A word about my links...

I've started to add a few links to the sidebar. A word or two about them...

Music Thing: this is a very cool blog about music hardware, software, and strangeware. They have a great eye for the cool and bizarre when it comes to music gear.

Lawrence Lessig: Awww everybody links to him. He is just the leading thinker on intellectual property in the digital age and is the founder of Creative Commons. His take on society and technology is right on! Nuff respect Larry!

The Galoot's Progress: This link just shows the "Amish" side of me. It is a page and listserv dedicated to the fine art of woodworking with only handtools. I love making things out of wood and now that I am again an apartment dweller, I have a need for clean, efficient, physically and environmentally safe ways of hacking the material world, especially the cellulose variety. Of course I have a fantasy of leaving it all behind and becoming a fine furniture craftsman working in a barn in the Midwest! Doesn't every one? Anyway, it is a fine group of folks that call their listserv "the Porch" where they "sit around" talk about old tools, their disdain for power tools, wood planes, sharpening chisels by hand, metallurgy and beer!

Make Magazine: This magazine is about hacking life! It details all sorts of groovy ways to butcher the analog and the digital. I have both of their issues now and am anxiously awaiting their third. I was incredulous when I stumbled upon a video camera stabilizer made out of galvanized pipe! In the late eighties I made a video animation camera stand out of the same material. Great minds think alike! Hack on Make!

infoAnarchyWiki: Wiki's are amazing! Wikis are part of a new wave of great social software tools that are light-weight, web-native and put the power of information into the hands of the people! This wiki is dedicated to openness and the hacker ethos! Hack the Planet!

The Decembrist: If you're into political commentary you can't go wrong with Mark Schmitt's insights. He is one of the most intelligent writers on the political left. He was, for some time, a colleague of mine at the Open Society Institute. He is now a senior fellow at the New America Foundation and his blog is one of the top political blogs in the country.

I'll be adding more links soon. This is what cybrarians do in their spare time!

Peace,
-N

Piltdown Hoax: The Dawn of Man

I read about the Piltdown Hoax as a kid and have always been fascinated with the story of amateur scientists in turn of the century England perpetrating a massive fraud claiming to have found the "missing link", that included a famous author, an existentialist priest, crushed careers and reputations, and even a death-bed confession. Why this isn't a movie I do not know! I wanted to start (yet another) band called Piltdown Hoax but now I'm old(er), married, a soon-to-be-father, a "professional" (whatever), so my hopes of ever being cool are as dead as, well Piltdown Man. So my only consolation is to title my blog Piltdown Hoax dedicated to my ADD interests which always seem to include the act of hacking, gerryrigging, jigging, duct-taping, hybriding, remixing, fusing, crazyglueing, jacking, spackling, cracking, breaking, welding, melding, fluxing and generally screwing ideas and objects together to create something...else. So I think Piltdown Hoax is a fitting title for this blog since not only does it conjure the fusing of disparate, albeit genetically similar, things together, it too is a massive fraud.
Enjoy!