Check out this cool, floating, wirelessly powered light bulb. The artist used Tesla’s work on wireless power to transmit energy to the bulb. Amazing!

I’m a big fan of TAL. May 1st they will be transmitting a live HD stream of one of their shows show to movie theaters around the country. Get your tickets ASAP. I missed out on the SF show : (

Here’s a great art exhibit that uses 1,600 3D scans of local Charlotte, NC residents as pixels in a larger 3D display that shows each of the faces in sequence. Check the link to get a better description than mine.

Site devoted to development of actual programming language based on LOLspeak.

To wit:

HAI
CAN HAS STDIO?
VISIBLE "HAI WORLD!"
KTHXBYE

Nigerian teacher Mohammed Bah Abba invented a simple system of refrigeration that requires no fuel other than water and sand!  He first developed it in 1995.  Something to remember should you ever find yourself with perishable food and no electricity to run the fridge…

Read “A Refrigerator that Runs Without Electricity” at Celsias.

As usual, Glenn Greenwald nails it:

Every day, it becomes more difficult to blame George Bush, Dick Cheney and comrades for their seven years (and counting) of crimes, corruption and destruction of our political values. Think about it this way: if you were a high government official and watched as — all in a couple of weeks time — it is revealed, right out in the open, that you suspended the Fourth Amendment, authorized torture, proclaimed yourself empowered to break the law, and sent the nation’s top law enforcement officer to lie blatantly about how and why the 9/11 attacks happened so that you could acquire still more unchecked spying power and get rid of lawsuits that would expose what you did, and the political press in this country basically ignored all of that and blathered on about Obama’s bowling score and how he eats chocolate, wouldn’t you also conclude that you could do anything you want, without limits, and know there will be no consequences? What would be the incentive to stop doing all of that?

This is the concluding paragraph of a post wherein he lays out the details of all he summarizes here.  As usual, I encourage you to read the whole thing.

Please, please, please – don’t let the assassin’s bullets silence the voice of compassion and righteousness:

This is a role our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful revolutions impossible by refusing to give up the privileges and the pleasures that comes from the immense profits of overseas investments. I’m convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, militarism and economic exploitation are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life’s roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be changed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life’s highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth with righteous indignation. It will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa, and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say, “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say, “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war, “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice, and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

Dr. King’s topic was “Why I Am Opposed to the War in Vietnam.”  He was speaking at the Riverside Church in Manhattan on April 30, 1967, almost a year before he was martyred on a hotel balcony in Memphis, Tennessee.

May he rest in peace, and may the rest of us draw courage and strength from his example.

The time has come for America to hear the truth about this tragic war. In international conflicts, the truth is hard to come by because most nations are deceived about themselves. Rationalizations and the incessant search for scapegoats are the psychological cataracts that blind us to our sins. But the day has passed for superficial patriotism. He who lives with untruth lives in spiritual slavery. Freedom is still the bonus we receive for knowing the truth. “Ye shall know the truth,” says Jesus, “and the truth shall set you free.” Now, I’ve chosen to preach about the war in Vietnam because I agree with Dante, that the hottest places in hell are reserved for those who in a period of moral crisis maintain their neutrality. There comes a time when silence becomes betrayal.

The truth of these words is beyond doubt, but the mission to which they call us is a most difficult one. Even when pressed by the demands of inner truth, men do not easily assume the task of opposing their government’s policy, especially in time of war. Nor does the human spirit move without great difficulty against all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world. Moreover, when the issues at hand seem as perplexing, as they often do in the case of this dreadful conflict, we’re always on the verge of being mesmerized by uncertainty. But we must move on. Some of us who have already begun to break the silence of the night have found that the calling to speak is often a vocation of agony. But we must speak. We must speak with all the humility that is appropriate to our limited vision, but we must speak. And we must rejoice as well, for in all our history there has never been such a monumental dissent during a war, by the American people.

I encourage you to listen to the whole speech, or to read the transcript.

Also… take a listen to Curtis Mayfield – Right On For The Darkness – Toshi’s MLK Mix, which Toshi produced for his 2002 compilation “Peace of My Mind, Vol. II.”

I mean, we all sort of recognized that they were acting as if the Fourth Amendment’s protections against “unreasonable searches and seizures” had been suspended.  But, this week, documentation emerged that, in fact, the so-called “legal scholars” at the so-called Department of “Justice” officially concluded this to be the case:

”Our office recently concluded that the Fourth Amendment had no application to domestic military operations,” the footnote states, referring to a document titled ”Authority for Use of Military Force to Combat Terrorist Activities Within the United States.” [That document was authored by John Yoo. –S.]

The footnote in question was part of a raft of documents released by the Pentagon this week to the ACLU under a Freedom of Information Act request.  If you’re not depressed enough, read the whole AP story.

So, to paraphrase Eliot…

This is the way our freedom ends
Not with a bang but a footnote.

I’ve been going through my iTunes music collection and adding cover art to all my tracks. Some things, mostly originals and custom compilations, don’t have cover art – so I’ve been making some. Here’s one I did for a recording of DJ Pussywillow’s set at Tribal Groove in 2006: