Millions of recordings on LP and 45, a life-time work of collecting and cataloging popular culture as a labour of love, a $50M collection with more rarities and limited pressings than you can imagine from 1887 to now, now about to be swept away because, well, who cares?:

The Archive from Sean Dunne on Vimeo.
[ "The Archive" ]  read more »

Last weekend the press reports told of a young man our local long-weekend police gates arrested and subsequently probationed for carrying a chest-pocket amount of this fungi. I'm sleeping so much better now. Absolutely, we don't mind you kids swarming off on bleary-eyed havoc sprees or getting into piss-drunk mass-brawl public knife fights or even stress tensored adults wound tight like the coil of a rifle, them sort is just fine by our local mores and stuff we understand and expect, but dag-blast it, the last thing we need around here is folks like his sort:

"... more than 60 percent of subjects described the effects of psilocybin in ways that met criteria for a 'full mystical experience' as measured by established psychological scales. One third said the experience was the single most spiritually significant of their lifetimes; and more than two-thirds rated it among their five most meaningful and spiritually significant."
[ Spiritual Psilocybin ]  read more »

Sent today, although it is reminiscent of casting bodily effluents windward, but if we don't try, nothing could happen. And yes, I did respond to that completely ignored Call for Comment before the bill too, but I'll trust Larry to at least make sure this one gets read. Can't promise the same for the other 10 million they'll receive ...

As a constituent who has been following recent developments in Canadian copyright law, I'm concerned that the Copyright bill presented by the government on June 12th goes too far in outlawing the lawful use of copyrighted material, and does not take into account the needs of consumers and of Canada's creative community who are positively exploiting the potential of digital technology. I'm disappointed that this bill adopts an American approach to digital copyright laws, instead of crafting a Canadian approach.

[ Tell MPs What's Wrong with the Prentice Bill ]

You can click through there to fill out your own template letter to be emailed to your MP; I highly recommend you customize your letter just so we don't bore the secretaries to tears. The full text of my letter follows:  read more »

Here, in a single link, is why the Internet as it is cannot work, why this open network can never be the unbiased universal source for informing humanity, at least, not in the long run.

Why? Because we are right back to our old friend the Trust Thread, and because it is only a matter of time before shill-squads like Canada Blog Friends (sic) have invaded Wikipedia and the rest.

Canada Blog Friends hopes to attract new members to help promote our culture online. This is a paying opportunity for bloggers with established blogs.
[ Craigslist: Toronto Jobs ]

Seeing as Canada tends half a decade behind the trendlines in online innovations, it's my guess a lot of what may be being read about elections and such south of the border may not be precisely what it pretends to be. True, any online material does demand a certain BS-detection Turing Test sense by the consumer, but in this case, we've got leagues of seemingly unaffiliated cash motivated personalities playing the spambot role, and thereby that much more difficult to spot.  read more »

Residential Schools investigator and author Rev. Kevin Annett is trying to get a message out, a message he wants us to hear before PM Stevie Harper stands up straight faced before the world's cameras and 'explains' that it was all just cultural misunderstanding and unfortunate accident.

Residential schools indeed: The mind-bogglingly cruel systemic and institutionally ritualized torture of children barely out of diapers, and a 50% extermination rate over forty years worth of conscriptedabducted school-children.

These were not schools. They were Death Camps. Death Camps for Children. Canadian Death Camps for 50,000 Children, sponsored still endorsed by you and I. Needless to say, the Reverend Kev is having some trouble getting his letter published, so here's hoping the blog'sphere can do something with it:

For in truth, there is not now, nor has there ever been, an "Indian problem" in Canada. Rather, the problem is a "white" one. The problem is with us.
[ Why an Apology is Wrong, and Deceptive ]  read more »

Hard to decide which is more completely wrong-road twisted and lost of way, the multiple bloggers I've found citing this stuff as sliced bread goodness, or the people who proffer it up for profit, or maybe the folks who buy into it to the tune of a major industry. The objective is fine of itself, to work to be better tomorrow than one was today, to work to keep mentally acute and fit, to stay mentally agile and so save others the need to dote and care over your advancing years, or even so as to ensure the peak condition and progressive cognitive development for growing minds, from 8 to 80 as the boardgames used to say:

Participants play fitness games for about an hour per day on a computer, training their brains to react to certain stimuli faster, thereby speeding up the process of when nerve cells talk to each other.
[ Reality Sandwich | Brain Workout ]

But dig, before you shell-out the subscriber fee for your ticket to übermench-hood, I want you to know something: there is something very very wrong here, fundamentally wrong, epidemically wrong, culturally wrong, and needlessly wrong, and I'll tell you what it is.  read more »

Brilliant. Another inspired flash of scientific brilliance illuminating a hundred years of darkness, and at long last, a resounding endorsement of the forward-thinking methodologies of Miss Clavel:

the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) created guidelines for children regarding physical activity and screen time, which includes both watching television and playing video games. The AAP has made the following recommendations: 1) boys should take at least 11,000 steps a day; 2) girls should take at least 13,000 steps a day; and 3) children should limit total screen time to two hours a day
[ Study suggests too much screen time and not enough physical activity may lead to childhood obesity ]

Hey, count me in, I'm all for it but only providing they confess their vocational blindspot and admit one further self-evident: the blackboard is just another 'screen'. Desks too, for that matter.  read more »

I wasn't really joking when I said we might someday have AI, but that it would be report generators prone to throwing tantrums or might snip up your database to make virtual paper dolls, or just to see what happens. Like the natural version, because we cannot forecast all possible futures, any artificial intelligence would need to grow-up, timeline itself into an experientially evolved first-person perspective set of sets and expectations, and that would mean it should start where we all start, at its beginnings.

And here now today, somewhere in Second Life, that's just what Eddie does: Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute's new bot has his own beliefs, an ability to reason about those beliefs and even a 4-year-old's capabilities in projecting those beliefs and experiences on to others, what psychology calls a "Theory of Mind".  read more »