[ B l o g / / Archive]


"Fear the Boom and Bust": a Hayek vs. Keynes Rap Anthem 



John Maynard Keynes and Friedrich August von Hayek summarize their macroeconomic theories in a gangster rap. While Keynes has the stimulus bling-bling, Hayek disses him hard:
Your focus on spending is pushing on thread
In the long run, my friend, it's your theory that's dead
So sorry there, buddy, if that sounds like invective
Prepare to get schooled in my Austrian perspective
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Piracy Kills Local Music. Really? 
In a market that is "rigged by piracy" it is non-English language music which suffers the most when the music industry tightens its belt.
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Sexually explicit jigs were a major part of the attraction of the Elizabethan, Jacobean and Restoration stage 
The crowds who flocked to the London playhouses in the late-16th and early-17th centuries could expect to be amused, amazed and moved. Not only would they experience the drama of some courtly comedy or woeful tragedy but, in many cases, if they stayed on after the play had ended, they would also be treated to a sort of 'B-feature', a rude, lewd farce, commonly known as a 'jig'. Featuring songs, dancing and slapstick, jigs involved far more than the simple Irish folk dance that the word has come to denote. In the playhouses of Elizabethan London dramatic jigs were established as the standard ending or afterpiece to more serious theatrical fare.Not that everyone approved. The playwright Thomas Dekker wrote in 1613:

"I have often seen, after the finishing of some worthy tragedy or catastrophe in the open theatres that the scene after the Epilogue hath been more blacke -- about a nasty bawdy jigge -- than the most horrid scene in the play was."

To the literary world they were an object of disapproval. Ben Jonson (1572-1637) loathed the 'concupiscence of jigs', believing they prevented audiences from appreciating plays. Shakespeare's Hamlet, after drawing Ophelia into a particularly vulgar exchange, apologises to her by calling himself 'Your only jigmaker'. The satirical poet Everard Guilpin (born c. 1572) dismissed the 'whores, bedles, bawds and sergeants' who 'filthily chant Kemps Jigge', noting how, on leaving the playhouse fired up with lust, 'many a cold grey-beard citizen' would sneak into 'some odde noted house of sin': easy to do, as theatres, bear-baiting pits and brothels were situated in close proximity on London's South Bank, outside the formal control of Dancers perform in a circle around musicians in a masque at a banquet held in the home of the courtier Sir Henry Unton (detail, c.1596). Inset: Richard Tarlton, a popular jig-maker and clown, portrayed in a manuscript from 1588. the City authorities. Even Thomas Heywood, a dramatist and actor with the Lord Admiral's Men, felt disgust at these sub-literary dramas. While on the one hand delighting in the comic farces he called 'merry accidents', he wrote in An Apology for Actors (1612): 'I speak not in the defence of any lascivious shrews, scurrilous jeasts, or scandalous invectives. If there be any such I banish them quite from my patronage.'
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Great rant by font designer Erik Spiekermann 

Straight Outta Compton - Nina Gordon 

What Came First in the Origin of Life? New Study Contradicts the 'Metabolism First' Hypothesis 
A new study published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences rejects the theory that the origin of life stems from a system of self-catalytic molecules capable of experiencing Darwinian evolution without the need of RNA or DNA and their replication.
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Landmark Human Rights Case in Argentina Puts Torture on Trial 
Argentine courts have launched an investigation into crimes committed at the ESMA Navy Mechanics School during the nation's military dictatorship. The landmark human rights trial is one of the most far-reaching attempts to bring crimes of Latin America's bloody past to justice.

For more than three decades, survivors and their families awaited the trial that finally began on Dec. 11, 2009. During Argentina's 1976-1983 dictatorship, the ESMA Navy Mechanics School served as a clandestine detention center, used to torture and disappear thousands of people. Now 17 former ESMA officers face charges of human rights abuses, torture, and murder.
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Gorgeous: Alka-Seltzer added to spherical water drop in microgravity 

Until one cries -- a short film about children and bazookas 
Brilliant short film about child play and violence, created by Christoph Neuhold and Benjamin Hable (students at the University of Applied Sciences in Graz).



Link



Space travel is kinda boring 

Dubai's Tower of Debt 
New year, new symbol? Dubai's new tower fits. The $1.5 billion building unveiled in downtown Dubai Monday is the world's new tallest tower. More than half a mile high, more than two Empire State buildings tall, the Dubai tower boasts 169 stories, the world's highest swimming pool, the world's highest place of worship, and the world's tallest mountain of denial.

History repeats. Like the Empire State building before it, the Dubai tower was built in a global depression when cheap labor was plentiful, as were the dreams of the ambitious and affluent.

The engineering marvel was constructed in the desert heat by low paid immigrant workers, mostly Indians and Pakistanis, paid 5-20 dollar a day. (It's a state secret how many lost their lives in the process.) While the state-owned construction operation suppressed worker demands and banned unions from the site, it catered to consumer fantasy with equal extravagance. The tower features 144 apartments and a hotel designed by Giorgio Armani, the Italian designer. In the super scraper, the super-affluent can live and vacation without leaving the brand, or the building.

On Monday, Dubai's Sheikh Mohammed and his Chicago-based architects hailed their building as a symbol of future good all things great. There's just one glitch. According to the Sunday Times, that future involves melting the equivalent of 28 million pounds of ice a day for air conditioning, and the consumption of billions of gallons of desalinated water in a city-state that already has the world's highest per-capita carbon footprint.

The climate actually changes as you ride the elevator. It's way, way hotter at the bottom. The engineers are doing everything in their power to counter physics and so far so good. But rising heat of a far less metaphorical sense already struck in the form of economics.
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Ferropaper: New Tech for Small Motors, Robots 
Researchers at Purdue University have created a magnetic "ferropaper" that might be used to make low-cost "micromotors" for surgical instruments, tiny tweezers to study cells and miniature speakers.

The material is made by impregnating ordinary paper -- even newsprint -- with a mixture of mineral oil and "magnetic nanoparticles" of iron oxide. The nanoparticle-laden paper can then be moved using a magnetic field.

"Paper is a porous matrix, so you can load a lot of this material into it," said Babak Ziaie, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and biomedical engineering.
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Unreliable evidence? Time to open up DNA databases 
When a defendant's DNA appears to match DNA found at a crime scene, the probability that this is an unfortunate coincidence can be central to whether the suspect is found guilty. The assumptions used to calculate the likelihood of such a fluke - the "random match probability" - are now being questioned by a group of 41 scientists and lawyers based in the US and the UK.
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Soviet Unterzoegersdorf @ ToorCamp 2009: A Triumphant Gala featuring Public Domain Clip Art 
monochrom content info
Finally, friends of Soviet Unterzoegersdorf, there is a video version of Ambassador Nikita Perostek Chrusov's uplifting talk about youth culture, communism and overthrowing "the system" at ToorCamp 2009! Embed! Embed! Embed!



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Welcome to The Product Bay 
RepRap and other 3D printers are the future. There’s no question about it. With the proud tradition from The Pirate Bay, we want to take all of this to the next level. TPB will be TPB, but for real life objects. For now, visit Thingiverse who already understands this.

We want you to download those new jeans.
We want you to share those new shoes.

It's possible, let's make it happen.
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Economy and Ecology and why the term "crisis" is somewhat misleading 
The term "crisis," attached to the global ecological problem, although unavoidable, is somewhat misleading, given its dominant economic associations. Since 2008, we have been living through a world economic crisis — the worst economic downturn since the 1930s. This has been a source of untold suffering for hundreds of millions, indeed billions, of people. But insofar as it is related to the business cycle and not to long-term factors, expectations are that it is temporary and will end, to be followed by a period of economic recovery and growth — until the advent of the next crisis. Capitalism is, in this sense, a crisis-ridden, cyclical economic system. Even if we were to go further, to conclude that the present crisis of accumulation is part of a long-term economic stagnation of the system — that is, a slowdown of the trend-rate of growth beyond the mere business cycle — we would still see this as a partial, historically limited calamity, raising, at most, the question of the future of the present system of production.
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Avatar's $1 Billion B.O. Doesn't Solve Hollywood's Problems 
An amazing number, but Avatar isn't exactly a business model. Hollywood can't live on a ginormous hit once a decade. And if the studios chase the success of Avatar, they're [liable] to throw a lot of bad money after good.
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The rise of Starbucks reveals how we really live, and it ain't pretty 
Part history, part ethnography, part marketing theory and part coffee memoir, Everything but the Coffee places Starbucks at the center of the hypocrisy of the American middle class. Simon has to stretch a great deal here, as he explores why, for a time, the American middle class saw Starbucks is central to its identity.

Simon shows us how we really live, and it ain't pretty. There was a time, not so long ago, Simon reminds us, that many of us wondered why people would pay so much money for a cup of coffee--even as we were edging closer in line to place our own order. Starbucks, writes Simon, "had little to do with coffee, and everything to do with style, status, identity and aspiration. ... Starbucks delivered more than a stiff shot of caffeine. It pinpointed, packaged, and made easily available, if only through smoke and mirrors, the things that the broad American middle class wanted and thought it needed to make its public and private lives better." Starbucks fed our emotional needs for status. It became our little "self-gift," an emotional pick-me-up. It allowed us to feel successful.

It also provided a safe, clean "third space" between home and work, those big chairs and couches becoming our new public sphere. It brought us exotic places and sounds, exposed us to an underground in the safety of a cushy seat: teaching us about places where our coffee came from, and new music and literary voices. It tried to be our cultural guide and helped us feel good about our environmental footprint through its green campaigns and aid to farmers, even if Starbucks did little and we did nothing but buy coffee. It did so consciously, purposefully manipulating our desires, hopes and aspirations, all the while making us feel good about ordering up a venti soy latte.
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Full body scanners at British airports break child porn laws 
Weird times.
The rapid introduction of full body scanners at British airports threatens to breach child protection laws which ban the creation of indecent images of children, the Guardian has learned.

Privacy campaigners claim the images created by the machines are so graphic they amount to "virtual strip-searching" and have called for safeguards to protect the privacy of passengers involved.

Ministers now face having to exempt under 18s from the scans or face the delays of introducing new legislation to ensure airport security staff do not commit offences under child pornography laws.
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"Get Lamp": Pre-Order Jason Scott's Documentary on Text Adventures 
"Get Lamp" is currently scheduled to be released on DVD in the second half of March 2010. Ordering now both guarantees the earliest possible acquisition of the movie and helps fund the initial duplication and packaging costs.



But what is "Get Lamp"?
With limited sound, simple graphics, and tiny amounts of computing power, the first games on home computers would hardly raise an eyebrow in the modern era of photorealism and surround sound. In a world of Quake, Half-Life and Halo, it is expected that a successful game must be loud, fast, and full of blazing life-like action.

But in the early 1980s, an entire industry rose over the telling of tales, the solving of intricate puzzles and the art of writing. Like living books, these games described fantastic worlds to their readers, and then invited them to live within them.

They were called "computer adventure games", and they used the most powerful graphics processor in the world: the human mind.

Rising from side projects at universities and engineering companies, adventure games would describe a place, and then ask what to do next. They presented puzzles, tricks and traps to be overcome. They were filled with suspense, humor and sadness. And they offered a unique type of joy as players discovered how to negotiate the obstacles and think their way to victory. These players have carried their memories of these text adventures to the modern day, and a whole new generation of authors have taken up the torch to present a new set of places to explore.

Get Lamp is a documentary that will tell the story of the creation of these incredible games, in the words of the people who made them.
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Qat: Yemen's afternoon high 
Walk down any major street in Yemen in the afternoon or evening, and you'll see men with bulging cheeks, chewing qat leaves; their constituents, cathinone and cathine, produce a high. Qat — or Catha edulis — is cultivated in the Horn of Africa as well. But in Yemen, buffeted by fierce government-tribal clashes in the north, renewed secessionist strength in the south and dwindling oil revenues, the qat shrub is just about holding the Arab world's poorest country together.

Qat chewing occurs almost everywhere in Yemen, except tourist hotels (one in Aden greets visitors with a sign, "Guns and qat are not allowed"). Many private homes have a comfortable, well-ventilated room, or diwan, set aside for the purpose. But it is at street level that the pervasiveness and tempo of the activity can best be appreciated, in the qat markets, or drifting amid those chilling out on it or consuming it during their workday as a taxi driver or an attendant for kids' camel rides at a park, or just shopping for fruit and vegetables.

If it is a ritualised activity, it is a seamless one, like taking coffee after a meal is for a westerner.

Partaking of this natural amphetamine is not prohibited in the Qur'an, and the jury remains out on whether it is addictive or harmful. Accepted in Yemen, it is not in other Arab countries; and while legal in the UK and much of Europe, it is banned in France, Norway, Sweden, the US and Canada.
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A Music-Based Treatment For Tinnitus 
Loud, persistent ringing in the ears, known as tinnitus, can be vexing for its millions of sufferers. This perceived noise can be symptomatic of many different ills—from earwax to aging—but the most common cause is from noise-induced hearing loss, such as extended exposure to construction or loud music, and treating many of its underlying neural causes has proven difficult.

But many people with tinnitus might soon be able to find refuge in the very indulgence that often started the ringing in the first place: music.

A new music-based therapy has shown promise in helping reduce the ringing's volume in tinnitus sufferers within a year, according to a study published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Tinnitus loudness can be significantly diminished by an enjoyable, low-cost, custom-tailored notched music treatment," wrote the researchers, who were led in part by Christo Pantev at the Institute for Biomagnetism and Biosign Alanalysis at Westfalian Wilhelms-University in Munster, Germany.
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A machine I like 
Simply wonderful.



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monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993.
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Booking monochrom:
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External monochrom links:
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Soviet Unterzoegersdorf / Sector 2 / The Adventure Game

Climate Training Camp

Krach der Roboter: Hello World!

Slacking is killing the DIY industry (T-Shirt)

Carefully Selected Moments / CD, LP

Freedom is a whore of a word (T-Shirt)

#fullboycott

International Year of Polytheism 2007

Santa Claus Vs. Christkindl: A Mobster Battle

Could It Be (Video clip)

Pot Tin God

Hacking the Spaces

Kiki and Bubu and The Shift / Short film

Kiki and Bubu and The Privilege / Short film

Kiki and Bubu and The Self / Short film

Kiki and Bubu and The Good Plan / Short film

Kiki and Bubu and The Feelings / Short film / Short film

Sculpture Mobs

Nazi Petting Zoo / Short film

The Great Firewall of China

KPMG / Short film

The BRAICIN / Short film

Soviet Unterzoegersdorf / Sector 1 / The Adventure Game

I was a copyright infringement in a previous life (T-Shirt)

Brave New Pong

Leben ist LARPen e.V.

One Minute / Short film

Firing Squad Euro2008 Intervention

RFID Song

A tribute to Honzo

Lessig ist lässig

I can count every star in the heavens above -- The image of computers in popular music

All Tomorrow's Condensations / Puppet show

Bye Bye / Short film

Revaluation

PC/DC patch

Proto-Melodic Comment Squad

myfacespace.com

The Redro Loitzl Story / Short film

Hax0rcise SCO

Law and Second Order (T-Shirt)

They really kicked you out of the Situationist International?

Death Special: Falco

Applicant Fisch / Short film

When I was asked to write about new economy

Taugshow #6

Taugshow #7

Taugshow #9

Taugshow #10

Taugshow #11

Taugshow #14

Taugshow #15

Campfire at Will

Arse Elektronika 2007, 2008, 2009 etc.

The Void's Foaming Ebb / Short film

Remoting Future

When you / Short film

Elf

Free Bariumnitrate

Toyps / Typing Errors

ARAD-II Miami Beach Crisis

The Charcoal Burner / Short film

Digital Culture In Brazil

Hegemonchhichi

Nation of Zombia

Lonely Planet Guide action

CSI Oven Cloth

Dept. of Applied Office Arts

Farewell to Overhead

Google Buttplug

Fieldrecording in Sankt Wechselberg / Short film

Dark Dune Spots

Campaign For The Abolition Of Personal Pronouns

Zeigerpointer

Space Tourism

In the Head of the Gardener

Entertainment (Unterhaltung) / Short film

Cthulhu Goatse

Nicholas Negroponte Memorial Cable

Coke Light Art Edition 06

Experience the Experience! (West Coast USA/Canada Tour 2005)

April 23

Overhead Cumshot

Irark / Short film

Wart

Instant Blitz Copy Fight

A Patriotic Fireman

A Micro Graphic Novel Project

Noise and Talk

The Exhilarator

H&M

SUZOeG Training / Short film

The Flower Currency

Gastro-Art/Gastrokunst

A Holiday in Soviet Unterzoegersdorf

How does the Internet work?

Paraflows 2006 and up

Special Forces

Coca Cola

About Work

Turing Train Terminal

Me / Short Film

Massive Multiplayer Thumb-Wrestling Network

Doormat

Some Code To Die For

The Year Wrap-up

Soviet Unterzoegersdorf Metroblogging

Project Mendel

Display, Retry, Fail

Manifesto of Ignorantism

Actionfilm

Towers of Hanoi

Heisenberg

Opto-Hedonism

Every Five Seconds an Inkjet Printer Dies Somewhere

Milk

Mobutobe

Brandmarker

We know apocalypses

452 x 157 cm² global durability

A Good Haul

Blattoptera / Art for Cockroaches

Minus 24x

Gladiator / Short Film

Eden

An attempt to emulate an attempt

Paschal Duct-Taping

Laptop Crochetication

Russka

Somewhere in the 1930s

Soul Sale

The Department for Criticism against Globalisation

Dot Smoke

Georg Paul Thomann

Nurgel Staring

War On

Let's network it out

Nude

Mackerel Fiddlers

Whales

Disney vs. Chrusov / Short film

Bulk Mail

Easter Celebrations

Mouse Over Matter

Condolence for a Crab

Force Sting

Turning Threshold Countries Into Plows

System

A Noise

A. C. A.

Hopping Overland

Achy Breaky Heart Campaign

Hermeneutic Imperative III

Holy Water / Franchise

Roböxotica // Festival for Cocktail-Robotics

Spears

Engine Hood Cookies

Ikea

The Watch

Creative Industry 2003

This World

Cracked Foundation For The Fine Arts

Sometimes I feel

Fit with INRI

Growing Money

Catapulting Wireless Devices

Buried Alive

Illegal Space Race

Magnetism Party

Brick of Coke

1 Baud

Scrota Contra Vota

Direct Intervention Engine

Oh my God, they use a history which repeats itself! (T-Shirt)

Administrating:

Dorkbot Vienna





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