1.08.2008

Magazine Wrap Up

Wired

Michel Gondry, frankly I had never heard of him...but then Jack Black's new movie about video store clerks remaking famous movies came about and...guess who the director is? Up to this point his best known movie was Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, which I thought was good but kind of in that David Lynch style of moviemaking (i.e. more impressed the movie actually got made because frankly it would have taken a leap of faith for anyone to actually green light...wouldn't you'd think someone would have to understand it before letting it go forward...all in the name art!)

42 Entertainment? Again anyone? Well if you remember the internet search for interesting clues for the movie AI then you've got the organization. The latest has been Nine Inch Nails internet advertising. Mysterious flashdrives lying in bathrooms reviewing a new song which ends with crickets which when analyzed by a spectrograph reveals a phone number in Cleveland which leads to a phone message which led to a website and etc etc... Also the whole perplex city cards indicated the potential for world wide games. Exciting but unfortunately most of us have lives...

Where does $15.99 go when purchasing a CD?
0.16 Musician's Unions
0.80 Packaging/Manufacturing
0.80 Publishing Royalties
0.80 Retail Profit
0.96 Distribution
1.60 Artist's Royalties
1.76 Label Profit
2.40 Marketing/Promotion
2.88 Label Overhead
3.84 Retail Overhead

And iTunes - $9.99
1.40 Artist
3.00 iTunes
5.59 Label
Interesting infoporn article on nutritional values









Sky and Telescope

The prime meridian was established in 1850 by George Airy and then in October 1884 at conference in Washington DC declared that this would "the " meridian.  Didn't realize it took so long to make it official.  At one time, Paris tried to become this meridian and years before India had established a 0 degrees longitude.

New Yorker
In depth article on the head of the US intelligence service.  Seems a decent type of guy but can you really honestly feel safe about someone running this organization who grew up in the Cold War era and probably still can't figure out how to turn off the ringer on his cell phone?  Problem with government jobs and seniority...by the time these guys get into the position to run an organization they don't know beans about what is going on in the world around them.  I mean this article discusses a Disney Imagineer coming in and designing the Natonal Counter Terrorism Center.  They talk about Intellipedia (a la wikipedia) , A-Space (social network), and looking into virtual worlds???  Good golly have they forgotten the underlying basis of intelligence...i.e. local gossip, learning foreign languages, integreting into societies.  Ughhhh

The one thing interesting that I didn't know about was a Women's school in DC during WWII that operated the machinery that deciphered German naval code...for the story here

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