones that are whole and positive. The numbers of a small child. But human consciousness expands. The child discovers longing, and do you know the mathematical expression for longing? The negative numbers. The formalization of the feeling that you're missing something.

And human consciousness expands and grows even more, and the child discovers the in-between spaces. Between stones, between pieces of moss on the stones, between people. And between numbers. And do you know what that leads to? It leads to fractions. Whole numbers plus fractions produce the rational numbers.

And human consciousness doesn't stop there. It wants to go beyond reason. It adds an operation as absurd as the extraction of roots. And produces irrational numbers.
It's a form of madness. Because the irrational numbers are infinite. They can't be written down. They force human consciousness out beyond the limits. And by adding irrational numbers to rational numbers, you get real numbers.

It doesn't stop. It never stops. Because now, on the spot, we expand the real numbers with the imaginary ones, square roots of negative numbers. These are numbers we can't picture, numbers that normal human consciousness cannot comprehend. And when we add the imaginary numbers to the real numbers, we have the complex number system.

And that (the complex number system) is the first number system in which it's possible to completely explain satisfactorily the crystal formation of ice."

from Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow.

laaitie

2007-07-16T03:29:00.001+01:00

check out 'laaitie'.
from the blog:

‘Laaitie’ is a South African colloquialism used to refer to someone younger than oneself or a young person. It may also infer someone being younger in experience or intellectual ability. It may be used positively, as a term of endearment, or as a way of dismissing someone as inferior to oneself. Mostly, laaities are not taken seriously in the world. This has not, however, stopped laaities all over the globe from changing the paths of history. Today, too, in struggles from Soweto to Paris to Argentina, it is ‘laaities with lus’ (Koenraad De Buys, 2006) who speak out and act against authoritarian and exploitative relations, situations and regimes. While the term ‘laaitie’ is often used to dismiss the fighting, critical and unrestrained spirit of young people as being outside of the domain of ‘the rational’, and ‘the responsible’ (not yet mature enough for proper consideration), it is reappropriated here in celebration of the laaitie as that spirit of unbridled freedom and rigour of critique and action in life.

2007-07-11T04:16:00.000+01:00

Ok, it looks like I've told this wrong (many, many times). I had it that he used the symbol to get out of a recording contract, but thats not quite right. Heres the story from an article i stumbled onto:

"In 1993, Prince’s dissatisfaction with his record label, Warner Bros., finally reached its peak. Despite his superstar status and $100 million contract, the Purple One didn’t feel he had enough creative control over his music. So 'in protest,' Prince announced that Prince would never perform for Warner Bros. again - this unpronounceable symbol would instead.

The symbol for the Artist Formerly Known as Prince combined three ancient symbols: the male symbol, the female symbol, and the alchemy symbol for soapstone, which was supposed to reflect his artistic genius. Prince retired the symbol when his contract with Warner Bros. ran out in 2000. Today, he is again Prince."

just slightly wrong, but i thought that I could straighten things out here. and yes, I am a fan.

anyone for scrabble?

2007-07-08T05:37:00.000+01:00

..online, or via email. at Scrabulous -the username is jaysen. Leave a comment if you want a game.

exxon proposes burning the dead for fuel if climate calamity hits

2007-06-20T05:58:00.000+01:00

they were actually YesMen - activists who posing as ExxonMobil and National Petroleum Council representatives delivered an outrageous keynote speech to 300 oilmen at Canada's largest oil conference - amazing how far it went before people caught on - funny. read it here

refactoring the mind

2007-06-20T04:52:00.000+01:00

Listen to A monk's guide to changing your mind (mp3 audio)
I like that he places the practice of meditation within solid neurological and cognitive frameworks.. mostly because i'm tired of all the new-agey crap that gets unintentionally bundled in with me sitting quietly for a few minutes everyday and breathing.

check these bookmarks for some material in text form.

notquitemindreading

2007-06-13T21:41:00.000+01:00

listen :BBC - Radio 4 - Frontiers 06/06/2007.

2007-06-01T10:45:00.000+01:00

the struggle is also for culture - one meme at a time

OpenArena

2007-05-28T01:12:00.000+01:00

OpenArena is an opensource first person (doomlike) shooter. You can find it in the Ubuntu repository using the package manager, or, for the windows version, check this mirror, or the others listed here.

I've played it a few times, and it plays well - much better than Nexuiz. If anyone wants to run around cool maps shooting at me, leave me a comment.

Nice that its free 'as in speech' software as well.

2007-05-22T10:51:00.000+01:00

mustn't underestimate stupidity. stupidity in general, mine in particular

apartheid israel

2007-05-21T21:22:00.000+01:00

from YouTube:William Fletcher on Apartheid in South Africa and Israel

beware - cognitive hazards..

2007-05-13T05:44:00.000+01:00

A Cognitive bias is distortion in the way humans perceive reality. Check out a really useful list of cognitive biases here. Some of these have been verified empirically in the field of psychology, others are considered general categories of bias.

also posted as 26 reasons what you think is right, is wrong

ubuntu for mobile devices

2007-05-09T01:44:00.000+01:00

Linux evolves for mobile devices: A version of the increasingly popular Linux operating system Ubuntu will be developed for use on net-enabled phones and devices (including the new Centrino based UltraMobile PC platform)
read more..

just what i need to get excited about the old pocketpc, er.. again

does JavaFX spell the end of AJAX?

2007-05-09T01:08:00.000+01:00

"-- You know all that AJAX code you've been writing and tearing your hair out over as you attempt to get the JavaScript working in both Internet Explorer and Firefox? Yeah, that AJAX code..
well, it's all going to be useless real soon."
read more..

I wasnt looking forward to having to wade through ajax, so hopefully a replacement will come before i have to develop any ajax type web content.

hacking your body's bacteria

2007-04-27T09:00:00.000+01:00

from this article:
" 'The microbes that live in the human body are quite ancient,' says a pioneer in gut microbe research. 'They've been selected (through evolution) because they help us.'

And it now appears that our daily antibacterial regimens are disrupting a balance that once protected humans from health problems, especially allergies and malfunctioning immune responses." (Vindication!)

"Microbial exposures early in life, scientists believe, cause mild inflammation that calibrates the body's responses to other pathogens and contaminants later in life. Without exposure as infants, researchers say, people can end up with unbalanced immune systems."

also from the article: "To hack the gut bacteria more precisely, Blaser calls for a Gut Genome Project, modeled after the Human Genome Project. It's a daunting task: The human genome, mapped to great fanfare but still dimly understood, contains a tenth of the genes believed to be in our gut bacteria."

oh yes, and they mention that: "Consumer probiotics don't always contain medically recognized bacterial strains, he said, and often the bacteria they contain are dead."

ubuntu's feisty fawn

2007-04-23T05:01:00.000+01:00

so, ubuntu 7.04 feisty fawn has been released, and on both my machines for the last few days. not that different from 6.10, but mainly i'm liking.

things like one click to enable compositing desktop effects, and that it auto installs proprietary drivers and codecs when you need them - much better for the new linux user.

still need to try out the new (now stable) ntfs read/write access using ntfs-3G

UPDATE- ntfs read/write works well - see this ubuntuforum post describing ntfs-3g installation in detail, or the ntfs-3g section of this article covering useful installs on feisty

imagining OpenGovernment

2007-04-17T16:34:00.001+01:00

some scribbles from fevered vision

taking government from the cathedral to the bazaar. or, at least, adding a bazaar to the cathedral of current governance.

creating collaborative open communities -an OpenGovernment space- with access to all documentation including all government processes, policies, decisions - those being in the public domain - using open content and discussion systems like wikis and forums for comments, discussion and debate. the space managed by the meritocracy based community of all participants. with access filtering, all the way to public redrafting, and beyond?. starting as a sort of a shadow government entirely in the public domain.

and people getting involved in these communities on large scales. awake to the necessity and possibilities of participation. trained in the hierarchies, groups and forum-rules of the these communities at all schools, and as part of ubiquitous computer/net-community studies. This learning and participation becoming an aspect of widely deployed community internet facilities , and an aspect of social life itself.

using rules for handling debate, discussion, flaming, vandals, and misinformation that are emerging from wiki communities and the larger opensource communal space

patterns similar to those noted in opensource communities concentrating participation from the people with the most in stake, the most interested and the most able contributers - from an enormous pool of potential contributers - using our vast numbers more to our advantage. the knots of complex problem spaces untangling under the weight of a multitude of eyeballs.

another two pieces of social software

2007-04-05T00:10:00.000+01:00

LastFm is social-networking for music. You grow networks of people that listen to similar music, based on your ongoing listening and tagging, and then listen to their playlists as streamed (tag radio) stations..
my lastfm userpage - early days but growing.

AllPeers is a group based filesharing extension for firefox using bit-torrent transfers.

UPDATE: uninstalled the AllPeers extension without testing - mainly because couldnt find anyone who wanted to try it out - probably will look at it when next i actually need to transfer large files with a friend. LastFM on the other hand is mostly all good.

wired to connect

2007-03-24T12:29:00.000+01:00

Science & the City | Webzine of the New York Academy of Sciences: "Wired to Connect - Daniel Goleman
In Social Intelligence, psychologist and science writer Daniel Goleman, known for his 1995 bestseller Emotional Intelligence, introduces new concepts in neuroscience that reveal how human brains are designed to connect."

listen to the interview directly here, or download the mp3 from here. hes got some good ideas in there.
Science And The City has an good store of articles and podcasts - most of those i've listened to so far have been worth the effort.

Gimmie, a new panel replacement for Gnome, and how to install it in Ubuntu

2007-03-13T12:50:00.000+01:00

Gimmie looks like it has some interesting user interface innovation - checkout this blog for how to install it.

will update this post after i've tested it properly.

UPDATE:20070620: still havent tried this -fuck it- and probably wont anytime soon

The Ape That Got Lucky

2007-03-11T04:19:00.000+01:00

bbc Radio4-Comedy- The Ape That Got Lucky: "Chris Addison - the thinking idiot's pretend anthropologist - takes us on a journey through the vast and rich subject of human evolution in four comic lectures"

damn funny

writing in common (with google docs)

2007-01-08T05:17:00.000+01:00

you getting this
Yeah very cool
this changes things, huh?
truly revolutionary bru

These were our first words on screen when sometime yesterday morning, DS - in Johannesburg - and jaysen - in Algiers - decided to check out google's collaborative authoring tools. I know what you thinking, and you right, we're are a little geeky. But now that we got that out of the way we can say, without fear of ridicule or censure...THIS SHIT IS FUCKING IMPRESSIVE. We were so impressed that we decided to test it with a joint blog.

First, We got there via http://docs.google.com. So far, google have come up with word processor and spreadsheet web applications done with some fancy AJAX. It imports/exports from/to openoffice, word, excel, html, and pdf and runs off your browser. The interface is pretty much what you get with most office applications. What makes this so cool is that any number of people, anywhere in the world, can be working on the same document at the same time with changes appearing almost instantaneously. (We did notice some delay creeping in sometimes, but not often)

The only shit thing we've found so far is that it doesn't allow footnotes. Although it transports footnotes from word documents as anchors in the text, its a bit of a pain to have create a new anchor every-time you add a footnote (DS likes footnotes).

There is an almost direct and linear progression from the wiki idea, or at least, the collaborative part of the wiki idea (not the unique funkiness of wiki's massively linked network of nodes - yes, we're both fans of wiki as well). But the collaboration with this tool just seems so much more immediate and realtime -with changes appearing almost as soon as others can make them during simultaneous use, with an excellent revision control system (the latter allows you to track changes in the document, literally, to the second. although the increments of time get larger the further back you go).
Add the extra dimension of a skypecall, and this becomes a dangerously powerful tool. Truly revolutionary. In fact, we're thinking, this might even be better than working together in the same room.

Apart from footnotes, the only drawback we experienced has less to do with software, and more to do with the singularity of each of our styles of writing and ways thinking. But the gap, if you can call it that, is the real tension that creativity springs from. Its a good thing even if takes working through

ShowMeDo - demonstrative video

2006-12-17T07:37:00.000+01:00

good resource -basically, people sharing what they know via screencasts- nice for slower, lazier learning.
its also pretty easy to submit screencasts, so if you've got some knowledge (that others could use ;-) -share!

checkout http://showmedo.com/videos/python and http://showmedo.com/videos/screencasting

natural selection of universes !

2006-10-17T05:53:00.000+01:00

Why is the universe the way it is - why are the fundamental properties of elementary particles and forces just such that complexity can arise? Shift the values of these fundamental properties around just a bit and things dont work out so well.. a universe with even slightly varying properties either doesnt survive very long or ends up very empty with no ability for complexity of any sort to arise.

The answer i've most liked so far is that we just happen to be in one universe (of an infinite set within a theoretical multiverse) that does allow for complexity, and that the other sorts of universes that form without the right properties dont exist for long and wont have anybody within them to ask any of these questions anyway..

but Lee Smolin's "natural selection of universes" idea is simply more beautiful and 'complete'. He starts of with the general postulate that some self organising cosmic scale phenomenon could underly the selection of fundamental quantum
properties, but where it gets really beautiful i think is his suggestion that that phenomenon is evolutionary - that universes have evolved fundamental properties that make their reproduction more likely.

As Martin Rees comments: "He's saying that in some sense the universes that allow complexity and evolution reproduce themselves more efficiently than other universes. The ensemble itself is thus evolving in some complicated way. Smolin speculates - as others, like Alan Guth, have also done - that inside a black hole it's possible for a small region to, as it were, sprout into a new universe. We don't see it, but it inflates into some new dimension"

To continue the metaphor he uses - universes as animals, fundamental physical properties as genes, and black-holes as reproduction events.

Read the Whole article here - it is a bit old and (in places) dated, but the underlying idea of natural selection for universes, seems to me -at least tonight- to be very exciting.

One question i do have with the article (and some of the comments) concerns the assumption he uses to conclude that the idea is testable - that any tweaking of fundamental properties should produce less or equal number of blackholes, but NOT more. According to Smolin, this should be the case because universes would have evolved to optimize their properties so as to have the maximum chances for reproduction.

But does our understanding of evolution bear this out? Evolution doesnt necessarily achieve perfection - it doesnt even strive for it - its just a self organizing phenomenon that allows things that can persist to persist. What i mean is that there is no guarantee that our current universes 'gene-set' is necessarily the most optimized..

If i'm right, this means that the testability of his theory is open to question - that if anyone finds a shift in fundamental values that allows for more blackholes, the whole theory is not necessarily proven wrong. Thats more sad than it sounds, because without testability, its just another beautiful idea.

(UPDATE: in the comments to this blog, someone pointed out that Smolin addresses this in his book, 'The Life of the Cosmos')

...
Something else that might be worth considering is the possibility of other 'reproduction events' that werent thought of when he wrote this - like maybe the "Brane collisions" that possibly create universes in some of the newer forms of the superstring/m-theory/membrane theories

python diaries

2006-10-14T13:50:00.000+01:00

michael palin's diaries - this weeks bbc4 book of the week. features extracts from michael palin's diaries of 'the python years', read by palin himself - definately worth listening to, enjoyable, but probably online for the next week only.. so thats about until the 20th of october. Until then, the links are:
part1; part2; part3; part4; part5;

bbc radio online needs realplayer -which can be downloaded here. just remember to turn Off realplayers irritating messagecenter [Tools->Preferences->Automatic Services->configure message center -> uncheck 'Check for new messages' and 'Show Message Center icon in system tray'] . thats after cancelling the irritating registration process.

a different sort of python diary entry is the release of python 2.5. highlights include the new 'with' operator, some changes to the Generator mechanism and some speedups.

listening to the material world

2006-10-06T09:31:00.000+01:00

been listening to The Material World on bbc4 again. Its a science radio show, and theres some interesting, er, material spread amongst the online archive of all previous shows. definately useful. Well.. worth listening to at least.

and while i'm here, i might as well mention that i'm still playing with ubuntu - its been about 3 weeks (i think) and within the last couple days, i've been brave/foolish enough to add it (as dual boot with xp) to the laptop as well. Testing the 686 kernel for the laptop's core-duo cpu now, and a lot of other stumbling around in the exciting unfamiliarity of linux. Ubuntu linux definately needs its own proper writeup here. . it will come, maybe, but that will have to be later.

linux with the ubuntu philosophy

2006-09-20T03:32:00.000+01:00

I spent the last week playing with ubuntu 6.06 and i think i might have gotten myself seriously hooked. it might finally be time for me to stick with linux. The install seemed much easier than the last ubuntu distro i tried, the latest gnome runs much smoother, it took just a bit of poking around to get my nvidia drivers working at full resolution (the forums enjoy excellent support),

US-Israeli terrorism

2006-07-25T03:11:00.000+01:00

In Lebanon and Gaza, they've been bombing the shit out of cities and residential areas, taking out all remaining services and infrustructure, using white phosphorous and clusterbombs -maximising the terror inflicted on the civilian population; with seeming unwaivering confidence that even the most obvious warcrimes will go unpunished - Seriously fucked-up.
As for the language the US and Isreal are using - its as sick as ever.

i needed to vent, but read A farewell to Beirut -a particularly moving article from Robert Fisk in Beirut

also check out U.S. Arming of Israel: How U.S. Weapons Manufacturers Profit From Middle East Conflict

and if you're in or around pretoria, there's a demonstration planned at the Israeli Embassy this Friday at 2.30pm.

Is South Africa burning in Paris?

2006-07-17T18:31:00.000+01:00

this is an interesting read on the deterioration of the multicultural project around the world..
HSRC Review. Volume 4, Number 1, March 2006. In conversation with Ivor Chipkin: Is South Africa burning in Paris?

happiness is ... er ....

2006-06-14T11:38:00.000+01:00

well, listen to what some scientists have to say on the subject. The audio below is taken from a recent podcast on the science of happiness, from the canadian science radio show Quirks and Quarks. pretty useful.

Listen to or download the mp3 audio file or Ogg audio file . (what's ogg?)

(i'm off to try and stimulate my left prefrontal cortex ;-)

Mind Hacks: Suicide itself now an act of war

2006-06-12T00:59:00.000+01:00

saw the following post ridiculing the US (and media) response to Guantanamo Bay suicides on the MindHacks blog -a blog focused on neuroscience, but that is quite generally interesting.

A motivation not yet mentioned in the extensive scientific literature on suicide was offered by the US Government for why three inmates killed themselves in Guantanamo Bay - apparently, it was a well-planned 'act of asymmetric warfare'."

Perhaps, someone could email the organisors of the US Department of Defense 2006 Military Suicide Prevention Conference and let them know that their opening talk on the Theoretical Considerations of Suicide by Dr. David Jobes (powerpoint slides here) obviously missed out this important explanation in an otherwise comprehensive coverage of the medical literature?

UPDATE: Six hours after the first story, the suicides are now being explained as a 'PR move'. Doesn't science move fast.

Autonomous Politics and its Problems

2006-05-27T06:05:00.000+01:00

ZNet |Vision & Strategy | Autonomous Politics and its Problems
from the site:

his "aim in this article is to present some hypotheses on issues of strategy for anti-capitalist emancipatory movements. The idea is to rethink the conditions for an effective politics, with the capacity to radically change the society we live in"

tagged code snippets

2006-05-23T16:56:00.000+01:00

Code Snippets : a code snippet repository, with del.icio.us type tagging. The service is still growing, and it still needs multi-tag searching capability, but i think its a winning combination.

oh yeah, they might also be suffering a bit from slashdot induced server strain.

Performancing for Firefox

2006-05-22T14:58:00.000+01:00

i'm trying this tidy firefox extension called Performancing to write this blog. Its a full featured blog editor that sits right within Firefox, and has Trackback, Technorati and Del.icio.us support. Its also been approved by the mozilla addons team, so you can lift it directly from the addons site.

UPDATE: After using it for a few posts, i think the blogger bookmarklet is all i need. its out.

back ...

2006-05-20T10:45:00.000+01:00

after my ISP apparently took a week to swapout a network card in
my local switching station. this does not bode well for the next 12 months.

ah well, its never that serious

my stumbleupon blog

2006-05-04T05:48:00.000+01:00

my stumbleupon reviews, where you'll find links/reviews . some of them to things as pretty as this.. even.

i'm currently posting more there, anyway.

who wants to play?

2006-02-18T17:51:00.000+01:00

a good opensource first person shooter nexuiz. anyone interested in joining me for a quick online game, can download the game from that site (its also available in the ubuntu repositories) and drop me a line in the comments.

blogmark sa

2006-02-13T17:00:00.000+01:00

i've happenned onto yet another interesting and funny (very, very) blog at the south african blogmark, Andreas' blog - scary clever.

here's one of his good ideas i just couldnt help pasting here - in case i cant tempt anyone to jump thru the link - hope he doesnt mind.

Okay, university fees, right? Here's my idea: We make a student’s university tuition fee equal to like double whatever his or her school fees were. Awesome, huh? Check, it’s like if you went to a really good school where the fees were say 15k...then, uh, your ‘varsity fees would be 30k. Now our varsity fees are only about 7.5k, but if they were 30 grand, we could subsidise, um, 3 other kids who went to shitty township schools that only cost like 500 bucks a year and where they probably got a kak education and now they still have to work part-time and shit just to afford to be at university – I mean, Christ, that puts them at such a disadvantage right away, dudes. How the fuck are they meant to compete with middle-class mother fuckers like us who had all these opportunities...And the best part is that those fucken pricks who went to those ultra-expensive elitist asshole schools like St. Wanker’s College or wherever would have to pay like 200 grand for ‘varsity instead of just the same 7.5k as the poor kids do now. So they’d subsidise like 20 other dudes who really need it and their robber-baron fathers would just have to compensate by buying the little wankers BMWs instead of Porsches to date-rape chicks in. I mean, fuck it, they’d still be rich Ralph-Lauren wearing cunts, but they’d at least have to contribute to a slightly more egalitarian society...I went to a good school...I got no problem paying more for my tertiary education, man...it’s frikkin’ bullshit that some people have to pay like 10 times what their schooling cost and others only have to pay like a tenth...I reckon that’d work, man….fuck those date-raping elitist asshole preppy motherfuckin’ spawn of apartheid robber barons and gold-digging-trophy-whores...

* dissolve into helpless laughter*

Independent World Television

2006-02-13T05:03:00.000+01:00

if ever there was a desperately needed initiative!
Check out Naomi Klein's clip

er. sorry DS for the blatant lift.

2006-02-06T19:18:00.000+01:00

"if you removed all vertebrates from the Earth (including humans), the ecosystems would continue to work flawlessly.

Remove insects or even just a few of their important groups and life on Earth would collapse."

Gene Pool

2006-02-01T06:39:00.000+01:00

very funky - i've been fantasizing about a SimLife type game like this for the longest time.

From the page: "Gene Pool is an artificial life simulation in which populations of physics-based organisms evolve swimming capabilities over time. These organisms are called "swimbots". You can set mate preference criteria and thus influence what the swimbots consider as attractive qualities in potential mates. The most attractive swimbots get chosen most often and so their genetic building blocks propogate to future generations. Eventually, swimbots get better at pursuing each other, competing for food, and becoming babes to other swimbots. Local gene pools emerge which compete for sex and food (for energy to have more sex). Eventually a dominant sub-population takes over.

And sometimes, everyone just dies (but you can help keep them alive, by moving food bits and swimbots around, and constraining the migration of competing populations by using the "Great Wall")

Gene Pool is best appreciated as a virtual Darwinian aquarium in which you initiate a primordial soup, and then occasionally check up on what Virtual Mother Nature is up to - about every fifteen minutes (or every few days, if you are interested in long-term evolutionary experiments!)

The strange and unexpected strategies for swimming (and being sexually attractive) that emerge can sometimes be amusing, and a bit reminiscent of that brand of creativity known as Darwinian Evolution."

[tagged with evolution]

Python Sidebar

2006-01-30T05:48:00.000+01:00

something useful for FireFox users/Python hackers:
Edgewall Software: Python Sidebar

algiers by flickr

2005-12-31T00:55:00.000+01:00

seeing as we're so crap at taking photos, here's some links to other peoples' shots of algiers.

algiers by sea

2005-12-12T02:30:00.000+01:00

wanted to test blogger's picture hosting, so here's a pic from our trip back into algiers via ferry. it was taken sometime in august, at sunrise, as the ferry docked.

progress report ..

2005-12-11T23:31:00.000+01:00

on understanding life, the universe, and everything:
most of the very broadest brushstrokes are there. just some nagging bits like: the very start of the universe (and what possibly framed that event), the neurophysiological basis of consciousness, the assymetrical predisposition to baryonic over non-baryonic matter; and how to get along with other people.

there's no time like, for instance... 'now'

2005-12-05T04:32:00.000+01:00

"There's no such thing as an instant in time or present moment in nature. It's something entirely subjective that we project onto the world around us. That is, it's the outcome of brain function and consciousness."

In the paper, "Time and Classical and Quantum Mechanics: Indeterminacy vs. Discontinuity", Peter Lynds, a 27 year old broadcasting school tutor from Wellington, New Zealand, establishes that there is a necessary trade off of all precisely determined physical values at a time, for their continuity through time, and in doing so, appears to throw age old assumptions about determined instantaneous physical magnitude and time on their heads. ...

read more here. The article doesnt provide enough meat, but i like the basic idea.

UPDATE: the actual article can be found here, and Wikipedia has some info and links to discussions on the piece, including the possibility of a hoax, here.

my feeling is that it does contain a bit of bad science, but that the idea itself is diggable.

my del.icio.us tagroll

2005-11-27T12:17:00.000+01:00

the del.icio.us tagroll shows your del.icio.us tags as a weighted 'cloud' that can be displayed in any webpage - the more links contained within any tag, the larger it appears in the cloud. checkout del.icio.us help for tagrolls to get the code for your tagroll
For those that dont know, del.icio.us is an online bookmarking service that allows you to sort your sites by tags.

UPDATE: i moved the actual del.icio.us tagroll to the sidebar on the right as a permanent fixture

a follow-up on the glen and raj saga..

2005-11-24T05:53:00.000+01:00

the class worrier blog has a follow-up post of last weeks march here.
mentioned there, is another article worth checking out:

Democracy took a beating in Foreman Road,
Richard Pithouse, November 22, 2005, The Mercury

Class worrier: Fucker stole my camera and shot my mates

2005-11-17T16:55:00.000+01:00

extract from Raj Patel's excellent blog..

" It was an ordinary mugging. The bastard had a gun, a swagger, a gang and didn’t seem to want to me to take his photo when he was roughing someone up. So he came up to me and told me to hand over the camera. Timid as I am, and not wanting much further trouble, I handed it over. There were witnesses.

“What’s your name?”

“Nayager”, he said, pointing to his badge.

Superintendent Glen Nayager, it turns out...

...
read on

Google Site Search Bookmarklet

2005-11-02T02:48:00.000+01:00

finally got tired of having Firefox's google toolbar just sitting there doing nothing... so i dumped it, and scratched up this bookmarklet for the only thing i really do use the toolbar for anyways - quick searching a site with google

javascript:void(site1=document.location.host); void(srchstr=prompt('enter Search String :','',' Google Site Search'));{if(srchstr!=null) {location='http://www.google.com/search?q=site%3A' +site1+ ' + '+srchstr}};

to use this bookmarklet on firefox :
- just right click the bookmark toolbar and select 'New Bookmark...'.
- then, in the dialog that appears, enter something like 'Google Site Search' for the Name and copy the short piece of script above into the Location field.

Now from any site, clicking the Google Site Search button wll prompt you for a Search String and find it on that site using google.

Chavez at the UN General Assembly, September 15, 2005

2005-09-18T18:55:00.000+01:00

cool speech - check it out here

contributing common sense to an Open Mind

2005-09-18T14:21:00.000+01:00

MIT's Open Mind Common Sense Project is working to gather common sense knowledge that can be used to improve AI technology.

The Open Mind Commonsense project is an attempt to make computers smarter by making it easy and fun for people all over the world to work together to give computers the millions of pieces of ordinary knowledge that constitute "common-sense", all those aspects of the world that we all understand so well we take them for granted. This repository of knowledge will enable us to create more intelligent and sociable software and better understand the structure our own minds.

if you've got any common sense to spare, you can join the project and share. theres another article on this project here
...
then, if you're interested, the resulting knowledgebase is available for download from the ConceptNet project
ConceptNet v2.1 is written in the Python programming language. It is distributed as a Python API and a standalone XML-RPC Server.

belarga? .. bothered? .. me?

2005-09-16T08:21:00.000+01:00

belarga
Originally uploaded by jaysen.

so, i finally put some pictures from the holiday in belarga .. over here at flickr.com.

an invitation to Stumble

2005-08-16T02:40:00.000+01:00

checkout StumbleUpon - a social bookmarking tool, and a good way to share sites.

"StumbleUpon is a community-oriented and personalized approach to web surfing - a browser add-on which automates "word of mouth" recommendations of quality web sites. The people-driven technology combines human recommendations with machine learning of personal preferences and interests to filter through the vast amount of information on the web and direct users to relevant web sites."

my stumbles can be found ..here

The ZoomQuilt .. expressing scale

2005-08-16T01:59:00.000+01:00

a brilliant piece of flash animation art at Flash The ZoomQuilt

wikidpad goes opensource

2005-07-16T09:08:00.000+01:00

WikidPad has been opensource for a few months now. the group has settled on using Trac/Subversion along with two google groups (dev and user).

hoggar mountains, sahara

2005-03-24T23:37:00.000+01:00

there's some pics from our trip down to hoggar mountains in the south of algeria on my flickr page

around Tamenrasset
Originally uploaded by jaysen.

BBC Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2003 - The Emerging Mind

2005-02-21T07:19:00.000+01:00

BBC - Radio 4 - Reith Lectures 2003 - The Emerging Mind: "Vilayanur S. Ramachandran" - Brilliant audio lectures from the forefront of evolutionary neuropsychology

Lecture 4 covering synesthesia and the evolution of language was particularly funky. you just need realplayer (downloadable from the bbc site) to listen.

snowy algiers

2005-01-27T18:50:00.000+01:00

snow for the first time.. lots of fun. apparently the most snow algiers has seen in 50 years. more snow pics on my flickr page.

Originally uploaded by jaysen.

pics on www.flickr.com :

2005-01-11T04:21:00.000+01:00

Sidi Frej in summer
Originally uploaded by jaysen.

I've started using flickr as an online gallery. free with lots of cool services..

checkout some Algeria pics on Flickr.com from 2004.