microRevolt reBlog: September 2006 Archives

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September 26, 2006

Governor Rendell Joins National Anti-Sweatshop Initiative

"We must not encourage companies that use sweatshops by doing business with them,” Pennsylvania Governor Edward G. Rendell said. “If companies know they will lose money by continuing to employ this industrial-age practice, they will stop. Businesses can still make money by treating their employees fairly."

Continue reading "Governor Rendell Joins National Anti-Sweatshop Initiative"

Posted by cat at 07:08 PM

September 22, 2006

Big enough for a Queen

just received a question about the color-bar blanket pattern i made for the happy hooker book. Renee wanted to know how to make it bigger, to fit on a queen size bed. the pattern from the above link is on a full size bed, so you can see it's more of a lap blanket... but if you want to increase the size, i can think of 2 solutions. 1) make your granny squares bigger (go arround the square with double crochet one more time) or 2) make more squares (pictured above) -- i just increased the number of pixels proportionally and then ran it through knitPro. this requires a lot more stitching but hopefully worth it! Remember GAUGE can be helpful when sizing too. if your granny squares are 4 x 4 inches, then you can measure how long it will be (4 " x 21 squares = 84 " across or 7 feet wide, big enough for a queen!) Renee, send us a picture once you stitch it up! download queen pattern here.

Posted by cat at 12:30 PM

How low can you go?

Sign on today and support a monthly minimum wage of Tk3000 (Euro34.37) for Bangladeshi garment workers. Garment workers have been participating in rallies and demonstrations across Bangladesh since the beginning of September to protest against the failure of the Bangladesh Wage Board to come up with an acceptable minimum wage for the garment industry. The CCC supports the workers in their demand for a wage that allows them to live in dignity. Your support is needed to pressure the Bangladesh garment factory associations to set a wage that will genuinely improve the lives of these workers. We also ask you to send a message to the international brands and retailers buying from Bangladesh to voice their support for workers' demand to be paid a living wage and put this into practice.

Continue reading "How low can you go?"

Posted by cat at 11:50 AM

September 19, 2006

Anti-war protest in America's Army

While pro-war propaganda and military recruitment tools are nothing new, using them as the medium to broadcast an anti-war protest is. Yet that is just what University of Nevada art professor Joseph Delappe is doing with his small bit of "performance art" in the military-funded game America's Army. Instead of playing the game as it was intended, Delappe logs in and runs around without firing a shot, eventually getting killed by his fellow players. As his character dies, Delappe broadcasts the name of a real American soldier killed in Iraq, an act he's performed 1,273 times so far, according to Salon.

Originally posted by Zonk from Slashdot, ReBlogged by cat on Sep 19, 2006 at 02:15 PM

Three-tiered Mario mushroom cake amazes

Originally posted by Blake Snow from Joystiq, ReBlogged by cat on Sep 19, 2006 at 02:14 PM

September 15, 2006

Anton Perich: painting machine

"In the Seventies I was a video artist, photographer and a painter. I dreamed of a machine that would paint. No more hand made paintings, but machine made, with sharp electric lines, on and off, like Morse code, short and long. So in 1977/78 I built such a machine, using surplus materials from Canal Street stores. I wired some photocells to the airbrushes on the motorized scanning unit that swept an area of about 10x12 feet, hung a piece of canvas, and made my first digital painting. In his Diaries Warhol said he was terribly jealous. This machine was an early precursor of ink jet printer/scanner. This was the time long before computer and digital art. I had my first show of electric paintings at Tony Shafrazy Gallery in 1979. I am still painting with this machine every day. It keeps breaking and I keep fixing it all the time." - Anton Perich

Posted by cat at 02:34 PM

September 14, 2006

HOW TO - Remove logos from your PDA / cell phone with sugar

Here's a way to remove logos with sugar on all sorts of gadgets...Spanval writes - "This instructable is to show you how easy it is to remove some unwanted logo's from cell phones and other plastic / metal products. The logo has to be of the type glued onto the surface rather then etched in (which generally is the case 90% of the time) as we will scratch them off. There are many ways which you can go about this from fingernails, to pin, but there is one trick, which i have tested and will show you..."

Originally from MAKE Magazine, ReBlogged by cat on Sep 14, 2006 at 12:36 PM

The Pirate Party: Rethinking Copyright

Rickard Falvinge is running for Swedish Parliament on a single issue - he's founder and candidate of the new Pirate Party, or Piratpartiet, which opposes strong copyright protection and supports file sharing. The party doesn't oppose all copyright, but it believes that all non-commercial copying and use should be completely free, file sharing and p2p networking should be encouraged rather than criminalized, and copyright term should be limited to five years after publication. When Sweden's Pirate Bay, a site that catalogs files available for download via BitTorrent, was raided by police and (temporarily) shut down recently, Falvinge spoke at the demonstration that followed, saying that copyright is not about protecting intellectual property, but about asserting control over culture.

Originally posted by Sarah Rich from WorldChanging: Another World Is Here, ReBlogged by cat on Sep 14, 2006 at 12:33 PM

September 13, 2006

Maritime Morning from knitbot

Posted by cat at 09:58 AM

Governors' Coalition Seeks End of Tax Subsidies of Sweatshops

New Jersey Governor Jon Corzine has announced that he will participate in a path-breaking governors' initiative to end sweatshop exploitation in apparel and other industries. Proposed by Governor John Baldacci of Maine, the Governors' Coalition for Sweatfree Procurement and Workers' Rights will use state government procurement as a catalyst to level the playing field for ethical businesses and advance justice for sweatshop workers.

Continue reading "Governors' Coalition Seeks End of Tax Subsidies of Sweatshops"

Posted by cat at 09:37 AM

September 12, 2006

Barcelona's inaccessibility mapped by mobile phones

How can new media be used to improve the world we live in? Since the introduction of the Digital Communities category in 2004, Prix Ars Electronica has been dealing more intensively with the socially relevant implementation of artistic and technological innovations.

[Thank you Antoni Abad !! for submitting this item]

Barcelona Accessible illustrates how 40 people with disabilities use mobile phones to photograph every obstacle they come across on the city's streets. By means of multimedia messages they create a map of inaccessible Barcelona on the internet.

Originally from unmediated, ReBlogged by cat on Sep 12, 2006 at 04:13 PM

Our Favorite Invader Piece Ever

Made with 323 Rubiks cubes. Lovely.

Originally from Wooster Collective, ReBlogged by cat on Sep 12, 2006 at 03:11 PM

September 11, 2006

The Wrong Lessons from September 11

One might have expected the governmental response to the terrorist attacks of September 11 to champion the importance of not treating people as means to an end but of respecting their rights as individual human beings. Human rights should be respected not only because it is the right thing to do but also because it provides the only hope of effectively undermining the destructive logic of terrorism. Sadly, the U.S. government never took that insight to heart.

Originally from Human Rights Watch News Releases, ReBlogged by cat on Sep 11, 2006 at 11:52 PM

Thank Heavens, Sabrina started a Blog!

Artist / Writer Sabrina Gschwandtner started a blog! After 6 editions of Knit Knit zine she is working fast and furious on the manuscript of her upcoming book Knit Knit (release date: September or October 2007 from Stewart, Tabori and Chang) Here's her BLOG!

Posted by cat at 12:58 PM

September 10, 2006

"Lumalive" textile garments

Ldm-Lighting 15-0 H
At IFA2006, Philips showed off their Lumalive light emitting textiles, the jackets and shirts can play animations as well as change colors. The video has a few clothing examples and a big clock inside a couch... - Link.

Originally from MAKE Magazine, ReBlogged by cat on Sep 10, 2006 at 12:53 PM

DIY turntable

Originally posted by Eliot Phillips from hack a day, ReBlogged by cat on Sep 10, 2006 at 12:52 PM

Nanomagnetic vortices could lead to bigger hard drives, faster RAM

Storage

You know, we were sitting in our editors' meeting the other day, and we all came to a very serious consensus about our reportage these days. There's been a serious dearth of vortices in our articles, and so we're going to do our darndest to bring you more coverage of these truly awesome swirling clouds. Fortunately for us, those egghead physicists down at Rice University know how to read our minds. A team over in Houston used a scanning ion microscope to create and measure "ultra-thin circular disks of soft magnetic cobalt" ranging in diameter from one micron to 38 microns. According to a press release issued by the university, the six micron wide (about the size of a red blood cell) magnetic vortex is "a cone-like structure that's created in the magnetic field at the disk when all the magnetic moments of the atoms in the disk align into uniform concentric circles." (Whatever that means.) Lead researcher Carl Rau, professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University, said that this new advance may lead to storage densities "in the range of terabits per square inch," and went on to say that "magnetic processors" and "high-speed magnetic RAM" may also be in the works. Now that we think about it, this is probably what would happen to the offspring of Storm and Magneto too.

Originally posted by Paul Miller from Engadget, ReBlogged by cat on Sep 10, 2006 at 12:48 PM

September 07, 2006

Ps & Qs

An exhibition curated by Shannon Stratton and Jeff M. Ward
September 8 - November 12, 2006
Glassell School of Art
Museum of Fine Arts, Houston

Ps & Qs will feature a group of emergent artists from throughout the United States and Canada. Using the century-long history of formalism as an ahistorical grab bag, the artists of Ps & Qs use a range of materials. Some are traditional like welded steel or oil paint-on-canvas. Others, like PVC, soap and a variety of fabrics, are less so. The artists included in Ps & Qs are: Todd Chilton, Nevin Tomlinson and Andrea Myers (Chicago), Kirsten Flanigan (Tampa), Mung Lar Lam (San Francisco), Paul Jackson (Calgary) as well as Carl Suddath and Katy Heinlein (Houston). Ps & Qs is curated by Shannon Stratton, Director of Programming at ThreeWalls Artists' Residency (Chicago), and Jeff M. Ward, current critic-in-residence at the Core Program of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (Houston).

Posted by cat at 12:10 PM

September 05, 2006

Natalie Jeremijenko OOZ, Inc., Postmasters Gallery 9/7-10/7

OOZ is ZOO backwards.
Expanding on her project at the 2006 Whitney Biennial Natalie Jeremijenko has created a unique garden on the roof of Postmasters Gallery - an environmental experiment in interaction with New York City bird population. The complex 1,000 square-foot garden includes architect-designed bird housing projects (multi-family dwellings), water systems, as well as other amenities to improve the quality of life for urban birds.