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12 Aug 04:21

Kansas couple sues IP mapping firm for turning their life into a “digital hell”

by Cyrus Farivar

(credit: Google Maps)

Ever since James and Theresa Arnold moved into their rented 623-acre farm in Butler County, Kansas, in March 2011, they have seen “countless” law enforcement officials and individuals turning up at their farm day and night looking for links to alleged theft and other supposed crime. All of these people are arriving because of a rounding error on a GPS location, which wrongly points people to their farm.

In their lawsuit filed against MaxMind, the IP mapping firm, the Arnolds allege:

The following events appeared to originate at the residence and brought trespassers and/or law enforcement to the plaintiffs’ home at all hours of the night and day: stolen cars, fraud related to tax returns and bitcoin, stolen credit cards, suicide calls, private investigators, stolen social media accounts, fund raising events, and numerous other events.

James Arnold has even been “reported as holding girls at the residence for the purpose of making pornographic films.”

Read 8 remaining paragraphs | Comments

01 Jul 23:30

Open access: All human knowledge is there—so why can’t everybody access it?

by Glyn Moody

(credit: Diliff)

In 1836, Anthony Panizzi, who later became principal librarian of the British Museum, gave evidence before a parliamentary select committee. At that time, he was only first assistant librarian, but even then he had an ambitious vision for what would one day became the British Library. He told the committee:

I want a poor student to have the same means of indulging his learned curiosity, of following his rational pursuits, of consulting the same authorities, of fathoming the most intricate inquiry as the richest man in the kingdom, as far as books go, and I contend that the government is bound to give him the most liberal and unlimited assistance in this respect.

He went some way to achieving that goal of providing general access to human knowledge. In 1856, after 20 years of labor as Keeper of Printed Books, he had helped boost the British Museum's collection to over half a million books, making it the largest library in the world at the time. But there was a serious problem: to enjoy the benefits of those volumes, visitors needed to go to the British Museum in London.

Imagine, for a moment, if it were possible to provide access not just to those books, but to all knowledge for everyone, everywhere—the ultimate realisation of Panizzi's dream. In fact, we don't have to imagine: it is possible today, thanks to the combined technologies of digital texts and the Internet. The former means that we can make as many copies of a work as we want for vanishingly small cost; the latter provides a way to distribute those copies to anyone with an Internet connection. The global rise of low-cost smartphones means that "anyone with an Internet connection" will soon include even the poorest members of society in every country.

Read 120 remaining paragraphs | Comments

27 Oct 22:37

“An Aeronaut to His Love”

by Greg Ross

http://www.freeimages.com/photo/love-message-1317117

In Patterns of Poetry (1986), Miller Williams writes, “Fourteen words have rarely done such duty as in the following sonnet, which differs from the traditional form only in not having ten syllables per line and in the combining of the Italian octave and the Shakespearean sestet”:

I
Through
Blue
Sky
Fly
To
You.
Why?
Sweet
Love,
Feet
Move
So
Slow.

— Anonymous

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24 Jul 15:51

The Hasanlu Lovers

by Greg Ross

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Hasanlu_Lovers.jpg

In 1972, archaeologists unearthed a plaster-lined brick bin in the Teppe Hasanlu site in northwestern Iran, an ancient city that had been violently sacked and burned at the end of the ninth century B.C. University of Pennsylvania archaeologist Robert Dyson wrote:

Lying in the bottom of the bin were two human skeletons, a male and a female. The male had one of its arms under the shoulder of the female, while the female was looking into the face of the male and reaching out with one hand to touch his lips. Both were young adults. Neither showed any evidence of injury; there were no obvious cuts or broken bones. There were no objects with the skeletons, but under the female’s head was a stone slab. The other contents of the bin consisted of broken pieces of plaster, charcoal, and small pieces of burned brick but nothing heavy enough to crush the bones.

“Two theories have been suggested to explain this unusual scene,” he wrote. “One, that a pair of lovers had crawled into the bin under some light material of some kind to hide in the hope of escaping the destruction of the citadel, and that this is a very tender moment between them. The other is that they were hiding and one is telling the other not to make any noise. In either case it would appear they died peacefully — probably by asphyxiation.”

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20 Apr 20:46

Viewer Prepared To Believe Whatever Documentary Tells Him About Coral Reefs

BETTENDORF, IA—Saying he had no plans to challenge anything set forth in the hour-long nature program, television viewer Adam Canales reported Monday that he was fully prepared to believe whatever the documentary Darkness Below: Ocean Life On The...






20 Jan 17:40

Report: Only 2% Of Internet Worth Sitting Through 15-Second Ad

IRVINE, CA—Suggesting that only a miniscule fraction of the internet warranted even a slight delay before viewing, a report released Wednesday by the University of California, Irvine, indicated that just 2 percent of all online content was worth sit...






08 Dec 18:11

Particulars

by Greg Ross

We cannot seek or attain health, wealth, learning, justice or kindness in general. Action is always specific, concrete, individualized, unique. And consequently judgments as to acts to be performed must be similarly specific. … A man who aims at health as a distinct end becomes a valetudinarian, or a fanatic, or a mechanical performer of exercises, or an athlete so one-sided that his pursuit of bodily development injures his heart. When the endeavor to realize a so-called end does not temper and color all other activities, life is portioned out into strips and fractions. Certain acts and times are devoted to getting health, others to cultivating religion, others to seeking learning, to being a good citizen, a devotee of fine art and so on. This is the only logical alternative to subordinating all aims to the accomplishment of one alone — fanaticism. This is out of fashion at present, but who can say how much of distraction and dissipation in life, and how much of its hard and narrow rigidity is the outcome of men’s failure to realize that each situation has its own unique end and that the whole personality should be concerned with it?

— John Dewey, Reconstruction in Philosophy, 1920

24 Sep 20:16

Of Thee I Sing

by Greg Ross

The editors of the Journal of Organic Chemistry received a novel submission in 1970 — Brown University chemists J.F. Bunnett and Francis Kearsley wrote their paper “Comparative Mobility of Halogens in Reactions of Dihalobenzenes With Potassium Amide in Ammonia” in blank verse:

Reactions of potassium amide
With halobenzenes in ammonia
Via benzyne intermediates occur.
Bergstrom and associates did report,
Based on two-component competition runs,
Bromobenzene the fastest to react,
By iodobenzene closely followed,
The chloro compound lagging far behind,
And flurobenzene to be quite inert
At reflux (-33°).

This goes on for three pages. The journal published it with a note: “Although we are open to new styles and formats for scientific publication, we must admit to surprise upon receiving this paper. However, we find the paper to be novel in its chemistry, and readable in its verse. Because of the somewhat increased space requirements and possible difficulty to some of our nonpoetically inclined readers, manuscripts in this format face an uncertain future in this office.”

(Thanks, Bob.)

04 Sep 15:54

Augury

by Greg Ross

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Fotothek_df_tg_0003433_Rechenkunst_%5E_Mathematik.jpg

Ohio State University philosopher Stewart Shapiro relates a puzzling experience that a friend once encountered in a physics lab. “The class was looking at an oscilloscope and a funny shape kept forming at the end of the screen. Although it had nothing to do with the lesson that day, my friend asked for an explanation. The lab instructor wrote something on the board (probably a differential equation) and said that the funny shape occurs because a function solving the equation has a zero at a particular value. My friend told me that he became even more puzzled that the occurrence of a zero in a function should count as an explanation of a physical event, but he did not feel up to pursuing the issue further at the time.

“This example indicates that much of the theoretical and practical work in a science consists of constructing or discovering mathematical models of physical phenomena. Many scientific and engineering problems are tasks of finding a differential equation, a formula, or a function associated with a class of phenomena. A scientific ‘explanation’ of a physical event often amounts to no more than a mathematical description of it, but what on earth can that mean? What is a mathematical description of a physical event?”

What right do we have to presume that the natural world will hew to mathematical laws? And why does the universe oblige us so graciously by doing so? Repeatedly, mathematicians have developed abstract structures and concepts that have later found unexpected applications in science. How can this happen?

“It is positively spooky how the physicist finds the mathematician has been there before him or her.” — Steven Weinberg

“I find it quite amazing that it is possible to predict what will happen by mathematics, which is simply following rules which really have nothing to do with the original thing.” — Richard Feynman

“One cannot escape the feeling that these mathematical formulae have an independent existence and intelligence of their own, that they are wiser than we are, wiser even than their discoverers, that we get more out of them than was originally put into them.” — Heinrich Hertz

“The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve.” — Eugene Wigner

(From Stewart Shapiro, Thinking About Mathematics, 2000; also his paper “Mathematics and Reality” in Philosophy of Science 50:4 [December 1983].)

26 Aug 20:03

Alongways Finds Interesting and Useful Stops Along Your Road Trip

by Alan Henry

Alongways Finds Interesting and Useful Stops Along Your Road Trip

Planning a road trip is rarely just about finding the fastest route between two points. You also have to consider stops for gas, bathrooms, food, or entertainment. Alongways is a Google Maps mashup that lets you plug in your origin and destination, and search for anything you want along the way, from "pizza" to "dog parks" and everything in-between.

Read more...








19 Aug 19:00

Inside Citizen Lab, the “Hacker Hothouse” protecting you from Big Brother

by Ars Staff
Citizen Lab / Aurich Lawson

It was May of 2012 at a security conference in Calgary, Alberta, when professor Ron Deibert heard a former high-ranking official suggest he should be prosecuted.

This wasn't too surprising. In Deibert's world, these kinds of things occasionally get whispered through the grapevine, always second-hand. But this time he was sitting on a panel with John Adams, the former chief of the Communications Security Establishment Canada (CSEC), the National Security Agency's little-known northern ally. Afterward, he recalls, the former spy chief approached and casually remarked that there were people in government who wanted Deibert arrested—and that he was one of them.

Adams was referring to Citizen Lab, the watchdog group Deibert founded over a decade ago at the University of Toronto that's now orbited by a globe-spanning network of hackers, lawyers, and human rights advocates. From exposing the espionage ring that hacked the Dalai Lama to uncovering the commercial spyware being sold to repressive regimes, Citizen Lab has played a pioneering role in combing the Internet to illuminate covert landscapes of global surveillance and censorship. At the same time, it's also taken the role of an ambassador, connecting the Internet's various stakeholders from governments to security engineers and civil rights activists.

Read 41 remaining paragraphs | Comments

24 Jun 19:04

Officer Nofun, may I just ask, sir, if you are aware of any law that says a dog CAN'T play basketball?? Or, for that matter, drive a car? Yes sir, I have my license and registration.

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June 24th, 2014: I have been informed that while we may not know much about dogs, we have considered bats! PHEW.

Midas Flesh #7 comes out tomorrow! SECOND-LAST ISSUE, you guys! What crazy things will happen in it?? HINT: ALL THE CRAZY THINGS. Here's a preview!

– Ryan

18 Jun 03:56

nudqe: "white people can’t danc-" "white people can’t twer-"

nudqe:

"white people can’t danc-"

image

"white people can’t twer-"

image

16 Jun 03:33

June 15, 2014


12 Jun 19:56

Investigation Of What Fell Off Nightstand Postponed Until Morning

FORT DODGE, IA—Moments after the thud of an unidentified object hitting the floor interrupted him as he was about to drift off to sleep Tuesday, local man Michael Reeves, 32, reportedly decided to postpone the investigation of what fell off his nigh...






01 Jun 19:14

ISEE-3

by xkcd

Back in early March, I posted comic #1337, Hack, about a wayward spacecraft. ISEE-3/ICE was returning to fly past Earth after many decades of wandering through space. It was still operational, and could potentially be sent on a new mission, but NASA no longer had the equipment to talk to it—and announced that reconstructing the equipment would be too difficult and expensive.

ISEE-3 is just a machine, but it’s a machine we sent on an incredible journey; to have it return home to find our door closed seemed sad to me. In my comic, I imagined a group of internet space enthusiasts banding together to find a way to take control of the probe—although I figured this was just a hopeful fantasy.

I wasn’t the only one who liked the idea of “rescuing” ISEE-3. In April, Dennis Wingo and Keith Cowing put up a crowdfunding project on RocketHub to try to learn how the lost communications systems worked, reconstruct working versions of them, obtain use of a powerful enough antenna, and commandeer the spacecraft. It seemed like an awfully long shot, but I contributed anyway.

Well, yesterday, Cowing and his team announced, from the Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico, that they are now in command of the ISEE-3 spacecraft.

Congratulations to the team, and good luck with your new spaceship! Watch out for hackers.

01 Jun 18:38

The Best Self-Hosted Alternatives to Popular Services

by Thorin Klosowski

The Best Self-Hosted Alternatives to Popular Services

Most of us use services like Gmail, Feedly, and Instapaper to get through the day—but that means giving up privacy and locking into a service you don't control. Hosting your own services at home used to be reserved for nerds, but it's easier than ever. Here are the best services that you can host yourself for all your daily needs.

Read more...








30 May 20:24

Budget Cheat Day Lets Government Splurge On Anything It Wants Once A Week

WASHINGTON—With lawmakers on both sides of the aisle agreeing that everyone deserves to be a little naughty once in a while, sources revealed Thursday a newly enacted budget cheat day that allows government officials to splurge on spending once per ...






04 May 19:35

A New Life

by Greg Ross

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Carl_Wimar_Abduction_of_Boones_Daughter_detail_Amon_Carter_Museum.jpg

Life in Puritan New England was so hard that children who were abducted by Native Americans often refused to come back. Eunice Williams, abducted in 1704 at age 7, refused to leave the Kahnawake Mohawks despite her father’s pleas — he found she had forgotten the English language and adopted Indian clothing and hairstyle. “She is obstinately resolved to live and dye here,” he wrote, “and will not so much as give me one pleasant look.” The Mohawks were much more indulgent of children than the colonists, and women were counted equal to men and played an integral role in society and politics. Eunice married a Mohawk and lived with him for half a century.

A returned captive named Titus King reported that many young captives responded similarly. “In Six months time they Forsake Father & mother, Forgit thir own Land, Refuess to Speak there own toungue & Seeminly be Holley Swallowed up with the Indians.” In 1753 Ben Franklin wrote:

When an Indian Child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our Customs, yet if he goes to see his relations and makes one Indian Ramble there is no perswading him ever to return. … When white persons of either sex have been taken prisoners young by the Indians, and lived awhile among them, tho’ ransomed by their Friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a Short time they become disgusted with our manner of Life, and the care and pains that are necessary to support it, and take the first good Opportunity of escaping again into the Woods, from whence there is no reclaiming them.

A 14-year-old named James McCullough, who lived with the Indians for eight years, had to be brought back in fetters, his legs tied under his horse’s belly and arms tied behind his back. Even so he escaped and returned to his Indian family. Children “redeemed” by the English often “cried as if they should die when they were presented to us.” The Indians freed children of the work obligations they faced in the colonies — boys hunted, caught fish, and gathered nuts; and girls cultivated corn but had no master “to oversee or drive us, so that we could work as leisurely as we pleased.”

(From Steven Mintz, Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, 2004.)

26 Apr 22:29

The Horse’s Mouth

by Greg Ross

In 1961, Robert Rauschenberg was invited to participate in a Paris show in which artists were to exhibit a portrait of gallery owner Iris Clert. Rauschenberg sent a telegram:

THIS IS A PORTRAIT OF IRIS CLERT IF I SAY SO

Was he right? Perhaps so: Three years later, Parisian performance artist Ben Vautier sat down in a street in Nice holding a placard in his lap. The placard read:

Regardez moi cela suffit je suis art.

That means, “Look at me. That’s all it takes; I’m art.”

20 Apr 05:48

“Socrates Among the Athenians”

by Greg Ross

socrates among the athenians

– Louis Phillips, Academe, February 1979

18 Apr 15:35

New App Matches You With Others In Vicinity Who Wasted $2.99 On Same App

NEW YORK—Sources confirmed Thursday that millions nationwide are signing up for Squandr, a new social discovery app employing GPS technology to match users with others in their vicinity who also wasted $2.99 on the same software.






14 Apr 16:42

Absentee Ballots

by Greg Ross

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Declaration_independence.jpg

Can one generation bind another, and all others, in succession forever? I think not. The Creator has made the earth for the living, not the dead. Rights and powers can only belong to persons, not to things, not to mere matter, unendowed with will. The dead are not even things. The particles of matter which composed their bodies, make part now of the bodies of other animals, vegetables, or minerals, of a thousand forms. To what then are attached the rights and powers they held while in the form of men? A generation may bind itself as long as its majority continues in life; when that has disappeared, another majority is in place, holds all the rights and powers their predecessors once held, and may change their laws and institutions to suit themselves. Nothing then is unchangeable but the inherent and unalienable rights of man.

– Thomas Jefferson, letter to Maj. John Cartwright, June 5, 1824

Tradition means giving votes to the most obscure of all classes — our ancestors. It is the democracy of the dead. Tradition refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.

– G.K. Chesterton

14 Apr 16:39

Shy

by Greg Ross

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mona_Lisa,_by_Leonardo_da_Vinci,_from_C2RMF_retouched.jpg

Pretend that you’ve never seen this before and that it’s an actual living person whose personality you’re trying to read. If you look directly at her face, she seems to hesitate, but if you look near it, say beyond her at the landscape, and try to sense her mood, she smiles at you.

In studying this systematically, Harvard neurobiologist Margaret Livingstone found that “if you look at this painting so that your center of gaze falls on the background or her hands, Mona Lisa’s mouth — which is then seen by your peripheral, low-resolution, vision — appears much more cheerful than when you look directly at it, when it is seen by your fine-detail fovea.

“This explains its elusive quality — you literally can’t catch her smile by looking at it. Every time you look directly at her mouth, her smile disappears because your central vision does not perceive coarse image components very well. People don’t realize this because most of us are not aware of how we move our eyes around or that our peripheral vision is able to see some things better than our central vision. Mona Lisa smiles until you look at her mouth, and then her smile fades, like a dim star that disappears when you look directly at it.”

(From her book Vision and Art: The Biology of Seeing, 2002.)

25 Mar 18:33

Pi Without Circles

by Greg Ross

The sum of the squares of the reciprocals of the positive integers is π2/6.

The sum of their fourth powers is π4/90.

The sum of their sixth powers is π6/945.

The area of the region under the Gaussian curve y = e-x2 is the square root of π.

The probability that two integers chosen at random will have no prime factor in common is 6/π2.

The integer 8 can be written as the sum of two squares of integers, m2 + n2, in four ways, when (m, n) is (2, 2), (2, -2), (-2, 2), or (-2, -2). The integer 7 can’t be written at all as the sum of such squares. Over a very large collection of integers from 1 to n, the average number of ways an integer can be written as the sum of two squares approaches π. Why?

20 Mar 16:10

A State-by-State Look at the Cheapest Day to Fill Up Your Gas Tank

by Thorin Klosowski

A State-by-State Look at the Cheapest Day to Fill Up Your Gas Tank

Gas is already expensive, but it's made even worse by the fact that prices tend to fluctuate depending on the day of week. So, gas price tracking site GasBuddy crunched the numbers to see which day of the week prices tend to be lowest, and it depends on which state you're in.

Read more...


    






13 Mar 22:54

A Softer World

06 Mar 20:48

15 Years In Environment Of Constant Fear Somehow Fails To Rehabilitate Prisoner

WOODBOURNE, NY—Reportedly left dumbfounded by the news that recent parolee Terry Raney had been reincarcerated on charges of assault and battery, officials at Woodbourne Correctional Facility struggled Tuesday to make sense of how the prisoner had n...
    






02 Mar 19:45

Expressing Deeply Held Political Opinion Referred To As ‘Gaffe’

WASHINGTON—In an attempt to quell the media firestorm surrounding controversial comments made last week by Kentucky Rep. Richard Wescott, aides to the congressman told reporters Monday ...
    






02 Mar 04:27

Wash and Carry

by Greg Ross

https://www.google.com/patents/US185372

This is admirably simple: In 1876 Ethelbert Watts invented a portmanteau that doubles as a bathtub:

“The object of my invention is to provide a portmanteau, valise, traveling-bag, or other equivalent article used for the transportation of clothing, which shall be convertible into a bath-tub, so as to afford travelers in places where such conveniences are wanting the luxury or comfort of bodily ablution.

“Articles of clothing, &c., may be packed and carried in it as in any portmanteau or equivalent device. When it is desired to use it as a bath-tub the portmanteau is opened, as shown in Fig. 1, and the contents removed. Water is then poured in, when a bath may be enjoyed, as in a permanent tub or fixture. When the bath is over, the water is poured or dipped out, the interior dried by any suitable means, and the device is again ready for use as a portmanteau.”