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Rudy Rucker

Rudy Rucker is a writer, a mathematician and a computer scientist. Born in Kentucky in 1946, Rucker moved to Silicon Valley when he turned 40. Rucker has published twenty-five books, primarily science-fiction and popular science. He was an early cyberpunk and an editor at Mondo 2000. He often writes SF in a style is characterized as transreal. His most recent novels were Frek and the Elixir, a far-future epic about a boy's galactic quest to restore Earth's ecology and As Above So Below, a historical novel based on the life of the sixteenth century painter Peter Bruegel.  Rucker is a professor emeritus of computer science at San Jose State University, where he created a number of freeware programs relating to chaos, artificial life, cellular automata, higher dimensions, and computer games. He is presently working on The Lifebox, the Seashell and the Soul, a nonfiction book about computers and the nature of reality. Rucker's website can be found at www.cs.sjsu.edu/faculty/rucker or at www.rudyrucker.com.


JUDGE: "The parties are advised to chill."
Excerpt from MATTEL v. MCA RECORDS case decided yesterday, over Danish band Aqua's song "Barbie Girl". "KOZINSKI, Circuit Judge: If this were a sci-fi melodrama, it might be called Speech-Zilla meets Trademark Kong...The parties are advised to chill. AFFIRMED." Link. Thanks, James.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 1:17:47 PM | permalink

The End of End-to-End Network Neutrality?
There's an insightful article here by Jonathan Zittrain on the filtering and "cantonization" of the Internet. He analyzes how states implement filtering, and the roles of libraries, spamcops, and other non-governmental intermediaries. "These cantons are not simply geographic: They're multidimensional... Some of those who identified end-to-end neutrality as an engineering principle now embrace it as a political one." Also noteworthy: Zittrain and Ben Edelman's study of Internet filtering in Saudi Arabia. And: Details here on new anti-DMCA suit filed by ACLU to protect researchers' right to conduct Internet filtering research--Edelman is a plaintiff. Grazie, Drazen.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:19:45 PM | permalink

Emoji Explodes
Since i-mode was first introduced in Japan, mobile phone users there have used text emoticons called emoji to send dense messages in fewer bytes. Top providers DoCoMo, J-Phone and AU/KDDI have begun offering proprietary sets of emoji characters enabling two users on the same service to send messages to one another on the go without conventional text. Thanks to recent introductions of new colorful, cool, animated emoji sets, speed-obsessed keitai (mobile phone users) are evolving a rich, all-pictographic, shorthand language. For example, "meet me for drinks and karaoke at 6PM--'bye" could be expressed in J-phone's emoji set as:
     
A hot one-night stand becomes:
           

J-phone's emoji set (the coolest): here and DoCoMo's emoji: here

Thanks to Tokyo-based D.C. of gamelet.com for the tip and the sexy sentence.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:22:54 AM | permalink

TIPSchalking
Brad Templeton posts counter-TIPS strategies at his Operation TIPS-TIPS web site. In the spirit of WiFi warchalking, he proposes mass documentation of citizen-spy hotspots by TIPSchalking: "Mark the informant. In a subtle way, place the mark of the all-seeing eye (the eye-in-the-pyramid from the Great Seal, shown above) on their home, vehicle or person. Chalk is best, though it must be renewed."

posted by Xeni Jardin at 2:37:57 PM | permalink

A Midsummer Night's Apocalypse
Survival Research Laboratories recently held their first Los Angeles performance in a long, long time... photos and videos are here. The LA Times described it as "transform[ing] the street outside the gallery into a hellish battleground of fire and noise." Whatever. Above: post-show goofery with my friend Beverly Tang of rhizome.org. Photos courtesy of inimitable geek sista Karen Marcelo of SRL. The machines aren't fighting, they're dancing.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 1:43:51 PM | permalink

Will the Real Alneda.com Please Stand Up?
John Young's Cryptome.org site has been following the intriguing, if confusing tale, of alneda.com, the site described in a recent CIA report as "Al Qa'ida's media mouthpiece." The site was yanked offline--supposedly by U.S. authorities--then, it reappeared. E-mail threads on Cryptome say its new operator is in fact "Jon David," a US-based porn site owner behind adult domains such as thewetlands.com. Alneda.com's current incarnation is said to include archived content from the actual, original site, and it's interesting stuff... particularly when paired with porn ads. Speculation as to why "Jon David" re-launched the site is that he's trolling for traffic. According to another account on Cryptome, the "real" alneda can be found at http://66.132.29.71/, but whois searches make that claim hard to authenticate. Curiouser and curiouser. If you want to read some of the site's Arabic content in English, try the Ajeeb.com translator engine, free registration required. Cryptome items: http://cryptome.org/alneda-wet.htm, http://cryptome.org/alneda-up.htm

posted by Xeni Jardin at 1:15:07 PM | permalink

Der Spiegel: TIPS Would Create Higher Citizen-Spy Ratio than Stasi
The German-language publication Der Spiegel ran a story yesterday featuring detailed comparison of the projected number of Operation TIPS participants to the number of citizen informants that cooperated with the state security system ("Stasi") in former East Germany. According to this article, the percentage of citizen-spies under TIPS would be over four times greater than the percentage of citizen-Stasi-informants in the former GDR. For more background, and a roughly translated excerpt, visit http://politechbot.com/p-03790.html.
Original item, in German: here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 12:30:38 PM | permalink


Do Androids Dream
of Electric Chalupas?
Constellations aren't just stars. Now, they're product placement opportunities. Taco Bell, the company that brought us the Mir space station "free taco" offer, and previously tried to buy the Liberty Bell, is at it again.... they've just launched a promotional campaign to brand "the galaxy's first 'star-studded' billboard" hawking their new Southwest Steak Border Bowl. Consumers are invited to find a constellation in the shape of a "spork," the hybrid utensil used to eat a "Border Bowl." Contest winners get a free trip to Hollywood ("to see the REAL stars", promises the press release). The STAR MAPS SOLD HERE signs toted by strung-out immigrant workers along Sunset Boulevard will acquire a surreal new meaning... and space will acquire, well, a spork.

Taco Bell constellation diagram: here.
Link to the online contest here.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 11:06:54 AM | permalink

Greetings.
Denizens of boingboing, it's a pleasure to be guestblogging in your fine domain. Until the boingboing overlords pull the plug on me, I promise to stream a nonstop barrage of funky, provocative, or brainwaveworthy items in your general direction. In the interest of full disclosure, though, I should confess I'm only doing this to meet boys.

posted by Xeni Jardin at 10:46:34 AM | permalink

Real Media

If you get all your news from CNN, you're getting one single media conglomerate's strategically-presented version of what's going on. To heck with that -- get the news on the streets, from the streets!


IndyMedia

posted by magdalen - at 12:38:43 PM | permalink

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