Month: April 2003

anniversary

Saturday, April 12, was the one year anniversary of this weblog. 890 entries or so later, it’s been interesting for me. How was it for you?

wetware

2003 UW Science Forum: Can the Mind Just Be a Machine Lecture Summary

Since the Renaissance, discoveries in astronomy changed our view of the Earth’s place in the universe, and discoveries in biology changed our view of Man’s place among living things. This lecture will highlight discoveries in neurobiology that begin to affect our view of the mind. We understand the neural signaling systems that underlie our computer-like processing of vision and the organization of our motor outputs. We begin to understand the signals that mediate changes of personality, mood and mental state. We have experimental approaches to learning and memory. As we progress in these areas, more and more mental processes will be explained by the laws of physics and chemistry.

Is the exploration of the mind “an exploration of inner space?”

the “Basic Problem”

University Week – Vol. 20, No. 19 –

“It may well be a law of nature that a civilization that discovers tools that are too powerful for its own good will simply kill itself,” Chaloupka said. “It may well be, but we don’t know and therefore the proposition is that since, in this spark that belongs to us right now, we have produced so many beautiful things — Mozart and Bach and Aristotle and Einstein — it would be a crime if we foolishly extinguished our spark too soon.”

alarmist or pragmatist

Charlie’s Diary

The US pursuit of Saddam is sending a very explicit message to Kim Jong-Il, and that message is “use it or lose it”. If SARS is a North Korean strategic bioweapon, it almost certainly isn’t the only one. In fact, the nightmare scenario is that it may be the attenuated form of something like the ebola-equivalent mousepox strain that Australian scientists unwittingly stumbled across last year, and this release is a test run in case they feel the need to bring the house down by releasing the real thing. Dr Strangelove, eat your heart out …

Conflicting reports on whether or not this new bug is man-made or not. There’s a discussion forum linked from this piece that presents both/all sides of the question.

One rule for the big boys, one rule for the small

Landline – 13/4/2003: Unfair meal gives taste of global trade pitfalls. Australian Broadcasting Corp

We’ve asked Antony Worrall Thompson to create a world-class meal but with ingredients we’ve bought from some of the world’s poorest farmers.

Almost three billion people in the world live on less than two dollars a day. Many farm the land. And from the rice fields of Haiti to the tomato fields of Ghana they tell you the rich world is harming them more through unfair trade than it helps them with aid.

“One rule for the big boys, one rule for the small. Nothing really changes, does it,” Antony Worall Thompson, Celebrity Chef, said.

History, they say, repeats itself as farce. Three decades after its last war with Vietnam, America is fighting another, not in the Mekong but the Mississippi Delta, not over communism but over catfish. To find the first ingredient for our unfairly traded meal we drove into the heart of catfish country.

MSFT and open standards

Microsoft limits XML in Office 2003 | CNET News.com

But analysts contend that WordML’s compliance with industry standards is a misnomer. Because the schema isn’t fully documented, people who want to edit files created in Office 2003 will only be able to do that with Office itself, as before. Text in Office 2003 files stored in XML format might be viewable in other desktop programs, but all document formatting would be lost and most other files would be unreadable.

Such a move could also hamper data exchange with competing desktop productivity software that recognizes XML, such as Corel’s WordPerfect or Sun Microsystems’ StarOffice, say analysts and competitors.

“From the beginning, there was a question whether Microsoft was going to buy in completely to XML,” said Technology Business Research analyst Bob Sutherland. “Microsoft is often trying to spin their message, and they want to appear as if they buy into (open) standards. But they always put in the proprietary hooks somewhere in the final release of the product.”

[ . . . ]

“We’ve never believed that Microsoft would truly make their XML format interoperable,” said Gregg Nicholas, a technology manager from Berrien County, Mich. Microsoft’s “standard operating procedure with standards seems to be embrace, extend and exterminate. Despite the hype from their public relations department, I’ve seen no reason to believe that they would act any differently with XML.”

I was really hoping they were getting it at last, that open standards were good, and perhaps they were dominant enough to let other players exist in the same market. Alas, no, it’s the same institutional arrogance we’ve seen for years.

karmic payback

I was working on testing the darwinports collection and the jakarta-ant port kept stubbornly breaking. A couple of small changes, a diff, and my changes are in the tree.

A small thing, but it feels good to have helped in even the smallest of ways. What have you done to help the people who help you lately?