Archive for the 'Technology' Category
Google Moon
In case you’ve never checked out Google Moon or don’t even know about it, it’s a lot of fun if that sort of thing interests you. To me, this little world in a gravitational dance with the Earth, about which so much is still not known, is a mysterious and fascinating place, and perusing its surface via Google Earth is almost addictive.
Here’s a site with extensive lists of named lunar features, which you may utilize in Google Moon to explore the surface of our satellite.
farmer in the sky
Robert Heinlein’s Farmer in the Sky this isn’t. Nevertheless, Heinlein would have been fascinated with the concept in the linked article, below. Heinlein was big on comestibles in his books, whether it was “syntho-steaks” or “yeast chops” or “Wise Girl Malthusian Lozenges.” And over two decades after his passing, a number of products are approaching what could be called syntho steaks; “Quorn” is pretty close to yeast chops, and the Malthusian lozenges*…well, that’s an old story, by now.
In this real future, however, Johnny Appleseed won’t be aboard Spaceship Bifrost, bound for a terraformed Ganymede. He’ll be out there on the Las Vegas skyline.
The Future of Farming: Reaching for the Sky (and down in the basement)
When you think of a farm your mind may invoke images of rolling fields, tractors and perhaps a cow or two. But in the future – not so! Farms are movin’ from the country and into your nearest metropolis faster than you might think…
*A contraceptive lozenge, mentioned in Stranger in a Strange Land. I read the book many years ago, and for whatever reason, I had in my mind transformed/confabulated these “Wise Girl Malthusian lozenges” into a non-existent product called “Nice Girl Cola.” This only became clear to me when I began a fruitless web-search for “Nice Girl Cola,” which led me to the Malthusian lozenges.
Kinda catchy, though, isn’t it? Nice Girl Cola. I like the ring of that. 🙂
Is Comcast EVIL?
I got an e-mail with a video link from Tim Carr, campaign director at savetheinternet.com this morning.
We just caught Comcast Corp. stacking an FCC hearing with paid (and apparently sleepy) seat-fillers.
The hearing was set up to investigate Comcast’s recent blocking of the Internet. But Comcast packed the room so that the public couldn’t get in to voice their support for Net Neutrality.
We took pictures and recorded an interview that proves Comcast was taking seats from concerned citizens. Now, we need you to make sure that the company doesn’t get away with this ever again.
UDF Skywalker V1.0 is a web-app that allows you to scan the Ultra Deep Field Image taken by the Hubble space telescope. The individual images have been combined into a seamless whole withiin the application.
A bit of background on the UDF:
The Ultra Deep Field obtained by the Hubble Space Telescope is the deepest view into the sky by humankind to date. This image combines 800 frames with a total exposure time of 1 million seconds. The 10.000 galaxies that are visible have distances out to times where the universe was just 800 million years old, one seventeenth of its current age.
Now, that’s interesting. That’s 800 million times more interesting than the bullshit they go over on the evening news every night.
Just a tiny piece of the UDF
flash earth
From the designer: “Flash Earth is an experimental [web] application that uses online imagery from online mapping websites without official consent.”
IS Google Evil?
How could it be, when it’s slogan is “Don’t be evil?”
Go here. Read and learn. Googlewatch also offers a Google proxy search called Scroogle, with the following attributes:
- Provides Google search results, from the Google engine
- Prevents Google from seeing your IP address (knowing your I.P. is analogous to not having your driver’s license #, but having your license plate #)
- Prevents Google from setting its “eternal cookie” (expires in 2038) on your computer.
- Effectively prevents Google from knowing anything about you at all
- Prevents Google from pitching you “targeted” ads
- Secure, encrypted search available, on top of all the above
Why should you be interested in this? Go back to the beginning of this post and click the first link.
All that glitters is not gold
Definitely something to keep in mind.
http://www.broom.org/epic/ols-master.html
I would add that it is not the individual prophecies (some of which did not come true – it would be unrealistic to expect something like this to be prophetic in a preternatural sense) that interest me, but rather the general direction of the slope. Could something like this happen? Is something like this happening? And, most importantly: can our off the cuff, gut-level assessments at the level of internet users – even savvy ones – predict where things are going? Can we separate our vested interest in the “value” that Google delivers to us, personally, from what it means for the greater good of the body politic (and our children) twenty, fifty, one hundred years down the road?
Other questions come to mind: is Google evil? In seeking the freedom of information that the Internet offers, are we in fact both bolstering and succumbing to the ultimate capitalist design, the monopoly on information and information filtering? The monopoly on what we hear, discuss, and believe?
In what ways – both subtle and gross – does the new cyber-reality shape our minds? I can’t pin it down, but having been born well before the internet revolution, I can say with complete certainty that the way I think has changed since I have become a “net junkie.” And I’m not sure if it’s for the better or the worse.
What does it mean when an enormous corporation consistently and routinely gobbles up smaller (but still successful and innovative) corporations, integrating them into its empire; when it grows into a massive, multi-billion dollar corporation and goes public less than a decade after startup, and just keeps on growing, gobbling up everything in sight, and soon thereafter monetizing those media via advertising, ensuring the eager compliance of individuals by offering remuneration for hosting their advertising, and offering “freebies” at every juncture, to build goodwill? What does it mean when 99% of the consumers do not, in fact cannot, fathom its innerworkings?
Is open-source “fairy food?”**
And, lastly: how does all this scope out when the acquisition of profit, personal and corporate, is the primary driving force behind it?
America has been a free society (in many, but obviously not in all ways) since its inception over 200 years ago. But things change; things are changing. It is unrealistic to expect that substantial challenges to our freedom are not on the horizon, given the amount of pure flux, both domestic and international, that now exists. Empires rise and Empires fall. This has been the historical experience for thousands of years. And I’m sure that common citizens of these empires, at the level of their own lives, felt that the Empire was their benefactor, that it would endure forever.
The most nefarious kind of mind-control is the kind that leads you to believe you are not being controlled at all.
Vigilance. Always vigilance. All that glitters is not gold; gilded tombs do worms enfold.
**Fairy food: The myth goes that once you have feasted on fairy food, ordinary, wholesome human fare can never nourish you again. In merely taking the food that is offered you by the fairies, you become a captive, either forced to subsist on fairy food for the rest of your life, or die of starvation.
BonkBonk 
