If I am not for myself, who will be?
If I am for myself only, what am I?
If not now, when?

I’m in Belfast at the minute and this was the scene we were greeted with on the way back to our hotel:

Dissident republicans are being blamed for a series of security alerts which brought parts of Northern Ireland to a standstill yesterday.

Around a dozen major roads in and out of Belfast were sealed off after hijacked vehicles were set alight and abandoned.

Many of the security alerts were declared close to police stations, including North Queen Street, Tennent Street and Oldpark in the north of Belfast, as well as Woodburn station on the Stewartstown Road and and Dunmurry station on the Lisburn Road in south Belfast.

Army bomb experts were last night called to deal with a suspicious vehicle at Oldpark Road.

An alert close to the main entrance of Stormont led to the Upper Newtownards Road being closed in both directions for several hours. On the Andersonstown Road an abandoned delivery vehicle caused traffic jams.

We’re staying at the Stormont Hotel. When we got back we were ushered into one of the dining halls at the rear of the hotel, the furthest part from Stormont and, we were told, the part with the least glass in the event of an actual explosion. The staff, you could tell, were familiar with the drill and did their best to make everyone comfortable while we waited it out… This was the latest in a series of incidents in Northern Ireland. Maybe the republicans have also been inspired by Obama’s ‘yes we can!’

Speaking of which, Obama is in London for the G20 summit. Worlds leaders have gathered to discuss how to reign in the chain reaction set off by last years financial crisis. A crisis that according to the Economist Intelligence Unit is about to enter a phase marked by social upheaval.

Manning the Barricade
Eighteen months after it began, this economic chain reaction.from banks to markets to consumers to companies.is entering a new phase. Economic pain, reflected in millions of lost jobs and destroyed savings, has entered the political realm, causing some governments to collapse and threatening others.The political risks from the economic crisis are increasingly dire. Dennis Blair, America’s new intelligence chief, says political turmoil from the global recession has replaced terrorism as the country’s biggest security threat. Ferenc Gyurcsany, Hungary’s prime minister, warns that an economic collapse in eastern Europe could tear apart the European Union and create a new Iron Curtain.

Further east, the slowdown in China’s economy and the lack of political freedom is  creating fertile ground for social turmoil. Millions of migrant Chinese factory workers who returned to the countryside for the lunar New Year holiday earlier this year had no jobs to return to.

London this past weekend saw the first of a series of protests planned to coincide with the G20. Between 35 and 40 000 people are said to have turned up and the demonstrations were mostly peaceful. But, with two more days of protest (no, wait three!)  planned, I think it’s only a matter of time before things really kick off.

But as significant as this events are, I think this evidence that a much larger shift is underway. John Robb’s has made some astute observations about this stage of the crisis. Firstly, he doesn’t think protests will achieve much and cites the following reasons:

1. The realization that peaceful protest, from marches and placard waving, has ceased to be effective tool of political change.
2. Regulations on protest have neutered it.
3. Police departments will crack down on protesters. From the use of counter-insurgency tactics and legal pressure against organizers to a rapid escalation to violence in the street (no repeat of Athens here).

This, he predicts, will give rise to what he calls an open source insurgency…

…will begin as groups form based on new primary loyalties (global guerrillas).  A plethora of groups, from criminal to nationalist to family to religious to ethnic, will form in an attempt to address the needs of specific/targeted populations.  Many of these groups, as we have seen elsewhere, will quickly resort to violence in order to advance their interests.

I’d like to come back to the idea of open source insurgency sometime soon but for now I want to turn to that Something Big. Robb see’s open source warfare is part of a larger paradigm shift and I think he’s seriously onto something…

A systemic crisis is usually a catalyst for transfor hmational societal change, and it’s likely that the current crisis of global capitalism is large enough to play this role.  However, if change is coming, where is it bringing us?  David Ronfeldt, a global guerrilla guru, has an interesting take on this from an organizational perspective.  He calls the model TIMN.  It’s composed of four organizational forms:

• Tribes
• Institutions
• Markets
• Networks

This is how Ronfeldt characteristics the form:

Once a form is subscribed to by many actors, it becomes more than a mere form: It develops into a realm, even a system, of thought and behavior. Indeed, the rise of each form spells an ideational and structural revolution. Each is a generator of order, because each defines a set of interactions (or, transactions) that are attractive, powerful, and useful enough to create a distinct realm of activity, or at least its core. Each becomes the basis for a governance system that is self-regulating and, ultimately, self-limiting. And each tends to foster a different kind of worldview, for each orients people differently toward social space, time, and action. What is deemed rational — how a “rational actor” should behave — is different for each form; no single “utility function” suits them all.

The financial crisis could very well be a product of the move from the market societal form to the societal network form by virtue of how inter[dependant/related] the companies and countries have become. And the behavior which got us into this mess, which to most of us seems perverse and irrational, might be the type of behavior which could be considered entirely rational in a society based on the network form.

The network (N) form, which is now on the rise, appears to have civil society as its home realm, the realm that is being strengthened more than any other. But it is possible, even likely, that a new, yet-to-be-named realm will emerge from it. Thus, a new phase of social evolution is now dawning in which quadriform T+I+M+N societies will emerge to take the lead and a vast rebalancing of relations among state, market, and civil-society actors will occur around the world. To do well in the 21st century and beyond, an advanced, democratic, information-age society will have to incorporate all four forms and make them and their realms function well together, despite their inherent contradictions.

The first is a blog post from iMomus, Supersize mind, where he thinks out loud on the Extended Mind Thesis (EMT). The theory is basically a logical progression of the Mcluhan idea that technology and the media act as an extension of our nervous system. So Radio and TV would be extensions of hearing and sight. This means that we now we now not only witness but  participate AND! experience events beyond just our physical locality. Think of how you felt watching the Israeli military intervention in Palestine on the news. In the beginning with traditional media this purely passive. Now think of technology and media like facebook, youtube, myspace. Today we are actively engaged in sharing and disseminating information, ideas and ultimately culture…

EMT takes this a step further by asking question, if our sense organs have become externalized and we’ve physiologically and psychologically adapted to this externalization then where do we now draw the line on The Mind? And not only sense organs, we also use technology, media and the social structures around us for functions like parsing information, storing memory, etc. The mind is basically outsourcing some of its functions…

Momus picks up on Jerry Fodor’s attempt to refute this theory

The general thrust of his argument seems to be posited on a belief in the absolute independence of the individual brain, a Cartesian insistence of its a priori separation from culture, body, world. I would be inclined much more to cultural determinism — I’m entirely happy with the idea that our national cultures, our software, our media, and even our philosophical traditions (Mr Fodor!) think us. I don’t think this determines us absolutely, but I do think it takes conscious effort to escape the patterning of, say, the way a music sequencing software engineer makes us think about music, or the way a British newspaper editor makes us think about current events in the world. I also think that one can’t ever entirely escape structurations like these, only swap them for other structurations (improv jazz, a Japanese poet’s take on current world events).

And I agree. Most, if not all, areas of ourselves and society are socially constructed (ok, maybe not all). Our personal identity, our beliefs, our politics, society, culture. So it follows, that as the tools for disseminating and constructing become more and more integrated into our daily lives they will become more a part of our psyche as well. (I might change my position once I’ve actually finished Fodor article)

Then there was the other site. The Extraordinaries and this is their elevator pitch:

The Extraordinaries delivers volunteer opportunities to mobile phones that can be performed on mobile phones in just a few minutes.

The Problem:
Busy people rarely volunteer. In the rat race of 60-hour workweeks, going to school, running errands, and driving kids to soccer games, many people wish to give back but only have small increments of free time. Most volunteer opportunities require training, vetting, and lengthy time-commitments. According to a January 2008 U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics survey, only 26% of Americans volunteered in 2007. Further, only 34% performed activities related to their occupational skills. Nearly half of non-volunteers listed “lack of time” as the main reason for not volunteering. In short, we live in a nation where the barriers to volunteering are too high and where we’re underutilizing the skills of those who overcome the obstacles to participation.

The Extraordinary Solution:
The Extraordinaries proposes to deliver skills-based volunteer tasks to people whenever and wherever they are available by mobile phone. Over 80% of the adult U.S. population carries a mobile phone in his or her pocket and the higher-end of these diminuative devices, so called “smartphones,” are as capable as any laptop computer. Nearly anything that can be done on a personal computer can be done on a smartphone. The Extraordinaries dramatically reduce the barriers to giving back by enabling people to volunteer on-the-spot and on-demand.

The Promise:
The result of dropping these barriers may be explosive. Suddenly, it becomes possible to volunteer during spare time. So instead of making a lengthy time-commitment to a single organization on a single day per year, you can volunteer for many organizations many times throughout the week.

They go into much more details as to what that actually means, how you would get involved, so follow the link if you want to know more. The idea that really grabs my attention though, is distributed participation. How big tasks are broken down into little pieces which then get done my loads more people. It’s Adam Smiths, Division of Labor all over again. Except now, facilitated by technology it’s happening on a scale he could only have dreamt.

Pretty damn cool if you ask me and it reminds me of the work that Luis von Ahn is doing with his Games With A Purpose project:

When you play a game at Gwap, you aren’t just having fun. You’re helping the world become a better place. By playing our games, you’re training computers to solve problems for humans all over the world.

Let’s take the ESP Game for example. You and a partner see the same image and are asked to type in a tag for it. When you agree on a tag, you move on and are awarded points. After just a minute of play, you’ve agreed on six or seven tags.

We record those six or seven tags and associate them with the images. Now a search engine will have a better idea of what’s in those images.

Sneaky bit of copy there, ‘you’re training computers to solve problems’. Von Ahn chooses to describe it as ‘Human Computation, which harnesses the combined computational power of humans and computers to solve large-scale problems.‘ It’s more a case of humans solving problems FOR machines if you ask me, but I digress…

Momus’ original article started out with him in a discussion about the likelihood of computers becoming brain implants, and whether he would get one (or not) if they did. This is something I’ve thought about as well. and about a year ago I wrote a short story(-ish thing) about that very same idea…

My mate Craig and I are both interested in the socio-political outcomes of emerging technology. We also both enjoy a bit of scifi. So we thought it would be interesting to explore some of those implications in short story format, and so Future Fragments was born.

I only ever wrote one story for the site. It was newspaper article about the attempted assasination of Luis von Ahn and a scandal surrounding his technology. Think EMT meets the Extraordinaries meets the Unabomber or The Weathermen.

Anyways, back to reality… These are fascinating ideas because they show how by reinventing society, by adopting tools like Extraordinaries, we are beginning to reinvent ourselves and quiet literally (or is it figuratively) broaden our minds.

Via: blackbeltjones delicious feed which (if you found this interesting) is a goldmine of interesting ideas.

NB! Craig’s writting is really good and I’d highly having a look at Future Fragments. Why not start with Wasting Art, Wasting I

It was recently commissioned by the Government’s Forsight programe to develop a set of evidence-based actions to improve personal well-being. This is the summary of their report (which is typical of their work)…

Five Ways to Well Being

A review of the most up-to-date evidence suggests that building the following five actions into our day-to-day lives is important for well-being:

Connect…

With the people around you. With family, friends, colleagues and neighbours. At home, work, school or in your local community. Think of these as the cornerstones of your life and invest time in developing them. Building these connections will support and enrich you every day.

Be Active…

Go for a walk or run. Step outside. Cycle. Play a game. Garden. Dance. Exercising makes you feel good. Most importantly, discover a physical activity you enjoy; one that suits your level of mobility and fitness.

Take Notice…

Be curious. Catch sight of the beautiful. Remark on the unusual. Notice the changing seasons. Savour the moment, whether you are on a train, eating lunch or talking to friends. Be aware of the world around you and what you are feeling. Reflecting on your experiences will help you appreciate what matters to you.

Keep Learning…

Try something new. Rediscover an old interest. Sign up for that course. Take on a different responsibility at work. Fix a bike. Learn to play an instrument or how to cook your favourite food. Set a challenge you will enjoy achieving. Learning new things will make you more confident, as well as being fun to do.

Give…

Do something nice for a friend, or a stranger. Thank someone. Smile. Volunteer your time. Join a community group. Look out, as well as in. Seeing yourself, and your happiness, linked to the wider community can be incredibly rewarding and will create connections with the people around you.

Via: The School of Life (photo)

- Jorge Luis Borge

on an idea I have brewing, which I’ll post more about in future. In the meantime, here are some of the dots…
[*update - added two more dots: lonelygirl15 and 'ambient intimacy']
[**update - despite quiet a few references to it this idea doesn't necessarily involve twitter]

Introducing the Twiller:

Recently, a handful of creators (present company included) have scrapped pen and paper for mobile phone and keypad, and started texting their novels — in real time, just a few characters at a time. Our medium is Twitter, a service that lets you broadcast bursts of 140 characters at a time to be read by people who subscribe to get your updates.In my case, I’ve for the last two months been using Twitter to write a real-time thriller. Hence: Twiller. (Cheap word play is what you get when you disintermediate, as they say, your agent and editor

More silly nonsense with Twitter:

One of the most wonderful things in that game (Left 4 Dead) is the banter between the four player characters. There’s so much dense, specific scripting, and enough dialogue so that it rarely repeats. I thought it would be interesting to see if you could simulate the four players’ dialogue over Twitter, sharing some state between the bots, but also finding a way to make them communicate a little with each other. Well, a bit later, I worked out how, and this is the result:

At times, watching the bots play together is a little like magic. The first time I saw them talk to each other, cover each other whilst reloading, help each other up after a Boomer attacked, I felt a little (only a little, mind) like a proud father. They’re dumb as a sack of hammers, but they look convincing, and that was the real goal. It’s fun to watch them fight the horde amidst all my other friends on Twitter

The Institute for the Future of the Book:

This blog is the public mind space of the Institute for the Future of the Book, a New York-based think tank dedicated to inventing new forms of discourse for the network age. if:book covers a wide range of concerns, all in some way fitting into the techno-cultural puzzle that is the future of ideas. When we’re not writing this blog, we build open source software and lead publishing experiments with authors, academics, artists and programmers.

Distributed narratives…

Distributed narratives don’t bring media together to make a total artwork. Distributed narratives explode the work altogether, sending fragments and shards across media, through the network and sometimes into the physical spaces that we live in. This project explores this new narrative trend, looking at how narrative is spun across the network and into our lives.

William Gibson on google auras:

Gibson: Well, I google it and get it wrong [laughter]. Or if I’m lucky, Cory Doctorow tells me I’m wrong but gives me a good fix for it. One of the things I discovered while I was writing Pattern Recognition is that I now think that any contemporary novel today has a kind of Google novel aura around it, where somebody’s going to google everything in the text.

ARGs:

Unfiction.com is a comprehensive resource for those interested in Alternate Reality Gaming, both from the players’ perspective and from that of the puppetmasters. It is also intended as a gateway to be used in introducing neophytes to this unique genre of gaming. Unfiction.com offers information about past, current, and upcoming campaigns; tools and resources to use in playing or creating campaigns; articles, editorials, and interviews about the genre; and a forum section for discussion of the site, genre, and game play.

Just because we can, doesn’t mean we should…

Learning to moderate desires and balance consequences is a sign of maturity. I could eat only chocolate for all of my meals, but it doesn’t mean that I should. If I choose to do so anyhow, I might be forced to face consequences that I will not like. “Just because I can doesn’t mean I should” is a decision dilemma and it doesn’t just apply to personal decisions. On a nation-state level, think about the cold war. Just because we could nuke Russia doesn’t mean that we should’ve. I am worried about the tech industry rhetoric around exposing user data and connections. This is another case of a decision dilemma concerning capability and responsibility. I said this ages ago wrt Facebook’s News Feed, but it is once again relevant with Google’s Social Graph API announcement. In both cases, the sentiment is that this is already public data and the service is only making access easier and more efficient for the end user.

the graphic novels of the street…

lonelygirl15:

Over the last week, i’ve gotten innumerable emails about lonelygirl15. Folks were wondering if i was behind it or if i knew who was. They wanted to know my opinion, if i thought it was fake. I did. I thought it was fake but i expected that it was a TV or movie organization. I was kinda curious if it was an ARG but it didn’t look like it. I decided that i should do a proper analysis of the different bits when the news broke: LonelyGirl15 is crafted by a group of filmmakers as an art project.

Social scientists have a name for this sort of incessant online contact:

They call it “ambient awareness.” It is, they say, very much like being physically near someone and picking up on his mood through the little things he does — body language, sighs, stray comments — out of the corner of your eye…

“It’s an aggregate phenomenon,” Marc Davis, a chief scientist at Yahoo and former professor of information science at the University of California at Berkeley, told me. “No message is the single-most-important message. It’s sort of like when you’re sitting with someone and you look over and they smile at you. You’re sitting here reading the paper, and you’re doing your side-by-side thing, and you just sort of let people know you’re aware of them.” Yet it is also why it can be extremely hard to understand the phenomenon until you’ve experienced it. Merely looking at a stranger’s Twitter or Facebook feed isn’t interesting, because it seems like blather. Follow it for a day, though, and it begins to feel like a short story; follow it for a month, and it’s a novel.

hmmm…

Being South African, this subject has always been close to my heart. Diversity is part of our DNA, one of our most celebrated characteristics. The population is made up of about 10 major ethnic groups, each with their own histories and traditions. That, especially when compared to Europe, is a hell of a lot of diversity!

So the question I’ve been pondering is, what does it mean to be South African today? Everyone is well aware of apartheid South Africa’s answer to that question. Who you were, your place in South African society was directly related to the colour of your skin.Identity was intimately tied to the role of oppressed/oppressor. One of the things that saddens me most thinking about home is the lack of national dialogue/debate on this question of identity. We need Steve now more than ever.

Our goal is to build a nation where everyone is free and equal and to get there we need to right the wrongs of the past. But as long as we have policies that are, like affirmative action, based on colour, we are not equal, our society is not equal. This was the central question of the essay, how do you balance the principle of equality with the need to recognize difference (ethnic, gender, economic, etc).

The countries we used as case studies were selected based on how they mapped to the the four central citizenship models -  liberal, republican, participatory and consociational. Britain was chosen as an example of the liberal model and France as an example of the republican model.

I found this quick-and-easy definition of citizenship

The key principle of the republican model is civic self-rule, embodied in classical institutions and practices like the rotation of offices, underpinning Aristotle’s characterization of the citizen as one capable of ruling and being ruled in turn. Citizens are, first and foremost, “those who share in the holding of office” (Aristotle 1958, 1275a8). Civic self-rule is also at the heart of Rousseau’s project in the Contrat Social: it is their co-authoring of the laws via the general will that makes citizens free and laws legitimate.^[8] Active participation in processes of deliberation and decision-making ensures that individuals are citizens, not subjects.^[9] In essence, the republican model emphasizes the second dimension of citizenship, that of political agency.

The liberal model’s origins are traceable to the Roman Empire and early-modern reflections on Roman law (Walzer 1989, 211). The Empire’s expansion resulted in citizenship rights being extended to conquered peoples, profoundly transforming the concept’s meaning. Citizenship meant being protected by the law rather than participating in its formulation or execution. It became an “important but occasional identity, a legal status rather than a fact of everyday life” (Walzer 1989, 215).

I really like republicanism. The idea that everyone is part of a community and can play an active role in shaping it. Sounds great in theory but it’s much harder to realise in reality, just look at the riots in Paris.

After a week of nightly disturbances that have left hundreds of cars and buses torched, and several buildings burned down, the horns echoing off the concrete walls of grim housing projects sounded a broader alarm. The spreading violence has lifted the lid on an ugly stew of poverty, discrimination, and desperation amongst immigrant-descended families that most French citizens have long preferred to ignore.

…

“The kids learn all the French republican values such as equality in school, and then they find in practice that it’s an illusion,” says Ms. Bouzar, who was recently named one of Time magazine’s 50 “European Heroes” as a role model for those seeking to be good Muslims and good French citizens. “There is an enormous gap between theory and practice.”

Europe, unlike South Africa, has always been culturally homogeneous. Nationality, that shared sense of identity has always played a key role in the evolution of the State. So immigration has really thrown these countries a curve ball. How do they they adapt to a suddenly diverse populous?

Britain has done some interesting work on the problem. In 1998 it created the Commission on the Future of Multi-Ethnic Britain, which concluded that a commitment to both the principles of equality and the acknowledgement of difference were essential. But again, it’s theory is very far from it’s practise.

As a migrant myself (sounds weird thinking it out loud) I’m very much aware of my position as an outsider, and quiet sensitive to increasingly anti-immigrant sentiment that’s brewing in Britain of late.

(Err, I’ve lost my train of thought, lol)

Equality, freedom, justice. These are things we all believe in. It’s essential to our politics. But equality, freedom and justice for who, and how? The world is changing, countries are changing and we (as in the State) need to find ways toadapt to those changes, without compromising our values.

This course is my attempt to understand the wider historical context of this question/quest, to stand on the shoulders of giants

• Age of Enlightenment - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - The Enlightenment is a term used to describe a phase in Western philosophy and cultural life centered upon the eighteenth century, in which Reason was advocated as the primary source and basis of authority. Developing in Germany, France, Britain, the Netherlands, and Italy, the movement spread through much of Europe, including Russia and Scandinavia. The signatories of the American Declaration of Independence, the United States Bill of Rights and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen were motivated by “Enlightenment” principles
• Social Contract (Rousseau) - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - The Social Contract was a progressive work that helped inspire political reforms or revolutions in Europe, especially in France. The Social Contract finally expelled the myth that the King was appointed by God to legislate; as Rousseau asserts, only the people, in the form of the sovereign, have that all powerful right.
• Polis - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia - The poleis were not like other primordial ancient city-states like Tyre or Sidon, which were ruled by a king or a small oligarchy, but rather a political entity ruled by its body of citizens.
• National Automated Archival Information Retrieval System - The automation of archival retrieval commenced in 1974 and is an on-going project with approximately 250 000 computer records being added to NAAIRS each year. Currently there are over six million records available on the system. Each of these records refers to an individual archival unit, like a correspondence file. In the case of the National Register of Manuscripts (NAREM) however, each record refers to a collection or group of papers.
• FFFFOUND! - FFFFOUND! is a web service that not only allows the users to post and share their favorite images found on the web, but also dynamically recommends each user’s tastes and interests for an inspirational image-bookmarking experience!!
• Protein® OS - Protein® focuses on the intersection of science and culture by bringing together interesting people and their ideas. Dubbed “the system from which we operate”, Protein® soon established itself as one of the leading UK-based sites thanks to the irreverent and much loved Protein® Feed.
• Body swap research shows that self is a trick of the mind | Science | The Guardian - Things got even weirder when the researchers dispensed with the dummy and put the cameras on the head of another person. After carrying out the same double stroking routine the subjects were convinced that they were occupying another person’s body. The illusion persisted even when the other person came over and shook the subject’s hand, producing the sensation of the subject feeling as if they were shaking hands with themselves.
• allez-allez: principles of geometry - their upcoming album on tigersushi ‘lazare’ is an ambitious album synthesis of decades of electronic music incorporating influences like john carpenter, terry riley, wendy carlos and the aphex twin. this hour long mix gives an idea of the sounds that have influenced them. put simply it is stunning.
• Trapper Jenn MD: You Hear that 808? - When Will High did in fact materialize at the gig, words were exchanged between himself and El-P. Will High claims that Vordul also took pot shots. An indignant Will High would later corner Vordul in the mens bathroom and deliver a sucker punch that broke the rappers jaw. He hightailed it out as security guards prevented the fallen man’s friends from exacting revenge.Cannibal Ox were never the same afterwards.
• MF DOOM Interview in Wax Poetics - STMB - “It’s something like breathing, like inhaling and exhaling. Time between pauses–while you’re inhaling, it’s like absorbing; exhaling is like putting shit out. It’s a process: you’ll have hiatuses, and then it all hits like “Pow.” Plus, those [in between] times is like gathering info; the mind gets a chance to absorb things to express. People expect you to be expressing all the time, but life just don’t work like that. It’s like an inhaling and exhaling kind of thing. Everything breathes like that.”
• Infovore » Momentum - It brings to mind Jump London. If there’s one thing Mirror’s Edge gets right, it’s the feel of the city under your feet. Faith doesn’t just exist as a character in a cutscene or as four disembodied limbs; she lies in the seams between her trainers and the concrete.
• MAKE: Blog: The Culture Jamming gift guide at MAKE - hack, stick, throw, jam and inspire! - Ok, folks, I know not all of you approve of culture jamming shenanigans, but here are some gift ideas for that mischief maker in your life!
  
• Jacob Kirkegaard, Labyrinthitis (Touch) « mapsadaisical - A couple of years ago at a Touch event in South London, I saw CM von Hausswolf exploring a similar concept to this: playing two pure tones, luxuriating in the sensations in the overlap. It was a spellbinding experience, and one that will stay with me for some. Jacob Kirkegaard was in attendance that night too, and it is he who gets to commit it to record, turning this mathematical exercise into something extraordinarily pleasurable
• Guilty Verdict in Cyberbullying Case Provokes Many Questions Over Online Identity - NYTimes.com - “It will be interesting to see if issues of safety and security will eventually trump the hallmark ideology of free, largely anonymous or pseudonymous participation in cyberspace,” said Sameer Hinduja, a professor of criminology and criminal justice at Florida Atlantic University.
• Rushdie’s ‘unfilmable’ Midnight’s Children heads for silver screen | Film | guardian.co.uk - Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie’s panoramic 1981 allegory of the birth of modern India, is heading for the big screen. Deepa Mehta is to direct and co-write the adaptation with the author, and the film is expected to start production in 2010, it was announced in New York yesterday.
• Packs of robots will hunt down uncooperative humans - Short Sharp Science - New Scientist - “What we have here are the beginnings of something designed to enable robots to hunt down humans like a pack of dogs. Once the software is perfected we can reasonably anticipate that they will become autonomous and become armed.” - Steve Wright of Leeds Metropolitan University, expert on police and military technologies
• US forces want man-hunting robot wolfpacks • The Register - There has also been significant research in the game theory community involving pursuit/evasion scenarios. This topic seeks to merge these research areas and develop a software/hardware suite that would enable a multi-robot team, together with a human operator, to search for and detect a non-cooperative human subject.
• Machinefabriek and Stephen Vitiello, Box Music (12k); Machinefabriek, Dauw (Dekorder) « mapsadaisical - Actually, maybe I shouldn’t bother reviewing this, just give you a few words for you to make one yourself. Quiet. Crunchy. Absorbing. Textural. Playful. Chocolate sprinkles. Off you go.
• The bombing of Coventry: the real story - Times Online - Winston Churchill knew of the attack several days in advance but held back the information to protect the most important secret of the war: the breaking of the German Enigma code at Bletchley Park
• Basic Hip Digital Gold - exotica | moog | soundtracks | pop instrumentals | weird stuff | whistling
• on Flickr - Photo Sharing! - Through their glasses I saw Canary Wharf.
  
• As art market bottoms out, a painter gives his work away for nothing - News, Art - The Independent - In his latest exhibition Street Art Action, Neate will be leaving 1,000 artworks around London, for canny collectors to spot, view then pick up and take home this week - totally for free. The exhibition is led by Neate’s desire to exhibit London-wide and to return street art to its urban, free and fun roots, hence You might have to pay up for a taxi though if you’re planning to scoop up a few
• NICO MUHLY, Mother Tongue - Boomkat - Within the space of his short, yet incredibly illustrious career, Nico Muhly has contributed his talents as an arranger to recordings by Bjork, Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy, Rufus Wainwright and The National, while also enjoying a successful sideline as a composer in his own right, presenting works in conjunction with a variety of high profile orchestras - he even finds time to work as a performer and conductor for Philip Glass on his various film soundtracks.
• Londonist: Nature-ist: The SOAS Japanese Roof Garden - This Japanese Roof Garden, on the other hand, looks stunning all year round thanks to a sturdy emphasis on mineral over animal and vegetable.
• Slashdot | Google Exec Hints At Future Open Platform - Google Exec: We’re going to open…. The box!
  People: Open what?
  Google Exec: The box! With… the wires, and blinky lights, and stuff in it!
  People: What’s in the box?
  Google Exec: New and interesting things!
  People: O RLY?
  Google Exec: YA RLY!
  People: …
  Google Exec: Oh look, pretty shiny…
• Scientists discover the chance meeting 1.9bn years ago that led to life on Earth | Mail Online - “It is an astonishing thought that a single random encounter between two tiny cells so long ago could have had such a huge consequence,” said Falkowski.
• Internet black boxes to record every email and website visit - Telegraph - further evidence of the Government’s desire to have the capability to vet every telephone call, email and internet visit made in the UK, which has already provoked an outcry.Richard Thomas, the Information Commissioner, has described it as a “step too far”.
• Miriam Makeba dies in Italy - Mail & Guardian Online: The smart news source - People gave me that name. At first I said to myself: ‘Why do they want to give me that responsibility, carrying a whole continent?’ Then I understood that they did that affectionately. So I accepted. I am Mama Africa,” she told Agence France-Presse in an interview in 2005.
• Pinay girl writes to Obama, gets response | The Philippine Star - News - News Feature - “Creating change and making the world better is not always easy, and you will probably find in your life that it is more comfortable to ignore injustices that don’t affect you directly. Don’t take that comfortable road. Challenge yourself to make a difference,” Obama wrote.

But winter has arrived. The cold is setting in. Memories are fading. So, I thought I’d put together a little mixtape to capture some of the highlights. I really like this mix, and I hope you do too…

It’s a real eclectic mix. A little bit of eletronica, some folky stuff, dubstep, hip hop and some ambient thrown in for good measure. Hey, maybe I’ve found my niche, my calling, as an ambientfolksteptronica DJ! lol!

Anyways, here’s the tracklisting…

Machinefabriek - Fonograaf
Dusk and Blackdown - Darker Than East Featuring Target
Iron & Wine - Faded From The Water
Beirut - Gulag Orkestar
Radiohead - Weird Fishes/Arpeggi
Ital Tek - Deep pools
James Blackshaw - Skylark Herald’s Dawn
Bonnie “Prince” Billy - Lay and Love
Leila - Teases Me
Leila - The Exotics
Flying Lotus - Beginners Falafel
J Dilla - Lightworks
Madvillian - Light of the Past
Stars of the Lid - Tippy’s Demise

Download (right click, save as)

*PS Oh, I’ll probably post some more about this later, but for now, mosey on over too my mp3 store http://peoplesmusicstore.com/thehealingarts/