R E T R O V A L E N T

Pressing Onward

2006-11-03T19:41:00.000-08:00

We've pressed onward to Wordpress. Wow, who knew what a real blogging platform looked like? Obviously, I was meta-clueless and will spend the rest of my life working to meta-fix that. Thanks for reading and hope to see you at the new digs.

From Molecule to Metaphor

2006-11-02T15:26:00.000-08:00

I hope I can make it to Jerome A. Feldman's talk today. BOLD and EXCITING are feeble understatements to describe the efforts in pursuit of a Unified Cognitive Science; which, as far as I understand it, is an absolute prerequisite to safe and effective uploading. Dvorsky is right to caution against hasty assumptions, but but researchers like Feldman are doing the kind of empirical work that will directly inform and influence the ultimate viability of uploading.

"Understanding language and thought requires combining findings from biology, computer science, linguistics, and psychology. A theory that seems perfectly adequate from one perspective may contradict what is known in another field. Problems that seem intractable in one discipline might be quite approachable from a different direction. Taking all the constraints seriously is the only way to get it right."

From Molecule to Metaphor, Preface: "While we are far from having a complete neural theory of language, there have been enormous scientific advances in all the relevant fields. Taken together, these developments provide a framework in which everything that we know fits together nicely. The goal of this book is simple; I would like you, at the end, to say: This all makes sense. It could explain how people understand language. There will be no attempt to convince you that other theories are wrong - in fact, I will assume that most of them are partially right. The book can be seen as part of a general effort to construct a Unified Cognitive Science that can lead the effort to understand our brains and minds. I will try to present a story that is consistent with all the existing scientific data and that also seems plausible to you as a description of your own mind."

Bye, Bye, Blogger

2006-10-31T19:56:00.000-08:00

It's a bittersweet necessity, but I just can't abide the MESS that Google has made of Blogger, post-acquisition. While blogger-status.blogspot.com repeatedly reminds us that "beta users are not affected by this outage," LONG TIME LOYAL USERS are both AFFECTED and UNABLE TO MOVE to the new platform. So, since the dawn of blogging, I've been using Blogger but will now move to WordPress 2.0; in large part due to WP's wise development of a content and comment import system based upon the work of Andy Skelton.

What's worst is that I've continued to sing the praises of Blogger for Ease of Use to friends and family, far and wide. When products blow it like this, they affect the reputations of those who trusted them and defended them. These things can be difficult to recover from. Might I return some day, post-beta? Perhaps, but only if there is a simple to use import system to bring my content back over from Wordpress, should that day ever arrive. In the meantime, I've now got grunt work to do. Thanks, for the Halloween Horrors, Google Blogger.

I2: Infective Invective

2006-10-31T13:47:00.000-08:00

This is a one-time deflection to route a particular meme stream to a more appropriate frequency. For all the histrionic heavenly hyperbole you could ever want or need, be sure to tune in to I2: Infective Invective. We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming.

From Molecule to Metaphor: Towards a Unified Cognitive Science

2006-10-30T06:42:00.000-08:00

***SYMBOLIC SYSTEMS FORUM***

From Molecule to Metaphor: Towards a Unified Cognitive Science
by Jerry Feldman
Computer Science Division and Institute for Cognitive and Brain Sciences, UC Berkeley

Thursday, Nov. 2, 2006
4:15-5:30 pm
Building 380, Room 380C (Math Corner) - MAP
(Parking in nearby lots at no charge after 4 pm)

Abstract:

The neural revolution in cognitive science, which was always inevitable, is well under way. There is already enough known about how our brains process information to render many traditional theories obsolete and a unified neurally-based cognitive science is emerging. Linguistics and Philosophy have, for both historical and technical reasons, been slow to integrate even the most basic neuroscience. Much of fundamental neuroscience is done with animals and, since only people use language, there has been no easy way to extend animal findings to human thought and language.

The talk is based on a new book that is a systematic attempt to show how human language and thought arise as an extension of the physiology and experiences that people share with other animals. Integrating findings from all the cognitive sciences yields a foundation for an explicitly neural theory of language that is an integral part of contemporary science. Many, but not all, of the fundamental issues about brain and mind become clearer in a Unified Cognitive Science.

And you may ask yourself, "What is Rational Longevity?"

2006-10-29T00:15:00.000-07:00

Existence is Wonderful: "Supporting longevity research is acknowledging that there is nothing special about aging that makes it any less solvable than any other complex engineering problem -- it's not a mystical force or a cosmic directive, it's a biological process. And the means of counteracting this process won't be mystical forces either -- they'll be the result of a lot of hard work and scientific inquiry."

Toward a Substrate Independent Engineered Subjective Qualia

2006-10-26T18:25:00.000-07:00

The in the words of the ever uber salient, George Dvorsky, "Protopanpsychism and the consciousness conundrum, or why we shouldn't assume uploads." He writes:

The other broad approach to the issue of consciousness is emergence theory, the idea that self-awareness and qualia can arise from complex computational dynamics in the brain. The critical assumption here is that mind’s architecture is largely computational, but that consciousness emerges through the concert of myriad neuronal interactions. In this sense, consciousness is an epiphenomenon or metaphenomenon of the brain’s machinations.

This approach to cognition is clearly essential, but it is not sufficient.

I was particularly happy to read this essay because it dramatically clarifies some ideas I shared on StumbleUpon, when asked by JollySpaniard (architect of the incomparably interesting Brain Parades on MemeTherapy.Net), "What's your 'pet prediction' of something that might happen in the next decade or two?" as a followup to his earlier stumbler poll, "What is the strangest thing you believe to be true?" In my case, both questions share the same answer. The strangest things that I believe to be true, I also believe will become better understood over the next couple of decades.

On Sept 30, 2006, I wrote to JollySpaniard:

For my part, the strangest thing I believe to be true is that Intelligent Design is on to something; but not what the feuding factions think they're on to. Remember, the Big Bang was first proposed by a clergyman, Father Georges Lemaître. The Big Bang was widely criticized as positing a Creation Event from which a Creator could be asserted into the scientific disciplines. A very similar argument is now leveled at so-called I.D. However, my own atheist belief is that Intelligence may be as palpable a force as any of the quantum entangling forces. In fact, it may be Intelligence that explains entangled behavior of quantum particles. Perhaps this is how one entangled particle "knows" the state of the other. My specific weird belief and pet prediction is the suspicion that just as the Big Bang adapted to the subsequently corroborating data, new OBJECTIVE DATA WILL EMERGE to suggest and subsequently bear out the influence of a "universally embedded intelligence" as a constituent feature of the observable and measurable universe. What some of us presently refer to as extropy, the inverse of entropy, could turn out to be Detectable Intelligence. This is a very quick and sloppy way to put it, but hopefully it is clear that I believe both sides of the present I.D. debate to be wrong for distinctly opposing myopic reasons. Put another way, if there's a Star Wars "Force," that "force" just might turn out to be Intelligence. Human Brains may not create Intelligence, they may simply be attuned -- like radio receivers -- to what is already there, in the ether. Of course, some antennas are far more effective and efficient than others.

I had no idea at the time that I was essentially describing some version of protopanpsychism. Then, imagine my surprise when I read, "This has lead to the development of what is known as quantum consciousness theory, which postulates the idea that consciousness is indelibly tied to quantum processes – that the brain is essentially a quantum computer utilized by an observer to “decohere” quantum superposition." This is not qualitatively different from what I was attempting to express a month ago when I spoke of intelligence as a fundamental force, particle, or energy that might have something to do with quantum entanglement. Interesting.

Perspective

2006-10-23T20:42:00.000-07:00

A humbling and awe inspiringPerspective.

Cyberwar, God And Television: Interview with Paul Virilio (1994)

2006-10-19T21:39:00.000-07:00

The year was 1993. Somewhere in a remote cubicle in Illinois, a couple of kids named Eric Bina and Marc Andreessen had grown tired of tunneling through gopher holes and fiddling with ASCII/BIN file transfer protocol modes. So they came up with something better called Mosaic and thereby "invented the internet" in the same way that Columbus "discovered" North America. Like the so-called new world, the internet had long been in existence, but soon it would become accessible to literally everyone.

The internet evolutionary steps of the late 1980's and early 1990's had emerged in response to the previous 30 years work; nevertheless, a few of the more visible -- and in some ways, quite superficial -- steps spawned heady thinking of brave new worlds and fired the imaginations of virtual Ponce de Leons in search of this "newly discovered" immortal cyberspace. In droves, the lemmings signed up for America's Orgy Line (AOL), as cybersex (such an elegant term, for what amounts to the rather pitiful image of isolated monkeys engaging in erotic text conversations combined with synchronized masturbation) made masses of lonely, increasingly fast-food obese and fast-porn horny Americans "feel young again." In many respects, the internet WAS the newest fountain of youth, and it delivered every bit as much youth as de Leon's.

Still, enthralled and enraptured by the perpetual bliss of this brave new cyber world, it would take literally a decade for many to glimpse the horizon beyond their bright afterglow and discover "THE" internet, vast and limitless, that had actually already existed for 40 years.

Philosophers and cultural theorists were not to be left behind in the old world; not for a second. In 1994 thinkers like Paul Virilio had already turned a vastly more aesthetic lens to gaze upon this new Promised Land, "All the qualities of the body are transferred to the machine. We haven't adjusted yet, we are forgetting our body, we are losing it. This is an accident of the body, a de-corporation. The body is torn and disintegrated." This, in response to nothing more than the world first two-dimensional hypertext link-following engine.

With artistic optimism marked by deftly placed and distinctly somber philosophical brush strokes, Virilio paints an impressively prescient canvas; particularly when one considers that this was written over a decade ago.

Anousheh Ansari Space Blog

2006-10-06T07:09:00.000-07:00

Anousheh Ansari Space Blog

The Future of Intelligence

2006-10-05T01:36:00.000-07:00

Ideum blog: museum and design news » Blog Archive » The Future of Intelligence: The Final Day of the Conference.

Scientists teleport two different objects

2006-10-04T05:15:00.000-07:00

CNN reporting Scientists teleport two different objects: "Professor Eugene Polzik and his team at the Niels Bohr Institute at Copenhagen University in Denmark have made a breakthrough by using both light and matter.

'It is one step further because for the first time it involves teleportation between light and matter, two different objects. One is the carrier of information and the other one is the storage medium,' Polzik explained in an interview on Wednesday."

Defense Tech: REPLACEMENT ARM, GOOD AS NEW

2006-10-01T21:38:00.000-07:00

I'm as excited about posthumanism as anyone, but somehow the terminology GOOD AS NEW strikes me as just a wee bit hyperbolic.

Wired 14.04: Dream Machines

2006-09-30T03:00:00.000-07:00

Wired 14.04: Dream Machines

Spore Gameplay Video - Google Video

2006-09-30T02:38:00.000-07:00

This belongs on metavalent because it borders on simulation of one possible posthuman mind-upload environment. A kinda scary thought, but exciting at the same time.Spore Gameplay Video - Google Video

Why We Need a War On Terror, Specifically

2006-09-29T08:29:00.000-07:00

'Pretty Horrific' but Not Terrorism

2006-09-29T08:27:00.000-07:00

When will these thick-headed Americans get it through their skulls? There is such a HUGE difference between "horrifying" and "terrifying" ... I mean, this guy didn't MEAN to terrorize, only to brutalize; so the fact that the entire community is terrorized is merely horrifying; and not threatening to national security only to THEIR security, so it's all okay, it's not terrorism. Unless we find out he was a Muslim; or maybe he had 1/64th Arabic blood or something ... THEN it would be terrorism; but for now, according to all the people with requisite badges, uniforms, and job titles on their business cards, this local act of terror was only 'pretty horrific.' So, I guess that makes it safe to go back to school in the morning; after all, it's not like this was TERRORISM or anything really bad like that. School gunman left suicide note.

UC Berkeley on Google Video

2006-09-29T06:09:00.000-07:00

UC Berkeley on Google Video

[RE] Imagining the Internet

2006-09-26T18:09:00.000-07:00

Imagining the Internet and the latest Future of the Internet II prognostications from the Pew Internet and American Life project.

Sunday Wordplay

2006-09-24T07:15:00.000-07:00

The Sultan of Stigma and Pope of Peccability; a Disconsolate Extropian Graphophobic Logophile; the Sempiternal Hypostatization of a Pathologically Pathetic Syncopic Counter-Consciousness Coeval with the Vastitude of Eternity.

You see? You're not alone and it's all going to be okay. And you thought you were the only one to feel precisely this way.

Net neutrality: The Good, Bad, and Mostly UGLY

2006-09-22T17:27:00.000-07:00

It's crucial to keep this thinking alive and active, 90 days after its publication The Buzz Report: Net neutrality: bring it on Molly Wood wrote:"You know, I wasn't really sure that Net neutrality legislation was such a good idea. Regulation of the Internet in any form seems scary, a bit hasty, and potentially dangerous. So I was holding out for a hero--maybe the FCC (PDF link), or just a groundswell of grassroots activism. But I can't wait any longer. I've decided to set aside my misgivings about overregulation. I now believe that we must have legislation to protect the open and equal nature of the Internet, or, sadly, the Internet must be regulated as a utility, just like the highways and the water pipes--and we must have one or the other right away. Why? Because I really believe that the telcos and the cable companies pushing for a tiered Internet will cheerfully turn the Internet into a lopsided disaster of have and have-not traffic that just happens to be filled with perfectly accessible content created by those very same telcos and cable companies. Basically, there's a pile of money on the table, and these folks are proving every day that they cannot be trusted."

And that's the plain, ugly truth, whether we like it or not. We simply cannot afford to indulge our Denial and Avoidance issues on this one. For additional history of this crucial issue, see Molly's May 13, 2006 article, "Is the end of the Internet upon us?"

If You Haven't Wiki'd in Awhile

2006-09-19T04:42:00.000-07:00

Wikimedia is not merely about creating an exhaustively cute and comprehensive little webby encyclopedia. If you haven't wiki'd in awhile, there are all kinds of interesting experiments and projects going on all the time. But then, this from a kid who thought it fun to read the dictionary like any other story book, so you've gotta' consider the source.

Wikibooks: Book of the Month.

Wiki Book of The Month, September 2006 is Cognitive Psychology and Cognitive Neuroscience. "The book is a collaboration work of the CPCN course at the University of Osnabrueck. It covers a wide range of different topics concerning brain, human behaviour and their interaction."

Wikispecies: Because LIFE is Public Domain technology ... for now, anyway.

Wikispecies "is meant to become an open, free directory of species. This will cover Animalia, Plantae, Fungi, Bacteria, Archaea, Protista and all other forms of life to the extent that our users allow us. So far [it includes] 70,243 articles."

Wikiversity (beta): Open Minds, Open Doors.

Wikiversity "subject areas and schools include: Engineering · Fine Arts · Humanities · Interdisciplinary Studies · Life Sciences · Physical Sciences · Mathematics · Social Sciences · Practical Arts and Sciences."

Yes, it's also true that September 19 is both International Talk Like A Pirate Day and RUSH Feature Day on the main Wikipedia page!

Glorious Times ... Or Not

2006-09-17T17:32:00.000-07:00

Radical life extension, less radical Quality of Life assurances, equals Radical Life Apprehension.

Barron's Online:

"AMERICANS ARE LIVING LONGER, healthier lives than ever before and, if you believe everything you read, this is terrible news. With the cost of health care out of control, a Social Security system in crisis and an uncertain economic future, millions of worried, hard-working folks now fear they face an old age beset by… hard work and worry."

Fairly typical of contemporary western socio-economic philosophy, the article dismisses the traumas of the many, as offset by the realizations of the few.

This approach is a nearly guaranteed way to ensure Unsustainable Posthumanism.

First Look - TimesReader - Sneak Peek 01

2006-09-15T14:07:00.000-07:00

My surprising initial reaction to First Look - TimesReader - Sneak Peek 01.

My system: Two year old Acer Travelmate C111ti; heavily battered and worn. 1GHz / 1GB / 60GB; XP, always patched to the gills, etc. :) Lots of garbage installed all over the place, because I'm always trying out new desktop and network applications.

If first impressions count, after about 30 minutes reading articles, I'm literally blown away by the TimesReader. I've been using a tabletpc for a couple of years, and the forethought that has gone into navigation by both keyboard and stylus, including ink annotations is MIND BLOWING! This is SMART software development at NYT. If the NYT keeps this up, it could become a better software company than Microsoft or Google! Who'duh'thunk'it? The NYT a WEB APPLICATIONS SHOP??!!

The ads are extremely well done, however, when an annotation note pops up over an ad, any mouse click or stylus click IN THE NOTE also launches the ad that it's hovering over. As a reader, I'm happy to see the ads, but I want to decide when and what to click on. This is especially prevalent for any kind of stylus or touch screen user, because the moment you touch stylus to screen, it's also a click. The effect is that the note area acts as if it's "transparent" to clicks ... the clicks fall right through them. HIGHLY recommend that notes act as notes, regardless of where they hover on the screen.

I'm looking forward to getting more acquainted with the interface. The arrow key navigation is nothing short or BRILLIANT and very much feels like thumbing through the paper. I've used a lot of readers (most notably Zinio) and none even come close to this new TimesReader approach. Will write later if anything else jumps out at me.

While other bugs might emerge over time, for now, it's a rare occasion worthy of sending a hearty WELL DONE, even at this early beta stage!

Not Good Enough. Not Even CLOSE.

2006-09-14T07:52:00.002-07:00

This is way off topic, but due to the weeks events, I must advise that all be sure to remember this, the next time your life, or the life of someone you love, is destroyed by a combination of sheer ineptitude and flat lies by government workers; against whom, we truly now have no recourse. As the brutish, blundering beast better known as the County of Santa Clara puts it:

Many times the decisions made by the police officers and sheriff deputies will restrict the freedom and liberty of people. Often these decisions materially affect the course of people's lives.

We fully realize that our involvement in these complex and often emotionally charged situations may not always result in a level of performance you, the citizen, have grown to expect. For this reason, there are well defined procedures for assisting citizens who wish to voice their grievances against our operations, policies, or employee conduct.

A life is DESTROYED by ineptitude and lies. Investigations after the fact bear out all the facts, but the DESTRUCTION IS DONE. This is not good enough, especially from our local court systems, to whom the vast majority of everyday people are subject.

The Meaning of Patriot Day

2006-09-11T05:05:00.000-07:00

Happy "We're All Still Really Terrified" Day, also known as, "If You're NOT Really, Really Afraid; or Say a Single Word Countering Our Fear, then YOU'RE Next On The Great List of Suspected Terrorists" Day.

At 9:02AM EST, C-SPAN showed live footage of an earnest First Lady, Laura Bush, trying desperately to elbow her autistic husband as he swayed to the music of "America" during memorial services in NYC. Against a wall of stoic, steadfast firefighters, the Commander in Chief couldn't stand at attention long enough to get through a sappy anthem or two. Look, I lost friends in the towers, too, but the legacy that America is on the road to creating is the ANTITHESIS of that for which many of those who perished would most desperately hope.

At 9:34AM EST, C-SPAN then broadcast the United States Military Choir leading the group of mourners at the Pentagon -- the seat of U.S. Military Power -- in the distinctly Christian hymn "Oh God, Our Help in Ages Past." BUT THIS ISN'T A HOLY WAR, it's a political war against fascism; our version versus theirs.

Over this same period of time, on NASA-TV, the space shuttle Atlantis crew opened the hatch and joined the International Space Station crew to continue construction of the P3-P4 truss systems, designed to double the electrical capacity of the ISS and enable further station assembly. THESE SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS ARE THE TRUE DEFENDERS OF HOPE AND PROGRESS FOR HUMANITY. This work is the most promising and consequential for the enduring long term goodwill of humanity, but where is the attention of the mass media fixated, but on fear-mongering memorials and the ritualistic reading of honorable, but ghostly names.

These activities do NOTHING for those lost; they are enduring indulgences for us, who remain. How long will we keep this level of tearful fanfare up? Five years? Seven? Ten? Fifty? There are those who sincerely believe that this day should grind to a halt for everyone, into all eternity. I'm sure survivors Nazi camps, of D-Day, of HIROSHIMA felt the same; but that's not how it works. We all have tragedies in our lives that stop OUR lives, every anniversary, for the duration of our time on the planet -- but if each group's tragedy stopped the entire world for a day, the world would be stopped, permanently -- in paralyzing woe and grief.

This does not strike me as a particularly honorable way to memorialize anyone.

Certainly, I love, honor, and miss the individuals lost from my life, just as much as any nominally compassionate human being ought, but I guarantee that the LAST thing many of those lost on Nine Eleven would want is for us to drag around for decades in sackcloth and ashes while simultaneously cutting the budgets for MOVING FORWARD and increasing budgets for dealing out mayhem and further curtailments of public liberty. Personally, I am deeply offended on behalf of all those lost on Nine Eleven, by the way that the historic event is becoming an anchor that keeps the USS America permanently battered and bashed in a perpetually storm-blown Vast Sea of Fear rather than serving as a reminder to pay attention to that which is just below the surface, and setting sail for new, more promising, more stable lands.

So, what *is* just below the surface of all this memorialistic media blitzkrieg? In a lasting legacy to Bush II's incomparably inarticulate ineptitude, the 9/11 Remembrance Day is called Patriot Day, as opposed to the pre-existing, longstanding anniversary of the beginning of the American Revolution, called Patriots' or Patriot's Day, which I well remember celebrating in grade school in 1960's Illinois. Other sources describe it as, "Patriot's Day, the third Monday of April (Apr 19, 2004). Commemorates the first battle of the Revolutionary War on April 19, 1775. Also known as Battles of Lexington and Concord Day."

But don't worry, you're not alone, because Republicans are already confusing the hell out of the two, as well.

U.S. House Joint Resolution 71 was approved by a vote of 407-0 on October 25, 2001. It requested that the President designate September 11 of each year as "Patriot Day." President George W. Bush signed the resolution into law on December 18, 2001 (as Public Law 107-89). It is a discretionary day of remembrance.

What's the big deal in a name? Well, for one, if you think the CAUSE and IDEALS of the former Patriot's Day -- the very American Revolution itself -- ought be displaced by the hystrionic hyperbole of the latter Patriot Day -- a largely media-age-driven politically expedient reaction to a singularly horrible, but clearly comparatively isolated tragedy -- then my friend, you and I are indeed at distinct odds.

To allow the essence of Patriot Day to coopt the meaning of the foundational word; to deprecate, eradicate, and obviate THE ORIGINAL 200 YEAR OLD PATRIOT'S DAY, is perhaps one of the most ideologically undermining and symbolically diabolical maneuvers that I've witnessed in my lifetime.

As complex as the issues raised by this day, this salient excerpt from Dave Winer's Scripting News: 9/11/2001 does a good job of bringing Focused Attention to the ideas that Patriot's Day ought most embody. Winer wrote:

John Perry Barlow compares today's events to the burning of the Reichstag that led to the Nazi takeover of the German government in 1933. He said in a published email "Within a few hours, we will see beginning the most vigorous efforts to end what remains of freedom in America. Those of who are willing to sacrifice a little - largely illusory - safety in order to maintain our faith in the original ideals of America will have to fight for those ideals just as vigorously."

A number of individual (although unverified) accounts can be found at the Rocketboom911 wiki.

Darwinism Under Fire?

2006-09-09T12:47:00.000-07:00

Some interesting points were made today on C-SPAN's Book TV, unfortunately, I did not catch enough of the program to get the book title and author names, I'll try to look them up later. Whatever my personal views on the subject, one could not possibly miss some of the unexpected parallels between the more intellectually rigorous proponents of so-called Intelligent Design and some branches of Extropian/Posthuman/Transhuman Philosophy.

Specifically, the idea or thought experiment that we may be living in a simulation -- that all creation is a simulation -- certainly implies an Intelligent Designer of that simulation. To my mind this may make for some potentially very strange bedfellows, indeed. I may predisposed toward either agreement or opposition to I.D. concepts, but I certainly cannot accuse the speakers of completely failing to employ their left brains.

If we are to be intellectually honest, then, until far more overwhelming transitional fossil records are collected, it's always valid to keep questioning.

A Scientific Dissent From Darwinism
"We are skeptical of claims for the ability of random mutation and natural selection to account for the complexity of life. Careful examination of the evidence for Darwinian theory should be encouraged."

To my mind, the statement that, "Gaps remain in the fossil record, however; and while some argue that this is a problem for evolutionary theory, most scientists [by logical extension, a.k.a., 'informed faith'] accept that the rarity of fossils means that many extinct animals will always remain unknown" is an extraordinarily weak argument. We cannot on one hand insist upon strict empiricism and on the other hand act so non-chalent in the absence of hard evidence; however witty or logical the explanation for such lack.

Websites Mentioned
Discovery.Org
DissentFromDarwin.Org
EvolutionNews.Org

UPDATE: The section of programming I caught may have pertained to the book "Traipsing Into Evolution: Intelligent Design and the Kitzmiller vs. Dover Decision," by John West and Casey Luskin. Will need to look closer to verify. I was surprised that it was not as simple as I expected to find what aired on BookTV on September 9, 2006. More later, as time allows.

How to Code a Human Zombie (Distributed Agent) Bot Net

2006-09-08T22:16:00.000-07:00

"Sometimes, the wisdom of crowds doesn’t work. Sometimes, the crowd is gaming you. It’s the tyranny of the well-organized minority."

Brilliant. Just flat brilliant. It's not often that you run into this caliber of illuminating metaperception with regard to seemingly insurmoutable, widespread, real world problems.

But then when you realize that it was all a metadistraction, oh, the disillusionment!

Shopping For Nine Eleven Cards in the Hallmark Aisle

2006-09-08T13:46:00.000-07:00

IMHO, Time Magazine just happened to create one of the more poetically accurate covers of the Nine Eleven Fifth Anniversary Media Frenzy. Sure, this week is as good as any to think about these things; however, by reducing the events of that day to a national Hallmark Anti-Holiday, we dishonor both the lives lost and the memories of their survivors. My bet is that the vast majority will look at that cover in the grocery store checkout line, mind their own business rather than dare pick up a copy, and move on. The problem is that the only way out of the mess we're in as a society is to pay attention to our surroundings, to daily embody a deep sense of personal responsibility for our environment, and fulfill our duty as brother's keeper each and every day -- if we are to become a better nation.

This leads me to speculate that one of the biggest reasons Nine Eleven happened in the first place is the disintegration of community, a growing "mind your own business" mentality in public spaces -- like grocery store lines. To my mind, this is one of the most ordinary places in the world. It's the evolutionary descendent of every open air market on the planet. But just *dare* to say anything the the person with 17 items in the 15 item checkout line; or 18, 19, 20, 21 ... you pick the arbitrary "grace amount" over the limit.

You see, that's the problem with "grace amounts," they vary wildly. That's there is a prominently posted RULE that says 9, 10, or 15 and therefore 9, 10, or 15 is the cutoff -- period. Otherwise, "just one more" can be infinitely justified. "It was only 16 ..." leads to "well, she had 16 and I only have 17 ..." and so on. No, there isn't a "common sense" level that is too many over the limit; because some would call it 18, some 20, some 25.

YOU AND I HAVE NOT ONLY THE RIGHT, BUT THE OBLIGATION TO POLITELY ENFORCE THESE RULES UPON *ANYONE* OF ANY RACE, CREED, COLOR, OR RELIGION.

The disingenuous defensive cry of RACIST! if you dare to POLITELY enforce this role upon someone who looks different from you is not just a red herring; it's utterly revolting, and it's un-American. AND it's becoming more and more the norm.

It's my anectdotal observation that there is a growing baseline ignorance, a cancerous conception of "freedom" that has grown more common than ever. That conception says, "this is America, where I have the 'freedom' to ignore the rules." The conscientious are increasingly trampled by the increasingly self-absorbed. This is an utterly distorted and dangerous misinterpretation of freedom.

But how can this whiny rant have anything to do with Nine Eleven? Some might read this and thing, "Wow, looks like you have some pretty weird control freak issues with numbers of yoplait containers and there's medication for that kind of thing, man. Chill."

My point is, these seemingly insignificant things matter because the perpetrators of Nine Eleven played them to the max, in EVERYTHING they did. They showed up to buy box cutters, glaring back at you with that, "MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS" glare. They showed up at local flight schools with that "MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS" attitude about my extracurricular life.

A terrorist's best friend is a culture of MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS because it guides eyes and attention away from the actions of others; especially, devious and ill-conceived actions. So, my contention is that a growing army of home-grown, common-folk Grocery Store Express Checkout Line Nazi's are the best protection against the need for Department of Homeland Security Nazi's doing the enforcement for us.

WE ARE OUR BROTHER'S KEEPERS, whether we like it or not. The more we neglect this fundamental role, the more dangerous our society will become; the more we fulfill the obligation -- in even the most insignificant ways -- the safer, more aware, and more alert we will become.

A Diversionary Pop Culture Moment

2006-09-06T09:53:00.000-07:00

Look, I'm only human, so when Katie Couric asks for tagline submissions, I'm just a mindless sheep automaton like the rest.

Now, I didn't wait with baited breath for Katie's Evening News Debutante Ball, but I did click on the stupid link after reading the MarketWatch Ceremonial Flogging by Jon Friedman.

My inane contribution:

Keep it High Fructose Corn Syrup Sweet and Simple, just like Katie. Say what you mean and mean what you say:

"Good night."

Katie's smile is the only signoff that has a chance of being added to the historical list of signoffs and she'll be cute for as long as Dick Clark was charming. It ain't broke, so don't fix it!

When Suri Cruise takes over the CBS Moonbase New Columbia anchor desk in 2050, she'll play the same historical montage of tough-guy signoffs, only to encounter Katie where she can only say, "and then there was Katie, and THAT SMILE; which neither I, nor anyone, will ever come close to matching."

And that's the way it is; metavalent, out. :)

Not Even a Mouse (gesture, that is) in IE7

2006-09-05T13:39:00.000-07:00

How in the world do you botch such a basic thing as this? Users have to dig through endless piles of half-baked, half-developed, half-retail, half-open source plug-ins just to find this Mouse Gesture Add On for IE7.

And this is RC1, a Release Candidate, which means that it is pretty much a done deal that IE7 will not have mouse gestures. Brilliant. I guess I shouldn't complain, because it's just all the more reason to

keep using Opera (by far the most standards-compliant) or

upgrade to Firefox (by far the most open to innovation).

Is Privacy Being Privatized Out of Existence?

2006-09-05T09:49:00.000-07:00

This is a LONG one, in two parts. First, a little bit about Inbox.com. Secondly, I'll explain why the service fits in with the subject of this post.

I have no affiliation with inbox, other than I've been fairly impressed with the amount of email and net storage provided. The web application suite is a wee bit slow to load on my vintage 2004 1GHz CPU + 1GB RAM TabletPC, but it's an interesting approach to integrated email and storage along with many more useful features (unlimited filters, folders, "from" addresses, etc) than the average free email provider.

The free account provides:

5 GB email
20 MB attachments (up to 50 MB with desktop tool)
Desktop tool for super easy access to online storage
Meanwhile, for $30 bucks a YEAR, you get:>
30 GB email
Daily backups
All the stuff from above

I-eff'n-ronically, today I found my first real glitch in the service. I used POP to fetch about 3,500 old emails from Yahoo (which I recently abandoned after 10 years of loyal patronage) only to suddenly find my Inbox.com account BLOCKED. The message is:

"Your account is blocked. Block reason code: 5"

Which I post here in hopes that others who might encounter that error, may eventually find this indexed by the search engines.

The entire reason that I left Yahoo was after a series of debates with them over alleged "unauthorized access" attempts on my account. Yahoo would lock my account, claim it had been compromised, and have me go through a process of verifying my information. This began to occur with increasing frequency and when I asked for EVIDENCE of the compromise to MY INFORMATION, I was met with the email equivalent of a blank stare.

Eventually, one of the "smart" droids at Yahoo support suggested that I had some kind of trojan horse on my system ... you know, the suspect PC that is scanned EVERY NIGHT and that nary a file nor email is handled but it is SCANNED first. Moreover, I am fairly diligent in terms of picking difficult passwords (UPPER and lower cAsE, numb3rs, and punctuat!on) and changing them regularly. So it's highly, highly unlikely that the system was compromised. Nevertheless, knowing all too well that pride goeth before a fall, and just in case, I did an fdisk /mbr and ditched the entire hard drive, partitions and all and rebuilt from scratch. Since Windows lacks anything even remotely as lightweight and fast as BSD's cpio or dump in a cron job, I have long since learned to put EVERYTHING in "My Documents" and then batch religiously by XXCOPY to another drive ... or two.

And yet, after all that to BE SURE that the problem wasn't at my end -- same problem.

So, amidst those changes, what constants HADN'T changed, my cheerfully scientific minded readers ask?

Anonymizer and Tor, both of which I use for all my web surfing, along with FoxyProxy on Firefox. Both products are from reputable companies, Anonymizer, Inc. and Electronic Frontier Foundation, working to promote and extend Identity Protection and Data Integrity to the far reaches of the net.

Which brings me back to the latest "Your account is blocked. Block reason code: 5" from Inbox.Com. Of course, once my account is blocked, when I go to the web site and click on the friendly Support icon, I am also prevented from filing said ticket as a subscriber to the service. To wit:

Nope. Once you're blocked, you're as suspect as anyone else on the net, despite being armed with all your own personally identifying information; father's second dog's middle name, grandmother's kindergarten teacher's maiden name, etc.

Lest it be misunderstood that I'm picking on Inbox.com, let me clarify: THIS ALMOST PERFECTLY PARALLEL'S MY EXPERIENCE AT YAHOO. In other words, in both places, the only common factor that I can possibly come up with is my use of encryption.

Joining the party a few weeks ago was TD Ameritrade (AMTD), another company that I have happily patronized online, for years. Suddenly, out of the blue, I got a message that my account had been compromised. I was, of course, THRILLED that my online broker is paying attention to anything even remotely funny regarding my MONEY. However, after following their prompts to change my login and password and talking with some very knowledgeable IT folks (take note, these people at AMTD were perhaps the most helpful of all Tech Support people I've ever encountered), I suggested that this might have something to do with my use of Anonymizing Proxies. "Oh, you use Anonymizer?" cam the clueful response. "Yeah, I won't go online without it or Tor running at all times." The IT guys at AMTD thought it was indeed likely that my account had been shut down for access from "a suspicious IP address" that was not at all suspicious, but merely PROTECTED BY ENCRYPTION.

Of the three cases here, AMTD said they'd made a note of the fact that I'm an Anonymizer users, and I haven't had a single problem, since. They also didn't even hesitate to send me the "suspicious" IP address, which I was able to confirm as being an anonymized IP.

Yahoo would never even entertain the idea of letting me know of what their evidence of account tampering consisted. I specifically asked for relevant portions of log files or "suspicious IP addresses so that I could help them. Not a chance. And lest my readers chastise me with "well, you get the service for free," the fact is that no, I don't. I've paid for Yahoo Plus for years.

I have yet to hear back from Inbox.com on this latest lockdown. I very much suspect, however, that a growing number of private companies are beginning to take measures to discourage use of client-initiated encryption.

So, is privacy being privatized out of existence?

If you've got similar cases to report, I'm sure we'd love to hear about them in comments. Better yet, if you have any good ideas or solution resources, please do share them.

Longevity Answer Isn’t Just in Genes

2006-09-01T05:13:00.000-07:00

Connecting with the lowest common denominator 12 year-old reading level demographic with a series on the new "age." I'm not criticizing, we DEFINITELY need 12 year olds on our side!

Live Long? Die Young? Answer Isn’t Just in Genes
The New Age: Betting on Longevity

This is the second article in a series looking at the science of aging. Other articles will explore body image and frailty and who ages well and why. The articles will remain online at nytimes.com/aging.

NYT Web Links

Genetic Influence on Human Lifespan and Longevity (Human Genetics)
The Quest for Genetic Determinants of Human Longevity: Challenges and Insights (Nature Genetics)

Watchdog Warning: AOL’s Free Software is Malware

2006-08-31T10:21:00.000-07:00

Speaking of dog watching, I continue to stick by Vonage. My shares from the Directed Share Program went from $17.00 to $6 to presently settle between $8 and $9 -- and I'm sticking with it. If it's statesmanship you're looking for, try this on for size: I won't begrudge anyone getting in and riding back up to $20+ with me by this time next year. Yep, you get to more than double your coinage and I'll only make $3/share. Now that's statesmanship.

On the other hand, if you want a scumbag company worth kicking to the curb, lets pick one worth kicking. For instance, as the New York Times reports:

Mr. Palfrey said ... software [does] not have to be malicious to violate consumer trust. “We currently recommend that users do not install the [free] version of AOL software that we tested,” the StopBadware.org Web site read yesterday, “unless the user is comfortable with the level of risk we identify or until the application is updated consistent with the recommendations in this report.”

GENCasts Weekly - Biotechnology from Bench to Business

2006-08-30T23:00:00.000-07:00

Definitely do not miss the new podcast series from Genetic Engineering News.

The Fast Turtle - Enter: The Transbeing

2006-08-30T22:58:00.000-07:00

The Fast Turtle - Enter: The Transbeing

A Moment of Silence

2006-08-30T20:13:00.000-07:00

Bush Urges Nation To Be Quiet For A Minute While He Tries To Think. Indeed, thanks again to The Onion - America's Finest News Source.

The Future is Here: Welcome to the CARN-Age!

2006-08-28T16:13:00.000-07:00

C'mon and join the joyous jamboree! Now that Jebus has changed His mind -- for confirmation, just ask your local fundamentalist flip-flopper who THEN screamed "charge" and NOW cries "retreat" -- it is finally time for all good RepubliCARNs to take full ownership of their share of the CARN-Age.

See the Republicans for Cut and Run Now (CARN) site for details (a DW production; and possibly a YoMoBlog diversion).

Zero Hope for Cognitive Liberty?

2006-08-28T10:35:00.000-07:00

In a society that is actually wasting tax dollars on this kind of foolishness. This is worse than pitiful. I can't even think of a word or phrase that is sufficiently embarrassed and repulsed at the same time. What a waste.

Is it arguably more wasteful for kids (of any age, for that matter) to actually be doing bong hits for Jesus, Mohammad, Krishna, Ganesh or any other number of reasons? Maybe, maybe not. Biopsychiatry tells us:

Yet marijuana is not a wonderdrug. Cognitive function in the user is often impaired. Marijuana interferes with memory-formation by disrupting long-term potentiation in the hippocampus. One of the functions of endogenous cannabinoids in the brain is to promote selective short-term amnesia. Forgetting is not, as one might have supposed, a purely passive process. Either way, choosing deliberately to ingest an amnestic agent for long periods is scarcely an ideal life-strategy. It's especially flawed given the centrality of memory to human self-identity. It's hard to see such a drug as a major tool for life-affirmation or the development of the human species.

And the Good Drugs Guide (GDG) adds:

Heavy users need as much as eight times higher doses to achieve the same psychoactive effects as regular users using smaller amounts. THC can be detected in a chronic user up to 12 weeks after use although the average is 25-27 days. Cannabis is highly detectable a long time after use because THC lingers in the fatty tissues of the body and leaks steadily into the blood and then the urine over weeks.

Smoking any drug is unhealthy. Cannabis is no exception. The smoke actually contains higher concentrations of carcinogenic polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) than tobacco smoke. Cannabis smokers generally inhale more smoke for longer depositing more than 4 times as much tar on their lungs as cigarette smokers.

Obviously, if the stuff is leaking into your bloodstream, you're a little bit impaired for quite some time after any given 'harmless' high. The thing about the GDG is that it follows each of these sobering facts with a dismissive statements like, "but it goes away if you stop" or "it's not so bad if you don't do so much; which may or may not be the case. This is my biggest beef with the GDG, because so many young people grant it all the authority of a Wikipedia or About.com source. So, it probably makes sense to also see what sites like WebMD and Wikipedia have to say on the topic of cannabis:

Animal research has shown that the potential for cannabinoid psychological dependence does exist, and includes mild withdrawal symptoms. Although not as severe as that for alcohol, heroin, or cocaine dependence, marijuana withdrawal is usually characterized by insomnia, restlessness, loss of appetite, irritability, anger, increased muscle activity (jerkiness), and aggression after sudden cessation of chronic use as a result of physiological tolerance.

Um, so you can give us a defensive look and hyper offended attitude, but just know that it is scientifically clear where the symptoms are coming from.

Prolonged marijuana use produces both pharmacokinetic changes (how the drug is absorbed, distributed, metabolized, and excreted) and pharmacodynamic changes (how the drug interacts with target cells) to the body. These changes require the user to consume higher doses of the drug to achieve a common desirable effect, and reinforce the body’s metabolic systems for synthesizing and eliminating the drug more efficiently.

So, like, if it were GOOD for you, the body would be incorporating it, like nutrients, not eliminating it, like a toxin, right?

Preliminary research, published in the April 2006 issue of the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, indicates that cannabis addiction can be offset by a combination of cognitive-behavioral therapy and motivational incentives. Participants in the study (previously diagnosed with marijuana dependence) received either vouchers as incentives to stay drug free, cognitive-behavioral therapy, or both over a 14-week period. At the end of 3 months, 43 percent of those who received both treatments were no longer using marijuana, compared with 40 percent of the voucher group, and 30 percent of the therapy group. At the end of a 12-month follow-up, 37 percent of those who got both treatments remained abstinent, compared with 17 percent of the voucher group, and 23 percent of the therapy group.

So even intense therapy only helps less than HALF the time. As I read it, if that much effort has such little impact, that's a pretty significant piece of evidence for showing just how powerful a grip this understated drug actually exerts on people who become dependent.

Another study of college students has shown that:

critical skills related to attention, memory, and learning are impaired among people who use marijuana heavily, even after discontinuing its use for at least 24 hours. Researchers compared 65 "heavy users," who had smoked marijuana a median of 29 of the past 30 days, and 64 "light users," who had smoked a median of 1 of the past 30 days. After a closely monitored 19- to 24-hour period of abstinence from marijuana and other illicit drugs and alcohol, the undergraduates were given several standard tests measuring aspects of attention, memory, and learning. Compared to the light users, heavy marijuana users made more errors and had more difficulty sustaining attention, shifting attention to meet the demands of changes in the environment, and in registering, processing, and using information. The findings suggest that the greater impairment among heavy users is likely due to an alteration of brain activity produced by marijuana.

Longitudinal research on marijuana use among young people below college age indicates those who used have lower achievement than the non-users, more delinquent behavior and aggression, greater rebelliousness, poorer relationships with parents, and more associations with delinquent and drug-using friends.

There also additional effects on the brain's sensory and mental health resources.

Bottom line? Go for it. Cannabis should be legal and people should be free to kick themselves in the head repeatedly, if that's what they choose to do. However, when the rest of the world then treats them like people who repeatedly kick themselves in the head, substance users have no grounds for offense. I say, d'criminalize d'ganga and take away users "unjust victim" card.

People should be free to make their own choices, but others in society are equally free to render their individual assessments of those who make self-impairing choices.

For my own part, the benefits don't outweigh the damage and I wish I'd chosen much sooner to stop inflicting additional needless damage on my own brain cells -- living in a greenhouse gas, second hand smoke, degenerating DNA world is damage enough, thank you very much -- but I absolutely defend anyone's right to put that silly sign up, anywhere, at any time.

New, Unimproved Bush iGod Strategy

2006-08-25T06:26:00.000-07:00

Writing for The Nation, Jonathan Schell says it's Too Late for Empire and, I might add, for what I've come to refer to as the Bush administration's imperialist Global Occupation Doctrine (iGOD) Strategy.

Now just hold on a sec. Before launching a prescriptive big 'R' Republican Rancher nuke-u-ler an hominem attack on all the wimpy pseudo-intellectual airy-fairy lowercase 'l' liberals, please read the strategy for yourself.

As Schell puts it, "The United States, to be sure, is a great power by any measure, surely the world's greatest, yet that power is hemmed in by obstacles peculiar to our era [specifically, the nuclear dilemma]. The mistake has been not so much to think that the power of the United States is greater than it is as to fail to realize that power itself, whether wielded by the United States or anyone else--if conceived in terms of military force--has been in decline. By imagining otherwise, the United States has become the fool of force -- and the fool of history" (Jonathan Schell).

For a primer:
The Jonathan Schell Reader: On the United States at War, the Long Crisis of the American Republic, and the Fate of the Earth

Transvision & Bostrom covered in Nature

2006-08-24T20:09:00.000-07:00

Dr. Nick Bostrom: "I don’t think healthy people are going to be attracted by mechanical or electronic enhancements in the near future. You can get most or all of the same benefits from having the same device outside the body. If you want to access Google, you don’t have to have a fibre-optic cable wired into your visual cortex. You can just have a computer screen. That saves you a trip to the surgeon, and it’s easier to upgrade."

ROTFLMAO! Obviously, it would be foolish to not agree (today) that such blatent enhancements are not a 20-30 years hence commodity. BUT, what about the mid to long-term? Say, 75 year? 175?

Bostrom adds, "One thing that has happened over the past five years or so is that bioethics has begun to take enhancement issues seriously. Bioethicists previously tended to ignore them or think of it as science fiction. Now there’s debate on a lot of ethical questions related to human enhancement, and interest is still on the up. These technologies are sufficiently likely that it is worth discussing them now."

This is probably the single most promising development in the field in recent years. Just about every scientific and technological advance that comes to mind went through two meta phases: pre-credibility and post-credibility. It is very, very difficult indeed to make significant progress on pre-credibility advances; at least the post-credibility type stand a chance of being sufficiently explored toward the end of ultimately proving or disproving.

Sources: IEET "Transvision & Bostrom covered in Nature" and Nature, "The modern make-over."

When do uplifted nonhumans become citizens?

2006-08-24T19:59:00.000-07:00

In When do uplifted nonhumans become citizens? George Dvorsky explains that, "We don’t have tiers of citizenship in liberal democracies—to do so would be a form of apartheid. I think it would be an extremely bad idea to start “demoting” uplifted nonhumans or psychological delayed humans based on some personhood metric. It’s a binary concept - you’re either an equal citizen under the law or you’re not a citizen."

And, "They are part of the social contract, but we acknowledge that their limited psychologies don’t allow for other citizenship type behaviour like voting. The same policy is applied to small children and the severely disabled. There is nothing new here."

These are two extremely salient points. In this post, I'd like to draw particular attention to the concept of "demoting ... psychological delayed humans." In many respect, I believe that I might partly represent this class of human. It took me until the age of 31 to realize the essential requirement for higher education. I earned and UNDERGRADUATE degree from Stanford at the age of 37. I'm on the verge completing my pilot training, nearing the age of 47. Both are activities more common to 20-something year olds.

Singularity Summit, 90-Day Post Report

2006-08-24T18:10:00.000-07:00

I'm super glad that photos, audio-video, and powerpoints are here, but still looking very much forward to transcripts and q&a!

Can Cheesy Sci-Fi Titles Help Take the Edge Off Looming Sociotechnological Discontinuities?

2006-08-24T14:17:00.000-07:00

Granted, this is from Forbes, so you have to look past the cheesy Saturday morning B-Sci-Fi title, The Robots Are Coming. Still, it's better than nothing in terms of getting investors to begin realizing that there is this emerging interdisciplinary mashup of scientific and technological capabilities that are on the verge of producing INTENTIONAL human-initiated and possibly human-directed evolutionary change.

How informed is that intention, strikes me as a question worthy of considerable debate.

Particularly, when we're dealing with a General Awareness Profile (GAP) such as this one -- created by non-scientific, self-selected Forbes poll repsondents -- it is important that we mind the GAP.

That is to say, if we take this poll as a rough, non-scientific GAP analysis of Forbes readers collective cluefulness about potential extro-post-trans-meta-human-bemanism issues (H+, in WTA lingo), there appears to be a respectable base of awareness upon which to build. This would not have been the case, even five years ago. Today, there is plenty of alternative energy awareness, and comparatively overweighted expectations for Biotechnology and Nanotechnology. This would seem to add up to a reasonable start for incrementing awareness from "here" to "there," wherever that may be in terms of H+.

Among the nonplussed (oh, the double entendre!) there is plenty of room for debate about said destination among those who are not doing the actual work; but among those rarified few who are both capable of, and inclined to do such work, there is neither time nor inclination for fruitless bickering about whether or not to cure aging.

Age is the single most ravaging disease ever known to all presently known life forms. The onset of aging's symptoms vary widely across both plant and animal species, from minutes or days to hundreds of years. And it has already served one purpose well: to provide suffient trial-and-error to get intelligent human life this far. Very soon, however, we will emerge as a species from this crysalis stage of unaugmented natural selection.

It is imperative, as an intelligent evolving species, that we CURE THE AGING DISEASE; but in order to marshal the financial and political resources to make that effort sustainable, the GAP must be continuously narrowed until those with the MEANS understand the feasibility of accomplishing the goals set for by those with the WAYS to get there.

In the meantime, go ahead and freak out, debate amongst yourselves, skewer one another with your respective native tribal Holy Writs, but as a species, we WILL CURE AGING as the number one cause of death, sooner or later. I'm sure that most Americans would still prefer the latter, mostly due to the incomprehensibly pathetic influence of fear-mongering religious control freaks, but that does not change the inevitability of our collective extropian H+ future.

Ready or not ...

Stem Cell Advances Still Not Good Enough?

2006-08-24T06:26:00.000-07:00

"Advanced Cell Technology, an Alameda biotech company, disclosed Wednesday in the journal Nature that it has developed a way to grow stem-cell lines from a single cell extracted from a human embryo."

``This is an important breakthrough,'' if other scientists confirm the method works without harming embryos, said Arnold Kriegstein, who directs the Institute for Regeneration Medicine at the University of California-San Francisco.

White House officials released a statement in response to Advanced Cell Technology's announcement that said, ``It is encouraging to see scientists making serious efforts to move away from research that involves the destruction of embryos.'' But it added, ``Any use of human embryos for research purposes raises serious ethical concerns. This technique does not resolve all those concerns.''

Puh-lease ... yes it DOES resolve them, and more. Particularly since a zygote is NOT a human, in the first place; despite superstitious tribal native "beliefs." This entire business of "beliefs" overriding EMPIRICAL OBSERVATIONS has got to come to an end, soon. Sure, you can *have* your beliefs all that you like, but you man *not* trample upon physical observations and measurements of REALITY.

GPS Phones: Fun for Kids of All Ages

2006-08-23T16:56:00.000-07:00

Dory (The Mom) Devlin clues us in to the new GPS phones, for kids of all ages, from 6 to 64. Fun for the whole family, right?

Running out of Young Guns? No problem, Send Retirees.

2006-08-23T09:52:00.000-07:00

You thought you'd paid your dues. You thought you had earned the right to a civilian life. In the words of an old commercial, "not exactly."

"[I]t is the first time the Marines have called back personnel who have left the service."

That's RETIRED Marines, friends, called back into a conflict where no beachhead even exists. Marines, the "tip of spear" now bringing up the rear as 2,500 discharged Marines face recall to duty.

The Christian Science Monitor characterizes this move as a back door draft.

To my mind, this is a direct reflection of an increasingly dilapidated Army. The Marines are being called upon to make up for deficient numbers, deficient training, and deficient expertise in our core armed services cohort. Not a good sign.

One word comes to mind: overextended. The combination of overextended military strength and overextended financial obligations is a precarious one, to say the least. At least an Armageddon-like end would be quick and relatively merciful for those instantly evaporated by atomic blasts; but the present situation indicates a far more excruciating end of the American Empire as we know it.

Army Corps Admits Flaws in New Orleans Levees

2006-08-22T06:00:00.000-07:00

It's hurricanes Katrina and Rita week. In the New York Times, Army Corps Admits Flaws in New Orleans Levees: "Call it a mea culpa, or call it a dry recognition, or admission, or whatever — but we're not ducking our accountability and responsibility in this.'" The chief engineer of the Army Corps, Lt. Gen. Carl A. Strock, said the report showed that "we missed something in the design," particularly in the construction of the drainage canal floodwalls that caused so much of the flooding.

This was news to me. Federal culpability had been questionable, in my mind, prior to hearing this report from the federal Army Corp of Engineers, itself.

Levees.org is possibly the most practical of the various grass roots groups formed in New Orleans in the wake of hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Founder Sandy Rosenthal explained that 70% of the water in New Orleans came from one of the levee breaks and 25% from the other; hence, 95% of all water in the city was due to levee breaks. If these figures are accurate, then the proximate cause of the vast majority of damage becomes more clear. Certainly, if the U.S. government can find money and human resources to send to Israel (caused by Israel's obliteration of Beruit?), it should be able to devote resources here at home.

It strikes me that money, however, is not the primary need, here. OVERSIGHT and ACCOUNTABLITY are the missing resources. This 20 year project also needs vastly improved BRANDING, so that people understand what the project is really all about. It appears that Sandy Rosenthal is one of the best-focused upon the issues that matter most in catalyzing both TIMELY relief and ENDURING solutions for this battered city.

Hezbollah continue to run the table

2006-08-18T23:27:00.000-07:00

Thomas P.M Barnett, points out that Hezbollah continue to run the table.

Hezbollah nails the war and now the peace. Do ya think Iran had preloaded its SysAdmin effort? (Take one Hezbollah and add money.)

The real embarrassment here?

Our enemies are sizing our force structure through their victories and no one in DC seems to be paying any attention.

Get a clue, go symmetric.

Wow. Mr. Barnett definitely seems to have one of the most unvarnished perspective of the Big Picture for American Christian-o-Imperialism that I've seen, to date. He's pretty much dead-on in terms of defeating the latest conjured demon, Islamofascism. C'mon ... Axis of Evil is so 90's, man.

In short, if you're going to be PERCEIVED AS an effectively benevolent Global Imperialist, you have to think like SysAdmin of The World and mostly keep Leviathan in the box. SysAdmin and Leviathan are Barnett's terminology, by the way. I know, it sounds crazy, but then, it is WAR management we're talking about, here. Related links of interest:

* Barnett's book: Blueprint for Action: A Future Worth Creating

* A 2004 Barnett presentation

* Appearance on BookTV Afterwords November 6, 2005. (Real video)

* Military Policy Video Archive

I'll link to the video archive of this C-SPAN2 8/18/2006 SESSION, as soon as it becomes available, here's the description:

"C-SPAN is hosting a special program with Thomas P.M. Barnett, author of the book "The Pentagon's New Map: Blueprint for Action, A Future Worth Creating." This work is a study of how globalization affects U.S. national security. It outlines a strategy for the way the U.S. and its military should operate in the post-September 11th world. The book is inspired by a briefing that Mr. Barnett has delivered hundreds of times in the past few years to government officials, military officers, business leaders and opinion makers. This show will aired a tape of Barnett giving that briefing, and from 9:30-10:30pm ET he took viewer phone calls. Thomas P.M. Barnett is a Senior Strategic Researcher at the Naval War College in Newport, Rhode Island, and a former strategist in the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation."

CBS beats CNN to the Web Video Punch

2006-08-18T16:32:00.000-07:00

Who'd have thunk it? And yet, CBS has taken the first step toward the most logical web broadcasting model. As opposed to CNN's retarded Pipeline program (I refuse to even link to it and it's over-engineered, over-priced, b-grade, non-broadcast psuedo content), CBS will simply send its broadcast to a wider audience; on the web. CBS To Air Evening News Live On Web, Simulcast Of 'Evening News With Katie Couric' To Begin Sept. 5 - CBS News.

Who knows, at this pace, in a decade or two, CBS might even catch up to LinkTV or C-SPAN, who has been "doing it right" for years. Without a doubt, C-SPAN is *the* way to do broadcast TV on the web. Forget about the web being some bizarre "cyber" space. It's not another dimension, it's just another OUTLET. If broadcasters want to reach the web audience, all they have to do is the same thing that C-SPAN has done for years.

A Flash of Creative Genius

2006-08-17T13:43:00.000-07:00

If you had any question about whether there exist multiple universes, just compare this reality to the reality experienced by the average south Lebanese resident in recent months. Of course, if you've ever dabbled with flash universe in the least, you'll especially appreciate this contrast.

"After the Israeli Army was Defeated ..."

2006-08-16T13:34:00.000-07:00

Link TV - Mosaic provides an overview of news coverage from Al Jazeera and other leading middle east news networks. REQUIRED viewing for any westerner who aspires to gaining even HALF a clue about what is going on in the middle east. Sure, it's "their" propaganda, but it's no less valid to "them" than "our" propaganda is, to "us." Thanks to ETHERNET TV, more people than ever can finally gain access to more perspectives than ever.

What we DO with this expanded context, of course, remains to be seen. If the world had Massive Symmetric Bandwidth, the phenomenon would be multiplied exponentially, as anyone with a net connection could upload (PROVIDE) content as easily as we've historically downloaded (CONSUMED) content. So, while sites like LinkTV represent a significant forward stride, it's still little more than Eastern Asymmetric Information Packaging meets Western Asymmetric Information Packaging.

The Revolution begins when the entire world finally gains access to affordable, univeral, SYMMETRIC broadband. Perhaps that is why select western multinational telecoms are presently working feverishly to roll back decades of Net Neutrality, before it's too late. If handled correctly, on the other hand, this issue of Net Neutrality could be the final blow to the old incumbent model of Central Services command and control for global Information Transit.

Humanitarian Relief for the Victors?

2006-08-16T07:12:00.001-07:00

Alms for the poor victors! Alms for the poor victors! This is precisely the kind of arrogant hypocrisy that Israel's opponents find revolting. Frankly, over the past several years I increasingly identify with anti-Israeli sentiment. The more that I question what I was taught as a child in Sunday school, read the history, and simply OBSERVE Israel's behavior, the more I oppose both it's objectives and it's means.

I understand that, under prevalent conspiracy doctrine, this makes me a Terrorist Sympathizer and therefore Suspect of The State. I won't count on ever flying on a U.S. commercial airliner without coming under closer scrutiny. I won't expect my credit score to reflect my true record of consistency. I understand that, by stating publicly that I OPPOSE ISRAEL and that the 1948 partitioning was hogwash, "they" will put me on "the watchlist." Oh well. See that old fashioned quotation from the increasingly irrelevant Patrick Henry, above.

Today on C-SPAN, just days after bombing Lebanon back to the 19th century, displacing tens of thousands of Americans, and declaring a mighty military victory, Israel shows up with tin cup in hand, asking for help for THEIR "poor victims." This is akin to Americans showing up in Saudi Arabia or Egypt today, asking for help for the "poor American victims" of the war in Iraq. By definition, VICTOR and VICTIM are mutually exclusive. You can't have it both ways, and to play it both ways is the definition of HUBRIS and HYPOCRISY.

Israel says it has a right to exist because of it's magic scrolls from God. Islam says it is the one true religion because of it's magic Q'ran. Christians say they are the only way because of their magic new testament. Any moderately functioning, minimally objective, reasonable mind can't help but see the root of the problem, here.

Lyrics by XTC bear periodic repetition:

Dear God,

Hope you got the letter, and...
I pray you can make it better down here.
I don't mean a big reduction in the price of beer;
but all the people that you made in your image, see
them starving on their feet 'cause they don't get
enough to eat from God, I can't believe in you.

Dear God,

Sorry to disturb you, but... I feel that I should be heard
loud and clear. We all need a big reduction in amount of tears;
and all the people that you made in your image, see them fighting
in the street 'cause they can't make opinions meet about God,
I can't believe in you.

Did you make disease, and the diamond blue?
Did you make mankind after we made you?
And the devil too?!

Dear God,

Don't know if you noticed, but... your name is on
a lot of quotes in this book, and us crazy humans wrote it, you
should take a look; and all the people that you made in your
image, still believing that junk is true. Well I know it ain't, and
so do you, Dear God ...

I can't believe in ...
I don't believe in ...

I won't believe in heaven and hell; no saints, no sinners, no
devil as well; no pearly gates, no thorny crown; you're always
letting us humans down. The wars you bring, the babes you
drown; those lost at sea and never found, and it's the same the
whole world 'round; the hurt I see helps to compound that
Father, Son and Holy Ghost is just somebody's unholy hoax,
and if you're up there you'd perceive that my heart's here upon
my sleeve; if there's one thing I don't believe in ...

... it's you.

Dear God.

Unedited Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Interview

2006-08-16T07:08:00.000-07:00

Still looking for a link to the actual video. Generally, all content that airs on C-SPAN is available on its website shortly after airtime. If you missed in in the media last week, here's a description of what I'm looking for at TVNewser. As soon as I can find a link to the actual interview, I'll update this post. Drop a comment if you can help out, thanks.

You ARE Your INBOX

2006-08-16T06:05:00.000-07:00

Hoarders vs. Deleters: How You Handle Your Email Inbox Says a Lot About You.

For fellow hoarders, this is a good time to put in another plug for 5GB email and storage provider Inbox.Com. I have no financial stake or interest in the service, but I do like the competition and love the added SPACE and lightweight desktop integration.

New Blogger Beta All The Buzz

2006-08-15T09:02:00.000-07:00

A new Blogger Beta is out. At first glance, it looks like some great new improvements. As quickly as I tend to critique the 3vi1 corporate GOOG beast; I still try to be as fair as my significant subjective biases allow.

Just as with Microsoft and other beastly 3vi15 out there, many innocent and hardworking engineers are hard at work in the trenches and doing nice work. So far, there does not appear to be a handy way to merge the old blogger sites like this one with new gmail account-linked sites, but it sounds like they'll be rolling this out in stages over the coming months.

If these improvements are anything close to what my first glimpse indicates, they could significantly ratchet up blogger's competitiveness as the self-publishing platform of choice. One reminder, here. Many people I've worked with seem to not understand that you do not HAVE to use blogspot.com with blogger. You can absolutely use your own domain name, with no traces of anything but Your Own Brand. This very site is proof of that, the only Blogger or Blogspot plugs are the ones that I placed there.

So if you already have a gmail account, or are just curious, check out the buzz.

Akbar Ahmed on Q & A - C-SPAN's New Interview Series

2006-08-14T08:06:00.000-07:00

PROGRAM NOTE: "Akbar Ahmed discusses Islamic fundamentalism, why he believes some terrorists act in the name of Islam and his goal to spread the peaceful teachings of Islam to younger generations."

BIO: "Ambassador Akbar Ahmed, Ibn Khaldun Chair of Islamic Studies, American University in Washington DC, is “the world’s leading authority on contemporary Islam” according to the BBC. Former High Commissioner of Pakistan to Great Britain he has advised Prince Charles and met with President George W. Bush on Islam. His numerous books, films and documentaries have won awards. His books have been translated into many languages including Chinese and Indonesian." more >>

Another worthy site for your internet video programming bookmarks: Q & A.

Are Scientists the Biggest Laggards?

2006-08-13T15:16:00.000-07:00

It wouldn't be the first time. I remember being virtually laughed out of the room at Xerox PARC in 1997 for insisting that what would come to be called the Ethernet First Mile needed to be built immediately; that broadband, and beyond, were absolutely vital to the advancement of the internet.

Don't get me wrong, "some of my best friends are scientists," but it's been periodically astounding to me to find that the scientific dogma of "it won't work, it's not feasible" is often functionally equivalent to the religious dogma of "it's evil, it's from the devil." Both statements were applied by many members of the respective groups when it came to evolution of the internet. "9600 bps will be more than sufficient for any residential user into the foreseeable future," that was the consensus comment that got all the PARC heads nodding, hemming, and hawing. So, for whatever "foreseeable future" meant in late 1997, we were to accept 9600bps according to the Brilliant Brain Trust at PARC.

Recently, since "June 2006, for about 3 months, Nature [has been] undertaking a trial of [an open, online] peer review. This trial [continues] in parallel with the usual peer review process, and allow[s] the editors to assess the value of soliciting comments from scientists while submitted papers are being peer reviewed. The trial is to test the quality of unsolicited [blog style] comments made during an open peer review process, against the traditional process with no unsolicited comments."

So far, virtually no takers. Am I the only one to find this laggard adoption behavior -- among what large portion of the public widely considers knowledgeable trend leaders -- interesting? I wonder if anyone has ever mapped technology adoption cycles to various vocational tribes? Sounds like another job for Metacrawler or the Rollyo Rollbar. Lots of other work to do today, so you'll have to forgive if I don't follow through and leave the exploration as an exercise for the reader. :)

Of Quantum Supercurrents, Reversals, and Carbon Nanotube Transistors

2006-08-13T14:11:00.000-07:00

Another ResearchChannel pointer. We start with: Will Computers Take a Quantum Leap?

Then, see also:

Supercurrent reversal in quantum dots
Jorden A. van Dam, Yuli V. Nazarov, Erik P.A.M. Bakkers, Silvano De Franceschi, & Leo P. Kouwenhoven
Nature 442, 667 (2006).

Quantum supercurrent transistors in carbon nanotubes
Pablo Jarillo-Herrero, Jorden A. van Dam & Leo P. Kouwenhoven
pdf from Nature 439, 953 (2006).

Building Block Created For Quantum Computing, Secure Communication And Quantum Internet. Max Planck Society in Science Daily (2004).

Atoms Under Control. Max Planck Society in Science Daily (2005).

How Does Order Arise in the Universe?

2006-08-13T09:54:00.000-07:00

With all the chaos and ignorance manifest in and among every human experience and societal systems, how can anything reasonable or organized ever stand a chance? In this episode of Closer To Truth, two nobel laureates lend a measure of comfort and hope for those of us who can otherwise barely tolerate the seemingly accelerating disarray of our American dystopia.

One interesting parethetical observation: SUPERSTITIONS, while not exactly rampant, do plague science from within. Scientists are not at all immune to purely superstitious clingings; albeit, said clingings are generally crafted in the elitest of highbrow lingo, which can further cloak their superstitionness to the quotidian querier (yes, it's a word). However, for those who can SPOT THE BULLSHIT FROM WITHIN, the opportunities for comparatively revelatory expansion are, perhaps, effectively endless.

Some highlights:

MURRAY GELL-MANN: "The whole point of emergence is you don’t need something
new to get something new. It is so much nicer to study each science at its own level and find the regularities that jump to your eye at that level, and that’s what emergence is all about."

ROBERT L. KUHN: Let’s talk about science in the 21st century. How do you see the
next two decades?

DAVID BALTIMORE: I think it might not be a bad idea to develop secret antibiotics,
antibiotics that we have in our arsenal but nobody knows how they work, I mean, nobody except a certain select group, knows how they work. So resistance to them. I think we have to be thinking that way.

MURRAY GELL-MANN: I think it’s not impossible that the progress in fundamental
physics and the possibility of actually learning the basic laws finding the unified theory of all the particles and all the interactions, finding the initial condition of the universes might be found.

ROBERT L. KUHN: What questions do both of you think about at night?

DAVID BALTIMORE: Well, you know, you think, as a scientist you’re often thinking
about very dull and mundane questions that come together to form something which is
larger than you expect or at least you hope they’ll come together. When I was an
experimentalist in the laboratory, and that’s a little while ago I’d go to sleep thinking about why the experiment that I did today didn’t work and that could be because I had the wrong solution, I had used the wrong glassware, I had used the wrong analytic method, or because I had the wrong way of thinking about it. And I, you know, you never know at what level the problem exists, and so you’re thinking about all these things at once, trying to figure out which one you can go in the lab the next day and vary in a way that’ll tell you whether it’s trivial or interesting and give your mind something to think about the next night when you go to sleep.

MURRAY GELL-MANN: It’s the same with theory, you worry about if your theory
doesn’t seem to be working, doesn’t seem to be agreeing with the real world you worry
about which aspect of the theory you have to change and, sometimes, the critical thing is to find some accepted principle that simply isn’t so, to go outside what they call the box, to go outside of regularly approved ideas in order to find that variant that will work. But, you better make sure that there isn’t some very good reason for that box. Mostly when you’re outside the box you’re doing crank science, but, every once in a while you find that there’s an accepted limitation that is not a real limitation and by. Einstein, for example found that absolute space and absolute time were a nuisance and there was no reason to have them. When I thought of the quarks, for example, they had fractional charge, well people didn’t like factional charge very much, they were, I figured right away that they would be stuck permanently inside of things like the neutron and proton and that was not a popular idea. And, so on and so forth. But I realized that there was no real reason for these forbiddenesses.

DAVID BALTIMORE: I had to accept the reversal of a flow of information in
biological systems in order to work on how viruses were able to integrate into cells.

ROBERT L. KUHN: What does that mean, briefly?

DAVID BALTIMORE: That was, I mean, that was the central dogma of the time, it
was to say that biological information flows from DNA to RNA to protein, and what we
showed was that it could go back from RNA to DNA and that was treated as
revolutionary. But actually, when you think about it, it was sort of trivial chemistry to imagine that that could occur. And there was nothing particularly revolutionary except for the fact that nobody was thinking that way.

ROBERT L. KUHN: In fact affirmatively thinking that that can happen.

DAVID BALTIMORE: People actually they hadn’t even thought a whole lot about whether it could or couldn’t.

MURRAY GELL-MANN: It’s like a superstition.

MURRAY GELL-MANN: But it’s very rare in science. You have to be careful, most
of the time there’s a damn good reason why people don’t assume certain things.

ROBERT L. KUHN: And it is superstition.

MURRAY GELL-MANN: But, every once in a while, you come across an accepted
idea that, [the vast majority of the scientific community says,] "you mustn’t think such-and-such-a-way, it’s just wrong," and when you look closely, you realize there’s no reason for it and it’s usually an opportunity to explain something that you couldn’t explain before.

Watch this 27 minute episode now, on the ResearchChannel web site.

Thinking of Thinking for Thinking's Sake

2006-08-11T10:24:00.000-07:00

For a "new millennium," the world is sure a bloody mess, these days, proving once again that newer is not always better. Even really smart people get disappointed, aggravated, and yeah, even PISSED OFF at the rampant ignorance and stupidity.

What to do about it? If world affairs continue on the current trajectory, what is the rational motivation for creating a posthuman future? If this is the way that groups, corporations, and countries behave, why bother EXTENDING this version of civilization?

Clearly, how we think about the present and future will substantively shape it; but what have we learned about thinking itself, so far? If you ask me, Edward Feigenbaum sums it up best in this roundtable discussion. We need a scientific discipline of thinking itself, of the same nature as physics or chemistry. Take a brief glimpse backward to better inform the way forward with Robert Kuhn's excellent series Closer to Truth, online at ResearchChannel - Thinking Out the Last Millennium.

Don't stop at this single program, though, the entire series is both entertaining and informative.

Planet of No Apes

2006-08-10T14:11:00.000-07:00

While we're on the topic of terrorism, here's a quite well done enviropolitical guerilla marketing spot. Guerilla, get it? =SMACK!= "Ow! That hurt!"
Sorry, your browser doesn't support the EMBED tag. You can try a <a href="http://www.ifilm.com/efp" target="_blank">click here</a>.

Bottled Bomb Water Lockdown

2006-08-10T06:19:00.000-07:00

It's in the water. And the ketchup packets that go with your McDonald's fries that you JUST GOT, RIGHT THERE IN THE AIRPORT. And the Starbucks cup that you are DRINKING FROM ... yeah, *that* might be a bomb, too.

And your cell phone. And your laptop. And your CAR KEY fobs. A news commentator just said it all, "this is because these are things that *MIGHT* have been used had the plot not been foiled."

Um, but the plot WAS foiled.

When will GUTLESS AMERICANS stop complying with this increasingly assertive Police State?

Where is the rational civil disobedience?

Just ask General Jack.

General Jack D. Ripper: Mandrake, do you realize that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk... ice cream. Ice cream, Mandrake, children's ice cream.

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: Lord, Jack.

General Jack D. Ripper: You know when fluoridation first began?

Group Capt. Lionel Mandrake: I... no, no. I don't, Jack.

General Jack D. Ripper: Nineteen hundred and forty-six. Nineteen forty-six, Mandrake. How does that coincide with your post-war Commie conspiracy, huh? It's incredibly obvious, isn't it? A foreign substance is introduced into our precious bodily fluids without the knowledge of the individual. Certainly without any choice. That's the way your hard-core Commie works (IMDb).

It doesn't matter to today's lockdown that the actual threatening liquids are of KNOWN particular colors, consistencies, and quantities.

It's likely that because the wages paid to TSA agents only attract workers of a particular intellectual ability, ALL LIQUIDS must be stopped. That's right, ma'am, your $300.00 Waterford crystal 0.025 oz. bottle of froo-froo juice is now A THREAT TO INTERNATIONAL SAFETY.

Precautions make sense. However, the intellectual assymptote of TSA workers is a serious common sense bottleneck in the system. Any human being with a modicum of common sense could quickly and ACCURATELY discern between a 68 y.o. lady's 10ml perfume bottle and a 43 y.o. BALD ARAB GUY'S 500ml bottle of Man Hair Spray; but not the average TSA worker.

I'm sure that I could be wrong, here, but the odds of bomb juice smelling like extract of lilac or jasmine juice seem pretty damned slim.

Oh, but that kind of intelligent discrimination would be just that ... DISCRIMINATION! PROFILING! Oh no, we can't have THAT. Not in the United States where all are created equal and therefore must be equally lined up against the wall.

No, no, there is no room for DISCERNMENT in the land of equality. People will be treated equally STUPIDLY in all cases; anything less would be un-American.

So, I'm sorry ma'am, but that SEALED bottle of CLEAR MOUNTAIN SPRING WATER is a TERRORIST THREAT to civilization.

"We HOPE that these measures, which are being kept under review by the government, will need to be in place for a limited period only," the statement said.

We hope? We can only hope that the THREAT of fluoridated water is held in check by the geniuses at DHS, too.

Sadly, this probably *is* the least disruptive way to operate such a system on such a vast scale. I'm not oblivious to the TIME it would take to examine all these personal items versus just having people cram them into checked baggage. I think that my biggest issue really comes down to what that TV news commentator said. In short, these measures are being taken because of what MIGHT HAVE HAPPENED, rather than as a preventative measure to any real domestic risk. That is, unless DHS is not telling us the whole story.

Your thoughts?

A Final Exam?

2006-08-10T06:10:00.000-07:00

Perhaps this is where TSA workers come from. Hey, I'm just saying what millions of people think every day, but they're AFRAID to say it.

Sure, this is all real funny and such, HOWEVER, if this is truly what was indeed turned in (and probably accepted) as a "final" for ANY high school class other than amateur video production, then I do believe, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, that the following qualifies as exhibit #1 toward proving the pathologically dysfunctional state of public education in America. Maybe it's funny as a video, but it's BEYOND REVOLTING as a reflection of what is going on in American high schools in the name of education.

All Value Is Ascribed

2006-08-09T14:40:00.000-07:00

An empirical case study, courtesy of one red paperclip. Yeah, it's old news, but worth reiterating anyway and stuffing away here in the archives; to which no sane person would ascribe the slightest value. Hence, empirical case study #2: this site.

AOL Shoots Itself In The Privates

2006-08-09T11:17:00.000-07:00

YOUR private information, that is. Forbes.com reports, "[AOL] inadvertently revealed to the world what 650,000 of its subscribers searched for as they browsed for online information. The searches often contained data that helped identify the users themselves, including names, Social Security numbers and local landmarks that they had looked up.

''This was a screw-up, and we're angry and upset about it,'' AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein told The Associated Press."

Yeah, well, Thinking Human Beings have been angry and upset about AOL for a long, long time. So welcome to the karma klub, buddy.

The Troops Are Just Fine

2006-08-07T10:48:00.000-07:00

Can you believe that the Weekly WhiteHouse.Gov newsletter actually distributed this photo? Why does the President need to sport aseptic protective gear to shake hands with a recuperating soldier? If U.S. soldier aren't being exposed to anything POTENTIALLY CONTAGIOUS, why the prophylactic garb there, Chief? And since I worked in the operating room of a major research hospital in Texas for FIVE YEARS, make-believe stories about hospital protocol won't cut it. Doctors DO NOT wear this stuff when making their rounds; this type of gear is reserved for asceptic environments like the O.R. At best, it's utter incompetence that such a photo would be circulated by the P.R. monkeys, at all.

Hmmm ... no rubbers worn here ...

Current Market Forecast

2006-08-07T06:00:00.000-07:00

Okay, I'm going to start tossing out my Market Forecasts every so randomly often and we'll see what kind of moronomaven I turn out to be. As of today, August 7, 2006:

1. Fed pauses Aug. 8.
2. Market goes "WooHoo" for a week or two.
3. The buzz wears off by the 15th or 20th and we BEAR sideways-down through October.
4. Stumbling sideways sort-of bull into November. Much yammering about "maybe no Santa Claus this year."
5. Just before Turkey Day, find out which turkeys fell for that one.
6. Santa not packing the same goods as some better years, but he's still Santa.
7. 2007: The Year of Vista. More staggering, stumbling, bumbling, barely bull action on the way to Vista. Much hand-wringing around tech. How did tech rebound while I wasn't looking? "Why, oh why didn't I BUY in JULY?" I want my, I want my, I want my A.M.D ...
8. IF Vista impresses both IT Managers in terms of stability; and Business Managers in terms of business continuity, THEN, we could see business fill in for the consumer.
9. IF Vista fails to accomplish #8, it's going to be a bumpy Presidential Cycle, but prez cycle we will, to one degree or another.

There, I said it. If you buy a single share of stock based solely on this FORECAST, you're an idiot and you will lose every penny and your wife or husband, children, parents, and civilization will end as we know it.

Do We Even Know What LIBERTY Is? Really?

2006-08-05T15:11:00.000-07:00

The philosophy of Liberty is based on Self-Ownership. Watch this simple, but elegant and hard-hitting flash animation to understand our right to life, liberty, and property - and our responsibility to think, speak, and act accordingly.

read more | digg story

Bah, nevermind. The newest Ethernet TV channel is on the air at C|Net TV ... let's go figure out what great new Stuff we can buy to numb the symptoms of that stupid liberty deficit disorder. Who needs liberty when the newest supertracker HD plasma-screen cellphone is out, anyway?

We NEVER see this on American TV. Why?

2006-08-05T15:05:00.000-07:00

Journalists who ask questions. Is that too much to ask for? Wow. Just wow. Please watch the videos on this pages. These are not wild-eyed lunatic anti-semites, these are current and former U.S. Government Officials asking Israeli Officials how it is that they can justify doing to the Palestinians what was done to them by Nazis.

Many Israeli leaders even use the exact same rationale to defend their actions that the Nazi's used during the Nuremburg Trials to defend Nazi brutality. My fellow Americans, the long dreaded day of a Second American Revolution may be nearer at hand than we imagine. Our very Constitution foresaw such a possibility if our representative democracy were to ever become hijacked by thugs. Believe me, I don't even want to THINK about that, any more than you do; but if we do not, we will get the world we deserve.

read more | digg story

IM 2.0

2006-08-03T18:33:00.000-07:00

You too? Then try out the new CHAT. There's also a tab up top of the page. In deference to current Buzzword 2.0 Regime 2.0, I'm calling this IM 2.0. Trillian, Gabbly, Meebo, and others have all been taking different approaches toward "universal" IM. It's a hell of a challenge, to be sure, and I'm super impressed with each and every stride these wildly underpaid, over inventive developers roll out.

Bay Area Blogger Jailed After Defying Court Order

2006-08-03T16:17:00.000-07:00

PlantTrees called my attention to this New York Times article. Can this actually happen in America?

If this is the new brand of Democracy, Liberty, and Rule of Law that we're exporting all over the world, no wonder world markets aren't buying and political trade deficits widening.

Mapping Israeli Assault: July 12-August 2

2006-08-03T12:54:00.000-07:00

I don't know if the idea of "proportionate response" really helps the debate when one is seeking to annhilate another -- for whatever reason -- but if nothing else, the maps here help to provide a better context for what is happening.

Truth be told, and various kneejerk rants aside, I'm as confused as you are about how to respond to all of this; my heart and mind are a mishmash of reason, emotion, sound judgement, moral outrage, and yet all I can really do for now is seek more DATA in order to eventually form some kind of fact-based perspective on all of this. It's just a phcking mess, man. A phcking disaster. Mapping Israeli Assault: July 12-August 2.

Amidst the Chaos: Atlantis space shuttle ready for launch

2006-08-03T08:09:00.000-07:00

"Atlantis arrived at Launch Pad 39B on Aug. 2, riding atop the mobile launch platform and carried by the crawler transporter. Once at the pad, the vehicle was enclosed by the rotating service structure. Preparations for launch continue, including the installation of the payload in Atlantis' cargo bay The launch window for this mission to resume construction of the International Space Station opens Aug. 27" (Spaceflight.Nasa.Gov).

BRIMMING
"life is simultaneously and perpetually brimming with disaster and chaos and failure and promise and hope and attainment; the degree to which any of these is lacking at a particular moment is a measure of the lifelessness of that moment." -- m.s.

Stop, Now, What's that Sound?

2006-08-02T15:28:00.000-07:00

This entry comes to us from the "If I Already Agree with the Reports, It's News; If I Don't Agree, or If New Facts Call Into Question My Existing Worldview, It's Enemy Propaganda" Department.

We begin with this incisive and heart-felt report from Mayssoun Sukarieh, PhD Candidate at the University of California, writing from Beirut, live from Lebanon, 30 July 2006: "Just how many outcries do you need to hear before you act out of a commitment to humanity, a humanity that links you and me and so many beyond this sick consumerism of images?

To tell you the truth, my friend, we have lost faith in the idea that "public opinion" is capable of changing anything. We have lost faith in an international community that can back us and stop these massacres. The UN is now just another cold and unfeeling face of the United States.

Or it is simply an organization as helpless and powerless as we are here? Its representatives die under the bombs alongside us, and no one is allowed to condemn Israel. We have lost faith in you because we do not think you can act on your knowledge, or that your knowledge even matters anymore.

We have lost faith in you because we think your governments do not give a damn about how you think or what you think. We have lost faith in you because you do not live in democracies, and hence your opinion does not matter anyway -- there or here!

We have lost faith in you because your democracy got exported to us with your missiles, and we are consuming them while you are consuming our news.

Next, Middle East Report 234: The Bush Team Reloaded, by Jim Lobe

"On September 20, 2001, just nine days after the attacks on New York and the Pentagon, the Project for the New American Century (PNAC) laid out a consensus agenda for President George W. Bush’s “war on terrorism.” In addition to military action to oust the Taliban in Afghanistan and “capture or kill” Osama bin Laden, PNAC called for regime change in Iraq “even if evidence does not link Iraq directly to the attack,” and “appropriate measures of retaliation” against Iran and Syria if they refused to comply with US demands to cut off support for Hizballah. Signed by prominent neo-conservatives and a smattering of liberal interventionists ... notably former CIA director James Woolsey and former Commentary editor Norman Podhoretz, [who] were soon describing [the PNAC strategy] as “World War IV.”"

Among its other recommendations, the slim volume encouraged the Bush administration explicitly to reject the jurisdiction of the UN Charter unless amended to accommodate Washington’s new strategic doctrine of “preemption,” to cleanse the CIA and State Department of their “realists” and “Arabists.”

For What It's Worth
Buffalo Springfield
Written in 1966
APPLIES TO 2006

There's something happening here
What it is ain't exactly clear
There's a man with a gun over there
Telling me I got to beware

I think it's time we stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

There's battle lines being drawn
Nobody's right if everybody's wrong
Young people speaking their minds
Getting so much resistance from behind

I think it's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

What a field-day for the heat
A thousand people in the street
Singing songs and carrying signs
Mostly say, hooray for our side

It's time we stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

Paranoia strikes deep

Into your life it will creep

It starts when you're always afraid

You step out of line, the man come and take you away

We better stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, hey, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, now, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down
Stop, children, what's that sound
Everybody look what's going down

If you don't have time to read on right now, please bookmark Electronic Lebanon and get back to it as soon as you can.

Correction: AOL can give it away ...

2006-08-02T05:25:00.000-07:00

Looks like I was wrong again. Mea culpa.

Time Warner to Make AOL Services Free

"Time Warner this morning confirmed its AOL unit will give away e-mail, software and other Web services for free to high-speed Internet users in a bid to boost online advertising sales, in what Reuters notes is the fourth overhaul of the online service in five years. The media conglomerate also said its quarterly results swung to a profit of $1.01 billion from a loss of $409 million a year earlier, when it booked a litigation-related charge. The profit growth was led by strong performances at its cable and network-television operations, the company said" (WSJ.Com, subscription required).

But don't worry, in case you missed it, Time Warner Expects Offering AOL Free Will Be Costly.

Warning: Do Not Feed the Geniuses.

Exploring the UberMetaSupraBe-O-Sphere

2006-08-01T17:55:00.000-07:00

Humanity's expanding contextual awareness is definitely reaching either an asymptote, an inflection point, a quantum jump, or similar discontinuity. The buzzword of the day is singularity, though Eliezer Yudkowsky's intelligence explosion is probably a more accurate term. Yet, the expansion of contexual awareness is more than that, as well.

Contextual awareness implies a practical UNDERSTANDING, resulting from applied intelligence. Without that contextual awareness, all we can do is sit around THINKING novel thoughts or at best possibly KNOWING a few cool new things, but unable to see how it all fits into the bigger picture; much less DO much about our newly synthesized insights.

Of course, I prefer my own further obfuscating yet vaguely meta-accurate and counterintuitively clarifying term for this singular explosion of intelligence resulting in collective uber contextual awareness: Metavalent Stigmergy.

Metavalent Stigmergy says that exponential, radical, or discontinuous change is a form communication, itself. The question is, What are these changes telling us, as a species? In large part, that is what I believe the Extropian-Singularitarian Ant Colony is grappling to discern.

Centuries of scientific discipline have gradually revealed more and more of the biggest picture, often by observing and understanding more and more of the littlest picture. We witness this acceleration and expansion in all kinds of unexpected, metatrivial applications. By metatrivial I mean developments that might SEEM trivial -- well, humble might be a better term -- but which portend radical discontinuous advances.

Case in point, "'There are advances being made in metamaterials that mean the first devices will probably be used for bending radar waves or the electromagnetic waves used by mobile phones,' he said."

tags: metavalent, extropian

Battle of the Blowhards on YouTube

2006-08-01T14:22:00.000-07:00

Michael Moore vs. Bill O'Reilly
Part One
Part Two

"It depends on whether it was an INTENTIONAL MISTAKE or an inadvertent mistake."
-- Bill O'Reilly

Brilliant.

Global Nanotech Investment Summit

2006-07-31T13:03:00.000-07:00

Not that it's nearly as monumental as the Monday Night Football channel change, but for what it's worth.

"The Third Bi-Annual Nanotech for Investors Summit brings together leading industry investors with top business and technology executives of nanotechnology growth companies. This intimate, executive-level event will provide an open and frank dialogue covering a financially-based outlook of how nanotechnology is, and will be, impacting global investments across various markets.

Jointly hosted by NanoDimension, a leading global venture capital firm in nanotechnology, and the Nano Science and Technology Institute, the largest industry and scientific organization focused exclusively on nanotechnology and organizer of the largest nanotechnology event in the United States."

Perhaps the Biggest Non-Event of the New Millennium

2006-07-31T11:34:00.000-07:00

WSJ.Com shocked the world today with this earth-shaking announcement that means everything in the world of sport is now -- as never before -- exactly the same, only different. What a phantasmagorical non-content noisemaker this stands to become.

Two staples of television football -- Monday Night Football on ABC and the Sunday night game on ESPN -- are no more.

Oooo .... are no more ... this is sooo hewwwge!

Monday night's National Football League game will now appear on ESPN, and the Sunday night game moves to NBC. Both networks need to re-create their football identities and persuade legions of fans to change deeply ingrained TV-viewing habits.

Yeah, man ... REALLY, REALLY, DEEPLY INGRAINED habits of clicking on channel 3 instead of 47. What a tremendous, world-tilting SHIFT this will be; punching TWO NUMBERS on the remote instead of just one! "Oh NFL and TV networks, you're SO BRAVE; I luuv yew!"

Hope for the Lost Children of Hope?

2006-07-30T06:29:00.000-07:00

Highly doubtful, but then, one can always hope for the hope to keep hope alive, I suppose.

EXCERPTS from New York Times article, below:

"[Reverend] Boyd finally became fed up, he said. Before the last presidential election, he preached six sermons called “The Cross and the Sword” in which he said the church should steer clear of politics, give up moralizing on sexual issues, stop claiming the United States as a “Christian nation” and stop glorifying American military campaigns.

“When [the church] conquers the world, it becomes the world. When you put your trust in the sword, you lose the cross.”

Mr. Boyd says he is no liberal. He is opposed to abortion and thinks homosexuality is not God’s ideal. The response from his congregation at Woodland Hills Church here in suburban St. Paul — packed mostly with politically and theologically conservative, middle-class evangelicals — was passionate. Some members walked out of a sermon and never returned. By the time the dust had settled, Woodland Hills, which Mr. Boyd founded in 1992, had lost about 1,000 of its 5,000 members.

But there were also congregants who thanked Mr. Boyd, telling him they were moved to tears to hear him voice concerns they had been too afraid to share. [Essentially TERRORIZED by fellow "christians."]

“Most of my friends are believers,” said Shannon Staiger, a psychotherapist and church member, “and they think if you’re a believer, you’ll vote for Bush. And it’s scary to go against that.”

Sermons like Mr. Boyd’s are hardly typical in today’s evangelical churches. But the upheaval at Woodland Hills is an example of the internal debates now going on in some evangelical colleges, magazines and churches. A common concern is that the Christian message is being compromised by the tendency to tie evangelical Christianity to the Republican Party and American nationalism, especially through the war in Iraq.

“I don’t think there’s a particular angle we have on society that others lack. All good, decent people want good and order and justice. Just don’t slap the label ‘Christian’ on it.”

New York Times: Disowning Conservative Politics Is Costly for an Evangelical Pastor

The 411 on 911 Theory -- Conspiracy Mongering Nutjobs or Myth Busting Patriots?

2006-07-29T17:39:00.000-07:00

"The truth about 9/11 is that we still don't know the truth; and we should." -- Lt. Col. Bob Bowman, former Air Force intercepter pilot.

Sites Mentioned in the C-SPAN airing of the two-day event, “American Scholars Symposium: 9/11 and The Neo-Con Agenda,” held in the ballroom of the Sheraton Los Angeles Downtown on June 25, 2006.

I wish that I could pretend that the more that I learn the more I'd vote that these guys are nutjobs. Alas, DATA is DATA and it's awfully hard to ignore empirical observations such as WTC 7's unprovoked collapse, the perfect symmetry of the towers dual collapse, and the presence of molten metal weeks after the event, bubbling at temperatures more typical of Thermate, far exceeding the heating capacity of jet fuel. What I would like to see is my own Direct Empirical Confirmation of some of these images and testimonies.

Certainly, it seems reasonable to suggest that a comprehensive independent commission investigation would go a long way toward either silencing the nutjobs for good or holding some of history's most notorious criminals accountable for their actions.

Conservatives Without Conscience

2006-07-29T14:38:00.000-07:00

When the banter is all stripped away, it's not difficult to confess that both major political parties have been taken over by extreme factions within their own ranks. Howard Dean is certainly NOT a valid representative of my own small-d democratic-leaning views.

Tonight at 5pm CST, C-SPAN 1 airs Conservatives Without Conscience, "John Dean [famous for his role in the Nixon dirty tricks club] talked about his book Conservatives Without Conscience, published by Viking. In his book Mr. Dean argued that conservative politics in the U.S. had moved perilously close to authoritarianism. Former White House counsel John Dean, who was a prominent figure in the Watergate scandal that brought down his former boss, then-President Richard Nixon, further distanced himself from his Republican roots with criticisms of the current Republican leadership, claiming it had sullied the principles of conservatism with radical right-wing policies and Machiavellian tactics. Following his remarks he answered questions from the audience."

If JOHN DEAN, arguably a master of dirty tricks on his own account, is calling the current radicals MACHIAVELLIAN, that's saying quite a lot. Another Hero of Progressive Conservatism, Barry Goldwater, would surely be rolling in his grave to witness the events of the past eight years.

Probably, in an increasingly polarized world, rather increasingly demonizing any and all opposing perspectives, what should be *most* expected from rational thinking Conservatives and Liberals is to stand up and insist that THESE Republicans are not representing MY republican views; and THESE Democrats are not representing MY democratic views.

Book: Devil's Game

2006-07-29T09:45:00.000-07:00

Devil's Game: How the United States Helped Unleash Fundamentalist Islam.

"If you don't know whether to laugh or cry about the latest news from the Bush-Cheney team's adventures in national security, you can do both while reading The Dreyfuss Report, the widely read blog by one of the country's leading freelance investigative journalists." by Robert Dreyfuss

The blog features such eminantly clueful observations as More Evindence that Americans [in general] are Insane, Ignorant, or Both.

It's Okay for Israel to Bomb Americans

2006-07-28T06:41:00.000-07:00

This is a picture of just some of the more than 25,000 Americans under attack by Israel. Yet, the White House never uttered a word of caution to "slow down and DO NOT PUT AMERICANS AT RISK." In a word: unconscionable. If this administration is not doggedly protective of 25,000 American Citizens living in Lebanon, what makes us think they were doggedly protective of those in the World Trade Towers. To date, I've generally considered 9/11 conspiracy theorists like Alex Jones a bit nutty and thoroughly debunked. Even the findings of the rational sounding 9/11 Scholars For Truth seemed quite a stretch. But events like this -- allowing Israel to bomb heavily American-populated areas without so much as a "whoaaa, slow down there, par'dner ..." certainly don't harm the otherwise irrational, paranoid, wild-eyed conspiracy case.

Perhaps C-SPAN and BookTV coverage this weekend July 29 - 31 is worth watching, after all. Even if you don't have cable, if you can read this, you can watch or listen online using the links in the previous sentence.

Thomas Ricks, "Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq," interviewed by Col. Jeffrey McCausland (US Army-retired).
Mark Danner, "The Secret Way to War: The Downing Street Memo and the Iraq War's Buried History."
James H. Fetzer, et. al., “American Scholars Symposium: 9/11 and The Neo-Con Agenda,” held in the ballroom of the Sheraton Los Angeles Downtown.

Conflicting Crash Reports

2006-07-27T18:03:00.000-07:00

An interesting post on Backfence.com says that Silicon Valley is in denial over a housing crash in progress.

Prices disconnected from fundamentals. House prices are far beyond any historically known relationship to rents or salaries. Rents are less than half of mortgage payments. Salaries cannot cover mortgages except in the very short term, by using adjustable interest-only loans.

Backfence.com - Palo Alto, Ca. local community news, information, events and advertising.

MyAndOnlyMy Southwest.Com

2006-07-26T11:42:00.000-07:00

In today's War on Customer Service Terrorism report, we feature the illustrious Southwest Airlines. As is often the case in this erratic series of reports, the story begins with a highly esteemed, respected company. A company I've done business with for some time, often years, based upon many happy transactions and an ongoing commitment to value. So when the Customer Service Terrorists strike, it's almost always completely unexpected and often explosively disruptive; hence, Terrorism. To be even more precise, what we are seeing is a War On Customers via Service Terrorism.

In today's episode, we follow the Southwest.com web site's appeal to make our travel more convenient and simple by using the MySouthwest portal to:

# View travel itineraries
# Quick reservations based on travel preferences and stored trips
# Store credit card preferences for added convenience
# View your account activity
# Verify/change your account information
# Change your password
# Rapid Rewards Members can view your Rapid Rewards credit detail and Awards

Sounds great. We have a small family, but still, as designated family travel agent, I book travel for the four of us on a fairly regular basis. This should be helpful. I'm happy.

So, I login to the MySouthwest site and snap through the familar screens to book a flight for my wife. Everything is familiar, they've done a good job of not OVER customizing and changing the whole interface, just because it's a "my" space -- in the generic sense, of course.

Click to confirm. Flight booked, great! Oh, but what!? I'm the passenger. Now, I KNOW I double checked to make certain that my wife's name was in the Passenger field, why did it do this to me? Scan the page for ways to "Edit My Itinerary." Bzzzt! Wrong answer. There will be no correcting for mistakes in MySouthwest. Okay, fine, I have a long history of good results with the humans at 1800-I-FLY-SWA, so I call.

Immediately, the Customer Accusations begin. I'm shocked and awed. When did this happen to Southwest, too? "Well, sir, were you LOGGED IN to your account?"

"Well, yes ma'am, I was."

"Well, YOU CAN'T JUST GO AND DO that. I don't know if they'll let you change this, but maybe they will, since you just now made the mistake."

Oh, it's MY mistake, I see, but I say, "What do you mean I can't do that, I thought that's what it was for -- MySouthwest.com."

In an irritated tone, "Well, that's YOUR MySouthwest, any travel you book there is only for you, [you idiot]." The bracketed text is implied, but believe me, I get it.

Working hard to keep cool, and so far succeeding, "All I'm saying is that the system asked me for a passenger and I put my wife's name in the passenger field, so I don't understand why it changed that on it's own."

In much more aggressive tone, "You CAN'T JUST DO THAT, sir. That's what I just told you. You can't put someone else in the passenger field."

Still consciously working to stay on the cool, "If you don't mind my asking, then why does the site even provide the field asking for passenger information, if I am the only allowed passenger? That's extremely confusing and costs both of us in terms of inconvenience and wasted time in the form of this call."

I often try to get the service rep on the same team with little techniques like this. The idea is to convey that we are both stuck in this together. It works about 25% of the time, so always worth a shot. But if you're dealing with a customer terrorist, forget it.

Insistent, "Sir, I can't hear you ... your phone is breaking up."

I repeat myself, enunciating more carefully, patience wearing thin.

More emphatic, "Sir, I can't hear you ... your phone is breaking up."

Now, audibly irritated, "Wow, that's interesting, you could hear me just fine all the way up to the point that I have questions or comments about the system?"

Now, literally shouting, "Sir, I can't hear you ... your phone is breaking up."

"Wow, okay, so that's how it is. Can you please help me fix this?"

"Yes sir, I'll need you to go back to the Southwest.com site, sign out of your account, rebook the entire flight, and then I'll give you a code to use existing funds so that you don't get charged twice."

So she could phcking hear me, the entire time.

That's fine, I'm happy enough with that and I understand that this is where she was pushing the conversation, but I still think it's important to provide CUSTOMER FEEDBACK to the customer SERVICE folks so that data points can be collected. By shutting down my report, the company is shutting out important DATA about what works and what doesn't work. Moreover, I am encountering this aggressive method of literally SHOUTING ME INTO SUBMISSION in more and more service center encouters. This is just one tactic that I'm suggesting as symptomatic of the wider War On Customers via Service Terrorism.

If 10,000 people get shut down like this, then the simple fix of correcting that MySouthwest web form by simply NOT INCLUDING A PASSENGER FIELD -- if that's the borked way they want to keep doing things -- could evade the company for years and literally cost hundreds of millions in wasted support dollars fixing calls like mine. I'll refrain from further comment on the overall web site design that first lures the visitor into the MySouthwest site "for your convenience, with quick reservations based on travel preferences and stored trips" UNLESS your travel preferences include your family members, that is. Because at Southwest, YOU are the center of our universe and to hell with your family.

PROPOSAL: Development of a network of blogs or a small set of distinct Technorati tags that helps to aggregate and collate information on the gradually escalating War on Customers via Service Terrorism.

PURPOSE: To better track and monitor corporate Brand Value and to balance financial claims of Good Will value with observed and documented Bad Will behavior.

Synthetic Vision System Wins FAA Approval for use in Corporate Jets

2006-07-25T07:27:00.000-07:00

"[T]his week, Gulfstream became the first executive plane maker to offer the [synthetic vision] system, which displays a computer-generated view of the terrain ahead -- even in heavy fog or cloud, when the ground can be invisible to the most advanced infra-red sensors. [The] SVS will result in more accurate tactical flight decisions by pilots and ultimately increased safety."

I have to admit that I'm a little surprised that a publication as hip as MIT-TR fails to mention that this system is the product of the NASA Simlabs at Future Flight Central. I've been privileged to tour the NASA Future Flight labs and get acquainted with a few of the engineers over there, and it's a truly impressive facility and certainly the engineering staff are all rock stars, kings, queens, visionaries and prophets in the Book of Metavalence. Who the hell cares what Paris Hilton is wearing? The NEWS is created by the cerebral celebrities at labs like this, and others all across the nation and around the world.

It's still about THE OPEN ACCESS, STUPID

2006-07-24T19:19:00.000-07:00

I've been momentarily transported to Net Policy heaven by watching this exchange between Net Prophets and Pioneers Vint Cerf and Dave Farber on C-SPAN2, unpacking and disambiguating the latest bumper-sticker topic of 'net neutrality.' What makes it particularly heavenly, for a fallen warrior in the 1990's net wars, is watching each of these RealMedia RTSP streams over EthernetTV!

In "What is Net Neutrality?" (7/22/2006) featuring Vinton G. Cerf, Google, V.P. & Chief Internet Evangelist and Dave Farber, Carnegie Mellon University, Distinguished Career Professor of Computer Science and Public Policy, we rediscover a topic that has LONG been near and dear to my heart, having been a point man in the Bay Area Open Access movement as long ago as 2000. What can I say, but once again, "We Told You So."

By failing to architect the Residential Information Infrastructure System (RIIS) as a native Ethernet To The Home (ETTH) network, the industry effectively and WILLFULLY failed to de-couple the physical transport and content layers, thereby creating the present REAL HAZARDS to universal openness and innovation; just as we painstakingly forecasted and explained in bygone millenium. It could have been avoided by simply thinking and acting ahead. Well, some of us DID act ahead, but we were killed for doing so, in the cause of bringing the network to where it is, today.

From the 7/22/2006 stream:

Dave Farber, "I hate that term, 'net neutrality' ... it's too general and innaccurate."

Vint Cerf, "Worst case scenario? Loss of OPEN ACCESS for consumers and OPEN ACCESS for providers."

This is NOT about "net neutrality." That newest bumper sticker is only serving to confuse the issue. This is the OPEN ACCESS issue which never really went away. The incumbent telcos did an effective job of stalling and thereby starving the CLEC's out of existence by systematically and methodically breaking the law -- The Telecom Act of 1996. THAT is what took the steam out of the Open Access public debate, but it DID NOT take the steam out of the issue, itself.

To hell with net neutrality, if there is to be one rule to bind us all, it must be 100% NON-DISCRIMINATORY UNIVERSAL OPEN ACCESS to a common global IP network substrate, and as I've ranted and ranted and ranted since 1992 that substrate -- from every home and business, to every home and business -- over every splitter, bridge, router, gateway or server, is ETHERNET, period.

Granted, today's issue isn't specifically about Ethernet, but it's closely related, because as the network completes its inevitable evolution to Ethernet Everywhere, the circuit switched network operators of the 1800 and 1900's are attempting to force antediluvian ownership, operations, and business models upon what must eventually become a Universally Affordable, Broadband, Symmetric, High Speed (hundreds of Mbps to Gbps), Ethernet network. Cerf makes clear a point that I've harped on for decades: Universal Service 2034 has nothing to do with the Universal Service of 1934; yet, more than 70% of the way there, the old definition continues to hold sway. Stupid. Period.

This discussion expanded on 7/24/2006 during a Center for American Progress day-long series of discussions that examined protection to consumers on the Internet. Therein, a variety of panels reviews a framework to future hearings on the issue by the Federal Trade Commission.

Also quite worthy as a quick Internet History Who's Who and general primer, see this RTSP streaming one-on-one interview with Cerf, the recent Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, himself.

Private Spaceport Plans Move Forward, er, Upward

2006-07-24T05:16:00.000-07:00

While started some time ago, current "plans detailed in a 229-page draft of an environmental review filed with the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA would issue permits and licenses for Blue Origin to go ahead with launch plans."

Bush Smacks Down Soldier's Questions

2006-07-23T16:21:00.000-07:00

President Bush: "Thanks for giving me a chance to visit and have a little lunch with you. God bless you all."

Q Mr. President, what do you hope Secretary Rice accomplishes on her trip to the Middle East, sir?

THE PRESIDENT: I'm going to talk to her tomorrow when I -- Sunday, when I get back to the White House. We're going to have a good visit.

Q What do you hope she accomplishes, sir?

THE PRESIDENT: I said I would talk to her tomorrow.

END 11:38 A.M. MDT

On the White House's OWN SITE!!! You can't make this stuff up, man!

Ten tech-related YouTube clips you shouldn't miss

2006-07-22T14:43:00.000-07:00

This entire CNET feature is more than worthy of exploration, but you just CAN'T MISS what I hereby dub a YouTube Investigative Series on Net Neutrality. Obviously, to use Senator Stevens tech jargon, the U-Tube is one of the more popular of the various interwebnet Tubes that make up the large interTube net.

After that comedic take, why not try the more factual perspective of pioneering internet architect Vint Cerf's perspective?

Finally, Amanda Congdon does a fairly good job of putting the issue of Net Neutrality in layman's terms, as well.

Going Up?

2006-07-22T14:06:00.000-07:00

Now, all we need is the space elevator to get us to the top floor of the first room of the 2015 space hotel.

Age of the Fast Green Machine?

2006-07-22T13:57:00.000-07:00

Reviewers claim that the Electric sports car packs a punch, but will it sell? CNET News.com

Browser Wars, the Next Generation

2006-07-22T12:23:00.000-07:00

Cut to the chase: The Acid Test results for new browsers.

Actually, it has been awhile since we've seen a PC inflection point such as the one that 2006/2007 brings. Early to the battle was Mac Darwin OS, OS X, and had it been on time, Vista from Microsoft. Nevertheless, Vista will finally arrive in early '07, barring any (very highly doubtful) potential surprise for an early Christmas. Along with these platform refreshes now comes a refresh of browser code, as well.

ExtremeTech takes a close and timely look at Firefox 2 Beta 1, Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3, and Opera 9.0. Personally, I have been a browser gypsy from the very beginning; fickle in my allegances, I happily trounce back and forth between browsers as improved products present themselves, be it mosaic, netscape, ie, maxthon, mozilla, opera, konqueror, firebirdfox, flock, avant, etc.

Right at this moment, big changes have or are about to occur in three well-known browsers: Internet Explorer is finally being updated, with version 7 in its third beta and almost ready to roll out the door; Firefox is also ripening an upgrade beta for its Version 2.0—it's in beta 1; and finally Opera, which has a devoted but smaller following, has recently come out with Version 9.0.

Presently, the Opera 9 offering is particularly impressing me. Subjectively, on my middle-aged 1GHz/1GB/60GB tablet pc, it seems to run the snappiest, especially with multiple tabs open. I like the selective content-blocker, though it would be nice to access some way other than right click. Maybe I can map a shortcut key with a little homework into the now legendary flexible and tuneable Opera *.ini files. Of course, I have nine-million extensions installed in Firefox, so as I continue to meddle with Opera 9, it may begin to hog up memory, as well. We'll see.

Be A Space Cadet: Just $35M

2006-07-22T12:10:00.000-07:00

Actually, I consider this a fairly reasonable price to step out of the capsule, if you dare.

How Benevolent Are You?

2006-07-21T16:44:00.000-07:00

As Spidey taught us, "With great arrogance, comes great condescention." Or maybe that's just the way I remember it. Do you dare question MY powers of recollection!?

Many of us who float among the uppermost echelons of this rarified air, find that acts of Benevolence -- often quite sincere, actually -- can cover for a multitude of sins; or at least help us to feel a little better about ourselves and hedge against moments of painfully accute self-awareness, when for just a fleeting instance, we truly realize how annoying we are to the average good-natured human.

But nevermind that ... we can truly bask in our own Benevolent Glory whenever we patiently try to explain the blaTANTly obvious to the obviously blaTENTly clueless. If you didn't track with the spelling there and actually don't know which is correct, well, that's okay, we accept you as you are. After all, it's probably not entirely stupid people's fault that they are so stupid. I mean, EVERYONE knows that all poor people are poor mostly due to individual and personal laziness, but probably also bad nature and or nurture, too. Poor things. We should be nice to them, anyway.

And just because so-called impartial observers or friends claim that we're only further convincing the lowly, yet favored object of our magnificent beneficence of our own overbearing and bloated haughtiness, well, that doesn't mean it's true. After all, they too are only our friends due to gracious favor extended toward them, so they aren't all that impartial after all, right? But we are patient with them, as well.

So, today I ask myself and my readers, How Benevolent Are You in your everday life? One measure is by answering this question, as honestly as possible. Remember, it's completely anonymous and you only hurt YOU if you are not truthful.

Another EXPERT backs Google

2006-07-21T15:06:00.000-07:00

Well, now. There you go. Now that Alex The Expert has deemed all things Fair and Balanced, that should put the whole issue to rest ... again ... right? Until next time, anyway. Apparently, it doesn't matter how 3vi1 the actual effect on customers, so long as anti-evil handwaving is of reasonable visibility. "'Based on my evaluation, I conclude that Google's efforts to combat click fraud are reasonable,' Alexander Tuzhilin, a professor of information systems at New York University, said in the court filing."

Remote Control Androids

2006-07-21T11:16:00.000-07:00

Snagged this one off the KurzweilAI feed, below. If you haven't scrolled down, why not give it a try?

And don't worry. The Android Clones are only the most basic -- though doubtless essential -- of building blocks. Even once we've accomplished Mind Uploading, the psychological experience of existing in a Substrate Independent body is what will seperate the next evolutionary strain of humanity from the less adapative. That's where today's Remote-Control Self becomes essential as an experimental training platform. The initial stages of mind transfer into a new substrate will be very awkward and disorienting, to say the least, unless that new substrate is an EXACT genetic replica. Surely that could be one scenario, but it is not the only scenario, and even then we don't really know what the result would be like. After all, EXACT is a very exacting ideal, indeed.

Short of that ideal case, only those humans possessing a TREMENDOUS amount of concentration and patience will have the slightest chance of adapting.

So, the uber rich might be the first guinea pigs in the posthuman future, but Natural Selection will weed them out as well. So, the only option will be to Adapt and Transcend, or sayonara.

Google Is Still a One-Trick Pony

2006-07-21T10:01:00.000-07:00

THANK GOODNESS that Paul Kedrosky over at Seeking Alpha has it dead right. I am so sick and tired of this whole gobbldly goog crap. Believe me, Sergey does NOT walk on water and don't get me started on the 3vi1 evil trip again.

What percent of your life do YOU spend explaining the blatantly obvious to the obviously blatently clueless?
	99.999% - Maligned Pariah. (Jim Cramer, Steven Colbert)
	89.999% - Misunderstood Genius. (Ben Bernanke, John Stewart)
	59.999% - Pillar of Common Sense. (Lou Dobbs, Carlos Mencia)
	39.999% - Average Joe. (Anderson Cooper, Chris Rock)
	19.999% - Kood U Reepeet th' Qweshtun? (Star Jones, Larry the Cable Guy)
	-0.009% - Shiny Happy People Holding Hands. (G.W. Bush, Pat Robertson)
.

R E T R O V A L E N T

Pressing Onward

From Molecule to Metaphor

Bye, Bye, Blogger

I2: Infective Invective

From Molecule to Metaphor: Towards a Unified Cognitive Science

And you may ask yourself, "What is Rational Longevity?"

Toward a Substrate Independent Engineered Subjective Qualia

Perspective

Cyberwar, God And Television: Interview with Paul Virilio (1994)

Anousheh Ansari Space Blog

The Future of Intelligence

Scientists teleport two different objects

Defense Tech: REPLACEMENT ARM, GOOD AS NEW

Wired 14.04: Dream Machines

Spore Gameplay Video - Google Video

Why We Need a War On Terror, Specifically

'Pretty Horrific' but Not Terrorism

UC Berkeley on Google Video

[RE] Imagining the Internet

Sunday Wordplay

Net neutrality: The Good, Bad, and Mostly UGLY

If You Haven't Wiki'd in Awhile

Glorious Times ... Or Not

First Look - TimesReader - Sneak Peek 01

Not Good Enough. Not Even CLOSE.

The Meaning of Patriot Day

Darwinism Under Fire?

How to Code a Human Zombie (Distributed Agent) Bot Net

Shopping For Nine Eleven Cards in the Hallmark Aisle

A Diversionary Pop Culture Moment

Not Even a Mouse (gesture, that is) in IE7

Is Privacy Being Privatized Out of Existence?

Longevity Answer Isn’t Just in Genes

Watchdog Warning: AOL’s Free Software is Malware

GENCasts Weekly - Biotechnology from Bench to Business

The Fast Turtle - Enter: The Transbeing

A Moment of Silence

The Future is Here: Welcome to the CARN-Age!

Zero Hope for Cognitive Liberty?

New, Unimproved Bush iGod Strategy

Transvision & Bostrom covered in Nature

When do uplifted nonhumans become citizens?

Singularity Summit, 90-Day Post Report

Can Cheesy Sci-Fi Titles Help Take the Edge Off Looming Sociotechnological Discontinuities?

Stem Cell Advances *Still* Not Good Enough?

GPS Phones: Fun for Kids of All Ages

Running out of Young Guns? No problem, Send Retirees.

Army Corps Admits Flaws in New Orleans Levees

Hezbollah continue to run the table

CBS beats CNN to the Web Video Punch

A Flash of Creative Genius

"After the Israeli Army was Defeated ..."

Humanitarian Relief for the Victors?

Unedited Mahmoud Ahmadinejad Interview

You ARE Your INBOX

New Blogger Beta All The Buzz

Akbar Ahmed on Q & A - C-SPAN's New Interview Series

Are Scientists the Biggest Laggards?

Of Quantum Supercurrents, Reversals, and Carbon Nanotube Transistors

How Does Order Arise in the Universe?

Thinking of Thinking for Thinking's Sake

Planet of No Apes

Bottled Bomb Water Lockdown

A Final Exam?

All Value Is Ascribed

AOL Shoots Itself In The Privates

The Troops Are Just Fine

Current Market Forecast

Do We Even Know What LIBERTY Is? Really?

We NEVER see this on American TV. Why?

IM 2.0

Bay Area Blogger Jailed After Defying Court Order

Mapping Israeli Assault: July 12-August 2

Amidst the Chaos: Atlantis space shuttle ready for launch

Stop, Now, What's that Sound?

Correction: AOL *can* give it away ...

Exploring the UberMetaSupraBe-O-Sphere

Battle of the Blowhards on YouTube

Global Nanotech Investment Summit

Stem Cell Advances Still Not Good Enough?

Correction: AOL can give it away ...