Padding the list to get to 10

10 12 2008

SMH today has one of those lists that get thrown together from a bunch of old columns to make a summer/holiday/everyone-else-is-on-leave article.

This one is the ‘10 propheices for the digital millennium‘. Never mind that it’s about the next 10 years - ‘millennium’ sounds much cooler. Much grander.

Some of the thoughts are pretty spot on, in my opinion. Point 7 (Increased importance of technology for the aged) is bang on. I’ve worked a little on projects going on at UNSW along these lines, of remote monitoring and alert systems for elderly and infirm patients who live at home, rather than at an institution. The use technology can help prevent injury, or get a rapid response when something does go wrong. This sort of thing will become increasingly important as the cost of such devices goes down, and technology becomes more and more prevalent.

Other ‘predictions’ are bollocks, to varying degrees.

2. The decline of the PC

This is a consequence of the first prediction [the internet will become the 'supernet']. PCs will not die - indeed, they will become massively more powerful, but they will become only one of many types of computing device. Mobile phones and “thin clients” will be much more popular ways of connecting to the supernet.

Phones, sure. “Thin clients”, however, will not take off. Their utility has been touted for years, but no-one wants to use a computer that isn’t all there. They’re just not very useful.

4. The decline of copyright

Regular readers of this column will know this is a hobbyhorse of mine. Copyright and most intellectual property laws are now an anachronism. Attempts by record companies and film studios and book publishers to stop people copying digital media are doomed to failure.

Technology is forcing big changes to business models.

Not convinced about this one. There’s a difference between copyright, fair-use provisions, and business models. Widely available does not necessarily imply freely available. The laws, and their implementation, might well be anachronistic, but the concepts of protecting the creator’s rights inherent to them are not.

8. The decline of IT as a speciality

A hundred years ago it seems someone predicted that if telephony job opportunities continued to grow at the same rate, within a generation everybody in the world would be a telephone operator. Well, with automatic dialling, everyone is. Somebody else once predicted a similar thing about computer programmers. Today we all program computers, by the very act of using them. There are fewer specialists, but many more generalists.

Such rot. We are not telephone operators. Telstra is. We do not program computers by the very act of using them. Not true, and incredibly so. Programmers are the people who code the programs, not use them. I also like the ’somebody else once predicted’. Top notch journalism.

The biggest bit of rubbish in this column, however, comes just over half-way through. I guess ‘9 predictions about the digital millennium’ isn’t as catchy as ‘10 predictions’.

6. The threat from intelligent machines

Look up “The Singularity” in Wikipedia or somewhere. The term, invented by American writers Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil, refers to the time in the near future when machines become more intelligent than humans and start replicating themselves. Who then will be the dominant life form on the planet?

You’ve got to be kidding. AI is not a slippery slope.

Looking this term up in ‘Wikipedia or somewhere’, it’s quite easy to see that Kurzweil did not invent the term, Vinge did. And he wrote about it in science fiction. Kurzweil has done a bunch of statistical extrapolation of technological growth to come up with pinpointing the ’singularity’ at 2045 (outside the purview of this column, it would seem), but he’s not without his critics. Specifically, it’s argued that his analysis is a case of ’static analysis’, where current trends are simplistically extended into the future… like, for example, telephone operators, or IT specialists.

I’m not sure why I keep expecting the Herald to not print stuff like this, given it comes out with such regularity, and the focus of the online site is so clearly trashy and tabloid.

Bah humbug.





About a dollar

26 11 2008

SMH today:

SMH.png

So that makes it about a dollar for everyone, right?





Caring Christian Community

14 11 2008




Perhaps why the USA’s foreign relations have seemed, at times, confused

12 11 2008

[via xkcd]




What’s in a name?

10 11 2008

Lots of words, apparently.

From the SMH today:

A British teenager has changed his name to Captain Fantastic Faster Than Superman Spiderman Batman Wolverine Hulk And The Flash Combined. Or Captain to his mates.

Explaining his decision to change his name, the formerly mild-mannered 19-year-old music student George Garratt, from Glastonbury, told the London Telegraph last week: “I wanted to be unique.”

Awesome.

An awesome, awesome idiot.





Free beer

28 10 2008

Not beer. Software.

Head on over to Code Weavers and take advantage of a free software offer. It’s due to some slightly cheaper petrol prices in the US - which doesn’t concern me at all, but that’s ok - and to celebrate, they’re giving away their CrossOver Pro software for free.

Crossover is a way of running Windows apps and games on the Mac (or Linux), without having to run the whole operating system. If you don’t want to run VMWare, Parallels or BootCamp, or if you want another solution kicking around give it a shot.

It’s for either Mac or Linux. 1 per customer, and is for today only.





What’s ‘walkwater’?

26 10 2008

After my last post, I noticed this interesting bit of information about how people have found this site:

stats.png

I might be turning up in people’s Covenant Eyes reports sometime soon.





Wild conjecture does not make for good journalism

23 10 2008

A report by Geoffrey Wheatcroft in today’s SMH, reprinted from The Guardian talks about the ‘resurgence of religion’ in American politics. I’ve not read such ridiculous reporting for some time. Read the full article, or stay tuned for illustrative portions with comment below.

Before we get into this, note that this is not a political post. It’s about rubbish journalism, the insidious kind that uses religion as a scare tactic in place of decent analysis.

From ‘The Return of Hell and Damnation‘, SMH 23/10/08:

Of all the dramatic changes witnessed since 1945 - the economic miracle in postwar western Europe, the collapse of Communism and now the latest boom and bust - none was more unforeseen than the resurgence of religion.

A new “revolt of Islam” was quite unexpected 50 years ago when secular Arab nationalism seemed the rising force and when, for that matter, secular Israelis didn’t guess that “religious Zionists” would one day make the running in their country.

Off to a good start. Radical Islamism or Zionism is much more frightening and attention-grabbing than Christians running for office in the USA.

The Republican presidential nominee, John McCain, has tried to negatively associate his Democrat opponent, Barack Obama, with Jeremiah Wright, his fire-eating radical former pastor, but less attention has been paid to McCain’s running-mate, Sarah Palin, being a member of the Assembly Church of God in Wasilla, Alaska, and to her pastor, Ed Kalnins.

Perhaps that has less to do with religion and more to do with politics and smear. Perhaps.

When the former US secretary of state Colin Powell endorsed Obama on Sunday, he said Palin was not yet ready to be president. He might have added her religious opinions raised questions about her fitness for high office.

But he didn’t. No, don’t let that stop you - go right ahead! Let’s raise questions about all the candidates!

Religion may now be the largest gulf between Europe and the US. Mitt Romney, the Mormon who ran for the Republican nomination, spoke of the empty cathedrals of Europe, and the former British prime minister Tony Blair was the oddity among European politicians in his public protestations of faith.

Could demographics be illustrative at all? Europe is full of empty churches, and has few (professing) Christian politicians; America has a sizeable Christian population and a number of professing Christian politicians.

Just saying.

See if you can spot the slide in logic in the following section.

In 1960, religion did become a factor, and earlier this year [Mitt] Romney [a Mormon] invoked the memory of John F. Kennedy to suggest his own eccentric faith should not be held against him. That was not comparing like with like. Kennedy was the first Catholic elected president, and in a famous speech to Protestant pastors in Texas he upheld the the separation of church and state.

But he was only insisting that a Catholic man could be as good an American as anyone (something the Bible belt was far from conceding when Al Smith, another Irish Catholic, was running for president only 32 years earlier). What Kennedy did not say was that his career was inspired by a devotion to Our Lady and the Sacred Heart. If he had, apart from the fact that anyone who knew him would have found it hard to keep a straight face, he would have lost the election.

Half a century later, a complete change. Palin’s convention speech was held for a time to be the height of feisty wit; but much more revealing is what she and her pastor have said about “the end of days”, an idea in which millions of American evangelical Christians sincerely believe.

Ok, slow down. The logic of this section seems to be this: JKF claimed just to be an American running for President who happened to be a Catholic. Mitt Romney says he’s an American running for President who happens to be a Mormon. JFK didn’t tell everybody his political career was a religious conviction. We can see everything is different just by looking at the faith convictions of Palin and her pastor.

See the slide? Romney, by implication, bases his career on his (wacky! Mormon!) religious conviction. “See? Everything is different! You can tell Romney is different to JFK, just look at Palin!”

His website mentions almost nothing about religion at all; his biography is completely silent. His speech (read the full transcript here) draws the same connections to Kennedy, insisting he is comparing like with like, not a reversal. He too insists that his church would not influence his policy should he be elected. He too upholds the separation of church and state, but speaks against this separation being inseparably and irreducibly understood as atheistic secularism..

Notice also the way that Palin’s public life (her convention speech) and her personal faith (her church involvement) bear no relation to each other in that last sentence? “Well of course her private life must be suspect!”

Concerning the (radical Zionist) convictions of her pastor:

As one of his flock, Palin presumably believes this too.

Hurrah! More conjecture! She can’t be fit to be VP!

McCain disowned John Hagee, a Texan preacher with a huge following, militantly hostile to Catholicism and Islam, who believes “Hitler was a hunter” sent by God to drive the Jews to Israel.

Even assuming McCain does not become president, sceptics might stop and think about where the fulfilment of prophecies could lead us.

So McCain disowns a militant preacher… and then what? These final two paragraphs simply don’t make sense. Am I meant to be worried about McCain’s religious convictions or not? If he doesn’t get in, who am I concerned about? Don’t end the article there! You can’t leave me hanging like this!

Either Wheatcroft is a hack, or the SMH editor has done a terrible job. In either case: amateur hour.





Awww… animals

18 10 2008

The Big Picture does it again. The shot to the left is a newly hatched green turtle from Indonesia (#17).

There are some amazing shots here… including the ugliest fish in the world (#11).

Whilst not quite in the same league, here’s one of mine to add to the mix, from Bangkok zoo:





Eyeball

7 10 2008

This is good fun.

I’m good at angles, rubbish at midpoints. My best is 3.91.





Quick

12 09 2008

This is insanity.

At one point they pass a car. On skateboards.





Large Hadron Collider

11 09 2008

lhc1.jpgCheck whether it’s destroyed the world yet. Also has a RSS feed so you don’t have to manually check the site all the time.

Handy.





It’s Windy

9 09 2008

Stunning shots of hurricanes/cyclones from space, from the Big Picture:

walkwater.jpg




Illustrated Bible

1 09 2008




Wireless

22 08 2008

I would pay good money to remove all the cables from my life.

Technology change can’t come soon enough (that is, 5 or more years - being optomistic - ain’t soon enough).