Wednesday, 2 June 2010

What goods does Israel bar from the Gaza Strip?

(Click to enlarge)
@'The Economist'

"one on one" "terrorists"?

"I was the second to be lowered in by rope," said Captain R. "My comrade who had already been dropped in was surrounded by a bunch of people. It started off as a one-on-one fight, but then more and more people started jumping us. I had to fight against quite a few terrorists who were armed with knives and batons."

Fast-Roping 101



Currently reading looking at the pictures...

Dennis Hopper, one of Hollywood's last great cult figures, is best known for his depiction of social outcasts in films such as "Rebel Without a Cause" and "Apocalypse Now", as well as for directing classic films like "Easy Rider". Hopper has also, however, made a name for himself as an artist and a photographer. His photographic chronicle of America in the 1960s, a decade marked by awakening and rebellion and documented by Hopper in forceful black-and-white pictures, has now become legendary. "A System of Moments", published on the occasion of a major retrospective exhibition at the MAK, Vienna, is a kaleidoscopic documentation of painting, photography, film, and life. It is the first comprehensive publication that takes in to account all of the diverse artistic activities in Hopper's nearly 50-year career, and it examines particularly the subtle connection between genres that is a hallmark of his work. For the first time, recent photographic works, which emerged after a long hiatus from the medium in the 1990s, are also presented. A major retrospective that will be the definitive statement on Hopper's career
 
I picked this up second hand  years ago, unfortunately (for me) it is the German language edition. 
Nonetheless a great collection of Hopper's photographs and artwork.

For Spacebubs XXX

Meet the Last Generation of Typewriter Repairmen

It’s easy to forget how much time computer word-processing programs have saved the writing public. Before computers, any typewritten document that needed revision had to be retyped again and again. And that’s hardly the end of it. Total up all the hours that people spent whiting out errors before the Delete key … how many zeroes would the final figure have? Combine the surface area of every lumpy smudge of liquid paper: Would it cover the country? The world?
Despite these inefficiencies, there are a few places where typewriters still clack away. New York City police stations, the desks of a few stubborn hangers-on, and, increasingly, the apartments of hip young people who have a fetish for the retro. Mechanical devices with a lot of moving parts, typewriters require maintenance by technicians with specialized knowledge and years of experience. A surprising number of people still make their living meeting that demand.
Wired.com takes a look back at these charming machines and visits three Bay Area workshops whose proprietors keep hearse-colored Remingtons and Underwoods from disappearing into the grave...
Continue reading
I am trying SO hard NOT to think about the 1916 Remington that I used to have that I came home one day only to find that my partner of the time had got rid of...

♪♫ Shuttleworth (feat. Mark E. Smith - England's Heartbeat


(Thanx HerrB!)

Exploring Music’s Hold on the Mind

Three years ago, when Oxford University Press published “Music, Language, and the Brain,” Oliver Sacks described it as “a major synthesis that will be indispensable to neuroscientists.” The author of that volume, Aniruddh D. Patel, a 44-year-old senior fellow at the Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, was in New York City in May. We spoke over coffee for more than an hour and later by telephone. An edited and condensed version of the conversations follows.
Q. YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF AS A NEUROSCIENTIST OF MUSIC. THIS HAS TO BE A NEW PROFESSION. HOW DID YOU COME TO IT?
A. I’ve been passionate about two things since childhood — science and music. At graduate school, Harvard, I hoped to combine the two.
But studying with E.O. Wilson, I quite naturally got caught up with ants. In 1990, I found myself in Australia doing fieldwork on ants for a Ph.D. thesis. And there, I had this epiphany: the only thing I really wanted to do was study the biology of how humans make and process music.
I wondered if the drive to make it was innate, a product of our evolution, as Darwin had speculated. Did we have a special neurobiological capacity for music, as we do for language and grammar? So from Australia, I wrote Wilson that there was no way I could continue with ants. Amazingly, he wrote: “You must follow your passion. Come back to Harvard, and we’ll give it a shot.”
Wilson and Evan Balaban, a birdsong biologist who taught me about the neurobiology of auditory communication, mentored me through my thesis, which was called “A Biological Study of the Relationship Between Language and Music.” When I defended it in 1996, this was unusual scholarship. The neurobiology of music wasn’t yet a recognized field.
Q. WHEN DID IT GO MAINSTREAM?
A. Not too long after that. By the late 1990s, all of neuroscience was being transformed by the widespread use of imaging technologies.
Because it became possible to learn how the brain was affected when people engaged in certain activities, it became acceptable to study things previously considered fringy. Today you have the neuroscience of economics, of music, of everything.
I published a paper in 1998 that really surprised people. It was the first imaging study showing what happens when the brain processes musical grammar as compared with what happens when it processes language. From what we learned, this was occurring in an overlapping way within the brain. And this was a clue that the neurobiology of music could give us a new path to access and perhaps even heal some language disabilities.
Q. HOW WOULD THAT WORK?
A. One example. There’s a neurologist in Boston, Gottfried Schlaug, who uses music therapy to return some language to stroke victims. He has them learn simple phrases by singing them. This has proved more effective than having them repeat spoken phrases, the traditional therapy. Schlaug’s work suggests that when the language part of the brain has been damaged, you can sometimes recruit the part that processes music to take over.
Music neuroscience is also helping us understand Alzheimer’s. There are Alzheimer’s patients who cannot remember their spouse. But they can remember every word of a song they learned as a kid. By studying this, we’re learning about how memory works.
Q. RECENTLY, YOU’VE BEEN WORKING WITH A SULFUR-CRESTED COCKATOO NAMED SNOWBALL. WHAT PROMPTED THE COLLABORATION?
A. Before I encountered Snowball, I wondered whether human music had been shaped for our brains by evolution — meaning, it helped us survive at some point. Well, in 2008, a colleague asked me to view a YouTube video of a cockatoo who appeared to be dancing to the beat of “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys!
My jaw hit the floor. If you saw a video of a dog reading a newspaper out loud, you’d be pretty impressed, right? To people in the music community, a cockatoo dancing to a beat was like that. This was supposed to be, some said, a uniquely human behavior! If this was real, it meant that the bird might have circuits in its brain for processing beat similar to ours.
Q. WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THIS INSIGHT?
A. I phoned up the bird shelter in Indiana where Snowball lived and talked to the director who told me his story. A man had dropped him off with a CD and the comment, “Snowball likes to dance to this.” One day, Irena Schulz, the proprietor, played “Everybody” to amuse the abandoned creature. And Snowball began to move. Irena then made the YouTube video, which immediately went viral. Millions saw it.
“Let’s design an experiment to see if this is real,” I proposed to Irena, who had a science background herself. We took the Backstreet Boys song, sped it up and slowed it down at 11 different tempos, then videoed what Snowball did to each. For 9 out of the 11 variations, the bird moved to the beat, which meant that he’d processed the music in his brain and his muscles had responded. So now we had the first documented case of a nonhuman animal who, without training, could sense a beat out of music and move to it.
Q. YOU SAY THAT SNOWBALL CHANGED YOUR THINKING. HOW?
A. Before Snowball, I wondered if moving to a musical beat was uniquely human. Snowball doesn’t need to dance to survive, and yet, he did. Perhaps, this was true of humans, too?
Since working with Snowball, I’ve come to think we could learn more music neuroscience by studying the behaviors of not just parrots, but perhaps dolphins, seals, songbirds — also vocal learners.
We eventually published the Snowball research in Current Biology. A group at Harvard published a paper right alongside ours in which they surveyed thousands of YouTube videos to see if there were other animals spontaneously moving to a beat. They found about 12 or 13 parrots. No dogs. No cats. No horses.
What do humans have in common with parrots? Both species are vocal learners, with the ability to imitate sounds. We share that rare skill with parrots. In that one respect, our brains are more like those of parrots than chimpanzees. Since vocal learning creates links between the hearing and movement centers of the brain, I hypothesized that this is what you need to be able to move to beat of music.
Q. IS IT DIFFICULT TO FIND MONEY FOR THIS TYPE OF RESEARCH?
A. It easier than it used to be. One of the founders of this field, Dr. Robert Zatorre, before 2000, he never used the word music in a grant application. He knew it would get turned down automatically because people thought this was not scientific. Instead, he used terms like “complex nonlinguistic auditory processing.”
But in recent years, it’s become O.K. to say: I study music and the brain. 
Claudia Dreifus @'NY Times'

A Special Place in Hell / The Second Gaza War: Israel lost at sea

HA?

Steve Bell @'The Guardian'
Sage Francis SageFrancisSFR
had a wonderful 6 hour dance at border patrol today. Never again. Never ever again. Ever.

Aquaman RIP

Dennis Hopper Beatnik Poetry Reading at the Shady Rest Hotel

VLR - Research: Heinrich Mueller

   
Download @ Soundcloud

Der Zyklus - Optical Fingerprint Correlation
Arpanet - NTT DoCoMo
Sébastien Tellier - Kilometer (Arpanet Remix)
Dopplereffekt - Hyperelliptic Surfaces
Arpanet: Großvater Paradoxon
Der Zyklus - Cherenkov Radiation
AIR - Le Soleil Est Pres De Moi (Dopplereffekt Remix)
Arpanet - Event Horizon
Japanese Telecom - Enter Mrs. Suzuki
Station Rose - Dave (Heinrich Mueller: Stanley Kubricks Vision Mix)
Dopplereffekt - Pornoactress
Japanese Telecom - The Making of Ultraman
Tuxedomoon - What Use (Heinrich Mueller Technik Mix)
Japanese Telecom - Nipponese Robots
Dopplereffekt - Scientist
The Hacker - Fadin' Away (Heinrich Mueller Remix)
Arpanet - Probability Densities
Ar2D - Inside The Rock (Heinrich Mueller Anti De Sitter Space Mix)
Japanese Telecom - Mounting Yoko
Der Zyklus - Der Tonimpulstest
ScanX - Wasteland (Prototype 2 by Dr Finn & Otto Henke)
Glass Domain - Fairy
Intellitronic - Pixel
Arpanet - Software Version
Der Zyklus - Formenverwandler
Kavinsky - Arpanet Nightdrive Rework
Le Car - Cinematic Automatic (Heinrich Mueller Remix)
Dopplereffekt - Myon-Neutrino

(Thanx to 'mnml ssgs'!)

That Sounds Good To Me


With this version the UK would have probably done a bit better in the Eurovision Song Contest...

The Enemy in Your Pants


Great gallery "The Enemy in Your Pants - The military’s decades-long war against STDs"

What does Israel fear from media coverage?

HA!

The English is clear enough to lorry drivers - but the Welsh reads "I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated."

Twitter says:

That Michael Dawson, Tom Huddlestone and Scott Parker will join Leighton Baines, Adam Johnson, Theo Walcott and Darren Bent as the seven players dropped for the England World Cup squad. Official confirmation will be in half an hour.
UPDATE:
ENGLAND'S 2010 WORLD CUP SQUAD:
Goalkeepers: 
 Joe Hart, David James, Robert Green.
Defenders: 
Jamie Carragher, Ashley Cole, Rio Ferdinand, Glen Johnson, Ledley King, John Terry, Matthew Upson, Stephen Warnock
Midfielders:
  Gareth Barry, Michael Carrick, Joe Cole, Steven Gerrard, Frank Lampard, Aaron Lennon, James Milner, Shaun Wright-Phillips.
Forwards: 
 Peter Crouch, Jermain Defoe, Emile Heskey, Wayne Rooney

WTF??? LibConDems announce that they....

Tuesday, 1 June 2010

Death toll from Gaza aid attack hits 20

The death toll from the Israeli navy's takeover of a Gaza aid convoy has risen to 20 while Israel carefully censors reports on the casualties from the attack.
Gaza Freedom Flotilla came under fire early on Monday by Israeli navy forces in international waters more than 150km (90 miles) off the coast of Gaza.
The six-ship aid fleet was soon stormed by commandos descending from helicopters.
At least 20 people were killed in the takeover of the Gaza aid convoy, al-Aqsa TV channel reported, saying that more than 50 people, including leader of the Palestinian Islamic Movement Sheikh Raed Salah, were wounded in the attack.
The news trickled through the Israeli military censorship which has sought to block the reporting of any information about the casualties.
A report on the Israeli radio said the censorship was aimed at covering up the number of casualties brought to Israeli hospitals for treatment.
Meanwhile, Israeli Trade and Industry Minister Binyamin Ben-Eliezer expressed regret for the deaths aboard the Gaza aid ships.
"The images are certainly not pleasant. I can only voice regret at all the fatalities," he told Israel's Army Radio.
The comments come as the first official acknowledgement by Tel Aviv that the attack had turned fatal.
Israel had initially declined to comment on the reports of casualties from the takeover of the aid ships.

WTF???

 From today's Murdoch owned Sun newspaper in the UK!

HA!

Speaking as someone who has NEVER driven a car in my life...I really like this one!

 Competition @'Greenpeace'
Ends June 28th
More
"If this is what modern womanhood means, then just fucking veil me and sew up all my holes. Good night."
- Lindy West of Stranger.com on 'Sex & The City 2'

Review: Arab Strap - Scenes of a Sexual Nature (Boxset)

Arab Strap: "Daughters of Darkness"
From Scenes of a Sexual Nature (Chemikal Underground; 2010)
Box sets may be the fallback preserve of the over-investor, but every now and then a band put one out you’d gladly sell off both kidneys for. I’m not talking about the likes of the never-before-heard Courtney Love archive of “You Know You’re Right” masters—I’m talking about Arab Strap, Falkirk’s premier confessors of sleaze, and the time capsule they’ve just dropped to fans. After calling it quits in 2006 to the dismay of feral romantics everywhere, Aidan Moffat and Malcolm Middleton forged respectable solo careers for themselves—Malcolm’s “We’re All Going To Die” was championed by Radio 1 for Christmas No. 1 2007, and Aidan…well, Aidan’s plain amazing. Their 1000-only Scenes of a Sexual Nature box sees them re-teaming to unearth old treasures, and while sixty sheets may seem a little steep, just look at what it gets you in the mail: repressed debut LP, repressed sequel to debut LP, newly-pressed LP of late nineties Peel Sessions, CD compilation of late nineties EPs, double-sided poster of reviews from newspapers, individually replicated “green frog demo” cassette that first got the label’s attention, handwritten liner notes from the band’s own Sharpie, a fat CD of MP3 backups, photos of the girls Aidan bedded between albums, and both singer’s Facebook passwords.
OK, so those last two items were a hoax, but seriously: that’s a pretty big kill for a day’s wages. The salivator though is new track “Daughters of Darkness”, which the band polished off in their original studio to show how seriously they’re taking this arrivederci. Seriousness was something the Strap always liked to get sticky with: festooned in bedroom paranoia, Moffat lays down his signature mutter over crashing guitar and piano, recounting the kind of Saturday night that keeps married people safely indoors. “Someone cracks a joke I’m not supposed to get so I pretend it’s over my head and try not to look too hurt / But the joke’s on them: they don’t know I’ve been reading their diaries,” he grumbles. Like John Wayne in The Shootist, this is the cowboys’ last night in town, though with no young Ron Howard to watch their backs menace bubbles from the outset. “Ecstasy killed the casuals,” muses Moffat at one point; “They used to wait for us outside and chase us home, but now they chat to us like old chums and try to sell us drugs.” One pick-up later, Aidan and pals hit the club, receptors opened up in their brains. “It’s amazing what a mirrorball and the right frame of mind can do,” he ponders from the safety of the girls’ toilet while bouncing his thoughts off the drum machine.
Unfortunately he’s not the only one bouncing, and Middleton’s trusty three-chord explosion signifies the lights-up, ejection, and fight. Some of those casuals weren’t quite so casual after all, and are now back from a night of bombing jellies to get a bit merry with weapons. As the band’s mate gets filled in and sliced on the pavement, you can’t help but recall their Peel Session mainstay “The First Big Weekend”—“Daughters” is essentially that track recycled; tweaked to take on the butterfly knife generation and cresting not with The Simpsons but casualty, where agency nurses piece the stabee back together. Moffat gets saved from a crisis of conscience by the twinkle in a wise girl’s eye, and as he vows to stick around for the end of the night you’re grateful this isn’t the end. Except, of course, that it is. Bon voyage, motherfuckers. You were good.


:: Buy Scenes of a Sexual Nature
George Bass @'cokemachineglow'

Death to “Piracy”: Should All Music Sharing Be Free?


Israel flotilla raid - fallout live @ The Guardian

The Palestinian-led International Solidarity Movement is reporting that a US activist injured in protests in the West Bank yesterday has lost her eye.
An American solidarity activist was shot in the face with a tear gas canister during a demonstration in Qalandiya, today. Emily Henochowicz is currently in Hadassah Hospital in Jerusalem undergoing surgery to remove her left eye, following the demonstration that was held in protest to Israel's murder of at least 10 civilians aboard the Gaza Freedom Flotilla in international waters this morning.
21-year old Emily Henochowicz was hit in the face with a tear gas projectile fired directly at her by an Israeli soldier during the demonstration at Qalandiya checkpoint today. Israeli occupation forces fired volleys of tear gas at unarmed Palestinian and international protesters, causing mass panic amongst the demonstrators and those queuing at the largest checkpoint separating the West Bank and Israel.
This YouTube video, posted by RussiaToday, appears to show Emily being carried to safety following a protest in Qalandiya.



Hunter S. Thompson: Self Portrait, After Beating by Hell's Angels circa 1960s

 M + B Gallery, West Hollywood

Dennis Hopper: Photographs

Tuesday Weld, 1965 © Dennis Hopper

Why the Digital Economy Act simply won't work

With the passage into law of the dread Digital Economy Act comes Ofcom's guidelines for when and how rightsholders will be able to disconnect entire families from the internet because someone on or near their premises is accused of copyright infringement.
Consumer rights groups and privacy groups – such as the Open Rights Group, the Citizens Advice Bureau, Which, and Consumer Focus – participated in the process, making the Ofcom rules as good as possible (an exercise that, unfortunately, is a little like making the guillotine as comfortable as possible).
But this isn't the last word in the copyfight – not even close. Because disconnection for downloaders will only serve to alienate entertainment industry customers (remember that the most avid downloaders are also the most avid buyers – "most avid" being the operative word here – the 20% of customers who account for 80% of sales, downloading, concert tickets, box-office revenue, DVDs, T-shirts, action figures, etc). And because those who download most avidly will simply change tactics.
The entertainment industry's capacity to gather evidence and make accusations against downloaders relies on the fact that, at present, most downloading systems don't bother to encrypt the traffic or disguise the user's identity. Neither of these things are very hard to do, though both are computationally more expensive than the alternative. But, in case you haven't noticed, computation is getting cheaper all the time.
Once non-anonymous, non-encrypted downloading bears a significant risk, downloaders will simple switch to anonymised, encrypted alternatives.
For example, SSL-based proxies like Sweden's IPREDator (use of which is also a tonic against identity thieves and other creeps who may be monitoring your network connection) provide a nigh-impenetrable layer of misdirection that confounds anyone hoping to trace a download session back to a user. And services like Easynews.com provide encrypted access to enormous libraries of material including infringing copies of popular shows, music and movies.
So why worry? If users won't be deterred from downloading – and may even be driven to start taking care to protect their connections from snoops and creeps – then how bad will the Digital Economy Act be?
Bad.
Because the naive user who only downloads occasionally will still be in harm's way, as will his family or housemates if his connection is disconnected by an entertainment bully.
And because once the state decides that it has a duty to police the internet to maximise the profits of a few entertainment companies (no matter what the public expense), it sets itself on a path of ever-more-restrictive measures. Once disconnection drives downloaders to make use of SSL-based proxies, watch for Big Content to inveigle their friends in parliament to enact laws prohibiting the use of virtual private networks – never mind that these are the best practice of anyone trying to safeguard a corporate or organisational network.
Once the Act drives downloaders to use SSL-encrypted services that are harder to monitor, watch for the entertainment lobby to ask for great swaths of the internet to be blocked by the Great Firewall of Britain that the Act also provides for.
Once you swallow a spider to catch a fly, you're on a course to swallow a bird to catch the spider, a cat to catch the bird, and so on until you swallow a horse – and every toddler knows that happens next.
Cory Doctorow @'The Guardian'

"I just don't know where to turn if I'm too bad even for a porn recovery group. Makes me want to cry.”

 

Why I don't watch TV

Sydney Morning Herald editor says journalists safe but being held in Israeli jail

Israel: Pirates?

Via Craig Murray
A word on the legal position, which is very plain. To attack a foreign flagged vessel in international waters is illegal. It is not piracy, as the Israeli vessels carried a military commission. It is rather an act of illegal warfare.
Because the incident took place on the high seas does not mean however that international law is the only applicable law. The Law of the Sea is quite plain that, when an incident takes place on a ship on the high seas (outside anybody’s territorial waters) the applicable law is that of the flag state of the ship on which the incident occurred. In legal terms, the Turkish ship was Turkish territory.
There are therefore two clear legal possibilities.
Possibility one is that the Israeli commandos were acting on behalf of the government of Israel in killing the activists on the ships. In that case Israel is in a position of war with Turkey, and the act falls under international jurisdiction as a war crime.
Possibility two is that, if the killings were not authorised Israeli military action, they were acts of murder under Turkish jurisdiction. If Israel does not consider itself in a position of war with Turkey, then it must hand over the commandos involved for trial in Turkey under Turkish law.
In brief, if Israel and Turkey are not at war, then it is Turkish law which is applicable to what happened on the ship. It is for Turkey, not Israel, to carry out any inquiry or investigation into events and to initiate any prosecutions. Israel is obliged to hand over indicted personnel for prosecution.

Info released on Saturday!

The Israeli army and navy, under direct supervision and orders from the Israeli government, prepared a plan dubbed “Operation Sky Wind” to attack the Freedom Flotilla” heading to Gaza and kidnap and the activists onboard.
Make-shift prison in Ashdod - Arabs48
Make-shift prison in Ashdod - Arabs48
Israeli sources reported that the navy had concluded all preparations to takeover the Freedom Flotilla, by force in needed, in an attempt to prevent it from reaching the Gaza coast to break the four-year long ongoing siege.
The planned offensive includes four stages;
1. Warning stage; the navy will try to stop the ships from reaching a “line” dubbed
as a red line, should the ships reach the designated line, they will be warned and informed that they “violate the law”.
2. Boarding and controlling the ships; should the ships fail to adhere to the demands of the navy, the navy will attack and control the eight ships carrying nearly 800 activists. The ships will then be taken to Ashdod Port and the activists will be detained in a huge tent installed for this purpose.
3. Deportation by air; Israeli soldiers and policemen would order the detained activists to sign statements accepting to be deported to their countries, and will be deported by air via the Ben Gurion Airport.
4. Arrest before deportation; those who refuse to sign deportation statements, will be arrested, sent to medical examination, then transferred to the Nahshon Brigade which belongs to the Israeli Prison Administration before being sent to Be’er Sheva Prison and likely other prisons.
They will be prosecuted and deported at a later stage.
Some 600 human rights activists boarding the eight solidarity ships heading to Gaza said that they are determined to reach Gaza regardless of Israel’s threats.
Greta Berlin, spokesperson of the Free Gaza Movement, stated that “nothing is going to stop the ships”, and that the human rights activists are determined to break the illegal Israeli siege on 1.5 million Palestinian in Gaza, and deliver the humanitarian supplies. 
@'International Middle East Media Centre'
(Thanx Fifi!)

Dialectic Physics

One through nine, no maybes, no supposes, no fractions. You can't travel in space, you can't go out into space, you know, without, like, you know, uh, with fractions - what are you going to land on - one-quarter, three-eighths? What are you going to do when you go from here to Venus or something? That's dialectic physics.

How To Destroy Angels - Free Download


                       

                           

WOW!


Dulux Walls - Global film for the Let's Colour Campaign by Euro RSCG London
Let's Colour is a worldwide initiative to transform grey spaces with colourful paint.
This 2 minute global film was shot by multi-award winning director Adam Berg over four weeks in Brazil, France, London and India. Every location is real and they remain transformed by a palette consisting of 120 different colours. The people in the film are not actors, they are real people who rolled up their sleeves to transform their community with colour.
Read more about the Let's Colour project here:
www.letscolourproject.com/blog
www.letscolourproject.com

Has Israel lost lone Muslim ally Turkey?