DJ Oleiro

One of the things that's been taking up a lot of my time recently is being involved in an art exhibition at the University of Brasilia with some other friends / artists.

This was a second edition of the Object Oriented exhibition we originally ran in Kentish Town in 2011. I showed a development of my Pot Jockey piece (now translated into Portuguese as "DJ Oleira", literally "DJ Potter"). The principle is the same, to turn a MIDI DJ Controller into a tool for making round objects. But I've updated the software to allow hollow centres (ie. cups, bowls, vases), and moved from the "stack of cylinders" model to a mesh of angled faces that can approximate a curved surface.

I have a lot more documentation to do on this over the next few days - including making the latest code public - but at least I managed to get a reasonable video this time :

RIP Nelson Mandela

A good Quora answer.

Diamonds

Fascinating story.

India Goes To Mars?

Cool.

European Courage and Action?

Glenn Greenwald :

If the German and French governments – and the German and French people – are so pleased to learn of how their privacy is being systematically assaulted by a foreign power over which they exert no influence, shouldn't they be offering asylum to the person who exposed it all, rather than ignoring or rejecting his pleas to have his basic political rights protected, and thus leaving him vulnerable to being imprisoned for decades by the US government? Aside from the treaty obligations these nations have to protect the basic political rights of human beings from persecution, how can they simultaneously express outrage over these exposed invasions while turning their back on the person who risked his liberty and even life to bring them to light?

Real-time 3D Printed Board Game

Aza Raskin's modest proposal :

You start with no pieces and as the game opens, you build lots of weak little ships. Their physical size means they don’t take much material and print quickly. That fire power buys you enough time to invest in building stronger big ships. These might take upwards of 15 minutes to build, but choose carefully, you’ll be blocking your production queue. With your 3D printer behind a sheet of cardboard, your opponent knows that you are are building, and for how long you’ve been building, but not what you are building. The whirr of your stepper motors give tantalizing hints of your strategy. Of course, you’ll be able to cancel production mid-way for an incomplete downgraded/vulnerable piece, like the partially constructed Death Star.

Update : Check out Shapeways Game Section for context.

Are All The Good Ideas Already Being Done?

My Quora Answer

OReilly BioCoder

Fascinating new DIY bio magazine from OReilly.

There's Nothing so Radical as Empiricism

Chris Dillow :

There's nothing so radical as empiricism.

Tech News

Dave Winer :

Tech is where big news is happening this decade. It's time to start doing it seriously.

FirefoxOS Launches in Brazil

FirefoxOS phone launches in Brazil. If it's not too expensive I'll look into getting one.

Ultima Viagem (Last Trip) - Corpo Baletroacústico - Goiânia em Cena 2013

Here's a performance that was recorded on Friday. Of the Corpo Baletroacústico at an "integrated performance" seminar in Goiania. You don't see me but I'm playing one of the computers in the orchestra : the one that's making a kind of wooshing sound in the background of the second movement, and slightly more harmonic chords at the beginning of the third, with a few stabs of noise later on.

BSBLOrk at Dead Night

We've been doing some death-related activities in Senhoritas Cafe in Brasilia recently.

Here's the laptop orchestra playing a couple of months ago :

Meanwhile, here's some "reporting from Hell" played at a more recent event.

Falling From The Sky

My new link-blog: Yelling At Strangers From The Sky is out of action. It seems that Trex, the server behind Fargo, has serious problems.

I'm still dropping links into this outline, because the principle of having microblogging under my control is a good one. But I'll have to find a way to render the output from this blog.

Hint : It may have something to do with GeekWeaver :-)

Hint 2 : Solutions that involve me hacking something together sometimes ... take ... time ...

How Useful is NSA's Dragnet?

Yochai Benkler :

After the Westgate Mall attack in Nairobi, few would argue that al-Shabaab is not a terrorist organization. But al-Shabaab is involved in a local war, and is not invested in attacking the US homeland. The indictment against Moalin explicitly stated that al-Shabaab's enemies were the present Somali government and "its Ethiopian and African Union supporters". Perhaps, it makes sense for prosecutors to pursue Somali Americans for doing essentially what some Irish Americans did to help the IRA; perhaps not. But this single successful prosecution, under a vague criminal statute, which stopped a few thousand dollars from reaching one side in a local conflict in the Horn of Africa, is the sole success story for the NSA bulk domestic surveillance program.

Mermaid Rock EP

PEACHY Printer

Not sure if this would work, but if it does, it's very clever and a brilliant use of cheap components.


Update : I asked about this on Quora.

Read Nick Cohen on the Abuse at Yarl's Wood

Nick Cohen :

If you want a picture of where Conservatives of all stripes are taking Britain, picture this.

A Roma woman, "Tanja", whose family arrived in Britain illegally, is in a room of the Yarl's Wood immigration removal centre, a block of bland modern buildings in the Bedfordshire countryside surrounded with barbed wire.

According to Tanja's account, a male guard locks the door. He pulls out his earpiece, perhaps to make sure he is not disturbed, and after some initial touching, he pushes his penis in her face. He laughs when he ejaculates in her mouth – so confident is he that he can escape punishment. As Mark Townsend reports in today's Observer, her allegations are not exceptional. One officer is alleged to have had sexual contact with four women. And there may be others we know nothing about.

Put yourself in Tanja's shoes and you will understand why something like this might happen. Take an isolated young woman, locked up in a detention centre, run for the British state by Serco, a private company that has built its profits by taking over public services. The corporate guards confine her and can punish her. One starts thrusting himself on her. What does she do? She could think that she has to go along with him or he'll put her on the next plane out. Or she could believe that if she does what she is told she will be in a relationship with an Englishman and that somehow this "affair" (if that is not too romantic a word) will allow her to stay in the country.

Either way, you might imagine that all targets of sexual predators agree on one point: they fear that, if they complain, deportation will follow. They may not be wholly deluded. Tanja was apparently targeted by three of Serco's creeps. A UK Border Agency investigation found that the three officers behaved unprofessionally in having sexual contact with Tanja. Police are examining a complaint that some of it was non-consensual.

The increasingly privatised criminal justice system has an interest in covering up mistreatment. I don't want to join the Pavlovian chants of "public good/private bad". The public sector is more than capable of hiding its vices, as the police and National Health Service demonstrate with dispiriting regularity. But although a scandal can destroy careers of individual public servants, it will not destroy the institution they serve. Whatever happens, the Metropolitan Police will still police London.

By contrast, scandal poses an existential threat to private corporations. If the complaints grow too loud, they can lose a contract. If they lose too many, they will go out of business.

Optimistic promoters of privatisation believe that the threat of bankruptcy is a market discipline that forces firms to meet higher standards than the sluggish public sector can attain. They have not grasped that the parasitic version of state capitalism Britain has developed is just as likely to regard secrecy as an essential self-defence mechanism. The officers at Yarl's Wood were not driven by market forces to offer a better service.

As for our leaders, can you imagine David Cameron, Theresa May or Chris Grayling giving thunderous speeches on the need to uphold decent standards in publicly funded institutions? Instead of announcing that they are willing to protect the vulnerable, they thunder that legal aid for poor claimants is a swindle that allows fat cat lawyers to get rich at the taxpayers' expense. Instead of ordering inquiries, they manipulate the law to stop the judiciary reviewing abuses of power by the likes of detention centre guards.

Chris Grayling, to take an asinine example, claimed last week that the courts have been taken over by left-wing agitators. Among their number our ignorant justice secretary includes the shire Tories who oppose HS2 and admirers of the Plantagenets who want a public consultation on where to bury the remains of Richard III, as if a nostalgic affection for the House of York were a leftwing cause.

We would not have published a word about Yarl's Wood were it not for the heroic efforts of Harriet Wistrich, the best feminist lawyer I know. But she will not be able to carry on bringing cases like these to the public's attention for much longer.

The legal aid cuts are not directed against fat cat lawyers, who continue to make their fortunes in the City, but against solicitors such as her, who do well if they make £40,000 a year. More seriously, they are directed against their clients.

As of this year, poor litigants, who could once take cases to court about their employment, their children's education, personal injury, clinical negligence, debt and housing no longer can. On matters of vital interest to them – and to wider society – they are beyond the rule of law.

The denial of access to justice falls with particularly severity on the state's detainees. The government will soon remove legal aid from prisoners who claim that their captors have mistreated them. As for the immigrant women, they will fail a new residency test and be denied access to justice too.

Wise politicians understand that the further they climb up the hierarchy, the less they know about the behaviour of public servants. They welcome challenges, not least because they warn them about the failures of the bureaucracy they are meant to control.

Coalition ministers, by contrast, abhor scrutiny. They don't want to know and don't want you to know either. They are using the Leveson report to limit press scrutiny and restrictions on litigation and expenditure to limit judicial scrutiny. They get away with it because the authoritarian left cheers them on when they attack freedom of the press and the authoritarian right cheers them on when they attack equality before the law.

No one is going to punish ministers. There are few votes in defending legal aid and none in defending public money going to that most despised group: illegal immigrants awaiting deportation. Even Observer readers may not want to hear about them and would much prefer to see a piece on Miley Cyrus. If so, don't worry. By this time next year, the sources for stories like ours on the women of Yarl's Wood will have disappeared. It will be as if they don't exist.

PRISM Break

PRISM Break

Smart Watches

The Guardian has a piece on developments in the Smart Watch world.

Personally I think people have Smart Watches the wrong way around. They think that watches are going to be an extra screen for mobile phones.

To me, the biggest problem with the device swarm, particularly Ubuntu's idea that your phone becomes your main computer, but portable, is that it's just so damned easy to lose it.




To me, the obvious move is to use the watch as the main processor / storage for a mobile computer (how often do you lose your watch?) and use a tablet as a dumb input / output device.

(I guess there are battery problems though.)