By Sheila
Lennon
Bottom-up' journalism from the pros
Fair and balanced, too!
August 13, 2004, 6:32 p.m. -- Last
week's weblog
Google
proceeds with IPO auction; company founders admit interview had misleading
information. AP,
The revised IPO documents corrected several inaccurate statements made in
the Playboy article. Google also took the unusual step of including the entire
Playboy interview in its revised IPO statement to set the record straight so
its auction could continue....
...The Playboy interview contained several statements that were either outdated
or simply wrong.
For instance, Brin boasts Google's new e-mail service, known as "Gmail," offers
accountholders 200 times more storage capacity than its rivals. That was
true in April, but no longer as Yahoo, Microsoft and other competitors increased
the capacity offered in their free e-mail services.
In another example of bad information, Page said Google has "about 1,000" employees.
Three weeks before Page gave the interview, Google had 1,907 employees, according
to the company's IPO filing in April. At the end of June, the work force
had grown to 2,292 employees.
Google also acknowledged the Playboy article didn't disclose many of the risks
facing the company.
Here's the interview: Playboy
Interview: Google Guys at Kottke.org
Link
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eBay
buys into Craigslist: eBay has acquired a 25 percent stake in Craigslist,
an online listing of classified ads and forums.
Don't miss what craigslist's Craig Newmark -- and especially his readers
-- have to say
about it on his blog.
(It wasn't his idea.)
Weekend fun: Weboggle is
Boggle online. How to play.
Link
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John
Perry Barlow 2.0: The Thomas Jefferson of cyberspace reinvents
his body -- and his politics. At Reason, an excellent interview with the
onetime Grateful Dead lyricist, co-founder of the EFF and former campaign
manager
for Dick
Cheney.
Here's one of the less obvious excerpts:
Barlow: You now have two distinct ways of gathering information beyond what
you yourself can experience. One of them is less a medium than an environment
-- the Internet -- with a huge multiplicity of points of view, lots of different
ways to find out what’s going on in the world. Lots of people are tuned
to that, and a million points of view have bloomed. It creates a cacophony
of viewpoints that doesn’t have any political coherence at all, a beautiful
melee, but it doesn’t have the capacity to create large blocs of belief.
The other medium, TV, has a much smaller share of viewers than at any time
in the past, but those viewers get all their information there. They get
turned into a very uniform belief block. TV in America created the most coherent
reality
distortion field that I’ve ever seen. Therein is the problem: People
who vote watch TV, and they are hallucinating like a sonofabitch. Basically,
what we have in this country is government by hallucinating mob.
Link
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Wrong Time for an E-Vote Glitch: From Wired,
It was simultaneously an uh-oh moment and an ah-ha moment.
When Sequoia Voting Systems demonstrated its new paper-trail electronic voting
system for state Senate staffers in California last week, the company representative
got a surprise when the paper trail failed to record votes that testers cast
on the machine.
That was bad news for the voting company, whose paper-trail, touch-screen
machine will be used for the first time next month in Nevada's state
primary. The company advertises that its touch-screen machines provide "nothing
less than 100 percent accuracy."
It was good news, however, for computer scientists and voting activists, who
have long held that touch-screen machines are unreliable and vulnerable to
tampering, and therefore must provide a physical paper-based audit trail of
votes.
"It goes to our point that a paper trail is very much needed to (ensure)
that the machine accurately reports what people press," said Susie
Swatt, chief of staff for state Sen. Ross Johnson (R-Irvine), who witnessed
the
glitch in the Sequoia machine.
With a paper-trail system, the voting machines would print out a record when
voters cast ballots on a touch-screen machine. Voters could examine, but not
touch, the record before casting their ballot. The paper would then drop into
a secure ballot box for use in a recount.
For nearly a year, voting companies and many election officials have resisted
the call for a paper record. ...
Without the ability to recount, we may as well just make up numbers, or give
the office to the highest bidder.
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Soldiers go online to make their voices heard: KRT reports,
Two young Army officers with time in Iraq are the brains behind a new Web
site called Operation Truth that will be launched later this month.
Former Capt. David Chasteen and 1st Lt. Paul Rieckhoff, who is still serving
in the Army National Guard, hope to ''educate the American public about the
truth of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan from the perspective of the soldiers
who have experienced them first-hand.''
Toward that end they hope that their Web site, www.optruth.org, will provide
a forum for soldiers and Marines still serving in Iraq or just returned, to
tell their stories, post their digital photos and voice their complaints.
Chasteen, a native of Muncie, Ind., and Rieckhoff, a native of New York City,
said Operation Truth is a nonprofit soldiers advocacy organization and is nonpartisan,
nonpolitical and not affiliated with any candidate. But, like the soldiers
they hope will post on their website, they have more than a few bones to pick
with those in charge of the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan....
From the optruth site:
Operation Truth will formally launch August 24th, with a press conference,
a new website, a nationally placed Op/Ed, and a fundraiser in New York City.
Link
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12:47 p.m.
Julia's
luscious legacy. Recipes from an American original:
Julia's
Best Recipes at ivillage:
• Chicken Broiled with Mustard, Herbs, and Bread Crumbs
• Beef Stew in Red Wine, with Bacon, Onions, and Mushrooms
• Pan-broiled Steak
• Steak au Poivre
• Buttered Green Beans with Lemon Juice and Parsley
• Queen of Sheba Cake with Chocolate-Butter Icing
At StarChefs:
• Deluxe chicken or turkey salad
• Chilled leek and potato soup: vichyssoise
• Fresh lemon sherbet
Julia's
recipes at Epicurious.com
Video
clips at PBS
Julia was the grand dame without pretensions, the great aunt giving patrician
permission
to enjoy life, shrug at failure and make the best of broken eggs. As a role model,
she took the cake.
The AP photo
above is Julia Child
just before receiving the French Legion of Honor on Nov. 19, 2000, in Boston.
Updated: Among the "Victual
Reality" items at Epicurious, a life-size
Xerox of Julia's hand. via Jeff Jarvis
Link
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Hurricane blog: Ryan Towell at Weatherbug. Now:
Shelters Filling Fast
More and more people are taking the advice of emergency managers and are making
their way to the evacuation shelters set up in schools and other 'safe' locations.
Some of these shelters are now reporting that they are nearing capacity. ...
Lee County is preparing for what could be the strongest hurricane to directly
hit the area within 30 years.
Other bloggers are mentioning Charley, but since power goes out in hurricanes,
I don't expect much live blogging.
Tampa Bay Online is all
over this. Here's the Miami Herald's storm package.
Hurricane Resources at Poynter.
Link
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August 12, 2004, 7:22 p.m.
Inside Al-Qaeda’s
Hard Drive: Budget squabbles, baby pictures, office
rivalries—and the path to 9/11 by Allan Cullison in The Atlantic.
The second dealer told me that he had serviced computers belonging to the
Taliban and to Arabs in al-Qaeda. I forgot about my own computer problems
and hired him to search for these computers. Eventually he led me to a semiliterate
jewelry salesman with wide-set eyes and a penchant for gold chains. This
was
the man who that December would take $1,100 from me in exchange for two
of al-Qaeda's most valuable computers—a 40-gigabyte IBM desktop and
a Compaq laptop. He had stolen them from al-Qaeda's central office in Kabul
on November
12, the night before the city fell to the Northern Alliance. He wanted
the money, he said, so that he could travel to the United States and meet
some
American girls
Among the documents seized are letters from Osama bin Laden.
Link
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Stairway to Heaven by Beethoven, Bizet, Mahler, Miller...: Composer Joe
Wolfe and University
of New South Wales Orchestra present "The Stairway Suite: (Orchestral
variations upon an air by [Robert] Plant & [Jimmy] Page)"
It's Led Zeppelin's Stairway to Heaven as you've never heard it before.
Clips do let you hear it.
Stairway to Heaven . . . Franz Schubert
Stairway to Heaven . . . Gustav Holst
Stairway to Heaven . . . Glenn Miller
Stairway to Heaven . . . Gustav Mahler
Stairway to Heaven . . . Georges Bizet
Stairway to Heaven . . . Ludwig von Beethoven
Finale
(Edgy is better. The Glenn Miller touch is so light it might blow
away.) via BoingBoing.
Link
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Babalu Blog bills
itself as "an island on the net without a bearded dictator." It's all about
Cuba. And it's just finishing a special project. Form the intro to BlogCuba:
When I first asked my fellow bloggers if they wanted to participate in this
BlogCuba the reaction was mostly "Yes. I'd love to be a part of it, but
what am I going to write about? I don't know much about Cuba." I told
them not to worry, they would think of something.
And they did. Boy, did they ever. I am humbled by the quality of writings
they have sent in. There's a bit of everything, from personal accounts of
a Cuban girl one blogger had a crush on when he was a kid to a major fisking
(of) Castro and his apologists.
Link
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Human labyrinth: A painted bronze sculpture by Italian
artist Rabarama sits in downtown Shanghai to promote the artist's exhibition
at Shanghai Urban Planning Exhibition Hall.
More of her works can be seen at this
gallery.
Others are
here. From Shanghai
Daily news,
``From February to April, Rabarama's works toured Shenzhen and Beijing,''
says Zhang Yirong, spokeswoman for the exhibition hall. ``At the beginning
we were afraid that such big sculptures would be destroyed if put outdoors.
But Rabarama said she'd like the visitors to touch them and she especially
loves kids climbing on them.''
You may send
e-cards with three of Rabarama's images.
Link
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Transparency Begets
Trust in the Blogosphere by J.D.
Lasica in OJR. The subhed is
The openness of Weblogs could help explain why many readers find them more
credible than traditional media. Can mainstream journalists learn from their
cutting-edge cousins?
The debate continues. (Can't we all just get along?)
Link
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A strong voice... changes: J.D. also writes
about
CBFTW, a soldier in the Stryker Brigade in Iraq
who hails from San Francisco, has a blog called MY
WAR - Fear and Loathing in Iraq." It is, simply put, the most amazing
war read I've ever come across. I'm going to quote extensively from it here,
to
give you a sense of the real news from the front lines. Warning: coarse language
ahead.
From his latest post, yesterday:
I never even knew what a Blog was until I read about them in an article
in Time Magazine, about two months ago....
J.D.
adds, "CBFTW's dispatch from last Thursday was the most chilling and
painfully real I've read from a soldier on the front lines of war. Read
the whole thing, ..."
Oddly, today, after a couple of says without posting, the soldier's voice
changed.
The other day, we went somewhere, and did something. ...
I would like to take this time now, to say a nice warm "Mar-Haba" (that's "Welcome" in
Arabic) to all my new readers down at M.I. (Military Intelligence) who are
now reading this site and have this bookmarked on their computers. Glad to
have
you all
aboard,
and I
hope you all like the site. Hopefully you'll find this site more entertaining
than most of that other boring crap I'm sure you guys have to sift through
all day.
A reader comments:
WHOO!! I AM SO RELIEVED.. even if you didn't give us your normal pull in the
people-type writing style we've become used to but we understand, it will take
time for you to let it all out again.
And then CBFTW interviews an Iraqi who gushes about how wonderful everything
is. The readers have
noticed. You decide.
Link
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August 11, 2004, 7:01 p.m.
AP photo |
| Oarsmen row a replica of an ancient Greek warship named Olympia past
a Greek navy vessel outside the main port of Piraeus, near Athens, today.
The replica will carry the Olympic flame. |
Who's blogging the Olympics:
Scott Goldblatt of Kansas is on the U.S. swim team. He's blogging, with some
photos, for
nj.com here, at his own site, at his own Athens
2004 Olympic Journal (latest post at the bottom, with links to
many more photos on the right) and at
a site he shares with his
wife, Colleen.
Check out the photo of Scott
with Muhammad Ali from July 27. He has more
photos from the night ESPN
did a group interview in Palo Alto that included gymnast Mary Lou Retton,
boxer Sugar Ray Leonard, track and field athlete Carl Lewis and fellow swimmer
Michael
Phelps.
Odd news from Scott yesterday at the nj.com blog:
Blogging Ban?
That was the big news yesterday as it hit my email inbox. It seemed that
blogging was outlawed here at the Games. After further research, I found
that each
federation (country) holds the right to choose what they do and do not
allow. I found out that Canada, so it seems, is not able to blog according
to reports
(see at my website) from bloggers around the web. Seemingly this news spread
awfully quick, and I had to be just as fast to respond. I talked with the
media officials from USA Swimming and they assured me that I was able to
go ahead with these blogs, as long as, I do not move into the territory
of journalism? But where does that line get drawn? ...
...As David Liss (sports producer at NJ.com) pointed out to me in an email, "The
IOC would certainly be hypocritical to call a blogger a journalist, since
I'm sure it's (the
IOC) not issuing any press credentials to Joe Blogger. The IOC also couldn't
presumably own your thoughts and therefore hold the rights to them".
I one hundred percent agree with this. But, as the Olympics have become more
and more commercialized the IOC has presumably tried to own almost every
right that an athlete has here at the Olympic Games, with the strictest of
leashes put on what we can and cannot do. When and where will the line be
drawn. If freedom of speech is lost, where do we go from their? To me this
is a step backwards in the ideals of democracy and the Olympic Games, but
then again the IOC is making a few dollars, are they not.
Joe
Wasser's Athens Olympics Blog: Joe has been working in
Greece since May 15. His blog began with
this
post on May 1 (If you want to read chronologically, start with this post
and keep clicking "Next"):
...Prior to the start of the Games I'll be helping to get the venues ready
for broadcast and then once the Game start I will be the Commentary Control
Room
Manager at Olympic Stadium. That's right, I'll be one of the top managers
as far as television for what will probably be at that time the world's largest
television broadcast. Not bad for somebody that grew up in the midwest baling
hay and selling auto body supplies. If you knew me back then and had any
idea
my life would lead me here drop me an email. I would really like to know
what's next....
Today: "They are still doing construction on venues as we try to prepare them
for broadcast."
Robert
Scheer's Summer Olympics blog: By an Indy Star photographer "covering
the Olympics for the Indy Star's parent company, Gannett and its big cousin,
USA TODAY."
...I also forgot a little gizmo that lets you trip off a remotely mounted
camera with a remote controller called a pocket wizard. Pretty cool stuff,
and I
thought I’d pick one up here, but no luck. So, I’ll have it FedExed
from Indiana this week, right? Wrong. They’re not a sponsor either,
and the nice folks at the media compound will only take parcels from USPS.
So, with a little help, and some Internet work, I’m having it shipped,
via UPS, to a location near my dormitory, where I’ll go get it, hopefully,
in a few days.
18 Days in August: Theoharis was born in Athens, left at 19 for London, and has returned as a tourist. Yiannis
is listed as a co-author, but hasn't posted anything yet.
Theoharis yields to his friend Solon, who has lived and worked in Athens
for seven years:
...To me, we have already won the Games. Not in 1997, when we were awarded
the (dubious?) honour of hosting them, and not in the last two weeks of August
while participating in them, but in the seven-year preparation span. Have
we
beaten our own propensity for procrastination? I do not know. I wish, though
I doubt it. Only time will tell. But we have achieved things great and wonderful,
in a very short time span.
If you have visited Athens in the past and plan to come again for the Games
you will know what I mean. If you have visited at any time during the last
seven years you will remember naught but a huge construction site. If you have
visited before that you will remember a small, dysfunctional and cluttered
airport (changed), inadequate roads (changed), interminable traffic (improved),
shabby (but cheap) taxis (not as shabby though still cheap), and so on, ad
nauseum.
As I said at the beginning, the Games have changed Athens. What remains to
be seen, is if Athens can change the Games. And if they can make any changes
stick.
Bart Lapers, a Belgian, is blogging a Diary
of an Athens 2004 Olympic Games Volunteer. Today:
Just back from my first day of work at the Aquatic centre. Well, 'work'
is maybe not the correct word, I would call it more 'hanging around'. The
training
I got today was limited to checking out the different desks and pools at
the Aquatic centre. I have access to the Press Areas, Broadcast areas and
the Competition & Athletes
preperation area. Lots of activity going on at the three pools, the Japanese
and Canadian teams were training at the Synchronised swimming pool, perfect
shaped athletes at the diving pool and of course a lot of press at the
main pool to see a glimp of Ian Thorpe, the Australian 'Thorpedo'.
Here's Bart's personal photogallery (not
an Olympics site).
The
Correia file at the St. Petersburg (Fla.) Times "is a Web Diary
written by Valrico resident Maritza Correia, a member of the U.S.
swimming team. Watch for more blogs from Maritza and her family from Athens."
She hasn't filed from Athens yet. What you'll find at that link now is a column
covering her time at Stanford, July 18-July 31.
Mark Chay of the Singapore swim team is moblogging (photoblogging).
Sydney Volunteers in Athens
Dedicated metablogging: The Australian Athens
Olympic
Games Blog is not blogging from Athens, but it has a blog for each sport,
which qualifies it for a link here.Olympic
Fever is also covering the coverage.
The official website of the ATHENS 2004 Olympic Games - Games of the XXVIII
Olympiad
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Must-download TV: The latest developments in TV-show-trading technology mean
you don't need TiVo
to watch what you want, when you want.
At Salon (watch an ad for a free day pass).
Hollywood's nightmare scenario is that high-definition TV
will become "Napsterized," with shows available online to anyone,
anytime, for free -- which may sound, to some TV fans, less like a nightmare
than a heavenly dream.
There's no reason you have to be home at a certain time to watch a taped show,
right? Watching what we want when we want should increase the audience for
just about everything -- and eliminate that Friday night hassle of Jon Stewart
vs. Bill Maher at 11.
Link
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Cashing in: Sotheby's
plans to auction property from the estate of Johnny
Cash and June Carter Cash for three days beginning Sept. 14. You can preview
the
773
lots
online, windowshopping for your piece of history.
Link
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The virtue of idleness by Tom Hodgkinson: A book extract in the Guardian
(U.K.) The blurb:
From the Bible on, moralists and nags have promoted the benefits of hard work
and early rising. They are mistaken, argues Tom Hodgkinson. For breathing space
to create and time to reflect, indolence is essential. He offers a guide to
easy living, pleasurable illness, and effortless sex
A sample:
I have been inspired to create a pub in my own home. For me, the pleasures
of staying in revolve around drinking and talking. So I took the unprepossessing
scullery in our rented Devon farmhouse and installed a dartboard and two
old dining-room chairs, which cost £7 each in a local bric-a-brac place.
I've also added a print of dogs playing pool, fairy lights, a piece of
driftwood, a shove-ha'penny board, beer mats, Hogarth prints, an old scythe
which I found
on a rubbish tip and postcards of Cornish men eating giant pasties. All
these items were either found lying around or were donated by friends. The
pub is
called The Green Man and my friend Pete Loveday has painted the sign. Through
the battered casement windows you can see the sun set over the sea, and
without stirring abroad I can know the whole world.
I have moved my old Dansette record player into my home-pub and we play
Noël
Coward and The Ink Spots on sunny afternoons. I find that sort of music
accompanies ale and cigarettes rather well.
Also at Salon: Blogging
grows up, about Ben and Mena Trott, the couple behind
the blogging software Movable Type.
Link
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Shadow interview: Marc
Canter, J.D.
Lasica's partner in the free Open Media project I
blogged yesterday,
has some fun
answering the questions I asked J.D.
In response to "I'd like to see vblogging by people who go to campaign
appearances, or by the campaigns themselves. Primary sources..." Marc
writes,
What a coincidence - in the case of poliiical candidates, debates, news
conferences, etc. there's an Internet Archies project that's doing that right
now!
I found it -- Election
2004 at the Internet
Archive -- and sorted
it by date. It's
not exactly what I wanted, with all the campaign commercials and one-offs.
Maybe a more narrowly focused "Video from the road" will be the ticket.
Marc was a found of Macromedia, so I expect he'll pull off interesting things
here.
Link
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August 10, 2004, 7:05 p.m.
Open Media project hopes for your videos: J.
D. Lasica and Marc
Canter have teamed up to make a grassroots video concept a reality. Marc
describes it:
...
enable folks to access the HUGE repositories of public domain and Creative
Commons content - that's out there.
And to help build our own huge repository of CC content.
First we'll start off with upload sites - which will enable folks to start
getting their stuff into the 'archives'. Then we'll provide Jukeboxes and Image
Albums (much like what's in the gutter of my
blog) that have built into them
these huge repositories.
Basically we're making sure to make it REAL easy for folks to utilize media
in their everyday lives, school and work.
J.D. says,
Open Media is three things in one:
• an open-source platform to bring personal media to the desktop;
• a destination Web site, to launch soon at www.open-media.org;
• eventually, it will evolve into a not-for-profit organization dedicated
to advancing amateur, hobbyist, and semi-professional visual works licensed
under a Creative Commons license.
Unlike other initiatives that are pure-play stand-alone Web sites, Open Media's
vision is to bring personal media to millions of desktops through playlists,
video jukeboxes, visual albums, and built-in media libraries.
Brewster Kahle and his Internet Archive are supporting this project with free
storage and bandwidth for grassroots video works.
J.D. also has a nice list
of sites now archiving homebrew video. (if you know of others, I'm sure he'd
like you to leave a link in the comments on this post.)
Okay, it's "an open-source platform to bring personal media to the desktop." What
does that mean to you and me?
I asked J.D. some questions I have a hunch might come up around some dinner
tables. Here they are, with his replies:
• Can I put my home movies up there and send the link to my family?
Yep. But we're not yet sure if there will be private spaces or if everything "up
there" will be part of the public archive, accessible to all.
• I want to create an archive of every Bush/Kerry/Cheney/Edwards campaign
speech, enlisting volunteers who live along their routes. Can you help me organize
that?
You mean the text of the speeches instead of the video?
No, I'd like to see vblogging by people who go to campaign appearances, or
by the campaigns themselves. Primary sources. Like this
little clip:
Yeah, this is the sort of thing that could be stored on the open-media.org
site we're building (what's nice for users is there's no bandwidth costs).
Then all you have to do is create a website with whatever branding and
text you'd like, and have a little screen for video footage, point it
to our servers
to deliver the video stream or download, and you're all set.
• Do you own what I put there, as TextAmerica does?
No. Anyone who uploads anything will be required to fill out a form stating
which Creative Commons license she chooses, which typically means the work
may be freely shared and viewed by others but must be attributed to the
content creator. Or, full copyright can be retained.
• Can I upload video from my phonecam?
Don't know. I'll ask around.
• Is this like public-access cable, where I can do a "Wayne's World" in
my basement and upload it?
If you'd like! Hopefully people will create works with a bit more meaning,
but it will run the gamut from deeply felt digital stories to satirical
bits of entertainment.
• I'm in Iraq. How can I get my war footage to you?
Our servers should be accessible to anyone in the world with an internet
connection, once the site goes live.
• Can I just store my footage there without making it available to anybody else?
Probably not. It's not for storage, it's for sharing, just as a library is.
• Am I gonna be able to search for other people's cat videos? By breed?
Yes. We'll have keyword searches and a rich metadata library.
• Can I put porn videos there?
No. We'll have terms of service and porn is one of the no-nos.
• When does the website start?
We're shooting for sometime next month.
• I'd like some recommendations for tools for participation. I've
deliberately held back till I could get the swiss army knife
phone/web/wifi/video/email/moblog
appliance.
We'll have a page up within the week, announcing the project.
The first video won't go up until next month at the earliest when the site
and its functionality are built out.
We'll be able to make recommendations for tools, too, within a few weeks.
Wheee!
Link
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A glance at politics: This campaign season is going to go on way too
long. Like a radio broadcast of a tennis match, it's already come down to,
"He hit it, he hit it, he hit it..."
Two things: Complete
transcript of Stars and Stripes' interview with Sen.
John Kerry. I hope they also do one with George W. Bush.
And a disturbing quote from a Chicago Sun-Times story about Alan Keyes (Keyes
fires up GOP faithful), but it's more generic than that:
...In fact, Republican Jim Oberweis, who flanked Keyes onstage along with
other GOP candidates who lost in the primary to Ryan, called the race with
Obama
no less than "a debate between good on the right and evil on the left."..
We are all Americans. There is an Axis of Evil and it does not include your
fellow voters. If politicians want to start another civil war in this country,
keep talking this way.
Link
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Comic
relief:Moore/Bush. Like the JibJab
video, which lampoons both sides equally to
the tune of "This Land is My Land...," Moore/Bush casts the filmmaker and the
president in zany lyrics to the tune of She'll Be Comin' Round the Mountain...
Link
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She uses the planets to predict the sun: There's a nice story about Rhode
Island astrometeorologist Carolyn Egan (Weather
Sage is her site) in the Bristol
Phoenix:
...Carolyn Egan is not your typical meteorologist. It's true, she does predict
the weather — but not using the methods of today's meteorologists,
with Doppler radars, enhanced satellite imagery and computer models. Ms.
Egan is
an astrometeorologist. She uses astronomy and astrology to predict weather
patterns across the globe. And she's usually right.
"It works so well with skill and experience," she said.
The desk in her office — tucked in a corner of the new Bristol in-law
apartment she shares with her husband — is littered with maps, diagrams,
binders and a computer screen with a map of the western hemsiphere displayed
predominantly on it. Mrs. Egan, who is retired, spends about 40 hours a week
on weather forecasting, mixing her hobby — she does make some money through
the classes and workshops she holds — with helping to care for her
grandchildren.
... Through the years, Mrs. Egan has become so accurate in her predictions,
she has occasionally been hired to predict the weather for special events — like
weddings and outdoor parties — a year in advance. She hasn't been wrong
yet, she said.
"I achieve 80 to 90 percent (of my weekly predictions) now and 100
percent for my daily predictions."
The craft doesn't allow Mrs. Egan to specifically say, "it's going to
be 85 degrees and mostly cloudy." She deals more in terms of warm or
hot, wet or dry, cool or cold.
"I don't use the same terms as meteorologists do," she said. "I
can give them an idea."
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The
Dreamachine -- invented by poet Brion
Gysin (a close
friend of William S. Burroughs) and mathematician Ian Sommerville in 1959 --
will be displayed in San Francisco for a month beginning Thursday (West
Portal
Books, 111 West Portal Ave.),
but if you're not there, you can make your own.
Meant to be viewed with eyes closed, those who've used it say it initially
creates images of Persian rugs on your eyelids, which might be relaxing in
itself. After 10 to 15 minutes, you enter lucid dreaming.
Brion Gysin and His Wonderful Dreamachine
A dreamachine is little more than a perforated tube of paper placed on a
spinning platter with a light bulb positioned in the tube. Holes are cut
from the tube
according to a specific pattern. You sit in front of the dreamachine at eye-level
with the bulb, with your eyes closed. If constructed correctly the dreamachine
should emit a pulse of light between 8-13 Hz, which is the precise rhythm
of alpha-waves in the brain. Alpha-waves are dominant during the "alpha state," which
occurs during deep meditation or the early stages of sleep. Alpha-waves are
associated with a healthy mind and a stress-free life. For those of us with
mentally taxing jobs and stressful lives, the dreamachine can restore order
and relaxation, with the bonus of some interesting visual effects....
...I'm not going to claim that the dreamachine works for everyone, although
it should. If you do decide to build one, I recommend mellow instrumental electronic
music to augment the experience. I also must caution epileptics not to use
the dreamachine, as the flickering lights may trigger a seizure, not unlike
a strobe light or TV. Otherwise try it: it's a cheap thrill for less than ten
dollars and it looks cool sitting in the corner of your dorm room.
WHAT
IS A DREAMACHINE? (from the catalog accompanying the very first museum
showing of the Dreamachine in Basel, Switzerland)
In the history of the world, Dreamachines are the first objects made to be
viewed with closed eyes.
In the history of art, Dreamachines bring to a conclusion the period of kinetic
invention in modern painting and sculpture.
Dreamachines open a new era and a new era of vision... interior vision.
"Dreamachines make visible the fundamental order present in the physiology
of the brain."...
Plans. Virtual
Dreamachine online.
Therapeutic use of the dreamachine
The dreamachine rythm, between 7 and 13 flahs (hertz?) per second, puts
the brain in alpha rythm. Since 3 years a number among us have built one
and
experimented
it.
Two therapists in the group have been experimenting its use with patients
: Jim tried it with people suffering from Altzheimer disease, and John with
mentally handicapped children. Both stated the dreamachine had a calming effect
on anxiety, similar to a medical prescription, and suggest it should be used
with specific music or sounds : sounds of nature, didjeridoo music, etc.
The alpha waves are already used in relaxation centers since years, not under
the shape of dreamachine but with glasses producing intermittent flashes.
One effect I have stated on myself is the dreamachine leads instantly to inner
silence, just as one can get to with practice of meditation, except that this
effect is automatic with the dreamachine, when it requires practice, time and
will through meditation....
There is a rumor that the late Kurt Cobain was experimenting with this --
and many other things, unfortunately.
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Gypsy Boots is
dead at 89, or maybe
91.
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