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Art Is Not Terrorism

Steve Kurtz is a professor at the University of Buffalo and also an artist using biotech as his medium to create commentary on genetic modification and modern American food culture. When his wife died of a heart attack recently, police found scientific equipment in his home he was using to produce one of his works — equipment similar to what you’d find in any factory producing GMO foods, and even in many high school biology labs. But the police decided Kurtz was a budding eco-terrorist, and called in the FBI, who are trying to hang him out to dry.

FBI lab tests immediately proved that not only was Kurtz’s equipment not used for any illegal purpose, it was not even possible to use it as a terrorist weapon … That hasn’t stopped the feds from continuing to pursue their case against Kurtz, in yet another egregious instance of contemptibly misdirected Patriot Act terrorist hysteria run amok.

Critical Art Ensemble maintains a site detailing Kurtz’ case, and runs a legal defense fund on his behalf.

Thanks Larry.

Music: Gruppo Sportivo :: Lock Yourself Up
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grep puzzler

Here’s a puzzler for all you shell-heads (you know who you are). Normal souls, please move along — nothing interesting to see here.

OK. You’re sitting in the parent of “dirname.” Inside dirname and its children are files that you know contain the string “string.” You want a text file listing the names of all those files. You run:

grep -r “string” dirname > dirname/output.txt

One of two things happens:

1) A few seconds later you have the file listing you need.
2) The command runs forever and output.txt grows indefinitely, until you run out of disk space.

As I discovered the hard way, which of these two occurs depends on which version of grep is installed on your system. In 2.5.x, you get outcome #1. Any version prior to that, you get outcome #2. On closer inspection, it’s easy to see what’s happening — grep is greedy, and is scanning the output file even as the shell is appending grep’s results to it. Reading itself and simultaneously reporting into itself. Devilish. Fortunately I spotted my error before I overflowed the drive. And sending output to any location outside of dirname avoids the problem, of course.

But here’s the puzzler: How was this fixed in grep 2.5? grep is not doing the output redirection — the shell is. grep only knows to pass results to stdout. Beyond that is a black box. So how is grep 2.5 able to avoid the problem of infinite recursion? How was it made aware of what the shell is doing? Cue Twilight Zone intro music.

Freaky deaky, super geeky.

Music: Stranglers :: Get A Grip
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BMRC Is Dead

Before I arrived at the J-School and set up the QuickTime Streaming Server, our multimedia classes used a university streaming service called bmrc to post Real Video content. Unbeknownst to me, bmrc lost funding a while ago and they pulled the plug on their servers, breaking tons of legacy content on our site (and others). Nice. No warning, not even a how-do-you-do, just blam, you’re dead.

After a chain of emails to various departments, finally tracked down someone who knew where the original servers were located — in a walk-in closet in his boss’ office. Cool guy. I gave him a list of .rm files and he kindly yanked the server out of storage, then passed me a gigabyte of legacy video content. Spent most of the day updating .ram files to point to the new location on our own server, where they all should have been to begin with.

Every summer at the J-School is like this – go into it with my sights set on a fistful of big-eyed projects I want to complete, and it slips away with a series of stupid emergencies and fiddly things. Death by a thousand papercuts. Sigh.

Music: Tindersticks :: Don’t Ever Get Tired
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Miles Finds the Parallel Port

parallel-cashewsAmy asks Miles what he’s doing behind the printer. “Bahroo!” he answers, hiding. Miles emerges, goes to town on his pounding bench for a bit, returns to his snack dish to munch a few more nuts, then returns to his spot behind the printer. More fiddling. “Miles, what are you doing back there?” “Nnnah bazzah!” Amy heads back to investigate, finds these two cashews gingerly placed in the clasps of the parallel port from behind. He does these things with so much intention, like he has a real and definite goal, even if he is the only boy in the Little Boy Universe who knows what that goal might be. He’s surprising us daily with his dexterity and imagination.

Music: Seeds :: Can’t Seem To Make You Mine
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National Sprinklerhead Day

Never dreamed having a lawn would be so much work. We apply great amounts of energy, water, nutrients and still it goes brown, dry, splotchy. Research: Lawn mites? Enough water? Thatch? Aeration? Soil penetrant? Dude at American Soil Products suggests it’s just too old — lawns apparently have lifespans. Said it’s probably time to rip it out and start from seed (he’s not a sod fan). Not ready to go there yet (the back yard is new sod six months old, it has its own set of problems).

Decided to resuscitate the decrepit, corroded, half-working original sprinkler system — manual watering is just too much labor for our schedules. Timer works fine, but the heads are whack. Took a vacation day and dug out 12 old Champion heads, installed new Rain Birds. Better, but needs tuning. 90% of the job is locating and digging out the old heads through rocks, under sidewalk underhangs, creeping roots…

Three trips for teflon pipe tape: Once when I ran out, again when Miles absconded with a roll, and the third when a roll vanished into thin air. Looked everywhere, time running out, gave up, got in the car again. As soon as I pulled into the street, saw it in the middle of the road — it had rolled into traffic and been run over. A bit crunched, but still teflon-y enough to work.

Amazed to study the water bill for May and June — we averaged 190 gallons per day, most of that going into the lawn I’m sure. And here we are concerned about low-flush toilets and the Water Miser setting on the dishwasher. With the century’s impending global water crisis, we’ll all have desert-themed yards soon anyway. Now I see why so many retirees decided to do the yard in a quaint gravel theme — throw on a few dead pine cones for good measure and call it a day.

Music: Gong :: Bodilingus
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Abalone Feast

When I was a kid, my dad dived for marine specimens with an outfit called Pacific Biomarine for a living. At the time, abalone were plentiful along the California coast, and he would often fill up his goodie bag with wild abs as he worked. We ate abalone several times a month, though I of course had no concept how lucky we were. Dad brought me an ab iron of my own for my sixth birthday. I remember that his friend at a machine shop forged it out of slab, and that it had a glittery purple bicycle hand grip.

Today, wild abalone populations have dwindled to almost nothing, thanks to a combination of factors — human overfishing, hungry otters, and the fact that abalone squirt their sperm into open waters hoping it will land somewhere useful (talk about getting lucky!); so when populations decline, the odds of this accidental fertilization succeeding drop precipitously.

You can still buy abalone, but you probably won’t find it at your local fish market. A handful of abalone farms raise them under protected conditions, and charge $20 – $50 / pound — an endangered delicacy. Dad’s coming to town this weekend, so I decided to throw him an abalone feast as a belated father’s day gift. Called Monterey Abalone to place an order, got to talking with the guy who picked up the phone, and it turned out that his dad was my dad’s boss at Pacific Biomarine, back in the 60s and early 70s! So this guy and I probably played together as little kids a few times, though we didn’t remember each other. Amazing how threads come together.

So a box of live abs will arrive this Friday, and the question of the week is how to prepare them. There are a lot of great recipes out there, but somehow I don’t think we should mess with tradition. Tenderize, a real light breading, a bit of garlic salt, and flash fry in olive oil (or butter, if memory serves).

Dad’s gonna flip when he hears the story.

Music: Spaceways Incorporated :: Tapestry from an Asteroid
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24-Hour Poetry Party

Some online friends from antiweb run the New York-based poetry collective LitKicks.com, which has been doing cool readings, gatherings and publications for a decade now. To celebrate their 10th anniversary, they’re hosting a massive, timezone-busting, internet-wide collaborative poetry generation happening next weekend (Friday 23 / Saturday 24):

The 24 HOUR POETRY PARTY is one of the most ambitious poetry experiments ever attempted. The entire event will take place online at LitKicks.com during the course of a single day and night. Seeded with original poems, writings and koans by a number of renowned poets, participants all over the world will join in the spontaneous composition of a single epic “real-time poem” describing 24 hours in the life of planet Earth.

Music: Loop Guru :: Buruk Burang
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Jeffy for Veep

Defective Yeti’s take on the NY Post’s Gephardt gaffe. “Can’t even pronounce spaghetti…” Although I might have been more inclined to give Nancy the nod over Jeffy (Family Circus is just “simple” dumb, whereas Nancy is (was) “delightfully surreal” dumb).

Note: The above in no way reflects my opinion of Edwards. Just thought it was funny.

Music: Cream :: Swlabr
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CSS Pencils

Stunning display of just how far CSS can be taken, given sufficient patience and a little imagination: There are no images on this page. Near as I can tell, he ran a bitmap through an image analyzer to determine the value of each pixel and translated each one into a corresponding DIV with matching CSS color value. He then created PHP transforms to let you drop channels, go grayscale, etc.

I’m not sure exactly how useful this is in practical terms, since the amount of CSS it takes to create a photographic representation exceeds the number of bytes it would take to represent the image as a JPEG, but it does seem to open a lot of doors for as-yet unimagined CSS designs. You’ve got to respect him just for showing that it’s possible. Check the fawning comments.

Described this to a non-geek friend and his only reaction was “That guy must have a lot of time on his hands.” Some people, ah swear.

Music: Linton Kwesi Johnson :: Di Black Petty Booshwah
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Tivo, RSS, Gluttony

We recently purchased Tivo for the house.* Like many users, we got Tivo not because we’re TV junkies, but because we don’t have time for TV. When we do sit down to watch, we want to spend less time, and we want to watch better TV. For the most part, the formula is working – we’re no longer spending a third of our time watching (or trying to navigate around) commercials, and we’re not watching whatever crap happens to be on once the boy is down and the dishes done, just to enjoy some well-earned veg time.

But there’s an unanticipated consequence: Suddenly we have a library of shows we like at our fingertips, always ready to watch. As a result, there’s suddenly the desire to watch more TV, not less. Oooo! All in the Family re-runs! Let’s stay up! That’s not how it was supposed to work.

It struck me that this phenomenon is exactly like the backlash against RSS that some people are experiencing. At first, RSS feels like a great time saver — I can skim 10 sites in the time it used to take to skim one. But RSS readers make it so easy to harvest lots of great content that you have this tendency not to save time, i.e. to move on and go do something else after your daily news gulp, but to spend more time overwhelming yourself with information.

Who can eat just three M&Ms? The tantalizing aggregation of desirable content that Tivo and RSS readers provide only gives you the illusion of saving time; in truth, most of us are seduced by the overabundance that accompanies aggregation, and merely dig ourselves deeper into the content hole. Aggregation lends itself to gluttony.

The key to dealing with content overload is not just in finding better tools to manage the flow, it’s knowing when to get up and walk away.

* We’re feeding the Tivo via antenna, still not willing to pay $50+/month for cable** when we would only want a couple of extra channels; the inability to purchase cable channels on an a la carte basis should be a case for the feds. While there are some good arguments explaining why you can’t just buy the channels you want, it’s still an abuse of monopoly, as I see it).

** Basic cable is only $14/month, but we already get 90% of what we’d get with basic via antenna. We do have a reception issue with the antenna that we’d like to improve upon (most local stations are transmitted from San Francisco, to the west, except for NBC, which comes from San Jose, to the south; it’s tough to make one antenna receive from both directions happily without an antenna rotator, so we might end up doing basic cable for the duration of the Olympics at least).

Music: Stevie Wonder :: All Day Sucker