Tuesday, February 08, 2005

Celebrating the Body Beautiful. The human body is intriguing in all its forms. A photo exhibit features subjects both nude and clothed, giving us a complex picture of who we are as a species and as sexual beings. Commentary by Regina Lynn. [Wired News] 7:32:05 PM  comment []  Trackback []     Now I'm really worried...and I thought public education was bad before (even though I insist on sending my children there to meet others unlike themselves.) Does the First Amendment go 'too far'?. The First Amendment grants too many freedoms, according to more than a third of US high school children. This is the disturbing conclusion of a new report by the Knight Foundation. [kuro5hin.org] 7:31:25 PM  comment []  Trackback []     Puijilittatuq, or just too many seals for one blogger to blog. The Inukitut have a word for it: "puijilittatuq." Translation: "He does not know which way to turn because of the many seals he has seen come to the ice surface." That's a good description (from this month's issue of Ansible, the scifi newsletter from David Langford) of the blog-blockage typically caused by a fresh copy of Ansible. Thank goodness, at least, that I'm not in Paris! Bloggers there will face the nightly temptation of being able to play mobile-phone-Tetris, using the lights on the Bibliotheque Nationale. (Thanks, Engadget!) And check out Anil Dash's piece on "Information Bankruptcy." My favorite bit: I learned that half of all bankruptcies in the United States are caused by medical bills, courtesy of Rebecca's link. I wish I had learned this from John Kerry about six months ago. This is the core of the health care debate in this country, not edge-case stem cell research. Modern political organizations have fantastic research resources available to them, but they squander these resources on finding weaknesses in their opponents... ... And I linked to Jay McCarthy's beautiful "Letter to Beatrice" from my del.icio.us linkblog, but never got around to pointing to it from here. Tiny sample: In these paragraphs I will take Aristotle's classification, if for no other reason then to impress those who are so impressed, on friends: those of interest, of love, and of contemplation. This division is not always perfect, and thus many components could easily be rearranged, but how many books are in the Bible is much less important than their complete message--so I press onward... ... Now, you've got plenty to read, and I'm headed back to Thog's Masterclass... [Betsy Devine: Funny Ha-Ha or Funny Peculiar?] 7:29:45 PM  comment []  Trackback []     I like this lady already... Is Mary Hodder brilliant or what? She and her friends go for a hike in the Los Altos Hills while TiVO records the SuperBowl. When they return, skip over the football and watch the commercials. Read that twice. [Scripting News] 7:28:50 PM  comment []  Trackback []     Solar Cell Implant May Restore Some Sight for the Blind. Ophthalmologists at Rush University Medical Center implanted Artificial Silicon Retina (ASR) microchips in the eyes of five patients to treat vision loss caused by retinitis pigmentosa (RP). The implant is a silicon microchip 2mm in diameter and one-thousandth of an inch thick, less than the thickness of a human hair. Four patients had surgery Tuesday, January 25. The fifth patient is scheduled for a later date. [Science Blog - Science Blog -- Research News in Science, Health, Medicine, Space, Physics and More] 7:28:00 PM  comment []  Trackback []     Well put, and high time someone figured this out... Economics of Sharing. Economics of Sharing: "Economists have not always found it easy to explain why self-interested people would freely share scarce, privately owned resources. Their understanding, though, is much clearer than it was 20 or 30 years ago: co-operation, especially when repeated, can breed reciprocity and trust, to the benefit of all. In the context of open source, much has been written about why people would share technical talent, giving away something that they also sell by holding a job in the information-technology industry. The reason often seems to be that writing open-source software increases the authors' prestige among their peers or gains them experience that might help them in the job market, not to mention that they also find it fun." Comment: The two biggest complaints directed at the open source movement are 1) it's anti-capitalism 2) it's not democratic. While I can see fanatical implementation of open source as fitting those categories, I think both assertions are generally false. Open source is a manner of openness and sharing. People are generating profits from open source software - the difference is that the value of the product has shifted. It's not about locking it...but positioning it for maximum creativity. Secondly, it terms of democracy, the very notion of open source is that everyone has a say, but, as with Linux, someone still has the final voice. While some may object, I think open source can be defined as a capitalistic, democratic process. Its key definition, however, is that it distributes power to many nodes, rather than limiting it to a central node. [elearnspace] 7:26:47 PM  comment []  Trackback []     What Exactly Is Under the Sea?. Even with today's advanced mapping technologies, old and sometimes secret data can lead to deadly surprises on the ocean floor. By Rowan Hooper. [Wired News] 7:25:23 PM  comment []  Trackback []

© Copyright 2005 Gail Marsella. Last update: 2/21/2005; 5:53:51 PM.

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