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Tuesday, May 16, 2006Why didn't they have all this when I was there? Wow. SUNY Albany, where I did my MS, has been named one of the top nanotech universities in the U.S. Not a bad year for SUNYA, what with making it into the NCAA Basketball Tournament for the first time and all. Space Colony Art from the 1970s Groovy, man. Here's a fantastic collection of artistic renderings of space colony concepts commisioned by NASA. Wednesday, April 26, 2006Kunstler interview video Frequent readers will no doubt know that I'm a fan of James Howard Kunstler. Orion Online has a series of video clips from an interview with Kunstler providing background material on The Long Emergency. Excellent stuff. Unfortunately, the site seems to require Internet Explorer (I had no luck with Firefox), but it's worth clicking on the big blue E for this one. Tuesday, April 25, 2006 Mathematical LEGO Sculptures I've been really busy, and haven't been updating much, but couldn't resist posting this. His geek-fu is very strong. Thomas Edison was a smart guy This posting at Gristmill is a bit old, but it has such a great Edison quote that it's still worth including. Thursday, April 13, 2006AT&T engineer: NSA built secret rooms in our facilities This Ars Technica article describes an AT&T engineer's first-person experience with the NSA's interception of massive amounts of domestic internet and voice traffic. It's just not possible to believe that they're disciplined enough to restrict themselves to specific investigations when they have that much stuff to mine. Friday, March 10, 2006Al Gore at the TED 2006 conference This is a bit old, but I figured I'd post it anyway. I'm once again saddened that Gore couldn't sound more like this when he was running for president. Common Sense on How We Got Here I have no idea how I came across this nonsense. Yet another argument against evolution - will these ignorant fuckwits never give up? One wonders: is this simply propaganda, or is the author really this stupid? Here's an good example of the brilliant reasoning displayed in this article: So, here is a test. Let's say someone handed you a plastic bag filled with all the parts to a watch, where you were certain that all the correct springs, screws, discs are in that bag. How long would you be willing to shake that bag hoping that the pieces would fall together and the screws would each find the right hole and tighten nicely? There must be some possibility that it could happen. Picture yourself shaking that bag. You probably wouldn't shake it beyond 30 seconds. Why not? Because common sense tells you that no matter how long you shake that bag, the pieces will never align to become a working watch. It wouldn't matter if you shook that bag one minute or thousands of years. It's hard to imagine a more profound misrepresentation of natural selection. Evolution is all about incremental accumulation of minute variations under environment pressure; this analogy misses the mark completely. The author gets extra credit for utterly failing to understand the anthropic principle. Tuesday, March 07, 2006Wiring the Web Ray Ozzie's proposing a clipboard for the web, and it's a pretty cool idea. The linked screencasts do a pretty good job of showing some of the stuff this would enable. I know that the simple "paste your shipping and billing information" example is something that I've wanted many times. As Dave Winer points out, the key to making this useful is agreeing to common data formats, which is a political, not technical problem. Still, it'd be useful today, and might drive adoption of common formats. There are also a lot of UI design issues to be worked out, such as making exactly what will be copied or pasted obvious, but this seems solvable. As always, I'm sure security issues will pop up. You get an immediate idea of the political obstacles from the comments on Dave's posting. There are several complaints of the "I didn't bother to read or watch any of the information, but I'm going to whinge anway" variety. Google lets slip talk of online storage service Google's march toward implementing Skynet continues with GDrive... (I wish I could recall where I first happened across the Google->Skynet meme.) Seriously though, I'd love to have something like GDrive, it's absolutely necessary if we're ever going to get something like David Gelernter's LifeStreams. I just don't want my data to be controlled by any single entity. Sorry to the "markets solve all problems with no outside intervention" crowd, but I think it's critical to have a heapin' helpin' of regulation in this area. I want an absolute guarantee that I can take my data and transparently move it elsewhere - potential hosts can compete for my business, but they can't own my stuff. It's easy to imagine lots of different business models for this. From Google's "free, but we mine the hell out of your data" to the Swiss bank account (pay us enough and nobody will ever find out what's here) approach. Warning! Financial responsibility can lead to terrorism Nice. Paying down credit cards is now grounds for being reported to Homeland Security. I can only imagine how many warning flags I've set off on my quest to shed as much debt as possible over the last few years. Tuesday, February 28, 2006U.S. Grants Patent For Broad Range Of Internet Rich Applications Just in case anyone still needed proof that software patents aren't working, here it is. What a joke. There appears to be plenty of prior art, so I'm sure this will eventually be thrown out, but the only ones to benefit will be the lawyers. Moving Mountains From Grist: It seems that normal coal mining wasn't destructive enough, so now we have mountaintop removal: Alongside this ecological devastation lies an even more ominous human dimension: an Eastern Kentucky University study found that children in Letcher County, Ky., suffer from an alarmingly high rate of nausea, diarrhea, vomiting, and shortness of breath -- symptoms of something called blue baby syndrome -- that can all be traced back to sedimentation and dissolved minerals that have drained from mine sites into nearby streams. Long-term effects may include liver, kidney, and spleen failure, bone damage, and cancers of the digestive tract. |
Last modified: Wednesday, May 17, 2006 at 12:13 AM.
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