anything happen the last couple of months I should know about?

merry christmas, etc.

Anyway. Here are some random things I encountered on the internet in the last months that didn’t quite get passed on.

This is possibly the greatest political speech ever. Makes some interesting points about the plight of the minority in a democracy, while being impressively mad.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Via Hamo, and just to mess with nonwrestler‘s head, mind altering parasites. Just creepy and wrong. Thanks, nature.

William Burroughs article on Led Zepellin, and sort of interview with Jimmy Page, from 1975.

Performance artist Marina Abramovic is more interesting than most people.

Breakdown of the 17 million US graduates in menial jobs.

And just cos why not: Aliens have deactivated British and US nuclear missiles, say US military pilots.

Aaaaand, that’s all for a while, folks.

I will probably check email once a week or so. Anything important get me via cell. I may pop back to town if anything particularly amazing is happening.

Peace.

(may squeeze out a couple of lingering posts before I go, may not.)

Also watched a very entertaining Hammer horror film, The Devil Rides Out.

Twitter makes most sense to me as a feed of what interesting people are thinking about, rather than a conversation/social thing (which I think only really makes sense for people working office jobs at the same time.) It is really quite amazing that you can sit on these people’s shoulders in this way and see what they are looking at, so to speak. Still, it is too much information, and most of it I don’t have time to engage with.

I have several twitter lists, making it functional. One for locals, one for thinkers, one for feeds. And one for mutants.

The mutants list is reserved for people who are way ahead of the curve in whatever field they are in. High grade information. Premium crack.

So the Sunday Mutants posts will probably be a linkfest from the far reaches, as, once a week or so, I read and curate the mutants tweets, tracking the bleeding edge of transformation underway in the world. (And throw in any extra stuff that otherwise will lag behind blogging.)

This is a couple of week’s worth.

*********

* For starters, this Foreign Policy article is one of the most interesting things I have read in ages: Beyond City Limits. Basically arguing that megacities evolving into relatively independent city-states is where we are heading.

* Increasing trend that the TV and the landline telephone are no longer perceived as necessities of life by the public. (More detail emerges in the demographics.)

* Ray Kurzweil does not understand the brain. Pretty sharply pointed argument that transhumanist/downloading consciousness arguments are based on woeful understanding/abstractions of how the brain works.
[EDIT: Kurzweil's response. Cheers, Steve.]

* More on the conscious distortion of our social filters on reality: pro Israel groups offering courses in Zionist editing for wikipedia. (Interesting in the wake of a conservative cabal voting down stories it doesn’t like on Digg based on ideology that I blogged last week.)

* Wired interview with Steve Jobs from ten years ago.

Q: Then how will the Web impact our society?

We live in an information economy, but I don’t believe we live in an information society. People are thinking less than they used to. It’s primarily because of television. People are reading less and they’re certainly thinking less. So, I don’t see most people using the Web to get more information. We’re already in information overload. No matter how much information the Web can dish out, most people get far more information than they can assimilate anyway.

Q: The problem is television?

When you’re young, you look at television and think, There’s a conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when you get a little older, you realize that’s not true. The networks are in business to give people exactly what they want. That’s a far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks are really in business to give people what they want. It’s the truth.

There is actually tonnes of interesting stuff in this.

* Oh yeah. All this e-book, e-reader stuff? All that matters is what the kids learn to read on. Obvious when pointed out. The long game is over.

Gotta say I missed instant access to information, but I didn’t  miss Facebook.

EDIT: Hmm. Actually, maybe you need to register to post comments that wont get eaten as spam? First link on the right under Meta

Anyone who has been reading via the straight IP address (207.210.219.115) probably won’t be able to see this, and I don’t think that will work any more. At any rate, just the straight www.undulatingungulate.com is the thing to bookmark from now on. Lose the /blog. And those of you playing by RSS may need to re-up.

At some point some customisation will happen. We seem to have lost embedded youtube links and photo links, and a theme will happen. But as a bonus, comments now seem unfubared, and the comment backlog has been automagically filtered. I just skimmed over the past few months and discovered a bunch of comments, and commenters, I didn’t know existed! (Hi, Rimu! Great grumping, ScottK! And on a geek joy level that maybe two of you will get, “Howard W. Campbell” posted a comment, too )

And I am now in some shiny new wordpress version. Gotta learn my way around it. (Hadn’t updated the other one in 4.5 years…)