Technology
evolvingthoughts | November 27, 2008
The Greens (who I am considering joining, despite their unreasonable opposition to nuclear power) have said they will oppose the "clean feed" proposal in the Senate, so unless the Coalition decides it is a good idea after all, or put it to a conscience vote (because let's face it, a number of conservatives think censorship is a legitimate form of governance), it's dead. This is a Very Good Thing.
But it raises some more general issues: why is Australia so damned intent upon censoring anything? Why do we have among the most draconian censorship laws in the democratic world? Isn't it about…
clock | November 26, 2008Hmmm, juxtaposing these three posts is thought-provoking....what is education all about? Is the 'coolness' factor overpowering the 'usefulness' factor? Thoughts?
Planning to Share versus Just Sharing:
But inevitably, with a very few exceptions, these projects spend an enormous amount of time defining what is to be shared, figuring out how to share it, setting up the mechanisms to share it, and then...not really sharing much. Or sharing once but costing so much time, effort or money that they do not get sustained. Does this sound familiar to anyone else? I don't feel like this phenomenon is…
evolvingthoughts | November 25, 2008
GetUp! is an excellent organisation that has been attacking the draconian laws of the "war" on terror, antigay laws, and so on. They now have a petition against ISP filtering. Go for it...
Hat tip Samuel Douglas
clock | November 25, 2008Ever since I first discovered it, I loved the idea of the Moodgrapher and I wish it continued to be developed (not all the functions work any more). What it does is plot, in various ways, changes in "moods" as reported by users of LiveJournal.
For instance, you can see the spike of "ecstatic" on the evening of November 4th, when Obama's victory became official:
Or you can track cyclic trends - here is "awake":
I wish the tools could be refined even better, for instance narrowing down the time to just an hour or two or broadening it to months or years.
It would be also nice to narrow it…
evolvingthoughts | November 23, 2008
At last the MSM seem to be picking it up. A Perth newsmagazine has reported it unfavourably (although are Xenophon and Fielding really waiting for the results, given they are major motivators of the idea?), and an online opinion site suggests that the ultimate source of this stupidity is Clive Hamilton and the Australia Institute, a reactionary "think tank", back in 2003. And a NSW Parliamentary Library report has challenged Conroy's claim, previously challenged by Greens Senator Scott Ludlum, that this is something already in place in various other countries. The report is available online…
clock | November 23, 2008Start here, then keep clicking on the 'plus' sign on the right to see everything. Interesting...
clock | November 23, 2008
From here:
Platinum is a Brazilian image manipulation studio which uses combination of photography, illustration, 3D and CGI to "make the impossible become reality".
clock | November 22, 2008NYTimes:
Eliminating daylight time would thus accord with President-elect Barack Obama's stated goals of conserving resources, saving money, promoting energy security and reducing climate change.
Eugene Sandhu:
In order to conserve energy, President-elect Barak Obama should eliminate daylight saving time.
Boing Boing:
President-elect Obama wants to get rid of daylight saving time in the United States to conserve energy.
The game of broken telephones? Or lack of reading comprehension, or just wishful thinking? I though we were the Reality-Based Community.
More....
gregladen | November 20, 2008 IMOVIO launched today a smaller alternative to a subnotebook -- much smaller. The new iKIT is about the size of a PDA from ten years ago, but has a QWERTY keyboard and connects to the Internet at 3G speeds via your cell phone or Wi-Fi.
The $175 Linux-based system has a Webcam built in, as well as a range of applications, including Web browsing, e-mail and IM.
It can connect to the Internet using a standard Wi-Fi connection, or it can use your cell phone's mobile broadband connection via Bluetooth.
The company is currently pitching it to mobile network operators and retail stores.
Details…
amillikan | November 17, 2008Technology
Technology channel photo. Nam June Paik's "Electronic Superhighway" at the National Portrait Gallery - Smithsonian - Washington DC. From Flickr, by frozenchipmunk
This week's reader reaction quote on the Technology channel comes from a discussion on Gene Expression about the rise of communication technologies over the past few years and how our behavior (and our expectations) has changed along with it.
ScienceBlogger Razib wrote about an experience he had 3-4 years ago:
I recall a woman loudly talking about her boyfriend leaving her, and the consequent emotional devastation…
clock | November 17, 2008The geriatric leaders of the government of Italy are making fools of themselves by trying to regulate bloggers, i.e., get them to register with the government, pay taxes, be liable for what they write, etc.:
The law's impact would turn all bloggers in Italy into potential outlaws. This could be great for their traffic, I realise, but hell on the business aspirations of an Italian web start-up, not to mention any tech company that wants to sell its blog-publishing software in Italy, or open a social network here. In addition to driving out potential tech jobs, the stifling of free speech also…
laelaps | November 16, 2008During the past few weeks I have tried to step back from adding new material to my book to gain a better perspective on how I'm telling the story I want to convey. Much of what I'm writing concerns recent discoveries to explain how we know what we say we know about evolution, but the framework from which all that hangs is a combination of historical and scientific narrative.
Nowhere is it more important to be conscious of this than in the chapter on human evolution. I have done my best to avoid illustrating evolution as development towards a given point, that our species in particular was…
clock | November 16, 2008There is quite a lot of chatter around the intertubes about changes in the communication environment that happened between the last and this election and how those changes may be affecting the way the new White House communicates to people as well as how the new White House will receive communications from the people.
A lot of people are impatient - they want to see everything in place right this moment. Easy, guys! The inauguration is on January 20th. Until that time, Bush is the President and the Obama communications folks have time to think through, design and implement communication…
gregladen | November 16, 2008That's how fast it is!
In yet another installment of: "Oh, I can't believe people use USB when Apple's Firewire is so superior" .... ti ti ti ti ti* ... "Apple no longer supports firewire, you will now all use USB" ... USB 3.0 will be released Monday. USB 3.0 will transfer 25 GB in 70 seconds.
To put that in perspective, the same transfer would take 13.9 minutes with the current USB 2.0 protocol and 9.3 hours on USB 1.0. Looks like the future of wired syncs and backups is bright and blazing. [LH]
Well, my next external hard drive is going to have that ... it will probably be faster than…
drorzel | November 15, 2008As mentioned briefly the other day, I recorded a Bloggingheads.tv Science Saturday conversation with Jennifer Ouellette on Thursday. The full diavlog has now been posted, and I can embed it here:
This was the first time I've done one of these, and it was an interesting experience.
I'm rocking the handset in this because of the aforementioned cell phone service problems, and because the whole thing was very hastily arranged, and I wasn't able to obtain a headset for the landline. If they ask me back again, I'm definitely getting one.
On the other hand, being tied to the handset did restrain…
drorzel | November 15, 2008Yesterday afternoon, SteelyKid and I dozed off in the living room recliner. When I woke up, it had been three hours since she last ate, roughly her usual between-feedings interval, but she was still sound asleep on my lap. Kate was due home in half an hour or so, though, so I wasn't sure whether to wake and feed the baby, or let her sleep until Kate came home.
I decided to call Kate's cell to confirm her ETA. Not wanting to wake SteelyKid by getting up to get to the landline, I pulled out my trusty cell phone, running on what an endless string of Verizon ads assure me is America's finest cell…
clock | November 13, 2008Will Richardson is noticing an addiction to paper and he looks at himself:
Now I don't know that I've ever thought of no paper as exciting, necessarily, but I continue to find myself more and more eschewing paper of just about any kind in my life. My newspaper/magazine intake is down to nearly zero, every note I take is stored somewhere in the cloud via my computer or iPhone, I rarely write checks, pay paper bills or even carry cash money any longer, and I swear I could live without a printer except for the times when someone demands a signed copy of something or other. (Admittedly, I still…
clock | November 13, 2008Here are a few examples. One will feed you greasy bacon every morning. The other will donate to the GOP. Others will force you to perform either menial or mental tasks. I prefer a more gradual approach - a system that gradually increases the illumination in the room, the volume of sound (some pre-chosen music), etc. and only does something dramatic at the last, most critical point in time when you absolutely HAVE to get up.
more animals
[btw, check out the other pages on that site - there are some other cool inventions there, mixed up with some quite silly ones]