My Thoughts Exactly – Page 45

Orson coming to your kitchen by way of your TV

John August 18, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

Another reason I want to set my wayback machine to about 1890. (And another reason I’m glad we got rid of television in my house.) From the story:

Sealey said advertisers would gain an unprecedented ability to see how their spending affected sales, especially as retailers adopt radio-frequency identification. RFID, the system that could replace bar coding, tracks the movement of individual products such as groceries from a few feet away.

In about five years, Ad-ID and RFID could be used together, he said.

“Then we could measure whether we delivered the commercial to you, and, as I am monitoring your pantry, whether you bought the product, too,” he said.

Technoparanoia and the future of Democracy

John August 1, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

Are you afraid that technology could be used to

steal the USian presidental election? I am.

Are you afriad that technology could prevent us from getting it back again? I am. (I’m thinking of surveilance technology, combined with data mining and the like–“Patriot Act, Orwellian stuff”– that could thwart a democratic counter-coup in the name of fighting “terrorists.”)

Suggestion: Let’s bombard our senators and congressmen, govenors, secretaries of state, newspaper editors and anybody else we can think of — before it’s too late.

Update: Futher suggestion — support black box voting, an organization that’s tackling this issue head-on.

Ted Turner rails against FCC and big media

John July 24, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

John here, pretending he’s Harold, with a link to a story about the FCC and big media. It’s by Ted Turner of CNN fame, & published in

The Washington Monthly.

His line of reasoning will be familar to loyal readers of Harold’s Tales of the Sausage Factory but it is refreshing to see it coming from the pen of a wildly successful media mogul.

Some tidbits:

Unless we have a climate that will allow more independent media companies to survive, a dangerously high percentage of what we see–and what we don’t see–will be shaped by the profit motives and political interests of large, publicly traded conglomerates. The economy will suffer, and so will the quality of our public life.

Big media today wants to own the faucet, pipeline, water, and the reservoir. The rain clouds come next.

I’ve included one more teaser in the extended section, but you’ll have more fun if you skip that and just follow the link to the article. It’s well written with Turner’s trademark directness, and it’s scary stuff from somebody who knows what he’s talking about.

Book Swap Musings

John July 19, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

I’ve published two books that I wrote. Since doing that I’ve developed an appreciation for self-publishers and self-published books. (Would now be a good time to mention that my Acts of the Apostles won Writer’s Digest’s National

Self Published Book award, first in a field of over 300? No? It wouldn’t?)

Anyway, from time to time reports of various self-published books have caught my eye, and I’ve written to the writer/publishers to suggest a book swap. In this way I’ve grown a collection of about 20 self-published books. Some of them have been awful, none have been great, but a few have been not bad, not bad at all.

Lately I’ve been thinking about a technoparanoid thriller about nanotechnology gone amok, written by a guy about my age in Wisconsin.

Thought police technology

John July 9, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

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

Ghost Writer

John June 9, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

I was ego surfing today when I came upon this

link to a book “Inside the Sun386i and Sun486i” by Peter Norton and, to my great astonishment, me.

Amazon lists the book as “not in stock”, but I wonder if it even exists, or ever existed. If it does exist I would certainly love to get my hands on a copy. Because I never wrote it.

Wedding announcement musings

John June 2, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

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.”

AofA Technology: Monster Cells

John May 12, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

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.

Disney stifles dissent

John May 5, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

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.

Yet another AofA technology announced.

Ron April 29, 2004 February 24, 2013General, My Thoughts Exactly

Reuters is announcing that

Professor Ehud Shapiro and researchers at Israel’s Weizmann Institute constructed the world’s smallest biomolecular computer a few years ago.

Now they have programmed it to analyse biological information to detect and treat prostate cancer and a form of lung cancer in laboratory experiments.

“We’ve taken our earlier molecular computer and augmented it with an input and output module. Together the computer can diagnose a disease and in response produce a drug for the disease in a test tube,” Shapiro told Reuters.

“