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.

Democracy and Media Deregulation at the FCC

Media Ownership Chart. Click to view.

As many BoingBoing readers will know, the FCC is currently considering all-but-abolishing its vestigal rules limiting the number of media outlets a single company can own. This could have as large an impact on your everyday media experiences as the recent Eldred fiasco.

Prior rounds of similar FCC media deregulation have had a disastrous effect on radio, where the resulting concentration of ownership (by "roll-up" companies like ClearChannel Communications) has turned the airwaves in many cities into a cookie-cutter clonescape of formulaic pop stations. The corporate free-for-all hasn't just restricted listener choice among formats, but limited the diversity of what one hears on any given channel. That's because, in the face of fewer, less-distinctive outlets, music producers have been forced to push (read: engineer) pop musical 'acts' that they think the corporate media will buy, virtually sterilizing the dial. (And that, as much as anything else, is why CD sales have been declining.)

Now, under the infamously free-market-oriented FCC Chairman Michael Powell (actual quote: "My religion is the market.", ) the FCC is considering deregulating other, more vital media like newspapers and TV. Powell espouses making a decision based largely on a series of studies which he himself sponsored, and which conclude that removing limits to corporate ownership will have a positive or negligible impact.

Powell's FCC has been incredibly cagey about holding meetings with the public on this issue. They have announced (pdf) a public hearing in Virginia "sometime in February" although they have not announced a date, (or provided one in several email exchanges) and they then held an unannounced meeting at Columbia University in New York two days ago which was (surprise) poorly attended. Powell's own press releases read like exercises in Newspeak, and are worth comparing to those of another FCC commissioner, Michael Copps, the lone FCC dissenter at this point.

I'd like to encourage any BoingBoingers interested to read up on the issue, and consider attending the February meeting when it is announced; those who can't attend can file a public comment via the FCC Web site by following instructions here.

Discuss

posted by Andrew Zolli at 11:56:25 PM | permalink

"I poisoned P2P networks for the RIAA"

Like many, I tend to consider the (occasional) stories I read in the UK Register with the same bemused suspicion with which I read the contents of the New York Post.

With that caveat out of the way, I was fascinated by the recent Register story on 'Matt Warne', who claims to have inflected P2P networks with useless junk on behalf of the RIAA and its international cousin, the IFPI:

"I suggested that they should put out files with legitimate titles - and put inside them silence or random noise - and saturate the file sharing networks with those files. That did start the poisoning."

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posted by Andrew Zolli at 10:24:04 PM | permalink

One Nation... Reading Very Different Books

About a year ago, David Brooks published a terrific piece in the Atlantic Monthly entitled "One Nation, Slightly Divisible", on the differences and similarities between the Red/Republican/Bushite States and the Blue/Democratic/Goresky ones. The piece is fairly nuanced and brilliantly deconstructs our current, complex social/political landscape.

Now network theoretician Valdis Krebs, of InFlow Software, has added another dimension to the discussion over what separates and divides us politically.

In this terrific piece, he analyzes the relationship between political books on Amazon. By carefully analyzing the online 'pairings' of dozens of political books, (ie. "people who bought The O'Reilly Factor also bought No Spin Zone") and then visualizing the results, Krebs shows that Republicans and Democrats who use Amazon share only one significant book in common between their purchasing networks. (That book? What Went Wrong: The Clash Between Islam and the West, by Bernard Lewis.) Beyond this one text, Republicans seem to buy Republican Books, and Democrats seem to buy Democrat Books, and ne'er the 'twain shall meet.

There is a major caveat to Krebs' map: the Amazon recommendation only tells you (presumably) the strongest correlation between book buyers - it doesn't formally exclude the possibility that someone bought The O'Reilly Factor and, say, Stupid White Men by Michael Moore. But Krebs' finds other significance in the networks' shapes and densities that are provocative.

CODA: Included is a link to this paper by networking expert Ron Burt on Trust, Information and Gossip in Social Networks (pdf) that is just terrific. (thanks Mark!)

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posted by Andrew Zolli at 9:51:51 AM | permalink

Put Your Website On The Map... Literally

An open standard for 'geographically locating' a Web site in physical space is essential if future location-based Web services are really going to take off. Finally, just such as standard has come to the Web!

GeoURL is a location-to-URL reverse directory that will allow you to find Web sites based on their proximity to a given location: find your neighbor's blog, perhaps, or the web page of the restaurants near you. (For example, follow this link to web sites within a 500-mile radius of Z + Partners!) With a few metatags, you can add your own site to their ever-growing directory. There is even a simple form that will generate the tags for you!

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posted by Andrew Zolli at 9:22:53 PM | permalink

Port-a-Parish

For that couple that wants to get married in a church, but really can't decide where: the world's only inflatable church is now available for rent.

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posted by Andrew Zolli at 8:48:29 AM | permalink

Being Artful with ET

Dr. Doug Vakoch, social scientist-in-residence at the SETI Institute, may have the most intruiging job on Earth. As part of SETI's Interstellar Message Group, Dr. Vakoch is paid to think about the aesthetics and social values encoded in our messages to other civilizations. How do we signal not just the fact of our presence, but our sense of beauty - or altruism - in what is arguably the most important message humanity could ever send?

This is just the sort of concern routinely discussed at the Contact Conference, an annual NASA event that brings together some of the foremost international social and space scientists, science fiction writers and artists to explore every possible facet of alien contact. Best are the "Cultures of the Imagination" sessions, in which participants design an integrated world, alien life form and culture, and simulate contact with a future human society. One of these worlds, Epona, is fully documented online, and CalState LA has a complete online "World Builders Course" that walks you through the science of building your own.

CODA: The Epona project has a new URL: http://www.eponaproject.com/. Thanks Stefan!

Discuss

posted by Andrew Zolli at 5:21:25 PM | permalink

Howdy!

Hello, fellow BoingBoing fans! I hope to bring you links worthy of BoingBoing in the next few weeks - although there's no way anyone could really follow the brilliant-and-much-sexier Susannah Breslin! If you have comments or suggestions, please send them along to andrew-at-zpluspartners.com.

posted by Andrew Zolli at 4:14:13 PM | permalink

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