In response to a request on Facebook today, I dug through some of my old Alamout Black CDs, and managed to locate a track we made called “World View“.
This song was featured in a fight scene in the 2001 film Extreme Force. My friend Kays Alatrakchi was the guy who did the music for that film, and we made this song specifically for it. A lot of fun, that, though I have to admit it sounds pretty dated to me now. Kays more recently did the music for Midnight Son as well, which is a totally excellent vampire film, and which you should see immediately, if you haven’t already.
So I was browsing around, trying to find footage to convince a couple of friends to come with me to see Amon Tobin play live here in Chicago in a couple of weeks, and what should I find, but this beautiful HD version of the live show, with excellent audio to boot.
Sit back for an hour, full-screen this baby, and enjoy.
UPDATE: It appears the YouTube video has been taken down for copyright reasons. Oh well. It was fun while it lasted.
I watched the ISAM 2.0 show in Chicago on Saturday night, and it was even better than the first one.
Today, a young lady posted, without context of any kind, an email to a semi-public email listserv, asserting:
Disclaimer: All communication sent from charityXXXXX@XXXXX.COM, or from Charity XXXXX
is privileged communication, owned exclusively by Charity XXXXX, as proprietary owner/ideas and information as copyright. No duplication, dissemination or profit from the above-mentioned material may occur without the express discretionary consent of owner, Charity XXXXX.
Copyright Charity XXXXX 1958-2012
All rights reserved
You see a lot of these kinds of things these days. Problem is, they’re completely pointless. As was pointed out by the Economist back in April of last year. And by Slate, in 2004. In fact, the only thing I can find which indicates these sort of stupid things have any merit is this guy, and then only in very limited circumstances. Continue reading →
Well friends, after 25 responses to the survey, it’s time to reveal what you all think is (and isn’t) cannibalism. It was an interesting survey, and after thinking about it a little, I might include some different questions in the next one.
So, is the crowd right? Tell me what you think in the comments!
Utterly uncontroversial. Nobody thinks this is cannibalism.
80% of people think this isn’t cannibalism.
Almost the same as the last question. 79.2% of respondents don’t think this is cannibalism.
Now this is interesting. More than half (58.3%) of respondents think that this IS cannibalism. But, how can it be cannibalism if you’re not consuming someone other than yourself?
No question here. Every respondent thought this was cannibalism.
Another interesting one. 75% of people said they thought this was cannibalism, even though the tissue is artificially manufactured.
87% of people believe both you and the other survivor are both cannibals.
This was the most controversial question. Is a zombie (a dead human) capable of cannibalism? The answers split almost evenly, with 52.2% of you saying, “no,” and 47.8% believing that it is cannibalism.
Har har. Nearly everyone agreed that cannonballism isn’t cannibalism. Good paying attention!
Well, I told you I had some neat things in the works, and today, I’m happy to report that Acceler8or.com, a new website featuring news and original articles about transhumanist and Singularitarian culture, is online and rocking.
The site editor is none other than R.U. Sirius, whom you might remember from his time editing Mondo 2000, or perhaps his collaborations with Timothy Leary, or maybe even from his presidential bid under the banner of The Revolution.
I did the design and implementation of the site, which is based on WordPress, with some rich customizations, and a theme I build from scratch using the Blueprint CSS framework.
ReadWriteWeb reports today on a study by the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism.
The takeaway?
According to the survey, 46% of people now say they get their news online at least three times a week, surpassing newspapers (40%) for the first time. Only local television is more popular among Americans, with 50% indicating that’s their regular source for news.
Not to mention this beautiful graphic:
So things are looking good for the web. Not so good for newspapers. Even less well for magazines, and worst of all for cable news.
I suspect that a large reason for the 13.7% drop in cable news numbers can be directly related to the perception of partisanship on most of those stations. At least, I hope that’s the reason — it’s a good one.
CC-licensed image, courtesy of Steve Rhodes, via Flickr
This post is an amalgam of several emails I sent to a private journalism-related listserv. I’ve got a project brewing in the ol’ noggin relating to journalism, objectivity, and transparency. I figured I’d post this publicly, in the hopes of soliciting more opinions, so please feel free to post in the comments.
So, one of my pet peeves about the universe of journalism is the fact that most (primarily non-journalist) folks, and particularly those on the conservative end of the political spectrum, insist that journalists must be “objective” in their reporting.
This notion is, of course, under constant debate, but it has recently been brought to the fore by several cases, including Juan Williams, Keith Olberman, Helen Thomas, and Octavia Nasr, who was fired over a mere tweet which was seen by some folks as partisan.
Frankly, I don’t believe that it’s possible for such a thing as genuinely objective reporting to exist in the real world. We might aspire to write just the facts, we might try our best to present every side of an argument without favoring one or the other, but ultimately, there’s no such thing as a human with no bias, and therefore by logical necessity, no reporting without bias.
Furthermore, because of the epistemological impossibility of “objective” reporting, I’m personally inclined to treat those who base their journalistic reputation on objectivity as suspect, because they either A) haven’t considered the philosophical consequences of their claim or B) they don’t believe that I’ve thought about it deeply enough to see their claims are bogus, or perhaps worst of all C) they genuinely DO believe that they are being more objective than anyone else, which is a level of self-delusion I’m not prepared to accept.
The primary benefit that a professional journalist brings to the table (in my opinion) is the impetus towards investigation and a willingness to discuss multiple points of view in their stories. Take for example Dave Weigel, who was fired from the WaPo for comments he made on a private listserv. Even though he didn’t personally hold the same beliefs as the folks he was reporting on, nobody was complaining about the content of his stories. He was reporting on a point of view that differed from his own, and apparently doing it well enough to satisfy the conservatives of the world (feel free to correct me if I’m wrong on this point). Ultimately, he was undone by expressing his personal opinions in a private forum.
Perhaps it is that the real advantage of professional journalism over “citizen journalism” is in fact that it requires a certain amount of exposure to ideas which may not completely cohere with your intellectual predisposition? Maybe what the NYT, Dallas Morning News, and Chicago Tribune offer is the opportunity to encounter a bit of cognitive dissonance from time to time. It may not be comfortable, but that just means you’re thinking about it.
David Weinberger, a former fellow with the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet & Society, has also argued that “transparency is the new objectivity,” and that readers can now make up their own minds about whether journalists are credible or not by looking at the sources of the news they are reporting, rather than relying on the notion of objectivity. “Transparency gives the reader information by which she can undo some of the unintended effects of the ever-present biases,” he said in a blog post last year. “Transparency brings us to reliability the way objectivity used to.” Transparency is also much more effective online because journalists can link to supporting evidence for their arguments, Weinberger said, instead of just relying on the principle of objectivity to buttress their opinions. “Objectivity,” he wrote, “is a trust mechanism you rely on when your medium can’t do links.”
