The former U.S. district attorney who prosecuted B.C. marijuana activist Marc Emery in a cross-border sting is calling for the legalization and taxation of pot in Canada and the U.S.

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I keep calling the Kinect a slow-burning revolution and using the phrase “that’s the future”, often in the same thought. Here’s a cool example:

As much as I am trying to switch to Sony, Microsoft has an amazing platform in Kinect+360. I just want to see them pushing “a gestural interface in every home.”

As Wikipedia will tell you, cold sores have been an annoyance throughout history. Kyla recently informed me that until the 1970s, there was no significant distinction made between oral cold sores and genital cold sores: genital herpes “was merely a cold sore in an unusual place”. In Canada, by the time you hit your 40s you have a 89% chance of having oral herpes and a 21% chance of having genital herpes but most carriers are asymptomatic.

Antiviral drugs were developed in the 1960s and could be used to treat things like chickenpox. It turns out that there isn’t a big market for treating chickenpox. So the drug company’s advertisers created the idea that genital herpes was bad and you should buy something to treat it. They were quite successful at getting the media on board and culture followed.

Today genital herpes is considered a serious sexually-transmitted infection. Herpes and human papillomavirus (HPV) are the two STIs which a condom only partially protects against (30% lower risk). There are online dating sites specifically for people with symptomatic herpes. Amongst my peers they’re a bigger concern than human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), ironically because antiviral drugs have progressed to the point where they’re effective at treating HIV.

Meanwhile, the media are engaged in scaremongering about HPV, leading governments to subsidize vaccines. I’m not saying that it’s not good to prevent cervical cancer, but I’m skeptical that HPV is being rationally evaluated. (Remember, when doctors move from is to ought, they stop being scientists and start being policy analysts.)

Via fucking everywhere:

The technology used to do it was from the 1860s, but GOD-DAMN that’s a good execution: digital media and the godhead. What happens when you’re recorded so much and so often that the camera really does absorb your soul? If violence and media are inherently intertwined (McLuhan) does the media TAKE your soul? Violence/media killed Pac, and now resurrects him through his recording art — the informational traces he generated moving through reality.

We are all recording artists now, because everything we do is recorded. Digital media, maybe, ARE the Eschaton, the strange attractor at the end of time trying to immamentize itself.

And Tupac’s Idoru is the first upload.

I’m just getting into Terence McKenna (via Joe Rogan but I’d heard about him before). Here’s his 1984 The Psychedelic Society:

If McKenna was around giving speeches today I think he’d be super famous. In the 80s this must have sounded really sci-fi — today I think his ideas about networks are totally like groovy man.

Here’s the output of one of my latest experiments, plugging the kinect’s depth map into the depth map of a fluid solver. Then I realized I could also plug it into the velocity map of said solver. I suppose this needs a video, and I’ll see if I can get one, but here’s a screenshot.

The turbulence in the bottom right of the left image was caused by the motion of me pushing the screenshot keys — the end of the couch I am sitting on is dipping into the velocity field, causing ripples in the virtual fluid. All of this is in Processing (read: a subset of Java), a “sketching” language for blocking out software systems quickly.

I came across this insightful criticism of dubstep DJ Skrillex by relational_sense on Reddit. My summary and own thoughts:

Skrillex was at the right place at the right time to ride the brostep wave: the dubstep accepted by the mainstream is boiled down to its essence as the drop followed by “crunchy” womp-womp-womp (or wub-wub-wub). Brostep is “in a sense ‘counter-culture’ in its rejection of preconceived notions of how music ‘should sound’”. All his songs are based particularly closed on the pop song structure, which effectively creates emotional tension. His songs have a very narrow emotional range that is created using very similar samples in all his songs.

Historically, dubstep was considered an “introspective” genre that was quite emotionally nuanced. This trend lives on in the cross-pollination of dubstep and minimal techno. The other direction dubstep has gone, as expanded upon in a comment by FelixByrd, is to be a mixing pot of diverse influences – apparently Bassnectar is a good example of this. As YouTube will show you, a dubstep remix can be made of any song and a dubstep song can bring in any sample.

Skrillex used to be a punk guitar player. He has a distinct look and a good stage presence. He started out as a producer, essentially playing around with a narrow range as discussed above. When he started DJing, he didn’t have much in the way of DJ skills. He’s an argument one way or another in the debate about whether DJs are more than jukeboxes. Apparently his skills have matured since then.

The mainstreaming of brostep has brought a large number of unsophisticated fans. Many of them consume dubstep because it’s fashionable and don’t really care about the rest of the genre. This has created a vicious cycle in electronic music, because the brostep fanbase is large enough to distort the entire genre. We “hate” Skrillex because he represents that process.

Ashley Judd wrote an insightful essay criticizing the media for speculating on her plastic surgery. Here’s the money shot:

Patriarchy is not men. Patriarchy is a system in which both women and men participate. It privileges, inter alia, the interests of boys and men over the bodily integrity, autonomy, and dignity of girls and women. It is subtle, insidious, and never more dangerous than when women passionately deny that they themselves are engaging in it. This abnormal obsession with women’s faces and bodies has become so normal that we (I include myself at times—I absolutely fall for it still) have internalized patriarchy almost seamlessly…The dialogue is constructed so that our bodies are a source of speculation, ridicule, and invalidation, as if they belong to others…

However, she notes “inevitably some will comment that because I am a creative person, I have abdicated my right to a distinction between my public and private selves, an additional, albeit related, track of highly distorted thinking that will have to be addressed at another time.” Here’s my distorted thinking:

Her plea would be more convincing if her entire career weren’t built in a system that handsomely rewards female beauty. She should be held responsible for deciding to capitalize on her appearance while more talented but less beautiful actresses cannot. In particular, she is being paid to be the face of H. Stern Jewelery and an Estée Lauder cosmetic brand called American Beauty.

Don’t make the mistake of thinking celebrities are people like you and me. They’re brands that sell based on their appearance. Speculating on Judd’s face is no different from discussing the shape of the iPad 3. The problem is not that we care about Judd’s plastic surgery, the problem is that we care about Judd at all.

Despite the author it’s a good essay.

Since writing UI specs is boring I’ve been using Mixel for rapid UI prototyping:

The inability of the program to conveniently do text is a huge selling feature — it forces you into the grossly practical: what does it look like? I am thinking of getting Simple Physics to prototype with too — I heard it can do springs.

Thinking of gestures for menu access… Slide discs in to pause.

The Canadian Mint recently declared that they can do better than BitCoins:

“The system we would bring in would be backed by a fund. Bitcoin may work for the small group of people that believe in its value, but that could change very suddenly.” – Marc Brule, Chief Financial Officer, Royal Canadian Mint

The Canadian Mint’s currency is called MintChips. They will be produced by the Mint, which can control inflation. MintChip transactions are superficially anonymous, but it’s not clear how well they’d stand up to law enforcement.

Instead of a cryptographic algorithm, MintChip security will be based on trusted hardware. Using hardware means that the system is not just decentralized but distributed and can be used with no Internet connection (although that’s becoming less of a problem any day). The hardware will be hackable by someone with sufficient resources. The government is used to policing paper counterfeiting, but it will likely be impossible to trace counterfeit MintChips to their source.

Although MintChips appear to be a competitor to BitCoins, there doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason for a BitCoin early adopter to switch. Instead, MintChips are probably competition for credit card companies, PayPal and iTunes. The transaction fees charged by those companies add friction to the economy, so the Mint is fulfilling its mandate to make the economy more efficient. Plus, instead of those companies getting transaction fees, the Mint will make money selling MintChip hardware.

MintChips won’t have chargebacks, which vendors will like, and they’ll be accessible to more people than credit cards. The mathematics behind BitCoins are too complicated for almost anyone to verify (although complexity doesn’t seem to stop anybody from accepting fractional reserve banking) and there are a number of doomsday scenarios since BitCoins seem too good to be true. With the backing of the Canadian Mint, far more people will trust MintChips.