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Fair and balanced, too!

Throwing a line to the future: The blogosphere is outraged that N.Y. Times tech reporter John Markoff dissed blogs in an interview (Reporter Reminisces on Years of Covering Computer Revolution) at Online Journalism Review -- "it's not clear yet whether blogging is anything more than CB radio... I already have a blog, it's www.nytimes.com..."

I think blogs are great, obviously, and participatory journalism both important and inevitable, but I don't believe in software. Many who don't type, can't spell, lack computer access or facility, speak broken whatever or simply aren't verbal are largely left out of blogging (even as readers). And many bloggers seem to live largely online, making them invisible in their communities as agents of change. (Not all, of course.)

Overlooked, and far more interesting to me, is this part of Markoff's interview:

Q: You say you've been depressed lately which brings to mind actually something I noted from your presentation in our last seminar, that you'd gone from being a techno-optimist to being maybe not so necessarily optimistic. Is that still the trend of your overall mood?

JM: I read Bill Joy's Wired piece (with great, great despair two or three years ago. It's not clear to me that Joy was right on nanotechnology or robotics or AI -- that's still I think pretty far-fetched stuff -- but the ability to create pathogens and biological weapons really quite worries me. And I feel like it's just a matter of time, and that's one of the things that makes me so pessimistic. I think there's nothing built into the nature of technological progress that determines that the world will get better as a whole. It can go either way and everything just seems to look more and more bleak sometimes.

Bill Joy was one of four founders of Sun Microsystems, which he left last month. The Contra Costa Times caught up with Joy last week (Sun legend Bill Joy rests, for now) in Aspen, where he's very much thinking about these sorts of issues.

His "Wired piece" is "Why the future doesn't need us: Our most powerful 21st-century technologies - robotics, genetic engineering, and nanotech - are threatening to make humans an endangered species." I urge you to read it. Here's a single paragraph:

The nuclear, biological, and chemical (NBC) technologies used in 20th-century weapons of mass destruction were and are largely military, developed in government laboratories. In sharp contrast, the 21st-century GNR technologies have clear commercial uses and are being developed almost exclusively by corporate enterprises. In this age of triumphant commercialism, technology - with science as its handmaiden - is delivering a series of almost magical inventions that are the most phenomenally lucrative ever seen. We are aggressively pursuing the promises of these new technologies within the now-unchallenged system of global capitalism and its manifold financial incentives and competitive pressures.

For instance, a headline this week in the Guardian (U.K.) finds that genetically modified crops -- modified to increase yield and profit -- do so to the detriment of birds, bees and butterflies.

Two GM crops face ban for damaging wildlife:

Two GM varieties, oil-seed rape and sugar beet, face a Europe-wide ban after long-awaited field-scale trials showed that the crops damaged wildlife, and would have a serious long-term effect on bee, butterfly and bird populations.

Three years of trials growing GM crops alongside conventional crops, the largest field study undertaken, has provided a legal basis for banning the two crops under European Union rules, which say that either health or environmental detriment must be proved.

The government is now faced with an embarrassing about-turn on its enthusiasm for GM technology. Loss of birdlife in the countryside has been put forward as a key "quality of life" indicator by the government and it is pledged to reverse the trend.

Scientists from the independent panel set up to conduct the field trials were surprised that the results - revealed in the Guardian earlier this month - were so dramatic. In the case of conventional oil-seed rape, five times as many weed seeds survived, providing food for birds like skylarks, than in the GM field. The results were uniform across the country, giving Professor Chris Pollock, chairman of the scientific panel, confidence that the results would be the same across all of Europe.

David Gibbons, another panel member, said the results were "unexpectedly dramatic. There were very big differences, three to five times more seeds, for example. There will be less food for birds if [the GM crops] are grown commercially".

As a species, what do we value?

There is another thrust in Joy's article -- the merger of man and machine, long a staple theme of science fiction. If you're thinking about the Borg (at right), you may be on the right track. If you're thinking of an X-Files scenario, you may see those gray aliens as humans from the future whose cloning has so threatened them with extinction that they've traveled back in time to get some cells from us, who are perhaps the last generation with wild, unengineered DNA. You may see The Matrix. All of these possibilities are up for grabs in an unknowable future shaped by powerful technologies and the struggle to control them.

A second dream of robotics (the first is that robots will do unpleasant work for us) is that we will gradually replace ourselves with our robotic technology, achieving near immortality by downloading our consciousnesses; it is this process that Danny Hillis thinks we will gradually get used to and that Ray Kurzweil elegantly details in The Age of Spiritual Machines. (We are beginning to see intimations of this in the implantation of computer devices into the human body, as illustrated on thecover ofWired 8.02.)

But if we are downloaded into our technology, what are the chances that we will thereafter be ourselves or even human? It seems to me far more likely that a robotic existence would not be like a human one in any sense that we understand, that the robots would in no sense be our children, that on this path our humanity may well be lost.

Joy quotes Danny Hillis: "I'm as fond of my body as anyone, but if I can be 200 with a body of silicon, I'll take it." (Hillis, cofounder of Thinking Machines Corporation, also co-founded the Long Now Foundation with Stewart Brand of Whole Earth Catalog fame. Hillis's description of its purpose ends with "I have hope for the future." The current Whole Earth website also addresses some of these issues.)

Indeed, Mondo 2000 editor and cyberpunk RU Sirius (co-author, with the late Timothy Leary of Design for Dying) has a new 'zine called Neofiles -- sponsored by a nutrition supplements firm -- that kicks off like this:

...Neophiles (lovers of the new) were contemplating a whole new set of technical “miracles” including:

* The rejuvenation of the body and its healthy survival beyond the natural biological life span
* Control over the molecular structure of matter (nanotechnology)
* Control over the neurochemistry of intelligence and emotion
* The easy and intuitive sharing of information and the contents of the human imagination on a global scale
* The building of intelligent machines to accomplish previously unthinkable tasks
* The comprehension and manipulation of the genome
* The expansion of human life into space
* Clean and plentiful energy
* The end of human scarcity

And while there is no proof that most of these goals can be achieved in full, extraordinary strides have been made.

Here at The NeoFiles we will be exploring scientific and technological advances towards these and other objectives over the coming months in interviews and articles. However, the seriousness and immediacy of these potentially life-altering developments is perhaps best indicated by evolutions in business and culture. On the one hand, hopes are symbolized by the long-term existence of Wall Street-ready businesses dedicated to marvels like the expansion of maximum life span. On the other hand, our fears are expressed by the increasingly vocal anguish of those who see potential for disaster in these developments.

In an attempt to avert such disaster, Bill Joy is taking his cues from the Dalai Lama:

A technological approach to Eternity - near immortality through robotics - may not be the most desirable utopia, and its pursuit brings clear dangers. Maybe we should rethink our utopian choices.

Where can we look for a new ethical basis to set our course? I have found the ideas in the book Ethics for the New Millennium, by the Dalai Lama, to be very helpful. As is perhaps well known but little heeded, the Dalai Lama argues that the most important thing is for us to conduct our lives with love and compassion for others, and that our societies need to develop a stronger notion of universal responsibility and of our interdependency...

The Contra Costa Times story about Joy today asks,

What's next?

Joy either hasn't decided or isn't saying. He mentions a need for more security on the Internet, more reliability in software. His interests in recent years have focused on the need for curbing potential abuses of increasingly powerful technology, abuses he worries could endanger mankind. Some colleagues suspect his next venture may address that concern, if only in a small, realistic way.

When Joy chooses his new challenge, he'll tackle it with a handful of colleagues, including Mike Clary, his right-hand man of 16 years at Sun.

"I want to do something worthwhile that I don't think someone else would do," Joy said. "If it's going to happen anyway, what's the point? Why not make a difference?"

Count me in.

This is becoming a novel-length blog item, yet it's ridiculously superficial. I hope these links seed some leaps around the Net, open some synapses and lead to more thought and discussion about where technology is all leading. They're truly just pointers to people who'll point you to better, deeper places.

Like John Markoff, I'm a little depressed about how badly it could all turn out, unless our values evolve more quickly than our power.

(I would welcome thoughts, discussion and more pointers on these issues. This is a textbook example of a critically important but complex story that can't be easily be covered by the mainstream print press, most of whose reporters are hitched to a calendar of upcoming and incoming events.)
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'Cosmic talent with a child's generosity' by Fidel Castro. Really. He's describing the great Gabriel Garcia Marquez (100 Years of Solitude). It begins,

Gabo (Gabriel García Márquez) has confessed that it is still on his conscience that he initiated me into what I still possess to this day, "an addiction to easy-to-read bestsellers as a method of purification from official documents". To which I must add his responsibility in convincing me not only that I want to be a writer in my next reincarnation, but that I want to be one like him, with those stubborn and persistent details that, like a philosopher's stone, give total credibility to his dazzling exaggerations.

The end note:

From Granma International, which has reproduced Castro's text for the Colombian magazine Cambio, on the occasion of a special edition celebrating the launch of the first volume of Vivir para contarla (Living to Tell the Tale), Márquez's memoirs, extracts from which can be read on Guardian Unlimited.

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FCC action alert: Cory Doctorow of the Electronic Frontier Foundation sounds the alarm about the "broadcast flag":

Today, we're asking for your help with the Broadcast Flag. This is a proposed technology mandate that would give Hollywood studios a veto over the design of the output and recording technologies that get built into DTV receivers -- which is by way of saying the stuff that we take for granted on our general-purpose machines, like CD/DVD burners, high-speed cabling standards like FireWire, and so on. This is an unprecedented maneouvre: the Hollywood studios are saying that tech companies should have to get the studios' permission before releasing new tools to their customers. These are the studios that tried to ban the VCR, that sued ReplayTV over commercial-skipping, that put Fritz Hollings up to the CPDTPA bill, a proposal to make *all* technologists get the entertainment industry's approval before producing new equipment.

What's more, the Broadcast Flag demands that approved technologies will have to be built to be "tamper-resistant." That means that we'll have a law that will require an entire class of general-purpose technologies to use only obfuscated, closed-source drivers. That's right, it bans open source for tech that can be used in DTV applications.

There's action to be taken:

Numbers count in this fight. When over 700,000 Americans wrote to the FCC on media consolidation, it so alarmed lawmakers that Fritz Hollings (of all people!) called for Congressional action to limit media consolidation.

We need lots of people to write into the FCC asking them to set this proposal aside, and we want you to help. If you are willing and able, we'd like you to post a call-to-action on your site. You can write your own, or feel free to re-use this letter (please omit the leading paragraph!) or the copy on the EFF's site:

http://action.eff.org/action/index.asp?step=2&item=2801

That link contains our "action center" item, which allows people to send a fax to the commission with one click.

You can read the full text of this at J.D. Lasica's New Media Musings -- which has finally settled down at newmediamusings.com.
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All the President's votes? "A quiet revolution is taking place in US politics. By the time it's over, the integrity of elections will be in the unchallenged, unscrutinised control of a few large - and pro-Republican - corporations. Andrew Gumbel wonders if democracy in America can survive" the Independent (U.K.).

...It is still unclear exactly how results from these missing cards were tabulated, or if they were counted at all. And we will probably never know, for a highly disturbing reason. The vote count was not conducted by state elections officials, but by the private company that sold Georgia the voting machines in the first place, under a strict trade-secrecy contract that made it not only difficult but actually illegal - on pain of stiff criminal penalties - for the state to touch the equipment or examine the proprietary software to ensure the machines worked properly. There was not even a paper trail to follow up. The machines were fitted with thermal printing devices that could theoretically provide a written record of voters' choices, but these were not activated. Consequently, recounts were impossible. Had Diebold Inc, the manufacturer, been asked to review the votes, all it could have done was programme the computers to spit out the same data as before, flawed or not

Astonishingly, these are the terms under which America's top three computer voting machine manufacturers - Diebold, Sequoia and Election Systems and Software (ES&S) - have sold their products to election officials around the country. ...

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Laurable's Poetry Weblog has lots of audio links.
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Secrets of the iPod, at TechTV.
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The typewriter-keyboard conversion: "Yes, it really works. Even down to slapping the carriage return for Enter."

My wife suffers from repetive stress problems in her fingers and wrists. Sometime in October we were talking about different keyboards on the market for people such as herself. In the course of the conversation she mentioned that she finds old-fashioned mechanical typewriters much easier on her fingers because they offer gradual resistance rather than the feeling of moving through air then hitting a wall, like most computer keyboards. Ah-hah, I think to myself! At last I know what I will give her for Christmas. The first weekend after Halloween I went out and found an old Smith-Corona and got to work.

The short how-to is thus: in a regular keyboard, each keypress completes a circuit. There's a little circuit board in there and I mapped all the connections from one terminal to another. This was then replicated inside the typewriter by wires going from the circuit board to strips of adhesive lamé, which contact their counterparts when a key is pressed. Of course, it's a bit more complicated than that...

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Enjoy the weekend.

October 16, 2003 7:22 p.m.

Don't saute the rabbi! Rabe is a vegetable that looks a bit like broccoli with too many leaves and too few buds. It used to be found only in Italian markets, but the Andy Boy company now distributes it to supermarkets. It tastes very bitter if you don't "peel it" -- remove the strings and tough stems.

Here's a recipe for Sauteed Rabe, from a 1996 Journal story by Donna Lee about an Italian Christmas Eve feast:

BROCCOLI DI RABE
Wash one or two bunches fresh rabe well, trim off tough ends. Split or discard thick stems.

Put rabe into big saucepan with about 1/4 cup olive oil, two or three cloves of crushed garlic, a shake of dry red pepper flakes and salt to taste. Add 1 cup water.

Cover and cook until tender (or tender-crisp), turning the rabe as it cooks. Taste for salt.

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Child's Play: "Would today's tykes tolerate the classic games you grew up with?" asks Electronic Gaming Monthly.

...we rounded up nine children of the PlayStation generation—ages 9 to 12—and forced them to play a variety of titles from the late'70s to the mid-'80s. Now read what the little scamps had to say, plus check their comments on a bonus game—Super Mario Bros.—that got cut from the EGM (print) article. If you grew up with these classics, prepare to feel very old.

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20 Great Google Secrets: At PC magazine, including,

Intitle: at the beginning of a query word or phrase (intitle:"Three Blind Mice") restricts your search results to just the titles of Web pages.

Intext: does the opposite of intitle:, searching only the body text, ignoring titles, links, and so forth. Intext: is perfect when what you're searching for might commonly appear in URLs. If you're looking for the term HTML, for example, and you don't want to get results such as www.mysite.com/index.html, you can enter intext:html.

And 18 more...

Related: A "Fireside Chat" with Google's Sergey Brin:

(Danny) Sullivan (editor of SearchEngineWatch.com) started things off by asking Brin when he first realized just how iconic Google had become.

Brin said it was when he received a letter and a photo from a man with heart pains whose family had used Google to determine if he was having a serious heart attack. With their questions answered, the family got the victim quick medical attention, and a subsequent triple-bypass procedure saved his life.

Related: Getting over Google grief : "The web has made it easier than ever to find out what's happened to old friends. But how do you feel when you discover that they've died?"
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The real James Bond dies: Patrick Dalzel-Job, who served with Bond author Ian Fleming during WW II in the undercover Commando 30 Assault Unit, died Sunday at 90. The Telegraph (U.K.), in a hefty story full of detail of his wartime exploits, reports,

During his service with the Navy, he navigated a miniature submarine; he was a crack shot and could ski backwards; he had a compass concealed in one of his buttons.

The Globe and Mail adds,

Peter Jemmett, a member of Mr. Fleming's unit, said later that when Mr. Fleming's first Bond novels appeared in the 1950s, colleagues immediately recognized Cmdr. Dalzel-Job in the 007 character.

"In contrast to a number of people who have claimed that they were the James Bond, Patrick has never made any fuss about it," Mr. Jemmett said.

Cmdr. Dalzel-Job later acknowledged that Mr. Fleming had told him he was the basis for Bond, but added: "I have never read a Bond book or seen a Bond movie. They are not my style. ... And I only ever loved one woman, and I'm not a drinking man."

Born in London, Dalzel-Job lived in western Scotland, The village of Plockton devotes a page to him on its website. The page leads with a photo of his 1991 autobiography, From Arctic Snow to Dust of Normandy, and the quaint note,

The author will sign copies in person at his house. (Please phone first.)

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The 100 greatest novels of all time: A British list, it begins with Don Quixote.
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"The Techno-Impressionist Museum hosts the world's largest collection of Techno-Impressionist art, from the earliest known works to the present" writes artist/founder Tony Karp. " Techno-Impressionism is the last art movement of the 20th Century."

The 21st Century Techno-Impressionism section:

This is an exhibit of art that does not yet exist.
It's a look into the future of Techno-Impressionism.
How did we do it? Take a look for yourself.
Note: this exhibition may take a while to download as it is coming from the future.

via Artchive.com
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Mozilla 1.5 released: For Windows, Mac OS X and Linux (as well as the more arcane operating systems AIX, HPUX,
OpenVMS and OS/2), it's allegedly the last version of the integrated browser-mail-newsgroup-composer-irc client. A speedy stand-alone browser (Firebird), mail client (Thunderbird) and many more components are being created by a far-flung corps of volunteer developers and a tiny staff at the Mozilla Foundation. (After AOL bought Netscape, which had assigned staff to Mozilla development, it cut Mozilla loose in July but gave $2 million to the Foundation, which is chaired by Lotus founder Mitch Kapor.)

The Mozilla.org site has also been redesigned, and seems to me to be appealing to those who might be turned off by the utilitarian appearance of many of the old site's pages.

Mozilla is aiming at end users now, not just early adopters: Mozilla Charts an Independent Course at eWeek.
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Dear Mr. G.W. Bush / Re: Your recent submission: (link fixed) The Missouri Review sends a polite rejection of the President's recent poem, then deconstructs offers suggestions for its revision.
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Papal Chase - Will the next pope be black, Hispanic, American, a Jew? At Slate.
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Every Second Counts: A game. Can you hold down your cursor for .2 seconds? How about 1.4 seconds? You can learn to. I did.
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The beer church: "Because beer is good and you are worthy."
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October 15, 2003 7:30 p.m.

Tiny blog today -- playing catchup after my extended weekend, and the Red Sox are distracting everybody. Baseball Blogs is where it all plays out. The Red Sox blogs are here.

Sci-fi writers on Schwarzenegger:

The Infinite Matrix asked a few Sci-Fi writers, editors, and physicians for pithy comments, and this is what we got. Some are pithy, some not.

Among the commenters: Ursula Le Guin, William Gibson, Harlan Ellison, Cory Doctorow and Rudy Rucker.
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On Rush: Most of the reaction to Rush Limbaugh is predictable -- liberals trying not to gloat, conservatives calling him a victim of back pain.

Indymedia Italia, while leading the page with a photo of a bombastic Limbaugh with a bad case of red-eye, has more detail than I've seen anywhere else. They look into Rush's previous rehabs -- probably an overnight stay at the Addiction Recovery Institute -- his back pain and more, and picks up on a New York Post item ("Sources have told The Post that Limbaugh may have checked himself into the upscale Sierra Tucson facility in Tucson, Ariz.)

Sierra Tucson, which bills itself as "more than a drug treatment center, as it is dually licensed to handle psychiatric issues as well as many types of addiction," has a gauzy, soothing, vague website.

At metafilter, the comments are full of related links -- including "Tommy Chong has begun his prison sentence." Chong's crime was selling waterpipes on the net. They threw the book at him for his celebrity -- nine months in a federal prison.

The funniest potential outcome: Rush Limbaugh Leaves Rehab, Says He's Now Liberal.
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On iTunes, Napster, and eMusic, Among Others: Blogger Derek Slater -- a junior at Harvard College. -- reviews the newest offerings in digital music. via Scripting News.
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Subterranean Homepage News
by Sheila Lennon
features & interactive producer of projo.com