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katlalog
050327 10:08 Politics
Europe apparently past it's peak, soon to follow the US to the superpower graveyard.
Although Cuba has expressed its desire to strengthen links with Europe, there are signs that its attention is elsewhere.
In recent speeches, Mr Castro has portrayed Venezuela and China as far more important partners.
Funny. The US has been so busy somewhere else that they haven't been paying attention to the very interesting developments in "their backyard".
050217 23:15 SciFi
J. Michael Straczynski (B5, Jeremiah) at the helm of Star Trek?
There's some really interesting stuff going on here. Firstly the whole fan power thing that we already saw when Farscape and Firefly needed support. Secondly the direct communication between show creators and show audience. Thirdly, these guys are even closer to us than that, closer than we are used to. They actually speak our lingo:
See, if somebody doesn't like a story, doesn't want to buy it, that's all well and good, that's terrific, that's the way it's supposed to be. But when "political considerations" are the basis...that just doesn't parse.
And finally, is there a growing interest in less outlandish scifi that is more about characters than technology?
The stories were, for the most part, safe, more about technology than what William Faulkner described as "the human heart in conflict with itself."
Scifi has become grittier, a lot less shiny. Just think of 'Cowboys in space'-Firefly. It took me until the last episode to notice that there hadn't been a single alien in it. Jeremiah isn't about space tech either, it's about post-apocalyptic human survival. And if you've seen the new Battlestar Galactica you know that what technology there is is pretty retro.
050215 19:42 Intellectual property
Will Wikipedia become Googlepedia? And will it be taken out of the public domain by making it content you have to pay for? We're not just talking public domain content: it's content written by the public domain.
050215 00:40 Culture
American shopping malls as community builders?
So are American shopping malls finally turning into a sort of neighborhood after all, where people bump into each other and chat without necessarily wanting to buy something? When Americans ask me why I like to live in these cramped old European inner cities, I usually try to sell the idea by comparing European town centers to our malls. Imagine there are apartments and parks above the two floors where everyone goes shopping. Most stores are then closer to your front door than your own car is. Everyone likes to walk everywhere, neighbors bump into each other all the time, and eventually everyone just hangs out without wanting to buy anything. Up to now, every American I have talked to has found that notion appealing, but I have yet to see any apartments on top of malls.
In Milton Keynes UK, where i lived for about 7 years, they took out all the benches, made it impossible to sit on the stones around the plants, made it impossible to linger and loiter and be sociable, so that people wouldn't be tempted to do anything but the one thing they were suppossed to do here: shopping.
050214 22:53 Intellectual property
Resistance is growing: MPAA versus An Army of Mice.
050213 10:29 Science
This extraordinary story is being reported as Random Number Generator That Sees Into the Future but the real issue is the possibility of a global consciousness.
Dr Nelson's investigations, called the Global Consciousness Project, were originally hosted by Princeton University and are centred on one of the most extraordinary experiments of all time. Its aim is to detect whether all of humanity shares a single subconscious mind that we can all tap into without realising.[...]
Using the internet, he connected up 40 random event generators from all over the world to his laboratory computer in Princeton. These ran constantly, day in day out, generating millions of different pieces of data. Most of the time, the resulting graph on his computer looked more or less like a flat line.
But then on September 6, 1997, something quite extraordinary happened: the graph shot upwards, recording a sudden and massive shift in the number sequence as his machines around the world started reporting huge deviations from the norm. The day was of historic importance for another reason, too.
For it was the same day that an estimated one billion people around the world watched the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales at Westminster Abbey.[...]
...in the closing weeks of December last year, the machines went wild once more.
Twenty-four hours later, an earthquake deep beneath the Indian Ocean triggered the tsunami which devastated South-East Asia, and claimed the lives of an estimated quarter of a million people.
So could the Global Consciousness Project really be forecasting the future?
I don't think that this thing predicts the future. I think it shows that the global consciousness, or universal mind as it is known among my british hippie friends, doesn't just include humans.
And the time running backwards thing... maybe time is just delayed for a couple of seconds. Or better, our consciousness is. Because if it is true that time is not linear than that means that everything is preordained and that our fate is not in our hands. I wouldn't want to believe that.
050211 13:21 Privacy
A Californian school tracks students' movements with radio signal badges and even threatens them with disciplinary action if they don't participate.
050211 13:03 Business / Environment
More than half of the biologists and other researchers who responded to the survey said they knew of cases in which commercial interests, including timber, grazing, development and energy companies, had applied political pressure to reverse scientific conclusions deemed harmful to their business. [...]
A biologist in Alaska wrote in response to the survey: "It is one thing for the department to dismiss our recommendations, it is quite another to be forced (under veiled threat of removal) to say something that is counter to our best professional judgment."
050209 18:00 Entertainment
The influence of a festival on its region:
...the 20th anniversary of the Burning Man art festival in the wastelands of Nevada is scheduled for Aug. 29- Sept. 5. In an only-in-San Francisco argument, several parents are demanding that school start Sept. 6 so their children can attend the event.
...their children? I think the parents don't want to miss Burning Man.
quote of the month
The good thing that came out of this was before commercials, my co-presenter Dave Green would turn to the camera and say, "And now, a few short films about capitalism."