The music in the video in my previous post is by ChouChou, a Second Life band devoted to exploring new frontiers of creating music.
That is awesome. Especially since they seem to be part of a movement. Check out the in-world music store where you can buy real MP3s and AIFFs. It even comes with music previews.
You can get ChouChou's songs on iTunes (though if you buy them through Second Life then Apple can't take most of the money on the sale), and check out their "live" concert images.
Yep, the Internet is over. It has nothing left to document. Now go read a book or something. I hear it's good for you.
Terrible Gallery Signals End of Internet via the Awl.
Just in case you thought there were all red point hats and cuteness.
Ninja Gnomes, available at Design Toscano.
via Foolish Gadgets << Nerd Approved.
Diaspora - the privacy aware, personally controlled, do-it-all distributed open source social network.
The open source alternative brought to you by a group of enterprising college kids.
A blade-free Tesla wind turbine, coming soon to an ecologically friendly location near you.
An interesting promo package from an interesting company.
Image via treehugger.
Idea via GGRP Sound.
Steven Weber assures us this could never happen now ... it is too 19th century.
Ooh! I know! Perhaps the Republicans are playing into some master plan wherein all power is gradually, systematically leeched from the masses and centralized into a snug, capitalistic, corporate version of an aristocracy, keeping The People perpetually strained but entertained by shiny yet easily broken/disposable/replaceable baubles and only minimally involved in the basic running of the country so as to provide the citizenry with an illusion of democratic participation and therefore allowing them to distinguish their lives from that of common, old fashioned serfs.
Read the full-article on the Huffington Post.
Happy Ada Lovelace Day!
Excitement! Drama! Women being good at math!
Okay, seriously, a computer used to be a female profession, not a machine. There have been some wonderful histories of computing discussing the images of early computers showing men in uniforms in front of computers who were really the office managers and didn't have a clue as to how the things actually worked. The women were shooed out of the room, or cropped out of the picture because the military thought it would hurt their credibility if computers weren't properly butch. The above linked PDF has one such example. The rise of automated computing removed a significant career path in mathematics from the hands of women and put its tasks in the hands of their (male) managers. And when programming shifted from being the work of mathematicians to the work of engineers, women were not brought along for the ride.
Interesting side note: In the mid-1980s, computer programming was considered a joke degree that you only took because you didn't have what it took to be an engineer. I always wondered how many of those first generation of college-trained programmers were laughing all the way to the bank.
Oh, and links mostly pillaged from boingboing.
An online game about tackling real problems in the real world collaboratively ... Evoke.
What an awesome concept.
via TreeHugger.
New animations from CCP, makers of EVE Online, make their new Incarna look very promising.
Not to be greedy or anything, but I want a way to do this in Second Life.
via Massively.
You know, I can still sing a fair number of the old Schoolhouse Rock songs. Maybe that should tell us something.
"Several studies have shown that poor families tend to have very few assets."
Well, I'm glad we cleared that one up.
Is between inclusive or exclusive?
Dunno why that question just struck me, but I think in perceiving it as exclusive we may be making a mistake. I also think that between is exclusive in Western culture, but inclusive in Asian culture. Though I could be wrong.
I suppose I should acknowledge that the between I am referring to here is the between that is the social and the political. The thing is that the Western tradition puts the social as something that happens between people but is exclusive of those people the social is happening between. While Asian cultures are more like to think of the social that is between as inclusive of the people it is between.
These two models are significant in what they say about the social, the political, and how it is that people interact. And perhaps by thinking of between as exclusive of what the between is between, we are creating a socio-political situation that impedes communication and negatively influences personal involvement. In other words, we are defining the very sources of the between as not part of the between and thus something that stands apart from the process that is between.
Between, in the social sense, is really something that must be inclusive of those that it stands between, so that it does not stand apart from that which defines it, but rather those that define it stand together as a functioning unit of between. I don't mean this in the sense of traditional Asian cultures, because there are other flaws with the model there. Though between is inclusive it it functions to define those who define it, rather than just letting them define the between that is between them. As such, it may be an odd quasi-circumstance where between is both inclusive and exclusive, or is claimed as inclusive but functions as exclusive.
And I have no idea of where I am going with that, it is the just the germ of an idea.
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