January 20, 2009 – 1:20 am
Really fascinating article from a ham radio friend on Twitter about the distinction that exists amongst the ham radio subculture between radio and broadcasting. Wonderfully articulate!
Fundamentally, broadcasting isn’t about radio; what matters to the broadcaster is putting the content they create (or assemble) in front of a consuming public. Radio is just one of the mechanisms that can be used for this. Ham radio isn’t about content. Most of the communications we send in ham radio are unimaginative, prosaic, even formulaic. About the only time the content matters is when we’re sending emergency traffic. Ham radio is about the mechanism.
I guess I’m looking at this from a totally McLuhanesque “medium is the message” sort of angle, and I love having my viewpoint challenged to adapt to new stimulus. I was unprepared for the massive subculture-specific learning that is going on with my education in amateur radio.
January 20, 2009 – 12:48 am
Last time I looked, “ultrasound technologist” was top search on Google USA. It’s now down to 17, and I just found this synchronistic infobit related to a strand I was exploring off my last post:
Sony Patent on Ultrasonic Hallucination Machine
http://www.icomw.org/archives/sony.asp
Sony owns U.S. Patent 6,536,440 which concerns a “Method and system for generating sensory data onto the human neural cortex”. It is a non-invasive system, overcoming the drawbacks of surgical implants. Essentially, Sony claims that by targeting certain locations of the brain with ultrasonic energy, pulsed at a low frequency, they can create hallucinations of visual, aural, olfactory and somatosensory sensations, as well as those of taste.
January 20, 2009 – 12:32 am
A friend sent me this transmission, possibly from a parallel universe. A-quick googling turns up no immediate explanation of the mandalic symbol or its possible origin.
Via a cuil search on same meme, I stumbled upon a website with the URL:
http://newshopper.sulekha.com/photos/slideshow/4647/pageno-9.htm
Featuring the image in larger detail:
At the top of the page is text reading “TEST — This is a Diastar test from AP London Photos. Please ignore. (AP Photo)”
Also while looking for this term on Google image searcg I happened curiously across the keywords “human effects testing” and a very spooky looking graphic 4th result on the 3rd result page. Dig this link, and a screen shot in case this somehow goes away:
Not sure what any of this proves or points to, most likely nothing “special”, but you never know I guess. Would love to find out more info from human searchers on this subject. Comb your specialized webs of knowledge and report back any findings. Thanks!
[Research credit, JK]
January 19, 2009 – 11:39 pm
Have put a spending freeze on my purchasing of domains though, but I’ve been doing a lot of off-site linking to URLs simply because I like them, knowing they don’t now exist, but hoping that some sympathetic frequencies pick them up and we can interweave our datawakes.
January 19, 2009 – 6:09 pm
Just come up with an innovative product to make people’s now useless - but still perfectly good television sets - have some other life. Hook it all into the blah blah sustainable blah blah green whatever jargon and imagery that’s going around. I can’t remember where I heard about something similar, some guy with an old warehhouse full of old computers that people had paid him to take just so they could get the physically useless and difficult to dispose of objects of their hands. He was supposedly “recycling” these tvs, but really they just sat there. Even copying something as idiotic as this would probably turn a quick buck in a pinch. Fill up a warehouse full of old useless analog tvs. Make people pay you to come pick them up out of their house. Something cheap.
One more elaborate idea: An electronic device bridging your laptop to your analogue television (small scale transmitting), programmatically connecting things like search history and user-defined settings so you always have a queue of videos loaded up and at the ready any time you sit down at the television. I can’t imagine that Google isn’t sitting on this right now. Xbox is positioning itself in this direction, my friend is getting Netflix on his machine, and there’s a console/interface built right in. Something even simpler wins. Something so pointlessly ingenious, that everybody be like, oh dammit why didn’t I think of that. That’s the world we’re living in right now, the Blank Now.
