June 30, 2011
The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) is a British multi-disciplinary institution, based in London. The name Royal Society of Arts is frequently used for brevity. It was founded in 1754 and was granted a Royal Charter in 1847. Notable members have included Benjamin Franklin, Karl Marx, Adam Smith, Stephen Hawking and Charles Dickens. Its founding charter expressed the purpose of the society as being to ’embolden enterprise, enlarge science, refine art, improve our manufactures and extend our commerce,’ but also of the need to alleviate poverty and secure full employment.
In its early years, the Society offered prizes — which it called ‘premiums’ — for people who could successfully achieve one of a number of published challenges. Captain William Bligh suffered the ‘Mutiny on the Bounty’ while attempting to win a premium for shipping breadfruit from the East to the West Indies. He subsequently repeated the voyage and this time succeeded, and the Society awarded him the prize. The Society offered premiums for a very wide range of challenges including devising new forms of machinery and agricultural improvements (which included seeking ways to improve the cultivation of opium poppies).
Posted in Art, Money, World |
Leave a Comment »
June 30, 2011
‘100,000,000 Guinea Pigs: Dangers in Everyday Foods, Drugs, and Cosmetics’ is a book written by Arthur Kallet and F.J. Schlink first released in 1933. Its central argument propounds that the American population is being used as guinea pigs in a giant experiment undertaken by the American producers of food stuffs and patent medicines and the like. Kallet and Schlink premise the book as being ‘written in the interest of the consumer, who does not yet realize that he is being used as a guinea pig…’
The book’s key proposition is that a great deal of products sold to the public – particularly pharmaceuticals and food products – are released with little regard or knowledge of how these products adversely impact the consumer. Corporations, often knowingly, release products which either do not do what they purport to, or have dangerous side effects or defects. Furthermore, many officials and government departments, namely the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, have fallen victim to regulatory capture (control by industry it is charged with regulating).
read more »
Posted in Health, Money, Politics |
Leave a Comment »
June 29, 2011
Octobriana is a comic superheroine originating from literary hoax by Czech artist Petr Sadecký. Sadecký wrote ‘Octobriana and the Russian Underground,’ a book that told the story of Octobriana, purported to be the creation of a group of Russian dissident artists calling themselves Progressive Political Pornography (PPP) in the 1960s. Octobriana was actually Sadecký’s own creation. While still in Prague, he enlisted the help of two Czech artists, Bohumil Konečný and Zdeněk Burian, in creating a comic centering around the character of ‘Amazona.’ Sadecký told the two that he had a buyer interested in the comic, and they worked together on writing and illustrating it.
However, Sadecký betrayed his friends by stealing the artwork and escaping to the West, where, in his efforts to market the Amazona comic, he changed the dialog, drew a red star on the character’s forehead, changed her name to Octobriana, and gave her a fake political backstory. Burian and Konečný sued Sadecký in a West German court, winning the case but never recovering all their stolen artwork. Since Octobriana is still widely thought to be the product of dissident cells within the U.S.S.R., she is not copyrighted, and has appeared in a variety of artistic incarnations.
Posted in Art, Money, World |
Leave a Comment »
June 29, 2011
Musopen is an online music library of copyright-free (public domain) music. Musopen’s mission is to record or obtain recordings that have no copyrights so that its visitors may listen, re-use, or in any way enjoy music, and ‘to set music free.’ In 2008, Musopen released newly-commissioned recordings of the 32 Beethoven piano sonatas into the public domain.
In 2010, the site organized a fundraiser via Kickstarter to commission recordings of a larger repertoire. Musopen is a nonprofit charity, operating out of Palo Alto, California, created by Aaron Dunn in 2005.
Posted in Art, Money, Politics |
Leave a Comment »
June 28, 2011
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) is a US copyright law that implements two 1996 treaties of the World Intellectual Property Organization. It criminalizes production and dissemination of technology, devices, or services intended to circumvent measures (commonly known as digital rights management or DRM) that control access to copyrighted works. It also criminalizes the act of circumventing an access control, whether or not there is actual infringement of copyright itself. In addition, the DMCA heightens the penalties for copyright infringement on the Internet.
Passed in 1998 by a unanimous vote in the United States Senate and signed into law by President Bill Clinton, the DMCA amended Title 17 of the United States Code to extend the reach of copyright, while limiting the liability of the providers of on-line services for copyright infringement by their users. The law is currently unsettled with regard to websites that contain links to infringing material; however, there have been a few lower-court decisions which have ruled against linking in some narrowly prescribed circumstances. One is when the owner of a website has already been issued an injunction against posting infringing material on their website and then links to the same material in an attempt to circumvent the injunction.
Posted in Money, Politics, Technology |
Leave a Comment »
June 28, 2011
In typography, rivers, or rivers of white, are gaps appearing to run down a paragraph of text, due to a coincidental alignment of spaces. They can occur regardless of the spacing settings, but are most noticeable with wide inter-word spaces caused by full text justification or monospaced fonts.
Typographers try to minimize or eliminate the river effect. They can test for rivers by turning a proof sheet upside down (top to bottom) to examine the text. From this perspective, the eye is less likely to recognize words and the type can be viewed more readily as an overall pattern. Other related terms are ‘lakes’ and ‘holes,’ which refer to a cluster of adjacent or intertwined rivers that create a lighter area within a block of type.
Posted in Language, Money, Technology |
Leave a Comment »
June 27, 2011
Zombie Nation is a German techno and electro project of the Munich based DJ and producer Florian Senfter (also known as John Starlight). The first Zombie Nation five track EP was released in the spring of 1999 on DJ Hell’s label, International DeeJay Gigolo Records.
A remix of the song ‘Kernkraft 400’ on this debut release landed in high chart-positions all over the world, including number 2 in the U.K. ‘Kernkraft 400’ was a 1:1 melody copy from the Commodore C64 computer game ‘Lazy Jones.’
read more »
Posted in Art, Money, Technology |
Leave a Comment »
June 27, 2011
Inside Job is a 2010 documentary film about the financial crisis of 2007–2010 directed by Charles H. Ferguson, who has described the film as being about ‘the systemic corruption of the United States by the financial services industry and the consequences of that systemic corruption.’ In five parts the film explores how changes in the policy environment and banking practices helped create the 2008 financial crisis.
The film focuses on changes in the financial industry in the decade leading up to the crisis, the political movement toward deregulation, and how the development of complex trading such as the derivatives market allowed for large increases in risk taking that circumvented older regulations that were intended to control systemic risk.
read more »
Posted in Money, Politics |
Leave a Comment »
June 27, 2011
Loompanics Unlimited was an American book seller and publisher specializing in nonfiction on generally unconventional or controversial topics, with a philosophy arguably tending to a mixture of libertarian and left wing ideals, although Loompanics carried books expressing other political viewpoints (including far right) as well as outspokenly apolitical ones. The topics in their title list included drugs, weapons, anarchism, sex, and conspiracy theory, among others. Many of their titles describe some illicit or extralegal actions, such as ‘Counterfeit I.D. Made Easy,’ while others are purely informative, like ‘Opium for the Masses.’
Mike Hoy started Loompanics Unlimited in East Lansing, Michigan, in 1975. He later moved the business to Port Townsend, Washington, where his friend and fellow publisher R.W. Bradford had earlier located. The company’s name is a play on words inspired by Hoy’s fondness for National Lampoon.
read more »
Posted in Money, Philosophy, Politics |
Leave a Comment »
June 27, 2011
CrimethInc. is a decentralized anarchist collective of autonomous cells. It emerged in the mid-1990s, initially as the hardcore zine ‘Inside Front,’ and began operating as a collective in 1996. It has since published widely read articles and zines for the anarchist movement and distributed posters and books of its own publication.
In their own words, ‘Crimethought is not any ideology or value system or lifestyle, but rather a way of challenging all ideologies and value systems and lifestyles—and, for the advanced agent, a way of making all ideologies, value systems, and lifestyles challenging.’
read more »
Posted in Money, Politics |
Leave a Comment »
June 27, 2011
Work is a book published by Crimethinc Far East, a decentralized anarchist publishing collective. It covers a wide range of economic, political, and philosophical issues, mostly relating to the ethical and utilitarian implications of Capitalism. Central to the book’s theme is that Capitalism is inherently immoral and inevitably causes massive wealth inequality and degradation of general human experience.
The book focuses specifically on the causes and effects crises suffered by capitalist economies, such as the 2008 financial crisis, and how the people can subvert global Capitalism to create a better future. The book features an ‘updated’ version of the Pyramid of the Capitalist System, designed by American artist, Packard Jennings, on the inside flap.
Posted in Money, Philosophy, Politics |
Leave a Comment »
June 27, 2011
‘He who does not work, neither shall he eat‘ is a Biblical aphorism derived from Paul’s letter to the Thessalonians, which became a slogan for new colonies and socialist societies. The slogan was used by Captain John Smith in setting up the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia after his experiment with the common store system, or socialism, was abandoned. According to Soviet leader Vladimir Lenin, it is the first principle of socialism. The phrase is mentioned in his 1917 work, ‘State and Revolution.’ Through this slogan Lenin explains that in socialist states only productive individuals would be allowed access to the articles of consumption.
This is not really directed at lazy or unproductive workers, but rather the bourgeoisie. Marxist theory holds that the bourgeoisie buy the commodity labor-power of workers and enlists them in the process of production. Profits are then made by the expropriation of surplus value. Accordingly, in a communist society, with the abolition of property and the law of value, there would be no class of individuals that lives off the labor of others. The principle would not apply to those who could not work, such as the elderly or the lame. These groups would have a right to society’s products because they were not at fault for their condition. The elderly, furthermore had worked during their youth, and so could not be denied life’s basic necessities.
Posted in Money, Politics, World |
Leave a Comment »
