The FAA has created a Google Map mash-up site listing the location of every single military installation in the USA. What a nice favor to, uh, law abiding airline pilots terrorist splinter cells and crazy white power militias.
Still, it's a pretty good mash-up. Check out SeeAndAvoid.org to play with it.
Seen on my pal Noah's Danger Room blog.
My friend Alice just published a great article in FirstMonday (an online peer-reviewed academic journal) about the persistence of moral panic over the sexual vulnerability of kids and teens online -- from the great cyberporn panic of 1996 to the tizzy in a teapot over MySpace predators today.
The article's especially timely, given the recent news that Verizon, Sprint and TWC will now be monitoring the bits they carry, and blocking users' access to newsgroups that have been identified as child porn destinations.
Now, I'm against child pornography in all forms, but I hardly think an ineffective witch hunt (honestly, how many microseconds will it take for the pervs to create a viable workaround?) is sufficient justification to destroy the legislatively-enforced protection that ISPs have against culpability for the actions of their users, and to further erode what little privacy we have left in this country.
What's next -- the telcos being held responsible for monitoring the content of our private phone conversations? Oh, wait a second...
From Alice's article:
Thus, I conclude that the furor over MySpace is disproportionate to the amount of harm produced by the site. Indeed, the furor over online predators seems also to be disproportionate. Rather than focusing on nebulous “predators,” it seems that parents, teachers, and social workers should emphasize identifying and preventing abuse in specific, local community settings.
Word to the mothaf*cka, Alice!
Those of you who know me (and a very few others) know I've been drawing comix on and off since the puberty years. I just started a new strip, called "Liberty," on the Village Voice website. It'll be a weekly (we're not sure what day yet, so stay tuned).
Below is the first panel of the first strip:
(thanks for the hook-up, Mike!)
UPDATE: There's a bit of a political struggle at the Voice site over whether this strip will continue to run. How very exciting. Either way, I'll let you know.
Mike Clancy over at the Village Voice's Runnin' Scared blog posted this great dance remix of Bill O'Reilly dropping the F-bomb. I particularly like the club-style appropriations of him dismissively saying "Go!".
Strangely, no Sue Simmons F-bomb remixes yet on GooTube.
UPDATE: Runnin' Scared posted another one. Good stuff.
Ever want to see Ronald McDonald and Hitler go at it head-to-head? Or how about God vs. a killer whale? Back when I was a bored teen, we could only fantasize about our ideal deathmatches. These days, if you can think it, you can make it happen.
Chris, a student in my Videogames class at NYU, recently hipped us to M.U.G.E.N., a free platform for creating characters and boards to use in a 2D, 2-player fighter. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of MUGEN characters available for free download from sites like this and this. Or, if that's not enough for you, you can make your own (just start with this video tutorial).
Below: Morrigan from Darkstalkers vs. Ronald McDonald (fighting in a BK parking lot).
One of my arguments about configurability is that it exposes cognitive processes that were once private and internal into the harsh (and/or nurturing) light of public scrutiny. Back in ye olden times, a composer would hear a bunch of influences, integrate and assemble those influences inside his skull, and expose us to the results. Now, we can listen live as this process happens, and even watch a DJ drag and drop samples and effects into Ableton Live.
The industrial side of the equation has a similar story arc. Once upon a time, we could buy a CD or vinyl record, and imagine what each of the parts sounded like on their own (apparently, this is part of the reason nonmusicians like to smoke pot and listen to music -- it allows them to hear the parts separately the way musicians do). Nowadays, musicians will often post the isolated component tracks (e.g. vocals, drums, guitar) to the internet, and invite fans to remix them (as Radiohead did recently).
Well, my crazy composer friend Scott Pinkmountain has taken things to the proverbial next level. He's a music analyst over at Pandora, and he's just produced a fascinating podcast episode for the site where he narrates his compositional decisions while he pulls the tracks of a song apart and reassembles them.
It's really entertaining stuff. Give it a listen.
Over at the blog for my copyright class at NYU, a musician student of mine posted a horrific story. The managers at Think Coffee, a "socially conscious" cafe catering to the university crowd (it's practically my second office) interrupted her band during a charity show, making the absurd claim that the band was not allowed to play cover songs (never mind that the other bands on the roster had, and that Think plays commercial music over their speakers all day every day).
It's worth reading the whole post, not only for my student's story, but also for her excellent analysis about the chilling effects of copyright ignorance and overcaution.
My friend Arnie, with the assistance of the state of Hawaii, just launched two sites pegged to the fiftieth state's 50th anniversary: a general-purpose site called StatehoodHawaii.org, and a Web 2.0 social-networky site called fifdififdi.com (think phonetically).
The sites are pretty cool. Lots of archival photo/video (much of it licensed under Creative Commons 3.0), plus tons of Web 2.0 features -- geotagging, social networking, blogs and so forth. Nice work, man. Wish I was Hawaiian.
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