Just another nerd.
According to this BBC storythe Chinese press is outraged that China is portrayed as harboring terrorist bases in the latest incarnation of the strategy game Command and Conquer. Of course, the Chinese have already paid the game the ultimate compliment according to the BBC,
Although the game has not been released in China, pirated copies of it are freely available.
Source:
Fury over EA’s generals. The BBC, February 27, 2003.
The Economist has an interesting survey of the debate amongst physicists about whether space-time is continuous or discrete. If space-time is discrete, then there is an ultimate limit on location and velocity, whereas if the universe is continuous then there aren’t such limits.
The general theory of relativity posits a continuous universe, whereas quantum theory implies a discrete universe. Unfortunately measuring at such small scales would require instruments a million times as sensitive as the best existing supercolliders.
Richard Lieu and Lloyd Hillman of the University of Alabama in Huntsville argue that the universe is continuous based on measurements taken by the Hubble telescope of a distant galaxy. Of course other researchers have chimed in disputing Lieu and Hillman’s claims, saying they underestimated the effects that space and time would have on such distant light by a factor of several million.
Source:
Plank-scale physics. The Economist, February 27, 2003.
Jim Lewis wrote a short analysis for the February 2003 issue of Wired which looks at the implications of ever-increasing hard drives sizes to the point where people start archiving almost everything related to their lives. Lewis writes,
If you wanted to, you could make a fair-quality audio recording of everything that reaches your ears for a month and store it on an iPod that fits in your pocket. Though, of course, you’d need another month to listen to it. Whence the rub: If life gets recorded in real time, it hardly counts as a record at all. It certainly has less impact, and in extreme examples it’s self defeating.
Lewis notes that the same sort of problem applies to the large amounts of recorded video, photographs, and other media that is increasingly being generated digitally (and much of what is not is being converted to one digital format or another).
But what I think Lewis fails to realize is that as our ability to store things digitally has increased, so has our ability to manage digital media — and such software will only continue to improve.
Part of the solution is to tag everything with metadata and use the metadata to organize the information. I’m very impressed with two applications I use to accomplish that task.
Conversant, of course, is the groupware system that drives this website and makes it easy to quickly tag everything I write with metadata and then organize the various articles into sensible (to me at least) topical pages.
Another program I’m very impressed with is Adobe’s recently released Photoshop Album which makes it easy and fast to quickly tag hundreds and even thousands of photographs with metadata and then find photographs that match the various tags.
The other part of the solution will be using increased computer power and other advances to have our computer systems more effectively highlight things of interest. Photoshop Album, for example, has an interesting option to select one picture and the find other pictures with similar color patterns. It works relatively well considering how crude of a search criteria it is using. Such tools will only get more powerful over time.
So, no, an audio recording of everything that your ear hears isn’t particularly useful yet. But when I can tell it to bring up all conversations with my supervisor over the last month or, even better, all recordings with my daughter in which she is singing, then things get really interesting.
People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals’ Daphna Nachminovitch wrote a letter to The Washington Times in February defending PETA’s decision to send a letter to Yasser Arafat that asked the Palestinian leader to exert pressure to stop the use of animals such as donkeys in terrorist attacks. The letter came in the wake of a failed terrorist attack in which explosives attached to a donkey were detonated in a failed attempt to kill Israeli citizens.
PETA was accused in many corners, including by The Washington Times‘ Gene Mueller of wearing moral blinders and caring more about animals than human beings. Nachminovitch responded,
PETA opposes violence and cruelty to all beings, but while millions of people and hundreds of organizers work to help the people in the Middle East, almost no one cares about the animals, who also suffer. We at PETA have chosen to work for animal rights because the animals need help — not to the exclusion of helping people, but in addition to it. Just a few months ago, we did both when we sent a delegation to this troubled spot to distribute healthful vegetarian food to both Arab and Israeli children, bringing a simple message of nonviolence along with nutritious food.
I wish Mr. Muller [who, while writing in defense of shooting animals for sport, probably has not asked Mr. Arafat to stop killing people] had been able to meet one of my fellow PETA employees, Ravei Chand, who worked tirelessly to share a message of compassion for animals. But he is not available for an interview because he is also a U.S. Marine. He has just shipped out with his platoon for the Middle East. He has put his life on the line to defend his country, yet he, like so many in Israel, can see what Mr. Mueller missed: We don’t have to choose between people and animals. Indeed, we can care for all.
If PETA can care for both humans and animals, that simply begs the question of why Ingrid Newkirk would write a letter to Arafat whose effect was to ask Arafat to stop using donkeys in future terrorist attacks. This would be a bit like somebody in favor of freedom for Tibet writing a letter to Arafat asking the Palestinians to ensure they don’t buy any explosives for China.
Source:
Make the Middle East safe for people and other living things. Daphna Nachminovitch, The Washington Times, February 25, 2003.