[Very interesting book review. -egg]

BETWEEN ROUGHLY 1995 AND 2007, mysterious emails pitching cheap Viagra and penny stocks were part of everyday life online. Over time, the messages grew stranger, incorporating passages of classic science fiction, ribald limericks, and the occasional incomprehensible JPEG. Although IT departments circulated enjoinders to “blacklist” these unsolicited messages, many of us were fascinated, producing blogs, fanzines, and poetry dedicated to the oddly evocative digital detritus. Meanwhile, spam continued to evolve, becoming increasingly intrusive. Often masquerading as urgent communication from a friend or family member, the absurd verse of anonymous “authors” like MegaDik gave way to desperate requests for money. Today, smart filters guard our inboxes, but the spammers are flanking us on blogs and social media. More cockroach than virus, spam adapts and stubbornly survives.

via The Tedium is the Message: Finn Brunton’s “Spam: A Shadow History of the Internet” |.

[Really like this stuff, and love the process. I’ve tried drawing using the same one-breath-per-line a bit in the last couple of days, and it’s really nice to do. -egg]

In his series of drawings titled Each Line One Breath, Netherlands-based artist John Franzen creates textured drawings remeniscent of wrinkled fabric or waves of water by drawing tediously placed rows of lines with black ink. The artist begins by drawing a single vertical line on the far side of a canvas but on subsequent lines allows for various imperfections to become amplified or suppressed as he continues, line after line. The process, which might look maddening, actually appears to be a sort of meditative effort for Franzen who works with almost robotic precision.

via Each Line One Breath: Morphogenetic Freehand Drawings By John Franzen | Colossal.

[Really interesting long article on MSG, umami, and fermentation. -egg]

Without fermentation, we would live in a sad world without beer, cheese, miso, kimchi, and hundreds of other delicious things humans have enjoyed for centuries. But in the carefully labeled containers stacked around the cramped confines of their lab, Chang and Felder have been fermenting new things. They’ve turned mashed pistachios, lentils, chickpeas, and other legumes into miso-like pastes Chang calls “hozon” (Korean for “preserved”). They’ve created variations on Japanese tamari — a by-product of miso production that’s similar to soy sauce — with fermented spelt and rye they call “bonji” (“essence”). They’ve even replicated the Japanese staple katsuobushi (a log of dried, smoked, and fermented bonito that’s shaved into bonito flakes) using fermented pork tenderloin instead of fish.

The flavor Chang and Felder are chasing in creating these new fermented products is umami — the savory “fifth taste” detectable by the human tongue along with salty, sweet, sour, and bitter. When bacteria and fungi break down the glucose in foods that are fermenting, they release waste products. And the waste valued in Momofuku’s lab above all others is glutamic acid, the amino acid that creates the taste of umami on our tongues.

Also on the shelf in Chang’s lab, underneath the jars containing foods in various states of controlled spoilage, is a giant tin of monosodium glutamate, more commonly known as MSG — perhaps the most infamously misunderstood and maligned three letters in the history of food. It just so happens that inside that tin of MSG is the exact molecule Chang and his chefs have worked so hard for the last three years to tease out of pots of fermenting beans and nuts. It’s pure glutamic acid, crystallized with a single sodium ion to stabilize it; five pounds of uncut, un-stepped-on umami, made from fermented corn in a factory in Iowa.

via The Notorious MSG’s Unlikely Formula For Success.

[Interestingly, the central premise of the article — that digital dualism is a fallacy — seems to be rapidly gaining acceptance in the field. I’ve got mixed feelings about it, myself. -egg]

The power of social media to burrow dramatically into our everyday lives as well as the near ubiquity of new technologies such as mobile phones has forced us all to conceptualize the digital and the physical; the on- and off-line.

And some have a bias to see the digital and the physical as separate; what I am calling digital dualism. Digital dualists believe that the digital world is “virtual” and the physical world “real.” This bias motivates many of the critiques of sites like Facebook and the rest of the social web and I fundamentally think this digital dualism is a fallacy. Instead, I want to argue that the digital and physical are increasingly meshed, and want to call this opposite perspective that implodes atoms and bits rather than holding them conceptually separate augmented reality.

via Digital Dualism versus Augmented Reality » Cyborgology.

Here’s a crazy fact: Thanks to soda and the sneaky added sugars in store-bought foods, 25% of Americans consume a diet that is 25% sugar. In fact, all it takes to hit that is three cans of soda on top of an otherwise sugar-free diet. What does eating like that mean for your health in the long term? Scientists are still trying to figure that out. Scicurious breaks down a recent study in mice that successfully demonstrates both why our sugar intake has health experts concerned AND why we don’t yet know exactly what we’re doing to ourselves.

via Scientists still trying to figure out how added sugar affects your health – Boing Boing.

[The extremely complicated afterlife of James Brown, and James Brown’s money. -egg]

James Brown was not expecting to die when he did. He was 73 years old, with a wheezing chest and swollen feet, but the man wasn’t ready to retire. He was going back on the road: New Year’s Eve at B. B. King’s place in Manhattan, then up to Ontario, west to British Columbia, down to Anaheim in February. Before the tour, in late December, he went to get a new set of bottom teeth screwed into his jaw, but a doctor heard that wheeze and sent him to the hospital. Thirty-six hours later, before dawn broke Christmas morning, his heart petered out.

Yet Mr. Brown was not wholly unprepared to die, either. Several years earlier, in August 2000, he’d drawn up a will in which he bequeathed his “personal and household effects”—his linens and china and such—to six adult children from two ex-wives and two other women. He was very clear, too, that those were the only heirs he intended to favor. “I have intentionally failed to provide for any other relatives or other persons,” he wrote in the will. “Such failure is intentional and not occasioned by accident or mistake.”

Everything else he owned, including his sixty-acre estate in Beech Island, South Carolina, and his catalog of 800 or so songs, was to remain in a trust, which in turn was divided into two funds: one to educate his grandchildren (seven among those six named children, plus the daughter of his son Teddy, who died in 1973) and a much larger one to pay tuition for “financially needy” students who attend school in South Carolina or Georgia. How much is that trust worth? Hard to say, because Mr. Brown’s best assets are of a sort that can be marketed and managed in perpetuity as opposed to simply liquidated for cash. But the lowball estimate is $20 million, which, with proper promotion, could be multiplied many times over for many years to come. Elvis has been dead for three decades, after all, and he’s still pulling eight figures annually.

In other words, Mr. Brown left a fortune to poor strangers.

Fifteen months later, none of those poor strangers have seen a nickel. Nor will they for months, and more likely years, to come, by which point there may be little left, after the creditors and the lawyers are paid. The first attorney was hired barely thirty-six hours after Mr. Brown died, and the first legal challenge was initiated less than two weeks after that. The lawsuits and lawyers rapidly multiplied—there are now more than thirty lawyers suing in three different courts—which has had the predictable result of resolving…precisely nothing.

via James Brown Profile – Godfather of Soul.

[Absolutely fascinating. -egg]

The disease that sours oranges and leaves them half green, already ravaging citrus crops across the world, had reached the state’s storied groves. Mr. Kress, the president of Southern Gardens Citrus, in charge of two and a half million orange trees and a factory that squeezes juice for Tropicana and Florida’s Natural, sat in silence for several long moments.“O.K.,” he said finally on that fall day in 2005, “let’s make a plan.”

In the years that followed, he and the 8,000 other Florida growers who supply most of the nation’s orange juice poured everything they had into fighting the disease they call citrus greening.

To slow the spread of the bacterium that causes the scourge, they chopped down hundreds of thousands of infected trees and sprayed an expanding array of pesticides on the winged insect that carries it. But the contagion could not be contained.

They scoured Central Florida’s half-million acres of emerald groves and sent search parties around the world to find a naturally immune tree that could serve as a new progenitor for a crop that has thrived in the state since its arrival, it is said, with Ponce de León. But such a tree did not exist.

“In all of cultivated citrus, there is no evidence of immunity,” the plant pathologist heading a National Research Council task force on the disease said.

In all of citrus, but perhaps not in all of nature. With a precipitous decline in Florida’s harvest predicted within the decade, the only chance left to save it, Mr. Kress believed, was one that his industry and others had long avoided for fear of consumer rejection. They would have to alter the orange’s DNA — with a gene from a different species.

via A Race to Save the Orange by Altering Its DNA – NYTimes.com.

[I know I’ve been posting a lot of Schneier stuff lately, but we so desperately need an expert voice of sanity right now. -egg]

At a Senate hearing in March, Director of National Intelligence James Clapper assured the committee that his agency didn’t collect data on hundreds of millions of Americans. He was lying, too. He later defended his lie by inventing a new definition of the word “collect,” an excuse that didn’t even pass the laugh test.

As Edward Snowden’s documents reveal more about the NSA’s activities, it’s becoming clear that we can’t trust anything anyone official says about these programs.

Google and Facebook insist that the NSA has no “direct access” to their servers. Of course not; the smart way for the NSA to get all the data is through sniffers.

Apple says it’s never heard of PRISM. Of course not; that’s the internal name of the NSA database. Companies are publishing reports purporting to show how few requests for customer-data access they’ve received, a meaningless number when a single Verizon request can cover all of their customers. The Guardian reported that Microsoft secretly worked with the NSA to subvert the security of Outlook, something it carefully denies. Even President Obama’s justifications and denials are phrased with the intent that the listener will take his words very literally and not wonder what they really mean.

via Schneier on Security: Restoring Trust in Government and the Internet.

[Totally fascinating. Medium.com has been running some really interesting stuff lately, I’ve noticed. -egg]

During the car sales pitch, there is a moment when you first get behind the wheel. You hit the ignition, the engine turns over, and the car comes to life. You are bathed in the sound of countless mechanical and electrical parts as they spin, twist, push, pull, and rub against one another. It’s Kara Gordon’s job to make sure you like what you hear.Gordon is a noise and vibration performance engineer with GM. She’s been doing this since 1999 and is part of the team that designed and tested the soundscape of the new Chevy Impala. GM is pushing the luxury car as their quietest full-size sedan, ever. While they’ve clearly put a great deal of effort into isolating and sealing the cabin, what’s more interesting is the effort they put into the sounds you do hear.

via How GM makes a car sound like what a car is supposed to sound like — Thoughtful Design — Medium.

riotclitshave, crassetination: Tattoos 01: Beautiful Body Art ….