100 bucks

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Ten Thousand Cents



"Ten Thousand Cents" is a digital artwork that creates a representation of a $100 bill. Using a custom drawing tool, thousands of individuals working in isolation from one another painted a tiny part of the bill without knowledge of the overall task. Workers were paid one cent each via Amazon's Mechanical Turk distributed labor tool. The total labor cost to create the bill, the artwork being created, and the reproductions available for purchase are all $100. The work is presented as a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously. The project explores the circumstances we live in, a new and uncharted combination of digital labor markets, "crowdsourcing," "virtual economies," and digital reproduction.


Think irony

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TomDispatch 

Ira Chernus, The General and the Trap
They came, they saw, they… deserted.
That, in short form, is the story of the Iraqi government "offensive" in Basra (and Baghdad). It took a few days, but the headlines on stories out of Iraq are now telling a grim tale and the information in them is worse yet. Stephen Farrell and James Glanz of the New York Times estimate that at least 1,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen, or more than 4% of the force sent into Basra, "abandoned their posts" during the fighting, including "dozens of officers" and "at least two senior field commanders."

Other pieces offer even more devastating numbers. For instance, Sudarsan Raghavan and Ernesto Londoño of the Washington Post suggest that perhaps 30% of government troops had "abandoned the fight before a cease-fire was reached." Tina Susman of the Los Angeles Times offers 50% as an estimate for police desertions in the midst of battle in Baghdad's vast Sadr City slum, a stronghold of cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia.

In other words, after years of intensive training by American advisors and an investment of $22 billion dollars, U.S. military spokesmen are once again left trying to put the best face on a strategic disaster (from which they were rescued thanks to negotiations between Muqtada al-Sadr and advisors to Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, brokered in Iran by General Qassem Suleimani, a man on the U.S. Treasury Department's terrorist watch list). Think irony.


Barry Crimmins responds to McCain

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Barry Crimmins : Political Satirist
"How about both?" -- Barry Crimmins

McCain's emergency appeal to boys who are more afraid of losing than anything else in the world speaks to every clown who ever got in a fist fight at a slow-pitch softball game. The United States has already lost a lot more than a war it never should have started in the first place. Thanks to America's growing police state, we have lost our civil liberties. Thanks to America's practices of torture, illegal detention and extraordinary rendition, America has lost whatever good name it had in the world. Thanks to America's two-term fascist moron president, America has become an international punch-line. Thanks to the low, low prices of politicians, the American government has become a subsidiary of heartless, bloodless corporate scum. And thanks to that, the American military has become Hessians in service of that scum. Under the phony cover of "globalization" America's economic backbone has been filleted and shipped in sharp shards for use in impaling peasant populi around the world. This country is broke, it's infrastructure is busted and its health in the exact same condition as the ethics of the insurance and pharmaceutical racketeers who value profiteering more than life. Why exactly should I give a shit WHEN we officially lose a war that was a lost cause the second it became a viable option?
Via James Wolcott


Aborting search terms

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Hopkins restores access to health site

Johns Hopkins officials restored full access yesterday to a reproductive health Web site funded by the US government, after learning that searches containing the word "abortion" were being intentionally restricted and that thousands of studies were being hidden from easy view. The change came after librarians and women's health advocates flooded the blogosphere - and e-mail boxes at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health - with complaints of censorship.
They became concerned after one research librarian was told the action was not a mistake - with the implication that it could be related to Bush administration rules restricting dissemination of information about abortions in foreign countries.

Dr. Michael J. Klag, Bloomberg's dean, said he learned about the action yesterday morning and ordered administrators of POPLINE to restore "abortion" as a search term "immediately." He also said he would launch an inquiry into why the decision was made to limit searches. "I could not disagree more strongly with this decision," Klag said in a statement. "The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health is dedicated to the advancement and dissemination of knowledge and not its restriction."


And a free meal too

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Dave Winer: Why this is the end for the Clintons
Yesterday we got our first look at the Clinton's tax returns, and the top line is a stunner. $109 million over the last seven years...Finally, we the people, get an idea of what this job is worth. A lot...I'd love to see a breakdown of the speeches. Who pays $1 million for an after-dinner speaker and why? Maybe I'm missing something, but something doesn't sound right here.
I prefer Winer now that he blogs about mostly non-techy stuff. He is an interesting guy to follow on Twitter too.

Dedicated to 'Aerial' Sharon.

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Sweat ducts may act as giveaway 'antennas'
Our skin may contain millions of tiny "antennas" in the form of microscopic sweat ducts, say researchers in Israel. In experiments, they found evidence that signals produced by bouncing electromagnetic waves off the tiny tubes might reveal a person's physical and emotional state from a distance. The research might eventually result in lie detectors that require no physical contact with the subject.