Is google actually turning evil?

(((It's 3 a.m. I woke up suddenly and can't sleep because I wondering if the corporation whose motto is "Don't be evil," is in fact, turning evil. Whatever, they sell ads--join the club of the freaking most of us. Not exactly Blackwater.)))

Will Google's Greed Ruin the Internet?
By Jeffrey Chester, The Nation
Posted on October 6, 2007, Printed on October 9, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/64214/

Should we be worried about Google? Ten years after the search engine was launched by two Stanford University graduate students, Google has become an empowering force and adopted behavior that has transformed the way we access news and information, shop for goods and services and -- increasingly -- how we engage in politics. Who would have imagined four years ago, that Google and its subsidiary YouTube would co-sponsor debates in which ordinary citizens could directly engage with presidential candidates?

Last week, Google's stock hit an all-time high, on the strength of reports that the company will earn more this year than the $10.6 billion it earned in 2006. But while Google has almost overnight become a trusted source of information for the technologically attuned, few have thought to question the extent to which its success poses threats to both our privacy and our aspirations for the positive potential of the Internet.

Google's dramatic growth is a reflection of its role as the most powerful player in the world of interactive marketing. Ninety-nine percent of Google's annual revenues (according to its 10K filing with the SEC) comes from selling targeted advertising on its search engine, which is driven by a massive consumer data collection system.

Google is far more than the digital incarnation of Madison Avenue in the twenty-first century. It is the engine driving us into a new communications era, in which interactive marketing will significantly shape our lives. The company is aggressively expanding its advertising role, building out a sales team poised to partner with the biggest brand advertisers on the planet. Google is pitching its souped-up interactive advertising system to global corporations so they can better blend marketing messaged into the news, information and entertainment we consume.

Google's message to Madison Avenue, as expressed at the OMMA Expo in New York this week is that its technology can leverage tremendous insights about global consumers of products and information, and can deliver the right interactive marketing messages to consumers at precisely the right moment. Ellen Naughton, Google's director of media platforms, urged advertisers to "fish where the fish are," a reference to the millions of viewers of online video, including YouTube. Naughton was particularly proud of "Green Tea Partay," a Google-sold video ad that has drawn more than 3 million viewers to date on YouTube. It's a cheeky video, in which Smirnoff Vodka marketing messages are subtly integrated into the insistent beat of an preppy California hip-hop routine.

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0.9999. . . = 1?

(((I don't understand why this is and it hurts my brain.)))

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In mathematics, the recurring decimal 0.999… , which is also written as or , denotes a real number equal to 1. In other words, "0.999…" represents the same number as the symbol "1". The equality has long been accepted by professional mathematicians and taught in textbooks. Various proofs of this identity have been formulated with varying rigour, preferred development of the real numbers, background assumptions, historical context, and target audience."

The original Proust Questionnaire

(((Early 20th century French intellectuals thought questionnaires were pretty cool. So you don't have to feel lame when you post one up on myspace))))

"The young Marcel was asked to fill out questionnaires at two social events: one when he was 13, another when he was 20. Proust did not invent this party game; he is simply the most extraordinary person to respond to them. At the birthday party of Antoinette Felix-Faure, the 13-year-old Marcel was asked to answer the following questions in the birthday book, and here's what he said:

• What do you regard as the lowest depth of misery?
  
  To be separated from Mama
• Where would you like to live?
  
  In the country of the Ideal, or, rather, of my ideal
• What is your idea of earthly happiness?
  
  To live in contact with those I love, with the beauties of nature, with a quantity of books and music, and to have, within easy distance, a French theater
• To what faults do you feel most indulgent?
  
  To a life deprived of the works of genius
• Who are your favorite heroes of fiction?
  
  Those of romance and poetry, those who are the expression of an ideal rather than an imitation of the real
• Who are your favorite characters in history?
  
  A mixture of Socrates, Pericles, Mahomet, Pliny the Younger and Augustin Thierry
• Who are your favorite heroines in real life?
  
  A woman of genius leading an ordinary life
• Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?
  
  Those who are more than women without ceasing to be womanly; everything that is tender, poetic, pure and in every way beautiful
• Your favorite painter?
  
  Meissonier
• Your favorite musician?
  
  Mozart
• The quality you most admire in a man?
  
  Intelligence, moral sense
• The quality you most admire in a woman?
  
  Gentleness, naturalness, intelligence
• Your favorite virtue?
  
  All virtues that are not limited to a sect: the universal virtues
• Your favorite occupation?
  
  Reading, dreaming, and writing verse
• Who would you have liked to be?
  
  Since the question does not arise, I prefer not to answer it. All the same, I should very much have liked to be Pliny the Younger.

Seven years after the first questionnaire, Proust was asked, at another social event, to fill out another; the questions are much the same, but the answers somewhat different, indicative of his traits at 20:

• Your most marked characteristic?
  
  A craving to be loved, or, to be more precise, to be caressed and spoiled rather than to be admired
• The quality you most like in a man?
  
  Feminine charm
• The quality you most like in a woman?
  
  A man's virtues, and frankness in friendship
• What do you most value in your friends?
  
  Tenderness - provided they possess a physical charm which makes their tenderness worth having
• What is your principle defect?
  
  Lack of understanding; weakness of will
• What is your favorite occupation?
  
  Loving
• What is your dream of happiness?
  
  Not, I fear, a very elevated one. I really haven't the courage to say what it is, and if I did I should probably destroy it by the mere fact of putting it into words.
• What to your mind would be the greatest of misfortunes?
  
  Never to have known my mother or my grandmother
• What would you like to be?
  
  Myself - as those whom I admire would like me to be
• In what country would you like to live?
  
  One where certain things that I want would be realized - and where feelings of tenderness would always be reciprocated. [Proust's underlining]
• What is your favorite color?
  
  Beauty lies not in colors but in thier harmony
• What is your favorite flower?
  
  Hers - but apart from that, all
• What is your favorite bird?
  
  The swallow
• Who are your favorite prose writers?
  
  At the moment, Anatole France and Pierre Loti
• Who are your favoite poets?
  
  Baudelaire and Alfred de Vigny
• Who is your favorite hero of fiction?
  
  Hamlet
• Who are your favorite heroines of fiction?
  
  Phedre (crossed out) Berenice
• Who are your favorite composers?
  
  Beethoven, Wagner, Shuhmann
• Who are your favorite painters?
  
  Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt
• Who are your heroes in real life?
  
  Monsieur Darlu, Monsieur Boutroux (professors)
• Who are your favorite heroines of history?
  
  Cleopatra
• What are your favorite names?
  I only have one at a time
• What is it you most dislike?
  
  My own worst qualities
• What historical figures do you most despise?
  
  I am not sufficiently educated to say
• What event in military history do you most admire?
  
  My own enlistment as a volunteer!
• What reform do you most admire?
  
  (no response)
• What natural gift would you most like to possess?
  
  Will power and irresistible charm
• How would you like to die?
  
  A better man than I am, and much beloved
• What is your present state of mind?
  
  Annoyance at having to think about myself in order to answer these questions
• To what faults do you feel most indulgent?
  
  Those that I understand
• What is your motto?
• I prefer not to say, for fear it might bring me bad luck.

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Grand Text Auto

((((Blogs are the yesterday's next big thing. However, many of the popular, long-standing ones seem mired in techno-geekiness and left/right "blogosphere" punditry as a sort of knee-jerk backlash to the antique blandness of mainstream media. That's my opinion for this particular minute.)))

EXHIBITION: Grand Text Auto

LOCATION: The Beall Center for Art and Technology, UC Irvine

OPENING RECEPTION: October 4th, 6:30pm-9:00pm, Beall Center

SYMPOSIUM: October 5th, 1:00-5:00pm, Studio Art Bldg. 712, Room 160, UC Irvine

PERFORMANCE: October 5th, 6:00-8:00pm, Winifred Smith Hall, UC Irvine

GENERAL CONTACT: (949) 824-4339 or http://beallcenter.uci.edu

OVERVIEW

Many blogs have become books - from The Baghdad Blog to Belle de Jour. But Grand Text Auto is the first blog ever to become a gallery exhibition. It opens October 4th and runs through December 15th at UC Irvine's Beall Center for Art and Technology. The exhibition features the work of Grand Text Auto members Noah Wardrip-Fruin, Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, Andrew Stern, Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, and their collaborators.

Grand Text Auto is a blog about the potential of digital media, from literary websites to experimental computer games. At the exhibition, the blog members will put these ideas into practice, showing a variety of cutting edge works. Some use the latest in artificial intelligence technology, such as Mateas and Stern's interactive drama Façade -- of which The New York Times says, "This is the future of video games." The Beall exhibition will feature the first public showing of a life-sized "augmented reality" version of Façade, created in collaboration with Georgia Tech's GVU Center. Virtual reality is also on display, as with Wardrip-Fruin's collaborative work Screen, a literary game played with 3D text -- never seen before outside of a research lab and presented with support from UC San Diego's Center for Research in Computing and the Arts.

On the other hand, some works in the exhibition use decidedly do-it-yourself techniques, such as Montfort and Rettberg's Implementation, an experimental novel distributed around the world on mailing labels. Others are quirky, such as Flanagan's [giantJoystick], a replica Atari 2600 joystick so large that two people must work together to play (this has its North American debut at the Beall show).

In addition to the gallery show, the members of Grand Text Auto are working together with the Beall Center to present a live symposium and performance evening, both on October 5th. The afternoon symposium (1-5 p.m.) will discuss the power of collaborative blogging, new directions for computer games, and the place of language in digital media. The evening performance (6-8 p.m.) will feature the disturbing and humorous interactive cinema experience Terminal Time (which automatically creates outrageously biased documentaries of the past millennium) and a live performance of the award-winning hypertext novel The Unknown (which tells the tale of a rollicking cross-country book tour). Parking for these events is available in the Student Parking structure at the corner of Campus Drive and West Peltason.

Online, Grand Text Auto (http://grandtextauto.org) is a blog with more than 200,000 visitors a month, collectively authored by six artists and scholars. Offline, Grand Text Auto members have been shown in major art museums, been written about in leading national periodicals, and shipped games that have met wide acclaim and sold millions of copies. The Grand Text Auto exhibition is the first time that these artists will show their work together. Delve into Grand Text Auto's digital depths October 4 - December 15, 2007 (closed November 22-26) and witness the live debut of blog-meets-reality.

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See, I knew science would solve global warming!

(((Sometimes I read something in the science section of the newspaper which I'm sure will be screaming on the cover of every news outlet. Usually these things just end up being a small blurb in "Harper's "Findings." Alan Jackson needs to start writing songs about things like this so it remains in our cultural memory.)))

"I am creating artificial life, declares US gene pioneer

• Ed Pilkington in New York
• The Guardian
• Saturday October 6 2007

"Craig Venter, the controversial DNA researcher involved in the race to decipher the human genetic code, has built a synthetic chromosome out of laboratory chemicals and is poised to announce the creation of the first new artificial life form on Earth.

"Pat Mooney, director of a Canadian bioethics organisation, ETC group, said the move was an enormous challenge to society to debate the risks involved. "Governments, and society in general, is way behind the ball. This is a wake-up call - what does it mean to create new life forms in a test-tube?"

He said Mr Venter was creating a "chassis on which you could build almost anything. It could be a contribution to humanity such as new drugs or a huge threat to humanity such as bio-weapons".

Mr Venter believes designer genomes have enormous positive potential if properly regulated. In the long-term, he hopes they could lead to alternative energy sources previously unthinkable. Bacteria could be created, he speculates, that could help mop up excessive carbon dioxide, thus contributing to the solution to global warming, or produce fuels such as butane or propane made entirely from sugar."

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I need to find me a meganiche

(((I'll be damned surprised if I ever get "niched.")))))
Wired 14.11
Tiny Slice, Big Market
by Clay Shirky

"Now that more than a billion people have access to the Web, there is no longer a trade-off between size and specificity. The basic math is simple: A tiny piece of an immense pie is huge. A decade ago, reaching one-tenth of 1 percent of Web users amounted to 36,000 people, a number that compared favorably with the circulation of, say, the daily newspaper in Bridgewater, New Jersey. Back then, reaching a million users required a decidedly mainstream offering (Amazon.com and MSN come to mind). Now, getting niche can be the path to getting big; one-tenth of 1 percent of today's Web audience is a million people. Forget Bridgewater – the Net is chockablock with special-interest sites and services you've never heard of but whose user base exceeds the print circulation of The Washington Post."

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Flarf

"My name is Morton Hurley and I maintain this site as a means of preserving and promoting the art of poetry developed from spam messages."

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Automatons

((((Do they play chess and read tea leaves?))))))




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William Gibson interview

New interview with William Gibson.. (I remember with Proustian accuracy the smell of my Neuromancer copy. I have since associated the smell of Tor wood pulp with a streamline obsidian future that never was except in Shinjuku.)

Nintendo Power

Had a pubescent brain pop just now and kicked back to about 16 years ago.
The Angry Video Game Nerd reviews Nintendo Power.
(Yeah, I was with Nintendo Power from Issue 2 {The gory Castlevania II cover} and thought I was the raddest kid on the planet. The thing basically shilled Nintendo. I think I ended up getting a 10 year subscription for Christmas and kept receiving issues well into high school. I still do things like research the entire history of Ninja Gaiden tho.

Videogames that warp your sense of reality

I experienced this phenomena very strongly when Doom first came out. I was always checking around corners. Video games mess you up worse than GHB.
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