Post NTK reshuffle:
Welp, so much for the EC taking care of human rights: Europe succumbs to UK pressure on data retention – ZDNet
The editorials in the Hamas Weekly are fantastically lurid. The Daily Mail has nothing on this Ode To Anthrax, as translated by the pro-Israeli MEMRI:
“I swear that your story is peculiar. The Americans see you as an imminent attack that is about to shake the lady with the proboscises that suck the blood of the peoples? All [the rulers of Arab and Islamic countries] tell [the U.S.] ? every time she farts, ? “Allah bless you” ? Nevertheless, you have found your way to only eight American breasts so far?”
Alexander Rose of the Long Now Foundation spoke at Xerox Parc last night. Rose is quietly-spoken and seemed a little shy in front of the curmudgeonly, Waldorf-and-Statler crowd at Xerox. He won them over, of course. He ran through some of the features of the 10,000 year clock, but concentrated on the Rosetta Disk project. The disks contain examples of a 1000 languages, micro-encoded onto nickel plate and embedded into a sphere, one half tungsten, the other a domed magnifying glass.
A selection of the most popular languages are arranged in a spiral lines around the edge. Each spiral contains the first words of Genesis (the only text the Long Now could find which is translated into enough languages). Each letter grows smaller as the text spirals into the center. The last letter of the spiral is the same size as the rest of the thousand language texts encoded in the center of the disk.
We’ve reached the point of civilisation where we’re creating Mysterious Alien Artifacts™.