Second Gen (2003-2016, 2016- )
Some great pictures at the BBC from the time of the building of the Great Eastern in 1858 taken from a new exhibit at the Science Museum in London.
Note to file: Victorian industrialists slouched and wore funny big hats. I think the combination of the slouch and the tall headpieces speaks to their versatility.
Only one question popped into my mind when I read this:
French scientists who explored the Coral Sea said Friday they discovered a new species of crustacean that was thought to have become extinct 60 million years ago. The “living fossil,” 12-centimetre female that the scientists baptized Neoglyphea neocaledonica, was discovered at a depth of 400 metres during an expedition in the Chesterfield Islands, northwest of New Caledonia, the National Museum of Natural History and the Research Institute for Development said in a statement.
The question, of course, is what does it taste like with a squirt of lemon juice.
Eight AM meeting across town so I may be brief today. Rainy Friday in May here, by the way. It’s close enough to winter still that you think rain is great.
He said fewer people identify with the classic image of cool than one would expect. For most, the new cool is someone who possesses more “socially desirable” characteristics. “I don’t know if I can blame marketers, or if there is even anyone to blame, but the mainstream got a hold of coolness and turned it into a mainstream version of coolness,” he said. “People now identify passionate and warm as cool, which is almost oxymoronic.”
This, of course, is the leading edge of the new neo-socialist movement that will whip neo-cons off the map from 2008 to 2022. It’ll start with nice, move through additional arts classes in high school and end up in news papers dropping their business sections. Mark my words.
Talking to the BBC, Mr Schmidt also reflected on Google’s decision to adhere to Chinese government censorship rules in order to launch its new site in China. He said the decision was “the hardest the company has ever made” but added that, despite it being heavily criticised, he still felt it was the correct move. Mr Schmidt also believed that competition in the internet search business, especially from Microsoft and Yahoo would drive up prices and increase revenue rather than threaten them. Google appeared to be benefiting from its “limitless growth model”, he said, adding that more users, more advertisers and more content would fuel further demand.
Excellent. More kowtowing to totalitarians and bizarre enununciations on economics please. These are the snippets you cherish after the bubble bursts.
Gotta run. Someone spell check this thing, wouldja?
What kind of week was it? It was hopefully the last glimpse of a skim of
snow. It has been a fairly optimistic week otherwise with lots of contact with
old friends over the internet, planning a summer reunion in Halifax at the end
of July. But what else has the internet done for me lately?
Well that is it for today. Let us gather and chat about things
we really do not understand fully and allow the glory of the medium give us
credence far beyond the quality of our thoughts.
The First Law of Discomforting states that lay rejection of the scientifically obvious will be directly related to the discomfort it provides to people, systems and investments. Discuss.
Here is my half-baked unified theory essay based largely on idle car driving and long meeting daydreaming. Entire chunks could be rewritten and reversed, deleted even. I am too lazy to edit it any more and I am note convinced myself but, thought I, what the heck. I’m posting it for comment but given that I am calling it half-baked I would expect that the comment would not be of the “yor a moeron” sort. Pick out what you like, mix and match, compare and contrast:
I don’t know why the opening of Jane Taber’s column in the Globe and Mail last Saturday has clung to the back of my mind:
Prime Minister Stephen Harper spent last Saturday night at 24 Sussex Dr. fiddling with the TV, trying desperately to find the channel that carried Ben and Rachel’s favourite show, The Forest Rangers. It was the Harper family’s first Saturday night at the Prime Minister’s official residence — the family of four and their two beloved cats moved in just two days before — and the cable wasn’t hooked up. “I told Stephen I would arrange the channels on Monday, and he said, ‘No, let’s do it right now,’ ” Laureen Harper wrote in an e-mail this week. The Prime Minister proceeded to call the cable company…
It is not a sour thought at the sight of a Dad trying without any luck to figure out the electronics or a hapless moment for the new PM that saddens me. It’s that it was The Forest Rangers. Secretly, I hope it is a remake I have not heard of but I suspect it is that same show that was never part of my growing up – because even at 42 it was before my time. I suppose what makes me really sad is that in the last four and a half decades of entertainment communications there is nothing better for a couple of kids to watch than the show that made The Beachcombers seem like Shakespeare – even if their parents hold a pretty tight rein on the TV’s remote control. But I doubt it. Who would remake the Forest Rangers? Who now could?
Is this another post about the false promise of recent changes in mass communications? I suppose it is. This weekend, taking in a movie in a 1930s cinema as well as an excellent live hockey game, I was struck like I should not have been struck how the digital advance is something of a regression. We have a population that has, say, doubled in the last so many decades but the volume and variety of entertainments has exploded. And, while the technological advances have been impressive, has the content kept up? Is it possible that there could be so many more things with which to be entertained or informed without a relative dilution of the actual quality of content?
What have we given up due to the dilution? Audio fidelity in favour of tiny ear plugs. The ability to value excellence in favour of the ability to value what we choose or, worse, what we do. Even TV as a topic for water cooler talk is dumped in favour of the replacement of water cooler talk, the SuperNetWay. We have exchanged audience for authorship and awarded each of ourselves the same prize. Except maybe for Harper as Dad. For him there is that world of kids playing in a fort (without any explanation of who maintains it and on what budget) and helping with some sort of government administrative function in relation to lands and forests (despite the child labour laws). There is something back there in that show which is not here – the suspension of disbelief, that awareness that what your are taking is has acceptable flaws.
But we are such mooks now – suckered by belief in whatever we have placed before ourselves. All it takes is for a new self-flattering toy or medium to come along to make ourselves earnestly believe we must have it. And so with politics – we are so determined to be a vital player in the administration of government that we value our whim is as good as a policy borne of the toil of hundreds and the rulings of decades. We can no longer suspend our disbelief as consumers or citizens but are locked into our own certainty in relation to all things, creating a flat world where anything is pretty much as good as any other thing. We cannot defer. We must each be authority if we are also the personalize me. So no journalist is worth their salt, no policy can be trusted, no means to assert our own personal dominion of expression can dared be passed up. We each pick at the world yet pick each our own world. Less shared, less trusted. More me-like-ness.
Sometimes I think that the few years of this millenium have seen two changes which have melded unexpectedly: the rise of networked information technology and the rise of the fear and the security demand in response to terrorism despite almost five years now passing since, hopefully, the anomaly of 9/11 that shook us out of the sleep and pattern of tens upon tens being blown up here and there on a regular basis between nation upon nation, tribe upon tribe genocides. We can forget sometimes that there was life and community and many of the same problems in 2000, 1999 and before. We trick ourselves that all has been changed. About a year ago I wondered if we were post post 9/11. I wondered it again a few months later, the day before the bombings in London. But maybe the trick is on us, that the uni-mind of internet and homogenization of shared concern has left us burned a bit, blurred a bit even as we technologically assert our individual autonomy. So concerned with our fear of flying – even while we are on the ground – that we now have met unending earnestness and each of us shaken hands with it and made it our own. I thought there was an end to irony in the weeks after September 11th but now I think we lost more than just that as tools of surveillance and information merge in the one screen wired to the network, taking and giving, providing what we can say we have made up ourselves. We must believe now, nothing left to be suspended. Where would you stand during the suspension?
What to do? Doesn’t anyone think this is just a town full of losers to be blown out of? Maybe Steve does. Is the Harper family gathering around the black and white world of the past one way to assert the contrarian way? I still think it is a little sad but I don’t know why exactly. I wish them well.
Hah! The new newest planet is also bigger than the old newest planet:
An icy, rocky world reported last year to be orbiting the Sun in the distant reaches of the Solar System really is bigger than Pluto, scientists say. New observations of the object, which goes by the designation 2003 UB313, show it to have a diameter of some 3,000km – about 700km more than Pluto.
This is great. I have always really really hated Pluto. The most extreme…sorry…X-treme planet without really anything to really show for itself. What other ball of methane gets such good press? Anyway, 2003 UB313 or Vulcan or whatever they choose to call it (I prefer “Marzipania” myself…the planet of marzipan) kicks Plutos arse all over town. Soon we will be hearing no more about Pluto than Uranus and that ain’t much.
For the third time in 2005, the basic Sony Cyber-shot has died. The first time it was the day before my cousin’s wedding in the US…so I had to buy another. Likely cause I thought was sand in the lens. That camera, a DSC-P32, had done yeoman’s service so I did not feel too bad. Then the next one was on the second day of summer vacation only a few months later. Maybe the DSC-S40 was getting treated too roughly. Likely problem I thought was a jarring of the lens. So I bought another in the US. Tonight we get that third one back from the trip. It was working fine at lunch but by 5 pm it can’t take a sharp picture, it keeps telling me to reset the date and it takes 15 seconds to “access”. I am thinking that the likely cause is that Sony can’t build a camera. They are being relegated to file back-up and shelf riding service.
I am sick of Sony, refuse now to be tied to their proprietary memory sticks and need your advice. What can I buy that is cheap and will not die?
GUI = Graphical User Interface. Now you can draw your own. I find this widget called the Fly very interesting – and I don’t find many new widgets actually of any use at all:
The Fly also comes with something called Fly Open Paper: a sheaf of blank pages that permit a much more free-form range of creative activities. You indicate which program you want by writing its initials in a circle. For example, in Notepad mode (draw an N in a circle), you can write up to three block-letter words at a time; the pen then reads back what you’ve written. In Scheduler (circled S), you can write “Tuesday 3:45 P.M. student council”; at the specified time, the pen will turn itself on and speak the appointment’s name. Then there’s the Calculator (circled C), which is for nerds what “Pinocchio” is to wooden puppets. As you draw a set of calculator buttons, they come to life, speaking their own names when tapped and announcing the mathematical results (“one hundred sixty-nine, square root, equals thirteen”).
Not only does the computer state it but it stores it and then makes it downloadable. The neat thing is that a whack of people could work off the a single computer in a setting where there is not a lot of cash to buy a PC per person. I wonder if it comes in United Nations green? Click for a bigger view.
Update: there is a harrowing little paragraph at the end of the New York Times article lined above:
when it comes to children’s technology, a sort of post-educational age has dawned. Last year, Americans bought only one-third as much educational software as they did in 2000. Once highflying children’s software companies have dwindled or disappeared. The magazine once called Children’s Software Review is now named Children’s Technology Review, and over half of its coverage now is dedicated to entertainment titles (for Game Boy, PlayStation and the like) that have no educational component.
The oddest news I’ve seen for a while:
Dr Christian Koch, 55, from Kleinhartmannsdorf, said his method uses old tyres, weeds and animal cadavers. They are heated up to 300 Celsius to filter out hydrocarbon which is then turned into diesel by a catalytic converter. He said the resulting “high quality bio-diesel” costs just 15 pence per litre.
CNN gets this point into the story:
Koch said around 20 dead cats added into the mix could help produce enough fuel to fill up a 50-liter (11 gallon) tank.
Scientists! So clever. Have some to tea. It’s almost a perpetual motion machine given enough road kill.