(Points if you recognize the title quotation.) From today's entry in the Wayback Journal:

Wouldn't it be a shame if that's what's wrong with this whole generation, we're looking for the book/movie love and not finding it, therefore giving up on love altogether, or settling for what we think is second best.

Yes, it would be a shame. Finally I may have learned this lesson. Better late than never.

11:58:49 PM    please comment []

The Register rakes Apple over the coals for its hyperbolic claims about the computational abilities of its new hardware.

Apple claims that "the faster-than-light processor speed gets an additional boost with an advanced cache memory architecture that provides ultrafast, dedicated memory with massively enhanced throughput."

Faster than light? Apparently so. Until now this achievement has been limited to small particles, such as photons, as apparently Feynman (a star of Apple's Think Different ads) suggested that the speed of light was only an average.

3:23:25 PM    please comment []

I've never really understood the hysteria around the issue of human cloning.

Wait. Let me restate. I think it's perfectly reasonable to vehemently oppose human cloning for the purpose of harvesting organs, creating slaves-soldiers-workers, or in general turning a human being into a means for someone else's ends. Human beings must always be treated as ends in themselves.

But aside from exploitation (and let's face it, people have been reproducing to create little slaves for their own purposes from time immemorial), I can't subscribe to any of the objections.

1. "It's not natural." Neither is 99% of our culture. The same objection was raised to every advance in science and medicine. Hey, lots of the biomass on the planet reproduces asexually, essentially cloning itself itself. Feh on this argument from nature.

2. "The clone will never be able to have his or her own identity." Unlike all those "natural" children raised in dysfunctional families who had to live out the lives, fantasies, or phobias of their parents? If identical twins can manage to have a sense of self, so can a clone. At the very least, they'll know they were really wanted.

3. "Anyone who wants to be cloned is a horrible egotist and would make a lousy parent." As opposed to all those perfect parents out there who procreate for only the most pure and righteous of reasons? Helloooooo? What world do YOU live in? Any pair of fools with functional gonads can create a child, and they do. We don't require a license for them. We don't require them to study good parenting. We don't watch them like hawks to be sure they are raising their children in a sane and healthy manner. (We could have another discussion about whether we should.) I think it's quite likely that the parent of a clone will treat that child pretty well ~ after all, it should be even easier to be empathetic.

4. "It will cheapen the miracle of human life by making it more of a market commodity." Gene tailoring is coming. Like it or not (and I'm inclined to NOT like it, except for eliminating identifiable diseases). The biggest surprise awaiting the first person to be successfully cloned will be how very different the new child is. Individuality does not reside in DNA alone, but in a complex interaction that commences at conception and may or may not end in the grave.

Wired News has an article about Randolfe Wicker, a man who speaks sense about cloning.

3:03:25 PM    please comment []

I bought a Mac in 1984. (As I'd said to my programmer boyfriend, "I'll get a computer when they make one that has black letters on a white background." And I did.)

And I started on the path that led me to my current livelihood when I encountered HyperCard. It was truly programming for the rest of us, and I was thrilled thrilled thrilled. I realized there were few things that I might want to make my computer do that I wouldn't be able to implement myself. Oh, the empowerment! There was also a wonderful community around the software; my first protracted online experiences were in AOL's HyperCard forum in 1991.

In 1997, at the MILIA Conference in Cannes, Apple gave an NDA demo of a new version of HyperCard that was under development. It looked fantastic! I was sooo excited, as were the other people there (some of whom I had met virtually before, which was fun). I waited and waited. It never came out.

For years I held out hope. But the web and its plethora of scripting languages (each of which is much less quickly learned and butt ugly in comparison to the clarity and simplicity of HyperTalk) pretty much put paid to Apple's interest in HyperCard. Sure, there's SuperCard ~ which got to a color version before the kludgey version in HC itself ~ and MetaCard, and all... but in my view the beauty of Bill Atkinson's creation is still unsurpassed.

Wired has a couple of articles on HyperCard: those who still carry the torch, and its creator's regrets. (I once started a project to make a HyperCard web browser, but never finished it.)

1:13:17 PM    please comment []