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Friday, January 09, 2004 |
Flight Sim inquiry raises terror alert. "At one time it was rare to find US citizens, in the safest and most prosperous country in the world, jumping at their own shadows. Now we only note how high.""A mother's enquiry about buying Microsoft Flight Simulator for her ten-year-old son prompted a night-time visit to her home from a state trooper...So alarmed was the Staples clerk at the prospect of the ten year old learning to fly, that he informed the police, the Greenfield Recorder reports. The authorities moved into action, leaving nothing to chance. A few days later, (she) was alarmed to discover a state trooper flashing a torch into to her home through a sliding glass door at 8:30 pm on a rainy night." — The Register (UK) [Follow Me Here...]
4:34:39 PM Permalink
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Is Mars Ours?. David Grinspoon ponders the logistics and ethics of colonizing the Red Planet.... [Martian Soil]
One of the things that gives you pause about this talk of going to Mars
is the kind of rhetoric you hear around it, as Grinspoon suggests:
Bob Zubrin, Mars Society President,
stated that mankind has a duty to terraform Mars, that given the choice
between letting Mars remain the sorry planet that it is and
transforming it in Earth's image, we have a moral obligation to do the
latter. He added that it is the Western tradition to expand continually
and to value humans above nature, that "this is the only system of
values that has created a society worth living in."
These comments were amplified by panelist Lowell Wood, an architect of
Reagan-era "Star Wars" space-based weapons plans. Wood stated
confidently that terraforming Mars will happen in the 21st century. "It
is the manifest destiny of the human race!" he declared and went on to
boast, "In this country we are the builders of new worlds. In this
country we took a raw wilderness and turned it into the shining city on
the hill of our world." To hell with terraforming: It seemed that we
were discussing the Ameriforming of Mars.
Hearing these words, my heart sank. Is this really the way we want to
frame our dreams of inhabiting Mars? Maybe these guys are simply not
aware of the historical use of this phrase and its negative
connotations, I thought. This hope vanished when Zubrin leapt to the
defense of Manifest Destiny, shouting, "By developing the American West
we have created a place that millions of Mexicans are trying to get
into!" to a smattering of applause (and some gasps of disbelief) from
the crowd.
Of course, since Mars has no inhabitants, there's not really that much
to worry about. Still, as Grinspoon says, you have to remember who "we"
is. Is it the US? The human race?
Is Mars ours for the taking? Do we have
a right to it? Not to be too Clintonian, but the answer may depend on
what we mean by "we." Mars does not belong to "America," nor to Earth,
nor to human beings. But if by "we," we mean "life," then yes, Mars
belongs to us because this universe belongs to life. I mean, without
us, what's the point? But before we go there and set up greenhouses,
dance clubs, and falafel stands, let's make sure that, in some subtle
form that could be harmed by the human hubbub, life does not already
exist there. If not, then by all means build cities, plant forests and
fill lakes and streams with trout—bring life to Mars and Mars to life.
We'll then be the Martians we've been dreaming about for all these
years.
12:44:43 PM Permalink
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John Carter of Gobi. Bruce Sterling blasts the idea, beloved by certain "national greatness" types, of colonizing Mars: I'll
believe in people settling Mars at about the same time I see people
settling the Gobi Desert. The Gobi Desert is about a thousand times as
hospitable as Mars and five hundred times cheaper and easier to reach.
Nobody ever writes "Gobi Desert Opera" because, well, it's just kind of
plonkingly obvious that there's no good reason to go there and live.
It's ugly, it's inhospitable and there's no way to make it pay. Mars is
just the same, really. We just romanticize it because it's so hard to
reach.
On the other hand, there might really be some way to
make living in the Gobi Desert pay. And if that were the case, and you
really had communities making a nice cheerful go of daily life on arid,
freezing, barren rock and sand, then a cultural transfer to Mars might
make a certain sense. (For Reason's interview with Sterling, go here.) [Hit & Run]
Great reading. Sterling nails something:
But I think we made really serious
missteps in 2000 and 2001, and we’ve really turned our backs on a world
that could have been pleasant, delight-ful, peaceful, and technocratic.
Now we face a world that is religious, narrow-minded, fundamentalist,
and violent.
10:54:28 AM Permalink
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Pete Rose
I used to be kind of wishy-washy on the whole Pete Rose issue. Maybe
he's not a nice guy, but he did play some great ball, he was about as
great a ball player as there's been, and isn't that what the hall is
for? (I remember seeing him back in the summer of 78 when the Reds were
at Candlestick, and we had some tickets just 4 or 5 rows back of first
base; watching him hustle was a joy.)
But then you read something like this:
I'm sure that I'm supposed to act all
sorry or sad or guilty now that I've accepted that I've done something
wrong. But you see, I'm just not built that way. Sure, there's probably
some real emotion buried somewhere deep inside. And maybe I'd be a
better person if I let that side of my personality come out. BUt it
just doesn't surface too often. So let's leave it like this: I'm sorry
it happened, and I'm sorry for all the people, fans adn family that it
hurt. Let's move on.
OK. Let's move on. I'll forget it Pete. But let's not allow you to wear
a baseball uniform again. Sure, you can go to the hall of fame. But not
while you're alive.
10:10:44 AM Permalink
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Texan WMDs.
Why do these scary bastards seem to be shuffled under the rug? The
terror threat at home, often overlooked Last month, an east Texas man
pleaded guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside
the home and storage... [Oliver Willis: Like Kryptonite To Stupid]
Last month, an east Texas man pleaded
guilty to possession of a weapon of mass destruction. Inside the home
and storage facilities of William Krar, investigators found a
sodium-cyanide bomb capable of killing thousands, more than a hundred
explosives, half a million rounds of ammunition, dozens of illegal
weapons, and a mound of white-supremacist and antigovernment literature.
Think of how everyone from the Wall Street Journal to the Bush
Administration (oops, I guess they'e pretty much the same) to Fox News,
etc. would be hollering if these were leftist terrorists instead of
rightists. The guilt-by-association would be flying. But instead...
... it points up just how political the
terror war is. "There is no value for the Bush administration to
highlighting domestic terrorism right now," says Robert Jensen, a
journalism professor at the University of Texas in Austin. "But there
are significant political benefits to highlighting foreign terrorists,
especially when trying to whip up support for war."
Mr. Levitas goes even further: "The government has a severe case of
tunnel vision when it comes to domestic terrorism. I have no doubt
whatsoever that had Krar and his compatriots been Arab-Americans or
linked to some violent Islamic fundamentalist group, we would have
heard from John Ashcroft himself."
9:20:27 AM Permalink
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The 20 Macs That Mattered Most. Twenty years after the introduction of the first Macintosh, here's a list of the 20 most memorable Mac models. Presented in chronological order, all of these machines advanced the state of the art on the Mac, and many featured innovations that influenced the computer industry at large. By Owen Linzmayer (Wired News via MyAppleMenu) [MyAppleMenu]
The article leaves out the Mac Plus which was the first personal computer of any kind to bring fast SCSI disk interfaces to the desktop. The piece also doesn't mention one of the nicest machines Apple ever produced, the IIci, a compact version of the II. Just the other day at Mac Expo I overheard someone say that this was the nicest Mac he ever owned, a sentiment shared by many.
8:41:23 AM Permalink
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© Copyright 2004 Steve Michel.
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