This really is a potentially big breakthrough for people with continence problems, but the commentary on it is entirely predictable:
OMG they’re cloning Barney Frank.
See?
Category Archives: Technology and Society
Next Stop, Space
This underwater hotel in Fiji looks pretty neat. I think that a lot of its clientele would love a room with an earth view.
One thing I see missing, though — no (obvious) curtains on the windows. I’ve heard that there have been problems with underwater hotels in the past, because the dolphins liked to voyeuristically look in the window and watch couples engaged in amorous activities.
Don’t Try This At Home, Kids
And now for something completely different — a man who is splitting atoms on his kitchen table. Bill Joy, call your office.
The Good Old Days Of Journalism
I think that if we’re going to have schools of journalism, this should be a required exercise:
Mariam, our managing editor, was previously our rock-star art director. So she resumed that role for ALL ON PAPER. Her designers mostly deserted her after they learned a terrifying reality of pre-computer layout…
You must do math.
First, there’s headline counting: A capital M is two, but a lower-case L (or is that the number 1?) is one-half. So how many counts do I have for a 48-point head across two columns?
Then there are the stories whose column inches must be distributed evenly across the page, requiring long division (without a calculator) and resulting in vaguely sexual newsroom directives like, “I need 11 inches to fill this box, and I need it now.”
Finally, there’s sizing photos with that confounded proportion wheel. Even though it’s supposed to help you shrink or enlarge a photo, and even though the instructions are printed right on the front, that God-awful wheel still doesn’t ever seem to give you the proper percentages. It’s more like a Magic 8-Ball than a round slide rule: much more mysterious than accurate.
“It’s been rough,” Mariam admits. “I’ve found myself sitting in silence, reminiscing about the days when CNTRL+Z was all it took. I miss my iMac.” But she also confesses…
Regardless of the stress or the obscene amount of paper that’s accumulated on the newsroom floor, I won’t forget what this project has given us. We’ve formed this sort of newsroom camaraderie that I hadn’t experienced before, and it means everything.
I’ve never been a professional journalist, but this is the process that we went through preparing proposals at Rockwell in the eighties. It took a long time to get the publications department to go to computers, even after the engineers were writing their proposal inputs in Wordperfect, and some had Macs with Pagemaker. We would have to print out our word processing output, and they would dutifully rekey it into their typesetting machines, because there were no compatible disk formats, which meant, of course, that we got to reedit for typos. They would cut out and wax the columns and lay them out on the boards, and then copy the gallies for us to review.
It meant that you had to have everything done about three days before it was due, because last-minute changes were just too painful to incorporate. On a thirty-day proposal, that was a lot of lost time.
There was an ugly transition period in the early nineties (a year or three before I left the company) when those responsible for actually writing the proposals rebelled and insisted on doing it themselves on Pagemaker. Pubs resisted, of course, reading the handwriting on the wall, and washing their hands of the results, though a few saw the future and came over to help (and learn what they would be doing themselves in a few years if they still had a job). Upper management had to adjudicate the situation, but the transition must have happened, because when I went back to do consulting at Boeing a decade or so later, everyone was publishing in Word, with an editor assigned to the team. But I think that it’s important for journalists using modern tools to understand the roots of their profession. If you could give them a hot-lead type machine, it would be even more educational, though probably going full Gutenberg with carved wooden blocks should be reserved for grad school. Hell, it might even teach them the difference between “font” and “typeface.”
Feel My Printer Fury
Everyone involved in the printer industry needs to be marched to the lip of a volcano and poked hard with tridents.
I feel his pain. I haven’t used my HP in weeks, which will neither print black and white, or scan, because it wants a new color cartridge.
The Man Who Fights Death
I have more thoughts on Bob Ettinger’s deanimation over at Pajamas Media.
The Shuttle Is Retired
…and the planet is saved. I’ll leave it to commenters to find all the errors. My favorite is making a fuel stop at Uranus.
More Ettinger Thoughts
I’ll have my own obituary up at Pajamas Media tomorrow, but he’s an interesting example of a man who lived (and perhaps continues to live) by his own beliefs, never relinquishing them even as he approached deanimation.
Many more men are interested in cryonics than women (though there are many of the latter as well), and generally the explanation for this is that women tend to be less individualistic, and define themselves in terms of their relationships, particularly family. I recall, almost forty years ago, when a friend of mine and I were discussing this, and his mother said, “Oh, I wouldn’t want to live forever, or wake up in a future in which I didn’t know anyone.” That has never bothered me, and I have never had trouble meeting new people and establishing new relationships. I’d rather do that than give up my individuality and memories. But Ettinger got around it partially by persuading his loved ones to get aboard the ambulance with him (though as he noted himself, it will be interesting times if he gets revived with both wives).
From Norway To Hell
Walter Russell Mead is channeling Bill Joy:
The inescapable reality is that the very forces creating our affluent, modern and democratic world also generate violent antagonism. Breivik, like Al-Qaeda and like Timothy McVeigh and the Unabomber, is the shadow of progress. When conditions are right, the lone psychopath becomes a cult leader; in a perfect storm when everything breaks his way, the psychopath becomes Fuehrer.
That would be bad enough, but there’s one more turn of the screw. The same technological progress that helps create violent alienation and rage also empowers individuals and groups. 200 years ago a Breivik could not have done so much damage. 100 years ago Al-Qaeda could not have hijacked a plane. Modern society is more vulnerable than ever before to acts of terror, and developments in weaponry place ever greater power in the hands of ever smaller numbers of people.
This is still in early stages. Fortunately Breivik was a traditionalist and relatively low tech mass murderer; he did not hack vital computer systems to wreak murderous havoc with a rail or air traffic control system. He did not poison the reservoirs with weaponized biologicals. He did not even pump poison gas into a subway system.
We can be reasonably confident that an increasingly chaotic and stressful 21st century will generate more bitter nutjobs and place more destructive power in their hands. Democracy and affluence won’t cure it; the same forces that raise those golden arches build bombs to knock them down.
I have to say that Breivik and McVeigh are in an entirely different category than bin Laden. The latter is part of a totalitarian religious movement, with the support of millions, while no one is cheering the former in the streets, and in fact they are being roundly condemned by their own group members (that is, those with whom they share a genetic heritage). I am particularly disgusted by the media’s attempts to paint both as “Christians” when I’ve seen no evidence that either is, and McVeigh actively disavowed a belief in God. But they have to do so to feed the moral relativistic narrative in defense of Islam.
But here’s where I just don’t get his argument at all:
The only conclusion that makes sense to me is that human beings are stuck in a condition of radical uncertainty. Something big and earth shaking is going on around us, but the information we have does not allow us to predict where it all goes.
In my view, this is one of the reasons that belief in a transcendent power beyond the human mind is intellectually necessary to grapple successfully with the realities of our time. When the determinist progressives threw God under the bus, they threw away the possibility of an integrated world view that has room both for scientific and rational analysis on the one hand and a honest, unsparing appraisal of the radical uncertainty around us on the other.
We still live in the Age of Apocalypse that opened in World War Two when Hiroshima and the Holocaust delineated the essential problems of the new and possibly last era of human civilization. Mankind has long had the potential for radical, desolating evil; today we still have that potential among us, and we have united it to the power to end all life on earth. We live with one foot in the shadows and another on the high and sunny uplands of democratic and affluent society. We have one foot in Norway and the other in Hell and nobody knows where we step next.
One of the reasons to bother God in our century is the hope that in turn he will bother about us. Whatever is coming, we will face it more honestly and live it more richly with him.
This presupposes that he exists, but that we are just ignoring him. Well, that may be, but I have no sense of it, which is why I’m a non-believer, and furthermore, I feel no need for him for me to intellectually grasp what’s happening. While I admire Professor Mead, I think that he is projecting his own apparent intellectual inadequacies on the rest of us.
Exploring The Uncanny Valley
Some interesting brain research at UCSD.