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A long way from mechanical relays and vacuum tubes, that is. A Canadian research team has made a single molecule transistor.
While a computer using this new technology is at least a decade away, Wolkow said his team’s discovery could eventually mean computers will run much faster using only one-millionth the power of conventional computers.
A Florida court has been tossing out DUI cases because the prosecution could not produce the source code of the breathalyzers.
All four of Seminole County’s criminal judges have been using a standard that if a DUI defendant asks for a key piece of information about how the machine works - its software source code, for instance - and the state cannot provide it, the breath test is rejected, the Orlando Sentinel reported Wednesday. Seminole judges have been following the lead of county Judge Donald Marblestone, who in January ruled that although the information may be a trade secret and controlled by a private contractor, defendants are entitled to it.
“Florida cannot contract away the statutory rights of its citizens,” the judge wrote.
In other news, unverifiable election results based on the proprietary code of machines notorious for being easy to tamper with are still OK!
So, this dude hacked (literally) his finger to implant a strong magnet, giving him magnetic senses.
I am now able to perceive magnetic fields in ways not naturally possible. The sensation is different than holding a magnet, as the neurons are stimulated with a higher resolution. With the implant I can detect subtle changes in polarity and strength that I cannot when equipped with a magnet in the conventional manner. Yet the most significant observations have come from another property of implants, their relative permanence to exogenous artifacts. Being able to perceive magnetic fields has expanded my conscious perception of magnetic fields ‘in the wild’.
In one sensory incident, I was walking out of the library, and I sensed the inductive anti-theft device. I have walked in and out of dozens of libraries hundreds of times, and never once have I thought about the magnetic fields passed through me to prevent me from stealing a book. I have been intellectually aware of the mechanism, but never paid attention until now. Another time I opened a can of cat food for my girlfriend’s pets, and I sensed the electric motor running. My hand was about six inches away from the electric can opener, and I was able to sense where the motor was inside of the assembly. Again it brought my attention to a magnetic source that I understood intellectually, but would have otherwise been unaware of. I feel I am one step closer to fully grokking the reality I inhabit.
Warning: the linked page has photos of the self-mutilation body art installation.
Wired has an interesting article on the problem of Torah theft.
Ritual Torahs don’t just roll off the printing press like yesterday’s newspaper. Under Judaic law, a new Torah must be meticulously copied from an existing scroll by a trained scribe, who pronounces each Hebrew letter aloud — for accuracy — before writing it on squares of animal skin. The pieces are later sewn together and reeled onto giant wooden rollers. The process takes a year, and a single letter broken or out of place renders a Torah unusable. […]
With a fair market value of around $50,000 for a new scroll, $9,000 for a used one, Judaism’s sacred text is in some ways a perfect underground commodity. […] But perhaps most attractive to a thief, and vexing to law enforcement, Torah scrolls are inherently anonymous. Jewish law dictates that not one character can be added to the 304,805 letters of the Torah’s text. That means no “property of” stamps, no serial numbers, no visible identifying marks of any kind.
(Via /.)
Around Nov. 2004, I was saying that the one silver lining to Bush’s victory is that the Republicans would be stuck with the responsibility for the quagmire Iraq so obviously already was. Had Kerry been elected, naturally the whole outcome would be Democrats’ fault (because it had been going so well up to then.)
But, y’know, I was wrong and TBogg is right.
With every American death, with every request for more billions for Iraq, the American public that initially supported the war starts to edge away from it as if it smells like last weeks garbage. Military recruiters are currently doing everything short of shanghaiing high school kids and they still can’t meet their recruitment goals. Soldiers are being kept in Iraq for too long. We are running out of money, soldiers, patience, and more importantly, the will to fight in Iraq.
Which is exactly what happened in Viet Nam.
So when we finally bow down to public opinion and admit defeat (only we won’t admit defeat…we’ll just call it a tie) and pull out of Iraq, and the power vacuum that ensues results in tribal warfare and more death and destruction, who do you think the rightwing echo chamber is going to blame? Not the neo-cons who sent us on this fools errand. Not the generals who were whistling past the graveyard when they should have been telling Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to fuck off. Not the 101st Fighting Keyboarders who waved their little flags and their well-thumbed copies of Sun Tzu and pointed out that it looked a hell of a lot easier on the Risk board.
No. They’re going to blame us because we didn’t wear little flag lapel pins and slap yellow ribbon magnetic stickers on our SUV’s and we subverted the cause of democracy in the Middle East and that’s why 1600 and counting American soldiers are dead, and the blood of every Iraqi killed in the wake of our leaving will be on our hands.
And it’s all because we didn’t stop them before they killed again.
In the film Fight Club, the real name of the protagonist (Ed Norton’s character) is never revealed. Many believe the reason behind this anonymity is to give “Jack” more of an everyman quality. Do not be deceived. “Jack” is really Calvin from the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes. It’s true. Norton portrays the grown-up version of Calvin, while Brad Pitt plays his imaginary pal, Hobbes, reincarnated as Tyler Durden.
(Spoilers ho.)
I would love to find the graphic novel described in this livejournal entry.
[The author] has the theory that dinosaurs, enraged by fallen angels, attacked Noah’s Ark as the flood began in a no-holds battle to the finish.
(A lot of the comments following the entry are fun, too.)
This Wired story is subtitled “Why it’s smart to disobey officials in emergencies.”
For nearly four years - steadily, seriously, and with the unsentimental rigor for which we love them - civil engineers have been studying the destruction of the World Trade Center towers, sifting the tragedy for its lessons. And it turns out that one of the lessons is: Disobey authority. In a connected world, ordinary people often have access to better information than officials do.
MemeMachineGo! advises beating the rush. Start disobeying them now.
Discordian Research Technology notes:
DRT headquarters is located in a tsunami risk zone, and the area has several well-marked evacuation routes in case one happens. It’s obvious that in the case of such a disaster, actually using one of the marked routes would be suicide (at least during tourist season.) The gridlock would set in as soon as the sirens started up. There are dozens of other roads leading to the hills, though, and while those that take comfort in being told what to do get stuck in traffic, we’ll be happily speeding along an actual escape route, which will be free of tourist traffic due to the decoy routes the authorities so kindly provided.
In a Google Images search for ‘vega’, the rank of Vega, the fifth brightest star in the sky, the first star photographed in an observatory, the brightest star in the constellation Lyra, known as such by humans since at least the 4th century BC, the star which in 12,000 short years will be the North Star: 12.
Rank of Paz Vega, hot 29-year-old Spanish actress who’s appeared in 14 movies: 1.
Jen tagged me, so I’m it.
Number of books I own…
12 bookcases full… something like a couple thousand, I guess (a lot of the shelves have two layers of paperbacks.)
Last book bought…
Destinos: An Introduction to Spanish, Workbook/Study Guide I. Pocahontas and I are learning Spanish via webcast telenovela.
Last book read…
Portrait of Jennie by Robert Nathan
Five books that mean a lot to me…
Watchmen, by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons. I am selfishly glad that Moore’s recent break with DC comics came too late to queer the deal for Watchmen: the Absolute Edition, especially since, as I’ve mentioned, my Science Fiction Book Club faux hardcover edition’s cheap acidic paper is yellowing. Dan Dreiberg’s story arc in particular means a lot to me, and I’ll often pick it up just to reread chapter 7 (or, sometimes 7 through the end.) And I’m not much of a rereader — I know many book lovers have this relationship with favorite sections of favorite books, but, for me, Watchmen is the only one.
Little, Big by John Crowley. My favorite prose novel. I buy it every time I see a cheap used paperback to pass it on. I’ve only read it once: I mean to reread it, but it’s a commitment. It’s a long and slow novel. Not slow because it’s boring, by any means, but it has a commanding unhurried rhythm it sucks the reader into. (I’ve encountered people who couldn’t get into it because they’re used to reading quickly and Little, Big thus left them with the alarming sense that there was something wrong.)
Stand on Zanzibar by John Brunner. I was reading this during my trip back to New Jersey to work for the phone company after I finished grad school at USC. I also read Brunner’s The Sheep Look Up and Brin’s Earth around the same time. They helped to cement my environmental leanings, and played a role in my decisions to become vegetarian and to not reproduce. But don’t get me wrong — it’s not on this list just for its message. The climax of Stand on Zanzibar is one of my favorite moments in all of literature.
There Is Nothing Wrong With You by Cheri Huber. Buddhist spirituality presented undogmatically as just irresistibly good sense (and, for the most part, without mentioning the Buddha or Buddhism.) Maybe some day I’ll get around to writing here about my experiences at Huber’s monastery.
The Past Through Tomorrow, Robert Heinlein. I imprinted on Heinlein as an adolescent, and I’m glad I did. If I’d come to him as an adult, especially if I’d started with some of his later works, I’d never have gotten past them. I suspect, even, that I’d be contemptuously dismissive of him as a sexist, tendentious know-it-all and a bad writer. And I’d’ve been wrong about that last part, as a bunch of the stories in this collection demonstrate, like “The Man Who Sold the Moon,” “Requiem,” “The Green Hills of Earth,” and “The Longest Watch.”
Next five:
The rich get richer to such an extent that the Times considers it news.
The average income for the top 0.1 percent was $3 million in 2002, the latest year for which averages are available. That number is two and a half times the $1.2 million, adjusted for inflation, that group reported in 1980. No other income group rose nearly as fast. The share of the nation’s income earned by those in this uppermost category has more than doubled since 1980, to 7.4 percent in 2002. The share of income earned by the rest of the top 10 percent rose far less, and the share earned by the bottom 90 percent fell.
Gosh, they must be working much harder than everyone else.
The Bush administration tax cuts stand to widen the gap between the hyper-rich and the rest of America. The merely rich, making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year, will shoulder a disproportionate share of the tax burden. President Bush said during the third election debate last October that most of the tax cuts went to low- and middle-income Americans. In fact, most - 53 percent - will go to people with incomes in the top 10 percent over the first 15 years of the cuts, which began in 2001 and would have to be reauthorized in 2010. And more than 15 percent will go just to the top 0.1 percent, those 145,000 taxpayers.
I can only assume Bush and his cronies are laughing their asses off at all the less than hyper-rich people who actually voted for him.
(via Dumb Monkey)
Wearable chocolate. That looks to be the closest contact with chocolate that model has ever had.
Yesterday afternoon, I arrived at a cafe in downtown Berkeley at the same time as an elderly blind man. He had a cane in his hand, and a small messenger-style bag over his shoulder. He asked for help getting to the counter, so I, all boy scout-ish, took his arm and guided him. He was maybe 80, and, even sighted, would have been moving slowly.
After he got his drink, I took him to his table. As we went, he explained “I heard this was a hotspot. I want to see if I can login from here.”
I regret that I was in a hurry to get back to work — I would have loved to see what equipment he was using.
Doodlebug is a cool site that records users’ doodles as Flash animations, so you can watch a reproduction of how they were drawn, stroke by stroke. Way cool.
Hard to imagine a writer ever agreeing to this…
I’m interested in a lot of subjects, and levels of interest ebb and flow. Of late, I’ve been geeking out bigtime, and that’s been one factor in not posting here. I don’t want MMG to require a programming background to understand (‘cause I don’t want to put Jimcat to sleep.)
One thing I’ve been doing is rebuilding Pocahontas’ computer to be quieter. After some modest success, I wanted to go further, and I ordered a new case. And, while transferring the old motherboard, I think I physically broke the CPU. Or maybe it was the motherboard. Or maybe both. But, certainly, it’s not working anymore. Oops. (My first casualty in all my years’ tinkering with computers.)
Now this was a motherboard I bought in, I think, 2001. And already its supported CPU’s are hard to find. And the prices I was seeing were about $80. (And, I could get it only to find out that the problem was with the motherboard.)
For $129 after rebates I could get a better motherboard, much better CPU, and a half-gig of memory. (the old memory wouldn’t have been compatible, of course.) So Pocahontas’ll be ending up with a mostly new system, with just a couple-years-old CD player and hard drive.
My stunning conclusion: computer hardware price drops over time are just weird.
Pocahontas and I recently saw Enter the Dragon at the Parkway Theatre in Oakland. The villain has a white cat, and she asked “What is it with villains and white cats?” Naturally, this led to a discussion of Ernst Stavro Blofeld. I did a web search and found four Blofeld fan pages among the top ten results.
As I read from them, Pocahontas commented “You’re so happy.” And it’s true — I was. I adore the sort of geek passions that lead to Blofeld fan pages.
Which brings me to the Dr. Strange Custom Covers Project. In the original Dr. Strange run, he shared a comic book called Strange Tales with first the Human Torch, then Nick Fury. And only in the final Steve Ditko issue did Strange get the cover to himself… he was otherwise relegated to a little inset box, playing second fiddle to his bookmate.
Well, one fan has taken it on himself to create the Dr. Strange covers that weren’t — covers based on the stories’ Ditko art that showcase Dr. Strange and put the other characters in inset boxes. And he’s been buying up coverless copies of the stories to attach his covers to.
Way cool. Howard Hallis, I salute you!
(That last link via NeilAlien — where else?)
Amazon is offering the complete Penguin Library Classics collection as a single item, 1-click orderable and all. Over 1000 titles for about $8000.
I wonder who’s going to order this, and how many of them they’ll actually read.
(If we wait another generation or so, we’ll probably get Humanity: the Complete Collected Works on a handheld.)
The Supremes have lately made a couple of decisions that I find terrible, the Grokster decision and this:
Cities may bulldoze people’s homes to make way for shopping malls or other private development, a divided Supreme Court ruled Thursday, giving local governments broad power to seize private property to generate tax revenue. […]
Justice John Paul Stevens, writing for the majority, said New London could pursue private development under the Fifth Amendment, which allows governments to take private property if the land is for public use, since the project the city has in mind promises to bring more jobs and revenue. […]
In dissent, O’Connor criticized the majority for abandoning the conservative principle of individual property rights and handing “disproportionate influence and power” to the well-heeled. “The specter of condemnation hangs over all property,” O’Connor wrote. “Nothing is to prevent the state from replacing any Motel 6 with a Ritz-Carlton, any home with a shopping mall, or any farm with a factory.”
One wag has wasted no time demonstrating O’Connor’s point.
Justice Souter’s vote in the “Kelo vs. City of New London” decision allows city governments to take land from one private owner and give it to another if the government will generate greater tax revenue or other economic benefits when the land is developed by the new owner.
On Monday June 27, Logan Darrow Clements, faxed a request to Chip Meany the code enforcement officer of the Towne of Weare, New Hampshire seeking to start the application process to build a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road. This is the present location of Mr. Souter’s home.
Clements, CEO of Freestar Media, LLC, points out that the City of Weare will certainly gain greater tax revenue and economic benefits with a hotel on 34 Cilley Hill Road than allowing Mr. Souter to own the land.
The proposed development, called “The Lost Liberty Hotel” will feature the “Just Desserts Café” and include a museum, open to the public, featuring a permanent exhibit on the loss of freedom in America. Instead of a Gideon’s Bible each guest will receive a free copy of Ayn Rand’s novel “Atlas Shrugged.”
There’s an interesting can of worms in California. While some states’ laws restrict their use of eminent domain to exclude the Lost Liberty Hotel scenario, this California Eminent Domain Handbook makes clear that California doesn’t.
The Fifth Amendment of the United States Constitution and Article I, Section 19 of the California Constitution allow private property to be taken by eminent domain only for a “public use.”
The term “public use” has been interpreted very broadly by the Courts. The project need not be actually open to the public to constitute a public use. Instead, generally only a public benefit is required. Elimination of blight through redevelopment projects, for example, is a public benefit which courts have held satisfies the “public use” requirement of the Federal and State Constitutions. This is true even though the property will typically be transferred to a private redeveloper and may never be open to the general public. It usually doesn’t matter if the redeveloper may be doing nothing more than building a new mall or a complex of movie theaters.
Since 1978, Proposition 13 (passed as a popular ballot initiative) has been the law in California.
Under Proposition 13, the real estate tax on a parcel of property is limited to 1% of its purchase price, forever, until the property is resold. […] Proposition 13 has benefited homeowners whose homes have appreciated in value since it was passed. Owners of commercial real estate have also benefited: if a corporation owning commercial property (such as a shopping mall) is sold or merged, but the property stays deeded to the corporation, ownership of the property can effectively change hands without triggering Proposition 13’s provision that fixes the amount of tax based on the property’s resale value. […]
Faced with the loss of revenues, California localities have taken measures such as condemning property using eminent domain, the act of government to take land property from the people, to attract large retail development. [emphasis added] The sales tax revenue generated by the “big box” retailers is more lucrative than the property tax and helped to bolster their original revenue.
Much of California has been undergoing skyrocketing real estate prices since 1978. Imagine how easy it is to make a case that a municipality could generate more revenue from seizing a 1978-appraised property and turning it over to a developer. For a start, it resets the appraised value.
And the Supremes have established the precedent that this is A-OK.