Currently:
2003-08-21»
freak-out!»
Sorry about the not-blogging. To be honest, the response to that Perl vs
Python deliberation rather freaked me out. It wasn't terribly well
thought-out, yet was followed by dozens of smart responses by people who I
assumed spent their spare time simulating 1024x1024 cellular automata in their
heads, or inventing a new form of anthrax and then devising the antidote - not
reading me. It's a bit like mumbling into your dictaphone and then discovering
a little wire that leads out of it into Broadcasting
House. I got the Fear.
I promise to be more slapdash.
bill thompson: info-anarchy as cultural imperialism»
Bikinis
in Saudi Arabia: info-anarchy as cultural imperialism. Noted without
comment. I do wish Bill would come a bit more out into the fray. He keeps
punting out these ideas and then never replies to the criticisms (apart from
in this constrained environment of mind-tennis game with Siva Vaidhyanathan).
I'm sure he must read his detractors. Who is he talking to?
Siva says that "this issue is not about bikinis in Saudi Arabia", but
of course it is. It is about the ability of a government to assert
appropriate authority over online activity, whether it is in breach of
copyright law or against public standards of morality. Pushing for
information anarchy is just another way of endorsing US cultural
imperialism, with its stress on US values and free trade. When cultural
floodgates are opened - and abandoning any possibility of regulating the
net in favour of p2p-induced anarchy would open them - then US culture
comes to dominate. Look at the film industry or the games market.
Alright, noted without much comment.
2003-08-19»
a day of firsts»
Ups and downs. Ada got her first food and I got my first dunking in rice
cereal today. She's also a bit poorly with her first virus. She takes being
ill well: lots of pained half-smiles and plenty of sleep. I am completely
amazed that harmless childhood viruses really do result in red polka-dots. I
thought that only happened in cartoons. We carry some entertainingly visual
DNA fragments on our broad shoulders.
Hutton Inquiry no longer a frame-up»
We've been running a competition on NTK
to get people to redesign shit nebsites - literally, pulling the useful
content dynamically from the terrible sites and redisplaying it in something
close to usable form. Think of it as the paramilitary wing of the usability
movement. Anyway, the de facto leader of this practice, Matthew Somerville,
has just hacked together a marked
improvement on the laudable but javascript-o-frame-o-riffic official Hutton Inquiry
site.
2003-08-14»
junk dna, and bernard lietaer on money, community and social change»
Quinn told me two years ago that
the basic problem with the global economy was that the idea of money was
broken. Around the same time she announced that junk DNA had to have some sort
of function, despite what current theories indicated. I humour Quinn on these
and other theories, as long as she doesn't talk so loudly that the geneticists
and economics professors at the next table hear her speak that way.
Today I discover that a) some scientists are coming to the same
conclusion about junk DNA, and b) the guy who co-designed and
implemented the convergence mechanism for the Euro, and co-founded one of the
largest and most successful currency funds, Bernard Lietaer, agrees with her about money.
I can only conclude that those bastards were scribbling notes on their
napkins all along.
california recall confession»
Is it bad to secretly wish Schwarzenegger gets in, just because of the
excellent rewrites of California
Uber Alles it will encourage?
petit disclaimer:
My employer has enough opinions of its own, without having to have mine too.
