I firmly believe that people do not actually want to have technological precision; they want their technology to be able to permit a certain level of deception. Perhaps you’ve been known to say “My spam filter must’ve eaten it” or “I’m going under a bridge so i might lose you” even though you know that these are (white) lies.

In For Liars and Loafers, Cellphones Offer an Alibi, a few mobile phone users have taken this to a new level. They’ve developed a network of people who aid each other in developing and maintaining deception via mobiles.

(tx Kevin)

Liz’s entry on blog research is spot-on, critiquing the current academic approach to studying blogs and offering some suggestions for how the medium should be researched.

“A community can represent many things and be directed toward a definite goal, but community itself is the focus of a spiritual science that inspires universality. Day-to-day living in a community fosters a very practical concept of existence. Community life represents the frontier between the macro and micro in terms of human organization, making it possible to experience all levels of human existence. The community is, therefore, a vast landscape for a material realization whenever each person enters into contract with the gifts, virtues, and shortcomings of its members. It is also the immense spiritual and psychic laboratory that enables our spirits to develop.”

-Alex Polari de Alverga
in Forest of Vision: Ayahuasca, Amazonian Spirituality and the Santa Daime Tradition

I first heard of Ani through tape recordings of shows back in the day. I had this 1991 Jazzberry’s tape that i literally wore through. After a series of dreadful events (including a few break-ins and a car fire), i lost almost all of my early boots. Of course, so many of them are burnt into my head that i can recall them without the recording. ::laugh::

This week, Ani announced that she will be putting out an official bootleg series for folks like me who have always appreciated the raw energy of concerts. Every six weeks or so, she will release a new raw concert boot. This is absolutely fantastic!

For the readers here who are not familiar with Ani, you should read her lyrics. She has been one of my biggest inspirations, always reminding me that there is value in fighting the system. Her work is very political and she is one of the strongest independent artists out there, refusing to sell out to the music industry in any form. (All of you EFF-loving readers, you’d love Ani’s political efforts against the music industry. For example, Million You Never Made is an ode to that system.)

You can beat me, you can abuse me, but don’t touch my hair or I’ll kill you.

Designer Joyce Leslie had the nerve to put this on their t-shirts. Understandably, V-Day was outraged and spoke up, calling on the store to recall these stores. According to Newsday, they did precisely that.

Yet Asimov’s reductionist approach to human interaction may be his most lasting influence. His thinking is alive and well and likely filling your inbox at this moment with come-ons asking you to identify your friends and rate their “sexiness” on a scale of one to three. Today’s social networking services like Friendster and Orkut collapse the subtle continuum of friendship and trust into a blunt equation that says, “So-and-so is indeed my friend,” and “I trust so-and-so to see all my other ‘friends.'” These systems demand that users configure their relationships in a way that’s easily modeled in software. It reflects a mechanistic view of human interaction: “If Ann likes Bob and Bob hates Cindy, then Ann hates Cindy.” The idea that we can take our social interactions and code them with an Asimovian algorithm (“allow no harm, obey all orders, protect yourself”) is at odds with the messy, unpredictable world. The Internet succeeds because it is nondeterministic and unpredictable: The Net’s underlying TCP/IP protocol makes no quality of service guarantees and promises nothing about the route a message will take or whether it will arrive.

This need for people to behave in a predictable, rational, measurable way recalls Mr. Spock’s autistic inability to understand human emotion without counting dimples to discern happiness or frown lines to identify sorrow. It’s likewise reminiscent of scientology, which uses quantitative charts of personality traits, such as “lack of accord” and “certainty,” to help people become 100 percent happy, composed, and so on.

[From Cory Doctorow’s Rise of the Machines in the current Wired magazine.]

With iRobot about to hit the theatres, Cory’s article addresses how Asimov “turned androids into pop culture icons – and invented the science of robotics in the process.” His account is pretty critical and insightful, reminding me that the science fiction literature that i love should not be considered a complete prescriptive tool because the stories written often fail to address the complexities that exist in everyday life.

San Francisco is the home of the premier of Eve Ensler’s new play: The Good Body. Like The Vagina Monologues, this play is a series of monologues. Only, this time, Eve is addressing the entire female body image in general. I’ve heard some of the monologues – they are absolutely fantastic. I strongly encourage anyone who can to attend; it should be a powerful play.

Whether undergoing Botox or living under burkhas, women of all cultures and backgrounds feel compelled to change the way they look in order to fit in with their particular culture, in order to be accepted, in order to be good. In The Good Body, Ensler explores their experiences with monologues representing women from Bombay to Beverly Hills. Delivering narratives collected in locker rooms, cell blocks, boardrooms, and bedrooms, Ensler frames their stories with her own personal journey from a self-loathing teenager to a (sometimes) self-accepting adult. Interspersed throughout are riotous excerpts from Ensler’s lifelong dialogue with her belly-a sassy and conniving antagonist in its own right.

They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom for trying to change the system from within. – Leonard Cohen

(for a friend)

Marble, my cat, has been quite lonely lately. Thus, we got a brilliant idea to bring a sister into her world. Of course, she hasn’t yet accepted this baby kitten, but we’re still hopeful. They say it should take 2 weeks. Marble has stopped hiding, but still won’t get very close. And while i was sleeping last night, Marble came in to sleep with me and found baby kitty and a little hissing fight broke out on my tummy. Introducing baby kitty….

While she looks like super kitty here, i should note that she’s a little bigger than my hand and curls up between my neck and shoulder. She’s super small.

I should note that baby kitty has no formal name yet. I’m inclined to call her Theo; my roommates are fighting for atrocious and disturbing names. She’s just too precious for that. Still not sure…

Oh, and out of complete cuteness, baby kitty woke me at 7AM by licking my eyelids. If it weren’t 7AM, this would’ve been very very very cute. Baby kitty though is a complete joy. She’s happy, relaxed and still spazzy enough to play at times. Now, i just need to convince Marble that this is her friend.

This week is Supernova, my first non-academic tech event in a while. I realized that i have no idea who will be attending. I could be patient and wait, but i’m kinda curious. Who that reads this can i expect to see there?