Wednesday, June 27. 2007
'Credit card companies don't give a rat's ass.
'That's the conclusion I've reached after years of doing stunts like The Credit Card Prank, where I forged fake names to credit card receipts, and The Visa Prank, where dim-witted customer service representatives let me break into credit card accounts.
'So when I got an offer in the mail for a new "IdentityMonitor" service from Citi, which supposedly protects you from identity theft, I laughed. First, because I was sure it wouldn't work. Second, because they were offering it to one of my own stolen identities.' (Zug article). media-underground.net
Wednesday, June 13. 2007
'In a sneak peek at Sicko broadcast on Oprah, we see some politically charged footage of how the Bush Administration turned their back on 9/11 rescue workers.' (AlterNet video stream). media-underground.net
Saturday, June 2. 2007
'For centuries humankind dreamt of being able to record sound. Seeing through the evanescent nature of sonic vibration and analyzing it repeatedly at will was a dream long reflected by the evolution of phonetic writing systems and musical notation.
'From the invention of the clock onward, we have tried in earnest to gain control of the elusive fourth dimension, time; to take the ephemeral aspects of life and put them to permanent record, to glimpse the fleeting details of our impermanence hidden beneath the constant conceptual push towards the next: second, minute, hour.' (Evolution Of Sound website). media-underground.net
Friday, June 1. 2007
'This is how you enlist in the Army of God: First come the fireworks and the prayers, and then 4,000 kids scream, "We won't be silent anymore!" Then the kids drop to their knees, still but for the weeping and regrets of fifteen-year-olds. The lights in the Cleveland arena fade to blue, and a man on the stage whispers to them about sin and love and the Father-God. They rise, heartened; the crowd, en masse, swears off "harlots and adultery"; the twenty-one-year-old MC twitches taut a chain across the ass of her skintight red jeans and summons the followers to show off their best dance moves for God. "Gimme what you got!" she shouts. They dance - hip-hop, tap, toe and pelvic thrusting. Then they're ready. They're about to accept "the mark of a warrior," explains Ron Luce, commander in chief of BattleCry, the most furious youth crusade since young sinners in the hands of an angry God flogged themselves with shame in eighteenth-century New England.' (Rolling Stone article). media-underground.net
Thursday, May 31. 2007
'Disclose.tv is a new video and photo sharing community dedicated to mysteries, secrets, anomalies, conspiracies and other unusal or unexplained topics of this world - the first of its kind.
Many of the videos uploaded on Disclose.tv have been banned from TV because of their controversial and mind-boggling nature, and that can only mean one thing: Hours and hours of rare footage that many do not want you to see' (Disclose.tv website). media-underground.net
Tuesday, May 29. 2007
'Hasan Elahi whips out his Samsung Pocket PC phone and shows me how he's keeping himself out of Guantanamo. He swivels the camera lens around and snaps a picture of the Manhattan Starbucks where we're drinking coffee. Then he squints and pecks at the phone's touchscreen. "OK! It's uploading now," says the cheery, 35-year-old artist and Rutgers professor, whose bleached-blond hair complements his fluorescent-green pants. "It'll go public in a few seconds." Sure enough, a moment later the shot appears on the front page of his Web site, TrackingTransience.net.
'There are already tons of pictures there. Elahi will post about a hundred today - the rooms he sat in, the food he ate, the coffees he ordered. Poke around his site and you'll find more than 20,000 images stretching back three years. Elahi has documented nearly every waking hour of his life during that time. He posts copies of every debit card transaction, so you can see what he bought, where, and when. A GPS device in his pocket reports his real-time physical location on a map.
'Elahi's site is the perfect alibi. Or an audacious art project. Or both. The Bangladeshi-born American says the US government mistakenly listed him on its terrorist watch list - and once you're on, it's hard to get off. To convince the Feds of his innocence, Elahi has made his life an open book. Whenever they want, officials can go to his site and see where he is and what he's doing. Indeed, his server logs show hits from the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, and the Executive Office of the President, among others.' (Wired article). media-underground.net
Monday, May 21. 2007
A thousand reasons (with references and links) that George W. Bush is the worst president the United States of America has ever had. (Thousand Reasons feature). media-underground.net
Thursday, May 10. 2007
'There are a few things lawmakers have decided really ought to be handled with the "care and oversight" that only the government can provide: e.g., tax collection, radioactive materials, biohazards, guns, and CDs. CDs? No, I'm not talking about financial Certificates of Deposit, though that might make more sense. I'm talking about Compact Discs.
'New "pawn shop" laws are springing up across the United States that will make selling your used CDs at the local record shop something akin to getting arrested. No, you won't spend any time in jail, but you'll certainly feel like a criminal once the local record shop makes copies of all of your identifying information and even collects your fingerprints.' (Ars Technica article). media-underground.net
Thursday, April 26. 2007
'Are psychedelics good for you? It's such a hippie relic of a question that it's almost embarrassing to ask. But a quiet psychedelic renaissance is beginning at the highest levels of American science, including the National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH) and Harvard, which is conducting what is thought to be its first research into therapeutic uses of psychedelics (in this case, Ecstasy) since the university fired Timothy Leary in 1963. But should we be prying open the doors of perception again? Wasn't the whole thing a disaster the first time?' (Time article). media-underground.net
Thursday, April 12. 2007
'The opinions and behaviors of people and societies are easily swayed. Every decade, every year, every week, those who control mass media change the climates of human thought. New pop stars, fashions, and fads are paraded center stage and then exit stage left followed by floods of expendable cash, leaving the path of sordid garbage known as “popular culture” in its wake.
'Now the power to rule the world and wag the cultural dog is at your fingertips. What follows are simple instructions, a manual, a playbook of sorts, some simple behavioral tools to influence and take advantage of the nervous systems of all your peers.' (Alterati article). media-underground.net
'So much conspiracy and disinformation surrounds the military's past work on LSD and other chemical agents that it's been difficult to separate fact from fiction. That's starting to change, however.
'Advocates of using chemical agents in nonlethal warfare are increasing, making now a good time to start reviewing the historical record. A recently published book on the Army's infamous "Edgewood Experiments" involving hallucinogenic agents like LSD may help shed more light on the debate. The infamous CIA work, MK ULTRA, is often considered synonymous with all government LSD experimentation. But the historical record is far more complex.' (Wired article). media-underground.net
Thursday, March 29. 2007
'Last year, the telecommunications industry did their best to build a tiered Internet that would have privileged the Web sites that paid companies like AT&T and Verizon an additional fee and degraded the speeds of Web sites that did not. But it was the advocates of “net neutrality” - the Internet’s long-standing design principle that prevents service providers from discriminating against any content, Web site or platform - who ended up with a string of impressive victories.
'After the House overwhelmingly passed the Communications Opportunity, Protections and Enhancement (COPE) Act without neutrality provisions in June, a massive grassroots campaign erupted, scaring enough senators away from its companion version to insure the legislation died on the vine. Then, in a development described by Columbia University law professor Timothy Wu as a “milestone,” AT&T agreed in December to respect net neutrality for the next two years in order to have the FCC approve its merger with Bell South.' (In These Times article). media-underground.net
Friday, March 23. 2007
'Intelligent teenagers often listen to heavy metal music to cope with the pressures associated with being talented, according to research.
'The results of a study of more than 1,000 of the brightest five per cent of young people will come as relief to parents whose offspring, usually long-haired, are devotees of Iron Maiden, AC/DC and their musical descendants.
'Researchers found that, far from being a sign of delinquency and poor academic ability, many adolescent "metalheads" are extremely bright and often use the music to help them deal with the stresses and strains of being gifted social outsiders.' (Telegraph article). media-underground.net
Wednesday, March 14. 2007
'Cellphone companies do not make it easy to break two-year contracts. But it can be done through shrewd negotiating or by turning to the innovators on the Internet who match contract sellers with people who want to assume the contract.' (New York Times article). media-underground.net
Thursday, March 8. 2007
'IBM wants to help you find out if UFOs are real. Well, sort of. With UFO sightings seemingly on the rise, Big Blue is teaming with The Anomalies Network to offer UFO Crawler, a new search engine specifically tuned to search for information about the paranormal, unexplained or just plain bizarre.
'The search tool employs IBM's OmniFind Yahoo! Edition enterprise search software and the UFO Crawler should help users precisely target and gather information from relevant sources, including thousands of documents and files collected in the vast Anomalies Network archive, as well as multiple global resources across the Web on topics such as such as ghosts, conspiracy theories and extraterrestrials, the companies said in a statement.' (Network World article & UFOCrawler search engine). media-underground.net
Tuesday, March 6. 2007
'You've heard of green cars, green tourism and green weddings. Now Canadians should ready themselves for green sex.
'For those who like to make love to the soundtrack of the global warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, Greenpeace has released a list of strategies for "getting it on for the good of the planet," suggesting "you can be a bomb in bed without nuking the planet." TreeHugger, an online magazine edited by Ontario's Michael Graham Richard, has just published a guide on "how to green your sex life." The famed adult store Good Vibrations announced last week they would no longer sell sex toys containing phthalates, controversial chemical plasticizers believed by some to be hazardous to humans and the environment alike.
'And throughout Canada and the U.S., people who want to pleasure the planet can now buy everything from bamboo bed sheets to organic lubricant and "eco-undies."
'"Green living is getting sexy," says Jacob Gordon, author of TreeHugger.com's recent green guide for the bedroom.' (Canada article). media-underground.net
Monday, March 5. 2007
'The government is to be urged to consider a controversial plan to reclassify drugs according to the harm they do. The new ranking system would see alcohol placed high on the scale because of its links to violence and car accidents. Tobacco, estimated to cause 40 per cent of all hospital illnesses, would also come before the class-A drug ecstasy.
'However, there is no suggestion that alcohol and tobacco should be banned. The Royal Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures & Commerce's commission on illegal drugs, communities and public policy has been examining what it believes is a "serious misfit between the law relating to drugs and the way in which drugs are actually used by members of society."' (Guardian article). media-underground.net
Wednesday, February 28. 2007
'Music videos started out as ads for albums in the early 80s, and stayed that way throughout the initial stages of the online music revolution.
'But about two years ago, the major labels - led by UMG - realized they were missing out on a cash cow that, along with ringtones, could help them weather continued declines in music sales. Ever since, a battle has been brewing between the labels and their online distributors, who claim they're being run out of business by the high costs of licensing music videos. On Tuesday, at the Digital Music Forum keynote panel in New York, the fight was, at least, entertaining.' (Wired News article). media-underground.net
Friday, February 23. 2007
'It is no longer 2007. According to Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero mania sweeping the internation, we’re almost three months into -15 BA (Born Again). In the semi-terrifying world of Trent Reznor’s new future-based concept album, the year 2022 is Year Zero, the year we were “Born Again.” Every 12 months prior to Year Zero is denoted by negatives, thus 2007 is -15 BA. If this confuses you, give up now.' (Rolling Stone article). media-underground.net
'Those wondrously intricate tile mosaics that adorn medieval Islamic architecture may cloak a mastery of geometry not matched in the West for hundreds of years.
'Historians have long assumed that sheer hard work with the equivalent of a ruler and compass allowed medieval craftsmen to create the ornate star-and-polygon tile patterns that cover mosques, shrines and other buildings that stretch from Turkey through Iran and on to India.
'Now a Harvard University researcher argues that more than 500 years ago, math whizzes met up with the artists and began creating far more complex tile patterns that culminated in what mathematicians today call "quasi-crystalline designs."' (Discovery Channel article). media-underground.net
Thursday, February 22. 2007
'It's official. The United States is currently suffering an epidemic of Lying Bastard Fatigue. It is caused by an overdose of Lying Bastards in the body politic.
We, and the world in general who must put up with them being de facto rulers without ever voting for them, are tired and sick at heart of the lying bastards who call themselves our leaders and the sycophantic goons who would allow any lie by those glorious annointed ones.
There have been lies over Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, "Homeland" security, Israel's influence, Katrina reconstruction, warrantless wiretapping, campaign finance corruption, lobbying graft, torture, rendition, election fixing, threatening the Supreme Court and even Christmas! That's not even close to a complete list!' (Newshog article). media-underground.net
'From a welling tear to a wounded stare, the ability to project convincing emotions in close-up is the test of a cinema actor. But now it appears that there is more to some star turns than meets the audience’s eye.
'Directors have started to manipulate actors’ performances in postproduction.
'Modern visual effects technology allows them to go beyond traditional cosmetic changes, such as removing wrinkles and unsightly hairs, and adjust actors facial expressions and subtly alter the mood of a scene.' (Times Online article). media-underground.net
Thursday, February 1. 2007
'A new online service is about to launch that will allow bedroom musicians worldwide to play together in real time - without leaving their own bedrooms.
'In March, eJamming will introduce eJamming Audiio, an online music studio that uses peer-to-peer connections to eliminate lag times between live performers.' (Wired article). media-underground.net
Tuesday, January 23. 2007
'"For many, it was a huge, obvious effect," says psychiatrist John Krystal. "One of the patients said, 'Don't give me those old medications, I want this again.'"
'Krystal, a professor at Yale University, is talking about the time he gave seven severely depressed patients ketamine, a mind-blowing drug developed as an anaesthetic but better known as a club drug. It was a long shot, but the results were astonishing. Though most of the patients found the ketamine experience itself unpleasant, once it wore off they had a far better feeling: the disabling and suicidal depression they had lived with for years had vanished.' (Ketamine article). media-underground.net
'It was a fairly modest experiment, as these things go, with volunteers trooping into the lab at Harvard Medical School to learn and practice a little five-finger piano exercise. Neuroscientist Alvaro Pascual-Leone instructed the members of one group to play as fluidly as they could, trying to keep to the metronome's 60 beats per minute. Every day for five days, the volunteers practiced for two hours. Then they took a test.
'At the end of each day's practice session, they sat beneath a coil of wire that sent a brief magnetic pulse into the motor cortex of their brain, located in a strip running from the crown of the head toward each ear. The so-called transcranial-magnetic-stimulation (TMS) test allows scientists to infer the function of neurons just beneath the coil. In the piano players, the TMS mapped how much of the motor cortex controlled the finger movements needed for the piano exercise. What the scientists found was that after a week of practice, the stretch of motor cortex devoted to these finger movements took over surrounding areas like dandelions on a suburban lawn.' (Time article). media-underground.net
Monday, January 22. 2007
'How do you make the first solo computer-generated animated feature? Fill your room with computers. Avoid contact with other humans. Play Game Boy a lot. Read esoteric books about playwriting. Work 30-hour shifts and don't let migraines slow you down.
'That approach worked for M Dot Strange (nee Michael Belmont) - writer, director, editor, producer and animator of the disturbing, mind-blowing (and often confusing) We Are The Strange. An instant landmark of do-it-yourself cinema, the film premiered last Friday to a packed house at a midnight screening in Sundance's Egyptian theater.' (Wired article). media-underground.net
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