Infocult: Uncanny Informatics

"I want a new invincible human being, insensitive to pain, resistant and indifferent about the quality of food they eat."

All right, I take it back.  That title was good, yes.  But this one is even better, from The Scotsman:
 

Stalin's half-man, half-ape super-warriors

(Jesse is to blame, once more)

Blog subject line of the day

Best title of anything today, from BetterBadNews:
 

MENA TROTT CALL FOR CIVILITY JEERED IN PARIS AS US TORTURE PRACTICES SPREAD TO SECRET EUROPEAN PRISONS

(thanks, Hugh)

End of the world: an MMOG to wink out of existence

In a new Wired article Clive Thompson sketches out the gloom preceding the end of a world.  Asheron's Call 2 is failing as a moneymaker, so the owners will pull the plug in a couple of weeks.  Some lovely, melancholy passages, like this:

"Anybody out there?" I type, but I already know it's pointless. There's nobody anywhere near me. For almost an hour, I've been wandering around a desolate plain: Gray clouds scud slowly over rough quartz mountains, while a few birds wheel in the air near mushroom-shaped trees. I never see another living soul.

Nearly ten years ago I scheduled a week on apocalypse narratives in my Cyber and Gothic class.  We looked at Byron's "Darkness", Mary Shelley's The Last Man, and various end-of-the-internet panics.  Ten years... has it been that long?

Charlie Brown meets HP Lovecraft

Another Infocult nod towards the holidays: a Charlie Brown/HP Lovecraft mashup.  Jesse pointed me to it:

As you are no doubt aware, I am the issue of solid Dutch stock—the prosperous Van Pelt family of St. Paul. Mine was a comfortable and happy childhood, and I spent much of it in the devoted service of the Great Old Pumpkin.

Another web 2.0 outage: del.icio.us offline

Due to the power outage earlier in the week, we appear a number of continued hiccups.

And now del.icio.us is offline for a while, after Typepad went wholly, then partially down.  A month ago my wiki host closed, sans warning.  Denham bravely helped save things.  Note to self: back all this web 2.0 stuff up, and in multiple places.

The FBI hits Second Life, by invitation

How we respond to antisocial acts in virtual communities is a longstanding problem.  Here's an approach from the MMOG world, in Second Life, combining network security with the feds:

When the party was bombed today by a griefer with pixelated C-4, Rosedale, whose avatar is Philip Linden, was bumped around the sim...

Bedecked in a red Santa’s cap and blue shirt, the Monetarized Socializing Platform Mogul danced around a roaring bonfire set for the occasion and said, “This seems about a good a time as any to tell you that I am turning over names to the FBI.”

Linden said that he viewed Monday’s grid crash like any denial-of-service attack on [a] web page.

It's a new twist on augmented reality.

(via MeFi)

Evolution of information: science, from Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly has an interesting post on the history of information, outlining a project for understanding the development of organization of information.  It's science-based, primarily.  I like identifying The Fact.
Here's a glimpse:

280BC Libraries with Index
1000 Collaborative Encyclopedia
1410 Cross-referenced Encyclopedia
1550 Invention of the Fact
1590 Controlled Experiments
1609 Scopes and Elaboratories
1687 Hypothesis/Prediction
1650 Societies of Experts
1665 Necessary Repeatability
1752 Peer Review Referee
1780 Journal Network
1920 Falsifiable Testability
1926 Randomized Design
1937 Controlled Placebo
1950 Double Bind Refinement
1946 Computer simulations
1974 Meta-analysis

Kelly's new book sounds interesting.

(via Oook)

Oedipuster

Today's Gothic cyberspace moment: two people get close to each other online, arrange to meet for the first time in person, and turn out to be... mother and son.

"I walked out on that dark beach thinking I was going to hook up with the girl of my dreams," the rattled bachelor later admitted. [didn't he? -Bryan] "And there she was, wearing white shorts and a pink tank top, just like she'd said she would.

"But when I got close, she turned around -- and we both got the shock of our lives. I mean, I didn't know what to say. All I could think was, 'Oh my God! it's Mama!' "

It was inevitable, wasn't it? 

Infocult and Typepad are back

We were offline, like everyone else.  It's good to be back.  Thankmyou, Typepad team, for addressing the outage with alacrity!

ARG article from CNET

A bit of Infocult-promotion: C|Net quotes me on ARGs and media today.