Megaupload - Filesonic

Looks like Filesonic didn't wait to be busted the way Megaupload was. There's a unilateral change on their front page.



This does make me wonder how to share legit files - it seems like thousands of people have had their files seized during the MU bust. At least Filesonic is trying to do the right thing.

No one knows how the camera lucida...

As a kid, one of my obsessions was Egyptology. One of my favorite books was C.W.Ceram's Gods, Graves and Scholars (Goetter, Graebe und Gelerhte),  which I think I almost learned by heart. In my teens I got hold of another of his books, The March of Archaeology, which was pretty much identical except for a larger format with many more good-sized pictures. Each page began with the first phrase of the text in bold on a line of its own, and one page was headed, "No one knows how the camera lucida".

It went on to add, "...was used by [Edward William] Lane to obtain this picture. The camera lucida was a device much favored by draftsmen of the period. It is still used by beginners in art schools. In principle the instrument is extremely simple. By means of a rotatable glass prism, the artist can cast a reduced image of the object upon a sheet of paper. [...] Lane's remarkable "air view" shows the pyramid of Chephren from above the north-east corner of the Great Pyramid."

Today I thought I saw the equivalent viewpoint from a modern camera obscura, or camera as we call them.  It's from a Nova article investigating who built the pyramids.



Excitedly, I went back through all my books. (Would you believe that "no one knows how the camera lucida" doesn't bring up any Google hits? (Well, until tomorrow when the Google bot finds this, of course.) Usually you can find these phrases through Google books.) After a while I remembered March of Archaeology and found the picture Edward William Lane projected and drew between 1826 and 1827.



Ceram was right - the viewpoint on the top of the pyramid is not the same as Lane's drawing. His really does appear to have been drawn in mid-air. The cut stones on top of the Great Pyramid (now called Khufu's pyramid) are accurate (as this detail shows) and Chephren's (now called Khafre's) capped pyramid is completely accurate also. But it's from above!

How about that? How did the Victorian drafstman guy get this particular shot?

RIP Megaupload...no, wait, what's that knocking I hear?

Today, the FBI took down exceptionally popular filesharing website Megaupload.  It's hard to see it as anything less than a power-play after the anti-SOPA and anti-PIPA strikes yesterday, but on the contrary, it appears that the Fibbies have been after Megaupload for about two years. Since the company has servers in Virginia, they had an 'in', and since New Zealand has an extradition treaty, it was possible to go out and arrest the company's owners, seize their bank accounts and take down their domain name. The owners face up to 55 years in gaol. Yep, 55 years for hosting files in cyberspace. Those annoying FBI warnings at the beginning of every legitimate DVD (but not on pirated DVDs) are true. They mean business.



When I heard about it, my first feeling was, "Great! Since Megaupload has 50,000,000 visitors every day, then we can quickly find out if MPAA and RIAA's stupid claims that every download is a lost sale is true. Because on Friday, we are going to see fifty million downloads of paid MP3s, movies, games and porn.

Edit: I originally posted a new IP address for them, but I've removed it as it may not be legit and may host malware. Don't visit it.

In which case a) sorry and b) now we can watch for those five hundred million paid downloads that are due to happen Friday and every day subsequently!


[Picture carefully cropped from a royalty-free Dover image
taken out of one of their free mailings I get on a weekly basis]

Megaupload makes a fortune, and it will be hard for them to claim that all their files were fair-use, or home movies of Gramps pushing Little Billy on a swing, so naturally they were a good first place for the FBI to go. However, it does make you wonder - if the FBI can take down infringing "pirate" sites like Megaupload, why do they need PIPA or SOPA? They already have the necessary powers to take down and prosecute.

They need the bills passed because they give them the ability to censor websites and insist they are removed from search engines. By also insisting that websites self-police, the new bills would simply cause the hated YouTube to disappear. YouTube couldn't possibly check every video and every soundtrack and of course, certainly couldn't tell if a video or soundtrack gave a link to a censored site. YouTube is home to videos showing such things as abuse of power, and the US government would be just as happy as the Chinese government, or the Arab dictators, if YouTube didn't exist.

In an exciting development, anonymous immediately went after several government websites and shuttered them. We'll soon see if they can recover as fast as Megaupload.

SOPA and PIPA.

Normal media on the bust (LA Times).

Ars Technica on why the government selected Megaupload.

RT on the counterattacks.

Or follow #Megaupload on Twitter.


Edited: I've seen figures that put MU's traffic at fifty million a day, not five hundred million.  Edited to show the lower figure. But either way, are any musicians you know flush with cash over the last three days? No, thought not.

SOPA and PIPA

In a couple of hours, several major websites will be going dark to support action against two "anti-piracy" bills which, if passed, would severely weaken the internet.

I like the internet. I'm sort of against piracy, but I certainly don't have any reason at all to believe that a person copping a free track or free movie off the internet would, if prevented from doing so, begin to pay money for them. And I'm certainly not convinced that the best way to stop them downloading something is to pass legislation that would make it impossible for Google, Reddit, boing boing, YouTube, all your favorite blogs including this one - and thousands of others, to function.

There's a nice flowchart about SOPA and PIPA here. Or you can check Wikipedia. For the next few hours, it's the only thing you can look up on Wikipedia, so there's plenty of netsurfing downtime you can spend on this project.

Eating that, I am not

I'm a sucker for anything Star Wars-related, and viola! (as they say on the internet) here comes another collectible to pique my interest.



The French burger chain Quick has designed a nifty line in Star Wars burgers. You can get the green Jedi Burger, the red Dark Burger, or if you dare, the black Dark Vador Burger.  I assume the red burger is Darth Maul - my favorite - but they seem to have chickened out on finding a word for Maul in French.  It means 'muzzle' (animal's mouth)  in German so I guess it's not a great candidate for international burger names. Various websites are happy to inform me that Dark Vador is Darth Vader - the French language apparently not being well-equipped with either a "th" sound, or a schwa on on the end of words - but no one seems to want to tell me exactly how they make a black bun for a burger.



I could probably come up with something relatively wholesome for that if I tried, however, but what has me really stumped is the stuff that looks like a ring of teeth on top of the Jedi Burger.  What is it? At first I thought it might be poutine, but that's the other Francophones, isn't it? Not the original old skool ones. It's evidently emblematic of the light side of the Force but as off-white melted cheese (if that's what it is) it just seems to emphasize the beigeiness, waffledom and slightly crusty look of the Jedi. The dark siders have always had more style.

Apparently the burgers are the equivalent of $6.29, which is cheap at half the price and I'd have one of each, except the air fare would be another $1,000 and that puts me slightly over my weekly burger budget.

The blues

Peter Green. Because Peter was the blues.

There's nothing quite like a Scotch education

And there'll never be anything like Ivor Cutler and his Life in a Scotch Sitting Room ever again.  (Or John Peel, to  popularize it.)

Santorum comes from behind

I once looked up Santorum on the internet's Urban Dictionary and apparently it means, "That frothy mixture of lube and fecal matter that is sometimes the by-product of anal sex."

Interestingly, it's also the name of a God-bothering moron who is running for president of the US on a ticket that can best be described as American Sharia. And so, when I read this headline on Catholic Online, I wasn't, at first, sure which type of santorum they were describing.

"Santorum comes from behind"?

Cute Chimeric Monkeys!

Are these the cutest monkeys ever or what?



I've seen a few articles today saying that 'science' has now created 'genetically modified' monkeys, with the usual invective about playing god. Both the newspaper articles and the BBC World Service news I listened to were keen to mention the genetic tampering.  These two artificial chimeras are apparently the result of Frankenstein let loose. Except.

There isn't any genetic modification here. Many, many creatures are chimeras. Your mother is, for example. And so was mine. Whenever a human female gets pregnant, the fetal cells get into the mother's bloodstream and settle down into her cells, creating a body that's genetically more than one 'person'.. And that's true for any other placental mammal. Almost every adult female monkey - not to mention ape - is a chimera. It doesn't modify anyone's genetics, just complicates the immune response and of course any work PC Plod tries when trying to identify anyone.

These monkey chimeras are made by letting two embryos live side-by-side until they incorporate each other (as many do in real life).  I only hope they get chance to live as the cute chimeras, and don't get relegated to the experimental lab.

The Kills on Jo Whiley 12-22-2011

A nice 25 minute YouTube from 22nd December 2011. Not exactly flac quality, but great to listen to.



I adore The Kills. This is a balls-out recent video with the famous drum guys and scarlet Alison Mosshart hair.

Best Peromyscus joke ever

Possibly the only Peromyscus joke ever.

Carrie McN sent me a link to this Overboard comic from Halloween:

Thank you and happy new year, Carrie!

Alice in Wonderland (1966) Jonathan Miller

I  watched the 1966 Jonathan Miller Alice in Wonderland this week.

Fascinating version. Miller did a "Wednesday Play" biopic on Charles Dodgson the previous year (included on the disc) in which hinted that the characters in the book (such as the dormouse) were not actually furry animals, but caricatures of other academics at Christ Church that Alice would have met and find funny. I've read The Annotated Alice, so I know most of the math jokes and so forth, but I didn't know the source of the characters. Miller didn't have much money but nevertheless persuaded half the greatest actors in Britain to be in the production - Sir John Gielgud, Sir Michael Redgrave, Peter Sellers, Leo McKern - and Peter Cook, channeling the Goon Show, as the Mad Hatter, along with Wilfrid Brambell (Steptoe) as a very camp White Rabbit. And Malcolm Muggeridge.

Miller aimed the production at adults - which led to the tabloids of the day assuming it was pr0n of some sort (it isn't) and portrayed Alice as a self-contained older girl, stiff and formal in the Victorian way, but with a biting superiority whenever she gets chance to snap at one of the little animals she meets after going through the tiny door.  None of the animals is in costume and some of the 'plot' is missing, so you have to know the book. Luckily I learned the book by heart when I was little and annoyingly completed all the poems she forgot to finish and carped about the missing bits - for instance, early in the book Giant Alice cries tears of frustration, which gives rise to a lake that almost drowns all the other characters. In this movie, you see her face glistening with tears and then a cut to her being the same size as the little animals and encouraging them to dry off.  They also cut Bill the Lizard's hilarious early part, but she still snatches his pencil from him when he's in the jury box, leaving him to write on his slate with his finger, so that's all right then. Some of the humor is missing, but a couple of times the actors add in funny (and quite Carrollian) lines of their own. The social satire is entirely elided, and even Alice's last line in Wonderland, "You're nothing but a pack of cards!" is cut, which means that the point of the story never quite makes it onto film.

The overall feel of the movie is psychedelic. However, it was made in 1966, which means that the Summer of Love was not yet here, Surrealistic Pillow (and White Rabbit) had not been released, and although Haight-Ashbury was winching its way into into our as-yet-unexpanded consciousness, I don't think Jonathan Miller ever spent much time there. This means that what resembles 'psychedelia' must have been in the air before everybody tuned in, turned on and dropped out with Leary in 1967. The transitions between the scenes that make this seem so very, very LSD-related must have been based on dream-logic, as in the book, not on Are-You-Experienced experiences on the part of Miller. [1] I've seen a couple of reviews that say this movie is dated, because of its sixties feel, but my belief is the sixties began to resemble the movie, rather than the movie drew on the sixties for its own look-and-feel. [2]

Alice - who is a child, and therefore should be seen and not heard - narrates most of the movie in her head. When she does speak, it's to put down one of the animals with a vicious remark. The Mad Hatter's Tea party is a venom-filled conversation between an angry Alice and (no slouch at insults himself) Peter Cook as the Mad Hatter, with occasional interjections of whimsy by the deeply drunk Dormouse.  The conversation between the Gryphon and the Mock Turtle is between two brilliant, non-animal-headed actors; old men reminiscing about their schooldays on a deserted very British pebble beach. It's a Last of the Summer Wine for mythical animals. The final court scene, where the Knave of Hearts is tried for stealing the tarts is a surreal tour de force, with Peter Sellers and Wilfred Brambell hamming it up, nothing being quite the right size (Alice being between one and two miles high at the time), and some of the theater boxes that line the walls of the courthouse appearing to be hotel rooms, with people shaving and washing up in them as they observe the scene. 

The DVD also includes a 1903 silent version of Alice, and a very interesting commentary track that has the feature, or possibly bug, that Jonathan Miller rabbits about whatever he wants to, so the explanations of each scene are given while other scenes are on screen...and at one point Miller says, 'And this is after Alice has got rid of her flamingo', when Alice wasn't carrying a flamingo previously. Miller seems to be able to see the animals in the scene even when his actual cinematography didn't include them. 

[1] Yes, I know the caterpillar in the book is sitting on a mushroom and smoking a hookah.

[2] I don't want to put anyone off seeing the movie by saying this, but if you look at the difference between Disney's Alice (1951) and Disney's It's a Small World After All (1964) you can see the quality of sixties-i-ness appears in the latter ride. Without having any singing dolls in it, this Alice has that atmosphere. A less obnoxious sixties-i-ness reference may be The Prisoner (1967) but that was after this version of Alice so I can't count it...

Kills Vogue video - Into the Unknown

Moody and atmospheric, the Kills explain how the music plays them rather than the other way round, and they're superstitious, filmed by an arty type.

It's described as "Six minutes for a rockumentary filmed in London by videomaker Giorgio Testi (under Marilena Borgna's supervision) that tells the moments before a concert of The Kills." The rest of the description seems to have been translated by Siri via Google from Italian through Greek into English but it sounds very cool if you don't think about the meanings too much. And the video is lovely.

Vogue Kills video.

Cooking a pie tonight.

Oh, and having said all that, don't get me started on the common American dish "Beef Shepherds' Pie". What on Earth (Terra) is a beef shepherd? Or are they ordinary shepherds who go cattle rustling whenever they feel the need for a pie coming on?

Astronomy

When I was a kid, the moon was called Luna. There were lunar expeditions and lunanauts, and the Russians had Lunokhod and so on and so forth. Since I moved to the US, I've noticed that most people call it "The Moon". I've even seen someone wonder on the internet why the Moon doesn't have a name. Today, I saw a piece in Universe Today about what if the Earth had two moons? Let's call the other one "Luna", the author writes, apparently unaware that the first one is already called Luna.

Worried, I checked Wikipedia. It says the moon's name is The Moon. I can find barely any mentions of lunanauts in Google (and my spellchecker doesn't recognize it) and although I see things like "lunar surface", Wikipedia says that's just the adjective from the Latin name of the Moon. 

I haven't been this disturbed since I learned that the word I learned for "fart" as a young kid - poop - didn't actually mean fart to anyone else, unless it was that day that I learned the lumpy vegetables I called turnips were actually rutabagas, and no-one else in the adult world was under the impression that they were turnips. 

So what happened? Did I switch timestreams or move to an alternate world or something? Did I go back in time and step on a butterfly? What am I going to find out next?

If it's that the sun's name isn't really Sol, I give in.  I know that Mars - it is still called Mars, right? - isn't called Ares, and I'm pretty sure the other famous one is called Venus and doesn't have a sekrit name only I know about. 

ObFuturama:

Professor: "I'm sorry, Fry, but astronomers renamed Uranus in 2620 to end that stupid joke once and for all."
Fry: "Oh. What's it called now?"
Professor: "Urectum."