Re:Is this a good thing? Nigerian Miss World Riots
on
Smart Mobs
·
· Score: 2
Let me put it another way:
While I'm not a McLuhanite, I think that there is a kernel of truth in the notion that the medium is the message.
The fact that Mein Kampf is a book, a persistent object, makes it not only more readily available, but easier to critique and rebuff. Hitler's radio broadcasts, on the other hand . . . they planted their seeds of nationalism and hatred and wafted off into the ether. It was harder to pin them down, analyze them on the fly, critique them after the fact.
So: What kind of message does the form of wireless-gadget communication lend itself to? How does the audiance engage with these messages? What kind of accountability or possibility of critique is there?
Stefan
Is this a good thing? Nigerian Miss World Riots
on
Smart Mobs
·
· Score: 2
Forget the talk about ____'s Law and the "value" ofa network. Instead ask: Are smart mobs a GOOD thing, socially and politically?
Are we talking about a new and unique form of human organization that can actually solve problems? Or will they just be a new form of easily-manipulated ideological sounding board, like Talk Radio, that ends up braking a lot of windows, besieging office buildings, and hassling people on a hit list drawn up by a clever organizer?
I've heard anecdotal evidence that the angry protests that led to the bloody "Miss World" riots in Nigeria were coordinated by cell phones and text messaging. If this is true, we may long for the day of Dumb Mobs.
The oil they're pushing up at us is part of a deliberate plot.
With an infinite supply of oil, we'll soon burn out way into a cataclysmic Greenhouse Effect that will turn the Earth into a moist version of Venus, allowing them to colonize the surface.
CFCs assault the ozone layer; they are not, as far as I know, a greenhouse gas.
The switchover to ozone-safe refrigerants is actually an excellent example of how things can work out right. There's a good chance that the ozone holes will be a thing of the past, thanks to international agreements banning the bad stuff.
You won't have to plow through the dying oceans' mats of dead fish and choking algea, or deal with violent cyclonic storms from fucked up weather systems, or risk attacks by the refugee ships fleeing drowned coastal cities and devastated farming areas in Asia.
Also, way up north the skies will be clearer because there aren't any smoke plumes from burning forests.
See? There are benefits to global warming!
Stefan Jones,
Viridian Archbishop
http://www.viridiandesign.org
Of course this won't satisfy die-hard cranks. That's not the point.
This booklet is for educators, to help them address concerns brought up by students who might have stumbled on a True Disbeliever's website or seen that atrocious Fox program!
That's not a waste of time nor money.
Stefan Jones
Remarried Re:We should strive to be like Sheffield
on
RIP: Charles Sheffield
·
· Score: 2
For what it's worth:
Charles Sheffield remarried Nancy Kress, a very talented SF writer in her own right.
Obviously, you harvest the plants and cart them away once they have done their work.
You could burn the plants under controlled conditions and chemically extract the arsenic -- a metal, as I recall -- from the ash.
Even if you didn't burn 'em:
If the plants are really concentrating the stuff, you'll have far less waste to deal with. Say, ten tons of branches and leaves rather than one hundred tons of soil. They might still end up in barrels in dumps, but there will be far fewer barrels.
Thirty or so years after he was a Bucky Fuller memoid hyping geodesic domes, Stewart Brand wrote an amazing book looking at how people actually use buildings:
(Uh, remove the space in the above link. The comment editor won't let me put in a continuous URL. Sorry . ..)
How Buildings Learn is amazing. Fun to read, persuasive, and rousing. It looks at building designs that work (e.g., MIT's ugly, rambling wooden lab and office structure, Building 20) and those that don't (e.g., MIT's Media Lab building, very modern and all but not given to easy adaption.
* Hands with non-slip grip. (To add this feature to your future child, select option 567B on the manipulators submenu. Special price of $433.34 for the next 10 minutes.)
* Fasteners on living, plant-based clothing. (Anyone remember the ads for the "Playtex Living Bra?" This one has a clasp the most determined teenage boy can't pry off!)
* Biologically based near-future equivalent of a Velcro Wall. You don't need a suit . ..
* Security floors. Intruders walk on but they can't walk off!
Actually, the early concept Orion ships WOULD be launched from the ground.
As I recall, the Isp for the larger versions of Orion STARTED at 10,000 seconds.
Ion drives are great for unmanned flights, but the low thrust is a problem. You spend a lot of time just building up to escape velocity. During this time your crew is exposed to cosmic rays, are consuming expendables, and perhaps going stir-crazy. (Space . . . MADnesss!)
For this reason, higher thrust at a lower Isp can be preferable. The trip costs more in terms of reaction mass, but you get there faster.
I recommend a lot of books to people; to maintain karma, I try to respect others' recommendations, and check out and buy books I might not normally read.
Per my rule above, I try to read these "should reads" before I read the books I really look forward to.
Generally, it works out. I've often surprised myself. The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley was on my "should read" list, and it turned out to be a gas; a really deep and portenteous nature book.
And then there's Understanding Comics. That was on my "should read" list too. I hated and despised most comic books, but enough people recommended McCloud's book that I thought I should give it a try. DAMN! What a book. I buy a lot of way freaky comics, now.
Or: Marketing Mishaps. I found this slim paperback in a Goodwill store. It is literally a textbook; case studies on companies gone wrong. I thought it would be a good "medicine" read, for understanding why products and companies fail. It was a gas! Now I know why A.C. Gilbert, highly respected maker of Erector Sets and Chemistry Sets, is now longer around.
In the essay "Extraterrestrials," Dyson specifically denies having come up with the Dyson Sphere.
He gives credit for the concept of a star-swaddling energy collector to a book he found in a London subway stop book stall: the quasi-novel Star Maker by SF writer and philosopher Olaf Stapledon:
Freeman Dyson is best known to SF fans because of the "Sphere" concept and the Orion drive. But please check out the guy's actual writing. There's a lot more to him than this eye-candy.
I like the very earliest review. Mine's the one after.
Dyson's books are as interesting as science fiction, but without the cranky politics and cluelessness about the human condition that pervades much of the genre. Imagined Worlds is a sort of lite version of Disturbing the Universe; Weapons and Hope is a still-relevant book about arms control from the mid eighties.
If we make these xenotransplant pigs intelligent, they'll be able to give informed consent.
This way, if any right groups challenge the ethics of the transplant, the hospital adminstrators can whip out a donor consent card with the pig' little hoof print.
Or course, we'd have to make them really gullible, so they actually volunteer when asked, instead of rolling their eyes and saying "yeah, right!"
The Romulans had a war with Earth many decades earlier than the Original Series episode. There were no face-to-face encounters. Just bloody space battles.
The question is, will Enterprise honor this bit of continuity?
Users will be able to accomplish productive goals or just waste time.
So does this environment, like, allow you to use your avatars to run machine tools, or steer a riding mower, or use some kind of houshold waldo that will let you clean the toilet or chop vegetables?
And since it will be in 3D, your productivity (or non-productivity) will be dramatically increased because . . . ah . . . um.
The EFF is holding a fundraiser in San Francisco on August 22nd at which Will Wheaton will take on the Purple Menace:
"The night features world-class electronic music artists and a special treat: celebrity boxing with Wil Wheaton and Barney! Wil Wheaton, of Star
Trek: The Next Generation and Stand By Me fame, will take on Barney in a celebrity boxing matchup for the history books. Watch and see if Wil with
his backing from EFF can protect free speech and parody on the Internet and defeat Barney and his team of corporate lawyers."
Slashdot Mirror
While I'm not a McLuhanite, I think that there is a kernel of truth in the notion that the medium is the message.
The fact that Mein Kampf is a book, a persistent object, makes it not only more readily available, but easier to critique and rebuff. Hitler's radio broadcasts, on the other hand . . . they planted their seeds of nationalism and hatred and wafted off into the ether. It was harder to pin them down, analyze them on the fly, critique them after the fact.
So: What kind of message does the form of wireless-gadget communication lend itself to? How does the audiance engage with these messages? What kind of accountability or possibility of critique is there?
Stefan
Are we talking about a new and unique form of human organization that can actually solve problems? Or will they just be a new form of easily-manipulated ideological sounding board, like Talk Radio, that ends up braking a lot of windows, besieging office buildings, and hassling people on a hit list drawn up by a clever organizer?
I've heard anecdotal evidence that the angry protests that led to the bloody "Miss World" riots in Nigeria were coordinated by cell phones and text messaging. If this is true, we may long for the day of Dumb Mobs.
Stefan
The oil they're pushing up at us is part of a deliberate plot.
With an infinite supply of oil, we'll soon burn out way into a cataclysmic Greenhouse Effect that will turn the Earth into a moist version of Venus, allowing them to colonize the surface.
You've been warned!
Stefan
The cool kids buy their processing cycles from the school server farm.
And god forbid they catch anyone with a PLAID lunchbox computer.
Self-righteous intolerance feels really good; giving people something to focus it on is a really astute political move.
"Time to start looking into Canadian job opportunities."
Quitter!
The switchover to ozone-safe refrigerants is actually an excellent example of how things can work out right. There's a good chance that the ozone holes will be a thing of the past, thanks to international agreements banning the bad stuff.
Also, way up north the skies will be clearer because there aren't any smoke plumes from burning forests.
See? There are benefits to global warming!
Stefan Jones,
Viridian Archbishop
http://www.viridiandesign.org
This booklet is for educators, to help them address concerns brought up by students who might have stumbled on a True Disbeliever's website or seen that atrocious Fox program!
That's not a waste of time nor money.
Stefan Jones
For what it's worth:
Charles Sheffield remarried Nancy Kress, a very talented SF writer in her own right.
The plants are probably just a first step.
Obviously, you harvest the plants and cart them away once they have done their work.
You could burn the plants under controlled conditions and chemically extract the arsenic -- a metal, as I recall -- from the ash.
Even if you didn't burn 'em:
If the plants are really concentrating the stuff, you'll have far less waste to deal with. Say, ten tons of branches and leaves rather than one hundred tons of soil. They might still end up in barrels in dumps, but there will be far fewer barrels.
. . . or you'll end up like Stan here:
l
http://www.ananova.com/news/story/sm_683401.htm
On the other hand, it's probably my fault.
I shouldn't have believed it when the guy told me that it wasn't uncommon for antique monkey automatons to take AAA batteries.
. . . the MIME types suggested in RFC1437?
http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1437.html
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0
(Uh, remove the space in the above link. The comment editor won't let me put in a continuous URL. Sorry . .
How Buildings Learn is amazing. Fun to read, persuasive, and rousing. It looks at building designs that work (e.g., MIT's ugly, rambling wooden lab and office structure, Building 20) and those that don't (e.g., MIT's Media Lab building, very modern and all but not given to easy adaption.
Stefan
Stefan
* Hands with non-slip grip. (To add this feature to your future child, select option 567B on the manipulators submenu. Special price of $433.34 for the next 10 minutes.)
.
* Fasteners on living, plant-based clothing. (Anyone remember the ads for the "Playtex Living Bra?" This one has a clasp the most determined teenage boy can't pry off!)
* Biologically based near-future equivalent of a Velcro Wall. You don't need a suit . .
* Security floors. Intruders walk on but they can't walk off!
As I recall, the Isp for the larger versions of Orion STARTED at 10,000 seconds.
Ion drives are great for unmanned flights, but the low thrust is a problem. You spend a lot of time just building up to escape velocity. During this time your crew is exposed to cosmic rays, are consuming expendables, and perhaps going stir-crazy. (Space . . . MADnesss!)
For this reason, higher thrust at a lower Isp can be preferable. The trip costs more in terms of reaction mass, but you get there faster.
Per my rule above, I try to read these "should reads" before I read the books I really look forward to.
Generally, it works out. I've often surprised myself. The Immense Journey by Loren Eiseley was on my "should read" list, and it turned out to be a gas; a really deep and portenteous nature book.
And then there's Understanding Comics. That was on my "should read" list too. I hated and despised most comic books, but enough people recommended McCloud's book that I thought I should give it a try. DAMN! What a book. I buy a lot of way freaky comics, now.
Or: Marketing Mishaps. I found this slim paperback in a Goodwill store. It is literally a textbook; case studies on companies gone wrong. I thought it would be a good "medicine" read, for understanding why products and companies fail. It was a gas! Now I know why A.C. Gilbert, highly respected maker of Erector Sets and Chemistry Sets, is now longer around.
Clear enough?
Stefan
He gives credit for the concept of a star-swaddling energy collector to a book he found in a London subway stop book stall: the quasi-novel Star Maker by SF writer and philosopher Olaf Stapledon:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/0486 219623/
Freeman Dyson is best known to SF fans because of the "Sphere" concept and the Orion drive. But please check out the guy's actual writing. There's a lot more to him than this eye-candy.
I feel compelled to plug Freeman Dyson's semi-autobiographical Disturbing the Universe:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0465016774/
I like the very earliest review. Mine's the one after.
Dyson's books are as interesting as science fiction, but without the cranky politics and cluelessness about the human condition that pervades much of the genre. Imagined Worlds is a sort of lite version of Disturbing the Universe; Weapons and Hope is a still-relevant book about arms control from the mid eighties.
If we make these xenotransplant pigs intelligent, they'll be able to give informed consent.
This way, if any right groups challenge the ethics of the transplant, the hospital adminstrators can whip out a donor consent card with the pig' little hoof print.
Or course, we'd have to make them really gullible, so they actually volunteer when asked, instead of rolling their eyes and saying "yeah, right!"
The Romulans had a war with Earth many decades earlier than the Original Series episode. There were no face-to-face encounters. Just bloody space battles.
The question is, will Enterprise honor this bit of continuity?
The Cartoon History of the Universe, Volumes I and II by by Larry Gonick (ISBN: 0385265204, ISBN: 0385420935)
Herodotus: The Histories (Project Gutenberg)
A Distant Mirror by Barbera Tuchman (ISBN: 0345349571)
Full House: The Spread of Excellence from Plato to Darwin by Stephen Jay Gould (ISBN: 0609801406)
Disturbing the Universe by Freeman J. Dyson (ISBN: 0465016774)
Utopian Entrepreneur by Brenda Laurel (ISBN: 0262621533)
How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They're Built by Stewart Brand (ISBN: 0140139966)
The Existential Pleasures of Engineering by Samuel C. Florman (ISBN: 0312141041)
The Immense Journey by Loren C. Eiseley (ISBN: 0394701577)
So does this environment, like, allow you to use your avatars to run machine tools, or steer a riding mower, or use some kind of houshold waldo that will let you clean the toilet or chop vegetables?
And since it will be in 3D, your productivity (or non-productivity) will be dramatically increased because . . . ah . . . um.
3D! Whooo!
"The night features world-class electronic music artists and a special treat: celebrity boxing with Wil Wheaton and Barney! Wil Wheaton, of Star Trek: The Next Generation and Stand By Me fame, will take on Barney in a celebrity boxing matchup for the history books. Watch and see if Wil with his backing from EFF can protect free speech and parody on the Internet and defeat Barney and his team of corporate lawyers."
http://www.eff.org/cafe/2002/
Give that vomitous terrycloth reptile hell, Will!
Stefan Jones