if you happen to be in D.C. June 3, check out the Observing Surveillance event. regardless, the website is fascinating…
observing surveillance
exhibit up.. checking email again
i actually went offline for the most part this week (gasp!) to get the art installation up . it looks great, so if you are down there, go check it out.
i finally got around to taking a look at a graphical search engine and i’m not too thrilled with it. it looks really cool, but the links are meaningless and the search results are really inaccurate. of course, i always test all search engines with ‘ani difranco’ because i know the results in all other search engines.
this morning, i also got a transcript of a chomsky vs. bill bennett debate with paula zahn on CNN. problem is that i don’t know how to read these things anymore. i know my government is lying to me (with help from the media) but i can’t say that i automatically trust the uber-left either, cause it’s so easy to be a paranoid in this current culture. how do you fight misinformation when all you have is misinformation?
i was psyched to see fake banner ads (#1, #2, #3) in my inbox – i love sarcastic cuts at corporations…
exhibit coming along
In less than a week, a collaborative piece that i have been working on will be going up at the Artists Space in NYC (feel free to join me at the opening May 30 6-8PM). I’m quite psyched, actually – it’s going to be absolutely gorgeous… I don’t have actual screenshots from my work quite yet, but as i was websearching, i found the most intriguing image that shows the kind of thing that we’re showing: clusters of people, partially colorcoded, interacting with other people:
(only ours is all text representations of people instead of actual people.. although it would be absolutely fun to have real people)
About a boy who isn’t
The NYTimes is running an article about being a trannyboy in middle school (and passing!!) It made me think back to the work that Peggy Cohen-Kettenis was doing, giving adolescents treatments to stop puberty until they reached an age where serious decisions could be made about hormones and surgery. I really do hope that the world continues to progress and accept people who don’t fit into traditional societal categories.
[cypherpunk login for nytimes: c1ph3rpunk/c1ph3rpunk]
scary socnet visualizations
Hmmm.. i just found out about a scary little socnet visualization tool – Watson. Apparently, it was built for the police in Britain… they would log into the phone company, suck down all the data and come up with social networks visualizations. Fun fun.
random thoughts
Doreen Kimura has a new article on Sex & The Brain… it’s nothing new, but it’s always nice to see it published, particulary when hilighted by metafilter.
Always good to know that all of my meds are on the Top 200 Rx List
I’m super psyched to see that the Dems & Reps are teaming up to call for a full independent investigation into 9/11… you can support this move, even.
articles of the day
Go out and get a piece, son is a nice reminder of how boys and girls are treated differently when it comes to sex and violence. Interesting descriptions that raise ideas about what is a portrait of someone.
Of course, you can be a male model & wear a real face. Female models are supposed to be random; men are supposed to embody power. My friend’s favorite passage: “For women who support themselves walking down runways, vulnerability to changing economic realities is never quite as pronounced. Despite four decades of feminist influence, women are still easily seduced by images of preternatural female beauty. But if women fantasize about what it would be like to possess nothing more than ethereal good looks, the daydreams of men generally follow different plotlines”
[cypherpunk login for nytimes: c1ph3rpunk/c1ph3rpunk]
ancient roman trans folks
It seems to take a bunch of archaeology research to believe that some men in ancienct rome spent their days dressed as women. And even then, it took the archaeologists 20 years to figure out that a male adorned with female jewelry might be a trans person. Do people really think that trans is a new phenomenon?
when spam provides humor
For four years, i dated a boy named Jon and my name has no ‘h’ on it. Yet, when Jon’s roommate received a piece of spam this morning, it took him a bit to realize that it was exactly that, not a real piece of mail. Why? Because the message was from “Dana” about her evil ex “John.” The mail was an advert for a porn site, and a bloody hysterical one at that, particularly considering that it was most likely randomly chosen names. (see email inside)
sponsor demos
Today was another sponsor demo day at the lab. These are always quite entertaining, often absolutely intriguing, as i babble babble babble about SecureId and Social Network Fragments for two hours. This time, i spent my two hours with three different groups of sponsors – from IBM Research (formerly Lotus), AOL Time Warner, and the DoD. The IBM folks are fabulous – they are academics and researchers and so our conversations are completely in line with research; this time, we talked mostly about social networks and the role they can play in research. Fun Fun. The AOL guy was fabulous, and had intriguing insight on the way that AOLTW and corporations worked. His job is to seek out what are the up-and-coming technologies that can make & break AOLTW, where technology is going and what should be built. I desperately want his job. Finally, my conversation with the DoD guys was almost depressing. They didn’t understand what i was doing, why it was interesting, and they didn’t understand the basic technology that made anything work (like spring systems). Now, i wouldn’t have been so annoyed that they didn’t understand my work (maybe they were management types), but they were so egotistical and in my face “you’re-just-a-little-girl” that i found myself 1) not trusting them; 2) wondering why they were wasting either of our time. (And my negative and frustrated impressions were built before i knew that they were DoD… they succeeded in magnifying my stereotypes.. i hate it when that happens.)