Gaia Agency

Speaking of intuitive processes, I saw Cory Doctorow post this on boingboing and had to follow suit. This fab art project about NSA spying, time-lapse recorded, reminds me of a painting I saw in Helsinki's Modern Art Museum a few years back that portrayed consumerism with a lonely green alien, sporting heroin needles in each arm, who's lying in a conjested apartment littered with every contemporary gadget for one to interface with reality beyond the abode. 

The Drum Major Institute for Public Policy did this wonderful study on how little US middle-class citizens know about current US public policy. Apparently, 72% of them couldn't name a bill that was passed within the last two years that benefited them. I can't imagine the picture to be all that different in Canada given my experience discussing politics with middle-class Canadians. This might not be surprising but what strikes me is not the severity of the disconnect between public awareness and public policy, it's the conviction people still have about whom they will or will not vote for regardless of such. If more than 50% of the population turn out to vote during the next US federal election I'll be surprised. And I'll be surprised of how many citizens feel comfortable voting even without much awareness of what bills either presidential candidates (or the members of their respective parties) have voted to pass or what actual policies they will push to implement if elected.

This brings me to a hunch I want to prove: that people are just too arrogant or presumptuous about what they believe in general.  read more »

The blogs are all about Lawrence Lessig's comment about a i-9/11 made during the 2018: Life on the Net panel discussion at this year's Fortune Brainstorm. Lawrence Lessig, founder of the Creative Commons, who has a knack for often making bold yet entirely rational statements, asserted that an online security threat, similar in magnitude to the devestation of the World Trade Center, will happen sometime in the future. If such an event occurs, a new crackdown legal-framework, similar to the Patriot Act, will be put into place. Talking to a governmental official, Lessig says that such an emergency policy has already been drawn up.  read more »

The video producers to this new Radiohead video have released the data used to generate the 3D models online at Google Code. Peter Kirn, from CDM, explains:

Radiohead’s new video uses 3D images capture from two scanners – one a close-proximity 3D scanner from Geometric Informatics, another a multiple-laser array for the “exterior scenes” rotating in a 360-degree pattern. That yields just data, not anything you can look at, so the artists created the video itself using the open-source tool we love so much, Processing. 

Click here to read the CDM post.  read more »

Quotes from the phantasmagoria to your left.

"Do anything for peace: piss for peace, or smile for peace, or go to school for peace, or don't go to school for peace. Whatever you do, do it for peace." 
 
"Everything you hear is there. It's all there. Either trivia or profound whatever, it's all there."   read more »

The digital copyright dispute in Canada is really becoming something of an enigma. Ever since Industry Minister Jim Prentice introduced a copyright bill, essentially allowing the discrimination and surveillance of our Internet use, several months ago, public outcry has been intense, but so has Mr. Prentice's determination. Prentice's initial attempt failed, and last week saw 300 people protesting outside of Parliament Hill because of the possible introduction of yet another (revised) bill. Michael Geist just blogged that Prentice's "staff is working overtime to eliminate any negative comments on Wikipedia" pertaining to the introduction of his new copyright bill.

 read more »