The overwhelming majority of theories are rejected because they contain bad explanations, not because they fail experimental tests.
– David Deutsch
|
|||||
|
I found it via engadget and The Raw Feed, but I might have found it in the Guardian. The Raw Feed reported it this way:
I do not see this as a problem. But what if the day ever comes when only government employees may use such gadgets? If present trends continue that may become the rule, especially when you consider that in a few short years time, we will be talking about devices that are pretty much invisible. Next step, having to have a license. November 22nd, 2006 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
 I do not know (I seldom do) whether this is original or not, but it sounds like a very significant achievement, which these people have at least copied and marketed quite well, or, better yet, may actually have semi-invented. Gizmodo reports:
As a constant searcher for photos, I have often found myself exclaiming “I wish you could search pictures!” By that I do not mean merely search the titles and wording that people have attached to pictures. I mean search the actual pictures themselves. It would appear that this process is now well and truly under way. But, does this stuff have a dark side? How soon before you can take a photo of someone, and say to the internet: Show me all the other photos you can find of this person. You could learn a lot, including quite a few things he might not want you to know. Imagine that kind of thing combined with searching through pictures like these, which I like to take of London tourists. I have been browsing through John Battelle’s book The Search (no problem finding books on the internet) in recent days, and he has interesting stuff on the privacy-invading potential of this kind of thing. (And oh look, Battelle’s Searchblog reports on something very similar to the ALIPR thing, by the sound of it.) Oh dear. The original idea of this posting was to be writing about something good, to counter the relentless temptation of those who want the world to get better but cannot help noticing all the ways in which it is getting worse. Never mind. Gizmodo has lots of other stuff like this. (Now you can do your work on one screen, and have crazy pictures on the other.) As does this blog, which I also recommend. Sample quote:
More bad news. But the good news is that if you want more pictures along those lines, they just got easier to find. November 10th, 2006 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
The advances in robotic vehicles due to the DARPA challenge prizes over the last few years has been nothing short of astounding. I am therefor slack-jawed at the congressional stupidity which has brought about this addition to the DARPA Urban Challenge press release:
I presume the problem with prizes is anyone from anywhere can enter and win it. This limits the usual opportunities for congressional corruption, or as I like to think of it, “Stevensing” (as in Ted Stevens, the Alaskan Ubercrook). I do hope some sanity breaks out in the Washington asylum. There are other Grand Challenges going on which have been generating simply amazing results. November 4th, 2006 | 8 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tim Blair links to a critique of the ubiquitous Stern Report, written by Bjørn Lomborg. Perhaps his most damning (and least surprising) criticism of the Report is that it is “unrealistically pessimistic”, and considering its wholesale adoption by the Green lobby, I have no doubt that this is true. The article is well worth a read as an antidote to all the hand-wringing the Stern Report’s tabling has inspired. However, Lomborg’s rejoinder only receives two cheers from me. Whilst Lomborg’s most famous publication – The Skeptical Environmentalist – was enormously refreshing, I found many of his remedies to the world’s problems uncomfortable. He really seems to believe that solving these crises is as simple as throwing a pre-determined mega-amount of cash at them – x billion dollars here will provide clean drinking water for those who currently have no access to it, x billion dollars there will defeat malaria. In this latest article of Lomborg’s, he ambitiously declares that all of the major problems of the poverty-stricken world can be solved by spending x billion dollars per year, claiming:
Really? Who is going to disperse this cash, and how? Lomborg does not say, but such a project has the State’s fingerprints all over it. Where else could Lomborg expect to get this sort of sustained funding from? Only an entity with the coercive power to extract resources from countless others would be able to volunteer a sum like 75 billion dollars year in, year out. Are we talking about government – or a coalition of governments? Of course we are! Surely only governments (or an intergovernmental body like the U.N.) are trustworthy enough to distribute such a volume of resources fairly and efficiently. Only governments would utilise these resources in the single-minded purpose of lightening the burden of the world’s poor, unadulterated by the agenda of other forces. An organic, non-governmental response is simply not organised; not holistic enough. Consider how well large-scale state planning has served us this past century or so. Not buying it? Well, I think we can all agree that the record of government and the U.N. in the field of aid distribution and poverty alleviation is really quite something. So whilst Lomborg is a useful resource if one is hosing down the wilder claims of the Global Climate Change mullahs, his obvious faith in government action should remind all liberals that he is not one of us. His solutions to the world’s problems are ultimately as futile as those proposed by the environmental industry, although Mr Lomborg’s are admittedly rather less demanding on the wallets of long-suffering taxpayers. November 2nd, 2006 | 15 comments - (Comments are closed)
Great article by Brendan O’Neill on the attempts – vain, I hope – to silence folk who dare contest the Truth of Global Warming. Right, it is Friday evening, I have a life, so have a good weekend and try not to think about English football. October 13th, 2006 | 21 comments - (Comments are closed)
Tom Clougherty, the new face at the Globalisation Institute, linked earlier today to a fascinating Wired piece about a new way of extracting drinkable water from “thin air”. Clougherty is wise enough to use the phrase “If reports are to be believed” when talking about the huge benefits that this invention might have. So, the question is: will it work? It being, approximately, and give or take a big dollop of industrial (and presumably military) secrecy this:
More about this at engadget, where there is comment on the same Wired piece. Do any of our more tech-savvy commenters have any other news concerning this apparently wondrous gizmo, or any opinions about whether such a thing is, in principle, likely to work? October 9th, 2006 | 27 comments - (Comments are closed)
I do not as yet know a great deal about this. It appears that some company has managed a court order requiring the domain name for spamhaus.org to be taken down. Spamhaus.org are one of the better anti-spam sites and supply an excellent real time blocking list to anyone who wants it. Their service has been free and voluntary and much appreciated by many harried network system administrators, among whose ranks I have from time to time been included. I know nothing about this ‘Ensight’ but I can think of no reason for a legal attack on the Spamhaus folk other than as a means of stopping the information about your current spam hosts from getting distributed to all those who voluntarily wish to block you. Whether Ensight is or is not run by a bunch of spammers I do not know. If anyone has any more information on the events leading up to the court order, feel free to comment. October 8th, 2006 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
In the days before accurate timekeeping, determining your longitude was an extremely difficult task, requiring extremely accurate timekeeping. The British Admiralty expended enormous resources and considerable sums of money on the problem until it was solved by John Harrison in 1761. These days, we just turn on electronic devices and communicate with satellites.  This is particularly useful when, as this afternoon, one is in a place where one couldn’t possibly discover the longitude any other way.  The Royal Greenwich Observatory no longer exists as an institution, having been abolished in 1998 (after moving its last astronomical faclities away from Greenwich in 1957), and the observatory buildings are today part of the National Maritime Museum, which has its main facilities in the former Greenwich Hospital buildings at the bottom of the hill below the observatory. I provide a picture merely because the view is nice.   Alas, the statue at the top of the hill does not seem right. The statue is of General James Wolfe, who captured Quebec City for the British in 1754. Whilst I do not begrudge Gen. Wolfe his statue, it seems wrong, for two reasons. Firstly, why is the statue in pride of place in Greenwich, a place of great maritime heritage, a General rather than an Admiral. Secondly, given the history of the place, there is another figure who to me should be the man standing there. → Continue reading: Satellite navigation is a wonderful thing October 8th, 2006 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Introducing the world’s grooviest washing machine. Mind you, ironing is still going to be a chore. (Hat-tip: Gizmondo). September 28th, 2006 | 9 comments - (Comments are closed)
I quite like iTunes, finding the ‘look and feel’ better than any other music players for both my Mac and PC… however I made the mistake of upgrading to iTunes 7 the other day and found its ugly, laggy and above all the sound quality was dire with crackling and buzzing sounds clearly audible. Looking on the internet I see I am far from the only person this has happened to. How Apple could release such a pox ridden piece of software is a marvel. Avoid at all costs until it is well and truly patched. I have gone back to the previous version with which I am entirely happy and will probably stick with it for some time now unless I can find an alternative player that I like. September 16th, 2006 | 30 comments - (Comments are closed)
The journey from environmentalism to sanity may not be so far after all:
And about bloody time too! The prohibition of DTT was a product of wrong-headed, fashionable green dogma and Lord only knows how many people in the developing world have paid for it with their lives. Just how many neural transmitters do you have shut down in order to hand-wring about poverty and premature death in the developing world while simultaneously campaigning against everything and anything that stands a chance of tackling them? I sincerely hope that the greenslimers are seething with thwarted rage. In fact, I hope their blood boils until they have a collective stroke. I wish a pox on them (before they unleash a pox on the rest of us). September 16th, 2006 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
|
   |
||||
All content on this website (including text, photographs, audio files, and any other original works), unless otherwise noted, is licensed under a Creative Commons License. |
|||||