girl eat machine.

This morning, I returned to the States (and Internet access) to find a lot of news going down in the good old You Ess of Ehya: Sen. Chris Dodd shoveling out his Financial Reform Bill, everyone worth knowing freaking out about South By Southwest (with a tech presence to rival its musical superiority), a Democratic proposal for health care that actually (like, really truly) will be released…soon. Maybe.

Big stuff.

But there’s plenty going on outside the U.S. border, too. Take, for instance, the fantastic resolution that just passed the EU Parliament: voting against the bill 663 to 13, Parliament has publicly flogged the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) and prevented its passage in the European Union.

I can see you blinking: Errr. Right. Let’s step back for a moment:

ACTA, noun: 1. a series of proposed international standards for defining and enforcing forms of global ownership in trade.

Although its provisions do address the sale of counterfeit goods, most of ACTA’s provisions relate to the ownership of intellectual property (and this is why you should give a darn). The extension of ACTA’s reach means an increase in governmental regulations over world trade in generic medicines, in the creation of an international standard for Internet regulation, and the penalization of non-commercial use of copyrighted information, to name a few.

Apparently, most of ACTA’s provisions are based on what the EU Parliament and ACTA critics refer to as “US-style draconian” methods for intellectual property regulation. I say “apparently” because most of ACTA has been drafted in secret. It’s through (a few) leaks of information that we’ve learned just how heavily the US is involved in negotiating this “executive treaty” and pushing its own restrictive approach to copyright law.

Throw in issues over policy laundering, the freedom from Congressional Review enjoyed by ACTA’s status as an “executive treaty”, the proposed creation of yet another international bureaucracy covering intellectual property, the questions about the sovereignty of international law, and the basic policies ACTA includes that we know about and you can (maybe) see why Members of the European Union Parliament should be applauded for their decision.

Or can they? Do you agree with the EU Parliament’s decision?

Before you defend ACTA on the grounds of supporting copyright law, consider: the rejection of ACTA isn’t some leftist rejection of all copyright law or ownership rights. Really, it’s not. The EU Parliament made its decision in defense of the Internet user against major corporations. You can sling the term “anti-corporatist” around all you like, but the Parliament’s decision is fundamentally libertarian — an attempt to restrict the size of governing power and control external influences on the future of international Internet commerce and communication. (I’m looking at you, U.S.A.) ACTA isn’t out to just stymie your attempts at posting Disney mash-ups on YouTube (yes, your attempts – ACTA would ultimately affect the US, too). If passed, this trade agreement would encroach on individual initiatives to create, share, and communicate that non-commercial organizations and independent entrepreneurs rely on. (Have we so quickly forgotten Google’s recent poaching of content on Blogger?)

Think the world spins another way? Then share your opinion, but be sure to read up before you fight for Uncle Sam. Some links to get you started:

• ACTA wiki, because you should have already been reading it by now.
• FAQ on a leaked chapter of ACTA by European Digital Rights Initiative.
• General FAQ from Public Knowledge.
• ACTA’s page on the EU Commission’s* website (*the executive branch of the EU)
  

My most recent fit of geekdom has involved lapping up every wikipedia page within reach on the subject of underground and alternative comics. Sorry: “comix.” Believe it or not, there’s a difference.

The underground comix scene is the hot bed of subversion you, honestly, probably never heard of. Think: knowing that there are those who can illustrate anything they imagine — and that we alllll can imagine some pretty….well, unpretty things — the possibilities are raunchy and endless.

The comix scene wasn’t just sex, drugs, and stickin it to the man, though. It was about the creation of independent art and social commentary without restriction. “Comix” refers to the small scale of publication and production, often done by the artist him or herself…or by teams of these artists, working together to publish in magazines and anthologies like Mad, EC Comics, Help!, and Bizarre Sex.

This is the world where many of today’s well-know comic artists who aren’t Stan Lee and aren’t sponsored by Marvel or DC got their start. Tell me you know Art Spiegelman, author of the Holocaust memoir-of-sorts Maus? Art left the scene, so to speak, in the late 1970s when

What had seemed like a revolution simply deflated into a lifestyle. Underground comics were stereotyped as dealing only with Sex, Dope and Cheap Thrills. They got stuffed back into the closet, along with bong pipes and love beads, as Things Started To Get Uglier.

Art helped to pioneer the alternative comics movement, what Stephen Holland termed “the real mainstream” of comic production. The idea is this: “mainstream” comics are obsessed with producing superheroes and fantasy with the same intensity of the little boys (and girls) in Superman pajamas with sugar highs and fruit juice stained faces that read them between bounces on the bed. (GROSS GENERALIZATION.) But the real mainstream, as in the mainstream outside of the comic world, deals with genres of drama, romance, thrills, (real) life, and memory and so on. “Real mainstream” comics, then, are freed from radioactive-spider-infused plots and future toy lines. I’m sorry, Spiderman, but it’s true.

And this Best Of History is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg, friends.

After the jump: some lessons from the wild world of upside down comic reading. (In which the author accidentally reviews a “comic” memoir of 9/11.) This way » » » »

(via NYT)

Aphrodisiac Equations:
If lover = male, then serve licorice + doughnuts for maximum (ahem) results.


If lover = female, well, things get a bit more complicated:
For best results, perfume your love nest with EITHER baby powder OR Good & Plenty candy + cucumber.

For second best results, spray eau de banana nut bread + … Good & Plenty.


… Good & Plenty? Really? I don’t even know what that smells like. (What am I missing!?)

Housewives take note:

Chuck Berry is the ultimate soundtrack for house-cleaning.

In other news, machines write poetry! …Sort of.

Rather, futurist Ray Kurzweil’s Cybernetic Poet //interprets// poetry…by writing its own. Reading the first sample of its work (“Pages”) left me skeptical, but there was something rather poignant (and adorably sad) about the haiku The Poet composed after reading poems by Patricia Camarena Rose and Wendy Dennis*:

The Stifling Stuffy

The stifling stuffy
Catholic schoolroom,
where I cannot be real

Oh, and what //is// a Cybernetic Poet?

• Short answer: a flexible, intelligent, language-based computer program.
• Long(er) Answer: a linguistic-modeling program with the ability to analyze/generate poetic personality and structure through a series of mathematical and poetic criteria.
• Exhaustive answer: here.

*Can someone link me to original poetry by these ladies? A preliminary search failed to turn up anything.

No, no, no. Read that headline again. Really read it:

Robots that Learn to Work Together in a study of Evolutionary Principles.

Yep, conceptually that’s pretty much an automatic Cardiac Arrest of Glee for my geeky-little heart.

Seriously, though: a recent group of researchers in Switzerland have just programmed a computer to behave as “Nature”, randomly assigning genetic traits to a series of robots. Based on the evolved patterns of kinship, something amazing (though, as blogger Eyder Peralta notes, not surprising) happens:

Over generations, the robots developed altruistic principles to help their kingroups survive. And mind that these were robots of very little brain.

Peralta spoke with researcher Lauren Keller who confirmed that none of this behavior was pre-programmed. “The natural selector computer was responsible for randomly selecting the fittest traits.” You can see it in this sweet video of astounding (read: terrifying?) robotic power.

Effing awesome.

Bonus: the study was published with PLoS Biology.

Most exciting thing I’ve read all day (and I’ve been reading about cryogenics!). Check out the full post here, and be sure to scope out more of NPR’s awesome tech blog, All Tech Considered.

Spent most of Saturday volunteering in digital for CrisisCommons Haiti initiative — CrisisCamp.

3 countries. 11 cities. Pretty powerful statement for the future of digital media and social networking. (Seeing the tweets from Bogota was inspiring.)

Karl and I may not have been the most useful of folks (we were certainly schooled in our knowledge of coding), but we did help map the island into OpenStreetMap. Sure, Haiti’s  mapped…but the geographical data has yet to be connected with the GIS applications in development to help rescuers both in Haiti and in the future. Learn more about how you can help, too, at www.crisicommons.org

Meanwhile, take a peek at some of the crowd (and its rogishly handsome volunteer…s) and the caffeine that got yours truly through the day. (Okay, mine was just the cup on the right, but it was refilled several times.) Photos curtesy of Andy Carvin. (See more.)

Over 100 people attended CrisisCamp DC, Haiti part 2

GIS Team (aka "The Map Room): Representing on the far end, left

Caffeine-aholic. Don't judge me.

In my sickness today, ‘word art’ — specifically, typography portraits — caught my attention.

Remember the Jay-Z video? (See above.)

Artist Evan Roth creates portraits of Jay using only the word Brooklyn. It’s simple and pretty stunning to behold. (And — *geek points* — it was apparently made with Open Code AND you can actually download the source code.)

Jay’s infectious beats came into my head while I was checking out this list of 25 Beautiful Examples of Typography Portraits on Creative Nerds. (A new favorite website and awesome skillz resource. (Yes, with a ‘z’.))

***
I’m trying to decide whether I respond better/like to the portraits where the words and letters mean something — even if its cliche. When the letters are random, it feels a little like cheating: of course an ‘l’ makes a nice bridge for the nose, but what else can you do with it? What can a word do in place of it? What does it mean to have word instead of a letter?

Then again, words with ‘meaning’ all over a face feel a little contrived. Here are some the ones I found more interesting, from both sides of random/ordered divide:

'Weiland Type' by Caliburless Soul (^)

The Brooklyn inspired ‘My Portrait’ by vic198x (^)

(My fav) ‘Erik Spiekermann’ by thierry-eamon (^)

I’d be interested to check out the impact of word- and letter-based portraiture prior to The Computer Age. Maybe I’m just a biased Gen X-er…or, er, Gen Y-er…or, whatever, but personal observation and cold facts confirm that computers have ushered in a new era of font-appreciation and worship (driven largely by the growing web design community, no doubt).

Part of it must be the expansion of branding. Companies have long relied on a manufactured style and graphic stamp to create a character. Yes, although corporations may be individuals under the law, to the surprise of no one they lack overt personalized qualities — like handwriting or vocal pitch for instance.

As more and more people turn to the net and become Users, they face a similar problem. All the ticks and quirks that identify people ‘in the real world’ are innately missing when they sign online. So, Users turn to text for differentiation. Different font colors and styles (in addition to one’s written ‘voice’) become identity markers — a User’s personal brand, if you will.

What’s my brand?

Less than having a font face (har har), I think my User brand is based in my style of writing. The more I write publicly, the more I notice certain patterns in my (written) language…especially the influence of my punctuation-queer, wordsmith hero, e.e. cummings…

***

(Oh, and if you need any convincing that there is, in fact, a great deal of energy, attention, and devotion to fonts, see the documetary Helvetica about the font of the same name.)