Ask Me No Questions, I'll Tell You No Everywhere Like Such As

After you get over the "Whaaaa?" moment from watching this video, go back and listen to the question again. I think she answered it perfectly.

Serving Up News Like Mini Dogs On Tooth Picks

Acording to Mingle², my blog rating is "G". I would like to take this opportunity to apologize. I'll try much harder. Why is a free online dating service handing out blog ratings? To attract links and attention of course, look how well it works.

Rare View Captured of Rings Around Uranus
*snicker*

Huge Hole Found in the Universe
Seriously, I'm not writing these headlines.

Copyright stories keep showing up in the news lately, rather than linking to them, I thought I would like to the best copyright explanation I've ever read.
Copyright Explanation Part 1: General Terms, and History of Copyright Law
Copyright Explanation Part 2: Fair Use
Copyright Explanation Part 3: Consequences of Infringement
Copyright Explanation Part 4: Other Protections for Intellectual Property

I found this article about banner blindness interesting. The short version is "People browsing the internet don't look at advertisements". If you're already bored, you probably shouldn't read it.

The Machine Is A Storyteller

I don't know how much sense yesterday's video made to people unfamiliar with HTML. Perhaps you're wondering why Dr. Michael Wesch, an Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology, made a video about web 2.0? Well, I can't speak for him, but I have my own answer to that question, which should help explain things a little more, if the video wasn't you're cup of tea.

What are we even talking about?
In one word: information. If you still aren't sure what exactly web 2.0 is, don't worry, it's something that is still being defined. In fact, I defined web 2.0 previously as a "sharing and collaboration" movement. That is the general idea behind most things being called web 2.0, but I'm not sure that really expresses the purpose behind it all, or at least, the lofty possibilities that some people see in it.

As the video discussed, the separation of content from format on the web was an important step. XML allows that content, that information, to be identified. It becomes data that can be passed on and used by others. I've been doing work in databases for awhile, and some of the philosophy behind how we store information, how we make that information available, I find very interesting. The passing of information goes by another name: communication.

In The Beginning, There Was The Grunt
Anthropologically, this is mostly bunk, I don't really have a background to explain how language developed, but I think it still helps put web 2.0 into perspective, so...

Communication certainly didn't begin with us. At some point, as animals developed, they began conveying information to each other. When this began, there were a couple things they needed to communicate: danger, food, let's procreate. Yup, I think that's all the basics. Communication, for the most part, stayed at about this level for most animals. Some animals were able to communicate a few other things, a few of those could even convey complex concepts to each other, like how to use tools. Then we came along, and something changed. I'm not really sure what it was, an increased storage capacity for more symbols I would guess.

All communication requires symbols, I do something (show you a picture, make a noise, perform a gesture, excrete some pheromones) which you perceive and interpret. If we both understand that symbol to represent the same thing, we've successfully communicated. This common codex of symbols, is language. When our ancestors began developing a language, it was probably a combination of noises and gestures.

At some point in our development, as our symbols became more and more complicated, important information could be conveyed, passed on to descendants. We had found a way to store our data, the very first database, the storyteller. This was a fairly good storage system, our history/culture/information could be passed on from one storyteller to another and preserved. Of course, back in those days, mortality rates were not worth bragging about, and stories would have been lost when a storyteller died before passing them on to someone else. A better database was needed.

From The Alphabet, To The Word Processor
Enter the written word. You could say we already had this form of symbol among our language. Cave paintings, lines drawn in the sand, face paint, tattoos, these are all drawn symbols that could be used to communicate, but they were inefficient, too impermanent, or too immobile. The written word, was a revolution in drawing. We say that a picture is worth a thousand words, but when it came to storing information, the written word left pictures in the dust. Scrolls and tablets became our new database.

The storytellers probably didn't shut up, but the stories could be written down, and if all the storytellers were killed, someone could pick up the written story, and begin telling it again. This was the real beginning of our cultural history. Any stories that weren't written down have been lost, but we've been able to hold onto written information for pretty impressive lengths of time. In addition, this written information would be copied and shared with others much easier than memorized stories, and it could be gathered in large quantities in buildings for study. Even tragedies like the Library of Alexandria burning down didn't necessarily mean that all that data was lost, if the words had been copied, and sent to another library.

However, while books may be portable, libraries are not, and as we create more and more information, they take up more and more space. Printed material also requires more paper and space when making copies. While micro-fish and other technologies certainly helped ease some of these problems, the main solution of these problems came with the personal computer.

Enter Digital Information
I think it's time to break out the numbers. According to Berkeley's How Much Information? study from 2003, one metric ton of paper (2.7 trees) can store 6 gigabytes of data (they seem to be using 1,000 bytes per kilobyte instead of 1,024 so I will as well). However, that's assuming the information is scanned and stored as compressed images. If we're only talking about plain text, then one metric ton of paper, is 550 megabytes of data. Unfortunately, the study doesn't try to estimate the cost, and the last time I tried to look into the current cost of paper I got lost, so I'll leave that exercise to you if you really must know. This hard drive can store 1 terabyte of data, and the specifications state it weighs 500 grams. That one hard drive could store about 1,818 metric tons of paper. If we go with compressed images instead of plain text, like the study does, then that hard drive can store about 167 metric tons of paper. The library of congress was estimated to be 136 terabytes at the time, and only 10 terabytes of that was on printed material. There were some other interesting statistics in there, such as"

• 5 Exabytes: All words ever spoken by human beings
• 2 Exabytes: Total volume of information generated in 1999
• 532 petabytes: Total size of the internet
  

a petabyte is a thousand terabytes, and an exabyte is a thousand petabytes

I imagine the internet has grown a bit in the past four years. The study goes into a lot of things besides just print, check out the executive summary if you're interested.

Databases in the digital world have gone through their own evolution as the need to access greater amounts of data has grown. From flat, to hierarchical, to relational, we've tried to find more efficient ways to both store and retrieve our data. To make it useful, actionable. Communicable.

The Next Evolution
At this point, you might say we have too much data. What we do have, is to much data for current database models. As more and more of it becomes available not just in a digital form, but available online, how are we going to organize it, find it, communicate it? Databases in an online world are only in their infancy. Our collective knowledge is slowly being collected in a single distributed library called the internet. In such a mountain of information, how do you find the signal and filter out the noise? How do you get people to participate in that attempt in a useful way? Those are difficult questions, questions that web 2.0 might be able to answer. At least, that's the dream.

The Machine

I've been doing some more thinking about the web 2.0 movement and collaboration, when I stumbled across this video. I think it sets the stage fairly well, I'll have more to say about it tomorrow.


The Machine is Us/ing Us

Where Do I Go From Here?

I think this is the most inspired thing I've ever written. I've been putting off posting it, partly because, what do you follow your best with? Also, because I find it depressing, it always makes me wonder if I'll be inspired like this again. Lastly because, if I somehow end up in a relationship again, how do I top this nonsense? I mean, jeebus, I'm socially shooting myself in the foot here (that's how it feels anyway). I'm not sure if it's my best writing, but I say it's my most inspired, because it captured a moment in my life more perfectly then anything else I've written, and the words can bring that back for me so vividly. It was a moment that felt like the cusp of my life at the time. It's one big run-on sentence. I'm not sure what that means.

Written: Fall 2002
Can't seem to get you off my mind, you are there as I am, like a feathery breathe in the night, you quiet me, still me, the breathe within me, I can't seem to get away, I can't seem to find the way, though I try you are always with me, now so long ago when it all began, and I can't seem to remember why I ever tried so hard to leave that which I love so much, like a drunken scream in the night as I did to myself what I thought the world wanted to do to me, but I couldn't, I couldn't stay away, as you were always with me, breathing in the night as I listened to your voice, in the end it will have been worth it all, all the pain and pleasure, all so glorious, and I know that you will be on my mind, as I fade into the darkness, I shall think of you and be happy, but the now, the future, thoughts of those, I cannot fathom, to dare to dream... such exquisite torture, but dangerous for me, and to feel the pessimism come, I cannot tell which is worse, but that you will be with me, makes the answers irrelevant, I do not mean to miss the now for the then or the what will be, but sometimes, the words, the meanings, bring the thoughts to my head, and the whispers bring memories, and I cannot help but feel you as we were together, I cannot help but feel us as we might be again, like a magnet drawn to you, I feel you pull me to you, but I resist and resist, though I sometimes wonder if I should, I cannot help but think it is for the best, though it goes against what I feel, what I want, desire, you are my life in ways I cannot explain, a dream that came to be, the only one that anyone has ever known or ever will, the world should weep to know the truth of this, and I should be the one to let them know, that they are not alone, that the world around them, everything that they have ever dreamed or felt or thought, but they do not know it as I do, and I have not the words to tell them, the beauty in my life fills me to bursting, it is a pain that I cannot express, life is killing me with kindness, that love should hurt so much is a blessing I never expected, I cannot feel this way, and yet I do, it all seems so wonderful that I despair, life and death all mixed together so that I cannot tell when the dreams come upon me where I go, but I know I'll find you there at the end, feeling as I do, knowing as I know, and my arms shall be open, and I will never let go.

Bitter No More

Chemists Find What Makes Coffee Bitter LiveScience

The bitterness apparently isn't from the caffeine. Experiments in woosified coffee beginning forthwith.

Watch Your Own Accident

Ever wondered what it would look like if you got in a car accident? Well wonder no more. Consumer reports will let you view crash test videos by make, model, and year. My car wasn't in the list, but there seem to be plenty of options to pick from.

hat tip: lifehacker

Great Quotes From Articles I've Read Recently

Blogger Sued For Book Review

...we all know that the way to prove that one is not a classic crackpot is to sue a blogger for $15 million over a bad book review in a complaint that misspells "its" and the defendant's name and brags about the plaintiff's affiliation with Andy Warhol and Prince Charles.

China Likes Making Laws

...China has banned Buddhist monks in Tibet from reincarnating without government permission.

Prison Optional

"It’s difficult to make plans for the prison terms when we have no idea who will show up and who won't," said Ellinor Houm

How Do You Allegedly Disguise Yourself?

He allegedly disguised himself by wrapping duct tape around his face. He also apparently pulled his t-shirt around his head Cornholio-style.

Benchslap

Above the Law calls opinions where judges criticize one another "benchslaps,"

This quote isn't that good, but the video is.

In this case, the accident-prone shopper's bad luck was that the store had just installed a surveillance camera.

Simulated Philosophy

...if you accept a pretty reasonable assumption of Dr. Bostrom’s, it is almost a mathematical certainty that we are living in someone else’s computer simulation.

This quote comes from a recent NY Times article. [Update: here is an alternative brief description of the simulation argument] I've heard a couple of people discussing this lately, and decided to look into it myself. I haven't read his simulation argument itself yet, just the news story about it, so I may update this later and completely change my mind if there's something unexpected in it.

The idea of us being inside a computer simulation is certainly an entertaining thought to play with, and it's the basis for good sci-fi flicks like The Matrix and The Thirteenth Floor, but is it really a reasonable philosophy? Much less a "mathematical certainty"? On the surface it doesn't even seem that original, it's just the high-tech version of "What if everything is a dream?" What is the reasonable assumption that brings this all together?

Dr. Bostrom assumes that technological advances could produce a computer with more processing power than all the brains in the world, and that advanced humans, or “posthumans,” could run “ancestor simulations” of their evolutionary history by creating virtual worlds inhabited by virtual people with fully developed virtual nervous systems.

Is this a reasonable assumption? According to the first paper I stumbled across, computers as powerful as brains will be available by 2020. How do we calculate the processing power of a brain? Computers are generally measured in FLOPS (floating point operations per second). Is it fair to compare a computer instruction being executed to a neuron firing? Some aren't even so sure that FLOPS are an accurate measurement of computer performance. It's such a complicated issue, I'm not sure I can accurately picture a computer working at the "instruction level", much less a brain working at the "neuron level".

We do have to start with something though, and it doesn't seem like a terrible comparison. So, if I have 100 billion neurons in my brain, capable of firing 1000 times per second, then my brain has a capacity of 100 Tera-FLOPS, or 100 trillion operations per second. Sadly, it never runs at quite that speed, but then, my computer is usually idling along as well.

I suddenly find myself wondering what would happen if every neuron in my head fired at the same time. Would I die? Get a headache? Would all my bodily functions go off at the same time? Ok, enough of that tangent.

Now, 100 Tera-FLOPS is fairly impressive, but according to the latest supercomputer list, a BlueGene/L machine running at DOE’s Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory is running at 280.6 Tera-FLOPS, and there are two other machines running at over 100 Tera-FLOPS. Obviously, speed alone doesn't cut it, we need the software. If we had the software, if we had a program called brain.exe, that when turned on, behaved in every way like a human brain, and we loaded it on this powerful piece of machinery, would it work? I have no idea. My first instinct is, probably not. I don't think the correlation is any good. It is tempting, the brain to computer mapping, but I'm skeptical that it is a reasonable esitmate.

So, where does that leave our assumption? One day, there probably will be a computer with "more processing power than all the brains in the world", whatever that does mean. However, even that isn't enough computer. What we need is a computer capable of simulating not just every brain in the world, but the behavior of every sub-atomic particle on this planet, and every visible point in space, and all the laws of physics. After all, if they weren't being simulated, we wouldn't see them right? So, let's go ahead and consider, that someday, there will be a computer that powerful. My very rough estimate, if we go down to the Planck length is 1.33*10^85 pieces of information to keep track of, just for this planet (the 280 Tera-FLOPS mentioned earlier is 2.8*10^14).

Moore's law seems to be starting to slow down, but since we're assuming, let's assume it applies to super computers, and that it will stay at a rate of computer speed doubling every 18 months. Geez my math is rusty... let's see... uh, I come up with "a while". Oh yes, and we'll need some software capable of simulating the behavior of all of that information. Hmm, this doesn't really sound like "a pretty reasonable assumption" anymore. It really goes to hell when you try to figure out how such a computer would work. If we're still dealing with bits, how much space will a bit take up? Let's say it's an atom, and we measure the charge of the atom to determine if it's a 1 or a 0. Well, if that bit is representing something at the Planck scale, the theoretical minimum size, then our computer would have to be many, many, many orders of magnitude bigger than the universe itself. If we squeeze our information down to the Planck scale, then our universe model would be actual sized. Oooh, maybe our universe is a computer simulating itself? Eh? Eh?

We haven't even started on the theory itself yet. I'm stuck trying to figure out the astronomical dimensions of the assumption. Trying to picture the entire universe as something that exists at all is mind boggling. Trying to picture the entire thing sitting on the hard drive of a box under someone's coffee table, next to multiple other simulated universes, seems a little ridiculous doesn't it?

There are certainly some ways around these problems, and perhaps they are discussed in the article I haven't read. If you've thought of any interesting solutions to the problems with the "simulation" I'd love to hear them. As far as the New York Times goes though, they seem to really be over selling this philosophy, and I can't imagine why. I'd like to see them run an article about when we'll have computers powerful enough to simulate newspapers that run articles for reasons other then selling copy. Mmmm, meta-news.

Edit: Somehow I left out the part about the article that annoyed me to begin with. At the top of the article the writer states it's a "near mathematical certainty" as I quoted earlier. Further down in the article the philosopher being interviewed states he thinks it's a 20% chance. Now, I'm no rocket scientist...

Derren Brown

Derren Brown does some fascinating things with psychology and hypnosis, like this video where he convinces some middle managers to commit armed robbery.


The Heist

Doing a video search will turn up plenty of other clips.

Lost In Predisposition

The mention of chess refers to a conversation I had once at the end of a chess game. The game ended in a position where I was unable to move any of my pieces without putting myself in check. When he declared victory I said "No one wins when that happens", but he didn't understand that I was referring to other events.

Written: 1999
In the corner searching. Lost in color. Lost in predisposition. Incorrigible habits. The conjugated life form. Never could see it coming. Why do you think I said such things? Wasn't Chess. When you stop moving we all lose. I forfeited. Don't you get it? Lost on the introspective. Wasted on those who aren't. Do you really think I can return the favor? Like as the doppleganger's child consumes. We can be anything we want the second time around. There is no picking up. There is no starting over. That one's no longer with us. Am I a mirror? My eyes are made of glass. What you see is yourself. Can you see me?

Science Spent a Week Goofing Off

Tell Grandpa to get off that mountain.

Major League Umpires, probably racists.

Gas pretends to be alive, gets grounded.

There was a blog post by a 12 yr old reviewing the $100 dollar laptops, and Scott Adams posted a fan letter from a 10 yr old. What do these two things have in common? People in the comments claiming they are hoaxes, because young kids "can't write that good".

In other news, people who comment on Freedom to Tinker and the Dilbert Blog have some dumb ass children. Their kids are also likely to be ugly, and swear in church. That's what I heard.

Gadget Geek meets Body Mod. (evil thumb?)

Science suffers from giant insect denial.

Gigantic Me

This is my one hundredth post. I figured it was about time I had a picture of someone giving someone else the finger. Thanks for everyone's kind words, I'm glad you've enjoyed it so far. I started this blog as a bit of an experiment, and I'm pretty happy with what it's turned into. I expect this is something I'll keep doing for a long time to come.


edit: I wrote this post two weeks ago, but just noticed it wasn't published. I'm not sure if it counts as the 100th post still, since I don't think anyone one saw it. Oops.

This Is Not A Notebook

While going through some of my old notebooks, I noticed that one of them had a price tag still on it. The price tag says Kmart on it, and is for 33 cents. For 70 sheets of letter sized paper, that seems like quite a bargain. Being that this particular notebook has my notes from 6th grade history in it, I guess I shouldn't be surprised. Sadly, said notes contain no commentary, but only boring facts about stuff that happened. Although there is one page that threw me for a loop. My notes say:

V. Other Americans
"hi" marijuana LSD
counterrevolution
"flower children" "gentle people"
love brotherhood communal living
the consumers champion
ralph nader general motors
"unsafe at any speed"
"nader's raiders"

That's right, my school book apparently had a chapter on hippies and Mr. Nader. The "Other Americans" chapter.

But back to the price of things. I decided to hop on Kmart's website, and try to find out how much this same spiral notebook would cost today. My first search was for paper, and that was close, but not what I was looking for. Then I tried a search for notebook.

Oh, right, laptops. Am I the only person still calling spiral binders of paper notebooks? Am I the only person who still uses notebooks?

Next step, categories. Hmm, no category for school supplies, or office supplies. What the heck? I'll just search for pencil, and see what category that is in.

Ah yes, of course, pencils are in the Computers & Electronics category, why didn't I think of that? Clicking on the Computers & Electronics link, took me to the Office Equipment & Supplies page. Well now it's just a challenge. The Kmart website is obviously some sort of test, a maze of unlikely synonyms, meant to stump the unwary. I accept your challenge Kmart. I will find your paper.

Underneath the apparently secret Office Equipment & Supplies category, is the School Supplies sub-category. Following this link not only makes Office Equipment & Supplies a subcategory of Computers & Electronics like some strange category acrobatics, but actually shows me a picture of what I'm looking for:
Yes, a picture of notebooks, labeled as the Dr. Grip Mechanical Pencil. Clicking on the picture takes me to a page with the same picture and name, as well as this description.

Dr. Grip Mechanical Pencils feature a revolutionary wide contoured that reduces required gripping power and alleviates writing stress.
Product images may differ from actual product appearance.

Yes, I'd say that's a "revolutionary wide contoured". In addition, your brazen disregard for the rules of the English language, indeed, perhaps even for meaning itself, have made this experience feel like a somnambulistic journey, I can almost picture this möbius like item writing on itself in an eternal statement of "I am", and it has opened my eyes to why you jerks closed all your stores.

So, apparently notebooks have gone up in price 2,000% and are now called pencils, but I can no longer recall what I planned on doing with that knowledge once I got it. However, I do know that Ralph Nader should totally start the "Other Americans" party. Sure, Green is in right now, but "Other Americans" has some serious potential.

This Time I Will Get A Different Result

This morning I had six voicemails waiting for me at work. They were all from the same lady, and they all basically said "I'm sorry, I must have the wrong number", except for the last one, where she also stated "I'm from out of town, and I'm trying to reach someone. I won't call this number again, I apologize." The messages were all left on Saturday, between 9:30 am till 4:30 pm.

Aside from the absurdity of leaving a message to apologize for leaving the very message you're apologizing for, I had to wonder why did it take seven hours and six phone calls to decide to stop calling that number? I can picture her, staring at a peice of paper with my number and someone elses name written next to it, talking herself into trying it again. The paper says it's the right number, maybe those past five times she just misdialed. Maybe it's a glitch at the phone company, crossed wires, or solar flares. Is the number of times you're willing to beat your head against a wall an accurate measurement of how important something is? My guess is that someone died, and I got caught in the periphery. What a lovely thought to start my week with.

The behavior really isn't that strange, we've all done it. Think of the last time you lost your keys and couldn't find them right way. Chances are you looked in the same place multiple times even though you knew you had just looked there a minute before with no success. Sometimes other people will even talk you into doing it.

"Did you check on your nightstand?"
"Yes, they aren't there."
"Maybe you should check again to make sure."
"I said they aren't there."
"Do you want me to check the nightstand?"
"Fine, I'll go check it again"

Sometimes that conversation is followed with "I found them, they were on the nightstand." Is it those exceptions that make us doubt ourselves? Have we learned to distrust our own senses, our memories? Why do we keep checking the nightstand? Sometimes we do make mistakes, overlook something. Going back to cover unsuccessful territory a second time doesn't seem that unreasonable. What about three times? What about six?

I myself have recently done this. I believe I had mentioned that the "With" book was something I had been looking for after I started this blog. Over a period of two weeks, I looked for it probably on 5 different nights, for about 5 minutes each time. On searches two through five I covered territory I knew had already been covered, but I did it anyway. I didn't keep track of how many times I looked in places I knew were the wrong place to look, but it must have been a lot. I didn't expect to find the book that way, but I still did it. I banged my head against the wall, because I wanted to find the book, you could say I just failed on purpose because I didn't know what else to do.

That makes me wonder how often I'm behaving this way. It's pretty easy to recognize when it happens with the span of 10 minutes, or even a couple weeks, but what about over the span of years? I had mentioned briefly in I Wish My Life Was Recorded that I worried sometimes that I had forgotten the mistakes I'd made and was doomed to repeat them. Maybe remembering doesn't even matter. What if I'm repeating my mistakes on purpose, because I don't know what else to do?

Another News Day

I was going to post this last night, but I was busy catching up on my lightning quota. So, instead of a Stream of Consciousness post, here's all the news items I meant to post something inspiring and thoughtful on, but didn't. Where does all the time go?

This is what happens when you get lost, and the people you know are technology-giants.

Cute & Creepy?

Here is a bunch of odd ocean life. About half-way down is the Ocean Sunfish, which I believe, could be called giant.

Here is a video from some Disney safari. It is action packed. I believe the tour guide says "I've never seen this before" about five times.

More animal stuff, I seem to be on an animal kick this week.

This is a great set of picture showing the difference in size between different planetary bodies.

I had mentioned previously about a pseudononymous story about terrible behavior from American soldiers in Iraq. He actually wrote three stories for the New Republic. I've been trying to hold off on following up until things concluded, and though I'm not entirely sure if they have, here's how things have unfolded:

• The author identified himself as Scott Beauchamp, to help lend credence to his stories.
• This of course kicked off a formal investigation.
• Someone found his old blog.
• The New Republic made a statement that basically said they had fact checked the story and were going to stand behind it (although, yes, some parts may not have been true).
• The Weekly Standard reported that the official investigation had concluded, when Scott signed a statement recanting what he had written for the New Republic.
• The New Republic said, "That's not what we heard."
• The Washington Post weighed in.
• Currently things seem to be in a sort of stale mate, where it pretty much looks like he made up or "edited" the stories for the New Republic, but the New Republic hasn't issued any retractions that I've heard of.

The whole thing is great example of why I don't trust the journalists manning the floodgates.

What Is A Civil Union?

In the gay marriage debate, the concept of a civil union comes up a lot. FactCheck has written up a explanation of the difference between civil unions and marriage is. They are often said to be functionally equivalent, but there are a couple important differences between them that usually don't come up in the debates.

TED

The video I linked to in the genomics post, as you may have noticed from the intro, was from TED. TED is a conference I think I've heard mentioned a couple times over the years but have never been exposed to. They seem to have all of their talks from April online. It's not all science, so even if that's not something you're interested in, chances are there's someone smart who said something you'd find interesting.

Say It Ain't So France

Come on, seriously, what has become of your country? This can't be for real can it?


The Majority of French People Are Dumb - Watch more free videos

Future Tech

In the video I linked to yesterday about genomics, one of main points of the speech was that genomics was the science of the future. I actually disagree with that, I think it's important, but I think it's only one part of a combination of things that will define our future from a technology stand point. Along with genomics, I would include nanotechnology, and quantum computing. I think the combination of these sciences will have a large affect on our everyday lives, on the scale of the personal computer. One other thing that is bound to come with these technologies, is fear. And in the case of nanotech, has already begun.

Fear isn't a bad thing in itself. In fact, it can come in quite handy, say when you're out walking in the savanna, and you see lions in the distance. Or your car stalls on train tracks and your seat belt is stuck. In the case of technology though, fear never seems to be very helpful. New technology seems to always inspire a fear of the unknown, usually expressed as the possible "loss of our humanity". Over time we've had fear of automobiles, pacemakers, pig valve transplants, vaccinations, computers, fluoride, and robots, just to name a few. Name any technological invention, and someone was probably afraid of it.

I spent about a half hour searching the internet trying to find some anti-tech stuff to link to, when I realized how ironic I was being. The point is, new technology tends to be demonized in the beginning. That repeating pattern seems to have developed into a general distrust of technology in some people. If you ask someone what technology has done for the world, some will respond "pollution" (or maybe "co2" these days).

It's easy to understand how something can go wrong. It's not always as easy to see the benefits of emerging science. Genetic manipulation is going to cause a lot of fear. Biotech augmentation? Probably more of the same. Tiny machines you can't even see? The continuing quest for artificial intelligence? Cloning?

Science certainly isn't blameless, or harmless. There can be unintended side effects. Those problems that do arise can be solved in one of two ways, by improving the tech, or abandoning it. When people talk about the "have"s and the "have not"s, that's always what I think of. The one's that embraced the future, and the one's that turned their backs on it. Kind of like human serfs, and their cyborg overlords. Let me know which side you'll be on in the comments.

Genomics

I came across this lecture on the study of genomes that I thought was pretty good. I'll probably have more to say about it tomorrow.

Musicovery

I came across an interesting website called Musicovery. Anything that tries to match music to mood is OK in my book. While it doesn't have the permanence that creating a Pandora radio station does, I think it's still worth checking out.

Someone Elses Words

Another guest contribution that someone wrote in one of my journals. Occasionally someone that doesn't usually write feels inspired to add something, I've always taken some pride in that. Also, the line "love is the absence of loneliness, and I am lonely absent of love", was borrowed, that's totally mine (just for the record). The phrase "To thy known self be true" though, is not mine, but I wish it was, I think it's a brilliant misquote. I thought it was intentional and clever, but doing a search for the misquote returns a bunch of results. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that there are a bunch of people misquoting Shakespeare. Let's just say that everyone's being clever. For the rest of it I'm still not sure if it's entirely introspective or if part of it was a critique of me. I guess that's why I like it.

Written: 1999, by my room mate at the time

Hate!
Hate is where I dwell.
Pain is what I sell.
The Hate is not of others, but of self.
Do I Hate myself?
NO!
What I haven't become I Hate.
A creature to scared to love am I.
To the world I am hard.
But the world cannot see my shadow.
I am a coward, who hurts those that I love.
Love! What is love?
Yes, Love is the absence of Loneliness, and I am lonely absent of love that must make me
The pain I bring to others is Pain I bring myself.
"To thy known self be True"
Lie is what I do.
Now I've accepted my emotions and painful they may be
Stronger do I feel.
A word not spoken in so long.
Now it may very well be to late. So what I say my friend is life Deals painful blows.
Sometimes you do it to yourself. To hold it in is to put up walls, and these walls must be torn down.
Accept Humility and walk away a greater being.

He actually left one other note for me. On one page I had written:

Auto-Sadist
The individual who derives pleasure by inflicting pain upon himself

Auto-Masochist
The individual who derives pleasure from the pain they inflict upon themself

I guess I was trying to figure out how to classify someone. Below that he wrote:

Auto-matic
The psychopath who shifts himself

Russia Claims North Pole in Global Race for Oil | LiveScience

Russia Claims North Pole in Global Race for Oil LiveScience: "Two Russian vessels have reached the North Pole and will attempt to plant a Russian flag on the Arctic seafloor "

Apparently the arctic contains all kinds of geological goodies, and Putin wants them. Good luck with that Puty.