[Funny new short story from Bruce Sterling. -egg]

Bruce Sterling: “From Beyond the Coming Age of Networked Matter,” a short story – Boing Boing
http://boingboing.net/2013/07/16/bruce-sterling-from-beyond.html

[Well, this is fascinating. -egg]

On October 10, 2011, researchers from the University of Minnesota found that women who took supplemental multivitamins died at rates higher than those who didn’t. Two days later, researchers from the Cleveland Clinic found that men who took vitamin E had an increased risk of prostate cancer. “It’s been a tough week for vitamins,” said Carrie Gann of ABC News.

These findings weren’t new. Seven previous studies had already shown that vitamins increased the risk of cancer and heart disease and shortened lives. Still, in 2012, more than half of all Americans took some form of vitamin supplements. What few people realize, however, is that their fascination with vitamins can be traced back to one man. A man who was so spectacularly right that he won two Nobel Prizes and so spectacularly wrong that he was arguably the world’s greatest quack.

via The Vitamin Myth: Why We Think We Need Supplements – Atlantic Mobile.

[Yum. -egg]

Tyrone Stoddart’s “Boxed” is a design for a desk, chair and desklamp that collapse down into a small briefcase. What appears, at first, to be a case-worth of sticks and assorted oddments transforms into furniture with a remarkably few steps:

via Briefcase transforms into table, stool and lamp – Boing Boing.

Boxed from Tyrone Stoddart on Vimeo.

[Looks like an absolutely fascinating documentary. -egg]

[…]twilight sleep was probably the most interesting discovery of the project. Twilight sleep is a moment in the teens where internationally, wealthy women began traveling to Germany to a clinic where there’s a drug protocol given to laboring women, an almost homeopathic dose of morphine that doesn’t really take the pain away in any significant way, coupled with scopolamine which induces amnesia. So the experience of laboring in twilight sleep may be intensely painful, but the women forget it as they’re experiencing it. The interesting thing historically about twilight sleep is that it became a real activist cause in the U.S., and the activists who were supporting and trying to bring it to the U.S. were all feminists and suffragettes. So the early 20th century history of women being really strong advocates for medicalized childbirth, for hospital birth, for drugs, for anesthesia, is an interesting forgotten history.

What was the position for advocating twilight sleep? Was it for equality, mainly?

That the pain of labor is an abject experience of very intense pain. The language that’s used in these books and articles that feminists wrote advocating twilight sleep is basically human-rights discourse: Society has the obligation to give us women this thing that will take away this devastating pain that we experience. It’s a human-rights discourse of equality for women in the form of pain relief. Which is incredibly interesting set next to ­today’s feminist conversation which is all about natural unmedicated childbirth being the correct, feminist way of giving birth. For me that was a discovery.

via The Birth of Motherhood – The New Inquiry.

It is quite likely this is the coolest desk in the world!

The Pipe Organ Desk has been in the works for more than 3 years. It is entirely made from solid wood down to the last screw. It features an octave of functional wooden organ pipes. Should you play the correct sequence of notes or tune, a secret compartment opens up.

When you push in a drawer on the desk the air is directed to one of the organ pipes at the front of the desk, sounding a note. Some of the air is also directed into a pneumatic logic board. The logic board within the desk actually keeps track of the notes played. When it picks up the correct tune it unlocks a very special secret compartment. The logic board, can be reprogrammed to pick up any tune, so at any time the song may be changed to a new tune. It is powered entirely by air, and it is made entirely from solid wood.

via Pipe Organ desk.

Clayton Seymour, a Navy vet, was outraged to discover that his Freedom of Information Act request to the NSA to see his file was rejected because telling him what information they’d gathered in secret would expose their secret information-gathering techniques. Obama’s 2009 Executive Order 13526 requires all government agencies to make all records public, other than in exceptional circumstances. The NSA has effectively crammed all of its information into an exceptional circumstance because to disclose anything would lead to disclosure of its methods. This is the basis on which it is rejecting all FOIA requests.

via NSA’s catch-22: we can’t tell you anything, because everything we do is a secret – Boing Boing.

[Really in-depth looks at a bunch of the most famous murder ballads. Although, dammit, where’s The Twa Sisters? -egg]

So, why murder ballads? First and foremost, I think its because theyre essentially a form of journalism. Most of the songs youll find discussed here were written very soon after the real-life crimes they describe, and sold in the streets within hours of the killers capture or execution. Cheerfully vulgar, revelling in gore, and always with an eye on the main chance, these songs were tabloid newspapers set to music, carrying news of all the latest orrible murders to an insatiable public.

Then theres the fact that murder ballads never stop mutating, morphing to suit local place names as they cross and re-cross the Atlantic, and changing with the times as they move down the decades to fascinate each generations biggest musical stars. Victims are bludgeoned, stabbed or shot in every verse and killers are often hanged, but the songs themselves never die.

For all this mutability, the core facts of the story in each song are surprisingly persistent, and give us just enough information to follow a trail through the clippings library to the real individuals whose short lives and brutal deaths have become an indelible part of popular culture. No-ones going to care how you or I met our ends 100 years from now, but theyll still be singing Billy Lyons tale and recalling his fatal encounter with that bad man Stagger Lee.

via Murder Ballads | Paul Slade – Journalist.

[Really excellent article, and important. -egg]

I am mystified by the “privacy moderate” who yearns for a debate about the surveillance state without anyone being so transgressive as to leak the information without which there would be no debate.

What I sense, but cannot prove, is the privacy moderate’s desperation to avoid facing the full extent of the establishment’s extreme behavior. Americans once condemned such excesses. The Obama Administration is nowhere near as morally odious as, e.g., the bygone East German state. But Americans didn’t just criticize its surveillance apparatus, the Stasi, because the East German regime used it for evil. Quite apart from the character of the regime and its secret police, Americans found the very notion of secret, pervasive spying on innocent citizens repugnant. We found the notion of vast files kept on private citizens creepy, because that isn’t the role the state ought to play in a free society. Today, the American state is engaged in intentionally spying on tens of millions of innocent citizens. It did its utmost to hide the truth about that spying.

Civil libertarians are objecting as if this is a historic scandal of the utmost importance — and it is exactly that. Privacy moderates are obsessed with policing the objections for hyperbole. They can tell their grandkids, “When I found out America was secretly spying on tens of millions of innocents, I focused on criticizing the people who overreacted rhetorically.” It’s like the blogs that spent the run-up to the Iraq War obsessing about scattered Bush-Hitler signs at anti-war protest rallies, as if, absent push-back, the nation was ready to side with the sign-makers; or like a doctor who worries more about cosmetic scars than cratering white blood-cell counts.

via The Problem With the ‘Privacy Moderates’ – Atlantic Mobile.

America’s 11-judge Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court (FISC) has made more than a dozen classified rulings that vastly expanded the powers of America’s spy agencies, operating under an obscure legal doctrine called “special needs.”

Under this doctrine, established in 1989 in a Supreme Court case over drug testing railway workers, a “minimal intrusion on privacy” is allowed in order to help the state mitigate “overriding public danger.” FISC’s rulings have widened this ruling to allow for wholesale spying in the name of preventing “nuclear proliferation,” as well as terrorism.

The NYT calls this a “shadow Supreme Court” but notes that FISC proceedings only hear from the government — no one presents alternatives to the government’s arguments. Much of the expansion of surveillance turns on whether metadata collection is intrusive (I think it is):

The officials said one central concept connects a number of the court’s opinions. The judges have concluded that the mere collection of enormous volumes of “metadata” — facts like the time of phone calls and the numbers dialed, but not the content of conversations — does not violate the Fourth Amendment, as long as the government establishes a valid reason under national security regulations before taking the next step of actually examining the contents of an American’s communications.

This concept is rooted partly in the “special needs” provision the court has embraced. “The basic idea is that it’s O.K. to create this huge pond of data,” a third official said, “but you have to establish a reason to stick your pole in the water and start fishing.”

Under the new procedures passed by Congress in 2008 in the FISA Amendments Act, even the collection of metadata must be considered “relevant” to a terrorism investigation or other intelligence activities.

The court has indicated that while individual pieces of data may not appear “relevant” to a terrorism investigation, the total picture that the bits of data create may in fact be relevant, according to the officials with knowledge of the decisions.

In Secret, Court Vastly Broadens Powers of N.S.A. [Eric Lichtblau/NYT]

via Secret rulings from America’s shadow Supreme Court legalizes spying in one-sided hearings – Boing Boing.

I’ve just released my first new album in seven years: “Chronotope.” It’s moody, pretty, experimental electronic music, made for the dancefloor in your head. I hope you’ll check it out!
Please pass it along to anyone who you think might be interested 🙂
http://tinpanalgorithm.bandcamp.com/