Posts by matt

The National Security Letter has always been a laughably frightening proposition, even for us post-privacy types. This is the one that FBI officials could issue legally requiring any organization to secretly hand over records on individuals. There may be an FBI file containing your work e-mails, bank records, and telephone contacts, and you will never know. Very Lives of Others.

Of course it would be revealed that the FBI’s insidious use of the NSL has gone far beyond the boundaries permitted even by the licentious Patriot Act. To hear it described in the news reports, FBI agents are using NSLs like we use Google. One imagines a New Yorker cartoon depicting two agents chatting over coffee: “This guy asked me out on Yahoo. I NSL-ed him, he seems clean.”

The WaPo‘s story has a chatty, charming tone to it: “The FBI collected intimate information about the lives of a population roughly the size of Bethesda’s.” “A report released yesterday by the department’s Office of the Inspector General offers the first official glimpse into the use of that impressive tool, and the results, according to the report, are not pretty.” It’s maybe a Reagan-era East Berlin cocktail party vibe. Check it out.

• Souvenirs in their original contexts.
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  (tags: art beautiful travel photos)
• Awesome story of bus lovin’.
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  (tags: twincities funny)

Another awesome idea passed along by Grand Text Auto: The MIT Media Lab has created a lightweight multiplayer restaurant simulation. You can play as a waitron or as a diner, and all your interactions with other players will be recorded and used to train an AI system. The resulting AI will power a single-player game, to be released next year.

My high score in Virus 2 is 43441. I got down to 25 attempts, and my fastest growth time was 23.

I think I’d wager that the number of games invented in the last 10 years and spread around the world outweighs the number invented in the last 10,000.

Yeondoo Jung has created a gallery containing drawings by children reimagined as photographs. My favorite thing about it is seeing how literally he translates some portions of the images (e.g. the triangular pigtail in “Television was so funny”). Divining the artistic intents of a 4-year-old = solid gold.

(Planetdandy.)

A mashup that allows users to create Pop-Up Videos out of YouTube videos. You’d get acquired by Google for $25MM, easy. And it would be soooooo hott.

The “Society/Culture” category on Snarkmarket is getting ridiculous.

1) This one really isn’t about race, per se, but it’s about Barack Obama, for whom race will be the designated press narrative pretty much through the duration of the 2008 election. And it’s less a reflection than a question: I know Timothy Noah’s been doing the Obama Messiah Watch, tracking Obama hype through the pressosphere, but is anyone doing an Obama backlash watch? I feel like every campaign reporter in America has gotta want to be the author of the Obama Controversy. Someone with a sharper attention span than me should totally be keeping track of the attempts. Wonkette, meanwhile, has a list of valid reasons for a Baracklash.

2) I’m slowly catching up on the first season of the Boondocks, and it’s super-smart. Much higher and more consistent quality than the strip. The cast of characters is just brilliant — unconventional configurations of familiar racial archetypes. And I love the texture of the show, like the recurrent ‘Gangstalicious’ single “Thuggin’ Luv” you hear from episode to episode. Favorite moments?

– The alternate-history Martin Luther King, Jr., episode, where he survives his assassination and awakes from a 40-year coma to witness 9/11. When his response includes an appeal to non-violence, civic leaders immediately distance themselves from the legend, saying, “That’s not the Martin Luther King, Jr., I know!”

– The courtroom party at the end of the R. Kelly episode.

– The news footage of the Gangstalicious fight at the Grammys.

BrandFlakesForBreakfast is right. JetBlue earns +10 humanity points for posting a YouTube video from its CEO instead of the standard press release on its website.

Riffing on an Arthur C. Clarke idea about the unpredictability of science, Kevin Kelly is musing about expected and unexpected inventions (via Infocult). Clarke actually created a chart of inventions or discoveries most scientists could have foreseen before they came about (e.g. automobiles, flying machines, telephones), and ones they couldn’t have predicted (e.g. sound recording, relativity, atomic clocks). Kelly does the same thing, putting organ transplants, the cell phone, and the test tube baby in the realm of the expected, and DNA fingerprinting, radar, and artificial sweeteners in the unexpected camp.

The criterion, Kelly explains, is the “perplex the ancient” test. If Da Vinci were brought back to life, would he be utterly mystified by the technology, or would he grasp the concepts behind it?

For instance, genetically modified crops would surprise no one, because the technique is simply breeding by another means. On the other hand, the underlying concepts of DNA fingerprinting would be mysterious, magical, problematic, and take great lengths to explain. The World Wide Web is the long sought after universal library and answer machine. But virtual reality doesn

I’m seriously appreciating the musical tastes of CitizenFork.com. Their weekly playlists are more delicious than Multigrain Cheerios.