A few books for the beach:
In Watermelon Sugar, Richard Brautigan. Hallucinatory. Short.
The Last Rock Star Book Or: Liz Phair, A Rant, Camden Joy. Turns the celebrity bio on its head. Creepy and cool.
Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem. Brooklyn Noir.
The Big Nowhere, James Ellroy. LA Noir.
Grand Central Winter, Lee Stringer. Life on the streets, from a Project Renewal alum.
| Camden Joy | Jonathan Lethem |
Richard Harris alerted me to this article in The Industry Standard, which reports that the electronic industy may be fueling the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The chips inside your Intel computer, your Nokia and Ericcson phone, etc. are made using tantalum, a heat-reistant powder that comes from the mineral coltan. Demand for the stuff (at $100 a pound) has enabled rebels in DRC to fund their efforts, and the mining is linked to environmental destruction, forced child labor, and killing. "Warring rebel groups - many funded and supplied by neighboring Rwanda and Uganda - are exploiting coltan mining to help finance a bloody civil war now in its third year. 'There is a direct link between human rights abuses and the exploitation of resources in areas in the DRC occupied by Rwanda and Uganda,' says Suliman Baldo, a senior researcher in the Africa division at Human Rights Watch." So what's industry's response? "If we found out our suppliers were getting tantalum from the Congo, we wouldn't kick them out, that would not help," said an Ericsson rep. What responsibility do tech companies have in this case? And what about us?
| Africa | Democratic Republic of Congo | Rwanda | Uganda | Cell Phones |
Tuesday June 19 9:33 AM ET
Taco Bell Robber Nabbed After Waiting for Chalupa
FORT WORTH, Texas (Reuters) - A youthful thief on a bicycle and brandishing a toy gun held up a Taco Bell through the drive-up window but had to wait so long for a chalupa that he ended up getting caught, authorities say.The robber pedaled up to the fast food outlet's window just after midnight on Monday. Waving what appeared to be a gun, he threatened the staff and demanded money and a chalupa, a soft taco-style specialty.
But a Taco Bell worker called police, who arrived while the thief was waiting for his food. The teen-ager took off, and kept bicycling even after an officer shot him in the arm and leg. He dismounted and surrendered once a second cruiser cut him off.
The gun turned out to be a toy.
"He got the money but then waited there while his food was being prepared,'' said Fort Worth Police Lt. Duane Paul. "He never got his chalupa.''
The alleged robber was identified as 17-year-old Lakount Maddox.
It's really too bad he never got the chalupa. Then the cops could call out, "Drop the chalupa." Of course, they might have mistaken a chalupa for a gun and shot him 41 times, instead of only twice.
| Crime | Fast Food |
Steve Gibson chronicles malicious hacker attacks on his site, and his efforts to track them down. The scary stuff: your computer could be host to a hacker's zombie bot. The really scary stuff: Microsoft's new Windows XP system will make it much easier to launch denial of service attacks. A remarkable account (and clearly written enought for non-techies like myself to follow), especially his dialogues with the hackers themselves. Check it out here.
| Microsoft |
Nick Clemente writes:
I wanted to give you the following tidbiddle for your Ishmates in California. My friend Cassidy and his friend Chris have designed and built a crazy device called a telestereoscope which effectively lets the viewer see things as if their eyes were no longer inside their heads but were in fact several feet apart. According to their website, "The principle behind it is based on human visual perception. In order to make sense of your visual surroundings, part of what your brain must do is estimate how far away things are. One of the ways your brain does this is by using the relative disparity between the images projected onto the retinas of your two eyes. Each object in your field of view will project to a slightly different location on each retina. Essentially, the closer the object, the greater that difference will be. Your brain already knows how far apart your eyes are (about two or three inches), and using that information it can make a good estimate of exactly how far away each object is. This is also the principle behind 3-D movies and stereograms.
Now, if you artificially exaggerate this relative disparity by placing your eyes several feet apart, your brain, still believing that your eyes are only two inches apart, will come to the wrong conclusion about how far away things are. This incorrect information about depth then interacts with everything else you know about what you're seeing (that is a tree, that is a car, etc.) and you begin to draw strange conclusions about the size of things. In short, because it's hard to believe that your head is really ten feet wide, you are forced to conclude that the world around you is really small.
One viewer described it as "like looking at the real world through a Viewmaster."
Cassidy Curtis and Chris Whitney built the device to bring to the Burning Man Festival in the Black Rock Desert, Nevada, which took place in the summer of 2000. The Telestereoscope will be part of an outdoor exhibition of art from Burning Man at the Sonoma Museum of Visual Art, on the grounds of the Luther Burbank Center for the Arts in Santa Rosa, CA. until 28 July 2001.
For more information, check out their website at www.eyestilts.com.
| Weird Science |
Our friend, neighbor, and furniture-mover Chris Kalb couldn't say enough good things about Moulin Rouge, Baz Luhrmann's latest. He called it "a cross between Singin' in the Rain and Flash Gordon." I'd have to agree. No one makes good movie musicals any more; Luhrmann skips over the songwriting stuff and gets straight to the point -- that moment when musical logic takes over and everyone bursts out into song. He uses songs we all know from the last few decades, and it works. It could have been really cheesy, but somehow he pulls it off. Ewan MacGregor does the starry-eyed artist, Nicole Kidman as the H. with an H. of G., Jim Broadbent (from Topsy Turvy) is fantastic as the impresario. (I'll charitably skip over John Leguizamo as a lisping Toulouse-Lautrec.) And Luhrmann's saturated visual style fits for a musical in the way that it didn't quite fit Shakespeare. Most compare it to MTV, but Debbie says (and I agree) that it's closer to Caro and Jeunet's City of Lost Children. So if you like musicals, check it out.
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Thanks to Adrian Taylor for forwarding the link to spudcannon.org. Two guys. A bunch of PVC pipe. A lot of free time. A sack of potatoes. Put these together, and what do you get? A spudcannon, of course. Capable of shooting a potato at 500 mph. (I think it works like those pressure-driven pump water rockets we used to shoot off, before we were allowed to launch the much cooler model rockets.) What do you do with a potato cannon? Pulverize stuff, obviously. A cinderblock. A monitor, And of course, a watermelon. (Go on, download the movie. You know you want to see a melon get blown up by a potato, don't you?) They put Gallagher to shame.
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