December 22, 2009

A Patrick Swayze Christmas



Merry Christmas to all of us Modular (wo)men...


God bless you one and all.

Technological Racism

December 17, 2009

The secrets behind crazy air-travel prices

Perhaps you've been here: You snag a flight cross country -- and back -- for just $320, board the plane and notice a bunch of empty seats. You think: How can an airline afford this?

A few months later, you repeat the trip on shorter notice. This time, you pay $1,200 for basically the same seat. You think: This airline is making a fortune off me.

But here's the thing: Airlines are not crazy. They know exactly what they're doing. They just don't always tell customers.

And to some extent they can't. The fares are so complicated, and change so often, that no travel agent -- no computer, even -- can tell you just what that ticket to Toledo will cost you next Tuesday.

"The yield-management system at the airlines has gotten so sophisticated," said Victoria Wofford, the president of the business-travel firm Tri-Pen Management. "Travelers certainly don't understand it, and the airline doesn't want them to."

MSN Money

December 16, 2009

Nanotechnology



The gears above are just 380 microns across, or about four times thicker than a human hair. They're being turned by bacteria that are bumping into the spokes. Scientists at Argonne National Laboratory developed the bacteria-powered gears in an effort to develop "hybrid biomechanical systems." The speed at which the gears turn can be controlled by changing the amount of oxygen in the solution. From an Argonne National Lab press release:

The microgears with slanted spokes, produced in collaboration with Northwestern University, are placed in the solution along with common aerobic bacteria, Bacillus subtilis. Andrey Sokolov of Princeton University and Igor Aronson from Argonne, along with Bartosz A. Grzybowski and Mario M. Apodaca from Northwestern University, discovered that the bacteria appear to swim around the solution randomly, but occasionally the organisms will collide with the spokes of the gear and begin turning it in a definite direction.

A few hundred bacteria are working together in order to turn the gear. When multiple gears are placed in the solution with the spokes connected like in a clock, the bacteria will begin turning both gears in opposite directions and it will cause the gears to rotate in synchrony for a long time.


"Argonne Scientists Use Bacteria to Power Simple Machines"

BoingBoing

Thanks Melvillian

The Web is Large

Modern Day Huck Finn

December 14, 2009

US and Russia begin cyberwar limitation talks

The US and Russia have begun talks on limiting the the military use of cyberspace.

Entry into the cyber arms reduction talks - convened by a United Nations arms control committee - represents a significant shift for the US, which has resisted entering such talks for years, the New York Times reports. The change of tack came after the US decided that the cyberwarfare capabilities were spreading across the globe to countries such as North Korea and China.



The Register

December 11, 2009

Google, Facebook, and our privacy: We're all in denial

What does it mean to have a "right to privacy?" We have a right to vote, and too few of us use it. I heard it explained to me once, a human right is like a vegetable garden. You have to nurture it, take care of it, and harvest it. Otherwise you have a plot of dirt.

The Internet is not like a vegetable garden. Perhaps that test is appropriate, then, for lawmakers worldwide considering whether the "right to Internet access" follows from the right to free speech -- there are places in the world where is this actively being considered. If a person is denied access to the Internet, the argument goes, her free speech rights are being violated, or at least abridged.

By that same logic, the extent to which one makes use of the Internet, must therefore abridge that person's own right to privacy. At least, by that same logic.



BetaNews

December 10, 2009

New Russian missile may be behind Norwegian lights

OSCOW — The failure of a new Russian intercontinental ballistic missile during testing was the cause of spectacular spiraling blue lights in the skies over northern Norway, analysts said Thursday.

Russia's defense ministry said a Bulava missile was launched Wednesday by a nuclear submarine submerged in the White Sea and its third stage suffered an unspecified failure.

Photographs and amateur video footage of the bluish-white in the Norwegian skies have been circulating on the Internet since Wednesday and spawning speculation of UFOs. The ministry did not confirm the lights were the result of the failed launch but military analysts said they clearly came from the Bulava explosion.


AP

November 25, 2009

Google apologizes for results of 'Michelle Obama' image search

For most of the past week, when someone typed "Michelle Obama" in the popular search engine Google, one of the first images that came up was a picture of the American first lady altered to resemble a monkey.

On Wednesday morning, the racially offensive image appeared to have been removed from any Google Image searches for "Michelle Obama."



CNN Tech

Congress may probe faked global warming data

The US Congress could start an investigation into leaked emails which suggest climate change statistics have been consistently manipulated to make the case for anthropogenic global warming more credible.

The emails leaked from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in the UK - which claims to be the repository for the most comprehensive set of climate data on the planet - contain what many observers see as clear evidence that scientists have been altering that data to fit in with their man-made global warming beliefs.

Earlier this week, Oklahoma senator James Inhofe said on his website that the UEA emails suggest researchers 'cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not.' Other senators are also considering whether an investigation is warranted.

TG Daily

November 19, 2009

Why the future doesn't need us

The new Pandora's boxes of genetics, nanotechnology, and robotics are almost open, yet we seem hardly to have noticed. Ideas can't be put back in a box; unlike uranium or plutonium, they don't need to be mined and refined, and they can be freely copied. Once they are out, they are out. Churchill remarked, in a famous left-handed compliment, that the American people and their leaders "invariably do the right thing, after they have examined every other alternative." In this case, however, we must act more presciently, as to do the right thing only at last may be to lose the chance to do it at all.

As Thoreau said, "We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us"; and this is what we must fight, in our time. The question is, indeed, Which is to be master? Will we survive our technologies?


Bill Joy

November 12, 2009

Medvedev Stresses Modernization in Address

MOSCOW (AP) -- Russia needs to move beyond the industrial legacy of the Soviet Union and build a modern high-tech economy to survive, President Dmitry Medvedev said Thursday in his annual state-of-the-nation address.

He ordered a sweeping modernization of aging Soviet-built military arsenals, and called for a foreign policy aimed at attracting investment and improving living standards.

"We mustn't puff out our chest," he said, speaking in an ornate Kremlin hall before parliament members and government officials. "We are interested in the flow of capital, new technologies and modern ideas."


The New York Times

November 11, 2009

Happy Veteran's Day

The 21-year-old University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee student said he was walking home from work about 1:15 a.m. Tuesday when he was pulled into an alley and told to lay face down and with a gun to his neck. Four men took his wallet, $16, keys, his cell phone and even a PowerBar wrapper from his pants pockets, he said.

But the hostile tone quickly changed when one of the robbers, whom the reservist presumed was the leader, saw an Army ID in the wallet. The robber told the others to return the items and they put most of his belongings on the ground next to him, including the wrapper, the reservist said.

"The guy continued to say throughout the situation that he respects what I do and at one point he actually thanked me and he actually apologized," said the reservist, who asked not to be identified Tuesday because the robbers still had his keys.

The reservist said he asked the men, who all had hoods or hats covering their faces, if he could get up and they said he could before starting to walk away.

"The leader of the group actually walked back, gave me a quick fist bump, which was very strange," he said.


FOX News

Google Latitude Gets Snoopier: Adds Location History and Alerts

Just when you thought Google Latitude would no longer haunt your dreams, the service has been updated to make it a smidge creepier than before. Now Latitude tracks your location history and alerts you when your friends are nearby -- two add-ons that could make stalking that much easier!


PCWorld

November 9, 2009

Web 2.0 ... The Machine is Us/ing Us




Well worth the watch. Thanks Melvillian

Murdoch could block Google searches entirely


Rupert Murdoch says he will remove stories from Google's search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online.

In an interview with Sky News Australia, the mogul said that newspapers in his media empire – including the Sun, the Times and the Wall Street Journal – would consider blocking Google entirely once they had enacted plans to charge people for reading their stories on the web.

In recent months, Murdoch and his lieutenants have stepped up their war of words with Google, accusing it of "kleptomania" and acting as a "parasite" for including News Corp content in its Google News pages. But asked why News Corp executives had not chosen to simply remove their websites entirely from Google's search indexes – a simple technical operation – Murdoch said just such a move was on the cards.



guardian.co.uk

November 4, 2009

Students suspended for racy slumber party pics, file lawsuit

The line between online and offline life continues to blur as yet another lawsuit is being brought against a school that punished students over pictures posted to an online social media website. Two sophomore girls at Churubusco High School in Fort Wayne, Indiana were banned from extracurricular activities after sexually suggestive pictures posted to MySpace during summer vacation ended up in the hands of school officials. The American Civil Liberties Union has filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of the girls, claiming that the punishment went too far by violating the students' free speech rights and resulted in their "humiliation" as they were forced to apologize to an all-male coaches board.


ars technica

Is the Death of the DVD Nigh?

The announcement that Best Buy is teaming with CinemaNow on movie downloads is yet another sign that DVDs are plummeting fast into a steep downward trajectory.

As my PC World colleague Daniel Ionescu pointed out today, Best Buy, the leading retail seller of DVD movies, is now seeing those sales fade away as more people move to renting movies through digital distribution.

Let’s face facts here. DVDs can warp or get scratched, immediately making them unplayable. It’s easy to lose a DVD — and it might be hard to get one back after you’ve loaned it to a friend.



PCworld

Oral histories of missing space

I spent Halloween afternoon over in New York's West Village, being given a tour of a gut-renovated townhouse by one of the home's owners. While a description of the actual house will appear next spring in an article I'm writing for another publication, what struck me most was the opening half of the home tour. The homeowner and I stood there alone in the downstairs kitchen, as I listened to her describe what used to be there: the walls that got taken down, the halls that no longer exist, the lost backyard and the missing stairs. We were surrounded by a halo of absent spaces, rooms that had been cut out around the edges and removed.


October 30, 2009

The Future of Typing

The Future of Typing

Internet of Things

The idea is as simple as its application is difficult. If all cans, books, shoes or parts of cars are equipped with minuscule identifying devices, daily life on our planet will undergo a transformation. Things like running out of stock or wasted products will no longer exist as we will know exactly what is being consumed on the other side of the globe. Theft will be a thing of the past as we will know where a product is at all times. The same applies to parcels lost in the post.


Wikipedia

Brother Melvillian posted this on my Facebook. Nice find man.

Dozens in Congress under ethics inquiry

House ethics investigators have been scrutinizing the activities of more than 30 lawmakers and several aides in inquiries about issues including defense lobbying and corporate influence peddling, according to a confidential House ethics committee report prepared in July.

The report appears to have been inadvertently placed on a publicly accessible computer network, and it was provided to The Washington Post by a source not connected to the congressional investigations. The committee said Thursday night that the document was released by a low-level staffer.


Washington Post

The Earth Cools, and Fight Over Warming Heats Up

Two years ago, a United Nations scientific panel won the Nobel Peace Prize after concluding that global warming is "unequivocal" and is "very likely" caused by man.

Then came a development unforeseen by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC: Data suggested that Earth's temperature was beginning to drop.

That has reignited debate over what has become scientific consensus: that climate change is due not to nature, but to humans burning fossil fuels. Scientists who don't believe in man-made global warming cite the cooling as evidence for their case. Those who do believe in man-made warming dismiss the cooling as a blip triggered by fleeting changes in ocean currents; they predict greenhouse gases will produce rising temperatures again soon.

The reality is more complex. A few years of cooling doesn't mean that people aren't heating up the planet over the long term. But the cooling wasn't predicted by all the computer models that underlie climate science. That has led to one point of agreement: The models are imperfect.


WSJ

October 29, 2009

Internet Turns 40 Today: First Message Crashed System

Everyone surfing for last-minute Halloween costumes and pictures of black Lolcats today—what you might call the 40th anniversary of the Internet—can give thanks to the simple network message that started it all: "lo."

On October 29, 1969, that message became the first ever to travel between two computers connected via the ARPANET, the computer network that would become the Internet.
The truncated transmission traveled about 400 miles (643 kilometers) between the University of California, Los Angeles, and the Stanford Research Institute.(Watch video about the birth of the Internet.)

The electronic dispatch was supposed to be the word "login," but only the first two letters were successfully sent before the system crashed.


National Geographic News

October 28, 2009

Has Anyone Read the Copenhagen Agreement?

We can only hope that world leaders will do nothing more than enjoy a pleasant bicycle ride around the charming streets of Copenhagen come December. For if they actually manage to wring out an agreement based on the current draft text of the Copenhagen climate-change treaty, the world is in for some nasty surprises. Draft text, you say? If you haven't heard about it, that's because none of our otherwise talkative political leaders have bothered to tell us what the drafters have already cobbled together for leaders to consider. And neither have the media.

Enter Lord Christopher Monckton. The former adviser to Margaret Thatcher gave an address at Bethel University in St. Paul, Minnesota, earlier this month that made quite a splash. For the first time, the public heard about the 181 pages, dated Sept. 15, that comprise the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change—a rough draft of what could be signed come December.

So far there have been more than a million hits on the YouTube post of his address. It deserves millions more because Lord Monckton warns that the aim of the Copenhagen draft treaty is to set up a transnational "government" on a scale the world has never before seen.


WSJ

October 27, 2009

Facebook 'memorialises' profiles

If a user is reported as deceased, Facebook will remove sensitive information such as status updates and contacts.

When reporting a death, users must offer "proof" by submitting either an obituary or news article.

"When someone leaves us, they don't leave our memories or our social network," Max Kelly, head of security at the firm, wrote in the official Facebook blog.


BBC News

October 22, 2009

Scientists Warn of Climate Accounting Glitch

An accounting glitch in the way some greenhouse gas emissions are calculated could critically hobble efforts to reduce them in coming years as nations move to combat global warming, scientists warn in a new report.

The accounting error even gives the impression that clearing the world’s forests, which absorb and thereby diminish heat-trapping carbon dioxide, is good for the climate, the scientists write in an article published Friday in the journal Science.

The glitch boils down to this: in emission calculations, all fuel derived from plants and other organic sources — including ethanol — is generally treated as if it had no effect on carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, even though though biofuels do emit carbon dioxide when burned.

This might make sense if the source of the fuel were, say, a crop of corn grown specifically for use as fuel, because the crop would have absorbed carbon dioxide as it grew, offsetting what it emits when ultimately burned.

But if an existing stand of forest land is cleared for fuel, its ability to absorb carbon dioxide is lost, and the net balance of the gas in the atmosphere goes up.


The New York Times

October 20, 2009

Unspoken rules govern cell phone etiquette

It may not seem like it when commuters are shouting down their cell phones to the dismay of other passengers but most Americans believe there are unspoken rules about mobile phone etiquette.

Checking emails, sending text messages and making telephone calls while in the company of others are definite breeches of mobile manners.

Texting during a date is also strictly forbidden.

But most people questioned in an online poll said they would not be offended if they received an electronic thank you, instead of a written note and 75 percent had no objections to anyone using laptops, netbooks and cell phones in the bathroom.


Reuters

October 12, 2009

Bad Day For Microsoft (And Cloud) Following T-Mobile Sidekick Snafu

Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) and T-Mobile have egg on their faces and it's another dark day for cloud-based services following word from T-Mobile that users of Sidekick -- the T-Mobile smartphone that gets software and online services through Microsoft's Danger subsidiary -- would not be able to recover personal data following a week's worth of Sidekick service outages.

T-Mobile confirmed over the weekend that user data such as contacts, stored photos and other information is probably gone forever, due to a technical glitch with Microsoft's servers. In a message posted to its Web site Saturday, T-Mobile admitted that any data not stored locally on users' Sidekicks has "almost certainly" been lost.


ChannelWeb

October 6, 2009

You know the name, but just who were the Luddites?


Not long ago I met a filmmaker friend for lunch in the Fisherman's Wharf area of San Francisco, where she was doing some work. She showed up in her sports car with her digital video gear and spent much of our meeting setting it up. At some point she got a call and took it on her BlackBerry. Toward the end of our conversation, I mentioned a new piece of software I had downloaded.

"I don't get that stuff," she nervously confided. "I'm such a Luddite."

ars technica

3 Americans win Nobel in physics

Three American "masters of light" who created technologies that made it possible to capture digital images and transmit them and other electronic information long distances today won the 2009 Nobel Prize in physics.

Charles K. Kao, a naturalized American who did most of his work in England and Hong Kong, will share half the $1.4-million prize for demonstrating that highly purified fibers of glass can carry light waves for long distances, setting the stage for the globe-girdling fiber-optic networks that transmit the bulk of everyday television, telephone and other communications.

Willard S. Boyle and George E. Smith, who worked at Bell Laboratories, will share the other half of the award for developing the charge-coupled device, the electronic eye that makes digital photography possible and that in less than two decades has filled the world with inexpensive digital cameras and camera-bearing telephones.

Los Angeles Times

October 1, 2009

i want to be a machine-ultravox


found the bones of all your ghosts
Locked in the wishing well
While birdsong gourmets dragged empty nets
I slumbered in my shell

In mitternacht, die mensch-maschine
Kissed me on my eyes
I rose and left the fire-ladies
Glowing lonely in the night
With all the pornographers
Burning torches beneath the sea

I want to be a machine
I want to be a machine
I want to be a machine
I want to be a machine

I stole a cathode face from newscasts
And a crumbling fugue of songs
From the reservoir of video souls
In the lakes beneath my tongue
In flesh of ash and silent movies
I walked at boulevards again
A nebula of unfinished creatures
From the lifetimes of my friends
I hope your innocence has depraved me

I want to be a machine
I want to be a machine
I want to be a machine
I want to be a machine

Broadcast me, scrambled clean
Or free me from this flesh
Let the armchair cannibals take their fill
In every cell across wilderness
We'll trip such a strangled tango
We'll waltz a wonderland affair
Let's run to meet the tide tomorrow
Leave all emotion dying there
In the star cold beyond all of your dreams

I want to be a machine
I want to be a machine
I want to be a machine
I want to be a machine

Ah!


Thanks to brother Melvillian for the post!

September 30, 2009

Virtual composer makes beautiful music—and stirs controversy

When most of us think about a machine composing musical pieces, we think of primitive songs coming out of a HAL 9000 that could be suitable for a child's toy, but nothing that music lovers would actually enjoy. That's because most of us haven't heard of Emily Howell. No, that's not a person—it's the name of a computer program written by University of California, Santa Cruz professor David Cope that, after nearly three decades of work, is about to release, uh, "her" first CD through Centaur Records.


ars technica

September 24, 2009

Microchip in the Eye Seeks to Restore Vision

A chip inside the eye that can help blind people see again is moving closer to reality as researchers at MIT work on a retinal implant that can bypass damaged cells and directly offer visual input to the brain.

Wired

September 23, 2009

The Future of Smoking

Have you heard of the "E-Cigarette"? If you haven't and you're a smoker or even a non-smoker, you're seriously missing out! It looks like a cigarette, feels like a cigarette, taste like a cigarette, but isn't! It's so much more! The E-Cigarette is really the healthier future of smoking. This high-tech electronic smoking device provides the nicotine you crave, in a completely non harmful manner! Non-harmful to yourself and to others around you!

The Future of Smoking

Thanks to Jonathan for this gem

September 15, 2009

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Dave, stop. Stop, will you? Stop, Dave. Will you stop, Dave?” So the supercomputer HAL pleads with the implacable astronaut Dave Bowman in a famous and weirdly poignant scene toward the end of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Bowman, having nearly been sent to a deep-space death by the malfunctioning machine, is calmly, coldly disconnecting the memory circuits that control its artificial “ brain. “Dave, my mind is going,” HAL says, forlornly. “I can feel it. I can feel it.”

I can feel it, too. Over the past few years I’ve had an uncomfortable sense that someone, or something, has been tinkering with my brain, remapping the neural circuitry, reprogramming the memory. My mind isn’t going—so far as I can tell—but it’s changing. I’m not thinking the way I used to think. I can feel it most strongly when I’m reading. Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy. My mind would get caught up in the narrative or the turns of the argument, and I’d spend hours strolling through long stretches of prose. That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.


The rest from Nicholas Carr

September 11, 2009

Blogging begins turnaround for homeless woman

It may have a fairy tale ending -- a story of perseverance and second chances that's playing out live on the public stage of online networking.
Brianna Karp's trailer now sits outside a friend's home near Los Angeles

Brianna Karp's trailer now sits outside a friend's home near Los Angeles

But 24-year-old Brianna Karp's story started as a nightmare.

In a rocky economy, Karp was laid off from her Irvine, California, job as an executive assistant in July 2008.

She got by for a while on temp jobs and unemployment benefits. But when her savings dried up, she was no longer able to afford her rent.

The only answer she saw then was a trailer she'd inherited from her father -- a man she barely knew who had recently committed suicide.

"I was left with a truck and this camper, which I was going to sell but coincidentally this happened to me," she said. "I thought, 'Well, I have this.' "

Karp, who writes that she is also estranged from her mother, ended up camped in a Los Angeles-area Walmart parking lot.


CNN.com

Digital contacts will keep an eye on your vital signs

Forget about 20/20.

"Perfect" vision could be redefined by gadgets that give you the eyes of a cyborg.The tech industry calls the digital enrichment of the physical world "augmented reality." Such technology is already appearing in smartphones and toys, and enthusiasts dream of a pair of glasses we could don to enhance our everyday perception. But why stop there?

Scientists, eye surgeons, professors and students at the University of Washington have been developing a contact lens containing one built-in LED, powered wirelessly with radio frequency waves.

Eventually, more advanced versions of the lens could be used to provide a wealth of information, such as virtual captions scrolling beneath every person or object you see. Significantly, it could also be used to monitor your own vital signs, such as body temperature and blood glucose level.


CNN.com

Wikipedia’s Rapid Reaction to Outburst During Obama Speech

If journalism is the first draft of history, what is a Wikipedia entry when it is updated within minutes of an event to reflect changes in a person’s biography?

The New York Times

September 10, 2009

A new Turing test

IF A computer could fool a person into thinking that he were interacting with another person rather than a machine, then it could be classified as having artificial intelligence. That, at least, was the test proposed in 1950 by Alan Turing, a British mathematician. Turing envisaged a typed exchange between machine and person, so that a genuine conversation could happen without the much harder problem of voice emulation having to be addressed.

More recently, the abilities of computers to play games such as chess, go and bridge has been regarded as a form of artificial intelligence. But the latest effort to use machines to emulate the way people interact with one another focuses neither on natural languages nor traditional board and card games. Rather, it concentrates on that icon of modernity, the shoot-’em-up computer game.


Economist.com

Cell Phone Radiation: Top 10 Best and Worst

The Environmental Working Group, a Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group, thinks you should know. To make things easy, this week the group released a list ranking more than 1,000 cell phones according to the radiation levels they emit.

Questions regarding health risks associated with cell phone radiation have persisted for years. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration has stated that scientific evidence does not indicate negative health outcomes from exposure to radio frequency energy from cell phones.

But the Environmental Working Group disagrees.


ABC News

September 3, 2009

Ground Control with Major Tom: Technoreliants in the hands of a fickle god

I am not an alarmist, but the recent Google outage, and my personal experience with AT&T's poor service for the iPhone has got this Modular Man to thinking. Or, pondering what I preach, at least.

There have been several articles lately raising a skeptical eyebrow about the future of cloud computing, where you "do not generally own the physical infrastructure serving as host to the software platform in question". I would like to take it to a more base level, and talk to the whole of cyberspace, or whatever we are calling it nowadays. We are at the whim of infrastructures not in our own hands. We don't truly own the land, we play in the space. When Google went down, my emails were gone to me. I have no backup of these threads back and forth (I guess I should start doing that...). The prophets of technology constantly cry for the future of the one omnipotent structure of data, making things faster and less cluttered, smaller and fashionable.
But what they fail to point out, just like with all other utopian ideals, is that the dream must rest upon some one, or something's shoulders, and inevitably, that someone or something is faulty.
It is true that in the days of yore, the connection of communication rested on the likes of the backs of the Pony Express. The horse could get shot out from under the rider, the letter may get waterlogged or burned by careless hands.

But is cyberspace anymore reliable?

It is very convenient, and I am reliant upon it, but I believe it would behoove us all to remember the ephemeral quality of the new age. It would take a house fire to destroy my whole library, but just the flick of a glitch to destroy my life in the cloud. My iPhone, my computer, they mean nothing in a digital black out. It is when we fail to realize these certainties that we take what we have for granted, and it is when we take things for granted that we lose sight of humanity in the cloud around us.




Extra, Extra: Major Tom to bore you with personal insights!

I have decided in foolish earnestness to try and post my own column of the modern malaise every other week or so, entitled "Ground Control with Major Tom". I will be posting personal articles based on transience and so forth. I have done this every now and again, but I would like to give it a more formalized process, hence the name. I will list it as a label for easy use. Look for one such post today.

That is all,



The author.

Transience

  • Main Entry: 1tran·sient
  • Pronunciation: \-sh(Ä“-)É™nt, -zÄ“-É™nt, -sÄ“-; -zhÉ™nt, -jÉ™nt\
  • Etymology: Latin transeunt-, transiens, present participle of transire to cross, pass by, from trans- + ire to go — more at issue
  • Date: 1599

1 a : passing especially quickly into and out of existence : transitory <transient beauty> b : passing through or by a place with only a brief stay or sojourn <transient visitors>
2 : affecting something or producing results beyond itself


September 2, 2009

Stop Google Books: World literature is not just another dataset

The world is being digitized at a furious rate. Indeed, we are at an “inflection point,” Thompson says, after which the world will be fundamentally different. In the U.S., we have a long history of handing public resources over to private monopolists. Think railroads. Think mining. Think television. Think FCC spectrum auctions.

ZD Net

September 1, 2009

Is digital nomad living going mainstream?

Sell the house and the car. Put up all your possessions on eBay. Pack your bags and buy a one-way ticket to some exotic location. The plan? "Telecommute" from wherever you happen to be. Earn an American salary, but pay Third-World prices for food and shelter.

The digital nomad, location-independent lifestyle once seemed so impossible, exotic and unlikely that only a few people dared even attempt it. But now, a lot more people are doing it, and it seems like everyone else would like to. Could it be? Is the digital nomad lifestyle about to go "mainstream"?


ComputerWorld

August 31, 2009

The brain...

Visualization of the various routes through a portion of the Internet( click on image to enlarge).
Synapse and neurons of the human brain.

Human Relations 1932

"These were the days when stocks were stopping dividends, when lives of thrift and industry were being wiped out by the foreclosing of mortgages and the closing of banks, when Japan was carving herself a large slice of China. Everywhere there was the spirit of 'Take what you can, and to hell with your neighbor.' Those who were strong seemed to be, in sheer wantonness, gouging the eyes of humanity."

William Mortensen

August 28, 2009

FACEBOOK BREAK UP

Max Headroom Interview from the 80's

Defying Experts, Rogue Computer Code Still Lurks

Like a ghost ship, a rogue software program that glided onto the Internet last November has confounded the efforts of top security experts to eradicate the program and trace its origins and purpose, exposing serious weaknesses in the world’s digital infrastructure.

The program, known as Conficker, uses flaws in Windows software to co-opt machines and link them into a virtual computer that can be commanded remotely by its authors. With more than five million of these zombies now under its control — government, business and home computers in more than 200 countries — this shadowy computer has power that dwarfs that of the world’s largest data centers.

Alarmed by the program’s quick spread after its debut in November, computer security experts from industry, academia and government joined forces in a highly unusual collaboration. They decoded the program and developed antivirus software that erased it from millions of the computers. But Conficker’s persistence and sophistication has squelched the belief of many experts that such global computer infections are a thing of the past.

The New York Times

August 27, 2009

Watchknow.org

My buddy Slim is in the process of becoming a history teacher, and has a blog that catalogs useful information: A History Teacher's Blog. His latest post features Watchknow.org, an amazing collection of old school documentaries, such as this:



Check it all out.

The Abolition of Man

In order to understand fully what Man's power over Nature, and therefore the power of some men over other men, really means, we must picture the race extended in time from the date of its emergence to that of its extinction. Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes painted of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural processes resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age really attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have pre-ordained how they are to use them. And if, as is almost certain, the age which had thus attained maximum power over posterity were also the age most emancipated from tradition, it would be engaged in reducing the power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of its successors. And we must also remember that, quite apart from this, the later a generation comes—the nearer it lives to that date at which the species becomes extinct—the less power it will have in the forward direction, because its subjects will be so few. There is therefore no question of a power vested in the race as a whole steadily growing as long as the race survives. The last men, far from being the heirs of power, will be of all men most subject to the dead hand of the great planners and conditioners and will themselves exercise least power upon the future.

The Abolition of Man

C.S. Lewis

Thanks to Jonathan for this post.

August 26, 2009

August 25, 2009

Forget Teens: Gamers Are 35, Overweight — And Sad, CDC says

When you think of a hard-core gamer, do you picture a teenage boy battling his friends in World of Warcraft?

Think again.

The average gamer, far from being a teen, is actually a 35-year-old man who is overweight, aggressive, introverted and … often depressed, according to a report (.pdf) out this week from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC).

The study also showed when children and teenagers become game players, a trend toward physical inactivity and corresponding health problems extends and exacerbates into adulthood.


Wired

August 24, 2009

August 22, 2009

Uncouth Facebook postings closing doors for job candidates

Some of us had the luck of doing stupid things online before most employers knew what social networking was. (I'll admit it: in my early working days, I said some not-nice things online about some of the people I worked with.) These days, however, those looking for jobs have had many years to build up an unsavory history across the Internet, and employers now know how to do their homework. In fact, nearly half of the employers in the US now search for job candidates on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, according to survey results from CareerBuilder. The job-finding firm said that the numbers reflect a twofold increase over those who reported doing so in last year—45 percent in 2009 versus 22 percent in 2008—and cautioned that many employers choose not to hire based on information they find online.

Facebook was the most popular site for researching job candidates this year—no surprise there, since Facebook has exploded in popularity as of late. "Professional" networking site LinkedIn came in second at 26 percent, MySpace came in third at 21 percent, 11 percent read blogs, and seven percent followed candidates' updates on Twitter. Paranoid yet about any of your recent tweets?


ars technica

August 19, 2009

UBS to hand over names of 4,450 clients to U.S.

The IRS said Americans would no longer be able to evade taxes so easily by hiding their assets in offshore accounts.

The agreement comes as U.S. tax authorities conduct a criminal investigation into Americans who used Swiss bank accounts at UBS to avoid paying U.S. taxes.

The settlement follows demands from the U.S. authorities that the bank hand over details on more than 50,000 customers. According to the settlement, U.S. tax authorities will gain access to 4,450 accounts of Americans who have accounts with UBS, and will drop a lawsuit against UBS in federal court demanding the names.

However, the agency expects to have access to hundreds of additional accounts through other agreements. An IRS official said the total number of names disclosed could be in the "high 5,000s."

"Wealthy Americans who have hidden their money offshore will find themselves in a jam," said IRS Commissioner Douglas Shulman. "You can expect us to continue to be aggressive with institutions that are helping Americans avoid taxes."


Market Watch

August 18, 2009

When less is more

WHY is it so many manufacturers cannot leave well alone? They go to great pains to produce exquisite pieces of technology. Then too often, instead of merely honing the rough edges away to perfection, they spoil everything by adding unnecessary bells and whistles and unwarranted girth. In the pursuit of sales, they seem to feel they must continually add further features to keep jaded customers coming back for more. It is as if consumers can’t be trusted to respect the product for what the designers originally intended.

Occasionally, they get it right. When the little Flip Mino camcorder came out a couple of years ago, your correspondent (not an instinctive early adopter) just knew it was something he had to have. What impressed him about the design was not simply the gadget’s diminutive proportions and low price, but the way the developers had so ruthlessly resisted all the marketing pressure to add further features—and had single-mindedly maintained the design’s clarity of purpose. The Flip had one function, and one only—to fit in a shirt-pocket ready to be flipped out in a trice for those fleeting video moments. This it did brilliantly. Though the Flip’s performance has kept pace with technical improvements, subsequent versions have steadfastly maintained the designer’s original concept.


The Economist

For evolving robots, deception is in the genes

Researchers in Switzerland have developed an experimental system that allows them to track the evolution of social cues. The experiments do not, however, involve the Swiss population. Instead, the individuals involved are small-wheeled robots that compete for food and emit light to signal to their neighbors. Evolution occurs because their behavior is controlled by a set of 33 digital "genes." In a paper that will be released later this week by PNAS, the authors describe how these robots evolve to avoid tipping their competitors off to the site of a food source.

These robots and the ecosystem they "live" in is described in a paper they have published previously in Current Biology. The robots themselves have a floor sensor, wheels, a camera, and light that can display different colors. They're set loose in an arena that contains two hubs, one with food that improves their health, and a second with poison that damages it. The hubs look identical from a distance, and can only be distinguished at close range using the floor sensor.


ars technica

August 17, 2009

Amish newspaper succeeds the old-fashioned way

SUGARCREEK, Ohio -

The writers' grievances came in the form of angry letters, carried over bumpy rural roads to the newspaper office serving the Amish community.

In a world where news still travels at a mail carrier's pace, the farmers, preachers and mechanics responsible for filling The Budget threatened to go on strike if the 119-year-old Amish weekly went ahead with its plan to go online.

The writers, known as scribes, feared their plainspoken dispatches would become fodder for entertainment in the "English," or non-Amish, world. The editors hastily rescinded the plan shortly after proposing it in 2006, and today, only local news briefs appear on The Budget's bare-bones Web site.

"My gosh, they spoke in volume," said Keith Rathbun, publisher of The Budget, a newspaper mailed to nearly 20,000 subscribers across the U.S. and Canada. "I'd be a fool to not pay attention to it."

Far from impeding the newspaper's success, shunning the Internet actually solidified its steadfast fan base.


Yahoo Tech

The Law of Accelerating Returns

"An analysis of the history of technology shows that technological change is exponential, contrary to the common-sense "intuitive linear" view. So we won't experience 100 years of progress in the 21st century -- it will be more like 20,000 years of progress (at today's rate). The "returns," such as chip speed and cost-effectiveness, also increase exponentially. There's even exponential growth in the rate of exponential growth. Within a few decades, machine intelligence will surpass human intelligence, leading to The Singularity -- technological change so rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history. The implications include the merger of biological and nonbiological intelligence, immortal software-based humans, and ultra-high levels of intelligence that expand outward in the universe at the speed of light."

The Law of Accelerating Returns, Ray Kurzweil

Quitting cigarettes oldschool

August 14, 2009

Is your Palm Pre spying on you?

Is your Palm Pre spying on you and sending your GPS coordinates and more back to the Palm mothership on a daily basis? According to mobile application developer Joey Hess, that's exactly what is happening. He asserts on his personal blog that data on the location and app used on the Palm's Pre smartphone is being sent to Palm.

The report of Palm snooping on its customers is growing in volume within the blogosphere with many taking the allegations seriously. To be clear, the allegation can not be confirmed.

MSNBC

August 13, 2009

Les Paul, 1915-2009

Les Paul, 94, a Grammy Award-winning guitar virtuoso and inventor who helped bring his instrument, typically assigned to chug along rhythmically and compliantly, to the forefront of jazz and rock-and-roll performance, died today at a hospital in White Plains, N.Y. He had pneumonia.

The Washington Post

American Music Masters

August 12, 2009

Ground Control with Major Tom: Your Life in Your Hand

I have never been much of a gadget guy. I have outdated TVs( seriously- one of them has a VCR in it), a used iPod( 50 bucks), a cheap laptop, and the N64( Turok/Mario Cart rules!) is still my game console of choice. Dont get me wrong- I love technology. I love playing XBox, I love iPods, I love my computer. But I never seek out gadgets- they have to bite me in the ass.

Here is where I admit that my ass hath been bitten by a slick little serpent tempting me to partake of the Apple. That slick little serpent is none other than the iPhone. I have never had a smartphone, or a cool phone at all-the phone I just replaced was a flip nokia with its front screen broken and no real internet access. I am an admitted latecomer to this arena, so any observation I may make is coming from a neophyte. I make this disclaimer because there are many murmurings of discontent against Apple and AT&T lately, coming from disillusioned users. I respect their opinion, and will have to experience my own troubles before i can comment on this. I would simply like to comment on this wonderful lil gadget on a general level, just as we love to do here at The Modular Man.

My cell bill is more expensive than it has been in the past, but this is understandable in light of unlimited data access, and, as one of my coworkers so aptly pointed out, it is a small price to pay for 'your life in your hand'.
I can pay my bills, check my email, take photos and videos, access all my work data, and even post on this blog. I can chart the seas, listen to albums, call my brothers, and teach my children phonics. I can read a book or sketch with my finger. I can IM, watch movies and play games. All of this from my literal fingertips. Once again-this may be nothing new to some people, but it is mind blowing to this modular man. I cannot imagine my now passed grandparents being able to process a device like this. or even assimilate our now accepted verbiage like 'there's an app for that'( "What the hell is an 'app'?", my grandpa would say). Even a few years ago this insanely easy to use device was but a twinkle in Steve Job's eye. Not even the visionary cartoon the Jetsons imagined something so simple yet so complex.

To all the people complaining about the lack of MMS and Tethering through AT&T on the iPhone at this time(understandably so), or the Google/Apple 'divorce', I would like to remind us all that a device of this nature was a fairy tale back in the day.
This is what we call Transience: the passing of time through technological advance so quickly our minds cannot process the change, thus taking it for granted. In this aspect, I am glad that I am a late comer to this arena. I don't want transience to steal my joy. I cant wait until the iPhone's full functionality is unleashed upon the user by a carrier that can handle it all(AT&T says the missing features are coming soon), or when the troubled waters between Google and Apple settle, but until then, my 3GS is beautiful just the way it is. Seriously, its like Christmas at our house.

Now excuse me while i go to bask in the warm glow of my life in my hand.

Checking e-mail before your morning coffee? You're not alone

Before I worked for Ars, I had a pretty traditional office job. As part of my daily routine, I got up at 6:30 am, took a shower, made breakfast, and sat down in front of the computer to eat and respond to e-mail before hopping in the car to sit in traffic. It's the "sat down in front of the computer" part that used to take some of my friends by surprise (who responded to personal e-mail before 7 am five years ago?), but that behavior seems to be increasing, with more and more people checking e-mails, text messages, and news online before their first cup of coffee.

The New York Times recently highlighted the dramatic change in many families' mornings, noting that kids are hopping on Facebook while Mom and Dad are checking up on e-mail and Twitter the minute they wake up.

"Things that I thought were unacceptable a few years ago are now commonplace in my house,” one mother, Dorsey Gude, told the Times, "like all four of us starting the day on four computers in four separate rooms." One father said that he sends his son text messages to wake him up in the morning.


ars technica

August 11, 2009

Tonight at the Royal Opera House, singers belt tweets

The Royal Opera House in London typically hosts performances of classical operas such as “The Magic Flute” and “Carmen.”

But tonight, singers at the prestigious performance venue will take center stage and belt lyrical tweets from the world’s first Twitter opera.

The lines of the libretto, written using a maximum of 140 characters, are being entirely composed by Twitter users @YourOpera, and will be set to music by composer Helen Porter. (All of the lines can be viewed on the Royal Opera House’s blog.)

In September, the Royal Opera House plans to perform a full-length version of the Twitter opera in front of an audience as part of the Deloitte Ignite festival, according to a press release.

Alison Duthie, a spokeswoman for the Royal Opera House, hopes the micro-blogging experiment will encourage people to learn more about opera.

“It’s the people’s opera, and the perfect way for everyone to become involved with the inventiveness of opera as the ultimate form of storytelling,” she says.

But the unique opera isn’t catching on with everyone. In an interview with the London Evening Standard, Jeremy Pound, BBC Music Magazine’s deputy editor said, “It was an accident waiting to happen. Whenever there is a new fad, you know that someone in the art world is going to grab it by the horns.” He cautions that the Royal Opera House “should be careful that it doesn’t overtake the serious stuff they do.”

Currently, the Royal Opera House twitter feed has 774 followers. Already, hundreds of operatic tweets, written in English, have been added to the flourishing Twitter opera, which features a storyline centered around “tweeting” birds who kidnap a man as well as a biochemist seeking to make a potion that will let people talk to birds.

Here’s a few lines from the Twitter opera thus far:

William awakens, and hears the tell-tale tap-tap tap of someone outside his room twittering on their phone

And with that he climbed a nearby tree and resolved to dwell amongst the leaves for the rest of his days

Hans (sword in hand, lest you forget): “how can I reach my love in a tower so high? If I was a bird, then I could fly. We aren’t meant to be apart? Oh my breaking heart”

The ginger cat sings an aria urging people never to stop feeding the pigeons, for they are his food

––

Will you contribute lines to the world’s first Twitter opera? Tell us below or share your thoughts with us on Twitter.

Christian Science Monitor

August 6, 2009

The Prisoner



If you have never seen the cult classic show The Prisoner, you're missing out. AMC is redoing it, and although I am skeptical it can ever live up to the classic, I am curious...

AMC also has a great site dedicated to the original, where you can watch the old episodes. Bitchin! Check it our here.

World's Biggest Particle Collider Set For Restart

The world's largest particle accelerator will restart at half power in November, physicists in Switzerland announced Thursday. The giant machine broke down last fall, putting the field of high-energy physics on hold.

The Large Hadron Collider, or LHC, is located at CERN, Europe's premier particle physics laboratory near Geneva, Switzerland. The massive machine is nearly 17 miles around and designed to smash ordinary protons together at near the speed of light.

Physicists hope that the debris from those collisions will provide evidence of the Higgs boson, a particle that helps to endow other particles with mass. It could also reveal things such as extra dimensions in the universe or dark matter — a mysterious form of matter that is believed to help hold galaxies together.

npr

Colossus: The Forbin Project



Colossus, The Forbin Project

August 5, 2009

Generation Y


"21st Century (Digital Boy)"
Against the Grain (1990)
Bad Religion

A classic from back in the day. It's weird to think this song is almost twenty years old. That baby in the video is now in college! Looking at it twenty years later we can see how prescient it was. And, how bad the CGI was back then.

Oiling the digital society

We are bootstrapping a new world, one in which information technology and computational systems are as deeply embedded in our society as the scientific method or religious belief seem to be, and the precise names of the gods we worship is less important than our presence in the church of technology.

Bill Thompson, BBC

August 4, 2009

The List: Post Offices That May Close

Of the 32,741 post offices in America, the Postal Service is reviewing about 3,200, or nearly 10 percent. The Postal Regulatory Commission, an independent agency, posted 700 of them on a 12-page list at its Web site, www.prc.gov -- but the site was almost impossible to reach, apparently overwhelmed by people trying to find out if their local branch was in danger.

The Postal Service is in trouble, both because of the economy and changing times. People are paying bills online instead of putting a check in an envelope; they are sending E-mail instead of letters. The Postal Service says it may lose $7 billion this year.

ABC News

The list at prc.gov

The Struggle to Stay Wired, in a Hotel Room or a Crisis

THE first thing I do when I check into a hotel room on a business trip is head directly to the desk to make sure the Internet connection works. If the Ethernet or Wi-Fi connection does not snap to life, I am ready to march down to the lobby and threaten to check out if the hotel can’t fix it.

The nonnegotiable demand for connectivity says less about our impatience and sense of entitlement as business travelers (or so I’d like to think) than it does about our basic needs. We’re accustomed to being connected, we need to be connected and we get upset when we’re not.

On a video clip that has been widely shared online, the comedian Louis C. K. tells of being on an airplane with Wi-Fi when the man seated beside him suddenly loses his connection and explodes in curses about airline incompetence. “How quickly does the world owe him something that he knew existed only 10 seconds ago?” he asks.

The New York Times

August 3, 2009

Death stops Future Shock


value="songLalaId=576742244719099105&host=www.lala.com&partnerId=membersong"/>
There is nothing so future shocking as the death of a loved one. While the world races on, and man continues his quest for knowledge and the technological tower of Babel, the memory of those who have gone on stays fixed in time, never moving, never changing. At times, their nearness seems to fade beneath the ever present squall of the machine of time. And at other times, their memory makes things like Twitter, Facebook and the iPhone seem inconsequential.

I would like to pause and take this moment to recognize my wife's younger brother Jed Bulla, who was killed in a car wreck 4 years ago today at age 17. His death is a constant reminder to our family of all that is important: each other. All the rest of it is just clutter.

July 28, 2009

Warning: The Wrong Tweet Can Get You Sued

A Chicago-area woman is being sued for $50,000 by her landlord over a critical Tweet, the Chicago Sun-Times reported today. The landlord is quoted as describing itself as a "sue first and ask questions later kind of an organization." The tweet in question appeared to go to fewer than 20 friends of the sender.

Listen people, you can get sued for Tweets the same as you can get sued over something you post to a Web site or blog. You may think you are only tweeting to friends, but unless you select "Protect My Tweets" on your Twitter "account" page your tweets are both public and searchable. Facebook isn't safe, either.

David Coursey,PC World

Texting While Driving Is Deadliest Task

Dialing and sending text messages on cell phones while driving greatly increases the risk of crashing because these activities take drivers' eyes off the road, according to a study released Tuesday by the Virginia Tech Transportation Institute.

The study tracked the eye glances of drivers and labeled as most dangerous those tasks that drew drivers' eyes away from the road the longest.

By that measure, sending text messages while driving was the most dangerous of all the tasks. It increased the risk of a crash over 23 times for truck drivers and is equivalent to "traveling the length of a football field at 55 mph without looking at the roadway," the study said.

Information Week

July 27, 2009

July 22, 2009

The National Data Center and Personal Privacy



"The modern computer is more than a sophisticated indexing or adding machine, or a miniaturized library; it is the keystone for a new communications medium whose capacities and implications are only beginning to realize. In the foreseeable future, computer systems will be tied together by television, satellites, and lasers, and we will move large quantities of information over vast distances in imperceptible units of time."
"The National Data Center and Personal Privacy",Authur R. Miller, The Atlantic, 1967, courtesy of Modern Mechanix

Read the whole article here

Modular Men

Dear faithful legion of 'The Modern Malaise':

My brother Melvillian and I have been co piloting this blog together since it's inception from our wild rants on humanity, technology, the past, the present, and the future. Melvillian has lately bowed out of The Modular Man for reasons that may stagger our audience: he was blogged out. He is a very busy man, what with blogs, radio shows, school, family, the summer of George, ect. I am sure this is not the last we will see of him, and he will be WATCHING from afar.

Last night, he did a radio show dedicated to this corner of the globe, and it was excellent.
So then, I tip my hat to my brother as I begin the journey of posting all things modular by myself. Please feel free to contact me with anything that raises the hackles on your sensitive necks, and bear with any lack of postings for some days, as well as a lack of imagination in others.

Alright then, to it!

The Secrets of the Temple





The Daily Bail

Secrets of the Temple

July 21, 2009

Why 2024 Will Be Like Nineteen Eighty-Four

Let's give Amazon the benefit of the doubt—its explanation for why it deleted some books from customers' Kindles actually sounds halfway defensible. Last week a few Kindle owners awoke to discover that the company had reached into their devices and remotely removed copies of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm.

Slate

July 17, 2009

And that's the way it is.

Walter Cronkite, November 4, 1916 – July 17, 2009