Month: March 2008

Theft Broadcasting

Brandon and Amber Herbert apparently placed the ad as a cover to a planned theft of 2 horse saddles. They placed the ad on Craigslist, which said that all the belongings were free for the taking at an abandoned house. They then joined in the mob that showed up for the goods. Their IP address was tracked by police through information supplied by Craigslist. It’s funny how few people understand how easy it is to track activity via IP address. For example, the startup CEOs who leave comments here under their real name, and then suddenly go trolling under an anonymous name, all under the same IP.

The goatee, trademark of the dumb male, gives it away!

Virgle

For 1000s of years, the human race has spread out across the Earth, scaling mountains and plying the oceans, planting crops and building highways, raising skyscrapers and atmospheric CO2 levels, and observing, with tremendous and unflagging enthusiasm, the Biblical injunction to be fruitful and multiply across our world’s every last nook, cranny and subdivision. An invitation. Earth has issues, and it’s time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading 100s of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.

how many years before this is not a prank anymore.

1857 Sound Recording

First Sounds has been in the forefront of finding and playing back the world’s earliest audio recordings. The first recordings of airborne sounds were traced onto lamp blacked paper; they were made to be viewed, not played. Extracting sound from soot is no trivial pursuit, and our approaches continue to evolve as our knowledge increases and new technologies become available. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville, the inventor of sound recording made the world’s first recordings of airborne sounds in Paris between 1853 and 1860 on a machine he called a phonautograph. Jeune Jouvencelle (August 17, 1857) is the earliest known sound recording. An inscription identifies the content as “song at a distance,” with the words “jeune jouvencelle” (“young little girl”) written at the beginning and “les échos” (“the echoes”) at the end—possibly referring to the lyrics of a song as yet unidentified. Because of the lack of a tuning-fork timecode, the sound file has not been speed-corrected, and the fluctuations in cranking speed were so great during recording that the melody can’t be readily recognized from the uncorrected file.

2023-01-17: Also fairly old, the recordings of Alexander Graham Bell

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History has embarked on a new project to recover and restore its collection of 300 experimental audio recordings made by Alexander Graham Bell and his laboratory between 1881 and 1892. These are some of the world’s oldest sound recordings and they have never been heard by living ear.

FCC Censorship

With not much original reporting, I discovered that the latest big fine by the FCC against a TV network — a record $1.2m against Fox for its “sexually suggestive” Married by America — was brought about by a mere 3 people who actually composed letters of complaint. Yes, just 3 people. I filed a Freedom of Information Act request to see all of the 159 complaints the FCC cited in its complaint against Fox. I just received the FCC’s reply with a copy of all the complaints — and a letter explaining that, well, there weren’t 159 after all. Because the complaints were sent to multiple individuals at the FCC, it turns out there actually were only 90 complaints. It gets better: The FCC confesses that they come from only 23 individuals. It is shocking enough that what 10s of millions of us are permitted to see by our government can be determined by 159 … or 90 … or 23.

abolish the FCC already.

The folks over at governmentattic.org FOIAed portions of the FCC’s television complaints database! Browse their site to find citizen complaints about your favorite TV show

Structured Bills

we would like Bills (and related instruments such as amendment lists and Public Bill Committee debates) to be published in a structured data format, with all relevant metadata, as soon as is possible. This doesn’t just mean “publishing bills online” as is currently done – it means publishing them online in such a way that each bit can be referred to and, more importantly, contains the data necessary to join things up – e.g. when an amendment paper says a particular amendment is going to change from halfway through line 15 to line 18 of page 3, that amendment has its own ID, and contains the means to point out what ID or IDs in the Bill are going to be changed by this amendment. When a Public Bill committee votes on a particular clause of a Bill, that reference is linked to the ID, so it can be cross-referenced to what is being voted on. This would be of use not just to the public, but to MPs, drafters, and everyone involved in the process.

calls for an XML format for bills introduced in the UK parliament.

Epilepsy Assault

RyAnne Fultz suffered her worst epileptic attack in 1 year after she clicked on the wrong post at a forum run by the nonprofit Epilepsy Foundation. Internet griefers descended on an epilepsy support message board last weekend and used JavaScript code and flashing computer animation to trigger migraine headaches and seizures in some users.

wow, quite mean