Just another nerd.
NationMaster.Com and its sister site, StateMaster.Com are like crack for map/statistics nuts.
Nation Master brings together statistics from the UN, OECD and other sources and not only allows quick nation-by-nation comparison, but also on-the-fly maps of just about any national statistical measure you can think of.
State Master does the same thing for all the U.S. states.
Both are very well done.
Michael Calore has the same problem that I’ve run into lately — what do you do when your music library starts to get really big?
My friend — let’s call him Jimmy — has a music collection of truly epic proportions. His library consists of roughly 90,000 MP3s at last count, which is about 560 gigabytes of data. That’s enough music to bring just about every software media player to its knees.
While Jimmy was building his massive library (which he stores on a local 1 terabyte RAID), he was importing and managing everything using iTunes. As soon as the library grew beyond 300 GB, iTunes started acting sluggish. After Jimmy’s music library passed the half terabyte mark, iTunes was so bogged down that it became almost unusable.
The folks in the comments section recommended a couple of solutions for Windows users — Media Monkey and Foobar 2000.
Personally, I like and use Media Monkey. It is not as slick as iTunes, but it handles the very large number of MP3s I’ve got without a problem. I especially like the fact that it embeds song ratings as metadata within MP3s which is much preferable to iTunes practice of simply storing ratings in the iTunes database (which means if you lose the database you lose the ratings — precisely why I never bothered with rating songs when I used iTunes).
The weird thing is that when I mention this to other people the typical response is, “why would anyone need 1 terabyte of music? Who has time to listen to that much music?”
I certainly don’t have time to listen to all the music in my collection. Then again, I don’t have time to read every web page ever created, but this doesn’t stop me from going to Google on a whim and finding exactly the pages I want/need to read now.
Music is the same way. I have no idea what I’m going to want to listen to tonight, tomorrow, or six months from now. Might as well just grab it all now and let the computer sort it out with the metadata and smart playlists.
The Foresight Nanotech Institute does a nice job of highlighting the World Council of Church’s nauseating policy statement on nanotechnology.
The WCC would subject nanotechnology to “democratic control,”
With public confidence in both private and government science at an all time low, full societal debate on nano-scale convergence is critical. It is not for scientists and governments to “educate†the public, but for society to determine the goals and processes for the technologies they finance. How can society assert democratic control over new technologies and participate in assessing research priorities?
Firstly, society must engage in a wide debate about nanotechnology and its multiple economic, health and environmental implications. Secondly, some civil society organizations have called for a moratorium on nanotech research and new commercial products until such time as laboratory protocols and regulatory regimes are in place to protect workers and consumers, and until these materials are shown to be safe. Given the regulatory vacuum and inertia by leading nano nations to act, the call for a moratorium is justified and deserves public debate…
. . .
The international community must create a new United Nations body with the mandate to track, evaluate and accept or reject new technologies and their products through an International Convention on the Evaluation of New Technologies (ICENT).
This would, of course, be the worst possible thing to do to nanotechnology. As Foresight notes, there may be very good reasons for the eventual creation of a Nanotech Weapons Organization to monitor and control development of nano weapons (much as there are similar entities that attempt to control and prevent nuclear proliferation), but placing science under “democratic control” is absurd. Many of the technologies that are ubiquitous would never have survived the sort of “democratic control” that the WCC envisions.
The Foresight piece is far too nice to the WCC, however, depicting the group as perhaps misguided in its overreliance on ETC. But the World Council of Churches has long been a menace to freedom.
The WCC has a long history of funneling money to terrorists. In 1978 it infamously donated $85,000 to Robert Mugabe’s Patriotic Front of Zimbabwe. The WCC long cooperated with and aided the “official” Communist-run churches of Eastern Europe, completely ignoring Christians persecuted behind the Iron Curtain (some with the WCC did issue a half-hearted apology about the organization’s blind eye to Eastern Europe a few years ago).
Today, the WCC is, like many lefty religious organizations, practically a mouthpiece for the Palestinians and a strident critic of Israel. When Yasser Arafat died, the WCC statement read like Arafat was some latter-day Gandhi or Martin Luther King, rather than the man complicit in the cold-blooded murder of Olympic athletes.