stray bullets

That Rothschild clan in full: eccentricity, money, influence and scandal Nat Rothschild’s career path – from playboy to plutocrat – has to be seen against the backdrop of his family history, studded as it is with eccentrics who were torn between loyalty to an immense and powerful name and the urge to break away from the clan. An interesting look at the 3rd Baron Rothschild and the celebrated, reviled and feared family of global players and manipulators. (via)

Turkish police may have beaten encryption key out of TJ Maxx suspect Otherwise known as rubber-hose cryptanalysis. (via)

Is surfing the Internet altering your brain? The Internet is not just changing the way people live but altering the way our brains work with a neuroscientist arguing this is an evolutionary change which will put the tech-savvy at the top of the new social order.

What I've Learned: John Malkovich There will be people who will hate anything you do. And some people will really love it. But that's not really different from the people who really hate it. You could learn a thing or two from what he's learned. (via)

also:
Judge Slams RIAA Tactics (via)
A guide to the Hippocratic Oath
Seven of the greatest scientific hoaxes
Top 10 Science Hoaxes
Evolution of Logos (pictoral history of well known logo designs) (via)
How to Take Better Photographs
Audio Slideshow: Photos compete for the Prix Pictet
Listen to Genius (audio library) (via)
Andrei Codrescu: Life Without Smell May Not Be Worth It (audio)
Pinewood Dialogues (conversations with film, TV, digital media innovators and creators) (audio) (via)

A by-product of obsessively, constantly surfing the net to discover the bright and the shiny is a steady flow of promising new ideas. Mostly slight variations on existing great ideas that tickle your fancy. Rands In Repose: FriendDA (via)

viddy:
FreakyFlicks (obscure torrents) (via)
Studs Terkel a/v linkdump
Film, Art and Creative Television (exclusive videos and interviews with artists and filmmakers) (via)
The greatest choreography in film history
Kids in the Hall - Sausages
Pig Fights Lion (wow)
Good for Nothing, Peanut-Stealing Cat (via)
Klaus Nomi's Lime Tart Recipe (doc)

"Be happy whenever you can manage it. Enjoy yourself. It's lighter than you think." - John Cage, 'Rules for Students and Teachers' (via)

stray bullets

Top NSA Scribe Takes Us Inside The Shadow Factory No outsider has spent more time tracking the labyrinthine ways of the National Security Agency than James Bamford. But even he gets lost in the maze. Despite countless articles and three books on the U.S. government's super-secret, signals-intelligence service — the latest of which, The Shadow Factory, is out today — Bamford tells Danger Room that he was caught off guard by revelations that the NSA was eavesdropping on Americans. He remains confused about how the country's telecommunications firms were co-opted into the warrantless spying project. And he's still only guessing, he admits, at the breadth and depth of those domestic surveillance efforts. In this exclusive interview, Bamford talks about how hard it is, after all these years, to fit together the pieces at the NSA's "Puzzle Palace" headquarters.

The Programming Aphorisms of Strunk and White If I could take ten software development books to a desert island, The Elements of Style by William Strunk and E.B. White would be one of them. (via)

Making A Living From Music For Picture Writing music for picture seems like the ideal career. You get to work in your studio for a living, you can earn good money, and there's so much potential work: action films, travel and nature documentaries, romantic comedies, cartoons, low-budget sci-fi, even breakfast cereal ads. But how do you break into this lucrative world? As we find out in the first part of this new series, the first thing you need is determination... (links to pts. 2-9) (via)

Talk to Elbot I did. For way too long. It was interesting, but I could tell it wasn't human, although I was probably biased because I already knew. It was a decent conversation and was quite funny at times. Elbot can be a bit of a wise-ass. (prev)

also:
New audio tapes of JFK released (via)
World Chess Championship 2008 (wiki) (more)
Searching for Robert Johnson (third photo?)
Project 10^100 is a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible (Google is giving out 10 million for the best ideas, deadline Oct. 20)
Invention: Natural colour underwater photographs
Sleep-deprivation is a myth, expert claims
How to Survive a Grizzly Bear Attack
The Playboy Interview: Marshall McLuhan (via)

viddy:
Photojournalist on the frontline
Inside The Actor's Studio: Dennis Hopper (1994)
Fernando Botero Interview 1/2 2/2 (prev)
Márta Sebestyén and the Sebő Ensemble: Sándor Weöres poems (lovely)
Hairyman (animated interpretation of an African-American folk tale from the South)
Do you know the first ten elements of the periodic table?
Gijs Gieskes beautiful spinning photoelectronic acid machine (synthporn)
Zombie Robots!

stray bullets

Gustav holdouts' tales give evacuees pause After curfew on Wednesday night, two National Guard soldiers traded their rifles for a guitar and some drumsticks....The night after Gustav came ashore, small squads of storm holdouts and National Guardsmen played an elaborate game of curfew cat-and-mouse. But they finally gave up as everyone ended up at the Maple Leaf lounge for a late-night gab session. (via)

The secret code of diaries A sampling of the more daunting diary codes, some taking many years to crack. (via) also: A high school teacher in Salinas, Donald G. Harden, and his wife cracked a code of a man threatening mass murder, a code which the Navy and FBI experts have failed to break in a week of effort. (read more and see the cracked message)

Elderly are more open-minded than young people People become confused more easily as they age because they succumb to distractions and not due to their brains slowing down, a new study shows.

Finding L.A.'s hidden homeless To most people, it's just trash: A scrap of dirty blanket visible under some stairs. A glimpse of blue tarp peeking out of a bush. A bag of recyclables parked discreetly behind a concrete column. But Courtney Kanagi, an outreach worker, has learned how to decode bits of urban detritus that most people ignore. She knows what these signs mean: the crawl space beneath the stairs was someone's home. When you're out there, you're acutely aware of many things that others miss completely, never noticing. (via)

Let's hear it for the autodidact Sean Connery's memoir is surprising, not least because the actor emerges from its thoughtful pages as self-taught.

also:
MIT-led Team Zooms in on Massive Black Hole at Center of Milky Way
Bare-breasted virgins compete for Swaziland king (photos!)
How to Create the Perfect Fake Identity
Archaeological Excavation Techniques
ClichéWatch: i.love.the.smell.of.*.in.the.morning (funny) (via)

viddy:
USCG Fly Over of New Orleans Post Gustav
Terry Gilliam on the Work of Roland Emmerich
Marshall McLuhan on the Today show (don't miss it)

stray bullets

There are five top tourist spots Americans can't visit; but if you're going to visit a big city, don't forget your Subway Emergency Kit; (via) there's a new virus that extorts by encrypting your files; (via) and VoIP is the new medium for steganography. (via)

Lagniappe: a Story with no Words; scrap paper fiction; The Surrealist Compliment Generator (via)

stray bullets

There's more than you'd ever want to know about the Pink Floyd pig, (via) (prev) the Fermilab Code was broken even before Bruce Schneier had a chance to blog about it, there's a new Theory for the Formation of Large Agrarian Empires and, um, a government insider says that George Bush authorized the 9-11 attacks. (via)

UT Web Favorites: Cryptome

Cryptome has been quietly leaking, disclosing and revealing for close to a dozen years.

In their own words:

Cryptome welcomes documents for publication that are prohibited by governments worldwide, in particular material on freedom of expression, privacy, cryptology, dual-use technologies, national security, intelligence, and secret governance -- open, secret and classified documents -- but not limited to those. Documents are removed from this site only by order served directly by a US court having jurisdiction. No court order has ever been served; any order served will be published here -- or elsewhere if gagged by order. Bluffs will be published if comical but otherwise ignored.

They have frequently updated news and links, as well. They also have an RSS feed but I prefer to scan the site.

With a sparse old-timey plain-text look, Cryptome delivers the nugs with a high signal to noise ratio.

For a $25 dollar donation you can get the Cryptome DVD with over 43,000 files covering their 11.5 year history. (But wait, there's more: they'll also throw in 18,000 pages of declassified counter-intel docs dating from 1945-85 from our friends at INSCOM.)

Though it may lean a bit too far toward the activist/conspiracy theory reality tunnel for some, don't be deceived, Cryptome is a great resource for researchers, aficionados, informed citizens and paranoids alike.