Wikis are hot, part 2

Lawrence Lessig: Code version 2 to be built collaboratively via wiki

Microsoft: "We have decided to create the MSN Search wiki to add a way for you to talk to us."

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Supercitizen and his army of mimes

Marginal Revolution: How much should governments influence norms?

Mathematician-philosopher-mayor-economist Antanas Mockus used a bevy of unorthodox approaches to educate and cajole citizens of Bogota, Columbia into new patterns of behavior.

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What are Weblications?

Adam Rifkin decodes application software's destiny: Weblications

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Stupid Asimo Tricks

Honda's anthropomorphic robot Asimo running is cool, but what I really want is a video of Asimo achieving a perfect score at Dance Dance Revolution. Then humans will be truly obsolete.

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I ♥ ASUS

I love Asian computer-tech manufacturer ASUS. My homebuilt AMD64 quiet desktop machine uses their K8V-SE Deluxe motherboard. I built my mother a Pundit-based desktop machine. I assembled my own 1.7Ghz Duron tiny notebook based on their M5200n barebones.

I've had my eye on a WL-330g "pocket access point" for a while. It's got three modes: wireless access point, wireless bridge/repeater, or ethernet-to-wireless adaptor.

They're also churning out stylish entertainment-center-centric PCs like the S-Presso. It's got a ST:TNG-like front color touch control panel and an instant-on mode for playing CD/DVD/MP3 without an OS boot.

I'm surprised they're not better known. ASUS might just be a few more mass-market products -- plus an English native speaker to write their marketing and instructional copy -- away from being a giant consumer brand. I might even invest in their stock, if I could figure out the right symbol/market to use. (WTF is PNK?) ASUS 200X == Sony 198X?

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What is E4X?

Jon Udell: Introduction to E4X

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Yahoo Video Search and Media RSS

Yahoo! Search blog: Yahoo! Video Search Beta

Mentioned there: Media RSS.

Interesting!

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Drug war victims: the Afghan people

Christopher Hitchens in Slate: Let the Afghan Poppies Bloom - How the drug war is undermining the war on terrorism

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Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle live on C-SPAN today: 6:30pm ET/3:30pm PT

As part of the Library of Congress "Digital Future" series, The Internet Archive's Brewster Kahle will be giving a talk, "Univeral Access to Knowledge," carried live on C-SPAN later today, at 6:30pm eastern time, 3:30pm pacific. A following Q&A session will also include emailed questions. Details here, and at the Digital Future series page.

(That's 23:30 UTC, and C-SPAN offers live Internet streams of their broadcasts.)

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Google Suggest Games

Google Suggest is pretty neat. I'm used to local browser auto-complete, where my previous entries into similar input-fields are offered as completions of my partial typing.

Google Suggest does the same based on their server-side, 'global' view of potential completions. Up to 10 potential completions are shown, apparently in order of how often they're searched for by Google users.

The updating of the list with each keystroke is instantaneous, with no noticable network lag -- so there must be some smart preloading (of compressed tables?) going on behind the scenes. (I haven't had a chance to peer behind the curtains and watch the javscript/http yet.)

They've blocked out common porn-related terms, but common misspellings are still there. Topics which some nations censor ('taiwan independence', 'mein kampf', etc.) are still present.

If suggestions are in fact ranked in order of search frequency, Google Suggest is leaking some very interesting information to outside interested parties -- the equivalent of Google Zeitgeist, but to a much greater depth (sliced by query prefixes). But it's probably the case that any major competitors already have their own strong windows into popular queries anyway, so they don't feel the need to guard this info as proprietary.

Anyhoo, Rachna and I came up with a couple of games you can play with Google Suggest:

1. Google Boggle: Decide on some search prefix, such as 'tre'. Each player writes up to 10 guesses of what the suggestions for that prefix will be. Winner is who guesses the most that round. Repeat as desired.
2. Power of Suggestion: Pick some search phrase -- a name, an event, a quote, whatever. One player guesses how many characters have to entered before that phrase appears in the suggestions. The other player can choose 'over' or 'under' that guess. Whoever's closer wins the round, and choosing order alternates.

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30 channels of digital TV on your cellphone?

NewScientist: Cellphones spell the end for pocket TVs

The emergence of DVB-H explains a puzzling purchase made last year by the transmission services company Crown Castle of Houston, Texas. The company, which runs the BBC�s transmitter network in the UK, paid $12 million for a 5-megahertz slice of coast-to-coast radio spectrum in the US.

At the time no one knew why. But used as a national cellphone broadcast frequency, Crown�s purchase may turn out to be an amazing bargain. Three Crown Castle transmitters near Pittsburgh are already broadcasting DVB-H to prototype Nokia mobile TV phones.

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Tim Bray on Wikipedia and its critics

Tim Bray contrasts the article-publishing processes of Wikipedia and Britannica and considers some criticisms of Wikipedia. He concludes:

[Wikipedia] may flower, but on the other hand, it may dissolve in a pool of demotivation and recrimination. Who can tell? Not me; but I�ll watch, and I�ll use it, and I�ll help out a bit. One thing is sure: the Wikipedia dwarfs its critics.

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Super-special HTML entities

You might have known that HTML entities include...

• bullet
∑ ∞ ≠ math symbols
™ ® © rights-marks
¢ £ ¥ € currency symbols

But did you know that most browsers can also display...

★ ☆ stars
☀ ☁ ☂ ☃ weather symbols
☎ ☏ ✆ telephones
☠ ☢ ☣ hazard symbols
☩ ☪ ✝ ✡ religious symbols
☭ ☮ political symbols
☹ ☺ ☻ smiley faces
♔ ♕ ♖ ♗ ♘ ♙ ♚ ♛ ♜ ♝ ♞ ♟ chess pieces
♠ ♥ ♦ ♣ card suits (and in outline: ♤ ♡ ♢ ♧)
♩ ♪ ♫ ♬ ♭ ♮ ♯ musical notes
✁ ✂ ✃ ✄ scissors/cut icons

I didn't, until I cam across this Expanded HTML Entity Reference page.

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Cheap information is making us stupid

UVa law prof Tim Wu in an interview with Ernest Miller:

Here is the problem: we are living with the unexpected consequences of low-cost information dissemination, or �cheap speech.� Cheapness is generally good, but it also creates strange consequences. Cheap corn, for example, makes us fat. Cheap drugs, like crack cocaine, can destroy neighborhoods. And cheap information is making us stupid.

As a society, the only answer is likely to be painful: an information diet. Consider the food analogy: in another age, food was scarce, and so everyone ate anything they could get their hands on. Today that approach will make you look like Andre the Giant. We have learned, albeit imperfectly, to eat more carefully. We similarly need to learn to regulate our information intake, or we�ll end up with brains that look like CNN Crossfire.

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Only in Austin

Austin takes its reputation as a live music mecca seriously, with a series of these "musician loading and unloading" zones painted into the streets downtown.

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So simple it just might work!

Marginal Revolution: Paying for Performance

Everything else has been tried, usually expensively and ineffectively, to improve performance in the worst urban schools. So why not just cut out the middlemen and directly pay cash to students who demonstrate academic improvement? Initial results are said to be encouraging.

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Presidential predictions: going out on a limb

If you look at the last batch of polls, showing Bush with a slim lead nationwide (and vanishingly slim leads in key battleground states), and then factor in a often-seen tilt towards the challenger in final polling, you could predict a Kerry victory in tomorrow's election.

If you take the polls literally, factor in an often-seen tendency to favor an experienced incumbent when faced with external threats, or trust other indicators (like betting markets or econometric models), you could predict a Bush victory in tomorrow's election.

But if you think the election mess of 2000 opened a national karmic rift that must be closed, you can join me in predicting that both Kerry and Bush win tomorrow: Bush narrowly winning the popular vote, Kerry narrowly winning the electoral college.

Lefty populists who've been criticizing the electoral college will suddenly discover its sublime wisdom.

Gloating by Kerry supporters and Bush-bashers abroad will be moderated.

Bush will have won exactly one popular vote, and served exactly one term -- just not the term corresponding to his popular vote victory.

The United States would get the usefully divided government that keeps costly federal adventures, at home and abroad, in check.

The imbalance introduced in 2000 will have been corrected, the Republic reinvigorated. Everybody wins!

You heard it here first. (Just don't make me lay money on such a unique outcome.)

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I, for one, welcome our new extinct pygmy underlords

NewScientist: Tiny new species of human unearthed

Tool and fire users with brains the size of grapefruit. Mmm, grapefruit.

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North Korea -- or Mordor?

Via Marginal Revolution: A social experiment

The darkness covering North Korea is evident from space... and there's even a sinister, albeit uncompleted, dark tower.

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The Kurzweil 250?

CIO Magazine: Machine Dreams - Interview with Ray Kurzweil

I keep seeing reports that Ray Kurzweil takes "250 supplements a day" to help extend his life -- but no mention of specifics. Where's the list, Ray? (And, are they all plausibly legal in the US?)

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Robots are the new Black

Associated Press: UN Report: Use of robots for household chores set to surge

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TYFYFW

TYFYFW = Thank You For Your Free Wireless!

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Scrooge McDuck is Sexy

ABC News Primetime Live: Poll: More Republicans Satisfied With Sex Lives Than Democrats

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I want to pay the same tax rate as the Heinz-Kerrys

Stephen Moore in the WSJ: A Wild and Crazy Guy

In 2003, George and Laura Bush paid an effective tax rate on their income of about 30%. I estimate that I paid an effective tax rate of 28%. The average middle-class family paid an effective tax rate of 20%. Billionaire couple John Kerry and Theresa Heinz Kerry, with an income ten times the Bushes, paid an effective tax rate of just 13%.

It's awfully hard to soak the rich. They know how to work the system to their advantage; that's one of the ways they got rich. Our best chance at a fair system is a simple, flat tax, with a generous individual deduction that frees anyone at a subsistence level of income from any taxes.

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Morpheus with Bitzi "anti-spoofing"

Upstanding bitizen Mike Linksvayer lays out, with screenshots, the Bitzi-enhanced functionality of recent Morpheus releases.

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Breasts and Wings

Perhaps the Wing Women should offer an upsell where your wing woman is actually breast-feeding during your outing.

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Edit This World

WSJ: Excite Founders Form JotSpot To Promote Wikis Technology

Wikis are hot.

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IPac - "A PAC for balanced intellectual property policy"

A new PAC which electioneers for more sensible intellectual property laws has launched: IPac. Its tagline: "Defending the public interest where culture and technology meet."

Good idea. Unsure of the name, though. Should it be said "I-Pac," like IPod? Such an association -- while cute now -- could eventually seem dated as fads change. They might also be misheard as AIPAC -- though that might not be such a bad thing when phoning legislators to get a meeting.

Or is it "I.P. Ack!", an exasperated exclamation?

Or should it be said "I.P. Action," like their domain name if not their logo? (What's up with promoting a name different from the domain? That tends to dilute the identity-juice...)

But these are nits. Whatever the name I'm rooting for them.

("IPac" also somewhat reminds me of Robin Gross's IPJustice, whose name has always struck me as a little funny. "Hey, take me out for a night of beers around the corner from the RIAA's offices, and by the end of the night I'll pee a little justice, too!")

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India, from a globalist and a tourist

Rediff.com: 'India has the innate ability to glocalize'

A 2-part interview with Thomas L Friedman of the NYTimes highlights Friedman's sunny view of outsourcing and offshoring. His cutesy coinages -- "glocalize," "the world is flat," "Globalization 3.0," "the McDonald's theory [of peace between nations]" -- get a bit cloying, but he has an important message. Meanwhile...

Slate: Trying Really Hard To Like India

A 5-part travelogue which, seeing brutal poverty in India from a tourist's perspective, finds dark humor in it. Slate may get indignant nastygrams, but levity can be a legitimate way to face horrors honestly, rather than simply turning away or adopting a hypocritical solemnity.

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Lo-Jack for your kids, and the marvelous manacles of the future

It's the Wherify GPS Locator "FOR CHILDREN", complete with "patented SafetyLock(TM)" for preventing "unwanted removal." Surely they'll bundle a USB demographic verifier "for children" next.

Meanwhile, for adults, your mobile phone will soon be an ID, a radio-entry key, a remote-control, and a credit card, too. That's the plan of NTT Docomo and others.

You won't need a wallet, a keychain, a map, or even a driver's license -- just a regulator-approved do-it-all and see-it-all device. Yesterday's driver's license data stripe will be replaced by tomorrow's active identifier handset. If you can't afford one, technological progress and economies of scale will ensure one can be provided to you, gratis or as part of licensing fees you had to pay anyway.

And we can't have official IDs swappable like baseball cards, can we? So expect a Wherify-like fitting at your local DMV. Miniaturization will ensure it's the least obtrustive and most feature-filled manacle ever developed -- barely the size of bracelet or class graduation ring. That's it -- think of it as trendy jewelry. Everyone who's anyone will be wearing it.

Ken-Ichi Enoki of NTT Docomo predicts of his companies' future offerings, "These handsets will be universal life controllers." As devices and uses converge, it's just not clear who'll be doing the controlling.

[Wherify and USB verifier links discovered via Umair Haque's Bubblegeneration.]

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Got big popular content, but tiny bandwidth? Coralize your links.

Via the p2p-hackers list, Michael J. Freedman writes:

We'd like to publicly announce the availability of CoralCDN, an open peer-to-peer content distribution network, beta-deployed on PlanetLab since March 2004:

http://www.scs.cs.nyu.edu/coral/

To take advantage of CoralCDN, a content publisher, user, or some third party posting to a high-traffic portal, simply appends .nyud.net:8090 to the hostname in a URL. For example:

http://news.google.com/ --> http://news.google.com.nyud.net:8090/

Through DNS redirection, oblivious clients with unmodified web browsers are transparently redirected to nearby Coral web caches. These caches cooperate to transfer data from nearby peers whenever possible, minimizing the load on the origin web server and possibly reducing client latency. In fact, such servers should see near to a single request per web object to initialize the cooperative cache.

More info is in Freedman's post to the list and at the Coral website.

I think this will be big: a free, distributed hashtable-based global caching proxy network for any web content. It could cure the Slashdot effect; it could end the bandwidth worries of small operators with popular rich-media content. And it's got pretty maps of the deployed system.

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Dem Party 527 Group Calls for Federal Ministry of Truth

America Coming Together (ACT) is a "527" political slush fund, one of the loophole demon spawn of the McCain-Feingold campaign speech quotas. ACT works to "elect Democrats up and down the ticket this November."

But they also want to set up the Federal Communications Commission as a sort of Ministry of Truth that would review and approve campaign ads before they run. On their site for hosting a satirical Will Ferrell campaign ad, White House West, they urge visitors to sign a petition:

STOP THE FRAUD: Stop airing fraud. Allow democracy to work.

Americans must be able to trust the facts in political ads. Every voter has the right to truthful advertising. Free speech is no defense to massive, purposeful fraud.

You, the FCC, have an obligation to ensure that broadcast stations around the country do not transmit misleading, deceptive and fraudulent advertising.

We, the undersigned American citizens, demand that you require proof of fact before airing political advertisements. Laws must change to protect our democracy.

You'd think a group backed by George "Open Society" Soros would have a better idea of what free speech means. If they take issue with a few numbers in Bush's campaign commercials, they should dispute the ads with more speech. Whining that a federal agency should exercise prior restraint over all political speech is pathetic -- and working to give any agency that power is dangerous.

And consider the irony of ACT exercising their First Amendment-protected right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances -- to ask for a curtailment of First Amendment-protected rights of freedom of speech and the press. What's next? An armed insurrection to revoke the right to keep and bear arms?

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Econometrics indicate a Bush victory

NYTimes: Questions for Ray C. Fair: Bush Landslide (in Theory)!

As a professor of economics at Yale, you are known for creating an econometric equation that has predicted presidential elections with relative accuracy.

My latest prediction shows that Bush will receive 57.5 percent of the two-party votes.

The polls are suggesting a much closer race.

Polls are notoriously flaky this far ahead of the election, and there is a limit to how much you want to trust polls.

Why should we trust your equation, which seems unusually reductive?

It has done well historically. The average mistake of the equation is about 2.5 percentage points.

The really funny part of this interview is how the interviewer practically pleads with Fair to soften or change or qualify his prediction to boost the prospects for a desired result: a Kerry victory. Of course, that completely misses the point of objective scholarship -- or for that matter, objective journalism.

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Copycats

California company announces first cloned pets. Born in Austin, they're named "Tabouli" and "Baba Ganoush", clones of a cat named "Tahini". A San Franciscan is incensed, naturally.

"Here, cloney cloney cloney. Here, cloney cloney."

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The Wikipedia Phenomenon

Imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. That's what we're doing.

That's Wikipedia founder Jimmy "Jimbo" Wales in a Slashdot interview. Read it all for a peek inside an amazing, important free-media project surging in content and popularity.

Sounds like he's also starting to make the case for ads as an important source of foundation funding...

The discussion about advertising is really more a question that asks: with this kind of traffic, and the kind of growth we are seeing, how much good could we do as a charitable institution if we decided to accept advertising. It would be very lucrative for the Wikimedia Foundation if the community decided to do it, because our cost structure is extremely extremely low compared to any traditional website.

That money could be used to fund books and media centers in the developing world. Some of it could be used to purchase additional hardware, some could be used to support the development of free software that we use in our mission. The question that we may have to ask ourselves, from the comfort of our relatively wealthy Internet-connected world, is whether our discomfort and distaste for advertising intruding on the purity of Wikipedia is more important than that mission.

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Decoding JibJab

A poster at Larry Lessig's blog makes a contrarian point: the JibJab "This Land" animation tilts heavily against John Kerry.

I agree.

The digs against Bush -- that he's stupid, inarticulate, and cartoonishly belligerent -- are old news. They've been repeated for years and get repeated several more times in the animation, but they're not delivering any new information or swaying any undecideds here. Bush is a known quantity, in real life and charicature.

Kerry is less well-known. The digs against Kerry deliver novel negative characterizations to a new and receptive audience. Kerry is shown as haughty, vain, super-rich, and mocking of poor people. (While Bush only misspells Massachusetts, Kerry sneers at an image of poor life.) Kerry can't shut up about his medals. And two meaty points the GOP would like at the top of voters' minds -- Bush delivers tax breaks, Kerry flip-flops on issues -- get prominent airing. (None of Kerry's substantive talking points, such as they might be, get similar placement.)

The same imbalance is evident in the visual parodies. Portrayals of Bush as a cowboy, a tank driver, and wearing camo fatigues aren't so bad for a war president who can benefit from a macho image. There's no such silver lining for Kerry being portrayed as a ketchup-pushing hot dog, Herman Munster, U.N. sex slave, diapered baby, funky peacenik, or botox patient.

JibJab's "This Land" is hilariously clever: a great mesh of visuals, words, music, and voices. (Did one guy really do all the voices? Wow.) Its veneer of equal mockery, and the final scene where Bush and Kerry join arms, add to its charm.

But point-by-point, it's a really effective piece of pro-Bush propaganda -- even if it wasn't consciously designed that way.

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Bill Gates and the broken window fallacy

Mike Linksvayer catches Bill Gates peddling a particularly ironic line of specious economic reasoning, the broken window fallacy.

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Friendster goes PHP

Friendster goes PHP

Comments there include some delightful PHP vs. Java/JSP sniping. It strikes me that most of the benefits claimed for PHP are achievable with Java... it's just not typical for Java-heads to constrain themselves in those same ways, often leading to scaling strains.

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Titles from my forthcoming series of self-help books

Volume 1: Achieving Total Victory Over Perfectionism

Volume 2: If You Worry That You're Worrying About The Wrong Things, You're Right

Volume 3: Sarcasm Can Be So Helpful In Your Relationships

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Scenes from 30 June 2004

Iraqi Prime Minister-designate Ayad Allawi gazes over Baghdad, contemplating the fearsome challenges and responsibilty of national sovereignty... but why is he wearing a Spider-Man costume?

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Spider-Man is really... Pavitr Prabhakar

Gotham Comics: Spider-Man India

Spider-Man India interweaves the local customs, culture and mystery of modern India, with an eye to making Spider-Man's mythology more relevant to this particular audience. Readers of this series will not see the familiar Peter Parker of Queens under the classic Spider-Man mask, but rather a new hero ?3 a young, Indian boy named Pavitr Prabhakar. As Spider-Man, Pavitr leaps around rickshaws and scooters in Indian streets, while swinging from monuments such as the Gateway of India and the Taj Mahal.

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Magnet URIs as a content-distribution aid

p2pnet.net: Steve Winwood on MagnetMix

Nice mention of the value of magnet URIs in this article about a Steve Winwood track being made available via P2P.

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Ray Bradbury to Michael Moore: Gimme My Title Back

SFGate: 'Fahrenheit 451' author Bradbury demands Moore change his film's title

Dilution of the "Fahrenheit 451" name affects not just the original book...

Bradbury's book was made into a 1966 movie directed by Francois Truffaut. A new edition of the book is scheduled for release in eight weeks, Bradbury said, and plans are in the works for a new film version, to be directed by Frank Darabont.

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Credit where credit is due

PBS | I, Cringely: Engines of Change: When It Comes to the Application of Disruptive Consumer Electronic Technologies, We Probably Have Napster (the Old One) to Thank

Cringely writes:

A number of forces have to work in conjunction to make these disruptive technologies possible. Economies of scale gained by mass production are augmented by the willingness of technically savvy people to share the fruits of their labor, but the third component we don't give enough credit to, I think, is the willingness of absolutely normal people to mess with this complex technology. I credit Napster (the original Napster, not the new one) and DivX for this relatively sudden willingness for average people to get their hands dirty twiddling bits. Motivated by free music and video, millions of people have learned that it isn't really that hard to do, especially if there is a 12 year-old available to help. And since we seem to keep producing 12 year-olds, I'd say the sky's the limit when it comes to how these technologies will change our world.

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Microbe hunting with DNA inventorying

Economist.com: An injection of innovation: Vaccinating livestock may be a way to slow global warming

Vaccinating flatulent livestock against greenhouse-gas-producing bacteria is a cute idea, sure, but this part of the article was most interesting to me:

At that point he [Andr�-Denis Wright, of the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation's laboratory in Perth] decided to try a different tack. Instead of restricting himself to those stomach bugs he could grow, he sought to identify the full range of what was there using a new technique called environmental genomics. This trick, pioneered by Craig Venter in the United States, breaks all of the DNA in a sample of liquid from, say, a stomach, up into small pieces. It then sequences each piece to establish the order of the genetic �letters� in it, and uses a computer to fit the pieces back together by matching the overlaps between the sequences of letters. That way, if all goes well, the genomes of the bugs in a sample will emerge from the soup of pieces, and the organisms can be identified without the need to grow them.

The researchers surveyed the microbial populations of 17 sheep stomachs in this way, and revealed several new species of methanogen, including some from a group of archaea not previously known to inhabit digestive tracts.

This kind of broad survey of indigenous microbial flora should be tried on anyone with exceptional health -- octogenarians, survivors of often-fatal diseases, etc. It's likely to find previously-unknown naturally-occurring health-promoting organisms.

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Viruses against cancer

New Scientist: Genetically-modified virus explodes cancer cells

This virus was genetically modified, but it sounds like a simple change -- dropping a viral adaptation that, while necessary to remain viable against normal cells, otherwise curtails the virus's replication. Could such a modification be part of the normal viral mutation churn in nature, meaning there are naturally occurring anti-cancer saluviruses from time to time? And might that also be the scientific explanation for occasional "miraculous" remissions from cancer?

Should we be searching for such novel agents inside cancer survivors?

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NASA wakes up to robotic Hubble-rescue option

NYTimes: NASA Weighs Robot Mission to Maintain Telescope

I wish I'd thought of that. Oh, wait, I did.

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Germs that cure. Doctors who infect.

Even though germs on doctors' neckties include disease agents, other germs in the mouth prevent mother-child HIV transmission, and still other germs in the gut help prevent allergies.

If the health breakthroughs of the 20th century were about eradicating disease-causing organisms -- with antibiotics, inoculation, and hygeine -- the breakthroughs of the 21st century could be identifying, cultivating, and deploying a large array of health-giving microbes. Is there a bacteria or virus out there that once discovered will save as many lives as penicillin has?

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Google's Self-inoculation

Is it a coincidence that these two news items both came out on the same day?

NYTimes (John Markoff): Google moves toward clash with Microsoft

CNET News.com (Declan McCullagh): Google offers advice to writers of adware

Nah. Google probably intends their forthcoming desktop search product to include an advertising component. But, they don't want to be lumped with the Gators of the world, or face another PR crapstorm like the one that accompanied GMail's email-based ad-placements. Hence, in advance of the desktop release, they're laying the groundwork for what an "acceptable" piece of ad-supported dekstop software might be. With any luck, they'll get publically attacked for meddling and arrogance by the makers of software that violates their proposed "principles," highlighting the very differentiation they seek to establish.

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Funny send-up of "bustling" VCs

VentureBlog: Calendar Calisthenics Redux

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Novel anti-HIV saluvirus synthesized in lab

Wired News: Designer Virus Stalks HIV

Wow. Even though nature already has its own anti-HIV saluvirus (discussed here), the fact that a few Lawrence Berkeley Lab researchers have managed to synthesize another is impressive. And, as the article notes, scary.

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Looking on the bright side

New Scientist: World's marine life is getting sicker

In 1998, a dozen of the world's top experts on diseases of marine animals warned that sea creatures seemed to be getting sick more often, with more diseases.

New viruses had appeared in whales and seals, while corals were dying of fungal and algal infections. Pilchards succumbed to viruses and an aggressive parasite expanded its range to attack commercial oysters, scallops and clams. In the Caribbean, some unknown bacteria wiped out what had been the dominant sea urchin.

Hey! That headline is unnecessarily glum! It could read: "World's marine disease and parasite organisms thriving."

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Full Bitzi catalog enumeration -- by hash

This may be of more interest to robots than people, but there now exist clickthrough paths to every file in the Bitzi catalog, organized by their arbitrary SHA1 hashes. See...

http://bitzi.com/lookup/*

...and drill down any 3 clicks.

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It's like Microsoft Office for the rest of your apartment... i-Kea

Via Yahoo News: IKEA founder overtakes Gates as world's richest

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Slip Sliding Away

Whenever I'm headed home, from a day's work or a long trip, there's a particular sight that lets me know I'm almost there. Recently returning from Europe, I caught a glimpse a lot sooner than expected.

Rounding a corner towards my departure gate in an hallway at London's Heathrow airport, I spotted...

...a British Airways poster plugging their Club World program, with a vista of the Golden Gate bridge. But no, it's not the bridge that symbolizes home. I had to look a bit closer...

Closer...

Do you see it yet? Faint in the clouds as is quite common...

There it is, Sutro Tower, looming over my neighborhood as always, letting me know I'm homebound and on the final stretch.

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More on the anti-HIV saluvirus

New Scientist: Mysterious virus may thwart HIV

This article features new research data confirming the apparent HIV-blocking effects of "GB-virus C." The first study about this came out about a year ago -- and I commented on it then, too. From this article:

'Until now, there have been many doubting Thomases who didn't believe this viral antiviral effect even existed,' says Roger Pomerantz of Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. 'This puts an end to the debate.'

Indeed! And if HIV has a benign, protection-giving competitive virus out in nature, won't many other viruses? And what other health benefits might turn out to be contagious, carried by viruses in a manner previously thought reserved for diseases? There's probably Nobel prizes hereabouts for some lucky and dedicated researchers...

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The research paper that prefigured Orkut...

From Lada Adamic, Eytan Adar, and the eponymous Orkut himself: A social network caught in the Web

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Prediction: bacteria confirmed on Mars -- if not tomorrow, soon

Tomorrow's announcement of "significant findings" might only involve water, but I think it's only a matter of time before Gilbert Levin is proven right and the Mars soil is confirmed to contain active bacteria.

There will be some speculation about Earth seeding Mars, or Mars seeding Earth, but the real winner should be the idea of panspermia: that life is prevalent throughout the universe, and probably reached Earth and Mars from elsewhere.

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Give That Man A Research Grant

Len Sassaman's Orkut "about me" statement gave me a good chuckle:

Some day, I will invent a machine that turns all marxists into ants. Then, we will all be happy.

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The semicolon always seemed a bit queer to me, too

A stray semicolon has slowed an injunction to stop the San Francisco same-sex marriage-a-thon. The LA Times writes 2nd S.F. Judge Delays Ruling on Gay Marriages:

Superior Court Judge James Warren told plaintiffs late this afternoon that they would likely succeed on the merits of their case but said he would not issue a court order until they corrected a punctuation error in their legal filing.

"I am not trying to be petty here, but it is a big deal That semicolon is a big deal," Warren told attorneys, according to an account by Associated Press.

In documents filed with the court, the Proposition 22 Legal Defense and Education Fund had requested a court order that would force the city "cease and desist issuing marriage licenses to and/or solemnizing marriages of same-sex couples; to show cause before this court."

"The way you've written this it has a semicolon where it should have the word 'or'," the judge said. "I don't have the authority to issue it under these circumstances."

;)

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There are 10 kinds of people... (extended edition!)

At O'Reilly Network, I write: There are 10 kinds of people... (extended edition!) [2018-07-02: O'Reilly broke link, & worse, made it a redirect, so link here updated to grab from Internet Archive]

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Gojomo: Two Full Years Ahead of Wired News In Headline Pun Technology

Wired News, February 10, 2004: Please Don't Squeeze the Sharman

Gojomo on the O'Reilly Network, January 21, 2002: Copyright Industries: Don't Squeeze the Sharman!

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Bitzi Bitcollider 0.6.0 Released

Bitzi has released version 0.6.0 of our Bitcollider utility.

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Don Asmussen Returns

After a too-long vacation, the SF Chronicle's hilariously hallucinogenic current-event cartoonist Don Asmussen is back with 2 panels this week...

a mash-up of NASA mishaps and Janet Jackson's "wardrobe malfunction"

an in-depth exegesis of John Kerry's (intermittently) furrowed brow

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I'm not easily squicked, but...

New Scientist: Pig-human chimeras contain cell surprise

Pig-human chimeras have pig cells, human cells, AND novel fused cells containing mixed pig-human nuclei. And those fused cells can catch pig viruses that previously haven't crossed the species barrier.

It's a trans-species viral superhighway!

I wonder if they're testing these part-human pigs for above-average-pig intelligence. At some point I picture one of the pigs -- let's call him Wilbur -- surprising the experimenters with a fully vocalized "what the hell do you think you're doing?"

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Lycos says: Janet Jackson Superbowl Breast Stunt Biggest Search Topic Ever

Lycos 50 Daily Report: Janet Jackson Makes History

It's staggering -- the risque superbowl halftime stunt generated more followup searches at Lycos, and presumably other search engines, than any other event, including the September 11 attacks.

We've seen the surge at Bitzi, but only starting late Monday night, when this page of user-reported info about a janet jackson superbowl breast stunt JPEG suddenly became a top hit at a major search engine.

We got the largest inrush of browsing traffic in our history soon after midnight... and that was only the beginning. By the morning, we'd hit our hosting bandwidth cap (quickly upped) and at one point were running at 15 times our usual bandwidth usage. That would have been even higher, if not for the predictable server problems which are revealed by such a flash flood.

Other files -- animated gifs, videos of various formats, alternate photos and even doctored remixes -- were also reported to our catalog. As of this writing, some of our top local search hits for janet jackson superbowl include:

1. janet_jackson_superbowl_breast_video_clip.wmv / 570850 (557.5KB)
2. janet_jackson_superbowl_breast_animated_tiny.gif / 452793 (442.2KB)
3. janet_jackson_superbowl_breast_plus_justin_timberlake_photo.jpg / 885062 (864.3KB)
4. janet_jackson_superbowl_breast_collage_photo.jpg / 49258 (48.1KB)
5. remix_superbowl_janet_jackson_breast_justin_timberlake_doctored_animated.gif / 343175 (335.1KB)
6. r2794264459 Janet Jackson Tittie Photo Super Bowl XXXVIII Tit Boob.jpg / 20269 (19.8KB)
7. Janet Jackson's breast superbowl 35 halftime 2004.mpeg / 1081348 (1.0MB)
8. Janet Jackson's Breast Exposed Superbowl 2004 Video Clip.mpg / 3021200 (2.9MB)
9. Janet Jackson boob, breast slip, paste - Justin Timberlake rips off her shirt, exposes her at Superbowl.wmv / 1482578 (1.4MB)
10. Janet Jackson boob, breast slip, paste - Justin Timberlake rips off her shirt, exposes her at Superbowl.avi / 1361920 (1.3MB)

I provide this information, of course, simply as a service to the readers of my blog, be they carbon- or silicon- based. Bitzi doesn't host these files, or any others, but is an increasingly reliable guide to what's floating around on P2P networks.

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Pretty Sneaky Software?

Brian Martin rants at attrition.org: Anti-Virus Companies: Tenacious Spammers

The heart of the problem, according to Martin:

In the case of the latest worm, I and others have received more spam from Anti-Virus products than the worm itself! As you read this, Anti-Virus companies are responsible for products that are sending out more unwanted mail than the worm itself. The most damning mail from these products not only purport to 'warn you of infection', but they go so far as to advertise the product to you. This is unsolicited commercial e-mail (UCE, aka 'spam') in its purest form.

If the Anti-Virus companies were really sneaky, they'd also sell spam-filtering solutions.

Then, their flood of spam-triggered spam would drive up demand for those products. And, because the spam-triggered spam is comparatively easy to filter, its volume pumps up the reportable "effectiveness-rate" of simpleminded spam-blocks.

Oh, wait, they are really sneaky!

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Shuttle scuttle means Hubble trouble? A rebuttal!

The announcement that Hubble would have to die early, because only the Shuttle could save it, is looking more and more like it was a NASA variant of the "Washington Monument Maneuver." This is where a government agency feigns the "necessary" closure of a popular, prominent program -- like the Washington Monument -- to stir up political support. The latest news via AP is: NASA to Review Plan to Phase Out Hubble

I already posted my opinion of the early defeatism -- and its antidote via a private competition to save Hubble -- in Send Asimo to Save Hubble and Hubble Rescue Battlebots.

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John Kerry: The candidate from the Gamma Quadrant

Drudge is implying, with pictures, that John Kerry has had something radical done to his face. Here's Drudge's main example pictures, showing the droopy, wrinkly Kerry of 2003 and the new improved "smoove" Kerry of 2004:

I have an alternate theory. Kerry is a shape-shifting changeling from the Gamma Quadrant, like Odo of Star Trek: Deep Space 9. Witness the subtle but significant resemblance between new smooth Kerry and alien smooth Odo:

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Let the best robotic repairman win

At O'Reilly Network, I write: Hubble Rescue Battlebots

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It's a Raging Meme

At Slate, William Saletan logs further observations about the consensual Reality Distortion Zone afflicting the pro-Dean movement: I See Dean People - Howard Dean's fatal echo chamber

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Dean's supporters too plugged-in -- to each other?

At Many-to-Many, Clay Shirky asks, Is Social Software Bad for the Dean Campaign?.

Shirky suggests online networking tools may have led to a sense of overconfidence and self-satisfaction among the Deaniacs that impedes their effectiveness. Earlier (1/21), Mickey Kaus relayed observations that the vaunted Dean volunteers may have actually turned Iowans against Dean:

Who Let the Blogs Out? Alert emailer "Andrew" offers an explanation of Dean's Iowa loss: "The decline in Dean's numbers in Iowa coincided with the arrival of his vaunted 3500 ground troops," who alienated Iowa voters. The Deaniacs were too opinionated and wouldn't shut up-- i.e., they were slightly crazed. Dean would have done better without them. As Andrew, a Dean supporter, put it: "I wouldn't want to let a lot of these folk into my house." ... It's just a theory, but note that it would explain the loss and the scream (which was Dean getting into their 'head'). ... People who were actually in Iowa should feel free to tell me if the theory rings true--though if Joe Trippi starts asking Dean volunteers to stay away from New Hampshire and "work on the Web," that would also constitute confirmation. ... New slogan: "Unseen for Dean!" ... It's warmer inside anyway, by the glowing screen. ... P.S.: kf reader "T.C." proposed the Deaniac-backlash scenario the week before the Iowa caucuses. ("Nothing like a bunch of young, smug, condescending, messianic, coastal elites to remind Iowans of why they don't like easterners.") ... Update: TNR's Lizza writes:.

There is undoubtedly a strong antiwar streak among Iowa Democrats, but they are not, for the most part, lifestyle liberals.When hordes of kids with dyed hair and multiple piercings descended upon the state to spread Dean's message with Scientology-like evangelism, Kerry began to look real good.

Can the blog-powered pro-Dean hive mind adapt their outwardly-focused tactics in time? We'll see!

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Do you concur? Do you concur? Then we concur. Carry on.

Cal professor of physics Richard A. Muller thinks Osama bin Laden is dead, and his voice on recent tapes has been faked.

Sounds plausible to me, though I might not yet bet on it.

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Send Asimo to Save Hubble

At the O'Reilly Network, I write: Send Asimo to Save Hubble

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Chinese remainder caucus?

Does the idiosyncratic Iowa caucus tallying procedure remind anyone else of the Chinese Remainder Theorem?

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Ocean vs. Sea Shell

This audio-sharing outfit should have offshored their operations.

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The new seven dirty words...

HR3687

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Life Imitates Cartoon Art

It's not quite Blinky, but...

Ananova: Taiwan scientists accidentally develop two-headed fish

Previously, a 1993 Simpsons episode parodying "Siegfried and Roy" as "Gunter and Ernst" depicted a tiger attack much like the 2003 attack on Roy.

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WiFi the Austin Moontowers!

Via BoingBoing, I came across this "Austin's Wireless Future" report.

It's a dry but comprehensive survey -- well, comprehensive except in one respect. There's little mention of the potential for a free community wireless backbone. Yes, they mention free hotspots, and wireless for reaching rural areas, but nothing in the mold of SFLan or Bay Area Research Wireless Network (BARWN). In these networks, strategically-placed 802.11 nodes, owned and maintained by volunteers, relay traffic through a completely over-the-air free metro network (with one uplink to the rest of the internet somewhere).

And it's a shame such a system hasn't broken into the Austin wireless consciousness yet, because Austin has something that could give a giant boost -- literally and figuratively -- to an SFLan-type project: the moon towers, relics of a 19th-century civic illumination project. The moon towers have power, prime locations, and sufficient height to give lines-of-sight to risk dying for.

Slap an SFLan-style relay-and-redistribute-node atop each tower, route them through each other, find one good uplink, and a giant swatch of Austinites would have access to a free, high-speed wireless internet. They could log on directly with their laptops, or extend the reach of the free net via ad-hoc hotspots built with off-the-shelf consumer tech.

(Regarding SFLan, from my apartment in central San Francisco, with a good ~$30 antenna, I can detect 4 of SFLan's free nodes, and achieve a solid connection to one of them.)

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