Gizmodo reports on Apple’s newest retail store on the upper west side of Manhattan.  The article is called “Inside Apple’s Newest Temple” and in it the author writes:

I call it a temple because the architecture conveys a nearly religious aesthetic, a place to worship Apple, beyond any other Apple store you’ve ever been to. The top floor’s a vast open space, enclosed by spartan stone walls which support a massive glass ceiling. The rows of tables in the main room feel like pews.

The University of Wales, Lampter is now home to the Sophia Center for the Study of Cosmology in Culture. Formerly housed at Bath Spa, the center offers an MA program in Cultural Astronomy and Astrology.

See the fascinating courses here.

A post on _Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ titled “_Emily is Not Real_: Uncanny Valley vs The Digital Übermensch” refers to my paper “Mapping the Temples of Cyborgism” and uses the graphic I created to illustrate an expansion of Mori’s map of the uncanny valley. The post is a RICH mine of links – so check it out.

_Augmentology 1[L]0[L]1_ is a blog seeking to “dissect post-geophysically defined notions of reality” and is sponsored by the Ars Virtua Foundation via the CADRE Laboratory for New Media.

“Ars Virtua is a New Media Center and Gallery located in the synthetic world of Second Life, World of Warcraft and the World Wide Web. It is a new type of space that leverages the tension between 3-D rendered game space and terrestrial reality, between simulated and simulation. The Ars Virtua Foundation is a locus of research around the issues of reality within simulated environments.”

This feels at first, in a speculative fiction sort-of-way, like one more step toward turning the planet into a large neural network… Building floating synapses for the network mind, out in the sea.

“In general, computing centers are located on a ship or ships, which are then anchored in a water body from which energy from natural motion of the water may be captured, and turned into electricity and/or pumping power for cooling pumps to carry heat away from computers in the data center,” Google writes in the patent application.

Read More…

Take a look at Gregory Donovan’s brilliant research blog – he’s re-launched. What a code master!

Genetic storefront opens in SoHo.

The Washington Post is reporting that the Bush administration is prepared to begin directing our most advanced spying technology on our own citizens. This includes advanced satellite systems.

We are entering the era of total surveillance. Every movement will soon be tracked – every cell phone call will enable location tracking – with clear line of sight, this technology will mean that you can be watched, from space, by your government.

Every time we tag a photo in facebook, we’re contributing to the facial recognition database. And every time we walk down the street our faces are captured by CCTV. Every book we list on myspace is entered into the matrix and one day, soon – perhaps you will have engaged in the requisite activities to be considered an enemy.

Will we see a movement toward wearing hoods and masks in public at all times? And will there be an attempt to regulate this? What if the hoods are worn for religious reasons? Will the face covering practice of fundamentalist Islam become the last refuge of the revolutionaries?

Biblical events as if seen on Google earth.

God’s Eye View (Ark)

Devices are always watching us – and feeding data into the network. This OS X screensaver by Michael Zoellner searches for CCTV feeds and displays them. Very eerie.

ZDnet posts an article called “Mac OS X Leopard installation as a spiritual practice“. I’m engaging in that practice right now – preparing my various Macs for the upgrade, the archive and install and the clean install. But it’s more than the installation that is spiritual.

To retrieve the software, I walked through the rain to wait in line at the Apple Store on 59th and 5th. A huge illuminated glass cube rising out of the midtown/central park architecture, the flagship Apple store can only be described as a temple.

After waiting in line, I was greeted by a collection of Apple store ‘evangelists’ standing by the entrance cheering and clapping for us. Upon entering the store, I was handed a “Leopard” t-shirt and encouraged to use the “Leopard only” purchasing line. Holographic DVD box in hand, I proceeded down a long path with ropes on either side to a special cashier who took my electronic form of payment for this virtual environment in a box I have been religiously anticipating for months…

The operating system on the hill… has arrived.

riseup.net has a great collection of tech activism listserves.

Highlights include:

nomesh-tech New Orleans Mesh Networking – Technical Support & Discussion

farma Renewable energy sources campaign for the Zapatista communities

leftistpython Leftist and combative object oriented programming

fpl-fbv Forum on the Patenting of Life – Forum sur le brevetage du vivant

vgranjeros List for the farmers who tend the fields of the vfarm

techne technology and democracy

The New York Times reports that prison libraries are being purged of religious books and other materials. The Bureau of Prisons is banning material that might “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize.”

Of course this is absurd and I can’t even begin to imagine who is deciding what would “discriminate, disparage, advocate violence or radicalize” and how to apply these criteria. Surely the entire Jewish and Christian Bible must be excluded – or is the Bureau of Prisons just assuming that there is no advocating or discriminatory content in the Bible. If so, they clearly haven’t read it. The Koran and the Bible both advocate violence in parts and peace in others. And so I can only conclude that this is an attempt to remove material that might inspire prisoners to rise up against the illegal and immoral system that has locked them up.

I wonder how much access to the internet prisoners have, if any. Could a case be made that access to cyberspace is a right for prisoners just as occasional access to the outdoors is?