Department of Justice Threatens the Internet -
Secret State Demands News Organization’s Web Logs, Gets Slapped Down
The Vatican joins the search for alien life - Telegraph
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Bruce Mau Design: INCOMPLETE MANIFESTO FOR GROWTH. Good stuff!
2012: The End Of The World? | Information Is Beautiful -
Large infographic debunking the 2012 mythos hype.
Post Tech - Chat with Michael Geist on secret copyright rules -
“Michael Geist, an Internet law professor at the University of Ottawa, thinks there is so much wrong with trade negotiations on anti-counterfeiting. The least of which is that the dozens of countries participating in anti-counterfeiting talks have been secretly meeting for two years around the world to hash out details on Internet copyright rules. As reported last week, no one outside the meetings have been able to hear the discussions and the public isn’t able to weigh in.”
“Our response to Y2K is remembered as an overreaction—and there’s probably a good case to be made that some of what we spent wasn’t necessary. But that’s not the only way to look at Y2K. The computer bug reshaped the tech industry, and the rest of corporate America, in lasting ways. Y2K helped bring tech managers to greater prominence within their organizations, and it arguably sparked the boom in tech outsourcing.” — Apocalypse Then: a two-part series on the lessons of Y2K. (1) - By Farhad Manjoo - Slate Magazine
Everything you want to know about the scary, secret copyright treaty - Boing Boing -
“Here’s a 20-minute, must-see lecture on the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement — the secret copyright treaty currently being negotiated, which stands to fatally wound all user-generated content sites from mailing lists to YouTube; which stands to criminalize kids for noncommercial file-sharing; which stands to put your internet connection in jeopardy if anyone in your house is accused of infringement, and much, much more.”
Today is Exploding Whale Day! « Shafe Shifter
2012: Carnival of Bunkum | h+ Magazine -
“But the worst of the 2012 bandwagon, epitomized by Pinchbeck’s lectures and writings, is the blithe cultural arrogance and staggering anthropological ignorance evident in the movement’s appropriation of Mayan beliefs and history. In a discussion hosted by Pinchbeck’s online magazine Reality Sandwich, the cultural theorist Erik Davis puts his finger on the minstrelsy implicit in the ventriloquization, by white, first-world New Agers, of the Maya. “[I]t seems to me that there is very little concrete sense of what ‘the Mayans’ (whoever that grand abstraction represents) thought about what would happen in the human world on 2012,” he writes. “To my mind it is kinda disrespectful to the Mayans to force them into our own narrative.””
Allison Kilkenny: Catholic Church Threatens To Stop Feeding Homeless Over Gay Marriage -
This article is referring to Washington DC Archdiocese.
Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.
Cody Brown - A Public Can Talk To Itself: Why The Future of News is Actually Pretty Clear
“Building microscopic critters via genetic tinkering was confined to the world’s most sophisticated laboratories a generation ago. But with more powerful computers and cheaper equipment, it is within reach of students at high schools, community colleges and universities, hundreds of whom are competing this year to create the coolest new organism on the planet.” — Nation & World | Competitors strive to create new life-forms | Seattle Times Newspaper
America’s (newest) largest solar plant set to go live in Florida