Hack Beat Scrap

from Rolando Penate

UVB-76 … is known among radio listeners by the nickname The Buzzer. It features a short, monotonous buzz tone …. On rare occasions, the buzzer signal is interrupted and a voice transmission in Russian takes place. …. There has been a spike in activity as of late August, 2010.

The real gems of the article are in the interpretation of the mysterious Russian signals that have interrupted the buzzing recently. The following words have been spelled out:

BROMAL: may refer to a company based in Barcelona, Spain, whose Internet Service Provider is KAOS.

bromal: a yellowish oily synthetic liquid formerly used medicinally as a sedative and hypnotic; tribromoacetaldehyde. Formula: Br3CCHO

IZAFET may refer to a company based in Maidenhead, United Kingdom whose Internet Service Provider is RapidSwitch Ltd. This website is a message board/forum targeting the Turkish language.

izafet, or izāfa, is a Persian language grammatical construct which links two words together.

NAIMINA may refer to a company based in Istanbul, Turkey whose Internet Service Provider is Turk Telecom. This website targets the Turkish language. Note that all the first letters of the Russian-sounding names spell out the spoken word “NAIMINA”: Nikolai, Anna, Ivan, Michail, Ivan, Nikolai, Anna.

Naimina may refer to the Loita Naimina Enkiyio Forest in Kenya.

АККРЕЦИЯ translates from Russian to English as Accretion.

From Rob Marianski

Commentary includes this explanation from Peter Bellamy

From Norfolk comes this dryly humorous song about profiteering. It probably dates from the depression which followed the Napoleonic Wars. The chorus, “Honesty’s all out of fashion…” makes this song the most valid in my repertoire!

Lyrics

original lead from Nick Smyth

“In the early nineteenth century, Samuel Taylor Coleridge speculated upon the concept of the clerisy — as an intellectual class, not as a type of man or woman — as the secular equivalent of the (Anglican) clergy, whose societal duty is upholding the (national) culture; like-wise, the concept of the intelligentsia also approximately from that time, concretely denotes a status class of ‘mental’ (white-collar) workers. Alister McGrath said that ‘[t]he emergence of a socially alienated, theologically literate, anti-establishment lay intelligentsia is one of the more significant phenomena of the social history of Germany in the 1830s’, and that ‘… — three or four theological graduates in ten might hope to find employment’ in a church post.^[6] As such, politically radical thinkers already had participated in the French Revolution(1789–99); Robert Darnton said that they were not societal outsiders, but ‘respectable, domesticated, and assimilated’.^[7]”

From Wikipedia

Really excellent explanation of “the problem of modernity”:

Geez, I don’t know! I mean, what is the problem of modernity? It isn’t that we’ve stopped being ancients. We have our problems, but do you want to give up capitalism, equality, democracy, and freedom so we can have a sense of meaning again? And science maybe, and modern religiousity? Modern art? Even if you can answer yes, forget it anyway, it ain’t gonna happen. The problem of modernity is that we got where we were going and it turned out kind of lame in a lot of ways. Maybe this is the problem of adulthood too. What can you do? You can’t go back, that’s for sure. Mostly you have the option of becoming neurotic and living through your anxiety. This is a kind of torturous existence though, so it’s worthwhile to look for some other options. Don’t ask me what those other options are. Fascism? Surrealism? Can you be a communist anymore, or is that basically done? What about Kiekegaard? I don’t know. Well I know what works for me, is yesterday, when I was driving to work, the late summer fields of the greenbelt stretched out to the river, and the trees dotting the green space suddenly took on a deeper guise, as if I could see all around them at once, and for a little while the kind of being I was was the kind of being who is passing through trees. But before long that being was overwritten by the being who is in a traffic jam, and then for several hours by the being who has a mid-level white collar job he’s not interested in (redundancy intended).

There’s more.

From Information is Beautiful

Flash game.

This is a great album.

Feminist performance art/book review turns introspective.

From Nick Smyth

I forget who sent me this; its been sitting on my computer unlistened to for a while.

Summary: scientists have created an algorithm, Eureka, that derives simple hypotheses that explain complex data.  These theories have predictive power, but for sufficiently complex data they are hypothesis that we cannot explain.

“We have had this window in human history when we could not just know things but actually understand them…and that’s a beautiful moment in history but it may only be a moment.”

Amazing sound engineering.  My favorite moment is when they translate the experience of watching a double pendulum in motion to sound.

From Zoe Mindell

Good poem, spoken with video, nice soundtrack.

Via Andy Cochran.