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Link Sluttin' 06-07-2011

Cisco drives epic Chinese surveillance network, says report

"Cisco and other western companies are reportedly working with the Chinese government to install a network of one half-million surveillance cameras in the rapidly growing commercial and industrial metropolis, Chongqing."

Boffins fix dead satellite using 'dirty hack' in space

"Engineers and ground controllers at the European Space Agency are overjoyed to announce that they have managed to bring an unexpectedly defunct, critical science satellite orbiting the Earth back to life – by hacking it."

MI5 accidentally spied on 134 people they didn't mean to

"MI5 wrongly collected subscriber data on 134 telephone numbers as a result of a software error, according to interception of communications commissioner Sir Paul Kennedy's annual report." Of course, if you haven't done anything wrong you have nothing to fear.....

McDonald’s gets you legally high

"Fats in foods like potato chips and french fries make them nearly irresistible because they trigger natural marijuana-like chemicals in the body called endocannabinoids, researchers at the University of California, Irvine, have found."

 

 

Connecting Print Comics to the Digital World

This morning, while not doing the job I am paid to do, I was reading an article on Imperica.com linked to from BERG LONDON's site about connecting the digital world to print media, by Durrell Fisher.

The article discusses ways in which print media could interact with online resources - beyond simply printing a URL for interested parties to type into their brower address bar. One of these methods would involve the use of QR codes that could be read by a cameraphone, webcam, or even a dedicated QR code reader.

This made me suddenly think, why can't a comic do that now?

If you take the example of Warren Ellis' Doktor Sleepless, here we have a comic book that had an extensive online datashadow in the form of the community maintained Dr Sleeples wiki, the  outbreaks of the future-spotting website Grinding.be, and a secret forum that you could only get to by either a leap of lateral thinking in working out the URL, or finding a link hidden deep within the wiki site.

So your QR codes could be embedded withing the panels of the comic book that could then point your readers' QR reading devices at whatever part of the book's datashadow you wanted to.

And then someone lit the blue touch paper, so to speak.

One of my twitter contacts (@nevali) mentioned that camera phones are often able to 'see' non-visible wavelengths of the em spectrum.

Now, of course fans of Warren Ellis will already know that he is working with BERG LONDON to create SVK, a comic that has sections printed in UV ink that requires the use of the special torch that comes packaged with the Comic to read.

You can probably see where I am going with this idea.

Yep, a comic book that has QR codes embedded within the panels that are completely invisible to the reader, until they point their QR code reading device at it.

BRAINGASM!
--

 

50 years of time wasted

So today is, as you are no doubt aware the fiftieth annivesary of Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's rocket ride around the globe, in doing so becoming the first man in Space.

This is a much worn path that I'm gonna spend some time trotting down, but I'm going down it anyway..
 
It had taken 57 years (from 1903 to 1960) to go from first flight of the Wright brothers, to  Yuri Gagarin's maiden manned spaceflight. 50 years further down the line and we are still no closer to having a Moon-Base, regular 'proper' space flights instead of scratching about at the top of the atmosphere, or any kind of launch capacity beyond single-use rockets.  

You can blather on about mobile communications and other technological advances such a miniaturisation and future NBIC tech all you like but I still think that this a sad tale about human acheivement in the last half of the twentieth century and first decade of the 21st. When did we get so paralised by fear (fear itself, and the fear of failure)?

Ok, I accept that spaceflight is risky and expensive, but part of me thinks that This Is what Makes It Worth Doing. But even if you take manned spaceflight out of the equation we are still suffering from a poverty of ideas and imagination when it comes to grand-scale engineering.

Where are the gigantic capital schemes for building the new infrastructures of the next 150 years? Why are we not being pushed to test what we can achieve,  instead of patching and repairing the legacy left to us by the Victorian Philanthropists? I'm talking here about smart/decentralised energy grids, networked & integrated transport systems, even fucking clean water supplies capable of meeting demand where needed etc etc.

These are the very schemes that could energise the country, provide new jobs and economic stimulation to deprived areas, and give us a push into the future that would make the white heat of technology that Harold Wilson talked about in the 60's seem like a used bath-full of tepid water.
 
I swear to god that if it wasn't for the last couple of offensive foreign wars and occupations of the last 50 years we would've had a muvva-fuggin no-foolin Space Elevator by now, but that is a rant for another time I fear.

</rant>

January Consumption

Following on from Warren Ellis and Will Ellwood I thought a list of what's new media has been listened to, watched, read and played over the last month would be a useful exercise for me, mainly because I have a terrible short term memory. So here goes.

 

 

  • Battlefield Bad Company 2 - X-Box: You bog standard FPS in which your squad of valiant military-spec stereotypes race around the globe (well South Amercia so far..) shooting at terrorist types in order to prevent an possible world war III. Now  I'm not an FPS expert by any means, but I'd imagine this is pretty run-of-the mill stuff:  Graphicly OK, the obligatory winter/snow/mountain levels that all FPS games come with nowadays and lots of vehicles to pilot/drive/crash into scenery.  On the downside the AI isn't groundbreaking so the enemies are a little predictable. I've not played either COD or Medal of Honour so I can't tell if they are any better or worse than Bad Company, but I can tell you it's still great fun when I've done a long day in the office and want to blast some mo-fo's in the face with a 20mm grenade or .50cal sniper rifle. I'm told the co-operative team-based multi-player is a lot of fun.

 

  • The Endangered Species mixtape by Peterbororough's DJ Slademan - available as a free download from the one-stop shop for UK Hip-Hop, Suspect-Packages. Featuring some of Slademan's personal favourites of the previous year, it also contains some of his own productions. Look out for the exclusives by Jeye Severe and Daim Ruff, and a particluar treat for a Notts boy (me) was the crew cut 'Eagles', that features serious Nottingham Heayweight MCs Cappo and Scorzayzee.

 

  • Started  to re-read Virtual Light by William Gibson, the first in the 'Bridge' Trilogy. My personal favourite of the trilogy, which is completed by 'Idoru' and 'All Tomorrow's Parties', without going into too much detail this is fundamentally a story about the class-conflict between the elite and the street but I think its lasting effects on me was first a desire to say 'fuck-it', drop out and become a bicylce messenger. The second lasting effect on me is a long term hankering for a armoured snatch Land-rover in the style of Rydell's 'Gunhead'.

 

  • HBO's Boardwalk Empire ticked all the boxes for me. Steve Buscemi plays Enoch "Nucky" Thompson, a corrupt official in Prohibition era Atlantic City, where he tries to stay one step ahead of the Feds, while flirting with gangsters and high society. I'm not sure which episode I was watching as it was late on a Saturday and things are a little hazy now (on further investigation it turns out to be the first episode). Gangsters, gambling, Whiskey heists, dangerous women and gratuitous on-screen violence are all pieces to a puzzle, that when completed will ensure that I will be returning to the rest of the series with gusto.

 

I've not mentioned any of the comic books, or various other bits and pieces I've consumed in the last month - but honourable mentions deserve to go to Alan Moore's Neonomicon, The Battery Apple Trees for their works in progress updates on soundcloud and last, but by no means least, everyone at Weaponizer for smashing open 2011 with lots of new comics, short SF and flash fiction.

 

KGB Connections - FedFlix on Archive.org

FedFlix is making US Government films available to the public on Archive.org. There are a wealth of movies available but this one caught my attention:

KGB CONNECTIONS (PARTS 1 & 2)

"A COMPREHENSIVE VIEW OF THE HISTORY, ORGANIZATION, AND RECENT OPERATIONS OF THE KGB. PRIMARY FOCUS IS ON NORTH AMERICA, BUT HAS APPLICABILITY AND INTEREST TO ANY GEOGRAPHICAL AREA. GENERATES A CONSIDERABLE DEGREE OF CREDIBILITY. LEAVES LITTLE DOUBT THAT THE MAIN OBJECTIVE OF THE SOVIET UNION WAS AND REMAINS THE CALCULATED, CONTINUING, COMPLETELY CYNICAL EXTENSION OF SOVIET POWER OVER THE ENTIRE GLOBE."

 

Link Sluttin' 19-01-11

"Researchers at the Idaho National Laboratory, which is overseen by the U.S. Department of Energy, may have passed critical information to Israel about vulnerabilities in a system that controls Iran’s enrichment plant at Natanz. That information was then used to create and test the so-called Stuxnet worm that was unleashed in a joint cyberattack on Natanz, according to The New York Times."

"Welcome to Two Fisted Tuesdays, Dieselpunks weekly beat on the mean streets.

Starring Gerald Mohr and starting with the famous lines, "Get this and get it straight! Crime is a sucker's road and those who travel it wind up in the gutter, the prison or the grave." The Adventures of Philip Marlowe runs about 25 minutes without commercials. You can listen to this blast from the past in MP3 format for free at the link below.

Download The Adventures of Philip Marlowe - Hiding Place

 

"High-resolution aerial photos taken over Brisbane last week have revealed the scale of devastation across dozens of suburbs and tens of thousands of homes and businesses."

 

"(PhysOrg.com) -- A joint project by universities in Algeria and Japan is planning to turn the Sahara desert, the largest desert in the world, into a breeding ground for solar power plants that could supply half the world’s electrical energy requirements by 2050."

 

Tianjin Eco-City

 

"The city will be divided into seven distinct sectors: a Lifescape, an Eco-Valley, a Solarscape, an Urbanscape, a Windscape, an Earthscape and Eco-Corridors. Surrounded by greenery, the Lifescape will consist of a series of soil-topped mounds that will counteract the towering apartment buildings of the other communities. To the north of the Lifescape, the Solarscape will act as the administrative and civic center of the Eco-City. Demonstrating the concept of a compact, multilayered city, the Urbanscape will be the core of the Eco-City, featuring stacked programs interconnected by sky-bridges at multiple levels to make efficient use of vertical space. In contrast to the Urbanscape, the Earthscape will act as a sort of suburb of the city, with stepped architecture that will maximize public green space. Last but not least, the Windscape will transform Qingtuozi, a century-old village surrounded by a small lake, into a venue for citizens to relax and recreate."

Tianjin Eco-City is due for completion in 2020. One step nearer the Olympus Arcologies of Appleseed?

via digitalyn:

Tianjin Eco City is a Futuristic Green Landscape for 350,000 Residents Tianjin Eco City – Inhabitat - Green Design Will Save the World (via Liam)

Peel Street Caves, Peel Street

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Rouse’s Sand Mine (Peel Street Caves) is the largest of Nottingham’s four remaining sand mines. Situated to the west of Mansfield Road the mine is 200m from end to end. It is thought that the mine was in use from around 1780 to 1810. However it is possible that the mine was worked from an even earlier date, acting as a direct source of sand for a nearby glass works which was in operation until 1760. The mine was forgotten until about 1892 when the caves became a tourist attraction, ‘Robin Hood’s Mammoth Cave’. A map of 1844 shows a number of properties on Mansfield Road. Some of these have basements cut into the sandstone which open out into the sand mine. In the Second World War the caves were used as air raid shelters. Two new entrances and associated tunnels were cut, lighting fitted and blast walls were added. The caves are now owned by Nottingham City Council and are not generally accessible.

via nottingham.ac.uk

Perhaps a move to the Peel St/Mansfield Rd/North Sherwood St area is called for.

Continuous Machinic Cinema

Continuous Machinic Cinema

This project explores a particular narrative for the future of cinema and, in turn, it proposes new possibilities for the moving image and its place, content, viewers & screen.

The project proposes a scenario of technological discovery and development where:

** Guerilla film distribution occurs in new places via Lawn Bowl and Shot-put film grenades;

** With anamorphic lenses the perpendicular hegemony of conventional cinema watching is broken;

A shift in content to QR coded cinema is predicted and, in turn..

** A future point where non-narrative images are viewed by post-human machine optics is proposed, with screens affecting the fabric of the city.

The project is a sneak preview for a future of cinema, proposing a continuous cinema that is freed from both the spatial confines of the movie house and the literary expectations of narrative — told by and to non-human machines.

via nearfuturelaboratory.com