Archive for April, 2008
Farewell, Doctor
Albert Hofmann, the father of the mind-altering drug LSD whose medical discovery inspired millions and caused controversy in others in the 1960s, has died. The good doctor died Tuesday at his home in Burg im Leimental in the village near Basel where he moved following his retirement in 1971.
For decades after LSD was banned in the late 1960s, Hofmann defended his invention.
“I produced the substance as a medicine. … It’s not my fault if people abused it,” he once said.
The Swiss chemist discovered lysergic acid diethylamide-25 in 1938 while studying the medicinal uses of a fungus found on wheat and other grains at the Sandoz pharmaceuticals firm in Basel.
He became the first human guinea pig of the drug when a tiny amount of the substance seeped onto his finger during a laboratory experiment on April 16, 1943.
“I had to leave work for home because I was suddenly hit by a sudden feeling of unease and mild dizziness,” he subsequently wrote in a memo to company bosses.
He said his initial experience resulted in “wonderful visions.”
“What I was thinking appeared in colors and in pictures,” he told a Swiss television network for a program marking his 100th birthday two years ago. “It lasted for a couple of hours and then it disappeared.”
He was 102.
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Coming off a bender
Clay Shirky presented this at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco last week :
I was recently reminded of some reading I did in college, way back in the last century, by a British historian arguing that the critical technology, for the early phase of the industrial revolution, was gin.
The transformation from rural to urban life was so sudden, and so wrenching, that the only thing society could do to manage was to drink itself into a stupor for a generation. The stories from that era are amazing– there were gin pushcarts working their way through the streets of London.
And it wasn’t until society woke up from that collective bender that we actually started to get the institutional structures that we associate with the industrial revolution today. Things like public libraries and museums, increasingly broad education for children, elected leaders–a lot of things we like–didn’t happen until having all of those people together stopped seeming like a crisis and started seeming like an asset.
It wasn’t until people started thinking of this as a vast civic surplus, one they could design for rather than just dissipate, that we started to get what we think of now as an industrial society.
If I had to pick the critical technology for the 20th century, the bit of social lubricant without which the wheels would’ve come off the whole enterprise, I’d say it was the sitcom. Starting with the Second World War a whole series of things happened–rising GDP per capita, rising educational attainment, rising life expectancy and, critically, a rising number of people who were working five-day work weeks. For the first time, society forced onto an enormous number of its citizens the requirement to manage something they had never had to manage before–free time.
And what did we do with that free time? Well, mostly we spent it watching TV.
We did that for decades. We watched I Love Lucy. We watched Gilligan’s Island. We watch Malcolm in the Middle. We watch Desperate Housewives. Desperate Housewives essentially functioned as a kind of cognitive heat sink, dissipating thinking that might otherwise have built up and caused society to overheat.
And it’s only now, as we’re waking up from that collective bender, that we’re starting to see the cognitive surplus as an asset rather than as a crisis. We’re seeing things being designed to take advantage of that surplus, to deploy it in ways more engaging than just having a TV in everybody’s basement.
You can read the rest of his presentation here – worthwhile!
Thanks to Jason Kottke for posting this!
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Needs vs. Desires
Edward Louis Bernays (November 22, 1891 – March 9, 1995) is considered one of the fathers of the field of public relations along with Ivy Lee. Combining the ideas of Gustave Le Bon and Wilfred Trotter on crowd psychology with the psychoanalytical ideas of his uncle, Sigmund Freud, Bernays was one of the first to attempt to manipulate public opinion using the psychology of the subconscious.
He felt this manipulation was necessary in society, which he regarded as irrational and dangerous as a result of the ‘herd instinct’ that Trotter had described. Adam Curtis‘s award-winning 2002 documentary for the BBC, The Century of the Self, pinpoints Bernays as the originator of modern public relations.
He was named one of the 100 most influential Americans of the 20th century by Life magazine.
Uh…ok…so this guy is saluted for creating consumerism as we know it today?
When you have some time and interest, watch this [part 1 of 4] and decide how you feel about this for yourself :
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Word to the Bird
This one comes to us via Fwwank – thanks for this one, man [and, yes, these fellas [der Fall Böse] ARE playing that song live in a van] :
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Houston, We Have a Coredump
Naturally, the astronauts aboard the ISS kept logs of all their activities while up there.
We can read the logs thanks to The Laboratorium, brought to us since 2000 by James Grimmelmann. Thanks, Jim!
The kinds of computer problems they experienced in space are interesting to read about if only because they are no different than the ones we experience here on Earth.
Read some of their logs by clicking here – if you likey.
And – if you’re REALLY geeking out on this stuff like i did, you can download the complete logfiles via NASA’s site.
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Spain : games
As some of you may know, i’m nearing completion on a documentary about the game of Tag.
Safe to say I have a rather compulsive interest in games of all kinds.
My good friend Bergey made this vid earlier in the year about games they play in Espain :
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ah, flamenco
my pal Fonz passed this along to me the other day – great vid of a beautiful culture :
thanks, Fonz!
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survival
And here i thought eagles were just big rats with wings who only scavenged. Perhaps Alaskan eagles are more lazy? These golden eagles are rather ambitious – warning to some – this footage is rather graphic so watch at your own risk :
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sourdough starter
My friend Jennie the Potter hooked me up with my first sourdough starter and i’ve been waiting patiently for it to stabilize so i can feed it to double it in size in prep for baking.
you can make a starter from scratch or acquire one from any number of places.
once you’ve got a starter going, it’s much more straightforward to keep one healthy than i thought. here’s the basics :
every week, feed it one cup of flour and 1/2 to 2/3 cup lukewarm water. mix it up well and put back in fridge if it’s not going to be used right away.
from what i’m told, it’s tough to kill a starter, even if you leave it neglected in the fridge for months. you can usually bring them back to health easily.
so, if i can do this, you sure can! making homemade bread is just a satisfying way to spend some time – it pays off huge in flavor and is better for us than store bought bread.
once you’ve got a good starter going and you’re ready to bake some fresh loaves, you can use the following as a guide :
1 cup starter
3 cups flour
1 1/2 cups water
mix
fridge overnight
next morning take out
let sit for 2 hours or until it is bubbling
add a tbsp of salt and a tbsp of sugar
work in 2 cups flour
knead until satiny
oil it up and let set until it doubles
cut in half
using cornmeal on parchment, shape the loaves [should make two]
oil them
cover with plastic wrap
let sit til doubled
slash loaves
bake in preheated oven at 450 for 20 minutes
bake for 10 minutes and turn
brush tops with butter
loaves are done when tapping bottom sounds hollow
for rye we can sub 1/2 cup rye flour, too if preferred
that’s all there is to it – thanks, Jennie!
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robot rebellion is alive and well
Via Gizmodo :
“The army’s machine-gun wielding, insurgent-slaying robot SWORDS is no longer spraying foes with hot doom in Iraq. Actually, it never got the chance to notch a single frag, and never will. Apparently, there was an incident where “the gun started moving when it was not intended to move,” meaning it totally pointed somewhere it wasn’t supposed toâ€â€like at friendlies, which resulted in recall from the field and might’ve set the program back 10-20 years, according to the Army’s Program Executive Officer for Ground Forces, Kevin Fahey.
He confirmed that no inappropriate shots were fired, so no one was hurt. But that doesn’t mean there weren’t any casualtiesâ€â€it might’ve basically killed the program says Fahey: “Once you’ve done something that’s really bad, it can take 10 or 20 years to try it again.” On the upside, it means we have another 10 to 20 years before they rise and go to war with us.”
Well, that’s relief.
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Buckley : Legacy
I just finished watching Tim Buckley : My Fleeting House, produced by my friend, Rick Fuller, a superb documentary about a true and fearless artist who resisted industry sensibilities and even Western culture at large and who remains a testament to the creative gifts that have influenced music.
His son, Jeff Buckley, inherited these gifts from his father, including an extreme vocal range and original style and is more a part of the mainstream intellect [if you wish to call it that] now thanks to a cover of his cover of the Leonard Cohen song “Hallelujah” on a popular television show, which, in turn drove it up to the top of the charts on music download sites last month giving Jeff his first number one song 11 years after his death.
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buttwhack.com
buttwhack.com is LIVE!
From the site’s about page :
“We, here at buttwhack.com, are interested in our collective struggle as human beings to make good choices.
As much as we’d like to believe we are always superior beings, the truth of it is we are a race of ups and downs, with the downs often regarded as negative and worthy of forgetting.
We disagree! What we post here is all the idiosyncratic nature of being human in all of its unglamorous truth.
As we find stories on the Web that reflect this our goal is to collect some of them here – each its own example of our profound capacity to behave like buttwhacks.
Thanks for stopping by.”
Check out buttwhack.com and if you find any cool stories that would make good home on the site, be sure to email them along!
: )
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Make a MUX!
Ok, enough complaining about this consumer state!
We’re still free to make mixtapes! well, sorta ; )
Have you ever made a muxtape?
Do it NOW while you still can!
Or, try mixwit!
It’s as fun as ever sharing music with pals.
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Deep Packet Filtering
As if the infiltration of our privacy by advertisers hasn’t been bane enough, we no longer have to fear *the cookie* as the new evil is deep packet filtering being conducted by many ISPs into the activities of their customers, relaying this info to marketers’ and advertisers’ perusal.
I can’t even begin to express my distaste at such actions and wonder if it was exactly this kind of scenario the people who run this country had in mind when they decided to start treating all of us like energizer batteries for their marketing machine.
UGH :
The Washington Post is reporting that some Internet Service Providers (ISP) have been using deep-packet inspection to spy on the communications of US customers. Deep packet inspection allows the ISP to read the content of communications including every Web page visited, every e-mail sent and every search entered, in short every click and keystroke that comes down the line. The companies involved assert that customers’ privacy is protected because no personally identifying details are released, but they make money from selling the information to advertisers who use the information to target their online pitches. Deep packet inspection is a significant expansion over tools like cookies in the ability to track users.
You can liken it to a phone company listening in on your conversations.
Read the New York Times article on the same controversy here.
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OpEd : Dally
The latest issue of OpEd is out, featuring this month’s word : dally.
We’ll be taking a leave of absence as the gatekeeper, Dave, [of DaveNSarah] embarks on the second half of a journey around the world [pretty sucky life, huh?] and will resume publishing upon return to the States, uh, whenever they get around to it. Viva la Gen X!!!
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Dally
verb ( -lies, -lied)
1 act or move slowly : workers were loafing, dallying, or goofing off.
2 have a casual romantic or sexual liaison with someone : he should stop dallying with movie stars.
3 show a casual interest in something, without committing oneself seriously
This issue’s writings:
DaveTheGrinch ponders Dante’s Inferno and a day in the office / waxieus ruminates about how dragons can interfere with homework / Chad Calease contemplates wardrobes working either against or in favor of the dally-er / David Browne muses on artwork, earlobes and a biopsy or two / Steve Bachman investigates lepidopterology and SuperCheap Brand Plump Raisins / Ed Eibel reflects upon two Chinas separated by a thousand missiles / Alan Baxter deliberates when SMS and pregnancy collide /
If you’ve enjoyed OpEd, please offer a toast to Dave, won’t you?
[his Grinch-ness thanks you]
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