2005 – Page 20 – Wetmachine

Feynman Nine

John January 14, 2005 - 8:17 pm February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

In my technoparanoid thriller Acts of The Apostles (which you can download for free by clicking on the left), two characters named Dieter Steffen and Pavel Isaacs develop a nanomachine for rearranging human DNA. There are implications for Gulf War Syndrome, and hints of a plot to lure the Americans back to Iraq for a second war, where they’ll be beaten. (Acts was published in 1999). They call the machine Feynman Nine.

Recently sometime-Wetmachiner Ron sent me these links:

Feynman Nine becoming reality, and and one of the leading bioinformatics molecular biology researchers around is indeed named Pavel in real life. He’s working on algorithms for rearranging genomes.

At some point in the future I’m gonna compile a compendium of all the stuff I made up for that book that has since happened.

Or else I’ll get Ron to do it — he’s been sending me “Acts of the Apostles technology sitings” for years.

Inventing the Future: players

Stearns January 12, 2005 - 10:46 pm February 24, 2013Inventing the Future

So, you join a university team that is in the middle of a project that is throwing away the models of how computer programs and interfaces work and starting again from scratch. Where do you begin?

There’s a nice outside review of the scope and implications of the Croquet project in
this person’s blog.

This is deep stuff — too deep for me to fully grasp in my first two months. So I started by sorting out the people and their projects.

An obstacle to human progress

John January 12, 2005 - 10:11 pm February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

So I decided to ego surf the google usenet archives the other day and was kind of taken aback to see that the first entry for “John Sundman” was this little nugget from comp.ai.philosophy:

John Sundman

People like “John Sundman” are obstacles to the progress of human knowledge and

deserve to be put out of their misery

It was a comment I hadn’t seen before in response to this story I wrote for Salon about artifical intelligence, or more precisely, about how certain AI types could stand to, y’know, lighten up a little! (Why, the nerve of me!). God, seeing that comment cracked me up, I must thay.

I was tempted to try to make some kind of extrapolation from that comment to Godwin’s Law, but I’m somehow not really all that motivated. So in closing I guess it’s only fair that I should remind you that you’ve just wasted half a minute of your life with an obstacle to human progress. Now, I want you to go off and think about that before you make any more foolish mistakes today.

Home made high-altitude UAV

Gary January 12, 2005 - 10:12 am February 24, 2013General Exception, Hardware

One of the neat things about the ever-dropping price of technology is how people end up using off-the-shelf parts to create things that just a short time ago were the domain of government-funded organizations or large corporations.

Last year, one such project prompted governments into action as a man in New Zealand started to document his homemade cruise missle project.

A bit more on the benign side of things is this high-altitude unmanned glider project. Capable of being released from the edge of the atmosphere, such a glider could be used for all sorts of research, including a very cheap way of performing aerial surveys of remote areas.

Tales of the Sausage Factory: “Return of the Telco Legislation” Now Playing in Indiana

Harold January 11, 2005 - 6:42 pm February 24, 2013Tales of the Sausage Factory

Hardly has the new year begun when new legislation has been introduced to squash local municipal systems. This time in Indiana. Like any good nemesis, the incumbent telcos and cable cos have learned from the Pennsylvania fight and have “improved” this bill to include more noxious features and to try to hide them better. But fear not, gentle reader, all such machinations shall be revealed below.

Inventing the Future: Jasmine release

Stearns January 8, 2005 - 5:36 pm February 24, 2013Inventing the Future

Croquet is still being designed. Personally, I’d like to see something useable this summer, but that remains to be seen.

There is a “developer’s version” available now, called Jasmine, but there’s some confusion as to what Jasmine is in relation to the real thing. I’m going to try to straighten that out here.

Tales of the Sausage Factory: Open Spectrum Doubters

Harold January 6, 2005 - 5:24 pm March 19, 2013Spectrum, Tales of the Sausage Factory

A mailing list I’m on pointed to this rant by Chris Davies against open spectrum, and asked for a response after it was cited approvingly (if confusingly) by Corante. While I am tempted to respond simply by reference to the filksong by Brenda Sutton, I will attempt a more substantive answer below (although everyone really should buy Rite the First Time to hear that song and others).

Confessions of a Reluctant Unitarian

John January 5, 2005 - 1:55 pm February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

I’m a member of the Unitarian Universalist Society of Martha’s Vineyard. We have part-time minister and members of the society are regually recruited to fill in & give talks on Sundays. I was shanghai’d a while ago and finally gave my talk last Sunday.

The minister had originally suggested that I talk about “creativity” and “being a writer” or similar. Which is precisely the kind of crap I hate about Unitarianism: navel-gazing passed off as meaningful spiritual activity. So instead I delivered a rant about everything I don’t like about my own so-called religion.

Text below the fold. A few notes follow.