Re: FCC

The FCC has been given leeway to further censor free speech on the radio. Justice Scalia, according to the article, says "It was [reasonable] to determine that it made no sense to distinguish between literal and nonliteral uses of offensive words".

Why were no linguists involved in this decision? Words themselves, as one could ontologically argue, have no meaning, and are more accurately defined as sounds we've adopted to represent a series of emotions. If the FCC effectively "bans" words we use now, our language will evolve to create new emotive facilitators.

The big picture, Justices, is that you've given the architecture to the FCC to ban words at their own discretion. The bill of rights was created to protect dissenters and minorities in a nation ruled by democracy. This is a blatant breach of the 1^st Amendment, and in time, you will lead our people to suffer.

This is ironically sweet in some way. I'd like to believe the UN will make an initiative to end stupidity, but like any good corporation, it needs to keep its own self-interest in mind. Slime mold is apparently more intelligent than the Facebook collective. In above study, the mold controlled a robot to move out of the light. My dear friend Robert and I were discussing the potential of creating vehicles for this slime to create servants for chores, or more.

In some distant way, I'm reminded of Flubber. Only this slime is yellow, and not quite as bouncy.

Also from New Scientist, and in more recent news, Japanese scientists created a chemical that moves of its own volition. The impacts of this discovery could create an AI system with no electronics.

Abligurition: Such is my Life

... and is also why I'm poor. But I feel the merriment that comes with food and drink to be quite worth my spendthrift tendencies. The heat makes want for a softer world, and if it means throwing my money to the wind, then have at it!

Winter Cometh to Stranger Lands

The Catskill winter wanes -- Soon enough, the whiners will spark up again to complain about the heat. It's bad enough I had to deal with them all winter long.

Non sequitur moment,

If you want to get noticed, do one or more of the following:

1. Invent something
2. Be outrageous
3. Use psychology

The first gives the greatest testament to your account. The second is most effective, but shortest lasting. The third is most powerful, but if you're caught, your social status drops significantly. So far, I've had the most success with the second.

On the bright side, I'm looking forward to a single next semester.

The Ego and the Id - The Second Empire

As the internet melts into its next permutation of "instant blogging", I am predicting that, unless places like Myspace update their mission statements and adapt to this new concept of dynamic internet, they will inevitably falter.

Let's put a contemporary perspective on this. America (I am limiting myself to the scope of America to be safe, but I'm sure this is happening elsewhere) has become more and more sensitized to the idea of Moore's Law, the idea that the number of transistors (and therein technological power) doubles every two years. This is an exponential increase in our tech world, but more importantly, this is a concept that, in my opinion, works in the mind of culture as well.

Lately, Twitter has been all the rage, and with the reason that Facebook was so popular when it first came out: Twitter took the best of the old, refined it, and broke away from the excesses of Myspace et al. From the projected direction these type of websites are taking, we are approaching what I called earlier as the "dynamic internet".

A perfect analogy comes to mind of the website being a synapse, which will have synapses around which will fire, and you will inevitably gain a tiny, vague glimpse at the entire internet at each page view. When we connect the internet to our minds, which will inevitably happen somewhere in the future, we could develop a complete and absolute proxy-hive mentality. The internet has laid down the architecture for it, and as we approach the crux of the second empire of the internet, and "Web 3.0" looms on the horizon, the possibilities and implications are both frightening and astounding.

A Medium

The question came up recently, through some channel or another, as to the sort of music I listen to. I think I might have laughed the question off, because I typically don't have all day to answer the question in full. In fact, on the computer I'm authoring this very blog, I have almost 300 hours of music. I have another computer with just as many unique tracks, and a plethora of CDs that have been buried in my quest for more music.

But I've been thinking about it, and I would like to condense what I listen to down a little bit, into what I've listened to regularly over the last month or so.

Voila:

AFI, Alizée, Arcade Fire, Ayumi Hamasaki, The Beatles, Black Moth Super Rainbow, Blaqk Audio, Blue Öyster Cult, Bright Eyes, Dinosaur Jr., Dir en Grey, Dire Straits, Fall Out Boy, Frank Zappa, Goo Goo Dolls, Green Day, Hellogoodbye, Imogen Heap, Jean Michel Jarre, John Frusciante, Liz Phair, Men At Work, Metallica, Modest Mouse, My Chemical Romance, Neutral Milk Hotel, Opeth, Peter Gabriel, Pink Floyd, Pixies, The Police, Polyphonic Spree, Rush, Sonic Youth, Stephen Malkmus, Tiger Army, Trivium


Si tu aimes ma musique, super!

For A While Now

I am now legitimately excited, because again, Mozilla has impressed me more than the sun. Not that it says anything positive about my preferences, but if you saunter on over to Flock.com, you can pick up on what I believe will be the next big browser. Flock is built to seamlessly integrate with many common applications used today, is already robust and powerful like its older sister, Firefox, and has dazzled me with an array of beautiful features that I swear have come to me periodically in my dreams. Web 2.0 never made more sense.