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You’ll have noticed no new posts for quite a while. This is because I’m busy moving into my new house. So, expect a very quiet few days, at least until I get everything moved, unpacked, and my internet reconnected.
Sometimes I read something that I just can’t believe, where it seems to be just too insane for anyone to have possibly said or done it. Today was such a day. So here we have Recruiting Sergeant Marcia Ramode educating African American Corey Andrew in an exchange of emails as to why being Gay doesn’t let you into the United States Military. Please excuse the capital letters, it would seem that Sgt. Ramode doesn’t know how to use the Caps Lock key:
YOU GO BACK TO AFRICA AND DO YOUR GAY VOODOO LIMBO TANGO AND WANGO DANCE AND JUMP AROUND AND PRANCE AND RUN ALL OVER THE PLACE HALF NAKED THERE AND PRACTICE YOUR GAY MORALS OVER THERE THAT’S WHERE YOU BELONG
Well. Yes. Indeed. My calendar tells me that this is the 21st Century, but I think the half-naked gay Africans dancing voodoo the world over have sent me back to the Middle Ages, just replace witches with gays and you’d be spot on. Get out the faggots and burn them!*
However, the whole email exchange contains so many great little nuggets that I can’t resist adding this little quote on, too:
YOU SHOULD SAY THANK YOU MILITARY PEOPLE FOR WHAT YOU DO SO THAT YOU CAN LIVE A FREE LIFE IN THIS COUNTRY. FREEDOM IS NOT FREE.
I can see how “freedom” having the word “free” in it can confuse the issue. Thanks for putting things straight, Marcia.
* In case you don’t know, a faggot is in fact a bundle of wood. What were you thinking?
If you visit regularly - it’s nice to delude myself that someone does - you’ll have noticed a few changes on the blog. For starters, my Daily Delicious news postings have been removed from the archives, mainly because it was getting a bit embarrassing to see there were more of those than actual posts. Oh, and the site’s gone through a major overhaul in design to try and make it a bit more user friendly and ridiculously good-looking. If you didn’t notice, you don’t visit often enough.
Finally, I’m going to try and remain a bit more focused and do “stuff” on a more regular basis because my brain is now on a diet to cut out fast-food junk that pollutes the airwaves. By stuff I mean my own interests: comments on film, photography, writing, philosophy, science and technology, politics and sociology etc. You’ll have noticed, for example, a lot more Word of the Day and Quote of the Day posts. These will be regular features as it’s my goal to try learn something new every day and to share it with whoever is interested. Can’t guarranttee that I’ll send ‘em up every day - I do have an annoying thing called work that bugs me a lot, and a wonderful wife who is not annoying but deserves nothing less than all my attention - but I’ll do my best.
Oh, and expect a few new topics, like Photographer Spotlight and Favourite Thinkers. See if you can figure out what they’ll be about.
I had an interesting conversation on the weekend with some friends, talking about Second Life, what it was, what it meant and so on. I held the view that Second Life fulfilled the requirements of being a type of drug, maybe even an hallucinogen, a highly addictive virtual substance that affected your senses and altered perception and reality. Having become addicted to old-school MUD’s in the mid-1990’s, I generally avoid online gaming as my addictive personality tends to not know when to quit, except perhaps too late (failing university was one consequence). So, when I hear of people dying from playing online games too much, or committing suicide, this strengthens my overall view that these things should be treated with extreme caution.
But something my one friend mentioned got me thinking. He asked, paraphrasing: “What’s the difference between what you do in Second Life, and what you do on, say, eBay? Or Amazon? Or any other internet activity?” And that’s, strictly speaking, true. A quick look at Second Life’s homepage shows 1.4 million users, and just over half a million dollars (US) spent in the last 24 hours (as of 16:51 GMT). But that’s not all. People have real-world business conferences in Second Life’s virtual setting, there’s traditional advertising and marketing and a virtual world representation of real world stores, musicians perform concerts, people buy, sell and rent virtual land, run businesses, and have legal disputes. People even play games within Second Life, as well as have traditional developers and coders within the game itself. There’s even porn.
What does it all mean? Is it just a game as many characterise it? Is it an OS or application platform as some people have suggested? Perhaps they’re both right. Myself, I view it as simply providing spatial references to the concept of “cyberspace”. (Perhaps we can call it “cybatial” if we want to get geeky). In Roger Clarke’s excellent work, Paradise Gained, Paradise Re-lost, he points out that “various experiences of using the Internet have” a “common” them, namely that “participants indulge in a ’shared hallucination’ that there is a virtual place or space within which they are interacting”. This is, incidently, where I thought that Second Life was a hallucinogen, but obviously the idea of Second Life being a drug applies to the internet as a whole.
The real significance of Second Life is that it has carried out what McLuhan termed the narcissus effect, named after the mythical story of Narcissus who saw his reflection in a pool of water and fell in love with it, eventually dying as he was unable to tear himself from gazing at the reflection. As he says in Understanding Media, “in the true Narcissus style, one is hypnotized by the amputation and extension of his own being in a new technical form”. What Second Life has accomplished is to amputate the physical bodies of its participants. You’re no longer just going to a webpage from your browser, you’re walking to a store or flying to a conference on an island.
What Second Life demonstrates is what the Internet of Things may well look like. Second Life 2.0 (as in the unknown future incarnation of Second Life or an equivalent) will be not just about amputating ourselves, but also our real-world objects once they are embedded with RFID, as well as places and locations. A virtual-world representation of the physical world is not too hard to imagine where you’re able to walk around your own home, invite guests over and have them interact with whatever you have in your house all within the confines of your computer. Got a new widescreen plasma? You buy it from the store, log online, and you can show it off to your virtual neighbours. Perhaps you could pop on some VR goggles and really walk around looking at a 3D representation of your home, design a few objects in Second Life, and have a fabber create them for you, all while a friend from Australia sits on your couch talking to you. Hey, nice Plasma.
As Cypher says in The Matrix, “It means buckle your seatbelt, Dorothy, ’cause Kansas is going byebye”.
I even suspect that real world geospatial data will be transplanted into “cyberspace”, meaning you could have a situation where you could physically interact with the real world - walking down the street, for example - but actually be viewing yourself in the game. Imagine: being able to live in a game, forever, that exists parallel to the real world. It’s not hard to conceive, because it does seem to be happening, slowly but surely, and Second Life is simply another sign of this, a reflection in the pool, not just of ourselves, but increasingly of our world.
One of my favourite skits from The Mitchell And Webb Look, currently showing on BBC Two on Thursdays, 9:30pm (GMT) is the Nazi Officer skit (view it here). They also have a MySpace site here. Well worth watching, utterly hilarious!.
Like many whites in South Africa, we had a maid from the moment we moved into our new house near Pinetown, Durban in around 1989 or so. Roughly 8% of South Africa’s workforce are thought to be domestic workers, the vast majority of whom are now earning R1000 or less per month (2003 figures). As late as 1999, the Congress of South African Trade Unions (COSATU) estimated that the average wage for domestic workers was between R369 and R549. The large domestic labour force reflects both South Africa’s apartheid past and its current struggle with job creation, poverty and unemployment, where “Between 1994 and 2003, unemployment rose by 153 percent … Unemployment is still 115 percent higher than it was in 1994.”
But our maid was not just a statistic, or someone who had to make the bed.
A new addition to the site: lowfatbrains’ mind, which is basically my own little store that I set up on Amazon using their new aStore feature available for their associates. If you go and have a look, it opens a new window (it seems their iframe code doesn’t fit in nicely with my site; it’s still in beta, so maybe that’ll change in future) and you’ll get a list of my featured books. At the moment they only allow nine books to be displayed, with no ability to add books to categories or sub-categories, so I’ll try and change the featured page on a fairly regular basis.
Moonrise through the branches of a Baobab Tree at Mopani camp in the Kruger National Park. From Wikipedia:
The baobab (Adansonia), or monkey bread tree are a genus of eight species of trees, native to Madagascar (the centre of diversity, with six species), and mainland Africa and Australia (one species in each). The mainland African species also occurs in Madagascar, but it is not a native of that country. The species reach heights of between 5â??25 m (exceptionally 30 m) tall, and up to 7 m (exceptionally 11 m) in trunk diameter. They are noted for storing water inside the swollen trunk, with the capacity to store up to 120,000 litres of water to endure the harsh drought conditions particular to each region [1]. All occur in seasonally arid areas, and are deciduous, shedding their leaves during the dry season. Some are reputed to be many thousands of years old, though as the wood does not produce annual growth rings, this is impossible to verify; few botanists give any credence to these claims of extreme age.
The Malagasy species are important components of the Madagascar dry deciduous forests. Within that biome, A. madagascariensis and A. rubrostipa occur specifically in the Anjajavy Forest, sometimes growing out of the tsingy limestone itself.
The leaves are also common as a leaf vegetable throughout the area of mainland African distribution, including Malawi, Zimbabwe, and the Sahel. They are eaten both fresh and in the form of a dry powder. In Nigeria, the leaves are locally known as kuka, and are used to make kuka soup. The dry pulp of the fruit, after separation from the seeds and fibers, is eaten directly or mixed into porridge or milk. The seeds are most used as a thickener for soups, but may also be fermented into a seasoning, roasted for direct consumption, or pounded to extract vegetable oil. The tree also provides a source of fibre, dye, and fuel.
The Boab was used by Indigenous Australians as a source of water and food; the leaves were used medicinally. They also painted and carved the outside of the fruits, and wore them as ornaments. A very large, hollow boab south of Derby, Western Australia was used in the 1890s as a lockup for Aboriginal prisoners on their way to Derby for sentencing. The Boab Prison Tree still stands and is now a tourist attraction.
New Scientist has an article on ‘Mashup Sites’, sites “created by merging data from two or more websites”. It was this interesting observation that caught my eye:
A hacker could feed false data to a crime location mashup, for example, perhaps to help raise property prices in a particular area by making it appear crime-free. A prankster could create bogus traffic jams on a mashup map, diverting traffic in such a way that queues are actually made worse.
This is simply using the content of the digital electric medium to manipulate people in a way similar to how governments and corporations can manipulate entire societies to go to war or to consume. However, the age old terms of propaganda and advertising are inadequate to explain today’s realities of manipulation and the ability of the “masters of the universe” to create other realities because today’s medium combines not only the old ones of TV, radio, and books into one, but also the actual active, participating minds of its users. I’ll explain this a bit more (I hope) but I’ll refer to this type of technique as “social hacking”. A good example of what I’m referring to (with a business twist) would the popular TV series Lost, which is completely viral new media using The Lost Experience, an ARG (Alternate Reality Game) that utilizes fake books and websites to create an immersive world in conjunction with the TV show. It’s no longer just a show, it’s another reality.
As the digital-electric medium as a whole morphs to whatever tomorrow brings, the power to manipulate social groups, cities or countries can belong to sole individuals, which is one reason why governments have such paranoia regarding hackers accessing restricted or sensitive information (or having criminal intent, depending on your outlook or their intent). But tomorrows buzzword will probably be “sockers” and the threat they pose to the civilized world because they will use the content of the medium to manipulate groups of people or societies. A forerunner to what I’m talking about is probably The Yes Men, hacking the business world to expose the WTO for what they are. How is what they do actually possible? Because today’s electronic medium represents the autoamputation of our mind, and tomorrow’s Internet of Things will be the autoamputation of reality. In other words, our minds and reality are becoming the content of the medium itself, and this has profound implications for us.