Suspension of Disbelief: December 2005

Have a good one!

I'm off to Spain for the winter break. I wish you all a great time these days. I leave you with this from Banksy:

Back in the new year! Until then, Spy's Spice will be turned...

Nazi Swing

Charlie and His Orchestra is a Nazi big band assembled by Hitler’s minister of propaganda Joseph Goebbels.

From the website:

"Leave it to Goebbels to take the music of The Andrews Sisters, Paul Whiteman and Irving Berlin and fill it with venomous rants against Jews, America and the British. The man took his propaganda seriously. But at least he admitted it was propaganda, unlike the current crop of spin-meisters."

If you’ve ever wondered what Nazi swing music is like, here it is: Link

Atheist manifesto

So, which one is it?

Very interesting discussion on atheism:

Somewhere in the world a man has abducted a little girl. Soon he will rape, torture and kill her. If an atrocity of this kind is not occurring at precisely this moment, it will happen in a few hours, or days at most. Such is the confidence we can draw from the statistical laws that govern the lives of 6 billion human beings. The same statistics also suggest that this girl s parents believe at this very moment that an all-powerful and all-loving God is watching over them and their family. Are they right to believe this? Is it good that they believe this? No. The entirety of atheism is contained in this response.Full Article

Gallery of atheists here.

Pics by Gill Rickson and Tom Coates.

The celebrity mask comes down. Fraud unveiled

From the website:

Almost all photos selling something have been touched up: magazine covers, fashion articles, advertisements, record covers and so on. [Here] you'll see how easy it is to alter someone's appearance.

We all knew it, but now we have a nifty site that shows how its done.
Link

Pick of Post Secret

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail-in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.

Post Secret

Congotronics

Congotronics is a genre coined to describe the electro-traditional mixtures which are being made in the suburbs of Kinshasa in Gongo. When the people of the countryside came to the city, they found that the noise around them made it difficult to play their music loud enough for it to be heard by their ancestors. They electrically hooked up their makeshift instruments (the thumb-piano is a specialty) in a DIY style and this distorted their music to a radical mutation that has been compared to avant-rock, electronica and trance.

Link

1000 friends

Mike in Germany has embarked on a tour around the world with his "1000 friends". He's chosen 1000 drawings from his scetchbooks that he did in the last seven years. He then mae cutouts of them so that the different bodyparts of the figures can be moved. You can change the different parts with all other figures... so each you can create new figures. Mike is currently on tour in Switzerland and Germany, where he has shows on the street, in bars, restaurants, galleries, shops and festivals...

Via.

What If Copyright Law Were Strongly Enforced in the Blogosphere?

The blogosphere would be in for some tough times I bet. Bloggers frequently copy large chunks of mainstream media articles and some of us copy pictures we find on the Web. Bloggers don't have a team of photographers and artists, so they snag images from the Internet. As for mainstream media articles, bloggers often quote very liberally because the mainstream media is notorious for creating dead URLs -- articles often just disappear after a week or two. In other instances, articles get archived and can only be retrieved for a fee. The result is that a post discussing a mainstream media article with just a link or a small quote can become hard to understand when the article being referred to becomes unavailable. That's why bloggers often copy significant portions of articles -- so their posts can still be understood when the URLs to the articles go dead.

We bloggers have, to put it mildly, a very robust concept of fair use. Fair use of copyrighted material is a fuzzy concept, and judges use four factors to determine if a use is fair:

1. the purpose and character of your use

2. the nature of the copyrighted work

3. the amount and substantiality of the portion taken

4. the effect of the use upon the potential market.

Full Post

I use many pictures from Flickr on this blog. In the early days I'd just slap'em on without attribution or anything, but now I let people know I'm using their pictures and give them the option to remove them. It's only fair.

Found on Flickr

There is a definite personality to these pictures. I love the atmosphere.

Pictures by Ferklint.

Reclaiming the Streets

This is the work of The Cutup Collective. To create their work, billboard posters are taken down, sliced up into pieces, then reordered and put back up on the streets. The original for this was an advert for a certain coffee company.

via

Beauty Is Relative

Picture by true bavarian

The Stanford Prison Experiment

From the Website:

A Simulation Study of the Psychology of Imprisonment Conducted at Stanford University
Welcome to the Stanford Prison Experiment web site, which features an extensive slide show and information about this classic psychology experiment, including parallels with the recent abuse of Iraqi prisoners. What happens when you put good people in an evil place? Does humanity win over evil, or does evil triumph? These are some of the questions we posed in this dramatic simulation of prison life conducted in the summer of 1971 at Stanford University.

How we went about testing these questions and what we found may astound you. Our planned two-week investigation into the psychology of prison life had to be ended prematurely after only six days because of what the situation was doing to the college students who participated. In only a few days, our guards became sadistic and our prisoners became depressed and showed signs of extreme stress. Please join me on a slide tour describing this experiment and uncovering what it tells us about the nature of Human Nature.

Link

insects sounds from the forests of Northern Thailand

Does exactly what it says on the tin.

The truth about dogs - (someone had to say it)

A very interesting article at Slate:

Have you heard the latest news? We've decoded the DNA of dogs. Here's how the media-approved version of the story goes: We're showing our love for "man's best friend" by discovering and treating the genetic causes of his ailments. In return, we'll learn to treat the same ailments in ourselves.

It's a heartwarming story, but it's a fraud. The reason we targeted the dog genome for decoding is that it's useful for genetic research. The reason it's useful for genetic research is that dogs are neatly divided into breeds, each of which is plagued by specific diseases. And the reason dogs are divided into diseased breeds is that we made them that way. Dogs are the world's longest self-serving, ecologically reckless genetic experiment, perpetrated by the world's first genetically engineering species: us.

What about the dogs?

In the course of engineering dogs to look, feel, and act as we wanted, we ruined millions of them. We gave them legs so short they couldn't run, noses so flat they couldn't breathe, tempers so hostile they couldn't function in society. Even our best intentions backfired. Nature invented sexual reproduction to diversify gene pools and dilute bad variants. By forcing dogs into incest (which we ban among humans, in part for biological reasons), we defied nature. We concentrated each bad gene in a breed, magnifying its damage: epilepsy for springer spaniels, diabetes for Samoyeds, bone cancer for Rottweilers. That's why the dog genome is so nifty: We can find disease genes just by comparing one breed's DNA to another's. Full Story.

Via.

Picture by deep warren.

Welcome to SwarmSketch: Collective sketching of the collective consciousness.
SwarmSketch is an ongoing online canvas that explores the possibilities of distributed design by the masses. Each week it randomly chooses a popular search term which becomes the sketch subject for the week. In this way, the collective is sketching what the collective thought was important each week. (Due to increased traffic sketches are currently being updated after about 1000 lines)
Each user can contribute a small amount of line per visit, then they are given the opportunity to vote on the opacity of lines submitted by other users. By voting, users moderate the input of other users, judging the quality of each line. The darkness of each line is the average of all its previous votes.

Link.

The editorial staff of the Western Daily Press are offering the services of journalists about to be made redundant by owner Northcliffe up for auction on eBay.

Full story.