I Kill Spies

this CD is the coolest thing ever
it's putting me in a coma
I feel like I'm on drugs
I have to save the rest for later

Wow this thing is great- possibly greater than Sigur Ros.

Quiet Icelandic ambient / electronica that sounds like you are in a waking dream- I would let you listen to it, but that would mean letting you touch my copy, and I will slit your throat and violate your corpse before that happens.

B000066HH0

SRI’s Centibots project. Kinda scary. It’s funded by DARPA… just like SkyNet.
Web link of note: Centibots
(At http://www.ai.sri.com/centibots/)

Jason Salavon
Web link of note: Jason Salavon
(At http://www.salavon.com)

The Bayeux Tapestry, from 12th century France, is a pictoral narrative of the 100 years’ war
Web link of note: The Bayeux Tapestry
(At http://www.bayeuxtapestry.org.uk/)

The Long Now Foundation creates things that will last “forever”- clocks, libraries… the exercise is fascinating. The purpose statement on their site is great reading by itself; they also have a book, “The Clock of the Long Now: Time and Responsibility: The Ideas Behind the World’s Slowest Computer“

Their Clock of the Long Now is designed to tell accurate time for 25,000 years. How would that be possible? The issues involved are staggering. The clock is designed to withstand corrosion and can be re-set using the sun and no knowledge of written language or tools. The clock has been designed to withstand the fall of civilization; it can be fixed with bronze-age tools.

No less ambitious is the Rosetta Project (part of the Library project), a series of spherical artifacts intended to make the task of translating all our written languages easer for archaeologists 10,000 years into the future. Making historical artifacts for the future.

A real-life application of this same thought exercise: the WIPP, a giant underground repository for nuclear waste. It will be radioactive for the next 25,000 years. How do you warn future generations away from the site? They won’t speak English, they will not have computers, they may not even read.

Fortunately there was a panel studying just this question, and it may be read in Sandia Laboratory‘s publication, Expert Judgment on Inadvertant Human Intrusion into the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, 1993. I love reading this thing; I should just get a copy somehow. My favorite part is the designs for a purposely inhospitable architecture that will last 20,000 years, and also the 3 panel “See Dick Die” cartoon.

• Here’s an excerpt from that paper
• ABC news article about WIPP
• An excerpt from DEEP TIME by Gregory Benford (Harper-Collins, 2000) called Ten Thousand Years of Solitude

The Clock of the Long Now is designed to tell accurate time for 25,000 years. The clock has been designed to withstand the fall of civilization; it can be fixed with bronze-age tools.

Clock of the Long Now, a clock designed by the Long Now Foundation to tell accurate time for 20,000 years
Web link of note: Clock of the Long Now
(At http://www.longnow.org/10kclock/clock.htm)

Library Project for the Long Now Foundation
Web link of note: Long Now Library Project
(At http://www.longnow.org/10klibrary/libIdeas.htm)

TOBY: http://www.meetup.com/
BRIAN: what is this
TOBY: you ever hear of meetups?
BRIAN: they look to be largly political
TOBY: you can create meetings for just about anything
TOBY: there is one in there for goth
TOBY: and another for chihuahuas
BRIAN: excellent
BRIAN: for petting or eating?
TOBY: who knows
TOBY: maybe we should attend meeting
TOBY: and say, I think the legs taste the best
BRIAN: yeah and get pelted with tiny sweaters

You know how milk is color-coded by what type of milk it is? It’s not consistent across companies, so it’s not like an industry standard or anything, but for example the Whole Milk will have a red label, the Reduced Fat (2%) will be blue, the Low Fat (1%) will be green, the Non Fat will be pink… and but for the color differences, they all have the same general design. Sometimes you get exotic types of milk like Butter Milk or Heavy Cream, or Eggnog.

I dreamed last night that I was looking at a half-gallon carton of milk, mostly white with a pastel green label. Where the phrase “Reduced Fat Milk” would usually be, there was just a single word: PARROT.

So now my question is, is it Parrot-Flavored Milk? Maybe made with actual Parrot? Or milk for consumption by parrots? I can just see a parrot dairy with rows and rows of parrots being milked.

Or maybe there is no milk in there at all, just a parrot. I totally should have bought one just to find out.

Turns out there is a real show called “EX-treme Dating,” which isn’t exactly the spelling we used, but it still cracks me up… I was worried for a second but it sounds like it’s every bit as bad as our hypothetical show. Although I haven’t heard of the girl having to date a sodomy clown.

Plus, as you can see, it looks like there is yet another “Xtreme” product out there- although this is not so bad, because

1. how obvious is “Xtreme” anyway
2. When we used the phrase Xtreme it was supposed to be stupid… which looks to be pretty accurate thus far!

On the way to Burning Man; I was in a terrifically bad mood from herding flakes for the last 20 hours and we pulled up next to some frat guys wearing no shirts and wrap-around sunglasses. I said “fuck you lookin at, ya X-Games motha fucka?” or something like that…