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Monday, February 03, 2003 |
Verisign: holding us accountable will kill the Internet. The crooks and fumblers at Verisign are still trying to stave off the inevitable $100,000,000 payment that Gary Kremen is demanding for their criminally stupid handling of the theft of his sex.com domain. They're getting desperate now -- asking the court to hold back because the judgement would force the end of the Internet.
Considering the NSI believes the decision may force the end of the Internet and have "enormous ramifications for a large sector of similar service providers, including cable television service and telephone service providers", it is a shame its legal arguments aren't stronger. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
12:57:44 PM 
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More on The Open Content Network: "OCN is not a file sharing network like Kazaa. Rather, it is a controlled content delivery network for legitimate freely-distributable content...The Open Content Network will work with the Creative Commons to deliver freely-distributable content." One of their sponsors is The Internet Archive... the idea of a 'content-addressible' Web is interesting... [www.gulker.com - words and pictures from Silicon Valley]
12:56:46 PM
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Atkins-MSG compound found in breast-milk. A compound that occurs naturally in breast-milk fools the tongue into ignoring bitter flavors. Naysayers warn that it will allow food manufacturers to use cheap, crappy ingredients and still turn out yummy chow. To me, it sounds like "Atkins-MSG."
Imagine a compound that could dupe your tongue into thinking bland oatmeal was hot-fudge-sundae sweet? Or another that could make kids hoover spinach like Popeye?
"You could make healthy foods taste better," Alejandro Marangoni, a food scientist at the University of Guelph, said of the new field. "Just blocking bitterness has huge potential. Somebody's going to make a lot of money."
Linguagen's "bitter blocker" compound, which received a U.S. patent this month, is the first chemical known to inhibit the taste of bitterness by altering human perception instead of flavour. But it's unlikely to be the last. Link Discuss (via /.) [Boing Boing Blog]
10:28:32 AM
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NewsQuakes.
newsQuakes.
newsQuakes.  ...
A cool concept. A wide scope of view of hotspots. Does highlight otherwise peripheral news. Unfortunately, seems like a work in progress. Imagine this with diffusion waves. [Jon's Radio] [Ross Mayfield's Weblog]
Well... Imagine this with live updating! Imagine taking this tech and retooling it to use GeoURL and DayPop. Talk about watching shock-waves! Then tweak some colors so that as an article is cross-posted, the original gets brighter so you could visualize the relative effect of a particular poster. Filter on "original location", news source (I'd say "blog' but I mean something broader), article, maximum number of hops. Chart referrers and hit-counts and translate those into the sizes of the circles themselves.
Go read Tufte's works. Then go see him speak if you get the chance. He's a really bright dude. Very twisty :-) [The Universal Church Of Cosmic Uncertainty]
10:17:53 AM
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Ad-Hoc Supercomputer For a Day. Linked together, the computers briefly formed the world's fifth largest supercomputer.
The technique could be used in the future to tackle other tasks that demand the application of huge amounts of computer power.
The virtual supercomputer ran for 24 hours on 4 November, accomplishing the equivalent of 3.54 years of computer processing.
The creation and operation of the Canadian Internetworked Scientific Supercomputer (Ciss) was being co-ordinated by Wolfgang Jäger, Paul Lu and Jonathan Schaeffer from the computer science department at the University of Alberta.
The computer was used to model the interaction of two molecules in 20,000 different positions and measure the energy bonds this bringing together creates.
If run on a single desktop computer, the modelling would have taken more than six years to crunch through.
The 1,360 computers making up Ciss were spread across more than 21 separate sites. [Smart Mobs]
9:01:53 AM
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Smart Mob Entertainment on Streets of San Francisco. The Go Game relies on the very latest in wireless technology, keeping the game moving with a constant give-and-take of digital information. Teams of 4 to 6 players compete with one another to complete a sequence of creative challenges or "missions" in the most ingenious, daring, creative fashion. We track your heroic deeds as you go along, verifying your location and the time it took to complete each mission. Go Game conspirators may be lurking around every corner.
Through clues downloaded to a wireless device and hints planted in unlikely places, you'll be guided through a city you only think you're familiar with. Clues can appear at any time, anywhere. Perhaps you didn't notice the woman on the bus reading a magazine upside-down. Or the note stuck to the side of the bathroom mirror of your favorite bar, or the electric scooter parked outside with your name on it. After a day of Go, you will.
As a player you may be a sleuth, a superhero, a saboteur, or all three. It all depends on, well, you. We at Go Game Central devise a diverse range of activities to suit everyone's interests, aspirations, strengths, and weaknesses. We beam these "missions" to your team and you, like any good super-human, are to complete them with wit, cunning, and creativity. To play The Go Game you'll need quick thinking, a little street smarts, a lot of ingenuity, and the courage to break a few social rules.
After the final mission has been completed, teams convene at a local pub to share their experiences -- in all their high-resolution, full-color glory. Over beers and burgers, players vote on the digital photos and videos from the day as they're projected on the big screen. Points are tallied in a hilarious exchange of the day's events and the winning team makes off with the prize. [Smart Mobs]
9:00:45 AM
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Natural Sight. A number of years ago, after being annoyed about having to wear thick glasses all day since my late teens, I sought out natural methods for improving my eyesight. In particular, I found a vision consultant who taught me principles, methods and exercises, loosely based on the Bates Method. It started working right away, and after a couple of months I could take off my glasses. For years I would only need glasses for driving at night. And I would faithfully do my exercises every day. But at some point I got lazy about it, and didn't keep up the exercises, and my sight has worsened. Not as bad as it was before, but I have to wear glasses if I drive of I'm out shopping.Now, looking around on the net, I found it depressing that the first thing I ran into was a lot of sites where eye doctors were claiming that this kind stuff is complete quackery, that myopia is genetic, and the only answer is glasses or surgery. Hm, I think I have a different opinion about who are the quacks.What I found most profound about the principles of regaining natural sight is that they apply to many things in life. Here are some of them.- Sight is primarily mental. If you can imagine something clearly focused, you can usually also see it like that with your eyes. If your mental picture is fuzzy, so is your eyesight.- Everything in the world is always moving. Natural sight sees that continously, and natural eyes will glide gradually over the scene, rather than jumping around between fixed points. Bad eyesight starts when one begins to see things just as fixed items at fixed distances.- Instead of letting yourself be thrown around by an apparently solid and immobile world, try turning your perspective around, and assume that you're still, and the whole world is constantly moving around you.- The periphery is important. Natural sight sees the periphery, the context, all the time, although not as clearly as the portion being focused on. Bad eyesight starts when we focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else, and when we insist that everything has to be clearly in focus. The periphery is never in focus - duh - but it is nevertheless very important.- Natural sight is relaxed. You see better by relaxing, not by straining. Just going for glasses or surgery, without changing one's habits, is almost as silly as taking a pain killer because somebody's standing on your foot. I feel bad that I've allowed myself to be so busy and stressed that I've forgotten about some of the fine ways I have of being relaxed and seeing better.Here are some more sites: brief overview, method in a nutshell [Ming the Mechanic]
8:25:19 AM
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Johnson Space Center: "NASA has established a special location on the Web where Internet users may upload their media files to be reviewed by NASA." [Scripting News]
8:18:11 AM
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Slashdot | Bush Names New Cyber Security Czar.
goombah99 writes "The Washington Post reports that Cybersecurity "czar" Richard Clarke has confirmed widespread reports that he is leaving the White House, to be replaced by former microsoft security chief Howard Schmidt. He was also part of the Air Force's 'Computer Crime and Information Warfare division'. In related news, the National Strategy to Secure Cyberspace has received Bush's signature and will be released to the public in the next few weeks. Clark's blunt staements on the to the need to avoid erosion of privacy rights is rumored to have rubbed the administration the wrong way, prompting his exit. Anyone know how Schmitt will view the relative security of closed versus open source?" --- Nothing says "Security" better to me than "Former Microsoft Security Chief". [Privacy Digest]
8:17:30 AM
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BBC: "NASA officials say data from the shuttle Columbia indicates it may have been losing heat protection tiles as it re-entered earth's atmosphere." [Scripting News]
8:16:57 AM
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“And how does this save us money?”.
Cross-range maneuvering is no longer possible by 50,000 feet. You're locked in, wherever you're going. Now you have company. Fighter planes—“chase planes”—have picked you up. They're swarming all around you, snooping around the hull for damage. Eighteen miles from the runway, you finally slow to subsonic speed. Now you really have some options. At this low speed and altitude, you could punch out safely.
At 12,000 feet, the plummeting begins. Nose down at 24 degrees to the horizon, 30 degrees in some flights. Feels like a dive bomber. That DC-9, the one that makes your knuckles white on commercial flights, comes in at three degrees. Thirty seconds out, you can raise the nose back up. Now you have one and only one chance to lower the landing gear. No time to cycle them. If the gear don't lock, that's it. The chase planes are coming right down to the strip with you, following your every move like baby ducks. They snoop around the landing gear. Locked? If not, the chase pilots have a couple seconds to tell you to bail out.
Via Scripting News, 5 … 5 … 3 … 2 … 1 … Goodbye, Columbia
The excerpt is talking about the landing of a shuttle. In fact, both the take-off and landing of a shuttle is pretty scary when you read about it. The article itself is from April of 1980 and goes into the cost overruns NASA incurred building the shuttles and how they aren't even that cost effective.
I remember hearing the arguments as a kid—especially the bit about the tiles, all 33,000 individually made and placed tiles per shuttle. So brittle that you could crush them in your hand. And the payload? Lucky to get a full 65,000 pounds into space. The Saturn V could lift 250,000 in a single shot (and in fact, the later stages of a Saturn V were used to construct Skylab in the mid-70s, which I suspect was bigger than the current Internation Space Station).
Sigh.
The shuttle is good at getting people to and from space (that is, when everything works correctly). I don't really see why we had to abandon the disposable rockets for those times when really large payloads have to go into space (like space station modules or even geosynchronous satellites) and leave the shuttle as a primary people mover.
But politics and budgets won. [The Boston Diaries]
8:15:40 AM
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Things that make you go "Hmmm."
Build Voting Machines - Win Elections. The respected Washington, DC publication The Hill has confirmed that former conservative radio talk-show host and now Republican U.S. Senator Chuck Hagel was the head of, and continues to own part interest in, the company that owns the company that installed, programmed, and largely ran the voting machines that were used by most of the citizens of Nebraska. Used in elections where Hagel won very unexpected landslide victories. [Ming the Mechanic]
8:13:43 AM
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© Copyright 2003 Mark Oeltjenbruns.
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