In the spring of 2013 the cicadas in the Northeastern United States will yet again emerge from their seventeen-year cycle—the longest gestation period of any animal. Those who experience this great sonic invasion compare their sense of wonder to the arrival of a comet or a solar eclipse. This unending rhythmic cycle is just one unique example of how the pulse and noise of insects has taught humans the meaning of rhythm, from the whirr of a cricket’s wings to this unfathomable and exact seventeen-year beat.

In listening to cicadas, as well as other humming, clicking, and thrumming insects, Bug Music is the first book to consider the radical notion that we humans got our idea of rhythm, synchronization, and dance from the world of insect sounds that surrounded our species over the millions of years over which we evolved. Completing the trilogy he began with Why Birds Sing and Thousand Mile Song, David Rothenberg explores a unique part of our relationship with nature and sound—the music of insects that has provided a soundtrack for humanity throughout the history of our species. Bug Music continues Rothenberg’s in-depth research and spirited writing on the relationship between human and animal music, and it follows him as he explores insect influences in classical and modern music, plays his saxophone with crickets and other insects, and confers with researchers and scientists nationwide.

This engaging and thought-provoking book challenges our understanding of our place in nature and our relationship to the creatures surrounding us, and makes a passionate case for the interconnectedness of species.

Publisher St. Martin’s Press, an imprint of Macmillan
ISBN 1250005213, 9781250005212
289 pages

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Rioting spread across Stockholm’s suburbs on Wednesday in the third day of unrest to hit the Swedish capital, as Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt blamed the violence on “hooliganism” and appealed for calm.

Stockholm police began rounding up suspected ringleaders behind the riots, leaving cars and buildings ablaze. The unrest is believed to have been sparked the deadly police shooting last week of an elderly man.

On Tuesday night, gangs of young men set fire to more than 30 cars across the Swedish capital, pelted police and firefighters with stones, and burnt a historic 17th century house to the ground.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/sweden/10073602/Stockholm-hit-by-third-day-of-rioting.html

The US government extensively monitors its citizens’ internet activities, with dangerous effects on personal liberties.
The most egregious rights violations tend to happen against the voiceless; those who have neither the platform nor resources to articulate their grievances to the broader world.

Last week, however, the US Department of Justice was caught in a very public transgression against the freedom of an influential and empowered private organisation when it was revealed that it had engaged in a spying campaign against the Associated Press (AP) – one of the country’s largest news agencies.

In what has been described as a “massive and unprecedented intrusion”, AP revealed that Obama’s Department of Justice had engaged in a surveillance campaign targeting its reporters and editors. This campaign included the covert acquisition of phone records from AP staff; including from their home and personal cell numbers.

http://m.aljazeera.com/story/2013515112828812589

Hackers who breached Google’s network in 2010 obtained access to the company’s system for tracking surveillance requests from law enforcement, according to a news report.

http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2013/05/google-surveillance-database/

This thesis traces the history and development of the facilities for electronic music in the UK. It covers the early attempts to experiment with electronic music and create studios in less than ideal circumstances and the subsequent bids to create a national centre. It also covers some elements of worldwide development of electronic music and sound recording, in particular those which occurred before 1965. The thesis calls upon non-traditional sources and the author was able to access many documents in the personal archives of electronic music pioneers. There is substantial reference to committees and societies for electronic music and their effects on the development of facilities for electronic music in the UK. Some of the early pioneers are studied in detail; these include Daphne Oram, Tristram Cary and Hugh Davies. Unprecedented access to information on Hugh Davies and Daphne Oram was provided by the family estates of these recently deceased composers. This allowed the author to gain valuable insight into the working patterns and methodology of these composers. Many references to later pioneers such as Trevor Wishart are also made but the focus remains on the facilities available to composers rather than the composers and their works.

Doctoral thesis
Music Department, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, Durham University, 2012
189 pages

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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8186

Hacking Politics is a firsthand account of how a ragtag band of activists and technologists overcame a $90 million lobbying machine to defeat the most serious threat to Internet freedom in memory. The book is a revealing look at how Washington works today – and how citizens successfully fought back.

Written by the core Internet figures – video gamers, Tea Partiers, tech titans, lefty activists and ordinary Americans among them – who defeated a pair of special interest bills called SOPA (“Stop Online Piracy Act”) and PIPA (“Protect IP Act”), Hacking Politics provides the first detailed account of the glorious, grand chaos that led to the demise of that legislation and helped foster an Internet-based network of amateur activists.

Included are more than thirty original contributions from across the political spectrum, featuring writing by Internet freedom activist Aaron Swartz; Lawrence Lessig of Harvard Law School; novelist Cory Doctorow; Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-CA.); Jamie Laurie (of the alt-rock/hip-hop group The Flobots); Ron Paul; Mike Masnick, CEO and founder of Techdirt; Kim Dotcom, internet entrepreneur; Tiffiniy Cheng, co-founder and co-director of Fight for the Future; Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit; Nicole Powers of Suicide Girls; Josh Levy, Internet Campaign Director at Free Press, and many more.

Edited by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, and David Segal
Publisher OR Books, May 2013
ISBN 9781939293046
316 pages
via gnd

publisher (pay-what-you-wish)

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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8175

Ants are sweet, nutty little insects, aren’t they?

I’m not talking about their personalities, but how they taste. Stinkbugs have an apple flavor, and red agave worms are spicy. A bite of tree worm apparently brings pork rinds to mind.

This information will come in handy for those of us following the latest recommendation from the United Nations: Consume more insects.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2013/13/130514-edible-insects-entomophagy-science-food-bugs-beetles/

If online oversharing is a public health problem, then the state’s decision to harness it for its own purposes means that huge, powerful forces within government will come to depend on it

http://m.guardiannews.com/technology/2013/may/21/privacy-public-health-surveillance

We all know about our five senses: sight, smell, taste, touch and hearing. Many people believe we also have a kinesthetic sense, which is what some folks believe is a sort of spiritual sense — for instance, when they perceive another person is in a room with them even though the other person is behind them and hasn’t made a sound. It’s as though they sensed them unconsciously. Personally, I seem to have another type of sense that I don’t know what to call, but it relates to anticipating things just before they happen; a lot of my experiences with this have been unsettling at times.

These extra senses are difficult to qualify and in many cases even hard to explain, but we are about to enter an era where a digital sixth sense will become a reality. Not only can this sixth sense be qualified, but it can be repeated as needed.

http://techland.time.com/2013/05/20/google-glass-and-augmented-reality-empowering-our-digital-sixth-sense/

A compelling examination of the future of Chinese modernity by the leading member of China’s “New Left.”

Challenging both the bureaucratic one-party regime and the Western neoliberal paradigm, China’s leading critic shatters the myth of progress and reflects upon the inheritance of a revolutionary past. In this original and wide-ranging study, Wang Hui examines the roots of China’s social and political problems, and traces the reforms and struggles that have led to the current state of mass depoliticization.

Arguing that China’s revolutionary history and its current liberalization are part of the same discourse of modernity, Wang Hui calls for alternatives to both its capitalist trajectory and its authoritarian past.

From the May Fourth Movement to Tiananmen Square, The End of the Revolution offers a broad discussion of Chinese intellectual history and society, in the hope of forging a new path for China’s future.

Publisher Verso Books, 2011
ISBN 1844673790, 9781844673797
274 pages

review (Jeffrey Wasserstrom, Los Angeles Times)

publisher
google books

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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8166

Craftsmanship, says Richard Sennett, names the basic human impulse to do a job well for its own sake, and good craftsmanship involves developing skills and focusing on the work rather than ourselves. The computer programmer, the doctor, the artist, and even the parent and citizen all engage in a craftsman’s work. In this thought-provoking book, Sennett explores the work of craftsmen past and present, identifies deep connections between material consciousness and ethical values, and challenges received ideas about what constitutes good work in today’s world.

The Craftsman engages the many dimensions of skill—from the technical demands to the obsessive energy required to do good work. Craftsmanship leads Sennett across time and space, from ancient Roman brickmakers to Renaissance goldsmiths to the printing presses of Enlightenment Paris and the factories of industrial London; in the modern world he explores what experiences of good work are shared by computer programmers, nurses and doctors, musicians, glassblowers, and cooks. Unique in the scope of his thinking, Sennett expands previous notions of crafts and craftsmen and apprises us of the surprising extent to which we can learn about ourselves through the labor of making physical things.

Publisher Yale University Press, New Haven and London, 2008
ISBN 0300149557, 9780300149555
326 pages

review (Lewis Hyde, The New York Times: Sunday Book Review)
review (Fiona MacCarthy, The Guardian)

author
publisher
google books

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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8157

Starting with the guerrilla media tactics of Industrial music in the late 1970s, the author charts an ongoing trend in electronic music: an increasing amount of sonic quality, recorded output and international contact, accomplished with a decreasing amount of tools, personnel, and capital investment. From the use of laptop computers to create massive avalanches of noise, to the establishment of micro-nations populated largely by sound artists, 21st century sound culture is expanding in its scope and popularity even as it shrinks in other respects. Numerous exclusive interviews with leading lights of the field were also conducted for this book: William Bennett (Whitehouse), Peter Christopherson (Throbbing Gristle / Coil), Peter Rehberg (Mego), John Duncan, Francisco López, Carl Michael von Hausswolff, Bob Ostertag and many others weigh in with a diversity of thoughts and opinions that underscores the incredible diversity to be found within new electronic music itself.

First published by Creation Books in 2009
Publisher Belsona Books
ISBN 0615736629, 9780615736624
417 pages

author
google books (1st edition)

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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8155

Matthew Inman (perhaps better known as web comic creator The Oatmeal) has an ambitious fund-raising project up his sleeve—to save Tesla’s Wardenclyffe Tower.
Wardenclyffe Tower is rich in history, a symbolic landmark of Nikola Tesla’s last great piece of scientific research that was in Tesla’s mind, destined to change the world.
I sat down with The Oatmeal for this Forbes exclusive to discuss his Tesla passion, ambitious campaign plans, and his motivation to attempt to execute such a massive fundraising goal.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gregvoakes/2012/08/15/the-oatmeals-latest-fundraiser-to-save-the-tesla-tower/

The online peanut gallery can get you so riled up that your ability to reason goes out the window, a new study finds.

http://m.motherjones.com/environment/2013/01/you-idiot-course-trolls-comments-make-you-believe-science-less

As Congress frets about the privacy implications of Google Glass, one thing is clear: The technology that can redefine what is “public” and link the digital and physical worlds is here.
Now the question is what will anyone do about it?
Owners of wearable Internet-connected devices already face choices about where or when it is appropriate to wear them—while legal experts say there aren’t many protections for people whose activities the technology records.
Noble Ackerson, a 33-year-old software developer in Washington, D.C., who has been wearing Google Glass for the past month, says he has developed his own “common sense” etiquette standards for Google Inc.’s new digital headset.
For instance, he takes Glass off in a public restroom, in a movie theater and in casinos, where having such a device could give him an unfair advantage. “Google Glass has technology that isn’t new, and the etiquette we’ve applied to existing technologies should roll into it,” he says.
Products like Glass are sparking a discussion about what is possible with technologies such as facial recognition, and whether governments need to intercede. While several members of Congress pressed Google on Thursday for answers about how its technology works, some business owners like bars or casinos are already banning it.

http://m.us.wsj.com/articles/a/SB10001424127887324767004578489503146013208?mg=reno64-wsj

The alpha wolf is a figure that looms large in our imagination. The notion of a supreme pack leader who fought his way to dominance and reigns superior to the other wolves in his pack informs both our fiction and is how many people understand wolf behavior. But the alpha wolf doesn’t exist—at least not in the wild.

http://io9.com/why-everything-you-know-about-wolf-packs-is-wrong-502754629

Date/Time
Date(s) – 06/09/13
3:00 pm – 4:45 pm

Location
Pace University

Category(ies) No Categories

Join author Nicholas Levis (of Occupy Astoria LIC) and philosopher Bryan Sacks for a two-hour presentation on “Hollywood and CIA,” with Rutgers Media Studies Professor Deepa Kumar as discussant, at the Left Forum 2013 in New York City. All those interested in attending any part of the three-day Left Forum can register in advance at highly discounted prices. (Note: If you’re interested in attending “Hollywood and CIA,” we’d like to know. Drop a line to nicholas at occupyastorialic dot org or join the Facebook EVENT PAGE. But RSVP is not required.)

Hollywood and CIA.
Hollywood as Propaganda Ministry: Ideological confluence, security state influence, co-creation of enemies. Counterpropaganda.

LEFT FORUM SESSION 7, SUNDAY JUNE 9, 3:00pm, ROOM W610.
PACE UNIVERSITY, 1 Pace Plaza near City Hall (Spruce Street entrance).

The controversy over the CIA’s production help for “Zero Dark Thirty,” with its apology for torture, was followed by an Academy Award for Best Picture for the CIA fable, “Argo.” Michelle Obama presented the Oscar from the White House. Are these just the latest products of Hollywood’s love affair with the US national security state? Or are we witnessing a new convergence driven by geopolitical realities?

Despite liberal repute, big-budget Hollywood often produces paeans to US imperialism, aids to military recruitment, and – crucially – constructions of the ‘enemy’. We look at historic examples when Hollywood has acted as de facto propaganda ministry, up to the present-day Pentagon subsidies for war films, and the ‘pornography’ of the surveillance state on TV shows like “Person of Interest” and “NCIS.”

Is there a way to intelligibly map the relationship between national security state and Hollywood that improves on current understandings? Would such analysis find the predictable ideological confluence rooted in shared interest, or also something more manipulative and directed?

Anyway, aren’t movies just entertainment produced for a market? Whether or not that’s the whole story, what would (and does) successful counter-propaganda look like?

Session features a dialogue between Bryan Sacks and Nicholas Levis and commentary by Rutgers Media Studies Professor Deepa Kumar. (More info on speakers, see below.) Also: Film clips. Audience participation. Pitch meeting.

http://www.occupyastorialic.org/events/hollywood-and-cia-panel-at-left-forum-2013/

For all the talk of artificial intelligence and all the games of SimCity that have been played, no one in the world can actually simulate living things. Biology is so complex that nowhere on Earth is there a comprehensive model of even a single simple bacterial cell. 

And yet, these are exciting times for “executable biology,” an emerging field dedicated to creating models of organisms that run on a computer. Last year,Markus Covert’s Stanford lab created the best ever molecular model of a very simple cell. To do so, they had to compile information from 900 scientific publications. An editorial that accompanied the study in the journal Cell was titled, “The Dawn of Virtual Cell Biology.”

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/05/is-this-virtual-worm-the-first-sign-of-the-singularity/275715/

The first sustained exploration of Simondon’s work to be published in English.

This collection of essays, including one by Simondon himself, outlines the central tenets of Simondon’s thought, the implication of his thought for numerous disciplines and his relationship to other thinkers such as Heidegger, Deleuze and Canguilhem.

Complete with a contextualising introduction and a glossary of technical terms, it offers an entry point to this important thinker and will appeal to people working in philosophy, philosophy of science, media studies, social theory and political philosophy.

Gilbert Simondon’s work has recently come to prominence in America and around the Anglophone world, having been of great importance in France for many years.

Contributors: Miguel de Beistegui, Elizabeth Grosz, Anne Sauvagnargues, Bernard Stiegler, Igor Krtolica, Jean-Hugues Barthélémy, Yves Michaud, Sean Bowden, Dominique Lecourt, and the editors.

Edited by Arne De Boever, Alex Murray, Jon Roffe, Ashley Woodward
Publisher Edinburgh University Press, 2012
ISBN 074864525X, 9780748645251
236 pages
via lastobserver

review (Wil Kaiser, H-Net Reviews)

publisher
google books

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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8142

Game magazine: Issue 135, available now at newsstands, print or digital. The article runs about 6 pages, with citations to Incunabula/Ong’s Hat and myself throughout. Here is a small excerpt (used with permission) from that article:

Excerpt: 

“But what exactly is an ARG? For the community, that definition is largely rooted in the ‘this is not a game’ aesthetic. ARGs are games that do not acknowledge that they are games; they pose as alternate realities hidden away in streams of dormant internet code. Their stories exist not in unified narrative, but are spread across phone lines, email addresses, websites and any other forms of media that the puppetmasters – that is, the game’s creators – deem to be useful. ARG’s exist in real-time as constantly evolving, potentially boundless storytelling experiences.

Yet despite these definitions, there remains no established rule set. “There aren’t really rules for ARGs,” says writer and transmedia artist Joseph Matheny. “There’s the basic TINAG principle that everybody has to practice, and things like the launch has to be clandestine and the rabbit hole – that is, the first media artifact that draws in players – can’t be obvious. But you’re not limited to those rules. An ARG can be whatever you want it to be as long as you’re building an immersive world for players to embed themselves; to cross the scene and to become an active participant in the story.”

Matheny himself was there at the beginning of the ARG, when the increasing prominence of online media got him thinking about new forms of storytelling. “I’ve been a tech person since the Eighties,” he reminisces. “I was an IT expert and moved up into software, and I used to play the Steve Jackson games a lot. I also played the Flying Buffalo play-by-mail games, which were kind of like a LARP but done through mail, phone and faxes. You would send your mailing address and your phone number and you would start getting stuff in the mail.

“I started thinking about the integration of story arc within games and started putting all of these pieces together, and Ong’s Hat came out of that.”

Ong’s Hat was more of a experiment in transmedia storytelling than what we would now consider to be an ARG, but it’s DNA – the concept of telling a story across various platforms and new media – is evident in every ARG that came after.

The project, also known as the Incunabula Papers, was a selection of documents posted on The Well, a pioneering internet social site in the late Eighties. Having sat dormant for a decade, the documents provoked a widespread online investigation in the late Nineties, with participants immersed in a fictional story about alternate realities via bulletin board systems, old Xerox mail art networks and early eZines.

With Ong’s Hat, Matheny took the concept of ‘legend tripping’ – that is, the act of venturing to areas of some horrific and supernatural event a la The Blair Witch Project – and shifted it online. “I set up this mythos, and hid elements of it all over the internet,” he remembers. “There were phone numbers that you could call and you would get strange voice mail messages; you might even get a call back from one of the characters. Everybody would come at it from a different angle. It was not a zero-sum game. The whole thing was set up to be an infinite play, so different people would get different things out of its persistence.”

This element of the experience, with players reassembling the scattered elements of the story in order to determine exactly what it all meant, would go on to become one of the defining features of the ARG. Rather than present an A to B narrative, ARGs present storytelling at a form of archaeology, the players themselves responsible for discovering and building the chronologically unified narrative.

“People who are interested in this kind of experience are interested in working together. It’s what the community calls the ‘collective detective’ scenario,” says Matheny. “One of my influences was also the murder mystery theatre things that they used to do…I think that people like that kind of stuff. They like to feel that the story is crossing the proscenium and they’re immersed in the story – even to the point of being a character in the story. I think that’s the hook with ARGs.””

“Ong’s Hat was more of an experiment in transmedia storytelling than what we would now consider to be n ARG but its DNA – the concept of telling a story across various platforms and new media- is evident in every alternate reality game that came after.”

Game magazine: Issue 135, available now at newsstands, print or digital.

Joseph Matheny http://jmatheny.wordpress.com/2013/05/16/the-rise-of-the-arg-games-investigates-alternate-reality-games-and-what-the-future-has-in-store-for-the-curious-experiment/

Wait, where was I going with that? Oh yeah, I’ve been saying this for years, but the term “conspiracy theory” is officially over. Here’s the problem. A long time ago, because of a quite coordinated campaign by monolithic mainstream media conglomerates, they slandered it to mean batshit. You see a lot of the word “tin foil hat” bandied about in the coverage. Then there was that movie with Mel Gibson. That should have killed it, but unlike say “alternative” in rock music, it refused to die. Regardless of what it might mean, or have meant to you, which in a lot of cases is just questioning the media’s official position on things, it now means paranoid gun hoarding shut in to most people. Get used to it. They’re very good at what they do. I can’t stand the word paranormal either just for the record.

https://disinfo.com/2013/05/the-term-conspiracy-theory-is-officially-dead-language-lets-move-on-to-mind-control-facts/

The FBI is pushing for expanded power to eavesdrop on private Internet communications. The law enforcement agency wants to force online service providers to build wiretapping capabilities into their products. But a group of prominent computer security experts argues that mandating “back doors” in online communications products is likely to compromise the security of Americans’ computers and could even pose a threat to national security.

http://m.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/05/17/how-the-fbis-online-wiretapping-plan-could-get-your-computer-hacked/

A $15m computer that uses “quantum physics” effects to boost its speed is to be installed at a Nasa facility.

It will be shared by Google, Nasa, and other scientists, providing access to a machine said to be up to 3,600 times faster than conventional computers.

http://m.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-22554494

Google Glass makes it easy for wearers to surreptitiously take pictures or video of unknowing subjects. That’s caused more than a few people to ask: What does Glass mean for our privacy? Now Congress, too, wants answers.

Eight members of Congress’ bi-partisan privacy caucus sent a letter to Google CEO Larry Page Thursday seeking answers about Glass’ privacy implications:

http://mashable.com/2013/05/17/congress-google-glass/

Co-creation of the “alien abduction phenomenon”

Sometimes an event comes hurdling along and scatters wellintentioned plans left and right. I had intended to wait several more years before writing about my hard-won insights into the alien abduction phenomenon. During my ten-year marriage to UFO researcher Budd Hopkins, I’d actively participated in some of Budd’s UFO cases; edited his third book, Witnessed; co-authored the next book, Sight Unseen, with him; shot extensive documentary footage of Budd’s research; and produced short films that he used on the conference circuit. But we haven’t been married for the past several years, we’ve each gotten on with our own lives, and, since 2004, I’ve refused to participate in abduction research. There seemed to be a lot to lose and nothing to gain by speaking up, during my former husband’s lifetime, about my perceptions of some researchers’ ethical violations, misuse of human subjects, and their steady manipulation of the abduction narrative into a rigid doctrine. No need to rush to print.

http://rr0.org/time/2/0/1/1/01/15/Rainey_ThePriestOfHighStrangeness/index.html

It’s a dark rock that’s a full 1.7 miles wide. It’s an asteroid.
Scientists compare it to the one that killed off the dinosaurs. But, before you start scrambling for the next shuttle flight off this planet, rest assured: It will not strike Earth.
But, it will come very close to us in just a few days.

Read more: http://www.newsnet5.com/dpp/weather/weather_news/Close-encounter-Asteroid-nearly-2-miles-wide-to-pass-Earth-this-month#ixzz2Teya5ZzG

http://www.newsnet5.com/dpp/weather/weather_news/Close-encounter-Asteroid-nearly-2-miles-wide-to-pass-Earth-this-month

The death of an American computer engineer, Shane Todd, in Singapore has created quite a stir. His parents contend he was murdered, but authorities say it was suicide. The mystery seems to have links to the dark world of cyber-spying and could possibly involve China.
Rick and Mary Todd traveled from Montana to Singapore to prove that their son was actually the victim of a web of international cyber-espionage.

http://m.cbsnews.com/storysynopsis.rbml?pageType=general&catid=57585154&feed_id=999&videofeed=999

Overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed papers taking a position on global warming say humans are causing it

http://m.guardiannews.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2013/may/16/climate-change-scienceofclimatechange

From the beginning of writing TSSBP, I consistently railed against two things: idiotic people who believe in unbelievable conspiracy theories and submarines flying “clean sweep” brooms when returning from 2 day underways for Alpha Trials. Somehow, I missed a post from the “Israel did it” 9/11 Truther website with the stunningly deceptive name of “Veterans Today” published a couple years ago that combined both elements: they claim that the “Jimmie” Carter caused the December 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami by firing “air guns” into the sea floor near the fault line, then bragging about it by returning from their “Alpha Trials” after a couple of months flying the broom. (They actually flew the broom on conclusion of Alpha Trials on 19 November 2004, but actual facts never stand in the way of conspiracy theorists.)

J.J. Abram’s second Star Trek outing “Into Darkness” will hit movie screens this week, no doubt packed with excitement, explosions, mind-melding Vulcans and phasers set to stun. But there will also be the USS Enterprise traveling faster than the speed of light, carving up the vast expanses of interstellar space as if it was a short jaunt to the shops.

Over the years, warping spacetime has become more than a sci-fi notion, however. Star Trek may have popularized the mode of space transportation with Captain Kirk at the helm in the 1960s original series, but today, there are some serious efforts underway to establish whether spacetime can be warped in a useful way. Could warpships really be the future of zippy space travel? Or should the very notion of warp speed be resigned to the darkness of interstellar space?

So sit back, put away your tricorders, load you engines with dilithium crystals and enjoy some recent research that has gone into warp drive science.

http://news.discovery.com/space/warp-speed-star-trek-into-darkness-movie-list-130514.htm

The American Civil Liberties Union was curious about warrantless government snooping on citizens’ text messages. So the group filed a Freedom of Information Act request to the Justice Department. Here’s what they got back:

Totally Redacted FOIA response

Totally Redacted FOIA response

A memo header:  “Guidance for the Minimization of Text Messages over Dual-Function Cellular Telephones” and then 15 pages, completely blacked out. 

Yup. An “unprecedented level of openness in government.”

Link: http://reason.com/blog/2013/05/13/most-transparent-administration-in-histo

Russian authorities detained an American diplomat accused of attempting to recruit a Russian intelligence officer into the CIA, the Federal Security Service said Tuesday.

Ryan Christopher Fogle, the third secretary of the American Embassy in Moscow, was held overnight before being handed over to U.S. authorities Tuesday, according to the Federal Security Service, or FSB, the main successor agency to the KGB. Fogle, who was ordered to leave the country, was carrying a large amount of money and written instructions for the Russian recruit, the FSB said.

http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-75914552/

Not since the covert surveillance exposed during the Watergate scandal of the 1970s has such a rash of revelations about spying and seemingly politically motivated investigations emerged publicly in the United States.

http://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/us/spate-of-us-spying-revelations-reminiscent-of-covert-surveillance-of-watergate-era-1.1393481

Chris beat me to the ludicrous ‘Global Warming is Over‘ story by David Rose in the London Daily Mail last October, but I wanted to finally delve into the issue a bit more, as it’s a great illustration of how climate change denialism works.

http://americablog.com/2013/05/how-climate-change-denial-works.html

Citizen scientists, environmentalists and anyone who lives near a power plant — your services are requested. Climate change scientist Kevin Robert Gurney needs your help in a grand undertaking: the mapping of all the power plants in the world.
http://touch.latimes.com/#section/-1/article/p2p-75898406/

France’s “cultural exception” — the policy that creative works like books, music and movies deserve protection beyond what is accorded ordinary goods — is in line for a digital update.

A government adviser has suggested that manufacturers pay a 1 percent levy on the price of smartphones and tablet computers to help keep funding for such works alive, as more and more end up online and beyond the reach of existing taxes.

The tax, “painless for the consumer,” could also be used to ensure that artists are remunerated at a time when so much is downloaded free, said the report, which was presented Monday to President François Hollande and his culture minister, Aurélie Filippetti.

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2013/05/15/business/global/france-urged-to-impose-tax-on-smartphones-and-tablets.html

Historical Archaeology and Ethnohistory of New York City: Tales and Microhistory of Gotham is a collection of narratives about people who lived in New York City during the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries, people whose lives archaeologists have encountered during excavations at sites where these people lived or worked. The stories are ethnohistorical or microhistorical studies created using archaeological and documentary data. As microhistories, they are concerned with particular people living at particular times in the past within the framework of world events.

The world events framework will be provided in short introductions to chapters grouped by time periods and themes. The foreword by Mary Beaudry and the afterword by LuAnne DeCunzo bookend the individual case studies and add theoretical weight to the volume. Topics in the book include:
- Native Americans and Europeans in New Amsterdam
- Stories of Dutch women in the colonial period
- African history in New York City, including the African Burial Ground
- Craftsmen and Churchmen of New York City
- A portrait of Stephen Allen, a New York City Mayor

Historical Archaeology and Ethnohistory of New York City: Tales and Microhistory of Gotham focuses on specific individual life stories, or stories of groups of people, as a way to present archaeological theory and research. Archaeologists work with material culture—artifacts—to recreate daily lives and study how culture works; this book is an example of how to do this in a way that can attract people interested in history as well as in anthropological theory. As such, this volume is an invaluable resource for archaeologists, historians, ethnographers, anthropologists, and anybody interested in the rich history of one of the world’s most influential cities, New York City.

With a Foreword by Mary Beaudry
With an Afterword by LuAnne DeCunzo
Publisher Springer, London, 2013
ISBN 1461452716, 9781461452713
369 pages

publisher
google books

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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8140

In this engrossing biography, Dorothy Stein strips away the many layers of myth surrounding Ada Lovelace’s reputation as the inventor of the science of computer programming to reveal a story far more dramatic and fascinating than previous accounts have indicated. Working with original sources, Stein clears up a number of puzzles and misinterpretations of Ada’s life and activities.

Augusta Ada Byron, Countess of Lovelace, was the only daughter of the poet Lord Byron and the close friend and associate of a number of the foremost scientific, literary, and artistic figures of the early Victorian period. She enjoys a growing reputation today for her report on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine—considered to be the first computer. Yet Stein shows how the often self-serving Babbage conspired to create the legend, using the Countess to promote his projects and make exaggerated claims for his engine. By placing Lady Lovelace’s report in the social and cultural context in which it was written, she finds that, far from being a clear and masterly exposition of the structure and logic of the computer, it was a rather mystical tract that dwelt on the inventor’s outdated philosophy of mathematics, and his mechanistic view of theology and the workings of capitalist economics.

Ada’s own life is vividly told, often in her own words, as Stein weaves into her narrative excerpts from letters, memoirs, and little-known documents to create an account that is at once black comedy, detective story, psychological drama, and scientific explanation. She examines the barriers and opportunities that Ada faced as she strove to develop her ambitions and search for truths that would free her of that shadow of her mysterious father and her overbearing and manipulative mother.

Stein reveals a turbulent and complex woman who tries to run away, who marries and bears three children, attempts to bury herself in the study of mathematics, and to find herself in a career in music or in writing. Ada corresponds and associates with men as diverse as Dickens, Chadwick, Quetelet, and Wheatstone. She sickens and attempts to find the cause of her malady by exploring the fringes of several sciences. Her interest in the use of electricity to treat nervous disorders involves her in the controversies over mesmerism and phrenology, and turns her from Babbage to Faraday and to Andrew Crosse, the “electrician” whose work served as the model for Frankenstein. With Ada, Stein examines the roots of the fear, fascination, and mystic awe with which we still regard the impact of high technology upon ordinary life.

Publisher MIT Press, 1987
History of Computing Series
ISBN 0262691167, 9780262691161
321 pages

publisher
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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8137

Mac Slavo
May 15th, 2013
SHTFplan.com

Financial privacy free of government intrusion and interference is dead.

In what seems to be the government’s latest attack on private transactions between individuals, the Department of Homeland Security has shut down funds transfers operated by mobile processing platform Dwolla, which is responsible for managing transfers for the BitCoin digital currency exchange.
Details are still sparse, but a spokesperson for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) confirms that an investigation is in progress and Dwolla is no longer able to accept currency transfers for its customers.
The U.S. Department of Homeland Security confirmed it has initiated legal action that prompted the Dwolla payment service to stop processing bitcoin transactions.

Read more at http://investmentwatchblog.com/financial-privacy-under-fire-dhs-freezes-bitcoin-money-transfers/#zG8yCcr7MRjrQmEC.99

http://investmentwatchblog.com/financial-privacy-under-fire-dhs-freezes-bitcoin-money-transfers/?source=mm802

Who are scientists? What kind of people are they? What capacities and virtues are thought to stand behind their considerable authority? They are experts—indeed, highly respected experts—authorized to describe and interpret the natural world and widely trusted to help transform knowledge into power and profit. But are they morally different from other people? The Scientific Life is historian Steven Shapin’s story about who scientists are, who we think they are, and why our sensibilities about such things matter.

Conventional wisdom has long held that scientists are neither better nor worse than anyone else, that personal virtue does not necessarily accompany technical expertise, and that scientific practice is profoundly impersonal. Shapin, however, here shows how the uncertainties attending scientific research make the virtues of individual researchers intrinsic to scientific work. From the early twentieth-century origins of corporate research laboratories to the high-flying scientific entrepreneurship of the present, Shapin argues that the radical uncertainties of much contemporary science have made personal virtues more central to its practice than ever before, and he also reveals how radically novel aspects of late modern science have unexpectedly deep historical roots. His elegantly conceived history of the scientific career and character ultimately encourages us to reconsider the very nature of the technical and moral worlds in which we now live.

Building on the insights of Shapin’s last three influential books, featuring an utterly fascinating cast of characters, and brimming with bold and original claims, The Scientific Life is essential reading for anyone wanting to reflect on late modern American culture and how it has been shaped.

Publisher University of Chicago Press, 2008
ISBN 0226750248, 9780226750248
468 pages

review (Barbara Herrnstein Smith, London Review of Books)
review (Theodore M. Porter, American Scientist)
review (Michael Cournoyea, Spontaneous Generations)

publisher
google books

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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8134

An overachieving sunspot on the surface of the sun unleashed its fourth major solar flare in two days late Tuesday (May 14), a solar storm that may deal Earth a glancing blow, space weather experts say.

The active sunspot AR1748 roared to life Tuesday night releasing an X-class solar flare — the strongest type the sun can experience — that peaked at 9:48 p.m. EDT (0148 May 15 GMT), according to NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center in Boulder, Colo. The flare came after a relative lull in activity from sunspot AR1748, which fired off three monster X-class solar flares within a 24-hour period between Sunday and Monday.

http://www.space.com/21150-huge-solar-flares-busy-sunspot.html

When American game designer Jane McGonigal wasn’t healing from a serious concussion more than a month after she slammed her head on the corner of a cabinet door in July 2009, she turned her recovery into a game.

She earned points for facing obstacles (“bad guys” like drinking coffee) and for doing things that made her feel good (“power-ups” like baking). Her family and friends (“allies”) sent her new activities to complete everyday (“quests”) and her husband tracked her progress in a notebook (“the Secret Lab”). In a short time, she achieved her goal (“an epic win”) and went from feeling depressed, anxious and helpless to feeling better.

The game wasn’t digital then, but it is now.

http://www.financialpost.com/m/wp/fp-tech-desk/post-arcade/blog.html?b=business.financialpost.com/2013/05/14/can-playing-more-games-really-improve-lives-and-save-the-world

This morning, The New Yorker launched Strongbox, an online place where people can send documents and messages to the magazine, and we, in turn, can offer them a reasonable amount of anonymity. It was put together by Aaron Swartz, who died in January, and Kevin Poulsen. Kevin explains some of the background in his own post, including Swartz’s role and his survivors’ feelings about the project. (They approve, something that was important for us here to know.) The underlying code, given the name DeadDrop, will be open-source, and we are very glad to be the first to bring it out into the world, fully implemented.

http://m.newyorker.com/online/blogs/closeread/2013/05/introducing-strongbox-anonymous-document-sharing-tool.html

Former Senator Joseph Lieberman recently charged that mistakes by U.S. security agencies were responsible for failing to stop the Boston Marathon bombing. I recently wrote about how mass surveillance makes this kind of recrimination inevitable, because once a government agency spies on a person, they become in a sense responsible for any actions that that person takes. To paraphrase Colin Powell, we might sum it up as “You surveil him, you own him.”

http://www.aclu.org/blog/national-security/fundamental-asymmetry-between-past-and-future-and-why-it-means-mass

We live in a hyperconnected, technologically turbo-charged world of mass surveillance and “digital shadows” that is so subtly controlling, that it makes the notion of Big Brother seem quaint.

http://www.polygon.com/2013/5/13/4326718/a-video-game-about-mass-surveillance-in-the-age-of-big-brother-and

How has the Internet, a medium that thrives on control, been accepted as a medium of freedom? Why is freedom increasingly indistinguishable from paranoid control? In Control and Freedom, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun explores the current political and technological coupling of freedom with control by tracing the emergence of the Internet as a mass medium. The parallel (and paranoid) myths of the Internet as total freedom/total control, she says, stem from our reduction of political problems into technological ones.

Drawing on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Michel Foucault and analyzing such phenomena as Webcams and face-recognition technology, Chun argues that the relationship between control and freedom in networked contact is experienced and negotiated through sexuality and race. She traces the desire for cyberspace to cyberpunk fiction and maps the transformation of public/private into open/closed. Analyzing “pornocracy,” she contends that it was through cyberporn and the government’s attempts to regulate it that the Internet became a marketplace of ideas and commodities. Chun describes the way Internet promoters conflated technological empowerment with racial empowerment and, through close examinations of William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell, she analyzes the management of interactivity in narratives of cyberspace.

The Internet’s potential for democracy stems not from illusory promises of individual empowerment, Chun argues, but rather from the ways in which it exposes us to others (and to other machines) in ways we cannot control. Using fiber optic networks—light coursing through glass tubes—as metaphor and reality, Control and Freedom engages the rich philosophical tradition of light as a figure for knowledge, clarification, surveillance, and discipline, in order to argue that fiber-optic networks physically instantiate, and thus shatter, enlightenment.

Publisher MIT Press, 2006
ISBN 0262033321, 9780262033329
352 pages

publisher
google books

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Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8130

Carbon dioxide levels indicate rise in temperatures that could lead agriculture to fail on entire continents

http://m.guardiannews.com/environment/2013/may/12/climate-change-expert-stern-displacement

A new study published in the current issue of Science suggests that an ice-free Arctic may very well become a reality in the near future.

The research team set out to study Lake El’gygytgyn, “Lake E” for short, which was formed 3.6 million years ago when a meteorite hit earth. Because it has not been eroded by continental ice sheets, which is rare in the Arctic, it has an undisturbed sediment record that the team wanted to examine. The sediment samples examined were collected in 2009 from Lake E, and enabled the scientists to look back in time 2.2 to 3.6 million years ago.

The research team discovered that “[e]vidence from Lake El’gygytgyn, NE Arctic Russia, shows that 3.6-3.4 million years ago, summer temperatures were ~8°C warmer than today when pCO2 was ~400 ppm,” the article summary explains. Essentially, the summer temperatures were about 14 degrees warmer than current temperatures in the Arctic, significant because of the relatively small difference.

“There was probably no sea ice, and the whole Arctic was pretty well forested, so it was a very different world,” lead author of the study Julie Brigham-Grette told LiveScience. “So, how did we go from that to the tundra that we have today, and what does this tell us about the future?”

Read more: http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/new-study-suggests-we-may-see-ice-free-arctic-in-our-lifetime/#ixzz2T5hlq0lK

http://www.sciencerecorder.com/news/new-study-suggests-we-may-see-ice-free-arctic-in-our-lifetime/

The vast majority of all email sent every day is spam, a variety of idiosyncratically spelled requests to provide account information, invitations to spend money on dubious products, and pleas to send cash overseas. Most of it is caught by filters before ever reaching an in-box. Where does it come from? As Finn Brunton explains in Spam, it is produced and shaped by many different populations around the world: programmers, con artists, bots and their botmasters, pharmaceutical merchants, marketers, identity thieves, crooked bankers and their victims, cops, lawyers, network security professionals, vigilantes, and hackers. Every time we go online, we participate in the system of spam, with choices, refusals, and purchases the consequences of which we may not understand.

This is a book about what spam is, how it works, and what it means. Brunton provides a cultural history that stretches from pranks on early computer networks to the construction of a global criminal infrastructure. The history of spam, Brunton shows us, is a shadow history of the Internet itself, with spam emerging as the mirror image of the online communities it targets. Brunton traces spam through three epochs: the 1970s to 1995, and the early, noncommercial computer networks that became the Internet; 1995 to 2003, with the dot-com boom, the rise of spam’s entrepreneurs, and the first efforts at regulating spam; and 2003 to the present, with the war of algorithms—spam versus anti-spam. Spam shows us how technologies, from email to search engines, are transformed by unintended consequences and adaptations, and how online communities develop and invent governance for themselves.

Publisher MIT Press, 2013
Infrastructures Series
ISBN 026201887X, 9780262018876
270 pages

review (Evgeny Morozov, The Wall Street Journal)
interview with author (NPR)

publisher
google books

Download (removed on 2013-5-20 upon request of the publisher)

Monoskop Log http://monoskop.org/log/?p=8113

It’s a thoroughly 21st-century heist: An online gaming service secretly leveraged thousands of users’ computers to acquire money in the form of online-only crypto-currency Bitcoin.

http://m.nbcnews.com/technology/bitcoin-scam-turns-online-gamers-unwitting-accomplices-6C9743685