A Fake Bomb is a Bad Public Service Announcement

Recently there have been several false alarms involving “suspect devices”, most prominently the Aqua Teen Hunger Force Guerrilla Marketing Boston Bomb Scare [also see BoingBoing's blog roundup of the fiasco], and the most recent Boston Freakout over a traffic counter attached to a post. So it is rather surprising to see a Public Service Initiative reminding people to be vigilant in the form of fake bombs being placed around R-Mall in Mumbai, India. What would have happened if these were placed in an American mall? Probably complete panic, an evacuation, and a bomb squad’s controlled demolition of the suspect devices. This seemingly innocuous reminder to be vigilant would obviously be a perfect way to disguise an actual explosive device. What the hell was the R-mall security staff thinking? According to Wikipedia, the literacy rate in the city of Mumbai is 86%, but I don’t know what percentage of the population there can read English. Adding translation in Hindi would have been smart. Making two dimensional posters of the same idea would have been a better idea.

Link [via BoingBoing]

Metacritic: Aggregating Media Reviews

I am not sure how many people are familiar with Metacritic, so I thought I would post about this great web site. Metacritic creates Metascores for film, DVDs, Movies, Games, Books, and TV by aggregating reviews from individual people as well as professional critics/sites. This makes it a reliable source for reviews on almost any kind of media. Sorting by top score is a great way to discover new things that have been rated well by others. Rotten Tomatoes is similar to Metacritic, but not as useful or broad in scope. Aggregation is an excellent tool, and as the web evolves and content is separated from formatting, aggregation will become more commonplace. If you are looking for a job, there is Indeed, a job board aggregator, so you never have to waste time searching individual sources. There is also a useful product review aggregator called Wize if you are in the market for a gadget or appliance of some sort.

Note: I realize the term aggregation is usually used in terms of web feeds, but I think it is also appropriate to describe the accumulation of multiple dissimilar sources of information into one central resource.

Suburban Sprawl and Car Culture

After my previous post on Suburbia I thought I would elaborate on the topic of American Suburbia, and some of the things wrong with it. This a wide-ranging topic with many societal implications. Let’s differentiate between a zoned suburban “sprawl” development and a regular town or neighborhood development.

A Sprawl is a suburb that is divided into strict, single-use zones by developers. Each residential, commercial, and office area becomes an isolated Pod. These Pods are then connected together by large arterial roads called Connectors. The only way to get around is by car. There are sometimes sidewalks, but it is embarrassing to be seen walking. Pedestrians are the underclass. Immigrants are bused in from surrounding areas to mow lawns. Suburbia is typically characterized by isolation, chubby families, and expansive parking lots.

In a town or neighborhood, mixed-use planning is used to create a heterogeneous environment. Homes, stores, and offices are typically small, intermixed units that blend together. Functional towns also have a mixture of economic classes living close together. This mix of classes is essential to maintain a healthy society. There is a sense of place and community. People don’t need to drive to a fitness center to use the treadmill, they can just take a walk outside.

There is an interesting video lecture by architect/urban planner Andrés Duany on the topic of New Urbanism. This guy has been touring to warn people about Sprawl since 1991. His lecture inspired this post and is the source for much of the summarized information above.

There is also a very entertaining BBC documentary called United Gates of America by Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Charlie LeDuff. This gem is about the gated communities being built across the nation, and I highly recommend it. It seems to be missing from Amazon and IMDB, but there might be a bit torrent distribution out there.

Yet developers continue to create these low-density suburban areas because that is exactly what people want. In the article Suburbia: Homeland of the American Future, Joel Kotkin writes,

Most projections show that the continued increase in the U.S. population and the projected 50 percent increase in space devoted to the built environment by 2030 will largely take place in the sprawling cities of the South and West, areas dominated by low-density, automobile-dependent development of residential, commercial, and industrial space.

Suburbia is not just limited to America. Suburban development is happening in all developed nations. Car culture is going to be an integral part of human civilization for a long time to come. Oil dependency, consumer culture, and traffic congestion are going to become major problems. There is already a Center for Sustainable Suburban Development. Welcome to the Homeland of the American Future. I hope you like curvy roads and beige garage doors.

RIAA has a New Business Model called Early Settlement

The RIAA recently sent out a letter to ISPs (internet service providers) with information about their future plans. There are two important bits of information I think need to be drawn out.

First, it is amusing to see that the RIAA asks the ISPs to let them know if the ISP could have possibly misidentified a customer after a subpoena, or if the ISP has become aware of technical information that causes them to question the information they provided to the RIAA. This comes as quite a shock, because everybody knows that the ISPs have infallible logging procedures and practices, with logging and accounting software written by the Psychedelic Coding Monkeys of Mount Vesuvius. Combine that with the overpaid staff that never makes mistakes, and you have a bulletproof way of logging your customers and their P2P criminal exploits. It is absolutely impossible for an ISP to link the wrong account to a target IP address. Nope. Never happened. Kinda makes one wonder if the FBI, DHS, and CIA are getting the same incorrect customer info for their subpoenas as well.

On to bit two.

The RIAA wants the ISPs to send out “early notification” letters to each customer for whom an identity subpoena has been issued. Some ISP’s already do this, but the RIAA wants it to become standard practice. Combine this with the RIAA’s plan to allow for discounted “early settlements” and you have a blatant plan for extortion (of innocent people, sometimes). Act now before we take you to court, and you could get $1000 or more off your settlement! Sale Ends Soon! Refer a friend and get a voucher good towards your next early settlement! The RIAA includes a fill-in-the-blank notification letter for ISPs to send to their next victim so they can hand over their early settlements to fuel the RIAA’s unruly pack of lawyers/attorneys/legal aids. This new approach makes perfect sense, since the RIAA has recently been informed by lady justice that their lawsuits are frivolous and unreasonable.

read [via slashdot]

Update: The RIAA’s horrendously ugly and cheap settlement website p2plawsuits.com is now live. This design is all they could afford with all those lawsuit settlements?

Top Gear: Deathwish Edition

The blokes from Top Gear, a show about motor vehicles, decided to go for a drive through the American South with some choice slogans written on their cars. Enjoy.

[via dethroner]

Suburbia and the Radical Christian Right

Chris Hedges, author of American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America
has an article on the same topic at Alternet. While Alternet is a radical lefty site that deserves a bit of skepticism, Chris Hedges himself is a respectable journalist. He was even on the Stephen Colbert show recently, which is a sure sign of legitimacy. Anyways, this is a great article worth the short read, and goes along great with the documentary Jesus Camp and a handle of gin. The growing Evangelical movement is certainly very fascist in nature, and there must be reasons why it is growing so rapidly. The idea that The Decline of American Suburbia is a catalyst for the growth of Christian radicalism is reasonable, and I imagine the book itself provides more grounding for it. From the article,

The stories believers such as Learned told me of their lives before they found Christ were heart breaking. These chronicles were about terrible pain, severe financial difficulties, struggles with addictions or childhood sexual or physical abuse, profound alienation and often thoughts about suicide. They were chronicles without hope. The real world, the world of facts and dispassionate intellectual inquiry, the world where all events, news and information were not filtered through this comforting ideological prism, the world where they were left out to dry, abandoned by a government hostage to corporations and willing to tolerate obscene corporate profits, betrayed them.

They hated this world. And they willingly walked out on this world for the mythical world offered by these radical preachers, a world of magic, a world where God had a divine plan for them and intervened on a daily basis to protect them and perform miracles in their lives. The rage many expressed to me towards those who challenge this belief system, to those of us who do not accept that everything in the world came into being during a single week 6,000 years ago because it says so in the Bible, was a rage born of fear, the fear of being plunged back into a reality-based world where these magical props would no longer exist, where they would once again be adrift, abandoned and alone.

The danger of this theology of despair is that it says that nothing in the world is worth saving. It rejoices in cataclysmic destruction. It welcomes the frightening advance of global warming, the spiraling wars and violence in the Middle East and the poverty and neglect that have blighted American urban and rural landscapes as encouraging signs that the end of the world is close at hand.

read the article

A related article along the same thread comes from the Americans United web site, entitled Targeting Public Schools and written by Rob Boston. It is about how the Religious Right, aka the RR, is trying to evangelize public school kids. If you are going camping with your kids, I recommend printing this out and reading it instead of the usual fireside spook story.

Military Bureaucracy

Here is a great example of grassroots ingenuity. A portable fingerprint scanning system for use in Iraq went from conception to actual use in one month. This was a collaborative effort between a small stateside networking company, a troop support group (Spirit of America), a blogger, and a deployed soldier. While the military takes years to design a high-tech and overly complicated biometric system to catalog insurgents, a group of people hacked together a functional solution to the problem, from start to finish, in one month. It’s already being used by the Iraqi Army. The portable scanner sends data via Bluetooth to a hardened field laptop, and that data is then sent to another computer at the base. The DoD’s Automated Biometric Identification System is still nowhere to be seen. From the article,

On the night of Jan. 20, Maj. West, his Marine squad and the “jundi” (Iraq army soldiers) took the MV 100 and laptop on patrol. Their term of endearment for the insurgents is “snakes.” So of course the MV 100 became the Snake Eater. The next day Maj. West emailed the U.S. team digital photos of Iraqi soldiers fingerprinting suspects with the Snake Eater. “It’s one night old and the town is abuzz,” he said. “I think we have a chance to tip this city over now.” A rumor quickly spread that the Iraqi army was implanting GPS chips in insurgents’ thumbs.

read The Snake Eater [via slashdot]

Gone With The Blast Wave

There are many great online comics, so I would like to highlight some of these. Gone With The Blast Wave is a very funny comic drawn with a Wacom tablet. The artwork is done by a Finnish guy named Kimmo Lemetti who isn’t even a professional artist – very impressive. Each page takes about 10 hours to complete. The comic takes a dry humor approach to post-apocalyptic world war, which is always good. There’s even fan-translations in Russian, Czech, and Polish.

Warren Ellis: Comic Genius

As a kid, I liked to read some superhero comics. I liked batman, spiderman, and superman comics. The Funeral for a Friend series was pretty cool. Batman was the man. Spiderman had serious issues, but he was still cool. A related topic is superhero cartoons, but I will leave that for a future post. Anyways, I was never a voracious reader, and my interest waned after a while. But I always liked good visual storytelling and quality drawing. Comic book storytelling is a great medium that is often underestimated.

But after many years my interest in comics resurfaced with a different focus. Superheros just don’t cut it for me anymore. And so I would like to point out my favorite comic book writer. Warren Ellis weaves worlds (with the help of graphic artists). He has an awesome imagination and a singular talent for comic narration. Typically, Ellis writes comics that present a dystopian futuristic world or alternate reality.

Of particular interest is Transmetropolitan whose main character, Spider Jerusalem, is a journalist. I would go so far as to call him a blogger, and since the comic started in 1997, that makes Ellis quite the visionary.

Other great comics by Ellis include Planetary and Desolation Jones.

The Machine Is Us

I just watched an interesting video about the social web. It made me feel all warm and fuzzy inside, just like good Irish Coffee. This is Web 2.0, from an anthropological perspective. Or something like that. The most significant aspect of the video response is the concept that we are the machine, feeding it/ourselves information. And in a way, this is true. There is a definitely a feedback loop taking place in the social web. Another important point is that the separation of content from formatting is a major development in the evolution of the web. It is refreshing to watch this cleverly made video, devoid of technical jargon or any verbal narration and still very meaningful.