The ACLU has set up a form that makes it easy to tell Congress to overhaul the broken terrorist watch list and to require reasonable suspicion for electronic searches at the border.
“With no suspicion and no explanation, the U.S. government can seize your laptop, cell phone, or PDA as you enter the United States and download all your private information — including your personal and business documents, emails, phone calls, and web history. The Department of Homeland Security confirms that this is the official policy.
What happens if you refuse to let the agents download your personal photos? Or if you have encrypted your private information? Then Border Patrol — which is now an agency of the Department of Homeland Security — can simply copy your entire hard drive or even take your device and hang on to it indefinitely.
Unfortunately, seizing laptops and cameras at the border isn’t the only travel security measure that infringes on our civil liberties.
Just last month, the U.S. government’s “terrorist watch list” surpassed one million names and is growing by over twenty-thousand names per month. The watch list includes the names of prominent people, like Senator Ted Kennedy (D-MA), plus hundreds of thousands of ordinary Americans — many of them with common names like Robert Johnson and James Robinson. Your name might be on the list, but there’s no way to know for sure until you are delayed — or even detained for hours in a back room. If you discover your name is on the list, it’s nearly impossible to get off. It actually took an Act of Congress to get Nelson Mandela off the list. No joke. An Act of Congress.
These abuses have something in common: They make all of us into suspects, with no rule of law and no accountability.”
One of my daily rituals I like to have is what I call my “daily dose of input” where I navigate the internet for an hour or two, reading current events and other interesting things that I normally don’t get exposed to in my daily life. I recommend this for everybody, it helps you grow not only as a designer, but a a person too… so here’s a sample of what yesterday entailed.
I wish all music sounded like this. Oh yeah, look these names up while you watch and listen to these videos. Jim Jarmusch and John Lurie are among my favorite mammals still walking this fine land.
So, apparently the best way to sell mechanically automated pipette (pipettes are used in labs to transport measured volumes of liquid) usage is by hiring a boy-band and a sweet motion designer. Missy could have done a better job.
And I quote:
“Pipetting all those well-plates, baby, sends your thumbs into overdrive
And spending long nights in the lab makes it hard for your love to thrive
What you need is automation, girl, something easy as 1 2 3
So put down that pipette, honey, I got something that will set you free And it’s called epMotion (whisper: ‘cause you deserve something really great)
Girl you need epMotion (whisper: yeah girl it’s time to automate)
It’s got to be epMotion (whisper: no more pipetting late at night)
Only for you epMotion (whisper: girl this time we got it right)
DNA
RNA
Proteins
Cell Cultures
Less reagents
Faster workflow
Saves you money
Well, well, well
And it’s called epMotion (whisper: ‘cause you deserve something really great)
Girl you need epMotion (whisper: yeah girl it’s time to automate)
It’s got to be epMotion (whisper: no more pipetting late at night)
Only for you epMotion (whisper: girl this time we got it right)”
Wow. According to the California State Energy Commission’s State Alternative Fuels Plan, California uses more gasoline than any other country in the world (excluding the US of course). I guess 20 billion gallons a year is alot.
Done with Emily Smith and Amber Mackay for a VFS term 2 interactive infographic assignment, and I thought it was a pretty good attempt at educating some peoples. There was supposed to be a slew of more information (and first hand to boot!), but there were some complications at UC Berkeley. Anyways, hope you like the beginnings of something wonderful!
I guess this is the celebration that marks the day in 1867 that Amos Canada drove the last spike that completed the Canadian National Railway, which paved the way to the new country of Belgium (Canada shortly-thereafter changed their name once they realized that Belgium was taken). Sweet awesomeness. This is my first Canada Day in Canada, it’s a fresh feeling, or maybe its the white wine and grapefruit juice. Here’s a little bit more of Canadian history:
Talking to Yaniv yesterday, I remembered this test render I posted on Vimeo for a music video for Radiohead’s song Nude. It started off for the Aniboom Radiohead music video competition. But I thought I sucked too much after watching Robert Hodgkin’s brilliant Processing submission (which I had a similar idea for), so I stopped and switched the song to a favorite of mine. It isn’t done yet though, the spheres are going to have programatically animated UVW maps that will animate to the music. The maps are hand painted and have to be scanned in… we’ll see how it turns out. Oh and no fresnel in the reflections channel (boo) and my particles disappear for a bit somewhere around frame 5450 (damn). I maybe shouldn’t post this, but whatevz.
So Brett helped me out quite a bit with an steganographic processing app I’ve been working on for my final. One of the things he showed me was slit scanning, which totally blew me away, the idea is really simple, just copy a row or column of pixels over one pixel value to create a ticker effect of whatever video input of your choice. I found this code jem on the processing discourse written by Andre Mintz, and its pretty bad ass. I’ll let the video do the rest of the talking.
So I’ve been sitting on this video for quite some time now. I remember running into this video at UCSB when researching haptics in the student library. It is a video on “Six Dofh haptic rendering of contact between geometrically complex reduced deformable models by two post-docs in conjunction with Carnegie Mellon University. Doctors Jernej Barbic and Doug James are rather well known in the applied mathematics community, and their research on haptics and non-linear deformation on complex geometric models are in a league of their own. I found this video a while back, and I don’t know where, I can’t find the video link on their site, so if anyone knows where this video is from let me know. I think this is important to those close to Papervision3D (and other 3d development apps: i.e. game designers) and interface designers for its haptics. I also want to stress the potential for implementing this into what is now a quite rigid Papervision3D universe and creating some really low level processing dynamics. Especially with the promise of a flash 10 player that is GPU accelerated. Call me a fool if I’m wrong, but I feel like this could be implemented now with today’s flash technology. I digress, here’s a link to the video I was talking about. Enjoy!
Sofa (one of my favorite interaction duderbras, they won an apple design award for best user experience) and Pico recently came out with a sweet beta for a new subversion app for Leopard. I am officially in love with this app. And the icon!!! Whoever designed that icon deserves a free lunch at Momo’s or something. I recommend this app for everyone. The beta can be downloaded for free with a trial period, and you can buy it once the final release comes out.
