An entiely geeky and hackish homage to things past.

Hmm even if it may be somewhat NANCY (Not A Nother Consciousness Yammering), I think that this debate between the Buddhist/scholarAndy Wallace and John Searle to be held next Friday at Northwestern, looks promising…

ps–> John Searle has a pictureonline with like a gazillion pixels. With such an image and such sharpness, makes you wonder if he secretly wants to be a male model.

All right I am going a little overboard with the blogging today but after such a long hiatus, I am making up for some lost time.

So I usually not all that excited about stuff I find on the web but this one was an exception —> check out radical software, a website about a journal published in the early 1970s on technology, IP, decentralized media, and political activism. According to their history page, they were way onto the politics of copyright: “To demonstrate their commitment to free information, they rejected the standard copyright mark in favor of a new one, a circle with an X inside it, meaning, “please copy.”"

The best thing is this site is not only is it about Radical Software, but it has all of the issues online. Nice.

A Linux Distro for Barbie?

Making a bid for a piece of the emerging desktop Linux market, Mattel, Inc. announced the immediate availability of downloadable beta ISOs for BarbieOS 0.99, and said it hoped the final 1.0 retail version would be on store shelves in time for Christmas. The new OS was created by Mattel to power the upcoming revision of its popular B-Book line of laptops for girls between the ages of four and eleven. The original B-Book laptop, which ran a modified version of PalmOS, was a huge hit with consumers last holiday season, so much so that many stores had trouble keeping them in stock. This year, Mattel is upping the ante by making the B-Book into a full-fledged desktop replacement targeted specifically at toddler through preteen girls who are currently Windows users but may be seeking alternatives, possibly due to increasing licensing fees or out of a desire to break free of vendor lock-in. Read the Rest..

What a brilliant parody that so misues and abuses the cherised Name and Object of Barbie and all her glittering associations. According to Bill Brown, the “misuse of objects” is wherein lies a dual political possiblity. To misuse an object is to change its ontological status from an object (that assumes a sort of uncritical closeness) to a thing, which has its own autonomy, experienced as distant and seperate from us and those ripe for reflection. Misuse dismembers objects from “the systems to which they’ve been beholden” (1998:953). A dismemberment that actualizes a freedom that breaks open, for all that are privileged to witness and herald creative abuse, the conventionality of meanings that we place on objects, whether the spoon that feeds us or the Barbie doll of our past. Yet as much as misuse is essential and essentially pleasurable, we can never obliterate all meaning for that is the nature of human sociality: to extend ourselves and connect to objects and others through the medium of meaning. Our intersubjective meanings are the glue that binds, for better or worse, in good and bad, us and objects together in an awfully dense matrix of meaning and power.

Yet when we can no longer see the medium of connection as something alterable, as something that is in our partial control, then it is time for playful and vulgar misuse. For if we are subject in blind and capricous ways to our systems of meanings, then there is no way to critically appreciate what it is that binds me to you, you to me, and all of us to each other through the objects of our daily use.

Bill Brown. 1998 “How to do with Things (A Toy Story). Critical Inquiry 24: 935-964.

It is one of those weeks I would most like to forget –> One night of proficient yacking, three days nausea and two days of aches is more than enough for me. So today after the most vivid dreams in the world that left me nauseous in the morning, I ditched my Friday seminar and headed up north to the student run acupuncture clinic at the Midwest Center for the Study of Oriental Medicine. I hesistate to go only because of the long wait although as I will soon write, it is usually an entertaining wait though always mildly depressing too. Despite the long wait, the quality of treatment tends to be quite quite good, I think in part because the students have to display proficiency to their teachers so they are extra careful and thorough.

When I lived in Chicago before I left for SF, I used to go regularly. It has since become a popular hotspot for cheap and caring therapy so now the wait is pretty tortorous. Today for example, they started seeing patients at 1 pm but by 10 am there were already a cadre of older ladies there, determined and waiting. I arrived at 11:20 am as was a lucky number 6 on the list that by 1 pm balloned to 17.

The mix of folks who go to the clinic is motely though overwhelmingly female. In the waiting room today there were Russians, Ukraines, an Indian, a couple of Asians, a few Hispanics, and an African American, and one Jamiacan lady, with the most awesome name (Saint something or another, but the saint part was what caught my attentionl).

As a person lacking a patience gene, waiting at the office is not always so easy for me and I find a roomful of ailing folks as depressing which never makes me feel any better so I tend to go only at extreme momements of desperation which is about the worst time to go since the idea behind acupunture is much like a car tune up and oil change: maintanence to avoid problems. But it is pretty darn good for acute sort of problems too.

So despite the aura of sadness of any medical clinic, there are always some enlivening moments and good bouts of humor. I love to listen to people’s conversations because there are usually filled with hope or resiliance despite the obvious pain folks are in… And then there are the more amusing moments, like today when this elder Latino man sitting next to me asked me if I was taking off my sweater because I was “HOT.” And indeed, I was “hot” (for it was a surprising 77 degrees today) but I was not sure if he was referring to hot as hot or hot as in HOT. But as soon as he started telling me that the Russian woman (who he had been moments earlier flirting with) across the room was also HOT (and he waved and winked at that moment), I knew which HOT he was referring to. But the funniest part was as he was flirting via punning, I was reading a book precisely on joking and I had just hit the part about joking relationships among non-kin in industrial societies, in which a permissible form of sexual joking was said to be the much older male with the young lady. Hmm, the book was written in the late 1960s so I am not sure how permissible it is post PC-era but anyway, I found it amusing and cute because he was *so proud* of his joke. And it got my mind off my tummy which was the whole point of being there in the first place and it made me wonder if he scored with the La Rusa…

So I am pretty excited about this especially since Marshall Sahlins was a little skpetical of the idea of Creative Commons at first. But indeed, Prickly Paradigm Press is going public so to speak and they have some wonderful political pamphlets to be consumed and circulated. I will leave the rest to Rex who was a main shaker for the move, and he of course, wrote a most excellent summary.

From Mako:

Patenting Patenting

One relatively recent development in the field of intellectual property is the ability to file for what are called business methods patents that do not cover a thing, an invention, or a design (the tradition scope of patents) but a way of doing business.

I think it would be a good strategy for companies with lots of over-broad — and in in-all-likelihood bogus — patents to file a business method patent on the act of filing over-broad and bogus patents to use as strategic leverage or tools for litigation. Better yet, they might patent the method of filing to have someone else’s’ patents reexamined and tossed out.

Of course, there’s plenty of prior art but the USPTO doesn’t seem to be too bothered by details like that anymore.

Move over segway for the conference bike a truly bizarre cycling innovation. I have to admit it looks like it is so dorky that is is totally rad. I mean you can workout, hang out friends, and get somewhere at all once. I wonder if those cheeseball outfits come with the bike.

At the steep price of 9500 Euros, I would only hope so..

I met Mika in Brazil, Mako’s delightful other half. I just stumbled onto her blog today and she has some of the most stunningly absurb, yet totally enlightening and delightful entries. In fact, she specializes in these koan nuggets of …. you decide…

zakuro

Pomegranates are tastieee. As I picked each piece out, it reminded me of something: pulling out teeth.

It’d be difficult to trust any dentists who like pomegranates.

Hackers like coffee and apparently some coffee home roasters think of themselves as hackers (or so I read on a coffe roasting mailing list today). Unconvinced, I went to this page Hot Rod Home Coffee Roasters: The Spirit of Invention and I was immediately convinced, these coffee nuts are hackers!

For some people who roast their own coffee, off-the-shelf home coffee roasting appliances don’t cut it. Either they don’t offer enough control of the roast, are too expensive, or just don’t allow the roaster (uh, the person that is) to express themselves. The homemade or seriously modified commercial roasters on this page are alternately amusing and intimidating in appearance, but whatever the case, they probably work very well. And if they don’t, you can bet they will be reconfigured endlessly until they do by their respective owners. …