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Tuesday, 1999 October 26
Millennial thoughtJust when you were ready to vomit at the next mention of "millennium": This is a surprisingly compact history of end-of-time beliefs and their political/philosophical/social consequences. A bit long, but well done. "For many centuries Antichrist seemed an intensely real and very important person." Buchanan: pretending to be normal Pat Buchanan changes his tune, talks about "racial reconciliation". Perhaps someone slipped him some LSD? Or did he finally realize that the sheet-head vote is not enough to get him elected? Big change for a would-be Milosevic. Cookie monster eats your privacy DoubleClick (the ad banner company) is working hard to track you through their cookies. They're almost everywhere and they want to know all about little ole YOU. A must-read if you are concerned about your surfing privacy. Not very technical, don't worry. It also gives the address for opting out of DoubleClick's big-brotherish scheme. Did we bomb the embassy on purpose? This story claims that we bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade deliberately. Why? Because Milosevic was using the embassy as a radio base after his home was bombed. That story about old maps did sound odd, didn't it? Buchanan jumps ship Pat Buchanan has dragged his intolerance platform over to the Reform party camp. What prompted his move? Maybe sister Bay pointed out that beggars can't be choosers. What will Pat do if the reform party won't give him the bid? Will he realize that no one wants his unamerican ideas?
Friday, 1999 October 22
Live-to-work ethic infects Europe
Oh, god. It's bad enough that we live for money. If everyone else starts doing it, where will we go for vacation? Am I the only one who believes that productivity takes a nose dive when you work more than 40 hours/week? And that productivity climbs when you work 36 hours/week? (You need a account to read the article. It's free and painless. ) Consciousness layered; mental functions dispersed That's the working hypothesis of a husband/wife team of neuroscientists. Not really so shocking: I hear echoes of Freud throughout (that's my reading, the name is never mentioned or hinted at): F said that "memories lie in strata" - and the statement in this article that "patients are windows into the brain" is much like F's breakthrough realization that the mentally ill have the same psychological setup and same mechanisms as healthy folk - only exaggerated. E-books are inevitable The author of this piece actually thinks the opposite, and I've heard a lot of e-book bashing, particularly from a friend who's a computer-illiterate writer. The idea that e-books will replace paper is as absurd as thinking that audio recording would replace live music, or that VCRs would replace movie theaters, or that TV would replace theater. At the point when an e-book reader is cheap enough, and e-versions of books are available cheaply (or freely) enough, the economy of effort (the heft) will be inescapable for folk who need to carry a lot of books (students, traveling professionals, etc.) Synching your wood block with your PC Cute story about how Jeff Hawkins designed the Palm Pilot and the Handspring hand-held by carrying around a block of wood and pretending it was a hand-held. He wanted to get the feel of it; see what movements a user would actually make. "I walked around answering phone calls with this block of wood, and of course it didn't do anything.... People thought I was crazy, but I got a feel for how it would work." Resistence is futile This is how the borg got started: first with a little implant in the arm to turn lights on/off and unlock the door. Next a pair of transceiver implants in a married couple. Soon after, the collective. "After a few days I started to feel quite a closeness to the computer, which was very strange. When you are linking your brain up like, you... do become a 'borg. You are not just a human linked with technology; you are something different and your values and judgment will change." Don't know their Erse from their elbow "Confused east Belfast loyalists have torn down street signs in the Ulster Scots dialect in the belief that they were striking a blow against the Irish language." Later, embarrassed, they returned the signs. One has to ask, if they can't tell the difference, what difference does it make?
Thursday, 1999 October 21
Cool names for asteroids
Like Zappafrank, Clapton, Colemanhawkins. "'I'm happy to see imaginative names,' Marsden said with a level of enthusiasm that might hint at how little it takes to get some of these folks excited. After all, they sit around and stare at numbers, trajectories, and fuzzy radar images all day long."
Wednesday, 1999 October 20
Three popular y2k lies
Interesting piece of clear thinking. The link above lands you on the second page of the article, which is where the piece should have started. Return of the zeppelins (I hope) Notes from the project leader at Luftschiffbau Zeppelin, after a recent test flight of a redesigned zeppelin. He believes that a 50 passenger zeppelin will be coming soon. I'd settle for less, as long as I could go for a ride! Can you imagine floating slowly and nearly soundlessly? They already have five customers for the new design. Outdated personality tests still in active use Weird old tests that won't go away. You've probably taken some of them: MMPI and TAT, especially. But have you taken them at work? There oughta be a law against using these relics as employment screens. (You need to register to read the article - it's free and painless.) Woman CEO in Silicon Valley Ellen Hancock's observations. Sample: "...if you feel there's a ceiling, that your company is not supportive, my advice is to find another one. It makes no sense to stay in an environment that isn't supportive. There will be someplace where you can grow." Tom Stoppard's personal prehistory Tom Stoppard is a writer, a playwright, who is sometimes compared to Shakespeare (by folk who can only name one or two playwrights). His genius lies in dialog, and he is at his best when writing dialog for someone else's story. It turns out that this very English man, with his acute ear for our language, is Czech. Here he explores that part of his past, which his English stepfather thought to have eradicated. The article is a bit long and a bit unfocussed. Must the web be understood? The author seems to think so. But why should it? Why should it all be indexed and available? My opinion: it's better if it's bigger than you can grasp. I don't want the web to be limited to what I can understand. Not only content, but both present and possible functions ideally would be limitless, unbounded. It's like New York: nobody knows the whole city. Everyone learns some parts and puts together their own New York. There is always more to discover. No such thing as time This guy asserts, in a not-very-complicated article, that it makes sense to treat time as something imaginary. I'm going to read this article again in a day or two to see if it makes as little sense as I think it does. The problem with geometric arguments about time is that you can't do anything with them. It's all very well for a physicist, who can make calculations and all that, but what does accepting this argument gain me? Can I travel in time? Take a few years off? No. So what is the point? What's missing is a conceptual context for this sort of stuff. Pentagon caches nukes around the world Not really a surprise, but I'm glad they're fessing up to it. |