From John Naughton: So airlines do have a rational reason for banning cell-phones in flight. I've often wondered about this but according to this report, the U.K.'s air safety regulator has released research about cell phone use on planes, warning of the serious effects that it can have on a plane's navigational equipment.

" The Civil Aviation Authority research found that standard cell phone use can cause a compass to freeze or to overshoot its actual magnetic bearing. Also, flight deck and navigation equipment indicators can be rendered unstable and inaccurate, and transmissions can interfere with critical audio outputs."

11:20:12 PM  #   your two cents []

Robert Heinlein. "The supreme irony of life is that hardly anyone gets out of it alive." [Quotes of the Day]
11:09:18 PM  #   your two cents []

Plants as architecture. Link Discuss (via Trubble) [Boing Boing Blog]

11:07:32 PM  #   your two cents []

Too clever, too fast, too happy. We can now fine-tune genes in embryos to produce a super race. Time to say enough, argues Bill McKibben. [Guardian Unlimited]
11:03:41 PM  #   your two cents []

This week I discovered that I really enjoy chairing discussions at conferences. Or at least, I enjoyed chairing my four-person panel at the O2 Digital Media Conference in Dublin. I get asked now and again to participate in panels, which I always like, as you get to meet some opinionated people, hear a range of views and then argue -- oops, I mean discuss intelligently -- whatever emerges in the afterburn of a set of presentations (hey, that sounds like one of my dinner parties...). I have been fortunate in that I've always lucked into snappy, smart panels (often delighted to snap at each other, in a professional kind of way). But I've only chaired something once before, and a long while ago it was indeed, when I was still an eager- (ish) doctoral candidate glad of any chance to generate some CV-padding by such an invitation from academic conferences.

At first, I wondered this time if I should accept an invitation to chair a panel on a topic (telecommunications) on which I've expressed plenty of strong opinions in print, and where I might easily be identified with a given perspective. After all, the job of a chair is as neutral host. Well, not neutral in a bland sense of seeking mild harmony, but neutral in that one is more a gatekeeper and warden to discussion, working to keep it focussed, interesting (if at all possible!), alive -- and to try to avoid physical blows (between panellists, self and/or audience). I actually found it was great fun to be the prod rather than the panellist-- nudging discussion along between panellists or the audience but not interjecting personal opinion. And it's always interesting (and good for the, er, soul) to get to play devil's advocate now and then. That said, I really had little work to do as the audience had great questions and the panellists were nice and concise, as well as opinionated -- and not averse to taking potshots at each other from the very start of the session!

May and June seem to be the months for talkshops. I've got a few of them lined up, as well as an essay to write on technology and culture for the Irish Review (which will be fun). I confess to especially looking forward to GU4DEC, the annual conference of GNOME developers and users, who've politely pretended that my Linux newbie-ness isn't as baldly, badly newbie as it really, really is, and asked me to chair a session on Open Source/Free Software and government. They're staging this year's event at Trinity College in Dublin in mid-June, and have worked up this excellent little graphic on the right. Is that cool, or what? (I see it is named pint-of-gnome. Heh.) If you're attending, come over to the session and say hi. I'll be lurking at other sessions, too.

10:59:35 PM  #   your two cents []

 Here's The Guardian's long profile of William Gibson, which ran in today's Review section. It's not flagged in any way, not even on the front of the Review, so it's easy to overlook. There's plenty of good reading in the section today (in what must easily be one of the world's best newspaper books supplements): Gary Younge on Zora Neale Hurston, an extract from Don DeLillo's new novel, Cosmopolis, and Thomas Pynchon on Eric Blair (better known as George Orwell...). I liked this lovely sentence of Pynchon's, describing an old (1946) photo in which Orwell -- with that always-dishevelled mop of hair -- holds his adopted son Richard Horatio on his lap: "Orwell is holding him gently with both hands, smiling too, pleased, but not smugly so -- it is more complex than that, as if he has discovered something that might be worth even more than anger."
10:27:28 PM  #   your two cents []

Genome Sequences of Two SARS Virus Strains Confirmed [Scientific American]
10:13:31 PM  #   your two cents []