The 2010 Election Manifesto of the Pirate Party UK

The Pirate Party is a new type of political party.
A party that talks about issues the other parties ignore.
A party free from corruption and expenses scandals, free from lobbyists and party whips.
A party that is not left wing or right wing.
A party that admits it doesn't always have all the answers, and is willing to listen.A party that wants to give you more rights not burden you with any more taxes.
Our manifesto covers 3 main areas: copyright and patent law; privacy law; and freedom of speech.
Copyright and Patents
Our copyright law is hopelessly out of date. The Pirate Party wants a fair and balanced copyright law that is suitable for the 21st century
Copyright should give artists the right to be the only people making money from their work, but that needs to be balanced with 'fair use' rights for the public.
We will legalise use of copyright works where no money changes hands, which will give the public new rights;
A new right to format shift (for example, buy a CD then copy it to an iPod - which is currently illegal);
A new right to time shift (record a TV programme for watching later) and
A new right to share files (which provides free advertising that is essential for less-well-known artists).
Counterfeiting, and profiting directly from other people's work without paying them, will remain illegal(read more...)

THE INFORMAVORE: Can we still decide what is important?

There seems to be an explosion of ideas, but not enough brains to cover them
When you view attention as food for information, we are now in a food crisis. That’s when dynamics of Darwinian selection kick in. Which ideas survive? Which thinking succeeds and which doesn’t?
The human is an informavore, it’s eating information. But just as with food it has to decide what take, what not to take, whether something has good or bad calories, whether it’s healthy etcetera
We are experiencing a cognitive revolution, much of what we are thinking is stored less in the lived life and more in systems linked to knowledge: Facebook, blogs etcetera
In the 19th century it was talked about that muscles had to adapt to the machines, in the 20th century we see the same question but now with the brain. We face issuess with e.g. multi-tasking.
There will be major issues with the tools developed, especially predictive search versus free will. Issues about the way we predict and the way we ARE predicted
Three important 19th century principles return – but in a different way – regarding information and society: Darwinism (who survives in the Net), Communism (question of free), Taylorism (people see themselves not capable anymore of keeping up with the system)
The realtime nature of the information has #iran already competing with @parishilton. You also already information cascades to influence this not only by humans, but also by bots
Kafka and Shakespeare in their time translated reality into literature – we need to find people that can do this on the level of software. George Dyson e.g. has done this very well in the article Turings Cathedral about his visit to Google: “Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral — not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built.”
People tend to forget heuristics, e.g. the ability to calculate as machines will do that for us.
(read more...)
from EDGE
The most significant intellectual development of the first decade of the 21st Century is that concepts of information and computation have infiltrated a wide range of sciences, from physics and cosmology, to cognitive psychology, to evolutionary biology, to genetic engineering. Such innovations as the binary code, the bit, and the algorithm have been applied in ways that reach far beyond the programming of computers, and are being used to understand such mysteries as the origins of the universe, the operation of the human body, and the working of the mind.
Enter Frank Schirrmacher, Editorial Director the editorial staff of the FAZ Feuilleton, a supplement of the FAZ on the arts and sciences. He is also one of the five publishers of the newspaper, responsible for the Feuilleton, and he has actively expanded science coverage in this section. He has been referred to as Germany's "Culture Czar", which may seem over the top, but his cultural influence is undeniable. He can, and does, begin national discussions on topics and ideas that interest him, such as genomic research, neuroscience, aging, and, in this regard, he has the ability to reshape the national consciousness.
In May of 2000, he published a manifesto in FAZ, a call-to arms,entitled "Wake-Up Call for Europe Tech", in which he called for Europe to adopt the ideas of the third culture. His goal: to change the culture of the newspaper and to begin a process of change in Germany and Europe. "Europe should be more than just a source for the software of ego crisis, loss of identity, despair, and Western melancholy," he wrote. We should be helping write the code for tomorrow."(read more...)

Jaime Lerner of Curitiba

For many city governments seeking visible improvements in their congested streets, the pace of change is measured in months and years. For Jaime Lerner, it's measured in hours. As mayor of Curitiba, he transformed a gridlocked commercial artery into a spacious pedestrian mall over a long weekend, before skeptical merchants had time to finish reading their Monday papers.
Since then he's become a hero not only to his fellow Brazilians, but also to the growing ranks of municipal planners seeking greener, more sustainable cities. His dictum that "creativity starts when you cut a zero from your budget" has inspired a number of his unique solutions to urban problems, including sheltered boarding tubes to improve speed of bus transit; a garbage-for-food program allowing Curitibans to exchange bags of trash for bags of groceries; and trimming parkland grasses with herds of sheep

210 Vitamins a Day

Ray walked on stage, played a composition on an old upright piano, and then whispered to I've Got a Secret host Steve Allen "I built my own computer".
"Well that's impressive," Steve Allen replied, "but what does that have to do with the piece you just played?" Ray then whispered the rest of his secret: "The computer composed the piece I just played." During the yes or no questions, former Miss America Bess Myerson was stumped, but film star Henry Morgan, the second celebrity panelist, guessed Ray's secret.(read more..)
Kurzweil does not believe in half measures. He takes 180 to 210 vitamin and mineral supplements a day, so many that he doesn't have time to organize them all himself. So he's hired a pill wrangler, who takes them out of their bottles and sorts them into daily doses, which he carries everywhere in plastic bags. Kurzweil also spends one day a week at a medical clinic, receiving intravenous longevity treatments. The reason for his focus on optimal health should be obvious: If the singularity is going to render humans immortal by the middle of this century, it would be a shame to die in the interim. To perish of a heart attack just before the singularity occurred would not only be sad for all the ordinary reasons, it would also be tragically bad luck, like being the last soldier shot down on the Western Front moments before the armistice was proclaimed. (read more...)

Jack Pajack and Kirkas Kiss

Jack Pajack joins Kirkas Kiss (Pocket Circus in hebrew)is the name of a theatre group from Ein Hod. Yael and Alain Koginsky, both members of UNIMA, founded the group, create the puppets props and costumes, produce and act in its shows.
The repertoire includes puupet shows for all ages as well as street events with giant puppets & actors..
Kirkas Kiss productions have toured in all National and International festivals all over Israel (The Israel Festival of Jerusalem 1998 & 1999 , the Acco Fringe Theatre Festival 1997 & 1998, the International Street Theatre Festival of Holon 1996, 1999 & 2000,), the Jerusalem International Puppet Festival (2001) & many more.
Kirkas Kiss productions include puppet theatre productions such as"The Cabaret Circus Show" & "The story of Yekutiel & Mitzi" and street theatre shows featuring giant puppets such as in" The Royal Colour Parade".(read more...)

Nothing Else to Loose

As a professor of computer sciences at Carnegie Mellon University, Randy F. Pausch expected students to pay attention to his lectures. He never expected that the rest of the world would listen, too.
Dr. Pausch, 47, is dying of pancreatic cancer, a disease that kills 95 percent of its victims, usually within months of diagnosis. Except for a pill bottle on the table in front of him, there were no outward signs of the deadly tumors growing inside him. Though he had just recently recovered from heart and kidney failure, he looked boyish, with a red knit shirt and a head of thick dark-brown hair.
Last fall, after doctors told him that he would probably have no more than six months of good health, Dr. Pausch stepped down from his academic duties and relocated to be closer to his family. But he decided to give one last lecture to a roomful of students and faculty members at Carnegie Mellon.
The lecture was not about cancer. Instead, he says, it was simply a father’s effort to digest a lifetime of advice for his children into one talk — a talk that Dr. Pausch knew he would not be around long enough to deliver in person. (more from nyTimes)
Thanks to Cliff

Cigarettes and Coffee - Lefty Frizzell

Nashville songwriter Harlan Howard remembers Frizzell from the "Town Hall Party" days. "He was a wonderful guy, someone who was just about as loose and free as any rock star you ever saw - on and off stage. He was really flamboyant, a good looking guy with curly hair." In listening to Lefty, you feel the conflict between the lure of good times and the melancholy ones. Frizzell was not only original in his vocal sound - he was the first country singer to wear rhinestones on stage. Although Frizzell liked sharp clothes, it took some convincing by a Los Angeles tailor, Nudie Cohen that women loved men that looked "flashy", and that rhinestones would work.
(more...)

Old Fuck Is Bad for Ya

George Carlin is still packing venues with fans who crave his legendary brand of observational, cantankerous wit.
At 70, he isn't just mailing it in, either. He performed about 80 shows across the country in 2007, and is still razor-sharp and very much on his game.
But with a record 14 live HBO stand-up comedy specials under his belt -- most recently a Saturday outing dubbed "It's Bad For Ya" -- Carlin admits to having a different take on things now.
It's not that he has exactly mellowed. Mellow isn't in Carlin's makeup. But no longer is he motivated to push the comedic envelope as a pioneer, as he did so memorably as a barrier-busting, hypocrisy-exposing rebel of the Las Vegas stage and the man who would become a Supreme Court test case via the famed "Seven Dirty Words" television furor in 1972.
"I accept it as someone looking in from the outside that the culture is destroying itself, and as someone who is no longer part of the human race, I can be fascinated by it rather than mourn it," he says.(more...)

We are tired

Richard Sennett’s The Craftsman continues an argument begun in the 19th century, when writers such as John Ruskin and William Morris extolled the crafts remembered in our surnames (Smith, Cartwright, Thatcher, Mason, Fletcher) while lamenting the mind-numbing and soul-destroying labour of the industrial process which was replacing them. A long line of thinkers, from Hegel and Marx to Sennett’s teacher Hannah Arendt, have sympathised with the argument. But Sennett does not think that craftsmanship has vanished from our world.

The word "craftsman" summons an immediate image. Peering through a window into a carpenter's shop, you see an elderly man surrounded by his apprentices and his tools. Order reigns within: parts of chairs are clamped neatly together, the smell of wood shavings fills the room, the carpenter bends over his bench to make a fine incision for marquetry. The shop is menaced by a furniture factory down the road.
The craftsman might also be glimpsed at a nearby laboratory. There, a young lab technician is frowning at a table on which six dead rabbits are splayed on their backs, their bellies slit open. She is frowning because something has gone wrong with the injection she has given them; she is trying to figure out if she did the procedure wrong, or if there is something wrong with the procedure.
A third craftsman might be heard in the town's concert hall. There, an orchestra is rehearsing with a visiting conductor; he works obsessively with the string section, going over and over a passage to make the musicians draw their bows at exactly the same speed across the strings. The string players are tired, but also exhilarated because their sound is becoming coherent. The orchestra's manager is worried: if the visiting conductor keeps on, the rehearsal will move into overtime, costing management extra wages. The conductor is oblivious.(

read more Here and Here)
Photo of Itche Mambush from Ein Hod Site

Vardi:if you don't fake an orgasm

Let me start by telling you what I don't look for. I don't look at business plans. After 38 years I've found that 100% of business plans say that their idea is very good. I think they are useless. I also don't like PowerPoint presentations. I don't think you can judge the validity of an idea. Maybe someone else is working on the exact same thing elsewhere. I found the more I liked the idea the bigger my losses were. Falling in love with an idea makes your vision blurry. I don't like demonstrations because the young guys showing me are so enthusiastic they think it is the greatest thing in the world—at least in their life, and if you don't fake an orgasm, they go away very disappointed.

Yossi Vardi is known as Israel's startup guru. For nearly 40 years he has helped to found and nurture over 60 companies in industries that include software, Internet, telecommunications, and energy. At 26, in 1969, he co-founded his first business, Tekem, one of the first software firms in Israel. Vardi was also the founding investor in Mirabilis, which created ICQ, the first Internet-wide instant messaging program. The company was launched in 1996 by his son, Arik, and three friends, and sold to AOL (TWX) in 1998 for about $400 million. The sale helped open the floodgates for numerous Israeli entrepreneurs(read more>>)

British Counsel , Crimean War , Polonium-210, Stalin and his Irish Whore

Beginning with the rise of Russophobia in Victorian Britain, former MI5 director general Stella Rimington explores our love-hate relationship with Russia over the past 150 years. The journey takes her to the East End of London on the trail of Russian revolutionaries and to the former mining town of Chopwell, once dubbed Little Moscow. She talks to former Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky and shares recollections of the bugged British embassy in Moscow with former ambassador Rodric Braithwaite.
The British Council has been in Russia long enough to know that its activities there are only legitimate if the government deems them to be so

The British Council in Russia, now under heavy pressure from the Putin government, insists it is a cultural organisation - and that for this reason Russian authorities should leave it alone and allow it to go about its business. As a cultural organisation working in Russia, the council is now learning some tough lessons about the culture of the country in which it operates.
Any Russian knows that all cultural activity is ideological: be it a musical or film festival, an exhibition, or a play. Even those who have not learnt this wisdom from their school textbooks and government-controlled media, have imbibed it with their Soviet mothers' milk. What did the British Council do in Russia? Its website boasts that last summer its St Petersburg office organised a roundtable discussion, Tolerance and City Culture, and that "experts from universities, non-governmental organisations, community organisations and local authorities from Russia and UK shared their experience of tackling racism and building cultural cohesion". Is this a cultural activity? Surely not. Propaganda for British views, pure and clear. Which means ideology. And who gave the Brits the right to spread their ideology in Russia, particularly at a time when political relations have become difficult?

(read more in Guardian)

Why Bullshit Is Worse Than Lie

"One of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit. Everyone knows this. Each of us contributes his share. But we tend to take the situation for granted. Most people are rather confident of their ability to recognize bullshit and to avoid being taken in by it. So the phenomenon has not aroused much deliberate concern, or attracted much sustained inquiry. In consequence, we have no clear understanding of what bullshit is, why there is so much of it, or what functions it serves".

On Bullshit is an essay by philosopher Harry Frankfurt. Originally published in the journal Raritan in 1986, the essay was republished as a separate volume in 2005 and became a nonfiction bestseller.In the essay, Frankfurt sketches a theory of bullshit, defining the concept and analyzing its applications. In particular, Frankfurt contrasts bullshitting and lying; where the liar deliberately makes false claims, the bullshitter is simply uninterested in the truth.Rather, bullshitters aim primarily to impress and persuade their audiences. Whereas the liar needs to know the truth the better to conceal it, the bullshitter, interested solely in advancing his own agenda, has no use for the truth. By virtue of this, Frankfurt claims, "bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are."
This work laid the foundation for his 2006 follow-up book, On Truth.(Via Edge)

Me fail English? That's unpossible

Until now, he's probably been best-known for one memorably straight-to-the-point quote - "D'oh!" But today, we can hail Homer Simpson as he takes his place in the pantheon of the world's greatest word-weavers. For the loveable slob from Springfield has secured himself not one, but two listings in the latest edition of the Oxford Dictionary of Modern Quotations. The honour of appearing alongside golden-tongued literary luminaries including Winston Churchill and Oscar Wilde would probably sail straight over the yellow head of the pot-bellied hero who heads America's most dysfunctional family in the celebrated cartoon series. But in fact it is more of a tribute to Simpsons creator Matt Groening and his talented team. It was Groening's scriptwriters who had Homer utter the immortal phrase: "Kids, you tried your best and you failed miserably. The lesson is never try." It appeared in an episode entitled Burns' Heir, written by Jack Richdale in 1994. Another to appear in the dictionary - which is published today - is Homer's homily to the local Asian shopkeeper: "Kids are the best, Apu. You can teach them to hate the things you hate. And they practically raise themselves, what with the internet and all." Both quotations appear under the entry for 53-year-old Groening, who is classified by the compilers as an American humorist and satirist. Homer is not, however, the first character from The Simpsons to find a place in the respected dictionary. Already there is the much-repeated reference to the French by Scottish caretaker Groundskeeper Willie, who remarked: "Bonjour, you cheese-eating surrender monkeys" in a 1995 episode. And Homer's son Bart has entered the hall of fame under a special catchphrase category for his "Eat my shorts!" and "I'm Bart Simpson. Who the hell are you?" From the mouth of Joan Collins there is an insight into love with the utterance: "Older men treat women like possessions, which is why I like younger men." Other first-timers include Linda McCartney ("I don't eat anything with a face."), Yves Saint Laurent ("I wish I had invented blue jeans."), and O J Simpson ("Fame vaporises, money goes with the wind, and all that's left is character.")
Our personal fave, though, is William Hague's inspired comment to John Prescott, broadsiding the battling former deputy PM with: "There was so little English in that answer that President Chirac would have been happy with it.Meanwhile, Stephen Fry gives a take on modern life with the observation that, "The e-mail of the species is deadlier than the mail". And there is a rather double-edged comment on the love of money contained in the quote from fallen media tycoon Conrad Black: "Since when was greed a criminal offence?" (from mail)

Self-service bicycle transit system called Velib’ in Paris

On July 15, 2007, the city of Paris will debut a new self-service bicycle transit system called Velib’. Parisians and visitors alike will be able to pick up and drop off bicycles throughout the city at 750 locations-offering a total of 10,648 bikes. By the end of the year, there will be a Velib’ station approximately every 900 feet for a total of 1,451 locations and 20,600 bikes.
To access the bikes, riders can select a one-day card for 1 euro, a weekly card for 5 euros or an annual card for 29 euros. After the purchase of an access card, riding for the first half-hour is free and a supplement of 1 euro will be charged for an additional half-hour, 2 euros for another 30-minutes and 4 euros for every addition half-hour after that. Example: a 25 minute trip = 0 euros, a 50 minute trip = 1 euro, an hour and 15-minute ride = 3 euros.
Each Velib’ parking station will be equipped with muni-meters to purchase one and 7-day passes and to pay any additional charges once the bike is dropped off. The Velib’ meters will also provide information on other station locations.
Application forms for the annual card will be available starting June 13 at Paris District City Halls, 300 métro stations and 400 pastry shops throughout the city.
The city of Paris has over 371 km (230 miles) of cycling lanes.

Why home doesn't matter

The BBC series "Child of Our Time" assumes that studying children with their parents will help us understand how their personalities develop. But this is a mistake: parents influence their children mainly by passing on their genes. The biggest environmental influences on personality are those that occur outside the home
During much of the 20th century, it was considered impolite and unscientific to say that genes play any role in determining people's personalities, talents or intelligence. But we're in the 21st century now, the era of the genome. So when Robert Winston informs us, at the opening of each episode of the BBC1 documentary series Child of Our Time, that we're going to "find out what makes us who we are," we know he's going to say that people are the way they are partly for genetic reasons. (In case you've missed it, Child of Our Time is a project tracking the lives of 25 children for their first 20 years, returning to them each year to assess their progress.
Child of Our Time is itself a sign of scientific progress because of its enlightened approach to the genome. Nevertheless, the series is scientifically misleading. Simply depicting the lives of 25 children, or sprinkling little "experiments" here and there throughout the programmes, sheds no light on the nature vs nurture question. Psychologists studied child development in this way for the better part of a century and learned remarkably little. Observing children at home or in school, individually or in groups, is not the way to answer the question of why they turn out the way they do.
The problem is that most children are reared by their biological parents, so the parents provide both the genes and the home environment. The effects of the genes are therefore impossible to separate from the effects of the environment. Young Johnny has a strong drive to succeed? Well, that's not surprising—so does his father! But does Johnny's drive to succeed come from lessons learned from his father, from genes inherited from his father, or from some combination of the two? Most 20th-century developmental psychologists assumed it was mainly Johnny's experiences at home that made him who he is today. Even those who admitted that genes may play a role continued to feel that the child's environment—by which they meant the home environment—was of greater importance.( more from prospect )
Judith Rich Harris is a psychologist and author of No Two Alike: Human Nature and Human Individuality (WW Norton)

you can only lose it once

The poignant thing about innocence is that you can only lose it once.
Starting in 1967, millions of viewers lost their innocence to a British television production known as The Prisoner. Unlike anything previously seen in mainstream television or film, The Prisoner permanently changed the rules of engagement between makers of entertainment and consumers of entertainment.Before The Prisoner, you could settle down in front of the TV secure in the knowledge that you would be served up a tasty and reasonably satisfying bit of fluff with a beginning, a middle and an end. While the quality might vary, depending on the skills of the writers, directors and actors involved, you knew for certain that everyone was trying their best to give you what you wanted.( more... )