Web 2.0
P.J. Harvey and Nick Cave
GhostPlane.Net
In December 2005, Condoleezza Rice, the US Secretary of State, assured the world that the flights of CIA private jets that have criss-crossed Europe since 9/11 had no role in the sending of prisoners to be tortured. ‘The United States has not transported anyone, and will not transport anyone, to a country when we believe he will be tortured,’ she said. Tony Blair assured Parliament: ‘I have absolutely no evidence to suggest that anything illegal has been happening here at all.’ But as Stephen Grey reveals in “Ghost Plane”, Rice’s claims were a falsehood – and Britain’s government has also turned a blind eye to a CIA operation that systematically out-sourced the harsh interrogation of its captives.
from the publishers summary, on GhostPlane.Net, the website launched in conjunction with Ghost Plane.
This is one of those issues that the wacky-right likes to think is simply the paranoid dream of the wackier-left. In fact, the issues of illegality that surround Bush and company’s so-called extraordinary rendition program continue to attract the attention of governments and law enforcement officials all around the world.
Ghostplane.Net keeps track of an ever growing list of trials and warrants and official apologies related to no-longer secret program. The website also has published the flight logs of planes suspected to be used in the programs as well as a useful timeline of the war on terror as reflected in the logs (from October 23, 2001, to November 4, 2004).
Recent news posted on the site includes the German warrants for “13 alleged CIA agents.” In a related story, Canada has recently officially apologized for its role in the rendition of Maher Arar to Syria, where, according to CBS.com yesterday, “he was tortured and imprisoned for nearly a year” (http://www.cbsnews.com/).
Color Code
Color Code is a full-color portrait of the English language.
The artwork is an interactive map of more than 33,000 words. Each word has been assigned a color based on the average color of images found by a search engine. The words are then grouped by meaning. The resulting patterns form an atlas of our lexicon.
–Martin Wattenberg
Here’s a beautiful visual map of the English language, using 33,000 nouns collected by WordNet. “Each tiny rectangle corresponds to a noun,” the Color Code FAQ helpfully explains. “The color of the rectangle has been assigned a color, based on an internet image search for that noun. The words are clustered so that similar words are near each other.” To navigate you can use the search function or click and zoom. The image above, titled “Grass,” is from their gallery page.