anyone interested in attending the pitchfork festival/visiting me this summer in chicago, take note: passes for the festival go on sale monday, and they've announced six of their 36 bands:

Mission of Burma

Ted Leo/Pharmacists

Mountain Goats

The National

Jens Lekman

Hot Machines

a decent if not blow-your-minds sort of line up, and there are still 30 slots left.

anyway, i'm going to try to snag two tickets for tommy and myself this monday. the magic futon is available for all who dare...

An IEEE Spectrum article about electrical neural stimulation techniques? Yes! This is the type of article that my college-era self and my college-era housemate Jon Brookshire could both be fascinated by: neuroscience problems combined with capacitor-efficiency problems. Rockin'.

Admittedly, the things I used to know about this stuff have faded alarmingly quickly — I found an old exam while cleaning out my car a little while ago and was completely shocked at the things I had forgotten. My essay answers were gibberish — did I really once know which enzymes consumed which neurotransmitters? I'd forgotten that I'd forgotten that.

But what little I do remember makes me excited about these therapies. Solving psychological problems by manipulating neurotransmitters with drugs is like trying to solve a city's downtown traffic congestion problem by manipulating the number of taxis on the streets: it's possible, and not too hard to implement, but it's difficult to anticipate the total effect on other parts of the system. Sometimes the taxi system really will be the thing that's fucked up, and what ought to be fixed — but not always. These electrostimulation techniques are still (mostly) pretty inexact, but seem ultimately likely to provide much more targeted action than pharmaceuticals.

[Via BoingBoing]

One of the things I've been helping out with at work is the setup for DearAOL.com, an open letter/petition put together by the EFF to oppose AOL's recent adoption of a premium email service. The idea is that users can pay a small premium to have their email bypass spam filters. The spam filters could then be tightened up, and spammers would be dissuaded from plying their noxious trade.

The problem is that this would also affect groups like MoveOn, as well as a vast array of email-heavy businesses. Yes, there are supposed to be one-year exceptions for the MoveOns of the world; no, there are no guarantees. And the basic point made by the EFF — that under this scenario AOL will have a financial incentive to do a poor job maintaining its unpaid-email-spamfilters — seems basically sound to me.

But people seem to have mixed feelings about this initiative. Hurting online advocates would be bad, but spam is pretty bad, too. In a perfect world we'd pay the email toll computationally, donating time to worthy causes through SETI@home-style computing. But botnets make that idea useless.

I'm inclined to agree with something our CTO JP said at work: this issue is more about precedent than the merits of the AOL scheme.

I like you, TechCrunch. I really do — you're a great way to keep up on what's cutting-edge. And certainly you can't be blamed for nearly everyone you profile failing and going out of business — that's just the nature of bubbly bubble boosterism.

But sometimes it seems like you're just making shit up:

I expect Ether to ramp quickly towards success, and it will be extremely hard for competitors to enter the space given the capital intensive infrastructure needed to do something like this.

"Something like this" refers to Ether's gameplan: selling ad-hoc expert services over the phone. But the "capital intensive infrastructure"? That'd be, um, voice over IP. Which, it turns out, isn't very capital intensive at all these days, unless for some reason you insist on building and maintaining your PSTN gateway yourself. But why would you do that?

So yeah: lease some space in a datacenter, talk to a bank about processing credit cards, then start setting up Asterisk boxes. This ain't the Apollo program (although it's still a neat idea).