Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

Information warfare: new Infocult category

We have a new category here at Infocult, on information warfare. We've been writing and linking about it often enough to suggest a department.

Pentagon admits a bit of hacking

A Wired article today sheds a little light on the Pentagon's elite information war team, the Joint Functional Component Command for Network Warfare. There's isn't much out there on this group, beyond connection to global and space operations, and the suggestion of an NSA commander.

The history of the laptop

Mobile Magazine explores the history of the laptop, from the Dynabook idea to the OQO.

Vermont Gothic and the missing head

It's a small genre, but here's today's instance of New England Gothic: a Vermont chap got caught pilfering a corpse's head.

...police at first could not believe what they had heard. But when they went to Morrisville Cemetery and investigated, they found that someone had, indeed, broken into a tomb, broken open the casket and removed a man's head. The man died three years ago.

Digitizing a unicorn

Mike Lynch points me to Capturing the Unicorn, an article about an unusually ambitious digitization project.  It's great stuff, especially the descriptions of the two-bodied mathematician, and of the tapestries emerging into digitally-influenced light:

The backings, which protect the tapestries and help to support them when they hang on a wall, were turning brown and brittle, and had to be replaced. Using tweezers and magnifying lenses, Colburn and her team delicately removed the threads that held each backing in place. As the conservators lifted the backing away, inch by inch, they felt a growing sense of awe. The backs were almost perfect mirror images of the fronts, but the colors were different. Compared with the fronts, they were unfaded: incredibly bright, rich, and deep, more subtle and natural-looking. The backs of the tapestries had, after all, been exposed to very little sunlight in five hundred years. Nobody alive at the Met, it seems, had seen them this way.

A pithy line about the history of information

Here's a neat encapsulation of one aspect of the impact of digital networks on information architecture:

Headwords have been supplanted by keywords

That's snagged from Russon Wooldridge's chapter on lexicography (page 77), in Schreibman, Susan, Siemens, Ray, and Unsworth, Jon, eds. A Companion to Digital Humanities (London: Blackwell, 2004).  I hope to review this sometime.

Web history project: the last days of WWII

Metafilter points outThe last days of the Soviet-Nazi war, day by day.  It's an intriguing way to organize content.  The bloglike format of the front sets up a chronological structure, which can feel "live" like (for example)the Pepysblog., then embeds and otherwise makes available multimedia content - texts, pictures, posters, and songs. Video and animations feel like naturals.

PS: I usually blog on teaching issues here, but might start exploring on this forum.

A quick wardrive in NYC

Driving through New York City last night, I opened my PC to check for available networks. After years of living in anti-wireless Vermont, what a richness of networks! Open and closed, personal and business-oriented, reaching across the streets for the connecting.

Infocult in NYC: World Horror Convention

This weekend we're traveling to New York City, to visit the World Horror Convention and our dear friend Steven Kaye. New York Gothic indeed!

Powerpoint goes to war

A new twist on information war, via a quote of the day:

"Getting rid of Office wasn't an option," [a program manager at the Pentagon] notes. "You can't run a war without PowerPoint."

This reminds me of the story a few years back in the WSJ, which I remember dimly, about the logistical chief for the armed forces telling people to use less ppt, because the uploaded media files were so big that they were hurting network operations.

(thanks to Jesse Walker)