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Wednesday, August 07, 2002
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Question: Did you think on Sept 18 that we'd make it to Aug 7 without any more huge terrorism hits on US soil? [Scripting News]
I was sure we would. I was wrong. I am sure we'll see a massive, uncontrolled panic hit a major US city at some point in the next five years. I pray I am wrong about that, too.
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4:34:42 PM 
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Leonardo da Vinci. "Patience serves as a protection against wrongs as clothes do against cold. For if you put on more clothes as the cold increases, it will have no power to hurt you. So in like manner you must grow in patience when you meet with great wrongs, and they will then be powerless to vex your mind."
Carl Jung. "Nobody, as long as he moves about among the chaotic currents of life, is without trouble."
Kathleen A. Sutton. "When you can't have what you want, it's time to start wanting what you have."
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11:45:30 AM
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Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance.
The future is bright, according to a report co-sponsored by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Commerce (DOC).
You can find the 405-page report in PDF format here, but you can read individual sections too.
Ed Frauenheim, from CNET News.com, wrote an article about this report under the title When brains meet computer brawn."
Here are some quotes.
Titled "Converging Technologies for Improving Human Performance: Nanotechnology, Biotechnology, Information Technology, and Cognitive Science," the report calls for more research into the intersection of these fields. The payoff, the authors claim, isn't just better bodies and more effective minds.
In the overview, the editors argue that a host of advances can be achieved in the next 20 years alone. Among these are wearable sensors that send health alerts, much more useful robots, invulnerable data networks, and direct broadband interfaces between our minds and machines.
The report thinks big when it comes to peering beyond the next two decades to the rest of the 21st century. Taking visionaries such as Ray Kurzweil seriously, it imagines robots so advanced they may deserve political rights, building surfaces that automatically change shape and color to adjust to the weather, and the prospect of personality uploads that make death itself ambiguous.
Not everyone is likely to sign up for this techno-utopia, however. Some people are skeptical about technology's capabilities and cast doubt on proposals such as capturing consciousness through computers or linking neurons with nanocircuitry.
One of these skeptical minds is likely to be Bill Joy, from Sun Microsystems. Do you remember the article he wrote for Wired 8.04 in April 2000. The title was "Why the future doesn't need us." Two years ago, he was saying that "our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species."
You can read this article here.
Sources: NSF/DOC Report, June 2002; Ed Frauenheim, CNET News.com, August 5, 2002; Bill Joy, Sun Microsystems, in Wired Magazine #8.04, April 2000 [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]
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11:37:06 AM
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Samuel Johnson. "What we hope ever to do with ease we must learn first to do with diligence."
Henry David Thoreau. "Goodness is the only investment that never fails."
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11:23:47 AM
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Albert Einstein. "The release of atomic energy has not created a new problem. It has merely made more urgent the necessity of solving an existing one."
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11:20:54 AM
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"Those who have lost the most in war are the ones who have the most to gain by putting aside
feelings of revenge--going beyond our own cocoon--learning to forgive and making peace with our
our painful past."
Takashi T. Tanemori, Hiroshima survivor, quoted in Aquarian Times, Summer 2001
Tree let your arms fall
raise them not in supplication
to the bright enhaloed cloud
Let your arms lack toughness and resilience
for this is no mere axe to blunt,
nor fire to smother...
for this is no ordinary sun.
Hone Tuware, Aotearoa-New Zealand serviceman, from the poem, "No Ordinary Sun"
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10:26:33 AM
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The devout cowboy lost his favorite Bible while he was mending fences out on the range.
Three weeks later a cow walked up to him carrying the Bible in its mouth.
The cowboy couldn't believe his eyes. He took the precious book out of the cow's mouth, raised his eyes heavenward and exclaimed, "It's a miracle!"
"Not really," said the cow. "Your name is written inside the cover."
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10:23:16 AM
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The Washington Post published a contest for readers in which they were asked to supply alternate meanings for various words.
The following were some of the winning entries:
Coffee (n.), a person who is coughed upon.
Flabbergasted (adj.), appalled over how much weight you have gained.
Abdicate (v.), to give up all hope of ever having a flat stomach.
Esplanade (v.), to attempt an explanation while drunk.
Willy-nilly (adj.), impotent
Negligent (adj.), describes a condition in which you absentmindedly answer the door in your nightie.
Lymph (v.), to walk with a lisp.
Gargoyle (n.), an olive-flavored mouthwash.
Flatulence (n.) the emergency vehicle that picks you up after you are run over by a steamroller.
Balderdash (n.), a rapidly receding hairline.
Testicle (n.), a humorous question on an exam.
Rectitude (n.), the formal, dignified demeanor assumed by a proctologist immediately before he examines you.
Oyster (n.), a person who sprinkles his conversation with Yiddish expressions.
Circumvent (n.), the opening in the front of boxer shorts.
[via joker@joker.org]
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10:17:33 AM
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Garrison Keillor. "They say such nice things about people at their funerals that it makes me sad to realize that I'm going to miss mine by just a few days."
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10:14:57 AM
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© Copyright
2002
Rick@Leaders.net.
Last update:
11/18/2002; 10:51:36 PM.
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