No, not 300, that’s a movie. 350. Parts per million CO2 concentration. Pass the word. Oh, right, it’s just a number, not words… PS: This posting does not constitute an admission that CO2 causes global warming. But I happen to agree with everything that anti-carbon campaigners believe in, even if I think that global warming is a hoax. And this is a nifty animation with cool music, so I’m posting it anyway.
I was thinking about data archival the other day because David Hagan was telling me about one time when he spoke to a group of librarians and told them to expect a data gap starting in 1950 and extending until we get serious about data preservation. According to David, the time when we stopped being able to save data was in the 50’s because xerography (which is the same as laser-printer technology) came into existence then. All other data archival techniques (magnetic storage on tape or disk, recordable CD’s, etc) are inferior to toner pressed onto paper, which is itself inferior to ink soaked into paper fibers. And, come to think of it, ink on paper is inferior to marks on clay tablets – though ink on paper has proven to be stable enough, since we use knowledge today gleaned from papyrus scrolls from thousands of years ago. ...
There’s an interesting little nugget of reality near the end of the first page of Ask the Pilot this week: If I have grown more cynical in recent years, it is travel, I think, that has pushed me in this direction. Exploring other parts of the world is beneficial in all the ways it is typically given credit for… But traveling can also burn you out, suck away your faith in humanity. You will see, right there in front of you, how the world is falling to pieces; the planet has been ravaged, life is cheap, and there is little that you, as the Western observer, with or without your good conscience, are going to do about it. ...
The Long Now foundation took a field trip recently. The pictures are cool, as is the irony that they went to a trade show held once every four years. Miners have a time scale closer to the Long Now’s. What does it mean that mining is a slowly changing industry? The economics of extractive industries push them that direction (capital investment is only warranted by a positive outlook in the commodity price). But workplace safety, which is a special case of universal human rights, demands that industries take advantage of the best available technology as fast as possible. This is an interesting story of the tension between capitalism and social welfare. If a mining regulator pushes an industry too much it will give up and move elsewhere. And apparently the mining industry is especially prone to regulatory capture an euphemism for corruption I especially like (like as in hate; in newspeak up is down, enslaved is free and corruption is regulatory capture). ...
A wonderful open letter from a fellow stockholder to our new investment’s board of directors. If only it were so easy… This is what justice would look like in a society that craved social justice and capitalism in equal parts.
Science Friday did an interesting story recently: New research shows that when people perceive they have no control over a given situation, they are more likely to see illusions, patterns where none exist and even believe in conspiracy theories. The study suggests that people impose imaginary order when no real order can be perceived. The first caller reports on how the conditions he experienced working as an aid worker in Somalia showed this. Also, he comments on the rough ride back to normality after suffering a situation with loss of control. ...
Yahoo published some best practices on OpenID, but I have one they forgot. Imran and I were talking at OpenCoffee Leeds the other day and we independently and together came up with this realization: OpenID providers should be required to be OpenID consumers first. Why? Well, the problem OpenID is trying to solve is “too many usernames”, which really equates to “too many authentication providers”. That means that the last thing we need is more stinkin’ authentication providers. OpenID providers who are not also OpenID consumers, are just making the problem worse. ...
Something very wrong is going on on South Africa, and the world is missing it: “It is better for us to be here than go for reintegration. The South Africans want to kill us and the government is trying to kill us. Reintegration’s a death sentence. We’d rather die here together,” said Johnny Kaka. MSF is only one voice, and though they are speaking out, the immigrants in South Africa need more people to speak for them. ...
Clarity on what’s wrong with our economy and our society, and advice on how to correct it, all in just 3 lines, and 21 words: You buy things and you don’t need. With money that you don’t have. To impress people that you don’t even like. From Aaron Stewart, " Our economic woes in three lines".
I was reading about vdash and inside the presentation, I found this interesting quote: “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk (at Google). “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.” That came from George Dyson, in this article on Edge. And as always with Edge, if you read on through the piece to the end, there’s some big ideas. Smart people thinking about important things over there. ...