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Thursday, November 06, 2003 |
 TV and the Hive Mind
Boing Boing post:
"Mack White's conspiracy comics. I'm a longtime fan of Mack White's comics. He did a regular strip for the print edition of bOING bOING called Jokey, which used a secret language. Mack recently let me know about his terrific blog, which is loaded with weird conspiracy stuff (including a link to an article that looks into Gen. Wesley Clark's involvement in the Waco massacre). Here's a one page comic Mack did for The Comics Journal about the Kennedy assassination, and how the reason behind it is similar to the current war in Iraq."
via [Boing Boing Blog]
Visiting Mack's blog, I discovered TV and the Hive Mind, which apparently has been quite a hit, but I missed it. Taste:
Thus, by the end of the 1940s, the basic research had been done and the propaganda apparatus of the national security state had been set up--just in time for the Dawn of Television ...
Experiments conducted by researcher Herbert Krugman reveal that, when a person watches television, brain activity switches from the left to the right hemisphere.
The left hemisphere is the seat of logical thought. Here, information is broken down into its component parts and critically analyzed. The right brain, however, treats incoming data uncritically, processing information in wholes, leading to emotional, rather than logical, responses. The shift from left to right brain activity also causes the release of endorphins, the body's own natural opiates--thus, it is possible to become physically addicted to watching television, a hypothesis borne out by numerous studies which have shown that very few people are able to kick the television habit.
This numbing of the brain's cognitive function is compounded by another shift which occurs in the brain when we watch television.
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 California 5-Year Plan for Austro-English
This email just in:
California 5-Year Plan for Austro-English
The New California Governor has just announced an agreement whereby English will be the official language of the state, rather than German which was the other possibility. As part of the negotiations, The Terminator's Government conceded that English spelling had some room for improvement and has accepted a 5-year phase-in plan that would become known as "Austro-English" (or, if nobody will be offended, "Austrionics").
In the first year, "s" will replace the soft "c". Sertainly, this will make the sivil servants jump with joy. The hard "c" will be dropped in favor of the "k". This should klear up konfusion, and keyboards kan have one less letter.
There will be growing publik enthusiasm in the sekond year when the troublesome "ph" will be replaced with the "f". This will make words like fotograf 20% shorter.
In the 3rd year, publik akseptanse of the new spelling kan be expekted to reach the stage where more komplikated changes are possible.
Governments will enkourage the removal of double letters which have always ben a deterent to akurate speling. Also, al wil agre that the horibl mes of the silent "e" in the languag is disgrasful and it should go away.
By the 4th yer peopl wil be reseptiv to steps such as replasing "th" with "z" and "w" with "v".
During ze fifz yer, ze unesesary "o" kan be dropd from vords kontaining "ou" and after ziz fifz yer, ve vil hav a reil sensibl riten styl.
Zer vil be no mor trubl or difikultis and evrivun vil find it ezi tu understand ech oza. Ze drem of a united urop vil finali kum tru.
If zis mad yu smil, pleas pas it on to oza pepl.
This literary item is copyrighted to Phil Leonardson, 2003.
Please feel free to use it as you would any other e-mail, but please include this copyright notice, as it's probably the only notoriety the author will ever achieve.
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 Sound Engulfs a Room Without Untidy Wires [NYT - NO Registration required]
Wiring the left, right and center speakers of a surround-sound system is easy enough because they are at one end of the room. More of a challenge is unobtrusively connecting the speakers along the room's sides. Two new home theater systems, the Niro 1.1 and 1.1 Pro, get around that by putting all five channels' worth of speakers, along with a small subwoofer, into one box. By Ivan Berger.
via [ New York Times: Technology] (clarification: the subwoofer is separate)
But hometheatermag.com has a more informative article:
[SNIP]
Developed by the legendary Niro Nakamichi, the Japanese master engineer who designed the first three-head cassette tape deck 30 years ago, the NIRO 1.1 and NIRO 1.1 PRO were made possible through Nakamichi's unique implementation of HRTF (Head Related Transfer Function) theory, according to a mid-October announcement. "Never before has it been possible to create 5.1 surround sound from one speaker," said Nirotek sales and marketing v.p. Lonnie Pastor. "Niro has developed the HRTF algorithms and the hardware to do it. You won't believe what he has accomplished with just one speaker."
[SNIP]
The NIRO 1.1 receiver has an onboard computer that performs 600 million calculations per second in processing Nakamichi's proprietary Niroson Cinema 1.1 algorithms and S.F.N. (Spatial Filter Network).
[SNIP]
Both are sold exclusively over the Internet at niro.net
Over at hiddenwires.co.uk, Pastor is quoted as saying,
"No rear speakers means no cables and no clutter," Pastor added. "The NIRO 1.1 automatically gets spouse approval."
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