Author: John

Thought police technology

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Here it comes. (Link to story about implanted electrodes in monkey brains that can read thoughts and predict behavior.)

Now, maybe this won’t scare most humans, because their thoughts and behaviors are more complex and harder to predict than are monkeys’. But I, like, Homer Simpson, basically never experience thoughts on the higher-than-simian level, to this story bothers me.

On the other hand, it at least gives me a nice technoparanoid story to post on wetmachine to celbrate the end of my vaation

Wedding announcement musings

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I live on the People’s Republic of Martha’s Vineyard, which is an island vaguely associated with the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where gay marriage recently became the law of the land. Last Sunday the weather was particularly fine. I was on the back porch, setting up for a cookout, when my neighbor Andrew came crashing through the underbrush that separates our houses. He had just come from a meeting with the minister of the Unitarian-Universalist Society of Martha’s Vineyard, during the course of which he had discovered that my wife and I are members of that church.

“We’re getting married in your church,” Andrew said. “Now that it’s legal, you know. I’m Jewish and Ron is Methodist and we wanted some kind of religious thing, so we said, ‘Let’s see what the Unitarians say about it.’”

“Maybe the rainbow flag on the church flagpole gave a clue?” I said.

“Well yes. And we just met your minister, and she was great, and it’s all set up.”

My wife Betty joined the conversation and gave Andrew a hug when she got the news.

“What’s the date?” she asked.

“September 11,” he said. “We have decided to reclaim that date from the haters. It will be a day of joy.”

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AofA Technology: Monster Cells

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As many of y’all know, I wrote Acts of the Apostles, (a nanotech thriller about (among other things) Iraqi bioweapons programs)during the years 1995-99.

As the book was science fiction, it contains a lot of stuff that I just made up. Since then it’s been fun to collect instances where the real world has caught up with Acts.

Here’s a link to an article in the Washington Post that describes an effort by Craig Venter(!!) to create an artificial cell that’s in many ways similar to the “monster cell” of AofA.

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Disney stifles dissent

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Evidently Disney wants to prevent distribution of Michael Moore’s film Farenheit 911, which is about Bush family ties to Saudi families, including, Ooops!, the Bin Ladins.

I expect that as this little imbroglio develops we may see a Sausage Factory story or two from Harold about it. In the meantime, I invite you to contemplate the irony of this film’s title — with its echoes of Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451, about the necessity of government censorship to keep people from being confused by the truth.

Well, hello everybody

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I spend a lot of time reading weblogs.

I read TalkingPointsMemo and a dozen other lefty news blogs. I read about Bush and I read about Iraq. And I worry myself sick because just about everything I read tends to confirm my sense that (in the immortal words of an R. Crumb character that I’ll track down one of these days) “the whole fucking planet is turning to shit.” But I enjoy those blogs because they have personality.

Over the last few weeks I’ve checked wetmachine a few times just to see what was up, and nothing much was. And I remember thinking: Damn, what’s up with this site? Why is it so dull? Where is wetmachine’s personality?

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We interrupt this program

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For a brief commercial announcement.

My employer, Laszlo Systems, makes some cool XML-based technology for so-called rich internet applications that run in Flash players. For those of you who don’t have a current degree in marketing buzzspeak, I’ll explain that that means you use Laszlo’s stuff to write nifty interactive web apps that don’t require page refreshes, and that the language in which you write them doesn’t suck. See the little blogging widget to the right for a micro-example.

As of yesterday Laszlo has greatly liberalized its free-for-developers and free-for-noncomercial-use policies. If you do any web development you really should go get the download. It’s cool, and it’s free.

Steve Talbott: Technopoly's eloquent critic

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I often describe myself as a technoparanoaic, or a technoskeptic, or a neoluddite, or whatever. I’ve used an excerpt from the Unabomber Manifesto as epigrams to my books, and I’ve called my Acts of the Apostles “Bill Joy’s Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us in convenient thriller format, with fewer pictures and more sex and car chases.” But although I might use a Kaczynski quotation in order to be provacative, and although I obsess on dystopian visions of the future, I really don’t have a consistent point of view.

To read somebody who does have a consistent point of view, see Netfuture:Technology and Human Responsibility, the occasional newsletter put out by Steve Talbott.

I don’t always agree with everything Steve says (although I usually agree with most of it), and once in a while his writing style gets a little floral for my taste. But he is a wise man and a thoughtful writer. I highly recommend him.

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