[Pretty spot-on. Don’t miss parts two and three. -egg]

Mightygodking dot com » Post Topic » MGK Versus His Adolescent Reading Habits.

Alternatives to the Singularity is a funny, crowdsourced, extended piss-take on the idea of the Singularity, created through futurists’ challenge. A bunch of funny people, futurists, and weirdos created 80+ variations on the theme of Singularity. They go on a bit, but they range between mildly funny to genuine ROFL, and are worth the time.

via Futurists try out less-boring, funnier Singularities – Boing Boing.

I’m really enjoying these new pieces by artist 1010 that seems to peel away layers from mundane urban walls to reveal a depth of colorful layers. The Hamburg-based artist had a number of similar works on canvas at the Stroke Art Fair in Berlin in September.

via Surprising Layers of Color Revealed on Urban Walls | Colossal.

[Epic new Bad Lip Reading trailer. -egg]

Game of Thones recut as trailer for comedy about theme park cast and crew – Boing Boing.

British sculptor Kate MccGwire (previously) creates uncanny organic sculptures from layers of bird feathers. The objects she creates are so precisely assembled that they seem to form hybrid creatures with tentacles or limbs that twist and curve into unexpected forms.

via New Feather Sculptures by Kate MccGwire | Colossal.

[James Bridle being all super-smart and stuff. -egg]

I first encountered Superstudio at the Arkitekturmuseet in Stockholm a few years ago, in a recreation of the seminal “New Domestic Architecture” show held at MoMA in 1972. Superstudio were a radical architectural practice who operated in Italy in the late 60s and 70s, proposing a series of vast, impossible conceptual interventions – a rejection of architecture’s decorative concerns in favour of a total architecture, a “total urbanization”, best characterised by the extensive sketches and models for the “Continuous Monument”.

Beginning in 1969, the Continuous Monument proposed a gridded structure which would eventually come to encompass the entire earth, a seamless surface laid over everything, a place of nomadism and possibility and an eversion of the domestic into the public. Long heralded as forerunners of architects-of-scale such as Rem Koolhaas and Zaha Hadid, they have also always seemed to me to be prefiguring the network: a world-scale communication system on and within which we all dwell now. The photocollages, which I have been somewhat obsessively reproducing in Google Earth, also seem to point towards a land art for the internet, of which I have written previously.

via How to see through the Cloud | booktwo.org.

[Wow, turns out to be a really interesting character. -egg]

Ladar Levison was Edward Snowden’s email provider, until the FBI came calling. For the first time, he talks about his odd childhood and the new snooping capability he thinks the feds have developed.

via The Real Story of Lavabit’s Founder.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/post/the-done-deal/2011/09/02/gIQAsAqjwJ_blog.html

[Über-geeky and totally fascinating rant against word processors and WYSIWYG. I got to it via http://bit.ly/19xjVeG — the original rant is better, but the comments thread is *fantastic*. -egg]

The word processor is a stupid and grossly inefficient tool for preparing text for communication with others. That is the claim I shall defend below. It will probably strike you as bizarre at first sight. If I am against word processors, what do I propose: that we write in longhand, or use a mechanical typewriter? No. While there are things to be said in favor of these modes of text preparation I take it for granted that most readers of this essay will do most of their writing using a computer, as I do. My claim is that there are much better ways of preparing text, using a computer, than the word processor.

via Word Processors: Stupid and Inefficient.

Since I started working with Snowden’s documents, I have been using a number of tools to try to stay secure from the NSA. The advice I shared included using Tor, preferring certain cryptography over others, and using public-domain encryption wherever possible.

I also recommended using an air gap, which physically isolates a computer or local network of computers from the Internet. (The name comes from the literal gap of air between the computer and the Internet; the word predates wireless networks.)

But this is more complicated than it sounds, and requires explanation.

…

Since working with Snowden’s NSA files, I have tried to maintain a single air-gapped computer. It turned out to be harder than I expected, and I have ten rules for anyone trying to do the same:

via Schneier on Security: Air Gaps.