…or Museum of Fantastic Specimens.
A wonderful group of creatures made out of paste, paper and the king of materials – bamboo. The site is in Japanese – what little I know of what’s going on comes from this post (thanks Pink Tentacle), discovered via boingboing.
Good coincidence in my nosing around today. This post on boingboing sent me (eventually) to a related couple posts on Mark Pilgrim’s new-to-me blog. Reader’s Digest version – Mark is moving to Ubuntu Linux after 20+ years of Mac use because of frustration with closed file formats:
I’m creating things now that I want to be able to read, hear, watch, search, and filter 50 years from now. Despite all their emphasis on content creators, Apple has made it clear that they do not share this goal. Openness is not a cargo cult. Some get it, some don’t. Apple doesn’t.
Here’s the bit of coincidence – I’m 30 or so pages into a new book by Charlie Stross – Glasshouse – and one of the bits of future history revealed early on is that the period from 1950 to about 2040 is a dark age – no one can figure out what went on back then, because no one can decipher the data format/media format/etc. mess (BTW – so far the book is a rippin’ yarn).
This issue isn’t a new one by any means – Neal Stephenson talked about it in his 1999 essay “In the Beginning was the Command Line”, and I worked in a place where we kept archived 7-track tapes in the tape vault (for legal reasons?) long after the last drive that would read 7 track G200 tapes was long gone. Still, it’s one of those things that makes you go, “hmmm…”.
Geoffrey hath mayde, lyk, an interviewe wyth Parys Launcecrona.
GC: What occupacioun dide ye dreme of whanne ye were a yonge girle?
PL: Saynte. Kanst thou beleve yt? Y totallye wantede to be a saynte. But thenne Y dide discouer that seyntez aren supposid to yive up the worlde and to spende their lives in werkes of devocioun and charitee. And so Y thoghte: “that sucketh” and Y decidede to be riche insteade. So nowe Y haue bought manye a beggare, who Y do feede at my cost, and eftimes Y do commaunde them to thanke and prayse me so that Y feele lyk a seynte – but Y kan yet swyve and drynke depe of wyn and snorte the poudre of cockayne, the whiche no Seyntez do. For telle me, litel man, who beth the patron seynt of cocayne?
GC: Ther beth none, my ladye.
PL: Exactemundo, Jeffie.
I just got around to reading Bruce Schneier’s latest Crypto-Gram – it contains an excellent essay on the value of privacy.
Privacy protects us from abuses by those in power, even if we’re doing nothing wrong at the time of surveillance.
and
Too many wrongly characterize the debate as “security versus privacy.” The real choice is liberty versus control. Tyranny, whether it arises under threat of foreign physical attack or under constant domestic authoritative scrutiny, is still tyranny. Liberty requires security without intrusion, security plus privacy. Widespread police surveillance is the very definition of a police state. And that’s why we should champion privacy even when we have nothing to hide.
Later, he quotes Solzhenitsyn (I’m not wild about Solzhenitsyn’s Mother Russia reactionary crabbiness, but if anyone can talk about the surveillance/police state, he’s the one):
“As every man goes through life he fills in a number of forms for the record, each containing a number of questions… There are thus hundreds of little threads radiating from every man, millions of threads in all. If these threads were suddenly to become visible, the whole sky would look like a spider’s web, and if they materialized as rubber bands, buses; trams and even people would all lose the ability to move, and the wind would be unable to carry torn-up newspapers or autumn leaves along the streets of the city. They are not visible, they are not material, but every man is constantly aware of their existence…. Each man, permanently aware of his own invisible threads, naturally develops a respect for the people who manipulate the threads.”