My mother, she had this car. It was …
This article from the Wall Street Journal discusses the rapid increase in traffic that Wikipedia
is experiencing. I’m not at …
If you haven’t checked it out yet, check out “Fantastic Voyage: Live Long Enough To Live Forever” by Ray Kurzweil. It’s his newest book. The premise is that there are three bridges to get us to a nearly unlimited life span. The first is using what we already know. The second bridge is using biotechnology [...]
Boris Mann posted a great summary of a fine evening that he and I spent chatting with an MBA class team who call themselves “Team Flow.” Lots of interesting discussion, and great questions from a very keen group of people. Thanks Lorraine and team for the wine and food! I would have posted this sooner, [...]
Here is an excellent article from CIO Insight on the rise of corporate blogs, wikis, and RSS.
Only Mark Morford can put all of this into one article and tie it all together so well. Excerpts below. The link to the left takes you to the full article at SF Gate. …James Dobson, the cute little founder of the cute little ultraconservative rabidly Christian happily neo-homophobic Focus on the Family, actually stood [...]
A Cornell university study has found that 44% of Amerikans favoured “some restrictions on the civil liberties of Muslim Americans.” But remember George Bush, “this is not a war of Christian against Muslim or Westerners against Easterners, it is a war on terror.” Umm, yeah, right. Shockingly, those who were most inclined to vote this [...]
Read it and weep, my Amerikan friends. And support the EFF. QUOTE December 10, 2004 A Taste of the System 02:07 AM | Current Affairs/ Drugs/ Politics Since the election, as you’ve doubtless noticed, I haven’t had much to say here. Having lost that crusade – and I do think we lost, election skullduggery notwithstanding [...]
If you have not read about this horriffic case yet, Lisa M. Montgomery of Melvern Kansas had a baby girl fourteen years ago and then had her tubes tied. Since that time, she frequently claimed that she was pregnant to her ex-husband, current husband, and fellow dog-show attendees. Even more recently, she claimed on a [...]
Many of you know that one of my favourite columnists is Mark Morford, who writes for the San Francisco Gate news. This is this weeks rant on Canada’s policies versus those of his own government. It’s a fantastic read and nice to see that at least one American is aware of what is going on [...]
The author of this article in The Register says it better than I could: QUOTE The plan underlying Fallujah’s ID scheme and phased return may be an effort to stop it reverting to a hostile no-go area for security forces, but it’s doubtful that this could entirely work. It won’t be possible to stop arms [...]
America was doing so well until the ideological war-mongering Christian crusader came to power and now that they have managed to stamp out sex education, increase teen pregnancies, and push Creationism back into the classroom, it only seems fitting that one of the largest American TV networks would ban an ad from the United Church, [...]
From the Register: QUOTE Three “bored” German teenagers blew a staggering £80 million (₠130 million) in just two hours after they ran amok in an online spending spree. Using stolen credit card details the trio bought airplanes, works of art, designer clothes, restaurants, industrial machinery, patents and sound systems. They were arrested by police on [...]
Book-burning and more importantly, book-re-writing has been used throughout the rein of man to erase the collective knowledge and to curb dangerous thoughts and direct society. This infamous technique for hiding knowledge continues unabated today in Texas. Dubya and the ideologues (sounds like a great rock band title), continue to push their ideological and theological [...]
Andrew Zolli (again) points out a fantastic project known as the Eastgate building in Harare, Zimbabwe that was modelled on the termite mound (see biomimicry) and that resulted in 10% lower up front capital costs, lower ongoing running costs, and 20% lower rents for its inhabitants compared with the building next door built with a [...]
I love stories like this one at the Christian Science Monitor about Chris Anderson, a New Zealand scientist using crops to clean up contaminated mines. (Thanks Z+Partners for the link.) In one fell swoop, he has come up with a process to improve the environment (both by having plants around and by having the plants [...]
This is an extremely long post on Massive Change, the multi-media exhibition that is intended to be the starting point for a global discussion on the role of design in creating our world. Here is a bit from their website that gives you a sense of the goals of the project.
Cool mapping site. You can do the following: • look up a person to see what they’re connected to • look up a company / organization to see who they’re connected to • find the connection between two companies (it will draw you a map of the connecting humans.) This is COOL. I still want [...]
Fred Wilson over at the A VC blog originally noted sometime back in September that Philadelphia had launched an initiative to provide wireless internet access across their entire city. Now he has written about San Francisco undertaking a similar venture. I think that this is something that Vancouver, Canada should absolutely launch. Having wireless internet [...]
CBS News has an interesting article that documents the U.N. Economic Commission for Europe and the International Federation of Robotics: QUOTE “…said that 607,000 automated domestic helpers were in use at the end of 2003, two-thirds of them purchased that year. Most of them — 570,000 — were robot lawnmowers. Sales of vacuum cleaning robots [...]
Declan McCullagh, chief political correspondent for CNET News, covers the next degree of heat in the boiling frog pot otherwise known as the American government’s plan to track every American citizen’s communications, travel, finances, relationships, and lives from cradle to grave. This time, One section of the new proposed legislation: “…anticipates storing the ‘lifetime travel [...]
William Gibson is blogging again. Sort of. His blog has no ability to directly respond to comments. Also, there are no permalinks to each posting. And even the archive is listed in date order as opposed to reverse date order. In short, it is a home-built blog app that defies most current blogging conventions. However, [...]
I love Ray Kurzweil. Here is a short but interesting interview from CIO magazine where Kurzweil predicts things that will sound outlandish to most people: • outsourcing is a good thing and in the bigger picture not an issue because it’s not a zero-sum game – he gives a 200 year view of these similar [...]
More election humour from the U.S. (Thanks Dan Gillmor for the tip.)
Okay, so it has to use human poop to attract the flies and it still can’t actually catch the flies – it has to have them fed to it’s little mouth – but all the same, the interesting parts of this equation are: • it is self-powered • it uses microbial fuel cells to generate [...]
Am I the only person who seems to see the connection between the Wikipedia and the Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. From the current Wikipedia definition: Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) is a “copyleft” encyclopedia that is collaboratively developed using wiki software. Wikipedia is managed and operated by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. In addition to standard “encyclopedic” knowledge, [...]
