Rarely will you see the adult entertainment industry and religious groups in “relative agreement”:http://www.cbc.ca/technology/story/2007/03/26/tech-porn.html, but strong lobbying by both camps influenced “today’s decision”:http://www.cnn.com/2007/TECH/internet/03/30/domain.xxx.ap/index.html?eref=rss_tech by Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers to reject creating .xxx domains for online pornography sites. The adult entertainment industry feared that having .xxx domains would make it easier for governments censor and control content, while religious groups believed that creating such domains would greatly increase the amount of graphic sexual content on the internet. Internet politics too makes strange bedfellows.
Category Archives: Uncategorized
Introducing Mike Pellegrino
Mike is a long-time friend of mine and after long consideration, he has agreed to join the Duenos staff bringing our size to a formidable two. Mike is a senior at the University of Illinois with designs on a future in law and world domination. His curiosity is piqued by technology, hockey, video games, mathematics and every possible form of politics. Here’s a picture of Mike looking into the distance at the start of his second year as an RA:
Last Harry Potter book jacket unveiled
Muggles rejoice! The richest person in the UK is that much closer to becoming even richer. In addition to having the “least navigable web-page in history”:http://www.jkrowling.com/accessible/en/ JK Rowling has finished the _Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows_ and with it the whole Harry Potter series. Here are the British book jackets, no word yet on the American ones.
Oh how much has changed since the first book came out in 1997. Words like quidditch and muggles weren’t parts of the vernacular, Alan Rickman wasn’t creepy (ok, maybe that was already true) and Daniel Radcliffe was yet to be chosen to play the boy wizard on screen and subsequently fear typecasting so much as to cause him to play naked “Equus”:http://www.playbill.com/images/photos/equuspre5.jpg on Broadway.
In Katrina's Wake
Absolutely brilliant and heartbreaking, those are the words that come to mind looking through Chris Jordan’s “web-preview”:http://www.chrisjordan.com/current_set.php?arch_id=6 of his book, _In Katrina’s Wake._
The Hurricane Katrina is one of those important events that gets completely ignored by the generation that lived through it only to be memorialised by their less-guilty-feeling children. The reason for the guilt? While we continue to consume at an almost inhuman pace, fight wars all over the world, and thumb our noses at global warming, proof that not all is right sits there in the heart of the United States where the Mississippi meets the Gulf and we’re almost straining ourselves to not look at it.
Back from England
I’m back from a trip to England that was, among many other things, empty of blogging. There’s a lot to say about things I saw and did there, but for now here’s a quick recap of the two news stories I heard most about in the UK:
Iran “captured 15 British sailors”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/6484279.stm for supposedly entering Iranian waters which later turned out to not be true. The raid was in fact a retaliation for the US capture of Irani soldiers which I suppose is fair considering that Iran isn’t a declared enemy of the United States.
Pakistani cricket coach Bob Woolmer was found dead in his hotel room after an upset loss to Ireland. It turns out that “he was killed”:http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6482981.stm although investigations are ongoing into whether it was a case of crazed fans gone mad or something more.
Lego Animation
There’s a lot of this sort of thing out on the internet, but Lego is really cool for stop animation. Some have more computer animation included, like this “Batman video”:http://www.filmclips.be/the_batboat.htm while others are just good old-fashioned labour-intensive stop motion like this “Harry Potter comedy”:http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-1749866178548669403&hl=en
I could embed a lot more videos but I won’t do that to you in case you are somehow not interested in this, follow your own nose instead to this “Monty Python video”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fIXByCAIzos&eurl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Efilmclips%2Ebe%2Fmonty%5Fpython%5Fand%5Fthe%5Fholy%5Fgrail%5Flego%2Ehtm or this “Indiana Jones video”:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=egPgU5kAjKE&feature=related.
Previously featured on Duenos:
* “Lego sculpture”:http://duenos.net/article/299/LEGOArt – An amazing sculptor whose strongly emotive work is made entirely from Lego bricks.
* “Amazing new animation technique”:http://duenos.net/article/398/Amazingnewanimationtechnique – In a world where very little is new, it’s nice to see cool ideas come to life. The technique is known as stratastenciling and involves a cascading series of paper cut-out cards.
Visualizations of Last.fm
A month or so ago I wrote an “article”:http://duenos.net/article/14/melodic-match-making-on-lastfm about “Last.fm”:http://last.fm , the self-proclaimed harbringer of the _social music revolution._ The site keeps track of what you listen to and then can export that data as simple XML feeds to put on your blog, or anything else. Well, two other websites, “Snapp Radio”:http://www.snappradio.com/ and “Last.tv”:http://lasttv.net/ have taken those data feeds about what you’re listening to and made something you can watch. The LEGO-trading hotspot is “http://www.bricklink.com/”:http://www.bricklink.com/ Home (at the time of writing) to 64,918 registered members, this site hooks people up who are looking to trade, buy, sell, or discuss LEGO. Sets, parts, figurines, books, gear, catalogs, instructions, original boxes, or just unsorted lots of pieces. You name it and someone will be willing to trade it on Brick Link. The next time the French parliament opens its doors, they will be serving Linux. According to this “Business Week article”:http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/content/mar2007/gb20070312_042781.htm?campaign_id=rss_daily , 1,154 computers will be switching to Ubuntu Linux from Windows XP, including all of the MPs staff and personal PCs. France has had a long history of embracing open-source software like Open Office and Firefox, but this will be the first mass switch of operating systems. In honor of the British government taking on the strictest (but still not nearly strict enough) carbon regimen in Europe, I give you “this game.”:http://www.bbc.co.uk/sn/hottopics/climatechange/climate_challenge/ In this better-than-average flash game, you the player are the president of the EU and you balance money, electricity, food, water, and carbon emissions against each other, guiding the Union into the future. Some options are very realistic (like tax breaks for domestic solar cells) and some are less so (like mag-lev trains) but overall this is a pretty good waste of time, and not a bad way to look at the decisions facing governments.
, most of the pictures are live concert shots or photos of the artist. If the band is not as big, like )
http://billiethevision.com then the pictures are more mood pieces, which I think are taken from "Flickr!":http://flickr.com
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Brick Link, the eBay of LEGO
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Open-source Europe
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1798381/posts article reports the Shadow chancellor George Osbourne's statement that Britain should support more open-source software in order to save the people 600 million pounds/year. That article features some other good examples of governments going open-source.
Climate Change Game
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