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.