Tales of the Sausage Factory

An insider’s view of the media hegemony

Tales of the Sausage Factory: Unlicensed Spectrum Access Part I

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In 2003, “wifi” went from geek toy to mainstream. But WiFi is only part of a much larger revolution in how people access and use the electromagnetic spectrum. Now, numerous competing and ill-fiting anaologies, “property,” “public commons,” “public trust” battle it out among Washington regulators. What’s at stake? While it sounds hyperbolic, this regulatory battle ground holds the key to the next stage of evolution of information technology. This is a background piece. I will post the current developments piece later.

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Tales of The Sausage Factory: CBS caves again for Bush

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For those of you haven’t followed, Bush and the Republican leadership fought off an broad attempt by Congress to roll back the national television ownership cap to 35%. The compromise was to freeze the limit at 39%, which means that Viacom (parent of CBS) and News Corp. (parent of Fox) don’t have to sell off any stations. Senator Dick Durbin (D-IL) says that CBS has paid the administration back for this favor by refusing to sell time to an anti-bush ad on the Superbowl.

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expressing things that matter; an old story

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I was touched by this story in today’s Boston Globe.

I liked the human crafstmanship in the telling, and deeply moved by the dramatic yet universal tale of the failure to live up to our potential.

So I gave it to my 11 year old daughter to read. I asked her why she thought I wanted her to read it. “So I won’t take drugs. Duh.”

I said, “something like that, but there’s something else….” But she had already left the room, singing Avril Lavigne.

MIT AI researchers develop healthy technoparanoia

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Or, so says The Onion, in any event.

“The more we thought about it, the less we were able to laugh off the threat of killer machines,” said Dr. Henry K. Arronovski, a leading expert in the field of heuristics classification. “It really started to freak us out. What if, decades from now, humans end up in a virtual-reality construct designed to blind them to their enslavement to the hivemind—all because of the work my colleagues and I started?”

Added Arronovski: “I want no hand in creating a world where only Keanu Reeves can protect my great-grandchildren from a giant drill that plummets through the ceilings of subterranean cave dwellings.”

As a true technoparanoaic, I guess I wish there were more truth to the story. . .

Fileswapping: A coda

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just a brief coda on my predictions for file swapping. According to The Washington Post, fileswapping is up again in October and November after declining steadily from June to September. I note that coincides somewhat with the college year, if new students get oriented in August/Sept., get a taste of broadband, and start fileswapping. that last is just speculatiuon on my part.

Stay tuned . . . .

Nanomeme Syndrome

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In both the philosophical and visual sense, ‘seeing is believing’ does not apply to nanotechnology, for there is nothing even remotely visible to create proof of existence. On the atomic and molecular scale, data is recorded by sensing and probing in a very abstract manner, which requires complex and approximate interpretations. More than in any other science, visualization and creation of a narrative becomes necessary to describe what is sensed, not seen. Nevertheless, many of the images generated in science and popular culture are not related to data at all, but come from visualizations and animations frequently inspired or created directly from science fiction.

From “The Nanomeme Syndrome: Blurring of fact & fiction in the construction of a new science” in Volume 1, Issue 1, of Technoetic Arts, a journal of speculative research, by Jim Gimzewski and Victoria Vesna, some legitimate hardcore nanotechnologists. Gimzewski won the Forsight Insitute’s Feynman Prize in 1997 for leading the team that made that nifty IBM logo written in atoms.

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Two Wetmachine Con Artists

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Your wetmachine host (that would be moi, John Sundman) and prolific wetmachiner and legal good-guy Harold Feld will be panelists at the Science/Speculative Fiction convention (“con” )

Arisia , to be held in Boston this weekend.

(It was at last year’s Arisia that Harold & I met, and I was so impressed with his general smartosity that I invited him to blog here. Lord only knows why he accepted the offer.)

If you’ve never been to an SF con (as I had not been before 2000), let me warn you that, in full conformity to stereoptype, cons are populated by weirdos. However, con-goers, who sometimes call themselves Fen, are some damn smart and well-read and thoughtful and articulate weirdos. And actually, come to think of it, now that I’ve been to about a dozen cons and have been on more than a dozen panels myself, I guess I’m one of the Fen too. Damn, how did that happen?