Saturday, November 20, 2004

Posted here Saturday, November 20, 2004 at 6:50:12 PM     Thinking about the image of america and the power of american culture. Note the last lines in the last paragraph from the excerpt. whole article at http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/14/movies/14HOLLYWOOD.html?oref=login&;position=&oref=login&pagewanted=print&position= The day before "Shrek 2" was set to have its premiere at Cannes, DreamWorks's representatives placed large plastic bags full of green Shrek ears along the Croisette, the bustling beachfront walkway that dominates the action in Cannes. Even before the festival began, it was feared that protesting French workers would shut it down over a labor dispute. On this day, a group of hundreds gathered outside the Carlton Hotel to denounce the war in Iraq. They were chanting in French for about 45 minutes, until the police broke up the demonstration. Then, as the protesters dissipated into the throng on the Croisette, I watched them, one by one, put on the free Shrek ears. They were attracted, it seemed, by the ears' goofiness and sheer recognizability. Immediately, the crowd, once filled with political fervor, was transformed into a sea of cartoon characters.   I felt embarrassed: America seemed, at best, an absurd, vaguely comic place. .... Part of the reason I find the globalization of American movies unsettling is that I can't remember a time when the dialogue at cocktail parties or between friends or in office meetings has been so lively and political. The shift in the national conversation is missing in our global film identity. For the most part, present-day politics may be too complicated a subject for Hollywood to handle -- at least in ambitious feature films. ********

	Thursday, November 18, 2004

Posted here Thursday, November 18, 2004 at 5:57:57 PM     Korea, Iran, Judges, Economy, flat tax, ake your pick. Some good things... SAN FRANCISCO, Nov. 17 - Google Inc. plans to announce on Thursday that it is adding a new search service aimed at scientists and academic researchers. Google Scholar, which was scheduled to go online Wednesday evening at scholar.google.com, is a result of the company's collaboration with a number of scientific and academic publishers and is intended as a first stop for researchers looking for scholarly literature like peer-reviewed papers, books, abstracts and technical reports. Google executives declined to say how many additional documents and books had been indexed and made searchable through the service. While the great majority of recent scholarly papers and periodicals are indexed on the Web, many have not been easily accessible to the public. The engineer who led the project, Anurag Acharya, said the company had received broad cooperation from academic, scientific and technical publishers like the Association of Computing Machinery, Nature, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers and the Online Computer Library Center. The new Google service, which includes a listing of scientific citations as well as ways to find materials at libraries that are not online, will not initially include the text advertisements that are shown on standard pages for Google search results. ********

	Tuesday, October 19, 2004

Posted here Tuesday, October 19, 2004 at 8:32:01 PM     testing http://calacanis.weblogsinc.com/entry/4349135256845547/ ********

	Monday, August 23, 2004

Posted here Monday, August 23, 2004 at 9:49:44 PM     Part of the problem of the overly graphic portrayal of sexiness is that we begin to lose the distinction between real people and the  perception of their surface. We are then ripe for the introduction into our lives of various mechancial surrogates. http://www.artificial-life.com/ ********

Posted here Monday, August 23, 2004 at 9:44:36 PM     Here is a link for Sterling's fascinating speech referenced yesterday http://www.boingboing.net/images/blobjects.htm ********

Posted here Monday, August 23, 2004 at 8:52:35 AM     From bruce sterling (site at http://blog.wired.com/sterling/ but not the text). The shape of things today is condemning our world to steadily increasing poverty, degradation, and turmoil. Four planets couldn't supply the material and energy to let the world live the so-called advanced world lives now. We're pretty advanced, but we're nowhere near advanced enough. This may sound a bit alarmist and theoretical, so let me phrase it to you in a way that holds your own feet to the fire. Steve Jobs is a pioneer of personal computing and the head of Pixar. Apple is the biggest vendor here. It's hard to get any more SIGGRAPH than Steve Jobs. Steve Jobs has neuroendocrinal pancreatic cancer. That's because, like everybody else in the world, like you and like me, Steve Jobs is carrying a load of carcinogens in his flesh. Silicon Valley, as an industrial clean-up site, is rather well known for its mutagens. The disturbing substances that are in the body of this captain of your industry, they should not be in there. They are wasted resources, they are systemic inefficiencies, they are externalities. We need ways to keep these substances organized and contained, and, eventually, designed out of the production system entirely. Steve is sick for physical reasons, for metabolic reasons. We may not know the exact chain of cause and effect, but there is one; he's not sick because some dark angel blew on his dice wrong. He has effluent, byproducts of industry, inside his body. It's painful. But we need to understand that our bloodstreams are our dumping grounds. So are our lungs and our livers. If we could visualize that, if we knew and could prove what had gone wrong inside of ourselves, if we could put a digital medical imaging screen on our bellies, our lungs and our livers, and make those invisible problems visible, then everything would become different. If that knowledge was attached to every object in our possession, the objects that were killing us would vanish quickly. That wouldn't be easy to do. But in the year 2004 it is no longer unimaginable. It could be done. It's possible to live in a cleaner way. We live in debris and detritus because of our ignorance. That ignorance is no longer technically necessary. Those who know, know. Instead, our problem is becoming obscurantism, which is a deliberate hiding of the facts by vested interests who know they are injuring us. Such acts of evil must be combated. Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Wanting to know, wanting to do it, that's half the struggle right there. Our capacities are tremendous. Eventually, it is within our technical ability to create factories that clean the air as they work, cars that give off drinkable water, industry that creates parks instead of dumps, or even monitoring systems that allow nature to thrive in our cities, neighborhoods, lawns and homes. An industry that is not just "sustainable," but enhances the world. The natural world should be better for our efforts and our ingenuity. It's not too much to ask. You and I will never live to see a future world with those advanced characteristics. The people who will be living in it will pretty much take it for granted, anyway. But that is a worthy vision for today's technologists: because that is wise governance for a digitally conquered world. That is is not tyranny. That is legitimacy. Without vision, the people perish. So we need our shimmering, prizes, goals to motivate ourselves, but the life is never in the prize. The living part, the fun part, is all in the wrangling. Those dark cliffs looming ahead == that is the height of your achievement. We need to leap into another way of life. The technical impetus is here. We are changing, but to what end? The question we must face is: what do we want? We should want to abandon that which has no future. We should blow right through mere sustainability. We should desire a world of enhancement. That is what should come next. We should want to expand the options of those who will follow us. We don't need more dead clutter to entomb in landfills. We need more options. ********

Posted here Monday, August 23, 2004 at 8:45:22 AM     The pace of technology continues. Is there a positive in it?  The nature of all physical objects will change. from http://stoprfid.org/rfid_overview.html RFID: Tracking everything, everywhere by Katherine Albrecht, CASPIAN [Excerpted from: Albrecht, Katherine. "Supermarket Cards: The Tip of the Retail Surveillance Iceberg."  Denver University Law Review, Volume 79, Issue 4, pp. 534-539 and 558-565.] "In 5-10 years, whole new ways of doing things will emerge and gradually become commonplace. Expect big changes." 1  - MIT's Auto-ID Center Supermarket cards and retail surveillance devices are merely the opening volley of the marketers' war against consumers. If consumers fail to oppose these practices now, our long-term prospects may look like something from a dystopian science fiction novel. A new consumer goods tracking system called Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) is poised to enter all of our lives, with profound implications for consumer privacy. RFID couples radio frequency (RF) identification technology with highly miniaturized computers that enable products to be identified and tracked at any point along the supply chain. 2 The system could be applied to almost any physical item, from ballpoint pens to toothpaste, which would carry their own unique information in the form of an embedded chip. 3 The chip sends out an identification signal allowing it to communicate with reader devices and other products embedded with similar chips. 4  Analysts envision a time when the system will be used to identify and track every item produced on the planet. 5 A number for every item on the planet RFID employs a numbering scheme called EPC (for "electronic product code") which can provide a unique ID for any physical object in the world. 6 The EPC is intended to replace the UPC bar code used on products today. 7 Unlike the bar code, however, the EPC goes beyond identifying product categories--it actually assigns a unique number to every single item that rolls off a manufacturing line. 8 For example, each pack of cigarettes, individual can of soda, light bulb or package of razor blades produced would be uniquely identifiable through its own EPC number. 9 Once assigned, this number is transmitted by a radio frequency ID tag (RFID) in or on the product. 10 These tiny tags, predicted by some to cost less than 1 cent each by 2004, 11 are "somewhere between the size of a grain of sand and a speck of dust." 12 They are to be built directly into food, clothes, drugs, or auto-parts during the manufacturing process. 13 ********

	Sunday, July 25, 2004

Posted here Sunday, July 25, 2004 at 8:10:32 AM     You have probably seen this but worth knowing if not. The presence of very large waves and their impact on shipping. http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/07/25/1090693835341.html?oneclick=true Rogue waves are believed to have sunk more than 200 supertankers and container ships over the past two decades. Long thought to be a myth, freak waves as high as 10-storey buildings are far more common than previously thought, the European Space Agency has found. Severe weather has been responsible for the sinking of more than 200 supertankers and container ships over the past two decades, and rogue waves are believed to be the main cause, the agency said. Three weeks of imaging data by the agency's satellites from early 2001 showed more than 10 individual giant waves around the globe of more than 25 metres in height. Previously, scientists believed that such large waves occurred only once every 10,000 years. "Having proved they exist in higher numbers than anyone expected, the next step is to analyse if they can be forecast," said Wolfgang Rosenthal, a scientist at the GKSS research centre in Geesthacht, Germany. In February 1995, the QE2 encountered a 29-metre rogue wave in the North Atlantic that Captain Ronald Warwick described as "a great wall of water - it looked as if we were going into the White Cliffs of Dover", the agency said. And in the week between February and March 2001, two tourist cruisers, the Bremen and the Caledonian Star, had their bridge windows smashed by 30-metre rogue waves in the South Atlantic. The Bremen was left drifting without navigation or propulsion for some hours. Advertisement Advertisement "The same phenomenon could have sunk many less lucky vessels. Two large ships sink every week, on average, but the cause is never studied in the same detail as an air crash. It simply gets put down to 'bad weather'," Dr Rosenthal said. Why don't they reach the mainland? ********

	Thursday, July 15, 2004

Posted here Thursday, July 15, 2004 at 4:03:58 PM     from a review of the new film, I,Robot. People will often scoff when i say about how science is often in religious categories. The transformation of humanity for example. Note here the use of the word "salvation." The question is, how much of the science enterprise is embedded in relgious thinking, even if the traces appear to be faded beyond recognition? Books like Doug Noble's Religion and Science make a strong case for the depth of tradition July 15, 2004 Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/15/movies/15NOTE.html But these opposing visions coexist. On the one hand is the Frankenstein plot, on the other the quest for salvation; on the one hand is the danger of technology, on the other its promise. "I, Robot" can't quite decide. But perhaps when it comes to robots, we are all hybrids.       ********

	Tuesday, June 29, 2004

Posted here Tuesday, June 29, 2004 at 10:18:14 AM     The enlightenment. The conventional view is as follows The Legacy of the Enlightenment http://learning.berkeley.edu/robertholub/research/essays/Legacy_of_Enlightenment.pdf Since Enlightenment thinkers promulgated a world view that undermined traditional values and doctrines, it was inevitable that they would provoke rejoinders and objections from those who felt threatened. Many of the most heralded figures in the Enlightenment engaged in debates with representatives of the ancien regime, whose ideas and ideals in politics, religion, aesthetics, and philosophy were suddenly called into question. Indeed, the history of the Enlightenment can be written as a series of conflicts between a new approach to nature and human endeavors, on the one hand, and the retrograde and futile attempts to counter this approach, on the other. This is a false choice. It forces the humane and non discrete theorists to be idnetified with retrograde thinking. The real choice going forward is between a reductionistic mechanical digital approach vs a poetic, indeterminate world of infinite variation and uncalculability. In some instances this sort of anti-Enlightenment critique seeks to recognize dimensions of human activity that are left unilluminated by enlightened thought, thus demonstrating that light has been shed on only a portion of human existence, and that the human being in his entirety has been ignored. ********