1975-08-20

Macbots and Dia Sobin have noted the passing of Mac Tonnies' birthday on August 20. Coincidentally, Mac's birthday was the launch date for the Viking 1 lander. Almost a year later, on July 25, 1976, the "Face on Mars" was photographed by the Viking Orbiter 1 as it examined possible landing sites for Viking 2.

Mac Tonnies-tagged content continues to be created on the internets despite his physical death. Below are some recent YouTube movies.

Question authority.
Empower yourself.
Seek truth.

I haven't been blogging much because I was travelling. In fact, August 20 itself was a day that partly disappeared for me as my plane crossed the international date line. However, I kept my cellphone on Tokyo time, and photos of my visit to the Science Fiction Museum (and Experience Music Project) of Seattle are all dated 2010-08-20.

Those were 2010-08-20 in Japan but this last one was 2010-08-20 in the US, the last shot I took before leaving.

Efforts are being made to name a crater on Mars for Mac Tonnies. If interested, you can join a Facebook group dedicated to it.

An Alternate History of Steve Computer

Everyone has heard of Steve Computer, but few know the tangled history of the company.

For example, did you know that early in its life, the company was known as "Apple Computer"? As funny as this sounds to us now, this name was used for a short time until "Apple Computer" lost a lawsuit and had to cease use of the name and pay a large settlement to the estate of The Beatles.

"That was like a good kick in the balls," Steve Jobs says. "We lost most of the company and our capital in that fiasco. I probably would have remained a money-oriented corporate asshole if that hadn't happened. Woz and I had to go to Plan B."

Plan B, as it turned out, involved renaming the company. "Steve Computer" was suggested--initially as a joke--but they liked the geeky, garage sound of it, and the name stuck. As Steve Computer lost control of the "apple" logo in a related lawsuit, they were able to get trademark control of the "iBomb" and began using that as their corporate logo. The company's "dude, yer gettin a steve!" ad campaign gave the company a recognizable ad line, as did the "THNKDFFRNT" campaign which eliminated spaces and vowels from ad copy.

Soon the battered, yet recovering company had a new hit with their MacKweeN. The MacKween, or "Mac" as it was called by some, used the MacKween operating system, or "Mac OS". The name tempted litigation, a peculiar habit of Mr Jobs, but attorneys for Steve McQueen lost Steve McQueen vs Steve Computer in a 5-4 decision by the US Supreme Court, recognizing Steve Computer's argument that consumers were unlikely to mistake the actor for a computer or its operating system. This argument was used again when the 1998 Steve e-1dr or "Steve e-wonder" as it was commonly called, was released, but the company pre-empted any talk of a lawsuit by offering Mr Wonder free lifelong technical support.

Legal troubles returned when company co-founder Steve Wozniac announced on December 31, 1999 that every MacKweeN contained software for making free phone calls to anyone anywhere in the world. Telecommunications and internet services were gradually restored to most countries in stages over the next three months, and Mr Wozniac received a full pardon from outgoing President Bill Clinton, and only ever served 6 months of his 150-year sentence.

In recent years, the MacKweeN OS has been replaced by SteviX, a more modern operating system, in all of the company's products. The Steve eNiX Music Jukebox runs on SteviX, but can also be installed on other operating systems. As you know, iBomb (also known as the Steve iBomb Musix Jacker) is a ubiquitous tool of the younger set. When plugged into a non-Steve computer, the iBomb partitions the drive, installs the SteviX operating system, and initiates file sharing of all music found on the player and the pre-existing partitions. Although SteviX is free and propagates virally, the company survives through sales of hardware and subscriptions to its "MacCloud" service. The release of the StEpHoNeY smart-phone has also boosted the company's profits and begun to heal the long-festering rift with the major telecommunications carriers.

SteeveeDeeveedee, Steeveemoovee, Stephoto, and GrungeBand are have been added to the company's software lineup in recent years. Older software titles include the movieviewer QuitTime and the Rastafari internet browser. Nummerz, Keyhole, and Pagers form a rudimentary office suite.

Steve Computer is not the only enterprise of co-founder Steve Jobs. Pixelator, a movie company he purchased, made a big splash with its first movie, Destroy a Toy, and subsequent hits, Scar, Destroy a Toy, Too, A Bug File, Gokiburi, The Incredulous, Year of the Light Buzz, and LARR+E. In a surprise move, Mr Jobs succeeded in a hostile takeover of Disney Inc, abruptly closing all of their theme parks and donating the land to non-profit, non-governmental educational organizations. Other Disney holdings were liquidated or released to the public domain.

It certainly seemed like a big setback at the time, but if Steve Computer had never lost their fight over the name of a fruit, they may have never joined the ranks of the other major computer makers: Tandy, Amiga, and Atari.

Legacy: The "Noughties" Ain't Over

Dick Cheney just won't stay underground. The Dark Lord appeared on deFace duh Nation and in Harry Shearer's Dick Cheney: CONFIDENTIAL (from the 38:00 minute mark). I never expected to hear much of him again after January 2009. In a related story, suspected Bush/Cheney sympathizer Lawton Smalls calls in to Mark Maron at BreakRoom Live again with some of his own unresolved medical and psychological issues surrounding health care (@ 19:15).

Sober Driver '09

Busy busy busy. Need a break. What's Dengue Fever been up to lately? SF and NYC. This video recorded January 17 is of decent quality. Sober Driver is one of my favorite tracks from Venus on Earth. This is the fist video I've seen of this band in the Obama era. And if you dwell on that thought, it may occur to you that we do have a "sober driver" at the helm of the United States, if the US has a helm. Black coffee, no sugar, a bit of LMM for sweetness. Sobers you right up. You may also recall that the last occupant of the office, his veep, and wife were all confirmed DUI drivers!

Sober Driver has a pretty good premise and funny lyrics. I particularly like "The cake is all dry!" as something the fictional self-centered loose drunk chick of the story would say when she's tired of the party and calls her sober part-time boyfriend for a ride. I have to say that "It's withered, dull, and dry" makes a strange refrain (unless I've been mis-hearing it massively all along). Unfortunately for America, the drunk chick in this extended metaphor is the American public. Oh, well. Carry on, my wayward sons of…

A Whole New World.

Republican Vice-Presidential candidate and Alaska Governor Sarah Palin continued to enhance her foreign policy credentials today as she toured Florida's EPCOT Center, meeting with the newly-installed animatronic presidents Zardari, Hamid Karzai, Indira Gandhi, and Abraham Lincoln. Later, the former beauty queen had lunch with Cinderella and Minnie Mouse, where the conversation veered away from the everyday concerns of hard-working fictional characters in the fantasy land community into an unexpectedly heated discussion of animal rights. Local reporters and national media were chased from the scene by an angry John McCain, who appeared to be shadowing Mrs Palin. Mrs Palin left the event by helicopter, and was last seen attempting to bag Bambi from the low-flying aircraft. Technicians who arrived on the scene were unable to field dress the animal due to rust and extensive soldering. The Disney autonomouse region casts 3 of the state's 27 electoral votes through a tough 2000 compromise that had the kingdom suspend its armed, eared, four-fingered secessionist struggle in exchange for implants in the spinal cords of the Bush royal family and their offspring.

Tales of Courage, Valor, and Horror

In May, 1968, John McKern was flying a bombing mission in Lower Kagookistan when his airplane came under small arms fire. As he returned fire on what he believed to be a suspicious boat sailing below, the plane was fired upon and disabled. McKern managed to crash land directly onto the swift boat before he was able to determine that it was a friendly craft. All the soldiers aboard were killed, with the sole exception of the boat's captain, John Kermacky. Mobile Army Surgical Hospital medics who rushed to the site described a hellish scene of severed body parts strewn about the banks of a tributary of the Messihippiz river. Forced to improvise under harsh field conditions, surgeons took two intact, living torsos and began sewing other intact body parts onto them. One man had two punctured lungs; thus a lung transplant was performed. The other man had two punctured kidneys, necessitating a kidney transplant. Both men were missing portions of their faces, jaws, assorted limbs, and even brain tissue. Surgeons labored for days in dark surgical tunnels, working to piece the macabre jigsaw together under woefully inadequate lighting conditions. Despite being subsequently captured by Upper Kagookistani irregulars, both men survived. Years later, their friendship survives as well. Stranger still, both men serve their country, the Republic of Armed Desire, in the House of Sedators. McKern is an Esteemed Predator of the Party of Reptilian Empowerment; Kermacky a Senior Elder in the Party of Demogogic Cyborgization. Despite their political differences, the two men reserve time to meet at least twice a year to share a meal of hot dog soup. "But on hot summer days of the Barbecue Festival, we usually have cold dog soup," Kermacky says proudly.

Source: Surrealist Review of the World Nest; Rat XX.

Context is Everything

A public service message brought to you by
Citizens for the Neutralization of Stupidity

What's *your* excuse?

"Awesome. I saw it, too! It came out of the sun and vanished behind the Starbucks Drive-thru. The craft resembled nothing so much as the delicate first impression of steamed milk from a Starbucks latte, or possibly a cappucino. It was hard to tell from the distance and speed at which it moved, which I would estimate as 4000 miles per hour."

This illustrated fictional episode grew out of a friend's forward of my own e-mail back to me. He later said he had mistaken me for his mom because he got the message (which did include the words "love, Mom" written by a tornado-stricken person) on his iphone as he went thru the starbucks drive-thru. I responded that the iphone/starbucks tale was the new "Dog-ate-my-homework." Today I was sent a picture of the confusing establishment, which, when visually enhanced over my lunch hour, revealed new evidence of illegal aliens working in the Los Angeles basin.
Uptweak 20080609: iPhone=I.

Charlton Heston is dead

You can pry his gun from his cold, dead hands now, you damn dirty ape!

Dirt-ePolitrix: Evil in Ads by Google

This is an ad that appeared on a news site, courtesy of Google Ads. I didn't follow the link, but it shows an almost Rovean level of political evil facilitated by the Google "Don't be evil" Ads.

A screen shot of the page is on the right, and the ad in context at the bottom of the page is shown below. The Daily Telegraph "Powered by the Sydney Herald" was the news site. Clinton, Obama slug it out was the story headline.



I don't know if it is just one newspaper, an Australian thing, or if even US news sites are allowing this kind of Obama slander and rumor mongering. It could be by an American or international racist organization, a wealthy and unscrupulous (but I repeat myself) Republican such as moneybags Mitt, or the Hill-Rod. I'm sure she would blame it on a vast right-wing conspiracy and contend that it came straight from the Republican Play Book. It looks like Google Ads has made it too easy to drop some money on them and them post libelous slander and lies disguised as ads. These would work best subliminally; most people don't even read the ads, only looking at them long enough to see that they are ads, but the message will come through better unfiltered in the peripheral vision, just as most ads are more effective if they are ignored and allowed to work subconsciously. If you pay conscious attention to commercials and analyze them intelligently, they are pretty much useless and ineffective. Google should watch themselves more closely, (slum)lord knows they are watching us.

Caesar Salad on the Table

I tend to get wind of most breaking news when I look at one of my computers and see the news scrolling, or spinning by on the RSS-reader screensaver. In the future, when someone asks how I learned of, oh, say the brutal lynching of the president or whatever spectacular news the near future holds, I will most likely have seen it go by on the screensaver. Once in a while a badly-worded headline rolls by like the one above, a headline that causes a surge of hope to rise in the chest, but which is just as quickly extinguished as one reads past the first three words. You really have to read beyond the first three words to get the whole story. It just goes by so fast. I guess I should have known better. Harry Reid doesn't run the Senate that way. And what would Julius "W" Ceasar be doing on the Senate floor, anyway? That's more like a place where you would find Mr Dick Cheney when he crawls out of his hole. If the Senate were to act, they should act against the VP first. The succession has got more complicated since the first century BC. This picture isn't from March, either, but is from June.

Global warming (by evildoers today)

America's National Priorities:

1. The War on Gays (US military would rather have soldiers be killed by al qaeda than use gay linguists)
2. The War on Terrorism (US would rather kill Iraqi and Afghan patriots than save American cities from destruction by global warming)
3. The War on Global Warming (US would rather send billions of dollars to Saudi Arabia, Iran, Russia, and other petrocracies and oleo-oligarchs than developing renewable energy sources)

I probably should have mentioned enriching themselves and their enron/exxonmobil/kuwaiti/saudi sponsors as the real number one, but the order I describe is clear from the objective facts. Why is it that this is the way the politics work out? One suggestion from Harvard Psychology Professor Daniel Gilbert, seen on the Richard Dawkins site, reprinted from the L. A. Times, where it is archived (to pay to view).

Thursday, March 22, 2007
If only gay sex caused global warming
by Daniel Gilbert, LATimes.com

Why we're more scared of gay marriage and terrorism than a much deadlier threat.

By Daniel Gilbert, Daniel Gilbert is a professor of psychology at Harvard University and the author of "Stumbling on Happiness," published in May by Knopf.

July 2, 2006

…
Why are we less worried about the more likely disaster? Because the human brain evolved to respond to threats that have four features — features that terrorism has and that global warming lacks.

First, global warming lacks a mustache. No, really. We are social mammals whose brains are highly specialized for thinking about others. Understanding what others are up to — what they know and want, what they are doing and planning — has been so crucial to the survival of our species that our brains have developed an obsession with all things human. We think about people and their intentions; talk about them; look for and remember them.
…
The second reason why global warming doesn't put our brains on orange alert is that it doesn't violate our moral sensibilities. It doesn't cause our blood to boil (at least not figuratively) because it doesn't force us to entertain thoughts that we find indecent, impious or repulsive. When people feel insulted or disgusted, they generally do something about it, such as whacking each other over the head, or voting. Moral emotions are the brain's call to action.

Although all human societies have moral rules about food and sex, none has a moral rule about atmospheric chemistry. And so we are outraged about every breach of protocol except Kyoto. Yes, global warming is bad, but it doesn't make us feel nauseated or angry or disgraced, and thus we don't feel compelled to rail against it as we do against other momentous threats to our species, such as flag burning. The fact is that if climate change were caused by gay sex, or by the practice of eating kittens, millions of protesters would be massing in the streets.

The third reason why global warming doesn't trigger our concern is that we see it as a threat to our futures — not our afternoons. Like all animals, people are quick to respond to clear and present danger, which is why it takes us just a few milliseconds to duck when a wayward baseball comes speeding toward our eyes.

The brain is a beautifully engineered get-out-of-the-way machine that constantly scans the environment for things out of whose way it should right now get. That's what brains did for several hundred million years — and then, just a few million years ago, the mammalian brain learned a new trick: to predict the timing and location of dangers before they actually happened.

Our ability to duck that which is not yet coming is one of the brain's most stunning innovations, and we wouldn't have dental floss or 401(k) plans without it. But this innovation is in the early stages of development. The application that allows us to respond to visible baseballs is ancient and reliable, but the add-on utility that allows us to respond to threats that loom in an unseen future is still in beta testing.

We haven't quite gotten the knack of treating the future like the present it will soon become because we've only been practicing for a few million years. If global warming took out an eye every now and then, OSHA would regulate it into nonexistence.

There is a fourth reason why we just can't seem to get worked up about global warming. The human brain is exquisitely sensitive to changes in light, sound, temperature, pressure, size, weight and just about everything else. But if the rate of change is slow enough, the change will go undetected.
…
Environmentalists despair that global warming is happening so fast. In fact, it isn't happening fast enough. If President Bush could jump in a time machine and experience a single day in 2056, he'd return to the present shocked and awed, prepared to do anything it took to solve the problem..

The human brain is a remarkable device that was designed to rise to special occasions. We are the progeny of people who hunted and gathered, whose lives were brief and whose greatest threat was a man with a stick. When terrorists attack, we respond with crushing force and firm resolve, just as our ancestors would have. Global warming is a deadly threat precisely because it fails to trip the brain's alarm, leaving us soundly asleep in a burning bed.

It remains to be seen whether we can learn to rise to new occasions.

It's funny to think that Philip K. Dick dealt with this idea decades ago (1968!) in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Precisely because these realities were not part of the brain's hardwiring, and because the planet had been ruined, the religion of Mercerism instituted the idea of life and nature as the most valued, sacred things, and empathy for all living things as the highest ideal.

Also, just as food and sexual taboos are socially constructed, we are witnessing the construction of these carbon taboos now. We will see anger at the immoral, mustached individuals when our afternoons are ruined, as it was for many residents of New Orleans a few years ago and perhaps Miami one fine day soon? I appreciate the article, but it will seem out of date as an explanation of why no action was taken in a few years. There already are, in fact, "moral codes about atmospheric chemistry", where one smokes, how that is perceived, what kinds of industrial and agricultural trace chemicals are tolerable in the air, and so on. You can imagine a similar article explaining why the slavery issue is not being dealt with, or why women's right to vote has not come yet.

Posthuman Roundup

Damn. I need to make more time to read some of my favorite blogs. Mac Tonnies has a story, One Hundred Years, out on Flurb,
posted the Stephen Colbert report on the growing robot menace (BearBC, Kansei),

points to an earnest and persuasive video pounding home the point that the possibility of catastrophic global climate change logically necessitates some precautionary action,

and links to perhaps the world's most complete collection of William Burroughs book covers.

2BR02B (Two-B-R-Naught-Two-B )

I was curious about any Kurt Vonnegut writing that might be in the public domain, having not read much Vonnegut since high school or university, so was happy to find this Kurt Vonnegut short story, 2BR02B. It's available at Project Gutenberg in html or txt, or from Time Traveller Show as an mp3. It was first published in (Worlds of) If magazine in January 1962, and later in Bagombo Snuff Box (Amazon, Wikipedia) in 1999.
(via BoingBoing)
Update: Minor motherlode of Kurt Vonnegut material here, for academic use only, while it lasts. Check out Kurt's Daily Show appearance.

The George W. Bush Memorial Library at Abu Ghraib

Some controversy has apparently arisen over the legacy of George W. Bush and the handful of documents that he intends to use to dedicate his proposed future "Presidential Library". Some worry that proposed plans to place the library at Southern Methodist University in Dallas will further cement the city's ugly reputation for killing Kennedy and encouraging Bushes. Residents fear the building may become an attractive target for terrorists. I haven't googled this to see if anyone else has made the suggestion, so they probably have, like that "50 Ways to Leave Iraq" idea that I was thinking about, but how about Abu Ghraib? Locating the George W. Bush pRedsiDenTal Lieberry in Abu Ghraib will send a bold message that this pRedsident idn't afeard to think outside the box, and will form an appropriate and lasting dedication to his legacy.

They might as well make an amusement park out of it and have an animatronic Saddam Hussein hung on a simulated gallows. Lieberrys are so dull, ya know, they need something for the kids…

A Scanner Darkly

A Scanner Darkly Quicktime trailer page: http://www.apple.com/trailers/warner_independent_pictures/ascannerdarkly/
This looks like it will be pretty good. Coming this summer. PKD lives!

More poster images at http://thecia.com.au/reviews/s/scanner-darkly.shtml

Movie review http://www.comingsoon.net/news/reviewsnews.php?id=15242

CELL by Stephen King

Eighteen chapters of "Book Extracts" from retired (?) writer Stephen King's new novel CELL are available from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8802-2055797,00.html  through to what looks like a conclusion at http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,8802-2055520,00.html

If you are like me, and a fan of short short stories, you will just read the first two chapters to pick up the premise and let your imagination do the rest. (Writing it as a short story is not the way to sell novels and make movies, however.)

The idea is that the global cellphone network is hacked, and used to send a signal that is formatted, not to wreck the phone, but to trigger a psychosis in the brain of the person who picks up the phone. This psychosis disables the higher functions of the brain. In other words, it's the first cellphone/zombie movie. This horror/signal meme may remind you a little of the Ring, but it may be a little more scientifically plausible, except that the victims also levitate, or so I read in the Amazon reviews.

Update: I stayed up an extra hour to read it. It doesn't seem to be the end after those 18 chapters (or book excerpts or whatever they are), since they are just trying to leave Boston. I didn't see anything about levitation, either, so this comment on Amazon must be from later or a different version.

A. Raymond
Some of the weirdness is just weird but with a stretch could "possibly" happen but the levitating???? I don't get it ....
Mar 24, 2006 1:43 PM PST

Charles B. Hinton
They clearly explained it within the book. Their brains were being rewired so they discovered new areas that we havent unlocked yet.

An illustrated version of the first 2 chapters is at http://www.ew.com/ew/report/0,6115,1150884-2-6_5||1151082|1_,00.html