The Null Device
2000/3/23
Allen Ginsberg's Howl, updated for the dot-com frenzy:
I saw the best minds of my occupation destroyed by venture capital, burned-out, paranoid, postal,
who chanted the free market mantras of laissez-faire and techno-darwinism and Adam Smith's invisible hand-job except when Big Bad Bill the Bully Gates-of-hell came to take away their lunch.com -- and became Socialists of Convenience.org,
Good article looking at Skull and Bones, the elite American WASP fraternity/secret society: (via Robot Wisdom)
But the superspooks of Skull and Bones had nothing on the all-girl break-in team, which managed to outwit their security, slip into the tomb and take pictures of each and every sacred ritual room. Including that dread enclosure I call the "Room With the License Plates of Many States."
Every year the society, the oldest and most secretive and (once) most exclusive of the dozen or so secret societies at Yale, selects or "taps" 15 members of the junior class for cultlike initiation whose ritualistic coffins, skeletons and mystical oaths derived ... from the mumbo jumbo of some early 19th-century Masonic lodges in Germany. (If you're familiar with the Bavarian Illuminati, you know the drill.)
It may have served some eugenics purpose in the founders? vision: a sharing of birth control and self-control methods to minimize the chance of a future steward of the ruling class being trapped into marriage by a fortune hunter or a working-class girl-the way the grand tour for an upper-class American youth always included an initiation into the secrets of Parisian courtesans so that, once back home, the young man wouldn't elope with the first girl who let him get past second base."
An intriguing piece in SFWeekly about the Anti-Defamation League's entry into Internet filtering, and its controversial record of surveillance of opponents of Israeli government policy. (via Robot Wisdom)
German scientists show how men and women use different parts of the brain to navigate. (BBC News)